Friday, August 31, 2018

Friday Freebie: One-Sentence Journal by Chris La Tray


Congratulations to Adrianna Rogers, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie: Still Life With Monkey by Katharine Weber.

This week’s giveaway is for One-Sentence Journal by Chris La Tray. If you’ve been paying attention to my Facebook feed over the past few years, you’ll know I’m a die-hard fan of Chris’ blog which features his journal, literally one sentence to sum up each day’s events in a precise, vivid capsule. Gems like “From the comfort of sheets and blankets I felt the storm blow in overnight, shake the house in waves, whistle in the dry branches outside my window, and rattle the vent cover on the roof over the kitchen, only to be gone by morning.” And “Never underestimate the emotional healing powers of a styrofoam tray heaped with cheap Chinese takeout.” And “Add Butte, America to the list of places I’d love to time travel to to witness it really jumping during its heyday.” (When he does, I want to be in the passenger seat beside him so I can meet the souls who once filled this ghosted city in which I live.) Good stuff like that abounds on every page of One-Sentence Journal. You’ll be hearing more about OSJ from me in the future, but for now, I’ll warn you this is one of those books which makes me fall hard and fast in love with it. Unsuspecting strangers on the street will be approached and persuaded. In the meantime, here at the blog, another lucky reader will have the chance to fall in love with the simplicity and beauty of this book. Keep scrolling for more praise for the book and how to enter the contest.


Each poem and essay in La Tray’s book focuses on what would appear to be microscopic and ordinary moments. Innocuous some would say. But not La Tray. His attention in these small moments, paired with his simple, honest, and heartfelt words, helps to remind us that the smallest moment is important. That chain-wrapped tires can sound like sleigh bells, that a glorious afternoon doesn’t require sunshine, or that living paycheck to paycheck makes every other Friday feel like Christmas. The majority of One-Sentence Journal is made up of short poems (yes, often just one sentence) grouped by season. These sections’ structure is very intuitive, each moment being captured and honored within its own space while also maintaining the context of that particular season. Whether it is the needling cold of windblown ice or Missoula covered in golden, autumn leaves, La Tray shies away from nothing, finding beauty, wisdom, and worth in everything.
       (Bryn Agnew, CutBank Journal)

Chris La Tray’s One Sentence Journal achieves the difficult task of creating a narrative out of snapshots. La Tray’s observations of the world around him not only take us into his world, but provide unique insights into our world. This book is proof of the power of language, even at its most spare.
       (Russell Rowland, author of Fifty-Six Counties)

Reading Chris La Tray’s One-Sentence Journal I find myself wishing all kinds of things: that I went for more walks in the woods, that I spent more time in the company of owls, that I ate more fried chicken, that I woke each day in time to watch the sunrise. For this is a sunrise book, a book of revelations, of creekwalks and roadfood and ordinary sadnesses, ordinary joys—which are, in the end, the only kind. “I have a stake in this,” La Tray writes. And so do you. So do you.
       (Joe Wilkins, author of The Mountain and the Fathers)

If you’d like a chance at winning One-Sentence Journal, simply email your name and mailing address to


Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on Sept. 6, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on Sept. 7. 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.


Sunday, August 26, 2018

Sunday Sentence: Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash


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


My mother had two placentas and I was living off both of them. I was supposed to have a twin.

Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash


Friday, August 24, 2018

Friday Freebie: Still Life With Monkey by Katharine Weber


Congratulations to Melissa Crytzer Fry, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie: Mad Boy by Nick Arvin.

This week’s giveaway is for the new novel by Katharine Weber, Still Life With Monkey. Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage, calls it “A brilliantly crafted novel, brimming with heart.” This week, one lucky reader will win a new paperback copy of the novel. Will it be you? Keep scrolling for more information on the book and how to enter the contest.


Duncan Wheeler is a successful architect who savors the quotidian pleasures in life until a car accident leaves him severely paralyzed and haunted by the death of his young assistant. Now, Duncan isn’t sure what there is left to live for, when every day has become “a broken series of unsuccessful gestures.” Duncan and his wife, Laura, find themselves in conflict as Duncan’s will to live falters. Laura grows desperate to help him. An art conservator who has her own relationship to the repair of broken things, Laura brings home a highly trained helper monkey―a tufted capuchin named Ottoline―to assist Duncan with basic tasks. Duncan and Laura fall for this sweet, comical, Nutella-gobbling little creature, and Duncan’s life appears to become more tolerable, fuller, and funnier. Yet the question persists: Is it enough?

If you’d like a chance at winning Still Life With Monkey, simply email your name and mailing address to


Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on Aug. 30, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on Aug. 31. 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.


