Caroline Leavitt's Blog, page 23

A school shooting. A paralyzed boy. A fractured community. One of the best books of the year (trust me because this is true.) Stefan Merrill Block talks about OLIVER LOVING.

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Then there is the book itself. I am not kidding around when I say I live for books like Stefan Merrill Block's Oliver Loving. Gorgeously written, it's also deeply profound. About the aftermath of a school shooting, it changes lives for both its nuanced characters--and for readers. </i><br /><br /><i>Thank you for answering my questions and being here, Stefan. I think I'd read your grocery list (well, as long as it didn't have lard on it, or mayonnaise.) </i><br /><br /><br /><i> And here is the bio: Born in 1982, Stefan Merrill Block grew up in Texas. His first two novels are THE STORY OF FORGETTING and THE STORM AT THE DOOR, which won Best First Fiction at the Rome International Festival of Literature, the 2008 Merck Serono Literature Prize and the 2009 Fiction Award from The Writers' League of Texas, and was also a finalist for the debut fiction awards from IndieBound, Salon du Livre, and The Center for Fiction. </i><br /><br /><br /><br /><b>I always want to know what was haunting you that made you know that now was the time to write this novel? </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I love that you chose the word “haunting.” I don’t think that I believe in actual ghosts, but beneath everything I’ve written is a similar haunted feeling of unfinished business from the past, a lost person or lost people who still feel profoundly present in some way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the case of Oliver Loving, the haunting was tied up with my hometown of Plano, Texas. Plano was a boomtown for much of my childhood – for a few years it was the fastest growing city in America—but beneath all that sudden prosperity there was also some profound darkness. In the 1980s, the media dubbed Plano “The Suicide Capital of America,” after eight kids ended their own lives. When I was a teenager, another crisis rocked Plano: within a year and a half, eighteen kids from my town died from heroin overdoses and several more from suicide. It became a fairly big story in the news; reporters from all over the country showed up to try to answer the same question that those of us in Plano could not: why this town? Why did so many children of a prosperous, upper-middle-class community fall victim to such terrible despair?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All of this is now nearly twenty years in the past, but for those of us who were present for that time, the scars remain, as well as the essential unanswered questions.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Around the time I turned thirty, I came back to Texas for a long stay. I’d been living in New York since I graduated, and my homecoming felt surreal in many ways. Like anyone stepping into their high school bedroom, it seemed to me like some prior, teenage version of myself was still living down there in Texas. But in my visits to Plano, I also found myself thinking often of all those children who died, who will forever remain trapped as teenagers. The impossible conversation that I felt myself having with those lost children and also with a prior version of myself: that was the particular haunting that I wanted to explore in this novel. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>You call your character’s last name “Loving,” and the town in which the tragedy unfolds is “bliss.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What made you choose these ironic names?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Both those names, Loving and Bliss, have a big place in Texas history. The cattleman Oliver Loving is a kind of folk hero in Texas, and Fort Bliss is a major army base in far West Texas, not so distant from the fictional town of Bliss I invented. To my ears, both those names are steeped in Texan lore, and that was a big part of why I chose them. As a reader, I’m always attracted to novels where an essentially realist story has dashes of fable or myth, something mysterious and larger than human drama at work. Given all the unanswerable questions about what happened to Oliver --and the long, unknowable way he has spent the last decade-- Oliver has become “a boy and also a legend” to the people of his hometown, and I wanted to choose names that also carried a kind of mythic echo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But you are right that those names are also ironic, considering all the tragedy that has befallen both Oliver and his town. In many ways, this is a book about how the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and I liked the way the names “Bliss” and “Loving” reinforced that theme, suggesting a huge contrast between the hope implied by those words and the reality of the present-day situations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>So much of this gorgeous novel is about family, and how our minds work—or do not work, and how we reach one another. I just loved it. Can you talk about this please?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And about how this differs from your earlier masterwork, the mystery of forgetting?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Almost all of my stories have an impenetrable or unknowable space at their hearts. In the case of The Story of Forgetting, it was the aphasiac mind of a person in late-stage Alzheimer’s; in The Storm at the Door, it was a grandparent who died years before I was born; in Oliver Loving, it’s a persistent vegetative state. In all three cases, the novels are largely about the stories that families create to make sense of those places where our ability to understand breaks down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are a lot of reasons why this dilemma appeals to me, but I know that one of my major motives has to do with my own feelings about the purpose of fiction. As literary fiction continues to wane from the public conversation, it feels important to me that we writers try to make a case for the necessity of invented stories. I’m always interested in thinking about what fiction can do that no other art form can, and the greatest power of fiction, to my mind, is its unique ability to enter the interior experience of minds other than your own. And that is a major reason that I’m attracted to these minds that exist in a space beyond our knowing: it is perhaps only through an imaginative literary act that you can throw some light into those dark and unseeable places. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><br /></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>How were you changed in writing this novel?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Caroline, as you have now written nine novels, I’d be curious to know: do you feel, with each book, that you are reinventing yourself? Zadie Smith once wrote, “<span style="color: #222222; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">fictionally speaking, the nightmare is losing the desire to move</span>,” and that rings very true for me. To keep moving forward, it feels essential that I revise both my idea of myself as a writer and the sorts of books I’d like to write. In the case of Oliver Loving, that revision felt more radical than ever. Though my first two novels touch on my own personal dilemmas, I also wrote both (as an actor might say) “in character,” transforming my voice to fit the story at hand. With Oliver Loving, I had a new goal: I deliberately wanted to sound like myself. I wanted the narrator’s voice on the page to be closer to my voice in real life. I took the advice I tell my students: I imagined that I was telling this story to a close friend, with whom I could be as sad or funny or ironic as I am in my life outside of writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t exactly believe in the old modernist ideal that every writer must “find” his or her truest voice – I think that every writer potentially possesses many different voices and tones in which he or she could write-- but I do feel that in the process of writing this novel, I found a way to be fluent in something closer to my actual self. <span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><b>What’s obsessing you now and why?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">After three novels that took place close to home in one way or another, I’m very excited to write about a time and place far removed from my own. I’m working on a novel set in Vienna in the 1930s, which was a fascinating, harrowing period in the city’s history. One can’t help but see –in the rise of fascism and the demolition of that city’s intellectual culture—dark parallels with our own moment. The story I’m working on is about an inordinately gifted but badly misunderstood child and his family’s fight for survival in a society where difference would not be tolerated. In part, I know that my curiosity in that topic is a response to what is going on in our country right now, but I can also see that my motives are more personal than that. My wife and I just had our first kid, and I find myself wanting to explore another parent’s story as a way to prepare myself for the joys and anxieties of raising a child.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><b>What question didn’t I ask that I should have?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">One last topic that I would like to talk about quickly is the presence of gun violence in this novel. Even now, it somewhat surprises me that a mass shooting is there, right at the center of my book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course, these shootings have become a national epidemic and an urgent crisis, but I think that my need to explore it in my book came from my own childhood. <span style="color: #454545; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Every time I see the news of another mass shooting, especially one in which young people are killed, I think about all those kids who died in my own hometown when I was a teenager, the grief that I know will stretch for decades and transform a community forever. There is a tremendous sadness in the thought that this long story of aftermath usually goes untold, as the public attention turns to the next tragedy. In putting a shooting at the heart of my novel, I wanted to explore that longer, more inward story of how sudden, drastic loss transforms families and communities, a story that has only just begun when the media have already moved on. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>

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Published on January 16, 2018 14:37

Deborah Reed talks about how writing can be hell, the coast of Oregon, and her extraordinary new novel The Days When Birds Come Back.

