Jennifer Weiner talks about The Next Best Thing, helping other writers, working in TV, obsessions and more, more, more

Every writer needs to know Jennifer Weiner. Not only is she hilariously funny and warm, she's a passionate, generous advocate for women writers and she's unafraid to say what she thinks. (If you haven't read her BEA speech, do so right now. Really. I mean it.) She was a newspaper reporter until she published her first novel, and her books include Good in Bed, In Her Shoes, Little Earthquakes, Goodnight Nobody, The Guy Not Taken, Certain Girls, Best Friends Forever, Fly Away Home, Then Came You, and The Next Best Thing. She's been on The Today Show, The Martha Stewart Show, The Rachel Ray Show and more, and she writes for the Huffington Post and her own blog. Time Magazine named her as one of the best 140 Twitter feeds, too, and they were right. I'm thrilled to know her and I'm delighted to host Jennifer on my blog. A million thanks, Jennifer!

You are one of the goddesses supporting women writers. Incredibly generous, supportive, and funny, I think we all need to build you a shrine. Women need to be supporting one another, especially since the publishing climate today is definitely male-centric. Can you talk about the smaller ways all writers can do help one another--and why it's so important?

One of my favorite writers in the world is Susan Isaacs. I love that she writes smart, funny, Jewish protagonists who get the guy and save the world and live happily ever after not because they’re gorgeous but because they’re smart and funny.

When we had ARCs of GOOD IN BED, I sent one to Susan Isaacs, with a note saying how much I loved her work. We had nothing in common – we didn’t share a publisher or an agent, we’d never met at a conference. When she gave me a beautiful blurb, I was so grateful and so moved that she took the time to read the book, that she liked it, that she said so, that she did it in a way that would help me immensely, I cried.

I had a very different experience with another one of my favorites, a newspaper columnist-turned-novelist/memoirist. When I sent her my book, I got a curt note from her assistant saying that she no longer did blurbs.

I decided, way back in 2000, that no first-timer would ever get that kind of note from me (or my assistant)…that I would always, always, always blurb…that I would always do whatever I could to repay the help and support that all of my blurbers had given me.

I am so lucky to live in a world that gives writers so many opportunities to support each other. In the days of e-reading, consumers aren’t necessarily wandering into bookshops and picking up new books and reading the cover copy.

So, blurbs still matter…but, I honestly believe that Twitter and Facebook matter even more. If your readers have come to trust you, if you talk to them like they’re your friends, or the lady standing next to you at preschool pickup or the nine-year-olds’ soccer game saying, Oh my God, I just read the most amazing book….that matters so much. More, even, than a review in a newspaper.

If you’ve got a computer, you’ve got a voice. If you read something you loved, chances are, you can tell the author, and you can tell everyone you know who follows you how great it was.

You and I have also talked about the one issue that makes my head explode--when writers attack other writers, which I think is just plain bullying and needs to be addressed and confronted. Any thoughts about how we can stop this?

I’m with you – it makes me stabby. I get so frustrated watching female writers make distinctions between “literary” and “commercial,” between who “churns out” a book a year and sells them at Target versus who writes less frequently and sells fewer copies. I was bewildered when Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer in 2011 and, instead of using her moment in the spotlight to thank her loved ones or her professors, or use the opportunity to say, “Here are five great women writers you’ve never heard of,” she decided instead to tell young female writers whose work was not worth aspiring to – the quote-unquote “chick lit” authors who’d been plagiarized by Harvard faker Kaavya Viswanathan. Because being plagiarized isn’t terrible enough – that pain must be compounded by a big-deal literary lady telling the world that your books weren’t even quality enough to rip off.

Egan eventually did give a very gracious apology, and I have a lot of respect for her saying that what she said was, at the very least, poorly timed. But how can we fix things? I don’t know. I feel like the grass is always greener, and that, to some extent, envy and anxiety are the natural state of artists. Commercially successful female authors, those of us whose churned-out books are sold not only in Target but also – quelle horror! – in Costco and Sam’s Club – will never be reviewed in the prestigious publications, the way bestselling male genre authors might be. Which sucks for us.

Meanwhile, well-reviewed literary ladies can’t make a living, can’t quit their day jobs, can’t even, in the case of the editor of the anthology charmingly entitled THIS IS NOT CHICK LIT, get their novels published. Which sucks for them.

But I don’t think either side profits by telling the other, “This is your fault.” Commercial writers are not out there stealing shelf space from more quote-unquote deserving authors…and literary ladies are not the ones, in general, keeping commercial women writers out of the book-review sections.

I don’t know the answer…but I don’t think that women beating up on other women is not how we make things better. And, no, this doesn’t mean that anyone in possession of a vagina must support anyone else who owns the same equipment…but I think it means being tactical in what we say, and where, and how, we say it.

Personally, I’m trying to do better. I’m practicing holding my tongue and rolling my eyes in private – not on Twitter -- when the next twenty-five-year-old with an MFA announces on The Millions or Jezebel that writers like me don’t deserve any critical attention because we write crap. If I find a book I love, whether it’s quote-unquote commercial or literary, I will tell the world, I will tweet and Facebook my heart out, I’ll run a contest, I’ll do an event, or mention her books at mine. If I come across another writer trashing my genre, I’ll point it out, but try to do it nicely, by saying that, “Hey, some of those books you’re rolling your eyes at have good stories between those sparkly pink covers.

Then I’ll find another book I love, and talk about that some more.

