Susan Conley's Blog, page 2

Mark Bessire Profile for Maine Magazine

This is a story about a teenage boy in New York City named Mark Bessire who knew he wanted to run a museum when he grew up. Art was his family’s pastime—a passion passed down to the boy from his parents like an inheritance. The boy experienced art viscerally. He bought his first painting, a Darby Bannard, for $150 with cash he’d saved from a paper route, and was hooked.

When the boy got older, he dreamed of a museum. It would be a vibrant, open place in a forward-looking city that lacked pretension, a museum where he could build a cutting-edge collection and stage art from the margins—presenting non-Western exhibitions and contemporary work alongside local artists. The boy moved to an island in Greece, then to a village in Africa. All the while he fashioned this museum in his mind. Then, in 2009, Bessire found the Portland Museum of Art (PMA), or rather the museum found him. When the PMA hired him as director, it was the kind of happy ending that lives in a fable.

Here’s what you need to know about Bessire from the start: he’s humble and self-deprecating and immensely likable. He walks the halls of the PMA with the ease of a man who’s found his calling—able to draw on a vast, intricate catalogue of art that he maintains in his capacious mind. To be around Bessire’s sense of purpose is infectious.

This may be why everyone’s smiling when I visit the museum on a Wednesday in late May. Spring has finally committed itself to Portland, and sunlight streams down through an octagon cut high in the ceiling. The security guards, whom Bessire knows all by name, are smiling. So are the docents and visitors and other staff. Even the art seems to be smiling.

I’m not making this up. Winslow Homer is upstairs happily chatting with Andrew Wyeth. Marsden Hartley is talking to Marguerite Zorach. In a striking example of Bessire’s bent to shake up the permanent collection, he’s hung these Maine legends together in a long conversation. He says the museum “can’t sequester” its famous artists in separate rooms, offering simply an “encyclopedia experience” that traces only the chronology of the story. Instead, a small museum like the PMA needs to have all kinds of stories and voices going at once.

When Bessire and I sit down in his airy office overlooking a small slice of the Portland harbor, he confesses that he doesn’t like to talk about himself. Ever. It’s a modesty passed down from his genial Southern parents, who moved to New York from Kentucky in the 1960s. They raised Bessire and his older brother in a house in Brooklyn Heights, filled with mid-century Danish furniture and a whole lot of minimalist art.

His mother, Louise Bessire, has been an educator and political activist and chaplain. She became friends with renowned art critic Lucy Lippard at Smith College, and Lippard helped introduce the Bessires to the New York City art world. Bessire’s beloved father, Henry Bessire, who died in 2012, oversaw the development arm of Lincoln Center. He later became vice-president of development at Princeton University. He had a keen understanding of the vital role that art plays in the lifeblood of a city, and he knew the importance of making the ask—another genetic marker that shows up prominently in his son’s DNA.

Bessire tells me that “knowing when to ask and if to ask and how to ask,” is no small thing for a museum director. In fact it can mean everything. Let’s just say Bessire has a knack for it. Call him a cultural magnetizer. I’ve seen friends with no intention of letting money be wrested from their wallets and pocketbooks listen to one of Bessire’s electrifying art talks and decide “on the spot,” as one woman recently whispered to me on her way out of the museum the other night, “to give any money we can to the museum this year because Mark’s so inspiring.”

I ask him, Why art? Why museums? “Rarely,” he says and smiles, “do you get to have an unmediated experience with anything in your life anymore. But museums give you that. Yes, we’ve edited the collection. But if you stop intellectualizing it, and stand alone with the art, then it’s just you and Picasso.”

He’s not remotely talented as an artist himself, he claims. He adds that it can be a tricky thing for museum directors who want to be artists. “I’m lucky. I don’t have that conflicting pull that other directors might.”

Bessire family weekends in New York City were always about art. His family “made the rounds,” hitting their favorite galleries in SoHo and on 57th Street. In high school Bessire was crazy for football, lacrosse, and art. When he wasn’t on the playing field, he’d ride the subway to the Metropolitan Museum after school with friends and “wander around.” He went to New York University as an undergraduate and got a master's degree in art history from Hunter College. Then all signs pointed to a doctorate—the first rung on the ladder of museum directing. But Bessire paused and asked himself one question: should he pursue the doctorate or something a little more radical?

J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery of Art, was an early member of what’s become an informal cabal of museum legends that dispenses advice to Bessire (Richard Armstrong at the Guggenheim Museum, Jim Cuno who runs the Getty Museum, and Adam Weinberg at the Whitney Museum of American Art). Brown told Bessire, thou shalt not get a PhD. Bessire needed to scale the ladder a different way and Brown told him to go get a master’s of business administration.

“I love numbers and I understood derivatives. But statistics almost killed me. The business degree was hard for the art history student,” Bessire says laughing. Maybe it was this vanguard move to the Columbia MBA program that allowed Bessire to deftly steer the PMA out of its recent financial trough. He took the job as director and immediately went “into triage mode.” He had to ask hard questions. For the PMA the abiding one was, “Do we retrench or do we grow.” Bessire chose growth. Thank goodness he stuck out that statistics class in graduate school.