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Reed</a></i></span></b><i> is a marvel. It's always exciting when an arc pops in the mail for me to read and blurb, and I devoured The Days When Birds Come Back, so of course, I wanted Deborah on my blog. She's also the author Olivay, Things We Set on Fire, and Carry Yourself Back to Me. She has also authored two popular thrillers under the pen name Audrey Braun. I'm thrilled to have her here. And now, some of the raves the book is already racking up:</i><br /><i><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></b><br /><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman";">"A character-driven narrative that focuses on the grief her two protagonists suffer. It's a sad tale in which grief almost becomes overwhelming but in which the reader is saved by Reed's lyrical and elegant prose and a sense of redemption at the end."</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman";"> —<b>The Oregonian</b></span></b></i><br /><i>"Reed is skilled at unraveling their stories gradually, and is particularly adept at both drawing parallels between June and Jameson and depicting how the two help each other through their pain....An emotionally satisfying novel about the lingering effects of trauma and how people deal with guilt." —<b>Publishers Weekly</b></i><br /><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman";"><br />I always think there is a why now moment, a haunting of the writer, that produces a book. What was yours? </span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">For me it was a major life change that led to living on the coast of Oregon, a place of immense beauty and fierce destruction, or impending destruction, as it were, living in a tsunami zone on top of the Cascadia subduction zone. It was all of this, as well as a casual conversation between a new </span><br /><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> <style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ明朝"; mso-font-charset:78; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;} @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073743103 0 0 415 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} </style><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">neighbor and me. </span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I was recently divorced, my kids grown, and I found myself living alone for the first time since my teens. Incredibly secluded and with open stretches of time, my past bubbled up to fill the void—the people, places, and things that had shaped my life, some good, some too terrible to speak of, but all influential, and I began to understand how I’d arrived at this moment in time of total isolation, penetrated by grief. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">One day my neighbor mentioned that the house I was living in had been fully renovated by an extraordinary man of particular talent and integrity, a man with whom she'd become friends. In an instant I felt a story in my bones. Hard to explain how that works, like a spell coming on, the senses spark and tingle and the work simply begins. I didn't ask any more details; I just sat down and started writing a story about the true north of home and the struggle of rebuilding one's life in the midst of loss and tragedy. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman";"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman";">What was it like writing this novel? Did you find it different than writing your other novels, and if so, in what way? (I always feel that I am starting from scratch, that I have learned nothing…) </span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><br />To be honest, it was hell. I experienced one of the worst health crises of my life right in the middle of the work. I spent nearly a year feeling incapacitated most days by migraines of all kinds and vertigo and nausea, and yet I would drag myself to the computer and try to squeeze in at least an hour if I could. It felt like exorcising demons--the pain and disorientation constantly needing to be cast out. At one point I was literally trying to manage a way to write while the left side of my vision disappeared in the middle of working. All the words on the screen suddenly read diagonally through my right eye, and only in fragments was I able to decipher a word here and there. And yet, I was telling myself that perhaps if I turned my head sideways and closed that left eye I could see clearly enough to get some writing done. I could not, of course, and recalling it now I don’t have any idea how I got through.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">However, I did find a strength I didn't know I had, and managed to unearth things that had been haunting me for most of my life. I figured out a way to let them go, and a catharsis took over and the illness disappeared. But the middle. The middle was horrific. The experience as a whole resulted in this book.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">From the perspective of a writer, I know exactly what you mean about starting from scratch. This is my sixth novel and every time I feel once again as if I am lost at sea. I feel foolish and fake and baffled as to why anyone would trust me to do this again. And yet, here we are. I suspect this is a healthy dose of humility keeping things in check. I hope so. I no longer fight against it, whatever it is. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman";">I wish this was not so, but loss always transforms us—as it does your characters. But there is always a choice. We can choose to be brave and transform, or we can succumb to the pain. Do you think there is a dividing line between the people who can and the people who cannot? And why? </span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I think this is quite true, how very often we do have a choice to transform and must consciously make a decision to break through to the other side. But there is also the option of taking refuge in one’s pain, because the idea of shedding it for the unknown can, over time, become more terrifying than to live each day with the pain one has gotten used to. I also believe there are people who are convinced that they actually <i>have</i> transformed, and they wear this transformation like a badge, which feels an awful lot to those around them like the lady protesting too much. In the case of my novel, Sarah Anne appears to be the one who understands how to move on and transform her life into something more stable, more so than June or Jameson seem able to, but there is a large part of her who is hiding behind her foster child, doing all the right things for a child who needs her, but perhaps not for all the right reasons. She is blind to what it is doing to her marriage, to what it is doing to the very foundation of her life. June and Jameson come across as more flawed than Sarah Anne, but to me, they are more honest and even honorable to their loss by allowing the darkness to run its course, until they can find a way to reach the other side. I think many people make the mistake of not processing the worst kind of pain, and try instead to outrun it. You can’t outrun grief. Those seven stages are the real deal, and more powerful than any of us would like to believe. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman";"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman";">I cried at the ending, and without giving anything away, I wanted to ask—did you always know this was the ending, or did it take you by surprise? </span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">I'm glad to hear you were so moved. Thank you. No, I didn't know the ending until about a month before I finished it. And, as with every ending I've ever written, I knew it was right and final only after I wrote it down. It’s a wonderful feeling, coming upon an ending in the same way the reader comes upon it. You write to see what will happen, and finally you turn to the last page, and there it is. You sit for a moment after that last word, thinking about these people you’ve come to know and love, wishing them well, and then you say goodbye in the same way the reader closes the book.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman";"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman";"><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" /></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman";">What’s obsessing you now and why?</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><br />Honestly, the state of the world we’re living in. My grown children’s futures, and if those futures will allow them to have children of their own. I am in a state of constant concern about healthcare, women’s rights, peace and goodwill toward other nations. I am finding it increasingly more difficult to write when everything feels petty by comparison to nuclear war and a totalitarian regime. Are you sorry you asked this question?</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman";"><br /><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" /></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman";">What question didn’t I ask that I should have?</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">How are you dealing with your obsession? The answer: Aside from phone calls and signatures directed toward making a change? Winging it, much like I did when I had to write but couldn’t see or sit up straight. Keeping a close awareness of the natural beauty all around me at the coast. Reading. Acknowledging the love of my family and friends. Continuing to search for hope. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>

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Published on January 13, 2018 12:01

Caroline Preston talks about her extraodinary memorabilia-as-novel, THE WAR BRIDE'S SCRAPBOOK

