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Filed under: creativity, writer quotes, Writing

Christine Hale publishes a masterful memoir

Originally published by Mountain Xpress

Throughout her book A Piece of Sky, A Grain of Rice: A memoir in four meditations, Christine Hale recounts penning and reworking a novel. It’s a detail she returns to over and over. “I was a fiction writer [and] weirdly, given this book, I’m quite a private person,” she says. But following the deaths of her parents, Hale’s focus on fiction shifted and she was compelled to write not just about the passing of her mother and father, but their relationship and her own life growing up in Appalachia. “The memoir hijacked me,” she says.

“Working with a lot of memoir projects [over] the past 10 years, it’s not unusual for it to just come out and insist,” says Hale. She teaches writing in the Antioch University Los Angeles low-residency MFA program and the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC Asheville.

Many MFA in writing programs incorporate memoir into a creative nonfiction concentration. This is the case at Antioch, but not at Warren Wilson College, where Hale completed her own MFA. But the prevalence of the genre remains strong among readers, with The New Yorker asking, “What does the popularity of memoirs tell us about ourselves?” in a 2010 article and, in 2014, Inquiries Journal stating, “In recent years the memoir has come to the forefront of American literature as a popular form for both writers and readers.” Both articles also addressed “the nagging question of how true any autobiographical information really is,” as Inquiries Journal put it.

Hale says that she’s never been to a public reading of a memoir where someone didn’t ask about the difference between autobiography and memoir. “The questioner always wants to know, ‘Is it true?’ or ‘Did you get it right?’” she says.

The former, or the “biography as told to,” Hale says, “is about the facts and achievements, for good or for ill.”

On the other hand, “One has to be careful about calling memoir nonfiction,” she says. “It really is its own category of writing. It’s not fiction, but it’s not necessarily nonfiction in the sense of having its primary allegiance be to fact.”

A Piece of Sky, A Grain of Rice finds a balance between fact and the malleability of memory by wending, dreamlike, between worlds and time frames. “It began as three things: I’d been writing a lot about my parents and my childhood,” says Hale. “As the years went by, I saw I [was] really delving for a story of forgiveness.”

Of the experience of the together tattoo to symbolize Hale’s bond with her children, “How could you not write about that?” she asks. Indeed, her treatment of that strange and touching event is both raw and tender. As for the final storyline, the Buddhist retreats Hale took: “That’s nonfiction that’s more bizarre than fiction,” she says.

“Somewhere along the line I just sensed these three apparently exceedingly separate stories belonged together,” the author continues. “They were all about me coming to terms with major unanswerable questions in my life.” Hale had been reading collaged nonlinear memoir — the work of Brenda Miller in particular — and began to study the technical means to make associative shifts. Pivoting on an image is one tool she employs. Another is the use of the capitalized second person pronoun.

“Off You toddled in the summer-gold light, unafraid — leaf shadow on your shoulder,” she writes in one section. And, “In my vision You make your way deeper into the field, Mother, through tangled grass, lugging that bucket.” It’s poetic and strange and weighty at the same time. The brief capital-You passages deliver Hale’s prose from a shared story to something deeply personal and breathlessly beautiful.

“When you write about difficult life experience,” Hale says, “One, you have to face it. You have stop denying if you’re going to keep writing. And the second part is that, by writing, you get control of the narrative.” A Piece of Sky, A Grain of Rice does so gracefully, translating its author’s singular and sometimes strange tale into a relatable journey.

Filed under: Author Talk, memoir, writer quotes, Writing

Free audiobook resources

I love audiobooks. While I don’t wish for listening to books to replace reading books, I’m a fan of books in all forms. Just like the ebook revolutionized travel with reading material, audiobooks mean we can tune into literature more often. I listen to books while walking, commuting to work, making dinner, and using the elliptical machine at the gym.

Here’s what I don’t like: How expensive audiobooks can be. That’s not to say I don’t support authors and their products (I am an author; I know how many sales it takes for the royalty check to amount to anything), but Amazon has turned Audible into quite the moneymaker. A membership is $14.95 for one book a month; an audiobook from Amazon without an Audible membership ranges from $18-$30 or so. Pricey.