 I loved The Next Best Thing, set in the world of Hollywood, which just sparkled on the page. You spent a year in Hollywood yourself,  with your sitcom, State of Georgia. What's it like moving from novel to TV?  And what surprised you about cowriting (and co-running) a sit-con.) Do you miss that year in Hollywood? Would you want to write another sitcom or a film? 

The obvious answer is that TV is collaborative. Instead of you and your laptop, alone in a room, you’re in a writers’ room, with a bunch of other funny people, making each other laugh (oh, and writing a script). I had a ball out there. I loved being in the room, I loved shoot nights, in front of the proverbial live studio audience, I loved learning a whole new job at forty-one.

There were, of course, things I didn’t love, and things I wasn’t very good at (talking to actors was one of them – turns out, spending ten years dealing with imaginary friends leaves you spectacularly ill-equipped for talking to real people). But I know I learned a lot, and I also know that just about every successful show-runner has a few flops in his or her background. So maybe someday I’ll be back…but probably when my kids are older. The hardest part was spending four months basically commuting between Philadelphia and Los Angeles, because the show got picked up in February, and we decided not to try to find a new school for our second-grader, and move her cross-country in the middle of the year. So she stayed in Philadelphia with her dad, and my three-year-old was with me part-time and in Philly part-time, and I flew home almost every weekend. If anyone needs them, I have a LOT of miles.

 What's your writing life like? Do you map things out or are you a "write by the seat of my pen" type of person? 

I’m a little bit of both. Generally, my books start with a character’s voice in my head. Then I start to figure out who this person is: what’s her story? Where is she in her life? Where does she want to go?

I’ll write up an outline once I know where things start, and how they end…but I’d say that the finished product is usually about 50 percent true to that outline, and 50 percent zigs and zags and curveballs. My characters still surprise me. Which is great!

What's obsessing you now and why?

I signed up for a sprint-distance triathlon in September, so I’m figuring out my training plan. I’ve been running, at a pace I like to think of as a brisk waddle, for months. Now I just need to add in the biking and the swimming. Of course, “The Bachelorette” remains a constant obsession, although this season’s disappointing me. Emily, while beautiful, just doesn’t seem to have many dimensions beyond “sweet” – at least, none we’ve seen so far – and the fellas in Sausage Mansion are still impossible for me to tell apart.

I’m in love with my new Nike sneakers, and watching my kids ask Siri dumb questions, and my little rat terrier Moochie, who came to us from a rat terrier rescue organization in January.

Finally, I’m obsessed – and not in a good way – with the woman who was full-on flossing her teeth at the table in a restaurant yesterday. Help me out, people: are we doing that in public now?

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

I did an interview the other day where the reporter asked me about goals, and did I have any big ones I was trying to meet? I couldn’t answer. It was crazy. I’m a major goal-setter (an Aries, if you believe in that, an oldest daughter, if you’re into birth order), and, all through my twenties and thirties, I had goals. I wanted to get a job as a newspaper reporter when I finished my six-week boot camp at the Poynter Institute in 1991. Then I wanted a job at a bigger paper. I wanted a job at a major national paper by the time I was twenty-five; I wanted a column by the time I was twenty-eight, and I wanted to sell a novel by the time I turned thirty (I missed that one by six weeks – GOOD IN BED sold in May of 2000, after I’d blown out my candles).

I wanted to write a saleable book, but I never hoped to have a best-seller…because, to me, that felt like hoping to win the lottery.

I’d written about writers and publishing as a pop culture reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and I knew what the odds were, and how few writers can actually make a living writing fiction (short summary: don’t quit your day job). My plan was to keep working as a reporter – a job that I loved – and write fiction on the side. I knew that walking into a bookstore, finding my book in the stacks and saying, “I wrote that” would be enough to make me happy. Saying “I want to write the best book I can” is a reasonable, attainable goal. Saying, “I want to find an agent and publish the book” is a little more of a crapshoot. Agents and editors turn down great books every day, and, with e-publishing, authors can take things into their own hands with self-publishing, which has became another path to traditional publication (if the author decides that’s what he or she wants).

So: writing a great book, yes. Publishing said book, yes. Hitting the best-seller list, though,doesn’t feel like it’s within an author’s control. Having a book become a best-seller is a rare and wondrous alignment of the right cover, the right title, the right blurbs and subject and voice and characters, all, of course, at the absolute right moment…and not all of the pieces of the puzzle are within the writer’s control.

So I don’t hope for another number-one bestseller, or having another book turned into film. If it happens, I’ll be thrilled, but it’s so far out of my control that I spend precisely zero time worrying about it.

I’d love to keep a foot in the world of television, because I think that’s where some of the most interesting storytelling is happening these days, and, again, if you get that once-in-a-lifetime confluence, where the stars align, you can create something magical. That didn’t happen my first time out. Could it happen down the road? Who knows?

Here is what I do hope for: I want to continue to strive for that work/life balance, where my daughters see me doing work that leaves me happy and fulfilled, and with plenty of time to be a mom, to cook dinners and give baths and read stories, or just spend a morning walking on the beach.

I want to make each book better than the one before. I want to push myself, in terms of dialogue and description and writing with the kind of vividness and immediacy that people like Kate Christensen and Curtis Sittenfeld can pull off. I want to plot like Dennis Lehane and Harlan Coben, I want to bring the funny like Nora Ephron and Fran Lebowitz. 

