Roy Miller's Blog, page 236
March 25, 2017
6 Tips for World Building in Your Fantasy
The books I enjoy the most rip me from the couch and drop me into an entirely new world. Suddenly, I’m an explorer, even though I’ve never felt the thrill of charting new territories; I’m scaling snowy mountaintops, even though I’d never even seen snow until I was ten, having grown up in Florida.
This guest post is by Amber Mitchell. Mitchell graduated from the University of South Florida with a BA in Creative Writing. She likes crazy hairstyles, reading, D&D, k-dramas, good puns, and great food. When she isn’t putting words on paper, she is using cardstock to craft 3D artwork, or exploring new places with her husband Brian. They live in a small town in Florida with their four cats, where she is still waiting for a madman in a blue box to show up on her doorstep. Amber’s first novel GARDEN OF THORNS released on March 6, 2017 with Entangled Publishing. You can follow her on Twitter @Amberinblunderl.
Because of my love of world building, I’ve always been drawn to the fantasy genre and knew I wanted to try writing a fantasy. But I found out very quickly that crafting a breathing, living world isn’t as easy as reading about one. Suddenly, I needed to know how long it would take to get from one city to the next on horseback. And how long could a horse travel at top speed in a day anyway? When the main character got to that next town, what does the architecture look like? What’s the hierarchy of authority?
It occurred to me then that I wasn’t just building a world where the main character lives, I was building a world where thousands of people exist. If I wanted to make my fantasy feel real, then I was going to have to understand what was going on beyond my main character’s point of view.
With that in mind, here are a few tips I’ve learned to help craft realistic fantasy worlds.
1. Not every world needs to be based off of the European Medieval period.
I love “classic” European-based fantasy, and the fashion of the medieval period fits so well with the epic fantasy feel. But I’ve found that selecting other cultures as a base for your fantasy world can really bring that fresh feeling to your fiction.
2. If you do decide to base your fantasy world off a certain culture, do your research.
This is such an important detail. I know it’s tempting to start writing after plotting and creating characters, but researching about the culture and time period you’ve selected will allow you to pick the most important aspects to add. Research far and wide, even though you’ll only end up keeping about 10% of what you find. If you’ve done your homework, it’ll show in the informed decisions you make while writing and will make your world feel unique.
[Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing: How to Build Fantastic Worlds]
3. Say “yes” to yourself.
This is one I had a lot of trouble with in the beginning. It’s hard to trust your gut, but the worst that can happen when you’re writing a fantasy is to get too bogged down in the details. If you find that to be the case, you can edit them out. Better to have many details that you can par down than to have a bare and unimaginative world.
4. Only keep your best ideas.
This one might be in contradiction with the last tip, but it’s really important, too. If you’ve said yes to everything about your world that’s popped into your head, the likelihood of your story being long and reading slow is pretty strong. But now you have so many details to work with. Use the details to craft multiple sentences of the same topic, describing details in different ways. Half of my first drafts are sentences written over and over again describing things differently. It’s easier to shape your favorites after you’ve done the hard work of thinking them up.
5. Give your world a history.
Take the time to go through your world’s backstory, per se. Even if you don’t know who first decided to cultivate the land your bustling main city is on now, make sure there are at least rumors on how the people think their world was created. Nothing is worse than reading about a setting that feels like it just sprang to life because the main character came there. Know the history so you know what shaped your character’s minds—even if you only use a fraction of it.
6. Keep it simple.
Above all, simplicity is always the right choice. If you have to bend over backwards to explain something, it probably doesn’t need to be in your manuscript. If you need to drink an entire mug of coffee to interpret or discuss your world’s over-complicated magic system, you should rethink things. Chances are that the simplest answers are often the strongest, and these details will make your world crystal clear to the reader.
Fantasy novels demand lush worlds. Readers want to discover the world you’ve created as much as they want to meet your new characters. Crafting a world that feels unique isn’t always easy, but if you do it correctly, every place on the page will feel like its own character. And who knows, you might even get readers to say a swear word you created or utter nox when turning out the lights after finishing their new favorite book.
You don’t have to leave your house to attend a writing conference thanks to the
3rd Annual Science Fiction & Fantasy Online Writing Conference.
Starts March 31! Space is limited. Sign up by clicking here.
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
Sign up for Brian’s free Writer’s Digest eNewsletter: WD Newsletter
Listen to Brian on: The Writer’s Market Podcast
You might also like:
The post 6 Tips for World Building in Your Fantasy appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Open Book: The Head Honcho’s Head Honcho
“The Gatekeepers” is a look at how chiefs of staff have advised, cautioned and encouraged presidents.
Source link
The post Open Book: The Head Honcho’s Head Honcho appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole
The following is an excerpt from Teju Cole’s essay collection Known and Strange Things, a finalist for the 2017 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.
A Piece of the Wall
I hear the sound of faint bells in the distance. It is like a sound in a dream, or the jingling at the beginning of a Christmas song. Jingle, jingle, jingle. The sound comes closer. Jingle, jingle, jingle. And then they come in, seventy of them, all men, chained together, bound wrist and waist and foot. They shuffle bright-sounding into the courtroom, a large bright room that is, for them, a chasm of hopelessness.
What you think is true of the country in which you have arrived is often true only of where in it you are. I immigrated to small towns in Michigan. Later on, I went to New York City. These places became my America, and their landscapes and ways of life became natural to me. Other Americas—Salt Lake City, Anchorage, Honolulu—I knew by name only, and considered part of my America only through the imagination. If I traveled to one of these distant Americas, I had to reimagine them. I understood only slowly how I was connected to life there.
Article continues after advertisement
This was my experience of Tucson, and of the Sonoran desert in Arizona, which goes all the way up to and beyond the border with Mexico. This dry and severely beautiful region, alive with traces of the old Spanish missions, is the home of the Tohono O’odham. Their land preceded Mexico or the United States and stretches across the current border. And the border is incessantly crossed, by various people for various reasons, a matter of commerce, culture, law, and unhappiness.
The program, called Operation Streamline, is about to jail and then deport these men. Most of them are indigenous people from Mexico or farther south, here in search of work, arrested in the desert or in town. Seventy small dark men. For most of them, Spanish is a second language. The brightness of the courtroom is like an assault, and the men have been coached to say yes, to say no. They are charged with illegal entry, reentry, or false claim to citizenship. Soon—each gets less than a minute in front of the judge—they’ll be taken back to detention. They will be imprisoned for weeks or months, then put on a bus or plane to Mexico City, hundreds of miles away from home. For now, as I watch them in the courtroom, they are like animals in a pen, fastened to one another, a shimmer of sound each time one moves. The security officers are imposing, white, and impassive. The judge is named Bernie. Afterward, I speak with him, and ask if he, himself, is from a Mexican family.
“My father didn’t fight for this country in World War Two so that people could call me Mexican.”
“But the chains: these men are not dangerous. Why the chains?”
“It’s more convenient.”
* * * *
I’m writing in the restaurant of the lodge. The server asks me about my computer. She’s thinking of buying a similar one, but not right away. She has just bought a mobile phone. She paid quite a lot for it, six hundred dollars. Well, it’s because she didn’t want to be tied to a contract, her boyfriend paid, she isn’t ready to buy a computer yet. The drift of talk.
