Clifford Garstang's Blog, page 10

I’ve Got Questions for Curtis Smith

Editor’s Note: This exchange is part of a series of brief interviews with emerging writers of recent or forthcoming books. If you enjoyed it, please visit other interviews in the I’ve Got Questions feature.

The Lost and the Blind by Curtis SmithWhat’s the title of your book? Fiction? Nonfiction? Poetry? Who is the publisher and what’s the publication date?

The title is The Lost and the Blind. It’s a novel from Running Wild. It comes out September 5th. If you’re a Kindle person, Amazon and Bookbub are offering it for .99 during the first week.

In a couple of sentences, what’s the book about?

The book follows a boy through his senior year of high school. His mother is an addict, and his father is serving a life sentence. The boy struggles to survive—he’s often hungry—and sometimes scared of the men his mother has crossed. In the background, a war is brewing, and the military, the one option he thought he had as an escape, is looking more and more daunting. Yet there are good people in his life—and he, in turn, is trying to walk the right path. But it’s not easy.

What’s the book’s genre (for fiction and nonfiction) or primary style (for poetry)?

Literary fiction—perhaps with an overlap into upper-level YA, given the age of its protagonist.

What’s the nicest thing anyone has said about the book so far?

We’re waiting on reviews—the first one came from Forewords Reviews—and they called it “lyrical,” “poignant,” “gritty,” and “undercut with scathing social commentary.” I’ll take that.

What book or books is yours comparable to or a cross between? [Is your book like Moby Dick or maybe it’s more like Frankenstein meets Peter Pan?]

Sometimes it reads like The Grapes of Wrath, and sometimes it’s like Huck Finn if Huck set sail through dopesick, small-town America instead of down the Mississippi.

Why this book? Why now?

I don’t know if there’s a real why beyond the fact it’s the only book I could write at the moment. I wrote it during the pandemic—and it helped me through—and I’m guessing some of that period’s anxieties made their way into the pages.

Other than writing this book, what’s the best job you’ve ever had?

I’ve been a teacher most of my life—thirty-three years as a public high school teacher working with special-needs students—and I’ve been teaching college the past seven years. I still enjoy the classroom, and I’m thankful for that.

What do you want readers to take away from the book?

Maybe to think a little more about the lost and hungry among us.

What food and/or music do you associate with the book?

There’s food—or a lack of it. Music plays a role—the boy’s boss plays classical music as they paint and strip wallpaper. The boy doesn’t know much about it—but he comes to enjoy it.

What book(s) are you reading currently?

I’m teaching a course about the study/writing of the novel—so I’m spending the summer rereading the books I’m doing this semester—The Virgin Suicides, The Handmaid’s Tale, Love Medicine, and Election. I’m also working my way through Demon Copperhead, which covers some of the same ground as The Lost and the Blind.

Curtis Smith

Follow Curtis on Facebook.

Buy the book from Amazon.com or Bookshop.org.

2023 Reading–August

Artemis by Andy Weir

Artemis by Andy Weir is a sci-fi novel that just didn’t work for me, possibly because the main character is obnoxious and snarky. Jasmine Bushara has lived on the moon in the city of Artemis since she was six years old, the daughter of a Saudi welder who also lives there. But she’s a troublemaker and free spirit who is mad at just about everyone for reasons that aren’t clear (her mother abandoned her, but still), and now she gets caught up in a get-rich-quick scheme that is both illegal and dangerous, not to mention way over her head. Since she’s already a smuggler, she doesn’t much care about the law—Artemis is pretty lawless anyway, it seems—and thrives on risk. So, fine, she agrees to take on a sabotage job in order to earn a potentially huge payday. Stuff—and much science gobbledygook—happens. Meh.

Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk

Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk is fast-paced and clever, but annoyingly ridiculous. I’m not sure what the author is trying to say in this story about a fashion model who is disillusioned and hates everyone, including herself. When she suffers a disfigurement, she seeks revenge against her former best friend and her ex-fiancé and teams up with a woman who is in the process of completing her gender reassignment. There’s much talk about hiding who we really are, and so maybe that’s the point of the story, including the many twists and revelations that come out along the way.

