My First Time: Luanne Rice

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands.  Today's guest is Luanne Rice, author of the just-released The Silver Boat, a novel about three sisters who reunite for the first time since their mother’s death.  Rice began her writing career in 1985 with her debut novel Angels All Over Town.  Since then, she has written 28 novels, including the best-sellers What Matters Most, The Edge of Winter, Sandcastles, and Light of the Moon.  Rice studied Art History at Connecticut College but left school when her father became ill.  Before she made writing her career, she worked to support herself as a maid in Newport, R.I., a researcher at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., and a whale researcher and deckhand in Woods Hole, Mass.  A passionate environmentalist, Rice has written essays on beaches, oceans, migratory birds, owls, and offshore drilling.  She is also deeply committed to helping women who have been victims of domestic violence.  She regularly updates readers with news at her website.

My First Time in Print

One morning when I was eleven, I went downstairs to find my father holding The Hartford Courant—beaming as he held up This Singing World, the poetry column.  He pulled me over, and there I saw it: my poem, my name, and my age.

I wish I could say I felt excited, or as if I’d accomplished something, but I only felt happy because my father was proud.  It didn’t occur to me to wonder how the poem had gotten there; I figured one had only to write a poem, then wake up to find it in the local paper.

This was a dangerous assumption.  I wrote from an early age—not with any thought of being published, but just because I’d learned that putting everything down on paper made it possible for me to live.  Doesn’t that sound melodramatic?

But it’s true; I had thin skin, and the world hurt my feelings on a daily basis.  One January day in third grade a neighborhood boy threw my coat up in a tree, and my cheeks scalded as I wrote about the ignominy.  That same winter I found a dead Dark-eyed Junco in the snow, and I grieved so terribly I couldn’t go to school until I’d written a story about it.

My mother recognized my love of writing and sent in who-knows-how-many of my poems and stories, causing a few more to magically appear in print.  Later, when my father was dying and I dropped out of college to be near him, I started submitting my own short stories.  Rejections poured in at a stunning rate.

The rejection slips were impersonal—printed form letters from The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and Redbook.  Each was a blade to my heart.  I doubted myself constantly.  Wasn’t it hubristic to think I could ever be published in pages along with writers I revered: John Cheever, Anne Tyler, V. S. Pritchett, Laurie Colwin, Mary Robison?

I stopped being able to bear those rejection slips.  When the self-addressed, self-stamped manila envelopes returned to me, I would stack them unopened, on my desk, just to the left of my Olympia portable typewriter.

The memory of that first poem didn’t help—what could be sadder than getting published because your mother sent something in, because the poetry editor probably considered it a novelty, the poem of an eleven-year-old?

One day when the stack was a foot tall, I decided to go through my stories and re-submit the stories to other magazines.  As I ripped the envelopes open, I couldn’t believe my eyes: notes on the rejection slips.  “Try us again!”  “We love the characters.”  “Please send us more.”

The best notes were from The New Yorker.  Still rejections, but down below Eustace Tilley and the printed words, a note signed “M.D.”  An actual editor!  Also, clipped to one story, was a handwritten letter from Brendan Gill.  The magazine’s drama critic, Brendan was a Hartford native who’d spent time on the Connecticut shoreline; he said my story’s strong setting had caused M.D. to show it to him.

Brendan invited me to New York for lunch at the Algonquin, where we sat one banquet away from William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker.  We had lunch frequently after that; he told me that if I wanted to have a literary life I should move to New York.  I did.

It took a few more years for a story of mine to see print, but that seems about right.  Putting in time at the desk, reading everything, not giving up, is the fiction writer’s equivalent of grad school (unless she goes to grad school).  Dan Curley, editor of Ascent, the literary magazine at the University of Illinois, accepted “July,” a short story about three sisters.

The New Yorker never did accept one of my stories.  But now that I’ve gotten published on my own, I am grateful for that first poem in The Hartford Courant; it hangs, framed and yellowed with age, on my apartment wall.

 
Photo: Adrian Kinloch

Soup and Salad: An Author's Pre-Tour Tour, Steinbeck Stretches the Truth, Alan Heathcock Sings Away the Pain, Tax Tips From David Foster Wallace, A Different Kind of Book Proposal, Movie News, Siobhan Fallon's What-Not-To-Do Book Tour, Covers & Blurbs, Karen Russell Picks Favorites

On today's menu:

1.  At Shelf Awareness, Sara Gran writes about the The Pre-Tour Author Tour, in which she visited bookstores in advance of the publication of her forthcoming novel, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead.  For three days, Gran writes, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt sent her on the road to schmooze with booksellers in New York and New England:

The idea was to introduce me to the booksellers, talk with them about the book, and to let them know that we appreciate the hard work they do not only my books, but all HMH titles....Booksellers who had already read Claire had intelligent questions, and those who hadn't seemed ready to pick it up next. I'd love to attribute the response to my writing talent (and I'm not modest, I like my book!), but as we all know, brilliant books come out every day that fall through the cracks.  Unfortunately, brilliant no longer cuts it. Best idea of the trip: taking booksellers out for nice meals (or bringing such to them). I remember what it's like to work in a bookstore: it's tough, sweaty work moving those boxes around, and to have a lunch or dinner where you get to talk about books instead of moving them is a treat I know I would have appreciated. Everyone was relaxed and we got to speak in a less formal, more fun setting.

I say that's a brilliant marketing idea and proves that the need for authors bonding with merchants has never been greater.  Nothing can beat the enthusiasm of a bookseller pressing your novel into the hands of a shopper who's just asked, "Can you recommend a good book?"  And Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead certainly looks like a good one (blog readers may remember I briefly spotlighted it in an earlier edition of Front Porch Books.)


2.  John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley may not be entirely.... truthful, reports The New York Times.

