Carol snields: the arts of a writing life and dropped threads 2: more of what we aren't told

• Published in: Border crossings 2003-08, Vol.22 (3)
• Main Author: Diehl-Jones, Charlene
• Format: Magazinearticle
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0831-2559

Her life and the lives she has created play through two books released this spring: she was an editorial presence, with Marjorie Anderson, in Dropped Threads 2, a sequel to the best-selling collection of personal essays by women documenting "what we aren't told"; and she was the subject of a thoughtful gathering of commentaries in [Carol Shields]: The Arts of a Writing Life, edited by Neil K. Besner. The books are absolutely unlike in genre and intention. At the same time, each tells us the same thing about Carol Shields. Dropped Threads 2 gives us a glimpse of her generosity of spirit and her infectious curiosity about the lives people live. Carol Shields: The Arts of a Writing Life demonstrates how that generosity and curiosity shape the lives--intellectual, social, emotional--of those who encounter her, in person and through her work. Together, the two books perform an extravagant portraiture: one offers the public face of the woman and her work, the other the generative spirit that animated and defined her living. Besner has organized Carol Shields: The Arts of a Writing Life around a central question: "not if, but how, a writer's life and her writing life communicate." The essays fall into four groupings: the first offers us access to Shields's life through personal reminiscences by her friends and her daughter; the second is a gathering of responses to her fiction; the third to her poetry, biography, and drama; the fourth section--ahead of a substantial chronology of her work life--is an essay by Shields herself. It's an unusual combination. Academic rigour has tended to detour around the personal, but Besner's determined folding together of resolutely unscholarly musings with critical responses to Shields's work gives us all access to one of the important qualities of Shields: she was a thoughtful chronicler of people's daily lives. Her abiding passion was the texture of lives in the process of being lived, the freight attached to insignificant moments, the agony of choices, both trivial and life-shattering. The domestic life, in all its quotidian glory. The art of living.