Katrina Denza

January Reading

2012-01-31T16:35:00.000-08:00

These are the books I read in January:

"The World We Found" by Thrity Umvigar
Beautifully written story of the strength of women's friendships.

"Running the Rift" by Naomi Benaron
*Review to come

"The Good American" by Alex George
Deftly written story of a family's journey to becoming American. The author, a recent English immigrant, has written a Great American Novel.

"The Flight of Gemma Hardy" by Margot Livesey
A hybrid of the retelling of Jane Eyre and a tale drawn from Livesey's own childhood and young adulthood. Atmospheric and highly readable. Even if you haven't read Jane Eyre, you'll enjoy the story, the characters and the language.

"The Artist of Disappearance" by Anita Desai
Three beautiful novellas. I'm a huge fan of Desai's elegant writing and sensibilities.

"Still Alice" by Lisa Genova
Gripping story of a professor slowly losing her life as she knew it to Alzheimer's.

"American Dervish" by Ayad Akhtar
This is one to read. It's the story of a young man raised in the Midwest by parents of non-praticing Muslim parents. When his "Aunt" Mina arrives from Pakistan, her devout faith shakes everyone up. Funny, tragic, insightful, refreshingly daring, this is a great read.

"Stay Awake" by Dan Chaon
The stories within this collection are grim and frightening in the best way. One of my favorite short story collections. A real stand out.

"The Odds" by Stewart O'Nan
O'Nan is one of my favorite writers. This story of a couple on their second honeymoon in Niagra Falls trying to save their finances and consequently their marriage is amazingly tight and so well done. Loved everything about it.

"The Invisible Ones" by Stef Penney
I enjoyed this mystery involving a group of elusive gypsies.

"Other People We Married" by Emma Straub
Loved these stories! Superb wrting, fresh imagery, and intriguing characters.

* These are not reviews but rather quick notes I made about each after I finished with it.

Read: The Barbarian Nurseries by Hector Tobar

2012-01-08T11:29:00.000-08:00

The Torres-Thompsons live in an affluent neighborhood on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Scott Torres’ software executive job has enabled him to provide his wife with a view of the Pacific and his boys with the kind of toys that inspire the maid to name their bedroom The Room of a Thousand Wonders. With the help of a gardener, a nanny and a maid, Maureen is able to teach art as a volunteer at their sons’ private school and stay home the rest of the time with her three children. When Scott loses money in the stock market, however, he’s forced to let go of the gardener and the nanny, leaving the cooking, cleaning, and baby-sitting to Araceli, the tall, dour-faced Mexican maid who was “more likely to ignore you when you said hello in the morning or to turn down her eyes in disapproval if you made a suggestion.”

Disagreements over money ensue and when the last argument wreaks havoc on the marriage, the two go their separate ways to lick their wounds: Scott to a coworker’s and Maureen to a spa with only her young daughter in tow. Both parents neglect to inform Araceli of their plans or their whereabouts and soon she feels compelled to take the boys into LA to search for the boys’ paternal grandfather, a decision which will impact her standing not only in the household, but also in the country.

“The Barbarian Nurseries” offers a hilarious look at our solipsistic culture and a poignant reminder of the Mexican immigrants who live among us, often invisible, taken for granted, and ultimately powerless. Tobar uses the omniscient point of view effortlessly, allowing the reader to see Araceli, a surprising, larger than life character, through the eyes of a multitude of people, people who perceive Araceli either as a victim or a criminal depending on their particular biases and agendas.

This novel is a comment on immigration in today’s volatile socioeconomic environment, a comment on our relentless desire as a nation to accumulate and consume more and more, and a comment on the pliable circus our media has become. Tobar’s love for his characters is obvious and none is without culpability of some degree. Intelligent, provocative, this book is loads of fun to read, and though the reader will be confronted with some unflattering truths, he can still come away from the experience entirely hopeful about humanity.

*Review first appeared in the December 18th edition of The Pilot

Read: Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks

2011-12-11T11:04:00.000-08:00

These days you can go to a sex offender registry and learn where the convicted offenders live in your area and how many there are. What the site can’t tell you, or at least, doesn’t at the moment, is the exact crime each of these registered offenders was convicted of. Without this information, you’re likely to lump all of them into the scary child molester/abductor category and not give them another thought. At least that’s what I did, until I read Russell Banks’ “Lost Memory of Skin.”

When I first heard Banks had written a novel featuring a convicted sex offender as his main character, I was skeptical. I’ve read his work before, I know how absolutely brilliant Banks is, but man, asking a reader to sit with one of the most deplorable kinds of characters for over 400 pages was asking a lot. As a reader, I wasn’t sure I could do it and as a mother, I wasn’t sure I could stomach it. Then one day, I picked up “Lost Memory of Skin” and read the first sentence, then the first paragraph and the first page, and the second, and so on, until I realized I was hooked. Because, in the end, the fact that Russell Banks writes about the down and out in our society with intelligent, highly readable prose kept me reading.

I learned there are various shades of gray in the matters of sex offenses and there are many levels of offense. For instance, a child molester and an eighteen year old who has sex with a minor (even a year younger counts here) both get labeled as sex offenders. There is no public differentiation. And with technology in the picture, there are more and more ways young people can make mistakes that will affect them for the rest of their lives.

Such is the case with Banks’ protagonist, the Kid. In the course of the novel, we learn why the Kid is an outcast and living under the bridge with the rest of the area sex offenders. And it is through Banks’ skillful characterization, his ability to go places most of us would turn away from, that we can come to have empathy for him. Not only is there a human story here, but there’s also a mystery: a professor of sociology has decided to interview the Kid and he has a hidden past of his own, a past that soon catches up with him. Banks has us questioning the Professor’s motives right to the end.

Compelling and beautifully written, this book is an important and timely read.

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

2011-11-17T03:39:00.000-08:00

There’s nothing pretty about poverty or the cruelty of dog fighting, however Jesmyn Ward writes about both in her latest novel, “Salvage the Bones,” with spectacular beauty.

Esch, the narrator, is fifteen and living in a small Mississippi town along the Gulf with her alcoholic father and her three brothers, one of whom loves his pit bull beyond all reason. Esch, enthralled by the myth of Medea and Jason, begins to see the story mirrored in her own life, in her dealings with Manny, the young man she imagines she loves, and in her brother’s dog, China, whose instinct to kill seems to be fiercer than her instinct to nurture. Motherless, Esch is left the only girl in a house full of males, and when she figures out she’s pregnant, she tells no one.

Ward structures the book using time. The story begins twelve days before Hurricane Katrina hits and each chapter is a separate day. We’re all familiar with Katrina’s devastation so tension is already built in, but Ward doesn’t stop with a little bit of trouble. She gives us characters so poor they’ll eat Ramen Noodles uncooked and chase them down with a packet of dry spice. She gives us a father stuck in his grief; a pregnant narrator who’s too young to be savvy in affairs of the heart, and a mother pit bull raised to fight, all on top of the category five hurricane bearing down on a family unequipped to properly prepare.

The story gripped me from the start and there were a few moments in which I found myself holding my breath, but what elevated this story from compelling to an absolute must-read was the quality of language:

“Daddy said that Randall and Skeetah and me came fast, that Mama had all of us in her bed, under her own bare burning bulb, so that when it was time for Junior, she thought she could do the same. It didn’t work that way. Mama squatted, screamed toward the end. Junior came out purple and blue as a hydrangea: Mama’s last flower. She touched Junior just like that when Daddy held him over her: lightly with her fingertips, like she was afraid she’d knock the pollen from him, spoil the bloom. She said she didn’t want to go to the hospital. Daddy dragged her from the bed to his truck, trailing her blood, and we never saw her again.”

Despite all the tragedy, this is a hopeful book, a testimony to the power of love and community. Currently, “Salvage the Bones,” is a finalist for The National Book Award, and this is one reader who’s rooting for it.

*Review first appeared in the October 30 edition of The Pilot of Southern Pines

Kathy Fish: Interview

2011-10-24T07:16:00.000-07:00

I’ve known Kathy Fish through an online writing site for nearly a decade now. Back in 2003 I asked Kathy to help me with my first flash fiction attempt. I’d noticed her short pieces, saw how even back then, she was a master with the form. Years later, she’s still amazing, and her work is playful and intelligent and fresh and will entrance you with its tragic beauty then two seconds later make you laugh out loud. Each of her pieces in her book, "Wild Life" is a glistening, detailed world in miniature, replete with humor, longing and willful creatures.
Kathy has graciously agreed to answer some of my questions about her process, her stories and her writing desires.

Katrina: I’d like to begin with your process. Where do you write? Do you use pen and paper? Computer? A mix of both? Do you have a set time? Number of words? Music? A certain required beverage? What is a typical writing day? What is your dream writing day like?

Kathy: I always begin with notebook and pen. I don’t think I’ve ever started any writing at all on the computer. I need time to scribble. And it’s all over the page. If something feels like it might be good I circle it. After awhile something clicks and I know I’m ready for the keyboard. I’m very unstructured. I don’t give myself a time limit or word count goal. Coffee is always involved. I know the writing’s going well if the coffee gets cold.

A typical writing day is spent messing around on the internet for longer than I ought to until I’m seized with guilt and shut it off. I stare out the window a lot. I take my dog for a walk. I pour another cup of coffee. Maybe after two hours I start to scribble in my notebook. I look out the window some more. My dream writing day is when I get past all of this and go into that beautiful trance, where I forget everything and look up, finally, two hours later and have before me something that feels real and right and pretty decent. A dream writing day is when it feels effortless.

Katrina: “Land and Sky and Cosmo,” is a hilarious story of a young woman trying to seduce her boyfriend, full of details such as this one in reference to the woman’s uncle telling them how to scare off a bear while camping: “He said make yourself look bigger, wave your arms and yell and he demonstrated and we saw the forest of his armpits.” I love that you chose to echo their environment in the description of armpit hair. What was the seed for this piece? How did you come up with such a perfect question to end the piece? I mean, this is a question often unasked, but present in all relationships, and I don’t think I’ve seen it before in fiction offered in just the right moment, said so beautifully and with such hope.

Kathy: I feel, often in my life, that I don’t connect in those moments when I most want to. And that the scene plays on nonetheless. It’s like small talk when you really want to say I love you. And the scene plays on and we go along and there’s so much courage to that. We swallow our disappointments and heartaches and the small ones are just as important as the big ones. That was my seed for this piece. So here is this woman, desperately wanting to connect and she knows it’s not happening and she wants to confront that. I’m interested in people who are just about at the end of their rope. She wants answers and she’s not getting them. She’d been deceived and it wasn’t the first time! That, right there.

Katrina: “The Cartoonist” is brilliant in its subtext and its ability to convey mood and lingering tension. I loved the title which instructs the reader and the last line which completely changed the color of the piece. Can you talk a little about its inspiration?

Kathy: It’s narrator as observer. That is her only part in this scene. To observe and sketch. Family dynamics as cartoon. Harried mother with exclamation points all around her head. I wanted to drop the brother in right at the end, just bluntly like that, to show how the cartoonist sees him. Smaller than everything and everyone else, because she sees him as he sees himself. It was just another way in, to write it that way. In my own family dynamic, as a child, I hardly said anything at all. I had six older brothers. I watched and listened and learned and that is what my cartoonist is doing in this story.

Katrina: “Lioness” is so amazing that it made me excited and teary when I read it. You describe the despair, the helplessness, the suffocation a mother feels when her child is ill so damn perfectly. I loved this:

“This house is getting tighter like that vacuum that sucks the air out of things so you can pack your quilts and sweaters and pillows into smaller spaces. You could pack this house into a dresser drawer, open it up in the springtime.”

But the moment she imagines a nuclear winter outside on her walk and determines, “This broken planet needs a hero,” is the moment in which she seems to find her super-hero strength. Brilliant. You’re a mother of four. I can guess what inspired it. However, what were the challenges, if any, in writing this piece?

