Roy Miller's Blog, page 286

Dry Erase Board Notes | WritersDigest.com

You come into work one morning and the dry erase board on your desk has a note on it that you didn’t write. You assume it’s a coworker friend so, just to amuse yourself, you respond to the note on the board with your own note. The next morning you come in and there’s another response, only this time, the response isn’t so friendly. What happens next?

Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.

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15 Works of Contemporary Literature by and About Refugees

This weekend, Donald Trump signed an executive order that temporarily closed America’s borders to entry for citizens from seven (predominantly Muslim) countries, and indefinitely closed them to Syrian refugees. Notably absent from the list of banned Muslim countries, of course are those where Trump has business ties—despite the fact that those unbanned countries are where the majority of terrorist activity against the United States has come from. This is only to say that whatever excuse he’s making about terrorism is patently bullshit.

The administration would like us to believe that refugees are nothing more than potential terrorists, but here’s what they really are: people in distress, in danger, under persecution, who need our help. Not for nothing, there are quite a number of great writers who were themselves refugees at one time or another—Vladimir Nabokov was a refugee, and so was Victor Hugo, and so was Bertolt Brecht, not to mention, oh, Albert Einstein—as well as leading lights in other fields (particularly science—as WIRED puts it, this “isn’t just inhumane—it’ll make America dumber“), but most importantly, they are people. To remind us all of the humanity of these refugees, and perhaps shed a little light on their experience, below are a few recommendations for great works of literature either written by refugees, or about the refugee experience, or both—not, of course, an exhaustive list by any means, but just something to get you started.

Leila Abdelrazaq, Baddawi

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In the vein of Maus and Persepolis, this is a personal, political graphic novel (that began as a webcomic!) based on the stories Abdelrazaq’s father told her about growing up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon and incorporating Palestinian iconography and art. A striking coming-of-age story.

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Porochista Khakpour, The Last Illusion

An Iranian refugee and now-US citizen, Khakpour wrote a wonderful piece for CNN just yesterday in which she compares her feelings about the recent orders to the thoughts she had after 9/11: “What is going to happen to this country, what will they do to my other country? You can be a refugee once, I’ve always thought, but how to be one twice?” Her wonderful novel The Last Illusion tells the story of another kind of refugee: an Iranian boy raised as a bird (read: in a birdcage, eating bugs) who is adopted by an American psychologist and brought to New York to try to become a man (and maybe learn how to fly, after all this time).

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Nihad Sirees, The Silence and the Roar

The prolific Aleppo-born novelist Nihad Sirees left Syria in 2012 under personal and political pressure from the Syrian government, who viewed him as a threat. In this horrifyingly prescient, distinctly Orwellian novel, a Syrian writer is silenced for refusing to contribute to a system of propaganda in service to the unnamed dictator of an unnamed country—but he can’t be silenced entirely. The novel is banned in Syria.

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Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini came to the United States with his family in 1980, seeking asylum during the Soviet–Afghan War. The protagonist of his mega-bestselling first novel follows a similar path, growing up in Kabul before escaping to Pakistan and then California during the war before going back to rescue his best friend’s son from an orphanage. Hosseini is now a goodwill envoy to UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, and has written eloquently about the Syrian refugee crisis.

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Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Mengestu’s father escaped from the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam and his Red Terror in 1978, first to Italy, and then to New York, where he was eventually joined by his family (Dinaw was two). In his much-acclaimed debut novel, an Ethiopian refugee who now runs a grocery store in Washington DC tackles his own relationship to America and his identity as part of the African diaspora as well as his unease with the gentrification of his neighborhood. In 2012, Mengestu was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant.

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Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives

Hemon was born in Sarajevo. In 1992, he was visiting Chicago when his homeland came under siege, and he has been stranded here ever since, a tourist-turned-refugee. In an interview about his 2015 novel The Making of Zombie Wars, he talks about zombies as a metaphor for oft-dehumanized immigrants: “It is appalling in so many ways; these people are refugees and they’re being shut out. There are so many instances in history where Europe, and other countries too, shut their doors to refugees, somehow hoping that they would die or vanish. The saddest thing is that the tragedy of people having to risk their lives, and losing their lives crossing the sea or half of Europe, is seen as a desire to steal from us what we have, this wonderful privilege of living in a democracy and having a stable life. And that we must protect it from them, and the only danger for us is their coming—it’s another variation of the zombie fantasy.” But actually, I’d like to recommend his luminous essay collection The Book of My Lives, which will allow for no dehumanization whatsoever—it’s one of the most human books I’ve ever read.

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Thanhha Lai, Inside Out and Back Again

This wonderful novel-in-verse—which won, among other things, the 2011 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature—is based on the author’s experiences as a refugee in Alabama after fleeing the Fall of Saigon: at first speaking no English, and then struggling to find happiness in a new world.

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Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and came to America as a refugee in 1975, landing first in a refugee camp in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania and eventually moving to San Jose. His 2015 novel The Sympathizer won a slew of awards, including the Pulitzer—maybe you’ve heard of it. His new book is a sharp collection of stories focused largely on the lives of Vietnamese exiles in California, and will absolutely live up to the hype.

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Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon is no refugee, of course, but Joe Kavalier is, and his story was to me the most compelling and memorable part of this popular novel. Joe lands in New York City as a 19-year-old Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague, and he spends the entirety of the book trying to get his family—in particular his little brother—to safety in America.

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Ismail Kadare, The Palace of Dreams

Another parable about a dictatorship that was banned by its country of origin, written by an author author who wound up seeking asylum elsewhere—go figure. Nobel Prize contender (and inaugural Man Booker International Prize winner) Kadare’s The Palace of Dreams is set in 19th-century Albania, in the eponymous Palace of Dreams, whose workers are charged with sifting through the dreams of the country’s citizens to analyze and use as political fodder. While Kadare did claim political asylum from Albania in 1990, he was apparently later invited to become Albania’s president.

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Chris Cleave, Little Bee

This popular novel tells the story of a young Nigerian refugee and the English woman whose life she changes when she shows up after two years behind razor wire in a detention center—and after their first horrific meeting on an African beach. There’s a lot of horror in this book, yes, but there’s a lot of goodness, too.

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Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

Already a contemporary classic, Allende’s magical first novel is a sweeping, delightful epic that follows three generations of the Trueba family. Allende’s father was the first cousin of Salvador Allende, the Chilean president overthrown by Pinochet. After she and her family began receiving death threats, she fled to Venezuela. It was there that, some years later, she learned her grandfather was dying; because she could not go to him, she wrote him a long letter that eventually became this novel.

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Lorraine Adams, Harbor

Adams was a staff writer for The Washington Post and has a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Her first novel is the story of Algerian refugee Aziz Arkoun, who finally arrives in Boston in 1999 after three attempts and 52 days in a tanker. But the life he finds—constant suspicion, hardship, and ambiguity—is not so much better than the one he left. And once he and his friends become suspects, it only gets worse. Worth reading for the pre-9/11 take on terrorist fears in America.

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Dave Eggers, What is the What

This one blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction—based on the life and true story of Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng, who walked thousands of miles to escape the violence always surging in his wake, who found struggle and squalor in refugee camps and who eventually came to the US as part of the Lost Boys of Sudan program—only, of course, to find that his problems weren’t over. The novel was a bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award.