Sunday, August 19, 2018

Sunday Sentence: Adultery and Other Choices by Andre Dubus


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


Jack wanted to escape his marriage; she wanted to live with hers; they drove north to the woods and made love. Then they dressed and drove back to what had brought them there.


Friday, August 17, 2018

Friday Freebie: Mad Boy by Nick Arvin


Congratulations to B. J. Nooth, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie: Northland by Porter Fox.

This week’s giveaway is for one of the very best of the 2018 novels I’ve read so far: Mad Boy by Nick Arvin. Picture a Dickens waif wandering across the Maryland battlefields of the War of 1812 (the one that oh so often gets lost in the shuffle of our nation’s major conflicts). Arvin paints a vivid battle scene (just as he did in Articles of War), and manages to balance the bloodshed with the buoyant spirits that bounce its young protagonist across the pages, dodging the musket-fire. This week, one lucky reader will win a new paperback copy of the novel. Keep scrolling for more information on the book and how to enter the contest.


Mad Boy is a rollicking, picaresque novel about family and perseverance set during America’s “forgotten war” of 1812. Young Henry Phipps is on a quest to realize his dying mother’s last wish: to be buried at sea, surrounded by her family. Not an easy task considering Henry’s ne’er-do-well father is in debtor’s prison and his comically earnest older brother is busy fighting the red coats on the battlefields of Maryland. But Henry’s stubborn determination knows no bounds. As he dodges the cannon fire of clashing armies and picks among the ruins of a burning capital he meets looters, British defectors, renegade slaves, a pregnant maiden in distress, and scoundrels of all types. Mad Boy is at once an antic adventure and a thoroughly convincing work of historical fiction that recreates a young nation’s first truly international conflict and a key moment in the history of the emancipation of African-American slaves. Entertaining, atmospheric, and touching, Mad Boy will transport readers with its cast of vivid characters, its masterful storytelling, and its poignant tale of a young man burdened by an outsized undertaking.

If you’d like a chance at winning Mad Boy, simply email your name and mailing address to


Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on Aug. 23, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on Aug. 24. 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.


Thursday, August 16, 2018

Front Porch Books: August 2018 edition


Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of new and forthcoming booksmainly advance review copies (aka “uncorrected proofs” and “galleys”)I’ve received from publishers. Cover art and opening lines may change before the book is finally released. I should also mention that, in nearly every case, I haven’t had a chance to read these books, but they’re definitely going in the to-be-read pile.



The Current
by Tim Johnston
(Algonquin Books)

Jacket Copy:  In the dead of winter, outside a small Minnesota town, state troopers pull two young women and their automobile from the icy Black Root River. One is pronounced dead at the scene, while the other, Audrey Sutter, daughter of the town’s retired sheriff, survives. What happened was no accident, and news of the crime awakens the community’s memories of another young woman who lost her life in the same river ten years earlier, and whose killer may still live among them. Determined to find answers, Audrey soon realizes that she’s connected to the earlier unsolved case by more than just the river. And as she plunges deeper into her own investigation, she begins to unearth long-hidden secrets and stoke the violence simmering just below the surface of her hometown.

Opening Lines:  The two girls, young women, met for the first time the day they moved in together, first semester of that first year of college, third floor of Banks Hall, a north-facing room that overlooked green lawns and treetops and streams of students coming and going on the walkways below. Roommated by mysterious processes, perhaps a computer algorithm, perhaps a tired administrator plowing his way through a thousand folders, the girls tried at first to become friends, then tried simply to get along, and finally put in for reassignment, each without telling the other, and by the end of the winter holidays had both moved into new rooms with new roommates. If they saw each other on campus after that, they pretended they hadn’t; they looked away, they looked at the sky, they received phone alerts of highest importance. They seemed to have made a pact of mutual invisibility, and this pact might have gone on forever, all the way through college at least, if not for a literature class in the fall of their sophomore year.



Deep Creek
by Pam Houston
(W. W. Norton)

Jacket Copy:  “How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us.” In her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, Pam Houston explores what ties her to the earth—her 120-acre homestead in the Colorado Rockies most of all. Here, elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire in a dry summer, threatening her century-old barn and its inhabitants. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds, Houston learns what it means to take responsibility for a piece of land and the creatures on it. A survivor of parental abuse and neglect, Houston also discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her. Deep Creek delivers her most profound meditations yet on how “to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief...to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive.”

