Colleen Mondor's Blog, page 18

Here we go - it's our annual spring book fair for Ballou Library in Washington DC

And we are back!

As longtime readers know, this time of year over at Guys Lit Wire we get hard at work to help librarian Melissa Jackson at Ballou Sr High School in Washington DC fill her school's shelves. From our previous efforts, starting in 2011, we have helped Ballou move from a library that had less than one book for each of its 1,185 students to a ratio now of FIVE books per student. While this is all kinds of wonderful and something we are quite proud to be part of, the American Library Association advocates eleven books for each student. Ballou is still operating at a serious literary deficit and so we are staying with them until they are busting that minimum standard and knee deep in all the reading these students could ever want or need.

The most exciting news for Ballou is that a new structure is in the works for the school and should be completed by January 2015. As the existing building dates to the late 1950s and is in disrepair, to say the project is overdue would be a vast understatement. But while the new Ballou is going to be a great and wonderful thing, it is not the answer to all its students' problems. The bright and shiny 2015 Library and Media Center will be 5,800 square feet of awesomeness but there is no money in the budget - nothing from the DC public school system - to actually provide books for its shelves.

Wrap your head around that fact for a moment, please. The library space will be grand, the library contents...not so much.

The main problem for Ballou's library, the thing Melissa Jackson is constantly working on, is getting new books. Her students want what all teen readers want - popular and newly released titles that speak to them. Specifically, the Ballou teens are asking for science fiction, romance, fantasy, graphic novels, historical fiction, thrillers and realistic fiction.

Sound like basically every other teen you know?

So while there are plenty of congratulations all around to DC for building the new school, the walls and windows will do nothing to actually get books into the hands of these kids who happen to be smack in the middle of one of the most challenging environments in the country. On the city's most recent standardized tests, only 22 percent of Ballou 10th-graders were proficient in math, and just 18 percent were proficient in reading. To improve their lives, we need to make books an easily accessible part of their school experience and, just as important, we need to make sure these are books that will get them excited about reading.

So, you know the drill - a wish list has been created at Powells books that has been vetted by both Melissa and her student literary leaders. We continue to partner with Powells because they do a killer job of getting the books out fast, they offer lots of sale titles (be sure and watch for those) and their "Standard" used copies a pretty much like new. Plus, we are supporting a bricks and mortar store in the fine city of Portland, Oregon which is nice way connecting both sides of the country in one outstanding literary effort.

Yeah, we love Powells.

Our 2013 Wish List for Ballou, (here's the link if you want to embed it in a post: http://bit.ly/GLWBookFair), has a lot of manga, urban fiction, poetry, paranormal titles and a boatload of big sellers. (Margo Lanagan, Ellen Hopkins, Sherman Alexie, Cassandra Clare, Paolo Bacigalupi and Walter Dean Myers are all front and center.) As a fan of nonfiction I'm delighted to see books like Courage Has No Color, The Elements, How to Fake a Moon Landing: Exposing the Myths of Science Denial and The Pregnancy Project on the list and there is also a healthy collection of adult crossover titles like Here, Bullet, (Brian Turner) The Grey Album (Kevin Young) and The Intuitionist (by Colson Whitehead). There is also a lot of urban fiction, as requested by the students, and since Melissa is working with a reading population that varies in literacy levels from 5th grade to college prep, we have liberally mined the resources of the ALA Quick Picks list to discover books with older teen appeal but manageable reading levels.

You can check out the list, make your selections for the school and please know while we prefer new it is perfectly fine to purchase used copies of a book (more bang for your buck). But check and make sure the book is in "standard" used condition and not "student owned" (you will have to click on the title and leave the wish list to check this). The "student owned" copies are very cheap for a reason - they are written in and thus not a good choice for this effort.

