Soup and Salad: Laila Lalami procrastinates, Patrick Ryan’s 15 unpublished novels, The Worst Book Signing Ever, Care Package Kurt Vonnegut, The Sweetest Book Publicist in the World, Help Put the War On Stage, Parnassus Piggies

On today’s menu:

1.  I have tried to come to peace with my demon, Procrastination, but he continues to sit on my shoulder, as he has done for years, and peck the back of my head with his relentless beak. I take comfort (small comfort, but comfort nonetheless) in knowing other writers—better and more successful writers—are also tortured by this devil. Take Laila Lalami, for instance. The author of The Moor’s Account writes in the L. A. Times:

     I berate myself regularly about this waste of time. Imagine how much you could get done, I tell myself, if only you’d quit social media. Imagine all the things you could write!
     But I can’t help my procrastination. And for me, at least, it is intimately connected to self-doubt. The novel I’m envisioning at any moment and the novel I’m actually writing are never the same. One is perfect; the other is imperfect. One is intricate and surprising and beautiful; the other is straightforward and conventional and ugly. So ugly that I can’t bear to look at it just yet. When I try to put the fictional world into real words, the result is often frustrating. Before I’ve even started writing the story in my head, I know it will disappoint me on the page.
     So I log into Facebook instead.

One of these days, I’m gonna write something as brilliant as this. One of these days.

2.  Patrick Ryan (The Dream Life of Astronauts) may or may not be a procrastinator, but he has certainly had his share of “desk-drawer novels.” Earlier this summer, Lit Hub had a great piece by Sophia Efthimiatou charting Patrick’s ups and downs. It begins thusly:

     He was at a meditation retreat in the Catskills, sitting cross-legged on a big flat rock on the side of a lake, eyes closed, pulse steady, surrounded by chipmunks and beavers and deer and newts, when Patrick Ryan decided he would never again try to write a book.
     He had completed seven unpublished novels by then, attempted eight or nine more unfinished ones, all of them shoved away into manuscript boxes that took up as much space in his apartment as a child’s coffin. As he was nearing 40, there was nothing impressive about this activity of his—writing, that is—but a sad compulsion that bordered on the absurd.

As someone who is looking forward to reading The Dream Life of Astronauts, I am so grateful that Patrick never gave up.

3.  Another excellent Lit Hub essay you might have missed when you were busy vacationing at Yosemite or slathering SPF 100 on your winter-pale skin at Atlantic City this summer: Remembering the Worst Book Signing Ever by Lori Jakiela. Her book is called Miss New York Has Everything, a line she took from an episode of the 1970s TV show That Girl, but a title that led to all sorts of hilarious confusion at Sam’s Club. Here’s a snippet of her trials and tribulations:

     Inside Sam’s Club, everything—the signs, the cake, the carts, more Grand Opening balloons—is red white and blue, as if Sam’s is America itself and not just a place where Americans get a bargain on 1,000-count boxes of latex exam gloves.
     People ram by, massive carts stuffed with paper towels and dog-food bags big enough to stash bodies in. Behind me a woman in a motorized scooter with a red balloon tied to the back revs up. She says, “Beep,” extending the vowels into a screech. She waves her arms like propellers. “I’m trying to get through here,” she says. “Jesus Christ.”
     I make my way to the information desk. I’ve brought a copy of my book and hold it up to show the woman at the desk. She’s wearing a regulation Sam’s vest. It’s covered with American flag pins, smiley faces, and buttons that say, “Ask Me! I Can Help!”
     I say, “I’m here for a booksigning? Do you know where I’m supposed to go?”
     “A what?” she says.
     “I’m an author,” I say and point to my book. “I’m supposed to sign some books here?”
      “I don’t know nothing about that,” the woman says and holds up a finger, then reaches for a big red phone that looks like a cartoon.
     Off toward the snack bar, the giant free cake seems mauled by squirrels. The line for free hot dogs stretches back to the entrance. The 300-count bags of roasted pig-ear dog treats are buy-one-get-one, which explains why nearly every cart that rolls by is stocked with them.

4.  Author Odie Lindsey (We Come to Our Senses) was the proverbial “Any Soldier” during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, which meant he was also the recipient of a care package full of Kurt Vonnegut novels, as he writes at The Millions:

     I looked around as if to thwart a setup, then squatted on the sand floor of the tent and went at it. Ripping the tail of packing tape off of the top, I expected a reward of Spaghetti-O’s or Cheerios, or pray-God, Jolly Ranchers.
     There was nothing there. Nothing but books. I read Slapstick out of obligation, and because it sat on top of the stack, and because its cover featured an illustrated clown.

I, too, was the recipient of care packages during my tour in the Middle East nearly 25 years later and transmogrified my experiences into the character of Abe Shrinkle (aka The Care Package King) in Fobbit. Like Abe, my greed knew no bounds. I mean, there’s just something euphoric about the squeal of ripping back that packaging tape....

5.  I can’t remember when I first met Caitlin Hamilton Summie—15 years ago? 20 years?—but I do know she was the first publicist to personally reach out to me, a neophyte book critic and blogger-in-the-rough. Now the owner of her own marketing and publicity company, Caitlin first crossed paths with me when she worked for Unbridled Books. I was always struck by the energy and love she put behind every book she sent my way (including during my year-long deployment to Baghdad in 2005). As I look back over my correspondence with Caitlin, I’m struck by how she never fails to ask about my life—my job, my writing, my kids, the weather outside my window, and so on. I always get the feeling that Caitlin’s words go deeper than the surface of e-mail text—her concern for my well-being rings genuine and true. Oh, did I mention we’ve never met in person? We came close once during an annual Book Expo America when it was held in Washington, D.C., but for whatever reason (probably socially-awkward me chickening out at the last minute), we never connected. So, I appreciated this behind-the-scenes look at Caitlin in her conversation with Sonya Chung (The Loved Ones), which includes this comment from Caitlin: “Every discouraging moment comes with a moment of success or joy—a great and important review, the discovery of a new talent, that perfect pitch to a niche outlet—and so we here in this firm get up and turn the lights on to make certain those voices are heard.” Perhaps the best news of all is the fact that Caitlin will see her own book, a debut collection of short stories, published next spring by Fomite. I can’t wait to start getting the word out about To Lay to Rest Our Ghosts.

