Roy Miller's Blog, page 181
May 24, 2017
Your Writing Platform: Letting Readers Know the (Sort of) Real You
This content was originally published by Guest Column on 24 May 2017 | 4:00 pm.
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A woman once drove more than 100 miles to meet me at a book signing. She carried with her copies of every novel I’d written, along with a special present, one that was so personal, so closely aligned to my tastes and loves that I almost felt as if she’d been spying on me.
Of course, all she’d done was read my books, which—much as I might resist the idea—reveal a great deal about me. It’s impossible to write good fiction without millions of specific details, and every detail comes from within the writer.
Which leads in a roundabout way to the sticky challenge of social media for writers—particularly novelists. We all hear a lot about the importance of platform building these days. Genuinely engaging through social networks creates a bond with your readers that can turn them into life-long fans. But after pouring so much of yourself into your writing, social media can feel like jumping naked into a hot tub with a bunch of strangers.
Intimacy, however, is a critical part of succeeding on these networks, where followers are easily fatigued by overt marketing attempts. And beyond your own focus on building your platform, amid the chatter and noise that bombards us all day long, the intimate online space created by a novelist for her readers can be a haven—for both reader and author.
So how can you share enough of your personal life to connect, while still drawing boundaries between what is public and what is private?
The Illusion of Intimacy
Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert is a genius at creating intimacy on her Facebook page. She posts inspiring tidbits from her life and the things people send her. She asks questions. She replies to visitors. This makes us believe we know her, gives us the sense that if we lived in the same town, we’d probably be friends.
We seem so alike. We find we think about the same things. We yearn the same way. And somehow, that is true for many of her more than 1.6 million followers. Whether that’s intimacy or the illusion of intimacy hardly makes a difference.
The problem for Gilbert and the rest of us who pour ourselves into fiction or memoirs is that in many ways our work is already intimate. We might not be willing to share our private lives any more overtly on the public stage. The implicit pressure on these platforms to always offer more can start to feel like a game of strip poker in which you’ve never had a winning hand.
How, then, to navigate this delicate balance?
Here’s the thing: We don’t really know Elizabeth Gilbert. It’s evident that she likes yoga and travel, as well as inspiring women to live authentic lives. But what does she talk about with her husband late at night? Has she had a fight with her mother lately? One of her tenets is authenticity, so her voice online is very much the same voice found in her books and when you hear her speak. I’m sure her friends recognize that voice very easily. And yet, it’s only a sliver of the real Gilbert.
As a shy young writer who was suddenly thrust into public speaking situations that terrified me, I created an author persona to cope with the terrifying tasks of attending conferences and book signings. Author Barbara would wear a particular wardrobe that Real Barbara never wore, and by simply donning that costume, I could stride out into the world as a professional.
Creating an illusion of intimacy via your blog or social media accounts is the same kind of trick. You have to find something—or really, several somethings—to talk about in an authentic way.
[How to Improve Your Writing Platform (or Author Platform) in 30 Days]
Your Online Persona
I genuinely love food and cooking, gardening, painting, hiking, travel—all things that pertain to my books, but also my life. I post recipes and photos of beautiful dishes I’ve made, and talk about the tomato harvest.
What I do not post: much about my children, my partner, the family member with substance abuse problems, health issues, etc.
How can you create a persona for yourself? A few tips:
Study the social media profiles of writers you admire. Look, too, at the online platforms that suit their voice. You don’t have to be everywhere, but try to find the best places to reach your own audience. Younger readers love Instagram, while Facebook’s demographics are creeping upward all the time. Where and what do your favorites post?
Choose a focus or approach. What subjects related to your books will allow you to be authentic and genuinely passionate?
Are you funny? Writer Mary Strand, author of the romantic comedy Cooper’s Folly, has mastered a comedic voice and shares a lot about her kooky athletic life, which involves a slapstick number of injuries accrued annually.
What things do you genuinely like to talk about? What would you discuss with friends? Jennifer Weiner loves “The Bachelor” and live tweets during episodes. Maggie Stiefvater draws her characters and posts them on Instagram and Facebook. These are ways to share things that you like or know or do personally without sharing anything that’s truly personal at all.
Revel in your imperfections. A sense of intimacy requires a certain amount of imperfection. Who likes to hang around with somebody who gets everything right all the time? I post about recipes that flopped, my smelly dog, my messy house.
Write it out. You’re privy to fiction—so write a character sketch of your public persona. Assign her a secret name, perhaps, and create some boundaries. What are you comfortable sharing? What is best left offline?
Avoid oversharing. It’s one thing to say you have a messy house because you’ve been on deadline, but quite another to post photos of what’s literally hidden in your closets. If in doubt, don’t use it.
Engage your audience. Offer readers a chance to reply by prompting them with a question or asking for their opinions. Always reward them with your replies and acknowledgment. Creating the illusion of intimacy will reward you tenfold with a ready-made community who can be mobilized when you have a new byline or book. It’s worth the time to cultivate it well.
Want to build your visibility and sell more books?
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Barbara O’Neal
(barbaraoneal.com) is the bestselling author of more than 40 books, recipient of seven RITA Awards and an inductee in the Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame. This article originally appeared in the October 2016 Writer’s Digest.
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‘Aliens’ Asks: If the Universe Is So Vast, Where Is Everybody?
This content was originally published by JENNIFER SENIOR on 24 May 2017 | 10:48 pm.
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If you’re interested in non-Earthly life, don’t look to the movies, is his point.
You could argue that that’s the general point of this modest, eccentric collection. Jim Al-Khalili, a quantum physicist and the editor of “Aliens,” opens with a question asked by Enrico Fermi in 1950: If the universe is so vast, and its age so old, and its stars so plentiful, where is everybody?
