Roy Miller's Blog, page 249

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Published on March 11, 2017 02:39

How Diverse Is African Art? A 54-Volume Encyclopedia Will Try for an Answer

Nana Boateng, a writer and poet editing the literature section of the Ghana volume, said: “At one point I was trying to compare Ghanaian poetic forms, so I went on the internet and there was just nothing. So though I know about these poets and writers, they are not online. So to have an encyclopedia that will be a reference point for generations is exciting. We are giving ourselves the opportunity to learn from what has already happened and build on it.”

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The Kiosk Museum at the Chale Wote festival 2016 in the Jamestown district of Accra, Ghana.

Credit

Ofoe Amegavie, via ANO

The project, which received a $40,000 grant from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2015, will also exist as physical exhibitions. The first one opened this month at the ANO gallery in central Accra, coinciding with the 60th anniversary of Ghana’s independence. It includes historical photographs of the country’s formation and videos and objects that were collected in Accra last summer, when the Cultural Encyclopedia opened a kiosk that Ms. Oforiatta-Ayim called a moving museum.

“It is such an important thing,” said David Adjaye, the British-Ghanaian architect who designed the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, and wrote a book about his experiences traveling throughout Africa, “because actually East Africans don’t know about West Africans’ culture, and West Africans don’t know about North Africans’ culture, and North Africans don’t know about Southern Africans’ culture — and I am being simplistic here — but it is very hard. So this writing and forming of identity of the continent is really important.”

Ms. Oforiatta-Ayim did research for Mr. Adjaye on the 2010 “Visionary Africa” exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. She and two other researchers traced 12 African countries’ production centers from past to present.

“So we looked at how art was produced and exhibited now — like museums and galleries — and how art was produced, for example, in 19th-century Yorubaland,” she said, referring to a cultural region of the Yoruba people in West Africa. “It set off this ‘Oh, this is doable,’” she added. “Having a research team, working with them over a year, that was where the idea was physically born because I worked on a project that made it possible.”

In 2011, she traveled by car with the Invisible Borders project — African photographers who head to different spots across the continent each year — to collect materials and connect with artists, curators and cultural producers.

“So I would just film, interview, take pictures and just gather information at every point,” said Ms. Oforiatta-Ayim, who has worked for the United Nations in New York and the British Museum in London. “That was also how I knew it was possible to travel the continent, and I know that in each country there are ways of collecting this information. At the end of the trip I thought, O.K., this is now about building a team and doing this on a bigger scale.”

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“Homowo Boy Staff Bearer” by the photographer and artist Nii Obodai Provencal, shown in the Kiosk Museum, 2015.

Credit

Nii Obodai Provencal, via ANO

She decided it made the most sense to start with Ghana. Ms. Oforiatta-Ayim invited Ghanaian experts in fields like music, theater, filmmaking and literature to a 10-day workshop in St.-Louis, Senegal, the oldest colonial settlement in French West Africa.

“It was an amazing time,” said Anita Afonu, a documentarian whose “Perished Diamonds” (2013) examined the history of filmmaking in Ghana. “And it was very eye-opening, meeting other Ghanaian artists, and discussing ideas and the way forward.”

Ms. Oforiatta-Ayim recognizes that the overall project will not be finished for many years. It will probably take two more years to complete the Ghana volume, which will soon include interactive maps of cultural institutions across the country. Then other countries can begin to add to the encyclopedia.

“So if other countries are going to take it on, then we are going to have a manual like, ‘This is how we collect things, this is what we did wrong and this is what we did right,’” she said. “There is no reason that, once we have the manual, there can’t be five countries at the same time working. So what I am doing is building teams in different countries.”

The encyclopedia is being coordinated under the auspices of ANO, an arts institution Ms. Oforiatta-Ayim set up in 2002 that has put together projects for events including the Liverpool Biennial and Dak’Art in Senegal. ANO has not had a physical space until now, and there — at least for the next two years — will correspond with the moving museum as it collects artifacts across the 10 regions of Ghana. So, for example, in April, when the pop-up kiosk is in Cape Coast, the theater director and performance artist Elizabeth Sutherland, whose family hails from there, will perform at ANO.

“To have a space that is online, accessible to a lot of people, and existing as a publication is really important for academic but also popular culture and reference,” said Ms. Sutherland, who is a granddaughter of the Ghanaian writer Efua Sutherland.

The Nigerian musician Keziah Jones, helping set up connections to his country’s arts scene, agreed: “What makes up the culture itself? And that is why it is open-ended and it is widespread in music, arts, language, dance. Every possible aspect is used and usable. It’s trying to tell your own stories and taking hold of your narrative.”

