Roy Miller's Blog, page 284

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Published on February 03, 2017 18:01

This local bookstore responded to President Trump’s immigration order with powerful window displays

President Donald Trump temporarily banned the citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. on Friday, and Brookline Booksmith answered with several powerful window displays on Monday morning.

The displays in three of the store’s windows prominently feature books by authors from all seven of the countries named in President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration: Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen.

“Two staff members came up with the idea and ran it by me, and I said, ‘Perfect,'” said Dana Brigham, the store’s manager and co-owner. “The bookstore has been here 56 years, and from day one, it’s been all about different views, different opinions, different ways of looking at things.”

Brookline Booksmith employees Paul Theriault and Shuchi Saraswat organized the displays and, along with Brigham, chose the 20 books that are featured. Those books include The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani of Iran, In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar of Libya, and Infidel: My Life by Ayaan Hirsi Ali of Somalia.

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Books written by authors from the seven countries named in President Trump’s executive order on immigration are on display at Brookline Booksmith. —Brookline Booksmith

The store posted an image of the display on its Facebook page Monday, along with a complete list of the staff-recommended books.

Brigham said the response to the display has been positive both in the store and on social media. She said the store has ordered extra copies of the books, which customers are beginning to purchase, and that the store will keep the displays up for several weeks, will construct a similar display inside the store, and may explore future programming around the books, such as discussions.

“There’s a schism in the country, it would seem,” Brigham said. “Customers are interested in learning different ways of looking at things. We are interested in providing that for them.”

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Published on February 03, 2017 03:20

Harry Mathews, Idiosyncratic Writer, Dies at 86

His wife, the French novelist Marie Chaix, said Mr. Mathews had died of an intracerebral hemorrhage.

Since his first book was published, in 1962, when he was 32 and living in Paris, he had become a cult figure, more so to non-English-speaking fans abroad than in his native United States. In its interview with him, The Paris Review said Mr. Mathews “rightfully belongs to the experimentalist tradition of Kafka, Beckett and Joyce.”

Mr. Matthews said he was originally inspired to write to fulfill Henry James’s dictum “lust to know.” But he left some baffled readers who had persevered through his unconventional prose still lusting to know what, if any, deeper meaning he had hoped to convey.

“In ‘The Conversions,’ ‘Tlooth’ and ‘The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium,’” he once said, “the narrators are all trying to solve some riddle or mystery and are overcome by an obsessive conviction that they will be able to find a definitive answer, but it all falls apart.”

For decades, Mr. Mathews was the sole American member of Oulipo, the quirky French literary salon where authors and mathematicians practice what they call constrained writing: forcing themselves to follow contrived formulas — for example, using specific words or leaving out certain letters. (Oulipo is short for “ouvroir de littérature potentielle,” or “workshop of potential literature.”)

He qualified for the group unwittingly, he recalled, after engaging in a particularly challenging word game: He rewrote Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” by using the vocabulary from a Julia Child recipe for a cauliflower dish, and vice versa.

What some might see as completely pointless, he found intellectually liberating.

“I gave myself the task of writing a story using the 185 words that were found in 46 proverbs,” he told The Paris Review. “This is a forbiddingly small vocabulary. It was hard to know what to do with them. Then I started putting words together, and a few words would lead to a sentence, and then eventually it became this sweet love story. It was as though you were wandering through a jungle and suddenly you came into a clearing that is a beautifully composed garden. It’s extraordinary, the feeling it gives you.”

In a pot vs. kettle competition, another Oulipian, Georges Perec, who wrote a novel, appropriately called “A Void,” without ever using the letter “e,” suggested that Mr. Mathews abided by rules of writing “from another planet.”

But the author Daniel Levin Becker, now the only surviving American member of Oulipo, explained in The San Francisco Chronicle this week that Mr. Mathews’s unruly, inventive use of language was just as important as his novels’ plots.

“Literature, for Harry Mathews, and in turn for his dauntless reader,” Mr. Becker wrote, “is enriched by prizing process over product, curiosity over certainty.”

Harry Burchell Mathews was born in Manhattan on Feb. 14, 1930. His father, Edward J. Mathews, was an architect who contributed to the design of Rockefeller Center and helped establish the New York City Planning Commission. His mother, the former Mary Burchell, was an arts patron who had inherited a real estate fortune.

He was raised on Beekman Place and attended the private St. Bernard’s School, where, he said, he wrote his first serious work, a poem, when he was 11:

It was a sad autumnal morn
The earth was but a mass of clay
Of foliage the trees were shorn
Leaving their branches dull and gray.

He graduated from the Groton School in Massachusetts, dropped out of Princeton in his sophomore year to join the Navy and graduated from Harvard in 1952 with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in music and musicology.

He said he learned a lot about narrative writing from comic books (“lots of invention and no pretense of realism”) but deliberately avoided college courses in literature.

