Hey y’all!
It’s Carmen here. Usually, in the weeks leading up to the Hatch, I flag a few poems or passages of prose that I think will make good subject matter for our gathering—either something that feels thematically timely, or seasonally timely, or just weird enough for this extraordinary community of seekers. But this month, when I went to look for something, I came up short. No poems saved in my bookmarks bar, no passages flagged with a post-it in my stack of books.
I was surprised by this. I have been reading a lot lately, and journaling quite a bit, too. Usually those two go hand in hand—as I shared in our gathering of the Hatch exactly a year ago, I often use reading as a springboard to journaling. I like to be provoked out of my own way of thinking, to see what thoughts or feelings another writer’s words bring up, or what insights I can glean, or to find parallels with my own experience, however oblique. My go-to for the last couple of years has been Virginia Woolf; I’m reading her diaries and letters in tandem, though at a century’s remove (so I’m currently working my way through 1924).
But there’s a limit to how much I can inflict dear Virginia on this community, so I thought of another book I have close at hand—it’s called Practice by Rosalind Brown. I’m reading it for a book club with friends who are involved in the literary world in various ways, as writers of everything from poems to young adult novels to commercial fiction, as editors, as literary agents, and so on. We all have wildly different tastes and interests, and it makes for wonderful, if at times heated, discussion. When my poet friend Molly chose this one, she texted me and said, “I can’t wait to hear everyone complain about how nothing happens in this book. But so much happens!”
And I completely agree, though at times the action is very interior. As an overview, the book is about a young woman who is studying literature at Oxford, and the routines she uses to mark her days and to regulate her mind, which at this moment is supposed to be writing a paper on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The passage I’ve selected is from early in the book, on page 27. As a little note of context, what has happened so far is that she has gotten up very early and has spent the morning wrestling with what she wants to say in this paper, not making much headway. And so:
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