Caroline Leavitt's Blog, page 84

Valerie Miner talks about the incredible book she swore she wouldn't write: Traveling With Spirits

Valerie Miner is the award-winning author of 14 books, including After Eden, Range of Light, Winter's Edge, and more. Her newest book, Traveling with Spirits is about her odyssey through Northern India and the Midwest section of the United States, as she explores religion, politics, international aid, human failings and innate goodness. It's a remarkable book, and I asked Valerie if she would write something about it for the blog. Thank you so, so much, Valerie. I'm so honored to host you here.

Traveling with Spirits is a book I swore I wouldn’t write.  But friend after friend said, “Of course your next novel will be set in India.” “Oh, no,” I replied, “I’m not going to expropriate someone else’s culture.   There are plenty of good Indian writers.”I fell in love with India on my first trip there in 1988.  Since then, the astonishingly diverse landscapes, the colors of the textiles, the spice of the foods, the music of the languages and most of all my good friends in Calcutta, Bombay and Delhi kept drawing me back.  Every visit has involved teaching (including a six month Fulbright in 2000) at such places as the University of Calcutta, the University of New Delhi, the University of Himachel Pradesh.  Mumbai University, the University of Rajasthan, Uktal University, North-Eastern Hills University and many other schools.  And with every return I made new friends who made the next trip even more compelling.I “knew” India, not as an Indian, but as an outsider.  A lifelong traveler, I have spent 10 years of my adult life abroad.  As much as I “knew” about India, I knew even more about the life of an expatriate.  Now I saw a way I could spend more time there—in my imagination.   I began with three short stories, “Veranda,” “Always Avoid Accidents” and “The Fall,” published them in literary journals and in my fourth collection of short fiction, Abundant Light.  The response was very heartening about each story from Indian and American readers.  “Veranda” won the McGuinness Ritchie Prize for the year’s best fiction in the Southwest Review.  Then it won a $25,000 McKnight Arts Grant.  I started to play with some ideas for Traveling with Spirits.One particular interest was the Catholic Church and its dubious role in developing countries.  As a formerly active, but now totally lapsed (or collapsed), Catholic who had traveled a lot in developing lands, I had deep concerns about cultural imperialism.  OK, India and the Catholic Church and an expatriate.  Suddenly Monica emerged—the family physician from Minneapolis who gets fed up with her clinic‘s uncompassionate triage treatment the greed of obdurate health insurance corporations.  She decides to practice medicine in a place where she might be more useful.   She opts for a Mission hospital in an Indian hill station, where she hopes to contribute and also to work in a more congenial atmosphere of colleagues with shared values.  Just as Monica is in store for big surprises, so too I found myself floundering in the land of the unexpected as I began to write. I always begin a novel by noting the things I know about the emotional, geographical, historical territory.  With Traveling, I reminded myself, I knew about being an expatriate.  I had spent long periods in India since 1988.  Of course I knew all about the Catholic Church.  I had friends who were doctors and had a good sense of how family practice clinics worked.As I began the first draft, I discovered how much more I didn’t know.  I wound up reading many books about the history of Catholicism in India (which began with the arrival of Thomas, the Apostle, in Kerala in the year 50.)  Now there are almost 20 million Catholics in India (including Syriac Catholics and others).  I read memoirs and studies about religious mission hospitals.  The more I tried to write about Monica’s work as a doctor, I realized I had the most superficial knowledge of the work.  This sent me to memoirs of family practitioners, studies of insurance companies (very depressing) and papers about the particular diseases she would encounter in India.  I asked Indian friends to read the novel in draft to make sure it was appropriate, not appropriating.    I asked a Minneapolis doctor to read with an eye to any flub I may have made in representing her profession.  I returned to India three times during the writing of the book.  Now, after a decade of two steps forward and one step back, the novel is published and this writer has learned a wee bit more about both the hubris and the humility involved in writing novels.

Jennie Nash, author of PERFECT RED writes hilariously and knowingly about the three worst moments in the writing life

I love Jennie Nash. And I loved and blurbed Perfect Red. She's warm, funny, and whipsmart, and she's also the author of The Threadbare Heart, The only True Genius in the Family and The Last Beach Bungalow, as well as three memoirs, including Other Lessons I learned From Breast Cancer. She teaches at the UCLA Extension Writing Program (Yay! So do I!) and is also a private writing coach, and so far, in 2013, six of her clients have signed with top New York agents. She lives in Los Angeles. Thank you so much, Jennie, for writing something for the blog!




The Three Worst Moments in the Writing Life 
By Jennie Nash
Writing is a horrible, rotten no-good business. Sure, there are moments of transcendent joy and quiet contemplative peace, but for the most part it’s just really hard. I mean, you sit alone in a room hoping against hope that someone out there will care about the words you are stringing together, and feeling every doubt ring through your head like a clarion bell — Is your opening line catchy? Does the comma go inside the quotation mark? Should you have gone to beauty school and learned a marketable skill?
Some days are harder than others and some years are like an earthquake that turns everything to rubble. This year was one of those for me. After six well-published books, I wrote a novel I loved and I couldn’t sell it. Poor me, right? When some people would be happy to have one book published? When some people would kill to have my resume? YES POOR ME! It was heartbreaking. I have wanted to be a writer ever since I was in fourth grade and we published our poems in a mimeographed book bound with blue cardboard. I have invested decades into this career. But you can’t be a writer without readers. So it was all over. I was done.
I brooded so hard. I pouted, I ate a lot of Ben & Jerry’s. And then I started to write about the horrible writing year I’d had. I wrote about the worst moments of the last twelve months, and then I kept going. I added in the worst moments from my entire 35-year career, and the worst moments from every writer friend I’ve ever known, and before I knew it I had 43 of the worst moments in the writing life.
The irony, of course, is that in the midst of feeling awful about writing, I kept writing. We all do. If you’re a writer, you write. And so for each of the worst moments, I added in a way to get over it. Maybe it’s not the only way or even the best way, but it’s a way.
I’ve picked out three of the worst moments to share with you today. Caroline Leavitt invited me to post ‘em because she knows a thing or two about the agonies of writing. Yeah, she’s killing it right now, but trust me: she feels the pain just the same way I do and just the same way you do. She is, after all, human.
Don’t agree that these three moments are that bad? Check out all 43 of the worst moments in The Writer’s Guide to Agony and Defeat: 43 of the Worst Moments in the Writing Life and How to Get Over Them. It’s available as of this moment as a PDF download for a special reduced price. It will be an e-book and a book you can hold in your hand some day later this fall, but for now it’s just a PDF, just a howl against the cruel nature of what we do. I’ll also be posting the 43 moments one at a time on a blog at jennienash.com starting September 1.
So here we go:
#1: You deem yourself unworthy.
You have a burning desire to write a book – an idea that haunts you like a ghost in the attic — but you don’t think you have the talent or the skill or the expertise to write it. “Who am I to write a book?” you ask. “I’m just a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker.” You cast around for someone to give you permission to write — a teacher, a friend who writes, a famous writer you met that one time at a signing, your mom — but no one ever gives you permission, because it’s not their job. It’s your job and you’re not doing it. Your thoughts of unworthiness grow even deeper and stronger, until you believe it with your whole heart: you are not someone who can write a book. What were you even thinking? You take up tennis, knitting, become a voracious reader of other people’s books — but the burning desire to write doesn’t go away. It smolders there, often for a lifetime, turning into a jagged, hard-edged regret. “I always wanted to write a book,” you say, and people smile their close-lipped smiles and quickly look away.
The way forward:
Stop looking outside for answers. Give yourself permission to create. You’re the only one who can grant it, and the only one who can take it away.
If there are certain aspects about writing that you need to learn — certain skills you need to develop, certain elements you need to master — start practicing. They say it takes 10,000 hours to gain mastery in any given area, and they’re not just talking about speaking French or performing brain surgery. They’re talking about writing something strangers will want to read. You may have mastered some of these skills over the years through your day job, or by journaling, or by writing on the sly. For everything else, the clock starts now.

