Roy Miller's Blog, page 276
February 11, 2017
‘The Warden’s Daughter’: A Girl Grows Up in the Prison Her Father Runs
THE WARDEN’S DAUGHTER
By Jerry Spinelli
343 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $16.99. (Middle grade; ages 9 to 12)
“No mother is finally buried until her child climbs out of the grave,” Cammie O’Reilly, the protagonist of “The Warden’s Daughter,” says.
But how can you profoundly miss a parent you never knew? And if you’re looking everywhere for someone to be the mother you never had, will the world present an endless series of heartbreaking disappointments?
Set mainly in 1959, in a small Pennsylvania town, this latest novel by Jerry Spinelli, the author of many books for young readers including the Newbery Medal-winning “Maniac Magee,” explores these questions and many others with the flair of a master storyteller.
Bookended by scenes of Cammie in the present, “The Warden’s Daughter” looks back at a world where preteenage kids could ride bikes at all hours of the day and night without someone placing an Amber Alert. Yet this is also a community in which a man is arrested for killing a 16-year-old girl and dumping her body in the river.
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It’s a singular town, while at the same time it’s every place of the late 1950s — perhaps both simpler and more dangerous than today all at once. The murderer becomes a celebrity the moment he’s taken to the local prison. It is here that Cammie, now 12 — she lost her mother to a tragic accident when she was just a baby — lives in an apartment above the castle-like jail with her father, the warden.
It’s a remarkable place to call home. Perhaps if there were a mother in the family, she would have insisted they inhabit more than a collection of rooms that look down over a walkway into the women’s exercise yard. Yet there is something so forbidding and exotic about this space that a group of girls in Cammie’s class show up uninvited (and later take to calling themselves the Jailbirds), vying to become tragedy tourists. The girl they seek to befriend, herself no stranger to tragedy, is prone to outbursts of anger and even goes out of her way looking for physical altercations.
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What Cammie so desperately wants, or believes she desperately needs, is someone to mother her. She’s surrounded instead by a collection of characters who include a mysterious inmate named Eloda Pupko, who has been tasked with being the warden’s housekeeper and is Cammie’s “trustee”; a gregarious shoplifter named Boo Boo, who treats Cammie like a pet and reserves time every day to sit in the prison’s quiet room for their visitation; a hyperactive, cap-gun-firing 5-year-old boy from the other side of town; a somewhat absent and vacant father; and a devoted best friend, Reggie, who is socially already in another world.
Cammie is not, like the other inhabitants of the prison, officially serving time, of course, but like everyone around her, it seems, she has the potential to travel down a destructive path. She finds solace pedaling fast all over town on her bicycle. “You never smile!” she is told by Boo Boo, and her adult narrator voice admits, “I was not a happy person.”
Outside the prison walls, demonstrators pushing for the death penalty for the incarcerated killer carry signs that read No Mercy. Is it any wonder Cammie longs for human contact, but punches a boy who likes her in the face?
The final steam locomotives of an earlier era still chug through town, leaving their sooty remains, while on television the popular new show, “Bandstand,” is shot in nearby Philadelphia. As it is turning Dick Clark into a household name and worldwide television impresario, the show has the kids spinning records and dancing in the streets. The teenager is being born in American culture — and on the page in “The Warden’s Daughter.”
The last passages of this novel read like a fever dream, with Cammie moving her story forward in leaps and bounds. Fame, good and bad fortune, friendship and mental illness all make their way into her narrative. While somewhat frustrating in the fitfulness of the storytelling, this book is never boring and never predictable. It is possible adults will respond to the material even more than children.
But then again, if there are times the reader feels overwhelmed, well, maybe that’s the point. If you live in a prison as the warden’s daughter, you can come and go, because your father runs the place. But it takes something more to break free.
