Writing is a Marathon Sport: Virginia Pye and Her Patience

Photo by Terry Brown

Today marks the official publication date of Virginia Pye’s second novel, Dreams of the Red Phoenix, and so I thought I’d share a few of her thoughts on the payoff of patience in a writing career. As a late-bloomer myself (Fobbit was published when I was 49 years old), I could relate to a lot of what Virginia had to say. Dreams of the Red Phoenix tells the story of Americans in China at the onset of WWII when the Japanese attack and Communism is on the rise. Kirkus says: “There’s a comparison to Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, but this unflinching look...shares truth in its own way.” Virginia’s highly acclaimed first published book, River of Dust, is also a historical novel set in China. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has taught writing at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University. Her award-winning short stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines and her essays and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, Huffington Post, The Rumpus and elsewhere.

At the age of twenty-seven, I sat in the impressive 57th St. office of one of New York’s top literary agents and listened as she described how Meryl Streep should play the mother and Judd Hirsch the father in the movie version of my first novel. As we stood to shake hands, I couldn’t quite grasp what was happening so I asked outright if she was going to represent me and oversee my book’s publication. She smiled, because how my future was intended to unfold looked apparent to her. As I left the shiny chrome and glass building and walked up Fifth Avenue towards Central Park, I let it sink in that my life’s dream was about to come true, right on schedule. I would soon be a young star on the literary scene. I felt elated and satisfied and it all seemed too good to be true.

And it was. Because neither that agent nor anybody else could have told me that I would be lucky enough to write books for the rest of my life, but I would have to wait until I was fifty-three years old—almost precisely twice the age I had been when the impressive agent took on that first manuscript—until my debut novel was finally published.

Writing is a marathon sport. It’s not for sprinters. Nor is it for the faint of heart. If the act of trying to get the words right on the page isn’t enough of a trial, then there’s the marketplace to take you down a notch or two. As it turns out, my trajectory as a writer isn’t uncommon. Many successful authors have first, second, third, and up to six, seven or even eight unpublished novels in their drawers. I know authors who had three or four agents before finding one who worked out well. The key strategy to achieving success in the face of such set backs and discouragement is to keep writing: to finish one book and start on the next. To write with the faith that someone will read and cherish the work someday, but probably not according to a timetable the writer has in mind.

When that New York agent tried a dozen publishing houses, but failed to place my first novel and returned it to me six weeks later, I was stunned. The narrative of myself as a successful author had quickly taken up a central place in my mind.

After a period of confusion and mourning, I started in on another novel, which I finished when I was pregnant with my first child. The agent who had represented my first novel was gun-shy about me and declined to see it. Although I worried my career would be tainted by that first failure, I found another agent who offered editorial comments on the second novel. I was to make revisions and then she would send it out to publishers.

But I had a baby on the way. After my daughter arrived, my writing desk became her changing table, replete with diapers, wet wipes and baby powder. As my computer accumulated dust, I remember thinking that was just fine with me. Worn out with the difficult business of trying to get published, I threw myself into mothering and three years later gave birth to another child, a son. The second novel became a distant memory. With a baby or toddler crawling on me, feeding off me, waking me in the night and generally taking over my every thought, I didn’t have the necessary distance on life required to write a novel and I even convinced myself I didn’t mind.

But finally, when my son went off to nursery school and the house was mercifully quiet in the mornings, I found myself returning to my desk. I wrote the next novel with great urgency, as if my life depended on it. A new agent tried to sell it, and came close, but the moment still wasn’t right. I tried to contain my disappointment but also realized that my battle with getting published was becoming secondary to my battle to simply write better.

In the new city where we had moved, I joined a writer’s organization and quickly became active, and then ended up leading it for seven years. It was easy for me to encourage other writers who were also struggling to improve our craft. I became less preoccupied with my own publication than with connecting to fellow writers as we shared the many ways we strive to gain wisdom from books—our own and others.

Despite my discouragement, I began to grasp that no matter whether my books were published or not, I was still living a writing life. I had my family, the students of writing who I helped with their manuscripts, the short stories I sent out with regularity, (though many of them were returned), my work with the writer’s organization, and always the larger projects evolving in my mind and on the page.

For me, it took a long apprenticeship to write a novel I ultimately feel proud to have published. In retrospect, I’m thankful that the high-powered agent didn’t place the first book that I wrote. It wasn’t nearly as good as my debut, River of Dust, which found itself between hard covers a quarter century later. And I think my new novel, Dreams of the Red Phoenix, might even be stronger still, because we improve with practice as writers —at least that’s how it’s worked for me.

