Blogging Mary Bowser

Nineteenth-century literary allusion du jour:

"November is the most disagreeable month in the whole year," said Margaret, standing at the window one dull afternoon, looking out at the frostbitten garden.

"That's the reason I was born in it," observed Jo pensively, quite unconscious of the blot on her nose.

Jo March and I have so much in common: authorial aspirations, inky noses, November birthdays.

But I did not have a disagreeable birthday. Instead, I had an affair.

Well, kind of. I spent the morning writing (or really, revising) poetry. Which, for a novelist, is a bit like having an affair.

I like writing poetry because, Homer and John Milton notwithstanding, it's short. The pressure to tell a tale in so few words is enormously challenging and weirdly pleasurable for me, as someone who tends to write long, long, long. I once started a poem and within six weeks had it accepted for publication. Even if those six weeks were converted into dog years, there is no way a novelist can ever pull something like that off.

I do think a November birthday can be tough, though. November is undeniably autumn. Autumn with the inevitable, creeping sense that winter desolation is on its way. If you have the slightest tendency to think birthday=aging=marching toward death, well, autumn birthday can be a bummer. But it doesn't have to be.

This summer, I heard Samantha Chang give a talk in which she proclaimed how great it is for an author to age. The more you live, the better your writing. I liked that. I like that the poetry workshop I'm taking right now includes a woman who is in her 80s. She is still writing, still taking classes to get better at her writing. She walks with a cane, she shakes a bit, but she still spends part of every day finding for words to capture the human experience. It's a veritable inky blot on the nose, that compulsion to literary expression.

After I was done having my torrid rendezvous with rhyme, I indulged in a nice November walk, stopping to take about twelve million photographs of beautiful foliage. Sure, those branches will be bare eventually, but not yet.





And then I spent the afternoon volunteering at a public high school to mentor students writing their college application essays. If you are ever despondent about aging, spend some time with adolescents. They are so sweet and goofy and unsure, it confirms that we should all be glad never have to be that age again. Just about any essay question on a college application gets easier to answer the further you are from the age at which colleges ask you to answer it. Except maybe the question I answered on my college application, the one about a book that had particularly influenced me.

I wrote about Little Women. Little did that Lois know she'd spend almost as much time living vicariously in the nineteenth century as the fictional March sisters did.