Trailer Park Tuesday: Joe (from the novel by Larry Brown)

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.

Larry Brown, the late, great chronicler of the South's darker corners, gets another big-screen treatment (after 2001's Big Bad Love).  This time, Brown's 1991 novel Joe fills the screen with heavy drinking, domestic abuse and ornery men yelling, "The hell you lookin' at?"  Nicolas Cage (who physically looks like Brown--perhaps intentionally?) plays the titular role of an alcoholic ex-con forester who hires a boy (Tye Sheridan, last seen with Matthew McConaughey in Mud) to work with him on his crew.  When Joe discovers the 15-year-old boy is nothing but a punching bag for his alcoholic father, that ole ex-con rage starts to build inside him and you just know somebody's gonna get his ass whupped--or worse--before the end credits (a fact highlighted by a lawman coming across our anti-hero slumped against a wall and saying, "What have you done, Joe?").  All ingredients are in place for this to be a decent-to-good (possibly bordering on great) movie.  I'm especially intrigued by the fact that David Gordon Green is the director.  I'm a big fan of his films George Washington and Prince Avalanche and think his quiet, resonant style will serve Joe well.  Now, will somebody please, please, please make a movie out of Larry Brown's final, posthumous novel, A Miracle of Catfish?  I think it was one of his best.

A sad coda to this story: The actor cast as the abusive father did not live to see his work on screen.  Two months after filming ended, Gary Poulter, a homeless man plucked from obscurity when Green cast him in the movie, was found dead....submerged in three feet of water after a night of heavy drinking near Austin’s Lady Bird Lake.

My First Time: Tova Mirvis

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 Tova Mirvis, the author of Visible City, The Outside World and The Ladies Auxiliary, which was a national bestseller.  Her essays have appeared in various anthologies and newspapers including The New York Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, and Poets and Writers, and her fiction has been broadcast on National Public Radio.  She has been a Visiting Scholar at The Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center and is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fiction Fellowship.  She lives in Newton, Massachusetts with her three children. Find her on Facebook and Twitter.  Click here to visit her website.

My First Hometown Reading

My first reading for my first novel was in Memphis, Tennessee, the first stop on what was scheduled to be a long book tour.  Though it was the city where I’d grown up and where my family still lived, this was no easy hometown crowd.  The book I’d written, The Ladies Auxiliary, was about the tightly knit Orthodox Jewish community there, and much of the audience was made up of members of that community–my family, my parents’ friends, my former teachers–and they had come to hear what I had to say for myself.

In the months before my novel came out, there had been much talk.  “Is the book nice or not nice?” people asked.  The word on the street was that it was decidedly not nice.  Before people had read it, the allegations were lined up: I had aired the dirty laundry, I had ensured that no one would move to this community, I had dished people’s lives.  People were both afraid they were in the book and afraid that they weren’t.  One of my grandmother’s friends called her and said, “I heard I’m in Tova’s novel.”  “No,” my grandmother was quick to reply.  “You’re not in it.  But I am in it.”

All this, I heard in the months and then days leading up to the book’s release, from my parents who still lived in Memphis.  At the time, I was in New York, living far from the epicenter of the talk.  I tried to shrug it off but I had imbibed all too well the lessons of my upbringing, a good-girl politeness that was the lovechild of Orthodox Jewish laws and Southern gentility.  I had lived by the edicts to please others, to squelch what you really thought.

But to be a writer, you have to be willing to say not what you were supposed to think but what you actually did think.  For me, the release of this book was my first time giving voice to the suffocation I felt growing up in this tight-knit community where everyone knew you and knew everything about you.  For the years in which I wrote the book, coming home to Memphis was like being able to visit the movie set of the novel which lived only inside my own head.  But with the book’s publication, coming to Memphis felt far more fraught.  The book was no longer in my private domain.

In the local TCBY that my mother and I went to on the day before my first reading, we ran into a woman who looked at me coolly over the top of her chocolate and vanilla swirl.  “Well if it isn’t Little Miss Famous,” she said.  Another woman in the grocery store pursed her lips into something that was supposed to resemble a smile.  “Heard you wrote a book,” she drawled in a voice dripping with a cocktail of Southern charm and venom.

By the night of my first bookstore event, I was anxious, my hands shaking as I started reading from the book.  I tried to gauge what people were thinking.  Could you stand by what you’d written, face down not an imaginary crowd of naysayers but actual people that you knew and say I think this, I wrote this?  I felt like I was on trial–was fiction an admissible defense in this court?  Before I stopped for questions, I made a pre-emptive strike and launched into a monologue about what fiction was, about how life gets translated and reinvented.  There is no one to one relationship between fiction and life; it’s not about expose but recreation.  Yes we are sitting in this place I described, yes, you think it’s you, or him or her, but can we depart here for one moment and enter a fictional universe?

