Randy Susan Meyers's Blog, page 52

When Marketing Can Be Too Much

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Guest Post by Robin Black

(originally published in Beyond The Margins)

It's almost New Year's resolution time.  I have a few this year.  All the usual ones about less food, more exercise, of course; a new one about buying only cruelty-free meat and poultry; and I am resolving this year to try to keep at the forefront of my consciousness the reasons I started writing in the first place.  Which oddly enough didn't have to do with selling books.  Didn't even have to do with getting an agent.  Or having twitter followers.  Or much of anything beyond an urgent desire to convey to some imagined, listening world, what I had observed in the preceding four decades about human interactions, human nature and how it is that we all manage to go on from day to day.

But it isn't so easy.  Not at any stage in a writing career.  At a recent conference, I was disheartened to realize that for every question a participant asked me about writing, I received at least a dozen more about writing careers.  How to get an agent.  How to get a book published.  How to build a following before writing a book.

And then, last week, in case I imagined I had transcended such concerns, Amazon made it possible for authors to check their sales figures weekly.  The graphics are weirdly compelling.  You can play with them in all kinds of clever ways.  Mesmerizing.  Emotionally gripping.  I feel as though I have become both video game and video game addict all at once.

For anyone, it is distressingly easy to slip from being a career writer to being a career careerist.  For me, those compulsions to strategize and monitor have absolutely nothing to do with why I initially began to write – except that they share with that impulse a kind of desperation, a sense that there is a way in which this thing over which I am obsessing may make me happy if only. . .if only. . .if only. . .  But there is an illusion at work, of course.  An illusion when it comes to sales figures making one happy; and an illusion when it comes to writing doing so, either.

Writers are by nature insatiable.  Insatiable and dissatisfied.  It is in large part what keeps many of us going, an oddly precious, motivating discomfort.  A day of writing may bring a feeling of content; but reading the results the following morning is likely to shatter that.  And so we write again.  The work is never perfect, in part because language, which gives so many gifts, also presents us with the dubious advantage of infinite possibility.  And in part because the urgency that drives so many of us to write, that sense that there is something (something!) that must be conveyed, cannot be extinguished.  Not even through the act of conveying.

But I am beginning to suspect it can be transferred, that because we are always prone to feeling that we having failed, we writers are exceptionally vulnerable to the danger of obsessing over empirical measures of success.  If the act of writing can't guarantee satisfaction, maybe the right number of twitter followers can.  Or the prestigious agent.  Or the book contract.  Or the Amazon ranking . . .  And, of course, the nature of the internet is that there is now no limit to how much time we can devote to this quest.

I don't want to seem rude or ungrateful for the honor of being consulted, but I sometimes want to suggest to the people who ask me for career advice that instead of inquiring about querying an agent, they should instead ask what I've been reading lately, so I can ask them the same.  There is so much excellent, practical advice online about query letters and such.  It's much harder to come by conversation with a colleague who has genuine interest in your work. Not interest in publishing it.  Not interest in whether one day it will make you famous.  Not even interest really in whether it's good – whatever that means.  But interest in what you are writing and why you are writing and how you find time to write and well, you.

It only gets harder as you go on.  That's what I have learned this past year, since publishing a book.  Harder and harder to focus on the work, to remember that this should always remain more art than marketing task.  Those early worries one has about getting an agent, getting published, they don't disappear without a trace when those things come about.  They morph and multiply in shocking ways.

Which is why we need to find as many sacred spaces for ourselves as we possibly can.  Spaces in which we discuss narrative strategies twelve times more than career strategies and in which we feel awe at the power of prose rather than that of social networking.  We need to conspire against the forces that conspire against our identities as artists, turning us into crafters of pitches and builders of platforms and wooers of followers.

Or anyway, I need that.  Because if truth be told, for every thought I have about writing these days, I probably have a dozen more about my writing career.  But I am resolved to reverse that over the coming months, to get my insecurities back into the work – where they can do me some good.

And as solitary a task as writing is, I would love to have some company.