6.  Air Force veteran J. A. Moad II wants to put the war on stage and he needs your help. Check out his crowd-funding project to stage his original production Outside Paducah: the Wars at Home this Veterans Day. Please consider sending a few dollars in his direction.

7.  And speaking of People Helping People....A wonderful thing is happening at Parnassus Books (in addition to the awesome bookselling skills on display, yo): authors are rallying around bookseller Stephanie Appell who is facing some steep medical bills. Check out the Parnassus blog post Book People Are the Best People, and then get ready to bid on some custom-designed piggy banks...so you can start saving for someone else’s rainy day.

Soup and Salad: James Joyce Illuminates Karl Ove Knausgaard, Matthew Norman on Every Writer’s Worst Nightmare, What’s in a Publisher’s Name?, RIP Lois Duncan and Jack Fuller

On today’s menu:

1.  “I longed to get away. What I wanted was to write, and I resolved to read this marvelous work and be illuminated by all its radiance.” In his introduction to the new Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Karl Ove Knausgaard (My Struggle) writes about how the Irish writer’s masterpiece shone a light on his life and career:

Even now, 27 years after I first read the book, its moods come back to me. The rain-drenched school buildings in the dusk, the circumambient sound of children’s voices, the dull thud of a foot striking a ball, the heavy arc of the ball in the dismal air. The smell of cold night in the chapel and the hum of prayer. The family gathered together on Christmas Day, waiting for the dinner to be served; the fire burning in the fireplace, candles lighting up the table, the bonds and conflicts that exist between the people seated around it. The father, who talks with strangers in bars and tells the same stories every time. The narrow, filthy lanes in which the prostitutes huddle, the yellow gaslights, the smell of perfume, Stephen’s trembling heart. And the birds at evening, circling above the library, dark against the blue-gray sky, their cry “shrill and clear and fine and falling like threads of silken light unwound from whirring spools.”

It’s been a number of years (too many) since I read Portrait. Thanks to Penguin and Knausgaard, I hope to return to its pages soon. To echo the novel’s concluding lines: “and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

2.  At Lit Hub, novelist Matthew Norman (We’re All Damaged) writes about every writer’s worst nightmare: a room full of empty chairs at a reading...

I don’t know exactly what I was expecting to find inside that bookstore. I’m not an idiot. I knew that I wasn’t The Beatles getting off that plane in San Francisco. No one was going to be throwing underwear at me or bursting into tears. But, surely someone was going to be there, right? Book people? A Hopkins creative writing class? My coworkers? My friends? But then it dawned on me that my book had only been out for about 72 hours and no one had any reason to have any idea who in the hell I was. And then something else dawned on me—something far worse. I hadn’t really told anyone about the reading. I’d posted something about it on Facebook, but that was about the equivalent of shouting the date and time of my reading out my open car window on I-95 in a rainstorm. A lone microphone stood in the café. Lined up there before it were five rows of startlingly empty chairs. My literary career had started.

3.  Book Riot gives the backstory behind some publishers' names, including a few of my favorites like Dzanc Books:

Pronounced “Da-Zaynk”, the not-quite 10-year old Michigan literary powerhouse (books, a monthly magazine, classes, writers residencies) took its name from the initials of the five children of co-founders Steven Gillis and Dan Wickett had between them: Anna, Zach, Chase, Nasstassja, and Dalton with letters moved around to form something that almost looked like a word.

and Tin House:

The power forward of the Rose City’s writing community began as a bi-coastal magazine operation in 1988 with two of its founders based in New York and its managing editor living in a literal tin house on the city’s northwest side. That same building (“to be honest, it’s corrugated zinc oxide,” a Tin Housian told me) now houses the operations of the magazine, book publishing unit and acclaimed summer writing workshops and the unbreakably sealed story of Tin House’s other potential names. “Those are buried under the Tin Garage. Along with the bodies.”

I was saddened to hear of two writers’ deaths this week—two authors whose orbits had briefly, peripherally touched mine in recent years...

4a.  To any young reader growing up in the 1970s and 80s, the name Lois Duncan will probably be familiar as someone who trailed icy fingers down the knobby spines of our backs. The author of I Know What You Did Last Summer, Killing Mr. Griffin, and many others wrote about sinister threats to teenagers and managed to tap directly into our deepest adolescent fears; she was like the darker sister of Judy Blume. Three years ago when I put out a call on Facebook for suggestions on what to read next, I was surprised to receive a personal email from Mrs. Duncan:

     Dear David Abrams,
     Of course, the book I’d like for you to read next is my book, One to the Wolves: On the Trail of a Killer, about the murder of daughter Kaitlyn Arquette. It has just been published as an e-book by Planet Ann Rule and can be downloaded to Kindles, Nooks, etc.
     I’ve written over 50 books, and am best known for fictional suspense novels. This time the horror story is a true one. The heroine was our own child and I was not able to manipulate the plot to produce a happy ending.
     Sincerely,
     Lois Duncan

