Well-Read Donkey

Notes on Psychological Landscape Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Aggie) — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 14:00:00 +0000

This is a sequel to my previous post Notes on Psychological Landscape Part I.

In their paper “Utilizing Complexity To Change Psychological Landscapes,” Maryann Reese, MA and Dr. Miriam R. Tausner use the landscape metaphor to show the features of psychological landscape:

Figure I. Psychological Landscape

Psychological landscapes consist of horizons and basins of attraction. Figure I depicts a curved line with a high peak, which is the horizon, and two hollowed out tunnels, which are the basins. Horizon is a vista from which we observe our life and its surroundings. Our outlook or angle of vision is skewed by our past experiences featured here as the deep burrows or our emotional life under the surface. A wide variety of events and sensory details make person access reference points. A reference point is a marker of an event, which is a gateway to external triggers such as (see Figure I) words, pictures, tastes, sounds, gestures, smells, etc. that propel a person to an attractor in a basin. Attractors are internal representations of original experiences; in other words the attractors pull us towards positive or negative place, depending of the nature of the original experience. Figure II illustrates this process:

Figure II. What is the process?

How this relates to the soldier’s photograph and the war landscape framed in the bombed-out castle wall, and my psychological landscape?

Image (castle’s ruins, soldier) → access brain’s limbic system/the core of emotions and memory → trigger memories of war destruction and exile → evoke emotions → nostalgia, displacement.

The image of the soldier and castle’s ruins sends signals to the brain’s limbic system, which is the core of emotions and memory. The signal accesses the reference point in my past experience of war destruction and exile and creates a sensation of pain. Thus, the photograph evokes emotions of nostalgia and displacement.

This is my mother in her kitchen in Sarajevo, just before the war broke out in 1992, following up the breakup of Yugoslavia:

And this is my mother's kitchen after the war:

Psychological landscape is the invisible landscape of our mind, a panorama of our past, present and future way of thinking, feelings and behavior. We could say that the psychological landscape of the character is the character’s vision of life. In her comments on William Styron’s short story "The McCabes," Katherine Ann Porter writes:

"Human life itself maybe be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist – the only thing he’s good for – is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. Even if it’s only his view of meaning. That’s what he’s for – to give his view of life."

I thought that perhaps I could use Reese & Tausner schema of psychological landscape as my framework in writing about psychological landscape in fiction, because writers use the same reference points and sensory cues in their work to bring characters to life. Similarly, the readers experience the text through senses in order to enter the emotional life of characters. Furthermore they draw upon memories of their own prior emotions to match the emotions of the characters. Reading too, is an emotional journey. It is not my intent to trivialize the work of psychology; my objective is to illustrate ways in which writers depict “what’s going on in characters’ heads,” the cause and effect between characters’ perceptions, emotions and behavior. By using the metaphors of landscape I intend to visualize internal and external manifestations of character’s landscape of the mind.

It seems to me that writer and reader are like two travelers. They are together undertaking a journey (that’s the story). The writer creates the character, charts the psychological landscape and setting of the story. The reader follows the map, reads the signs and symbols and learns how to experience the invisible landscape of the hero’s inner reality, or in other words to feel empathy. On the both journeys, the writer’s and the reader’s experience is based on their emotional landscape, their perception of the world, because we all identify the feelings and actions of others out of our own experiences.

Cynthia Ozicks writes in her essay “The Shock of Teapots” about the sharpened sensitivity of the travelers:

"What we remember from childhood we remember forever – permanent ghosts, stamped, imprinted, eternally seen. Travelers regain this ghost-seizing brightness, eeriness, firstness. They regain it because they have cut themselves loose from their own society, from every society; they are, for a while, floating vagabonds, like astronauts out for a space walk on a long free line. They are subject to preternatural exhilarations, absurd horizons, unexpected forms and transmutations: the matter-of-fact (a battered old stoop, say, or the shape of a door) appears beautiful; or a stone that at home would not merit the blink of your eye here arrests you with its absolute particularity – just because it is what your hand already intimately knows. You think: a stone, a stone! They have stones here too!…For the vagabond-voyeur (and for travelers voyeurism is irresistible), nothing is not for notice, nothing is banal, nothing is ordinary: not a rock, not the shoulder of a passerby, not a teapot."

The act of reading or experiencing is as important as the act of writing. When I compare the writers and readers to travelers, I am assuming that they possess childlike curiosity and imagination and willingness to play and roam free, even to get lost. In his book "Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer," Peter Turchi compares writer to an explorer and artistic creation to a voyage into the unknown. I mentioned the word empathy earlier because it is an important aspect in both acts: writing and reading. Empathy is understanding and compassion towards other human beings; it means being able to identify with another’s person feelings. An Other is that voyage into the unknown.

When we embark on that trip into unknown we construct new worlds from our reading material; we envision the places and characters we read about or visually construct the new landscapes in our imagination; we see them with our mind’s eye. We inhabit the psychological landscapes of the characters and look out at the world through each character’s eyes. How do they feel about life?

Notes on Psychological Landscape Part III will focus on writers’ techniques of externalizing characters’ intangible feelings. How do we express characters’ emotional life using other methods than first-person point of view or going directly into characters’ thoughts?

READING by Joyce Kiefer

noreply@blogger.com (Aggie) — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 15:00:00 +0000

I was sitting around the kitchen table with a half dozen women friends from college, and we were making a list of good reads for one of us – Donna – who was about to have knee surgery. Donna had asked each of us to suggest a good book for her convalescence. An avid reader, she considered her recovery time as a good excuse to read non-stop - anything - fiction, nonfiction, history, light, heavy. She wanted to surround herself with a smorgasbord of books.

Joan, a newspaper writer, took down our suggestions. She queried each of us. Suggest three books, she said. “Shadow of the Wind,” I offered. “The masterpiece by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. The very end let me down, but what a poetic, mystical ride! The story involves a library.”

"You'd love "People of the Book," Donna replied. “Geraldine Brooks.”

How about "Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson ?" I started to describe its stark characters and setting.

"Already read it," said Donna.

I ended with “The Book Thief.” “The presentation is key. I’ll say no more.” Neither did she. Somehow her book club missed that best seller by Markus Zusak. The movie hadn't come out yet.