I’m no marketing expert, but “Where Is Everybody?” strikes me as a far catchier title for this book than the one it has, and it’s definitely more accurate. There really is nobody — so far — to write about. (Fighting words, I know. My hands hovered, spaceshiplike, for several minutes over the keyboard before committing that sentence to print.) This doesn’t mean that life elsewhere doesn’t exist. But it probably corresponds very little to what most of us have in mind, and not at all to the ooze-covered beasts of Ridley Scott’s electric dreams.
One of the most consistent takeaways from this anthology is just how banal extraterrestrial life might be. Often, when entertaining the possibility of aliens, what we’re really entertaining is the possibility of hardy microbes that can withstand extreme conditions, whether they’re thermophiles (heat lovers), psychrophiles (cold lovers) or halophiles (salt lovers). Read enough of “Aliens,” and you realize that the search for life is just as much about the most mundane aspects of biology as about the trippier questions of cosmology.
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Jim Al-Khalili
Credit
Paul Stead
But it is also about philosophy. In this search, it helps to know what life is. Yet there’s no consensus about how to answer this question, strangely. (At the risk of being too Clintonian, it depends on what your definition of “is” is.)
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Nor do we know how life began. At some point, the Earth made the transition from chemistry to biology, yes, but we cannot “agree on a definition that separates the nonliving chemistry from life,” as the geneticist Johnjoe McFadden puts it. (He then paraphrases the astronomer Fred Hoyle, who famously said that the odds of assembling something like a bacterium out of the primordial ooze were akin to the odds of a tornado’s assembling a jumbo jet out of a junkyard heap as it sweeps through.)
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There are scientists who will go so far as to say that life is a spectacular fluke. Not everyone, mind you: Researchers now estimate that there are one billion Earthlike exoplanets in the Milky Way. “To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” Stephen Hawking has said.
But a powerful essay by the evolutionary biologist Matthew Cobb will make you wonder whether any form of multicellular life is far less likely than one in a billion. He points out that “there are more single-celled organisms alive on Earth than there are Earthlike planets in the observable universe”; that the number of single-celled organisms that have lived on this planet over the course of 3.8 billion years is beyond calculation; that these organisms have interacted “gazillions” of times (I love it when words of the appropriate magnitude desert even the experts). Yet we’ve never had a second instance of eukaryogenesis — that remarkable moment when one unicellular life form lodged inside another, forming something much more complex — in all this time.
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Of course, there are researchers who dispute this theory and Cobb’s reasoning. But you get the idea.
The experience of reading almost any anthology is a bit like traveling across the country in a rental car with only an FM radio for company. Sometimes you get Sinatra; other times you get Nickelback.
This collection has its share of Nickelback. One of its most disappointing essays is about aliens in science fiction, which manages, against stupefying odds, to contain just one interesting insight: that authors tend to be more concerned with physics than with biology. (How did those gigantic sandworms evolve on the desert planet in “Dune”?)
But the best of these essays are far out in more ways than one. The very first, by the cosmologist Martin Rees, notes that our best hope for interstellar travel isn’t as humans, who don’t live very long and require far too much fuel to get very far, but as post-humans, who will have made the Kurzweilian transition from organic to inorganic, from decaying mortals to silicon-based, eminently portable machines. He adds that alien intelligence, if we ever detect it, will also be in this form.
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The final essay, by Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI institute (short for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), goes even further, saying that if we really want to be attuned to alien life in the cosmos, it’s so likely to be in the form of machine intelligence that we ought to “be alert to apparent violations of physics.”
These forms of life may well be speaking to us even now. It’s just that our radio telescopes, which listen to the skies for signals from alien beings, can’t understand what they’re hearing. “Even if the search succeeded,” Rees writes, “it would still in my view be unlikely that the ‘signal’ would be a decodable message.”
It’s a whole new twist on George Berkeley’s question. The tree would fall in the forest. We’d hear it. But it would sound nothing like a tree.
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NEH Chair Resigns as Trump Renews Bid to Eliminate Arts, Library Funding
This content was originally published by on 23 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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The president’s latest budget proposal once again seeks to terminate the NEH, NEA, and virtually all federal library funding.
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Writing Fiction: A Good Story Must Be Disturbing
This content was originally published by Guest Column on 24 May 2017 | 8:30 pm.
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As David Mamet once said to me, “If Hamlet comes home from school, and his dad asks him how school was, and Hamlet says, ‘It was fine, Dad,’ it’s boring.”
Whether you’re writing a literary novel, a psychological, medical, legal or spy thriller, or even a cozy mystery, for a novel to be engaging, it must center on human conflict and disturbance.
Without chaos, there’s very little story to tell. [Like this quote? Click here to Tweet and share it!]
This guest post is by Mark Rubinstein. Rubinstein is the author of Beyond Bedlam’s Door: True Tales from the Couch and Courtroom. He is an award-winning novelist, physician and psychiatrist. He was formerly a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College and an attending psychiatrist at New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. For more information, please visit http://www.markrubinstein-author.com/ and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter.
If you think you’ve got a story worth telling, before you start to write, reflect upon what you’ve enjoyed when reading fiction, and also remember those books you just couldn’t plow through. Where did those writers go wrong?
The scintillating stories you favored most likely brimmed with conflict. An engaging novel is disturbing. It presents chaos and upheaval—either within the characters’ minds or in their lives. These clashing interactions and relationships between people are at its core.
As readers, we crave disturbance and uncertainty. We live vicariously through the anguish, turmoil, and trouble the characters must endure in an attempt to reorder the chaos propelling the story.
This dynamic holds true no matter the genre.
And, it’s as old as storytelling itself: consider The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Within their pages we find incest, murder, kidnapping, wars, and nearly every other conceivable horror that can beset human beings.
