Monday Morning Required Reading. In my spare moments - before bed, on lazy weekend mornings - I've been meandering through Carol Shields's collection of short stories Dressing Up for the Carnival. I was introduced to Shields by way of her novel The Stone Diaries in an undergraduate class called The Self and the Novel. The class was wonderful, and many of the books we read have stuck with me. The Stone Diaries was no exception. It didn't so much stick with me because I loved it from the first time I read it as because I grew to feel affectionately toward it. There is something about it that I find captivating, although I never really have been able to define why or what this is. Out of curiosity I decided to pick up something else by Shields and opted for a collection of short stories for goodness knows what reason since short stories and I have a tenuous relationship in many ways. That was about a year ago. The book sat on my shelf, moved across the country with me, and then sat on a shelf again. Until now. I have suddenly found myself devouring short stories. Having finished a collection by Lorrie Moore, I decided to pull Dressing Up for the Carnival off the shelf and give it a try. I've been finding the same strange phenomenon of inexplicable and gradually growing affection is holding true for these stories as well. So, today I present you with "Mirrors," an interesting story from this collection. Let me know if you like it, and why or why not. Perhaps hearing others articulate their opinions will help me understand mine.

When he thinks about the people he's known in his life, a good many of them seem to have cultivated some curious strand of asceticism, contrived some gesture of renunciation. They give up sugar. Or meat. Or newspapers. Or neckties. They sell their second car or disconnect the television. They might make a point of staying home on Sunday evenings or abjuring chemical sprays. Something anyway, that signals dissent and cuts across the beating heart of their circumstances, reminding them of their other, leaner selves. Their better selves. 

He and his wife have claimed their small territory of sacrifice, too. For years they've become "known" among their friends for the particular deprivation they've assigned themselves: for the fact that there are no mirrors in their summer house. None at all. None are allowed. 

[KEEP READING]

I love sentences. This is why I am a writer. I love to make sentences. I even love punctuation. I love all this stuff that we are given, this little handful of equipment and raw materials. So, it is a joyous expression when you see something come together at last. Then the next day you look at it and you realize that you haven't done it at all. Then you do it again. It is in the rewriting where I find the exhilarating part of the whole enterprise. The writing itself, the first draft, the sort of hacking at the stone wall, seems to me such a difficult piece of work that it is hard to see where pleasure comes in this process. But once it is on the page and you start moving it around, changing words, moving sentences - so you get closer and closer to what you really want to say, to what you really mean. You never get it right, and I think you have to accept that as writer, that what we call “the golden book in our head” is not going to make it to the page completely. But we keep getting closer, and I find this exhilarating.

-- Carol Shields, in an interview for The Academy of Achievement in 1998