This was what fiction was for me, a chance to reshape and recreate.  The world I’d grown up felt too small; on the page, it stretched, expanded.  I grew up feeling fenced in by the restraining words of who you were supposed to be, what you were supposed to think.  I’d lived with the tight knot that comes from reshaping the inner self to match the outer expectations.  Here on the page, I was starting to see how you could break free.

At the end of the reading, a family friend whom I’d heard was angry at the book came up to me and patted me on the arm.  “You acquitted yourself beautifully,” she said.

I appreciated her words though I knew not everyone agreed with her, though I knew that this so-called acquittal mattered less than the knowledge that I could be accused of trespassing upon communal norms and still stand by my words.  I could face the wagging tongues and angry feeling, I could stand there and say, this is what I have said.  This is what I think.

Sunday Sentence: Balefire by Shann Ray

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

            In a few short years
            the older brother would be gone
            into
            the maw
            of an ancient canyon,
            his dark vehicle
            burning
            in open air
            as it leapt the barrier

            and fell
            far into a valley
            black with trees, where
            the detonation
            boomed and
            the forest
            bloomed with fire.

"The Family Who Lived With Their Faces to the Sky"
from Balefire by Shann Ray

Friday Freebie: Knitting Yarns by Ann Hood, Last Friends by Jane Gardam, Hand Me Down by Melanie Thorne, North of Hope by Shannon Huffman Polson, The Promise by Ann Weisgarber

Congratulations to Lauren Bufferd, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: Pioneer Girl by Bich Minh Nguyen.

This week's book giveaway is another big blow-out bonanza. It's time to clear the decks of some extra books which have been piling up over the last few months. One lucky reader will win a copy of Knitting Yarns edited by Ann Hood, Last Friends by Jane Gardam, Hand Me Down by Melanie Thorne, North of Hope by Shannon Huffman Polson, and The Promise by Ann Weisgarber.  Last Friends and Hand Me Down are trade paperbacks, the rest are hardcover.

Why does knitting occupy a place in the hearts of so many writers?  What's so magical and transformative about yarn and needles?  How does knitting help us get through life-changing events and inspire joy?  In Knitting Yarns, twenty-seven writers tell stories about how knitting healed, challenged, or helped them to grow.  Barbara Kingsolver describes sheering a sheep for yarn.  Elizabeth Berg writes about her frustration at failing to knit.  Ann Patchett traces her life through her knitting, writing about the scarf that knits together the women she's loved and lost.  Knitting a Christmas gift for his blind aunt helped Andre Dubus III knit an understanding with his girlfriend.  Kaylie Jones finds the woman who used knitting to help raise her in France and heals old wounds.  Sue Grafton writes about her passion for knitting.  Also included are five original knitting patterns created by Helen Bingham.

Here's what Booklist said about Jane Gardam's novel: Last Friends brings to a close Jane Gardam’s lauded series that includes Old Filth (2006) and The Man in the Wooden Hat (2011).  Like its predecessors, this final installment examines the complex world of British class, empire, and the social circles that bring them together.  Gardam tells of the rise and fall of Terry Veneering, the son of a mysterious Russian acrobat and a rough-and-tumble local girl living in the English midlands.  As a child, Veneering is exposed to the ugly side of the British upper class and narrowly escapes death during the Blitz in WWII.  Disgusted by the attitudes of the English gentry, and with his hometown destroyed in the war, Veneering sets off to remake himself in the Far East, only to return to England under suspicion.  Gardam’s previous novels have brought her acclaim in England, and with the right mix of publicity and word-of-mouth support, American readers, too, will respond to her witty style, insatiable readability, and cast of strange and amazing characters.

In Hand Me Down, Melanie Thorne's autobiographical novel, fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Reid has spent her life protecting her sister, Jaime, from their parents’ cruel mistakes and broken promises.  When their mother chooses her second husband and their new family over raising her firstborn girls, Elizabeth and Jaime are separated and risk losing the shelter of each other.  Hand Me Down indelibly captures a contemporary family journey--how two young people, against incredible odds, forge lives of their own in the face of an uncertain future.  “Thorne sounds utterly liberated as she describes the merits of exploring fact through fiction…With the clear-eyed honesty of a Daniel Woodrell or Bonnie Jo Campbell character, Liz describes the pain of being a young person among careless, thrill-seeking men and hardworking, wounded women.”  (San Francisco Chronicle)

Shannon Huffman Polson's memoir North of Hope is an utterly gut-wrenching and ultimately very moving story of how she coped with loss and grief.  After her parents are killed in a rare grizzly attack, Shannon is forced into a wilderness of grief and explores this perilous terrain through music, the natural world, and her faith.  Her travels take her from the suburbs of Seattle to the concert hall where she sings Mozart's Requiem, and ultimately into the wilderness of Alaska's remote Arctic and of her heart.  This deeply moving narrative is shot through with the human search for meaning in the face of tragedy.  Polson's deep appreciation for the untamed and remote wilderness of the Alaskan Arctic moves her story effortlessly between adventure, natural history, and sacred pilgrimage, as much an internal journey as a literal one.  Readers who appreciate music or adventure narratives and the natural world or who are looking for new ways to understand loss will find guidance, solace, and a companionable voice in this extraordinary debut.  “Shannon Huffman Polson has written a soulful and brave book about death, life, and the complexities surrounding both.  There is nothing sentimental in these pages.  North of Hope shows us how personal loss and loss of our planet come from the same place: Love.  This is a testament to deep change, human and wild.”  (Terry Tempest Williams, author, When Women Were Birds)

