Lisa's Shelf

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Mother’s Day has been a complicated holiday for me ever since my own mother died five years ago, and it has only grown more complicated as I have reached an age where it is looking more and more improbable that I will have children of my own. And today, as I so often do when melancholic, I pulled out what gives me comfort--a book of George Saunders’ stories. These stories not only taught me how to write; they taught me, and continue to teach me each time I reread them, how to be more human. Much like my mother did. So George Saunders, I bow to you in the deepest gratitude, and I thank you for offering me your heart on this difficult and challenging day. Please consider this my utterly inadequate Hallmark card to you.

There is a part of me--the part of me that works with people who are homeless and who often experience utter deprivation of basic needs--that emphatically resists Ben Marcus’s claim that short stories, or that art in general, can offer the sort of fundamental nourishment provided by “water. Food. Love. The company of others. Shelter.” Ben Marcus and I are operating from a position of extreme privilege, and it is surely a luxury to have the education and time and money and space and fullness to be able to find something so deeply sustaining and meaningful in the writing of another human being that it can be to us as food. But there is also a part of me that sees my client, who is homeless and struggles with mental illness, weep when his copy of Where the Red Fern Grows goes missing, and that same part of me realizes that, when we read/write/make or receive art, we are forming an unfathomable connection--with ourselves, with each other, with mystery--that can at least temporarily transcend physical/material need. My heart dwells in the tension between these conflicting parts of myself.

Ben Marcus, Introduction to the anthology New American Stories

Trevor might not be as excited about this anthology as I am...