Home of Baggott & Asher & Bode

On Selling Out, Reading while in Labor, and How We are All Writers in Disguise.

2012-02-09T11:50:00.003-05:00

I'm blog touring these days, my friends.

Today, on Caroline Leavitt's blog, I'm talking about BEING A SUPPOSED SELL-OUT. (It's a little mouthy.)

And at Supernatural Snark, I'm caught in an interview confessing that I read CIDER HOUSE RULES while in labor ...

One more ... At the International Reading Association, I talk to teachers & parents about how each of us is a Writer in Disguise, sometimes so deeply in disguise we don't even know it -- and how to get that writer in our kids to show up.

Why I Write.

2012-02-08T16:39:00.003-05:00

Today I talk about writing --

"...I’ve learned that writing – this twitch of my fingers – is really rooted deep inside of me. It’s a way of running your hands through the reeds, the silt – the kind of silt still clouding the day, the kind settled (like memory) waiting to be stirred...."

at THE DIVINING WAND.

A Word on Madonna from an 80s Chick.

2012-02-05T21:34:00.011-05:00

Here's Dick Clark on American Bandstand interviewing Madonna in 1984. Come in at 1:23. He's going to ask her if she was nervous to go solo. She says quietly, "Not really. I've always had a lot of confidence in myself."

The next question is about her dreams not just for the upcoming year but into the future. She says, with a big smile, "To rule the world." I love that clip.

It's not that I am or ever was a huge Madonna fan. I'm a bad fan in general. But Madonna was, for much of my life, ubiquitous . It was hard not to have an opinion of her. And I've had many. I'll put in some below. But the thing is a lot of my frustrations with her don't matter. Madonna is tough as hell. She struggles. Mainly, she's pushed for liberation and self-definition.

No one, to my mind, has said more clearly -- by her actions -- that it is a person's individual right to define who they are and to change that definition as they change. For me, Madonna is about the self-expression of identity and the freedom to evolve. Agree with her choices or not, she raised identity to an art form.

(I hate making statements like that because someone will come along and name five people off the top of their heads that turn this statement on its ear. But, there. I've said it. If it spurs you to think of five better examples, my work has had a positive outcome.)

Look, if you were a Catholic white girl in the 1980s, like THIS Catholic white girl of the 80s, you probably had a very complex relationship with "Like a Prayer." It's still weirdly about faith for me -- as well as sex -- but when the chorus pours in, it's all convoluted and rich. And then the video's about race, which just further stirs it all up, Catholic guilt heaped with white guilt and sexiness and choir robes.

"Like a Virgin" at the Grammy's? Humping the wedding veil? I'd never seen anything like it.

And her Truth or Dare documentary? Her new-world confessional mode meeting Warren Beatty's old world closed doors? Her loss. Her desire. Her exhaustion. She was way ahead of her time. Evidently, it's all Americans want to see and THAT was some incredible footage of a life.

Her sudden British accent? I felt betrayed on a deep Detroit level; and I'm not even from Detroit.

Her run-in with Courtney Love. I don't know. I have this weird I-want-to-save-you relationship with Courtney Love, and I kind of wanted Madonna to be maternal there. I know that she sees Courtney for the baby she's being in that messy moment. But I wanted Madonna to love her anyway.

Her spiritual mode. I think it was genuine. I think she was digging.

All of my kids know how to Vogue.

Her picture book for children about apples? What-what? And how she suddenly showed up in bookstores to read for children, wearing small-floral-print sundresses? I felt my motherhood was being openly mocked. Surely, she didn't write that book with its 1950s sentimentality. Surely not. I want the picture book that she actually pens.

Her being pregnant in the cowboy-hat video, just a little. I liked that.

Her dating A-Rod? Yep.

And if you came up in the 80s, you're now of a certain age -- an age where you can't watch Courtney Cox because all you're thinking is, "What exactly has she had done to her face?" It's not a rude thing. It's just a deep curiosity. Has there been padding put into her cheeks? And is that done with a needle? And if she didn't wear lip gloss would her lips look more normal? Ditto a lot of actresses around my age. Sometimes I wonder who will play the parts that Meryl Streep now plays? And for so long Madonna was a great last hold-out. But, alas, no more. But I have to say, she did it well. I don't obsess over her features. In fact, I feel like she's not as puffed and pinched, and it's more as if she's been arrested in time.

(BUT ... REMEMBER AGING? I miss public aging. I miss the dignity and beauty of aging. Remember Katharine Hepburn as she aged? So wonderful.)

Madonna is 53. I held my breath during the Super Bowl. Yes, saw her stumble once. But she was wearing five inch heels. Lordy. I was dying for her to take off her headdress and whip it. And she did. Would I have preferred to hear her breathing hard in that mic, really huffing and puffing, some realism -- some this-is-my-voice-right-now? Yes.

But I feel, weirdly, proud of her. Why proud? I didn't feel proud of Prince when he rocked the Super Bowl a couple years. I think it's because of the heavy demands we put on women. Here are a series of boxes, we seem to say. Cram yourself into each one in a specific order. And Madonna hasn't done that. We usually punish women for not fitting into the marked boxes. and certainly entertainment is a punishing industry. She was exhausted in Truth or Dare, run ragged, in a way suffering. But she always fights her way through, a force of nature, with sheer determination of will. She has such a will.

I want to believe in that kind of unboxed life for a woman, however that life is defined by the one living it.

Survival of the Baggott-ist? Nope. Not at all.

2012-02-04T19:13:00.005-05:00

So, I learn a cold hard truth in NYC this past week. As a post-apocalyptic novelist (and I'm now trying to embrace this new identity), it's hit me that I've been walking around thinking I'd survive the apocalypse. I mean, deep down, I think I've got some grit and a strong will to live. I'm not good at basketball really, but play some tenacious D, if you get me. And if my kids were at risk, I have often imagined I'd be one of those mothers who could lift a car suddenly, if need be.

But in NYC, this happened.

7:35 am. Alarm goes off in my hotel. Fire alarm. I'm bolt upright. I scurry around. I think, Take the pocketbook. No, leave it. Put on your shoes. No time. What if there's broken glass? Shoes yes. Go go go.

And I'm out in the hall and there's another woman with me. That's it. Just us -- though I've shared a lot of elevators with fellow 19th floorers. Look, in another city with a different history, I might not have booked to the stairwell quite so fast, but I booked it.

And this other woman is young. She's got me by a solid 15 years. And she's strong. She could have played volleyball -- not college, but first string varsity high school. We mutter to each other. Things like: Where is everybody? And we head down.

Now, I'm shot-through with adrenaline and woken from a dead sleep. My legs are shaky. So, okay, maybe I haven't kept up with the P90X. Is that a reason for me to die? That seems like a pretty harsh punishment, doesn't it? I'm thinking of how, in the video, that one guy does the WHOLE THING on a prosthetic leg. What was my excuse? So, these thoughts. Yes.

And then the volleyball player -- who is two flights ahead of me -- calls up, "The alarm isn't sounding on the other floors!" And I think, What? I have weak thighs AND I'm lacking observation skills? I'm a goner.

We both persist, though, the alarm a dull blast overhead. Did I mention she's completely sprinted ahead of me? She's not like, "Hey, older lady, let me help you." No, no. SHE is going to survive. It strikes me now that her volleyball team may have even made it to the state finals.
So she gets to the bottom and can't find the final exit. I see a sign that says, "TO OBBY," which, hey, I've never won a round of WHEEL OF FORTUNE but I put it together. And we push through the door and there's the lobby...

A swirl of bustle and morning cheer. And I feel like Francis Weed in the beginning of THE COUNTRY HUSBAND who was almost in a weather related plane crash but no one cares because it's not raining at their current location.

The volleyball player gets a question out to the concierge and I hear him say, "Oh, yeah. That was a mistake. They're going to make an announcement soon. It's all good."

I say, "Are you kidding me? They can make announcements and they didn't immediately make one after flipping the wrong switch?"

Did I mention that I did manage to grab my coat and it's heavy and hot and full length, like one of those NARNIA kids and I'm in a full sweat and still shaky.

BUT ... this is where I think my experience in the world comes in handy.

The volleyball player, upon hearing the news, shrugs and walks off to the elevators to go back to bed.

Me? No, no. I wasn't raised by my older sister Kate Baggott (The Reigning Queen of All Things FREE) for nothing. I will get something for free or I will never, ever be able to tell this story to anyone in my family without bringing dishonor upon us.

I go to the front desk -- I am NOT a swirl full of bustle and morning cheer -- and say, "I'm from the 19th floor."

"What?"

"There's a fire alarm on the 19th floor and I just walked down 19 flights of stairs."

"Oh! I'm so sorry!"

And I'm taken to someone else who is perhaps trained to deal with people like me -- maybe there's a training video, starring someone with smeary make-up.

Now they can't comp the entire night -- because of the third-party way I made the reservation -- but there will be a full hot breakfast etc ... And this isn't really good enough to make my family proud, but it will do. I can save face.

And what is really good is that I'm not dead.

My 15 Year Old Accidentally Busted for a Moccupy-Occupy Movement

2012-01-31T20:27:00.005-05:00

So it starts benignly. My 15 year old and his friend are waiting to get their pictures taken for Drama Club -- like all of the other clubs in the school. It's cold outside -- not like really cold, Florida-cold but they're uber chilly. So they decide to make a sign to press to the window that reads: "We Demand Entrance!" The friend holds the sign and my son fist-pumps lazily.

Here I should add that this is a private school -- a good, smart, thoughtful type of private school, though it perhaps leans a bit toward the conservative.

The sign miraculously works. They're let in. Buoyed by this successful demand via a sign, they make other signs.

After some embarrassing debate over the correct spelling of the word "OCCUPY," they opt for "We are the 99%." By this, one figures that they meant they were the 99% still waiting to get their club picture taken alongside all the other clubs -- it's a school with a high over-achiever population, lots of clubs.

They go on to create a "Close the gap" sign, making it read "Close the gap between high honor roll and honor roll." (My son teeters on the lower edge of plain honor roll so this was a bold move.)

Now there are many kids with signs and many more in the making.

A young stray English teacher walks by and shouts encouragingly, "Stir the pot, son!"

Things are going well -- so well that when one kid asks my son what he's doing, he answers, "Protesting! This is the beginning of Protest Club!"

Within minutes there's a Facebook page entitled "OCCUPY [Name of School Here]".

Now let's keep in mind who we're dealing with here. Now, my DAUGHTER, well, she aspires to be pepper-sprayed, but this one? No. He's here not to OCCUPY but to MOCCUPY -- if you get me.

So eventually, the person in charge of organizing the photography of all the clubs at this school shouts at my son, "Gentlemen! Put the sign down!" BUT the best part is this: this teacher had a bullhorn on him. A bullhorn! I don't know why or how the organization of photographing clubs required a bullhorn -- or perhaps he'd just strolled in from some bullhorn specific event.

But there it was. My son in a Moccupy Moment was yelled at through a bullhorn. A thing of beauty, a memory to behold forever. He was ORDERED TO STAND DOWN THROUGH A BULLHORN!

(My daughter, on the other hand, would have spearheaded a NORMA RAE moment.)

But my actor son put his sign down, shrugged, and posed for his Drama Club photo -- which was why he was there in the first place.

When I asked him if I could write about it, he said, "Try to do my bravery justice!" with his fist clenched and raised in the air.

1/2 Dozen for Michael Gills

2012-01-30T23:41:00.012-05:00

Here is a 1/2 Dozen
with my dear friend (from way back)
Michael Gills.
His story collection THE DEATH OF BONNIE AND CLYDE and his novel GO LOVE came out this past year.
(GO LOVE is a triumphant novel that I read early on. Truly wonderful. Click here to read a Q and A with Gills in Psychology Today -- in take a look at his process.)
I adore Gills and his brilliant writerly soul!

HERE GOES:

Current obsessions—literary or otherwise.

I play guitar and sing in a band that is currently working up a cover of Gregg Allman's cover of Sleepy John Estes' "Floating Bridge," this killer blues song from the 30's about a near death experience in muddy water. Allman's version appeared on Youtube just after his own near death from liver failure and subsequent transplant. That edge comes through--his voice shakes, and I believe. Now, I'm rehearsing the song, and it's under my skin, that eerie bridge, the tremolo, what seeps between.

Writing Tip #2.

Get up at 4:30 a.m., turn on your machine, and go. Your inner-censor is turned off then and you can knock out a chunk before the sun even rises--hard to fuck up a day like that. Revise by the hard light of day. In bed by 8:30 p.m. Do it all again.

What kind of child were you, inside of what kind of childhood, and how did it shape you as a writer?

I grew up in the sticks of Lonoke County, Arkansas. None of my people had ever gone to college, much less made it much past the lipstick line at the Maybelline factory, or the driver's seat of a longnose Peterbilt. When my step-father was off wherever he went for months, I built rabbit traps and set them on the thinly winding paths in the fields. They’re naturally curious, rabbits, so no bait was needed–just a box with a trap door, and a little trip stick stuck through a hole. All winter of my eighth-grade year, when Moma got depressed and stayed in bed through Thanksgiving and Christmas, my brother and sisters and I ate like kings–I learned to cook rabbit ten different ways, how to find wild onions and gig bullfrog, trotline catfish. Squirrel and flour dumplings was my brother’s favorite, and we never got too skinny. My friends the Mayfields, Cherokee Indians from the Trail of Tears, poached deer all year long, and there was always a hog in a pen just inside the hill thicket, they’ll eat anything at all, including what’s left of the trotlined catfish and rabbit guts. I suppose I learned early that what you need is always close at hand if you just open your eyes. Poor people either get smart or die. I’ve always heard that rabbit’s good for the brain.