Ann Weisgarber's new novel, The Promise, won't be released until next month, but if you're the Friday Freebie winner you'll be able crack it open well in advance of publication.  I think you're gonna love what you find inside.  Here's the plot synopsis: 1900.  Young pianist Catherine Wainwright flees the fashionable town of Dayton, Ohio in the wake of a terrible scandal.  Heartbroken and facing destitution, she finds herself striking up correspondence with a childhood admirer, the recently widowed Oscar Williams.  In desperation she agrees to marry him, but when Catherine travels to Oscar's farm on Galveston Island, Texas--a thousand miles from home--she finds she is little prepared for the life that awaits her.  The island is remote, the weather sweltering, and Oscar's little boy Andre is grieving hard for his lost mother.  And though Oscar tries to please his new wife, the secrets of the past sit uncomfortably between them.  For Nan Ogden, Oscar's housekeeper, Catherine's sudden arrival has come as a great shock.  For not only did she promise Oscar's first wife that she would be the one to take care of little Andre, but she has feelings for Oscar which she is struggling to suppress.  And when the worst storm in a generation descends, the women will find themselves tested as never before.

If you’d like a chance at winning a copy of all five of these books, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on March 20, at which time I’ll draw the winning name.  I’ll announce the lucky reader on March 21.  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.

My First Time: Je Banach

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 Je Banach.  Je is a member of the residential faculty in fiction at the Yale Writers' Conference.  In 2013 she was awarded the CT Artist Fellowship for Fiction; she was previously awarded the New Boston Fund Fellowship in Fiction.  She has written for The Paris Review, Esquire, Granta, Guernica, Bookforum, KGB Bar Lit, L.A. Review of Books, Opium, and other venues.  In 2012 she wrote PEN's "Final Word" for Banned Books Week.  A long-time contributor to Harold Bloom’s literary series with Infobase Publishing, Banach is the author of publishers' guides to classics as well as works by contemporaries such as Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Dinaw Mengestu, Hisham Matar, and E.L. Doctorow, among others.

My First Yes

“Are you a writer?”

About a decade ago I found myself face to face with Norman Mailer and this was how he greeted me.  We were at his Provincetown home for a reception following a reading in town.  He sat in a chair in the center of the room, and I sat directly across from him on his living room couch until all of the guests who had been lined up to speak with him had finally dispersed with drinks and books in hand.  It had seemed like enough just to sit on that couch in a great writer’s home, but as the night drew to a close I began to think I might later regret not seizing the opportunity to speak with him, so I sat down next to him and said hello, and this question—“Are you a writer?”—was his greeting.  Though I had been writing for some time, I felt that I hadn’t yet produced sufficient work to be able to reply in the affirmative.  I said I was not. “Is your father a writer?” he countered.  I said that he was not.  We exchanged a few more words and soon the magic minutes passed and I was making my way back down Commercial Street in the dark, weighed down with the disappointment that I had somehow misspent my time with him.

When I returned home after that trip, I felt the urge to take a larger, more certain step into the literary world.  Though my background as an undergraduate was in literature, I had become divorced from it and had worked for a local non-profit arts organization in the years after helping to put together exhibitions and then at another local gallery where Arthur Miller had strolled in one day, putting the idea back in my head that I really should be dealing in words and books.  I declined job interviews with the artists Jeff Koons and Spencer Tunick in the hopes of returning to literature.

Though I cannot recall what specifically drew my attention to him, I knew the world-famous literary critic Harold Bloom was living and working in my home state, and I got the idea that he might give me some work as a place to begin, perhaps assisting with research for his latest book.  So I emailed him.  He replied by politely pointing out he already had local assistants and that I was some miles away.  I replied by saying I do not like to let geography limit me.  He replied with his editor's phone number.  I remember staring at the numbers on the screen in disbelief.  If I called, I was certain the editor would inquire about my background and what I had accomplished.  What would I tell him?

I decided I would try, regardless.  When I rang him, he was cheerful and asked right away whether I would like to work on a book—a guide to Tennessee William's Glass Menagerie for a series edited by Bloom.

Could I complete an entire book?  Could I complete this book and do a good job?  How could I be sure?  I had never done it before.

