My First Time: Don Rearden

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 Don Rearden, author of the new novel The Raven's Gift, which has just been released in the US by Pintail Books, a boutique imprint of Penguin USA.  Rearden grew up on the tundra of Southwestern Alaska.  His experiences with the Yup'ik Eskimo culture shaped both his writing and to a larger extent his worldview.  He lives in the mountain community of Bear Valley, Alaska, and teaches as an Associate Professor Professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage.  He also serves as the president of the board of directors for the 49 Alaska Writers and has served as faculty for the Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference.  Click here to visit Rearden's website.  [Want to win a copy of The Raven's Gift?  Click here to enter this week's Friday Freebie contest.]

My First Time...Again.

I never quite understood the term “born-again virgin” until now.  Like most first-timers, I dove into the backseat of the publishing car with little knowledge of what I was doing and utterly devoid of any idea as to the future consequences of my actions.  What was perhaps unusual about my initial romp with publication was that it happened outside the US.  And while this first time was beyond exciting and totally satisfying, like most first-timers, it left me yearning for more--and something more--you could call it an S.T.I. that I’d never get over (a Sexually Transmitted ISBN, if you will).

My first tryst was with a Canadian.  A very popular Canadian.  An important Canadian.  A hot Canadian.  The kind a debut author kills to climb in bed with.  The problem?  This made me like that kid in junior high, you know the one who had a girlfriend, but she lived in Canada?  The Raven’s Gift debuted there in 2011 with Penguin Canada, but they only acquired rights to Canada, and this made getting the novel here in the US, and particularly in Alaska, where it was beyond my expectations popular, exceedingly difficult and expensive.  All roads to publication here in the US seemed impossible, perhaps because the world happened to be ending at the time (stock market crash, publishing industry crash, and death of a Bee Gee) and the book dealt with that very subject matter?  I don’t know.  Whatever the case, I could only keep writing and working hard to promote the book and hope that some US publisher would want to crawl in the sack with me--I mean publish the novel.

All the while, the Canadian book grew in popularity here, despite or perhaps in spite of the availability.  The book received Alaskan novel of the year by the Alaska Professional Communicators, then runner-up by the National Federation of Press Women.  I’d acquired an impressive list of blurbs from some of America’s most popular authors.  But still, I was just that guy with a girlfriend from Canada.

Then, much to my amazement, the book was picked up by major publishers in Australia and France.  I was a first-timer again!  Then again.  See, just like getting to be a born-again virgin, in publishing your debut status is renewable, country by country!  It’s all really a mind-set.  One that I was still having trouble grasping, since my own country apparently had no interest in getting intimate--I mean publishing the novel.

So all this time I’m working diligently doing the publicity dance that writers must do these days and wondering if I shouldn’t just move to one of those other countries.  I suppose my friends and family were ready to send me, too, as they must have grown tired of me being a first-timer again and again and again, and yet they had little proof of such relationships but a photo.  “My new girlfriend,” I would joke as I attached a cover of the most recent edition of the novel in an email to my buddy Seth Kantner, author of Ordinary Wolves.

“Where is she from this time?” he’d ask.

To be honest, I’d pretty much given up on getting any action here in the US with The Raven’s Gift.  I’d grown accustomed to being the guy with the mystery girlfriends.  I learned to be happy with the long-distance thing while I tried to re-Kindle a new affair with those Americans publishers that had shown serious initial interest but ultimately rejected me.

Then I got the message.  It was a strange message.  One I never expected.  Sort of like coming home from a high school dance, where you didn’t get to actually dance at all, and your mom says, “that cute girl you like called.  You know the one from Canada.  She said she’s moving here and wants you to call back.”

Penguin Canada and Penguin US had formed a new boutique imprint of popular Canadian titles and The Raven’s Gift made the list.  My Canadian girlfriend had transformed, from Penguin to a beautiful Pintail.  She’d sprouted some wings that could lift her over the border.

That’s how my first time happened.  Again.

Author photo by Michael Dinneen

Sunday Sentence: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

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

At first, I do not think I knew what I was looking at.  I could make no sense of it.  Where Ursula Monkton had been made of gray cloth that flapped and snapped and gusted in the storm-winds, Lettie Hempstock was made of silken sheets the color of ice, filled with tiny flickering candle flames, a hundred hundred candle flames.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Friday Freebie: High and Inside by Russell Rowland and The Raven's Gift by Don Rearden

Congratulations to Frank Larson, winner of last week's Friday Freebie.  Frank will soon be enjoying a bundle of books which includes Me and the Devil by Nick Tosches, The Distracted Preacher by Thomas Hardy, Float by JoeAnn Hart, Pretty Much True... by Kristen J. Tsetsi, and Kingdom Come by J. G. Ballard.

This week's book giveaway is a nice duet of two new novels: High and Inside by Russell Rowland and The Raven's Gift by Don Rearden.  Both Russ and Don are personal acquaintances of mine and it's always heartening to see friends succeed.  I've known both for well over ten years--I met Russell through the now-defunct Readerville.com (RIP) and since moving to Montana we've bonded as Big Sky writers often do; Don was a fellow classmate during my graduate-study years at the University of Alaska Anchorage and we've kept in touch electronically ever since.  I haven't had the chance to read their new books, but knowing the authors behind the pens, I'm pretty sure they're outstanding.

