Dorothy Allison on The Bluest Eye

lizshine74by lizshine74

In Book Reviews!.

In The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate The Books That Matter Most To Them, Dorothy Allison explains how The Bluest Eye taught her the power of words:
“The Bluest Eye made it plain. The world could be different if truth was told in such gorgeous and stark ways.
I want to do that, I thought. Not, I can do that. I could not imagine a world in which I could put voice to all the things I thought and remembered and imagined about being poor and hated and used and denied. But oh Lord, if I could, if I could make a story that would touch someone else’s heart the way this one touched mine. If I could repay a tenth of what I owed this storyteller, this brave and wonderful woman on the page, I would give anything.
I would give anything—and will. This is a debt that passes to the reader—to take up the reader—to take the story up and remake the world. It changed me utterly It changes me still. It remade my life.”
What books have had similar impacts on you? I’m thinking about this while I read this book. For me there have been many short and long, fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose. Among them are A Wrinkle In Time, Even Covwgirls Get the Blues, Leaves of Grass, the poetry of e.e. cummings, The Golden Notebook, “The Story of An Hour”, “The Art of Losing”, The Boxcar Children mysteries, James and the Giant Peach and more. You?

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Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.