Once you have made your selections head to "checkout" and you will be prompted to inform Powells if the books were indeed bought from the wishlist. This lets the store know to mark them as "purchased" on the list. After that you need to provide your credit card info and also fill in the shipping address. (If you have already done this in the past the info will be saved to your Powells account.) Here is where the books are going to:

Melissa Jackson, LIBRARIAN

Ballou Senior High School

3401 Fourth Street SE

Washington DC 20032

(202) 645-3400

It's very important that you get Melissa's name and title in there - she is not the only Jackson (or Melissa) at the school and we want to make sure the books get to the library.

After that you pay for the books and you're done! Please head back over here when you get a chance and leave a comment letting us know who you are, where you're from and what you bought. Also be sure to follow @BallouLibrary on twitter where Melissa will be updating on books as they arrive and student reactions. You can also let her know what you have ordered via twitter - I'm sure she will be delighted to let the kids know what's coming their way.

As always, the crew at GLW and especially me personally, thank you from the bottom of our hearts for helping us in this effort. The book fair is one of the best examples of what we all believe in - getting as many books as possible into the hands of kids who need them. Books matter so much - actual physical books that can be checked out and shared and read dozens of times over by kids for whom owning an e-reader is a distant dream. The Book Fair for Ballou is all about letting kids in a tough spot know that someone out here, someone they will never meet, wants them to read great books and is willing to put forward some of their own hard-earned dollars to make that happen. This level of caring is a powerful thing folks, and it can change the world in significant ways.

Buy a book, send a tweet, post on your blog or at facebook. Spread the word for Ballou and never doubt how much your help is appreciated. And now, enjoy a few recent pictures from the Ballou Library facebook page showing just how much this library is appreciated!



Toriko! Vol 2 is on the list! (And we would be happy to add many more in the series... :)



Chess Club getting serious in the library



Annual African American "Read In"

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Women's History Month celebration

Some Plath, some Flynn, some pink saris, and a scientist lost on Denali

What I'm reading

The Reenactments by Nick Flynn. This is pretty amazing. It's a memoir of the period when Flynn's book Another Bullshit Night in Suck City was being made into a movie starting Robert De Niro (called Being Flynn - here is Roger Ebert's review). The chapters are only a few pages long and each page has only a paragraph or two on it. So it's not a cohesive narrative - more a bunch of memories, thoughts, flights of fancy, all grounded in what Flynn was experiencing as the movie was made. (Since it includes Julianne Moore portraying his mother who killed herself with a gun, the experience was pretty intense.) I'm just loving it - very thoughtful reading.

The Pink Sari Revolution by Amana Fontanella-Khan. For Booklist, this is incredibly timely. It's a topic that never gets easy to read about though.

September Girls by Bennett Madison. Just barely began this one but it's a beach read with mysterious beautiful girls (mermaids?) and Bennett...well, he's a writer who never lets me down. I'm looking to include it in my July column.

The Last Full Measure by Jack Campbell. I had to set this alt history set during the 1860s down as I had a pile of Booklist titles to get through. But I'm thinking now I will include it in either my August or September columns. It's really fun.

Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 by Elizabeth Winder. Also just barely started this one but I'm thinking my September column. I find Plath endlessly interesting, less for how she died then the struggle of how she lived. It just wasn't easy to be a woman in that time (she's just a few years older than my mother) and to be a creative, passionate one - so tough. I'm looking forward to reading this.

What I'm Reviewing:

Just started my July column with Below by Meg McKinlay. I have an endless fascination with landscapes that are altered by intentional flooding for damns. I don't know why but the choice to bury someplace under water - it really gives me pause. In Below, which is a great young teen mystery/coming-of-age, McKinlay has nicely woven the story of a girl trying to come into her own with a look at how history is remembered and how facts can be manipulated. Plus there's a nifty mystery. It's a nice little read and In enjoyed it.