“Literature was my great love,” he told The Paris Review, “and I was determined to keep it unsullied by academia.”

After Harvard, he moved to Paris with his wife at the time, the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle. There he planned to study conducting but he changed course when the poet John Ashbery introduced him to the works of Raymond Roussel, the French proto-surrealist.

With Mr. Ashbery and another poet, Kenneth Koch, Mr. Mathews founded a literary magazine called Locus Solus, named for one of Roussel’s books. It lasted only four issues but published work by leading writers and poets, including James Schuyler as well as Mr. Ashbery and Mr. Koch.

Mr. Mathews’s marriage to Ms. de Saint Phalle ended in divorce. He is survived by two children from that marriage, Laura Mathews Condominas and Philip Mathews; his wife, Ms. Chaix; two stepdaughters, Emilie Chaix and Leonore Chaix; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Mr. Mathews had divided his time between France and the United States, where he taught and had homes in New York and Key West.

His first book, “The Conversions,” published in 1962, is about a wealthy New Yorker who dies and stipulates that the protagonist will inherit his fortune if he can decode the mysterious symbols engraved on the blade of a ritual ax.

Terry Southern praised it in The Nation as a “startling piece of work,” though Time magazine complained that Mr. Mathews’s bounteous symbolism “spreads through the novel like crab grass.”

In 1975, Edmund White, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called Mr. Mathews’s “The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium” — structured around an exchange of letters between a husband and wife searching for a lost medieval treasure — a “comic masterpiece.”

Among his other novels were “The Journalist” (1994), “Cigarettes” (1987), “My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973” (2005) and the forthcoming “The Solitary Twin.”

He also wrote “Singular Pleasures,” a 1988 book made up of 61 vignettes about masturbation. He chose that topic, he said, “because it’s the universal form of sexual activity, and it’s hardly been written about.”

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Published on February 03, 2017 02:18

Leslie Stacey obituary | UK news

My father, Leslie Stacey, who has died aged 96, was a leftwing entrepreneur dedicated to the arts, sport and community activities.

He was born in London, the son of Frederick Stacey (who also used the name Roy), a City trader, and his wife, Edith (nee Rance), a piano teacher. At the age of 13 Leslie spent a year in hospital with osteomyelitis and underwent surgery on both legs. Despite having to learn to walk again, he became a good tennis and cricket player. He attended Merchant Taylors’ School for Boys, London. Although he showed academic promise, his father took him out of school six months before his final exams and found him a job on the Stock Exchange, which provided Leslie with the material for a book, The Small Man’s Guide to Profitable Investing, which was published under the pseudonym A Clifton Danvers in 1947.

During the second world war he served in the RAF. He was invalided out due to arthritis in his legs three months before the conflict ended. When he returned to civilian life he began speaking on platforms for the Labour party and campaigning for the NHS. His staunchly Conservative father wanted him to work in the City again but instead he became a journalist and publisher, using Roy Stacey as his professional name.

He was a keen sportsman, qualifying as a tennis coach and playing for Hazelwood tennis club, near Enfield, north London, where he met my mother, Daphne (nee Dall). They married in 1955.

Running the monthly magazine Amateur Stage, he set up Stacey Publications, becoming the UK agent for the New Orleans-based drama-in-education publisher Anchorage Press. He remained self-employed, managing his small business from our family home in Hayes, near Bromley. Throughout my childhood, I would wake every morning to the sound of him typing in his office across the landing.

On retirement in 1986, he joined the University of the Third Age (U3A), setting up and chairing the Bromley branch, which now has more than 1,600 members. He founded and ran the national travel group, organising educational trips for U3A members; and he proofread Third Age Matters, the U3A magazine, until he died. He believed we could change things and make a difference. At the age of 90 he invested in solar panels – with a 30-year payback period. He was ever the optimist.

He is survived by Daphne, by my brother, Tony, and me, and by five grandchildren and three step-grandchildren.

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Published on February 03, 2017 01:17

Totally, Radically Baldwin: Raoul Peck on I Am Not Your Negro

In 1979, the writer James Baldwin began working on a new project. “Remember This House” was originally conceived as a piece written for The New Yorker that would be a tour through Baldwin’s memory of the civil rights movement. The article never happened—parts of the original idea eventually migrated to Pat Hartley & Dick Fontaine’s documentary I Heard it Through the Grapevine (1982)—but as the decade progressed, Baldwin kept returning to project, over and over again. It became the foundation of a book proposal that was never completed, now focused on the intersecting lives of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and a film project with the Maysles Brothers that was discussed before Baldwin’s death in 1987.