Now he leans back in his chair and says, “Let’s be city planners for a moment and ask how we build a healthy art ecology in this city?” Bessire envisions a rich ecosystem—one in which a student can attend Maine College of Art (MECA) on Congress Street; when her work matures, she might stage a show at Space Gallery further up the road. Later, when her art’s in full bloom, she could land an exhibit at the PMA and the art food chain would be complete.

Take the exiled artist Ahmed Alsoudani, whose show, Redacted, will arrive at the PMA in the fall of 2013. Born in Iraq, he came to Maine by way of Syria and attended MECA, where his work “blew people away” and caught Bessire’s attention. Alsoudani’s paintings depict war and violence but are filled with bright, sometimes garish colors. They sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars on the international art market. In interviews, Alsoudani explains that he’s a Maine artist, because Maine is where he found support and discovered his voice. “This is how Maine impacts artists,” Bessire says. “It’s crazy. How many states can claim they’ve had such a role in so many artists’ lives?”

Bessire knew nothing about Maine when he crossed the old, gritty Veterans Bridge in his car in 1998. He came to Portland for a curator’s job at MECA’s Institute for Contemporary Art, after working for two years at the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bessire says he “took one look at the piles of metal slag” in Portland’s working harbor and was smitten: “Here was a real working city.” He stayed at ICA for five years. In 2003 he became director of the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, which he calls another dream job.

There’s a love story woven into this Portland museum fable. It starts back in 1987 when Bessire meets a student named Aimée while the two are completing fellowships at the Whitney. They marry in 1991. By 1994 they’ve moved to East Africa, where Aimée conducts field research for a PhD in art history at Harvard. The boy from Brooklyn with the wavy brown hair and the John Lennon glasses is living in the remote Tanzanian village of Bujora. He has deferred his museum dream. Or maybe he hasn’t.

“The choice to go to Tanzania,” Bessire says, “was never in question. It was easy. Aimée and I had fallen in love so quickly and were so lucky. She was trailblazing. East African art was under-researched then.” There was a rudimentary museum in the tiny village, and during the couple’s second year in Africa, Bessire won a Fulbright fellowship to study the community’s deep collection of dance and performance art.

Bessire and Aimée, who now teaches at Bates College and is a leading scholar on African art, have two daughters: Blakey who’s 15 and Clay who’s 12. Together the Bessires founded and run the nonprofit Africa Schoolhouse, dedicated to building schools in rural Africa for kids who lack access to education. The whole Bessire family has brought shovels to Tanzania twice to live and help build the program’s first school, which now serves over 600 children.

Back in Portland, Bessire continues to offer provocative exhibitions at the PMA, even under enormous budget stress. The recent Winslow Homer blockbuster show Weatherbeaten  and the concurrent opening of Homer’s studio in Prouts Neck were crowning moments for the museum. He says, “The best paintings Homer did are the ones he did in Maine. We opened up his studio and were able to borrow some of these Maine paintings from other museums throughout the country. We’re a small museum here. Without Homer’s studio, it’s hard to trade with the big boys.” Renovating the studio has taken the PMA to another level nationally. “We have a much higher profile,” Bessire explains happily.

There’s a constant balancing act at the PMA—mixing the depth of the permanent collection with the vitality of new contemporary exhibits. In June, Shangaa: Art of Tanzania came to the museum, after opening at the QCC Art Gallery in New York, where it received a rave review in the New York Times.Bessire and Aimee both acted as advisors to the show.

A fear of stagnation—call it Bessire’s mausoleum anxiety—has also prompted him to call for an internal inventory of the PMA’s permanent collection so his team of talented curators can “really see what’s there.” The big news is that in 2015 everything will come down off the walls and be rehung. How’s that for a shake up?

I ask him if he has a secret agenda at the museum. He laughs and finally says, “That we can find the great shows in the margins—shows that should be in New York. And that we’re good and nimble enough to put them on here.”

Now it’s time to go see the art. We set out together from his office to walk the museum. The art entirely animates Bessire. There’s a Scott Peterman photograph. There’s an Alex Katz painting. There’s a Louis Dodd. Bessire can’t hide his pleasure. Here’s the New York City teenager again, responding to the art somewhere in his solar plexus.

On our way out, we pass under a painting called Woman Flying, by Katherine Bradford, that’s hung high, high on the wall overlooking the museum’s open lobby. It features a small, slightly plump woman soaring over a blue sky with a poignant red cape flapping behind her. She looks like an avant-garde superwoman. Where is she going? What is she leading us to? I don’t need to know the answer. I have an impulse to follow her wherever she’s headed.

I think this trust of mine is akin to the faith that Portland and the whole state of Maine has put in Bessire and the PMA. “Museums,” he says, “help tell us where we’re going as a culture.” He smiles up at the painting a little longer. “This is what we do. We help people go to other places.”

This article was published in Maine Magazine in August 2013. Photo by Patryce Bak.

