PAULA WHYMAN

This weekend at Politics & Prose, DC's premier indie bookstore, there are two don't-miss author events. With this heat (115 degrees??) there's no reason to go outside, especially when all the literary heat is on the inside.

From the P&P website...


SANDRA BEASLEY
Don't Kill The Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life
Saturday, July 23, 2011 3:00 pm

This memoir from the award-winning poet chronicles Beasley’s life-long allergies to...just about everything. A partial list of what she must avoid includes dairy, soy, beef, shrimp, cucumbers, and mustard. Thriving despite the constant threats, Beasley tells her story with wit and humor, examines the science of allergies, and offers advice to fellow sufferers.
Publisher: Crown, 7/2011




TOM CARSON
Daisy Buchanan's Daughter
Sunday, July 24, 2011 5:00 pm

GQ’s “The Critic” and author of Gilligan’s Wake, Carson in his third novel lets one Pamela Buchanan Murphy Gerson Cadwaller talk about her life, loves, and exploits from the vantage point of her 86th birthday. Just a few of the highlights: her experience as a war reporter on Omaha beach, stepping out with Marlene Dietrich, and comforting LBJ when events went against him.
Publisher: Paycock Press 6/2011


Location:

Politics & Prose
5015 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington,DC 20008
202-364-1919

Susi Wyss debuted The Civilized World, her widely praised linked story collection, at Politics & Prose this weekend. At the reading, she told the audience she's working on her next book, which is a novel. Compared with writing stories, she says, it's a struggle. Why? Wyss gave a clever explanation.

Writing short stories, Wyss said, is "like serial monogamy." It's exciting every time, and then it ends, often with an epiphany, and you embark on another short-term adventure... Whereas the "novel is like marriage"-- intense in the beginning, but that intensity doesn't stay. As in a marriage, the hope is that sticking with it will, in the long run, be more rewarding.

For more of her take on the differences between novel and short story-writing, see her blog post, aptly titled "For Better or Worse."

And, by the way, I encourage you to read The Civilized World, which is a moving collection of intertwining stories told from the points of view of women living in five African countries, including the Central African Republic, where Wyss was in the peace corps. As a dedicated public health worker for 20 years, Wyss saw firsthand the issues facing people who lived in that part of the world. At her reading, she described the moment she realized many of the women were overlooked and voiceless and how she decided to try and give them a voice. The Civilized World has been praised by reviews ranging from Publisher's Weekly to Booklist to O, Oprah's magazine, which named it a "Book to Watch for" in April.

From the title of this post, I'm sure it sounds like I'm a little behind the times. But I was one of those people who, when the first e-readers came out, said I will NEVER EVER read books on a little gray screen. I want to TOUCH the book; I want to fold the corner down; I want to doodle in the margins, I want to UNDERLINE and otherwise make marks in the book, which I can then flip through and randomly locate and read aloud on the subway. I want to see the spine of the book facing out on my shelf. I want to see the stack of books next to my bed, and the stack on my desk, and the stack in my home office, and the pile near the phone, which I'm always knocking over, and the pile near the exercise bike, and the stacks on top of the books that are nicely shelved because there is no more shelf space for books in my house, read or unread. And I cannot find my copy of Island of the Colorblind, even though I've been reading it for 4 years--Wait! there it is! Turns out I was using it to raise up the mirror in my bathroom.

I have a bad habit of falling asleep while reading and then awakening with a book pressed into my eyeball, which results in dizziness and blurred vision for several hours. When I was miserably sick and read Franzen's Freedom in one marathon weekend, I fell asleep in my recliner and awoke two hours later with a severe indentation in my forehead from the edge of the book. My arm was completely numb and trapped between the heavy hardcover (562 pages!) and the arm of the chair. I was home alone, except for the kids who were playing Runescape and could not hear me calling them; it was a scary experience. Finally, I had to amputate my arm with the only tool I could reach with my other hand, which was the letter opener. I'm sure it will not surprise you to know, they're making a movie about it.

So you see, I've been reckless with the traditional book, and my reading habits have become hazardous for me.

As a result, I have taken steps to prevent this from ever happening to me again. That is, I convinced my husband that he had decided to give me a Kindle. I may have dropped some hints about it reducing health care expenses and book purchase expenses. I may have failed to mention that now I can buy twice as many books! For the same money! (If you're wondering why I didn't get an iPad--There are a number of reasons besides the cost, but essentially, I wanted something smaller, and I only wanted it for books.)

There are of course things that bother me about e-books, which is why I've waited until now to try them. These topics have been well-covered by others, but I have not heard solutions for some of these issues. For instance, how will authors sign their books if I only have an e-copy? Should I start bringing cocktail napkins to readings? And what will happen when my kids are a little older, and they do what I did, that is, they pull their parents' books off the shelves to read them and see what passages they marked many years ago? Which reminds me, I will have to put some of those books on a higher shelf. Will my kids have access to my Kindle notes and reading list? Or will 3500 gigs of books be in the e-trash-heap before they're interested?

Anyway, these concerns are tempered by my excitement at being able to carry a small device around with me instead of several large volumes. I have always kept a book in my purse for emergencies; now I can carry lots of books in my purse. Although I don't plan to purchase e-versions of most books I already own in hard copy, I believe I'm completely justified in downloading one of my favorite novels, Middlemarch, so that I can keep it handy at all times, its 795 pages fitting on the head of a pin.* Most important, did I mention that I can buy even more books than before and not be concerned about finding space for them on the shelf...?

Here's the beginning of the list I've been compiling for my new toy:

Fiction:
To the End of the Land, David Grossman
Normal People Don't Live Like This, Dylan Landis
Pictures of You, Caroline Leavitt
The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman

Nonfiction:
Must You Go? My Life With Harold Pinter, Antonia Fraser
Elia Kazan: A Life, Elia Kazan
Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great, Rick Meyerowitz
Memorable Days, Robert Phelps (correspondence with James Salter)
Life, Keith Richards
Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks
Cleopatra: A Life, Stacy Schiff
Saul Bellow: Letters, Benjamin Taylor

Now I need an electronic device that gives me more time to actually read the books, or I may have just as many piling up by the electronic bedside as by the actual one...

*When I went to download Middlemarch, I learned that this and numerous other classics are free e-books, because they're in the public domain. While I was happy not to have to pay for it, as a writer, I was conflicted about the idea. A blog for another occasion.

Welcome to the latest installment of an occasional series about strange, funny, or simply awful book tour experiences. I feel privileged to present a guest post from the talented novelist Caroline Leavitt, whose newest novel, Pictures of You, is now available and poised to be a huge success, with raves from Vanity Fair, and Oprah's O Magazine, where reviewer Jane Ciabattari called it "Suspenseful...gripping. Leavitt is superb at revealing the secrecy inside many marriages."



Here, Caroline tells the unfortunate story of her television appearance from hell...

Sometimes publicity comes at you from an angle. When I wrote a piece about infidelity for a popular anthology, the editor, a friend of mine, and I were invited on a really prominent national television show. I was so thrilled! “It’ll be a fantastic opportunity to talk about your new novel,” my friend advised. Another friend, a media coach reminded me, that no matter what happened on the show, I could turn the questions in the direction I wanted by saying, “As a novelist, I feel…”

I thought I was prepared. I told everyone on the planet that I was going to be on national television, especially my mother. I spent hours changing my clothes and got to the NYC television studio hours in advance. The makeup girl swiped off all my makeup, sighing and reapplied it. The hair person frowned. “We like curly hair, but it has to be TV curly hair,” she said, and proceeded to flat iron my curls so I looked like someone’s prom date in the 1960s. It didn’t matter. I was going to be on national television and I was going to talk about my novels.

The studio is chilly, and it’s me, and three other women, and to my surprise, I’m not introduced as a novelist or even as a writer. I’m just “one of the women in the anthology.” Well, I figure people will know I’m a writer, right? My piece in the anthology is about a time in my life when my first husband cheated on me, and my best friend, his sister, had actually brokered the deal. I’m asked a few questions, but I’m never able to turn anything around to the fact that I am a writer, and then I happen to look at the monitor, and I see under my image, the legend, in big red letters: HER HUSBAND CHEATED ON HER. Nothing about my novel, nothing about my being a writer, nothing about the fact that it’s my first husband who did this and not my darling second. Not even my name! Every question I’m asked is about infidelity. Finally, during the break, my friend, who sees my discomfort, blurts out to the program host, “Did you know Caroline wrote all these novels? That she has a new one coming out? Maybe it would be good to mention it.”

The host smiles and waves her hand. “Oh, of course I know that. I’ll mention it on air after the break.” She pats my knee encouragingly.

“And did you know it was a betrayal by her first husband, not her current one?” my friend says. “The monitor just said husband.”

The host looks sympathetic. “Of course, I know that,” she says. “We’ll fix it immediately.”

