Clifford Garstang's Blog, page 38

March Whirlwind

[image error]Dogwood blossoms in my yard

I know, it’s mid-April, but I just realized that I failed to
post anything about my exciting March after the report about my New
York trip and the shows I saw, the museums I visited, the readings I heard,
the food I ate, etc.

The week following my return from the Big Apple, I
participated in the annual Virginia Festival
of the Book, one of my favorite literary happenings each year. The festival
began for me when I moderated a panel at Barnes & Noble on Wednesday
afternoon.  (I’ve written earlier
about the authors and books represented on the panel: The Magnetic Girl by Jessica Handler and Weather Woman by Cai Emmons.) The event was packed, the questions
and answers after the panel were lively, and book sales were brisk. After the
panel I hustled over to the New Dominion
Bookshop for a fascinating talk by Jarrett Krosoczka, this year’s Carol
Troxell Reader (so called because of a fund established in honor of New
Dominion’s former owner). Krosoczka, a charming and practiced presenter, is a
children’s author who recently published a graphic memoir for young adults and
adults, Hey, Kiddo, about his
difficult childhood and teen years. That was followed by a reception next door
at Tilman’s a terrific little wine bar for the author and donors to the fund.
After meeting a friend for a drink, at a dive bar (that might actually be its
name, I’m not sure) I headed home, over the mountain, only to discover that the
light rain in town was blinding snow on the mountain. I was happy to arrive at
home.

The next day I was just an observer at the festival. I attended a poetry reading at New Dominion with two old friends (Leona Sevick and Rebecca Morgan Frank) and one new one (January Gill O’Neil). Then, back at Barnes & Noble, I heard two fiction writers read and speak: A.D. Hopkins and Elaine Neil Orr. Then I headed home so I could attend the Heifetz International Music Institute’s Spring Hootenanny, always a fun event that supports their scholarship fund.

On Friday I was slated to moderate another panel, which I
thought was fascinating: The Book of H
by Marina Perezagua, Thomas and Beal in
the Midi by Christopher Tilghman, and The
Emperor of Shoes by Spencer Wise. (Again, I wrote about each of those books
in an earlier post.)
It was fun to chat with the authors; I knew Chris Tilghman but I was meeting Spencer
and Marina for the first time. The panel went well and afterward I rushed out
of town because I was driving down to Winston-Salem, NC for another literary
event.

[image error]High Road Festival

The High
Road Festival of Poetry and Short Fiction is a new event hosted by Press 53 (combining its former Gathering of
Poets and Gathering of Writers into a single festival). It kicked off on Friday
night with readings at Bookmarks, a terrific bookstore in Winston-Salem, by
poets Clint McCown and Sean Sexton. (Oddly, as I waited in the lobby of my
hotel to head over to the reading, I ran into friends from home who were in
town for a wedding.) Saturday was filled with workshops (I taught one on
editing, twice) and masterclasses and concluded with another reading, this time
with Sean Sexton and David Jauss. We celebrated at a local watering hole, even
though some people still had the Sunday morning poetry roundtable to look
forward to. With a busy week ahead of me, I skipped the Sunday morning program
and hit the road early Sunday for the drive home.

[image error]TSOTV on the Braddock Avenue Books Table

Then came a crazy few days. Early on Wednesday, I flew to Portland, Oregon for the annual AWP Conference. (That’s the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.) It usually attracts 12-15,000 people and is always a madhouse. Happily, even with tight connections in Dulles and San Francisco, I arrived without a hitch. The tram system in Portland is great, so I got to my hotel easily, checked in, and made it back to the convention center with plenty of time to get the Press 53 Booth set up, along with another Press 53 author. (Perhaps foolishly, we volunteered to manage the booth when the publisher announced he would not be attending the conference this year.) That evening, after the booth was set up, I located my new publisher’s table and was thrilled to see my new book, The Shaman of Turtle Valley, prominently displayed among the other Braddock Avenue Books titles.

[image error]Press 53 Booth at AWP

For the next three days, I spent all my time in the book
fair, either at the Press 53 booth or at the Braddock table or wandering the
aisles of some 800 exhibitors. I didn’t attend a single panel. Honestly, not
many of them appealed to me. The good thing about being largely stationary in a
huge exhibition hall like that is that eventually everyone else is going to walk
by, so it’s a great way to see old friends. But then there are parties in the
evenings and I saw more old friends at those.