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Robin Black's story collection If I loved you, I would tell you this, was published by Random House in 2010 to international acclaim by publications such as O. Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Irish Times and more. The stories, written over a period of eight years, focus on families at points of crisis and of growth. Her writing is very much influenced by her belief that the most compelling act of creativity in which we all participate is the daily manufacture of hope. Though the book can be seen as a study of loss, it is also a study of the miraculous ways in which people move forward from the inevitable challenges of life. Robin's stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications including The Southern Review, The New York Times Magazine. One Story, The Georgia Review, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Freight Stories, Indiana Review, and The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. I (Norton, 2007). She is the recipient of grants from the Leeway Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Sirenland Conference and is also the winner of the 2005 Pirate's Alley Faulkner-Wisdom Writing Competition in the short story category. Her work has been noticed four times for Special Mention by the Pushcart Prizes and also deemed Notable in The Best American Essays, 2008, The Best Nonrequired Reading, 2009 and Best American Short Stories, 2010. Robin is currently working on her first novel, about a mother who flees the strains and the judgments of her suburban community, taking her disabled daughter out into the country and away from it all. The book will also be published by Random House.

Fiction From Emotional Fact

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A parent's tragedy will always influence the life of their children—often to an overwhelming degree. Writing fiction from the emotional truth of one's past can be liberating and also confusing. How do writers use their past without being wedded to events as they happened? How do we write honestly, without spilling family secrets that other's want kept private?

Ellen Meeropol's exploration of family loyalty, the aftermath of violence, and the possibilities of redemption in House Arrest fascinated me. How one reconciles the past and lives with tragedy that is not of one's own making, but that color ones' daily existence was the nub of my own book, The Murderer's Daughters, where sisters cling to each other in the aftermath of witnessing their father's murder their mother, building their lives in the shadow of his imprisonment. In House Arrest, a nurse responsible for the health of a pregnant patient (who is under house arrest for the cult-related death of her toddler daughter) is haunted by the consequences of her parents' antiwar activism a generation ago. Her pregnant patient grew up troubled by her father's connections to racially motivated violence.

I was only four when my father tried to kill my mother—an event I could never truly remember, despite being there. Then, after ten years of working with batterers and the women they'd victimized, I wrote a story of sisters who witnessed their father murder their mother and how they then lived as virtual orphans.

When Ellen Meeropol fell in love at 19, she had no idea that her husband-to-be was the son of executed "atomic spies," but his family story led to her political education and activism. Years later, when she started writing fiction, she had no intention of exploring the Rosenberg case, and she never has, not directly. But her characters led her to the intersection of political activism and family, of injustice and divided loyalties.

Neither home-care nurse Emily Klein, nor her pregnant patient Pippa, are happy about being thrown together in House Arrest, but despite their differences, they make a connection. As anti-cult sentiment in the city grows, the women must make decisions about their conflicting responsibilities to their families and to each other—facing in some sense the same issues as did their parents.

As an activist and a mother, author Ellen Meeropol often worried about what would happen to her daughters if she were arrested, imprisoned or hurt during a demonstration, or if she were targeted by an overzealous security apparatus. Her husband was three-years-old when his parents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, were arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit espionage. He was six when they were executed. When Ellen started writing House Arrest book, she had no clue where Pippa and Emily's story would take her, but it's not surprising that themes of politics and families wormed their way into the narrative. Both her characters are haunted by their parents' actions – very different actions – and both have been constrained by these legacies.

Meeropol's characters have empathy for people who've done awful things and made terrible mistakes—mistakes that caused death and destruction. A large plot concern, revolving around a religious cult, is handled with great wisdom, managing to avoid the heavy hand of the usual judgment shown around this topic. This, I think, is the genius ofHouse Arrest, the cult is portrayed as a collection of people. Whether exploring an imaginary cult or real ones, we'll never be able to prevent tragedy borne of zealotry unless we can see into the hearts and minds of those attracted and those repelled by such intense, and sometimes misguided, loyalty.

In researching cults, Ellen Meeropol found a quote that must have guided her work, as she walked the line of finding a realistic moral compass and empathetic burrowing into a character's heart:

"…if you believe in it, it is a religion or perhaps 'the' religion; and if you do not care one way or another about it, it is a sect; but if you fear and hate it, it is a cult." Leo Pfeffer.