I'm not sure how or where I met Caroline Preston, except I've known and loved her for a long time. She's is the author of three previous novels, Jackie by Josie (a New York Times Notable Book), Lucy Crocker 2.0, and Gatsby’s Girl, and her first scrapbook novel, The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt. She has collected antique scrapbooks since she was in high school, and has worked as an archivist at the Peabody/ Essex Museum and Harvard University. Her latest book, THE WAR BRIDE'S SCRAPBOOK is both a fascinating exploration of a long gone time, and a very personal narrative that reads like a novel. I loved it, I love Caroline, too.
This is your second scrapbook novel. What first gave you the idea of creating a novel in the form of the scrapbook?
I like to say that the idea of making a scrapbook novel was 40 years in the making. As a little girl, I used to pore over my grandmother’s flapper scrapbook filled with dance cards, ocean liner tickets, and even long curls snipped when she got her hair bobbed.
My first three novels were what I guess you’d call “conventional” format—i.e. just words. My third novel Gatsby’s Girl was inspired by the meticulous scrapbook F. Scott Fitzgerald kept about his first love, Ginevra King. Later he would turn the story of his unrequited crush into The Great Gatsby.
When I was casting around for the idea for my fourth novel, I wanted to create something that was as visual and powerful as a scrapbook. And then I had a crazy idea—why not make a novel that WAS a scrapbook. Not a digital scrapbook, but an actual one made of real stuff that I cut up with scissors and pasted together with glue. And so I created The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt.
2. The War Bride’s Scrapbook is a scrapbook kept by a young bride while her husband fighting overseas. What inspired you to make a WWII era scrapbook?
I have a large collection of vintage scrapbooks. Some of the most fascinating ones are the scrapbooks kept by wives while their husbands were overseas during WWII. They are an odd combination of touching love letters, cheerful home front memorabilia such as ration stamps, grim war clippings about battles and casualties, and military souvenirs such as dog tags and discharge papers.
These “bride’s scrapbooks” provide an interesting glimpse into the reality of wartime marriages. Many couples had gotten married only a few weeks after they’d met and then were separated for years. Letters were often their only means for getting to know one another and forming an actual relationship.
The scrapbooks kept by war brides are often sweetly hopeful and aspirational. They draw an idealized image of what their marriage and life will be like when their husbands return from war-- babies, new houses, new appliances and cars, domestic routines and jobs picked up again.
Most WWII scrapbooks tend to end abruptly in August, 1945 with headlines about the atomic bombs. It seems like the scrapbooks were put away, never to be looked at again until they turned up on eBay. We don’t know what happened when (or if) the husbands returned home after the war.
In The War Bride’s Scrapbook, I’ve tried to write the whole story behind one of these bride’s scrapbooks. Why the bride (Lila Jerome) started to keep it in 1943, why she stopped keeping it in 1945. And what truths her daughters discover about their mother when they find the scrapbook 70 years later.
Are Lila Jerome and Perry Weld based on your own parents?
Not at all. My father was 4-F because of terrible eyesight and spent the war in San Diego as a Navy Jag throwing drunken sailors in the brig. My parents didn’t get married until 1947. But Lila and Perry’s story was inspired in part by real people and real events.
My last surviving WWII-generation relative, an aunt, dropped out of Vassar at 20 to marry her college boyfriend before he shipped out. She wrote me some very candid emails about how she came to regret her wartime marriage almost immediately but felt economically and socially obligated to stick it out for 20 miserable years.

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Published on December 07, 2017 14:24

Christina Adams is a leader in Autism and Camel milk and the author of A REAL BOY: A TRUE STORY OF AUTISM, EARLY INTERVENTION AND RECOVERY. You KNOW you want to read this interview

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And be prepared. She gets even more incredible.<br /><br />Her essays and reported pieces have appeared in the LA Times, The Washington Post, NPR, OZY, Open Democracy, Orange Coast Magazine, Orange County Register, Global Advances in Health and Medicine and literary magazines. Perhaps more unusually, her work with autism and camels has been featured by Dubai One, Gulf News, Khaleej Times, Tata Sky Channel, Epocha, GOOD, Farming, radio and more. She’s spoken at Sarah Lawrence Writer’s Program, CSULB Distinguished Visiting Writer’s Program, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, international health and disability conferences, and just spoke at the Marwar Camel festival hosted by HRH The Maharaja of Jodhpur. She wrote A Real Boy: A True Story of Autism, Early Intervention and Recovery.</i><br /><b><br /><br />You’re a writer, but you have this other side. I’ve seen the photos. You’re in India or Dubai or Cuba, or on some Amish farm. Is this related to your writing?</b><br /><br />Yes, and it’s all because of my bedeviled writer’s mind. After writing in the corporate and government world, I got an MFA in fiction and wrote a novel. It won an award, but before I could publish it, my son was diagnosed with autism. So I worked hard to get him better and wrote a memoir about that (A Real Boy). After it came out, I was at a children’s book fair. I got bored and my mind started turning when I saw a camel there, but no kids were riding it. I went over to chat with the owner and got an intuition that camel milk might help my son. After a lot of research and guesswork, I flew in some frozen milk from Bedouins in Israel. He drank it and got better overnight. That set me down the path into this strange world. Sort of my own Silk Road.<br /><b><br />That’s an incredible story. How do you balance being a writer with your research and advocacy work? Do your two lives get along or conflict with each other?</b><br /><br />I’m a literary writer at heart—I wrote my first short story at nine. I was so devastated when my son was diagnosed, and I swore that autism wouldn’t stop me from writing, but slowly you turn toward your lived story. Autism became a window on the world and informed my writing—it taught me biology, nature, law, psychology, medicine. And I had to try to help others. So I’ve written memoir, essays and reported pieces and do TV, radio and conference speaking. My first piece about camel milk and autism went viral and helped start the industry. Then I published a medical journal article on it. It’s cited a lot, but it’s a weird success for a writer since only scientists see it (it’s cute how many assume “MFA” is some kind of scientific credential!). That piece led to international speaking and advising. I’ve always had a knack for putting advanced concepts into explainable terms. I guess the takeaway is that life happens and since we chronicle life as writers, we have to chronicle what it does to us. Whether it’s overt or unconscious.<br /><br /><b>So your work energizes your writing?</b><br /><br />Definitely. I just returned from a month’s speaking tour in India, and had overflow crowds on the topic of autism, camel milk and the value of camels to society. Being barefoot in the TV studio was a fun new thing, wearing glam Indian clothes but no shoes. I wrote an essay for the Rajasthan Patrika (newspaper) and got a lot of press, which triggered a lot of interest. Being treated like a celebrity was really unexpected. A policeman showed up at my hotel at night, and I asked, am I in trouble? Turned out a VIP wanted to talk about camel milk! Having people drive so far to meet me, being honored at a village temple, seeing my work in Hindi and Portuguese, was all gratifying, but once I got back home it was humble pie as usual. My favorite part was hanging out with the Raika camel herders, a reclusive camel caste I’ve gotten to know as we try to save their camels. Blowing smoke from a bedi (leaf cigarette) out my nose, like they did, won me some points--a guy wanted to trade rings with me.   Camels are amazing creatures and more useful to humans than you could dream, almost sci-fi stuff. They have unique abilities found in no other creatures. Now the price of a pregnant camel has doubled in the US since I started, but camel cultures are under pressure. I just read my new piece about this at Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute’s series on Democracy and Education. These herders have never shared their ancient wisdom, so I help bridge the two worlds. Camels can help human health conditions like diabetes, STDs, snakebite, and cancer now, so I work with scientists and spend time with Somali, Tuareg, Amish, Indian and Arab cultures. I’ve seen 2,000 pampered camels gleaming in red desert sand, and fed bottles to bleating, curly-haired baby camels. My videos were translated into Malay this month. Some things you just can’t see coming. <br /><br /><b>Maybe not! So what stories have yet to come from all this?</b><br /><br />I’ve been on this wild ride for over 10 years, so now I have a book proposal I’m finishing. It’s a great emotional subject. The camel world is super visual, hidden, magical and political. Camels mean different things to people: family member, heritage or ego symbol, currency, luxury pet or work animal. Also, this year I published print magazine essays, one about my “divorce apartment,” a place I rent to divorced people, framed by the story of my own divorce and remarriage, as well as a long feature on an autism school. Other things I want to write are about being an Appalachian that breaks tradition to leave home but finds out you never really can, with some sensitive family history about the Civil War and its aftermath. And one about marriage and divorce, a subject I finally mastered in real life. But so many of my readers want this camel book, and I hope I can get it out there.<br /><br /><b>What are you obsessing about now?</b><br /><br />Indian fabrics. I wore Indian clothes for my events and I’m missing getting up and choosing a dupatta (scarf), embroidered tunic, leggings and sparkly jewelry every day. I love the care women take with their daily style. I visited female sheepherders who wore ruffled bodices, armloads of bracelets and pink toenail polish. <br /><br />Also people give me camel statues, art, chocolate and hats. So I’m facing ‘creeping camelization’ in my life, but trying to keep it micro.<br /><b><br />What question did I fail to ask you?</b><br /><br />The word ‘fail’ doesn’t apply to you! I love how real and friendly you are on Facebook and the NYC vibe is a bonus. People often ask how my son is. He’s doing great. Got a job without help, at a big employer. Taught a lesson in class. He even asked me what I wanted for Christmas. He never ends a call to me without saying, “Love you.” So that’s what it’s all about. A producer just finished a short documentary about him. He even did a radio show, discussing the ‘toxic masculinity’ of frat culture and why guys with autism are more logical than that. Like they say here in Orange County, Dude, that’s sick! (A compliment.) <i><br /></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>