We continued around the table. The shocker came when we got to Jeannie. She and I had been classmates in an honors Western Civ course. We read everything from Homer to Wittgenstein and Hume. I envied her insights, how she got the points that I missed. But now all she could suggest was "Peter Pan." “Yes,” I said, “You must have found J.M. Barrie a fascinating writer, making an allegory of his refusal to acknowledge himself as an adult. "Maybe," Jeannie replied. "But my life is so busy with grandkids (over a dozen), that I don't have time to read for myself."

I was further amazed when Mary, another honors classmate, agreed. She has no time to read either. And Charlotte confessed she did so much required reading in college (between 3 and 6 a.m. because her roommates were quiet then), that she never wants to read another book. She does read the paper end to end to keep up to date.

I was shocked because reading is an essential part of my own life. I assumed these old friends – intelligent women all – shared the same passion. How could they turn their backs on history, well-crafted stories, the classics, the opportunity to engage with new ideas? Did the personal curiosity of these former teachers freeze at graduation?

My mother taught me that reading is an art. When I was little, she would open a new book I’d received as a gift, run her finger down the title page to flatten it to the spine, and say, “See? It smells like a new book.” Then she’d turn to the dedication, read it, and explain, “This is the person who inspired the author.” Next, she would turn to the table of contents. “Here’s what’s waiting for us.” Finally, she would slowly turn to Page 1 and begin the story. She taught me to savor a book, not speed through it.

She also showed me that books are organic. “Protect the spine, or the book will fall apart,” Mom would caution. “The leaves are the sheets of paper with the printed page on each side and they’re made from trees.” As she read to me, it seemed that real people bloomed from those leaves.

I’ve always enjoyed scanning other people’s bookshelves, even as a kid. The contents tell me what their owners like to explore, the stories they treasure, the ideas that tweak their minds.

A built-in bookshelf next to a used brick fireplace sold me on the first house we bought. We still live there.

Chasing down a physical book is part of the fun of reading. First of all, there’s the literary buffet offered by a brick and mortar bookstore. On my way to the travel section of one favorite store, I had to stop and sample the cookbooks on display and thumb through the selections on the best seller table before I reached my destination. I was looking for guidebooks to Turkey but couldn’t resist Uzbekistan. How would I get around if I were going there instead of Turkey? What would I see? Of what should I be aware? Finally I returned to the Turkey shelf and looked for Rick Steves.

Then there’s the library treasure hunt. My book club decided to read “The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York” by Deborah Bloom. I didn’t want to own this title. Anyone snooping my bookshelf might suspect a Lucrezia Borgia side to my personality. I didn’t want the book on my iPad, either. Something contaminating about that. All the copies were checked out of my local library. I had one alternative: the library at Stanford University where I have borrowing privileges. What could be sweeter than the joy of wallowing in seven million books?

The Poisoner’s Handbook was available but I had to hunt it down somewhere in the basement of the main library. Once I stepped down there, I followed the arrows along a dimly lit aisle to the South Stacks. Then I stepped round the corner into a darker underground wing. Finally I found the right neighborhood of call letters, but my number range was missing. I refused to give up. I spotted a couple of aides with a book cart. Surely one could help but I thought how strange it would be to say, I’m looking for “the Poisoner’s Handbook.” Can you help me find it?” Perhaps one aide would chat me up while the other pushed a panic button. Or they would wave me off to the Chemistry Department. But I was on a mission and I finally found the Poisoner’s Handbook on a lower shelf in a dark corner.

A friend who’s an engineer said no one needs books anymore. Everything is on the internet and the young generation knows this. But my ten-year-old granddaughter would disagree. She inherited the bookworm gene. Her friends know she loves to read and gave her gift cards for her birthday to the one bookstore in her town. She showed me the stack of books she chose, picked one up, and read me the story outline on the flaps.

“Tempt me,” I said, as we were eating lunch. “Read me a little bit of the first chapter.” She opened the book carefully, smoothed down the page, and began to read.

Joyce Kiefer is a long-time member of the A-Z Writing Group formerly known as Kepler's Writing Group. Her poetry has been published in several anthologies and she writes columns for several websites, as well as her own blog: http://lifeinthepursuit.blogspot.com/

James Chandler: Titanic Centennial Celebration

noreply@blogger.com (Aggie) — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 17:27:00 +0000

Bowker's issued a press release about the 98 books published for the Centennial of the Titanic's sinking. Most seem to look at the same event from different angles or work with Cameron's version. No one attempts to change the outcome -- until this one.

Want to read a happy ending, an alternative that could have transpired even with no change in the surroundings that night? A man coming of age, a love he's just met, a challenge he meets in an unconventional way, turning his odd vision into a beacon for survival.

Read the story here for free:

ADRIFT, by James Chandler

James Chandler is the editor of Fallen Leaf Anthology (twenty writers attending The Write Retreat at Stanford Sierra Camp collectively present more than 40 works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry) and long time member of Kepler's Writing Group.

Jennifer duBois: Mental Distress Across Culture and History

noreply@blogger.com (Aggie) — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:15:00 +0000

The New York Times Magazine recently ran a fascinating article about the group of teenage girls in upstate New York who succumbed, en masse, to a set of mysterious symptoms—such as twitching and spasming—for which no satisfactory biological explanation can be found. One girl was afflicted with the symptoms, then another and another, until the affliction has spread fairly widely throughout the school. Many of the sufferers are cheerleaders. The story has attracted much national attention, and the incidence of the symptoms seems to rise and fall with the level of media scrutiny. After ruling out environmental explanations, some experts have concluded that the girls are suffering from conversion disorder—commonly called mass hysteria. But perhaps understandably, many of the victims and their families are resistant to this diagnosis, in part because it sounds like an accusation that the girls are faking their symptoms—and their symptoms, it turns out, are pretty hard to fake.