Image via diygenius.com

I’ve been tracking down ways to get free (and legal) audiobooks. They’re not the latest titles. Many are classics and so are in the public domain. But those books are still wonderful, still inspiring, and can take on a new life if narrated by a talented reader.

1. Try your local library. You can borrow classic and contemporary books on CD, upload them to a computer and download to a mobile audio player. It’s an extra step, but you can’t beat the price. If you’re in Buncombe County, visit the North Carolina Cardinal system here.

2. If your library doesn’t have what you want, try Overdrive, an online lending resource connected to the public library system. There’s even an app for it.

3. There are many works in the public domain (Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Jane Austen romances) available as full-length recordings through YouTube.

4. And finally, the volunteer-run Librvox offers free, public domain audiobook recordings. The options — there must be thousands — range from children’s books, bibles, and cook books to law books, memoirs, and, of course, fiction.

Filed under: Books

My blood and stars and everything: Gregory Alan Isakov on writing

I recently interviewed singer-songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov for Mountain Xpress. He’s on tour for his new record, Gregory Alan Isakov with The Colorado Symphony. Read the full feature here. Greg is one of my favorite musicians because his songs tell stories of encapsulated worlds and moods. The poetry is fleet is graceful and surprising, the melodies are bittersweet and strangely reminiscent, like remembering a snippet of a dream that fades even as it’s called to mind.

The poignancy of his lyrics, and his process as a writer, seem applicable to all genres of writing, so I wanted to share some expanded quotes fro our talk that didn’t make into the article.

Photo by Blue Caleel

Can you talk about the new project you’re working on?

Gregory Alan Isakov: I’m just sketching a record now. I made a few EPs over this winter and last summer. They were kind of a collection — there were three or four different EPs. They were kind of complete works, and then I began working on a full-length.

Time has always been my biggest ally with writing and recording, which is why it takes me so long to put out [new work]. It’s usually no less than three years between records. I think a lot of that is letting things settle. Coming back to the recording and [asking myself], “Does this make me feel something still?” and “Is this still working?”

Because I think when writing something new, and I think a lot of artists go through this, that’s your favorite thing for that moment. Then time kind of goes by and you’re like, “I don’t know about that.” You get this clear vision, seeing if songs will live and last. I make things and then I put them to bed for six months or three months, and then I come back to them and see if they’re still working.

Is that not really difficult? Don’t you have a desire to get it out there to the world?

The whole thing is a little bit torturous. I love it, but I feel like a mad scientist or one of those crazy people in their bathrobe and bunny slippers. I definitely go though that feeling. But to be completely honest, I feel like I come back to the same sense — and I don’t know if I’m alone in this or not — but my final thought on it is, “I’m gonna die.” I have an opportunity to make something that can affect someone when I’m not alive anymore. It sounds so grandiose, and even if no one ever listened to it or whatever, I think as an artists you have to just treat your art like that. It’s really important to me. Even if it gets buried and no one ever hears it again, that’s not the point. The point is having integrity and making sure that, when the vinyl comes back from press … I know [I put] my blood and stars and everything into [it] and I can sleep well.

I have a fear with writing fiction that if I ever take a break from it and step away from it, I’ll lose the thread. I’ll lose energy that keeps it going.

Totally. I can relate. It’s funny though, I feel like songs are alive. Sometimes I’m waiting for them — I’ve read stories about Leonard Cohen, how he’d slave over lines for a year, daily, reworking songs forever. I tried that on and it never really worked for me. I’m never afraid to punch in or work hard, but I believe that songs or pieces of writing, when you’re just starting, are this living thing. They need a minute and you come back to them and they’ll tell you a little more. You can’t beat it out of them.

Do you have a sense of where the little piece of stories come from?

I’m always kind of collecting. I feel like my job is first and last lines. I’m always hunting for those. Then I feel like, once I can kind of plant the seed, [the songs] are like, “Cool. Were gonna help you finish this.”

Filed under: creativity, inspiration, Music, Writing

Q+A with horror writer Grady Hendrix

This story was originally published at mountainx.com.