And, professionally, I want to use whatever power I have for good. I want to help some other woman feel what I felt when Susan Isaac’s blurb for GOOD IN BED came rolling off the fax machine at the Inquirer…or when my youngest brother came into Bertucci’s that night in May and pressed a scrap of paper into my hand that read Your editor called. You’re number 33 on the Times.

If 2010, the Year of Franzen, was all about cursing the darkness, about tallying up the bylines and books that got covered and insisting, Hey, there’s a problem here, even when nobody wanted to hear it, I want the next stage of my career to be about lighting a hundred candles. If the New York Times continues to ignore womens fiction, I want to remedy that situation as best I can, to be a voice that says these books are worthy, even if the Grey Lady says they’re not. 

Win a copy of An Uncommon Education by Elizabeth Percer

I was handed An Uncommon Education, Elizabeth Percer's extraordinary new novel by her editor, Maya Ziv, who also happened to be a former assistant of my agent. Maya had saved my life when I almost botched sending in the right manuscript, and so I was willing to look at anything she wanted me to--and this book was astonishing. About a young woman's coming of age, and how she begins to learn how to find and figure out what really matters in life, An Uncommon Education is the kind of book you want to hand to all your friends. And all this week, we are having a giveaway! there are five copies to hand out and all you have to do is comment on Elizabeth's  question below. The first five commenters will win a copy of the book! Please email me your email to reach you at carleavitt@hotmail.com.

People have asked me if the title for this novel was the original one. And the answer is no! The idea for the title came from the idea that we all have uncommon educations--not uncommon in the sense of rare or privileged, but uncommon in the sense of being unique to our own particularly chosen paths. Far more important than the knowledge I gained in school were those moments of informal learning that happened along the way -- my mother reading Irish poetry to me as a toddler; my father telling and retelling me stories of his childhood in Jerusalem; joining an underground Shakespeare Society when I should have been studying more at college. How have you learned to craft a life around what is uncommon to you? 

Elizabeth Collins talks about the loaded subject of The Beautiful Anthology

I first heard about the Beautiful Anthology from the superb writer Gina Frangello. Because I love Gina's writing and I trust her judgement completely, I wanted to see a copy--plus, beauty is such a queasy kind of topic.  What's beautiful? Who decides that? And what does it do to us if we don't fit the general norm? (Please don't make me go back to my teenaged years, where I was routinely mocked, caricatured and threatened for the way I looked.) The Beautiful Anthology is provocative, inspiring, and yup, important. I asked writer/editor Elizabeth Collins, who put together the anthology of essays, poems and art, if she'd come on my blog, and I'm honored she said yes. Thank you so much, Elizabeth.

What sparked the idea for this collection? Were there any surprises? 

We have so many great contributors at TNB. (The Nervous Breakdown.) Getting a group together for an anthology seemed like a natural project for TNB Books. 

Beauty was chosen as a topic because it's a universal theme. Everyone has an opinion about it; everyone has a story and strong feelings about the subject.

As for surprises--yes, definitely. I was pleasantly surprised by some of the creative twists in many of the essays. For example, I asked my writer friend J.E. Fishman to contribute, and he came up with a fascinating piece about the most beautiful tennis serve he ever hit. Similarly, one of the first students I taught--now a grown-up and a very talented writer--Nora Burkey surprised me with her mature, feminist take on why we should not impose Western ideals of beauty on other parts of the world. I could go on, of course. The point is that many of the essays and stories have an interesting, unexpected angle. I would say that The Beautiful Anthology explores the flip side of beauty, and not necessarily the literal definition of the word.

This seems like a collection that would really touch a nerve. Can you talk a bit about that?

I think beauty is a loaded subject. Most of us feel that we don't measure up in terms of beauty. We might feel resentful about the ideals of beauty that are always shoved in our faces and that are always changing. Fashions change; the general notion of what is beautiful (in terms of fashion) changes. But beauty should be more than that. Beauty should be a feeling, a state of grace, a happy place where we simply feel our best and at peace with the world.

Sometimes, when we think about beauty, we immediately also think of when we did not feel beautiful, when the beauty was outside of us and not in us, but we longed for it. 

What I find interesting in the anthology is the different takes on beauty that our male and female contributors have. The female experience is often fraught with fears of not measuring up, and full of worry about what we'll look like when we grow up. The male experience is conscious of not wanting to judge the opposite sex too harshly, and/or finding a new vantage point from which to discuss the subject of beauty.

I was really moved by your piece, by the way something that happened in the past still has such an impact, almost like a scar. (I still can remember my mother saying I looked like a wild woman with my hair--and I was only five!) Do you think we ever get over those scars?

As for my piece, well, it's funny that I don't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, but I remember precise details about what life was like when I was five (and even a bit younger). I think the healing comes from a place of acceptance, a realization that "this is who I am. This is what I look like." My story is about a scar--but we all have scars of some kind. We can let those scars bother us, or can we not even see them anymore (as is the case with me). It's also about taking care of what you have and making the best of it. We can absorb the things we are told about what is beautiful or how to be beautiful, but ultimately, we have to make our own way and be who we are. 

I loved the photos in the book. Who did them?

The photographs in the anthology are all finds of our intrepid and talented book designer, Charlotte Howard. (I can direct you to her for more on the photos; she got them all and made the placement decisions)

Do you think women will ever not be burdened by the idea of what they should look like?

