Roy Miller's Blog, page 291
January 25, 2017
What to Do (And Not Do) After Attending a Writer’s Conference
Everyone can tell you how to prepare for a writer’s conference–how to pitch, how to schmooze, what to wear and what to say. But no one tells you what you should be doing after the conference is over, and how to enhance and get the most out of your experience there. Here are some insider do’s and don’ts:
This guest post is by Irene Goodman. Goodman has been agenting for 37 years, and after a slew of #1 bestsellers and successful authors, it just never gets old. She loves to find new authors and help them to create careers. Originally from the Midwest, she learned early to talk straight and stand up straight. There are seven agents in her agency, The Irene Goodman Agency (all women). They are known for their joyful approach, fierce commitment to excellence and killer shoes.
Follow her and her agency’s stable of agents on Twitter @IGLAbooks.
Post Writer’s Conference DO:
Follow up immediately. Like the day you get home or the day after. Not a month later and certainly not a year later. If someone requested ten pages or a few chapters, send them before the dust settles. This means they should be ready to go before you leave your house to go to the conference in the first place. This will accomplish two things: 1) You will be first in line. It’s always good to be first. 2) You will demonstrate that you are prompt, you have drive, and you know how to deliver what was asked.
Post Writer’s Conference DON’T:
Wait too long to send your material to an interested agent. If you send requested materials six months later, you run the risk of not being remembered at all. Remember, we have to read a lot of stuff. The personal connection you made will be diluted or lost if you don’t strike while the iron is still hot. It’s not that you can’t send it six months later, but the lack of promptness will signify insecurity and lack of preparation. It makes me feel that you were just floating the idea back at the conference, and that’s not really what pitches are all about.
Post Writer’s Conference DO:
Send brief emails to absolutely everyone that you met, including the conference hosts. Add one short personal thing if you can. “Hi, Matilda, I enjoyed meeting you at the Bullfrog conference. You were right—that Merlot was fantastic. Best, Hermione.” That’s it. Seal the connection and file it away. You and Matilda may need to find each other one day, and it may be sooner than you think.
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Post Writer’s Conference DON’T:
Never assume that small, seemingly insignificant contacts are not worth pursuing. You just never know. Today’s junior assistants are tomorrow’s editorial directors. I have known some editors for decades, and we first met when we were both assistants. Now we can schmooze like old friends, because we are. We ask about each other’s kids and know each other’s tastes. It all starts somewhere, and that time is now.
Post Writer’s Conference DO:
Keep all your notes where you can find them. You learned things at that conference that will come up one day. Sure, there’s a lot you don’t need, but save those golden nuggets because they will add up.
Post Writer’s Conference DON’T:
Don’t believe everything you hear. Sorry, folks, but sometimes people lie. I don’t mean that they embellish or spin or misheard. I mean they LIE. Agents know to brace themselves for those calls that come on a Monday after a conference. “Matilda is getting a $2 million dollar contract, and I’m only getting peanuts. Why don’t they love me?” This actually happened to me once. After a quick call to Matilda’s editor, and after that editor stopped laughing hysterically, I was able to call back my author to tell her that she had it wrong. Matilda had flat out lied to her face. It happens. Take what you hear with a grain of salt.
Post Writer’s Conference DO:
After your followups have been completed, take a day off. A conference is not a leisurely experience. You have to be “on”, and you strive to make the most of it. That requires energy and work. Most people don’t understand that. They think you’ve been off whooping it up, staying up late, tossing back Cosmos in the bar, and making your dreams come true. And maybe you did all those things, but the reality is that you had highs and lows, one exhilarating experience, one disappointing one, you met some people you liked and other people who made you uncomfortable, and you ate rubber chicken and scrambled eggs made from a mix. Now you are home. The roller coaster has stopped. Take some time to unwind. You may not realize it, but you need it.
Post Writer’s Conference DON’T:
In spite of all this, don’t take the whole thing too seriously. Get what you can out of the experience, and move on. If you made a terrible mistake at the conference, it probably wasn’t so terrible and you’re the only one who remembers it anyway. If you feel like Cinderella who just home from the ball—good! Enjoy the feeling.
Conferences provide a lot of opportunity and they are a huge bazaar of people who are connecting, trading favors, hustling, and meeting their peers. You were there, and you were one of them. Give yourself a gold star.
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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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The post What to Do (And Not Do) After Attending a Writer’s Conference appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Listen to Alia Shawkat Read From Big Cats
The following is from the audiobook recording of Holiday Reinhorn’s short story collection Big Cats. Each story is read by a different narrator, including Rainn Wilson, Helen Hunt, and Patricia Arquette. Below, Alia Shawkat reads the title story.
“This summer,” Polly says to me in her soft, scratchy-gravel voice, “I’m making it with a forklifter.”
We’re sitting alone, the two of us, in the woods behind our development, the Sylvan Townhouse Estates, changing into work uniforms, and her whispering mouth is up so close to my earlobe I can feel her lip gloss.
“Don’t pair off with Polly all the time,” my mother keeps on begging, “You need to expand your horizons.” But she doesn’t see that Polly is my horizon and when she puts her arm around my shoulder and squeezes, the sweet, oily smell of her bubble gum makes me picture a hot tropical place where the two of us are getting stared at through the palm trees by hundreds of eyes.
“Last summer was for wishing,” Polly says, “This summer is for fucking.”
Her words are invisible, but they crash between my legs like giant cymbals.
Yesterday, all the second-season girls with work permits marked age 14 were taken aside at the orientation by Division Manager Weiss of the Washington Park Zoo. We were lined up on the loading dock at the side entrance after he had all the boys go stand by the time clock outside his office, and he told us: “No female food and giftshop concessionaires are to mix with warehouse personnel on zoo grounds in zoo uniforms no matter what.”
“Now Ladies,” he said, leaning his bubble rear up against one of those oxygen tanks they use for pop, “warehouse jobs at these Zoological Gardens are community service positions and the policy here is to leave those gentlemen well enough alone, especially while the Elephant House is under construction.”
“Picture the Weiss fingering his vagina,” Polly said out of the side of her mouth and I was about to fall over on the floor holding my stomach. The things Polly says can make me do that. She makes me fall down in public all the time.
Now Polly scoots away and dewy pine needles cling to the back of her legs. “Say it, Brenda,” she says, “that’s an order,” so I take off my summer shorts and in my newest bikini underwear with the leopard thunderbolt, I do as I am told, shouting it out to her and the dark, empty woods. “We fuck something from the warehouse or nothing at all!”
