Melanie Wells's Bumps on the Road to Tupelo

I met Melanie Wells at a book festival in East Texas last month—she'll tell you a little more about that—and I've become a big fan of her series of novels, which center around a psychology professor in Dallas who finds herself at the center of ongoing spiritual warfare, real angels versus demons territory with human souls in the balance. The book's covers call them "suspense," I think of them as horror novels with strong religious themes, and you'll probably find a descriptor somewhere in between once you read them—which you really ought to. (You don't have to start with When the Day of Evil Comes and work your way up to the latest, My Soul to Keep, but that's how I did it.) Melanie blogs with her friend, Trish Murphy (who you'll also hear about in her essay), at a blog called "Thelma & Louise." Melanie's Louise.

I did my best to convince them to blog a little bit more often—not about their projects, although those are cool, but about their friendship and their creative lives, because I believe those things make for a compelling story that will convince you that they're very cool people whose projects are worth a look, and that's when they'll really reel you in. Which is pretty much how I feel about blogs for creative people in general...

This is my wacky friend Lynette Shirk's idea of a brain explosion prophylactic:

I met Lynette at Girlfriend Weekend in Jefferson, TX, a fantastic blur of leopard print, fuchsia, and well-crafted words, and this headwear would have fit right in. I was there with my best friend Trish Murphy. Do all my friends have websites, you might ask? Only the interesting ones.

Which brings me to the topic of brain explosion. This happens to me regularly, which is why I'm so grateful to Lynette for her suggestion. A more sane person in a more sane profession (read: not a writer) would simply get her life under control rather than risk the ridicule of wearing a rubber headpiece with big orange flowers on it. A sane person would simply learn to file instead of pile. To fold while there's still fluff. To pack up a trailer and move out of the time management disaster zone. Things of this nature. But this is not my destiny.

Trish, who is a rock star—really—and who, like me, was raised by creatives in a home with no office supplies, where the only snack in the refrigerator was olives (for martinis), and I complain regularly about the perils of the creative life. We talk daily, just to make ourselves feel better about the chronic disorganization that infects every single thing we do. And we buddy-breathe through the creative process. We take writing trips together to jolt ourselves out of the tar pit inertia that comes, for example, when you turn the corner in a novel (for me it's always around chapter 10) or get your wheels stuck in the middle eight. All songwriters hate writing the middle eight.

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Alaya Dawn Johnson: What Makes YA Fantasy So Awesome

Alaya Dawn Johnson is a young fantasy writer whose debut novel, Racing the Dark, has been drawing comparisons to authors like Paulo Coelho and Ursula K. LeGuin. You can read one of her shorter works, the novella "Shard of Glass," at the Strange Horizons website, and in this essay, she explains what attracts her to young adult fantasy, as both a writer and a reader.

I love young adult fantasy. My life underwent a sea-change when I discovered Diana Wynne Jones in sixth grade, and I've never grown out of it. What I especially love about young adult fantasy is a certain quality of focus, wherein even epic situations have a very personal orientation. In other words, the world might be about to get destroyed, but instead of hearing the story from the point of view of the king and his advisors and soldiers (the George R.R. Martin model), the young adult fantasy novel focuses on the scribe buried in the library (The Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia McKillip), or the thief falling in love with his greatest enemy (The Thief and sequels by Megan Whalen Turner).

But even better, in YA fantasy the world is frequently not in any danger at all. There's no more of a "chosen one" in these novels than there is in real life. The problems are closer to those we encounter in our own lives, no matter how exotic the setting. So, in Summers at Castle Auburn by Sharon Shinn, the main character has to confront how she has enabled the slavery of another race. In The Homeward Bounders by Diana Wynne Jones, the main character struggles over nearly a hundred years just to get home.

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Joshua Henkin: Condensing 20 Years to About 300 Pages

Yesterday, I shared an essay from Joshua Henkin about how he dealt with the characters in his new novel, Matrimony, over such a long stretch of narrative time. In this second essay for Beatrice readers, he expands upon that theme. If you'd like to read more from Henkin, he'll be appearing on The Elegant Variation on Monday, November 12.

Matrimony is about the twenty-year history of a marriage. Weighing in at just under three hundred pages, it is, as Dani Shapiro put it, "at once sprawling and economical." But how does a writer do that? How do you decide what to include and what to exclude in a novel that takes place over so much time?

Lorrie Moore was once asked what's the hardest thing about writing fiction writing, and she said, "Getting my characters into their cars." She was being funny, of course, but she was also, I believe, being serious. The question of how to move your characters around, how to get them from one place to the other without giving the reader a blow-by-blow account ("She took forty-two steps, turned left out of the door, reached into her handbag, pulled out her keys, checked to make sure all was well in the glove compartment, etc.") is the question every writer faces. How much more so when you're trying to get your characters not simply from the house to the car but from late adolescence to their late thirties.

Although my novel is made up of scenes from a marriage, it couldn't rightly be called Scenes From a Marriage. I was picking and choosing, and what I picked and chose needed to be illustrative of something, though not so obviously illustrative as to be reductive. A novelist, it's important to remember (and I try to hammer this into my MFA students again and again), is never trying to make a point. Points are for anthropologists, political scientists, and mathematicians. A novelist is trying to tell a story and, through story and language, he is trying to convey character.

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Joshua Henkin: Going the Distance With Your Characters

I began reading Joshua Henkin's new novel, Matrimony, last month while I was serving jury duty, and the story immediately engrossed me; the following two days just flew by. His fame is beginning to spread to other parts of the literary world; Jennifer Egan liked the novel and said so in the NY Times Book Review; the same week, his short story "What My Father Looked Like" appeared at FiveChapters.com.

One of the aspects of the novel that impressed me most as I was reading was the way that Henkin stayed with his characters and their intimate relationship over such an extended period of narrative time, and I asked him if he would comment on this for Beatrice. He was kind enough to oblige, and more than patient as I scrambled to find time, and then the right time, to share his reflections with you.

My new novel, Matrimony, took me ten years to write. I threw out literally thousands of pages—some of them perfectly good pages; they just didn't belong in this book. A novel isn't a sprint, it's a marathon, but when you get to the end of that marathon, you're not the person you were at the beginning. Your voice has changed; your preoccupations have, too. And so you need to go back and revise yet again, so that what happens at the beginning of the book and what happens at the end feel conceptually and tonally part of the same endeavor.

When I began to write Matrimony, I was thirty-three and living in Ann Arbor, where I had gone to graduate school; my first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson, had recently been published. I had also just met the woman I would eventually marry, and though our relationship would be long-distance for the first two years and we wouldn't get married for several years after that, I knew from the start that this was the person I would spend my life with. And I sensed, in knowing this, that big changes lay ahead, changes I couldn't yet comprehend.

I had also recently attended my tenth-year college reunion, and so I suppose I had reunions on the brain. When I started Matrimony, I wasn't sure what I was going to write about. Hardly any novelist I know does; you just put your characters in a situation where something will happen, and you hope that over time you figure it out. I had this image of a couple attending their college reunion. That was all I knew—the beginning of the book. As it turns out, I didn't know even that. Yes, there's a college reunion in Matrimony, but it comes 250 pages and twenty years into the novel and it's a relatively short scene.

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Simon Van Booy Gets Lost in Atget's Paris

Instead of telling us about one of his favorite short story writers, as many Beatrice guests do when they have a new collection of their own stories, Simon Van Booy has elected to reveal another one of the inspirations that shaped The Secret Lives of People in Love. We don't talk as much as we could about the visual arts on this blog, so Simon's essay is a welcome surprise.

There is no greater comfort for a very lonely person than to see the photographs of Eugéne Atget. The first time my eyes fell upon the headless torso of a classical statue, crumbling in a winter park—then turned the page to an empty garden chair on a balcony of stray leaves, I felt the panic of an unexpected embrace. I closed the book and sat down on a small ladder. I was at The Strand; it was autumn. My hiding places were no longer secret. Someone else had used them a hundred years ago.

I was like an orphan who had accidentally unearthed an album of photographs that bore the faces of his lost family. Discovering these misty, black and white pictures mitigated the pain of a long loneliness. I no longer felt invisible. My vision of the world was shared—even celebrated. There were people here before me. People had walked in my shoes—had stopped to look at park benches softened by rain. They had left notes in the walls. I was a part of some ongoing love affair with overlooked details, an affair that had not begun with me and would not end with me. I was not the only person governed by feelings rooted in that most secret form of isolation: the ability to be alive and to be a ghost at the very same moment.

It's not that I saw Atget's work, which then influenced my work, but through Atget, I found the confidence to keep going, to take chances, to allow myself to explore the dark woods where the secrets of my characters lay buried. And so, I set one of my stories, "Some Bloom in Darkness," within the photographs of Atget. If you look at the images very closely, you might even see my protagonist standing on a wall with his walking stick in the water, or on a bench sketching small birds. There are writers from whom we learn, and there are those who by some mysterious circumstance we come to know as members of our own family.

