Sunday Sentence: National Treasures by Charles McLeod

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

But beneath her vamp allure were the good values instilled upon her in youth; when she smiled, it was a smile of church Sundays and ribbons received at 4H events.  It was a smile of wheat.

"National Treasures" from National Treasures by Charles McLeod

Friday Freebie: North of Hope by Shannon Huffman Polson

First of all, congratulations to Anne Civitano, winner of the hardback edition of Fobbit, freshly published in the United Kingdom by Harvill Secker.  Thanks also to those of you who helped with last-minute promotion of the contest by trying to increase the number of followers at my Facebook page.  Though we didn't quite make it to the goal of 500 followers, I'm still going to give away a second copy of Fobbit as promised because....well, because it's my blog, my rules, and I can do any ding-dang thing I want to, right?  So, without further ado....[drumroll as he reaches into the hat and pulls out another slip of paper from among the entries]....the second Fobbit winner is Rebecca Schwartz.  Thanks to all who played along.  And thanks also to those readers in Great Britain who have been greeting Fobbit with open arms and kind words--places like We Love This Book and The Times (may require subscription to read in full).

Now, back to our regularly-scheduled contest....Congratulations to Susan Warner, winner of last week's Friday Freebie, Tin God by Terese Svoboda.

This week's book giveaway is a memoir that's been mentioned once or twice before here at The Quivering Pen: North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey by Shannon Huffman Polson.  The winner of this week's Friday Freebie will receive a signed copy of the book.  Shannon's is a story that begins in tragedy and gradually finds its way out of grief to the healing light of hope through her faith....and, as the subtitle states, a trip along an Arctic river.  Here's what Publishers Weekly had to say about North of Hope:

In her debut, Polson offers a memoir of her journey down a river of grief, set against the sparkling beauty of the wilderness of her native Alaska.  A year after her father and stepmother are killed by a bear in their remote camp, the author seeks solace in retracing their rafting route and visiting the site of the attack.  Her unlikely companions are her estranged and volatile adopted brother, Ned, and his colleague Sally, a virtual stranger.  Along the way, Polson rediscovers the Episcopal faith she abandoned.  The trip also sparks self-discovery, love for nature, respect for many religious beliefs, and memories of her father and his wife, made vivid in journal entries they recorded during their voyage over the same territory.

You can read more about Shannon and her book at her website (which includes photos of her parents and her trip along the Hulahula River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge).

If you'd like a chance at winning a signed copy of North of Hope, all you have to do is email your name and mailing address to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on April 18—at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on April 19.  If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week Quivering Pen newsletter, simply add the words "Sign me up for the newsletter" in the body of your email.  Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning?  Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter.  Once you've done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.

Judging a Book: You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt

The cover of Elliott Holt's debut novel You Are One of Them cleverly obscures half the face of a person standing at a train window with a black cloud of what could be spray paint, an ink blot, a smear of violent graffiti.  Designer Janet Hansen takes advantage of that dark blot of negative space by filling it with the title and author's name.  The partial black mask is, of course, a nice play on the title's implied theme of identity, assimilation, and homogeneity.  The book will be released at the end of May and it's already in my To-Be-Read queue.  Here's how the publisher, Penguin Press, summarizes the plot:

Sarah Zuckerman and Jennifer Jones are best friends in an upscale part of Washington, D.C., in the politically charged 1980s. Sarah is the shy, wary product of an unhappy home: her father abandoned the family to return to his native England; her agoraphobic mother is obsessed with fears of nuclear war. Jenny is an all-American girl who has seemingly perfect parents. With Cold War rhetoric reaching a fever pitch in 1982, the ten-year-old girls write letters to Soviet premier Yuri Andropov asking for peace. But only Jenny's letter receives a response, and Sarah is left behind when her friend accepts the Kremlin's invitation to visit the USSR and becomes an international media sensation. The girls' icy relationship still hasn't thawed when Jenny and her parents die tragically in a plane crash in 1985.  Ten years later, Sarah is about to graduate from college when she receives a mysterious letter from Moscow suggesting that Jenny's death might have been a hoax. She sets off to the former Soviet Union in search of the truth, but the more she delves into her personal Cold War history, the harder it is to separate facts from propaganda.

