Goodbye Mr. Salinger

I'm a terrible terrible blogger that never updates. I feel like facebook status' have become an easy way to share/express my feelings in a few sentences every day. I try to update those every day, but I should also really keep to this blogging thing. It is good to practice writing that I am beginning to miss for the first time since Grad School. I think I needed a break from those deadlines and pressure to really enjoy it again. I met my good creative writing friend from Grad School yesterday. We had coffee and talked about writing. One of her short stories is a finalist for a competition- I am so proud of her...but we made a new years pact. Our pact is that we will write ten pages a month (to think we used to do it per week!) and meet for coffee and "workshop" each other's peices. Both of us will be writing our first novels. I have had a YA novel idea in my head since Sep. 2008. I hope this forces me to finally write it. But here I am updating my blog because a) I felt like writing for once and b) I am inspired and feel like I should write in J.D. Salinger's honor today. His death hit me harder than I thought. I can't think of someone who I never met and who died hit me hard like this one. It's been on my mind all day and as I have been thinking about it all my memories started coming back to me.

I remember the first time I picked up Catcher in the Rye. I was 16 years old and my english teacher told us it is a controversial book that our high school was at the time trying to ban. I felt like a rebel reading it. I felt like I was breaking rules through books and stories instead of alcohol and drugs like a lot of my peers. I wasn't depressed like holden caulfield but I connected to his sarcastic sense of life and felt a writer's awakening within myself. I understood symbolism for the first time. And when we were assigned to write an essay on the book my english teacher pulled me aside and told me it would be fine if I wrote a short story in Holden Caulfield's voice. I want to say that I wrote my first story because of this book. But that's not true. I was writing stories before I could spell. But I can say that this book did teach me how to being dissecting stories and learning how they are written. I became passionate of understanding what everything meant in stories. This book made me laugh and connect to the pains of the character. It made me understand atheism. Most importantly, Catcher in the Rye inspired me and it still does. I read JD Salinger's Franny and Zoe and some short stories, but the personal connections I had with Catcher in the Rye still make it my favorite. J.D Salinger is an amazing talented artist that will not be forgotten.



"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be." - J.D. Salinger