Roy Miller's Blog, page 299

A Conversation with Foyles CEO Paul Currie

Foyles' flagship bookstore on Charing Cross Road in London is one of the most famous bookshops in the U.K.—and one of the most innovative. In 2014, the store, which has been in operation since 1903, moved down the street from its dusty, labyrinthine former premises into a sleek new space in the building that was formerly home to Central St. Martin's College of Art and Design. That same year Foyles, which now includes three other locations in London as well stores in Birmingham, Bristol, and Stratford, was reinvented with the theme of physical meets digital.

Today each Foyles employee carries a tablet in a sling, which gives the employees mobile access to a proprietary app that directs customers to titles on the shop floor and lets employees take home-delivery orders for books that aren't in stock. "The booksellers have told me that they feel naked if they don't have their tablets with them," says Foyles CEO Paul Currie. Having tablets also helps younger booksellers, who may have less extensive knowledge of the store's stocks, get up to speed faster, he adds.

That said, Currie, who came to Foyles in April 2015 from U.K. cosmetics company Molton Brown, notes that he has actually "dialed back on digital." He prefers to emphasize the seductiveness of the physical bookstore and to increase the interactions between customers and booksellers. "I think in the digital age our competitive advantage is our people," Currie says. "The Internet offers what bookselling was 20 or 30 years ago: shelves in alphabetical order from which you pick a book, buy it, and leave. That is Amazon. In our bookstores, we want customers to feel the logic, empathy, and connection that is human."

A cornerstone of Currie's brief tenure has been the implementation of a professional-development program for booksellers. Dubbed Barnum, after the 19th-century circus impresario to whom the original founders of Foyles were once compared, the program promotes four principles (which Currie will discuss during his Winter Institute address) aimed at helping booksellers be more "mindful" and connect better with customers. "Traditionally, book lovers tend to be self-contained, and many were attracted to the profession of bookselling because they wanted an extension of their hobby," Currie says. "We try to help them be more open and aware, reminding them that the bookselling profession is about sharing that love."

While Foyles' flagship is some 37,000 sq. ft. in size, the satellite and regional stores are significantly smaller, at 4,500–5,000 sq. ft. Currie has promoted former booksellers to head the retailer's in-house digital-marketing and customer-experience teams. Ultimately, he says, the goal is to make the bookstores "more sticky," whether that is by offering knitting circles or wireless-audio listening stations, where one can hear recordings of authors discussing their latest books.

"We have seven stores and our nearest competitor, Waterstones, has 270, so we have to work with our strengths," Currie says. "We can do this by becoming known as the family-owned local book retailer, one that is playful, fun, and relevant. For this reason, we're not afraid of Amazon. We are not an algorithm. Nor are we librarians. We are passionate booksellers. We want to be considerate of people's needs and be of genuine service to our community."

A version of this article appeared in the 01/16/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline:

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Author Nick Petrie Discusses Building a Strong Protagonist

People don’t read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for the science, and no one watches Forrest Gump for seafood recipes. Character is what truly makes an audience turn a page or turn up the volume. Thus, I am so pleased to sit down with bestselling author Nick Petrie to discuss the much anticipated second book in his Peter Ash series Burning Bright because see? I just called it his PETER ASH SERIES. Ash is an astounding character, and the craft, technique and detail that went into his conception and development is just phenomenal. Join me while I ask Nick some burning questions about his bright protagonist. (See what I did there?)

This interview is with author Nick Petrie. Petrie received his MFA in fiction from the University of Washington, won a Hopwood Award for short fiction while an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, and his short story “At the Laundromat” won the 2006 short story contest in The Seattle Review. A husband and father, he runs a home inspection business in Milwaukee. (Interviewed by literary agent Barbara Poelle.)

Barbara: So, Nick. Lee Child himself was quoted as saying, “Lots of characters get compared to my own Jack Reacher, but Peter Ash is the real deal.” Two questions: How many riffs did you do on air guitar after hearing that, and why, beyond the drifter/veteran angle, do you think so many are thrilled and confident to make this comparison?

Nick: Less air guitar and more of a dance around the living room. A friend compared my situation to being a newbie filmmaker just finished with my first little indie project, and then Steven Spielberg starts saying nice things about me in public. Pretty cool, right? Turns out Lee Child is very generous in this way to new writers. I’m extremely grateful, and thrilled that he likes my work.

It’s odd for me to compare my stuff to Lee Child’s because I’m such of fan of his, and also because it’s curiously something I never did until I kept hearing about our protagonists’ similarities.

Some comparisons are pretty obvious. Like Jack Reacher, Peter Ash is a rootless military veteran. Both characters are physical, confident in their skills, and tend toward action as a solution to problems. Despite this, both characters are also intellectuals – the reader can feel them reasoning their way through the mystery they’re confronting. And both characters have a strong moral center and they use their considerable skills to protect the weak against the powerful.

Barbara: What was your first impression of Peter, what was he doing in your mind? And how has he changed book to book from that initial first impression?

Nick: I had this single image of a young man on a narrow, winding trail, coming down from the mountains to the edge of a town. But for some reason, he didn’t want to go into town. He had a decent pack on his back, he was fit and capable – he wasn’t a bum – but he was hungry and alone.

At the same time, I was coming into contact with combat veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m a home inspector and these were my customers, buying their first homes. I realized how little I knew about what they’d faced overseas, and were now dealing with on their return home. So I did what I always do: talk to people, ask questions. After some compelling conversations, I made the connection between these young men and women trying to return to their lives and my own mystery man on his narrow mountain trail. Something just clicked.

This actually the core of how Peter is changing. The larger arc of the series is one man’s path back from his wartime experience. He’s trying to find his way home.

[Here are 10 Questions You Need to Ask Your Characters]

Barbara: Peter moves through the world not necessarily wanting to encounter adventure, but then is, for lack of a better word, subtly relieved when he does. How do you craft that irresistible, impossible line between one dimensional adrenaline junkie versus complex character reacting to external influences in an adrenalized way?

Nick: From a purely craft standpoint, a simple character has a single motivation, while complex characters have two or three or more motivations, at least one of which is in direct conflict with another. Here are a few of Peter’s motivations. Alone, each is pretty basic. Together they paint a more complicated picture.

Peter wants to put the war behind him because it was horrifying, cost him many friends, and has given him post-traumatic stress.


Peter wants to remain a warrior because war has fundamentally changed him as a person, and because he finds physical conflict deeply attractive. The dopamine fight-or-flight response is addictive, and helping others with his warrior skills makes him feel good emotionally.


Peter wants to find love and a home, but returning to civilian life requires an entirely new kind of effort and discipline, one that doesn’t come naturally to Peter.


Peter welcomes the distraction of another adventure, because it allows him to put off the difficulty of his return to civilian life.

Barbara: Lewis is such a fabulous character – and I mean who does that? Who makes the ANTAGONIST of book one into a co-protagonist for the series?!?! (Mad air guitar riff.) Did you mean to make him recurring? Or did he elbow his way in?

