Caroline Leavitt's Blog, page 92

Heather Barbieri, author of the Cottage at Glass Beach, talks about writing through loss

Heather Barbieri is the author of Snow in July (Soho) and The Lace Makers of Glenmara (Harper). Her new novel, The Cottage at Glass Beach, is racking up the raves with praise like this: " Wonderful, subtle, transporting story," Booklist (starred review).  "In the enchanting world of Maine's Burke's Island, fanciful stories--of captured selkies becoming dutiful wives and tears cried in the sea beckoning lovers to shore--are gracefully woven into modern reality." Publisher's Weekly.


I asked Heather if she'd consider writing something for the blog, and here it is, below.
Thank you so much, Heather. I'm honored to host you here.

Writing through Loss            I’d just submitted an outline and sample chapters for my third novel, The Cottage at Glass Beach, to my agent when the news came. In a surreal twist of fate, my previously healthy, active mother, the woman who was frequently asked what products she used to keep her skin so beautiful (she could have done ads for Oil of Olay), had been flown from our hometown to the emergency room in Seattle. Our house quickly became base camp for me, my sisters, and shell-shocked father, as we drove back and forth from the hospital overlooking Puget Sound. It took a day or two before the doctors realized she had one of the worst conditions possible, cerebral amyloidosis, from which there was no recovery. (C. a. is a little known member of the Alzheimer’s family of illnesses; there’s no treatment, no cure.) She never regained consciousness and died within a few days, better for her, given the prognosis, hard for us, as it is for so many who find themselves suddenly bereft.            Two weeks later, I was struggling to get my bearings in both an emotional and literary sense. Despite what had happened, there was a book to be written.  As had been occurring frequently since my mother’s death, a blue jay perched in the rhododendron bush across from my office window, trilling in what might have been interpreted as encouragement and staring me in the eye. You can do this, it seemed to say. In the weeks that followed, whenever I was feeling uncertain it, or one of its brethren, would appear to cheer me up at just the right time. (One of the birds had alighted on the dining room windowsill when we were telling my dad that Mom had passed away, tapping on the glass to get our attention.) Blue had been her favorite color, and the birds became her emissaries, signs and wonders, in a time of need.            Each of us mourns differently. For me, what initially seemed like a daunting challenge of writing a novel in a few short months, became an outlet to process and express a profound loss and in doing so, discovering the transformation, the sadness and gifts that can come from such tragedies.  The subconscious, so essential to the creative process, is no stranger to grief.             And so I wrote, five days a week, writing the story I’d told her about that December—she’d always been my sounding board, sharing ideas and reading recommendations. The story she knew, but changed too, focusing on a woman’s journey to find her way in the wake of a devastating betrayal, protect her young daughters, and solve the disappearance of her mother when she was a child.  The book, this book, I would dedicate to my mother’s memory, lost and found.

Yep, A. S. King won the Los Angeles Book Prize for Ask The Passengers, and she's also hip, cool, generous, and the reason why she hasn't let it all go to her head is because she's a Pisces

I cannot tell you how thrilled I am to be doing this interview. I think I first met A. S. King at a Backspace conference and we just hit it off. I'm rabid about her work, too, and every time I run into her, the world just seems brighter. In fact, a month ago, I was in the ladies room at the Tucson Book Festival for a 1000-person dinner and I hear "CAROLINE LEAVITT!" and there she was. Just read her responses here and you'll immediately fall in love with her, too.




And as for her latest, Ask The Passengers, take a look at this list of honors: 2012 Los Angeles Book Prize winner, 2013 Cooperative Children's Book Center Choices pick, A 2012 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, A 2013 Capitol Choices book, An ALA GLBTRT Rainbow List Top Ten pick, A Kirkus Best Book of 2012, A School Library Journal Best Book of 2012, A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2012, A Library Journal Best Books 2012: Young Adult Literature for Adults book, Six starred trade reviews, A Fall 2012 Junior Library Guild Selection, A Fall 2012 Indie Next List Pick, A YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults pick, 2014 Rhode Island Teen Book Award nominee, a Carolyn Field Award nominee. About a young girl who sends her love to the only people who might want it--passengers in a plane, Ask the Passengers shifts the way you see the world. Which, of course, is what the best books always do. 




Thank you so much, and a big hug from me, Amy.


Your work is "intense," "compelling," and it's won just about every honor and prize I can think of. Ask The Passengers has a knockout, eerie premise: a troubled girl caught in a smalltown, sends her love to the passengers in the planes above, hoping they'll appreciate it. Where did the idea for this spark?

I’ve been sending love to random passengers in airplanes since I was a little girl. I can’t remember how young I started—maybe six or seven. I don’t know why I started except I might have been bored in my back yard surrounded by a huge cornfield with little to do but use my imagination. I still do it when I see an airplane. Every time. I still imagine that it’s helping someone. Every time. 

When I sat down to write Ask the Passengers, I set out to write about love. I found myself asking How can I write about love in a setting full of small-minded hate? I remembered all those random people who I’d sent love to over the years and I knew I wanted to write about their journeys as receivers-of-love as well as my own, as the sender-of-love. 

The metaphor arose: If we love randomly and freely, it is a lot harder to hate people for who they love and it’s a lot harder to judge other people and be critical and small-minded. With that, the spark…sparked. 

