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 these writers-to-be, thanks to the wisdom and vision of the adult population, were swiftly and comprehensively forced to switch to right-handed writing, eating, and violin-playing. How is anyone to know, then, with absolute certainty, that Shakespeare was not a southpaw?

Continue reading Guest Author: David Wolman

Guest Author: Kevin Sampsell

Kevin Sampsell's commitment to indie literature runs deep. Not only does he run the small press section at Powell's, he's the founder and publisher of Future Tense Books. And, as you'll learn in this essay he wrote for Beatrice, he's willing to give out props to his heroes when he's given the opportunity.

A New Kind of Author Appreciation
by Kevin Sampsell

You know how you see kids with their backpacks or jackets all cluttered with buttons? They're usually for their favorite bands or for some personal affirmation or political statement. Anything under the sun really—Johnny Depp, Bettie Page, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, SpongeBob SquarePants, Jesus. So why not our favorite authors? A writer's mug pinned to a denim jacket can be just as much a signifier of a wearer's personality as an anarchy pin. If I saw someone with a David Sedaris pin I could guess that person had a good sense of humor, or if I saw Annie Lamott's face on someone's lapel I could probably guess that person is thoughtful and maybe a little spiritual.

Matthew Simmons and Shya Scanlon, editors at MonkeyBicycle, a very entertaining web site and literary journal, decided it was about time to usher in this new era of pinnable fashion. Matthew sent me an email to see if I'd like to act as the first curator. Since he knows that—like him—I work at a bookstore and read constantly, he figured I'd have a few authors to champion. He told me I could pick three authors and write short essays about each one. They would be printed as bookmarks, with a short excerpt of the author's writing on one side. Artist Ellen Forney (author of I Was Seven in '75) was lined up to draw portraits of the chosen authors. The buttons would be the style, the bookmarks the substance: a complete package!

Here's a list of people I could have picked for my trio: Harry Crews, A.M. Homes, Ben Marcus, Larry Brown, Michelle Tea, Dave Eggers, Mark Leyner, and Terry Southern. They've all affected me a great deal, perhaps twisting and shaping me into the type of writer I've become. But the three that stood out for me, the three that captured some elusive greatness, some pinnacle of individual style that should become a benchmark for generations to come are Gary Lutz, Sam Lipsyte, and Diane Williams.

Continue reading Guest Author: Kevin Sampsell

Guest Authors: Tara McCarthy

You might remember that post this summer where I mentioned the website for the Sparks Sisters, the fictional conjoined twin pop sensations who star in Tara McCarthy's novel, Love Will Tear Us Apart. Well, now Tara's come along to tell Beatrice readers a little more about her book and about a problem she didn't anticipate having in getting people to read it. It just goes to show Oscar Wilde was right: The only thing worse that being talked about really is not being talked about.

Read It in Spite of Yourself!
by Tara McCarthy

Some of you may remember me. I wrote a book—Been There, Haven't Done That: A Virgin's Memoir—back in 1997. I was on the Howard Stern show; Leno made jokes about me; People magazine put me on their top ten worst books of the year. Radio interviews, print publicity, local news crews in my very own apartment . . . Ah yes, I had it all! But I was naive, unprepared, easily flustered...I thought maybe it was a bit overmuch. I remember crying a lot and wishing that the book hadn't gotten quite so much attention.

So I toiled away in isolation for years, hid from public life and wrote two bad half-novels and then one complete one that I felt was worthy of publication. Love Will Tear Us Apart was released last month and the media who'd once critiqued every aspect of my non-sex life ("She wants to know why she's still a virgin? Look at her!") couldn't have cared less.

Like most first-time novelists, I now spend a good portion of my days marveling over the near-complete lack of publicity I've managed to scare up with this book. In addition, I bemoan that my fifteen minutes were used up by a sensational memoir that lacked artfulness and literary merit. I'm saddened that my novel—so much more interesting than the memoir to talk about, as far as I'm concerned—is struggling now to be "a sleeper hit" or "word of mouth sensation"... if it's lucky.

Continue reading Guest Authors: Tara McCarthy

Guest Author: Kitty Fitzgerald

If you saw the NYTBR review for Kitty Fitzgerald's novel Pigtopia yesterday, you've caught a glimpse of the remarkable voice that Fitzgerald created for Jack, a village outcast in the mold of Boo Radley. I was curious about how Fitzgerald created his unique form of speech, so I asked her—and this was her reply.

Discovering Pigsense
by Kitty Fitzgerald

The story of Jack Plum started life as a radio play called Pig Paradise, which was broadcast by the BBC in 1998. At the time I wrote it, I couldn't find Jack's inner voice at all, and didn't even know if I wanted to, so his character was explored entirely through dialogue with the younger Holly Lock.

It worked well and I felt no loss at not having Jack as part-narrator of the play, which had been the director's desire. After the broadcast I thought I'd heard the last of Jack Plum but it wasn't to be. Fragments, images and words kept shoving themselves into my head; I saw an inordinate number of pigs rummaging in fields and at times felt as if someone large was following me when I took the dog for a walk on the moor.

Eventually I understood there was more to be explored in the story of Jack. I sat down and began making plans for turning the play into a novel. This time I knew I had to get right inside his internal landscape.

It wasn't easy finding Jack's voice because it wasn't a technical linguistic exercise; it was a question of being able to hear its nuances inside my head. The creative process is a strange beast. You have to find a way of opening yourself up to possibilities; you have to get rid of your internal censor; you have to listen and wait. And when I finally heard the first sentence from Jack's inner world, that was just the beginning.

Continue reading Guest Author: Kitty Fitzgerald

Guest Author: Megan Crane

Megan Crane first appeared on this site several months back, taking part in a conversation with E. Lockhart about their debut novels. Now, with her second book, Everyone Else's Girl, about to show up in bookstores, she's here to fill us in on how she's handling the excitement, having been through the publication cycle once before.

The Unimaginable Writer's Life
by Megan Crane

Long before my first book came out, I imagined what it would feel like. I had ample time to do this while I was in that seemingly endless "sold but not published" stage. During this stage I found myself at parties, saying things like, "Why yes, I'm a writer but no, the book's not out yet." People would crook their eyebrows at me and then lose interest, clearly under the impression that I was the sort of pathetic person who went about making self-aggrandizing yet unproveable statements at cocktail parties.

I told myself that it would all be different when the book came out, in ways I couldn't imagine. And of course, this was true: I really couldn't imagine it, because I'd never had a book come out before, nor had anyone I knew. I supposed that my life would change somehow, or there might be bright lights of some kind, or even, though I was ashamed to admit it, glorious song. Why not? This was the realization of a childhood dream! Why shouldn't there be an aria or two? People online claimed to burst into tears in the bookstore upon catching sight of their debut novels; some asserted that they kicked their spouses from the marital bed so they could cuddle up with their ARCs instead. I couldn't quite see myself doing any of these things, but I allowed for the possibility that, perhaps, publishing a book flipped some interior switch and just like that I would go from somewhat repressed to open and emotional in ways that led to weeping in public and/or cuddling with inanimate objects.

And then, when the book did come out, it was… different than I'd imagined.

Continue reading Guest Author: Megan Crane

Stephanie Lessing Meets the Superheroes

When Stephanie Lessing told me she'd gotten tickets to the Brooklyn Superhero Company's fashion show benefit for 826NYC at Symphony Space, I said of course I wanted a full report, because who doesn't believe in "supporting students ages 6-18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write," right? It's a swell organization which can still use your donations or your volunteer work--and not just in New York, but in any of the five other cities where the organization has built learning centers. Here's what Stephanie had to say about the evening:

The evening kicked off with a live performance by the Hungry March Band followed by a brief fashion statement by fashion designer extraordinaire Edna Mode--via satellite--who made it very clear that cloaks, capes and ponchos--even the seemingly bullet proof variety-- were nothing more than the fuel for fantasy and that in order to be truly "in fashion" one must have a firm grip on reality--particularly in terms of what's needed to fund upcoming projects at 826NYC--the five day a week program drop-in program in Park Slope, Brooklyn that offers free tutoring, field trips and writing workshops to children ages 6-18.

Before the fashion show got underway, Rob Cordry of The Daily Show did a reading of a story by Jonathan Goldstein about his experience dating Lois Lane just after she broke up with Superman and how he was sure they were going to get back together as well as the circumstances that lead him to expose his fear of their reunion to his good friend Clark Kent.

Next up was Hodgman who explained why invisibility was a far greater super hero power than the ability to fly and equated anyone who chose flying over invisibility with the type of person who, if they had only one wish, would undoubtedly choose a really big swimming pool. It was a lot funnier when he said it.

And then came the fashion show.

Continue reading Stephanie Lessing Meets the Superheroes

Jerome Charyn's Isaac Babel Shortlist

Jerome Charyn has long been one of my favorite novelists, and when I found out that he'd just published a biography of Isaac Babel—Savage Shorthand—I wondered if he might have some recommendations for readers who, like me, aren't yet familiar with Babel's stories. He very kindly sent the following note:

"Babel's 'Guy de Maupassant' is my favorite story in the whole world; it's funny and sad, and it's the most telling story ever written about language and all its tricks and traps.

"My next best favorite is 'The King,' about the Odessa gangster Benya Krik and his magical orange pants.

"Readers should also look at 'Di Grasso,' a story about the mysteries and sometimes sordid magic of art.

"I would then suggest a look at Babel's 1920 Diary, which is his own portrait of the artist as a young man, an artist under enemy fire.

"Now the reader is ready to look at Red Cavalry and its curious ride through Poland, with all the savagery and bump-bump of the human heart.

"And lastly, the reader should look at 'Benya Krik,' Babel’s screenplay about Benya, but from the point of view of a Soviet writer who has to wind his way through Soviet politics, which has already become a deadly maze."

Charyn has also recently edited Inside the Hornet's Head, which starts with his love for Saul Bellow's Adventures of Augie March and goes on to include eightteen other great Jewish-American writers, ranging from Isaac Bashevis Singer to Leonard Cohen.

Guest Author: Noelle Ashley

I met Noelle Ashley at a publishing seminar a few months back, just before she started shopping her manuscript to agents. While I was out speaking at a writer's conference last week, she came to Manhattan for the New York Times-sponsored "Great Read in the Park," and a few days later she sent me her impressions of the event.