As for whether or not I think that women will ever NOT be burdened by ideas of what they should look like? Well, we are assaulted constantly with media ideals (magazines, TV, film) and images of models and infomercials about fitness, etc. It's literally impossible to be unaware of what the marketers are trying to sell us (or make us feel insecure about). Even if we moved off the grid and isolated ourselves, we would still have some hopes for our looks and our body, perhaps based on family members' influence, or our neighbors or friends. I think that it is when we get away from our natural states that we start to be less beautiful--and by this I mean that if our bodies are very out of whack in terms of size, then that's a signal to us that our weight is unhealthy. After all, the "perfect" size woman is supposed to be some ideal of fertility, her shape literally a signal that she is good mother material. On some level, the human animal will always find the "healthy" specimen the most attractive, and when we feel good, we tend to look good, so it's all a circle.

(I am probably getting too literal and biological--sorry.)

What's obsessing you now? 

Do you mean in terms of projects and writing, or beauty-related topics? I am in the final stages of memoir writing/pre-pub madness. My memoir, Too Cool for School, is about my experience as a English teacher in a girls' school. I got pretty caught up in my persona as "rock star teacher" (which is embarrassing to think about now) and I was constantly being tapped for new classes, new projects. On one level, perhaps it was because I was versatile and I'm a writer, so it makes sense to ask me to teach lots of different kinds of writing, but on the other, I had people say to me, "They are setting you up to fail. No one can teach that many classes well." And it's true. At some point, the house of cards has to fall. In my case, I was blindsided by a politically motivated attack by a couple of parents who wanted me fired because I am a Democrat, and it became this horrific witch hunt that nearly killed me. Sounds dramatic, but when your purpose in life is attacked, it can leave you reeling. So that story is what is coming next, but even that is a subject I am over because I have been living it (and the attendant notoriety) for years. I am telling the story and I wrote the book in the hopes of helping protect other teachers, particularly in the hyper-partisan landscape and partisan teacher hate that's been going on. I really want to work on my new YA novel, though. If I could get my draft done this summer, I will be happy.

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

As for unasked questions, I suppose I'd like to address the idea that The Beautiful Anthology is not chick lit; it's a universally appealing (I hope) exploration of many facets of beauty. We have male contributors; we have sad stories, funny stories, academic stories, political stories--a great mix of fresh voices from an international slate of established and emerging writers. Now, I realize that sounds too promo, but I feel I have to say it if I can. 

Rebecca Woods, author of Living Through Charlie, talks about the Mommy Competition

Rebecca Woods was a student of mine in my UCLA class, and I got the pleasure of seeing her novel, Living Through Charlie, grow. She grew up in Orange County, California, and she's got  a bachelor's degree in Drama and attended the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley.  A former drama teacher in “a posh private school” as well as a special education school, she lives in Southern California with her husband, her two mean little dogs, a parakeet, and three tortoises, and is working on her second novel. Rebecca wanted to write something different for my blog, and I gave her carte blanche. So thanks, Rebecca!

The Mommy Competition

If you’ve spent a good portion of your adult life either driving a car or looking for your keys so you can drive your car, chances are you’re a mom. And if you’re a mom, chances are you occasionally have doubts that you’re doing it right. Okay, you frequently have doubts. You wallow in doubt. You lap it up from a spoon and wear it daily as a skin suit Silence of the Lambs style. This insecurity fuels something I call Mommy Competition. You know what it is, it’s that need to figure out who’s doing it better. That uncontrollable desire to look at another mom’s kids, do a quick assessment and decide who is the Alpha Mom and who is most likely to serve dinner by tossing a greasy bag of food from a drive-through window into the back seat of the mini-van on the way home.

The best way to quickly establish the identity of the Alpha Mom is to greet each other with A Question About Each Other’s Children. “Is he breastfed?” “Is she talking?” “Walking?” “Reading?” “Applying to preschool?” That’s right. I just said, “applying to preschool” like that’s a normal thing that normal three year olds do everywhere. They don’t. But in communities where there’s a waiting list for toddler tutors, Mommy Competition rises to a near professional level.

If you live in the school-by-application-only culture like I do, you’re lucky! Your town has conveniently set up a Mommy hierarchy for you! Recognizing the Alpha Mom is as easy as knowing the reputations of the local private schools. There are the good schools and there are the schools-your-kid-got-into-because-he-couldn’t-get-into-a-better-school-so-you-must-be-a-crappy-mom. It starts with preschool- “So, where is Hydrangea going to preschool?” What you’re really trying to find out is- Were you teaching your kid the alphabet while I was drinking wine and playing Yo Gabba Gabba on a continuous loop? Did you have a reward system for your child that never included you saying, “Fine. Here’s the damn cookie.”? …like me.

Most of the private elementary schools in my area have uniforms. This is a wonderful shortcut if you have to establish who the Alpha Mom is from a distance. (If your child’s school doesn’t believe in uniforms, there’s a whole different ranking system involving license plate holders and the Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s parking lots but it’s too complicated a formula to explore in such a brief blog post.) Should two moms encounter each other in the wild and the children are wearing uniforms, you can skip, “Where is Petunia in school?” and go straight to, “What is Carnation up to?” Carnation went to summer camp in Costa Rica where she hand pollinated indigenous vines and then she won the third grade science fair with the paper she wrote about it! Damn it. But Carnation isn’t in school right now. Yes! She’s got a tutor on set until her movie wraps. You win. I give.