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”  ― Maya Angelou

#14. Another writer writes your book before you finish writing your book
You’re toiling away at your novel about Abraham Lincoln, thinking you’re really on a roll now, when you open the Wall Street Journal and there on the “Off Duty” page is a round-up of great books about Abraham Lincoln, collected by the author of a forthcoming novel about Abraham Lincoln. You Google the author and learn that he is one of the world’s foremost experts on Abraham Lincoln, and holds a special endowed chair on Abraham Lincoln at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. He just happens to write fiction in his spare time on Tuesdays, and that effort has resulted in this great new novel. You click around and notice that the expert’s book has recently been reviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air and optioned for a movie by Steven Spielberg. Then you shut your computer down, go eat a big slice of chocolate cake, get in bed and pull the covers over your head. When your loved ones ask you what’s wrong you yell, “Why the fuck do you think anything’s wrong?”
The next time you log onto your computer, you take the draft of your novel about Lincoln and slip it into the archives. You will try to forget about it, but you will now see the other person’s Lincoln book everywhere. It will be stacked a mile high at Costco, displayed in the window of your local independent bookstore, lovingly set on the coffee table of your best friend’s ski lodge. The blurbs on the cover will taunt you and that stupid portrait of Lincoln peering out at you as if he knows what you have failed to do. When your book club decides to read the Lincoln book, you bow out. When people start talking about it at cocktail parties, you grit your teeth. You have to go to the dentist and get one of those mouth guards to protect your teeth from sure destruction. And of course the dentist will have the Lincoln book on the side table for his patient’s reading pleasure.
The way forward:
Take a deep breath and keep writing.
And note that there have been 15,000 books written about Abraham Lincoln. There is room for one more. There is always room for one more.
"So this is always the key: you have to write the book you love, the book that's alive in your heart.  That's the one you have to write."  ― Lurleen McDaniel

# 39. You hold a book signing and no one comes.
Your publicist arranged a book signing at Sweet Neighborhood Bookstore, in a town about an hour from where you live. You don’t know anyone in this town, so you drive down early and grab dinner at the Whole Foods deli. You find the bookstore, and then drive around the block a few times looking for parking. When you find a spot, you walk back to the store and stand on the sidewalk out front gazing at the stacks of your book in the window and at the giant poster of your book cover. Someone has made a sign that says, “Author reading tonight!” You take a picture, making sure to include in the frame the stacks of John Irving’s latest novel, the stacks of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest treatise on the way we behave, and the stacks of the Barefoot Contessa’s new cookbook. You have never felt more awesome in your entire life. You feel that you know, now, the true meaning of success and contentment. You have done it! You have written a book!
A slightly disheveled woman walks by with a dog on a leash. The dog stops to sniff by the window, and it sniffs your shoe and so you smile at the woman, nod at the window, and say, “I’m the author.”
The woman smiles. “Congratulations,” she says.
You smile back. “Thank you so much.”
The woman yanks her dog away and continues on her path, so you go into the store. The young man at the counter looks up and says your name. He recognizes you from your author photo. He directs you to the stack of books set out on the table and hands you a Sharpie. “We’d like you to sign a dozen for the store,” he says. You see that he is making out a shelf talker that says, “Signed copies available!” You sit and sign the books and chat with the counter guy about traffic and the weather and the new John Irving novel. There are half a dozen customers in the store, browsing and reading and making their way quietly through the stacks. There’s another bookstore employee who wanders in and out, asking if you’d like water or tea. She’s the first one to look at her watch. She’s the first one to speak about what is happening, or rather what is not happening. 
“People often come late on Thursdays,” she says, “It can be a busy night.” You smile and chat with her about the Barefoot Contessa’s roasted tomato soup recipe, which you recently had at a potluck.
Counter Guy makes an announcement. “Our author reading will begin in five minutes,” he calls out, hoping to summon the customers to fill at least a few of the black folding chairs set up before you. There are 27 chairs. You know because you counted them. None of the customers emerge.
The bell on the door tinkles and you look up with huge hope, only to see a mother dragging two small girls, and talking loudly about not touching any of the stuffed animals. They have come to pick up a birthday present for a party. You surmise this because one of the little girls has on sparkly red shoes and the other has on sparkly pink. Watch Girl steps in to help them, and you watch the small drama unfold – the choosing of the gift, the wrapping of it, the paying.When the party-goers are gone, Watch Girl looks at her watch again and then turns to you. “Let’s give it five more minutes.”
You nod and get up and go look at the shelf of poetry behind the rows of empty chairs. After five minutes, Counter Guy comes out from behind the counter and folds himself into one of the folding chairs. “You can read to us,” he says, “It will be good practice, anyway.”
“Sure!” you say, as if you were just offered an all-expenses trip to the moon. As Watch Girl perches next to Counter Guy, you launch into the program you prepared — a few comments about your background and how you came to write the book, and then you pick up your book, turn to the page you carefully marked with a Post-It, and read the words you slaved over. As you read, you want to die. You are amazed that you can have such a strong, clear intention separate from the actions of your mind and your mouth. You are reading your book out loud in a bookstore, and yet you want nothing more than to die.
When you are finished reading, you close the book and Counter Guy and Watch Girl clap enthusiastically. Counter Guy leaps up to help a customer who has made his way to the counter. “Bravo,” Watch Girl says, and then she gets up and starts to put away the chairs.
You help her, because what else are you going to do?
The way forward:
Grin and bear it, then go back and read all those posts about platform building that you ignored the first time.
“It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.” ― Gertrude Stein

Valerie Trueblood talks about her amazing new short story collection SEARCH PARTY, the idea of rescue, writing, and so much more

Valerie Trueblood is one of the masters of short story writing. Her new collection Search Party is unsettling, full of desperation, and yet brimming with a kind of hope as well. A young babysitter takes care of a child who falls dangerously ill, a cop tackles a violent student, and a homeless family reexamines the meaning of home, and all of the people struggle to find meaning and a mastery of their situation. It's just a gorgeous collection.  She's a contributing editor to The American Poetry Review, and her essays, articles, and poetry have appeared in One Story, The Northwest Review, The Iowa Review, The Seattle Times, and Seattle Weekly, among others. She lives in Seattle and I am totally thrilled to host her here. Thank you so much, Valerie!

Why does the very idea of a search lead to so much story?

We need so many things!  A lot of life is spent in finding them.  While we may not go out with a lantern like Diogenes, we do spend a lot of time searching, from babyhood on:  for food, safety, a friend, work, knowledge, a place to live, a mate--and finally searching our own memories for what remains of these things when we're old.  I admit this came to me just now in thinking about your question.  I didn't think in these sweeping terms when I was writing the stories.  A story can't be summoned that way.  Mine seem to have to be found under a rock.

I also want to ask you about the title, which I think is perfect--Search Party, seems so ominous, but then there is the subhead, stories of rescue, which almost makes us breathe a sigh of relief.

You're a writer, and you're the reader we all want:  someone who feels the ominousness, someone who sighs with relief--and just at the title, at that.  I wish everyone read in this spirit, with this openness to what might be coming.  
I do believe in rescue.  The situation gets pretty desperate and now and then--perhaps rarely, but often enough that we remember the times it happened or the stories we heard of it--someone says or does something that helps, even saves.  How or why this happens at times, and at others does not, is one of the mysteries, and the short story seems to me the perfect vessel for it.  Because the story isn't obliged to say why.  It just holds the mystery.

How do you go about crafting a story? Your language is so exquisite that I’d love it if you could talk about the relationship between story and language.

It takes me a long time to get a sort of tent up and then I see it's empty, and that must be when I try to somehow create rooms in it.  But that's an easy metaphor, isn't it.  For me the story really has less to do with construction than with sound.  I hear a story faintly and in fragments and have to listen for it and try to lure it, so I can get some of the pieces down on paper.  Then for a long time it's just adding in the tones of someone's experience, and then heavy subtracting. 
Each story seems to have its own language, depending on the person having the experience or living through the state of mind.  So the words for what happens to a poet have to be filtered through the poet's senses and thought, and they'll have a tone, a pattern different from that of the words for what happens to a policeman.  Before anybody assaults me, let me say that I know at least two poet-policemen!  I'm just using these broad categories because a couple of characters in this book fit them and their stories have their own sound (while I hope still having something an Artificial Intelligence, if it read them, would know came from the same "voice").
I don't think writers can investigate our own style very deeply--or even think about it at great length--without getting into trouble, though.

Your endings are so deeply satisfying and unexpected. Do they take you by surprise or do you know them before you begin?
I rarely if ever have even a glimpse of an ending when I'm starting out.  I have to hope and trust every time that the thing will end!

What’s obsessing you now and why? 
I'm deep in the next book of stories, Garden of Children, and didn't realize until this question of yours that yes, the word is "obsessed."  But like the others it started to come together as a book more or less accidentally, because I must have been thinking and writing about children for years before I saw that a group had formed and there were children staring out of it.  These aren't coming of age stories.  As my husband says, "By the time people get around to coming of age, they're pretty much done for."Another book is taking shape, stories of love.  People grin if they hear that.  But however jaded we get about what has been "done" in fiction, however eager for new categories, love is never done with.  Though I like to have war in there too--war being a form of hate--weighing on people who live in a rather heartless time while trying to fulfill the human duties.  Thus the title of the second group, Let Live.

What question didn’t I ask that I should have?

You ask wonderful questions, that tempt us to go on and on about ourselves.  Thank you.

Jillian Cantor talks about her provocative new novel Margot, Anne Frank, the emotional journey of writing and so much more

I hung out with the sublime Jillian Cantor at the Tucson Book Festival, which included book talk, lunch and even some shopping thrown in.  I'm so thrilled to host her here. She's the genius writer of The September Sisters, The Life of Glass and the Transformation of Things, and her new novel, Margot, imagines what might have happened to Anne Frank's sister in post-war America. It's a dazzling achievement. Thanks so much for being here, Jillian.
Can you tell me how the idea for this novel sparked? I always believe that writers write the book that they themselves need to read. Would you say this is true for you, too? 