The break is over, and I try to sit up straighter. The interviewer turns to me. “So, how did it feel to be cheated on?” This time I’m prepared. “Well, as a novelist—“ I start to say, when another guest interrupts me and goes off on a tangent about the psychology of infidelity. It’s at that moment that I feel everything is lost. I look up at the monitor and under my picture it now says, “BETRAYED BY HUSBAND.”

I come home. My hair is gluey with spray and I feel like I look ridiculous, my eyes are weighted down with mascara and I’m on a busy urban block. I pass a bus stop and two women suddenly turn and look at me. One of them frankly stares. “Hey, I saw you on television!” she crows and I smile weakly. Maybe they’ll remember my frantic quip about my book. “You’re the one whose husband cheated on you, right?” one woman says.

I sit down on the bench beside them. I tell them I’m an author and that I was upset about the show because it was my first husband, not my current one who cheated, and that I really wanted to promote my novels. One of the women nods sympathetically. When I tell them the name of my latest book and what it’s about, one of the women ferrets in her purse and pulls out a pen and writes the name down. “I’m going to buy it!” one of the women says. “Me, too,” says her friend.

I get up and walk home. My hair still looks stupid, but I feel a little better. You never know what kind of doors publicity can open.

Caroline Leavitt’s new novel, Pictures of You, is a Costco Pennie’s Pick and was in its third printing before publication. For an engaging interview in which Leavitt actually does get to talk about her work, see this recent piece by novelist Susan Henderson at The Nervous Breakdown. Leavitt can be reached at www.carolineleavitt.com.

I read recently that Cormac McCarthy's Olivetti typewriter, which he used to write all his books, was sold at auction for over $250,000. Maybe the buyer thought to capture some of McCarthy's talents via magical transference through the keys of his typewriter.

McCarthy had to replace it, of course, so he went and bought another one, for $20. I think he made out pretty well there.

My dad used to sell Olivetti typewriters, and to my knowledge he never sold one for $250,000.

Anyway, this got me thinking, what talismanic object stands in for the typewriter, now that the typewriter is basically history? Does anyone want to buy Jonathan Franzen's laptop with the sabotaged ethernet jack? How would you display that in your home? Oh, here's my collection of laptops and flash drives belonging to famous writers! See how Shteyngart didn't update his virus software for 3 years? and here's the empty toner cartridge from Joyce Carol Oates's printer. That one wasn't worth as much, because she uses so many...

Okay, clearly this is hyperbole, and in the age of vanishing drafts, there are other items we might imbue with value besides the instrument through which the work is produced. And anyway, I'm sure that someone is going to tell me about a famous writer's laptop selling for a lot of money on eBay.

On the other hand, I'm strangely comforted that a writer's typewriter itself is held in such high esteem, as opposed to the treasured paperweight or the stuffed pet cat. (I'm not saying that McCarthy has a stuffed pet cat! I hope not.) What separates it from a dress a celebrity wore on the red carpet, or, of all things, William Shatner's kidney stone (which supposedly went for $20,000 on eBay), is the transcendent value of the creative project that came out of it.

But still, $250,000 for a typewriter?

I'm pretty sure the IBM Selectric I used in college is still in the attic. Tell you what, I'll give a deep "early career" discount to anyone who wants to wager on my future output...

Twenty dollars, you say?

That sounds about right.

I realize I'm a little late on this, but I just found out last week that M*A*S*H was off the air, so...in case you're still living in the past like me, the past in this case being last fall, you also might not know that a novel-length parody of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series is out in paperback: Nightlight is Harvard Lampoon's first full-length parody in 40 years. I can barely contain myself...

When I was in school, in the "olden days," many an amused hour was spent in the back of Crown Books reading aloud from the well-thumbed copy of Harvard Lampoon's last parody novel, Bored of the Rings (yes it's a Tolkein parody). Now I can't figure out why we didn't just buy the book. Maybe it was more fun to read it out loud in public. To wit, an excerpt from one of the Hobbit "songs":

I sit on the floor and pick my nose and think of dirty things
Of deviant dwarves who suck their toes
And elves who drub their dings.

I sit on the floor and pick my nose and dream exotic dreams
Of dragons who dress in rubber clothes
And trolls who do it in teams.

You can see how this would have appealed to your average 7th-grader. (And is it at all surprising that I called this little rhyme up from memory, after not having thought about it in years...?)

Of course you don't have to read the Twilight series in order to get the humor in the Lampoon's parody. Here's a sample:

It was then that I saw him. He was sitting at a table all by himself, not even eating. He had an entire tray of baked potatoes in front of him and still, he did not touch a single one. How could a human have his pick of baked potatoes and resist them all? Even odder, he hadn't noticed me, Belle Goose, future Academy Award winner.

A computer sat before him on the table. He stared intently at the screen, narrowing his eyes into slits and concentrating those slits on the screen as if the only thing that mattered to him was physically dominating that screen. He was muscular, like a man who could pin you up against the wall as easily as a poster, yet lean, like a man who would rather cradle you in his arms. He had reddish, blonde-brown hair that was groomed heterosexually. He looked older than the other boys in the room--maybe not as old as God or my father, but certainly a viable replacement. Imagine if you took every woman's idea of a hot guy and averaged it out into one man. This was that man.

"What is that?" I asked, knowing that whatever it was it wasn't avian.

"That's Edwart Mullen," Lucy said.

Edwart. I had never met a boy named Edwart before. Actually, I had never met any human named Edwart before. It was a funny sounding name. Much funnier than Edward.

As we sat there, gazing at him for what seemed like hours but couldn't have been more than the entire lunch period, his eyes suddenly flicked toward me, slithering over my face and boring into my heart like fangs. Then in a flash they went back to glowering at that screen.

"He moved here two years ago from Alaska," she said.

So not only was he pale like me, but he was also an outsider from a state that begins with an "A." I felt a surge of empathy. I had never felt a connection like this before.

"That boy's not worth your time," she said wrongly. "Edwart doesn't date."

I smirked inwardly and snorted outwardly. So, I would be his first girlfriend.


Look for a well-thumbed copy in the back of a bookstore near you.

From a conversation with my 9-year-old:

Boy (sees book on shelf): Who's John Updike?

Me: He's a great fiction writer.

Boy: He writes about rabbits?

Me: No, there's a man called Rabbit...

Boy: John Updike is a rabbit?

Me: No, the character in the book is named Rabbit.

Boy: But he's not a rabbit?

Me: No, he's a man.

Boy: Why is he named Rabbit if he's a man?

Me: That's his nickname...

Boy: It's not about rabbits. That's weird.

Me: It's about what happens to him in his life, the man called Rabbit.

Boy: Oh. Can I read it?

Me: Maybe not yet... Maybe...when you're 10.

Boy: You always say that.

Me: That's my job...

Take a listen to this fabulous interview with author A.S. Byatt by Charlotte Higgins at The Guardian. Byatt is one of my favorite writers (you're beginning to think I have too many "favorites," but when one considers the vast number of published authors, really, my list still seems insignificant). In this interview, she touches on everything from how difficult it must be to grow up the child of a children's book author ("children's writers want to prolong their own childhood") to the difficulty with defining one's identity in the absence of a religious framework.

It's her discussion of the latter that I find most intriguing. She refers primarily to Western society when she says that the map of the world provided by religion is gone--that religion itself has "gone away," leaving only an interest in "ourselves." She talks about the various frames for trying to understand ourselves--how to work out identity--and finally identifies the "blogosphere" as the place where people are attempting self-definition. She says that everyone needs a mirror to "tell you who you are"--and that we are finding that mirror on Facebook. According to Byatt, Facebook has, in that sense, replaced God.

If we do look to Byatt's "blogosphere" for self-definition, that presents an interesting problem. Because the identity people construct, their online "persona," is just that: a construct. A fiction. Is that the primary mirror through which you see yourself, this fiction you've created?

For the sake of argument, how is this different from any other locus of self-definition? Isn't any self you put forward a fiction, exclusive and exclusionary, by definition? Shaped by you, both consciously and unconsciously?

I would think that, more than any other medium, the web's sheer pervasiveness, and the possibility of spending so much of one's time and "relationship" energy there, could make it the overwhelming source of one's self-definition.

I'm obviously not a scholar of philosophy, and I'm not a psychologist, I only play one on TV. But if Facebook (etc.) really is where we locate our primary sense of self, that seems dangerously reductive and illusory.

Byatt thinks someone should write a book about it. I think she's right.

In this enlightening interview with novelist David Mitchell at The Rumpus, Mitchell is asked about the sheer variety of his work. He tells interviewer Alec Michod that writers are like duck-billed platypuses "and critics are taxonomists, and to us duck-billed platypuses the question of whether we should be considered as an egg-laying mammal or what is a pointless exercise... A novelist’s job is to write a novel, not worry about how it fits into one’s oeuvre..."

I've always wondered what to call myself: fiction writer? humor writer? food/travel/grocery list writer? At some point, I settled on..."writer." But now I'm thinking duck-billed platypus might be a more descriptive label.