What I'm writing

My latest piece in my series on aviation on Mt McKinley is up at Alaska Dispatch, this time on the first aircraft landing in 1932. (More on this later as it involves one of my all time favorite bush pilots, Joe Crosson.) Now I'm reading on Bradford Washburn so I can have that piece ready to next week to my editors. But I'm also reading more about Allen Carpe, the expedition leader from 1932 who was lost in a crevasse. He was a very interesting man - completely in the vein of the 19th century scientist/explorer. I'm hoping to find enough about him to write some more because I'm just not ready to let him go yet. I'll keep you posted on how the research goes.

The [often overlooked] fine art of lettering

Book designer Emily Gregory has put together a really fine look at typography in the Little Book of Lettering. This one was a surprise for me - typography doesn't exactly leap out at as something that would be deemed page-worthy to a person who is not in the design field. But seeing it here, in all its full color glory, it becomes hard to look away if you care the slightest bit about art. (And if you like books and appreciate their design then you'll really love this.)

The book is put together really well - brief biographies of designers, some examples of their work and split into three sections as "Digitally Drawn Lettering", "Hand-draw and Illustrated Lettering" and "Three-dimensional Lettering". Readers get a little taste of the work of a ton of artists while also learning a bit about how they do it and gaining a healthy list of people to follow-up with. (Gregory has compiled websites in a contributors' list at the end.)

Little Book of Lettering is an easy choice for anyone interested in art but it has a unique appeal that should transcend the obvious. I want the work of so many of these people to grace my own walls - really truly fabulous stuff here!



A sample of what's inside - this one by Yulia Brodskaya

Thinking about summer, old issues of National Geographic and Emily Dickinson.

What I'm reading:

Below by Meg McKinlay (for the July column). I am still working with an outdoors/summer theme for July but it's turning into something water-related. Below is a perfect example - it looked like an offbeat title about a ghost town that was submerged in the creation of a manmade lake but with all the swimming going on, I'm thinking July just might end up being about swimsuit related reading. (This is how themes are developed in case you were wondering.)

The Last Full Measure by Jack Campbell (not sure where this will be reviewed). A novella set in alternate mid-nineteenth century history where southern politicians control the military and a politician from Illinois is imprisoned while a crew of West Point grads with names like Winfield Scott and Lewis Armistead and James Longstreet join forces with a professor from Bowdoin College named Joshua Chamberlain to break him out. It's just - smart and cool and fun. I never get tired of playing with history.

Wild Ones by Joe Mooallem (for Booklist). All I can say is that I'm already depressed about starving polar bears. Next chapters are on butterflies. God help me.

What I'm Reviewing:

Rocket Girl by George Morgan (for Booklist). Very timely after the whole NYT rocket scientist obit dramarama. All I can say is that it was really really hard to be a woman into rocketry in the 1950s.



Emily's Dress and Other Missing Things by Kathryn Burak (for September column) (maybe August). Partly a mystery, partly coming-of-age, some slight romance that becomes more significant but mostly a book about grief and confusion and family. Also, Emily Dickinson (always a good thing). The big thing about this title is not so much the story (which is great) but how it is written (which is incredibly subtle and elegant and unique). I am now a big fan of this author.

What I'm writing:

I have several emails out for some aviation articles; It's always hard to be patient and wait to hear from folks. (Why can't the world wait for my phone calls??!!) I'm also reading National Geographic articles by Bradford Washburn in the 1930s and 1950s for two upcoming articles on climbing Mt McKinley. There is nothing that beats going back to the source, plus I love paging through old Geographics - talk about getting a deep peek at the world as it was (and what we thought we knew). Awesome.

And an essay on climbing/flying/mountain-y stuff. Who knows if it will work for where I plan to send it, but it fits the theme and it is what I know. Plus, it's an excuse to read about climbing/flying/mountain-y stuff and that NEVER gets old!

"I Will Not Leave"

First, the new issue of Bookslut is up and includes my column on biographies (and biographical essays) for teens. Lots of good stuff in there on Yoko Ono, the Carter Family, the Brontes (talk about tragic!), some good scientists trying to save the wild horse population, and more. All highly recommended, of course.

For aviation types, I have a short post up at Alaska Dispatch on new flight time standards in the wake of the Colgan Air Crash in 2009.