Yes, I absolutely think that’s true. Writing is always such an emotional journey for me that I feel my stories come from the emotional point I’m at at a particular time. Margot’s story first came to me a few months after the shooting in Tucson in 2011. I live in Tucson and happened to be having coffee in the shopping center at the time of the shooting. I was very fortunate that I didn’t get shot or even see what happened, but for months afterwards I felt paralyzed by sadness, and I had trouble writing anything. I reread Anne Frank’s diary during that time, and I realized that in real life Margot Frank had also kept a diary during the war, but that hers was never recovered after. I wondered how Margot would’ve felt had she survived and saw what had happened with her sister’s diary after the war. Margot’s story in my novel is very much one of finding her way through grief and fear, of learning how to live and love again after horrendous tragedy. That’s what I needed to read – and write – at that particular time.

I’ve read and enjoyed your other novels, and this one seems a departure for you--it has a new, kind of thornier feel to it, a more moral depth, almost, which I absolutely loved. Did you feel the writing of this book was different than your others? Can you talk a bit about that please? What was the research like? Did anything surprise or startle you? 

Thank you, Caroline! The writing was definitely different, first because this was the first historical novel I’ve written so it required a lot of research on my part. I definitely labored over the first draft more, not only to get the writing right but also to get the historical details right. But I think I also wrote Margot purely for myself, at first, and never thought about what people would think or if anyone would ever even read it. I’d written another novel between this novel and my last published novel (which was published in 2010), which over the period of a year failed to sell and which I struggled to revise repeatedly and it just never came together right or sold. So I came into writing Margot with the thought in my head that no one might ever read it but me, but that it was a book I needed to write all the same. It felt very personal to me, and I got so emotionally attached, more so than with my other books. I was a mess when the book did actually go out on submission to editors and when it started getting rejections, which, as writers, we know always happens. But it felt more personal to me, this time.
My research involved reading about the Holocaust and reading and re-reading and re-reading again Anne Frank’s diary (for details of the annex), as well as researching Philadelphia in 1959 (a time I knew very little about before I started writing). I was surprised by how much blatant anti-Semitism existed in Philadelphia still in 1959. I had expected to find this in my research of the Franks’ life in Europe in the 1940s, but I was surprised to find so much anti-Semitism still existed in America in the late 1950s. But this also ended up playing a big role in the book.
Let’s talk about craft. What kind of writer are you? Do you outline everything out? Did you know the ending, or do you set up characters and let them dictate the action? 

I don’t outline. I wish I could, but I just can’t. If I know exactly everything that will happen that takes some of the authenticity out of the voice for me, and essentially I get bored if I know all the answers up front. So yes, I set up the characters and let them dictate the action, which generally ends up in a very messy first draft. I had a big pacing problem initially in this novel as a result, but for me, it’s easier to go back in and fix the plot and the pacing later if I can get the characters and voice right first. I do usually have an idea of around where I want my characters to end up, and I knew when I started writing about Margot what she would do and where she would be in the last scene (which I won’t say here, as I don’t want to give any spoilers!). I kept to this vision all along, and it’s in the final version of the book.
What’s obsessing you now and why? 

I don’t want to say too much about what I’m researching and writing now (which is, of course, what’s obsessing me) because I don’t know what’s going to happen with it yet., but I’ll just say generally, my head in is New York City in the late 1940s and early 1950s during The Second Red Scare and post-atomic bomb. With more details to come J
What questions didn’t I ask that I should have? 

How about, what’s up next for you? I have a new book for young adults coming out next summer called Searching for Sky, about a girl who spent most of her life on a deserted island, and who is “rescued” and brought back to California just after her sixteenth birthday. But she soon learns both the real world and her idyllic island life were not at all what she believed. 

Read an excerpt from the amazing Ilie Ruby's astonishing novel THE SALT GOD'S DAUGHTER

“This enjoyable read stays true to this objective throughout, bringing unforgettable characters to readers through circumstances that are believable, yet nestled in the cultural traditions and superstitions we sometimes need to guide us through difficult times.”
—The LA Review“When a blue moon rises, mistakes can be undone, lost children can find their homes, and sea lions can shed their skin… This is a bewitching tale of lives entangled in lushly layered fables of the moon and sea.”
—Kirkus Reviews“Lushly woven with elements of folklore, Ruby’s novel is a captivating inquiry into the generational, wayward bonds of mothers and daughters.”
—Booklist Ilie Ruby's The Salt God's Daughter came to me through the mail, and because the cover was so gorgeous, and the story seemed so intriguing to me, I put it on my to-be-read-and-reviewed shelf. I began to read a week later. And I couldn't stop. The writing is so evocative, the story so enrapturing,  that I devoured the novel in two days and spent the next week obsessed with it. Finally, I contacted Ilie because I had to meet the person who wrote such a book.  I consider Ilie Ruby  a partner in crime. I'm thrilled to have done  a panel with her at the Tucson Book festival, and even more fun, to have interviewed her at one of her many packed appearances in New York City. We conspire, talk writing, and I am absolutely honored she's my friend,  She's also the author of the critically-acclaimed The Language of Trees, which was a target Emerging Author's Pick and a First Magazine for Women Reader's Choice.  The Salt God's Daughter is about what it means to be different, how we find our way in the world and manage to survive. It tells the story of Ruthie and her older sister Dolly who grow up under their mother's exotic stories, and the pull of the ocean. Full of folklore and Jewish mysticism, this novel is as original as Ilie herself. Truly, one of my favorite novels of this year, and any year. It's now just out in paperback and trust me, you want it immediately. 






Excerpt from The Salt God’s Daughter by Ilie Ruby
Ruthie, 1972We ran wild at night, effortless, boundless, under ablood-red sky—to where and to what we couldn’t haveknown. We craved it, that someplace. We were two little girls,sisters, daughters with no mother, distrustful of the freedomwe were given, knowing she shouldn’t have left. We tore acrossdirt campgrounds where we slept, naked but for our mud boots,letting the wind shiver up across our bare chests. We stole bagsof chips from the canteen on the pier. Our feet pounded thecrushed oyster shells in seaside motel parking lots when we’dsearch for drinking water, and we let calluses thicken up oursoles to withstand the hot desert sand, or dash over a highwayof broken glass, wherever we’d been dropped. We scamperedacross the foggy cliffs that separated Pacific Coast Highwayfrom the ocean in old ballet slippers, as nimble as two fairies,our long red hair whipping into tangles in the wind. Webumped up against the night, without stopping. We stole wrinkledleather sneakers that were two sizes too big, and worethem until they fit. We raced in the sand, fought in the dusk.We knew we were not invisible. We tightened belts around ourstomachs at night and bicycled unlit sidewalks and sometimestucked up our knees and steered with no hands through thedarkness. No one hit us. We believed we were unstoppable. Weslept under sleeping bags, beneath trees, and pushed our backsagainst cliffs, our noses cold.We waited for our mother to come back.“Ruthie, do you miss her?” Dolly asked.“No,” I lied.We talked of Cool Whip and ice cream, of warm apple crispand salty Fritos. We dreamed of flying.Then my mother came back. We’d crawl into our stationwagon at night, trapped by her need for freedom, and thenby her soap opera, General Hospital , which we watched on herportable television. Afterward, we listened to folk songs andHebrew prayers as she’d strum a fat-bellied classical, knowingthis meant that she was feeling fine, that she had acknowledgedshe had two little girls, whether she wanted us or not.We used our fingernails to cut away ticks from our legs, andwe cleaned up her empty bottles before she’d wake up. We bitat the skin around our nails, leaving it swollen and red.If I told you that I ached for a different mother, I’d be lying.I ached for my own, every minute. As motherless daughters do.She was our child. We didn’t know anything different.Everyone knew a mother was a daughter’s first love.When she asked if we thought she was still beautiful, wesaid yes, because she was. We told the truth about the steelylightness of her eyes, how quickly they changed color with heremotions, from gray to blue, in parts. We lied when she askedif we thought she’d fall in love one day. We said yes.It was as possible to miss someone who was right in frontof you as it was to miss someone who had left. It was alsopossible to miss someone who had not yet been born. ThisI had learned. My mother had told us as much. We walkedaround craving everyone, even before they’d leave. We neverthought it would end, our ache. Often, from the windows ofmy mother’s speeding green Ford Country Squire, we shoutedout the words to James Taylor ballads and motioned for truckersto honk on demand by pumping our fists up and down. Wegrew cocky, forgetting we were people who had been left.We were already nomadic, and from the most primal ofplaces, we had become hunters, always searching for someoneor something we could lay claim to, hook ourselves onto, toquiet our trembling clamorous souls.As long as she came back for us.

Leora Skolkin-Smith talks about Hystera, Palestine, Grace Paley, and more. Plus read an excerpt of her novel HYSTERA

“Poetic, strange and evocative… A poignant prose-poem…” — Publisher’s Weekly




I' first met Leora Skolkin-Smith through Readerville.com, a now defunct and once vibrant online readers and writers community. We quickly began friends and began swapping pages. I'm thrilled to have Leora here talking about HYSTERA , the WINNER of the 2012 USA Book Award and the 2012 Global E-Books Award. HYSTERA is also a Finalist in Literary Fiction and a winner in The International Book Awards, 2012, and The National Indie Excellence Award, 2012, as well as being chosen  for The Princeton University Series.  Leora is also the author of EDGES, which is in production as a feature film. Scroll down because after the interview is an excerpt from the book!  Thank you, Leora, for being here!