Reading this piece reminded me of an amazing book I read a couple of years ago called Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche by Ethan Watters. In it, Watters argues that mental illness, unlike physical illness, manifests itself in culturally distinct ways. In different cultures, different symptoms are scanned as reflective of psychic pain—and thus, in different cultures different symptoms of psychic pain appear. Watters argues for a more culturally aware approach toward global mental health, raising the interesting example of schizophrenia—understood as the product of malfunctioning brains in the West, and of demonic possession in certain African cultures. In those cultures, because the problem is understood as external to the individual, schizophrenics are more accepted and well-integrated into their families during periods of wellness and calm. Watters also discusses the case of anorexia, which is widely and popularly believed to be a function of the Western media’s obsession with image and emphasis on thinness. But he raises the point that when anorexia first emerged as a set of symptoms it was not often accompanied by the body dysmorphia we often believe to be its hallmark today—it usually afflicted a young woman on the heels of a romantic heartbreak, and first presented as vague stomach problems and an inability to eat. A similar disorder is arising among young women in Hong Kong, where the disease is not understood—at least not by its sufferers—as a pursuit of thinness, but is in fact experienced as a sensation of chronic stomach discomfort or fullness.

I was reminded of all of this while reading the article about the cheerleaders in upstate New York. When no external and organic explanation for the girls’ symptoms was found, sufferers were understandably hesitant to accept the diagnosis of conversion disorder—feeling that this was, on some level, an implication that their disease was not real. Crazy Like Us gives us another way of understanding their symptoms: as a culturally influenced manifestation of an underlying, and very real, psychic issue. It shouldn’t surprise us that symptoms of mental distress are variable across culture and history, or that certain mental symptoms can be unusual, transitory, or even, on some level, ‘contagious.’ After all, the brain is in constant dialogue with the culture around it, which makes diagnosing and caring for it an even stranger project than caring for our bodies. My mother tells the incredible story of how, as a young candy striper volunteering in a V.A. hospital, she roused a catatonic patient from his stupor by offering him a glass of what she thought was apple juice—it was, in fact, his urine sample. His vigorous head shaking was his first movement in months, and he subsequently made a dramatic and full recovery. Though for some reason, this never made it into the medical protocol.

Jennifer duBois: When One Falls In Love With a Book

noreply@blogger.com (Aggie) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Really loving a book—especially one that not everyone else in the world has read—comes with a very particular blend of emotions. There’s the feeling of private elation, as though the book’s been written for you personally. There’s that impulse to babble to everyone about how much you loved the book. And there’s the sense of gratitude that, out of the vast universe of books, this particular book happened to find you. All of these feelings are heightened, I think, when one falls in love with a book that has, in one way or another, only recently emerged and become available to you—either through a translation or an exhumation or a re-release. Over the past decade, I’ve read three books of this sort that have particularly stayed with me: Embers by Sandor Marai, Desperate Characters by Paula Fox, and There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

Desperate Characters, originally published in 1970, was re-released in 1999 after many years out of print. It’s a prickly and perfect little book, written with economy and grace and wryness and an astonishing command of our sympathies. Fox skewers the solipsism of her characters—Sophie and Otto Bentwood, fragile inhabitants of late-60s New York—without ever abandoning her empathy for them, and she’s a master of strange and chilling and small domestic symbolism (the plot mostly revolves around Sophie waiting to find out if she’s contracted rabies from the bite of a stray cat). Sophie and Otto’s lives provide the perfect canvass to delineate, with wrenching clarity, the changing social and political landscape of the time. Desperate Characters is that very rare thing—a social novella, no less wise and prophetic for being so slim.

Embers was written in Hungarian in 1949, fell out of print forever, and was translated into English in 2000, eleven years after Marai committed suicide. It’s an enchanting and haunting novella, told mostly as an elegant monologue—and extended accusation— delivered by an aging general to an old friend he’s invited over for dinner. The fact of the general’s direct address invites us to feel implicated in the events he describes—and I think in a strange way this device manages to subvert the possible artificial coyness of withholding the revelation of what’s occurred. By telling us what’s happened as though we already know, we sort of feel as though we do. This book feels like a fairy tale in the very best way, and its emergence from obscurity (and Hungarian) adds to this mythic feel.

There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby is a collection of stories that were selected and translated into English by Anna Summers and Keith Gessen and published in 2009. Though widely known in Russia, this collection was Petrushevskaya’s first English translation from a major American house. The stories are deeply strange and spare and utterly singular; they grapple with the inexplicable; they careen from dreaminess to nighmarishness, and from the literal to the metaphorical, and back again. They straddle realism and surrealism in a way that is both disturbing and gorgeous; one is always left wondering, deliciously, what kind of story one has just read.

All three of these books would be lovely and thrilling no matter what—at any time, and in any language. But the fact that they’ve only recently become accessible to me, as a reasonably young reader of English, makes them—at least to me—even more intoxicating and compelling.

Jennifer duBois: How should one proceed when the cause is lost?

noreply@blogger.com (Aggie) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Not long ago, I was asked in a radio interview what I might do if confronted with the situation my character, Irina, finds herself in A Partial History of Lost Causes. Given a diagnosis of impending Huntington’s disease--the fatal neurological disease that she’d watched slowly kill her father—Irina runs away from her life. She leaves her boyfriend and mother and job and friends, and she goes to Russia to ask Aleksandr Bezetov (a chess champion turned dissident, loosely based on Garry Kasparov) a pretty abstract question: how should one proceed when the cause is lost? In the book, the tenuousness of Irina’s links to her life—most importantly, her relationships—allows her to go on this strange last adventure. Might I do something similar, the interviewer asked, if I were in Irina’s shoes? How might I look for meaning? I said that I’d have to run away to Russia to find Garry Kasparov, of course, but that was not at all true. The question made me contemplate Irina’s profound and distinctive isolation, and the ways in which this feature of her character enables the book’s plot. And the experience of promoting Partial History has reminded me (as if I could ever forget), how very different I am from Irina on this score—and how the existence of the book itself, and Irina in particular, feels to me to be a very communal effort.

The truth is, I think I would probably do the opposite of what Irina does if I was in her situation: I imagine I would cling to my fiancé and my mother and my friends; I would tediously invest in my relationships; and though I’m sure I’d share a huge portion of Irina’s self-pity and fear, her philosophical concerns (even for a former philosophy major like myself) might, at the end of the day, turn out to be pretty low on my list of priorities. This would probably be a typical response; after all, millions of people confront the exact same diagnosis as Irina without doing anything so dramatic and self-indulgent as she does. But I wanted to write a story about someone who does do something dramatic and who is propelled by the abstract, and that meant writing a character like Irina: isolated in the extreme, at least at the book’s beginning, and unable to invest (or so she thinks) in much of anything—even though she recognizes, on some level, that her problem is really everyone’s problem (namely, mortality).

