Caroline Leavitt's Blog, page 67
October 10, 2014
Yona Zeldis McDonough talks about You were Meant for Me, taking scary chances with a new novel, Pomeranian dogs, parenthood, and so much, much more
It's always fun when I get to host an author who is also a friend, which Yona has been for a very long time! Yona Zeldis McDonough is the author of six novels for adults: The Four Tmperaments, In Dahlia's Wake, Breaking the Bank (which has been optioned for a film), A Wedding in Great Neck, Two of a Kind and her newest, You were Meant for Me.
She is also an award-winning children's book author with 23 children's books to her credit. For over a dozen years, Yona has been the Fiction Editor at Lilith Magazine.
I'm so thrilled to have Yona here!
I always want to know, what sparked this particular book? (I actually know the answer, but I want readers to know it!) What surprised you in the writing?
I was inspired by a true story told to me by a friend. In the actual story, it was a man who found the baby--it was a boy--and he kept visiting the family court judge to see if anyone had claimed the child. The judge suggested that the man consider adoption--and he did. The boy is a teenager now and lives with his two adoring dads. The story remained with me and I realized I wanted to write it; or at least my own version of it. I changed a lot of the details--that's the prerogative, if not obligation, of the novelist. But the core of it was the same: sometimes, despite all odds, there is grace, redemption and a happy ending. Amen to that!
How do you think this book is a departure from your other novels?
Actually, I think of it as a continuation rather than a departure. The book centers very much on parenthood and raises the questions of who is a good parent and how being a parent changes a person. I think all of my novels have addressed these questions in one way or another. So I see You Were Meant for Me as part of a continuing exploration of the subject.
Let’s talk about the four very different men in the novel. Why was each necessary for Miranda’s development?
Ah, the men in Miranda's life! Luke is the narcissist who is sexy but self-involved; he has a lot of appeal for Miranda but she eventually comes to see that he will not make her happy and is not the one with whom to build a life. Jared is also a very sexy man and Miranda responds to him in an immediate and primal way. He is more honorable than Luke though; he knows he does not want to settle down and he does not want to hurt Miranda. Evan is the last in this trio of potential candidates for Miranda's heart. At first, Miranda is not that attracted to him; she considers him a friend rather than a lover. But his good qualities emerge slowly and she is won over; it's only when she thinks she has lost him that she realizes she really does love him and that he indeed was meant for her. Miranda's father is the last--or first, depending how you look at it--man in this quartet. They were very close when she was a child but she has loses him twice--first to dementia, and then to death. Yet there is a moment at the end when he recognizes her and she is able to keep that memory when he is gone.
I have to ask, what would you have done in Miranda’s situation?
I have fantasized about this more than once and I think that I'd do just what Miranda did. Finding a baby seems like such an astonishing thing; how could that not change you, and make you feel that somehow, it was meant to be?
You’ve written 19 books for children. 19! How different is it to do that than writing for adults? Which do you prefer and why?
The number is up to 23 now! I like writing for children very much, especially fiction for children, which I have done in my chapter books. I don't prefer one over the other; each form fills different needs, and taps into different strengths. When I am writing for children, I am really writing for the nine year old girl who is alive and well inside of me. If I can write a story that she would have liked, then I feel I have succeeded.
What’s obsessing you now and why?
The House on Primrose Pond, which is the new manuscript I am working on. This one really is a departure because it is set in New Hampshire, a first for me, and because it will include a novel-within-a-novel. That's something I have never attempted before. It's exciting but a little scary too; I have no experience with this structure at all, so I have to figure it out as I write.
What question didn’t I ask that I should have?
About my dogs! There are two, both small, happy Pomeranians, and I love them both without restraint or measure. They often keep me company as I work and if I get stuck, they provide endless diversion.
October 3, 2014
Jodi Picoult talks about LEAVING TIME, elephants, memory, why things are not where they should be (yet) for women writers, and more
Okay, here is an astonishing fact. It is estimated that there are 25 million books by Jodi Picoult in print —in 35 countries. She's one of the most beloved writers on the planet, but I also need to tell you, she's also one of the most down-to-earth. She answers every e-mail. She can kick back with you and have you laughing in a nanosecond. She's got the best hair on the planet. And she not only champions women writers--she uses her considerable clout to fight for them.
Her newest novel, Leaving Time, is with a new publisher, Random House, and it's a stunning story about memory, love, grief and healing. As always, my gratitude to Jodi is huge, and my delight at having her here again, overwhelming. Thank you, Jodi!
I always have to ask, what sparked this particular novel?
JP: I have three kids, and my daughter – my youngest – was getting ready to go to college, which meant I’d be an empty nester. It was daunting, to say the least. Then I read a fact: In the wild, an elephant mother and daughter stay together until one of them dies. I thought, How enlightened! Why can’t we be like that!? I began to do a little digging on elephants, and learned how advanced their cognition is. And when I discovered that they actually grieve and experience and process loss, I was completely hooked, and knew I would be writing about what it meant to be left behind…and also that I had my profession for the character of Alice.
I know you actually worked with the elephants at an elephant sanctuary in Tennessee. Did you have any preconceived ideas that were changed by your experience? What surprised you the most?
JP: I was privileged to spend time at The Elephant Sanctuary – and I really do mean that, because the whole point of the sanctuary is that their elephants are no longer on display but in a lovely retirement setting. Since this was my first experience with elephants I didn’t have many preconceived notions, but I was touched again and again by the stories I was told. For example, Sissy is an elephant who survived the 1981 Gainesville Flood by being submerged for 24 hours with only her trunk above water. When she got to the sanctuary, she was traumatized and took to carrying around a tire, like a child’s security blanket. Eventually she bonded with an elephant named Tina and they were fast friends. But Tina died, and when she did, Sissy stayed with her – and then remained by her grave for a few days. Finally, she placed her tire on the grave – like a wreath – and left it behind, never to return to it – almost as if she believed Tina needed the comfort more, now. What surprised me the most was how easy it was, given these very human-like interactions, to assume that these elephants are tame. They’re not. A keeper was killed at The Elephant Sanctuary and recently in Maine, one of the owners of a small sanctuary was killed by an elephant.
So much of this novel is about what, how, and why we remember what we remember. Can you talk about that please? And is it true that elephants’ memories rival our own?
JP: I think these days I can’t remember anything, LOL. My brain is fried! But yes, there is a fine line between a bad memory and a traumatic one in the human brain. My friend Abby Baird, a psych professor at Vassar, taught me all about the human brain and cognition. Bad memories get coded as red flags, to remind us NOT to repeat the same behavior. This is similar for elephants, too, who will avoid corridors where poaching has historically occurred. But a traumatic memory can be so scarring that it gets morphed and warped by the brain, as a protective measure – so that you can actually function and not be crippled by it. Elephant memories are BETTER than our own. At the Elephant Sanctuary in TN, they had to institute a no-fly zone because the elephants got so agitated by the sound of planes and helicopters, even though the only helicopters that the elephants had ever heard were 50 years ago during the South African culls when they were captured. Also at the sanctuary were two elephants with a terrific story of memory: Jenny lived at the sanctuary when Shirley was brought there, and that first night, in the barn, they kept roaring and banging on the gate between them, touching through the bars. Eventually the keepers opened the gate and let them into the same stall. They immediately touched each other all over, and when Jenny lay down to sleep, Shirley stood over her like a mom would. They were inseparable for years. As it turned out, they had been at the same circus when Jenny was a calf and Shirley was 30 years old. They’d been separated for 22 years but hadn’t forgotten each other. And here’s a story from the wild: In Pilanesberg, SA, a reserve existed for elephants that were orphaned after culls for population control. It was a social experiment – they thought these teen elephants would bond into a herd, but that didn’t happen, because there was no matriarch. So a decision was made to bring two older females, Durga and Owalla, back to Africa from the US where they had been working and training. It was a success – the two matriarch formed two thriving herds. However, Owalla got bitten by a hippo 16 years later and couldn’t be anesthetized for medical reasons. They knew she was going to die, if not treated. So Randall Moore – Owalla’s former trainer –was called in. He found the herd, got out of his vehicle, and called Owalla by name. The younger members of the herd scattered, terrified of this human contact. Owalla came forward and greeted Randall, and then lifted her trunk and her leg according to his commands, letting the vets treat her without any anesthetic. After sixteen years of being completely wild, she remembered him, and his commands.
Leaving Time has a really different--and totally gorgeous cover--than your other books, and you are now with a new publisher. Somehow, this very simple design is so incredibly arresting! Did you have input into the cover?
JP: I am very happy to be with Random House – a really committed group of folks who love this book as much as I do. They wanted a cover that looked different from my others, and Paolo Pepe – the art director I had once worked with at S&S – is now at Random House and was given the task of creating the cover. When I saw the two tendrils of grass grasping like two trunks, I was sold. I got to pick the color – I went for the greeny blues instead of a rosy pink.
You’ve also started writing these wonderful e-shorts, novellas which feature the characters from Leaving Time, which is richly satisfying. What gave you the idea to write them? Where these written after you wrote the novel, before, or during--and should they be read after the novel, or are they stand-alones?
