Impulse Buys

After work, I ended up hanging out with Justin for a bit. We were on our way to grab a drink, and decided to duck into Myopic.

I didn’t really have anything I was looking for, so I ended up just wandering the stacks aimlessly. Next thing I knew, I was in the fiction section and looked up to see a novel by an old professor of mine, Bill Roorbach. He was an instructor at OSU while I was a grad student there, and though I only had one or two classes with him (he taught Creative Nonfiction, I was studying Poetry), he had a strong influence on me.

Bill’s big thing was writing daily. It didn’t matter, he said, if all you can do is re-read the stuff that you wrote the day before. It still counts – just so long as you do it every single day.

It’s a habit I’ve fallen out of, but back in the day when I employed it? Man… I wrote like you wouldn’t believe. As an undergraduate, I kept looking for that perfect block of time – that handful of hours where I could dim the lights, turn on some music and just WRITE. Of course, that perfect block of time never came about, and the writing always got pushed to the side.

While I was in graduate school, I had some of the most productive phases of my writing career during my final year, when I was setting aside time every day to write. In many ways, this blog is a testament to that incremental growth. It’s not like I sat down and wrote out a month of entries – it’s a little bit, every day that’s led to this big huge site.

Finding Bill’s book was a nice stroke of luck. As I was reading the first paragraph (looking for the hook), I could hear his voice coming off the page.

For those who don’t know his writing, I heartily recommend Summers with Juliet. And if you’d like a great textbook on how to write creative nonfiction, be it essays or memoirs… I can’t say enough good things about Writing Life Stories.

The second book I purchased happened to be right at the register. Justin had been thumbing through a copy of The Book of Imaginary Beings. By Borges, no less! After picking it up and sifting through a few pages, I was hooked and bought it on the spot. I’ve been a big fan of Borges ever since my high school spanish teacher (Edna Staferi) taught us to read him in the original. Really, what home is truly complete without some sort of Bestiary?