One nice thing about the book fair: at least once an hour
someone came up to me to tell me how much they appreciate the Literary
Magazine Rankings I do each year. Or when I’d introduce myself they’d get
this glimmer of recognition in their eyes. “Hmm,” they’d say, “where do I know
your name from?” I’m glad people use the rankings and I’m even happier they
approached me to tell me that.

We packed everything up on Saturday evening and I had Sunday
free before my red-eye flight home. (I hate taking the red-eye, but it went
smoothly enough.) I walked around the city—the weather was fantastic—visited a
coffee house, a donut shop (not Voodoo, because the line was too long), a
seafood restaurant, and the iconic Powell’s Books (twice, because in the
morning I learned there was a poetry reading there in the afternoon).

March was a whirlwind, and I’ve been catching my breath ever
since.

Descent of the Mountain God

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We are now just a few weeks from the official publication date of The Shaman of Turtle Valley, my debut novel (Braddock Avenue Books, May 14, 2019). I’m terribly excited about this, and about the fact that review copies and early release copies have begun making their way into the world, so it’s only a matter of time before I start hearing reactions from readers. (Note to self: Don’t read the reviews.)

I’ve given several interviews about the book and have a few more scheduled, but there’s one thing concerning the book’s origins I haven’t talked about much yet.

[image error]The Mountain God

There is a painting above my fireplace that I have had for over 40 years, a souvenir of the time I spent living in South Korea, one of the novel’s settings. The painting, shown at right, depicts Sansin (산신), the Mountain God, a guardian spirit thought to protect against evil spirits and misfortune. This is a common motif in Korean art: Sansin shown with a tiger and various other Korean symbols—the mountain stream, the pine tree, a fungus, a magpie. While my painting is mostly monotone, over the years I’ve found many colorful versions on the Internet, and I recently saw one in the Korean art collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I’ve included a gallery of just a few of those images below. But what do they have to do with my novel? Although my first working title for the book was “Birdhouse,” which is an important repeated image in the novel, for a long time its title was “Descent of the Mountain God.” I envisioned Lee Soon-hee, one of the book’s main characters and a developing shaman, summoning Sansin, even though she finds herself in Virginia, far from her mountain home in Korea. The epigram that opens the book is a poem by the poet Yi Ku-yong and mentions Sansin: “The mountain god descends like a meandering stream . . .”

[image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error]

The Shaman of Turtle Valley is still available
for pre-order from Braddock Avenue Books.

2019 Reading–March

Although March was a crazy month—I spent a week in New York,
was busy with the Virginia Festival of the Book, taught at the High Roads
Festival of Poetry and Short Fiction, then flew out to Portland, Oregon for the
AWP Conference—I still managed to finish reading six books.

[image error]We are Water by Wally Lamb

I didn’t love We are
Water by Wally Lamb, which I listened to on Audible. Although the novel is
told in several voices, it seems to focus on Annie Oh, a visual artist who left
her husband to pursue her career in New York and is now about to marry the
woman who owns the gallery that represents her. Annie had a very difficult
childhood and that has manifested itself in a number of odd choices, including
anger toward her son. Annie’s ex-husband Orion seems like a good guy, but he’s
got his own issues, as do all their children. These are interesting, if not
particularly likeable, characters, but it’s the story-telling that I didn’t
care for. You might want to wait for the movie, which I hear is in the works.

[image error]The Story of H by Marina Perezagua

I read The Story of H
by Marina Perezagua because the author was part of a panel I moderated at the Virginia Festival of the Book. It is a
solid, lyrical novel that addresses a wide range of issues—gender identity,
nuclear war, slavery, and environmental disasters among them. The main
character, H, is a hermaphroditic Japanese child who survives the Hiroshima
bombing at the end of WWII but in the process loses her male organs. She then
identifies as a woman and eventually finds herself in America with a man who is
a US veteran of the war. They are searching for the Japanese daughter he
fostered at the end of the war, and that sends H on a global search.  

