Mary Volmer's Blog, page 5

This Is Not "The End"

“You wait for the first bloom like you wait for a baby to come.  Sometimes you wait four years and it opens and it isn’t what you expected, maybe your heart wants to break, but you love it.  You never say, ‘that one is prettier.’  You just love them.”

Amado Vazquez speaking of raising rare orchids in Joan Didion’s The White Album

Finishing a novel feels much the same.  Except that unlike an orchid or an infant, you can edit a novel!  Thank God for that. 

Photo: Damon Tighe 

Squaw Valley Community of Writers

I'm crawling out of my writing cave to attend to the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley!  Should be great fun.  This year I'll be reading in the published alumni series and I have only fond memories of my time as a workshop participant.  Good people, good food, good books. (And really, what else do you need?)   http://squawvalleywriters.org/writers_ws.htm

Lafayette Historical Society Lecture

Home Sweet Home

Back safe from my travels!  Thank you to everyone who made the tour such a fantastic experience.  For an album of trip photos feel free to visit my facebook page.

And check out the nice little mention Crown of Dust received in The New York Times.

Crown of Dust--Paperback Release Tour Dates!

I'm so excited for the paperback release of Crown of Dust.  Love to see you if you're in area!   

Reading/ Book Signing--Wednesday, November 2, 2011                        
7:00 – 8:30 p.m.                                                
Third Place Books                        
Lake Forest Park Towne Centre
17171 Bothell Way NE
Lake Forest Park, WA 98155
206-366-3333

Lecture/ Book Signing--Thursday, November 3, 2011                        
7:00 – 8:30 p.m.                                                
Redmond Library
15990 N.E. 85th Street
Redmond, WA 98052
425-885-1861

Reading/ Book Signing--Saturday, November 5, 2011                        
11:00 a.m. – 1:30 p.m.                                    
Edmonds Bookshop
111 5th Avenue South
Edmonds, WA 98020
425-775-2789

Reading/ Book Signing--Sunday, November 6, 2011                                    
5:00 - 7:00 p.m.                                                
The Elliott Bay Book Company
1521 Tenth Avenue
Seattle, WA 98122
206-624-6600

Lecture/Book Signing--Monday, November 7, 2011                                    
7:00 – 8:30 p.m.            
In Other Words Bookstore                                    
14 NE Killingsworth St.
Portland, OR 97211
503-232-6003

Reading/Book Signing--Tuesday, November 8, 2011                                    
7:00 – 8:30 p.m.                                                
The Book Bin
215 S.W. 4th Street
Corvallis, OR 97333
541-752-0040

Reading/Book Signing--Wednesday, November 9, 2011                        
6:00 - 7:00 p.m.                                                
Kenton Library in collaboration with the St. John Bookstore!                                                 
8226 N. Denver Avenue                                     
Portland, OR 97217                                                
503-988-5370 

Lecture/Book Signing--Thursday, November 10, 2011                        
5:30 - 7:00 p.m.                                                 
Eugene Public Library
100 West 10th Avenue
Eugene, OR 97401 
541-682-5123

Lecture/Book Signing--Saturday, November 12, 2011                        
11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.                                                
Pacific Beach/Earl & Birdie Taylor Library
4275 Cass Street
San Diego, CA  92109
858-581-9934

Meet and Greet/ Book Signing--Saturday, November 12, 2011                        
2:00 - 5:00 p.m.                                                
Barnes & Noble – Mira Mesa                                    
10775 Westview Pkwy
San Diego, CA 92126
858-684-3166

Reading/Book Signing--Sunday, November 13, 2011                                    
1:00 – 3:00 p.m.                                                
The Last Bookstore
453 South Spring Street
Ground Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90013
213-488-0599

Reading/Book Signing--Wednesday, November 16, 2011                        
5:00 – 8:00 p.m.                                                
Barnes & Noble
Amerige Heights Town Center
1923 W. Malvern Avenue
Fullerton, CA 92833
714-871-9855

Reading/Book Signing--Thursday November 17, 2011                        
7:00 – 9:00 p.m.                                                
Barnes & Noble
13400 Maxella
Marina Del Rey, CA 90292
310-306-3213

Reading/ Book Signing--Saturday, November 19, 2011                        
1:00 – 3:00 p.m.                                                
Chevalier's Books
126 N. Larchmont Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90004
323-465-1334

Historical Novel Society's Editor's Choice Titles

Crown of Dust had made the Historical Novel Society's Editor's Choice list.  Very exciting!

From the website:

For each quarterly issue of the Historical Novels Review, the editors will select a small number of titles they feel exemplify the best in historical fiction.  These novels, which come highly recommended from our reviewers, have been designated as Editors' Choice titles.

CROWN OF DUST
Mary Volmer, Soho, 2011, $24.00/C$29.50, hb, 274pp, 9781569478615 / Harper, 2006, £6.99, pb, 448pp, 9780007205776
   
The tiny mining town of Motherlode isn't just another place to try one's luck in Gold Rush California. It's also a place to escape. Emaline, proprietress of the town's only inn, knows most of the secrets.  The only woman in Motherlode, she's lover, mother, and confidante to the miners who drift through.  The newest, Alex, is different from the other rough-and-ready miners.  Emaline takes Alex under her wing, not knowing that the quiet, reclusive "boy" is really a young girl fleeing from her past.  Alex carries her secrets tucked beneath her shapeless clothes, alongside the gold nugget she accidentally found one day.  A gold nugget that brings unwanted attention to both Alex and Motherlode. As Emaline struggles to hold tight to the town she's built, Alex struggles to hold tight to her new identity, that of a person strong enough to stop running and stand on her own two feet.
  
