Not going to ALA Midwinter, but…

Thanks to my weekly American Libraries Direct email, I already have the first itinerary item on my next Seattle visit. When this will be, I don’t know, but I know I won’t miss visiting the Richard Hugo House Zine Archive & Publishing Project. Richard Hugo is the author of one of my favorite books of poetry, 31 Letters and 13 Dreams (sadly out of print, so keep an eye out at used bookstores) and I think it rocks that he has not only a museum, but a museum that supports local literary life with readings and workshops and, as I started out saying, the Zine project. One thing that my MFA program is currently making me more aware of is that literary innovations depends on unknowns getting their start in their friend’s publications and in other types of independent publishing venues. That’s chapbooks,  zines, and increasingly websites, so it’s great to see an organization devoting itself to catching what might otherwise fall through the cracks. Writers and scholars will benefit for decades to come.

Alice Munro retires

Get out your copy of Open Secrets and start re-reading, that’s the last where that came from. A blogger friend alerted me to this story in the Toronto Star announcing that she’s decided to stop writing, making her memoir The View from Castle Rock her final published work. There’s nothing that I can say that is nearly as effortlessly articulate as a single sentence from any of her stories, so I’ll just quote this final paragraph from the title story of the first book I mentioned:

Maureen is a young woman yet, though she doesn’t think so, and she has life ahead of  her. First a death–that will come soon–then another marriage, new places and houses. In kitchens hundreds and thousands of miles away, she’ll watch the soft skin form on the back of a wooden spoon and her memory will twitch, but it will not quite reveal to her this moment when she seems to be looking into an open secret, something not startling until you think of trying to tell it.