Agnes Martin: "I paint with my back to the world."
Empty mind.... yes. No ideas... what would that be like?
For the last few weeks I've been considering the possibility of giving up reading all books for a year. Yup, no books. None. A year. I am dreaming of what might be changed for me in doing something so drastic. I wrote my first piece of fiction when I was 9 years old, in response to the books I was reading then, by a guy named Edward Eager. My grandfather actually "published" the story, by running it off on a mimeograph machine at his office and distributing it to... I don't know who. This is when I first figured out that maybe I could be a writer, like Edward Eager. Since then, as you everyone who knows me knows all too well: reading and writing and reading and writing. Half a century later... a good time to try something else maybe?
I would take all the books here in my office -- and there are a LOT of them! -- box them up, and store them in the basement. (Have to clean the basement first...) Then, all that extra space and all that extra time I'd have. And if I wanted to read a book, well I guess I'd just have to write it myself...
susan taylor chehak
PublicationsAs Kathryn Dow
“Dow’s ambitiously imaginative debut novel questions the very nature of reality… [a] diverting exploration of metaphysical concepts. Winsome and smartly playful.” —Kirkus Reviews
When her father bumps his head and collapses, in Linwood, Iowa; June, 2006, Alma doesn't know what to do. And then she does.
Fiction
Mouse Wendler's account of her father's disappearance in Linwood, Iowa, June 2006.
"Chehak's prose provides a seamless, calm flow to a novel whose elements of love and murder ripple enticingly, fully surfacing only gently, only eventually, in the most satisfying kind of storytelling." -Booklist
"Haunting . . . Clodine Wheeler is the bemused narrator who strings together brilliant beads of descriptive phrases as she sorts through her memories . . . Chehak skillfully depicts small-town meanness and ironic generosity . . . . Her mesmerizing tale has classic resonances." – Publishers Weekly
"A dark tale of obsession among the posh ranks of a midwestern town... Chehak's poetic style exposes the passionate longings beneath the mannered sterling-and-crystal patina of Cedar Hill life; she renders both violence and love with an unflinching eye and casts a mournful spell." -Vogue
"Chehak is a very accomplished storyteller, always in control of her narrative, which moves ahead with grace and speed. But it's not only the plot that matters to this writer. It's the telling little details, particularly of teenage angst and of domestic life that makes the novel rich... SMITHEREENS is a novel fully worthy of the title thriller. It's hard to put down. It has a kind of dark allure." - The Los Angeles Times
“In Susan Taylor Chehak’s skilled hands, Iowa becomes the seething, steamy setting for a tale of pure evil… This is a marvelous, creepy story.” -The Kansas City Star
Short Stories
Now available at Amarillo Bay
Now available at Juked
available online at Folly
available online at
Word Riot
Now available at Guernica Magazine
read it on your Kindle, or your Kindle App
Online Projects
Nonfiction
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What's NewInfluence and ignitionAugust 26, 2009
I'm reading Making An Elephant by Graham Swift -- a writer writing about writing -- and this afternoon I came upon this passage:
"'Which writers have influenced you,' is a complicated question. How writers affect other writers is as mysterious and misunderstood as how writers are made in the first place. The word 'influence' itself is misleading. It assumes that one writer's writing can directly shape and inform another's, as it can, but surely the most important influences aren't influences in this sense at all. They are those other writers who, though they may not leave on you any stylistic mark, yet ignite or reignite your simple desire to write." Graham Swift was this to me when I was writing my first (published) novel. I read his "Waterland" and was ignited. |
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