Her name is Aurora. She is Peruvian, and in her thirties, and she has been in Tucson for nine years.
“What are you doing here, vacation?”
“No, I’m a writer. Here to find out more about the border and immigration.”
It has been a season of trouble, and it has gotten worse since 9/11. This is why I’ve come. This grief, this unsteadiness, is everywhere. I ask Aurora if she knows anyone who got into trouble.
“Many. I was working in a hotel about six years ago. The owners were Indian. In one morning, twelve Mexican girls, maids, were taken away. They never returned.”
“You were a maid?”
“Me? No, I’ve always worked in banquets.”
She glances at the counter. It’s mid-morning. The restaurant is quiet.
“But I’ve had trouble. I get stopped all the time while driving. Two years ago, a policeman stopped me, and I didn’t have my resident card. I’m not afraid, but the policeman is so angry. He starts to shout. I look at him directly”—she raises her hand to her face and makes a V with her fingers, pointing at each eye—“I look at him and say, ‘I’m not afraid of you. I’m legal. I have all my papers at home.’ I know if he arrests me, he will be in trouble, because I have done nothing wrong.” She speaks low but with a holy intensity. “But now I carry my card with me all the time.”
* * * *
Drive an hour directly south of Tucson, and you come to the small town of Nogales, Arizona, at which there is a wall eighteen feet high. On the other side of the wall is the town of Nogales, Sonora. The wall goes on, with gaps, for more than six hundred miles, in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Most of it is in Arizona. Like a river, it takes different forms along its course. More closely guarded here, lower there, deadlier elsewhere. In Nogales, it is great vertiginous rust-colored iron bars spaced just close enough to prevent even a child’s head from getting through.
Looking through the fence, I see two kids in white and green school uniforms waiting for the bus. They are standing in front of a freshly painted house. Nogales, Sonora, looks, if not prosperous, not desperately poor. The bus arrives. They get on. It leaves. At my feet is a small bar of rusted iron, a heavy rectangular ingot about a half inch square and seven inches long: a piece of the wall. I pick it up and put it in my bag. The wall is not extensive in Texas, and it stops short of the most inhospitable parts of the desert in Arizona. Those who wish to cross on foot are compelled to walk around the wall. Many do. It’s a quick two- or three-day trek in ideal circumstances. It is much longer for those who get lost. Hundreds of people each year die attempting to cross, killed by heatstroke, cold, dehydration, Border Patrol agents, or wild animals. Some of the lost, the “lucky” ones, are found alive. If they are not arrested, they are simply dropped off, with neither money nor help, on the Mexican side of the border.
* * * *
In Nogales, Sonora, in a simple shed-like building close to the checkpoint, Father Martin talks about his organization, the Samaritans. The Samaritans provide shoes and some emergency care for those who have been brought in from the desert. Father Martin speaks of the sorrow of the rescued, and of their wounds (terrible pictures of blistered and burned feet have been put up). Some of the rescued migrants, particularly those who have been separated from their families, will attempt to cross again.
One of the volunteers at Samaritans is Peggy, a blond American woman in her late fifties or early sixties. She drives down from her ranch in Arizona weekly to work here. She is a retiree and had worked as a nurse in Oregon. She more closely fits the profile of those who fear undocumented immigrants: white people, old people, retired people. What she says when I ask her to describe Arizona’s situation surprises me.
“It’s a race war. They just don’t like the Mexicans.”
“Is that true? Most people would hesitate to say that.”
“What else could it be?”
* * * *
Through narrow darkness, through scrub forests and rocky cliffs, our Elder Brother brought us across, his name was I’itio. On our setting out from the other side, he turned us into ants. He brought us through narrow darkness and out at Baboquivari Peak into this land. Here we became human again, and our Elder Brother rested in a cave on Baboquivari, and there he rests till this day, helping us.
The land is a maze. You have to be guided through, right from the beginning you had to be guided. The first story in the world is about safe passage.
* * * *
This, too, is my America: people wandering in the desert in fear of their lives. At this very moment they are there. There are people in the desert, a never-ending migration. They die out there because the policy is to let them die (the wall is strategically incomplete) to discourage others from crossing. In their thousands they have died, for the crime of wishing to be in America or the crime of wishing to return.
* * * *
In Tucson I go out to dinner with Roberto Bedoya, an eloquent and thoughtful man who runs the city’s arts council. “There are three ways of making a space,” he says, in the middle of our multifaceted conversation. “Through systems, through arguments, and through poetics.” After dinner, he drives me out to the parking lot of the Casas Adobes supermarket. Here, less than a year earlier, a young man had shot eighteen people and killed six. The U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords had been shot in the head, and reported dead, but she had lived. The parking lot is quiet. What do we miss unless we are told? What do we fail to see? Roberto drives me back across the city to the lodge. In spite of the city’s lights, I can see the stars near the horizon.
* * * *
If you go down from Tucson by a southwesterly route, you come to the border at Sasabe. To our right is Tohono O’odham land. The sacred peak of Baboquivari has a changing profile with each passing minute as we go down the narrow road, like a face turning around to look at you. I am with a group of artists brought down by an organization called CultureStrike. The land is dry, covered with small hardy trees, shrubs, brown grass, and the saguaro cactus. (The saguaro, native to the Sonoran Desert, has always been for me a shorthand for the Southwest.) There is an element of “come and see what is being done in your name” in this journey.
At Sasabe, under the high brown wall that rises and falls with the variegated terrain, officers have set up targets for shooting practice. Their M16s shatter the air of the quiet crossing point. We present our passports, and cross the border from Sasabe into the small Mexican community of El Sasabe. There are kids playing here (the gunfire of the M16s from the American side still audible), and a pair of thin horses graze in a field. We are taken to a small bungalow to listen to Grupos Beta give a presentation. Grupos Beta is a sort of Mexican cognate of the U.S. Border Patrol: a federally funded uniformed service, mandated to work along the border. But Grupos Beta does not prevent people from migrating; it aims only to help them. It provides medical help, search and rescue services, water stations on the Mexican side, and up to three days of temporary housing. And this is what they talk about during the presentation, sidestepping any questions about the drug trade. In the office is a large map of the border and the Sonoran Desert. One red dot for each death, the officer says. The map is a field of proliferating color, like something growing out of control in a petri dish.
When we return to the border point, the shooting has stopped. The wall spins away into the distance like an unspooling length of ribbon. In the grass near the inspection post, on the Mexican side, someone has planted two white crosses. The large one lists at a forty-five-degree angle. On the smaller one, I can make out the word “mujeres.” The man who takes my passport has on a tag that reads “OFFICER BAXTER.” I ask him about the work of the Border Patrol. He has a ready answer: “The Mexican government doesn’t care. They are not doing their share of enforcement. They need to make their country good so that people don’t need to come over here.”
