Kenneth Atchity's Blog, page 184

Girls rule, boys drool.

Women-Centric Films Out-Gross Male-Centric Films on Average: Twist! 

By Bruce Handy
 Clockwise from top: Sandra Bullock, Jennifer Lawrence, Melissa McCarthy, Will Smith, Johnny Depp.

Hollywood: dumb or venal? I once thought the latter, but now I’m not so sure. The prompt was a study that came out this week claiming that of the 100 highest-grossing movies of 2013, only 15 featured women as their central protagonists.

As mingy as that number might seem, it is actually up from the 11 high-grossing films carried by actresses in 2011—but down, alas, from 16 in 2002. The study was published by the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film at San Diego State University, which also tabulates the number of women working behind the camera. (Not such a great statistic, either. You can find the center’s studies here.) On the one hand, given the conventional wisdom that says there are no good roles in Hollywood for actresses—especially actresses over the age of 23 or so—maybe those numbers aren’t so shocking, even in a movie year that produced Gravity and Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Frozen. On the other hand, I for one will confess to being un-jaded enough to be surprised and dismayed by the further finding that only 30 percent of all speaking roles in those top 100 movies went to actresses—a number even more disturbing when you calculate that probably half those speaking roles for actresses were strip-club hostesses asking Mark Wahlberg or Vin Diesel if they wanted to buy a bottle of lousy champagne.

Of course, many people took the study as proof that Hollywood is myopic and sexist and dumb. As Martha M. Lauzen, the author of the study and executive director of the center, told The New York Times, “We think of Hollywood as a very progressive place and bastion of liberal thought. But when you look at the numbers and representation of women onscreen, that’s absolutely not the case.” She blames that on a dearth of women in positions of power in the film industry: “If there’s gender inertia behind the scenes, you’ll find gender inertia onscreen.”

I wondered, though. My operating assumption is that Hollywood’s sins can generally be laid at the feet of audiences, that the studio’s biggest character flaw is that they try so gosh-darn hard to please. Put another way, audiences get the films they’re willing to pay for, as the summer movie-going season demonstrates year after year. Was The Lone Ranger a big huge bomb? Well, sure, if you only care about so-called return on investment. Leaving aside that it cost Disney approximately $12 quadrillion to make, The Lone Ranger grossed $89 million domestically; with an average ticket price of $8.38 last summer, that means more than 10 million people went to see it. Which you have to admit is still a lot of bad-movie enablers.

So I figured that if Hollywood sharpies decline to make many movies about women having adventures in space or catching criminals or getting to be the funny ones, it was because, despite a few prominent exceptions, audiences didn’t want to see them, in aggregate. Money talks, walks, eats, breathes, has a private yoga instructor, collects Richard Price, flosses, so I figured there must be method to Hollywood’s ostensible sexism.

To prove my theory, I put on my Nate Silver hat and looked at the top 100 grossing domestic movies of 2013, as tabulated by Box Office Mojo. (By definition, these are films that played in theaters, most with the benefit of serious to reasonable marketing budgets as opposed to VOD-only releases, etc.) The Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film’s doesn’t list which specific films it counts as headed by women, but I did my own tabulation and also came up with these 15 (listed here, followed by its place in the top 100):

    The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (1)
    Frozen (3)
    Gravity (6)
    The Heat (15)
    Identity Thief (20)
    Epic (31)
    Mama (47)
    Safe Haven (48)
    Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor (68)
    The Call (69)
    August: Osage County (79)
    Philomena (81)
    Carrie (83)
    Blue Jasmine (86)
    The Host (96)

Obviously, some of these calls are subjective. Identity Thief co-starred Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman and was more or less told from Bateman’s point of view, but McCarthy’s character dominates the film and, with all due respect to the wonderful Bateman, I’d argue she was the one audiences were coming to see, so I added that film to the women’s column. Similarly, August: Osage County, an ostensible ensemble film where Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts are the draws.

On the other hand, there was Saving Mr. Banks, which is really Emma Thompson’s movie, but Tom Hanks figured so prominently in the advertising and promotion I put it in a neutral category—great parts for all! (or at least equal parts)—along with five other films: American Hustle, We’re the Millers, The Conjuring, Side Effects, and Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, a film the very title of which speaks gender equity.

You might quibble with some of these designations, but I think we can all agree that the bulk of the year’s top 100 movies, from Iron Man 3 to World War Z to The Secret Life of Walter Mitty to Grudge Match were boy movies. Two close calls that I left on the male side of the ledger: Tyler Perry’s A Madea Christmas (my, grandma, what a big Y chromosome you have) and One Direction: This Is Us (starring boys, made for girls).

Also, just to be sure that box office wasn’t skewing the study’s results, that there wasn’t a huge cache of women-centered flops clustered below the top 100, I took a look at the next 50 films on Box Office Mojo’s grosses list; at that point, you’ve pretty much covered all the big studio films and many indies and are drilling down into documentary, foreign film, and re-release territory. Of those 50 films, I tallied 10 headed by actresses—a slightly higher percentage than in the top 100, but not dispositive—and 4 gender neutral. A list of those films is appended below.

O.K., here’s the math part, which is actually pretty simple (otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it):

    Total gross of all the top 100 movies in 2013: $10.039 billion.
    Total gross of 15 actress-centered movies: $1.908 billion.
    Total gross of 79 actor-centered movies: $7.525 billion.
    Average gross of actress-centered movie: $127 million.
    Average gross of actor-centered movie: $95 million.

So I was wrong! Actress-centered movies out-grossed actor-centered movies by almost exactly one-third! Hollywood is myopic and sexist and dumb! Or else it has a better excuse for not making more movies starring women than I can think of—are Gravity and Catching Fire exceptions to some closely-held, super-secret rule? At any rate, according to math, the studios appear to be leaving money on the table, one sin they’ve rarely if ever been accused of.

To tie a neat little numerical bow around this report, the six gender-neutral films grossed an average of $101 million each, essentially the same as the average gross for all top 100 films films—$100 million. The difference is the change in Brett Ratner’s couch.

I suppose someone might argue that these aren’t fair comparisons. One might whine that the boys’ average is dragged down by a surfeit of tired thrillers, tired action movies, tired comic-book movies, and tired buddy movies. But whose fault is that?

A couple of suggestions:

Whoever it is who has an obsessive need to squander Robert De Niro by putting him in movies like Grudge Match, The Family, and Last Vegas should take a good look in the mirror, and then maybe think about squandering Charlize Theron for a change.

And memo to Sony: next time you make After Earth, cast Willow instead of Jaden.

***

Here’s my list of actress-centered films from the next 50, again followed by rank:

    Baggage Claim (106)
    The Book Thief (109)
    You’re Next (114)
    Admission (116)
    Enough Said (118)
    The Last Exorcism Part II (125)
    Spring Breakers (126)
    The Bling Ring (146)
    Pulling Strings (147)
    The Wizard of Oz, 3-D re-release (149)
    Chennai Express (150)


Reposted From Vanity Fair

Story Merchant Books - May Bestsellers

Hachette Chief Leads Book Publishers in Amazon Fight

By JONATHAN MAHLER 
As a young book editor at Little, Brown & Company in 1992, Michael Pietsch paid $80,000 — $45,000 more than the next-highest bidder — for a postmodern novel by a little-known writer named David Foster Wallace.
He spent years urging Mr. Wallace to cut hundreds of pages from the sprawling manuscript and impose at least some structure on the disparate plot strands. The book, “Infinite Jest,” was finally published in 1996 and became an instant literary sensation.
Mr. Pietsch is now chief executive of Little, Brown’s parent company, the Hachette Book Group, and is engaged in a very different sort of battle — not with a fragile author, but with one of the most powerful corporations in the United States: Amazon.