What’s your reading life like? Do you have any current favorites or sleepers that may have flown under our radar?

For about thirty years I've been reading Lao Tzu everyday, and I'm maybe about to get it, though probably not. The Tao that can be spoken of is not the Tao... Humbling stuff, really.

What other jobs have you had -- other than writing or teaching writing? Did one of these help shape you as a writer?

I've poured concrete, roofed, framed, insulated, plumbed, bricked, painted and done trim and fine cabinet work--pretty much the whole shibang of construction, and every one of those jobs is immediately useful to the writer. Then, when you get off work, go fishing, one cast after another over blue water, until the moment comes when the drag flies and you've hooked something ancient and beautiful. I've also worked at a chicken plant which is a bunch of shit--also useful, knowing about that, maybe.

If you teach the craft of writing, why do you do it -- other than cash?

It beats the Jesus out of laying bricks in Lonoke County.

To read more 1/2 Dozens by novelists, essayists, poets,

short story writers, and agents, click on the below.

Justin Manask (agent)

Melissa Senate

Steve Kistulentz

Christopher Schelling (agent)

Elizabeth Stuckey-French

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Karen Salyer McElmurray

Kim Wright

William Giraldi

The Post-Apocalyptic Valentine's Day Card (& Video)

2012-01-30T09:45:00.003-05:00

Okay so, I was at a recent bookseller convention dinner and said jokingly, "Yeah, because PURE is such a great Valentine's Day pick." A couple of days later, I thought -- wait, a post-apocalyptic Valentine's Day card -- that's funny.

So I made up the sentiment, Dave designed it and put it to a printer. Those will ship to independent booksellers ... but what about YOU and YOUR significant dystopian other?

WELL.... we have THIS!!!, created by one of my brilliant offspring (the third one with the blue eyes).

PLEASE feel free to send to your Valentine on 2/14. Meanwhile take a gander.

Let the Extra Materials Begin!

2012-01-30T09:38:00.002-05:00

Here's the link to the UK's site for THE PURE TRILOGY -- did we make a lot of this stuff ourselves? Was our garage a staging area? Did it take over our lives for a while?
Yes, yes, yes.

(More on how this all came together soon ...)

Post-Apocalyptic Writer on the Road ...

2012-01-24T09:43:00.008-05:00

Okay, so PURE pubs in about two weeks, and I've been a post-apocalyptic writer on the road -- and finally kind of getting that I AM, deep down, a person who lives in fear of the apocalypse, perhaps raised that way. (Lo, I have written about my sweet mother, the hyper-phobic matriarch made of the hearty starch of uber-protective love so you know what I'm getting at...)

Item A.

This week in New Orleans walking on Bourbon Street, Dave asked me where I wanted to eat. I said, "How about a place that doesn't have a TB feel to it?"

He said, "You know when people cough like that you don't have to look back to see how it all turned out."

"Right," I said, "right. Don't look back! Stop looking back!"

So, maybe it's just me and I'm kinda prissy and all, but Bourbon and Royal Streets have a kind of Old World ripe-for-a-Black-Plague feel ... which is basically the apocalyptic writer in me surfacing.

Item B.

This week in Dallas, I only wanted to see THE GRASSY KNOLL.

Item C.

And I heard that the tv show Dallas was coming back -- with original actor of J.R. -- but wasn't he shot? I mean, seriously, wasn't that the reverberating phrase of my childhood? The two most ponderous questions of my youth were (correct me if I'm wrong) Where's the beef? and Who shot J.R.? (It was an era of great questioning and deep introspection...)

Item D.

A general observation: In a bookstore, an optimistic writer (a rare specimen, I'd like to meet one some day), will say that if there are no copies of your book, they must have sold out and if they have lots, well then, they really stocked up! The pessimistic writer (a plentiful breed -- like the writer gene and the pessimistic gene are side by side on some lowly part of the chromosome) is going to say if there are none that they didn't even order any and if there are many that no one's buying.

OVERALL:
Listen, I'm writing a lot these days -- bloggishly -- but just not here. I'm doing Q and A's at blogs scattered all over the place. And so I'll be giving random buckshot updates ... but expect no cogent thought here -- not for a while. (Book II of the trilogy, FUSE, is on my desk, marked up with edits from my editor and while not being in traveling salesman mode, I'll be in deep ... very deep...)

New GroupThink vs. the Writer in Isolation -- and a place in between.

2012-01-14T11:12:00.006-05:00

The New York Times ran an oped yesterday, "The Rise of the New GroupThink." I appreciated some parts of it very much -- I especially liked the promise in the title of the author's byline “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.” -- but other parts felt like they were drawing on old models that hadn't actually been erased by the Rise of New GroupThink and the article felt like it was encouraging reverting -- especially as this applies to writers.

But before I dig in, let me first say that I worry about the erosion of the skill of being alone. My students don't seem to ever be truly alone. They walk in, thumbs pumping on phones, and leave, thumbs pumping. First, I worry about the loss of the skill set of relating to people in person. While texting to someone far off, they're ignoring the person sitting next to them in those moments before class starts. It takes me a long time to create a community in a classroom of texting strangers. Work? To get college students to be social?

And then, too, I talk about how and when we humans often get our best ideas -- I talk about Thomas Edison, sitting by a fire with ball bearings in his hands and pie pans below so that when he fell asleep the ball bearings would hit the pie pans and he'd wake up and write whatever he was thinking. I talk about Grant Wood, the painter of "American Gothic," having to leave the city because he got his best ideas while milking cows. Alone. Contemplative. Drifting. Associative thought ... idea.

But, also, once those ideas are hatched and mulled, we talk about them, hash them out, draw maps on the board ... We collaborate. Why? Because the stories are better. I'll explain why ... but first:

As a young writer, I was taught to write in solitude, emerge with something whole, collect criticism, and hole up again. This model broke down for me over time. I found it inefficient and creatively limiting as a writer and as a teacher. It didn't play to my natural instincts and so, over time, I've changed the way I teach writing and the way I write.

Writing a novel -- as the sole author -- is solitary. You can't write 300 pages and not feel alone -- like the sole survivor on a ship at the helm (in a storm, approaching icebergs).

Throughout my life, I've heard writers say that you shouldn't talk about your work -- that it ruins the writing. Maybe this is just a very easy -- almost superstitiously-based -- way to shut up aspiring writers who only want to talk about the project they find themselves hip-deep in -- young writers who really aren't looking for tips and warnings from those who've sailed through a number of storms and hit a fair share of icebergs. (Sometimes it's hard to listen to -- like hearing another person's dream, which sometimes I love and sometimes I loathe.)

But I took it to heart and didn't discuss my work until finished. In a poem, fine. In a short story, doable. In a novel?

I think about when I was studying French in France. Why would I do homework at home? Why not do it on the Metro while surrounded by people who are specialists? I mean wouldn't you do your math homework on the bus if you knew the bus would be filled mathematicians? If I'm surrounded by smart storytellers, why not ask their opinions about a novel that I'm mired in?

When I started to get desperately stuck as a novelist, I began the habit of coming to my husband, rambling about my issue (with little context), and he'd ramble back.

He says one thing and I say, What? Were you even listening? He says something else. I say that won't work ... He says a few more things until I lift my hand and say, "Stop. I got it." Sometimes what I've come up with is related to what he's saying, sometimes not. It's that he's shed a new light on it and I'm seeing different shadows.

I need a fresh head, fresh eyes. Someone not mired in the word by word of it all. He provides.
(I've recently heard novelist Marisa de los Santos talk about a very similar relationship with her husband, children's book author David Teague.)

Just yesterday, I described the entire plot of a novel to my parents -- to the mid section -- and asked them what they thought might happened, told them what I thought might happen, offered options. We talked for well over an hour.

I have a close friend and now a reader I truly trust -- who does this work-for-hire editorially, Heather Whitaker. Early on a project, I ask her what she thinks. Why early? Well, she's brilliant and the work is still really supple in my mind. I'm open to huge suggestions early on.

Am I too open to suggestions? I don't think so. I've always been able to discern -- more or less -- when an idea feels right, on a gut level. Maybe not at first mention, but if it is the right suggestion, it won't go away.

The older I get as a writer, the easier it is for me to throw pages away, sections, even entire novels -- because I don't actually throw them away. I collect them. I put them in my junkyard where they get all kinds of fecund with wear and weather and rot -- until they're good and usable elsewhere. I have faith -- established by experience -- that no writing really goes to waste. If nothing else, it's taught you how to write it -- and that is transferable.

It's harder, however, to convince a writer at work on only their fourth or fifth short story of all time to make major changes once they've written a whole draft of 15 pages. They labored. They don't know it's not a waste.

Some not unusual responses to a story by a young writer:

Wonderful, but it's the plot of a 350 page novel, not a short story. Yes, yes. Nice scenes. One problem, it really starts on page 9. I see what you were going for, but why not tell this story from this other character's point of view? See how it all becomes much more organically suspenseful?

Now, take that same new writer, and ask them to think, jot, collect memories, tie them together, imagine, invent, plot, scheme, map, and then come in with only a first page and an idea for the rest ... well, at that point, they can appreciate the comments above. They're not damning them to start from scratch -- which is what it feels like after the 15 pages of words are committed.

(By the way, I make them go through a very specific process for the first story they write for class. The second story can be written any way they see fit.)

A few other thoughts on the article.

1. I thought that open classrooms were a feature of schools built in the 70s primarily and most of them have since been cordoned off because it was clear they weren't working. (The upper parts have to be kept open a little for circulation, but they're no longer fully open.)

2. Donuts. I think what I'm saying actually fits with what Susan Cain writes here about the donut breaks at Hewlett Packard. Getting halfway through a novel and then asking for other people's thoughts isn't anything close to GroupThink. I'm not writing novels by committee -- see ship above.

But I do believe deeply in the donut! I can stew in my office -- stuck -- endlessly. But if I walk out and talk to Dave, donuts or not, often the confusion lifts and a new tack is found. Yes, I get a lot of ideas when I'm alone. But I've also been very aware of the people I'm with when I get ideas while not alone. Because not all of my ideas are hatched in solitude. (Four kids, two dogs ... alone isn't always easy to come by -- my process hasn't been allowed to be built on concepts like solitude, no interruption, quiet ....)

I've noticed that the grad students here who create smaller critique groups and commit to them over time and geography do well. Books emerge from these clumps of dedicated friends/critics.

The writer in isolation -- good old Walden Pond -- is a very powerful cultural concept. It's still holding strong. NewGroup Think hasn't touched it. And I think, actually, that some writers might benefit from some interaction. One could at least try a discussion as an experiment with a fellow writer you know and trust -- especially if brooding lonesomely and fully stuck.

Something I'll Never Forget.

2012-01-11T20:38:00.005-05:00

There are moments that you recognize in your life as ones in which you see the future -- and it's here -- and you realize, even as you're experiencing the moment, that you'll remember where you were and who you were with and, vaguely, the damp stain of emotion.

This is how it started. Yesterday someone sent me a link to a book app. I didn't know what a book app was, exactly, but it was for kids, had won awards; we have an iPad. I sent the link to Dave and told him we should buy it. $4.99, not much of an investment, and made by the man who brought us Wilbur Robinson. We were in good hands -- William Joyce's hands.

I worked late and Dave "read" to Oti before bed. When I saw Dave that night, he said, "Jules, it's amazing. The book, the movie. You have to see it."

Cool, I thought, exhausted, and went to bed.

I woke up to my 4 year old's face. "I want to watch the book movie."

"What?"

"The book movie! I want to watch the book movie!"

I came to and figured it out. The kid was set up with the iPad, the day drove on. Dave took the iPad with him on the way to pick Oti up from preK because watching it on the way home was something that had been properly pleaded for. My parents watched the book movie with Oti in the afternoon. And then finally, it's bedtime and my turn to read to Oti.

My eleven year old showed up too. And we read it together. But there is no reading. There's a short animated, word-less film (though filled with words) and then a version where the book narrates to you with words on the page. The story itself is stunning, emotional, beautiful. I cried at the end -- so moved by it. (If you're wrecked every time you see the life-set-to-music section of UP, you'll cry here too.)

The pages are all touchable -- and I'm pretty sure you have to be with a kid to know how they all work. The kids can spell things out, play the piano, make things fly and talk and dance and turn day to night, change the seasons, rotate a house in a twister ...

Right now, my two youngest are playing with certain pages found in the book or film or movie book, as Oti calls it.

I watched The Making Of which fascinates -- the back story of Hurricane Katrina, the inspiration from old films, the emotional range of the simple music, the artistry of it all.

In case you want to know what I'm raving about ... HERE. Check it out [child not required].

Oddly enough, 15 years ago today, I gave birth to this person.

2012-01-10T09:41:00.004-05:00

Weirdest thing. I gave birth to this person. Finneas Scott. Today, he turns 15.