The Middle Ground: the Boundary Region Where Fiction and Non-Fiction Live

Ever wonder why some of our favorite fictional characters read like real, historical figures? Or why the best memoirs we've read unfold cinematically--as rich and lavish as fully realized novels? I wrote a memoir that I tried to make read as richly as a novel. Now I’ve written a novel that comes out this week that features a first-person narrator who I could swear sometimes thinks she is in a memoir.

I’ve given a name to this place that I find myself inhabiting as a writer, where I’m moving from memoir to fiction and then back. I’m calling it the middle ground. I’m sure I’m not the first person to come up with this title. But it’s working for me this month as I get ready to go out in the world with a novel and call myself a fiction writer.

For me the middle ground is the fertile territory where fiction writers mine their life experiences and non-fiction writers transform the bare facts of their lives into something more meaningful.

Colm Toibin, the great Irish fiction writer, recently said, "If I tried to write about a lighthouse and used one that I had never seen and did not know, it would show in the sentences. Nothing would work; it would have no resonance for me, or for anyone else. If I made up a mother and put her in another town, a town I had never seen, I wouldn’t bother working at all... If I had to stick to the facts, the bare truth of things, that would be no use either..."

The American novelist Richard Russo was also recently interviewed about his memoir, Elsewhere. He said, "the best memoirs read like novels, which means, among other things, that the writer must decide what fits the narrative arc and what doesn’t. The fact that something actually happened doesn’t mean it should be included. A memoirist isn’t free to invent, but the shape of the story is up to him. He decides — as in a novel — how and where the story begins (near the end, in this case). He also chooses, just as a novelist does, when to summarize and when time should slow down for a dramatic scene."

Toibin and Russo give me permission to go back and forth from the facts to the fictive. They both use their pasts as springboards for compelling and enlivened stories and they arrive at emotional breakthroughs—moments when they really know their characters and allow them autonomy on the page. There are searing emotional truths to be found in both these writers’ books.

You may write memoir or novels, or maybe both. But I think the emotional connection is what matters most in what you write. Toibin and Russo have helped show me the way through the middle ground. They’ve given me a kind of map. And now, on the eve of publication, I find that I simply need to trust these new voices I've created on the pages of my novel. I think this is the trust we all need to put into our writing—staying stubborn, banishing the censor, doing the hard work, whether fact or fiction.

The Middle Ground

The Boundary Region Where Fiction and Non-Fiction Live

Ever wonder why some of our favorite fictional characters read like real, historical figures? Or why the best memoirs we've read unfold cinematically--as rich and lavish as fully realized novels? I wrote a memoir that I tried to make read as richly as a novel. Now I’ve written a novel that comes out this week that features a first-person narrator who I could swear sometimes thinks she is in a memoir. 

I’ve given a name to this place that I find myself inhabiting as a writer, where I’m moving from memoir to fiction and then back. I’m calling it the middle ground. I’m sure I’m not the first person to come up with this title. But it’s working for me this month as I get ready to go out in the world with a novel and call myself a fiction writer.

For me the middle ground is the fertile territory where fiction writers mine their life experiences and non-fiction writers transform the bare facts of their lives into something more meaningful.

Colm Toibin, the great Irish fiction writer, recently said, "If I tried to write about a lighthouse and used one that I had never seen and did not know, it would show in the sentences. Nothing would work; it would have no resonance for me, or for anyone else. If I made up a mother and put her in another town, a town I had never seen, I wouldn’t bother working at all... If I had to stick to the facts, the bare truth of things, that would be no use either..."

The American novelist Richard Russo was also recently interviewed about his memoir, Elsewhere. He said, "the best memoirs read like novels, which means, among other things, that the writer must decide what fits the narrative arc and what doesn’t. The fact that something actually happened doesn’t mean it should be included. A memoirist isn’t free to invent, but the shape of the story is up to him. He decides — as in a novel — how and where the story begins (near the end, in this case). He also chooses, just as a novelist does, when to summarize and when time should slow down for a dramatic scene."

Toibin and Russo give me permission to go back and forth from the facts to the fictive. They both use their pasts as springboards for compelling and enlivened stories and they arrive at emotional breakthroughs—moments when they really know their characters and allow them autonomy on the page. There are searing emotional truths to be found in both these writers’ books.

You may write memoir or novels, or maybe both. But I think the emotional connection is what matters most in what you write. Toibin and Russo have helped show me the way through the middle ground. They’ve given me a kind of map. And now, on the eve of publication, I find that I simply need to trust these new voices I've created on the pages of my novel. I think this is the trust we all need to put into our writing—staying stubborn, banishing the censor, doing the hard work, whether fact or fiction.

 

Photo credit: Courtesy Andrea Palladio / Thomas Jefferson, via Wiki Commons

 

Words Matter

My new novel comes out in ten days and for some reason yesterday seemed like a really good time to complicate my life even more and buy a new cellphone. There’s no news here except something about the new keyboard has me ending all my messages as the country of Sudan. What happens is that my fingers hit the letter d instead of s, which means instead of signing off as Susan, I write “Best Wishes, Sudan.” And “Sincerely, Sudan.” And “Take Good Care, Sudan.”

