Roy Miller's Blog, page 245
March 15, 2017
Amos Oz and Ismail Kadare named on Man Booker international prize longlist | Books
A Chinese satire of communism, a retelling of the Robin Hood myth set in the Republic of Congo and a coming-of-age tale in a still-divided Jerusalem are among 13 books from 11 different languages that are longlisted for the Man Booker international prize.
Books from Europe dominate the longlist, alongside two Israeli novels, and one apiece from China and Argentina. The annual award, which celebrates the finest global fiction translated into English, is worth £50,000, to be split evenly between author and translator.
Albanian author Ismail Kadare, 81, who was the first writer to win the Man Booker international prize in 2005 in its previous iteration as a lifetime achievement award, is listed for The Traitor’s Niche, following a courier in the Ottoman empire who is tasked with transporting the severed heads of the sultan’s adversaries.
The octogenarian appears alongside three previous nominees for the international prize. Israel’s Amos Oz, who at 77 has published Judas, his first novel in a decade, was nominated in 2007 for his body of work. Alain Mabanckou, a French writer born in the Republic of the Congo, was nominated in 2015 and is up for the prize again this year for his novel Black Moses, about a Robin Hood-like figure and his band of Congolese Merry Men in Pointe-Noire.
And Chinese author Yan Lianke, who was shortlisted last year for The Four Books, is up for the award again with his satire The Explosion Chronicles, a surreal fantasy about a village called Explosion that is transformed into a pulsing metropolis.
Arabic and Persian scholar Mathias Énard is also listed for his novel Compass, 18-months after it won him the Prix Goncourt, France’s oldest and most prestigious literary accolade. Also listed is A Horse Walks Into a Bar, David Grossman’s novel about an Israeli comedian – which a Guardian reviewer warned is “an unexpected delight … but neither remotely funny nor an easy read”. German author Clemens Meyer’s novel about sex workers, Bricks and Mortar, has also made the longlist.
Also nominated are War and Turpentine, a novel based on the journals of the Flemish poet Stefan Hertmans’s grandfather; Roy Jacobsen’s The Unseen, a family drama set on an Norwegian island; and Fish Have No Feet, a story of two romances set in a tiny Icelandic town, by Jón Kalman Stefánsson.
While seven of the 13 translators are women, there are only three female authors on the longlist. Polish poet Wioletta Greg, who lives in Essex, is nominated for her first novel, Swallowing Mercury, a bildungsroman set communist Poland. The Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin is nominated for Fever Dream, her first novel to be translated into English but her fifth book, while the Danish writer Dorthe Nors, a household name in Denmark, is nominated for her tragicomedy Mirror, Shoulder, Signal.
Recent counts have found that only about 26% of English translations are female-authored books. The ratio of women to men on the longlist is slightly worse than last year, when there were four female authors and eight female translators. Then, judge Tahmima Anam acknowledged the disparity, saying that it “really reflects the gender bias in who gets translated”. Han Kang and her translator Deborah Smith would go on to win the prize.
The 13 books were chosen from 126 submissions by the judges: chair Nick Barley, director of the Edinburgh international book festival; translator Daniel Hahn; authors Elif Shafak and Chika Unigwe; and poet Helen Mort.
Barley said 2016 had been “an exceptionally strong year for translated fiction” and that the longlisted books were “compulsively readable and ferociously intelligent”.
“Fiction in translation is flourishing: in these times when walls are being built, this explosion of brilliant ideas from around the world arriving into the English language feels more important than ever,” he said.
A shortlist of six books will be announced on 20 April and a winner will be revealed at a ceremony in London on 14 June.
The 2017 Man Booker international prize longlist:
Compass by Mathias Énard (France), translated by Charlotte Mandell and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions
Swallowing Mercury by Wioletta Greg (Poland), translated by Eliza Marciniak and published by Portobello Books
A Horse Walks Into a Bar by David Grossman (Israel), translated by Jessica Cohen and published by Jonathan Cape
War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans (Belgium), translated by David McKay and published by Harvill Secker
The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen (Norway), translated by Don Bartlett and published by MacLehose Press
The Traitor’s Niche by Ismail Kadare (Albania), translated by John Hodgson and published by Harvill Secker
Fish Have No Feet by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (Iceland), translated by Philip Roughton and published by MacLehose Press
The Explosion Chronicles by Yan Lianke (China), translated by Carlos Rojas and published by Chatto & Windus
Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou (France), translated by Helen Stevenson and published by Serpent’s Tail
Bricks and Mortar by Clemens Meyer (Germany), translated by Katy Derbyshire and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions
Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Dorthe Nors (Denmark), translated by Misha Hoekstra and published by Pushkin Press
Judas by Amos Oz (Israel), translated by Nicholas de Lange and published by Chatto & Windus
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin (Argentina), translated by Megan McDowell and published by Oneworld
The post appeared first on Art of Conversation.
When Femininity is Code for Feelings
A famous writer, whose name is Franzen, might like birds more than he likes humans. He talks about them in the New Yorker, to undergraduates in fancy college commencement speeches, to explain what feeling is.
To explain what feeling is, I’ve always thought, would be my project. I would say it right, shape it perfectly. And then I would be heard. I would shape it in a way that someone somewhere would have no choice but to understand it, see it, hear it. They would themselves feel heard and understood. There are perhaps more noble reasons to become a fiction writer: politics, philosophy, a calling from some higher power, to piss off one’s attorney mom and dad. But mine were never those.
