Whose Consciousness Do YOUR Descriptions Reflect?

Your Mid-week inspiration, courtesy of Mark Doty & Bruce Chatwin

Image by author; “Daylilies” etching by Peter Milton

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to MFA Lore’s mid-week inspiration for paid subscribers! I’ll confess, I wasn’t sure if this offering had legs when we started it last month, but I’m really enjoying it now as a practice.

Each Tuesday, I scan my craft shelves for a favorite master’s text and search the marginalia for reminders of points that made a deep impression on me. I select one passage. Then I peruse my fiction/memoir library for prose that beautifully illustrates that passage. Finally, I survey my photo library for an image that visually reflects the passage. The result of all this is your Mid-Week Inspiration, which inspires me, too!

So, this week’s inspiration comes from poet Mark Doty, whose marvelous little book, The Art of Description, resides within Graywolf’s equally marvelous The Art Of series.

This week’s illustration is a passage from Bruce Chatwin’s classic travel memoir In Patagonia .

And the image above is a self-portrait layered on an etching by master lithographer Peter Milton, featuring a portrait of me some fifty years ago. Hence, Description as Reflection— or vice versa.

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Poet Mark Doty describes Description

Mark Doty, author of more than a dozen books of poetry, won the National Book Award for My Alexandria in 2008. He also writes memoir and teaches at Rutgers. (And I can’t help adding that he received his MFA from the late and dearly lamented Goddard College, where I taught for 15 years.)

His book on description is informed by his poet’s eye, but the wisdom he shares applies to all forms of writing.