Product Details
Paperback
128 pages
About Time Press
Published 1999
Amazon.com
Linda Tatelbaum knows what happens when the words run out. She has hit "rock bottom" before: When is a writer not like a rock? When she is lying, inert, on the floor. What you see is, objectively, a body at rest, not unlike the rock except for one thing: her mind, which, doubts. Does a rock think, Will I ever move again? Rocks get the author to thinking. Her homestead in Maine is littered with them. For a while they don't mean much. Sure, they mark old boundaries and once impeded the progress of a vegetable garden, but not until a man in a pickup tries to make off with a few choice ones does Tatelbaum realize they're worth something. Working with rocks--moving them, using them--becomes her path back to words. In this sense, Writer on the Rocks is a book-length exercise in remembering how to write.
Tatelbaum is a lyrical correspondent from the rock-strewn edges of the American landscape; and while her digressive ruminations on aging, death, and the value of physical work will strike some readers as overly self-conscious, these frank, playful essays should inspire anyone building a stone wall or relearning the leverage of language.
Kate Barnes, Maine Poet Laureate
"From the darkness of lost hope to the bringing out of this book, Linda Tatelbaum's wonderful story of a writer on the land, and in the community, reaffirms the creative power of human, earth-loving ambition."
Book Description
What happens when a writer runs out of words? Pensive, wry, gutsy essays track how the author ascends out of writer's block by struggling to move big rocks on her "back-to-the-land" Maine homestead. A meditation on ambition and despair, "Writer on the Rocks" begins at the bottom of a dry old well, with Linda working to restore the flow of water. She faces her own creative drought by laboring on the land.Humorous attempts to move a huge rock instruct her that failure is the fulcrum for moving anything, even words. Linda finally gets the rock where she wants it, and ends her writer's block by becoming a publisher. |
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