The majority of migrant deaths happen in the Tucson sector, around two hundred each year. Arizona’s legislature and its law enforcement are notorious—or, to some, admirable—for their aggression toward recent immigrants. Racial profiling is legal, and there are initiatives to expunge Mexican-American studies from public high schools. This aggression is also there on the federal level. President Obama has deported people at a greater rate than any of his predecessors. The deportation rate has been kept up, even after the president offered amnesty to undocumented residents who came to the United States as children. The horror of sudden familial division is something experienced by thousands of people in the United States every month. Human rights activists in Tucson organize on several fronts.
The organization Coalición de Derechos Humanos serves as a local focal point for some of these acts of resistance. They work on gathering information, organizing protests, documenting abuse, doing legal work, and offering direct aid to migrants. They also work in partnership with other organizations. CultureStrike, which involves creative people in immigration policy, is one. The faith-based group No More Deaths, which provides humanitarian assistance, is another. I attend a meeting of No More Deaths one evening in the basement of Tucson’s St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church. It is a group of about fifteen, most of them white, and most middle-aged or older. It feels like a classic church missions group, with an air of welcome to visitors. After a moment of silence in memory of the dead, they discuss a strategy to replenish drinking stations on the American side of the border.
At the Tucson office of Coalición de Derechos Humanos, I speak with Kat Rodriguez and Isabel Garcia, two of its leaders. Isabel is also a Pima County public defender, and has been prominent for decades in the fight against inhumane immigration policies. She tells me about one of the men who died in the desert, a man named René Torres Carvajal, a father of five. His body was never found. Many of those most desperate to return after deportation are people whose lives are here, whose entire families are here. Kat shows me the storeroom, with a large pile of white crosses made by volunteers, for use in a memorial procession on Día de los Muertos. The crosses are marked either with the name of someone who died or “desconocida,” “desconocido,” unknown. Desconocido, desconocido, desconocida, desconocido, desconocida, desconocida, desconocido, desconocido, desconocido: to infinity, it seems.
“The visibility of groups like No More Deaths is important for our work,” Isabel says. “In 2005, two young white men were arrested for rescuing a migrant, and it was a big story. Because they look like the people who consider themselves the real Americans. We need a lot of education in this country. People have opinions, but they are ignorant of what’s going on.”
“Ignorant and maybe also desensitized?”
“People have to be desensitized,” Kat says, “to allow the kind of horrible death that happens to someone like René. If you really confronted it, it would be unbearable. If a dog died like that, there would be an uproar.”
“Our friends—the unions, the churches, the politicians—have let us down, they’re the ones who make this happen,” Isabel says. “They are afraid and don’t want to deal with root cause. They don’t want to deal with the six million jobs NAFTA took. They don’t want to think about American intervention in Central America and all the refugees that caused. We paid for that army to be persecuting its own people. And our ‘war on drugs’ is going to cause more refugees.”
I ask them to tell me about the penalties for those who are arrested.
Kat says, “Illegal entry is up to 180 days, and they are the more fortunate ones.”
Isabel says, “It’s two to twenty years in prison for reentry: reentry is a felony. All these people are relabeled as criminals. Definition of criminal: drug dealers, violent offenders, and ‘repeat immigration offenders.’ So they sweep them up with a few actual criminals, send them to prison, and the prisons make money. Obama gives this speech in El Paso: ‘We have to enforce the law.’ How come they don’t enforce the law on Wall Street?”
“And once you get branded as a criminal,” Kat says, “no one is going to want to defend you. The American people just think: well, they are drug barons and rapists. They don’t know ‘criminal’ more often means someone who committed immigration offenses.”
I wonder if, for the 11 million who are undocumented now, amnesty would be the answer.
“It wouldn’t be the answer,” Kat says. “It would be a start. People want to go home: those conditions have to be addressed.”
“These neoliberal trade agreements that are creating poverty have to stop,” Isabel says. “What we want is comprehensive reform. We’ve got to address root cause, and we have to recognize these people who are already working in this country. And a third thing, just as important: we have to demilitarize the border.”
“And the bodies that are found in the desert: can you tell me your role in getting those bodies identified?”
“Kat gets these calls. ‘My brother crossed here five weeks ago, can you help me find him?’”
“And I have to ask them difficult questions,” Kat says, nodding. “Did he have any broken bones? Birthmarks? When he laughed, did you notice metals? A silver filling? And I can feel them imagining their lost brother laughing. When I speak to people, I never use the past tense. I say, ‘What color are his eyes?’ not ‘What color were his eyes?’”
The Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office depends on the information Coalición de Derechos Humanos provides. They have a relationship of trust with the community. The government doesn’t. Kat shows me René’s cross and tells me that his sister comes here to visit it.
“You said some of these crosses are for people of unknown gender. How come?”
“Sometimes the remains are too dispersed,” she says. “The men can be small. In the absence of a pelvis, it’s hard to tell man from woman.”
“But people keep looking.”
“Who do you know who would ever stop looking for their loved ones?”
As I leave, a woman in a green shirt comes into the office, and Kat says: “That is René’s sister.” A woman returning again and again to the only place she can, worrying a grief bare.
* * * *
Later that day, I make a visit to the Tucson Sector Border Patrol headquarters. It is a complex of new buildings on Swan Road, just outside of the city. After I put in my request and after a short wait at the Public Information office, Officer Escalante comes out. “Everybody is interested in what we do here,” he says. “We get a lot of requests.”
“There’s no one I could talk to, even briefly?”
“No.”
A wasted visit. The taxi driver who takes me back into town from Swan Road is named Al. He is jovial and bearded, and looks like Dumbledore.
“We didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us. We’ve always been here. This business of trying to keep people out: in the end it’s futile.”
“What do you think the government should do?”
“I think every border in the world should be knocked down, and let people go wherever the hell they want. If people want to come here and be respectful of our ways, then we should be welcoming. It’s not poor people coming through the border. You have to pay the coyote, what, six thousand dollars? I don’t know about you, but I don’t have six thousand dollars in my pocket I can pay somebody.”
“We are talking about extremely courageous, extremely hardworking people here.”
“People say: they’re taking our jobs. Let me see: the non-English-speaking, undereducated person came here and took your job? Don’t be telling people that. It’s embarrassing.”
“In your view, what’s really going on here?”
“Our policies have created the narco situation down there. Our policies have created the poverty.”
* * * *
Citizenship is an act of the imagination. I was born American, but I also had to learn to become American. I have had to think for myself about “the systems, the arguments, and the poetics” of this complicated country. These thoughts took me deep into the history of the Black Atlantic. My understanding of American experience has mostly been from the point of view of a recent African immigrant. I tried to understand the interconnected networks of trade and atrocities that formed the histories of the cities I’ve known and visited. I’ve brooded on New York City and Lagos, but also New Orleans, Ouidah, Cape Town, Port of Spain, and Rio de Janeiro. In Tucson, witnessing the ongoing crisis in the borderlands, I have to revise my understanding of my country to include this, too.
* * * *
We wander out to the intake area. It is like an emergency room’s loading bay, but simpler. Inside is a small morgue unit; outside, a larger one. Dr. Hess says, “This can take up to 142 bodies.” Greg Hess is the chief medical examiner for Pima County. He is about forty years old, with sandy hair and a friendly face that makes him look about ten years younger than he is. The larger morgue unit contains rows of body bags in metal shelving, stacked in a regular array like a card catalogue, five levels high.