Writers and book-lovers gathered in Bryant Park for the Great Read on Sunday. The goal was "A Celebration of Books," but the theme should have been "Acting Classes For Authors." I suggest shy or monotone authors hire appropriate people to impersonate them at readings: Chick lit writers can check Sarah Jessica Parker's availability; sci-fi authors should use William Shatner.

A major highlight of the event was finding authors who made their work sound alive. Like Isabel Rose, who read dialogue from her novel, The J.A.P. Chronicles, in a thick New York accent. Wearing a tank top and jeans, the young author had the audience howling with her tale of a Jewish mother urging marriage and pregnancy. The protagonist protests that Madonna gave birth in her forties, until her mother tells her, "You're not Madonna. And nice Jewish girls don't get pregnant by their trainers!"

Rose receives the award for Funniest Excerpts, followed by L.A. Times reporter J.R. Moehringer. In a perfectly conversational tone of voice, the handsome Pulitzer Prize winner read about growing up fatherless in Manhasset. His memoir, The Tender Bar, told tales of a reclusive grandfather who suddenly "turned into Clark Gable." Gigi Anders also poked fun at her family, with an air-piercing Cuban accent, entertaining the crowd as she read from Jubana!: The Awkwardly True and Dazzling Adventures of a Jewish Cubana Goddess. In her childhood, her mother took her to a mental hospital and told her to "play with the patients." It was enough to make you want to cancel Mother's Day.

Continue reading Guest Author: Noelle Ashley

Guest Author: Joshua Davis

Joshua Davis is a magazine writer and documentary filmmaker who's put himself through a lot of interesting paces for his first book, The Underdog, traveling around the world to compete in unusual athletic competitions. What's so unusual about sumo wrestling, you ask? Nothing...unless, like Davis, you're 129 pounds soaking wet. (As for the photo at left, that's Davis after he snuck into Iraq as a war correspondent for Wired.) Anyway, in this essay he tells Beatrice readers about the rather unathletic experience that propelled him on this journey.

A Small Victory
by Joshua Davis

Some people are attracted to success. I'm not one of them. I spend most of my time thinking about my failures, which is why, after a series of disastrous business decisions in my early and mid-twenties, I ended up working as a temporary data entry clerk at the local phone company. It gave me plenty of time to mull over the negative turn my life had taken. I'd show up at 9:00, pick up a giant box of Universal Lifeline reduced phone fee applications, put on a pair of headphones and have the pleasure of torturing myself for eight hours while my fingers flashed across a numeric key pad.

The applications were sworn statements by people saying that they were poor and shouldn't have to pay full price for their phone service. It was a parade of poverty and rich misers but deciding whether they were lying or not wasn't my job. I simply typed their phone number into a computer to signify that they had applied. What started to get to me though were my mistakes. If I mistyped the phone number, the computer would beep at me and reject the number. This opened up a world of possibilities. Did the computer already know the numbers and if so, why did they need me? Was this all a giant psychology experiment? Were they trying to see how long it would take before I went mad?

Continue reading Guest Author: Joshua Davis

Guest Author: Don Silver

Don Silver is the author of Backward-Facing Man, a novel set during the social upheavals of the 1960s and early '70s. In this note to Beatrice readers, he explains how he came to write fiction when his own life was turned end over end.

Just before my family's business collapsed, I'd separated from my wife of nineteen years, and was therefore unable to distinguish between those two great liberations. The company, the girl I married and I had, all three of us, since high school, been a strange ménage a trois--and the splitting apart was both wrenching and inevitable. We'd become as incompatible as different plaids.

The company had once been the biggest and most innovative in its little field, but by the 1980s, was in precipitous decline. I was named President & CEO the same year a vicious family feud was settled for a lot of money, money that was sorely needed to modernize the business. We tried our hardest, but after seven years, the bank modified our loan agreement, hired a turnaround manager and insisted we offer up the company for sale.

The breakup of the marriage was more my doing, or undoing, depending on how you look at it. I was almost forty. My ambition had fizzled and seeing my diminishing chances of being an accomplished athlete, tycoon or virtuoso guitarist humbled, and then hobbled, me, which I'm sure made me a lot less attractive to my wife. I had elaborate fantasies of spending my days reading and writing poetry, activities which I'd forsaken, along with romanticism, in my late teens. I was exhausted from being the sole breadwinner supporting my wife and four children and I was either foolish or clever enough to tell her that. I will spare you the details of our deliberations, the separation, and the reaction of our children, except to say I was fitted with a mouth guard by my dentist and advised by a wincing physician to take as much Xanax as I needed. Really, he told me. Go ahead.

It was under those circumstances that I started writing a novel.

Continue reading Guest Author: Don Silver

New York Times Nonsense

Hi-Pearl posting again, because, well, because it had to be said.

I don’t usually read Wednesday’s, New York Times’ Dining and Wine section, but a piece titled “Kugel Unraveled,” was brought to my attention by a friend. In the way that most articles on Hasidism or Yiddish (see Walter Grimes, “To Provoke in Yiddish, Try `How Are You’,” also published in the Times on Wednesday) usually are, this piece, too, is sentimentally nostalgic and centered on nonsensical inaccuracies. Desperate to entertain, Joan Nathan quotes Professor Allan Nadler, who should know better, saying that, “According to Hasidic interpretations of Kabbalah mysticism, kugel has special powers.”

Though Nadler may have attended what’s known as a Rebbe’s tish (or table), he misinterpreted the ritual, because he goes on to say, "Clearly the spiritual high point of the meal is the offering of the kugel... At that moment the rabbi has the power to bestow health and food, and even to help couples conceive.”

The FACTS: When during the meal, the rabbi passes food to a guest, especially when he does so by name, whether it is a piece of gefilte fish or challah or kugel, the honor is in the regard for that person, in the rabbi’s remembering him in this special way. These individualized honors are often followed by a more general one, in which the rabbi offers a larger piece of, say, bread, and those near enough to reach it, tear off a bite for themselves and pass the rest on to others. The food itself is treasured only for what it is: a gift from the holy rebbe himself.

More on the sloppiness of NY Times reporting and reporters: If I were a psychotherapist, I might be tempted to write a paper on the psychology of Judith Miller, in other words, her need to accept punishment and go to jail even after, read again, AFTER, her source had let her off the hook a year ago, according to said source. Her sin? Misleading articles about long-absent weapons of mass destruction that cited as reliable sources close to, and often paid by, the Bush administration.

Guest Author: Chris Grabenstein

Chris Grabenstein and I went through the same Book Promotion 101 workshop earlier this year so we'd know what to do when our debut books came out this fall--and, yes, guest blogging's one of the tips we picked up! Believe me, I'm more than happy to help, because Chris is a fun guy: I like him a lot, and I think you will, too. His novel, Tilt A Whirl, is the first in a series of mysteries set in a coastal New Jersey town with a seedy amusement park, so during the lunch break, I told him, "Dude, you totally have to call the next one Wall of Death." Turns out the second one will be Mad Mouse, but I'm positive he's going to come around to my way of thinking eventually... Before he turned to novel writing, Chris worked in advertising--was hired by James Patterson, in fact--and invented Trojan Man.

The Dog Finished My Homework
by Chris Grabenstein

A lot of writers mention their dogs in their bios.

I guess it helps foster a romantic notion of the writer as this dreamy, solitary soul crunching through the leaf-strewn forest with his faithful companion in a perfect L.L. Bean moment of authorial contemplation. I find it corny and swore I'd never mention my dog in my book jacket bio if I ever got published.

Then Buster, my Beagle-mix mutt, came up with the idea for my first murder mystery, Tilt A Whirl.

Well, not the idea--the structure.

He's the one who first said, "You need a Watson!"

Continue reading Guest Author: Chris Grabenstein

Readings & Talks

Up there at the B&N podium, looking out at an audience of, largely, friends and family who already know the book, I couldn’t help feeling embarrassed by it all and wondered why I, why any of us writers, do this. And though I am very grateful for friends who do show up, especially friends who have attended more than one reading, still, if I could look into the future, that is, if I were psychic, I’d hope to see that bookstore readings, meetings with the author, staged Q&A’s, or whatever variation these public events come in, will become a thing of the ridiculous past, and that books not authors will make their way to individual readers who will once again read in privacy and solitude, without the author's spoken voice in their ears.

The week is drawing to a close and with it my postings for Beatrice. It has been fun, as always. And now, with deadlines for writer’s grants, awards, and fellowships looming, with the New Yorker festival gathering steam, and the academic semester already in full swing, not much fiction will be written in the next week or so, which should mean that the muses will be more accessible than usual. Therefore, I turn back to my novel-in-progress and hope to find wings.

Na Nach Nachman of Uman in the Landscape

In Israel, in the streets of Jerusalem, on bus stops and buildings in Tel Aviv, at checkpoints in Jenin, the stuttering mantra, "Na Nach Nachman of Uman," appears as colorful grafitti (see it at www.pbase.com/abbarich/na_na_nachman). The legend surrounding this mantra is intriguingly absurd in the way Hasidic writings often are:

Some eighty years ago, at the age of 17, a teenager named Yisroel Ber Odessa became enamored of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, an early 19th century Hasidic master, writer, and charismatic whose interrupted tale inspires The Seventh Beggar. Disturbed by their son’s strange obsession, Ber Odessa’s parents banished him from their home, which depressed the young man. In an effort to cheer him up, several of his friends penned a letter and signed it "Na Nach Nachman of Uman," a kind of stutter of Nachman’s name. Ber Odessa considered the letter a genuine missive from Nachman, accepted the stuttering signature as a mantra, and persisted in his belief even after his friends confessed that they had authored the letter as a prank. When Ber Odessa became a spiritual teacher in Tiberius, his young students adopted their teacher’s mantra as their own and started broadcasting it in graffiti format. The uplifting spirituality taught by Ber Odessa came to be associated with Nachman, and the ubiquitous mantra continues to proliferate in the form of this graphic populist art.

I will be reading from The Seventh Beggar tonight at 7:30 at B&N at 8th Street and 6th Avenue.

