2 December 2011
Friday's Poem: "Gin" by Jacqueline Berger, from The Gift that Arrives Broken. Friday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of Ann Patchett (1963). She was born in Los Angeles, but raised in Nashville, Tennessee, by her single mom. Her first published work was in The Paris Review, not bad for a 21-year-old writer. She published her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, in 1992 after several rejections and a bad case of writer's block. She wrote the book over a six-month period, while she was living with her mom and waiting tables at T.G.I. Friday's in Nashville. The waitressing job was demoralizing, but she found an unexpected sense of camaraderie there. "Everybody believed that they were special, that they weren't really a waiter, that they were the one who was getting out. ... I had to come to terms with the fact that I was just like everybody else, a girl with a dream and a plate of hot fajitas. You get out not so much because you're special but because you've got enough steel in your soul to crawl up."..
Dec. 02, 2011: The Writer's Almanac • Opuss № I