Barbara K. Richardson
  • Books
  • Info
  • Blog

When a Reader Gets It

9/24/2012

0 Comments

 
Picture
In 1966, I ran the 100 yard dash alongside Dilaun Terry and all of the boys in our fifth grade class. I won. In sixth grade, Dilaun won the pentathlon. Fleet of foot, tiny, slender, with straight flying dark hair, she outran, out-jumped and out-threw every strapping young adored boy and girl Adelaide Elementary School placed at the starting line. (OK, it was a five-way tie with a basketball toss tie-breaker. Still, she won!)

43 years later, Dilaun and I re-met on Facebook.

45 years later, Dilaun read and reviewed my novel Tributary. She doesn’t normally read literary fiction. She’s a sculptor and a painter. She didn’t think she could write. She sent the review to me to see if it would do as an online review.

I said, Oh my goddess—she’s outpaced the professional bloggers. I love this review.


"Tributary is a book for those who want to learn how to see.

"Barbara Richardson has masterfully blended extremes between the humble and ordinary lives of poor Utah settlers during the early formation of the Mormon Church and complex literary poetry.

"She has used her craft to introduce an untold historical viewpoint that had no place in common history books, but nonetheless delivers that voice today. Clair Martin rises to find a family she never knew by a lifetime journey following her roots and, in the end, finding what real family truly means. Her story illustrates that some wealth and riches transcend social hierarchy and money.   

"Barbara’s superb command of poetry helps one see history through another vantage point, while treating the reader to a rich tapestry of beauty beyond social constraints and materialism."

Run, Dilaun, Run!

Picture
Thanks so much, Dilaun. The stronger the woman, the better the tale.
0 Comments

Slow is Beautiful Guest Blog

9/9/2012

1 Comment

 
Picture

Visit a great website, Becca's Byline, to read my guest blog and
de-accelerate your day!

Picture
Slow is Beautiful

I remember a Rilke quote, an insight from that wise and sensitive poet, suggesting life is a closed envelope and nearly all of us just pass the envelope along to the next generation. Few open it. Few even try. Almost no one realizes the envelope is addressed to them. To us. To you.

That letter from the universe waits in your hands. You are the recipient. The mystery, of course, is how to open the envelope. Every day. Every minute of every day.

I know one thing that will raise your odds: slow down . . . (click slow down to read the rest)

1 Comment

Spin

7/6/2012

0 Comments

 
Picture
I read a remarkable chapter in a book that almost explains the mystery of our experience of the world. The chapter talks about spin.

Everything we perceive and know is, deep down, an effect of spin. All the polar opposites that intrigue and plague us—north and south, right and wrong, catsup and mustard, predator and prey, woman and man, passion and aggression, left and right—are essential to the functioning of the universe. Opposites repel each other, thus starting a spin. That same whirl that we seem unable to transcend, even to the destruction of everything we hold dear, is truly irresistible. The earth itself spins. The solar system spins. Water spins down the drain in a predictable direction, depending on which pole—north or south—it answers to.

Here is the beauty of Steve Hagen’s view in How the World Can Be the Way It Is: spin always points beyond itself. If you imagine the world turning on its axis, all of the movement which parallels the equator spins, spins, spins. Oceans and wind currents bow to this spin. But the north/south axis is static, unmoving, and it “suggests a direction which points beyond the spinning system, much as north points beyond the Earth while east and west do not.”

North and south cannot exist as opposites without what lies beyond their polarity. Imagine you’re perceiving the Earth from five hundred miles out in space. You will see the Earth spin, you will see ocean and weather patterns bending to accommodate that spin. You will be unaffected, except perhaps by the stunning beauty of it all. You’re seeing the polarity within its larger context.

“The relative aspect—conceptual reality—is characterized by spin. If we latch on to any object within that world of spin, we too will begin to oscillate, back and forth, up and down, with the spin. The other element of our experience, however, is steady and unchanging—this is the aspect of experience which is Absolute,” Hagen writes.

We live in the relative with the ability to see the Absolute. That is our human gift.

And here’s where I got happy, and quietly curious, wanting to look for the “pointer beyond” in all circumstances. Realizing that even the most intractable conflicts point toward harmony. Not resolution. Not one over the other. As long as you grab onto that spinning golden ring of opposition/opposites, one side wins, one loses and the game repeats itself. It spins.