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Published on December 07, 2017 14:10

The luminous Gayle Brandeis talks about her profound memoir, THE ART OF MISDIAGNOSIS: SURVIVING MY MOTHER'S SUICIDE, which is gorgeous, important, healing, astonishing, and every other great adjective I can think of

THIS book. This book. This book.

Portrait of the artist as a gorgeous person

Gayle was wearing this jacket the first time we met at BEA
Some people you just know you have a bond with. I first met Gayle Brandeis on Readerville, and I felt that bond. That I got to meet her at BEA, and as soon as I saw her walk in in a green leather jacket, I felt this flood of warmth. Over the years, we've deepened our connection, in person, by phone, by email, by every bit of our cells. I've watched all the amazing changes in her life--and in her writing. When she sent me THE ART OF MISDIAGNOSIS to read, I was gobsmacked. I had never read anything so profound, so powerful, so brave and so gorgeously written. About love, about the mother/daughter relationship, about mental illness, about the things we do to ourselves to protect ourselves--it's an extraordinary memoir by an extraordinary person.

Gayle is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write, Dictionary Poems, the novels The Book of Dead Birds, which won Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement, Self Storage and Delta Girls, and her first novel for young readers, My Life with the Lincolns which won a Silver Nautilus Book Award and was chosen as a state-wide read in Wisconsin, and the e-book, .The Book of Live Wires, the sequel to The Book of Dead Birds.

Gayle’s poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies (such as Salon, The Rumpus, The Nation, and The Mississippi Review) and have received several awards, including the QPB/Story Magazine Short Story Award, a Barbara Mandigo Kelley Peace Poetry Award, a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2016. Her essay on the meaning of liberty was one of three included in the Statue of Liberty’s Centennial time capsule in 1986, when she was 18. In 2004, the Writer Magazine honored Gayle with a Writer Who Makes a Difference Award.

Gayle currently teaches in the low residency MFA programs at Antioch University Los Angeles and Sierra Nevada College, where she was named Distinguished Visiting Professor/Writer in Residence 2014-2015. Gayle is currently editor in chief of Tiferet Journal and founding editor of Lady/Liberty/Lit.

I love you Gayle. Thanks for being here. Now let's have dinner together.

<b> </b><div class="Body"><b>How did you manage the courage to write this extraordinary memoir?</b></div><div class="Body"><br /></div><div class="Body">There<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>s a moment in Brene Brown<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>s TED Talk on vulnerability where she says that the original meaning of courage was <span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">“</span>to tell one<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>s story with all one<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>s heart.<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">”</span><span style="font-family: "arial unicode ms"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;"> </span>I love this. This definition resonates with me so much. It did take every ounce of my heart (and my gut and my head) to write this story. There were definitely times I had to back away, times I didn<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>t feel capable of going to those painful places, but then I eventually regrouped and threw all of myself back into the endeavor. </div><div class="Body"><br /></div><div class="Body"><b>What was the why now moment when you realized that you had to write it right now?</b></div><div class="Body"><br /></div><div class="Body">Really, as soon as my mom began to exhibit delusional behavior 16 years before her death, I knew that I would have to write about her. Writing is how I best make sense of things, and I couldn<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>t make any sense out of these delusions<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">—</span>they came out of the blue and turned my world upside down. She explicitly asked me not to write about her while she was alive, and I didn<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>t<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">—</span>her words held great power over me. Even after she died, when I realized I was free to write about her, when I knew I HAD to write about her, it took me a while to unknot the gag order she had placed upon me (plus I was grieving and post-partum, so it was hard to do much of anything), but I could feel the words gathering steam inside of me and eventually they started to pour out.</div><div class="Body"><br /></div><div class="Body"><b>What did you expect to heal by writing this--and what happened instead or besides, that was healing?</b></div><b> </b><br /><div class="Body"><br /></div><div class="Body">I wanted to write my way toward understanding my mom and her suicide, even though I knew total understanding wasn<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>t ever going to be possible. I think I wanted to write my way toward a sense of peace. I wanted to build a container for my pain, to give shape to what felt so big and chaotic in my life, to gain some power over a story that had held so much power over me. What ended up being most healing, and was really unexpected to me, is how much compassion I gained by writing this<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">—</span>I started out really quite angry with my mom and ended it with my heart cracked wide open.</div><div class="Body"><br /></div><b> </b><br /><div class="Body"><b>Our mothers are almost always a loaded subject. Especially when you are a mother yourself, as you are. How did writing this memoir change your mothering?</b></div><div class="Body"><br /></div><div class="Body">I think that as I started to feel more compassion toward my mom, I started to feel more compassion toward myself, as a mother and a human being, as well, started to be a bit more forgiving of both of us, to acknowledge that we each tried to do our best to our capabilities at any given time (and some times we<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>re more capable than we are at others). I definitely feel very conscious about wanting to avoid certain aspects of my mom<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>s parenting<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">—</span>the way she made everything about her, for example<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">—</span>and wanting to emulate others<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">—</span>the way she exposed me to the arts, the way she encouraged my creativity, the way she made me feel limitless (at least in certain ways.) </div><div class="Body"><br /></div><div class="Body"><b>What is obsessing you now and why?</b></div><div class="Body"><br /></div><div class="Body">The thing I really wish I wasn<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>t obsessed with is the news. I feel like I have to stay on top of it, have to know what<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>s happening in the world so I can respond to it, so I can resist in the most effective way possible, and it<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>s exhausting. I don<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>t step away from it enough and I know I<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>m risking burn out. But voices like Roxane Gay<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>s and Rebecca Solnit<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>s and Lindy West<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>s keep me going, writers who respond to current events with such intelligence and fearlessness. I<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>m definitely obsessed with reading good smart takes like theirs on what<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>s happening in the world. And jellyfish. I<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>m obsessed with jellyfish<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">—</span>I love how beautiful and graceful they are, and am fascinated by how they can exist without a brain or heart. I was stung by one twenty or so years ago<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">—</span>I<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>m still waiting for my jellyfish superpowers. </div><div class="Body"><br /></div><div class="Body"><b>What question didn't I ask that I should have?</b></div><div class="Body"><br /></div><div class="Body">Who is one of the most generous and amazing writers you know? Why, Caroline Leavitt, of course! I am so very grateful to know you and thank you for all you do of promote books and writers. You give so much and I hope you know how deeply it is appreciated, and how beloved you and your books are.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="Body"><br /></div><div class="Body"><b>If your mother had been able to read this book, what do you think her reaction would have been?</b></div><div class="Body"><br /></div><div class="Body">She would either never speak to me again or we would finally have the relationship I had always hoped to have with her, one in which we could speak openly to one another, one in which we didn<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>t have to be on guard around each other. I very much would like to think it would be the latter. I know I feel close to her now in a way I wish I had when she was alive; I<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: Helvetica;">’</span>d like to think that feeling would be mutual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><br /><br />

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Published on November 16, 2017 11:10

Acclaimed writer Joan Silber talks about IMPROVEMENT, books being pains in the neck, writing stories, and so much more

"There is something so refreshing and genuine about this book, coming partly from the bumpy weave of its unpredictable story and partly from its sharply turned yet refreshingly unmannered prose. A winner." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

I first met Joan Silber through her novel HOUSEHOLD WORLDS, which was so breathtakingly brilliant, so alive with the troubles of a family, that I was underlining passages. I still have that copy, though it is dog-and-cat-eared now. Since then, I've met Joan for lunch, run into her as I, too, was trying to escape the madding crowd of a book festival, and I'm so, so honored to know her.