When my agent and I sent my first book out, it was pretty universally panned by the Sales and Marketing departments at a handful of major publishers. But it’s so feminine was our feedback. Feminine, I think, is code for feelings. Too sad for book clubs. Not-quite-literary, but somehow still too difficult. I’m pretty sure that not-quite-literary was yet another term for all those overt feelings, maybe with the added implication of too many, too felt mentions of Virginia Woolf. Uncategorizeable, they said. Just not right.
This has, in some form or another, been the feedback I, the person, have gotten most of my life. Too. So. Just not, said my attorney parents. Please, they said—still say. Please just stop.
Once, in grad school, a woman wrote, in blue pen, at the top of the 25 pages I’d submitted to our workshop, does any actual person cry this much?
UNBEARABLE, wrote a woman in an online review a year after those rounds with Sales and Marketing, when the book was a real book.
These whiny neurotic women need to get a life, said another one.
Gather all the writers in a room and ask how many felt misunderstood as children, ask how many write, not so secretly, just in case someone might finally see and understand. It is perhaps that the others have just couched it better, covered it in gorgeous metaphor.
I have never been much interested in metaphor. I wanted to just say the thing. It felt too dire not to. I was too afraid I’d get it wrong.
I came out of that first book determined to talk less about feelings, to be less overtly just one thing. I came out more more interested in finding new ways, new shapes, new forms through which to feel.
*
For a few weeks in Fall last year, there was a Painted Bunting living in the just-pre-winter starkness of the park by our apartment. I’d run by him, by the crowds around him, in the morning. There was that buzz of groups gathered together for one shared purpose, whispering and awkward shuffling, binoculars and nudging, the click and buzz and flash of cameras and phones.
It was suggested in the paper by bird experts that he’d lost his way, this Nonpareil (another term for Painted Bunting); lost hold of the flock with which he’d been flying; lost, perhaps never had, the sensors, the specific mechanisms in his brain that told him where to go and when.
They knew it was a male because they’re better looking, “exceedingly flashier” than the mostly green females. It was suggested that the bird might either stay or go or might be eaten; especially susceptible, they said, because of his flashiness, to predators.
I read about him in the newspaper, clicked on links to pictures of his type of bird online when I was home; I never stopped to see him. In the six weeks that he was perched a mile from my home, I never saw the actual bird.
*
Birds are toothless with a four chambered heart and a high metabolic rate, says Wikipedia.
Once, over a period of a week, I had separate lunches with three brilliant birdlike women writers. Their work all specializes in a kind of devoted noticing. Each of them looks as if she might, at any moment, disappear.
Is bitterness, I said to one of them, is brittleness just part of it? This feeling that you’ve done all of it wrong?
This woman drank a large black coffee and was, perhaps, a hundred pounds. She laughed and sipped her coffee, pulled the sleeves of her big sweater down over her hands.
Not for the men, she said. Not ever for the fucking men.
Fossil records indicate that birds are the last surviving group of dinosaurs, having evolved from feathered ancestors.
In a story I read once, the woman kept asking the man to fuck her, to come inside her, to prove to her that she exists. Finally, he pummels her to death with a headstone. I thought: this is a perfect articulation of what it is to be a certain kind of woman at a certain kind of age, written by a man.
Wings, which evolved from forelimbs, give most birds the ability to fly, although further speciation has led to some flightless birds.
I read fractured fragmentary books about young mothers. I read an essay, by a man, about why these books are broken up. Why these women flit, like birds, from topic to topic, moment to moment, never able to stay put. Mothers write in vignettes because they’re tired, he says. Mothers write in vignettes because they’re scared.
I say: Mothers write in vignettes because they’re learning daily how to make space for an other. That there’s joy inside of white space, joy in silence. That there’s something lifelike in not just feeling, not just thinking, inside what can’t be felt or seen or understood.
I say: Mothers write in vignettes because they’re learning daily that all of life is failing; that we’re just always failing better, failing different, failing more.
*
In his 2000 New Republic essay, “Human, all too Inhuman” James Wood took down Zadie Smith for what he coined White Teeth’s “Hysterical Realism.” Please gather all the women ever in a room and ask them what the word “hysterical” is meant to mean. Except, in Wood’s estimation, this hysteria had to do with being too smart, too intellectual, too ideological—not felt enough.
Fiction is contained by its definition, limited and separate from the world. Fiction-writing is contingent on containment: white space, language, the fact that it must end just to exist. Every choice is made at the expense of another; every success means that in other ways you’ve failed.
Next to the “Birds” listing on Wikipedia is the term Aves, followed by the word “Disambiguation,” parenthetically. Aves, it turns out, is the Latin word for Birds. The disambiguation page explains, if you click it, that these (Disambiguation) pages “are used as a process of resolving conflicts in article titles that occur when a single term can be associated with more than one topic, making that term likely to be the natural title for more than one article. In other words, disambiguations are paths leading to different articles which could, in principle, have the same title.”
For example, “Failure.” For example, “Feeling.” For example, “Birds.”
Woolf was birdlike and she killed herself. Duras was drunk. Jean Rhys, Shirley Jackson, Lucia Berlin, Doris Lessing, drunk and drunk and drunk and abandoned half her kids. What is it that these women couldn’t stomach sober? What is it that felt not worth the work? What was it about the way they failed that felt that much more like failing? Why, for them, wasn’t failing again and again, but then still trying, not just the most noble thing?