I’ve never been to the Sudan. Every time I appropriate the name of that war-torn country I feel fraudulent and vaguely unsettled. I blame my spate of typos on the launch of my novel and on the rush of Dopamine that surges through my veins every time my inbox dings. My urge to respond feels incredibly and unnecessarily urgent. I call it the curse of the smartphone—this false sense of intensity. I also call it the rush of the book launch, the crazy spate of time before a book comes out when a rain of niggly details begins falling.

And in my haste, I type things into my tiny, cofounding keyboard that I didn’t really mean to say, or I take the name of an oil-rich country in North Africa ringed by Libya and Egypt, where civil war technically ended in 2005 under a shaky peace agreement. This war was a particularly brutal one, featuring child soldiers and child slavery, and more death and displacement than almost any conflict since World War Two.

When my smartphone writes, “Thanks so much, Sudan,” I feel like it’s trying to pretend that the Sudan and I are intimates. Like I know things about what it means to be from a country in perpetual civil war.
Two days ago I texted a friend about photos she took of my two sons wearing rubber animal masks. They’re good photographs and some of them are slightly unsettling. I closed out my text to her, “Big thanks for showing me these, Sudan.” Every time I do this—type the word Sudan by accident into my phone, it feels like the gulf between what’s real and what’s not real in my life only grows bigger.

Or maybe my cell phone is trying to teach me something. Maybe it’s trying to make me slow down inside the social media onslaught that can become a book launch. Take last night. My ten-year-old Aidan and I were waiting for burritos at a small place north of the city. I texted another friend about a neon green wig Aidan wanted to borrow for a costume. “Aidan died want to wear your green wig,” is what I wrote. Then I hit Send.

For some reason I scanned the words, and the hair on my arms stood up: “Aidan died.” Who’d written that? I got a rush of adrenalin in the burrito shop.
Aidan hadn’t died! He couldn’t have died! I just drove to the burrito shop with him. He was sweaty from a pick up basketball game and wearing the same Kevin Garnett shirt he slept in the night before.
To convince myself of how very much alive Aidan was, I ran outside and watched him leaping off a picnic table again and again using only his left leg. Only then did I calm down.

What I’d meant to text my friend was that Aidan “does” want to wear the wig. Didn’t the little person who lives inside my phone know this? Didn’t they understand that what sits in the space between the words “died” and “does” is the unspeakable chasm that must be some terrible part of losing a child?
Our burritos came. Aidan and I got in the car and drove home. I was rattled. I didn’t care about my book launch anymore. What I was thinking about was how I couldn’t tell Aidan that he’d died on my cell phone. I couldn’t explain that the specter of this was haunting me and making me name my love for him out loud in the car while we navigated the two-lane highway that wraps around our city.

Language felt very slippery that night. I was struck by how much words can still matter—even against the backdrop of war or the randomness that is our lives. This is one of the central themes of my novel: how much words matter. In fact the narrator is sort of obsessed with words and I use the words that she holds dear as chapter titles in the novel.
Maybe this is it—we keep bending our necks at awkward angles and typing on those inscrutable screens because we want our words to matter too. We want to be heard. We want to send a message. We write the words and the words talk back to us. Then we’re in some kind of conversation with ourselves. And with the Sudan. And with our children. And maybe none of this is a bad thing.

Words Matter

My new novel comes out in ten days and for some reason yesterday seemed like a really good time to complicate my life even more and buy a new cellphone. There’s no news here except something about the new keyboard has me ending all my messages as the country of Sudan. What happens is that my fingers hit the letter d instead of s, which means instead of signing off as Susan, I write “Best Wishes, Sudan.” And “Sincerely, Sudan.” And “Take Good Care, Sudan.”

I’ve never been to the Sudan. Every time I appropriate the name of that war-torn country I feel fraudulent and vaguely unsettled. I blame my spate of typos on the launch of my novel and on the rush of Dopamine that surges through my veins every time my inbox dings. My urge to respond feels incredibly and unnecessarily urgent. I call it the curse of the smartphone—this false sense of intensity. I also call it the rush of the book launch, the crazy spate of time before a book comes out when a rain of niggly details begins falling.

And in my haste, I type things into my tiny, cofounding keyboard that I didn’t really mean to say, or I take the name of an oil-rich country in North Africa ringed by Libya and Egypt, where civil war technically ended in 2005 under a shaky peace agreement. This war was a particularly brutal one, featuring child soldiers and child slavery, and more death and displacement than almost any conflict since World War Two.

When my smartphone writes, “Thanks so much, Sudan,” I feel like it’s trying to pretend that the Sudan and I are intimates. Like I know things about what it means to be from a country in perpetual civil war.

Two days ago I texted a friend about photos she took of my two sons wearing rubber animal masks. They’re good photographs and some of them are slightly unsettling. I closed out my text to her, “Big thanks for showing me these, Sudan.” Every time I do this—type the word Sudan by accident into my phone, it feels like the gulf between what’s real and what’s not real in my life only grows bigger.