Opening Lines:  When I look out my kitchen window, I see a horseshoe of snow-covered peaks, all of them higher than 12,000 feet above sea level. I see my old barn—old enough to have started to lean a little—and the low-ceilinged homesteaders’ cabin, which has so much space between the logs now that the mice don’t even have to duck to crawl through. I see the big stand of aspen ready to leaf out at the back of the property, ringing the small but reliable wetland, and the pasture, greening in earnest, and the bluebirds, just returned, flitting from post to post. I see Isaac and Simon, my bonded pair of young donkey jacks, pulling on opposite ends of a tricolor lead rope I got from a gaucho in Patagonia. I see Jordan and Natasha, my Icelandic ewes, nibbling on the grass inside the goose pen, keeping their eyes on Lance and L.C., this year’s lambs. I see two elderly horses glad for the warm spring day, glad to have made it through another winter of 30 below zero, and whiteout blizzards, of 60 mph winds, of short days and long frozen nights and coyotes made fearless by hunger. Deseo is twenty-seven and Roany’s over thirty, and one of the things that means is that I have been here a very long time.

Blurbworthiness:  “Pam Houston is the rodeo queen of American letters. In Deep Creek, her voice has never been more fully realized, and her message never more important.”  (Samantha Dunn, author of Not By Accident)



Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin
by Mary Clearman Blew
(University of Nebraska Press)

Jacket Copy:  Music, whether a Debussy étude or Gram Parsons’ “Hickory Wind,” has been a constant in Ruby Gervais’s life. After Ruby helps fuel a paranoid fervor that spreads like wildfire throughout her rural Montana community, her home life deteriorates. As a sixteen-year-old high school dropout busing tables at the local bar two nights a week, her prospects are uncertain. So when, after her shift one night, the Idaho Rivermen invite her to join their band and head toward fame and fortune, Ruby doesn’t think twice. In Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin Mary Clearman Blew deftly braids together memories of the past with the present, when the Rivermen have imploded and a severely bruised and disillusioned Ruby returns to her hometown to find everything she ran away from waiting for her. In lyrical yet muscular prose, Blew explores women dealing with the isolation of small towns, the enduring damage done when a community turns against itself, the lasting effects of abuse on the vulnerable, and our capacity to confront the past and heal. Throughout, Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin is underscored by the music that forms inextricable bonds between Blew’s fascinating characters.

Opening Lines:  The hiss of the Greyhound’s air compression brakes wakes me from what might have been sleep. The pain in my abdomen is much worse. Lights flash past the bus windows, hitting my eyes like blows after miles of rolling through darkness. It must be past midnight, we must be arriving somewhere, I don’t know where, but maybe it’s Versailles, in northern Montana, because I remember buying a bus ticket to Versailles. I think I remember. My mind hasn’t been right for days.

Blurbworthiness:  “Mixing real time with past time, Blew reveals the underbelly of small-town life—secrets, betrayals, Satanic cults, and sexual abuse. But she also discovers grace and generosity driven by love, and how music may have the power both to heal and to connect. This is a stunning narrative told in vivid detail with the insights of someone who has been there. You will not be able to put it down.”  (Annick Smith, author of Crossing the Plains With Bruno)



You Know You Want This
by Kristen Roupenian
(Scout Press)

Jacket Copy:  From the author of “Cat Person”—the short story that went viral after it appeared in The New Yorker last December—comes Kristen Roupenian's highly anticipated debut, a compulsively readable collection of short stories that explore the complex—and often darkly funny—connections between gender, sex, and power across genres. You Know You Want This brilliantly explores the ways in which women are horrifying as much as it captures the horrors that are done to them. Among its pages are a couple who becomes obsessed with their friend hearing them have sex, then seeing them have sex…until they can’t have sex without him; a ten-year-old whose birthday party takes a sinister turn when she wishes for “something mean”; a woman who finds a book of spells half hidden at the library and summons her heart’s desire: a nameless, naked man; and a self-proclaimed “biter” who dreams of sneaking up behind and sinking her teeth into a green-eyed, long-haired, pink-cheeked coworker. Spanning a range of genres and topics—from the mundane to the murderous and supernatural—these are stories about sex and punishment, guilt and anger, the pleasure and terror of inflicting and experiencing pain. These stories fascinate and repel, revolt and arouse, scare and delight in equal measure. And, as a collection, they point a finger at you, daring you to feel uncomfortable—or worse, understood—as if to say, “You want this, right? You know you want this.”

Opening Lines:  Our friend came over the other night. He and his terrible girlfriend had finally broken up. This was his third breakup with that particular girlfriend, but he insisted it was going to be the one to stick.