He was a hilarious-looking baby -- cheeky and purposeful, a brooding baby -- one that seemed like he was contemplating a foreign film. We were once asked to leave the audience of a small crowd gathered in a coffee shop around an acapella singing group because his intense stare was making it hard for the singers to keep a straight face.

An incredible memory for film lines, he turned to us at two and repeated his first, "You can't change the past, Buster," from Arthur and very profound.

At three, he'd coined the joyful phrase (always to be shouted as loudly as possible), "Het da day!" It's best said if raising a sword or wearing a cape. We don't really know what it means -- but we do. I mean, Het da day! It's self-explanatory.

Put on his first peewee soccer league in Newark, Delaware -- at four or five or so -- he spent his time trying to corral the other kids into playing the roles he'd mapped out for them -- Batman, Robin, Joker. On his first baseball team, he twisted his cap and wore it upright and convinced others to do the say -- as part of super-hero headgear.

He said the word Batman so much that it was his younger brother's first word.

When teaching Finn French as a little kid, he would only say, "Je m'appelle Robin."

After French camp one summer, he said, exasperated, "The French! They have a different word for EVERYTHING!"

And at the end of a long day of Vacation Bible Camp, he said, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. It's all they ever talk about."

And now?

Well, he's passionate. I mean, he loves the movie Inception so much that he's made me swear not to be critical of the third act -- ever -- which I'd discuss here (even briefly) but I'm not allowed.

This past week, while watching the opening of Midnight in Paris -- no credits, only shots of Paris to music -- he said, "If Woody Allen plays the credits over the actors' faces, I'm going to be pretty annoyed." And then Woody Allen plays credits over a black screen while the actors are talking. "Really? Oh, come on!" (I'd have never noticed.)

He went to districts in acting this past week and ran into a kid faking a British accent, girls flocking around the kid. Finn knew the kid was faking. So he walked up and shook his hand and said in a pretty sweet British accent, "I'm from just outside of Manchester. You?" And the kid buckled. And then they engaged in an Accent-Off.

He wanted to create a quotable line, so he worked, really honed it and came up with, "It's not our enemy's victory that defeats us. It's our own loss." You have to say it in a deep voice, slowly -- a mix between General Douglas MacArthur and Vince Lombardi, a man among men... and maybe some Barry White.

He's funny -- really truly funny, deep down, and right on the surface of his skin, funny. He's sweet -- a wonderful brother. He's smart. He's disarming. He's been in a lot of FSU Film School films and he's fierce on screen -- because you see what's inside of him -- and he is lit up from within -- a bright and brilliant soul.

Happy Birthday, my son, Finneas Scott.

And, as always, het da day!

New Year's Resolution? More Resolutions. More Resolve.

2012-01-01T10:37:00.012-05:00

So if most New Year's Resolutions fade out in a month or two, a couple weeks, or, let's face it, never even really get much traction at all then I've got an idea...

My New Year's Resolution is along the lines of the person who gets three wishes and asks for unlimited wishes with the third wish. My Resolution is to resolve weekly. In other words, I want to back up every week, take a longer view, and decide if my resolve has failed and make a re-resolution or figure out what new resolve I need and make a new resolution.

I like resolutions. Maybe it's kind of Catholic of me -- it feels like it goes back to my uber Catholic middle school years when I chose my confirmation name, Joan of Arc (not just Joan, the whole thing). I've also heard that vows are quite Buddhist, and that in the Buddhist tradition if you break a vow, you simply recommit. Makes sense. More vows keep you focused -- more so than one broken resolution that, well, kinda gets you off the hook.

2011 was one of the most challenging years of my life -- in particular the second half.

Professionally? I've gotten to work with some of the most brilliant minds I've ever come across -- company so creative that, honestly, I don't know that I deserve to be in it.

Personally? It's been hard. Our family suffered a trauma -- from the outside in -- and it's taken us a while to feel safe again. Over the course of it, I miscarried. I have to say that we also felt an outpouring of love and support from our friends and family. One day, I might write about what happened. We got to see some ugliness in humanity but also incredible beauty and courage.

I said to Dave last night, "I think we feel freshly pistol whipped, but there's an adrenal rush that comes after getting beaten, right?" We've got adrenal, resolve to push forward. Last night, Dave dreamed of finding a multi-tiered waterfall off of a highway filled with outlet malls and fast-food chains -- he'd driven by it many times and just never noticed it before. There are things we need to see, but we need to look for them if we're to lay eyes on them. Eyes wide.

We're gearing up for big changes in 2012, again, personal ones. We're making resolutions first and foremost about how best to raise our kids -- in a sometimes brutal and cruel world; we're resolving to live by our convictions; we're resolving to be bold, professionally (so much I want to do visually, narratively, weirdly, fiercely... gloves off, literary handcuffs gone); and we resolve to have faith that we can't know the future, only seek to create the best possible one. To struggle toward it. Day by day. Resolution to resolution.

We resolve to have more resolve.

A Found Journal & A Note to Writer-Parents of Young Children

2011-12-30T09:32:00.005-05:00

What we really did this winter break? We cleaned out our house. Some of you who know me are laughing -- hard -- right now. I've always said that cleaning is a form of oppression. In fact, there's a poem in Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees called "Poetry Despises Your Attempts at Domesticity" that gets to the heart of the matter. I can't as of yet explain WHY I've broken down and set the household into a frenzy ... but ... in that frenzy Dave unearthed (in addition to aforementioned Baby Jesus in a Triscuit box) my old journal from grad school and a Creative Process journal that was assigned in my screenwriting course.

The 9/5/92 entry reads: How does the process work? You collect things... I had no idea that it started for me that early. It's exactly the way I'd start my answer to the question today.

The journal starts with letters to Dave, weirdly. I was on a trip with a childhood friend. It starts on 12/30/92 and the first line is It's such a luxury to be only me, known not presented. (We'd spent the holidays introducing each other to family and friends.)

The journal collapses over time. Eventually there are no more dates only quick jottings, lists of characters' names (Ogden, Cappage ...), bits of those things I'd collected to make stories from, notes in the margins where I say what I'm doing wrong ("Nothing works because setting is only a casement...").

There's a gap of over a year, it seems. It's '95. I'm married and have a baby.

The last written paragraph in the journal appears only half-way through the book. It sits alone at the top of a page. It reads, "I'm writing 2 stories at the same time. They're both ended but incomplete -- the baby just woke up + I'm thinking no not possible -- no. C'MON!"

The baby woke up and there were more babies and more wakings. But I kept writing, two stories at a time, leaving pages empty to take care of kids -- abandoning journals, abandoning this small extra step of clarity, learning to do it in my head and on scraps of paper, finding some small measure of time to write and write and write ...

(Note: New Parents -- there are times when you're doing this labor, this work -- the baby's head sweaty as he falls asleep on your chest, the cutting of fruit into small pieces -- where your mind can untether and drift and words are there and images and characters, story. Find scraps. Take notes. Still -- somehow -- try to hunt and capture time to write. Remember, too, that on the other side of young children, you'll still have to work to find time. The world doesn't just hand it over to you. Time. I won't say what everyone says to you -- cashiers and deli clerks and bankers -- those parents of older children you run into, day in and day out -- It goes so fast. I won't because you already know and the truth is it goes fast at an incrementally slow pace. If nothing else, practice living doubly -- being in your life, the thick of it, and observing it in fine detail. Note it. Jot. Untether sometimes and let stories come to you. The thing is, the more you engage in this raising of children -- really live it with all of your senses and love and fears -- the more prime you are to dig deep, as a writer. So let yourself go deep as a parent. It goes so fast. Let these babies mine your souls. It goes so fast. Your work will be the richer for it.)

Happy Holidays -- and a writerly gift.

2011-12-25T10:23:00.009-05:00

First off, HERE is a gift to my fellow writers out there -- really a gift from THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY -- but one that'll hopefully brighten and rev 2012.

Oh, and gift to give yourself? Go see the new SHERLOCK HOLMES GAME OF SHADOWS while it's still in theaters. There's this scene where someone loads a bomb called Little Hansel and then there's this incredible scene of the people running from the wreckage in a forest. I didn't know whether I was watching a film, really, or lush children's book illustrations or CGI or oil paintings in motion -- just gorgeous sumptuous heart-thudding beauty in motion. AND ... years from now when these films are classics and people watch them, they'll ask, "Did audiences back then know that there was such lurid attraction between Holmes and Watson?" I can only answer for myself. "Um, yeah. I think we got it."

Brilliant stuff.

Some Holiday Quotatiousness:

The 4-year-old is playing Santa and Mrs. Clause. The 15 year old says, "Santa, you ARE real!" And then quickly amends, "Not that there's been any speculation about your existence!"

The 4-year-old keeps worrying about getting chalk for Christmas. "Would it be THAT bad to get sidewalk chalk as a stocking stuffer?" Finally, I realize that by chalk she means coal and reassure that there will be no coal (or sidewalk chalk, which might be just as bad). (In retrospect, there's a lot of naughty list talk in Elf.)

The 4-year-old refers to our manger scenes as "the Jesus sets." And as we set them up this year, we realized that we're low on baby Jesuses. Historically, the kids play with the sets and the babies tend to disappear and end up being taken care of by a Barbie in the wooden dollhouse. Later, one of the Baby Jesuses is found -- manger and all -- in an empty Triscuit box on my 11 year old's dresser, accompanied by Mardi-Gras beads and monopoly money.

(Here's a link provided by my college roommate -- the 27 worst Manger Scenes of all time. I'm most disturbed by those that are edible.)

(4 year olds DOMINATE the season, if you haven't noticed.)

I get one of the kids a handshake buzzer, the kind you wear like a ring that sits in your palm and buzzes people when shaking hands. Why? I don't know. "It's like an old-fashioned wind-up taser," one of the kids says. Not exactly what I had in mind. (Did I HAVE something -- anything -- in mind when I bought it? Blind panic stocking stuffer shopping...)

4 year old threw up the morning after Christmas -- the start of a little stomach bug. One of the older kids asks how she's doing. She says, "I didn't get many Christmas presents."
"Is that why you threw up? Just not enough gifts?"
"I got all this little pieces of stuff."
"And a Barbie Jumbo Jet?"
"Oh. I got that too."

Ho ho ho.

Trying to Explain Snow to a 4 year old Floridian

2011-12-23T10:28:00.002-05:00

She's watching a Christmas show. An elf comes out and measures the snow -- it gets deeper and deeper, inching up the measuring stick.

She says, "Look, they're sinking!"

"No, the snow is coming down from the sky and getting deeper and deeper." I give some hand gestures to explain it, getting pretty elaborate.

She says, "I don't get it."

Snow. We need to get this kid some snow.

Newark, Delaware: An Unlikely Love Song

2011-12-23T09:56:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, I want to go home. My homing device is set on one place: Newark, Delaware. Does it inspire many love songs? No. It's not windy; it's not a lot of people's idea of their "kind of town." It's a city that does sleep -- a lot.

Coming up, I was jealous of writers from New Jersey -- at least New Jersey held a placeholder in the American psyche.

Sometimes, growing up, the Chrysler plant would start to stink and my parents would call it in. Now the Chrysler plant is gone.

The creek that I loved as a kid, running behind the neighbors' houses was really just street run-off, but I loved the oily rainbows.

Delaware brought us George Thorogood and Valerie Bertinelli and the dead-pan girl from Parks and Rec.

It IS quaint. It has a little Main Street, now likely lit up with wreaths strung to the telephone poles.

Poe slept at the Deer Park. They keep a stuffed raven on display.

Sometimes I think of the sign out in front of the Travel Lodge that read: Lordy, Lordy, Gordy's 40 -- and I think, damn, Gordy must be closing in on 60 now.

It's where I was a kid, growing up in a yellow house with ivy, snugged up against the heating ducts.

It's where I was dirt poor with the man I love.

It's where 75% of my babies were born.

When my first book came out, it was, at a glance, like the local bookstore (Rainbow Books) was only selling one book. Hundreds of copies were displayed in the front window. And about 400 people came to the signing -- including the two postmen who worked the desk at the Main Street branch, Tom and Jerry -- who took a ribbing while standing in line, after years of all of us standing in their line. They were mentioned in the acknowledgments pages because sometimes I'd ask them to put a little extra love into those packages I sent off. The town was good to me.

Still, I can walk downtown and meet people I haven't seen since I was little -- from a Brownie troop, a bad date, a part-time job in a deli, one of my kids' preschools ...

It's a place where, when I'm there, I live in layers.

I'm not saying Newark, Delaware will burrow into every person's heart, but it's in mine.

1/2 Dozen for Jerri Chaplin

2011-12-22T01:23:00.004-05:00

A debut collection by Jerri Chaplin -- Vertically Coastal -- made its way to me, circuitously. And here's a Q and A with the wonderfully warm Jerri herself.

Enjoy.

Current obsessions—literary or otherwise.

My current slightly-less-than-obsession is the movie “The Descendants.” It is about and was filmed in Hawaii where I grew up. Director Alexander Payne portrays the real thing, not a plastic paradise or stupid tourist/umbrella drinks scene. This movie inspired me to seek out Hawaii friends I had not spoken to in years. I bought the CD/score of the great Hawaiian music and will play it often.