Knowing a little more about the plot, I think the cover design creates the perfect atmosphere for the reader who will see that black cloud over half of (presumably) Sarah's face as she rides that cracked, decaying train in search of the truth about her friend.

When I emailed Elliot to express my enthusiasm for the jacket design of her novel, she responded:

What I love about it is that it captures the tone of the book perfectly: it's mysterious and melancholy. One of the central images in the book is of old Super-8 film melting. (The characters in the book watch home movies, and when the projector overheats, it creates a dark blot on the image as the film melts.) So the type treatment on the book jacket evokes that image beautifully.

In her Blurb o' Praise for the novel, Hannah Tinti hints at what the cover nicely alludes to:  “You Are One of Them journeys through the U.S. and Russia, perfectly capturing that frightening time in the 1980s when every child went to bed dreaming of mushroom clouds. Like the cold war, this remarkable novel revolves around hidden truths and unreliable friendships. Elliott Holt skillfully draws out her characters’ secrets, exploring the different ways we open and close our hearts, and delivering a well-wrought tale of international and emotional intrigue.”

Intrigue.  Yes, that's the word I was looking for when I was trying to describe what I like about this cover design.  I don't know about you, but I can't take my eyes off those concealed eyes on the cover.

Trailer Park Tuesday: North of Hope by Shannon Huffman Polson

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.  Unless their last name is Grisham or King, authors will probably never see their trailers on the big screen at the local cineplex.  And that's a shame because a lot of hard work goes into producing these short marriages between book and video.  So, if you like what you see, please spread the word and help these videos go viral.

"There is a time in each of our lives when we are hurled into the terrible understanding that bedrock can crumble in the blink of an eye."  For Shannon Huffman Polson, that bedrock suddenly crumbled in 2005 when she received a phone call informing her that her father and stepmother had been killed by a bear while camped in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge during a two-week kayaking trip along the Hulahula River.  In her new memoir, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey, out today from Zondervan, Polson tells the story of how she dealt with the loss of her parents and the trip she took a year later retracing their final fatal journey along that Arctic river.  The trailer promoting the book is a simple one--too simple, I thought on my first viewing.  But then, each time I watched it I found myself more and more moved by the narration (prose lifted from the book), the haunting music, and the lines running between framed photos on a white wall, connecting them like leaves on a family tree.  As the animated lines move like fresh green shoots sprouting across the screen, you get the feeling that inner peace can likewise grow out of tragedy.  Polson writes: "This Arctic expedition was taking me to one of the most remote areas of the world and to the darkest recesses of my own pain, a journey over the jagged edge of loss, a trip into uncharted territory."  I hope you'll join me as Polson leads us on this hard, beautiful journey through grief and faith.

My First Time: Terese Svoboda

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 Terese Svoboda.  She has published 14 books of prose, poetry, and translation, including Tin God, Bohemian Girl, Weapons Grade: Poems, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI's Secret from Postwar Japan, and Trailer Girl and Other Stories.  Publishers Weekly called her "a fabulous fabulist" when writing about Tin God, her fourth novel which is narrated by God (a woman, of course) and concerns the misadventures of a conquistador and two Midwestern dope dealers five hundred years later.  Click here to visit her website.  (And don't forget that Tin God is this week's Friday Freebie.  Click here to enter the contest.)

The ABCs of My First Novel

The title of this sounds like a primer, something that should be illustrated in bright colors.  There was nothing ABC about it.  Getting Cannibal between boards took fifteen years, from first draft to finish, and three agents.  Its subject attracted their attention: a woman stuck in the middle of Africa with the wrong man, a topsy-turvy of the usual white-man-in-Africa-for-romance.  But I was a poet, what did I know about novels?  I had done eight all-the-way-through drafts when that wrong man—a real one, since most first novels are roman a clefs—revealed that he had been possibly C.I.A. during our travels.  In my third person presentation of the heroine's dilemma, I'd already had a lot of trouble figuring out what the Africans were thinking, they whose actions often resulted in surreal or very mysterious outcomes.  Now I had to reconsider what this man's motives were, too.  I rewrote the book thirteen more times.  Agent number one quit after a top editor suggested that there be helicopters at the end, a surreal solution that made no sense to either of us.

