Writer on the Rocks: Moving the Impossible - Softcover

Linda Tatelbaum

9780965442831: Writer on the Rocks: Moving the Impossible

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0965442837 ISBN 13: 9780965442831

Publisher: About Time Press. Appleton, Maine, 2000

What happens when a writer runs out of words? Linda Tatelbaum's meditation on ambition and despair tracks her ascent from rock bottom, the wordless place. "English has failed me. Body is the only way out. But how do you speak Body?" Linda's best teacher is a fallen stone wall on her Maine homestead. Rebuilding it, she learns how physics magnifies strength, and how language is another way to move things. "The impossible is only a name for what we haven't yet accomplished," she says. Change the definition of failure and loss. Use obstacles as leverage. Take matter into your own hands, and speak Body English.

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Review:

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.

From the Publisher:

Linda Tatelbaum's first book, "Carrying Water as a Way of Life: A Homesteader's History," now in a fifth printing, appealed to readers of all ages. A chronicle of living on a back-to-the-land homestead for over 20 years, the book emphasizes that it's better to adapt a dream than abandon it. "Writer on the Rocks" speaks to the same audience. Here is a woman who has come of age on the homestead, doing physical labor throughout the seasons. She has gained strength, not only physical but philosophical. The wisdom contained in her new books of essays grows out of her work with nature, her commitment to home, her sense of the permanent value of roots.

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