Mitchell comments on maturing over time as a writer: "...the older you get the more familiar you become with your own ignorance. Your writing, hopefully, has more spontaneity and verve as you age. Now it can take painstaking weeks...to excrete a single sentence. It can be like having a hemorrhage, but one hopes the quality is superior the greater the excretion."

Mitchell's hemorrhages are a good deal better quality than most. His latest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, has been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His earlier acclaimed novel, Cloud Atlas, was shortlisted in 2004.

I'm a latecomer to James Salter's work, having just recently read and been bowled over by his novel, A Sport and a Pastime. It was published in 1967, and I expected it to seem quaint and dated. In short, it's not. Its exploration of a love affair between an American man and a French girl is probably the best narrative of "good" sex that I've read. Because face it, most of the sex one finds in novels these days is "bad" sex. You know the difference; I don't need to explain that. And when there is good sex (particularly if it's at all explicit), it's often badly written to the point of being cringe-inducing--even by the best writers. So...I humbly suggest Salter's book as a primer for those who are preparing to attempt a scene of that kind in their own fiction.

A volume of Salter's correspondence with longtime friend Robert Phelps, Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps, edited by John McIntyre, will be out this month from Counterpoint Press. Although I don't read literary correspondence all that often, what I've seen so far of these letters has led me to believe I'm missing out. In addition to which this kind of exchange may soon become a relic.

Robert Phelps, a fiction writer, literary biographer, and writing professor, sent an adoring letter to Salter after reading A Sport and a Pastime, and so began an affair of friendship that lasted until Phelps' death. Excerpts from the letters have appeared in The American Scholar.

In their letters, the two men commiserate about everything from travel to bad reviews. (On reviewers, Salter reminds Phelps that "they are not the only readers, they are the paid readers." Something to keep in mind.)

What interests me most are their references to the creative process. Richard Ford is quoted in The American Scholar as saying that Salter "writes American sentences better than anybody writing today." In which case, it's gratifying to know that writers like Salter can have days like the rest of us:

"I'm still at work, disheartened, on the final chapter of my book...It still eludes me...Somewhere in all that boring clay is the shape I'm looking for." Later, he describes a play he's working on: "I don't know anything about it yet except there are parts I don't detest."

I think I can get on board for that, writing a passage that I don't detest.

Phelps says that if every writer has his given form..."I sometimes think mine is the footnote....I think I am an annotator. The story exists for the scribbled notes in the margin."

Salter, on the other hand, loves "the infinities, the endlessness..." He will clearly always find something new to say, or a new way of saying it. "We must consume whole worlds to write a single sentence and yet we never use up a part of what is available."

I can't help being struck by the likelihood that this type of relationship may never again be immortalized and made public this way. Unless of course you're a person who saves emails (intentionally--not just to avoid cleaning out the inbox), and (even less likely) you're corresponding with a person who writes emails that are worth saving.

For further insight and reflections on Robert Phelps, see this essay, written by Derek Alger, a long-time student of his and editor of Pif, the online literary magazine.

Carolyn Parkhurst is back from a whirlwind tour to promote her new novel, The Nobodies Album, which Liesl Schillinger reviewed glowingly in the NYT this past Sunday. Carolyn has condensed her on-the-road experiences into this list of hilarious book tour wisdom. Highly recommend.

A sampling:

Stay in character. When you call home, have your kids ask you a few questions about narrative voice.

In-flight writing exercise: Choose an item from the SkyMall catalog and try to imagine a character who might actually use it.

While you're on the road, you're functioning as an Ambassador of Literature. This means you can pretty much park anywhere.

(On my way to the DMV now to get one of those Ambassador of Literature hang-tags for my car...)

I just finished reading Scott Turow's New York Times review of Mr. Peanut, the new book by first-time novelist Alex Ross. The book sounds marvelous, exactly the sort of story I'd enjoy reading. It's about three faulty, possibly deadly marriages, and includes a character based on the real-life Sam Sheppard, who was accused (and then acquitted) in the murder of his wife. All three husbands portrayed here consider killing their wives. Which made me want to ask my husband a few questions. Anyway, the plot is complex, the story multilayered, and Turow describes it as "daring, arresting" and praises its "audacious and moving honesty." So far so good; it sounds brilliant, and I can't wait to read it.

And then Turow interrupts himself midstream to congratulate Ross on tackling such a forbidding topic: Marriage.

Really?

Turow tells us that back when he was in writing school, Richard P. Scowcroft, then Director of Stanford's Creative Writing Center,
"told those of us in the advanced fiction seminar that the one subject he had always feared writing a novel about was marriage, because it still seemed to him the most complex and frequently unfathomable of human relationships, notwithstanding his own long and successful marriage. Scowcroft’s remark is a testimonial to Ross’s bravery. In many ways it would have taken less courage to present a sympathetic portrait of Osama bin Laden than it did to write this novel, which flouts the treasured conceptions of love and marriage many of us depend on to make it through the day."

Wow. Did I read that correctly? Less brave to write a sympathetic portrait of an international terrorist than to write a deep and accurate portrait of marriage? Flouting treasured conceptions? Maybe it depends on who's doing the flouting.

If all novelists did was reinforce conventional wisdom, I suppose that would be pretty dull stuff. So, is that what most novelists who write about marriage are doing?

My complaint about Turow's review has nothing to do with what sounds to me like an intriguing book that I'd love to read. It's about Turow's puzzling assertion.

Normally, when one writes about marriage--attempting to get to the meat of it and portray, deconstruct, analyze, explore, whatever--well, such books are not often called out for their brave importance, are they? The authors are not usually lauded as fearlessly confronting this awesome yet central human territory. And yet, there are so many that do it. I'll leave their mention to others. (Yes, I'm being lazy, but this is my blog... so I'll just say that the first one that came to mind was Nadine Gordimer's None to Accompany Me, and the second was Paula Fox'a Desperate Characters.)

I'm led to wonder--I just wonder...whether the topic of marriage is suddenly deemed such a difficult and brave one to tackle because a man finally decided to write about it.

Those of you who know me will know that I'm not given to knee-jerk feminism, and usually I pay little attention to these kinds of inequities. That's because I'm not interested in keeping score or evening out a playing field just for the sake of it. And frankly, I want some help changing that flat tire. But this strikes me as all too rich. Our little novels of domesticity written by women are considered a dime a dozen, but as soon as a man tackles the subject, whoa, what courage!

One would think that women rarely produce myth-busting examinations of marriage, and only the husbands lie in bed at night dreaming of murder.

Susan Coll's hilarious new novel, Beach Week, is featured on NPR in Lizzie Skurnick's Three Degrees of Failure for the Recent Graduate.

I like this part: "It might seem odd to describe a novel that involves barfing in cars, stalking boys and a drunk dad playing beer pong in his underpants as heartwarming..."

Behind the barbs that Coll wields are understanding of and affection for her targets, and that's part of what makes the book's humor so effective.

Three Books is a regular NPR feature in which writers recommend their favorite three books in a given category. (You can read my contribution to the series here.)

Terrific review in The Washington Post for The Nobodies Album, which I blogged about here a few days ago. Art Taylor calls Parkhurst's novel "brisk and engaging...a meditation on writing itself and on the curious intersections between the imagined world and the real one."

What did I tell you?

I am always amazed by Carolyn Parkhurst's seemingly limitless imagination, and the unique lens through which she views the world, both of which are evident in her writing. I've known Carolyn since we were in grad school, and now we're in a fabulous writing group together. As a result, I've had the privilege of reading her new book, The Nobodies Album, as she was writing it. It's an absorbing, intelligent, complex work, and I thoroughly enjoyed watching the process as it unfolded, eagerly awaiting each new installment. The structural task Carolyn set for herself seemed huge: The main character, Octavia Frost, is a novelist late in her career. Her newest book is a rewrite of the final chapters of EACH of her previous novels. These final chapters, and their revised versions, are actual chapters in Parkhurst's book. In the novel's "present" story, Frost learns that her son, a famous rock musician, has been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend. Frost and her son are estranged because of something she wrote in one of her novels. The story of the murder and the mother-son relationship is told in chapters alternating with those final chapters of Frost's novels.

It sounds like one of those things one is told not to do in writer-school. But, that is because most people couldn't pull it off. Carolyn, however, DOES pull it off, which makes it a fascinating read.

It may seem like I'm putting too much emphasis on the complex structure, which I don't want to do--I don't want it to put people off. Because the amazing thing about it is that while it sounds complex in the explaining, when you read it, it's quite clear and clean and even elegant in its logic. And human--because Carolyn nails the mother-son relationship in all its strains, as well as the desire to remake one's own "story."
Booklist calls The Nobodies Album "a stunning blend of craft and ingenuity."

Publishers Weekly says that Parkhurst has "the gift of a real storyteller."

