Since the first leaves of autumn began to crisp and fall, so, too, have my pleasure, academic reads fallen from my lap to the floor. I have purchased, borrowed, and resurrected from the archives several books of interest. The farthest I have gotten in each is several chapters deep. I've tried fiction and non, brooding and beautiful, romantic and cruel. Everything piques my curiosity but fails to sustain it. I have failed pop quizzes in my class because somehow I developed an allergy to required reading. I became a book club delinquent as month after month I flaked. And then I became a book club drop-out. Is this the winter of my discontent as a reader?
My non-fiction instructor opened class the other night reminding us that these winter months (up here in bleak New England where the sun sets at 4:30p.m.) can be a great time to delve into our writing, to open up the veins of wintry thinking and bleed them out into our work. Perhaps this is the reason I have had no inclination to be a reader since the days grew long and cold and dark. I was frittering away my time trying to do that which I am not meant to do during this season. My brain was longing to produce the kinds of pieces that my brain loves to read during the rest of the year.
I suspect I am not the only one for whom winter triggers a desire to write, rather than to read, to focus on the output rather than the intake. Further, are there particular seasons in which certain genres of fiction or non-fiction are en vogue for you, and other seasons in which those same reads collect dust on your shelves or accrue overdue fines at the library?
Or has Netflix simply ruined us all?
Kendra Stanton Lee's work can be found in Cosmopsis Quarterly 2 as well as on her web site at http://www.kendraspondence.com.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
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Despite our modern trappings, Netflix included, as creatures of nature I think we register and respond to the seasons at a very deep level. Maybe the urge to create is also cyclical or seasonal. But our own peculiar wiring and our age and other circumstances, I suspect, are also factors. Personally, I can't imagine not being affected by the seasons, or feeling compelled to write the same way year-round, or to read the same type of thing. And then there are times we do neither. But who's to say that those times aren't our most creative of all? Sometimes, bursts of artistic activity are almost like taking dictation: the work has already been done; we need only transfer it to canvas, paper, or song.
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