Soul Windows

Elixirs of expression from other writers whose fictional voices, and writerly wisdom, Noreen admires.

On the act of writing:

“Fiction is work.”  --  Barry Hannah, in “Why I Write,” Writer’s Yearbook 1999

“I have rewritten every word - often several times - I have ever published.  My pencils outlast their erasers.”  --  Vladimir Nabokov 

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."  --  E. L. Doctorow

“Short stories are  akin to jokes.  They must make their move at a certain moment to work.”  --  Robert Stone, in a seminar

“None of us can teach the other of us how to write.  No one can teach us how to love.  One can buy those manuals about placing that part of your body here, so your lovemaking partner can place her whatchamacallit thus -- but, so very obviously, you cannot get her to love you that way, and neither of you may be able to sleep with gladness afterward.  Technique is so very far from love; narrative passion is the same long distance from craft.”  --
Frederick Busch, L.A. Times Book Review, April 11, 1993)

Moments in fiction:

“It’d be a hard life if we never got more than we deserved.”  --
Lawrence Block, Small Town

“I had a high school friend who died in a plane crash when he was working on a trail crew for the Forest Service.   Sat next to his bed down at the Seattle Burn Center and he told me about flying into the narrow pass when the clouds closed in and how the pilot tried to steer a compass course to the other side.  He talked about the engine easing back slightly as the pilot considered banking and heading out and about the weird feathered ticking the prop seemed to make as they cut through the fog and then the treetops, bombing the floats, and the one loud crunch as the undercarriage of the plane was torn away and the mossy rocks at the top of the pass spun up in his face.  The rest he didn’t remember, except the quiet of the engine being off and the rumble of flames.”  --
John Straley, The Curious Eat Themselves

(Noreen says, “The images these writers offer are so precise it's microsurgery performed on our imaginative vision.  We are made wiser and richer by their hard-wrought efforts.”)

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Noreen holds a Master's degree in Literature and Language Arts from Cal-State at L.A. and has taught creative writing in the California college system, won awards for fiction, poetry, and screenwriting, and has been on judging panels for national writing award competitions. She is one of 45 people whose stories of perseverance in business, entertainment, and sports are
featured in a book called Unstoppable compiled by Cynthia Kersey.

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