In case it wasn't enough to merely write this book, Carolyn has also created a real website for Octavia Frost, her fictional author-protagonist, which even includes book covers and descriptions of Frost's (fictional!) works. And, Carolyn has begun posting an entertaining series of tweets, which you can find on Twitter under #selfpimpinghaikus. Each tweet is a clever haiku that relates to her novel. And if you'd like to know what music inspired various aspects of the characters and story, on Carolyn's website, you can find a playlist that she used in the course of writing the book.

I may be Curiouswriter, but it's very likely that Carolyn Parkhurst is Geniuswriter.

I neglected to mention that Susan Coll will read from her new novel, Beach Week, this week.

Thursday, June 3, 7pm
Barnes & Noble
Bethesda Ave. at Woodmont Ave.

See you there!

For more scheduled events, see Susan's website.

I feel privileged to present a guest blog from the funny and talented novelist Susan Coll, whose newest novel, Beach Week, will be available in stores on June 1.



Seeing as Paula was bold enough to guest blog for Alternate Sides about an embarrassing moment in air travel, I thought I’d return the favor with an anecdote about my most embarrassing moment in book promotion. I should probably add, my most embarrassing thus far.

My last novel, Acceptance, was a satire about college admissions hysteria, with some inevitable subtext about the culture of hyper-parenting in the affluent suburbs. Because I approached this book with something of a journalistic eye, interviewing academic deans and admissions officers, and using source material, I came to know a lot about college admissions. I also wrote a piece for the Washington Post Outlook section about helicopter parenting. Somewhere along the way, the line between fact and fiction became a little blurred, I suppose, and I found myself frequently being asked in interviews for advice on raising teens and on shepherding them through the transition to college. These questions caught me off guard each time, but I answered them politely, even somewhat confidently at times---hey, I may not be a child psychologist, but I am a mother!

A couple of months into the book promotion cycle I was invited onto a network news program in the New York City metropolitan area---a small coup for a novelist. Accordingly, I went all out and bought a new brown top from Banana Republic and spent a fair amount of time trying to decide whether or not to wear my glasses. I made my way into the building, past security, and up the elevators at 30 Rock, trying to channel my inner Tina Fey. But the disaster began with the first question, and I never recovered. The young producer, probably just out of college herself, clearly had me confused with Dr. Phil, and began to ask me a series of parenting questions way beyond the range of even a battle-weary mother of three. I tried to fudge my answers for a while until the whole thing began to feel dishonest; I had visions of some aggrieved parent banging on my door demanding to see my Ph.D., and in return I’d slip her a slim comic novel. I finally interrupted the interviewer and asked if she was aware that I had written a novel. Um, no, she was not. The ride back down the elevator was something of a blur, particularly as I’d removed my glasses. The segment never aired. I gave the brown shirt to my daughter and she wore it to a recent interview. At least she got the job.

Susan Coll is the author of four novels, including Acceptance, which was made into a Lifetime Network film starring Joan Cusack. Coll's new novel, Beach Week, is a dark comedy that examines a suburban teenage rite of passage--the adult-free, post-high school trip to the beach. Teenage girls plan an unhinged blowout at the beach, while their misguided, affluent parents are too busy worrying about legal liabilities to fret over some missing pills or random hookups. Beach Week will be available on June 1. Also check out Susan's funny blog, Alternate Sides: Adventures Along the Northeast Corridor.

I think the humiliating book tour story could become a regular feature on this blog, so for those of you who have such tales and are willing to publicly humiliate yourselves (a second time?) for the benefit of...art...please get in touch!

Author C. M. Mayo has been living in and writing about Mexico for many years. Luckily for me, she also spends a good bit of time in Washington, DC, and I've had the chance to chat with her on many occasions. Not only is she a wonderful writer, she is full of helpful information, innovative ideas, and contagious enthusiasm for all things writing-related, and she doesn't mind sharing with the writing and blogging community at large, to our great advantage. See for instance, her tips on "How to hang in there and finish your novel" (yes, I'm taking copious notes...) on Leslie Pietrzyk's fabulous Work-in-Progress blog.

If you have not already had the pleasure of reading C.M. Mayo's novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, which was a Library Journal Best Book of 2009, rush out and get the paperback, which is now available. The Last Prince follows Maximilian’s short-lived career as the unfortunate Emperor of Mexico, and focuses specifically on his doomed adoption of a half-Mexican, half-American boy he chooses to be his heir. This little-known and fascinating piece of history is brought to life in Mayo's novel.

Publisher's Weekly calls The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, "an engaging story brimming with majestic ambition."

Library Review says, "Mayo's cultural insights are first-rate, and the glittering, doomed regime comes to life."



Mayo's story collection, Sky Over El Nido, won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. She is also the author of the widely acclaimed travel memoir, Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico; and the anthology, Mexico: A Traveler s Literary Companion. Mayo is an avid translator and editor of contemporary Mexican literature.

Here, you can watch an interview with C.M. Mayo on WETA's Book Studio, hosted by Bethanne Patrick.

Here, you will find Mayo's Library of Congress lecture about her novel.

C.M. Mayo is a blogger extraordinaire, writing-savvy and internet-savvy, and she can be found in that incarnation at Madam Mayo. I especially admire her writing exercises, known as C.M. Mayo's Giant Golden Buddha and 364 More Daily 5-Minute Writing Exercises. Honestly, I don't know where she gets the energy for all she does! I wish I could borrow one-tenth of it now and then. Maybe when she takes a rare nap, she wouldn't mind... Madam Mayo, do you nap?

Join me this Sunday, May 16, at the Writer's Center in Bethesda to hear two very accomplished Washington women read from their work.

Ann McLaughlin, with whom I was lucky enough to be in a writing group, will read from her new novel, Bayberry House, the story of two sisters who meet at their deceased parents’ country house to prepare it for sale. Their father committed suicide in the house years ago, and their return to the house spurs a return to bittersweet memories.

Ann McLaughlin's previous work includes five novels: The House on Q Street, Maiden Voyage, Lightning in July, The Balancing Pole and Sunset at Rosalie. You can read more about Ann and her work at Leslie Pietrzyk's Work-in-Progress blog.

Myra Sklarew, poet and past Professor at American University, where I was lucky enough to meet her, will read from Harmless, her new collection of poems published by Mayapple Press. Her past collections include Lithuania: New & Selected Poems, and The Witness Trees. Sklarew also writes nonfiction, and her book Holocaust and the Construction of Memory is forthcoming from SUNY Press.

Details, Details:

Sunday, May 16, 2pm
The Writer's Center
4508 Walsh St., Bethesda, MD

See you there!

Author Debra Galant has me thinking about cars. I am a person who can mark time by the types of cars I've owned--or didn't own. From my grandmother's '63 Chevy Bel Air, which didn't survive quite long enough for me to get my driver's license, to my first car, a '68 Dodge Coronet 440 (the only car my dad ever bought new)--which did survive, barely, unless you factor in how it would stall out every time I was about to turn left across three lanes of oncoming traffic. The car I drive today is the first one I really chose for myself, plus it has XM radio (my first one only had AM...), so it's my favorite.

Now, Debra Galant has brought us the funny, poignant new novel, Cars From a Marriage, which charts the important events--big and small--in one couple's relationship by way of the automobiles that drive them throughout the course of their lives. The cars steer the reader from Ivy and Ellis's first meeting, to their first fight, and down the line to a family funeral. Finally, on a drive along the Pacific Coast Highway, Ivy and Ellis come to some serious and illuminating realizations about their lives.

Publisher's Weekly calls it "an affecting and strikingly honest look at a marriage."


In an interview from Crazy for Books, Galant talks about the slightly nontraditional structure of the book:

Unlike my first two books, “Rattled” and “Fear and Yoga in New Jersey,” which are satires, “Cars from a Marriage” strove to tell a really nuanced story of the way romantic love fades over the course of a marriage. With each successive chapter, Ivy and Ellis grow further apart, telling secrets to the reader that they wouldn’t dare tell each other. This breaks one of the rules of fiction writing, which requires a single protagonist. Because Ivy and Ellis get equal weight in the story, sympathy shifts between them. In a way, the protagonist of “Cars from a Marriage” turns out to be the marriage.

Crazy for Books says the author "deftly navigates" through the lives of this couple "with humor and insight."

You can also hear Ms. Galant discuss her book in this interview with Brian Lehrer on WNYC radio.

Full disclosure: I met Debra Galant during a residency at the VCCA, where she hooked me into playing the diabolical, addicting game known as Ex Libris. I was daily entertained by her perceptive wit, and I had the opportunity to hear her read from her funny and absorbing work. I highly recommend it!

From "The Minotaur Speaks," which appeared in Blackbird:

They say this man has flaxen hair,
a mouth so fine the gods
beg him to speak. They say
my death will make him
a hero. Everyone loves a hero,
but a hero only loves you
until he reaches the next island.
This is my only island.

Sandra Beasley, essayist, former editor for The American Scholar, and acclaimed poet, will read from her new poetry collection, I Was the Jukebox at Politics & Prose Bookstore on Sunday, May 2, at 1pm.