As the first chief executive of a major publishing house to negotiate new terms with Amazon since the Justice Department sued five publishers in 2012 for conspiring to raise e-book prices, Mr. Pietsch finds himself fighting not just for the future of Hachette, but for that of every publisher that works with Amazon. “In a sense, Michael Pietsch is like ‘Horatius at the Bridge,’ ” says the literary agent and former Amazon executive Laurence J. Kirshbaum, referring to the soldier of legend who single-handedly saved ancient Rome by fighting off an invading army. “He is carrying the rest of the industry on his back.”
Because Hachette and Amazon have signed confidentiality agreements as part of their negotiations, the particulars of their dispute have been kept secret. But inside the publishing world, the consensus is that Amazon wants to offer deep discounts on Hachette’s electronic books, and that the negotiations are not going well.
The proudly customer-friendly Amazon is delaying shipments and preventing preorders of certain Hachette books, suggesting to potentially frustrated shoppers that they buy them elsewhere. Mr. Pietsch (pronounced peach), ordinarily easygoing and accessible, is refusing to talk to the news media and has told employees to do the same.
There is little question that Mr. Pietsch, 56, would not be squaring off against the country’s largest bookseller if it were not an absolute necessity for his company’s bottom line. Friends say he never wanted the negotiations to become public. But now that they have, everyone in the book industry is watching and waiting.
“We’re all Hachette now,” one publisher joked last week at the trade fair BookExpo America in Manhattan.
Given his background, Mr. Pietsch, is an unlikely figure to find himself in such a position. He is trained as an editor, not a businessman. He took over Hachette in April 2013, trading a life of poring over manuscripts for one of scrutinizing spreadsheets.
Like a player-coach, though, he has continued to acquire and edit a small handful of books, most notably Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Goldfinch.” He has built an all-star stable of authors that includes highbrow writers as well as mass-market giants like Michael Connelly and James Patterson.
It is unusual for a lifelong editor to become C.E.O. of his own publishing company, but over the years, Mr. Pietsch had developed a reputation as both a man of letters and a shrewd deal maker. The combination could serve him well in his dispute with Amazon.
“While I don’t envy his position in this street fight, I think he’s exactly the right guy to be conducting it,” said Sloan Harris, an agent at International Creative Management.
The son of an Army officer, Mr. Pietsch grew up in Norfolk, Va. He attended Harvard, where he concentrated in English and wrote his senior thesis on Chaucer’s 14th-century work “The Canterbury Tales.” During his senior year, Mr. Pietsch interned at a publisher based in Boston, David R. Godine, and liked it so much that he stayed on after graduating.
He eventually moved to New York and spent six years at Scribner — among other things, editing an unpublished Ernest Hemingway manuscript — before joining Little, Brown as an editor in 1991. Over the next 10 years, Mr. Pietsch helped transform the company from a sleepy, largely literary house, to a modern, commercial publisher.
Mr. Pietsch worked his way up through the ranks there, becoming editor in chief in 1998 and publisher in 2001. Even as a publisher, he was known for being hands-on. After Mr. Wallace committed suicide in 2008, Mr. Pietsch painstakingly assembled the thousands of typed and handwritten manuscript pages that Mr. Wallace had left behind into a posthumously published novel. He also wrote the introduction to that book, “The Pale King.”
A resident of Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., Mr. Pietsch is married to Janet Vultee Pietsch, a children’s book editor. As Hachette’s chief executive, he now oversees not just Little, Brown but all of the publisher’s imprints, which together put out about 1,000 books every year.
Hachette has been largely silent since the dispute broke out into the public last month, though it did issue a public statement — written by Mr. Pietsch — that underscored its view that books deserve to be treated differently from hard drives, diapers and the countless other products that Amazon sells.“Amazon indicates that it considers books to be like any other consumer good,” the statement said. “They are not.”
Mr. Pietsch’s central role in his industry’s dispute with Amazon seems to be nothing more than sheer happenstance. As part of Hachette’s antitrust settlement with the government, the company agreed to allow Amazon to continue to discount the price of e-books for two years. That agreement has expired, and for some reason — no one is sure why — Hachette is the first publisher to find itself in the position of negotiating a new one.
Other publishers are holding their breath. It is in their interests for Mr. Pietsch to drive a hard bargain, and they are cheering him on, but silently. They have their own relationships with Amazon to protect, and they do not want anything they say to be construed as antagonistic, all the more so now that Amazon has demonstrated its willingness to punish booksellers when negotiations become contentious.
If Mr. Pietsch is a hero to some, he is a reluctant one. “He doesn’t want to be seen as the warrior against Amazon,” said Mr. Wallace’s agent, Bonnie Nadell, who has known Mr. Pietsch for 25 years. “I think that makes him incredibly uncomfortable.”

Michael Pietsch at a Glance
Age: 56
Education: Harvard

Career: Editor at Scribner’s (1979-’85); editor at Harmony (1985-’91); editor at Little, Brown (1991-2001); publisher of Little, Brown (2001-’12); chief executive of the Hachette Book Group (2012-present)

Notable Books and Authors:
• “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace
• “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell
• “The Art of Fielding” by Chad Harbach
• “Life” by Keith Richards, right
• “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt
• Michael Connelly
• James Patterson

 A version of this article appears in print on June 2, 2014, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Toe-to-Toe With a Giant.

Reposted from New York Times  

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The Devil's Violin
By Art JohnsonDigital media products such as Amazon MP3s, Amazon Instant Videos, and Kindle content can only be purchased on Amazon.com.

Average customer review:
(19 customer reviews)A special FBI investigator and a neurotic sneak-thief cross paths when the world’s most prized violin becomes the centerpiece of intrigue.
Product DescriptionThe world’s most prized violin becomes the centerpiece of intrigue as FBI Special Investigator Chris Clarke and his partner Carlos “Chubbs” Gonzales weave their way through a maze containing a notorious assassin, Illuminati, secret documents, a master violin forger and his deceptive and charismatic daughter, a Hollywood film producer and one of L.A.’s finest and most neurotic sneak-thieves.

The chase across two continents resolves in an art gallery in the South of France for a shocker of an ending.

FBI Special Investigator Chris Clarke doesn’t like “…anything or anyone” in his way while working a case. In his seventeen years with the Bureau, he has dealt with everything from retrieving stolen works of art to tackling some of the world’s biggest scumbags.

With his diverse background of art evaluation and Desert Storm duty, Chris Clarke is ready for all comers. Only one fugitive haunts his thoughts: the notorious and ruthless assassin known only as “The Man in Black," whose trail of contract killings had never led law enforcement to anything but a figure lurking in the shadows.

One morning in August 2010, the “man in black” suddenly popped up, seen by witnesses in Cremona, Italy to have been in the area where a young violinist was found dead with his throat cut. Chris Clarke and Gonzales head off to Europe to track down the assassin while attempting to decode the mystery that lies behind the motive.