So many of your books target people on the edge, or the disenfranchised--but to me, you make those people the ones who are NOT to be dismissed, the ones we NEED to know. How do you such alchemy?

You know, I think my characters are a lot more common in our world than people want to see. In fact, that’s the problem, isn’t it? We know the stats. We know 1 in three women are beaten or raped in her lifetime. We know that 1 in four people suffer from some sort of mental illness. We know about 1 in six children are sexually abused. Etc. Etc. We feel hugely uncomfortable talking about or tackling these issues. And yet not one of us is untouched in our family or friend circles by one of those stats. So, even though we do not talk about it, in reality, characters who are dealing with these very common issues are universal because we all have them…or we are them. 

In the case of Ask the Passengers, Astrid is simply falling in love with a girl. She is confused because society has given us so many labels and she feels uncomfortable affixing one to what she’s feeling. Labels are permanent and so…limiting. I don’t see life that way and neither does Astrid. This is why it was so helpful to bring Socrates into the story and have him question everything around him, as was his habit. In my mind, it’s a habit I wish more people would get into. So many people stick themselves in confining boxes and stay there for their very short lifetimes. It seems a waste not to grow throughout the entire journey. 

Tell us about your new book, Reality Boy? And about Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future?

Reality Boy is about Gerald Faust—a boy who was once a five-year-old reality TV “star”…if you call being a mess on TV stardom. Now that Gerald is a teenager, he’s suffered a lifetime of being recognized everywhere in his town, being teased and bullied by his teachers, peers, and even his family. He is beyond angry about everything that was once aired on TV…and especially the things that weren’t aired on TV. He’s very close to snapping. Until he meets the girl who works at register #1 while he works register #7 at the food stand at the local ice hockey arena. She’s the first person who treats him with any sort of respect and he’s not quite sure what to do with it. The book releases October 22, 2013 and ARCs are floating around now.

Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future is about…um…I’m revising it and it’s giving me an eye twitch at the moment, so let’s just use the PW announcement for that one…which reads: A graduating senior struggles with growing apart from her two best friends as all three of them begin having strange and powerful visions of divergent futures. That’s slated for fall 2014. 


I have to ask: you've won so many accolades, such praise, such prizes, and yet you remain the most down-to-earth, warm, generous author I know, which is probably why you are so beloved. How do you not let it all go to your head?

Thank you so much for saying this. You are very kind. I’m not sure how to answer. I mean…the publishing business won’t let it go to my head, really. I still drive a 1997 Dodge Neon with no air conditioning and I eat soup for dinner some nights. Accolades and awards don’t buy food. That’s part of it, I bet. Although, if I made money in this business, I’m not sure my head would inflate, either.

So…I’m guessing that I’m just like this. I’m the youngest of three daughters and a born mediator. I’m a Pisces. I love and hug freely. I still volunteer inside my community. I get to hang out with very level-headed teenagers in their schools a lot and they remind me to stay open-minded, non-judgmental and groovy. Life is short. Why would I want to go around with a big head, you know? 

What's your writing life like? How do you make time for all that you have to do?

Caroline, things are about to get crazy for me. For 20 years I’ve managed to write novels between jobs, little children, volunteer things and most recently, a lot of travel for school visits. I have no idea how I did that. But I’ve just landed a fantastic faculty position at a low-residency MFA program and that is about to change the whole game. 
The short answer to this question is: I work a lot. I don’t watch TV. 


What's obsessing you now?

I am in love with the book I am writing for 2015. In. Love. I can’t tell you what it’s about, really, but I am learning a lot about helicopters and reading a lot of contemporary surrealist fiction. 


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

Here are the answers: I like Jameson whiskey, my shoe size is 11, and I love roller skating with my kids more than anything in the whole world.

Cool cats and swinging chicks, come to my 1950s party at the fabulous Clinton Book shelf to celebrate IS THIS TOMORROW

Because Caroline Leavitt's latest book, Is This Tomorrow is set in the 1950's, we thought we would have a little fun. We will host 50's trivia, music, snack, complimentary cocktails and more. All to celebrate the release of Is This Tomorrow. Please call the Clinton Book Shop to register for this event.

Join us for a Ladies Night Out (But guys are welcome!) featuring author, Caroline Leavitt. Caroline's new book, Is This Tomorrow is an Indie-Next Pick for May and is a Staff-Pick at the Clinton Book Shop and indie book shops ac... Clinton Book Shop12 E. Main Street, Clinton, New Jersey 08809View map · Get directions
Clinton Book Shop updated the event photo.

Watch the book trailer for Is This Tomorrow

Please watch the book trailer for Is This Tomorrow, made by by friend Jeff Clarke (you might know him as the guy fighting Pete Campbell on the train on MadMen) and starring my friend Gina Sorell!
If I was more tech savvy, I could put it right up here for you, but I think the link will work!

Sneak listen of Is This Tomorrow audiobook!

From the amazing Xe Sands, who did the audiobook:

Finally time to start sharing "sneak listens" of some recent favorite projects that will be releasing rapid-fire, starting with this marvelous book from Caroline Leavitt, IS THIS TOMORROW (HighBridge Audio). This was an exceptional project to work on and it continues to live with me. Look for a joint post and giveaway of the print & audio on Leavitt's blog on release day, May 7th. 

