Category Archives: writing

Date a Girl Who Reads

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Date a Girl Who Reads by Rosemarie Urquico

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent.  Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilightseries.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

short story (work in progress)

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ROOSTER

A weekend ski retreat, and after a full first day on the slopes, our college group is back at our rented chalet, warming up by the fireplace and playing a strange version of a game show, replete with trick questions.  For example, I was just removed from the game because I guessed (like an idiot), “the north side” to the question, “If a rooster lays an egg on the roofline of a shed, which side will it roll down?”  The answer, of course, is that roosters don’t lay eggs, but now I’m standing in the back of the room, next to beautiful Ethan, my friend of just six months, who was convinced by his brother to come along at the last urgent minute even though he doesn’t go to our school.

Ethan teases me about my stupid answer, but somehow he manages to be very charming about it.  Ethan has gray eyes and messy curls and this persistent ghost of a grin that always makes me wonder.  He plays bass guitar in a local indie band called Flight Theory and started his own web design company with Miles, his (also talented) brother.  Ethan uses his words very wisely, and sometimes I think that I might end up loving him.

I’m the most experienced skier of the group, so this weekend Ethan asks me the questions, although it’s usually the other way around.  Although he’s met everyone in our group before, it’s me he’s chosen to cling to while Miles races around like his usual manic self.  And now, here we are, Ethan in dirty denim and a clinging gray thermal, standing beside me, his arms crossed, appearing a little nervous and out of place.

“Hey, Ethan?”

“Yeah?”

“Relax.”

He smiles.  Ahhhh, that’s good.  The hair on my arms stands up, and I feel cold on my neck behind my ears.  Crazy how beautiful boys can slow things down.  “Do I look that uptight?” he asks.  “I think I’m still keyed up from that Straight Shoot run.”

“How is it that you live in Minnesota and have never been skiing?” I ask, wandering across the open concept to pour myself some decaf from the pot beside the fridge.

“I don’t know,” he says, now leaning over the kitchen island, his back to the game show chaos.  “I guess I just never had the desire before.  It’s good to be here now.”  He looks at me, vague clouds of confusion resting in those gray eyes, his lips pursed in thought, probably pondering something profound, perhaps how fate kept him from the hills until just this weekend, for some experience that could happen only now.

“It’s like an eclipse,” I say.  What am I talking about?

“What is?”  His eyes are so warm.  Not like Miles’s.

I swallow.  “I don’t know, I guess.  Something about timing.  Waiting a long time for something.”

Ethan looks at me longer than normal without speaking.  It’s good.  Comfortable.  I offer him a drink of my coffee, but he shakes his head, and we both turn at the sudden burst of laughter coming from the seats around the fireplace.

The catalyst is Ethan’s brother.  He almost always is.

Yes, Miles, whom I fell in love with (or something I mistook for the thing) two years earlier, when we were silly college freshmen, once upon a different lifetime.  And now things are so different, so sad and strained, and it’s bizarre being back here with him but without him, this same chalet where he first made me blush in a very, very good way.  We stayed up talking all night in the loft and watched the sun rise through these floor-to-ceiling windows when morning peeked in on us.  It was probably all wrong, but his offering was exactly what I searched for during the year that tripped behind those days … then that year doubled, and the whole enterprise went crazy because in July his older brother was introduced into the unspoken mess.

And Ethan is clever and willing and always up for discussion about metaphysics and logic and God.  I desire to desire him more, but I’m so distracted by Miles, wondering what exactly happened those early months, if Miles was intoxicated with the weather, drunk on the cold.  Meanwhile, I confused a winter-induced kiss with love and a connection that I fooled myself about for the next year and a half.

Miles had rescued me from the overwhelming transition to college.  After a semester of dorm room insomnia, worrying about classes, grades, and my ex-boyfriend James, when Miles stormed onto the scene, it had been a welcome distraction—but more than a distraction, a delight.  Miles was wild and brilliant, resourceful and creative, full of ideas and passion—all of which he still is, only now his moods flash like lightning and roll like thunder, and his pride is a wall I can’t see over.  I remember the old Miles sometimes, like the special seconds when he actually raises both his eyebrows in a way that shows he’s learning.  So infrequent.  Today he stooped low to talk gently to the kindergarteners making their way to the bunny hill, and it punctured my heart with that old syringe of longing.