Authors Lounging

My friend Patricia (author of the very sexy and musical Mambo Peligroso) and I were overdue for one of our regular lounge sessions, and although the timing wasn’t right--we usually meet at 3 in the afternoon since we’re both writers without regular jobs (also without regular salaries) and this should be one of the perks--because Patricia didn’t get out of work until 6 and was tired after a long day, we met anyway. This time we went to the lounge of The Hudson Hotel, located precisely at the halfway point between us, and caught up on books, bags, boyfriends, then went straight from the b’s to p, for psychics, because Patricia had not only had a reading done, she was also advised to become a psychic herself and finance the writing of her next project with the proceeds.

Here’s what we could have been, but weren’t, doing: We could have attended the “Lolita at 50” event at the Miller Theatre at Columbia University, or heard Neil Gaiman talk about Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange… at the Thalia. This brought up the question of whether writers should attend readings, read the NYTBR, Amazon rankings and customer reviews. One ICM agent’s advice to his client, a young Hollywood actress, goes something like this:

Racehorses wear blinkers. They don’t look to the left or right at the other horses. They’re focused only on their own singular path to glory.

Of course, writers are not racehorses, or Hollywood actresses.

I was happier when I published Monkey King (1997), Patricia said, since I didn’t yet know about Amazon rankings and reviews. I could still focus, not on sales, but on the goodness of having the book published, of having completed a project.

The Amazon customer reviews, we both agree, should be abolished since they’re rigged either way. The positive reviews are written by family and friends (and some writers have more than others), the negative ones by the School of Resentment made up of ex-boyfriends, ex-students, writers who couldn’t finish or publish their manuscripts. In my case, the reviewers are also resentful young women who have either found religion or can’t get away from it, and much of the writing is confused and misinformed. The good reader reading for the right reasons is not desperate for the public forum that Amazon provides, and, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, Amazon does not screen for inappropriate comments, plot details revealed, etc.

On the NYTBR, Brian Morton (A Window Across the River) wrote that everyone is happier when he doesn’t read it. I read the book reviews, Patricia says, when I am about to or have just published. But the NYTBR has changed. It used to be worthy reading. I used to think of it as a weekend treat and read it cover to cover and came away feeling that I had learned something about literature.

I agree. Given what it has become, the Book Review is now merely a “book announcer” and should be referred to as the NYTBA.

The New Yorker’s Books in Brief section is still okay, Patricia says, but I can no longer read John Updike on other writers. He’s gotten so strange.

He’s gone off the rails, I agree. Last year, in his review of Alter’s translation of the Five Books of Moses, Updike ridiculed the Bible for its archaisms (as if the New Testament is free of them) and criticized the Jews for the Israel-Palestine conflict, neither of which had anything to do with the translation at hand. Perhaps he was on his third margarita and tipsy, as we are just now, but the piece had, dare I say it, a generous dollop of old-fashioned wasp anti-Semitism. Astonishingly, this went unremarked.

This morning, Patricia wrote: It did my heart good. A little lounging is better than none. I think of our time together as one long lounge, and last night was a small piece of it.

Celebrating the Reader

It’s the beginning of my week as Beatrice.com co-host, and with the paperback of The Seventh Beggar just out, I’ll begin with this letter from a reader (with her permission):

Dear Pearl Abraham,

Aside from learning from, and loving, your latest novel, "The Seventh Beggar," I have to tell you how startlingly weird it was for me to reach the part on the "Winterfox" Festival in the Berkshires, including the reproduced schedule with Sugar Hill Records' artists featured on the main stage. I understand your inclusion of a music festival, the seven-day creation myth recreated in this way, using fantasy and reality, side by side. What a strange collision of cultures, indeed.

However, my personal interest has to do with Sugar Hill Records, itself, which is based in Durham, North Carolina, my hometown. The founder/owner of Sugar Hill Records is an old friend of mine, and I actually worked for him briefly some years back. How could I resist alerting him to the mention of Sugar Hill in your new novel, which he found to be a "chasidic shocker"! He immediately went out & bought your book, and says all your information is accurate about the former Berkshire Mountain Bluegrass Festival. He then got in touch with the director of the Festival, who is a friend of his, to see if she knew about this citation in your book. He just emailed me that he heard back from the director, who says she doesn't know you.

So, I'm just writing to tell you that we're all curious about your choice of this Festival, and your interest in Sugar Hill Records. Needless to say, we're delighted, but would like to know if you've been to the Festival; if you know any of the performers. I loved "The Romance Reader," too.

Thanks for your time.

Susan Naumoff
(of Latvian & Belarus Jewish heritage)

I have a farmhouse in Ancramdale, NY (Columbia County) and every summer, in the third week of July, the Rothvoss hilltop several miles north of me becomes a temporary village, with tents and teepees and parked campers just visible over the treeline. For days leading up to the festival, the not-altogether-welcome traffic on my rural road (which normally gets about a car an hour) comes in an assortment of RVs, SUVs, campers, old cadillacs, Vanagons, etc. I was writing The Seventh Beggar, with its themes of creation, origin myths, originality, and storytelling, one July, when once again the festival got going and I was thinking about the attraction to such events, the way it harks back to Mircea Eliade’s (Myth and Reality) ideas about the human need for re-enactment rituals of our shared origin myths. One thing led to another, and the local bluegrass festival made its way into my novel. Since the Hasidic characters of the book aren’t bluegrass musicians they take the idea and run with it, in other words, they transform the bluegrass festival into a Hasidic storytelling festival.

The first summer I spent in Ancramdale, I won a free pass to the festival from Oblong Books in Millerton, and got to see and hear Alison Krauss, among others. I now have a CD collection of bluegrass music, and a favorite, Dolly Parton’s Halos and Horns, is from Sugar Hill Records. I love her bluegrass rendition of “Stairway to Heaven,” and play it, according to Stephen (my Mr. Beatrice), much too often.
----------------------

I will be reading from The Seventh Beggar on Wednesday, September 21st, 7:30pm, at B&N, 8th Street at 6th Aveneue. Introducing me will be Charles Honart, another reader (now a friend) who contacted me, rather than the usual editor or novelist/friend.

Guest Author: Rosemarie Santini

Rosemarie Santini is a poet, journalist, and novelist who has lectured for more than a decade at The New School. She's been published in Playboy and other major magazines and is the author of a nonfiction book called The Secret Fire: How Women Live Their Sexual Fantasies. I mention it because her latest novel, Sex and Sensibility: The Adventures of a Jane Austen Addict offers a fictional foray into similar territory, heavy on the romance. In this essay, she thinks about why she and her character just can't get Austen out of their heads.

Jane Addiction
by Rosemarie Santini

I've always been a Jane Austen fan. In the last decade, my creative writing classes have been populated by young Sex in the City gals who also love Jane Austen. Invariably, the contrast between our present era and Jane's comes up in discussion, and I'm constantly surprised at the similarity in courtship rituals and romantic dilemmas.

That's what inspired me to write Sex & Sensibility. I'll be reading from the book at an upcoming meeting of the Jane Austen Society. The theme of the meeting is: "Is it possible to lead a Jane Austen-inspired life?"

Well, can we?

Continue reading Guest Author: Rosemarie Santini

Guest Author: Susan Swan

Susan Swan is the author of the acclaimed novel The Wives of Bath, was turned into the Sundance Festival hit Lost and Delirious with Piper Perabo as a prep school girl with a crush on her classmate that just won't go away. Her latest, What Casanova Told Me, starts with the fictional diary of the lover he takes on one last grand adventure, then jumps headlong into the present day, as that woman's descendant searches for the end of that story while sorting through complications of her own. In this essay for Beatrice readers, she explains what she--along with so many others--sees in the life and legend of Europe's greatest lover.

Locating Myself in the Casanova Craze
by Susan Swan

I didn't notice the Casanova craze until I was halfway through my own novel about the celebrated Venetian. I'd scoffed when an aging family member recommended Casanova's 12-volume memoir, History of My Life, and said the passage describing Casanova's escape from the prison in the Ducal Palace was the most gripping escape narrative he'd ever read.

Somewhat disdainfully, I took away the memoir and began to read. All I knew about Casanova was his reputation as the most notorious rake the world has ever known, one of those playboys your mother told you to avoid. I'd also seen Fellini's movie, Casanova, which cemented the womanizer myth. This film doesn't show the intellectual and literary side of Casanova, the European man of letters who had translated the Iliad, written poems and operas and essays and engaged in scientific discussions.

I read most of the 12 volumes of Casanova's History of My Life and decided my family member had been too stinting in his praise. Casanova had written brilliantly about his escape from the Leads, the famous Venetian prison. But as far as I was concerned, History of My Life was one of the great works of Western literature. Soon I was writing my own version of Casanova's tale, a novel about him returning as an old man to Venice for a last look at the city he loves and running off to travel in the Mediterranean with Asked For Adams, a descendant of Puritans and cousin to president John Quincy Adams.

A belief that your own book is unique shores up the creative trance writers need to work. But somewhere in the midst of writing my novel, I stuck my head above my desktop and noticed that I shared my Casanova obsession with a host of fellow authors. By last count, at least eleven other books have dealt with Casanova in recent years.

Continue reading Guest Author: Susan Swan

Guest Author: Eva Etzioni-Halevy

Austrian-born Eva Etzioni-Halevy hid from the Germans as a small child and then emigrated with her family to Palestine after the war. She's turned to fiction writing after a long career as a sociologist; for her first novel, The Song of Hannah, she draws inspiration from the Bible and the unusual family described in the First Book of Samuel. (If this was Heeb, I'd probably be calling this "Samuel Has Two Mommies," but not because it has anything to do with that--where do you people get these ideas?) Hannah's gone from the original story by the second chapter, and Etzioni-Halevy's other female protagonist, Pninah, gets even less mention, so the novel does a lot of imaginative filling in the blanks. In this original essay for Beatrice, she explains why.

Meeting two Aggrieved Women in the Bible and…

an Emotionally Tormented Prophet
by Eva Etzioni-Halevy

How would a woman react if she was unable to bear children, and her husband consoled himself by marrying another woman and having children with her? How would a woman respond if she found that, although she had borne her husband sons and daughters, he did not love her, but loved another woman and married her? And how would the two women--the barren and the unloved one--feel if they shared the same husband?