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Lit Hub Daily: February 6 – 10, 2017
The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
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The Stolen Child
The Yank
May 1959
One Year Earlier
The Yank arrives on the first day of summer, with the pigs. She comes in Festy’s…
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Changes at 'PW'
Judith Rosen steps down as senior bookselling editor and New England correspondent, and Ed Nawotka returns as international editor; he'll also cover bookselling. Alex Green fills the New England shoes, and Emma Kantor is the new associate children’s book editor.
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Writing About Writing (And Occasionally Some Writing): Saying Goodbye
Last year.
Folks, it looks like the steroids we put my cat, Princess Mononoke, on only bought her a couple of weeks.
I’m going to spend the day saying good-bye and watching for any signs that she might improve. But I think it’s time. We knew the steroids would reduce inflammation around a brain tumor (one of the likeliest suspects) but obviously that improvement would be temporary. We were hoping for a clot that caused a small stroke because then she would get better.
Twas not to be.
I have a guest post I can put up tomorrow, but this is going to need my full attention today. Apologies if posts get spotty until next week.
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A Romantic Comedy With Pleasingly Ridiculous Characters
Elinor Lipman
Credit
Michael Benabib
ON TURPENTINE LANE
By Elinor Lipman
305 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $24.
Faith Frankel may have made a few mistakes. She left Brooklyn for Everton, Mass., and “what appeared to be a stress-free job” in stewardship at her alma mater, the Everton Country Day school, but now her knucklehead boss has rather casually accused her of misappropriating funds. She has also just accepted a halfhearted proposal from her boyfriend, Stuart, which might be fine if the trauma of an emergency appendectomy hadn’t transformed him from a loving companion and upstanding citizen into a gooey, unemployed mystic who has decided to walk across the country seeking enlightenment. (He’s bolstered by a jointly held credit card and a two-sided sign reading “IN SEARCH OF STORIES”/“FREE HUGS” in Spanish and English.)
And then there’s Faith’s recent purchase of an enchanting little death house on Turpentine Lane. Bewitched by a gnarled fruit tree, a soapstone sink and a carved pineapple newel post, she chooses to ignore a few insalubrities, like kitchen linoleum that makes her “want to look up the year linoleum was invented” and the former owner’s possible expiration in one of the bedrooms.
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Rest assured that Elinor Lipman is far too canny to weigh her latest novel down in the tedium of real estate ownership. Forget the physical deficiencies of Faith’s bungalow; Lipman is more interested in the characters the new house brings out from the woodwork. They include its previous owner, Anna Lavoie, and her daughter, Theresa Tindle; Faith’s quasi-separated parents; her gruff brother, Joel; and her loyal friend and officemate, Nick.
Light and tight, “On Turpentine Lane” is constructed with an almost scary mastery. Not a single thread dangles, not a single character is left without a place in Faith’s world. The story folds out and back in as neatly as an origami flower, and Faith recounts it all with a raised eyebrow and plenty of cheek. “I tried to be circumspect,” she says of a nouveau riche broker of customized Chagall copies. “I might have let slip some of the adjectives I meant to stifle, such as ‘domineering,’ ‘insensitive’ and ‘hypersexual,’ but I was careful to balance those with compliments about her décor.”
Even Faith’s macabre discoveries don’t flatten the fizz; instead, they become some of the book’s most delicious elements. Similarly, Lipman seems to have the most fun writing ridiculous characters, which may be why the novel’s worst people are so enjoyable. Stuart’s semiliterate hippie musings are pure perfection, as are Faith’s various nemeses in love, life and homeownership, who pop up with welcome regularity.
The novel’s few difficulties are in some ways the flip side of its pleasures. True, every character finds a home when the music stops, but for one or two of the less-developed characters that neatness can feel contrived. For me, the larger question involves one of Faith’s most significant relationships, which provides the central plotline. This romance never seems anything but likely, yet the prospect also never feels as tantalizing as it should. In some ways, this easy progression is refreshingly adult, a neat bourbon swapped for the usual rom-com grenadine.