Also, King Lear in Gwich'in!!!! This is so made of awesome I don't know where to begin.

And now, what I read recently and can't stop thinking about:

I am a big fan of magazines and long form journalism in general. I highly recommend Garden & Gun, Orion, Smithsonian and National Geographic, all fabulous in different ways. But my heart belongs very much to Yankee, a magazine my father subscribed to forever (really) and always reminds me of my Rhode Island side of the family. (An item on my dream writing list is to be published in Yankee.)

In the current issue, Howard Mansfield has two pieces, "My Roots Are Deeper Than Your Pockets" and "I Will Not Leave: Eminent Domain in Ascuteny, Vermont". Both deal with sense of place, with the attachment to and affection for the land and both are quintessential Mansfield. I've been a fan of his for a very long time - for the exceedingly authentic New England flavor to his writing and for the eloquence in which he captures the lives of people he meets and places he visits. Here's a bit of "I Will Not Leave" about Romaine Tenney and his tragic battle in the 1960s not to have to sell his farm due to progress:

Romaine's story stands as a regret. Romaine stands as the lost and the last; he's the lost authentic life, the unrecoverable past. He's as vanished as the road under our wheels at 65mph. We know that "all is change"--yet we don't know that. It's the truth we don't want to acknowledge. We want Romaine to be there on his farm forever. He is the Vermont we want to believe in. As his niece Gerri wrote, "He not only ... represented what Vermont stood for, but also unwittingly took so many of us to task to do the same." We want the old life, accessible, and we want the new things. Why do we have to give up one for the other? Regret is the literature of progress.

I return to Mansfield's collection Bones of the Earth every couple of years. It is a lesson in the best way to capture sense of place in your writing and quite enjoyable, interesting writing to boot. (It's an obvious win for New Englanders but anyone interested in historical preservation is going to like it.)

I was quite pleased to see these Yankee pieces online - it's a chance for folks new to Mansfield to get a taste of his writing (and also to get fired up about the struggle to keep your land). Mansfield is a writer who is criminally overlooked in my opinion; anything I can do to shine a light on his work is time well spent.

More on all of Mansfield's books at his website; he has a new title, Dwelling in Possibility, due out this fall.

This girl did not need to fall for the guy

Rachel Sa's The Lewton Experiment jumped out at me from the catalog as a girl detective/girl reporter mash-up that takes place in a town that has been mysteriously devastated by a nearby Big Box store. Our heroine is seventeen-year old Sherri who has landed a job as a reporter for the newspaper at the small tourist town of Lewton where her aunt and uncle own and operate a B&B. It is a little odd that she got the job - it seems hard to believe a teenager would be this lucky, but Sherri is too delighted to care. Then she steps off the bus to discover a boarded up downtown and desolate streets. Lewton is about dead and everybody - even her family - just wants to talk about Shopwells.

(We can call it Walmart, if you want.)

Sherri finds a lot of weird really fast, starting with her uncle, who works at Shopwells and is not at all himself, and her aunt who seems to be compulsively shopping for things she does not need. The newspaper isn't interested in covering the negative impact Shopwells has on the town and no one is interested in explaining how last year's summer reporter went from investigating Shopwells to working for them. Sherri decides to go into the belly of the beast and investigate the store which is where things get all tense and also very funny.

Sherri is a great character; she doesn't waste a lot of time wondering what to do or second guessing her instincts. It's obvious that something is seriously wrong (made all the more clear as the few remaining stores seem to close up overnight), and when she finds herself succumbing to a store-induced euphoria and shopping with abandon, she knows enough to be really freaked out the next day. I liked how she followed clues and broke into offices and went looking into file cabinets and computer files and archives. I liked how she wouldn't let go of the story and I liked how through it all Ra tossed out some really silly moments (what everyone ends up buying is hysterical) and her villains proved to be a bit cartoony. But....and this is a big but....there's one dying romance and one budding one in this book and neither does a thing to help the story. In fact, having Sherri juggle boys in the midst of a criminal investigation just got in the way of the plot and really ruined all the goodwill that I felt for the novel.