(Ellen and I will be reading at Porter Square Books in Somerville MA tonight at 7PM.)

 

THE SOLACE OF DARK BOOKS

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Whatever his politics, and I am certain we'd disagree far more than agree, I bless Senator Scott Brown for revealing the sexual and physical abuse he suffered as a child.

What could be a more compelling argument for being truthful about abuse suffered than the fact that so many of us hide the pain others have heaped on us. Maybe we hide it by wearing our pain with a hundred extra pounds, perhaps praying the world will guess the hot mess we are inside. Or we won't leave the house without our face made into a Kabuki mask of make-up, refusing to present an inch of reality.

We hide with food, with drugs, with cigarettes, and, on the other side of reactions, with driving wills to succeed. One can certainly see that in Senator Brown.

(CONTINUED ON THE HUFFINGTON POST)

 

First Pages Friday: THE LAST WILL OF MOIRA LEAHY

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First Pages Fridays offers a taste of an author's work—from books long on the shelves to works-in-progress, because while you can't judge a book by the cover, you can tell plenty from the first pages.

"Therese Walsh's strange, fascinating novel of psychological suspense is suffused with the supernatural. (It's) an imaginative exploration of the bond between twins." The Boston Globe

The Last Will of Moira Leahy

by Theresa Walsh

CHAPTER ONE

Prodigy

I lost my twin to a harsh November nine years ago. Ever since, I've felt the span of that month like no other, as if each of the calendar's thirty perfect little squares split in two on the page. I wished they'd just disappear. Bring on winter. I had bags of rock salt, a shovel and a strong back. I wasn't afraid of ice and snow. November always lingered, though, crackling under the foot of my memory like dead leaves.

It was no wonder then that I gave in to impulse one November evening, left papers piled high on my desk and went to where I'd lost myself in the past with a friend. I thought I might evade memory for a while at the auction house, but I slammed into it anyhow. It was just November's way.

Only this time, November surprised me.

*****

I had to have it.

Just over a foot long, the wavy dagger looked ancient and as though it'd been carved from lava rock. The grooved base was a study in asymmetry, with one end swooping off in a jagged point and the other circling into itself like a tiny, self-protective tail or the crest of a wave. Gemstones filled a ring that bound metal to a cocked wood handle. Intricate engravings covered the silver sheath. If not for a small hole in the blade's center, it would've been flawless.

I leaned in to touch it but was jarred out of my study by a poke to the thigh. The poker, a little girl, almost capsized me, and not from the poking either. I don't believe in ghosts, but if I did I might think I was looking at my sister from years past. My sister, a child. Eyes like the sea. Long, red hair like hers—and mine, before I snuffed out my pyrotechnics with several boxes of Platinum Snow and found a pair of scissors.

My vision grayed a little as I stared at her. She might've been seven or eight—a few years younger than Moira and me when we'd filched a sword like the one I intended to have and lost it in the bay. Well, I'd lost it, pretending to be Alvilda, Pirate Queen.

The girl poked me again.

"Can I help you, little one?" I asked. "Are you lost?"

She didn't answer, just pointed toward the far back of the viewing table. There wasn't much there: a bust of JFK, a pearlized candy jar and an indigo bottle that might've been depression-era glass. Noel would've been able to say for sure.

"Do you want that?" I took a guess and pointed at the candy jar. Maybe there was a secret stash of chocolate in there, who knew? But she shook her head. I looked again and saw a small black box slathered with pink roses, the buds as sweet as frosting. Of course. "The box?" She nodded.

I cradled it before her, and she reached out a hand pudgy with youth. "Careful," I said. I looked for parental figures but saw no one exhibiting missing-child panic—or with the right hair color. The girl didn't take the box, just left it in my hands and opened the lid.

Music swam up at me. The Entertainer. The girl giggled.

"Do you—" My voice turned to rust. "Do you like music?"

"I love dancing to the music." Her voice was sweet, as shy as her smile. She was so much like Moira, but whole, able to run and laugh. I missed my sister's laugh—maybe most of all.

"Do you play any instru—"

"Jillian! There you are!" A woman with dark hair strode toward us, her face a combination of annoyance and relief.

"I was looking at the music, Mommy," the girl said. "See how pretty?"