JP: When Random House took over and wanted to move my pub date from March to October, I knew I was going to have a lot of furious fans. I wanted to give them a taste of the book, and Gina Centrello at Random House suggested that I write an e-short. It’s really hard, you know, to take a completed book and find a hole in it! But I read a sentence in one of Alice’s sections that began “the first time Africa healed me…” and I thought, Hmm, why was she hurting? That became Larger than Life. However, I apparently did SUCH a good job that Random House wanted to use that piece in late August, to drive readers to pre-order LEAVING TIME. So I wrote a second piece, this one a flashback in Serenity’s voice, because she’s so much fun to create. That was released first, actually, in the spring. You don’t have to read the e-shorts before you read the book. Or even after. But if you do, it will really make the characters even more three-dimensional.
I always ask you this question, because I think it’s an important one, and we need to keep hearing the answer over and over again. You’re a huge champion of women writers and you fight constantly about getting women the same sort of attention that male authors do. Can you talk a bit about this please? Do you see the situation improving at all?
JP: We’re still not there yet – ask VIDA, which crunches the numbers. Sometimes I feel like we are improving. There are outlets for reviews that have dramatically undertaken to balance their coverage of books by women and men. One lovely thing that happened this year was the Year of Reading Women – a concerted effort from the reading public to search out female authors they might not otherwise have read. And of course Pamela Paul’s appointment as editor of the NYTBR is a great start, and has led to some welcome changes – reviews of genre fiction, even new bestseller lists devoted to categories that usually didn’t merit NYT coverage or mention. I just think it’s really important to remember that for every literary star like Matthew Thomas, who wrote an excellent book (We Are Not Ourselves) that is a sweeping, generational family saga – there are women who have been doing that sort of writing for years who have been marginalized and sidelined as “women’s fiction” authors. What, all the men just woke up and started reading this stuff? Really? And of course, when you wake up to the news that of ten NBA longlist finalists for non-fiction, ONE is female…well, you just want to crawl into bed again.
What’s obsessing you now and why?
JP: Racism. It’s the topic of my next adult book and God knows it’s a conversation we need to have in this country. It struck me that when white writers write about racism, it’s from the safety of a historical context – i.e. slavery. I mean, no one reads about slavery and thinks, “Man, those were good times.” But why aren’t white writers talking about racism NOW? Why only the writers of color? Well, because it’s terrifying to speak out. You don’t want to upset anyone, and you are afraid of saying the wrong thing, and/or of being called to the carpet for what you say and why you think you have any right to say it, as a white person. It took me a long time to grapple with this (and several workshops about racism) but I have the right story to tell, and the right way to tell it. I am not writing this book to tell my fans of color what the world is like. They KNOW, and they feel it daily. I’m writing this book to tell my white fans that racism isn’t about intent – it’s about power, and privilege, and just by being born with your skin a certain color you have had privileges you’ve never had to think about (which in itself is a privilege). I’m writing this book to open people’s eyes.
What question didn’t I ask that I should have?
JP: What’s next for you? Well, I’m so glad you asked, Caroline. My daughter Samantha and I just finished the sequel to the YA book we wrote a few years ago, BETWEEN THE LINES. The next installment, OFF THE PAGE, will be published on May 19. We’re so excited about it – for many reasons. Not only is it a great read, but the two books combined are being developed into a major musical, hopefully headed for Broadway. Stay tuned!
Binnie Klein talks about BLOWS TO THE HEAD: HOW BOXING CHANGED MY MIND, the weird stones in our path, letting loose, and so much more
Boxing fascinates me. It's brutal, it's dark, it gives way to great drama (think Ray Donovan), and it's an alien world to me. Now consider a book about the male-dominated sport of boxing written by a woman, with the fabulous title, Blows to the Head: How Boxing Changed My Mind. You're hooked, right?
Binnie Klein not only boxes, she's a radio host of A Miniature World, a popular weekly music and interview program, and The Home Page Radio Show, the first radio show devoted exclusively to our relationship with our living spaces. It airs on the 4th and 5th Thursdays of each month on WPKN, 89.5FM or www.wpkn.org. But wait, there's more! Binnie is a psychotherapist in private practice in New Haven, Connecticut, and a Lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University.
Thank you so much for being here, Binnie!
Why boxing?
I grew up in a pretty sedentary family. We were all “mind,” and there were some physical fears and phobias floating around in our DNA. In my mid-fifties, I was in rehab for a broken ankle and foot when I spotted a pair of boxing gloves in the facility. They called out to me, and I didn’t know why – so I asked the trainer to show me a few things. I fell in love with it. I ultimately got my own coach, a former middleweight state champ who loved teaching middle-aged women to get comfortable with their aggression. Although I was a complete novice and would never be a “contender,” I wanted to get as close I could to the real thing.
What is it about such a brutal sport that drew you to it?
Unconsciously, I needed to let loose, to do something that contrasted with my daily work as a psychotherapist, where I am there for the “other,” helping someone else’s journey. That requires a lot of containment of feelings, for them and for you. It takes patience. Boxing turned out to be quite the opposite, with its immediacy and complete physicality. Yes, it challenges the brain (there’s a lot to remember – protect yourself at all times, how and when to choose what punch, watch your stance, etc.), but it’s so physically absorbing. The quick decisions you make in boxing can have volatile consequences. Plus, you can grunt and emote and generally let it all hang out! (although I admit I never spit in a bucket).
Also, as women, we’re definitely not encouraged to recognize or express our aggression. I had been ambivalent about my own competitive nature. Competition and ambition don’t have to involve physical violence of course, but they do require a certain comfort with self-assertion and sometimes, appropriate aggression.
What’s the connection between being Jewish and being in the ring?
One day, while sparring with my coach, the late John Spehar, who had a vast knowledge of the history of boxing, I asked if there were ever any Jewish boxers. The answer was a resounding “yes!” In fact, there were 26 Jewish champions between 1910 and 1940. With the waves of Jewish immigration in the turn of the 20th century, America became a new center for Jewish fighters. It was a more lucrative alternative to 16 hour shifts in sweatshops. As Budd Schulberg wrote: “To see (Benny)Leonard climb into the ring sporting the six-pointed Jewish star on his fighting trunks was to anticipate sweet revenge for all the bloody noses, split lips and mocking laughter at pale little Jewish boys who had run the neighbourhood gauntlet.” Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom, Barney Ross, Benny Leonard – these sounded like the names of my relatives – and I began the research that resulted in Blows to the Head: How Boxing Changed My Mind. I’d grown up thinking of Jews as the pale scholars, heads bent over books, not particularly physical. I needed this other image of strong, tough Jews to round out my experience of my heritage. And I needed to understand my own father’s love of boxing, and explore some of the sources of his own rage.
So tell us, what did you think it would be like to be in the ring, and what was it really like?
I’d love to modify this question – because I was never in the ring the way real fighters are, and it does a disservice to those who truly face their fears and risk injury. I was a poseur compared to them, an investigative researcher. I can only speak to my experience of sparring with my coach, which was a relatively contained and safe version of the sport. Yes, we were in the ring, but as he often said “I would never use my right hook on you; I will never hurt you.” But even being buffeted about on the head and body, I experienced sensations I’d never had. He encouraged me to thrust out punches, aim for his face. I felt stronger and empowered, and began to feel that if faced with danger I might be a wee bit more courageous in protecting myself. But for me, learning about boxing, the history of Jewish boxers, and women who box, was never about wanting to inflict pain on anyone.
When did you begin to notice that you were changing from your involvement in boxing?
The immediacy of boxing forced me to get out of my head. I looked forward to the lessons and felt a difference when I didn’t box. I noticed that I felt more confidence in general, and I don’t know if it’s primarily because I learned some punches; I think it’s because I pushed the envelope in my life. I tried something I never thought was “me.” Also, I’d never understood the lure of sports; now I watched footage of Ali fights, mesmerized by the choreography and grace. I began to appreciate the joy others took in following baseball, tennis, etc. Taking up this unusual sport late in life made me realize I could make other changes, too. I could put myself in new and unfamiliar settings – go to pro fights, meet women boxers, attend boxing camp, interview famous fighters and boxing writers. I started to write about my experiences. I’d always written – poetry, reviews, clinical essays – but it had always been a dream to do a book.
It affected my clinical practice, as I began to look at my patient’s physicality more closely. How were they with their own aggression? Were they timid? How we inhabit our physical bodies has so much to do with our sense of identity and possibility of effecting others. We can cower or we can have a stance of sorts. We are entitled to prevent others from hurting us.
What surprised you about it?
That any and all of these changes would come from a passion that most people could not understand. “Boxing? You? But it’s so violent,” and so on. That I found connection and comfort with the boxing community, a world of people who I never would have known before.
was surprised that this involvement and research made me more empathetic towards my family and piqued my curiosity about my heritage. I studied immigration (my mother had come from Poland at 8 years old), and talked with Rabbis. I held the rare text of 18th century fighter Daniel Mendoza’s memoir in my hands. I “worked the corner” for a young fighter at an amateur bout. I cried when a famous trainer bullied me at Gleason’s Boxing Camp. I learned my limits, and celebrated the triumphs of others.
Tell us about the “weird stones” in our path?