Nick: Writing The Drifter, I didn’t plan for Lewis to turn out the way he did. He just showed up with that tilted smile and took over. With the chemistry between Peter and Lewis, I knew Lewis would have to come back. He’s so much fun – he gets almost as much fan mail as Peter.

Barbara: Often one of the most interesting things about a character is his or her flaws. Peter is such an interesting juxtaposition of complicated Everyman. If you asked him what his flaws were what do you think he would say?

Nick: Peter always thinks he can do better, that he should try harder. He’s more concerned with analyzing his failures rather than celebrating his successes. It’s part of what made him a successful Marine, and what makes him such a compelling hero, the fact that he’s never satisfied. At the same time, he’s capable of seeing something truly amazing about the exact moment he’s living – I tried to give him more of those moments in Burning Bright. I had a lot of fun with that book.

Improve your writing and the background where your characters live
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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 Night Stages | Literary Hub

The following is from Jane Urquhart’s novel, The Night Stages. Urquhart, one of Canada’s best-loved writers, is the author of several internationally acclaimed novels, a collection of stories, and four books of poetry. She is the recipient of numerous international awards, including the Marian Engel Award and the Harboufront Festival Prize. Most recently she was named the Banff Distinguished Writer. She lives in Ontario, Canada, and occasionally in Ireland.

Iveragh

Just after midnight she walks out the door, steps over frost-stiffened grass, and approaches the grey shape of the Vauxhall. She slings her suitcase into the back seat, slams the door, then opens the driver’s side, sits behind the wheel, pulls the door toward her. She turns the key in the ignition, places her palm on the cool, vibrating knob of the gear shift, and allows herself one moment of hesitation. Her white cottage, an unlit rectangle against a sky busy with stars, is as grey as the car. The turf shed is grey as well, squatting at the back of the yard. There is a moon somewhere, but she refuses to look for it. She flicks on the lights. She shifts into reverse.

The grass of her own lane flattens under the wheels; then, when she turns the car, an ill-repaired road with a ribbon of similar grass at its centre appears in her windscreen. Three miles of hedgerows accompany her to the crossroads at Killeen Leacht, with its single tavern, dark and empty, and its wide, slow river. Salmon are gently turning in their sleep under that shining water. Salmon and the long green hands of water weeds, shaken by the current.

Soon she is deep in the Kerry Mountains, disturbing flocks of sheep drowsing near potholes, and birds probably huddled in hidden nests. The car’s lights bounce on the stone bridges of Coomaclarig and Dromalonburt, then illuminate the trunks of last standing oaks of Glencar. She wants the constellation tilting in the rear-view mirror to be Orion, and when it follows her for some time along the hip of the mountain called Knocknacusha, she concludes that it is. Climbing to the Oisin Pass, she thinks about the ancient warrior Niall had spoken of, the one who had searched from that height for lost companions but not found them. He ’d been gone for three hundred years, Niall said, but the woman he was with made him believe it was only three nights. He had lost everything, Niall insisted, for three nights with a woman.

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She descends to the plain. Lough Acoose, still and dim under faintly lit clouds, slips into her side window. On the opposite shore the hem of a shadowy mountain touches the water. Ten minutes later there is the town of Killorglin, and then the Laune River, oiled by moonlight.

Goodbye, she thinks, to all that. Goodbye to the four flashing strands of the Iveragh Peninsula, to the bright path of surf in St. Finian’s Bay, the Skellig Islands freighted by history, the shoulders of mountains called Macgillicuddy’s Reeks. Goodbye to her own adopted townland, Cloomcartha, to the kitchens that had welcomed her, and to dogs whose names she had known. Goodbye to her own small drama–that and the futile, single-minded tenaciousness that had almost maintained it. The changing weather patterns, the gestures, the theatrical light.

An hour and a half later she reaches the smoother roads and quieter hills of neighbouring County Limerick. She accelerates, and as she does, she begins to visualize the abandoned peninsula unfurling like a scarf in the wind, gradually unwinding, then letting go, mountains and pastures scattering behind her on the road. “Iveragh,” she says out loud, perhaps for the last time. The landscape, she knows, will forget her. Just as Niall will forget her. What she will forget remains to be seen. She imagines her phone ringing on the table and no one there to answer it. This provides a twinge of pleasure until it occurs to her that it might not ring at all.

She leaves the car in the airport parking lot, knowing it will be towed, stolen, or junked when it becomes apparent that no one is coming back to claim it. The sky, overcast now, is a solid black, echoed by greasy black macadam. It begins to rain in a half-hearted way as she walks with her suitcase toward the lights of the terminal, leaving, she hopes, such full preoccupation and terrible necessity. She is leaving the peninsula. Leaving Niall.

* * * *

Ten hours later, the airliner on which she is travelling shudders, preparing to descend. The window is an oval, the shape of a mirror that once hung on a mother’s bedroom wall. A mother, she thinks, and a mother’s bedroom wall. What she sees through this oval is the blurred circle of the propellers, then a broken coastline, froth at the edges and rocks moving inland as if bulldozed by the force of the sea. Now and then an ebony ocean emerges between long arms of altostratus clouds trailing intermittent rain. Altostratus. One of the words Niall has slipped into her vocabulary, along with geomagnetism, cyclonic, convective, penultimate. Ultimate.

All night the hum of the engines has remained constant, but reaching this shore the sound changes, the Constellation banks, and the seascape below tilts to the left. There are caves and inlets, and the curve of a sudden beach like a new moon near dark water. The noise diminishes and the cliffs move nearer until she can see the ragged cut of the bitten periphery, then the uninterrupted northern forest, moving inland.

She searches in her handbag, finds a cigarette, and lights it while staring at the blue flame near the propeller, which for a moment echoes the reflected orange flame of her lighter. While she smokes, the roar of the aircraft intensifies, then diminishes again, like an argument. One silver wing dips toward the sea, and she sees a freighter half a mile or so beyond the rocks of the coast. She believes the ship is fully lit and of a great size, waves cascading over its long deck, pale castles of ice on the bow in the full dark of a late December afternoon. But it is autumn, not winter, and the day is opening, not closing.

She cannot visualize the cockpit of this very domestic plane, this padded and upholstered airborne parlour called a Constellation. More than fifteen years have passed since the war, the Air Transport Auxiliary, and the intense relationship with aircraft that filled her then-vivid life. The young pilot she had been then, the young woman behind the controls, would have been disdainful of what she has become: a sombre person with the bright centre of her life hidden, her days unfolding in the pause that seems to define this half-point of the twentieth century. Fuselage, she thinks, instrument panel. These terms are still known to her, but she has, beyond her facile drawings of aircraft, no real relationship with them. She has become unknowable, and very likely uninteresting. She has blamed Niall for this, and for much else, though she knows it has been her own acquiescence that has caused her to become, in every possible way, a passenger.