I Was the Jukebox (Norton) has been awarded the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize. Joy Harjo, in her judge's citation, describes Beasley’s work as “fresh, crisp, decisive and fearless,” and notes that "every object, icon, or historical moment has a soul with a voice." Publisher's Weekly has called the collection "more fun than most recent books," and "a book that could go a long way."

Beasley's first collection, Theories of Falling, won the 2007 New Issues Prize, selected by Marie Howe.

Details, Details:
Sunday, May 2, 1pm
Politics and Prose
5015 Connecticut Ave. NW
Washington, D.C. 20008
A reception will follow the reading.

For more insight into Sandra Beasley and her work, see Leslie Pietrzyk's work-in-progress blog, and see Sandra's website, www.sandrabeasley.com and her blog, Chicks Dig Poetry.

Kermit Moyer reads from his new novel, The Chester Chronicles, tonight at American University. Learn more about The Chester Chronicles here, and read Moyer's guest post for his take on autobiographical fiction.

Alice McDermott calls The Chester Chronicles "heartbreaking and funny," and Publishers Weekly says it "brings to mind the stories of Lorrie Moore." Kermit Moyer's first book, a story collection called Tumbling, was called "a work of ringing authenticity," by the New York Times.

The reading will take place in the lounge at the School of International Service (SIS) at American University tonight, Wednesday, April 14, at 8pm. The book will be available for purchase, in paperback.

Hope to see you there!

From The Guardian newspaper:

The annual prize for the oddest book title has been won by the splendidly eccentric Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes, by Dr Daina Taimina. Last year's winner was The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais.

The Diagram prize has been awarded annually by The Bookseller magazine since 1978. Horace Bent, the magazine's diarist, who administers it, said: "I think what won it for the book is that, very simply, the title is completely bonkers. On the one hand you have the typically feminine, gentle and woolly world of needlework and, on the other, the exciting but incredibly unwoolly world of hyperbolic geometry and negative curvature."

"One hopes that Dr Taimina's win prompts other enlightened crocheters, knitters and embroiderers to produce similar works, so I look forward to seeing books such as Cross-stitching String Theory and Felting Feats with Phenomenology in the near future."

Taimina will receive no prize aside from "the sales boost that will now inevitably occur", according to Bent.

The book is in fact a serious work by a mathematician at Cornell University in New York state. As David Henderson, Taimina's husband, has explained, a hyperbolic plane "is a simply connected Riemannian manifold with negative Gaussian curvature". Hyperbolic planes – surfaces with constant negative curvature – which are studied as a branch of non-Euclidian geometry, have traditionally been hard to visualise: Taimina's breakthrough was to use crochet to create such shapes. Dr Taimina's work has appeared in an exhibition titled Not The Knitting You Know.

The other shortlisted titles included Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich by James A Yannes.

I, for one, love that The Guardian has used the word "bonkers" in an article. Yes, it's a quote, but it balances out the more typical, understated, "splendidly eccentric" comment that comes earlier.

In my son's school, there's a period in the schedule that's called "DEAR" time. DEAR is the acronym for "Drop Everything and Read." Each child chooses a book and reads for an uninterrupted block of time (which is never long enough, according to the young readers in my house).

I try to build DEAR time into my own daily schedule, even if it comes after 11pm. And I agree, whenever it is, it's never enough. The Curious Stack on my night stand is becoming rather precarious. As is the one by my recliner. And the one in the kitchen. And the one by the exercise bike... You get the picture.

But I'm more determined than ever to get my reading time in, because this is such an exciting season for new fiction. If you have some DEAR time of your own, whether it's at 11pm or during your Spring Break vacation, here are four great new novels that will make you want to drop everything and find a comfortable chair. These books are dramatically different from each other, yet they have two important things in common: All have garnered critical praise from many quarters, and all four talented authors hail from right here in the Washington, DC, area.


THE POSTMISTRESS by Sarah Blake, a Politics & Prose Bookstore bestseller. Boston Globe calls it a "book to get lost in." Praised by novelist Kathryn Stockett.

Iris James is the postmistress of Franklin, Massachusetts a small town at the end of Cape Cod. She firmly believes her job is to deliver and keep people's secrets, to pass along the news of love and sorrow that letters carry. Faithfully she stamps and sends the letters between people such as the newlyweds Emma and Will Fitch, who has gone to London to help out during the Blitz. But one day she slips a letter into her pocket, and leaves it there.

Meanwhile, seemingly fearless radio gal, Frankie Bard is reporting the Blitz from London, her dispatches crinkling across the Atlantic, imploring listeners to pay attention. Then in the last desperate days of the summer of 1941, she rides the trains out of Germany, reporting on what is happening to the refugees there.

Alternating between an America on the eve of entering into World War II, still safe and snug in its inability to grasp the danger at hand, an a Europe being torn apart by war, the two stories collide in a letter, bringing the war finally home to Franklin.

Buy this book at Indiebound! or Amazon.

THE OPPOSITE OF ME by Sarah Pekkanen, a Redbook Magazine March pick, praised by novelist Jennifer Weiner. Booklist calls it "funny and poignant."

Twenty-nine year old Lindsey Rose has, for as long as she can remember, lived in the shadow of her devastatingly beautiful fraternal twin sister, Alex. Determined to get noticed, Lindsey is finally on the cusp of being named Creative Vice President of an elite New York advertising agency, after years of 80 plus-hour weeks, migraines, and profound loneliness. But during the course of one devastating night, Lindsey’s carefully-constructed life implodes.

Humiliated and desperate, she flees the glitter of Manhattan and retreats to the time warp of her parents’ Maryland home. As her sister plans her lavish wedding to her prince charming, Lindsey struggles to maintain her identity as the smart, responsible twin, while she furtively tries to put her career back together. But things get more complicated when a long-held family secret is unleashed that forces both sisters to reconsider who they are and who they are meant to be.

Buy this book at Indiebound! or Amazon.

VINTAGE VERONICA by Erica Perl, for young adult readers (and the young-at-heart!). Booklist calls Perl "masterful" and the story "earthy and real."

Veronica Walsh is 15, fashion-minded, fat, and friendless. Her summer job in the Consignment Corner section (Employees Only!) of a vintage clothing store is a dream come true. There Veronica can spend her days separating the one-of-a-kind gem garments from the Dollar-a-Pound duds, without having to deal with people. But when two outrageous yet charismatic salesgirls befriend her and urge her to spy on and follow the mysterious and awkward stock boy Veronica has nicknamed the Nail, Veronica’s summer takes a turn for the weird. Suddenly, what began as a prank turns into something else entirely. Which means Veronica may have to come out of hiding and follow something even riskier for the first time: her heart.

Buy this book at Indiebound! or Amazon.

MAJOR PETTIGREW'S LAST STAND by Helen Simonson, a Politics & Prose bookstore bestseller and Indiebound March Pick-of-the-Month. The Washington Post praises the book's "crisp wit and gentle insight."

When Major Pettigrew, a retired British army major in a small English village, embarks on an unexpected friendship with the widowed Mrs. Ali, who runs the local shop, trouble erupts to disturb the bucolic serenity of the village and of the Major’s carefully regimented life.

As the Major and Mrs. Ali discover just how much they have in common, including an educated background and a shared love of books, they must struggle to understand what it means to belong and how far the obligations of family and tradition can be set aside for personal freedom. Meanwhile, the village itself, lost in its petty prejudices and traditions, may not see its own destruction coming.

Buy this book at Indiebound! or Amazon.

Now, no more excuses: Flop down on that beanbag chair, Drop Everything, and Read! (And, by the way, while you're down there on the bean bag chair, could you please pick up those hard bits of popcorn that are ground into the carpet from last time? Thanks...)

Lately, I've been asking myself, what good is it having a blog if you don't use it to shamelessly promote the work of your friends and family members?

I'm lucky in that my friends and relatives who do creative work are very talented and their work is of such high quality that I would read (or look at or listen to) it, even if I didn't know them personally.

Sure, fix me with that skeptic's smirk, but I don't think I've steered anyone wrong yet.

So, when I announce this new volume, I'm not telling you about it only because it was written by a family member. I'm telling you about it because I know it's a good book. It's already garnered praise here and across the pond, as we say. You don't have to take my word for it.

March 12 is the official U.S. launch date for The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660-1800... by Susan E. Whyman. Yes, there's a similarity in last names. You might say the last names are identical. That's because Dr. Whyman is my mother-in-law. And I'm not doing this for brownie points, not at all! She really doesn't need my help.

According to a History Today review by James Daybell, The Pen and the People is "[an] impressive new book...breaks significant new ground [by] arguing for the 18th century as the period that witnessed the emergence of a popular culture of letter-writing. [It] will undoubtedly have considerable impact on the field while the fascinating case studies will appeal to the more general reader."

The author spent more than 10 years poring over original documents, unearthing new treasure troves of letters that other historians were convinced did not even exist. As a result, The Pen and the People explores original, cutting edge ideas on the history of writing, reading and the novel. There are actual discussions, found in these previously unknown letters, of marriage, poverty, poetry, and the emotional lives of servants.