My kids are in their mid-twenties so I should know better. And, in spite of (or maybe because of) my inability to ever rise to the role of the Alpha Mom based on this Mommy Competition criteria, my kids are seriously awesome! Seriously. Nevertheless, I actually did the let’s-see-how-I-rank-as-a-mom thing at a Pilates class yesterday. (Yes, I do know how that sounds. I already told you I live in a private school environment, that there are Pilates classes nearby shouldn’t be that much of a surprise.) I ran into a mom I hadn’t seen in about fifteen years and I greeted her with, “Oh my gosh, hi! So, what is Chrysanthemum up to?” 

We were doing the back and forth about her kids and my kids (I was winning, by the way, it seems little Chrysanthemum is still living at home and hasn’t chosen a college major) and I suddenly realized what I was doing! I don’t want to do this, I’ve already won this game!  She’s won this game! Being a mom is hard, we shouldn’t be competing with each other, we should be supporting each other! So what if Chrysanthemum hasn’t chosen a college major, one of my kids flunked out of the first college she went to! And even though Carnation won the science fair in third grade, she could get bullied every day in fourth grade like my other kid did. Suddenly I blurted out, “I wrote a book! It’s about private school moms trying to live vicariously through their kids and what it’s like for one mom when her kid doesn’t fit in!” Our conversation stopped as my faux pas hung in the air. Did I really just start talking about myself instead of continuing to rank our kids’ accomplishments so we can identify the Alpha Mom?  We stared awkwardly at each other’s Lululemon workout gear for a moment not knowing what to say as if I had made a racial slur or an inappropriate political comment. Finally I broke the silence. “And I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to.” 

Dead Beats, the astonishing student run publication/readings/organization speaks!

I first heard about Dead Beats on twitter. An uber-successful student run group, Dead Beats doesn't just share the works of published writers, but it acts as a lift-off for unpublished ones. The top photo is from one of their sell-out crowded readings, and of course, you know who is in the second photo! (HINT: Kerouac and William S. Burroughs). I'm honored to host them here--and hope you all will support their readings (in the UK right now), and submit to them! Thank you, Dead Beats!

How did the idea for a student run publication organization come about?  What was the initial reaction?

Dead Beats originated in a post-seminar study group whose numbers quickly dwindled to form the core membership of three that composes the organisation today.

Already deft at using social media to communicate with each other, the thought of broadening the readership was simply an organic step. We wanted to share not just extracts from published canonical authors, but also other unpublished writers' homespun material that would otherwise remain unseen.

The initial reaction was stupendous and the reach astounding: within our first two months we received upwards of one hundred submissions from the world-over and the fact that we published 62 pieces in only our second month of being established is a great affirmation of the vital role literature still plays in modern society. We were surprised and overwhelmed at the amount of support we received.


What made you decide on your wonderful name, Dead Beats, and how do you reach out to writers all over the world?

As relationships and group dynamics settled, we came to the realisation that the Beats were formative to our thinking; the sentiments of that generation, and the methods with which they expressed them, struck a chord.  

However, the name was more of a formality than anything else. It described both our dispositions at this time last year and referenced our departed heroes.

As for reaching people, we still rely on word of mouth primarily and this seems to engender a more grassroots feel to the blog.


Who decides what gets published? What's the process like?

The three of us converge on a weekly basis to discuss each individual submission we receive, usually over coffee or pints depending on extraneous circumstances. Decisions are predicated on mutual agreement within the group. There are quite a few disagreements over submissions at times, and when this variance occurs is when we most look forward to the reader response. 

There is a misconception amongst some of our contributors that we are only interested in work of a Beat orientation, yet, Dead Beats publishes work of both an inspired and inspiring nature; the Beats stirred the ethic of the blog but their work doesn't define our goals.

We have no reading season and accept submissions of short stories and poems all year round. We believe that this marks us out from other literary journals, as we are all about keeping a constant flow of literary quality.


What do you see that is up next for Dead Beats?

We intend to collate an e-book compendium of our favourite writers thus far, curate even bigger poetry events and try our hand at organising regional workshops. Sheffield is just one city with followers; we have the world to explore yet.


You've been getting sell-out crowds for your performances. Any chance of you bringing Deadbeats to the USA?

Only if you're paying!
Though tongue out of cheek, we will venture as far afield as we can when the funds allow it. Expanding literary awareness across the globe is a notion that very much motivates us. Should a city call, we'll be there.


What's obsessing you now?

Currently, we are on the cusp of celebrating our first anniversary gig. We're determined that it'll be the best poetry night Sheffield's seen: we've bought party hats and benzedrine, so it better be good!


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

You might have asked: "Who are the Dead Beats?"
We would have responded: "There is no 'Dead Beats', just a bunch of guys trying to get published" (Ginsberg circa Sheffield 2012).

Emily St. John Mandel talks about The Lola Quartet, Inspiration, jazz, and so much more

I carried around Emily St. John Mandel's The Lola Quartet because I couldn't bear to stop reading it. A #1 Indie Pick for May, it's so ingeniously plotted, so rich with character, that I found myself underlining the pages. Of course I tracked Emily down and begged her to let me interview her, and she was gracious enough to agree.  I don't know what to thank you for more, Emily, your mind-blowingly good novel or this fantastic interview, so I'll say thank you for both.

I couldn't begin to classify this brilliant novel--it's part literary noir, part crime thriller, and you could even say it's adult coming of age. Was the mixing of genres a deliberate choice? This, of course, leads us to my question of choice: How do you write? Do you plan everything out? Do you start with character? 

