“Letters to a Young Writer: Some Practical and Philosophical Advice” by Colum McCann

I told myself I wouldn’t buy another book about writing until I actually started to write. I don’t know what it is, if it’s fear or laziness, but I keep preventing myself from writing what I want to write. I’ll sit down with the intention to jot down the story in my head, but I either run away from the empty page, or write a few pages worth of stuff, get anxious, and run away. I don’t know what my problem is.

When I saw McCann’s Letters to a Young Writer in the bookstore, I couldn’t walk away from it. I was pulled toward it. I picked it up. I skipped the intro and read the first essay, I held it away from myself wondering if I should buy it, I walked around the store with it in hand, I paid and left with it. The title harkens to Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which I read off and on one summer in New York, and that made McCann’s book seem promising. He will surely get me writing, I thought.

But McCann is frank about what he can’t do for us and what we can do for ourselves. He mentions in his introduction a statement he includes on his syllabus at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where he teaches in the MFA program — that he can’t teach his students anything. He can’t teach us how to write (or make us write), but he can guide us and allow us to do what we most want to do. And in this book, he is sincere, though frank, as he advises us on writing.

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“Every Heart a Doorway” by Seanan McGuire

My mind was in a weird place when I reached for this book, but I was glad to find it the perfect story to satiate it. Every Heart a Doorway tickled my brain cells and made me think of some weird shit; weird because the story is based in our world and it gives credence to the impossible and the fantastic and validates our odd quirks.

Quick overview:

Every Heart a Doorway is a fantasy, young-adult novella that packs a punch. It’s about kids who make it back to the real world after visiting magical ones and how they cope with readjusting to a normal life.

The story is told from the perspective of Nancy, a teenaged girl who recently returned from the Halls of the Dead, as she tries to adjust to her new school, Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, a boarding school for children who have returned from other worlds. Eleanor West is an older woman who started the school because she understands what such children endure. She provides a sanctuary for them. Of course, she doesn’t tell parents this. Instead, she tells parents and guardians, who often are unaware of the magical realms, that she can help their troubled charges adjust. That she can “fix” them.

Shortly after Nancy arrives at the school, the students’ lives are threatened and Nancy becomes a prime suspect because of her connection to the Halls of the Dead.