The book interests me as an illumination of a newly uncovered piece of history, but also because letter-writing is a disappearing art form. Please don't suggest emails are the new letters. Emails are not letters. They're built for speed and brevity, full of abbreviations, typos, and ill-thought-out expressions. They're meant to be disposable, more often than not, and they only hang around when they're meant to embarrass CEOs and government officials.

When something is handwritten, the words seem much more carefully chosen. The labor of writing by hand makes the letter a project in itself. How many of you had a pen-pal when you were a kid? Do you remember the eager anticipation, waiting to get a letter back? No more; everything happens instantly. There is no time spent in the pleasurable agony of waiting for some special communique. What about love letters? You know you saved them. Somehow, a flip email punctuated with emoticons just ain't the same.

Think how the sense of urgency of so many of our communications would be redefined if we had to write them by hand and then wait for a response for more than the minutes it takes to get a return email? Believe me, I wouldn't want to return to those days completely, but on the other hand, I can't remember the last time someone wrote me an actual letter on actual paper. I'm not a luddite (here I am, blogging---), but I miss that.

In Susan Whyman's book, you can see some of what we've lost. Ordinary people began to speak their minds, and, 300-plus years later, their handwritten words remain. What's the message there?

The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660-1800 by Susan E. Whyman is the author's third book. It can be ordered from Amazon or directly from Oxford University Press.

Kermit Moyer, author of The Chester Chronicles, which I discussed here, has interesting things to say about the intersection between fiction and autobiography. After I heard his quote in a Writerscast interview, which I mentioned here, I knew he had only scratched the surface of his thoughts on the matter. Here, then, more on the subject from Kermit Moyer (and enough said by me).

I believe that the best way to tell the truth about yourself and your experience is to lie—that is, to write fiction rather than a memoir. Having just published an autobiographical novel called The Chester Chronicles, I can tell you that, first of all, it’s simply easier to tell uncomfortable truths about yourself when you seem to be talking about someone else. As the poet Richard Hugo has said,

The poem is always in your home town, but you have a better chance of finding it in another. . . . Though you’ve never seen it before, it must be a town you’ve lived in all your life. . . . [Here] it is easy to turn the gas station attendant into a drunk. Back home it would have been difficult because he had a drinking problem. (The Triggering Town)

But there’s another, even more crucial way that fiction is necessary if we’re going to tell the truth about our lives. If my recounting of my experience is to be as detailed and as richly textured as my experience has been, I have no choice but to use my imagination as much as, or more than, my memory. Because it’s simply impossible to do justice to life’s intricate and filigreed surfaces, its detailed particularities and varied textures, without resorting to imaginative invention.

And who can do without dialogue? But if dialogue occurs in a memoir, it tends to be suspect, to partake of the imagined rather than the remembered, since we can’t usually recall whole past conversations verbatim. So the inclusion of dialogue tends to compromise the memoirist’s primary obligation, which is to be true to the actual facts of the author’s life. The fiction writer’s primary obligation, on the other hand, is to be true to feeling rather than to facts. As E. L. Doctorow says:

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it’s raining, but the feel of being rained on.

Finally, I think the special power of fiction has something to do not only with the way it can render a felt sense of life in all its intricacy but also the way it can render life’s moment-by-moment spontaneity and its constant openness to surprise. I may start with the feeling of a remembered situation, but to be true to my experience, I have to let things develop on the page as they will, just as they do in life. Sometimes they take a course I’m familiar with; sometimes—in fact, more often than not—they don’t. Unlike the memoirist, I am free to allow my narrative’s course to be open to the living moment and to unfold as organically as life itself does rather than being predetermined by the facts of my life.

Which is also why I opted to use the present tense for The Chester Chronicles, even though the point of view is retrospective: the present tense indicates that the recounted experience is happening again right now in the memory and imagination of the narrator, and of the reader. And if the reader is living through it imaginatively along with the narrator, the effect is to make readers feel like the story has happened to them too, that it is actually part of their own experience. And when that happens . . . well, that's it, isn't it? That's what we're aiming for.

Kermit Moyer grew up an Army brat in the 1950s. He got his BA, his MA, and his PhD in English from Northwestern University and in 1970 joined the faculty of American University in Washington, DC, where he taught literature and creative writing for 37 years. His short fiction has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, and The Hudson Review, and he is the author of Tumbling, a collection of stories published by the University of Illinois Press. He lives with his wife Amy and their dog Zora on Cape Cod.

In an interview with David Wilk on WritersCast.com, Kermit Moyer discusses his new novel, The Chester Chronicles, which I also talked about here. Wilk points out that the linked stories in Moyer's book are autobiographical, and Moyer explains why he chose not to simply write a memoir:

"I decided the best way to tell the truth about myself was to write fiction." That way, says Moyer, he can truly express an emotion that's real, even if the events built around it are made up.

Wilk adds that it's less important for the reader to know which parts of the story are fiction and which are real than it is for him or her to feel a connection with the character. Wilk says he felt this connection with the narrator of The Chester Chronicles, and he compares the book to A Separate Peace by John Knowles.

You can listen to the complete interview here.

1. We were both born in February! Happy Birthday, Mr. Ford!

2. We are both writers! (Bet you knew that was coming...)

3. Richard Ford is one of my favorite writers. (I'm sure he is one of his favorite writers, too. Why not?)

4. We both write novels. Richard Ford's novels have been published!

5. Some of Richard Ford's books take place in New Jersey. I have been to New Jersey many times. (See how these commonalities start to pile up?)

6. We both used the expression "gorked off" in a book to indicate someone dying. Richard Ford may have used it first.

7. Richard Ford keeps his manuscripts in the freezer. I keep pizza in the freezer. We both use our freezers!

8. We both attended that gala award reading last spring! We both had a few drinks, got our courage up, and had a nice conversation. (Maybe that was just me with the drinks. And the courage.)

Anyway, Happy Birthday, Mr. Ford, from a big fan.
Hope you have a great day, because before you know it, the good times are gone like a fart in a skillet.

Listen to the podcast of my NPR commentary on Independence Day, and two other books about desperate suburban men. Angst Lurks Behind the Lawn Mower was broadcast on All Things Considered.

The Authors Guild has developed a new way for authors to track what Amazon is doing to their book's page:

The Authors Guild is pleased to announce the launch of WhoMovedMyBuyButton.com, which is now live in fully-functional beta form. Who Moved My Buy Button? allows authors to keep track of whether Amazon has removed the "buy buttons" from any of their books.

Simply register the ISBNs of any books you'd like monitored, and our web tool will check daily to make sure your buy buttons are safe and sound. If there's a problem, we'll e-mail you an alert.

Although we've launched WhoMovedMyBuyButton.com in response to Amazon's wholesale removal of buy buttons from Macmillan titles, we believe Amazon should be monitored for years to come. Amazon's developed quite a fondness for employing this draconian tactic (there's a chronology at the website); it's only grown bolder with its growing market clout.

Vigilance is called for: sounding off is our best collective defense. Register your ISBNs today -- it's free and open to all authors, Guild members and not. (Though we'd prefer you join.)

Look here for more information and a screen shot.

And, if I may put in an additional word for the Authors Guild, they help make this here website possible, and I'm pretty happy about that.

Kermit Moyer is not, technically, a new writer. But he is probably that great fiction writer you’ve never heard of. Until now. The Chester Chronicles is Moyer’s first book in more than twenty years, and his first novel.

Michael Cunningham calls Kermit Moyer “one of America’s undiscovered treasures.”

Publisher’s Weekly says Moyer’s stories “bring to mind the stories of Lorrie Moore.”

And according to Booklist, which gave the book a starred review, Moyer “displays an unerring feel for those moments that distill both the pathos and the comedy of growing up.”

In The Chester Chronicles, Chester "Chet" Patterson describes what life is like as an Army brat growing up in the 1950s and coming of age in the 1960s. His mother is a seductress and a lush, and his father is an Army officer whom Chet both resents and admires. Moving every two or three years, Chester is a perennial new kid as well as a bookish and movie-obsessed romantic. At the age of thirteen, he falls in love, he thinks, with his own first cousin. Each chapter could stand alone as a story about a pivotal moment, but taken together, the reader gets the whole of Chester's life. As Andre Dubus is quoted in the epigraph, "A life is a collection of stories." Each of Chester's stories takes him deeper into himself as well as a little farther into the century, during a time that includes the birth of rock and roll, the Civil Rights Movement, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the assassination of President Kennedy.

As Lee K. Abbott says, “I am…keen to see that this moving [book] reach as many folks as have eyes.”



Kermit Moyer was my first teacher in MFA school. He soon became my mentor, thesis advisor, and friend. Back then, I read his collection of stories, Tumbling, which The New York Times called “impeccable,” when it was published in 1988. I was floored by Moyer’s ability to channel a child’s perspective in those stories, including the often sexually charged circumstances in which his characters found themselves. Now, in The Chester Chronicles, he has honed and concentrated this skill, conveying the richness of one man’s inner experience as he comes of age along with the 20th century.