Think of a walk on a beach, or on a trail. We pass many stones on the ground. Sometimes we spot an unevenly shaped one, “a weird one.” If you follow your attraction to the unusual stone and pick it up, turn it over, study its contours, you may find a hidden gem. But you have to pick it up and get closer to it. Boxing was my “weird stone.” Weird stones rub out assumptions and preconceived notions, especially when we finally see the imprint of their true shape. We can’t know the true shape when we first pick them up. They are ones that surprise our friends and loved ones. “You?” “You’re going to work with gorillas?” “You’re boxing?”
“Each person has to find his own range considering the things that matter.” I find this to be as eloquent as it is illuminating. Can you talk about this please?
My coach John Spehar often talked about the importance of “finding my range.” Initially it was mystifying. Did it have to do with the length of my arms? Where I stood in relation to my opponent? I was a kinetic learner, he said; I understood things only after I tried them physically, and repeatedly. The right range was the amalgam of everything he’d taught me about my body’s abilities and limits. My proper range was not so far away that I couldn’t make contact but not so close up that I would get lost and smothered. It’s like when you get too enmeshed with a loved one, you can’t quite get your bearings or feel your own boundaries; you’re merged with them. We merge when we fall in love, and it’s an incredible feeling; nothing like it, but eventually we have to re-introduce the separateness so we lose illusions and truly see the other. We try different things out -- this close, that far away -- and only by trying can we find the right distance that works for us. When my range was right, when I was “the right distance away,” I had the most power, anything that emanated from my being was authentic, even if imperfect.
Each person finds their own range as it apply to the things that matter to them, whether it is family, work, beliefs, or relationships. These days I’m trying to find my range in relation to social media and facebook, things like that. Like many of us, I’m so absorbed and so focused on various screens, my eyes are getting blurry. I need breaks. I need to prioritize. I need to walk away so that I can come back.
What’s obsessing you now and why?
I can’t tell you how much I love that you asked this question, because it assumes that there is always another obsession. It speaks to the truth of my and many other creative peoples’ lives in particular. We have to have a project. It’s an engine inside that never shuts down. We only feel truly and fully alive when the engine is revving and adequately fuelled.
So my current focus is the creation of a half-hour radio podcast which will weave together my long-standing interests in literature, film, culture, and music. I’ve been hosting a weekly music and interview show at WPKN, a listener-supported station, for many years, and have treasured the freedom. We are entering a new era of radio delivery, and if it is in fact going to be achieved through podcasts and easy Internet access for consumers, I want to be part of it! It challenges me to hone my skills, edit down some longer pieces, and weave together threads that I hope will give the audience a tiny bit of respite from the chaos of our over-stimulated lives. I want to share the joy I get from books and contemporary thinkers, and the thrill of discovering new and powerful music. I hope I get the opportunity to reach a wide audience.
What question didn’t I ask that I should have?
Ooh, that’s another great question. I’ll pick “What was the most fun aspect of writing the book for you?”
When I arrived at a structural component that involved a fantasied meeting with 3 of the greatest Jewish boxing champions of all time – Barney Ross, Benny Leonard, and Daniel Mendoza. It was an imaginative exercise that really stretched me. I wanted to avoid just a dry historical recounting of their lives, and I wanted to see what I had in common, if anything, with each of them, and how I imagined us interacting. Barney “Beryl the Terrible” Ross, was a champion from 1933 to 1938, a handsome gambler who loved the ponies (like my Dad). He “told” me about early beatings in the neighborhood, and his father’s murder, leading to disillusionment with “the Jewish things.”
By eleven years old, small and wiry Benny “The Ghetto Wizard” Leonard was the boxer of Eighth Street on the lower east side. He learned about his “range” by studying defense, and was responsible for boxing’s designation as “The Sweet Science.” He could use his head and understand how to succeed without being big and burly and powerful.
When Daniel “The Star of Israel” Mendoza battled in the 18th century, it was bare-knuckles, no rounds, and you went until you dropped. His book “The Art of Fighting,” discussed the need for keeping one’s equilibrium, and he described it the way I thought about “keeping one’s range”
These remarkable men were true boxers. I learned through writing this book that I could face some of my fears. I learned that I wasn’t really meant to be a boxer, but that in my own way, I had been, and would always be…. a fighter.
October 2, 2014
Elizabeth Rosner talks about ELECTRIC CITY, practicing gratitude, technology's impact, writing, memory, and so much more
Elizabeth Rosner is one of my favorite writers--and favorite people on the planet. Warm, funny, generous, she also writes novels that defy categorization because they're so fascinating on so many levels.
Her novel, The Speed of Light was in Book Sense 76 twice, and was selected as one of Borders Original Voices. It's also been optioned by Gillian Anderson, and is slated to be her directorial debut. The novel was the recipient of the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, administered by Hadassah Magazine and judged by Elie Wiesel, N. Scott Momaday and Myla Goldberg (the previous year’s winner). Hadassah additionally selected the novel for their National Book Club in spring 2003. Rosner also received the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award for Fiction in 2002. In 2003, the French edition of this title was a finalist for the prestigious Prix Femina. In April 2004, the French awarded the novel a newly inaugurated literary prize, called the Prix France Bleu Gironde, at an award ceremony in Bordeaux. She's also the author of Gravity, and Blue Nude, and a poetry collection, Gravity. Her prize-winning fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in the New York times Magazine, Elle, Chicago Magazine, Catamaran, and many other places.
Her newest novel, Electric City, is about memory, history and invention, and it's unlike anything I've read before.
What sparked you to write this particular book? How was the process different from any of your other fine novels?
It may seem strange to say this, because my previous two novels are both quite autobiographical (and in fact I often refer to them as "emotionally autobiographical"), but the initial spark for ELECTRIC CITY happened when I realized that I hadn't yet written a novel about the place in which I grew up. At the age of sixteen, after graduating a year early from high school, I got a scholarship to study for a year in the Philippines, and I seized the opportunity to "get as far from home as I could without leaving the planet." (This is a line from one of my poems in GRAVITY called "Keeping Kosher in the Philippines.") The truth is, not writing about Schenectady, New York had a lot to do with having fled from there at a young age, with no desire to return.
And yet, in my late 40s, it occurred to me that I could finally look back at my hometown with a liberating mix of curiosity and forgiveness. Suddenly I became altogether fascinated by the place, discovering that it possessed many more layers of history and personality and cultural complexity than I had ever been able to recognize. I quickly found myself wanting to burrow into those strata as though in search of secret treasures. The process became profoundly research-driven at times, especially because I was incorporating historical figures into my work. This was certainly new for me, often more than a little intimidating. And yet as I had done while creating my previous novels, I also had to keep digging for the stories beneath the story. I had to keep allowing my characters to show me the way forward.
There's the whole notion of the double-edge sword of technology in the book, how it can light up a city, and yet it can also be harnessed for war's killing. Can you talk about that please?
As the daughter of a scientist and also as someone raised in the post-Sputnik era, I was taught to believe that technology and invention held the keys to our future, promising to save us from every difficulty. Yet my instincts and intuition seemed to tell me otherwise. I saw what I considered to be enormous dangers and disasters that our own brilliant human minds had created. I was a wanna-be hippie and a devoted peacenik, convinced that war was not the answer. I was haunted by Oppenheimer's quoting the Bhagavad Gita, after the test detonation called Trinity when he faced his own participation in the building of the atomic bomb: "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds."
Your characters were just so live and breathing on the page. I fell in love with Sophie, in particular. Can you talk about how you shape your characters? And what was it like writing about real, historical figures?
As I mentioned above, writing about historical people was an unfamiliar challenge for me. In certain ways I feel somewhat limited in my imagination, so it can be comforting to look for source material in documentation, but at the same time, I am extremely fearful about "making mistakes" or being accused of falsification. One of the most helpful pieces of advice I got along the way was in a conversation I had with E.L. Doctorow, when I asked him how he managed to work so brilliantly with real-life figures from history. He said (something like): "I just treat them like the rest of my characters. Portrait painters don't always just work realistically. We interpret." That gave me a lot of permission to be elastic with the kinds of facts and details I came across in my research.
Perhaps my favorite way of shaping characters is to ask them over and over again: What do you want? What are you afraid of? As for Sophie Levine, she is both like and unlike me in all sorts of ways. For one thing, in creating her, I wanted to imagine who I might have been if I'd been born ten years earlier. (Not surprisingly, I always wished I had been born earlier so as to be old enough to fully participate in the anti-war movement). I wanted to explore some of the alternate paths I might have taken in life (for example, going to medical school, as my mother had always urged). I truly loved the experience of seeing the world through her eyes.
The novel is such a fabulous and heady mix of history, that I was wondering about your research process. What surprised you? Did anything you learn turn the plot around for you?
Some of the most surprising things I learned had to do with the Mohawk history --- the living history --- of my hometown. When I was growing up, there were Native American names all over the place, but I thought the Iroquois Nation had been lost to the distant past. It probably never even occurred to me that I might meet a living member of the Mohawk tribe. When I did meet a Mohawk man --- by sheer coincidence, while traveling in Mexico --- my entire worldview shifted for good. You could say that the plot of my novel came as a delayed result of that encounter.
For the record, I feel the need to repeatedly confess that I am a sloppy and haphazard researcher. Each time I revised the manuscript, it seemed I had to delve yet again into the archives for some "perfect" item to make a scene come out right; magically it would always appear (usually in the place I had looked before, and not found anything). I am quite possibly the least organized novelist in the known world.
