CarolineLeavittville

Sarah McCoy talks about the color red, research, motherhood and The Baker's Daughter

2012-01-30T04:58:00.000-08:00

I love Sarah McCoy. Her novels and the person. We met on twitter and discovered that we share so many things--packing phobias, curly hair products, and a love and obsession with our writing. I loved The Time it Snowed in Puerto Rico, and I love The Baker's Daughter even more. I'm not just honored to have Sarah here on the blog--I'm deliriously happy because she's also my friend. Thanks for everything, Sarah!

Where did the idea for this novel spark?

On my first visit to El Paso to look for a place to live, my husband and I were on the plane with a group of Germans. I didn’t think it too out of the ordinary at the time. I figured it was a tour group – vacationing Europeans off to see the American Wild West. My dad was an Army officer, and we were stationed in Germany during my childhood. My husband also grew up in Germany, speaks fluent German, and worked at a German resort during college. So we were familiar with the German fascination with America’s cowboys and Indians as much as our own with their lederhosen and beer steins.

Months later, when we officially moved to El Paso, the city magazine asked me to write a feature article on the German community. I had no idea there was an established community. I learned: the Luftwaffe has trained fliers in the United States since 1958. In 1992, they consolidated their troops at Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico, just up the road from El Paso. Yes, there is a sizeable German air force base on the Tex-Mex border. Bet you didn’t know that! I sure didn’t but was instantly riveted.

My research for the magazine led me to a bakery in town called Marina’s German Bakery. The staff graciously allowed me to poke around their kitchen and ask a bazillion questions, which ultimately led to the creation of Reba and the present-day storyline of The Baker’s Daughter.

Then one day, my husband and I went to a farmer’s market and met an octogenarian German woman selling bread. I was completely enamored of her, and all that I imagined her life might’ve contained. While picking out my brötchen rolls, I asked how she came to be in El Paso. “I married an American solider after the war,” she said, and I had a vision of a young woman named Elsie in 1945 Germany. My childhood in Germany, and my many visits back as an adult, stoked my imagination as I dug into the history books and firsthand accounts of that horrifying final year of World War II.

What about your present-day research for Reba’s story?

For that, all I needed to do was open my eyes and look around; unplug my ears and listen to my neighbors; allow myself to challenge the prevalent immigration opinions and imagine it from a Mexican national’s perspective or from an American who loved and cared about that person. I read Border Protection and police raid transcripts, cut out articles from the newspaper, listened to radio and TV reports, and read the essays my students wrote. I was teaching writing courses at the University of Texas at El Paso. Then I went out to where El Paso’s Interstate-10 curves around the heart of Ciudad Juarez. On one side of the highway, a giant Mexican flag flies over desert shacks burning tires for warmth. On the other side, UTEP’s giant Sun Bowl with digital screens and football fans eating heaps of nachos each weekend. It’s a stark contrast. All-American versus… not.

Your second novel is vastly different from your first— a coming-of-age story. Is that something you consciously aimed for or does your imagination take the helm?

In my writing and reading, I love stories in which I learn something new—be it historical, emotional, philosophical, scientific, artistic, etc. I like to close a book and know that I’ve acquired some body of knowledge that I didn’t have prior to opening the cover. I can’t write the same thing twice just as I couldn’t learn to ride a bike twice. Once you learn, it sticks. So you move on to how to waterski or do the Cha Cha, paint a landscape or make a lemon battery—something new.

The Time It Snowed In Puerto Rico is about an 11-year-old Puerto Rican girl coming of age in the 1960s. The Baker’s Daughter is about war and exclusion, love and forgiveness. The appeal for me, as the author, is in the discovery of unexplored themes and learning from the characters as they share their stories.

The hat on your book cover is red and you use the color throughout the story. Was that intentional?

(I’m in good red-loving company, Caroline. I blatantly covet your red boots and am on a quest to find a pair by the time we meet in person.)

The use of the color red was not intentional. It simply started appearing in the story: a poppy, a sunset, a dress, a ribbon, geraniums, a hat. It organically bloomed from the characters. About three quarters of the way into writing, I stopped and took notice.

In regards to the cover, I had no clue what the designer would come up with, but when I saw the woman’s back and the red hat, it all seemed to fit. There’s something about red. It grabs your attention and holds it. It’s beautiful, vibrant, and slightly alarming. In a color, it captures how I felt while writing this novel—how the characters felt in each of their settings.

What's obsessing you now?

Motherhood. I’m at that age when every friend I know seems to be nursing a newborn or pregnant. I’ve sat besides friends waiting for stripes on the pregnancy wand and friends undergoing months of fertility treatment to both joyful and disappointing outcomes. The concept of nurturing—the definition of being a nurturer– keeps me up at night. What lengths will we go through to fulfill our desire to parent? And what happens when the traditional path fails or is not chosen? Can you still be one? Of course, all of this has funneled into my current work-in-progress, novel #3.

What question didn't I ask that I should have?

I guess you could’ve asked me who is the baker’s daughter? But I’m glad you didn’t because I can’t say for absolute certain. There are so many layers of daughters in this book. What I can say is that I am not the baker’s daughter! My mom can fry a fierce egg and steam up seafood like you’ve died and gone to Old Bay heaven, but growing up, she wasn’t much of a flour-&-yeast devotee. For a few years, she tried her hand at homemade sourdough in a bread machine. My brothers and I thought the vertical loaves extremely odd and the frothy “culture” worthy of a horror movie. We went to the supermarket bakery for baguettes instead. She gave up and stuck to baking peanut butter cookies after that.

I talk about bullies, reviews, second chances, dogs and more on Brad Listi's wonderful Other People

2012-01-29T07:04:00.000-08:00

Brad Listi is one of the funniest, kindest smartest people on the planet. Besides The Nervous Breakdown, he runs this incredible podcast called Other People, where he conducts hilariously funny, inappropriate interviews with writers. I'm thrilled and honored that he interviewed me! Please take a listen, and leave an inappropriate comment or six.

Sheri Holman talks about fear, writing, motherhood and illness

2012-01-25T07:34:00.000-08:00

Sheri Holman’s one of the coolest people on the planet. A brilliant writer, her first novel, A Stolen Tongue was translated into 13 languages and The Dress Lodger was both a national bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The Mammoth Cheese was short-listed for the UK’s Orange Prize, and she’s also written for children. A founding member of The Moth storytelling venue, she lives in Brooklyn with her family. I'm honored to have Sheri here, and her essay, about the ways we cope with fear is a stunner. Thank you, Sheri. For everything.

We noticed something was wrong while I was on tour for my last novel. My beloved publisher Grove/Atlantic had managed it so that my mother and aunt could travel along, helping to care for my six-week old twin boys. It was an exhausting, exciting time and trouble was far from my mind. But while Felix was nursing and gazing at me as babies do, his twin brother, Linus, was looking down and away, not making eye contact. My mother worried he was blind, and while I didn't think it was that extreme, I did have a irrational gut feeling something was terribly wrong. Home from tour, I took him to the doctor, but the pediatrician told me twins sometimes lagged behind developmentally. Unable to shake the feeling, I took Linus to an ophthalmologist to have his eyes checked. Looking into my three month old son's dilated pupils, the doctor grew quiet and left the room. When he returned, he had the number for an oncologist. He had found a massive tumor on Linus's retina, pressed against the optic nerve.

I had thought I knew what it was to be afraid, but I had no idea the depths of terror and helplessness into which a parent could be plunged with the serious illness of a child. During the next few years of Linus's intensive treatment – chemo, radiation, laser, and cryotherapy (not to mention the normal sleep deprivation of raising twins and their barely older sister) – our family struggled to stay positive and strong. But fear ate away at everything, and as much as I fought it, superstition and magical thinking crept in. I had failed at a mother's first job – I could not protect my child. I lost confidence, saw danger everywhere. I popped into random churches to light candles, I made bargains. I tried to write – the medical bills were piling up – but I had nothing to say. One especially frigid winter morning, waiting for the car to warm up so that I might drive Linus in for his predawn appointment, I sat reading Lorrie Moore's brilliant “People Like That Are the Only People Here.” It was the first time I cried, and I sobbed until snot ran down my chin. It was too good and too true. Even as I wiped my face, I wondered if I would ever again have room in my life for fictional characters. I wondered if I even cared.

Up in the middle of the night, nursing fretful babies, I would watch the news. The casual fear- mongering, which before had caused me to roll my eyes, now felt cynically manipulative. For us, the world did seem to be coming to an end, we felt perpetually under attack by unseen forces. And the news was mirroring and heightening my own fears. I watched as supposedly respectable journalists like The New York Times's Judith Miller conjured horror stories about weapons of mass destruction. I watched America plunge itself into a blind war and destroy the lives of millions, leaving families here at home and in the Middle East gutted, children orphaned. I thought about how easy it was to mobilize an already weakened society, how terror becomes its own weapon of mass destruction, effecting not one generation, but the descendants of all it touches. I began to ask myself what sort of societal suicidal impulse spawned a news media invested in keeping us paranoid and afraid? Who profited by this?

Under the care of a dedicated, gifted group of doctors, my son got better, and is now a happy, healthy, wickedly funny eight year old. Ultimately, I took those years of anxiety and anger and poured them into the book that would become Witches on the Road Tonight, a novel that explores America's fascination with fear through three generations of the Alley family – Cora, a mountain witch who rides men at night; her son Eddie, a campy TV horror host, and granddaughter, Wallis, an anchorwoman for CNN.

I've been away from publishing long enough that I've lost my illusions a trajectory exists for any writer's career. It's a scary thought and sometimes gives me the 5 am panic attack. Sometimes, I still wonder how much I have to give fictional characters; and, yes, sometimes, even if I care. But writing about my own primal terrors has taught me that fear is ours to control. And having my son tickle me awake every morning, demanding his breakfast, gives me the courage I need to keep finding out.

Sam Winston talks about his extraordinary debut What Came After, crossover writing, bad advances and the future of us and of publishing

2012-01-25T07:28:00.000-08:00

I hear about books in all sorts of ways. Sometimes publicists and editors contact me. Sometimes authors do. And sometimes I just keep hearing about a book on social media and I get so curious, I seek out the book myself. Case in point: Sam Winston’s extraordinary What Came After, an e-book about the end of the world. I started reading after dinner and didn’t stop until I finished. This is no ordinary book. Character-driven, haunting, and gorgeously written, I think it’s a classic. So, of course, I tracked Sam down and talked him into coming on my blog. Thanks, Sam! Now hurry up and write something else! And visit Sam at his website http://www.whatcameafter.com.

So what's it like to be a celebrated new novelist? Can you tell us about your road to publication? And what's next on your agenda?

There’s celebrated, and then there’s celebrated. But people are finding the book and responding enthusiastically to it—that’s the main thing. And apparently they’re telling their friends, too, which makes all the difference. It’s gratifying.

My path was and remains like that of so many other writers. I’d written a number of novels, and I’d had some first-rate literary representation over the years, but for whatever reason that magical sale to a big New York house never quite materialized. And when I finally began working on What Came After, there was an urgency about the whole project that made me decide to forego the usual commercial process—which, as you well know, has a built-in delay of at least a year between sale and publication even if things go perfectly—and publish it myself. My agency never even saw it, although they’ve definitely seen it now…

As for what’s next: I’m working like mad on a couple of related projects. One is a full-length sequel, and the other is a group of short stories set in the days just prior to What Came After. Little bits of backstory, having to do with the collapse that set everything in motion. I’ll be releasing them one by one, with the aim of keeping readers happy until the sequel’s ready.

I always ask--what sparked this novel? It certainly seems really timely.

You’ve put your finger on it. The classics of science fiction have always been imaginative responses to the culture around them, and in that sense What Came After is a real-live hunk of old-fashioned sci-fi. The world that it describes comes straight from the list of things I worry about every single day: the cruel imbalance of rich and poor, the perilous state of our health care system, the outsourcing of government (especially the military), the genetic modification of foods, and so on.

Just as filmmakers in the fifties and sixties conjured up alien robots and little green men to substitute for the Russians, today we substitute hordes of vampires and zombies for the things we’re really afraid of. I thought it would be good to write a post-apocalyptic adventure that didn’t rely on that kind of transference, but faced up directly to the mess we’re making of things.

I really loved that the Apocalypse was caused by our need for greed. Do you think that our future is ever going to change or are we doomed?

We need to start working together if anything is going to change.

Funny thing is, you see very similar sentiments on both sides of the political spectrum. The Tea Party hates big government and the Occupiers hate big business, but in the end it’s the collusion of government and business that’s gotten us into this fix. In What Came After that collusion is best represented by Black Rose, a private army that the federal government spun off in the years before the novel begins. They’re brutal mercenaries through and through, selling their services to the highest bidder. Poor Henry Weller, one man just trying to get some health care for his daughter, has his hands pretty full.

At the heart of the novel is Henry's love for his daughter, which was so moving and which, for me, grounded the novel, and put it squarely in the literary arena. Do you think that love can save us?

I sure hope so. I’m a dad, you know, so that’s the kind of thinking that drives both me and my work. As a parent you can’t help but look into the future and try to imagine how things will work out for your children—and right now, we’re in a state that Americans haven’t been in for a long time: life threatens to be worse for our children than it has been for us. Henry Weller saves Penny. With any luck, by giving readers a lens through which they can look at these things, I can help save my own kids.

I’m glad you mentioned the word “literary,” because everything else I’ve written would fall squarely into that camp. What Came After uses very compressed and telegraphic language that’s not quite conventional for sci-fi, and it’s built around a steamroller of a plot that’s not quite conventional for literary fiction, and so in those ways it’s a bit of a crossover. So far, though, folks on both sides of the aisle seem to dig it pretty well. The main thing is that it’s about credible people in a credible—and extremely perilous—situation.

What's your writing life like? (I love to hear about structure, rituals, outlines, the works.)

I’m very methodical. Most people don’t realize that if you write for an hour a day, and get 250 words down, inside of a year you’ll have a whole novel on our hands. That’s a very powerful routine. And the duration of it gives you the time you need to get the thinking right.

I usually start out working by the seat of my pants and end up shifting into a kind of desperation outline by the halfway point just to keep things straight. This novel was different, though. Instead of jumping right in, I sat down and wrote out the whole narrative just the way I’d tell it to you over the supper table. Maybe four or five pages’ worth. So I knew exactly what was going to happen when, and how it all tied together.

I’ve never heard of anyone using that system before, but then again I don’t get out much. It worked really well, though.

What's obsessing you now?

The whole crossover phenomenon in publishing. I came to this book organically, as a more or less literary writer who’d grown up reading the masters of elegantly-written science fiction: Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut. So it was only natural that What Came After worked out the way it did. (My brother sent me a note while he was halfway through, saying that as he read it he could see me propped up in my bunk bed, reading The Martian Chronicles.)

Today, though, we have this phenomenon of literary writers jumping into the more speculative and sensational genres—Colson Whitehead writing about zombies, Justin Cronin writing about vampires, Glen Duncan writing about werewolves—but the criticisms in the air suggest that there’s nothing deeply integrated about some of these projects. They don’t seem to appeal all that strongly to either side of the literary/genre divide, and that’s too bad.

Then again, maybe it’s a matter of expectations. As an unknown, I have the good fortune of coming to the table with absolutely zero in that department.

What question didn't I ask that I should have?

How about, “Do you have any regrets about self-publishing instead of taking another stab at the traditional route?”

Why, I’m glad you asked.

Sure, I have some regrets. A big advance would have been nice. Review coverage in the press would have been nice. The support of a publisher who’d send me out on tour would have been nice, too. On the other hand, those things have never been exactly common, and they’re less common today than they ever were.

So I look at the upsides. Doing it yourself gives you total control over the product. There’s very little delay in getting to market, which was important for this book. You get to keep one hundred percent of what you make, and if you price your work properly you can do just fine in that department too.

In the end, it all comes to the same thing: your work and the reader. If someone likes your book and tells a friend and that friend likes it too, then you’ve succeeded.

Laura Harrington talks about Alice Bliss, doing what you're afraid of doing, and creativity

2012-01-23T12:49:00.000-08:00

I'm giving over my blog to the great Laura Harrington, author of the wonderful novel Alice Bliss. Thank you, Laura!

“If you’re in control, you’re not going fast enough.”

Mario Andretti

At every Q & A for a book event there’s always the “how” question. Various forms of: How do you do it? How do you create/ write/ find the discipline/ stay motivated? Given that we are all creative beings, what is it that separates those who write from those who wish they were writing? I’ve given this a lot of thought over the years. What follows is my own very personal list.

Doing what you’re afraid of.

The new age version of this is: Embrace your fears. Sounds a little too cozy for real terrors, doesn’t it? And actors would say: Use your fear.

We all have our fears; fear of failure, fear of bungee jumping, fear of not being loved, not measuring up, etc. In college I was so afraid that my dream of becoming a writer might not come true I stopped writing altogether. This became so uncomfortable over the course of several years that I finally decided to confront my fear of failing and figure out whether I was going to write or not. The need to know one way or another trumped my fear. I enrolled in a graduate creative writing program and took the course that sounded the most terrifying: playwriting, about a subject I knew absolutely nothing about: plays. Taught by a type of writer I did not really know existed in modern times: a playwright. It changed my life.

Tolerating uncertainty.

In order to create anything you have to learn to tolerate uncertainty for long stretches of time. Most of us hate uncertainty and avoid it as much as we can.

In the beginning: There’s the “contemplating the void” period, when you’re starting a new project but it’s not actually a project yet, it’s hardly an idea, it’s something inchoate and is only beginning to take form and swim in your unconscious. You have to sit with the emptiness day after day, week after week, taking notes, showing up, not knowing. Robert Anderson, author of Tea and Sympathy, calls this period ”fishing.”

In the middle: When I’m in the middle of a book or a play everyday is uncertain. Will I have ideas? Will my characters talk to me? Am I moving in the right direction? Is there a story here? Does anyone care? Do I care?

In the end: Will my book be published? Will my play be produced? Will I survive the critics? Will I make any money? Can I quit my day job?

Here’s the secret: Hidden within all of this uncertainty, this not knowing, being off-balance are the questions that lead deeper into the work, the obsessions, the writing.

Creating a practice.

I find it more useful to model my working life on musicians rather than the romantic idea of the writer waiting for the muse. Waiting for the muse has never worked for me. While waiting for the muse I get overwhelmed by uncertainty and doubt and fear and by the crushing need for chocolate or coffee or companionship or anything at all that will take me away from the uncertainty and doubt brought on by waiting for the muse.

Showing up everyday with a pen is the only way I can circumvent the uncertainty. I’m just sitting here, I’m just writing, I’m just going to see where this idea takes me. Like practicing scales on the piano. It’s not a big deal. It’s not art. It’s not important. I’m just warming up. It’s just practice.

This is why you see brilliant writers like playwright August Wilson writing on napkins. It’s just a napkin. There’s no pressure for this poor napkin to win another Pulitzer.

Faith.

When Caroline invited me to write this essay about creativity the first word that popped into my head was faith. In the middle of a book or a play I’m living on blind faith. I might have a map, I might know that there’s a bridge I’d better be sure to cross, but finding my way? Faith. Stumbling around in the dark. My writing practice often feels like simply showing up and trusting. Doubt, faith’s twin, is with me every step of the way, biting at my heels. Blind faith can be exhilarating: days when a new character appears, fully formed. Doubt can be overwhelming: days when it’s just too damned difficult to trust, to be patient, to follow the path rather than control the itinerary.

But I always come back to this: I have faith that writing is important, that I will finish this book or this play, faith that what I am obsessed with will matter to a few other people, faith in the written word, faith in the process, faith in my practice to see me through one more time.

Getting physical.

For me, none of this would be possible without getting physical and getting playful. Getting out of my head and onto the beach or into the quarry or the ocean or the pool. I have ridden horses, taken boxing lessons, learned how to salsa, practiced yoga, walked, hiked, biked, skated, played volleyball, just about anything to engage my body and give my mind a vacation or a new challenge. I’ll never be a boxer, a yogi, or a professional athlete; but each of these things refreshes my spirit and both allows me to experience the joy/fear combo of being a beginner again and reminds me that progress, like writing, comes in very small steps.

Letting go.

In a recent interview, painter Frank Stella quoted race car driver Mario Andretti:

“If you’re in control, you’re not going fast enough.”

There are things in our life that we can control, or that we like to think we can. Controlling your writing is not such a great idea. Arthur Kopit, my first playwriting teacher would say, “Consider the word “play” in all its meanings. If you are not playing and having fun when you’re writing your audience won’t be having much fun either.”

Great writing has the promise of a wild ride or a bacchanalia within it; the best party you’ve ever been to, where unexpected, sometimes terrifying life-changing events occur.

So I try to be fearless, I try to enjoy the fact that I don’t know where I’m going or if I’ll ever get there, I remind myself to play, to be a beginner, I try to have enough faith to let go. And I remember playwright Suzan Lori Parks saying: “Every morning when I wake up I get to say: I’m a writer. Today I get to write.”