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Jane Green: Grief and Redemption and Literature

I first met Jane Green at a Cosmopolitan reception earlier this summer honoring some of the magazine's favorite "fun and fearless" women writers, and we had a great time talking about the image of "chick lit" in literary circles. So when she was putting together a virtual book tour, and was wondering if Beatrice readers might be interested in the story behind her new novel, Second Chance, I greenlighted the idea immediately, before I had even the faintest notion of the loss and recovery that lay behind the story.

I was sitting in my office, procrastinating as usual by surfing around the web reading various news stories. 'Brits still missing' announced one, the day after the tsunami occurred, a tragedy that for me, here in America, was terrible but didn't affect me on a personal level.

Until I saw a name I knew: Piers Simon. I had spoken to him three weeks before, had known, but forgotten, he was flying to Thailand for Christmas to visit his brother who was teaching there. Piers Simon. The words were blurry on the screen as I squinted to focus and my head filled with fog. It didn't make sense. It couldn't be the same one. These things don't happen to people we know.

I had met Piers a few years before. He was a garden designer and had designed my garden in Westport, Connecticut, flying over from his home in England every few weeks to traipse around my garden and make me laugh with his stories. He was thirty-three. Tall, handsome, and the sweetest man I had ever met with an infectious giggle that was irrestistible. He quickly became a friend, staying in our spare room when he came over, jumping in the pool with the kids, sitting on the deck drinking a beer with me as the sun set.

I phoned his mother a few days later, holding it together until the end of the phone call when we both started crying. It didn't seem real, and the grief was shocking to me, sweeping me up in its clutches and not letting go for months, playing an endless tape of memories of Piers in my head, over and over, but never enough.

He wasn't a husband, a boyfriend, a best friend. He was someone I adored, but not inner circle, and I didn't feel entitled to feel the way I did, it felt too much, I didn't know who I could share it with. And so, as with all eventful emotional experiences in my life, I knew I had to write about it, to express it on the page as a means of getting over it.

But life never seems to go according to plan.

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Ron Currie, Jr.: The Brat Who Killed God

I love God Is Dead, the debut novel from Ron Currie, Jr. Well, it's more of a collection of linked stories, really, pitch black comedies in the George Saunders vein about what happens to human civilization after God comes down to Earth as a Dinka woman, is shot dead during military unrest in Darfur, and eaten by a pack of feral dogs. (Hint: It doesn't go well for anybody, not even the dogs.) As the continuity unfolds, the world transforms in bizarre ways, but no matter how outrageous the circumstances, the emotional cores of these stories work. And now Currie's going to explain how the stories all came together. It's not the answer I was expecting, but it makes perfect sense...

His legs pumped in protest, mini-sneakers drumming the base of the restaurant booth. His face was red with the effort of sustained screaming. He shoved and slapped at his father with his adorable little hands. He was sitting right next to me. I had murder and a bacon cheeseburger on my mind. In that order.

The kid's father, though, was the very picture of patience. He was an obvious believer in the progressive parenting philosophy that exchanges corporal punishment for repeating requests—in this case, "Eat your dinner, please"—a thousand times to no effect whatsoever. And then, as a last resort, unleashing the dreaded "time out."

But this kid had long since sacked and pillaged the time out. He was psychotic. He had superhuman reserves of furious energy. And rather than box the little bastard's ears and tell him he had two choices, eat or starve, the father continued trying to bring him under control by absorbing one-two combos and murmuring in soothing tones.

What should a normal person do when he bears witness to such a mind-numbing example of parental overindulgence? Roll his eyes and shake his head, most likely. Exchange whispered comments with his companions. At most, maybe ask to be re-seated on the far side of the dining room, away from the offending brat, or else just get up and walk out in a lame protest no one will notice anyhow. Any of these, even the last, would probably be considered a normal reaction.

Going home and writing a book probably would not. Nevertheless, that's what I did.

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Tess Uriza Holthe Makes a Short Story Connection

I've been noticing a slight increase in the number of linked short story collections lately, so when Tess Uriza Holthe's The Five Forty-Five to Cannes showed up among the new releases, I invited her to tell me about its origins. Her debut novel, When the Elephants Dance, was widely acclaimed and a #1 bestseller in her native San Francisco; it will also be the selection for nearby Mountain View's second annual city-wide book club this November.

The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes wasn't planned. I was working on my sophomore book and my mother in-law invited me on a three-week trip to Cannes and the Italian Riviera. The whole point was to take a break from the second book and though I was happy to do that, I couldn't concede not to write at all. So I brought one notebook to log down our travels, the sights, the sounds, and the people, with the idea that perhaps in the future if I decided to set a story in France or Italy I would have a sense of the place.

For the plane ride over, I brought along three short story collections: Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever, Carson McCuller's The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Storie, and The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (the Finca Vigia edition). By the time we landed in Milano I was in a short story frame of mind.

I loved how a character in Ship Fever—I think it was the Carl Linnaeus character from "The Behavior of Hawkweeds"—showed up even for just a second in another short story, or maybe his name was simply mentioned, but to have him exist outside of his short story was a fascinating concept for me. I wanted to play with that concept, the idea of the character continuing on after their short story ends.

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Robert Anthony Siegel's Visual Muses

I went to see Robert Anthony Siegel read from his latest novel, All Will Be Revealed, about a month or so ago at a furniture gallery in SoHo, where he set up a slide projector and interspersed his excerpts with illustrated mini-lectures about some of the book's themes. And that's when I knew I wanted him to talk about his creative process for Beatrice. You can also read a new short story from Siegel this week on the Five Chapters website, which if you haven't discovered it yet is pretty nifty.

My first novel, All the Money in the World, was set in the world of my youth: New York in the 1970s. For my second book, the novel that eventually became All Will Be Revealed, I wanted to go in the opposite direction and explore a world I didn't know firsthand, a world I would have to make my own through an act of imagination. What I decided to do was go back in time to the close of the so-called Gilded Age, at the end of the nineteenth century. The period had always fascinated me because it seemed like the birthplace of our own strange contemporary scene: obsessed with celebrity and spectacle, in love with illusion, unsure where fantasy ends and reality begins.

In 1896, the year in which my protagonist, Augustus Auerbach, guides his wheelchair into the parlor of the spirit medium Verena Swann, lower Broadway was lined with "museums" in which one could view a whale kept in a tank of water (slowly starving to death—they didn't know what to feed it), throw bits of meat to a supposedly man-eating plant, or play chess against an automaton (with a boy or a dwarf hidden inside). If you got tired of the life-size diorama of the battle of Gettysburg, you could step into a spirit photographer's studio and get your picture taken with a dead relative: the ghost would appear, nearly transparent, in the background.

What I saw in all this was the first stirrings of our own "virtual" world, a world in which imitations of life—TV shows, movies, and images on the Internet—threaten to become more real to us than life itself. Going back to the Gilded Age thus offered me a chance to think about my own creeping sense of unreality, but with the perspective that a hundred years' distance can provide.

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Elizabeth Hickey's Lives of the Artists

When I got word of Elizabeth Hickey's second novel, The Wayward Muse, I was intrigued—I knew that Hickey's first novel, The Painted Kiss, had looked at the relationship between Gustave Klimt and Emilie Flöge, and now here she was tackling the romantic triangle between Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Jane Burden, and William Morris. How, I wondered, had she come to focus on the lives of artists as a recurring theme for her fiction? Fortunately, I'm in a position to get answers to those kinds of questions...It's funny that she mentions Irving Stone, because he was actually one of the names I was prepared to invoke regarding her work.

The truth is that I've been unintentionally training for this particular niche my entire life.

Fall 1977, Louisville, Kentucky: The first day of first grade at St. Matthews Elementary. Since I can already read, the teacher sends me to the library, where I ask the surprised librarian where the biographies are. I read about Florence Nightingale, Jenny Lind, Helen Keller, Babe Didrikson Zaharias—the few women who are considered important enough to have biographies written about them. Later, I graduate to adult biography and my new heroines are Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott and Marie Curie. Marie Curie, I learn, kept her husband Pierre's brain in a jar in her room. Even then I had an eye for the curious detail.

Summer 1983, Northwest Harbor, Maine: I am twelve, and my vacation reading is The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone. I fall in love with Michelangelo. I fall in love with sculpture. I fall in love with Italy, with the Medici, with the artist's romances. I can still picture Vittoria Colonna's pale, lovely face.

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Maggie Leffler on Writing Amidst Tragedy

The publication of your first novel is supposed to be a time for celebration, but for Maggie Leffler, life is a bit more complicated. In this essay, she talks about writing and publishing The Diagnosis of Love while coping with the loss of two of her greatest inspirations.