But those days are rare now.  He is as fascinating as ever—but insolent as hell.

Ethan is usually around then, and looking so alive and accessible.  Last summer, the whole college gang spent a week at the brothers’ family cabin on a lake up north, which is where I’d first met Ethan.  Miles had run around that week in red swim trunks, his mood as unreliable as our cell phone signals that far north.  One minute he was telling jokes and entertaining the crew, the next he was remote, letting us guess if he’d wandered off on one of his long walks alone around the lake.

So I ate lunch with Ethan that week and journalled about the way he looked so responsible as he steered the boat.  Ethan was older, brimming with respect and artistry and quiet words.  I wanted to be near him—it was something very different, much less humbling, than my desire to serve Miles, the boy whom I figured could command the stars and spill success anywhere.  Ethan felt more like someone you could sit with on a park bench and watch the clouds, the people, the birds.

“Everyone up there just loves Miles, you know,” I say to Ethan as we both lean against the island.

“I know.”  Admiration from him too.
I sigh.  “Oh that Miles.”  It’s loaded.

So the question becomes this:  if Miles returned to the 2-years-ago Miles, would I abandon this little untenable affair with his brother?  Maybe that exact Miles is an illusion, or maybe the illusion takes form in the person of Ethan.  Do I want Ethan to be more like Miles or Miles to be more like Ethan?

“How did you and Miles meet anyway?” some bad muse prompts Ethan to ask.

I offer a crippled smile.  “We met at school but really clicked on a trip here.  You wouldn’t know it now.”

“No, I guess you wouldn’t.”  Oh horrid honesty of the older guy.  “So,” Ethan continues, “what happened between then and now?”

Do I really want to discuss this with Ethan?  “I don’t know.”

“Miles needs to grow up, Claire.”

I just look at my woolen socks, gray like his shirt, like his eyes.  When I look back at Ethan, those eyes are sad with knowledge.  I breathe quickly, feel my chest rise and fall.  It’s a peculiar moment, plump to bursting with unprocessed truth, for both of us.  In our own ways, we’re facing a reality we can’t hold.  I want to force myself to feel things; he does too; neither of us can.  Maybe we need to hold Sorrow’s hand longer to learn other things.

If he said that he himself is grown up, it would be cliché.  I notice that it has begun to snow outside.  This room is thick with heat and I need to sit down.

“I know,” I say, and it suffices as an inclusive answer as I find a kitchen stool for myself.  I hand another to Ethan, and he perches on it, now listening closely to the next game show question that his brother is attempting to tackle.  Ethan’s focus is so attractive that in that moment I want to lead him out of the chalet and wrap myself around him under the witness of the pines.

Stupid.  Somehow, in this ridiculous triangle, the rooster conceived.  None of us know (and right now, Miles doesn’t care) which direction the egg is rolling off the roof, and all at once it feels fated and manipulable, and all I can do is breathe in, breathe out, wait.

Martha, Martha.

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Productivity really matters to me.  A lot.  Maybe too much.

This was my prayer the other night:

I love You, God.  I really do.  Why don’t I spend more time with You?  I have this idea about productivity meaning that I churn out a product.  But it is productive to spend time with You.  I think of the Mary/Martha story– Martha was cleaning and serving and being productive, but You said that Mary made the better choice– to sit at Your feet and listen, adore.  Calm me down.  Help me to not feel like I always need to produce.  I know that part of it is just the creative spirit that You gave me that drives me to create– and in so doing, I believe I am mimicking You, hopefully to Your glory– but I never want my creative tendencies to get into the way of my relationship with You.  Holy Spirit, I need You to change this in me.  Help me to be satisfied just to be with You.  I do feel like we are together while I write– and I am writing for You– all I do is for You.  I want to be like Mary, to sit at Your feet and adore.  But it is not in my nature, Lord, so I will need You to engender that in me.  Martha, Martha, you are worried about so many things.  Jackie, Jackie.

9 years later

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… I finally finished the poem that I starting writing right around college graduation in May 2003.  I hope it makes sense to you.  Some people have gotten confused by it.  Hint: there are 3 characters in it, not 2.