What’s your advice to someone who’s fallen in love with a writer?

You have to have a life of your own plus be a support system; it’s a delicate balance (for example, my husband has an electric train set and works, too). You need to have great patience and realize your beloved can be moody, crave solitude, and may see a red cabbage where you see a crumpled trash bag. Know not to chatter when they’re writing and don’t take anything personally unless told to! Don’t accept B.S., abuse or statements like “I can’t stop drinking, I’ll lose my talent.” Writers are good manipulators with imagination to boot.

What other jobs have you had—other than writing or teaching writing? Did one of these help shape you as a writer?

I had an 18 year career writing in advertising and P.R. This made me a relentless editor. I was driven to pack as much punch in as few words as possible. I also developed business skills and etiquette such as returning phone calls ASAP and my career was all about marketing which has been invaluable to me as a writer, I don’t live only on planet poetry; I function in the world of business and reality (ugh).

Was there an extremely influential writing teacher who was impactful on your writing life?

Absolutely. My adored Dr. Duane Yee at Punahou School in Honolulu. In eighth grade, he wrote on top of my paper “You really can write!” Seriously? I kept these words and took them out at times when I felt I had no talent. Dr. Yee and I keep in touch.

Are you a writer of place? Is place always one of your main characters?

Yes, because place shapes persona. Vertically Coastal is all about living 7 months in Charleston, SC, and 5 in the Berkshire Mtns. of MA. The places differ and I am different in each one. Hawaii, my growing-up place, definitely impacted my character and personality. I’ve lived in Israel and Ireland, both of which I love. As a Jew, Israel is my spiritual home.

What’s your worst writerly habit?

I am terrible with punctuation and line breaks. I’ve worked at this consciously since 1996, with no improvement. I always need a good editor!

Jerri Chaplin is a poet and certified poetry therapist in her birthplace, Charleston, S.C. She grew up in Honolulu and in 1970 received a B.A. in English from the University of the Pacific in California. Her love of Irish poetry, particularly that of W.B. Yeats, took her to Ireland many times for study and work. Her poetry has been published in anthologies and in a 2010 book, Pictures of Change. She has won a number of prizes for her work and has given numerous readings. Her new book, Vertically Coastal, will be launched October 2011 by Planet Media Books. Her loves are her family, including a Shetland Sheepdog, friends, poetry and dance.

Website: http://jerrichaplin.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Jerrichaplinpoet

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Vertically-Coastal-Poems-Jerri-Chaplin/dp/1614680329/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1324535499&sr=8-1

To read more 1/2 Dozens by novelists, essayists, poets,

short story writers, and agents, click on the below.

Justin Manask (agent)

Melissa Senate

Steve Kistulentz

Christopher Schelling (agent)

Elizabeth Stuckey-French

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Karen Salyer McElmurray

Kim Wright

William Giraldi

For My Brother whom I love so damn much. Happy Birthday.

2011-12-17T11:49:00.003-05:00

My brother's birthday looming, I've been wanting to write something, well, something worthy of him. I realized today that I already have written a brotherly Bill Baggott tribute -- never posted before. (It appears in my collection COMPULSIONS OF SILKWORMS AND BEES.) Is it wrong -- under the frenzy of the holidays and having been away for 10 days -- to use it again here? Cheating?

It's called "The Stolen Poem: My Brother Poem after Levine’s 'What Work Is'". As I recall, the form here is that I take one word from each of line of Levine's beautiful poem written for his brother and I use it to write a poem to my own brother.

And so here goes. A poem for Bill Baggott -- whom I admire and love so damn much. Happy Birthday.

The Stolen Poem: My Brother Poem
after Levine’s “What Work Is”

He won’t admit to rain,
only a break in the sun to wait out.
For now, a mist. His kids slip through the park gate,
Almost old, my brother’s blond whitens.
Work doesn’t exist, only a hearty laugh, damp grass.
He forgets everything but the children, the gate,
for a moment, a shift of sentimentality.
He has five kids—he should be toughened—but his eyes mist,
the risen blur of love.
I see him now, from a distance,
his ruddy cheeks, sloppy pants, chins, tinged mustache.
Unlike other men who turn sour, joyless,
who narrow to a staircase soul,
he grins, beams, a search-light,
and, too, the stubborn ulcer hidden,
his refusal of anger alive and livid,
the pooled sting of sleepless hours.
Saturday, it will lead somewhere.
My brother will wait for it to unwind
amid the no-no of children, jazz, scotch.
He won’t play the hired man today.
He reasons loneliness the opposite of love,
asks for company, stands joyful, sings in a crowd,
a flooding love. He swells with it.
Once he traveled beside bluesmen,
far from home, the sour stink of reeds, horns,
hotel sheets. It became a miserable moan of sax.
He hitched a ride in a Cadillac, east,
recalls now only the old German on trumpet,
his jowly face pursed to bawl. Hours turn,
Saturday, an opera he doesn’t try to understand.
He hates to read: It invents a different world,
and he always prefers his own. But music,
oh, how it moves beside you, within,
shoulders the day. He doesn’t close
his eyes to it, but allows its kiss.
A simple benediction. An obvious gift.
He is no longer young and dumb.
His meanness has atrophied to a splinter of bone.
Incapable of drifting beyond,
he adores all of us, this presence,
because we are and he is.

My Favorite Two-Star Review.

2011-12-06T10:10:00.004-05:00

Listen, I know it's my job to post all the positive reviews and glowing accolades and blurbs-of-admiration, but why not the flip side? Seriously, PURE has gotten more pre-publication buzz than maybe all 17 of my other books combined. You can check all of that out here. But no novel is beloved by all. A good book has to be distinctive enough that it doesn't appeal to everyone.

Lately, I've been thinking about the distinctions between the traditional review -- written by a fellow novelist, critic, scholar -- and the online review written by a reader. The first has to answer, perhaps: Is this book worthy? They have to take the book on its own terms and try to gauge its effectiveness. The reader-reviewer is answering a more personal question: Did I like it?

To answer the first question -- is this book worthy? -- the critic has to put some of their own personal feelings aside and judge the book's merit. Sometimes they also love the book, but that's not the point.

To answer the second question -- did I like it? -- the reader-reviewer isn't asked to judge its merit but talk about their own reaction to the book.

Or so it seems to me.

Some reader-reviewers are truly adept at writing critical reviews about the merits and failings of a book with great insight. I appreciate those takes.

What frustrates me sometimes is when a reader-reviewer slams a book because it's simply not the book they wanted. For example, a reader-reviewer ofter veers into the Is this book worthy territory when they say: This book sucked! Don't waste your time! But when they add: It didn't have ANY vampires in it! Well, that's frustrating, especially if the book jacket makes no mention of vampires whatsoever...

Or the reviewer who writes, I hated the jacket. I hated the first chapter. I hated the whole book. Why didn't you stop at the jacket or first chapter? To fuel your discontent? For the love of all things holy, stop reading books you immediately detest.

Or like the reviewer who slammed my book for 9-12 year olds saying something like -- I guess I should start out by saying that my 8 year old daughter loved this book, but I really didn't like it at all... She just found it too juvenile. Um, she's probably around thirty. The book was actually written for her 8 year old daughter... for juveniles.

I've seen a review that said something like, This book was okay, but not half as good as the publishers think it is. Well, actually, it's kind of the publisher's job to believe in the book that they're trying to sell. I mean, as an author, I'd be pretty upset if a publishing house took on a book of mine and then wrote ad copy like: This book is okay. I mean, it's not going to be a serious contender for the National Book Award, but we decided it could get some good advance praise and might hit its target market.

Basically, there's this disconnect. There are so many examples of these disconnected reviews -- ones that blur Is it worthy? and Did I like it? If you want some fun, go look up the literary classics you've loved and read some of the Amazon reviews...

I should add that I've worked as a reviewer a bit, and I'm not good at it. I don't like being critical in the ways that the seriously well-written review demands. I get nervous trying to place a book into a larger literary landscape. I've read too many reviews of my own books claiming that I was seriously influenced by writers I've never read.

And there was one review that I'll never forget, that really stopped me from writing literary fiction for some time -- years, in fact. I became, perhaps, the most prolific novelist to have writer's block. My writer's block was very specific and I wrote around it -- in other genres.

I've been waiting -- without knowing I was waiting -- for the negative review that said the words I wanted to hear: This book just wasn't for me. This is what I say of books that I don't like. I admire books I don't like -- ones that I can find to be full of literary merit. I teach certain novels because they're so important, iconic, essential to the discussion of fiction -- whether I like them or not. And I help young writers achieve works of great promise -- deepening their own unique voices -- even if I don't like the characters myself or if I'm not drawn to the plot on a very personal level. Those things are moot. My own personal feelings about the book don't matter. I'm trying to draw out the best possible work from my student.

So, I was DELIGHTED when someone brought my attention to THIS two-star review. The last paragraph includes those words I've longed to hear:

"Even though I couldn't connect . . . doesn't mean you won't. Don't get me wrong, there's still a lot to like about this book but like I stated above, it just wasn't the right book for me. PURE is a dark, gritty and sometimes a disturbing novel, and I'm sure a lot of readers with a profound love of the Hunger Games, Matched and the likes of Divergent will eat this baby up, and become a classic young adult hit. "

Let me repeat: It just wasn't the right book for me. She wasn't being a critic and answering: Is it worthy? She was answering: Did I like it? And, too, she positioned the book in the larger literary landscape for other readers. She gave it two-stars -- for personal reasons and she makes those reasons clear. This seems like the difference between those two kinds of reviews, that divide, and I'm fine with it because she's upfront about her take. I felt like hugging the reviewer -- virtually, of course.

I have a lot to say about the evolution (revolution) of reviewing that's happened over the course of my career. But, for now, this is a little moment of odd two-star gratitude.

Baggott is Goading You This Holiday Season, Bookishly.

2011-12-02T11:08:00.003-05:00

Listen, we spend the year bemoaning the death of literature, the short attention span of America's youth, the end of reading as we know it ... whine, whine, whine.

But what are we doing to build the next generation of readers? And I'm not talking about the kids with bookshelves already standing -- full and overloading -- in their bedrooms. I'm talking about the kids who don't have books, the kids who aren't cracking open books and disappearing into worlds....

If the book is there, they will eventually crack that book open. If the books aren't there? Well, chances are that they won't be reading them.

Books in the home is a primary indicator for literacy. Let's work this.

"But, Baggott," you say, "how do we get books to those kids? Huh? How?"

Actually, it's really simple.

HERE ARE THE 7 SIMPLE STEPS:

1. Get a box.

2. Put that box in front of your office door.

3. Send an email telling people it's there and encouraging them to put children's books (new and lightly used) into the box.

4. Go to schooldigger.com. Look for the schools in your area that are scoring low, that have a high number of kids who qualify for Free & Reduced Lunches. Call one of the schools and ask if they're Title I.

5. If yes, ask to talk to the media specialist or reading coach. Tell them you have free books for their kids -- just to give away, or to help stock the library shelves.

6. They will say: Bring it on!

7. Bring the books on.

There's also another way -- a simpler version.

1 SIMPLE STEP

Write a check and send it to Kids in Need - Books in Deed:

The FSU Foundation
C/O Kids in Need - Books in Deed, Fund #0430
2010 Levy Avenue
PO Box 3062739
Tallahassee, FL 32306-2739

We'll buy books for kids in the state of Florida and help set up author-donated school visits (complete with free books).

And I'm thinking up a New Year's Resolution in which I relentlessly goad other Creative Writing Programs into a competitive book drive . Other programs: beware.

Entertainment Weekly Gets Exclusive of PURE Book Trailer

2011-11-28T14:20:00.001-05:00

Entertainment Weekly gets the exclusive look at the book trailer for PURE. The trailer was shot by same team who did the recent trailer for Stephen King's JFK book -- and I love the shout to Lisbeth Salander in GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO.

Feel free to send this on to people ...

I'm Married to a 46 Year Old Man.

2011-11-28T11:28:00.002-05:00

I'm married to a 46-year-old man? Shocking, I know. (I'm so young! What would we ever have in common? I mean an entire 4-year difference!) Crazier still, I'm in love with him.

So, here are some things you might not know about Dave Scott.

He can give a half-time speech to a middle school soccer team that's never won a game in the school's history -- a speech so beautiful and inspiring that it can make grown men cry.

For better or for worse, he sings -- with a Tourette-ish insistence -- throughout the day.

He once rammed a luggage rack on wheels through a revolving door at a hotel -- got stuck for a panic-stricken moment in the middle -- and finally burst through to the other side.

Excellent at Scrabble, he flounders at Charades -- once acting out a sounds-like for Fancy and Poo to lead us to Nancy Drew.

He has a weakness for Nikes.

We spend every day together, pretty much. And even at the end of those days, we still feel like we need time to talk.

I miss him sometimes when he's in the other room and we follow each other -- talking -- throughout the house.

On our first date, he made me dinner. At the end, he asked me what I wanted for dessert -- as if, back in his kitchen, he had every dessert known to man. I said, "I like chocolate and I like cheesecake." He only had one dessert, in fact. A chocolate cheesecake.

Because he has such a common name, I once asked him if he'd ever wished he'd had a more exciting name when he was a kid. He said, "Yes. I always wanted to be named Jeff."