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Tommy Wieringa, These Are the Names

In this novel by one of Holland’s most beloved writers, a group of refugees—ragged, starving, their numbers winnowing by the day—walks across the Eurasian steppe, towards what they hope is safety. Far away (but getting closer) is a policeman named Pontus Beg, on his own internal journey. The two paths will meet, of course, raising questions about identity, exile, and that tenuous place we call home.

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Who Cares About Format? Just Read

The Association of American Publishers recently released its 2014 results for revenue in book publishing and journalism, and the final number was $28 billion. According to the International Publishers Association, the U.S. is the largest single market for publishing in the world. Yet we must recognize that the U.S. publishing business is under siege. Books battle for time and attention. How many games of Candy Crush can one person play? Who really needs 2,000 selfies a month? As an industry, we need to call consumers back to books, to rediscover the magic of reading, whether in print or digital formats.

As a 35-year industry veteran, I have witnessed the transformation of the business of publishing. In my early days at Houghton Mifflin, there was a sense of publishing as an art. Poetry books might not show the most aggressive bottom line but they needed to be published. The bestsellers would carry along a poetry book or two. Publishers sponsored a balanced spectrum of works, a mandate taken into account when publishing decisions were made.

In the 1990s, the book world became more business minded. Publishers acquired one another, building empires and cultivating backlists. Random House and Bantam Doubleday Dell joined forces in 1998 in a move that dazzled industry pundits, creating the first mega-conglomerate in publishing. Ultimately, the trade publishing world evolved into the Big Six: Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Book Group, Random House, and Simon & Schuster. And then, on July 1, 2013, the industry watched in awe as Penguin and Random House finalized their union, creating what Markus Dohle, the chief executive of the new company, called “the first truly global trade book publishing company.”

I have worked for a paper merchant selling to book publishing companies and printers since 1984. I’ve watched publishing morph from an art into a business model. Smaller companies were consumed by larger ones, and publishers experimented and ultimately expanded their e-book platforms. Now the triple-digit growth has plateaued, and the e-book is simply another format. How a reader reads is immaterial; the industry must continue to coax audiences into the magical world of the written word.

Throughout my career, I have made it a point to be involved in a wide variety of industry organizations. I am on the board of directors for the Book Industry Guild of New York, Poets & Writers, and the Book Industry Study Group. I serve on assorted committees for each of them, as well as the Book Manufacturers’ Institute. I also participate in the Book Industry Environmental Council, and my company, Lindenmeyr Book Publishing, is an affiliate member of the Association of American Publishers. From this insider’s vantage point, across all of these platforms, I witness how each of these very earnest groups focuses on a discrete aspect of our industry. Wouldn’t it be to our advantage to consider a new spirit of cooperation to promote reading?

On July 8, the U.S. paper and packaging companies jointly launched an industry-wide campaign aimed at the paper consumer market. This type of campaign (think “Got Milk?” or “Pork, the Other White Meat”) is evaluated, approved, and audited by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to ensure no antitrust agreements are violated. The industry’s message, “How Life Unfolds,” is designed to create awareness about the positive role of paper in our lives and to combat negative messages, such as the (increasingly disputed) claims that paper is worse for the environment than its digital counterparts.

Perhaps the book industry should consider a similar joint consumer check-off campaign. The concept we collectively want to share is that reading is entertaining, informative, and productive. It stimulates the mind, broadens perspectives, and answers a multitude of questions. It has real social value. As Michael Pietsch, CEO of Hachette Book Group noted recently, “I remain in awe every day of the miracle of writing. These people who build worlds, and thrills and knowledge for us, out of words, are my heroes.” How can we as an industry best reinforce the value of the written word? Consider this observation from Dohle, “Together, we are even better positioned to fulfill our core purpose: to bridge authors and readers by publishing the very best books.” He was referring to the combination of Penguin and Random House. But there is a bigger message there. And we, as an entire industry, would do well to contemplate it.

Janet McCarthy Grimm is v-p of sales for Lindenmeyr Book Publishing.

A version of this article appeared in the 11/30/2015 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: A Case for Reading

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Current Events Dominate Final Day of Winter Institute

While the 650 independent booksellers in Minneapolis during this year’s Winter Institute were there to network with one another and talk shop, conversations throughout the weekend inevitably turned to current events far beyond the Hyatt Regency -- and Monday was no exception. Even the morning’s keynote speaker, management coach Kim Scott, made several references to the Trump administration, as she presented her philosophy of employer-employee relations that is contained in her new book, Radical Candor: “You have to hold your employees accountable -- as well as our government,” she said. As professionals running a business, booksellers have “a moral obligation to challenge the people you work with” by caring about them personally and criticizing them directly, without descending into passive or “obnoxious” aggression.

If the attendance at Monday morning’s keynote was not a full house, it was for good reason: about 60 booksellers skipped the breakfast to meet elsewhere in the hotel to brainstorm on how to make their stores the sanctuaries that Saturday’s keynote speaker Roxane Gay had urged them to do. According to Anna Thorn of Upshur Books in Washington, D.C., one of the meet-up’s four organizers, three different groups of booksellers had wanted to do something in response to President Trump’s recent executive orders, as well as to move forward after Sunday’s lively Town Hall, when a number of young and new booksellers had challenged the ABA to make the industry more inclusive. The booksellers in attendance used the opportunity to explore ways to make their bookstores more inclusive beyond its customer base, and to establish a network to enable them to act in solidarity in response to government actions, such as tweeting out the same book title or image, and creating similar book displays.

“What is responsible bookselling,” Thorn asked PW, “What do we do as individual stores and how do we work together to reach out to our communities? How do we provide spaces for people in these times that are productive and safe?” Thorn said the meeting “worked out better than we could have imagined” with ideas ranging from creating multilingual websites to making available to customers cards with the contact information of elected officials to holding salons with local experts discussing current events. Booksellers were also urged to become actively involved in the regional bookseller associations and in the ABA – which had announced moments earlier at the morning’s breakfast that it was forming a diversity task force and asked for nominations for the ABA Booksellers Advisory Council.

Politics even dominated the “Featured Talk: Indie Next List Authors” session later in the morning, with Kate DiCamillo, Ann Patchett, Alice Hoffman, Joshilyn Jackson, Ben Winters, and Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney repeatedly referring to current events in response to questions from moderators Josh Christie of Print: A Bookstore in Portland, Maine, and Erica Luttrell, a bookseller at Chevalier’s in Los Angeles.

Patchett disclosed that she often wakes up in the middle of the night in a “Trump sweat,” and recalled that her favorite sign at the recent Women’s March in Washington, D.C. had a literary allusion, “I refuse to live in The Handmaid’s Tale,” which prompted the other authors to recall signs they had seen at protests that had contained literary allusions.

Winters pointed out that President Trump is “doggedly unliterary,” and is a “president who clearly hates books, hates words,” prompting Jackson to respond that it is “the essential thing that is wrong with him: that man is not reading. Through reading, that is how you learn empathy.”

Publishing books as an act of political resistance was an underlying theme of the Small and University Presses Lunch, where most of the 10 publishers presenting emphasized the diversity of their 2017 lists, as well as the topical nature of certain titles. Doug Seibold of Agate Publishing introduced its new Denene Millner children’s imprint, which focuses on the “everyday lives of the African-American community,” and Jennifer Baumgardner of Feminist Books introduced its new imprint, Amethyst Editions, curated by Michelle Tea, which will publish books by emerging LGBTQ+ writers. Nathan Rostron of Restless Books, which is launching a children’s imprint this fall, pointed out that, in resistance to the current administration’s latest policies, the Brooklyn-based publisher of international literature will continue to celebrate the immigrant experience by publishing such books as Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan (March), which won Restless’ 2016 Prize for New Immigrant Writing.