What's your writing life like? Do you have rituals? Do you outline?
Re: outlining, see confession above.
As for rituals, they mostly included relentless paths of avoidance, distraction, procrastination and despair. How I find my way out of that mess and into productivity remains a marvel to me. I'm serious.
I often tell my students that when Toni Morrison was asked "Where do you write?" she replied, "I type at my desk. I write all over the house." My version of an answer is "I write all over town, all over the world." I write while taking long walks in my neighborhood with my dog. I write while swimming. I write in my sleep (or so I'm inclined to believe).
To clarify, though, there is a huge difference for me between composing and revising. What I said just above has mainly to do with composing the earliest drafts and also perhaps an early phase of revising that is something maybe akin to architectural design or even choreography. Once the pages exist in a great big pile and the story has its shape and the characters are dimensional --- in other words, when it is time for the diligent task of improving and refining, polishing the facets, I am much more able to sit at a desk and focus.
What's obsessing you now and why?
Obsessing may be a strong-ish verb for this, but I'm fully committed to practicing gratitude on a daily if not hourly basis. I am acting on the belief that I can rewire my brain and place my attention on everything inside and around me that is already good, already enough, already perfect. Pardon me if this sounds embarrassingly optimistic (or naive or whatever).
If what you're really asking about is what writing project I'm working on next? It's most definitely too soon to talk about it.
What question didn't I ask that I should have?
THANK YOU FOR ASKING SUCH GREAT QUESTIONS!!!
October 1, 2014
Dylan Landis talks about her extraordinary RAINEY ROYAL, the turbulent 1970s, the sharp edges of girls, and so much more
It's been called captivating and unnerving. It gets under your skin like a thorn--and you want it there. Janet Fitch said, "It should carry a warning sign: do not read before bedtime." Joanna Rakoff called it "beautiful and brutal," and Roxane Gay said, "there's edge and tenderness and longing to be found." Dylan Landis' debut novel, Rainey Royal is all that, and more. About girlhood, sex, friendship and fighting for your place in the world, it's an absolute stunner.
Dylan is also the author of Normal People Don't Live Like This, and her fiction has appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories 2014, Bomb, Tin House, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She's won a fellowship in fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts and has written six books on decorating. I'm so thrilled to have Dylan here. Thank you, so much, Dylan!
Your first book was a collection of linked short stories. How difficult and/or strange was it to write a novel? Did anything about it surprise you?
The novel, Rainey Royal, also began as a set of tightly linked stories. So the surprise lay not in the writing but in revision, in going back and giving them the arc and the weight of a novel. It took much weaving and reweaving to work characters and iconic objects and subplots through the book from beginning to end. For example, a story about Rainey's Aunt Laurette became chapter 12, so Laurette now had to make earlier appearances. A story about a robbery became chapter 3, but the plunder from that robbery had to turn up elsewhere. Rainey's longing for her mother had to resonate throughout. I had to retrofit the book with unity and layers and resolution. That took a while.
Will your next work be a novel?
I hope so. I'm so in love with the distillation of the short story, the sprawl of the traditional novel does not come naturally to me. But I'm trying. A novel requires airspace and I'm working to embrace that, to learn to defer the action, not to frontload everything in the first fifteen pages for fear of losing the reader. And yet don't you have to start with a character in trouble? My favorite novel, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, takes its time unpacking the storyline, and I've probably read it ten times.
The setting, the turbulent 1970s, is very much a character here. What made you set the book during that time period, and in the Bohemian heart of New York City, and what was your research like?
I grew up in New York in the '60s, till I was twelve, and then in the suburbs through the '70s, but very city-connected. Those years every nerve ending was alive, and I remember so vividly how everything around me looked and smelled and sounded. It was the most intense setting I could bring to life from memory. It was dissolute and enthralling and our parents had no idea what we were doing. The Met was waiting to be explored and school was waiting to be cut and the music was charged with burgeoning sexuality and curfews were waiting to be broken and there was a sense of physical danger on some blocks, true or not. Kids were marching in Washington with their parents and it really mattered how your jeans fit. I don't have the same sensory access to any other decade, or to any other cities I've lived in and loved.
What I researched was jazz. I'm not remotely musical. I went online and watched people play instruments, so I would know how they moved. And I Googled "terminology of jazz" so I would have a vocabulary with some metaphorical freight, like when Tina thinks about the inner voice of the music, and of course of her own heart.
Rainey is an extraordinary creation, a tough, fierce, tender girl struggling to become an artist--and a person in her own right. Actually, all of the girls in the novel are astonishing. There’s such a dangerous edginess to the girls’ friendships, their sexual escapades, their lives. How did you go about crafting them?
One line of dialogue and gesture at a time, draft by draft by endless draft. It was a process of discovery. There was so much I didn't know about these girls until I wrote a couple of new lines and thought, Oh! So Tina's grandmother isn't blind—but Tina really does take care of her—and with such grace—I had no idea till I got there. Or that Rainey won't ask for a glass of milk from Gordy because milk feels too intimate—that sprang itself on me, like nearly everything else. All I knew for sure was that they had to have very sharp edges, these girls, and they had to be vulnerable where it didn't show. Andrea Barrett talks about how the "layers accrete" as she writes draft upon draft upon draft, and that was my experience.
What kind of writer are you? Do you put out a welcome mat for The Muse or do you outline everything until you have a solid skeleton?
The welcome mat's always out, but I don't wait for The Muse to enter. I try to just write, however badly. If I can't write, I revise. I've tried outlining for the novel I'm working on now, and sometimes it feels reassuring; it gives me something to write toward, a sense of direction. I like in particular the index-card method that Robert Olen Butler describes in From Where You Dream; it's a much looser version of an outline. But sometimes knowing too much makes me feel, as Robin Black says, like I'm doing a paint-by-numbers picture. With my best stories, I knew how a scene opened, but I didn't know the ending till I fell over it. So my answer lies in the middle of the spectrum you describe. Welcome mat, but don't wait. Think ahead just a little. Work in the dark.
And honestly if the Muse just peers in at the window I feel lucky.
What’s obsessing you now and why?
Hoarding and collecting and art, and the places where they might intersect, if they do. I saw a hoard when I was little, a newspaper hoard, and it overwhelmed and fascinated me, and I never forgot wanting to explore the pathway that led into it and see what secret lay beyond those towering stacks of newsprint. It was in a large storage room of the basement of our building, and I knew the porter lived back there. Rainey has an aunt who's a hoarder, and there's a hoarder in the novel I'm trying to write, though that project is shape-shifting as I work on it. I'm also fascinated by the way art exists in us as a drive apart from morality. Rainey's father says at one point, "An artist can't be a criminal," but of course that's not true. Rainey is an artist and she does something criminal at one point, and so does her father's musician-acolyte, Damien, who lives with them. Yet art can save us. It can hold us together when nothing else works.
What question didn’t I ask that I should have?
Rainey's been in two books—will she come back?
She's my alter ego. I miss her already. I'd love to write about her at an older age. I'd love to hear Rainey's voice in my head again.
September 30, 2014
Leora-Skolkin Smith talks about Edges, the culture of celebrity, the legacy of Grace Paley, the Israel and Palestine conflict, and more
The wonderful thing about books is that they can have second, third, and multiple lives. They can be reprinted, put into different formats, and made into movies (every writer's dream!). Leora Skolkin-Smith's Edges has just been reissued, and the timing is important, because it's a novel that explores the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Edges was nominated for the 2006 PEN/Faulkner Award and The PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award by Grace Paley; a National Women Studies Association Conference Selection; a Bloomsbury Review Pick, 2006: “Favorite Books of the Last 25 Years”; a Jewish Book Council Selection, 2005; and won the 2008 Earphones Award for an original audio production narrated by Tovah Feldshuh.Her other novel, Hystera was selected by Princeton University for their "The Fertile Crescent Moon: Women Writers Writing About their Past in the Middle East." It was also the winner of the 2012 USA Book Award and the 2012 Global E-Books Award, as well as a finalist in the International Book Awards and the National Indie Excellence Awards.
I'm so honored to host Leora here! Thank you, Leora!
1. The writer Oscar Hijeulos said: “Edges is an elegantly written, quite moving novel that has a lot to say about love, identity, history and the meaning of nationality.” Can you explain why he chose those words to describe Edges?
What I was trying for was to present Jerusalem to the reader through the eyes of a young woman whose mother’s grew up in Palestine, now vanishing, but never talked about it. After my character, Liana’s, father commits suicide she is left to this wild and fascinating mother who fought in the Jewish underground and who holds a very unknown past. The mother returns to Israel with her daughter after the father’s death. For the daughter, it began to feel that this young Israel and Palestine were coming of age at the same time she was and the geography and canvas of Jerusalem became a silent guide to how each was experiencing their growth, reflecting each other in interesting ways. The language of the body and nature is always important to me. The landscape became a story-teller all unto itself. What brings in the meaning of national identity and history is that the mother, though Jewish and part of a family that had been in Palestine for generations, can’t find her old home, Palestine when she returns, taking her daughter with her. The turbulent changes, the wars, the buried history of early Palestine is repeatedly held hostage to the border hostilities between Arab and Jew, and the effects of the formation of the state of Israel and all that came with that. So in a sense the mother is stateless. Identity for both mother and daughter had to be an internal one, sexual identity of the daughter was also confused by the lack of borders between her mother and herself, as boundry-less as the land itself. In this sense, I wanted to ask questions about nationality, identity, history and of course, love, as the bonds of mother are daughter are broken by the emergence of an American diplomats son into the story who take the daughter away from her mother.