Things fall into place, and we’re never truly meant to fear that they won’t. And yet, while Faith’s growing contentment provides a calm base for the chaos playing out around her, I found myself wishing for a little more tension. It would have helped if the object of Faith’s affection had received the kind of physicality and vividness Lipman lavishes so wonderfully on her more difficult characters.
Of course, maybe Faith as the eye of the hurricane is exactly as intended. Her romance may not pulse with nervous sexual possibility, but then again, that tension usually comes from wondering who can be known, who can be trusted, and Lipman takes another tack here. The reader knows right away who’s trustworthy in “the murder site” Faith calls home, and so does Faith. The novel’s pleasurable uncertainties — and there are many — come from everything that whirls around that stable center.
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February 10, 2017
When Farm-to-Table Fare Meets an Indie Bookstore
As proverbs go, “a bird in hand is worth two in the bush” seems particularly apt in Baltimore. It’s cautionary, but it’s underpinned by a notion of gratitude, and in a city that so mightily and publicly struggles with violence and poverty, there’s practically an ethical imperative to be grateful for what you’ve got. Yet, for all of the city’s well-known economic and social woes, in the two years I’ve lived here, I’ve noticed that many Baltimoreans love Baltimore in a way that, say, you’re average DC resident doesn’t love DC (particularly since the inauguration).
I won’t speculate as to why others enjoy living here (especially since this is well-worn ground: the city’s been written about and celebrated by people with far more Baltimore credibility than I’ve got), but for me, Baltimore’s appeal has everything to do with its affect and atmosphere. Put simply: Baltimore and Baltimoreans are generally unpretentious and they’re also pretty damned interesting, which are two adjectives I’d also use to describe Bird in Hand, the city’s new café and bookstore.
I mention all of this—Baltimore’s laidback affect, the endearing and enduring love people have for the place—because these things make Baltimore feel like a small town. This is a city in which it’s still big news when a new café-bookstore opens, but it’s especially big news when that café is the work of James Beard Award-winning chef Spike Gjerde and the bookstore is run by Ed and Anne Berlin, the proprietors of Baltimore’s beloved Ivy Bookshop.
To be clear, though, in speaking to both Gjerde and Berlin by phone last month, each stressed the importance of thinking of Bird in Hand not as an extension of an earlier venture, but as something wholly new. Their emphasis on Bird in Hand’s singularity is manifested by the space itself. Located between Baltimore’s two primary north-south arterials (Charles Street and St. Paul Street), Bird in Hand occupies an impressively sleek and light-filled space in Charles Village, a central Baltimore neighborhood that’s home to Johns Hopkins University and the Baltimore Museum of Art.
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When I ask Gjerde about the design—which stands in stark contrast to the stone and heavy beams of his other restaurants and to the warm wood and Kilim rugs of The Ivy—he tells me, “There are really two things that define our space: lack of budget and salvaged materials.” He laughs at this, but it’s clear that while he’s only partially joking about the money, Gjerde is serious about the salvaging. “In the past, we’ve had a really cool old building to work with, and we’ve salvaged or reclaimed materials that we could repurpose. This time around, we had our customarily low budget, but the thing that was lacking was the old building. Instead, we had a new space to work with, but for the look and the feel of Bird in Hand, we wanted to maintain our process of repurposing salvaged materials. Sort of in the same way that we build a menu by looking around us to see what’s available and what’s unique, we looked around for interesting materials and we worked with a builder who loves using those materials and who’s great at it.”
Thankfully for Gjerde, who tends to speak in long, if not digressive sentences, it’s not hard to find interesting architectural salvage in a city that’s lost a third of its population in a little more than half a century.
“The only real design decision we made was to use that painted tile,” he says, referring to the ochre and black tiles that provide a dramatic pop of color in Bird in Hand’s dining area. The tiles are painted in the eight-pointed star motif seen in traditional American quilts, and alongside the wooden furniture, the teal mugs, and the spines of the books on the shelves, they soften Bird in Hand’s industrial edges—its sealed concrete floors, its dolphin gray bookshelves, and the tall, steel-framed windows.