THE CALL

When the sky burst like a balloon, the rain soaked the hikers
for ten wild minutes that shivered like forever.
It was like a gift, he said, or like a holy baptism.
Or it was like a scene in a story you would write.
And when the call was dropped, she phoned to tell me,
who pictured this boy or that on a cell phone in the mountains,
smelling clean like Appalachian rain and wanting me to know.

writing lately

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I have been working on a couple different things lately, some short stories and poems, and I have loved every minute of it.  When I lay awake in bed at night thinking of how I cannot wait to get back to work on my projects, I just know that I was created to write.  I have issues with writer envy (major issues), but I am trying to just become the best writer that I can be.  I will not be C.S. Lewis.  I can only be Jackie Lea Sommers.  But the more I work at being the best writer Jackie Lea Sommers can be and the less time I spend being envious of Markus Zusak and John Green, the more my own writing will improve.

Here is what I’m currently working on.

MADAM, MEET ADAM

When he woke, his sleep hung about him, heavy as a fog, and his side had a strange sensation as if it had been touched by something very, very cold—so cold he gasped as his body registered the local chill amidst all the afternoon heat of the garden.  His right side, mid-torso.  It had a peculiar tingle, although it did not hurt, and when he stood, he had the queerest impression that his insides had shifted.  This is new, he thought.  But he conceded, It all is.

He stood in the garden—green, although he did not know the word for the color yet, and full of nameless flowers and anonymous vegetation of every kind.  He wondered if it would fall to him to label them, just as he had named the creatures, that parade of beasts, his subjects over whom he’d uttered a pronouncement.  The first taste of creativity, that initial spark of imagination, and the names had spilled out of him as if inspired.  Even now, he had to admire the words—dog, swan, lamb, elephant.  The last had made him proud, those syllables erupting from his mouth when he had not known they were in him.

Fascination: the fleece, the fur, the feathers, the scales.  And some could hang suspended in the sky, and some could breathe beneath the waters.  It was true there was none quite like him, with almost translucent skin and blue rivers climbing each wrist, and while he could not exactly feel lonesome—nor could he fathom such a word—he did wonder at the animals’ companionship.  Of course, he had the Maker, and as they walked the garden in the cool of the day, he was perfectly happy, filled with love just the way his chest was filled with air.  It was impossible to want in the face of the joy and affection that spiked from the Maker, planting fearsome and holy barbs in his deepest core.

His side still blazed with that same cold tickle.  Examining it, he found there was the faintest mark along his ribcage, as if there had been an opening which had since been closed up, not like a stitch, but more like the smoothing of wet clay over a crack in the riverbank.  He had the vague impression of being a patched vessel.  He ran his fingers over the spot—cool to the touch, flush and silky, the color of the sand on the beach.

Something stirred nearby.  Curious, he noticed a creature lying beneath a beech tree, looking odd where it rested unrecognizable.  A beast he had missed?  His intrigue sparked as he approached and stared in awe at the creature by his feet: a biped, like himself.  Two long legs, a waist as smooth and perfect as fresh foam on the shore.  He could see the outline of ribs, like the ripple made when he’d tossed a stone into the water.  Two perfect peaks of flesh and the strange and sweet valleys above the collarbones.   The ivory neck, the soft shadow on the inside of the bicep, the dark hair that lay in glossy waves beneath the head.  Somehow this creature was at once just like him and nothing like him.  It had its own secret.  He needed to know.

Without realizing what he was doing, he reached out, his hand drawn to that shadow below the breast to see if it was as cold as his.  When his hand pressed gently on its side, the creature’s eyes blinked wide, its mouth making a small “Oh!”  The eyes.  They were the newest of all creations, and yet in a moment he could see that that they knew more than all the beasts he had named.  The eyes were wide and welcoming and intelligent but not yet wise, and the long lashes fluttered as gently as the wings of the butterfly when it has alighted.  The being swallowed, and that slightest movement of the throat’s hollow made him ache—it was not pain but compassion, which he felt must be rolling off him like a billowing fog.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said, barely moving his mouth.

“I’m not,” it answered, the voice, valiant as an empress, sweet and certain as a schoolgirl.

“You can speak,” he said in surprise.