This is beautifully and unabashedly a character-driven novel.  Through Alex and Emaline, we feel what it is to be a woman in the rough-and-ready man's world of the Gold Rush.  So alive are the miners that they threaten to swagger right off the page, knees caked with red dust, picks over their shoulders.  In such a leisurely novel, details are savored and back stories are trickled in teasingly.  But it never drags.  Despite the simplicity of the prose and the starkness of the setting, the author has crafted a gorgeous debut, and I look forward to future novels. -- Jessica Brockmole

Historical Novel Society's Editor's Choice Titles

Crown of Dust had made the Historical Novel Society's Editor's Choice list.  Very exciting!

From the website:

For each quarterly issue of the Historical Novels Review, the editors will select a small number of titles they feel exemplify the best in historical fiction.  These novels, which come highly recommended from our reviewers, have been designated as Editors' Choice titles.

CROWN OF DUST
Mary Volmer, Soho, 2011, $24.00/C$29.50, hb, 274pp, 9781569478615 / Harper, 2006, £6.99, pb, 448pp, 9780007205776
   
The tiny mining town of Motherlode isn’t just another place to try one’s luck in Gold Rush California. It’s also a place to escape. Emaline, proprietress of the town’s only inn, knows most of the secrets.  The only woman in Motherlode, she’s lover, mother, and confidante to the miners who drift through.  The newest, Alex, is different from the other rough-and-ready miners.  Emaline takes Alex under her wing, not knowing that the quiet, reclusive “boy” is really a young girl fleeing from her past.  Alex carries her secrets tucked beneath her shapeless clothes, alongside the gold nugget she accidentally found one day.  A gold nugget that brings unwanted attention to both Alex and Motherlode. As Emaline struggles to hold tight to the town she’s built, Alex struggles to hold tight to her new identity, that of a person strong enough to stop running and stand on her own two feet.
  
This is beautifully and unabashedly a character-driven novel.  Through Alex and Emaline, we feel what it is to be a woman in the rough-and-ready man’s world of the Gold Rush.  So alive are the miners that they threaten to swagger right off the page, knees caked with red dust, picks over their shoulders.  In such a leisurely novel, details are savored and back stories are trickled in teasingly.  But it never drags.  Despite the simplicity of the prose and the starkness of the setting, the author has crafted a gorgeous debut, and I look forward to future novels. -- Jessica Brockmole

The Sower

"Art, it seems to me, should simplify.  That, indeed, is nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—so that all one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.  Millet had done a hundred sketches of peasants sewing grain, some of them very complicated and interesting, but when he came to paint the spirit of them all into one picture, "The Sower," the composition is so simple that it seems inevitable.  All the discarded sketches that went before made the picture what it finally became, and the process was all the time one of simplifying and sacrificing many conceptions good in themselves, for one that was better and more universal."

Willa Cather
 

Pretty Cool! -- MV

The Sower

“Art, it seems to me, should simplify.  That, indeed, is nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—so that all one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.  Millet had done a hundred sketches of peasants sewing grain, some of them very complicated and interesting, but when he came to paint the spirit of them all into one picture, “The Sower,” the composition is so simple that it seems inevitable.  All the discarded sketches that went before made the picture what it finally became, and the process was all the time one of simplifying and sacrificing many conceptions good in themselves, for one that was better and more universal.”

Willa Cather
 

Pretty Cool! -- MV

Identity Crisis Courtesy of the 21st Century

Once upon a time Noah asked God to create a website and facebook page in order to market GOD. And God was like, "Market myself?  Forget it, man.  I AM." 

Here I am, human, infinitely more limited than an omnipotent being, and still paralyzed by the thought of trying to define myself for an on-line audience.  Instead of getting to work, I do what I always do when faced with tasks that are foreign or mildly distasteful to me: I begin over-thinking. (Can you hear the existential crisis speeding round the corner?)

But who am I?  Am I just one me?  And if I am, as I have always suspected, a crazy collection of manifestations, no one of which fits comfortablyfor more than an hour at time, then which "I" do I put forth as the definitive edition?   Which I do I want the world to think I am?  And am I then stuck with the I that I create?  Is the I that I create, and the I that I am, really the same person after all?  And who is that?

But then I think to myself, hold on, self!  Wait just a minute!  Who I am isn't really the question, is it?  The real question is, am I cool, smart, attractive, experienced, witty enough to represent the book I've written.  I'd buy and read my book.  But would I buy my book from me?   Or not from me, me, but from the me I find on my blog, twitter account, facebook page, website?  Because let me tell you that that confident, mildly attractive, carefully benign individual is not me.  No really.

Yes, I know.  Just write.  Of course I know because that's what I tell my students to do.  Don't worry about it!  Just write and rewrite and the universe will unfold as it should.  Hypocrite!  I know.  But that too is a part of who I am.