Or maybe my cell phone is trying to teach me something. Maybe it’s trying to make me slow down inside the social media onslaught that can become a book launch. Take last night. My ten-year-old Aidan and I were waiting for burritos at a small place north of the city. I texted another friend about a neon green wig Aidan wanted to borrow for a costume. “Aidan died want to wear your green wig,” is what I wrote. Then I hit Send.

For some reason I scanned the words, and the hair on my arms stood up:  “Aidan died.” Who’d written that? I got a rush of adrenalin in the burrito shop.

Aidan hadn’t died! He couldn’t have died! I just drove to the burrito shop with him. He was sweaty from a pick up basketball game and wearing the same Kevin Garnett shirt he slept in the night before.

To convince myself of how very much alive Aidan was, I ran outside and watched him leaping off a picnic table again and again using only his left leg. Only then did I calm down.

What I’d meant to text my friend was that Aidan “does” want to wear the wig. Didn’t the little person who lives inside my phone know this? Didn’t they understand that what sits in the space between the words “died” and “does” is the unspeakable chasm that must be some terrible part of losing a child?

Our burritos came. Aidan and I got in the car and drove home. I was rattled. I didn’t care about my book launch anymore. What I was thinking about was how I couldn’t tell Aidan that he’d died on my cell phone. I couldn’t explain that the specter of this was haunting me and making me name my love for him out loud in the car while we navigated the two-lane highway that wraps around our city.

Language felt very slippery that night. I was struck by how much words can still matter—even against the backdrop of war or the randomness that is our lives. This is one of the central themes of my novel:  how much words matter. In fact the narrator is sort of obsessed with words and I use the words that she holds dear as chapter titles in the novel.

Maybe this is it—we keep bending our necks at awkward angles and typing on those inscrutable screens because we want our words to matter too. We want to be heard. We want to send a message. We write the words and the words talk back to us. Then we’re in some kind of conversation with ourselves. And with the Sudan. And with our children. And maybe none of this is a bad thing.

Photo credit: Wiki Commons    

The Book Tour Isn’t Dead

What I’ve learned about book publishing in the last four years is that no one out there really, truly knows how to sell books. Not the publishers and their small armies of marketing people and publicists. Not the agents. Everyone seems to have been completely blindsided by online book selling and e-books. And very few books seem to be able to yell above the noise that is the constant 24-hour news cycle.

This all came as a big surprise to me when I was a new writer. I thought that if you got your proverbial backside into the chair every day and wrote your book and solicited agents (far and wide), you might get a publishing contract. And if you landed that, then you could lie down on the rug in your living room and take a long nap. Because the rest of the work was up to the publisher.

And apparently there was a time and place when this rang true--when publishers really did do the book selling for authors and there was more room out there for a wide swath of books on all kinds of arcane subjects and more space out there for quieter conversations about books. Now you often need headlines to get your book noticed. You need to be the blockbuster hit novel or memoir of the entire summer. And maybe you’ve heard you need to have 5,000 Facebook friends and 3,000 twitter followers (at least). (None I which I entirely understand the benefit of, not to mention how we would really ever have the time to cultivate that many relationships if we’re meant to be actually writing. The next book!)

But none of this is probably news to anyone now. Though when I first heard it, when my publishers made it clear that it was a guessing game how books really got sold, I felt my knees go weak. No one knows? How to sell books? What do you mean? I tried to get a better answer from someone. How could they not know?

And what the marketing folks told me was that at this moment in our universe, this exact juncture of time and place in July of 2013, no one can really tell how long the printed book is going to last. It’s partly about the gift and the curse of e-books. They’re easy to buy and to read apparently, and great on airplanes, and I entirely get their appeal for certain people. But they’re killing authors’ royalties and driving prices down and really hurting bookstores. Because bookstores can’t sell e-books. It just doesn’t work. Bookstores are all about bricks and mortar. All about the town you live in. All about the actual page. Or paper. E-books are most often bought from Amazon which is the land of the those headline-grabbing, megahit books I mentioned before.

Amazon is about pushing a very small number of books to become huge successes. There are no browsing tables at Amazon where you can pick up dozens of books you’ve never heard of and read their opening pages. Amazon doesn’t pay taxes in your town or help with your community arts scene. They don’t bring living authors into the stores to meet actual readers and shake their actual hands and blow their minds by reading their luminous, trenchant stories.

So this was dispiriting news to receive when I first heard it. It still is. But here in the topsy-turvy world of books in 2013, some of the Indie bookstores we all know and love are getting stronger. Thriving in fact. Take our local store, Longfellow Books (pictured above), in Portland, Maine. It is the very backbone of our Maine writing community. The amazing owners and booksellers there PUSH good books and they understand the vital role that books—real living breathing books, play in keeping our arts community alive and in connecting readers to the work that will change their lives.

If you have a book you’ve written and want need to sell it, there are things you CAN do to help give yourself a leg up in the marketplace: the first is to reach out to any and every bookstore that you have ever stepped foot in, and even those you haven’t. Write personal notes to them. Emails if that’s better. Tell them what you valued about their store and then mention your book and see if they have a reading series.