Her younger self would have been disdainful of the clutter of what passes for comfort in this airborne interior: the seats that become beds, the blankets, the linens and tableware. She can remember evenings when, after a day of ferrying warplanes, the moon would sit complacently over the dark airfield and the makeshift bunkhouses where she and her flight companions would sleep. She can recall whispered confidences and bursts of laughter, the sense of guardianship, inclusion. And now, more than a decade and a half later, she is being flown into nothing but personal scarcity. She leans her head against the curved frame of the window, trying to bring the communal engagement of the war years back into her heart. But when she closes her eyes, the memory of a map falls into her mind.

Because it was drawn on a narrow slice of paper, she had believed Niall had placed a drawing of a river in her hand. Then she had looked at it more closely and had seen there was only one shoreline moving down the sheet, defining thumbsized spots of blue. Bays, he had told her, the beginnings of open water in a cold climate. Whoever made it must have been working on the deck of a ship that was following the coast, he had said. It was one of the few gifts he had ever given her, and she cannot now recall the occasion that had prompted it: only that it had moved her, and she had not told him how much. She would never, now, be able to tell him how much.

She opens her eyes, turns back to the oval.

What she sees below is not quite arctic, is a mirror image instead of the sea cliffs that were visible after the takeoff from Shannon, except there are far too many trees now to mistake this country for Ireland. The cliffs appear to be wilder, though the surf breaks around them in the same familiar way. As the plane lowers more purposefully, making its final approach into Gander, Newfoundland, the pine forest approaches. Sea, rock, then acres and acres of forest. Like all transatlantic flights, the aircraft would refuel in this bleak, obscure place. The passengers would disembark for an hour or two.

Tam recalls the bright new American aircraft she had sometimes been instructed to pick up at Prestwick in Scotland: Mosquitos often, or Lancasters. Those planes had set out for the transatlantic part of the journey from the place that is now directly below her, as Ferry Command had been situated at Gander. She had always wanted to pilot a transatlantic flight, but it was understood that no woman would ever be invited to do so, regardless of her skills or accomplishments, so the idea of Gander had remained a vague point of intersection to her, situated between one important shore and another. Soon her boots will be on Gander’s transient ground, however: all these years later. You bide your time in a temporary place like this, she thinks. You make no commitment. This is the geography of Purgatory and the aircraft is about to touch down.

She had always enjoyed “touching down,” noise and power and forward momentum lightly brushing the ground, then settling in, becoming calmer, silencing. She recalls the satisfaction of a completed mission, the pleasure of performance. But now she believes that when she lands it will be as if an idea, something tonal–a full weather pattern, Niall would say–will have closed up behind her, and she will be in the final stages of leaving him.

In the mountains of the Iveragh, he had told her, there would always be times of scarcity. But the old people of the Iveragh knew the difference between scarcity and famine. There is hope in scarcity, the old people had said. She had heard them say it. They had said it to her.

There was no hope in her. Not anymore. From now on she would starve.

* * * *

Niall had been born in a market town on the Iveragh Peninsula of County Kerry–the Kingdome, he called it–and except for university and a handful of years working for the Meteorology Service in Dublin, he had never lived anywhere else. Sometimes he would recite the ancient names of the peninsula’s townlands and mountains when she complained, as she occasionally did, of his silence, until, laughing, she would ask him to stop. Those names were tumbling around in her mind now, mixed with the sounds of the engines. Raheen, Coomavoher, Cloonaughlin, Killeen Leacht, Ballaghbeama, Gloragh. Beautiful places, as she had come to know, though diminished by the previous century’s famine and then by ongoing, unstoppable emigration.

Niall’s direct antecedents had survived the famine. Probably by their wits, he ’d said. They had not perished in the mountains, he told her, but had made a life for themselves instead in the town. Nor had they later run up the slopes of mountains during uprisings or in the tragedy of the civil war, as those in the rural parishes had done. He had shown her the memorial plaques that were scattered here and there around the countryside at the places where rebels had been shot or beaten to death. He had had a sentimental, if not a political, sympathy for those desperate boys and the songs that were sung about them. “‘We ’ll give them a hot reception,’” he had sung to her more than once, “‘on the heathery slopes of Garrane.’”

No one in the family had taken the boats from Tralee either, he ’d told her. There were none of them in London or New York. Not until his younger brother, Kieran, of course. Kieran, who had been the first of the tribe to go.

Goodbye to Niall and his impossible, lost brother. Goodbye to the heathery slopes of Garrane.

* * * *

Niall had himself once made the journey to America, seeking his brother. He had bought a ticket to New York and spent his holidays tramping through the streets of that city, from flophouse to flophouse. After this, he stayed away from her for more than a month, and his phone calls–the few times he made them–were brief and tense. When she did see him, he would not describe his life to her in any kind of detail. It was during periods like that, when he went silent, that she knew he associated her with everything that was dark and wrong. She was a mistake he had made or, worse, a crime he had committed. She was misdirection, shame, something for the confessional, though he never went to confession. At times like that she would begin to suspect that he had taken a vow against her.

So Niall too would have spent some time in this airport. She thinks about this as she descends the lowered steps that lead to the ground. He would have heard the hollow sound of his footsteps on these aluminum stairs, the slap of his shoes on this damp tarmac.

* * * *

Now she is entering a cool room filled with yellow-and-orange leatherette benches, the tiles beneath them polished, light from the large windows mirrored on the floor like long silver pools. Certain details surface in the room, this waiting room: the four clocks announcing the time in distant cities, the acidic green of the plastic plants placed among the banquettes, hallways leading to washrooms and restaurants, and at one of these entrances, a sign with the black silhouettes of a man and a woman, lit from behind.

She walks down the corridor and pushes open the door of the women’s washroom. Inside she finds herself in a pink-tiled antechamber. There is a series of mirrors above a counter in front of which a number of stools are bolted to the floor. She sits on one of the stools and becomes slowly aware of her face in the mirror. By habit she takes lipstick out of her handbag and paints her mouth. She had sometimes felt that beauty was the one, perhaps the only, gift she could give him. She looks for a moment at her wan skin, her own exhausted eyes. Then she reaches for a tissue and angrily removes the colour from her lips.

* * * *

Minutes later she stands at the end of the hall outside the washroom and gazes across the passenger lounge toward a colourful wall, only a part of which is visible from this vantage point. She wonders if what she sees is a large map, but as she walks into the room itself it becomes clear to her that she is looking at an enormous painting: oranges and greens and blues. It holds her attention for several seconds before she turns toward the window where the dark shape of the airliner can be seen, along with the fuel truck that is connected to it by a thick hose. A soft rain is falling now, but there is no hint of wind, no storm. The low light and the rain obscure the fir trees that had been so clearly visible at the end of the runway. The plane is lit from within. The line of yellow oval windows looks faintly yet ominously militaristic in the weak light, much more so, oddly, than any of the warplanes she had flown in the past. She turns away from the window, back to the mural.