“I guess it’s not design in a traditional sense,” Gjerde continues. “Instead, we were working with the constraint of one or two elements that we’d come into, and we spent a lot of time asking ourselves what’s available? What’s at hand? The marble that’s in the space is salvaged from a church that’s part of a project we’re working on in DC, and a lot of the wood was salvaged, too, as were the chairs. They came from the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and oddly enough, they’ve got this midcentury look and feel to them, and we liked how they looked in the space. So, I’m not even sure if design is quite the word for what we’ve done. If anything, it’s a process of rejuvenation and luck.”
Coming upon the tiles and the chairs may have been a stroke of luck, but Gjerde’s menu is the result of many hours spent figuring out how to bring a more affordable version of his locally sourced dishes to a student-dominated neighborhood.
As with Gjerde’s Woodberry Kitchen, Artifact Coffee, and Parts & Labor, Bird in Hand’s fare reflects Baltimore’s status as the northernmost southern city, and in half a dozen visits to the new café over the course of the past few weeks, I’ve eaten a series of great lunches there. (I’ve also picked up two trade paperbacks and Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, which I first thumbed through while drinking my coffee and snacking on Gjerde’s deviled eggs.)
While the concept of slow food and the farm-to-table movement are nothing new, Gjerde’s particular culinary ethos has been informed not just by trends in the food industry, but by writers and thinkers like Wendell Berry. Long a fan of his work, Gjerde had recently attended a lecture of Berry’s when we spoke.
“It’s actually a little hard to admit, but even when we opened Woodberry Kitchen [in 2007], we didn’t fully understand what we were about. But things really came into focus after reading Berry—who I think is an explainer of the first rank—and thinking through how we could become a place that served our guests but that also served another purpose.”
For Gjerde, Bird in Hand is an extension of that purpose (a hyper-local focus on food and drink), but the venture also seems at least partially rooted in the chef’s nostalgia for another Baltimore institution that closed in 1999, after an 18-year run.
“I had these great memories of Louie’s Bookstore Café, years ago, that I held dear, so I loved the idea of coffee and lighter fare and books sharing space.” Which is where Ed and Anne Berlin came into the picture. “We had opened Artifact and were chugging along there. Ed and Anne were operating my favorite bookshop in the known universe, The Ivy, and they’d emailed—really thoughtfully—about how they would be interested in hosting Ivy events at Artifact. We met with them right away and it went really well. We were able to provide food and drink and it was immediately a good fit.”
If Gjerde speaks in more elliptical sentences, Ed Berlin speaks in comparatively declarative ones. “We’ve always wanted to partner with a restauranteur to create a book café,” Berlin told me by phone. “Baltimore should have a really great book café. We thought: if we’re going to partner with anyone, the right person to do it with is Spike.” He tells me a bit of how the project came to be, and like Gjerde, wants me not to see Bird in Hand as a mere expansion of The Ivy Bookshop. “We don’t necessarily see it as an ‘Ivy.’ Bird in Hand really is a separate animal.”
Given the local affection for The Ivy, I’m at first surprised to hear Berlin put it this way, but Baltimore’s a town that changes block by block, and The Ivy Bookshop is located in Mt. Washington, a quiet neighborhood that abuts the county to the north. While plenty of people live and work in Mt. Washington, there’s relatively little foot traffic. In other words, nobody’s really stumbling upon The Ivy. They’re driving up in the evening to browse and to buy gifts and to catch a reading.
By contrast, Bird in Hand is a place Berlin and Gjerde want people to stumble upon and come to love. “We’re so excited to have a location that’s got any kind of foot traffic at all,” Gjerde tells me. “We were standing outside of Bird in Hand today sort of marveling at all of the people passing by. You think about where Artifact is and where Woodberry is and, you know, we just don’t see a lot of pedestrians. But with Bird in Hand, we’ve had a lot of people just coming in to check it out, and we’ve seen a lot of repeat guests already.” As just about any brick-and-mortar store owner can tell you, the difference between success and failure is often the difference between one-time buyers and regular customers.