She's the acclaimed author of Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories, is the author of Lucky Us, Fools, In My Other Life, In the City, and Household Words, winner of a PEN/Hemingway Award. Her work appears in the current O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize, and in Norton's The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, and other magazines. She's received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Improvement, her newest novel is about the choices we make and the costs we bear, a single mother, an eccentric aunt, and so much more.

Thank you so much, Joan, for being here. You're my heroine, literary and otherwise.

You have such an acclaimed career, that I am wondering if you feel that every new book builds on the last one? Or do you feel that each book is a brand new work with its own ideas?

I think my writing has especially felt like a continuing project since Ideas of Heaven (2004), when I began writing long stories linked in a particular way, where a minor character in one is major in another, and characters are circling the same ideas. Improvement is a novel, so I had to find new ways to unify the elements while getting the range I wanted. I wanted to write something with the intensity of a line carried through, while still using the skills I learned in spreading across a web.

That said, each new book is a pain in the neck in its own way. I think I know what I’m doing and then I don’t.

What was the why now moment of writing this novel?

I just looked at my old notebooks before answering this, and I had entirely forgotten how long it took me and how many false starts I made. I had made a third trip to Turkey and it was much on my mind. And then Hurricane Sandy hit New York, and I heard a report on the radio about older people in housing projects who were managing just fine with no electricity or water. (My own neighborhood, the Lower East Side, was in the dark zone so I knew what they dealt with.) I’m always interested in self-reliance, and I began to develop the character of Kiki, unfazed by the blackout, and I gave her a past in Turkey. I had a younger character, her niece, narrate her story, to get a sharper angle. Once I gave the niece a boyfriend at Rikers, I saw the story heightening.

I wrote the first chapter as a short story—to my great joy, it got picked for Best Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories. I didn’t know it would turn into a novel that I’d spend the next three or four years grappling with.

Improvement bursts back and forth from the 1970s to present day, and employs more than a few narrators. Was this always your plan or did the book unfold this way organically?

I knew I wasn’t going to stick with one narrator. But I didn’t know who the various characters would be or where in time I’d want to move them. As it turned out, there are eight chapters and Kiki and her niece are only in three of them. I wanted to follow a constellation of characters whose lives bear the results of what the niece decides, and I wanted to tell about the aunt’s past, with its own trails.   I liked moving the settings—I’m sort of against fiction being too parochial--I could do New York, parts of Turkey, and Berlin (where I have friends), and it was my luck to have a student who’d taught high school in Richmond.

When I wrote cycles of stories in the past, I always just made them up as I went along, and I recklessly thought I’d been writing long enough to do that in a novel. It was much harder than I thought. I’m not doing that again! But I did know early on how the book was going to end.
I did write a craft book on Time in Fiction, and I’m always interested in fiction’s powers to move through time. I learned a huge amount from Alice Munro—I can’t tell you how happy I was when she won the Nobel Prize. I think she has many admirers but not so many followers, and I am proud to be one of them.

I’d love for you to talk about the title Improvement. Reyna makes a decision for the good of her child, which sets off a kind of train wreck. What does it really mean to improve your life, or at least to give it a chance?

I love your summary of Reyna’s decision—that’s just right. She is able to make a kind of recompense in the end—she can’t fix things but she can improve them. I think she’s quite resourceful about it, actually. People joke that for once I’ve come up with a cheerful title, and I think I do want the story to end with a feeling that the effort Reyna makes, the stretch to generosity, is what a reader would wish for her. It’s my version of a happy ending, though there’s plenty of disaster and loss in the book.

I also thought of her boyfriend’s cigarette-smuggling scheme as an attempt at improvement as well, a form of hope (hope can get a person into trouble). And I wanted reparations to have other echoes in the book—Monika works at compiling records of art bought in the Nazi era, Teddy the truck-driver is trying to be re-paid by his insurance company.   Teddy’s wife tells him, “It’s just a big mistake to think you ever get paid back what you deserve in this world. You’re not dead, that’s the main thing.” Not only is the wife giving good advice, but this is the dilemma of any fiction writer: portraying an unjust world while allowing for right conduct.
     
What’s obsessing you now and why?

I am very aware, as we all are, of the catastrophic changes in our political world--I feel it as a time when the worst of human nature is rising to the surface. I really didn’t expect to be alive in such an era.   Of course, I’ve marched in protest (I’ve been marching all my life) and signed many, many petitions. I think I probably work at not letting it take over my thoughts—I guess that’s the opposite of obsessing. My escapes have taken different forms. I went through a spell of re-reading Dickens, I’ve taught English as a volunteer to novice monks in Laos and Thailand, I’m traveling on vacation to Sri Lanka in March. The idea is to remind myself of what else there is.

What question didn’t I ask?

Ask me what I’m doing next. Stories again. I’ve got four done, and they’ve been very demanding, though I’ve loved working on them.   I don’t know why I thought writing would get easier—no writer has ever said that, that I’ve heard. But I’m happiest when I’m working and a simmering malcontent when I’m not.

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Published on November 11, 2017 13:55

A wild, gorgeous holiday gift: Carolyn Turgeon talks about The Faerie Handbook: An Enchanting Compendium of Literature, Lore, Art, Recipes, and Projects

It was the boots that did it. I was at Kathy L. Murphy's Pulpwood Queens Girlfriend Weekend, when I saw the ones belonging to Carolyn Turgeon--embroidered, black and gorgeous. "They fit like slippers," she told me. We became friends that weekend, and we've stayed in touch ever since. Her new book, THE FAERIE HANDBOOK is truly one of the most beautiful books I've seen, and it's filled with recipes, fashion, fascinating facts, and lore, all faerie-centric, too. The pages are silver tipped. There is a lovely lilac ribbon to mark your page. The illustrations and photographs are breathtaking. (Just take a look at the photos above!)

Carolyn is also the author of Rainvillage; Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story; Mermaid, The Fairest of Them All. She's the editor of Faerie Magazine, too.

Thank you so much, Carolyn for being here, and I hope to hang out with you really soon so we can compare boots.