There are children of various sizes, placed here and there across the painted surface. Some of them are toylike–not dolls exactly, more wooden and brightly coloured than dolls. They resemble nutcrackers, she decides, remembering the ballet she had been taken to as a child. In spite of their fixed expressions, they seem to be filled with an anxious, almost terrible, anticipation, as if they sense they are about to fall into a sudden departure from childhood. All around them velocity dominates the cluttered air. Missile-shaped birds tear the sky apart, and everything is moving away from the centre. How strangely sad, she thinks, that children should be affected by such abrupt arrivals, such swift departures. And their stance, the way they stare out and away from the frantic activity surrounding them, is resisting this. It is a kind of defiance. She turns back to the room, walks to an orange banquette, and sits down, facing the mural. But she is no longer looking at it because she is once again thinking of Niall.

Her Kerry kitchen had been closer to the earth than the rest of the house: two steps leading down into it from the parlour. She is seeing Niall now, sitting on the first of these steps early in the morning after one of their few full nights together. Behind him the morning sunlight was a path into the parlour. But he was turned toward where she stood, in the darker morning kitchen. How strange they were then, still tentative in their reunion after months apart. She recalls how she had walked over to him and pulled his head toward her hip, her hands in his hair, and how his arms were warm around the backs of her thighs. He was still stunned by sleep and it seemed to her that they had remained in this embrace for a long time. She couldn’t remember disengaging, or when exactly they had broken out of that moment. She couldn’t remember how they had moved through the remainder of the morning.

She glances at the clock, under which the phrase GANDER, CROSSROADS OF THE WORLD is printed in large red letters, then out the window toward the airliner. It is almost eleven a.m. The rain, intermittent upon landing, has settled in, and a dull shadow has darkened the fuselage and dimmed the lights of the plane. “A common greyness silvers every- thing”: that one line comes into her mind, Niall saying it in relation to literature and weather. Shelley, or was it Browning? He had told her that silver was the colour most often, and inaccurately, associated with weather, something about climate theory that, even when he explained it in detail, she had not quite grasped.

The plane is blurred, the runway has vanished.

There is no argument with fog. In its own vague stubbornness, it wields more power than wind, rain, snow, even ice. During the war, just a hint of it cancelled all plans, all manoeuvres. Having no access to radar, she and the other ferry pilots in the Air Transport Auxiliary had flown beneath the clouds, following roads and rivers, sometimes even a seam of limestone, from airfield to airfield. Once she had flown along Hadrian’s great wall in a wounded Hurricane that had coughed as it plowed through the air, a dangerous situation, but one not impossible to manage. Fog was impossible. There was no avoiding it, no manoeuvring around it. The flight here in Gander would be delayed.

All the children in the mural accept this. They do not intercede on behalf of themselves or anyone else. Neither their defiance nor their anxiety has anything to do with the world outside the painted landscape where they live. They themselves would never change, and are uninterested, therefore, in a world undergoing constant revision.

* * * *

Whenever anyone asked her about her childhood, she would always reply with one word: temporary. No one had ever taken the conversation further, until Niall. “Isn’t everyone’s,” he had said, the words meant as a regretful statement of fact rather than a challenge. He did not ask for an explanation, which may be why she had provided one. “I felt trapped in it,” she said to him, “trapped in my body, which wasn’t aging fast enough to please me. I wanted out.”

“Of your body?” He laughed.

“No, I just wanted that to grow. I wanted out of my childhood.”

“I ran with a brilliant pack of boys all over the hill behind the town,” he said. “We ’d only go home if the midges came out, and even then reluctantly, and only after the tenth bite.” He told her he still saw some of these boys–men now–in the Fisherman’s Bar in the evenings. They were labourers, he said. A few had gone to London or New York, work in the parish being so scarce. A distance had developed between him and those who had either returned or remained, something to do with the stability of his own employment, he thought. His brother, Kieran, however, had neither returned nor remained.

There were things, she told him, that had made her childhood more livable. A dog, belonging to a boy she played with and whose house was connected to the walls that surrounded her father’s property, the little village her father essentially owned. She didn’t mention the boy himself, though he had made her happier than she knew. Later it had been the nearby airfield. She had hated it at first, this airfield. The whole village had been destroyed to build it. Compulsory purchase. Expropriation. Miles of Cornish dry-stone walls were bulldozed, she ’d told Niall, ancient fields, and, yes, the whole village. It had felt to her as if some of her childhood had been destroyed at the same time because she had always believed that the good part of it had taken place outside, not inside, her father’s walls. “Since I was a toddler,” she said, “I’m certain I preferred to believe this.”

Niall had particularly liked her descriptions of her early life among a gang of village boys–the men’s club, her mother had called them. As she had grown older and other girls her age began to go to dances and house parties in the company of just one boy, the tomboy in her had remained stubbornly emplaced. She and the boys had on occasion tracked down couples parked in cars, interrupting their intimacies by jumping up and down on the rear bumper, chanting insults, then running away.

“Football with ‘The Boys of Barr na Sráide,’ the Upper Street,” Niall, the athlete, had said. He mentioned that there was a poem, one that had quickly become a song. “Back in the hills where my brother lived,” he added, “almost every story, even a simple anecdote, turned into a song.”

She remembers now that she had never heard the song about the Upper Street, “Barr na Sráide.”

A room full of leaf shadows and the two of them talking, explaining themselves: what had they looked like during their hesitant, first conversations? Very early in the morning, because it was often Saturday, when he had the afternoon free, a diagram of the day’s forecast would have been chalked up by him in the weather station near the town where he lived. He had spoken about this, as if he were embarrassed about the way he spent his days. “I am a meteorologist,” he said, almost shyly, “and in these parts that means I spend most of my time measuring rain.”

She told him about her war. Day after day she would have departed to fly somewhere with only a map and the predictions of the meteorologists to guide her. Likely she would have had an instruction manual in her hand as well, for the Mosquito or Spitfire or any of the other half-dozen aircraft she and the others might have been required to ferry on that particular day. “Forty-seven aircraft, I flew four dozen different kinds of planes during the war.” She added that there had been a number of women pilots, all quite young. On the final run of the day, one or the other of these girls would fly from airfield to airfield picking up the others who had delivered planes to different military locations or to factories. Once, returning to the base, seven or eight of them were seated in the back on the floor of an Avro Anson, knitting.

He had been entranced by this. “Was he any good, then, your weatherman? Had he predicted fine weather for the knitting?” She could feel his body shaking with laughter.

“No,” she said, smiling.

“But you trusted him, I expect, took his advice.”

“No, I did not.”

There was a good chance that the day’s weather had already been telegraphed from the Kerry Station by Niall’s boss, McWilliams, or by his own father, as bad weather arrived in the west of Ireland first. “It bursts in from the Atlantic,” Niall said to her, “like the front line of an army aching for a battle.” He opened his arms expansively. And then there was his laugh.

Aching for a battle, she thinks now.

There had been sun moving on the wall as they spoke, and now and then, when the wind shook the fronds of the sallies on the lane, it travelled across the pillow and into his hair, gold and red, so that when she thrust her hands into it, it was warm.

“Why was it you didn’t trust him?”

It had taken a moment to remember that they had been talking about her war-time meteorologist. “Because our weather person was a woman,” she told him. “And, yes, I trusted her completely.” He laughed again, his face opening with delight, when she told him that the woman’s nickname was Wendy Weather.