*
I feel, think, say: the most terrifying part of every day is when I stop writing, when I am no longer containing feeling inside language, inside fiction, when I must swoop down and into life.
Feature image from Vivre Sa Vie, dir. Jean-Luc Godard (1962).
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Blueprint for Feminism
In person, Ms. Adichie, 39, is warm and thoughtful, and also distinctly glamorous. She has spoken often about the pleasure she takes in fashion, and she is the face of Boots No7, a makeup brand.
Ms. Adichie has cultivated these two strands of her identity: the serious literary author and the fashion icon. In turn, she has been celebrated both by mainstream pop culture and the literati. She won a MacArthur fellowship in 2008, and her novel “Americanah” won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Her 2012 TEDx talk, “We Should All Be Feminists,” was sampled by Beyoncé in her music, and excerpts appeared on T-shirts at Dior’s Paris Fashion Week show last year. The pop and the literary threads are not opposites to her, and their merger is central to the way she presents her public self and her work.
“I think it’s very important that brilliant women step up and be hot babes,” Ms. Adichie joked in a conversation with the author Zadie Smith in 2014.
Photo
Credit
Patricia Wall/The New York Times
So in the past few years, she has become something of a star, flourishing at the unlikely juncture of fiction writing and celebrity. Her position was on full display during her visit to New York, where she started her book tour last week. She took the stage in front of a sold-out crowd at Cooper Union, and there was “this kind of unanimous scream,” said Robin Desser, a Knopf editor who has worked with Ms. Adichie for 12 years.
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“I really have never seen anything like this,” Ms. Desser said. “And I’ve published people who are really popular.”
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The main proposition of “Dear Ijeawele” is that feminism is a project that necessarily binds mothers and daughters, and that raising a daughter feminist has as much to do with what you tell yourself as what you tell her. Ms. Adichie’s first of 15 suggestions places a mother’s freedom and growth at the center of a daughter’s feminist education.
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“Be a full person,” Ms. Adichie writes. “Motherhood is a glorious gift, but do not define yourself solely by motherhood.”
The book grew partly out of the desire of Ms. Adichie’s friend, called Ijeawele in the text, to teach her daughter “to take less of the nonsense” that past generations faced. Ms. Adichie wrote her friend a letter in 2015 and published it on Facebook last year.
She said she still wasn’t thinking of it as a book but simply wanted to start a conversation. The responses she received made her even more sure that it was an important piece to write.
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“Even friends of mine — people I love — wrote, ‘why yes, we kind of agree, but why call it feminist? It’s just common sense.’ And I’m like no, it’s feminist,” Ms. Adichie said. “Or, oh it’s just humanism. Or someone said, ‘these are just democratic ideals.’ And I thought, what? It’s everything but to acknowledge the fact that gender is a problem.”
Ms. Adichie wrote the letter before she was a parent, but now she has a 17-month-old daughter whom she is trying to raise as a feminist. She and her husband split their time between Nigeria, where she grew up, and the United States.
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Ms. Adichie often comments on how race and gender play out in the United States, but her book does not tackle some of the meatier questions that have occupied the American feminist movement in recent years, most notably the role of transgender people.
On this book tour, after we spoke, Ms. Adichie made controversial comments suggesting that transgender women experience male privilege before they transition. For activists who have been grappling with these questions for years, the comments came across as ill-informed. Asked about them, Ms. Adichie suggested through a spokesman that people go to her Facebook page, where she has posted several responses, acknowledging that her comments “upset many people, and I consider their concerns to be valid.”
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“I see how my saying that we should not conflate the gender experiences of trans women with that of women born female could appear as if I was suggesting that one experience is more important than the other. Or that the experiences of trans women are less valid than those of women born female,” she wrote. “I do not think so at all — I know that trans women can be vulnerable in ways that women born female are not.”
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Ms. Adichie has written about Hillary Clinton for The Atlantic and Michelle Obama in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and last summer wrote a short story in The Times imagining Melania Trump’s experience on the campaign trail. Although she was an enthusiastic Hillary Clinton supporter in the election, she sees Mrs. Trump as a sympathetic character.
“I think there is some misogyny in the way she’s been characterized, and I think it’s ugly,” Ms. Adichie said. She becomes animated talking about the vitriol aimed at Mrs. Trump, in the same way she bristles when asked about how Mrs. Clinton was treated during the campaign. She is concerned with how society responds to powerful women across the political spectrum.
“I don’t even like talking about it, because I get very upset,” she said while describing the media’s focus on Mrs. Clinton’s “likability.” (One of the suggestions in her book is for mothers to teach daughters to “reject likability.”)
Ms. Adichie will not say what she’s working on next — “I’m very superstitious” — but continues to write and throw herself into her international speaking engagements. The satisfaction she takes in her work is at the heart of her proposal: To raise feminist daughters, mothers must take pleasure in their own achievements, follow both the challenges and delights of the work, and give themselves room to fail. Ultimately, as Ms. Adichie writes, they must be full people.
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Henry S. Lodge, Author of ‘Younger Next Year’ Books, Dies at 58
Dr. Henry S. Lodge
Dr. Henry S. Lodge, whose series of health-advice books, “Younger Next Year,” written with his patient Chris Crowley, sold in the millions, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 58.
The cause was prostate cancer, his partner, Laura Yorke, said.
In the late 1990s, Dr. Lodge became concerned about the patients he was seeing at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, where he was an internist with a specialty in geriatric medicine. Far too many in their 50s and 60s were having strokes, developing diabetes, falling down and suffering fractures.