Sure, it was what some might call “shameless self-promotion” (though I say there’s no shame in trying to spread the word about something you worked long and hard to produce; it’s a noisy world out there and it’s hard to be heard); but I was struck by the little twist she even managed to put at the end of a simple email. I think I was also so stunned to receive a message from one of my childhood idols that I never wrote back (nor, more to my self-disappointment, did I read One to the Wolves) and now I’m sorry to have let that moment slip by. Lois Duncan passed away on June 15 at age 82. At The New Yorker, Carmen Maria Machado wrote a beautiful tribute to the author she first discovered in 1997 when she was eleven:

     That was the summer when—tan, smelling of chlorine, stippled in mosquito bites and goose bumps from the air-conditioning, just on the verge of puberty—I discovered Lois Duncan. Her books’ dramatic titles, such as “Summer of Fear,” “Killing Mr. Griffin,” “Gallows Hill,” drew me in, and their taglines sealed the deal. I wedged as many as could fit into my bag. Horror novels had been banned in my family since I was seven, when an older kid on the bus let me borrow his copy of “Night of the Living Dummy,” and it gave me such terrible nightmares that I insisted on sleeping with the lights on for a week. So, when my mother picked me up from the library, I pleaded my case. Most of them had been written in the nineteen-seventies, I told her. (I had checked.) How scary could they be?
     Very, of course. The climax of “Gallows Hill”—in which a girl’s classmates believe her to be a witch and gather on a hilltop to hang her—was so thrilling that I literally trembled. (Only when it was over did I notice that, while I was reading, I’d moved to the arm of the couch and perched myself there.) I picked up “Summer of Fear” next: a teenager’s beautiful cousin moves in with her family after a terrible tragedy and begins to steal the protagonist’s life. After that, “Killing Mr. Griffin,” about a group of high-school students who accidentally kill their English teacher. Then “Daughters of Eve,” in which a teacher runs a feminist organization to instruct her students about the poison of regressive gender roles—but her message of empowerment is tinged with something sinister.
     These novels weren’t scary in a way that I recognized. They walked a delicate line between impossibly terrifying and terrifyingly possible. Duncan has sometimes been grouped with writers like Christopher Pike or R. L. Stine, but her novels lack the comic, pulpy luridness of their work. Her prose is unfussy and clean. She centered her books on young women, and her writing considers themes that have come to obsess me as an adult: gendered violence, psychological manipulation, the vulnerability of outsiders. She writes about folie à deux and mass hysteria, doppelgängers, sociopathy, revenge. She portrays psychic powers and past-life regressions with a kind of realism; she recognized that even a supernatural evil must have a human heart.

4b.  I knew Jack Fuller was terminally ill. Greg Michalson, his publisher and friend, had arranged for Jack to write something for this blog in order to help get a little more visibility for what would turn out to be his last book, the just-released One From Without. But then I got this note from Greg: About his “my first time” blog post for you: Jack’s health has taken a steep turn for the worse and he entered hospice care yesterday. But I spoke with both him and his wife—he’s going to try to dictate this piece about his time in Vietnam with Stars & Stripes, if he’s able. I know he very much wants to do this. Though I’m not sure how this will work. That’s why, when I did receive Jack’s essay, “Finding My Novel,” five days later, I knew the high cost of the words he’d written. I don’t think I’ve ever published anything here at The Quivering Pen with more respect and appreciation. Jack Fuller passed away earlier this week at age 69. The notice at Shelf Awareness included this tribute from Greg Michalson:

The passing of Jack Fuller is inexpressibly sad and difficult. Our hearts go out to his family. It was a tremendous privilege to know and be allowed to publish this man, whose brilliant writing may only be exceeded by his intellectual curiosity and good will toward his fellow man. His interests, like his career, had a breathtaking scope. A conversation with Jack was always profound and entertaining. He was truly one of the good guys, someone who tried to make the world that much better. We’re glad we were able to launch into that world his final novel, a masterpiece which he said took him a lifetime to be ready to write.

I’ll leave the last word to Jack, in these closing lines from the essay he wrote for this blog as he recounted the struggle to put his thoughts about his Vietnam War experience on paper:

     Perhaps a year passed. I did not have a story in mind, just a faint, restless, buzzing in my head, something that wanted out. Then one night, while I was studying in an underground library, all of a sudden the story came to me. Every movement of every soldier in it was clear in my mind. The geography of the village was so sharp that somewhere in my papers there is still the map I drew that night, which did not change over the years I wrote and rewrote and rewrote the novel.
     When I started writing that night, I had no idea who these men were, moving through the village. I did not know where they came from, what else they had done in the Army, anything about them. And so I started with whatever I could with each of them, and worked from there.
     Many things remained unclear to me even as I worked deep in the story. But the importance of this story itself never failed me. It was at least a decade before I saw the book in print. It was actually my second book to be published. But it was the one that I would never let go.
     The picture of those grunts in the village is still as vivid to me as it was that night, underground, in the library, reflected from my experiences at Stars and Stripes.

Soup and Salad: Hilary Mantel’s Writing Day, Write Your Way to Jackson Hole, George Saunders’ Debut Novel, How Books Can Help Us Survive A War, Charles Dickens Names Names, 12 Things Kelly Luce Noticed While Reading Every Short Story Published in 2014-15, Friends in Books

On today's menu:

1.  This piece by Hilary Mantel at The Guardian about how she spends her writing day went viral when it was published last month, but for those of you who missed it the first time around, here’s how it begins:

     Some writers claim to extrude a book at an even rate like toothpaste from a tube, or to build a story like a wall, so many feet per day. They sit at their desk and knock off their word quota, then frisk into their leisured evening, preening themselves.
     This is so alien to me that it might be another trade entirely. Writing lectures or reviews–any kind of non-fiction–seems to me a job like any job: allocate your time, marshall your resources, just get on with it. But fiction makes me the servant of a process that has no clear beginning and end or method of measuring achievement. I don’t write in sequence. I may have a dozen versions of a single scene. I might spend a week threading an image through a story, but moving the narrative not an inch. A book grows according to a subtle and deep-laid plan. At the end, I see what the plan was.