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Published on March 11, 2017 01:38

The Weird Things People Leave in Books

To mark your place in a book, do you turn over the corner of the page, or do you grab the closest thing and use it as a bookmark? How about bending back the spine of one of those fat paperbacks? Do you write in the margins, underline, doodle? Or is even the idea of any of these too terrible to contemplate?

I’ll happily do all of them; I like my books to look as if they’ve been read. A book that shows the marks of the reader means it was loved, or perhaps unputdownable. For me, toast crumbs in between the pages means it was read at the breakfast table, a bus ticket bookmark says it was open on the way to work, and a coffee stain shows it was read on a park bench during a lunch break.

I’m talking about the books I own rather than library books, although I do admit to underlining a few passages and scribbling in the margins of borrowed books when I was a student (and paying more attention to the sections underlined by previous readers). But I never went as far as the English playwright Joe Orton and his boyfriend Kenneth Halliwell (later, his murderer), who defaced 72 library books in the 1960s. They stole them from their local library because they didn’t like the selection on offer and doctored the blurbs on the inside and the pictures on the covers: pasting cutouts of giant cats on an Agatha Christie novel and The Three Faces of Eve, among many other changes. The pair were caught after a sting operation and sentenced to six months in prison.

Perhaps such extensive defacing of library books happens less frequently now, but it seems we still like to leave things behind in the books we read. Tin House, the publisher of my novels, recently asked librarians to describe the most interesting, memorable, or just plain weird thing found in a book. Some answers weren’t so surprising—they were probably what the borrower had at hand to keep his or her place: a photograph, a ticket to a play, a wine label. More interesting were the three lots of money, the two paychecks, and the divorce papers.

However, what’s puzzling is the quantity of food the librarians found: a whole cooked shrimp (Was it flattened? Did it smell?), pickle slices, french fries, and a Pop-Tart. Three reported finding slices of bologna left between the pages. I do like to snack while I read, but generally the food doesn’t end up as a bookmark. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer, but I can’t help thinking about the readers here. Perhaps bologna is the snack of choice for children who have just come home from school: quick, cheap, and easy. Read your library book and I’ll give you a slice of bologna. Unfortunately the librarians didn’t say whether the slices of bologna were all found in children’s books.

But what about the two occurrences of raw bacon? Why raw? Somehow, I can understand cooked bacon. Perhaps breakfast has been put in front of the child—the one who didn’t eat the bologna the afternoon before (now that the child knows nothing bad will come from leaving food in library books)—and he or she doesn’t like bacon. Where better to hide it than in between the pages? But raw? I can’t even begin to think up a scenario for raw bacon.

One of the three winners of the Tin House competition found a taco “perfectly preserved and pressed like a flower in the middle of a book.” Another, amazingly, came across a photograph (printed in the book) of her Russian grandparents and uncle who had been persecuted for their religious beliefs. And the third found a sealed, stamped envelope that had never been sent. The librarian who discovered it said she put it in the post; I’m sure I couldn’t have resisted steaming it open first. There’s a story in the making around what the recipient thought when the letter arrived.

I will continue to turn over the corners of my books, drink coffee while reading them, and write in the margins, while I’ll carry on treating library books a little more gently. But perhaps now and again I’ll leave something in one before I return it: an old photograph, a cinema ticket, maybe even a little note to the next reader. What about you?

Claire Fuller’s second novel Swimming Lessons was published by Tin House in February.

A version of this article appeared in the 03/13/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: You Found What?

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Published on March 11, 2017 00:36

March 10, 2017

Emma Brockes: Writers on Writing

Emma Brockes is an award-winning journalist and the author of the memoirs What Would Barbara Do?: How Musicals Changed My Life and She Left Me the Gun, a portrait of her relationship with her mother and an investigation into the dark legacy of her maternal grandfather, a pedophile whom Brockes’ mother unsuccessfully tried to have convicted. In She Left Me the Gun, Brockes investigates her late mother’s childhood in South Africa and describes visiting that country after her mother’s death. She goes to unearth court records and speak with family members, to piece together the story that her mother had been unable to reveal fully to Brockes before she passed away. Brockes was born and raised in England, where she attended Oxford University, wrote plays and worked for The Guardian, before moving to New York, where she currently lives and continues to write for The Guardian and other publications, including The New York Times.

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned about writing?