“You take care of somebody, and you see him gaining five pounds a year and being sedentary,” he told U.S. News & World Report in 2006. “Then really awful things happen — strokes, heart attacks, and people becoming apathetic and withdrawn. It became clear to me that this was lifestyle choice. Very little of it was related to luck or genetics.”
Harry’s Rules
Tips adapted from Dr. Henry S. Lodge’s series of health-advice books, “Younger Next Year,” written with Chris Crowley.
Mr. Crowley, a retired lawyer in his 60s, was a prime example: He was 40 pounds overweight and aging poorly until Dr. Lodge put him on a regimen of regular exercise and healthy eating that returned him to his 50-year-old self.
Together the two men translated their experience into an advice book, “Younger Next Year: A Guide to Living Like 50 Until You’re 80 and Beyond,” published in 2004 by Workman. Alternating chapters, the authors delivered a breezy guide to better living that rested on seven rules that blend physical and spiritual disciplines. Readers were told to work out daily and stop eating junk food, but also to “connect and commit.”
Putting an evolutionary spin on diet and exercise, Dr. Lodge argued that humans remained, from the physical point of view, hunters and gatherers who thrived when in motion and surrounded by others.
The idea of resetting the biological clock proved deeply appealing to the swelling population of Americans approaching old age. The Hartford Courant called the book “a near cult item among some baby boomers, who appear to be fueling a good part of the sales through word of mouth, with one reading it, then pestering a friend to get a copy.”
“Younger Next Year” and the rest of the series, “Younger Next Year for Women: Live Like You’re 50 — Strong, Fit, Sexy — Until You’re 80 and Beyond” (2005), “Younger Next Year Journal” (2006) and “Younger Next Year: The Exercise Program” (2015), have more than two million copies in print and have been translated into 21 languages.
“Most aging is just the dry rot we program into our cells by sedentary living, junk food and stress,” Dr. Lodge wrote in Parade magazine in 2006. “Yes, we do have to get old, and ultimately we do have to die. But our bodies are designed to age slowly and remarkably well. Most of what we see and fear is decay, and decay is only one choice. Growth is the other.”
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Henry Sears Lodge Jr., known as Harry, was born on Oct. 20, 1958, in Boston and grew up in Beverly, Mass. His father, who died two days before him, was chairman of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority and the first president of the Metropolitan Center theater for the performing arts in Boston. His grandfather was Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the Massachusetts senator and ambassador to the United Nations. His mother, the former Elenita Ziegler, was a freelance writer and editor active in civic affairs.
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He attended Groton and took pre-med courses at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1981, he earned his medical degree from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1985.
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After completing a three-year residency at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan, he became an internist at Presbyterian Hospital (now NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital). He also taught at Columbia University Medical Center, where he was the Robert Burch family professor of medicine.
Dr. Lodge was the chairman and chief executive of New York Physicians, a multi-specialty medical group affiliated with Columbia University, and a contributing medical editor to Self magazine.
His marriage ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Yorke, he is survived by his mother; his daughters, Madeleine and Samantha Lodge; a sister, Felicity Lodge; his brothers, Fred and John; and Ms. Yorke’s sons, Elliott and Coleman Snyder.
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Jaswinder Bolina: Poet Interview | WritersDigest.com
Please join me in welcoming Jaswinder Bolina to the Poetic Asides blog!
Jaswinder Bolina
Jaswinder Bolina is an American poet and essayist. He is the author of the chapbook The Tallest Building in America (Floating Wolf Quarterly) and the full-length collections Phantom Camera (winner of the 2012 Green Rose Prize in Poetry from New Issues Press) and Carrier Wave (winner of the 2006 Colorado Prize for Poetry from the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University).
His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, been included in The Best American Poetry series, and been translated into Russian for inclusion in the Russian literary journal Polutona. His essays can be found at The Poetry Foundation, The State, Himal Southasian, The Writer, and other magazines. They have also appeared in anthologies, including the 14th edition of The Norton Reader, Language: A Reader for Writers, and Poets on Teaching.
Here’s a poem I really enjoyed from his collection Phantom Camera:
If I Persisted for Seven Lifetimes, I’d Spend Six of Them with You, by Jaswinder Bolina
but something in me would
desert you
the way I lie
awake and wait for the turbine
of your breathing
to whir steady and deep
until in your sleep
I feel simple again
like myself
and reckless again
outside the road is the apparition
of a bridge deck suspended
by cones of light
from the lampposts
a drone of rotors and axles
semis about
the slow groan
of departure
but our two snifters sit
in the sink
so a prowler come
purloining might picture you
glad and drinking beside me
our toothbrushes dally
and crowd each other daily
in a cup in the bathroom
so he might wonder
at our life as trajectory
pristine and decoded
and on hearing the warp
of a floorboard
the murmur of our bodies
stirring above him
he might think to drop
deftly out of a window
with a few items to sell
or to barter
for airfare and a room
overlooking a square
so he might step out
of that room
onto his balcony
alone in a foreign light
and feel simple again
feel reckless and modern
and himself again
*****
Forget Revision, Learn How to Re-create Your Poems!
Do you find first drafts the easy part and revision kind of intimidating? If so, you’re not alone, and it’s common for writers to think the revision process is boring–but it doesn’t have to be!