Once I put aside the worry about publication and focused instead on writing well and helping other writers to do so, too, I started to achieve greater success. And I see now that the greatest reward of all isn’t the way my novels feel in my hands—though that’s pretty terrific—but that I have continued to use writing to make sense of my life. I’m grateful that a writer’s way of seeing the world, more than being identified as a published author, defines who I’ve been all along.

My First Time: Jan English Leary

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 Jan English Leary, author of Thicker Than Blood, praised by Katherine Shonk, who said: “In Thicker Than Blood, Jan English Leary tackles big issues: the mother-daughter bond, race, adoption, and immigration, to name a few. Readers with an interest in any of these issues will be absorbed by this well-crafted and insightful novel. But if her canvas is broad, Leary's focus on her two main characters, Andrea and her daughter, Pearl, is tight and discerning. With great empathy and insight, Leary portrays a mother-daughter relationship that is both unconventional and universal. I was left thinking of Pearl and Andrea, and wishing them well, long after I turned the final page.” Leary grew up in the Midwest and central New York State. During her junior year at Smith College, she studied in Paris, an experience which fostered the love of travel that runs through her fiction. She received an M.A. in French Literature at Brown University. While teaching French and raising her children, she completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts. For the remainder of her career she taught fiction writing at Francis W. Parker School in Chicago and at Northwestern University. Her short fiction has appeared in Pleiades, The Literary Review, The Minnesota Review, Carve Magazine, Long Story, Short Literary Journal and other publications. Click here to visit her website.

My First Fiction Writing Class

I came to writing fiction in my late thirties. I’d been a life-long reader, a lover of books and language. I studied Latin, French, and Russian. I loved crossword puzzles. I considered myself more of a decoder than an inventor. I chose a career teaching French to high-school students, mostly grammar, but also beginning literature. I enjoyed teaching, and it was a good career to have while raising children.

However, I began to grow restless. I considered embarking on a second Master’s, and as I tried to study for the GREs, I’d have flickering thoughts about writing fiction. I dismissed these thoughts as frivolous. At one point, when the thought of graduate school sat simmering on the back burner, I read that the Newberry Library in Chicago was offering an adult night course in fiction writing. I decided to sign up but gave myself permission not to write anything if I didn’t want to. No one could force me; I was an adult after all. I would stick my toe in the water, but no one could make me dive in.

I soon found that non-participation was not an option. I would never have allowed a student to sit in a language class and not speak. Why did I think I could audit a writing class? I wrote a story there, a very personal one about a woman taking her son to a swimming class at the Y, about how she observes the other mothers and children, about how she feels inadequate compared to them. I called it “Floating.”

I was hooked. I sent it out and it was accepted for publication. No one was more surprised than I that I could do this, that I could conceive of and finish a story.

I’d never before approached anything important by backing in instead of facing it directly. I wanted to have a career, to be married, to have children, and I worked to make those things happen. But writing seemed out of my reach and to ask for it and be denied seemed too frightening. But, as is true for most things, the higher the stakes, the scarier the contemplation, the greater the rewards.

Sunday Sentence: “The Hotel Child” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

Among these was young Count Stanislas Borowki, with his handsome, shining brown eyes of a stuffed deer, and his black hair already dashed with distinguished streaks like the keyboard of a piano.

“The Hotel Child” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
(Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 31, 1931)

Friday Freebie: Everyone Wants to be Ambassador to France by Bryan Hurt, Flings by Justin Taylor, and Press Start to Play (edited by Daniel H. Wilson and John Joseph Adams)

Congratulations to Carl Scott, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie contest: the new Penguin Classics edition of Emma by Jane Austen.

This week, I have a trio of short story collections to give away to one lucky reader: Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France by Bryan Hurt, Flings by Justin Taylor, and Press Start to Play, an anthology edited by Daniel H. Wilson and John Joseph Adams. Read on for more information about each of the books.

An astronaut quits NASA to paint pictures of the moon; a man builds a star in his basement; an astronomer falls in love with a moose and loses his nose in a sword fight; and an aristocrat adopts two teenage girls in the hopes of raising one to become his perfect wife. Bryan Hurt’s stories depict a world of wonder, magic, humor, sadness, and compassion. Wildly imaginative and meticulously researched, Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France is the debut of a new and exciting talent. “I have been a longtime fan of Bryan Hurt’s stories and what a joy to have them all together now in this book! They are a soup pot of the funniest dry sentences plus unusual facts that he unearthed from who knows where, and an understated humanity tucked inside those facts, and a constant eye on the oddness of culture and the lilt of a well-placed phrase and a carrot. In our endlessly data-packed world, Hurt’s keen spareness is a welcome addition to the bookshelves.” (Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake)

