Chris Bohjalian's Blog, page 38

Random House is giving away 200 copies of The Night Strangers

It's official: 33 days to publication, and Random House is giving away 200 advance copies of "The Night Strangers."

Simply click on the link and enter to win.

http://read-it-forward.crownpublishin...

And even if you don't win. . .you will learn a lot about my VERY scary basement.

Thanks so much!

Yankee Magazine calls The Night Strangers "A Halloween hair-raiser."

Big thanks to Yankee Magazine's Tim Clark, who wrote in his review of The Night Strangers:

"Put a haunted man in a haunted house. . .and you have a Halloween hair-raiser. But it’s more than that. Bohjalian, with a dozen well-received novels to his credit, understands trauma: how long it takes to recover from unimaginable pain, and how people who have never experienced it rarely understand.”

But the headline is wonderful as well, really getting to the heart of the novel:

"The Man Who Wasn't 'Sully' Sullenberger."

To read the full review, click here:

http://www.yankeemagazine.com/issues/...

In the loop and along for the ride -- despite a little thing called a hurricane

Chris Ashby, director of sales and marketing at Vermont’s Champlain Valley Exposition, is excited. The Champlain Valley Fair opened Saturday in Essex Junction and this year there is a brand new ride: It’s a specially designed vomitron called the Loop Fighter that was built in Europe and only arrived in the United States in late July. According to the manufacturer’s web site, it gives “passengers a strong negative and positive acceleration for incredible weight change sensations.” It also “delivers unbelievable G-force” and “the effects of a fly over spinning pendulum and the typical looping twirl of a roller coaster ride!”

In plain English this translates roughly to “you better be wearing a diaper on this bad boy.”

There are a thousand reasons why I love the Champlain Valley Fair, but the proximity of things named Loop Fighter — as well as Freak Out, Sling Shot, and Power Surge — to onion rings and fried sausages has to be one of the bigger ones. The only thing more terrifying than climbing aboard a gondola that does somersaults 60 feet in the air while traveling at warp speed is standing beneath a group of people in one who just polished off a paper plate of Fat Daddy’s “famous pork boners.” (Gosh, do I love my annual opportunity to string those three words together in a family newspaper! I really do have the maturity of a 5-year-old.)

I must confess, I have never eaten a “famous pork boner” because I’m a vegetarian and a pork boner is a two-ounce slice of deep-fried pork shank. Some of my friends think being a vegetarian makes it difficult to find fair food. Yeah, right. Last year at the fair I consumed French fries, fried dough, fried onion rings, a fried Oreo, maple cotton candy, a maple creemee, and a maple doughnut. Because, at mid-life, I need to watch my calories, I stayed with the diet sodas.

Ashby is confident that the Loop Fighter is going to be a popular addition to the fair’s thrill rides. Last year he rode Speed for the first time, one of the brilliantly terrifying monsters of the midway. Ashby and I are probably among the older patrons of what are called “inversion rides.” Usually by the time you hit 30, you have the common sense to steer clear of a ride that is designed to scare you silly or make you puke like a cat with a rodent-sized hairball — or, in some cases, both.

Nope.

In all fairness, I appreciate these rides for the same reason I savor almost everything about the Champlain Valley Fair. The whole experience is one absolutely massive, moving, beautiful Proustian madeleine: A remembrance of things past, of childhood, of pleasures that remind us of what it was like to be young. Not only are we surrounded by children having a universally great time, we’re indulging in the sorts of pleasures that in theory we’ve outgrown. Things like petting zoos. Racing pigs. Eating muffins the size of softballs.

For a few days (except today, of course, when the fair is canceled because of Hurricane Irene), we are allowed to forget details like our cholesterol numbers and chow down on fried dough and barbecue. We can put aside the reality that we’re way too old or bald or paunchy to dance in the aisles to the music of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Suddenly, the federal deficit — the definition of a truly scary thrill ride — or global climate change or Syria or Afghanistan or North Korea seem very far away. When we’re at the fair, we’re kids in flip flops and T-shirts with snow cones. Or kids in mud boots in the dairy barn, savoring a blue ribbon beside a Holstein that positively dwarfs us. Or kids who are, finally, tall enough to ride the Loop Fighter.

Really, does it get any better than that?

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on August 28, 2011. Chris’s next novel, “The Night Strangers,” arrives on October 4, 2011.)

Jane Lynch's bookstore brilliance

Yeah, this is how ya do it! Big props to Jane for showing writers how REALLY to merchandise our books!

A must watch two minute video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu5I9P...

Happy viewing.