“We see publishing as directly counteracting Trump and what [his administration] stands for by emphasizing diversity and under-represented voices and immigration and internationalism," Rostron said.

Ben LeRoy of Tyrus Books talked up Echolocation by Mark Powell (June), describing the novel about a CIA contractor as “something that is playing out today, as this country is reconciling what has been done in our name, and its repercussions around the globe.” Nathaniel Marunas of Quercus described Brian Freeman’s latest Jonathan Stride mystery, which begins with a terrorist act, Marathon (May) as “timely, especially considering the injustices of the current administration.” And the last speaker, Gianna LaMorte of the University of Texas Press, drew laughs when she said while presenting The Making of Hillary Clinton: The White House Years by Robert McNeeley (Jan.), that she was “not here to bum anyone out.”

Next year, Winter Institute 13 will move south, to Memphis, Tenn., January 22-25, 2018.

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Jonathan & Faye Kellerman: Bonus WD Interview Outtakes

By Jesse Kellerman

For more than three decades, Jonathan and Faye Kellerman have frequented the bestsellers lists, creating some of the most successful works of contemporary American crime fiction. Their respective series protagonists—psychologist Alex Delaware and detective Milo Sturgis; husband-and-wife investigative team Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus—are among the most indelible and beloved in the genre. Between them they’ve won countless awards, enlisted legions of devoted fans, and given numerous interviews, together and individually.

To which I say: Tell me something I don’t know.

Growing up, I was certainly aware, in a literal sense, of what my folks did for a living. I had a vague notion of their professional standing. Like most children, however, I was intensely self-involved. And as I became an adolescent and began to write for myself, I grew righteously indifferent to their opinions on writing (or anything else).

Only in recent years—when I’ve been blessed with children and a writing career of my own—have I come to appreciate them not just as authority figures but as the first and most potent molders of my authorial voice. And I wonder how much I missed out on in my egocentricity.

In some ways, though, it’s a gift, arriving at this insight now. I’m much better positioned at 38 than at 18 to ask questions that matter. My dad puts it like this: “Once you think you understand everything about a person, it gets a little boring, doesn’t it?”

I agree. So when I sat down to talk to them about the writing life (on the eve of their February new releases—my mother’s Bone Box and my father’s Heartbreak Hotel—scheduled just two weeks apart), I tried to bear in mind how many things about them remain mysterious to me. I suppose most people feel that way about their parents.

The March/April 2016 Writer’s Digest features an in-depth discussion between Jonathan, Faye and Jesse Kellerman on growing into the craft, standing out in a crowded genre, and allowing characters to keep surprising you. Here, in these outtakes we didn’t have space to print, they talk more about the writing passions that go back in their family for generations.

JESSE: Do you think it ever would have occurred to your own parents to write a novel? I know that Grandpa wrote short stories—I have some of them. But do you think they had books in them somewhere?

Faye: Our parents’ generation was very different. World War II was still fresh. They were the walking wounded. Their aspirations were different. “Hey, I’m still in one piece, let’s breed, and have a family, and that’s it.”

Jonathan: I think my dad was certainly a good writer. He published poetry. He played with it, but he was involved in so many other things. We do have relatives who were journalists, quite a few of them. We had a great-great-uncle who wrote for The Forward when it was a Yiddish paper.

Faye: My second cousin on my mom’s side—or my third cousin?—is the poet laureate of Massachusetts. But I dare say if you take any family and go back for generations and generations you might find a writer in there somewhere.

Jonathan: We had a big generation gap between us and our parents. But my mom told me: “You think you had a gap, you should see the gap I had with my parents.”

I think there’s a much smaller gap—I could be wrong—between my generation and your generation, for a variety of reasons.

I was kind of an art prodigy, and I remember telling my parents, “Maybe I’ll be an artist.” As cosmopolitan as my parents were, it was like, “Well, if you want to starve …” It was not encouraging.

JESSE: I’m often asked what it’s like to be the child of writers. What it’s like for you, being the parents of writers, with some of us having both collaborated with you and published separately?

Jonathan: Tremendous satisfaction. I want my kids to be happy and to do what they want to do, and there’s no competitive element. I’ve really enjoyed writing books with you, now that you’ve established yourself independently.

Faye: It’s also fun because now, as an adult, you understand what we did while you were growing up. You understand on an experiential level.

Jonathan: Now I look at your son, and he clearly is really good at it, too. It’s not something we planned. We just encouraged you to do what you enjoy. To me, that’s the key to a happy life. I never set out to create a dynasty—but if we do, that’s great.

To read the full fascinating discussion from this talented family of writers, don’t miss the full-length interview in the March/April 2017 Writer’s Digest.

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LitHub Daily: January 31, 2017

The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day

TODAY: In 1935, Nobel Prize-winning author Kenzaburō Ōe is born.

15 contemporary works of literature by and about refugees. | Literary Hub
Kristen Evans on how repealing the ACA will have wide-ranging effects on writers and freelancers. | Literary Hub
Lev Grossman doesn’t actually believe in magic, and other revelations. | Literary Hub
Kayla Rae Whitaker on coming of age with South Park, and the power of dark comedy in even darker times. | Literary Hub
“It is a portrait of America, a self-portrait of Herriman, and, I believe, the first attempt to paint the full range of human consciousness in the language of the comic strip.” Chris Ware on Krazy Kat. | New York Review of Books
On giant merkins and Amazon’s new “one-woman biographical burlesque” about Zelda Fitzgerald, Z: The Beginning of Everything. | The New Yorker
“Our imaginations are so overpowered and outmaneuvered by the toxic gravity of the global economy that we are happy to amuse ourselves watching the whole world burn instead of doing anything to keep that from happening.” Jessa Crispin on our obsession with dystopias. | The Baffler
“I dreaded the end of class, when I’d have to look at my phone again—wondering which part of my identity would clash with what fresh news update: partially-disabled, chronically ill, Iranian, American, artist, academic, journalist, woman.” Porochista Khakpour on Trump’s Muslim ban. | CNN
Some of the questions being raised that are driving the debate about whether the government should fund the NEA, NEH, and CPB. | The New York Times
“I am trying to write poems to make you feel like you have permission to be yourself and be seen.” An interview with Morgan Parker. | Catapult
Kaveh Akbar shares poems from the seven countries—Iran, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria—impacted by Trump’s executive order that temporarily bans immigrants from those countries. | PBS

 

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Why Writers Need Pen Names

I was in the midst of writing my debut novel, The Charm Bracelet, when I was hired by People magazine to write an article revealing that Robert Galbraith was actually the secret pen name of J.K. Rowling.

Before starting the research, I gulped and opened my own working manuscript for my novel. The first page read, The Charm Bracelet by Viola Shipman. To be clear, my name is not Viola, and I am not a woman. After writing four humorous memoirs, I chose a pen name for my first novel. Or, more accurately, the pen name chose me.

The Charm Bracelet—a novel about how the charms on an heirloom bracelet reconnect three generations of women and remind them of what’s most important in life—is a tribute to my grandmother Viola Shipman. The story was inspired by her charms and lessons.

I grew up with my grandmother in the Ozarks, and the jangling of her charm bracelet was as ever present as the moan of bullfrogs, the call of whip-poor-wills, and the hum of cicadas. Through her charms I got to know my grandmother as not just my grandma but an incredible woman who’d lived an extraordinary life filled with beauty, hope, and tragedy.