From the acclaimed author of Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever and The Gospel of Anarchy comes a piercing collection of short fiction that illuminates our struggle to find love, comfort, and identity. In a new suite of powerful and incisive stories, Justin Taylor captures the lives of men and women unmoored from their pasts and uncertain of their futures. A man writes his girlfriend a Dear John letter, gets in his car, and just drives. A widowed insomniac is roused from malaise when an alligator appears in her backyard. A group of college friends try to stay close after graduation, but are drawn away from—and back toward—each other by the choices they make. A boy’s friendship with a pair of identical twins undergoes a strange and tragic evolution over the course of adolescence. A promising academic and her fiancée attempt to finish their dissertations, but struggle with writer’s block, a nasty secret, and their own expert knowledge of Freud. From an East Village rooftop to a cabin in Tennessee, from the Florida suburbs to Hong Kong, Taylor covers a vast emotional and geographic landscape while ushering us into an abiding intimacy with his characters, Flings is a commanding work of fiction that captures the contemporary search for identity, connection, and a place to call home.

You are standing in a room filled with books, faced with a difficult decision. Suddenly, one with a distinctive cover catches your eye. It is a groundbreaking anthology of short stories from award-winning writers and game-industry titans who have embarked on a quest to explore what happens when video games and science fiction collide. From text-based adventures to first-person shooters, dungeon crawlers to horror games, these twenty-six stories play with our notion of what video games can be—and what they can become—in smart and singular ways. With a foreword from Ernest Cline, bestselling author of Ready Player One, Press Start to Play includes work from: Daniel H. Wilson, Charles Yu, Hiroshi Sakurazaka, S.R. Mastrantone, Charlie Jane Anders, Holly Black, Seanan McGuire, Django Wexler, Nicole Feldringer, Chris Avellone, David Barr Kirtley,T.C. Boyle, Marc Laidlaw, Robin Wasserman, Micky Neilson, Cory Doctorow, Jessica Barber, Chris Kluwe, Marguerite K. Bennett, Rhianna Pratchett, Austin Grossman, Yoon Ha Lee, Ken Liu, Catherynne M. Valente, Andy Weir, and Hugh Howey. Your inventory includes keys, a cell phone, and a wallet. What would you like to do? [The answer is, of course, Read the Book!]

If you’d like a chance at winning all three 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 Oct. 15, at which time I’ll draw the winning name.  I’ll announce the lucky reader on Oct. 16.  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.

Stay the Marching Year: The Autumnal Beauty of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Poetry

When the leaves crisp, when the garden hoses freeze, when the pumpkin-spice lattes make their way to the lips of Starbucks patrons, then it is time to acknowledge the year in its decline. Autumn is, bar none, my favorite season of the year. I think it has something to do with the slant of light, the brief color of lingering leaves, the nostalgia for my school years and late-afternoon football games on the field behind the Jackson Hole Junior High (Go, Broncs!). Or maybe I just like pumpkin-spice lattes.

This Fall, I’ve been out walking in the world a lot (this is where I captured the above photo, up Dyce Creek in southwestern Montana) and it’s in nature where the full force of year’s-end strikes a hard, golden blow.  That’s why, when I came across this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay this morning, I knew I’d have to share it here on the blog.

This sonnet was written in 1946, when Millay was emerging from a dark period of her life: depression, a morphine addiction, a dry spell in her writing, a nervous breakdown (all of which is documented, in distressing detail, in Nancy Milford’s biography Savage Beauty).

No matter the external circumstances, this is a beauty of a poem. I especially love the lines “autumn stays/The marching year one moment; stills the drums.” For some, this time of year can be one of melancholy; but for me, I like to think of it as a time when I can “catalogue, question, contemplate, and see.” Thank you, ESVM for these words which reach across the decades...

Tranquility at length when autumn comes,
Will lie upon the spirit like that haze
Touching far islands on fine autumn days
With tenderest blue, like bloom on purple plums;
Harvest will ring, but not as summer hums,
With noisy enterprise — to broaden, raise,
Proceed, proclaim, establish: autumn stays
The marching year one moment; stills the drums.
Then sits the insistent cricket in the grass;
But on the gravel crawls the chilly bee;
And all is over that could come to pass
Last year; excepting this: the mind is free
One moment, to compute, refute, amass,
Catalogue, question, contemplate, and see.