When the Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck began developing a film about James Baldwin around 2006, with the assistance of the author’s estate, he saw the unfinished “Remember This House” as the crucial centerpiece that, because of its cumulative stature and open-endedness, allowed him to bring Baldwin into conversation with a present-day audience. As a teenager, Peck had been transformed by Baldwin’s words, partly because there was a direct connection between writer and reader that couldn’t be found anywhere else. It felt like Baldwin was speaking right to him, and the film needed that same immediacy and focus.

“I Am Not Your Negro,” the resulting film that will be released in theaters tomorrow, achieves this through an intimate relationship with its subject. Baldwin’s words, for the most part, are the only words you hear in the film, whether it be through voice-over (read by the actor Samuel L. Jackson) or archival footage of Baldwin’s many television appearances. The film, which was recently nominated for an Academy Award, is a staggering achievement of synthesis, jumping around many different points of Baldwin’s evolving thought—about race and power and the realization that, as Baldwin says in the film, “my countrymen were my enemy”—to produce not just a visual memoir but an immediate call to action.

In a recent conversation, Peck explained what it meant to read Baldwin as a young man, how “I Am Not Your Negro” was conceived as an “open project,” and how it relates to the present day.

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Craig Hubert: When you did first become aware of Baldwin?

Raoul Peck: I was a teenager, probably somewhere between finishing my school years and going to college. It must have been The Fire Next Time that I read first. I have read French literature, German literature, American literature, most of Latin American and Caribbean literature, and there are not many authors who are much more than authors. Baldwin spoke of real life; he spoke of who you are as a minority or as a black person or as a gay person or as a woman. He gives you a very structural way to analyze everything around you. So it’s not just about literature—it’s about life, it’s about history, it’s about the narrative that you’re given when you’re born, and how you deal with it, and how to recognize it as well. This is a rarity.

CH: Do you see the influence of Baldwin on your film work previous to I Am Not Your Negro?

RP: I’m a total product of Baldwin, along with a few other thinkers. I learned from him very early about the strength and the impact of film: as a central form of not only art, but propaganda. We are all deeply entranced by film—the image and the narrative are transporting. Having read some of his criticism and his views on narrative, at a time when I didn’t have models to look at, was very influential. Don’t forget: for a young black man in the 1960s, aside from a few Latin American and Caribbean authors, there were not many things around to help you understand your world. It could be frustrating to read, let’s say Faulkner, and you’re totally in the story, and then at one moment you realize the character that is the closest to you is maybe the fifth, the sixth, or the eighth character. They are not the main character. Then you turn the page, and you bump into something totally racist. You realize the book was not written with you in mind. It’s like this all your life. That’s why for me every single line of this film is like the Bible. Our lives were never separated from reality and the contradiction of it. We were living in a contradictory world from the beginning. And it’s continuing on until today. I can’t say that I see myself or the people around me when I watch The Real Housewives of Atlanta, or am surprised by the conversations about “Oscars So White” every single year.

CH: When did you start developing this film?

RP: I decided to make the film more than ten years ago. I managed to get access to the estate of James Baldwin. That was everything, because I knew without being close to the estate, having their confidence and trust, this project would not have been possible.

CH: Where did you begin?

RP: It was an open project. I did not know what would ultimately be the result of this process. The only things I knew was I had to make sure this film was unprecedented, totally original in its form and in its content. I had to develop the proper way for Baldwin to be seen in a movie. For that, I needed time and access. The film is the result of this process. The longer you work on something, the more layered and mature it becomes. If I made this film three or four years ago, it would have been poorer.

CH: Did recent events like Ferguson, which you show in the film, make the completion of the project more urgent?

CP: No. I wanted the film to go to the fundamentals. What are the fundamentals? That nothing has changed, basically. So whatever happened in terms of the news, the only thing it can tell me regarding the film is we were right from the beginning. This film works not because of what is happening around us in the news. It will work ten years from now, and ten years further. I did send a team to Ferguson because I knew something symbolic was happening. But it took me time to figure out what the right footage would be. I wanted to avoid any images that would remind people of the news coverage. I had to find the proper approach, the proper images, and how to include it in the film. I was never running after the news. The killing of these young boys was, of course, an incredible source of reality coming into the film. But I had to find an artistic way to include it in the film, as a symbolic occurrence. If it was just news, I would have had to include hundreds of names people who were killed just in the last few years.

CH: You use “Remember This House,” an outline Baldwin wrote for a proposed book before he died, as the structure for your film. Why did you choose this material as the foundation?

RP: Baldwin was so multilayered. He had so many different projects, all of them open on his desk; he would work on one, leave it, go back to another one, change titles, use pieces of one in another essay. This particular book was, for Baldwin, it seems, one of the most important. It was a chance for him to go back over the last 40 years, the loss of these three friends, and link them. They were all icons, they all died before they were 40, and they all became closer politically. People forget that Martin Luther King, Jr. became a rebel. The speeches of his last two years are radical, and Malcolm X’s discourse also changed, after he gained more perspective following his travels. When I saw Baldwin’s pages I thought, this is the film. It opened an entire universe and allowed me to go everywhere in Baldwin’s work to find the book that was never written. I knew it was buried somewhere.