Kathy: Yes, much of the inspiration for this story came from life. I’ve had so many times of being home alone for days with a sick child or two sick children and that claustrophobic and desperate feeling of, this is all there is, this will never change, Spring will never come, etc. One of my children went through a period of high fevers and febrile seizures. It was the scariest thing I’d ever gone through. I wanted to take that experience and notch it up, to put my character right on the edge to the point where she believes the snow outside is nuclear snow, that she is the only hope for her child and for humanity. The challenge was letting myself as a writer go to that strange place and letting that peculiar voice take over the story and letting her say the things she did without going, oh this is just too demented. To trust in the story.

Katrina: Your endings are sometimes ambiguous and always artful. I’m thinking specifically of two pieces: “Spin” and “The Bed.” In “Spin” your ending mirrors what the protagonist does every day with her son. It’s their life in one line. It’s also a hopeful line. And in “The Bed” this last line: “I go to him, but I can’t get any closer than this,” aptly describes a universal truth not only about relationships but about life itself: the distance between people can never fully be breached. How do you come to your endings? Are they easier than beginnings or more difficult?

Kathy: Endings are definitely more difficult for me. And one of my most common self-edits is to cut the last line, ending on the line before it instead. The last lines of my early drafts tend to feel too much like a wrap-up. They feel too neat, often, even contrived in order to achieve that neatness.

I’m glad you felt the hopefulness at the end of “Spin.” That’s how I wanted that story to feel, that this mother is never going to stop trying to connect with her child. To me, there is such joy in that alone, in stories and in life. It’s so not about everything being perfect or all problems being solved, it’s about not giving up. The ending of “The Bed” is sadder, more resigned, I think, in its recognition of a connection that will never be fully made.

Katrina: The precision and freshness of your details make me think of poetry. How often do you revise a piece? Do you write line by line, not moving forward until a line is just the way you want it, or do you get a quick draft down and work with it?

Kathy: Thanks, Katrina! I’ve always been a line-by-line writer, revising as I go. I actually enjoy taking my time, fussing over words and sentences. I have had a few stories that seemed to come out very quickly, but it’s not my normal process.

Katrina: Who are some of your favorite authors?

Kathy: Charles Baxter, Amy Hempel, Joy Williams, William Maxwell, Edward P. Jones, Salinger, Tolstoy, Julie Orringer, Raymond Carver, Jane Austen, Flannery O'Connor…also, I love and admire the work of my friends who are writers and who are amazing.

Katrina: You have another collection forthcoming. Would you tell us about it?

Kathy:”Together We Can Bury It” from Cow Heavy Books. It’s a collection that keeps evolving. The title has changed three times. It’s gone from being a chapbook of flash fiction to a longer collection of both short shorts and longer stories. I really like the mix of work included, the emotional tone of the book as a whole. Molly Gaudry is a gifted and thoughtful editor and just a joy to work with. And the cover is gorgeous.

Katrina: What’s next?

Kathy: Is it too much of a cliché to say I’d like to write a novel? Well, I’d like to write a novel. And plays. I’d love to write some plays. I’m feeling a tremendous need to stretch and try new things.

Read: "We the Animals" by Justin Torres

2011-10-20T15:43:00.000-07:00

At only 125 pages, “We the Animals” by Justin Torres is slight in weight but not in substance. The narrator us tells the story of his growing up with two older brothers, a well-meaning but often ineffective mother, and a mercurial father, mostly using the first person plural point of view.

“We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats; we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.”

So begins Torres’ novel as it eloquently speaks of what it was like for the narrator to grow up in Brooklyn with parents of different cultures, with poverty a perpetual threat, and with a passion for words no one else in the family shared. The narration is spare, precise, lyrical, and Torres’ point of view choice aptly captures the swirling, joyous mess that is brotherhood. The brothers in this family are often rolling, wrestling, hitting, a united front against all others, a tumbling trio of lion cubs.

Told in succinct and startling sections, our narrator invites us to witness this family’s trials beginning on his seventh birthday and on into his early adulthood. Though there’s abuse, it lingers on the peripheral, slightly out of our focus, to allow for the real story: how a person can emerge an individual out of such an all-consuming entity that is family. Metaphorically, the consequence of the narrator finding and claiming his individuality works on both a large and small scale.

An Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate, Justin Torres spent five or six years working on his debut novel and his patience has paid off. “We the Animals” is fierce in its ability to evoke potent emotion with poetic language and veracious insight.

* Review first published in the October 12th edition of The Pilot of Southern Pines

Elizabeth Gilbert on TED

2011-10-18T15:34:00.000-07:00

I've posted this before because it helped me write a draft of one of my novels in about three months. And I'm reposting because I'm in a bit of a writing funk and thinking maybe it might help me again and anyone else who may be in a funk with me.

Read: Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr

2011-10-10T11:32:00.000-07:00

After reading Anthony Doerr’s second collection, “Memory Wall,” it was easy to understand why it won the prestigious 2010 Story Prize, a prize created in 2004 to promote story collections. The paperback edition, released in July 2011, also includes his story, “The Deep,” which won the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, a prize that offers the highest cash award given for a short story.

I admired all six stories in the hard cover edition, but my favorites were “Memory Wall,” “Village 113” and “Afterworld.” The title story, which won the 2010 National Magazine Award for fiction, is set in the not-too-distant future and features a wealthy South African widower beset with Alzheimer’s. Through new technology she’s able to relive memories that have been medically extracted from her brain and recorded on cartridges. As she becomes more and more reliant on the cartridges, she’s visited nightly by a mysterious man and a young helper—a memory thief—in search of one very valuable memory. Everything comes to a head and in the end, Doerr manages to infuse redemption and humanity into an otherwise bleak story.

In “Village 113” a village is about to be sacrificed for the construction of a new dam. Li Quing, a young, earnest man working for the Village Director, is put in charge of relocating everyone. His own mother, a seed keeper, is resistant. The story illustrates not only the struggle between generations, mother and son, new and old, but also the relatively new struggle between nature and technology.

“Afterworld” begins: “In a tall house in a yard of thistles eleven girls wake on the floor of eleven bedrooms.” We learn this is the house in which the protagonist Ester Gramm spent her childhood, an orphanage in Hamburg, Germany. Through the course of this beautifully rendered story, we also learn that Ester’s imperfection will ultimately save her.

So what makes Doerr’s writing special? His stories seem to have it all: imagination, suspense, metaphor, intelligence, verisimilitude and emotional depth. He uses the imagined to more aptly describe reality. But perhaps it’s his use of language which has the accuracy and vividness of poetry and his willingness to take on larger mysteries:

“Nothing lasts,” Harold would say. “For a fossil to happen is a miracle. One in fifty million. The rest of us? We disappear into the grass, into beetles, into worms. Into ribbons of light.” It‘s the rarest thing, Luvo thinks, that gets preserved, that does not get erased, broken down, transformed. –“Memory Wall”

*First published in the September 18th edition of The Pilot of Southern Pines

Passages North-Literary journal

2011-10-08T15:11:00.000-07:00

Passages North has a brand new website and Jennifer A. Howard has taken over as Editor-in-Chief.

They have a cool new blog and they've linked several stories and poems in their archives including my story, Blue Moon.

Barcelona

2011-09-26T05:25:00.000-07:00

My family and I are off on an adventure to Barcelona!! As much as I love these trips and am so very grateful, there's a little part of me (maybe not so little) that wishes to be at home writing. That said, I realize each of these trips and other things life throws our way, good and bad, enrich my writing soul.

I hope your journeys are marvelous adventures, whether real or fictional.

Peace.

"Echolation" by Myfanwy Collins

2011-09-13T04:07:00.000-07:00

is now available for preorder!! Myfanwy is an incredibly talented writer, and I cannot wait for her debut novel!

Read: Recommendations

2011-09-12T06:56:00.000-07:00

Here are some books that I've read in the last month or so and loved:

Richard Bausch's "Peace" and his latest short story collection, "Something is Out There." "Peace" is a powerful, slim novel set in Italy during World War II; and I've loved his stories for over a decade and this group is just as elegant, real, masterful, as his previous collections.

"Vida" by Patricia Engel. The language in this novel/novel-in-stories is energetic and lyrical and the narrator is larger than life.

"This is Not Your City" by Caitlin Horrocks. These stories are amazing and tense and the characters are faced with real consequences. The narration is beautiful.

"This Beautiful Life" by Helen Schulman. Timely premise and this writer knows how to create a beautiful sentence.

"Anatomy of a Disappearance" by Hisham Matar. Subtle and powerful, the narrator experiences the disappearance of his father and the narrator is left with all of its implications.

Also, if you're looking for an intelligent nail-biting read:

"Before I Go to Sleep" by S.J.Watson. The narrator loses her memory every night she falls asleep.

"Turn of Mind" by Alice LaPlante. The narrator in this one has Alzhiemer's and she's accused of murder.

Wish Tank

2011-09-09T09:34:00.000-07:00

Love the idea and the sentiment of Laura Ellen Scott's new blog Wish Tank

I can't wait to read her book Death Wishing

Read: A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano

2011-09-07T10:08:00.000-07:00

“A Good Hard Look” by Ann Napolitano
The Penguin Press
978-1-59420-292-6 July 11, 2011

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it,” is the epigraphic quote that begins Ann Napolitano’s new novel, “A Good Hard Look.” Even if you haven’t read Flannery O’Connor and experienced her unflinching characterizations and situations rendered with sharp wit, you will feel as if you know her after reading this memorable portrayal. Milledgeville, Georgia, the town in which O’Connor lived, comes to life in Napolitano’s assured hands, and its characters are just as lively and flawed as you’d expect them to be.

One of the women, a pampered belle, is terrified she’ll end up a character in Flannery’s work, an unflattering replica doused with Flannery’s acerbic humor. A boy suffers from crippling anxiety except when he’s around his summer employer. Two women take care of each other’s child and the result is that a girl gets the nurturing she needs and a boy moves too quickly into adulthood. After a wealthy, married man is asked to teach Flannery to drive, they develop a clandestine friendship, and a police man lives for earning a promotion and little else. Firmly in the center are Flannery, hindered by her illness, yet dedicated to her work, her mother Regina, whose devotion to her daughter is deeply affecting, and a flock of raucous peacocks. As in O’Connor’s work, there are larger questions of religion and grace throughout. The people in “A Good Hard Look” are leaning toward self-destruction and one irreversible, calamitous misstep will bring others down like dominoes in its wake.

Napolitano is a gifted storyteller, recreating Milledgeville and its imperfect but well-meaning people, lending a sensibility that’s arguably in keeping with O’Connor’s vision, yet grounded in her own modern voice. In this vein, Napolitano offers us a look at characters on their rough and painful journey toward redemption.

O’Connor once wrote, “I am not afraid the book will be controversial, I’m afraid it will not be controversial.” I imagine Ms. O’Connor would have approved of “A Good Hard Look.”

* Review first published in the August 14th edition of The Pilot of Southern Pines

Read: State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

2011-09-07T10:01:00.000-07:00

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
HarperCollins/ June 2011
978-0062049803

Ann Patchett’s latest work, “State of Wonder” has everything I love in a novel: science, exotic locale, mystery and ethical exploration. Marina is a pharmacologist whose boss sends her on a mission to the Amazonian jungle of Brazil to prod and report on the scientist working for his company. She’s also been asked by the wife of her deceased lab partner to learn more about the circumstances of his death and to retrieve his body. What Marina actually finds there in the jungle will delight and intrigue the reader and maybe even elicit a shiver or two.

Dr. Swenson has been working on a fertility drug in the jungle, stringing her employer, Vogel, along for years. She’s as tough and harsh as the environment she inhabits and she’s not about to be pushed. When Marina, who was once her student, meets her again in Brazil, she learns more from her old teacher there than she ever did from her lectures.

A riveting and intelligent story, “State of Wonder” also explores the implications of interfering with indigenous cultures, and underlines the need for maintaining a balance between offering solutions for medical problems and diseases and protecting those social and ecological systems from which solutions are extracted.

Anyone familiar with Ann Patchett’s work will know how skilled she is in creating tense situations which force her characters to react and this book is no exception. The smooth, authoritative writing captivated me from the start, the lush details and fascinating premise kept me engaged, and the last pages were truly wondrous.

