That old Thomas Edison saw about inspiration and perspiration? It came to mind when we received Alison McGhee’s response to our question about which five things she’d take with her to a deserted island. McGhee, a Minneapolis-based writer who has won two Minnesota Book Awards, didn’t just answer the question–first she wrote an entire essay about the proposition, and then whittled the thing down. Presumably that industrious approach to the creative process has proved useful to McGhee in the writing of her six novels, including the acclaimed Shadow Baby and her most recent, All Rivers Flow to the Sea, a young adult novel–and yet another MBA nominee. Her work also appears this month in The Rake’s first-ever literary supplement. And judging from her annotations below, she wouldn’t let a thing like being stranded on a desert isle hamper her artistic life. Here’s what she’d bring:
1. The brown, fake-leather Merriam-Webster dictionary that I won at age eleven in the New York State Spelling Bee. This dictionary is the only book I will need, because it contains all the words I’ve ever known, and with enough time and patience, those words can be rearranged into all the books I’ve ever loved. Every day on my desert island I will look for cool words I don’t know, like “testudo,” which is a row of armor made by Roman soldiers when they hold their shields up high in the air, and “palimpsest”: writing that has been partially erased from that which it was written on.
2. A notebook in which I have copied down my ninety favorite poems. Ninety because my grandmother lived to be ninety, and my grandmother loved poetry, and if A = B and B = C, then ninety poems seems about right. On my desert island I will finally have plenty of time to memorize all my favorite poems.
3. My piano and the music I brought with me. I’ll play my Hanon scale exercises over and over and over. Maybe I’ll play them ninety times each. And then I’ll turn to my Chopin prelude, the one I can never get exactly right. With all that time, alone on my desert island, maybe I can finally get the incredibly hard part near the end to sound as if it’s not hard at all.
4. A needle and thread and the small box of old clothes from the top shelf in my closet. These are clothes I have saved over many years: My grandmother’s flowered housedress, my baby’s polka-dot pants, the navy blue shift that my mother looked so beautiful in when I was a child, the shirt my best friend wore every time we went dancing in college. I will cut them all up into scraps and turn them into a quilt that will keep me warm on the sand at night.
5. A small, sharp knife. I don’t know how to carve, but I’ve always wanted to, and finally I have plenty of time to learn. I’ll carve only the pieces of driftwood that wash up on shore. No coconuts, no plastic flotsam. When I get good at carving, I’ll mount a driftwood sculpture installation beside a poem written on the sand, below the high tideline, for the fish and seagulls to admire. When the tide is high, I’ll play Chopin for the seagulls, and the fish will raise their silvery fins in a testudo, honoring the palimpsest of our art as it washes out to sea.
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