<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073743103 0 0 415 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-priority:99; color:blue; mso-themecolor:hyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} </style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">I have to ask, though I know the answer, what is about Faeries that draws you? As a child did you believe in them and devour all the Fairy Tale books like I did? (And do you think they are around now?)</b></div><div class="MsoNormal">I did love fairy tales and myths and magic as a kid, and books full of pretty stories—and of course I still do! I like the idea that the world is full of magic, if you know where to look, that there’s tremendous beauty just out of sight. In the book’s introduction I describe an old story of a country midwife who’s taken to a cottage that seems normal and cozy until she accidentally rubs her eye with a strange ointment; then the cottage becomes an ancient oak tree and the fireplace, a hollow, mossy tree trunk. To me fairy stories are about all those hidden things. Whether fairies are around now? I don’t know. There have been stories about the fairies leaving us as long as there have been stories about fairies, it seems, but I like to think that there are all kinds of things out there that we can’t see.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">This book is so completely gorgeous that I want to know if you had a hand in the design? It’s an exquisite gift book, too.</b></div><div class="MsoNormal">Actually, for months before we even signed a book deal and agreed on what the book would <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">be </i>exactly, my editor Liz Sullivan and I went back and forth discussing the book’s sumptuous, ornate, storybook design—and salivating over fancy Victorian-y book covers we used as inspiration. Like this one, with this <a href="https://www.ursusbooks.com/pictures/m... gilded floweryfont:</a> ! Isn’t that gorgeous? So we knew from the beginning that this book had to be like a treasure chest, from the silver foil to the stained edges to the purple satin bookmark and the inset image (by Kirsty Mitchell, who does some of the most elaborate and stunning fairy tale photography out there). As for the images inside the book, Grace Nuth (who is a senior editor at <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Faerie Magazine</i> and helped me write the book) and I spent many hours finding the most wonderful images we could to illustrate each section, and Liz and the design team narrowed down the final images from those choices. In the past, I did not really have a say in how my novels were presented (and didn’t always love the way they were!), so I really appreciated that Liz discussed every step with me and was dedicated to making something so, so beautiful. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Faerie Handbook has literature, lore, art, recipes and even projects. How did you decide what you wanted to put in here? Did anything not make the cut (and you wish that it had?)</b></div><div class="MsoNormal">I made the initial list by sitting down and brainstorming with Kim Cross (who founded <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Faerie Magazine</i>) and we refined it as we went. Initially, it was twice as long! But we had to make room for all those lush images, so lots of things were cut. Originally there was going to be a whole section on fairy tales, including some actual stories, and a bit about moss, and sections on berries and tree houses and fairy gardens and Hans Christian Andersen’s paper cut-outs…. All kinds of lovely things! But we narrowed it down and actually expanded the book by thirty-two pages over what it was supposed to be originally. Of course I’d have loved another ten, or hundred, but the ones we have are pretty good!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br />What’s your favorite part of this book and what is up next for you?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal">I love all of it, to be honest, but I have a particular affection for the image of the 80-year-old fairy lady featured in the “Fairy Beauty” section written by Grace. That image actually originally came to our <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Faerie Magazine</i> submissions folder and was from photographer Marsha Steckling, who did the shoot to celebrate her mother Sharron Rhoads. “We both have always loved the theme of the Fairy Queen,” Marsha wrote, “and put together her costume and created the photographs in a park near my home.” When we posted the images on our Faerie Magazine Facebook page, it was insanely popular, one of the most beloved images we’d ever posted, so it was important to me to include it in the book! The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">most</i> popular image we’ve ever shared was from Tricia Saroya, a brilliant stylist we’ve worked with many times, of a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Midsummer Night’s Dream</i> garden party she created for our summer 2015 issue. You see this long candlelit table with an arbor draped in fairy lights stretching over it, and that image (taken by Vince Chafin) had something insane like 150,000 likes when we first posted it online and was seen by many millions of people. We actually shared that image the other day on a panel we did at FaerieCon, and a couple in the audience was astonished—they’d based their wedding on that image and had no idea it was from us! So that’s <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">in the book as well, along with Tricia’s tips on how to throw your own enchanted soir</span><span style="background: white; color: #222222;">é</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">e. I loved being able to include a few of those treasures.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Next up is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Mermaid Handbook</i>, which is the same thing but with mermaids, out in May 2018! I’ve had a long history with mermaids by now, ever since I wrote my novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mermaid</i> and started a mermaid blog and ended up doing things like attending mermaid camp at Weeki Wachee Springs and going on a mermaid dive trip in the Bahamas, etc. So doing that book felt like a good way to pull all that mermaid expertise together.</span><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br />What’s obsessing you now and why?</b>I’ve turned back to a novel now, one I’ve been working on for years (off and on), about Dante and Beatrice (I studied medieval Italian lit in graduate school), so in every spare moment I’m reading about all things medieval and carrying around suspicious-sounding tomes like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy</i>. Our winter issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Faerie Magazine</i> is medieval-themed, as it happens (we’re just finishing it now) and we recreated Dante Rossetti’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Beata Beatrix</i>, a portrait of Dante’s Beatrice, for the cover, which was shot by Steve Parke (who is brilliant photographer; he has a book of photos of Prince just out, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Picturing Prince</i>, from his 14 years as Prince’s art director!). Doing a magazine can be incredibly stressful, but being able to do something like that is pretty great. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br />What question didn’t I ask that I should have?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal">Well, if you’d asked me about a particular challenge we had with the book, one is that I’d written this bit about taking a fairy bath but couldn’t find the right image to go with it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I spent hours searching for the perfect shot! It didn’t exist, so we had to make one. I live in a beautiful apartment building in Baltimore but the tubs are ordinary, and everyone knows that fairies never do anything ordinary, so I put out a call for an extraordinary clawfoot tub, and a friend of a friend of a friend ended up having one we could use. So Steve Parke grabbed his camera and we bought a pile of flowers from the local florist and a jug of milk and showed up at this lovely house, where the husband of the friend of a friend of the friend was waiting on the charming front porch. He greeted up graciously and watched as we filled that clawfoot tub with milky water and flowers and then took a zillion photos, rearranging the flowers as we went, adding in new ones as the old ones sunk. When we were done, I offered the fairy bath to the husband, but shockingly he turned us down, so Steve and I cleaned the tub and filled a basket full of milky flowers, which we returned to the florist in case they could put them to use.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all that, the image in the book doesn’t even show the tub! </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>

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Published on November 11, 2017 13:51

Clea Simon talks about her brilliant new novel WORLD ENOUGH, Boston's 1980 punk rock scene, cats and crime, and so much more

Oh yes, I first met Clea Simon on a website and we soon formed a fast friendship. We've been to each others' houses, held each others' hands through various personal and publishing disasters, and no one makes me laugh as much as Clea does. I've read all of Clea's books, from nonfiction like Mad House: Growing Up in the Shadow of Mentally Ill Siblings (Doubleday, 1997), Fatherless Women: How We Change After We Lose Our Dads (Wiley, 2001), and The Feline Mystique: On the Mysterious Connection Between Women and Cats (St. Martin’s Press, 2002).Her new, darker Blackie and Care mystery series starts with The Ninth Life and continues with As Dark As My Fur (Severn House).

The Theda Krakow mystery series was launched in 2005 with Mew is for Murder and continued with Cattery Row and Cries and Whiskers, and Probable Claws (Poisoned Pen Press).

Her Dulcie Schwartz series launched in 2009 with Shades of Grey and continues with Grey Matters, Grey Zone, Grey Expectations, True Grey, Grey Dawn, Grey Howl, Stages of Grey, Code Grey, and Into the Grey (Severn House). The Pru Marlowe pet noir series started with Dogs Don’t Lie and continues with Cats Can’t Shoot, Parrots Prove Deadly, Panthers Play for Keeps, Kittens Can Kill, and When Bunnies Go Bad (Poisoned Pen Press). She's also a regular contributor to The Boston Globe.