My husband tells me that there is an American Indian expression, "Hoka hey," which means today is a good day to die. It's a statement of preparedness, not of wishful thinking. Greet each day as if it were your last, because there might not be a tomorrow. As a physician who deals with death on a regular basis, and as a daughter whose mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in my third year of medical school and died before my graduation, I've been regularly reminded of just how fragile life is—it's just that sometimes I don't want to be reminded.

My mother was a doctor, as well as a writer. The same year that she died, she was working on a mystery novel, while I would work on the manuscript that eventually became The Diagnosis of Love. I would take off from medical school, and we'd sit, side by side, tapping away on our laptops, and then compare chapters. We were each other's harshest critics and biggest fans. The year that she was sick, I wrote furiously, as if we were both dying of cancer. The year that she died, I kept writing at the same pace, both to save myself from my grief and because the characters had become my old friends. They'd seen me through the worst and kept me laughing. Even my mother knew them intimately. I had to see the story through.

"Seeing it through" meant applying to the Iowa Writers Workshop and not getting in, joining a local writers group instead, and ultimately, writing six more drafts over the next seven years. The perseverance paid off: When I got an agent, she sold the book to Bantam within two weeks. Joy! A year later, the advance copies were in, and I sent one to my father, complete with "Cliff's Notes" of which characters were completely imagined and which characters had been inspired by a real person. ("As if I couldn't tell," he said, chuckling).

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How James Cañón Learned English
By Writing a Novel

As I read the opening scenes of James Cañón's Tales from the Town of Widows, I was impressed to find myself in the hands of a debut novelist who was already an accomplished stylist, and even moreso when I realized that Cañón had only become fluent enough in English to write this novel as he was writing it. I asked him to talk about that process, and I hope it inspires you to check out his book!

Writing fiction in a second—and even third—language is a literary choice that has a long history: Joseph Conrad, Milan Kundera, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, among many others, wrote masterpieces in languages different than their own.

For me, writing my first novel in my second language was not a choice. I conceived the idea for Tales from the Town of Widows originally in Spanish. I even wrote a few pages of it in Spanish, but it didn't feel right. I don't know how to explain it: I wanted to write a novel about Colombia that took place in Colombia, and yet it didn't seem natural to write it in Spanish. I put the idea aside, then joined the creative writing graduate program at Columbia University and began writing short stories in English—I could write English, only not idiomatically or precisely, much less beautifully. But I couldn't delay the idea forever, and in my second year at Columbia I decided to give it another chance. I wrote a short story called "The Other Widow," in English, because it was for school and the weekly workshops were obviously conducted in English.

The story was terrible and the grammar was wrong, and yet I felt good about it. English, I realized, offered me an unconventional perspective on the Colombian conflict. It made me more detached from patriotism and sentimentality, and therefore more unbiased to convey my own points of view in my writing. I kept redrafting that first story until I thought it was good. Then I wrote and rewrote several more stories that eventually became chapters of the novel. I, however, continued doing all the thinking in Spanish, translating those thoughts into English before putting them in writing. In fact, I wrote the entire novel with the help of an unabridged English-Spanish dictionary, and of a good writer friend who worked as my "unofficial" editor/proofreader.

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By Writing a Novel

Sarahbeth Purcell on MoDo's Time Warp

Maureen Dowd wrote a particularly silly column about chick lit for the New York Times over the weekend, and though Sarahbeth Purcell doesn't consider herself a chick lit writer, she knows there are plenty of people in the publishing and bookselling worlds who think of her novels, Love Is the Drug and This Is Not a Love Song, that way, so she's not going to let Dowd's attack pass unremarked. "The reason I felt compelled to comment on her most recent attempt at staying current," Purcell commented, "is, honestly, its lack of being 'current,' its complete lack of modern observation. She might as well have written a few thousand words about how she's just noticed that young people seem to be wearing strange padded beans in their ears everywhere they go, touching tiny, space age-looking pods that light up and seem to respond to their touch, oblivious to the daily noises of life around them; that she's heard these devices contain digital music, and how shocked, appalled and saddened she is that these young fools are not at home cranking the Victrola, doing the jitterbug and listening to real music."

Welcome to 1997, Maureen Dowd! It's good to have you! For the next ten years, I'm going to lead you through what struggling young authors (who happen to be female), have endured, regardless of their merit, their talent, their stories, their publishing house or the books they've written.

You see, Maureen, chick-lit is not a niche, and hasn't been a "niche" market, as you call it since… Well, since its inception. Long before you noticed a bevy of pink books in your local Borders. Is the new generation of books geared toward women of a particular lifestyle, with an empathic slant, a marketing ploy developed by the major publishing houses based on the success of fantastic books about strong female protagonists such as The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing, which was written far ahead of its time? Well, sort of. That was the idea, I gather.

Real chick-lit, as you are describing it, the less than ingenious, more soap-opera quality, non-challenging material I've always referred to as "beach books," started long before I was a writer, and long before 1997. And it found massive success far before the bookshelves oozed martini from their pages.

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Kyra Davis: "Thank You, Maureen Dowd!"

Kyra Davis was one of the many authors with something to say about Maureen Dowd's anti-chick lit column over the weekend (I collated a lot of responses at my other blog, GalleyCat). Davis, who has appeared as a guest author here before, is the author of several novels for Harlequin's Red Dress Ink and Mira imprints, including last fall's So Much for My Happy Ending.

When I read Maureen Dowd's column, my initial reaction was one of gratitude and relief. It's nice to know that, while chick lit books aren't selling as well as they used to, the genre is still successful enough to tick off the literary elitists: If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, animosity is a close second.

Once the giddiness elicited by Dowd's harsh critique subsided, I started thinking about the issues raised in her piece. For instance, Dowd was indignant to find that her local bookstore had the audacity to put Sophie Kinsella's books next to Rudyard Kipling's. I can see her point. How dare they shelve their books in alphabetical order? Everybody knows that they should be organized in order of greatness. They should start with Lynn Schnurnberger's The Botox Diaries and work their way up to Dante's Inferno.

And of course she's right to be horrified by the pink cover put on Romeo And Juliet. It would be awful if someone who wouldn't normally read Shakespeare became compelled to pick up one of his greatest plays because of its new girly cover. Shakespeare's plays should all be bound in black so that those who buy them can flaunt their somber attitude about literature, even if what they're reading is a play about a guy with a donkey head being romanced by the queen of the fairies.

But perhaps I'm not going far enough. Maybe the classics should come with their own dust so they look like old collectors items and the chick lit books should be put in a dark corner somewhere in hopes of shaming those who dare to seek them out. No one has the right to look to literature as a form of escapism. If a woman wants to be entertained she should turn on her TV like a normal American. Literature isn't supposed to make us laugh. It's supposed to make us wiser and depressed.

And there's no denying that Dowd was right on the money when she cautioned her readers not to put chick lit books in the same category as the books of Jane Austen. Austen's books weren't just about her characters; they were about the times those characters lived in. When we read Pride and Prejudice, we are treated to a new perspective on the societal norms and expectations of nineteenth-century women. But chick lit is completely different. How could a novel about a single, thirty-something woman struggling in her career and worried about her weight be in any way reflective of a time in which obesity has become an epidemic and women are working longer hours and marrying later in life than ever before? The very idea that these books have any cultural significance is preposterous!

So thank you, Maureen Dowd, for being brave enough to publicly ridicule chick lit. You are one of only a thousand or so people who have had the courage to do so. It's refreshing to have an esteemed journalist of the New York Times give us all permission to judge an entire genre of books by their covers.

Michael McColly Remembers Worlds AIDS Day

In The After-Death Room, Michael McColly writes about his encounters around the world with people who are confronting the AIDS crisis head-on and helping those who are HIV-positive to live, and die, with dignity. In this essay, he looks back at his personal history of World AIDS Day, which has been formally commemorated on December 1 since 1988 but, as you'll see here, can't be pinned down quite so easily.

My first World AIDS Day was in 1981, when I was sitting in a thatch hut in a small Senegalese village listening to the BBC and heard the news from America about a "mysterious virus that had been discovered in homosexual and bisexual men." I had thought I had run far enough away from my conflicted sexual life by joining the Peace Corps, but when that announcer in London let loose upon the world the word AIDS, it was as if the world had shrunk and the great African sun had turned pale.

My second World AIDS Day came on a chilly April morning in Chicago. I'd snuck out of my North Side neighborhood to a public health clinic on the near South Side to get results from a test nobody wants to take. I remember the young African American men sitting in silence with their baseball caps pulled like mine down over their eyes. I remember the voice of the Latina social worker, "you weren't expecting this, were you?"

For the next few years I didn't celebrate any World AIDS Days. I went on no walks. I went to no fundraisers. I wore no red ribbons. When I heard that word—that word that lived inside my body on television, I turned it off. Every day was for me World AIDS Day. I'd joined a worldwide tribe growing larger by some 3,000 every day. I didn't need to be reminded.