These are the questions that inspired my writing of The Song of Hannah. For this is the stuff the story of Hannah and Pninah, on which the novel is based, is made of. I had heard that story each year as it was read on the High Holidays in the synagogue, and each time these questions popped up in my mind.

It occurred to me that the grief of the barren woman, Hannah, was temporary; it dissolved the moment her son, the prophet Samuel, was born. By contrast, the unloved one, Pninah, was permanently and deeply injured. So I had little doubt that she would find a way to get back at both her rival and her husband.

So I decided to champion Pninah's cause by writing a novel in which I would depict her hurt, her enmity toward Hannah and the revenge she wrought on her husband in the arms of a lover. But the heroines and heroes of the novel-in-the-making rebelled. They took over the story, and what started out as a tale of rivalry and revenge, gradually turned into a tale of redemption through friendship and love. In its course, both Hannah and Pninah are revealed as women of courage who stand up for each other's and for their own interests in a male-dominated society.

Continue reading Guest Author: Eva Etzioni-Halevy

Ginger Strand @ Macdowell, Redux

Ginger Strand, the author of Flight, sent me a "postcard" from the Macdowell Colony last week. That guest essay is now the second-highest ranking item when you Google her name, right behind her own home page! I'm delighted to get another note from her about what's been going on since then...

If a tree falls at MacDowell and everyone sees it, does it mean anything? That is what we had to ask ourselves last night.

Observed with due eloquence at dinner--"Oh my god, a tree just fell down!"--the downed tree was quickly surrounded by agog artists. A huge and stately white pine, the tree had divided itself at a rather low crotch, and what looked like one half of it had snapped off and crashed to the ground. We gaped. Trees are really very big when you suddenly see them horizontal.

I had been writing about deforestation for two weeks, and couldn't help but feel a flicker of fear--could I be personally responsible? Could my 27 pages on the decimation of white pines and silver firs have summoned a malignant spirit of tree-felling that was going to work on the Peterborough woods? Other explanations were floated: the tree was being choked by vines; lightning had struck it; illness had rotted it for years.

We couldn't help but speculate about what would have happened if the tree had fallen forty-eight hours earlier, on Medal Day, when a donor family had been spotted happily lunching in the sylvan poison-ivy grove beneath that very tree, oblivious to the fell doom poised just above them.

Earlier this summer, in Michigan, I came upon a hawk taking flight with a rabbit in its claws. Knowing the ancients would not fail to interpret such an obvious prognostication, I had muddled for weeks about this sign's meaning. Would my plane home fail to take flight for lack of wind? Should I inform my pilot? What did the bunny stand for, and what the hawk? Now, added to the hawk-bunny conundrum, there was the tree conundrum.

And then something funny happened. Slowly we drifted away from the tree. We finished dessert. We had postprandial cigarettes. We went to the library and watched a film made by one of our number. We laughed. We came back to Colony Hall and discussed sexual politics. We played a little pool. Eventually we drifted back to our studios or bedrooms to sleep, or read, or work.

The tree, we all seemed to realize, was a sign, but it wasn't a prognostication. It was more like a reminder of something we already knew, something built into the spirit of MacDowell. Expect the unexpected. Admire the world. It doesn't always work the way you think it will. Pay attention and you will see that sometimes water flows up, the sky falls, trees lie down at your feet. Sometimes you speak in the forest, and someone else hears you.

Ginger Strand @ Macdowell

When Ginger Strand told me she was going away to the Macdowell Colony for the month of August to work on the followup to her excellent debut novel, Flight, I begged her to send me some sort of dispatch I run here, like my friend N.M. Kelby's letter from Sewanee. So I was pretty excited to see Ginger's email turn up in my inbox last night.

Artists! Woods! Shooting stars! That is the fabulous concurrence to which I was recently exposed here at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where I am happily spending August.

Somehow word spread about the meteor showers. Rumor flitted from table to table at dinner, hot on the heels of the news that a certain novelist had been given extra sausages. Stories of stellar resplendence rolled with the 3-ball down the pool table. No one could quite explain it, but the attempts were creative: earth had rolled into a projectile meteor belt; the planet was tilting on its axis toward cosmic chaos, one of the gods had ashed a cigarette. In any case, there were shooting stars up there, and several of us decided to go to the golf course across the street to watch them. By 10 p.m., the appointed congregation time, word had spread further and the outing had grown--in the way colony outings often do--to the size of a Roman legion. We waited for last minute bathroom runs, then phalanxed onto the darkened road.

Immediate controversy arose over the use of flashlights. One of our number--a fabulously gung-ho sculptor--had vowed not to use her flashlight unless absolutely necessary. MacDowell has been impressively resistant to lighting, and as everyone knows, the woods are lovely, dark and deep. Going lightless can be challenging. However, one can usually follow either the hump of the rounded gravel roads, or the thin, jagged line of sky that parallels it, finding guidance, as humans will, either above or below.

In the absence of light, however, a Greek chorus of doom began summoning the specters of werewolves, ax-murderers and passing Volvos, and a few flashlights were duly, if grudgingly, engaged.

Continue reading Ginger Strand @ Macdowell

Guest Author: Leora Skolkin-Smith

Leora Skolkin-Smith is the author of Edges, a powerful family drama and coming-of-age story set in 1963 Jerusalem. It's not only her first novel, but the first book published by Glad Day Books, a new imprint founded by Grace Paley and Robert Nichols that aims "to bridge the gap between imaginative literature and political articles and criticism." Skolkin-Smith has previously discussed the novel's backstory at one of M. J. Rose's excellent blogs, and given readers a glimpse inside her friendship with Evan Hunter at the other, but here she reveals a bit more about why her story could only be told in the form of a novel.

Writing Towards "The Open Destiny of Life"
by Leora Skolkin-Smith

About five years ago, I was struggling to pull together three novels. What they all had in common was a sprawling, unmanageable length and structure, but a use of language in their telling which was, on the other hand, compressed, condensed, and urgently meaningful. Though some editors and agents had responded favorably to the "writing" in all three, the structure remained incomprehensibly complicated to them.

In "A Conversation With My Father," Grace Paley wrote:

"'I would like you to write a simple story just once more,' he (my father) says, 'the kind Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov, the kind you used to write. Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next.' I say, 'Yes, why not? That's possible.' I want to please him, though I don't remember writing that way. I would like to try to tell such a story, if he means the kind that begins: 'There was a woman...' followed by plot, the absolute line between two points which I've always despised, not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life."

I had the gift of studying with Grace Paley as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence and then, later, as a graduate student. My arrival at her office with mounting pages all in chaos never seemed to daunt her. For Grace, it was a plight which could be made sufferable by some inner strength a writer needed those years to develop anyway. I admired Grace's work so much but I could not write a short story. I was stuck with the novel form because, simply, I could not tell my stories in shorter versions.

Continue reading Guest Author: Leora Skolkin-Smith

Guest Author: Beverly Gray

If you've been reading this site for any length of time, you know I've written a book about 1970s Hollywood called The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane that comes out this November. The movies wouldn't have been what they were in that decade without the guiding spirit of Roger Corman, and though I didn't stumble onto Beverly Gray's biography, Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches and Driller Killers, I'm sure I'll be dropping anecdotes from it in interviews this fall (fully credited, of course). After earning her PhD in American literature at UCLA, Beverly spent nearly a decade in the film industry, much of it with Corman (as she explains below). She teaches screenwriting at UCLA Extension, covers the entertainment world for the Hollywood Reporter, and has also written a biography of the most recent of Corman's protegés to win the Oscar, Ron Howard. So when Jimmy McDonough's Big Bosoms and Square Jaws showed up, I thought she'd be a natural to talk about the other great pioneer of the '60s/'70s exploitation flick, Russ Meyer. And she didn't disappoint...

The Lowdown on Two Low-Budget Guys
by Beverly Gray

Three decades ago, my pal Stan Berkowitz applied for a job with low-rent movie maven Roger Corman. He hoped to parlay his UCLA film degree into a chance to make biker movies and women-in-prison flicks for Corman's New World Pictures. By coincidence, I was up for the same Corman job. I got hired, and Stan went to work for Russ Meyer.

Why did I--and not Stan--get the gig as Roger Corman's assistant? At the time I hired on, I was completing my PhD dissertation on the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov. That tells you something about Roger Corman: he's impressed by intellectual credentials. And he likes to hire women, not only as eye-candy in front of the cameras but also as the brains behind them. Gale Anne Hurd, who graduated from being Corman's assistant to producing The Terminator, explained to me the basic Corman logic: women are smarter, work cheaper, and are more loyal.

While I was learning the ABCs of low-budget filmmaking from Roger Corman, my friend Stan survived Russ Meyer's Supervixens. On the set he saw plenty of women, most of them flaunting the audacious "Guns of Navarone" bazooms that were Meyer's stock in trade. But on the production team there was not a female to be found, and the pneumatic starlets were strictly off-limits. Meyer made movies to feed his personal obsessions. He wanted his crews, like himself, in a permanent state of arousal.

Continue reading Guest Author: Beverly Gray

Guest Author: Lisa Williams

Letters to Virginia Woolf contains a half-dozen epistolary essays in which Lisa Williams, a literature professor at Ramapo University, addresses the doyenne of modernism on subjects like war and memory, drawing out Woolf's perspective as she elaborates her own. (Williams knows Woolf pretty well; her previous work was a book-length study comparing Woolf to Toni Morrison.) In this essay for Beatrice readers, she talks about the book's beginnings as hope clung to in the aftermath of tragedy.

A Common Interest Unites Us
by Lisa Williams

After 9/11, I returned to Virginia Woolf's words from her pacifist manifesto, Three Guineas: "A common interest unites us; it is one world, one life." She dared to dream of a world without war, a world where race, nationality, history, and culture did not divide people. For so many years, I had been reading and studying Woolf. I still remember at sixteen years old, when I picked up Mrs. Dalloway and read through it. I did not understand a single word, but loved the rhythm and melodies of language moving along the pages, words dancing inside me.

During this post-9/11 time, I keep coming back to Mrs. Dalloway. For it is here, in the prophetic voice of her shell-shocked character, Septimus Warren Smith, that Woolf foresees the horrors of the twenty first century, and the senseless loss of young life from war.