In the 48-minute tutorial Re-Creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will learn how to go about re-creating their poems with the use of 7 revision filters that can help poets more effectively play with their poems after the first draft. Plus, it helps poets see how they make revision–gasp–fun!
*****
What are you currently up to?
I’ve recently finished up work on my third book of poems and am sending it out to publishers in hopes someone will pick it up. Beyond that, I’m working on several essays while doing my regular teaching and reading. I’ve also gotten more deeply involved in community organizing in the aftermath of the election. It feels like a dire time in the U.S., and I’m finding it extremely difficult to ignore the political part of life right now.
Phantom Camera, by Jaswinder Bolina
I loved reading Phantom Camera. How did you go about getting this collection published?
Thank you for reading and for your generous praise! Publication has always been a bit of a mystery to me. So far, the best I’ve been able to come up with is writing the poems, eventually collecting them into a manuscript, then sending the manuscript around to university-sponsored book contests and independent literary presses. That’s what I did with Phantom Camera.
It wound up a finalist at something like 14 book contests over the course of two or so years before finally landing the Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press at Western Michigan University. For that prize and publication, I’ll be forever indebted to the poet and editor William Olsen who saw the manuscript fit to print and spent meticulous hours on line edits to tighten up the individual poems and the book as a whole considerably. Thanks, Bill!
Your first collection, Carrier Wave, won the 2006 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Was it easier getting the first or second collection of poetry published?
The first go-around, I didn’t really know what I was doing. An earlier draft of Carrier Wave had served as my MFA thesis at the University of Michigan. I continued working on it for about three years after receiving my degree, sending out various drafts to contests and open reading periods along the way. When Lyn Hejinian selected it for the Colorado Prize, it came as one of the great shocks of my life. Still, because I’d never written a book before, I suppose it felt impossible and easy all at once. I simply didn’t know how the process worked.
With Phantom Camera, I was more acutely aware of the ups and downs because, by then, I held preconceived notions and expectations. I suppose that second one felt more difficult because I thought it would be easier, if that makes sense.
In the end, I don’t imagine that it was really any more difficult or any easier. I simply had to grapple with the anxiety of high expectations. In many ways, my expectations are even higher the third time through, so the great challenge right now is in tempering them.
For the individual poems, do you have a submission routine?
My only routine is that I don’t send any poem out unless I feel I could read it in front of a roomful of poets I admire without feeling embarrassed. Additionally, I wait until the poems begin to feel at least a little alien, like I can’t quite remember how I came up with some turn or image or another. Once that happens, they feel ready. At that point, I’ll pick a few journals that I’ve read many issues of and admired, and then I send the poems to those places with a brief, two or three sentence cover letter and hope for the best.
Carrier Wave, by Jaswinder Bolina
I love the various forms the poems take in Phantom Camera. Is this something you like to play around with when composing your poems?
That’s absolutely something I focused on in, both, Phantom Camera and Carrier Wave. I tried to force every poem into an appearance on the page that differed as much as possible from the poem preceding. It felt like the variations in physical form pushed me into refreshing the content as best I could with every new piece. This was meant to be a defense against monotony or redundancy. I’m not sure how well it worked, but that was the idea.
In the new book, I’m actually less concerned about form in that global sense and focused far more on phrase and line break, on the combinations of words in a line. Now, that seems enough to propel me forward into the next poem.
You also teach. How does teaching writing help (or hinder) your own writing?
The only way teaching ever hinders anything is in the time it takes up, not so much in the classroom, which is almost always fun, but in the reading of student poems and offering of feedback, in the preparation of lessons and syllabi and the like. Trying to find writing time during the semester can get tough, but I usually find plenty.
Beyond that, teaching is a tremendous resource for my writing. Spending a few hours talking or thinking about poetry nearly every day tends to generate ideas for my work. This isn’t to say that I’m taking ideas from the things I’m teaching or from the student poems I’m workshopping. Rather, having my head in the game, so to speak, readies me for producing my own poems once I get to working on them.
One poet nobody knows but should. Who is it?
Honestly, I feel like there are more poets that I don’t know and should than there are those I know that others don’t. Did that sentence make sense? What I mean is, there are so many poets publishing right now—it really is something of a golden age in that respect—that it can be difficult to keep up.
That said, I think everyone should have a look at Sarah Galvin’s work. I also know for a fact that Amy Meng’s book Bridled, which should be out in the next year or so, will be amazing. Ditto Virgin, by Analicia Sotelo.
If you could pass along only one piece of advice to fellow poets, what would it be?
I’m really not one for doling out unsolicited advice. Students looking for help are one thing, but all those poets out there in the world should keep on doing what they’re doing regardless of anything I have on offer. I might not agree with all they do. I might find some of their work baffling or annoying or dull. But, I certainly do find some of it spectacular and inspiring. Keep writing. The rest will take care of itself.
*****
Robert Lee Brewer is the editor of Poet’s Market and author of Solving the World’s Problems. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
*****
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March 14, 2017
New Sentences: From ‘Serious Sweet’ by A.L. Kennedy
Credit
Illustration by Kyle Hilton
‘Inside a pocket of his coat there was the flinch of his phone as it gathered a text, the small noise that warned him of incoming communications.’
A.L. Kennedy, “Serious Sweet” (Little A, 2016), Page 56
A decade or so into the ubiquity of smartphones, our writing about them has yet to mature. We generate staggering amounts of text about their features and release dates, but not enough imagination has been applied to the more crucial thing: the way they’ve become characters in our daily lives, permanent little sprites that occupy the crevices of our clothing and time and minds. Are they more like tapeworms, hermit crabs or the birds said to clean hippos’ teeth? How do we describe the daily things they do — their high jinks and interruptions and chivalrous gestures, the way they move our minds around?