 This is a very intimate and raw portrait of mental illness; what brought you to write so honestly about the subject?

        I wanted to write about mental illness because I was deeply bothered the popular medical and cultural presentations of it in commercial mediums.   I strongly felt that the continual oversimplifications in the media and elsewhere threw more confusion and darkness  into this disturbing and beguiling state of human behavior and, in the end, muffled the cries from those in the throes of it. In recent years, drugs such Prozac have been used in memoirs and accounts of depression which I felt was only a partial, inadequate answer. I desperately wanted and needed a deeper exploration and journey and one that was not based on easy resolutions, "kitchen therapies" or being "fixed"  which our current society has relied on, but, instead on an exploration of engaging philosophical and sexual questions of existence itself, questions about identity and intimacy that transcend our purely medical and limited understanding of mental illness and see it as part of a continuum of human experience throughout history.

Why did you use Patty Hearst in the novel?                 Patty Hearst was a symbol in so many ways for me of my troubled and splintered era. First, she symbolized  the sexual identity struggle confusion of the times as norms and roles were in flux, then the turbulent economic and class upheaval our society was undergoing in the early 1970s. She had transformed from a rather pleasant looking college student in straight skirts, the well-behaved daughter of a multimillionaire Into a wild haired radical dressed as a male guerrilla soldier, holding up banks with a machine gun flung across her shoulders and shouting slogans about social equality for the unseen, unheard masses, the poor and cast away. The labile nature of identity itself was shown through her transformations. But yes,she was also a prisoner to her own sickness in a sense, her masochistic sexuality, she had fallen in love with her kidnapper.
Lilly believes she is growing a “bulb” from between her legs; what was that all about?            The bulb was about so much! I wanted the "bulb" to express the ineffability and mysteriousness of her illness and mental illness in general, and of our vulnerable nature itself, I guess. Again in response to the overly simplified and concrete medical models constantly used as one dimensional diagnostics, it simply felt so right to express her states, as a poetic metaphor might, with all the resonance and power possible through language and imagery, and I went with it. I wanted to create the sense of enigma, of bafflement that felt truer to me then the rational truism we apply to illness. It still somehow belonged to the poets to express and had no ready made answers. Though the pharmaceutical revolution has changed everything in many good ways, towards cure end stabilizing I still like to believe there are states, and questions about the nature of identity and existence that remain ineffable. I never thought of the bulb in purely Freudian terms. it came from old prints from the Renaissance and the Middle Ages of personal, unexplainable "spiritual journeys of the soul" so to speak.
What role did you mean Dr. Burkert to play in the  novel and in Lilly's life? 

       I think Lilly, is very much a daughter of her era. She sees men as entitled, especially in receiving unconditional nurturing  and sustenance from the women around them, as women remain hungry and deprived of such riches of support. When Lilly enters the monastery She asks why Jesus is on the lap  of  Mother Mary while she feels so abandoned and left out, as if her needs for the same for the same  nurturance were in fact invisible and illicit. She sees her mother as suffering from that unfed hunger, an unstable self. Her relationship to the mother who abused her is altered by her realization that her father's demands were insatiable, and drained the possibility of independent existence away from him. Her mother must remain his caretaker, and Lilly was partly responsible for the prison her mother finds herself in after her father becomes brain-damaged, dependent and helpless as a child. This I think is the abuse Lilly feels from men, being rendered invisible in terms of her own neediness, her own helplessness, having to serve only their often unreasonable hungers while starving herself, dwindling away. She is sucked dry by obligation to the men she must take care of, their unquestioned demands on her life and energies. Dr. Burkert is of course, very different just by virtue of his role as physician. He challenges her despairing view that all men are, like her father, unable to offer her caring back. Also her sexual attraction to him further helps her reintegrate a damaged and very undifferentiated sexual identity that had thrown her into psychotic fears and paralysis. He is a catalyst for a change in Lilly if she can accept his help.


You write a lot about British-occupied Palestine in all your novels; can you elaborate on what this means for you?
      I had the privilege of seeing the pre Israel world through the eyes of my Jerusalem born mother and as a baby taken there before the state of Israel was really strong. I think all my work as a novelist carries a sadness and a pining tenderness for the lost world of an earlier Palestine/Israel. I loved the world I saw there as a young children. My mother was born in the old city of Jerusalem as was my grandmother and my great grandmother, Some of my maternal family members go back as far as the 1600's in Jerusalem. My grandfather was in business with his Arab colleagues in Jordan and my uncles attended the University of Beirut. As a baby, then as a child, then as a young girl and woman I spent much time in my  mother's country, cloaked in intoxicatingly beautiful, often mystical stories of lives spent amidst these earlier limestone streets and pine trees, and as Jews, of lives spent and shared with a multicultural neighborhood of Muslims, Christians, and Armenians. The hate and bitterness of war between the Arabs and Jews had not yet poisoned the air because in British Palestine, the streets were not yet divided, and there was a mystical sense of things all around the Biblical places which made the whole earth feel magical to me as a child. Jerusalem was also a very sensual place, full of exotic scents and tastes, stories and ancients spirits I never knew in my Westchester home. As I said, I loved it there as a child, before 1967 when the war seemed to change everything.

Lilly finds comfort and direction in the Hebrew texts her mother, a bookbinder, repairs and restores.  Can you say more about the meaning these books have for her?
       I think the symbols Lilly finds in her mothers book-binding books bring Lilly back to a sweeter, and more important relationship with her mother, one that isn't damaged and one she can rely on to bring her meaning and identity. She, like her mother, can lose herself in an imaginative rendering of her world. Her mother taught her the power of finding such quiet self -fulfillment and self-definition through solitude, pursuing an art, a craft.  It was a chance to reintegrate the chaos of selfhood, make confusion cohere. 
But also essential, those ancient enduring Hebraic symbols bring Lilly back to that  Jerusalem of her childhood, to a universal belonging to worlds larger than herself. And finding those symbols puts Lilly back on a trail home.
What are you writing about now?  What kind of themes are obsessing you?
     I am writing a nom de plume about my relationship with Grace Paley, whom I knew for over thirty years, experiencing her as mentor and mother. The distortions and claims after her death shook me up quite after her death shook me up quite a bit, she was being erased and her crucial, glorious past as an important writer of our times, as an important literary figure of our time was being drowned out by voices who hardly knew her or her work but professed to. I felt a soul rape, and I mean this in the deepest way. I thought, how dare they? Grace wasn't like this, Grace didn't say this. Grace barely knew them and they say she did, and intimately at that. Larger more important questions arose, what do we we owe history? The truth?An allegiance to something larger than our personal egos like uh..a literary canon? Have we come to worship narcissism and will the next generation be deprived of literature as it was authentically created by true innovators like Grace Paley. I couldn't sleep at night if I let the imposters win, it became my own private war against what I felt was a destructive literary age of celebrities.
What question didn't I ask?
    Can't think of one!


Excerpt from Hystera
Inside the locked ward on Payne Whitney’s fifth floor, Lilly stepped onto a steel platform.  The examination room was harshly lit, the bulbs behind plastic squares on the ceiling— fluorescent and burning. The metal examining table sparked from too many electric darts and moonbeams.It was an April evening, in 1974. The city’s night lights streaming in from the window would have been enough to illuminate the room, Lilly thought.   The arrows of moon pierced her blue-jeaned legs."You’re a dark girl."  The nurse said. "You look a little like Patty Hearst. Lillian, is that your name?" Lilly nodded, staring up at the large woman who confused her.   The nurse fisted her hands, big as a serviceman’s, glossy nailpolish shining on her nails, reddish-brown like her long hair.  The nurse was sturdy and strong, her copious breasts bulging under a tight blue tank top.Lilly was a mess of unbrushed hair and pale features, the odor of imported Italian sardines in olive oil on her stained Tee-shirt.  I want to rest now, she wished.  She turned to stare out into the darkened evening. A spring rain was slanting on the pane behind the metal bars."We're going to keep you here in the hospital with us a little while," The nurse said. "I'm going to examine you, Lillian. My name is Beverly.""Examine me?""It's just routine. Nothing elaborate.""That's not possible.""I beg your pardon?""I can't be examined.""Dear, all of us can be examined."A sheet of thin white paper was pulled all the way down to the metal stirrups, attached to the base of the examining table."Lie down on your back now, Lilly." Out the window, a soft indigo veiled the sky; the wind swirling, incessant.  Lilly eased herself down, flat on her back. The cool air was a wet cloth slapped on Lilly's forehead.  But, her breathing was short, panicked."I need you to squish yourself down further on the table here, Lillian." Beverly said. "Did I frighten him?" Lilly asked her."Who do you mean, Lilly?""The doctor who spoke with me in the interviewing room.""Oh, heavens.  It would take a lot to frighten Dr. Burkert.""But is that why I'm here?""Howard Burkert's one of our best third-year residents. No, no. You didn't scare him. Dr. Burkert thinks you're really feeling some discomfort in your pelvic area. We need to know whether you have a physical problem, or if it's something else." Stretched out on the examination table, Lilly wondered again if there were an abnormality in her sex, a cyst there, a tumor—. Maybe she was pregnant.Her boyfriend, Mitchell, was gone. Lilly read about body delusions. She learned, too, after her father had come home from the hospital three years ago from his long coma, the extent in which a mind could reinvent its former world, house a whole alternate universe of worlds.Maybe Beverly and Dr. Burkert didn’t know yet about her father’s two cerebral strokes, his coma, his altered mind.
(c) Leora Skolkin-Smith. Reprinted from Hystera, Fiction Studio