“They are mostly John Does. It’s worse in summer. Border Patrol brings them in, and we work with the folks at Derechos Humanos to try to identify them. We do our best, whether we think the person is American or not. We try to treat them as we would our own family. We mostly fail. People cross the desert without identification, or their personal effects are scattered by coyotes or birds.”
He takes me into the property room, where unclaimed personal effects are kept. The clear plastic bag I examine has typical contents: a red comb, pesos, dollars, a bank card, a damaged birth certificate. Hess points to a locked metal cabinet. It is empty for now, set aside for next year’s unknowns. These deaths will continue.
On my way out, he shows me the anthropology department of the County Medical Examiner’s Office. There are skeletal remains on the table. But this is not a migrant from the desert. It’s from a murder in Pima County itself. There is a bullet hole in the skull, and parts of the skeleton are charred black where someone tried to burn it. The remains of some argument.
“What happens to the unknowns,” I ask, “after every effort to identify them is exhausted?”
“Cremation, and then interment at the county cemetery.”
On the table on which I write this is the piece of iron I took from the base of the wall at Nogales more than two years ago. The officers at Tucson Airport gave me trouble (it was in my hand luggage, and came up strange and solid on the X-ray). I told them it was a memento. They took it out of the bag and examined it, puzzled. Then they let me go, with my piece of the wall.
* * * *
Tucson’s Evergreen Mortuary and Cemetery is a good example of what Elysium might look like. Its quiet lawns and abundant shade, provided by twelve varieties of evergreens, are a tranquil setting for the beloved dead. That much green speaks of repose. But drive a little bit past the serene atmosphere of Evergreen, past some construction work, perhaps stopping to ask for directions. Leave the green behind, drive on into the dusty back section. You have come to quite a different view of the afterlife. This dusty field is the Pima County Cemetery. There is no grass here, a couple of young trees but no shade, and there are no visitors. All there is is dirt. Here and there are plastic flowers swallowed by the dust.
The headstones are sunken, overruled by dirt. There are two columbaria for urns. The wind blows trash across the graves. Some of the grave markers, particularly the older ones, have names and dates on them. Many others are simply marked JOHN DOE, JANE DOE, or UNKNOWN, though each, to someone somewhere, must once have meant the world, and more.
From Known and Strange Things, copyright © 2016 by Teju Cole. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House LLC.
The post Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole appeared first on Art of Conversation.
March 24, 2017
Every Writer Needs an Editor, Especially if that Writer is Also an Editor
There comes a point in every writer’s life where we find ourselves questioning everything: our ability to write, our odds of getting published, our sanity at having dared to venture down this path in the first place.
Why have I chosen this life of misery?” we cry. And for those of you who have yet to reach this ugly threshold, I regret to report that this is not a softly mumbled cry into one of those lovely old-fashioned handkerchiefs. It’s a crumpled-on-the-ground, raging-at-the-injustice-of-it-all, this-was-not-how-this-was-supposed-to-go, Nancy Kerrigan–style plea: “Why?”
Yes, the moment will come, and with any luck it will pass just as quickly. It’s perhaps best, however, if this particular moment does not arrive for you while you are also the editor at the helm of a leading international publication for writers.
Imposter syndrome, in the omniscient words of Wikipedia, is “a concept describing high-achieving individuals who are marked by an inability to internalize their accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a fraud.”
During the two and a half years I was querying agents with my first novel, and the five years I would ultimately spend rewriting and rewriting (and rewriting) that same manuscript, and perhaps especially the year that the agent I did eventually sign with all but stopped responding to my emails, I don’t think high-achieving applied. So maybe I wasn’t truly suffering from imposter syndrome, but it sure as hell felt like it.
“This is what makes you great,” my boss at Writer’s Digest would tell me when I dared say this out loud. He was a kind, supportive publisher, largely because he, too, was a writer in his off-hours. “You know just what our readers are facing. Who better equipped to guide them on this journey?”
It still didn’t feel great. I’ve been a writer all my life, and I’d always brought a writer-to-writer perspective to my editing work. But I knew I was good at editing. I’d once beaten out 170 applicants for an editorial job just a few years out of journalism school.
Fiction writing, though, was a leap into the unknown. I practiced it in the closet—figuratively and eventually even literally, when I had to move my desk inside my walk-in after my daughter was born. I was used to having articles and essays rejected, but those were fleeting setbacks, and there were successes in between. With fiction, this kind of repeated and persistent failure, which I recognized on an intellectual level as necessary and even healthy, was new to me.
Writing conferences, which I’ve always loved, started to test my convictions. “You know we’re all crazy, right?” I wanted to yell from the podium. “We spend hours, days, years working on things that quite possibly no one will ever read!”
In our cluttered staff in-box at Writer’s Digest, the mail for which I’d once had patient, sleek responses now churned within me a deep sympathy. “How is ‘no response means no’ an acceptable literary agency policy?” our readers would demand. Whereas I typically would have delivered calm reassurance that there are many fish in the sea and we simply need to play by the rules, I found myself biting my tongue against a less professional response, something along the lines of: “I know, right? Want to meet for drinks at five?”
But still, at a conference, I’d find myself tearing up at the keynote speaker whose work I’d been admiring all my adult life. In the in-box, I’d find thank-yous, success stories, humor, signs of hope. Again and again I’d read, in the very pages I was editing, that quality work will find a way to rise to the top. I still believed this to be true, and so there came a time where I had to admit that maybe mine wasn’t good enough. Yet.
For the better part of a decade, I’d been encouraging people to persevere in this unpredictable, subjective, sometimes nonsensical but often wonderful world of publishing. To keep at it, to have the courage to keep trying, to have the stomach to put a tired project aside and start something new, to practice even when they didn’t feel like it—sometimes especially when they didn’t feel like it. When it was hardest to take my own advice, I took a deep breath and did it anyway. And what do you know? It really does work.
Jessica Strawser is the editorial director of Writer’s Digest and the author of the novel Almost Missed You (St. Martin’s. Mar.).
A version of this article appeared in the 03/27/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: When an Editor Writes Fiction
The post Every Writer Needs an Editor, Especially if that Writer is Also an Editor appeared first on Art of Conversation.
This Week’s Bestsellers: March 27, 2017
The Maine Woods
Michael Finkel’s The Stranger in the Woods expands on the author’s 2014 article for GQ—one of the magazine’s most-read pieces ever—about a man who lived as a hermit for 27 years in Central Maine, never interacting with another person. The book debuted at #19 in Hardcover Nonfiction and dropped a notch in its second week. Though its nationwide showing has been relatively modest, sales were strong enough in the Northeast to make it the top-selling book in the region in the two weeks it’s been on sale.
The other regional champs are more expected, since they are among the country’s top-selling books overall. Here’s a look.