From Gina Sorell's blog, an interview with David Rotenberg, author of A Murder of Crows

David Rotenberg is not only a highly acclaimed bestselling mystery writer, and skilled master of tightly wound suspense thrillers, he is a renowned acting teacher and founder of The Pro Actors Lab, andPro Actors Lab L.A. 
Check out his website for more about his novels, and the great reviews they have received at: www.davidrotenberg.com
Full disclosure, David and I go way back. Back to when I was a young actress, studying with him. He taught and mentored my husband acting, and now my husband acts and teaches his famous technique. I taught his daughter improv, and have shared holiday gatherings with his lovely wife and family. We were out of each other’s lives for years after I moved to Los Angeles, and recently got back in touch. And though we are both older and hopefully wiser, David’s latest book A Murder of Crows, the second installment in The Junction Chronicles, is about protagonist Decker Roberts, an acting teacher, and a man with a secret. Decker has the dangerous gift of being able to know when someone is telling the truth. In the first novel, The Placebo Effect, this gift turns from a lucrative side business that he uses to help corporations in their hiring process, to a life threatening hazard that turns his world upside down and sends him on the run from an unknown enemy, and a government agent determined to find him and others of “his kind”.
A Murder of Crows has Decker trying to stay off the radar of the NSA, searching for his estranged son. But when a vicious attack wipes out the best and brightest of America’s young minds, devastating the country's future, Decker is forced to step out of the shadows and help track down the killer. The hunt brings him in contact with other people of "his kind," and Decker begins to realize that the full extent of his gifts, go beyond his wildest imagination.
I am thrilled to have David here today to talk about story, his stories, and his writing process!

This book is the second installment in the Junction Chronicles. Did you know when you were writing the first one, The Placebo Effect, that there were going to be more, or did you just fall in love with your characters and want to keep going?
I knew that it would be several books. My first contract with Simon and Schuster was for two books. In fact now we have a bit of a dilemma – I’ve pretty much completed a draft of book three which would wind up the plot lines of the series – but, I really feel that I’m not finished with these characters and the ideas driving the books. So Simon and Schuster and I (and my lawyer) will have to sit down and discuss the possibility of extending the series.
That should be interesting.

Your protagonist Decker Roberts has an extraordinary gift that comes with an extraordinary responsibility. As an artist do you feel that we have responsibilities with our gifts? To share them? To help others find and realize theirs?
I’m not sure about the ‘as an artist’ part of this. I think people with gifts have a responsibility of sharing those gifts – beauty (see Anouilh’s play Mademoiselle Colombe), strength, intelligence etc.
All eight of the novels that I’ve had published deal with the problem of people who have special gifts of some sort. Many of the novels deal with that gifted person wanting his/her gift acknowledged by others while at the same time wanting to be simply part of the greater society. This was absolutely central to my first five novels all of which are set in modern day Shanghai.
In fact I was faced with this issue when I was invited to Shanghai to direct the first Canadian play in the Peoples Republic of China. The very first thing that the Artistic Director of the Shanghai Theatre Academy said to me – through my translator – was: “You are to remember that you can be replaced.” No welcome to China, no how was your 28 hour trip, just: “You are to remember that you can be replaced.” Hard to hear when you were a Broadway director, but central to a lot of what I’ve written.
As a teacher I think it’s absolutely my duty to help others realize their gifts, no matter how different they may be from mine. 

 What obsesses you? I am obsessed by secrets and really, by choices. All my work deals in some way or another with choices, and the ramifications that they have for us later on. Right now I am obsessed with this idea of “how did I get here”? Cue, the Talking Heads soundtrack. What about you? What is obsessing you these days?
Dave Alvin’s version of Route 61 Revisited. Early Dylan altogether. Namibia is in my thoughts a lot. High desert. The southern sky – especially the constellation Scorpio (no I’m not a Scorpio). Why the behavior of so many people seems to have been learned from bad tv acting? Would police officers know how to walk? Talk? Be? Without bad examples on TV? When did every cabbie think it was his job to be a witty raconteur? When will I hail a cabbie who actually is a witty raconteur rather?
When did life begin to imitate art – rather than vis a versa?
And what kind of world are we generating where everyone has seen virtually everything so that we have programmed responses to every situation? We know what every line of text should sound like – jeez, we even know what a nun having a baby is like!
By the by – that voice reading your lines to you is not your voice or your first impulse. It’s the voice of big media talking to you. Want to find your own voice? You’ve got to kill the voice of media in your head.