It’s been interesting, then, for me to read from the point of view of such a remote person to bookstore crowds composed overwhelmingly of my relatives and teachers and friends and friends of friends and parents and cousins and in-laws of friends, many of whom contributed to the book in ways known and unknown to them: the Iowa classmate who gave me brilliant line edits and the fourth grade teacher who let me write stories with spelling words instead of taking spelling tests; the Stanford colleague who directly solved a second chapter problem and the great college friend/ghost publicist who tirelessly promoted the book to everyone, everywhere; the hugely talented high school buddy who took my author photo and the inspiring history teacher who pushed me to deal with my public speaking fear; the tireless Alzheimer’s home health aide, who gave Irina her pragmatism; my widowed mother and widowed aunt, who gave Irina her resilience.

In A Partial History of Lost Causes, Irina’s isolation grants her a freedom to do things that—at least narratively, and at least to my mind—are more interesting than the things that most normal, reasonably socialized people might do in her place. So I’m glad that Irina is a solitary person. But I’m also glad that I’m not. Because standing behind Irina—even though she doesn’t know it—is an entire army of people I’ve learned from and loved. And they have made both of us possible.

C. J. Noonan: What a Newly Published Author Learns

noreply@blogger.com (Aggie) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 15:00:00 +0000

“Evocative” is a powerful word in a book review. The critic implies mystery, depth of feeling, swell of remembrance, emotion rising. Readers assume fascination, excitement, complexity, sensation. As a new author, I value the adjective. It guided my writing.

“An evocative first novel from C.J. Noonan begins in the rough, early 20^th century Sierra Nevada outpost of Truckee, California. It chronicles the tumultuous growing-up years of five children during the California woman’s rights movement and closes with the startling understandings of a good woman’s life, lived long.” These words are used to describe my novel, The House on Harrigan’s Hill.

A novel contains memoir and imagination. My novel’s characters, called “animated, no wooden, lifeless personalities…” from one reader’s brief Amazon review, are based on my grandmother’s early life. The events happened, told to me many times by my grandmother. Settings in the book come from places I know well in Sacramento, the Sierra Nevada, and Truckee. Beloved objects in the story decorate my home today. But these are all carefully chosen from among many events, scenes, and furnishings to add insight and to interpret the particular characters, landscape, and actions of the story. The novel is a doppelganger; two sides of a coin; or as the protagonist says things “remembered … one way and Tiny had a completely different memory.”

First time novelists are urged to block out a careful sequence of action that builds to a climax and resolves the conflicts in a denouement. They are told to spend time making character outlines. And some writers do. I used a more chaotic method. I just wrote and new ideas rolled out of my mind as the sequences developed. I moved sections around and rewrote as a new angle came to mind. I spent time thinking about what was going on in the character’s head to make them act a certain way. I recalled that the real “Mama,” my great grandmother, was a fountain of poems, lines from Shakespeare, and sayings from the Bible, so I molded that character to include those traits. They make her unique, which she was.

At workshops, on the internet, and from friends the advice was “get a reader.” The college writing professor friend who read the novel through many drafts helped beyond compare. She refers to me as one of her successful “mentees.” How lucky I was!

The Bay Area Writing Project’s emphasis on reading a draft and accepting the expert advice from colleagues was invaluable. I remember Jim Gray (first Writing Project director and friend) who promoted teachers as writers. From his words of wisdom I learned that a writing group is a must. The five pairs of eyes in my group, reading the same chapter I’d struggled over for weeks, suddenly provided a solution to a perplexing, seemingly irresolvable problem. That’s essential for every novelist, and especially a first timer.

The House on Harrigan’s Hill took four and a half years to write, rewrite, and rewrite again. Yes, I took vacations, worked on senate and presidential elections, wrote short stories and weekly posts to my education blog, attended the many plays offered in the Bay Area, and generally lived my life. But the novel was in my imagination day and night.

It was frustrating that agents and publishers did not immediately see a sure winner in the novel set in early 20^th century California, filled with quirky, quixotic characters living during social and economic upheaval high in the Sierra, with a climax at the time of the election for the Woman Suffrage Amendment that gave California women the right to vote.

The House on Harrigan’s Hill was published by Sea-Hill Press. It’s available at Kepler’s and Books, Inc (Mountain View) as well as Amazon. Word of thanks to the Los Gatos Library, first to put it on the shelf. And thanks to friends and relations who have spread the word about a new author and a wonderful book. They speak the magic word: “Evocative!”

-Claire

Meg Waite Clayton: In Praise of Writing Friends … and Publishing and Bookselling Ones, Too

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

The history of my writing starts with a purse. Like the character of Linda in my second novel, The Wednesday Sisters, my first writing teacher—at a college extension class—dumped hers out over the table and told us to write for five minutes about anything that spilled out. She swore we wouldn’t have to read (just as Linda does in The Wednesday Sisters when she’s pushing the sisters to write at the picnic table in the park). Then she called on me to read first.

Which is the good news. If she hadn’t, I’d have ducked out before she could. It had taken all the nerve I had just to get to that class, to admit that, yes, I dreamed of writing novels.

To make a long story short from that point, I’m just going to say it: Ten Years. That’s how long it took me from dumped purse to first novel on bookstore shelves. The thing that kept me going: writing friends. Like the Wednesday Sisters in the book, none of my early writing friends was published when we started out, but we now count - as of the publication of The Four Ms. Bradwells yesterday - seven books between the four of us, and an eighth under contract. We’re a stubborn bunch—which, if you’ve read any of the guest posts I’ve been honored to host on 1st Books—seems to be what it takes. So it seems fitting that the first Four Ms. Bradwells sighting was by my best writer-pal, Brenda Rickman Vantrease.

It took me another five years to get a second novel published after my first, The Language of Light, sold "modestly." (I'm absolutely thrilled, though, that Ballantine will be releasing it in paperback for the first time this June.) In the interim, I learned the hard way that while just being published is lovely, book sales are important, too. I have come to see that booksellers are the front line in helping new voices find audiences, and I do my best to support the booksellers who support writers. Selling books is as much a labor of love as writing them is.