She walked outside with him that day into the dampness of the late afternoon. Two fields away toward the mountain, they had seen a heron rise from the marshlands, then fly purposefully in the direction of the lake. “He will have a nest there, Tamara,” Niall said, “or she will.”

She preferred the single syllable of Tam. But the sound of her full name carried by his voice, the formality of that, drew her to him in a way that surprised her.

Sitting now in the airport, looking at the Constellation cloaked in mist, then back toward the sun yellows and night colours of the mural, she thought about his and her own resistance. She had always run away. But after the fact of him, what they were to each other, she had come to an uneasy sort of rest. “I’ve nothing to make you want to stay,” he had said to her, more than once. “Nothing but trouble. You could step into desperate trouble from something like this.” When early on she had asked about his children, he explained that it hadn’t been possible or, at least, that it had never happened. “Sometimes,” he said, “it is as if he was my child and I somehow lost him.” When she asked, he was astonished that she hadn’t known he had been speaking about his younger brother.

* * * *

The house where Niall’s brother had been raised still stood near the heathery slopes of Garrane, looking as if it had grown out of the rough pasture. Beside it, one of the Iveragh’s disordered burial grounds tumbled down the hill toward the bog below. The brother had lived there in his later childhood, and into young manhood under the care of the country woman that Niall would refer to as Kieran’s Other Mother, and was happy there, Niall had said, in a way he had never been in his own home. Niall had shown her a newspaper clipping concerning his brother, and two black-and-white photos, one with the brother astride a bicycle, grinning. Kieran was a chancer, Niall said. You never knew what he was going to do.

“Dead?” she asked gently, having noted his use of the past tense.

“I hope not,” he said, not looking at her. “I don’t think so. In England or maybe America, for a long time now. He just vanished in the night. Working, or so they say, on building sites or perhaps the motorways.”

Later he would begin to look for his brother in the most desperate of ways. It was my fault, he said. My fault.

It is even darker outside the window now, as if the fog is trying to cancel the struggling light.

 

 

From THE NIGHT STAGES .  Used with permission of Picador. Copyright © 2016 by Jane Urquhart.

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Why Parents Should Take Their Children to Literary Readings

The novelist is reading from her latest collection, a story about loss and despair. And in the back of the room, our son is doing snow angels on the carpet.

This is what can happen when you bring your children to literary events. They don’t always want to sit still and be quiet. They’d much rather be watching Curious George than listening to Elizabeth George.

And yet my husband and I regularly take our four-year-old son, Dashiell, to readings. We’ve even been known to let him sit in the front row.

Critics frown at this, and I get it. No one wants their literary moment ruined by a toddler’s outburst. In the case of the snow angels, no one was more mortified than me—and I whisked Dash outside before the audience even had a chance to notice.

But keeping kids away from events like this isn’t really the answer either. Parents are often reluctant to bring their children to places that require quiet or are considered too “adult,” and yet research shows that sharing your passions and interests with your children can spark their curiosity and make them better learners.

If that’s true, then Dash is already a pro. He was at the party for my first book, experimenting with taking his first steps and chewing on a pacifier. He was at a book launch for my husband, Art Taylor, last fall, excited about the cake. At a recent poetry event he sat quietly during the first reading, laughing with delight when the audience laughed.

Each time we learn new tricks. Bring toys, but quiet ones. Food is good, too. We arrive early and stake out the bookstore for alcoves we can relocate to when he gets bored. We also know our limits—no very formal events, late-night readings, or bars where the alcohol is flowing.

It’s hard to expect a little one to be patient for too long. That poetry event I mentioned earlier? After the first poet, Dash was done sitting quietly and popped up and down every few minutes to get crackers and cheese, announcing in loud whispers how each tasted. We’ve had to intercept Matchbox car crashes and prevent him from climbing on the backs of couches. Many times we’ll miss most of the reading but get a grand tour of the outside of the building and earn a pocketful of rocks and leaves.

So why bring him at all? Why risk annoying our friends, the readers, the audience? An easy answer might be the practical issue of money—it’s expensive to hire a babysitter. But that’s not it, at all. We simply like having him there. We want him there.

When I was a kid, I remember how endless Sunday Mass used to feel, listening to the priest talk about things I didn’t understand. I had to sit still and be quiet. And yet I was aware that there was something important going on, something special and significant, and it was nice to be part of that.

I don’t equate readings with church (although good ones can be a spiritual experience in their own right), but my husband and I see Dashiell picking up on the specialness of the events we take him to. During one reading, a woman recited a long poem while Dash parked his cars in the back of the room. But when she started firing off a list of names in a rapid succession, he looked up and started laughing at the rhythm of the words. Another time we were at a friend’s reading, sitting in the children’s section flipping through picture books, when he looked up at me and whispered, “She just said ‘son of a gun’! That’s not a nice thing to say.”

There’s something cool about Dash growing up among writers. We’ve seen him arrange his stuffed animals in a semicircle on his bed and open a book to give them a reading. He has his own library card and checks out all his books by himself, dragging a stool to the counter so he can reach the scanner.

We’re teaching him, one (sometimes painful) experience at a time, that literature is something to be celebrated and cherished, that words and stories are special. We’re teaching him that he has a place in our world and that we want him there. Regardless of whether it all goes perfectly or not.

Tara Laskowski is the author of two short story collections, Bystanders and Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons. She lives in Virginia.

A version of this article appeared in the 06/13/2016 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Children Allowed?

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Tracking Unit Print Sales for Week Ending January 8, 2017

Unit sales of print books declined 5% in the week ended Jan. 8, 2017, compared to the similar week in 2016, at outlets that report to Nielsen BookScan. The slow start to the year reflects declines in all four major categories, as well as sales dropping in both the retail and club and mass merchandisers channels. The biggest decline was in juvenile nonfiction, where units dropped 12% from the week ended Jan. 10, 2016. In the first week of last year, two Johanna Basford adult coloring books were in the second and third places on the juvenile nonfiction bestsellers list, selling a combined 30,000 copies. (In first place was Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the Visual Dictionary by Pablo Hidalgo, which sold more than 17,000 copies). The top-selling title in the category in the first week of 2017 was First 100 Words by Roger Priddy, which sold more than 7,000 copies. Print units of adult nonfiction fell 7%. Oprah Winfrey’s new book, Food, Health, and Happiness, debuted at #1 on the adult nonfiction list, selling more than 41,000 copies. Print units in juvenile fiction fell 5% in the week. The top 100 titles in juvenile fiction in the first week of 2017 sold a total of 368,000 copies, a 20% decline from the same week in 2016. The adult fiction category had the smallest unit decline in the week, with units off 3% compared to a year ago. A new Danielle Steel book, The Mistress, was #1 in the week, selling more than 25,000 copies. The new year also brought two new categories to the BookScan list: young adult fiction and young adult nonfiction. But because there are no comparisons available with 2016, the YA totals are combined with the overall juvenile fiction and juvenile nonfiction segments.

