In Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer she describes how, as a child, she “loved novels in which children stepped through portals—a garden door; a wardrobe—into an alternate universe.” Me too. And there’s a sense in which I’m realizing Ms. Prose’s book has been for me a kind of portal—a series of such—doors opening to books.
Some of these are books that I read nearly twenty years ago now. Books that made me want to write:
Flannery O’Connor’s Everything that Rises Must Converge.
Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.
Also Raymond Carver’s Cathedral, a book of eleven stories.
I’m wondering this morning—what kind of books might make a person want to write? What kind of writing invites writing? Which books and stories and poems have done so for me? Which might do so for other people? And how do they do it?
Which are the stories that beckon? Not only into the process of reading but also into the process of writing? Could it have something to do with the way a story begins?
Here are three beginnings from Raymond Carver’s Cathedral:
Saturday afternoon she drove to the bakery in the shopping center. After looking through a loose-leaf binder with photographs of cakes taped onto the pages, she ordered chocolate, the child’s favorite. The cake she chose was decorated with a space ship and launching pad under a sprinkling of white stars, and a planet made of red frosting at the other end. His name, SCOTTY, would be in green letters beneath the planet. The baker, who was an older man with a thick neck, listened without saying anything when she told him the child would be eight years old next Monday.
Carlyle was in a spot. He’d been in a spot all summer, since early June when his wife had left him. But up until a little while ago, just a few days before he had to start meeting his classes at the high school, Carlyle hadn’t needed a sitter. He’d been the sitter. Every day and every night he attended to the children. Their mother, he told them, was away on a long trip.
This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night. His wife had died. So he was visiting the dead wife’s relatives in Connecticut. He called my wife from his in-laws’. Arrangements were made. He would come by train, a five-hour trip, and my wife would meet him at the station. She hadn’t seen him since she worked for him one summer in Seattle ten years ago. But she and the blind man had kept in touch. They made tapes and mailed them back and forth. I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me.
(So much could be said about these three stories. Each, and the first two especially, is a study in loss. And what can happen in the wake of loss. Each of the stories culminates in a conversation that changes things, a conversation that makes loss somehow more bearable. If I were going to find a spot for these stories on my other site—One Year—I’d put them in the Tenth Month—on healing conversation. And these conversations are unexpected—they occur between people that are strangers at the outset of the stories. Between Scotty’s mother and the baker. Between Carlyle and the sitter he finds for his children. Between the speaker of that third story and the blind man. Something happens in each of the stories. We’re being invited in for a reason. Look. Look what can happen.)
(If this book were a garden it would be a garden with benches and chairs in it for sitting—and talking. But not ornate benches. The seating would be both ordinary and weathered. The garden would be a corner of a park in a neighborhood that had seen better days. There might well be a trash can next to the bench. But there might also be something unexpected as well—an unexpected patch of green. Not formal. Not planned. Unexpectedly beautiful----)
But back to beginnings. The doorways to stories. The beckoning. I’m reminded of a poem by Robert Frost, a writer who, like Carver, spoke in a kind of plain language that was ordinary at the same time that it was more than ordinary. A language that seemed ordinary but had something large in it as well. The poem by Frost is The Pasture. It begins this way:
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.
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The first beginning above is from A Small Good Thing.
The second is from Fever.
The third is from the title story, Cathedral.