I’m a journalist by training, and have always worked primarily for a daily newspaper, which means that from my first reporting job at the age of 22 onward, I’ve been accustomed to writing to short deadlines. Even so, I think for a long time I labored under the delusion that there was something a tiny bit magical about writing something good. I would fret about the chemistry of what I was writing, and rev endlessly on what I took to be small defects in the opening lines or pages. I would decide I couldn’t write after 3 p.m. (Not for the newspaper – I had a 6 p.m. deadline, so didn’t even start writing until 3 p.m. most days). But I made a distinction in my head between the nuts and bolts of journalism, and what I thought of as the posh end of writing, which is book work. It took me until my mid-30s, after I’d written my second book, to finally banish this snobbery and understand that there is, beyond a certain point, no correlation between the time spent on something and how well it turns out. I learned that good writing is what happens when you stop thinking about the writing itself and think more straightforwardly about what it is you’re trying to say, that it’s a question of mechanics, not magic.
How has that helped you as a writer?

It stopped me being quite such an arse when it came to writing books, which I now approach with my normal, journalist’s head on. I like fancy writing; I like the flips you can do to show off your dexterity. But those aren’t the things to focus on. I used to think that even the best journalism was a transitional phase you went through en route to something better – but it isn’t. For me, the skills that underpin good journalism underpin everything: brevity, angle, observation, discipline, structure and, above all else, story. When things are going well, the posh bits write themselves. It’s the tables and chairs – the lines like “He went into the room and sat down” – that accrete, over the course of a story, to make something real.

—Gabriel Packard is the associate director of the creative writing MFA program at Hunter College in New York City.

PW Picks: Books of the Week, March 13, 2017

This week: new books from Hari Kunzru, Elif Batuman, and more.

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[How to Craft Characters Scene by Scene]

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Published on March 10, 2017 22:33

The Differences Between a Crime Novel, Mystery Novel and Thriller Novel

Every writer’s job is to give the reader what she wants in a way she doesn’t expect. [Like this quote? Click here to Tweet and share it!] (And it’s wise to remember that every agent and editor is foremost a reader, too.)

One of the first things to consider when setting out, therefore, is what kinds of expectations your story creates, so you can go about gratifying readers in surprising ways.

This is particularly true of writing in a genre, where conventions can seem ironclad—or all too often degrade into formula. And formula, by definition, surprises no one.

This guest post is by David Corbett, who is the award-winning author of five novels, the story collection Killing Yourself to Survive and the nonfiction work, The Art of Character. David is a regular contributor to Writer’s Digest. He resides in Northern California with his wife and their Wheaten terrier. Find him online at davidcorbett.com.

Follow him on Twitter @DavidCorbett_CA.

The suspense genres in particular have a number of seemingly hard and fast rules that a writer defies at his peril. And yet the most satisfying mysteries, thrillers and crime stories find a way to create a new take on those rules to fashion something fresh, interesting, original. In other words, while you don’t want to mistakenly pitch your cozy mystery to an agent who wants only high-octane thrillers, you also want to make sure that when you connect with that cozy-loving agent, she’ll be jumping to sign you because your cozy stands out from the rest.

Here’s a map to help you navigate subgenre subtleties.

Mystery Novels

A crime is committed—almost always a murder—and the action of the story is the solution of that crime: determining who did it and why, and obtaining some form of justice. The best mystery stories often explore man’s unique capacity for deceit—especially self-deceit—and demonstrate a humble respect for the limits of human understanding. This is usually considered the most cerebral (and least violent) of the suspense genres.

Thematic emphasis: How can we come to know the truth? (By definition, a mystery is simply something that defies our usual understanding of the world.)

Structural distinctions: The basic plot elements of the mystery form are:

The baffling crime
The singularly motivated investigator
The hidden killer
The cover-up (often more important than the crime itself, as the cover-up is what conceals the killer)
Discovery and elimination of suspects (in which creating false suspects is often part of the killer’s plan)
Evaluation of clues (sifting the true from the untrue)
Identification and apprehension of the killer.

Additional Reader Expectations:

The Hero: Whether a cop, a private eye, a reporter or an amateur sleuth, the hero must possess a strong will to see justice served, often embodied in a code (for example, Harry Bosch’s “Everyone matters or no one matters” in the popular Michael Connelly series). He also often possesses not just a great mind but great empathy—a fascination not with crime, per se, but with human nature.

The Villain: The crime may be a hapless accident or an elaborately staged ritual; it’s the cover-up that unifies all villains in the act of deceit. The attempt to escape justice, therefore, often best personifies the killer’s malevolence. The mystery villain is often a great deceiver, or trickster, and succeeds because she knows how to get others to believe that what’s false is true.

