A writer or not?

If you talk, you are a talker. If you golf, you are a golfer. If you write, you are a writer.

Roy Peter Clark, Murder Your Darlings

Roy Peter Clark

I love what Roy Peter Clark says. "If you write, you are a writer." Yet I am not sure that I believe it.

Even when I wrote for a newspaper every day, I did not think of myself as a writer. I was a journalist. I was a newspaperman. I did not call myself a writer.

In retirement I continue to write almost every day. I post something on this blog three days a week. Often I blog about the act of writing. Otherwise I write lots of emails and a few letters. For the past couple of years I have been writing and preaching sermons on occasion. I write, but does that really make me a writer?

The problem, I think, is that the word suggests a certain level of professionalism. A novelist is a writer. Someone whose articles are printed in magazines is a writer. A blogger, on the other hand, is a blogger.

Can a portly middle-aged man who plays softball on weekends justifiably call himself an athlete? Should someone who plays Chopsticks on a piano be able to call himself a pianist? Can a woman who sometimes works on a friend's hair refer to herself as a hairdresser?

How we think of ourselves is one thing. I can easily be a writer in my own mind. The question is, how does one introduce oneself at parties? I would never tell a stranger that I am a writer, for that would give the wrong first impression. I am simply a retired journalist who still likes to write.

Like a wolf in the forest

It's rare to see a person with a book or magazine these days; it's like glimpsing a wolf in the forest.

Dwight Garner, The Upstairs Delicatessen

Dwight Garner

People apparently still read. Bookstores still have customers perusing their shelves. Book clubs remain popular. Magazines survive. And yet Dwight Garner is right: You rarely see anyone holding a book or a magazine. Instead they have their phones in their hands.

Medical offices and barbershops may still have a few magazines on hand, yet I rarely see anyone looking at them. Instead they are all looking at their phones.

In restaurants, virtually everyone, whether sitting alone or with someone else, is holding a phone in front of them.

I live about a mile from the Gulf of America, but it has been a long time since I have been to the beach, even to see a sunset. Yet I suspect that those reclining in the sun are mostly looking at their phones, not at one of those thick, spicy novels that used to be called "beach books."

I am proud that my granddaughter, like me, packs her books before packing her clothing when taking a trip. She, too, is a rarity in today's world. How many people have books with them on planes, even for long flights? How many take a book with them for a week at a cabin or a resort?

Some people do read e-books, to be sure. I applaud them. Yet somehow it is not quite the same.

Prefabricated phrases

Patricia T. O'Conner

Patricia T. O'Conner writes about prefabricated phrases in her book Words Fail Me. She doesn't like them, and neither do I.

A prefabricated phrase (her term) happens when certain modifiers predictably precede certain nouns. Take for example the phrase "foolish pride," which can be heard in any number of popular songs. Why can't they avoid the cliche and write something like "silly pride" once in awhile?

O'Conner lists many of the phrases she notices too often: oil-rich Kuwait, golf-ball-size hail, hastily summoned, seriously considered, sweeping change, measured response, overwhelming odds, viselike grip, narrow escape and knee-jerk reaction.

After George Floyd's unfortunate death several years, we saw or heard the phrase "systemic racism" everywhere. The phrase turned out to be more political than accurate, but people used it anyway, and many people still do.

O'Conner states the remedy for this kind of sloppy writing better than I could: "Modifiers should be fresh, alive, interesting, not predictable. So if a descriptive phrase springs to mind, preassembled and ready to use, put it back in the box."

Led by the spirit

The mystery in William Kent Krueger's Spirit Crossing (2024) is solved as much by the dead as by the living.

Young women have been disappearing in this area of Minnesota, but authorities concentrate mostly on the daughter of a prominent politician. That American Indian women have also disappeared doesn't interest them, even when it seems likely the disappearances may have the same explanation.

A little boy called Waaboo is attuned to the spirit world. He senses where dangers lie, and also where bodies lie. Soon he, too, becomes a target.

Waaboo's grandfather is Cork O'Connor, a retired lawman and the hero of Kruger's mystery series. He listens to the boy, even if the authorities don't. In fact, his entire family gets involved in the case, including a daughter, who has returned to Minnesota to die of a brain tumor.