Last summer, when we were new, we couldn’t believe the boys. Eight boys working Main Cafeteria, five boys with money belts taking tickets for the boats and trains, six boys in white paper hats leaning up against shade trees selling popcorn and Sno-Kones, three garbage pickers. But the forklifters were actual men. Sweaty, shirtless, numberless men with skull wristbands and visors and tattoos, racing in and out of the scaffolding behind the broken down Elephant House, backing boxes full of things into dark doorways, shifting gear after jerky gear.
“That’s right, blood sister,” Polly says, lifting up her hand. I lift mine, too, and we clap those hands together hard. In the air they are the same hand. We leave them there and intertwine fingers. Yeah.
We have to be at work in less than twenty minutes, but Polly doesn’t seem to be in a hurry at all. She’s lying topless in the moss with her eyes closed, humming a song she’s making up right this second, and I know for certain, she’s got a much better chance than I do of making it with forklifters. She has nice wide hips compared to me, and soft thighs that don’t spread out when she sits on fences. Polly’s hair is towhead also, and so frizzy she can even use an Afro comb on it, no matter the style.
All I’ve got is plain silky brown hair that wants to lay down and not do a single thing. “It wants to be auburn, too,” my mother says, but she won’t take me to the colorist until I’m fifteen. My hips are not wide either, but narrow, like a giraffe’s.
The only thing in the entire world I do have, compared to Polly Swann, though, is a chest.
Even to this day she doesn’t need to wear a bra under her uniform or any of her other clothes, and looking at her now, at her bare-boy flatness on top, makes me worry all of a sudden that they will never grow and she will end up being bottom-heavy. But then I remember that both of us have pretty decent faces, and if you took the bottom of her body and my top and put them together, I think forklifters would like us. I think we would balance each other out.
That’s all I’m thinking about when I’m looking at her, regular thoughts, but a cloud comes over Polly’s face.“What are you staring at?” she says, covering her nipples with her palms, which is easy because they are only about the size of two pink pennies.
“Nothing, blood sister,” I tell her, raising up my shirt and giving her a quick flash of my mother’s bra with the lace cross straps and the rose in the center. “I stole it from her drawer.”
“No point when it’s too big.”
“Not for long,” I say, showing her the safety pin I used to clip the back. “Almost.”
“That is disgusting, Brenda,” Polly says, scrunching up her face and rolling away.“Old sick-lady clothes.”
I whip a stick in her direction. “She’s not sick.”
“Whatever.”
“Well,” I say in a high, stupid voice, knowing by the tone that I will live to regret it, “can’t go bra-less anymore, like you.”
Polly shoves her middle finger in my direction. “Fuck off, anyway,” she says, grabbing her clothes up in a wad. “I’m not sitting around here so you can stare at me like a perv.”
Then she turns her back and slips into the rest of her zoo uniform, which is brown shirt with official patch, brown knee-length tie apron and ironed cotton pants with a crease. No jeans.
Neither of us says anything while we’re dressing, and when she’s done, Polly leans up against a peeling birch whose papery bark crinkles as she rips big sheets of it away. I know she shouldn’t do that to the tree, but I’m scared to say anything, even when there’s a smooth naked patch on the trunk that looks like it hurts.
“I’m not mad anyway, freak,” she says, grabbing the big kitchen mitt we keep in our hiding place near the fence.“You just shouldn’t get so excited.”
“Oh, please,” I tell her, reaching for the pot holder, which in reality is mine because I stole it from my mother after the hysterectomy last summer. In the old days before she had everything removed, she would have missed that thing, but now that she’s on the different hormones, she barely ever cooks anymore. If it wasn’t for Ed the Renter who lives in the downstairs and takes care of her, she’d probably set her bathrobe on fire.
“Get going then, Brennie,” Polly says, shoving the pot holder on my hand, and I lift the bottom strand of barbed wire so she can slide under. When it’s my turn, I hear one of the peacocks calling down in the zoo, and it makes me feel eerie. Like the sign of death.
“Brush me off?” I say, turning my back to Polly, but she’s already balancing along the tracks of the little kid’s railroad, heading off.
“I’m going my special way, ok?” she says, adjusting her Afro comb, and even though I want to, I don’t follow her or try to catch up. Instead I act like I’ve got other things I’m thinking about, and my own path, too.She turns left at the Arctic Wolves without even looking around, so I cut up the other way by the Sun Bears on purpose, because that’s the way it is with Polly. You have to give her space to do things. Like when we’re at Crystal Ship getting records, or at the Brass Plum Boutique, I let her browse on her own. I don’t follow her from rack to rack when we’re shopping and talk about the things she’s looking at. And if you do that, if you ignore her, she’ll always come back to you and show you the things she’s picking.
I know Polly’s special route to Main Cafeteria is shorter and she’s secretly trying to beat me, so I jet past the Hippo Pond, sprint around the Ladybug Theater, and cut up through Mini-Everglades. There’s nobody around, so I pretend to be a spy on a mission. I hit the tunnel behind Polar Bear Island at my fastest pace yet, until I see a fat fire hose snaking along the ground toward the side entrance and I have to stop then because I know it leads to a zookeeper.
The only reason I ever wanted us to work at the zoo at all was because of the animals. In the newspaper, when I showed the ad to Polly, it said, Animal Lovers Wanted. But zoo policy is that no one is allowed to assist the zookeepers. You can’t touch the food or help or even go into the Nocturnal or Monkey Houses when they’re being cleaned. Weiss says you cannot ever plug things in for a zookeeper or help them screw in a hose because there could be a lawsuit.
“Leave the keepers officially alone” was how he put it. “They are this zoo, and they don’t have time to talk with any of the food and beverage personnel.”
Zookeepers always come to work in perfect security-guard-looking uniforms with fancy walkie-talkies and rings of keys. Except it’s not like you’d imagine from the nature shows where zoo experts are always so excited to show people animals and baby animals and how to hold them and things. It’s rare to ever see the same zookeeper twice in one day. The only ones we see a lot are the two women that get to take care of the lions and tigers and snow leopards. “Big Cat Lesbians,” Polly calls them, but I don’t think they sleep in the same bed. Last summer we saw them be in the same cage, practically, with a cougar.