As a poet, I had a hard time with plot.  I knew about potent images but causality, images that build on each other, that don't just torque?  Lyric poems, the kind I did best, occur on the page, timelessly.  Their readers are expected to return to the top or just dwell in the poem in order to get the gestalt that a lyric poem strives for.  This whole idea of linearity, of going to the edge of the margin and returning with meaning accruing, was alien to me.  Even sentence structure was alien, when a stanza break could provide a grammatical innuendo unavailable to fiction.

Another problem was one that plagues most beginning fiction writers: reality, writing down what happened.  Creative nonfiction writers lament that they have the problem of shaping their experience, they can't just make everything up.  But fiction writers nearly always base their writing on something they've lived.  That's the material that's most potent, and has to be shaped in a framework that life doesn't provide.  Shaping is everything.  At least--as a poet--I understood that problem.  It's just that I couldn't figure out what happened, how I had gotten myself into this situation.  Who was I?

What wasn't a problem was my determination.  As you might have guessed, I am perseverant.  I was also bent on revenge, one of the most volatile motivators for writers, especially when you begin.  I switched the book to first person in order to really harness that emotion.  It was only much later, when I was showing around my twenty-first draft, when everyone asked why the heroine didn't leave that man, he's so difficult, that I began to realize anger doesn't necessary produce a book.

I redrafted the work another twelve times to show his good side.  I had to invent a lot.  No, that's not true.  The guy did have a good side but I was not prone, in this endeavor, to show it.  Let's just say he was difficult.  When I finished, I showed the manuscript to my second agent and he suggested I put the book back into third person, that I might get the necessary distance from the situation to show the relationship more evenly, and then the book would “come alive.”  The dead horse analogy is useful here.  I dutifully dragged the horse back into the corral and—before computers existed to make such a change easy—retyped it with the switch of pronouns.  I was too naïve about the writing business—after all, I had a graduate degree in writing poetry, not prose—that I didn't understand a thing about point-of-view, how it allows a writer different access to characters.  Nothing changed.

I despaired.  It was time to despair.  I was on version thirty-three.  Christ died when he was thirty-three, as the man I was struggling to get right in the book was fond of telling me in Africa, trying to convince me to get pregnant before he died.  (He has thus far survived into his seventieth year.)  Under the aegis of the wonderful  and patient Willy Kelley (who later taught at Sarah Lawrence), I had begun writing stories about ten years earlier, in an attempt to understand the simplest workings of fiction.  I wrote close to a hundred stories--I counted them—trying to figure out what the secret was.  I couldn't get it.  I could do the character sketch, I could orchestrate stiff tea parties staged in the savannah, I could riff.  It was near that hundredth story that Willy announced that I had written one.  I was doing my grandmother's voice, a voice I had only imagined since she was seldom around in my childhood.  That make-believe voice released all that energy I had cornered, trying to write realism.

When Gordon Lish sent me a note rejecting that story, or maybe something I had, with new hubris--I could write stories!--submitted to The Quarterly because it was impossible to get published in, he offered to have me take his class.  I didn't have to pay.  What did I have to lose?

People wept in his legendary classes, grown men, half-grown gorgeous women, people on respirators and for all I knew, people with knife wounds.  Lish liked to invite the vulnerable, but the invulnerable particularly interested him.  These were the people with the deepest reserves, who came to him because they wanted to write something but they didn't know evisceration would be necessary.  The clever bastard that Lish still is, pitted one writer against another, and cut. But I'd never been in the presence of someone who believed that fiction was worth sacrificing everything for, that fiction made the writer immortal after those cuts—and that immortality was all that mattered.