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Carolyn Turgeon's Heart Belongs to Nanni

Carolyn Turgeon is different from the authors who usually make guest appearances here, in that she and I have a longrunning rivalry at Scrabble (at which she currently, damn her, has the advantage). Tomorrow night, she'll be reading from her debut novel, Rain Village, at the Astor Place Barnes & Noble, and then heading out to a nearby tiki bar for a party that, I've been led to believe, will include "fire eaters, sword swallowers, burlesque girls, an old-time vaudeville band, and pink cupcakes." So that sounds like it'll be fun. In the meantime, she's here to tell us about one of her favorite stories.

It was in an Italian literature class in college that I first read "La Lupa" ("The She-Wolf") by the late nineteenth-century Sicilian writer Giovanni Verga, and lost my heart.

How could you not love Verga? He was famous for verismo, naturalist writing rooted to the harsh realities of peasant life in Sicily, but to my mind there is no bigger drama queen than this man, and this is pure diva fiction: mothers crying over their dead sons; men losing their mind and crawling on their bellies in front of churches as penance; women stalking through the countryside in the burning afternoon, ravenous with lust; hot ax-wielding men covered in the grease of fermenting olives.

I don't know a more lusty, ravenous woman in literature than Pina, the title character of "La Lupa." I mean, just look at the story's first lines: "She was dark-haired, tall and lean, with firm, well-rounded breasts, though she was no longer young, and she had a pale complexion, like someone forever in the grip of malaria. The pallor was relieved by a pair of huge eyes and fresh red lips that looked as though they would eat you."

I love her the way I love Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Imagine Marlene Dietrich setting her formidable gaze on a poor olive farmer with the unfortunate name of Nanni. No one would be able to match her, or resist her. For Pina, it doesn't matter that she has a grown daughter and spends her days working in the fields. She's hot! She's even made a priest lose his soul. As often as I myself pass in front of churches swinging my hips, I have yet to even come close to this. And she always has bright red lips, no matter how many hours she slaves in the fields, while I have to reapply "Wine with Everything" on the hour. And Pina wastes no time on small talk or stolen glances: instead, "she would gobble up their sons and their husbands in the twinkling of an eye with those red lips of hers."

Continue reading Carolyn Turgeon's Heart Belongs to Nanni

Erica Simone Turnipseed Gets Real With Her Fiction

Erica Simone Turnipseed recently published Hunger, the sequel to her first novel, A Love Noire. Both books work to ground the relationship between the central characters by placing them in a world recognizable as our own, even to the extent of drawing from recent events. Here, Turnipseed explains why she chooses to embrace the responsibility of getting public stories right in order to tell her own.

The phrase "truth is stranger than fiction" is ubiquitous, at least in English. We often utter it when watching the evening news as some sort of explanatory statement that helps us process the world's endless parade of madness and sadness, whether man-made or the proverbial act of God. As a fiction writer, I am clear about two things: that the stuff of fiction can be pretty strange, and that fictionalized human drama must ring with authenticity in order for the reader to believe it.

For me, my characters are real: they have a history, a dysfunctional family, favorite haunts, and people who care for them, not least of which is me. When I wrote A Love Noire, and gave birth to the characters of Innocent and Noire, I learned just how real these characters had become: My inbox was full of emails from readers who confessed that they knew Noire, the Afro-wearing Ph.D. student, and her love interest Innocent, a well-heeled investment banker who hailed from Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa. Not only did they know these characters, but many proclaimed that they were these characters! Fictionalized or not, Noire and Innocent—and their family, friends, and colleagues—were real to many.

It was in A Love Noire that I decided to make their universe parallel our own: they lived on real streets in New York City and traveled to historical sites in New Orleans, Charleston, Jamaica, and Côte d'Ivoire. They shared a penchant for the music, clothing, and restaurants of many of the trendy sorts here on our side of planet Earth.

But those things were simple. It gets harder when characters are affected by the incidences of recent history. In most historical fiction, writers can create a plausible, historically accurate story line for their characters knowing that their readers are unlikely to have a personal association with the events. It was quite the opposite when I wrote about the Christmas Eve coup in Côte d'Ivoire as experienced by Innocent and his family: some of my readers had first-hand accounts of it as well.

Continue reading Erica Simone Turnipseed Gets Real With Her Fiction

Meg Tilly Recovers Her Voice

I recently interviewed Meg Tilly for GalleyCat about Gemma, her first novel in more than a dozen years. As we were talking, she told me a story about the story's beginnings that I knew would be of interest to Beatrice readers who are trying to find their own writing voices, so I asked her to email me more of the details so I could present them to you.

People have asked me how I managed to get inside the mind of Hazen Wood, the thirty-six year old pedophile in Gemma. How was I able to make his thought process so realistic, to figure out what his motivations were? They want to know how it felt to write him; was it hard for me, given my background with this type of predator?

The answer is a complex one. Yes, I had an enormous amount of resistance to writing anything from this man's point of view, let alone a novel where he is one of two principal characters. I don't think I ever would have voluntarily chosen to spend even fifteen minutes of my adult life in his company.

The Hazen in my book first came into being in 1999. After Singing Songs was published by Dutton in 1994, I became severely blocked. The reaction from my family to the fact that I had not only written, but even worse, published my memories as a child was…to put it lightly…not pleased. When Singing Songs first came out, only one member of my family was speaking to me.

I hadn't thought it through, realized how violent their rejection of me was going to be. I figured since the rest of the world thought it was fiction, why would they care?

Continue reading Meg Tilly Recovers Her Voice

Alax Fox Explains the PR of Storytelling

Alan Fox is the director of StoryFocus, a corporate communications firm, and has managed more than 350 publicity campaigns including work on behalf of major publishers, Hollywood film studios, and a wide range of leading companies. He's also a novelist who chose to publish The Seeker in Forever himself and is using his own publicity background to get the word out. In this essay for Beatrice, he explains how solid PR work isn't just about knowing the right tactics to use; it's about having a strategy in place that those tactics will serve.

I have found, through 14 years in the field, that a lot of people don't understand the true nature of publicity. If you are interested in writing as a human enterprise, and you want to know one of the great secrets of the story industry, then you'll want to pay attention to this. I have not seen this adequately explained anywhere.

Publicity was born out of news writing. News writing was born out of story.

Most people think publicity was born of advertising. They have totally the wrong picture in their heads. It's not that at all. To go there is to go in the wrong direction.

It's sad to see writers work for years and then go wrong.

For a writer of stories, publicity is not going off to fight a strange war in an alien territory. Publicity is coming home. You're coming home to your finished story. You will find quality. And there you will stand. And you will not let anyone move you.

Continue reading Alax Fox Explains the PR of Storytelling

Laura Zigman Explains Her Faction

I've been a fan of Laura Zigman since I interviewed her way back when, so I'm glad to turn the site over to her briefly so she can tell you about her latest novel, Piece of Work, and how it illustrates the success you can have by "writing what you know." (This essay originally appeared on the Warner Books website.)

People often ask authors if the stuff in their novels—the good stuff, the juicy stuff, the stuff most likely to get them into trouble—is true. And when asked, most authors will say that they've made everything up; that nothing in the book is autobiographical. One of the reasons they say this is because they don't want to get in trouble, which is completely understandable. Another reason they say this is so that they can appear to be fabulously imaginative: it's much harder, these alleged fabulously imaginative fiction writers would argue, to make stuff up than it is to simply write things down that have actually happened to you.

Not for me. I think recalling and dredging up and writing about painful and embarrassing events that have actually happened—bad blind dates, bad relationships, bad break-ups, acting like a completely insane obsessive-compulsive jealous suspicious (but almost completely justified) boyfriend stalker—and things that have been survived—gigantic narcissists; bad sadistic bosses behaving like complete lunatics—is much harder. But then, I'm biased. Because that's what I do. I write about things that have happened to me.

What I also do is admit that I write about things that have happened to me.

Continue reading Laura Zigman Explains Her Faction

Stephen Elliott Gets the Kinks Out

As I was preparing for the relaunch of Beatrice, Stephen Elliott was kind enough to let me print the introduction to his new collection of eleven linked stories, My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up. I'm hoping that we'll be able to do an Author2Author conversation with Stephen later this month, but in the meantime, he can tell you a little bit about what he's up to with these stories...

This could have been a memoir. It isn't. Most of it is true. This could be a sexual memoir. Ultimately, I made the poor marketing choice to call this a book of stories because there were too many things I knowingly made up. With the exception of "Early In Our Relationship," "My Stripper Year," and "Just Always Be Good," which were originally published as non-fiction, nearly every story has already been published as fiction. Real life does not always finish as neatly as fiction. Also, as I say in "I'll Love You Back," I didn't want to be responsible for the truth of my recollections.