When writing my own novels, I keep conflict center stage. And, with surgical precision, I use my expertise as a forensic psychiatrist to bolster that chaos.
[Here are 10 Questions You Need to Ask Your Characters]
For example, in The Lovers’ Tango, Bill Shaw, the protagonist, is not only on trial, accused of murdering his wife, but the reader is kept off-balance experiencing all that led up to the courtroom, and ultimately that which follows the jury’s verdict.
Despite my years working as a forensic psychiatrist testifying in many trials, I avoided making the courtroom scenes an exposition of arcane language and legal concepts. Instead, I kept the focus on conflict, and did so through dialogue, the engine driving this and many other novels. I employed my knowledge of the courtroom and psychiatry in the service of heightening the tension, but didn’t allow my professional fund of knowledge to drown out the chaos and turmoil.
As for using any writer’s knowledge in a specific field or endeavor, be it medical, legal, military, financial or otherwise, a balance must be struck so the expertise doesn’t burden the all-important role of pacing. It’s fine to employ that which you know well, but it must play only a supporting role to the tension and conflict driving the novel.
Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow perfectly illustrates this maxim. Turow skillfully imbued his novel with legal expertise, but the tension in the story derived from the chaos of the characters’ lives. His legal knowledge added color, authenticity and depth.
Jonathan Kellerman’s latest novel, Heartbreak Hotel, achieves this same goal, integrating his knowledge of psychology into a riveting tale about the death of an old, mysterious woman.
We read novels to experience vicariously something far different from our daily lives. We want to be tittilated, frightened, angered, overjoyed, heartbroken or moved in some kinetic way as we turn the pages.
[How Long Should Novel Chapters Be? Click here to find out.]
If we want to immerse ourselves in a field of study, there are many non-fiction books available to provide such information.
When you’re ready to write, keep in mind those novels which kept you turning the pages as opposed to those you put down after a chapter or two.
“Write what you know” isn’t always the best advice.
Write to tell a story that captures the imagination and makes a human connection with the reader.
And one final but essential piece of advice: remember, dialogue isn’t just what characters say to each other, it’s what they do to each other with words.
Make your dialogue count. It should be thrusting the tension and hence the storyline forward.
Most of all, aim to make the reader regret when the book is coming to its end.
No matter what your primary field of study had been, when you write a novel, your basic aim is to tell a good story.
Don’t get lost in the weeds of expertise.
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Thanks for visiting The Writer’s Dig blog. For more great writing advice, click here.
Brian A. Klems is the editor of this blog, online editor of Writer’s Digest and author of the popular gift book Oh Boy, You’re Having a Girl: A Dad’s Survival Guide to Raising Daughters.
Follow Brian on Twitter: @BrianKlems
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Preschool Properties Lure Publishers at Licensing Expo 2017
This content was originally published by on 24 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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Licenses for the youngest readers are abundant on the show floor, and a number of publishers report they are adding new licenses to their preschool portfolios.
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‘Black Mad Wheel,’ By Josh Malerman : NPR
This content was originally published by Jason Heller on 24 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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The recent success of John Darnielle — author of the acclaimed Wolf in White Van and Universal Harvester as well as the leader of the indie-rock band the Mountain Goats — has given fresh legitimacy to the crossover between music star and literary figure. (We won’t bring up Bob Dylan.)
In a quieter way, Josh Malerman has done the same. His debut novel Bird Box was published in 2014, and its horrific vision of post-apocalyptic America garnered critical accolades as well as a pre-publication Hollywood option. Malerman is also the frontman of the long-running Detroit garage-rock group the High Strung. And in his sophomore novel, Black Mad Wheel, he takes a big step toward merging his jobs as a writer and a rocker: He’s penned a novel about musicians, namely, a fictional 1950s band called the Danes.
Philip Tonka is the leader and pianist of the Danes, a Detroit-based rock group whose members met each other while serving in the Army band during World War II. The government has approached the band with a bizarre request: Investigate “a malevolent sound” inexplicably emanating from the Namib Desert in Africa, one whose uncanny power threatens the geopolitical status quo of the early Cold War.
Philip and his bandmates agree, but what goes down during their mission isn’t immediately clear. Malerman tells the story through alternating chapters: One set follows the Danes as they venture closer to the source of the eerie sound, while the other takes place six months later, as Philip recovers from massive injuries in a hospital in Iowa, unable to fully remember what happened to him and his friends in the Namib.
The book’s ping-pong structure makes for a kinetic read. The chapters are terse and tight, as is Malerman’s prose.
The book’s ping-pong structure makes for a kinetic read. The chapters are terse and tight, as is Malerman’s prose. “The wind passing over the teeth of the skull of world’s first man,” is how he describes the strange sound at one point. Malerman builds tension to a suspenseful frenzy in both timelines, while assembling Philip’s fragmented memories into a labyrinthine conspiracy. In the hospital, every bone in his body broken, he falls for his nurse, Ellen, and together they uncover a plot that grows more mysterious and surreal with each revelation. As both halves of the story crescendo, what previously seemed like a weird science-fiction premise unfolds into something far more fantastical and chillingly metaphysical.
For all its velocity and intricacy, Black Mad Wheel doesn’t always ring true. Philip never fully comes to life on the page — he’s more a collection of ciphers than a real person — nor does his romance with Ellen ever feel like more than a convenience for the plot. Malerman makes up for that, though, with his lavish musical details. The Danes as a whole have more dimension than Philip alone; while in the recording studio or discussing their ideology of sound engineering, the band has a verisimilitude that amounts to an intriguing alternate history of America’s post-WWII musical landscape. In fact, knowing the High Strung’s own garage-rock sound, it’s not hard to imagine the real-life band breathing life into the Danes’ fictional ’50s rock songs, from “Make Noise” to “Killer Crawl” to “Be Here” — the last being a song that winds up playing a pivotal, startling role in the book’s dizzying climax beneath the sands of the African desert.