His French is good enough to explain -- in great detail -- to non-English-speaking cops how exactly we got robbed.

He is the Patron Saint of Lost Abs. Seriously, he's as fit as the day I met him, which can be irritating (four babies later).

Sometimes I make him sing to me -- really cheesy stuff. And he does.

One time, I told him that he was my Starsky. And he said, "Really? I've always fancied myself a David Soul type."

When he drops me off at work (he drives me because I don't like to drive and because it gives us time to talk) -- and especially when work's been a little fraught -- he shouts out, "Be cavalier!"

When he's in a funk, all I want to do is gaze at him.

When he's asleep, he looks exactly the same as the day I met him.

He invented the term "Hug the Bear" and would really love to see it take off.

Every night, I say, "Do you think everything's going to be alright?" And he says, "Yes." And I can then try to fall asleep.

Happy Birthday, Dave Scott -- or Jeff -- my Starsky (or Hutch).

And, of course, Hug the Bear!

A few more Dave Scott snapshots:

My Valentine:
http://bridgetasher.blogspot.com/2011/02/my-valentine-i.html

The Long Marriage:
http://bridgetasher.blogspot.com/2011/06/18-years-marriage.html

Through Loss:
http://bridgetasher.blogspot.com/2011/04/on-loss.html

Is the UK Still Down on Teaching Writing?

2011-11-26T09:41:00.006-05:00

Here's a piece in The Guardian. The old worn-out debate on whether or not you can teach creative writing is the topic thrown at the UK. Visit the comment boxes -- well written responses that strike me as so very sad. This ran on May 9th of THIS YEAR.

Electricians can have mentors, can take classes, can have a master electrician's ear, can study, can have guided practice ... but not writers? They have to do it alone? And the master electrician can be paid to train younger electricians -- as well as master theologians, philosophers, lawyers, podiatrists, large-animal veterinarians... -- but if writers become part of the system of higher education -- creating those mentoring relationships -- we're taking advantage of wannabes and the university is just trying to make a buck?

This strikes me as so sad. The comments are so outdated. The arguments are those old ones -- feeble and bound up in so many ideas of what writers are like, the mythology, instead of the basics.

I remember the first time I heard MFA programs existed. I wanted to write. I wanted to talk to other writers about writing, writers, books. I wanted to know how lit mags worked. I wanted to go to readings. I wanted to have mentors, guides ... A place existed for me to do just this. I was going. Is that so baffling?

And did all of the people in my MFA program become writers? No. But many, many have published books and most have gone into some kind of writerly profession -- editor of magazines and books, ghost writer, communication director, teacher of writer/literature, one started her own press and acts as publisher...

Also, as a more experienced writer and poet now, if I didn't have an outlet to hand down some of the hard-won things I've learned as a writer, I'd feel so much less useful in the world. A young novelist can ask me about three options of narration they're thinking about, and in ten minutes I can explain the upsides and downsides of each of their options -- the challenges, the risks, the rewards. I've been down the roads they're heading down. I'm reporting the conditions. They can choose.

Writers teaching in their homelands, growing young writers helps create a sense of time, place, history in a geography. Writers becoming mentors, writers reaching out to the younger generations...why are these bad things?

A bad mentor of writing is bad. A bad mentor of the art of being an electrician is bad. But a great writing mentor? Why not facilitate those relationships?

I don't understand the deep territorial ire around the subject of can writing be taught. Is it that we want to elevate our writers as having been kissed on the brain by God? Is it that we want to cling to the myth of inspiration? Is it that we want to find a way around the truth that writers learn their craft like everyone else -- by asking questions, finding answers, practicing. In other words, they work.

Ruth Stone (1915-2011)

2011-11-24T12:32:00.003-05:00

I heard Ruth Stone read alongside Sharon Olds about ten years ago. Olds read first. Dressed as a Sunday school teacher who might at any point whip out guitar, Olds surprised me -- I'd been expecting someone less tame in appearance. She joked that she'd been left at train stations and airports because the people sent to pick her up for readings simply didn't recognize her.

To be honest, I'd come for Olds. I assume most in the audience had. Stone, for whatever reasons, has been lost to the larger poetry audience. Her poetry, in recent years, has finally started to garner the kind of respect it's deserved for a long time. She won the National Book Award at 87.

If we were ignorant in that auditorium (I certainly was), Olds clearly understood the importance of Stone's work. She introduced Stone -- with great unbridled admiration. I remember Stone as unassuming and, yes, old -- even ten years ago. Her poems were forces of nature.

For those of you who've seen Elizabeth Gilbert's TED Talk, you probably remember how Stone described her poetic process to Gilbert; when as a child working the fields, Stone would feel and hear a poem “coming at her from over the landscape, like a thunderous train of air.” “She’d have to run like hell to the house” to write it down, but didn’t always catch it. Sometimes it would almost escape her, then she’d reach out and “catch the poem by the tail,” “perfect and intact, but backwards, from the last word to the first” (For more on Stone, check out Rosanne Wasserman's 2009 blog post: http://groundwater-zanne.blogspot.com/2009/11/normal-0-0-1-1126-6421-university-of.html)

In her poem "1941," she writes:

"Oh mortal love, your bones

were beautiful. I traced them

with my fingers. Now the light

grows less. You were so angular.

The air darkens with steel

and smoke. The cracked world

about to disintegrate,

in the arms of my total happiness."

I wish Ruth Stone a peaceful passage from this world of mortal love into the arms of total happiness.

Deep Q for the Kids & Something to be Thankful For

2011-11-24T00:02:00.001-05:00

It struck me, recently, to ask my kids to think of themselves 20 years from now and to look back on their childhoods from that vantage point and try to think of how they'd want my parenting to have been different. Basically, why wait until they're in their 30s and throw something at me? Why not get that now so that I can actually parent better, more individually?

Now, this isn't my first hypothetical thrown at the kids. I make up questions for the kids -- and on long car rides they can be elaborate questionnaires asked and answered aloud, steamrolling fasion ... about their futures, their plans, the person they may marry one day, careers, lives... I love talking about this stuff with the kids and, actually, I think it helps us get to some important issues and, of course, it gets them thinking about the future, concretely, which is a good thing to do ... setting goals, moving toward it ... actually thinking about the traits of the person you'd like to build a life with.

So here are my kids' answers to THIS question.

11 year old thinks and says, "I wish you'd taught me Spanish when I was younger."

"I don't speak Spanish."

"You could have arranged it."

"But remember how I tried to teach you French -- the words taped to objects in the house? The trip to France? Bastien giving you all lessons, the books, the flashcards..." He stares at me. "Okay, okay. I'm being defensive. I got it. That's valid. You want a Spanish tutor now?"

"No. Definitely not."

I ask the 14 year old the question.

He stares at me. "Okay ... Honestly?'

"Of course."

"I'd like you not to ask us deep questions like this. I don't care for them."

"You don't care for them? But, I'm so good at them... the elaborate questionnaires on the long car rides... the steamrolling conversations ... "

"Nope. I don't like 'em and twenty years from now I'm going to wish you hadn't asked them."

"Okay... but, but ..." I give. "Okay."

I ask the four-year-old. Not sure the term regret will register, I ask if there's anything I should be doing differently.

Lit up, "YES!"

I'm a little surprised by the enthusiasm. "What would that be?"

"Bring me lots of toys!"

"You get toys for Christmas and your birthday."

"All the time."

Got it.

I ask the 16 year old.

"I don't know."

I told her what the 11 year old said about Spanish, the four year old on toys,and the 14 year old said about deep questions.

"Oh, no. I like the deep questions. I just need some time ..."

And the way she says she needs some time makes me a little worried. Is it going to be a long list? She's a thoughtful kid with very high standards. (Something I've learned in the long car-ride questionnaires...) What exactly should I be waiting for? Was this really such a good idea?

A few weeks later, my daughter says, "I think we should watch The Daily Show as a family. Make it a nightly tradition."

"I'm not sure we can do that." I mean, a trusted news source, of course, but mandatory?

"Well, then, that will be my deep regret."

And so there you have it. Not enough toys, not enough early foreign language development (Seriously! I sent kids to French camp!), not enough mandatory Jon Stewart, and too many deep questions.

I can live with this. And that's something to be THANKFUL for.

If Your Child Were Attending UC Davis.

2011-11-21T17:03:00.003-05:00

According to CNN (here's the link -- which shows the actual footage you can watch with your own eyes), this is what happened.

Without any provocation whatsoever, other than the bodies of these students sitting where they were on the ground, with their arms linked, police pepper-sprayed students," wrote Nathan Brown, an assistant professor in the college's English Department, in an open letter to the chancellor. He said that police then used batons to separate the students, kneeled on their bodies and pushed their heads to the ground.

"When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats," Brown wrote.

My oldest child is a junior in high school. We're looking at colleges now. We've heard about the safety systems in place at many campuses -- blue lights all over campus, text and email alerts, campus security ... I'm always keenly interested in campus safety, in how they combat crime -- in particular violent crime -- and how each college intends to keep my child safe.

In the case of UC Davis this week, there was brutal and very public violence; the victims were students -- the brutal acts of violence were committed by campus police.

It's easy to imagine my daughter sitting at that peaceful protest. It's easy for me to imagine her being pepper-sprayed, her body knelt on, her head shoved into the ground ... She articulate, smart, passionate. She believes in things deeply. At a time in her life when she's challenged to examine issues and live her convictions -- things that a good college will try to instill in its students -- she could have joined a peaceful protest about things that matter to her.

According to a Davis wiki, a "California resident pays roughly $7,457 in fees each year, while an out-of-state student's yearly fees total $25,949. 'Fees' here is just tuition, and doesn't include the cost of books, insurance, housing, food, etc."

I would be paying $30-40,ooo a year -- and this is how you treat my child?

There have to be some lawsuits brewing.

Even if it hadn't been my own child, how would I be able to write the next tuition check?

Alumni, how will you be able to write your next donation?

Is the next act of peaceful protest to write no checks to UC Davis at all?

We hand our children over. We hand our savings over. We do this because the university convinces us that our children will not only be safe but thrive in the environment that the university has created. The students and parents of those students -- not just those violated but all students -- have had their trust broken. The violence and the chilling premeditation are going to have lasting repercussions.

This environment has been poisoned. I don't know how the administration intends to make it right, but they have to act fast and they have to be smart and bold. And I hope they know how much is at stake.

We're all watching.

Time vs. Talent -- The Battle Rages On.

2011-11-21T11:41:00.005-05:00

So, you all know that I'm fond of Anders Ericcson's work on Talent (the world's leading expert on expertise who doesn't really believe in talent). He believes that the key to achieving truly recognized expertise is 3-4 hours of guided practice for 10 years. (He's heavily quoted by Malcolm Gladwell.)

-- Here's my take on Ericsson's ideas about Talent as they apply to writing -- as well as what I call The Inspiration Myth (I'm sure someone has dedicated research to this as well) ...

On Sunday a friend of mine, Chris Harris (adored by me and always a wonderful instigator) sent me a NYTimes piece that aggressively counters Ericsson's work. Here it is: "Sorry Strivers; Talent Matters." (My own NYTimes was still blue plastic wrapped and sitting at the end of my driveway. The day had gotten away from me.)

I buzzed through the piece and I liked that someone was countering Ericsson. I love his work but I've always held a place for talent -- athleticism, artful eye, natural hard-wired sensitivity ... But when I got to the end, I was floored.

Here's the final paragraph: "None of this is to deny the power of practice. Nor is it to say that it’s impossible for a person with an average I.Q. to, say, earn a Ph.D. in physics. It’s just unlikely, relatively speaking. Sometimes the story that science tells us isn’t the story we want to hear."

What? Wait. Is the author suggesting that people LIKE to hear that the key to success is 3-4 hours a day of guided practice for TEN YEARS?

Let me explain this quite simply: No. People DO NOT like to hear this. Not at all. I know because I've told them -- again and again. Frankly, they really hate the idea that time is more important than talent.

Why?

1. Dearest sweet authors of this article -- Hambrick and Meinz -- have you never gone to a cocktail party and heard someone proclaim that they have a great novel ALL UP HERE, they say, tapping one of their temples with their index finger?

This is, of course, a professional hazard of mine. I can't go anywhere without someone telling me that if only they had some afternoons to spare, they'd write down their fantastic novel (presumably a bestseller in first draft form) and would begin their brilliant career.

Training? No. They don't need training. Years of practice? Nope. They're good. Why? Because they have natural talent. Their teachers always told them so.

Ericsson's work allows me to look at them -- and with data in hand -- say, "Hey, all it takes is 3-4 hours a day of guided practice for 10 years... Well, that's no guarantee. But it's a start."

Do people LIKE hearing this? Is this the story that science tells us that we want to hear? No. We want to believe -- especially in the arts -- that we all have a nascent talent that -- once expressed in its raw form -- will be seen as genius by the greater world at large. We want to believe in talent!

Hard work? 10,000 hours? Are you kidding me? That's someone's idea of a good time?

And 2. Talent is the Perfect Excuse.

Basically, if we believe in talent -- God-given talent -- that some have it and some just don't then, we can decide that we don't have to beat ourselves up about not achieving success. We don't have to put the work in. Talent has spoken. The ones deemed talented can stride on and we can sit on our butts and watch them stride. No harm, no foul. No reflection on our laziness or lack of commitment. They were born with it. Done.