But the reason I am admitting here to the general, if not complete, truth of this book, is because I believe in being open about sexuality. Recently there has been a rash of crackdowns on practitioners of consensual sadomasochism. Our president, who sanctions torture all over the world, who threatens to veto bills banning the American military from torture, has initiated a war at home on people who like to tie and hurt each other in the privacy of their own bedrooms. In response to the Department of Justice crackdown on SM websites many sex educators have taken down their pages. The result is that people who are just beginning their explorations in the world of Bondage and Discipline are going to find good information advocating safe and consensual play harder to find. When that happens beginners are more likely to play without safe words, to engage in dangerous activities, like cutting and asphyxiation, with partners who are not properly trained. And people are going to continue to live unhappy and ashamed of their desires when they could be leading satisfying and passionate lives.

It is in the best interests of everyone for more people to be open about their sexual desires. More pride flags need to be displayed on porches and windows and tattoos. As kinky people we need to talk to our non-kinky friends about our desires. We can't wait for the approval of others; we must force them to accept us. We will never have political power until we let the politicians know that we are not ashamed. 

With that in mind I take responsibility for these stories, for every sexual act depicted, many of which occurred when I was younger, before I made the effort to acquire the information I needed. I acquired scars instead. This is not a memoir, but it's damn close. And I'm OK with that. And I'm OK with you knowing that.

David Long: "You Are What You Read"

David Long's guest essay pretty much encapsulates what Beatrice is all about: introducing readers to writers. When I first saw his lists of what to read, I knew I wanted to find out more about where those lists came from...and he more than came through. I hope it'll inspire you not only to read some of the writers he talks about, but his own recently published novel, The Inhabited World.

I started keeping track of the books I read in 1979—not a reading journal, just a list, month by month (I'm a big believer in externalizing memory). I also keep other lists: a big list of novels and story collections (with a few memoirs, etc.) that I recommend when anyone asks (and when they don't); a list of books from outside the U.S. (most in translation); a list of my hundred all-time favorites, in order... and this year I broke down and cobbled together my "life list," organized by year of publication (lovely way to spend a rainy weekend). The big list and the hundred faves are posted at my website, along with a new invention called "fives": Five Czech novels; five short, odd novels; five good novels you may not have heard of; five skewed-reality novels, etc.

A few points:

• Except on the life list, it's one book per writer. I have to keep thinking: What's the one work I want someone else to read (not so tough when it's Harper Lee, but what about Joyce Carol Oates?).

• I can change my mind. Fascinations fade; then again, some books surprise you by how deeply they root themselves in your reading life.

• These are not lists of Best Books. There's a multitude of great novels and story collections I've never read (or read and don't much like). No, this is my list; it's biased, personal. These are works that still get under my skin. These are the ones that have marked me, that have sprung me from the here and now, or taught me what art is capable of—that have, in fact, become indispensable to my life as an artist.

Continue reading David Long: "You Are What You Read"

Lila Shaara Considers Her "Heavy Name"

When you think Shaara, you probably think of the Civil War—Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, maybe his son Jeff's Gods and Generals (though he's written several other historical novels set in other American conflicts). Lila Shaara is about to change your mind with her debut psychological thriller, Every Secret Thing. And in a special essay for Beatrice readers, she explains why the Shaara literary legacy isn't as cut-and-dry as you might think for her.

Before the manuscript of Every Secret Thing ever saw an editor's desk, I gave it to a friend whose opinion I value. She said she liked it, adding, "But you've got a heavy name." Believe it or not, this had not occurred to me. The truth is, I don't feel as though I came from "a writing family." The phrase brings to my mind a large group around a fireplace, all happily scribbling on parchment and eagerly showing each other their finished work. But in our house, my father alone was The Writer.

He also taught for many years at Florida State University. He loved teaching, and was great at it. Because of that, he taught all the time, and so I learned as much as I possibly could about story-telling from him (e.g. never use the phrase "naked bulb" for a bare light, and there are three main ways to start a story: introduction of a character, something happening, or atmosphere). But since it was clear that in our house there was only one writer, the short stories, poems, songs (a lot of sea shanties, for some reason) that I wrote as a child were not for public, or even family, consumption. When I left home for college and beyond, I joined a band and for many years wrote the angriest and most emotional songs I could. I got better at it, went to school far longer than any sane person should, and did a lot of academic writing as well as music. But I stayed away from fiction.

Writing killed my father. When brain damage from a motorcycle accident left him unable to do it as well as he'd done it before, it killed him faster. He never sold enough books while he was alive to make a living. By some measures, he was very successful in that he published most of what he wrote while he was alive, but the publisher of his first novel (New American Library) folded after printing only 3,000 copies of The Broken Place in 1968. It wasn't reprinted until long after The Killer Angels won the Pulitzer, and then only because McGraw-Hill wanted another historical novel, this one about William Shakespeare. It was never finished, in part because my father heartily resented being told to produce something for commercial reasons, even though he desperately wanted commercial along with critical success. The Killer Angels itself was rejected by twelve publishers before it found a home. The year he won the Pulitzer Prize, Time only listed my father's name in a footnote to an article called "The Quiet Pulitzer." He got a phone call, a plaque and a check for a thousand dollars. That was it. After he died, the university where he'd taught for fifteen years wasn't even interested in his papers; few people in the English department there knew who he was.

My father hated publishers, agents, New York City, and most of all, being pushed into genres. Yet he longed for validation, vindication, and an audience. He had great hopes of the Pulitzer Prize bringing him these, but even that accolade was as understated as such an honor can be. The Killer Angels is now considered a classic of its kind, but most of the attention my father has gotten has been posthumous; almost all of his other works, some of them arguably superior to his most famous book, are out of print.

I grew up seeing writing as something that gripped you in poisoned talons, gave you little or nothing back, drove you to addiction and depression, and killed you young. And so I avoided writing fiction for as long as I possibly could. When I couldn't hold it back any longer, it came out in great gushes. And so I've become, for better or worse, a writer. I have two great advantages that my father didn't have; his heavy name, and his example. I'm doing everything that I can to see that it doesn't kill me; my kids are still young and need a mother. They are already producing plays, books, songs and poems by the bucketful. They come from a writing family.

Kim McLarin Ponders the Universality Trap

Kim McLarin refuses to pull punches in her fiction, and that's true of this essay for Beatrice.com about her reaction to the reaction she's getting for her third novel, Jump at the Sun. She raises an important question that will tug at every writer's conscience: Is it possible, in aiming to appeal to the widest possible audience, that you might get cut off from what could potentially be your core readership? For that matter, is the mainstream really the perfect place to be? It's something everyone has to consider for themselves, but Kim's thoughts on the subject make an excellent starting point.

I received a lovely email the other day from a woman who had read Jump At The Sun.

I receive my fair share of emails—fewer than Dan Brown, I'm sure, more than the guy down the street who blogs about his bathroom tile—and they are always welcome, but rarely do they give me pause. This one did, not because of what the writer said (loved the book, stayed up all night reading it, the issues of race and class and motherhood you explore hit home for me), but because of who she was.

"My grandparents were Italian and Polish immigrants," the woman wrote, "and there are family members who act like your characters."

Since the characters in my novel are neither Italian nor Polish nor immigrants, but the sharecropping grandsons and granddaughters of African slaves, this was, to me, a compelling comparison. I sent the email on to my (white) editor because I knew she would like it. Back when the book was just a sparkle in my eye, she spoke about the need to make my third and, hopefully, break-out novel a "universal one." And when the book was delivered she crowed that I had succeeded. Which should have been music to my ears.

But there's one problem: I'm not certain I want to be dubbed universal by the white publishing industry. It's vaguely insulting and potentially dangerous. Plus, it's not going to help me sell books.

Continue reading Kim McLarin Ponders the Universality Trap

Ayun Halliday's Foodie Memoir Pet Peeves

Ayun Halliday kicks off a month-long "Virtual Blog Tour" for her new book, Dirty Sugar Cookies, a compendium of "culinary observations [and] questionable taste," by talking about some of the things that drive her nuts in other people's food books. I'm thrilled that Ayun asked if she could start her tour here, and I hope you'll follow her through her itinerary and keep track of her further gustatory antics on her very own blog.

The autobiographical genre holds a lot of appeal for me, as both a writer and a reader. I often find myself wishing I could erase or reword something in one of my books, but that's nothing compared to the intense desire to start ripping pages of other people's books whenever I come across one of my memoir-related pet peeves. Like autobiographies themselves, these gripes are easily divisible for the sake of sub-categorization. For instance, is it not time for a moratorium on "quiet awe" as an acceptable response to one's first viewing of the Taj Mahal? Adjectives like "poopy", "yummy" and "soccer" are words for parents and authors who write about their experiences as parents to rage against, not embrace (and while we're at it, let's pillory the idiot who coined the term "momoir." ) As far as culinary reminiscences go, now that I'm a food memoirist myself, my plate's heaped high with bones to pick:

Exquisite, Miniscule Portions Glistening Like Jewels: This kind of twee description makes me want to storm the Bastille. Unless the author has demonstrated an equal willingness to hork down a heaping helping from a fly-specked, outer-borough street stall, I refuse to stomach such fawning over a $23 appetizer. I'll take the phrase "glinted malevolently" over "glistened like jewels" any day!