I run my hand along the railing of Polar Bear Island as I sneak beside the hose watching Uba, the mother polar bear, and Eka, the baby, while a zookeeper in work gloves and rubber boots stands right below the fake iceberg where they are sleeping, hosing down what’s supposed to be the Arctic Ocean.
She is tall and muscley, with strawberry-blond dreadlocks spiking out through the back of her baseball cap, and she’s sending a river of thick green water into a drain hole. There’s a radio on down in the den too, tuned to “Jamaica Sounds” on KISN. The music is up pretty loud, and her back is to me, so I quickly bend down and just for a minute touch the hose, because I’ve heard they can handle a lot of pressure. Jim Kemper, one of the high school re-hires, says they can take up to forty pounds per square inch.
I’ve still got my hands on the hose when the water stops, and when I look up she is staring across her shiny blue surface of painted waves.
“Can I help you, my girl?” she says loudly over the radio, and I can’t tell if she’s upset or not because her eyes are covered with little round sunglasses like John Lennon’s.
“Sorry,” I say, removing my hand from that hose and standing up to walk away. But instead of getting mad, the zookeeper smiles kind of crookedly. She goes over and turns down the volume on her radio so it’s just dim mumbling, then comes over to the den doorway, dragging that heavy hose behind her like it’s a body.
“What can I do for you today?” she says, still smiling, and I see there’s a little chip in one of her front teeth.
I peek over her shoulder at Uba and Eka to see if they are listening to any of this, but those bears are lying flat on their faces like they’re dead.
And even though I know we’re never supposed to speak, I look her straight in the eye, just like Polly would have, and ask her the question we’ve had ever since the beginning of last summer when we saw the male snow leopard on top of the female, making love to her over and over again on a sawed-off log.
“I heard all the animals here are on birth-control pills,” I say. “Is that correct?”
The keeper doesn’t answer right away. Instead she takes off her sunglasses and looks at me seriously, checking out my uniform, and I can tell she thinks it was a smart question. “You betcha,” she says. “But only the females, my girl.”
* * * *
The first thing I see when I get to Weiss’s office in back of the gift shop is a bunch of first-season hires standing around in a little huddle in the courtyard with their plastic orientation notebooks and fold-out food-service maps. The pants they are wearing are way too dressy, of course, and they’ll be sorry if Weiss puts any of them on french-fry grill.
I waltz through the center of the new-hire clump without having to say excuse me, then head for the second-season area, where I see Polly in a group of rehire boys, leaning back against the wall with Doug Sengstake and Eric Folkstad, talking. At first she looks over and doesn’t say anything to me, so I roll up my uniform sleeves and check the pockets of my cotton pants, until I hear Polly give a squealy little scream.
“Blood sister,” she calls to me now, because Sengstake has grabbed her around the waist, and Folkstad is reaching his whole hand up her apron.
“Blood sister,” Polly yells again, trying to stomp on Folkstad’s toes to keep him away. “C’mere and help me, honey, please.” And even though I think technically we’re still supposed to be mad at each other, I elbow in as close as I can through all the other rehire boys who are starting to cluster around.
“I’m coming, Poll,” I say, but five of them grab my arms behind my back, and all I can do is thrash while everybody starts rooting for people: boys for Sengstake, girls for Polly and me, until there’s a muffled knocking from inside Weiss’s Plexiglas and everybody gets quiet. All except for Polly, who’s fighting so hard she doesn’t even hear the door to the office complex creak its way open.
“Let go, faggot,” she screams, pony-kicking out fast and sharp at Sengstake’s shins. “Butt soldier!”
“Mademoiselle Swann,” Weiss says in his calm dictator voice, and as she turns, all the wild electricity in her eyes fades. “Shall we have a little rendezvous in my office?”
Polly’s mouth works up and down, as if her jawbone is out of whack. “They’re the ones who started it,” she says, waving in the boys’ direction. “Tell him, Brenda.”
“She didn’t do it,” I say, looking down at Weiss’s Nikes. “It was two ganging up on one.”
Weiss turns to me, smiling with his mouth but not with his eyes. “Mademoiselle Hopkins,” he says to me. “Your friend has violated a very important rule. My staff does not use profanity. That’s not how I run a zoo.”
You don’t run a zoo at all is what I want to tell his fake French face. You are not the one with reggae hair and a hose in the Polar Bear Display. You are not in a special uniform with your partner, practically inside the cage with a cougar.
But Weiss doesn’t care what anybody thinks. “Patch not showing,” he says, pointing to my rolled up sleeve in front of the new hires. “Now, let’s get inside for day assignments, troops.”
As soon as Weiss and Polly are gone, all the boys crowd in around the assignment sheet so nobody else can see it. Half those boys get garbage duty anyway, which is so easy. Girls don’t ever get to do garbage.When it’s finally my turn, I skip my name and look for Polly’s first. Swann, Polly, it says, Troubleshooter, which is nothing less than a total jail sentence: stocking straws and napkins inside the Solarium and busing the tables on the Picnic Deck with all the yellow jackets swirling around your hands.
I follow my finger up the list and find my name in Weiss’s curly writing just as Polly gets back from her lecture. Her face is soft, and her blur of hair looks like it’s been scribbled around her head with a crazy white crayon. She brushes by me like we’re strangers and goes up to corkboard, running her sky blue fingernail up and down the assignments until she gets to her name, then mine: Hopkins, Brenda: Big Cats Candy Kiosk.
Considering how amazing that day assignment is compared to hers, I expect her to snub me again like before, but instead she treats me fake-nice, the way the runner-up girl at a beauty contest would treat the girl who won.
“Hey, Big Cats Candy Kiosk,” she says, giving me the kind of excited hug that doesn’t mean anything. “Congrats, baby. Con-grats.”
“You can have it, I promise,” I say. “We can trade.”
“Don’t worry kitten,” she says without meeting my eyes. “Nothing Mama can’t handle.”
“What about the Weiss, though?” I ask, and Polly sighs.
“Weiss is so gay, Brenda,” she says, turning to the time clock and thwonking her card down into the machine’s loud teeth. “What else do you need to know, or anyone?”
* * * *
What every member of the food and gift personnel knows is that Big Cats Candy Kiosk is the best assignment in the entire zoo. It’s built right in the middle of the Central Concourse and looks like a little round temple from China. The whole front of it is Plexiglas, for one thing, and gives you an excellent view of the Big Cats outdoor exhibit, which is shaped like a giant pie. Lions, snow leopards, cougars, and jaguars split it in quarters, and from the Candy Kiosk you can see right into the sector that looks like a real African semi-desert. The only things separating you from the lion and lionesses are a walkway, a moat, a low hedge, and a railing.
