Last week D and I shot a brief interview of John R. Paul at Prairie Archives Booksellers and after I picked up an interesting bio of Lorca. I’ve been reading selectively and found an interesting portion on Lorca’s first writing success–but oddly the passage is themed towards failure. The writer Leslie Stainton describes Lorca’s attitude concerning his first book of poems in the following: “He expected to fail.”
That first book was titled Impressions and Landscapes and Stainton writes that Lorca retrieved all the unsold copies of the book from Granada bookshops and piled them in his family’s attic and she reveals that in his essays and lectures he later claimed to have burned those copies.
“There is within me an ideal so lofty that I will never achieve it.”
I’m thinking of Lorca and his first self-proclaimed failure especially since so much of my revision work for the summer is becoming larger and larger. I am beyond the genesis of the story and now I am going line by line and crafting sentences which is my biggest weakness and the thing I am least interested in. In short, I must become ambitious with my sentences as well as the arcs of stories.
