A Walker in the Suburbs

I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating. The company of writers is unlike the company of other folks.

Others may take issue with this, of course, may say it’s the company of actors or stamp-collectors or plumbers that does it for them. And they would be right. It’s the company of those with whom you feel an affinity. Or, to put it another way, writers are my people!

Take last night’s bunch. We talked of safety in university laboratories, the manufacturing of steel, a murder in Centropolis, Kansas, in 1905. One of us read poetry aloud, from a memoir penned in verse. Another passed around a coffee table book on the Chesapeake that was back in print after 20 years. Still another talked about her plan to bring computers to African kids.

I don’t mean to brag here, but writers have many interests. They ask good questions. They are curious. They are also endangered, now that book publishing is in free fall and newspapers and magazines are fading away. So we also traded frustrations, gripes, gallows humor.  But somehow the upshot of it all was overwhelmingly positive.

It was a cold, blustery night. I had worked 12 hours. I should have been exhausted.

I wasn’t.

In his farewell to Washington Post readers yesterday, reviewer Jonathan Yardley said that throughout his 33 years at the Post (writing more than 3,000 book reviews), he came to the task as a “journalist not a literateur.”

I have high literary standards and delight in
the expression of strong opinion, literary and otherwise, but I also
read a book as if I were a reporter: looking for what it is “about” in
the deepest sense of the word, determining what matters about it and
what doesn’t, trying to give the reader a feel for what it is like as
well as passing judgment on it.

When I led workshops at the Writer’s Center, “what is it about?” was my standard question. It’s the one I ask myself as a writer, too. I suppose journalism has a lot to do with it, but it seems like common sense, too. If a writer has nothing to say or if the point is hopelessly muddled, there is no communication.

I like to think my journalist roots keep me honest, anchor me in sound thought and clear language. Often this is more aspiration than fact. But it’s a worthy goal — and one I was glad to see confirmed.

First she made a joke about being shorter than the other people at the podium.  Then she told the audience that she was sharing her award —the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters — with fellow fantasy and science-fiction writers. Then Ursula LeGuin said this:

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of
writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through
our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways
of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope.

We will need
writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a
larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the
difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of
an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We
live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right
of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings;
resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the
art of words.

I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company,
and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American
literature get sold down the river. … The name of our beautiful reward
is not profit. Its name is freedom.

 Within an hour I was at the library checking out three books by Ursula Le Guin. Here’s a writer whose voice I want to read.