*First published in the August 21 edition of The Pilot of Southern Pines

Read: Faith by Jennifer Haigh

2011-07-29T06:59:00.000-07:00

Faith by Jennifer Haigh
ISBN: 9780060755805
HarperCollins

These days perhaps few are surprised when they hear of a priest under suspicion of inappropriate behavior—similar stories have made headlines for a couple of decades now. In Jennifer Haigh’s new novel “Faith,” not only do we get the unexpected, but we get a layered, complex, and evocative tale with richly drawn characters as well.

Haigh’s character, Sheila McGann, tells us how her half-brother Art became one of the accused priests and how that accusation destroys his life. The author’s brilliantly controlled structure prevents us from receiving all the facts at once so that we can never be quite sure of how things really went down. Through most of the book we may be wondering, is Sheila’s recounting of what happened reliable? Is she forthcoming with all the information? Does she really know her brother? After all, the attention Father Art lavishes on a lonely boy with an often negligent mother could reasonably appear suspect given the history of similar transgressions within the church. We’re left wondering only until the moment Haigh decides to relieve us of that doubt in one stunning, illuminating scene which arrives near the end of the novel. This new revelation will alter perception of events that transpire before and after. Not all things are as they seem, and Haigh reminds us of this as she skillfully explores the meaning of faith and all of its nuances.

“Faith” is a remarkable novel, both for its strong rendering of place and the salt of the earth people who inhabit that place, and also for its invitation for us to think beyond our assumptions, maybe even discard them altogether. It’s a novel that will not only deliver answers, but will also leave the reader with deep, profound questions.

*Review first published in the July 17th edition of The Pilot.

Read: Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman

2011-07-29T06:55:00.000-07:00

When I first read the publisher’s introduction to Francisco Goldman’s “Say Her Name,” I have to admit I was distracted by the fact that the novel appeared to be more truth than fiction. Francisco Goldman really did lose his young wife, who was also a talented writer, to a horrible swimming accident while on vacation in their beloved Mexico. As I was reading, I kept wondering why not simply a grief memoir? Perhaps calling it fiction allowed Goldman the distance he needed to write of such a painful event, perhaps the author strayed from the facts here and there. Eventually, the beauty of Goldman’s lyrical prose convinced me to let go of my questions and trust the writer.

Goldman’s elegant precision in laying out details of the couple’s daily lives is impressive as is his use of metaphor and language. I was also impressed with the design of the book because it was after reading so many details, of the characters’ histories, desires, frailties, each detail described in an exacting, loving manner, that I felt I had come to know these people, thus making the tragedy of Aura’s death all the more affecting. Goldman doesn’t withhold, he freely admits to his failings and he keeps the reader guessing as to why Aura’s family would blame her husband for her death. “Say Her Name” is the perfect example of the kind of alchemy made possible with words and heart. By the time I’d finished, I realized Goldman had not simply written a story of grief, he’d written a love story.

*Review first published in the July 10th edition of The Pilot.

Read "22 Britannia Road" by Amanda Hodgkinson

2011-07-29T06:43:00.000-07:00

When Janusz Nowak boards the train to help Poland’s cause in the Second World War, he leaves behind his young wife, Silvana, and their infant son, Aurek. Soon after, the Germans invade Warsaw and Silvana is forced to flee with her child and find refuge in the woods.

Skip ahead a few years and the war is over, but its scars remain. Janusz has relocated to England with every intention of becoming a proper Englishman. Word of his wife’s and son’s survival compels him to send for them in the hopes they can all begin again as a happy family, far removed from Poland’s painful memories. Janusz realizes, however, that starting over isn’t as easy as he imagined when he’s confronted by the war’s changes on his wife and the fact his son is a wild and fearful creature he hardly recognizes.

The premise was intriguing enough to entice me to pick this one up, but Amanda Hodgkinson offers so much more as life-altering secrets held by both Janusz and Silvana are revealed and new complications arise. The narrative is spare and beautiful, and the story, utterly captivating. Alternating between past and present in the voices of Janusz, Silvana, and their fascinating son, Aurek, Hodgkinson has written a complex tale of loss and recovery, love and redemption.

*Review first printed in the June 5 edition of The Pilot.

Read: "Touch" by Alexi Zentner

2011-06-19T04:51:00.000-07:00

My review of Alexi Zentner's wonderful debut novel is in this Sunday's edition of The Pilot:

Alexi Zentner’s stunning debut novel “Touch,” begins much as a snowfall might, dropping quiet hints of tragedy and hauntings with a meditative melancholy, then builds in intensity until the reader is buried in the story’s fierce grip. Set deep in the woods of northern British Columbia, in a time when men dream of gold, the fight for survival, whether pitted against man or nature, is still very much relevant.

The novel opens with the narrator reverently describing his father’s skill floating logs down the river, and later, his skill with storytelling. The narrator, now an Anglican Priest, has returned to his boyhood town of Sawgamet to tend to his dying mother. The town, with its history of gold mining gone bust and its life-crushing winters is a character as indelible as the people who settled it. Pierre recounts the stories his father told him, how his father mangled his hand trying to tame the logs and how his grandfather, Jeannot, little more than a boy, walked thousands of miles across the continent to finally settle in an area of woods in spite of the monsters and spirits dwelling there. It was in those dark woods that Flaireur, a dog Jeannot had stolen from a witch, lay down to rest and refused to move except to drink from the river or relieve himself. Later, after he discovered his dog had a keen sense for gold, Jeannot understood before anyone else that gold’s promise of wealth was fleeting and real survival depended on making use of the trees. And it was under the shelter of those trees that Jeannot would fall in love with the woman who haunted him thereafter.

Zentner is a sublime storyteller. Clear, pristine prose and striking imagery make this book a standout. Sprinkled with magical realism, “Touch” is part adventure story, part ghost story, and foremost a love story, a testimony to the unwavering, enduring power of love, a love unhampered by ordinary boundaries of time and space.

Pank

2011-05-16T06:29:00.000-07:00

The latest issue of Pank is live and includes three beautiful stories from Michelle Reale, an essay by Lidia Yuknavitch, and among many excellent stories and poems, my story "In the Fall."

The Other Life by Ellen Meister

2011-05-09T11:39:00.000-07:00

The Other Life by Ellen Meister
ISBN: 978-0-399-15173-4
G.P. Putnam

Imagine having the ability to second guess your life’s most significant choices. Imagine the ability to go back to the fork in the road and travel down the other path. Would that ability be a gift or a burden?

In Ellen Meister’s new novel, “The Other Life,” Quinn Braverman is living in the suburbs, happily married to her steady and giving husband, mother to a lovely son, and pregnant with her second child. Though she lost her mother to suicide seven years earlier, she has a good relationship with her brother and father, and a friend in the quirky woman who lives next door. Life is good, if not terribly exciting. However, the day she learns that the baby she’s carrying has a serious, and potentially fatal, abnormality, her serenity is shattered.

Quinn has always known about the portals, the openings to another possibility. She’s never actually tested them, though she’s come close out of curiosity. Now, desperation drives her to slip through one of the portals, a crack in her basement wall, to her other life, the one in which she’s remained with her needy, shock jock boyfriend, living a childless, high-powered life in the city. In this alternate reality she can feel relief from the pain of her future and relief from her fear for her unborn daughter. Something else tempts her to keep returning to this other life: in this reality, her mother is still very much alive. After moving back and forth between the two lives, Quinn is forced to make a decision because the portal is closing.

Meister magically makes the impossible believable and keeps the reader guessing right to the end. “The Other Life” is funny, sexy, poignant, and also unflinching in its willingness to tackle subjects some people may find difficult: depression, sexuality, quality of life. “The Other Life” is a stunning story of love, marital love and sibling love, yes, but perhaps more emphatically, the indestructible love between mother and child.

*Review was printed in the May 15th edition of The Pilot.

Off Topic: Editions de Parfums by Frederic Malle

2011-04-26T10:18:00.000-07:00

It started out innocently enough. I was researching perfume for a future story. I was not a connoisseur myself, in fact, I even went a few years without wearing any perfume at all. My past perfumes were far from boutique: Ralph, by Ralph Lauren, Happy by Clinique and Aqua di Gio by Armani. All very nice and very safe. All non-orientals because years ago when I was young and foolish I became very ill on too many rum and cokes while wearing Opium. Anyway, two years ago, I tried a sample of Flowerbomb, which was different from any perfume I'd worn and it got me to thinking about perfume, about the people who create them and the people who wear them and also about the people who critique them. So I started checking out the perfume blogs and began my education which, eventually led me to Frederic Malle's boutique collection of scents, all created by a small group of master perfumers.

All the Malle perfumes I've tried so far are indeed masterpieces, though not all are wearable for me. They have completely transformed my expectation of a perfume. There are scents to smell nice, scents to attempt to cover body odor (FYI: it doesn't work people and I do wish you'd stop trying) and then there is the Frederic Malle line. These perfumes are nothing short of wearable art.

The Parisian company is nice enough to send you three free spray samples for 20 euros of shipping cost (or you can go to Barneys and try them there). I've tried Carnal Flower, Lys Mediterranee, Un Fleur de Cassie, En Passant, Iris Poudre, Une Rose, Lipstick Rose and Parfum de Therese. Of these, the only one I had a strong unpleasant reaction to (and I'm hyper-sensitive to smells) was Parfum de Therese as it smelled like rotten meat on me and turned my stomach. Une Rose is too big of a flower for me--it's a big lush Georgia O'Keefe rose and too heady for this time of year, but still, it's beautiful. My favorites are Carnal Flower, En Passant, Lys Mediterranee, and Iris Poudre. Carnal Flower is a lush, green, complex tuberose scent. En Passant is just as described: a bush of white lilac in the rain. The scent smells exactly like the lilacs that grow in my southern yard and less like the ones from New England, but incredibly lovely nonetheless. Lys Mediterranee smells soft and salty sweet, and is intriguingly complex, and Iris Poudre is my winter scent. Less like powder to me and much more like something yummy to eat, this is an amazing iris and vanilla perfume.

In my research, I've learned about notes and noses and sillage, learned the difference between marine and metallic notes, learned about flankers and niche houses. But most surprising to me is that I fell in love with perfume for the first time, truly fell in love.

My favorite and most edifying perfume blog: Now Smell This

West of Here by Jonathan Evison

2011-04-05T09:29:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Evison’s “West of Here” is a gritty, full bodied epic set in the fictional town of Port Bonita, Washington. The beginning pulls the reader in with beautiful, assured narration and indelible characters who embody the spirit of the pioneers who ventured west in search of opportunity. These are men who set out to move the course of a river, who imagined selling ice gathered at mountain tops, who envisaged electric stairs, and who dreamed they could save the culture of a people. These are women who believed their voices and actions were valuable; for one woman that meant to send her child away to a better life, for another, to break out of a destructive pattern, and for another, to attempt to stop big-money progress with the power of the written word.

A few chapters in, Evison introduces a whole new set of characters as he travels forward in time to the lives of the descendants of the men and women who settled Port Bonita. The transition comes as a surprise but as the reader comes to know these new characters he won’t mind being ripped from the earlier group. Connecting the two time periods are the Elwha river, the men who tried to tame it and their descendants, the Native American settlement of Jamestown, and an odd shaman-like out-of-body experience in which the Native American boy, Thomas, switches places with a modern day Khallam Indian, Curtis.

The themes are familiar: man versus nature, Native American wisdom versus progress, the tangible versus the mysterious, but Evison’s quality of writing and depth of character take these themes to an enviably high level. By the end, the reader realizes the author has threaded these two disparate sets of characters seamlessly to offer a rich, multi-layered novel that satisfies.

*Review first published in the March 20th edition of The Pilot of Southern Pines, NC

Pacazo by Roy Kesey

2011-03-23T14:01:00.000-07:00

Roy Kesey’s “Pacazo” is not a book to be rushed through. It is a work as fine as any classic, meant to be read again and again, slowly, with attention. It is the story of John Segovia (when John was a boy, his father told him he was a descendant of Juan de Segovia), a North American ex-pat historian working in Piura, Peru as an English professor. He’d come to Peru and not only fell in love with his late wife, but seemed to fall in love with the land and all of its quirks, failings and beauty. We meet John after his wife has been brutally raped and has died, disoriented and wounded, in the desert. John spends much of the novel overcoming the urge to seek violent revenge, sometimes while carrying his infant child around in a snuggly. He seems to always be plotting, seeking, and nearly always on the verge of being fired, and though he’s clearly suffering, avenging Pilar’s death seems to give him a purpose, as does diminishing the ill effects of El Nino on comfortable living.