All told Mr. Steigerwald estimates that Steinbeck spent no more than a couple of nights in the camper itself, and says, “Virtually nothing he wrote in ‘Charley’ about where he slept and whom he met on his dash across America can be trusted.”

Really?  A novelist stretching the truth?  I'm shocked!  Shocked!


3.  At New West, Jenny Shank has an outstanding interview with Alan Heathcock (Volt) who talks about taking readers out of their comfort zone, walking the fine line between subtlety and obscurity, and how movies--especially those of Roy Rogers--have impacted him as a writer.

NW: Roy Rogers comes up in a couple of stories--"Smoke" and "Fort Apaches"--what do you think he represents to the characters in your stories?
AH:  Roy Rogers is kind of the quintessential American man, in that he gets into a scrapes in just about every episode of his TV series, and yet also sings lovely ballads. For me, it represents the duality of the man who is called upon to fight, to destroy, and then must soothe himself, alone—in this case on a horse and riding the range. Yet Roy is so far from reality. Some of the fistfights on his show are brutal, actors flying over tables, windows breaking. And yet there is never any blood. Never. Why? Because that’s what we all want to believe—that you can fight, can destroy, without there being blood. I have a great fondness for Roy Rogers while at the same time understanding the damage that kind lie can produce. We can’t sing away the pain once the punch is thrown. This is a point my books hits upon again and again. Volt is basically an episode of Roy Rogers, just with the blood on-screen, and without the singing away of pain.  [read more...]

 4.  From beyond the grave, David Foster Wallace offers these tax tips as gleaned from his posthumous novel The Pale King by the folks at GalleyCat.  Here are some of the audit "triggers" found in the novel:

1. “Who’s got unusually high charitable deductions compared to averages for his income level?”
2. “Who’s in a largely cash business?”
3. “Who’s getting divorced? … divorces tend to generate unusally high net revenue from audits.”
4. “[L]ook for large dips in income or spikes in deductions.”

On one level, The Pale King is about the day-to-day operations at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Ill.*  As with every DFW book, the novel has many levels.  I'm just starting to explore them--crawling on my hands and knees, LED headlamp sweeping the cavern of his brain as I make my way forward.  I received my copy three days ago and, thanks to an insufferable head cold, got up in the middle of the night, went out to the living room, and started reading The Pale King.  After two hours and 75 pages (yes, I'm a slow reader), I didn't want to quit, but my heavy eyelids insisted otherwise.  First impressions:  the novel is disjointed, there are paragraphs which suffer from Faulknerian swell-and-bloat and go on for pages and pages, and each chapter introduces a new set of characters who in the way of most government employees tend to have the shape of cookie cutters around the edges; but goddamn if The Pale King isn't some of the best writing Wallace has ever produced.  It's Infinite-Jest-good, maybe even better.  (Though, again, it's still early and I haven't gotten to the deepest parts of the cave yet.)


5.  I've heard of book proposals before, but never a proposal in a book.  Debut novelist Christopher Currie asked his girlfriend to marry him by way of a message embedded in the acknowledgements.  No word on whether or not the book got down on bended knee.


6.  In movie news: Director Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men) is teaming up with screenwriter Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park) on one of the first major big-screen adaptations of an Agatha Christie novel in about 20 years: Crooked House....Here's one I never expected: What to Expect When You're Expecting, the bible for soon-to-be-parents (including my wife and I many years and three children ago), is being adapted into a film "in the vein of Love, Actually and Valentine's Day....For fans of Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (coming this summer), here's a sneak peek:



And for those of you who are fans of Raymond Carver (present company leaps out of his seat and raises his arm, waving and straining and hooting in unabashed Horchak-fashion, "Ooo!  Ooo!  Me!  Me, Mr. Kotter!"), here is the trailer for the Will Ferrell "dramedy" based on Carver's short story "Why Don't You Dance" (which might be a good Ferrell movie but looks like a lousy Carver adaptation because there's just too much of an uplift, complete with hugs and indie-pop songs and dialogue like "You're a good person, Nicholas"):




7. Here's another account of Siobhan Fallon's What-Not-To-Do-On-A-Book-Tour Book Tour to promote her debut collection You Know When the Men Are Gone.**  This time, she returns to Fort Hood, Texas and decides to take a pre-appearance drive-through of her old neighborhood:

       But just when you think you might have done everything right for one whole day of your life, I am going to remind you of something foolish you might have done earlier that afternoon. You may have driven around your old neighborhood in the incredibly obvious Lincoln Continental that your publishers sent to indulge you. Be warned that if you make that mistake and ask your driver to swing by your old house, he might decide to stop in the middle of the street and show you a picture of himself with Sean Puffy Combs from the last time Puff Daddy was doing a concert at Fort Hood. While the driver is scrolling through his cell phone pictures, you might see all the children in the neighborhood, who were just playing dodge ball on your old yard, stare at that big black car, then start to scatter for their homes, and it might even seem like they are screaming. That's when you will ask your driver to hurry up and drive away but for some reason he will just take his time making a K turn in the middle of the street, then hand you his phone to show you a picture of his Texas-bred football playing son. I tell you all of this, because when you are smiling at Barnes and Noble, signing books and chatting away, the woman who lives in your old house will peer at you, a little embarrassed, and asked if there is any chance that you drove by her house earlier? She will be with a couple other of your neighbors, who will also be staring at you a bit oddly. And you will feel yourself go all red and wonder if you should lie, but you will nod, and she will tell you how there has been a pedophile loose in a dark car, how the entire neighborhood was worried sick all day when their children came sprinting in talking about a big black car lurking.
       This will now be part of your legacy, how you wrote a book about Fort Hood, and when you came back to town, you scared the hell out of all your neighbors' kids.
       But it will still have been a close-to-perfect day.