Weeks before, Hollywood movie-mogul Max Pendleton, who loves fine works of art, no matter how they are acquired, hires veteran sneak-thief Gus Edward Happy to fly to Europe and steal the most valuable violin in existence—the famed violin coveted by the Jimi Hendrix of the nineteenth century, Niccolo Paganini--thought to be in league with the devil because his genius was unexplainable in earthly terms.

Through a tangled web involving Illuminati, secret documents in the possession of Paganini at his death, a master violin forger and his deceptive daughter, thieves, and assassins, Clarke faces the challenge of his career as he and his partner Gonzales move across Italy to the South of France where pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place with the Devil’s Violin center stage, leading to a rapid-fire conclusion.

The author:

From jazz clubs smelling of stale beer to Carnegie Hall, the journey of Art Johnson has been diverse. As an accompanist to Luciano Pavarotti and Lena Horne, with credits for Grammy and Academy Award winning music, his background of world travel and experience has provided him with a story-telling nature which has produced his first novel, The Devil’s Violin. Product DetailsAmazon Sales Rank: #348424 in eBooks Published on: 2014-02-09Released on: 2014-02-09Format: Kindle eBook

Cullen Gallagher on Night Terrors : A Daniel Rinaldi Mystery

The Criminal Kind: Dennis Palumbo’s "Night Terrors"


NIGHT TERRORS, the third in Dennis Palumbo’s series featuring clinical psychologist Daniel Rinaldi, proves that there is more to a procedural mystery than mere procedure. A cunning reworking of genre conventions, it is consistently surprising and occasionally even subversive, undermining our expectations and challenging the fundamentals of procedural mysteries.

In his latest literary outing, Rinaldi is abducted in the night by the FBI and thrown into a case against his will. He’s been assigned to Lyle Barnes, a recently retired FBI agent who is suffering from a severe case of night terrors that has him on the brink of collapse. Barnes’s condition isn’t helped by the fact that he, too, is in the custody of the Feds. Barnes’s final job was helping to apprehend a serial killer of prostitutes, John Jessup, who recently died during a prison riot. Now, one of Jessup’s admirers — an anonymous letter writer known only by his signature tag, “Your Biggest Fan” — has been avenging Jessup’s death by murdering those responsible for his imprisonment. Barnes is high on the list. But before Rinaldi can begin the therapy, Barnes escapes, and it’s a race against time to find him before the “Fan” does. Concurrently, Rinaldi is pushed into yet another investigation when he agrees to meet the mother of Wesley Currim, a young man who has confessed to the brutal murder of a local businessman. Besides pleading guilty and leading the police and Rinaldi to the body, however, Currim has revealed no details as to how, or why, the crime was committed, or why he denies his mother’s alibi. Initially called in for his psychological expertise,

Rinaldi soon finds himself acting as detective more than therapist — a role far more dangerous than he anticipated.

Smartly structured with well-timed twists and revelations, Palumbo and his surprises are always one step ahead of the reader. Though at times dense on procedural exposition, Palumbo deserves high praise for playing so fairly with readers. His style is low on red herrings, out-of-the-blue clues, and last-minute rescues — the puzzle pieces are all there from page one, and while the way they fit together isn’t obvious, the conclusion is achieved naturally.

Whereas conventional mysteries can be seen as reasserting stability on an unstable world — uncovering the truth, righting wrongs, and asserting justice — Palumbo in Night Terrors repeatedly disrupts any notion of security. Fiendishly clever villains and feeble authorities are nothing new to the mystery field, but Palumbo approaches these stale tropes with a fresh perspective. So much of Night Terrors’s exposition is dedicated not to how the investigative process pieces things together, but rather how it frequently fails to. “They still don’t have squat, do they?” asks Barnes. “That’s ’cause they rely too much on procedure and modern forensics.” In this sense, Night Terrors is an anti-procedural. And whereas one would expect a professional specialist like Daniel Rinaldi to use his vocation like “magic” at key points throughout the narrative, Palumbo repeatedly denies any such narrative convenience. (Barnes, too, is apathetic toward Rinaldi’s attempts at psychology: “That’s just therapeutic bullshit.”) Palumbo challenges his character to move beyond the niche he has created for himself — a provocation that many series creators (and their protagonists) don’t often place themselves in.

Among the most distinguishing facets of noir is the way in which it responds to social conditions. Even in literature, crimes don’t happen in a vacuum. Economic desperation fuels the nihilism of James M. Cain and Horace McCoy’s 1930s novels, just as post– World War II discontent and malaise runs deep through the 1950s paperbacks of Day Keene and Harry Whittington. In Night Terrors, Palumbo reacts to a distinctly post-economic-collapse American geography:

Unlike Pittsburgh, whose seventeen miles of steel works had been torn down, victims of the economic cataclysm that ultimately revitalized the city, towns like Braddock had no reason to dismantle their dying mills and factories. Nothing was going to take their place.

And in retired FBI agent Lyle Barnes — at one point the grand protector of the country — Palumbo sees a fractured, shaken consciousness that hasn’t been pieced together again.

Clinicians are blaming the unusual rise in adult symptoms to the uncertainty of contemporary life. The economy, terrorism. Even the recent natural disasters. Tsunamis. Earthquakes. The daily anxiety suppressed by adults during waking life, later invading their sleep.

Palumbo may state his theme obviously, but he’s not trite about it, nor does he pretend that Rinaldi could solve these paramount issues. Once more, Palumbo contests the notion of the fix-it-all detective in favor of one whose wisdom lies not in his power, but in his powerlessness. Reposted from The Los Angeles Review of Books

Paris Review Interview With Maya Angelou

This interview was conducted on the stage of the YMHA on Manhattan’s upper East Side. A large audience, predominantly women, was on hand, filling indeed every seat, with standees in the back . . . a testament to Maya Angelou’s drawingpower. Close to the stage was a small contingent of black women dressed in the white robes of the Black Muslim order. Her presence dominated the proceedings. Many of her remarks drew fervid applause, especially those which reflected her views on racial problems, the need to persevere, and “courage.” She is an extraordinary performer and has a powerful stage presence. Many of the answers seemed as much directed to the audience as to the interviewer so that when Maya Angelou concluded the evening by reading aloud from her work—again to a rapt audience—it seemed a logical extension of a planned entertainment.