Blurbworthiness:  “In an age that needs a wrecking ball You Know You Want This provides one. This is a raucous, visceral page-turner that tunnels into the heart of relationships gone awry, modern-day miscommunications, and other horrors of being human. Not polite. Suffers no fools. Takes no prisoners. Read it.”  (Jeff VavnderMeer, author of Annihilation)



Lost Children Archive
by Valeria Luiselli
(Alfred A. Knopf)

Jacket Copy:  A mother and father set out with their kids from New York to Arizona. In their used Volvo—and with their ten-year-old son trying out his new Polaroid camera—the family is heading for the Apacheria: the region the Apaches once called home, and where the ghosts of Geronimo and Cochise might still linger. The father, a sound documentarist, hopes to gather an “inventory of echoes” from this historic, mythic place. The mother, a radio journalist, becomes consumed by the news she hears on the car radio, about the thousands of children trying to reach America but getting stranded at the southern border, held in detention centers, or being sent back to their homelands, to an unknown fate. But as the family drives farther west—through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas—we sense they are on the brink of a crisis of their own. A fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can feel beneath their feet. They are led, inexorably, to a grand, unforgettable adventure—both in the harsh desert landscape and within the chambers of their own imaginations. Told through the voices of the mother and her son, as well as through a stunning tapestry of collected texts and images—including prior stories of migration and displacement—Lost Children Archive is a story of how we document our experiences, and how we remember the things that matter to us the most. Blending the personal and the political with astonishing empathy, it is a powerful, wholly original work of fiction: exquisite, provocative, and deeply moving.

Opening Lines:  Mouths open to the sun, they sleep. Boy and girl, foreheads pearled with sweat, cheeks red and streaked white with dry spit. They occupy the entire space in the back of the car, spread out, limbs offering, heavy and placid. From the copilot seat, I glance back to check on them every so often, then turn around to study the map again. We advance in the slow lava of traffic toward the city limits, across the GW Bridge, and merge onto the interstate.


Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist by Michael Downs



This afternoon, a pleasant woman with a smoker’s cough is scheduled to pry open my mouth, reach into its moist depths with her gloved fingers, and yank on my teeth like they were gems cemented to a river bottom and she was the world’s most determined jeweler. There will be pain, there will be a clenching of torso muscles, there will be the airy, sloppy suction of spittle. But when all is said and yanked, I will emerge from the dentist a new man with a new tooth. The only lingering traces of the molar crown work will be the rubbery tingle of a numbed jaw and the monetary throb of the dentist’s bill.

This morning, however, from the dry, pain-free safety of my desk, I’m watching the hypnotic trailer for Michael Downs’ new novel, The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist. The video has the potential to be a Grand Guignol dental horror show—all those teeth! all those rusty metal tools!—but Downs provides a counterbalancing calmness as his NPR-smooth voice narrates a passage from the book. The words are soothing enough to make me unclench my grip and pull my fingernails from the armrest of the dental chair. This passage, for instance, marvelously describes the sensation of anesthesia rippling through the titular Horace:
His body became waves—waves instead of legs, waves instead of arms, waves instead of lungs, the weightless pleasure of waves. He experienced something like a laugh, but it was the laugh of soul rather than body.
Those sentences are so beautiful they bring pleasure even to someone who has a mouth riddled with pain. The novel concerns itself with Horace Wells, a Connecticut dentist practicing in the early 1800s who learned that nitrous oxide (i.e. laughing gas) could also help relieve pain. His discovery would change the world, reshaping medicine and humanity’s relationship with pain. Regular readers of the blog already know I am a big fan of Downs’ previous book, The Greatest Show, and I expect Horace Wells will keep me entertained no matter where I find myself today: in a reading nook or a dentist’s chair.

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


Monday, August 13, 2018

My First Time: Tony Ardizzone



My First True Writing Teacher

“I’m not here to be your friend,” he said as he stood before us, fifteen or so nervous undergrads sitting around a long wooden table in a windowless seminar room on the second floor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s creaky English Building. The faint smell of chlorine hung in the air. We could hear the occasional soft thuds of volleyballs and the muted whistles of referees. At the time, Illinois’ English department was housed in an old building that did double duty as a women’s gymnasium. Picture a doughnut with the women’s gym in the center, the English department’s offices and classrooms flanking the gymnasium’s sides. The odor of chlorine was strongest in the classrooms on the first floor, where the swimming pool lay, hidden like the motifs and symbols in the poems and stories and novels we were studying. Sometimes the doors to the volleyball court up on the second floor were left open and we English majors saw a splash of color, a sea of variously colored Danskins, countless young women leaping about in their leotards, spiking the ball, blocking it back down over their opponents’ heads. “I’m not here to be your friend,” the new professor told us. “I’m here to break your bones.”

