Elizabeth Graver's Blog, page 4
July 5, 2022
Kantika Video, Behind the Book
In 1985, when I was twenty-one, I taped my grandmother Rebecca telling stories. My grandmother—a vibrant, shape-shifting, endlessly creative person whose life journey brought many challenges—inspired my writing in oblique ways over the years, but it wasn’t until decades later, long after her death in 1991, that I felt ready to turn to her story.
I wrote Kantika as fiction but drew on a rich mix of oral history, family photographs and research. For the central characters (and with the permission of the people still alive), I used real names. You can watch a 5 minute video about the inspiration for Kantika and my research process. A close reader might be able to spot a few exact phrases from my recordings of my grandmother that found their way into the book!
The post Kantika Video, Behind the Book appeared first on Elizabeth Graver.
Kantika Video
In 1985, when I was twenty-one, I taped my grandmother Rebecca telling stories. My grandmother—a vibrant, shape-shifting, endlessly creative person whose life journey brought many challenges—inspired my writing in oblique ways over the years, but it wasn’t until decades later, long after her death in 1991, that I felt ready to turn to her story.
I wrote Kantika as fiction but drew on a rich mix of oral history, family photographs and research. For the central characters (and with the permission of the people still alive), I used real names. You can watch a 5 minute video about the inspiration for Kantika and my research process. A close reader might be able to spot a few exact phrases from my recordings of my grandmother that found their way into the book!
Watch Now.
The post Kantika Video appeared first on Elizabeth Graver.
April 27, 2014
Giveaway, The End of the Point, Ends Soon!
Two more days to enter!
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
April 23, 2014
April 20, 2014
Goodreads Giveaway: The End of the Point
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
Elizabeth Graver
April 15, 2014
Goodreads Giveaway, The End of the Point!
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
May 28, 2013
Boys, Beetles, Birds...Give Them an Island, and They'll Grow
It feels like a place out of a dream, this little green-and-gold island with its swooping birds and mounds of grass. It might be far away—in the Scottish Hebrides, perhaps—or out of a children’s adventure story where barefoot boys roam free. But Penikese Island sits in Buzzards Bay, 12 miles from Woods Hole.
My husband grew up on Buzzards Bay and knew this 75-acre island as a therapeutic boarding school for troubled teens. For six months of the year, boys came to grow their own food, tend the animals, chop firewood, and go to class.
The first time I visited, over a decade ago, we beached our motor boat, climbed ashore, and were greeted almost instantly by a suntanned, tousled teenager. We returned at least once a summer, and were often the only visitors, though occasionally we’d run into a scientist who’d come to observe the roseate terns or American burying beetles—both endangered species making a comeback on the island. On a mid-October day a few years back, we took the boat out past seals gathering on Gull Island and arrived on Penikese. There, we played touch football with the boys, the sumac turning red, the waves the iron gray of fall.
In 2011 the school suspended operations. Since then, the island has felt ghostly without the boys’ presence. Now the school is scheduled to reopen with a new focus: helping teenagers recover from substance abuse. Meanwhile, the tern population is thriving. The American burying beetle is going strong.
Birds, beetles, boys. Give them an island, and they’ll grow.
—Elizabeth Graver’s fourth novel, The End of the Point, came out this spring.
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/arts-en...
April 29, 2013
Radio Interview, Here and Now, with Robin Young
and (as I could have predicted from listening to her show) was a terrific interviewer, at once dynamic and relaxed. We sat across from each other, separated by wires and mikes, and talked. We talked about history, family, place, my book, her own family history, New England, insiders and outsiders, our fragile planet, time, war . . . .
We finished talking by a little before 3 pm. I got my car from the WBUR garage and pulled out on the bright street. Outside, everything seemed quiet, except for two police motorcycles going by, sirens on. Without giving it much thought, I pulled my car over to let the motorcycles pass.
It was not until I was halfway home, nearly a half hour later, that I switched on the radio and learned that at 2:49 pm, as Robin and I sat talking, two bombs had gone off at the marathon, two miles down the road from WBUR. My book tries to imagine, among other things, what it might have been like to be living in New England as unspeakable violence--WWII, the Vietnam War--happened far away. How strange, how unsettling, and (mostly) how very very sad, to have been sitting there chatting about my little book as huge (probably homegrown) violence took our city.
I'll never be able to think about that interview without remembering what--unbeknownst to us--was happening down the road, even as the events of that week have left me ever more grateful for the chance to talk, live, make art.
http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2013/04/29...
The End of the Point: A Novel
April 16, 2013
Q&A with Deborah Kalb
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/...
April 1, 2013
Literary New England Radio Show
Interviews with Elizabeth Graver, Emily Rapp, Joyce Carol Oates, and Ruth Ozeki.
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/literary...The End of the PointThe Still Point of the Turning World