The mother bent before her daughter. "You scared me. Next time you want to look at something, we'll go together."

The girl nodded, serious, just as the lights flickered.

"Let's find a seat." The woman pulled her daughter behind her as the girl lifted her hand to me. Goodbye. They disappeared in the crowd.

I shook off my melancholy thoughts and turned back to the blade. My fingers itched to touch it, but just as I reached, an auction attendant pulled it off the table, sheathed it and placed it in a cardboard box. "Viewing time's over," she said.

"But—"

"Fallen in love, have you?"

I'd never seen another blade like the one I'd lost to the sea, and the desire for it tugged at me like a line rooted in my mouth. "I have to have it."

The woman added items to her container: the blue bottle, the candy jar, the music box. "You'd better get out your checkbook, then. Old George thinks that sword will go for hundreds."

Fine then. I had a checkbook.

[image error]Therese Walsh's debut novel, The Last Will of Moira Leahy, was published in 2009 by Shaye Areheart books (Random House) and released in paperback in 2010 by Three Rivers Press. She's the co-founder of Writer Unboxed, a blog for writers about the craft and business of genre fiction. Before turning to fiction, she was a researcher and writer for Prevention magazine, and then a freelance writer. She's currently hard at work on her second novel—another story about self-discovery, acceptance and magical journeys—at her home in upstate New York.

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Book Trailer Thursday: THE TRUTH ABOUT DELILAH BLUE

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Book trailers are such a brave new media. Some are awful droning talking heads (you know what I mean) where the author looks like he'd rather be shoveling coal in Siberia than filming the interview. Some are almost good–but too long. And some, like Goldilocks found, are just right and manage to capture the spirit and genre of the book.

Today's trailer is from Tish Cohen, author of The Truth About Delilah Blue

"There are some books you can't put down, and others that won't even let you look away. Tish Cohen's new novel is both. Try to read it while ironing, and you will perma-press a pinky; do the same while making a sandwich, and you will end up buttering the phone bill. . . . Delilah Blue is a purely domestic drama; no wild-bird invasions or psychotic moteliers in sight, though there may as well be…"—The Globe and Mail

(Almost) Weekly Book Launch Wednesday: ACT OF GRACE

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(Almost) Weekly Book Launch Wednesday offers a taste of an author's book—from ones long on the shelves to those newly launched, because while you can't judge a book by the cover, you can tell plenty from the first pages–I know that the moment I read Karen Simpson's words, I had to get her book. See what you think.

"Grace's intimate narration and folksy-but-modern-Southern-down-home voice immediately pulls the reader into the story. You can't help but like her: she's sassy, she's smart, and when her Nana explains to her that she is to be a conduit for their ancestral spirits, you know immediately that the right girl was chosen for the task." Marlon Edwards-The Speculative Literature Foundation

ACT OF GRACE

By Karen Simpson

PROLOGUE—RISE

Mr. Gilmore was supposed to have died that day at the Justice Rally, but I got in the way and now people in my hometown of Vigilant, Michigan, are either calling me an Uncle Tom hero or hissing that I'm a double-stuffed Oreo bitch. Actually I'm neither, but I realize now that one of the reasons why people's attitudes about me are as nasty as dried snot is because there is a critical lack of information about my motives. Those who love me already understand my reasons. For them, it's enough for me to say the ancestors made me do it. Other folks, however, especially other folks of color, feel I need to testify about why I, Grace Johnson, a supposedly rational African-American high school senior and honor student committed racial treason.

If it were up to me, I wouldn't say anything. I would just leave everyone in the dark and go on about my business. But, the voices of the ancestors tell me I owe an account of my story as an example of the true meaning of my name. Now, I can blow people off, I can tell them what part of hell to go to and give them detailed directions on how to get there. The ancestors, however, cannot be ignored. They can't be told to mind their own ethereal business because we, the living, are their business. Pain and suffering have made my hindsight telescopic, so let's begin at the true beginning, a breath to prime my memory: "Rise, story, rise.