Can you tell me what your writing life is like? Do you outline? Do you have a writing ritual? I find I am completely lost in a fog for months, sometimes longer, driven by a thought or a line of dialogue that I roll around my brain and body forever, until I trust that there is more there. And I outline, but wait until I absolutely have to.
My refusal to do outline drives my editors quite mad. I also refuse to show them things until I totally understand what I’ve got. Over and over again things that I know any talented editor would have crossed out proved to be the very hook that I needed to make the plot turn – and I didn’t know it until well after I’d written it.
I always know what I’m writing about – always. But the circumstances, plot and details can take me a long time to find.
On a scene level, because I was a stage director for so many years, geography is important to me. I can write the scene if I know where the door is, what’s out the window, who stands and when. Looking at and looking away become important to me.
I was an extremely disciplined stage director. But as a writer I’m a mess. When I finally have a full day to myself I usually cook and clean. Sometimes when I have absolutely no time I find ideas. I can go an entire week without writing a word worth keeping then have a fifteen page morning where almost every word is a keeper.
I love the ocean to help me clarify my thoughts – especially plot, which is not my forte. I tend to write scenes first – heavy on character. Once I know the characters I can imagine them in various circumstances – some of which I keep – most of which I discard. Writing a series is fun that way – surely by the end of the first novel you know the basic characters. I often keep them somewhat close to my age – usually ten or fifteen years my junior so I have a bit of distance to understand what they are going through.  
As for writing rituals … depends totally on the project. Some novels I wrote with the same music playing over and over again – didn’t make me all that popular with my kids. Some novels I wrote in complete silence.

You’ve lived and worked in New York, Toronto, China, South Africa, and most recently Los Angeles. How does this effect your writing inspiration? Does each new location become a possible setting for your next work? As writers I know we are constantly mining people and places for story, but is there one place that speaks to you more than others?
I’m a terrible tourist and seldom find that kind of travel helps me. I like to go places and work. I’ve directed in China and South Africa as well as a great many American cities. I ran a major American regional theatre in North Carolina. It’s living in places that allows me to understand – or begin to understand – them. I spent a lot of my formative years on NYC and still somewhat think of it as my home although I haven’t lived there for 25 years. I was born and raised in Toronto and came back to raise my kids. It’s an unusual city. Over 50% of the people in Toronto were not born in Canada. So there are many times when you look at things here – that there simply is no ‘there’ there. Sorry Gertrude. I never found that with NYC or Shanghai for that matter. Those places have deep roots, you can push hard against them and they won’t give. They are easier to write about, and from.
I’m deeply influenced by architecture and interior space. So different cities often give me ideas for stories. 
What question should I have asked that I didn’t?
I think unfortunately the one question that all novelists must now face is why exactly are you still doing this? Do you not sense a tidal wave approaching? Can you not see the trend away from valuing what you do?
And there are times that I feel that – but I’m attached to story. I continue to believe that story itself is important to the human spirit. And that the novel still presents the most intimate way to tell stories. It doesn’t hurt that after all those years in the collaborative art of the theatre that it’s downright fun to actually not collaborate – to control the process virtually from beginning to end.
I also think that “Does long form TV invade the space of the novel?” is an important question. Perhaps the best of such – The Wire, Breaking Bad etc. – does. Yet the experience of taking a book and controlling your pace of consumption, of being able to go back and re-read or skip sections – still strikes me as the most truly interactive of the media … besides, I can’t imagine a world without novels. 
Thanks for a great interview David!!

Christina Baker Kline, bestselling author of Orphan Train writes about book clubs, more

Christina Baker Kline isn't just a great writer, she's also the funniest, warmest, and most generous writer on the planet. And I'm lucky to call her my friend. We're both going to be appearing at the Center for Fiction, Wednesday, the 24th at 7. I'll be talking about Is This Tomorrow, a May Indie Pick that's coming May 7th, and Christina will talk about her NYT, USA Today, Bookscan, Indie Heartland, and Indie List bestseller, Orphan Train. I asked Christina to write something for the blog in honor of our appearance, and I'm thrilled to include some of her essays here! Thank you, Christina.
A TALE OF TWO BOOK CLUBSI belong to two book clubs, and I love them equally for completely different reasons.  The first is comprised of about a dozen women who came together more than a decade ago in my town of Montclair, New Jersey, when our children were in diapers. We were substance-starved new mothers, overwhelmed by life’s demands and delighted to have an excuse to get out of the house one evening a month to engage in real conversation about something other than our offspring (adorable though they were). The mandate of this group – never explicitly stated, but clear from the beginning – was to read the most talked-about books of the moment:  books we’d feel silly not knowing about at a party.  We tend to favor novels and memoirs, but occasionally choose books in psychology, economics, and current events.  From Room (by Emma Donoghue) to Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Katherine Boo), we’ve read more than 150 books, often bestsellers and usually award-winners, with an occasional classic thrown in for good measure. (Our current pick, for example, is Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree.) We meet at members’ houses every fifth Monday (excepting holidays), eat cheese straws and grapes, drink sauvignon blanc, chat about our kids, our trips, and yoga, and eventually settle in to discuss the book.  For a while we had some rules: each person brought in three ideas and the group voted; the person who chose a book was responsible for introducing it, etc.  But that didn’t last long.  Now we come to consensus as a group, throwing out ideas and letting the conversation dictate our selections. If someone feels strongly about a book, we almost always read it.  Discussion focuses on the stories, the writers themselves, the hype surrounding the book, and, in the case of nonfiction, the true story, time period or historical event the book is based on.  
This group has survived the breakup of several marriages, illnesses including cancer and chronic fatigue, falling outs between members, and many child-related heartaches (learning disabilities, anxiety attacks, broken limbs, and now, as our babies become teenagers, all kinds of nerve-wracking experimentation).  Over the years, some members have dropped out for a variety of reasons – for one thing, the urgent need to have an evening to oneself is gone, and with homework, sports and other pressures it can be hard to get away for a non-essential meeting.  But a hardy band of book lovers remains, and new members have come in to fill the gaps. 