Can I get an “Amen!”?

2.  From the Department of Having a Great Time, Wish You Were Here comes two writing opportunities in Jackson Hole, Wyoming (the granite-peaked paradise where I grew up).
     The first, a Nonfiction Book Writing Retreat, is led by Laura Bush and features two days of intensive writing (including a session called “Getting Down and Drafty”) in the historic Moulton Ranch cabins which lie in the shadow of the Grand Tetons. Space is limited, so you need to sign up now. (Full disclosure: Laura is a friend and former classmate of mine, but I wouldn’t be telling you about this retreat if I didn’t think she had the energy and smarts to get you kickstarted on a draft of your book).
     The second event coming up next month is the renowned Jackson Hole Writers Conference, led by Tim Sandlin. As a past attendee, I can vouch for the value of this three-day conference: it’s inspiring, entertaining, and full of creative energy. In fact, I loved my time there so much, I even wrote two essays (actually one essay broken in half) for a new anthology about the conference called Writing It Right. This year’s conference features authors Gretel Ehrlich, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Brian Doyle and many others across a wide spectrum of genre. Go here to get registered.

3.  Four words: George Saunders’ debut novel.

Okay, here are a few more words about the inspiration behind Lincoln in the Bardo from an interview with Saunders at Vulture: A really long time ago, in the Bill Clinton era, my wife and I and my wife’s cousin were driving by Oak Hill Cemetery in D.C., and she just said casually, “Did you know that when Lincoln was president, his son died and he was buried right out there?” And she pointed up to the exact crypt where Willie Lincoln was. Several of the newspaper accounts said that Lincoln had been back to visit the crypt. And wow, this image came to mind of the Lincoln Memorial plus the Pietà. It just stuck with me for many, many years. I knew I couldn’t possibly do it justice, but after a while I thought, if it’s this insistent, it would be kind of dishonorable to not try.

4.  Over at Literary Hub, novelist Emily Gray Tedrowe (Blue Stars) has a beautiful essay called How Books Can Help Us Survive A War. Subtitled “A Sister Tries To Read Along With A Brother On The Front Lines,” it’s a good way to start your Memorial Day weekend, reflecting on the powerlessness military families feel when loved ones are deployed. Here’s how it starts:

     In the photo, my Marine brother is unshaven, wearing cammies, leaning wearily against the rough outer wall of a building. Around the corner you can see foothills of the Korengal Valley mountains, a remote and dangerous area in Kunar Province, rife with Taliban when Malcolm deployed there. A month ago as I was unpacking boxes in our new apartment, I found this picture that he’d mailed me. What my daughters noticed—with fearful delight—when I called them over to see it: Uncle Malcolm is smoking! He is. With a cigarette clamped in the middle of his mouth, my former track star brother is, like his fellow squadmate resting on the bench alongside, clearly taking a smoke break. What I immediately noticed, and the reason this photo is so precious to me: Malcolm is reading. His gaze isn’t fixed on the terrifying mountain behind him, where he’d just spent a sleepless rain-filled night at the Ops post, hearing the enemy all around him, and where he would be heading back shortly. Nor is he talking or joking around with the other guys in battle gear nearby. He’s focused only on the book he holds on his lap, in a moment of private concentration that I would recognize anywhere.
     What can reading do for us when we’re under the gun? When we are in the throes of an extreme experience, when we’re lost or grieving or sick? Or when we are deeply, deeply afraid, as I was during the seven months Malcolm spent in Afghanistan. As a writer, teacher, and life-long reader, I have built my life around books, and so I reached instinctively for novels and stories myself when my younger brother was deployed to war. But for the first time, reading failed me. Fear for his safety had torn my attention into jagged pieces, and suddenly I couldn’t find the mental energy to connect one part of a page, or even a sentence, with whatever followed.

5.  “Allow me to introduce Mr Plornishmaroontigoonter. Lord Podsnap, Count Smorltork, and Sir Clupkins Clogwog. Not to mention the dowager Lady Snuphanuph. As for Serjeant Buzfuz, Miss Snevellicci, Mrs. Wrymug, and the Porkenhams.” That’s how Chi Luu opens the essay Charles Dickens and the Linguistic Art of the Minor Character at JSTOR Daily. You don’t have to scratch deep below the surface of my own novel Fobbit to see how Chuck Dick influenced the christening of that book’s characters: Eustace Harkleroad, Chance Gooding Jr., Abe Shrinkle, et al. But my character names pale in comparison to those of the Great Baptizer. As Luu points out: “Even for minor characters who are but briefly mentioned, in the Dickensian world, knowing just their names is sometimes enough to know the most important features about them. What might you think of a Mr. Murdstone or a Mr. Pecksniff if you knew nothing else about them? Dickens was adept at linguistically manipulating a name in different memorable ways to persuade readers in one direction or another.”


6.  As we close out Short Story Month, Kelly Luce has a few things to say about reading compact fiction over at Electric Literature. The list, 12 Things I Noticed While Reading Every Short Story Published in 2014-15 (or, Extremely Long Titles That Are Complete Sentences Are Still Very Much a Thing), includes such gems like this: “There was a disconcerting number of stories by white male writers set at family lake houses, in which someone, usually a young girl, drowns. The surviving characters spend the remaining 2-3 pages feeling sad and fighting, usually with Dad.”


7.  At his blog, bookseller and author Gary D. Robson (Who Pooped in Central Park?) describes the joy of turning your friends into characters in a book: “Watching Dominique’s face when she saw herself in this book was a wonderful thing.”