If too many cooks spoil the broth, perhaps too many detectives can spoil a murder mystery. At any rate, this novel gets a bit confusing and is not as satisfying as some of Krueger's other books.

Reading positions

Hermione Lee

In his book The Upstairs Delicatessen, Dwight Garner quotes English biographer Hermione Lee as dividing reading into two kinds — vertical and horizontal.

This distinction could be taken literally. One refers to when we are upright, whether at a library table or in a comfortable chair at home. The second is mostly done in bed, but sometimes on a sofa or perhaps a recliner. In our youth we may have read while stretched out on the floor. I have done little horizontal reading in this sense. When I lie down, I usually fall asleep. Even David Baldacci can't keep me awake in bed for very long.  I prefer to read during daylight hours.

But Lee is referring to more than just body position with these terms. She defines vertical reading as "regulated, supervised, orderly, canonical and productive." Horizontal reading, meanwhile, is "unlicensed, private, leisurely, disreputable, promiscuous and anarchic."

Presumably all the adjectives need not apply to the same book at the same time. Reading can be productive without being supervised, private without being promiscuous.

Most of us would simply make a distinction between serious reading and leisure reading or, if we are still in school, between required reading and reading for fun. Many readers would probably prefer to tackle one of Lee's books while sitting upright, while saving a sexy thriller for after dark in their beds, so perhaps both understandings of the terms vertical and horizontal can apply at the same time.

Family complications

She couldn't follow all the lines out in every direction: all the people to whom she was by marriage mysteriously related.

Ann Patchett, Commonwealth

If a character in Ann Patchett's Commonwealth (2016) can't keep the members of her own family straight, pity the poor reader. But that is the point of this wonderful novel: Families are complicated.

That confused character is Franny, the novel's main character, if there is one. She is a baby at her own christening party when the novel opens, a mature woman well into her 50s when it ends at another family party. The chapters jump around from here to there, finally giving a picture of an American family as complicated as any of them.

At that christening party an uninvited guest named Albert Cousins shows up with a bottle of gin, a most unsuitable christening gift. Bert only wanted an excuse to get away from his own house and his own family on a Sunday afternoon. Soon other alcohol is brought to the party, guests drink too much and by the end Bert is kissing Beverly, Franny's beautiful mother, and an affair begins that leads to the break up of both families.

The six children from the two families often share time together because of custody arrangements. But then new marriages crumble, leading to more divorces, more stepparents and an ever more complicated family.

As if things weren't complicated enough, Franny, in her 20s, has an affair with a prominent novelist, Leo Possen, who is looking for an idea for his next book. Franny's family story becomes the plot for this novel, which is also called Commonwealth. The book complicates her family even more as members start reading it. Years later it is turned into a movie, making everything still worse.

Franny feels guilty for her unplanned role in bringing embarrassment to her own family, just as she is sorry for all the trouble that resulted from that kiss at her christening party. And yet she thinks, too, of all the good that resulted. So it goes with families. Bad marriages result in good children. Youthful indiscretions lead to mature wisdom. Negatives sometimes become positives, and vice versa.

Families are complicated.

Pluck in Portugal

If you have a taste for plucky heroines, World War II espionage and adventure stories that are (almost) G-rated, you will find what you want in Alan Hlad's The Book Spy (2023).

Maria Alves works wonders with microfilm at the New York Public Library when the war breaks out. She speaks Portuguese and thanks to her pluck manages to gain acceptance microfilming Axis publications in neutral Lisbon. She is told that she most definitely will not be a spy. If you've read the title, you know very well that this is not true.

In Lisbon, she falls in love with a bookstore owner, who supplies her with all the German books and magazines she can handle, but even so she becomes involved with a Swiss banker who works for the Germans. Soon she finds herself a double agent, spying on the Germans while supposedly spying on the British. She provides misinformation about the location of the D-Day invasion and even seriously contemplates trying to assassinate Hitler at a wedding she attends. Talk about pluck.

The novel seems a bit amateurish (not as good as Hlad's The Long Flight Home), but it should please many readers, especially girls in their early teens and old ladies.