Top-Selling Books by Region
Northeast
The Stranger in the Woods
Michael Finkel
East North Central
The Obsession
Nora Roberts
West North Central
The Obsession
Nora Roberts
Middle Atlantic
The Shack
Wm. Paul Young
South Atlantic
The Shack
Wm. Paul Young
South Central
The Shack
Wm. Paul Young
Mountain
Dragonwatch (Fablehaven)
Brandon Mull
Pacific
Trump’s War
Michael Savage
(See all of this week's bestselling books.)
Bunny Hop
Too Many Carrots by Katy Hudson, in which a rabbit wrestles with the conundrum of the title, debuts at #3 on our Children’s Picture Books list, more than a year after its publication. A Barnes & Noble promotion began March 14 and runs until just after Easter: customers who buy another children’s book can buy Hudson’s for nearly half off its retail price. The week after the promotion began, weekly print unit sales jumped from 1,454 to more than 14K.
New & Notable
Kim Stanley Robinson
#22 Hardcover Fiction
Robinson dives deep into climate apocalypse with a book our review found “exposition-heavy,” though not irredeemably so: “Readers open to an optimistic projection of how humans could handle an increasingly plausible environmental catastrophe will find the info dumps worth wading through.”
Elif Batuman
#23 Hardcover Fiction
The author of 2010’s The Possessed, a highly praised essay collection, returns with her debut novel, which follows a Turkish-American Harvard student to France, Hungary, and beyond. Our starred review said that “Batuman updates the grand tour travelogue just as she does the epistolary novel and the novel of ideas, in prose as deceptively light as it is ambitious.”
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
J.K. Rowling
#2 Children’s Frontlist Fiction, #7 overall
Scholastic has repackaged Beasts and two other Potterverse texts—Quidditch Through the Ages and The Tales of Beedle the Bard—as Hogwarts Library books. 19% of the retail price of each book sold goes to two charities Rowling selected: Lumos, the children’s NGO she founded, and Comic Relief U.K.
Top 10 Overall
Rank
Title
Author
Imprint
Units
1
The Shack
Wm. Paul Young
Windblown
26,130
2
The Obsession
Nora Roberts
Berkley
25,430
3
A Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman
Washington Square
19,902
4
Dragonwatch (Fablehaven)
Brandon Mull
Shadow Mountain
19,588
5
Milk and Honey
Rupi Kaur
Andrews McMeel
19,131
6
The Cutthroat
Cussler/Scott
Putnam
19,127
7
Fantastic Beasts... (Hogwarts Library ed.)
J.K. Rowling
Scholastic/Levine
18,451
8
Green Eggs and Ham
Dr. Seuss
Random House
18,124
9
Dangerous Games
Danielle Steel
Delacorte
18,013
10
Trump’s War
Michael Savage
Center Street
17,998
All unit sales per Nielsen BookScan except where noted.
A version of this article appeared in the 03/27/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: PW Bestsellers
The post This Week’s Bestsellers: March 27, 2017 appeared first on Art of Conversation.
A Writer’s Guide to British vs. American English
This infographic is courtesy of Jennifer Frost of
GrammarCheck
. Visit them online at
grammarcheck.net
or check out the free online grammar checker at
grammarcheck.net/editor
for proofreading help.
Any Specific Marketing Material You Want Included in the Post (include its URL to the shop):
Baihley Grandison is the associate editor of Writer’s Digest and a freelance writer. Follow her on Twitter @baihleyg, where she mostly tweets about writing (Team Oxford Comma!), food (HUMMUS FOR PRESIDENT, PEOPLE), and Random Conversations With Her Mother.
You might also like:
CATEGORIES
There Are No Rules Blog by the Editors of Writer's Digest
The post A Writer’s Guide to British vs. American English appeared first on Art of Conversation.
The Great American Novelist Who Spied for the Soviets
Nicholas Reynolds
The Old Man And The C.C.C.P.: The military historian Nicholas Reynolds considers himself a lifelong fan of Ernest Hemingway. “I started reading Hemingway when I was in junior high,” he told me in a recent email exchange, and even at that precocious age he admired all the things you might expect a future military historian to admire in Hemingway’s work. “The characters he created embodied so many American values we still cherish,” Reynolds explains in the introduction to his new Hemingway biography, “Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy,” which enters the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 14. “Truth, bravery, independence, grace under pressure, standing up for the underdog.”
So it was only natural, when Reynolds was curating a 2010 exhibition at the C.I.A. Museum about the agency’s roots in World War II, to wonder if Hemingway, with his love of adventure, had ever spied for his country. “And then I learned something that surprised me,” Reynolds writes in the book: “He had signed on with another intelligence service, one that did not fit the conventional narrative of his life. That service turned out to be the Soviet N.K.V.D., the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the predecessor of the better-known K.G.B.”
Hemingway, a Soviet spy? “I was a traditional product of the Cold War,” Reynolds told me. “There was little sympathy for Communism in our house. So I felt like le Carré’s character George Smiley, who learns of yet another betrayal: I felt like I had taken an elbow deep in the gut.” But the more Reynolds dug, the murkier the picture became. Hemingway seems never to have provided any secrets to the Soviets, and was probably motivated more by anti-fascist politics than by any love for the Soviet Union or antipathy to America. The biography, then, is Reynolds’s attempt to tease out how his subject’s undercover life fit into the more familiar world of his work. “Hemingway did not write much about his spying, at least not for public consumption,” he told me. “His interest in intelligence emerges mostly from his letters, especially those to his close friend Gen. Buck Lanham, which include comments on Cold War espionage and the Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s.” Hemingway’s voice, he added, “was uniquely American — and revolutionary only for its effect on the English language.”
Personal Trainer: “The Devil’s Triangle,” the fourth thriller in the Brit in the F.B.I. series co-written by Catherine Coulter and J.T. Ellison, is new on the hardcover fiction list at No. 4. Coulter lives in Sausalito, Calif., in a 6,000-square-foot house she calls the Pink Palace, where a writer for The Sacramento Bee visited her last year. Among the other tidbits he gathered is that she writes to her fans every day on Facebook. “I’m always preaching at them to stay fit — it’s one thing to do for yourself,” she said. (Coulter herself goes to the gym three days a week.) “But I try to be funny,” she added.
Continue reading the main story
The post The Great American Novelist Who Spied for the Soviets appeared first on Art of Conversation.
The Return by Hisham Matar
The following is an excerpt from Hisham Matar’s memoir The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, a finalist for the 2017 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.
6. Poems
The country that separates fathers and sons has disoriented many travelers. It is very easy to get lost here. Telemachus, Edgar, Hamlet, and countless other sons, their private dramas ticking away in the silent hours, have sailed so far out into the uncertain distance between past and present that they seem adrift. They are men, like all men, who have come into the world through another man, a sponsor, opening the gate and, if they are lucky, doing so gently, perhaps with a reassuring smile and an encouraging nudge on the shoulder. And the fathers must have known, having once themselves been sons, that the ghostly presence of their hand will remain throughout the years, to the end of time, and that no matter what burdens are laid on that shoulder or the number of kisses a lover plants there, perhaps knowingly driven by the secret wish to erase the claim of another, the shoulder will remain forever faithful, remembering that good man’s hand that had ushered them into the world. To be a man is to be part of this chain of gratitude and remembering, of blame and forgetting, of surrender and rebellion, until a son’s gaze is made so wounded and keen that, on looking back, he sees nothing but shadows. With every passing day the father journeys further into his night, deeper into the fog, leaving behind remnants of himself and the monumental yet obvious fact, at once frustrating and merciful—for how else is the son to continue living if he must not also forget—that no matter how hard we try we can never entirely know our fathers.