When she arrives in Lewton, Sherri and her boyfriend back home, Michael, are on the ropes. They exchange several phone calls throughout the book, all of which slow down the plot, until Michael conveniently shares that he has spent some time with another girl. This gives Sherri the out she was looking for to break up with Michael without being a bad person, something that wouldn't have been necessary to worry about if Michael never existed in the first place.

The local guy, the one Sherri wants to date but can't because of Michael, is Ben who works at a diner in in Lewton and becomes involved in her investigations. Ben is smart, a little dubious of all of Sherri's rather wild assertions but game to jump onboard and get to the bottom of things. The two end up on the road tracking down someone on the inside at Shopwells who might have some information and they end up staying at a hotel (separate rooms). After barely exchanging a kiss, having no discussion of dating or anything meaningful at all, Sherri wanders into Ben's room, says "who needs sleep anyway" and pulls Ben down to the bed.

Cut scene. Hours later the chase for information begins again.

Ben existed, until that moment, primarily as a buddy for Sherri so she wasn't the only sane person in town. He was becoming a potential love interest but with few pages left in the book, I thought that development seemed unlikely. Then boom - there's sex (apparently), the nefarious plot gets uncovered, all is revealed and they end up kissing again in Ben's apartment for the last scene. I guess Sherri could not be happily ever after without a boy, any boy, even a boy she barely met and slept with for no good reason.

I can't believe I'm saying this but the sex scene that barely occurs only in this book has to be one of the more gratuitous sex scenes I've come across in a book in ages.

What I think - and I have no idea if this is true - is that either the author or editors thought romance was critical to the success of The Lewton Experiment. However, none of them wanted that romance to be too graphic so it is barely here, dropped in every few chapters and while it exists, won't get the book banned (for sure). But being unnecessary, it is distracting and clunky. What could have been a cute young teen mystery thus ends up being a roundly unsuccessful YA- wannabe.

I really wanted to like this one but Sherri and her love triangle just didn't work for me at all. Damn.

In which things are not as I thought they were.

Recent revelations on the writing front:

Last week I discovered that while my book did sell out of its first printing and go into a second, the print run on that first printing was dramatically smaller than I had been led to believe. Dramatically. This has left me reeling a bit as while I still sold out, I didn't sell out on a level that is anything impressive and honestly after all the work I did to sell those copies (travel, speak, send a thousand emails), and after the pretty big notice it received (starred review, NPR summer choice, great Air & Space review), it still sold only a few thousand [low thousands] copies.

So I'm wondering just what all the trying hard is really for.

My editor left after the 2nd printing, my agent has just left the business and while I have some emails & recall lots of conversations telling me that first nice round figure for the initial printing, now no one seems to know how I could have been so misinformed. And there's no one to challenge on it because, well, they're all gone. And really, what's the point anyway? The numbers are what they are and the book is still a wonderful thing and does any of it matter but that?

I should say no right now, shouldn't I?

MAP is now out in paperback (with over 2,000 on that print run) (I think). The paperback is really really lovely (Air & Space quote on cover!) and, well, that's it. But was it worth all of it? Or more importantly, now that I've done it once, now that I know I can write a book and get published and get positive notice, do I need to do this again?

Can I afford to do this again?

I'm not sure at the moment. I know that writing for Alaska Dispatch is a good thing, a paid-for thing (for all those "writing for free" folks who might be wondering), and there are other essay-type paying outlets I'm trying for and maybe that's enough.

I'll let you know what I decide.

Meanwhile: What I'm reviewing right now:

Antarctica: A Biography by David Day and Full Upright and Locked Position by Mark Gerchick, both for Booklist (both as you would expect from the titles); Hidden Things by Doyce Testerman, an urban fantasy/noir mash-up that was published for adults but turns out to be an excellent crossover for teens - all about childhood and rebelling as a teen and how you never really can forget where you come from. This will be in the June column.