The mystery of Philip’s malevolent sound is resolved vaguely and in hallucinatory terms, but Malerman’s harmonizing of some big ideas … makes it satisfying.
“Philosophy doesn’t travel at the same speed technology does,” Malerman writes toward the end of Black Mad Wheel. It’s as close to a conclusive theme as he gets. The mystery of Philip’s malevolent sound is resolved vaguely and in hallucinatory terms, but Malerman’s harmonizing of some big ideas — among them the cyclical nature of war, history, and music itself — makes it satisfying.
The power of music, naturally, sits at the center of this gripping novel by a musician and about musicians. But Malerman is wise to extend his story’s sphere, inviting in even those who have no knowledge of his band or its music to explore a terrifying vision of midcentury America and beyond — one where a rock ‘n’ roll band stands on the vanguard of reality, and where the mythology of popular music meshes with the darkest forces of human history.
Jason Heller is a senior writer at The A.V. Club, a Hugo Award-winning editor and author of the novel Taft 2012.
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New in Memoir: The Intersex Body, the Dead Body, the Body in Grief
This content was originally published by MEGHAN DAUM on 24 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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“I know getting out of trouble wouldn’t have been so easy if I hadn’t been able to hide behind being a girl,” Viloria writes. “I’m completely aware that I played that card.”
The author’s life experiences, especially the sexual ones, have a greater range than most of us could possibly imagine. Viloria has sex with both women and men as both a woman and as a man (stop and think about that for a moment). In daily interactions with the world, Viloria has seen down both sides of the mountain and tunneled through for good measure. Ultimately, there’s no need to choose a side. “‘I’m both,’” Viloria says. “Or alternatively, ‘I’m neither.’”
The bodies in Carla Valentine’s THE CHICK AND THE DEAD: Life and Death Behind Mortuary Doors (St. Martin’s, $25.99) belong to other people — or at least did at one time. Valentine, who now curates a collection at Barts Pathology Museum in London, worked for eight years in Britain as a certified A.P.T., or anatomical pathology technician. The book covers this period, one in which Valentine spends her days assisting in autopsies and other forensic investigations by removing organs from corpses, replacing those organs post-examination (at least when possible) and then sewing, washing and grooming the bodies into presentability.
As a child, Valentine recounts, she tried to perform autopsies on her toys and was “enthralled by any dead animal I found on the street.” After university she pursued an advanced degree in forensic and biomolecular sciences and gets an entry-level gig at the mortuary, cleaning up after organ dissections (the job requires steel-toed Wellington boots). Eventually, she was hired as a trainee A.P.T. “And thus,” Valentine writes, “began a new chapter of my life in death.”
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“The Chick and the Dead,” which spins its title from the well-worn idiom “the quick and the dead,” is filled with such turns of phrase, and Valentine’s tone, which is meant to come across as playfully irreverent, sometimes gives way to glibness if not a surfeit of cheesy puns. Scarce space in mortuary refrigerators is described as “popular real estate; people are dying to get in there after all.” Nor can she resist reminding us that “working in a mortuary is not a dead-end job.”
But even though Valentine might have the sense of humor of an aging uncle, her zest for gross-out depictions of bodily functions rivals that of any 10-year-old boy. And it actually works spectacularly well, at least if you’re into that kind of thing. In a chapter focusing on the five stages of decomposition, she has no problem telling us about the preservatory effects of maggots — “many experts call them ‘the unseen undertakers of the world’” — or the time she cut into a distended abdomen and “the green, taut flesh rippled and burst like a balloon from hell and I was rewarded with a face full of the most hideous gas I’d ever smelled in my entire life.”
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If the book succeeds as a morbidly galloping parade of every possible kind of dead body, it falls short when it comes to the author’s life. There are occasional mentions of parents, references to ever-changing roommates, and a disastrous affair with a co-worker, but they form a blurry background against the sharp focus of the cadavers. For what it’s worth, Valentine’s bio says she runs a dating and networking site for death professionals, a detail that may or may not have any relevance to her observation in the book that “watching someone carry out an autopsy is, in many ways, like watching someone have sex.” Let’s maybe not stop and think about that for a moment.
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A more genteel exploration of life’s inevitable decay can be found in Martha Cooley’s GUESSWORK: A Reckoning With Loss (Catapult, paper, $16.95). This splendid and subtle memoir in essays captures 14 months in the ancient rural village of Castiglione del Terziere in northern Tuscany. Cooley is on sabbatical from her teaching job in New York City, though the word she’s chosen for this leave of absence is caesura, which refers to a break between words or notes in a line of poetry or music: “In life — mine, anyway — it’s a deliberate interruption, a chance to reckon with divisions imposed by loss.”
The losses have been piling up. Cooley has lost friends to drugs and suicide and cancer and various other illnesses. Her parents are in declining health, another friend lives in the diabolical grip of A.L.S., silent and immobile even as his brain carries on. Her husband of just a few years is a widower; his late wife was Cooley’s close friend. “She was my age, 57, when back pain turned into rampant cancer,” Cooley writes. “How did the inexplicable happen: her leaving us, loss uniting us?”
In “Guesswork,” the body is both canvas and carapace, both superficial construct and, for better or worse, the whole damn point. Vacationing on the island of Giglio in the Tyrrhenian Sea, Cooley and her husband find themselves in the literal and figurative shadow of the Costa Concordia, the giant cruise ship that struck a rock and capsized earlier that year, leaving 32 dead and two still missing. The boat has remained partly submerged in the water, a body that can be neither exhumed nor buried.