8.  At The Awl, six writers talk candidly about covers and blurbs, including Mark Jude Poirer:

The cover they chose for Modern Ranch Living, however, sucked and continues to suck today....I’m not sure why this happened, but I have a theory. First off, my editor left Miramax Books before the novel was released, just before the cover was chosen. She had been much more than an editor—she was my publicist and friend, and she had made sure that my opinions were considered in the creation of my covers. And I trusted her. When she moved on, my main contact became my publicist, who rarely returned calls or emails and ended up quitting Miramax Books in the middle of my book tour. I imagine he just lost the mock-ups and didn’t bother to tell anyone until it was too late, and a clueless 19-year-old NYU intern chose my cover on her first day in the chaotic offices. And now I’m left with this crappy cover for my fourth—and I believe my best—book. Cry me a river.  I certainly wouldn’t pick up Modern Ranch Living in the bookstore. The bland cover screams bland novel. Actually, it doesn’t scream anything. It mumbles.

9.  I've always liked The Barnes & Noble Review's "Guest Books" feature in which prominent writers pick works which influenced them, but I especially liked this one from Karen Russell (Swamplandia!) in which she gives Flannery O'Connor, Russell Banks, and Ray Bradbury some love.


*A place which exists only in Wallace's imagination.  The Simple Ranger website has an interesting sidebar on Wallace's relationship to Peoria: "Section 1: Will It Play in Peoria?"  The Ranger wasn't impressed by The Pale King's opening chapter; me, I was bowled over by Wallace's imaginative twists of language.
**Which I have finally received from Amazon and hope to get to just as soon as I finish The Pale King.

Craig Lancaster Kills the Marlboro Man

My review of Craig Lancaster's new novel, The Summer Son, has been posted over at New West.  The story is set in Billings, Montana and at other oil fields and ranches around the Rocky Mountain West.  At every turn, Lancaster cranks the domestic tension tighter and tighter as a father and son try to repair the cracks in their relationship.  In this novel--as well as his debut, 600 Hours of Edward--the author explodes the myth of the modern Marlboro Man, covering territory previously scouted by writers like Richard Ford, Wallace Stegner and Thomas McGuane.  His fiction takes a swing and connects a roundhouse punch to the hard, weatherbeaten faces of the stoic ranchers and oil riggers of the new-century West--a place which, by their estimation, is full of pansies and snivelers.  The two novels boil down to Old-Ways Men vs. New-Age Men.  Lancaster is essentially doing his best to kill the the Marlboro Man and leave his body behind in the 20th century.  Here's how my review at New West begins:

       Craig Lancaster never met a troubled family he didn’t like—or at least felt he couldn’t mend through dialogue and cathartic scenes of pop psychology in his novels. Conflict between father and son was at the core of his debut, the award-winning 600 Hours of Edward and it’s front and center in his sophomore novel.
       In The Summer Son, Lancaster has sliced open another vein of domestic pain for a more ambitious book. If he’s not quite as successful here as he was with 600 Hours of Edward—a tightly-wound novel with an unforgettable narrator (the titular Edward who has Asperger’s)—then it’s not for lack of trying. The Summer Son is looser and baggier by comparison, but it also feels more intimate. The Billings author has put his heart into telling the story of an embittered relationship between narrator Mitch Quillen and his 71-year-old father, going deep into territory that feels both singularly personal for Lancaster and universally accessible for readers who will identify with what’s at stake here.
       The Summer Son begins in 2007 when Mitch pays a visit to his father after getting a series of cryptic phone calls from the old man. The trip back to his boyhood home in Billings sets in motion a series of flashbacks, which appear with increasing frequency and intensity as the novel progresses. What was once a chummy father-son relationship turned sour at some point in 1979 and Lancaster spends the course of the book peeling away the layers of scabs which have built up on both men in the ensuing twenty-eight years.
       Mitch’s parents divorced when he was three years old. He went to live with his mother in Washington state and spent every other summer with his father, alternating years with his older brother Jerry. In 1979, the boys join Jim Quillen as he moves between jobs exploring for oil in the West. In these scenes set at the end of the Me Decade, there’s plenty of drinking, casual sex, and rabble-rousing in the sagebrush—all of which Lancaster captures in finely-crafted detail.
       The weather in 1979 is not all golden sunlight, however, and it’s bitter memories that come flooding back to the characters in the present day. There’s conflict from Page 1 as Mitch takes a phone call, hears his dad’s voice, and immediately puts up an emotional wall: “I felt my guts coil.” The tension only winches tighter as the pages turn and Lancaster shifts between the past and the present where long-stuffed feelings of resentment are about to become unavoidable for Mitch.
       There are equal amounts of feel good and feel bad in Lancaster’s novels. He puts his characters through some pretty tough wringers—fathers neglecting young sons, adult sons later lashing out at those same fathers, and wives and daughters caught somewhere in the middle ground of not knowing whose side to take.  [Read more...]

While my review of The Summer Son was somewhat mixed, I can tell you I really enjoyed Lancaster's first book.  In 600 Hours of Edward, Lancaster keeps firmer control over plot and character, telling the novel through the distinctive voice of the titular Edward Stanton, a middle-aged single man with Asperger's Syndrome.  The story unfolds over the course of 25 days (or 600 hours, as the numbers-obsessed Edward would have it) and while the plot's action might seem minimal--Edward talks with his therapist, tries internet dating, makes friends with the young boy next door, and has repeated arguments with his father, a county commissioner--there is a lot going on under the surface.