Soup and Salad: RIP Jim Harrison, Emily St. John Mandel and Laura van den Berg Talk Dystopia, “Difficult” Women Puzzle Margaret Dilloway, Susan Perabo Marvels at Tobias Wolff, Ghosts Haunt Elizabeth Brundage, What Novelists Should Worry About, Jodi Paloni Comes to Terms with “Too Many Books,” Glen Chamberlain’s Funny Valentine

On today’s menu:

1.  The death of author Jim Harrison (The Ancient Minstrel, Legends of the Fall, etc.) a week ago touched nearly all of us in ways great and small. I was stunned but not surprised by his passing. He’d worked hard and played hard and it showed in recent photos of the 78-year-old. You could hear the Grim Reaper sharpening his scythe every time you looked at that face. Nonetheless, the passing of a legend is always a sad, regretful thing. Speaking of coulda-shoulda-wouldas, the Barnes & Noble Review was kind enough to publish my essay about a late encounter with the legend. It begins like this: I met Jim Harrison on a flight from Bozeman, Montana to Chicago three years ago. I say “met,” but as we soared over the wheaty heartland, not a word passed between us. It remains one of the greatest regrets of my life.  Click here to read the rest.

2.  “An idea I’ve been thinking about lately is that perhaps we’re drawn to these (dystopian) stories because we long for less distracted lives. We’re tethered to, distracted by, and addicted to our technology, and maybe there’s a certain longing for a world where our phones no longer work and we have to talk to people face to face again and spend more time alone with our thoughts.”
      ~Emily St. John Mandel in conversation with Laura van den Berg at FSG’s Work in Progress


3.  “Difficult” women? Novelist Margaret Dilloway (Sisters of Heart and Snow) pins ’em to the page over at Read Her Like an Open Book:

This whole concept of “difficult” women still puzzles me. Sometimes, the word “difficult” is a code word for “bitchy.” Someone you don’t want to deal with. To me, to be “difficult” means to be human—imperfect, struggling with baggage from the past, responsibilities, aging, expectations, dreams. In real life, every woman I know would be classified as “difficult” the way my characters are. The women I know are fierce and mercurial. Everyone’s got some kind of problem they’re trying to overcome. They complain and they struggle even while they love. And women mess up their lives just as forcefully and thoroughly as men ever have, thank you very much.

4.  At Beatrice, Susan Perabo (Why They Run the Way They Do) talks about why Tobias Wolff’s short story “Bullet in the Brain” is a prime example of how much can be contained in just three short pages:

I’ve decided that the only single word that can possibly define this short story is “audacious.” I’ve read the story maybe forty times in the last twenty years, and I still can’t believe Wolff pulls it off. The tightrope Wolff walks, bridging the gaping canyon of sentimentality that this story should be, is so thin as to be invisible. Only through sheer audacity could a writer take this character, and this plot, and create something this good.

Related:  My own take on “Bullet in the Brain” (a mini-review that consistently ranks as the #1 most-read Quivering Pen post of all time)

5.  Head Butler reminds me to levitate Elizabeth Brundage’s novel All Things Cease to Appear closer to the top of the To-Be-Read Stack. If nothing else, for the haunting story-behind-the-story. As Brundage explains:

      It was the late 90’s and my husband had just joined a medical practice in Troy, New York. For Mother’s Day the year before, he took me to a beautiful inn in Columbia County – the Old Chatham Sheepherding Company – and over the course of that weekend I decided that Old Chatham, New York was one of the most beautiful places on earth and I wanted to live there. We decided to rent a house in nearby Malden Bridge, a historic hamlet that had been settled in the late eighteenth century. One afternoon, with my girls in the car (our son was just a twinkle in my eye back then) we drove past this old house with a For Rent sign hanging from a tree. It was a lovely white clapboard cape with a small front porch. I pulled over and we got out. There was nobody around; the place looked empty. We roamed around to the back yard, smelling sage and wild onion, and discovered a Dutch door. On impulse I tried the knob, but of course the door was locked. And then the strangest thing happened. The bottom half of the door eased open all on its own.
      We ended up signing a lease and moving in. Shortly thereafter, we discovered that we were not alone. Every morning on the way to school the girls told me stories about the ghosts, three little girls who had died in a fire and whose mother and father were up in heaven. They knew details that seemed beyond their ability to fabricate, including the names of the ghosts, and historic details about an old mill down the road with tainted water...

6.  Worry. We’ve all got it, we all learn to seamlessly incorporate it into our routines, our personalities, the very fibers of our bodies. Creative types, I think, are especially prone to anxiety. At Lit Hub, Susannah Felts delivers a nail-chewing list for writers:

I worry that I’ll never finish. I worry that I’ll finish a draft and never revise it. I worry that I’ll finish the book and no agent will pick it up. I worry that an agent will pick it up and fail to sell it and then dump me. I worry that it will sell and get bad reviews. I worry that it will sell and get no reviews. I worry about the attention I’ll get when it’s reviewed. I worry what people in my hometown will think of it. I worry that I’ll fail at bringing the ideas to life the way they are in my head.

Click here to finger the rest of the worry beads.

7.  One of the things I tend to worry about (needlessly, as all worries are at heart) is the fact that I’ll never live long enough to read ALL THE BOOKS. At Read Her Like an Open Book, Jodi Paloni (They Could Live With Themselves) says she, too, has ”more books than a person could ever possibly read.” But she’s come to comfortable terms with it:

      It doesn’t matter how many books. Books are not just for reading. They’re for viewing, touching, dusting, sorting, stacking, arranging, re-sorting, shelving, un-shelving. They’re a source of pleasure.
      My husband has twenty-two screwdrivers, thirteen wrenches, and sixteen wood files.
      My goat cheese-making friend keeps a couple of bucks around for kicks and, out of compassion, nurtures elder chickens that are all done laying eggs.
      My daughter has 2,178 songs on her iPod.
      That we are a species of excess is another topic. My point here is to say that we pay attention (and dollars) to what sparks passion, nourishes obsession, furnishes joy, soothes.