[image error]Thomas and Beal in the Midi by Christopher Tilghman

Thomas and Beal in the
Midi by Christopher Tilghman continues the story the author has been
telling in earlier novels Mason’s Retreat
and The Right-Hand Shore. Now
(1893), Thomas, scion of the family, has married Beal, the daughter of the
freed black farm manager from the family’s estate in Maryland. Because they
cannot legally live together in Maryland, they travel to France where they fall
in with a community of expatriate artists and Thomas purchases a vineyard in
the Languedoc region. Having recently spent a month in the South of France, I
enjoyed this engrossing historical novel about the area. (Tilghman was also one
of the authors on a panel I moderated at the Virginia Festival of the Book.)   

[image error]Last Days of the Dog-Men by Brad Watson

Last Days of the
Dog-Men: Stories by Brad Watson. I’ve enjoyed Watson’s stories since I read
one in The New Yorker ten years ago. So I recently picked up this slim
collection of stories (1996) I hadn’t seen before. All the stories are strong,
but one in particular, “Kindred Spirits,” blew me away.

[image error]A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink

A Whole New Mind
by Daniel Pink was interesting (I listened to Pink narrate the audiobook). I’ve
read a couple of other of his books and had the pleasure of meeting with him
when he was the keynote speaker of a leadership conference I organized for the
Northwestern University Alumni Association (Pink is an alumnus of
Northwestern). The book was originally published in 2006 and argues that in the
future (now?) right-brain creativity will be more important for the US economy
than left-brain organizational skills.

[image error]Facts and Fears by James Clapper

Facts and Fears by
James Clapper. Former Director of National Intelligence under President Obama
(and also a top intelligence appointee in the Bush administration) recounts his
long military career and subsequent service in the Intelligence Community. The
first half of the book is a little slow, but it gets really interesting when he’s
writing about Snowden, Manning, and Assange, the so-called “Benghazi scandal”
(his sober account of what really happened is very helpful), and Russian
interference in American elections. My book club chose this book for March and
even though I wasn’t able to attend our discussion, I’m glad I read it.

That was another solid reading month. On to April!

Excerpt from THE SHAMAN OF TURTLE VALLEY

[image error]The Shaman of Turtle Valley

The good folks at Cagibi were kind enough to run an excerpt from my novel, THE SHAMAN OF TURTLE VALLEY, which is now available for pre-order from Braddock Avenue Books. See the excerpt here.

On Stage/On the Road

In the midst of a very busy month, I gave myself a break and
headed to New York last week. It had been years since I’d been to the city and
I longed to see some shows, visit some museums, and catch up with some friends.

[image error]Self Portrait, Van Gogh

First, the museums. I’m not exactly starved for museum visits, honestly, having recently been to Paris where I spent hours in several fine museums. I was in Chicago in January and went to the Art Institute there. And I also visited the Virginia Museum of Fine arts last month. But I had never been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Museum of Modern Art in New York, so I definitely wanted to go there, and both were great, of course. I didn’t do the Met right because I wanted to find every corner of the place, which is impossible. If I got to NYC regularly, I might have spent all my time in one wing and concentrated my viewing. Instead, I sought out all of my favorite things—early modern paintings, Asian art, Impressionism, etc. It was a whirlwind. I did pretty much the same thing with MOMA, although it’s less overwhelming. I thought I might hit one or more of the many other fine museums in the city, but I was slowed by a cold and frankly ran out of energy and time. (I actually arrived at the Whitney but then saw the crowd inside and decided I wasn’t that keen on seeing the Warhol exhibit, after all.)

Then, food. I was able to connect with an old friend for
dinner one night, another friend for early drinks and a newer friend for late
drinks another night, which was wonderful. But the culinary highlight was a
visit to Korea Town—I ate at a place called Miss Korea BBQ—and some delicious
Jeonju-style Bibimbap. (43 years ago this month I arrived in the city of Jeonju
to begin my Peace Corps job, so Bibimbap always brings back memories.)