Lauren Grodstein talks about THE EXPLANATION FOR EVERYTHING, forgiveness, crappy little outlines and so much more

I always bond with other Algonquin writers, and I loved Lauren Grodstein's writing long before I ever met her. Smart, funny, and profoundly honest (You can talk about your deepest fears with Lauren and get exactly the response you want and need), Lauren is also a knockout writer. Just take a gander at her new novel, The Explanation for Everything.What is the real meaning of life? What do we really believe? How, when and why should we forgive? These are just some of the powerful themes winding through the book.Biologist Andy Waite is haunted by the death of his wife, but when he takes on a young evangelist as an independent study student, he begins to question everything around him, and his personal and professional ground begins to earthquake. A provocative and thrilling novel about what we choose to believe and whom we choose to forgive, and how those choices shape our very lives--and the lives of others.  Lauren is also the author of the New York Times bestseller, A Friend of the Family, Reproduction is the Flaw of Love, as well as the short story collection, The Best of Animals. Her pseudonymous Girls Dinner Club was a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers-Camden where she helps administer the college's MFA program. I couldn't be more jazzed to have Lauren here. Thank  you, thank you, Lauren!
So much of this brilliant novel is about how what we believe becomes, in a sense, who we are, and as we change, so do our beliefs. Can you comment about that? And why and how do you think belief works for some people and not for others?

As much as anything, I think the capacity for belief comes down to temperament and upbringing.  I wrote this novel after ruminating for years, really, over a series of conversations I had with a beloved student who was, and is, a devout Christian.  This student was smart, savvy, sophisticated, experienced in life – in other words, she wasn’t easy to dismiss.  I respected her enormously and still do.  And yet, soon after we met, she informed me that she believed that the Bible was the literal word of God, and she believed that the earth’s age could be calculated according to Biblical math (I think she thought it was about 6,000 years old).  You can only imagine how frustrating it was for me, her teacher, to argue with her over what seemed to me to be such an utter rejection of science, knowledge, modernity – such an utter rejection of the truth!  (Naturally she felt similarly toward me).  One day I said to her that I imagined if she had grown up in my Jewish-leaning-toward-atheist family in the Northeast and I had grown up in her very very Christian family in the Midwest, we might believe what the other did.  She disagreed; she said that no matter where she was born, and to whom, she would have found her way to God.  She might be right, but I’m pretty sure I am.
 I’m really curious what the research was like. Did you talk to evangelicals? To evolutionary scientists? And do you think the chasm between them can ever really be bridged?
The research was intense.  I started with a year of reading – this was easy and fun to do because a) reading is so much more pleasant than writing and b) it was great to dig deep into subjects that really interest me.  And also it was good to spend a year that way because my son was still not exactly sleeping through the night, so I’d sit up, nurse him, and read.  Some of my favorites from that year include Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle and On the Origin of Species, Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, Francis Collins’s The Language of God, and Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. 
Once I finally started to write, it became clear I needed to see some scientists in action.  This is where my affiliation with Rutgers came in handy; not only was I able to interview campus biologists, but I got to tour the labs, see the rodents, and get vivid (too vivid!) explanations of the kinds of experiments they run.  I hired a grad student to fact-check my science for me, and he called out the myriad things I got wrong. 
As for whether the chasm between Darwinists and Creationists can be bridged, I sometimes doubt it.  The two camps seem to live in parallel cultures, both angry about the other sides’ perceived attacks.  I’m an atheist who believes in science, who believes that scientific research is the engine of human advancement.  But I also believe in wonder, and that the capacity for wonder brings about great joy.  And religion itself is an enormous source of wonder and joy for so many – how can I dismiss that?  Why would I want to?  Just because I don’t share those beliefs is no reason for me to discount them in others.
And finally, do you think science will ever find an explanation for everything? Some scientists have postulated that the need for religion is in our DNA, hardwired as a biological helpmate for us. Care to comment?
I think that evolution, or evolutionary theory, is probably part of the explanation for everything.  I also think much about us is genetically predetermined, including, perhaps, religiosity.   But I don’t know enough about the science to say more than that.
To me, a lot of the book is also about the cost of forgiveness--both for ourselves and for others. It’s one of the issues that Professor Waite grapples with, and which you resolve in an unexpectedly moving way. Did you always know that ending?
That’s exactly what the book is about!  Even more than faith, this book is about forgiveness, and about the realization that the worst thing that’s ever happened to you is not the worst thing that’s ever happened to anybody.  I was inspired, too, by this story I love, Swimming, by T Cooper (which couldn’t be more different from my novel in tone, setting, plot, all of it) –  Swimmingrevolves around this guy who made the worst mistake a person could make and is determined to live the rest of his life feeling sorry for himself and refusing all human connection.  But over the course of the plot, he realizes that other people have suffered even more than he has and still insist on living life, on being human.  And it’s this realization that I find so crucial.  How do we acknowledge suffering in others?  How do we forgive others for what they’ve done to us?  Is faith a path to that recognition and forgiveness?  It is to some – and for others, life experience in itself provides that path.  And of course, for too many of us, other peoples’ lives and journeys and needs never get acknowledged at all.
Let’s talk about craft. How much did you know before you started writing The Explanation for Everything? Did you outline or fly by the seat of your pen?
I always make these crappy little outlines just so that I feel I’m writing toward something – and so I have something to fiddle with when I procrastinate.  But honestly my outlines got scrapped and scrapped again while I was working on this novel.  I did write toward a moment - when Andy mails a letter to the drunk kid who killed his wife.  I thought that might make for a nice closing scene.  But how he was going to get there, to that mailbox, I wasn’t really sure til I actually wrote thoe paragraphs.
What’s obsessing you now and why?
In books or in life?  In books, I am so obsessed with Jane Gardam’s Old FILTH trilogy (FILTH stands for “Failed in London, Try Hong Kong”) which lots of people have read but even more people should.  It’s my favorite kind of storytelling: dry, surprising, told from all sorts of angles, full of good British manners and bad British weather. 
In life I’m obsessed with getting my son through his first weeks of kindergarten while also being far away on book tour.  Next week we’re supposed to turn in these forms saying who will pick him up when: for instance, Mondays, mom, Tuesdays, mom, Wednesdays, mom.  Etc.  But of course my form says: Mondays, babysitter, or maybe a neighbor, or maybe dad if he gets there on time, and then Tuesday, I have no idea, and then Wednesday, panic.  Please don’t call family services.   Ahem.
What question didn’t I ask that I should have?
Well, people often ask me how I feel about the future of publishing and e-books and that sort of thing.  I feel good about it in some ways (lots of ebooks promise lots of readers) and bad in others (what booklover can’t help but worry for the endangered bookstore?)  But I will say that with every novel I publish, I feel so very blessed, so very lucky, for anyone to read my work at all.  I don’t care which format they choose.  I don’t care how they found the book in their hands.  I just love being a writer, and I love every reader who makes it possible for me to keep writing.

Want to read the first chapter of Rob Roberge's astonishing new novel THE COST OF LIVING?

One of my favorite books of the year is Rob Roberge's The Cost of Living. Gritty, wild, searing, it it's about love, loss, and addiction, all told in a voice so razor sharp, you better keep the bandages handy.  Don't take my word for it, Cheryl Strayed calls The Cost of Living "mind-bendingly smart." Janet Fitch calls the novel, "lyrical and ferociously realistic." And I call it genius. Rob is also the author of Working Backwards from the Worst Moments of My Life, Drive,  and More Than They Could Chew. Extra bonus: Rob is one of the funniest, smartest people on the planet.  I'm so honored to have this excerpt here. Thank you, thank you, Rob.







You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory(June, 2011)
DECEMBER 30, 1983Police search waters for missing woman. Middletown - Police and firefighters in several towns are looking for a missing Middletown resident whose car was found running on Route 3 by the Putnam Bridge early Tuesday morning. Sarah Barrett, 42, of Middletown, was last seen by a friend around 7:30 a.m. Tuesday. A state police trooper found her car in the northbound lane of Route 3 just north of the bridge around 8:20 a.m., state police said.
MAY 12, 1984The body of Sarah Barrett, 42, of Middletown, was found in the Connecticut River Saturday morning in the waters off the Deep River landing area. Deep River and Middletown Fire Departments responded to recover the body around 10:30 a.m., after receiving a 9-1-1 call from a fisherman alerting them to the discovery. Barrett had been missing since December after her car was found running near the Putnam Bridge in Glastonbury.