And so is publishing. I know the publishing world can seem impersonal. Believe me, I know what a form rejection looks like. But I also know that most people in publishing stay there because they love books, and work really, really hard. I feel incredibly lucky to have a wonderful team helping me negotiate the turbulent waves of these changing publishing days.

Which leaves me with readers.

C.S. Lewis once said, "We read to know that we are not alone." It's a funny thing to think that a solo activity connects us in ways that little else does. But I know reading has made me feel understood, and helped me understand myself in ways that nothing else does. I hope that my writing will make you feel understood, too. And I appreciate all the precious time you commit to reading. Without readers, there would be no books. - Meg

P.S. If you're leaving here to take a look at The Four Ms. Bradwells - thank you! And will you take a look at The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen as well? It came out yesterday, too, and is a wonderful novel. Thanks!

Treasures of the Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 01:32:00 +0000

My third novel, The Four Ms. Bradwells goes on sale tomorrow, and I'm so looking forward to sharing the joy of that at Kepler's, where friends will be gathering for refreshments and a short reading. But I'm going to be spending so much time talking about that at so many readings over the new weeks that I thought I'd use today to talk about some of the things I've been reading. I've just finished The Peach Keeper, a lovely novel by Sarah Addison Allen. It, too, goes on sale tomorrow - I hope everyone who takes a look at The Four Ms. Bradwells will take a look at it.

And like everyone else, I suppose, I've been glued to the news - Japan, Libya and Cairo and Bahrain - and sometimes wondering what good writing does in this kind of world. But for a reassuring answer to that, I turn to the wonderful historian, Barbara Tuchman, who said

"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind.

Books are humanity in print."

And so I'm doing my best to set my light glowing at the top of my lighthouse, to shed what light I can. - Meg

Belle Yang: My Life, My Family, My Graphic Memoir in Snapshots

noreply@blogger.com (Belle Yang) — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 19:52:00 +0000

I will be at Kepler's at 7:30 P.M. July 8th talking about the process of making a graphic novel. Please join me.

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A drawing from 1967, the first year of my family's arrival in America. I like to show school children I wasn't drawing any better than most of them. The scene is of San Francisco Chinatown New Year's parade. Bing, Bang, Bong! Loving comic book sound effects at an early age.

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My parents and I moved to Carmel in 1971. I was lonely the first summer and Nancy Johnson, a professional watercolorist, who lived across the street, took me in her green VW Beetle to join her elderly students sketching and painting at Point Lobos and Cannery Row. The latter was no tourist destination. It was still the real Cannery Row of John Steinbeck.

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Self-portrait in my studio with my cat, Chairman Mao. Mao is a homonym for Mao--Cat (different tone. In Mandarin, there are 4 tones). You'll find him in my graphic memoir, "Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale." He appears in the present and in the past, because I wanted to connect my father to my great grandfather who were spiritually atuned.

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During my three-year sojourn in China, I studied traditional Chinese painting from contemporary masters. There he is, Chairman Mao sitting on his bistro chair.

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My studio at night.

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I use pigment markers for shading and hatching. Pigments do not turn blue or purple with age. This ensures my art work remains unchanged. I continue to do everything by hand. Some artist draw with Photoshop, but this leaves them with no original art. Perhaps they retain merely the sketches, which were scanned into the computer to begin the art work. Maybe not even sketches. I feel rich when I have stacks of art work under my bed, in the closet.

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A tube of gouache (pronounced goo-wash). It's an opaque watercolor and gives me the richest black. I prefer lamp black to permanent black.

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An Ames guide allows me to draw parallel lines. They corral my uneven lettering. But my lettering is hardly as good as it was in grade school. WW Norton decided to digitalize my handwriting, so I have a Belle Yang alphabet. It looks good. I had to do a double-take when I saw my pages with the new alphabet inserted in the captions and word balloons.

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A graphic novel page in the works.

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Taping off an edge of a panel so . . .

I can paint a straight edge. But I rarely use this trick, because my hands have gradually grown steady and I can make a straight edge free hand.

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Having a little show on the carpet of the living room with my dad watching on. It's so satisfying to spread out a bunch of the work and see how far I've come.

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Asked to try my hand on the jacket art, I drew these two pieces. As you can see from the published book, we went in an altogether different direction.

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The last page--"Finis!'

And Matt my loyal Fedex man comes to take it all away. It still amazes me my precious art, the results of 14-years, can reach New York City in less than 24-hours.

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My great granddad, Yang Junchen. He is the tragic hero in "Forget Sorrow."

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The Yang Family resettled in Tianjin during the mid-1930s after the Japanese attacked Manchuria.

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My father Zu-Wu, or Joseph Yang, and me. This was taken in 1994 when my first self-illustrated, adult nonfiction book, "Baba: A Return to China Upon My Father's Shoulders," was published.

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Laning and Zu-Wu. My parents on their engagement.

A life-long partnership.

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My next project will be on my mother's Hakka tribe on the Island of Taiwan. Hakkas were pushed out of the north in the 3rd Century by horse-riding peoples of the steppes. Hakkas in turn became nomads and are often called the Jews of China. My grandfather was adopted by a Japanese family when Taiwan was a colony of Japan (1985--1945), thus the kimono.

THE END

The Tao of the Graphic Novel

noreply@blogger.com (Belle Yang) — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:39:00 +0000

Belle Yang Interviews Belle Yang

Before we begin today's Q and A, please click here to watch this 4 minute film in which I am drawing a graphic novel page.

Q: Ms. Belle, are graphic novels all fiction?

A: Well, Belle, this area of art/literature is still being defined as it develops, but I asked my friend the librarian Ruthie Pennington Paget who is my go-to gal pal. This is what she says:

Comics are non-continuous, short stories that you find in a newspaper.

Graphic novels are book length, but they are their own format, which uses the methods of movies for presentation. They are the fiction format.

Graphic memoirs are a non-fiction genre of the graphic format.

The graphic style is a new format with fictional and non-fiction content.

Graphic style = cup. Non-fiction and fictional work are different kinds of ice cubes.