My grandmother encouraged me to become a writer. She taught me to dream big but to always remember that the simplest things in life—family, friends, faith, fun, love, and a passion for what you do—are the grandest gifts. She was a seamstress at a local factory, but she dreamed of being a fashion designer. I believe, based on her encouragement, that she saw a piece of her own dreams come true through my subsequent accomplishments as a writer.

As I dug into the reasons why J.K. Rowling chose Robert Galbraith as a pen name (in the process I learned that J.K. was itself a pseudonym chosen to appeal to young male readers), as well as why other current authors made similar choices (such as Nora Roberts writing as J.D. Robb, and Madeline Wickham as Sophie Kinsella), I discovered that a number of famed authors from the past had written under pen names as well, including the Brontë sisters and Louisa May Alcott.

All chose pseudonyms for specific reasons: to ensure readers would buy their work, explore new genres, appeal to new audiences, and get their work published in a male-dominated world. What I didn’t uncover in my research was male authors using female pseudonyms. Was I making a horrific mistake?

I admire and closely follow the work and observations of Jen Weiner, who over the years has rightly stoked debate about the critical reception of female writers in today’s media. And to be honest, I have often felt the same way as Weiner. (Female authors and female characters, in my real life and writing, and have long been my heroes, from Erma Bombeck to my mom and grandmas.) It seems that if you’re a memoirist who happens to be gay, you are immediately compared to David Sedaris or Augusten Burroughs, and then you’re written off because you’re not them. (And I’m not. I’m decidedly Erma.)

My gut clenched. How would Viola fare? Moreover, I was writing a sentimental, sweet family novel at a time when fiction was becoming decidedly darker.

When I finished The Charm Bracelet and sent it to my agent, I kept the pen name and explained the reasons why. For me, the decision to use it was as simple and poignant as the foundational themes of the book: my grandma didn’t just help make me the man I am, she helped make me the person I am.

Her sacrifices and love helped propel me to this place in my life, and I felt bound to honor her and our elders not only with The Charm Bracelet but also with the series of novels I am writing for Thomas Dunne Books—all of which are inspired by my grandmother and her heirloom treasures, and all of which tell touching stories and exalt the bonds of family. (The second novel, The Hope Chest, will be published in 2017.)

I want readers to remember my grandmother’s name and, in turn, their own family histories.

So if there’s confusion, or a lack of reviews because of the pen name, so be it: my grandma was (pardon the pun) as charming as her bracelet but also as tough as the rocky, red-clay Ozarks countryside where she lived. And those traits run in the genes.

Once readers learn why I chose a pen name, I hope they will say, “Viva Viola!”

And I will continue to say, “Thank you, grandma. I’ll love you forever.”

Wade Rouse is the author of The Charm Bracelet (St. Martin’s, Mar. 2016).

A version of this article appeared in the 12/07/2015 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: What’s in a Pen Name?

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The Full Text of ‘Bad Feminist’ Author Roxane Gay’s WI12 Speech

Given the current political climate, the Winter Institute that just ended in Minneapolis was like none other. With demonstrations going on simultaneously at cities around the country, booksellers felt a sense of urgency, not witnessed in previous years, about their role in changing times. For many, Roxane Gay’s opening keynote, which called on booksellers to stop talking about diversity and do something and to step up their role in providing sanctuary, set the tone for one of the most political and energizing bookseller gatherings in recent memory. Below is the full text of her talk.

When I received the invitation to speak at Winter Institute, I knew, even before I got the details, that I would be asked to talk about diversity in some form or fashion. This is the state of most industries, and particularly contemporary publishing. People of color are not asked about our areas of expertise as if the only thing we are allowed to be experts on is our marginalization. We are asked about how white people can do better and feel better about diversity or the lack thereof. We are asked to offer “good” white people who “mean well,” absolution from the ills of racism.

The word diversity has as of late become so overused as to be meaningless. In a 2015 article for The New York Times Magazine, Anna Holmes wrote about the dilution of the word diversity, attributing its loss of meaning to “a combination of overuse, imprecision, inertia, and self-serving intentions.”

The word diversity is, in its most imprecise uses, a placeholder for issues of inclusion, recruitment, retention and representation. Diversity is a problem, seemingly without solutions. We talk about it and talk about it and talk about it and nothing much ever seems to change. And here we are today, talking about diversity yet again.

I am so very tired of talking about diversity.

Publishing has a diversity problem. This problem extends to absolutely every area of the industry. I mean, look at this room, where I can literally count the number of people of color among some 700 booksellers. There are not enough writers of color being published. When our books are published, we fight, even more than white writers, for publicity and reviews. People of color are underrepresented editorially, in book marketing, publicity, and as literary agents. People of color are underrepresented in bookselling. On and on it goes.

And, of course, it’s not as if there are no people of color who are eminently capable of participating in publishing. We are many but somehow, publishing can’t seem to find us unless we do the work of three or four writers and catch a few lucky breaks. This inability for publishing to find people of color is one of the great unsolved mysteries of our time, I suppose.

Instead of problem-solving, we count as a means of highlighting just how underrepresented people of color are, in all area of publishing, and how very little changes. People of color offer testimony about their experiences in publishing and are dismissed, more often than not. Or, the few of us who do manage to break through are touted as examples of progress while we are still the exceptions and not the rule. And then, the writers who come up after us are told that there’s no room for them. I can’t tell you how many black women have written me to tell me that their essay collection was rejected by an editor because, “Publishing already has a Roxane Gay.” Those of us that break through are, to some, interchangeable tokens, trotted out as examples of progress when, in fact, that progress is mostly an illusion.

When our stories are heard, they are generally forgotten until of course, there is a hand-wringing article to be written or there is a panel to be convened or there is a conference to be gathered. Then, people of color, myself included, are invited to talk to and teach white people about things that are, largely pretty easy to figure out. We are asked for solutions to problems we had no hand in creating. Though we are writers, we are asked to become experts on diversity which is, in fact, a specialized field of its own. More often than not, we are asked to provide this labor without compensation. We are asked to provide this labor while neglecting our own creative work for some ephemeral greater white good. Let me tell you-- it’s a pretty bitter pill to swallow.

Last year, I decided I was done sitting on panels about diversity. I am done having the same conversations over and over while very little changes. People don’t really want to hear about diversity and inclusion. They don’t want to do what it takes—the investment of actual money, for a sustained period of time, to change the make-up of this industry. Instead, most people seem to want to feel better about themselves by making a few symbolic gestures and letting those symbolic gestures be enough because hey, at least they tried—a panel discussion here, a fellowship there, change, nowhere to be found. Herein lies the inertia, the self-serving intentions.

First and foremost, I am a writer. I’ve been writing since I was four years old. Back then, I would draw pictures of villages on napkins and then write stories about the people in those villages. I loved how I could make up anything I wanted. There were no limits or rules beyond the borders of my imagination. My parents saw me writing these little stories and got me my first typewriter and that’s when my love of writing really exploded.

I was also a reader and it was reading that allowed the borders of my imagination to expand. It was reading that stoked my ambition to write bigger and better stories. The first bookstore I visited was the Little Professor Bookstore in Omaha, Nebraska where I grew up. My mom, who is a voracious reader in her own right, wanted to supplement the education my brothers and I were receiving in school (a very Haitian mother thing to do) so she took us to the Little Professor for textbooks with which to further our education and storybooks for us to read.