Grady Hendrix, author of Horrorstör (set in a haunted IKEA-type big-box store), returns with the 1980s-themed My Best Friend’s Exorcism. Of a recent author event he said, “I’m going to be talking about the Satanic Panic in the ’80s when everyone thought heavy metal music and backwards masking were sending kids straight to hell, Dungeons and Dragons was a doorway to evil, and Saturday morning cartoons were indoctrinating children into the occult.”

The book — part humor and part horror — borrows a big from Hendrix’s own high school experience (as he explains below, in a Q&A with Xpress). Hendrix is also the author of Occupy Space and Satan Loves You, the co-author of the YA series The Magnolia League and the graphic cookbook Dirt Candy, co-founder of the New York Asian Film Festival, and a contributor to Slate, Village Voice and Variety, among others.

Alli Marshall: I suspect most people think their high school experience was, at least in part, a horror story. What was the idea for you that initially led to My Best Friend’s Exorcism?

Grady Hendrix: The title popped into my head first. Then I figured best friendships were most intense in high school, and my high school experience was in 1988, so that’s when it would be set. Then I wrote a first draft and showed it to my wife because I was feeling pretty studly … and she told me it was a dumpster fire of secondhand ideas and stolen characters. And she was right. I was just recycling John Hughes movies and other people’s ideas about high school. So I sat down with all my letters and diaries from high school (and all her letters and diaries from high school) and read them for about three weeks. And somewhere in there, I had a genuine, authentic memory about what it felt like to be in high school in the ’80s, then another, and then another, and then I was off and writing.

I love the high school yearbook design of My Best Friend’s Exorcism — are those photos from your yearbook by any chance?

My author photo is my senior portrait and I thought that was horrifying enough. The rest are from the staff at [boutique publisher Quirk Books], so there’s a heavy New Jersey/Philadelphia vibe to them. One thing I’d like to point out is that even though I wrote all the yearbook inscriptions on the inside covers, our designer, Tim O’Donnell, farmed out the actual handwriting of them to about 32 different teenaged girls, like a yearbook-signing sweatshop.

The author, dressed as a Cardinal, presents his new novel. Photo courtesy of Hendrix.

Horrorstör also has a design element (the Ikea-type catalog). Do you seek out story ideas that have both a visual and literary component?

With Horrorstör the idea was there from the beginning because the IKEA catalog is the most published book in the world after the Bible and Harry Potter (and it surpasses the Bible some years — 160 million copies and climbing!). But with My Best Friend’s Exorcism, the story came first and the design came second. However, book design is pretty much 100 percent boring these days, so Quirk and I are doing our parts to make it more awesome.

It seems like the publishing industry is opening up to multi-media projects.

I think publishers are desperate to try to get people to read, and so they’re willing to try anything. But it’s rare that the multi-media aspect is more than a gimmick glued on at the last minute. One thing that’s been nice with Quirk is that they make this process organic. All we’re trying to do is make the most awesome books possible, by any means necessary.

You’ve worked as a journalist in the past — did that type of writing help inform your fiction in any way?

It’s made me a research junkie. I can’t start writing until I’ve got all my research done, and to be honest, research is the fun part. I’ve gotten to go to machine gun collector conventions, AA meetings, Civil War re-enactments, morgues and cut-rate heavy metal shows to research books and articles. For My Best Friend’s Exorcism, I had TV schedules from 1988, weather calendars from that year and school schedules all over my walls, and I made sure I walked or drove every route the characters took in the book. It’s a lot more fun than hanging around on Wikipedia.

Why do you think horror novels (and TV shows) have such a big following right now?

Probably because reality is just an endless strip mall full of corporate logos and family-sized servings of frozen buffalo wings. We’re all either really bored of reality or completely terrified by it, and we all know, deep down, that a couple of monsters would probably spice up the place. Who doesn’t want a sexy vampire boyfriend or to see your entire compliance department turned into zombies so you can shoot them in the head?

You’ve published two books with Quirk, a relatively small press. Why did you decide on that publishing route, and has it been a good experience?

I’ve published with Random House and Little, Brown, and Quirk has been a lot more fun. They only do a small number of books every year, which means they can spend more time and resources on your book, and they fight harder for attention and are willing to take more chances. A lot of publishers have a very corporate feel but if I wanted to work for a big company I would have gone to law school. I’d probably be richer, too.

