Sunday Sentence: Eighteen Days Without You by Anne Sexton

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

          Catch me. I’m your disease.

“Eighteen Days Without You” from The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton

Friday Freebie: An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Congratulations to Kris Faatz and Jane Rainey, winners of last week’s Friday Freebie: signed copies of Steve Yarbrough’s new novel The Unmade World.

This week’s contest is for An American Marriage by Tayari Jones, author of Silver Sparrow. Here’s what Jacqueline Woodson, author of Another Brooklyn, had to say about the novel: “I love An American Marriage, and I'm so excited for this book to be in the world. Tayari's novel is timely, thoughtful, and beautifully written. Reading it, I found myself angry as hell, laughing out loud, choking up and cheering. A gem of a book.” Keep scrolling for more information about An American Marriage...

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together. This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward--with hope and pain--into the future.

If you’d like a chance at winning An American Marriage, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on Jan. 18, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on Jan. 19. If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.


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My First Time: Steve Yarbrough

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today’s guest is Steve Yarbrough, the author of eleven books, most recently the novel The Unmade World, now out from Unbridled Books. Steve’s other books are the nonfiction title Bookmarked: Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, the novels The Realm of Last Chances, Safe from the Neighbors, The End of California, Prisoners of War, Visible Spirits and The Oxygen Man, and the short story collections Veneer and Family Men. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the California Book Award, the Richard Wright Award and the Robert Penn Warren Award. He has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

How My First Novel Came to See the Light of Day

At some point in every fiction workshop that I teach, I make a point of telling students that most of us are going to need some luck along the way. But it’s important, I always add, to make sure that when fortune casts its gaze in your direction, you’ve got plenty of work to display. Then I tell them this story.

One day in the spring of 1996, I walked into my office at Fresno State, where I taught at the time, and saw my answering machine’s message light flashing. “Steve,” a voice said, “this is Susan Lyne calling from Disney.” I was not in the best of moods. Professionally, things hadn’t been going my way. Though I was tenured and had recently been promoted to full professor on the strength of two short story collections published by university presses, my first novel, finished two and a half years earlier, had chalked up somewhere north of forty rejections, refused by all the big New York publishers, as well as every small press my agent and I could think of. Over the previous year, I’d actually turned to writing non-fiction, publishing a handful of essays. I couldn’t think of any more short stories that begged to be written, and I felt all but certain that I was not a novelist. How could so many publishers be wrong? One rejection, from an editor who has since become a friend, put it this way: “As is true in most of his short stories, Yarbrough just doesn’t quite manage to get to the heart of things in this novel.”

My maiden voyage as a nonfiction writer had been an essay I wrote about Southerners and guns. My dad, like most of the men I’d known growing up in a small Mississippi Delta town, was armed to the teeth. On a recent trip home, I’d discovered that he had recently purchased two M1 carbines that had been modified by the Israeli military, becoming fully automatic. He’d also bought five thousand rounds of .30-caliber ammo. This discovery troubled me, as one might imagine, and when I got back to California I decided to write about it. The essay was snapped up by a literary magazine that paid me ninety dollars, then reprinted by The Utne Reader, for the princely sum of four hundred.

Over the last two decades I have often wondered what course my literary life might have taken if I’d acted on my initial impulse and pressed “delete” after hearing the first sentence of Susan Lyne’s message. The thing was, I assumed the person calling worked for Disneyland, to which we had taken our daughters a few months earlier. They probably wanted to sell us some kind of package: you know, a night in one of those hideous Anaheim hotels filled with truculent kids and their stressed-out parents and X-number of rides that would make me as queasy as I’d been when we hit the water at the foot of Splash Mountain. No thanks. I believe my finger came within an inch of hitting that button. Fortunately, just in time, I heard the word “movie.” The person on the other end was the book scout for Disney’s film division. The rest of the message remains a blur. I’m not even sure I listened to the whole thing before calling back.

When my essay on Southerners and their weaponry appeared in The Utne Reader, it had attracted the attention of Kathleen Kennedy, who was especially interested, Susan said, in the issue of gun control. The name “Kathleen Kennedy” meant nothing to me, which is probably a good thing, since my ignorance protected me, for a time at least, from acting overly impressed. In fact, I had seen numerous films that Kennedy and her husband Frank Marshall produced for Steven Spielburg’s Amblin Entertainment: E. T., The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun. Kathy, Susan Lyne said, badly wanted to meet me.