Then create a Book Tour:  Get on the calendar of each of those bookstore’s reading series. Because bookstore readings matter. They just do. And I know that it seems like all you might need is a lot of Goodreads and Amazon ads for your book to find readers. But I think what still really matters is the part where you look people in the eye and read a sentence from your opening c

I went out on the road with my first book, a memoir, and I crisscrossed the country. I had enough friends with couches I could sleep on, that I was able to do it pretty cost-effectively. And my publisher helped. So I’m doing it again in three weeks--going to lots of local and far-flung bookstores to read from my new novel. Some say the book tour is dead. But how can that be when there are hundreds of great Indie bookstores out there shouting out the praises of the authors they love and selling crates of books?

So I say, let’s read from our books. Out loud. In bookstores. We wrote these books. We lived in them for years. So we understand them. We can inflect. We can enunciate. We can deliver them in person in a beautiful, soulful bookstore like Longfellow Books, much better than the electronic device can. I read from this new novel of mine last month for the first time, and it felt like putting on a very familiar, favorite old coat. I’d written those sentences. I’d crafted those paragraphs. I knew this novel. And I was so glad to be standing there in front of a live audience of friends and strangers, holding the spine of the book in my hands.

What Territory Is Your Book Staking Out? Know the Answer Before You Try to Sell Your Manuscript

When I was working on the final, final, final draft of my novel it already had a title, but this working title only got me so far in the book finishing business. It had served me well. But I had to let it go. That’s when I sat down and did one of those hard distillations I talk about in my previous blog, where I asked myself what my novel was really about.

Here are the things I already knew about my novel: the book was set in Paris. My characters were deeply imbedded in their lives on the Right and Left Bank of the Seine. They had jobs that they rode the metro to get to. They had favorite creperies and Indian restaurants dotting the 6th and 7th arrondisements.

I sat in a small cabin up North in coastal Maine, not so far from where I’d grown up, thinking hard on a new title, and I had one of those crystallizing writing moments we only get maybe a few times in the life of a manuscript. I saw how almost everything in the novel had to with the notion of place. In many ways the novel was a love letter to Paris—not the Paris of navy berets and good, soft cheeses. The Paris I was writing about was about vegetable curries and working class immigrant neighborhoods.

Maps were woven into almost every chapter of the novel. My narrator’s slightly crazed father even makes maps for a living. It’s the 1970’s and he spends months out in the Sonora Desert in Arizona taking coordinates for maps the old-fashioned way.

And many of the characters in my novel are displaced—from their home countries. From their families. So as much as my novel had to do with Paris, it also had to do with what happens when we’re dislocated from the home places (and people) we know and love best.
I got busy working in that Maine cabin. I knew that in order to really finish the book and imbue it with a true sense of place, I had to know my landscape more. I’d lived in France before and I’d traveled throughout it a whole lot. But what was the name of the second stop on the metro line that my narrator took to get to work at the school in the 9th arrondisement? Where did she buy wine? What roads did she take to the hospital when she had to drive her brother there after he got sick? These were all things the novel needed to answer.

Because if the novel had staked out the territory of place, with a capital P. Then it had to deliver. This was all rather anxiety provoking for me, there at the start of that final draft in that small rental cabin. I realized how much this sense of place was crucial to almost every aspect of the novel—how place was the door through which a reader would enter the novel. But how to render Paris? How to make it fully come alive?

It is detailed and niggly and unglamorous work to make place become real in a book—any book. But it can also be great fun, and it’s so often vital to the whole success of the enterprise. When place was really working for me, when I was able to achieve lift off and make Paris come to life, then the city acted as a fully realized character in my novel. And this is no small thing. The city did a lot of work for me. Because if you can capture place, then you usually capture locale and often also a kind of cultural tone that doesn’t need any more explication. Which is a gift. And sense there are very few actual gifts given to you in the long, hard solo journey that is your writing life, if you get one of these gifts of place, or a gift from some other rich territory that your book happens to stake out (like Russian food or the 1960’s peace movement or mid-century art), receive the gift with gratitude. And thank the writing Gods.

If you can get your characters drinking in a tiny, cave-like jazz bar in the 6th arrondisement, where the walls are made of slightly damp limestone, then this sense of place—this jazz bar, will do a lot of good work for you in establishing mood. Then your narrator won’t have to talk so much about the jazz bar, which is always a good thing because in general I fear our narrators talk a little too much when place could be doing even more heavy lifting.
What I did that most helped me nail this sense of place was to make horribly messy, almost unreadable hand drawn maps. I found some poster paper and I began drawing in minute detail the places that my characters lived and worked and orbited. The map was completely out of scale. But it’s a little window into my personal craziness.

My hand-drawn map of Paris is chicken scrawl, and even though I can't really read it anymore and it looks like Greek to me now, this map was my Bible. I studied it and added to it every day. It showed me the way to my new title. The title I kept. The title I borrowed from a line of Gertrude Stein’s, which ends: “Then Paris Was the Place.”