My second book club doesn’t call itself a book club.  It’s a group of about eight published novelists and memoirists, several of whom teach creative writing on college campuses. We live in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersey, and gather three or four times a year in NYC to discuss a writer’s work over dinner.  

            The New York group is closer to a class, in some ways, except that we all lead the discussion.  We talk about books that have influenced us as writers, or that we’re embarrassed to say we’ve never read – books we consider significant for one reason or another.  After taking more than a year to read Remembrance of Things Past, we moved on to Sue Miller’s The Good Mother, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and are now reading Chekhov’s short stories.  What we’re looking at, primarily, is how the writer does what he or she does. How does she pull it off?  We analyze craft and theme, characterization and pacing.  We pinpoint moments of change and look at how and why characters are introduced and discarded and where the climax originates.  We examine the arc of the narrative and look closely at moments that, to paraphrase Hemingway, teeter on the edge of sentimentality without going over.  

            It takes a lot of planning to coordinate the schedules of eight busy writers in several states.  So after chatting over wine and cheese about our own latest books and other projects, we get down to business fairly quickly.  Conversations tend to be fast-paced and energetic; we push each other to dig deeper and explore further than we might have done on our own. Each book is a learning tool, a rich text brimming with ideas and inspiration.  I always leave these gatherings with a heady sense of having gained insights and connections that will help me in my own writing.  (I wrote about one of these moments of insight here.)

            My two book clubs serve entirely different purposes. The Montclair group provides a way to stay in touch with a circle of friends and read current books; it’s socializing with a literary excuse. And the writers’ group is equivalent to a welders’ convention – a place to exchange ideas about our trade.  It’s literary analysis with a socializing bonus.  I feel lucky to belong to both.   Because the truth is that sometimes I want to read for pleasure, to get swept up in the magic of a story.  And sometimes I want to learn from a book, to figure out how the magic tricks are done.
PRIMING THE PUMP  Mondays are hard.  All weekend you've been doing laundry, taking family bike rides, reading the Times in bits and pieces, going to your kids' soccer games, and then it's Monday morning and they're all out the door (except the dog, who is lying on your feet), and it's hard to know where to begin, how to pick up where you left off.When I was growing up in Maine, my professor parents bought an A-frame on a tiny island on a lake.  The house had no electricity or heat, and a red-handled pump was our only source of drinking water.  When we arrived on the island (having paddled over from the mainland in our evergreen Old Town canoe), we had to prime the pump with lake water to get it started.  One of my sisters poured the water into the top while another pumped.  The well water took a while to emerge, and then it was cloudy, rust-colored, for at least a minute or two before running clear.This reminds me of my own writing on Monday mornings - or anytime I've taken a substantial break from it.  As with the pump, I've learned to prime my writing.  I might read a chapter or two of a book on my nightstand, or perhaps turn to one of my 'touchstones' - those dog-eared, broken-spined, oft-read volumes I've defaced with marginalia and underlinings, and which I know I can count on for inspiration.  (I've talked about some of those books here and here.)Then I start to write, knowing that it may take some time to reach the deep, cold source of inspiration, but trusting that sooner or later my words will run clear.

New lives for old books! Thrilled that Dzanc rEprint series is reprinting my backlist!

 Dzanc Books rEprint is an innovative new publishing venture by the genius Dan Wickett, dedicated to publishing great works of contemporary literature in e-book formats. I'm honored to be chosen as one of the authors for this, along with Jane Ciabattari's Stealing the Fire, Robert Coover's The Public Burning, my friend Abby Frucht's Life Before Death (and more), Gina Frangello's My Sister's Continent, Ellen Gilchrist's The Age of Miracles --and so many more.

My titles should be available this September, and I hope you'll take a look! Here's the lowdown:



MEETING ROZZY HALFWAY

My first novel, which actually made me a sensation (but then, of course, my next four publishers went out of business.) About sisters, Boston suburbia, madness and love.

"Leavitt's writing shows feeling and authority."
Boston Globe
"Leavitt is a deft writer who brings a nice, wry specificity to the most incidental description."
New York Times Book Review
"Like Judith Guest's Ordinary People, Meeting Rozzy Halfway shows us the dark side of upper-middle-class American family life. Underlying both of these stories is the same desire to get at the heart of what happens between siblings and also between parents and the complex messages exchanged within the family organism."
Washington Post Book Word.
"This novel is, in a word, excellent. Leavitt is a wonderfully imaginative and compassionate writer. Her characters are rich and her voice is strong."
Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

LIFELINES



About love, rebellion and need, between a mother who may or may not be psychic, and her troubled daughter.


"Her book describes nothing less than the lifelong struggle between mother and daughter for love, independence and identity. Leavitt has already found her subject–the irrevocably tangled lines that bind every family together and she has staked out a territory of her own."The Washington Post
"Strong and memorable characters. Excellent!"
The Los Angeles Times



INTO THIN AIR

For three whole days, Madonna considered this one for her directorial debut! A young wife and mother abandons her husband and newborn baby to slide into a new, dark life.

