Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

What a challenging few days it’s been, watching the news, hearing the yelling match across the divide of people who see different things in the videos of the shooting of an American citizen by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.

In the middle of all that, I stumbled on a New York Times interview with author George Saunders. I feel bad as a writer that I’d never heard of Saunders. He’s an award-winning author with essays, short stories, nonfiction and fiction books published over the last 30 years. He teaches writing at Syracuse University.

Here I am now, playing catch-up and grateful for it. Saunders is known for, has written about, the value of kindness. Not exactly what I would have expected from what I perceived to be an uptown posh East-Coast guy. (His background suggests some depth in the blue-collar world.)

My mistake. Here are a couple of lines from a convocation speech he gave in 2013 that eventually became a New York Times article: Here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it: What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. … It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.

My go-to goal in this realm: Don’t be a jerk today. But a positive version may be the higher order. On the other hand: Start where you are.

Second reason I’m excited about Saunders is this book he wrote about writing: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.

https://www.amazon.com/Swim-Pond-Rain-Russians-Writing/dp/1984856022

I’m so excited to read this book and learn what it has to teach about story.