Click here to read the rest.

8.  Your Friday is about to get a whole lot better. A new issue of High Desert Journal is now online and chief among its contributors is Glen Chamberlain. I suggest you take time this afternoon to do two things: 1) Read the short story “Her Funny Valentine” and 2) Go buy Glen’s new collection All I Want Is What You’ve Got. There’s a very good reason I call her “the Alice Munro of our American West.” Here’s how “Her Funny Valentine” begins:

Cash Gunn was born in Pocket, Montana, at the tail end of the Depression, and he never got out of it. It wasn’t that he didn’t try: when he was 18, he was going to go to college, but the Korean War came along. When he survived, all he wanted was something familiar, so he returned to Pocket and married Agnes.

Click here to read the rest at High Desert Journal.

Soup and Salad: Negotiating a writer’s worth, Where are all the patrons?, Alexander Chee’s 13-year journey, Max Ophuls at The Lincoln, Punctuation kills words, Great cover designs, Lee Boudreaux’s careful reading, “I wanted to publish a book before I died,” Paul Giamatti channels Balzac

On today's menu:

1.  Manjula Martin, editor of the anthology SCRATCH: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living, which will be published later this year by Simon & Schuster, on how to negotiate ways to be paid for your art:

The one super-strict rule I hold myself to is: Always ask for more. Every time. No matter what. Because no one is going to give you more money unless you ask for it. And if you ask for more and the person instantly agrees without even blinking... then you should probably ask for even more next time. When I negotiate, I sometimes don’t get more. And I sometimes get more than more. But I never get less, I can tell you that!

Manjula’s occasional tiny letter newsletter is well worth subscribing to. (Also, it’s free!)


2.  $peaking of $upport for writer$: “No longer supported by the state, today’s writers must meet market demands. Those who succeed often do so by innovating no more than is necessary.”

3.  Listen, my children, and you shall hear...of the rollercoaster ride of Alexander Chee. His novel The Queen of the Night tops my To-Be-Read stack and after reading this interview at The Millions, it’s almost a wonder the book is in our hands at all. As Claire Cameron (author of The Bear) describes it,

The Queen of the Night is Chee’s first novel hardcover release since Edinburgh in 2001 and its reissue in 2003. While he has hardly been idle, I wondered how that felt. As novelists often talk of the pressure to publish, were the intervening 13 to 15 years productive or full of angst? What I found was a story filled with all the twists and turns of the greatest writing careers, a publisher bankruptcy, bouts of teaching yoga, the consequences of missing a deadline by 10 years, the advance money running out, an Amtrak residency, surviving through four changes of editor, and whether it’s all worth it in the end.

Chee says when he thought about working on the manuscript for The Queen of the Night,

It was like wandering blind into a storm. I moved to Los Angeles, where I really just sort of rested for a few months, read things, and went to parties and libraries and tried to put my head together again. When I ran out of money, I moved to my Mom’s in Maine....writing in her basement every morning starting at 5 a.m., taking a break for Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns at 11 a.m. and making an early lunch before working more. It was like the weirdest saddest colony stay, about three months.

And then these comments, of course, spoke directly to my heart (which is often torn between writing this blog and doing some “real writing”):

My friend Maud Newton and I were talking about our history with blogs recently, and we agreed to think of them respectively as the sort of minor books that you publish in between the books that matter, an experiment done in a way that eventually helps the sale of the next book — people read it, treat it like a blog and not a book — and which allows to sustain a readership without suffering the damage of a tragic sales track record.

4.  If you’re in the New York City area, you might want to drop by The Lincoln Center on March 2. That’s when Chee will be on hand to help bring Max Ophul’s 1953 classic The Earrings of Madame de... to the screen. The Print Screen series “invites our favorite authors to present films that complement and have inspired their work, with discussions and book signings to follow screenings.” Click here for more information on the recurring series.


5.  Punctuation posters. Who needs words anyway?


6.  I can always count on The Casual Optimist to drop some delicious eye-candy into my inbox. The blog’s February Book Covers of Note includes some stunners, including one of my favorites: Jamie Keenan’s design for My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir by Chris Offut.

7.  Over at Lit Hub, Lee Boudreaux takes us into the mind (and heart) of an editor:

The editing process is asking every question that occurs to you and reading the manuscript as carefully as anyone is ever going to read it. This is the time to ask those questions and it is always the author’s…well, they have permission to reject anything, it’s just that you’re raising the question. I believe the author always has a better idea on how to solve the problem than anything I would suggest.

8.  If you can read this and not be moved, you’re a stonier person than I am: I wanted to publish a book before I died.


9.  I leave you with Paul Giamatti channeling Balzac and his 50-cups-of-day habit:

Soup and Salad: Larry Levis peels the wallpaper, Story Prize finalists announced, Andria Williams pays attention to her characters, The Proust Book Club, Katey Schultz teaches you how to flash

On today’s menu:

photo by George R. Janecek

1.  Before this year’s publication of The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems, I wasn’t familiar with the works of the late poet Larry Levis. Shame on me, I guess, because Levis—who died of a heart attack in 1996—appears to have had many admirers: among them, Pam Houston, who was getting her doctorate degree at the University of Utah while Levis was teaching fiction writing there in the 90s. Over at the Graywolf Press blog, Pam has a wonderful story to tell about Levis’ appearance at the 1990 AWP conference in Denver:

      The Utah contingent sat near the front of the ballroom, feeling cool by association. In a few minutes Larry was going to peel the fleur-de-lis off the wallpaper with his poetry, and with the misguided smugness of grad students, we considered him ours.
      Except then it was fifteen minutes after the scheduled time of the reading, and there was no sign of Larry. This did not surprise us. He’d be there, we assured each other; time wasn’t really his best thing. But then another fifteen minutes went by.
      We looked around the room nervously. Nobody seemed to want to go to the podium and call the reading off.
      Just when the din of chatter seemed to have reached maximum volume, the doors to the ballroom crashed open and Larry stepped in. As distinctive as everything else about him, his walk was a little like a cartoon dog’s—think Pluto, or Marmaduke—he took big strides during which his feet never seemed to quite touch the ground. He float-loped to the podium in this fashion, and everyone fell quiet. He was wearing his uniform of a black motorcycle jacket, black jeans, and boots. He tucked the half cigarette he’d been holding behind his ear and looked down at his hands, as if a book might appear there. He felt around in all of his pockets, and came away with nothing.
      In the second row we stole glances at each other. No one in the room seemed to be breathing. Then he put one hand on either side of the podium, bore down on us, and recited Caravaggio: Swirl and Vortex—all 4 glorious long-lined pages of it-- from memory. The room burst into applause. Our little cadre of grad students swooned. It was one of those moments—there are a few in every young writer’s life—that let you see exactly what you have signed up for.

2.  The three finalists for The Story Prize were announced earlier this month: There’s Something I Want You to Do by Charles Baxter, Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson, and Thirteen Ways of Looking by Colum McCann. The winner will be announced on March 2.


3.  At the Time Now blog, Peter Molin appears to have loved Andria Williams’ debut novel, The Longest Night, as much as I did:

Williams notices what her characters notice, but also much that they don’t understand or only half-intuit; this close attention to their interiority as much as the period detail makes The Longest Night come alive. In many ways, though, the strictures of military service and culture portrayed in The Longest Night might be said to be timeless, for Williams casts a net around military families and military duty and pulls in many fine fish in the way of still relevant insights about life in uniform. Readers who never served or veterans who served only a tour or two can make of Williams’ portrait of military domesticity what they will, but readers who have tried to keep a marriage together over the long haul of a military career will marvel at her acuity at describing the rewards and pleasures, such as they are, while also conveying a more pervasive feeling of disappointment and perhaps even of life wasted.

4.  File under: In Search of Lost Reading Time.

While in college, I promised myself that one day I would read the entirety of In Search of Lost Time after graduation. I made this vow, as all 21-year-olds must, knowing very little of the realities of full-time employment, commuting, and Sunday brunch plans. I also made this resolution at a time when my daily Internet activity consisted of checking my email and maybe, if I was really hungry, the dining hall menu. I had no idea that reading would one day become an activity that I would have to plan....And so, here I am, 10 years (!) later, trying again to finish one of the best novels I’ve ever read, possibly the best novel I’ve ever read. (I’ll know for sure when I finish.) The world (i.e. the Internet) has only gotten more distracting and, having become the mother of a three-year-old, my daily responsibilities have increased and become less negotiable. At the same time, one thing I’ve learned over the past decade is that you can accomplish a lot by doing a little of something every day. You can raise a child, write a book, make a life with another person. Almost everyone I know who has completed In Search of Lost Time (and to be clear, most of these “known” people are those who have written about the experience, not anyone I’ve met personally) did it slowly, reading just 10 to 20 pages a day, usually in the morning. At a pace of 10 pages a day, it will take me about a year and two months to finish, a period of time that doesn’t seem as long as it did 10 years ago.

Over at The Millions, staff writer Hannah Gersen is knuckling down, buckling up and saying “To hell with the distracting internet!” as she embarks on a plan to read Proust. Will you join her journey? I see you’ve bought a box of madeleines, so you’re already halfway there.

5.  The 49 Writers Center in Alaska always has a good lineup of classes, but if you can't afford to travel all the way to Anchorage, I have good news for you: you can get your schooling from the comfort of your lawn chair in Boca Raton. The Center has a series of online courses, including one on flash fiction taught by Katey Schultz (Flashes of War). Here are the details:

This four-week online course will focus on flash fiction—short stories that range from 250-750 words—often described as “stories of the moment” or “a work of art carved on a grain of sand.” Writers who are unfamiliar with the genre will find enough challenge and support to come away with new knowledge and guided practice, as well as a very clear understanding of scene. More experienced writers will enjoy the intellectual challenges of the lectures and discussions, as well as in-depth prompts from the instructor. Each week includes guided discussion forums, assigned readings, a brief lecture, and prompts. Participants should plan on 2-3 hours of work with the materials per week (or more depending on personal engagement), in addition to writing time. At the end of the month, turn in 1 polished flash fiction to the instructor for feedback (and participate in the optional peer-review process, if desired). The course concludes with an optional livestream Video Chat.

The first class bell rings on Feb. 29. Go here to see the syllabus.

Soup and Salad: Val Brelinski Worries About Her Sister, Gordon Lish Fools Around With Raymond Carver, a Bookstore Curates Desert Island Books, War Lit Gets Listed, Susan Henderson Keeps On Keepin’ On, Lisa Gornick Observes, Rebecca Makkai Evangelizes Short Stories....and a Memo From the Completely Self-Serving Department of Vanities

On today’s menu:

On the last day of August in 1970, and a month shy of her fourteenth birthday, Jory’s father drove his two daughters out to an abandoned house and left them there.