Continue reading Guest Author: Lisa Williams

Guest Author: Eric Dezenhall

Eric Dezenhall's latest novel, Shakedown Beach, just came out in paperback. Like his first two novels, Money Wanders and Jackie Disaster, it brings a little bit of Joe Klein (in his novelist mode) and a little bit of Carl Hiaasen to the less savory corners of New Jersey, where the difference between organized crime and organize politics can be merely a matter of perception. It's a field Dezenhall knows a bit about from his day job running Dezenhall Resources, a D.C.-based crisis management firm. So I asked him to explain just what his work experience brings to the writing table, and he very kindly obliged.

Fictionalizing a Career in Damage Control
by Eric Dezenhall

My day job is damage control. I'm hired to make bad news go away. It's not easy to do because our culture demands bad news. In the twenty-plus years I've been defusing public relations bombs, I've noticed that as media crises--Martha Stewart, Enron, Kobe Bryant, Whitewater--have proliferated, so has America's evangelical belief in the spin doctor. That's where my novels come in. I chronicle spin--as a crime. Whereas conventional mysteries are whodunits, my books are essentially howdunits, exploring how massive deceptions are executed.

Americans believe we are being "spun" by powerful, invisible forces. The spin doctor has become our culture's Merlin -- a pixie with transforming powers. I see it differently. I believe you can only spin a public that wants to be spun, that deceptions happen not only with our complicity, but with our active participation.

Each of my novels features a client who believes redemption comes in the form of publicity. I write about high-end sociopaths. Gutter scoundrels, like the ones Elmore Leonard writes about, wind up dead or in jail, but talented sociopaths end up running corporations or in the Senate. They don't get there by accident, they get there because we, the public, put them there.

Continue reading Guest Author: Eric Dezenhall

Guest Author: Jackie K. Cooper

I first learned about Jackie K. Cooper when Karen Spears Zacharias met him at a literary festival in Bowling Green earlier this year. When he dropped me a line a few weeks ago after having seen Karen's write-up, Jackie mentioned that he was going to the ceremony for the Georgia Author of the Year Awards, and I said, sure, I'd love to hear about that. Halfway Home is his third batch of tales drawn from his life's "journey as a gentle Southern man" (to quote the title of his first), and focuses primarily on reflections from the mid-life point of fifty. Here's his tongue-in-cheek take on getting (some) home state recognition for it.

It's Not Whether You Win Or Lose...
by Jackie K. Cooper

My most recent book, Halfway Home, was nominated in the memoir category. Now to have a book nominated is an honor, at least until you look at the fact that any book can be self-nominated or nominated by your publisher; as long as the entry fee is paid, you too can be a nominee. But why quibble, my book was nominated and this required me to drive to Atlanta for a reception, followed by a dinner, followed by an awards ceremony. All of this was held at the Georgia Tech Campus, quickly located by my agile mind and dear old Mapquest.

At the reception all of the nominees and their spouses or significant others mingled and chatted each other up. I found a spot and propped my body on a large chair in which a gentleman was seated, carrying on a conversation. I didn’t realize how much I was leaning on the chair until this man arose to greet someone and the chair toppled over sending me falling to the floor. I immediately sprang to my feet with amazing grace for someone who is "halfway home."

Thinking perhaps no one had noticed, I quickly resumed my conversation with Patti Callahan Henry, author and fellow nominee for Losing the Moon. That was when I heard someone yell out, "No more drinks for him!"

Continue reading Guest Author: Jackie K. Cooper

Guest Author: N.M. Kelby

I got a lot of positive feedback about N.M. Kelby's's BookExpo reports, so I was pleasantly surprised to receive her post-event reflections. If you enjoyed her stories as much as I did, there's good news: the experience has won her over completely, and now she's blogging! So look for all sorts of observations from her in the near future...but for now, here's what she learned last weekend...

LATER...The thing about BEA is that, when you come right down to it, it's all about wisdom: the wisdom of the business, the wisdom of the authors who speak at the events, and the wisdom, or lack thereof, that can be found in the books themselves.

I'm writing this missive a few days after the show has ended. I am home with my hardworking staff, my beloved dogs, and my big screen TV. Tonight it is the NBA playoffs. Even though I also like Detroit, it is my secret hope that Tim Duncan, whose skill, athleticism, work ethic, and genuine decency are unsurpassed, will lead the Spurs to victory. He's a good guy. I like it when good guys win.

The thing I've learned about basketball is that good players train incessantly to be at the top of their game. But great players, like Mr. Duncan, not only train, but study the wisdom of those who have come before. They understand the kindness and grace and dignity of Dr. J and take it to heart. They play the game as if it is more than just entertainment. To them, it is about how teamwork and fair play can illuminate the human spirit. The great players are living proof that man is a creature that can attain a certain mortal perfection. They can hit an impossible 3-point shot, while in traffic, from center court. Or hang in the air forever like Jordan, an angel levitating. The great ones take the wisdom they have been given all through their life and manifest it.

It's a lot like being a writer.

Continue reading Guest Author: N.M. Kelby

N.M. Kelby @ BookExpo, pt. 3

People have been walking up to me all weekend saying they've spotted N.M. Kelby making the scene, and letting me know they're looking forward to reading these dispatches. And I've been looking forward to them, too!

Today, I have filled my room with flowers as a reminder that life is good. This sounds more opulent than it is. My room is very small. Doesn't take much to fill it. I've bought four dozen pink-tipped white roses and six pink peonies, as big as a baby's heads. They are stuffed into a garbage can filled with water. It's not elegant. It's the best I can do.

But they are real and tangible––and there's no hype. The beauty of them is clear. My mouse-sized room is filled with their soft perfume.

After three days at the convention, I have come to love this room. It is quiet. No one is hawking anything here. Strangers with 'Free Hugs!' signs are nowhere to be found. Curious George is back at Javitis glad-handing some one else. Sanity prevails.

All my life, I've been a writer. I'm not much good at anything else. I tend to be too empathetic–-that's not exactly a quality that Corporate America looks for. So, when I'm sitting at the luncheon and Doris Kearns Goodwin speaks of her new book about Abraham Lincoln, I am overcome. I find myself weeping. I feel like an idiot. But, I am overwhelmed by the idea that Lincoln was considered by all, even himself, as being too empathetic. I understand. I have spent the past days listening to writers and editors trying to put their delicate love for a book into a four-word phrase they can shout at you as you pass. It is painful.

Lincoln once saved a group of wild pigs, because, as he said, he could no longer take their pain. After three days at BEA, I understand.

Continue reading N.M. Kelby @ BookExpo, pt. 3

N.M. Kelby's Further BookExpo Adventures

The second installment of N. M. Kelby's dispatches, covering the exhibition by day and the parties by night...

DAY TWO: On the second day of BEA my new loves gave to me:

One plastic squeaking tugboat.
One lollypop wrapped in a condom.
Two ESPN poker decks.
One Statue of Liberty crown.
Six useful book bags.
Two yoga t-shirts.
Forty-eight advance readers' copies.
Forty-eight business cards from pleasant publicists.
One fountain pen with built-in lava lamp technology.

And a fat yellow ceramic pig bank.

Free. 'Free' has to be the most frightening word in America when you have 100,000 people, a city of people, crammed into one place and needing to use the bathroom and/or eat but they won't because there is free stuff everywhere and they don't want to miss it.

Free. Nothing is ever free. Each rhinestone crown that you are given by the people who are publishing a book about beauty queens brings with it a cost. But, hey, I look good in a tiara. And it is the perfect fashion accessory--just ask Queen Elizabeth. So, I'm keeping it. I'll worry about my mortal soul later.

Continue reading N.M. Kelby's Further BookExpo Adventures

N.M. Kelby Hits the BookExpo Party Circuit

When N. M. Kelby volunteered to come to BookExpo and go to all the parties so she could write about them for Beatrice, I immediately said yes. Not just because I like Theater of the Stars so much, and I can't wait for Whale Season to come out next spring, but because she writes such great emails I couldn't wait to see what she'd have to say. And because it was a perfect excuse for Mrs. Beatrice and I to meet her! (After the party she mentions here, Nicole hightailed it over to the tail end of the litblogger reception, then the three of us piled into a cab, in pursuit of Sarah Weinman, Pearl Abraham, and Bella Stander, on our way to the party for Akashic's latest Brooklyn Noir anthology...)

DAY ONE: Alice. I feel like Alice tumbling through the looking glass. DRINK ME. I am too small when I enter the Javits Center. Steel cuts across the ceiling several stories above my head. Everybody is getting ready for the show. Scurrying. Running up and down the flights of frozen escalators carrying boxes of books, looking worried. "Could somebody turn these damn things on?" a woman shouts to no one in particular. Security makes its way towards her. Her voice is so small in the cavernous building, it doesn't even echo.

On the fourth floor, tucked away in a corner of the building, is the pressroom. The Journalists, a tribe that I've been a member of for nearly 30 years, sit in the huge room at table rounds and don't speak to each other much. Their cell phones chirp rap music, Chopin, and one plays Queen's "We are The Champions." The room feels like the ballroom at hotel scheduled for demolition. Smells like industrial cleaner. The journalists polish their 'game faces'. They look so appropriately wary, tired, and bored––it makes me feel even smaller. I write novels now mostly. I'm neither wary, nor bored, but often amazed and joyous at the texture of the world. I laugh a lot. Try to ferret out joy.

My tribe is lost to me, now. I've lost my edge. I'm Alice and the Queen and her court is playing croquet all around me.

In the Press Room there's huge windows that provide a bird's eye view of the show floor. Right now, the displays are endless and empty. Tomorrow's the big day. Show time. Tomorrow, I will be one of the thousands and thousands of novelists who make their living whispering in the dark. I'm not part of the show, I'm here as a tourist—so I'm even lower on the convention food chain. And I certainly I am not John Irving, Or E.L. Doctorow. Or Billy Collins. I am small. So small. Smaller than Alice.

But the great thing about BEA is that even though I am so tiny that I cannot be seen in the sea of titles, I can go to a party. I can't be John Irving, but thanks to my publishers at Random House, I can eat a shrimp and talk about the weather in Syracuse with him—and I'm not even from Syracuse.