What Territory Is Your Book Staking Out?

When I was working on the final, final, final draft of my novel it already had a title, but this working title only got me so far in the book finishing business. It had served me well. But I had to let it go. That’s when I sat down and did one of those hard distillations I talk about in my previous blog, where I asked myself what my novel was really about.

Here are the things I already knew about my novel: the book was set in Paris. My characters were deeply imbedded in their lives on the Right and Left Bank of the Seine. They had jobs that they rode the metro to get to. They had favorite creperies and Indian restaurants dotting the 6th and 7th arrondisements.

I sat in a small cabin up North in coastal Maine, not so far from where I’d grown up, thinking hard on a new title, and I had one of those crystallizing writing moments we only get maybe a few times in the life of a manuscript. I saw how almost everything in the novel had to with the notion of place. In many ways the novel was a love letter to Paris—not the Paris of navy berets and good, soft cheeses. The Paris I was writing about was about vegetable curries and working class immigrant neighborhoods. 

Maps were woven into almost every chapter of the novel. My narrator’s slightly crazed father even makes maps for a living. It’s the 1970’s and he spends months out in the Sonora Desert in Arizona taking coordinates for maps the old-fashioned way.

And many of the characters in my novel are displaced—from their home countries. From their families. So as much as my novel had to do with Paris, it also had to do with what happens when we’re dislocated from the home places (and people) we know and love best.

I got busy working in that Maine cabin. I knew that in order to really finish the book and imbue it with a true sense of place, I had to know my landscape more. I’d lived in France before and I’d traveled throughout it a whole lot. But what was the name of the second stop on the metro line that my narrator took to get to work at the school in the 9th arrondisement? Where did she buy wine? What roads did she take to the hospital when she had to drive her brother there after he got sick? These were all things the novel needed to answer.

Because if the novel had staked out the territory of place, with a capital P. Then it had to deliver. This was all rather anxiety provoking for me, there at the start of that final draft in that small rental cabin. I realized how much this sense of place was crucial to almost every aspect of the novel—how place was the door through which a reader would enter the novel. But how to render Paris? How to make it fully come alive?

It is detailed and niggly and unglamorous work to make place become real in a book—any book. But it can also be great fun, and it’s so often vital to the whole success of the enterprise. When place was really working for me, when I was able to achieve lift off and make Paris come to life, then the city acted as a fully realized character in my novel. And this is no small thing. The city did a lot of work for me. Because if you can capture place, then you usually capture locale and often also a kind of cultural tone that doesn’t need any more explication. Which is a gift. And sense there are very few actual gifts given to you in the long, hard solo journey that is your writing life, if you get one of these gifts of place, or a gift from some other rich territory that your book happens to stake out (like Russian food or the 1960’s peace movement or mid-century art), receive the gift with gratitude. And thank the writing Gods.

If you can get your characters drinking in a tiny, cave-like jazz bar in the 6th arrondisement, where the walls are made of slightly damp limestone, then this sense of place—this jazz bar, will do a lot of good work for you in establishing mood. Then your narrator won’t have to talk so much about the jazz bar, which is always a good thing because in general I fear our narrators talk a little too much when place could be doing even more heavy lifting.

What I did that most helped me nail this sense of place was to make horribly messy, almost unreadable hand drawn maps. I found some poster paper and I began drawing in minute detail the places that my characters lived and worked and orbited. The map was completely out of scale. But it’s a little window into my personal craziness.

My hand-drawn map of Paris is chicken scrawl, and even though I can't really read it anymore and it looks like Greek to me now, this map was my Bible. I studied it and added to it every day. It showed me the way to my new title. The title I kept. The title I borrowed from a line of Gertrude Stein’s, which ends: “Then Paris Was the Place.”

Photo credit: Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville, "Quatrième plan de la ville de Paris" via Wikimedia Commons

To Sell Your Book You Need to Know (and I Mean Really Know) What that Book of Yours Is All About

So let’s say you write a book. Or you write the first or second draft of a manuscript that’s well on its way towards being a book. You live in the weeds of this book for weeks and months and years. You inhabit it. Even in your sleep. It’s exhilarating work. And it’s a slog. It’s the most creative thing you’ve ever done. And it’s also mind-blowingly difficult. You’re trying to capture a beginning and middle and end of something that you may understand intuitively, but still need to build sentences for. In a sense, you’re trying to hold the whole, entire story in your head at any given moment.

Then, as you begin to turn the corner on the material, you think you may be close to done. Your book’s plot follows a clear arc. The dialogue hums along. The characters (of fiction or non-fiction) say authentic, compelling things. Some of them are people you’d even like to date or go on vacation with. And the setting is spot on. The grit of the different locales is there in all its glory. The pacing seems good too.

What I’m suggesting that you do at this moment, pre-publication, is pause and ask yourself what’s this book is about. Then get out a pen and try to answer the question. This may involve broad brushstrokes at first—a kind of 30,000 foot view. And it may be harder than you thought. But try to more past the broad strokes and get closer to the material and ask more detailed questions: consequences of the plot? Motivations of characters? What does it all add up to?
Call it a pitch if you want. But it’s a little different than the pitch. You’re not “selling” the book yet to an agent or editor (though they will be very interested in the answers you write down). Instead, you’re finishing the book for yourself. And you need to be very clear with yourself.