"Tells a riveting story beautifully."New York Daily News
"Fresh and vivid language."
Baltimore Sun
"Leavitt has a wonderful insight into interpersonal relationships and writes in a style similar to that of Anne Tyler and Jane Smiley, capturing the rich complexities of everyday life."
Library Journal
"An emotional roller coaster...the story accelerates towards an inevitable, but somehow unpredictable crescendo. It is gut wrenching and engrossing."
Gainesville Sun


FAMILY

After the precipitous deaths of his doting parents, Nick Austen grows up in a home for boys. When he finds his first love, Dore, he settles into domestic bliss. But when another tragedy occurs, he struggles to protect himself against further loss by creating a powerful second, secret family, which could ensure his survival--or his demise.


"A good read and a fine novel."
Boston Sunday Globe
"The characters are true and their feelings are significant. Ms. Leavitt makes it impossible not to risk all our emotional involvement."
The Atlanta Journal & Constitution
"There is no denying this author's talents. Leavitt has a wonderful understanding of the minutiae that characterizes relationships."New York Times Book Review

Marisa Silver talks about Mary Coin, Dorothea Lange, drinking lots of tea, whether or not art can be immoral, and so much more

I've been avidly following the career of Marisa Silver since she was first published in The New Yorker. She's the author of Babe in Paradise, A New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; No Direction Home; The God of War, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction; and Alone with You, winner of the O. Henry Prize. Her new novel, Mary Coin, is already a New York Times bestseller, and it's one of the most provocative and gorgeous novels I've ever read, and which uses the famous Dorothea Lange photograph, "Migrant Mother" as the jumping off point for a brilliantly imagined story of photographer and subject. I'm so honored to have Marisa here. Thank you, Marisa, so very much.
What sparked this particular book, and why did you choose to fictionalize the characters?
A few years ago, I went to an exhibit focusing on photography of the West at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Lange�'s famous photo was part of the exhibition. I had seen the image many, many times and was always drawn to the woman�'s face, which seems to me such a mixture of strength and resignation, as well as to the curious composition of the photograph � the way the children face away from the camera. But what struck me seeing the photo this time was not the image itself but what was written on the curatorial label next to the image. The description noted that the woman in the photograph did not reveal who she was until she was sick and dying, when she appealed for help from the public in order to pay for her medical care. This fact struck me powerfully. Here was a woman who was the subject of, arguably, one of the most famous images of the twentieth century and who, for the better part of her life, did not lay claim to this legacy. I was immediately filled with questions. Did she choose her anonymity or was it chosen for her? Was there something about the taking of the photograph, and its subsequent ubiquity that troubled her? And what must it have meant to her, nearing the end of her life and in a time of physical duress, to have made the decision to finally reveal herself?
One of the central ideas that I deal with in Mary Coin is how history is made, how it is preserved, and how it is interpreted. The photograph taken by Dorothea Lange, �Migrant Mother�, was rooted in time and place. Then the photo began its journey. It became an inadvertent icon and made its way down through the generations in all sorts of forms � as an exhibit in museums, as a document in textbooks, even as a U.S. postage stamp. The life of the original object was interpreted and reinterpreted, and, as a piece of history, it adopted meanings and values that were different from those in play at the moment of its making. I based the characters of Mary Coin and Vera Dare on Dorothea Lange and Florence Owens Thompson, actual people in history. But I was less interested in trying to document the real and verifiable facts of those women�'s lives than I was in exploring the nature of interpretation. Fictionalizing the lives, and allowing myself to invent on top of a framework of facts, enabled me to deal with these themes not only as part of the text, but as part of the making of the text. 
There�'s a thread in the book about whether or not art can be immoral. While the portrait of Mary Coin is a testament to a hugely difficult time in American history, Mary also sees it as an invasion. How do you think art can juggle this division--and is there ever a time when it shouldn�t?
That is such an important question. When the artist confronts human suffering, is it immoral simply to document that suffering, or to make art out of it? Is the only moral position to involve oneself and try to alleviate that suffering in a more immediate way? War photographers deal with this issue all the time. Their position, of course, is that they are endeavoring to alleviate the tragedy by exposing it broadly. But what does that do for the person in that photograph who is desperate for help at the exact moment of the photograph�s taking?  In Mary Coin, the photographer, Vera Dare, realizes that the portrait she has taken will draw attention to the plight of the migrant workers. But she also knows that aid might not reach Mary and her children specifically. 
I�'m not sure there is a single answer to the question about morality in art. I think everyone will draw different lines in the sand as to what the moral stance of the artist should be. Wherever that line lies, though, I believe there is a moral consequence to the making of art. In the case of a photographer and a subject, an uneasy bargain is struck even if one is not overly articulated. A person can agree to be photographed, but in doing so, she relinquishes some control over her identity. She does not determine how the aesthetics of the image � the framing, the angle, the lighting � will shape how she is seen. And she cannot really fathom what the effect her exposure will have on her life, in terms of being seen by others, and having allowed herself to become a kind of object. The artist is in control of the aesthetics, which contain so much meaning. But the ethical ramifications of making an image will live with her. She will always have �taken� that picture, altered the real life of her subject for her own purposes. That is the artist�s burden to bear. I suppose what would be immoral would be to not recognize the weight of that responsibility, to act as if there were no ethical consequence to be shouldered when one takes a living person and makes them into an artifact.
There�'s so much in the book about the power of photography, about what we choose to focus on, and what we ignore, and why. Can you talk about that a bit, please?
Books have been written about this so it would be hard to sum up the subject in a few sentences, but I can talk about how this issue is explored in the context of Mary Coin. Walker Dodge, the contemporary historian in the novel, talks to his students about the difference between �looking� and �seeing�. Photography is an interesting form because it is one that is practiced not only by artists, but by everyone. We are a planet of image-makers. Instamatic... instagram, the message is that life can be captured and fixed in an instant. And then we move on to the next thing. And I think, because of the democracy of the process, and the ubiquity of the product, we have a more casual, and maybe less conscious attitude about looking at a photograph, especially one that is more documentary in nature. We tend to take those images at face value, consider them to be simple representations of reality, when in fact, there is really no such thing. The minute someone frames the world, he makes a choice of what to include and what to leave out. He is making a judgment about what is important, what he wants others to see. He is positioning himself at a certain distance from the subject, and that distance suggests an attitude, a particular point of view. All these choices alter reality. When we study a photograph carefully, we have to look beyond the frame.
What was the research like? Did anything surprise you?
I researched the lives of Dorothea Lange and Florence Owens Thompson, the woman in Lange�s photograph, Migrant Mother. I researched the times in which the women lived � early twentieth century New Jersey and New York, San Francisco in the twenties and thirties, Eastern Oklahoma at the turn of the last century, Central California during the Depression. I researched logging and cotton picking and orange growing and nineteenth century land deeds. I researched what kind of carnival rides might have come through a small Midwestern town in 1910, and what an abortion might have been like for a poor woman in a rural area in the nineteen thirties.  The research went on and on and all of it was fascinating and surprising. One of my favorite moments was when I discovered a website that tracks word usage over time. So, for instance, I could find out when the world �motel� came into the lexicon. Language usage is such a window into the culture and mores of a moment.
What�'s your writing life like? Do you have rituals? Do you plan things out? What kinds of ideas tend to capture your interest?
If I�'m being very, very good, I write three pages a day. Then I stop, hopefully mid-idea so that the following day I know exactly where to begin. Although usually I begin by going backwards and revising what I wrote the day before as a way to get a tonal running start on the day�s work. Tone is everything. I have to catch the right frequency in order to be writing well, and tone shifts and morphs all over the place, especially at the beginning of a project, when I am not yet certain of my point of view on my subject, on the dominant voice, or where I want the reader to be in relationship to my characters. 
Lots of tea is consumed. Lots of books are read. I write in my bedroom and the bed is always right behind me, beckoning. Sometimes it is very persuasive.
What�s obsessing you now and why?
I have been wandering around the territory of a few very disparate ideas lately. I am trying to find out why they are in my head at the same time and if they might be connected in some obscure way. If I can figure that out, I might know what it is I am going to work on next.