1.  That’s the first line of The Girl Who Slept with God by Val Brelinski...and the novel gets even better from there. Religious fundamentalism in central Idaho in the 1970s, a young girl struggling to come of age, a mother who just can’t seem to deal with her daughters’ messy lives, a possible immaculate conception, a hippie commune, a love affair with an ice-cream-truck man...there’s a lot to love here. It is also, Brelinski admits, an autobiographical novel which hews close to the bone. In the novel, Brelinski includes many (though not all) of the facts of her own life and that of her older, devoutly-religious sister. Novelists who put their own families in their books are a brave breed, and in this essay for Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog, Val Brelinski shows us just what’s at stake when she asked her sister Gail to read The Girl Who Slept With God for the first time:

     Gail returned to the states once her missionary-tenure was over, but our lives continued to part ways. She stayed in our hometown in Idaho and retained her faith-filled lifestyle, while I moved to San Francisco and became a “worldy” writer. And because I was incapable of truly knowing my sister, and because I desperately wanted to, I did the thing that many writers do: I wrote about her. I wrote an entire novel devoted to uncovering the mystery that was my older sister, titled The Girl Who Slept with God. In it, her name is Grace and she does a few things that she didn’t in real life, but the majority of the novel is a direct expression of my desire to dissect her, to peel back the careful carapace that she built around herself in order to see what was beneath. Naked, unshelled insects are terrible things to behold, and even worse things to be, and as the publication date of my novel approached, I began to worry.
     Gail had not read the book, nor did she know anything about its contents. This wasn’t her fault, but mine. I deliberately hadn’t told her anything about the novel and I hadn’t sent her an advanced copy of it either. Avoiding trouble until the last possible moment has always been my shameful m.o. An absurd and fanciful part of me even imagined that she might never read the book at all.

2.  “I saw in Carver’s pieces something I could fuck around with. There was a prospect there, certainly. The germ of the thing, in Ray’s stuff, was revealed in the catalogue of his experience. It had that promise in it, something I could fool with and make something new-seeming.”
     It feels like every time editor Gordon Lish opens his mouth, Raymond Carver dies a little more.


3.  I love the idea behind One Grand, a new bookstore in Narrowsburg, New York: celebrated thinkers, writers, artists, and other creative minds share the ten books they would take to their metaphorical desert island. For instance, Neil Patrick Harris’ list includes books like To Kill a Mockingbird, A Confederacy of Dunces, and Bridge to Terabithia. For his list, John Irving chose Dickens, Hawthorne, Melville and several other Dead White Guys.


4.  Speaking of lists, Peter Molin is curating a pretty damn fine one of war literature at his Time Now blog. I’m grateful he includes Fobbit, but I also appreciate all the other works which he’s added to my ever-growing To-Be-Read mountain of books (aka Mount NeveRest).

5.  It’s been a long time since I’ve read something which captures the writer’s life as precisely as this blog post by Susan Henderson (author of Up from the Blue). The struggle is real, people.

     If (my neighbors) happen to see me out and about, they’ll often ask, How’s the book going? It’s a perfectly sensible question, but I always feel like there’s the answer people want to hear, and then the one I’m going to give them.
     What they’re really asking about is the end-product. Is the book done yet? Is it on a shelf in the bookstore?
     When you’re a writer, you regularly answer such questions with no and no. Which gives an illusion of failure. Maybe you’re not writing fast enough. Maybe you’re not smart enough. Maybe you don’t work hard enough. Maybe you’re fooling yourself when you say you’re a writer.
     But most of a writer’s work is not about this end result. It’s about the private and often circular process of thinking, scribbling, re-thinking, rearranging, erasing, scribbling again. This process can take months or years or decades, depending on the writer and depending on the work.

Amen, sister, amen.


6.  At the Story Prize blog, Lisa Gornick (author of Louisa Meets Bear) also captures the essence of what makes writers tick:

     1. To write, I have to observe. I have to push myself to see: sky beyond generic dawn or dusk, drunk beyond scruffy and stumbling. To hear: the breathing of someone so angry he might punch a wall, trees before a hurricane hits. To smell garbage on the eighth day after an apocalypse, feel a sea slick with oil, taste chicken a hallucinating mother browned with shoe polish.
     2. To write, I have to tolerate being alone at my desk, without answering the phone or checking email or looking up Black Friday sales. An act of warfare against the multitasking-google-social media-hegemony.

Click here to read the other five points on Lisa’s list.

7.  While you’re at the Story Prize blog, make sure you read Rebecca Makkai’s funny, sad-but-true essay, What Some Readers Are Missing Out On. Here’s what happened when she was sitting at a table with stacks of her short story collection, Music for Wartime, sitting in front of her:

     I’m one of three authors at a signing table at a benefit. A woman walks up, touching each book. She gets to my story collection. “What’s this about?” she says.
     I say, “It’s a collection of stories, and—”
     And she goes, “Oh.” Not as in, “Oh, how interesting,” but like, “Oh, I thought the hors d’oeuvre you were passing was foie gras, but it’s Spam.” A little to the left of “Oh, no thank you, I would not care for a dead raccoon.”
     And so I decide to call her on it. I make sure to laugh, and I say, “Wait, what’s that about?”
     I’m not a confrontational person. It’s just that this is the 300th time this has happened to me since June, and I’ve reached a breaking point.

8.  And now, from the Completely Self-Serving Department of Vanities: I’ve recently had the good fortune to have several of own short stories published in print and on the web. In fact, numbers-wise, 2015 has been my best year as a short-story writer. If you’re interested in reading some of my fiction which is available online, here’s the list:

     Welcome to the First Day of the Rest of Your War at Litbreak
     Vulture at High Desert Journal
     The Wedding Party at Provo Canyon Review

In print, I’ve got work in F(r)iction (“Thank You”), and (forthcoming) Glimmer Train Stories (“A Little Bit of Everything”), Pleiades (“Kuwaiting”) and The New Guard (“Jesus and Elvis Have a Little Conversation”).