Hold Fast by Spencer K.M. Brown

Hold Fast by Spencer K.M. Brown is a charming novel about a grieving widower and his grown son who has suffered losses of his own. They have come together to live, but are adrift and aimless in their home on the shores of Lake Superior. They each claim to be “holding fast,” meaning that they’re doing okay, but in reality they’re both sinking. Whether they’ll be able to pull themselves together and recover from their losses is the book’s central question. Brown’s writing is excellent, and the reader feels real sympathy for both father and son as they work through their grief and also work on their relationship with each other. A fine plot element that is revealing of character is the arrival in the father’s life of a young pregnant woman who needs shelter from an abusive domestic situation. Perhaps more important thematically is the project the father undertakes—he begins to build a boat that he intends to row across the lake. I savored the reading of this book because of the fine writing, until I neared the end and needed to know how the various conflicts would be resolved. Highly recommended.

Big Sur by Jack Kerouac

Big Sur by Jack Kerouac is a trip. I’ve never read a whole Kerouac book before, so this was something of a revelation. Supposedly he wrote it over a ten-day period, and given its rambling nature that’s entirely believable. The language strikes me as Joycean in places, and is a convincing portrait of a mind that is nearing the edge of sanity, tipping over, and just barely hanging on. The people in the book are all based on Kerouac’s beatnik friends. For example, the story, for want of a better word, is that Jack is going to Big Sur to stay in his buddy Monsanto’s cabin for a few weeks to relax and write. Monsanto is based on Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Jack and his other pals visit Monsanto’s bookstore in San Francisco (Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Booksellers). While Jack loves some aspects of being in the cabin, he goes nuts and needs to be around other people, but that only drives him nuttier.

The Cyclone Release by Bruce Overby

The Cyclone Release by Bruce Overby is a workplace novel set in a Silicon Valley startup. Brendon is hired to be a technical writer—actually, the only tech writer at first—for a software firm that is gearing up for the release of a big new product. The novel is divided into parts that are named for the phases of a release like that and the milieu is one that Overby knows well from his years working in the industry. The wrinkle here is that Brendon is coming back to work after several months following the death of his wife in an automobile accident that still haunts him. The new release, though, along with the planned IPO of the company, offer a significant distraction for him as well as high stakes. One more complication—he hires help in the form of Mo, an attractive tech writer who is also recovering from loss. It’s a compelling novel and a quick read.

The Next Book–Part 3: Research

[This is Part 3 of my series on The Next Book. For the first two parts, see Inspiration and Beginning the Novel.]

I lived in Singapore from 1983 to 1993 (minus a year spent in Los Angeles), so I felt comfortable writing a book about Americans living there. In fact, my 2021 novel, Oliver’s Travels, also includes a section set in Singapore about a young couple who have taken teaching jobs at the Singapore American School. However, the story I had in mind for the new book takes place almost ten years after I left and, although I’d been back a few times over the years passing through on my way to Jakarta for work, I felt I needed to refresh my perceptions of the city. More importantly, a significant part of the novel is set in 1914-15 in Singapore, and I didn’t know much about the city during that period.

The internet is amazing, but there was a limit to what I could glean. I did find some resources that spoke of the colonial period in Singapore and some that also described a particular incident that I was interested in, but that was about it. In order to do more comprehensive research, I concluded that I needed to take a trip, and so I spent most of January 2017 revisiting the city that I knew well. It didn’t hurt that it was the dead of winter here at home, so being in the tropics during that time wasn’t really a hardship.

I decided to stay in two different hotels in Singapore because I was going to break up the trip with a short visit to Bali, which also figures in the book (in a small way), and that gave me an opportunity to spend time in two different parts of the city.

Goodwood Park Hotel

I started at the Goodwood Park Hotel, which happens to be next door to the apartment building where I lived from 1984 to ’87 and not far from the other two apartments I lived in during my time there. In the novel, the main character has dinner in that hotel with a local couple and learns that it once served as a social club for the German community, which was impacted significantly by the First World War and the events described in the historical section of the novel. The hotel provided a great base for the first part of my research, which was re-familiarizing myself with that part of the city, including places such as the Botanic Gardens and the former Tanglin Barracks. (Also, the hotel upgraded me to a suite with a kitchenette and wonderful balcony, so it was delightful.)

After a week or so, I flew down to Bali. That trip to Bali was in part just a beach getaway, but I was also moved to visit the scene of the 2002 terrorist bombing in Kuta Beach, another important event in the novel. I had been to Bali three or four times over the years, but this time I did some things I hadn’t done before, including taking a tour up to the volcano at the center of the island and visiting other areas in the island’s interior and west coast.