CHAPTER ONE

The only warning of the coming destruction of my old life last October was sweat and a swelling sense of unease. I woke up sodden, so slick with perspiration my nightgown had formed a big wrinkly fist and climbed up my legs. At first I thought I had the flu, but decided I just needed to open a window because my room was stuffy and hot. Although the calendar read autumn, the weather was still acting like summer. But, I had no explanation for the sense of unease. It wasn't my usual muddy angst, and yet the nameless brand of anxiety raised crops of goose bumps on my arms and made me turn my head to check the emptiness behind my back.

Restless and damp, I stood in my bedroom doorway scanning the hall for evidence of my so-called family. The depth and texture of the silence told me my sister Jamila was still sucking all the beauty she could from sleep, and Mama didn't have to do overtime as a clerk at city hall. If my luck wasn't stingy, then for one or two hours the house would be my private sanctuary.

An unusually swift current of hunger pulled me toward the kitchen. I made a big pot of grits, which I garnished with more than the recommended daily requirement of butter and cheese, and fried a half-pound of bacon––even though for the hundredth time that year I'd sworn I would become a vegetarian. My morning nerves seemed to drive my appetite. I ate and ate, my lips smacking out a greasy melody as I crunched on crisp cords of bacon and shoveled in snowy drifts of congealed corn. All the while I kept thinking about how good it would be to escape to college next year. Anyone who has lived in the desert realm of high school unpopularity knows how eager I was to go where no one knew me as me. It looked as if Spelman College might accept me, and I was excited. But as I sat there still hungry, even after two plates of food, my joy dissipated. I think even then I knew Spelman was being put on hold, but I didn't know how to talk about it because I had only a shadowy understanding of my true metaphysical identity.

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KAREN SIMPSON was born in Detroit, Michigan and now lives in Ann Arbor Michigan. She received her bachelor's degree in Animal Husbandry from Michigan State University and has an M.S. in Historic Preservation from Eastern Michigan University.  As a historic preservationist trained in heritage interpretation and administration, Karen has designed exhibits for museums and historical institutions that deal with issues of cultural diversity, racial reconciliation, and various aspects of African-American culinary and agricultural history. She is also a quilter and has exhibited quilts and taught African-American quilting for over twenty years. She loves reading and writing speculative fiction. Act of Grace is her first novel.

Flooded With Birthday Gratitude (reprise)

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(Looking back on the Massachusetts floods (and my birthday) one year ago.

It's my birthday and my husband stayed home from work to wetvac, trying to keep the floodwaters covering our basement under the five-inch mark. He's been down there since before 6:30 this morning. It's now past midnight.

He's unshaven.

I'm wearing torn jeans.

He forgot to say "Happy Birthday" and I don't care, because this is what I know:

Living with a man who spends the day in a damp dark basement vacuuming up murky water is about as big a birthday present any woman in her right mind would want.

Living with a man who doesn't take a minute to point out that he's doing all the work: priceless.

Living with a man who worries more about your weak back than his wonky one: a price above rubies.

I don't care if we have cake. It doesn't matter if supper was Cheerios. My present is downstairs. Still vacuuming up water and not complaining.

Okay, barely complaining.

But really, dayenu.

Hebrew for: if I get nothing else, it's enough.

(Almost) Weekly Writer at Work

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Writers' Work-in-Progress showcases the work of new and long-published authors. This is what their first pages look like now—perhaps the published versions will read exactly the same, perhaps they will be quite changed. That part of the mutable beauty of writing—always a work in progress, until the book hits the shelves.

As the Crow Flies

by

Elizabeth Barrett

The stairs leading down to the nightclub gleamed wet black in the street lights. Angie stepped carefully, uncertain if the gleam was just wetness or incipient ice, forming in this dank stairwell that never saw sunlight. The TV newscaster swore the temperature was above freezing; she didn't believe it. Her feet in cheap leather boots ached with cold. Her hands were warm enough, shoved into the pockets of her wool coat; but of course she hadn't worn a hat and her ears had gone numb three blocks back.

"Hurry up!" said Toss, Angie's closest friend in Edinburgh, her adopted home. "It's fookin' freezin' out here."

Toss reached past Angie and dragged open the heavy wooden door, and heat and noise and the smells of beer and chips and scores of warm young bodies smashed into the two women. Toss grabbed Angie's hand as she hit the crowd clustered nearest the door and shoved her way through, heading for the bar.