Continue reading N.M. Kelby Hits the BookExpo Party Circuit

Guest Author: Steve Leveen

Steve Leveen is the founder of Levenger, the company that specializes in "tools for serious readers" like lap tables, bookweights, and stands. But he's also the author of The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life, which gets at the mission behind all those tools. It's actually a new mission for Leveen--or, rather, a mission with newfound fervor. In this essay, he explains how it all came about.

Starting a Well-Read Life
by Steve Leveen

You would think that someone who's made his living selling "tools for serious readers" would be a serious reader himself. Far from it.

My wife, Lori, and I started Levenger in 1987 as a catalog of tools for serious readers. But until two years ago, I was barely a reader. Raising a family and building a business left me too busy for books--or so I thought. Then one day, time-starved as usual, I decided to listen to an audiobook by Roger Horchow, a fellow direct-mail merchant, to pick up some tips.

The book was informative. But the experience was transforming.

Continue reading Guest Author: Steve Leveen

Guest Author: Karen Heuler

Karen Heuler is the author of the short story collection The Other Door and the novel The Soft Room. Her most recent novel, Journey to Bom Goody, follows a man as he tries to deliver electricity and mass media to the natives along the Amazon River. I wondered how much on-site research Heuler had done, so I went ahead and asked her. New Yorkers will be able to hear her read from the novel on Wednesday, June 1st, at Pier 63 (I'm guessing at the tiki bar).

Journey to the Amazon
by Karen Heuler

Jungles are big surprise packages for me. I went to the Amazon in 1990, a time when the Shining Path guerrillas prompted advisories against traveling in Peru. When I got to my lodge outside Iquitos, there were very few tourists, so I had a guide of my own for a while. We spent leisurely days going from one village to another, or looking for birds or plants. He pointed out trees that cured malaria, diabetes, intestinal worms, as well as leaves that held the antidotes for snake bites, tree saps that hardened into casts for broken bones, and vines that contained pure water. He insisted we both look straight ahead when we paddled past a lagoon with a monster in it and described a one-legged devil that turns into the enormous blue morpho butterfly. I saw birds that made nests like great drooping socks and spiders the size of dinner plates. I heard frogs that sounded like rattling bones and birds that sounded like police whistles. I whistled like he did to attract the pink river dolphins, and I swung from vines, shot blow guns, got chigger bites like rows of bracelets around my ankles.

Continue reading Guest Author: Karen Heuler

Guest Author: Joy Nicholson

I met Joy Nicholson eight years ago when she had just published her first novel, The Tribes of Palos Verde. We got back into touch a few months back, which is how I found out she'd spent a couple years in Mexico with her husband, where she'd first started working on The Road to Esmeralda, which should be showing up in your bookstore any day now. I'm looking forward to reading it--but before I do that, I guess I'll be taking her recommendation about a book that shares some of her interest in the complicated paths Americans' lives can take when they search for meaning abroad...

The Word on And the Word Was
by Joy Nicholson

One of the most beautiful things in the world is finding a great book purely by chance. For instance, you happen to be in a bookstore buying a coffee table book on Egypt for your boss's birthday, when an Ed Ruscha-esque title font catches your eye. And The Word Was, purrs the title, by Bruce Bauman. It's right there on the new fiction rack.

You pick it up, intrigued, annoyed by the biblical phrase. And The Word Was seems to be about god, godlessness, quantum physics, hope, escape, fucking, New York, India, a Columbine-style massacre. You read a few sentences--and then a few more. Uh, oh--your eye catches this gravelly sentence, spoken by a Holocaust survivor, "People like you don't want to believe that I wasn't a sweet-souled mensch before Auschwitz, or a nice boychik after." You can tell this book is not going to be like other (politically correct) literary fiction books.

Of course you can't afford a gift and a new hardback novel, but, well, you don't like your boss much, and besides, you are a bookaholic. You go home. You devour the novel.

Oh, my God. My God.

Continue reading Guest Author: Joy Nicholson

Guest Author: Kris Radish

Keep your eye on Kris Radish: her fiction is already starting to show potential of Ya-Ya proportions. When I found out that she was already--after just two novels in two years--doing well enough to fill up unique weekend getaways that bring her together with her readers, I dropped her a line and asked if she'd be willing to give Beatrice the inside info. Since she had one coming up the very next weekend, she was more than happy to oblige...

Dancing Naked and as Elegantly as Possible
by Kris Radish

It sounds risky doesn't it--to dance naked with the women who read your novels but the women who read my novels know how to do it better than anyone else. And I have photos to prove it--just kidding.

The Elegant Gathering of White Snows and Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn have touched a raw and very open nerve with women across the country. The books have been called "a virus" by booksellers who see one woman come in to buy a copy and then come back days later to buy ten copies so she can send them to friends across the world. Elegant just went into its tenth printing, while Dancing is already in its seventh…since coming out this January.

Continue reading Guest Author: Kris Radish

Guest Author: Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson makes neuroscience fun and entertaining. His latest book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, explains "how today's pop culture," especially video games and television dramas, "is actually making us smarter." New Yorkers can come here him talk about the topic at SoHo's Apple Store (and since it's not a Wiley book, they can buy it there, too), but that's just the first of several tour dates. Today, though, he's letting Beatrice readers in on how the book changed radically from initial conception to publication.

How Everything Bad Got Better
by Steven Johnson

A little more than two years ago, as I was finishing up my third book, I went through a brief phase where I decided that my next project should be a "little" book--a collection of essays, perhaps loosely united by some kind of theme. I had a few longer pieces that I'd written over the past five or six years that I thought could be expanded and packaged into a book with minimal effort. I knew a collection of essays was not likely to be a huge moneymaker, but I figured it would be fun, and relatively painless, to track down all these orphaned essays and bind them together into a single volume.

Continue reading Guest Author: Steven Johnson

Guest Author: Tommy Hays

[Tommy Hays explains the origins of his latest novel, The Pleasure Was Mine. (You might also have seen Hays recently recommending a book on MoorishGirl.com, or just heard about him through the blog created by one of his writing students, Tingle Alley.)]

My wife left me for Alzheimer’s. This was the first sentence to my new novel until my editor asked that I change it, fearing that if the reader learned in the first sentence that the book was about Alzheimer's they would be turned off. The first sentence now is: My wife is gone. I like it better. It feels more open, more inclusive and suggests more. And, unlike the original sentence, it does not rely on cleverness.

Still, my editor's cautiousness reflects a fear that I encountered again and again on my long journey to publishing this novel. The manuscript had been rejected by my previous editor at another publisher because she felt people didn’t want to read about Alzheimer’s. She said people were afraid of getting it. And as my agent sent the manuscript around to other houses and other editors, many of them passed on it, because it was about Alzheimer's. Finally we found an editor willing to risk the subject matter.

Continue reading Guest Author: Tommy Hays

Guest Author: Lauren Baratz-Logsted

When Publisher's Lunch reported the sale of This Is Not Chick Lit, "a collection of original stories by America's best women writers," which is to say Francine Prose, Myla Goldberg, Vendela Vida, Aimee Bender, Curtis Sittenfeld, Jennifer Egan, and Samantha Hunt (among others), the reaction from chick-lit writers was not a happy one. Jennifer Weiner tore into the authors for "turning up their noses at their fellow women authors' more commercial efforts," particularly after several of them had signed onto the letter begging Oprah Winfrey to save contemporary fiction from oblivion (about which Jennifer is equally scornful). Lauren Baratz-Logsted let me know how she felt about the anthology as well, and asked if I'd be willing to share her thoughts with you. (Now, before we get too far into this, I should acknowledge up front that the editor of This Is Not Chick Lit, Elizabeth Merrick, is an acquaintance through my intermittent attendance of the Cupcake readings she co-directs, and I'll probably run her side of the story before too long, if she wants to tell it...) Lauren's chick-lit all the way; her third novel, A Little Change of Face, will be coming from Red Dress Ink this summer.

This Is Not Chick Lit, Eh?
by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

It's interesting to me that these women are defining their collection with a title that declares what it is not, bitch-slapping the subgenre of chick-lit while at the same time exploiting those two much-maligned words in an attention-grabbling bid that is bound to garner more notice than if they simply called the book "America's Best Women Writers," which leads me to my next point...

Continue reading Guest Author: Lauren Baratz-Logsted

Guest Author: Shyam Selvadurai

Shyam Selvadurai is the author of the novels Funny Boy and Cinnamon Gardens. In the essay that follows, he describes how he came to edit Story-Wallah, "an anthology of short fiction from South Asian writers," for a publisher in his hometown of Toronto. The collection is now available to American readers as a Mariner trade paperback, and includes a wide array of prominent authors, from Salman Rushdie and Michael Ondaatje to Monica Ali and Jhumpa Lahiri.

Stories from the Diaspora
by Shyam Selvadurai

In the fall of 2001, I was approached by Patrick Crean, the managing editor at Thomas Allen Publishers, to put together an anthology of short stories featuring South Asian writers in Canada. I proposed, instead, doing an anthology of South Asian writers from the diaspora, as this would allow me to include a number of writers I was really passionate about from North America, England, Australia, Fiji, Singapore, Malaysia, the Caribbean and Africa.

Before I began reading for the anthology, I researched library databases world-wide and was surprised to find that, despite the huge interest and popularity of South Asian fiction, no one had thought to collect short stories by these writers in this way. The few anthologies I did find were limited to a single country or cultural group or gender: Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, or Indo-Caribbean writers, South Asian women, and so on. No attempt had been made to bring these disparate parts together into a single anthology of literature from the South Asian disapora, despite the fact that most of the writers we consider "South Asian" are actually diasporic. I was very excited that I was about to create something unique.

Continue reading Guest Author: Shyam Selvadurai

Guest Author: Marc Estrin

Marc Estrin will be reading at the Greenwich Village Barnes & Noble tonight, so if this brief note about the origins of his latest novel, The Education of Arnold Hitler, gets you curious, and you live in New York City, you can check him out for yourself. The book is published by Unbridled Books, which will also be bringing his first novel, Insect Dreams, back out in trade paperback this fall.