The night before my father would beg me to kill him, I sat alone in a hotel room across the street from his hospital, re-reading old newspaper articles about my mother’s suicide. I had six months clean for the second time in my life. The first time stuck for six years. But that seemed impossible to do again. My skin itched and my body crackled and I had no idea how I’d get through the next five minutes, let alone the night, or the rest of my fucking life without being loaded. I was freezing and the room wasn’t cold. I went into the bathroom and turned on the heat lamp, which came on along with a fan, and I paced for a minute. I sat on the toilet, fully clothed with the seat down and counted the square inch white tiles on the floor three times while breathing deeply. I listened closely to the fan’s small jet-like idle to block any thoughts that might come. I tried counting the subway tiles on the walls but couldn’t concentrate. I looked back down at the floor. I let my sight blur and the moldy grout started to form a pattern that looked like floating chicken wire. I needed sleep. Without it, I was apt to fly into a manic episode my brain stabilizers and anti-depressants and sleeping pills could never reach. I was allowed to travel with a few benzos, which frightened me, but I needed them for anxiety attacks. They couldn’t really tame a manic swing, anyway. If I was lucky enough to skip a psychotic episode, there would still be the inevitable depressive suicidal down and I’d fought through enough of those over the years to be exhausted at the thought. The meds had been more or less working. For the first time in my life they’d found a combination that seemed to keep me steady and fucked less with my weight or sex drive than the other pills. Though I didn’t really have much use for a sex drive unless Olivia took me back. She’d never divorced me, but she probably would have if I’d had my own insurance for rehab and the meds. But still, I told myself far too often for it to be healthy, if she hadn’t divorced me maybe that was a sign there was still a chance we could be together again.I closed my eyes and tried to breathe with my head between my legs and I felt the heat lamp on the back of my neck.Ten minutes later I was dripping sweat. The floor tiles came up a different number every time. I’d counted two hundred forty two, two hundred thirty eight and two hundred and forty four tiles as my sweat dripped and pooled on the ones closest to the toilet. I had to stay in there and count until I had hit the same number twice. Two counts later, I came up with two thirty eight and I could leave the bathroom and try to find a temperature that worked. I wanted to call Olivia but was worried she wouldn’t want to talk to me in this state. There was no way I could tell her I wanted to get high. She made it clear she’d seen and heard enough about that in her life. I scrolled through my contacts and looked at Ray’s number. Ray was the guy the label sent out on tour with me to make sure I stayed clean. Part of the contract. It was embarrassing, but, with a track record like mine, I couldn’t blame them for a minute. My ex-sponsor—when he was still my sponsor—told me I shouldn’t have been planning a tour, but I said I had to make a living. He told me I had to stay clean and that was my full-time job until I heard differently. I wouldn’t budge and he recommended Ray, who’d been, as my ex-sponsor dismissively called it, an “addict’s babysitter” for a bunch of actors and musicians. Ray had turned out to be more help than the sponsor, though. He knew what touring was like. He knew what playing bars every night meant. I was surprised that I ended up liking a guy who was supposed to tell me what to do and to keep me in line.I turned out the light and focused on my breathing.My right hand ached. It was tight and premature arthritis swelled the joins and the repaired tendons. I’d flown out of LAX early that morning and the humidity of Connecticut made it feel like I had cut glass in every knuckle. A car’s headlights cut through the drapes and made the room bright for a while and then the light went out and I heard the car door open and close. There was the click of a woman’s shoes on the asphalt. My room faced the parking lot. They’d asked me which side I wanted. Like the hospital was ocean view or something. The surgery scar on the back of my hand ran a deeper red color in the humid air. Looking at it, I thought about Olivia and thought about my relapse and quickly tried to stop thinking about either of them.I’d left the heat lamp and fan on. The fan whirled and heat coil light bled into the room through the open bathroom door. I closed my eyes and saw the ghosts of orange light for a while before it faded.
My mother left twice. First, when I was thirteen, after my father killed that man and again when she jumped off the bridge. If she ever explained her reasons for leaving me with him, he never told me, or showed me any letters. For years, I was convinced she was sending me letters and that my father kept them away from me or burned them. I had no idea at the time if she ever really tried to get word to me, but I’d created a world in my mind where she overflowed with regret for leaving me and kept trying to get me back. By the time I was staying at the hotel across from his hospital, I’d only talked to my father twice in twenty years and he hadn’t said much more than that my mother had gone crazy and that was that. That I’d started to believe his version near the end didn’t matter for the first forty-five years of my life—when I believed what I wanted to believe. That she was the saint and he was the monster. That simple belief shaped so many years.Things I remembered:I remembered her working the night shift at the Emergency Room at St. Jude’s hospital, where I’d been born. We didn’t have money for a sitter, she told me, explaining why she brought me to work. I’ve always been dug in and too stubborn to forgive my father for much of anything, but I’ve never blamed my mother for having me sit, night after night, in a room where people were wheeled in with gunshots, knife wounds, and people beaten so badly their families couldn’t have recognized their faces. Where I saw a construction worker with two feet of rebar that went in his mouth and came out the back of his neck and he was awake and conscious and when he tried to speak, I saw shattered teeth and blood filled his mouth the way water does when you dig a hole at the shore. When he tried to speak, he gurgled and I heard what teeth he had clatter against the rebar. At one point, his head sagged toward his chest and blood poured all over his orange reflector vest.I remembered the woman who held a dead child she wouldn’t let go of even after the police were called and stood over her dumbly for hours.But back then, and in my memories, it became time with her and time away from him, which made it, no matter what surrounded the situation, part of the good times of my childhood. Or at least what seemed like, if not good times, safer times.I remembered the man who’d been torn nearly in half in a car accident, his guts open, his intestines out of his body and snaking over his chest. Later that night, word came back to my mother at the desk, that the man from the car accident was brain dead. They were waiting for his family while my mother explained to me there were machines that could keep a person alive.I asked, “Is he dead?”“He’s brain dead, honey.”“What’s brain dead?”“He’s alive, but his brain doesn’t think anymore.”What could a brain do if it didn’t think anymore? I thought about Mike the Headless Chicken. In the late 1940’s, some farm family was cutting a chicken’s head off for dinner, but the chicken lived. It lived for seven years and got named Mike the Headless Chicken and the family made a small fortune, charging people a nickel at county fairs and travelling side-shows to see Mike run around without his head. They fed it with an eye-dropper. He died eventually when food got stuck in his feeding hole. I’d read about it in an encyclopedia.  I said, “Will he join the circus?”“Who?’ my mother said.“The brain dead man. Will he go to the state fair?”She smiled sadly. “Sweetie, where do you get your ideas?” She hugged me tightly and I hugged her and felt the stiff and mildly abrasive fabric of her uniform that smelled like soap when I huddled my face against her. “He’ll live at the hospital.” She released me. “For a while.”“What then?”She didn’t answer. One of the few sharp images I’ve been able to keep of her while she was alive is a snapshot of that moment. She hugged me again, her uniform so stiff and rough it felt like construction paper, and didn’t let go for a long time. I wondered what she thought, unable to tell me about death. What do you tell a five-year-old kid? She held me close and tight enough that the world felt safe, even with all the blood and the brain dead man and everything else in that emergency room. I couldn’t let go of those moments of her protecting me.A woman protecting me, always, I’ve taken to mean love.I’d forgiven her the fact that I should never have been in that hospital at that age. That she never should have allowed that. That I shouldn’t have seen what I saw, and that it was her fault that I did. Instead, I cherished that moment of her holding me forever. And I tried to find that moment, again and again and again in so many women’s arms over the years.
I called Ray and told him I wanted to get high. That I was thinking of killing myself, which—without warning—I was. That I was scared.“All you’re allowed to be is scared,” he said. I heard the whirl of his big aquarium and I figured he was standing close to it. “Feeding the fish?”“You call to talk about my fish? Talk about something that fucking matters.”  I looked around the room. “How many hotel rooms you think you’ve been in, Ray?”“What?”“In your life,” I said. I listened to the fan and went to the window and pulled the heavier curtains over the light gauzy ones that let in light from the parking lot. The room got darker. Large moths careened into the light outside my door. I was amazed they could live through even one blow that hard, let alone repeated ones until they finally destroyed themselves, smashing madly against the light and glass.Ray said, “Who cares?”“I’ve been in maybe a thousand.” I thought about the years with the band where we played nearly three hundred dates a year. We had three years with over two hundred and seventy days on the road. Around two hundred and fifty shows. Before that, there were the years where we stayed on strangers’ floors. “Maybe more.”“You want a fucking medal?”I said, very calmly like I was ordering a coffee, “I’m really thinking of killing myself, Ray.” I was actually thinking of doing it once my father died of his cancer. Whether he died a day or the week or two the doctors gave him at the outside. Once they were both gone, it seemed like I could just close the door on this whole fucked up family if I still felt like this. But if I told Ray I was waiting to do it, he might have grabbed the next flight, so I made it seem like I was thinking of it right away. I needed to talk it out, whether I was going to wait a week or not. Or, I had to admit the possibility, I might not be able to go through with it.He didn’t say anything for a long time. Maybe forty five seconds—an uncomfortably long pause on the phone. I listened to the fan in my background and the trickle of the aquariums in his.He said, “You’re in a bad place, Bud.”I laughed. “Isn’t that kind of the definition of suicidal?”“I’m talking a literal bad place,” he said. “You’re back home. Your father’s dying.”“I’m reading old newspapers about my mother’s suicide,” I told him.“Jesus,” he said. “Triggerville.”“I know Triggerville pretty well,” I said. “I grew up here. It’s home.” I paused. “Maybe I’m more comfortable here.”“Listen to you.”“What?”“Feeling sorry for yourself. Asking for me to confirm your childish feelings and I won’t do that. I’m here for a lot of things, but that’s not one of them.” Ray could say words and make it sound like he’d spat them at your feet. He had killed his wife in a car accident eleven years before when he was driving drunk. He had to give the go-ahead to take her off the machines from his own hospital bed, where he stayed until he was well enough to go to prison for manslaughter. If he’d left her live on life-support, his lawyer said the charges would have been reduced to very little time away—maybe none with a deal. He knew about feeling sorry for himself, about what it was like to punish yourself for years. He said, “You know what? You are more comfortable there.”I needed a cigarette and walked out of my room. The air was so thick and muggy it felt like I was breathing though a warm towel. “Thanks for all the help, Ray.”