And literature. I extended my originally planned stay in
order to attend the reading of finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards.
This occurred at an auditorium in the New School and was a wonderful
event—almost 30 short readings by some fine writers, including Rachel Kushner,
Luis Alberto Urrea, Ada Limon, Francisco Cantu, Stephen Greenblatt, Terrance
Hayes, Nicole Chung, and others. Earlier that day I also paid a visit to the
Strand, the famous bookstore. It’s a little overwhelming, as anyone who’s been
there knows. Still, I found something I needed to have and came away with one
book. The next day I attended NBCC’s annual meeting (I’ve been a member for
years) but wasn’t able to stay for the awards
dinner.

Finally, theater. The primary excuse for the trip was to see
some shows. While I was in New York I saw two, and as soon as I got home I saw
another, so that was 3 plays over a 5-day stretch.

[image error]

First was The Ferryman at the Bernard B.
Jacobs Theatre, an intense drama by Jez Butterworth directed by Sam Mendes
about a family in Northern Ireland in 1981. Read a review here.
At three hours, it’s a long play, but riveting. Frankly, the reason I chose the
show was because my college roommate (Fred
Applegate) is in it, and he was fantastic in the role of Uncle Patrick. He
invited me backstage after the show and then we went out for drinks with a
couple of other fascinating members of the cast. A great night.

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Two nights later I saw my second play of the week: Boesman
and Lena by Athol Fugard. I’ve been aware of Fugard for a long time and
knew of his play Master Harold and the
Boys, plus I have an academic book by Albert Wertheim, my graduate school
mentor at Indiana University, The
Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard. (Fugard was a visiting scholar at IU in
2000-01, at about the time that book was published.) Another intense drama,
this one features two primary characters, a couple, who are walking with all
their possessions after their only shelter has been bulldozed by authorities.
Like much of Fugard’s early work, the play is among other things an indictment
of apartheid in South Africa, but the racial issues are just as relevant in the
United States today. Read a review of this production here.

The next day it was time to head home, giving me time to
rest and read on the train. But on Saturday it was back to the theater, this
time for opening night of Arden
of Faversham at the American
Shakespeare Center. As we’re told in the pre-show speech, the play is by
Anonymous or Unknown, scholars are undecided (hah hah). It’s a light-hearted
murder mystery (although without much mystery) in which Alice Arden and her
lover Mosby arrange for the murder of Alice’s husband by hiring a couple of
bumbling thugs, Black Will and Shakebag. As always, the ASC does a fine job
with the play.

I’m just about recovered from last week now, heading into
another busy week in which I’ll be attending both the Virginia Festival of the Book in
Charlottesville and the High
Road Festival of Poetry and Short Fiction in Winston-Salem NC.

2019 Reading–February

My year in books continues.

The Virginia Festival of
the Book is in March, and I agreed to moderate two panels again this year.
That means I have lots of reading to do, but I managed to get a good chunk of
it done in February.

[image error]The Magnetic Girl by Jessica Handler

The first panel I’m moderating is called Embracing
Power: Women and the Supernatural. The two books we’ll be discussing are
quite different—one historical and one contemporary—but both center on women
who may have extraordinary powers. The
Magnetic Girl by Jessica Handler is based on a real 19th Century
figure who appeared at venues throughout the South and East. In the book, she
is trained by her father to perform apparently miraculous feats—witnesses
believe they have been lifted by her “electrical charge”—and she herself
believes she is practicing mesmerism to control her “marks.” It’s an engaging
novel and I enjoyed reading it in part because the author is a friend of mine
from graduate school.

[image error]Weather Woman by Cai Emmons

In Weather Woman
by Cai Emmons, a young woman discovers she has the power to control the
weather. She has dropped out of graduate school at MIT, against her mentor’s
advice, and taken a job as the “weather woman” at a small TV station in New
Hampshire. Feeling extraordinary stress in her personal life, one day she
experiences a disorienting phenomenon and comes to suspect that she has the
power to affect the weather. Whether she does or not and whether anyone else
believes her creates some of the suspense of the novel.

[image error]The Emperor of Shoes by Spencer Wise

The second panel I’m moderating is Seeking New Lives, Elsewhere. Of the three books considered on this panel, I’ve only read one so far: The Emperor of Shoes by Spencer Wise. The novel is set in southern China in 2015 and focuses on Alex Cohen, heir to a shoe manufacturing company with a factory in Foshan, the city right next to Guangzhou (Canton). As he becomes more familiar with the business, he discovers both the corruption and exploitation that keeps the Chinese economy humming.

