The Fruits--and Veggies-- of My Labor... and the Reading Room

In gardens, beauty is a by-product. The main business is sex and death. ~Sam Llewelyn

Here's the sex part:
Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, cukes, carrots, nasturtium, marigold. And I love the vibrant pallet-- sort of...moorish.

Here's the death part: The lone pumpkin I had was halfway there but the squirrels got it, and there's nothing but a pile of rinds and stems. Savage beauty sounds like a bodice ripper, but it's an apt description for my vegetable garden-- it manages to be both Darwinian and holy.

Makes one wonder if George Bernard Shaw was being ironic when he said:

The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there. ~George Bernard Shaw, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, 1932

And now for something completely different:

Also a reminder of tonight's Reading Room, featuring Joshilyn Jackson and Katherine Min.
7 pm, The Handlebar, 304 East Stone Avenue, Greenville, SC 29601.

EMRYS READING ROOM featuring JOSHILYN JACKSON and KATHERINE MIN Today, 7:00pm Age Policy Tickets
	Published writers read from their works The season begins with blockbusters. Joshilyn Jackson’s short fiction has been published in literary magazines and anthologies including TriQuarterly and Calyx, and her plays have been produced in Atlanta and Chicago. Her bestselling debut novel, gods in Alabama won SIBA's 2005 Novel of the Year Award and was a No. 1 BookSense pick. Between, Georgia was also a No. 1 BookSense pick, making her the first BookSense author to receive No. 1 status in consecutive years. Her third novel, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, was published in March. Katherine Min’s short stories have been widely anthologized, most recently in The Pushcart Book of Stories: The Best Short Stories from a Quarter-Century of The Pushcart Prize. She received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her novel, Secondhand World, (Knopf, 2006) was a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Award. She teaches at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.
	Links: Joshilyn Jackson, Katherine Min, Emrys Foundation $2 for Emrys members, $4 for non-members

Wild Gardens of Prose

I had to thin out my my lettuce the other day. It seems counter-intuitive-- you toil and nurture and sow seeds and when the tender darlings sprout, you pluck half of them out. If you don't, your bunch fails to thrive, starved for air and space. You get an overcrowded, anemic crop. And no salad.

Editing is like that. Words and images are strangled without some air and space.

"Kill Your Darlings," Faulkner advised writers.

Samuel Johnson said, "Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."

More pithy quotes:

“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector.”
– Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

“The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.”
– Robert Heinlein (1907-1988)

“I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.”
– Truman Capote (1924-1984)

“I have been correcting the proofs of my poems. In the morning, after hard work, I took a comma out of one sentence…. In the afternoon I put it back again.”
– Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

“A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. As a journalist you are expected to know the difference.”
– United Press International Stylebook, cited by Bill Walsh in “The Elephants of Style”

“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
– Thomas Mann (1875-1955)

“Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.”
– Cicero (106-43 BC)