Hilma Wolitzer talks about An Available Man

2012-01-23T12:28:00.000-08:00

I loved this novel so much, I blurbed it! In the wake of her fantastic New York Times review, I am honored to have Hilma on here today writing about writing. Thank you, Hilma!

Looking for an Available Man

When I began to write An Available Man, I was thinking more about available women, those friends and relatives who’d suddenly found themselves single again through divorce or a spouse’s death. Some of them were content to be on their own, but others were longing to be part of a couple again. I heard a lot of horror stories about online dating: men who lied about their age (by up to 25 years!), photo-shopped themselves into Brad Pitt, tried to cop a feel right after (or during) a coffee date, or had the creepy look and demeanor of serial killers. Occasionally, I’d be asked, wistfully, if I happened to know of anyone nicer, more suitable.

Like Jane Austen’s Emma and Sholem Aleichem’s Yente, I’ve always had an impulse for matchmaking, usually with a stunning lack of success. My heart was in the right place, I suppose—why should anyone be lonely?—but I just didn’t seem to have a talent for pairing people up. The general consensus was: what was she thinking?! Sometimes, I was told, it was even hate at first sight.

I started to think I’d have more luck writing a novel about looking for love the second time around. What if my protagonist was someone recently widowed whose (well-meaning) friends try to fix her up? And what if she goes online? I had a lot of material to build on: all those reported dates from hell—the raunchy and/or impotent men, the cheapskates, the scary ones.

But weren’t there any decent guys out there? And how did they meet women? How did they feel about blind dates, about loneliness, and horniness? The more I thought about it, the more I began to envision a newly available man named Edward Schuyler. Soon I was hooked on the idea of writing from the male perspective, not my usual POV. I worried a little (in a twist on Freud) if I knew enough about what a man wants. And I’d once heard that Renoir claimed he painted with his penis. Unfortunately, I’m not similarly equipped, but men have been writing about women’s inner lives for centuries, and I believe it’s possible for women to also imagine the ultimate other, and the other side of the story.

I came to like and care about Edward, the way I do for most of my heroines, and I wanted him to find happiness. He seemed like the perfect match for so many of my witty, sensitive, attractive friends. It’s just too bad he’s not real.

Kathy L. Patrick talks about Beauty and the Book, The Pulpwood Queens, literacy and more

2012-01-23T12:22:00.000-08:00

If you've been reading this blog, you know how much fun I had at Pulpwood Queens Girlfriend Weekend. No one does more for literacy, readers or writers than Kathy L. Patrick, so of course I had to corner her and interview her. That's gorgeous Kathy below, decked out for The Pretty in Pink Prom at the Pulpwood Queens Weekend! Thank you, Kathy, for doing this interview, and for everything I can think of.

How did the idea for Beauty and the Book, the first and only beauty shop and bookstore, come about?

The idea happened in the worst way. I was downsized in my job as a book publisher's rep. I lost my job. I was devastated as I thought that was my dream job. But what I learned was that sometimes when a door is slammed a window of opportunity does indeed open. My sister suggested that I open a hair salon again. I had put myself through college doing hair, the story is all in my book, "The Pulpwood queen's Tiara Wearing, Book Sharing Guide to Life". I told her I would be bored just doing hair and she suggested I do the book thing. Zing! Wham! Bang! Lightbulbs were going on in my head. I thought what a terrific idea, I could do hair and talk books and instead of loaning them, I could sell them. So the beginning chapter is all about me getting a real lemon but instead of making lemonade, I made margaritas!!!

The Pulpwood Queens Girlfriend weekend was unlike anything I've ever experienced--a heady brew of friendship, reading, and costumes!!! I know every year you come up with a theme. Can you talk a bit about how you do decide the theme?

The theme comes mostly from my interests and the books that we read. This past year I had read 'Water for Elephants", "The Night Circus", and one of my favorite past reads was Carolyn Turgeon's "Rain Village" and they all had a circus connection. I always wanted to run away with the circus so this is was a dream of a theme for me. My life has always been a three ring circus with running a home, a business, and the largest "meeting and discussing" book club in the world, The Pulpwood Queens so "The Greatest Book Show on Earth" was created for this past Girlfriend Weekend's theme.

I was deeply moved by some of the wonderful things that the Pulpwood Queens do to promote literacy. How did this come about?

One book, one Pulpwood Queen chapter at a time. I ask all the Pulpwood Queens to take on a literacy endeavor. I have book clubs embracing that endeavor and leading us all in their literacy efforts. My charity of choice is the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, www.imaginationlibrary.com. I ask the authors to donate a personal item signed for Silent Auction and these funds keep our literacy programs going. Then this year I decided to award my book club chapters that were doing incredible, mind-blowing literacy endeavors, this the Diamond in the Tiara Award. By showcasing these chapters it truly is inspiring for all of us to perhaps go one step or more further in promoting literacy.

I hear you yourself are writing a novel! Tell us about it!

I have been working on and off on this for years but it's to be called "EUREKA" which means I found it. All I have to say as a born and raised Kansan, I felt we need a story from Kansas that was beyond "The Wizard of Oz". It's my love letter to the place that I truly call home.

What's obsessing you now?

The fact that I am dying to buy an airstream trailer so I can fix it up like a gypsy caravan and hit the road to travel and have literary adventures. I have always loved to camp and big on decorating to make a place my own. My Beauty and the Book, I have been told, looks like Moulin Rouge meets a gypsy caravan wagon but I have now reached the point where I really want to see the world. Vintage is always more intriguing to me than new as the item or in this case trailer has a story. And my favorite quote by Muriel Rukheyser has always been, "The world is made up of stories, not atoms."

What questions didn't I ask that I should have?

I just think that if I have one more thing to share is to tell everybody to go after your life's passions. I was forced into it losing my job but this has ended up one of the best things that happened in my life. For me, my life finally came into full bloom when I decided to go after my true passions, beauty and the book. I never dreamed that when I lost my job that my life would turn out to be so beautiful, so purposeful, and so rewarding.

Kathy L. Patrick

Author of "The Pulpwood Queens' Tiara Wearing, Book Sharing Guide to Life", Grand Central Publishing

Founder of the Pulpwood Queens and Timber Guys Book Clubs

Beauty and the Book

608 North Polk Street

Jefferson, Texas 75657

903-665-7520

kathy@beautyandthebook.com

www.beautyandthebook.com

www.pulpwoodqueen.com

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Sere Prince Halverson talks about The Underside of Joy

2012-01-17T12:22:00.000-08:00

About marriage, family, and a custody battle, The Underside of Joy is just a knockout of a book. I couldn't wait to invite Sere Prince Halverson to my blog, and I'm absolutely honored she's here. Thank you so much, Sere!

Your luminous novel is set against the redwoods and the vineyards, which I loved. is this something you already knew, or did you research, and if so, what was the research like for you?

I am fortunate to live in Northern California, surrounded by redwoods and vineyards. I spent a lot of my childhood here, but then left to go to college and ended up living for seventeen years in San Diego, which is lovely, but never felt like home. Whenever we’d drive through Sonoma County, I’d tell my kids, “Look at the trees! Look at the trees!” Even now that we’ve lived here quite a few years, when I step outside, I still want to twirl around like Maria in the opening scene of The Sound of Music. This is a place that continues to awe but also feels deeply familiar. In part, the novel is my love song to this beautiful area.

I loved the complexity of the relationships, especially between the two mothers. You ask the question in the book, what makes someone a mother, and a good one? Can you talk about the answer?

I don’t think there’s one answer to that question. It takes a lot to be a good mom and motherhood does not come naturally to every woman. Even good mothers fail their children at times. But a mother who leaves her children? Society tends to automatically label her as a “bad mother.” There are times when the decision to leave, given a mother’s circumstances or limitations, can be a painful sacrifice that’s the best choice for the children, although there will still be scars. This decision was something that as a mom, I couldn’t fathom. I knew I needed to write about it.

And because I’m a mom and a stepmom (as so many of us are) and have a mom and a stepmom (as so many of us do), I wanted to explore the relationship between two women who love the same children, to turn the fairytale version of the evil stepmother on its head.

I'm always fascinated by process so can you please talk a bit about how you wrote the book? Are you an outliner or a writing-by-the-seat-of-your-pen type of person?

Oh, I do both! It begins with a character. I start writing without a map, sort of like jumping in the car for a road trip, not knowing where I’m headed. But by the first rest stop, I start making notes, asking questions, coming up with a loose plan. I tend to write the first draft fairly quickly then spend a lot of time on revision. I pin it all up on a bulletin board to try to get the shape of the thing. I also lay it all out on the floor and walk through chapters, moving things around. Old-fashioned, I know.

But I revise constantly on the computer, too. I love revising. You know how the wonderful Annie Lamott insists on the shitty first draft? My second draft, third draft, even fourth draft—all shitty. But eventually I get into the land of not-so-shitty, then into not-too-shabby, and that’s when I glimpse the twinkly lights of it-may-actually-be-working, and I keep going. I should also add that I took a month-long writing retreat at a cabin in the redwoods by the Russian River. This was a writer’s absolute heaven—total immersion—and made a huge difference in The Underside of Joy.

What's obsessing you now?

I’m going to reveal myself as the newbie debut novelist that I am and admit that I’m completely obsessing about the publication of my first novel. It took me forever to get here--with a lot of close calls and major disappointments along the way. I stare at the gorgeous finished books my publisher sent me and think, Hey, it’s really happening. And they even spelled my name right!

I want my story to inspire others. For twenty years, I worked as a freelance copywriter and creative director, helped raise our four kids and wrote fiction. This is actually my third novel, although it’s the first to be published. And it’s being published in 15 countries! Keep going. You just never know what’s ahead.

What question didn't I ask that I should have?

How about this one: How do you feel about being interviewed for this blog?

Extremely grateful. And touched once again by your big-hearted generosity to other writers. Thank you, Caroline!

The Underside of Joy will be published January 12^th by Dutton. Read more at Seré’s website: www.sereprincehalverson.com and on her blog at www.whomovedmybuddha.blogspot.com

What makes authors dress up like clowns? Kathy L. Patrick's Pulpwood Queens Author Extravaganza

2012-01-07T09:47:00.000-08:00

You know me, the one who always dresses in black, preferably jeans and sneakers, with only a splash of red cowboy boot for color? Well, next week, I am happily hightailing it down to Texas for Kathy L. Patrick's famous Pulpwood Queens 12th Anniversary Girlfriend Weekend Extravaganza!

Kathy's the genius behind the mega-membered Pulpwood Queens and Timber Guys Bookclubs and she's the owner of the only hair salon/bookstore in the world.

The theme this year is Circus. This Greatest Show on Earth is having an 80" Pretty in Pink Prom Party (I bought a pink wig, black tiara and black lace gloves. Hey, you thought, I'd do without the black, didn't you?) , A Great Big Ball of Hair Ball, a Come as your Favorite Circus Character (I'm going as a fortune teller), a Silent Auction (I donated a 1950s red plastic purse that I drew all over) and an event where all the authors clown it up by dressing like clowns and serving the attendees with a smile. Plus, there are tons of author events, including mine on Saturday the 14th at 2:30 (Books to Share Like Popcorn with Your Bookclub)!

Kathy, (she's the gorgeous redhead in the photo) is one of the warmest, funniest, most enlightened book lovers around, and I cannot wait to go. I've already got my red cowboy boots packed. Come and have fun! The author roster is amazing, the events are a hoot, and I'm going to be posting live from the book circus. The photo of the women in green regalia is from a previous event and I bet this one is going to be even more outrageous!

12th ANNIVERSARY GIRLFRIEND WEEKEND
AUTHOR EXTRAVAGANZA
The Greatest BOOK Show on EARTH!
January 12 – 15, 2012
Jefferson Tourism and Transportation Convention Center
305 E. Austin
Jefferson, Texas 75657

Gayle Brandeis talks about The Book of Live Wires, writing, bellydancing and more

2012-01-05T16:44:00.000-08:00

Poet. Novelist. Activist. Wife. Mother. Friend. Bellydancer. How many people can claim all those things? Gayle Brandeis can and does. I first met Gayle Brandeis at BEA at a Readerville reading. We had emailed back and forth before and I just instantly felt a connection. Gayle's the kind of person you could call at three in the morning if you had to and she'd sit and listen and console you. She's had an amazing life, which she's navigated with grace and heart. She's also a brilliant writer, which brings us to The Book of Live Wires, available for e-readers, the sequel to her beloved Bellwether Prize- winning novel The Book of Dead Birds. I'm honored to have her here. Thank you so much, Gayle! (And be sure to visit Gayle's wonderful blogs, Mama, Redux, and Fruitful. And read her other wonderful books, Self Storage, The Delta Girls, and My Life with the Lincolns.)

What sparked the writing of The Book of Live Wires? And how is it connected to your prize-winning novel, The Book of Dead Birds? What was it like to revisit the characters? Did anything surprise you?

I wrote The Book of Live Wires back in 2002, during National Novel Writing Month. I had just had the most exciting year of my life as a writer; I honestly doubt I’ll ever top it, thrill-wise. My first book, Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write had just been published that spring, and while I was on my book tour, I got a call from Barbara Kingsolver saying that my novel-in-manuscript, The Book of Dead Birds, had won the Bellwether Prize, judged by herself, Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston, three writers I revere. Of course this was all so mind blowing and affirming, but it ended up having a strange effect on me as a writer: I got writer’s block for the first time in my life. I started to worry that every word that came out of me needed to be worthy of Toni Morrison’s praise, and this made me freeze. I felt like a total fraud because I was still touring around with Fruitflesh, talking to people about the writing process, and I wasn’t writing at all, myself; I was avoiding it, in fact, and had actually become quite afraid of it. When I heard about NaNoWriMo, I realized it might be just what I needed to get out of my own way--and it was.

I had always had the sense that my characters were out living their lives after the first book ended, but I wasn’t able to access them until I started to write The Book of Live Wires. It was wonderful catching up with them--like a month long family reunion. The thing that surprised me most, I think, is that Darryl wanted to be the narrator. He was the love interest in Dead Birds (which had been narrated by Ava Sing Lo), and a few readers had told me that he seemed a bit too good to be true, and they couldn’t quite get a real sense of him. I suppose this book was Darryl’s way of making himself known, and making himself much more complex. He made some decisions that definitely shocked me.

There is a great deal about the secrets we hide from others, and the truths we refuse to believe. Can you talk a bit about that?

Oh golly--it’s hard to know where to begin. It can be hard to be truthful, to face truth, as a person and my characters certainly wrestle with this. Darryl and Ava are both good human beings, but they are also in a bit over their heads--they are dealing with their baby’s illness while they are still getting to know one another, plus they are each working out some of their own internal issues, and this (along with sleep-deprivation, I imagine) leads to some questionable, not very honest, actions.

I suppose I still struggle with this a bit, myself--growing up, my loving and wonderful family had a tendency to always say that everything was okay even when it wasn’t, and this made it difficult for me to face and voice my own darkness. It led to a lot of secret keeping, a lot of denial. I have gotten much better at acknowledging when things are troubling me, but it is still a challenge. I am slowly learning to be more and more brave in my life (writing helps--somehow it is easier for me to be brave in my writing.)

What was the whole writing process like? Were there any surprises? (Ah, surprise again..)

I wrote the book so long ago, it’s a bit hard to remembert he actual process of it (other than the fact that NaNoWriMo got me writing every day.) There were definitely surprises as I revised the book last year, however I should mention that I never thought I would share this book--I thought I had written it just for myself, to slip back into my writing process, but I’ve mentioned its existence over the years at various book events, and readers have always expressed curiosity. I finally decided to take a look at the manuscript last year (I hadn’t even glanced at it all this time) and was surprised to see how much life was inside it--there were even some passages that may be among the strongest I’ve ever written. What was especially surprising to me, though, was how much in the novel resonated with my current life. Darryl was in a new second marriage with a new baby--so was I (and both of us got married during the pregnancy.) Darryl was dealing with tremendous grief--so was I (although of a different kind; he lost his first wife to cancer. I had recently lost my mom to suicide and then my mother in law to a sudden heart attack four months later.) Darryl is Jewish, yet baptized his baby for non-religious family reasons; so did I (you can read about that here: http://mamaredux.blogspot.com/2010/09/our-journey.html). It was really kind of eerie how many coincidences popped up. When I wrote the book, I never could have anticipated that these storylines would be part of my own life in a few years.

Revision was a fun process--I had enough distance from the manuscript that I had no compunction about striking out whole scenes, etc. (although I found myself making less changes than I thought I would need to. The manuscript felt surprisingly whole for being written in one white hot month.)

You are also a prize-winning poet and a belly dancer! Can you tell us how those two things infuse your work and change it—and you?

Poetry and dance have been a central part of my life since I was a little girl; I wrote my first poem at four, and have been dancing as long as I can remember. My BA is in “Poetry and Movement: Arts of Expression, Meditation and Healing”, a concentration I created through the Johnston Center for Individualized Learning (now named the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies) at the University of Redlands. I remember telling myself in college that I wanted to figure out how to write with the muscularity of dance and dance with the articulation of language. This is still a desire of mine. I have to say I am more of a passionate dancer than a precise one--technique has never been my strong point. It makes me happy that I wrote about a couple of my dance influences--Isadora Duncan and Josephine Baker--in The Book of Live Wires (they both go unnamed but are hopefully recognizable); their example gave me permission to be wild and free in my dancing as a young woman, and it feels good to honor them this way. Poetry definitely continues to feed my writing, too, makes me acutely aware of word choice, how words sound and feel when they rub up against one another; I think it helps keep my prose fairly economical, as well.

I am super grateful for belly dancing--when I separated from my first husband, a friend invited me to be part of her troupe; I hadn’t belly danced for 15 years at that point, and it was a way back into my body, back into joy. Writers have a tendency to live in our heads, I think, and belly dancing helps keep me grounded inside my skin.

The world of publishing is changing dramatically, which brings us to our next question. Why go to Smashwords to publish your novel? How is and was the process different than with your traditional publisher?

I did this as an experiment. I had been feeling freaked out by all the changes in the publishing world, and had been really resistant to the idea of ebooks. I eventually realized that it is quite amazing to be part of a shifting culture, and I decided to embrace those shifts rather than fear them or run away and stick my head in the sand. I felt comfortable doing the experiment with this particular book because I felt I had nothing to lose--the novel’s just been sitting in my computer for all these years...might as well give it some air.

I do hope to continue to publish traditionally--I still am in love with physical books, plus I love the storied tradition of the publishing world, and it’s great to have a whole team of people working to get your book into readers’ hands--but there is something satisfying about making all the choices yourself, from cover image to platform. I chose Smashwords because it makes the book available to the widest variety of e-readers--you can download it in just about any form (and once you’re approved for their Premium Catalog, they list the book at B&N, the Apple Store, Sony, Diesel, etc. They don’t have an Amazon connection, though, so I uploaded it through Kindle Direct Publishing, as well). Once I deciphered the Smashwords style guide, it was really quite easy to format the text. I also uploaded the novel to Google Books because I learned that several independent bookstores are selling Google e-Books to their customers now, and I want to do whatever I can to support beloved indies (my one major hesitancy about this experiment was worrying about how ebooks will affect brick and mortar stores, and I don’t want to contribute to their decline.) It’s exciting to me that there are so many tools now to help writers take publishing into our own hands if we choose to go that route.

What’s obsessing you now?

Right now, my two year old’s temperature, I’m afraid--it spiked to 105 a couple of days last week, and has been fluctuating since then. The doctor thinks it’s just a virus, and he is really doing fine now (his temp is down to 99.5) but I can’t help but obsessively take his temperature. This sweet little guy reminds me to be joyful about my obsessions (other than this thermometer-related one)--I love seeing how he takes such pleasure in trains and clocks and rocket ships and pretending to be a cat. He gives himself over to them so fully and openly--a great reminder to throw myself into my own enthusiasms with abandon.

One of the things that obsesses me right now is the collective voice--I have been so inspired by the power of people rising up throughout the world, and am eager to see where the Occupy movement will go next. This has also translated into a fascination with non-linear, multiply voiced narratives.

I recently saw the stunning documentary Bombay Beach--I thought it would be good research for the piece I’m working on about the Salton Sea for the Los Angeles Review of Books, but it ended up being much more than that for me. It’s an intensely lyrical, beautiful, painful film chronicling the lives of three people in the Salton Sea area (one of the poorest regions in the country--it’s where The Book of Dead Birds is set, and The Book of Live Wires spends a bit of time there, as well). It does something no documentary I’ve seen ever do before--the filmmaker was able to get her subjects to do these dreamlike, surreal, moving choreographed dance numbers, and I found the mix of honesty and artifice incredibly energizing. It made me wonder how I can do something similar in my writing, find that balance between improvisation and directed vision, truth and art.

What question didn’t I ask that I should have?

I suppose you could have asked about my kids. In addition to my cutie-pie toddler, I have two full-fledged adult kids now, which blows me away--my firstborn son is 21 and will graduate from college in June, and my daughter just turned 18 and is poised to start college soon, herself. They are super cool people; I feel lucky to know them, and even luckier to be their mom

Pictures of You makes USA Today BestSeller List for ebooks!