The Talent Myth -- as well as The Inspriration Myth -- are damaging. They create a system of the anointed and the un-anointed. The haves and the have nots.

I'll take a student with gritty life experience and a brutal work ethic -- something to say and the will to perfect it -- over extreme IQ and perceived talent any day of the week. (Meritocracy? How about IQocracy?)

And please -- don't get me started on IQ. Don't get me started on the highest measured IQs giving birth to huge opportunities that create big gusting billowing puff balls of support that make it, not only possible, not only encouraged, but socially demanded -- within that culture -- to publish articles, win prizes for scholarship, publish books ...

Ericsson's work is important because people are naturally drawn to the concept of talent -- because THAT is the story we want told. Not its opposite.

I hope Hambrick and Meinz would agree: talent without time is talent wasted.

Advice Given to a Brilliant Debut Novelist.

2011-11-15T12:19:00.000-05:00

Wiley Cash -- if you don't know his name, you will. He's got a big debut novel lined up for this spring. (Check out his site for more on his first novel, A LAND MORE KIND THAN HOME.)

I dropped him a line when he friended me on Facebook because I recognized his name -- heard it around... He said he was nervous about the book coming out and asked if he was crazy.

This was my answer, more or less:

1. it's socially awkward. people will think you're uppity, publishing a book, or will be weirdly competitive or just awkward. don't base any changes on your relationships based on the way a friend responds to this book. people don't know how, for the most part -- unless your friends are all in the industry... then expect some weirder stuff. people will surprise you both ways.

2. it's out of your control and yet it feels like it's in your control and other writers will tell you that there "so many things you can do" -- from your tour schedule, you're doing those things...

3.protect your relationship with the page. right now, you're forming that relationship in a new way. meaning -- do you still write when you're going through this weird public part of your life? the page wants to hear that you are. b/c between public self and the private self, the relationship with the page is the one that matters and needs protecting. keep the two separate.

longer answer than you asked for, i guess. but these are things i wish people had told me ... annie lamott -- heard her in some PBS thing telling an audience that they think they're crazy now, but after publishing their first book they'll be so much crazier. my husband dave tells people that it won't fix their lives. it's all this out-there stuff, in a job that's private.

[I'd like to note that it's weird that I write lists and number stuff
even when writing a casual FB message.]

What I'd like to add is that it's hard to go public with this very private endeavor -- this thing that lives in the drawers of your desk -- no matter how long you've worked toward it. And the catch is that you won't be able to complain about it. People won't understand. You got what you wanted. You're a published novelist. Shut up. But that only makes it feel more isolating. There is a very strange rearrangement of cells -- or, at least, that's what I felt and still sometimes feel in this process of going public, of opening up to large-scale judgment. We're artists after all; we got into this business, many of us, because we observe closely -- out of necessity or instinct or need -- and feel things sharply.

From what I can tell, it's Cash's abilities as an observer and translator of things felt sharply that makes his debut distinctive. (Can't wait to find out for myself.)

How We're Tricked into Wanting to be Writers and How to Trick Back

2011-11-12T11:31:00.005-05:00

The first year of writing -- really dedicating yourself -- the returns on your investment of time are hugely rewarded. You go from writing your weakness (sentimentality? superficiality? overly ornate language?) to beginning to overcome it and writing toward your strength. You get better very quickly -- faster still if you're working with someone who knows a bit more and is farther down the path, faster even still if you've found the great writers you, as a writer, need to read.

It's like your first six months in a foreign country. You can learn the language to the point of fluidity pretty quickly. But to become truly bilingual? Well, that might take another ten years -- and it might never happen at all. There are no guarantees.

It's like when I went to the orthodontist as a teenager to fix the little unevenness of my two front teeth. He said, "It'd be easier if you had buck teeth out to here than to try to perfectly and permanently allign those two teeth." Still, there was a retainer and it pushed one forward until it was a little farther out than the other and then it slid back and was pushed forward ... and I gave up. (Now, by the way, that one tooth is much farther back than it was before and when I'm pregnant and my lips get fattened up and I smile, it sometimes disappears completely in the photo and I look partially toothless.)

Basically, you take these huge leaps the first year, an occasional leap the next. By the third year, you continue to grow but the advances are less apparent. And years go by... Have you made it another millimeter of progress? Are you getting better at all? Have you started writing knock offs of your own work? (Sometimes I fear that I'm just Baggott, being Baggott again.)

(In case you're a little shaken -- don't worry. I'll have suggestions... But first...)

The Law of Diminishing Returns might apply here because you can actually start getting worse.
From Wikipedia:

"The law of diminishing returns ... states that in all productive processes, adding more of one factor of production, while holding all others constant, will at some point yield lower per-unit returns."

Their example? Perhaps fittingly, fertilizer.

"... the use of fertilizer improves crop production on farms and in gardens; but at some point, adding more and more fertilizer improves the yield less and less, and excessive quantities can even reduce the yield."

The writing example? Maybe you get better and better at finessing the page and the inner workings of your human heart remain constant (maybe you even hold back some?) and you reduce your yield.

And at this point, you might no longer have the ebullience and (necessary) arrogance and fiery desire to keep pushing forward or you might have built up so much arrogance that you aren't humble enough to approach the page with honesty. At a Richard Ford reading a few years ago, he confessed that writing required a lot of "heavy lifting" for him these days.

So, first off, I want to say that writing is a trickster. It cons us into the craft by offering the rewards of early long-legged leaps and slowly steals those back. It's cruel.

But -- sorry -- it's the same in most if not all fields. So you can keep bouncing from one to the next just reaping the great early leaps but if you don't dig in you won't ever get deep.

And there are rewards as you go along. Whatever you think of Bruce Sprintsteen's oeuvre, he said in an interview -- in the past few years -- something about his young writing as having been full of words, and that he's lost that frenetic relationship with language but, in return, he's gained insight.

The truth is that the older a writer gets the more life experience the writer's digested and can offer -- hopefully with some depth, clarity, and insight.

Now, I happen to have a trick to offer that I think helps combat all of this trickery.

Go muck around in a different genre.

1. All of your skills with words will still apply so you're not starting from scratch but ...

2. You'll get those early leaps back.

3. You won't have to think about yourself as a serious writer at all. No weight of career aspirations or reputation. You can come to the genre as a novice, as someone just having fun. You'll remember what it is to just ... write.

4. You'll learn new lessons that, when you return to your original genre, will apply in strange ways that will bring freshness to your work.

5. You'll hopefully find a new set of literary voices to draw from, refiring some neurons ...

Other ideas:

Find the deathly fluorescent lights of your youth. Gaze up at them and let your mind wander anywhere but where you are.

Remember what got you into this to begin with. I bet the fire is still hot.

Remember: If you don't need the page, it doesn't need you. So find out why you need it and then come back.

Or take up the harmonica.

A Replay: THE MOVE FROM SHORT STORIES TO THE NOVEL.

2011-11-11T12:27:00.003-05:00

[Here's a quick replay of a WRITERLY post from a few years ago. Hope it helps.]

I have some things to say, quickly, to those who are writing stories and want to make the move to the novel. Actually, I've got lots to say about this -- bolts and bolts of fabric lining the walls -- but I'm going to give the small package version.

First of all, it may well be true that you're tromping the terrain of a novel without knowing it. Try to look at your characters specifically. Is every woman character of a certain age really the same woman -- your mother? -- that you keep dressing up in different pantsuits?

This is possible. Look for your recurring characters. See if they fit together. This could be a very good discovery.

Now look through the stories you've written for the ones that hold the most heat -- the ones with the meatiest characters, with the strongest undercurrent of longing, suffering, need.

Then think in terms of the story as container. What keeps a short story short? Things like: size of cast of character, passage of time, point of view (the dissolution of a family from one point of view can be a story, same dissolution from 3 points of view is a novel), geography, heft of insight, limited retrospect, limited backstory ...

Is there a place in your story that can be opened up -- I call this looking for pleats. In my first novel -- originally an 11-page story -- the narrator's father has an affair with a redheaded bankteller, is confronted (in a weird way), and disappears for the night. In the novel, the most important pleat was that one night. Why not have the father disappear for a summer? What then?

I also filled in a present day for the narrator so that she had a reason to be looking back at the summer of her father's disappearance. I created a novella-length present day plot for her, expanding retrospect. In the father's absence, the mother and daughter road-trip back to the mother's childhood home ... expanding geography and cast of characters. I was then given a reason to write the mother's backstory. I kept the singular point of view.

Of course, this is just one way of getting at it -- a pinhole view.

The unforgiving truth is that each novel teaches you how to write it.

[www.juliannabaggott.com & www.pure-book.com]

The Life You Save May Be Your Own.

2011-11-08T17:32:00.007-05:00

I don't know that I've ever needed to read a book about writers as much as I needed this book by Paul Elie -- THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN.

I'd met Elie at Breadloaf in 2000. He was there in his role as editor at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. I felt out of place at Breadloaf -- having brought my family, staying at a lodge off-campus, the youngest of the three kids still nursing. I was there as a scholar in poetry and so my reading consisted of poems. Elie saw me after the reading. He told me that he'd liked my poems, felt the best were the ones that were straightforward and candidly funny. Or at least that's what I remember him saying. I liked the honesty. I liked that someone had listened enough to have an opinion.

I don't know how I came across his book in 2004. In general, I'm not drawn to accounts of writers' lives. But, I found it early that summer. I was struggling to find out what it meant to be a writer -- in particular a writer of faith. I found myself writing a book of poems called 52 Sundays. (Although most of the poems are published, I never sought to publish the collection. In fact, I don't think I got past about 30 Sundays.) I was about to uproot my family and take my post at FSU. Things felt up in the air and my poems were turning to ancient themes and struggles.

I wasn't happy about being a poet who writes about faith, actually. I'd heard not to write about children because it makes women poets look, what? Soft, or something like that. My first collection was already out -- THIS COUNTRY OF MOTHERS. Ah, well. Damage done.

But a writer of faith? It seemed like it could so easily be mistaken for rhyming devotional poems -- and this terrified me.

What was I? A literary kamikaze?
(What's next children's books? Well, in fact, yes.)

A few years later, I was up for tenure at FSU. Letters were sought by outside sources. After tenure was granted, I was allowed to read the letters. One letter was from Ernest Hebert -- a great endorsement, however he claimed that he couldn't tell what my theme was, exactly.

I seized with panic. Theme? What the hell was my theme?

And then I read Richard Russo's letter. My theme was clear to him.

Faith.

I was a writer who wrote about faith.

Since then, I've decided he's probably right. My characters ask those questions because I ask those questions.

But in 2004, I wasn't thinking about themes. I simply knew I was desperate to read Elie's book and couldn't stop. I found the company of these four writers of faith -- and not just any faith. Catholics. From the book description at Amazon:

"Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York; Flannery O'Connor a "Christ-haunted" literary prodigy in Georgia; Walker Percy a doctor in New Orleans who quit medicine to write fiction and philosophy. A friend came up with a name for them-the School of the Holy Ghost-and for three decades they exchanged letters, ardently read one another's books, and grappled with what one of them called a 'predicament shared in common.'"

And, okay, I'll make the claim. Out of all the Christian denominations, it strikes me that the Catholics have taken "the word made flesh" very seriously -- the passion. Our crosses are rarely empty. We don't hold back on the images of Christ's suffering. We allow for the flesh in "the word made flesh."

I know that it's my job to make the word as close to flesh as possible. Show don't tell. Flesh not simply words. It's all driven down deep into my wiring that there's no way around Catholicism for me. I understand the 'predicament shared in common.' I understand the eye that can't help but veer toward God.

I've struggled with Catholicism, in particular the Church (and have written about those struggles). I don't want to get derailed by the Catholic Church. I'm trying to get at faith and what I circle back to, as a person, as a writer.

I don't want to be devout. I don't want to be a staunch atheist. I want to struggle. As a writer, it's the struggle, after all, that keeps me coming back to the page.

[This Country of Mothers is now a free downloadable pdf. If you want it sent to you, request by sending an email to davegwscott@gmail.com.]

1/2 Dozen for Chandra Hoffman

2011-11-07T09:41:00.000-05:00

Here's a 1/2 Dozen
with
debut novelist
CHANDRA HOFFMAN.
(Parental types & Homeschoolers,
Check out
Hoffman's idea
of a book tour
with three kids in tow.)

Here goes:

I despise the pervasive myth of inspiration – the idea that an entire book can exist simply because of an accumulation of inspired ideas – but I don’t deny that inspiration exists. There are things that have no other explanation. Was there a singular moment of inspiration for this book?

My first novel, CHOSEN rattled around with me for several years. The novel was inspired by my work in an orphanage in Eastern Europe, my experience as the director of a domestic adoption program and my own transition to motherhood. The story is fiction-characters and settings and scenarios are as though I took a few handfuls of my past, threw in a well-marinated childhood paranoia of abduction, seasoned them with the salt of my vivid imagination, put them all in a bag and shook it. From all of these tidbits and themes, CHOSEN grew.