[image error]The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty

The Cooking Gene by Michael Twitty is the non-fiction book my book club selected to read for this month. Twitty is an interesting character who has made a career of being a historical interpreter of African American cuisine, and this book traces southern cooking—especially that favored by African Americans—back to its roots in slavery and before that to Africa. At the same time, he’s also exploring his own roots and family tree.

[image error]Where Am I Giving? by Kelsey Timmerman

Where am I Giving by Kelsey Timmerman is the third book in Timmerman’s “Where am I” series (the first two being Where am I Wearing and Where am I Eating). In a conversational tone, the author looks at ways in which we give to charitable causes and attempts to develop some guidelines for the most effective way to channel our generosity. It’s an effective narrative because he uses examples from his own travels to poor countries, including Myanmar, Kenya, Cambodia, and elsewhere.

[image error]American Nations by Colin Woodard

It took me awhile to get through, but I finally finished American Nations by Colin Woodard. This
one was illuminating because it looks at the distinct cultures, or nations,
that were formed by the colonization of different parts of North America, and
argues that these distinctions have continued to this day and in part explain
the political divide we’re experiencing.

[image error]The Shaman of Turtle Valley by Clifford Garstang

Lastly, I’m going to take credit for having read The Shaman of Turtle Valley by Clifford Garstang this month, because in fact I read it more closely than I’ve ever read anything before. The galley proofs arrived in late January and I carefully read the proofs line by line to look one more time for any errors in the text. (I didn’t find many; I hope I got them all.) The book, which will officially be published in May, is about Aiken Alexander, an Army veteran from Virginia who brings home from a deployment to Seoul a young Korean bride. Culture clashes and misunderstanding ensue.

That’s it. A big reading month.

JMWW Interview

I had the pleasure of chatting with Curtis Smith at JMWW about my forthcoming novel, The Shaman of Turtle Valley. The interview is here.

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New Novel: Path to Publication

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With my first novel, The Shaman of Turtle Valley, scheduled for publication in May, I thought it might be interesting to review its path to publication.

In the summer of 2011, I was invited to a residency at VCCA France,
a property owned by the Virginia
Center for the Creative Arts in the lovely village of Auvillar on the
Garonne River. I had been working for a couple of years by then on a novel
about an American Army veteran who returns from a posting in Seoul, Korea to
his home in rural Virginia with a young Korean bride. The project was fun to
write because it allowed me to revisit my own experiences of having worked in
South Korea as a Peace Corps Volunteer (minus the Korean bride). In fact,
earlier that year I’d had the opportunity to return to Korea to visit my old
haunts.

During the residency, I finished the book. Or, at least, I
arrived at a point in the writing where I felt I could do no more and I was
ready to look for an agent. When I came home in September that year, I began
that process with a feeling of optimism and energy. It wasn’t the first time
I’d queried agents—I had an agent for an earlier book who had since retired—and
I knew the process. I did some research and targeted agents I thought would be
a good match for the book, or agents with whom I had some previous connection. Off
went the query emails.

To my delight, I didn’t have long to wait. I had several agents
who expressed interest in seeing the manuscript, and ultimately four agents
wanted to represent me and submit it to publishers. I was thrilled, but faced a
decision—which one would be the best agent for me? I spoke to them all on the
phone and ultimately signed with one of them. She promised to give me notes on
the manuscript as soon as she could, after which she expected me to do a
revision before she would submit it to publishers.

That sounded great to me, and while I waited for her notes I
chugged along on a new project. Eventually, I got a long email from the agent
with her comments on the book and we had a follow-up conversation about what
she thought I needed to do with it. I didn’t disagree with these proposed
changes, and dived right in. I cleared my calendar and went to work, anxious to
produce a publishing-ready manuscript. I sent it back to the agent in about a
month having made the changes I thought she wanted me to make.

A month later, in May 2012, the agent wrote back and told me
I needed to find another agent. There was no explanation other than that she
didn’t think I’d understood what she wanted me to do with the book she felt I’d
taken it in the wrong direction. After I got over being devastated by this
news, I was angry about the agent’s unprofessionalism. She couldn’t do that in
a phone call?