INTERVIEWERYou once told me that you write lying on a made-up bed with a bottle of sherry, a dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, yellow pads, an ashtray, and a Bible. What’s the function of the Bible?
MAYA ANGELOUThe language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful. I read the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is. Though I do manage to mumble around in about seven or eight languages, English remains the most beautiful of languages. It will do anything.
INTERVIEWERDo you read it to get inspired to pick up your own pen?
ANGELOUFor melody. For content also. I’m working at trying to be a Christian and that’s serious business. It’s like trying to be a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Buddhist, a good Shintoist, a good Zoroastrian, a good friend, a good lover, a good mother, a good buddy—it’s serious business. It’s not something where you think, Oh, I’ve got it done. I did it all day, hotdiggety. The truth is, all day long you try to do it, try to be it, and then in the evening if you’re honest and have a little courage you look at yourself and say, Hmm. I only blew it eighty-six times. Not bad. I’m trying to be a Christian and the Bible helps me to remind myself what I’m about.
INTERVIEWERDo you transfer that melody to your own prose? Do you think your prose has that particular ring that one associates with the King James version?
ANGELOUI want to hear how English sounds; how Edna St. Vincent Millay heard English. I want to hear it, so I read it aloud. It is not so that I can then imitate it. It is to remind me what a glorious language it is. Then, I try to be particular and even original. It’s a little like reading Gerard Manley Hopkins or Paul Laurence Dunbar or James Weldon Johnson.
INTERVIEWERAnd is the bottle of sherry for the end of the day or to fuel the imagination?
ANGELOUI might have it at six-fifteen a.m. just as soon as I get in, but usually it’s about eleven o’clock when I’ll have a glass of sherry.
INTERVIEWERWhen you are refreshed by the Bible and the sherry, how do you start a day’s work?
ANGELOUI have kept a hotel room in every town I’ve ever lived in. I rent a hotel room for a few months, leave my home at six, and try to be at work by six-thirty. To write, I lie across the bed, so that this elbow is absolutely encrusted at the end, just so rough with callouses. I never allow the hotel people to change the bed, because I never sleep there. I stay until twelve-thirty or one-thirty in the afternoon, and then I go home and try to breathe; I look at the work around five; I have an orderly dinner—proper, quiet, lovely dinner; and then I go back to work the next morning. Sometimes in hotels I’ll go into the room and there’ll be a note on the floor which says, Dear Miss Angelou, let us change the sheets. We think they are moldy. But I only allow them to come in and empty wastebaskets. I insist that all things are taken off the walls. I don’t want anything in there. I go into the room and I feel as if all my beliefs are suspended. Nothing holds me to anything. No milkmaids, no flowers, nothing. I just want to feel and then when I start to work I’ll remember. I’ll read something, maybe the Psalms, maybe, again, something from Mr. Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson. And I’ll remember how beautiful, how pliable the language is, how it will lend itself. If you pull it, it says, OK.” I remember that and I start to write. Nathaniel Hawthorne says, “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” I try to pull the language in to such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy. Of course, there are those critics—New York critics as a rule—who say, Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer. Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language. On an evening like this, looking out at the auditorium, if I had to write this evening from my point of view, I’d see the rust-red used worn velvet seats and the lightness where people’s backs have rubbed against the back of the seat so that it’s a light orange, then the beautiful colors of the people’s faces, the white, pink-white, beige-white, light beige and brown and tan—I would have to look at all that, at all those faces and the way they sit on top of their necks. When I would end up writing after four hours or five hours in my room, it might sound like, It was a rat that sat on a mat. That’s that. Not a cat. But I would continue to play with it and pull at it and say, I love you. Come to me. I love you. It might take me two or three weeks just to describe what I’m seeing now.
INTERVIEWERHow do you know when it’s what you want?
ANGELOUI know when it’s the best I can do. It may not be the best there is. Another writer may do it much better. But I know when it’s the best I can do. I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, “No. No, I’m finished. Bye.” And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won’t do that.
INTERVIEWERHow much revising is involved?
ANGELOUI write in the morning and then go home about midday and take a shower, because writing, as you know, is very hard work, so you have to do a double ablution. Then I go out and shop—I’m a serious cook—and pretend to be normal. I play sane—Good morning! Fine, thank you. And you? And I go home. I prepare dinner for myself and if I have houseguests, I do the candles and the pretty music and all that. Then after all the dishes are moved away I read what I wrote that morning. And more often than not if I’ve done nine pages I may be able to save two and a half or three. That’s the cruelest time you know, to really admit that it doesn’t work. And to blue pencil it. When I finish maybe fifty pages and read them—fifty acceptable pages—it’s not too bad. I’ve had the same editor since 1967. Many times he has said to me over the years or asked me, Why would you use a semicolon instead of a colon? And many times over the years I have said to him things like: I will never speak to you again. Forever. Goodbye. That is it. Thank you very much. And I leave. Then I read the piece and I think of his suggestions. I send him a telegram that says, OK, so you’re right. So what? Don’t ever mention this to me again. If you do, I will never speak to you again. About two years ago I was visiting him and his wife in the Hamptons. I was at the end of a dining room table with a sit-down dinner of about fourteen people. Way at the end I said to someone, I sent him telegrams over the years. From the other end of the table he said, And I’ve kept every one! Brute! But the editing, one’s own editing, before the editor sees it, is the most important.
INTERVIEWERThe five autobiographical books follow each other in chronological order. When you started writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings did you know that you would move on from that? It almost works line by line into the second volume.
ANGELOUI know, but I didn’t really mean to. I thought I was going to write Caged Bird and that would be it and I would go back to playwriting and writing scripts for television. Autobiography is awfully seductive; it’s wonderful. Once I got into it I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass—the slave narrative—speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning we. And what a responsibility! Trying to work with that form, the autobiographical mode, to change it, to make it bigger, richer, finer, and more inclusive in the twentieth century has been a great challenge for me. I’ve written five now and I really hope—the works are required reading in many universities and colleges in the United States—that people read my work. The greatest compliment I receive is when people walk up to me on the street or in airports and say, Miss Angelou, I wrote your books last year and I really—I mean I read . . . That is it—that the person has come into the books so seriously, so completely, that he or she, black or white, male or female, feels, That’s my story. I told it. I’m making it up on the spot. That’s the great compliment. I didn’t expect, originally, that I was going to continue with the form. I thought I was going to write a little book and it would be fine and I would go on back to poetry, write a little music.
INTERVIEWERWhat about the genesis of the first book? Who were the people who helped you shape those sentences that leap off the page?
ANGELOUOh well, they started years and years before I ever wrote, when I was very young. I loved the black American minister. I loved the melody of the voice and the imagery, so rich and almost impossible. The minister in my church in Arkansas, when I was very young, would use phrases such as “God stepped out, the sun over his right shoulder, the moon nestling in the palm of his hand.” I mean, I just loved it, and I loved the black poets, and I loved Shakespeare, and Edgar Allan Poe, and I liked Matthew Arnold a lot—still do. Being mute for a number of years, I read and memorized, and all those people have had tremendous influence . . . in the first book and even in the most recent book.
INTERVIEWERMute?
ANGELOUI was raped when I was very young. I told my brother the name of the person who had done it. Within a few days the man was killed. In my child’s mind—seven and a half years old—I thought my voice had killed him. So I stopped talking for five years. Of course I’ve written about this in Caged Bird.
INTERVIEWERWhen did you decide you were going to be a writer? Was there a moment when you suddenly said, This is what I wish to do for the rest of my life?
ANGELOUWell, I had written a television series for PBS, and I was going out to California. I thought I was a poet and playwright. That was what I was going to do the rest of my life. Or become famous as a real estate broker. This sounds like name-dropping, and it really is, but James Baldwin took me over to dinner with Jules and Judy Feiffer one evening. All three of them are great talkers. They went on with their stories and I had to fight for the right to play it good. I had to insert myself to tell some stories too. Well, the next day Judy Feiffer called Bob Loomis, an editor at Random House, and suggested that if he could get me to write an autobiography, he’d have something. So he phoned me and I said, No, under no circumstances; I certainly will not do such a thing. So I went out to California to produce this series on African and black American culture. Loomis called me out there about three times. Each time I said no. Then he talked to James Baldwin. Jimmy gave him a ploy which always works with me—though I’m not proud to say that. The next time he called, he said, Well, Miss Angelou. I won’t bother you again. It’s just as well that you don’t attempt to write this book, because to write autobiography as literature is almost impossible. I said, What are you talking about? I’ll do it. I’m not proud about this button that can be pushed and I will immediately jump.