So, you got it? I am actually more rattled. I’ve read “Graphic Novels for Dummies” and it says graphic novels encompass fiction and non-fictional works as in memoirs. And some creators would be outraged to be called graphic novelists when they prefer the aesthetic simplicity of being creators of comics. Some just want to be called cartoonists. Manifestos have been written about what comics should mean. Manifestos? I thought they were only for Communists. Is Communism the root of all comics?

Q: Ms. Belle, what are a few of your favorite graphic novelists

Okay, the obvious ones are Art Spiegelman and Marjane Satrapi. Then there is Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home”—oh, she is just so literary and laugh-engendering even in as quirky a setting as a funeral home. How can you get literary in a comic book, you ask? You can. She does and I do or at least I try to be.

There are historical comics like the Canadian Chester Brown’s “Louis Riel.” Now that’s an area I want to see grow—biography and history. Comics grow up.

“Stitches” by the Caldecot bemedaled David Small. Josh Neufeld—and I am raring to get my hand on his “A.D. New Orleans after the Deluge.”

There is Joe Sacco’s journalistic approach in “Palestine” and “Gorazde.” He’s great, even if his characters were drawn by an overzealous dentist.

Seth’s “It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken,” about the main character’s obsession to discover the past of a dead New Yorker cartoonist. Seth's drawings are loose-limbed and stylish. Yes, some people get to go by one name because they are special.

Oh, not to forget David B.’s “Epileptic.” He’s French, so he gets to be just David B. (That’s Daveeeed to us uncouth Americans.) His drawings are stunning, marvelous. They make me wish I had made them. His story is painfully personal, about life with a brother who suffers grand mal seizures. Their parents’ attention is focused on the child with the problem. You get the picture. David has to live with the horrid N word: Neglect.

And I could tell you about the graphic novels I don’t love, but I always stop myself from being negative about another maker’s opus. This is my pet peeve: if it’s a bad book of any genre, it will die a natural death. Don’t throw dung at it. We need to review the good ones. Leave room for the idea that all your taste may be all in your buds?

Q: How did you choose the comics format?

A: It jumped out at me in a dark alley at a dead-end. It truly did.

I lived in Japan as a child and was devouring the telephone book-sized manga for girls and came to the US in 1967 wearing my favorite manga character shoes. Now in middle age, the manga phenomenon has washed over this continent like a tsunami.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s Well-Read Donkey post, I had a tough time selling my prose book with full color illustrations. In the eleventh year of my struggle, I reconnected with Alane Salierno Mason, my former editor at Harcourt Brace. She had moved to WW Norton and Company, and she suggested I take a look at Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis.” I did, and KAPOW! I was knocked over madly in like with the comics format all over again. I said, hey, I can do this, and do it well. So I turned my prose work into captions and dialogues, drew the pages in panels of art then showed them to Alane. Norton offered me a contract in the fall of 2007.

Q: Why do you work in black and white. Are you giving up color?

A: Ms. Belle, you know very well this question sends me into a tizzy.

As far as I can remember, I've loved black and white art. It began with black crayons on white sheets of paper on the backs of mom's students’ exams. When someone mentions comics, my mind flies to black and white inky panels, not color. Black and white has it's own set of parameters and design issues. Black on white is ecstatic. The two "colors"--one being the total absorption of light and the other, the throwing off of all light--are polar opposites. It's thrilling, its ecstatic, it's exhilarating. It's drama and conflict. Durm und strung.

Think about the first mark you make on a pristine sheet of paper. The abrasion of the black crayon or pencil is like an explosion in the cosmos, the moment when matter comes into existence.

Q: Ms. Belle, how should someone new to the graphic novel approach the reading of the first one?

A: I am always surprised by this question, because I learned to read manga when young, so it’s as natural to me as eating rice. You can do it any way you like: read it fast and come back to study the details. Or linger over each panel until satisfied and go on to the next. I can’t begin to break down my eye-brain functions, but I imagine I scan the panels and the entire page.

A graphic novelists like Chris Ware in his “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth” asks us to scan the whole page, because he wants us not to read in the usual way of moving our eyes left to right and top to bottom. He requires us to take in the whole and then home in on the details within the panels. You eyes will get a lot of exhausting and exhaustive exercise when you read graphic novels. It’s not kid’s stuff. Oftentimes, you have go back to find the trail of white pebbles, like Hansel and Gretel, in order to find your way.

And no, you are not stoopid if you missed it the first time round. Reread, reread and reread.

Q: Why did you use a brush and gouache instead of markers or pen and India ink?

I’m Chinese. Chinese love the brush. Therefore, I love the brush. Chinese culture is inseparable from the brush, since Chinese calligraphy is defined as the Mother of all arts. (I’ve heard Westerners refer to calligraphy as the art of the dunce. Hey, don't frown at me: I didn’t say it.) The brush can be supple or energized. It is able to express the artist’s every emotion, whether it be peace, rage or elated trembling.

With gouache, an opaque watercolor, I can get the darkest velvety black. India ink can crack. It’s not as supple after it dries on the Bristol board and causes the paper to warp. Nothing uglier than warped art.

Q: Why do you say the Chinese horizontal scroll is like a pre-modern motion picture. How does it relate to the graphic novel?

When you go into Asian museums, you might see a horizontal scroll unrolled in its entirety under glass. This is the wrong way to look. Horizontal scrolls were hand-held devices. Intimate. You unroll a section to the left and roll up what you’ve seen on the right. It’s as if you are riding on the back of a donkey and you get to travel the landscape, entering the mountain, descending into a village, crossing a bridge, getting into a boat to float downstream . . . the boat goes over a waterfall (Uh, just checkin’ to see if you are still with me.)

This is exactly what I try to show the reader of a graphic novel. I take my reader into the landscape of my story. And I might add that scrolls have lines of poetry written directly into the silk or paper, just like captions in a graphic novel.

Q: Why are you nuts about this format?

A: Because it’s perfect for me. In my prose books, the two-dozen pieces of art got lost. In my children’s book, the art was dominant partner. In graphic novels, words and images come together in a perfect balance and neither overwhelms the other. And how cool is that to be make ice cubes to fill a largely unfilled cup. My cup runneth empty is a good place to be.

Q: What are you going to blog about tomorrow, Ms. Belle?