2. I always want to know what generates a book for an author, so what inspired this one?
For me, this novel was really the work of more than twenty-five years of failures. I could not understand how to write through my own personal experiences with Israel and Palestine, the conflicts I had with a troubled mother who was taken from Palestine to affluent New York and was an outsider there. But when the Persian Gulf Crisis broke out and the situation for the Palestinians and Israelis became severely inflamed, I felt had to integrate all I had heard as a child, if only for myself. The drive was there all along, though when I was taken as a young child to such a mysterious and often frightening country as Israel was back then. But when the Persian Gulf Crisis happened, I felt more urgency for some reason. I don’t think I’m a political person, so that wasn’t it. It was that I was witnessing the erasure of a whole tribe of people virtually forgotten as history rang its self-righteous bells. One doesn’t read much about Palestinian Jews, so I felt like was working from blanks in my own education too but not in my sensual and very real memory banks which held all those family stories of early Palestine vital and sensually alive for me.
3. After all critical attention Edges won (and I understand Grace Paley nominated it for the prestigious PEN/Faulkner award) was it difficult to write the next book or did it make it easier? Did you find that the whole process of writing the book was different somehow, and if so, how?
Yes! It was terrible. I really didn’t have another book to go to! It was hard when Grace died because I lost all that stalwart support, I felt lost in some forest of others who scared and intimidated me without Grace. But now, ten years later I’m finishing my new novel and pleased.
4. You worked closely with Grace Paley. Tell us a little bit about what that was like.
I wrote an essay about her for the Quarterly Review a few years back, after she died. I think it told what I knew of her as the writer. It was called “The Legacy of Grace Paley”. What I most remember about her personal is her vaudevillian sense of things. She could make the world's horrors and your own grimest moments, all the dark places luminous, and jokes weren’t just jokes, but a power to not feel like a leaf in the wind, thrown to the world’s chaos. Humor was very important to her. And she was quite a vaudevillian, a real performer. Everything was for the work of either living, working or writing, just that you came by things honestly. Grace, she could turn words into a flip and make them tumble around. She was a tumbling expert I always thought. There were also many Interruptions whenever I visited her but then she made the interruptions seem fascinating. She was a woman who wrote about women’s lives, ordinary lives, she wasn’t interested in the famous, and she was among the first to ever reveal women’s lusts, inner lives, feelings about family obligations and dailiness with such a clear eye. And no one wanted to read such stories before Grace! Much more. There will always be much more to say about Grace.
5. What's your writing life like? How do you plan your books, or do you? I’m all over the place, I write doing the dishes. I write when I’m supposed at a social gathering and paying attention. But I have absolutely no routine.
5. What’s obsessing you now and why?
I’m obsessed with the culture of celebrity and consumerist art and writing find myself in. And with the feelings of, being an outsider and trying to not feel that, but also asking what is an outsider? Can that be mire meaningful and gratifying in a way? I ’m writing a book set in the literary 80’s, which I saw as the time when writing books really changed, and the celebrity cults began. I’m also writing about de-institutionalization, which happened under Reagan and was tragic. My character is a mentally ill women who feel ill in her mid twenties and keeps having multiple hospitalizations but truly finds the people in the hospital and the homeless she “socializes” with in the streets more meaningful than the places she can’t belong to or feel comfortable in outside society
7. What question didn't I ask that I should have?
None, and thank Caroline for having me!
Edges was nominated for the 2006 PEN/Faulkner Award and The PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award by Grace Paley; a National Women Studies Association Conference Selection; a Bloomsbury Review Pick, 2006: “Favorite Books of the Last 25 Years”; a Jewish Book Council Selection, 2005; and won the 2008 Earphones Award for an original audio production narrated by Tovah Feldshuh.Her other novel, Hystera was selected by Princeton University for their "The Fertile Crescent Moon: Women Writers Writing About their Past in the Middle East." It was also the winner of the 2012 USA Book Award and the 2012 Global E-Books Award, as well as a finalist in the International Book Awards and the National Indie Excellence Awards.
I'm so honored to host Leora here! Thank you, Leora!
1. The writer Oscar Hijeulos said: “Edges is an elegantly written, quite moving novel that has a lot to say about love, identity, history and the meaning of nationality.” Can you explain why he chose those words to describe Edges?
What I was trying for was to present Jerusalem to the reader through the eyes of a young woman whose mother’s grew up in Palestine, now vanishing, but never talked about it. After my character, Liana’s, father commits suicide she is left to this wild and fascinating mother who fought in the Jewish underground and who holds a very unknown past. The mother returns to Israel with her daughter after the father’s death. For the daughter, it began to feel that this young Israel and Palestine were coming of age at the same time she was and the geography and canvas of Jerusalem became a silent guide to how each was experiencing their growth, reflecting each other in interesting ways. The language of the body and nature is always important to me. The landscape became a story-teller all unto itself. What brings in the meaning of national identity and history is that the mother, though Jewish and part of a family that had been in Palestine for generations, can’t find her old home, Palestine when she returns, taking her daughter with her. The turbulent changes, the wars, the buried history of early Palestine is repeatedly held hostage to the border hostilities between Arab and Jew, and the effects of the formation of the state of Israel and all that came with that. So in a sense the mother is stateless. Identity for both mother and daughter had to be an internal one, sexual identity of the daughter was also confused by the lack of borders between her mother and herself, as boundry-less as the land itself. In this sense, I wanted to ask questions about nationality, identity, history and of course, love, as the bonds of mother are daughter are broken by the emergence of an American diplomats son into the story who take the daughter away from her mother.
2. I always want to know what generates a book for an author, so what inspired this one?
For me, this novel was really the work of more than twenty-five years of failures. I could not understand how to write through my own personal experiences with Israel and Palestine, the conflicts I had with a troubled mother who was taken from Palestine to affluent New York and was an outsider there. But when the Persian Gulf Crisis broke out and the situation for the Palestinians and Israelis became severely inflamed, I felt had to integrate all I had heard as a child, if only for myself. The drive was there all along, though when I was taken as a young child to such a mysterious and often frightening country as Israel was back then. But when the Persian Gulf Crisis happened, I felt more urgency for some reason. I don’t think I’m a political person, so that wasn’t it. It was that I was witnessing the erasure of a whole tribe of people virtually forgotten as history rang its self-righteous bells. One doesn’t read much about Palestinian Jews, so I felt like was working from blanks in my own education too but not in my sensual and very real memory banks which held all those family stories of early Palestine vital and sensually alive for me.
3. After all critical attention Edges won (and I understand Grace Paley nominated it for the prestigious PEN/Faulkner award) was it difficult to write the next book or did it make it easier? Did you find that the whole process of writing the book was different somehow, and if so, how?
Yes! It was terrible. I really didn’t have another book to go to! It was hard when Grace died because I lost all that stalwart support, I felt lost in some forest of others who scared and intimidated me without Grace. But now, ten years later I’m finishing my new novel and pleased.
4. You worked closely with Grace Paley. Tell us a little bit about what that was like.
I wrote an essay about her for the Quarterly Review a few years back, after she died. I think it told what I knew of her as the writer. It was called “The Legacy of Grace Paley”. What I most remember about her personal is her vaudevillian sense of things. She could make the world's horrors and your own grimest moments, all the dark places luminous, and jokes weren’t just jokes, but a power to not feel like a leaf in the wind, thrown to the world’s chaos. Humor was very important to her. And she was quite a vaudevillian, a real performer. Everything was for the work of either living, working or writing, just that you came by things honestly. Grace, she could turn words into a flip and make them tumble around. She was a tumbling expert I always thought. There were also many Interruptions whenever I visited her but then she made the interruptions seem fascinating. She was a woman who wrote about women’s lives, ordinary lives, she wasn’t interested in the famous, and she was among the first to ever reveal women’s lusts, inner lives, feelings about family obligations and dailiness with such a clear eye. And no one wanted to read such stories before Grace! Much more. There will always be much more to say about Grace.
5. What's your writing life like? How do you plan your books, or do you? I’m all over the place, I write doing the dishes. I write when I’m supposed at a social gathering and paying attention. But I have absolutely no routine.
5. What’s obsessing you now and why?
I’m obsessed with the culture of celebrity and consumerist art and writing find myself in. And with the feelings of, being an outsider and trying to not feel that, but also asking what is an outsider? Can that be mire meaningful and gratifying in a way? I ’m writing a book set in the literary 80’s, which I saw as the time when writing books really changed, and the celebrity cults began. I’m also writing about de-institutionalization, which happened under Reagan and was tragic. My character is a mentally ill women who feel ill in her mid twenties and keeps having multiple hospitalizations but truly finds the people in the hospital and the homeless she “socializes” with in the streets more meaningful than the places she can’t belong to or feel comfortable in outside society
7. What question didn't I ask that I should have?
None, and thank Caroline for having me!
