Sunday Salon: Girl Clown, by Mary R. Wise

I must admit that I haven't gotten a lot of reading done for today's Sunday Salon. This past week I began Julia Cameron's The Complete Artist's Way, and I've slowly been incorporating that into my life.

I did remain true to my literary core today, however. I interviewed a local author (local, to me, anyway) originally from Takoma Park, Maryland -- Mary R. Wise, who wrote Girl Clown, a memoir of her life working for three years as a clown in the circus.

I plan to elaborate more on that this week. My schedule has been pretty crazy lately, but I'd like to come back to this, as it was both educational for me as a beginning writer and entertaining for the conversational value. I'll soon be posting the details of the interview surrounding this author and her written work.

Sunday Salon: Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert

This is my first post on the Sunday Salon, and I'm currently reading Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert.

I just completed Book One of three within Gilbert's memoir -- the part that focuses on her time spent living in Italy -- and I can't read any further. Well, that is, not until I seek out some Italian cuisine to quell my raging hunger. After reading descriptions of a number of culinary delights found in places like Rome and Sicily, an empty stomach just would not do.

Gilbert's book stirs the appetite, but not just through references to food. Eat, Pray, Love is a delightful romp through Italian history, culture and language, as well as human emotion. I found myself nodding my head in understanding at the sorrows of relationship difficulties, and moments later, learning that the true Italian language sprang from the prose of Dante himself.

In my estimation, Gilbert is a brave, intelligent woman who has set upon a new and exciting adventure, and is having a blast; maybe, authentically, for the first time ever. But, rather than a voyage of distance across three countries, the author also travels through episodes of healing and self-discovery, and we get to share in the journey. Her writing is deeply personal, and it embodies universal themes, such as coping with the pain of divorce, discovering our own personal truths and choosing to live by them, battling with depression and more.

Gilbert's writing style is sharp, witty, and constantly unexpected.

Next stop on the Elizabeth Gilbert train... India, for some soul-searching.

Hand to Mouth, by Paul Auster

I picked up this short memoir about the author Paul Auster's life while browsing in the Daedalus Books & Music Warehouse Outlet in Columbia, Maryland. I knew the name from having read his novel, In the Country of Last Things, a few years before.

The book focuses on Auster's years as a struggling writer, made much more difficult by the fact that he philosophically railed against settling into the status quo of 9-to-5 working society. Even after graduating from the prestigious Columbia University, he preferred instead to tag onto random spurts of blue collar work where he found it (Merchant Marines, dishwasher, etc.) and to take on stints of freelance work in French language translation when he could get them. He moved through life, just getting by like this, for over a decade, from odd job to odd job, continuing to write whenever he had spare time.

One can't help but admire Auster for holding on so doggedly to his writing, that, at times, seemed to be the only glue that held him together. Where someone else may have tossed it all aside, the person Auster describes as himself in this book plodded on, seemingly toward a goal that would end with him becoming a writer or else destroying himself in the process. There was no other way. He didn't say he chose to be a writer; it chose him.

Had he not suffered these setbacks and woven such a tapestry of unique characters into his world, one wonders if he would have become the unique writer he is today. These experiences, coupled with the urgency that kept him churning out the written word were a second education to his Ivy League one. So many of us would never be so bold as to attempt to ride the winds of life without that safety net, the regular paycheck, at least by our own volition.

One of my favorite ways to look at art (to include the creative craft of writing) is that it supports life, and not the other way around. That's what came back to mind when I read Hand to Mouth.