Unit Sales of Print Books by Channel (in thousands)

Jan. 10, 2016
Jan 8, 2017
Chge Week
Chge YTD


Total
13,022
12,355
-5%
-5%


Mass Merch./Other
1,521
1,412
-7%
-7%


Retail & Club
11,502
10,943
-5%
-5%

Unit Sales of Print Books by Category (in thousands)

Jan. 10, 2016
Jan 8, 2017
Chge Week
Chge YTD


Adult Nonfiction
6,099
5,671
-7%
-7%


Adult Fiction
2,700
2,630
-3%
-3%


Juvenile Nonfiction
841
736
-12%
-12%


Juvenile Fiction
2,519
2,383
-5%
-5%

Unit Sales of Print Books by Format (in thousands)

Jan. 10, 2016
Jan 8, 2017
Chge Week
Chge YTD


Hardcover
3,184
3,173
-0.3%
-0.3%


Trade Paperback
7,376
6,774
-8%
-8%


Mass Market Paperback
1,239
1,090
-12%
-12%


Board Books
423
425
0.5%
0.5%


Audio
68
61
-10%
-10%

Source: Nielsen BookScan and Publishers Weekly. Nielsen BookScan’s U.S. Consumer Market Panel covers approximately 80% of the print book market and continues to grow.

A version of this article appeared in the 01/16/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline:

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Weekly Round-Up: Get Organized, Get Your Idea, and Get Writing

Every week our editors publish somewhere between 10 and 15 blog posts—but it can be hard to keep up amidst the busyness of everyday life. To make sure you never miss another post, we’ve created a new weekly round-up series. Each Saturday, find the previous week’s posts all in one place.

Make It Work

To be a writer, you have to write. It doesn’t matter how busy you are—just write. Make it work by putting into practice these 5 Ways to Maximize Your Time (even if you’re managing a full-time job).

For more ideas on how to organize your writing life, check out Smart Ways to Get Organized and Be Productive. Then go pick up a copy of the February 2017 Writer’s Digest, designed to help you be productive.

Agents and Opportunities

Looking for an agent? If you write middle grade contemporary fiction, here are 14 Literary Agents Seeking Middle Grade Contemporary Fiction NOW.

This week’s new literary agent alert is for Aimee Ashcraft of Brower Literary. Aimee is specifically interested in literary and upmarket fiction, historical and women’s fiction, and young adult fiction (all genres).

Once you’ve e-mailed a query letter, how long should you wait before following up? We have the answer here.

For the opportunity to work one-on-one with an agent, sign up for the Writer’s Digest Boot Camp: How to Craft Query Letters & Other Submission Materials That Get Noticed. The Boot Camp starts on January 17, so sign up while you still can!

Poetic Asides

Congratulations to the winner of the Writer’s Digest Poetic Form Challenge for the landay! Find out if you won or made the Top 10.

For this week’s Wednesday Poetry Prompt, write a dream poem. Then check out this week’s Poetry Spotlight: the Paul Laurence Dunbar House.

Ever wonder why some authors cross out their printed names in a book before adding their signatures? Learn about the practice and the differing opinions on it .

The Origins of Stories

Coming up with story ideas can be a challenge. If you’re stuck for an idea, check out Paula Munier’s tips and tricks for Brainstorming for Story Ideas and try a new tactic.

For some inspiration on finding ideas, read about the reality behind five famous children’s stories in When Truth Is Stranger Than (Children’s) Fiction.

You might also like:

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Best of the Week: January 9 – 13, 2017

The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day

More Story

LitHub Daily: January 13, 2017

On accidentally naming your fictional villain after a real person. Who then emails you. | Literary Hub

Alana Massey…

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Books Brought Me Back to Life

When I was four years old, for reasons no one in my Italian-American family can explain, I picked up my older brother’s book and I read it. All these years later, I can still see the writing on the first page: “Look! Look!” I can still remember the thrill I felt when I realized I was reading. I had one thought that day: I want to live inside a book. In many ways, that’s exactly what I did. In fact, I read my way through most of my life.

My mother worked in a candy factory, stuffing Easter baskets and Christmas stockings. She liked to spoil us, and her paycheck often went to luxuries such as T-bone steaks, a chemistry set for my brother, and go-go boots for me. But to her, books weren’t a luxury; they were a waste of money. At our local discount store, I’d plop myself in the meager book section, while my mother splurged on new curtains. She’d find me there with a lapful of books, often sniffing one (even now the smell of a new book is one of my greatest pleasures). A Nancy Drew book cost $2.99 back then, and I’d hold one up to her, its yellow binding as beautiful as the sunshine. “I’m not going to waste my money on books,” she’d say.

But I did. I spent my allowance on those Nancy Drew books, even as I read my way through the library. I read before I fell asleep at night and as soon as I woke up in the morning. I read when I felt sad or lonely or confused. I read because I was so bored in my small Rhode Island mill town, where even the movie theater and Woolworth’s had gone out of business. In high school I lost myself in Russian and French novels hidden in my textbooks. In college I majored in English and happily read for four years.

I didn’t realize that my love of reading would actually save my life some day. But that is what happened. In 1982, my only sibling, my brother Skip, died suddenly in a household accident. I moved home that summer to help my parents, even though I was stunned by grief myself and couldn’t begin to understand what they needed. At night, I read to escape my mother’s tears and my father’s bewilderment over the loss of their son. I don’t remember the title of one book I read through that endless summer; I just remember how words comforted me at a time when comfort could not be found.

Eventually, of course, the summer ended. I relocated to New York City and began to write my own first novel. I even took a part-time job at a bookstore in Soho so that I could buy books at a discount. I fell in love. My heart got broken. I moved away from N.Y.C. and felt a homesickness I’d never experienced before. I made and lost friends. I fell in and out of love again and again. And through it all, I read.

In April 2002, I was a full-time writer living back in Rhode Island, married with two children—eight-year-old Sam and five-year-old Grace. One morning Grace woke with a high fever that I couldn’t bring down. By the time the doctors learned she had a virulent form of strep, she lay in the ICU, dying. Grace died 36 hours later. The next morning, I couldn’t believe that the sun had the audacity to shine, that the newspaper arrived on my front stoop. I couldn’t believe the world could still spin when my world had come to such a horrible halt. I looked at that newspaper, and for the first time since I was four, I could not read. Months passed, and still I could not read.

One day, over a year after Grace died, a book caught my eye in my local bookstore window: The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. I bought it. Then I went home, sat on my sofa, lifted the book to my nose, and inhaled deeply. It was like seeing an old friend again after too long apart, that smell. I opened the book, and I read it straight through. Then I cried. I cried for the daughter I had lost. I cried for all the pain in this big beautiful world. I cried for the gift that books bring us, for the comfort of words, for the human heart that breaks and mends over and over. “Look! Look!” that book called to me so long ago. I was too young then to understand exactly what it was offering me.

Ann Hood’s new novel, The Book That Matters Most, will be published this August by Norton.

A version of this article appeared in the 06/20/2016 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Look! Look!