2012-01-05T11:24:00.000-08:00

To my astonishment, a year after publication, my novel, Pictures of You, is suddenly on the USA Today Bestseller list for ebooks! To say I am amazed, grateful, stunned, is to put it mildly. And yup, I am posting it everywhere because I am so filled with joy.

There are always a lot of conversations going on on twitter or Facebook about how, or even if, a writer should self-promote. Many have others do it for them. Some don't do it at all. Some posters say that if you self-promote, you are sending out a message, "I achieved this AND YOU DIDN'T (with maybe a ha-ha thrown in for good measure.) Others actually gripe. "So what, you have this today, but don't get so smug because maybe you won't tomorrow." Others talk about how it's not deserved, or there are better books out there, or if you post too often, readers and writers both will hate you and hope you move to Siberia.

I find all of this sad and shocking.

Hey. We're all swimming in this big huge sea of writers, and what helps one, helps the many. I've posted a lot about how hard my struggle has been to get here, how many years I suffered, and how some months, I had trouble paying the bills. I've written a lot about how ecstatic I am that now I am finally, finally, having some success.

When I post about something wonderful happening to me, I have a few different messages than the snarky ones in the first paragraph. And here they are.

1. If I can do it, so can you. I had no virtually no career, and no sales. No one was taking my calls or emails. And this is after NINE books. I'm the patron saint of second chances and proof that it's never too late. You want someone to cheer you on? Consider me. Be brave, be bold and never give up.

2. I've been helped so much by other incredibly generous writers, (and hurt by some, but those we won't talk about), and I've made it my business to do the same, to help every writer I could, in any way that I can, be it blurbs, blog space, advice, reading, support, and yes, thrilled congratulations when they post about something wonderful happening to them. If I have success, hey, it just means I can help other writers even more.

3. Always be grateful. Always be in a state of wonder. And share everything with other writers.

So yes, I'm giddy with celebration, but I'm celebrating with everyone who ever wrote a line, or picked up a camera or a paintbrush. Joy can be contagious and so can success.

Craig Lancaster talks about unraveling, writing, and Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure

2012-01-03T13:26:00.000-08:00

I've known Craig Lancaster for about a year now. Introduced by way of Jonathan Evison, I've come to really appreciate Craig's take on writing (as well as his writing, itself!) I'm so happy to have him here on my blog, again. He's really brave, and that makes for a great writer. Thanks, Craig!

THE UNRAVELING

By Craig Lancaster

In late October 2010, I was in Missoula for the Montana Festival of the Book, and it should have been one of the great moments of my life. My debut novel, 600 Hours of Edward, had just won the High Plains Book Award for best first book—this on the heels of being named a Montana Honor Book earlier in the year. All in all, it was a remarkable showing for a little book that I’d written in twenty-four feverish days two years earlier, one put out by a little publishing house in Montana. I was in the company of writers I deeply admire, I had a chance to read from my novel, and I was looking ahead to the January 2011 release of my follow-up, The Summer Son.

But I also knew what was going on back home in Billings.

My wife and her mother and father were packing up her things and moving them to a small house about a mile away, a house she had rented in the throes of her despair at no longer being able to tolerate my moods, my silence, my disregard for her and our marriage. When I came home, it was to an empty condominium, with only a couch for me to sleep upon. I’d grown used to it; it had been months since we had shared a bed.

At a joint session the following week, I told Joe, our counselor, that coming home to an empty house drove home for me just how much damage I’d done. He looked at me, incredulous. “So you were just oblivious for all these months?” He knew I was full of shit. I knew I needed help.

I scheduled a talk with the pastor who’d married us. We didn’t say a word about God. Jim, a clinical psychologist in a previous professional incarnation, asked me questions—deep questions about where my moods go, when they show up, my seeming inability to derail them. I described the experience as something akin to throwing rocks at a freight train. He seemed uncannily clued in to the nuances of my mental state, and finally he said, “I’ve known you a long time, and I’ve seen it. I think you’re bipolar II, and I think you need to get a diagnosis so you’re sure.” I’d never heard of it. When I got home, I started reading up, and the illness described—hypomania marked by an almost rhythmic series of depressions—sounded like a perfect fit with what had dogged me for most of my life. I scheduled an appointment with a psychiatrist.

At this point, I’m going to cut through a lot of the medical mumbo-jumbo, except to say this: Jim’s suspicions were largely correct. My relief at having a diagnosis was offset by the knowledge that, while my moods obviously could be destructive, the alternating periods of hypomania were large factors in my ability to create the work that is so central to my life. I absolutely wanted and needed a way to “lift the floor and lower the ceiling,” so to speak. But, like a true crazy person, I gave my illness a lot of the credit for my ability to do the things I do well. I didn’t want to lose that. And by clinging to something that was corroding me from the inside, it was a few more months before I got serious about getting better.

Something wondrous happened when I finally did. I began writing short stories, tales that hewed closely to the things I was thinking about: personal relationships, the loss of control, separation, the struggle to find our way back to the people we love. By day, I was trying to make amends: to my wife, to her family who had taken me in and loved me, to mutual friends who had seen the destruction I had wrought. By night, in the darkness of a house where I now live alone, I tried to find peace with my torment by writing stories. I want to be clear about this: I was (and am) mentally ill, but in no way do I blame that for what I did. I made the choices, I hurt my wife and others, and to whatever degree my bipolarity was a contributing factor, I own that, too. I waited until I was forty years old to do anything about it. That’s on me and no one else.

Now, as I write this, those stories are out in book called Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure, a perplexing title on the surface but one that makes perfect sense when the book is read. All of my work is personal on some level, but nothing I’ve written is quite so in my deepest brain as this book. For the first time in three years, I’m not actively working on a new book, and I’m OK with that. In the past year, my wife and I have tried to find our way back to each other in fits and starts. We’ve discovered that there’s still a lot of love between us and that what made us best friends in the first place carries on despite everything. The anguish of what happened a year ago isn’t far from the surface, though, and we try to deal with those things quickly when they flare up. We have committed to working as hard as we can to rebuild our life together, and we’re both optimistic and terribly scared. I’m the one who allowed the fear to come in. I’m the one who’ll have to do the heavy lifting of making it go away.

It’s the most important work I’ll ever do. No book could possibly compare.

Coming up in 2012

2012-01-02T11:16:00.000-08:00

Coming up here in 2012, writers I love and want you to love, too: Anne Lamott, Jodi Picoult, Jonathan Evison, Liz Flock, Jessica Brilliant Keener, and more, more, more. I'm hoping to have more film people on here, too!

Thanks so much for reading.

Pictures of You on San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of 2011

2011-12-24T07:24:00.000-08:00

I am speechless. My novel Pictures of You is on Kirkus Best Books of 2011 List, Kirkus Top Five Books about Family and Love 2011 List, Providence Journal Best Books of 2011, Bookmarks Magazine Best Books of 2011 List and now on San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of 2011.

This is so amazing because this particular book was rejected by my previous publisher as being "not special enough." The publisher also said they didn't really get what I was trying to say or do. I truly thought my career was over. It was my 9th novel. Although I had some great reviews from stellar places for previous novels, I had no sales. No one really knew who I was (or cared.) And then Algonquin Books came to my rescue and told me they were going to turn my life around.

And they did.

I've had five publishers before them. Three went out of business right before my novel came out. Two ignored me and wouldn't take my calls. Algonquin got POY into 4 printings months before publication. They gave me a huge tour. They got me on the NYT bestseller list and as a Costco Pennie's Pick. And they call me! They email me! They are still pushing Pictures of You a year later and they are publishing my next novel Is It Tomorrow! They are truly an Edenic paradise for writers.

So, consider me your poster girl for second chances. Never give up. You never know what is around the bend.

Sometimes, it's magic.

Filmmaker Sheldon Candis talks about Luv, moviemaking and never giving up

2011-12-22T08:12:00.000-08:00

I’m a movieholic as well as a bookaholic and because I also write scripts, I keep a close eye on new film talent. Sheldon Candis is getting a lot of buzz for his new film LUV, about a young boy's coming of age in the mean streets of Baltimore, so I tracked him down and he very graciously allowed me to pepper him with questions. Thank you, Sheldon!

Can you tell us how and why you got into film?

For me, movies molded me as a child. My dad would faithfully take my mom and me to the movie on Sundays. Also, when my mom wasn't around, he would show me rated R movies when I was 9. PURPLE RAIN and THE FLY altered me early.) That world on that screen was one that I wanted to be a part of, no matter how dark or heartbreaking the story! Also, my grandfather James Moore, aka “Mr. Fish” had a serious VHS collection in the 80s. I was always in front of Sears wooded floor model TV, watching movies over and over again. My uncle Charles McCaskill and I have seen THE TOY a few hundred times! (those OCD viewings came at our great Uncle Arthur and Great Aunt Doris’ house.

LUV is set in your hometown of Baltimore. What was it like filming there? Was this a place you wanted to escape when you were a kid or did you always know you’d come back and stick around.

Filming in Baltimore was great! Very surreal. I was shooting the movie in places where I grew up. We shot a scene in the pimlico horse track parking lot, right in the neighborhood where I grew up. My Uncle Tyrone Moore came to visit set that day, For part of my childhood, I slept in the basement under his room. We also shot down at the inner harbor and inside Lexington Market. M y grandfather would take me to the market, a very communal space where many of my cousins and uncles eat oysters there religiously

Did you want to escape Baltimore growing up?

Yes, I did. There were some tough times growing up off Cordelia Ave. and Ducatel St. My parents fought a lot. My uncle would come pick me up nights and take me driving through the city with him. It was an escape. I also grew up quickly because of the very adult things I was experiencing young. My mom and I moving to North Carolina with my grandparents was the best thing that happen to our lives. We got to see the world outside of Baltimore and I was exposed to a lot of things that I wouldn’t have seen in the city. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown fonder of Baltimore and it has a special place in my heart. I love Baltimore because the rest of the world views it as this ultra violent place. Isn’t violent everywhere? I love that Baltimore’s nickname is Charm City. If you take the time to explore it and get to know it, Baltimore will win you over.

I’m always interested in structure. What made you decide to tell the story of Woody Watson, an 11-year-old boy during one day, rather than spread it out over time? What were some of the challenges of doing it that way?

I personally love movies that take place in one day, if done properly, it ups the stakes and makes the experience more visceral for the audience. DOG DAY AFTERNOON & TRAINING DAY are two of my favorites. My writing partner Justin Wilson and are branded ourselves as the guys who write DRILLERS. a hybrid genre of a coming of age drama with thriller undertones. We felt that it was very compelling for an audience to witness a boy's rite of passage, coming of age all in one day through the crumbling relationship with his fallen hero of a father figure. We thought, hmmm…we've never seen a story where a kid is exposed to violence for the first time. How does he react to that? Does it feel more authentic and present if it's all happening in real time in movie real time, where you don't give the audience time to catch their breath, where the child feels like he's present within danger.

I believe I read that it was 8 years and over 45 drafts to get LUV onto the screen. How were you able to keep from being defeated?

It was very challenging shooting a movie in a short shooting schedule with a child actor as the lead. Sean Banks, our co-producer, brought Michael Rainey Jr. to me and said, "I found him." he was so right. Michael is incredibly mature and self-possessed. He acts as if he's been doing it for years. The truth and vulnerability he emotes gives me chills. It's unfair that a 10-year-old kid has that many layers and depth. Michael is an "old soul," wise beyond his years!

I always saay: hear a thousands no's for that one yes. My producers Jason Michael Berman, W. Michael Jenson, Gordon Bijelonic, Datari Turner, Joel Newton, Derek Dudley, and Executive Producers Tom Fore, Michael Finley, Dwayne Robinson, Sandra R. Berman, and Mark G. Mathis sacrificed a lot to get this movie made and they believed in me as a first time filmmaker. Jason and Michael have been with LUV for the past 7 years. Jason and I had become like a feuding married couple. There's a strong level of respect and trust between us. I always believed Jason would get it done.

Gordon, Datari, Joel and Derek came onboard and made things happen during some critical moments. I've known Gordon for many years. He's a fearless and passionate producer who always fights for his filmmakers.

Executive Producer Tom Fore and his partner Sean Banks, our co-producer, energized the team and made things happen. They were on the ground every day actively working with the team to make sure the film would cross the finish line. Your team must be fighting everyday to get your movie made. Every Day, do something to be working towards it being real: a phone call, writing, talking to someone. Don't ever stop working on it!

What’s obsessing you now?

Shame, Watch the Throne, Phoenix, Tumblr, Raven’s Football.

What question should I have asked that I didn’t?

What keeps me going? My faith in God, the foundation given to me by my mother, Minister Leslie Morrison, and my dad, Minister of Music Fredrick Morrison. They have always kept me up. God knows there have been some dark days in LA. Without them, I couldn’t do this interview right now. Without them, my filmmaking dream is not realized.

My beloved local yarn shop owners wrote a book!

2011-12-19T13:14:00.000-08:00

Every community/city needs a fabulous yarn shop--for me, a knitoholic, it's a necessity of life. I'm completely thrilled with Patricia's Yarns, which just happens to be two blocks away from my house. Patricia not only knows everything there is to know about yarn and patterns (and she's calmly and patiently helped me out of near disasters more times than I care to admit), she's got this warm, cozy shop that's filled with unbelievably gorgeous yarns. (Sometimes I just pop in to look and touch.) And she's smart, funny and wonderful--and so is her husband Adam, who hangs out, and their gorgeous little girl Grace, and their dog! When I found out that Patricia and Adam wrote a book, The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater, I had to promote it! (And hint hint, it would make ANY knitter on your holiday list really, really happy. Trust me on this.)

Thank you Patricia and Adam for answering my questions!

So, tell us how the idea for writing a book came about. Had you ever written before? Was it fun or were there times when you felt like screaming? What was it like writing together?

In 2004, Adam was in the shop and he heard someone talk about the urban legend known as the curse of the boyfriend sweater / the curse of the love sweater (it has been given so many names). He said that day that the topic would be a great idea for a book. I agreed, there were so many websites and articles about the curse, but no one had written a book about it. Initially, we were just going to do a book of patterns (Adam and I agreed, there weren't enough good men's sweater patterns and thought it would be cute to make a book about "breaking the curse"). We wrote out an outline and then started adding anecdotes to go with each pattern idea. After a while, the outline became a story line – we thought, let’s make it into a novel with knitting patterns. For years, the story line was nothing more than a few Microsoft Word documents - a project for a later date. Then in 2008, we started to get serious about having a family and put together a list of things we wanted to do before a baby arrived... go to New Zealand, save some money, write the book, etc.

We aren't writers. The last time either of us had written fiction was in high school. But, we thought the story idea was great. So, at first, we looked for ghost writers, but found out quickly that we couldn't afford one. Then a friend who worked in publishing said, "just write it yourselves, you can do it. Just write the first draft". At the time, my father-in-law was sick with cancer. We were spending a lot of time in the hospital. So writing was a good outlet for both of us. We could work on the book in the waiting rooms, one chapter at a time - and then have something to talk about later (besides cancer). Writing became therapeutic. Before we knew it, we had written more than 15 short chapters. Adam would write a few paragraphs and I would read it, adding here and there to each section. It was fun to work on together. There were times when I would ask him to read what I had changed and he wouldn’t have time – or vice versa- and we would just leave a working copy – covered in sticky notes – on the counter until the other person had time to look at it. We did really well giving ourselves deadlines - until our daughter Grace was born. Then things slowed to a halt. When we finally completed the chapters, we then had a friend, Tommy Crawford, do some of the first drafts editing and he helped flesh-out some scenes. This summer, though, a typically slow time at the shop, we were able to make final edits and upload the project to Createspace.

Tell us why there's a curse attached to a boyfriend sweater?

If you Google this you will have thousands of search results, each with a slight variation on the same theme: if you knit your boyfriend a sweater, he will break up with you. There are many explanations for this phenomenon, but the best in my opinion, are (1) he doesn’t understand how much work is put into making the sweater – which causes problems, (2) he realizes the commitment you’ve made to make the sweater, and him, and it scares him off. It’s like a hand-knit engagement ring. Or, (3) you knit him the equivalent of the Christmas jumper – one very ugly sweater. Either way, it makes for a good knitting topic – and has been discussed often at the shop.

I love the story of how you, Patricia, left corporate life to forge this wonderful knitting store (I also left a horrendous corporate job years ago to write full time at home.) Tell us what that was like. Were you nervous about it or had you just reached a breaking point?

I used to really like my job in finance. I was fresh out of college and was surrounded with people my age – many of whom I really liked. Then, over a few years, many of my work friends were moved to different departments. And their jobs became mine. I was one person doing the job of three (or four). I was stressed, getting sick often, getting migraines, it wasn’t healthy. And, the hardest part was that Adam, a teacher, really liked his job. I eventually called him from work one day crying. He said, “quit”. Just like that. And so, the next day, I did. We had been talking about starting a knitting shop in Hoboken – so I seized the opportunity. We were living very simply at the time, so Adam supported us while I got the business up and running. I quit in April, 2004 and opened Patricia’s Yarns in August of 2004. I love my shop and I haven’t had a migraine since!

Are you writing another book?

No. Writing our book was a marathon. Some people finish marathons and want to run another. We are just happy we finished the race.

What question didn't I ask that I should have?

For all of your readers that are thinking about self-publishing, we were very pleased with the simplicity and quality of Createspace.

Our book is available at www.curseoftheboyfriendsweater.com Thank you so very much for featuring us. We know your readers are all very knowledgeable writers and hope they enjoy our book for what it is – a lighthearted story with a few simple, but favorite knitting patterns.

Tamar Cohen talks about learning to like the public side of being a writer

2011-12-09T08:46:00.000-08:00

I love this post with a passion. Tamar Cohen's a wonderful author (go out and read her darkly funny and richly imagined The Mistress's Revenge if you haven't already) and I was thrilled that she wanted to write something for my blog. She could have been writing about my life! The oddness of being a solitary writer who suddenly has to "go out of the house" and speak and perform and be "on" all the time, is captured perfectly and wittily here. Thank you, Tamar!

On Monday night I went to hear the celebrated Turkish novelist, Elif Shafak, talk about her books and her characters and the meaning of love. She was beautiful, impressive, articulate. She made jokes in two different languages. She told anecdotes about her grandmother, shared her thoughts on identity, and on the concept of home. She took questions from the floor and replied coherently and generously and made the questioners feel validated and special. Afterwards she signed books and chatted to people she’d never met and answered the same questions over and over again without her smile once slipping.

Now here’s the thing – if Elif Shafak was a politician or a film star or a motivational speaker you wouldn’t be surprised. But she’s a writer. For 99 per cent of our lives, we’re expected if not encouraged to hibernate inside our own homes, dressed in pyjamas and ugly fleece-lined boots and refusing to answer the phone, insisting instead that all communication be done remotely via the medium of email and Twitter. Yet, for the remaining 0.1 percent, we are expected to magically transmorph into public figures, at home in front of an audience, dressed in clothes without egg stains down them, able to converse on a range of topics in voices that haven’t atrophied from under-use, and to remember not only our own names, but also interesting and relevant anecdotes, all delivered with a winning smile.

It was a huge shock for me when my debut novel The Mistress’s Revenge came out in June this year to realise that certain things were expected of me as a published writer. There were meetings and parties to go to, people to impress, questions to answer (often the same questions, again and again), intelligent points to be made, books to be signed. And all of these things took place outside of the house! After months spent holed up in a back room, hunched over my computer with only the dog for company (and believe me, my dog’s conversational ability leaves a lot to be desired), it was like entering into another space/time dimension.

Now, I’m not saying most people go into writing because they’re socially inept misfits who can’t handle the real world but… oh who am I kidding, that’s pretty much what I am saying. But the great paradox of being published is that, having gone into writing because you’re naturally a shy retiring type who prefers tweeting to chatting and doesn’t own a single pair of trousers that aren’t elasticated at the waist, the payoff for success is that you leave all that behind and go out into the world to be on show – the very thing you hoped to escape by becoming a writer in the first place.

I’m a truly terrible public speaker. Give me an audience of any type and my tongue becomes velcroed to the roof of my mouth, I say things like ‘um’ a lot or else make a strange nervous humming noise. I start sentences with no clue of how they might end. I also develop a rather disturbing giggle.

The thing is I’ve never been taught how to do it. I like to see things written down, I like to play

around with words and sentences until they’re exactly how the way I want them to be. That’s why I write. When I speak, it comes out in either a trickle or a gush, I get words wrong. I gesticulate madly (even if I’m on the radio). My mind goes blank. Doing a series of live radio interviews to publicise the book in the USA a few months back, I took to placing a sheet of paper in front of me with the names of my main characters written in big capital letters, after embarrassingly getting one of them wrong on my first attempt.