Back in Singapore, I checked into a funky hotel near the Singapore River, one that was within walking distance from Chinatown. Studio M itself plays no part in the novel, but I enjoyed its design elements—rooms included a loft sleeping space, a great work area and comfortable lounging spot. In addition, it included a massive buffet breakfast by the pool. It wasn’t as close to the subway station as I might have liked, but that just meant I had to stroll along the river before beginning my explorations.

I was mostly interested in seeing buildings from the colonial era, many of which remain, and I was able to enter many of them—now museums or serving other public functions. For that, I was grateful for a book called A Walking Tour of Singapore by G. Byrne Bracken. However, my primary research activity for this part of the trip involved going most days to the National Library of Singapore, which is housed in a beautiful new building in another part of downtown. I had contacted them in advance about the subjects I was interested in and when I arrived, I had a list of materials I wanted to see. I sat in their wonderful reference room with my laptop and thoroughly enjoyed going through countless books, pamphlets, and old newspapers on microfilm. Because the library was so comfortable and the staff so helpful, I enjoyed spending time there—out of the heat, humidity, and monsoon rains!

During the final days of my stay, I visited a shop that I knew well from my days of living in Singapore and bought a reproduction of a 1913 map of Singapore. It shows the city much as it was during the historical part of my novel, and it’s also beautiful.

In the end, the trip provided me with more material than I could use in the book without overwhelming readers, but it was all absolutely necessary and gave me the confidence I needed to continue writing.

Next: Writing the Novel

The Next Book–Part 2: Beginning the Novel

This is a series of blog posts in which I discuss the process of writing my new, scheduled for publication in early 2024. Part 1 was about my Inspiration for the book. Today I want to discuss Beginning the Novel.

People often ask me how long it takes to write a book, and of course it varies from project to project. I wrote my second book, What the Zhang Boys Know, in under two years, which was very fast for me. The Last Bird of Paradise, though, has taken much longer. I’m not exactly sure when I started writing it, but it must have been 2016. That year, I was still looking for a publisher for my first novel, The Shaman of Turtle Valley, and I had also finished writing my second novel, Oliver’s Travels which was also looking for a home. With those books done, I must have turned to a new project.

And I know I must have been pretty far along with it in early 2017, because I took a research trip in January that year to Singapore, the setting for most of the novel. I’ll describe that research trip in the next part of this series.

Then came several interruptions. First, I found a publisher for The Shaman of Turtle Valley, with a publication date set for May 2019. That meant I would need time for editing and pre-publication marketing work. Then, in early 2018, I found a publisher for Oliver’s Travels, with a scheduled publication date of late 2020. Also in 2018, I put together a third short story collection, House of the Ancients and Other Stories, and found a publisher for that, to come out in early 2020, between the two novels. That prompted a delay until 2021 for Oliver’s Travels so the books wouldn’t come out too close together. By the end of 2018, all three of those books were done and scheduled for publication, and I could really focus on a new project.

In November and December of that year, I had a writing residency in France, and that’s when I really began to make steady progress on The Last Bird of Paradise.

But beginning to write and finding the right beginning of a novel are two different challenges. And what a writer writes first is very often not what readers see on the first page of the book. I knew that the Singapore Mutiny that I mentioned in Part 1 of this series wasn’t the whole story I wanted to tell. I needed to show a more contemporary view of the subjects and themes that interested me and that I thought readers would be interested in. That led me to create a contemporary character who would acquire paintings by the English woman from the Singapore Mutiny part of the story. That would establish the connection between the two narratives, but how to get the modern character to Singapore?

The character I imagined is an ambitious young lawyer who meets and has an affair with a banker who is her law firm’s client. I didn’t yet know much about this character, so I began with the scene in which she meets the man and becomes infatuated with him. I loved writing these pages because it helped me understand her and her background, how she was thrilled to be an associate at a high-powered New York City firm, learning the ropes from a great mentor. She has an affair with the banker, who is married, and…as I said, I loved writing these pages.

I kept writing through the progression of their affair, their eventual marriage, and the trauma of 9/11. I loved all of that, but eventually I realized that this wasn’t the novel I wanted to write, and we were well over 100 pages into the book and the woman still hadn’t come to Singapore, still hadn’t acquired the paintings, and we hadn’t gotten to a point where it made sense to introduce the narrative about the Singapore Mutiny.