I loved going to the Little Professor because I knew I was always going to find something new for my imagination to devour. Every weekend, my mom also took us to the library where I took it as something of a personal challenge when I learned that I could borrow all the books I wanted. My parents didn’t monitor my reading, so I read well beyond what was age-appropriate. The borders of my imagination continued to expand in thrilling ways.

As I got older and received a weekly allowance, books were all I spent my money on. We lived in the suburbs so when I aged out of The Little Professor, the bookstores I had access to were B. Dalton and Waldenbooks in the mall. I loved how many books there were in these stores, the smell of them, how even though I had to buy a book if I wanted to take it home with me, I could sit in the store and read while my mom shopped in other stores. It was at these stores that I bought The Girls of Canby Hall and The Babysitters Club and The Boxcar Children and Sweet Valley High. Clearly, I loved taking in my fiction episodically.

As I grew older, I continued to frequent bookstores—both independent and the bigger stores like Borders, Barnes & Noble, Books a Million. I continued to be charmed by booksellers who were always so patient when I was younger and then as I grew up, helpful and interested in showing me, by introducing me to all manner of books, that there need not be any borders to my imagination, at all.

Throughout my life books have been my best friends. In bookstores and with books I have been able to forget the cruelties of the world. I have been able to shield myself when I needed safety. I have been able to find solace and joy. I have been able to find sanctuary—a consecrated place, a place of refuge and protection.

I have been thinking a lot about sanctuary lately during this rising age of American disgrace. I have been thinking about how I have long believed that to write as a woman and to write as a black woman is political and that words are my sanctuary and more than ever, I need refuge.

On Tuesday, November 8th, 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. I spent the evening watching election returns and with each passing hour, the hope of Hillary Clinton as our first woman president faded a little more. But I still held on to hope because that was much easier than facing reality. I do not think of myself as an idealist but I did not allow myself to believe Trump could be elected. I didn’t even think he could garner the Republican nomination. For some foolish reason, I believed that there were enough people, across the country, who believed in social progress and the greater good, to overcome those who, for whatever reason, believed in Trump’s harmful rhetoric.

I was stunned. I was ashamed of being so stunned, so unprepared to face this American reality.

The morning after the election, my mother called and I ignored my phone. I knew she was calling to check in on me. I knew she was worried because we had spoken throughout election night and I was taking it hard. A few minutes later, she texted me, “The sun is shining today and we are alive, still together, and definitely stronger. Wake up.”

I didn’t want to wake up. I still don’t. But.

I had to leave my home on November 9th because life goes on, even when we don’t want it to. I had to run errands. That evening, I had a comic book signing at Von’s, the local bookstore in West Lafayette. Because I live in Indiana, a state that voted for Trump enthusiastically, I knew there was little sanctuary to be found. It was hard to leave my home.

I went about my day. There were media interviews, even though I had no idea what to say, no way of making sense of the incomprehensible. What do we do next? I was asked and what I wanted to say was, “I have no fucking idea.” I couldn’t because you’re not allowed to curse on the radio.

While I was running errands, the sun was indeed shining. The air was crisp, a perfect fall day. Other people were also out and about, living their lives. At my gym, everyone bantered as they usually do. The woman who works at the dry cleaner smiled and wished me a good day, as she usually does and I wished her a good day back as I usually do. Life was going on, or at least it seemed that way. I kept wanting to scream, “Don’t you know what’s going on?” And at the same time, I looked at each and every person and thought, “You probably voted for Donald Trump. How could you? Do you have any idea what you have done?”

All that day, I thought about language and how careless we had gotten with language throughout the election. The phrase, “love trumps hate,” was particularly loathsome because that is, in fact, rarely the case and in saying that over and over, people were literally centering Trump. The election results proved that love does not trump hate, not at all. As catchy as it sounds, I am not a nasty woman because there is no reclamation in how Trump sees women. Pantsuits are a charming, fashionable rallying outfit but they will not get us to the promised land.

I also hated the phrase, “They go low, we go high,” and how people parrot these words with no understanding of the world and how it really works. Too many people were and are invested in the idea of purity and infallibility. They did not seem to realize there can be no purity in fighting everything Donald Trump represents. There is no high road with a man who appointed a man like Bannon as the White House chief strategist and who is cavalier about sexual assault and who is hell bent on building a wall along this country’s Southern border and who has signed an executive order to, essentially, ban Muslims from coming to this country.

Language matters and sometimes, like the word diversity, it becomes an empty container for whatever people want to fill it with. Go high. Trump hate. Be nasty. Wear a pantsuit. I don’t begrudge people finding comfort or solidarity in these words and ideas, but goddamn. We needed to do better then and we need to do better now. We need to get uncomfortable and that means moving beyond tidy words that make us feel like the world is a better, more unified and inclusive place than it is.

I am a black bisexual woman. I am Haitian American. I am a Libra. I grew up middle-class and then upper middle class. I am fat. My identity is political because so much of who I am is part of the public discourse, subject to legislation, subject to discrimination and disadvantage. Clearly, this is not the entirety of my life and who I am. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve got it pretty good. In fact, the work I do, it isn’t for me, really. It’s for the people who don’t have the privileges I do, who need someone to stand and speak and fight for them, with them. I am trying, with my writing and activism, to offer sanctuary.

Which brings me back to books and bookstores, such consecrated places. The day after the election I was in a bookstore, surrounded by people who love books and who were as distraught about the election as I was. I was surrounded by strangers who were not quite strangers because we shared a love of reading. To feel like part of a community, even for an hour on that dark day, offered some measure of comfort and a smaller but much- needed measure of hope. Together, we found refuge.

Bookstores have always been important community spaces but in the coming years, they will be more important, more necessary than ever. Books will be more important than ever as writers use words to hold this new administration accountable, to bear witness, to remember and remind us of history and to document the ways in which history is being repeated.

As such, it is imperative that bookstores, these community spaces, are more inclusive and that booksellers do their part to ensure this inclusivity.

Ten days ago I did a reading at the wonderful Skylight Books in Los Angeles and later that night a Latina woman sent me a message on Facebook. She asked, “Is it amazing or surprising to have a majority of white women in the audience tonight?” And I thought “No, it isn’t amazing,” because there was nothing remarkable about the demographics of that audience. I travel to bookstores all over this country and there are always handfuls of people of color, far more than most writers get no doubt, but a majority of white women and the men they bring along. The majority of the booksellers at these stores are white people and rarely does anyone bring this up.

Publishing has a diversity problem and so do the bookstores that work within the publishing ecosystem. Book people are good people but we are not immune from the ways of the world.

I was asked to talk about this diversity issue, and to suggest solutions but I am just a writer. I don’t have access to secret magical Negro wisdom that white people aren’t privy to. What I do know is that today, tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future, everything we do is political as readers, as writers, as booksellers, as people.

We no longer have time for allies and allyship. We cannot afford to allow ourselves the comfortable distance of allyship. The challenges the underrepresented, marginalized and vulnerable face, have to be challenges we are all willing to take on too. Everything is now political and we have a responsibility to make the political personal. We have to fight for and with each other.

As booksellers, the work ahead of you know is to ensure that your stores are places of refuge for everyone who needs sanctuary.

I’ll give you an example. When I visited the Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee in 2014, for my novel An Untamed State, the owner Daniel told me how he did outreach to local black organizations, and that he often did this when black writers came to his store. Sure enough, several black women were in attendance. I’ve never forgotten that, how Daniel took the initiative to broaden the community welcomed into his store. He did not allow himself comfortable distance. He afforded me the quiet joy of seeing some people who look like me in the audience. He afforded me sanctuary.