Soup and Salad: Jane Smiley on Why Fiction Matters, Staging Karl Ove Knausgaard, Staging The Other Woman, September Covers, Awards Season is Upon Us, Lauren Groff Finds the Joy, Joshua Mohr and His Three Strokes

On today’s menu:

1.  It’s been nearly a year since I served some Soup and Salad here at the blog, but I think it’s about time I resurrected this news-bite feature. To welcome its return, I thought I’d share some recent thoughts on the power and purpose of novels, brought to you by the never-uninteresting Jane Smiley, who writes at The Center for Fiction’s website,

The novel is not like any other form of art. It takes up a subject, makes use of a voice and exposes us to that subject and that voice for hours on end. If we want to, we can immerse ourselves in a subject and/or a voice endlessly, by reading one book over and over, by reading series of books, by reading all the books of a single author, by reading many books about a single subject. We can zip through Agatha Christie or we can toil through Ulysses, we can read through “100 Best” lists or rummage in the attic, keep up with bestsellers and Goodreads favorites. What we seek, I think, is the drip drip drip of another consciousness into our own, a set of images we could not imagine without those words, a gallery of worlds we may never have actually seen, but feel we have seen because an author has portrayed them.

2.  “My first thought was that it’s impossible. There’s no way. The novel, and the amount of thoughts and reflections in it, was too huge. My second thought was, I’d like to give it a try.” Bringing Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume, 3,600-word My Struggle to the stage.


3.  Speaking of theater, if you’re connected with the local arts group in your community, you might be interested in a nationwide staging of a work featuring women’s voices, organized by Victoria Zackheim, author of Faith: Essays from Believers, Agnostics, and Atheists. She recently emailed me with this description of the stage project:

In 2007, my book The Other Woman: Twenty-one Wives, Lovers, and Others Talk Openly About Sex, Deception, Love, and Betrayal was launched on the Today show. This collection of non-fiction/personal essays immediately became a Canadian national bestseller, was featured in People magazine and generated dozens of radio and television appearances around the country. Shortly before the launch, I selected five essays and wove them into The Other Woman, a dramatic, edgy, and sometimes humorous one-act play of ninety minutes. The night before the book’s national launch, the adaptation had a reading at the Players Club in Manhattan. Onstage were Kathleen Chalfant, Ellen McLaughlin, Penny Fuller, and Winslow Corbett, and author Connie May Fowler. The event was repeated in San Francisco, with equal audience enthusiasm. With the play now polished and bursting with energy, co-producer Cynthia Comsky and I have designed One Night/One Play, a reading to be presented in multiple theaters across the United States on Monday, November 9, 2015. Participating U.S. theaters will be part of a national media campaign directed toward the uniqueness of this one-night event. It is our hope that we’ll have experimental as well as traditional theaters, houses reflecting the wonderfully dissimilar communities that represent diversity in the US. In this reading, actors sit five abreast, the only props being five chairs and five music stands (on which scripts will rest). Stage directions and sound systems are at the discretion of the director. Actors are on script, so one rehearsal is sufficient. All participating theaters will receive a packet (electronic) of marketing and PR materials to support local promotions, including the bios and head shots of the five contributing authors. Our goal is to connect with theaters that engage with their communities. We will work toward multi-media coverage nationwide. If you join us for this exciting one-night project, we ask that you not alter the script and that you cast experienced actors. In terms of a financial arrangement, there is none. You will pay us nothing, nor do we pay you. Any proceeds you collect through ticket sales and/or donations remain with you. If you choose to present this reading as a fundraiser, we suggest a percentage be donated to a local women's shelter.

If you’re interested, email Victoria ASAP at vdzack@aol.com.


4.  I can always depend on The Casual Optimist to tickle my eyes with book cover designs. Here are some of my favorites from its recent gallery of September releases, including some non-U.S. covers I prefer...

 Design by Matt Roeser; illustration by Kikuo Johnson

Design by Justine Anweiler; photography by Jonathan Simpson 

Design by Erin Fitzsimmons

...and though it’s not included in the C.O. roundup, a visit to Erin Fitzsimmons’ website led me to this terrific cover for Mindy McGinnis’ new novel A Madness So Discreet:

5.  It’s awards season, and you know what that means: late-night reading sessions, tossing back cup after cup of hot coffee, rapidly flipping pages and stuffing sentences into your head as you race to keep up with all these highly-praised books. Or maybe that’s just me. At any rate, at least two lists, the Kirkus Prize finalists and the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 list, are already populated with residents of my ever-towering To-Be-Read pile (aka Mount NeveRest). I’ll see you on the other side of the coffee, my friends.

6.  One of those honorees, Lauren Groff (Fates and Furies), was recently interviewed at The Millions. Here’s a snippet from that conversation with Elizabeth Word Gutting:

I write almost everything by hand. It works out well for me because I can’t read my own handwriting, and so I don’t go back to read the drafts I’ve just written. I do a draft, and by the time I’ve finished it, I understand the foundational problems that are ruining the book. And then I just start over again. That way I’m building my idea of the world of the story, I’m building the characters. The things that I remember when I’m finished with one draft are the living details, and the living details are the ones that are meant to be in the story, that mean something. My drafting system is insane, and it’s very wasteful, and I’m frustrated for years and years at a time, but it ends up working out for me, because otherwise I would end up polishing foundationally problematic work. My impulse always is to spend all my time playing with words—that’s the most joyous part for me.