INTERVIEWERDo you select a dominant theme for each book?
ANGELOUI try to remember times in my life, incidents in which there was the dominating theme of cruelty, or kindness, or generosity, or envy, or happiness, glee . . . perhaps four incidents in the period I’m going to write about. Then I select the one that lends itself best to my device and that I can write as drama without falling into melodrama.
INTERVIEWERDid you write for a particular audience?
ANGELOUI thought early on if I could write a book for black girls it would be good because there were so few books for a black girl to read that said this is how it is to grow up. Then, I thought, I’d better, you know, enlarge that group, the market group that I’m trying to reach. I decided to write for black boys and then white girls and then white boys.
But what I try to keep in mind mostly is my craft. That’s what I really try for; I try to allow myself to be impelled by my art—if that doesn’t sound too pompous and weird—accept the impulse and then try my best to have a command of the craft. If I’m feeling depressed and losing my control then I think about the reader. But that is very rare—to think about the reader when the work is going on.
INTERVIEWERSo you don’t keep a particular reader in mind when you sit down in that hotel room and begin to compose or write. It’s yourself.
ANGELOUIt’s myself . . . and my reader. I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool—and I’m not any of those—to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues. There’s a phrase in West Africa, in Ghana; it’s called “deep talk.” For instance, there’s a saying: “The trouble for the thief is not how to steal the chief’s bugle but where to blow it.” Now, on the face of it, one understands that. But when you really think about it, it takes you deeper. In West Africa they call that “deep talk.” I’d like to think I write “deep talk.” When you read me, you should be able to say, Gosh, that’s pretty. That’s lovely. That’s nice. Maybe there’s something else? Better read it again. Years ago I read a man named Machado de Assis who wrote a book called Dom Casmurro. Machado de Assis is a South American writer—black father, Portuguese mother—writing in 1865, say. I thought the book was very nice. Then I went back and read the book and said, Hmm. I didn’t realize all that was in that book. Then I read it again, and again, and I came to the conclusion that what Machado de Assis had done for me was almost a trick: he had beckoned me onto the beach to watch a sunset. And I had watched the sunset with pleasure. When I turned around to come back in I found that the tide had come in over my head. That’s when I decided to write. I would write so that the reader says, That’s so nice. Oh boy, that’s pretty. Let me read that again. I think that’s why Caged Bird is in its twenty-first printing in hardcover and its twenty-ninth in paper. All my books are still in print, in hardback as well as paper, because people go back and say, Let me read that. Did she really say that?
INTERVIEWERThe books are episodic, aren’t they? Almost as if you had put together a string of short stories. I wondered if as an autobiographer you ever fiddled with the truth to make the story better.
ANGELOUWell, sometimes. I love the phrase “fiddle with.” It’s so English. Sometimes I make a character from a composite of three or four people, because the essence in any one person is not sufficiently strong to be written about. Essentially though, the work is true though sometimes I fiddle with the facts. Many of the people I’ve written about are alive today and I have them to face. I wrote about an ex-husband—he’s an African—in The Heart of a Woman. Before I did, I called him in Dar-es-Salaam and said, I’m going to write about some of our years together. He said, Now before you ask, I want you to know that I shall sign my release, because I know you will not lie. However, I am sure I shall argue with you about your interpretation of the truth.
INTERVIEWERDid he enjoy his portrait finally or did you argue about it?
ANGELOUWell, he didn’t argue, but I was kind too.
INTERVIEWERI would guess this would make it very easy for you to move from autobiography into novel, where you can do anything you want with your characters.
ANGELOUYes, but for me, fiction is not the sweetest form. I really am trying to do something with autobiography now. It has caught me. I’m using the first-person singular and trying to make that the first-person plural, so that anybody can read the work and say, Hmm, that’s the truth, yes, uh-huh, and live in the work. It’s a large, ambitious dream. But I love the form.
INTERVIEWERAren’t the extraordinary events of your life very hard for the rest of us to identify with?
ANGELOUOh my God, I’ve lived a very simple life! You can say, Oh yes, at thirteen this happened to me and at fourteen . . . But those are facts. But the facts can obscure the truth, what it really felt like. Every human being has paid the earth to grow up. Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth. Not superficial costs—anybody can have that—I mean in truth. That’s what I write. What it really is like. I’m just telling a very simple story.
INTERVIEWERAren’t you tempted to lie? Novelists lie, don’t they?
ANGELOUI don’t know about lying for novelists. I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they’re telling the truth. The fact is they’re using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they’re telling the truth about the human being—what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.
INTERVIEWERJames Baldwin, along with a lot of writers in this series, said that “when you’re writing you’re trying to find out something you didn’t know.” When you write do you search for something that you didn’t know about yourself or about us?
ANGELOUYes. When I’m writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we’re capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness. I’m trying for that. But I’m also trying for the language. I’m trying to see how it can really sound. I really love language. I love it for what it does for us, how it allows us to explain the pain and the glory, the nuances and the delicacies of our existence. And then it allows us to laugh, allows us to show wit. Real wit is shown in language. We need language.
INTERVIEWERBaldwin also said that his family urged him not to become a writer. His father felt that there was a white monopoly in publishing. Did you ever have any of those feelings—that you were going up against something that was really immensely difficult for a black writer?
ANGELOUYes, but I didn’t find it so just in writing. I’ve found it so in all the things I’ve attempted. In the shape of American society, the white male is on top, then the white female, and then the black male, and at the bottom is the black woman. So that’s been always so. That is nothing new. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t shock me, shake me up . . .
INTERVIEWERI can understand that in various social stratifications, but why in art?
ANGELOUWell, unfortunately, racism is pervasive. It doesn’t stop at the university gate, or at the ballet stage. I knew great black dancers, male and female, who were told early on that they were not shaped, physically, for ballet. Today, we see very few black ballet dancers. Unfortunately, in the theater and in film, racism and sexism stand at the door. I’m the first black female director in Hollywood; in order to direct, I went to Sweden and took a course in cinematography so I would understand what the camera would do. Though I had written a screenplay, and even composed the score, I wasn’t allowed to direct it. They brought in a young Swedish director who hadn’t even shaken a black person’s hand before. The film was Georgia, Georgia with Diana Sands. People either loathed it or complimented me. Both were wrong, because it was not what I wanted, not what I would have done if I had been allowed to direct it. So I thought, Well, what I guess I’d better do is be ten times as prepared. That is not new. I wish it was. In every case I know I have to be ten times more prepared than my white counterpart.
INTERVIEWEREven as a writer where . . .
ANGELOUAbsolutely.
INTERVIEWERYet a manuscript is what arrives at the editor’s desk, not a person, not a body.
ANGELOUYes. I must have such control of my tools, of words, that I can make this sentence leap off the page. I have to have my writing so polished that it doesn’t look polished at all. I want a reader, especially an editor, to be a half-hour into my book before he realizes it’s reading he’s doing.
INTERVIEWERBut isn’t that the goal of every person who sits down at a typewriter?
ANGELOUAbsolutely. Yes. It’s possible to be overly sensitive, to carry a bit of paranoia along with you. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It keeps you sharp, keeps you on your toes.
INTERVIEWERIs there a thread one can see through the five autobiographies? It seems to me that one prevailing theme is the love of your child.
ANGELOUYes, well, that’s true. I think that that’s a particular. I suppose, if I’m lucky, the particular is seen in the general. There is, I hope, a thesis in my work: we may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated. That sounds goody-two-shoes, I know, but I believe that a diamond is the result of extreme pressure and time. Less time is crystal. Less than that is coal. Less than that is fossilized leaves. Less than that it’s just plain dirt. In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats—maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats—but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike. There’s no real mystique. Every human being, every Jew, Christian, backslider, Muslim, Shintoist, Zen Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, every human being wants a nice place to live, a good place for the children to go to school, healthy children, somebody to love, the courage, the unmitigated gall to accept love in return, someplace to party on Saturday or Sunday night, and someplace to perpetuate that God. There’s no mystique. None. And if I’m right in my work, that’s what my work says.
INTERVIEWERHave you been back to Stamps, Arkansas?