Setting: Although mysteries can take place anywhere, they often thematically work well in tranquil settings—with the crime peeling back the mask of civility to reveal the more troubling reality beneath the surface.

Reveals: Given its emphasis on determining the true from the untrue, the mystery genre has more reveals than any other—the more shocking and unexpected, the better.

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Mystery Subgenres

➤ Cozy: One of the ironic strengths of this subgenre is the fact that, by creating a world in which violence is rare, a bloody act resonates far more viscerally than it would in a more urban or disordered setting. Reader Expectations: A unique and engaging protagonist: Father Brown, Miss Marple, Kinsey Millhone. The crime should be clever, requiring ingenuity or even brilliance on the hero’s part to solve. Secondary characters can be coarse, but never the hero—or the author. Justice triumphs in the end, and the world returns to its original tranquility.

➤ Hard-boiled: The hero is a cop or PI, tough and capable. The moral view is often that of hard-won experience in the service of innocence or decency. The hero tends to be more world-weary than bitter—but that ice can get slippery. Reader Expectations: A strong hero who can “walk the mean streets but who is not himself mean,” as Raymond Chandler once put it. A realistic portrayal of crime and its milieu, with detailed knowledge of criminal methods and investigative techniques. The style is often brisk and simple, reflecting the unpretentious nature of the hero, who is intelligent but not necessarily learned. Although the hero almost always sees that justice prevails, there is usually a bittersweet resolution. The streets remain mean; such is the human condition.

➤ Police Procedural: A cousin to the hard-boiled subgenre, with the unit or precinct taking over for the lone cop. Reader Expectations: Much like the hard-boiled detective story, but with a larger cast and special focus on police tactics, squad-room psychology, station-house politics, and the tensions between the police and politicians, the media and the citizenry.

➤ Medical, Scientific or Forensic Mystery: A refinement of the police procedural in which the protagonists—doctors, medical examiners, forensic pathologists or other technical experts—use intelligence and expertise, not guns, as their weapons. Reader Expectations: Similar to the police procedural, with extra emphasis on the physical details of analyzing unusual evidence.

➤ Legal or Courtroom Drama: The crime is seen through the eyes of the lawyers prosecuting or defending the case. Reader Expectations: A meticulous rendering of criminal court procedure and politics, along with how police and prosecutors work together (or don’t).

wd_thriller

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Crime

In this genre the focus is on the contest of wills between the lawman hero and the outlaw opponent, and their differing views of morality and the aspects of society they represent. The greatest crime stories deal with a moral accounting on the part of the hero for his entire life, or provide some new perspective on the tension between society and the individual.

Thematic emphasis: What is a just society? The story world of the novel is out of balance, somewhere between a state of nature (where chaos prevails and those with money and/or guns wield power) and a police state (where paranoia prevails and the state monopolizes power). The hero hopes in some way to rectify that imbalance.

Other moral themes can include the challenge of decency, honor and integrity in a corrupt world; individual freedom versus law and order; and the tension between ambition and obligations to others.

Structural distinctions: There is seldom any “mystery” as to who the criminal is. Typically the story starts with a brilliant or daring crime, and then a cat-and-mouse game of wits and will ensues, with the tension created by the increasing intensity of the battle between the opponents. The underlying question is: Will the cops prevail before the opponent stages his next crime?

Given the similarity to war and action stories, the prose often tends toward the naturalistic.

Additional Reader Expectations:

The Hero: Usually a tough and capable cop (or vigilante) who believes in the society she defends despite its flaws, the crime fiction hero is often seen as an outcast but is revealed to be the most morally engaged character in the story.

The Villain: Routinely a tough and brilliant criminal who considers the system rigged and the society inherently flawed, he is often a kind of Luciferian rebel—the rogue individual par excellence—even if he commands a crew
or organization.

Setting: This genre gravitates toward urban locales, but suburban, rural and even wilderness settings have all been used to great effect. Let the setting ground the moral theme.

Reversals: Just as the mystery genre, by focusing on the search for truth, obliges numerous reveals, the crime genre, by focusing on battle, obliges numerous reversals—with the hero and the villain trading knockout blows and suffering serious setbacks to their respective plans.

[The 5 Biggest Fiction Writing Mistakes (& How to Fix Them)]

The Noir Subgenre

Here, the criminal, or someone who is morally compromised—perhaps even a cop—serves as hero. The moral calculus is usually Bad vs. Worse.