Clea's new novel WORLD ENOUGH is unlike any of her other books. And I went absolutely nuts for it. She catapults you into Boston's burgeoning punk-rock scene. And I'm not the only one:

With a colorful cast of characters, a gift for detail, and intricate plotting, Simon takes her readers deep into the esoteric world of the Boston music scene.
– Lisa Unger

WORLD ENOUGH is excellent – a twisty, bittersweet trip back to the glory days of the Boston club scene, with just the right mix of edge and nostalgia.
– Joseph Finder

And yo, New Yorkers! Clea will be at Mysterious Bookshop, 58 Warren St., NY on Wed., Nov. 8, at 6:30!

Thanks Clea and see you soon!

Why this book now?

I have two answers for that. The first is horribly prosaic: This is my 23rd mystery, and my first mystery to not feature cats somewhere in the mix. And on the most basic level, it came about because Edwin, the publisher of Severn House (which has published 12 of those cat books in two different series), wanted me to write something different. We were having drinks in Bristol, at the Crimefest conference, and he said, “Why don’t you write romantic suspense?” Well, this is not romantic suspense, by a long shot, but it did get me thinking of something outside of what I had been doing. Something darker, sans cats.

The deeper answer is that I was probably ready to write this book. I first started writing one version of it about 20 or 25 years ago, not long after my stint as a rock critic. I wanted to capture that feeling of excitement I remembered. I specifically recalled the feel of the frozen earth crunching beneath my shoes as I ran across the median strip toward the front door of the Rat so vividly – the brittle quality, the urgency, like the earth was rushing me toward the club. But back then – I’m talking early ‘90s – I had neither the distance nor the skills. I’d been writing professionally, both as a rock critic and a journalist, but I wasn’t a novelist yet. I kept reworking the first 100 pages and then it all just petered out.  

Then, about ten years ago, I went out to hear a band I used to love and wrote a version of the opening scene. But still… I was writing mysteries by then, but even if I had started to develop the chops, I didn’t have the emotional distance.

So that first scene – which takes place ten years ago – was you?

Well, I was in a similar place as Tara, my protagonist. That’s probably why it took me another ten years to write! I needed to be well past that time, able to look back. Tara isn’t me, obviously. But she is in a place that I recall. She’s still nostalgic for “the scene,” and, of course, for her own youth. Over the course of the book, she gets some perspective.

But not just on the scene, I think.

No, I don’t think so. She unravels the mystery aspect – what happened and who was involved – but in the process, she learns to see herself and the people around her more clearly, too.

One of the comments about World Enough is that it’s about a middle-aged artist looking back on the scene. Does that make sense?

Yes, among other things. When we’re young, we don’t have a sense of limits – of where our art will take us or what it will mean if it doesn’t change the world. I like to think that as we age, we learn to value our arts simply for themselves. I mean, fame and fortune – or being able to earn a living doing what we love – would be wonderful. But do they still have value without these measures of success? Does their value change?

This is probably your first morally ambiguous book.

Yeah, more realistic, I guess. I mean, I hope that the ending makes the “what happened” part clear. But as to what will happen next for Tara … I don’t know.

What will happen next – for you?

I’m returning to cat mysteries for a while! I’ve got the next dark cat mystery (literally, the next book in my dystopian black cat Blackie and Care series) Cross My Path coming out next summer and another Pru Marlowe pet noir, Fear on Four Paws, scheduled after that (think snarky/funny amateur sleuth) – both are in various stages of editing and production. And I’ve signed with Polis Press to write a truly cozy series about the witch cats of Cambridge next. I think it will feel good to get back to whimsy and sweetness for a while. But, yeah, there’s another dark rock noir on the horizon. I’m taking notes and part of me is itching to get back there.

In another ten years?

No, this will be sooner than that! I promise!

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Published on November 06, 2017 13:36

How does one death inform all the others that follow? Anne Edelstein talks about her magnificent new memoir, Lifesaving for Beginners

<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ明朝"; mso-font-charset:78; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;} @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;} @font-face {font-family:Perpetua; panose-1:2 2 5 2 6 4 1 2 3 3; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Perpetua; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ明朝"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Perpetua; mso-ascii-font-family:Perpetua; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ明朝"; mso-hansi-font-family:Perpetua;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} </style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8QkGDQsaKg..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="375" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8QkGDQsaKg..." width="256" /></a></div><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Fdkbi-4grz..." imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="317" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Fdkbi-4grz..." width="203" /></a><br /><br /><i> I first met <a href="https://www.anneedelstein.com/about/&... Edelstein </a>a million years ago. She was starting out on her own as a literary agent. I was starting out on my own in New York City, and we became friends, and then life intruded and we didn't reconnect until recently! I'm thrilled to host her here (we share the same extraordinary agent, Gail Hochman). Her book, Lifesaving for Beginners is a deeply personal and profound exploration of grief, love, and how one death impacts every other death that follows. Thank you so much for being here, Anne.</i><br /><br /><i>“Anne Edelstein’s remarkable debut is an unforgettable―and unputdownable―portrait of a singular American family. Reminiscent of Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments and Daphne Merkin’s This Close to Happy, this slyly powerful memoir reads like a conversation with your kindest, funniest, most incisive friend. <b>―Joanna Rakoff</b>, author of My Salinger Year and A Fortunate Age</i> <br /><i><br /><br />“Loss, grief, and ‘the proof of love’ are at stake in this poignant and penetrating memoir of a daughter’s quest to understand her elusive mother, the suicide of her beloved brother, and the mystery at the heart of the will to live.”<b>―Jill Bialosky, author of History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished life</b></i> <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What was the ‘why now’ moment that jump started this memoir?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What made you feel brave enough to write it?</i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">On one level I knew immediately after my mother died suddenly while snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef that I had to begin taking notes in order to make sense of her death and understand my conflicted feelings about her. But the real turning point that made me know what the core of this book would be, and that actually got me to start writing came two years later, when a man with MS intentionally drowned himself in the pond where I swam every summer in Maine. That act that was the catalyst for the book.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What was the writing like?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Was it strange to be on the other end of the agent/writer relationship?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The book, which is magnificent, feels as if you were healing yourself through the writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Would you say this is the case?</i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The writing allowed me to revisit scenes of my life that were difficult, but at the same time it was good to be in those scenes again, a way of holding onto them and contemplating as I let them go. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Writing the book was very separate from my work as an agent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I isolated myself on certain days or partial days of the week, and over longer periods of vacation, as writing was a very different state of mind from the everyday workings of the literary agency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I did come to understand the notion of, ‘I have changed through writing my book,’ something I that had always believed happened in the process of writing a successful work and something I had long repeated to my authors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After completing my own memoir, I came to comprehend this in a more literal way.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">At the end of the memoir, you have a scene with you telling Eli that you will talk more about your mother when he is older.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Have you?</i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Both of my kids read my memoir some time ago when it was in manuscript form, and both were very moved by it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not so surprising, because really they are the heroes of the book!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But before reading the work, over the years they already had come to know most of the details about both my mother’s and my brother’s deaths. The thing that both of them told me struck them most when they read the manuscript was that even though they already sort of knew most of what was in it, they hadn’t understood just how much the family had kept quiet for so long.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The title Lifesaving for Beginners is so evocative, and yet I found it so hopeful, too, as if there is no time limit for saving ourselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Can you comment?</i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Lifesaving for Beginners at its most literal is a swimming term.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even after achieving my badge as a ‘Senior Lifesaver’ I questioned whether I would ever physically be able to save someone’s life. Today I still don’t know if it’s possible to save the life of another person, and by that I mean spiritually more than physically. But it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> possible to begin a conversation about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By looking into what has been kept quiet in the past, it may be possible to shift family patterns that haven’t been acknowledged, and with this some lives might be saved, especially one’s own. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What’s obsessing you now and why?</i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In one word, my biggest obsession is ‘time.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it will undoubtedly be the subject of what I write next.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By time, I don’t mean only the passage of time, but more a sense of the meaning of ‘timelessness,’ although I think it may be understanding one that helps solve the other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What question didn’t I ask that I should have?</i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Your questions are impeccable, and allowed me to say just what I wanted to about my memoir.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thank you!</div>