God knows how big-name writers go into television studios to perch on sofas and talk knowledgeably in front of audiences of millions. How on earth do they know what to wear? At home I have a Writing Cardy, an outsized, woolly moth-eaten cardigan that sits draped over the back of my chair and that I put on over the top of whatever I have on (usually garments of the ‘leisure-wear’ variety), basically because I’m too mean to put the heating on when it’s just me in the house. This is what I spend most of my life wearing. After publication, not only did I have to step away from the cardy, I also realised that none of my other clothes would stand up to public scrutiny. Things had to be bought in a hurry and chosen according to criteria other than whether they were a) comfortable and b) able to accommodate a pair of wellies for the daily dog walk. For the first party after I’d been signed by my publisher, I bought a pair of shoes with sky-high heels and spent the night grimacing rather than smiling at important people I was introduced to and hardly able to talk for the pain. I suspect the collective verdict was that the company’s latest signee was clearly a sociopath.

But you know how they say you can get used to anything? Well, the truth is that after a couple of months blinking in the unaccustomed light of an external environment in my non egg-stained clothes, I started to quite like it. I relaxed enough to throw out my characters crib-sheet when I did interviews, and stopped feeling like a child dressing up as a grown-up whenever I ventured out to work-related events. So it was a bit of a rude shock to find myself, after a whirlwind couple of months, back at my desk in the Cardy, writing Book Two and once again wisecracking at the dog (a wasted exercise if ever there was one).

The last year, since The Mistress’s Revenge was accepted for publication, has been the steepest of learning curves in so many respects. But perhaps the one thing I was least prepared for was this schizophrenic arc of the published writer’s life. Next time, hopefully, I’ll be more ready for it. Next time I’ll step seamlessly from the solitary subterranean fug of my home-office straight into any number of public situations and be impeccably dressed and effortlessly impressive in the style of Elif Shafak. I’m working on the bilingual jokes as we speak. The dog thinks they’re great!

The Mistress’s Revenge is published by Free Press (Simon & Sc

The editors of "Men Undressed: Women Writers and the Male Sexual Experience" talk about sex scenes, male critics and more

2011-11-28T13:39:00.000-08:00

How could I possibly resist wanting to talk to the editors (Stacy Bierlein, Gina Frangello, Cris Mazza and Kate Meads) of the provocative Men Undressed: Women Writers and the Male Sexual Experience? The book is a terrific collection of bold, brave and brash essays from such extraordinary female authors as A. M. Homes, Aimee Bender, Tawni O'Dell, Gina Frangella, Cris Mazza, and many more. Thanks to all the editors for talking with me.

CL: So, what made you decide to gather women writers to write about the male experience?

Cris Mazza: Someone said to me, as the controversy over the title Chick-Lit for the first anthologies I co-edited subsided, that maybe it was now time to do Dick-Lit. Ha-ha, I said, as though that hasn’t already be done in so many anthologies since the onset of printing presses. But … there was a way in which the “male experience” hadn’t been anthologized.

At first, I was also playing amateur psychologist. I wanted to see if the way women wrote sex from a male POV said anything about how they themselves view sex – something about their attitude that wouldn’t be consciously available, even to them. This curiosity, of course, could not be satisfied because I had no way of knowing if any assumption I could make after reading their material was, in fact, anywhere close to plausible. And, quickly, the initial curiosity that launched the project quickly changed when I discovered (a) many women didn’t even write graphic sex, let alone from a male POV, (b) many submissions claimed to have graphic sex and didn’t, (c) other anthologies of “women’s sensual writing” or “women’s erotic fiction” completely ignored the issue of perspective or point-of-view and men exploring sexuality from anywhere other than their own experience. Some of my old bells started re-ringing: the comment a male editor had made to my then-agent about a male perspective sexual situation, a general lambasting at a women’s-writing conference from a woman-of-color who said no one else had the right to imagine or depict of character outsider her own cultural reality. [Note: co-editor Kat Meads has a new book out in which she did exactly this. http://www.katmeads.com/] I decided to go see what was out there and what might be said of it if I gathered it together under one cover.

Kat Meads: My motivation was similar to Cris’s. I get very perturbed when critics or reviewers or readers start making rules about what can and can’t be written about. Very perturbed. I’m truly stunned and amazed that anyone would suggest/demand restrictions on a creative composition. Imagination: no creed, no color, no age, no gender. Anything and everything up for grabs. Does it work/convince as a piece of fiction? That’s what counts, the only judgment that matters. But when Cris and I started thinking about and reading for this project, it was clear to us that a particular kind of censorship—either absorbed or self-imposed—was operating in terms of women writing from the male viewpoint about sex. And I think both of us—and then all four of us—were a bit taken aback by the difficulty of finding work that met our vision for the book. But when we did find those stories and novels, we were ecstatic. In Men Undressed, women not only write as men about sex, they write very, very well.

CL: What kinds of stories did you expect to receive and were you surprised at what you got? I'm also curious what direction you gave your writers, and how you chose the stories you chose.

Stacy Bierlein: Several colleagues asked, “Are you sure about this? People write so badly about sex.” But I didn’t believe that. A well-written sex scene can be central to any powerful literary work. Sex scenes are often an ideal means for both writers and readers to really know a character. In the 1700s male writers like Samuel Richardson got to know their female narrators by writing their soul-baring letters. This was a time of high censorship, so these letters likely stood in for sex scenes that would have prevented a novel’s publication. (It’s interesting to note too that Richardson’s work inspired more than one American clergyman to call fiction itself “a sinful form of writing.”) In our age of texts and tweets, our characters do not write soul-baring letters, but certainly writers can put their characters in sex scenes to reveal their most intimate, honest, or horrifying selves. Certainly as writers we can attempt these moments that allow heightened power to details. The guy who reaches for his Blackberry before his partner has finished coming …. Well, we know exactly who he is. (It’s better to be writing him than dating him, of course.) As we began work on our book, we asked writers for works of literary fiction with “frank sexuality.” It took our attention that in the early months of our reading for Men Undressed we received strong, deeply admirable stories that were highly sensual yet void of real sexual tension or actual sexual encounters. Our associate editors got a little tired of the four of us saying things like, “Great story, but my god, why don’t they fuck?” And to be honest, due to the high quality of some of the not-quite-sexual work we were rejecting, I wondered on several occasions if we might consider altering our mission for this book. Certainly “narrative cross-dressing” on its own was a formidable topic. Cris, Kat, and Gina held firm to the frank sexuality requirement and they were right to do so. We chose visual stories that held us in awe, stories whose vibrant characters pushed at us in some way, and stories we envied and wished we had written. I think the results are stunning.

CL: Why don't men--and some women--want women to write raunchy?

Cris Mazza: I’m breaking this question down to “why do so many writers avoid graphic sex?” I believe some writers, male and female alike, might fear the appearance of using graphic sex only to amp up a book’s “drama” – that old “only for prurient interest” criticism which, outside obscenity court cases, just means sensationalizing, on par with including graphic violence and gore. Some, perhaps, fear always being associated too closely with their characters and don’t want to feel that readers are able to peer into their own private intimate lives. Some men likely don’t want their writing to live in the same sphere as locker-room one-upmanship. But when it comes to what you’ve actually asked, why don’t men want women to write frank sexuality …? Okay, you said “raunchy,” and I find I can’t apply that word to the category of sex-writing I’m talking about; and that’s why I’m demurring. Raunchy is defined as vulgar, crude, coarse, gross, etc., and we’re right back into that court definition of obscenity.

Staring over: Why don’t men want women to write graphic or frank sex scenes? Porn video makers in the 70s and 80s included some girl-on-girl scenes because men are very interested in women expressing their sexuality. (Hey, have there been any women porn film makers?) But publishers and editors and critics? Somehow many were infused with or confused by a standard their mommies taught them for what kind of girl they should marry. A virgin who would never use a “bad word” or even refer to her own body parts (or his) and wants to get undressed in the dark.

OK, I know I’m being snarky. I don’t know if men don’t want women to write sex scenes. I do know that some women writers simply said to me, “I don’t do that,” as though I’d asked them if they like to have sex in public.

Gina Frangello: I’m not sure that men don’t want women to write sex scenes, exactly. What I do think is that “the market”—which both men and women are responsible for in different ways—tends to discourage literary women writers from focusing much on sex, whereas it actually very much encourages female genre writers—whether romance or pop or chick-lit or even thrillers—to write more overtly about sex. This is so complex, really. I’m not that much younger than Cris but we did come of age, so to speak, in a different literary era, and in my formative years as a writer/editor there was no huge shortage of women writing sexual fiction—some of my influences were Mary Gaitskill, Kathy Acker, Kate Braverman, really many women writers by the early 90s were writing candidly about sex, I sometimes think more so than in today’s market. This was just on the brink of the wide-scale corporatization that took place in the publishing world, and it was also prior to 9/11 and the economic downturn, both of which had a somewhat “Puritanizing” influence on the publishing world (as well as on other art forms such as film).

Between the fact that trade publishing is now almost synonymous with shareholders and marketing teams making more decisions than editors, and the fact that there started to be this prevailing belief post-9/11 that audiences couldn’t stand anything other than “feel good” or simple, inspiring stories, I think the truth is that bold, risk-taking art forms have really suffered pretty much across the board. In my view, serious explorations of sex in fiction has been a casualty of these developments. In the 90s, you had even mainstream magazines like Vogue talking about “perversion chic”—Quentin Tarantino was all the rage in Hollywood.

The post-9/11 landscape, paired with what corporatization and economic recession did to the publishing world, really changed that cultural zeitgeist. I think this has far less to do with men as a sweeping gender discouraging or disapproving of women talking about sex, and much more to do with an actually (much more discouraging) move away from serious art on a wider scale and with an anti-intellectual movement in the country. Women are still writing plenty of sex. But they’re not encouraged to do so in a serious way, outside of beach reads. With the downsizing of serious art/literature in the United States, it seems to me that sexism has reared its ugly head in a way that would have seemed passé in the 1990s. There are fewer and fewer “slots” available to writers of literary fiction, and among those writers only a certain number can also be edgy, risk-taking writers who are pushing the boundaries of convention with graphic content, and among those writers even fewer can be women because the publishing industry seems to accept without question that male work is Universal whereas female work is “for women.”

I guess, Caroline, I think this question is almost unspeakably complex—it’s fascinating to me so I have to put the brakes on myself. There are a few trade publishers out there, like Algonquin and Harper Perennial, that still seem to really be encouraging writers to take risks and that seem very open to women writers with big, bold or subversive ideas, but this seems to be less and less prevalent due to the current Armageddon in publishing. People are going with the safe, the crowd-pleasing, and a lot of women writers are being ghettoized, with literary fiction becoming more a boy’s playground than it was in the 1990s, paradoxically. And in this vein, women writing frankly, graphically and honestly about sex has never been exactly “safe.” Which is why it’s more important than ever right now.

CL: How have male critics responded. Has there been any, "How dare you!" type of response? (And, by the way, I loved the foreword by Steve Almond.)

Gina Frangello: Well here’s the irony, really. My personal belief is that once a book is published—once it’s been given that “stamp of approval” by being in book form, the general public tends to be far less aghast by it than marketing departments might have imagined they would be. A lot of people seemed to believe, going into this project, that we were going to get some serious flack. However, that hasn’t actually proven true thus far. I did see a fairly heated exchange on the Facebook wall of one of our contributors, where some of her male “friends” were agitated by the book’s concept. They felt it was reverse-sexism and that the book was going to be all about turn-about being fair play or about a reaction against male writers or men in general. But the fact is, these guys hadn’t read the book; it wasn’t even released yet. I think it would be very hard to come to a conclusion like that if they had.

While the male characters in the anthology are often flawed—as all great literary characters are—the anthology is a celebration of male sexuality, not an indictment. The women writers we selected are grappling mightily to understand men and get inside their skin in a visceral way. Steve Almond remarks, as you note, that we are sorely in need of that understanding, and I think that’s precisely true. No critics have yet disputed that or taken issue with it. I’ll be somewhat surprised if things play out in that way. The women in Men Undressed aren’t just trying to get revenge on D.H. Lawrence or something. They feel their characters very deeply and care about them and breathe life into them. Some of these women—like A.M. Homes, for example, were at the forefront of launching this new literary tradition, in which women are equally free with men to explore the Other. There’s much to debate on the pages of Men Undressed, but I don’t think anyone who really cares about literature—as obviously critics do—would dispute the right of women writers to do that.

CL: Do you think male writers and female writers have different ideas on what makes a good sex scene? In reading these stories, I actually thought the writers were really more interested and focused on individual character, rather than trying to reveal the male at large, Could you talk a bit about that?

Gina Frangello: I’m not sure if male and female literary writers have different conceptions of good sex scenes, broken down cleanly into gender. Certainly it does seem that there are ways of portraying sex, i.e. much of the porn industry on the male side, or romance novels on the female side, that appeal strongly to one gender and less strongly to the other. But is this true in so-called “literary fiction?” I’m not sure. I think of someone like Mary Gaitskill, who is just a master at writing sexuality, and it seems to me that she has as many male fans as female fans, even though she’s a woman writer. So I think the further away from stereotypes—and the closer to “individuality”—the art form becomes, the more it actually eschews a gendered definition, you know?

Which actually ties in to the next part of your question, Caroline, because yeah, on the one hand our anthology is intended to focus on how women writers may envision Male sexuality, capital M. As a compilation of 28 pieces of fiction, we hope to be able to launch discussions about that. But on an individual, story-by-story level, I doubt that was any writer’s singular intent. What I mean is: the focus on individual character, rather than some concept of “male at large,” is probably why the stories/chapters we chose are so strong.

If a story attempted to capture the "male experience" in some global sense, it would likely be disastrously didactic and annoying. After all, what would we think of a male writer who was trying to capture the "essence of woman" in his fiction, as opposed to writing about an individual female character, right? Even in the example of Lady Chatterly, which—as Cris Mazza points out in her Introduction—may have misled many women readers over the years in terms of being a role model of female sexuality, we have to remember that Lawrence was only positing that one woman might have this sort of experience, not that all women were Lady Chatterly. And as Cris also points out in her Introduction, this is the task of all fiction, really.

It's always about the individual character, even when you are writing about a gender, race or ethnicity to which you as a writer also belong. Toni Morrison may be a black female, but her character, Sethe, in Beloved is not meant to be Every Black Woman. Imagine the critical outrage if Morrison had been implying that Every Black Woman would murder her child! But she was writing about one woman, and therefore her task was to make this action believable, resonant, and even understandable in that one character’s eyes and circumstances—and she succeeded brilliantly. That's all any writer can ever hope to do unless they're conducting a clinical study, not writing a piece of fiction.

What question didn't I ask that I should have?

Stacy Bierlein: I realize this echoes some of what we have discussed here as well as Steve Almond’s forward, but for the writers reading this interview I would suggest again, Why not write about sex? It baffles me how many writers still avoid or dismiss this vibrant and important arena in their work. In an era where we have so-called leaders discussing things like abstinence-only education for young people, there is precious little frank discussion of sex as a means of self-exploration or self-expression. For many characters on the pages of Men Undressed, sex is that and more.

Kat Meads: Who should read this anthology? Women and men. Read Men Undressed for its variety and surprises. Read it to discover new voices. Read it, discuss it, argue about it.

Stacy Bierlein: Indeed!

Renée Thompson talks about The Plume Hunter

2011-11-28T13:27:00.000-08:00

Renée Thompson writes about her love of birds, wildlife, and the people who inhabit the American West. Her first novel, The Bridge at Valentine, received high praise from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove.--but more importantly, at least to me, she's also warm, funny, and a wonderful friend. Her second novel, The Plume Hunter, about conflict, friendly, love and plume hunting (killing birds to sell the feathers for hats) is due from Torrey House Press on December 1. I'm honored to host her here.

Renée, I’m intrigued. I’ve heard of plume hunters – which I thought existed only in Florida. Yet your book is set in Oregon?

I know, Caroline – it’s a surprise, right? Most readers assume that birds were killed strictly in Florida, but plume hunters also shot birds in other regions of the country, including the marshes of Klamath and Malheur, in Oregon, where my novel is set (Portland also plays a small role).

What kinds of birds did they shoot?

Great egrets (hunters were attracted to the “bridal plumes” on the birds’ backs during breeding season), snowy egrets, western grebes, pelicans, terns, owls, and all sorts of songbirds and shorebirds. In the winter, market hunters in Oregon and California also shot thousands of ducks for the restaurant trade in San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.

What inspired you to write a novel about plume hunting?

I was intrigued by a photograph of William Finley and Herman Bohlman, who, in the late 1800s were oölogists (egg collectors) in Portland, Oregon, but who turned to photography when egg collecting became unpopular with bird lovers. About the same time, I saw a historical photo of market hunters with their kill, and something just clicked. I did some research, and learned that in 1885 more than five million birds were killed in the United States alone for the millinery trade. When I read that feathers sold for $32 an ounce – which in 1903 made plumes worth about twice their weight in gold – I knew I would craft a story about a plume hunter and his best friend – someone stalwartly opposed to pluming – and that their differing philosophies would provide conflict, and help propel the plot.

Can you tell us more?

I don’t want to give away too much, but I will say that at its core, Plume is about two best friends who are torn apart by their differences; Fin is Plume’s dark hero, and Aiden Elliott is his best friend, a man who considers himself the birds’ savior. I’ll also mention that it was an interesting paradox that men who collected eggs and bird skins in the name of science – often for museums – didn’t see themselves as contributing to the demise of birds, since they weren’t “real” killers, but men furthering the understanding of our avian world. To that end, I’ve also incorporated a fictionalized version of Frank M. Chapman, who, in real life, was the curator of birds for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Chapman was instrumental in the re-formation of the Audubon Society after its failed first start, so I’ve cast him as Aiden’s mentor.

Where does that leave Fin?

That’s actually a pretty important question. Fin loves to hunt – it’s in his blood and bones. Still, he struggles to understand if it’s hunting that fuels his soul, or the actual killing. I think this is a question some hunters ask even today, and so I’ve explored it in Plume, allowing readers to decide for themselves the moral implications.

Speaking of moral implications – am I giving away too much by saying Fin and Aiden fall in love with the same woman?

Not at all – we just won’t let on who gets the girl, or what it costs the “winner”!

Amy Bourret talks about Mothers and Other Liars and the novel experience of being a novelist

2011-11-28T13:09:00.000-08:00

A young drifter. A baby. A split second decision that will have ramifications for all involved. That's the subject matter of Amy Bourret's incredible new novel, Mothers and Other Liars. I'm thrilled to host her here on my blog writing about the experience of having a novel out! Thank you so much, Amy.

Novel Experience

The first one was sent to me through my publisher before my novel was even published. A woman had received an advance copy of “Mothers and Other Liars,” and just had to write to tell me that she loved my book and couldn’t get my characters out of her head. I was thrilled! I have been a voracious reader since I could read and can’t think of a time I wrote to an author just to say I loved a book. I’m sure “famous authors” get them by the bagful. But here was nobody me holding an honest-to-goodness fan letter.

The letters have continued to arrive. Granted email, websites and facebook make it easier, but some readers have taken the time to put actual pen to actual paper and sent them with actual postage stamps: “I don’t even know what to say……what a moving, wonderful story”; “I just wanted to write and say thank you for sharing your story with me”; “I wish to congratulate you on writing such a thought-provoking and beautiful story”; “I am still walking around days after finishing wondering what I would do if I were in Ruby's shoes.”; “Your debut novel is a journey through betrayal and forgiveness, secrets of the past, and the love and dedication that defines ‘family’”; “I stayed up all night reading”; “WOW. I just finished Mothers & Other Liars, and I had to email you to let you know how much I loved every single word of it”; “Thank you so much for the amazing novel Mothers and Other Liars, the book is such a gift;”

The true gift – and genuine surprise -- for me has been receiving these letters. People are busy trying to cram 42 hours in a 24-hour day. I already thought that being invited into a person’s home, to have my words sit with her in a cozy corner for a few hours, was an honor. And now for her to take even a few more minutes out of her day to write words back to me? Ironically, I have difficulty crafting the words to describe how meaningful that experience has been for me. Even the hate mail, like “You obviously have no maternal bone in your body” or “You may write pretty words but you sure can’t tell a decent story” tells me that my book has touched someone enough for her to remember it after the last page (how many times have you read a book that afterwards you couldn’t describe?) and aroused enough emotion for her to follow through and write to me.

I thought I had prepared myself for publication. I stocked up on blue pens and pithy comments for book signings. I knew I would love talking to book groups and listening to them debate the choices made by my main character, Ruby. Writing happens in a vacuum, just me, my keyboard and an empty room, so feedback about characters and plot and, yes, petty words helps me to write better. But the letters, this unexpected gift from the hearts of readers, has been such a novel experience.

Amy Bourret is a graduate of Yale Law School and Texas Tech University and a former partner in a national law firm. Her pro bono work with child advocacy organizations sparked the passion that fuels Mothers and Other Liars, her debut novel which was, selected as a Target Stores Breakout Book. She loves to visit book clubs and hear from readers. Learn more at www.amybourret.com.

Five reasons to see Answers to Nothing, coming Dec 2.