It sounds obvious. And you already know, in theory, what your book is about. I mean you’ve been living inside the book for years. But now that you’re close to the end, has its focus shifted? Have certain characters taken over more than you realized and changed the dynamics? Answering these questions was something I did repeatedly while I wrote drafts of my novel. And my book’s focus changed over time. I lost characters I liked, who I thought might be central. I let go of entire, slow-cooked plotlines.

Then, after my editor bought the book, she challenged me to write the tightest description of it ever. Fifteen words or less. It was like putting together the most complicated jigsaw puzzle, and it took me way, way too long. That’s when I knew I still had work to do on the manuscript. And that’s when I understood that I still didn’t fully know the consequences of the plot lines and character dynamics I’d created. This was one of those personal reckoning moments.

I was holding the strings of the marionettes but I hadn’t fully owned up to my responsibilities. The plot still needed me to tighten it until everyone’s actions were accounted for. The characters needed me to help them stop making a mess of their lives and the lives of the people they loved.

The tight synopsis that I wrote for my editor served almost as a trail marker for me when I went back in to do the subsequent draft. I’d refer to it when I was lost in the weeds again. Then I’d remind myself, oh my novel is about X. And X.

It was then that I got to fully understand the beating heart of the book--its emotional truth. Which was something I hadn’t been able to fully see before. But this insight came only close to the end, when I’d laid enough of the grounding wires and done enough writing to get the intimate view in. Then the more my editor understood my book’s motivations—its obsessions and preoccupations, the more she could be an actual editor. Her work began in earnest, and she helped me shape the book to be the strongest final, final, final draft that I had in me.

To Sell Your Book You Need to Know (and I Mean Really Know) What that Book of Yours Is All About

So let’s say you write a book. Or you write the first or second draft of a manuscript that’s well on its way towards being a book. You live in the weeds of this book for weeks and months and years. You inhabit it. Even in your sleep. It’s exhilarating work. And it’s a slog. It’s the most creative thing you’ve ever done. And it’s also mind-blowingly difficult. You’re trying to capture a beginning and middle and end of something that you may understand intuitively, but still need to build sentences for. In a sense, you’re trying to hold the whole, entire story in your head at any given moment.

Then, as you begin to turn the corner on the material, you think you may be close to done. Your book’s plot follows a clear arc. The dialogue hums along. The characters (of fiction or non-fiction) say authentic, compelling things. Some of them are people you’d even like to date or go on vacation with. And the setting is spot on. The grit of the different locales is there in all its glory. The pacing seems good too.

What I’m suggesting that you do at this moment, pre-publication, is pause and ask yourself what’s this book is about. Then get out a pen and try to answer the question. This may involve broad brushstrokes at first—a kind of 30,000 foot view. And it may be harder than you thought. But try to more past the broad strokes and get closer to the material and ask more detailed questions: consequences of the plot? Motivations of characters? What does it all add up to?

Call it a pitch if you want. But it’s a little different than the pitch. You’re not “selling” the book yet to an agent or editor (though they will be very interested in the answers you write down). Instead, you’re finishing the book for yourself. And you need to be very clear with yourself.

It sounds obvious. And you already know, in theory, what your book is about. I mean you’ve been living inside the book for years. But now that you’re close to the end, has its focus shifted? Have certain characters taken over more than you realized and changed the dynamics? Answering these questions was something I did repeatedly while I wrote drafts of my novel. And my book’s focus changed over time. I lost characters I liked, who I thought might be central. I let go of entire, slow-cooked plotlines.

Then, after my editor bought the book, she challenged me to write the tightest description of it ever. Fifteen words or less. It was like putting together the most complicated jigsaw puzzle, and it took me way, way too long. That’s when I knew I still had work to do on the manuscript. And that’s when I understood that I still didn’t fully know the consequences of the plot lines and character dynamics I’d created. This was one of those personal reckoning moments.

I was holding the strings of the marionettes but I hadn’t fully owned up to my responsibilities. The plot still needed me to tighten it until everyone’s actions were accounted for. The characters needed me to help them stop making a mess of their lives and the lives of the people they loved.

The tight synopsis that I wrote for my editor served almost as a trail marker for me when I went back in to do the subsequent draft. I’d refer to it when I was lost in the weeds again. Then I’d remind myself, oh my novel is about X. And X.

It was then that I got to fully understand the beating heart of the book--its emotional truth. Which was something I hadn’t been able to fully see before. But this insight came only close to the end, when I’d laid enough of the grounding wires and done enough writing to get the intimate view in. Then the more my editor understood my book’s motivations—its obsessions and preoccupations, the more she could be an actual editor. Her work began in earnest, and she helped me shape the book to be the strongest final, final, final draft that I had in me.

Photo credit: Sous la Tour Eiffel by Jebulon courtesy Wikimedia Commons.