High and Inside seems like the perfect summertime read since it has baseball at its core.  Here's the publisher's plot synopsis:

Pete Hurley is not the first person to have the idea that building his dream house in the country will bring him some kind of peace and happiness.  But he may be the first to arrive in Montana with a World Series ring, a three-legged dog, and a thirst for self-destruction.  High and Inside documents, with stark clarity, one man's struggle with the dark side of fame, as well as his internal battles with alcoholism and a crumbling sense of self-worth.  A community of people who love him and a generous inheritance aren't enough to counterbalance Pete's apparent determination to sabotage every healthy aspect of his life.  It's a downward spiral that won't end until he's forced to confront not only his own ugly past but his unfulfilled future as well.  With wit and compassion, sharp humor and startling insight, author Russell Rowland gives us not only a portrait of fame and addiction, but also an indispensable glimpse into the character of the modern West.

Alan Heathcock, author of Volt, called High and Inside “an elegant and potent investigation of community and home, of healing and forgiveness...this wonderful novel is a grand slam of indelible characters and infectious drama, and a flat-out great read.”

The Raven's Gift will also make a good read for the hot summer months since it's set in Alaska.  Here's more about what waits for readers on its pages:

John Morgan and his wife can barely contain their excitement upon arriving as the new teachers in a Yup'ik Eskimo village on the windswept Alaskan tundra.  But their move proves disastrous when a deadly epidemic strikes and the isolated community descends into total chaos.  When outside aid fails to arrive, John’s only hope lies in escaping the snow-covered tundra and the hunger of the other survivors—he must make the thousand-mile trek across the Alaskan wilderness for help.  He encounters a blind Eskimo girl and an elderly woman who need his protection, and he needs their knowledge of the terrain to survive.  The harsh journey pushes him beyond his limits as he discovers a new sense of hope and the possibility of loving again.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Eoywyn Ivy (The Snow Child) said, "The book is fantastic, one of the best books about Alaska I have ever read.  It calls to mind Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King, but at the same time it is all its own.  The Raven's Gift is the story of a couple teaching in a remote Alaskan village when a epidemic sweeps through.  People are dying in isolation, and others descending into savage violence.  It is a survival story and an edge-of-the-seat thriller."

If you'd like a chance at winning both High and Inside and The Raven's Gift, 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 July 18, at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on July 19.  If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words "Sign me up for the newsletter" in the body of your email.  Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

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

Soup and Salad: Harlan Ellison's Haircut, Reading Women, Loving and Hating Jess Walter, Fair Warning on JKT and DFW Auction Lots, Novel Research, Edith Wharton's Curtains, Reading on the Way to Mars, Beautiful Fake Book Covers

On today's menu:

1.  If you're in L.A. this Saturday, you should stop by Sweeney Todd's Barber Shop (4639 Hollywood Blvd.) at 2 p.m.  That's where you'll be able to watch Harlan Ellison get a haircut from "coif king" Sween Lahman.  Using switchblade combs, Sween will cut Mr. Ellison's hair in a specially designed pompadour.  Afterward, leather-clad bodyguards will escort Ellison down Hollywood Boulevard to a benefit reading for Kicks Books, whose Red Hook warehouse was submerged in floodwaters from Hurricane Sandy last October.  In this rare personal appearance (with special guest Patton Oswalt), Ellison will read--for the first time in history--from his pseudonymous and scarce 1959 street fiction, collected now by Kicks Books in two "hip pocket paperbacks" titled Pulling A Train and Getting in the Wind.  Afterwards, Ellison will sign both Kicks Books which will be available for purchase along with commemorative perfumes called Sex Gang and Sin Time, created by Kicks Books' founder Miriam Linna.   I can't think of the last author reading event which began with a haircut and ended with perfume, can you?  File this one under "Not To Be Missed."


2.  Jason Rice, one of the founders of 3 Guys 1 Book, writes about how he emerged from a nearly all-male-writers diet to find that he was equally stimulated and enlightened by female authors:

Right around this time, someone forced Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children on me, and I couldn’t care less.  I was trying—and struggling—to read Richard Price’s latest.  Claire Messud poured cold water down the front of my pants.  This book was the gateway drug to female writers.  Messud made me realize that you only have one life, and you should read this story about this family.  The main characters are both exciting and compelling in a way that makes you want to find them and move into their house.

Rice goes on to read works by Zadie Smith, Jennifer Egan, Emily St. John Mandel, Eliot Holt and others.  And he is a better man for it.


3.  Ann K. Ryles had me at the first line of a recent interview at The Rumpus: "I didn’t want to like Jess Walter."  Having gotten to know Jess a little bit over the past year (we've done a couple of book festival panels together), I knew exactly what Ryles meant.  Jess Walter is super-talented AND he's a super-nice guy.  The bastard.  Don't you just hate a winning combo like that?   Read Ryles' interview and you might just want to go leave flaming bags of dog shit on Walter's front porch.  Either that or you'll be stalking him on the interwebs and promising to give him your first-born children if he'll just be your new BFF.  Or maybe that's just me.


4.  On the auction block: a photocopy of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces manuscript and a photo sell for $31,000.... Letters and manuscripts by David Foster Wallace go for $125,000.