I said yes.  This was my first real “yes” as a writer and is the affirmation that confirmed me as one.  I finished the book—my first substantial assignment—and it led to another project that led to some more, until I could look back and see my own course—the course that I continue on today.  And these were the first important lessons I received as a writer: That one must be able to hear “No” and continue on regardless; that one must be ready to say “Yes” and to make it true.

For weeks after the visit to Mailer’s home, I continued to think about his question—“Are you a writer?”—and to wonder why he had asked.  I had overheard his conversations with the other guests, and he had not asked the same question of anyone else.  So I wrote him a letter.  I thanked him for having me at his home and confessed that I was, in fact, a writer and I had been wondering how he had known.  I also mentioned I was writing for Bloom and suggested I might write about him for Bloom’s series some day.  I can’t remember how much time passed before it arrived, but one day when I walked up my front steps I could see in my mailbox an envelope stamped faintly with a Provincetown address.  I opened it without too much excitement, expecting to find a form letter inside.  Instead, there was a typed letter signed by Mailer which answered my question and made me sure that I should always, always say yes:

      I enjoyed your letter and to answer your question as to why I suspected you were a writer, it is a developed instinct. I think a very good poker player knows when someone has a good hand and is not bluffing when they raise you and they are right most of the time. I am probably that way in spotting young writers.
      I must say, that is a most peculiar job working on guide books for Harold Bloom. I’m not sure that he likes my work much; he’s quite a bit back and forth about it in the occasional references that he makes so he may not be that excited by your suggestion that I am the next one to tackle. But if so, splendid. I think you will do a better job on this venue than anyone else he might choose.

Sunday Sentence: Demon Camp by Jennifer Percy

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

Sergeant Caleb Daniels wanted to save all the veterans from killing themselves. A machine gunner three years out of the 160th Special Operations Regiment, 3rd Battalion, he’d tried to kill himself, four or five times, but he was interrupted each time—once by his dead buddy Kip Jacoby; once by his girlfriend Krissy, whom he met at a strip club; once on a lake by his house in his canoe when the rain stopped and he saw the moon; and once when the demon called the Black Thing came into his bedroom in Savannah and said, “I will kill you if you proceed,” and Caleb said, “No you won’t, asshole, because I’m going to do it myself.”

Opening lines of Demon Camp by Jennifer Percy

Graffers R Us in Butte, Montana

Today at the blog, I thought I'd share something special about my adopted hometown.  Since we moved to Butte, Montana five years ago, my wife and I have settled into a comfortable lifestyle in what we're calling our “forever home.”  We're happy here--not only in this Craftsman house which was built in 1920, but in the town as a whole.  Though on the surface, Butte might look like the victim of urban blight, if you look past the crumbling walls of its historic buildings, you'll find a resiliency (they call it “Butte tough”) and a spirit of generosity (“Butte nice”) which is bound to carry this mining city far into the future.  My wife and I are certain that Butte has reached the end of its boomerang trajectory and is on its way back.  Butte, we tell ourselves, is the Next Big Thing.

Nance Van Winckel has also discovered Butte's beauty--in the unlikeliest of places.   My thanks to Nance for sharing her essay about graffiti and grace with Quivering Pen readers. Nance calls her hybrid work PHO-TOEMS.  Click here to see more of her work.

Graffers R Us in Butte, Montana

from "Astral Project Town"

I am not a fearless person, but I play one in Butte.  This place calls out of me the kind of chutzpah I can’t seem to manage anywhere else.  Alone, I roam past boarded-up bank buildings, the noodle palace, and the miners’ homes, the majority of which are empty now.  In their faded terracotta hues and poses of slump or demise, the structures’ haunting beauty hauls me out of bed to shoot their graffiti-covered facades in the sweet soft early-morning light.

And since apparently no one leashes dogs in Butte, when I see a snarling snout coming at me, I yell at it.  “I have pepper spray,” I tell the beast, “and I’m not afraid to use it.”  I grip the canister I keep in my pocket.  The beast backs off.  Butte makes me over into....what?  A force?  Someone who can at least put on the face of force?

The poor sad alcoholics half asleep in the doorways offer me curses or kind greetings or obscene remarks.  A morning’s walk in Butte adds up to equal amounts of each.

Roo N Boom Love More Than You says the graffiti on a crumbling tavern.  At 39 degrees on this early mid-August morning, it seems to me that is as lovely a poem as I could want.  Later when the shot is on my computer screen, I may have to add a little something to that wall.  Perhaps some faces from the old family photo album I found in a Butte junk store.  I stood in the store with tears dripping ridiculously down my cheeks as I turned those pages.  Hand-written notes on slips of yellow paper explained who each figure is, or was.  This is your great uncle Rudolph’s 1911 graduation picture.