We’ll get to why he was new in a moment. For now, let’s put his opening words into context. Though we immediately thought what he had to say was harsh, hindsight invites me to consider that he began in this way to make us focus on our class, on the task at hand, rather than sit glumly in our chairs dwelling on the tragedy.

The tragedy. Our course’s assigned teacher, the distinguished writer and editor J. Kerker Quinn, died of a heart attack halfway through our previous class session. Word was he was reading one of our manuscripts and in the middle of a sentence slumped to the table. I wasn’t there to witness it. I was taking a course in Shakespeare’s tragedies and had fallen behind in my readings, and since I knew that Professor Quinn was putting off discussing one of the two manuscripts I gave him on the class’s first day I decided that morning to take one of my three allowed cuts. Later, early evening, in the kitchen of the fraternity house where I worked as a waiter for my meals, I overheard the pots-and-pans man tell the dishwasher that he’d heard some professor dropped dead in class. Where? the dishwasher asked. I think it was English, the pots-and-pans man said. You know, in one of those classrooms up on the second floor where you have to know which staircase to take unless you want to be blocked by the women’s gym.

I was taking Quinn’s class because my previous creative writing teacher, a rough-and-tumble teaching assistant whose comments about our work made one writer rush from the room in tears, recommended him to me. The TA had a hard time figuring me out. He said my writing lay somewhere on the cusp between fiction and poetry. His class had us write both genres, and he was a good sheepdog, driving the poets to one side of the pasture, the fiction writers to another. Since I was good at neither he left me in the center, sort of lost. When my fiction was discussed I was told it was overly poetic–one of the harshest insults a prose writer can ever receive. When my poetry was discussed I was told it was ruined by too much narrative. Once again, ouch! Take a class with Kerker Quinn, my TA advised. If anyone can straighten you out, he can.

J. Kerker Quinn
On the first day of the semester I gave Quinn two short stories I’d written over the summer. I believe I did my best to not make them overly poetic. But then again, I really liked words. That was part of the reason why I wanted to be a writer. I liked the way words looked on the page. I liked the way words felt in the mouth. I liked the way they sounded. And once a word or sound earned its way onto my pages, I liked allowing it to live there. I was like the friendly soul living at the end of the block who seldom turned away a stray cat. After the first few weeks of the semester passed and my work hadn’t been discussed, I stayed after class one day and asked Quinn when he was going to get to me. He told me he was saving my stuff for later. I took this as a good sign since the stories he was reading to us seemed to me to be growing increasingly stronger. At least, at the time that was my hope.

This was back before writing workshops made physical copies of student’s work. Back then the workshop director sat at the head of the table and read the student story aloud, commenting along the way, more or less like the director’s critical commentary on a special edition of a DVD. So we learned by listening. Before Quinn began reading us our stories, he lent us copies of the literary magazine he edited, Accent, and had us read and talk about some of the stories he’d published. We learned why out of the hundreds if not thousands of short stories sent to him he’d selected these.


Back then I knew only a handful of facts about J. Kerker Quinn, and it was only after his unfortunate death that I learned more about his life. Quinn was the founder and editor of the distinguished literary magazine Accent (1940-1960), which published and helped to launch the writing careers of, among many others, Richard Wright, E. E. Cummings, Sylvia Plath, Henry Miller, William H. Gass, and Langston Hughes. He was the first editor to publish Flannery O’Connor, then a student at Iowa. Other writers he supported during the early and middle days of their careers included Nelson Algren, Eric Bentley, Walter Van Tillburg Clark, Malcom Cowley, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, J. F. Powers, Wallace Stevens, and Eudora Welty. What I learned from Quinn during the time that he talked about our stories was that all too often our work resembled essays and it was not uncommon that the real story we had to tell actually began on page five. I also learned that the first page of a story was its most important page. If the first page wasn’t good, the editor wasn’t likely to read the second.

Before the new professor walked into the room you could hear our pencils idly scratching on our yellow legal pads as we sat around the seminar table, waiting. None of us talked. I never learned whose manuscript Quinn had been reading when he died, and I never asked. I often thought that if it had been mine I would have considered never writing again. Of course I was sad that he’d died but at the same time I was also selfish enough to feel disappointed that he’d never told me what he thought of my work. Of course I wanted his praise. I wanted this great editor, who recognized before anyone else the genius of Flannery O’Connor, to confirm that I was a fiction writer. Or, if he felt it was in my better interests, to kick me to the curb, send me to the opposite side of the English building and the vast, deliberately lined, then-confessional alien planet of poetry.