If we live with a larger view—if we see the world as it is and take no sides but that of witness—does all that up-close-and-personal with the Absolute make us indifferent, detached, heartless? Would you be indifferent seeing the whole blue spinning ball of Earth in dark space?

Picture
Seeing the whole picture makes us resonate with the truth of everything we hold deer. 


Thanks to Mark Bailey for the star spin photo. 
The firefighter and deer photo is from Facebook. Sorry, I cannot remember who posted it.
0 Comments

The Quotidian

5/4/2012

1 Comment

 
Picture

Doctor Who, the adventurous time-traveling British sci-fi hero, uses a phone box to explore the cosmos in his extraterrestrial adventures. The TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space) looks just like a traditional blue British phone box, but the interior is much larger than its exterior—it is in fact a spacecraft with all the bells and lights and whistles. Because this powerful time machine looks like a phone box, it blends with its surroundings.

The quotidian is gateway to the profound.


In the movie American Beauty—which won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay and Best Cinematography in 1999—the most captivating five minutes of the movie involve the lilting flight pattern of a plastic bag caught in an updraft in a dirty alley. That lyrical unplanned (free) movement mesmerizes, whereas all of the actions of all of the characters are deeply bound with suffering.

Release, through a random plastic bag.

You can open an entire world, paying attention to the quotidian. A seemingly everyday item can be the linchpin, the secret door, the portal to understanding. We’ve all watched dust motes; remember when that was the most fascinating thing happening in school?! How about a bike wheel, window glass, a bee sneaking into blossoms, laundry in the breeze, a bird feeder.


Let's visit that bee in blossoms . . . 

Picture
In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, we follow the life of the very independent and deeply misunderstood free-living Janie Crawford: “Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.”

When Janie thinks of her young years, she remembers exactly when “her conscious life” began.

“It was a spring afternoon in West Florida. Janie had spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree in the back-yard. She had been spending every minute that she could steal from her chores under that tree for the last three days. That was to say, ever since the first tiny bloom had opened. It had called her to come and gaze on a mystery . . . She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid . . . Oh, to be a pear tree—any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her?”

Lordy, what a sumptuous world arose from a bee in a trees-worth of spring blossoms. 

Now let’s visit that laundry . . . 
Picture
. . . someone awakens to laundry on the line outside their window, but this is not mundane laundry because it’s seen through the eyes and the heart of poet Richard Wilbur. Flapping laundry led him to this:

Love Calls Us to the Things of the World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.

Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,

“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

"Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.”

                                    —Richard Wilbur, 1956
Picture



And lastly, as a gift to you and all humanity, the birdfeeder . . .  

which hangs just outside Wendell Berry’s study window. Plain language, plain sparrows, plain writing day. But are these birds or are they his poems, or they the spirits of all of humankind?





Window Poems #7

Outside the window
is a roofed wooden tray
he fills with seeds for the birds.
They make a sort of dance
as they descend and light
and fly off at a slant
across the strictly divided
black sash. At first
they came fearfully, worried
by the man's movements
inside the room. They watched
his eyes, and flew
when he looked. Now they expect
no harm from him
and forget he's there.
They come into his vision,
unafraid. He keeps
a certain distance and quietness
in tribute to them.
That they ignore him
he takes in tribute to himself.
But they stay cautious
of each other, half afraid, unwilling
to be too close. They snatch
what they can carry and fly
into the trees. They flirt out
with tail or beak and waste
more sometimes than they eat.
And the man, knowing
the price of seed, wishes
they would take more care.
But they understand only
what is free, and he
can give only as they 
will take. Thus they have
enlightened him. He buys
the seed, to make it free.