At $14.95, the deep burgundy leather album was a steal.  (And apparently one receives a ten percent discount if one is weeping while handing over the cash.)  Gradually, over the last dozen years, I’ve been putting these figures back up around Butte.  I like them in the windows where they may gaze over their city’s streets.  Like me, they seem to appreciate some aspects of the future more than others.

roo n boom love more than you

Today I wear a heavy hooded sweatshirt.  My camera, hanging from a strap around my neck, is zipped inside the hoodie.  This cuts down on the camera’s annoying bounce as I walk.  But I realize, as I catch my reflection in a window, that I look about seven months pregnant.

People are amazingly kind to pregnant women.  They get out of my way in the crosswalk; they motion for me to go first through doorways.  Even the sad residents of the alleys where I most like to shoot don’t bother the pregnant lady.  Especially not one who’s clearly past fifty years old.

What Is the Who?

Just off Church Street, a wall speaks to me: Go Fuck Yourself, it says.  To stand and look at the wall is to recognize that there are others who aren’t like me and/or don’t like me.  From a most primal urge of “graffiari,” to scratch, someone has made a clear statement.  I AM HERE, TOO.  I LIVE AMONG YOU.  READ THIS AND REMEMBER ME.

And obviously Go Fuck Yourself is, basically, shorthand for that.

What, Inc.

The wall speaks.  It’s all about the wall.  I’m starting to get that.

The wall is what you walk beside.  It keeps what’s out OUT and what’s in IN: people, sewage, animals, merchants.  It keeps things moving in the “correct” directions, in the “correct” channels.  Pompeii was a city of many walls, an impressively large functioning underground sewage system.  One of many graffiti left after Mt. Vesuvius wiped out the town was Hello, we’re all wineskins.  As with a lot of poetry I admire, the message here may not be totally clear, and an exact paraphrase may be impossible.  The "wineskins" remark was seen frequently on walls—apparently a shared joke in 79 A.D.

In Butte I climb over crumbling chest-high walls.  I want to shoot their backsides.  All the good stuff’s on the backsides.  And as I climb I recall how, as a girl, I went over a wall I wasn’t supposed to and almost died.  It was a hot summer day in Roanoke, Virginia.  I was 5.  There’d been a big rain and the drainage trench behind my family's house was a flowing stream.  I scrambled over a wall, lowered myself into the murky water, and let myself be carried gently downstream.  When I was thoroughly drenched and happily cooled off, I stood up and walked home; I climbed back over the wall.  By early evening I was running a very high fever.  It was all the poison ivy and poison oak—weeds people had culled out of their yards and thrown into the blocks-long trench—that almost killed me.  A concentrated poisonous sewage.  I had blisters internally.

I spent a few nights in the hospital.  Respiratory problems, erratic pulse, etc.  I had defied the walls.  Bad.  I disobeyed the walls’ boundaries.  And I had been duly punished.

Butte Carriage Works

Susan Stewart in her book, Crimes of Writing, discusses the nature of “criminal art,” and graffiti’s position as both crime and art.  Graffiti, she says, “combines the remoteness, abstraction, and simultaneity characteristic of mechanical modes of production with the ethic of presence, signature, and individuality characteristic of handicrafts.”

Art, she reminds us, is usually experienced in a “closed arena of consumption.”  Museums and galleries contain the visual art.  You go to the printed page for your poetry.  So graffers call into question the whole idea of how/if art is to be/should be contained.  Graffers negate the very notion of art as commodity.  Back in 1988 when her essay first appeared, Stewart made a good case about this non-commodity idea as a reason graffiti had stayed (until then) outside mainstream art.  Nobody made money off the graffiti artist.  But in the last 30 years, this has dramatically changed.  As with other outsider arts, eventually a door somewhere is tipped open.  In the 1990’s as the art establishment began to embrace graffiti as a kind of pop art, or the hip-hop version of pop art, graffers moved indoors.  To canvases.  A part of a building graffitied by Banksy can sell for a hundred grand.

Like graffers everywhere, Butte’s graffers blur preconceptions about the ownership of space.  They convert the “privately” owned into “public” sphere.  Or, put another way, just how privately owned is it if some Boston bankers (who’ve never set foot in Butte) are, by default, the deed holders?

Summer's Whistle of Wind

Walls stand betwixt and between anyway.  A here and a there.  But the two aren’t so mutually exclusive.  After that five-year-old girl defied the wall and was poisoned by what lay beyond the protected domicile, in her poison-ivy fever-dream her dead father appeared at the foot of her bed and spoke to her.

He was, in point of fact, killed when she was two.  What happened to this child is a wondrous thing—a thing forever after associated for her with transgression, for now she, by virtue of her transgression, has somehow trespassed through one sort of wall into a realm she'd believed was forbidden to the living.  But WTF?  There she was.  Her deceased father, three years after his death, was wearing a white cummerbund.  The girl can see him and the outfit to this very day.

And to this day, linked in her little mind are the words TRANSGRESSION and TRANSFORMATION.

Some sort of message was conveyed.  From behind an unfathomable wall.