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Libraries in the Age of Trump

For all the programs at the upcoming ALA Midwinter Meeting, which opens this week in Atlanta, I expect the event that will generate the most interest is the one taking place in Washington, D.C., on the conference’s opening day: the inauguration of President Donald Trump.

In a way, it’s fitting that so many librarians will be together on inauguration day. Trump’s presidency—and the divisive politics that led to his election—portend a period of uncertainty for libraries. Here are a few library-related issues on my mind as Trump prepares to take the oath of office.

The Fake News Trend Is an Opportunity for Libraries—Let’s Not Blow It
Talk about a sign of the times: post-truth was named the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of 2016, defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The fact that our post-truth politics play such a big role in the news media today should be not only unsettling to librarians but a personal affront.

It wasn’t that long ago that librarians operated walled gardens, where we collected facts and opinions from high-quality, vetted sources, offering them to users to help them make informed decisions. Of course, the Web changed all that. But librarians’ hand-wringing about Google and the quality of Wikipedia seems kind of quaint, in retrospect. During this year’s election, as the BBC reported, teenagers in Macedonia were cashing in by creating fake news stories for hyperpartisan supporters in the U.S., posting them to Facebook and earning advertising revenue from the site.

But there’s a silver lining when it comes to fake news: it has seriously piqued people’s interests—left, right, and center—and many people genuinely want to know more. After all, no one wants to be duped. And the rise of such blatantly false stories offers librarians the perfect opportunity to engage with their communities. Who better to lead a conversation about reliable sources than librarians?

But for God’s sake, please don’t use the terms information or media literacy. And don’t set up fake news workshops that require people to register online. Instead, find ways to get out and meet your community where they are—book groups, at the Y, churches and synagogues, PTA meetings, senior organizations, and after-school programs. Work with children, teens, and adults. Ask people where they find their news and the context in which they are discovering it. Show them how to locate the sources that produced it, and how to verify it.

Perhaps most importantly, explore the risks of reading news that only supports one’s own perspectives. And position yourself not as an expert but as a fellow learner, ready to help with a process that is ongoing and often difficult.

Will Yiannopoulos Usher in a New Genre?
One of the hot topics in the halls of the upcoming ALA Midwinter meeting will likely be the forthcoming book, Dangerous, from Milo Yiannopoulos, the far-right provocateur and Breitbart editor most famous for being banned from Twitter for engaging in the targeted harassment of actress Leslie Jones.

Yiannopoulos caused a media firestorm this month after signing a deal with Threshold Editions, Simon & Schuster’s conservative imprint. Critics of the deal say that Yiannopoulos, unlike S&S’s other right-wing authors (including Glenn Beck, Dick Cheney, and Donald Trump), invites an especially divisive, fringe element into the cultural mainstream, and there have been calls to boycott S&S in a variety of ways.

Will I buy Dangerous (which, I should point out, no one has yet seen) for my collection? Yes. Like most public librarians, I have a collection development policy that riffs on the ALA’s Library Bill of Rights: materials should not be excluded because of origin, background, or views, and libraries should provide “materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues.”

I’ll likely have a small number of patrons who will request Dangerous. And I’m betting there will be many more who will want to flip through it, even though they won’t want to borrow it, and certainly won’t purchase it.

But it’s what comes next that bears watching. If Dangerous is the financial success S&S is betting it will be, it will release that bane of the book industry—the copycats. Brace yourselves: while Yiannopoulos may be the first to cash in on his own particular brand of hate, there’s plenty more to go around: white nationalists, anti-Semites, haters of homosexuals, Islamophobes, and others.

ALA Cannot Afford a Leadership Vacuum
If there was ever a time when ALA needs strong leadership, it’s now. Yet, in the days immediately following Trump’s election, the first statements out of ALA—two of which were later rescinded—were textbook examples of how not to communicate if you are a large, professional membership organization. And what followed was a weeklong train wreck of retractions, more releases, emails to listservs, a blog post, a Q&A “Related to the New Administration,” and finally an announcement for the inevitable town hall at the upcoming Midwinter meeting.

It all began with a postelection statement from the ALA’s Washington Office (which was later rescinded and explained away as a mistakenly released draft). The release outlined how ALA could assist the new administration with certain goals identified by Trump’s transition team, including infrastructure, education, and veterans’ services. But what really upset librarians was a quote in the release from ALA president Julie Todaro that said ALA stood “ready to work with President-elect Trump, his transition team, the incoming administration and members of Congress.”

For the ALA Washington Office, this kind of statement is normal after an election. Fitting libraries into a new administration’s agenda is its job. However, this year’s election was anything but normal. And for many ALA members, this communication couldn’t have been more off-key. Trump’s campaign rhetoric directly contradicted the ALA Code of Ethics and the library community’s core values—especially those regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion. And many ALA members believed that any statement from ALA needed to address such contradictions, first and foremost. Instead, draft or not, such words were absent entirely.

There were several troubling things about this debacle, but, to me, the most troubling is that it appears ALA didn’t just take its eye off the ball, but that it didn’t have its eye on the ball to begin with. ALA has since apologized for the mistake. But the episode has left many librarians wondering what will happen when we’re faced with the true “hardball” of the policy wars, as ALA president-elect Jim Neal has put it.

Perhaps, as with so many things we fear today, some good will come from this episode. Maybe it will help to mobilize a new generation of librarians who will lead ALA forward. There’s certainly a whole lot worth fighting for.

A version of this article appeared in the 01/16/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline:

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Get Published in 2017! Agent One-on-One Boot Camp Starts January 17

When your submission materials—a query letter, synopsis, manuscript, or book proposal—arrive in an agent’s inbox, they land among hundreds of others. At that point, one of two things will happen. Either the agent (or the agent’s assistant) will like the submission and request more materials, or they will reply with a rejection.

Authors who get rejected tend to fall in one of two categories when submitting materials: they try too hard, or not enough. This Writer’s Digest Boot Camp, “How to Craft Query Letters and Other Submission Materials That Get Noticed” (starts January 17, 2017), is designed to help you streamline your submission materials to stand out in a good way.

Attendees will learn how to write a dynamite query letter, tackle a one-page synopsis (for fiction) and a book proposal (for nonfiction). The instructing literary agents will also explain the importance of author platform in addition to basic etiquette in dealing with an agent and manuscript basics.

Lastly, all attendees will have an opportunity to interact one-on-one with an agent and submit ten double-spaced pages of materials (in any combination—query, synopsis, book proposal, first pages of your manuscript) for valuable feedback provided by successful literary agents.

Here’s How It Works:

On January 17, you will gain access to a special 60-minute online tutorial presented by literary agents Kimberley Cameron and Elizabeth Kracht. This tutorial will provide nuts & bolts advice on how to help you streamline your submission materials—including the query letter, novel synopsis, nonfiction book proposal, and first pages.

After listening to the presentation, attendees will spend the next two days revising materials as necessary. Following the tutorial, writers will have two days in which to log onto the discussion boards and ask your assigned agent critiquer questions related to revising your materials. The agents will be available for a discussion session from 4-6 p.m. (ET) on both Wednesday, January 18 and Thursday, January 19. By end of day (11:59 p.m., ET) on Friday, January 20, attendees will submit up to 10 double-spaced pages for review to their assigned agents. These pages can include any combination of double-spaced query, synopsis, book proposal, or pages of their manuscript.