The narration, told in the present tense and from John’s point of view, is a hybrid mix of collage and stream of consciousness. Scene blends into historical discourse which blends into dreams remembered which blend into sensory observations, sometimes within the same paragraph, sometimes within the same sentence. The result of which lends the feeling, at times, of being unmoored thus reflecting the narrator’s state of mind. The novel is laced with humor and packed with startling imagery: pacazo shit raining down on John’s head, whole mountains collapsing, and details of how a stingray’s “barbed spine will plunge in and rip out, taking its plug of flesh.” Not only rich with history and detail, the novel also offers insight on Peruvian manners and customs: for instance if someone pauses before he says yes to an invitation, he’s politely saying no.

John Segovia is a magnificent, lumbering, well-meaning character, and in “Pacazo” the country of Peru is a character just as prominent, just as magnificent. After reading this imaginative, refreshingly unique novel, I feel I know the place and its people enough to hold them both in my mind and heart, almost as if I’d been to Piura, Peru myself.

T.J. Forrester: Interview

2011-02-15T13:45:00.000-08:00

T.J., let me begin by telling you how very much I admire your first novel, “Miracles Inc.”". Fast-paced, witty, unflinching, narrated by a unique and unforgettable character, this novel succeeds on so many levels. Congratulations!

A. Thanks so much, Katrina.

Q. How long have you been writing? How long did you work on this novel?

A. I've been writing since 2000.

In 2002, I began work on the novel, but I wasn't capable and frustration got the best of me. I put away the manuscript. When I started getting a handle on the craft, something that happened in 2005, I focused on the story for about a year and still didn't make headway.

Along about that time, I began work on Black Heart on the Appalachian Trail, and this is the collection that garnered so much attention when I queried agents. I signed with Leigh Feldman, who is now with Writers House, and she wanted a novel partial to sub with the collection. So, I sent her the first eighty pages of Miracles, Inc. She said the story was cliched. I rewrote another eighty pages, which I didn't send because I didn't like them very much. A few days later I started again, and this time the novel came together from sentence one. (I'll take a shot at explaining why in the answer to the next question.)

From then on, facing a Simon & Schuster deadline, I worked twelve hours a day. It was exhausting, and I had to squeeze in time for exercise and eating right or I couldn't stay alert enough to make progress. If I add up the failed attempts and the tangents that led to nowhere, I wrote somewhere around 300,000 words to come up with the 70,000 that made the final cut.

Q. What came first for “Miracles Inc.,” character or situation?

A. During the writing of this novel, I tried for years to bring the main character to life. I started close to the action, I started far from the action, I gave him different characteristics, and put him in different situations. The chapters turned out bland, bland, and blander. Finally, I woke up one morning understanding that the story begins after the bad thing happens. I put Vernon Oliver on death row, and his voice revealed itself from sentence one. When I heard that voice, that's when I knew I had a character who could carry the novel.

To answer your question, the character and situation were so entwined from the get-go it's impossible to separate the two.

Q. That fact that you take the reader into little known worlds makes this book even more special and fun to read. How were you able to lend such verisimilitude to televangelism and to death row? What was the extent and process of your research?

A. I went to a few faith healing meetings when I was younger, so I have some knowledge of the Pentecostal religion, but I mostly used my imagination to pull off that part of the book.

To research death row, I spent many hours in the library. Still, I wasn't comfortable in trying to precisely portray prison life, so I put my main character in a fictional institution south of the real death row in Florida. This setting, I felt, gave me more freedom to fictionalize his incarceration.

However, research is only the start of lending veracity to fiction. The other part of the equation is writing with significant detail. A word to younger writers: fiction readers rely on their imaginations and if you add too much detail you take away the fun. Too, if you don't put in enough detail the fictive dream never kicks off. The trick is finding the right detail and the right amount of detail. Sometimes it takes revising a scene many times to get it right.

Q. The pacing is break-neck and yet slows down at the right moments. Did you cut anything out to achieve this pacing or did it "fall” out this way?

A. I don't remember making a conscious decision to slow things down or to speed things up. I blame a lot of my writing on intuition. (There is still so much that is mysterious about the process.)

Q. You handle the large and small scale seemingly with ease, widening the lens and narrowing again when necessary. Is this something you were conscious of?

A. That part of my writing comes naturally.

Q. You nailed the voice. You nailed the character. For all the trouble Vernon gets into, his desire appears to be simple: to live comfortably with the woman he loves. This simplicity makes him incredibly likable despite his failings. How did he first show himself to you?

A. I didn't know Vernon had a lover until I began the second chapter, so when he first appeared he was unlikeable. Developing his relationship with Rickie softened him up and added a complexity he wouldn't have otherwise had. I suspect Vernon resonates because we all have desires and what greater desire than one lover for another?

Q. Which do you prefer to write, short stories or novels?

A. I like both genres, see the act of creating a short story as rewriting until I form a narrative that fills a bubble. Hard, but not scary. Writing a novel is a set of train tracks heading across the mountain and is much more intimidating because I never know if I'm angling toward a cliff or a bridge. If pinned down, I like writing novels better than writing short stories. There's something about long term immersion that's attractive to obsessive personalities.

Q. And lastly, what does the L in Vernon's name stand for?

A. Lamar.

Thank you, T.J., for answering these questions and thank you for writing such a dynamic book!

T. J. Forrester comes from a family of four and has thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, and the Continental Divide Trail. He prefers to sleep on the ground and is no longer scared of bears. His stories have appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, The Literary Review, The MacGuffin, The Mississippi Review, Potomac Review, and Storyglossia.

He wrote Miracles, Inc. while living in Virginia. The attic room was small, chilly in the winter, but his landlord was very kind and fed him when he was without food. His second work, a novel-in-stories titled Black Heart on the Appalachian Trail, is forthcoming with Simon & Schuster in the spring of 2012.

He blogs at his personal website. tjforrester.com

Pank

2011-01-27T13:30:00.000-08:00

My story "In the Fall" will be appearing in Pank in May. I've been an admirer of Roxanne Gay, one of the editors of the journal, for a while now. I've been reading her blog and I'm amazed how gorgeous and meaningful her posts are. She's a natural.

"In the Fall" started out as a 6000+ words story and I kept shaving off the dead areas, again and again, until I ended up with the final piece just under 1200 words.

"Tenderoni"

2011-01-18T12:50:00.000-08:00

Writer and blogger Myfanwy Collins reviews Kathy Fish's new chapbook "Tenderoni" here.

I'm looking forward to reading it!

Curio

2011-01-16T12:59:00.001-08:00

is Laura Ellen Scott's collection offered in installments by Uncannyvalley.

Each of these first three pieces shows just how talented and imaginative Laura is. My favorite so far is "The Brewsters."

Excerpt: The tin screams as we enter forcibly to stand inside damnation. The Brewster children sleep in a pile, stuck together like old candy. Their parents are naked and chattering in the tub of a wringer washer, tipped over. Sometimes I think I want a love like that. They don’t even know we’re here.

Lit Journal Giveaway

2011-01-16T11:13:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: These have now found a new home.

I'm willing to send all of these journals or a few to the first person who emails me with his or her address (tdenza@nc.rr.com). Rather than send these to the recycling center which just doesn't feel right, I'd like them to go to someone who will appreciate them.

The Kenyon Review Fall 2006
Zoetrope Fall 2008
A Public Space Spring 2006
The Missouri Review Winter 2007
AGNI 64
The MacGuffin Winter 2007
American Short Fiction Winter 2007
The Baltimore Review Winter/Spring 2007
The Chattahoochee Review Winter 2007
Ninth Letter Spring/Summer 2007
The Missouri Review Winter 2008
Ninth Letter Spring/Summer 2008
The Gettysburg Review Winter 2007
The Chattahoochee Review Winter 2006
Fourteen Hills Summer/Fall 2006
Harpur Palate Volume 6 Issue 2
cream city review 30th Anniversary Issue
Cimarron Review Winter 2007
Southern Indiana Review 2007
Ninth Letter Fall Winter 2008-9
Parting Gifts Spring 2007

Congratulations to Myfanwy Collins!

2010-11-13T12:21:00.000-08:00

for winning Flatmancrooked's Fiction Prize!

I love that Benjamin Percy says she's the real deal. Yes she is!!

Kenyon Review

2010-11-02T07:40:00.000-07:00

Kenyon Review Online has a new, interesting feature called "Why We Chose It." I am always interested in analysis of what makes a story not only work, but stand out.

Prime Number

2010-10-19T12:44:00.000-07:00

The latest issue is live and it looks fantastic!

June

2010-10-07T09:21:00.000-07:00

is the month in which I entered my last blog post. The end of June but still...JUNE! A little over three months and during that time, I've been playing with my son while he was on summer vacation (and delivering him to his swim team practices), reading submissions for Narrative, away at Bread Loaf for eleven days and then away again to Rome for a week. I'm back from Italy, at least in body, and I'm slowly slipping back into my writing self but I've been out of it so long the slipping feels clumsy.

However, until I become fully engaged again, here are a couple of links to must-have books:

Cut Through the Bone

Up From the Blue

Aryn Kyle: Interview

2010-06-30T06:25:00.000-07:00

Aryn Kyle's latest book, "Boys and Girls Like You and Me," is an extraordinary read. After I read her debut novel, God of Animals," I was a fan and I awaited her collection of stories with great anticipation and excitement. I know wise-beyond-her-years is an overused phrase, but I'm going to stubbornly insist it fits Aryn Kyle's distinctive voice. Her characters are vulnerable and wonderful and flawed but it's also clear they are loved by the author and it is this lens of love through which they reveal themselves that makes them so special.

I asked Aryn if I could interview her about her writing process and her short story collection and she graciously agreed:

Hi, Aryn,

Let me start off by saying I enjoyed reading these stories very much. Thank you for writing them!
Q: Your characters are rich with depth, and as I’ve said before, they’re messed up in all the best ways. Do you have any tricks for creating such vulnerable, imperfect yet empathetic characters?

One of the things I find most frustrating about life is that we’re all just stuck with ourselves. No matter how rich our imagination is, how deep our empathy, none of us can ever truly know what it’s like to be inside someone else’s skin. At times, I find this confinement, this limitation, almost too much to bear.

I think that’s how my love affair with books began. I’ve always felt kind of weird, kind of different, kind of uneasy in the world (though I suppose that most people feel like this sometimes). As a child, books gave me an escape from myself, a chance to experience the world through someone else’s eyes. I suppose it was a pretty natural progression for me to begin writing. I’m fascinated by the details of other people’s lives—their childhoods and friendships and marriages, the ways they describe their wants and needs and failures, their secrets. At parties, I’m much more content to linger on the perimeter, watching other people interact than I am to interact with them myself. This probably indicates some sort of major social dysfunction on my part, but it tends to be good for my writing.

First and foremost, I write for character. Plot, setting, etc.—they all come later, after I have the characters, after I’ve spent some time living with them in my head and carrying them around with me. By the time I sit down to write, I know them as well as I know my friends and family, better than I know my friends and family. And while I don’t always share my characters’ life experiences, I can usually access them emotionally. I wasn’t abandoned by my mother as a child, I didn’t sleep with my high school drama teacher, I’ve never gone to a therapist and pretended to be someone I’m not. But I know what it’s like to feel lost, to feel lonely, to feel longing. And that’s my point of entrance.

Q: In “Nine” a young girl is left basically left on her own to grieve the loss of her mother. Her father tells her simply that her “mother’s moved forward.” Her mother leaves a red raincoat in the hall closet and I saw this coat as a brilliant symbol for the silence between Tess and her father. When she puts the coat on and wears it, it becomes the emotional burden she takes on herself—an apt metaphor for children in similar situations in which important things are left unsaid. Was the red coat an intentional symbol or was its appearance a surprise even for you?