CH: Were there things about the film that you noticed changed during this long process? Not because of what was happening in the news, but because of your own evolution of thinking about Baldwin?

RP: No, because Baldwin was so totally in my way of thinking and analyzing the world around me that it was not about discovering anything new. When I said that this film was ten years in the making, that’s not really true. Really, the 35 years prior were just as important. I was already making this film; he was already a part of me. The urgency I felt was, How do I share this with everyone else? How do I give the younger generation the opportunity to profit from him the way I did in my life and work? There are very few thinkers who have this capacity to play that kind of role in somebody’s life. In the same way that Shakespeare is at the center of every playwright because what he explored was unique, Baldwin, in his own way, is the center of many things. He invented a language. This will continue for a long time. He’s still original; you can’t imitate him.

CH: Do you think of your film as somehow completing his unfinished project?

RP: The film does several things. First, it makes sure Baldwin will never be forgotten. That is a victory, because people have started to push him aside. The film will circulate, and it will only bring people back to his books.That was the idea: to make sure his legacy will continue. For that to happen, the film had to be totally, radically Baldwin. It had to be a direct confrontation between Baldwin and the audience. The perspective of the film is Baldwin; he is telling the story. He is pointing his finger at you, looking at you through the camera.

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Published on February 03, 2017 00:16

February 2, 2017

How One Author Turned the Internet into a Giant Book Club

When my second novel, Henna House, was about to come out, I thought about how I could make a difference in its success. Henna House had been acquired by Scribner, and I felt so lucky. Now I wanted to do my part. I wanted to know at the end of the day that I had done absolutely everything I could to get my book into readers’ hands.

I believe in grand gestures. Grand gestures make people sit up and take notice. Grand gestures set you apart from the rest of the world. So I came up with my grand gesture. I challenged myself to personally meet with 100 book clubs. I called it my 100 Book Club Challenge and put the word out on Facebook that I would meet with any book club (either in person or by Skype) that invited me. I asked people to help me reach a goal and to become part of a community of readers.

I sent my challenge out to the cyberworld, and then I sat back and waited. But I didn’t have to wait long. Pretty quickly I had my first 20 invitations. My Facebook friends shared my challenge with their friends, who shared it with their friends. At first my plan had been to visit 50 book clubs for my hardback, and another 50 for my paperback. But as the invitations rolled in, I realized that I would be able to do 100 in under six months.

As you can imagine, it was a pretty crazy six months! What happened was that for every book club I visited, I got invited to another. A book club member’s sister, or cousin, or neighbor, or sister-in-law heard about my book club visits and invited me to their book club. So when I had 20, I really had 40; when I had 40, I really had 80, and so on and so on.

I’m convinced that one of the primary reasons my challenge took off was because of my book club photos. After I visited a book club, I obsessively posted photos of the visit on my Facebook author page and on my website; I also tweeted them out. The photos helped create connections and spread the word. Even book clubs that I didn’t visit posted their own photos of when they discussed my book, just so that they could also be a part of my challenge. When I started, I pledged to travel in person to one “far-flung” book club. The librarian at the Boise Public Library reached out to me, and since I’m from Philadelphia, and I had to take two planes to get to Boise (in January!), I figured that was my far-flung.

I’ve met with book clubs in living rooms, mansions, social halls in apartment buildings, senior citizen centers, libraries, conference rooms of high schools, synagogues, and country clubs. By this point I consider myself an anthropologist of book clubs. I can discuss in detail their feeding habits (dinner or dessert, drinks or coffee?) and their mating and life cycle rituals (how do they pick new books and invite new members?).

I hosted two traveling Henna House book clubs in my house: one from Spring Lake, N.J., and another from Fair Lawn, N.J. On another day I did three book clubs. While I was in Boise, an online forum, The Outlander Book Club, opened discussion of my book. So while I was meeting with one group in person in a public library, a virtual Henna House book club was also in progress. And that night that I skyped with a book club from Connecticut.

For my original challenge, I visited 30 book clubs by Skype and 70 in person. Skype book club visits generally only take around 45 minutes, and all I have to do is brush my hair and change into a decent top and I’m camera ready. I love Skype. As the mother of three children, I love how Skype allows me to be at home at bedtime and still be able to be with a book club. I’ve skyped with readers in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Toronto, Washington, and many more places.

At this point, I’m only doing Skype visits, but I have a brand-new challenge. I’m up to 138 total book clubs. Of these, 68 have been by Skype. My new challenge is to skype with 100 book clubs. I only have 32 to go.