A: I’m taking you on a photographic visit of my workspace and the tools of my trade, which includes empty, white tofu containers. And the latter has zero to do with being Chinese. I also want to show you family pictures of ancestors. But I have 24-hours to change my mind.

Belle Yang Interviews Belle Yang

noreply@blogger.com (Belle Yang) — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 01:46:00 +0000

I’ve had many an interview on this book tour for my graphic memoir, “Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale,” published by WW Norton and Company. I’ve had fun replying to the questions, but sometimes, I leave the sessions feeling unfulfilled—mostly on radio when the platform is really for the scintillating host fast-talk.

One of my favorite telephone interviews became material for the Asian Pop column by John Yang in sfgate.com. John and I were so culturally in tune with one another, I could skip over the explanations and jump into the real deal of Chinese history and aesthetics. Tomorrow, I’ll do a self-interview about the art and process of the graphic novel (comic format). Today, some getting-getting-to-know what's under Ms. Belle's mad hat.

Belle Yang Interviews Belle Yang

Q: Belle, what question do you hate most?

A: “Are you writer first or do you primarily think of yourself as a painter?”

I say: "When I write, I am a writer; when I paint, I am a painter.” I add: “When I make graphic novels, I can be both.”

Q: You’re a writer/artist of adult nonfiction books and children’s books, and now you are a graphic memoirist. Why do you jump categories, formats and generally make a librarian's job harder?

A: Belle, I came a cross a saying by a writer in India. She said: “ To be categorized is near death.” My soul was smiling when I read her words. I know it’s a trope, an exaggeration, but since I’ve long outgrown my childhood need to be like everyone else, I now have the opposite fear: of being plugged into a single category, let’s say “Asian American literature” or “Immigrant Literature.” I am a communicator. I can speak to young and old and anyone in between.

Q: Belle, if Forget Sorrow is your Chinese King Lear, can you identify the parallel characters in your book and in Lear?

A: My father’s grandfather was King Lear, who was blind to the truth nature of his children. His father was an imperfect Cordelia. My father’s second uncle was the fool and so was Yuan the Taoist idiot who came to claim his winter clothing from Great Grandfather when geese flew south and frost was on the eggplant. You know that Shakespeare had multiple fools in “As You Like.”

Q: Then who is your Edmund?

A: The Communist. They blinded China. The old order was turned upside down. Children were turned against parents to eradicate the Confucian legacy.

Q: Come now, did you reeeeally work 14 years on Forget Sorrow?

A: Yes, I had two adult nonfiction books under my belt. Then I met with rejection after rejection from my agent and editors, so I reworked my prose manuscript each time after I recovered from the blow. (I’d sleep for 2 days then get up, ready to fight on). Even when I was ill a decade ago, I returned from the hospital and dreamed of my great grandfather. He did not say a word, but I interpreted the dream as a reminder I had no time to be ill: I had not sent his story out into the world.

Q: Why were you so darn persistent?

A: There are many parts to the answer. One, I wanted to take away the pain my father bore for decades after the dissolution of his family and country.

Two, I wanted to take revenge against time, war and forgetting for my great grandfather who was thrown off his estate and wandered a beggar, dying ultimately of starvation and heartbreak.

Three, I was born in 1960 when great grandfather was “going home,’ so I often envision myself as his reincarnation.

Four, I always try finish what I begin. I’ve been a sprinter in the athletic sense, never a marathon runner. In my creative life, I want to be the latter.

Q: Under your hat, I see you have a bit of gray. What are the most important lessons you have learned in your half-century?

A: I lived with an abusive man who turned stalker after I fled him. He had gradually silenced me through manipulation. Manipulation is the evil art of alternating praise with pain. Sweetness followed by bitterness, on and on in this iambic pattern.

After I left him, I found a haven in China, but ran smack into the Tiananmen Massacre in my third year. I saw an entire people silenced by manipulation.

I learned that voice is power and stories make us individuals. When an emperor comes to the throne, he burns books—quashes stories—to enslave the people. I returned from China, vowing I would never waste this gift known as freedom of expression.

I’ve lent my voice to my parents who are bards in Mandarin Chinese, but lost their voice in this new country. I helped to make them individuals in the eyes of this society.

Q: What are your goals as a writer?

A: I want to have my books published and do well enough so that I can keep on doing the same thing. The reward of writing is to continue writing. No more; no less.

Q: How do you pronounce your last name?

A: Yang is pronounced like “young” as in young and old. We don’t have nasal “a’s” in Chinese. The “g” is almost silent. A few years ago, I made it my mission to teach non-Chinese speaker how to wag and curl their tongues properly. Yang means poplar, birch, willow or aspen. It's a beautiful family of trees and deserves to be pronounced with an open "a".

Q: I am writing a comic book script myself. It’s about my mother who was a member of the Hakka tribes. They fled the Huns when they rode in from the north. It's going to be really good. You want to read it?

A: Uh, oh gosh, I forgot I have an appointment for a pap smear followed by a root canal. Maybe later, okay?

How to Find an Author

noreply@blogger.com (EGauvin) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 08:42:00 +0000

Translation: like my publisher, I’m in it for the benjamins. But purely mercenary reasons aside, I should say one of the greatest rewards is stumbling across “new” authors. There’s an innocence, yet also a covetousness, to such occasions: you’re in love, you’re making a discovery that only a minority of English-speakers can share, and in staking out ground with your flag, you’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg—probably the larger part of an entire oeuvre still lies submerged in another language. It’s possessive in the best sense, like when, as a kid, you couldn’t wait to race to the library and check out all a given author’s books because you’d just devoured the last one. But of course, if you love an author, you also want to share him or her with the world.

How do I find the authors likely to interest me? Well, how do you decide what book to read next? The time-honored ways apply: critical histories, serendipitous bookstore finds, tips from trusted friends. I look up interviews with authors I like, then look up the authors they mention as friends, influences, heroes, contemporaries. Really, one read leads to another: epigraphs, quotations, allusions, blurbs, these all whet hungry curiosity with the breadcrumbs of further names or titles to investigate. One of the best things about reading foreign fiction is encountering the strange. Read a lot. Be willing to be surprised.