She and Frank now had their own production company, Kennedy-Marshall. Over the next couple of weeks, I took part in several conference calls with two production executives, Jonathan Zimbert and Robin Schorr, and then finally Robin called to tell me when the meeting would be held. She said a limo would pick me up and take me to the airport, a distance of no more than three miles from our house. A second limo would collect me at LAX and carry me to Kathy’s home in Brentwood. It turned out she lived next door to O. J. Simpson.

I met with Kathy, Robin and Jonathan for an hour or more, then flew home. I didn’t think the meeting had gone well, as I’d been forced to reveal that I’d never seen a screenplay and also that I didn’t have any good movie ideas. As I was leaving, Kathy asked me if I’d ever written a novel. I had, I admitted, but nobody would publish it. She asked me to have my agent send it to her. I went home and heard no more for several weeks.

Then one day the phone rang. It was Jonathan Zimbert, who told me that they all loved my novel and that Kennedy-Marshall would be in touch with my agent to buy the film rights for The Oxygen Man. “You write great dialogue,” Jonathan said. “Would you be interested in writing the screenplay?”

Oh, hell yes.

He said he would send me nine or ten scripts and some screenwriting software. “You’ll figure out the form,” he said, with confidence that I could not muster.

I did figure the form out, and I came to like it, and the next year they would hire me to write another script. My book, unfortunately, never became a film, though people still inquire about the film rights from time to time. But in failing to become a film, it learned how to become a novel. Or to be more precise, in writing the screenplay, I figured out a couple of things that were not quite right with the book, and when I finished the script, I went back and made some changes. Zimbert put me in touch with a young agent at ICM, Jessica Green, and though Jessica left the agency without selling my book, she handed it off to another agent named Sloan Harris, who called me one day while my family and I were at a ski lodge to say he had fallen in love with my work. In no time, he sold the novel to a relatively new publisher called MacMurray & Beck.

When The Oxygen Man came out, it received numerous positive reviews. TIME magazine compared me favorably to Faulkner. USA Today accorded one half of a page to a certain British novelist named J. K. Rowling and gave the other half to me. The review was headed “Oxygen Resuscitates Southern Fiction.” Some months later, the paperback rights were auctioned off to Scribner, which had been one of the first publishers to turn the book down four years earlier, during the initial round of submissions.

Since then, a great many nice things have happened, and my eighth novel and eleventh book, The Unmade World, is about to be published. Two things, however, have not changed: writing is still difficult, and the work remains its own reward. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Sunday Sentence: The Break by Anne Sexton

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

The T.V. hangs from the wall like a moose head.

“The Break” from The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton

Friday Freebie: The Unmade World by Steve Yarbrough

Congratulations to Tawnya Zorn, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie: The End We Start From by Megan Hunter.

This week, in celebration of the publication of Steve Yarbrough’s new novel The Unmade World, the publisher Unbridled Books is offering up two signed copies of the book. So, we’re doubling your odds of winning this week. Will you be one of the two lucky readers to win The Unmade World? Keep scrolling for more information about the book and how to enter the contest. Good luck!

“This many-layered novel is a thriller, a love story, a travelogue full of richly observed scenes, a morality tale replete with betrayal, remorse and lust for revenge, and a hilarious comedy. The tight control Yarbrough exercises over the ten-year span of the story kept me turning the pages and left me full of admiration.”
–Colm Toibin

Set against a backdrop of the current political and cultural upheaval in the U.S. and Eastern Europe, The Unmade World is a thoughtful literary novel with a dose of suspense that moves from Poland to California to the Hudson Valley and back to Poland. It covers a decade in the lives of an American journalist and a Polish small businessman turned petty criminal and the wrenching aftermath of an accidental, tragic encounter between these two on a snowy night in 2006 on the outskirts of Krakow. The accident costs the lives of the American journalist Richard Brennan’s wife and daughter, an event that colors the rest of his life. It also leads to a downward spiral for Bogdan Baranowsk, leaving emotional scars as he suffers the seemingly inevitable loss of his business, his home, and his wife. The Unmade World is a story of ordinary, otherwise decent people from various backgrounds and circumstances who must learn how to live with the personal grief, sense of guilt, and the emotional consequences of violence. Along the way, the novel grapples with a spectrum of cultural and political issues. It includes a murder mystery wrapped around the corruption of major college sports, the pressures on immigrants and refugees in both the U.S. and Poland, the fallout of political change, economic upheavals and armed conflicts–including the horrific destruction of Luhansk, Ukraine in 2014. It also references the 2016 presidential campaign, cultural politics in the American university, and the demise of print journalism, etc., though never in a dogmatic or overtly partisan way.

If you’d like a chance at winning The Unmade World, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on Jan. 11, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on Jan. 12. If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.