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Comments Off on Kate’s 2¢: “The accidental tourist” by Anne Tylert
Kate’s 2¢: “The accidental tourist” by Anne Tylert
“The accidental tourist” by Anne Tylert
You might say that the dog, Edward, is the main character in this story. He brings it all together. I even like the ending of this story.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Anne Tyler (born October 25, 1941) is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published twenty-four novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Breathing Lessons won the prize in 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence.[1] Tyler’s twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Road was longlisted for the same award in 2020. She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her “brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail”,[2] her “rigorous and artful style”, and her “astute and open language.”[3]
Tyler has been compared to John Updike, Jane Austen, and Eudora Welty, among others.
Early life and education[edit]
Early childhood[edit]
The oldest of four children, she was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her father, Lloyd Parry Tyler, was an industrial chemist and her mother, Phyllis Mahon Tyler, a social worker. Both her parents were Quakers who were very active with social causes in the Midwest and the South.[4] Her family lived in a succession of Quaker communities in the South until they settled in 1948 in a Quaker commune in Celo, in the mountains of North Carolina near Burnsville.[5][6] The Celo Community settlement was populated largely by conscientious objectors and members of the liberal Hicksite branch of the Society of Friends.[7] Tyler lived there from age seven through eleven and helped her parents and others care for livestock and organic farming. While she did not attend formal public school in Celo, lessons were taught in art, carpentry, and cooking in homes and in other subjects in a tiny school house. Her early informal training was supplemented by correspondence school.[4][5][6][8]
Her first memory of her own creative story-telling was of crawling under the bed covers at age three and “telling myself stories in order to get to sleep at night.”[5] Her first book at age seven was a collection of drawings and stories about “lucky girls … who got to go west in covered wagons.”[5] Her favorite book as a child was The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton. Tyler acknowledges that this book, which she read many times during this period of limited access to books, had a profound influence on her, showing “how the years flowed by, people altered, and nothing could ever stay the same.”[9] This early perception of changes over time is a theme that reappears in many of her novels decades later, just as The Little House itself appears in her novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Tyler also describes reading Little Women 22 times as a child.[4] When the Tyler family left Celo after four years to move to Raleigh, North Carolina, eleven-year-old Tyler had never attended public school and never used a telephone.[5] This unorthodox upbringing enabled her to view “the normal world with a certain amount of distance and surprise.”[10]
Raleigh, North Carolina[edit]
Tyler felt herself to be an outsider in the public schools she attended in Raleigh, a feeling that has followed her most of her life.[5] She believes that this sense of being an outsider has contributed to her becoming a writer: “I believe that any kind of setting-apart situation will do [to become a writer]. In my case, it was emerging from the commune … and trying to fit into the outside world.”[5] Despite her lack of public schooling prior to age eleven, Anne entered school academically well ahead of most of her classmates in Raleigh. With access now to libraries, she discovered Eudora Welty, Gabriel García Márquez, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many others.[4] Eudora Welty remains one of her favorite writers, and The Wide Net and Other Stories is one of her favorite books; she has called Welty “my crowning influence.”[6] She credits Welty with showing her that books could be about the everyday details of life, not just about major events.[5] During her years at Needham B. Broughton High School in Raleigh, she was inspired and encouraged by a remarkable English teacher, Phyllis Peacock.[4][11] “Mrs. Peacock” had previously taught the writer Reynolds Price, under whom Tyler would later study at Duke University. Peacock would also later teach the writer Armistead Maupin. Seven years after high school, Tyler would dedicate her first published novel to “Mrs. Peacock, for everything you’ve done.”[11]
Duke and Columbia Universities[edit]
When Tyler graduated from high school at age sixteen, she wanted to attend Swarthmore College, a school founded in 1860 by the Hicksite branch of the Society of Friends.[12] However, she had won a full AB Duke scholarship[13] to Duke University, and her parents pressured her to go to Duke because they needed to save money for the education of her three younger brothers.[4][14] At Duke, Tyler enrolled in Reynolds Price’s first creative writing class, which also included a future poet, Fred Chappell. Price was most impressed with the sixteen-year-old Tyler, describing her as “frighteningly mature for 16,” “wide-eyed,” and “an outsider.”[5] Years later Price would describe Tyler as “one of the best novelists alive in the world, … who was almost as good a writer at 16 as she is now.”[5][8] Tyler took an additional creative writing course with Price and also studied under William Blackburn, who also had taught William Styron, Josephine Humphreys, and James Applewhite at Duke, as well as Price and Chappell.[8]
As a college student, Tyler had not yet determined she wanted to become a writer. She loved painting and the visual arts. She also was involved in the drama society in high school and at Duke, where she acted in a number of plays, playing Laura in The Glass Menagerie and Mrs. Gibbs in Our Town.[5][8][15] She majored in Russian Literature at Duke—not English—and graduated in 1961, at age nineteen, having been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. With her Russian Literature background she received a fellowship to graduate school in Slavic Studies at Columbia University.[8]
Living in New York City was quite an adjustment for her. There she became somewhat addicted to riding trains and subways: “While I rode I often felt like I was … an enormous eye taking things in, turning them over and sorting them out … writing was the only way” [to express her observations].[5] Tyler left Columbia graduate school after a year, having completed course work but not her master’s thesis. She returned to Duke, where she got a job in the library as a Russian bibliographer.[4] It was there that she met Taghi Modarressi, a resident in child psychiatry in Duke Medical School and a writer himself, and they were married a year later (1963).[4]
From NLS/BARD/LOC:
The accidental tourist
Tyler Anne Reading time: 10 hours, 51 minutes.