"The Education of Arnold Hitler is a great example of how a novel can grow unexpectedly from a stupid question you ask your wife. We were driving up to Bread & Puppet one day, and from nowhere, I turned to Donna and asked her 'Wouldn't it be funny if your name were Arnold Hitler?' 'Yes,' she said, and we continued listening to 'Benito Cereno' on tape.  At that point, I was thinking Arnold Stang--a small, whiny guy with an irritating nasal stupidity. And look what happened. Never can tell.

"Maybe it was Melville-at-the-birth, but Billy Budd soon signed on as a leitmotif, the inevitable drawing down of dark by light. So Arnold had to be "a handsome sailor," had to meet his evil Claggarts--and he does. His adventures, physical and spiritual, flow from those encounters. Another literary nudge here: the book originally had a terrible ending--Arnold torched to death by neo-Nazis for not living up to his name.  But I'd been indulging in a Dickens orgy for the past year (I never read him before!), and felt...chastized, I guess, by his generosity toward his characters and story, his embrace of happy endings in even the unhappiest of tales. So I thought I'd try a happy-maybe ending instead of the awful one I'd imagined. It was no more or less plausible, I learned more about the characters. and it was a hell of a lot more fun to write. Plus the reader is spared a second hero in a row to go up in flames."

Guest Author: Quinn Dalton

Quinn Dalton is the author of Bulletproof Girl, a short story collection that comes out this week. I heard her read a story from it a while back, and the reason I did was her publicist, knowing my interest in supporting emerging writers, invited me to come. Which is just one example of how an independent publicist can help an author get a little extra attention, a theme Quinn explores at length in this guest essay. (Here's another: Quinn's friends will be buying the book en masse from Amazon on April 19th to drive its rank up into the top 100 bestselling titles, and her website extends an invitation to other potential readers to do the same.) She can also be found on Mediabistro, analyzing the end of fiction at the Atlantic Monthly.

Why Hire an Indy Publicist?
by Quinn Dalton

When my agent sold my novel and story collection to imprints of Simon & Schuster, I couldn't have been happier. It was wonderful news to share with family and friends, many of whom had encouraged me over the years, or at least gently ignored the fact that until that point I'd made less than a thousand dollars from my life's passion.

I thought I could be pretty effective doing publicity for High Strung. I had been the director of public relations for an advertising agency for a number of years, and I figured that after getting great coverage for my clients, I'd do fine getting some for myself. Though I didn't have a literary publicity background, I knew about positioning new products. I knew how to build a media list and develop story angles. I wasn't scared to cold-call journalists.

My PR experience did help me in some ways; I had some credibility when promising my publisher I could fill seats for a tour and suggesting a focus on regional publicity. But I found there were limits to how much I could pitch myself. It's a funny thing: Publishers want writers to be more media friendly, even savvy, but when writers promote themselves, they run the risk of being perceived as arrogant or grabby. I learned this, painfully, on a couple of occasions. So when my novel came out in paperback last July, I prepared a short but detailed media list, complete with pitch angles for the targeted journalists, and asked the in-house publicist assigned to me at the time if she would call these people--and not just leave a voice mail, but try to catch them on the phone, because a voice mail, like email, generally just gets deleted. The publicist could not see my point. "I just don't think calling will help," she actually said to me.

This is when I decided to hire an independent publicist for Bulletproof Girl.

Continue reading Guest Author: Quinn Dalton

Guest Author: Laura Furman

Laura Furman became the current editor of the annual O. Henry Prize Stories collection in 2002. When this year's edition came out, I asked if she'd let Beatrice readers in on the selection process, and she graciously agreed. Ms. In addition to her experience as a founding editor for American Short Fiction, Ms. Furman is also an accomplished short story writer, novelist, and memoirist in her own right, so her insights into what makes for a good story are more than welcome here!

"The Most Wonderful Group of Stories I'll Ever Find"
by Laura Furman

Every morning when I drive my son to school through downtown Austin, I pass the little yellow cottage where William Sydney Porter, best known as O.Henry, lived with his wife and daughter. It's now a museum, pressed on one side by the convention center and the other by a towering hotel. Its fretwork is preserved; inside are artifacts of the writer's life and work, as well as donated furnishings illustrating the period. The writer of "The Gift of the Magi" is commemorated in Austin and elsewhere, but his most important monument may not be his stories, which many readers still love, but the O.Henry Prize Stories, founded in 1918 by his friends to honor him and to "strengthen the art of the short story." Rather than being relegated to literary history, O.Henry will always be associated with the current masters and promising talent in contemporary writing.

There are intimidating aspects of being series editor of the O.Henry, the job I began in 2002. The editorship carries with it a responsibility to the writers of the many short stories submitted each year, to the magazine editors, and to the readers of the annual collection who expect a variety of excellent, challenging, and moving stories. My principal mission is to believe in writers and the original ways the best of them find to face the ancient challenge of telling a story.

Continue reading Guest Author: Laura Furman

Guest Author: Jennifer Weiner

When Jennifer Weiner read last week's Meg Wolitzer essay here at Beatrice, her first reaction prompted me to invite her to write a fuller response here. After all, I've known her since 2001, when she debuted with Good in Bed, and I've followed her career through to the latest novel, Little Earthquakes, which should also serve as your warning that I lack total objectivity on the subject of Jennifer. Will this turn into an ongoing literary controversy? I'm more than willing to present as many sides of this (or any other) literary issue as writers care to share with us, so we'll see.

Gray Ladies Up
by Jennifer Weiner

True confession: Once upon a time I was a bit of a smarty-pants.

I went off to Princeton with plans to be an English major and, of course, write the great American novel. "We expect great things from you," my professors said. I'm not sure, but I suspect that those great things did not include a debut novel featuring naked legs and cheesecake on a candy-pink cover. (One of my most persistent Princeton fantasies involves my world-renowned professors standing in a circle saying, "Good in Bed? Nope, she wasn't in my class!")

Clearly, something happened on my way to becoming Jonathan Franzen, and I think I know where.

Continue reading Guest Author: Jennifer Weiner

Guest Author: Valerie Frankel

Valerie Frankel goes way back with Beatrice, so when she told me her most recent novel, The Girlfriend Curse, was heading out to the bookstores, I asked if she was interested in writing something for the site. In all honesty, I was expecting something more chick-litty, so this tribute to Hunter S. Thompson surprised me, but in the right kind of way, telling me something I didn't know about Val before I read it--although I'm bracing myself for some reader somewhere to take offense with the final paragraph...

One Less Crazy Bastard In The World: That Can’t Be Good
by Valerie Frankel

Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels was originally published in 1967, two years after I was born. I read it in one bloody swallow in the spring of 1985 when I was a student at Dartmouth. Full of sex, drugs and violence, his filthy slog through an outlaw culture astonished me. At the end, when the Angels stomped the shit out of Thompson, I felt his terror and disgust viscerally. I shook with the Angels' betrayal for days.

This was a sublime reading experience, and I decided that Thompson was one of my favorite writers. My second novel, Murder on Wheels, a 1992 mystery about a fictional biker gang in the East Village, was my tribute to Thompson. Sex, drugs and violence continue to be themes in my novels (although, I admit, soft-core versions: sex to be sexy, drugs for fun, and violence as slapstick).

When I heard that Thompson shot himself in the head last month, I was sad that one my early idols was gone, but secretly glad he died vividly and violently. It made sense. What might not: that a chick-lit writer like me is a big fan of the balls-to-the-wall writing of Hunter S. Thompson. Which goes to show you: Pigeons should live in holes--not authors. Nor readers. I love Fight Club and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, too, but I'm not an alienated young man or a melodramatic teen. Hungry readers go wherever we can for a satisfying meal. And we crave variety.

Not to say that marketers, publicists and editors shouldn't do their jobs and try to sell books to likely buyers. I'm often asked by interviewers who I think my target audience is. I give a predictable answer, but the truth is, no author can know for sure who will appreciate her or his stuff. We have to write as if no one will ever see the pages. Second guessing and catering to a niche compromises the work, and probably repulses the very readers the author has targeted.

Myopic gun-lover Thompson must have had a different notion of a target. He didn't shoot for one; he shot at it. And he hit the bull's eye, too, even if (because?) he was too drunk and stoned to see. He couldn't have imagined (and didn't) that, in 1985, one of his biggest fans was a 20-year-old doctor's daughter from suburban New Jersey who blew off her 19th-century English novel class because she could not stop reading Hell's Angels. Or that, twenty years later, she'd call him a lingering inspiration in spirit.

And now, a fantasy scene: A 67-year old sickly recluse sits in his house in Wood Creek, Colorado. A copy of The Girlfriend Curse lands in his lap. He starts to read. He likes it, keeps going, his plans for the day postponed. He waits until he's read the last word on the last page to pull the trigger.

Guest Author: Meg Wolitzer

It doesn't really surprise me that Meg Wolitzer (who's described her new novel, The Position, so perfectly in her opening remarks that I'm not even going to try to top her) is a fan of "chick lit." She's just one of the many readers who have noticed in recent years that some of contemporary fiction's deftest social observations are tucked away in (mostly) romantic comedies passed off as mere entertainment. (And for anybody thinking that tying social critique to generic plots is a weak technique strictly for "feminine" genres, your local bookstore has shelves and shelves of private eye novels for your enjoyment.) You've seen a few writers that fall into Wolitzer's "Pink Ladies" category in this blog before, and you'll see plenty of them in the future as well, and Wolitzer can tell you why.

In Praise of Pink Ladies
by Meg Wolitzer

I've done many things in my life that I'm ashamed of. Mostly, these are not things that other people would be ashamed of, but I've got an exceedingly low shame threshold. In fact, I just published a novel about the children of two parents who, in the 1970's, write a Joy of Sex-type of book that features illustrations of themselves making love; my novel deals with the ensuing shame and discomfort that haunt the grown-up children as they try to lead their own lives.