Katharine Weber talks about Here Today! a new musical based on her memoir, The Memory Of All That

Here Today! is a new musical based on the love affair between Kay Swift and George Gershwin, written about in Katharine Weber's wonderful memoir, The Memory of All That. It's about to be performed Saturday, April 27th, 3:30-5:30 at the Lang Recital Hall at Hunter College, on East 69yh Street. Tickets are just $5 for members, and $12 for non members. For reservations, call Lucy at 917-371-5509 or email ziegfeldsociety@aol.com. In honor of this event, I'm reprinting the blog post I originally did with Katharine last July!
I first met  Katharine Weber  after asking her for a blurb for a novel of mine, which to my delight, came with an offer of friendship. We quickly became confidants, and now spend hours talking about books, writing, food, art, music and gossip, too, of course. Her career is enviable. She debuted with a story in the New Yorker, and three of her novels were New York Times Notable books. Her extraordinary just-out memoir, which is also her sixth book, The Memory of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family's Legacy of Infidelities,  has already garnered an A from Entertainment Weekly and raves from Booklist, Publishers Weekly and More.  Levi Asher also weighed in on all of Katharine's novels in a terrific piece in Literary Kicks. I'm so happy to have Katharine here! (Thank you, Katharine!)



This book defies labeling--though it's the story of your family, it's also the story of so many other things, so you can't really call it a traditional memoir. Can you talk about how you stretched and changed the boundaries of the genre?
The book really isn't a traditional memoir, is it? It is not my story in any complete or historical sense. It is my sensibility and my awareness of this vast cast of characters in my family, starting with my mother and father, but it is certainly not the story of my life in a traditional sense. At the same time, even though there is a great deal you won't learn about me from this book, in some essential ways, it really is very intimate and personal. These are my people, and these are my experiences of my people, and here is more of their story which I have researched in the writing of the book. So in a certain sense, it is a researched group biography hybridized with a very personal memoir strategy. Is that stretching and changing the boundaries of the genre? I had no idea I was writing the book this way when I set out to do it.  Though I did want to use my father's enormous FBI file as an organizing element with the contrast between my memories of childhood in contrast to the FBI 's way of telling the same story about my family. I thought the book would be much more about the ways we tell our stories.
How would you say writing this book changed you?  Did anything surprise you? Did you have something in mind and then the book took on a life of its own?