7.  I’ll leave you with five minutes of heartbreak. I don’t usually stomp my feet and insist you read something, but when I do, you can bet it’s important. So I’m stomping and insisting as I point you to this essay by Joshua Mohr (All This Life) about his three strokes:

     I roll over onto my stomach, a gesture that Ava interprets as an invitation to play and she’s straddling my back and yelling, “Hop on pop! Hop on pop!” which makes this moment of emergency seem ludicrous but also sort of perfect, the way a child can’t comprehend how grave and mortal things are.
     She keeps thumping her butt on my back and chanting, “Hop on pop!” and I crane my head around to see her as she bounces on me, and I say to Ava, “I don’t want to die.”
     It’s silly to say that to an 18-month-old, but I can’t stop myself, and maybe, there’s no better person to tell because she’s the reason I need to live.

Go here. Read it and weep.

Trailer Park Tuesday: City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg

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

If you read one book in October, make it City on Fire—and with its 944-page length, Garth Risk Hallberg’s debut novel may very well be the only book you read this month. It wouldn’t be time wasted. I’m halfway through it now and I’m here to tell you this book is a luxurious bath of words. City on Fire is big in all senses of the word: not just in page volume, but in the scope of its plot and the large cast of characters—every one of them interesting to some degree. When you start reading this novel, you are in its world...and there you stay until your eyes lift from the page. It is a full-immersion baptism of story. City on Fire reminds me, at times, of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (but de-fanged of that book's satire) and Don DeLillo’s Underworld (though Hallberg confines himself to just one place and time: New York City in the mid-1970s). With the seamless dazzle of a Las Vegas magician, Hallberg juggles so many different plot threads—all of which will eventually tie together—that it feels like several books smooshed into one. Not only is City on Fire one of the best books of 2015, it has a rich, eye-bursting trailer featuring a couple of poetic passages from the Prologue, narrated by the author, and a collage of images that move so fast they can only leave a subliminal impression in your brain. Driving the video forward is a terrific new song called “My Reward,” written and performed by Hallberg’s friend Hamilton Leithauser of The Walkmen, along with bandmate Paul Maroon. Music, from punk to pop, plays an important role in the novel, so it’s only fitting that the trailer adds a nice sonic layer to the two-minute video. If you see only one book trailer in October, make it this one.

My First Time: Emily Ross

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 Emily Ross, author of the young adult mystery/thriller Half In Love With Death, forthcoming from Merit Press in December. Set in the 1960s, Half in Love With Death was inspired by the eerie, true story of serial killer Charles Schmid, aka “The Pied Piper of Tucson.” Kate Racculia, author of Bellweather Rhapsody, says, “Half in Love with Death is as dreamy and dark as the beautiful boy at the center of its twisty mystery.” Emily’s fiction and nonfiction have been published in Boston Magazine, Menda City Review, and The Smoking Poet. She is an editor and contributor at Dead Darlings, a website dedicated to discussing the craft of novel writing (where a version of this My First Time post first appeared). Emily is a 2012 graduate of Grub Street’s Novel Incubator program.

The First Time I Fell In Love (with Writing)

There wasn’t a specific moment when I realized I wanted to be a poet, novelist, or whatever. I would spend years working out those details. But there was a moment when I fell in love with writing.

It happened in third grade. My teacher was named Miss Gamrad. Behind her back everyone called her Miss Ramrod, because she was tall and thin, straight up and down. She had a triangular face, a wide unsmiling mouth, bulging eyes, and dark curls that stuck to the sides of her head. Except for the curls, she resembled a praying mantis, or rather a “preying” mantis, more than a ramrod, and she was mean. She was never mean to me, of course, because I was perfect, but other kids in the class weren’t so lucky. She especially liked to yell at Russell M, a boy I loved. Russell had an edge, a wise mouth, and a problem with subtraction. Miss Gamrad would frequently subtract him from the room. He spent a lot of time standing in the hall.

Outside of Russell the other thing that made her yell was lunch. Our six-room schoolhouse didn’t have a cafeteria. Lunch was brought in from another school miles away. The food arrived cold, and included such appealing entrees as salmon wiggle with peas on saltines. Miss Gamrad made sure that we finished every last bite. Fortunately my parents wrote me a note saying that I didn’t have to eat anything I didn’t like (yes, they were probably the world’s first helicopter parents). Russell wasn’t so lucky. His shirt cuffs were frayed and he wore shoes without socks. Everyone knew he was poor. On the rare occasions when he brought lunch, it was something weird like a cold fried-egg sandwich — with mustard! Miss Gamrad made it her personal mission to see to it that Russell got enough to eat.