“You want to kill yourself, call some fucking fan that’ll bring you dope just to say they got high with you. Don’t call me.”I didn’t say anything.Ray said, “You still have a few fans. Go find one that wants to say he got you high.”I felt numb. Like my insides were a block of ice. More bugs thunked against the light. I lit a cigarette. I didn’t have my key card with me and I left the door open a crack and several huge moths got into the room. Their  shadows swirled around on the ceiling and I heard them banging into the walls in my room.I thought about hanging up. “Look, I don’t want to get angry.”Ray sounded kind for the first time. “Killing yourself, whether you’re getting loaded or fucking hanging yourself in your thousandth hotel room closet—destroying yourself in front of people who love you is an act of anger. And cowardice. You’ve got a wife. You’ve got real friends. And you know what it does to people. If you’re not guilty of that, make your case.”“I’m not in front of anybody I love.”“You always are.”I watched the smoke drift as I blew it out—gray in the dark and then slightly blue when it past the light. “Maybe it’s just in my fucking genes.” A lot of stats backed me up.“Your mother was crazy,” he said. “You’re not.”I felt the way you feel when you’re a kid and the world gets to be too much—too swollen with emotion to keep it inside. I tried not to sound like I was close to crying, which was stupid, because Ray was one of the few people who wouldn’t have cared. Who would have cared enough not to care. “I’m not trying to be…I don’t know if I can live clean,” I said. “I’ve tried. Really tried. It hasn’t worked.”“Look, I love you. But you wouldn’t be the first junky or drunk I loved who went out and died. I had to make peace years ago that my life was going to be littered with people who couldn’t stay clean and who didn’t make it. What do you want me to say?” His voice sounded like a resigned shrug would look. “I’d miss you. I’ll say nice things about you along with how pissed I am at you at your funeral. I can’t make up your mind for you. You’re afraid to change. You’d rather live your self-fulfilling prophecy of being a loser.”I leaned on the wall and smoked. My left arm grew stiff from holding the phone and my right hand didn’t work well enough to hold the cigarette between my index and middle fingers. I could just barely hold a guitar pick with that hand. I had to jab the cigarette between the middle and ring fingers junky-style, the way I had for years because you couldn’t drop it while you nodded out and burn whatever place you were in down to the ground. My hands were mangled. Every fingernail bitten bloody and malformed. My mother told me I started biting my nails when I got teeth. I was worried before I knew there was a word for it. “I am a loser—don’t you get it?”“I get plenty.”Whenever I was pissed at Ray, I forced myself to think again about him waking up in the hospital and hearing about his wife, dead but not dead yet because of him—with her somewhere in the same building but gone already. People had died around me most of my life. I’d hurt other people. But I hadn’t killed anyone. Ray had been worse places than me. I stopped myself before I said anything stupid or hurtful. I watched my cigarette and thought another thing I do that destroys me. Inch by inch instead of mile by mile, but intentionally fucking myself just the same. It felt like some storm inside seemed to have passed, at least for that moment. A fist had let loose a grip and opened up—gone from clenched around my heart and lungs to relaxed.Ray seemed to sense it. “How’s your father?”“He’s dying. All I know is what I told you this morning.”“But nothing went wrong when you talked to him?”“I got here after visiting hours,” I said. “There hasn’t been a chance for something to go wrong yet.”There was a pause. Muffled noise came from a TV close to my room. Like most things I could barely hear, things at a distance hurt my ears and gave me blinding headaches.Ray said, “You going to kill yourself tonight?”I thought about it. “No.”“You going to get loaded?”“I want to.”“That’s not what I asked.”I tossed my cigarette into the parking lot and lit another. When I closed it, my zippo clicked with its cold metal authority. An ambulance siren swelled closer and closer until it turned across the street, into the emergency room.“No,” I said. “Not tonight.”“Good. Call me tomorrow,” Ray said and hung up.
After St. Jude’s and the emergency room, she worked at Fairfield Hills Mental Hospital—where I later learned she became a patient when she went crazy. I was six and with her at work after school and I took a pill off the floor of the pharmacy and OD’d for the first time. I’d crawled around on the cool tiles and the pill looked like a piece of candy. I felt that dreamy floating-out-of-my-body-feeling for the first time and felt my brain lift like a state fair balloon and wondered why life couldn’t always be like that and thought that maybe this was what it would be like to be kept alive by machines and brain dead and maybe it was much easier than people thought and the next thing I knew I was in the hospital and they were flushing me with charcoal and my mother you cried and my father stood there, and I couldn’t understand why everyone was so upset. That first overdose was the first time in my life I felt true peace. And then there was the man my father killed. And then she was gone.
In my forties—when I was still clean—I allowed myself to see that she was crazy and nothing could have been done. But I found that out too late and by then I’d learned there are few things worse in this world than learning something crucial about someone you loved too late for it to matter. Too late for you to do anything about it.
I found my key card so I could lock my guitar in the room. I smoked and walked around the building and saw across the city street the hospital where my father was dying. Some of the rooms flicked with blue TV light. Some still had their cold fluorescents on. I wondered which was his room. I wondered if he could sleep. I wondered what kind of person I was that part of me wanted him to be asleep and part of me wanted him to be awake and in pain for however many hours he had left.The traffic changed from green to red. The little white pedestrian lit up and told people when they could walk. Then the countdown numbers came—along with the beeps for the blind—one every second. Every beep a reminder of the treacherous sweep of the secondhand. Of the seconds of pain I had just wished on my father. The lights changed again. I stood there for ten more cycles of Red, Yellow, Green. No one was out at this time of night and the lights just did what they did whether anyone needed them or not.It struck me that if my father lived as long as the doctors said he might, I could be here on my birthday—just two weeks away. I stood and smoked a cigarette and looked at the hospital where I’d been born, just shy of forty-five years earlier.
One night, alone in our house with my mother, I’d seen a spider with a body as big and dark as a black olive and I ran to see her.“Are you scared?” she said.I nodded.“Most spiders aren’t even deadly,” she told me. “Things that scare us aren’t that bad, most of the time.” She licked her thumb and wiped something off my cheek. “What you’re afraid of almost never happens.” She held me with both of her straight arms on my shoulders and looked intensely into my eyes. “Ok?” I nodded again.“You know what the most deadly insect on earth is?” she said.“No.”“The mosquito,” she said. “It’s killed more people than any other bug. And people think they’re harmless.”She pulled me closer.“The smallest things, the ones nobody else notices, baby. That’s what you need to be afraid of.”
Before the suicide I expected her to come back and rescue me. When I asked my father about her, all he’d say was “your mother’s gone” in a tone that made it clear that his answer was the end of the conversation. I thought I must have done something that drove her away. Even years later, guessing and hoping it had to be because of my father, because of something I didn’t know, I wondered why she left. How she could leave a kid. Before her suicide, I always thought someday I’d get the chance to ask her why.
The police, then the papers, said there was no note. Only her car, still running, on the side of the bridge. For too many years, I lived in her past and not my present. I woke up, sweating and hearing that car idling, smelling its exhaust in the cold morning air, even though I wasn’t there. She’d crossed the road and jumped on the opposite side of where she’d parked. The driver’s side door was open and her purse and wallet sat on the passenger seat.I learned quickly not to romanticize her death. I did at first. I imagined her free, weightless, flying and empty of sorrow for a moment—and maybe empty of it forever after that. Like the overdose, but lasting until time would stop. Afterwards, I read and read and read about bridge suicides. The impact was like being hit by a car. The water might as well be cement—the body hits the water and stops and the organ tree keeps going and rips itself away from all the connective tissue that keeps us together. The children of suicides were five times more likely to kill themselves than the rest of the world. Later, in one of the rehabs that didn’t take—while they tried to find some combination of meds that would keep me from psychotic episodes—there was some doctor telling me that junkies were fourteen times more likely to kill themselves than their peers.
At four in the morning, I left the hotel. There was no way I could sleep. I walked ten city blocks to a Dunkin Donuts and bought a coffee that spilled so hot it seemed like melting plastic on my fingers. I poured a third of it out and walked back to the hotel, smoking.The sun wasn’t up yet, but I smelled the salt in the air from Long Island Sound. At 6:30, I heard the Amtrak to New York City and I remembered getting drunk under the railroad bridge with Tony when we were in our first band in high school. They had a maintenance level ten feet beneath the train level and you could drink wine and, as long as they weren’t up on their ladders doing repairs, lay on the old wood supports and smell the tar in the railroad ties , mixed with cooler salty air from the water and listen to the sea gulls and be wasted and feel the train coming from ten or fifteen miles away. First, a small vibration, maybe when it pulled out of Stanford. And then it would grow and I would close my eyes and feel the heat and light of the summer sun and the train would get closer and louder and closer and louder until the noise swept everything else away and you prayed that it was a New York Express so the noise would stay that loud for five full minutes because the train wouldn’t stop like it would if it was a Local. I finished my coffee and lit a cigarette and went back to the hotel and waited for the sun to come up.
A life of questions. What brought her there to that place that she was so out of options and without hope that any day would ever be different again? Always wondering how she felt. How different was her moment from my crossing of that line over the years? A loneliness that swelled so hard that it must have pushed against her skin from the inside, that she must have had a pain no words would ever reach. And could I have done something, anything, before she left? Could I have changed the course of events that brought her to that moment, that collection of seconds, where she stood and decided, finally, to fall toward the river, cold air in her hair and face, the wind pining back and fluttering her dress in that moment before impact?And, later, when I did attempt suicide and even later, after what I hoped was the last relapse, where I’d get close again to ending it all, when that same loneliness swallowed the world, I wondered: Was I trying, in some sort of desperation, to get close to her, or trying, just as desperately, to get away?