At that point, I was busy preparing for the publication of
my book, What the Zhang Boys Know,
due in the fall. I shelved the other book, not knowing what to do with it, and
turned my attention to promoting the Zhang
Boys. I was happy with the reception that book received—it won the Library
of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction in 2013—and part of me hoped the agent
knew that.

After the book was launched, I returned to the new
manuscript and worked on another round of revisions, preparing to go back to
the process of querying agents, which I finally did in the fall of 2013, more
than a year after being dismissed by the agent. This time I was less optimistic
because of what had happened, but still hopeful because of the success I’d had
with Zhang Boys.

By the end of the year I had landed a new agent, we discussed
changes he wanted me to make, and I completed revisions that I totally agreed
with. In January of 2014, the book went out on submission to major publishing
houses and I waited for lightning to strike. Digits were crossed.

The lightning never came. Over the next two years we got
lots of very nice rejections and I was pleased with the effort my agent made on
my behalf. But eventually an agent reaches the point where he knows the book
just isn’t going to sell to the major houses, and we reached that point in
mid-2016, two years after we started.

Meanwhile, I had finished another book. I could tell that my
agent had some misgivings about the new manuscript. We discussed what the
problems were and I tried to address them in a revision. But then we went out
on submission with the second book, in hopes that maybe a two-book deal would
be offered and we could resurrect the first novel. At the same time, though, I
urged my agent to submit the first novel to some smaller presses and gave him a
list of the presses I thought might be a good fit. He agreed to do that with a
few where he knew editors, and gave me the green light to submit on my own to
others.

That’s how the book, now known at The Shaman of Turtle Valley, came to the attention of Braddock Avenue Books. While
other small presses expressed some interest, Braddock was the first to offer.
Because I had met the editors there, I was pleased to sign a contract with them
in the fall of 2017. I invited my agent to remain involved with the process,
but I understood that it would be difficult for him to do that. Royalties from
a small-press book are limited and his commission would be even smaller, so it
wouldn’t be worth his time. We agreed to go our separate ways at that point.
(Which meant that my second novel, then on submission to publishers, was orphaned,
but it eventually landed at another small press. A story for another day.)

All last year, then, we spent on edits and planning. We
chose March of 2019 as a publication date (later pushed to May 14, 2019). With
the help of a reader, I identified some areas that I wanted to address in the
manuscript and I completed a new draft by late summer. We then moved on to the
publisher’s edits and then, in January, cover design. At this point, Advance
Reading Copies are being sent to reviewers, the publicity machine is in motion,
book launch events are being planned along with a modest tour, and one day soon
I’ll hold the actual book in my hands.

The book is now available for discounted pre-orders from the
publisher: The
Shaman of Turtle Valley.

Ragdale–January 2019

[image error]Then We Came to the End.

No, this isn’t a post about the Joshua Ferris novel. A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the beginning of my residency at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago). A four-week gig, it is now over and I’m heading home. It’s been eventful, to say the least:

I spent time with some wonderful artists—a composer, a painter, and a gaggle of writers in various disciplines. For me, this is one of the best reasons to spend time in an arts colony, and I look forward to staying in touch with these folks.
[image error] It snowed. A lot. There was no snow on the ground when I got here on Monday, January 7 for the beginning of the residency (see the pictures in the post linked to above), but on Saturday we got a bunch (5 inches? More?) and it never went away because it stayed cold. We got more the following weekend and another dose the next, the last one nearly a foot of it. The snow made walking into the town of Lake Forest a little tricky, and also complicated walks on the prairie behind the Ragdale House, something I would like to have been able to do daily. Still, it was pretty, and maybe it kept me at my desk more than I would have been otherwise.
It got cold. Really cold. I mean, it was below freezing the whole time, but this week the Polar Vortex escaped the Arctic Circle and attacked us with a vengeance. The high temperature on Wednesday this week was -11, the low -24, windchill of more than -50. Crazy cold. The Ragdale staff wisely stayed home and we all just huddled in our rooms (there was plenty of heat).
Before the hyper-cold set in, I made a couple of forays into Chicago on the Metra, the local commuter rail. One Saturday night I went to dinner at a friend’s house, which was fun. And one Sunday I went to the Art Institute of Chicago, something I do almost every time I visit the city. Love that place.
The cover for my new book ( The Shaman of Turtle Valley , forthcoming from Braddock Avenue Books in May) was finalized—I got some helpful input from the other residents here—and we revealed it on social media, my blog, and the publisher’s website. It’s now available for pre-order and ARCs are beginning to go out to reviewers.
[image error] We had an all-residents reading in the living room (plus a studio visit to see the visual artist’s work and a slide-show for a presentation of the work of a writer/artist who has been working on an interdisciplinary project). It was great to do that all in one evening rather than taking up many nights with separate events.
I finished reading some excellent books. Check out my post on my January reading.
Oh, yeah, and I got some writing done. It is great to have so much time to dedicate to a project, and my work-in-progress made some, um, progress. I’ve got big decisions to make in terms of structure before I embark on the next draft, but I currently have a draft of 111,000 words that is more or less complete. It’s unreadable, however, and needs lots more work, so that’s what I’ll be doing at home beginning Monday.

