Writing is only the frosting on my cake.
Tabitha King on writing. (The Commonplace Book Project)
You can find all the posts in The Commonplace Book Project here:
“writing is only the frosting on my cake. I’m whole without it.” — Tabitha King
I found Tabitha King’s book One on One at the library. I was looking for a new book by her husband. I don’t even remember which one now. Or maybe I was just looking for anything of his that I hadn’t read yet. I was maybe 22 or 23 years old.
I found her instead.
It’s hard to say what makes a book reach inside and become part of you.
Stephen King’s body of work has been foundational for me, but there isn’t a single one of his books that is mine as much as One on One is. Mine as a reader.
Every two or three years, I get this strong desire to re-read it. Sometimes I just start thinking about Sam and Deanie and I want to visit them. Sometimes I’m feeling particularly discombobulated and only a very familiar story will do.
That’s where I am right now. Desperately homesick. Missing Nevada and the sun and the mountains. I haven’t connected yet with people in my new town. And there it was — the pull to re-read a favorite book.
So, I’m halfway through with maybe my sixth or seventh reading of One on One over the last couple decades.
The quote above is interesting to me. It comes from an interview in People magazine, where it’s contrasted with Stephen King saying that if he weren’t writing, “I might be like that guy in the Texas tower. Writing is what God put me on earth to do.”
I’ve wondered before how two writers can live together. I think it would be . . . difficult . . . to live with another writer. Especially one who is such a superstar that it would be difficult to ever move beyond being his wife.
That People article is really interesting.
So, I guess it makes sense that writing is more important to one of them than the other. Or, maybe not more important. More central.
Tabitha King, incidentally, has been in the news lately, coming down on being referred to as ‘the wife of.’
If you haven’t read One on One, I recommend it. It’s out of print, but easy to get used.
Today’s Poem:
Maine Burial Plot by Thomas R. Moore
Granite posts square a God’s acre, a tiny plot of blueberries and asters beside a crushed- stone drive to three new houses on the shore.
The black slate headstones vanished a few years back, pretty pieces for a garden in New York or maybe it was kids one night in a pick-up
drinking Bud Light who tipped them out, then regretted what they’d done and dropped the stones into a gully. Somebody knows. The names
are erased except on a tax roll or a family tree — hardscrabble farmers working thin soil over ledge, the husband cutting shingles at a mill
or wrestling granite or shaping white oak futtocks for a schooner in Castine. The new driveway skirts a rough-cut granite cellar
hole grown up in popple, the apple trees gone wild, the only sounds a clunking hoe, the gulls, the wind, a washboard’s splash and thrum.
Thanks for reading and clapping (to let me know you enjoyed it!) If you’d like to get these daily doses of inspiration in your inbox, fill out the form below.
(DISCLAIMER: This post contains affiliate links.)
Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, two dementia patients, a good friend, Alfred the cat, and a yellow rescue dog named Maybelline Scout. She’s on Twitter @shauntagrimes and is the author of Viral Nation and Rebel Nation and the upcoming novel The Astonishing Maybe. She is the original Ninja Writer.