Article continues after advertisement
I think this as I consider Uncle Mahmoud’s account of learning that Father was not safely home in Cairo but a few metres away in a cell in the opposite wing. Like many of the stories I heard from men who were in prison at the same time, this one, too, offered more questions than it did answers. I wondered why Father waited so long before speaking. He had already been in Abu Salim for a few days and must have heard uncles Mahmoud and Hmad, cousins Ali and Saleh, talking loudly across the cells. And why, once he had spoken and was not recognized, did he wait a whole week before trying again and then, after that second attempt failed, wait yet another seven days? What was he thinking about in that time? From where did the doubt or reticence stem? And why the secrecy; why not simply say “Mahmoud, it’s me, your brother, Jaballa”? On the other hand, I could not understand why Uncle Mahmoud and the others were unable to make out the voice of the man they knew so well. In fact, even before Father spoke directly to Uncle Mahmoud, calling out, “Mahmoud, you don’t recognize me?” how could they not have realized that the man reciting poems at night was Jaballa Matar? They may not have recognized the voice, but how could they have missed the clue in the poems Father selected for those night–time recitations? Father’s literary memory was like a floating library. It would have been unusual for him not to be able to recall at least one poem by every significant Arabic poet from the modern era. But in prison he did not go to the poems of Ahmed Shawqi or any of the numerous poets from the period of Al-Nahda, the so-called Arabic Renaissance that took place at the turn of the twentieth century, nor did he turn to Badr Shakir al-Sayyab or the various other modernist poets he admired. Instead, in those dark and silent nights when, as Uncle Mahmoud had put it, “the prison fell so quiet you could hear a pin drop or a grown man weep softly to himself,” Father sought refuge in the elegiac Bedouin poetry of the alam. The word means knowledge or banner or flag, but has always, at least to my mind, signified an apprehension gained through loss. It’s a poetic form that privileges the past over the present. It is popular across Cyrenaica, but no more so than in Ajdabiya.
I picture him reciting the alam in the same voice he used at home, a voice that seemed to open up a landscape as magically uncertain and borderless as still water welded to the sky. This happened rarely. It would often take several obliging individuals to get him to start. Friends would turn to him towards the end of one of those epic dinner parties my parents used to host at our Cairo flat. This stage in the evening, which always arrived too late, was for me the moment that made sense of all the preceding madness. It was like one of those villages perched high in the mountains, reached after too many dizzying turns and arguments: Mother saying, “Enough, let’s turn back,” and Father answering, “But, look, we’re nearly there.” Then the incline would flatten and we would be inside the village, protected from the vastness of the landscape.
First, there was the menu, which shifted several times before agreement was reached. And then the machinery would start. Every resource would be employed—servants, children and a handful of committed friends—until each desired ingredient was located and delivered. My mother managed this complicated operation with the authority of an artist in the service of a higher cause. She spent hours on the telephone, handing out precise instructions to the butcher, the farmer who brought us our milk, yogurt and cheese, and the florist. She made several trips to the fruit-seller. She would drive into the Nile Delta, down narrow dirt roads, to a small village near Shibin El Kom in the Monufia Governorate, to select, as she used to say, “with my own eye,” each pigeon. I would be sent to get nutmeg from one spice shop west of the city, then gum arabic from another in the east. There was only one vegetable-seller in the whole of Cairo from whom to buy garlic at this time of the year. Several samples of pomegranate would be tasted before she placed the order. And because, she maintained, Egyptians have no appreciation for olive oil, she would order gallons from her brother’s farm in the Green Mountains or, if the Libyan–Egyptian border was closed, from Tuscany or Liguria. Ziad and I would then have to accompany the driver to the airport to explain to the customs officials why our household consumed so much olive oil, pay the necessary bribes and return home to Mother’s happy face. Orange blossom water was delivered from her hometown, Derna, or, if that wasn’t possible, from Tunisia. On the day of the party, a dash of it would be put onto the pomegranate fruit salad and into the jugs of cold water. The marble tiles would be mopped with it too.
The combination of Mother’s eccentricities and Father’s wealth—he had made a small fortune importing Japanese and Western goods to the Middle East—meant not only that we could live lavishly but also that the money helped fuel Father’s political activism. He set up a fund for Libyan students abroad and supported various scholarly projects, such as an Arabic translation of a legal encyclopedia. But what made my father dangerous to the Qaddafi regime was that his financial resources matched his political commitment. He was a leader. He knew how to manage and organize a movement. He coordinated several sleeper cells inside Libya. He set up and led military training camps in Chad, close to the Libyan border. He did not only pour his own money into this; he also had a gift for raising large donations and would shuttle around the world convincing wealthy Libyan exiles to support his organization. Its annual budget in the early 1980s was $7 million. A few years later, by the late 1980s, that figure had gone up to $15 million. But he did not stop there. He personally commanded the small army in Chad.
Growing up, I had somehow always suspected that our money would all disappear. I worried about it. On more than one occasion I asked him, “How much is left?”
“Well, Minister of Finance,” he would say, smiling. “Let’s just say it’s none of your business.”
“But I want to make sure we’ll be all right.”
“You’ll be all right,” he would say. “All I owe you is a university education. After that, you are on your own.”
After he was kidnapped, we found that the bank account was nearly empty. According to the statements, the balance in 1979, the year we left Libya, was $6 million. In a little over a decade, it had all vanished. I felt terribly resentful, particularly since the day Father had disappeared, the countless so-called activists who used to float in and out of our flat, and even Father’s closest allies, vanished. It was as though we had contracted a contagious disease. Most of all, I couldn’t believe he would leave Mother, who had never worked a day in her life, without a proper income. Ziad and I had to immediately find ways to support the family. The only explanation I could think of was that Father must have been certain of imminent victory. He must have thought he and Mother would return to Tripoli, sell the Cairo flat and perhaps live off the land he had in Libya. It took me time to understand the implications of Father’s actions. When it came to Mother, he considered Ziad and me as his guarantors. He believed he could rely on us. It was a profound gesture of trust. I know, not least of all from his letters, that from within his incarcerated existence the thought of his sons brought him comfort and reassurance. He had given me something priceless: namely, his confidence. I am grateful I was forced to make my own way. His disappearance did put me in need and make my future uncertain, but it turns out need and uncertainty can be excellent teachers.