Let's see, also Escape Theory by Margaux Froley, a boarding school murder mystery also for the June column. (Fun in every way you expect with a great cast and I happily turned every page and look forward to more Keaton School skullduggery.) And The Lewton Experiment by Rachel Sa which I will discuss here this week and had some serious potential to be a very fun spin on big box stores and blind consumerism but got bogged down by tacking on a truly forgettable romance that seems to be here only because someone somewhere convinced the author she had to have it. Note to all YA authors: you don't have to have it. Trust me.

What I'm reading right now:

Unspoken by Sarah Rees Brennan which everyone and their cousin has already read but I put off as it is for my June column. So far, I'm loving the Nancy Drew girl detective spin, and the Scoobies in their clubhouse/classroom solving crime bits. The jury's still out on the paranormal stuff (I'm cautious - I've been down this road before and burned by YA titles)

Also, Rocket Girl: The Story of America's First Female Rocket Scientist by George Morgan for Booklist. (I can't believe this story, or that no one knows this story); Soundings by Hali Felt (got this for Christmas - first read about Maria Tharp in They Made Their Mark and have been curious ever since - she's as interesting as I hoped); When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams which is gorgeous both in style and design, really really something and The Little Book of Lettering which will be a "cool read" in a column later this summer and I'm enjoying immensely as it is so very pretty. (The beauty of having your own column is that you get to indulge your inner typography geek.)

And I'm working on an article about Joe Crosson who was the first pilot to land on Mt McKinley in 1932 and I'm tracking the provenance of Ben Eielson's first aircraft in AK so I can ask some folks a few intelligent questions about it before it's hung in the Fairbanks airport and I'm lately very intrigued about the existence of a map in an air force base outside of Anchorage which includes push pins noting the locations of some of the earliest crash sites in the state. It's decades old but still there. I have to see it and I will write about it.

And I'm trying to figure out how to write about a pilot you've never heard of but managed to be at ground zero for several historical moments. He's the Forrest Gump of the flying north. Really. How do you resist as story like that?

What the land remembers, even when we willfully try to forget

Candace Savage's A Geography of Blood is a personal examination of the area around the small Saskatchewan town of Eastend. The author and her husband came to live in Eastend on a whim - after first visiting it on a trip, they later booked a two week stay in the Wallace Stegner House and then bought a place. The more time they spend there, the more they fell for the prairie landscape and the more Savage wanted to explore it. Initially she sees it as most people see a place - the features, the climate, the wildlife, etc. But history quickly seeps into everything she sees until it is clear that the past is part and parcel of the modern day. This especially true in considering Wallace Stegner:

"...it occurred to me that Stegner had been engaged in a kind of literary and historical stratigraphy. As he compared the heroic myth of the pioneer era with the equivocal data of his own childhood, he had detected evidence of unconformities, gaps between the received version of the settlement story and the reality he had lived. Part of his purpose in writing Wolf Willow, I suspected, was to take a stand against this erasure - to backfill the legend with truth.

I love the whole notion of "historical stratigraphy".

There is much around Eastend and across Saskatchewan to consider, from the conflicts that arose among First Nations members, immigrant Canadians and the French fur traders (and their descendants who were neither the settlers nor the tribal members but something completely different and also part of America's story) to the Hudson' Bay Company, the military and more. There have been clashes (hence the "blood" of the title) and conflicts, pain and sorrow. It is a not geographical history of brightness and joy but Savage is far less political then you would expect and more intrigued by how all that history continues to affect us today.

Something I couldn't name seemed to be urging me on, challenging me to pay attention and remember. The imperative seemed to emanate from the hills themselves, with their treasury of bones and stones and narratives. Something in me had decided to honor this land and its stories as best I could...