ANGELOUAbout 1970, Bill Moyers, Willie Morris, and I were at some affair. Judith Moyers as well—I think she was the instigator. We may have had two or three scotches, or seven or eight. Willie Morris was then with Harper’s magazine. The suggestion came up: Why don’t we all go back South? Willie Morris was from Yazoo, Mississippi. Bill Moyers is from Marshall, Texas, which is just a hop, skip, and a jump—about as far as you can throw a chitterling—from Stamps, my hometown. Sometime in the middle of the night there was this idea: Why don’t Bill Moyers and Maya Angelou go to Yazoo, Mississippi to visit Willie Morris? Then why don’t Willie Morris and Maya Angelou go to Marshall, Texas, to visit Bill Moyers? I said, Great. I was agreeing with both. Then they said Willie Morris and Bill Moyers would go to Stamps, Arkansas to visit Maya Angelou, and I said, No way, José. I’m not going back to that little town with two white men! I will not do it! Well, after a while Bill Moyers called me—he was doing a series on “creativity”—and he said, Maya, come on, let’s go to Stamps. I said, No way. He continued, I want to talk about creativity. I said, You know, I don’t want to know where it resides. I really don’t, and I still don’t. One of the problems in the West is that people are too busy putting things under microscopes and so forth. Creativity is greater than the sum of its parts. All I want to know is that creativity is there. I want to know that I can put my hand behind my back like Tom Thumb and pull out a plum. Anyway, Moyers went on and on and so did Judith and before I knew it, I found myself in Stamps, Arkansas. Stamps, Arkansas! With Bill Moyers, in front of my grandmother’s door. My God! We drove out of town—me with Bill and Judith. Back of us was the crew, a New York crew, you know, very “Right, dig where I’m comin’ from, like, get it on,” and so forth. We got about three miles outside of Stamps and I said, Stop the car. Let the car behind us pull up. Get those people in with you and I’ll take their car. I suddenly was taken back to being twelve years old in a Southern, tiny town where my grandmother told me, Sistah, never be on a country road with any white boys. I was two hundred years older than black pepper, but I said, Stop the car. I did. I got out of the car. And I knew these guys—certainly Bill. Bill Moyers is a friend and brother-friend to me; we care for each other. But dragons, fears, the grotesques of childhood always must be confronted at childhood’s door. Any other place is esoteric and has nothing to do with the great fear that is laid upon one as a child. So anyway, we did Bill Moyers’s show. And it seems to be a very popular program, and it’s the first of the “creativity” programs . . .
INTERVIEWERDid going back assuage those childhood fears?
ANGELOUThey are there like griffins hanging off the sides of old and tired European buildings.
INTERVIEWERIt hadn’t changed?
ANGELOUNo, worse if anything.
INTERVIEWERBut it was forty years before you went back to the South, to North Carolina. Was that because of a fear of finding griffins everywhere, Stamps being a typical community of the South?
ANGELOUWell, I’ve never felt the need to prove anything to an audience. I’m always concerned about who I am to me first—to myself and God. I really am. I didn’t go south because I didn’t want to pull up whatever clout I had, because that’s boring, that’s not real, not true; that doesn’t tell me anything. If I had known I was afraid, I would have gone earlier. I just thought I’d find the South really unpleasant. I have moved south now. I live there.
INTERVIEWERPerhaps writing the autobiographies, finding out about yourself, would have made it much easier to go back.
ANGELOUI know many think that writing sort of “clears the air.” It doesn’t do that at all. If you are going to write autobiography, don’t expect that it will clear anything up. It makes it more clear to you, but it doesn’t alleviate anything. You simply know it better, you have names for people.
INTERVIEWERThere’s a part in Caged Bird where you and your brother want to do a scene from The Merchant of Venice, and you don’t dare do it because your grandmother would find out that Shakespeare was not only deceased but white.
ANGELOUI don’t think she’d have minded if she’d known he was deceased. I tried to pacify her—my mother knew Shakespeare but my grandmother was raising us. When I told her I wanted to recite—it was actually Portia’s speech—Mama said to me, Now, sistah, what are you goin’ to render? The phrase was so fetching. The phrase was “Now, little mistress Marguerite will render her rendition.” Mama said, Now, sistah, what are you goin’ to render? I said, Mama, I’m going to render a piece written by William Shakespeare. My grandmother asked me, Now, sistah, who is this very William Shakespeare? I had to tell her that he was white, it was going to come out. Somebody would let it out. So I told Mama, Mama, he’s white but he’s dead. Then I said, He’s been dead for centuries, thinking she’d forgive him because of this little idiosyncrasy. She said, No Ma’am, little mistress you will not. No Ma’am, little mistress you will not. So I rendered James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes.
INTERVIEWERWere books allowed in the house?
ANGELOUNone of those books were in the house; they were in the school. I’d bring them home from school, and my brother gave me Edgar Allan Poe because he knew I loved him. I loved him so much I called him EAP. But as I said, I had a problem when I was young: from the time I was seven and a half to the time I was twelve and a half I was a mute. I could speak but I didn’t speak for five years and I was what was called a “volunteer mute.” But I read and I memorized just masses—I don’t know if one is born with photographic memory but I think you can develop it. I just have that.
INTERVIEWERWhat is the significance of the title All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes?
ANGELOUI never agreed, even as a young person, with the Thomas Wolfe title You Can’t Go Home Again. Instinctively I didn’t. But the truth is, you can never leave home. You take it with you; it’s under your fingernails; it’s in the hair follicles; it’s in the way you smile; it’s in the ride of your hips, in the passage of your breasts; it’s all there, no matter where you go. You can take on the affectations and the postures of other places and even learn to speak their ways. But the truth is, home is between your teeth. Everybody’s always looking for it: Jews go to Israel; black Americans and Africans in the Diaspora go to Africa; Europeans, Anglo-Saxons go to England and Ireland; people of Germanic background go to Germany. It’s a very queer quest. We can kid ourselves; we can tell ourselves, Oh yes, honey, I live in Tel Aviv, actually . . . The truth is a stubborn fact. So this book is about trying to go home.
INTERVIEWERIf you had to endow a writer with the most necessary pieces of equipment, other than, of course, yellow legal pads, what would these be?
ANGELOUEars. Ears. To hear the language. But there’s no one piece of equipment that is most necessary. Courage, first.
INTERVIEWERDid you ever feel that you could not get your work published? Would you have continued to write if Random House had returned your manuscript?
ANGELOUI didn’t think it was going to be very easy, but I knew I was going to do something. The real reason black people exist at all today is because there’s a resistance to a larger society that says you can’t do it—you can’t survive. And if you survive, you certainly can’t thrive. And if you thrive, you can’t thrive with any passion or compassion or humor or style. There’s a saying, a song that says, “Don’t you let nobody turn you ’round, turn you ’round. Don’t you let nobody turn you ‘round.” Well, I’ve always believed that. So knowing that, knowing that nobody could turn me ’round, if I didn’t publish, well, I would design this theater we’re sitting in. Yes. Why not? Some human being did it. I agree with Terence. Terence said homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. I am a human being. Nothing human can be alien to me. When you look up Terence in the encyclopedia, you see beside his name, in italics, sold to a Roman senator, freed by that Senator. He became the most popular playwright in Rome. Six of his plays and that statement have come down to us from 154 b.c. This man, not born white, not born free, without any chance of ever receiving citizenship, said, I am a human being. Nothing human can be alien to me. Well, I believe that. I ingested that, internalized that at about thirteen or twelve. I believed if I set my mind to it, maybe I wouldn’t be published but I would write a great piece of music or do something about becoming a real friend. Yes, I would do something wonderful. It might be with my next-door neighbor, my gentleman friend, with my lover, but it would be wonderful as far as I could do it. So I never have been very concerned about the world telling me how successful I am. I don’t need that.
INTERVIEWERYou mentioned courage . . .
ANGELOU. . .the most important of all the virtues. Without that virtue you can’t practice any other virtue with consistency.
INTERVIEWERWhat do you think of white writers who have written of the black experience—Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner?
ANGELOUWell, sometimes I am disappointed—more often than not. That’s unfair, because I’m not suggesting the writer is lying about what he or she sees. It’s my disappointment, really, in that he or she doesn’t see more deeply, more carefully. I enjoy seeing Peter O’Toole or Michael Caine enact the role of an upper-class person in England. There the working class has had to study the upper-class, has been obliged to do so, to lift themselves out of their positions. Well, black Americans have had to study white Americans. For centuries under slavery, the smile or the grimace on a white man’s face or the flow of a hand on a white woman could inform a black person that you’re about to be sold or flogged. So we have studied the white American, where the white American has not been obliged to study us. So often it is as if the writer is looking through a glass darkly. And I’m always a little—not a little—saddened by that poor vision.
INTERVIEWERAnd you can pick it up in an instant if you . . .
ANGELOUYes, yes. There are some who delight and inform. It’s so much better, you see, for me, when a writer like Edna St. Vincent Millay speaks so deeply about her concern for herself and does not offer us any altruisms. Then when I look through her eyes at how she sees a black or an Asian my heart is lightened. But many of the other writers disappoint me.
INTERVIEWERWhat is the best part of writing for you?
ANGELOUWell, I could say the end. But when the language lends itself to me, when it comes and submits, when it surrenders and says, I am yours, darling—that’s the best part.
INTERVIEWERYou don’t skip around when you write?
ANGELOUNo, I may skip around in revision, just to see what connections I can find.
INTERVIEWERIs most of the effort made in putting the words down onto the paper or is it in revision?
ANGELOUSome work flows and, you know, you can catch three days. It’s like . . .I think the word in sailing is scudding—you know, three days of just scudding. Other days it’s just awful—plodding and backing up, trying to take out all the ands, ifs, tos, fors, buts, wherefores, therefores, howevers; you know, all those.
INTERVIEWERAnd then, finally, you write “The End” and there it is; you have a little bit of sherry.
ANGELOUA lot of sherry then.