On this particular day, she said none of us would be able to go out for recess until Russell finished his spinach. We watched as he forced small bites through his thin defiant lips. It took a while, but when the plastic tray was empty except for a pool of greenish water, Miss Gamrad smiled in triumph. And then Russell put his hand over his mouth, rushed past her, and vomited the spinach into a sink at the back of the room. As we crowded round and watched the food-flecked stream go down the drain, I’m surprised we didn’t all vomit. When Miss Gamrad was through cleaning it up, she announced that because of Russell we would miss recess. Instead we would have to write. There were groans. Not writing! Anything but that.

By now you’re probably thinking that on that afternoon I wrote my first story about Russell. I should have. I had a crush on him. I hoped he had a crush on me. He was a hard-scrabble, vomiting James Dean, in a tiny classroom in the middle of nowhere, perfect fodder for a budding young writer. But I didn’t write about him. I hadn’t yet figured out I could write about the world around me. Instead, as I sat in a room that smelled of Lysol and vomit, I wrote something called, What the Waves Tell Me. It wasn’t a poem, but it wasn’t really a story either. It was just something that I wrote on yellow blue-lined paper, and I couldn’t stop writing it. I wrote about sitting on a beach and how the waves told me a story. I moved to another beach and they told me another story. Then I moved to yet another beach, and they told me a different story. The words just kept just coming and there was no way I was going to stop them, because nothing had ever felt so right. When Miss Gamrad said to put our pencils down, I didn’t.

I would like to say that she had to tear the paper from my feverish hands, that I refused to give it to her and was defiant for the first time in my life, that Russell came to my rescue, read it, and fell instantly in love with me, but that would be the made-for-TV version of this. I ended things by simply making the tide go out. Today I can’t remember much of What the Waves Tell Me but I suspect there was a certain lack of plot, an absence of dramatic tension, too many multiplying existential beaches, but that doesn’t matter, because the feeling I got from writing it is still with me. It was as if a door had opened to a place I’d never dreamed was there. But it was there. It still is. And I keep coming back for more.

Sunday Sentence: City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg

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

The coffee tasted like water colored brown with a crayon.

City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg

Friday Freebie: Emma by Jane Austen (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Congratulations to Jonathan Butters, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie, Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff.

This week’s book giveaway is the gorgeous new edition of Emma by Jane Austen, published by the fine folks at Penguin Classics. Even if you already own Emma (and if you don’t, why the dickens not?), you’ll want to add this dee-luxe, annotated edition to your shelf. Released in honor of the novel’s 200th birthday, it is handsomely packaged and comes with a new introduction and notes by Goucher professor Juliette Wells. I’m happy to offer one paperback copy to a lucky reader (sorry, international readers, U.S. only entrants for this contest). Read on for an interview with Professor Wells, describing some of the work she did in preparing this edition of Emma for publication.

When we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Emma, what in particular are we celebrating? What’s new about this edition?

We’re celebrating the 200th anniversary of Emma’s original publication, in London in December, 1815. The date of publication is a little confusing because “1816” was printed on the title page of the first edition of the novel, but it was actually released in December, 1815. I think this gives us the right to celebrate for a whole year! And what better way to celebrate than to re-read Emma, or read it for the first time? Our 200th-anniversary annotated edition has everything you need, all in one place, to help you appreciate this wonderful novel. You can immerse yourself in Austen’s world and also have, right at your fingertips, explanations of some of the elements of the novel that tend to trip up or puzzle today’s readers.

In the Austen canon, what would you say makes Emma special and unique?

Emma is special because it’s the capstone of Austen’s career as an author. She had already published three novels (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park), and she was at the very top of her game as a writer. She didn’t know it, of course, but Emma would be the last book she saw through to publication. When Austen died in July 1817, she left two essentially completed novels (Northanger Abbey and Persuasion), which her brother published at the end of that year. So Emma is the last Austen novel that was published in the exact form that she herself approved. Emma is also special because it’s the most perfect example of Austen’s particular genius as an author, which is (I think) to create a recognizable, engaging fictional world from the slenderest of materials. She writes about everyday life and ordinary people—you won’t find kings and queens in her novels, or ghosts or vampires. Her effects are wonderfully subtle.

What was the publishing process like when Emma was first published? How was the novel received critically? Was Austen as popular in her own day as she is today?

