I love this year’s National Poetry Month poster!  Do you?  I still have last year’s (need to get some nice poster frames for the new study, I think).  This one features the lines “We make a dwelling in the evening air, / In which being there together is enough.” from Wallace Stevens’s poem “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.”

I’m still thinking about how I will celebrate NPM this year.  Do you have any plans?

Do you read narrative history?  I’m talking about books like Eric Jager’s The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France or Leslie Carroll’s Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp Through the Extramarital Adeventures That Rocked the British Monarchy or Jon Meacham’s American Gospel: God, The Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation. When it comes to history, I appreciate a heavily-footnoted scholarly treatment as much as the next academic, but I find narrative history more appealing.  I think it’s partly the confidence these books bestow — in reading them, you learn enough about the subject to discuss it intelligently, even if you wouldn’t presume to present a conference paper on it — and also partly it’s the sheer enjoyment of reading a true story as well-told as a good novel.

I’m considering a book project of this nature, so your input would be much appreciated at this stage.  Do you read narrative history?  How often, relative to other genres?  What do you like or not like about it?  Do you have favorite periods (Colonial America), dynasties (Tudors), regions (Japan)?  What’s more important to you: compelling story or careful source citation?  How important is the cover art, the title length, or the author’s pedigree?  Do you have a favorite author in this genre?

Do tell—and thanks!

Novelist Terrence Cheng on how writing is like being in love, right down to the rejection:

Which is why rejection, particularly in your love life, is good training for being a writer. Because your work, if it’s true, is you—the culmination and symbol of your heart, your passion, your hopes and dreams. Your work is everything you want and need to make things right in the world—it’s what sets you apart from the rest, what makes you believe that all the devotion, dedication, and the grueling brutal daily grind to produce actually means something.

Of course it means something to you, but does it mean something to anyone else? For it to mean something, you want and need that validation from the outside, just like you need someone else to know you are more than just a “nice guy.” You want someone to really know you, to trust in you, to take a risk.

Writing and love are both leaps into the unknown, acts of discipline as much as they are acts of faith. If you are not in love with writing then you shouldn’t write, because without love, you won’t be able to take it. (And I didn’t say in love with your writing—I said in love with writing. There’s a difference.)

Read the rest of his essay in Glimmer Train’s Bulletin 37.

Novelist and literature professor Eric Puchner on what makes a good story title:

Even if we end up cutting the original “creative beginning” of a novel or short story—the part of the novel or story, often, that we’re most attached to—this doesn’t mean it’s not an essential part of the writing process. In some ways, it’s the most essential. The same goes for titles, I think. I’ve heard students tell me they come up with their titles first, before they have the slightest notion of a plot. I see nothing wrong with this, so long as they’re willing to give up their “creative title” when it no longer serves the story….

In short, there seems to be very little correlation between producing something brilliant and the ability to come up with a half-decent name for it. Perhaps it’s a different skill set entirely. I sometimes think there should be professional titlers: Just as we wouldn’t ask a carpenter to tar the roof of our house, we shouldn’t expect writers to work outside their métier. But even if the perfect title is destined to elude us, I do think it’s possible to identify a bad one—even, I think, to lay out some basic ground rules for what to steer clear of.

Read the rest of this essay — including a humorous list of “Titles to Avoid” — at The Rumpus.

After weeks of remodeling and painting, my muscles needed a break.  So even though I have lots of work to do on the house, I gratefully have spent evenings over the last week or so catching up on all the reading I set aside when we moved in.  Right before the move, I had re-read A Wrinkle in Time and resolved to read, for the first time, the remaining four titles in that series.  Having done so now, I think I’m still partial to the first one, but all are that fun and characteristically L’Engle combination of easy reading yet thought provoking.  I’m looking forward to introducing my oldest niece to these soon.

Also at the time of the move, I was about halfway through C. S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (I read a great review of it at a blog inspired by the book) and am back to that now. It was his last book and the one that perhaps captures him in his most natural habitat as a classics prof, and it’s one of those books I read with a full packet of post-it tabs for marking excellent points or quotes I want to remember.

Thanks to my sister, who’s a fellow Maisie Dobbs fan, I also got to catch up on that series with the latest, Among the Mad.  This is a consistently interesting series, I have to say.  I was excited to learn that a new one, The Mapping of Love and Death, is due out in April.

And now I finally have my TBR stack unpacked and organized again, so as soon as I finish Lewis, I’ll be reaching for one of these — which one, I haven’t yet decided.

What are you currently reading?