"We'll see if James is here first," she said over her shoulder.

"How about the loo?" Angie said. "My hair …"

The damp Scottish air was a blessing during the day, thickening and curling her dark hair, which in her native New England always lay flat and uninteresting against her head. She hated the wavy hair when she went out though, thinking it made her look childlike and naïve.

Toss turned to face her. Her own short black hair was streaked with purple, matching her eye shadow and lipstick. She had offered to take Angie in hand that night, but although Angie had freely borrowed from Toss's closet, she refused the makeover. She could never pull off the punk look.

Toss lifted a hank of Angie's hair and let it drop back onto her shoulder. "Still straight. Not to worry. Let's get a drink. Christ, I'm so fookin' cold I might order a fookin' tea."

Of course she didn't. They both pushed close to the bar, young men giving way for them and genially saying hello and how are you, in accents that ranged from unintelligible highlands Scot to unintelligible Midlands Brit. Actually, not as unintelligible to Angie as they once had been, when she first arrived in Edinburgh six months earlier. The two women ignored the men and both tried to catch the bartender's eye. Toss, no surprise to Angie, succeeded first.

They both ordered half pints of a local brew, the barkeep swept up their money, and they dove back into the crowd.

The pub they'd chosen for that night, Grace's, was popular with students. But considering Edinburgh had five different schools, half the pubs and nightclubs in the city seemed to cater to students. Not that Angie was a student, not any longer. Nor Toss. But they were only twenty-three and certainly lived like students, working low-wage jobs and sharing a small apartment with irregular heat and rooms the size of shoeboxes.

Her height giving her an advantage over Toss, and half the people crowded into Grace's front room, Angie spotted James first. She thumped Toss on the shoulder and pointed; Toss nodded and switched direction toward the blond man leaning against a wall, beyond a cluster of overcrowded tables. He stood alone, drink and cigarette in one hand, the distant expression on his long narrow face indicating he did not want to be there. Or that he was stoned out of his mind.

Toss sidled through another gaggle of shouting students, finally reaching James. Angie held back for a moment, waiting to see James's reaction. He was moody, no doubt about that, and had been known just to tell Toss to piss off when he was feeling bleak and anti-social.

Not tonight. For a man with such a melancholy face, he had a charming smile. He dropped a kiss on Toss's lips, then gestured to Angie with his drink and smoking cigarette. One arm around Toss, he gave Angie a cheek kiss when she joined them.

"How are you, Angie?" he asked, his King's English crisp and clipped.

"Slumming again, James?" she said in response.

He tightened his arm around Toss as he took a long drag on his cigarette. "Only the best girls come to places like Grace's. What, you thought I'd fine such prime company at the Balmoral?"

Both women laughed, though Toss enjoyed the joke more than Angie. James was slumming, enjoying the novelty of hanging around with and, to be blunt, shagging a lower-class girl from the rough streets of Glasgow. Not a girl he'd ever take home to the castle.

Toss said she didn't mind. Said James was perfectly up front with her, told her he wasn't looking for anything serious or long term. And neither, Toss said, was she. She had no expectations.

Angie didn't believe that. Women always had expectations.

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Elizabeth Barrett worked for nearly twenty years for the New York publishing house, Bantam Books, first as an in-house editor, and then as a consulting editor working out of her home. In 2003, she started her own freelance editing business. She also teaches adult education writing classes in both Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Newburyport, Massachusetts. Her young adult novel, Free Fall, was published by HarperCollins in 1994.

Writers Work in Progress

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Writers' Work-in-Progress showcases the work of new and long-published authors. This is what their first pages look like now—perhaps the published versions will read exactly the same, perhaps they will be quite changed. That part of the mutable beauty of writing—always a work in progress, until the book hits the shelves.

As the Crow Flies

by

Elizabeth Barrett

The stairs leading down to the nightclub gleamed wet black in the street lights. Angie stepped carefully, uncertain if the gleam was just wetness or incipient ice, forming in this dank stairwell that never saw sunlight. The TV newscaster swore the temperature was above freezing; she didn't believe it. Her feet in cheap leather boots ached with cold. Her hands were warm enough, shoved into the pockets of her wool coat; but of course she hadn't worn a hat and her ears had gone numb three blocks back.