What marks I leave (albeit just “digitally”) on Butte’s walls are brief “passings,” like the cigar sign from 1923, or the faded 1951 school logo, or the 2007 graduates’ hooray for their class.  Leaving a mark, we enter the wall.  We state our biggest joys and curse our crazy foes.  We tag back to all the wall holds—between us and it.

Footnote Palace

Nance Van Winckel, originally from Roanoke, Virginia, has lived in Spokane, Washington since 1990.  Pacific Walkers, Nance's sixth book of poems, was recently released from U. of Washington Press.  A fourth collection of linked short stories, Boneland, came out with U. of Oklahoma Press in October 2013.  Nance’s other books of poetry include: No Starling (University of Washington Press, 2007), Bad Girl, with Hawk (U. of Illinois Press, 1987), The Dirt (Miami U. Press, 1994), Beside Ourselves (Miami University Press, 2003), and After A Spell (Miami U. Press, 1998), which received the Washington State Governor’s Award for Poetry.  Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Gettysburg Review, Field, Volt, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Ploughshares.  Nance's three books of short stories are Curtain Creek Farm (Persea Books, 2000), Quake (U. of Missouri Press, 1998) which received the 1998 Paterson Fiction Prize, and Limited Lifetime Warranty (U. of Missouri Press, 1994).  Her stories have appeared in The Georgia Review, Colorado Review, and AGNI.  A former editor of Willow Springs and creator of Spokane's Writers in the Community Program, she is an emerita professor in Eastern Washington University's creative writing program and currently teaches in Vermont College of Fine Arts' low-residency MFA in Writing Program.  Click here to visit her website.

Friday Freebie: Pioneer Girl by Bich Minh Nguyen

Congratulations to Celeste Young, winner of last week's Friday Freebie, The Orphan Choir by Sophie Hannah.

This week's book giveaway is the new novel by Bich Minh Nguyen, Pioneer Girl.  If you're a fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her Little House series, then Nguyen's book is probably already on your radar.  If not, then you better put it there!  But I think Pioneer Girl will have universal appeal to anyone looking for a good, satisfying read.  Here's more about the plot from the publisher's synopsis:

Jobless with a PhD, Lee Lien returns home to her Chicago suburb from grad school, only to find herself contending with issues she’s evaded since college. But when her brother disappears, he leaves behind an object from their mother’s Vietnam past that stirs up a forgotten childhood dream: a gold-leaf brooch, abandoned by an American reporter in Saigon back in 1965, that might be an heirloom belonging to Laura Ingalls Wilder. As Lee explores the tenuous facts of this connection, she unearths more than expected—a trail of clues and enticements that lead her from the dusty stacks of library archives to hilarious prairie life reenactments and ultimately to San Francisco, where her findings will transform strangers’ lives as well as her own. A dazzling literary mystery about the true origins of a time-tested classic, Pioneer Girl is also the deeply moving tale of a second-generation Vietnamese daughter, the parents she struggles to honor, the missing brother she is expected to bring home—even as her discoveries yield dramatic insights that will free her to live her own life to its full potential.

Praise for the pages: “Elegant, sharp-eyed, and very funny, Pioneer Girl is ultimately about how one finds kinship—familial, cultural, literary—that transcends the usual lexicon about identity and belonging. Navigating Vietnamese ‘immigrant guilt’ and a stalled academic career, Lee Lien finds escape in trying to solve a literary mystery which leads her deep into her own heart and history. A wonderful read!”  (Cristina García, author of King of Cuba and Dreaming in Cuban)

If you’d like a chance at winning a copy of Pioneer Girl, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on March 13, at which time I’ll draw the winning name.  I’ll announce the lucky reader on March 14.  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.

My First Time: Patrick Hicks

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 Patrick Hicks, whose debut novel, The Commandant of Lubizec, will be released later this month.  He is the author of several other books, including the poetry collections This London and Finding the Gossamer.  Later this year, his next book of poems, Adoptable, will appear with Salmon Poetry and, in early 2015, his first collection of short stories, The Collector of Names, will be published by Schaffner Press.  His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and many others.  He has been nominated seven times for the Pushcart Prize, been a finalist for the Dzanc Short Story Collection Competition, as well as the Gival Press Novel Award.  He's won the Glimmer Train Fiction Award as well as a number of grants, including ones from the Bush Artist Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  He is the Writer-in-Residence at Augustana College and also a faculty member at the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.  He lives in the Midwest with his wife and son.  Click here to visit his website.  And for those who missed the earlier Trailer Park Tuesday featuring The Commandant of Lubizec, click here to see the video.

My First Dizzy Ride

It all started when I found out my first novel was going to be published.  That alone was incredible, and mind-blowing, and it left me thunderstruck.  Like most other writers, I had allowed myself to imagine that moment when an offer—an offer!—was made on my work.  I always imagined I’d bounce around like I’d won the lottery or something, but I didn’t do that.  Instead, I just kept reading and re-reading the email from Steerforth Press because I was confused.  Was it saying what I thought it said?  Were my eyeballs working properly?  It wasn’t until a friend read it and yelled out words of congratulations that I allowed myself to believe that maybe, perhaps, possibly, I might have sold a novel.