Reposted From the Paris Review

Dennis Palumbo on Elements of Surprise "PEN ON FIRE" SPEAKER SERIES June 5th, 7 PM

 Elements of Surprise
Please join noted mystery authors JENNY MILCHMAN, NAOMI HIRAHARA and DENNIS PALUMBO for a discussion titled "Elements of Surprise." Hosted by Barbara DeMarco Barrett, the event will focus on ways to enhance suspense and weave in the unexpected in your fiction.

Suspense and mystery writers have much to teach writers of literary fiction, mainstream fiction, and other genres and subgenres.  These authors will discuss how to use surprising elements in your writing, whether it be fresh characterization, misdirection in plot, restraint and hidden information, and more.  They’ll also talk about how their publishing journeys have surprised them.

No writer, seasoned or new, will want to miss this exciting evening!



Dennis Palumbo, M.A., MFT, is a writer and licensed psychotherapist in private practice. His acclaimed series of mystery thrillers, called “Riveting” by Publishers Weekly, include Mirror Image, Fever Dream, and the latest, Night Terrors. They all feature psychologist Daniel Rinaldi, a character that Kirkus Reviews calls “Jack Reacher with a psychology degree.” The next book in the series, Phantom Limb, comes out in September. All are from Poisoned Pen Press.  Dennis is also the author of Writing From the Inside Out (John Wiley), and a collection of mystery short stories, From Crime to Crime (Tallfellow Press). A former Hollywood screenwriter, his credits include the feature film My Favorite Year, for which he was nominated for a WGA Award for Best Screenplay. He was also a staff writer for the ABC-TV series Welcome Back, Kotter, and has written numerous series episodes and pilots. His first novel, City Wars (Bantam Books), is now available as an e-book, and his short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, The Strand, Written By and elsewhere. He provides articles and reviews for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Lancet, and many others. He’s also done commentary for NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Currently, he writes the  “Hollywood on the Couch” column for the Psychology Today website, and blogs regularly for The Huffington Post. More on Dennis here.


After 15 years of writing and rewriting, Naomi Hirahara published her first novel, Summer of the Big Bachi, in 2004. The book, which featured a Los Angeles-based gardener and Hiroshima survivor, was among Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2004 and Chicago Tribune‘s Ten Best Mysteries and Thrillers of 2004. Her third in this Mas Arai mystery series, Snakeskin Shamisen, won an Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original in 2007. Murder on Bamboo Lane, the first in her new series with a 23-year-old female LAPD bicycle cop, was released in April 2014 with Berkley Prime Crime. Her fifth Mas Arai mystery, Strawberry Yellow, was a finalist for the T. Jefferson Parker Award, presented by the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association. A former journalist, she has also authored and edited several nonfiction books and was a consulting writer for the exhibition at the Manzanar National Historic Site’s Visitor Center. Her middle-grade book, 1001 Cranes, was honorable mention in youth literature from the Asian/Pacific American Libraries Association. Also a short story writer, Naomi is a past chapter president of the Southern California Chapter of Mystery Writers of America.  More on Naomi here.

Jenny Milchman‘s journey to publication took 13 years, after which she hit the road for seven months with her family on what Shelf Awareness called “the world’s longest book tour.” Her debut novel, Cover of Snow, was chosen as an Indie Next and Target Pick, reviewed in The New York Times and San Francisco Journal of Books, and nominated for a Mary Higgins Clark award. Jenny is also the founder of Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day and chair of International Thriller Writers’ Debut Authors Program. Jenny’s second novel, Ruin Falls, just came out to starred reviews from Booklist and Library Journal, and Jenny and her family are back on the road.