So, that’s how I spent my January.

THE SHAMAN OF TURTLE VALLEY available for pre-order NOW.

[image error] Announcing the publication on May 14, 2019, of my first novel, The Shaman of Turtle Valley, by Braddock Avenue Books. The book is NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER (at a discount for a limited time).

From the back cover:

The author of the award-winning What the Zhang Boys Know (“…utterly beautiful and unforgettable”—Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang) now gives us a heart-rending first novel about love, displacement, and the powerful ghosts that haunt so many families.

The Alexanders have farmed the land in Turtle Valley for generations, and their family and its history is tied to this mountainous region of Virginia in ways few others can claim. When Gulf War veteran, Aiken Alexander, brings home a young and pregnant South Korean bride, he hopes at long last to claim his own place in that complicated history—coming out from behind the shadow of his tragically killed older brother and taking up a new place in his father’s affections. However, things do not go according to plan. While he loves his young son, his wife, Soon-hee, can’t—or won’t—adjust to life in America. Her behavior growing stranger and stranger to Aiken’s eyes every day until the marriage reaches a breaking point.

When Soon-hee disappears with their son, Aiken’s life and dreams truly fall apart—he loses his job, is compelled to return to the family home, and falls prey to all his worst impulses. It is at this low point that Aiken’s story becomes interwoven with a dubious Alexander family history, one that pitted brother against brother and now cousin against cousin, in a perfect storm of violence and dysfunction.

Drawing on Korean beliefs in spirits and shamanism, how Aiken solves these problems—both corporeal and spiritual—is at the center of this dynamic and beautifully written debut novel.

Praise for The Shaman of Turtle Valley:

With his first novel, The Shaman of Turtle Valley, Clifford Garstang has created a melding of two worlds he knows intimately, and he has done so with the outright surety of a master.  Turtle Valley itself sits below the mountain ranges of Virginia, maybe, but the valleys at work in the hearts and minds of Mr. Garstang’s characters owe as much to the history and culture of Korea, that far-off land from which the novel’s protagonist brings his teenage bride. By using a series of short but fluid sections, moving about the world with ease, Mr. Garstang has given us a novel with the feel of something universal and, indeed, epic.  Once you start it you won’t be able to put it down.  ~Richard Wiley, author of Soldiers In Hiding, winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award for Best American Fiction

In his excellent and deeply moving novel The Shaman of Turtle Valley, Clifford Garstang has created a fine cast of characters, most notably the women surrounding his protagonist, Aiken. By inhabiting their voices and lives, showing their resilience and complexity, their precise, individual emotional terrains, he imbues the novel with a powerful undertow of empathy, alignment, and imaginative comprehension. This is a story about the many kinds of love—beautifully written, unerringly told. ~Kate Christensen, PEN/Faulkner-award winning author of The Great Man and The Last Cruise

When Aiken Alexander, a vet returning from Desert Storm, brings his young Korean shaman wife home with him to the Virginia mountains, he sets off a powerful cross-cultural collision.  Garstang’s novel reads like a modern-day version of the Odyssey with a delicious twist: on his return to Ithaca, this Odysseus brings Circe with him. ~David Payne, author of Barefoot to Avalon