6 July 2009
Lady Jane’s Salon: Love, Lawson, & Dee
Categories: lady jane's salon |
It’s the first Monday of the month, and that means it’s time for Lady Jane’s Salon, the reading series for romance novelists that helps generate donations for Share the Love, a non-profit organization that donates used romance novels to women’s shelters. This month’s guests include Dianna Love, one-half of the writing team behind Anthea Lawson, and Dee Davis, with a special appearance by Susie Felber, who will tell us about her mother, the late Edith Layton.
The show begins shortly after 7 p.m. at Madame X (94 W. Houston Street, New York NY), and the cover is $5 or at least one used romance novel. Every show has been a blast so far, and the audience keeps growing—I hope you’ll join us!
5 July 2009
Moving John the Baptist from “Opening Act” to Headliner
Categories: interviews |
Brooks Hansen’s new novel, John the Baptizer, was published just shy of two weeks ago, on John’s feast day. But when we met in a café near the offices of his publisher, W.W. Norton, to discuss the book, he confessed early into the interview that he had not been a big fan of the Baptist attending Mass as a child. “I didn’t really buy this guy,” Hansen recalled. “He seemed angry, he seemed cartoonish… he felt like an opening act. What you’re taught to understand about John doesn’t make sense when you’re a little boy—his willingness to point at Jesus and then withdraw. It was only in returning to the story later in life that I felt compelled by him.”
(For more about what drew Hansen to John’s story, be sure to watch the video interview embedded above or on YouTube.)
There are some distinct challenges to building a story around John, however. “The second you make him the central character,” Hansen explained, “Jesus becomes the bad guy, the guy who comes in and steals the spotlight.” In fact, one of Hansen’s primary sources for his version of events was the sacred writings of the Mandaeans, a religious group that reveres John the Baptist as its greatest prophet and Jesus as a false messiah who betrayed John’s teachings. That doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that Hansen’s novel contradicts Christian doctrine. “Even the most controversial aspects of the story I’m telling are found in the Gospels,” he said. “And John’s story concludes before Jesus’ death and resurrection, so you can explore John’s story entirely without having to address the central Christian issue.”
In addition to the Mandaean scriptures and the Christian gospels, Hansen also drew upon the Roman historian Josephus (particularly when it comes to the Herods). Altogether, he spent seven years writing John the Baptizer, although he admits some of that time was spent working on another project. “But the only way of getting away with this was to tell the story as if I knew it like the back of my hand,” he confided. “You can’t shoot from the hip with this story.” As far as I’m concerned, he’s done a fantastic job—in prose that recalls the majesty of scriptural language but remains modern enough to engage contemporary audiences. But don’t just take my word for it: You can listen to Hansen reading excerpts from the novel on YouTube, starting with the fate of John’s head.
1 July 2009
How “The Scarlet Ibis” Helped Peter Neofotis Find His Voice
Categories: selling shorts |
For the last three years, Peter Neofotis has been performing his short stories in various venues around New York City—all of them set in a fictional community which gives his debut collection its title: Concord, Virginia: A Southern Town in Eleven Stories. As I was reading the first stories, given that one of them is about a Korean War veteran fending off an inquisitive reporter’s attempts to get him to say something inspiring for the young men heading out to Vietnam, I made assumptions about Neofotis’s age that proved completely off base; turns out he’s still on the young side of 30. And yet his voice is already clearly identifiable as his own, and it’s unlikely, once you’ve read one or two of his stories, you’d mistake any others you come across for anybody else’s. When I asked if he would discuss his literary inspirations, he picked a story that helped shape both his writing and his performances.
I have just reread James Hurst’s “The Scarlet Ibis,” and once again, it has made me weep—just as it did when I read it in my high school freshman English class ten years ago. I remember the entire class—a very mixed bunch in a public high school—had been moved by the story. Mrs. Lynda Gray, a terrifyingly brilliant teacher, even cracked a tear when she read a few lines from its pages:
“It’s strange that all this is still so clear to me, now that that summer has long since fled and time had had its way…”
The tale behind the “The Scarlet Ibis” is as lonesome and beautiful as the story itself. James Hurst wrote it in his 30s, a few years after taking a job at a bank, to express his grief over his failed career as an opera singer. And though it is his only writing to ever receive national attention, it was a phenomenal success: first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1960, it won the magazine’s annual fiction prize then, as Hurst has commented, “took on a life of its own” and has been republished in several anthologies. Often, it is used to teach symbolism. For the death of the stray scarlet ibis foreshadows the death of the narrator’s frail but wondrously lucid brother Doodle.
“the sick-sweet smell of bay flowers hung everywhere like a mournful song…”
30 June 2009
Kate Furnivall: What’s in a Name?
Categories: guest authors |
Nearly a year ago, I published a guest essay from Kate Furnivall about addressing her uncovered Russian ancestry through fiction. This summer, she returns to the world of The Russian Concubine with a new novel called The Girl from Junchow… except in the United Kingdom, where it’s known as The Concubine’s Secret. As the possibility of a new guest essay emerged, I found myself wondering about those two titles—so I asked if she’d be willing to explain how they came about.
Titles are magic keys. They open the door to a book. They are designed to give a sense of what lies between the covers but in such an intriguing way that they tempt the reader to pick the book off the shelf in the bookstore.
Question: What makes a good title? Answer: One that sells books.
This is the holy grail of both novelists and publishers. Ideally, any writer will tell you, it is preferable to have settled on a title before even starting to put pen to paper because it means you have worked out exactly what lies at the heart of your book, what your focus is as its author. It means that every day when you open up the file on your computer, it is there in front of you in large letters—the title of the book. Reminding you what it is about.
Wouldn’t it be nice to live in such an ideal world? But sadly we don’t. So titles do not always slot into the brain as conveniently as authors would wish. Think about the titles that have attracted acclaim. There are some great ones out there—For Whom The Bell Tolls and Gone With The Wind. And more recently of course the supremely simple The Da Vinci Code. I’d really like to know how convoluted was the process by which those titles were chosen.
An author can spend months trying to drum up the right title. I know. I’ve done it. As the days and months tick by while you’re writing the book, endless wakeful hours in bed are spent with your mind churning, trying out every different combination of words. Whether you’re mowing the lawn, cleaning your teeth or feeding the cat, your mind keeps tugging at the knotty problem. It can end up driving you mad. And that’s when—if you’ve any sense—you rope in your publisher and agent to help.
