[R]evolving Incarnations: A Questionnaire For Passionate Readers is an interview series done in classic Q&A format. Each entry features one intrepid writer/blogger/artist/creative mastermind as they take on the same 40 reading-themed questions and scenarios. This is the second entry (you can read the first here). Be sure to leave your thoughts in the comments section!

CASSIE

Cassie of Books & Bowel Movements is a North Carolina based blogger. I discovered her blog shortly after joining WordPress, and it remains one of my favourite reads. Her writing is funny, beautiful, and moving. Be sure to check out her site!

• What book have you always wanted to read, but haven’t? Why? I’ve never read “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith. My mom is going to kill me for this if she sees this Q&A.  She’s been recommending that book to me since sixth grade. I’m not sure why I haven’t read it. It’s just one of those books that sits on my shelf and I know I’m going to read it one day and hopefully that will be the day that I was meant to read it. There will be some lesson that I need to learn at that moment in my life. I haven’t read enough Larry Levis, Leonard Cohen, Anne Carson, Jack Gilbert or Edna St. Vincent Millay, Amy Hempel, either. And Raymond Carver, but I think I’d need a whiskey sour and a deep cigar in order to crack him open for an evening.
• What is your favourite line or passage from a book? Oh, dear God. How do I choose one?  I’ll give you one or two from each of my favorite book notebooks.                                                                                                         Notebook #1: titled “Summer 2011-Fall 2011: Chautaqua, Merwin, Phase 10”
• 1. “You know everything at 8, but it is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find.” – The Gathering by Anne Enright
  2. “Do not listen to the lies of old men/who fear your power/who preach that you were “born in sin.”  A flower is moral by its own flowering.” –Circling the Daughter by Ethridge Knight

  Notebook #2: titled “Bad Experiments: Miss Blue Pleated Skirt”

  1. “But ultimately, it all remained unreadable for him, though reading, he felt, was not a natural thing and should not be done to people. In general, people were not road maps. People were not hieroglyphs or books. They were not stories.  A person was a collection of accidents. A person was an infinite pile of rocks with things growing underneath. In general, when you felt a longing for love, you took a woman and possessed her gingerly and not too hopefully until you finally let go, slept, woke up, and she eluded you once more. Then you started over. Or not.” – Lorrie Moore
  2. “But it was more than that. It was womanhood they were entering. The deep forest of it and no matter how many women and men too are saying these days that there is little difference between us, the truth is that men find their way into that forest only on clearly marked trails, while women move about it like birds.” – Andre Dubus
  3. “Virginia imagines someone else, yes, someone strong of body but frail-minded; someone with a touch of genius, of poetry, ground under by the wheels of the world, by war and government, by doctors; a someone who is, technically speaking, insane, because that person sees meaning everywhere, knows that trees are sentient beings and sparrows sing in Greek.” – The Hours, Michael Cunningham 

  Notebook #3: titled “End of the Image”

1. “When I want to see the furthest into my soul, I will write a sentence by hand and then write another sentence over it, followed by another. An entire paragraph will live in one line, and no one else can read it. That is the point. On occasions, in a café, I can fill an entire paper place mat on both sides. On a plane, the paper bag for airsickness is my canvas. Anything will do: the backs of business cards, receipts, and napkins, any scrap of paper. A friend of mine calls it my disease, I call it my confessional.” – When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams

And every other word written by that woman. 

• Who do you think is the most underrated author? Continue reading →