The agents will spend three to four weeks reviewing all assigned pages, provide relevant feedback and offer suggestions to help attendees improve upon them. The agents reserve the right to request more materials if they feel a strong connection to the work and want to read more.

In addition to feedback from agents, attendees will also have access to “Everything You Need to Know About Literary Agents,” an on-demand webinar by WD editor Chuck Sambuchino.

While we accept requests to work with a specific agent, there are no guarantees that attendees will be matched with their requested agent.

All agents are able to provide critiques for all genres.

AGENDA REVIEW

Tuesday, January 17: Online Tutorials
Wednesday, January 18: Agent Q&A 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM (ET)
Thursday, January 19: Agent Q&A 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM (ET)
Friday, January 20: Writers Submit Materials
Friday, February 10: Agent Critiques Due

(Sign up for the boot camp here.)

ABOUT THE AGENT INSTRUCTORS:

KIMBERLEY CAMERON

Kimberley was educated at Marlborough School for Girls in Los Angeles, Humboldt State University, and Mount St. Mary’s College. She began her literary career as an agent trainee at the Marjel de Lauer Agency in association with Jay Garon in New York and worked for several years at MGM developing books for motion pictures. She was the co-founder of Knightsbridge Publishing Company with offices in New York and Los Angeles.

In 1993 Kimberley became partners with Dorris Halsey of The Reece Halsey Agency, founded in 1957. Among its clients have been Aldous Huxley, William Faulkner, Upton Sinclair, and Henry Miller. She opened Reece Halsey North in 1995 and Reece Halsey Paris in 2006. In 2009 the agency became Kimberley Cameron & Associates.

Kimberley resides and works from Tiburon, California and Paris, France, with many visits to New York to make the rounds of editorial offices. She is looking for exceptional writing in any field, particularly writing that touches the heart, and makes us feel something. She’s been successful with many different genres, and especially loves the thrill of securing representation for debut authors. She represents both fiction and nonfiction manuscripts, with the exception of romance, children’s books and screenplays.

ELIZABETH KRACHT

Note: While Elizabeth is on the presentation, she is not taking on any students for this boot camp.

Elizabeth Kracht represents both literary and commercial fiction as well as nonfiction, and brings to the agency experience as a former acquisitions editor, freelance publicist and writer.

Elizabeth’s career in publishing took root in Puerto Rico where she completed her BA in English and worked as a copyeditor for an English-language newspaper. When she returned to the mainland she found her “vein of gold” in book publishing. She thrives on working closely with authors and researching the potential market for new books.

Elizabeth’s eclectic life experience drives her interests. She appreciates writing that has depth, an introspective voice or that offers wisdom for contemporary living. Having lived in cities such as New York, San Francisco and San Juan, Puerto Rico, she is compelled by urban and multicultural themes and loves settings that are characters unto themselves.

In fiction, she represents literary, commercial, women’s, thrillers, mysteries, and YA with crossover appeal. She is intrigued by untrustworthy narrators, tragic tales of class and circumstance, and identifies with flawed yet sterling characters. In nonfiction, she particularly loves memoir and other narrative nonfiction projects that contribute to the well-being of the self or others in addition to niche projects that fill holes in the market, offer a fresh approach, or make her laugh. She also has a soft spot for nonfiction heroic pet stories.

NO: Fantasy, Science Fiction

YES: Women’s, Historical, Mysteries, Thrillers, Nonfiction (all types)

MARY C. MOORE

Mary started her career in publishing as a writer. She graduated from Mills College with an MFA in Creative Writing. After freelancing for two years as an editor and writer in non-literary sectors, she began an internship with Kimberley Cameron & Associates with the desire to learn more about the literary business for her own writing. During the internship she discovered a passion for helping others develop their manuscripts. Now she balances three jobs: writer, editor, and agent, and finds that the experience in each helps and supports the other. She is looking for unusual fantasy, grounded science-fiction, and atypical romance. Strong female characters and unique cultures especially catch her eye. Although she will not consider most non-fiction, stories about traditional dance or pagan culture may interest her. Above all, she is looking for writing that sweeps her away.

NO: Nonfiction

YES: Fantasy! Science Fiction, Mysteries, Thrillers, Historical, Women’s

DOUGLAS LEE

Douglas came to Kimberley Cameron as a writer in 2014 with the purpose of learning what hid behind the curtain of publishing. While completing his MFA, he found that he loved the work both behind and ahead of the typewriter. At this time, his sole focus is representing science fiction and fantasy that stimulates the imagination.

As an agent he is looking for SFF manuscripts that utilize the craft elements of literary fiction and the best parts of imaginative genre. He is seeking novels with writing just as enticing as the story. Subtle and deft world-building techniques capture his attention; as do characters with raw magnetism and confused moral compasses.

Douglas welcomes all SFF sub-genres. He has a soft spot for Cyberpunk, Weird Fiction in the flavor of China Mieville, Steampunk and noir influenced voices. He seeks writers who write against genre and bend preconceptions. LGBTQ based manuscripts are welcome, as are unconventional SFF protagonists with marginalized voices in their world.

NO: YA

YES: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Speculative, Horror and Literary Fiction

LISA ABELLERA

Lisa Abellera joined Kimberley Cameron and Associates in 2013 with a background in management, marketing, and finance. She has studied creative writing, design and business, earning her B.A. in Strategic Management from Dominican University of CA and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from University of San Francisco.

She is actively building her client list with both debut and established authors. She is looking to form long-term, collaborative relationships with writers who are committed to putting forth their best work.

YES: Upmarket Fiction, Women’s Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mystery/Suspense, Speculative or Medical Science Thrillers, Science Fiction, Fantasy, NA, YA and Middle Grade.

AMY CLOUGHLEY

Amy came to Kimberley Cameron & Associates in 2012 with a background in editing, writing, and marketing. She seeks authors with unique, clear voices who put forth smart, tightly-written prose. She is actively building her client list with both debut and veteran writers.

She enjoys literary and upmarket fiction of all types in addition to commercial—including well-researched historical and well-told women’s fiction. She also loves a page-turning mystery or suspense with sharp wit and unexpected twists and turns. She has a soft spot for distinctive, strong, contemporary characters set in small towns. Amy always looks for an unexpected story arc, a suitable pace, and a compelling protagonist.

She is interested in narrative nonfiction when the plot and characters are immersed in a culture, lifestyle, discipline, or industry. She will also consider a travel or adventure memoir.

She is not currently focusing on military/government thrillers, fantasy, or YA projects.

Amy has studied creative writing, journalism, and literature and holds a B.S. in magazine journalism. She worked in editorial and marketing roles in magazine publishing and corporate business before shifting her professional focus to her lifelong love of books. She leverages her background in both words and business to benefit her clients.

(Sign up for the January 2017 boot camp here.)

 

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