“In the case of tragedy,” Valentine writes in “The Chick and the Dead,” “demystifying it helps you to regain control of the emotions. I did that with death.” If Viloria’s demystification of her body evokes a similar reclamation, then Cooley, for her part, knows that she will find equilibrium only if she can fully embrace the wild fluctuations of grief. “On some days I’m lured mesmerically to the rabbit hole of loss, and am forced to thrash around down there like trapped prey,” Cooley writes. “On other days all the losses seem to recede like any object in a rearview mirror once the accelerator’s been pressed, and I’ve no trouble keeping my foot on the pedal of the present.”
It’s a lurching way to live; simultaneously brokenhearted and in love, crushingly bereaved one moment and surprisingly O.K. the next. Must we pick a side? Maybe Viloria said it best: “I refused to choose, because … ‘I am both.’”
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Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 394 | WritersDigest.com
This content was originally published by Robert Lee Brewer on 24 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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Earlier this week, my car broke down around Lexington, Kentucky. So I spent the night in an unexpected place while my car got repaired by a nice mechanic named Tony, who owns Tony’s Automotive Repair.
For today’s prompt, write a repair poem. Could be about repairing a car or a bike, sure, but there are other possibilities. For instance, the poem could be about repairing a relationship or repairing yourself, whether physically, mentally, or psychologically. Or if you’re not feeling that, write a poem about something unexpected (good or bad).
*****
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The 2017 Poet’s Market, edited by Robert Lee Brewer, includes hundreds of poetry markets, including listings for poetry publications, publishers, contests, and more! With names, contact information, and submission tips, poets can find the right markets for their poetry and achieve more publication success than ever before.
In addition to the listings, there are articles on the craft, business, and promotion of poetry–so that poets can learn the ins and outs of writing poetry and seeking publication. Plus, it includes a one-year subscription to the poetry-related information on WritersMarket.com. All in all, it’s the best resource for poets looking to secure publication.
*****
Here’s my attempt at a Repair Poem:
“when you feel in disrepair”
take this heart & shove it
into your own chest
before you forget how
it feels between beats
these strange butterfly wings
that string your stomach
together like a quilt
you always call home
*****
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). When in doubt, he writes it out.
Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.
*****
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May 23, 2017
In ‘Grief Cottage,’ a Ghost and Other Things That Haunt Us
This content was originally published by SARAH LYALL on 22 May 2017 | 9:50 pm.
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Marcus tends to feel unduly responsible for the people in his life, and he feels responsible for the ghost, too. “It struck me that he might need me to keep faith that he was still there,” he says. “He had been waiting all this time, 50 years Aunt Charlotte had said, for someone to wonder where he was — to miss him after he was gone.”
It’s a classic setup: An isolated child indifferently cared for by a neglectful adult can’t be anything but easy prey for a maybe-malignant supernatural being suffering from unfinished earthly business. The reader expects Marcus to lose his grip, to weaken as the emboldened spirit begins to suck the life out of him. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m thinking particularly of Patricia Clapp’s “Jane-Emily,” one of the great children’s ghost stories, featuring a nasty little dead girl who is not at all pleased when a good little living girl comes to stay in her old house.)
Photo
Gail Godwin
Credit
Dion Ogust
But Godwin is playing a longer, cleverer, more ambitious game. The author of numerous novels, short stories and works of nonfiction, now approaching 80, she remains a forensically skillful examiner of her characters’ motives, thoughts and behavior. “Grief Cottage” revisits some of her favorite themes — fractured families, parentless children, the initial shock and long-term repercussions of death and disappearance, how the future can run off course in a flash — to make the very good point that it doesn’t require a ghost to haunt a life.
Her characters can’t escape the past. Aunt Charlotte, a successful artist and wine-guzzling alcoholic, turns out to be gruff, prickly, good-hearted, concerned about Marcus — and corroded by anger at the terrible things her abusive father did to her. Coral Upchurch, an elderly neighbor, is grief-stricken by the untimely death of her son.
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As for Marcus, he has uncanny insight into his own emotions, extraordinary sensitivity toward others, and a crippling feeling of displacement. He has endured so many losses. These include the loss of the father who died before Marcus was born, and whose identity the boy has never learned. (His mother had always promised to reveal it when he was older.)
There’s the loss of his mother, whom he loved deeply but whose lack of education — she was escaping something in her past, too — restricted her to low-paying jobs and kept them so poor that they had only one bed between the two of them. And there’s the loss, as painful in its own way, of a boy called Wheezer, Marcus’s only friend, after a vicious and irreparable falling-out several years earlier.
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It’s much to Godwin’s credit that she finds a way to weave all these strands together, along with neat little side stories about Marcus’s friendship with Lachicotte Hayes, an older man in the community, and his interest in the imminent hatching of hundreds of loggerhead turtles’ eggs on the beach. In a way, “Grief Cottage” is no more a book about a ghost, really, than “Stand by Me” is a movie about a corpse.
Godwin isn’t one to leave a lot of ambiguity at the end of a novel. “Folks can’t tolerate loose ends — they’ve got to tie up a story,” one of her characters says. Answers even to mysteries we didn’t identify as mysteries are revealed in a coda laying out what other people thought, and what they meant, years after the fact. It’s as if the characters in “Rashomon” got together and compared notes. We’re reminded of how easy it is to mis-ascribe others’ motives, to get things wrong.
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All this is deeply satisfying to the sort of reader who, like me, enjoys a neat ending. “Grief Cottage” is in some ways about the search for meaning in the narratives of our lives — the stories we tell others, and especially the stories we tell ourselves. “I wonder how you’ll look back on this period of your life,” Aunt Charlotte tells Marcus, “how you’ll describe it to someone in the future.” Happily for us, that’s just what he’s done.
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‘Smile Stealers’ Recalls A Time When Dentists Routinely Reached For The Pliers : NPR
This content was originally published by on 23 May 2017 | 5:15 pm.