People ask me if I get bored having the same discussion over and over again. My answer is that I enjoy myself every single time. Just ask my Henna House book club tribe. I always show up with a smile. Having readers is my wildest dream, and every conversation has its nuances, rewards, and surprises.

Nomi Eve is the author of Henna House and The Family Orchard. She is also the director of Drexel Storylab.

A version of this article appeared in the 11/02/2015 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Reaching Out to Readers

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Published on February 02, 2017 23:14

10 things I learned at writing conferences

One of the best things that Elmaz Abinader, one of my first writing mentors, ever did was to encourage me to attend my first writing conference. “These are our people,” she said. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that I could be a legitimate member of this passionate community – that I, a beginner, could join a group of real writers. A storm of anxious thoughts flooded my mind: Would I be called out as a novice? Would I feel self-conscious, lonely or embarrassed? As it turned out, none of my fears came to pass, and instead, I found inspiration and support at that Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Tempe, Arizona. Decades later, I still get excited when I register for a writing conference. Here are 10 invaluable things I’ve learned in the 20 years I’ve been attending conferences.

Writing can be a very solitary practice. But at a conference or workshop, you can experience that “I’ve found my people!” feeling, whether you’re in a group of dozens or thousands. Novelist Masha Hamilton says that it is an extraordinary experience to find “a camaraderie with people who live for stories and who care about words: their shape and their texture and their taste.” The network of people that you meet now can pay off well into the future. After making friends at a writing conference, playwright Mona Washington finds that she always has others to connect with at literary events and readings. When Olivia Olivia was applying to graduate programs, she reached out to workshop peers she had met at the Voices of Our Nation Arts (VONA) conference and was thrilled to be “surrounded by people who were there to support me making whatever choice I needed to make for school.”

You may think you’re the only writer in your town or region, but conferences can demonstrate that you’re not, and you can take the camaraderie and support of the conference home with you. Many conferences will sponsor regional meet-ups or provide attendee lists so you can contact people later on. I once sat across a workshop table with another writer, Michael Alenyikov, who shared an unforgettable short story. I emailed him to express my admiration, and 15 years later, we’re still in a close-knit, inspiring writing group hosted in his living room. The story he shared at the conference became the title story of an acclaimed collection, Ivan & Misha. Bearing witness to this story’s first reading in that conference workshop makes me feel as if I had some small hand in his success.

Believe it or not, it thrills mentors to connect with new writers as much as the other way around. Meg LeFauve, Oscar-winning screenplay writer of Inside Out, shares that while mentoring at Cinestory, a screenwriting lab, she worked on a script with a young writer who “got really honest with me about where the story was coming from inside of her. I asked a few questions, and suddenly there it was – this beautiful, raw, vulnerable perspective on her character that was so real and so her that both of us just sat there blinking. I saw her face change – like light flooding in. It was a powerful experience for both of us.” Mentors live for those shared moments of inspiration.

Many conferences feature “speed-dating” events with agents during which you can pitch your book premise and get a sense of its appeal in the marketplace. Writer Jennifer Baker had great speed-pitch experiences at BinderCon, a conference for women writers. “I got immediate requests for my material, with three different literary agents for a collection and a YA novel. I find I’m more natural and it’s easier to gauge if an agent may be right for you when meeting them in person than when crafting a query, which I’m not great at.” Finding an agent or editor is much like dating – interpersonal chemistry can spark the beginning of a new relationship.

Large conferences often offer opportunities to meet publishers and editors face-to-face, which helps make sure your future submissions won’t be so anonymous. Being able to say, “It was great to meet you at AWP!” gives your email an edge over a random manuscript from the slush pile. It’s great to be reminded that there’s a human being at the other end of an email, reading your submissions and queries, maybe wearing that fringed purple scarf you complimented at the book fair.

Writer Audrey Ferber walked by a booth and recognized the magazine that had just published a story by one of her good friends. She picked up the latest issue and exclaimed, “This is a great journal! And you’ve got great taste in authors!” The editor walked around the table and hugged her, happy to meet a reader in the flesh. At the next booth, Ferber picked up a free notebook and pen from the Cimarron Review. She wrote notes for a story with the Cimarron Review freebies, and a year later, it was published in their pages.

Conferences offer in-depth craft classes on everything from utilizing multiple POVs to creating social change through storytelling. Even after taking many individual classes or completing a master’s degree, there is always something new to learn at a conference, something that will help take your writing to the next level or introduce you to valuable new resources. The current schedule of the 15,000-attendee AWP Conference offers hundreds of scintillating talks, from how to use science to improve your writing, to knowing how to successfully end a story, to writing essays that can change the world.

When attending classes and panels, it’s important to be open to surprises. Karen Lynch had looked forward to finally working with her writing heroine, Cheryl Strayed, at a conference and was deeply disappointed to learn that Strayed had fallen ill and was being replaced by another author, someone she didn’t know. When Steve Almond took over the workshop, “Each of us felt we learned more in those few hours with Steve than we had in many much longer workshops. In the end, Steve was a huge help to all of us. He’s now my favorite teacher.”