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Published on November 03, 2017 11:04

Wendy Werris talks about AN ALPHABETICAL LIFE: LIVING IT UP IN THE WORLD OF BOOKS, escorting authors, being a sales rep, writing her memoir, and so much more

<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ明朝"; mso-font-charset:78; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ明朝"; mso-font-charset:78; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-alt:Calibri; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-520092929 1073786111 9 0 415 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-alt:Cambria; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073743103 0 0 415 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ明朝"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ明朝"; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} </style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-agbMqUJebU..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="323" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-agbMqUJebU..." width="207" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gGmhytaeRD..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gGmhytaeRD..." width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>When it comes to books, Wendy Werris has done just about everything you'd ever want to do with books: she worked in a bookstore; she was a sales rep, she was an author escort, and she writes for Publisher's Weekly, and she writes! An Alphabetical Life: Living it Up in the World of Books is flat out wonderful, and so is Wendy. We talked on the phone as if we had grown up together (and maybe we have! You never know, right?) I'm thrilled to host her here, and I cannot wait for her new memoir. Thank you, Wendy! (Let's talk soon.) </i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I absolutely loved your account of working in a bookstore at 19. (Are we sisters? I got my first job at 19 being the actual book buyer for a tiny bookstore in Ann Arbor. I looked sixteen.) I loved that you got hugged by Bukowski.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: "calibri";">I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time, working in the early 1970s at Pickwick Bookshop in Hollywood. Everyone who was anyone shopped there, and as a teenager I was still susceptible to the glamour of show business. One story I left out of AN ALPHABETICAL LIFE, because it didn’t happen to me but to the assistant bookbuyer Joni Miller, is about the day Elvis Presley came into Pickwick. The front counter was in an L-shape, and Joni got up from her desk and frantically ran to the other side of the counter to find a book for a customer. She had her head down, and ran right into Elvis, and they both fell to the floor. His bodyguards swarmed around both of them, thinking Joni was out to hurt Elvis in some way. After Joni collected herself, she looked up and saw Elvis. She was shocked. He apologized to her, and she to him, and Joni (who moved to New York later and worked for years at Workman Publishing) was a wreck for the rest of the day. Right or wrong, I don’t think Elvis would have shopped at the tiny Ann Arbor bookstore where you worked. This was Pickwick, though. I never knew what to expect from day to day. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I loved your tales of escorting authors on tours. Without mentioning names, can you tell me the most scandalous story?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: "calibri";">I was too professional to act on any sexual feelings I might have had towards an author, so nothing scandalous there. But I can tell you about the most humiliating experience. I went to LAX to pick up Simon Winchester, the author-historian, who was an Oxford author when I was their rep. I parked my car and walked to baggage claim to meet him and his MUCH-younger girlfriend, who was having a princess hissy fit about something. It was most unattractive. We walked to my car, and I put their luggage in the trunk, and when I looked up, Simon and girlfriend were sitting in the back seat together. They thought I was their chauffeur. And the fact that I was driving a VW Jetta at the time, not a limo or some luxury car, made it all the more absurd. I was pissed, but got them to their hotel without incident. The next morning when I picked them up, the girlfriend wasn’t with Simon. I said to him, “please sit in the front seat today,” and he did, and every time after that. I suppose I put him in his place, but in a kind way. We then got along swimmingly. I enjoyed his company.</span><span style="color: #4f81bd;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The book business has changed so much. What do you miss most—and do you think we can ever get it back?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: "calibri";">I miss all of the indie bookstores that were forced to close during the last 20 years. Amazon e-books are responsible for that, and I make no bones about it. I miss the people who worked in those stores, many of whom became dear friends. So we can never get back that important part of the book community in Los Angeles and other cities. Yet the indies that survived and are still going strong provide the same warmth, personal touch, and knowledge of books they always have. That is something to be cherished and supported. A few months after the death of a family member in 2015, I took a part-time job at the local Barnes & Noble to get out of the house and stop isolating. Huge mistake. I lasted two weeks before quitting. It was not so much a bookstore as a merchandising business that focused on books. Of course there’s more to this story, but will save it for another time.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I loved hearing about your job as a sales rep—I remember at 19 having a sales rep actually ask me, “So, you like looking at the pictures?” he was so rude, I didn’t order anything from him. You are still deeply in the world of books and publishing. What do you want people to know about it that they most likely don’t know?<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: "calibri";">People aren’t really aware of the essential role publisher’s reps play in their reading experience. When you walk into a bookstore and find the book you want, it was a sales rep that made it happen. A rep came in, sat down with the buyer, and presented the new list of books for hundreds of publishers. Thus the buyer becomes aware of what books they need to stock, will place an order, and then a bookseller unpacks the cartons when the order arrives and places the books on the shelves in the right sections of the store. Most people never think about this, but if not for the rep, the books readers want to buy wouldn’t be there! I quit repping several years ago, but will always admire and support the reps who do a sometimes difficult job, simply because they love books!</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I also loved your talking about John Irving. He has this great quote about writing: If you don’t feel you are on the edge of humiliating yourself, then you’re not writing hard enough.” I loved it so much I tracked him down. He wrote me a lovely handwritten letter, but he said he never wrote it. “Though it sounds like me.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: "calibri";">What a privilege it was to sell John Irving’s break-out novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The World According to Garp.</i> To participate in the success of a book you personally love . . . nothing comes close to that degree of literary satisfaction. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What I loved about this book so much, besides all the bookish material, was how deeply personal you made it. You talk about having a refrain of sadness, which I have come to believe that all deeply funny people have.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Would you agree? </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: "calibri";">Certainly, Caroline. My own father, a comedy writer, suffered from depression on and off for much of his life. I have the sadness gene in my soul as well. Most of my dad’s comedy writer friends were the same way – with deep, heavy souls, and insecurities. To turn tragedy into comedy is not disrespectful in any way. In fact, it is the buoy that makes it possible to go on living . . . and writing. Joni Mitchell said, “Depression is the sand that makes the pearl.” I believe this has made me a better, and funnier writer. Why bother writing if you don’t dig deep and tell the whole truth about yourself?</span><span style="color: #4f81bd;"><br /></span><br />What’s obsessing you now and why?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: "calibri";">My obsessions are all political these days. I want to see Trump impeached, assault weapons banned, and our environment protected and respected above all else.</span><span style="color: #4f81bd;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">And what is your next book, because of course, there has to be one.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: "calibri";">I’m writing my second book now. The title is SOME NERVE: A MEMOIR. It’s hard to believe my first memoir came out eleven years ago! Now I have so much more to share with readers, experiences they can relate to and hopefully learn from, and stories that will make them laugh and feel good about who they are. </span></div>

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Published on November 03, 2017 10:57

Caroline Leavitt's Blog, page 23

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Clea Simon talks about her brilliant new novel WORLD ENOUGH, Boston's 1980 punk rock scene, cats and crime, and so much more

November 3, 2017

How does one death inform all the others that follow? Anne Edelstein talks about her magnificent new memoir, Lifesaving for Beginners

Wendy Werris talks about AN ALPHABETICAL LIFE: LIVING IT UP IN THE WORLD OF BOOKS, escorting authors, being a sales rep, writing her memoir, and so much more

Caroline Leavitt's Blog