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TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. I don’t usually gasp while preparing my interviews, but I gasped several times while looking at the illustrations in the books by my guest Richard Barnett. He’s a medical historian who’s just completed a trilogy of books on the history of disease, surgery and dentistry. The illustrations are historic drawings, paintings, woodcuts and photos, dating back decades, or in most cases centuries, of tumors, pox, leprosy, incisions, amputations and so on. In most cases, the illustrations were originally intended for medical students and practitioners. The final book in the trilogy is called “The Smile Stealers: The Fine And Foul Art Of Dentistry,” and it includes illustrations of rotting teeth, early dental instruments, Etruscan dentures, Dutch paintings and more. Barnett teaches at Cambridge University’s Pembroke College.
Richard Barnett, welcome to FRESH AIR. Reading your books, I was just kind of almost at war with myself between wanting to look at all the illustrations and being so kind of repelled by them because some of the images are so gruesome. I want to look because the body is capable of such strange and beautiful and gruesome things. And, you know, because your books deal with surgery and cancers and diseases and pox, there’s a lot of hideous stuff in there, a lot of irregularities. And, you know, I want to see it, and at the same time, I’m afraid of scaring myself. I’m afraid that these images will stay with me and that the next time I have a little rash, I’ll be thinking about the worst-case scenario (laughter) which – well, I have just witnessed in your book. So what do you think the value is for non-medical professionals of seeing these images?
RICHARD BARNETT: Well, I think these images show us the outside of the inside. They show us a side of the human body that, if we’re lucky, we never get to see. And I think there are a number of different kinds of value from seeing these images. Firstly, as an academic historian, I’d have to say they are deeply enlightening about many different kinds of history – the way that we’ve thought about disease in the body most obviously but also aspects of aesthetic history as well, changing conventions of depicting the body, especially I think depicting differences in gender and race, which is perhaps a subject we can come to think more about.
So historically, I think they’re fascinating – aesthetically as well. I thought a lot about what you might call the bodily sublime or the anatomical sublime. These certainly aren’t pretty images, but I do think many of them are beautiful the way in which something like a lupus, various kinds of skin disease, the body flaid, the body put on display, the body disfigured, can be a very powerful and a very moving kind of beauty. And I think it can lead to a kind of sympathy as well. Something I’m very interested in is the question of how do we look at these images.
I think there’s a certain ethical weight that comes with these images. We’re looking at images of people made in a time well before any notion of informed consent. Very often, we don’t know their names. We don’t know anything about them other than their diagnoses. They exist in history almost as, you know, incompetent or broken body parts. So I think a bigger question here about how any historian relates to the human beings they study, the human beings who lived and breathed and felt and died, how do you treat them with dignity?
GROSS: So in the books that you’ve done with these historic medical illustrations, is there an image that has most haunted you?
BARNETT: Honestly, no, but I daresay the two images that stay with most readers of these books are the cover images that we chose for the first two in the series, “The Sick Rose” on the history of disease and “Crucial Interventions” on the history of surgery. The image on the front of “The Sick Rose” is of a young woman dying of cholera in Vienna in 1831. And we were far from the first book to reproduce this image. It’s widely used in histories of cholera. But the more you look into it, the more unsettling and the more moving it becomes. It’s firstly one of a pair of images. The first image is of the young woman in health, looking very healthy, very rosy-cheeked, indeed very beautiful. The second image was made shortly before she died, and she is evidently moribund. She is extremely sick. The skin is drawn over her features, and she’s clearly in a very bad way indeed.
And the more I thought about this image, the more I wrote about it, the more intriguing the nature of the relationship between the artist, the doctor and the patient seemed to me. I wanted to know how this image was made. Was it made retrospectively? Was it, as it were, an imagining, a remembrance of what this young woman had looked like in health and in disease? Or was the artist sitting by her bed? That’s a very strange kind of encounter. It’s a kind of encounter that a novelist might try and imagine. What would have been the commerce, as it were? What would have been the conversation between this dying young woman and the artist trying to record her. And I was also intrigued by the way in which he gives her so much character. There’s a lot in this image that doesn’t, so to speak, need to be there. There’s a lot in this image that isn’t communicating medical knowledge. For example, there’s great attention paid to her hairstyle and to the little bit of her dress that we can see.
So I was fascinated by the idea that the artist here might have been trying firstly to give a sense of verisimilitude, firstly to give a sense that you’re not just looking at an abstract case here. You’re looking at a real person dying of a real disease. But I think to any sensitive viewer, one has to think as well about whether he’s trying to capture something of her personality, whether there’s something here about trying to preserve, record even a little bit of this woman who very soon will be gone.
GROSS: Let’s talk about your new book on the history of dentistry. And you write in that pain in the head can seem unbearably close to the core of who we are, to which I can say, yes (laughter). Is that part of why you wanted to write the book?
BARNETT: Well, I think dentistry of all the medical professions has always generated the most fear, certainly continues to generate the most fear. I think very few of us go into a dentist’s surgery with a light heart and a spring in our step. So I wanted to think about the place of fear, the place of pain but also the place of attempts to mitigate that in the history of dentistry. And I was very struck as I researched the history of dentistry that it’s the story of technique.
It’s the story of getting better at solving medical problems, practical problems with the teeth. But it’s also the history of making dentistry and crucially dentists acceptable to ordinary middle-class folk, moving away from that medieval idea of the charlatan in the town square holding a bloody tooth in a pair of pliers and moving toward something that is more respectful, more expert, more professional but also crucially that takes more account of the patient’s feelings.
GROSS: Well, your book made me think how in the past before dentistry was really an art and a medical science that people lived with a lot of dental pain and with few teeth (laughter) because your teeth would be extracted or they’d fall out or they’d decay. And so if you lived long enough, a lot of people were toothless.
