David Abrams

My 2024 Year in Books, at Story Graph: https://app.thestorygraph.com/wrap-up/2024/davidabrams

If you're not on Story Graph, you're missing out on a really great book-tracking site (it's FREE) for readers. It's better than Goodreads, in my opinion.

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A new edition of The Quivering Pen has been published: https://davidabrams.substack.com/p/what-im-reading-hollow-by-bailey

This week, I'm focused on HOLLOW, the new memoir by former Marine Bailey Williams:

Hollow is a flare of pain, a throat-aching cry of rage, a wake-up call at 2 a.m., a sharp splinter slipping under the skin into the bloodstream and traveling to the heart, a rumble in the stomach, and a restless chase after self-identity. Bailey Williams' story of her struggle as a female Marine with an eating disorder will have you riveted to the page and leave you reeling with empathy. This is an astounding book about pain and the empowerment that rises out of it.

The Quivering Pen is back!
Sort of.
I'm still trying to find the blog's identity in this 2.0 version, but for now, here's a mini-review of "The Exorcist," the 1971 novel by William Peter Blatty, with a scary-good new cover from Harper Perennial: https://open.substack.com/.../p/what-im-reading-the-exorcist

I don’t know about you, but an aging novel about a demon-wracked girl seems entirely appropriate to be reading in America right about now.

I've started publishing some random stuff over at Substack, keeping the old Quivering Pen blog name....but the content will be slightly different this time, a little more personal--and certainly more experimental. So far, I've been testing the waters with some poetry (today, it's "Jesus Breaks Bread With Lazarus"), but gliding into more of an essay/journal format in the future. I'll certainly be posting about what I'm reading, so booklovers need not fear. This is all a work in progress and it will be raw and unpolished at times. Thanks to all of you who come along for the ride (I'm keeping as much content free as I can, for now).

Jesus Breaks Bread with Lazarus It was a Friday and Jesus had stopped by for dinner.M&M were in the kitchen—as usual—so it was just ChristAnd a few of the guys and we were all pretty much in our cups at that point,Except J.C., who said someone had to drink water and stay soberTo keep us all on the straight path when we walked ...

This autumn, I've been reading the collected poems of Jack Gilbert. I purchased this now-battered paperback at the great Iconoclast Books in Haily, ID, and I've been letting Gilbert's verse prod my heart daily ever since. Here are some good, pertinent lines for this past week:

There is a wren sitting in the branches
of my spirit and it chooses not to sing.
It is listening to learn its song.

—Jack Gilbert, “Trying to Write Poetry”

Even though I'm on the road full-time now (currently in Iowa), I'm still accepting new clients for my editing services through Grub Street. If you have a manuscript--in whatever form (short story, essay, novel) or at whatever stage (sh*tty first draft, polished "final" draft)--I'm all eyes and ears and "red pen." I help writers clean up their manuscripts and find the narrative focus needed to get their work on the path to publication (if that's the goal).

Want to learn more? Click over to my Grub Street writing consultants page and click on Request Consultation: https://grubstreet.org/grubbie/112194/david-abrams

Most of you are already on board, but just in case you hadn't heard the news, we've sold our house in Helena, Montana and are moving full-time into Sugar, our Winnebago Solis Pocket van with our three cats. Yep, you heard me correctly: 2 aging adults and 3 cats in a 17-foot van! It's a big, bold move and we're feeling ALL the feels right now (mostly good feels, but we have our days....). We're hanging around western Montana for another week, then we'll venture out across the Pacific Northwest, for starters.

I plan to document the adventure in a series of short films, and I hope you'll follow along on my You Tube channel: https://www.youtube.com/

(I'm in the early stages, so I could really use some subscribers to help get me boosted)

I'm going dark on social media for the first month or so, as a way to recharge my spiritual batteries and to gather footage to illustrate the next chapter of our lives. In the meantime, here's a trailer I made to whet your appetite: https://youtu.be/oPcRTPIZBtI?si=tHZzBH9zK5yKeUZf

See you on the other side!

________________________________________________

"Coming in Fall 2024: a radical change in our lives!

The Van Life Diaries will document our life as a married couple in their 60s who embark on full-time life in their Winnebago Solis Pocket van. Did we mention the three cats who are coming along for the ride?

Subscribe to the channel and keep up with Sugar the Van as she travels the United States (and beyond)."

"Abrams knows about the banality of warfare and how it grates on those who made the decision to go into the armed forces and it totally shows in this work."