When visiting Bird in Hand, it’s hard not to notice the number of Hopkins-affiliated patrons there, eating, reading, browsing the shelves, doing pretty much what you’d expect to see folks doing in a book café. It’s also impossible not to notice that Barnes & Noble is directly across the street.
“We decided we wanted to be near Hopkins,” says Berlin, “but when this location was ultimately selected, my first reaction was ‘Does it have to be across the street from another bookstore?’ But you know what? If you go to London, you can walk down Charing Cross or Shaftesbury and there’s a bookstore on practically each block, so who knows? It could be the development of a new book row.”
Gjerde and his team have worked to make the menu appealing to students by providing more affordable options, including snacks that can be fired and consumed quickly, but the demographics and the foot traffic of Charles Village pose a trickier challenge for Berlin. “The Ivy has 27,000 books,” he says. “Bird in Hand has 2,500. That’s less than ten percent of the Ivy’s inventory, so we didn’t assume that we could just do less of everything. Instead, we conceived of Bird in Hand primarily as a literary fiction and poetry store with a smattering of nonfiction, cooking, a small children’s section as well as something we don’t have at the Ivy, which is graphic works. We also aimed to have some of the normal stuff people might be looking for—bestsellers and so on. We’re still not 100 percent sure we’ve got the right mix, but that’s always a challenge.”
I tell Berlin that I’d noticed the special shelves reserved for books by Hopkins professors and he tells me that he and his staff reached out to some friends at Hopkins to let them know that they could source trade books for their classes through Bird in Hand, and that students buying books for their classes are eligible for a ten percent discount on the purchase.
While Berlin sounds optimistic about how Bird in Hand will fare, he also maintains a measured tone. He’s not one to overpromise, and his obvious excitement about the new venture is tempered by his basic understanding of the economics of the book business.
As someone whose first job, at 15, was in a B. Dalton Bookstore and whose first post-college job was in an editorial division of Random House, I understand Berlin’s caution. Few businesses are as fraught as the book business, but if any is field is tied for first, it’s the restaurant industry. Bird in Hand, then, is rolling the dice twice: it has to function successfully as a café and as a book vendor. It has to feature good food at a fair price, and it must be stocked well enough to keep people from heading across the street to the Barnes & Noble or to their laptops and Amazon.
As I was working on this story, it took a turn that reinforced for me just how small Baltimore (and the book world) truly are. Emma Snyder, my friend and MFA classmate from the University of Wisconsin (and my former boss at the PEN/Faulkner Foundation), recently bought a 49 percent stake in The Ivy Bookshop. Born and raised in Baltimore, Snyder will step down as the Executive Director of PEN/Faulkner this summer, and will shortly thereafter return to Charm City to take on her new duties as a bookseller.
I recently wrote Snyder to ask how she was feeling about her partnership with The Ivy and about her pending move home. Replying like only a Baltimorean can about Baltimore, she emailed back: “I left home at 18 and moved here and there in the last 18 years, but I never fell out of love with Baltimore (as you well know). It’s home, and I’ll never shake the feeling that I know it better—and will always know it better—than any other place.”
Which is to say, Snyder not only brings her hometown gusto to The Ivy and Bird in Hand, but she’s also bringing the very serious literary credentials earned during her years at PEN/Faulkner. Later, in that same email, she wrote something that, to anyone who knows her, seems like the understatement of the century: “I’m a pretty earnest believer in the ability of books to build community, and that’s The Ivy’s spirit.”
That’s the cautious optimism of a Baltimorean for you, as is this: Not once in speaking with Gjerde, Berlin, or Snyder did I get the sense that any of the three of them had any sincere doubt about whether putting a book café in the center of town was an excellent idea. On the contrary, much like the aphorism for which Bird in Hand is named, each knows the value of what they’ve built and are building in Charles Village. And if the packed tables at Bird in Hand are any indication, a whole lot of other people do, too.