The red raincoat was one of those things that just appeared out of nowhere. While I was writing the story, I pictured Tess’s world in grays and blues—all that rain, all that sadness—and so I think I was subconsciously looking for something that would stand out against the color pallet, something bright and unavoidable. This is my favorite part of writing, when you enter a character so entirely that you just let them escort you through the story. Tess opened the closet and there it was: her mother’s raincoat.

Of course, at some point, the writer has to separate from the character, or at least be able to see beyond what the character can see, in order to make choices for the story as a whole. Once something like the red raincoat pops up, you have to use it. It has to show up again. It has to be important. You can’t just close the closet door and forget about it. For me, that’s almost always how I find the plot of whatever I’m writing. Early in the process, I’m just letting myself type, trying to keep up with my characters, trying to give them enough space to wander around and make discoveries. Eventually, though, I have to make decisions about those discoveries, put them to work, make them contribute to the overall arc of the story.

Once the raincoat showed up, it became the physical presence of her mother’s absence—if that makes sense—and I knew that Tess would have to wear it at some point, that she would have to pull the past into the present. And I knew there would have to be some sort of consequence for that, that Tess’s choices would, inevitably, alter her world by the end of the story.

Q: In “Sex Scenes from a Chain Bookstore,” the appearance of Angry Man made me laugh out loud because in my brief experience working in that environment, I’m fairly certain I’ve met him. You did a fantastic job offering the reader satisfaction as the narrator gets her revenge. Did you ever work in a bookstore?

All four years of college I was employed by the Fort Collins Barnes and Noble—store 2611, if you want to get specific. It’s funny because when I think back on college, I remember very little about the campus or my classes. Mostly, what I remember is the book store. I wouldn’t have said so at the time, especially while I was cleaning vomit off the floor or dealing with some irate bully of a customer, but it was an awesome job. I loved the people I worked with. Loved. We spent our time schlepping books around and smoking cigarettes by the Dumpster and prank calling each other from the safe room. I never made too many “college friends.” All my friends were booksellers.

There seems to be a certain type of person who’s attracted to working at a bookstore. A fairly twisted sense of humor seems to be key. And, obviously, a love of books. I remember a roommate saying at one point of my B&N crowd, “You guys are the only people I know who get drunk and talk about what you’re reading.”
I should probably clarify that while I worked at Barnes and Noble, my manager was a married mother of two—so it ought to go without saying that we never had sex with each other in the store or anywhere else. But I did date one of my supervisors for awhile, and we sometimes made out in the stacks during slow shifts. It was pretty hot.

Q: I loved “Captain’s Club.” Loved, loved, loved it, particularly the relationship that develops between Tommy and Tree. Such lovely empathy between them which, by contrast, emphasizes how cavalier and self-absorbed C.J. and his father are. For me, the most beautiful moment in the story was when Tommy sees the red moon:

“He felt that he should be afraid, because this was something he had never seen, never heard of, because it was larger than anything he had ever imagined, because it was the sun or a star or a planet full of blood.
But the beauty, bright and full and red as a human heart, made his body ring inside, and he could not be afraid.”

This is such an amazing moment/feeling you’ve captured here that it led me to wonder if the image came before the story and you wrote the story around it.

The moon came before the story. I went on a Mediterranean cruise years ago (with my parents and my grandparents) and one night my parents and I were walking the deck of the ship late at night—it was nearly deserted—and we saw the moon I tried to describe at the end of the story. Though it was, truly, beyond the description of words. I have never seen anything like it in my life and don’t expect to ever see anything like it again. It was terrifying and electrifying and it filled me with a combination of awe and euphoria and deep, deep sorrow. I remember feeling frantic almost, like I needed to take pictures of it or wake up everyone on the ship so that they could all see it too.

Big moments are always hard for me—I’m trying to figure out how I will retell them even while they’re still happening, panicking that people I love aren’t there to share them with me, aware that all too soon, they’ll be over and maybe never happen again, at least, not to me.

Years after that cruise, when my novel sold, I was very far away from almost everyone I loved. I was living at a writers’ colony in New Hampshire and there was no cell phone reception and very limited Internet. The sale of my book happened quite quickly, days after I’d finished writing it, and though it was the most fantastic thing that had ever happened to me, I remember feeling these giant waves of grief. It felt so big and so important and there was no one there to share it with, no one to validate it or witness it or remember it.

For some reason, those two experiences, the moon over Mykonos and the sale of my novel are inexplicably linked in my memory, though they happened years apart and on different sides of the planet. For a long time, I tried to find the story that would let me work out some of my feelings about both of those things. “Captain’s Club” is one of the newest stories in the collection—I wrote it a little over a year ago. Tommy, the main character, appeared in my head one day, entirely out of the blue. It was like I’d known him forever. And once I figured out that he and that moon belonged in the same story, everything else came very quickly.

Q: In “Femme” you executed the second plural pov so very well. From where did the inspiration for this story originate?

I wrote “Femme” as an exercise for a techniques class in graduate school. There was some sort of assignment, but I can’t for the life of me remember what the assignment was. I think it had something to do with irony, though the story isn’t at all ironic, so maybe I’ve got that wrong.

I remember too that I was annoyed with a girl in my class who I felt had befriended me and coaxed my secrets out of me only to turn on me after I’d given them up to her. It wasn’t the first time I’d fallen for such tricks—I’m easy prey for a woman who strokes my vanity while seducing her way into my privacy. I wrote the exercise, in part, to release my frustration at having been such a willing victim to such a familiar ploy, and also, I think, because it was the closest thing to a confrontation I was capable of mustering. More than anything, I remember being tremendously disappointed that the girl for whom the story was intended didn’t come to class that day and never even knew I wrote it.
Probably just as well.

Q: Speaking of points of view…in “Boys and Girls Like You and Me,” you slip into second person twice, and it’s this decision that, for me, took the story to even deeper emotional level. The end was devastating in a good way. Did you have anyone telling you not to switch povs?

“Boys and Girls” is another story where I had the ending long before I had the beginning. I knew that it would end in second person. The other spot where it slips into second person was completely accidental, or rather, unplanned. For awhile I went back and forth about whether to cut that bit out—I think that the story would work fine without it. My problem with it, still, is that it isn’t exactly the same second person that shows up at the end. The second person at the end is, more or less, direct address. But the second person that shows up earlier is basically the narrator referring to herself.

In the end, I left it in because I felt that it was important for the narrator to, in some way, claim responsibility for her situation, to own her mistakes. Something about doing that in first person just felt a little melodramatic. I’m still not sure I made the right decision leaving it in, but since the book has been bound and published, I suppose I might as well stop worrying about it.

Q: I’m always curious about process. Your stories are clear and polished and rich with developed characters and situations. How long do you work on a story? Do you revise often? Do you ever get sick of working on a story?

Every story is different. I wrote “Brides” in a single sitting and the draft that appears in the book is very close to the original draft—there were only a few edits. “Allegiance,” on the other hand, took nearly two years for me to finish; I went through at least twenty drafts of that sucker. The others fall somewhere in-between.

I’ve never written anything that I didn’t hate at some point during the process. Starting a story is a ton of fun, and finishing a story is truly the most amazing experience in the world—at least for me. It’s like being on the most fantastic, perfect drugs. I feel like I can fly. Literally. Everything I’ve ever written has been finished around 3:00 in the morning—probably because I write at night—and when I’m done, I’m filled with so much adrenaline, I can hardly contain myself. I want to go running or dancing or find a trampoline. The night I finished my short story collection, I woke my then-boyfriend by jumping up and down on our bed and shrieking, “I finished! I finished! Let’s go swimming!” Of course, this was February in Montana and it was in the middle of the night, so he wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about the idea. But we did drink champagne for breakfast.

I think it’s pretty lucky that it feels so fantastic to finish, otherwise I might not have the impetus to get through the mucky middle. Inevitably, at some point, every story feels impossible, like a giant, messy waste of time. The excitement of starting something new burns off and you’re suddenly adrift in threads that don’t tie together and arcs that go nowhere. And when you reach that point, there really is nothing to do but just clench your jaw and power through. It can feel like digging through concrete with a salad fork, but that’s just the nature of the beast. I’ve never written anything that didn’t, at some point, feel like a mistake, like it wasn’t meant to be and I should just give up on it. Usually, though, I think the voice that tells us we’re wasting our time is the voice of laziness, the part of the brain that’s bored and tired and would rather be watching TV. When that voice starts talking, I know it’s time to brew some coffee and settle in. Because I’m going to be there for awhile.

Q: You’ve written and published both a novel and a collection. Do you have a preference for one form over the other? How are they different for you?

I prefer them each at different times for different reasons. As a reader, I think that some of the best work in contemporary fiction is happening in short stories. It’s very rare that I finish reading a novel and think, “That piece of writing was perfect.” But I read short stories that I think are perfect all the time. Of course, I expect different things of stories than I do of novels. With a story, I want to be left feeling like I’ve been punched in the stomach, like the wind has been knocked out of me. The stories I remember and admire and force my friends to read are all stories that hurt me in some way, that showed me something I wasn’t expecting to see and made me feel something I wasn’t expecting to feel. With novels, I want to lose myself, to disappear into the lives of the characters and come back out in a different place, with a different view of the world than I had when I began.

Technique-wise, I feel more freedom writing a story than a novel, and I’m more willing to let myself take risks, to write something simply because I want to, even if it’s dark or troubling, even if I suspect it might alienate some readers, even if it breaks rules about form or structure.

With a novel, I’m primarily concerned with character, with giving the characters enough space to be real on the page, to form their own decisions and make their own mistakes, while still trying to wrangle them together and keep their various plotlines moving in the same direction. Of course, I’ve written many more stories than I have novels, so perhaps my feelings will change as I get more experience.

Q: What was the first thing you ever wrote?

It’s hard for me to recall a time when I wasn’t writing. I’ve kept a journal for as long as I can remember, and even when I was really little—first or second grade—I wrote poems. But my first real writing endeavor started in the fourth grade. I spent the whole school year working on a novel about a magic puppy. All I wanted in the world was a puppy and since I couldn’t have one, I spent my time writing about one, which, I suppose, soothed me. In the fifth grade, I got a real dog and promptly stopped caring about my novel. And, as I’m writing this anecdote, I suddenly realize that it’s revealing quite a bit about who I am and why I write, and it’s creeping me out, so I’m going to stop.

Q: What does your typical writing day look like? Are you a write-when-inspired writer, or are you in the chair every day whether your muse joins you or not?

I’m an all-or-nothing writer; it goes in waves. Months pass in which I don’t work at all. But when I am writing, that’s all I do. I hardly sleep, hardly eat, hardly have any contact with the outside world. I stop answering my phone, I don’t respond to emails, I forget to pay my bills. This is neither terribly healthy nor terribly good for my social life, but I try to remind myself that Emily Dickinson lived in an attic, which makes me feel well adjusted by comparison.

Q: What are you working on now?

I’m working on a new novel, which, for superstitious reasons, I don’t talk about at all. It’s been a bit slow-going lately, but it’s difficult to write one book while in the midst of promoting another. I have some travels coming up this summer, but am hoping to disappear into my writing cave afterwards and get a draft cranked out by late fall or early winter. Fingers crossed, anyway.

Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions. You’re a hugely talented writer and I’m looking forward to the next book from you.

Author photo by Miriam Berkley

Summer Break, Writing and Gargoyle

2010-06-09T07:04:00.000-07:00

My youngest has a half day of school tomorrow and then he's on break for five weeks. He'll be going into third grade. An unsettling fact, since it seems as if he was in preschool only a hour ago. He was fortunate to have an amazing teacher (all bright, inspiring teachers, but particularly his second grade teacher), in an equally amazing environment.
In these last weeks while he was in shool, I wrote six new story drafts and sketched out another and I received inspiration for my two novels. I feel best when I'm creating, so this productive time was a gift.

I'm also excited to have a story accepted for Gargoyle #57!

Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man by Bill Clegg

2010-06-07T06:12:00.000-07:00

is an amazing book. In his memoir, Bill Clegg shares his story of trying to hide his addiction to crack while maintaining his success as a New York Literary Agent and his relationship with his boyfriend. He brings us along into his descent into paranoia and tunnel vision and eventual fall, with uncommon honesty and courage. The writing is compelling and I particularly liked the decision he made to forgo a linear narrative, because I found the dips into his past a relief from the building tension and also very illuminating.

Jen Michalski Interviews Dawn Raffel

2010-06-01T06:43:00.000-07:00

Here.

I have Dawn's book and am looking forward to reading it. I love the cover!

Interview: Becky Hagenston

2010-05-26T15:13:00.000-07:00

Recently, I read Becky Hagenston's "Strange Weather," published by Press 53 (a press from North Carolina that's been enjoying much success lately) and was wowed by both the quality of the writing and by the emotional depth. Clearly, Hagenston is that kind of large-hearted writer I admire. One who writes realistic fiction, but also one who isn't afraid to depart from the expected. I so loved this collection, I immediately read her earlier collection "A Gram of Mars," and found it equally as moving and strong. Both collections were award-winners: "A Gram of Mars" won the 1997 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction (judged by A.M. Holmes) and "Strange Weather" won the 2009 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction before Press 53 published it.

I had a few questions for Becky and she generously agreed to answer them:

Q: The stories in each of your collections impressed me with their surprising details, honesty, and range of character. I was also impressed by your obvious love of character, even when these people have been very, very, bad. What amazed me as well was the consistency of quality. In a collection I’m fairly satisfied if I like most of the stories but I found in each of your collections there wasn’t one story I didn’t admire. They all seemed to pull their weight. Were there any stories you’d written you decided not to include?

Becky: Thanks so much for saying that. I always have a hard time deciding what to put in and what to take out. I have a huge backlog of stories—and each of my collections went through several variations in terms of their content. In fact, I almost included the story “Poison”, which appears in my latest collection, in A Gram of Mars. That’s how old that story is! I think I didn’t include it because there was already one depressed-father story, and one per collection is plenty. So when I leave things out, even if they’re publishable, it’s usually because there’s already a story that’s too similar in some way. Of course, I also have a huge backlog of failed stories. I’ll send them out again and again, revise and revise, but sometimes I just have to accept that a story isn’t working, and set it aside, or use it for parts.

Q: In your collection “A Gram of Mars” it struck me that the many of the characters within have a difficult time moving on, of letting go. The title story is particularly poignant. An older man, unhappily divorced, clings tightly to unrealistic fantasies of getting back together with his wife and this manifests itself in his impractical, impulsive need to have a piece of Mars. Where did the inspiration for this story originate?

Becky: This story is the most autobiographical story I’ve ever written (though much of it is entirely made up), and it came about when my family—like all families at some point—was going through a really crappy time. My father actually does have a very small piece of Mars rock, but he has a friend with a bigger, more expensive piece, the three thousand dollar an ounce kind, and that-- mixed in with what my family was going through—was the catalyst for the story.

I wasn’t sure how my parents would react to me mining their troubles for fiction, but they were wonderfully supportive. When my father read the story he said it upset him a little, but he understood that this was what I had to do, and he was proud of me. My sister was the one who was kind of annoyed, but she got over it!

Q: In your collection, “Strange Weather,” though I admired all the stories, my absolute favorite was “Anthony.” I think, perhaps, because of the risks you took and the departure from complete realism which was executed so well. In the story, which begins: “The ghost had gotten inside her daughter like a tapeworm and refused to come out,” the ghost sort of takes over and as everyone around becomes more dependent on the ghost’s “wisdom” the girl gradually recedes into the background. She, essentially, becomes the ghost. Where did you find the inspiration for this highly imaginative story, and why a young black male for the voice of Anthony? Also, I admire your use of multiple povs in this piece. Was this a decision you made early on or was it one you arrived at after revision?

Becky: I love this story too, because it was such an utter surprise for me. I had been reading Aimee Bender and Robert Olen Butler and Kelly Link, and so I was ready for something kooky to happen—but when the first sentence came to me, I just wrote it down and thought: Now what? I had no idea. I knew I didn’t want a cliché ghost story, so I was casting about for something unexpected, but I really didn’t know who the ghost would be until he spoke: “It’s time to party!” and that’s when I knew what a joyful and full of life (though he’s dead) character Anthony was.
I don’t know why he’s black, but a friend of mine who grew up in the south pointed out that this was a way for this white southern family to deal with race without having to really deal with it—seeing as how Anthony has no physical presence--so I liked that. But really, that was just the voice that came to me, and I went with it.

I had intended for the story to be entirely in Cindy’s mother’s point of view, but as soon as Anthony appeared, I realized he was going to affect everyone, and that the story had to accommodate him by moving into other points of view. I had also originally figured that Anthony would bring the family together and then move on, (although I don’t know why, considering I don’t really go for happy endings!) but along the way I realized I didn’t want him to leave. And neither did anyone else, even though he’s a kind of parasite sapping poor Cindy’s strength. I really like what you said about her turning into a ghost—I hadn’t even thought of that, but that’s totally true!

Q: Speaking of revision…how often do you revise a story usually? Do you follow a set plan or is the revision organic to each story?

Becky: I never have a plan for anything, and I’ve revised stories as little as three times (though I also revise as I’m writing) and as many as . . . countless times. And as I’ve already mentioned, there’s that stack of stories that just aren’t ever going to work. It once took me fifteen years to go from a first draft to a publishable draft—not that I was working on it every day, or even every year. But I always have several stories going, in various stages: from the polish-it-up and give it to my husband to read stage (I can’t give him anything until it’s almost finished) to the scribbles-on-scraps-of-paper stage. And everywhere in between. Right now I’m revising a story I started two years ago but also finding ways to avoid it (because I’m still stuck) by writing a brand-new story. And I may finish the new story first, who knows?

Q: What does your writing day typically look like? How do you balance the demands of family, teaching, and your own writing?

Becky: When I was in grad school, I was a full-time secretary and part-time coffee shop worker, and I would get up early and write for a half hour before work and then write during my half hour lunch, so I’ve trained myself to work like that, and I still do. I couldn’t write for 6 hours, even if I had 6 hours. I ask for 8:00 classes so I have to get up early, and if I manage to write from 6-6:30 a.m., I’m pretty happy. I also take notes throughout the day, in between classes and grading and student conferences. I’m sure it would be much more difficult if I had kids, but I haven’t really had problems carving out small blocks of time to write.
On weekends, I do more time-consuming stuff, like revision or the ever-tedious submitting to journals and contests. And weekends are when I get most of my reading done—I never feel like I have enough time to read. Of course, there are plenty of days when I don’t get anything productive done at all, and I’ve learned that’s okay, too.

Q: Your stories have emotional depth and a great range of character. In one story you write from an upper-middle class perspective (“Trafalgar”) and in another you write from a working-class point of view (“All the Happiness in the World”). You accomplish both with respect and veracity. Did you intend to broaden your range in this way or do the characters arrive to you already formed and you listen?

Becky: I think for the most part the characters are just there—or there’s a particular voice I have in mind. I wrote “Trafalgar” because I spent a lot of time in England, but could not manage to write an England story no matter how hard I tried. They all turned out like Notes About My Fun Study Abroad Trip. So I invented this mother-daughter team to see the sights instead, with a little naughty secret thrown in. I had also just read Gay Daly’s fantastic book, Pre-Raphaelites in Love, so that’s where the art stuff came from.

The character Gina in “All the Happiness in the World” is inspired by one of my best friends from college, who is one of the funniest people I know. I would take notes as we talked on the phone, because I wanted to get her voice just right. So most of the events of the story aren’t real, but a lot of her dialogue is. When I told her I was writing the story, she was tickled—and she put up with a lot of “Can you say that again so I can write it down?”

Q: I’d love to read more from you. What’s in your future? A Novel? Another collection?

Becky: I’m sending out a new collection to contests, and I have an almost-finished 4th collection that I’m going to finish this fall when I’m on sabbatical in the south of France. (I’m thinking there must be a lot to write about in the south of France!). I’m also always, always working on a novel. I think I’m currently working on number four, or maybe number five. They’ve all been pretty bad, and my attempt at chick lit (How hard could it be?) was a disaster (It’s hard!), but now I’m working on a mystery and I’m really just entertaining myself. Maybe I’ll never publish a novel, but I still enjoy writing them.

Thank you so much for taking the time to share your insights and for writing such beautiful books.

Becky: Thank you for wanting to interview me, and for your great questions!

Myfanwy Collins at Dark Sky

2010-05-24T10:57:00.000-07:00

The lovely and talented Ethel Rohan interviews one of my favorite writers, who also happens to be very talented and my good friend, Myfanwy Collins, at Dark Sky Magazine.

"Easy for You" Stories by Shannan Rouss

2010-05-22T09:12:00.000-07:00

I found this gem of a collection in my local bookstore and LOVED it. The voice in these stories is assured and controlled and clear. I think my favorite story might be "Belief in Italy" in which the narrator, a woman with an eating disorder, goes to Italy with her chef boyfriend. I enjoyed all of these stories and will be looking out for more work by Rouss.

Here's a video of Rouss discussing the inspiration and process behind the book:

Bread Loaf 2010

2010-05-21T11:19:00.000-07:00

I'm grateful to have been awarded a spot as a contributor at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference this year. Now must convince my family it would be okay to live on peanut butter and jelly for the next three months...

Wigleaf Top 50

2010-05-21T11:14:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to the many talented writers who made both this list of 50 and the long shortlist posted underneath. There are some beautiful innovative things being done with very short fiction these days and this list serves as evidence of that fact.

Apologies? Again?

2010-05-20T09:37:00.000-07:00

Anyone looking at this blog lately will notice that every other post seems to be an apology for not posting so I'm not going to apologize this time in order to avoid redundancy.

In any case, I'm happy to report that along with a full and happy family life, I've been writing! A lot!

And I've also been reading many wonderful short story collections, all of which I'll be naming in a coming post.

I'll also be posting an interview with a writer of two of those much admired collections soon...

Ultra Orange Emmanuelle

2010-04-28T06:54:00.001-07:00

How to Write in 700 Easy Lessons...

2010-04-22T04:44:00.000-07:00

an essay by Richard Bausch in The Atlantic Monthly online's special fiction issue.

And in the same issue, be sure to read Joyce Carol Oates' heartbreaking essay "I Am Sorry to Inform You."

"Pretty" by Kim Chinquee

2010-03-18T07:50:00.000-07:00

This is a book you simply must get. "Pretty" is a masterclass in writing.
I'm reading one piece a morning because to read them all at once, for me, would deny the immense power of each one. Chinquee's fictions are weighty with meaning, clear and concise, filled with unusual imagery, but at the same time, familiar. They are examples of controlled language so fine they even look pretty on the page. "Pretty" has made me fall in love with Flash Fiction all over again.

Kyle Minor

2010-03-10T10:43:00.001-08:00

has a story in Fifty-Two Stories:

The Truth and All Its Ugly

Everyday Genius: March

2010-03-03T15:42:00.000-08:00

I'll be looking forward to reading this issue since it's guest-edited by Laura Ellen Scott. Laura Ellen's own work is highly original and rich. I can only imagine what she has in store for us.

Melody Gordot

2010-02-28T14:57:00.000-08:00

Melody Gordot

and here

Have Your Characters Do Something

2010-02-26T07:10:00.000-08:00

Mary Akers offered this link to an article by Laura Miller: A Reader's Advice to Writers. It's a great article but the one thing that resonated most with me was: Make your main character do something.

Oh. Yeah.

You see, I have a hard time with this one. Probably because I'm not much of an outrageous, interesting, doer in my own life. I do things, of course, but I don't protest naked, I don't punch people, I don't spy on my ex-wife, and I don't set fires. So I notice, usually between my first and fifth draft, my character is thinking about things and usually taking the high road. SNORE.
Now I thought I'd learned this point already, but it wasn't until I read this article and I looked at the story I'm working on that I realized, Oops, I've done it again. So now I'm off to give my character a kick in the butt--or maybe not, since he packs a mean punch.

