A boy's birthday brings him a host of chickens, whose care consumes his attention and eventually that of the entire family.
Shirley Kurtz lives with her husband in backwoods West Virginia, where the countryside quiet tends to settle down onerously around her ears and clobber her to mush, the same as it does for Anna in Sticking Points, Kurtz's novel, when she's toiling on a paragraph. Bit by bit she goes to pot--slumps in her seat and turns numb. Brain circuitry stuck on a single solitary word, she's left with nubbing her pencil eraser in circles against her paper, huffing at the shredded black tails, and pondering fruitlessly.
So any interruption is a mercy--the shrill of the telephone, or the stove timer's ding (say, a pie in the oven), or the thwump of the washer quitting its final spin cycle, out in the mudroom. The noise hauls her upwards.
Something to get the blood running, that's the crux. Outside at the backyard lines, plopping her wash basket and clothespins bucket in the grass, she'll sense her brain prickling. Merely that act, the stooping motion and the sudden downswing of her head, causes a rush--the red corpuscles start galloping--and as she raises the first pieces of laundry to the crisping sun, the sole stickler word in her brain dislodges. And back in the house, wheeled up close to the desk again, she'll give her paper a good shake and bend once more to her task. The fixating alleviates, for a spell.
But maybe any writer, says Kurtz, gets snagged like this. And the solitary pursuit of apt words daren't be left to dawdlers--the uselessly sedentary--or to those deafened by banality's din.