2011-11-20T15:21:00.000-08:00

I'm a confirmed movieholic and nothing makes me happier than a wonderful film. I was honored to have had a chance to see a screener of Matthew Leutwyler's astonishing film, Answers to Nothing, opening December 2. Because I want everyone on the planet to see the film so I can talk about it with them, I've come up with five more reasons why you need to see it.

1. Dane Cook's revelatory, nuanced, heartbreaking performance.
2. And for Dexter fans, there's Julie Benz (Dexter's wife Rita!) Actually, the whole cast is just sublime.
3. Intertwined stories with fascinating characters: a single parent detective looking for a missing child; a pregnant wife dealing with her husband's infidelity, A cop haunted by his wife's death, a self-loathing African-American, and a school teacher with a jones for video games who is obsessed by the crime.
4. Because Matthew gave me this great interview.
5. And how about the fact that Matthew Leutwyler is just so cool? Says he: "It's uncomfortable to expose your inner workings, but it just feels more authentic." And isn't that what we all look for in art (and in life?)

Pictures of You on Kirkus Best Books of 2011 List!

2011-11-14T10:51:00.000-08:00

I am sitting here unable to work because I'm too excited. My novel Pictures of You was just chosen for the Kirkus Best Books of 2011 List! What is so astonishing to me is that from the moment I went with Algonquin, my whole life changed. I went from someone with meager sales to being a NYT bestseller, a Costco Pennie's Pick, a San Francisco Lit Pick, a Best Book of the year from Bookmarks Magazine, Bookpage AND Kirkus--and I think it really goes to show that you cannot give up. You cannot ever give up. You never know what miracles are out there.

Leora Skolkin-Smith talks about madness, Grace Paley, resisting writing about what you need to write about, and Hystera

2011-11-09T10:43:00.000-08:00

I first met Leora Skolkin-Smith through Readerville, an online literary community and we quickly became friends. We talk about writing all the time and I've been thrilled to see how Leora's first novel Edges is now edging its way into becoming a feature film from Triboro Pictures. Her new novel, Hystera, about madness, youth and NYC in the 1970s, is from the Fiction Studio Imprint, one of the more exciting new publishing venues around. I'm honored to have Leora come on and talk about her book--which debuts November 15th! And don't forget to listen to Leora on Reading With Robin, this Saturday, 92WHjj, 7 to 8 AM.

What sparked the idea for the novel? Where did it come from?

I once heard the German writer Christa Wolf speak on a panel, long ago, when her "The Quest for Christa T." first came out in East Germany. This book was banned immediately and as she wrote it, she had no belief it would find print. She said something even more interesting--she said, first she had been working on another book she knew would sell and be read, but this one, Christa T. kept looming up and haunting her instead. She had such a resistance to writing anything like it, to the unconscious, disturbing material inherent in it and she could feel that resistance so strongly, like a brick lodged inside her gut. Her resistance was overwhelming and so she had to try to understand it., or she would never be able to write the "sellable" one. She asked herself: What was it she was so scared of writing? What would she expose if she wrote? What material didn't want to surface from deep inside her? Was that too frightening? Too raw? Too passionate? All of these things could make a writer terribly uncomfortable and cause such a resistance. The only way she could concentrate again was to write out what she was so afraid of. Express what about Christa T. made her fight so hard against knowing her character and her character's situation. And she wrote the book against all better judgement. And it was the best work she ever had done. Drive and force and passion to tell it broke through the resistance in the end. And that is the energy one needs to really write a meaningful book.

So now, she explained, when she asks herself, what should I write? The answer is: write the story you are most resisting, that is the one you truly must tell.

For me that was HYSTERA. And for all the same reasons Christa Wolf resisted telling the story of Christa T.

What kind of a writer are you? Do you map things out or do they come organically?

I'm a big messy spiller of paints. I love images, I have images come to me way before story. Images and fragmented senses. Sometimes just smells. I work from impressionism purely. I wish I could be someone who plans and structures with plot, but...that just never happens for me. Plot is the very last thing that happens.

You have a feature film coming out for your last book Edges. Has being involved int he film process changed the way you look at writing novels?

I love working on the feature film. It stretched all the boundaries, I learned so much about how a screenwriter must visualize and communicate the same feelings embedded in words alone inside a novel and I think that helped my work as a novelist. Plus, it's all so exciting. I felt an affirmation I hadn't felt in the literary community, a welcome mat.

What's obsessing you now?

I'm trying write about a relationship I had with Grace Paley. Since I was very close to her, I was witness to a whole lot of circumstances and saw up close what happens to celebrities and beloved writers who are fundamentally literary, but used, exploited by others and the media to create them as icons, in false pictures. It's a challenge because I could get in a whole lot of trouble doing it. Most of the characters are well-known. It's a roman a clef. Very hard but fun in that revengeful way one can't ordinarily express, having to be a "lady" or a "nice person".

What question didn't I ask that I should have?

Can't imagine! These were great!

Lisa Unger Talks about where it all began

2011-11-07T07:26:00.000-08:00

New York Times bestselling author Lisa Unger really needs no introduction. Is there anyone on the planet who doesn't know her? Her novels have sold over a million copies and have been translated into 26 languages. Her new novel, Darkness My Old Friend, about the secrets of the past and the future of a rebellious teen was chosen as a Washington Life Magazine Lit Pick. I'm thrilled she's agreed to write a little something on my blog about her beginnings as a writer. Thank you, Lisa!

Preface

Lisa Unger

I was nineteen years old when I first met Lydia Strong. I was living in the East Village, dating a New York City Police officer and attending Eugene Lang College, the under graduate division of the New School for Social Research. I was sitting in a car, under the elevated section of the “1” line in the Bronx, waiting – for what I can’t remember. But, in my mind that day, I kept seeing a woman running past a church. She was in New Mexico. And all I knew about her was that she was a damaged person, someone in great pain. Running, for her, was salve, religion, and drug. That was Lydia.

I pulled a napkin and a pen from the glove compartment and started writing the book that would become ANGEL FIRE. It took me ten years to write that novel, mostly because the years between age nineteen and twenty-nine were, for me, years of hard work and tumultuous change. But also because during that time, I let my dreams of becoming a writer languish a bit. Lydia was faithful; she waited.

In spite of a first rate education, a career in publishing, and a strong desire to write fiction, I didn’t know much of anything when I was writing my first novel. I don’t think you can really know anything about writing a novel until you’ve actually written one. (And then you go to school again when you sit down to write your second, and your third, and so on.) All I knew during that time was that I was truly fascinated by this woman occupying a place in my imagination, and I was deeply intrigued by her very dark appetites. I was enthralled by her past, by the mysteries in her present, and why she wouldn’t let herself love the man who loved her. There were lots of questions about Lydia Strong; and I was never happier over those ten years then when I was trying to answer them.

I was fortunate that the first novel I ever wrote was accepted by my (wonderful, brilliant) agent Elaine Markson, and that she fairly quickly brokered a deal for ANGEL FIRE and my second, then unwritten, novel THE DARKNESS GATHERS. I spent the next few years with Lydia Strong and the very colorful cast of characters that populate her life. And I enjoyed every dark, harrowing, and complicated moment with them as I went on to write TWICE, and then SMOKE.

I followed Lydia from New Mexico, to New York City, to Albania, to Miami and back. We trekked through the abandoned subway tunnels under Manhattan, to a compound in the back woods of Florida, to a mysterious church in the Bronx, to a fictional town called Haunted. It was a total thrill ride, and I wrote like my fingers were on fire.

I am delighted that these early novels, which I wrote under my maiden name Lisa Miscione, have found a new life on the shelves and a new home with the stellar team at Broadway Books. And, of course, I am thrilled that they’ve found their way into your hands. I know a lot of authors wish their early books would just disappear, because they’ve come so far as writers since they first began their careers. And I understand that, because we would all go back and rewrite everything if we could.

But I have a special place in my heart for these flawed, sometimes funny, complicated characters and their wild, action-packed stories. I still think about them, and feel tremendous tenderness for even the most twisted and deranged among them. The writing of each book was pure pleasure. I hope that you enjoy your time with them as much as I have. And, thanks, as always, for reading.

Caroline Preston talks about The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt

2011-11-07T07:25:00.002-08:00

I first met Caroline Preston at a literary party and was instantly charmed by both her--and her work. Preston is the author of Jackie by Josie, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Lucy Crocker 2.0, and Gatsby’s Girl, which chronicles F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first girlfriend who was the model for Daisy Buchanan. In The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, she's delved into her own collection of vintage ephemera to create a novel in the unique form of a scrapbook, creating a book that is gorgeous, enchantingly original and so much fun to read. I'm so honored to have Caroline here! Thank you, Caroline.

What gave you the idea of writing a novel in pictures?

I like to say the idea of making a scrapbook novel was 40 years in the making. The house where I grew up (in Lake Forest, Illinois) had a great old attic jammed full of trunks and boxes of 1920’s stuff that had belonged to my grandmother. Flapper dresses, coils of her long hair which she’d bobbed in 1924. And of course big thick scrapbooks filled with dance cards, letters from old boyfriends, ocean liner tickets. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent up there rooting around and daydreaming.

My first three novels were what I guess you’d call “conventional” format—i.e. words-- but I always used photographs and visual material in my research. My third novel Gatsby’s Girl was inspired by the meticulous scrapbook F. Scott Fitzgerald kept about his first love, Ginevra King—her first note to him, her handkerchief, and a newspaper clipping about her marriage to another man. Later he would turn the story of his unrequited crush into The Great Gatsby.

When I was casting around for the idea for my fourth novel, I wanted to create something that was as visual and powerful as a scrapbook. And then I had a crazy idea—why not make a novel that WAS a scrapbook. Not a digital scrapbook, but a real one made of real stuff that I cut up with scissors and pasted together with glue.

How did you go about writing it? Did the photos, images, etc. come first and fashion themselves into a story, or did you have the story in mind and search for the images to support it?

I started with my character, Frankie Pratt, and the outlines of her story, which was set in the 1920’s. I imagined an 18-year-old girl who wanted to become a writer and her journey which would take her to Vassar, Greenwich Village, and Paris.

Then I hunted down and bought all the things that a girl like Frankie Pratt would glue in her scrapbook—postcards, movie tickets, Vassar report cards, menus, sheet music, fashion spreads, popular magazines, a New York subway map, a Paris guidebook, and of course love letters. In all, I collected over 600 pieces of vintage 1920’s ephemera.

I found that Frankie’s story changed and evolved as I found surprising things—for example an original book cover for The Sun Also Rises. The book caused a huge fuss in Paris when it came out in 1926 because everyone recognized the characters, and she would been right there to bear witness.

So much of the wonderful ephemera in the book tells the story, but I also deeply admired the text--Frankie's voice is so spot on, and her character, revealed through her scrapbook is so alive. How did you find her voice?

Frankie’s story is told through her typed scrapbook captions. I was inspired by the style I found in so many of the 1920’s scrapbooks I looked at, including Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s—breezy, funny, self-ironic, but also serious. Most vintage scrapbooks do feel very alive because people kept them to record the happiest and most exciting times of their lives—going to college, getting married, having a baby, going off to war. And of course, what could be more alive than Greenwich Village and Paris in the 1920’s!

So much of the pleasure of the book is in the design, which looks and feels like a genuine scrapbook. Did you work with a designer or was this all your own considerable--and genius-- creativity?

I designed the entire book, with the exception of the cover. Even I’m pretty surprised by that fact, because I have no training in graphic or book design. I was liberated to try designing a book because it was in the format of a scrapbook, which is by definition laid out and constructed by amateurs.

On each page, I imagined what Frankie would have chosen to glue in and how she would have put it together. Through the course of the book, 1920-1928, her design sense gets more sophisticated as she’s exposed to things like Art Deco and Cubism.

The fantastic book designer at Ecco, Mary Speaker, went over my final pages and made it into a finished book. Ecco did a beautiful job with the book production—the paper quality, the cover, the photography, and the four-color printing are all amazing.

What's obsessing you now?

I have started in on my next scrapbook novel, this one kept by a bride during her first year of marriage 1959-1960. I like to think of it as a prequel to Mad Men. My favorite finds so far: a 1959 Brides magazine, the Betty Crocker Bride’s Cookbook, a 1960 sex manual, View-Master slides, a set of bride and groom paper ...

Director Michael Medeiros talks about his upcoming film Tiger Lily Road

2011-11-07T07:25:00.001-08:00

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m fascinated by craft, by how creative people manage to do what they do--and that I am not just a bookaholic, but a movieholic, as well. I first read about the film Tiger Lily Road, Michael Medeiros’, upcoming dark comedy about the lives and loves (or lack of) of two Connecticut women, on Google, and I was instantly fascinated. So I immediately tracked him down and badgered him for an interview. I’m honored to have him here. An actor, director, writer and songwriter, Michael’s acted in everything from Xmen First Class to Synecdoche, New York to The Good Wife and he's the director and writer of Underground. Thank you so much, Michael.
You’re also an acclaimed actor as well as a director and writer. Do you prefer being in front of the camera, behind it or at your desk, and why?

It feels great to switch from one creative activity to another. Sometimes I get to a point where I am thinking, “what the hell am I doing?” I tell myself I have to focus more, but then sometimes it helps to take a break and say, play my guitar, and then come back to film editing. I’ve been a songwriter since I was thirteen, and sometimes when I get editing fatigue I leave the desk and I play for half an hour and it refreshes me. And editing is, in itself, so much about the musicality.

What do I prefer doing? It depends on the day I’m asked. I just finished acting in a film that a friend of mine is doing, and I really had a good time. The material, the character – makes it a good time. And I got to learn a little big of magic for the role. But I do find that directing films uses all of my artistic resources quite thoroughly.

Tiger Lily Road is about the lives of women in a Connecticut Town—how they perceive themselves and the men in and out of their lives. Where did the idea come from?

Well, the easy answer is I’m not sure. The more complex answer is that it came from several places. After I wrote my film Underground, I wanted to make a feature and I wrote several that just wouldn’t have been practical for me to produce. They were too big, too expensive. I didn’t want to spend years chasing five million dollars. I wanted to spend months chasing a much smaller amount. So I was looking for that idea, and then I was up at this Connecticut cottage—my girlfriend’s family’s place—and one night at a party, I got to talking to these women. They were all in their mid to late 40s and none of them happened to be with a man, and I had this epiphany. I kept thinking, what great women they were, how funny and smart and talented. Why weren’t they in a relationship? And I thought, “There’s a story here.” And the story, as it evolved seemed to match up with the whole Connecticut location I loved. I've always found that "place" is one of the strong characters in any story. That probably comes from my acting training with Uta Hagen.

I started imagining –or something started to imagine for me--two women in this house and I started listening to them and following them, and what they were saying, why they didn’t have successful love lives. And then these two women began to split off in different directions, and these two best friends began to be complete characters. And as total opposites, I could use them to dramatize two sides of the same question.

On a deeper level I think the impulse to write it came from a need to express something about women - about how they empathize (or don't) with men and what that may cost them.

How do you write? Did you map this story out or did it organically evolve?

It was more organic. As in song writing, I go until the structure reveals itself. I don’t try to impose it too soon. I always allow that this may only ever be a fragment and then at some point, something clicks in and I know I'll finish it and have an understanding of how.

Did any of the women that sparked the idea read the script? What’d they think?

Well, the characters are not really them. I used the voice, the sensibility, but not the circumstances.

How long did it take to write Tiger Lily Road?
It was about a year and a half from first draft to shooting script. In that time, many people read it and gave notes—some of them quite scathing! I also did four different table readings with full casts of talented actors.

What’s fascinating to me is that you are making people out in the world part of the process by posting snippets from the film and asking for reactions. What’s the response been like?

It’s been fantastic. I have to be careful what I show online. I don’t want to give things away, but it does help to build a fan base.I'll be putting up a highlights reel in the next couple weeks. You'll be able to see it by going to: www.bennettparkfilms.com or by liking us on Facebook at tigerlilyroadmovie.

What’s obsessing you now?

Distribution. Finding the audience. Realistically, you have to seek the distributors. But now that there is this entire social media thing, it’s a little easier to create a presence before the film is ever released. But it's a lot of work. Eventually, the film will have its own website. But now, at this mid stage of post production, I make a lot of lists - of theaters, distributors, possible supporters.

Question you didn't ask: Who's in the movie?

An amazing cast, including: two time Emmy winner, Tom Pelphrey (a rising star if there ever was one), talented stage actresses, Ilvi Dulack and Karen Chamberlain. I wanted to use theatre trained actors for their ability to conceptualize complex characters. And New York theatre legend, Rita Gardner who starred in the original production of The Fantastiks with the late great, Jerry Orbach. Rita is in danger of stealing the entire movie.

Julie Klam talks about Love at First Bark

2011-11-07T07:25:00.000-08:00

Ok, you might love Julie Klam because she's so hilarious and generous, but the icing on the cake is that Julie is the guardian angel of dogs everywhere, and she's made it her mission to show us all how fostering and loving dogs can really make us better people. Plus, she knows Timothy Hutton...need I say more? Anyway, I'm deliriously happy to have Julie back on my blog. Thank you, Julie!

I love the whole idea that dog rescue is a two-way street, in that it impacts both the dogs and the people doing the rescuing. How does that work? (And does it ever backfire?)

I think if you rescue animals, you're rewarded, you can't help it. Specifically in this book I was thinking about when times are hard and you feel you don't have control over things and you can do this one small gesture which actually isn't small at all, and make all the difference in the world. It's empowering and validating and it doesn't cost you anything.

I need to ask (because I am insanely jealous) about that hilarious book trailer you did with Timothy Hutton.

Okay, truthfully, Tim and I are secretly in love. In fact it's such a secret that he doesn't even know it. Honestly we had a mutual admiration society going, mutual in that I loved him and he was drunk when he said he'd be in my book trailer.

I always thought that people loved their dogs simply because they got unconditional love, but your book shows that it is really so much more than that. Dogs teach us to cherish each moment, to never give up, to be loyal, and more. Is there anything else I'm missing?

You forgot how to cook french food. Oh, no that was Julia Childs.

How can regular people get involved?

Regular people as opposed to insane losers like me? When you contact a rescue group, you can be as involved as much or as little as you want. You can do very small, simple things like making phone calls, doing home visits to prospective adoptive families, reference checks, fundraising. You don't have to foster dogs, though doing it is insanely wonderful.

How did all your rescue work change you personally?

I think like any volunteer work it makes you conscious of how much there is to do in the world and how few people there are to do it.

Can you talk about your NPR radio show Hash Hags?

Ann Leary used to do a show on NPR that was just her and one day she asked Laura and I if we would do it with her. It's ridiculously fun, we get great guests and having been on the other end of those author interviews where the person asks you the standard questions, we try and make it a little different. And once a week I get to talk to Ann and Laura, what could be better than that?

And the questions I always ask, What's obsessing you now?

I just got back from my book tour and I bought something before I left that has to be returned within 14 days and today is the 14th day so until it's out of my hands I'm going to be obsessed.

What question didn't I ask that I should have?

Everyone else has asked me if my husband is some kind of saint or something for allowing me to wreak the havoc in the house with all the dog rescue that I do. I'm glad you didn't ask me that

Ayelet Waldman and Robin Levi talk about women in and out of prison and their astonishing book Inside This Place, Not Of it: Narratives From Women's Prisons

2011-11-06T09:21:00.000-08:00

Ayelet Waldman and Robin Levi have created a book that is nothing short of extraordinary: Inside This Place, Not Of It, is a collection of narratives from women who are inside prison, or who recently got out. It's powerful, important and it does what the best books do--it changed you. I'm so honored to have both Ayelet and Robin here to talk about this powerful book.

Where did the idea for this book come about? What made you decide to make this a narrative project (which, by the way, is a brilliant idea) and how did you get access to these women?

Ayelet: The oral history Voice of Witness series founded by Dave Eggers and Lola Vollen is remarkable. Each book illuminates a different human rights crises around the world. They've done books on exonerated death row prisoners, on undocumented workers, on Burma, on Sudan. I found the series so exciting, illuminating, tragic that I knew right away that I wanted to do a book on women in prison. Robin and I have known each other ever since she came as a guest lecturer to a class I taught at the law school at the University of California at Berkeley on the drug war to talk about the effect of the drug war on women, and I immediately knew that this book could not happen without her.

Robin: I was thrilled when Ayelet approached me about doing this book. Despite the fact that the population in women's prisons is skyrocketing, there is very little discussion of who is going there and why and even less about the abuses they face when in prison. For me and my organization, this seemed like a once in a lifetime opportunity to highlight the experiences of these women (and men) in their voices. And we were particularly pleased to do it through the oral narrative that allowed us to look at their whole lives, not just the abuse and to have it in their voices. So often, those of us in the social justice world only get to talk about the abuse, not all the abuses leading up to it or the strength that allows people to survive the abuse. If they do, as we well know, some don't survive.

How did the prison officials and the guards feel about this book?