Congrats to Sue Williams!

2010-02-18T08:34:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to fellow Narrative editor, Sue Williams, for winning an honorable mention in Glimmertrain's Fiction Open for her novella, "The Winged Hendersons of Welton-on-Sea"!!

Snow

2010-02-13T04:56:00.000-08:00

I've been quiet here on my blog lately and this time it's for a good reason: I've cut back on socializing--virtual and real--and have been writing and reading. I miss the interaction but there are many gifts I've found in the silence.
We've also had unusually, horribly, cold weather here in NC but there's a gift in that too: this beautiful snow.

Mississippi Review: Flash Issue

2010-01-13T08:17:00.000-08:00

Read this brilliant issue full of wonderful talent all displayed in the very short form.

The whole issue is solid with pieces from Mary Akers, Randall Brown, Kathy Fish, Avital Gad-Cykman, Scott Garson , Peter Grandbois, Tiff Holland, Paul Lisicky, among others.

Guest-edited by Kim Chinquee a master of flash-fiction in her own right.

Stars: Your Ex-Lover is Dead

2010-01-12T10:58:00.000-08:00

2010

2010-01-11T05:25:00.000-08:00

Peace on Earth

2009-12-25T09:00:00.000-08:00

I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday. I'm tucked in with my family on this dark rainy day--which, if there's no snow, is the next best thing.

See you in the New Year.

SmokeLong Quarterly's

2009-12-21T13:38:00.000-08:00

newest issue is live and WOWEE that's a gorgeous cover. And look at all those talented writers inside!

Apologies

2009-11-25T07:13:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to get to my much neglected blog but Life (flu, trip to D.C., submissions, holiday...)has been getting in the way lately. However, I see a break in the clouds coming soon (after Thanksgiving and before New Orleans trip?) and I have so many good books to talk about and some more thoughts on process and links to good work. So hopefully in a couple of days I'll be back on track...

Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving.

Peace

StoryGlossia Issue 36

2009-10-29T06:38:00.000-07:00

The new issue is out! It's all about music and obsession.

"Leveling Appalachia"

2009-10-28T09:11:00.000-07:00

thanks to Mary Akers for this link.

Roxana Robinson On Writing:

2009-10-26T04:51:00.000-07:00

The New York Times Article

On Planning a Novel: Amy Tan in Conversation with Roger Rosenblatt

2009-10-25T10:51:00.000-07:00

To hear what she says about planning a novel, click on "Watch Full Program" then scroll down to the appropriate section. You have to pause the original link or the introduction will keep going...

Read This: Bad Monkey by Curtis Smith

2009-10-25T05:57:00.000-07:00

Curtis Smith has a gift for conjuring any kind of character imaginable, so much so, that I suspect he walks around with whole worlds in his mind, as varied and intriguing as they are familiar.

The first story in "Bad Monkey" is fiercely detailed and will likely haunt you. With chilling subtlety, Smith reveals, or more accurately, hints at, what happened to the smiling girl in the video. "The Girl in the Halo" is one of the few stories I've read in which the second person POV is so well done and fitting, I didn't notice it until the end. In "Think on Thy Sins" a son grows up quickly and takes on his father's businesses, both legal and illegal, after his father has an accident. In "What About Meg?" a widower, recovering from heart trouble, wants to down-size and sell the family home, but first he must decide whether or not to place his adult special needs daughter in a permanent care facility.

Smith's shorter stories are as richly layered and weighty as his longer pieces. In "In the Jukebox Light," a town looks at a promising local couple with a kind of loving awe which later turns to a wistful sadness after tragedy strikes. The piece "Caravan," reveals how the kind of unquestioning faith that lures people into the cult life can be as ominous and deadly to the spirit as the worst kind of evil. And in "Fever," one of my favorites of the collection, a mother cares for her feverish son as an ice storm snaps branches and makes a trip to the emergency room as treacherous as the fever itself. Smith creates atmosphere and suspense with concise precision. As the mother scolds herself for an affair that drove her husband away, she considers her son's future:

"She stroked her boy's flushed cheek, tasted the salty residue on her fingertips, and wondered how many nights he would spend trapped in a fever of one sort or another, his bearings undone by a fire within, a flame he could no more explain than he could resist."

Just as Parker has to deal with his troublesome monkey in the title story, the characters in this exquisitely crafted collection are forced to contend with their own bad monkeys.

Read This: Normal People Don't Live Like This

2009-10-18T08:44:00.000-07:00

by Dylan Landis. This is an incredible collection. Landis has delivered with precision, honesty and art, the adolescent female mind. Her sentences, vivid and daring, are honed to the clarity of a mountain stream. The details in her prose will surprise as will her characters even as their actions seem inevitable. I enjoyed the science threaded through the stories as well.

It's difficult to pick a favorite story in this even collection but the title story captures so well the precise moment in which a well-intentioned but disillusioned mother realizes she no longer has a handle on her daughter.

'It will hold, Helen thought. She was not lost. She was merely trying all sorts of stunts. Leah Sophia, one name from each grandmother. The cigarette was nothing. It was only smoke. It was only a moment: daughter, fifteen.'

The first story, "Jazz," is also striking in its raw honesty and head-on look at how a young girl rationalizes allowing a much older man to have sex with her. This passage shows so well how limited a thirteen year-old girl's understanding of herself and her place in the world is:

'She has known Richard since she was a toddler. She doesn’t have to be polite.
“Five minutes,” says Richard. He has freed a breast with his teeth. Rainey, propped on her elbows, sees how her breast lights up in the dark. It pumps out its resplendence like the sun. When Richard sucks on the nipple, the water rolls up through the pipes in Bethesda Fountain and rains on the heads of angels.
Rainey punches him in the head.
“Five minutes,” he says. “In five minutes you’ll be thirty-nine and I’ll be fourteen and then we can go.”
Rainey says, “Goddamit, Richard,” and she is half-crying. She is not getting raped but he won’t get up. She still wants to go too far but she is not sure how far is far.
“You think I just want one thing,” says Richard. “You think there’s only one part of you that’s special.” He kisses her mouth again, and she lets him, even though he has a beard and his mouth does not have that boy-sweetness; it tastes of tobacco and steak.
“Thirteen,” Rainey says, but there is clay in her mouth.'

For anyone wishing to understand those defining, and yet often lost moments, of a girl trying to leap into womanhood, this is a must read.

TED: Isabelle Allende

2009-10-12T10:03:00.000-07:00

This woman is amazing. Her talk is filled with humor and of course, passion.

Wabi-Sabi, Slowing Down, and Acceptance

2009-10-12T06:10:00.000-07:00

Right now, I'm reading a book I orginally bought for my husband and after he read it, he told me he thought I would enjoy it. I put it down in my stack, months went by, and then, as is usually the case, I picked it up at just the right time. It's a book called The Wabi-Sabi House: the Japanese Art of Imperfect Beeauty.

I've recently returned from a trip to Paris. That trip could be labeled a trip of imperfect beauty. I felt right at home in Paris. I've always loved the language and found when I was there I could speak enough to get by very well. I loved the food, the architecture, the people, the fact that there are flower markets on nearly every street corner in some parts and that grapes hang in bunches in the sunlight. I love that the women there, of all ages, take the time to present themselves with imperfect beauty. I loved seeing the joy in my son's eyes at the city life he loves so much: the metros, the glittering, magnificent lights of the Eiffel Tower, the hustle and bustle of transportation of all kinds, and I loved seeing my world-traveler husband adapt, take charge, as he does so well in any country. My trip was marred only by the fact that what I thought was a sinus infection turned out to be an abscess, so for the whole week, I lived on Advils and an antibiotic I'd never seen before. That could have ruined it for me, but it didn't. I still went out, pain and swelling be damned. I still enjoyed. I still soaked in all the beauty that was around me. After all, I could have had the abscess anywhere, much better that it was Paris!

When I returned, I started to take stock of my own life, its balance or lack of, and my priorities. I've not written a word since August--or maybe even July. I've stopped counting. I'm not blocked. I'm letting some air in. I'm taking notes, letting the novel stew, working out some issues. (I did manage to write two outlines of stories while I was in Paris, one sketchier than the other, so I guess that counts as writing, but barely). I haven't sent out a story to a magazine in almost a year though I have a couple of stories almost ready, and three others ready to be drafted. This is a departure from my determined, driven manner of the past few years of writing and sending stories out for the end result: publication. At this point, when I think about my novels and stories there's a kind of freedom I feel, the freedom of taking my time with them, of letting them be what they will, imperfect as they are. Of protecting their imperfection against the judment of others, of myself.

Wabi-Sabi is defined in the book as: "...the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature, of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death. It's simple, slow, and uncluttered--and it reveres authenticity above all. Wabi-sabi is flea markets, not warehouse stores, aged wood, not Pergo, rice paper not glass. It celebrates cracks and crevices and all the other marks that time, water, and loving use leave behind. It reminds us that we are all but transient beings on this planet--that our bodies as well as the material world around us are in the process of returning to the dust from which we came."

For the moment I've removed myself from the race. I'm accepting this is where I need to be. I'm enjoying the quiet. I'm taking note of the things for which I'm grateful. I'm drinking tea with reverence and I'm enjoying the beauty of imperfection.

TED: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

2009-10-08T07:11:00.001-07:00

New Books

2009-09-19T15:48:00.000-07:00

Some new story collections waiting on my shelf (!!):

"Bad Monkey" by Curtis Smith
"Girl Trouble" by Holly Goddard Jones
"Normal People Don't Live Like This" by Dylan Landis
"In an Uncharted Country" by Clifford Garstang
"In the Valley of the Kings" by Terrence Holt
"Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing" by Lydia Peele

Not to mention some amazing novels sitting right next to them. Ai! I'm going to have a fabulous time when I get back from Paris!

(I've already dipped into Smith's collection and the first story is powerful and beautifully written.)

I'll begin posting my thoughts on these and other books after I return. Have a productive couple of weeks. Happy writing and reading!

Peace.

Read This: A Story by Steven McDermott

2009-09-09T05:32:00.000-07:00

Night School at the journal You Must Be This Tall To Ride.

Paris and the Novel

2009-09-05T09:32:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd get right back into revising the novel when school began but instead I'm taking notes for it and trying very hard to learn French as we're going to Paris in three weeks. I've had five years of French in school, however, I wasn't always paying attention and now I'm trying to cram because while I struggled with Spanish in Madrid last year I feel as if I should be able to speak the language in France. Or at least try.

My soon to be eight year old son (who will be going with us, bien sur!) is not thrilled with the constant auditory vocab lessons: "Can we shut that French off? I can't think!"

Meanwhile...the note-taking is getting me excited to work on the novel again when we return.

Guernica

2009-09-02T08:41:00.000-07:00

The talented and award-winning writer, Pia Ehrhardt, has guest-edited this very special issue of Guernica/ After the Flood.

Storyglossia Issue 35

2009-09-01T11:05:00.000-07:00

is now live!

Read This: Everything Matters!

2009-08-24T06:30:00.000-07:00

Ron Currie's second book impressed me, captivated me and ultimately slayed me. The end is so damn beautiful I stayed up late so I could finish and I had to remind myself to take a breath once in a while. The end is so damn beautiful I reread it this morning and wept again.

Ron Currie is a generous author. He's given us an amazing story and then some. He's offered us food for the intellect and for the soul. If you, as you're reading along, think your mind can't handle any more surprises and that a book couldn't possibly hold so many twists and turns, Currie proves you wrong time and again.

"Everything Matters" is a novel of contradictions: elegant restraint/ raw emotion; pragmatic/ spiritual; despair/ hope. It shows us we are alone and at the same time we are bravely and wonderously connected.
Currie's imagination takes us on a white-knuckled ride and in the end, screeches to a halt in front of the undeniable truth that everything does indeed matter.

Do not miss reading this book. It will change your expectations of what literature can do. It may even change your life.

The Collagist

2009-08-14T10:47:00.000-07:00

(I love the name!) is going live Saturday afternoon!

Staccato is back

2009-08-13T11:26:00.001-07:00

and online.