The professor who took over for Quinn was Daniel Curley, a tall man, rugged, with a ragged crew cut, flannel shirt, brown belt and corduroy pants. Decades later, with the help of his good friend and former writing student Roger Ebert, the distinguished film critic, Curley founded and edited a literary magazine titled Ascent, a clear nod to Quinn’s Accent. And years after that, Ebert, who confessed to having taken every course Curley offered and looked upon him as a father figure, co-wrote a lovely memoir with his former teacher, The Perfect London Walk. After introducing himself, Curley said a few words about Quinn’s passing, but only a few words, as I remember–this wasn’t the memorial service–and then he delivered the stunner, how he was there to break our bones.

Daniel Curley
Being a working-class kid from Chicago, what today we’d call a first-generation college student, Curley was speaking in a language I could understand. He spoke with what sounded to my ear like a slight British accent, though later I learned that he’d been born and raised in a town not too far south of Boston. Despite his flannel shirt and crew cut, he seemed to me to be quite a formal man. He took his seat at the head of the seminar table, then added, “Not all of them, mind you. Not all of your bones. Just the ones that have grown crooked. Just the ones that over the years have set themselves wrong.”

He then described how doctors moved through the Middle West in the early 1800s, traveling from town to town, treating the farm boys and farm girls who’d fallen from trees and broken an arm, who’d been kicked by a mule or cow and fractured a leg, who dislocated a shoulder, and so on, and as a result ended up funny, twisted, since the body has a way of healing itself regardless and broken bones, no matter how they’re set, harden back solid into bone. As a result the lands these doctors tended were full of people with gnarled and twisted limbs. In order for the doctors to make their patients’ arms and legs straight, the crooked bones they found would have to be broken. This would be true of our writing, Curley told us. Whether we realized it or not we each had taken on habits, bad habits, quirks. We came to rely on language that was easy and inexact. We embraced stereotypes. Clichés. We’d watched too many TV shows, read too few books. It was his task to break us of these habits, habits that didn’t do service to our purpose, which was to write strong, engaging fiction.


I don’t know whatever happened to the two stories I’d given to Professor Quinn – more than likely both were really lousy–but I immediately headed for one of the back tables in the Illini Student Union cafeteria, which at the time served as my writing room, and wrote a story for Dan Curley. At the time I was in a Nelson Algren phase and as a result I wrote a story about a wino in a neighborhood just south of where I lived, Uptown on Chicago’s North Side, a neighborhood known for its bars and pool halls and flashing neon lights, a neighborhood inhabited by hookers and hustlers and winos. In my story my central character, an unnamed wino, lay passed out in an alley when another wino spots him and then kneels down at my wino’s side and looks for a few moments at his face, then pulls off my wino’s boots, which my wino had been quite proud of, then stands up and walks away.

When Curley read my story aloud to the class and came to this climatic scene he paused for a moment, staring out into the air, and then said, “I can’t quite see that.”

He read the passage aloud again, this time more slowly, then pushed back his chair and stood and had us move about the room so that we could see him as he knelt near an empty space near the door. The unconscious man is lying here, he said, gesturing to the empty space before him. He had one of the other students read the section again. Curley played the part of the second wino. So here I am kneeling over the other man, he said, and now I’m looking at his face. What comes next? He steals the wino’s boots, the student said. Curley reached out an arm, miming the action. How? Curley said. I can’t quite reach them. Still kneeling, Curley swung his left arm down and then scooped it up. I can lift one of the man’s legs, he said, but I can’t reach his boots. He turned back to face the class. And even if I could touch one of his boots, he said, how could I pull it off? Standing now, he walked to where the first wino’s feet might lay and mimed lifting a leg and pulling off a boot–one hand at the toe, the other grasping the heel. Then Curley sat back down at the table and read my story’s final few paragraphs, though by that time I wasn’t listening. My ears rang with his words, his judgment. “I can’t quite see that.”

I learned more than I can explain that afternoon up on the second floor of the University of Illinois’ old English Building, as the sound of volleyballs thumped gently in the air. I learned that truly good creative writing teachers don’t so much teach how to write as they teach how not to. I learned that the best lessons a teacher can give a young writer are specific to the writer’s work. I learned that as a young writer I was too much in my head, not enough in my body. I came to understand that I was writing more from idea or concept than from my five senses. I learned that as a writer I had to see. Later I would generalize the lesson and add hear, smell, taste, touch. Perhaps I came closer to being a fiction writer that day as I sit here remembering–as my mind’s eye still sees–Dan Curley miming the actions necessary to realistically steal another man’s boots.