I was originally going to offer some advice on how booksellers can diversify their store communities and encourage book buyers to read more diversely. I came up with a list of things like learning from stores like Eso Won Books in Los Angeles or Source Books in Detroit—black-owned bookstores that foster strong black communities of readers. I was going to talk about doing outreach into communities of color and making sure that books by people of color are not just in segregated sections but throughout the store. I was going to discuss the importance of booksellers being vigorous in handselling books by writers of color and finding ways to sell such books not just to readers of color but white readers as well. I was going to talk about the physical spaces of many independent bookstores and how inhospitable they are to people with disabilities, because inclusion is not just about race and ethnicity. The list goes on.

But really, you don’t need me to tell you these things. I am not going to give you the answers you seek or provide absolution or do the work that you are eminently capable of doing. You’re smart, passionate book people. You can forego the distance of needing to be taught what you can learn through trial and error. You can figure out how to be more inclusive in all ways. You can get political. You can get uncomfortable. You can remember that you are not just selling books. You are providing sanctuary. You are the stewards of sacred spaces. Rise to the occasion. Rise.

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How to Write a Good Memoir: Advice on Finding Your Voice

When my literary agency received the manuscript Candy Girl, written by copywriter-turned-stripper-turned-screenwriter Diablo Cody, my interest wasn’t piqued by the subject matter alone. The topic of stripping had been tackled in memoir before, and I didn’t think the author was likely to add much to an already crowded market. But then there was the voice. After just one paragraph, I was a) completely convinced that stripping was the solution to all of the author’s problems, b) laughing uncontrollably and c) definitely interested in reading all 250-plus pages. This is what voice in a memoir is all about and it’s an important element in understanding how to write a good memoir.

Voice is like your book’s fingerprint—only the author can give a book its own voice and style. [Like this quote? Click here to Tweet and share it!] A unique voice can make almost any topic fascinating, from teaching to cattle ranching, and it can make the most wretched of circumstances uplifting. Your voice is also a uniting element; it’s the glue that ties everything together. The structure of your memoir, your setting and your story are all tied together by the voice you use.

This post is an excerpt from literary agent Paula Balzer’s Writing and Selling Your Memoir. Balzer is the founder and owner of The Paula Balzer Agency. She represents writers of memoir, popular culture, journalism, and fiction, including Oscar-award-winning writer of Juno, Diablo Cody, author of NYT bestsellers Pledged and Quarterlife Crisis, Alexandra Robbins, American Idol judge Randy Jackson and author of cult classic Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster Bobby Henderson. Purchase her book here.

Think of your voice as your book’s personality. We won’t know if your memoir is quirky, funny, semi-tragic or ultimately inspiring until your voice clues us in. Frank McCourt’s childhood in Angela’s Ashes and Haven Kimmel’s childhood in A Girl Named Zippy each have a completely different feel, even though both deal with tragedy. This is because these authors have distinct voices, and they use them to relate their stories in different manners.

Does every writer have a voice? The answer, luckily, is yes. But not all voices are created equal. That’s OK. Together, we’ll figure out the strengths of your unique voice and how to maximize them in your memoir.

[11 Things You Need to Know When Writing a Memoir]

DEVELOPING A GREAT VOICE

Agents and editors are always on the lookout for a great new voice—but what exactly is a great voice? An author’s voice consists of the patterns, habits and language she uses. When combined, these elements create a style that is unique to that particular author. A good voice should aim to do the following:

Add style and energy to the writing
Present prose in a manner that is unique, interesting and readable
Enhance the story being told without distracting from the events taking place
Engage and excite the reader
Relay the events taking place with appropriate emotion.

Using your voice means having the confidence and courage to let your writing style shine. This takes practice, diligence and, in some cases, the willingness to un-learn some of the “writing rules” you’ve spent years mastering.

BREAKING THE RULES CORRECTLY

Let me start out by saying that my “breaking the rules correctly” method is by no means a substitute for not knowing the rules in the first place. I assure you that any or editor will immediately know the difference between a writer who is artfully playing with language and someone who just plain doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing.

So what do I mean by “breaking the rules correctly”? I have found that sometimes writers feel a need to be correct, and this conformity to the picture-perfect sentence structure we learned in grade school can really be an obstacle when it comes to finding your voice. If a writer spends too much energy focusing on creating the perfect-sounding sentence, her writing is often completely devoid of the kind of life and energy that make the prose worth reading. What you end up with, while correct, is often flat and dull. What are some signs that you might need to let loose and break a few rules?

You constantly self-edit as you write.
You use too many or too few words, i.e., you feel the need to have a specific number of adjectives or verbs to properly describe something.
You want to write the way you sound in your head but worry that the way you sound is “wrong.”
You’re unable to translate your voice onto paper.

Feeling a need to write correctly is common, and believe me, this need springs from good instincts! But with practice and patience, you’ll be safely and comfortably following your own set of rules in no time at all.

HOW TO WRITE A BETTER MEMOIR:
AVOIDING COMMON VOICE MISSTEPS

To avoid coming across as dry, boring or pompous, ask yourself a few questions about what you’re trying to say and how you’d like to say it.

Just the Facts, Ma’am
Have you ever been seated next to someone at a dinner party who was especially difficult to make conversation with? No matter what you did, you just couldn’t get a feel for this person. You ask, “Hey, how do you know the hostess?” and all you get back is “College.” This guy may very well be a world-famous NASCAR driver or a leading expert in stem cell research, but unless he’s capable of communicating the information, you’re going to give up and start talking to the person on the other side of you.

I can’t tell you how many promising memoirs I’ve received where I actually think, Wow, if this is as good as it sounds, it could be HUGE!—only to be disappointed by the utter lack of voice.

Instead of finding interesting ways to relate their stories, many authors fall prey to the “just the facts, ma’am” syndrome, where they focus so much on getting all the facts on the page that they completely forget about the importance of voice.

Worried you might be falling into the “just the facts” trap? Ask yourself the following questions:

Am I more focused on getting my story straight, i.e., what happened when, who was there, etc., than I am about describing how things felt and looked? Am I more focused on facts than an overall picture?
Is my manuscript devoid of emotional reactions to the events I am describing?
Am I feeling hesitant or nervous about letting my personality show in my memoir?

If so, remember that your voice needs to work in balance with the story you’re trying to tell. Readers want to know about you—your personality, your quirks, your way of thinking and writing. If they lose interest in “just the facts,” they’ll turn away and read something else.

[Memoir or Novel? 8 Issues to Think About Before Writing Your Own Story]

All Voice and No Substance
At the opposite end of the spectrum are those writers who have found their voices but don’t take into consideration the content of their work—the substance. If you answer yes to the following questions, you may be relying on your pithy voice too much.

When asked what your memoir is about, do you list several completely disjointed and totally unrelated themes that you can’t tie together?
Have you decided you’ll work on your voice first and worry about your narrative later?
Have you found your voice but have been forced to start over a few times using several different stories?
After several attempts, have you admitted that you just don’t know what your memoir is about?

False Authenticity
While it’s important (and of course fun) to have an interesting or quirky voice, it should also be authentic. When I refer to authenticity, to some extent, I’m referring to whether or not you want to sound like a pretentious jerk. And do you? If you write perfectly lovely prose, don’t try to make it sound edgy or weird or funny—unless you are naturally those things. Don’t write your memoir about spending a year herding sheep in rural Italy in a way that reads like it was written by a member of the Hells Angels. And on the flip side, if you in fact are a member of the Hells Angels, go ahead and sound like one! A large part of finding your voice is finding the voice that suits you. Not only does it need to be readable, understandable and interesting, but it also needs to relate well to the person who is actually writing it.