Connections don’t have to happen over a workshop table at a panel. They can also happen at the hotel bar or the swimming pool. That person you share your sunscreen with could end up being your future best writing partner or agent. Literary magic often happens during after-hours events, socializing in local restaurants or parties. Unburdened by professional duties and the pressure of pitching, people are free to form organic relationships that can morph into professional and personal connections. Roommates or dormitory neighbors can become longtime friends. Wendy Patrice Williams didn’t know a soul when she went to one conference, but her assigned roommate went on to read her manuscript drafts, write a cover blurb for her book and accompany her to other conferences in subsequent years.

Whether you write mystery or romance, literary or YA or science fiction, or if you’re an LGBQT writer or writer of color, there is a world of writers and publishing professionals who share your interests. Williams was an avid attendee of the Writing the Medical Experience Conference for multiple years, and she described it as the “perfect blended community of health professionals, patients, caregivers, cancer support group members and others. There was no hierarchy, it was just a wonderful group of people yearning to understand and write their experience.” After the conference, the attendees’ works were published in a thematic anthology.

Lisa Factora-Borchers, who is now completing her MFA degree at Columbia, says of VONA, “It was the first time in my entire life that I saw real authors of color in the professor role. It was a profound experience. I remember calling my husband and telling him that I felt like I could do anything. I could become a writer and professor. I said these words that I’d never said before: ‘I can do this. I’ve seen it here.’”

Conferences cost a lot of money to put on, and the sponsors who support and host them are wonderful. Check out the local bookstores, universities, small presses, libraries and other local sponsors – they can offer a rich added dimension to your conference experience. The Loft Literary Center offered a star-studded week of readings plus tours of their writing center, letterpress studio and bookstore to participants of a recent conference I attended, and I swooned over the gallery of handmade books while listening to award-winning poets. Some smaller conferences like the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference offer low-cost or no-cost homestays that can engender long friendships between local hosts and their visiting writers.

For some people, vacation means sitting on a beach or exploring a new city. And some writing conferences can feel like a vacation. Karen Lynch adored the lovely Sanibel Island conference off the coast of Fort Myers, Florida. “Sanibel is one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, famous for millions of seashells on the beaches.” Some writing conferences are held in gorgeous mountain settings, others in vibrant cities or lush wineries. A conference can be the perfect blend of working, networking and exploring a fantastic new setting. Choosing to tack an extra day onto the front or end of a conference can offer a nice balance of business and pleasure.

Attending a writing conference can be nothing short of life-changing. Leanna James Blackwell, now the director of the MFA program in creative nonfiction at BayPath University, recalls her first conference. “I will always remember the first writing conference I attended as an accepted writer. My daughter was only two years old, and I was worried I wouldn’t fit in, as the mother of a small child who hadn’t published anything major yet. It turned out to be one of the best experiences of my writing life. I received an outpouring of validation and confirmation that I was on the right track. I met an agent who loved my work; my work was respected and taken seriously. It was a huge boost for me and helped give me the confidence to keep writing.”

Audrey Ferber had been a closet writer before her first conference. “Before I went to [the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley workshop], nobody even knew I was writing a novel. It was a secret, and I had nobody to talk to about it. I told people I was in the jewelry business. At the conference, it was so intense and moving to be around other people who were writers. I realized that I wasn’t crazy – that there were other people who loved writing stories. When I left, for the first time, I said I was a writer, too. Now, writing is my whole world.”

Michelle Valladares, a professor at the City College of New York, tells her students, “At every conference, there is one good thing that will happen. At every conference I’ve been to, I’ve made at least one new friend or met one editor, writer or publisher that I admire.”

Not every conference will be a dream come true: Dull lectures and disappointing food offerings can happen, too. But if you stay alert for your “one good thing,” you’re likely to come home with inspiring tips, new comrades-in-writing and a shot of validation, confidence and community that will keep you going, and possibly change your life.

Susan Ito writes and teaches at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto.

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Published on February 02, 2017 22:13

Bookstore News: February 2, 2017

A store in northern Maine wins a cash prize; college students petition for a Barnes & Noble; Houston gets a new Latino bookstore; and more.

Volumes Book Store Wins Town Entrepreneur Prize: The Houlton, Me. bookstore won the inaugural Houlton Entrepreneur Prize, which gives the store "a package of more than $10,000 which includes a $7,500 forgivable loan and incentives from program partners totaling more than $2,500."

Students at Ohio University Petition for a Barnes & Noble: Students at Ohio University are gathering signatures on a petition that is lobbying for a Barnes & Noble bookstore to open in Athens, Oh. The closest B&N is in an hour away, though Athens is home to three other bookstores.