Filed under: Author Talk, Books, fiction

Chapbook assembly station

The first 10 copies are being put together. Fancy red tape for the spines. Just need to find the right size stapler and they’ll be available to readers.

Filed under: Books

Anton DiSclafani on historical fiction

“The thing about writing historic fiction is it’s easy to see the character’s flaws,” says Anton DiSclafani, author of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls and The After Party. “It give you automatic tension. The reader understands what the characters don’t: that their world is coming to an end.”

Story originally published at mountainx.com.

Anton DiSclafani, the New York Times best-selling author of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, sets all of her books in the past. Her debut novel took place in 1920s Appalachia; her work-in-progress is set in 1940s Alabama, and The After Party, her just-published follow-up to Yonahlossee, gives readers a window into Houston in the 1950s. But “I’m a big believer in not letting the research get in the way of writing,” says DiSclafani. “I’m not somebody who wants to spends days and days in the library.”

The After Party was inspired by the River Oaks community, a wealthy neighborhood in Houston. Both sets of the author’s grandparents are from that city, and when she’d visit as a child, DiSclafani loved to drive past the sprawling homes of River Oaks. While many of those grand domiciles are now being demolished to make way for larger, newer houses (“Houston is all about the future,” the writer says), The After Party’s narrator, Cece Buchanan, can’t imagine living anywhere else.

The novel follows Cece and her best friend, Joan Fortier, two girls whose fates are entwined as children. When Cece loses her mother and is estranged from her father, she moves in with the Fortier family. But while Cece aspires to the Fortiers’ level of social standing, Joan grows disenchanted with Houston’s social circles and begins to rebel. Much of the narrative is shrouded in mystery, but the tension, says DiSclafani, “comes from Cece’s obsession with Joan.”

While not exactly a midcentury Single White Female, the women’s fraught relationship is in part a product of its era. It was important that The After Party was set before Betty Friedan published her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, which is credited with sparking a second wave of feminism in the U.S. Without access to those ideas, Cece was content to be a housewife; her wealth allowed her empty days without a job or even housework. But that vacuousness leads to a fixation on her best friend’s romantic life and carefully guarded secrets.

“The thing about writing historic fiction is it’s easy to see the character’s flaws,” says DiSclafani. She discusses such topics — how much of the historical record an author needs to get right, and what parts of a story set in the past can be filled in with fictional detail — with her writing students at Auburn University in Alabama. “It give you automatic tension,” she says. “The reader understands what the characters don’t: that their world is coming to an end.”

But even as Cece’s and Joan’s posh universes fall down around them, DiSclafani manages to resurrect a setting that’s been lost to time. Houston circa 1950s “was a city where anything — and everything — went,” she said in an interview with Star-Telegram. “Watered by oil, organized by the women and men who would have been laughed out of the social registers in most cities, unbound by zoning laws or a sense of modesty — you can’t make Houston up, literally. The details were spectacular.”

And, though opulent night spots like the Shamrock Hotel, frequented by Cece and Joan’s crowd, are being torn down to make way for new construction, DiSclafani brings them back to life — at least for a few hundred pages. “I’m just not a writer who wants to write about the presidential election or the newest technology,” she says. “It’s not that I’m not interested in those things, but I’m not interested in writing fiction about them, so it’s easier to set books in a world where my characters don’t know about them, either.”

Filed under: Author Talk, fiction, history, Writing

Interview with Matthew Quick

“When you write about mental health, you want to start conversations [that are] helpful in the community,” Matthew Quick says. “But where does your responsibility as a writer end?” Known for Silver Linings Playbook, among other novels, Quick has recently published a new YA book, Every Exquisite Thing.

This story was originally published at mountainx.com.

There’s a hint of The Catcher in the Rye to Matthew Quick’s new YA novel, Every Exquisite Thing. Main character Nanette is a star soccer player, but when she reads The Bubblegum Reaper, she finds she has a lot in common with that novel’s anti-hero. In a Holden Caulfield move, Nanette develops an aversion to doing what’s expected and in interest in what Wrigley calls “quitting.”