                        --Wendell Berry

Picture
The things of this world teach us directly when we close our ears to language and discourse, and open to the spirit of what is.
1 Comment

Shout Out Loud

3/13/2012

0 Comments

 
It is spring, folks, and new things are rumbling in the breezes. Bears are coming out of hibernation, and with them, this new book on Colorado bears by the talented writer Laura Pritchett.
Picture
Laura just wrote the first endorsement for my novel Tributary, thereby cutting off all fears that not one soul on the planet would really enjoy it. Ridiculous fears run like freak windstorms through the publishing process. And here is Laura's loverly blurb:

"This is a gorgeous novel. This book does what art should do, which is to show us our lives with renewed clarity and better insight. Tributary takes the incomplete history and mythos of the West to task, and instead shows us some of the far more interesting and unexplored stories of American West – Mormonism, racism, women who don’t need marriage or men. Beautifully written and engaging, this is a story of one woman and her refusal to cave into societal norms in order to seek her own difficult and inspired path."

--Laura Pritchett, author of Sky Bridge and Hell’s Bottom, Colorado

Deepest thanks to her for the smashing Tributary endorsement.
Pritchett turns from powerful fiction writer to stellar storyteller in her newest book, a collection of historical, geographical, sorrowful, heart-pounding tales about the bears who did and do exist in the wilds of Colorado. I can’t wait to read it. And neither can my significant other who loves all things bear.

Great Colorado Bear Stories comes out this week, so check it out at online booksellers, or ask at your nearest dearest bookstore. Laura’s website features all of her other award-winning books. In fact, how can one author win so many awards—PEN USA, Milkweed National Fiction Prize, Colorado Book Award, WILLA Literary Award—and not be in her dotage?! I’ll ask her when she comes to read in Boulder, April 17.

From strangers to colleagues in two days flat. Life is good.

And if you have a minute, listen to dear young Amos Lee sing “Shout Out Loud.” (Hit mute for the noisy advertisement at the start!)
0 Comments

Payback Time*

1/7/2012

5 Comments

 
How many books have you read and loved?
Picture


How many
of those books
have you reviewed?


_ Authors have spilled their sweat and inky blood for you. It’s time you paid them back.

We count on online reviews to spread the word and promote our titles. Luckily, an online book review can take just a few minutes. So challenge yourself to review the best ten books you’ve read in the last year. And then do it every year. Contribute reviews to help boost your favorite authors and keep their books from going out of print!

It's simple. Here's how:

On any of the following bookseller sites, enter the title of the book you’d like to review. Then, once you’re on that book’s page . . .

AMAZON--

_ Scroll down past the professional reviews and the “Product Details” to “Customer Reviews.” On the right hand side of the page, there’s a button called “Create your own review.”
Picture
_ You’ll be given the opportunity to create your reviewer name and password. Then you can 1) rate the book with stars, from one to five 2) enter the title for your review 3) type in a written review of at least 20 words. You can then preview your review and post it, once it says what you like.
Picture
_That took five minutes, max!

BARNES & NOBLE--

_ Similar to Amazon, scroll down to “Customer Reviews.” Click on the “Write and Review” button on the right hand side of the page. Create an account for your reviewer self, and then proceed to rate with stars and a written review. You can choose to show your pen name or write an anonymous review.

POWELL'S BOOKS--

Picture
_You click on “Add a comment for a chance to win!” in order to create your identity and then star and review the book. This is right under the “What Our Readers Are Saying” heading.

BOOKSAMILLION--

_ On this site, you can only enter a star rating, so it is fast and easy!

All of these booksellers give you the chance to post your review to Facebook or Tweet it or email it to friends. It’s up to you, how far and how wide you’d like your review to spread its wings.
_

And for the Truly Devoted Reader:

Picture
This is a great website for book fanatics. You can meet other folks with your reading tastes, read reviews by your "friends," write reviews of your favorite and unfavorite books, and win free books on giveaways. It really is a fine way to keep a journal of all you’ve read.

You won't be alone! Goodreads has 6,700,000 members who've added more than 230,000,000 books to their online "shelves."Click here for a pitch from one devoted fan. Or just join the conversation.

It’s easy to sign up on Goodreads. Once you have an identity, you get your own reviewer page. You can enter the name of any book, and it pops up cover and all. You can then read existing reviews, say whether you’re reading it or have already read it, and give it a star rating and/or add a written review.

When you sign up for favorite reviewers, you'll get updates on books they’ve read. You can join groups of like-minded readers. You can also visit author pages, to read blogs and watch book trailers.