Tatjana Soli talks about The Forgetting Tree, second novel feeling like first syndrome, what haunts us and why, and so much more

Tatjana Soli  is one of those writers you speak about with a kind of reverence. Her gift with words is rivaled only by her talent with story. Set on a California citrus ranch, The Forgetting Tree explores how one woman survives not just an unspeakable tragedy , but an illness that could take her land from her, as well as her life. A New York Times Notable Book and Editor's Choice, The Forgetting Tree is now in paperback. You know you want it immediately, right? I'm honored to have Tatjana here today to talk about the book. Thank you, Tatjana!The book is so wonderful that I think it‘s safe to say that there was none of that ‘fear of the second novel measuring up to the first.‘ If anything, it‘s richer, deeper, more nuanced. How did you do that alchemy? Are you a worrier about things like this or do you just burrow into the story so the only world is the world of the story? What‘s your writing process like? Well, luckily or unluckily depending on how you want to look at it, I had trouble getting my first novel published so I reluctantly moved on to a new book. When I started The Forgetting Tree, it was very much with the mindset of this being another ‘first‘ novel, and I wrote it trying to accomplish the goals I had for it, assuming that there might never be an audience for it. That was very freeing, and even now as I work on future projects, I try to separate the writer part of myself from the author who considers how a work might be received. That‘s the good part of the long time between creation and publication. Yes! I am a compulsive worrier about anything and everything, most of which I realize is beyond my control, but that makes no difference. The only thing I can do to maintain my sanity as a writer is to try to shut down that part of myself during the period I write, which I find doable. When you are in the zone, you find great satisfaction inside the world of your novel. I try to keep to keep to a schedule such as so many pages a day, so many months per draft, etc., but I don‘t beat myself up for inevitably slipping behind as long as I feel something important was accomplished each day, that the process is moving forward on some level. Sometimes you hone the perfect paragraph for a scene and that‘s time well spent. I love the whole image of the forgetting tree, a myth about walking round a tree and forgetting our painful pasts. Do you think we can ever forget our pasts--and should we? Doesn‘t being haunted, as Claire and Minna are, serve a purpose sometimes? That is a great question. What is that old joke? Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, and repeat it, and repeat it. Seriously, part of the attraction of a good book for me as a reader is following how the pasts of characters and historical events play out in a satisfying way that is seldom available to us in real life. Part of that happens by a winnowing process, a narrowing of possibilities so that fiction is by necessity less complex than real life. If that complexity were allowed, the story wouldn‘t work. The past affects us, but we can‘t let it overwhelm. My main characters, Claire and Minna, go back and forth on this continuum by extreme degrees that most of us luckily will never have to experience. I think being haunted can serve a purpose. People focus on the negative aspect ‘ that we become paralyzed in the present ‘ like Claire is by the loss of her son. Yet the more common danger is pretending it has no bearing on the present. That creates an unmoored life that is very familiar in contemporary life. If the past doesn‘t matter, how can anything in the present or the future count either? What was the research like? Did anything surprise you? I love research because it teaches me about things I might never come across in any other way. For example, I love the orange groves where I live, but knew next to nothing about the nitty gritty of running them. I met an organic lemon rancher in San Diego County who was a retired English teacher and who was really passionate about this life he had deliberately chosen. This connection to land and place is something most of us are divorced from in our daily life. In writing about Minna I realized that I didn‘t know enough about current history in the Caribbean, especially Haiti in the last twenty years. So I studied books and documentaries, talked to people. As surreal as anything you can write, the reality of the people living there far outstrips what the imagination can invent. And yet the imagination allows us access that doesn‘t come in any other way. I spoke to people who grew up in Haiti, who had sheltered, privileged lives there, and were blind to the daily realities of what was happening in the streets. They did not share the American journalists‘ views of the country‘s politics. It made me think of my small, daily routine, how much I willfully block out, turn away from. Don‘t we all avoid driving down certain streets, avoid certain neighborhoods? The best research changes the way we see our place in the world. I love the photo of the desert island under ‘Future Projects‘ on your wonderful website. What‘s obsessing you now and why? Maybe it’s being a certain age, but I think you get to a place in life, and no matter your particular situation, you ask, Is this happiness? Is this all there is? Does this give us meaning? So even though the book I’m writing now is the lightest, comedy mixed with tragedy, it’s also the most autobiographical in terms of what I’m obsessed with at this particular stage of my life. One of my characters, Richard, is a professional chef. He is passionate about cooking, yet he’s kind of lost his way. I’m having great fun writing about food, which always figures heavily in my books anyway. I’m hoping when reading this one, people will be tempted to sneak away to the refrigerator between chapters!
Tatjana Soli, author of The Lotus Eaters, New York Times Bestseller, and The Forgetting Tree. "Quietly mesmerizing... tough and lyrical."  Janet Maslin
http://www.tatjanasoli.com

Elizabeth Cohen, author of THE HYPOTHETICAL GIRL, fights it out with the blank page

A matchmaking web site features a Yak farmer in Iceland. A deer and a polar bear flirt it up on Skype. Elizabeth Cohen's astonishingly inventive collection of stories, The Hypothetical Girl,  follow people struggling to fall into love--and avoid smashing up their hearts in the process. I don't think I've ever read anything more original, and I'm thrilled to have Elizabeth here, writing about confronting every writer's nemesis: the blank page.  Thank you, Elizabeth!






Dear Blank Page
by Elizabeth Cohen




1.



I started out with you in front of me. You were sorta mean looking, like a girl I knew in high school. She grew up and got nicer and I was hoping that was what you would do as well.

Thankfully, you did! I put things on you like I was decorating a room. Pretty things, little things, glow in the dark things. Other lIttle doo dads. I put stories on you that I made up. You seemed ok with it all. I named you.  That name seemed good and right and you took right to it, so that was nice.

Then, you took this big jump off the screen and I decided it was time to send you out in the world. I said, run, run run, little page, and run you did. You ran right out in the yard. Don’t go in the street, little page, I yelled, but you did, right into traffic.. Fortunately you did not get hit.

Well, that isn’t exactly true. The Kirkusmobile sort of bruised you but the Publisher’s Weekly thing was the antidote; it picked you up and took you for a pleasant and scenic ride.

And now little page, you are out in the world having a life.


2.

This is what authors do. We are crazy like that. We take words and toss them at pages and see if they will stick, spaghetti on the walls, and then see if anyone will even notice. That is the big big trick. Will anyone notice our words. in a world of - what is it now, 6 billion personisms, walking around, eating, pooping, sleeping and at least 1 billion of them writing first novels and another 500 million spitting out poems, why would anyone, why should anyone care about my little page running around all nakedly like this.  It is just nuts.

I call this the deer tick syndrome. We are all naked, We are all running about. And we are all scared of getting bit by deer ticks. These ticks may carry diseases that might blind or cripple us, yet we still do  it, run around naked with our little pages, flapping vulnerably in the wind. What the freaking hell, right?


3.

So, back to you little page. That was a digression there, sorry. Now you are out, gates open and you are running wild, running with a pack of other naked pages. And I have a choice. I can sit home and check my Amazon numbers or do what we do the best, we writerly animals. Yep,  I am birthing a new little page. No, none of that,. No sibling rivalry here! I am doing it. I am facing it right now. A new BLANK PAGE.

This one is terrifying, sorta like that mean girl I knew in high school. She got nicer. You did, too. Hope second little blank page, will as well.

I am counting on it.

Love,
Your author mamma, E

Elizabeth Cohen is an assistant professor in the writing arts program of the English Department at SUNY Plattsburgh. She is the the author of several books, including, this summer, The Hypothetical Girl, a book of short stories, from Other Press. www.thehypotheticalgirl.com. She lives in Plattsburgh, NY with her daughter Ava, their dog Samo and way, way too many cats.