Ayelet: Basically, we had to do our interviews under the radar for the most part. Robin? You tell Caroline how we snuck in places, how we got in in CA, etc.

Robin: While putting this book together, Ayelet and I learned in great detail the wide array of obstacles that the prison system puts in place to prevent the voices of people in prison from being heard. It is extremely difficult to get inside prisons, unless you are an attorney, and we were getting information on matters of a legal nature and even then it can be difficult. Once in the prisons there are many restrictions on recording equipment, some states on allow some antediluvian technologies, which involve surfing Ebay to procure, others allow nothing, meaning that the interviewer is trying to interview a person about the harrowing details of her life, while madly scribbling to take it all down verbatim. It is not surprising that the one state where we tried to do that, we were unable to use that narrative. And then in very few states you can actually use a digital recorder. And other methods of communication are even more difficult, even if doing this type interview via phone wasn't already ridiculous, the 10 -minute time restrictions on calls combined with the exorbitant rates made it impossible. Even writing was difficult. In Colorado we sent lined paper and a self-addressed stamped envelope to one woman as a courtesy so she could write us back. The paper and envelope were confiscated and she was told that if we did that again, the letter would be thrown away. This is why Ayelet and I stepped back from our original choice to only interview people inside prison and decided to include recently released women.

How were the narratives recorded? Did you need to build trust or would women eager to tell their stories? It must have been incredible healing for these women to tell their stories, but more importantly to actually be heard. I'm reminded of one of the lines, "What saved me was that someone cared."

Ayelet: Again, Robin can talk so eloquently about this...but I"ll say one thing. We were blessed with the assistance of one of the narrators, who is also a member of the board of directors of Justice Now. Teresa helped us train our interviewers, and without her we never would have understood how much we were asking of these women, how traumatizing it can be to open your heart so completely, to revisit trauma, and then to return to the grim reality of prison. To say she made us sensitive to their pain is to belittle how much we learned from her. Teresa is such a brave woman, and such an inspiration.

Robin: Sadly, I will not be eloquent, but I will do my best. Well, as I said the narratives were recorded in the only way the prisons would allow us to. For the narratives that were done outside the prison, we used a digital device which obviously made things easier for both the interviewer and interviewee. But that said, building trust was vital and we had a lot of help to make that happen. First, my organization, Justice Now, has a long history working in the CA prison system so we had a lot of good will built up there. Second, our first narrator, Theresa Martinez, which is her real name, really stepped up to do an amazing job of letting us know what is was like and telling us ways that we could support the narrators both during and after the interviews. She then trained the crew of people interviewing folks and created an advice sheet to use for doing interviews particularly in prison, where there is no formal support system to go to after reliving all of this trauma. That sheet is now being used at the Yale Human Rights Clinic in their work unrelated to the book. When we were reaching out to other states, the good reputation of Justice Now helped us to access other narrators and in some cases other attorneys or advocates vouched for the fact that we would be respectful during the process and would use the information with respect. But the thing that was really amazing was that so many were willing to put themselves through this process, to relive these abuses, because they wanted to make a difference. They were so emotionally giving. So many more women wanted to participate that we couldn't access either because they were inaccessible or involved in litigation so their attorneys would not let them participate. And I do think, especially with Theresa's work that they found it healing. Several of our narrators are really looking forward to doing advocacy on this book. Olivia Hamilton is going to work on anti-shackling initiatives in Georgia, Sheri Dwight is working with anti-domestic violence organizations in LA. They gain strength from telling their story and having it heard. But that does not mean that it is now easy. After the book was released, Theresa spoke publicly for the first time as herself and she broke down in tears, which she almost never does when doing public speaking, but we talked later and we felt it was part of, "Okay this is really it. Its out there." Sheri said, "Did I really say all that? Well I did and it’s true, so print it." It’s healing and scary. They are my heroes.

It's fascinating to me that women who got out, wanted to help the ones who were still in.

Ayelet: That's the most amazing thing to me, too. We're so used to thinking of prison as this dangerous place full of dangerous people. But in women's prisons, at least, the danger doesn't come from the women. It comes from the guards, the wardens, the medical "professionals." The women by and large don't harm one another. They support one another. They lean on each other. Their sense of community is utterly inspiring.

Robin: That really struck me too. All the women who were out wanted to do something to help people still inside and or people who were recently released. In fact, many of the people who are still inside are working hard to support people inside the prison. This speaks to this enormous sense of community inside prison. It is amazing. It also speaks to the fact that these narrators are by and large the strong ones. They have survived and come out the other side. They are strong enough to share their experiences in the hopes of positive change. They are the leaders. Sadly, as I said before, not everyone survives.

One woman says that "I learned who I am because I was stripped of everything," which is very, very powerful. And what I got from these narratives is that hope does not die.

Ayelet: Isn't that amazing? In this country we have tried so hard to destroy the hope of people in prison -- we strip away their basic dignity, we treat them so cruelly -- and yet they manage despite our best efforts to maintain optimism. How is that even possible?

Robin: Hope doesn’t really die. They create this amazing supportive community, they make pecan pie and even thanksgiving feasts with these macgyver-like ovens. They help each other overcome these abuses and drug addictions. Humans, along with an amazing capacity for evil, also have an amazing capacity to for love and through that to survive. At least that's my opinion.

Writing a book always changes a writer--and I can't imagine that putting together this book did not change you in some significant ways, because I know that reading it certainly changed me. Can you discuss this?

Ayelet: It's sounds so lame to say that I try to appreciate my blessings .... but it's true. Whenever I think of Teresa, for example, I am reminded that here is a woman who despite everything is so generous, so sweet. How dare I ever complain?

Robin: It’s true, doing this work I always been aware of how lucky I am. But this book has re-emphasized it, in such a human way. As a person doing this work on a day to day basis, it has made me view the statistics I spout differently. I also said that more than 2/3 of people inside women's prisons had experienced sexual or domestic abuse, but now when I say it I can think of the different, awful ways that they were abused. In many it makes it harder to be that rational spouter of facts, but so much more important.

These narratives are harrowing, upsetting, unfathomable. What can average people do to help these women?

Ayelet: We have a section in the back of the book that tells you where to go, what to do. Mostly, it's a matter of letting those in power know that we as a society will not tolerate this any longer. We won't accept a prison industrial complex that harms so many people, and makes us less safe, rather than more.

Robin: I do think the first thing is to go to our what you can do section and see if there is a particular issue that you want to pursue, send a letter about, volunteer or support work on. We give resources and suggestions for challenging the high number of women in prison, shackling during labor, high cost of telephone costs, family separation, child sexual abuse, etc. But also, as Ayelet says, we really need to take these women to heart and through our everyday activities, our voting, our volunteer work make sure that decision makers know that we must change our criminal justice system. That we need to put money into communities and rather than prisons, because while working on this book it struck me that as a society we break these women and then as a response we throw them away into prison. We must make sure that our narrators great gift of telling their lives is not in vain.

I'd like to ask Robin about Justice Now, which is trying to build a movement to challenge violence and imprisonment. Can you elaborate on this please? What kinds of things are being done and what is the most effective?

Robin: Justice Now has been trying to build a movement to challenge violence and imprisonment for more than a decade. As you can imagine it has been slow going. We do this through partnering with people inside women's prisons on advocacy and through leadership development. We have three main divisions: direct service, human rights and campaign. Direct service works to help people in the here and now, especially those with child custody issues and serious medical issues. They also work to put together advocacy/information sheets for people inside. Through this program we have been able to help people who have less than 6 months to live or are permanently incapacitated get released from prison, under the California compassionate release law. The human rights program conducts research to inform decision-makers and the public what is really going on inside prison. The Human Rights Division produced "Inside this Place," and other reports/ law review articles on safe motherhood and destruction of reproductive justice inside prison. The campaign division works to support initiatives to reduce the number of people in prison and to oppose that increase funding for prisons. This division expanded the compassionate release to include permanently incapacitated people.

All of our work is done in partnership with the people inside the prison and with our substantial intern contingent, and this is our leadership development because we train future leaders. In many ways, I feel that the leadership development aspect is our most successful part of our work. Many of our former interns have gone on to become activists and as for the people in prison, they also have become advocates and have gained strength from the experience. Theresa, Victoria Sanchez and Charlie Morningstar are active with our organization.

Are you in touch with any of these women now?

Robin: Absolutely. I think we are in touch with most of the narrators. A few have disappeared back into their demons, but most have not. Many email me and they are all very, very excited and pleased about the book and hoping to be part of advocacy. We are drafting op-eds with four of the narrators, one of whom will be working on anti-shackling legislation in Georgia and one of them will be joining in May at a conference at UC-Irvine. In a month or so, I will send them a letter updating them on what is happening with the book. I am hopeful that this will be the start of a long term relationship.

Director/writer Drake Doremus talks about love, life and LIke Crazy

2011-11-01T12:08:00.000-07:00

Ah, love. Rapturous. Tortured. Insane. To die for. Like Crazy hits all those beats and more and critics and audiences are falling head-over-heels hard for it (the film swept Sundance)--and with good reason. I'm thrilled beyond words to have this interview from Drake Doremus, the film's uber-talented director/writer (he co-wrote the film with Ben York Jones.)

Drake, I can't thank you--and Paramount Pictures--enough. I'm wrapping up the planet Saturn for both of you, as my thanks.

The best films, to my way of thinking, are the most personal. What drew you to the subject of long distant love and what were you expecting to discover as you made the film?

Just about every rave review I've read has mentioned the blazing honesty of the film, and how you depict young love in a way we've never seen before, which, of course, is what every artist wants to do--to create something. Since almost all of the novelists I know always think they are failing right up until they get on the bestseller list or win prizes, I wanted to put the same question to you. Do you have doubts as you are working? And if so, how do you handle them?

As far as trying to depict something never seen before, I certainly try as hard as I can every day to focus on being honest to myself first and foremost, whether it be on set or in the edit room. I'm always trying to make sure how I feel is being honestly portrayed. I hate the idea of trying too hard. Mots of the time when I do that, it comes across as false. I try to let the moments speak to me and I try to stay centered on what I want to say.

Yes, I have doubts. I have them every day. I think it's important to continue to have them, otherwise I could get comfortable and complacent. I always want to ask myself, "What the hell am I doing?" At least twice a day. Making movies is a roller coaster and the thing I learned most from going from one project to the next is that I know what to expect and just how hard each day is going to be. It's the ultimate grind. But it's worth it. Beyond worth it.

I read that most of the film was unscripted. What was that experience like? Did anything about that surprise you--or the talented cast of actors?

Yes, every day is a surprise. Most people think that because a film is improvised that anything can happen. That is very false. Ben and I spend so much time delicately designing every plot point, and emotional objective for the characters so that things are always on track. The improvisation just allows the performances to be fresh and requires the actors to listen to each other. The actors surprised me every day with how boundless they were.

What's obsessing you now--and why? (And this doesn't have to be a "what film are you doing next" kind of question.)

Love. Always love. The idea of what real love is, what it means, having it, feeling it, losing it, maintaining it, growing it. These are constant themes in my head, so the movies really do reflect that.

What question didn't I ask that I should have?

Ha ha--How about what do you think is most important to you about your work? The answer is that each film is a chapter in the book of growth.

Suzanne Morrison Talks About Yoga Bitch: One Woman's Quest to Conquer Skepticism, Cynicism, and Cigarettes on the Path to Enlightenment

2011-10-29T08:59:00.000-07:00

Come on, how could you not love a book that's called Yoga Bitch? Suzanne Morrison's tale of enlightenment is a fresh, hilarious look at how we try to reshape our lives. I'm deliriously happy to have her on my blog (especially considering my own Yoga trauma.) Thank you, Suzanne!

Your book is so, so funny! I just loved it, especially after my own yoga trauma. (I got yelled at after refusing to do a freaking handstand in the very first day of beginner's class. "You look like you need challenge!" the teacher told me. )

First off, that is an example of the absolute worst kind of yoga teacher, the one who makes you try something you aren't ready for and then guilts you into it. That's not yoga, that's asshole acrobatics.

(Asshole acrobatics: Oh, the images that come to mind!)

When I got to the part where all the yoga people, except for you, are drinking their pee, I was laughing so hard that I nearly peed. But I still wonder, why didn't you leave then? I know you said it was penance, but don't you think reward acts just as well?

Ha! Well, I considered leaving. But the thing is, I’m prone to inertia. Once I’m in a place, it’s very hard for me to pick up and leave. I’m not one to change horses in midstream. (Midstream! Insert pee joke here!) Also, I was fascinated. I mean, the world is full of so many different kinds of people. So many crazy motherfuckers. I’ve always been attracted to people who are completely different from me, and this was an opportunity to be embedded in this weird, foreign world. If we were talking about pissdrinking on day one, I couldn’t help but wonder what we’d discuss on day twenty, you know?

So, people always tell me that someone rushing around all the time and agitated (like me) would really benefit from slowing down with yoga. But it didn't work for me at all. You seem sort of similar to me--do you think that statement is Kool-ade or does it have some merit?

Well, I think it all depends on the kind of yoga you were to try. If a person told you Christianity would help, that could mean being a Catholic, a Baptist, a Calvinist, a Unitarian, one of those crazy Westboro Jerkfaces . . . same with yoga. There are a kajillion types of yoga out there, and I think if someone wants to do yoga, they’ll find their type. But, well, you have to want to try it. Seems like you might be drawn more to a yoga teacher who’s wicked and smart and funny, maybe one who comes from a more intellectual yoga tradition as opposed to one of the more airy-fairy types or the drill-sergeant Iyengar type.

Folks who are more agitated and rushing around all the time, like us, can go in a few directions: some of us prefer slower, more restorative yoga (where you basically lie around on the floor pretending to be dead for ninety minutes) because it chills us out (I’m in this camp, usually) or we need something to burn us out a little, like a flow class, where you sweat and move a ton, and by the end you’re exhausted. Some of us need to exhaust ourselves first before we can relax. If I’m mad at someone, that type of yoga is very good for me.

BUT! That said! There are countless yoga proselytizers out there, trying to convert the masses. They can’t help it—yoga has changed their lives and they want to share the wealth. It doesn’t mean they’re right about it working for you, too.

For me, if I sense that a teacher is really happy with herself, really satisfied with her spirituality and her flexibility and her vegetarianism or whatever; if she really knows she has a lot to teach us, because she’s figured out so much? I run like hell from that teacher. I’m a lot more attracted to the Woody Allens of yoga, the neurotic, searching, questioning yogis who suspect it’s all a house of cards. Those are the teachers whose classes I return to again and again. Who knows, maybe you would too?

Then again, maybe you should just stay home and watch some TV. I love TV. Add some chocolate or bacon to the experience and you just might reach enlightenment.

I know that yoga is about limitlessness, but your wise, funny and acerbic account makes it seem limiting and even cultish. (I know, I am showing my bias). why do you think it isn't as accepting of the unique? You, frankly, were the one person in the group, that I would have wanted to talk to!

Aw, thanks Caroline! You would have liked Baerbel, too—she was smart and funny and very grounded. Whenever I felt myself becoming too ethereal, I would run to her house for a good, sarcastic conversation.

As for accepting the unique, I think yoga studios attract certain types, for sure. One studio will be bursting at the seams with yoga bitches in overpriced workout clothes. Another will be full of smiley, happy people who’ve cooked their brains in overheated rooms and become very compassionate as a result. You’ve got your classes full of people who admit they have no idea what they’re doing in yoga, that they don’t know why they even came to class, that they know they’ll never touch their toes, but jeez, here they are, so they’re going to try, however sheepishly. (I love those people.) You have the smelly throwbacks to the sixties and you have the power yogis who look like bodybuilders.

But there’s that one type of yogi that seems so ubiquitous from the outside, the judgey, yogier-than-thou, perfect yogi, at once an acrobat and a self-appointed guru. This type has figured it out. She gets it. Anyone who thinks differently than she does simply does not get it. She is to be avoided at all cost. She strongly believes that your uniqueness would be vastly improved if it were remodeled in her image. Run.

Part of why you went on this retreat was because you were afraid of death. What about now? (and why or why not?) You were also trying God on for size. How is the fit? It it different now than it was when you were in Bali?

Oh, I’m still afraid of death. I don’t have any equanimity about death whatsoever. I’m completely against it. I don’t know how one “gets over” death, or why I ever imagined I could do that. I mean—it’s death. You’re over. Done. It’s appalling, a major design flaw. But what’s nice about yoga and meditation is that they both really do help me to be more in the moment, so I’m thinking less about all my various psychic cancers and the probability of my dying of lupus or some rare type of encephalitis.

Writing does that, too—anything that requires complete concentration is good for eradicating, or at any rate postponing, fear. (There’s a reason artistic types tend to have an affinity for yoga and meditation—we engage that kind of focus on a daily basis. Concentration isn’t a foreign concept when you write books or music. It’s a requirement.) So I find that in concentration there is some relief from the fear of death, from fear of anything, really—change, illness, aging, loss, financial devastation, nuclear war, boils, taxes, all the things I fear when my mind isn’t occupied. The goal is to be that focused all the time, when chopping carrots, writing, having a conversation, waxing your legs. That’s enlightenment, in a nutshell.

As for God, I’m still looking. I think I’ve come to a place where I can admit that I’m on the hunt, that I’m deeply interested in religion and spirituality, and that might be enough for me. To be sort of a hobbyist at religion. I try to pray, to meditate, and I fail all the time. I think I’m doing it almost as an experiment, like, what will happen if I pray to Mary every night? It’s a challenge, almost. But I don’t know if I can believe in God as defined by any of the world’s religions. That’s why yoga’s a good fit for me, I think. It’s a great way to engage in spiritual inquiry without feeling like I’m getting boxed into something that feels fictional.

Why do you think it took you eight years to see how you had changed? And can you talk about that a bit here?

Well, I can be slow. I think that’s part of it. But mostly it took falling in love, which felt like starting a whole new life, to be able to look backwards and see the path that had led me there. It wasn’t until I had that perspective that I knew what the story was.

That’s why I structured the book the way I did, as a sort of dialogue between perspective and lack thereof. I went on my yoga retreat in Bali thinking that wisdom and self-understanding was something you could schedule, or pick up at the store, like a loaf of bread. (I think the wellness industry encourages this notion, too, and I am very susceptible to it.)

But of course that’s not how it works. I picked up a lot of tools for developing self-understanding while on retreat, but I didn’t come home with everything figured out the way I had hoped I would. I came home more confused than when I’d left! Here I’d thought that I would return to the States as wise and grounded and certain about myself as the yoga teacher, Indra, I admired. I thought she had found everything—God, herself, the love of her life—through yoga. I thought that if I just followed in her footsteps, I would find all of those things, too. Instead I left Bali thinking Indra might be a huge fraud and that I wouldn’t ever be able to truly change my life.

If I hadn’t responded so powerfully to Indra I wouldn’t have felt the need to write this story. But for years, I couldn’t stop wondering why I had believed her to be so perfect and why my disillusionment was so disappointing when she turned out to be—well, a human being.

And so the story is partly about how those tools I picked up on retreat became useful to me as I learned how to use them over time. There was one moment, many years after the retreat, after I had finally ripped my life apart and sewn it back together, when I felt like I finally understood what had happened with Indra. When, for the briefest of moments, I had insight into my life and compassion for the woman I had idolized. That was when I knew I had a story, because I knew where it ended.

Do you think any sort of journey, other than yoga, can take people to where they need to go, if they are willing to self-examine?

Absolutely. For one thing, anything you do can be considered yoga. So you might never chant Om or do a downward dog or read a sutra, but if you’re living an examined life as a garbage collector, you’re doing yoga. If you engage your life honestly, you’re doing yoga. The idea is that you’re trying to acknowledge what’s real. What’s real might be that you’re an asshole, and if you recognize it, and say, “I am an asshole,” then you are doing yoga. If you are an asshole, and you tell yourself “I am not that bad. I’m not a real asshole, compared to that guy. Compared to that guy, that Hitler guy, I’m a real peach,” then you are not doing yoga. You are warping reality instead of allowing it to be what it is. Embrace the asshole. It’s what’s real.

Self-inquiry is everything. Honestly looking at yourself will take you all kinds of fascinating, harrowing, hilarious places. You don’t need to do yoga to go on that journey. You just need to pay attention, and invite your whole self to the table, not just the nice parts.

What's obsessing you now?

My new memoir is about my first big relationship, and how it changed me. I’m very interested in the struggle in my late teens/early twenties between my desire for independence and my need for connection. I thought I had figured the whole world out before I fell in love for the first time. But suddenly I found myself in a whole new world, one I didn’t understand at all. And most of all, I didn’t understand myself in it. I didn’t know myself anymore, with a man. I’m fascinated by that sort of alienation we can experience from ourselves.

I’ve also been doing a lot of research in the past couple of years on serial killers—my new show has to do with Ted Bundy, who was a friend of my parents’.

What question didn't I ask that I should have?

Which foods would you trade enlightenment for?