Since then, it’s been a dizzy ride.  And I’ve enjoyed every damn second of it.

Before I go any further, I should mention one or two things.  I’ve published a number of poetry collections and I’m used to editing, giving input on book covers, promoting my work, and doing readings.  I’m used to all that stuff, so I thought I had my poop in a group.  Publishing a novel can’t be that much different.  Can it?

But it is different.  I mean, aside from the print run being exponentially higher, I’m just blown away by the marketing apparatus and the fact that I’ve got a publicist (really?), and that I’m getting invitations to read at places I’ve never read before.  Sometimes, I half-expect someone to knock on my door and tell me it’s all a big hoax.  I’m sure it’s like this for all first-time novelists.  How could it be otherwise?  We sweat over our books for years and then, voilà, it’s out there in the public.  I’m still astonished this document that's on my computer in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is going to be in real bookstores with real readers.

Given all of this, it’s hard for me to pick a “first time” to write about—there have been many firsts this year.  However, I think I’ll write about the first time I was a “Featured Author” at a national conference.  That was weird.  And wonderful.  And it’s a moment where all of my firsts coalesced, at least for a day or two.

I had never heard of the American Booksellers Association or their “Winter Institute.”  I had also never been to Seattle, where the conference was being held, so when my publisher asked if I was available in late January to meet 500 booksellers and discuss my book, I immediately said “Yes.”  It sounded like a great opportunity to promote my work, and I could also watch fishmongers huck salmon at each other in Pike Place Fish Market.  Maybe I’d be able to see the Space Needle, too.

The conference started like any other—lots of nametags, a bag o’ swag, people sitting outside a grand ballroom—but it was odd to look down and see my name, which had the word AUTHOR next to it.  In spite of the fact that I was a “Featured Author,” I had no idea what that meant or what I’d actually be doing.  I tried to act cool even though eels were swimming around inside my gut.  What should I say about my first novel?  Did I need to prepare a speech?

Fortunately, I was meeting my publisher, Chip Fleischer, for dinner that night and he would explain everything.  Just relax, I told myself.  You’re used to standing in front of people.  Whatever you’ll be doing tomorrow at this Winter Institute will be easy-peasy, lemon squeezy.

Before I met Chip, I was determined to do one thing: not be a doofus.  I mean, this man changed the whole trajectory of my writing life, and goodness knows the financial investment for publishing a novel is steep.  I wanted him to know how grateful I was for the opportunity and that I was going to bust my hump when it came time for readings and interviews.

We met in the hotel lobby.  His wife was with him and, together, they could not have been more gracious or kind.  Dinner was at a wonderful Asian restaurant and we ordered warm saké.  As we talked about the book and what prompted me to write it, I realized it was the first time I’d had dinner with a publisher.  I’ve published a number of poetry collections, but it was only while I was eating Pad Thai that I realized I’d never broken bread with someone who was printing one of my books.

It was a great evening that meandered between talk of parenting, travel, cooking, and expectations for the Winter Institute.  I also realized Chip is amazing at what he does and that my book couldn’t possibly be in better hands.

After we said goodnight, and after I returned to my hotel room, I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and said, “Congratulations for not being a doofus.”

And so, I began my first time as a featured author at a national conference the next day.  The highlight for me was sitting at a table and signing advanced reading copies of my book.  It was surreal having a poster with my photo on it next to me, and it was even more dreamlike that two of my literary heroes had given amazing blurbs for my work.  I’m still quietly shocked that Tim O’Brien and Robert Olen Butler not only read my first novel, but they liked it a lot.

I deeply enjoyed talking to booksellers and readers.  The conversation was somber because—let’s face it—I’ve written a novel about the Holocaust.  It was a hard book to write and the research I did at the former death camps in Poland was emotionally taxing on me.  This means discussion is necessarily heavy whenever I talk about The Commandant of Lubizec.  This is only appropriate, and I look forward to touring the book where I might be able to crack open conversations about Operation Reinhard.  Although the camp in my novel, Lubizec, is fictitious, it’s based upon the real life camps of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka.  I hope to remind people about what happened in these places during the war.  I want to nudge readers toward finding out more.

David Abrams once pointed out that I’m “book pregnant” and that my due date is March 25.  True enough.  It’s strange to think that this novel, which has been so much a part of my private life for the last two years, will be out in the public soon.  That experience will be something new for me—another “first time.”  And who knows, maybe that’s something for a future article....

Sunday Sentence: Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting by Kevin Powers

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

I tell her how Private Bartle says, offhand,
that war is just us
making little pieces of metal
pass through each other.

Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting by Kevin Powers

Still Reading Still Writing

The view from my writing desk

We are adrift in snow.  For the past three days, flakes have fallen steadily, without cessation, turning my driveway into an obstacle course, the streets into amusement-park rides.  Cars parked curbside are no longer recognizable as anything but half-oval bumps in a blank white landscape.  Today's newspaper headline reads "Pummeling to continue," warning us another eight inches could be on the ground here in Butte, Montana by tomorrow morning.

This is what I'd call "reflective weather."  Time to curl into a ball, have a bowl of soup, turn inward, be still within our souls.

For me, that means facing up to the fact that I've been disappointing myself lately.  It's the "same old song," as The Four Tops once told us.  I've been Not-Writing, which leads to disgust and discouragement, which leads to depression.  I'm descending a staircase slicked with butter, spiraling down into a dark basement.

And now it's time to stop on one of the landings, turn around, and start climbing that staircase back to the top.  Of course, it's all up to me to stop the madness, to find the inner fortitude, to reach down and give a sharp yank on those bootstraps (if I wore boots, that is).  I can do this, I tell myself.  Put one word after another, like hesitant toddler steps across the floor.  Just write one sentence--doesn't have to be perfect, doesn't have to be clean--just write one sentence, and then you can call it quits for the day.

Except I never stop at one sentence.  Words beget words and soon I'm tumbling in somersaults across the page--bouncing up that dark, slippery staircase.

To give my energy a little boost--more fuel in the rocket engines--I return to Still Writing by Dani Shapiro, one of the best books I read last year.  In the whole span of my life, I can count the number of books I've re-read on a single hand--ones by Flannery O'Connor, Charles Dickens, Raymond Carver, Agatha Christie.  I'm the kind of reader who is always leaning forward, never circling back.  There are too many unread books in front of me, from here to the horizon, to "waste time" by retracing my steps through a novel's pages.

I will happily make an exception for Still Writing--not just for the beauty of language, but also for its clarity of instruction to me as a writer.  When Oprah Winfrey recently devoted an entire episode of Super Soul Sunday to a conversation with Shapiro, I was a little disappointed because they never once discussed Still Writing.  I understood why Oprah wanted to focus on the earlier memoir Devotion, but I wish they'd also touched on some of the wisdom to be found in her latest book, which is subtitled "The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life."  As I wrote earlier here at the blog, "Most of the book is written in plain-spoken language, as if Shapiro was sitting across the table with a steaming mug of tea, honestly telling me what I need to hear."  Right now, I need to hear passages like this, from the book's Introduction:

      Sitting down to write isn't easy. A few years ago, a local high school asked me if a student who is interested in becoming a writer might come and observe me. Observe me! I had to decline. I couldn't imagine what the poor student would think, watching me sit, then stand, sit again, decide that I needed more coffee, go downstairs and make the coffee, come back up, sit again, get up, comb my hair, sit again, stare at the screen, check e-mail, stand up, pet the dog, sit again...
      You get the picture.
      The writing life requires courage, patience, persistence, empathy, openness, and the ability to deal with rejection. It requires the willingness to be alone with oneself. To be gentle with oneself. To look at the world without blinders on. To observe and withstand what one sees. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks. To be willing to fail—not just once, but again and again, over the course of a lifetime. "Ever tried, ever failed," Samuel Beckett once wrote. "No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." It requires what the great editor Ted Solotaroff once called endurability. It is this quality, most of all, that I think of when I look around a classroom at a group of aspiring writers. Some of them will be more gifted than others. Some of them will be driven, ambitious for success or fame, rather than by the determination to do their best possible work. But of the students I have taught, it is not necessarily the most gifted, or the ones most focused on imminent literary fame (I think of these as short sprinters), but the ones who endure, who are still writing, decades later.
      It is my hope that— whether you're a writer or not—this book will help you to discover or rediscover the qualities necessary for a creative life. We are all unsure of ourselves. Every one of us walking the planet wonders, secretly, if we are getting it wrong. We stumble along. We love and we lose. At times, we find unexpected strength, and at other times, we succumb to our fears. We are impatient. We want to know what's around the corner, and the writing life won't offer us this. It forces us into the here and now. There is only this moment, when we put pen to page....
      The page is your mirror. What happens inside you is reflected back. You come face-to-face with your own resistance, lack of balance, self-loathing, and insatiable ego— and also with your singular vision, guts, and fortitude. No matter what you've achieved the day before, you begin each day at the bottom of the mountain. Isn't this true for most of us? A surgeon about to perform a difficult operation is at the bottom of the mountain. A lawyer delivering a closing argument. An actor waiting in the wings. A teacher on the first day of school. Sometimes we may think that we're in charge, or that we have things figured out. Life is usually right there, though, ready to knock us over when we get too sure of ourselves. Fortunately, if we have learned the lessons that years of practice have taught us, when this happens, we endure. We fail better. We sit up, dust ourselves off, and begin again.

And so I, too, will begin again. The snow outside the window has turned my world into a blank slate. I'm ready to start filling it with words.