Tony Ardizzone is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently The Arab’s Ox: Stories of Morocco, an updated edition of his previously published collection, Larabi’s Ox. His novels include The Whale Chaser, In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu, Heart of the Order, and In the Name of the Father. His work has received the Milkweed Editions National Fiction Prize, the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award for Fiction, the Virginia Prize for Fiction, the Pushcart Prize, and two NEA fellowships, among other honors. A native of Chicago, he currently lives in Portland, Oregon. Click here to visit his website.

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. For information on how to contribute, contact David Abrams.


Sunday, August 12, 2018

Sunday Sentence: Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook


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


Sexton wasn’t writing poems anymore; she was writing anguished appeals for attention.

Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook


Friday, August 10, 2018

Friday Freebie: Northland by Porter Fox


Congratulations to Pauline Logan, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie: The Strange Case of Dr. Couney by Dawn Raffel.

This week’s giveaway is Northland by Porter Fox. Subtitled “A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border,” it’s about that other border (the one without the plans to build a wall) and it’s high on my list of books to read before New Year’s Eve (we’ll see if that actually happens). But you, dear reader, have the chance to win your very own copy and start reading it now! Keep scrolling for more information on the book and how to enter the contest.


America’s northern border is the world’s longest international boundary, yet it remains obscure even to Americans. The northern border was America’s primary border for centuries—much of the early history of the United States took place there—and to the tens of millions who live and work near the line, the region even has its own name: the northland. Travel writer Porter Fox spent three years exploring 4,000 miles of the border between Maine and Washington, traveling by canoe, freighter, car, and foot. In Northland, he blends a deeply reported and beautifully written story of the region’s history with a riveting account of his travels. Setting out from the easternmost point in the mainland United States, Fox follows explorer Samuel de Champlain’s adventures across the Northeast; recounts the rise and fall of the timber, iron, and rail industries; crosses the Great Lakes on a freighter; tracks America’s fur traders through the Boundary Waters; and traces the forty-ninth parallel from Minnesota to the Pacific Ocean. Fox, who grew up the son of a boat-builder in Maine’s northland, packs his narrative with colorful characters (Captain Meriwether Lewis, railroad tycoon James J. Hill, Chief Red Cloud of the Lakota Sioux) and extraordinary landscapes (Glacier National Park, the Northwest Angle, Washington’s North Cascades). He weaves in his encounters with residents, border guards, Indian activists, and militia leaders to give a dynamic portrait of the northland today, wracked by climate change, water wars, oil booms, and border security.

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


Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on Aug. 16, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on Aug. 17. 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.


Sunday, August 5, 2018

Sunday Sentence: These Truths by Jill Lepore


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


James K. Polk was forty-eight and wiry and had eyes like caverns and hair like smoke.

These Truths by Jill Lepore

Friday, August 3, 2018

Friday Freebie: The Strange Case of Dr. Couney by Dawn Raffel


Congratulations to Nancy Moore, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie: a bundle of John Straley’s mystery novels set in Alaska, including the latest entry in the Cecil Younger series, Baby’s First Felony.

This week’s giveaway is The Strange Case of Dr. Couney by Dawn Raffel. It’s the extraordinary tale of how a mysterious immigrant “doctor” became the revolutionary innovator of saving premature babiesby placing them in incubators in World’s Fair side shows and on Coney Island and Atlantic City. Keep scrolling for more information on the book and how to enter the contest. And, in case you missed it earlier here at the blog, be sure to read Dawn's account of how she researched the book: The First Time I Dug Up History.


What kind of doctor puts his patients on display? As Dawn Raffel artfully recounts, Dr. Couney figured out he could use incubators and careful nursing to keep previously doomed infants alive, and at the same time make good money displaying these babies alongside sword swallowers, bearded ladies, and burlesque shows. How this turn-of-the-twentieth-century émigré became the savior to families with premature infants, known then as “weaklings”while ignoring the scorn of the medical establishment and fighting the climate of eugenicsis one of the most astounding stories of modern medicine. And as readers will find, Dr. Couney, for all his opportunistic entrepreneurial gusto, is a surprisingly appealing character, someone who genuinely cared for the well-being of his tiny patients. But he had something to hide. Drawing on historical documents, original reportage, and interviews with surviving patients, acclaimed journalist and magazine editor Dawn Raffel tells the marvelously eccentric story of Couney’s mysterious carnival career, his larger-than-life personality, and his unprecedented success as the savior of tiny babies.

If you’d like a chance at winning The Strange Case of Dr. Couney, simply email your name and mailing address to


Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on Aug. 9, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on Aug. 10. 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.


