THE POWER OF GREAT BOOKS: I ran across this response paper I wrote while studying for a seminar in the Queens MFA Program. It still resonates with me. The Role of the Writer in the 21st Century Michael Kobre seminar by Karon Luddy May 19, 2004 How a $26.00 Novel Ended Up Costing Me $20,000 and Why It Was Worth Every Penny My love affair with words began early. In first grade, I met twenty-six lifelong friends—letters that were sometimes big and sometimes small according to where they found themselves in a sentence or word. My teacher, Miss Graham, was an up-to-date old maid who smelled like pickles. A phonetic genius, she dredged my imagination for interest in Dick, Jane and Spot, who led quite boring lives because they were forbidden to do anything that required more than six letters—just so I could learn to read. I don’t know why, but from the beginning, words settled into my fat brain like orphans who had found a good home without even trying. The part I liked most about learning to write was erasing. I loved the way it smelled when I rubbed the pink end of my big fat pencil across the cheap lined paper, exterminating mistakes easily, and brushing them onto the floor as if they never occurred. For years, my love affair with words was discreet, hovering like a calm blue sky over my rollicking and rambunctious life. I read like an insatiable fiend. I wrote gazillions of words. Hundreds of poems. A stack of short stories. Dozens of essays. Halves of novels. I lived a lot too. Made a living selling nifty apparatus for Fortune 100 companies. Had two children. Married two times. (Second time is the charm.) Welcomed two grandchildren and a son-in-law into my world. Buried my father. Buried a dog. Loved a lot of beings, human and otherwise. Cried the usual human tears related to walking on this planet. Wrote down a lot of words about it. Erased some of them. In college, I earned a B. A. in English, but never pursued any more instruction in this precarious business of writing. But last year, all that changed a few days before my forty-ninth birthday when I heard Diane Rehm interview Colum McCann about his new novel, whose subject was the life of Rudolph Nuryev. My long submerged love affair with this charismatic dancer rose from the depths of my being and I knew unequivocally that I must read the book. Plus the author sounded sincerely mystical. So I requested the novel, entitled Dancer, for my birthday, which pleased my husband because I never know what I want! From the moment I picked up dancer, I became rabid. The novel touched me on a cellular level. It’s rare to discover an author who writes in the flesh and blood of his characters like Colum McCann. I fell deeply in love with Rudi and with Victor, the dancer’s spiritual twin. The prose dazzled on the page— panoptic and provocative—like superb cinematography. I smelled Rudi’s sweat, caressed his gnarled feet, and felt his pulse pounding in my veins, simply because of the way the author put the words on the page. They say that a work of art distinguishes itself. Mr. McCann’s novel is obviously a true masterpiece, the best book I have ever read on the artistic temperament. Three weeks passed before I allowed myself to go back and read the book again. Every night, I heard the novel calling me like a piece of dark luscious chocolate, but I resisted until just the right evening, when I could delve into this stormy ocean of a book and swim without drowning in its glistening black water. And on the second read, I laughed out loud again when Rudi calls himself an asshole because his legs still aren’t long enough. The perfectionist in me understood the sentiment perfectly. And when I got to that phrase “here comes loneliness applauding itself all the way down the street,” my heart ached as deeply as it had before. That one sentence nailed the spirit of Rudolph Nureyev to this great cross of a book. Sometimes, finely-written books discourage me or push my envy button, but reading dancer by Colum McCann made me appreciate the enormous task it took to write it. So I wrote a letter to the author and mailed it to his publisher. Two weeks later, I received the following email: Dear Karon, Your beautiful letter (which I got today) will be cherished by me and my family. I appreciate everything you say and also how you say it. I truly thank you for putting a smile on my face. With all best wishes, Colum McCann Well, the fact that I wrote something that put a smile on Mr. McCann’s face put a big smile on mine. The whole experience—hearing the interview, reading the book and corresponding with the author was incredibly inspiring to me—it made me want to become a better writer, pronto. A couple of weeks after I received Mr. McCann’s response, I woke up one morning and knew exactly what I must do. I decided to apply to Queens University MFA Program in Charlotte. Being a writer is a lonely, frustrating, and exhilarating experience and I wanted to join a community of those similarly afflicted. Now in my third semester, I’m astonished at how much I’ve grown as a writer. But still, I have so much to learn.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Nov 2014 14:43:46 +0000
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