Feature image by Shannon Partrick.
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‘My Favorite Thing is Monsters’ by Emil Ferris
It’s 1967 and 10 year old Karen Reyes—the irresistible fictional voice that animates Emil Ferris’ mesmerizing, gorgeously drawn new graphic novel, My Favorite Thing is Monsters (Fantagraphics)—is slowly turning into a werewolf in her family’s apartment in Chicago.
Actually, Reyes just likes to think of herself as a monster (as well as a kind of monster-detective), because she loves movie ghouls and the pulp horror magazines of the period that feature them. But in the context of her young life—grappling with her sexuality, she’s also an outcast at school—Karen happily views herself as a monstrous social outcast in waiting.
Using Reyes and her family—Marvela, Karen’s hilarious hyper-superstitious mother, Deeze, her vampire-like artist brother, and other colorful tenants in the building—Ferris has created a murder mystery that is also a deeply affecting spiritual tour of Chicago. The book is a loving portrait of an impossibly rich world of working class misfits and social grotesques; it’s an embrace of the black, immigrant, elderly, discarded, maladjusted denizens of the lush social underbelly of Chicago in the 1960s.
Ferris’ debut graphic novel is moving and funny, but, created in the form of a kids’ composition notebook, it is also imaginative and inventive. She’s found new ways to tell a powerfully literary visual story.
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Write What You Know (BS Writing Advice That Isn’t As Trite As It Seems) [Arielle K Harris]
I used to think that one of the least helpful writing maxims was “write what you know” – especially in writing fantasy. I thought, “Why would I want to write about what I know when the whole point is to write about the unknown?”
Then I wrote my recent self-published novel and found that writing what you know doesn’t need to be a transposition of straight facts. It can be interpretation, the use of ideas taken out of context, or knowledge of one subject used as the basis for another. (Having written this out it sounds pretty basic, but for the longest time this epiphany eluded me.)
My novel, Bestial, is a fairytale retelling which reimagines Beauty and the Beast. I thought about how I wanted to portray my main characters, my female Beast and my male Beauty in this reinterpretation, and how to write the relationship between a man and an inhuman creature. Then I realized: I know this!
No, of course I didn’t have direct experience with mythical griffin-like Beasts, nor am I now or have ever been a man, but I have long experience with the working relationships between humans and some of the proudest, most intractable of inhuman creatures: I’m a falconer.
This is definitely one of my more unusual hobbies, and something that I can use as a wildcard when desperate making small talk with strangers (because I suck at this) or on an awkward first date (I suck at this even more, because what’s worse than talking to a stranger – talking to one who is judging your worthiness as a potential mate based on your ability to not be socially awkward for a whole two hours at a time. I’m not sure that randomly talking about birds really helps me with this, however...)
For the last six years I have had the privilege of working with a wide variety of birds of prey while I lived in Scotland, and am currently pursuing the various permits and licenses in order to continue practicing now that I live in the USA. For much of that time I was employed in this capacity, doing educational displays at a wildlife park, and enjoyed the great amusement of being able to write “Falconer” on the line marked “Occupation” on boarding cards every time I took a transatlantic flight. It gave me and Border Control something to chat about, and goodness knows they need a bit of entertainment during their day. But above all, I got to develop relationships of trust with the birds I worked with, and grew to love them all for their fierceness and their independent nature.
Except owls. Those fluffy wide-eyed bastards are assholes. (I kid, sort of, but whoever first thought that owls were wise certainly never had much experience with them. What they lack in intelligence, however, they make up for with utter contrary stubbornness, and I will admit [though not in their hearing!] that I love them, too, for exactly that.)