Thursday, August 2, 2018

Living With My Books: A Bookseller’s Library



Reader:  Barbara Theroux
Location:  Missoula, Montana
Collection Size:  Averages 2,000.  It’s a fluid collection: books come in and are donated to grandchildren, the university, and the Missoula Public Library.
The one book I'd run back into a burning building to rescue:  It’s actually four books. Two books “created and bound” by my sons when they were in third grade and two journals created on trips to Disneyland in 1982 and The East Coast in 1984
Favorite book from childhood:  Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne
Guilty pleasure book:  As a bookseller, there were several customers that would always request “airplane reading” those books that you can escape into on a flight, my suggestions were always mysteries. Guess I have Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie to thank for that reading tradition. Joe Pickett, Walt Longmire, Sean Stranahan, Erin Murphy, and Lola Wicks are current characters that give me pleasure.

I have been surrounded by books all my life. In the 1950s, Little Golden Books were the beginning of my personal library; my mother could buy these treasures at the grocery store. As a librarian she knew the importance of reading to children. Not only were books in our home, but I had my own books and bookshelf. Early books that I purchased with my own money at Woolworth’s were in the popular series titles featuring Donna Parker, Trixie Belden, and Nancy Drew.


Libraries were also an important part of my childhood, especially useful to explore topics of interest like ship disasters. One summer I went through the pages of history as I read about the Titanic, the Andrea Doria, and the Lusitania. With library books I did not have to clear room on my bookshelves, but I did have a special spot to keep them so that I did not forget to return them on time. I continued to work in and volunteer in school and public libraries all my life. Today I am president of Friends of Missoula Public Library and have served on many committees working on the new library.

In the late 1960s, my summer employer was Doubleday and Co. The publisher had a bindery and shipping center in my hometown of Hanover, Pennsylvania. This was the center of The Literary Guild and various other book clubs. Working on the assembly lines, gave me insight into how a book is made. It also gave me incentive to complete my college education. At least once a month, employees could purchase damaged books for twenty-five cents apiece. Many times I came home from work with a backseat full of current books.

I graduated with an education degree with a school library certification. This took me to a junior high school library in Pendleton, Oregon. From there I moved to Moscow, Idaho, and went to work in the public library. In 1971, I accepted a position as trade book buyer at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. Being a book buyer at two university stores and later a bookstore owner gave me an introduction to another side of the book business. One full of catalogs, advance reading copies and opportunities to meet authors (and add signed books to my personal library). The decades of bookselling greatly increased my personal library and started my sons’ libraries as well.

This bookshelf holds some of my favorite titles. There is even one Doubleday damaged book, Five Smooth Stones, among the advanced reading copies, signed copies and many Montana Book Award titles.


In addition to acquiring books throughout my life, I had to learn to downsize my collection. Over the years I have donated to various library book sales, the University of Montana President’s home library, established home libraries for my grandchildren, and added to Little Free Libraries at my apartment and across town. My bookshelves also display travel mementos, family photographs and other collections. I now life in a 750-square-foot double-loft apartment where my books surround me but still allow room to entertain friends, family and occasionally host a book club.

This built-in piece of furniture provides a good place to house some of my signed editions.


My travel bookcase not only contains travel guides and books from destinations, but a collection of photos and empty beverage containers from most of the countries I have visited. My travels have taken me to Romania, Hungary, Korea, Russia, China, Cuba and Kenya. The Kenyan kiondo holds a collection of books by Kenyan authors and those which are set in Kenya. One of my sons was in the Peace Corps and spent three years teaching in Kenya where he met his wife. I have traveled to Kenya several times and love having family to visit there.


Now that I am retired from bookselling, I still purchase books and obtain advance reading copies for the next phase of my life with books, becoming a blogger. Book Bound with Barbara began one year ago and is evolving (which is a polite way to say I am still exploring how I want to talk about books).


My office (above) and reading corner (below) show stacks of books, some divided into month of publication or category such as young adult. It is an ever-changing landscape!



Barbara Theroux retired in 2017, giving her time to read the books she accumulated over the 45 years of bookselling. In 1986, she opened Fact & Fiction in downtown Missoula, giving her many years of book events, customers, authors and experiences in creative bill-paying. She still volunteers with the Montana Book Festival, Montana Book Award, and the Missoula Public Library but loves to travel especially to see her grandchildren. These days her opinions can be found at BookBoundWithBarbara.blogspot.com

My Library is an intimate look at personal book collections.  Readers are encouraged to send high-resolution photos of their home libraries or bookshelves, along with a description of particular shelving challenges, quirks in sorting (alphabetically? by color?), number of books in the collection, and particular titles which are in the To-Be-Read pile.  Email thequiveringpen@gmail.com for more information.