back to good reads

A good read: Jim Harrison's Returning to Earth.

A good read about writing:
Write Your Memoir: The Soul Work of Telling Your Story, by Dr. Allan G. Hunter.

Here's a synchronicity for you -- on the first page the author uses an image from an Andrei Tarkovsky's film, The Sacrifice. as a metaphor for the process of writing your life story, "a process most people don't understand."

A small boy . . . is seen everyday walking over a barren landscape lugging a bucket of water, which he pours over the base of a very dead-looking tree. People tell him it's useless, but he keeps popping into the frame, barely strong enough to carry the bucket and does it anyway. The other characters shake their heads and sigh, busy with their confusions and arguments. Almost the last scene in the movie shows the boy still dragging the bucket up the hill, except now the tree has green buds and leaves on it. . . .

As a metaphor for quiet belief in daily devotion to a task it works . . . Turning up everyday to write one's life story may look to some like a loosing proposition, but in the doing of it something changes within the writer. Dead trees sprout leaves, one's sense of life is enriched -- and we move closer to an awareness of what our lives might mean.

I believe this is true of any piece of writing we are devoted to, fiction or non-fiction. It is why I write.