With the book I am working on now, it really was a moment of creative inspiration. Last year, I was on book tour with my three little kids all tucked around me in a hotel in Santa Monica. We had been traveling for two weeks, and it had been months since I had done any creative writing. I had a few stories that I figured I would work on after I got home and the dust settled, but that night, something happened. We had left the windows open so we could hear the ocean and I dreamed an entire novel, a love story set in the islands. I had to get through a day at Disneyland and hustling everyone on to a red-eye flight before I had four uninterrupted hours to write it all down, but I knew it was the next story.

What's your advice to a writer who's looking for a lifelong partner? Any particularly useful traits to suggest in said partner? (Do you want to tell us a brief love story here?)

It is helpful to pick someone who accepts that your life is a constant mining ground--that parts of it are going to show up in books. Recently, my husband made a rare, snotty remark. A few hours later, he came to apologize and said sheepishly, "That line is ending up in a book, isn't it?" It was already written into a scene.

In CHOSEN, the character of Dan bears some outward similarities to my husband and I wondered about reactions of readers who know us. I knew they'd see Dan's passion for kiteboarding and extreme sports and think of J. Of course, like all characters, Dan is a composite of traits and personality quirks that grew into his own entity.

I also wondered what J would think. My husband didn't actually read CHOSEN until it came out as an ARC, which means the book is coming out, soon. He read it in one sitting, and I heard him chuckling over conversations that were stolen directly from our history, and then some long periods of silence. I was sweating it a little. When he was finished, he kissed me, handed the ARC back and said, "Excellent work. If everyone is going to think Dan is me, at least you gave him great abs and made him good in bed!"

Writing Tip #17 for Aspiring Writers – or #47 or #2. Your pick.

Have several kids. Three worked for me. Get some animals too; really needy ones. You'll never be blocked again, because you will be so grateful for those stolen moments in a world where you have some semblance of control.

Seriously: a flawless, well-researched and dazzling query letter. I had offers from the first three agents I queried.

Have you learned to strike a balance between your writing life and the other aspects of your life?

I'm not sure.

Last year, when CHOSEN came out in hardcover, I decided to homeschool my three kids and take them on a twelve city book tour with me. We built the tour around things we wanted to see (like Mt. St. Helens for my volcano obsessed nine-year-old), readings and guest author visits to book clubs. I had a policy that if I could put together a minimum of three events in any city and there was something of interest, we'd go there. It was an incredible four months--a whirlwind experience we will never forget, but I wasn't doing any writing at the time. We perfected the art of rolling clothes and living out of carry-on size suitcases for three weeks at a time, navigating with an iPhone and playing Crabs in your Crackers/Awful Alliteration for hours in the car. But when it was over, it was a transition to go back to writing, with the added trick of having everyone at home.

Now, the kids are in school for twelve hours a week, and I'm still juggling... The second time I went back to grad school for my MFA, I had three kids under the age of five. Sitting in class, this single guy is whining about being so blocked, and my cell phone is buzzing with a message from my mom back at the hotel that my six-week-old hasn't stopped screaming for three hours and my two-year-old is on his second pound of room service bacon and I remember thinking that writer's block is a luxury and a curse I will never have again. (See above writing tip)

For me, it's never a matter of inspiration, only one of time. So I guess the answer is no.

Was there an extremely influential writing teacher who was impactful on your writing life?

I have only great things to say about my mentor, Leonard Chang. I met him the first time I attended Antioch, just back from the islands--twenty-two years old, a little wild and adrift. It was his first year teaching and he quietly blew me away. He was such an astute editor and really gifted at teaching craft, while assuring me I had a unique voice. I left my MFA program for the siren song of a little town in Spain with no internet cafe, but when I was ready to go back, ten years later, it was for Leonard. I picked him to help me hone CHOSEN because he couldn't be more different than my target audience. I didn't want a mentor who might get swept up in the emotion of the story--since so many of the topics are things that are close to our hearts. I wanted CHOSEN to have an edge. Leonard also connected me with another student, my dearest reader friend Linda Davis and created the framework for our bi-coastal weekly editorial relationship and friendship. Without her, I would be sunk.

What’s your take on touring?

You can read some of my stories from the road (see below)

CALIFORNIA http://www.chandrahoffman.com/blog/2010/10/13/no-lifeguard-on-duty.html

ATLANTA http://www.chandrahoffman.com/blog/2010/11/1/word-from-the-road.html

CAYMAN ISLANDS http://www.chandrahoffman.com/blog/2011/1/8/favorites-on-friday-ish-fans.html

By far, my favorite part of touring is the book clubs--I've done forty-two of these so far and I love being a guest author and talking about CHOSEN. It's fascinating how different each book club is! Some are structured and serious--following Harper's reading guide and answering the questions in order, and others are loose and loopy, where we all suddenly wipe away the tears of laughter from under our eyes, squint over our glasses of wine at the clock and realize it's after midnight. I had one group of really seasoned readers draw a parallel between two characters in my book I had never realized consciously, and I always love to hear about reader's reactions to Jason and Francie, those love-to-hates. I will happily make a serious effort to participate in any book club who reaches out to me, and though I prefer to be there in person, Skype works too. Even better, nobody is the wiser if I'm in my pajamas.

Are you a writer of place? Is place always one of your main characters?

Setting is always a character in my stories. I think of my novels as love letters to places I have lived with, loved, and left. Up and coming: the rustic gorgeousness of Boulder, Colorado in a study of physical beauty, morals and fidelity, and a sweltering summer love story set in the Cayman Islands.

CHANDRA HOFFMAN has been an orphanage relief worker in Romania, a horse trainer in the Caribbean, a short-order cook in a third world hospital, the director of a U.S. adoption program, and an event planner for Philadelphia’s Main Line elite. A graduate of Cornell University and Antioch’s MFA program, she has settled back in her hometown outside Philadelphia with her husband, three young children, and an ever-changing menagerie. Chosen is her first novel.

www.chandrahoffman.com

To read more 1/2 Dozens by novelists, essayists, poets,

short story writers, and agents, click on the below.

Justin Manask (agent)

Melissa Senate

Steve Kistulentz

Christopher Schelling (agent)

Elizabeth Stuckey-French

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Karen Salyer McElmurray

Kim Wright

William Giraldi

Writing the Family. Part I.

2011-11-04T11:08:00.004-04:00

I've been on a couple of panels with a title like WRITING THE FAMILY -- once at AWP, once at the Tennessee Williams festival... (Or so my memory has it. Panels blur...) But this topic is one that surfaces again and again -- for good reason.

How do we write about our families? What's our story to tell and what isn't? Do we ask for permission or forgiveness?

My formula -- and I use that term loosely -- for a bestselling book is related to two things: the writer's urgent need to tell it and the readership's urgent need to hear it. (Of course, equally important are the agent's ability to convey those urgent needs, the editor's vision and ability to hone those words so that they are urgent, an art department's ability to create a compelling cover that reflects those two urgent needs, a publicist's ability to let it be known, urgently ...)

Sometimes the most urgent story a writer needs to tell is the one of their own family -- what and who shaped them. This is what we know, our point of reference, our bearings.

Rick Bragg -- who won a Pulitzer for his family memoir -- was on one of the panels with me. (Note: I've got a good Rick Bragg story, one that shaped me early on as a writer, on the subject of panel jockeying. One day...) On the panel, Bragg gave his take -- he always wants to be invited back for Thanksgiving. He gave ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTIN' to the members of the family in it before publishing. They gave him the go ahead, a testament to his family, in fact.

This is the question you have to ask yourself. How important is it to tell that urgent honest story and how important is it to you to be invited back?

My parents have given me free reign. As I've mentioned, my mother is fond of tweaking Faulkner's mother's line -- which she read in a National Geographic issue -- "My daughter writes what she has to." And so I can write whatever I want about my parents.

Still, there's often a dance. My mother reads it. She calls me. She says, "Well..." and then I know that she's going to ask me to soften, tweak ... I listen. I tell her that I'll think about it. About a half hour later, she calls back. "It's okay," she tells me. "I take what I said back. Don't change anything."

My personal take on parents is that they made you and your story as child is completely your own. But this is easy for me to say. My parents and I are extremely close. I rely on them (at 42) as parents, friends, wise counsel.

I did, however, write an entire novel called THE MADAM based on the life of my grandmother who was raised in a house of prostitution in the 1920s and 30s. My grandmother was still alive during the writing and publishing. She told me everything. It was the hardest research I've ever done -- because it was personal and often brutal. (My essay on the writing of the novel can be found in Best Creative Nonfiction 2009.)

I was very anxious about her reading it. I wasn't sure she'd understand the difference between fiction and biography. And at first I gave her early drafts. She handed one back to me and said, "Maybe next time you'll write about the family," meaning the truth.

But when the entire novel was done, she read it -- which wasn't easy. Her eyesight was failing. And she told me that I got it right, especially her mother. Ella. I remember that moment. She was sitting in my mother's kitchen. And I was on my knees and she held me and we both cried.

Her mother was a woman I felt I'd poured myself into -- the hardest character I've ever written. Someone who required every ounce of empathy I could muster.

I got it right. And I'd told it urgently. It was probably the adult novel of mine that's sold the least and that's probably my most artful. Its commercial failure was hard for me. These women's voices had been dismissed in their time and place in history. I was trying to give that back and they were dismissed again. Some part of my writerly soul sealed up after that... It's hard to explain. I toughened.

And I think that's one of the hardest parts about writing family. You give them voice. You open not only yourself up but your family -- those you're deeply tied to, for better, for worse. I couldn't have prepared myself for that -- the criticism not of characters (though it was fiction and they were surely fictional characters in a fictional plotline) but I also saw them as deeply inspired by those ancestors I owe and love, not of me as a writer, but me as someone trying to give due to those who came before me, those who survived so I could exist.

Maybe you can't prepare yourself for the response that any of your writing gets. That's what makes all of it courageous, which is possibly why E. B. White said that he admired anyone who "has the guts to write anything at all."

The advice here is no advice. Only an admission that it's hard -- and write was already hard enough.

1/2 Dozen for Emily Heckman (Editor Q and A)

2011-10-31T15:31:00.028-04:00

An Insider's Look
at the Publishing World....
Here's a 1/2 Dozen
with editor Emily Heckman
who's worked as an editor
for major publishing companies,
including Grove Press, Macmillan, Random House and Simon & Schuster
with writers ranging from
Wendell Berry to Stephen King.

Here goes:

How much freedom did you have in choosing books? And how did the potential success of a book play into your decisions versus a more personal response?

Now that I’m freelance, I have a wide array of books I work on: rush editing jobs for publishers; proposal drafting for authors & agents. When I choose a novel to edit, I choose it just as I did when I was in-house. If there’s something electric there, within the first 25 pages, I’m in. And I become as devoted to the story as I ever did while still in-house.

Walk us through the process of a book being acquired by an editor?

Being an acquisitions editor is largely the business of saying no. You have to get buy-in from a huge wing of the house to make a play for something: editorial, sales, marketing, publicity have to see potential in a project before you’re authorized to make an offer. Though it begins with personal passion, acquiring a book for a major publisher is not, in the end, a passion play: it’s a p&l decision. So you spend a lot of time shoveling submissions off your desk so that it’s clear for when one gets to land.

Criticism. It’s part of the territory. How do you handle it? Is this the way you’ve always handled it?

Invite the criticism you receive from people of substance and wisdom and love. Welcome and receive their influence, always. From the rest, throw it away.

What do you think would most surprise aspiring novelists about the process of a novel being chosen for publication?

I think they’d be surprised by how subjective the process is. I remember when the manuscript for The Bridges of Madison County was making the rounds. I was at Bantam then, and I remember the buzz in the hall was that it was awful. Warner Books editors (now Grand Central) disagreed and laughed all the way to the bank on that one.

Also, and I know this just makes me sound old, but editors don’t really get to edit anymore. If a book has potential, but needs lots of work, then it’s an automatic no, where in the old days, you could buy a few of these, spend lots of time behind the scenes nurturing them, then, eventually, publish them well.

Most writers (even those currently being published) benefit now from working with freelancers who have had a tour of duty in-house. We can edit to the level of expectation of a publisher—the writer is game.

Writing Tip #17 for Aspiring Writers – or #47 or #2. Your pick.

Anne Lamott sort of said it all, didn’t she: “Bird by bird, buddy, bird by bird.” Writing is not glamorous. It’s pretty blue-collar in a certain way, like working for a moving company. You just have to tighten your belt and lift all that heavy stuff. It will break your back if you’re not careful, and you’ll definitely get bruised up, but you gotta get the stuff off the truck and into the house.

I sometimes liken it to knitting a giant sweater. In the end, it’s gotta hold together beautifully, but it is, in reality, one stitch (or word) latched onto the next. Word by word by word.

Tell us a tale from the publishing world – something, ANYthing about that process from your perspective.

There were a couple of times when the stars aligned in ways that just made me so glad to be in publishing. For me, as a publisher (though I wasn’t her publisher) the first time was when Anne Proulx’s The Shipping News (one of my top 5 novels of all-time) made the (best-seller) lists, won the Pulitzer, and was just so damn good. (Though the movie kind of sucked. Alas.) I remember thinking, “There you go. There’s a moment when “we” did it perfectly. It was the publishing equivalent of a no-hitter.