Thank you! I truly appreciate the kind words. With regard to genre, what I want is to write literary fiction with the strongest possible narrative drive. I never set out to write crime fiction. I was surprised to discover that whether you think of your own work as being literary fiction or not, if you start adding a lot of plot then people start calling them crime thrillers. I try to just write the best book I can without worrying too much about where it's going to be shelved in the bookstore. 

I don't plan anything out. My first two books began with wisps of premises, but this one was a little different, more a matter of a number of topics and ideas that I wanted to write about coming together. The first was a plumbing problem. When I was eighteen and nineteen I had my own (very small) apartment in Toronto. Living alone felt like freedom and I loved it, even though covering the rent took more than half my income at the time. (The rent wasn't that high, but I worked in a coffee shop.) 

At a certain point the shower started leaking extremely hot water. Plumbers would come by and fix it and then it would instantly break again, and the condensation was such that before long I had a situation where it was more or less raining in my bathroom and there was water running down the walls. I imagined the damage being done to the paint job was irreparable, but at the time this struck me as a reasonable trade-off for the landlord's failure to do anything about the cockroaches. (Like I said, I was nineteen.) 

I liked the idea of rain falling indoors, and it was always something I wanted to write about. I also knew that I wanted to write about foreclosed real estate and Florida's exotic wildlife problem, after reading a couple of articles on those topics, and I knew I wanted to write a novel about the economic collapse. The collapse was such a strange time and there's still such uncertainty. I was also fascinated by the Jayson Blair story a few years back, and I wanted to write about a disgraced journalist.

I loved the jazz motif that plays throughout the novel. How do you come by your knowledge of jazz?

Thanks. I studied piano for years as a child and teenager, but I never played jazz and I still don't feel like I know that much about it, to tell you the truth. There's a gypsy jazz guitarist who plays a regular set at a club about a block from my apartment, so I've spent a lot of time listening to him. I've also read some Whitney Balliett; he was a writer who chronicled the New York jazz scene of a few decades ago, and I liked reading about those musicians. Once I knew that gypsy jazz guitar music would be a part of the book, I spent some time reading about the life of Django Reinhardt.

Loyalties shift, things are not what they seem, and it all builds to an ending that left me thunderstruck--the kind of "never ending story" ending that I love, that made me continue to wonder about these characters' lives. Did this ending surprise you as you were writing it?

The whole story surprised me. I never know where any book I start writing is going to go. I just start writing and hope for the best. I'm glad you liked the ending… it was the hardest thing in this book to get right. I must have rewritten it a dozen times. It hasn't been a universally popular ending, but it's the only ending that made sense to me. 

What's obsessing you now--and why?

I've been interested in orchestras lately. Partly because there's an orchestra in the novel I'm presently writing, and partly because I love music and I find that orchestras are beautiful things to watch in action; there's something moving to me about that many people collaborating to create a live experience.

Laura Harrington talks about Alice Bliss and the credits that follow our names

Laura Harrington's Alice Bliss is a remarkable, haunting novel about a girl grappling with her father's being deployed to Iraq, coming of age, and the aching bonds of love. Harrington's an award-wining playwright, lyricist and librettist, and I am honored to have her writing something for my blog.  Thank you, Laura!

A Modest Life

Laura Harrington

My father was an exceptionally modest man. Born in 1917, the third youngest of thirteen children, he was a wonderful listener and rarely talked about himself.  His highest form of praise was to call someone a true gentleman; he revered the old-fashioned attributes of grace, modesty, and service to others. After he died I found a list he had written on a piece of three-ring notebook paper, titled “credits.” I love this list so much I’ve framed it and it hangs in my office as a source of inspiration.

In our brave new world of self-promotion and online sharing of our lives, so many people now seem to come pre-packaged with a list (often of “credits”) following their name.  Not too many years ago, we had hyphenates; the classic example was: writer-director, which looks so moderate now, almost self-effacing.  Then the hyphenated lists started to grow until they became ungainly, such as chef-entrepreneur-television personality-artisanal cheese maker, etc

Now, thanks to Facebook and Twitter we can all have lists after our names. We package our public personas in quick, sometimes witty profiles.  These are like mini online dating entries, meant to communicate enough to inspire “following” or “liking.” 

I wish my father were still here so that I could ask him what motivated him to write that list.  Was it all those years of coming to my plays and reading theatre programs where my "credits" were listed? Who knows?   But my father’s list doesn't include any of the credits we now expect to follow someone's name, and that should, by all rights, follow his name, such as World War II veteran, accountant - turned entrepreneur, wine merchant, wine importer.  None of that.  

Top of the list: selling magazines door to door during the depression, which is how he helped feed his family when he was twelve and thirteen years old. He sold the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal and the Country Gentleman, until he started caddying at age fourteen, and became Caddie(sic) Master at Ridgemont Golf Club.

Other items on the list:

Played on Marshall High School’s basketball, soccer and golf teams.

Lt. U.S. Army-AirForce. (Nothing about being a navigator/ bombardier, how many missions he flew from France into Germany, what medals he was awarded.)

Coached basketball.

Started Biddie Basketball League.

Started Little League team in the 18^th Ward.

Coached Little League.

Secured 6000 signatures for Ike for President.

Appointed 18^th Ward Republican Committeeman.

Helped AFS (American Field Service) recruit families for foreign student exchange.

Co-President of AFS, Penfield chapter.

Co-President of Baird Road School PTA.

Helped organize/ fundraise for the new Episcopal Church in Penfield.