Writers will, I think, recognize this dilemma. What I had written was absolutely necessary for me, but not necessary for the reader to read. I had begun the story in the wrong place. (Spoiler alert: very little of those first pages have made it into the final version of the book, but I couldn’t discard all of them. Some of the scenes appear as flashbacks or memories.)

So, if not at the moment when she meets her husband, where to start? I tried several different spots and eventually picked one. That is now the beginning of the novel.

It still took years to finish the book and revise it into a shape I was happy with, and I didn’t consider it really done until October 2022.

Next: Research

2023 Reading — July

I didn’t get a lot of reading done this month, but I have a good excuse: I was attending a concert almost every night in July as part of the Heifetz International Music Institute’s Summer Festival of Concerts.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens was the author’s penultimate novel and for some reason was chosen to be my book club’s selection for this month. Many Americans read the book in high school, but somehow I managed to avoid it, even though its characters and intrinsic morals have become part of our culture. Miss Havisham, an old maid with a hatred of men but a generous streak, is both a familiar name and type. Pip, the orphaned protagonist of the story who gains and loses a fortune, ultimately realizing his failure to be grateful to the people who helped him, is likewise familiar. The story, then, is simple enough—the rise and fall of a young Englishman and the pitfalls of revenge.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson was her first novel, and like others of her books I’ve read, it is a sprawling family saga. This one begins with the conception of the narrator, Ruby Lennox, daughter of Bunty and George Lennox. (For the sake of the story, I’m willing to accept the idea of a zygote’s consciousness.) The chapters gradually carry Ruby’s story forward, but long footnotes to each chapter provide detail of other family members in her family tree—on her mother’s side—along with their various challenges, scandals, and tragedies, including male family members who served in the world wars. It’s all very complicated, but if one stays focused on Ruby, it makes sense. Atkinson is a fantastic writer, and this is one I’d recommend to anyone.

The Ghetto by Tamara Kamenszain

The Ghetto by Tamara Kamenszain, translated from Spanish by Seth Michelson is a bilingual collection of poems, including an essay by the poet that was not in the original Spanish edition. (The translator is a friend of mine.) My Spanish isn’t great, but it was fun to read both the original and translated versions of the poems, if only to get a sense of the sound the poet intended. As one of the back-cover blurbs says, “The spare, intense voice of these poems speaks of Tamara Kamenszain’s troubled relationship to the Jewish-Argentine experience, where history is a scratched Beatles record, words in Ladino, men with beards who glance askance at the women they see as carriers of sin.”

The King at the Edge of the World by Arthur Phillips

The King at the Edge of the World by Arthur Phillips grew on me. Late last year I read this author’s novel Prague (which is actually set in Budapest, and I read it because I was traveling there) and was impressed. I wanted to read another, and this title intrigued me. The book begins, though, with a delegation of Turks arriving at the court of Queen Elizabeth I in 1591, focusing on the Sultan’s physician who is traveling with them. His manipulative rival arranges for the doctor to be left behind when the delegation returns to Constantinople, and the rest of the novel is about how he is used by a political faction that is worried about the expected succession to the throne of King James of Scotland when Elizabeth dies. The beginning was necessary, but it took some time before the reader gets to King James—the book’s title character. That aside, I liked the book a lot and found the writing excellent. (I had a library copy of the book but also listened to the audiobook version, which was narrated wonderfully.)

The Next Book–Part 1: Inspiration

My new novel, The Last Bird of Paradise, which is set mostly in Singapore, is being published in February 2024. In this series, I’ll share some of the process of bringing the book to life, from inspiration to publication.

Let’s start with inspiration. At the end of 1983, the law firm I worked for transferred me from Chicago to Singapore. I was excited about the move because I had lived in Asia before, in South Korea, and in early 1978 I visited Singapore, a former British colony that was enticing–a blend of East and West that was both exotic and familiar at the same time. The transfer was an amazing opportunity for a junior associate of the firm.

For a couple of years after I moved to the country, I lived in a weird, sterile apartment building on top of a shopping center and didn’t do much in the way of decorating or acquiring art. Three years later, I moved to a much nicer apartment building and picked up some attractive artifacts here and there on my travels around the region. In 1989, the firm transferred me back to the US, but, as it turned out, only for 18 months. In 1990, I returned to Singapore, this time as a partner of the firm. I found a great apartment and this time I wanted to buy some art to hang on that apartment’s walls.

