There’s a bookshelf of mine in my son’s room (a room which was, not all that long ago, my office). This morning I sat on his floor, helping him get ready for school, and looked at those books: Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Alice Munro, Terry Tempest Williams, Jamaica Kincaid, others. They’re my heart books there on that shelf. The ones that have shaped me, defined me, saved me, resurrected me. The ones that showed me how you could make something deep and beautiful at once. Blood-thick and porous. Rooted and star-spattered. Real and mystical. Feminine and radically intelligent. Crimson and gold. Place-based and transcendent.
One of the very first assignments I give to all students in my workshops, regardless of their age, is to find their literary touchstones. I tell them to choose between two and five books that are their lodestars, and to bring those books to class, and tell us why. I tell them to think of the book they’re writing as the “literary love child” of these touchstones.
I go on to tell them that once they have their writing spot in their house/apartment/room picked out (and I highly recommend having a writing spot to all of them), they should make a stack of those two to five books and place them front and center on their desks. Have them close, I say. Pick them up when you need re-tuned. Look at them as visual reminders of what words can do. Use them as a map to keep you centered and true.
What fabulous advice! And how far I am from living it during these eight months in a small house with no room of my own, in a house with books scattered everywhere, and with the most precious ones of all living on a shelf in my son’s bedroom. Symbolic! Of disorientation, distraction, dislocation, noise.
The room where my desk currently resides is a lovely room, full of light and windows and an old rug, but it has no doors that close. It is full of books, but they are a wild tangle of kids’ books, cookbooks, art books, and the many, many new books I’ve purchased over the past ten years.
Many of those books are beautiful, important, necessary, radical, transformative. But not many of them are my touchstones. These new books stretch me, pull me, push me, challenge me—all good things. But few of them feel like home to me. They are not my lodestars. They are not my maps, sacred geography, first teachers, gods.
And so I think a little rearrangement of my rooms is in order. I’m going to move some books around today. Maybe build a new shelf. Move the noise into less sacred rooms. Make the sanctuary clean, rooted, holy.
Tell me—what are your literary touchstones? And if your book in progress was the lovechild of three books, what would they be?
xx
Robin