In Big Cats Kiosk, Weiss has the candy organized on a lower shelf in his own order, like library books, plus, you have your own phone and authorized permission to call forklifters if you run out of any brand.
As soon as I get to Big Cats, I check my inventory, then call my mother. I’ve told her that using an outside phone line is against Weiss’s policy, but she still says to do it anyway. “It gives me something to look forward to” is what she tells me, even though it takes her more than ten rings sometimes to get to the phone.
Today she picks up right away, though, which means she probably still has it with her in the bed. “Oh hi, BeeBee,” she says in her sleepy underwater voice. “What are you doing?”
I’m about to tell her, “Working” or “Selling stuff,” which is what I always say, except right then I see that same zookeeper from the morning, driving slowly up the concourse in one of the official green zoo pickups.
“Nothing,” I say, twisting the phone cord around my fingers as that zookeeper comes right up alongside my kiosk and leaves her truck idling. “Just feeding lions is all. Sometimes other animals.Going into their cages, too.”
“Oh,” my mother says. “That sounds like fun. Is Polly with you?”
I watch as the zookeeper takes a king-size Shop-Vac out of the back of her truck and carries it around toward the side entrance to Big Cats. “Are you making any other friends?” my mother says, but before I can answer, a big senior-citizen group arrives along the concourse and starts blocking my view of the entire semi-desert. They are teetering down the steep hill from the entrance in a zigzag pattern and have got balloons tied to their wheelchairs and walkers. Senior citizens and the people who take care of them hardly ever want candy, but still, I feel dread, especially when I see Polly strolling along behind some of the stragglers.
“I have to go,” I say, but my mother is so slow on the uptake.
“What’s going on, Beebee?” she says. “Are you mad?”
“I’m not,” I say. “I am not mad,” but of course, she won’t believe me, and as I hang up I can still hear her in a half-panic, calling my name.
At first Polly almost passes me by with the senior citizens, then at the last second, she turns and stares at both me and Big Cats Candy Kiosk, as if she’s never been more surprised. The green zookeeper’s truck is still idling out there, too, right in front of her face, but she doesn’t act like she’s noticed.
“Oh, Brennie, it’s you,” she says, putting her face up to the hole in the Plexiglas with a giant smile. “I couldn’t remember where you were.”
“Female animals here are on the pill,” I tell her the minute I let her in the door, and finally, Polly looks out at the green pickup and narrows her eyes.
“You’re so full of shit, Brenda,” she says. “Who told you anyway? Her?”
“That’s correct.” And then I tell Polly every single detail while we split a Twix and suck the chocolate off our fingers. About Uba and Eka and the smell of the water. The chip in her tooth and the UB40 on the radio. Her dreads.
When I’m done, Polly looks at me and sighs. “All that’s very sweet,” she says, tracing her initials in the dust on the window.“Are you in love now, blood sister?”
“Shut up.”
Polly swings her legs, and I try and ignore the bang of her high-tops on my clean cabinets. “Well, I found a rat in the grease bucket, is what I’d like you to know,” she says. “Weiss had me call forklifters.”
I look at Polly, and my stomach feels like its diving way down. “So?”
Polly picks up a box of Hot Tamales and taps them against her knee. “Brenda, Brenda, Brenda,” she says, in a way that makes me hate the sound of my own name. “My point is, I made contact with the warehouse, which is more than I can say for you.”
I inform her that I am, in my own way, making forklifter contact, and she can go finger herself, but Queen Polly only shakes her head grandly.
“Maybe I’m meeting someone later, blood sister,” she says. “Which is more than I can say for you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Polly says, brushing off the back of her pants. “It’s hard to say.”
“It isn’t that hard,” I tell her, “just open your mouth,” but instead of answering, all Polly has to do is stand there and I can see it inside her. The glow. That same green nuclear power she inherited from her mother Leanne Swann, who, last time Polly talked about it, was dating a tennis pro from Corno’s Produce and having an abortion.
I’ll screw a forklifter right now, I want to promise Polly. Yes, I definitely will. But then I think of Leanne Swann in her two-piece tennis outfit compared to my mother in her wilty bathrobe, and I can see why Polly would doubt me.
“Move aside,” I say to her, reaching for the phone. “What’s the number of the forklifters?”
“You know it, Hopkins,” she says with her victory smirk. “Dial it yourself.”
The forklifters take even a longer time to pick up than my mother does and when they finally do, all I hear is a roaring from a giant machine, like some kind of shredder.
“Warehouse,” the voice says, and my ribs close up.
“Pick up on deck,” somebody else yells in the background.
“Warehouse,” the forklifter says again, louder, and when I hear the engines revving behind him, I can’t help but picture us together in the crooked scaffolding of the Elephant House, doing it in the different positions of sex Polly and I saw in the Dutch Book of Eros: sometimes in front of an audience wearing girdles and open tuxedos, sometimes just alone, with neckties and strapped-on extra penises.
“Warehouse,” I hear again and my tongue turns so icy hot in my mouth I can’t move it.
“Help me,” I mouth to Polly, covering the receiver, but instead she grabs the phone.
“Yes, this is Brenda Hopkins over at Big Cats Candy Kiosk,” she says officially into the receiver. “Would it be possible to suck my pussy?”
“Shut up!” I scream, wrestling the phone away and shoving her out the door, but it doesn’t do any good, because in a minute I see the same evil, fluffy head pass by in front of my window. I cover the mouthhole of my Plexiglas, but I can still feel her breath on my palm.
“Gotcha,” she says.
Then, right in front of me, while she knows I’m watching, she runs her finger along the side of the zookeeper’s green truck. There isn’t anybody around to see her, so she does it slow, making sure I see the line her finger is leaving across the dusty paint. She circles the whole truck like that, with her finger dragging, then jumps up on the back bumper and swings herself aboard.
I pound the window with my fist, but she ignores me and walks all around inside the open back of that zookeeper’s truck, touching and stepping over everything she sees, the rolled up hose and the handles of other weird official-looking animal equipment, even though that zookeeper could come out at any time and catch her.
“You better knock it off,” I hiss at her through the Plexiglas hole, but she knows I am trapped in here, in my kiosk. She knows if a customer comes to buy candy in an empty kiosk, Weiss would fire me on the spot.