Chicago Bookstore Offers Political Panels: The Women & Children First bookshop has launched a month-long series of discussions and events focused on the intersection of culture and politics.

Latino Bookstore Set to Open in Houston: Nuestra Palabra Art & Books, run by Mexican-American author and activist Tony Diaz, is set to open in a small space that is part of Talento Bilingüe de Houston, a bicultural arts center near to downtown Houston.

Anchorage's Title Wave Used Bookstore Seeks New Home: Rent hikes are forcing out the popular used bookstore that's been opened since 1991.

Ohio's Blue Manatee Children's Bookstore is Moving: The much loved Cincinnati bookstore in Oakley, Oh. will close in April for what is being called the "Great Migration," which will see the store, which has been opened since 1989 move into a smaller location nearby.

Historian Traces the Rise of Black-Owned Bookstores: In a forthcoming book, historian Joshua Clark Davis writes about the rise of black-owned bookstores and their impact on the social movements of the 1960's and '70's.

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Published on February 02, 2017 21:11

Read Narrowly: When You Should Read Books You Love Again and Again

Cinephiles rewatch films until they know them backward and forward. The average music fan is a walking iPod of melodies and song lyrics. Art lovers return to galleries time and again to contemplate a favored painting. Most novels, on the other hand, are read only once. Read and shelved away until, if the book is lucky, it gets loaned to a curious friend who never returns it.

Such is the life of a book.

This guest post is by Matthew FitzSimmons. FitzSimmons is the author of the bestselling first novel in the Gibson Vaughn series, The Short Drop.

Born in Illinois and raised in London, England, he now lives in Washington, DC, where he taught English literature and theater at a private high school for over a decade. Poisonfeather is his second novel. Follow FitzSimmons .

There are good reasons for this. A book takes far longer to digest than a movie and doesn’t make for a good first date. Unlike music, you can’t read and drive. Reading is a private, antisocial, time consuming activity…coincidentally much like writing one. The calculus for most is simple – there are simply too many good books to fool around with rereading books a second much less a third time.

Ironically, writers are even less likely to reread books because they’ve been expressly told not to. Read widely, we are advised. If there’s an older saw dispensed to the aspiring novelist I haven’t heard it. Read widely – soak up a range of styles, techniques, perspectives, and genres. Don’t get me wrong, it’s excellent advice when you consider how many brilliant authors there are who deserve to be read. The difficulty is that it is also terrible advice if taken at face value.

Let us consider Toni Morrison, an indisputably brilliant author. Since 1970 with the release of The Bluest Eye, Ms. Morrison has published eleven novels. The artistry and genius of her writing makes it easy to see why she requires between three and six years to complete each book. The craft apparent in her work speaks to countless hours of writing and revision. Well, not countless, only three to six years’ worth. And in return, we read her novels in a matter of days or weeks. And based on that one reading, we form our critical judgment, comfortable in the knowledge that we got it. Then we put the book aside and move on to the next. We must. How else is one expected to read widely?

I taught English literature at a small high school in Washington DC for over a decade. It’s an experience that I credit for not only rekindling my love of writing but also for rewiring my approach to reading. I taught Ernest Hemingway for eight years. Before we began the unit, I would reread The Sun Also Rises once or twice to refresh my memory. Then I would read along with the students each night so that the chapters for homework were fresh in my mind. I would estimate, conservatively, that I’ve read The Sun Also Rises fifty times. I can say something similar for books by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Truman Capote and many others.

The benefit to such a narrow focus was books that I realized that I had only scratched the surface of these books that I thought I knew so well. While teaching my students, I was also learning. Every pass through a familiar text yielded fresh insights. Gradually, these great authors opened up to me in a way that wasn’t possible from a single read. They became my teachers, and I know unequivocally that I owe my writing to their lessons.

Now I know that reading a book fifty times isn’t practical. Nor am I suggesting that aspiring writers should teach – alright, maybe I am suggesting that much. Reading widely is good advice, and I encourage it. But perhaps, in addition to reading widely, if you come across an author whose work you love, read it again and again until you know it inside and out. Sometimes it pays to read narrowly.

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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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A Japanese Crime Thriller in Which Crime Is the Least of It

“In order to describe the main character’s feelings or passions, you need a big organization that is like a big ocean that I let the character swim in,” said Mr. Yokoyama, who spent a dozen years as a reporter on the police beat in Gunma Prefecture.

Photo

Credit

Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

“Six Four” has sold extremely well in Japan and was adapted into a movie that has been nominated for the Japan Academy Prize, this country’s equivalent of the Academy Awards. The book was translated into English last year and published to positive reviews in Britain, where it was a best seller, and will go on sale in the United States on Tuesday.