The Scottish novelist A.L. Kennedy makes her character’s phone “flinch” in his pocket and “gather” a text — vivid active verbs that strike me as a good model. Elsewhere in Kennedy’s book, the character’s phone “tickled and asked in his jacket pocket — knowing, smug”; it “chimed and shuddered against his chest, indicating a volley of texts. …”
Reading this made me pay more attention to what my own phone is doing as it shadows me through the day. When I jog, it pours a stream of music into my ears as its body slaps clumsily against my thigh. At my desk, it works as a paperweight to hold books open, reflecting ceiling tiles the way a dentist’s mirror reflects an upper molar. When I load the dishwasher, my phone fills the kitchen with echoing voices from England, Germany, India, New Zealand, Spain. When I get an unpleasant call, it shivers and spasms like a lost hiker in the final stages of freezing. Even when I am not paying attention, my phone is busy harvesting news, which it loads onto little barbed hooks and offers to me as bait — and when I take it, the phone yanks my mind out of its natural stream and off into phone-world, where objects disappear and language moves at the speed of light.
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Abrams Press’s First Title Due in May
After announcing last October that it had formed a new text-driven imprint called Abrams Press, illustrated book publisher Abrams said that the first book under the new line will be released in May.
Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America by bestselling food writer Michael Ruhlman will be published May 16. The book, which Abrams said will "explore that ways in which we produce, market, and consumer our food," was acquired by Abrams publisher Michael Sand.
Additional books from Abrams Press, which is being overseen by by executive editor Jamison Stoltz, will be released in the fall and include Two-Dimensional Man by graphic designer Paul Sahre; Breaking Bad 101, a companion to the AMC show, by television critic Alan Sepinwall; and A Stash of One’s Own edited by Clara Parkes, a collection of literary essays from some of the biggest names in the knitting world.
Commenting on the official launch of the new imprint, Abrams CEO Michael Jacobs said: “With Abrams Press, we are realizing a longstanding desire to add timely, thought-provoking narrative books to our already successful adult publishing portfolio.”
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Your Favorite TV Show Character Leaps to A Different Show
Take your favorite TV show character of all time and put him or her into a different show that you enjoy. The character should be surprised to be in unfamiliar territory, but should interact with the other characters and, if possible, help them solve a problem. You can make up a scene or insert the character into an already existing scene from that show. It’s all up to you.
Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.
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Obituary: Amy Krouse Rosenthal
Author Amy Krouse Rosenthal, known for her sunny, witty children’s books and the optimistic, relatable memoirs and guided journals she created for adults, and writer of a widely read Modern Love essay recently published in the New York Times, died of ovarian cancer on Monday, March 13 at her Chicago home. She was 51.
Rosenthal was born April 29, 1965 in Chicago, the city where she also grew up and later lived with her husband and their three children. After graduating from Tufts University in 1987, Rosenthal’s first rung on the professional ladder was in advertising, working as a copywriter for commercials at agencies that included Foote, Cone & Belding. She spent roughly a decade in that career before, as she noted in a 2015 blog post, she had what she calls her “McEpiphany”: she realized she wanted to write books as she sat a local McDonald’s with her kids while on maternity leave for her third child.
But on the road to becoming a published author she pursued other artistic endeavors, too, contributing audio pieces to National Public Radio, cofounding a company that designed t-shirts, producing a line of humorous notecards, and launching her own radio show/audio magazine, Writers’ Block Party. “My basic drive to do anything is just a love of making things,” she said in a 1994 interview for advertising magazine Shoot.
Rosenthal published her first book for adults, The Book of Eleven: An Itemized Collection of Brain Lint (Andrews McMeel) in 1998, followed by memoirs about motherhood and marriage, her popular Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (Crown, 2004) and last year’s follow-up, Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal (Dutton). In 2005, she made her children’s book debut with Little Pea, illus. by Jen Corace (Chronicle), about a young pea who is denied dessert (spinach) because he won’t finish his dinner of candy. Other well-received children’s titles include Cookies: Bite-Size Life Lessons, illus. by Jane Dyer (HarperCollins, 2006) and several sequels, Duck! Rabbit! illus. by Tom Lichtenheld (Chronicle, 2009), Spoon (Disney-Hyperion, 2009), and Uni the Unicorn (Random House, 2014). In all, Rosenthal published 28 picture books and had finished seven other forthcoming titles, including Dear Girl, written with her daughter, Paris, (HarperCollins, 2017), Uni the Unicorn and the Dream Come True (Random House), Straw (Disney-Hyperion), and Ballet Babysitter (Scholastic Press, 2018). During her work on these latest projects, especially, Rosenthal had praised the efforts of her assistant Ruby Western, who helped her keep things running smoothly for the past three years.
Though she found success in the print world, Rosenthal also continued to craft videos and short films, and designed interactive projects like “The Beckoning of Lovely,” which began with a short YouTube video titled “17 Things I Made.” That video invited viewers to Rosenthal’s favorite park in Chicago at an appointed date and time (the first one was 08/08/08 at 8:08 pm) to create something together. Those in attendance knew they could recognize Rosenthal as “the one holding a yellow umbrella,” the color of the optimism she always embraced. The collection of subsequent projects became the short film The Beckoning of Lovely Story. Rosenthal subsequently presented a TED Talk about her plan to “save the world” between 12/12/12 and 12/21/12.