Chocolate, crème brulee, salt & vinegar potato chips, bacon, a perfect cup of coffee, Fritos, Doritos, Tostitos, Taquitos, Burritos. Pretty much anything that ends in an –os. A hamburger crammed with dill pickles and ketchup. Any cheese or dairy product except for cottage cheese, which I’ll eat but am not truly passionate about. Skim milk is for people who hate life, so that’s out, too. Crispy buttery chicken skin, with or without the rest of the chicken. Chocolate with almonds, chocolate with hazelnuts, chocolate with caramel, chocolate with mint, chocolate with chocolate, double chocolate, triple chocolate supreme which is something I think I just invented. Hot chocolate—I love hot chocolate. Chocolate covered bacon is very good. I also like wine with a chocolatey bouquet. Also, sausage.

Sonia Taitz talks about In the King's Arms, Love, Loss, and What She Wrote

2011-10-29T08:51:00.000-07:00

I raved about Sonia Taitz's novel in my book column at Shoptopia.com, and I'm absolutely honored to have her here talking about the writing process. I can't thank you enough, Sonia!

LOVE, LOSS -- AND WHAT I WROTE

People tell me I’m making up for lost time. My just-released novel, IN THE KING’S ARMS, was nearly published two decades years ago (the deal fell through). The last book I wrote, MOTHERING HEIGHTS, came out in the 90’s. Where have I been, and what have I done, and how can I catch up now?

The thing is, I’ve really been here all along. My body, mind and heart have all been avidly involved in the raising of three kids. When MOTHERING HEIGHTS came out, I was still able to juggle two children and my writing. But being on television in makeup and heels to promote my book never felt as right as wiping off the paint, kicking the high-heels back to the closet, and getting down on the floor to cuddle or play. By the time the paperback edition of MOTHERING HEIGHTS came out, I had three lively children – Emma, Gabriel, and Phoebe – all under the age of five. My housekeeper quit in dismay (to be fair, the place looked like the lovechild of Disneyland and Hoarders). Then my father fell ill with terminal cancer and a year later, my mother did, too. It felt like the easiest and most right thing in the world to put on my sweats and grab some facecloths and be useful in the most anonymous and thankless way. The thanks, actually, was there, but was unspoken; it was the love between all of us. As I said in MOTHERING HEIGHTS, “what children take from us, they give…. We become people who feel more deeply, question more deeply, hurt more deeply, and love more deeply.” The same is true when we take care of our aging parents.

I popped my head out in the 00’s. Both my father and mother, by then, had passed away, and I had been there with them, invigilating even their deathbeds. I knew they were at peace. My children were growing up happy, good and strong. Eventually, I started writing again, first a play, and then a draft of a new novel, and then – when my parents had been gone for many years -- a memoir about growing up as the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Perhaps taking care of the helpless or wounded had begun with this unique childhood. As an immigrant’s daughter, being there for my parents -- who had survived death camps and refugee camps, and who came to America without money or language – had always felt right to me. As I began writing again, I also dusted off my long-dormant law degree, working with foster children and with victims of rape and domestic violence. Gradually, slowly, I emerged back into the world of makeup and heels. Well, lip gloss and two-inch heels. But I emerged.

IN THE KING’S ARMS (the story of the daughter of survivors and her romance with the son of anti-Semites) is now published. Another novel is being buffed and polished, and my memoir will be out next year. I’m also planning to bring MOTHERING HEIGHTS out as an ebook. So I’m guess I’m back. But I never left. I just went somewhere beautiful, worthy and rich – and am a better writer for it.

Mike Levy talks about Kosher Chinese: Living, Teaching, and Eating With China's Other Billion

2011-10-29T08:47:00.000-07:00

I first met Mike at the Brattleboro Book Festival, and sat enthralled through his reading (and also had a blast talking to him at the Authors' Reception.) I quickly discovered that not only is he one of the funniest people on the planet, but his stories are so engaging, all you want to do is just sit and listen to him talk--or keep reading his phenomenal book! Of course, I badgered Mike into coming onto my blog and I'm thrilled to host him here. Thanks, Mike!

How did writing the book come about and what was the whole process like? Did you start writing it after you were home or while you were in China?

I once read that Maya Angelou does all of her writing on legal pads with a felt tipped pen, and does it with military regimentation: 5-11am, every day, in the same room, with the same things sitting next to her (a thesaurus, a Bible, and a bottle of wine, or something like that).

My process was the opposite. No regimentation, or even intention! I was blogging while in China, and a friend sent the blog to his literary agent. The agent—Will Lippincott, a real champion for young writers— liked what he was reading and contacted me on Skype. It was all very 21st century. We chatted on and off while I was in China, but I never really thought of trying to create the seamless narrative necessary for a memoir. But when I got home and met with Will, he convinced me a memoir was not only possible, but the best way to tell my story. And so we started the year long process of transforming hundreds of blogs into a book pitch.

What was it like to build a community in such a foreign environment--and what was it like when you came back home to culture shock?

I was surprised to find how easy it was to build community, even half a world away, among people with a wildly different background from my own—these were farmers earning a few dollars a day, and I grew up in a typical American suburb.

I learned that people everywhere respond to authenticity, and people everywhere like to be heard. So I tried to be myself, and I tried to ask questions. This led to a lot of mahjong, a lot of late nights drinking beer with new friends, and a lot of basketball. Life in Guiyang was physically difficult, and at times I was spiritually isolated (I was the only Jew within a thousand miles, after all). . . but it was emotionally rich. I quickly found friends and community.

Coming home was easier than I thought it would be. One thing I remember vividly was lying in the grass in Northampton, Massachusetts, and literally burying my face in the soil. That sounds ridiculous. . . but China’s environment is so wildly devastated, and the county is so overcrowded, that I had not seen an open, clean patch of grass in almost three years.

We are lucky to be post-industrial, and I will never again take clean air and water for granted.

You and I have had a conversation about why going to an extremely foreign environment is so much better an experience than going to, say, Paris or London, where it's much easier to fit in. The rewards are just greater. Do you feel that that way of thinking transcends travel and applies to everything else in life as well, like work and love and etc.?

What a fun question! As you know, I’m a teacher, and the best part about the job is seeing things with fresh eyes—seeing a text from a teenager’s perspective, or looking at a problem again for the first time. I feel like this is such a gift. Traveling to a new place can result in the same feelings (newness, curiosity, rebirth, connection). And when I’m not teaching and not able to travel, I use literature to create a sense of the foreign. I spent last weekend in feudal Japan. . . thanks to David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

I was really interested in how your love for ritual comes across in the book. You keep kosher, go to temple (sometimes), yet you aren't religious. Can you talk a bit about that?

The simplest way for me to describe my habits is that I do what works for me. Yoga helps me relax, so I do it. Traveling helps me stay curious, so I do it. And Jewish ritual helps me feel healthy and happy, so I do it. In other words: my religious habits are done for the same reason as my exercise habits, or intellectual habits. I wrap tfillin in the mornings because, for some reason, it connects me to myself. I keep Kosher because it gives each meal meaning. I don’t do these things because I think God wants me to. I don’t even know what that statement could even mean.

All of this makes me a typical Jew, I think. . . A person wrestling with tradition, text, and the divine. It’s a life long journey.

What's obsessing you now?

Home brewing Chinese rice wine, reading Haruki Murakami, and trying to figure out how to teach 4th graders about Buddhism. Yikes!

What question didn't I ask that I should have?

The question that comes up most frequently as I travel to talk about Kosher Chinese is this: why are the stories in the memoir so different from the stories people see in the mainstream media. The answer is that central China really is a world apart. The billion people living there are rendered invisible by the New York Times and CNN. . . I guess the story of the booming coast on the one side and the spiritual Tibetans on the other overwhelms the story of actual daily life for typical Chinese people. And that’s a shame.

Pictures of You one of BookMarks Best Books of 2011!

2011-10-29T08:31:00.001-07:00

Joy. Joy. Joy. Joy.

Beth Kephart talks about book trailers and You Are My Only

2011-10-24T18:01:00.000-07:00

Nowadays, you sort of have to have a book trailer. It's interesting and fun to think about your novel as a preview at the local movie theater, with people watching while they chomp on popcorn. But it's also really difficult to get the visual right. I did a trailer for Pictures of You, but I hired someone I thought was brilliant to do it for me, and all I knew at the start is that I wanted fog. I wanted it to be moody. I wanted it to feel dark. I'm glad I have a trailer. I really like it, though I keep wanting to change it around, much the way I do with my novels after they are finished. And I take full responsibility for the misspelling I didn't catch!

I invited Beth Kephart here to talk about the process and to show off her trailer. Thanks, thanks, thanks, as always Beth, for being here on my blog (and here in my life.)

I don’t know, truthfully, what a trailer for a book should be. Or if trailers, in general, make a difference. But I wanted to make something (my own hands, my own heart) that would hold the book in a small electronic space—engender a mood, suggest a sound, give voice.

You Are My Only touches on sensitive things—on the real-life heartbreak of kidnap. Cute wouldn’t do for this trailer. Big and noisy would be wrong. Slick, I thought, was a poor choice, too. I just frankly wanted quiet, wanted the book to speak for itself. I also wanted to thank some of the many exquisite people who have read this book ahead of its release and given me the hope I needed to carry it forward.

I take photographs when I’m not writing; I decided to use some of them. I know how to operate iMovie, so I made a “B” roll with that. My husband was in charge of filming me (tripoding the camera, testing the lights, then leaving the room when I spoke so that I could feel alone) and in charge of transitioning our various bits and pieces into Final Cut Express. I sat beside him for four hours on a rainy morning until we got it right.

Well. Right is an overstatement. I am aware of the trailer’s flaws. But the quiet is there. The mood of the day. Me in my office, reading. That’s all it is, but I am glad we made it. It

Pictures of You proud sponsor of brilliant Brad Listi's OTHER PEOPLE author podcast!

2011-10-24T10:48:00.000-07:00

I'm thrilled to announce that PICTURES OF YOU is the sponsor of the latest episode of Brad Listi's new author interview podcast, OTHER PEOPLE, episode 11, Adam Levin. Brad's the brilliant founder and producer of The Nervous Breakdown, and all TNB book club titles are getting podcast sponsorships in the early going as a way to help the cause and the club.

And the show is available for subscription free of charge at iTunes.

How cool is this???

Former Algonquin Publicity Assistant/ Genius Sarah Rose Nordgren talks about her new writing fellowship, Paris, and the writing life

2011-10-22T09:01:00.000-07:00

It's no secret how I worship all the gods and goddesses at my publisher, Algonquin. Sarah Rose Nordgren, as publicity assistant there, booked my flights and my hotel, held my hand when I panicked, and made sure I never had to get up too early or leave too late from anywhere at any time. Sarah just won this amazing writing fellowship, and I wanted a chance to celebrate her so I asked her to come on my blog. Thank you, Sarah, for being on my blog, for being on my side, for being my friend, for everything in the world I can think of.

You've won this extraordinary Fellowship in Provincetown. Tell us about it--and is it strange going from a fulltime job to being a writer full time?

The winter fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center is an artist’s dream. Each year ten visual artists and ten writers are awarded seven full months to devote exclusively to their art. The Center provides living and working space and a small stipend, and the only criteria is that the recipient spends the fellowship months here in Provincetown creating. The Fine Arts Work Center has been around since 1968, and has hosted a parade of amazing writers including Louise Glück, Michael Cunningham, Denis Johnson, Marie Howe, Ann Patchett, and Nick Flynn (the list goes on and on!). The community and support provided by the FAWC is invaluable, and Provincetown itself is a wonderful place to write. At the very tip of Cape Cod, the town is surrounded by ocean, and the fellowship year begins just as the last tourists are straggling out of town. The winters here are windy, dark, moody, and isolated, which makes it perfect for writing as long as you keep your head screwed on tight. As a Returning Fellow (I was also here in ‘08-09), I know what I’m getting into, and this time I brought my fiancé (poet Michael C. Peterson) and furry feline (Yuri) along with me to fend off insanity.

Three weeks into the fellowship, I’m still getting my sea legs, as it were. The transition from working fulltime (and I had an exceptionally busy summer) to being a fulltime writer again does feel very extreme! I’m trying to be patient with myself as I loosen my grip on the clock and relax into a more writerly schedule. It’s impossible for me to just jump in and start producing poems when my brain has been tuned into work and schedules and wedding planning and moving… I have to clear away the mental clutter gradually so my writer-brain can wake up and emerge from the waters.

You were this remarkable publicist at Algonquin and I owed my life to you so many times--how did you manage to write while always been available to other writers?

I liked my job at Algonquin precisely because I had the opportunity to work with other writers. Even though we were usually communicating about practical things like schedules and press materials and tours, I enjoyed feeling like I could contribute to the success of a book, and help writers have a positive publishing experience. The world of publishing for poetry is usually quite different than for fiction because there aren’t big tours, and the books don’t sell in large numbers, but if and when I’m lucky enough to have my manuscript published, I’ll be thrilled if I have anywhere close to the support and care that Algonquin gives it’s authors.

While I do think it’s possible to write and work a day-job (many people are doing it as I write this!), I’m sorry to say that I’ve personally never figured out a satisfying way to balance work and writing. My brain goes into productive/schedules/to-do list mode, and it’s very difficult for me to slip into a more open and spacious mind-frame in the evening or on a Saturday. I wish I could give some advice about this issue. Perhaps someone can give me some good advice!

When --and why--did you first start writing? And why poetry? Do you also write fiction?

Like many writers, I fell in love with words early and hard. I was fortunate to attend an alternative school (Waldorf) from preschool on through middle school, and one of the pedagogical strategies there is to do a lot of memorization and recitation. We learned and recited poems by Blake and Emerson (my 8^th grade class learned the entirety of The Raven by Poe), read stories and poems aloud, studied fairy tales and Bible stories and Norse and Greek mythologies. It was the perfect education for an artist! In elementary school I began writing several novels which I never finished (the first clue that I’m not a fiction writer!). These novels usually revolved around some young girl who had a terminal illness or other major tragedy in her life, and her wild Arabian horse. Then in middle school and high school I started writing poems and never stopped.

Besides one foray into a fiction workshop as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence, I’ve known for awhile that my heart is written in verse. The “stories” I wrote in that one fiction class were more like extended prose poems under the influences of Lydia Davis and Hans Christian Andersen (I’m making them sound way better than they actually were). The big tip off was the conversations in workshop. Students wanted to discuss “what happened” in my stories, and politely requested more character development and dialogue. Plot? Character? I looked at my classmates like they were Philistines. “But what about the mood?” I asked. “And did you notice my syntax?”

Where do you want to be in five years? (Besides in Paris, writing in a cafe!)

Only there and nowhere else! (Add husband and lovely future children to the scene: Michael and I can alternate days so one can write while the other cavorts in the park with our dear son, Marcel, and daughter, Joyce. We can meet for lunch in the café, where Michael and I will drink café au lait and the children will have steamed milk and sandwiches.)

What's obsessing you now?

I’m reading The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin and India by Patrick French, and thinking a lot about pre-history. Today I also started reading The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale (a college friend whom I recently became reacquainted with), which seems like it could be a nice compliment to the other books. I don’t know where these lines of thinking will take me, but probably somewhere!

What question didn't I ask that I should have asked?

“Where can people read your poetry?” Well, online you can read it here and here. Also look out for my work in the Best New Poets 2011 anthology which pubs in November, and in upcoming issues of The Iowa Review and Pleiades.

Anna Solomon talks about The Little Bride, when writing feels like a lie, and the joys of research

2011-10-22T08:50:00.000-07:00

Let's begin with this: I love this novel. Anna Solomon's The Little Bride, about a young Jewish woman who comes to the West as a mail order bride, is always haunting, sometimes horrific, and totally sublime. I raved about this novel for my column at Shoptopia.com, and I wanted to talk more with Anna about her book. Thank you, Anna!

How did the idea for the novel spark?

You had to ask that, didn't you? It's a bit embarrassing, actually. I was Googling myself - yes, indeed, in the good old days before 'Google Alerts' - and among other Anna Solomons, I came across one, Anna Solomon Freudenthal, who was on this website called "Stories Untold: Jewish Women Pioneers." I was fascinated. I had no idea that Jewish pioneers even existed! It seemed like a wonderful, exaggerated version of my own experience growing up Jewish in New England. I poked around, and saw that one of the women on this site, a Rachel Bella Calof, had been a mail-order bride to North Dakota. Now I was more than fascinated, I was hooked. I read Calof's memoir (an amazing account her children discovered and had translated from the Yiddish) and when I was reading her description of the "Look" she'd been given - this was the examination she had to undergo to see if she was fit to be a bride - when I read her line, "They inspected me like a horse," I was stunned. It's one of those lines that says everything and nothing. A perfect entry point for a fiction writer. So that's where I began.

What was the research like? Did anything surprise you?

My research process was intensive, thorough, and also random. I didn't research for a year and then start writing, I started writing immediately and researched as I went. I never really set out to write a historical novel. I felt like I was writing a novel that happened to be set during a different time. (I felt this way until I sold the book and was informed that what I'd written fell firmly into the category of 'historical novels.') So I really used the history to inspire the story, but I didn't want to be inhibited by it. Most of the book turned out to be true to history - or true enough - but I knew that for me the story's truth had to come first.

One thing that surprised me was that other fiction often turned out to be the richest source of information for me, especially when it came to bringing particular places to life. Odessa, for instance, I couldn't have written without Isaac Babel's 'Odessa Stories.' And Willa Cather's 'My Antonia' was critical to my own experience of - and expression of - the Great Plains.

What I loved (and I don't want to give it away) was the ending of the novel, which was that glorious combination of exactly right and yet totally surprising. At Because I am always so interested i process, can you tell me when you knew the ending? Did you always know it or did it startle you?

I'm so glad you loved it! I love the ending, too, in part because it did surprise me. Not the general trajectory - I had a sense of where Minna (my protagonist) would end up pretty early on in the writing process - but how it occurs, how she gets herself to that ending. A lot of my writing it like that: I know where I want to go, but have no idea how to get there. For me, this ending is an opening out. Most of the book is very intimate, it's very close to Minna's point-of-view and you don't see a whole lot of what's going on in the wider world - because she doesn't, she is very focused on what's right in front of her, she is also pretty self-absorbed, I think that's fair to say. At the end, though, she changes, and so the book changes: suddenly the world (the public world of the 1880s - the events and trends and architect of the time) comes spinning into view. I found that exhilarating, and unexpected, but it was also just right, for Minna and the book. To me, it's a very hopeful ending.

What's your writing life like?

Usually, very regular. I thrive on routine, and discipline. (Sexy, right?) I write in the mornings. I used to write within 15 minutes of waking but now that I have a small child I can no longer do that. I have to come at my work after being awake for two hours and sending her off to school. I've adjusted, though. I write for 3 hours, on average, then try to take a break, a shower or a run, maybe one more idea ekes out of my unconscious, and then I open myself up to the world. Turn on the wi-fi, deal with emails, write copy for a PR firm, etc. But it's so important to me not to do any of that before I get the writing done. Sometimes I don't write very much, or what I write is bad, but I sit there anyway. It's a kind of faith, I guess.

Right now, though, everything I just wrote feels like a lie because I have been working really hard to promote this book and traveling a lot and writing essays and answering wonderful q&a's like this one and so I have absolutely no routine. I find it very disorienting. I mean, it's a lot of fun and I love giving readings and I am so thrilled and gratified to hear from people who are actually reading and discussing and debating my book! It all feels totally worthwhile and wonderful. But I do miss my good ol' daily routine. My goal is to be back to it by January 1.

What's obsessing you now?

A personal essay I'm writing, for a magazine I won't name for fear of jinxing myself. It's a family story - about suicide, and memory, and living in the present. Small topics, right? It's kicking my butt. But it feels great to be struggling in that way, even if I'm not able to struggle with it every day right now.

What question should I have asked that I didn't?

Oh let's see. How about my short stories? It's funny, because I've been publishing short stories for years and this novel thing is so new so I still identify myself more as a short story writer and I have this weird feeling about the fact that more people are reading my novel than have ever read my stories. I'm so happy they're reading it but I want to knock on their doors and say, hey, you know what? It's not really my first book. My first book - in my mind - is made up of short stories. I love short stories. They are such a demanding form, and they've been so important to my development as a writer. I plan to keep writing them, even as I write my next novel. And yes, there is a next novel. It's set in Gloucester, MA - my hometown - during Prohibition.

Pictures of You on Bookmark Magazine's Best of 2011 List

2011-10-21T09:59:00.000-07:00

I am thrilled, honored, and totally jazzed to announce that PICTURES OF YOU made Bookmark Magazines Best Books of 2011 list.

Thank you to everyone who read my book or supported it in any way.
I want to buy you the planet Saturn.

Jessica McCann talks about writing a jigsaw novel

2011-10-21T09:49:00.000-07:00

Jessica McCann is the author of the award-winning novel, All Different Kinds of Free. Inspired by a true story, the novel follows Margaret Morgan, kidnapped in 1837 along with her free children and sold into slavery. And on a personal note, Jessica is one of the coolest, warmest writers on the planet. I'm thrilled to have her here on my blog. And you can follow her on twitter and facebook at Twitter: @JMcCannWriter

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/AllDifferentKindsOfFree .