Sunday school teacher. Classes held in our home until the church was built.

Member of Brighton Rotary Club.

President of Brighton Chamber of Commerce for two terms.

What I love about this list is that it gives such a clear picture of the man.  He served in the Air Force, raised four children, participated in politics, volunteered his time to enhance children’s lives through education, sports and foreign exchange, built a church, and was active in his business community. He thought children should learn to compete by playing games so that we might avoid competition on the battlefield, and he championed foreign exchange as a means of diminishing differences in the hope that we might learn to live peacefully side-by-side.

I wonder, in spite of my theatre credits and even adding in my teaching credits, whether my life and my contributions can possibly measure up to the idealism and dedication of my father’s exceptionally modest life.

Eileen Riley-Hall talks about writing and her new book, Parenting Girls on the Autism Spectrum: Overcoming the Challenges and Celebrating the Gifts

There are a lot of everyday heroes and heroines in life, and I truly think Eileen Riley-Hall is one of them. She's raising two daughters with autism, and when she couldn't find a book that offered any sort of hope, she decided to write one herself. Parenting Girls on the Autism Spectrum: Overcoming the Challenges and Celebrating the Gifts dispels myths and emphasizes practical advice on raising a child with special needs. I asked Eileen if she would write something for my blog, and I'm honored to have her here. Thank you so, so much, Eileen.

I always loved to read, and growing up I hoped one day to write a book.  The first book I fell in love with was Charlotte’s Web.  How I admired Charlotte and prayed for the world to see what she saw in Wilbur.  In middle school, To Kill a Mockingbird  took me South for with lessons in family and character.  Scout and Jem were my companions, though I loved sad, sweet Dill best of all.   By my freshman year of high school, I considered my tastes more sophisticated.  I was wildly enamored of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his crazy, tragic wife and muse Zelda.  Their ill-fated love seemed the epitome of romance.  In my junior year I read Look Homeword Angel and fell under the spell of the poetic images, carved angels, “a stone, a leaf, an unturned door.”  Look Homeward, Angel became my obsession.  I carried the book like a medieval monk gripping the Book of Prayers.   I even chose Thomas as my confirmation to the consternation of my parents and the Bishop.  Of course, I know this makes me a total geek, as well as a devoted book lover.  In my defense, I was a well-rounded geek.  I was also a mathlete in high school – you know, feverishly solved math problems in tense competitions with nerds from other schools.  But books were still my first love.

In college, I majored in English, following a brief phase as a philosophy major.  After two semesters, my father pleaded with me to choose a major that might actually lead to employment some day.  Apparently positions as philosopher kings are increasingly rare and don’t pay off college loans.  So it was back to the novels and plays, and I continued my love affair with tortured artists – it all seemed so romantic to me.  Dramatic lives, full of such heavy sighs and fading sunsets.

Then, life happened, as it does to all of us.  I graduated from the grassy knolls and endless intellectual discourse of college to join the “real world.”  After a bumpy start at several boring desk jobs, I eventually found my career as a teacher.   My first job was teaching in middle school.  It only took a few weeks of cajoling twelve year-olds into reading to realize that teaching in middle school is not about books; it’s about children.  That year my feet touched the ground, and I found I liked it.   The chubby, awkward, often too candid characters in front of me every day proved more compelling and complex than any character in a book.  Reading To Kill a Mockingbird (still my favorite book of all time) with them became a chance to hear their stories of siblings and families configured in unusual ways.  Every day was a revelation.

Then, life happened again.  I became a mom – maybe the most “real world” experience a person can have.  Oh, did I fall in love, like a crazy person!  First with Lizzie, my brown-eyed baby girl, all serious and contemplative, like a skeptical little Buddha.  And then two years later with her sister Caroline, my smiling party girl, all energy, mischief, and hugs.  Never did I think there was anything unusual about my girls.  They were just delightfully original, quirky and sweet.  But when Lizzie was five, her nursery school teacher advised me to have an evaluation done with a developmental pediatrician. Lizzie was shyer than other kids, more intense.  Having Caroline in tow the day of the appointment proved profound.  The doctor evaluated Lizzie while Caroline lined up blocks on the brightly colored rug.  I could see him watching Caroline out of the corner of his eye as he asked me questions about both girls.  After a lengthy evaluation, the doctor pronounced Caroline with autism and Lizzie somewhere along the spectrum between Pervasive Developmental Disorder and Asperger’s.  I was devastated.  What would this mean?  Why had just been eliminated from their futures and mine?

So I did what seemed wisest:  I turned to my old friends, the books.  Not novels this time, but parenting books, books on autism.  The first books I found were grim, hefty tomes, describing therapies and struggles, or scary experimental interventions to be followed like a devout religion.  They would not work for me, so I kept reading.  I decided to become an expert, if not on autism, on my girls.  And in ten years, I read everything I could, and talked to every teacher, therapist, doctor, and parent I met.  And now at 13 and 15, my girls are nothing short of miraculous.  Are they still “on the spectrum?”  Yes.  Are they in any way diminished people?  Not one bit.  I learned that a diagnosis is not a prophecy and autism is just a word to describe some things that might be harder for them to learn.  But with opportunity and work and unconditional love, amazing things are possible.  Today, Lizzie participates in her school’s musical theatre productions, and has earned straight A’s all freshman year.  And Caroline still has autism, but she plays the trumpet in her school band, and she is learning algebra.  Lizzie has perfect pitch, a remarkable feel for music, and a lovely voice, special gifts from Asperger’s.  And Caroline is funny, does uncanny impressions of friends and neighbors, and is a virtual palm pilot of dates, times, birthdays, and holidays.  Her gifts from autism.