On March 3, Rosenthal’s bittersweet essay “You May Want to Marry My Husband,” chronicling the love story of her marriage, and sharing news of her illness, was published online in the New York Times in the site’s Modern Love column and quickly went viral, reaching nearly four and a half million readers, according to the Times.
Rosenthal’s longtime literary agent Amy Rennert shared these words of appreciation: “What a joy it was for me to work with Amy all these years. Everything Amy did was life and love affirming. She was such a bright light with a great sense of wonder. Amy loved her family. She loved words, ideas, connections. She taught us that life’s seemingly small moments are not really small at all. Amy's final essay, written under the most difficult of circumstances, a love letter to her husband Jason, was the ultimate gift to him and also to the rest of us. She leaves behind a legacy of love and beauty and kindness.”
Victoria Rock, who edited Rosenthal’s books at Chronicle, offered this recollection: “I have an extremely clear memory of the first time I met Amy. I can see just where we sat as she showed me her dummy of what would become her first children’s book, Little Pea. She was funny and passionate. It was clear she had a big mind. I would come to know she also had a big heart. She was very insistent that she was going to illustrate as well as write her book. Over time, I convinced her that maybe her strengths were in the imagining, not the drawing (although many of her visual ideas are in that book). When the book was published, in her very Amy way, she thanked me for being as stubborn as she was. “Who else but Jen [Corace]) could have illustrated it?” she asked rhetorically. But of course, really, who else but Amy could have had the warmth and wit that created that very special book and the many that followed? Miss AmyKR—she was one for the books.” Upon the news of her illness and her wishes for “more” as posted in the Modern Love essay (and also in her 2015 book I Wish You More), Chronicle Books launched on March 10 the “I Wish You More”/Yellow umbrella campaign as part of #loveforamykrouserosenthal on Instagram, as an expression of love and support for Rosenthal and her family.
And Rosenthal’s editor at Penguin Random House, Maria Modugno, recalled a recent visit: “I visited Amy at her home in Chicago just a few weeks ago. We had three new books in the works and there was so much to talk about. The morning meeting ran into the afternoon and Amy decided to make lunch for us. I had to leave behind the beautiful pear she chose for dessert. “Just save it for the next time I see you,” I said kiddingly. A few days later, Amy sent me a framed photograph of the pear along with the words “Amy and Maria, What a pair!” Amy loved words and wordplay and seemed to find them everywhere, not just in her books. I really wish I could see her again.”
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Scott Turow: Bonus WD Interview Outtakes
Author, attorney, advocate—Scott Turow’s collective roles range in scope and responsibility, yet each is a key exhibit in the mountain of evidence that upholds his position in writing’s upper echelon.
Over the past four decades—2017 marks the 40th anniversary of his acclaimed debut, the law-school memoir One L—Turow has published 11 bestsellers (nine of them legal thrillers), served two stints as president of The Authors Guild, and penned op-eds for The New York Times and essays for The Atlantic, all while continuing to practice law (most of it pro bono) in his hometown of Chicago. When asked why he didn’t quit his day job after finding literary success (the way most other lawyers-turned-bestsellers do), his response is firm: “For me, having to produce a book a year would be a form of slavery.”
Indeed, it’s that kind of conviction that keeps Turow’s body of work squarely in the realm of art.
As president of The Authors Guild, he fought relentlessly for writers to receive a fair wage equal to their creative output. His background as a litigator made him an ideal candidate for the position, targeting issues such as intellectual property rights and e-book piracy during his tenure.
With one foot in the literary world and the other in law, the twain meet in his novels. All are largely set in Kindle County, a fictional facsimile of Chicago’s Cook County, where the Cubs are called the Trappers, the Lake looms large and the courts are packed with complex cases. It’s a setting shaped in his celebrated first novel—1987’s Presumed Innocent, later made into an eponymous film starring Harrison Ford—in which deputy prosecutor Rusty Sabich is charged with the murder of a beautiful colleague with a mysterious past.
His latest, Testimony, Turow’s first in four years, drops in May: a suspenseful globe-trotter in which middle-aged attorney Bill ten Boom leaves behind his life in Kindle County for a role with the International Criminal Court in The Hague. His new position takes him to Bosnia, where he investigates an alleged genocide, has a fling with a sultry barrister and becomes involved in the pursuit of a Serbian war criminal. Turow deftly explores identity as a theme both overt and subtle, as ten Boom struggles with a family secret that has roots reaching back to Nazi Germany.
Turow took a short recess from the courthouse and his current work-in-progress to chat with WD from his home in the Chicago suburbs. Look for the feature-length interview in the May/June 2017 Writer’s Digest. In these online exclusive outtakes, Turow talks discusses the role setting plays in his fiction, and why the backdrop of his latest, Testimony, is so different from past works.
Setting plays a significant role in your novels, with most taking place in Kindle County. But in Testimony, the primary setting is The Hague. At times, the Netherlands and Bosnia are painted so vividly they almost feel like characters of their own. What made you decide to deviate for this new book, and how do you generally view the interplay between setting and plot?