During the Cairo years when he was still here, we lived in a penthouse that occupied the entire top floor of a tall building in Mohandeseen. When we first moved in, you could see for miles, all the way to where Cairo ended and the farms took over. But very quickly high buildings rose all around us and left only narrow views on to the horizon. In preparation for those dinner parties, men would come and hang precariously off the ledge to wash the glazing that covered the whole wall at one end of the drawing room. On the day, the brass incense cup would be taken into every room, the smoke deposited in each corner, trapped behind curtains. The doorbell would not stop ringing with deliveries. The kitchen, which was off the main entrance, would have my mother at its center, helped by the cook and a couple of maids. The radio would be on very loud, playing the songs of Farid al-Atrash or Najat al-Saghira or Oum Kalthum or Mohammad Abdel Wahab. My mother belonged to one of those Libyan families for whom Cairo was the cultural capital. She loved the city and moved in it with great ease. She would repeat what her mother used to say whenever she encountered a grim person: “Don’t blame them; they must’ve never been to Cairo.” In those days my mother operated as if the world were going to remain forever. And I suppose that is what we want from our mothers: to maintain the world and, even if it is a lie, to proceed as though the world could be maintained. Whereas my father was obsessed with the past and the future, with returning to and remaking Libya, my mother was devoted to the present. For this reason, she was the truly radical force in my adolescence.
Ours was a political home, filled with dissidents and the predictable and often tiresome conversations of dissidents. These high dinners were my mother’s retaliation against that reality. Her obsessiveness with where and when to get each ingredient, combined with her extraordinary talent as a cook, produced astonishing results that literally silenced these men of action. I would escape the activity and not return till evening. Mother would pull me into the kitchen, insisting I taste several of the dishes, asking if the salt was right, if she should not add more chili. The table would be set so magnificently that guests would either be speechless or induced to such heights of pleasure that they could not stop talking. I remember once a gregarious man who had been a minister under King Idris. He had dominated the conversation until soup was served. He took the first mouthful and fell utterly silent. The entire table took note of the sudden change. “All well, Minister?” Father asked. The man nodded without bringing his head up. He would occasionally dab his eyes with the napkin. I thought he was one of those men who break out in a sweat the moment they start eating. It wasn’t until his plate was empty and he had no option but to look up that we saw his eyes were red. When the main course arrived, his emotion shifted to laughter. All this gave Mother great satisfaction, and, even though Father tried to hide it, his pride was clear. Those were the strong years, when my parents had the confident manner of couples that, notwithstanding the usual apprehensions of parents, regard the future as a friendly country.
And it was usually after one of those dinners that the welcome request would arise, spoken softly at first, then less timidly by another guest, before the insistent calls would grow into a loud clamor. Father’s cheeks would redden slightly, his eyes betraying a twinkle of pleasure, and then he would yield. Nothing seemed to please him more than the presence of poetry. A good line reassured him, put the world right for a second. He was both enlivened and encouraged by language. It would become clear that his earlier resistance was merely to test the enthusiasm of his companions. He would lean slightly forward and it would happen: in that tentative silence, a new space would open up. He knew exactly what to do with his voice, where to tighten the strings and when to let them slacken. He always bracketed these recitations, perhaps out of reminiscence or loyalty to his hometown, with the alam.
He had, on several occasions, written in the genre. He recited them to me when he and I were alone in the car, which is to say, very rarely. My father hardly ever drove me to school, or to sports clubs, or collected me from a friend’s house. Once, on my mother’s insistence, he came to watch me compete in judo. I was distracted by how out of place he looked. He neither fitted in with nor could altogether hide his disinterest in Egyptian middle–class society. He almost never engaged in small talk or talking merely to pass the time. I cannot recall him speaking about money or property or the latest this or that. He had an astonishing ability to sustain social silences, which is why he was often mistaken for being haughty or cold. He was certainly proud. I recall him once saying to a member of the Egyptian government who was trying to convince him to quit politics: “The only thing standing between you and me is a suitcase. If I’m no longer welcome here, I’ll pack tomorrow.” He taught my brother and me to never accept financial assistance from anyone, especially governments, and when giving to give so discreetly that your “left hand does not know what the right hand has done.” Once he saw me count change before handing it to a beggar. “Next time, don’t make a display of it,” he said. “Give as if you were taking.” It took me a long time to understand this. If we passed laborers or street-sweepers eating their lunch and they invited us to join them, which was the custom—meaning they never expected you to actually join them—Father would sit in his fine clothes on the ground amongst the men and, if I was not as quick as he was, he would say, “Come, an honest meal feeds a hundred.” He would take a bite or two, then conduct his magic trick, sliding bank notes beneath the plate mid–sentence. He would look at the time and say, “Men, you are excellent, thank you.” His voice, which was always gentle, would rise if he learnt that one of the servants had turned away a needy person or shooed off a cat. The simple rule was never to refuse any one or thing in need. “It’s not your job to read their hearts,” he once told me after I claimed, with shameful certainty, that begging was a profession. “Your duty is not to doubt but to give. And don’t ask questions at the door. Allow them only to tell you what they came for after they’ve had tea and something to eat.” The word got around. Our doorbell would ring two or three times a day. Most people needed money for food or school or medicine. Some wanted us to mediate in a dispute, to return to them a piece of property—a wagon, a bicycle, a basket—that someone had confiscated after an argument. My brother and I would often manage this without my father’s involvement, as if it were part of our education. It thinned the walls of our privilege a little and taught me something of the injustice and humiliation of being in need. The other thing he insisted on was that we learn how to ride a horse, shoot a rifle, and swim. It was something his father, Grandfather Hamed, believed and, I suspect, took from Umar ibn al-Khattab. Father would drive me into the desert on the edge of Cairo, beyond the Giza Pyramids, to teach me how to handle a rifle. It was on such rare afternoons, when we were alone in the car, that he would recite to me his new compositions. If I teased him, he would say, “They are masterpieces; you would’ve known this had you not been an ignorant boy,” which made me laugh like nothing else.
Uncle Mahmoud knew all of these details. In fact, given Father’s intention to covertly inform him of his presence, it is very probable that Father had chosen one of his own poems to recite, perhaps the one that starts:
Had the pain not been so precise
I would have asked
To which of my sorrows should I yield.
Uncle Mahmoud blamed his failure to recognize his brother’s voice on the general confusion of prison life, the shock of his capture, the endless interrogations, the disorienting confinement. “Such circumstances,” he said, “tamper with your cognitive powers.”
He could detect that I was not entirely convinced.
“In the end,” he added, “I just didn’t want to believe it.”
But shock and the refusal to accept bad news can only partly explain it. I was gradually surrendering to the only explanation that seemed credible. Father wanted to be recognized just by his voice. To be known without needing to provide any more evidence. Perhaps, like me, what was uppermost in his mind was preservation. Part of what we fear in suffering—perhaps the part we fear most—is transformation. I still have recurring dreams in which I appear to him a stranger. One of these took place only months after his disappearance and yet I have never forgotten it. In it, Father had undergone an experience so extreme that he could not recognize me. He looked at me as if we did not know each other. Therefore, perhaps Uncle Mahmoud’s inability to recognize Father was not only due to the bewildering effects of prison life but more to Father having become a changed man. And perhaps Uncle Mahmoud knew this but did not want to say it out loud. Perhaps on hearing his brother’s voice, Uncle Mahmoud’s response was like that of Dante when, descending into the depths of hell, the poet comes upon Ciacco, a man he had known in the life before but who was now completely unrecognizable, and tells him:
The anguish you endure
Perhaps effaces whatever memory I had,
Making it seem I have not seen you before;
But tell me who you are, assigned to so sad
A station as punishment—if any is more
Agony, none is so repellent.