Goodreads will send you handy suggestions for titles you may love and a monthly newsletter of what's new in your favorite genres.
Picture
Better still, you can go to authors' pages, and leave encouraging words. If they're active Goodreads members, you will be able to find out what they're reading and reviewing. Wouldn't you love to know what's on your favorite author's nightstand?

_There's a great big network of book lovers.
Why are you reading out in the cold?

*NEWSWEEK reports that one way to get smarter and "Buff Your Brain" is to WRITE REVIEWS ONLINE. I quote: "Anyone can be a critic on the Internet—and you should too. When you like or hate something, review it on Amazon, Yelp, whatever. Typing out your opinion will help you to better understand your own thinking." (Sadly, the online version does not list the 31 ways to get smarter faster. But it does have a link to a great article on meditation and brain happiness by Amy Gross, former editor of O Magazine.)
5 Comments

The Subtleties of Grace

9/22/2011

0 Comments

 
* spoiler alert * this book review tells all *
Picture
Jesus was not an intellectual. The narrator of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, the Reverend John Ames, is. His discourses on things Christian explore the subtleties of grace and love and God’s light, but he himself cannot act to save his godson, the lying, selfish, devious, no-account son of Ames’ best friend the Reverend Boughton. When the prodigal son Jack Boughton returns home to Gilead, Iowa, he receives precisely no help in his attempt at starting a new life. He receives a cold reception, a pointedly critical sermon, unflinching attention to long-held gospel principles and, in the end, one blessing.  

I would not call this Christian behavior.

For the first illegitimate child Jack Boughton abandoned, early in his life, the Reverends Ames and Boughton expended great efforts to assist the mother and child. But for the second illegitimate child, which Jack fathered in mid-life with his black common-law wife—a woman and child he loves and longs to support and live with—nothing. His elderly father cannot be told about the mixed-race couple for fear the news will kill him. He is dying, and in the year 1956 miscegenation is a scandalous thing. The Reverend Ames, also in failing health, does nothing with the knowledge but assess and bury it.

The tastiest bits of the novel involve Ames’ grandfather, an abolitionist preacher who harbored John Brown in his Kansas church and used his ministry to end slavery and save the United States’ soul, violently. Whereas our Reverend Ames refuses to forgive Jack Boughton for abandoning his first child, for squandering fatherhood “as if it were nothing,” and cannot be stirred to assist the older, humbler Jack whose mixed-race family needs a decent place to spend their days together. Jack comes to lay his burden down—could he and his wife and child find a place to live in Gilead? To me that is the central question of this book. But Robinson’s Gilead is a “hill of testimony,” pages and pages of delicate reflection on a spiritual life, so there is no place for Jack.

Jesus spent his ministry with sinners, prostitutes, the poor, the weary and outcasts. John Ames does not even feel the lack of Christlike care offered to Jack Boughton. He uses Jack as a tool for self-examination, a theological sticking point. The only warmly compassionate person portrayed in this novel is Ames’ uneducated wife Lila, who says, “A person can change. Everything can change.”

If religion is not effective in relieving suffering and opening closed doors into grace, why is it worth our attention? For all Ames’ artistry of thought and expression, I would rather have read the life of Ames’ wife. Or his driven grandfather. I’m with the Bible on this one: To him who asks, give.

P.S.
Poking around in the history and life of John Brown, I found he created an anti-slavery group called The League of Gileadites. I doubt this is an accidental link. Brown said at the founding of the League, “Nothing so charmes the American people as personal bravery.” Wikipedia explains that “In the Bible, Mount Gilead was the place where only the bravest of Israelites would gather together to face an invading enemy.” Robinson’s town of Gilead, like the aging failing Ames, is the opposite of this. I hope she intended the irony.



0 Comments

Summer Reading

8/12/2011

0 Comments

 
What was great about this summer? I stumbled on a few fine reads, herewith shared.
Picture

Lilies of the Field—William E. Barrett

Bold simple tale of a man who finds his calling with a flock of German nuns.

The Wild Birds—Wendell Berry

Strikingly true agrarian views of life, delivered by the lawyer of a rural town in Kentucky.

Stargirl—Jerry Spinelli

Ever want to be a free spirit? Remember anyone in high school who ever dared? Stargirl shows you how.

The Beast in the Jungle—Henry James

You may think nothing happens in this novella, until the work explodes inside you the next day.