My first novel, "Fobbit," got some love this past week from blogger John Abraham Watne: https://www.johnabrahamwatne.com/blog/reading-list-fobbit-david-abrams

Thanks so much, J.A.W.!

(Spoilers abound)

Once again, Tom Gauld nails the Writing Life.

June 3, 1983: Jean and I go on our first date after meeting for the first time a week earlier. The movie is "Flashdance," popcorn fills our mouths, our hearts beat to the music, and despite our individual anxieties and insecurities (or perhaps *because* of them), we fall in love...eventually. Little did we know that day, that June 3rd, was a Significant Life Event and would mark a turning point in our history. We got married 6 months later, to the day.

June 3, 2024: Jean and I put our house up for sale in Helena, Montana, and begin final plans to move into our campervan full-time. This, too, is a Significant Life Event and we feel like we're on the path to rewriting our future history (oxymoron intended).

Yes, it's true!!! We are, in the very near future, about to live full time with the three cats in Sugar, our 19-foot Winnebago Solis Pocket. We are going to reinvent ourselves on the road, reconnect with each other (after 41 years of marriage there are a few frayed ends that need reconnecting), and explore undiscovered (to us) places on this continent and others. We'll live in the moment and lower our blood pressure. We will slow down and listen. We’ll lift our eyes from our phones and look. We'll bathe in the forest and wade in the ocean. We'll roll across the prairies, we'll taste the city life. We will--we think, we hope--be better people on the road.

This may come as a shock to some of you, others saw it coming down the road. We've been holding on to this news for several months, until we could get all the pieces in place to make it public. The time is now. I've given notice at my job, we've downsized our possessions to within an inch of our lives, we've yard-saled away our once-valuable goods and keepsakes, we've donated boxes of clothes and other home goods to local charities, until finally we've emptied this house to a shell (we're leaving a few furnishings for the next owner). Our footsteps echo when we walk through the house, reminding us that a house is only a home when it's lined with your possessions, the bits and pieces of You. There's a tinge of melancholy hanging in the air of the house, the ghosts of memories from the past four years drift through the rooms and up the staircase, and my heart hurts a little when I walk into the backyard and know soon I'll have to leave our little garden-terrace paradise (with its resident magpies, chickadees, deer, and squirrels).

But one glance in the direction of the future and that wistfulness thins and vanishes. The future is bright. The future is euphoric. The future is waiting.

*The future is also a little scary and I'd be lying if I didn't say it feels a little like running toward the cliff's edge with a hang-glider strapped to our backs. When we drop over the side, we trust the Universe will catch us with an air current.

We'll still hang around Helena this summer (and perhaps into the fall) as we wait for the house to sell. As we do, we'll start transitioning into van life with the cats, getting them more acclimated to living inside Sugar. Soon, we expect they'll be treating the campervan as their "safe space." We already see signs of their "vanxieties" melting away as they show more interest in Sugar (i.e., they've sniffed the tires and paced around her perimeter with curiosity bordering on approval). They'll be fine, we'll all be good. Sugar herself is excited, revving her engine at the thought of rubber meeting road. "Let's go!" she calls.

We will, we will. But first, let's see about getting that house sold!

Here's the link to the listing: https://portal.onehome.com/en-US/consumer-share/MTg5MTY0OTAjTVRSIzE5NDU1IzE=

Please help spread the word about our lovely 2 bed, 2 bath (with Airbnb cottage included!) for sale here in Helena. It's a gem in a nice tree-lined neighborhood and we couldn't be happier/sadder about selling it to someone else to enjoy.

"Double Moon" is a marriage of visual art by Margo Klass and the "responding" words by her husband Frank Soos (both of whom were friends and mentors of mine while I lived and studied in Alaska). Margo constructed small shoebox-size works of art using found objects: rusty nails, a smooth stone, sticks, fishing lures--you know, things you'd find on a walk in the Alaskan woods. Frank wrote short poetic paragraphs which obliquely address what we see in the box. Together, they truly created a "marriage of art." One of my favorite pieces of Margo's work shows an old garden faucet suspended over a tiny pile of pebbles while light streams in from three squares cut in the side of the box; suspended from the mouth of the faucet is a ceramic teardrop-shaped object which we realize is not a big drop of water but a ceramic faucet handle (a handle coming out of a handle); it's called "Indian River Run" and here's what Frank wrote to accompany it:

"This is how the world got made, made so slowly, so secretly that we hardly noticed. One drop of water on a rock, then another. Pretty soon a river. Then bugs, fish, and the people to catch and eat them.

What happens next will not be slow at all, but sudden. We will only notice when it's gone."