During my first stay in Singapore, I occasionally visited a shop called Antiques of the Orient not far from the district where I lived. I may have bought some small things there, but nothing significant. Now, though, I came across three really interesting antique paintings. They were expensive, but I thought they’d look great in the apartment’s dining room. They were signed by the artist, although with just a first initial and last name, and dated 1917. I left Singapore in 1993 and have held onto those paintings. They currently hang in a hallway in my home here in Virginia.

I didn’t at first make much of an effort to learn about the artist, although I did wonder about her. I also wondered what was happening in Singapore at about the time she was working on her art. What was her life like? Why was she even in the colony? That was at the height of WWI, and I was ignorant of what impacts the war might have had on the small settlement far from the upheaval in Europe.

Unlike WWII, in which Japan took control of Singapore from the UK, the first war resulted in no such change. There was, however, a dramatic incident early in the war that I thought was worth looking into. In 1915, a group of Indian sepoy conscripts in the British army rebelled; they believed they were going to be sent to North Africa to fight the German-allied Turks and they did not want to take up arms against fellow Muslims. The incident, which became known as the Singapore Mutiny, seemed ripe with dramatic potential.

That was the grain of sand around which the novel grew.

Next: Beginning the novel.

The Next Book–Part 1

My new novel, The Last Bird of Paradise, which is set mostly in Singapore, is being published in February 2024. In this series, I’ll share some of the process of bringing the book to life, from inspiration to publication.

Let’s start with inspiration. At the end of 1983, the law firm I worked for transferred me from Chicago to Singapore. I was excited about the move because I had lived in Asia before, in South Korea, and in early 1978 I visited Singapore, a former British colony that was enticing–a blend of East and West that was both exotic and familiar at the same time. The transfer was an amazing opportunity for a junior associate of the firm.

For a couple of years after I moved to the country, I lived in a weird, sterile apartment building on top of a shopping center and didn’t do much in the way of decorating or acquiring art. Three years later, I moved to a much nicer apartment building and picked up some attractive artifacts here and there on my travels around the region. In 1989, the firm transferred me back to the US, but, as it turned out, only for 18 months. In 1990, I returned to Singapore, this time as a partner of the firm. I found a great apartment and this time I wanted to buy some art to hang on that apartment’s walls.

During my first stay in Singapore, I occasionally visited a shop called Antiques of the Orient not far from the district where I lived. I may have bought some small things there, but nothing significant. Now, though, I came across three really interesting antique paintings. They were expensive, but I thought they’d look great in the apartment’s dining room. They were signed by the artist, although with just a first initial and last name, and dated 1917. I left Singapore in 1993 and have held onto those paintings. They currently hang in a hallway in my home here in Virginia.

I didn’t at first make much of an effort to learn about the artist, although I did wonder about her. I also wondered what was happening in Singapore at about the time she was working on her art. What was her life like? Why was she even in the colony? That was at the height of WWI, and I was ignorant of what impacts the war might have had on the small settlement far from the upheaval in Europe.

Unlike WWII, in which Japan took control of Singapore from the UK, the first war resulted in no such change. There was, however, a dramatic incident early in the war that I thought was worth looking into. In 1915, a group of Indian sepoy conscripts in the British army rebelled; they believed they were going to be sent to North Africa to fight the German-allied Turks and they did not want to take up arms against fellow Muslims. The incident, which became known as the Singapore Mutiny, seemed ripe with dramatic potential.

That was the grain of sand around which the novel grew.

Next: Beginning the novel.

I’ve Got Questions for MJ Werthman White

Editor’s Note: This exchange is part of a series of brief interviews with emerging writers of recent or forthcoming books. If you enjoyed it, please visit other interviews in the I’ve Got Questions feature.

An Invitation to the Party by MJ Werthman WhiteWhat’s the title of your book? Fiction? Nonfiction? Poetry? Who is the publisher and what’s the publication date?

My book’s title is An Invitation to the Party. It is fiction, published by Regal House Publishing, and due out July 18th, 2023.