Generally, the “hero” finds himself in some sort of desperate situation, or is tempted into one by an opportunity he sees as his last, best chance at the brass ring. The lure of sex or money routinely leads to violence and often betrayal. If the hero is a cop, the reader is never quite sure whether he’s going to solve a crime or commit one. Or both. Reader Expectations: The real allure is the psychology of temptation and desperation, the little guy trying not to drown. Readers expect plot twists, often based on the hero’s inability to see what he’s up against.

Thriller

Where mystery stories represent the most cerebral of the three major suspense genres, and crime stories the most dramatic, thrillers are typically the most emotional, focusing on the fear, doubt and dread of the hero as she faces some form of what Dean Koontz has deemed “terrible trouble.” This genre is a hybrid of mystery and horror. However, the thriller also shares a literary lineage with the epic and myth. Monsters, terror and peril prevail.

Thematic emphasis: The dangerous world we live in, the vulnerability of the average person, and the inherent threat of the unknown.

Structural distinctions: The plot often proceeds along these lines:

A devastating crime is about to be committed, or has been committed with the threat of an even worse one in the wings.

The perpetrator is known, but his guilt is not absolutely certain—or the hero wishes not to accept the truth of his guilt. (The uncertainty enhances the suspense.)

The hero is under constant attack as she tries to definitively prove the perpetrator’s guilt and/or stop the next atrocity. (Note the difference from the mystery genre, where the villain typically remains hidden.)

Additional Reader Expectations:

The Hero: Given the relentless attack the villain inflicts, and the emphasis on terror and dread, the thriller hero must be vulnerable—not just physically but psychologically.

The Villain: In the best thrillers, the villain either targets the hero specifically from the outset or learns through the course of the story what his particular weaknesses and wants are, and targets them for ruthless attack.

Setting: Whether as small as a cottage in the woods or as large as the planet, the world the hero seeks to protect represents everything she values. The stakes are ultimate.

Thriller Subgenres

➤ Epic Thriller: This usually concerns the threat of some catastrophe affecting whole communities, cities, countries, even the planet. The threat need not be total devastation—the assassination of a leader will do—but the effect of the action must be profound.

The villain can be a terrorist, a diabolical genius, or an ordinary person with an oversized grudge and a unique capacity for damage.

Given the scope of the threat, the protagonist must possess the skills to defeat the villain, and thus is often a soldier, a spy, a trained assassin, a cop, or a civilian with a special skill set. The action is brisk, even nonstop, and the climax needs to be both thoroughly foreshadowed (we need to know the basic parameters of the threat all along, and the measures being taken to stop it) and unexpected (plot twists are not optional—they’re required). This is a pull-out-all-the-stops genre. Reader Expectations: A diabolical plot, a superbly capable and motivated nemesis, a hero with an impossible mission, breakneck pacing, and clever but credible plot twists.

➤ Psychological Thriller/Suspense: Here the threat is still diabolical but more contained, even intimate—usually targeting the protagonist and/or his family—and the hero is often a relatively “ordinary” man, woman or child. The pacing is a bit more deliberate, to reflect the ordinary person’s difficulty understanding the exact nature of the threat—and the enemy—and then struggling to respond. The third act, however, moves briskly. Reader Expectations: Emphasis is on the eerie over the sensational. Twists again are key, with chapters routinely ending in one disturbing revelation after another. Character is more important than pacing, but pacing can’t be neglected. This subgenre demands an ability to reveal dread and panic without explosions or car chases.

➤ Supernatural Thriller: This subgenre is something of a hybrid, in that the nemesis presents an overwhelming threat—he might be Satan himself—and yet that threat is often focused on a single soul or a mere few, rather than the whole of mankind, at least within the story. Reader Expectations: An amplification of the powers available to the villain, whether the threat posed is truly spiritual or merely psychological in nature. Also, obviously, a credibly rendered menace from the spirit realm.

Stumbling into a mystery, thriller or crime story without understanding what agents, editors and readers expect is a recipe for disaster. Know what they want—and then find a way to gratify that desire in ways they don’t see coming. Your efforts will be rewarded with a resounding yes.

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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.

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Size Matters in Fay Weldon’s Novel of Aristocratic Manners

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Sebastian Willnow/DPP

BEFORE THE WAR
By Fay Weldon
298 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $26.99.

“It seemed to be one of life’s wonders,” observes Sherwyn Sexton, the not wholly unlikable cad at the center of Fay Weldon’s lively if sometimes frustrating new novel, “Before the War,” “that nothing happens and nothing happens and all of a sudden everything happens.” The line is a sly wink in a novel full of playful authorial interjections, in this case channeling an aphorism widely attributed to Weldon herself.