Drive time: Better late than never

My wife and I have been teaching our 17-year-old daughter to drive this month, and we have chosen this moment because:

1. August is the deadliest month of the year for motorists, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (Na-Hi-Traf-Sad for short); and

2. She is about to leave for college in New York City, which means she will depend entirely on mass transportation for the next four years of her life.

In other words, this was super slick planning on my wife’s and my part. We really thought this one through well.

Just for the record, August is indeed a statistical train wreck — excuse me, car wreck. According to Na-Hi-Traf-Sad, more Americans are killed in automobile accidents in August than any month of the year. The reason for this is pretty simple: More of us are driving and we’re driving more miles.

Also, just for the record, among the things you can do to protect yourself and your family is buckle up. It sounds obvious, but here is another killer Na-Hi-Traf-Sad statistic: 15 percent of Americans still don’t wear seat belts. That is — to quote the kids in the backseat of your local high school’s driver’s ed car — “crazy stupid.” So, this is not simply a “click it or ticket” warning: It’s a “click it or become a crash test dummy” cautionary tale.

In any case, I have enjoyed watching my daughter learn to drive immensely, largely because I pop tranquilizers like M&Ms when she’s behind the wheel and I’m in the passenger seat. Obviously I’m kidding. I pop them like Milk Duds, which are consumed at a much more leisurely pace than M&Ms, because Milk Duds are made with caramel.

The truth is, our daughter is doing great. She drives responsibly and at a speed that makes me proud, only taking one hand off the steering wheel when she needs to signal a manure spreader or other slow-moving farm vehicle to pass us. She is also almost an inch above five feet in height now, and so — much to her relief — her middle-school age fears that she would learn to drive while sitting atop a phone book have not come to pass. She can see over the dashboard just fine.

Teaching her to drive is, of course, a serious rite of passage for both of us. It’s an experience every parent looks forward to, along with property taxes and colonoscopies and the weekly realization that Facebook has changed its settings once again and you have to be younger than 21 to know how to use it. It’s up there with that moment when she started kindergarten and first climbed on the school bus, or the first time she went to Fenway Park and started waving like a crazy person to get on the big screen jumbotron — or, yes, that moment at the end of this week when she will leave home for college.

That is, I imagine, one of the reasons why my wife and I have loved teaching her to drive: Every moment together is suddenly very precious.

Consequently, I do not expect she will take her road test this coming week. My sense is that we will take up where we left off when she returns home from school for Thanksgiving break, and then again in late December when she returns home for nearly a month. Then together we can share the joys of driving around Vermont when there is snow and ice and lumbering sand trucks (that will, invariably, pass her when she is behind the wheel).

Who knows? Maybe we can prolong this teaching process until she gets married. It’s all quality time together. Besides, if we wait long enough, maybe it will be her husband who, with the tranquilizers at the ready, gets to remind her that the brake’s on the left. The left!

In the meantime, remember: Buckle up.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on August 21, 2011. Chris’s next novel, “The Night Strangers,” arrives on October 4, 2011.)

A NIGHT STRANGERS giveaway right here on goodreads

Big thanks to Random House and goodreads.

Right now -- right here -- they’re giving away 25 free copies of “The Night Strangers.”

To enter the drawing to try and win one, click here:

http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sho...

Thank you — and happy reading!

Terribly sudden, but not terribly sad

In the last half year, I have found myself eulogizing in this space my mother-in-law, my godfather and my good friend, John Vautier. Now we can add to this illustrious pantheon, my father, Aram “Bo” Bohjalian. He died last week at 83, passing away in a fashion eerily similar to my mother-in-law this spring: A burst blood vessel in the brain in the still of the night. I have made it clear to my friends and family that I would prefer that they not die for a while, if only so I can resume writing about things that really matter, such as my cats’ turd hockey team and fried dough at the Champlain Valley Fair.

The truth is, I was never shy about writing about my father, because he was always good copy. He was a loving dad and a wonderful friend, but he was also worth chronicling: There was something universally poignant about his last years that lent itself to examination, and the way that he and his girlfriend and golf buddies in Florida endured the indignities that come with age.

Moreover, his will to live was ferocious. This was a guy who had had Crohn’s Disease since 1973, a bad ticker, high blood pressure, macular degeneration, a pair of 83-year-old ears, and a short-term memory that was about as sharp as a butter knife. (His long-term memory, like that of many seniors, remained impressive: Ask him about a television commercial he filmed in 1965, and he would give you an answer the length of a History Channel documentary.) He was frail and walked slowly, resistant to the very end to the idea of a walker.

And while his life had its share of disappointments, his last full day on this earth was weirdly perfect. The day before the night when his brain would be drowned in a tsunami of blood was an unexpected gift.