Amy Impellizzeri talks about Lemongrass Hope, writing, and so much more
Amy Impellizzeri knows the terrors of being a first novelist, and she's written a wonderful essay about dealing with them. Her first novel Lemongrass Hope was called a "layered, bittersweet romance" by the notoriously cranky Kirkus Reviews, and New York Times bestselling author, Jacquelyn Mitchard called it "a truly new story. Impellizzeri is a bold and tender writer, who makes the impossible feel not only real, but strangely familiar."
Lemongrass Hope, about love, time travel, and what lasts, is haunting, mesmerizing and unforgettable. Thanks for writing an essay for the blog, Amy!
I was sitting on my bedroom floor with the pages of what would later become my first novel strewn all over the place like they were auditioning as a new carpet.
On any given day, I loved them and I hated them.
But on that day, I hated them.
They were staring at me like lost children. Like Ishould somehow be the one in control. Like I should know.
But, instead, it wasthey who were controlling me. Taunting me with their 143 occasions of the word “whispered” (Wait! There’s another one. 144. And counting.)
Taunting me with their mistaken uses of lay/lain. With their “something is not quite right here with the structure of your story” – they chided me petulantly and I rubbed my eyes, as I thought about how easy it would be to just.give.up.
We went on like that, day after day, week after week, month after month. The pages and I. No – the wordsand I. A dance for control. We got into each other’s heads. We danced some more. Got into each other’s heads some more.
I started to believe something about the pages – about the words.
The end. It’s the end that’s bothering me.
The end was haunting me.
One night I woke from a dead sleep at 2 am, and I wrote and wrote as if I was possessed. For weeks and then months, I wrote, and re-wrote and edited.
The words and I danced and I no longer even tried tried to control them. I let them take shape. The way they wanted. The story unfolded in ways I never realized it could.
It was at that point - oddly enough – that the end stopped haunting me.
I wrote and wrote, and re-wrote and edited.
But not the end.
I left the end alone.
Because I realized that it was the beginning that had been haunting me all along.
And one day, I said to my publisher “Should I-?”
“No,” she said. “It’s finished. It’s ready.”
“Not even the end?”
“Especially not the end.”
Yet, despite her words, her assurances, and the fact that the novel has been sent to print, I’m still haunted.
I write more words, and I sit with them on my bedroom floor, pages strewn all over the place like they are auditioning as a new carpet.
I love them and I hate them.
They are the beginning of something new, and I am starting to realize that the beginning will always be what haunts me.
Not the end.
Because when you write – when you have to write, of course, - there is no end.
September 29, 2014
Sheila Weller talks about The News Sorority, humanity, Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer, Christiane Amanpour, sexist news, and so much more
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After I devoured her book GIrls Like Us, about Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Carly Simon and the music industry, I couldn't wait to see what she was going to do next. And it turned out to be The News Sorority, about three more fascinating women: Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric and Christiane Amanpour.<br /></span></span></span></span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">I asked Sheila a bunch of questions, and she's written her answers in a fascinating riff that doesn't require my questions repeated here at all. I can't thank you enough, Sheila!<br /><br /> I love your questions, Caroline. Like me, you’re super-curious and enthusiastic.<br /><br /> Here’s what happened: After Girls Like Us was such a gratifying critical and commercial success, people said, You should do another three-woman book, but I resisted. I confabbed with an editor I’d had in the past and we came up with first one, then a second, single-living-woman biography idea. The first was to do a biography of Gloria Steinem. But there were already two biographies of Steinem out – one, an authorized one by an esteemed (now dead; she committed Kervorkian-like self-chosen suicide) feminist, and, though the early chapters were good, it was teeth-achingly hagiographic and cheerleaderly. But there was a second, by a virtually unknown writer (and the book got almost no attention --- or sales), and it was GOOD. Really good, and thorough. So it seemed like there was nothing fantastically new to say . Also a close friend of Steinem’s essentially talked me out of it, by saying: It’s all been said. I took that as polite code for: And, anyway, people won’t talk without Gloria’s permission and that may be hard. Idea nixed. (And, by the way, Sheila Nevins’s HBO special on Steinem – a fantastic hero/she-ro – was great.<br /><br /> Second idea with this same editor (see, I’m telling you more than I’ve told anyone else, because we’re writer-to-writer shop-talking): Michelle Obama biography. HarperCollins actually gave me a contract for it just before the election. The money was kind of “If you can pull this off, great; if not, we won’t lose our shirts on the gamble” kind of money. Liza Mundy’s biog of Michelle had just come out, and it was both good and also…slightly nervously hagiographic., or inhibited, or both. I said to myself, “I just don’t think a white woman can – or should -- do this particular book.” When a very big-deal political writer friend of mine said, “The Obamas have signed Bob Barnett” – the DC mega-lawyer-book-agent who EVERY DC bigwig hires for book deals – “and he never lets his clients, who may be doing memoirs years down the line, give access to people in their inner circles to other writers,” that’s when I realized it couldn’t be done well. (But I will say this: The White House responded to my e-mails more quickly than the network executives and producers I subsequently begged to talk to.)<br /><br /> So I turned that book contract back, unsigned, and, with a new agent (whom I adore), decided that the whole idea of how women re-made the concept of what news IS was a juicy topic. I have been a writer for lots of years, and I have seen how many things -- feminism, the human enlightenment movement, the diversity movement, popular psychology, the elevation of celebrity news to a place where it’s seen to MIRROR our lives, the proliferation of upscale tragedies and scandals (the Menendez brothers, OJ, JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy) and political sex scandals (Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill, Clinton/Lewinsky), the elevation of family dynamics and work-life issues to respectable news-worthiness: how all of these things, which would never have been “news” in the mid’60s has become what news is, along with politics and war. So I thought of a book about three women who rode that wave and helped MAKE that wave. And it was clear that the three most charismatic, distinctive, influential, and years-long successful women in TV news were Diane, Katie and Christiane.<br /><br /> But as I began interviewing for the book, and researching their lives, and discovering how something as seemingly “liberal” as TV news was so hide-boundly sexist, the focus changed from the women riding the wave of a changing conception of news to three women who woke up every morning of their lives never taking NO for an answer.<br /><br /> Gee, I’ve been talk-typing a lot. Did I answer your question?<br /><br /> Oh, no I see I didn’t – you asked me about their “humanity,” and I am really glad you did, because there’s been so much cherry-picking by the tabloid media (not that we don’t sometimes love the tabloid media) about their “catfights” (when women are aggressive, they’re indulging in cat fights; when men are aggressive, they’re doing their jobs), that the humanity which all three of them have brandished personally and professionally throughout their careers has been lost.<br /><br /> Their humanity. Some examples: Women in general intertwine their aggressive work lives with responsibilities to their families and abiding alliances to their friends…also with charity and philanthropy to strangers. All three of these women, as busy as they were, did that. Family came first to all three – Christiane dropped her CNN work (just as she was finally ascending) on a dime to rush from NY to England when her youngest sister had a leg amputated after a bike crash…and she risked life and limb for 15 years telling some of the most poignant, urgent stories of crises and brutal unfairness to women and children in ignored parts of the globe on CNN and CBS. And, while she was nabbing her exclusives with Mubarek and Ghadaffi during the Arab spring, she was simultaneously planning the details of a book party she was throwing in New York the minute she arrived home for a good friend.<br /><br /> Katie? For Katie, family and friends always came first. She’s had the same girlfriends from childhood. She once interrupted an interview with General Petraeus in his helicopter over Afghanistan to call a doctor in New York to make an appointment for a friend’s college-aged son, whose cold seemed, to Katie, suspiciously trenchant. She’s saved hundreds of thousands of lives, literally, by telling a reluctant and squeamish America about colon cancer --- how easily it can be avoided, a sad reality she and her late husband Jay Monahan did NOT know in time. Katie’s anti-cancer activism is among the strongest of any celebrity, in any field – and she has had a key hand in raising $230 million in cancer treatment and research (including funding clinical trials) over 15 years. And she’s funny as hell! And hates pomposity. When she was the Princeton commencement speaker, in the first line of her speech to the cap-and-gown’d graduates, she slyly offered the fact that the National Enquirer called her a “cougar.” Who the F else sitting in Walter Cronkite’s “hallowed” chair would do that? That’s humanity…and with wit.<br /><br /> Diane? Diane is first of all so close to her mother, her mother is still the most important judge of her life. Diane is under her urbane glamour and life with her husband, the ultra-sophisticated Mike Nichols, a good Southern Methodist girl who believes in “purpose,” in doing good. Diane is an extraordinary compassionate friend and giver – and most of it is anonymous. From my book:<br /><br /> “Diane’s generosity has been quietly known within her circle of colleagues for years. She is such a good friend that “if you get sick, forget about it—she’s calling a van to the rescue,” says someone. [Producer]Ira Rosen concurs: “She is simply the best foul-weather friend in the business. If, God forbid, something bad is happening in your life, she will go through every doctor she knows. When Anthony Radziwill was dying of cancer, she spent days on the phone [calling doctors and] tryingto save his life.” She did the same for a colleague who had pancreatic cancer. Private school tuitions for kids of single moms she barely knows, beach camps for children who never saw an ocean, surgeries for family members of a studio tech and an elevator operator, all done anonymously, with the recipients not knowing the source: “You could fill a stadium with the people she’s helped,” says Mark Robertson. On long international flights, she’d often force her first-class seats on her young producers while taking their coach seats. Eventually, when she took over the anchorship of ABC World News, she bought the whole staff gym memberships, each one including a trainer.” In addition, her ten or so years of specials on impoverished and at-risk children in America – award-winning, policy-influencing --<br /><br /> And, as I say at the end of the book, summing up their humanity:<br /><br /><br />“There’s a flip side of resilience, and that is vulnerability. says, “All three of these women are strong, but they’re still very vulnerability.” As Jeff Zucker” [long Katie’s producer, then head of NBC-Universal, now head of CNN] says, “All three of these women are vulnerable. It’s a very hard business, to put yourself out there” where millions see you daily, “every day, on the line. And be graded every day by people who have never had the courage to do this. Having the courage to put yourself out there every day: it says something about all three of these women.”<br /><br /> <br /><br />Ginny Vicario, the first female camera operator ever hired by a network, who has collaborated with them all, takes it further. She says: “Diane, Katie, and Christiane have worked their asses off. But with that hard work has come compassion, in the stories they’ve told, in the stories they’ve chosen to tell, and in their lives. Power has not taken that away. If anything, it has increased it.”