Jessica Rosevear

My friend Maria recently told me about this New York Times article:  Does Your Language Shape How You Think?  The article offers an interesting examination of the differences in languages that might influence the flow of conversation.  Case in point:  “I saw a friend last night.”  In English, the speaker of this sentence wouldn’t have to specify if the friend is male or female.  In French, the speaker would have to specify.  So those fights we see often on TV between couples would never even take place:  “You said you were with a friend, but it was another woman!”  “She is a friend!”  “You didn’t say it was a female friend!”  And so on.

Personally, I’ve always believed that the biggest flaw in the English language is that there is no gender-neutral pronoun.  We do have “one” (”one must take care of oneself”), but it doesn’t always work.  Take, for example, some recent Taylor Swift lyrics:  “When you’re fifteen and someone tells you they love you, you’re gonna believe them.”  Notice how she’s forced to follow “someone” (singular pronoun) with “they” (plural pronoun) because she has no gender-neutral singular pronoun to follow the gender-neutral, singular ”someone.”

Just saying.

I wouldn’t mind waking up one morning to find someone defaced my garage door with this!

I’ve recently realized that I tend to classify friends into groups.  ”She’s my writer friend.”  ”She’s my teacher friend.”  I think I do that not because I don’t recognize the other dimensions of those people, but because it’s so rewarding having friends that understand where you’re coming from.  Trading lesson plan ideas with “teacher friends” and exchanging rough drafts with “writer friends” makes me grateful that I have so many interesting, talented, and passionate people in my life.

So I wasn’t surprised when I found out that my “writer friend” Jen has started an awesome yearlong blog project for ChicagoNow.com called Stop and Blog the Roses.  Calling herself a “spoiled American,” Jen blogs daily about three things for which she’s grateful, “no repeats,” in an effort to be more like her husband, her mother, and the Dalai Lama.

Jen and I met in a New York writing class about two years ago and continued to be each other’s readers and cheerleaders after the class ended.  Others I’ve met through my grad programs, classes, working, and interning.  Once I was even able to bring my friend Bisanne in to talk to my creative writing students about screenwriting.  I think these friendships are so important in any profession.  It’s different from having a mentor.  It’s having a peer, someone who can inspire, who you in turn can inspire, and then laugh about other things over coffee when the school day or the writing workshop is over.

So, in the spirit of Jen’s blog, today I’m grateful for all kinds of friendship–the people that keep you going, make you think, make you laugh.  Cheers!

Check it out–I just found a whole book of essays compiled for a Virginia Woolf conference a few years ago.  The forward is written by Ruth Gruber, author of the first doctoral thesis focused exclusively on Virginia Woolf in 1935.  She was invited to tea by Woolf herself at 52 Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury, London (the very same building I had an emotional breakdown outside of last April).  I’m excited to take a look through these essays and see what my fellow Woolfians have to say!

In the latest Writer’s Digest, Sherman Alexie shares the following writing advice:  “Every word on your blog is a word not in your book.”  In line with this philosophy, I’ve spent the bulk of July working on my second novel and not so much time blogging.  It’s a book about the world of student publications at an Idaho high school, and is told from the revolving perspectives of four very different teenagers. 

One of my college friends is expecting her first baby and posting weekly pictures of herself on her Facebook page.  She grows in each picture as the weeks go by, and it’s fun to see her progress.  I feel a little bit like this regarding my novel.  I have a daily word goal of 1,000 words, and after each writing session, I like to double space everything and see how many pages I have.  Each day, it continues to grow, and one day, it will be complete.  It’s not quite the same thing as having a baby, but I look forward to the day when I can finally hold the finished manuscript in my hands.

I’ve also been trying to read as much as I can while the summer days are long and relatively free of obligations.  Some titles on my list include:

Prose, Blue Angel and Reading Like a Writer; Friend, Lush; Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Bell, Virginia Woolf:  A Biography; Senate, Whose Wedding is it Anyway?; Gibbons, Ellen Foster; Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night; Schulman, P.S.; Hart, Summer at Tiffany; Moore, Lies of Silence; McCafferty, Sloppy Firsts; Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London; Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Kinsella, Shopoholic & Baby; MacPherson, Elbow Room; Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; ed. Benedict, Muses, Mentors, & Monsters.  I also recently subscribed to the coolest new literary magazine out there:  Electric Literature.

Other suggestions??

Ever wonder what my voice sounds like (or why I like writing as opposed to articulating thought under the pressure of the moment)?  You can find out if you watch me tonight on Cash Cab at 6:30 PM on the Discovery Channel.  Spoiler alert… I learned that sometimes it’s best to quit while you’re ahead…

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be an artist, here’s the greatest explanation that I’ve ever read:

“She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked:  it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed.  It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child.  Such she often felt herself–struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say:  ‘But this is what I see; this is what I see,’ and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her.” 

From Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

I was in Barnes & Noble the other day (mostly just window shopping–I’ve been really getting into buying used books on Amazon for pennies plus shipping) when I saw a disturbing sight.

A very poor rendition Virginia Woolf’s face being used to sell the Nook, B&N’s e-book device. 

Woolf is also being exploited in a recent development in YA fiction–a popular book called A Room of My Own (a spin-off of Woolf’s groundbreaking feminist essay “A Room of One’s Own”) delivers the message that a girl’s selfless sacrifice is more important than having her own room.  If you know anything about Woolf, let alone her original essay, you know this theme couldn’t be any less Woolfian.

I wonder if Woolf would have been pro-Nook.  The Bloomsbury group was often criticized for its dismissal of tradition, and Woolf was one of the most experimental writers of her time–if not of any time.  She was once quoted as saying that some books should have a limited shelf life, and, after a few months time, crumble into dust, allowing room for new books to grow and be read. 

I like to think she relished holding a book, turning its pages, as much as she was committed not just to the act of writing, but doing so in purple ink.  But I can’t speak for Woolf.  I wish everyone else would realize that they shouldn’t speak for her, either–much less exploit her for their own gains.

I didn’t write this article, but I’m quoted in it–scroll all the way down to read about my favorite book series when I was a kid.  I sound a little like a surfer chick, which I suppose is fitting now that I’m on summer vacation!

I’m turning 27 in three days.  My impending birthday serves as a reminder of the limited time I have to achieve one of my personal goals:  to make a “thirty under thirty” list.

These lists appear at least once a year in various magazines I read.  The premise is that young talent is more noteworthy, more remarkable, than talent at an older age.  There’s apparently something special about being able to say, “I’ve achieved XYZ… in my twenties!”  I remember interning at a literary agency 2004, when advance copies of 22-year-old Natalie Krinsky’s Chloe Does Yale were being distributed, and feeling jealous that I hadn’t made my grand authorial debut yet.

Ultimately, though, I know it’s silly.  Success at any age is commendable.  Look at Frank McCourt, who taught high school English for decades before writing Angela’s Ashes.  Heck, I feel happy when one of my friends reads my manuscript and says she laughed out loud. 

Either way, it’s only fitting that The New Yorker released their “20 under 40″ list this week.  I’m excited to see a lot of authors I admire–and some I’ve even met!–made this list, and I look forward to working my way through the issue to read their stories and meet new writers.  The website has interviews with each of the writers–check them out, along with the cool sketch-portraits that go with each of them.

Of course Jonathan Safran Foer is too cool to look directly at his audience. 

Okay, okay.  Young-author-jealousy has now been fully exorcised.