Like Dante, Uncle Mahmoud must have known it was my father’s voice, and, like Ciacco, Father was hoping to prove to himself that he was who he had been.
Excerpted from The Return by Hisham Matar. Copyright © 2016 by Hisham Matar. Excerpted by permission of Random House, A Penguin Random House Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
The post The Return by Hisham Matar appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Bookstore News: March 24, 2017
New England Mobile Book Fair to downsize; Foyles touts second profitable year; Pennsylvania's Quadrant Book Mart reopens; and more.
Tom Lyons, who bought the venerable, sprawling bookstore in Needham, Mass., five years ago says the store's lease is up and, with revenues down, he will downsize from 32,000 sq.-ft. to as little as 4,000.
Foyles Bookstore Has Second Year of Profit: The U.K. chain saw turnover rise 2.7%, to £25 million ($31 million), giving it a second year of profit in a row.
Pennsylvania's Quadrant Book Mart Reopens: The Easton, Penn., store re-opened on Thursday after being shut down for two months due to a heating system failure.
Booksellers Start GoFundMe Campaign for Louisville Store: Blackberry Books and Coffee started as a bookstall, but now the owners are raising $55,000 to pay for a bricks-and-mortar location for a new diversity-oriented children's bookstore in West Louisville.
Gibson's Bookstore to Close: The Lansing, Mich., store will close following the end of Lansing Community College’s spring semester, after a dispute with the school involving a partner textbook vendor.
Journalist Tries to Visit Every Bookstore in New York City: Bookriot's Emma Nichols has compiled a color-coded map of bookstores in New York City, indicating whether they serve alcohol, offer used books, and other attributes.
The post Bookstore News: March 24, 2017 appeared first on Art of Conversation.
After Dylan’s Nobel, What Makes a Poet a Poet?
Then there is the music. A well-written song isn’t just a poem with a bunch of notes attached; it’s a unity of verbal and musical elements. In some ways, this makes a lyricist’s job potentially easier than a poet’s, because an attractive tune can rescue even the laziest phrasing. But in other ways, the presence of music makes songwriting harder, because the writer must contend with timbre, rhythm, melody and so forth, each of which presents different constraints on word selection and placement. To pick just one example, lyricists must account for various forms of musical stress beyond the relatively straightforward challenge of poetic meter. In Fleetwood Mac’s otherwise poignant “Dreams,” Stevie Nicks tells us, “When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know,” a line that would be completely fine in a poem. Yet because the second syllable of “washes” falls at a higher pitch and in a position of rhythmic emphasis with respect to the first syllable, Nicks is forced to sing the word as “waSHES.” This kind of mismatch is common in questionable lyric writing; another example occurs at the beginning of Lou Gramm’s “Midnight Blue,” in which Gramm announces that he has no “REE-grets” (all of them presumably having been eaten by his egrets).
Continue reading the main story
Beyond the many technical differences, though, there is the simple fact that people don’t really think of songs as being poems, or of songwriters as being poets. No one plays an album by Chris Stapleton, or downloads the cast recording of “Hamilton,” or stands in line for a Taylor Swift concert, and says something like, “I can’t wait to listen to these poems!” That’s true no matter how skillful the songs, since competence isn’t how we determine whether a person is participating in a particular activity. We don’t say someone isn’t playing tennis just because she plays less brilliantly than Serena Williams, nor do we say William McGonagall wasn’t a poet just because his poems were terrible. So if Bob Dylan is a poet, it follows that anyone who does basically the same thing that Dylan does should be considered a poet as well. Yet while people routinely describe both Dylan and Kid Rock as “songwriters” and “musicians,” there are very, very few people who refer to Kid Rock as a poet.
That’s because when the word “poetry” is applied to Dylan, it isn’t being used to describe an activity but to bestow an honorific — he gets to be called a poet just as he gets to be a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient. This may seem odd, because we don’t typically recognize excellence at one endeavor by labeling it as another, different venture. But poetry has an unusually large and ungrounded metaphoric scope. Most activities exist as both an undertaking (“hammering,” as in hitting something with a hammer) and a potential metaphor tied to the nature of the activity in question (“McGregor is hammering his opponent now!”). But poetry’s metaphoric existence is only loosely tethered to its sponsoring enterprise. When a person says something like, “That jump shot was pure poetry,” the word has nothing to do with the actual practice of reading or writing poems. Rather, the usage implies sublimity, fluidity and technical perfection — you can call anything from a blancmange to a shovel pass “poetry,” and people will get what you’re saying. This isn’t true of opera or badminton or morris dancing, and it can cause confusion about where metaphor ends and reality begins when we talk about “poetry” and “poets.”
Moreover, while most people have limited experience with poems, they do generally have ideas about what a poet should be like. Typically, this involves a figure who resembles — well, Bob Dylan: a countercultural, bookish wanderer who does something involving words, and who is eloquent yet mysterious, wise yet innocent, charismatic yet elusive (and also, perhaps not coincidentally, a white dude). When you join all of these factors — the wide metaphoric scope of “poetry,” the lack of familiarity with actual poetry or poets, the role-playing involved in the popular conception of the poet — it’s not hard to see how you might get a Nobel laureate in literature who doesn’t actually write poems.
Yet if this dynamic explains why people weren’t baffled by Dylan’s Nobel, it doesn’t explain why quite a few poets and English professors wanted him anointed. One would think, after all, poets might be put off by the idea that songwriters can be poet enough to win a prize in literature, when the implied relationship is so clearly a one-way street. (John Ashbery will be waiting a long time for his Grammy.) But in fact, poets have often benefited from the blurred edge of their discipline. Poetry has one primary asset: It’s the only genre automatically considered literary regardless of its quality. Popular songwriting, by contrast, has money, fame and Beyoncé. So there is an implicit trade going on when, for example, Donald Hall includes the lyrics to five Beatles songs in his anthology “The Pleasures of Poetry” (1971). But it isn’t just a straight swap in which song lyrics are granted literariness and poems take on a candle flicker of celebrity. Poetry also benefits in a subtler and more important way, because the implicit suggestion of these inclusions is that only the very best songwriters get to share space with poets. Poetry’s piggy bank may remain empty, but its cultural status is enhanced — in a way that is hugely flattering to poets and teachers of poetry, even as it is insulting to brilliant songwriters who happen to be less famous than, say, the Beatles.
Which is what makes this a risky game for poets. Culture is less a series of peaceable, adjacent neighborhoods, each inhabited by different art forms, than a jungle in which various animals claim whatever territory is there for the taking. It’s possible that poets can trail along foxlike behind the massive tiger of popular music, occasionally plucking a few choice hairs from its coat both to demonstrate their superiority and to make themselves look a bit tigerish. With Dylan’s Nobel, we saw what happens when the big cat turns around.
Continue reading the main story
The post After Dylan’s Nobel, What Makes a Poet a Poet? appeared first on Art of Conversation.