I drop my forehead onto the counter and stare down at the rows of candy. I even take a complete inventory again, until I notice Polly stop and lift that zookeeper’s radio over her head. She holds it up there for a long time to make sure I’ve seen it, then lowers it next to her face and pretends to scream, as if it’s a prize she’s just won on a game show. The truck heaves as she jumps up and down with the radio, and I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe I have called her sister, that blood from our fingertips has ever even mixed.
I check up and down the concourse for candy customers, Weiss, or forklifters coming to suck pussy, but thank God, none of them are coming.
And by now Polly has on the zookeeper’s hat and is making out with the radio, pretending to tongue-kiss the front of it. She stops, pointing at me from the truck and it is obvious what she is saying: “Big Cat Lez-bo. YouYouYou.”
I hold my middle finger up to the window, but Polly, slowly, slowly, slowly, with a wild orgasmic look on her face, takes hold of the radio by the cord and starts lowering it down her body, inch by inch into the cab of the truck. While she does that, she starts to dance, a seriously sexy dance, as if she’s trying out to be a stripper, and even though it’s the most embarrassing, shittiest thing, of course she looks good. She looks good doing it.
I cover my face with the clipboard, but it’s impossible to do that for very long.There’s nowhere else to look but back at Polly. She lifts one hand over her head and pretends to twirl a lasso. The other hand she puts between her legs, then looks at me and swings her hips, pretending to be the zookeeper. “Oh my God, Brenda,” she calls, lifting up her shirt. “I’m so gay for you.”
At Polly’s townhouse, she and Leanne Swann swap clothes and scarves. They put lipstick on each other like they are Greek sisters from a sorority. I’ve seen them trade things, use tampons out of the same box, whisper to each other like they are the only ones in the entire world. “This is my baby,” Leanne will say about Polly, as if I’m not even in the room. “Gorgeous, right? She’s my best friend.”
The door of my kiosk explodes in front of me, and when I burst out onto the concourse with my inventory clipboard, the whole world feels like it’s at a slant.
“You better fucking cut it out, Swann,” I warn her from across the walkway, lifting the clipboard, but she only laughs and starts to go at it even harder.
“Oh God, girlfriend,” she says, rubbing the radio across her chest.“Nobody does it like you.”
“Quit!” I say, grabbing for the radio, but Polly is still dancing away.
“Oh yeah?” she says in a voice like syrup. “And who’s gonna stop me? Dyke!”
I draw my arm back, aiming for her mouth, and the clipboard slices through the air just like the boomerangs they have hanging on the walls in the Koala Kabin, whistling past her head, over the truck, across the fat hedge, and right into the middle of the semi-desert.
Polly drops the radio with a clank, and I run to the railing and see my clipboard in the long grass, lying about fifteen feet away from three lionesses, who all look up at me with golden eyes and blink.
“Nice job,” she says. “Stupid.”
Slowly, I turn to the truck with a heat around me that is more than just burning.
“I’m real sorry about that,” says Polly, pointing down into the display. “Maybe you better call your mama.”
I look up at her face, but the sun is too bright. A white ring around a world of raging fire. I ask her if maybe she’d like to repeat that.
“Oh yes,” says my friend Polly. “Absolutely. I said call your mama, BeeBee. Your poor, sad, dried-up mama.”
“What did you say?”
“You heard me. Hysterectomy.”
My eyes tear wide open to take her in and for the first time since I ever saw her, I can picture Polly Swann’s dead skeleton lying in her grave. I lean forward, and my voice feels so velvety and viper-quiet I think it might be coming from the mouth of one of the reptiles. “You stupid, titless bitch,” I whisper. “Slut.”
She springs from the truck like it’s a trampoline, and we are on the cement then, joined. I can’t believe how easy it is to hit her. My fists drop down and down like carpet bombs. It doesn’t seem to hurt when she’s hitting me, either, and we roll back and forth on the cement like pit wrestlers.
She goes for the pocket of my apron, and when I hear the rip, I grab for the zoo patch on her arm. There is a giant stretch, the sound of material giving way, and then I choke her until her face purples out.
I press my forehead onto hers, and I want to hate-kiss her over and over and smash her teeth. My lips are inches from her lips.
“Pill popper’s baby,” she rasps, digging at my chest for my mother’s bra, “Sterile!” And as she gets hold of it, yanking the straps, I remember suddenly what it is my mother said, and I sink my fingers deep into the mass of cotton-white hair. “Leanne Swann is a two-dollar whore,” I say, wagging her head back and forth in my hands. “Abortion!”
All at once there are words, then footsteps, and my hold on Polly feels like its loosening. I reach out to hit as hard as I can at the thing between us, but I am being pressed into the ground by a cool gray shadow that blots out the sun.
“My patch, she took my patch,” a hoarse voice is shouting, and when I open my eyes, I am on my back somehow and the sound is Polly, practically crying like I have never seen her before, holding the place on her uniform where her zoo patch used to be. I follow the finger she is pointing at me and see that it leads to my hand where crazy threads are poking out through the fist.
“It’s all right now,” a voice is saying. “Let’s everybody calm way the hell down.”
On my chest there is a tapping, and when I look there, I see it’s the knotted end of a reddish dreadlock dangling in front of my eyes like the tip of a paintbrush. Then I know exactly where I am.
“Are you hurt?” she says to me. “Can you get up?” It’s a nice voice, smooth and deep and faraway.
“You’re going to fire us, aren’t you?” I say.
“Oh no she isn’t!” Polly says, like she’s about to have some kind of tantrum. “I cannot be fired. I can-not!”
The zookeeper turns to Polly. “I need it quiet from you now,” she says, in a much rougher voice than she used on me. “I don’t want to hear another word.”
Polly’s mouth snaps shut with enough force to bite off her tongue and I have never seen her clam up like that, not ever.
“I’m definitely hurt,” I say. “I might be paralyzed.”
“Uh huh. Let’s get you on your feet.”
Her smell is like hay and cigarettes, and I put my whole weight into her arms. I could not do that to my mother, but all this zookeeper does is hoist me right up.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Polly says taking a step forward and tapping the zookeeper on the shoulder, “but an inventory clipboard is in with your lions. She threw it at me. She totally attacked me with it, and it flew in.”
“She was in your truck first,” I say as calmly as I can. “She was in the back, touching your equipment and doing a strip tease.”