In An Uncharted Country

2009-07-18T16:56:00.001-07:00

a short story collection by the talented writer and blogger Cliff Garstang is now available for preorder from Press 53 or Cliff's new website!

Read: "Wash, Dry, Fold" by Myfanwy Collins

2009-07-18T16:54:00.000-07:00

in the summer issue of Mississippi Review

Push the Limits

2009-07-18T16:37:00.000-07:00

Twice in one week this wisdom has come to my attention, though it may be fairly obvious to some of you, for me, at this particular time, it was like receiving permission from the universe.

From Poets & Writers Magazine's interview with Joshua Mohr:

Any advice about navigating publishing?
"I think it's vital to remember that no one knows what will succeed and what will flounder in the marketplace, and therefore, writers should take that intimidating unknown as license to write the craziest books they can imagine. If there are no guarantees for success, why not shove the boundaries so far away that they're invisible?"

and after watching the powerful,sexy, and haunting movie "Little Ashes" last night, which, by the way, was critically chastised, but I loved it, I was reminded Dali lived by his belief it was important to push the limits in art and in life if one wanted to be recognized as an important artist.

30

2009-07-02T20:09:00.000-07:00

is the number of books I want to bring on my two week trip.

8 is the actual number of books I'll be bringing.

4 is the number of books I'll probably end up being able to read.

Oh why can't I read faster?????

Out of Touch

2009-07-02T11:39:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be without internet access for the next couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to this "quiet" time with family and travel. I'm also looking forward to coming home, getting back to routine, my writing, and specifically, the novel.

Be well. Be fruitful.

Peace.

Read: Everything Matters!

2009-06-24T04:19:00.000-07:00

The second novel by Ron Currie Jr.. It's getting rave reviews and Ron's offered a free download of his first chapter on his website.

To friends in Iran

2009-06-20T05:56:00.000-07:00

May you be safe, may your voices be heard, and may your country come to a peaceful resolution.

Introducing: The Collagist

2009-06-10T13:15:00.000-07:00

The new online literary journal produced by Dzanc books!!

I imagine this journal is going to be amazing since it has Dzanc Books behind it as well as Matt Bell as editor and Mathew Olzman as poetry editor.

Read This: Freight Stories

2009-06-10T06:08:00.000-07:00

There's a new issue out and it has a piece by one of my very favorite writers: Alicia Gifford.

Read This: Kathy Fish

2009-06-01T04:17:00.001-07:00

at Night Train

Novel, Story, Novel, Story...

2009-05-28T12:05:00.000-07:00

I sat down with my rough draft this morning and read and took notes on the first five chapters. At first, I panicked at the amount of work there was to be done after looking at the thing in the harsh morning-after light. But there's definitely something there that still excites me and that's really all I can ask of a first draft.

Oddly, in the last day or two, I've been getting flashes of inspiration for a story/excerpt of my other novel and am now desperate to revise that piece. Go figure.

Rough Draft of My Novel is Done

2009-05-20T05:48:00.000-07:00

Ah. I never thought I'd get to write those words. I'm both excited and relieved. And today I'm going to take a day off from writing.!!!

In other news, I've been put on a waitlist for Bread Loaf. Which means if someone who was invited decides not to go, I may have a chance to get in. On the postive side, going to the mountain in 2006 was one of the most validating experiences I've had and on the negative side it's a lot of money to go as a contributor. I'm not going to worry about it now. If it's meant to be, it will.

I hope to dive into a couple of short story collections for Dan Wickett's May is Short Story Month, and soon I'll be scouring the internet for interviews and advice on revising the novel and who knows what else...

Question on Process

2009-05-08T07:48:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I have these three chapters that have just been sketched in as place markers. I'm going in now to fill them in, but I'm considering (but not decided) a major change to the book, a main character getting banished to back story. Do I fill in the chapters with new change in mind, or with same character and make the changes in revision?

What would you do?

Here's what I'm going to do...postpone killing the character until I have the full draft done.

Oh boy. Can't wait to see what kind of mess I have when I'm finished.

Listen: Interview with Elizabeth Strout

2009-05-07T14:42:00.000-07:00

on NPR

Wigleaf's Top Fifty

2009-05-06T08:08:00.000-07:00

Here is this year's amazing group of short-shorts, wigleaf's top fifty. I see many writers I admire on that list. I can't wait to dig in!!!

Read This: "Dear Everybody" and "Lawnboy"

2009-05-05T09:12:00.000-07:00

With apologies to Dan Wickett at Emerging Writers Network I want to take a moment out of short story month to talk about two novels I've read recently that blew me away. They're quite different, and yet there are enough similarities to inspire me to write about them both in one post. Both are coming of age stories, both deal with strained relationships between brothers, and both are written with an uncommon level of emotional vibrancy.

The first is "Dear Everybody" by Michael Kimball, which has already been nicely summed up at the offical website:

"A Novel Written in the Form of Letters, Diary Entries, Encyclopedia Entries, Conversations with Various People, Notes Sent Home from Teachers, Newspaper Articles, Psychological Evaluations, Weather Reports, a Missing Person Flyer, a Eulogy, a Last Will and Testament, and Other Fragments, Which Taken Together Tell the Story of the Short Life of Jonathon Bender, Weatherman."

In this brilliantly designed novel, we learn right up front that the main character of the story, Jonathon Bender, commits suicide. Kimball then takes us through bits of archeological evidence to show us what is too often left unknown after a suicide: why. And we gradually learn that in this broken, dysfunctional family, the young man who kills himself was actually the sanest one of all. What I loved most about this book, aside from its beautiful structure, is the depth of character and emotion. It left me feeling as if the author left a huge chunk of his heart on the page and it is this generosity and depth that left me stunned when I finished and grateful I had read it.

Here's a small excerpt from Bender's crushingly innocent point of view:

"Dear Mom and Dad,

I know that I must have looked strange after I pulled most of my eyelashes out of my eyelids. It must have looked as if there were something wrong with me. But I want you to know why I did it: this girl at school told me that if you blow on your eyelashes and they fly away it's good luck."

#

I found this same level of depth and emotion in Paul Lisicky's "Lawnboy." A beautiful coming of age story set in south Florida. The reader finds dysfunction in this family as well, if a bit quieter, still a dispiriting dysfunction all the same. And our main character must navigate his teen years under the blanket-like unhappiness of his parents and without the guidance of his adored and elusive older brother. The narrator eventually breaks away from his stifling parents and grows into himself. I found his embrace of his true self, his reconnection with his brother, and his finding "the one" when he was least expecting it, beautiful and affecting. Lisicky writes with the attention of a poet. His ability to go deep into experiences gives us passages such as this one:

"Hector and I floated in the pool one night. No talk. My suit floated off on the surface, an empty bag. Our mouths fastened. We were circling, hands pushing at each other, muscles tensing. I wanted him closer. I studied his face: that scar beneath his ear, those fleshy pink lips. How to get him closer? How to get deeper inside the body? Our bodies. I tried hard as I could to inhabit it, us, closing my eyes frenetic."

And Lisicky isn't afraid of shocking us with startling images such as this one on the first page:

"They didn't know that I spent hours inside a concrete pipe, a cool, cramped cylinder in the middle of a field, whenever I needed to get away. They didn't know about the morning in my thirteenth year when out of sheer boredom, I stitched my fingertips together with needle and thread, making an intricate basket of my hand and giving myself a tremendous infection."

But for me the most amazing part of the novel is the moment in which the narrator sees for the first time his lover, really sees him, in all ages, future and past, in his vulnerability and strength, and it is this seeing that is the eventual undoing of our narrator's protective armour, and he has made the leap to living life fully.

Read This: Women Up On Blocks by Mary Akers

2009-05-01T05:35:00.001-07:00

What better way to kick off Dan Wickett's designated short story month then a riveting, unique collection of stories by my talented friend, Mary Akers. I'd read most of these stories prior to reading them in the collection and it's a testament to Akers' talent that I was just as dazzled by them this time as I was then--even more so, actually.

Mary writes about motherhood, marriage and desire with a fierce honesty. Fierce! "Medusa Song," the opener, is an affecting story of a harried, exhausted mother with little support and we follow her through her afternoon, breath held from the fear of what will happen next, and then Akers ends it in the most desperately beautiful way. "Wild, Wild Horses" offers a look at the strength of a woman, both literally and figuratively. "Mooncalf" blew me away with its raw, emotional power. Who would dare to write about motherhood from the perspective of a woman with cerebral palsy? Mary Akers did and she does it with veracity and heart and this story will slay you. And then there's "The Rashomon Tree," a story of two women with very different views, each mired in their own brand of righteousness, discovering the middle ground, learning what it means to love "the other". Mary Akers has a gift for empathy, for getting inside the heads of all kinds of women, and giving them a voice full of bravery, honesty, strength, humor and love.

Interview with Elizabeth Strout

2009-04-24T14:34:00.000-07:00

at Failbetter

I love everything Elizabeth Strout writes.

In terms of process I'm quite interested in "Olive Kitteridge" being considered a hybrid, and in the reasons Elizabeth Strout gives for the structure. My other novel, not the one I drafted in March, but the one I've been working on for over two years now, has come to me in a similar fashion. And knowing that kind of hybrid isn't considered as marketable as a novel has done nothing to whip my muse into compliance. I'm not sure why the novel is coming to me through stories, perhaps because the span of time and the subject matter are daunting for me to handle in one neat line. Before I drafted this other novel, though, I thought it was a failing on my part of being able to write a normal novel. I'm proving that theory wrong. (I'm not talking about quality of content, mind you. That will remain to be seen.) And I'm beginning to understand that each project demands its own kind of attention and process.

Wordle

2009-04-24T06:36:00.000-07:00

Wordle is fun and the results are visually interesting. I'm not sure how useful it is in analyzing your work, but the clouds are pretty. I don't post mine, but instead, I just print them out for fun. I've done three short stories so far. I haven't tried it for a micro (probably won't make much of a cloud--more like a wisp) or a novel.

Narrative's Winter 2009 Contest

2009-04-23T15:11:00.000-07:00

The results are in. Congratulations to the all the talented winners and finalists!!

Laila Lalami interviewed

2009-04-23T07:03:00.000-07:00

at Powells.

Olive Kitteridge wins PULITZER!!!!

2009-04-20T13:44:00.000-07:00

I love, love, love this book. I am so thrilled that it was recognized in this way!! Many deserved congratulations to Ms. Strout.

And it's a novel-in-stories!! Hooray!

*Thanks to New Pages for the original link.

Congratulations to Ron Currie Jr.

2009-04-16T05:46:00.000-07:00

and the rest of the writers honored this year!

Read This: Jim Tomlinson's Nothing Like an Ocean

2009-04-13T07:25:00.000-07:00

Jim Tomlinson’s stories in his collection Nothing Like an Ocean and the characters who inhabit them run as deep as the ocean. There’s something endearing about these people struggling to get by, get past, get closer. Tomlinson’s writing is smooth, his worlds easy to enter.

My favorites were the title story; Angel, His Rabbit, and Kyle McKell; Overburden; and A Male Influence in the House. Perhaps they stood out for me because Tomlinson does not shield his readers from the uncomfortable, or the uneasiness of despair. He doesn’t shield us from three quietly broken adults all complicit in a child’s death, doesn’t shield us from a soldier’s brokenness and anger, doesn’t shield us from the murder of whole mountain tops and all the life reliant on those ecosystems, doesn’t shield us from the horror of a young man poisoning himself in an attempt to feel something other than his lonely anguish.
There are no neat, happy endings but therein lies the veracity of this collection. And often Tomlinson’s endings are spot-on gorgeous such as the one in Overburden, juxtaposed as it is against so much destruction:

“Inside Sarah will tell him that her labor has started, early pains, but unmistakable. There’s no need to rush, she’ll say, but they shouldn’t delay, either, getting to the hospital. It’s only a matter of time. Yes it’s five weeks early, maybe six, but their future, she’ll assure him, is most certainly happening now.”

More about process...

2009-04-08T10:23:00.000-07:00

Laila Lalami has a post about process today that I found interesting--quite near the end of the process, but still resonates all the same.