Eventfulness is indeed what fuels this comedy of aristocratic manners, set in a bygone era when Britain is in a state of collective shell shock and relative deprivation. “We like to dream the costume drama of Edwardian times, all fine clothes, glittering jewels and clean sexy profiles,” Weldon writes, “but we are less drawn to the 20 years between the wars.”

We first meet 20-year-old Vivien Ripple in 1922 as she awaits a London-bound train, en route to meet Sherwyn Sexton. He is handsome, but under 5-foot‑7 — some four inches shorter than Vivien. Size matters in this novel, not just in height but in, er, length, about which we learn plenty. But here physicality isn’t at issue: This will be a marriage of convenience. Vivien has money; Sherwyn can’t afford to resole his shoes. He’s an aspiring writer; her father is a publisher. So begins this maelstrom of twisty plot points, complicated entanglements, pregnancies of ambiguous etiology and colorful if sometimes stock characters.

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Historical details, which abound, are often fascinating. (Who knew that beards interfere with gas masks?) And Weldon’s descriptions can beguile. Adela, Vivien’s self-absorbed mother, is observed in a mink coat, “hiding inside it, as if she were some tiny furry Alpine creature evading predators.” Adela, who first appeared in Weldon’s Love and Inheritance trilogy, is grimly funny and entirely oblivious. She never understood the fuss about Germany invading Austria. “Apart from a few details like what they ate for breakfast and what kind of bed they slept in,” Austrians and Germans seem to her to be the same.

At times, “Before the War” can offer wry social satire, but with its many quirks and repetitions it sometimes reads like breezy “notes to self.” Weldon appears to be having great fun, periodically bursting onto the page to speak to the reader or to offer a 21st-century reference, including one to the best-selling 2012 novel “Gone Girl.” Early on, she even confides a plot quandary: “I haven’t yet quite determined whose fault Vivvie’s death is going to be. . . . I will let you know.”

Another Weldonian idiosyncrasy is a fondness for the word “anyway,” which appears in lieu of a more artful transition at least six times in the first 22 pages. The reader will find this either cute or highly annoying. We are told twice that it took three years for Sherwyn to write his novel and that his employer underpays him. And Adela twice laments that her husband was present as she gave birth to Vivien, as if they were in a “foaling box.”

Speaking of Vivien, potentially the novel’s most intelligent and intriguing character, she is rendered two-dimensional, reduced to a barrage of adjectives about size, from “large” and “ungainly” to “crude,” “excessively sized,” a “giantess” and an “elephant,” with hands that are “raw, red peasant things dangling from the end of intolerably long and large limbs.”

Weldon tells us (twice) that unattractive women are generally ignored in literature and film and asks, “Why should I break the rules?” Given the evident delight she takes in balking at narrative convention, you have to wish she had made an exception for her unfortunate heroine.

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Published on March 10, 2017 20:30

On Persistence: The Lessons of a Middle-Aged Debut Novelist

Though we gaze at each other across a socioeconomic divide, I’ve discovered over time that my dreams are similar in form, if not substance, to those of the students who enter my developmental English classes each semester.

Reggie was one of them, an aspiring nurse and a student in my accelerated English classes, which are designed to help students quickly catch up to their peers. The courses appeal to adults returning to school who are at a bend in the river and eager to put some difficult passages behind them. In Reggie’s case, this included a two-year prison sentence and a relocation from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh.

Reggie was slim, wiry and strong, with an almost pretty face that was occasionally lit with a wide, angelic smile. He lived in public housing, worked too many hours at a Lone Star Grill on the outskirts of town, and depended on the Allegheny County Port Authority to get him everywhere. He had a daughter back home in Philadelphia whom he spoke of only in passing—“Hitching a ride with a buddy to Philly to see my little girl”—but in those moments, when his voice would rise a half-octave, it was clear how much he loved her and missed her.

For the classes he took with me, we read a long passage from John Edgar Wideman’s Brother and Keepers. In it, Wideman tells the story of his brother Robby, who was imprisoned for life for a crime he committed that resulted in a man’s death, and the burden of sorrow, regret, and anguish he experiences about his mother, his child, and the web of history and circumstance that led to the fateful moment. Robby says, “Here I sit today behind that story. Nobody to blame but my own self. I know that now. But things was fucked up in the streets. You could fall in them streets, Brother. Low.”

