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Mary Sanders Shartle

~ Writing quietly – Reading aloud

Mary Sanders Shartle

Monthly Archives: January 2016

The Writing Life, and other madness…

30 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by msshartle in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

I don’t write for this website much.  I plead several knee surgeries in the last few years. Recuperation from surgery is taxing. Mentally it’s just exhausting. I’m about fourteen weeks out of the last knee replacement and have just begun to turn a corner in the last few weeks. I discovered Reiki helps. Who knew?

Enough of the organ recital. Thankfully, my surgeon informs me I’ve run out of knees to operate on. And thank you, I’m feeling and walking much better now.

Also, just to keep the idly curious informed, I’ve been working on a massive project with about fifteen other writers to create a history book on Bethesda Episcopal Church in Saratoga Springs, NY, a significantly lush Gilded Age building designed by Richard Upjohn, the architect for Trinity Church in Wall Street. With so many authors, it’s been a massive undertaking, but the end is in sight. For a home-spun effort representing both professionals, academics and a doughty bunch of parishioners, it has been a hugely rewarding effort and fascinating research. But perhaps I should wait ‘til I can actually hold a copy in my hand. At least now, after three years, that seems possible.

People who know me, and especially fans of The Truth and Legend of Lily Martindale, keep asking me when the next book is coming out. Aside from the vast church history and two older fiction manuscripts of mine which need to find a publisher or agent, I have two other projects underway. One is about an elephant, a stuffed one, in the Adirondacks (obviously fiction). The other (also fiction) is about a woman in a witness protection program in Saratoga Springs who becomes interested in the history of the house where she’s kept under guard. I’m flying blind on both.

There’s a great poem from Jay Rogoff’s poetry collection How We Came to Stand on This Shore (River City Publishing, 2003) called “Driving in Fog” which aptly describes so much of what I feel when I write. He says “The road emerges out of nowhere/all ten yards of it—and runs straight nowhere,/the white lines stuttering. . .”

Like many of us, I write, or try to write, every day on whatever project comes to hand whether it’s my journal or a serious project like the church history or my own fiction. Poetry has not risen to the surface since The Three Poets did a reading last fall at the Saratoga Springs Public Library. Here’s a poem I read that night that is an apt sense of how I’ve been feeling about poetry and the writing life:

POET FOUND DEAD IN RIPPED STOCKINGS

The Poet is found dead, road

kill it appears, her stockings

laddered out to here, up to there.

 

A great violence done, not all

by vehicle. She had not shaved

in some time.

 

Her bra, of cheap manufacture,

was so worn in places

the wires and padding poked through.

 

Her underwear—likely bought in bulk—

stained and over worn

in the posterior.

 

She carried to the last

an old leather briefcase, heavy

with books and papers.

 

The impact had split the seams,

sent pages and pages

out upon the wind.

 

No one could say if she’d been

known, published.

Those men and women

 

who attended the body

cannot be said to be interested

in the flying papers.

 

No one seemed inclined to

gather to her the pages that strayed

into the neighboring corn field

 

which, had she lived, she would note

the way the stubble, broken, bent and tattered

still gave sustenance to the crows.

 

How the crows were set off against

the darkening sky

the dusting of snow.

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