“Yes,” it agreed.  That voice!  Soft as the milkweed silk.  He had not known how desperately he had wanted to hear such a voice until he heard it stop.  That silence was the very first hole in paradise.

“What are you?” he asked.

“I am your partner,” it said, then touched his side.  The tiny hand warmed the spot.

“Flesh of my flesh,” he whispered, earth’s first poet.  “Bone of my bone.”

And then joy pressed hard against the man’s heart, for the Maker had joined them.  The man didn’t know the word, but he wanted to dance, to throw out his arms and spin in the garden’s sunlight.  It was too much—to have them both here.  His heart was full, too gloriously full; it was rupturing the way the apple buds had burst into blossoms.

“You may name her as well,” the Maker spoke to the man.

“Her?”

“Yes.  Her.  She.”

The secret.  It was brilliant and beautiful and profound.  He never knew if it was a minute or a month before the next came to him: “Woman.”

The woman smiled, the first smile in the history of the universe, and its splendor flabbergasted him—the curve of the lips, the flash of the strong, white teeth.  His world was unmade and reimagined in that brief but broad moment.

“This is your queen,” said the Maker, “and together you will make princes.”

He had to be near her, needed to touch her, had this strange desire to press his mouth against her body.  She was a gift made of bone, and he of clay.  They were naked and natural, organic in every way, the original man and wife making their way into the shade of the beech trees to celebrate God.

 

Week of the Lovely Lines: Friday

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You knew I had to include Peace Like a River quotes this week, right?  How could I possibly share a week of lovely lines and not quote Leif Enger, whose brilliant fiction often reads like poetry?  He delights me on paper and is just as wonderful in person!

“I remember it as October days are always remembered, cloudless, maple-flavored, golden and so clean it quivers.” 

“When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of earth.”

“Be careful whom you choose to hate. The small and the vulnerable own a protection great enough, if you could but see it, to melt you into jelly. Beware those who reside beneath the shadow of the Wings.” 

How about this from So Brave, Young, and Handsome:

“…for his life seemed a curving line, capricious, moment by moment inviting grace.” 

 

Week of the Lovely Lines: Thursday

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What week of lovely lines would truly be complete without at least one poem?  Here, I present to you one of e.e. cummings’ best, with a stunning final line.  I remember re-reading this my second year of college, alone in my dorm, and the tears started just running down my face.  It was as if I were coming alive again, remembering why I loved words.

I sat on my roommate’s couch, reading and re-reading this poem.  It was like a gift.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

Week of the Lovely Lines: Wednesday

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Today is a menagerie of utter gorgeousness taken from Peter Beagle’s book The Last Unicorn.  You can’t tiptoe your way through this book without bumping into beauty every few paragraphs.

“Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.” 

“He thought, or said, or sang, I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full.” 

“Another sound followed them long after these had faded, followed them into morning on a strange road – the tiny dry sound of a spider weeping.”

These flabbergast me.  He thought, or said, or sang … yes.  Yes.

Week of the Lovely Lines: Tuesday

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Today’s lovely line comes from The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.  The first time I read this line, I thought I had never heard something prettier.  It still gets me every time.

“She was the book thief without the words.  Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like rain.”

The image is pure genius.  If you can write a better line than that, I want to shake your hand.

Week of the Lovely Lines: Monday

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  Do you ever encounter a line or a passage in a book that makes you shiver with delight, one that bends your mind, or (if you’re a writer) one that makes you so envious you could scream?  In all my years of reading, I have encountered some lines that just take my breath away every time I read them.  This week, I’m going to share them with you.

Today’s lines come from That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis.

“As the desert first teaches men to love water, or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else – something he vaguely called the “Normal” – apparently existed…. It was all mixed up with Jane and fried eggs and soap and sunlight and the rooks cawing at Cure Hardy and the thought that, somewhere outside, daylight was going on at that moment. He was not thinking in moral terms at all; or else (what is much the same thing) he was having his first deeply moral experience. He was choosing a side: the Normal.”

Mmm … all those k-sounds!  Rooks cawing at Cure Hardy.  LOVE.

How about this:

“great syllables of words that sounded like castles came out of his mouth”

That sounded like castles.  I’m in love.

Jack Lewis, you are my hero.