"Hurry up!" said Toss, Angie's closest friend in Edinburgh, her adopted home. "It's fookin' freezin' out here."

Toss reached past Angie and dragged open the heavy wooden door, and heat and noise and the smells of beer and chips and scores of warm young bodies smashed into the two women. Toss grabbed Angie's hand as she hit the crowd clustered nearest the door and shoved her way through, heading for the bar.

"We'll see if James is here first," she said over her shoulder.

"How about the loo?" Angie said. "My hair …"

The damp Scottish air was a blessing during the day, thickening and curling her dark hair, which in her native New England always lay flat and uninteresting against her head. She hated the wavy hair when she went out though, thinking it made her look childlike and naïve.

Toss turned to face her. Her own short black hair was streaked with purple, matching her eye shadow and lipstick. She had offered to take Angie in hand that night, but although Angie had freely borrowed from Toss's closet, she refused the makeover. She could never pull off the punk look.

Toss lifted a hank of Angie's hair and let it drop back onto her shoulder. "Still straight. Not to worry. Let's get a drink. Christ, I'm so fookin' cold I might order a fookin' tea."

Of course she didn't. They both pushed close to the bar, young men giving way for them and genially saying hello and how are you, in accents that ranged from unintelligible highlands Scot to unintelligible Midlands Brit. Actually, not as unintelligible to Angie as they once had been, when she first arrived in Edinburgh six months earlier. The two women ignored the men and both tried to catch the bartender's eye. Toss, no surprise to Angie, succeeded first.

They both ordered half pints of a local brew, the barkeep swept up their money, and they dove back into the crowd.

The pub they'd chosen for that night, Grace's, was popular with students. But considering Edinburgh had five different schools, half the pubs and nightclubs in the city seemed to cater to students. Not that Angie was a student, not any longer. Nor Toss. But they were only twenty-three and certainly lived like students, working low-wage jobs and sharing a small apartment with irregular heat and rooms the size of shoeboxes.

Her height giving her an advantage over Toss, and half the people crowded into Grace's front room, Angie spotted James first. She thumped Toss on the shoulder and pointed; Toss nodded and switched direction toward the blond man leaning against a wall, beyond a cluster of overcrowded tables. He stood alone, drink and cigarette in one hand, the distant expression on his long narrow face indicating he did not want to be there. Or that he was stoned out of his mind.

Toss sidled through another gaggle of shouting students, finally reaching James. Angie held back for a moment, waiting to see James's reaction. He was moody, no doubt about that, and had been known just to tell Toss to piss off when he was feeling bleak and anti-social.

Not tonight. For a man with such a melancholy face, he had a charming smile. He dropped a kiss on Toss's lips, then gestured to Angie with his drink and smoking cigarette. One arm around Toss, he gave Angie a cheek kiss when she joined them.

"How are you, Angie?" he asked, his King's English crisp and clipped.

"Slumming again, James?" she said in response.

He tightened his arm around Toss as he took a long drag on his cigarette. "Only the best girls come to places like Grace's. What, you thought I'd fine such prime company at the Balmoral?"

Both women laughed, though Toss enjoyed the joke more than Angie. James was slumming, enjoying the novelty of hanging around with and, to be blunt, shagging a lower-class girl from the rough streets of Glasgow. Not a girl he'd ever take home to the castle.

Toss said she didn't mind. Said James was perfectly up front with her, told her he wasn't looking for anything serious or long term. And neither, Toss said, was she. She had no expectations.

Angie didn't believe that. Women always had expectations.

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Elizabeth Barrett worked for nearly twenty years for the New York publishing house, Bantam Books, first as an in-house editor, and then as a consulting editor working out of her home. In 2003, she started her own freelance editing business. She also teaches adult education writing classes in both Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Newburyport, Massachusetts. Her young adult novel, Free Fall, was published by HarperCollins in 1994.

First Pages Friday: THE QUICKENING

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First Pages Fridays offers a taste of an author's work—from books long on the shelves to works-in-progress, because while you can't judge a book by the cover, you can tell plenty from the first pages.

