Poetica Magazine

While my kids are away at camp, my husband and I escaped the heat of Phoenix and spent a few days in Flagstaff, in the northern part of the state. 

One of my favorite things to do there is visit a used bookstore called Bookman's.

There are a couple other Bookman's in the greater Phoenix area that are satisfying in a pinch, but there's just something about that Bookman's that makes it special.  Maybe it's the proximity to the university up there, the books that the professor's assign on their reading lists, and the students' subsequent desire to dump all those great books in this great bookstore.  This leaves me with a multi-day experience.

It took me three separate visits this time just to get through the section they call "Biography" but which actually contains Biography, Autobiography and Memoir.  There were three twenty-foot rows of books to get through.  I came away with about 20 new books to read - all memoir - and I was being very selective and moving pretty quickly.  I knew my husband, a non-reader, would never put up with what I really wanted to do:  just stay at Bookman's while we were in Flagstaff, except for meals.  Why don't they put in a bed and breakfast?  After all, I never even had a chance to get to my other areas of interest, like Judaica, Fiction and Poetry.

One thing I learned when I was working on my Master's degree is that half of learning how to write occurred in reading other authors.  When I taught Freshman English it was amazing to me that I could lecture my students all day about the things that had them mystified, like paragraph use and punctuation, but if I gave them enough wonderful stories to read, they got it right away. 

Since I'm apparently never too old to start again, and never too smart to not have something I need to learn, I've been taking online classes this year, lately taking one in Memoir.  I now know that I have to restructure the memoir that I've written.  So when I read these books that I bought after spending hours in Bookman's I'm not just going to be reading them for enjoyment.  I'm going to be a student again, studying their structure, studying their use of tenses, studying beginnings and endings and realizing that each books is the final form that made it through the publishing house, through multiple editings.  This thing that I hold in my hands probably doesn't look like the thing the author first completed, but it got there somehow.  

Thanks for reading JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor