The Big Christmas Read

It happens every year, as predictable as bad drivers after the season's first snow, dust on ornaments brought up from the basement, and tears wrung by Rankin-Bass animated specials: I feel compelled to set aside time for a Christmas-themed book.

Beautiful, but blech

By this point in the calendar, my reading schedule is in a state of Panicked Scramble as I frantically try to finish books I've already started so they can be included in the tally for that year's reading logs (see 2012's "My Year in Reading" post, for example).  But in the midst of all that page-turning and Kindle button-pushing, I always make time for a special year-end Christmas-y book.  Usually, it's an Agatha Christie holiday mystery; last year, I explored Anne Perry's Christmas novels for the first time; and one year, I read a beautifully-illustrated, poorly-written religious-tract-in-the-guise-of-a-novel called The Romance of a Christmas Card by Kate Douglas Wiggin.

This year, I didn't choose one book.  I picked out four.  It's as ambitious and most likely as knuckle-headed a move as Clark Griswold's Christmas light display in Christmas Vacation.  We all know how that ended.

Last week, I started Christmas at High Rising by Angela Thirkell, A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition by Lee Mendelson, The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries edited by Otto Penzler, and London Snow by Paul Theroux. Whether or not I blow a fuse and fry myself with this reading plan remains to be seen.  For now, I'm getting in the Christmas spirit, dammit--even if it kills me.

Three of the books have already gone down quickly.  With the word "Big" in one of the titles, you can probably guess which one I'm still fa-la-la'ing my way through.  I may or may not finish Mr. Penzler's 654-page doorstopper by the time I'm drinking New Year's champagne, but I'm giving it my best shot.

~

Christmas at High Rising by Angela Thirkell (Virago)

At the beginning of the month, I was in the midst of culling my home library--a massive project which involved slimming my 8,000-plus volumes by at least two or three hundred titles, replacing some existing titles with Kindle versions or just plain getting rid of some books I know I'll never ever read (harder than it sounds--trust me, there were plenty of Sophie's Choice moments)--when I stumbled across a set of Barbara Pym novels which a friend had given me nearly a decade ago, making me swear I would read at least one of them because, he thought, they would be my cup of tea.  I assured him I would.

I have since broken that vow by never cracking open a single Pym (not through lack of interest but rather through my inability to shoehorn Excellent Women into an already-tight reading schedule).  I knew I'd keep all the Pyms, but I wanted to see if they were available on Kindle so I could free up some shelf space.

Well, yes, I found the electronic versions, but they weren't at the price level I'd set, so I opted to keep the paperbacks in the collection.  Before I left that Amazon page, however, my eye was caught (as the Amazon elves had hoped) by the "You Might Also Like...." book covers below.  There I found a neatly-illustrated cover design of a woman skating on a pond, a splay-legged boy following behind, snow falling, a rabbit dashing away, and--most important--the word "Christmas" in the title.  Click.

I'd heard of Angela Thirkell before, but only on the farthest periphery of my attention span.  A contemporary of Pym's, she was most famous for her 1933 comic novel High Rising, which is set in the fictional English county of Barsetshire.  Before Thirkell died in 1961, she wrote nearly thirty Barsetshire novels which, if Christmas at High Rising is any indication, were light and airy as butter scones.  It's full of sentences like this one about a woman suddenly learning her ex-lover was in the next room: "Amelia still could not hear William Hay's name without feeling that she was rather drunk in the middle of a display of fireworks."

Frankly, I was a little disappointed with Christmas at High Rising--not because the writing isn't any good (it's mostly excellent, and severely funny in patches), but because there was very little Christmas within its pages.  Oh, the eight stories in the collection are all fine and dandy, but only one of them is unmistakably set during the Yuletide season: "Christmas at Mulberry Lodge," which has a nasty little streak running through it (the nature of which I can't divulge without giving too much away).

Still, I'm glad I discovered Angela Thirkell (if nothing else, she stokes my fire to really actually truly sit down with Barbara Pym someday soon).  In fact, I enjoyed Thirkell's writing so much, I went in search of her other novel High Rising.  I found a copy on Abe Books and to my delight, I saw that it definitely takes place during Christmastime.  To my crushing disappointment, however, the book won't arrive until December 30.  Oh well, there's always next year's Big Christmas Read.

~

A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition by Lee Mendelson (It! Books)

The lights came up in the screening room and the two television network executives looked at each other, then turned to the show's producer.

"Well, you gave it a good shot," said one.

"It seems a little flat...a little slow," said the other.

The producer was crushed.  So much hard work had gone into this half-hour animated special.

"Well," said the first TV executive, "we will, of course, air it next week, but I'm afraid we won't be ordering any more.  We're sorry; and believe me, we're big Peanuts fans.  But maybe it's better suited to the comic page."

History, of course, has proved those two network suits to be lunkheads.  A Charlie Brown Christmas had the #2 spot in the ratings when it was first shown on December 9, 1965 (just behind Bonanza) and in the forty-eight years since then it has been a holiday staple as certain and dependable as that can-shaped quivering tube of cranberry sauce on the Christmas dinner table.

For those of us who came of age soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the holiday season doesn't officially get underway until Charlie Brown's tree droops from the weight of its single red ornament.  Just a few bars of Vince Guaraldi's jazzy score can get us soggy with nostalgia faster than the sight of Andy Williams in a sweater.

In this book, the show's executive producer, Lee Mendelson, goes behind the scenes of the animated cels to give us a warm-hearted history of 30 television minutes which proved it is possible to be weird and low-key and still be wildly successful.  We take A Charlie Brown Christmas for granted these days, but when it first aired in the mid-60s, it was something very unique and different. Jazz during a cartoon?  Using child actors for kids' voices instead of adult actors?  Reciting an entire passage from the Bible on prime-time TV?  It was mold-breaking, bubble-bursting stuff back then.

Mendelson's book (which was first published in 2000) gives us the entire script, plus personal stories about Charles M. Schulz, animator and director Bill Melendez, jazz musician Vince Guaraldi, and a few of the kids behind the voices (they grew up to be schoolteachers and real estate agents).

The show is all about depression and the commercialization of the holiday--let us not forget the glum mood which settles over everything like a wet blanket--but it also has the joy of a dancing beagle, catching snowflakes on the tongue, and the rebirth of a skinny, neglected tree into a bright, twinkling Tannenbaum.  And that's what Christmas is all about.

~

The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries edited by Otto Penzler (Black Lizard/Vintage Crime)

Murder never takes a day off.  It certainly doesn't enjoy a holiday during the Christmas season, as the sixty stories and novellas in this volume can attest.  As Otto Penzler notes in his introduction:

While most of us are busy shopping for gifts for those we love, or decorating a home and putting up a Christmas tree and hanging mistletoe, and generally enjoying the extra warmth of hellos from friends and shopkeepers...unsympathetic souls will find solace in the fact that crime, violence, and even murder continue to flourish at what should be a time of peace, joy, and love.

I blame Mr. Penzler and his Big Book for jarring and jolting my well-laid holiday reading plans all out of whack.  I'd already started thinking about the Agatha Christie book I'd read to cap off the year and in my mind I was all set.  But then, while I was working as a Bookseller for a Day during Indies First at Fact and Fiction Books a few weeks ago, I spotted the cover of The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries.  "Kill me now," I said softly.

It was all over in an instant.  The book was paid for, bagged, and I was on my way to tearing up my holiday biblio-plans.

(One interesting note: the cover design is a detail from the February 1938 issue of The Country Home and in the original--which you can see here--the distressed damsel hurrying away from the car is not holding a revolver.)

I'm only one-fifth of the way through the anthology, but I've enjoyed what I read so far, starting with Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot investigating a jewel theft in "The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding."  The book is full of bodies in the snow, drunk (and murderous) Santas, poisoned mince pies and a general lack of goodwill toward men.  There's also a liberal dash of good humor, as supplied by writers like John Mortimer (creator of Rumpole of the Bailey), Damon Runyon, Donald E. Westlake, and Ellery Queen, whose Christmas festivities are interrupted by the arrival of a lawyer seeking help:

December the twenty-third is ordinarily not a good time to seek the Queens.  Inspector Richard Queen like his Christmas old-fashioned; his turkey stuffing, for instance, calls for twenty-two hours of over-all preparation and some of its ingredients are not readily found at the corner grocer's.  And Ellery is a frustrated gift-wrapper.  For a month before Christmas he turns his sleuthing genius to tracking down unusual wrapping papers, fine ribbons, and artistic stickers; and he spends the last two days creating beauty.

The Queens cannot, of course, resist a puzzle.  And so it is that they find themselves in the middle of a department store crowded with last-minute shoppers, trying to figure out how a priceless doll was stolen from a heavily-guarded glass case.  I had great fun trying to figure it out (I couldn't), as I'm sure I will sleuthing the remaining mysteries in the book--stories by the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John D. MacDonald, Bradford Morrow, Ed McBain, Sara Paretsky, Mary Higgins Clark, Ngaio Marsh, Rex Stout, and O. Henry (not "The Gift of the Magi").

The Big Book is a wonderful tribute to Christmas literature and, while some of the stories might be a little redundant in terms of crimes and settings, there's no mistaking the publisher's devotion to the season.  How into Christmas are they?  Take a look at the Black Lizard logo:

~

London Snow by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin)

Shortly after going through the "P" section of my library (and renewing my vows with Ms. Pym), I came to the Ts, and there, sandwiched between The Mosquito Coast and Millroy the Magician, I saw a slender red spine.  London Snow.  I opened to the first of the book's 50 pages and started to read:

On this winter afternoon the bright window of the sweet-shop crackled with colour--the red ribbons on a pyramid of chocolate boxes, trays of glazed fruit, marzipan wrapped in crisp green cellophane, and bins of humbugs that shone with an enamelling of sugar.  In the centre of the window was a Christmas tree with silver needles, and decorated with baubles of mint lumps and wine gums.  It had been raining since morning, but the day had turned cold and the raindrops had frozen on the shop window, coating it with crystal pebbles that crazed the light and made it merrier.

Oh my, my, what exquisite writing.  Once again, I shifted course and added another book to the Big Christmas Read (but hey, it's only 50 pages).  I swallowed the book as quick as I would a mouthful of wine gums (which, I've just learned, are basically Swedish fish candies).  When I went to my book log to add this title to the 2013 list, I was shocked to discover this was the first Paul Theroux book I'd ever read.  How could that be?  Somehow, he'd lived all these years on my shelves, untouched.  I'm glad events conspired to bring us together this Christmas.

Out of all the books on my list, London Snow epitomizes the true spirit of the season.  Its story is simple: a candy shop owner and her two adopted orphans are threatened with eviction by a nasty-wasty landlord (he first shows up at the shop with "the wet wool of his shaggy coat dripping" and a face that was "all red lumps and bristles").  The ill-tempered bear of a man storms out, the candy-store kin ponder their future, and all looks bleak.  But then things appear to take a turn for the brighter when the landlord disappears during a heavy blizzard which strikes London the next day.  The mother, Mrs. Mutterance with a heart as sweet as her wares, decides they must go out in search of Mr. Snyder, much to the dismay of her adopted children Wallace and Amy.

      "But we don't like him," protested Wallace.
      "We have to like him," said Mrs. Mutterance.
      "Why, Ma?"
      "Because it's Christmas.  If we don't find him, we'll lose Christmas."

How you read that sentiment will depend on whether you're a Tiny Tim or an unreformed Scrooge.  Either way, there's no denying this short book is long on heart.  Though the ending is rather predictable (what Christmas story isn't complete without spiritual reformation?), I savored every line Theroux set down.  Like this description of London just after the storm:

      It was snow.
      It clung thickly to the rooftops where it was nearly blue.  It was mounded like white eyebrows above the windows of the houses, and it had blown against the brick walls and stuck, making beards hang from the sills.  It was piled against the doors and made caps on the tops of lamp-posts.  Each spike on the churchyard fence was encased in a fluffy sheath, and so far the only marks in the white street--what a beautiful street it seemed!--were the milkman's footprints.

Sentences like those are gifts to all of us.  I couldn't have asked for anything better under my tree this year.

Trailer Park Tuesday: Man Alive! by Mary Kay Zuravleff

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

A quarter.  A parking meter.  A bolt of lightning.  A changed life.  That's the premise of Mary Kay Zuravleff's third novel, Man Alive!.  While feeding money into a parking meter, pediatric psychologist Dr. Owen Lerner is struck by, as they say, a bolt out of the blue.  He survives the jolt of heavenly electricity but he's a changed man.  Now all he wants to do is barbecue--much to the consternation of his family.  Here's what award-winning novelist Alice McDermott says about the book: “A lightning bolt to a parking meter certainly packs a punch, but so does every sentence and scene of this exuberant novel.  Mary Kay Zuravleff writes so well—with such wit and compassion and wry intelligence—that she can make the daily, domestic life that follows Owen Lerner’s encounter with the transcendent as electrifying as the lightning strike itself.  A suburban marriage, a young romance, gymnastics, brain chemistry, backyard barbecue, wherever Zuravleff aims her keen eye, something transformative happens, the way a thunderbolt turns sand to glass.  Man Alive! is vividly alive and breathing.”  To be honest, I hadn't even heard of the book before I saw the trailer.  The video, which bubbles along with a Bobby McFerrin-esque jazz scat, is cryptic and pretty downright full of WTF?! images.  Sizzling bacon, a bar graph of quarters, a man in shorts and sandals spinning through space?  Totally WTF.  But that's what makes it effective as a book trailer; I was so puzzled by what I saw, that I zipped right over to Iconoclast Books' website and did a search for the title.  Ah!  Now it started to make sense.  When I later saw a video of Zuravleff giving a reading at Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC, the hook was set even deeper.  I might just have to give Man Alive! a spin.  Not only that, but now I have a hankering for some grilled bacon.

My First Time: Kelly Luce

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 Kelly Luce, author Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, available now from the publisher, A Strange Object.  Luce grew up in Brookfield, Illinois. After graduating from Northwestern University with a degree in cognitive science, she moved to Japan, where she lived and worked for three years. Her work has been recognized by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale Foundation, the Kerouac Project, and Jentel Arts, and has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, and other magazines. She lives in Santa Cruz, California, and Austin, Texas, where she is a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas and fiction editor of Bat City Review.  Click here to visit her website.

My First Residency

In the fall of 2008, after a season of failed applications to artist colonies, I got a phone call.  It was a woman from the MacDowell Colony (the only place where I’d been waitlisted), offering me a residency from mid-December to mid-January.

I was fine spending Christmas and New Year’s away from family.  I would have missed my own wedding for a month at MacDowell.  Besides, as a native Midwesterner living in California, I missed snow over the holidays. I looked forward to a real winter.

Anxiety set in somewhere between the airport in Manchester, New Hampshire and my arrival at Colony Hall.  Did I have anything interesting to say to legit artists?  Wasn’t it weird to go to a prestigious residency when I’d barely published?  I worried that people would see through me, the Muggle who’d lucked into a spot at Hogwarts.

The storm hit my second night.  I was in my studio, a tiny stone cottage set deep in the blackness of the woods.  Dinner had passed in a blur of lively conversation and laughter and I was high from the energy of the land and the other residents.  The power went out around ten.  I lit a few candles, delighting in the way the warm light flickered off the walls, where wooden plaques (“tombstones”) hung, listing the name of every artist to occupy the studio since 1931.  I started writing my novel—really writing it, not just making notes—that night.

As I sat with my laptop in front of a hot, crackling fire I’d built myself, cozy and full of hope for the coming weeks, I didn’t really want the power to come back on.

By the time the fire died down and it started to get cold in the studio, it was the middle of the night.  I grabbed my flashlight, snapped ice grips onto my boots, and scampered down the path to the house where my bedroom was.  It was freezing in there.  I found extra wool blankets in the closet, threw them on the single bed, and fell asleep in my clothes.

I woke at dawn to what sounded like gunshots.  A few pistol pops, then the crack of a shotgun, followed by a thud that shook the building.  There was a thin layer of ice on the inside of the window and a thicker one outside, making it impossible to see what was going on.  My breath was visible.

“Warzone” is maybe too melodramatic a descriptor for what it looked like outside, but let’s just say that shit was a mess.  The arboreal carnage was total.  Some of the downed branches were big enough to carve into benches.  I made my way to Colony Hall, where the kitchen was partially powered, thanks to a small generator.  One of the cooks was making hot breakfast.  We later found out how incredible the presence of any of the staff was that morning: the road to town was impassable by car, with more ice-laden branches crashing down, taking power lines with them, every minute.  This woman had driven as far as possible and come the rest of the way on foot so that we didn’t miss our hot breakfast.

One by one, the other residents burst through the door of the dining room, each with a story of a near-death on their journey through the woods.

“I can’t believe I risked this just for coffee,” someone said.

Not everyone made it to breakfast that morning.  A couple people didn’t risk the trek to Colony Hall; a fallen tree had trapped one writer in her studio.  Luckily, no one was hurt.  The only casualty was Alexandra’s borrowed car, smushed under the six-foot arm of an oak that had survived a hundred New Hampshire winters.

The world’s new look was both shocking and insanely beautiful.  Ice encased every tree, rock, and blade of grass.  The birches along the edge of the colony’s central meadow bent over completely under the weight of their ice-coats (“Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair / Before them over their heads to dry in the sun…”  Robert Frost’s “Birches” became the official poem of that residency.)  Every few minutes we heard the savage crack of a treetop snapping off, but during the moments in between, frozen twigs clicked and tinkled, occasionally falling prettily to the earth.

Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

Photo by Corrie Francis Parks

Twenty-five artists moved into Colony Hall, the only place with heat and (limited) power.  We were brought cardboard and blankets as makeshift beds; we fought over sockets in the power strip connected to the generator.  Out in the studios, the cold froze paints and cracked sculptures-in-progress.  When the road to town was cleared of debris after a couple of days, a lot of the visual artists left.  When the power still hadn’t returned on Day 4, there was another exodus.

In the end, we were seven.

Oh, the meals.  The kitchen staff went all-out, spending as much time preparing dinner for seven as they had for twenty-five.  Rack of lamb.  Souffles.  Personalized cakes for dessert.  And they often ate with us, as did the maintenance crew and the people who ran the office.  Getting to know the staff, many of whom could have stayed in town with their families and their electricity, remains for me one the best things to come out of The Great Ice.

I didn’t get as much work done as I’d planned, of course.  I’m sure no one did.  During the first couple of days especially, many artists (myself included) felt frustration and panic over “wasted” time.  But in hindsight, among those who stayed, that waste is impossible to identify.  We didn’t necessarily do what we’d expected to do, but who’s to say all the gorgeous photography, ice-poetry, random reading, extra silence, extra noise, didn’t turn out to be more productive than our original plans?

I learned something about myself, for example: in order to write, I need silence and a lack of distractions even more than I need warmth.  During those disconnected days, I worked mostly in my studio despite the lack of heat, typing in gloves with the fingertips cut off.  When my laptop battery ran out I wrote in a notebook.  The studio was small enough that a good fire could raise the temperature to just-tolerable (my personal best was 56 degrees).  I remember a sense of heightened awareness at working in such adventurous conditions.  The pages I wrote that week have remained, years later, among my favorite in the book.  They’re pages born of fire and ice.

~

It had been a week since the lights went out.  Most of Peterborough proper was back online, but MacDowell was still without power.  A hotel in town offered us two of their rooms for the afternoon so we could shower in hot water.  While one person used the bathroom, the rest of us sat on the bed watching TV and listening to the delighted whoops of the one getting clean.

Of course, the power eventually came back on.  We’d gone eight days without it and had gotten used to our new work routines (we were four writers, a composer, an animator, and a visual artist).  To return to the regular program and to share the territory of our brief and relatively inconsequential suffering with new people felt strange.

When new residents, many who’d delayed their trips due to the storm, started arriving, they listened to our stories with horror, relieved at having been spared such discomfort and disruption.  But among those of us who stayed lived a secret gratitude that we’d been there for it.


(On a side note, Corrie Francis Parks, the talented artist who made the book trailer for Kelly Luce's debut story collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, was one of the seven artists who stayed through the storm.  As Kelly told me in an email: “She's become a dear friend and I'm pretty sure that without the ice storm, there'd be no trailer.”  The video was featured here at The Quivering Pen on a recent Trailer Park Tuesday.)

Author photo by Russell O. Bush

A Charming, Chattering, Completely Unreliable Narrator: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is like that hypertensive friend you meet for coffee and you realize, after a caffeinated hour, that you've never gotten a word in edgewise, but that doesn't really matter because you've been held in thrall by the conversation which has bounded along on a series of breathless loop-de-loops.

As this funny, quirky novel begins, narrator Rosemary Cooke admits she’s always been a “great talker.”  As a child she chatters like a chimp in a zoo and really gets under the skin of her parents--a father who’s “a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, fly-fishing atheist from Indianapolis” and a mother who has retreated into near catatonic madness.  Could they be driven to drink and insanity by Rosemary's tongue-flapping, teeth-clicking babble?

"There were occasions on which I had to be stopped," Rosemary tells us in the book's prologue:

      When you think of two things to say, pick your favorite and only say that, my mother suggested once, as a tip to polite social behavior, and the rule was later modified to one in three. My father would come to my bedroom door each night to wish me happy dreams and I would speak without taking a breath, trying desperately to keep him in my room with only my voice. I would see his hand on the doorknob, the door beginning to swing shut. I have something to say! I'd tell him, and the door would stop midway.
      Start in the middle then, he'd answer, a shadow with the hall light behind him, and tired in the evenings the way grown-ups are. The light would reflect in my bedroom window like a star you could wish on.
      Skip the beginning. Start in the middle.

And that's exactly what Fowler does as well, opening the book "in the middle" when Rosemary is a twenty-two-year-old, "meandering" through her fifth year at the University of California, Davis.  There's an unforgettable scene in the school's cafeteria, and boom! we're off and running through the rest of Rosemary's story.

This is a book about looking back while desperately trying to move forward.  Along the way, the classic nature vs. nurture argument is put in the petri dish and closely examined, both by the narrator and her creator.

As she's grown older, Rosemary has retreated into silence after her family experienced a traumatic upheaval.  Two of her siblings go missing (at separate times) and the majority of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is about Rosemary’s quest to learn what happened to them.  I won’t say much more because surprises abound in these pages and I don’t want to have angry readers come throw rocks at my house because I’ve spoiled things.  Let’s just say, things aren’t always what they appear to be.

At one point, Rosemary says, “There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened.”  There’s a lot of mist in this book--and Rosemary is a very unreliable narrator guiding us on our journey.  But, hey, unreliable narrators are fun, right?  None were ever as fun as Rosemary Cooke.

What’s most delightful and addictive about We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is what we like to call the “voice” of the novel.  It’s clever, funny and pretty damned poignant in places.  And it never stops chattering in our ear.

A shorter version of this review previously appeared at Book Riot.

Sunday Sentence: "Between Ship and Ice" by Chelsey Johnson

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

Synneva touched the handle of the door, ready to slam it shut.  But the bear did not move.  And so neither did she.  Synneva had never been so aware of the body she lived in: its secret knowledge, each tensed muscle, the caged rich organs, the warmth she contained and the warmth she must give off.  Alone in the doorway between ship and ice, she stood and held the bear's gaze.  Silky shivers rippled over her, like a cold dress pulled down over her shoulders again and again.

Last lines of "Between Ship and Ice" by Chelsey Johnson, One Story*, Issue 181

*A Sincere (Unpaid) Endorsement: A subscription to One Story makes a great Christmas gift--to yourself or for that special lit-lover in your life.  Through December, they're running a special: all subscriptions are $15.  Use promo code GIVE13 at checkout.

Opening With the Penis, Stealing Time, and Other Tips for Writers: an interview with Jessica Anya Blau

Interview by Jane Delury

My friend Jessica Anya Blau keeps her head down and the words flowing. Her hard work has paid off. She’s had three books come out in the last six years, and has published more than 30 short stories. Her most recent novel, The Wonder Bread Summer, was featured on summer reading lists by CNN, Oprah, NPR, and Vanity Fair. Nick Hornby gave it a rave review in The Believer. The book was recently optioned by Hollywood. Recently, when the two of us were writing together in her dining room in a hundred-year-old house in Baltimore, I asked Jessica a few questions about writing, motherhood, and being productive.

On page one of The Wonder Bread Summer, there is a “bare dick, which was… thick as a pair of tube socks.” I think another writer would have waited until…page four? Why does the book open there?

I wasn’t thinking about the book opening with a penis or not. I wanted it to open with an intense moment of crisis. And that moment is when he pulls out his penis. But it didn’t occur to me not to open there because there’s a penis. I was writing with some friends in a café a few weeks back--I think you were there--and I pointed out that a woman who works in our local bookstore took offense to the page one penis. And the other writers at the table all pointed out other books that have penises on the first page. They came up with Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York....I can’t think of the rest, but there were several of them. I’m not comparing myself at all to those writers, but I do think that an exposed penis adds an element of tension and clearly I’m not the first person to use that element of tension.

It’s a point of tension because Allie, the woman in The Wonder Bread Summer who’s looking at the penis, doesn’t want to see it. Plus, the penis belongs to her boss, Jonas. When Allie then takes Jonas’s drugs and hits the road is she running away or claiming some kind of power?

That’s a good question. Those aren’t the kinds of questions I ask myself when I’m writing. When I’m writing I’m simply writing down what I see in the movie running in my head. Once it’s done, I can look back and figure out what I’m doing. I think that through the act of running away she is claiming power. The guy hasn’t paid her for her work. He cornered her in a fitting room. He’s pulled out his penis. She’s empowered herself by running off. But in taking his bag of drugs, she’s also taking some of his power. His power doesn’t necessarily come from his dick. It comes from his store, his cocaine in the stockroom. She runs away with some of his power and empowers herself.

This incident in the book is based on something that happened to you when you were younger. Do you think you were claiming some kind of power over the incident when you wrote that scene with Allie?

I think the act of detaching oneself from one’s stories is a way of taking control of them. You lessen the hold they have over you. To be a writer is to be the director and producer of the narrative and if that narrative is taken from one’s childhood or one’s life in general, then to write about it is to take control of it. To own it. So, yes, my boss pulled out his dick and started masturbating when I was working for him in a dress shop when I was 20. It may have been shocking and a little terrifying then. But now it belongs to me, and I make of it what I want. What I wanted to make of it was an entire novel of a 20-year-old girl who deals with that and then takes over and comes out on top in the end.

You are a great mother but you write about mothers who are hands off to the point of neglect. Could you talk about that?

I think most of the mothers in my writing are based more on my experience of my own mother than on my experience of mothering. I love my mother. She’s a wonderful person--so smart and interesting. But she wasn’t really concerned with mothering when my brother and sister and I were growing up. We were sort of left to fend for ourselves. And when I was around 7 she officially “quit” being a housewife. She sat my sister and me down and said, “I quit.” That was that. She no longer cleaned house, got us up for school, packed lunch, drove us around, etc.

Since that’s not your approach, how have you managed to respond to the demands of your writing on top of the needs of your kids?

Well my entire writing life has happened concurrently with having children. When my girls were small, I wrote while they napped. And then when they stopped napping, I put them in morning nursery school so I’d have two or three mornings a week when I could write for two hours. When they started elementary school, I could write during school hours. I used to only write short stories. And then, as I had longer periods of time to work, I wrote longer works. Now I mostly write novels. I could, I suppose, have hired someone to take care of my kids, although I didn’t always have the money for that. Also, I wanted to be the one taking care of them. I like mothering—it’s fun and the girls crack me up.

And next year your youngest heads to college, so there’s no imagining how much you’ll get done. What’s next?

I’m writing a kids’ novel that might be a complete and total piece of shit, but I’m finishing it anyway and I’m praying that’s actually good.

Don’t be such a girl.

Ha! Yeah, I know. Most male writers I know don’t really doubt themselves or their work. But I think that’s all a bunch of bluster. They’re probably just as quivering and insecure as I am, but they’re too afraid to admit it. It’s a front. Women are braver in some ways. We expose our vulnerabilities to each other and then we connect through them and form webs of support. We make each other stronger. To isolate oneself with hubris and bombastic superiority is to set off on a very rough and lonely sea. I find much more strength through my connections with other people than through some false confidence I might try to pull off. As a mother, though, I’m pretty confident. It feels very natural to me and I rarely doubt myself there. Although if you interviewed my kids maybe they’d say I’m a total freakcase, nutball, lunatic and all I’ve done is given them decades worth of fodder for their own novels.

Last question. When we write at your house, you sit on an exercise ball. Why are you on that thing?

Well, hell, it’s better than sitting flat on my ass in a chair all day. I bounce when I’m thinking, and I move around a lot. I’m not very still: I get up and walk around, I make tea, I go to yoga classes. Also, the shifting, rolling fitness ball keeps me more alert.

I’ve exposed the secret to your productivity. That and the bar of dark chocolate.

Yes, dark chocolate is good. Chocolate, friends and family, loads and loads of laughter. Oh, and listening to music and dancing. There aren’t too many things in life that are better than singing really loudly while dancing.


Jane Delury’s fiction appears in publications including Narrative, The Southern Review, and The Yale Review.  She’s on the faculty of the MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts at the University of Baltimore.

Friday Freebie: N0S4A2 by Joe Hill

Congratulations to Jane Rainey, winner of last week's Friday Freebie prize package: The Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan, The Death of Bees by Lisa O'Donnell and Someone Else's Love Story by Joshilyn Jackson.

This week's book giveaway is Joe Hill's latest novel, N0S4A2 (or "Nosferatu," if you say it aloud).  I have a nice paperback copy to put in the hands of one very lucky reader.  And if you've already read the novel, this will make a nice gift to give that twisted individual on your Christmas list.  Since N0S4A2 takes place in a scary hell called Christmasland, they'll want to start reading it right away while the smoke from the Yule log is still hanging in the air.  The updated design of the paperback edition even has some blood-spattered Christmas tree branches and a broken gingerbread man to give you a hint of what's inside.  For what it's worth, I love the subtle menace of the novel's opening line: Nurse Thornton dropped into the long-term-care ward a little before eight with a hot bag of blood for Charlie Manx.  The syntax is is all casual and homey until you get to that "hot bag of blood" and the axe-chopping sound of that last word, "Manx."  That sentence is a harbinger of good, scary things to come.  As a sort of added stocking stuffer treat, the pages inside are decorated with some very cool illustrations by Hill's Locke and Key collaborator Gabriel Rodriguez.  Because nothing says "Merry Christmas" quite like a grinning Santa who looks like a corpse.

For those of you who missed the earlier Trailer Park Tuesday here at The Quivering Pen, you can click here to check out the book's video.  As Hill says in that trailer:

"Christmasland is a place where the fun never stops; every morning is Christmas morning and every night is Christmas Eve....[It's] a place that any child would like to spend the rest of their days in. When you get to it, you never want to leave--which is a good thing because once Charlie brings you to Christmasland, you never do leave." That would be Charlie Manx who drives around in a 1938 Rolls Royce that runs on souls, not gasoline. Hill's novel brings together two fascinating characters: the creepy Charlie, and a young girl named Victoria who has a gift for finding lost things. One day, Vic finds herself in the back seat of Charlie's car. And that's when the nail-biting fun really begins.

The whole package is designed to give you the willies and add a chill to your holiday festivities.  It's highly recommended, even if you don't win the Friday Freebie contest.

If you’d like a chance at winning N0S4A2, 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 Dec. 12, at which time I’ll draw the winning name.  I’ll announce the lucky reader on Dec. 13.  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.

Resurrecting a Minor Writer: BUtterfield 8 and The New York Stories by John O'Hara

BUtterfield 8 and The New York Stories
by John O'Hara
Review by Henry Gonshak

(Note: This review contains several plot spoilers.)

Does anyone read John O’Hara anymore? From the Great Depression in the 1930s to past the midpoint of the 20th century, O’Hara was one of the most popular writers in America, though his work was generally more appreciated by readers than critics. A short story writer as well as a novelist, O’Hara published more than two hundred stories in The New Yorker, which makes him the most widely published author in the history of the magazine. However, today O’Hara has lost much of his audience and his critical reputation has waned. While academic Harold Bloom included O’Hara’s first and best novel, Appointment in Samarra (1934), as part of “the Western canon” in Bloom’s book of the same name, Wright State University English Professor Martin Kich, for example, has carped, “O’Hara’s achievements have been so long and thoroughly denigrated that he is now considered a novelist of the second, or even the third, rank.”

But the publishers of Penguin Classics have concluded that the time is ripe for an O’Hara revival, and this year they’ve reprinted many of O’Hara’s books for their prestigious series. After reading two of them, BUtterfield 8 and The New York Stories, my conclusion is similar to Kich’s: in our era O’Hara comes across as a dated and minor writer who should not be classed with such brilliant contemporaries as Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner. While O’Hara does a decent job at depicting the manners and lifestyles of America in the last century, particularly its upper classes, he fails at the most important responsibilities of any fiction writer: creating engaging characters and a compelling, well-plotted story.

O’Hara was born in 1905 in the mid-sized town of Pottsville, Pennsylvania. He attended a ritzy local prep school, but when his father died in 1924 the family became too poor to enroll O’Hara in the college he yearned to attend, Yale–a loss that rankled the writer for the rest of his life, inspiring a sense of grievance reflected in his writings, which often depict frustrated social climbers. In his wonderful memoir about the magazine, Here at the New Yorker, Brendan Gill writes, “People used to make fun of the fact that O’Hara wanted so desperately to have gone to Yale, but it was never a joke to O’Hara. It seemed...that there wasn’t anything he didn’t know about in regard to college and prep school manners.” All his life, O’Hara longed in vain for an honorary degree from Yale.

Perhaps one reason critics abused O’Hara, and Yale refused him an honorary degree, is that, by all accounts, he was an incredibly unpleasant man. According to the contemporary writer Fran Lebowitz, who praises O’Hara as “the real F. Scott Fitzgerald,” the reason the author is underrated is “because every single person who knew him hated him.” O’Hara’s egomania is even reflected in the words he demanded be carved on his tombstone: “Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well.” Gill comments, “From the far side of the grave, he remains self-defensive and overbearing. Better than anyone else? Not merely better than any other writer of fiction but better than any dramatist, any poet, any biographer, any historian? It is an astonishing claim.”

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The protagonist of BUtterfield 8 is Gloria Wandrous, an 18-year-old, wealthy, New York society girl whose last name seems a play on “wondrous,” which Gloria certainly is, with her beauty and, particularly, irresistible charm to men of all ages. Gloria is notably promiscuous--having had numerous affairs with usually older married men, gotten three abortions, aroused any number of smitten lesbians (whose favors she consistently refuses), and once at a party even engaged in group sex with her then-boyfriend, another woman and her lover, while her fellow party-goers looked on. Although the novel was published in 1932 during the Great Depression, which is also its setting, Gloria seems more a product of the preceding decade, the raucous “Jazz Age” of the 1920s, in which young women known as “flappers” sported bobbed hair and short skirts, and engaged in “free love,” which sharply distinguished them from their prudish sisters from the Victorian and Edwardian eras. In the novel’s great opening scene, Gloria awakes one morning alone in the posh Manhattan apartment of a rich, married businessman, Weston Liggett, whom she’d slept with the night before while his wife was conveniently absent. Because Liggett had torn Gloria’s dress and stockings while in the throes of primal passion, the young woman has nothing to wear, so she cavalierly rifles through the clothes closets of Liggett’s wife, draping herself in one of Mrs. Liggett’s elegant fur coats, which causes Liggett to spend much of the novel desperately trying to retrieve his wife’s garment. BUtterfield 8 was a bestseller when it first appeared, and no doubt Gloria’s unbridled sexuality accounted for much of the book’s appeal. But today, when female sexuality is much less demonized, Gloria’s sexual escapades probably strike most readers as considerably less risque than when the book was first published.

If O’Hara had turned Gloria into a credible and appealing character, the fact that she seems much tamer today than she appeared to previous readers wouldn’t necessarily be a problem. But Gloria comes across as a stick figure, and a rather tedious one at that. Basically, she is a spoiled rich girl, pampered by her indulgent parents. She lives for sex and fashion and heavy drinking, and seems to have never had a deep thought cross her mind. It’s nearly impossible for readers to care about her. As a result, when she dies at the novel’s end in an accident aboard a cruise ship, there is little sense of real tragedy, even though her death is shadowed by the irony that Gloria has just decided to marry the divorced Liggett and put her wild lifestyle behind her. Moreover, despite the fact that the couple decide to wed, there is little that is meaningful or substantial in their relationship. The businessman’s only response after he sees Gloria churned to pieces by the ship’s wheel, after she falls overboard, is a muttered, “There was nothing I could do.” Afterward, rather than mourning Gloria or confessing his love for her to the world, Liggett’s principal action is to embark on a quest to retrieve his ex-wife’s coat. In general, Liggett and Gloria’s torrid romance seems based more on mutual lust than any more profound emotion. Even had they wed, it seems unlike that their marriage would have lasted once the passion had cooled.

The only sympathetic character in BUtterfield 8 is Gloria’s platonic friend, Eddie, at whose Greenwich Village apartment the young woman appears after her night with Liggett. An impoverished script-writer, with a warm, supportive fiancee, Eddie is the one character who seems to honestly like Gloria for herself rather than her voluptuous body, and to truly understand her. When Liggett appears at Eddie’s apartment in search of his wife’s coat in the aftermath of Gloria’s death, Eddie is appalled by the businessman’s apparent indifference to his lover’s demise, telling him, “Listen, did you come here about that God damn coat? Because if you did, there it is. Take it and stick it. I don’t want you coming here with a long face and all you’re worried about is are you going to get mixed up in a public scandal.” O’Hara never clarifies why Gloria and Eddie never have a romance, but one can speculate that Eddie’s poverty clashes with Gloria’s unabashed gold-digging. In any event, because Eddie is a secondary figure, his appealing personality is merely an exception to O’Hara general lack of interest in creating enthralling, three-dimensional characters.

I’ve suggested that the climax of the novel, ending in Gloria’s violent death, is a botch. Even Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, admits in his otherwise fawning introduction that BUtterfield 8 has a “shaky ending.” Apparently, after writing a digressive, meandering novel, O’Hara decided he had to insert some drama that wrapped up the story, so he chose to bump Gloria off. As a result, the conclusion has a deus ex machina quality. Moreover, it’s plausible that the author, by killing his protagonist, is punishing her for her promiscuity, as if Gloria’s death is divinely decreed, which gives the book a conventionality that conflicts with the author’s alleged sympathy for women who flaunt their sexuality.

In 1960, BUtterfield 8 was made into a movie starring Elizabeth Taylor as Gloria, Laurence Harvey as Liggett, and the torch singer Eddie Fisher as Eddie. Taylor won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance, though she always maintained that the only reason the academy had given her the Oscar (her first) was because she fell deathly ill right after the shooting, and Hollywood wanted to reward her for her suffering. Another bit of behind the scenes gossip: during the filming Taylor and Fisher fell in love, and Taylor wound up stealing Fisher away from his then wife, Debbie Reynolds, and eventually marrying him. (Five years later, the much-married Taylor would dump Fisher for Richard Burton.) The film of BUtterfield 8 is worth seeing simply for Taylor’s luminous performance. Just glimpsing Taylor in the movie’s opening scene (copied from the book) in a full-length fur coat and not much else is worth the price of admission. But the film of BUtterfield 8 suffers from many of the same problems that plague the novel–principally, that female promiscuity today seems a less tantalizing topic than it did in the past. I appreciated, though, that the filmmakers changed Gloria’s economic status from wealthy to middle class. As a result, Gloria’s decision to sleep around, almost invariably with rich older men, seems tied to her social climbing as well as her sex drive. The movie also changes O’Hara’s ending; in both versions, Gloria dies, but in the film she is killed in a car crash, as she speeds from the scene of a tortured rendezvous with Liggett, having vowed to end their affair, while Liggett chases her desperately in his own car. This ending is less lurid than O’Hara’s, but both conclusions suffer from the same problem–they’re a contrived, convenient way to wrap up the story with a dramatic flourish. In his introduction, Stein claims that the movie turns Gloria into a prostitute, but that wasn’t my impression; she just seems a young woman with a vigorous sex drive and a flagrant disregard for societal morality, as she is in the book.

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Penguin Classics has also just published The New York Stories in a handsome new edition which reprints all the stories O’Hara penned about the Big Apple, where he moved as a young man. The stories span the full length of O’Hara’s career, from the early 1930s to the early 1970s, the most recent published posthumously. The later stories tend to be longer and more digressive than the earlier ones, which are often mere sketches only a few pages long. But, like BUtterfield 8, they often focus on the city’s upper-crust–the well-heeled businessmen, the society wives, the spoiled children. However, the collection extends O’Hara’s range by also featuring working-class characters: a barber, a poorly paid secretary, a small-time crook, even a black man who works in a car wash. Many of the tales also take place in the fevered and glamorous world of Broadway, with characters who are playwrights and directors and producers, and who sometimes abandon New York for the allure of Hollywood. O’Hara knew New York’s theatrical world well; his 1940 epistolary novel, Pal Joey, was turned into a popular Broadway musical, and several of his other works were also made into plays.

In Here at the New Yorker, Brendan Gill, who worked with O’Hara at the magazine, ranks him as “among the greatest short-story writers in English, or in any other language,” and credits him with helping “to invent what the world came to call the New Yorker short story.” I see O’Hara’s influence on later New Yorker stories, but, unlike Gill, I find that influence harmful. The classic New Yorker story can be classified as belonging to the “Nothing Ever Happens” school of literature. That is, the stories tend to eschew dramatic action, replacing plot-driven fiction with slice-of-life pieces that usually culminate in some subtle, muted epiphany on the part of the protagonist. So often, after reading a New Yorker story (especially those published after O’Hara’s death and up to the late 1990s), I find myself wondering, “What the hell was that all about?” Often, the stories don’t conclude so much as simply end. I had an identical reaction with most of O’Hara’s New York Stories. They usually seem less full-bodied short stories–with the traditional story’s stock trajectory, from exposition to rising action to climax to denouement–than they do vignettes or character sketches, with conclusions so obscure they leave the reader flummoxed. Steven Goldleaf, the editor of this collection, confesses in his introduction that “O’Hara’s endings...sometimes puzzle readers,” because nearly all share “an elliptical quality.” O’Hara himself was aware of his stories’ cryptic natures. In a 1936 letter, O’Hara said of his New Yorker stories, “I almost include a plea to the editors that if they can understand them, please to let me in on the secret.” In one story, “It’s Mental Work,” about a bartender, when something actually happens–namely, a character dies–it comes as a breath of fresh air.

In place of a compelling and comprehensible plot, O’Hara usually substitutes protracted dialogue. Many critics have commented on O’Hara’s purported gift for writing dialogue. In the Foreword to the collection, the distinguished novelist E.L. Doctorow praises “O’Hara’s remarkable ear for American speech.” It’s true that O’Hara, after regrettably experimenting in his early stories with dialect, afterward wrote dialogue that was generally clear and fluid and mimetic. But O’Hara either forgot or ignored the literary rule that dialogue must further the narrative, either by developing a character or propelling the plot. In contrast, O’Hara’s dialogue often seems inserted purely for its own sake. His characters tend to talk and talk and talk ad nauseam.

In a related problem, O’Hara often seems more interested in getting the details of his story right–the appearance of his characters, the way they dress, the rooms and buildings in which they reside–than he does in telling a compelling story. One description, of a posh Manhattan penthouse, will suffice as an example: “The sitting-room is, as the decorators used to say, busy, with a profusion of jade, Meissen, cameo, Josiah Wedgwood, bell pulls, mirrors of all sizes, cloisonne, clusters of miniatures, porcelain snuff boxes, sterling ash trays, a Lalique clock that stopped running in 1951, a crystal candelabrum with too short candles, and a rather startling portrait-in-oils.” My first reaction after reading this passage was, “Why are you telling me all this?”

I did like a few stories. My favorite was “The Private People,” a longer and later story that features Jack Dorney, a popular Broadway actor wed to a chronic alcoholic; eventually, the wife escapes their dysfunctional marriage and flees to California, turning up at a rather seedy health spa, where she is apparently “drying out.” Dorney and a friend track her down and insist on transferring her to a more reputable detox center, run by a relative of the actor–a plan to which Dorney’s wife reluctantly agrees. The best thing about “The Private People” is the harrowing portrait O’Hara draws of alcoholism, which seems utterly authentic. The story hauntingly concludes with the couple reunited but far from happy:

They returned to New York, and they are there now. He takes his walk to Sixtieth Street and puts in the time until evening. She is drunk at seven o’clock, and he is alone with the TV and his reading until past midnight. He knows that when he has turned out his light she waits a little while and goes to the sitting-room and has some more to drink. Back in her bedroom she leaves the light on all night long. She cannot sleep unless the light is on. Oh, it is not a very bright light.

An alcoholic himself, O’Hara knew whereof he spoke. But a handful of good stories does not a successful collection make.

I have one last complaint about The New York Stories–namely, the book’s haphazard organization. Goldleaf has decided simply to arrange the stories alphabetically by title. He justifies this procedure by noting in his introduction that O’Hara himself chose to arrange his final five collections, from 1962 to 1969, in this manner. But just because O’Hara did it doesn’t make it a good idea. The result of Goldleaf’s approach is that the arrangement of the stories proves arbitrary. If one story resonates with another that it precedes or follows, the effect is purely coincidental. It would have made more sense to organize the stories chronologically by publication date, which would have enabled the reader to trace the trajectory of O’Hara’s career, or to group them by theme or subject. The result of the book’s random arrangement is to make the stories seem even more “elliptical” than they would be if conventionally organized.

All in all, in regard to John O’Hara, I find myself agreeing with the judgment of New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani that O’Hara was a “minor writer” and a “well-known lout.” There’s surely no harm in Penguin Classics resurrecting much of the author’s best-known work for a new audience, but the endeavor hardly seems worth all the energy that’s been expended.


Henry Gonshak is the Rose and Anna Busch Endowed Professor of English at Montana Tech. His writings have appeared in three book collections and a variety of publications, including The Journal of American Culture, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review and Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. He also writes a monthly books column, “The Reading Life,” for The Montana Standard.

Bookstore of the Month: Iconoclast Books

Iconoclast Books
671 Sun Valley Road
Ketchum, ID  83340
(202) 726-1564
Iconoclast Books on Facebook
Iconoclast Books on Twitter

For your health's sake...for complete relaxation and enjoyment...visit Sun Valley this winter.  It's a delightful, easy-to-take tonic...skiing, skating, warm-water, outdoor swimming and joyous evening hours.  Nature's big, white blanket soon will be spread.  Plan now to see this land of sun and fun in Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains.  A robust, western welcome awaits you!

--from an ad for Sun Valley ski resort in the Milwaukee Sentinel, Dec. 7, 1952

Drive up Idaho Highway 75, past the quaint towns of Bellevue and Hailey, along the Big Wood River (one of Ernest Hemingway's beloved trout streams), and into the shadows of Old Baldy and Dollar Mountain.  There, just when you think the forests, mountains and streams couldn't possibly be equalled in beauty, you'll discover they were just the prelude to Ketchum, Idaho, a jewel of a town set in the Sun Valley crown.

Ketchum is home to about 2,700 residents.  Make that 3,700 because Sarah Hedrick has the dynamic energy of 1,000 souls.  She is at the heart of Iconoclast Books--the Hope Diamond of Ketchum's crown jewels--and she is one of the most dedicated and tireless booksellers I've ever met.  On the June day I drove into Ketchum, it was raining in Sun Valley (Irony Alert!) and clouds had pulled a dark blanket over the town, but all the lights were on in the bookstore and Iconoclast fairly glowed on its corner of Ketchum's main street.  Somewhere inside the shop, I'm sure that electricity was caused by Sarah swirling and humming through the bookshelves, helping a customer find the best biography of Hemingway, recommending the latest staff pick (like Alexander Maksik's A Marker to Measure Drift), or frothing milk for a latte at the store's small cafe.  Though she has a great and equally-dedicated staff of booksellers (some of whom "came for the skiing and stayed for the books"), there's no getting around the fact that Sarah Hedrick is Iconoclast Books.

Sarah Hedrick and her daughter Penelope welcome Papa Hemingway to the store

I first met Sarah at the Humanities Montana Festival of the Book shortly after the publication of my debut novel, Fobbit.  I'd just given a reading and was sitting at the book-signing table when a slender blonde-haired woman came up, kneeled in front of the table, and took my hands.  "You must come to Sun Valley."  Did I mention Sarah is also a one-woman Chamber of Commerce for Ketchum?  Just like those Union-Pacific posters which called the rich and famous to come play at the Sun Valley Ski Resort back in the 1940s, I was being summoned to the mountains of Idaho.  How could I possibly resist?  (It took nearly eight months, but I eventually did make my way to Sun Valley and gave a reading at the Community Library and then splurged an appropriate amount of money on books at Iconoclast the next day.)

In preparing for this Bookstore of the Month post, I asked Sarah to tell me a little bit about what the store has to offer. Here's what she wrote in an email: "We encourage intellectual curiosity.  We pride ourselves on being unique and going beyond the bestseller selection. New, used and rare titles, Hemingway and Idaho history, book clubs, magazines, gifts, stationery, candles, educational games and toys, and more. Our cafe features locally roasted coffee, local organic dairy, homemade chai, organic teas, smoothies, fresh-baked goodies, bagels, homemade soup, paninis and salads. We specialize in unique cards, gifts, candles and host the area's largest children's section--from baby gifts and board books to a phenomenal Young Adult selection, with everything in between. We host author events, Poetry Slams, music events, Open Mic Nights, book club discussions and educational events. We are also very fortunate to be a part of so many great partnerships with arts and non-profit organizations in the community, like the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, The Sun Valley Center for the Arts/Company of Fools, and The Community Library."

Iconoclast Books, now occupying 4,800 square feet, began in the trunk of a car in the University District in Seattle. Here's a bit of the store's history, taken from its website: "Iconoclast Books was founded in 1993, to very little fanfare. After many years of working in restaurants and bike shops in Ketchum, Gary Hunt, a practicing ski bum, set out to find his niche in life. He traveled. He worked in more restaurants and bike shops. He grew weary of that and more importantly, he felt vaguely unfulfilled. He had a friend, Royce Wilson, who managed a used bookstore in the University district of Seattle and they would often talk late into the evening over red wine or scotch while Royce outlined the basics of the used book business to Gary. This led to a period of a few months in which Gary went around to garage sales and thrift stores buying books and selling them, or attempting to sell them, to used bookstores throughout the city. This is what is known as book scouting, and Gary discovered that he had a certain knack for it....It wasn't long before a tidy little stack of boxes of books had been built up and they no longer fit into the trunk of the car. And so Iconoclast Books was born. At first it was just on weekends in the street market on Capitol Hill, with weekdays devoted to scouring the yard sales for choice inventory. By the end of the summer there were enough boxes of books built up to open our first store, in Greenlake, a suburb of Seattle."

Eventually, Gary grew restless and in 1994 he decided to head back to Sun Valley (remember, he was a "practicing ski bum"). He landed in a basement studio of about 800 square feet off 4th Street where he could sell used and out-of-print books.  Somewhere along the line, he met Sarah (then a bookseller at, um, The Book Cellar).  They fell in love, got married and joined forces at the revitalized Iconoclast.  The business grew and moved from one location to another, adding new books, magazines, and gifts. Iconoclast Books spent five years in the historic Griffith building on Main Street in Ketchum before moving into its present location on Sun Valley Road at the end of 2007. Sadly, Gary was killed in a car accident less than a year later.  Even from the dark valley of her grief, Sarah has carried on Gary's drive and vision for the store.

I'm going to turn the rest of this section of the blog post over to Sarah because, frankly, I couldn't have described the store or the current state of bookselling any better than she did in an email to me yesterday....

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Our philosophy is along the lines of this: anyone can sell New York Times bestsellers; we want to introduce you to something about which you haven’t already heard. We want to be relentlessly current and honor the classics.  We want to help you find you that rare book you remember from your childhood. We want your experience in a beautiful space--with a curated selection of books, beautiful music playing (often live on our “Dead Man’s Piano”), the smell of house-made chai being steamed, and a wise and well-read staff--to be so wonderful that you wouldn’t even consider an Amazon experience.

I think bookstore customers in general are the best out there.  Think about it: they’re intellectually curious, they’re usually not in a hurry, they are CHOOSING to be in a real store and not at their computer or in a fluorescently-lit box store (we like to say it’s the difference between a fine dining experience and fast food) and they’re buying something that is going to enlighten them, make them laugh, weep or think. This is an entirely different experience than buying most other retail items.

In a small valley we’re so grateful to our customers, not only for choosing us as the place to buy books, but because in a small town, they’ve become our friends and in some cases, our family.  We have some of the most curious and intelligent people coming through our doors and we not only get to help them, we learn from them. We have time to chat, to get to know their tastes, to remember what their spouses loved to read last month, or what we chose for their grandchildren. Because of the café we have people who stay for hours and hours. We have a customer we call “The Moon Man” because in the winter days when my daughter Penelope was a toddler, he’d take her outside and show her the early evening moon and recite “I love the moon and the moon loves me.” She’s now 8 years old and still brings him every book with moon in the pictures or title to read to her. These people are raising my children with me!

There's no way to choose the most rewarding thing about being a bookseller, but maybe one part of it can be found in this email from an employee the night before he left the country for a trip abroad:

Dear Sarah,
      I really want to thank you. Working at Iconoclast has been one of the best things that's happened to me. I don't think many people can say they love going to work, and I feel lucky that I can. I feel so much love from you and the people around me everyday. There's nothing more important than that. Working at Iconoclast I've grown as a person. I've become a reader, and have a deep appreciation for books that I couldn't have gotten elsewhere, and will have for the rest of my life. You've also given me the gift of travel. Letting me leave for 7 months and having a job I love waiting when I come home is invaluable. It's allowed me to live the life I want to live. There's no amount of quotes, novels, or libraries to express how grateful I am. You've changed my life.
      So really, truly, thank you Sarah, you're a great boss, and an even better friend.

Or maybe it's in this moment when, driving up to my store one day this summer, I saw a pre-teen girl having her photograph taken in front of the store’s sign like she was being photographed with Justin Bieber...I asked about it and she nearly screamed/wept: “Because I’ve been able to visit bookstores all over the world, and THIS IS MY FAVORITE. My friends will be so jealous when they see this.”

I now have a toddler customer who comes in once a week with his father, hollers a hello to “Uncle Sarah” and makes a beeline to my (now almost 18 year old) son’s wooden train set in the children’s section while telling his father which books to grab to read to him. His father has been a customer since his teens, buying Bukowski. From Bukowski to Board Books...

Three nights ago, I left work after a 14-hour Black Friday, which included an Open Mic Night of prose, poetry and LOTS of music, including a trio with a stand-up bass. We had a full house and the performances ranged from an 8-year-old telling jokes, to a 16-year-old singing and playing the ukulele, to a gray-haired, conservatively dressed father getting up there with an acoustic guitar and blowing us away (we found out later it was Dave Dederer, formerly of the Seattle rock band The Presidents of the United States of America). I went outside to my car at one point and what I saw from the outside made me nearly weep.  This beautifully-lit store with silver snowflakes hanging in the windows--it was packed with people, books, ideas, music, old and new friends, and three of my own children.  I just felt full, nourished and proud. We do good things inside those brick-and-mortar walls. So on my exhausted, I-can’t-keep-up-this-pace, drive home, I realized I can. I love it too much and we’re good at it.

I also love watching someone’s face light up when you finally nail the book they didn’t know they were looking for until you describe it and place it in their hands. Or the kid who calls my home, late in the evening with a shaking voice, “Sarah, do you have the third book in the Divergent trilogy at home? Or at The Modern Mercantile?  I am three blocks away....” (You can substitute that with Hunger Games, Twilight, Harry Potter, Series of Unfortunate Events, etc.)  It happens more times than you'd think and it's been this way for decades. You gotta love small towns.

Alexander Maksik signing books at Iconoclast

We’ve hosted so many amazing events it’s hard to choose. We’ve danced on table tops with Alex Kuczynski (author of Beauty Junkies), we’ve watched Billy Collins sing “Mustang Sally,” and I can remember making Pete Fromm nearly cry many years ago when he showed up at the store and we had a guitarist walking around strumming while a packed house of eager Fromm fans drank wine and nibbled cheese before his event. We go out of our way for authors because we realize we're off the beaten path. We found a Polish speaking ski instructor for Anne Applebaum’s kids when she came here, we took Jonathan Evison to every single Hemingway watering hole and closed down Ketchum, and we’ve called in favors to the best restaurants that were booked solid just to get a table for Walter Kirn. We’ll score you lift tickets, concert tickets, sometimes a funky condo.

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I can testify to Iconoclast's Author TLC.  More than six months after Sarah first grabbed my hands and insisted I come to Sun Valley, my wife Jean and I drove our car off that beaten path and visited Ketchum for an all-too-brief stay.  Sarah did indeed arrange for us to stay at a friend's condo (an elegant place which was far from funky) and made sure everything was set up for me at the Community Library's lecture room (which is a bland name for what turned out to be a gorgeous auditorium--all the more impressive given the small size of the town).  The next day, Sarah even made us some of her Idaho-famous lattes (did I detect a hint of potato in the foam?).

While Jean and Sarah chatted about mutual vintage mercantile interests (Jean had just opened The Backyard Bungalow in here in Butte, Montana, and Sarah is the proud owner of the Modern Mercantile in Hailey), I wandered the store, browsing the books.  I zeroed in on the Hemingway section--an entire wall of shelves dedicated to the author who lived in Sun Valley off and on for part of his life and chose this mountainous Garden of Eden as the place where he'd end it with an early-morning shotgun blast.  While I didn't find exactly what I was looking for (a book specifically about Hem's Ketchum days), my eye was caught by another book on display near Iconoclast's front door: The Sun Valley Story by Van Gordon Sauter.  Perfect.

For those of you with even a passing interest in the ski resort's history, I highly recommend this sumptuously-illustrated account of the valley's history--its rise from a sheepherding crossroads to a multi-million-dollar winter wonderland where stars like Gary Cooper, Marilyn Monroe, Clint Eastwood and Jamie Lee Curtis came to play.  Sauter emphasizes Sun Valley's self-made entrepreneurship and resilience even during economic downturns.  Bottom line, the region's successful legacy begins and ends with the mountains and rivers, the solid foundation of nature which will never change.

Except when it does.

Resiliency and nature collided in Sun Valley this past summer, two months after my visit.  Six years after the devastating Castle Rock Fire roared over the mountains and down into the lowlands, flames once again threatened Ketchum, Hailey and the other small towns dotting the valley floor.  The Beaver Creek Fire forced hundreds of evacuations this past August and brought everything to a standstill--at a time when Sun Valley normally depended on heavy tourism traffic.

Most of us (myself included) hear about these things and while we may pause to read the headline stories and feel a little pinch of sympathy inside, the truth of the matter is, we turn the page of the newspaper, go on eating our toast and eggs and rarely give the ashes of Sun Valley forests a second thought.  Until, that is, someone takes us by the shoulders, gets all up in our face, and tells us that we should care.  Such a thing happened to me when I read the following heartfelt note Sarah included in her bookstore newsletter a few weeks after the fires had been extinguished.  I'll close with Sarah's words in hopes that, like me, you will be moved to help out the store with a donation or--as I did--by ordering a few books from Iconoclast instead of that Other Place which rhymes with Shamazon.

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I've been ruminating for weeks on thoughts and the proper way to put them into words about the impact of the Beaver Creek Fire on our community, to my store and to my family. I've been interviewed many times--locally and nationally--and have (this should come as no surprise) worn my heart on my sleeve and often, possibly, said too much. The focus of many of these conversations has been about devastation: The damage to our beautiful landscape and the impact of that on our economy, the repercussions that losing the busiest three weeks of our season has on a budget that absolutely depends on tourism, the trickle-down effect of what occurs when a store loses necessary income and can no longer support the causes it normally does; the struggles with paying employees, vendors, taxes, rent and utilities. Sometimes, I've imagined the loss of the store.

Tonight, I want to tell the good stories and I hope you'll bear with me. I've thought a lot about the last 6 years--the Castle Rock Fire from which we're still not recovered as evidenced by still paying off the disaster relief loan from the Small Business Administration, the death of my husband and true iconoclast behind the store, the loss of our locally-owned bank which carried our credit lines so that we could get through slack seasons, the recession that hit not long after Gary's death, the egregious efforts of Amazon to destroy brick-and-mortar stores of all kinds, and yes, I have a hard time with that little Kindle.

Despite all of these obstacles, I am awake at midnight feeling invigorated about Monday morning--mostly because I adore what I do and also because I have a lot of great ideas AND I have a few beautiful stories to tell.  They may not save the store, but they have nourished my soul on sad days and reminded me why I do what I do, seven days a week.

In no particular order and because no monetary value can be attached to goodwill.

1.  During the evacuation I received a Facebook message from a stranger in Twin Falls: "Sarah, I know we're only fb friends but I love your store and all that you do for your community and book lovers. I was in the mall today and heard that all hotels are booked in Boise and Twin. If you and your children need a place to stay, we have a guest room for you. We'd love to have you."

2.  Numerous, and I mean numerous, offers similar to this from all over Idaho and beyond.

3.  This week, an online order from the Stanley Library for 25 books, all of which could've been purchased at cost through a book distributor. Yesterday an online order came in, for one book, with this message: "I'm a bookseller in California and I just heard about the wildfires in your area. I so hope things start looking better soon. Solidarity!"

4.  And a story that I hope goes viral, not for the benefit of Iconoclast Books, but because I hope people who are able will be inspired to support all local businesses--and for those of us who cannot, will remember it and do something similar in another way, down the road. Most of us know Carol and Len Harlig as they've been figures in and pillars of this community for decades; they're kind, generous and passionate about our valley, giving of themselves in more ways than this email will allow. I've known them for nearly 24 years and they never cease to amaze me. Read on...

This is what they've done and how Len explained it to me: "Carol and I sat down the other night and identified businesses that we're concerned about as well as the people we're grateful to in our valley, especially the fire fighters who saved our community. We would like to support and thank a few." The Harligs proceeded to spend a very generous amount of money at Iconoclast Books, citing us as a business they consider to be one of many that are integral to our community and they couldn't envision being without.

Clearly I wanted to give Carol and Len a public thank you without embarrassing them.  In their graceful way, they stated that they don't want acclimation for this gesture, but in hopes that others would do something similar, I was free to share. In Len's words:

      Our "plan" is to buy $1,000 worth of $100 gift certificates at local businesses for five months, thereby helping local businesses to survive until the snow flies, and by gifting the cards to emergency responders (firefighters first, law enforcement next, hospital workers third, and then another round for firefighters and law enforcement), as a way to thank the women and men who did so much for so many. (Apologies to Winston for the paraphrase).
      Our first thought was to do this below the radar as neither of us seeks publicity for our community efforts, but if getting the word out will encourage other residents to shop locally or to do something similar to our "plan" then we'd give up a little privacy for the higher cause. Maybe we can start a movement and help revitalize our local economy. "OCCUPY MAIN STREET!"

Need I say more about this incredible community and state we live in?  Yes, I want my store to survive this latest tragedy, not just because I want a job I love and appreciate, but because it allows me to live and raise my children in a community full of so many creative, smart and caring people in hopes that they'll continue in that vein for the rest of their lives.

Iconoclast Books is the featured bookstore all this month at The Quivering Pen.  By clicking on the links to books mentioned in this month's blog posts, you'll be taken to the store's website where you can purchase the book (or, better yet, several books).  The Quivering Pen is dedicated to supporting independent bookstores.

Sunday Sentence: Inventing the Christmas Tree by Bernd Brunner

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

A visual magnet, [the Christmas tree] lightens the gloom of winter, delivers a slice of the forest within the walls of the home, and, on Christmas Eve, awakens joy and hope that the sun will soon return for longer hours.

Inventing the Christmas Tree by Bernd Brunner