My 17-year-old daughter, Grace, and a friend of hers had joined me in Fort Lauderdale to visit him that week. The two of them would spend the days at the beach and catch up with my father and me late afternoon.

On my father’s last full day, the two of us went shopping for shoes, because we agreed that his footwear lacked style. At Macy’s we found him some loafers with a serious “Miami Vice” vibe, and he was thrilled. Then we went to see one of the 7 million doctors who kept him vertical. Actually, we saw his favorite physician, Steven Hahn. My dad had known Steven for years. Like so many of the people in my father’s life, years earlier their relationship had transcended even the friendliest doctor-patient relationship. (The next day, after my father had died, one of Steven’s assistants said she had known in her heart — and she thought my dad had, too — that they were never going to see each other again and he had come over to say goodbye.)

Then my dad and I drove to a tony strip of Fort Lauderdale called Las Olas Boulevard and an Italian restaurant he liked, where we met Grace and her friend and my dad’s girlfriend and her grown daughter from Texas.

As we approached Las Olas, I joked about my notoriously bad sense of direction. “Proud of me?” I said. “I got us here without getting us lost.”

“Son,” he said. “I am always proud of you. Always.”

We polished off a bottle of Chianti and my father regaled Grace with stories of what college had been like for him as a military veteran in the late 1940s.

About 9 at night, we said goodnight to him at his apartment at the assisted living facility where he lived. Four hours later, a night nurse found him on his living room floor, breathing but unresponsive, and 14 hours after that he died in the hospital.

In theory, he had almost no brain function left when he passed away. But a little before 3 in the afternoon his blood pressure was solid and he was breathing on his own. And so his girlfriend took his hand and whispered, “Bo, you’ve always been so strong. You don’t have to be strong forever. Let go, honey, let go.”

And so he did. His blood pressure dropped like a stone and he was dead within minutes. The end was terribly sudden. But it wasn’t terribly sad.

I’m confident that my father has now been reunited with my mother and those golf buddies you’ve read about all these years. Once again Bernie and Saul and Bo are teeing off somewhere in heaven, the fairways groomed and the putting greens true, and the only pain is that damned sand trap on 17.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on August 7, 2011. Chris’s next novel, “The Night Strangers,” arrives on October 4, 2011.)

Another strange but true book group story

Susan Gregg Gilmore, author of "The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove" -- just out in paperback from Broadway books -- asked me for a strange-but-true book group anecdote.

Actually, I could have given her a dozen.

But here's one.

Click here to read it. It's on Susan's web site.

http://www.susangregggilmore.com/2011...

Teens give peace a chance

Last week, beside a fireplace in a living room at the Sugarbush Inn in Warren, Vermont, two teenage girls told me of their plans to raise awareness among young adults of the prevalence of violence against women. A few minutes later, along the couches near the inn’s main entrance, two teenage boys outlined for me their program to encourage public schools to expand their recycling programs.

Both ideas — only two of a dozen and a half that I heard about that day — were inspiring. But here is what excited me the most: The two girls were visiting Vermont from Armenia. The two boys had journeyed to the Green Mountains from Turkey.

There isn’t a lot of interaction between Turks and Armenians. The border between the two nations is closed. And the two peoples’ shared history revolves around what is sometimes referred to with spectacular understatement or euphemism as “the past,” “the tragedy,” or the “Meds Yeghern” (an Armenian term for “great calamity”). Others, including me and an overwhelming number of scholars and objective historians, simply call it genocide. Roughly one and a half million Armenians — three-quarters of the Armenian population in Turkey — died along with the Ottoman Empire in the midst of the First World War, slaughtered by soldiers and gendarmes or brought to the Syrian desert to die. Three of my four Armenian great-grandparents perished in 1915. Today, the Turkish government doesn’t dispute that Armenians died in the cataclysm, but remains adamant that there was no government plan to exterminate them.

Consequently, the idea that Turkish and Armenian teenagers were coming to Vermont for two weeks to work together to try and solve some of the problems that beleaguer their countries — and ours — interested me. They were brought to Warren by PH International (formerly Project Harmony) to take part in the Youth LAB program. Youth LAB is a Waitsfield, Vermont-based part of PH International, and LAB is an acronym for “Leadership Across Borders.”

Altogether, 72 students participated, 24 each from Armenia, Turkey and the United States, each of whom designed a civic action project that they will bring to life in their home community in the coming months. The endeavor was funded by the U.S. Embassy in Turkey. Later this year, all of the students will travel together to Armenia and Turkey.

According to Miriam Martirosyan, an Armenian from Yerevan and a part of the PH staff since 2002, “The primary focus of the program is leadership not history. Any interest in the genocide should come naturally.”