The Picturesque Old Lady Who Presses Her Own Olive Oil: I've got no beef with the old lady, per se. It's more the verbal diarrhea she inspires in the culinary pilgrims who follow her back to the tumbledown villa her family has inhabited for centuries, marveling at every cobblestone and noting the similarities between her gnarled yet capable fingers and the twisted branches in her orchard. I find myself hoping that the old lady will whip out a cell phone and start talking about how much she loves the Olive Garden. "They've got the best Early Bird specials and unlimited refills on breadsticks!"

Continue reading Ayun Halliday's Foodie Memoir Pet Peeves

Christopher John Farley on Bob Marley

Years ago, I read a great novel by Christopher John Farley called My Favorite War. I lost track of him after that, but I've recently learned that he became the pop music critic at Time and, from there, an editor at the Wall Street Journal, and that he's got a biography of Bob Marley pubbing this week called Before the Legend.

Writing a novel requires you to look inside yourself. Writing a biography requires you to seek out others and convince them to look inside themselves, and Before the Legend presented the most difficult task I've ever faced as a writer.

Truth can be stranger, and harder, than fiction. Discovering just who Bob Marley really was required more than three years of research, investigation and writing. Degas once said, "One has to commit a painting the way one commits a crime." Biography is the same way. Committing a biography is pressure-filled work, full of stealth and danger.

My biography had more than its share.

Continue reading Christopher John Farley on Bob Marley

Marc Weingarten Remembers Jack Dunphy

It somehow seems fitting that this guest essay from Marc Weingarten should run today, as millions of film fans (many of whom may also be literature lovers) prepare themselves for tonight's Oscars presentation, wondering just how many awards Capote is going to take. Marc is the author of The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight, a history of the early years of New Journalism which I've heartily enjoyed.

This is a tragic story about what happens when a fine writer's reputation is obscured by the very public persona of a genius, and how literary fame always trumps solid literary grunt work.

You might have heard of the protagonist, Jack Dunphy, if you have read about the life of his companion of 35 years, Truman Capote. You might have seen Dunphy, or at least tantalizingly fleeting glimpses of him, portrayed by actor Bruce Greenwood in the film Capote. He's the one who peremptorily slams his study door shut while Capote struggles with the moral dilemmas of In Cold Blood, as if to keep the gathering storm of his partner's life at bay. But chances are you have not read Dunphy's books, as they are all out of print.

That's where the tragic part comes in, because Dunphy was a very skilled and sensitive novelist. Perhaps not a brilliant prose stylist like his partner, but why should a fine novelist be penalized just because he shared his bed with a giant?

Continue reading Marc Weingarten Remembers Jack Dunphy

Michael Drinkard Discovers the (Revolutionary) War at Home

I met Michael Drinkard a few weeks ago at the Old Stone House, the reconstruction of a Revolution-era home where the Battle of Brooklyn was fought in the summer of 1776. It was an apt setting for the book party (organized by his wife, fellow novelist Jill Eisenstadt) celebrating the release of Rebels, Turn Out Your Dead, Drinkard's first novel in over a decade. It's the story of a hemp farmer named Salt whose life is completely upended in a violent encounter with a British soldier, and it's such a major departure from his work in the '80s and '90s that I had to ask how the subject matter came to him. He graciously agreed to allow me to reprint the novel's afterword.

My office is in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, on Wallabout Bay in the East River, just across from Manhattan. A few years ago a security guard pointed to the water and said, "That's where the British tossed ten thousand dead Americans." Did I know that during the Revolutionary War more people died on Brooklyn prison ships than in all the battles combined?

No, I did not.

About a dozen floating prisons were anchored in Wallabout Bay between 1776 and 1783, the most notorious of which was the Jersey, moored about a hundred yards off the Brooklyn shore. No one knows for sure how many were held there, or how many died. Historians put the death toll somewhere between 8,500 and 11,500 men (I found no credible accounts of women held prisoner). By my rough calculations, as a percentage of the total population, today's equivalent would be about 1,000,000 to 1,300,000 dead.

The salient feature of the Prison Ship Martyrs' Memorial in Brooklyn's Fort Greene Park is a tall, fluted column. It was designed by the most famous architect of his time, Stanford White, built at huge expense, and unveiled to great fanfare a hundred years after the war ended and the Jersey gave up its last prisoner, was abandoned, and sank. And it's a failure. Its "eternal flame" in a bronze urn at the top was either extinguished in the 1970s, or during World War II as a wartime security measure, or never lit at all; accounts differ. The bronze eagles that guarded it are in storage in Manhattan, but two may be returned shortly, or may not; accounts differ. Civic groups and city agencies are committed to restoring the monument. While it may not succeed as a public memorial, its peculiar beauty can inspire intense private moments. Underneath the expansive granite stairs is a crypt. Not long ago, I paid a visit.

Continue reading Michael Drinkard Discovers the (Revolutionary) War at Home

Ally Carter on the Year That Changed Her Life (Except It Didn't)

Ally Carter's debut novel, Cheating at Solitaire, came out last November, and she'll tell you a little bit about her forthcoming YA novel, I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You, in the essay below. But as she explains, sometimes the difference even a hugely successful year makes in a writer's life isn't that much difference at all.

It's almost Valentine's Day, or as I like to call it, National Chocolate Day (because, really, isn't that more inclusive?), and I can't help but think about Valentine's Days past. Remember when we covered shoeboxes with red velvet and everyone in class got a card from everyone else? Remember when flowers poured from the principal's office like it was the Rose Parade and the hallway was Main Street in Pasadena?

Last Valentine's Day, I had a nice day job and a publishing deal for Cheating at Solitaire and its sequel, Learning to Play Gin. I had a big box of chocolates and the notion that 2005 was going to be a good year. But in March, things changed. In March, it became a great year. It became—in a word—significant.

That's when my agent asked if I'd ever wanted to write a young adult novel, and even though I sometimes doubt that I ever was a young adult (those Rose Parade-like flowers weren't flowing to me), I said yes. By April I had an idea I loved and three sample chapters. By May, I had a deal with Hyperion which was significant, or at least Publisher's Lunch thought so—it had the requisite zeros.

I'll never forget that phone call from my agent, especially her parting words: don't quit your day job.

Then June came and the call from Disney and the film option and yet another warning from my agent: don't quit your day job.

Then came a number of foreign rights deals and an audio book deal, and you guessed it, I still didn't quit my day job.

Continue reading Ally Carter on the Year That Changed Her Life (Except It Didn't)

Judith Lindbergh Finds the Vikings' Soft Side

I'll be going to see Judith Lindbergh read from her debut novel, The Thrall's Tale, tonight at Coliseum Books (a joint event with Marisa de los Santos). I'd heard Lindbergh had spent over a decade researching the Vikings, so I was curious to hear some of her thoughts on what it's like to live with a subject for so long. This is what she had to tell me....

The interesting thing about the Vikings is that, for me, as the author of a novel about them, I never really liked them very much. Well, that's not exactly true. I never liked the public image of the Vikings. It was almost embarrassing: the stereotypical brawny warrior, horned-helmeted (a detail that is archaeologically unfounded, by the way), filthy and brutish, more beast than man. I do not dispute the facts of the Viking raids, or the Vikings' male-centered ethos, or the numerous sagas depicting wild, raging battles fought by ferocious warriors. But as a 21st-century woman, I wanted to get past these testosterone charged images. I wanted to find a way to the Viking heart, assuming it was in there at all.

The poem, Hávamál (The Sayings of Hár) is part of The Poetic Edda. It outlines in detail the worldview of the Norse, as spoken by Hár, "the One-Eyed" god, one of the many appellations of the great god Odin. Much of the poem reads like passages from the biblical Proverbs, with Hár/Odin giving counsel to his listeners of all that is right and wise in a man's behavior. The overtones are fatherly, and the focus is on the man's world where hospitality, moderation, loyalty, wisdom, and self-control are key.

All hail to the givers! A guest has come
Say where shall he sit?

Such extravagant geniality seems simply pretentious, but it was also self-interested, I realized. The guest might as easily be a stranger as a well-loved friend. If a man didn't welcome and treat his guests fairly, how could he count on such hospitality when he himself traveled through distant lands?