The zookeeper holds up a work glove. “I’m not interested,” she says. “Can you girls settle this now, or do you need intervention?”
Polly and I look at each other, but as soon as our eyes come together, they jump apart like the wrong ends of magnets.
I toss the patch to Polly, but she lets it flutter down on top of her tennis shoes.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” the zookeeper says. “Am I right?”
Polly brushes off her pant legs. There is gravel in her hair, and red crescent moon marks are on her cheeks from my fingernails. It looks as if she just got raped.
“All right, then, girls,” the zookeeper says. “I’m going in for this damn clipboard. You two stay right here.”
And before either of us can argue, that zookeeper hefts the ShopVac into the back of her green truck, kills the engine, and strides off toward the side entrance.
Neither of us says anything to the other one. We just wander toward the railing, as quiet and stunned-seeming as the animals. There is no sound either, except for the baboons, who are always screeching twenty-four hours a day anyway with their fangs out and their swollen red bottoms.
Inside the display, on top of their grassy cement hill, the three lionesses are still lying side by side, taking turns licking each other’s paws and ears. Every so often they swish their tails at the lion too, who is relaxing on a flat rock not far away, watching the women in his pride clean themselves with their rough tongues. And in between the two groups, lying upside down at the edge of the central watering hole, is my inventory clipboard, looking ridiculous in there, like some weird commercial is being made about office supplies.
“Jesus, look,” Polly whispers suddenly, but she doesn’t need to open her mouth, because I can see that zookeeper fine by myself, bending down through the low cave opening at the back of the display that’s spray-painted with running herds of wildebeests. Her hands are quiet at her sides, and she comes out slowly with total expertise, like she doesn’t want to make any rapid moves.
“Oh my God,” Polly says, as the zookeeper rises from her crouch and moves out into the pen, as if it is not just tan cement she’s walking on, but deep Serengeti sand.
“We need to be quiet and calm,” I say to Polly. “They could tear her up.”
But as the zookeeper’s safari boots rustle through the dry grass, her confidence is so complete that the lionesses lie right where they are, yawning and blinking, and the lion just goes on shaking the bugs out of his mane, like this kind of unbelievable thing happens all the time.
In less than a minute, that zookeeper is exactly where she needs to be. She bends down like a karate fighter, straddling the water hole, and when she has a hold on the clipboard, she looks up at me directly, with that same crooked smile from the morning, and winks before lifting my candy inventory up over her head and carrying it at the exact same pace back out through the door.
There is a short silence after she disappears where I can only hear my heart and Polly’s breath as she leans against me whispering, “Holy shit.”
Then somebody starts to clap. I snap my head around and there they all are, the exact same group of senior citizens, back now, I guess, from Primates. They have all wheeled up behind one old man with binoculars, who is focusing on the door where the zookeeper just used to exit. “That was my clipboard,” I say to him, and he smiles at all of us with very white and young-looking teeth.
“Congratulations, young lady,” he says. “Bravissima.”
And when they hear him say that, the rest of the seniors clap even harder. They just keep on clapping and clapping and staring into the semi-desert with their balloons bobbing until Polly and I both do the same.
And while I clap, I picture what we all must look like there, and my whole body gets really big from the awe, until I am a giant, standing over the zoo in a tight silver uniform that is the exact same color as the clouds. And looking down, I see the whole green field across the Jazz Concert Bandshell, and it is shining like a bright neon square, filled with every single forklifter that works here, all staring up at my hugeness, all hoping to screw me.
Then I get even bigger still, until I can see right down into our townhouse, where my mother is floating in the air, six feet at least, above our couch. “Look at me, BeeBee” she says. “I’m flying.”
And way down below me, tiny munchkin Polly is squinting up, cupping her hands around her mouth, saying I’m still her blood sister. She promises I am. And I smile down at my friend then, from that great height. I smile almost gently, because I know that if I wanted to, I could lift her into the sun.
From Big Cats by Holiday Reinhorn. Text copyright © 2005 by Wil-Horn Enterprises, Inc. Text reprinted by permission of Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Audio narrated by Alia Shawkat. Audio excerpted courtesy Penguin Random House Audio, a division of Random House, LLC, a Penguin Random House Company.
The post Listen to Alia Shawkat Read From Big Cats appeared first on Art of Conversation.
EDC Coping with Growing Pains
Educational Development Corp., which has seen unprecedented growth in the last two years due to the success of its home party division, reported a number of challenges that curtailed growth in the third quarter ended November 30, 2016, and limited gains in earnings.
While total revenue in the most recent quarter rose 26% over the period ended November 30, 2015, to $30.7 million, earnings increased just 1.3% to $1.3 million. Moreover, EDC said that issues with its shipping and distribution process led to a “significant” order backlog at the end of the quarter, and the company was forced to reduce service levels to its home-based sales consultants as well as to its retail accounts.
For over a year, EDC has been installing new software and distribution systems, but those upgrades ran into problems. Implementation of the new systems “was hampered by steep learning curves and complicated customizations,” EDC said. In particular, a new program designed for use in its direct sales program has taken longer to install than expected, and while the company is working with the software vendor to improve its functionality, it acknowledged in its quarterly filing with the SEC that it may need to take further steps to bring the new system up to acceptable levels.
The problems EDC has incurred to keep up with its growth led to inventory levels jumping to $34.5 million at the end of November 2016, compared to $17.6 million a year earlier. The buildup has caused EDC to fall behind in its payments to some of its suppliers and put it in violation of its bank covenant. EDC said it expects to receive a waiver to the covenant by the end of January.
EDC said it will continue to improve its warehouse-fulfillment operations throughout fiscal 2018, which begins March 1, 2017.
To provide more details about what is happening at the company, EDC said it will hold its first-ever quarterly analyst call on January 27 at 3 p.m. EST.
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Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 381 | WritersDigest.com
There are few certainties in life, but one thing’s been continuously happening for years and years: a poetry prompt on Poetic Asides on Wednesdays. So let’s dive in to this week’s poetry prompt!
For today’s prompt, take the phrase “Let’s (blank),” replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem. Possible titles include: “Let’s Rock,” “Let’s Get Dinner,” “Let’s See About That,” and so on. Let’s see what kind of inventive titles (and poems) are created this week.
*****
Revision doesn’t have to be a chore–something that should be done after the excitement of composing the first draft. Rather, it’s an extension of the creation process!
In the 48-minute tutorial video Re-creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will be inspired with several ways to re-create their poems with the help of seven revision filters that they can turn to again and again.