The publishing process was recognizable in some ways and very different in others. Austen didn’t have a literary agent; at that time, authors dealt directly with publishers. With Emma, she chose a new, more prestigious publisher—John Murray—than she had used for her three earlier novels, and she negotiated hard for a good contract with him. As authors are today, Austen was responsible for proofreading and approving copy before publication. Since being a published author was considered not so respectable for an unmarried woman, Austen chose to remain anonymous on her title pages throughout her lifetime. Emma identifies her as “the author of Pride and Prejudice.” Her identity wasn’t made publicly known until after her death. Like Austen’s earlier novels, Emma was praised by reviewers, who appreciated Austen’s ability to convey a very realistic fictional world. Austen wasn’t a bestseller in her day; then as now, thrillers, adventure stories, and romances outsold quiet literary fiction. But Austen did have the satisfaction of knowing, in her lifetime, that readers appreciated her work. In addition to reading reviews, she kept track of the responses of her friends and family, which offer a wonderful glimpse into what everyday readers of Austen’s own time thought of Emma. Some of what they liked and didn’t like may be very familiar to us!

One of your specialties as a professor of English is how Jane Austen’s work continues to appeal to people, how it remains at the forefront of pop culture conversation. Last year, Alexander McCall Smith updated Emma, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies hits the big screen in 2016, and movie and TV versions of Austen continue to draw viewers. Why do you think we keep updating and adapting Austen? What are your favorite adaptations or updates, and what makes them successful?

Austen really is endlessly adaptable, much like Shakespeare! You can transpose her stories and her characters to other places and times, and they still work. My own favorite creation inspired by Austen is Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, from 1995. Clueless is a joy to experience, and smart too, much like an Austen novel. I’m also a big fan of Sense and Sensibility, also from 1995, for which Emma Thompson wrote the screenplay. Experiencing Austen through the eyes of a witty, thoughtful contemporary woman—it doesn’t get any better than that! I like Karen Joy Fowler’s novel The Jane Austen Book Club, from 2004, for the same reason—an experienced writer chooses to think about how Austen’s works matter to us today, and takes us along for the ride. Lost in Austen, the British miniseries from 2008, is also a big favorite of mine. A rabid Austen fan finds her way into the world of Pride and Prejudice and messes it up. It’s a hoot to see the Austen characters we know so well doing and saying things that they never would have done or said in the original novel. I think TV and movie adaptations of Austen are so popular for two main reasons. They’re beautiful to watch, no question. And they offer a respite—which a lot of people of all ages value—from the loud, fast, scary, stuff that much of mainstream entertainment is these days. The tricky part comes, sometimes, when someone knows and loves Austen through the films and then goes to pick up one of the novels, only to discover that the reading experience is a lot more complex and challenging than the viewing experience. I had those first-time readers of Austen very much in mind when creating this new edition of Emma.

What is it like to prepare a new edition of a book that’s so well-known and exists in many editions? What kind of research did you do? Did anything you learned during the process surprise you?

It was really important to me to create a truly new approach to Emma—a welcoming, reader-friendly approach. Excellent editions of Emma already exist for scholars and for devoted “Janeites.” With this anniversary edition, I wanted to open Austen up to people who hadn’t given her a try before, and to support their reading experience by using everything I know from years of teaching undergraduates and from talking with everyday readers. I certainly reached for plenty of scholarly and reference sources on my shelves, but I’d say my most important preparation was to have built up, over time, a sense of what readers are curious about and what frustrates them in their first encounter with an Austen novel. And, through my teaching, I’ve had a lot of practice at explaining historical concepts in an accessible way. I also had the huge pleasure of re-reading Emma myself, slowly, with pencil in hand, making lists of topics to cover in my contextual essays and marking words that would likely be unfamiliar to present-day Americans. By doing this, I developed a much deeper appreciation of Austen’s artistry with words. This surprised and delighted me—I would have said I appreciated her artistry plenty before! But it wasn’t until I was trying to figure out how to convey the meaning of a particular phrase that I realized how much meaning she packs in with her clever, economical word choices. Thinking about readers’ experience with Emma also shaped how the contextual material is presented in this new edition. In my experience, many ordinary readers, and even college students too, are put off by footnotes, or at best ignore them. So we decided instead to group topics together in contextual essays, which are easier—and, I hope, more fun—to read. Here too my experience explaining historical concepts And, there’s no question, the gorgeous cover by Dadu Shin is a beautiful invitation to pick up this Emma!

Click to enlarge

The illustrations for this edition are drawn from historical copies of Emma in the Jane Austen Collection at Goucher College, where you teach. Can you tell us more about that collection? What is it, exactly?