Savage won the $60,000 Hilary Weston Prize for A Geography of Blood and it is well worth reading for a look at the truths we tell and those we hide. (And also a must read for Stegner fans - so much of who he was comes from his time in Saskatchewan.) I found it endlessly interesting and gave me much to think about. I'm not sure how much we can or should dwell on events from centuries before but Savage makes a powerful case for how we can not let myths to overpower fact. This is something that is very true in the Eastend and also, as anyone who watches reality tv knows, happening right now in Alaska.

Yep, not hard to see why this book resonated so much with me.

[See more on A Geography of Blood at The Globe and Mail and The National Post.]

"Storage is becoming a problem*"

Just when you thought the British couldn't top finding Richard III under a parking lot, they seem to have uncovered an actual knight!!!!



Archaeologists who were on hand during the construction of a new building in Edinburgh uncovered a carved sandstone slab, decorated with markers of nobility -- a Calvary cross and a sword. Nearby, the team found an adult skeleton, which is thought to have once occupied the grave. Scientists plan to analyze the bones and teeth to learn more about this possible knight or nobleman.

"We hope to find out more about the person buried in the tomb once we remove the headstone and get to the remains underneath, but our archaeologists have already dated the gravestone to the thirteenth century," Richard Lewis, a member of the City of Edinburgh Council, said in a statement.

And over in London, they are apparently overflowing with historical graves:

Seven centuries after their demise, the skeletons of 12 plague victims have been unearthed in the City of London, a find which archaeologists believe to be just the tip of a long-lost Black Death mass burial ground.

Arranged in careful rows, the bodies were discovered 2.5 metres below the ground in Charterhouse Square in works for a Crossrail tunnel shaft beside the future ticketing hall for Farringdon station.

Tests are needed to confirm the skeletons' provenance, but the discovery should shed more light on life and death in 14th-century Britain and help scientists to understand how the plague mutated.

While the first story made me think of Indiana Jones, the second has brought thoughts of Poltergeist to mind. I'm quite worried about some kind of mash-up happening in my brain at any moment. This does not make me happy.

*Title totally copped from Jenny D. whose link brought me to the Black Plague article. It was too good not to use here. :)

It's 1927 and I'm trying to describe a mountain range

I am, at the moment (and yes this has changed in the last couple of days) reading three books for Booklist (one on commercial aviation, one on the history of Antarctica and one travel/memoir on Alaska), one for my June column (another YA mystery from Soho Press) and Soundings, for myself (still sublime). Plus there is the War issue of Tinhouse (which includes a Samantha Hunt short story and thus I had to have it) and several magazines all of which showed up at once and are glossy and thus irresistible.*

So, I'm flitting from one book to another with three Booklist reviews due in April (and two more on deck after those), the mystery column begging for attention (as those books are really like candy at this point - so much fun to read) and stacks of research surrounding me that I dive into every day, mining for the exact facts and figures I know are there and now am ready to insert in the appropriate places.**

And I'm writing about the affect aviation has had on climbing Mt McKinley. Short answer = a lot. (You probably knew that already.) I love this topic though - love combining aviation and climbing history and really love writing about Joe Crosson because I don't think enough people know about him. (He was the first pilot to land on McKinley.)

This has to be the most scattered blog post ever.

The one unexpected surprise I'm dealing with in writing the new book - the Mountain Book - is finding my voice. It's so weird to look for a voice in nonfiction (you would think it would just be MY voice) but I know what I have is not right. The words are stiff, hollow - flat on the page. I keep putting them down so the bones are there, so I know where I'm going, but it's a draft with no soul.

SO BLOODY FRUSTRATING. (End rant.)

Reading and writing will continue. It's the only way to find my voice, I just wish the sucker wasn't hiding so far away these days.



*And the Andrea Barrett continues but slowly, sparingly; I don't want to rush it. Archangel is so wonderful - can't recommend it enough.

** I actually have a phone call to make tomorrow to confirm that a list is kept of notable wrecks in Merrill Pass so search and rescue does not launch every time one of them is sited again. Some are 50 years old.