Continue reading Judith Lindbergh Finds the Vikings' Soft Side

John Falk on Keeping It Real

When I got a postcard two weeks ago announcing the paperback edition of John Falk's Hello to All That as being "in the tradition of A Million Little Pieces," I chuckled to myself: Hell of a time for that comparison to be making the rounds. But then I got to thinking that Falk, who'd written about his battle with chronic depression and his experiences as a Sarajevo war correspondent, probably had something to say about the art of telling the truth about your life. So I asked, and I received, and I pass along to you...

You could be drunk, in a writing workshop, or maybe just sitting on the can. The point is that great insight, that magical inspiration can hit you just about anywhere. Maybe you can't put it into words just yet but you suddenly know, can feel in your gut actually, that somewhere in your past there unfolded a series of events that meant something, really meant something. They all fit together. You then think of all the people you knew, all the crazy, colorful scenes in your life. There is a story there, a great story. Man, this can be good, you think. You run it by your friends and family. They all agree: You really should take a crack at writing a memoir.

For most people it's about here, or maybe after two or three trips to Starbucks with your laptop, that the whole enterprise unravels. Why? Because you just can't capture on paper that initial inspiration. The words fall short. The details overwhelm. Your life wasn't as coherent as it seemed and what was an inspiration quickly becomes drudgery. It's here that the more sensible among us order that final mochachino and split back to living their life instead of writing about it.

For the rest, you dive deeper. Keep writing. Month after month. Year after year. You chase that rabbit, that initial inspiration, word after damn word. As you learn more you start thinking in character arcs, acts, conflicts and resolutions. It's a necessary step, of course, the only way to impose that timeless story structure on what had been until now a rambling retelling of your life.

Continue reading John Falk on Keeping It Real

How Linda Donn Discovered Her Balloonist

After writing two nonfiction books (which she'll tell you more about below), Linda Donn has come out with her first novel, The Littlest Balloonist. The story of how she found the subject and setting for this foray into fiction is a happy accident which I hope you'll find as interesting as I have.

When I began to write about my heroine, Sophie Blanchard, I was surprised to find the little French balloonist as familiar to me as if I had known her for a long, long time.

I would like to explain how this came about.

Years ago, I was writing my first book, a nonfiction story about the friendship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and I did a lot of research in the Rare Book and Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. Even on a blistering hot day in Washington, D.C., it is very cold in the archives. It helps preserve the old papers. And so, to warm up—and because you can't help but get stuck in research sometimes—I would get up and wander around the room and pull out the drawers of files that describe the different collections in the Manuscript Division. There are large lives in there—Kennedys and Roosevelts and Fords and the like. But there is also a little archive, all in French, about the adventures of the early balloonists. I can read French, and so it amused me to read about their escapades—they once sent an elephant up in a balloon, and described as him as 'superb' and 'modest'!

Then, too, I read descriptions of the young Sophie Blanchard, how generous and daring she was, and how she became Napoleon Bonaparte's official balloonist.

When I finished writing the book on Freud and Jung, I thought of doing a book about that brave little band, but I couldn't figure out how to structure the story. I mentioned the problem to a friend—who happened to be a Roosevelt—she said, "Oh, you like stories about relationships. You should write about a group of Roosevelt cousins." Well, I went back to the Rare Book and Manuscript Division and pulled out the drawers of Roosevelts—and found a fascinating story. But on my research visits, inevitably, I would get cold and stuck, and so I'd wander over to the drawer of my French balloonists.

And this time, when I finished my book on the Roosevelt cousins, I pulled out the folders about hydrogen balloons in 19th-century France and went to work.

Continue reading How Linda Donn Discovered Her Balloonist

Kathryn Davis on Thin Places

Kathryn Davis is one of those authors I've been meaning to fully engage myself with for a while now, ever since I found a batch of her earlier books on sale at Housing Works a few years ago. Well, life's kept intervening since then with its own ideas, but now that Davis has just published her sixth novel, The Thin Place, maybe it's time for me to pull it together and get cracking. In the meantime, she was kind enough to tell me, and by extension you, about the inspiration for her story.

I first heard of thin places five years ago, while visiting a friend who was a lay member of a religious community—St. Mary's Convent—high on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River outside of Peekskill. At the time one of the sisters was very sick, ill unto death. Plans were already in motion to commence the ritual ringing of the bell—the number of times it would ring being equal to the number of years of her life—when, miraculously, she recovered. "It's because this is a thin place," Sister Anastasia told me, going on to explain that in such a place the membrane between this world and the spirit world was very thin. Anything can happen in a thin place, she told me.

At that time, there were two Malawi sisters at the convent, participants in an exchange program between the world's richest and the world's poorest country. When the two Malawi sisters had arrived they'd been like scarecrows, but they were quickly gaining weight. When they heard the convent referred to as a thin place, they burst out laughing. "This is a fat place!" said Sister Martha, though of course the very fact that they were there at all was, as Sister Anastasia pointed out, very thin.

I was immensely attracted to this idea, and knew I wanted to write a book about a thin place in which "anything could happen." I also knew that I wanted the frame of reference to be wide as well as thin, in order to accommodate my concerns about extinction, and about what we're doing to this planet during our brief tenure here—the wages of "human time too thin to be discerned."

John Niven on Music from Big Pink

One of my favorite book series is Continuum's 33 1/3, an ever-expanding collection of novella-length considerations of key albums in rock history by a motley assortment of writers and musicians. Until recently, each installment had been nonfiction—imaginative and highly personal, to be sure, but firmly rooted in "the real world." That changed late last year, as John Niven's Music from Big Pink became the first fictional segment in the series. In this essay, he explains how his literary ambitions coincided with Continuum's cultural aims.

For a while I had been toying (and please forgive me that 'toying,' the author in his folio-lined study, disinterestedly 'toying' with any number of weighty subjects; the process was decidedly more fraught than that, but, nonetheless, toying I was) with the idea of a novel about a rock group right on the edge of success, but seen from the POV of a hanger-on, a drug dealer, a bagman. But something kept holding me back.

What was holding me back was what we might call 'The Stillwater Problem': the idea of hanging the story around a fictionalised group left me cold, cold, cold. (Grab a pencil and draw up a list of novels featuring an invented rock group that have really worked. Done? You should have a piece of paper with Roddy Doyle's The Commitments written on it.)

Continue reading John Niven on Music from Big Pink

Steven Heighton:
"Locked in the Ice and Free to Play"

Steven Heighton's second novel, Afterlands, was recently published in his native Canada and will be appearing in the United States (and several other nations) early next year. He is also the author of The Shadow Boxer, a Publishers Weekly Book of the Year for 2002, and the short storie collections Flight Paths of the Emperor and On earth as it is. In this essay for Beatrice readers, he explains how fiction can emerge from a kernel of fact...

Duke Ellington once said that it's good to have limits. He was talking about jazz music, but I think the same can be said about writing. When I write poetry I often use some sort of constraining form—sometimes a traditional form, like the sonnet, sometimes one of my own devising—to help compress and intensify the material and also the medium, language. That's what the limitations of form are for. Not to provide a stage on which a writer gets to preen and flaunt mastery of the craft; not to promote retrograde cultural nostalgia or politically reactionary attitudes. Simply, formal constraints impose a framework that forces the imagination to dig deeper, making the writer compress and intensify the material of the poem—or, sometimes, the novel.

The framework of historical fact I used in writing Afterlands was particularly suited to imposing constraints, and not only formally but geographically. In 1871 the U.S. Navy sent a largely civilian expedition north to the Arctic where it was to reach the North Pole, if possible, and plant the American flag. But the ship, the USS Polaris, was stopped by the ice, and after a full winter trapped in the ice it was forced to turn back. It didn't get far. During a storm in which the ship seemed to be sinking, much of the crew—a white American, a black American, five Germans, a Dane, a Swede, an Englishman, and two Inuit families—were cast away on a large ice-floe, which then began to shrink steadily as it drifted south in the Arctic seas through the winter darkness. This microcosm of varied characters soon fragmented along ethnic and national lines, even as the floe's steady shrinking forced them into ever closer quarters.

Continue reading Steven Heighton:
"Locked in the Ice and Free to Play"

Noelle Ashley on André Leon Talley

Noelle Ashley has given Beatrice readers on-the-scene reports before, but after this account from a recent New York Historical Society event, I may have to make her my permanent red carpet reporter. As long, of course, as there's always a literary angle, as in this spotlight on André Leon Talley...

There are two sides to the Vogue editor and New York icon Andre Leon Talley.

When Naomi Campbell, Donald Trump and Vera Wang joined him at the New York Historical Society benefit the other night, I expected a breathtaking presence to stand before us. Often caught on camera in flamboyant fashions, Talley delivered a surprisingly subtle look, with black on black simplicity. The only hint of color peeked from his pocket in the form of a cranberry silk handkerchief.

Co-chairing the event were Pat Aschul and the pregnant Melania Trump, in a cleavage-baring, gorgeous black gown, who stopped by with her husband en route to the premiere of "King Kong." Unlike Melania, Talley looked like he wanted to blend in—but his height didn't let him. Talley is too tall for anonymity, and too graceful to slouch.