The event takes place at the Scape Gallery in Corona Del Mar.

Scape Gallery
2859 E. Coast Highway
Corona Del Mar, CA. 92625
(949) 723-3406

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The Insanity Plea
By Larry D. ThompsonDigital media products such as Amazon MP3s, Amazon Instant Videos, and Kindle content can only be purchased on Amazon.com.

Average customer review:
(58 customer reviews)A spell-binding tale of four amateur sleuths who must find, track and trap a serial killer before the clock clicks down to a guilty verdict for an innocent man.
Product Description"...fierce courtroom drama..."
"...intoxicating...and nail-biting..."
"...the courtroom scenes often soar..."
-Kirkus Reviews

A young nurse is savagely killed during a pre-dawn run on Galveston’s seawall. The murderer slices her running shorts from her body as his trophy and tosses the body over the wall to the rocks below. As dawn breaks, a bedraggled street person, wearing four layers of old, tattered clothes, emerges from the end of the jetty, waving his arms and talking to people only he hears. He trips over the body, checks for a pulse and, instead, finds a diamond bracelet which he puts in his pocket. He hurries across the street, heading for breakfast at the Salvation Army two blocks away, leaving his footprints in blood as he goes.

Wayne Little, former Galveston prosecutor and now Houston trial lawyer, learns that his older brother has been charged with capital murder for the killing. At first he refuses to be dragged back into his brother’s life. Once a brilliant lawyer, Dan’s paranoid schizophrenia had captured his mind, estranging everyone including Wayne. Finally giving in to pleas from his mother, Wayne enlists the help of his best friend, Duke Romack, former NBA star turned criminal lawyer. When Wayne and Duke review the evidence, they conclude that Dan’s chances are slim. They either find the killer or win a plea of insanity since the prosecution’s case is air tight. The former may be a mission impossible since the killer is the most brilliant, devious and cruel fictional murderer since Hannibal Lecter. The chances of winning an insanity plea are equally grim.

It will take the combined skills of the two lawyers along with those of Duke’s girlfriend, Claudia, a brilliant appellate lawyer, and Rita Contreras, Wayne’s next door neighbor and computer hacker extraordinaire, to attempt to unravel the mystery of the serial killer before the clock clicks down to a guilty verdict for Dan.
The Insanity Plea is a spell-binding tale of four amateur sleuths who must find, track and trap a serial killer as they prepare for and defend Wayne;s brother who is trapped in a mind like that of John Nash, Russell Crowe’s character in A Beautiful Mind.

Combining legal thriller with tracking a serial killer, Thompson once again takes the reader on a helluva ride, right up to the last page and sentence.

The Insanity Plea, a new legal thriller by Larry D. Thompson, Best Selling author of Dead Peasants, The Trial and So Help Me God.

Product DetailsAmazon Sales Rank: #9082 in eBooks Published on: 2014-05-06Released on: 2014-05-06Format: Kindle eBook

Guest Post:Memorial Day Reflections by Richard Pena

As America prepares to celebrate another Memorial Day, it is important to remember the lessons of prior wars. There is a common thread that links all wars and it is important that we not forget any of the wars or the soldiers that served in them.  For example, throughout the years that followed the withdrawal of combat troops from Vietnam,  America generally tried to forget the Vietnam War. However, it is vitally important for the 3.1 million soldiers who served in Vietnam and to the millions more of that generation who were affected by the war that we not forget. In fact, it is important to America’s interest that we not only remember Vietnam, but more importantly that we remember the lessons from that War.

Yes, it is good that the American service men and women have left Iraq and are currently in the process of  leaving Afghanistan, as it was good in March of 1973 that American troops left Vietnam. But the American consciousness should not stop there. We should not say to ourselves, “ Now that our troops from Iraq are back home and those from Afghanistan will soon be back home, we can forget about those wars.” We must be honest with ourselves individually and as a country. There are those who say that Iraq was not like Vietnam just as there are those who say that Iraq and Vietnam were very much alike. Well, both sides are right. Iraq was not like Vietnam because the fighting was not in jungles, napalm was not being dropped on civilians, the troops were not draftees, and over 58,000 Americans were not killed. There are however, several similarities. In both, young American troops were sent halfway around the world for questionable causes in wars we could not win. In both, there was a drumbeat for the necessity of war by the politicians. In both, what the politicians professed was accepted as the truth. In both, it was not.

 As another war is coming to a close let us not romanticize it, but let us see it for what it really is.  Many say that there are lessons we should learn. My response is that there are lessons we MUST learn. We, as a country, cannot continue to march blindly into wars of choice. The consequences are catastrophic for our country, not only in the enormous amount of money we spend in these wars but, just as importantly, in the toll it takes individually on our troops, their families, and on the military itself. The American veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are different from the Vietnam War veterans in part due to the vast number of head injuries sustained, the multiple deployments endured, and the increased number of women serving. But for both, the nightmare of war may continue long after their service is completed.

They cannot turn the war off after the 6 o’clock news like many civilians are able to do. These men and women will carry invisible scars of war back with them as they try to reintegrate into society.

Many Vietnam Veterans continue to suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or addictions. The Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court, Justice Nathan Hecht, in the November 13, 2013 edition of Texas Bar Blog, cites the national organization Justice for Vets as reporting that approximately 460,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffer from PTSD or depression and another 345,000 suffer from alcohol or drug addiction.  Obtaining statistics on homelessness is difficult, but it has been estimated that approximately one third (1/3) of the adult homeless are veterans and nearly half of those are Vietnam Veterans. When these young soldiers were accepted into the military and sent to war they were not like this. Too many returned unable to forget the horrors of war and instead of being treated for their mental wounds or addictions caused by the war, they were put out on the street. Those who deal with Veterans affairs warn of a coming tsunami of serious mental conditions and suicides in the military because of the multiple deployments and stresses related to the current wars. America should not forget these veterans. The least we can do for our aging Vietnam Veterans, and our Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans, is to take care of the injuries brought about by these wars. On this the 41st anniversary of the last American troops to leave Vietnam, let us honor the Vietnam Veterans. In the March 6, 2013 edition of At War, which ran in NYTimes.com, Mike Haynie and Nicholas Armstrong call for a National Strategy on Veterans. The time has come for this. We owe it to the men and women who have fought and sacrificed for our country.

Richard Pena is an Austin attorney, co-author of Last Plane Out of Saigon, and is a veteran who left Vietnam on the last day of American withdrawal.

 

Jay Atleson’s PLATINUM BLACKMAIL FREE Kindle Download May 27 – May 31

 Cryptic messages appear on Mark Sterling’s secure iPhone with a link to a website on which he discovers a video for sale that shows him in bed with his boss's deceased daughter, along with explicit instructions to pay a million dollars in blackmail to keep the story from the prying eyes of the media.

Like some modern-day Job, Mark finds his sales career sabotaged, his company in danger of bankruptcy, his modeling expectations at a brick wall, and himself the victim of a vicious ship-board attack. Then things get worse.

Mark is wanted for murder, his house is blown up and burned to the ground, and he’s knee-deep in a cosmic battle for his life against the forces of cyberspace.

Platinum Blackmail is a story of high-tech power, sex, Wicca, murder, and love that displays the intimate psychological thought processes of a somewhat self-consumed man, forced to mature and realize one of life’s important lessons: be careful what you wish for since nothing is as it seems.