Lelia
"Nightbitch" & Wildness: A Descent to Soul
Nightbitch has created a tangled skein of ideas in my head and I’m not sure I’ll unravel it. You know how Austin Kleon does mind maps? I...
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Lelia
- Jan 16, 2022
- 3 min
Eudora Welty, Peter Schjeldahl + Bill Plotkin
In The Optimist’s Daughter, the dark forces in the novel are Fay and her family, people “who never know the meaning of what has happened...
Lelia
- Jan 11, 2022
- 10 min
Jane Austen, Joan Didion & Self-respect
Don’t you think Persuasion the best Jane Austen novel ever? It’s by far my favorite. That’s kind of a joke because most characters in...
Lelia
- Jan 8, 2022
- 3 min
Imagining 'Vague Days' Clearer through Writing*
I’m experiencing a concatenation of ideas about writing, self-understanding and self-actualization. Joan Didion started it. After her...
Lelia
- Jan 2, 2022
- 4 min
My Best-of Book List for 2021
I like year-end best-of lists. Reading others’ lists is a fun way to learn about things I’ve missed. And thinking about my own best-of...
Lelia
- Jan 2, 2022
- 2 min
Endeavoring in 2022
I’ve never been big on making New Year’s Resolutions. In fact, the idea used to annoy me deeply back when I worked out at a gym and...
Lelia
- Dec 29, 2021
- 3 min
Anam Cara, the Unlived Life and Shadows
I’m trying to reread Anam Cara, and I can’t stomach the pollyanna sunshine spiritual message. O’Donohue writes, “Light is the secret...
Lelia
- Dec 26, 2021
- 3 min
Astrology Lessons from Ursula K. Le Guin*
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about Indigenous Americans’ Original Instructions. “These are not ‘instructions’ like...
Lelia
- Dec 24, 2021
- 2 min
Alter Ego as Creative Muse
To my delight, I fell down a Maxine Hong Kingston rabbit hole and discovered this gem from an interview in The Guardian. Describing a...
Lelia
- Dec 24, 2021
- 3 min
Anne Brontë's Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Rereading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I caved in and let myself skip Helen’s painful awakening to her husband’s true character. At first...
Lelia
- Dec 21, 2021
- 3 min
Edith Wharton + Principles of Creativity
Reading Edith Wharton, the biography by Hermione Lee, I’m becoming aware of why I never liked to read Edth Wharton’s novels, which are...
Lelia
- Dec 20, 2021
- 3 min
Eudora Welty + Aries + Guilt
I’m entranced by Eudora Welty right now. Reading her short story "Livvie," I’m awed by how much Welty does in just ten pages. In One...
Lelia
- Dec 16, 2021
- 5 min
Memoir, Elderhood & Saturn
Having read Angela’s Ashes and The Liar’s Club in quick succession, I was beginning to think that the only enjoyable memoirs overflow...
Lelia
- Dec 8, 2021
- 3 min
Memoir and the Moon
I used to pay a lot of attention to the first lines in books. I had a notebook where I wrote them down and classified them according to...
Lelia
- Dec 5, 2021
- 3 min
Dickens, Frank McCourt and Compassion
In Sally Ledger’s Introduction to Charles Dickens’ The Christmas Books, she writes, “Redemption through suffering is a significant...
Lelia
- Dec 4, 2021
- 2 min
Mary Karr, Memoir and the South Node
Ooph.I was relishing Mary Karr’s delicious language, but didn’t realize that this line I so admired - “Maybe it's wrong to blame the...
Lelia
- Dec 1, 2021
- 2 min
Falling in Love with Penelope Fitzgerald
Penelope Fitzgerald always wanted her children to be well-educated, to study foreign languages, to be employable. In her biography of...
Lelia
- Dec 1, 2021
- 2 min
Savoring Language
I’m learning to slow down and savor Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club. It’s a good story that gallops along and then arrests my attention with...
Lelia
- Nov 3, 2021
- 3 min
Edith Wharton's Gardening Life
“I am intrigued by writers who garden and by gardeners who write. The pen and the trowel are not interchangeable, but seem often linked.”...
Lelia
- Sep 29, 2021
- 5 min
I Finally Read Eat, Pray, Love
And the most disappointing thing about the book is the way Liz Gilbert seems to suggest that in finding Felipe she’s completed her...
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