Glen Hirshberg's Blog, page 4

Jury Duty and a WHOLE BUCKET OF STARS

And yet. And STILL.



This week, while the fluorescents spat in the criminal court hallways, and talkative Filipino fellow jurors twitched at their own shadows and told me about that, and despair over lost time swelled and ebbed and swelled in the Hirshberg heart, I took up the notes and scribbles and doubts and notions I'd been squirreling away all year while finishing the story collection. And under cover of darkness--dawnness, actually, since that's mostly when I have--I hoisted my sail, caught a surprising, word-heavy wind, and slipped from port. And now, here I am, all the way out into the last book of the Motherless Children series.
ETA? God, I don't know, depends a little on just how much flourescent purgatory, how many haunted, talkative Filipino fellow jurors the world throws at me. How long I can hold this wind. But no matter how many, or how long, I'm turning this thing in before the end of 2016.
Working title? I'm thinking A WHOLE BUCKET OF STARS...

Book Two in the Motherless Child series, Good Girls, will be out in February:

Jury Duty Still

And THEN life said, “Wait…that guy’s still managed to write EVERY SINGLE DAY since his summerlong jury duty exile began? Okay, okay, give me a minute… AH. I know. Let’s send him … Friendly Filipino Fellow Juror, who speaks very little English, is a lovely and gentle person, and wants nothing more in this world than to spend every lunch break, indeed every available moment outside the courtroom telling Glen about his more than 500 (he’s counted) personal and terrifying encounters with the supernatural.” (Actual sample from yesterday, with the English cleaned up, but with this guy’s sweet, impossible-to-squelch smile missing: “Once, I worked in a building that had been an abandoned hospital. And once, I turned around, and a shadow…MOVED…”)

Jury Duty

And then life said, "Okay, Mr. Self-Proclaimed Write Anywhere, Anytime, No Matter What Guy. Let's see you do it in a Jury Room. For the whole summer..."

The Three AM Epiphany

Tweeted this, but it's worth reposting here, too, as some of you may have use:

Rapt tone, exercises to "derange student stories", writing as learning to write. Best teaching-writing book in years: http://tinyurl.com/pehujwd

The Three AM Epiphany by Brian Kitely

Teaching, writing, and Saskia!

So, I have considered myself a writer my whole life. Still do, always will, can't help it, don't want to try. But teaching has given me so many things that writing won't, can't, ever. not even if there really is a Writing Promised Land, not even if I ever reach it.



What it gave me today involved "Pee Wee's Playhouse," a Bluetooth speaker, a displaced recording apparently of me reading Motherless Child cribbed from Youtube (though no one, including me, recognized it), a chocolate cake with SAAAASSSKIAAA!!!? scrawled across it, the Dutch version of the movie "The Vanishing",



my current Into to Creative Writing class, and two gleeful, spectacularly talented, and seriously unhinged former students who apparently started hatching the plot that led to today at least a month ago, from 3000 miles away. Katie Russell and Olivia Nathan, you are not well people. And my Intro class may never recover. And you made me very happy.

Battle of the Books

To be honest, the whole "Battle of the Books" concept makes me a little queasy...but it's nice to be included. And Motherless Child has survived round one...

Motherless Child goes up against The Last Weekend-->

Reading and Writing and Enjoying Criticism

The hardest writing to get my students to love--or even to fathom-- isn't poetry, isn't serious fiction, sure as hell isn't the ghost story; it's criticism.

And so, in the furtherance of my ongoing service of the good word, in all its diverse manifestations, I offer this year's Robert Christgau Prize for Critic I Almost Never Agree With But Will Read Forever to....(drum roll....oh, can you feel the tension)...NEW YORKER TV critic Emily Nussbaum.



One day, Em--can I call you Em?--we're really going to have to sit down and talk about what you really should be liking instead of Broadchurch. (Clue REVIEW) But this was the year you came up with this two-sentence masterclass in critical precision, authority, joyful engagement: "These early scenes hint at something caustic, like the cartoon-realist satire sometimes favored by the directors Alexander Payne and Todd Solondz. In such stories, ordinary Americans...are held up for mockery, as if the director were using the lens to sizzle ants." (Olive Kitterage Review)

You're still wrong, Ms. Nussbaum. Almost every time. And you're magnificent.

Happy Holidays

To all of you celebrating today, whether in a church or with family, or at Jewday at the Movies somewhere, with friends or just out walking in the quiet by your wild lone, I hope you are indeed celebrating.

And to those of you who aren't--for whatever it's worth--I was thinking of you yesterday, when I came across this. So--as talisman, as thing of icy, aching beauty , not lump of coal--I offer this, by way of George Mackay Brown:

Widower

Old Stephen three winters now
Has spoken to none
But his cat
And the spider at the back of his bed
And himself
And to a stone in the kirkyard
With thirteen names
(The last cut sharp and deep)

Haunted Nights Live Interview

In case you missed it and are interested, here's where you can find a complete podcast of the delightful hour I got to spend chatting Motherless Child, the writing process, the nature of horror, and, erm, furries, with Tamara Thorne and Alistair Cross on their fabulous HAUNTED NIGHTS LIVE show on the Authors on Air network. Comments and responses and reactions welcome.
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/authorso...

Ann Marie MacDonald

Adult Onset Ann-Marie MacDonald

Why--WHY--did no one alert me that this had happened?????? Her first two books remain in the top five novels I've read, in any genre, in my lifetime...



Can't say I'm stirred by the concept of this one. Also couldn't care less. Purchasing immediately.