It began with my educational work, but I was soon determined to experience true falconry – that is to say, hunting with a bird of prey in their natural environment, and since then I’ve hunted with a male German Goshawk and a male Red-tailed Hawk. When you fly a hawk you cast them off your glove totally unencumbered, apart from the leather anklets and jesses they wear which are designed not to hinder flight and perhaps a telemetry tag in order to track them should they be drawn out of sight by the hunt. They’re completely free-flying wild birds, and the only thing keeping them from disappearing over the horizon is the trust you have built with them.
It’s an awe-inspiring act to call down the hawk you’ve trained out of the high branches of a tree, and to have him respond to your whistle, glide down with outspread wings and alight upon your glove in perfect trust and partnership. He trusts that you’ll provide him with the chance to do what he does best; you’ll help him locate his prey, flush it out for him to catch, and help him secure it on the ground. He trusts that if he misses he won’t go hungry. He trusts that if he gets injured, you’ll care for him. Life with you is far more beneficial than life without you.
In return, you trust that he will stay by your side, in a not-too-distant tree, watching your every move, waiting on your word, and allowing you to take part in his wild existence.
So when I sat down to write about a man and a Beast and a love story that wouldn’t choke the feminist in me, I drew from this experience of trust and partnership. I wrote what I knew.
It didn’t mean that I needed to restrict myself in any way, I could still write about fantastic creatures and unknown places. I didn’t need to write autobiographically, this could still be a fantasy novel. Only I could now write my character’s burgeoning relationship with authority and believability, drawing on my own depths of knowledge on the kind of relationship I was describing.
While I don’t believe that an author must always have personal experience in everything they write about, there are some things you just can’t easily pretend to know without true experience, and Google doesn’t replace foot-on-the-ground research.
I’m reminded of a fairly silly romantic comedy movie, The Decoy Bride, set on a fictional island in the Outer Hebrides. David Tennant plays the character of a writer who set his bestselling novel on the island, but never set foot on it until later events bring him there when he attempts to discreetly marry his famous actress fiancée. Hijinks, obviously, ensue. His fictionalization of the island becomes a point of tension and comedy between him and the island inhabitants, and he finds that the reality of the island is very different from what he described.
This is a real danger for a writer who might choose not to write what they know or, perhaps more accurately, choose not to know about what they write. Not only the danger that you might be wrong, but that you might be ridiculous. But this can be prevented.
In writing to the second half of Bestial, I decided I needed to draw from a greater canon of fairytales, especially those of the Grimm’s Brother’s collected folktales, because I couldn’t face either a moral conclusion in the style of the original tale, or a Disney-style happy ending. I didn’t know these fairytales yet, but I knew I needed to. So I studied them and their history, drank them in, read every tale I could find in every spare moment I had until I did know them. I made myself an authority on a subject where previously I could only profess ignorance.
But, above all else, you need to be an authority on your book itself, your book’s world and those living within it. This is especially true for fantasy, science fiction and other speculative fiction because, as your world’s creator, if you aren’t the authority on it who can be?
So don’t be too quick to dismiss the trite advice often handed out to writers. Sometimes you may find that there’s a reason why a tired old idea is so old and tired, and that maybe, just maybe, it’s right.
[Ed Note: Leela Bruce has some similar things to say about "Write what you know" here.]
Arielle K Harris is the author of the novel Bestial as well as the ridiculous steampunk time travel drama short story The Adventurous Time Adventures of Doctor When. She is responsible for one very opinionated toddler as well as a writer, poet, falconer, knitter of many half-finished scarves, drinker of tea, enthusiast for wine and sometimes has been known to have wild birds in her spare room.
She can be found online at her own website: www.ariellekharris.com as well as on Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/ariellekharris/ and her published work can be found on Amazon here:https://www.amazon.com/author/ariellekharris
If you would like to guest blog for Writing About Writing we would love to have an excuse to take a day off a wonderful diaspora of voices and you can even make a couple of bucks. Take a look at our guest post guidelines, and drop me a line at chris.brecheen@gmail.com.
