Elizabeth Graver's Blog - Posts Tagged "end-of-the-point"
Giveaway, The End of the Point!
http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sho...
Starting today and running through March 2nd, a Goodreads Giveaway of 25 copies of The End of the Point (out in the "real world" on March 5th).The End of the Point
Starting today and running through March 2nd, a Goodreads Giveaway of 25 copies of The End of the Point (out in the "real world" on March 5th).The End of the Point
The Page 69 Test
I was asked to do this fun blog entry for a site called The Page 69 Test, where writers examine how Page 69 of their books shed light on the larger work.
http://page69test.blogspot.com/2013/0...
http://page69test.blogspot.com/2013/0...
How Did The End of the Point Originate?
How did The End of the Point originate?
This book took me a long time to write, both because of the particular challenges and pleasures that went into it and because over the past decade, my non-writing life has been very full—with the birth of two children, the illness and death of my father, the daily routines of teaching and family life, and, perhaps most centrally, the growing sense that I didn’t want to rush; time moves fast enough on its own. Over the years, as the story took shape, I spent a part of every summer and many fall and spring weekends at the real place that my fictional place grew out of. Often,while I was there, I wrote. I walked the paths, navigated the rocks to swim in the ocean and began to feel that the land—and the one-room cabin my husband had built on it—was a kind of home to me—not (as it is to my husband and our daughters) a first home, but a surrogate second home, at once alluring and vexed. I watched my children learn to walk, swim and live in nature there, the place a great gift for them but also a complicated privilege and even a danger—for how fully it can shelter and how much it can exclude. I used this real place as a way to begin to imagine my fictional Ashaunt Point.
This book took me a long time to write, both because of the particular challenges and pleasures that went into it and because over the past decade, my non-writing life has been very full—with the birth of two children, the illness and death of my father, the daily routines of teaching and family life, and, perhaps most centrally, the growing sense that I didn’t want to rush; time moves fast enough on its own. Over the years, as the story took shape, I spent a part of every summer and many fall and spring weekends at the real place that my fictional place grew out of. Often,while I was there, I wrote. I walked the paths, navigated the rocks to swim in the ocean and began to feel that the land—and the one-room cabin my husband had built on it—was a kind of home to me—not (as it is to my husband and our daughters) a first home, but a surrogate second home, at once alluring and vexed. I watched my children learn to walk, swim and live in nature there, the place a great gift for them but also a complicated privilege and even a danger—for how fully it can shelter and how much it can exclude. I used this real place as a way to begin to imagine my fictional Ashaunt Point.
New York Times Review
The End of the Point received a lovely, smart, perceptive New York Times review by Alida Becker today. It's an amazing feeling to work so long and so hard and in such a private, largely solitary way on a book--this one took me over seven years to write--and then to send it off into the world and have it find readers who GET it. For me, this is a very particular sense of being seen, not for your own self--for the writing is not my self, exactly--but for some essential soul-ness that is and is not the self, that is, perhaps, the self combined with the world and the imagination, the book a little piece of architecture born from the long process of coaxing and knocking down, of reworking, dreaming, doubting, trusting and (mostly) returning and returning to try to get it right.
I remember going back to give a reading from my first novel, Unravelling, at Wesleyan University, where I'd been an undergraduate some years before. My mentor and teacher, Annie Dillard, was there, and she pulled me aside moments before the reading and said, "We've known each other socially over the years, and as student and teacher, and now I've read your novel. Which way do I know you better?"
"Through reading the novel," I said.
"Knock 'em dead, kiddo," Annie said and sent me out to read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/boo...The End of the Point
I remember going back to give a reading from my first novel, Unravelling, at Wesleyan University, where I'd been an undergraduate some years before. My mentor and teacher, Annie Dillard, was there, and she pulled me aside moments before the reading and said, "We've known each other socially over the years, and as student and teacher, and now I've read your novel. Which way do I know you better?"
"Through reading the novel," I said.
"Knock 'em dead, kiddo," Annie said and sent me out to read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/boo...The End of the Point
Q&A with Deborah Kalb
In her wonderful essay, "Place in Fiction," Eudora Welty writes, "Place in fiction is the named, identified, concrete, exact and exacting, and therefore credible, gathering spot of all that has been felt, is about to be experienced, in the novel's progress. Location pertains to feeling; feeling profoundly pertains to place; place in history partakes of feeling, as feeling about history partakes of place."
Welty gets at the compelling mix of the particular and the vast that a focus on place can provide for a writer, as well as at the emotional pulse of place. I'm very attached to the natural world of New England, and I view this novel as a kind of (complicated) love song to that world...
read more of the Q&A at....
http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/...
Welty gets at the compelling mix of the particular and the vast that a focus on place can provide for a writer, as well as at the emotional pulse of place. I'm very attached to the natural world of New England, and I view this novel as a kind of (complicated) love song to that world...
read more of the Q&A at....
http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/...
Goodreads Giveaway: The End of the Point
Paperback publication date of The End of the Point is April 22nd! Enter here to win a free copy!
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
Elizabeth Graver
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
Elizabeth Graver
Giveaway, The End of the Point, Ends Soon!
Goodreads Giveaway: The End of the Point
Two more days to enter!
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
Two more days to enter!
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