5.  At her blog, Cathy Day (The Circus in Winter) offers a peek behind the writer's curtain, describing how in researching her new novel one thing leads to another:

      So, the other day, I was writing those scenes.  Linda in Chicago at this divorce trial.  March of 1902.
      I decided to have her stay at the famed Palmer House.  Why?  Well, I stayed at the Palmer House for AWP 2012, and so this way, I can write off some of my expenses.
      Also, it’s gorgeous.
      While I was staying there, I grabbed a flyer about the history of the Palmer House and gleaned two great details:
      * The floor of the barber shop was tiled in silver dollars.
      * The owner was so sure that his hotel was “The World’s Only Fire-Proof Hotel,” he promised that if any of his guests were willing to pay to remodel and replace their room’s furnishings, they could set their hotel suite on fire and close the door.  Potter Palmer vowed the fire wouldn’t spread, and he was willing to prove it.
      When I saw those details, I knew my character’s rich, bad-boy husband wouldn’t be able to resist setting his hotel room on fire, and that he’d want to show her that floor tiled in silver dollars.

Silver-dollar floors and hotel fires?  Man, I can't wait to read Day's book!   (But of course I'll have to bide my time since she's still in the middle of writing it.)


6.  How would you like the job of re-creating Edith Wharton's curtains?


7.  This has always been my kind of dream scenario: stranded in isolation for 520 days with nothing to do but read.  Some people think of deserted islands (I love coconuts, but I'm sure I'd get permanently sick of them along about Day 241), others pretend a prison sentence would be a good thing (okay, except for the shower-rape episodes), and then there's always a long hospital stay (yes, but what if you got a roommate who only wanted to watch Wheel of Fortune all the time?).  Engineer Diego Urbina had a different opportunity for a read-a-thon:

      On June 3, 2010, six men filed through the weedy, Soviet-era campus of the Institute of Biomedical Problems, in Moscow.  They made their way past friends, family, scientists, well-wishers and a bronze-toned, gigantic statue of the astronaut Yuri Gagarin before entering a vaulted hall that contained a mock-up of the type of spacecraft that could one day ferry humans to Mars.  The men climbed aboard.  Behind them, the hatch sealed shut.  They didn’t come out for a year and a half.
      The Mars500 expedition was the world’s first full-length test of what it would be like for astronauts to travel to and from Mars, which is much farther from Earth than the moon.  For five hundred and twenty days, the international crew—three members came from the Russian space agency, two from the European space agency, and one from the Chinese space agency—lived as if they were in flight, eating Russian space food, moving through the capsule’s diminutive rooms via tube-shaped metal hallways, performing scientific experiments to see what was happening to their bodies and their minds, sometimes losing contact with mission control, and only occasionally getting word from their families.
      Like real space travellers, they also had lots and lots of downtime.

Urbina, who said he likes books but doesn't normally have a lot of time to read, decided to pack his bags for the faux-Mars trip with a small library of novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

      While he expected to like Márquez, in the weeks following “takeoff,” Urbina, who recently turned thirty, began to find that the stories were helping him in ways he hadn’t anticipated.  “The themes Gabriel García Márquez writes about were very similar to what we were going through,” said Urbina.  “He’s talking about loneliness, his stories take place over long periods of time.  I felt so identified with the characters.”

8.  I just stumbled across these absolutely riveting fake covers for well-known books.  Levente Szabó is a graphic designer worked in Brussels, and currently he’s redesigning the covers for some of his favorite books.  You can find links to the galleries here at The Millions.  There were so many I loved, I just decided to post all of my favorites:

And my favorite:

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

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

Elizabeth Gilbert's writing career has been defined by Eat, Pray, Love.  That memoir about Gilbert's travelogue into the Self has dominated her other books like a skyscraper, leaving the rest of them in shadow.  But let us never forget that her roots lie in fiction.  Her first book, the short story collection Pilgrims, was a finalist for the PEN/ Hemingway Award and was followed three years later by a novel, Stern Men.  And so—not to bash E, P, L by any means—it was with a relieved cheer that I watched the trailer for her next book, The Signature of All Things, a novel coming our way in October.   Spanning the 18th and 19th centuries, The Signature of All Things is a sweeping epic of the Whittaker family in Philadelphia, particularly Alma whose research into botany takes her deeper into the mysteries of evolution.  As the publisher's synopsis tells us, "Alma falls in love with a man named Ambrose Pike who makes incomparable paintings of orchids and who draws her in the exact opposite direction—into the realm of the spiritual, the divine, and the magical.  Alma is a clear-minded scientist; Ambrose a utopian artist—but what unites this unlikely couple is a desperate need to understand the workings of this world and the mechanisms behind all life."  In the trailer, Gilbert takes us on a tour of The Woodlands, an 18th-century mansion on the Schuylkill River near Philadelphia—a setting which she says provided her with the kind of inspiration to immerse herself into Alma's world.  The novel also had its start in a 1783 leatherbound edition of Captain Cook's Voyages.  "It was through my fascination with those botanical explorers and illustrators that my book was born," Gilbert confides.  Interspersed with Gilbert's talking-head shots and views of the mansion are closeups of a lush forest floor.  It's as beautifully filmed as any National Geographic documentary—fern porn, if you will.  All the while, there's this symphonic music crescendo-ing in the background, building to a fever pitch of excitement.  This is one of the most effective book trailers I've seen in a long time.  It's like a phalanx of trumpeters lining the halls of a castle, raising horns to their lips and blasting a fanfare as we walk through a set of heavy doors into the throne room.  All hail Queen Elizabeth!

My First Time: Susan Choi

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 Susan Choi whose new novel My Education has just been published to great acclaim (New York Newsday called it "a chaise-lounge literary page-turner par excellence: sexy, smart, well-plotted, jammed with observations witty and profound, and so well-written it occasionally leaves you gasping”).  Choi's first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction.  Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and her third, A Person of Interest, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award.  A recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation, in 2010 she received the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. She teaches at Princeton and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and sons.

My First Time With Gordon Lish

Long before Tess Gallagher's campaign to republish some of the most well-known stories of her dead husband, Raymond Carver; many years before D. T. Max's revealing research on the Carver/Lish collaboration in the archives of the Lilly Library; before, even, Carol Polsgrove's early disclosures about the Gordon Lish editorial style at Esquire; I was a recent college graduate without a clue as to how editing or publishing worked.  My fellow-aspiring-writers and I still spent a lot of time debating the ethics of the multiple submission.  Wasn't it really ok?  Would any one editor ever notice us, let alone two?  We still submitted our stories--to The New Yorker, of course, and to The Atlantic, and, right up there with the big ones if not the big one itself, to Gordon Lish's Quarterly--with SASEs, the appearances of which I would agonize over.  Remember the SASE?  If you do, you've just dated yourself.  Remember agonizing over whether to hand-write or laser-print your own address?  Whether certain stamps were luckier than others?  I knew an aspiring writer who used to make his girlfriend kiss every submission envelope before he put it in the big blue mailbox.  It must have worked; he's a household name now, and a Pulitzer winner.  Anyway, this was back in those days, and I'd never had a publication nor even so much as a hand-written note from an editor.   Then I heard from Gordon Lish--the Gordon Lish!  Of The Quarterly!  The man who'd made himself, and countless other writers, famous!  Been fiction editor ("Captain Fiction") of Esquire!  And mentor to none other than Carver!

Even had I known, then, about Lish's signature editorial style, I would have had no idea how to put it in context.  Like the rest of the general public, I was unaware of the editorial role Lish had played in preparing for publication Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, already a canonical work when I entered college an eager, aspiring writer in 1986.  I wouldn't have guessed that, as Giles Harvey summarized in the New York Review almost twenty years after its publication, the manuscript of that book had been "cut by over 50 percent; three stories were at least 70 percent shorter; ten stories had new titles and the endings of fourteen had been rewritten."  Even had I been aware of what Blake Morrison, in The Guardian, calls "the scale of his interference," I wouldn't have realized Lish's alterations were incomparably off the scale.  For all I knew, cutting half of one's words, rewriting one's ending, and retitling one's story was simply what editors did.  It was, after all, what Lish had done to my story, the one he was proposing to publish.  It had gone from 27 manuscript pages to less than 13, its final paragraph contained almost no words I had written myself; and its new title, "Lamplight," was very different in feel from my original title, "The Way to Live Wisely," which sounded a bit infantile, but at least was my own.

In Carver's case, readers can now compare the pre-Lish stories--published as a volume called Beginners after much campaigning on the part of Carver's widow, Tess Gallagher--with the post-Lish versions in What We Talk About..., and make their own judgments as to whether Carver owed Lish a debt of gratitude or a punch in the face.  In my minor case, it's harder to decide.  The evidence--my original manuscript, Lish's cuts and rewrites, and our brief correspondence, which went back and forth a few times--is buried, effectively if not forever, somewhere in my basement.  Someday, if I am lucky enough to grow old and have nothing better to do, I'll dig it up.  For now I can only go on the evidence of my actions.  If I'd agonized over the stamps on my SASEs, imagine how I agonized over this.  But in the end, I told Lish "No, thank you."  I don't recall his exact response, but it was gracious.

Barely days later, my home telephone rang.  It was Michael Koch, the editor of Epoch.  Was this Susan Choi, who'd written "The Way to Live Wisely"?  Epoch wanted to publish the story.  Now the truth is out at last: I'd multiply-submitted!

I was so astonished by this turn of events I could barely speak.  Finally I managed to say, "You want to publish it?  As is?"

Mr. Koch--who I'd later learn is one of the earth's finest humans--was puzzled and slightly bemused.  "Why--yes," he said kindly.  They wanted to publish it "just as it was."  That's what they did when they liked something--they published it just as it was.

In the fullness of time, I started to write longer things, and want more intervention from an editor--perhaps I should say interference.  I'm no longer elated, but a little suspicious, if someone wants to print something "just as it is."  Still, my ideal editor lies far closer to Michael Koch's end of the spectrum.  I'll never forget the dreadful feeling of first looking over the edits Lish made to my manuscript.  After seeing Lish's edits to his book, Carver wrote a desperate letter to Lish in which he described himself as "confused, tired, paranoid, and afraid."  Not to compare great things to small, but I get how he felt.  That was his own self on the page, being excised or transformed beyond all recognition.  At that point, even publication's holy grail no longer feels worth it.

Author photo by Adrian Kinloch

Sunday Sentence: The Stick Soldiers by Hugh Martin

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

At Fort Polk, Louisiana,
the Opposition Force shoots
all three of us,
but we enjoy this death,

which gives us a chance to sit,
smoke, rest our feet.  Dying
is part of training
for war in Iraq.

"Four-Letter Word" from The Stick Soldiers by Hugh Martin

The Day the Clowns Cried: The Circus Fire by Stewart O'Nan

Today marks one of the saddest days in circus history.  On July 6, 1944, fire broke out under the big top during an afternoon performance of the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus in Hartford, Connecticut.  No one left that tent unscathed.

To this day, people are haunted by memories of the disaster--especially those who have read Stewart O'Nan's searing account of the fire.  I first read The Circus Fire more than 12 years ago and I still can't shake it.  I'm an unabashed fan of O'Nan's fiction, but I think this might just be his best book.  Here's a review I wrote for another website back in 2001.

At first, the fire was small.  The flames burned a hole the size of a silver dollar in the canvas wall of the big-top tent.  Very few of the 8,700 people inside saw the smoke and flames.  They were too busy watching the lion act and the Wallenda family's high-wire act—all part of the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus.  Those who did the see the fire at its origin shrugged and thought, "Somebody will be along soon to put it out."

But nobody doused the flames that afternoon.

What happened during the next few disastrous minutes on July 6, 1944 in Hartford, Connecticut changed history.  Those of you who pick up and read The Circus Fire by Stewart O'Nan will be witnesses to that history and, try as you might, you'll never be able to erase it from your mind.

Reading this minute-by-minute, detailed account of the Hartford Circus Fire is the closest you'll ever come to experiencing the terror and confusion of the event.  O'Nan brings the disaster to life so vividly you'll swear the pages smell like smoke.

The fire, a sad landmark in American disaster history, killed 167 and injured thousands—most of them trampled as panic-stricken circus-goers clogged the narrow exits while trying to escape the burning and collapsing tent.  There were heroes (Bill Curlee who stood on top of a lion cage and pulled dozens of children to safety), there were villains (a sailor who broke a woman’s jaw to keep her from escaping before him) and there were tragic victims (relatives who went back inside in search of loved ones who'd already made it to safety).  The stories are manifold and they are heartbreaking, all of them brought to us under the watchful gaze of O'Nan, a novelist and short story writer (Emily, Alone, Last Night at the Lobster).

O'Nan says he never intended to write the book.  Soon after moving to Hartford, the novelist went in search of an account of the city's "emotional touchstone."  He came up empty-handed.  "So many people had died, I couldn't believe no one had commemorated the event," he writes in the book's foreword.  He started doing research, thinking he'd turn his notes over to another writer, one who specialized in non-fiction.  Instead, the stories wormed their way into his heart.  "I started asking people around town what they knew about it.  Everyone had a friend or neighbor who had been there that day, a grandmother or a cousin.  Everyone had a story."

O'Nan compiled the stories, winnowed down the thousands of witnesses to a manageable two dozen or so, then he stepped back and let the tale tell itself.  With only a few exceptions ("It was snowing fire," is one), O'Nan resists literary flourishes.  Suppressing the fiction-reflex, he presents the story in an exact, clear-eyed style—it's as if we were watching a documentary on the History Channel.  It is the smartest move he could ever make.  There are times when real life needs to be fluffed-up and tinted—this is not one of those times.  The facts of the fire and the testimonies of the survivors and investigators are strong enough to break the stoniest of hearts.

I read through The Circus Fire at breakneck speed and came away shaken and haunted through and through.

Suspense builds as we watch the ill-fated, war-weary crowd gather for the matinee on that stifling hot afternoon.  We're taken inside the huge tent, we sit down next to several families as they watch the lion-tamer's act and then the acrobatic thrills of the Great Wallendas.  We groan at the irony of a vendor moving through the aisles, hawking paper fans and calling, "It’s going to get hotter and hotter."  The band blares, the cats roar, the sawdust swirls.

And then it starts.  To this day, no one knows exactly what caused the fire (though O'Nan follows every investigative lead).  The why and how didn't matter to those 8,700 people; they were only concerned with the what of the moment.

As is our storyteller.  O'Nan really jolted me with these four sentences:

The flames leapt up the roof, and now everybody could see the fire.  No one was going to put this out.  The crowd gasped and then let loose a roar.  The grandstands stood, and the chairs went over with a deafening clatter, Coke bottles rolling down the risers.

O'Nan's description of the fire and panicking crowd-crush goes on for nearly 50 pages.  It's like watching a slow-motion horror film and reading it can be an emotionally-draining experience.

The Circus Fire is liberally sprinkled with photographs—some of them, incredibly, taken just before and just after the fire started.  The pictures of terrified survivors running from the still-burning tent are as haunting as O'Nan's text.

What struck me the most about The Circus Fire was the unselfish, heroic display of human spirit during and after the fire.  In the confusing aftermath, strangers took children under their wing and helped them reunite with parents (those who survived the flames, at any rate).  Residents of neighboring homes opened their doors, served lemonade, treated burns and let survivors use the telephone to call families (of course, there were an opportunistic few who charged five dollars a call).  Emergency workers quickly deployed to set up a makeshift morgue in the armory, lining up the charred bodies on cots and leading relatives through the gruesome task of identification (to this day, several bodies remain unidentified, buried in anonymous graves—most famously, the blonde-haired Little Miss 1565 whose cherubic face struck an emotional chord in America).  In the midst of the awful event, it was comforting to be reminded that mankind does sometimes rise to the occasion.

The circus owners, however, come away smelling like elephant dung.  Starting with Rickett's Equestrian Circus in 1799, circuses in America had been prone to fires, train wrecks and other unnatural disasters.  By the time Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus reached Hartford on July 5, 1944, they'd had their share of troubles that year: political in-fighting between the owners, labor problems and schedule delays.  Surely the least of their worries was the common practice of weatherproofing the big top by coating it with 6,000 gallons of gasoline and 18,000 pounds of paraffin.  It was a proven method for keeping out the rain, they later told the court.  As with the book's other events, O'Nan tells the Ringling story with the emotional balance of a court reporter.

It is, however, one transcript you'll never ever forget.

[For a fictional treatment of the fire, I highly recommend Michael Downs' short story collection The Greatest Show]

Friday Freebie: Me and the Devil by Nick Tosches, The Distracted Preacher by Thomas Hardy, Float by JoeAnn Hart, Pretty Much True by Kristen Tsetsi, and Kingdom Come by J. G. Ballard

Congratulations to Vanessa Blakeslee, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: A Nearly Perfect Copy by Allison Amend.

This week's book giveaway is a mega-huge grab-bag of some excellent books which have been waiting patiently for their turn to step into the Friday Freebie spotlight. All are new, unread copies and all are paperback, with the exception of Me and the Devil, which is a hardcover. One lucky reader will win all of the following books: Me and the Devil by Nick Tosches, The Distracted Preacher by Thomas Hardy (part of the Art of the Novella from the good people at Melville House), Float by JoeAnn Hart, Pretty Much True... by Kristen J. Tsetsi, and Kingdom Come by J. G. Ballard.

In the past, Nick Tosches has written music-industry biographies of crooners like Dean Martin and Jerry Lee Lewis.  Here, he takes on someone a little different, a little darker. Me and the Devil's plot goes something like this:

An aging New Yorker, a writer named Nick, feels life ebbing out of him. The world has gone to hell and Nick is so sick of it all that he can't even have a glass of champagne. Then one night he meets a tantalizing young woman who agrees to come back to his apartment. Their encounter is the most strangely extraordinary of his life. Propelled by uncontrollable, primordial desires, he enters a new and unimagined dimension of the forbidden and is filled with a sexual and spiritual ecstasy that is as intense as it is unholy. Suddenly Nick's senses are alive. He feels strong, unconquerable, beyond all inhibition and earthly morality. He indulges in life's pleasures, pure and perverse, sublime and dangerous, from the delicate flavors of the perfect tomato to the fleshy beauty of a woman's thigh. But Nick's desire to sustain his rapture leads him to a madness and a darkness far greater and dreadful than have ever ridden the demon mares of night. Writing in a lineage that includes Dante, William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Hubert Selby, Jr., and Hunter S. Thompson, Nick Tosches may be America's last real literary outlaw-a fearless, uncensorable seeker of our deepest secret truths and desires, from the basest to the most beautiful. Me and the Devil is outrageous, disturbing, and brilliant, a raw and blazing novel truly unlike any other.

Thomas Hardy's 1879 novella The Distracted Preacher is an uncharacteristically comic tale, but yet still retains Hardy's trademark social commentary bite.  Here's the plot synopsis:

When young Mr. Stockdale arrives in a small village to fill in for the Methodist minister, he finds himself pining for his comely new landlady. But she leads a mysterious life, keeping odd hours and speaking in hushed tones. As his love for her grows, he’s soon at the center of a hilarious high-stakes adventure, complete with slapstick, hijinks, and a marauding band of cross-dressers. And he’s forced to choose: follow his heart or his higher purpose?

By the way, I highly recommend subscribing to Melville House's Art of the Novella series.  Each month, you'll receive two novellas by authors like Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others.  The print versions are beautiful to look at, beautiful to hold, and beautiful to read.

Float by JoeAnn Hart is a satirical look at family, the environment, and life in a hardscrabble seaside town in Maine:

When everything around you is sinking, sometimes it takes desperate measures to stay afloat. When Duncan Leland looks down at the garbage-strewn beach beneath his office window, he sees the words God Help Us scrawled in the sand. While it seems a fitting message-not only is Duncan's business underwater, but his marriage is drowning as well-he goes down to the beach to erase it. Once there, he helps a seagull being strangled by a plastic six-pack holder-the only creature in worse shape than he is at the moment. Duncan rescues the seagull, not realizing that he's being filmed by a group of conceptual artists and that the footage will soon go viral, turning both him and the gull into minor celebrities. And when an unsavory yet very convincing local, Osbert Marpol, talks him into a not-quite-legitimate loan arrangement, Duncan can't help but agree in a last-ditch attempt to save the jobs of his employees. For a while, it seems as if things are finally looking up for Duncan-yet between his phone-sex-entrepreneur ex-girlfriend's very public flirtations and the ever-mysterious terms of his new loan, Duncan realizes that there's no such thing as strings-free salvation-and that it's only a matter of time before the tide rises ominously around him again. A wry tale of financial desperation, conceptual art, insanity, infertility, seagulls, marital crisis, jellyfish, organized crime, and the plight of a plastic-filled ocean.

Pretty Much True... is a new novel about the lingering effects of war on those who fight and those who greet them upon their return.  Here's what Caroline Leavitt had to say about Kristen Tsetsi's novel: "Hauntingly spare and shimmeringly powerful, Tsetsi's book does what the best books do--it hurls you into a world you may only think you know or understand, and makes it living, breathing and absolutely engrossing." Here's the plot synopsis:

"I smell yoru shirt sometimes, but not foten," Mia writes, those slurred keyboard strokes the only connection to her deployed boyfriend, whom she sees everywhere and nowhere in their small military town. A former English professor, Mia passes the time working as a cab driver, mulling over the intricacies of her encounters with others who are affected by the war: her dramatic future mother in-law, who eats bad news for breakfast; a charismatic alcoholic who may have been a medic in Vietnam; a pragmatic but secretive longtime Army wife; and a soldier who found a way to stay home. Pretty Much True... is the war story that's seldom told-the loss and love in every hour of deployment, and a painfully intimate portrait of lives spent waiting in the spaces between.

Kingdom Come is J. G. Ballard's last novel, published in 2006, three years before his death. If you've never read any of Ballard's books (which also include Empire of the Sun and Crash), this might be the place to start.  (Please note: the cover pictured at right is different than the paperback version up for grabs.)  The story, in summary:

A violent novel filled with insidious twists, Kingdom Come follows the exploits of Richard Pearson, a rebellious, unemployed advertising executive, whose father is gunned down by a deranged mental patient in a vast shopping mall outside Heathrow Airport. When the prime suspect is released without charge, Richard’s suspicions are aroused. Investigating the mystery, Richard uncovers at the Metro-Centre mall a neo-fascist world whose charismatic spokesperson is whipping up the masses into a state of unsustainable frenzy. Riots frequently terrorize the complex, immigrant communities are attacked by hooligans, and sports events mushroom into jingoistic political rallies. In this gripping, dystopian tour de force, J.G. Ballard holds up a mirror to suburban mind rot, revealing the darker forces at work beneath the gloss of consumerism and flag-waving patriotism.

If you'd like a chance at winning the aforementioned books, 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 July 11, at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on July 12.  If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words "Sign me up for the newsletter" in the body of your email.  Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

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

War Journal: Fireworks in Baghdad

From time to time, just to keep things in perspective, I like to go back to the journal I kept during my year in Iraq.  Some of the writing is pretty horrible and embarrassingly trite--like so many free-writing exercises tend to be--but it's still good to remember the important things which were dominating my life eight years ago.  I thought it might also be of interest to Fobbit readers to get a taste of the life which inspired the novel.  So, here's the Fourth of July entry, live and in living color from Camp Liberty, Iraq.  Some of the names have been changed to protect those who don't know they ended up in my journal.

July 3, 2005: When I walk in the front entrance of the Division Main headquarters this morning, the guards at the front desk are having an intense conversation.
      “No, man, I’m talkin’ about that cat from Tom and Jerry.  Which one was the cat?  I never can remember.”
      “Tom.”
      “Yeah, Tom, man.  Dude, that cat was always gettin’ his ass whupped.  Just for once, I wish he’d win.”
      “You don’t get it—it’s all about the underdog.  When the small and supposedly weak is pitted against the big and strong, you always want to cheer for the little guy.  That’s what makes those cartoons so great.  Jerry has to win.”
      “Oh.  Is that what it’s about?  The underdog?”
      “Yeah.  Jerry’s the underdog—the undercat, I mean.  Good triumphing over evil and all that shit.”
      The other guy was silent for a few pondering moments.  “Still, I wish for once the cat would win.”

* * *

      Somehow, the general population, not just the news media, ends up getting our press releases and our e-mail addresses.  Every so often, an e-mail will pop up in my inbox from someone in the heartland who doesn’t tote a camera or wield a pen.  Here’s one I received today:

From: bradley1985@giz.com
Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2005 5:57 PM
To: Task Force Baghdad PAO
Subject: Release A050627g

      My friend was the one who you were referring to in this article.
      If there is any more information pertaining to this in the investigation, I would appreciate it if you would keep me informed.  Tim and I have been best friends throughout high school and this has been a shock to me as well as my friends that knew him.  He had died doing what he loved and it saddens me to know that I will never be able to make new memories with this outstanding hero and soldier.
      Thank you,
      Brad

Task Force Baghdad Soldier dies
Task Force Baghdad PAO
      BAGHDAD — A Task Force Baghdad Soldier died June 27 from wounds sustained during a small-arms fire attack in central Baghdad around 10:15 a.m.
      The Soldier’s unit was assisting Iraqi Police at the scene of a vehicle fire when it came under attack from terrorists.  The Soldier was evacuated to the 86th Combat Support Hospital where he later died of his injuries.
      The name of the Soldier is being held pending notification of next of kin.  The incident is under investigation.

      This is the KIA which had caused so much confusion between me, our G-1 Casualty section and Corps last week.  I remember sending up a ceremonial-like groan when I saw this come across the Sig Acts —the same kind of knee-jerk groan I release every time another soldier dies over here.  Put a tick-mark on the wall, another nameless, faceless American has died.  Now, reading Brad’s e-mail, that gesture seems so hollow, so plastic and artificial.   This guy—who I only knew by three letters, K-I-A—was once somebody’s best friend, someone he’ll never be able to make new memories with ever again.
      Terrorism sucks.

July 4, 2005: They’ve got the Dining Facility decorated in full red-white-blue orgy.  Flags draped everywhere, red-white-blue crepe paper, red-white-blue silk flowers on each table.  Hell, I’m surprised the eggs are still yellow.
      At breakfast, instead of the pulsing R&B that always dominates the room and kills all hope of conversation, they’re playing music from the 50s and 60s: “One Fine Day,” “Our Day Will Come.”  The Third Country National cooks and busboys stand around grinning at us listening to the music.  I guess they assume the 4th of July means nostalgia and nostalgia means the Chiffons and Bobby Darin and the Supremes.  What they don’t realize is that for most of the kids in the chow hall eating their omelets and slurping their Coco Puffs and gingerly taking sips of their rancid coffee, nostalgia means Nirvana, U2 or Prince.

* * *

      Specialist Carter says today is “just another holiday in Iraq,” then corrects himself, “Well, just another day, actually. They’re all the same here.”
      And when I come in to work, Master Sgt. Randolph turns to me and says, “Happy Fourth of July, Sergeant Abrams!”
      I give him a dead-eyed stare.  “Yeah.  Yee-friggin-haw.  Just another day.”
      Randolph gets that silly, vacant grin on his face.  “Well, I hope you don’t have too many fireworks.”
      “I’m thinking we might, actually.  Like the terrorists want to make a point about our upstart, independent nation.”
      “If it’s any consolation, G-2 (Intelligence) doesn’t seem to think so.”
      “Really?  They think it’ll be quiet?”
      “Well, I don’t know about that, but they don’t have reports of any planned attacks.  Of course, the terrorists don’t exactly go around advertising what they’re going to do, do they?”
      “No.  No, they don’t.”

* * *

      When I walk to lunch, I see a group of Third Country Nationals clearing away the seven-foot reeds along the canal by the Dining Facility.  A U.S. Soldier stands by, casually holding his rifle and smoking a cigarette while they hack away with their machetes.  They are working right next to the red, triangular metal sign that marks where an unexploded mortar buried itself into the mud a year ago.  From Day One in the Army we’ve been told that UXO is not something you fuck around with.  That’s why the reeds have been allowed to grow up around that short little stretch of the canal.
      Now, for whatever reason, they’re brave or stupid enough to go traipsing around in the hair-trigger mud.
      I walk past them at a faster pace, unwilling to be part of their human fireworks display.

* * *

      Today’s Stars & Stripes carries an article which is headlined: Great-grandmother, 73, heading to Baghdad PX.

WASHINGTON – About the time most Americans are celebrating the Fourth of July, Lena Haddix will be en route to Iraq.  She’s a 73-year-old great-grandmother who recently finished a six-month deployment to Kuwait and then signed up for a six-month deployment to Baghdad.  Haddix is a store manager for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service and volunteered to work overseas because she wants to support the youngsters in the military….She did not tell her children that she had volunteered for the duty until her paperwork was in order.  “They were kind up upset at the start, but they support me and are behind me,” she said.  Haddix is the mother of five children, ranging in age from 41 to 52.  She has eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren….Yes, she said, it is “sometimes” dangerous in combat zones, but the military and her co-workers at the PX “take good care of me…I just don’t feel the fear, and I feel like I am of help to them when I am there.”

      Well, Mrs. Haddix, thank you for dealing a square blow to the terrorist propaganda machine which is fueled by fear and intimidation.  I mean, if we’ve got white-haired great-grandmas over here defying insurgents, then it can’t be all that bad, can it?

My First Time: Russell Rowland

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 Russell Rowland.  He recently published his third novel, High and Inside, with Bangtail Press.  Novelist Kim Barnes had this to say about High and Inside: “You don’t have to love baseball to love this story about one (aging) boy of summer who is brought to a bittersweet reckoning with his past.  I found myself laughing, cringing, and knuckling down...”  Rowland's first novel, In Open Spaces, earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly and made the San Francisco Chronicle's bestseller list.  The Watershed Years, the sequel, was a finalist for the High Plains Book Award for Fiction in 2008.  He also co-edited West of 98: Living and Writing the New American West, an anthology of original essays about the modern Western identity.  Rowland has an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University, and he lives in Billings, Montana, where he does private consultation with other writers and teaches.  Click here to visit his blog.

My Multiple First Times

My first publication
My first publication was my first novel, In Open Spaces.  It was eleven years after I finished writing it, so it was a huge thrill, not to mention validation that my hard work had finally paid off.  I had written three other novels in the meantime, and had given up on this first one, so when it was raised from the dead, it was a huge boost to my confidence.  And of course the opportunities are too numerous to mention, but the best part has been continuing to get published and to actually have the opportunity to work with other writers.  I get a huge kick out of teaching and working privately with other writers.  And I learn so much.

My first editor
This is a very complicated question because the editor who bought In Open Spaces didn’t last long.  The book was originally bought by William Morrow, and Harpercollins bought them out six months later, while we were in the middle of editing the book.  She was among those who lost their jobs in the merger, and for several months after that I didn’t know whether my book was even going to get published.  Eventually Harper did agree to publish it, but I was assigned to five different editors by the time it came out.  They kept leaving the company, although there was no indication that my book was the reason.  The one who finally edited the book was very good to work with, but she also left the company, a week before the book came out.

My first inspiring teacher/mentor
My biggest mentor was C. Michael Curtis.  When I was at the Creative Writing Program at Boston University, I did an internship at The Atlantic Monthly, and Mike, who was the fiction editor there for decades, showed a great interest in my work.  He read every story I wrote and gave me feedback.  When I started writing In Open Spaces, I showed him some early chapters, and he offered to help me find a publisher for it.  He wasn’t able to do that, but the fact that someone of his stature believed in it was another huge boost of confidence.

My first failure as a writer
The biggest mistake I’ve made in my career was turning down an offer from Harper for my second novel.  I had the first few chapters written, and my new editor there (number seven) made a very nice offer on it.  I met with him and my agent in New York, and we discussed the offer in person, and they both suggested that if we waited until I finished the book, they might be able to get an even better offer.  I got greedy, and turned down the offer.  By the time I finished it, the editor was gone, and the new one turned it down cold.  I’ve been trying to recover ever since.  It almost felt like I was shoved out of the major publisher club and once that happens, everyone assumes there’s a reason for it.  But the reason was that I was a bonehead.  It was a real eye-opener about the publishing industry.

My first review
This just shows what a bumpkin I was.  Before my book came out, I got a call from my agent saying I had gotten a starred review in Publishers Weekly.  I had no idea what he was talking about.  I think I had heard of PW, but I didn’t know what a starred review was, and I was very confused that a review had come out when the book wasn’t even released yet.  I didn’t have a clue what a big deal this was.  It turned out to be a great way to get that book launched out into the world.