*****
Here’s my attempt at a Let’s Blank poem:
“let’s write”
— with a nod to David Bowie
let’s write
pick up your red pen
& write again
let’s write
to the beat
you’re hearing on your xylophone
let’s read
while color lights up your page
let’s read
read through the crowd to an empty space
if you say think, i’ll think with you
if you say dig, we’ll dig
because my love for lit
would make my frail brain split
if you revise
all of your lines
& create a metaphor
*****
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). And now he’s off to listen to David Bowie music on iTunes.
Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.
*****
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Alternative Facts | Literary Hub
sounds like the name of one of those early 90s Britpop bands
I loved so much, as in “I liked that new Oasis album,
but the one by Alternative Facts is better!”
I guess losing should now be known as “alternative winning.”
Infidelity shall henceforth be known as “alternative dating.”
The raccoons that tore a hole in my house’s roof?
Alternative pets!
That bill didn’t get paid? I’m not delinquent—
I just paid it in alternative money.
Article continues after advertisement
Cake shall henceforth be known as “alternative celery.”
Students, don’t be upset if you get an F. It’s just an alternative A.
This chocolate donut I’m eating? Alternative apple.
It’s not belly fat–it’s my alternative six-pack.
The New York Knicks will be the alternative
winners of the 2017 NBA Championship.
That dead tree in my backyard? Alternative gardening.
You can call it sleep—I prefer the term “alternative exercise.”
Jelly stains and milk mustache=alternative makeup.
When it comes to tennis, I’m an alternative Serena.
Gymnastics, I’m an alternative Simone.
That concrete over there=alternative grass.
That pile of dirty unwashed exercise clothing: alternative compost.
How many of us are here because our parents practiced
“alternative virginity?” Doritos=alternative carrots.
When I was a young flat-chested teenager, I had alternative plastic surgery.
I put socks in my bra.
This alternative water sure does make me giggle my inhibitions away….
But I’m not ignoring you—I’m just paying alternative attention.
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Want to Better Understand the LGBTQ Experience? Read These Three Books
When we talk about the progress made by the LGBTQ movement in recent years, we’re describing a state of affairs in certain very privileged parts of the world. I was forcefully reminded of this in the four years I spent teaching high school in Sofia, Bulgaria, the setting of my first novel, What Belongs to You.
Like much of Eastern Europe, Bulgaria is a place where it’s still almost impossible to imagine the availability of basic resources for vulnerable queer people, much less the large-scale social validation that comes with marriage equality.
But even in the United States, access to the freedoms some LGBTQ people enjoy depends on geography, class, education, and cultural background. This is hard to remember when there’s such a seductive, sweeping narrative of triumph emerging around the queer rights movement. But it’s important, I think, that we make a space for queer stories from outside the zones of (still very relative) queer privilege: other parts of the world, as well as rural America.
Three debuts coming this winter and spring offer a chance to listen to those stories. The first is Soul Serenade: Rhythm, Blues & Coming of Age Through Vinyl, a memoir by the journalist and music critic Rashod Ollison, which Beacon will publish in January. Born in central Arkansas, Ollison was raised by a mother whose “only way of loving me,” as he has said in interviews, “was keeping me alive.” His father, traumatized by the Vietnam War and struggling with addiction, was absent for much of his childhood and adolescence. Increasingly withdrawn, isolated both by his race (he’s the only black student in many of his gifted classes) and by his burgeoning awareness of his own sexuality, Rashod takes refuge in music. The popular music of several eras fills these pages, and Ollison writes gloriously about it. “I wanted to be the sound: free and powerful, bold and assured,” he thinks, listening to Chaka Khan after being bullied at school. “This was not the sound of a faggot.”
March will bring Saleem Haddad’s Guapa (Other Press), a novel about a young gay man in an unnamed country that resembles Syria. The story takes place over a single breathless day in the life of the narrator, Rasa—a day that’s bookended by two traumatic events. The first is being discovered in bed with his lover, Taymour, by his grandmother. The second is Taymour’s wedding.
In between, Rasa accompanies a journalist to interview Islamic militants in the city’s slums and searches for his friend Maj, a star in an underground drag club who has gone missing after a raid on a theater where men cruise for sex. These present-day crises are punctuated by Rasa’s memories of his childhood and his years as a college student in the United States during 9/11 and its aftermath. The book is a double portrait—of a young man coming of age in a place where being queer is a crime too terrible to be spoken, and of a city riven by conflict, from the gyms and shopping malls of the elites to the impoverished margins. It’s a beautiful, timely book.
Finally, in May, Riverhead will publish Boy Erased, Garrard Conley’s memoir of “ex-gay” therapy, a barbaric practice still in use almost everywhere in the United States. (Only four states and Washington, D.C., have outlawed it.) Like Ollison, a native of Arkansas, Conley grew up the son of Baptist pastor, whose religious conviction Conley shared as a young man. But his desires increasingly make him question the life he’s being groomed for. Terrified at the thought of separation from the family and the faith he loves, he agrees to enter a fundamentalist 12-step program that promises to make him straight. The scenes of this therapy are harrowing in their portrayal of vulnerable young people being led to the depths of self-hatred and shame. But the real marvel of Conley’s book is the portrayal of his parents, who are torn between the myths of prejudice and the reality of their devotion to their son. Though the book is a compelling condemnation of gay conversation therapy, by the end it offers less a narrative of anger than a rich testimony to resilient love.
None of these books presents LGBTQ people as mere victims, but neither do they subscribe to a narrative of equally distributed progress. Each of them is a reminder that almost everywhere in the world, including the United States, queer people are still fighting for their lives.
Garth Greenwell’s novel, What Belongs to You, was published by FSG in January 2016.
A version of this article appeared in the 02/15/2016 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Stories of LGBTQ
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January 24, 2017
PW Speaks with the 2017 Newbery and Caldecott Winners
'Completely Gobsmacked': Kelly Barnhill on Her 2017 Newbery Medal
Some time ago, one of Kelly Barnhill’s children changed the ringtone on her cell phone to play the theme song from a 1970s TV show. She was “dead to the world” when that phone rang very early on Monday morning. “So that’s what woke me up at 5:15 a.m. – the theme song from Wonder Woman, only the greatest TV show theme song of all time,” said Barnhill. She is not sure who, specifically, was on the other end of the line with the astounding news that her fourth novel, The Girl Who Drank the Moon (Algonquin), had won the 2017 Newbery Medal. “I had no idea I was even on their radar. It was the furthest thing from my mind. I’m completely gobsmacked.”