Continue reading Noelle Ashley on André Leon Talley

Nasrin Alavi on Mahmood Ahmadi'nejad

It's only fitting that Nasrin Alavi, the author of We Are Iran, has been making the rounds of bookblogs like MoorishGirl and The Elegant Variation, since her book is a compendium of what's been said by members of the Iranian blogosphere, where online publishing has created a workaround against political repression and enabled expats to keep in closer contact with their native communities. (There's about 75,000 blogs being written in Farsi these days; only three other languages command higher writership. Is writership a word? It should be.) In this essay, she explains some of the political situation to which "Blogistani" writers are reacting so vocally.

Since 9/11, when so much of the attention directed at the Islamic world is focused on violence and terrorism, it has become increasingly difficult to see beyond the sabre rattling of fanatics, especially when a representative of an Islamic nation openly calls for the destruction of another country. In a remark that has reverberated around the world, Iran's new president, Mahmood Ahmadi'nejad, had recently called that Israel should be "wiped out from the map".

During the 2005 presidential elections, Ahmadi'nejad was promoted as the man of the people. Corruption and cronyism were the vein of popular anger into which Ahmadinejad tapped and he appealed to the minds and hearts of jobless youth and underpaid workers promising food and housing subsidies for the poor. According to Behzad Nabavi, acting chairman of the parliament during President Khatami’s era, the modest looking mayor of Tehran backed by the establishment "was promoted as an anti-establishment figure." At one stage during his campaign Ahmadi'nejad even falsely complained that the "establishment" had cut off the electricity supplies of large areas of Iran so that his campaign speeches promising a fight against corruption could not be heard by the ordinary people.

Even so, the election result was announced amid accusations of vote rigging by some observers, including three of the candidates. These were not members of the opposition calling foul play, but Mehdi Kahroubi (onetime parliament speaker), Mostafa Moin (ex-education minister), and Ayatollah Rafsanjani (ex-president).

Continue reading Nasrin Alavi on Mahmood Ahmadi'nejad

How Nell Irvin Painter Illustrated Creating Black Americans

Nell Irvin Painter's Creating Black Americans is destined to become one of the most beautiful history textbooks in recent memory, with roughly 150 creative representations of the African-American experience ranging from painting and sculpture to graffiti art and quilts. Most of the images are in stunning color, some of them filling an entire page. (I've done what I can to show the sample images in this post in the best light while keeping bandwidth low, but they don't do the printed versions justice.) I asked Prof. Painter, who only recently retired from teaching after running Princeton's African-American History department, how she chose the images to accompany her work.

Creating Black Americans works beautifully as a finished product, but I was feeling my way as I wrote. You see, I'm an American historian, not an art historian. So most of my preparation went into the narrative text, into the job of getting the history right. Even so, over time, dealing with the images grew into a bigger and bigger task. Toward the end of the work, permissions demanded what seemed like an infinity of time: tracking down artists or their agents or their executors, and getting them to reply with permission and usable images. That was how my work with illustrations ended. It started with my deciding which art to use.

I had begun with the decision to relate the illustrations to the major theme of the book: black people's own creativity. That meant that all the artists would be African-American. Then there was the fundamental fact that Creating Black Americans is a history book. The artwork had to relate to historical themes in African-American history. Those two imperatives separate Creating Black Americans from art history, despite my book's wealth of art.

Even within those limitations, I found much more art than I could use, except in three chapters. The themes of the Atlantic slave trade, the Civil War, and Reconstruction have not yet produced the gorgeous abundance of more favored themes such as ordinary working people and racial violence. Two examples from my book are Elizabeth Catlett's "Sharecropper" (1968, left) and David Hammons's "Injustice Case" (1970, right).

Continue reading How Nell Irvin Painter Illustrated Creating Black Americans

How Karen Olsson Discovered The Gay Place

A month or so ago, I read an entertaining essay by Chris Lehmann in which he suggested that "the one truly great modern American political novel" wasn't All the King's Men but The Gay Place. I filed the title away for future reference...and dang if not a few days later, the NYTBR was devoting the first two paragraphs of its review of Karen Olsson's Waterloo to The Gay Place and its author, Billy Lee Brammer. Well, I thought, this is the sort of thing that leads to Beatrice guest essays. As you can see, I was right...

I'd never heard of Billy Lee Brammer's 1961 trilogy The Gay Place before I moved to Austin, but I came across it soon enough. A friend from college, turned graduate student at the University of Texas, was serving as a teaching assistant in a Southwestern U.S. Lit class that had Brammer's book on the syllabus. When I found it on his shelf, he explained that the book was not about gay people, as outsiders commonly assume, but about affairs both political and (hetero)sexual, in a 1950s state capital closely based on Austin. (The title comes from an F. Scott Fitzgerald verse: "I heard Helena/ In a haunted doze/ Say: "I know a gay place/ Nobody knows.") To me that sounded quaint and provincial; I probably made a face. No no, he told me, it was actually pretty good.

I can no longer really remember my first reaction to The Gay Place, because I've reread it several times since then, but I do know that I loved it. It consists of three short novels, totalling over five hundred pages, linked by setting and by the character of Governor Arthur "Goddamn" Fenstemaker, an LBJ/Huey Long-style good old boy who strides in and out of the narrative, pulling at his nose and drinking and cursing and pushing the plot along. Brammer greatly admired Fitzgerald, and his prose has a lyrical bent, but he also admired Lyndon Johnson, and the book's more fanciful turns of phrase are tempered with Fenstemaker's cursing. Likewise, the mooning passive quality of some of his characters plays against Fenstemaker's machinations. For me (transplant that I am) that mix of romanticism and salt-of-the-earthiness captures something essential about the character of Texas itself—which was the subject of Brammer's memorable first lines: "The country is barbarously large and final. It is too much country—boondock country—alternately drab and dazzling, spectral and remote. It is so wrongfully muddled and various that it is difficult to conceive of it as all of a piece."

Continue reading How Karen Olsson Discovered The Gay Place

Gabriel Brownstein

Gabriel Brownstein's latest book, The Man from Beyond, is a fictional account of the contentious friendship between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini. It's a relationship that's been explored by other writers over the years, including William Hjortsberg (Nevermore) and Thomas Wheeler (The Arcanum)—in fact, we may hear from Wheeler soon, but that's another tale to be unpacked another day... Anyway, when The Man From Beyond came to my attention, I decided to ask what the story behind the story was. And this is what I found out...

Why I Wrote My Novel
by Gabriel Brownstein

Joan Didion's advice to writers about words applies to novelists and their subjects: You don't choose them; they choose you. Why did I write a novel about Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle? Why are so many other writers drawn to these subjects? I can't answer. I can only tell you in my case how it happened.

In a church basement book sale, I saw Houdini's name in red on the spine of a musty black hardcover. I was surprised to see that he was not the subject, but the author of the book, A Magician Among the Spirits, a title whose power to me was incantatory. At this point in my life, I had published a couple of stories in literary quarterlies, stories that would become part of my collection, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W, but I had no notion those stories would be put together in a book. My first child had been born. My first novel had garnered only warm, encouraging rejection letters. Had I been a sane person, I probably would have given up writing altogether. But I opened the cover of Houdini's book, and there on the frontispiece was a picture of the magician shaking hands with Arthur Conan Doyle. There's a moment in Othello when Iago says: "It is engendered." That's what happened when I saw that photograph. I was going to write the book, even if I did not know it then.

Continue reading Gabriel Brownstein

Guest Author: David Wolman

I didn't have to read too far into A Left-Hand Turn Around the World before I thought it might be a good idea to invite David Wolman to tell Beatrice readers about his favorite lefty writers. It was just so much fun to skip around and read about Wolman's exploits hanging out with Portland Satanists and Japanese golfers, all in order to understand the mysteries of left-handedness. I'm not always a big fan of the "travelogue in support of quirky cultural theses" genre, but Wolman knnows how to be entertaining without constantly making the people he writes about the butt of his jokes. So I asked, he agreed to take some time out of his book tour, and, well, here he is...

Carroll, Clinton, Clemons… Lefties the Lot of Them
by David Wolman

Ah, to write with the left. It was Oscar Wilde (we presume) who coined that by-now-clichéd-among-southpaws line: "If the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handed people are in their right minds." Wilde, it appears, was not left-handed, but Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Bill Clinton, and other famous names to put pen to page did so from the port side.

To a certain degree, any recap of favorite left-handed authors—including the shorty I plan to serve up three paragraphs from now—is fatally flawed from the get-go. For starters, a natural preference for the left hand has been perceived with such negative freight for so much of human history and across cultures, that scores of writers, famous and anonymous alike, may have been, in the neurological sense, left-handed. But as children