In the upper Midwest of the early 1900s, two women struggle to make a living on neighboring farms. For one, their hardscrabble life comes easily, while the other longs for the excitement of the city. Though they depend on one another for survival and companionship, their friendship proves as rugged as the land they farm. While the Great Depression looms, the delicate balance of their relationship tips, pitting neighbor against neighbor, and exposing the dark secrets they hide. (from Michelle Hoover's website.)

"In Hoover's debut, the quiet struggle between two Midwestern farm women has the stark simplicity of a Biblical parable….The book's lament for a lost way of life—one in which people 'looked in hope to the ground and the roots growing there more often than we looked for grace from the sky'—has a mournful beauty." — The New Yorker

The Quickening by Michelle Hoover

I.  Enidina (Summer 1913–Spring 1914)

My boy, you might think an old woman hasn't much to say about the living, but your grandmother knows when a person does right by her and knows when they don't.  In this bed, I have little else to do but scratch down my life with this pencil.  And I have little left to me but the thought of you my grandchild who I've known only in the warmth of your mother's belly under my hand.  Even if you never come home, you should understand the way our life was, your grandfather, your mother, and I, and all the little things that make its loss so very terrible in my mind.  The Morrow family, they were a worry to ours from day one.  And once you know what they took from us, you might just understand the kind of people you come from.

It wasn't until late in the summer 1913 that your grandfather and I began to work this farm from the acres of weeds and grasses it was to a fine place.  A place where we could earn a living.  That's what a beginning is.  My father and his father and his father before that had lived within the same ten square miles of land.  Even with my marriage, I didn't move farther from home than a day's wagon ride.  I'd seen no other landscape as a child.  Had never dreamt of it.  A farm is where I was born.  Where I would always live.  I'd known it from the day my mother walked me through the fields and rubbed her fingers in the dirt, putting her thumb to my mouth so I could taste the dust and seed we lived on.  She said this was home.  When I asked her if there was anything else, she shook her head.  "Nowhere you need pay any mind to," she said.  "Not for the likes of us."

It was only a month after I'd lost my father that Frank and I first came to this place.  We married on a Sunday, as Frank thought right, the chapel holding only our families and a few friends.  There we stood, both in our thirties, Frank the older by eight years and graying at the temples.  He wore a borrowed suit that showed his ankles and wrists, I in a dove-colored dress, my red hair combed smooth to lessen my height.  Afterward we ate cake and berries and they tasted too sweet.  We opened our gifts.  My mother swept a spot of frosting from my chin and drew out my arms to look at the fit of my dress.  I'd always been a big woman, suited more for the farm than for marrying, an old bride as I was back then.  My cousins had to squint to find the ring on my hand. 

Only late did we return to what Frank had made our home.  This same house, with borrowed furniture in the rooms.  The house smelled of earth and smoke.  Frank had polished the wood and swept the floors, leaving the broom to rest on the front porch.  He'd spent most of his years working to buy the house and land, much of it still in sorry condition.  Though he didn't speak of it, his family were croppers.  He'd seldom had a thing of his own.  Now the both of us had a fair bit, and after the loss of my father, I was as determined as Frank to keep it.  When I hurried in, Frank took that broom under his arm and strummed me a song, a sorry frown on his face when he pretended the broom had snapped a string.  I grinned, dropping a penny at his feet.  This was my husband, a string of a man himself with a good bit of humor in him.  He was fair-skinned with black hair and long limbs, his eyes fainter than any blue I'd ever seen.  If anything, I knew him to be kind and hardworking, and that was enough.  Behind a curtain of chintz was the bed he'd made.  The sheets were white and damp with the weather, and in the night they would prove little warmth.   Outside, the animals in the barn were still.  I could smell them through the window.  But inside, this was what marriage was.

I'd left those ten square miles and moved to the next county over, a place that looked and smelled the same as my father's land.  The difference was my part in this place.  I was a wife, and not until that night did I know what the word meant.

[image error]Michelle Hoover teaches writing at Boston University and Grub Street. She has published fiction in Confrontation, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, and Best New American Voices, among others. She has been a Bread Loaf Writer's Conference scholar, the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, a MacDowell fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and in 2005 the winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction. Her first book, The Quickening, was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize.