Colleen J. McElroy, “Remarks Beneath the Visiting Moon”

tell me how you get here I say
I want the map to keep in my head
tell me when do you turn inland
off the highway and what
houses what lights lead the way
tell me how you remember and what
lets you navigate I want
to be with you when the road
curves bends and dances

in the rearview mirror
tell me if my smell taste
lingers on your mouth hands
tell me how I fall into
the shape of your words
your breath beside me
on the pillow tell me how
in the dark I can write
your name shamelessly on every

window tell me how
I can assume the shape of your
body holding me tell me I say
I am hopelessly helplessly
in love at 60 still going on 16
and no sunset moonrise will
ever be the same

From Sleeping with the Moon, which also includes “Photolinen: La Push Beach.” Older poems published in Ploughshares include “Paris Subway Tango” and “Caution: This Woman Brakes for Memories.”

11 November 2007 | poetry |

Joshua Henkin: Going the Distance with Your Characters

I began reading Joshua Henkin‘s new novel, Matrimony, last month while I was serving jury duty, and the story immediately engrossed me; the following two days just flew by. His fame is beginning to spread to other parts of the literary world; Jennifer Egan liked the novel and said so in the NY Times Book Review; the same week, his short story “What My Father Looked Like” appeared at FiveChapters.com.

One of the aspects of the novel that impressed me most as I was reading was the way that Henkin stayed with his characters and their intimate relationship over such an extended period of narrative time, and I asked him if he would comment on this for Beatrice. He was kind enough to oblige, and more than patient as I scrambled to find time, and then the right time, to share his reflections with you.

My new novel, Matrimony, took me ten years to write. I threw out literally thousands of pages—some of them perfectly good pages; they just didn’t belong in this book. A novel isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon, but when you get to the end of that marathon, you’re not the person you were at the beginning. Your voice has changed; your preoccupations have, too. And so you need to go back and revise yet again, so that what happens at the beginning of the book and what happens at the end feel conceptually and tonally part of the same endeavor.

When I began to write Matrimony, I was thirty-three and living in Ann Arbor, where I had gone to graduate school; my first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson, had recently been published. I had also just met the woman I would eventually marry, and though our relationship would be long-distance for the first two years and we wouldn’t get married for several years after that, I knew from the start that this was the person I would spend my life with. And I sensed, in knowing this, that big changes lay ahead, changes I couldn’t yet comprehend.

I had also recently attended my tenth-year college reunion, and so I suppose I had reunions on the brain. When I started Matrimony, I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about. Hardly any novelist I know does; you just put your characters in a situation where something will happen, and you hope that over time you figure it out. I had this image of a couple attending their college reunion. That was all I knew—the beginning of the book. As it turns out, I didn’t know even that. Yes, there’s a college reunion in Matrimony, but it comes 250 pages and twenty years into the novel and it’s a relatively short scene.

(more…)

10 November 2007 | guest authors |