Even the way Lancaster has structured the novel in a series of daily dispatches from Edward's journal is revealing.  By repetition of weather data, sleep/wake cycles, and episode number of Dragnet watched each evening, Lancaster takes advantage of the subtle differences from day to day to show us how Edward progresses through life.  Dragnet, by the way, is Edward's favorite show and he has a library of video-cassettes containing all episodes, which he has watched repeatedly in chronological order over the years, the tape wearing thin in some spots.  It's the perfect symbolic vehicle for Lancaster to use; like Sgt. Joe Friday, Edward Stanton deals with "just the facts."  Here's the start to a typical day in the life of the man-child:

       The sound of a lawn mower jolts me awake. I turn to face the clock, and it reads 7:28. This is an oddity. Every previous day this year, I have awoken at 7:37, 7:38, 7:39 or 7:40. Now, on the 288th day of this year (because it is a leap year), I am awake at 7:28. Further, I am all but certain that I have never awoken at this particular time. I will have to check my data, as I don't like to trust assumptions. I prefer facts.
       I retrieve my notebook from the end table and grab a pen. I record my waking time, and my data is complete.
       At the front door, I bend over and retrieve the Billings Gazette from the front stoop. I can now see the source of my early awakening: The woman across the street, the one who moved in on September 12th (the 256th day of this year, but only because it is a leap year), is mowing her front yard. I have seen her a few times since she moved in, but this is the first time I have seen her mowing her front yard. A boy lives with her, and I assume that he is her son, although I don't like to assume. He looks to be 8 or 9 years old, but I'm not comfortable with such conjecture. If I could find out the boy's birth date, I would know for sure and would feel more comfortable about the situation. There is a big difference between the ages of 8 and 9, and in this case, I just don't know. This frustrates me.

Reading 600 Hours of Edward, I was constantly reminded of Daniel Keyes' novel Flowers For Algernon.  It's an easy comparison to make--both chart the progression (and regression) of a simple soul who tries to breach the frightening world of us "normal" folks.  Edward and Algernon's Charlie are initially mystified by a life that can be lived with variables, but eventually come to see how their puzzle pieces fit into the rest of life's jigsaw.

*     *     *

There's an inspirational backstory to the writing and publication of 600 Hours of Edward, some of which you can read at this in-depth Q&A.  Briefly: Lancaster wrote the first draft during National Novel Writing Month, self-published the novel, earned some enthusiastic readers, got picked up by a regional publisher (Riverbend Publishing), earned lots more fans, and saw Edward go on to be named a Montana Honor Book in 2009 and a High Plains Best First Book in 2010.  Not bad for a guy who spent 30 days writing a novel in his underwear.

*     *     *

This Just In: 600 Hours of Edward has been chosen as the One Book Billings selection for this spring.  As part of the community-wide reading series, four discussions will be held in several venues in Billings during National Library Week, April 11-16, wrapping up with a talk by Lancaster at the Parmly Billings Library on the 16th.

In other news, Lancaster was recently asked to speak to the Montana Library Association.  As he writes on his blog:

Somehow, when I was recruited for this panel some months ago, I got it into my head that we were to deliver speeches.  Well, no.  We were there to read from our work (which, frankly, is a way better deal anyway).  I was happy to make the switch, and I realized that I could just post the speech and PowerPoint presentation I prepared here at the blog.

Oops.  Oh well, the librarians' loss is our gain.  It's a good speech and begins:

I came to book writing relatively late. Although I’ve been involved with writing and editing as a journalist for nearly a quarter-century, it was just two and a half years ago that I wrote my first novel, 600 Hours of Edward. And while I sometimes retroactively kick myself in the pants for waiting so long to get going, in some ways I’m happy to have a nascent career at a time of such upheaval and rapid change in the business of words and publishing. You see, I have no time to sit around and pine for how it used to be, back when publishers were proliferate, writers were given three or four books to become overnight sensations and a fella could wear an ascot without getting funny looks. I have to figure out how to make it work with conditions as they are, not as I wish them to be.  [Read the whole thing here...]

Friday Freebie: Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod

Congratulations to LuAnn Ritsema, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady by Elizabeth Stuckey-French.

This week's book giveaway is Light Lifting, Alexander MacLeod's debut collection of short stories.  A finalist for Canada's Scotiabank Giller Prize last year, Light Lifting is, according to Globe and Mail, "Impeccably structured, profoundly tragic....[It] makes courage its theme, frailty its balancing shadow."   Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of American Salvage, blurbed the collection thusly: "To read each story in this gorgeous collection is to live a series of rich and dangerous lives along the Canadian-Michigan border.  The forces threatening Alexander MacLeod’s characters include speeding trains, rip tides, lice, old age, automobile assembly lines, the exuberant despair of vacationing in Nova Scotia, and everything that lurks in the Detroit River.  MacLeod is a literary rock star, and his prose is wise and rowdy music."  For a good review of the book, I highly recommend this one which appeared in Canada's National Post last year and said, in part:

       Almost all MacLeod’s stories revolve around people being bustlingly active at work or play. His characters swim and play hockey, they lay bricks and they build cars. All these exertions are described with such knife-sharp precision and finesse that your own muscles may start tensing up as you read them.
       An undertow of anger tugs at more than a few of them, occasionally surfacing into violence. Many of the men have a need to prove themselves, either through barroom bluster or reckless acts of derring-do. In "Miracle Mile," the runners aren’t content to compete against each other on tracks, they also play a game of chicken by running through the tunnel beneath the Detroit River, risking being crushed by an oncoming train. In one tense passage, a runner manages to stay only a few seconds ahead of death: “Burner was there charging toward me, the only dark space in front of the light. He had this long line of spit hanging out of his mouth like a dog and the look on his face wasn’t fear but something more like rage.”

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of Light Lifting, all you have to do is answer this question:

What novel won the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, beating out four other short-listed books, including Light Lifting?  (You might refer to this earlier "Soup and Salad" page to find the answer)

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until the contest closes at midnight on April 14--at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on April 15.

A Poem a Day, That's All I Ask

If poetry is one of our nation's most invisible arts--transparent to the average American who is daily barraged with the cultural noise of everything ranging from American Idol to Charlie Sheen's Twitter feed--then surely the United States Poet Laureate is the palest of ghosts floating across the landscape.  Stop ten people on the street and ask them to name the current poet laureate and you'll be lucky if you get one correct response.  True confession?  I would be one of those people giving you a blank stare.

