Writer on the Rocks: Moving the Impossible - Softcover

Linda Tatelbaum

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0965442837 ISBN 13: 9780965442831

Publisher: About Time Press. Appleton, Maine, 2000

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Linda Tatelbaum was born in Rochester, NY in 1947. She holds a BA, MA, and PhD from Cornell University. She homesteads with her husband and son in midcoast Maine, where they raise their food and generate solar electricity. An English professor at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, Linda's passion for challenging projects led her to found About Time Press, which published her first book, "Carrying Water as a Way of Life: A Homesteader's History," in 1997.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Rocks, he said. What you want to write about is rocks.

Ed says this, rocking back in his chair in the little office in my mind where dead friends look me in the inner eye and tell me what to write. They're full of good suggestions. These dead editors have no care about the problem of language or leverage. They rock back in their chairs and smile. Force is exactly what doesn't worry them now.

What would he want to hear about rocks? Force is, in fact, the issue, the way you can't move a big rock that's sitting flat on the ground, but if you off-balance it with one round stone, it can be moved. He'd want to hear the way even the biggest rock will rise and sing to the clever dance of a well-placed fulcrum. And the way, later, marked in your lower back by its obstinate weight, you return to touch its cool texture in the dark, reading with your hand the blind story that words can never write.

Edition details

• Publisher: About Time Press. Appleton, Maine
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0965442837
• ISBN 13: 9780965442831
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 117