'A Very Incredible Day': Javaka Steptoe on His 2017 Caldecott Medal
“This has been a very incredible day,” said Javaka Steptoe, referring to the hours following the announcement that he had won the 2017 Caldecott Medal for his picture book Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (Little, Brown), a biography of the 1980s New York street artist. When the phone rang in Steptoe’s Brooklyn home, “I was actually in the shower,” he said. “My girlfriend was yelling, ‘There’s a phone call for you! There’s a phone call for you!’ I came running to the phone dripping wet.” Of course, the news on the other end of the line was worth the awkward sprint.
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Getting Arrested on Jeopardy | WritersDigest.com
You are a contestant on Jeopardy and are in the lead. Final Jeopardy comes up and it’s a question you know. As you are on the verge of revealing your correct answer and claiming your winnings, FBI agents rush the stage and grab you and Alex Trebeck and march you both off into a back room and accuse you both of cheating. What happens next?
Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.
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LitHub Daily: January 24, 2017
The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1891, Caresse Crosby, co-founder of the Black Sun Press and “literary godmother to the Lost Generation of expatriate writers in Paris,” is born.
“There’s nothing crime fiction can’t do.” In conversation with Ian Rankin. | Literary Hub
Roxane Gay on empathy, representation, and the brilliance of Alice Childress. | Literary Hub
On the occasion of her birthday, everything there is to know about Edith Wharton’s deep love of dogs. | Literary Hub
Camille T. Dungy on feeling unwelcome in her own country, and at her own church. | Literary Hub
Finding much needed hope in this year’s ALA award-winning children’s books. | Literary Hub
“It isn’t Trump as a character, a human type—the real-estate type, the callow and callous killer capitalist—that outstrips the imagination. It is Trump as President of the United States.” Philip Roth on Donald Trump. | The New Yorker
“On some level, I think most writers consider their work to be political, if only in the sense of it creating empathy through narrative, through characters.” A conversation with Melissa Febos and Garth Greenwell. | Slice Magazine
Protests run on words as well as actions: On the writers protestors turned to in the Women’s March and the future of literature under the current administration. | Times Literary Supplement
“I felt stuck in the quicksand of a crossroads, and felt I needed to read up on love for direction. I came across—and was forever changed by—bell hooks’s All About Love.” Ibram X. Kendi on the book that changed his life. | Public Books
Works of fiction that consider the US-Mexico border, from 2666 to Signs Preceding the End of the World. | Signature Reads
“Do you worry that what you write is too fantastical, exaggerated, dream-like?” In which Laurie Sheck interviews herself. | Rain Taxi
The winners of the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction & Nonfiction and ALA Notable Books List have been announced. | American Library Association
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Book Titles Never Come Easy
Before writing a book, I had an idea about how an author decided on a book title. It was kind of like the way queens name their children in fairy tales: a magic-wand ritual, with no doubt or any contrasting opinions or people pissed off at one another. Just a very simple “and you shall be called...” moment. With my debut memoir, Only in Naples, I learned that that’s not exactly how it works.
I’m an American actress who moved to Italy nearly 20 years ago and fell in love: with the city of Naples, with Italian food, and with a Neapolitan man... and his mother. The culture of Naples astonished and enchanted me. I learned to embrace the concept of carnale, living with comfort in my own skin, as well as the importance of preparing and consuming food in compagnia, in the company of others. I decided to write a memoir because I wanted to share my transformative experience with American friends and family. I wanted them to experience Naples with me.
The book was sold, and like a first-time mother, I have wondered every day since then, how is it possible that so many people have done this, and that some have done it lots of times? The steps in the getting-ready-for-publication process have been exciting, stressful, surprising. No step, however, has been more fraught with emotion than choosing a title.
When the memoir was just a file on my computer, I changed the title daily. The Save As click at the end of my writing day was a moment fra me e me, between me and myself. Nuggets from Naples, Weird Things My In-Laws Do, Riffs on Ragù—you get the picture. Naming and renaming was something I did for fun. The working title was The Mother-in-Law Cure, which I thought was kind of cool. But mother-in-laws don’t have the best rap, and the people at Random House were skeptical. Suggestion: how about Here, Taste? Or some word in Italian that Americans could understand?
Everyone had a different idea of what the book should be called. I waited, with anxiety and adrenaline, nixing some titles and mulling over others. I was a wreck, which is why I made the mistake of calling my parents, two human beings who agree on nothing, and who compete over everything—not the best people to share a problem with. I got both of them on the phone (otherwise they would compete over how many minutes each got on the line) and asked nonchalantly if they had any ideas.
They signed off quickly. “Great talking to you, honey!” Click. But less than an hour later the barrage of emails began.
The subject line of my father’s first email was “I’VE GOT IT.” His title (the reasoning behind which was described in punchy caps lock) was SUPERSPOON. With all fairness, there are important wooden spoons in my memoir: my mother-in-law uses them to spoon-feed her ragù to the whole family. But the idea that my life in Italy could be reduced to a piece of cutlery with a superhero cape was disconcerting, to say the least.
My mother’s first email had as a subject line “So wonderful talking to you.” In the body was a list of titles including Table of Plenty and Sacred Feast, suggestive of songs in the Presbyterian hymnal. The words nourishment and tender were all over the place, as were love and garnish.
Things degenerated fast. My mother’s subject headings soon became “DISREGARD your father’s email,” and my father’s were “URGENT!! SUPERSPOON!!” At one point, there were eight exclamation points after Superspoon.
When my editor came up with Only in Naples: Lessons in Food and Famiglia from My Italian Mother-in-Law, I was happy. I felt like it captured what the book was about, and honestly, I was getting sick of the clandestine, whispered phone calls that had begun when my parents realized that I wasn’t answering their emails. (“Your father’s upstairs, I only have a second, honey. Just enough time to share... A FEAST OF PLENTY!! And lemme tell you why!”)
Finally I thanked my parents for their help and told them that the title had been decided by “the powers that be.” I made it sound like I had very little say in the matter.
I made it sound like the kingdom of publishing had waved a magic wand.
Katherine Wilson’s memoir, Only in Naples, will be published by Random House on Apr. 19, 2016
A version of this article appeared in the 02/22/2016 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: What’s in A Name?
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