Cranford
—Elizabeth Gaskell

Doilies and tea in a small English town, simpler days and ways. I confess, I enjoyed the BBC series more than the book. (Dame Judi Dench always delivers!) The dramatic ardency of Gaskell’s novel North and South gives way to gentle portraits of country women at home and in company.

IBS Cookbook—Heather Van Vorous

This woman knows great food. Amazing fallen chocolate soufflé with raspberry sauce. Scrumptious orange flower bread. Zesty fresh mango salsa on grilled shrimp. Delectable roasted cauliflower soup. I cook from this book all of the time for guests, who never guess the dishes are low fat. Unless the recipe says it’s from Van Vorous’ mother or grandmother, it will likely be delicious. Van Vorous' recipes are pure food love.

Tattoos on the Heart—Father Gregory Boyle

An oasis of human caring, Boyle works with fatherless young men in East L.A. To quote a friend, Father Boyle “is a fascinating human being, doing more positive good than all the government agencies combined." Bask in compassion. Read his book.

And treat yourself to another compassionate hard-working man, Sydney Poitier in Lilies of the Field. The first words from the Mother's mouth when he hops out of his dusty car,


Picture
"God is good, He has sent me a big strong man."

Thanks to the best picture project for the Poitier photo.
0 Comments

Plunge

7/31/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
Hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park yesterday, I sang—heaven help me—“Rocky Mountain High." I pondered a Henry James novella I’d just read, “The Beast in the Jungle.” Because I wore brown-tinted sunglasses, the beetle-kill pines stood out on every slope, and I could not feel anything but implicated in and convinced of our changed planet.

In James’ story, the hero John Marcher misses the event of his lifetime. He feels chosen by an obscure destiny, waiting as if anointed for some beast to leap onto him and render his life profound. May Bartram, the only friend who knows of his obsession, stands beside him for decades, waiting, but Marcher’s self-absorption is so complete he only realizes when flinging himself on May’s grave that he has missed out on her love. That was his unrecognized beast.

The twists and turns of James’ syntax far exceed plot points, and I dismissed “The Beast in the Jungle” as a windy staid study in the human ego; profound—the beast is within not without us—and a dated sleeper written by a man who spent all his time indoors.

But as I hiked the thousand feet up toward Lake Helene, surrounded by vast browning slopes, the power of his novella came at me from an unexpected quarter, haunting my climb. James’ protagonist fit perfectly our environmental dilemma: we cannot really love the earth, though it offers itself, so we use it and simultaneously feel cut off from it, valuing our self-importance more than the opportunity to genuinely live, which makes us unable to stop pillaging, unable to stop missing the point, and we're just about to throw ourselves on its grave in misery and cowardice, like James' hero. Empty, when what is offered us is so full.

I have found no good way to face such a grand-scale environmental demise. Which leaves me in the Jungle with John Marcher.

Whatever you can do to plunge into this love, do it now.
0 Comments

Red Jackets

5/24/2011

0 Comments

 
Picture
I just received my second royalty check for GUEST HOUSE. The checks come every six months in a large white folder packed with info and joy. I sold 213 copies between December and May. In many circles, those are small potatoes. The way I figure it, "I am a few miles luckier, a few clouds wealthier, a few shoes humbler," and the small potatoes are the sweet ones. With red jackets!

So it's time to say thank you to everyone who has purchased a book, atttended a reading or cheered from the sidelines. I am grateful to you all.

If the fates are kind, another novel will emerge from the potato patch. Right now it's rooty research and dreams...

0 Comments
<<Previous
Forward>>

    All Lit Up:
    love, mayhem, literature
    __________

    Categories

    All
    Environment
    Miscellany
    Reading
    Simple Living
    Spirit
    Trees
    Winter
    Writing


    Favorite quotes:

    "Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.” 
    —Willa Cather

    "Nothing is as powerful as beauty in a wicked world."
    ​—Amos Lee
    ​

    Favorite place:

    The middle of nowhere.
    ​

    Currently reading:

    Curse of the Pogo Stick
    The Maytrees 

    Just finished reading:

    Finding Stillness in a Noisy World
    ​

    Favorite blog:

    One Woman's Meat: Notes from Escalante

    Picture