Read by Bob Askey.
Bestsellers
Psychological Fiction
Macon Leary leads a quiet, routine life until his young son is killed in a fast-food shop holdup and his wife of twenty years suddenly decides to leave him. Macon returns to his family’s home and settles into a dull, soothing life with his brothers and sister–until he meets a dog trainer named Muriel Pritchett, who is as different from his wife as anyone could be. Some strong language. Bestseller 1985.
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by kate
Comments Off on Kate’s 2¢: “Hanging Falls: a Timber Creek K9 mystery” by Margaret Mizushima
Kate’s 2¢: “Hanging Falls: a Timber Creek K9 mystery” by Margaret Mizushima
Kate’s 2¢: “Hanging Falls: a Timber Creek K9 mystery” by Margaret Mizushima
This story kept me engaged with the characters and I liked the narrative arc. Of course, my heart went out to the dog when he was dognapped.
From her website:
Margaret Mizushima is the author of the award-winning and internationally published Timber Creek K-9 Mysteries. Active within the writing community, Margaret serves as past president for the Rocky Mountain Chapter of Mystery Writers of America, was elected the 2019 Writer of the Year by Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, and is also a member of Northern Colorado Writers, Sisters in Crime, and Women Writing the West. She and her husband recently moved from their home in Colorado to the Pacific Northwest. She can be found on Facebook/AuthorMargaretMizushima, Twitter @margmizu, Instagram at margmizu, and her website at www.MargaretMizushima.com
More About Margaret:
I was born in Kansas and grew up on cattle ranches in Texas and Colorado. My childhood summers were spent either on horseback herding cows or nestled in the crook of a tree reading a library book. When I was in high school, I volunteered to work with a child who had cerebral palsy, teaching lessons that were designed by the school speech/language therapist. I developed an intense interest in this very intelligent boy whose motor skills wouldn’t allow him to talk. So I pursued a degree in Speech Pathology, which I received from Colorado State University after completing my undergraduate degree at the University of Northern Colorado. Eventually I married a veterinarian, and we have two daughters. I worked as a speech therapist in an acute care hospital before establishing my own rehabilitation agency.
After I sold my company, I decided to study the art and craft of fiction writing. What a wondrous world this opened up for me. Whereas before, I’d been driven by the science of speech, language, and communication disorders, I could now focus on artistic creativity with language. I could also use my years of experience working with people to create characters that readers seemed to enjoy. Since I’m an avid crime fiction reader and crime documentary watcher, mystery writing seemed like the way to go.
My husband helped me develop the idea for the Timber Creek K-9 Mysteries, and the premise for the first in the series, Killing Trail, grew from a conversation he had with one of his clients. The primary characters, Deputy Mattie Cobb, Robo, and Cole Walker, DVM, came strictly from my imagination, and I hope you enjoy their adventures as much as I do.
Currently, my husband and I live with three dogs near a small town in Colorado. I balance writing with assisting him with our veterinary clinic and Angus cattle herd. My fiction has won contest awards, and you can find my short story “Hay Hook” in the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers 2014 anthology, Crossing Colfax. In addition to reading, I enjoy yoga and hiking in the Colorado high country. I would love to hear from you, so please feel free to write to me. My email address is on the Contacts page.
From NLS/BARD/LOC:
Hanging Falls: a Timber Creek K-9 mystery DB107430
Mizushima, Margaret Reading time: 10 hours, 12 minutes.
Nancy Wu
Mystery and Detective Stories
Officer Mattie Cobb and her K-9 partner Robo are on a scouting mission to pinpoint trail damage when they find a body floating at the edge of a lake. Robo scents another human, leading to a forest dweller becoming the prime suspect. But the victim’s identity leads to an odd religious cult. Mattie and Robo must find the killers. Unrated. Commercial audiobook. 2020.
Download Hanging Falls: a Timber Creek K-9 mystery DB107430