Mr. Yokoyama follows other Japanese crime writers whose work has been translated into English, including Seicho Matsumoto, Natsuo Kirino and Keigo Higashino, though he is currently assigned to a marketing pigeonhole that compares “Six Four” to Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”

Where Mr. Larsson’s series was propelled by violence, sex and its charismatic heroine, Lisbeth Salander, “Six Four” features a stodgy protagonist who is called a “gargoyle” by the press and is haunted by the fact that his daughter ran away because she “despised the face she inherited.”

In his descriptions of interactions between the police and the news media, Mr. Yokoyama captures their everyday sexism: One of the junior press officers, a young woman, repeatedly asks Mikami to let her attend after-hours drinking sessions with reporters. He refuses, in a paternalistic effort to protect her from lecherous journalists.

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Hideo Yokoyama at home in Japan. As a reporter, he felt different, but as an author, he thinks “anyone could commit a crime.”

Credit

Kentaro Takahashi for The New York Times

With his gray hair long enough to brush the edge of his collar, Mr. Yokoyama recalled how he grew frustrated with journalism and what he saw as its absolutist lens.

“When I was a reporter, I was very confident that I was not the kind of person who could ever commit a crime,” he said. “But now that I have been working as an author, I believe that I could commit a crime — or that anyone could commit a crime.”

Toward the end of his reporting career, Mr. Yokoyama started writing fiction. He submitted a short story for a literary prize and won third place; by then, he had decided to quit his job.

He was 34 and married, with two young children at home, so he worked odd jobs at moving and security companies while writing in his spare time.

It took seven years for him to sell his first novel, “Kage no Kisetsu,” or “Season of Shadows,” which was published in 1998 and won the Matsumoto Seicho Award, named after one of Japan’s most famous crime writers.

Publishers began clamoring for more, and Mr. Yokoyama buried himself in writing.

He rented a 110-square-foot studio apartment and wrote for more than 20 hours a day, imbibing energy drinks to keep awake and popping sleeping pills when he needed to nap. “I just stayed in that apartment, writing on three hours of sleep a night,” he said. “It was a big science experiment.”

Mr. Yokoyama frantically pumped out four new books in five years, while also working on and off on the manuscript of “Six Four.” It takes its title from the reign of Emperor Hirohito, the father of the current Japanese emperor, Akihito, and denotes the year in which the cold kidnapping case at the center of the novel took place. (The Japanese count the years of each emperor’s reign separately from the Gregorian calendar year, and the year of the emperor’s death was known as “64.”)

The punishing schedule caught up with him, and in 2003, Mr. Yokoyama had a heart attack. As he gradually recovered and returned to writing, he could not even remember Mikami’s name. But long bouts tending his garden helped refresh him, and three years later, he finished the novel.

The publisher Bungeishunju released “Six Four” in 2012, and Japanese critics praised it for subverting the traditional police procedural. In a culture where an increasing number of workers are frustrated by hierarchical bureaucracy, the novel was a big hit.

At a dinner party in Tokyo, Jon Riley, editor in chief of Quercus, a London-based publisher that released the Stieg Larsson novels in Britain, heard of the novel’s popularity and commissioned an English summary. On the basis of that report, Quercus bought the rights to translate “Six Four” into English, and hired Jonathan Lloyd-Davies, an accomplished translator of Japanese fiction.

Writing in The Guardian last year, Alison Flood described “Six Four” as a “slow burn” crime novel that provided a “layered insight into internal police politics.” The novel was shortlisted for an International Dagger Award for crime fiction.

In the United States, where “Six Four” will be released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in Mr. Lloyd-Davies’s translation, the publisher is planning an initial print run of 11,000 hardcover copies and hopes American audiences will be drawn to the discursive police drama.

“Yes, it’s about a Japanese police department, and clearly it’s central to the story that it is Japanese,” said Sean McDonald, executive editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “But I don’t think you need to be reading it because you’re interested in Japan.”

David Peace, the Tokyo-based author of the crime novels “Tokyo Year Zero” and “Occupied City,” who was an early champion of the novel, argues that more such translations are vital, and not just for literary reasons.

At a time when the United States and Britain are becoming “more inward-looking than they already are,” Mr. Peace said, “our need for translated literature and to try to understand other cultures and countries is greater than ever.”

Mr. Yokoyama continues to work what he describes as “irregular hours” on a 15-year-old Mitsubishi desktop computer in a narrow room in his home that smells of tobacco and overflows with books, newspaper clippings, postcards and ink bottles. He proudly displays a baseball bat autographed by the Japanese baseball player Hideki Matsui.

He said he was working on four or five projects. “I’m trying to finish them,” he said, “so they will be presentable to society.”

Correction: February 2, 2017

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the reason the novel is titled “Six Four.” The final year of the reign of Emperor Hirohito was 64, based on a Japanese system under which each emperor’s reign is counted separately from the Gregorian calendar year.

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