BARNETT: Absolutely. If you look at the earliest surviving human fossils, they bear mute witness to the kind of suffering that human beings and hominids have always experienced from their teeth if they lived more than perhaps 30 or 40 years untreated. And certainly, if you look at the average working person in Europe perhaps in the 15th or 16th century, they probably wouldn’t have most of their teeth after the age of 30 or 40. They would sort of gradually fall out or decay, and the amount of pain involved in that must have been absolutely terrible.
This is one area where there’s a sort of paradoxical social dimension to dentistry as well. Very often, it’s the rich who’ve suffered most from problems like caries and tooth decay. And this is because the rich were able to afford all of the new exciting commodities that were coming out of the mystic East, as Europeans would have seen it in this period, so things like sugar, for example. If you look at the example of Queen Elizabeth I of England, she, from a very young age, became addicted to sweets and toffees and sweet meats and all sorts of things. And the immediate result of this was that her teeth turned black, and she suffered very, very badly from dental decay and all kinds of problems throughout her life.
So I certainly wouldn’t want to make the case that the poor were better off. They certainly, of course, had many problems to face, but if we’re looking at the people who suffered the most from that kind of what we think of as the modern problems of dentistry, the problems of, you know, sugary drinks and too many sweets, it was the rich who were really the first to suffer these problems.
GROSS: One of the things that surprised me is that, you know, dating back to ancient history, there are illustrations of kind of makeshift dentures that were made for people who had lost critical teeth.
BARNETT: Early dentistry could be surprisingly sophisticated. We’ve got evidence from ancient Indian culture and especially from ancient Roman culture of fairly sophisticated, fairly elegant dentures being made. We’re talking here about what a modern dentist would call a bridge, so a partial replacement for a couple of – one or two missing teeth, generally clipped or tied to the surviving teeth. A lot of these survive in ancient Rome because that was a habit in Roman culture of removing any prostheses or jewelry before a body was cremated and then putting it back in with the ashes, so quite a few of these survive. And they really are quite magnificent.
They’re not quite the sort of thing a modern dentist would be proud of, but they’re certainly sophisticated attempts to solve a problem practically but also to solve it aesthetically as well. This is a really important word, I think, in the history of dentistry. So much of it is about aesthetics. So much of it is about appearance, not only restoring a functioning mouth, but restoring something like beauty and respectability.
GROSS: Which leads to what were false teeth made of hundreds of years ago? And you use the example of George Washington’s dentist, John Greenwood. What are some of the things he made false teeth out of?
BARNETT: Good heavens, yes. Washington, in his later years, was walking around with almost the history of America in his mouth, one might almost say world history in his mouth. His teeth were made of various materials. One of the most common materials for false teeth in this period is what is called walrus ivory. So these are the long tusks of Arctic walruses. This was a sort of byproduct, one might say, of the Greenland whaling trade. So you’ve got that kind of trade, that kind of exploitation of world resources going on.
Another very common and really rather macabre source of teeth was the dead. There’s a long tradition in Britain of what were called Waterloo teeth after the great Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The idea was that these were teeth that were supposed to have been pulled from the mouths of dead soldiers. Now, in fact, although this was a – this was as it were a kind of marketing routine, this was a way of selling the public the idea of, you know, fresh healthy young teeth from soldiers who were killed on the battlefield.
In fact, most of these teeth most likely came from morgues. Of course, there was no reason to go all the way to a battlefield to get fresh teeth. You could go to any morgue or undertaker and find a fairly good supply of dead bodies. So, in fact, most of the people who were proudly walking around with the teeth of dead heroes in their mouths were most likely walking around with the teeth of the outcast dead in their mouths.
Washington’s dentures were also partly made out of silver as well. And, of course, most silver in this period came from South America, a lot of it from the great mine of Potosi. So it’s quite possible that George Washington was walking around with a – really a history of his age in his mouth.
GROSS: You have pages of illustrations of early dental instruments that were used for various procedures, including extractions. What do those instruments tell you about what dentistry was like before modern dentistry?
BARNETT: It’s very striking that in some ways the instruments haven’t changed enormously. Extraction of a tooth is still a violent business, as any modern dentist will tell you. When there’s a lot that can be done to make that better, most obviously anesthetics. But the basic business of extracting teeth from jaws, it always has taken a great deal of brute muscle power. We can see this in the evolution of the equipment used for it. Go back to ancient Greece and Rome, and they had special pliers carefully made out of lead.
The great problem when you’re trying to extract a tooth is if the tooth shatters, the root can be left in the jaw, and with the root, quite a lot of the decay. And it’s much harder to get purchase on that. So the great challenge is extracting the tooth without shattering the enamel crown of it. So Greek and Roman dentists would use lead pliers with the idea that lead is a little bit softer, and it’s less likely to shatter the tooth. But it’s really in the medieval period that I think we have the most terrifying instruments for extracting teeth.
The most famous of these is called the pelican. The pelican is based on a device used by barrel-makers to get iron hoops down over the staves of a barrel. If you’ve ever seen a barrel being made, it’s basically about using loops of iron to kind of bring the staves of wood together. So the Pelican was essentially a kind of hook combined with a lever. And you’d sort of clip the hook onto the teeth and kind of pull the lever back. And it must have been an agonizing process, especially if the tooth was well lodged in the jaw.
There’s a point here about the position in which dentistry used to take place. We’re now used to if we go to the dentist, we’re used to lying in a fairly comfortable chair in a fairly sort of comfortable prone position. But early dentists would have got their patients into whatever was the most practical position for levering teeth out of their jaws, so lying on the floor or head between the knees was quite a common position as well. So all things considered, this must have been an extremely painful and a most undignified kind of activity.