In a couple of sentences, what’s the book about?                                                                                              

It is 2017. Garnet, a poet, resides in the fictional western New York state village of Haven. Retired bookstore manager, she is a loving sister, bitter ex-wife, devoted aunt, failure as a mother, and doting owner of the imperious Great Pyrenees, Vera. Her increasingly confused ex, the philandering Bowie, lives down the street where he is having second thoughts about their split. Garnet will turn seventy in a few months, and she wants no fuss made. Her family is determined to ignore her wishes and throw a big surprise party. Things do not go well.                                                                                

What’s the book’s genre (for fiction and nonfiction) or primary style (for poetry)?

An Invitation to the Party is literary fiction. Readers of Ann Tyler and Richard Russo will feel right at home.                                                                                                          

What’s the nicest thing anyone has said about the book so far?

Poet Jim Daniels’s fiction-writing alter ego, Jim Ray Daniels, called it “A novel full of depth and heart that explores the complications of a complicated family with plenty of wit and empathy to go around.” You can’t get much nicer than that.

What book or books is yours comparable to or a cross between? [Is your book like Moby Dick or maybe it’s more like Frankenstein meets Peter Pan?]

In writing this novel Richard Russo’s beloved (by me at least) family saga, Nobody’s Fool, was my lodestar. Garnet, in An Invitation to the Party, is no Sully, and Haven is no Bath, NY, but Russo’s love of his characters and use of humor despite adversity inspired me as I wrote. If you’ve never read his novel, you’re in for a treat. It’s one of my top five lifetime favorites. The other four titles change over time, but Nobody’s Fool remains a permanent fixture. Do yourself a favor and watch the eponymous movie too. You’ll thank me.

Why this book? Why now?  

For a while, I’d been looking for a story to read that I could identify with, one with an elderly woman as the main character who didn’t have dementia, was not a joke or harridan or saint, but a complicated human being, someone–like many, many my age–who was smart, courageous in the face of significant challenges, funny, full of human failings and, most important, capable of surprising a reader (and sometimes herself and the author).

I also wanted a book with characters who, despite real flaws, were not repellent. And, because I love them, I wanted there to be dogs. I decided if this was truly what I wanted, maybe I’d write it myself.

Other than writing this book, what’s the best job you’ve ever had?

I worked in a small indie bookstore for a few years in the 1970s. I loved every aspect of that job in those long-ago before times – selling actual analog books (no such thing as eBooks), filling out special orders for customers (no computers, no internet – everything done on paper, using stamps and snail mail, all notifications by not-smart phone). It felt like Christmas opening those boxes of new book shipments. My salary was pathetic. Of course, I spent it on books. (Experiences like this may explain why I’ve turned out to be such a Luddite in my declining years.)

What do you want readers to take away from the book?

Even when it’s bad, life is good.

What food and/or music do you associate with the book?

Shameless product placements in the book (all, sadly, unremunerated) include Cool Ranch Doritos, American cheese, Sunny D, Twinkies, and Lucky Charms. As for music, featured in the novel, are Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and, it being a party after all, “Happy Birthday.”

What book(s) are you reading currently?

I recently ordered and received my own Christmas in July box of books from Regal House, my twelve fellow Summer 23 authors’ novels. I stacked them in order of publication dates, and am just now finishing the first, Laura Scalzo’s absorbing tale of young adult friendships, American Arcadia, in which Scalzo’s beautifully rendered New York City of the 1980s in all its broken glory may be one of my favorite characters ever. Next up, The War Ends at Four, by Rosanna Staffa.

MJ Werthman White

Learn more about MJ on her website.

Buy the book from the publisher (Regal House Publishing) or from Bookshop.org.

Mid-year check-in: Writing Goals

At the end of last year, I set writing goals for the coming year, as I do every year. It’s usually enlightening to look back to see how I did when I sit down to formulate new goals. But the year is already half over, so how am I doing so far?

When I set the goals last December, I had begun submitting a new novel manuscript to agents and small presses, and to some extent that book was out of my hands, at least for the moment. I knew I might need to return to it, but I didn’t know when or to what extent it would require my attention this year. That question was answered in April when I signed a contract with a small press for the publication of the novel. I’ve been working hard on edits since then, but those are now essentially done, and the publication is scheduled for February 2024. I’ll have more to say about this soon.