Pep talk (or bootie-kicking) for the downhearted writer. Let fly.

This is an easy one. Forget about finding an agent or a publisher. Forget Oprah (or whatever the next “Oprah” will be) or getting a snazzy ebook publishing deal with Amazon. Become slavishly devoted to your story. This is the only way. If you can’t do that, then don’t write. Period.

This is a vast question. Interpret it at will. What’s the future of publishing?

Wow. This is a good one—and a question that fascinates and excites me. When I left Simon & Schuster (where I was an Executive Editor) I worked as the VP of Business Development for one of the first “Self-Publishing” companies. It was a bold/controversial move for an editor with a literary press pedigree, but I was drawn to the idea of helping empower writers/authors. This was ten years ago. (Which, in post- Guttenberg time, is really about 500 years ago). I liked seeing the development of ebooks 1.0 (remember the sony ereader?) up close, of being part of the core group of people who were creating the lexicon and trying out new ways of doing things in a pretty fearless way. People in publishing were excited and reaching out into the future back then. I wish there was more of that going on in NYC offices now but it seems that the techonology companies (Apple, Amazon) got there first and are the ones having all the fun with books, at the moment.

I’m certain that at some point in the near future we’ll be reading, exclusively, digitial words (some gurus say the generation of kids who are under 5 now will be the first fully digital one).

What I don’t think will be lost (or what I hope isn’t lost) is the art of selection, of making a discerning choice (this is what publishers do on a macro level, editors on a micro level). This is where the passion, the art of publishing comes into play and if it were lost (and everything written were published, without the benefit of editing (revision is the high-art of writing) or a meaningful imprimatur (a publishing imprint, a blog blessing? A writers community?), then we’re all sunk.

Good books—regardless of what format they’re published in (digital, audio, print) are passed around hand by hand, by word of mouth. This won’t change. So they’ve gotta be good or no one will recommend them.

What’s your reading life like? Do you have any current favorites or sleepers that may have flown under our radar?

My reading life has been pretty unorthodox for the last twenty-five years. 90% of what I read is “under construction.” When I do get to put my pencil down (yup: I still edit on a printed manuscript—it’s the only way for me), I’m unbelievably picky. So I’ve read the first 50-100 pages of many best-selling books these past few years but felt that most of them didn’t merit more time than that. A book that surprised me? A client recently turned me on to the stories of Leonid Andreyev, a Russian writer working at the beginning of the twentieth century. His stories are shocking, gorgeous, perfect. They’re like a sharp slap in the face. Bracing and brilliant. They remind me why I got into publishing in the first place.

What project of yours was the easiest writing of your life? And, flip-side, which one was the most like wrestling bears? (And could you tell before you started or did they turn on you, for better or worse?)

Writing celebrity memoirs is not a happy occupation. As a writer, you give your all, working to craft something that’s not only beautiful, but that actually elevates the persona you’re presenting on the page. Most famous people have no appreciation for how difficult and subtle writing is and how devoted and talented ghost-writers are. It’s also undervalued by publishers (ie. Doesn’t pay well.) It’s a business I’m leaving behind, in favor of writing my own books.

On the flip-side, I’ve loved writing books by brilliant doctors and scientists who are on the cutting edge of making break-throughs that will benefit mankind I get to draft along with some pretty brilliant minds and it’s incredibly energizing and fun. Plus, I’m a bit of a research freak, so I’m up for anything that gets my brain going (neuroscience, unironically, is a current favorite topic).

What is your current job and how was it shaped by your earlier experiences?

That’s a funny question in a lot of ways as I’ve been working on essays and a memoir about betrayal—the gift that keeps on giving! It’s an extraordinarily knotty topic and one that, I think, the human mind doesn’t automatically get. I’ve done an incredible amount of reading (there are some great memoirs out there that brush the topic) and tons of research into the psychology behind betrayal and the trauma that ensues. It’s fascinating. (I just read that it’s only ever been effectively approached in literature by writers like Jane Austen who take the time to plot the complex web of relationships that betrayal shatters and twists). So that’s the heavy lifting. I’m balancing that with something much more fun. I was awarded a grant from my college (Vassar: I transferred there from the University of Delaware!) this year to make a documentary film. I’m excited to try narrative nonfiction in a different medium and I’m working with really fun people on this project. It’s scary, humbling and extremely exciting as I’m an absolute beginner. A total dofus who is going to give it a shot anyway.

But I still edit freelance, to keep the lights on. Big secret about me is that though I write nonfiction books, editing fiction is my secret talent.

Do you have advice for someone thinking about going into editorial work?

Yes. Do it! I got my first job in publishing when I drove across the country a week after graduating from college. I knocked on the door of North Point Press, the legendary literary press, in Berkeley. CA. I started as an unpaid intern and worked two other jobs to pay my rent. It was in a converted church and there were 12 people working there, surrounded by tall shelves of their gorgeous books (the offices were the warehouse). I learned the art & craft of editing and publishing there, then, after three years, I got a job offer at Grove Press in New York, moved to the city and never looked back. Editing is an honorable vocation, so different from writing in some crucial ways, yet so intimately sympathetic with it. Editing is a very noble profession, one that I’ve been proud to be part of. I would tell anyone who loves literature and books to go for it.

BIO

I joined the IEG after spending more than fifteen years working as an acquisitions editor for major publishing companies, including Grove Press, Macmillan, Random House and Simon & Schuster. I edit adult nonfiction and fiction in equal measure. Currently, I divide my time between co-authoring and editing, and I work selectively for writers, agents, and major publishing houses.

I’ve worked with many best-selling and award-winning authors including, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Elizabeth Kelly, Stephen King, Mary Higgins Clark, Ann Rule, Jeffery Deaver, Bev Marshall, and James Swain.

Areas of particular interest for me include narrative nonfiction, women’s health, spirituality/religion, psychology, and current events. I edit many types of fiction, but specialize in commercial literary fiction, mysteries and thrillers. (Sorry: I don’t edit science fiction or fantasy).

Recent successes include editing Apologize! Apologize! By Elizabeth Kelly (Twelve, 2009), The Perfect Ten Diet by Dr. Michael Aziz (Cumberland House 2010), and co-authoringPlease Don’t Label My Child (Rodale, 2007), and Ask Me Again Tomorrowby Olympia Dukakis (HarperCollins, 2003), the best-selling memoir by the Academy Award-winning actress.

I’m available for developmental editing, line-editing, proposal development, and more general writing, editing and publishing consultation.

CONTACT: emilyheckman@aol.com

SITE: http://www.bookdocs.com/editors/eheckman/

To read more 1/2 Dozens by novelists, essayists, poets,

short story writers, and agents, click on the below.

Justin Manask (agent)

Melissa Senate

Steve Kistulentz

Christopher Schelling (agent)

Elizabeth Stuckey-French

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Karen Salyer McElmurray

Kim Wright

William Giraldi

Stuff to Buzz About

2011-10-28T13:07:00.017-04:00

A recent film I loved ...

I love when directors let Gandolfini breathe like a bull into the mic. And I'll watch Diane Lane in ANYTHING. I was riveted to this film. CINEMA VERITE. It felt like it captured the era without being a set piece. I've never seen the original series, An American Family, but want to now. (The accuracy of the actors looking like the real people ... incredible.)

A book I recently blurbed ...
THE ODD CLAUSES by Jay Wexler. Seriously when I told my father -- a lawyer who'd wanted me to become a lawyer -- that I'd been asked to blurb a book about constitutional law, he really thought that the world had gone mad. Not so! The Odd Clauses, as I put it, is A Know-it-Alls Treasure Trove, a cabinet of constitutional curiousities that touches down on NASA, Ellis Island, even Saturday Night Live. Jay Wexler is brilliantly snarky, erudite, and comedic. They cut the part of my blurb where I said that if I hadn't bailed on law school, he was the kind of prof I'd have hoped for ...

A book that just found me ...

THE MYTH OF YOU AND ME by Leah Stewart
I love the plotting of this tale -- and how it goads you. The main character is a rare bird, and the road trip, the mystery, will keep you turning pages.

A book I'm jacked to read ...

THE TASTE OF SALT by Martha Southgate -- I met Martha at a bookseller conference and then dug into the book ... looking forward to the rest.

An old favorite ...

UNRAVELING by Elizabeth Graver -- Oh, how I loved this book. Still do. Beautiful, historical, sweeping ...

A book of poems I've just returned to (again!) ...

Rachel Zucker's MUSEUM OF ACCIDENTS -- Zucker's wild. Fall into these pages. Don't come up for a while ...

Academic Job Hunt Leads to Brain Depletion

2011-10-27T10:43:00.005-04:00

Okay, so this isn't actually research-based brain depletion. This is just me talking; I was asked by a former student to give advice -- and so, having been on the market a few times, I thought I'd weigh in. (My take and my advice are only that -- some thoughts gathered together. Mainly, I wish you all good luck and Kevlar toughness.)

The academic job market is brutal -- especially right now. (What job markets aren't brutal right now? Foreclosure specialist?) The two main problems with the academic job market are
1. that it entails fully and completely re-imagining your life -- this is the true source of the brain depletion -- and
2. it's seasonal -- there's this one big hunting season. If you don't hit it, you usually have to wait until next year. (Except that you don't -- and I'll get to this!)

Unlike many other jobs -- especially entry-level -- you usually can look for positions in the place you already live. Some fields are geographically contained to one or two areas of the country. Once there, a new job doesn't have to entail a move -- as it usually does in academe.

If you send out ten applications for, say, Creative Writing jobs in academe -- a modest sum -- you're likely looking at two-to-three different geographic regions of the US. And you'll be competing with hundreds of applicants for each post -- even for posts in North Dakota.

Also, in this market in creative writing, you'll be competing with those writers who were making a living in the wilds but have since decided to try to find some shelter -- a rugged breed who rack up pubs because their lives have, in fact, depended on it.

You might think that what's leading to the brain depletion -- for surely you're exhausted in ways that surprise you -- is the incredible minutia involved in formatting your CV, detailing your entire teaching philosophy in a page or two, picking and choosing the exact right sample of your work, hitting up your recommendors (again), the uploading and uploading ...

But no. For me, it's been the effort of trying imagine myself living among mountains or in this or that city or in this or that podunk town three hours west of civilization or in the dustbowl or the swamps or suddenly near my in-laws...

And then you wait. This, too, is exhausting. You wait and wait to see if you're going to get a few big calls to attend MLA for interviews. This also is wearying (and sometimes insanely last-minute). Let's say you get one interview and have to fly across the country, pay for a hotel room ... to sit in another hotel room to talk to 3-5 strangers who may or may not despise each other and answer questions about things that are pertinent -- or not. Maybe you're lucky and get to do this a number of times during MLA.

And then ... you wait again. If you get an on-campus -- and you want to do it right -- you immerse yourself in the faculty you'll be meeting -- you get to know their work -- you get to know their university, their department, their programs and publications ... You study up, which takes a lot of time. And while they pummel you with questions, you're trying to figure out if this is a place you could live, if these are people you could work with, if you're going to get anymore on-campus interviews, if timing-wise you'll have to make a call before you even know your options ...

The imaginative effort is grueling. The amount of power it requires could fuel a couple of lengthy novels.

And then it's over. You have a job or you don't. But this ending to the hustle-bustle is hard either way. If you got a job, now you must haul yourself to it and dig in -- not only to the job but to an entire new life. (The more people you've got in tow, the harder this becomes.)

If you didn't get a job, you wonder what you did wrong. The truth is -- it's a numbers game. And the numbers right now are not good. In another market, you might have gotten a couple of offers, had your pick. You cannot let this get at you.

The main thing for creative writers is that no matter where we are and what we're doing, we should be able to find time to write. Chuck Palahniuk wrote FIGHT CLUB in part in pencil and paper, while lying on his back under cars, pretending to fix them.

Where a surgeon needs a hospital and a scientists needs a lab to do the work they're called to do, we only need our own brains -- a few simple tools. We've done this for centuries -- in prisons and trenches... We can still write.

And think of those writers who've been in the wilds again -- the ones you might be up against now for jobs -- they wrote because their lives depended on it. That's what the wilds can teach -- hunger. Writing in comfort versus writing on your back under a car ...

(Not that writing in academe is actually writing in comfort -- academe can be its own jungle. I've written some very hungry prose while supposedly writing in comfort.)

And, listen, academe isn't the only place that will have you. Sometimes I think grad students imagine that it's either academe or a cubicle in an office complex somewhere. Not true. There are really gratifying, creative jobs out there -- even some that are really gratifying (on the soul level). You have no idea how (weirdly) valuable the MFA and Ph.D. are in the wider world. The people I went to grad school with for my MFA have done the following:

editor of an outdoorsy mag, editor of weekly newspaper, communications director, director of a camp for terminally ill children, ghost writer (over a million copies sold), freelance writer, grant writer (nice income and flex hours), started own publishing press, literary agent, tennis coach, ski patrol, conference coordinator, editor at a publishing house....

There are other jobs out there. Keep a wide view. Some of these jobs don't entail re-imagining your life, uprooting everything. They aren't all soul-sucking or even require a necktie. And they aren't seasonal. You can keep looking, year-round.

But most of all, write. Always that. Write. It's what you're called to do and, in the end, it's what makes you undeniable.