I made the mistake of starting Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety very late last night: this is a book that I think I either should have read twenty years ago, or perhaps should read twenty years from now, or maybe I’m just blaming the book for not ending -- and perhaps exacerbating -- a bout of insomnia last night, and yes, I know that it’s strange to take issue with a book for not putting you to sleep. Or maybe it’s just that there is a particular time to be in right relation to a particular book, and so much depends on being able to find that sweet spot when you can fully commune with a writer’s words.

I should have held the course with Shirley Jackson’s posthumous collection Come Along With Me. It’s been a pleasure to read others’ responses to her work, catalyzed by the recent Modern Library edition of her work, though I’ve been finding that -- as with episodes of Phineas and Ferb -- when people try to recount the plot of a particular story or novel of hers, it doesn’t actually convey very much about the work. Which is, perhaps, as good a definition of a good short story as any that I can come up with while in the grip of the grippe (having tempted the gods who are jealous of human happiness by announcing not once, but twice yesterday that I was finally getting over it), or, rather, an insight into what a useful reflection on a work can convey – something about how a piece works, rather than the basic mechanics of the thing.

Having written that, though, Jackson writing on the basic mechanics of writing short stories is some of the most wonderful writing I know: “It is most agreeable to be a writer of fiction for several reasons – one of the most important, being, of course, that you can persuade people that it is really work if you look haggard enough – but perhaps the most useful thing about being a writer of fiction is that nothing is ever wasted; all experience is good for something; you tend to see everything as a potential structure of words” (“Experience and Fiction”).

Which all brings me to my embarrassing admission, which is that….I paid retail (but at an independent bookstore, thank you, Powells.com) for Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries because this woman knows how to pay attention to structures of words with an insight and clarity that shows you why it matters, and why you should care. She so attunes you to the rhythms of language and the structures and mythologies in which words circulate that you come to realize that “Helen Vendler” is two trochees, the metrical pattern where the first beat is stressed, familiar to us from nursery rhymes (MA-ry HAD a LITtle LAMB).  Wondering if this is why so many good fictional names are trochees (Perry Mason! Morgan Fairchild!),  even though Helen Vender may be one of the few non-fictionalized names in Isabel Gillies’ Happens Every Day, which is on some level a contemporary variation on the lives-of-academics theme Stegner sounds in Crossing to Safety that I promise I will give a good go-round sometime in the next twenty years.