Reggie recognized himself in Wideman’s story—he had a younger brother back home whom he knew he’d let down when he’d gone to jail on drug charges—but he didn’t write about his siblings or his daughter beyond a few brief references, possibly because, like many students, such revelations might compromise his privacy and dignity. He was more interested in the sociopolitical underpinnings of the essays we read that also framed his own story. In the case of the Wideman passage, this was the plight of black families living in blighted, high-crime neighborhoods, circumstances which Reggie believed hadn’t changed in the 40 years that had passed since Robby’s conviction.

Reggie was fairly indifferent to the practical matters of writing essays: thesis, summary, quotation, and analysis. He struggled with grammar and punctuation, skills that often block community college students’ progress through developmental courses. He missed too many classes, turned in too many essays late, spent too many hours on buses, took too much overtime, and slept too little. (His story is like many.) At the end of the semester he was barely scraping by with a C in both courses he took with me.

He came to my office on a warm day in May just after classes had ended, two late papers in hand. He asked me what grades I was thinking of giving him, and when I told him, he shook his head and said, “I get that, but see, I’m failing math. I’m gonna lose my funding if I don’t get at least a B in your classes. It’s all about grade point average. I don’t make 2.5, I’m done. Any extra credit or anything I can do to move those grades up?” But the term was over, and there was no time and nothing more to be done. I’d heard similar requests from students throughout my teaching career. His appeal was an academic one, but his plea was personal.

I told Reggie I’d consider it, and he shook my hand, thanked me, and left. Most likely, if I didn’t raise his grades to a level he hadn’t earned, he would not only lose his financial aid, but likely be placed on academic probation or suspension, and his college aspirations would end there.

I’ve struggled with unfulfilled aspirations in my own life. At age 17, I decided I wanted to become a writer, and I pursued that dream through four years of undergraduate work and an MFA, but at each milepost—age 25, 30—and the births of my children, I was looking at the same short list of publications in largely unknown literary magazines, and I was scraping together a living teaching as an adjunct. At 35, when I was finally hired full-time at the community college, I was humbled enough to feel grateful—for a modest but steady salary, for healthcare, for some stability for my kids, despite a failed marriage. I would like to say I poured myself into my teaching, but I was never a gifted teacher, merely dutiful; still, the five-course-per-semester load and the accompanying paper-grading took most of my working hours, and the demands and devotions of fatherhood sent writing to the boundaries.

I quit altogether for years and took it up again only in desperation after a second failed marriage. By then, I was 45, and for the first time since graduate school, I wrote consistently and seriously, two manuscripts of short stories and two novels in a span of ten years. But all I had to show for this work, again, was publication in a few small literary journals.

The disappointments were sometimes profound and pulled down hard in my gut, but I’d learn to navigate them by late middle age, as has everyone. Even teaching at a community college, rather than a university is often viewed as a consolatory achievement: occasionally, when I introduce myself to someone at a party as a college professor and that person asks, “Graduate school?”, and I say, “No, a community college,” the well-meaning response is, “Well, good for you!”

I still dreamed. Silly dreams, at times, from how I might answer questions from Terry Gross about my late-breaking writing career to the conjuring of a great-grandchild who might open the drawer of an abandoned desk and find a yellowing manuscript of my work. I knew I was by no means alone among unpublished writers, but I also knew as each year ticked by, the chances of success, by virtue of my age alone, diminished.

I wrote another novel, in part as a tribute to a faith in work alone that I held rather loosely. When that novel was taken up by a young and gifted agent, I felt like a student again. I received more detailed criticism than I had in 30 years and worked through multiple revisions, cutting broad passages I loved, reinventing others, failing at those reinventions, and reworking them again. When the book was sold to an editor whose contagious enthusiasm came along with a fine advance, my world was refracted. Had the success come 30 years earlier, I would have been inflated with promise and pride. Coming as it had, I felt an immense relief. I was suddenly less alone.

The news of the novel’s acceptance was a month old when Reggie walked into my office on that May day. Is it fair to say that I saw myself in him? He was twenty years younger and was desperately trying to build a life about which his young daughter would be proud while confronting barriers of race and class that I’ve never had to clear. That mattered to me, just as it mattered to me that my own children might be proud that their flawed father had finally published a book. I had lived long enough to know that Reggie’s future didn’t teeter on my decision alone—I did not have that power. And I had also taught long enough to see hundreds of students like Reggie in developmental courses disappear from my classroom and the college: Under 40 percent of developmental students at community colleges earn a two-year degree or certificate after six years. But I had also issued and seen issued enough final grades—thousands—to understand how subjective and flexible “standards” can become.