In the middle of writing your memoir or thinking about writing it?
WD’s Memoir Writing Kit is 6 items rolled into one bundle
at a steep discount. T his kit gives simple, yet in-depth instruction
on crafting a great memoir  and getting it published.
Order now from our shop and get the huge discount.

Thanks for visiting The Writer’s Dig blog. For more great writing advice, click here.

Brian A. Klems is the editor of this blog, online editor of Writer’s Digest and author of the popular gift book Oh Boy, You’re Having a Girl: A Dad’s Survival Guide to Raising Daughters.

Follow Brian on Twitter: @BrianKlems
Sign up for Brian’s free Writer’s Digest eNewsletter: WD Newsletter
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Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan

The following is from Ruth Gilligan’s novel, Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan. Gilligan is a novelist, journalist, and academic from Ireland, currently living in London. A graduate of Cambridge, Yale, East Anglia, and Exeter Universities, she contributes regular literary reviews to the Guardian, LA Review of Books, Irish Independent, and Times Literary Supplement.

Ruth was the first to open her eyes.

The throb of her hand had woken her, pulsing its way through her sleep. She breathed in. Metal and sweat. An aftertaste of sea.

It had been late last night—long past her bedtime—when the woman down the end of the port had led them here. Lady Liberty. Not a statue at all, as it turned out, but a landlady, touting for business; offering a place where they could rest their poor, tired heads. They had followed her in silence, exhaustion winning out over a thousand questions, each of them just content for the moment to sleep on solid ground again. Though, actually, Ruth had found it strange dropping off without Mame and Esther below her. She had liked being in the top bunk on the ship, feeling their words as they vibrated beneath—secrets they never let her hear but that at least now she could feel.

She checked her finger. Already the base had begun to blacken.

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Beside her, her father snored, eight hours of ideas clogging his nostrils. The white patch of baldness gleamed out from the crown of his head, the first bit of him to come into the world usually hidden away beneath the circle of his kippah.

Next to him in the dust her mother’s curls mingled with her big sister’s—a carpet of black, oily and slick. Like the story Tateh used to tell about the trio of women who spent their lives knitting—a widow, a spinster, and a divorcee—alone except for one another and their needles and wool. Until one day they had an argument and tried to pull apart, only to discover that they had knitted themselves together—their clothes, their hair, even their eyelashes, bound into one.

Mame had warned him to stop. She said it would give the girls nightmares.

“But Austèja,” Tateh had protested, eyes vast with confusion, “it is supposed to be a metaphor. For family.”

Ruth’s family had begun to wake now, limbs stiff from awkward folds, and then the other bodies across the floor stirred too. Ruth watched as they opened their eyes one by one, each face registering a split second between waking and realizing; remembering where they were.

America.

Arrived.

A sleep-crusty grin. And a look around for a bucket so that the men could wash their hands to begin their brand-new day; their brand-new everything.

“Have a look for one outside, girls, would you? There’s bound to be one by the port.” It was Leb Epstein who made the request, drowsy up on elbows, his gut still resting firmly on the ground.

He was a tailor who had come from the very same shtetl as Ruth and her family, accompanied by his thin little wife. She always looked at your shadow instead of at you, as if her eyes were too skinny to fit too much at once. The couple planned to travel to America first and save enough money through waistcoats and pleats to send back to the rest of their clan, just like Uncle Dovid had for them—letters of advice; certificates of introduction; pale pink flushes from sisters-in-law that couldn’t always be hidden.

Ruth put her left hand behind her back. “A bucket, Mr. Epstein? Yessir.” She repeated the word in her head as she beelined for the door, abucket abucket abucket.

She had always been eager to make herself useful; to help the adults wherever she could—barely able to walk before she had sought out the orders, the chores, the tasks that made her feel more important than she really was. Sometimes the villagers laughed at her diligence; told her she had a very old soul for her eight little years. But this morning especially she just needed an excuse—anything to get outside.

Ruth eased the shed door open, a low groan off the hinges as if they had been sleeping too. She craned her neck, preparing herself for the New York view. The skyscrapers. The cabs. The peanut vendors on every corner—every single one—Uncle Dovid wrote that he worried he was about to turn into a peanut! And Ruth thought now it sounded a bit like one of her father’s ideas, A Plague of Peanuts! The Incredible Salty Man! So she wondered if that counted as imagining; if maybe she should try to tell Tateh. Guess what guess what, America has fixed me! Or if maybe she should just stay shtum and stop trying too hard to please.

Outside the shed, America hadn’t tried at all.

The dock was deserted, quiet as an inhale.

There were no sailors.

No peanut vendors.

Nobody.

Ruth craned a little farther.

Beyond the empty quay the sea was empty too. There was no sign of their ship—not even an orange-rusted bruise smudged against the port—while, above, the sky stretched away uninterrupted, untouched, no buildings or scrapers at all. Like an uncracked glass on a wedding day, Ruth thought—an omen she hadn’t ever understood.

Until now.

Behind the shed the warehouses sat in rows, abandoned. Smashed-out windows. A barrel leaking a tongue of rust where the rainwater had spilled. The only sign of life was the maul of seagulls overhead, their wings making hard work of the breezeless air, currents that just wouldn’t run.

“Right, you runt.” Ruth’s big sister suddenly appeared next to her, eyeing the dockside wasteland. “Where would we find a pump?” Not that, really, they looked like sisters at all. Even at ten, Esther was much too like their mother—the wool-thick hair; the black eyes; the stare that cut like wire—whereas Ruth, as Esther always liked to remind her, had been born deformed, one of her eyes green and the other one brown.

Ruth never understood why the world didn’t look different colors out of each one.

But this morning, the world just looked wrong. Felt wrong. Not even a shudder from the trains running under the ground—had Uncle Dovid just been making them up? And where was Liberty this morning, Ruth wanted to know—there had been no word from her either. What if it had all just been a big fat trick?

“Esther . . .” She looked at her hand. The blackness had traveled even higher. “Esther, are you sure . . .” She wondered if the nail would fall off soon; if the seagulls would swoop down to peck it up.

And normally she wouldn’t have said a thing about her confusion. She didn’t like to complain. Most of all, didn’t like how cruel her sister could be with her weaknesses. All of them.

But this was different—this was everything.

Or at least, it was supposed to be.

“Esther, are you sure this is New York?”

Two days before they began their journey Tateh had taken the girls up to his attic, almost empty now that his papers had been carried off for the fire. He told them they could each choose one remaining item to take with them when they left—a souvenir from this life to the next.

Of course, Esther had gone first; had marched right up to the Shakespeare that sat on the top shelf of the bookcase, swathed in pale blue leather—another cow in another life. She had struggled even to carry the ton weight down, let alone for thousands of miles, but it seemed the impracticality was precisely what had made their father smile; the perfect after-his-own-heart choice.

His second daughter had opted for the compass. It was hidden half-forgotten in the clutter of the desk, a mere four words in total. North, South, East, West. But even as she held it Ruth had felt better; had run her then-unbroken finger around the rim so that her nail made a sound along the ridges, a buzz that almost drowned all the other noises out.