But the shame I want to write about here isn't sexual. It isn't graphic in any way, and yet I feel a deep unease. For I am a secret lover of chick lit. I know, I'm supposed to curl my mouth into a sneer whenever the term "chick lit" is mentioned. After all, I'm a so-called "literary" novelist, and like all such novelists I'm routinely asked to list my favorite books or influences. The names "Virginia Woolf" and "Thomas Mann" tend to spring to my lips. These are not lies; I love these writers. Yet those "other" writers--those fluffier, sunnier, pinker ones—are my guilty pleasure. Though all of them are marginally different from each other, their book covers are often pink of hue. For the sake of expedience, I will herein refer to them as the Pink Ladies.

Continue reading Guest Author: Meg Wolitzer

A Little More About Meg Wolitzer

Dan Cryer (Newsday) recently interviewed Meg Wolitzer about growing up in Long Island in the late '60s and early '70s, where she first honed her writerly imagination:

"Streets in the neighborhood were named after women in the builder's family--Ann Drive, Leslie Drive, Harriet Drive. I used to wonder who was Harriet and so on. I turned it into something writerly in my head. Though it was a subdivision and all the houses were similar, I liked to try to figure out what the differences were. What about the house that had no books? And there was a house that had no furniture. The people who lived there kept saying that they had just moved in, but of course eventually they'd been there a long time. There was a story there."

Wolitzer also recently wrote an essay for the Washington Post about the varying speeds at which writers write.

Guest Author: Cynthia Shearer

The press kit for Cynthia Shearer's second novel, The Celestial Jukebox, had a lengthy playlist identifying albums Shearer cited as influential in shaping her story of the polyglot immigrant culture in the contemporary Mississippi Delta. Some of her tracks were by musicians I'd already discovered and loved, like Othar Turner, the "Mississippi Master of the Fife"; some I'd been meaning to track down, like the Louvin Brothers; some were completely foreign but quickly went on my search list. I wanted to hear more about how Shearer, the former curator of Faulkner's home at Rowan Oak, fell in love with this music, and she kindly filled in the backstory with this essay.

Stocking the Celestial Jukebox
by Cynthia Shearer

I do not play any musical instrument, unless spoons count. So my instrument of choice has always been the English language. When I was growing up in an isolated part of South Georgia in the 1960s and 1970s, I had to rely on local truckstop jukeboxes and hand-me-downs from my hippie radical draft-resistance counselor of a brother for shaping of my musical tastes. In addition, I had an itinerant retired military man for a father, who was always quoting 1930s songs to me or showing up at my apartment at college, Stevie Wonder album in hand, saying, "You gotta hear this." I've learned over my lifetime that when certain people say, "You gotta hear this," it's best to hear it, whether it's Tibetan monks chanting, or Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies singing the vintage, original version of "Keep On Truckin'" in Texas. I'm still, at this late date, always on the lookout for something new and odd to listen to. The Celestial Jukebox is a love letter to all musicians from any epoch or place, regardless of how they might register on Sony's Richter scale. I have a deep love and respect for certain semi-literate black bluesmen in Mississippi, both living and dead: Othar Turner, fife and drum player from Gravel Springs; Joe Callicott; Bukka White; Howlin' Wolf; Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside of Holly Springs; The Rev. Gary Davis; The Rev. Robert Willkins; and Willie Eason of the Jewel Dominion Church in Crescent, City Florida, and his inimitable lap steel.

Continue reading Guest Author: Cynthia Shearer

Guest Author: Ann Townsend

As I was looking through Ann Townsend's second collection of poems, The Coronary Garden, and some of the biographical materials that came with it, I was struck by a reference to the early 19th-century poet John Clare. (If you follow that link, by the way, you'll find a charming example of how a blog can be used to show appreciation for a poet.) The connection becomes even more explicit when you realized that Townsend's poem "Mouse's Nest," included in The Coronary Garden, is named after one of Clare's own sonnets (as she discusses in her essay). With that in mind, I asked if she would be willing to share what it was in his poems that attracted her, and this was her reply.

My John Clare
by Ann Townsend

In 1992, I dug and fenced my first real garden. My daughter was newborn, and all summer I carried her as I weeded and trimmed, learning her ways even as I learned the names of the plants, trees, and insects native to my part of the world. Perhaps that's why the poems of John Clare spoke to me so clearly that year. Clare, a contemporary of John Keats, was a country poet, a writer more than usually alert to the living world around him. One of my favorite poems is his sonnet "Mouse's Nest," with its vivid, visceral action:

I found a ball of grass among the hay
And progged it as I passed and went away
And when I looked I fancied something stirred
And turned again and hoped to catch a bird
When out an old mouse bolted in the wheat
With all her young ones hanging at her teats
She looked so odd and so grotesque to me
I ran and wondered what the thing could be
And pushed the knapweed bunches where I stood
When the mouse hurried from the crawling brood
The young ones squeaked and when I went away
She found her nest again among the hay.

Continue reading Guest Author: Ann Townsend

Guest Author: Tom Dolby

Tom Dolby (no relation to the singer) passes through Beatrice today on his "Virtual Book Tour," a coordinated blogblitz that will bring him to ten blogs in a single day to promote the paperback release of his debut novel, The Trouble Boy. I asked if he'd be willing to talk a little bit about the thematic connections between his story of a young gay man coming of age in a glitzy celebrity subculture and chick-lit novels which put female protagonists through similar personal and ethical dilemmas. (And it's a fortuitous coincidence that his thoughts appear here so soon after I found Mary Bly's eloquent defense of romance!)

Bright Lives in the Big City
by Tom Dolby

While I don’t like to pigeonhole my work any more than the average chick lit author does, I recognize that The Trouble Boy, while having its share of straight fans, falls into the category of gay literature. (By the way, if you're offended by the term "chick-lit," I sympathize, but there doesn't seem to be any alternative.) I don't plan on staying in the gay lit ghetto forever, but I believe that if the category helps readers find my novel, then that's terrific. The gay press has been incredibly supportive of my work, and I've received far more reviews than most first novels ever do.

Continue reading Guest Author: Tom Dolby

Guest Author: Edith Pearlman

Edith Pearlman's most recent collection of short stories is How to Fall, out this month from Sarabande Books. The stories, which Joanna Scott says "combine subtlety with extravagance, understatement with spectacle," is the 2003 winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, thus extending Pearlman's streak of prize-winning collections to all three of her books, starting with her debut, Vaquita, which received the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature, after which Love Among the Greats was awarded the Spokane Annual Fiction Prize. As it happens, many of the stories in How to Fall share a setting in Godolphin, a "leafy wedge of Boston" which may, perhaps, share a few characteristics here and there with Brookline, where she has lived much of her adult life. I asked her if she'd tell Beatrice readers a bit about how she discovered this locale and what it has come to mean for her and her stories.

O My Godolphin
by Edith Pearlman

The town of Godolphin, though geographically a wedge of Boston, is self-governing by a representative Town Meeting whose members scream at each other for several evenings every October. Bow-fronted apartment buildings line Jefferson Boulevard; trolley tracks run down its middle like a zipper. In the town live ancient Yankees, prosperous Jews, envious academics; shopkeepers, secretaries, music teachers; Asian-Americans, Irish Americans, Russian almost-Americans.  A few inhabitants sleep in alleys. Godolphinites exhibit every sexual preference including the preference to be left alone.

Continue reading Guest Author: Edith Pearlman

Guest Author: Sharon Owens

Sharon Owens's debut novel, The Tea House on Mulberry Street, was a bestseller in her native Northern Ireland, and she soon landed an international publishing deal with Penguin Putnam that will bring two of her books to the United States in 2005. As an added incentive to readers, Putnam is releasing Tea House and its followup, The Ballroom on Magnolia Street, as $15 hardcovers. (If you're wondering whether you might like Owens, three of the blurbs on the dust jacket mention Maeve Binchy, with one adding Joanna Trollope into the mix, and Cecelia Ahern said the urge to keep reading "made me refuse nights out.") One comment Owen frequently gets from her fans is that they find it refreshing to see a novel set in Northern Ireland that doesn't dwell on the political and sectarian violence, a decision she explores in this essay written for Beatrice.

Why I Chose to Write About a Different Belfast
by Sharon Owens

When I moved from Omagh to Belfast in 1988, I was twenty years old. I was enrolled to study at the Art College on York Street, and I was terrified. All through my childhood, I'd seen terrible images of our capital city on the news: Bombs exploding, splinters of wood and debris falling like rain onto the road. Men and women screaming at the police, sometimes while carrying hysterical infants in their arms. Teenagers in tight jeans, brandishing automatic weapons in front of huge bonfires. I wanted to pass a degree in book illustration, but I thought I'd be shot dead before I had the time to fill one sketchbook. I was afraid someone would ask me about my religious background and then beat me up if I said the wrong one.

Continue reading Guest Author: Sharon Owens

Guest Author: Michele Martinez

Ex-federal prosecutor Michele Martinez wrote the following essay revealing the story behind the creation of her debut thriller, Most Wanted, scheduled for a March release from Morrow. She'll be making the rounds of the crime book conventions this spring, starting with Left Coast Crime at the end of February and then on to Sleuthfest in March.

Continue reading Guest Author: Michele Martinez

Guest Author: Damian McNicholl

Damian McNicholl spent the summer on the road promoting his first novel, A Son Called Gabriel; heck, he's still got a reading left to do at the Barnes & Noble in North Wales, Pennsylvania next month. His fictional tale of a coming of age in Northern Ireland in the 1960s and '70s "vividly captures the confusion, trials, and small triumphs of a boy making his way through a culture constricted by its religious doctrines and economic hardships," according to the Chicago Pink Pages, and Seamus Deane tells us, "Comic, courageous and often painful, this is a beautifully paced and balanced novel that will have an assured place in contemporary Irish writing." McNicholl sent me this account of his touring life, and I'm happy to introduce him, and his debut novel, to you.

Continue reading Guest Author: Damian McNicholl

Guest Author: Daniel Hayes

I'm going to conduct an experiment of sorts this afternoon--Daniel Hayes' people recently sent me an item that he's written which, though it's not directly related to his forthcoming novel Tearjerker, should call your attention to that work anyway...as might reading the first chapter online. Which is as far as I've gotten so far, though I have the galley at hand and am looking forward to digging into it next week... Anyway, here this content pretty much falls into my lap and I figure why not pass it along to you, the reader? So follow the jump and read on, and if you want to see more "guest authors" in the future, let me know.

Continue reading Guest Author: Daniel Hayes