My goals also included progress on two other projects—one straightforward, one experimental. Both have continued to move forward, although neither is as far along as I’d hoped, largely because of the time I’ve put into editing the novel coming out next year. Also, I think I’m more committed to the experimental project at this point, and I’ll try to have a draft of that done by the end of the year. I have a December writing residency scheduled, so that seems feasible.

As for the goal of writing a personal essay, I’ve pecked at a couple of ideas, without making much headway. There’s still hope, though.

So, for the remainder of the year: I need to focus on plans for promoting the new book; I’ll be pushing the experimental novel forward; and I still want to complete at least one essay.

I’ve Got Questions for Janet Goldberg

Editor’s Note: This exchange is part of a series of brief interviews with emerging writers of recent or forthcoming books. If you enjoyed it, please visit other interviews in the I’ve Got Questions feature.

The Proprietor’s Song by Janet GoldbergWhat’s the title of your book? Fiction? Nonfiction? Poetry? Who is the publisher and what’s the publication date?

A literary novel published by Regal House, The Proprietor’s Song will be released on July 4, 2023.

In a couple of sentences, what’s the book about?

The Proprietor’s Song is about grief and recovery, about the iconic California landscape—the Sierra Nevada and Death Valley—where the novel is set.

What’s the book’s genre (for fiction and nonfiction) or primary style (for poetry)?

The Proprietor’s Song is literary fiction written partly in an epistolary style, including brief newspaper articles, song lyrics, a complete poem by the wonderful poet James Wright, and more.

What’s the nicest thing anyone has said about the book so far?

Beautiful. Eerie. I think these words are also apt descriptors of the setting—California’s Sierra Nevada and Death Valley.

Stephanie Cowell, author of The Boy in the Rain, also wrote this:

“Janet Goldberg writes so powerfully of loss and grief. We follow the crooked paths of people left stumbling behind those who have gone on (a son, a sister) until we recognize our own intimate irresolvable journey in theirs. The author manages to say the unsayable. A truly original and effervescent writer.”

What book or books is yours comparable to or a cross between? [Is your book like Moby Dick or maybe it’s more like Frankenstein meets Peter Pan?]

Though The Proprietor’s Song isn’t part of the horror genre, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula come to mind because they’re written in an epistolary style. Incidentally, two of the characters in my novel, Grace and Elwood Fisher, discuss Dracula over dinner when Grace happens to spot a provocative painting in the bar that reminds her of the Stoker novel.

Why this book? Why now?

That’s complicated and painful. I can’t say I set out to write a novel as I’m far more comfortable in short form—poetry or short story. Some years before I started the novel, or what I assumed would be just another short story, my younger sister died suddenly, and then while I was working on the novel my nephew (my sister’s son) was murdered in his English class in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre. So I suppose there’s no mystery as to why I ended up writing a novel about grief.

Other than writing this book, what’s the best job you’ve ever had?

I’ve taught for about thirty years, and no doubt that’s been rewarding, but now I feel fortunate to be the fiction editor for Deep Wild, a literary journal that publishes writing about the wilderness, a passion of mine. It’s been a privilege working with and learning from other talented short story writers, helping them hone their stories, and seeing their stories in print!

What do you want readers to take away from the book?

Just how gut-wrenching and life-changing loss and uncertainty can be, that grieving is a life-long task. You basically have to relearn how to breathe, how to live again.  

I also hope The Proprietor’s Song inspires a road trip to the Eastern Sierras and Death Valley.  Though I grew up in the Northeast and the Midwest, I do consider California home and never tire of its varied, unexpected beauty.

What food and/or music do you associate with the book?

There’s some of both in the novel, but the food probably figures more largely since the main characters do an awful lot of driving/traveling! Grace and Elwood Fisher, while retracing their missing son’s tracks in Death Valley, stay in the same park motel their son stayed before he’d disappeared and eat at various restaurants there and on the road trip back home. Grace, hypercritical, often complains about the food, while her more pragmatic husband Elwood tempers that. In a way, their differences over food mirror their attitudes around the far more important issue of how to cope with the very real possibility that they’ll never see their missing son again.  

What book(s) are you reading currently?

A Living Remedy: A Memoir, by Nicole Chung
Battleborn, by Claire Vaye Watkins
Don’t Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet, by Alice Robb

Janet Goldberg

Learn more about Janet on her website.

Buy the book from the publisher (Regal House Publishing), Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or Bookshop.org.