The Poets Laureate Anthology, edited by Elizabeth Hun Schmidt and published by W. W. Norton in association with the Library of Congress, sets out to right that wrong.  At the very least, the thick volume of verse goes a long way toward lending the reputation of the Nation's Poet a certain dignity and gravitas.  The anthology compiles select poems from each of the 43 American poets laureate, from the first (Joseph Auslander, who served from 1937 to 1941) to the latest (W. S. Merwin, who began his term in 2010 and also served from 1999 to 2000).  The position was originally called "Consultant in Poetry" and was renamed in 1985.

So what, exactly, does the poet laureate do?  It's often a mystery even to those who hold the chair.  As Schmidt notes, it's "the only official job in the arts in the United States;" laureates are appointed by the Librarian of Congress for a one-year term.  Apart from giving an annual reading and lecture, the poet is pretty much free to make use of the time however he or she pleases.  Some work on new poems, some start programs to bring more poetry to high schools, and some lobby to place poetry books in motels and supermarkets.  In his foreword to the anthology, Billy Collins attempts to explain:

Becoming the United States poet laureate is a surprisingly straightforward process, especially considering the trumpeting resonance of the title. Unlike the British model, the American version is conferred without ceremony or ritual of investiture. No wreath is bestowed, nor is a cask of dry wine bestowed as is the custom in England. The news, however stunning, is delivered via a phone call from the Librarian of Congress, who congratulates you and talks you through a short list of duties, and after a pleasant luncheon in the Library's pavilion weeks later--poof, you're the new poet laureate.

Most PLs know what they don't want to be.  As Schmidt notes in her introduction, Robert Penn Warren said "he had no intention of performing as a 'hired applauder' or of writing 'odes on the death of the President's cat.'"

The Poets Laureate Anthology sheds bright, strong light on the office and gives background information on each of the poets, along with a generous slice from their body of work.  The book arranges the poets in reverse chronological order and it's an interesting time-travel trip going from the unpunctuated free verse of Merwin to the dense formality of Conrad Aiken's poems.  Instead of peeling away layers, it feels like the opposite--as if we're starting out in T-shirt and shorts, then adding more and more clothes until we're bundled with heavy winter coats.  This is less a criticism of the ornately-structured verse of the early 20th century than it is a way of saying I was fascinated by how poetry's roots began to show the farther back in the book I traveled.

I haven't read the entire anthology--in fact, I'm just starting my journey with Merwin--but in leafing through the pages, I can already tell there are plenty of beautiful landmarks waiting for me ahead.  We get the expected highlights--Robert Frost's "The Gift Outright" and William Carlos Williams' red wheelbarrow--but we're also treated to Donald Hall's "To a Waterfowl" which begins:

Women with hats like the rear ends of pink ducks
applaud you, my poems.
These are the women whose husbands I meet on airplanes,
who close their briefcases and ask, "What are you in?"
I look in their eyes, I tell them I am in poetry,

and their eyes fill with anxiety, and with little tears.
"Oh, yeah?" they say, developing an interest in clouds.*

And we get Billy Collins' "Introduction to Poetry" in which he tells us how he wants his students to approach and appreciate a poem ("press an ear against its hive").  He writes:

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.**

Collins has particular meaning to me as reader.  I've mentioned before how it was his collection Questions About Angels which brought me back to poetry after a long post-graduate drought.  There in my hooch, hunkered down from mortar strikes in Baghdad in 2005, I would start each morning by reading one or two poems from that book.  When I was done with Collins, I moved on to Andrew Hudgins and then Gilgamesh and then finished out my tour of duty with Walt Whitman.  When I returned to the States, the habit continued.  To this day, I reach for a poem while my morning coffee is brewing.

And that's my challenge to you, dear blog reader.  If you haven't already integrated poetry into your life, why not start now?  April is National Poetry Month, after all.  I can't think of a better time to begin a poem-a-day routine.  Grab a copy of The Poets Laureate Anthology, visit your library, browse the poetry section of your local bookstore, or log on to Poets.org and get a Poem-a-Day email in your inbox each morning.  I'm not saying poetry will change your life, but it will--for a few short moments--add some music to it and make you see the world through fresh eyes.



*From The Poets Laureate Anthology, published by W.W. Norton in association with the Library of Congress. Poem copyright Donald Hall
**From The Poets Laureate Anthology, published by W.W. Norton in association with the Library of Congress. Poem copyright Billy Collins

Tuesday Tune: "Walking Far From Home" by Iron and Wine

"Walking Far From Home" by folk troubadour Iron and Wine* (from the album Kiss Each Other Clean) is so lyrically potent, so sonically pure, so breath-stealing, so heart-stopping, so much like the most beautiful sound you ever heard which plays on an endless looping figure-eight caroming off the walls of a room you've just entered by mistake at your best friend's party thinking it was the bathroom but it turned out to be this blank white room like something out of the mind-tripping end of 2001: A Space Odyssey and even though it doesn't have a floating fetus the effect is still the same because there's that hypnotic ribbon of sound pulling you in and you step over the threshold without your space-helmet and the door closes and locks behind you but that's okay because you don't really want to leave the living breathing presence of this hymn that swirls and floats before you in all its glory forever and ever amen.  Yes, it's so very, very good, I won't offer any commentary this week, but let the lyrics and the music speak for themselves.

I saw sickness, blooming fruit trees
I saw blood and a bit of it was mine
I saw children in a river
But their lips were still dry, lips were still dry
I was walking far from home
And I found your face mingled in the crowd
Saw a boatful of believers sail off
Talking too loud, talking too loud
I saw sunlight on the water
Saw a bird fall like a hammer from the sky
An old woman on the speed train
She was closing her eyes, closing her eyes
I saw flowers on a hillside
And a millionaire pissing on the lawn
Saw a prisoner take a pistol
And say, "Join me in song, join me in song"
Saw a car crash in the country
Where the prayers run like weeds along the road

If you would like to purchase "Walking Far From Home" from Amazon, CLICK HERE


*aka Samuel Beam

My First Time: Clifford Garstang

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands.  Today's guest is Clifford Garstang, author of In an Uncharted Country (Press 53), a collection of linked stories set in rural Virginia.  Elizabeth Strout said of In an Uncharted Country: "This collection delivers on its title: each story takes us into an area—emotional and geographic—that we may not have been before.  There is an impressive variety here, and Garstang's ability as a storyteller is on display each time.  These characters are real, vulnerable, and always, in unique ways, brave."  He is a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and received a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship to the Sewanee Writers' Conference.  He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte and teaches writing courses at Writers.com.  He is also the editor of Prime Number Magazine.  His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Ledge, The Baltimore Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Potomac Review and many other places.  He blogs about the literary life at Perpetual Folly.

My First Ghost

I’m not a believer in the supernatural.  Never have been.  It’s called “supernatural” because it’s not natural, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been all about what’s natural and knowable.  If I can see it or touch it, then it’s real.  Otherwise, forget it.

That goes for jolly, old red-suited elves with flowing white beards, as well as hobgoblins, imps, demons, and ghosts.  Even as a voracious young reader I preferred realistic stories to fantasy and science fiction.  There’s a reason we call those genres “speculative”!  They aren’t real!  Although I found all the Hobbits amusing, and I did my best to grok Stranger in a Strange Land, mostly I stuck with the Hardy Boys and Chip Hilton.  I suspect that if Harry Potter had come along when I was a kid I’d have been unimpressed.

When I started writing my own fiction, then, it was no surprise that I was strictly a realist. I wrote the world as I saw it, and that left no room for speculation about other realms, mysterious creatures, or time-travelling spouses.  Not that I threw my hands up in disgust (or the book across the room) when I encountered any of these in my reading, and sometimes enjoyed them, but they weren’t going to be part of the fictional world I was creating.  As a beginner, I wrote (and re-wrote several times) a novel that became my MFA thesis.  Set in the 70s, the only thing other-dimensional about it was that the story took place in a fictional country in Asia so that I wouldn’t be hampered by actual historical events.  Other than that, though, it was about as real as fiction gets, and remains stuck in a drawer, probably forever.

After finishing that novel, I turned to short stories.  I did this because (a) I still had one semester left in my MFA program and needed material for workshopping, and (b) I couldn’t bear the thought of another long project after I’d struggled with one novel for years.  For inspiration, I turned to the world around me.  I had recently moved out of Washington, D.C., into the rural Shenandoah Valley, and so everything was still new.  That newness, I think, sparked a different kind of creativity in me, one that was less wedded to reality.

Which brings me to ghosts.  One of the first short stories I wrote was based on a translation of a Korean fairy tale I had done while I served in Korea in the Peace Corps.  Originally it was simply a language-learning exercise, but the story stayed with me.  The protagonist of the tale, a down-on-his-luck Korean woodsman, resonated with some of the other characters I was imagining in what eventually became my linked story collection, In an Uncharted Country.  As the character developed in my consciousness, he became a grizzled Vietnam war veteran in Virginia whose rich fantasy life included the nymphs, the talking deer, and the flying tiger I borrowed from the fairy tale.  Having made that leap, it wasn’t hard to envision this dark character being visited by his late father—my first ghost—and the ghosts of several buddies killed in Vietnam. Suddenly the supernatural was the most natural thing in the world—for that particular character, in that story.

With my first ghost out of the way, I found that I enjoyed straying from realism now and then in service of the story.  Another story in my first collection includes talking antiques, although it is only the young store owner who can hear them.  Those make sense in context because of the metaphorical demons the man is facing.  And a couple of my stories set in Mexico have veered toward magical realism, featuring paintings that offer a threshold to another world, and children who age before our eyes, both reflecting themes that worked well in their Latin American settings.  Nor did my new interest in ghosts stop with stories.  The manuscript of the novel I’ve just completed is loaded with them, because that’s what the character who sees them needs.

What I’ve learned from watching the ghosts and other otherworldly forces enter my fiction is simply that a little of the unreal is sometimes helpful to unleash my imagination and to move a story forward.  We sometimes try too hard, to stick to the facts, to what is observed and known, and we forget that the magic of fiction can take us on much longer journeys.  Instead of taking another tour of the known world, these days I’m inclined to take the hand of a ghost who will show me what other worlds are out there, beyond my imagination.


Photo credit: Carol Turrentine

The Success of Michael Chabon's Failure

In 1992, Michael Chabon killed his novel.

After his successful debut, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Chabon was heady with new fame and wondered what he could do to make his lightning strike twice.  "I was twenty-four, rootless, feckless, homeless, and mapless, a child of divorce, raised in the broken Utopias of the 1970s," he writes.  His life at the time was a mess, he admits, and he was "baffled, literally not knowing which way to turn."

Then he turned into a bookstore, drawn by a copy of What is Post-Modernism? by Charles Jencks in the front-window display.  "I flipped through its pages as if searching for a clue, a way home, a cool drink for a thirsty soul."  He found that tall cold one on page 20: a watercolor painting by Leon Krier which depicted an idealized vision of the architect Pierre L'Enfant's layout of Washington, D. C. (see above).  The painting struck a chord in Chabon, stirring up memories of his own idealized childhood in of Columbia, Maryland, a "planned city" with ruler-straight streets and cookie-cutter homes 50 miles north of the nation's Capitol.  So, for the next half-decade, the once-and-future author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay poured his energies into writing Fountain City, which tried to tell the story of “a poetically sad young man who apprenticed himself to a visionary, postmodern architect out of a longing for some vanished home or notion of home."  Chabon also threw messianic Zionism, French cuisine, radical environmental activism, baseball, miniature-model building, and Japanese monster movies into the big bubbling stew of his novel.

