I found this list of book ideas in my journal from 1993 – the one I kept when I lived at Fort Drum:
Sleep and High Places, a story of a lookout mountain park ranger
A story set in or around a beauty parlor
A story about an unwed mother/gay person
A story about a beautiful mother of five who met her second husband while dancing
A story of one woman’s love for her friends
A Vermont country mom
The story of an abortion and a birth
“The poem, as Joseph Brodsky once pointed out, is really about shame–about how cultures are infected by overwhelming feelings of shame, their “habit-forming pain,” and seek to escape those feelings through violence. What drives mend mad — drives them to psychopathic gods – is the unbearable feeling of having been humiliated. The alternative, the poem says, is not to construct our own narrative of shame and redemption, which never really comes in any case, but to follow our authentic self-interest, which means being in touch with the reality of what is and is not actually possible in the world.”
from Adam Gopnik’s Through the Childrens Gate about Auden’s “September 1, 1939“