The Jane Austen Collection at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland began as the passion project of an alumna of the college from the 1920s, Alberta Hirshheimer Burke. Alberta loved, loved, loved Jane Austen’s writings and decided that her own purpose in life was to gather as much material as possible relating to Austen. So Alberta bought first and rare editions and even some manuscripts—such as letters in Austen’s handwriting—all of which she felt brought her closer to her beloved author. The images in our new edition reproduce turn-of-the-twentieth century illustrations of Emma by English and American artists, from books that Alberta owned, and which she bequeathed to her alma mater when she died in 1975. (Her manuscripts went to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.) Alberta also cared deeply about ephemera with an Austen connection, such as newspaper and magazine articles, which she preserved in ten overstuffed scrapbooks. So our Austen Collection at Goucher is a terrific resource for popular culture studies as well as book history.

As a college professor, what’s your favorite aspect of teaching Austen? Do you face any challenges in interesting students in her writings?

Absolutely the best part of teaching Austen is that so many students are enthusiastic about studying her writings. She is an easy sell! Shakespeare is the only other English writer who has a draw like hers. And Austen has the advantage that her life story as a woman writer is especially appealing. Many of my students are creative writers themselves and find Austen’s confidence and perseverance to be very inspiring. That said, I do often encounter people—students and ordinary readers—for whom Austen just seems unappealing. Maybe her novels seem girly; maybe they seem awfully full of privileged white people (not untrue); maybe the sentences or paragraphs are just too long. Stephen King said recently in a New York Times Book Review that he had never read any Austen, and I feel it’s a real shame that a great writer like him has missed a great writer like her! Maybe I’ll have to send him this new Emma and see if he can get into it. I love it that everyone who reads Jane Austen has her or his own ideas about what’s important and what’s interesting. Some readers gravitate towards her humor, while for others, the morality really resonates. Pretty much all of us can find at least one character who reminds us of someone we know—and we’re lucky if it’s a character who’s nice!

Do you think we have a modern-day equivalent of Jane Austen? Or do you have any “further reading” suggestions for Austen fans who’ve read all of her books a thousand times and are looking for something new?

I love to read contemporary novels and memoirs, and I always keep an eye out for hints that an author is influenced by or interested in Austen. I recently re-read Allegra Goodman’s novel The Cookbook Collector and really appreciated how she weaves in elements from Emma as well as from her more obvious place of inspiration, Sense and Sensibility. I also particularly like that Alison Bechdel, author of the graphic-format memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and the Dykes to Watch Out For comics, gives several shout-outs to Austen. Flyover Lives, Diane Johnson’s hybrid family history/memoir, includes a fascinating account of what Johnson’s foremothers in America were up to at the same time that Austen was writing about much more privileged women in England. I’d also warmly recommend the novels of Barbara Pym, a 20th-century English writer. Pym’s dry humor and close observation of everyday people ally her very closely with Austen. And it’s always rewarding to read, or re-read, 19th-century novels by authors who knew and loved Austen’s writings. In that category, I’d especially recommend Elizabeth Gaskell (start with Cranford) and George Eliot (outside of Austen, Middlemarch is my all-time favorite novel). And, finally, I’d say that Austen lovers are the best people to ask about what to read next! Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of shout-outs for the novels of Anthony Trollope, so I may have to get cracking on his enormous oeuvre...

If you’d like a chance at winning Emma, 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 Oct. 8, at which time I’ll draw the winning name.  I’ll announce the lucky reader on Oct. 9.  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).

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Everybody Read Now: The Middle on ABC-TV

Since it premiered in 2009, I have watched every episode of The Middle on ABC. I have laughed, cried and, when the truths about parenting hit a little too close to home, squirmed uncomfortably. Mike and Frankie Heck of Orson, Indiana represent the Everyfamily of modern America with their foibles and follies raising three children, Axl, Sue and Brick. They take imperfect parenting and turn it into classic comedy TV. Hilarious stuff, each and every week.

But I think the latest episode, “Cutting the Cord,” will always hold a special place in my heart for youngest child Brick’s impromptu pep rally dance as the new school “mascot,” Bernie the Bookmark. For those of you who’ve never seen The Middle (and if not, you better start binge-watching on Netflix now), a brief word of explanation: Brick, played by Atticus Shaffer, is the socially-awkward, but yet self-assured, nerd who would always rather be reading a book than dressing out for gym class (as he tells his brother Axl: “I don’t play sports. I don’t exactly have a ton of friends. I have books.”). He’s full of ticks (I call him “the Lap Whisperer”) and will defend his right to read to the death (“I’ve decided from now on, I want to spend every moment I can with the things I cherish most. So, I’ll be in my room with my books. Try not to bother me.”). But he may have reached his apex in Season 7, Episode 2 this week. Take a look and I think you’ll agree when I say, “Everybody read now!” is the new earworm for library lovers.


Apologies for the poor sound and video quality--I just grabbed this off my computer this morning; if you’re a Hulu subscriber, you can see the full episode here.