Moyer has a surgical ability to pare down to just the right phrase to describe a sensation or a gesture. Here’s the beginning of one of my favorite chapters, “Learning to Smoke,” in which Chester, at the age of 13, gets lessons in a bit more than smoking from his older cousin:

My cousin Frenchie is teaching me how to French inhale—a neat trick that involves jutting out your jaw just far enough to draw the smoke up from between your lips directly into your flaring nostrils. I’m sure that the dizziness I’m feeling is caused less by the carbonized tobacco hitting my still pristine lungs than by the taste of Frenchie’s cherry-red lipstick on the Parliament’s famously recessed filter tip.

Kermit once told me that for him, writing could be a slow, methodical process, because he works like a painter who, with a whole huge canvas before him, concentrates on one tiny segment at a time, getting each detail right before moving on to the next and the next.

He may work like a painter, but these stories are like gems, cut with the greatest of care and attention. They communicate through the simple drama of truths, multifaceted, and yet without pretentious devices. They build to a whole life’s experience, and they sparkle.

The Chester Chronicles by Kermit Moyer is available now from Amazon and The Permanent Press. Read it, please. I am lucky to have such talented friends.

Virginia Woolf is one of my favorite writers of all time. Notice I didn't say "woman" writers... just "writers." I don't make the distinction, and it annoys me whenever I see it.* As if we aren't all humans writing about humans (or humans writing about dogs). But never mind that, for now. I'm curiously cranky today, it being Monday, and it raining when I wanted to run, and there being no school for the second Monday in a row...etc.

In the essay, "A Sketch of the Past," Woolf considers the problem of writing about what she calls "non-being" as opposed to "being":

Often when I have been writing one of my so-called novels I have been baffled by...how to describe what I call..."non-being." Every day includes much more non-being than being....A great part of every day is not lived consciously. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; writing orders to Mabel; washing; cooking dinner; bookbinding. When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger.

Although I'm grateful not to have "bookbinding" as one of my concerns, I wonder what Virginia Woolf would have done with the internet and social media to contend with. Probably she would've left them alone. If time spent on Twitter is not "non-being," I don't know what is.

Woolf has her (well-documented) moments of severe self-doubt: "The real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being...I have never been able to do both." She names Jane Austen as a fine example of one who can. But in my opinion one of the qualities that defines Woolf is that she writes primarily about these crystallizing moments and leaves the rest to others. Yet she didn't see herself as a "real" novelist. And I don't think she only meant that in the stylistic sense.

I've always thought I had the opposite problem: How to eliminate the "non-being" and cut to what's most critical, what's most deeply felt in a piece of work. Sometimes it means I cut ten pages and keep one. For the sake of verisimilitude, maybe we include both kinds of moments. But by its inclusion, each one becomes meaningful, doesn't it? If it's not, we take it out, right? Or if we don't, we should. So, do we create these moments of "being" by giving them weight?

It leads me to wonder, though, how much "being" can one person handle? Isn't it potentially overwhelming to be hyper-aware? Still, we could all probably do a little more of it. So, in honor of Woolf's birthday, I'm going to try for a day more of "being" than of "non-being," both in work and outside of it.

I'll keep you posted...
on Facebook...and Twitter...




*If only it were so simple, saying "writer" vs. "woman writer" and making it so... This leaves aside what also annoys me--the small number of writers who happen to be women who get nominated for and win awards... And yet, see the Book Critics Circle Award nominees--we are guardedly pleased.

I have on my shelf one of my favorite childhood books about snow, The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. This was my brother's book. I know it was his because, on the inside cover, there's an inscription from one of his teachers: "Happy reading, Mrs. George, 1978." This copy of the book is from 1962. The price on the cover is listed as 75 cents. It seems that Mrs. George was kind enough to give my brother her own copy of the book.

And I stole it.

I'm not sure when, or why (except that this was one of my duties as the persecuting older sibling), but that's what I did. And anyway, that's another story.

The Snowy Day begins:
One winter morning, Peter woke up and looked out the window. Snow had fallen during the night. It covered everything as far as he could see.

My favorite part of the story is where the boy puts a snowball in his pocket "for tomorrow." Then he goes into his house and forgets about it. Meanwhile, he reflects on the day and stores his memories of all his snowy adventures much more effectively than the snowball. When he looks for the snowball later, of course, it's gone.

I was working on a new chapter of my book the day before it snowed here. When I started it, I had no idea where it was going or how it would fit in with the rest of the story. In fact, I'm not sure I know yet where the rest of the story is going. But the weatherman was saying it was going to snow a lot, and I had to stop working and go home without figuring it all out. Although I like to stop work for the day with a question unanswered, a place to get started the next time, stopping at that point was more than a little frustrating.

But I had no choice, so I shut down the computer and put the chapter away, and while I shoveled the driveway the next day, twice, and pulled the sled up the hill, and baked the cookies, and made the hot chocolate, I thought and thought and thought about it. I played out the events of the draft chapter in my mind, daydreaming about the various directions things could take.

In The Snowy Day, Peter dreams that while he's asleep the sun comes out and melts all the snow. But when he wakes up the next day, the snow is really still there, and he goes out to play in it. But even if the sun had melted the snow away, the adventures he had would stay with him.

When I woke up this morning, and shoveled the driveway again, all I could think about at first was how much my back hurt, and how sore my muscles were, and how all I wanted to do was get in a tub of hot water with bath salts and maybe watch something from Netflix. While I was imagining what that would feel like, when I had almost completely stopped thinking about my book, I had an idea for a place to go with my chapter, for a way that it can fit into the story, and for a way of approaching the book as a whole. Even if the sun melts the snow tomorrow (which I hope it will!), the idea will stay with me.

But just to make sure, I didn't try to hold it in my head where it could melt away like a snowball in a coat pocket.

I wrote it down.

This just in from The Author's Guild on Random House
attempt to secure retroactive e-rights on old book contracts that don't include them:

On Friday, Random House CEO Markus Dohle sent a two-page letter to many literary agents regarding e-books. Much of the letter is devoted to Random House's efforts and investments to market traditional and electronic books.

On the second page, Mr. Dohle gets to the point. After noting that most of Random House's backlist titles grant the publisher electronic book rights (we agree, since most backlist titles are from the past ten years, a period in which authors have generally licensed electronic rights in tandem with their print rights), he writes that "there have been some misunderstandings concerning ebook rights in older backlist titles." He then proceeds to argue that older contracts granting rights to publish "in book form" or "in all editions" grant electronic rights to Random House.

The misunderstandings reside entirely with Random House. Random House quite famously changed its standard contract to include e-book rights in 1994. (We remember it well -- Random House tried to secure these rights for royalties of 5% of net proceeds, a pittance. We called it a "Land Grab on the Electronic Frontier" in our press release headline.) Random House felt the need to change its contract, quite plainly, because its authors did not grant those rights to it under Random House's standard contracts prior to 1994.

A fundamental principle of book contracts is that the grant of rights is limited. Publishers acquire only the rights that they bargain for; authors retain rights they have not expressly granted to publishers. E-book rights, under older book contracts, were retained by the authors.

There's no need to take our word for this, however. A federal court in 2001 examined this precise matter in Random House v. Rosetta Books. Judge Stein of the Southern District of New York was unequivocal in his 10-page decision: authors did not grant publishers the e-book rights in the old book contracts at issue. Judge Stein specifically dismissed notions, raised by Mr. Dohle in his letter to agents, that the non-compete clauses of these old contracts in some manner acted to grant Random House electronic rights to the works, saying that this "reasoning turns the analysis on its head." The court pointed out that the license of rights comes solely from the contract's grant language, not from the non-compete clause, and that non-competition clauses, to be enforceable, have to be narrowly construed. Using the non-compete clause to secure future rights is unsustainable. An appellate court affirmed Judge Stein's decision.

We are sympathetic with the difficult position the publishing industry is in at the moment. The recession has been tough on book publishing, as it has been on many industries. And everyone with knowledge of the dynamics of the industry properly fears that Amazon's dominance of the online markets for traditional and especially e-books will give it a chokehold on industry profits. Difficult times, however, do not justify this attempt at a retroactive rights grab.

It's regrettable and unhelpful that Random House has chosen to try to intimidate authors and agents over these old book contracts. With such a weak legal hand, it would be well advised to stick to its strength -- the advantages that its marketing muscle can provide owners of e-book rights. It should also start offering a fair royalty for those rights. Authors and publishers have traditionally split the proceeds from book sales. Most sublicenses, for example, provide for a 50/50 split of proceeds, and the standard trade book royalty of 15% of the hardcover retail price, back in the days that industry standard was established, represented about 50% of the net proceeds of the sale of the book. We're confident that the current practice of paying 25% of net on e-books will not, in the long run, prevail. Savvy agents are well aware of this. The only reason e-book royalty rates are so low right now is that so little attention has been paid to them: sales were simply too low to scrap over. That's beginning to change.

