May 14, 2010
Friday

I have about 800 unread books on my shelves. Some would find this excessive, and they would probably be right.
                        — Kirsty Logan, b. 1984
                            Scots writer, editor, reviewer, and teacher

I do not have 800 unread books on my shelves. I don’t know how many books I have. My LibraryThing inventory, a work in progress, is at 650, so surely I own at least 1000 books, and while many are unread, many are not. Whatever the number, I have fewer books today, both read and unread, than I did yesterday.

I’m on edge these days. I’m awaiting notification of my up or down status with the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. As I write this, I am 48 hours away from the anniversary of the moment last year when I got my initial rejection. (My reversal of fortune came six weeks later.) It had long been the practice at Bread Loaf to put letters of notification into the postal mail around May 25, so the early news surprised many of us in the community of Bread Loaf hopefuls I correspond with. The conference website says that notification will be in “late May” now, and though this is technically still “mid May,” anxiety is building.

We already know about one acceptance, of someone who applied as an auditor. It was announced via Twitter about three weeks ago, and I wrote to her to ask, because I am shameless and aggressive and care too damned much about Bread Loaf. Turns out she was a work-study participant many years ago, and now lives in a remote area of the world (possibly on another planet) and will have to plan her travel carefully. At least that’s the assumption she made about her early notification.

I knew that I would be feeling this way, so I looked for a project that would require some physical energy and be useful in and of itself in furthering my desire to declutter my house, an ongoing and endless project that gets even less attention now that Lynn doesn’t live here and I no longer have my big holiday party.

And I decided to focus on books. Back in 2007, seeking to dispel some anxious energy that was building as I approached my first month-long cabin-in-the-woods-alone residency, I gathered, catalogued, and alphabetized all of the poetry books I had acquired over forty years of collecting. As I wrote then, “For some reason, I find assembling, categorizing, and organizing a collection of similar things a very soothing activity, especially if it prepares me for (or keeps me from) facing a blank page to which I must commit original material.”

It is my ultimate goal to have every book on a shelf instead of in a stack beside the bed or a pile on (and under) the desk in Lynn’s room and elsewhere about the house. A notice in the newspaper that my community library is collecting books this weekend for their used book sale next month set me in motion. Since this is the Year of Reading and Writing Fiction Seriously, I targeted fiction.

I found titles that I haven’t read and titles that once were useful or important but which I will never read again. I found many issues of periodicals like Ploughshares and The Gettysburg Review that look like books but are as ephemeral in their content as issues of Newsweek or Time. (I found some of those, too.) I put into the giveaway box some volumes that are in a form as obsolete for me as a VCR tape — mass-market paperbacks (the small size) of Mary O’Hara’s Flicka trilogy and MacKinlay Kantor’s Andersonville. I can’t read print that small comfortably anymore. I have replaced those titles with trade paperback (the large size) versions. I let go some material that I acquired for graduate school classes I took in the 1970s, and some I had because some youngster I tutored wanted to learn to write like some genre author.

I even resolutely put into the goodbye boxes Stories from the Sixties, edited by Stanley Elkin, and other books from that era. I acquired them in the early 70s, and they lived beside my bed on the shelves of a wicker night stand in my apartment on Chambers Hill Road, where I lived single and unshared, reading fiction on a Saturday night after the Mary Tyler Moore Show and dreaming of a different life.

I have that different life now, although I still read fiction in bed on Saturday nights, and at the table on Sunday mornings, and in my studio most afternoons. I’m reading my way, slowly, through the Fiction Fifty, through current issues of the periodicals I want to be published in, through volumes I pluck off a shelf or up from a pile because it’s handier than anything else or that I borrow from the library because it’s been used as an example in a craft exercise.

In essence, although I love the life I have, I am still dreaming of a different one, one that takes place in an impeccably neat house where I’ve been photographed for the jacket of my first novel. It’s called Perpetual Light, and I go back to writing it Monday morning. And in the moments (sometimes the hours) when I can’t put one more line down, when I can’t think of what Brenda needs to say to Andrew when she discovers the depth of his spirituality, a depth her own lacks, a lack she feels threatens her relationship, I’ll arrange on the shelves the books that are now corralled in stacks in front of the fireplace.

Because that’s where the picture is going to be taken.

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