But the story wasn’t inspired by J.D. Salinger’s 1951 work. Instead, the idea came from Quick’s own experiences as an author. While known for Silver Linings Playbook, which became a film starring Bradley Cooper, it was Quick’s previous YA novel, Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock, that struck a chord with readers. In that 2013 book, a teenager plans to shoot the high school bully before ending his own life. “I get really intense fan mail from teens who connect with Leonard [and] feel like he represents things that they think,” says Quick. “They read symbolism into it and want me to confirm that their view is right.” While Quick is flattered by his readers’ investment, he’s also conflicted.

“When you write about mental health, you want to start conversations [that are] helpful in the community,” he says. “But where does your responsibility as a writer end?” The author was a teacher before his writing career took off. He parlayed his classroom knowledge and his thoughts about those fan letters into Every Exquisite Thing. There, Nanette and two other teens befriend Booker, the author of The Bubblegum Reaper — a reclusive older man who serves as a sort of mentor.

As the teens in Every Exquisite Thing seek answers to their problems (divorced parents, feeling isolated, uncertainty about the future) in Booker’s out-of-print novel, they become obsessed the author himself. Plot points and characters serve as clues to the writer’s own life, though he has little interest in sharing his personal story. “Authors are not people who typically seek out fame — most authors are people who like to quietly work out things alone in a room,” says Quick. Adding to that conundrum, “the boundaries between reader and author are forever being blurred on social media.”

But Quick has his own list books that made an impression when he was a teen. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison were “books that make you look at society and question everything.” And as a kid who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home, reading The Stranger, by existential writer Camus “felt revolutionary,” he says. “It was a moment when I saw that the adults in my life, there were other people who opposed their thoughts.”

Every Exquisite Thing is likely to be that for some teens. Early reviewers on GoodReads have already been pulling out pithy quotes (”Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you have to do it.’’) The book is full of brash poetry and challenging situations and one interesting literary tool: To get away from the habit of pleasing others, Nanette switches from speaking in the first person to the third person perspective.

“As a writer, you can’t be reader-centered,” says Quick. “It’s not good for the work and it’s not good for a you. You can’t take care of every reader the way you take care of every kid in a classroom.” But though fiction he can create a platform for conversation and introduce young people to new ideas and sympathetic characters.

So, he says, “I think I’m just going to keep writing.”

Filed under: Author Talk, Books, fiction, Q+A

Coming soon … poetry chapbook!

Just a quick happy Friday announcement: In June I’ll be publishing Every wrong could be righted with a slow dance, a collection of poems. It will be a limited print-run, with each copy numbered and for sale on my website. I’ll just leave this here:

For those of you who don’t know, I have an MFA in poetry from Goddard College, where I studied with Chase Twichell and Michael Klein. I wrote my thesis on the natural metaphor and compared the work of Yosano Akiko and Walt Whitman. My poetry has been published in Malahat Review (Canada), FifeLines (Scotland), California Quarterly, Asheville Poetry Review, and Roach Motel.

I also feel compelled to share that I just ate a fortune cookie and it informs me, “Your sense of humor will soon cheer up a friend.” I’m not sure if my poetry chapbook is exactly rife with witticisms, but it does have several poems about kissing.

 

 

Filed under: Books, Writing

Music + words

The Low Counts onstage at Jack of the Wood

I recently told a new friend that if one doesn’t have children, one doesn’t have a way to mark the passing of time. (Only I didn’t say “one” because that would sound weird in casual conversation.) What I do have is a blog. Or various blogs. And it turns out that they mark not only the movement of years but my own waxing and waning interests and obsessions.

I used to write about music a lot. Like, all the time. I still love music, but my literary focus is more on, well, literature these days. And my music writing Tumblr page, NavyBlack, has languished over the past two years. But it’s kind of fun to look back at the shows I went to, the albums I listened to, the bands I thought about, the videos I watched, the singles I cheered for and the careers that have taken off since I was standing up-close-and-personal at intimate shows (Alabama Shakes, I’m looking at you).

I’m in the process of moving some of my favorite writing from NavyBlack to its own page on this website. You can find it here. Feel free to visit and browse.

Filed under: creativity, inspiration, Music