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Lisa Gardner Catches Up With ‘Old Friends’ in Her New Novel
Lisa Gardner
Crowdsourced: Some authors cultivate an especially collaborative relationship with fans. Janet Evanovich has let readers title her books; Neil Gaiman has solicited story ideas on Twitter. And the suspense novelist Lisa Gardner — whose new book, “Right Behind You,” jumps straight to the top in its first week on the hardcover fiction list — turned to Facebook back when she was still trying to decide which of her regular protagonists the novel should feature. “I wasn’t sure who I wanted to write about,” she told the New Hampshire public radio host Peter Biello this month. “Did people want the F.B.I. profilers? I’ve written some books with them. What about Boston detective D.D. Warren, who had a very successful book last year? What about Tessa Leoni? I really thought it would be between those two characters, so I was as surprised as anyone to have the readers choose the F.B.I. profilers.”
The profilers in question are the husband-and-wife team of Pierce Quincy and Rainie Conner — only one of whom, Quincy, has actually worked as an F.B.I. profiler. (Conner, his frequent sidekick, is a former homicide investigator with the police department in Bakersville, Ore.) In “Right Behind You,” the two are hunting for a rampage killer who’s fled into the forests of the Pacific Northwest, and who may be the older brother of the girl they’re trying to adopt. If you think that sounds like a knotty ball of yarn to untangle, Gardner doesn’t necessarily disagree. “I hadn’t written those books in a good eight years,” she told Biello. “So it was homework for me. I got to reread my old novels. I had to catch up on my own characters. It was a lot of fun, though. It was a lot of fun to go back to, almost like old friends.”
False Witness: “The Blood of Emmett Till,” by the historian Timothy B. Tyson, enters the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 13. The book has made news for its revelation that the white woman at the center of the case — who claimed the 14-year-old Till flirtatiously grabbed her before his 1955 murder — now admits she made that story up. But the confession only confirms what many people had long assumed. “We already knew her story was a lie,” the Chicago Tribune columnist Dahleen Glanton wrote last month. “So did the judge who presided over the murder trial of her husband and another man. . . . So did most of the people who lived in the tiny town of Money in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. But the all-white jury acquitted them anyway.” Glanton doesn’t spare a lot of sympathy for the woman’s delayed spasm of conscience: “She was a coward then and she’s a coward now. If you want to know what courage is,” she continues, look at Till’s mother, who “was brave enough to use her sorrow to reignite a movement.”
At Last: Paul Auster published his first book over 30 years ago, but he’s never hit the hardcover fiction list — until now. “4 3 2 1,” his new novel, debuts at No. 13.
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Lit Hub Daily: February 10, 2017
The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1909, Min Thu Wun, poet, writer, and scholar who help launched the Khit-San literary movement, is born.
Vietnamese and : a primer from Viet Thanh Nguyen. | Literary Hub
Kathleen Donohoe, of Brooklyn, returns to discover her hometown is crammed with writers. | Literary Hub
Lydia Peelle on the tensions of war and motherhood. | Literary Hub
When every word is an act of resistance: Renee Macalino Rutledge finds her voice. | Literary Hub
We see this human business as an angel does, looking down: Colson Whitehead on George Saunders’ first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. | The New York Times
“You can always survive bad times more than you think you can when they start, when ‘thus bad begins.’” A conversation with Javier Marías. | Los Angeles Review of Books
Emily Witt on sexuality’s resistance to commodification, self-help as an alibi for desire, and the importance of questioning why you like what you like. | Work in Progress
Another piece on the death of the novel (or, more specifically, “on the decline in the public’s investment in literature as a cultural phenomenon.”) | Overland
On last words, death poetry, and what traditions around dying can reveal about a culture. | The Paris Review
Understanding the nuances and complexities involved in the making of a movement: On Wesley Lowery’s They Can’t Kill Us All. | The Nation
#IReadIndie has launched to “draw attention to big books from smaller publishers across the country.” | Workman Publishing
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