<br /><br /> All three of these women modeled a reality of success that was different from past models. The more powerful they became, the more interested in people they became. They remained profoundly committed to telling the stories of ordinary Americans, unfairly besieged victims, people in cataclysms and crises, fascinating celebrities both worthy and spoiled, world leaders both benign and heinous. They passionately kept up their commitments to their families, friends, and needy strangers through both improvised<br /><br />and formal philanthropies. They remembered what they had pushed past—grief, danger, tragedy—and the more they saw and reported, the more they folded the new experiences into those primary lessons. As intensely competitive as they have been, each of them had a moral brake on runaway power. They asked, “Where’s the heart?” (Diane) or they considered their network colleagues their cherished “family” (Christiane) or they knew that that “other side”—the “payback” side—of their luck and bounty existed (Katie). Whatever their idiosyncrasies, whatever their egos, whatever their aggressiveness and ambition, they retained an experienced kernel of humbling reality, and it controlled their choices and their consciences. From Three Mile Island to the Arab Spring, from the Gulf War to Bosnia to Iraq to Syria, from Columbine to 9/11 to the Haiti and Japanese earthquakes, from Matthew Shepard to Whitney Houston to Hosni Mubarek, from cancer awareness to corruption to genocide to childhood poverty, we got the news from them. And we also got from them what is underneath the news, what is underneath all news: We got humanity.”<br /><br />WHY DIDN’T I INTERVIEW THE WOMEN?<br /><br /> <br /><br />Katie and Diane declined to be interviewed and by the time Christiane assented to be included and give me access to her friends and family – and she was in England, anyway – I didn’t want to unbalance things by asking her alone.<br /><br /> <br /><br /> You get more from people’s intimates than you do from very “managed” (as these would be) interviews with women who are the most sophisticated interviewers in the world.<br /><br /> <br /><br />I suppose I could have wrangled and wangled and begged to get some questions answered by them, but after five years of begging most of the other 200 people for interviews, I was exhausted. And I felt, from the interviews they gave to others (celebrities --- even in news – will always give selected interviews to magazines and newspapers, because it helps sell and promote their shows; the PR departments are in favor of this; but they do not want to give interviews for someone else’s BOOK about them), that they would be charming, facile, guarded, articulate…and that I would not get anything new. While also, in the bargain, having to make certain promises or give certain access/information to their publicists in exchange.<br /><br /> <br /><br />I didn’t interview any of my GIRLS LIKE US except Carly (and she came to ME, bless her), and, at that, in a limited way.<br /><br />WHERE DO I SEE NETWORK NEWS GOING NOW?<br /><br /> Not much of anywhere. These three women;s prominence coincided with what you might call the Golden Age</span></span></span></span><i><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></span></span></i></div>
September 18, 2014
Bill Roorbach talks about The Remedy for Love, being "the poet of hopeless tangles," writing, being a judge on the Food Network, and so much more
<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Arial; panose-1:2 11 6 4 2 2 2 2 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536859905 -1073711037 9 0 511 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:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; 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-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:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} strong {mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} .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:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; 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"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2788O7gMYuE..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2788O7gMYuE..." /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fmfUmX0IpGs..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fmfUmX0IpGs..." height="320" width="213" /></a></div><br /><br /><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> I first met Bill Roorbach at an Algonquin Books Party, amidst party chaos. When I really met him was at the Tucson Book Festival, where we got to hang out and talk, and I realized what a smart, hilarious, and truly wonderful guy he is. Of course I stalk him on FaceBook, and of course, I've a huge fan of his work, which is brilliant, blazingly alive, and full of surprises. His newest, THE REMEDY FOR LOVE is about two lost souls, struggling to survive a blizzard--and each other.</span></i><br /><br /><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Bill's self-written bio is so funny, I'm going to just post it here: Bill is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, including the Flannery O'Connor Prize and O. Henry Prize winner Big Bend , Into Woods Temple Stream, and Life Among Giants. The 10th anniversary edition of his craft book, Writing Life Stories, is used in writing programs around the world. </span></i><br /><br /><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Recently, Bill was a judge on Food Network All Star Challenge, evaluating incredible Life Stories cakes made under the gun, so to speak. Bill knows nothing about cake, but he knows a lot about life stories! </span></i><br /><br /><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">His work has been published in Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, New York, and dozens of other magazines and journals. His story "Big Bend" was featured on NPR's "Selected Shorts," read by actor James Cromwell at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Bill has taught at the University of Maine at Farmington, Colby College, and Ohio State. His last academic position was the Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts. He has now retired from academia in order to write full time. A comic video memoir about his tragic music career, "I Used to Play in Bands," and all kinds of other work, including a current blog on writers and writing and just about everything else (with author David Gessner) is online at www.billanddavescocktailhour.com.<... <br /><div class="MsoNormal"><i><br /></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #6d381b;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Thanks Bill for being here! Next time you're in NYC, I am so buying you pie.</span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #6d381b; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 7.0pt;">I have to ask you about your being called by Kirkus, in a starred review, “the poet of hopeless tangles.” Explain yourself, please!</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 7.0pt;">I think Kirkus needs to explain that!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I do love it, not even sure what it means.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They loved <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life Among Giants</i>, too, which is a mess of love and other knots.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Remedy</i>, a very different book, really is a tangle, a ball of string, all these loose ends to pull on, everything connected, or maybe not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Knot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think is what they’re saying.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #6d381b; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 7.0pt;"> </span><span style="color: #6d381b; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 7.0pt;">I seem to remember seeing different titles for The Remedy of Love. Is that true or am I hallucinating? And if so, how did you come to call it The Remedy of Love?</span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 7.0pt;">The working title was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Storm of the Century</i>, but Kathy Pories, my editor at Algonquin, reported that people there thought it sounded too non-fiction-y.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Plus, I’d given it a Google and someone named Stephen King (also a Maine author), had already used it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We kept thinking and trying titles and falling half in love with one or another idea before rejecting it, even as time was running short. </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Then, middle of the last possible night, I remembered that my friend Liesel Litzenburger, who is a novelist herself (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Now You Love Me, The Widower</i>) and an all-around genius, is also a kind of title savant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can tell her in a few words about your characters and story, and without skipping a beat or taking a breath she’ll calmly tell you your title.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, even though we hadn’t been in touch for a few years, I sent her a very brief description of the book via email, plus a title idea we’d gotten from Thoreau.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Not four minutes later she shot back a reply, mostly tongue in cheek, but not entirely: “</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Well... yes to Thoreau, but you have to get the word “love” in there to double your sales as you are male, so the HDT quote from his journals, after being shot down in<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a marriage proposal: ‘The only remedy for love is to love more.’ So then you have <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Remedy for Love</i>…”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I knew that was it, and tried it on Kathy, and with a quick adjustment to the article, we were done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thanks, Liesel!</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination: none;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #6d381b; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 7.0pt;">I always want to know what sparked a particular book, so what generated this one?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">A few winters ago I went grocery shopping before a snowstorm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As I was driving out of the parking lot, I spotted a young woman carrying, like, ten bags of groceries along the verge of the no-sidewalk commercial strip in our rural town here in Maine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I recognized her slightly from her job at one of the thrift stores and stopped to offer her a ride. That’s all. </span>She was grateful and explained that she was newlywed and that their truck had broken and they didn’t have the money yet to fix it—transmission.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those stories about the pressures of being newlywed, of just starting out in the world!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I found it touching, this new couple with their private struggles, doing their best, living on cuddles and Pop Tarts and minimum wage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I dropped her at her incredibly tiny house (several miles from the store, what was she thinking?).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But when I got home, snow starting to fall, I realized her groceries were still in the back of my car!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’d driven off with them!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I roared back in the snow fifteen minutes to her house and popped the hatchback and gathered all ten bags by their plastic handles as she had done and knocked on her door with my forehead.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, not like what happens in the book, but it got me thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What if she really didn’t have a home to go to?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We have a problem here called rural homelessness, much less visible than city homelessness, and winter turns it into crisis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pretty soon I was inventing my characters… </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #6d381b; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 7.0pt;"> </span><span style="color: #6d381b; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 7.0pt;">Both Eric and Danielle are so distinct and fascinating. They never act as anticipated, and they have so many layers to them. How do you go about building a character? </span> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 7.0pt;">Really, truly, I just write.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I start with a thin premise, get the people moving and talking, talking, and pretty soon they begin having deep reality, real presence, and whole complex lives, nothing to do with me, certainly to do with all I know about the world, but characters have their own lives, and often I’ll have to do research, both formal and conversational.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Making a character is like meeting someone new and gradually getting to know them as you draft.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By the end of a rough first go, you know enough to go back and get all the early stuff right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #6d381b; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 7.0pt;">After all the accolades Life Among Giants won, was it more difficult to write your next book? Or did that make it easier? Did you find that the whole process of writing the book was different somehow, and if so, how?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 7.0pt;">It was harder and easier both.