I do think writing this book changed me, and in some unexpected ways. For one thing, it really expanded my capabilities as a writer in some practical ways. I knew how to write a novel,  or at lest, after five novels I knew how to teach myself how to write each of those novels and will know how to teach myself to write the next novel, and the next. But I didn't know how to write a book like this, a book based entirely on actual people and actual events, an amalgamation of what I experienced and remembered about them, what I knew about them, and what I discovered as I researched these many very different family members and their stories. I kept getting deep into the material and losing my perspective, feeling that every tiny fact and discovery had equal value and weight for the story, which wasn't the case.
If I had been writing fiction, I would have been able to recognize the extraneous material as I wrote it or at least as I revised it, so I would have had better control of the shape and pace of my narrative as I wrote. Instead, I labored over pages of material, revising and revising, only to recognize (often thanks to my editor John Glusman, who read and line-edited the manuscript thoroughly for each of three drafts) that I had overdeveloped something that didn't really serve the story at all and it needed to be eliminated.
John also confronted me with the chaotic and associatively unruly order of the first draft. Once again, my experience as the author of five novels had not prepared me to write in a less organic and more pre-determined and straightforward structure. I can trust my novelist's instinct when it comes to layering a narrative with associative and tangential interludes, while always keeping the narrative arc in mind and moving the character development and story forward, often in very nonstandard ways. But that same narrative instinct had led me to craft something far too organic the first time through -- which is to say I had lost control of the narrative because I was inside it and hadn't succeeded in maintaining a long view at all.
And at first I didn't have a "voice" for the story, because I wasn't inhabiting a narrating character, whose needs and wants would be clear to me, I was telling my own story. I always interrogate my narrator as I write, asking her, What do you want? What do you do to get what you want? Can you change in the course of this story? Do you change or do you fail to change? In what ways does this matter to this story? But I had failed to question myself. I needed to develop my own narrative voice, which I think I did, in the end write the book the way I would write a novel. So on the one hand I was to dependent on my experience as a novelist, and on the other hand I wasn't at first aware of the necessity to work at developing the narrative voice in exactly the same way I would for a novel. All of this was a giant learning curve.
Perhaps the change and surprise for me that came out of The Memory Of All That was realizing at the very end that I now had a profound understanding, for the first time, of the difference between grievance and grief. I think I moved from grievance to grief from the start to the finish of the book. So that is the answer to the question I pose to the main character of every novel, among the questions I had to pose to myself, about change, and how it signifies for the book.
I'm very interested in process.  Can you talk about what you're working on now and how you work at it?
I am writing a new novel. I have been spending a lot of time with it in my head, though I have very little to show for it yet on the page. It has taken me a long time to accept that this is my process, this stage of development which might look like "not writing" to someone else. There is value for me in holding the increasingly complex vision of the novel until it has, to quote Virginia Woolf "grown heavy in my mind."  When I discovered something Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, when she was beginning to write The Waves, it was a huge relief to me -- I had a revelation about this process of developing a new novel with which I had previously struggled. Something I had always thought was a liability, this delaying of the moment when I would begin writing it all down, I now understood was actually an asset, and it gave me permission to write the way I write. This is what she said: “I am going to hold myself from writing till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear.”
What kind of legacy do you think our families leave us and how can that be understood in writing?
What an intriguing question, Caroline. I think it varies tremendously from family to family, don't you? Starting with how families define for themselves what a legacy is. In some families, the legacy is absence, secrets, mysteries, lost connections, disappearances, missed opportunities. In other families it's Aunt Polly's good silver, the earlobes that mark you as a Worthington, the family tone deafness, and the right to be buried in a family plot where all your ancestors have been laid to rest since the Pilgrims landed. How we write about legacy seems to me the basis for many of the great novels and plays. Our heritage, our legacy -- does it define us, or do we define ourselves in conflict with it?
I think one of the most intriguing written documents of legacy that human beings create is very literally about legacy -- a Last Will and Testament. In my case, as I write in The Memory Of All That, I discovered that my father had cut me out of his Will in response to the news that I was pregnant with my first child. In my novel True Confections, disputes about the intentions underlying ambiguous language in a Will are central to the plot. What someone leaves behind in his or her Will, in addition to material objects and money that can delight or harm the recipients, can be anything from fantastic generosity to cruel rejection.
Can you talk about your writing process? Are you an outliner?
I have learned to be an outliner because, challenging as it is to do it, working from a solid outline can save you from wasted energy going up a lot of blind alleys and it can make you a more efficient writer. On the other hand, my method is pretty much to make an outline and then deviate from it significantly at certain junctures. If I stuck to the outline all the way through a first draft, to the end, with no deviations, that would herald a failure of some kind on my part. It would be a sign that something about this draft wasn't really succeeding.
Your novels have been optioned many times for films--how difficult is it to let go of a project and see it transformed, sometimes into something very different?
I would love to have more experience with this sort of difficulty, I assure you! I have seen a lot of scripts, but nothing has made it to the screen yet. However, a short story of mine, "Sleeping," has been made into an award-winning  short film by Doug Conant and Group-Six Productions, and that was an intriguing experience. (See the trailer here.) I loved the look and feel of the film, and the casting was terrific. The ending was changed -- in my story there is ambiguity, while in the film there are concrete explanations. I wouldn't have scripted it the same way. However, it's not my film, it's Doug Conant's film.