Nevertheless, all of the Turkish and Armenian students were aware of what Eric Palomaa referred to as “the elephant in the room. But everyone is also a future diplomat.” Palomaa, from Phoenix, Ariz., is a part of the Youth LAB staff this summer because he just finished his master’s program at the University of Chicago, studying Armenian-Turkish relations.

In other words, the purpose was to build friendships across borders and inspire future leaders.

Elora Silver, a 16-year-old American in the program from Windsor, Vermont shared with me how over one lunch she watched three Armenians and one Turkish student dance around history. The discussion kept “escalating and the tension was rising,” she said, and then, suddenly, the Armenians and the Turk were shaking hands and smiling. Silver’s civic action project is about tolerance: She says in a small Green Mountain town such as Windsor, there are people “who think all Muslims are terrorists” and she hopes to educate them of the absurdity of that presumption. Silver is Jewish.

And that is precisely the sort of thing that left me so moved by these 72 teens.

Somehow they are finding just how very much they have in common and overcoming the scars and legacies of their national histories.

As Volkan Duranoglu, one of counselors from Turkey, put it, “Conflict is between governments — not people.”

We still have a long way to go. Personally, I think a Turkish government acknowledgment that what occurred in 1915 and 1916 was indeed genocide would go a long way toward reconciliation. In the meantime, the Turkish, Armenian and American teenagers I met at Youth LAB sure gave me hope for the future.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on July 31, 2011. Chris’s next novel, “The Night Strangers,” arrives on October 4, 2011.)

Overheard on Vermont's Rodeo Drive

The other day, the sun high and the sky cerulean, I wandered up and down Burlington, Vermont’s very own Champs-Elysees – our Rodeo Drive, our Via de’ Tornabuoni, our uniquely Vermont strada di sophistication. Church Street. I love the Marketplace, especially in the summer: I shop, I eat, I eavesdrop. I listen to a little music. A little over two years ago, I shared with you a few snippets of actual conversations I overheard. Here is what people were saying this month.

“I would have paid $100 to see Michelle Obama. But I would have needed to spend another $100 on clothes. So I just went to Moe’s and got a burrito.” (Woman chatting with two friends.)

“I like my cargo pants. They have pockets. There’s even a pocket for my phone, see?” (Defensive young man in his early twenties to a friend who, apparently, was not enamored with cargo pants.)

“No, Sweetie, Champlain – not champagne. I mean, it would be cool if the lake were champagne. But it’s not.” (Mother to her young daughter)

“This place would be perfect if it weren’t so bloody hot out. This is, after all, why they invented indoor malls.” (Male who seems to want days that are sunny – but not hot and sunny.)

“Oh, my God, I have no idea who I just sent that picture to! Quick, give me back your phone and show me how it works!” (Teenage girl who had just posed with Dennis and Sansea Sparling’s classic statue, “Leapfroggers.”)

“I’m thinking we have our meeting here [outside on Church Street]. Really, that conference room is a freakin’ cave.” (Young businessman on a cell phone.)

“Honey, you smell like Abercrombie & Fitch. I don’t care that you have a bag from American Eagle. You smell like Abercrombie & Fitch.” (Mother to her teenage daughter.)

“Yeah, it was a good weekend. I waxed my car and my wife her waxed her – never mind.” (One of two men having lunch at an outdoor table at the Church Street Tavern.)

“Yes, Ben and Jerry are real people. If you want to make someone up to sell stuff, you use, I don’t know, elves or tigers.” (Mother to her young son.)

“It’s a diaper. I don’t mind. I’ve been cleaning up the dog’s for years.” (A new father to his friend.)

“Maybe the Echo Center is a bunch of caves. You know, waterfront caves. You go there and shout and the echoes are cool. ” (Male tourist with a map, standing in front of Leunig’s and gazing down College Street toward Lake Champlain.)

“I read somewhere that originally they were going to put the names of all fifty states in the bricks, but there were too many. So, they used countries instead.” (Very knowledgeable middle-aged woman.)

“I love Beatles cello. You don’t hear it often enough.” (Very knowledgeable – and sincere – middle-aged man, nodding and listening to a street musician play “Yesterday” on the cello.)

“Is this conversation going to be in your column?” (Yes.)

This coming Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday is the Church Street Marketplace and downtown Burlington’s annual summer sidewalk sale. It’s a great opportunity for a little retail therapy and the chance to savor the sights from an outdoor table at a restaurant or bar. Just keep your eyes – and ears – open.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on July 24, 2011. His next novel, “The Night Strangers,” arrives on October 4, 2011.)