Thank you, Jessica.

Writing a Jigsaw Novel

by Jessica McCann

As a kid, I used to do a lot of jigsaw puzzles with my mom. She taught me to put together all the edge pieces first, to create the outline, and then fill in the middle. In school, that seemed to be the conventional wisdom from my writing teachers, too. Start with an outline, then fill in the details. For better or for worse, I’ve never been very good at following conventional wisdom.

When doing jigsaws, I would try to work the edges first. I really would. But then, what’s this here? Could it be part of an elbow? Maybe it’s an ear. And what about this piece? It has the same peachy hue, maybe it goes with this one. Ah ha! Little by little, section by scattered section, the big picture would eventually come together. Inevitably, the final piece to snap into place would be some flat-edged rascal that seemed to be lost until the very end.

My writing generally takes shape the same way. Even for the shortest magazine article, I struggle with sticking to an outline. A quote jumps out at me. An anecdote begs to be fleshed out. A statistic yearns to be researched. Then all the pieces get shifted and rearranged again and again, until the big picture finally materializes. The opening paragraphs are usually the last thing I write.

Multiply that by about a hundred, and you have a pretty good idea of how I wrote my first novel -- little by little, scene by scattered scene, until the last plot point finally snapped into place. ALL DIFFERENT KINDS OF FREE was inspired by actual events. It tells the story of Margaret Morgan, a free woman of color in 1830s America whose perfect life was shattered when she was kidnapped and forced into slavery. It took me a good five years to figure out all the plot points, to write and assemble all the scenes and chapters of the book. And the first scene I wrote, the one I thought would be the opening scene, ended up somewhere in the middle.

For a long time, the realization that this is my writing process was daunting as hell. Oh, it's fine for a 1,500-word article that takes a few weeks to complete. But apply it to novel writing, and you're looking at years of writing and revision for every book. Finally, I came to accept that writing a novel (and doing it well) simply takes as long as it takes.

Freelance writer and memoir author Jessica Handler also thinks it's OK write out of order. In fact, she encourages it.

"Just because your story follows a timeline doesn't mean you have to write it linearly," she said in her article "Writing without a Map" (The Writer magazine, May 2011). "If you're inspired to write a scene other than the one that comes next in your manuscript, go for it. You can put the story in the right order later."

You can put the story in the right order later.

Handler’s advice is comforting as I hammer away at my second novel. My outline is sketchy, at best. I have about two dozen scenes and vignettes written, which are random and completely unrelated. But that’s OK. I know now the big picture is there somewhere, waiting to reveal itself. And as I shift and re-arrange all the sections, I know that final flat-edged piece is just waiting to be snapped into place.

Cindy Bokma talks about writing, beauty blogging and Here If You Need Me

2011-10-21T09:41:00.000-07:00

I first met CIndy when she interviewed me for her great blog Cindy Reads. We became friends and Cindy now even has me writing about beauty products for her fantastic beauty blog Hello Dollface (You cannot imagine how much fun this is to try out $70 lipsticks and $200 skin creams!) But Cindy and I also have many, many conversations about writing, novels, scripts, the works, and one of the best times of my life was shopping in Manhattan with her--No one has a sense of style like Cindy, or better celebrity gossip. Her new novel, Here If You Need Me is as sparkling as Cindy herself, and I'm thrilled to be peppering her with questions. Thank you, Cindy!

So tell me about your book. What sparked the idea?

The book is about a working class young woman befriending a down- on- her- luck celebrity with disastrous results. When I wrote the book, I was running my celebrity gossip website. I considered what would happen if a regular person like myself became friends with a celebrity. I don’t think it would be as glamorous as most people imagine. In fact, I could see being sucked into that world of fame and money and losing everything!

What's your writing process like? Are you an outliner or do you just "follow your pen?"

I love to follow a screenplay format. It helps to keep my ideas clear so I know where I’m headed. I use Blake Snyders “beat sheet” from his Save the Cat book. Its brilliant. Once you kind of know what your character is going to do, and is supposed to do, you can be free to fill in the blanks. It works for me...most of the time.　

You run a successful beauty blog, Hello Dollface, another literary blog Cindy Reads, and you're also a screenwriter as well as a novelist. Plus, you're a wife and mother! So how do you juggle everything in your day?

Oh my gosh, Caroline, I’m overwhelmed! I am super busy every single day. There isn’t one day of the week where I’m not on my computer, working on something. I feel like in order to reach the level of success I’m after, I have to put in the hard work! Its been ten years of sitting at the computer every single day whether I feel like it or not.

What's obsessing you now?

Right this second, it’s the pile of laundry in the bedroom and the fact Project Runway is on!

There are a few projects on my mind- one is my 40 Things Before I Turn 40 series, about trying to cram in all the things I want to do before I turn 40. I want to try NaNo and bang out a novel in November. And I have an idea for a television series I’ve been planning in my mind- I have to get that on paper.

What project are you working on next?

NaNo! I have an idea for my book and it will be the first character I write that is a mother and wife in the suburbs, which is exactly what I am.

What question didn't I ask that I should have?

Maybe if I have an agent? Which I do not, but I desperately need!

Danielle Younge-Ullman talks about writing, divorce and dysfunctional families

2011-10-21T09:32:00.000-07:00

Danielle Younge-Ullman's Falling Under is the story of a reclusive young artist whose past begins to catch up with her when she falls in love. Gripping, disturbing and deliciously dark, it's a book that gets under your skin. I'm honored to have Danielle here to write about it. Thank you Danielle!

Agoraphobia, sex, art, gay rights, religious extremism, alcoholism, dysfunctional families…these are some of the things I talked/wrote about when Falling Under first came out.

But I recently realized I’ve never said, in blunt terms, what the book is about.

Kind of a major omission, I know—one I’m going to remedy right now.

Falling Under is about how hard divorce hits kids, and how deep and long-lasting the effects are.

It’s about how much harder divorce hits a kid when the parents stop being parents.

It’s about how those kids go forward with a profoundly changed view of the world, and how, despite everything they count on being ripped from under them, they bravely adapt and survive.

Finally, it’s about how some of the deepest effects of divorce are not seen until the children become adults and tackle adult relationships. This is where their world-view (often “trust nothing”) becomes hard to live with and the survival skills that got them through child/teenage-hood stop working.

I wrote Falling Under to explore these issues and demonstrate the effects. I hope readers come away with a deeper understanding, and a motivation to do better and be better, whatever their circumstances.

Now, I am not anti-divorce, nor am I in favor of blaming one’s parents for everything.

I am in favor of fighting like hell to save a marriage, YES for the sake of their kids, before giving up. Because as much as people want to tell themselves that getting out of an unhappy marriage will benefit their kids, across the board, statistics say otherwise. (Sorry.)

I am in favor of putting the kids first in every subsequent decision, once you decide to divorce. Difficult? Yes. Impossible sometimes, when two parents have different opinions on what “putting the kids first” actually means? Yes. But TRY, and KEEP TRYING. These kids need to be protected and supported, not used/fought over/abandoned, and/or turned into mini-adults. Many parents, I believe, do their best. Many more could do better.

On the flip side, if you are/were the kid and you’re not coping well and maybe living with a continual feeling that the sky is falling, you are not crazy—you’re having a normal psychological reaction. (This applies even if your parents had a “good” divorce.)

Bottom line: you’re going to need to do some work and/or get some help. Look at where you came from for understanding, though, not for blame, or justification for your own mistakes. Fact is, parents are flawed, and sometimes they’re going to fail to give you what you need, probably because they don’t have it to give. Cultivate empathy. Learn to forgive, because when you’re an adult (and parent) you’re going to fail too sometimes. And know that while this experience may have messed you up, if you pull through it, you will be a bigger, stronger, better person with a deep understanding of the human condition and the fierce power and perspective of a survivor.

That’s it. Now you don’t even need to read the book. But if you do, and you want to drop me a line, you can find me on Twitter @DanielleYUllman and at www.danielleyoungeullman.com

The hilarious Greg Olear warns writers what NOT to do when your book comes out

2011-10-17T09:14:00.000-07:00

I've had Greg Olear on my blog before to talk about his fantastic new book Fathermucker. (He's also the author of Totally Killer, which is totally killer, and the senior editor of the fabulous The Nervous Breakdown.) Now I'm thrilled that Greg is giving advice about how to deal with the release of a new book. Oh, and Greg? About the new Book Scan feature on Amazon? Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

The Second Coming

By Greg Olear

With one novel under my belt—it’s called Totally Killer, and there are plenty of good copies still available—I’m now the world’s leading expert on how to approach the release of a new book. Here are five inviolable rules:

1. Thou shalt not obsess over thine Amazon ranking.

Yes, fine, it’s the only real metric we have. And the rest of the publishing world has access to it, so it’s sort of like having to publicly tape-measure your pecker in various stages of post-pool shrinkage—except with Amazon rankings, unlike priapic endowment, large size is not desirable.

But it’s just a number, man, and a fickle one at that; blink and you miss when it breaks 2,500. And it doesn’t take into account all those pre-orders. Or the legions of fine consumers who buy their novels from indie bookstores or the Nook. So don’t let it ruin your whole day when it plummets like lead to the high six digits. And whatever you do…

2. Thou shalt not buy thine own book on Amazon to improve thine Amazon ranking.

Do the math, dude. Just not worth it. But very, very tempting. In fact, I’m completely certain that the nefarious purpose of the Amazon ranking is to shame authors into buying their own books. Speaking of Amazon…

3. Thou shalt ignore thine Amazon reviews.

Although the volume of reviews, good or bad, is probably a better indicator of sales success than the aforementioned Amazon sales ranking—case in point: 151 reviews of a certain New York Times bestseller with a picture of a wingèd camera on its cover—you should read those things at your own peril. People can be mean. Sadistic, even. And in the same way that the über-conservative Republicans are always the ones who vote in every single election, the sadistic one-star-givers are always the ones who cross-post, so…

4. Thou shalt not visit Goodreads.

Seriously. Just stay away from that site. Block it with your parental controls. If being a working writer is like living in a 12-step program, Goodreads is a hideous bender from which you wake up a week later, in some Bangkok slum, with a gang symbol tattoo on your forehead and a bad case of the clap. There should be the Dantean warning on the splash page: abandon hope all ye writers who enter here. Yes, there are a lot of excellent, excellent people on there, and the site has been good to me…but it has also made my heart sink.

5. Thou shalt not visit thine bookstore.

I went a few days before Fathermucker came out and bought a stack of books to last the next few months, because once my novel drops, it fills me with dread to walk into a bookstore. What if they don’t have my book? What if they do, but it’s not prominently placed? Should I swallow my pride and explain to the friendly bookseller that they should carry it? No, no, better to stay home and try one more time to get through Swann’s Way.

Those are the rules. Break them at your peril. Now if you excuse me, Amazon has this new Book Scan feature I have to investigate…

Alma Katsu talks about the truth about love

2011-10-17T08:51:00.000-07:00

I'm just back from the phenomenal Brattleboro Book Festival and I'm honored to have Alma Katsu on my blog today, writing about the mysteries of love. (Her book The Taker is fierce, thrilling and gorgeously written.) Thanks, Alma!

The Truth About Love

When I decided to write a novel, I decided that I wanted it to be about love. Not just any love story, though: I wanted to write something epic, a tragic story that would grab readers right away and sweep them up in a story that would break their hearts but that they could not stop reading.

I knew all about love, didn’t I? I’d been married over twenty years. You don’t stay married for that long without knowing about love. Or so I thought.

Funny thing about writing a novel: all those wisps of feelings and fragments of situations that are the fabric of your story come from somewhere inside you. Your story comes from your subconscious. Your subconscious knows what you’re afraid of, what really drives you, what you’d like to stay hidden and what you never want to face. Writing a novel is an exercise understanding yourself—if you’re brave.

So I started writing The Taker and quickly found, oh damn, this isn’t a conventional love story. It’s not going to be tied up with a pretty bow at the end, with the main characters living happily ever after. This story is a knock-down, drag-out examination of the nature of love.

The Taker is not a sixteen-year old girl’s idea of love. It’s not about having a man who makes you the center of his universe. It’s not about the white poofy dress and the perfect wedding. It’s not about being in love with the idea of love, of confusing love with romance. Romance is nice, but love is hard. Romance is sweet, but love is rewarding.

What if you loved someone who couldn’t give you what you wanted? What if you knew you were the best thing in the world for him, but he still couldn’t commit? What if you gave him everything you could and it still wasn’t enough? What if making him happy meant letting him go?

Don’t be too quick to think you know the answer to those questions. The divorce rate wouldn’t be so high if we all knew what we were doing when it comes to love. People wouldn’t stay in relationships that are bad for them, parents wouldn’t cling to children when they should be teaching them to be independent.

We do funny things in the name of love.

Do you know what really draws us to another person? It’s not the color of their eyes, or their pretty/handsome face. It’s not what they do for a living, or where they went to school, or that he finds all your jokes funny or that she loves how handy you are with tools.

I thought about giving you the answer here, but I decided not to (hey, I want you to read the book.) But I’ll give you a clue. It comes right out of The Taker:

“Looking back, I know we were only filling in the holes in our souls, the way the tide rushes sand to fill in the crevices of a rocky shore. We – or maybe it was just I – bandaged our needs with what we declared was love. But, eventually, the tide draws out what it has swept in.”

Why I Love Dear Reader and why you should, too

2011-10-12T08:55:00.000-07:00

Suzanne Beecher is amazing. Warm, bubbly, and so positive you believe she could walk on Jupiter if she wanted to, she's a best friend to readers and writers. Dear Reader is her invention, a way to sample a huge variety of books, get hooked, read author essays and so much, much more. I'm honored to have been featured on her site twice, and to have written essays for her, and I've found dozens of fascinating books just browsing Dear Reader.com.

Sign up for a free book club and every day she'll email you a 5-minute portion of a book. She'll send a different book each week and you can sample two to three chapters. Before long you’ll be hooked on a book and you just might win a bubble machine, a signed copy of a book, or some of Suzanne's homemade chocolate chip cookies too--she loves to bake for readers.

Lisa Tucker talks about Creativity, questioning and The Winters in Bloom

2011-10-11T08:46:00.000-07:00

Completely kind. Totally generous and warm. And very, very funny. You can't ask for better adjectives than that to describe yourself, but these apply to Lisa Tucker. I first met Lisa Tucker at Readerville.com, a now defunct online stomping ground for writers. Her latest novel The Winters in Bloom is about families, secrets, and the ways we navigate our lives--and it's been racking up the raves. And take a look at these other accolades: Lisa is the author of six other novels, she's been published in a dozen countries and her books have been selected for Border's Original Voices, Book of the Month Club, the Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club, People magazine's Critic's choice, Amazon Book of the Year, Target "Breakout" books, and more. I'm honored to have Lisa write something for my blog about her process. Thank you so much, Lisa!

All of my novels begin with a sentence that intrigues me, a sentence I simply can’t get out of my head. In the case of The Winters in Bloom, that sentence would become the opening line of the novel: “He was the only child in a house full of doubt.” I had to know who “he” was and why his house was “full of doubt.”

Within a week, I had the first chapter, and I knew that the child was five-year-old Michael Winter and the “doubts” he was talking about belonged to his mother and father. The Winters are extremely anxious about Michael’s safety; indeed, they are so fearful that they made the parents around them feel better: “for if they were a bit overprotective at times—or more truthfully, when they were overprotective—at least they were nowhere near as bad as David and Kyra Winter.”

Of course I still didn’t know why the house was full of doubt, what had made David and Kyra so fearful. And by the end of chapter one, two new questions were haunting me. Where was Michael and who was the mysterious woman who’d come into the Winters’ backyard and taken him away?

Obviously, I’m one of those fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants writers. I’ve never made an outline until after I’ve finished my first draft. Then I can see the story and I make lots of outlines: to access the emotional arc of the story, to evaluate the momentum of the plot, and to trace the development of each character. But while I’m writing, I feel like I pray the reader will feel. I’m driven by curiosity to find out who these people are and what will happen to them.

Admittedly, I become somewhat obsessed while I’m writing a novel. I find myself thinking about the story everywhere: in the shower, while I’m driving or cooking or even listening to my family or friends. My son calls me “286” when he realizes I’m not paying attention—referring to the old computer we had before he was born, with a very slow processor: the IBM 286.

I never think about themes while I’m writing, but of course I wonder what the book will mean to readers when it goes out into the world. In the case of The Winters in Bloom, I’ve been told that it’s about learning how to forgive other people and especially ourselves. Kyra and David Winter had been keeping secrets from each other: to find Michael, they have to travel through time and accept who they’d been and what they’d done. As odd as it sounds, I feel very lucky that they trusted me to guide them on that journey.

Matthew Leutwyler talks about Answers to Nothing, writing, movie making, redemption and hope

2011-10-04T06:38:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a movieholic with very definite favorites. When I saw that brilliant producer/writer/director Matthew Leutwyler had a new film out, called Answers to Nothing (Great title, isn’t it? Plus, I had loved his This Space Between Us), I tracked him down, wanted to interview him, and he generously sent me a screener—and gave me a phone number.

Answers to Nothing is one of the most mesmerizing, moving, brilliantly done films I’ve seen. These adjectives are not hyperbole.The performances are knockout (the film features Dane Cook, Barbara Hershey, Julie Benz, Kali Hawk and more), and the film, which swirls around the main story of a missing young girl, is so haunting, that there were moments I was watching while weeping—yet, it’s very much a story that is also filled with redemption and hope. I’m still thinking about the story. It’s officially opening December 2 and already is creating a sensation (at the Woodstock Film Festival, people were unabashedly crying.) So I’m honored and thrilled to reproduce the conversation I had with Matthew here. Thanks, Matthew!

Your upcoming film, swirls around a missing girl, but the film is really about all the things missing inside of us that we try to fill. How did the idea for this film spark?

It was a really interesting process. Six years ago, I was going through a divorce and looking at all the mistakes I had made in my life. I started jotting down lists of all the personality traits of myself. Then I began developing characters based on those traits and all those conflicts I have internally. So I came out with all these characters, but I thought, well, I have to have one thread that binds all these characters together, don’t I? And I came up with the missing girl. I always wanted to do a film that was an unflinching look at modern relationships and the mistakes that we make—and how we go about making them right.

My previous work was comedies, or horror, amusing things. It wasn’t really the road I wanted to go down creatively. In fact, I hated the stuff I was doing before and I wanted to get back to dealing with the real issues. It’s uncomfortable to expose your inner workings, but it just felt more authentic.

Although a haunting and dark film, Answers to Nothing also has this seed of hope—lives are disrupted but they are not ruined, and people do find their own kinds of redemption. Can you talk about this?

The film was always about this, people all trying to do the right thing. They take a half step forward and attempt to correct their mistakes. When I first started writing, I wrote sixty pages and then sat on it for four years. I thought I knew where I wanted to go, but I brought in another writer, Gillian Vigman, both to force me to write (I had terrible writer’s block) and to bring in a woman’s touch to it. She helped to lighten the tone. I also got into a relationship and those positive feelings found their way into the writing.

In my novels, I always try to create what I call the never-ending story—a sense that nothing is neatly tied up but these lives keep going on and you wonder about them past the last page. I felt that same sense in your film.

I think about that sense, too. I still wonder, what the characters are doing.

I also wanted to talk about the moments in the film that are so striking. In novels, as well as films, there are always these moments that really resonate—images more than plot pushers. In your film, there is this incredible marathon race. There is a moment when Barbara Hershey opens a box and finds a scarf and we see the pleasure on her face. There is the weird school teacher playing the dangerous video games, and there is the African American woman who is never very nice to people, finally buying coffee for two security guards –I can’t get these moments out of my mind. Did these come organically or were they conscious decisions?

Every single thing was written except for the coffee. The actress, Kali Hawk started fiddling around. She liked to add on these small moments and when she was doing something with the coffee, I thought, “this is really interesting,” We kind of moved the camera around to it and made it a bigger deal.

Can you talk about the title, Answers to Nothing?

This was a title that I had in my head that I thought was going to change. It felt to me like a novel title. The movie is really about all these small moments of decision that we make in our life that we usually feel are small nothing moments, but when we look back on them, they turn out to be the most significant things in our lives.

What's obsessing you now?

Gillian and I are writing a wacky comedy about two women with dead end jobs that open up a brothel. Sort of in the vein of NIGHT SHIFT meets BRIDESMAIDS called ACCIDENTAL MADAMS, a couple of dramas, particular one about the border towns, based on true stories. I used to go down to Tijuana, Rosarito, and Ensenada a lot, but now, no one goes there anymore. It’s pretty much a ghost town. I found a lot of interesting true stories, especially about the locals that have stood up to the forces around them.

My company, Ambush is also producing a whole lot of stuff, the comedy IMOGENE with Annette Bening, a documentary, SPINNING PLATES, about three restaurants, and producing a film version of Martha O’Connor’s THE BITCH POSSE.