If you have an old book contract in which you haven't granted e-book rights, patience is likely to pay off. The e-book industry is still young -- there's no need to jump in. And we strongly suspect e-royalty rates are at a low-water mark.

More to come on this for sure.

Friday night, Stephen Elliott read from his new memoir, The Adderall Diaries, at Teaism in Washington, DC, for an appreciative audience that included a number of other writers and artists. He talked at length about the process of writing memoir, and one point that really struck me was when he warned that if you're going to write about something real, you can't go halfway. It doesn't work. The reader will always know when you're faking it or pulling back from a tough subject.

So here's a note to all my relatives: It's too late! I know everything.

Below, some pics from the event. Unfortunately, the weird light on the wall threw off my flash, which may explain the demon eyes...

This was a great way for readers to get quality time with an author, minus the barrier of the bookstore gatekeepers. (No offense intended to the bookstore gatekeepers, of course.) Someone suggested we do a series of these events. I'd be up for that.

Here, also, is a link to Leslie Pietrzyk's Work in Progress blog, in which she describes Stephen Elliott's talk at Teaism, specifically his advice to writers about how to do the delicate work of letting people know they're characters in your book, among other pertinent issues.

And, here's a link to MoCoScene, a blog by journalist Karen Watkins who was newly exposed to Stephen Elliott's work through this event and had an intense response to it. I love the idea of bringing a talented writer's work to the attention of new people; it's very gratifying when that happens.

TEAISM has ginger margaritas and mighty fine Bento boxes. Check it out, tonight.

AN EVENING WITH STEPHEN ELLIOTT & THE ADDERALL DIARIES

Friday, November 20, 2009
6:30pm - 9:30pm
Teaism-Penn Quarter, 400 8th St., NW, Washington, DC

Stephen Elliott will read/discuss his acclaimed new memoir, The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder

Books will be available for purchase.

RSVP to rsvp@aiwriters.org or mail at paulawhyman dot com or through my Contact page.

This event is cosponsored by American Independent Writers.

See you there.

This just in from the Author's Guild on Amazon's latest sob story:

Amazon made it official yesterday, filing a brief in the Google case claiming that someone else might gain a monopoly in bookselling. It seems we're compelled to state the obvious:

Amazon's hypocrisy is breathtaking. It dominates online bookselling and the fledgling e-book industry. At this moment it's trying to cement its control of the e-book industry by routinely selling e-books at a loss. It won't do that forever, of course. Eventually, when enough readers are locked in to its Kindle, everyone in the industry expects Amazon to squeeze publishers and authors. The results could be devastating for the economics of authorship.

Amazon apparently fears that Google could upend its plans. Amazon needn't worry, really: this agreement is about out-of-print books. Its lock on the online distribution of in-print books, unfortunately, seems secure.

The settlement would make millions of out-of-print books available to readers again, and Google would get no exclusive rights under the agreement. The agreement opens new markets, and that's a good thing for readers and authors. It offers to make millions upon millions of out-of-print books available for free online viewing at 16,500 public library buildings and more than 4,000 colleges and universities, and that's a great thing for readers, students and scholars. The public has an overwhelming interest in having this settlement approved.

I know what you're thinking--Poor Amazon! How will that widdle goldmine ever survive? I'm going to go right to their website and buy a a lot of stuff to show my continued support. Stuff of lasting aesthetic value. Like THIS.

Their concern for our cultural life is palpable.

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Stephen Elliott, author of the acclaimed novel, Happy Baby, and other works, both fiction and nonfiction, has written a new memoir, The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder, due out in September from Graywolf Press. There's a detailed and glowing review on Fanzine.

The Adderall Diaries, Elliott notes, is "structured around the depths of my own psychic pain." Part true-crime story and courtroom drama, part a story of depression, sex, and drug use, and of the author's troubled relationship with his father, these seemingly disparate elements inform each other and contribute to a fuller picture of the author's life and struggles.

The true crime drama that overlays that of Elliott's own life experiences is the long and sensational trial of Hans Reiser, accused of killing his wife, Nina, a mail-order bride who became a model wife and mother of two. There's much evidence to implicate Reiser, but he maintains his innocence. Elliott becomes interested in the case when an acquaintance, a man named Sean Sturgeon, who's also an ex-boyfriend of the deceased woman, claims to be a murderer, though there is no evidence that he's committed any crime. Could this man have been involved in Nina's death? Or is he a red herring?

Elliott chronicles the trial, and it becomes a pathway to examining certain aspects of his own life, especially his abandonment by his father. Following an incisive character profile of the defense attorney, Elliott concludes that the point is "not truth. The point of the defense is that there is no truth." Truth, as this book proves again and again, is not so absolute.

A witness who knows Reiser from jail is called to the stand. He's asked why he decided to testify.

"I've done some bad things. But killing your wife, that's evil," the witness says.

"I see. And you would say it's evil to kill your wife, but not to smack her around?" the defense lawyer asks, referring to the witness's own felony conviction.

The witness smiles. "That wasn't my wife," he says.

I found myself connecting the dots in my head as I read, drawing conclusions based on the facts as well as the author's interpretation of events. Defending his use of material from his life and his friends' lives, Elliott writes, "It's just what I do. I spend years crafting a...story, all the time my life sits next to me like a jar of paint."

In trying to explain this book, I find myself going in a million directions, but trust me, it all eventually makes sense. Even the section I read with the most sadness-- where Elliott claims that he feels in some way responsible for his father's abusive behavior, as if it's up to him to forgive and heal the rift his father caused. I found myself wanting to convince the author that only an adult can be held responsible in that situation. Why doesn't he understand, I want to ask him, that the child is never to blame?

The Adderall Diaries is a book rich with ideas on the subjectivity of truth and some hope for the ability to move forward even the smallest distance, in spite of the greatest pain. As Elliott chronicles the trial, he feels his depression lift, though he can still see it looming, "like a cloud cresting a mountain range." But, briefly, he finds some relief. And maybe, at times, that's the best we can hope for.

When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women, edited by poet Andrea Hollander Budy, is the first significant anthology of poems by American women to be published in more than 30 years.

If that's not enough reason to read it, stay tuned. It features 460 poems by 96 accomplished poets including Kim Addonizio, Natasha Trethewey, Robin Becker, Lia Purpura, Hilda Raz, Tracy K. Smith, Chase Twichell, Marilyn Nelson, Marie Howe, Sharon Olds, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Martha Collins, Jan Beatty, Maxine Kumin, Naomi Shihab Nye, Claudia Emerson, Lynn Emanuel, Mary Oliver, Jane Mead, Mary Ruefle, Kay Ryan, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, and Pattiann Rogers.

On Tuesday, May 19, Andrea will read with featured poets Claudia Emerson, Laurie Kutchins, Natasha Saje, and Sue Ellen Thompson at the Goethe Institute, 812 Seventh Street NW, Washington, DC. Chapters Literary Center will sponsor this free reading. For directions, call the Goethe Institute at 202-289-1200 or ww.goethe.de/washington.


Here are a few excerpts:

From Andrea Hollander Budy's

Firmly Married

is what he said but as he said it
swayed a little in my direction,
the hair on his neck so like
my son's, barely there, but golden
if you bothered looking.



From Linda Pastan's

The Almanac of Last Things

but I choose The Song of Songs
because the flesh
of those pomegranates
has survived
all the frost of dogma.



From Ada Limon's

The Fireman Are Dancing

O and the firemen are dancing. My favorite part is how
they are dancing so close.

One is pulling the other to his hip and one with the hat is laughing
and tossing his head back as if they were seventeen or, even, as if they
were alone.



And one of my personal favorites:

From Jane Mead's

Passing a Truck Full of Chickens at Night on Highway Eighty

What struck me first was their panic.

Some were pulled by the wind from moving
to the ends of the stacked cages,
some had their heads blown through the bars--

and could not get them in again.



Full disclosure: Andrea and I shared quarters at VCCA and gave a reading together on my last night there. I liked her poems so much, I bought her book. And then I bought another one for a gift. I think you'll like it, too.

Here's an example of what you can do at Reading Trails. I created this list of classic novels that are among my favorites. You can see that there are some "intersections," some books that appear on other lists, and if you click on "intersections," you'll see those lists. It's not quite done, in that I'll probably add more comments about the books, but this will give you an idea of the possibilities. I don't know why you can't see the comments or descriptions when you click on the books in the widget, but you can see more information if you go to the site itself and view the trail. There are some other things I can't figure out, too, like why can't the site come up with a cover for Madame Bovary? Anyway, what do you think of this? How does it compare with other reading sites (e.g., Goodreads)? I'm curious...

Reading Trails is a newish social networking site for sharing book recommendations. You can use it to create a reading list around the theme of your choice, and then your list gets connected with the reading lists of others whose book choices overlap with yours. You can view other lists for ideas, and create as many lists as you want. There are also open lists that everyone on the site can build. Cool!