This morning, Esther’s voice was loudest of all. “Stupid girl!” it cried, the disdain filling the whole span of her mouth. “Don’t you remember what Uncle Dovid said?” It was a voice for the stage, her father always boasted—the finest legacy he could have hoped for. The only one, really, he would ever need. “Ellis Island,” it said now. “He told us we had to come to Ellis Island first before we were allowed in.”’ Reading from a script everyone else seemed to know—everyone except for Ruth. “All right?”

And to any audience the gesture that followed would have just looked like a kindness, a sibling affection, as Esther smiled and took her little sister’s hand in hers. “That’s why Tateh and Mr. Epstein are about to go to the immigration office.” She gave it a tug, a squeeze of reassurance. “That’s why you are shooing off with them too.” And then a twist. An extra snap. A whimper barely heard. “You didn’t think we’d traveled all that way for this, did you?”

Two hours later, having woken from her faint, Ruth sat on the tram with her father and his friend, stiffening her face into a smile, nice and wide like her sister had shown her. And maybe someday, years from now, they would come to look alike, maybe even be loved alike. An American family healed better again, the scars you could barely see.

Just as long as she ignored the pull in her pocket where the compass tried to drag her down. It must be broken too, she told herself, the magnets somehow mangled when the boat slammed the shore, because as they boarded the tram she had checked it, just to be sure. She had stood at the edge of the dock and gazed out at the Atlantic, knowing the sea was meant to be East. The arrow had dithered, stuttering like a lip before tears. And then it had fallen down. South. The sea spreading off the bottom of Ireland and away.

So Ruth smiled a little harder now, telling herself that once Tateh and his rats were rich and famous he would buy her a new one that worked, the four points back where they belonged again.

* * * *

In the end, the smiles turned out to be more like a plague. A transatlantic epidemic.

They were only in the immigration office five minutes before the laughter caught on, the flat-capped men behind the giant oak counter in stitches at the Ratman’s wit.

“New York?” they screeched as they regarded the stranger with his scrap of a hat and his bush of a beard—a nest for the seagulls who squawked outside, taking the Mick themselves. “America?”

His face turned as pale as the tiny patch of white on the crown of his head. Or as white as a spot on a map that desperate fingers have pointed at again and again and again. Until it is gone.

In time, so many stories would be spooled out of that moment it would become impossible to count.

Some said that when their boat found land there had been cries of “Cork! Cork!” but that in their exhaustion they heard “New York! New York!” instead; didn’t notice the difference for weeks.

Others claimed they had somehow known the English word for pork and thought that that was what the sailors were heckling—“Pork! Pork!”—a barrage of unkosher threats to run them off the ship.

Other times it was just that the captain had told them this was the last stop, “only up the road” from America; only a short, final shimmy in the wilderness—sure, they would be there in time for tea.

But for Ruth and her family, there was only one story; one version of the heartache.

After two weeks they sent Tateh off again, this time to the housing office on Lynch’s Quay, to try to find them somewhere to stay. Mame insisted it was just a temporary measure, just a matter of pride—anything to get them out of that shed. “We may be your family, Moshe, but we are not your rats.”

So the paperwork shoved them off toward an abandoned redbrick terrace, the houses huddled together like a crowd trying for warmth. “Hibernian Buildings,” they were called. Celtic Crescent. Monarea Terrace. Down the road from the port, as if the family could still be called up for the second leg of their journey at any moment.

They scalded the place with boiling water every day for a week, to annihilate the native germs. Mame refused to unpack a thing, insisting the bundles remain untouched. “Temporary, remember—what did I tell you?” But soon Tateh put up a mezuzah outside the front door, another matter of pride. Then he coaxed the girls to unwrap a couple of items they had lugged halfway across the globe (or, as it turned out, only a quarter of the way). So now there was a tub of tea leaves in the kitchen, a snag of lace around the window, a copy of Shakespeare and the Talmud sitting on the shelf, the latter with the words of different rabbis written side by side.

And every Friday as Ruth sat side by side with her family for dinner, she could almost forget about everything else; could almost ignore the rage and the resentment that lay ahead that evening as soon as she and Esther had been banished to bed.

Because they had become nightly by now, her parents’ arguments—rituals forming even in the worst of times. It went food then prayers then pleas and regrets; the high pitch of her father’s optimism and the lash of her mother’s anger reaching up the stairs to the landing, where Ruth sat, crouched in her nightdress, a covert Jewish playwright in the highest stalls of a gilded Moscow theater.

She cracked her knuckles one by one. The fourth one wouldn’t give.

“But Moshe, I have told you,” she heard her mother cry now, the line almost on cue. “We do not belong in this place.”

She spied the back of Mame’s head, the neck tensed into bones, before it thrust itself forward for the usual swerve—the same old new line of attack. “And what about Dovid?”

“Nu, what about Dovid?”

“Moshe, he is over there all by himself.”

“Austèja, why must I keep telling you it does not matter about my brother Dovid?”

It was the only time Ruth heard her father raise his voice. It sounded like a stranger’s sound.

She checked behind to the bedroom door, though she knew Esther wouldn’t stir. Even during the day her sister barely bothered to listen, unwavering in her allegiances: “How am I supposed to become a famous actress,” she had sobbed, “in some country I’ve never even heard of?”

“But Esther,” Ruth had tried to console her, eager to please as ever, “I think they speak English here too.” Because she had heard them out in the street, all right, the melody in their talk; the bounce and skip to their tone; the word “boy” after every lovely line.

“Look, my dear.” Downstairs now, Tateh was panting as if he had been running, the heat of it steaming the inside of his specs. They said he was practically blind and yet still he was able to see things that no one else could. “My darling Austèja, I will do it—I will write another play.” As he spoke he took a step closer to his wife. He seemed calmer in her orbit. “Not the rats, but a new one. I am telling you, there is something . . . I can feel it already.” He had even inquired already after one of those newfangled typewriter contraptions—just the thing to set him off. “Nu, can you imagine it,” he had exclaimed. “Letters flying through the air! Only, they do say that sometimes the letters get stuck . . .”

Lttrs flyingthrough thea ir!

And Ruth smiled now as she thought of it, because it sounded a bit like her own words; how they sometimes congealed whenever she got nervous.

Wehaveeachotheristhatnotenough?

MamewhatistheIrishwordforhome?

Doesthesecondchildalwaysgetlovedsecondbest?

“Just . . . just let me do this,” Tateh concluded now. “Let me do it for you?” Until it came, the highlight of the ritual. “For my Princess of the Bees?” The silly pet name and the only story in the world the playwright refused to tell.

His daughters had pleaded with him over the years, begging for even the gist of the tale:

“Tateh, why do you always call her that?”

“What are the bees?”

“Mame?”

But even Esther had failed to prize the truth from their mother’s lips, so instead they could only wonder at the flicker in her stone-black eyes whenever it was mentioned—somewhere between a warning and a delight. Sometimes, recently, the only sign of life that was left.

The Princess of the Bees.

Through the silence below, the footsteps clipped away.

Ruth turned and sprinted back to bed before she was caught and smacked to sleep, a hot face on a cold pillow. Only, as she lay there, she realized that tonight had been different. Because this time, Mame hadn’t objected—hadn’t said no, in any language—the ritual evolved and witnessed by two different-colored eyes.

And Ruth remembered how Tateh once told her that bees sometimes communicated not by sound, but by sight; by watching one another dance—a “waggle” he called it—making shapes with their flight that could be turned into maps for the others to follow. So then, no matter what, the rest of the hive would never get lost.

 

 

From NINE FOLDS MAKE A PAPER SWAN .  Used with permission of Tin House Books. Copyright © 2017 by Ruth Gilligan.

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