I changed Reggie’s grades from Cs to Bs.

A colleague recently asked me, now that I’ve published, whether I would quit teaching. A friend tells me I should retire and dedicate myself to writing. “You deserve this chance. You’ve earned it.” I smile and turn the idea over in my mind. Persistence is as essential a life skill as any, and can surprise us, as I learned with the acceptance of my later-in-life novel. Adult students learn this, too. And we teach them with the faith that the thousands we will never see again, never hear from again, will enjoy richer lives as workers, mothers, fathers, employees, and citizens because of the hours spent with us, striving. But now, even five semesters later, when I see Reggie in the stairwells because he’s yet to complete his two-year degree, I question the wisdom of changing his grades. At what point do shibboleths about persistence inflate students and teachers with false promise? But it is not for me to say where Reggie might be otherwise. Like me, he is still here.

The post On Persistence: The Lessons of a Middle-Aged Debut Novelist appeared first on Art of Conversation.

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Published on March 10, 2017 19:28

This Week’s Bestsellers: March 13, 2017

The Heart of the Matter

First-time author Angie Thomas’s YA novel, The Hate U Give, is inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, but it’s more than an “issue” book. “Though Thomas’s story is heartbreakingly topical,” our starred review said, “its greatest strength is in its authentic depiction of a teenage girl, her loving family, and her attempts to reconcile what she knows to be true about their lives with the way those lives are depicted—and completely undervalued—by society at large.” The novel has received favorable attention from NPR, the New York Times, Salon, Entertainment Weekly, and Cosmopolitan, among other outlets. It debuts at #7 in children’s frontlist fiction.

Breakfast in America

Thanks to the annual Read Across America/Dr. Seuss birthday celebrations on March 2, Green Eggs and Ham is the #1 book in the country, and Seussian favorites take three more of the top 10 spots. While the verdant meal is the

favorite dish in most of the country, two other books are making their bid for main course. Portraits of Courage by George W. Bush, a collection of the former president’s oil paintings of U.S. military veterans, is the top-ranked title in the south Atlantic and south central regions (the latter includes his home state of Texas). Unshakeable by Tony Robbins, which aims to help readers achieve their financial goals, is making bank in the Pacific region.

Movie Watch

The film adaptation of Wm. Paul Young’s inspirational novel The Shack opened March 3, boosting sales for three editions of the novel. Here’s a look at where the books are ranked and how print-unit sales compare with the week before.

Conventional trade paperback
#6 overall up 52%

Trade paper movie tie-in
#9 overall up 48%

Mass market movie tie-in
#11 mass market up 53%

New & Notable

Cop Under Fire

David Clarke Jr.

#6 Hardcover Nonfiction

The outspoken Milwaukee Country sheriff, a frequent critic of the Black Lives Matter movement, shares his views on racial politics, faith, and law enforcement. Sean Hannity contributes the foreword.

Ageproof

Jean Chatzky and Michael F. Roizen

#15 Hardcover Nonfiction

Roizen, chief wellness officer at the Cleveland Clinic and originator of the RealAge concept, and Today show financial expert Chatzky draw the connection between health and wealth.

Dodge City

Thomas Clavin

#22 Hardcover Nonfiction

This look at Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and other denizens of the infamous frontier town “brims with a colorful collection of real outlaws, sex workers, gamblers, and chorus dancers,” our review said, “whose personalities, deeds, and even nicknames help readers understand why the Western legend entranced the nation in the first place.”

Top 10 Overall

Rank
Title
Author
Imprint
Units

1
Green Eggs and Ham
Dr. Seuss
Random House
44,072

2
Portraits of Courage
George W. Bush
Crown
39,121

3
One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
Dr. Seuss
Random House
32,524

4
The Cat in the Hat
Dr. Seuss
Random House
29,552

5
Unshakeable
Tony Robbins
Simon & Schuster
29,114

6
The Shack
Wm. Paul Young
Windblown
24,562

7
A Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman
Washington Square
24,451

8
Hidden Figures (movie tie-in)
Margot Lee Shetterly
Morrow
21,605

9
The Shack (movie tie-in)
Wm. Paul Young
Windblown
21,253

10
Fox in Socks
Dr. Seuss
Random House
20,872

All unit sales per Nielsen BookScan except where noted.

A version of this article appeared in the 03/13/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: PW Bestsellers

The post This Week’s Bestsellers: March 13, 2017 appeared first on Art of Conversation.