GROSS: When you say head between the knees, you mean the patient’s head between the dentist’s knees?
BARNETT: Well, I suppose it depends how well it went but yes, that’s what I meant.
GROSS: (Laughter) OK. If you’re just joining us, my guest is Richard Barnett. He’s a medical historian who’s just completed a trilogy of books about the history of disease, the history of surgery and now the history of dentistry. The dentistry book, the new one is called “The Smile Stealers.” This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF LOOP 2.4.3’S “ZODIAC DUST”)
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let’s get back to my interview with Richard Barnett. His new book, “The Smile Stealers: The Fine And Foul Art Of Dentistry,” completes his trilogy of books on the history of disease, surgery and dentistry. Before becoming a medical historian, he went to med school.
How much of a chance as a medical student before you dropped out of med school did you have to observe the kind of, you know, viscera and disease and surgery that your books are about?
BARNETT: In Britain, at the time, medical school still followed the old preclinical clinical model. So in the first two years that I was at medical school, it was largely an academic education. So it was lectures, and very strikingly, it was the dissection room. That made a big impression. I still think dissection is one of the greatest privileges I’ve ever had. There are no other legal settings in which one can open up a human body and learn about it.
I’ve always had great admiration for those who donate their bodies to medical schools. It really is a tremendous act of charity and one that is enormously appreciated by medical students. It was a chance to confront death. I don’t want to be too pretentious here and call it a kind of Hamlet moment, you know, Hamlet confronting the skull of his dead friend Yorick.
But there was a sense of being able to have laid before you on a table – on a mortuary table – everything that it was to be human or everything it is to be human, you know, 6 feet and a couple hundred pounds of flesh. And it does – what I really appreciated was that it was a space in which you could kind of return.
To the idea of dissection is – in English medical schools, anyway – that you do it over a couple of years. You gradually over the course of a term dissect certain parts of the body, and then you return next term to another part of the body. So it’s a very gentle, very low-key way of I suppose living with the dead, coming to terms with the dead and also getting over that and then learning.
I think learning to see, learning that peculiar kind of clinical or even pathological gaze that one needs when looking at the chaos of a dead body to reduce it to some sort of order, to reduce it to something you can understand and say, well, this is the structure I’m looking at, and this is how it functions, and this is how it goes wrong and so on.
So I really appreciated that kind of encounter. It’s – looking back, I don’t think I had these thoughts at the time, but looking back, it was very interesting to reflect on the anonymity of the dead. That in some ways this was a very important relationship that went on over two years with somebody whose name I didn’t know but with whose body I and my colleagues were more intimate than anybody had been during that person’s life.
You know, we saw more of him. We explored more of him. We took him apart to try and work out, you know, what made him tick and what had stopped him ticking, as it were. So it’s a fascinating and I think unsettling in the best possible way kind of relationship. And it’s one that I’ve returned to in my mind and in my thoughts many times over the last couple of decades.
GROSS: Were you mentally prepared – were you prepared by your teachers in any way for your first encounter with a corpse that you’re going to dissect?
BARNETT: Yes. Medical schools, as you can imagine, are very careful to make sure that their students are prepared for this. One of the most important aspects of this concerns the face. What – certainly, again, in English medical schools, the order in which dissection proceeds one begins with the abdomen and the chest. And the head of the body that you are dissecting is covered. And this goes on for, I think – my memory’s a little fuzzy, but it was certainly a couple of terms, if not an entire year.
So again, you have the chance to sort of get used to, come to terms with – and there are – I remember that it was sort of widely advertised that if one needed to talk to a member of staff about this experience and how it was affecting you, you could do so. So, no, there was a great effort on the part of the medical school authorities to make this a constructive rather than a destructive and challenging experience.
GROSS: So the impression I get from your books is that the surgeon used to be considered lower than the physician – that the surgeon was seen more as like the mechanic who would, like, you know, step in or the craftsman who’d step in. But it was the surgeon who was, like, directing it and who was the more educated person. Why was it seen that way?
BARNETT: There’s a very long division in the history of Western medicine between surgeons who are seen as fundamentally craftsmen or tradesmen and physicians who are seen as educated professional gentlemen. Partly, this comes down to education. The way for a long time in the European tradition that you get to be a physician is by going to university. So you become an heir to this long-learned classical tradition. You study in Latin, and you get a degree at the end of it. So you acquire all of the trappings of a learned gentleman, whereas, if you wanted to be a surgeon, you learn surgery through an apprenticeship. So you become a surgeon in the way that you become a butcher or a baker or a candlestick maker. It’s through experience. It’s through what you might call tacit knowledge rather than any kind of higher-status education.
But I think there’s more to it than that. I think we can see an emotional and a social aspect to this, as well. Of course, surgeons are associated with blood, pain, death, suffering of all kinds. So I think surgery rather like butchery, rather like professional executioners – there are people who it seem to be useful to have around, but they’re not people you want to have dinner. They’re not people you want living next to you. So there are people who carry a certain kind of stigma because of the work that they do.
In fact, if you take the word surgeon back to its Greek root, it comes from the Greek word kheiros (ph) or cheiros (ph), which means hand. So you can very directly think of surgeons as the hand embodying a certain amount of expertise, an amount of skill but very much under the control of the head. And it’s the physicians, the educated learned gentleman, who wanted to see themselves as the head of medicine.
GROSS: Richard Barnett, thank you so much for talking with us.
BARNETT: Absolutely my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
GROSS: Richard Barnett’s new book is called, “The Smile Stealers: The Fine And Foul Art Of Dentistry.” After we take a short break, we’ll hear from Pamela Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, who has a new book of her own about her life as a reader. And Ken Tucker will review new solo albums by Harry Styles of One Direction and Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys. I’m Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
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