I wept.  He had called me brilliant one session and an idiot in the next.  The result wasn't that I quit writing my pitiful novel, my novel full of pity and not what Lish would call itself, but that I finally understood that if no one was ever going to publish it, then I could write it any damn way I wanted.  I tossed away all those many dead trees and rewrote the whole thing from scratch. I don't think a word survives.  Lish's ravings and exhortations taught me how to link one sentence to the next, how plot is linked inexorably to syntax, and how words matter.  As a poet, I already knew words mattered, but not what that meant to fiction.  I had been bent in making them transparent, hoping to transport the reader with character and plot.  Ha.  I changed back to the most extreme first person point-of-view I could manage, and started back up that African river again.

I sent the manuscript out another thirteen times.  My lucky number.  NYU Press took it, gave me an award, and the best agent in town called me the day after the ceremony.

Nothing to it.

Sunday Sentence: National Treasures by Charles McLeod

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

His teeth were a mess, not aware of each other; they sprung from his gums at all angles.

"The State Bird of Minnesota" from National Treasures by Charles McLeod

Win a copy of Fobbit (UK version)

This past week marked a new chapter in the life of my novel.  Eight months to the day after being published by Grove/Atlantic in the U.S., Fobbit was published in the United Kingdom by Harvill Secker, part of the Random House Group.  I'm honored to be part of that illustrious family.

I'm also a big fan of the jacket with which they've clothed my debut novel.  It's a cover design that's a sly homage to two of my favorite movies: M*A*S*H and Full Metal Jacket.  I hope you'll agree that it's frame-worthy jacket art.

As part of the international celebration, I'd like to give faithful readers of The Quivering Pen blog a chance to win a copy of Fobbit, the British version.  I have an extra hardcover from Harvill Secker that I'll send to the winner of this contest.  I'll be happy to sign it, too--either personalized or just a signature.  By the way, the contents of this version are exactly the same as the U.S. Fobbit--only the jacket is different (not to mention the fact that this is the first hardcover publication of the book).  I suppose you could read the novel aloud in a British accent....and hopefully you'd do a better job than Abe Shrinkle and his faux-Brit persona of Richard Belmouth as he floats in the Aussie swimming pool.

(For those of you meeting Fobbit for the first time, it's a dark comedy about the Iraq War which follows two groups of soldiers through the unpredictable battlefield in Baghdad: a company of combat-arms soldiers led by the well-meaning but inept Captain Abe Shrinkle; and, on the other side of the military coin, the support soldiers back at task force headquarters working out of one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces.  These are the titular Fobbits, the slang term given to soldiers who avoid combat by hanging back at the FOB, or Forward Operating Base.)

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of Fobbit, all you have to do is email your name and mailing address to david.abrams@gmail.com

Put "FOBBIT UK CONTEST" in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  The contest will remain open to entries until midnight on April 11—at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on April 12 in the weekly Friday Freebie blog post.

Friday Freebie: Tin God by Terese Svoboda

Congratulations to Carol Wong, winner of last week's Friday Freebie, the three-fer prize package of The City of Devi by Manil Suri, Leela's Book by Alice Albinia, and Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now--As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It by Craig Taylor.

This week's book giveaway is Tin God by Terese Svoboda.  Originally published in 2006, it's been recently reissued in trade paperback by the University of Nebraska's Bison Books imprint in its Flyover Fiction series, which also published Svoboda's novel Bohemian Girl.  I could think of no better way to convince you to enter this contest (and, if you don't win, to ultimately buy the book) than to reprint this excerpt from Emily St. John Mandel's terrific review of Tin God at The Millions which appeared earlier this week:

      In Tin God there is a conquistador, and he’s fallen off his horse in a field of tall grass. He comes to and hears whispering all around him; a tribe of grass-dwelling people have come across him in the midst of their hunt. They’re reasonably sure he’s a god — the way he lies there in full armor like a flipped-over beetle, glinting improbably in the sun; the way his eyes are the color of the sky, unsettling to a people who’ve never seen blue eyes before — but it’s impossible to be sure, so they send him a virgin to watch how he uses her and to gather proof.
      Five hundred years later, a sweet but dim-witted gogo dancer named Pork loses a bag of drugs in the same field. His friend Jim threw it out of the car, which as he points out probably saved them from certain legal entanglements given that a cop was after them, but the problem is a tornado touched down in the field in between Pork and Jim throwing the bag out of the car and Pork and Jim coming back to look for it, and now the bag could be anywhere. The field is torn up and in disarray. Pork is in a certain amount of trouble.
      God watches over both narratives. God is, in fact, the first-person narrator of the book, whose opening lines are “Hi, this is God — G-O-D, God with all the big letters. I’m out here in the middle of a field.” God is everywhere, especially in the field; God knows everything; God is somewhat competitive and likes to win; God sometimes takes the form of a Nebraska farm woman who enjoys donuts and drives a pickup, because why not. (“I drive by on my route that follows Pork’s, lifting My two fingers off the wheel in traditional car greeting.”)
      Tin God is confidently-written, often beautiful, sometimes profane, and strange in the best possible way. It takes some time for the two narratives to come together, but the entire picture does eventually click into place and there’s a feeling, reading this book, of encountering something that hasn’t been done before. It seems to me that Terese Svoboda is a true original.

Or maybe I should take a page from Svoboda's book and tell you, "Hey, this is God. G-O-D.  The one with all the big letters.  I'm giving you an Eleventh Commandment: Get this book.  That's B-O-O-K.  Not my Book (though you should already have that one, too), but THIS BOOK.  The one with all the pretty letters."

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of Tin God, all you have to do is email your name and mailing address to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on April 11—at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on April 12.  If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week Quivering Pen newsletter, simply add the words "Sign me up for the newsletter" in the body of your email.  Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning?  Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter.  Once you've done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.

Soup and Salad: Now Let Us Praise Masha Hamilton, Paperback Reboot, American Reading Habits, Sorry Television's Great American Bookstore Tour, Coos Bay Catches a Wave of Fobbits, Flannery O'Connor is Badass, Kate Atkinson's Life, Ron Hogan Plays Book Matchmaker

On today's menu:

1.  As I've mentioned before, when I was serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom in Baghdad during 2005, I was sustained by a lifeline of correspondents and care packages from home--the majority of which came from fellow writers I'd never met, authors who belonged to the Emerging Writers Network and were rallied to my cause by EWN founder Dan Wickett (who is now also the publisher of Dzanc Books).  Among those writerly pen pals, none was more faithful and  encouraging than novelist Masha Hamilton.  I carried her book The Distance Between Us with me in my duffel bag as I deployed to the combat zone from Fort Stewart, Georgia and wrote her several words of praise and appreciation in an email early in that deployment.  She responded with a friendly, generous email which said, in part, "Please be careful in Iraq and listen to your gut. In my experience, the gut is often very wise...I will be thinking of you."  Thus began months of correspondence (which closed "the distance between us") and, at one point, included a very delicious care package direct from the orchards of Harry and David.  To this day, I've never met Masha in person, but when I read Unbridled Books publisher Fred Ramey's tribute to her at the Unbridled blog, I could only nod my head vigorously and say, "Yes, that's the Masha I came to know during my year at war."  Fred writes:

Being a publisher is a privilege. I’m reminded of that every time a new book arrives from the printer. But some authors an editor can be downright humbled to work with….What astounds me about Masha Hamilton goes beyond the extraordinary empathy of her novels and the artfulness of her story-telling. What humbles me about working with her is the recognition of all she accomplishes in the wider world.

These accomplishments include founding the Camel Book Drive, a mobile lending library of more than 7,000 titles availabe to children in nomadic schools in northeast Kenya, and starting the Afghan Women’s Writing Project which gives a worldwide voice to Afghan women who have stories to tell of their lives. Masha Hamilton is one of those writers who is making a difference in the world beyond just putting words on a page.  Her new novel comes out in June.  It is called, most appropriately, What Changes Everything.


2.  At The Millions, Nicole Bernier examines the ways in which paperbacks can reboot books: "A paperback isn’t just a cheaper version of the book anymore.  It’s a makeover.  A facelift.  And for some, a second shot."  Bernier talks to bookstore owners, publishers, and authors like Melanie Benjamin, Randy Susan Meyers and Jenna Blum who says, “The paperback cover [of Those Who Save Us] helped save the book from the remainder bins, I suspect.”  As someone whose debut novel came out as a trade paperback original, I'll admit to having a pinch of jealousy at authors who are able to celebrate more than one "launch date" for their books--though, in a way, I'm experiencing the reverse effect for Fobbit as it comes out in hardcover from Harvill Secker in the United Kingdom TODAY.


3.  I don't have much to add to the "Amazon Swallows Goodreads" discussion that wouldn't be beating a dead horse (except to say that I'm not deleting my Goodreads account or setting fire to my Kindle in a public protest), but I thought this examination of book buying/reading habits at The Atlantic was interesting.  The article has enough charts and graphs to make me cross-eyed, but here's the heart of the story:

The United States is not, sadly, a country of lit buffs. In 2008, a little more than half of all American adults reported reading a book that was not required for work or school during the past year, according to the National Endowment of the Arts. And as shown in the graph below, which like the other charts in this piece come courtesy of the industry researchers at Codex Group, and updates the sample data to match the 2010 Census, just 19 percent read a dozen or more titles. Or, to put it another way, according to Codex just 19 percent of Americans do 79 percent of all our (non-required) book readin'.

I'm proud to be one of those 19 Percenters.

Elliott Bay Books

4.  Are you following Sorry Television's Great American Bookstore Tour?  You're not?  Well, you should be!  It's like getting to ride in the passenger seat on a road trip, eating Red Vines and turning up the volume whenever The Belle Brigade comes on.  No, wait, it's better than that.  It's like:

Day 2 started (after a morning walk through Pike Place Market, and a visit to the first-ever Starbucks) with the much-anticipated trip to Elliott Bay Book Co., which is, I don’t know, heaven? Between the wooden floors, high ceilings, skylights, armchairs, reading tables, and respectful hush—I’d underestimated the value of shopping for books in peace and quiet—I basically wanted to throw down some blankets and camp out there forever, dividing my time between reading, sleeping and…no, just those two activities. In fact, the only thing that would make EBBC better is if its adorable little cafe sold wine. OH WAIT, IT DOES.

And now I'm punching myself in the head (which isn't easy to do with a broken arm).  Elliott Bay purveys wine?  Why oh why did I not linger there in the honeyed glow of its wood floors and bookly ambiance after my reading with Roy Scranton and Gavin Kovite last week?  Oh wait, I know why I left right after the reading--Jean was waiting for me back at the hotel room and I was afraid she was going to eat the slice of Cheesecake Factory's Chris's Outrageous despite our solemn marital vow to share and share alike.  As it turned out, she couldn't handle the Sweetness and left all but two small exploratory bites for me.  But looking back, I do wish I'd hung around Elliott Bay a little longer, basking in what Sorry Television calls its "aesthetically pleasing" book displays.  Next trip to the Pacific Northwest, I promise I'll browse and buy...and drink.

This is where I'll be reading
from Fobbit in May

5.  Speaking of the Pacific Northwest, have I mentioned how much I love it?  More specifically, how much I love the good people of Coos Bay, Oregon?  Jean and I honeymooned along their beautiful, rugged shoreline in 1983.  And now, Coos Bay is going all out in its campaign to have everyone in the community read Fobbit.  A special hug and smooch to the librarians who are rallying readers to the cause.  I'll be reading from Fobbit and visiting schools along the coast in May, so if you're in the area, please stop by and say hello.  And let me assure you, having your debut novel chosen to be the Title Wave "one book" selection is just about the coolest thing.  Cooler even than an afternoon with Red Vines and the Belle Brigade.


6.  "[Flannery O'Connor] was something like our badass grandmother who liked to say inappropriate things at a formal dinner table."


7.  If I hear one more person say that Kate Atkinson's Life After Life is, bar none, the best book they've read in years....well, then, I guess I'll just have to sit down and read it for myself.  Actually, I'd already put the novel near the peak of my To-Be-Read pile (aka Mt. NeverRest) after I read this New York Times article on Atkinson:

      Imagine having the gift (or the curse) of continually dying and being reborn, so that you relive segments of your life again and again, differently each time, going down various paths and smoothing out rough areas until you get it right and can move on. Imagine, too, that you are not conscious that this is happening, but experience it as intermittent déjà vu, a sometimes-inchoate dread, an inexplicable compulsion at sudden moments to do one thing rather than another.
      This is not an original artistic conceit, obviously. A century ago, the book “Strange Life of Ivan Osokin” depicted a young man who is given a chance to relive his life and correct his mistakes in 1902 Moscow. And in “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray is forced to repeat the same wretched day, and listen to the same wretched Sonny and Cher song, in Punxsutawney, Pa., until he becomes a better person and wins over Andie MacDowell. But in “Life After Life,” her eighth and latest novel, the British writer Kate Atkinson has taken these notions — what if practice really did make perfect, and what if we really could play out multiple alternate futures — and put them through the Magimix, pumped them full of helium, added some degrees of difficulty and produced an audacious, ambitious book that challenges notions of time, fate and free will, not to mention narrative plausibility.

8.  I'm rarely at a loss deciding what to read next (See Also: Mt. NeverRest), but if I'm ever stumped, I'll turn to Ron Hogan.  He's started up a new literary matchmaking service ("Book, meet Reader.  Reader, this is Book.") called The Handsell.  Check it out.  And feel free to drop Ron a line if you need a recommendation for what to crack open next.  (Of course, as most of us already know, and as Hogan is gracious enough to point out, John Warner has been doing something similar for years as the Biblioracle.)

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.  Unless their last name is Grisham or King, authors will probably never see their trailers on the big screen at the local cineplex.  And that's a shame because a lot of hard work goes into producing these short marriages between book and video.  So, if you like what you see, please spread the word and help these videos go viral.

I was there at the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association meeting when Wendy Pearl, a sales rep for Penguin publishers, held up an advance reading copy of Kristopher Jansma's debut novel The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards and bravely announced to the hundred-plus booksellers in the room that if the book didn't become an Indie Next bestseller, she would "eat this galley."  It's the kind of passion every first-time novelist dreams of getting from those responsible for marketing and publicizing their "book babies."  Fortunately for Pearl, she won't have to break her "strict, no-paper diet" because The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards made the April Indie Next List.  I've had my eye on Jansma's book ever since that NCIBA trade show, having packed a galley in my suitcase even before Pearl's challenge.  (Lack of) time and (too many) circumstances have kept me from reading it yet, but the book trailer for Leopards certainly re-piques my interest.  It's a beautiful video which is at once intimate and globally-expansive.  There's just enough odd detail to intrigue us (why is the narrator's manuscript disintegrating at the bottom of an ice-bound lake?) and plenty of big-name blurbs to convince me that Jansma's novel is worth my time: "Light and airy, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards is a funhouse of a novel about the outsized ambitions of authors and the sneaky power of storytelling.  Kristopher Jansma's debut is a whimsical round-the-world tour that recalls Calvino, Millhauser and The Confidence Man" (Stewart O'Nan).  I can't wait to eat this book.

My First Time: Miriam Karmel

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 Miriam Karmel.  Her debut novel, Being Esther, has just been published by Milkweed Editions.  Booklist had this to say about the book: "Karmel’s novel of womanhood, the love and strife between mothers and daughters, marital dead zones, and the baffling metamorphosis of age is covertly complex, quietly incisive, and stunning in its emotional richness."  Karmel has published writing in AARP Magazine, Minnesota Women’s Press, Bellevue Literary Review, and Minnesota Monthly.  She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Sandisfield, Massachusetts.  Her My First Time essay is probably the most unique in the series so far.

My First Wedding in a Bookstore

It wasn’t a first marriage for Bill or for me.  But it was the first time either of us was married in a bookstore.

We hadn’t planned on the venue, though in hindsight, what better place to exchange our vows?  From the start, our love for each other was bound up in a passion for words.

Our first encounter was an e-mail exchange engineered not by an online dating service, but by a mutual friend.  Alan had been Bill’s friend for ages.  They were practically kids when they met at Centrum, a writer’s retreat in Port Townsend, Washington.  Bill was there to work on a second novel.  Alan was writing a book of his own.

Flash forward many years to Ragdale, in Lake Forest, Illinois, where I was playing around with a short story that was the genesis for Being Esther and Alan was writing another book.  On the last day of the retreat, he casually mentioned that he had a friend—a widower in New York.

It was love at first word.  Bill’s letters were gentle and funny, genuine and smart.  I began to doubt he was real.  “You’re not some lonely boy,” I wrote, “hiding out in your basement, writing sweet nothings, toying with my affection?”

Then we met.  He was no kid.  Neither was I.  It hardly mattered.  Neither did marriage.  We’d both done that before.  Then one day, marriage felt right.  But we didn’t want a wedding with all the trappings, the logistics, the Sturm und Drang.  Still, we needed witnesses.  Who better than our matchmaker friend and his wife, Linda?

Our mutual friends live in Vermont, in a small town that is so far north it is practically Canada.  We called them and said: “We’re coming to Vermont.  To get married.  You’ll be our witnesses.”  They were delighted.  They offered their home.  They knew an officiant.

Kim Crady-Smith is a local justice of the peace who happens to own a bookstore.  Or perhaps it’s the other way around.  Bill and I met Kim the way we met each other—through e-mail.  We corresponded, shared our thoughts about the ceremony, about each other, and agreed that we would meet her at Alan and Linda’s home the day of the wedding.

But our good friends had other plans.  They asked: Did we mind a surprise venue?  We did not.  Yet knowing Alan, who’d written Just Walking the Hills of Vermont, I feared we might have to scale a mountain to say our vows.  In theory, a lovely idea; in high heels, not.

The heels, it turned out, were just right for walking down the aisle at Green Mountain Books in Lyndonville.  The shop is a homey affair in a white brick storefront.  Outside, there are two wooden signs.  One says: Books.  The other: New and Used.  Inside, sunshine streams through plate-glass windows, illuminating a space jam-packed with books.  There are books everywhere.  Piled on tables.  Stacked on the floor.  Arranged in shelves that run the length and breadth of the room.  It’s a place for poking around, getting lost in the stacks, searching for hidden treasure.

In our case, it was also a place to get married.  The layout was just right.  Two long tables full of books formed a natural aisle.  That day, the tables were festooned with flowers—blowzy, white hydrangeas that Linda had foraged from a vacant lot and plunked into mason jars.  The aisle ended at a wall of books, which doubled as a backdrop for a chuppa, the traditional Jewish wedding canopy under which a bride and groom are married.  This particular canopy was fashioned from an antique tablecloth, two corners of which were tied to tall poles (Kim’s t’ai chi sticks) that our witnesses held.  The other corners were tucked under books on the shelf.

The store stayed open.  A few customers drifted in.  The UPS guy showed up.   Charlie (we never learned his last name), a bookshop regular, looked on from a chair somewhere in the back.  A poet named Roberta arrived with a bouquet of sunflowers and warm wishes.  There was even a musician strumming classical guitar.

Ours was the first wedding at Green Mountain Books.  Kim tells us there hasn’t been one since.  We’ll return this summer, this time for a reading from Being Esther.  It won’t be my first reading, or even the first reading at Green Mountain Books.  But it will be the first reading from a writer who got married in a bookstore for the first time to a man who shares her love of words.