He spent five years and 1,500 pages trying to wrestle it into presentable shape.  He fought the novel and the novel won.  So he killed it, or "wrecked" it, as he states in the marginal notes of the first four chapters of Fountain City recently published in McSweeney's (I have been quoting from Chabon's introduction to that 95-page mini-book).  But what had gone wrong with Fountain City?  When had the golden ray of sunshine turned into the leaden albatross around the neck?

Every novel, in the moments before we begin to write it, is potentially the greatest, the most beautiful or thrilling ever written; but in the long dying fall after we have finished it (if we finish it), every novel affords us, with the generosity of a buffalo carcass affording meat, hide, bone, horn, and fat, the opportunity to measure precisely, at our leisure, the distance between it and that L'Enfantesque dream.  Our greatest duty as artists and as humans is to pay attention to our failures, to break them down, study the tapes, conduct the postmortem, pore over the findings; to learn from our mistakes.

If nothing else, these four chapters--liberally annotated with footnotes that document the novel's demise in Chabon's self-deprecating asides--are valuable as an instructional manual.  Every writer should keep a copy of Fountain City propped next to the keyboard--wedged between The Elements of Style, The Bible, and John Gardner's The Art of Fiction.  Just think of how many wrong-headed novels would be deservedly wrecked if more writers heeded Chabon's advice.  The new-release table at the local Barnes & Noble would be considerably lighter and thinner, to our benefit.

After Fountain City's funeral, Chabon did learn from his own mistakes.  He wrote Wonder Boys (which, lest we forget, is about a man writing an out-of-control novel) in seven months, published it, and rolled forward into a successful career.  Fountain City never had a chance from that point on.

Chabon's dilemma of "novel failure" is not uncommon, as we learn from this essay in the New York Times by Dan Kois:

       Many writers get lost in their first attempt at a longer work. Adam Begley, author of a forthcoming biography, said Updike wrote two-thirds of “Willow,” a small-town novel, while still a student at Harvard. Loath to waste either ideas or paper, Updike mined the novel for material for a series of Willow-set stories — some of which were written on the flip side of old novel pages. “Updike was nothing if not thrifty,” Begley said.
       Chang-rae Lee said he had spent two years on “Agnew Belittlehead,” a “bombastic, unfunny, oddly New Agey version of a David Foster Wallace toss-off,” before dropping it and writing “Native Speaker” instead. Junot Díaz wrote “a whole lot” of “Dark America,” a science-fiction novel about mutants, before abandoning it 10 years ago because, he said, “it was hopelessly stupid and convoluted.” Jennifer Egan remembered writing, at 22, a “monstrous” 600-page novel, “Inland Souls.” “I would send this book to people,” she said, “and they would become unreachable. And that includes my mother.”

When I learned that bits of Fountain City--which by now had become legendary, thanks to Chabon always chattering about it during interviews--was to be published in McSweeney's 36, I knew I had to get a copy.  Truth be told, though, this particular issue of the off-beat literary journal is a little embarrassing to own.  It comes bundled in a box which looks like a man's head.  A sweaty, red-faced man, at that.  It's more than a little creepy.  But, symbolically, the design seems appropriate: you lift the lid of the man's head and reach inside to dig out the scrap of what Chabon couldn't make work, despite all of his sweaty, red-faced effort.

The four chapters are interesting artifacts from Chabon's brain.  They're a little uneven in quality--some brilliant sentences surrounded by wooden prose which could have used a splash of red editorial ink (though it's impossible to believe that Chabon didn't go back and rewrite these chapters before submitting them to McSweeney's).  One problem--at least evident in the four chapters we're given--is that Fountain City lacks unity and a coherent plot.  Briefly: Harry Klezmer returns home to Huxley, Maryland (a thinly-disguised Columbia) after a year-long nomadic ramble across the United States "in his dead brother's Alfa Romeo," only to find his childhood home put up for sale, his parents split up, and his rabbi father about to embark on a sabbatical to Jerusalem.  Harry goes to visit his dead brother's lover, a big bear of a man named Foster.  They talk about death and stare gloomily into the C&O Canal where Harry's brother drowned himself.  Then, feeling even more cut off from home and heritage, he heads for Europe and another long episode of wanderlust begins. Who knows where Harry aimlessly drifts in the course of the other 1,400 pages?  So yeah, structurally, it's a mess.

Still, if we look at this as the lumpy dough of a second draft, it's really not a bad start.  Based on what we know Michael Chabon is capable of, there is a glimmer of greatness in the midst of the crap.  Even though I knew what I was reading was a truncated amputation and that there would be no sense of closure when I was done, I still came across moments of pure Chabonian delight.  The opening to Chapter 4, for instance, is especially good:

       The plan, as Harry finally conceived it, was to cross the ocean, and then just keep on going. Paris; then Berlin, Smolensk, Ulan Bator, Vladivostok; he would ride in the beds of chicken trucks and in reindeer sleighs and on the backs of Bactrian camels. He would stand on the rear platform of an eastbound train, in a fur hat, and Uzbek snow would fall upon his shoulders and his eyelashes, and his heart would be filled, as it had been for so long now, with Uzbek snow. That was the plan. When he arrived in the capital of France, however, intending to stay for a month at least, the city was in the middle of the wettest September in 117 years, and he felt miserable in the downpours and dank churches, and saddened by the cold reveille of the rain in the drainpipes. After only seven days he was itching to move along.
       For the first few nights he slept in one of the half dozen beds that shared room 17 of the Colombier youth hostel, in the Marias, in the rowdy company of eleven young men from nine different countries, all of them smelling of sour beer and purple wine and the rancid-butter tang of young men. It was a far cry from the perfect solitude of an American motel room, cooled by Freon, lit by a blue TV. By day he walked, endlessly, alone, from one end of Paris to the other, avoiding the great crowds and monuments and churches, spending hours on end aware only of the light coming off the river, of the rain on black umbrellas.

I like writing that's enlivened by the inclusion of the reveille of rain and the rancid-butter tang of young men.  If only the story, as a whole, had been more engaging...

Nonetheless, the McSweeney's artifact, dredged from the "brined and barnacled" shipwreck "at the sea-bottom" of Chabon's hard drive, is worth salvaging and putting on display in the American Writers Museum.  What's most revealing, and beneficial to all writers, are Chabon's marginal annotations accompanying Fountain City.  Here the skull is cracked open and we see the writer's brain at work.  The notes are witty, revealing (Chabon attempts to put to rest the question of his sexual orientation), and above all instructive.

Lesson One:  Write smaller books.
Lesson Two:  Trust your gut and heed the icy grip of the Hand of Dread.
Lesson Three:  Don't take advances; sell your work only when it is complete.
Lesson Four:  Persevere.
Lesson Five:  Marry a strong, talented, vocal, articulate, and above all persuasive reader.*

As he tells The Atlantic in this interview: "the notes are there to serve as the literary equivalent of the label on a packet of silica gel that says DO NOT EAT."  I could particularly relate to this footnote where Chabon writes:

....a book itself threatens to kill its author repeatedly during its composition.  I often and variously felt, as I was slogging hrough the five-and-a-half year ordeal of F.C., that it was erasing me, breaking me down, burying me alive, drowning me, kicking me down the stairs, rendering me null and powerless.  And of course I was the one writing the damn thing.  I was killing myself.

It's enough to make a weak-hearted writer swear off his own Great American Novel forever.

I myself have the wreckage of at least** two novels smoking along the highway which stretches behind me.  One, The Last of Anne, was written in the very earliest years of my marriage when relationships are velvet-soft and raw as exposed nerves, when our new partner is still essentially a stranger.  I don't know where that manuscript is today--probably on the sea-bottom of a hard drive five or six computers ago--and I can't remember exact details of its plot, except that it was about a lonely, insecure guy who marries an enigmatic woman (named Anne) who avoids talking about her past and who, on their honeymoon in a small, backwater town in Wyoming, disappears.  Poof!  Kaput!  The husband tries to get to the bottom of the mystery but is stymied by the local sheriff's deputy who appears to know more about the case than he should.  It was, in short, an amateurish Frankenstein of Richard Adams' The Girl in a Swing and the movie The Vanishing.  Looking back, I can see how I poured all the fears of a newlywed male into the novel: was he worthy of his bride? would she wise up and abandon him on a moment's notice? worse, would she be tragically snatched from him by sudden, unexplained death?  At that time in my life, I was also snacking on a cultural junk-food diet of horror movies in which city-slicker kids took weekend trips and wound up in backwoods Southern towns with bucktoothed and/or toothless horny serial-killer hillbillies and drawling, no-good lazy-ass sheriffs who couldn't give two hoots about the mysterious deaths of the aforementioned city-slickers.  It's no wonder my novel was plagued with unendurable stereotypes and unprintable cliches.

Before The Last of Anne, however, there was the book I believed would catapult me to fame and fortune as a mystery writer.  This failed novel actually showed some promise and may, at some later date, be resurrected (albeit radically improved with cosmetic surgery).  It was a by-the-numbers locked-door type of mystery novel featuring a Jane Marple-ish sleuth named Mrs. Winter.  I was gorging myself on Agatha Christie at the time; which only proves that you shit what you eat.  In the novel, Mrs. Winter is at a Hollywood party when the host, a has-been actor filming his comeback movie, falls into his swimming pool and is eaten by piranhas planted there by the murderer. I got about 50 pages into the first draft before realizing the best thing about it was the title: Mrs. Winter and the Pool of Teeth.

Did I mention I was 13 when I started writing it?


*In Chabon's case: Ayelet Waldman.
**I say "at least" because there is the undecided fate of my more recent novel, Dubble, which is about a 33-year-old midget named David Dubble who goes to work as a stuntman for enfant terrible child actor Eddie Danger in the 1940s.  It's heavy on doppelgangers and Hollywood hijinks.  If you are foolhardy and industrious enough, you can search out the complete manuscript of Dubble and read it for yourself.  It's buried somewhere in the stacks of the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus.  It even has a call number assigned to it.

Friday Freebie: The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady by Elizabeth Stuckey-French

Congratulations to Mike O'Brien, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: Rodin's Debutante by Ward Just.

This week's book giveaway is Elizabeth Stuckey-French's new novel, The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady.  It's a funny, touching story of a wronged woman who plots her revenge on a doctor for contributing to her daughter's death more than 40 years earlier.  Technically, Marylou Ahearn may not be radioactive, but as the novel opens, she does burn with a nuclear fury at Wilson Spriggs.  Now suffering from Alzheimer's, the daffy Dr. Spriggs gave a pregnant Marylou a radioactive cocktail as part of a government experiment in 1953.  Hell hath no fury like a woman's dish of revenge served cold.  Or something like that.

However, the novel is about much more than Marylou's plot to kill Wilson.  Like John Irving in his finest moments, Stuckey-French covers a lot of ground with an ample cast of characters, including a menopausal wife, her weather-obsessed workaholic husband, some sibling rivals, a pair of teenage lovers, a whip-smart boy who's building a nuclear device in his shed, and a sleazeball minister.  Just for fun, Stuckey-French also throws in some Elvis sightings, a Welsh Corgi dog named Buster, a poisoned pineapple-upside-down cake, and a hurricane.  In my earlier review of the book, I wrote:  "Offbeat, jaunty, and sometimes poignant, The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady plants its tongue in its cheek from the start and only takes it out for an ending that earns its feel-good denouement honestly."  [Click here for the full review...]

If you'd like the chance to win a copy of The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady, all you have to do is answer this question:

What 1999 book was an inspiration for Stuckey-French's novel?  (The answer can be found at the author's website--click on the "Story Behind the Story" link)

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until the contest closes at midnight on April 7--at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on April 8.