So, I finally wrote my book.   Not the novel I had once aspired to write.  But a true story, decidedly less glamorous, to share my girls’ stories, along with my evolved understanding of autism and the irrelevancy of the word disability.  We all have our struggles, don’t we?  Some have labels and some don’t, but they are within us nonetheless. The “characters” in my book don’t attend fancy parties, nor do they stare glassy-eyed at lights across the sound.  They don’t lament the emptiness of love, nor the surprising disappointment of success.  They are my girls and the many amazing children like them who keep trying even when the whole world seems to say give up.  I realized finally that writing a book isn’t about metaphors and angst; it’s about having something to say, something other people need to hear.  You just put it in words the best you can.

So I end back where I began when I turned the first page of Charlotte’s Web.  And like that insightful spider, I find miracles in the ordinary.  I write so all of the world can see that my girls are:  “Some girls!”  and “Terrific,”  but most of all they are “Radiant.”  

 

Meg Pokrass, author of Damn Sure Right, talks about being silly, screenwriting, Damn Sure Right, and more

Meg Pokrass writes flash fiction, poetry and makes animation--and her new book, Damn Sure Right (great title, right?) is absolutely wonderful. Her work has appeared in over 100 online and print publications from the Rumpus to the Mississippi, and she runs the incredible Fictionaut Five author series. Nominated for Dzanc's Best of The Web, the Pushcart Prize Anthology and more, she also teaches writing privately. I was honored to interview her for the blog.

You studied acting, so I want to know, does it help with writing? (Should I do it?)

You should if it sounds like fun! It can't help but stimulate creativity. 

Everything I know about writing I learned by studying acting at age 8 - 25 and by reading wonderful books and plays starting very early. I was very taken by the work of Tennessee Williams, Sherwood Anderson, Wendy Wasserstein. I've never taken a formal writing class. Everything I learned as a writer came from the early training, such as working with sense-memory recall, and how to develop an awareness of character motivation. Showing through this behavior, not telling.

One learns the power of rhythm through use of inflection, learns to listen to the subtleties in dialog...  

I had an interesting acting teacher who said, "Every scene... every relationship.. all moments in life involve some subtle relationship to sex, how there is sex in everything."  I still can't figure this out... and I don't think I agree...  HOWEVER, I do write a lot about sex. 

I also write a lot about my fear of abandonment (one of my life-long issues), getting older, losing places and people. I use my neurosis, I make lemonade from my emotional lemons. 

Here are 3 acting quotes which make just as much sense to me in writing:

"One of the things I like about my profession, and that I find healthy, is that one constantly has to break oneself to pieces." - Liv Ullmann

"Acting doesn't have anything to do with listening to the words. We never really listen, in general conversation, to what the other person is saying. We listen to what they mean.   - Jack Lemon

"Acting is behaving truthfully in imaginary circumstances." - Sanford Meisner

Why flash fiction? Did you gravitate naturally to it or was this something you tried and found it was a perfect fit. Do you also write longer fictions, or even contemplate a novel?

Prose poetry and narrative poetry got me first. I started writing poetry in the 1980s and was encouraged by two great mentors and poets, Molly Peacock and Ellery Akers.  My poetry was fairly narrative, and I had no idea that I was trying to write little stories. I found that out later. When I took a hard look at my poetry, it was flash.

I recently completed writing a novella created from flash fiction and prose poetry fragments. It is semi-autobiographical. 

I have to say that when i figured out poetry was not really my form, it opened the world up. I was less inhibited and clumsy immediately.  I don't know why. I felt like someone who had danced ballet realizing they were better at modern dance.. I jumped into flash with glee and haven't been able to leave it. 

I still write poetry, but the weight of that form is lighter on me now. 

You've been commissioned to turn the book--or some of the stories--into a script! How did that come about? What's it like for you? 

My friend, screenwriter Eugene Corr, who wrote one of my favorite movies, "Desert Bloom",  told me my work is quite visual, which was interesting to me --  and gave me the confidence to show my novella to a few people.

It just happened to be the right fit.   The producer hired an award-winning screenwriter (I can't name the screenwriter yet) to co-write an adaptation with me. I'll be learning so much about screenwriting from working with him. My novella has not been published yet, and I am about to send it around to agents and publishers soon. I do need a good literary agent now, so that is my new goal -- finding a good fit. I never needed a literary agent before since I wrote only tiny stories. 

What's obsessing you now? 

Justin Torres's tiny novel "We the Animals" - I can't get over it, keep re-reading it.  Oh man. A novel in 140 pages, these bombshell tiny chapters. Reading it feels like living a whole life. A life is inside there. It feels like some kind of miracle, what he did.

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

(Why are you so silly on Facebook Meg?)

It is my release. I love Facebook too much, have met so many wonderful friends there. It is my city which never sleeps. I know that is odd, but I work at home and am isolated from people too much. It brings the world in and opens up all kinds of creative interchange and play.  And yeah, I can be an actress again... there. 

Senior Associate Editor, 

BLIP Magazine (Mississippi Review online)

Managing Director,

Fictionaut Five author interviews

"Damn Sure Right" Reviews:

NewPages Review 

HTML Giant 

Mid American Review 

My Website 

Damn Sure Right

Animations

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