Years ago—in 2000—I was on book tour in the Netherlands. The American ambassador at that time—Ambassador Schneider—invited me to The Hague to have a reception in my honor. Naturally, The Hague, as the novel makes clear, is a center of legal activity, so she invited many of the American lawyers who were working in town to come to this reception. A group who were working at the Yugoslav Tribunal (because there was no International Criminal Court at the time) kind of cornered me and said, “You’ve got to write a novel about this place.” That idea had immediate appeal because I didn’t think I was acquainted with anything close to that. Then the ICC came into being over the years, but I wanted to go back to that.
Bosnia was sort of a byproduct of that in the sense that the other thing I’d always wanted to write about was the Roma. It goes back to the time that I had a gravely ill family member in a hospital in Chicago and it so happened that [a gypsy] was dying in the same hospital. It was not an atypical story that the nurses were running around closing the doors to all the hospital rooms because valuables were disappearing. I remember coming in one morning to visit this family member and all of the ashtrays—ashtrays on stanchions—all disappeared from the reception area. Like everybody else, everyone was on guard, so I began to think to myself, What are the terms that these people live by that this is OK with them? Both committing these petty crimes against the gadjo and bearing the rejection that was going to come with it.
It just always was an interesting question to me.
So, writing about the Roma—it’s got to be a war crime because that’s what the ICC does. I began to wonder, How would a war crime against the Roma have occurred? Especially if I wanted to think about it in American terms.
The obvious conflict for a plot was the conflict between the ICC and Americans being subject to its jurisdiction potentially. Then when were there American soldiers presumably on European soil? And that led to Bosnia. As an aside, though, the Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon is a Chicagoan and he’s somewhere between a friend and an acquaintance. Reading what [he] wrote about Bosnia, and what my friend Scott Simon wrote—a wonderful novel set in Sarajevo called Pretty Birds—left me with a sense that there was a lot I didn’t know. So things sort of conspired and that struck me as an interesting place to learn about.
I’m curious to hear about your research process. In Testimony, you explore the aftermath of the Bosnian War, and in doing so demonstrate extensive knowledge of the conflict and of the inner workings of the ICC. How did you prepare for a book composed of such complex threads?
It’s different for each book. Some things are closer to my own experience than others. In this case, one of the odd things is that I don’t have to leave my chair in suburban Chicago to watch the proceedings at the ICC because those are broadcast over the internet. So it wasn’t getting a feel for what the courtroom was like that propelled me to The Hague. It was learning what the milieu around the court and life in The Hague was like. I found that just sort of jolting, in the sense that I could be sitting in my office and watching the proceedings 6000 miles away. I spent a lot of time with different people who worked around the court—they were very, very generous with their time. I’m sure if the press office had had its way there would’ve been more conditions on these interviews, but people were willing to meet me without that. I listened to a lot of people, listened to a lot of stories, and was in their offices for much of a week and kept my eyes open and listened to other people in The Hague, some of them had nothing to do with the court. I love The Hague as a town. I thought it was an amazingly interesting place. Doing good is really sort of the principle industry there. That makes it an unusual city.
As far as Bonsia is concerned, I knew I would need a translator. I needed to be near where the American troops were stationed, so that meant most of my time was spent near Tusla instead of Sarajevo. But [a friend] had told me that he thought Tusla was a great setting because it had always been Bosnia’s most polyglot city. The Catholics and the Muslims and the Orthodox really co-existed there in much greater amity. The war had sort of torn the spirit of the city in some ways, most deeply (even though the physical and casualties were far greater in and around Sarejevo). It was a very interesting place to be. I came away with a deep affection for Bosnia, too. Don’t ask me what I think the Bosnian future is, because it’s forbidding. But as a people they share remarkable warmth, great cuisine, and a lot of pride in what’s an extraordinarily beautiful country.
While your novels are often driven forward by the case at the core of the book, the personal lives of your characters add further layers. In Testimony, one of the core themes is identity, as the protagonist struggles through a midlife crisis and questions about his family history. How do you entwine these internal conflicts with the more tangible plot?
I wish I could answer that. I didn’t start out with the idea that Bill [ten Boom, the protagonist] was going to discover … or basically be wrestling with the consequences of the fact that his parents had hidden elements of their identity. But all of these crimes that the ICC investigates, in almost every case, are related to ethnic identity. It’s heavy in the themes, and pretty natural to want to have a protagonist who’s got some conflict. Now if you take an American and put him overseas you’re halfway there anyway. But I’ve always been fascinated by these stories—many years ago a friend of mine in the United Kingdom told me a story about her parents. And I think she was 30, rather than 40 [as ten Boom was], when her parents sat her down and told her that she’d been raised as a high-church Anglican and her parents told her they were actually Holocaust survivors who’d been hiding that fact since they’d got to England shortly after the war. I was deeply struck by the story and the way she had reacted to this. She was, like Bill, pretty upset with her parents. She wished she had grown up being in on the secret. That’s one of those stories you hear as a writer that you tuck away and think, There’s a lot to this. There’s a book in here somewhere.
So when I began to intuitively recognize the issues of identity that are essential to the war crimes the ICC investigates, it was natural that this story came out of my unconscious. I said, “Oh, this is perfect.” It also then helps to explain what the midlife dissatisfaction is that this man has experienced, and why he feels, as he puts it, that he’s never really felt at home with himself. It starts fitting together. These ideas don’t feel to me intuitively that they have some kind of overall integrity. It’s not like I just to inflict them on the book. As I said, I wasn’t long into the process of exploring that I began when the idea of this hidden Jewish identity to me.
Tyler Moss is the managing editor of Writer’s Digest.
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