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Harder just because the new book was so different from the old, easier because I had the sense that there were readers out there…<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And of course these are my 8<sup>th</sup> and 9<sup>th</sup> books, respectively…<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The process for each book has been different, and each book very different from the last, I can’t explain it…<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m always trying to do the thing I can’t do, and just making it harder for myself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life Among Giants</i> was a big, sweeping narrative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Remedy for Love</i> is more intimate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life Among Giants </i>had dozens of characters operating over several decades, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Remedy for Love</i> is two people, one location, a few days, though back story fills it out considerably…<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="color: #6d381b;"><br /><br />You’re in the astonishing position of being involved in the making of an HBO TV series of Life Among Giants. How amazing is that? What surprises you about all of it? And what did you expect? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 7.0pt;">It’s so fascinating and really fun, bringing my characters into a new medium and a new reality with the help and full collaboration of some really brilliant people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hadn’t watched much TV at all in life, and never any of these great premium cable dramas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I did my homework, which was watching complete sets of all the great shows.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was really impressed with some of them, stuff everyone I know had already seen years before, like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sopranos</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s not uniformly great, but much of it is great indeed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I found myself saying, This is where narrative has gone to live! And it’s where people go—the masses, I mean—for their daily human requirement of stories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who knew?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My hope is to make a great show.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We just finished the pilot script.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course there are many more hurdles to leap, such as, will HBO actually order the pilot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We shall see.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m feeling awfully good about it, and hopeful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I haven’t quit my day job, which is writing novels.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #6d381b; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 7.0pt;"><br />What’s obsessing you now and why?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 7.0pt;">Home maintenance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a creaky old place, and I’ve been working on it twenty years, long enough that stuff I built—I was in construction for some years when I was young—now needs upkeep!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Plus, we have embarked on yet another a major renovation, this time with professional help: tearing the old deteriorated porch down and building a new one that will be useable year-round, effectively making our house bigger, but in fact not changing the shape or look much at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the whole house will be warmer and dryer and prettier.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #6d381b; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 7.0pt;">Will you be touring?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where can people see you?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 7.0pt;">Here’s my tour schedule, with warm thanks to Algonquin, the best publisher in the world, for putting it together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And if your readers come see me and mention your name (and give the secret handshake, like this), they will get a valuable free prize.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or at least a drink at the nearest watering hole:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Tuesday, October 14<sup>th</sup>, </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">7 p.m: Longfellow Books, Portland, Maine</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Thursday, October 16<sup>th, </sup></span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">7 p.m: Jesup Library, Bar Harbor, Maine</span><sup><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"></span></sup></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Friday, October 17<sup>th</sup>, 7 p.m: <sup><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></sup></span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Emery Center, UMF, Farmington, Maine</span><sup><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"></span></sup></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Wednesday, October 22, </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Noon:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Portland Public Library</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Thursday, October 23</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">, 7 p.m: Lithgow Public Library, Augusta, Maine</span><sup><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"></span></sup></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Friday, October 24<sup>th</sup>, </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">7 p.m:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Magers and Quinn Books,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Minneapolis, MN [A Whiskey Tour event!]</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Saturday, October 25<sup>th</sup> and 26<sup>th</sup>, </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Texas Book Festival, Austin, TX [A Whiskey Tour event!]</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Monday, October 27<sup>th</sup>, </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">8 p.m: Books and Books,</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"> </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Coral Gables, FL [</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">A Whiskey Tour event!]</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Thursday, October 30<sup>th</sup>, 6 p.m: Watermark Books</span><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">, Wichita Kansas</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"> </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 14.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Saturday, November </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">1<sup>st</sup>, 2 p.m: Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop, Denver, CO </span><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Monday, November 3<sup>rd</sup>, noon, Boulder Book Store, Boulder, CO</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Tuesday, November 4<sup>th</sup>, </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">7:30 p.m: Book Bar, Denver, CO</span><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Wednesday, November 5<sup>th</sup>, </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">7:30 p.m: Booksmith, </span><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">San Francisco, CA </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Thursday, November 6<sup>th</sup>, </span><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">7 p.m: Rakestraw Books, Danville, CA </span><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Monday, November 10<sup>th</sup>, </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">7:30 PM: Powell’s Books (Hawthorne)</span><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">, Portland, OR 97214</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Tuesday, November 11<sup>th</sup>, </span><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">6 p.m: University Books</span><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">,</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"> <span style="background: white;">Bellevue, WA</span></span><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Monday, November 17<sup>th</sup>, </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">7:00 p.m: <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Talking Leaves Books, Buffalo, NY</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Tuesday, November 18<sup>th</sup>, </span><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">7:00 p.m:<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>RiverRun Books, Portsmouth, NH 03801</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" /><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" /></span><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Monday, November 24<sup>th</sup>, </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">7:15 p.m: Georgia Center for the Book</span><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"> </span><b><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">at DeKalb County Public Library</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" /><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" /></span><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Tuesday, November 25<sup>th</sup></span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">, 7:00 p.m: Politics and Prose </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Washington, DC </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>
September 12, 2014
Tour de Blog: My leg of the "My Writing Process Blog Tour!"
I was invited to participate in the MY WRITING PROCESS BLOG TOUR by the most wonderful Bill Roorbach and Dave Gessner who run the smart, hip and funny blog, Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour. I know Bill personally and he's not only hilarious fun to be with, but he's generous, smart, and a truly extraordinary writer. Not only did he write the sublime Life Among Giants, (winner of the Maine Prize), but his newest, The Remedy for Love, will be coming out this October, and I plan to have Bill on my blog. He’s the author of eight novels, including the Flannery O’Connor Prize and O’Henry Prize winner Big Bend, Into Woods, and Temple Stream,
I don't know Dave personally, but any friend of Bill's is a friend of mine. Dave Gessner is the author of nine books, and his latest All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and The American West will be out in April. He’s won the 2012 Reed Award for Best Book on the Southern Environment and the Association for Study of Literature and the Environment’s award for best book of creative writing in 2011 and 2012. And he’s a sure bet for winning the national championship in ultimate Frisbee.
Not only do you want both these guys hanging out with you over dinner, you want to buy all their books.
So without further ado, here are the questions, my answers, and my nomination for the next log of the blog tour!
1. What are you working on?
I’m trying to let go of my novel Cruel Beautiful World and get it to my agent and then to Algonquin, even though I’m six months early on deadline, which never happens. Then I need to immediately start on something else because otherwise the paranoia, fear, and anxiety over letting a novel go will begin to eat me alive. It's better to focus that obsessiveness on something new.
2. How does your work differ from others of its genre?
I never understand what the word genre means, unless a book has dragons in it (then it is sci-fi), or Fabio on the cover with a woman in a tight dress (then it’s romance). I try to write what feels truest to me, and trust that I'm odd or unique enough to give whatever I'm writing about my own spin.
3. Why do you write what you do?
If I didn’t write, I’d probably need a constant IV drip of Valium. I write about the questions that haunt me. How do you find community when you are an outsider? How do forgive the unforgivable? How do you live with yourself when you can’t make things right? I never know the answers until I finish the novel, and it’s not always the answer that I hope to see. I write about my deepest fears in an attempt to understand and defuse them. (Doesn’t always work, but I keep trying.)
4. How does your writing process work?
Ha. I wish I knew. I always start with something that obsesses me, and it’s almost always around character. I always feel that people dig down and struggle to find their best selves when they are in the midst of their worst disasters. I am big on story structure. I know some writers hate making outlines and synopsis and all of that, but to me, without knowing something of the shape of my novel, I might as well be driving from New York City for miles not knowing where I am going. At least if I know I am headed to San Francisco, then I have a destination. But I plot and plan by what I call moral structure. How does the character change by being forced to make difficult choices? I often call this the Rolling Stone’s method, because I am always thinking in terms of the character “not always getting what he or she wants, but if he or she tries hard enough, maybe, he or she can get what he or she needs.”
I do about 20 drafts. Not kidding. I show to three trusted readers. Then I rewrite. Then I show again. Then I rewrite. Writing is re-re-re-rewriting.
For the next stop on the Blog Tour...
I nominate Bill Wolfe, whose blog Read Her Like An Open Book celebrates women novelists. He not only reads many novels by women writers, but often prefers them. His blog is genius, writers are devoted to him, and I’m honored to send you to his blog.