Because of the relatively small amount of work translated into English (as opposed to the amount translated from it), any authors you find are likely to be “new” only to English speakers, though sometimes they can be young or budding talents even in their home country. (This, like sales figures or an established reputation, can in fact be a selling point to US publishers.) We may feel we live in an international age, but c’mon: roaming charges, DVD regions, voltage variations, and a thousand other details of daily life make the experience of being in any one country quite different from being in another. The truth is, unless you can afford to spend your days following another country’s literary news, the best you can get from abroad is a very filtered view. What’s it filtered by? Professors, pundits, experts, scholars, reporters, reviewers, various government-funded initiatives for international cultural dissemination, authors, translators—think about all the usual people telling you who to read; think about how much you do or don’t ignore them; imagine that number doubled—the US plus another country’s literary establishment—then imagine the intermittent signal from one to the other further staticked by rumor, speculation, misperception, mistranslation, partiality, and gossip. How do we ever manage to get the skinny on another country?

This may sound exceedingly cynical, but what I’m saying is: make up your own mind. Find something you love and champion it. Only you can make it the next big thing. Often there’s a lot of competition among translators for a few big names that not only make it over, but make a splash. Toussaint. Houellebecq. Bernard Henri-Lévy. Don’t be satisfied with what people tell you is big abroad. The people over there think something if not totally different, then definitely more varied. As Americans, we have a certain conception of France, and naturally, we often look to confirm that conception. Publishers who like French stuff are looking the next book that’s somehow quintessentially French. But humans are great rationalizers, and everything that makes it big as French somehow gets added to the general conception of “Frenchness,” even if only as “something not formerly thought of as French.” So much of taste is decided around a dinner table, anyway: an editor goes to Paris, dines with his or her friends, comes back with recommendations. Why shouldn’t your dinner table be a source of informed opinion, provided that you’ve done your research and can eloquently advocate your tastes? Translation is your chance to revamp national reputations—to renovate a cliché. Up till recently, there was no such subgenre as “Scandinavian crime.”

I for one would love to expand the notion of Frenchness to include fabulism, not generally something we’ve looked to France for since, oh, maybe Jules Verne. As a genre, the Francophone fantastic is something of a lost continent for American readers today; the last communiqués from its shores to reach our own date back to the Decadents, or the Surrealists at best. Internationally, its centrality to French letters has been overshadowed by more prominent movements. Existentialism, Oulipo, the nouveau roman, structuralism: thanks in part to their successful exportation, these are the must-sees on any tour of postwar French literature, yet in the 20^th century, a tradition born of the transition from Romantic to Modern also thrived, and evolved to address contemporary concerns. French Decadents were reflected in the dark mirror of their British brethren and in our own American “weird tale,” homegrown name for a somber hybrid of fantasy and horror. But it’s clear the contemporary fantastic, which remains virtually unknown outside France, has much to offer similar Anglophone developments, from the metafictionalists of the 1960s, who playfully appropriated fantastical content, to the contemporary New Weird and New Wave Fabulists. Publications like Fairy Tale Review, or such recent volumes as the Library of America’s two-volume American Fantastic Tales bear witness not only to resurgent interest in the genre but its legitimization as literature.

A bit of advice for budding translators: international rights are a tricky business, and more than one translator has gotten burned by issues of permission. There have even been stories of fickle or unscrupulous authors retracting rights or pitting two translators against each other. Before you dive into the work, do your homework. Who owns the rights: the publisher, the author, or the author’s estate? The older a work is, the harder it may be to track down the rights. Contact the rights department for the publisher in question, and wait patiently for your email to be dug out of spam by an intern. Chances are, answering your query will not be a priority, unless you are coming with a publication contract or some other offer of money (sadly, publications in literary magazines may not always cut it). Then, stand by your author. The translator is writer, critic, and representative. In a way, I was Châteaureynaud’s US agent for a while, when I was trying to build a presence for him with publications in literary magazines. It may not pay much, but it’s gratifying, and a good way, down the line, to make a case for your author to a publisher. So what if your author isn’t even well-known in his or her homeland? The ironies and vagaries of international publishing are such that making it into English could, conversely, make your author big back home.

It’s been a pleasure and a privilege blogging this week at Well-Read Donkey. I am grateful and honored Aggie asked me to drop by, and I hope it’s been as fun for you as it has for me. To paraphrase Beyoncé: if you like it, then you should put a comment on it.

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P.S. If you’re reading A Life on Paper, why not drop by the terrific blog Largehearted Boy for a peek at the soundtrack the author and I have devised for the book? Then stick around for other awesome soundtracks writers have concocted for their creations.

Also, if you’re into supporting excellent writing, I’m in the Clarion Write-a-Thon this summer.You may have heard of the Clarion writing workshop, which has been running for 42 years and has turned out many bestselling and award-winning writers, often in the speculative vein. Funding has been cut for the program this year, and so Clarion has responded by running a "Write-a-Thon" to ensure that the workshop can continue. Sponsor me, and all proceeds go to keeping Clarion alive. What this entails is making a small PayPal donation via my profile page, which can be found here. Even a $5 donation helps Clarion tremendously. Sponsors also have the option of joining the Write-a-Thon forums, tracking my progress, and cheering me on during this six-week event.

Ways of Reading Châteaureynaud and the Fantastic

noreply@blogger.com (EGauvin) — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 08:53:00 +0000

(Photo of G.-O. C. and me courtesy Christine Bini)

Translators often say that one of the things they like best about their job is research (though writers could claim the same). A proper rendering in the target language involves looking into the subject matter of the source text, with attendant crash courses in history and vocabulary. You can never quite predict the strange side alleys where translating will lead you. While working on the uncollected story “Talking Ape Clobbered by Clowns” (which appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of Epiphany) I stumbled across Heidegger’s concept of Geworfenheit, or “thrownness”: “the accidental nature of human existence in a world that has not yet been made our own by conscious choice.” It seemed to describe perfectly this headlong tale of circus life with a climax in which the hapless heroine’s last words as she is hurled from a speeding motorcycle are “Oh Lord, what is this world where I've been flung?” (When I asked Châteaureynaud about Geworfenheit, he smiled, intrigued, and said he’d never heard of it.) In researching the story “Delaunay the Broker,” I scoured the sites of antique dealers to get visuals of silver sauceboats on pedestal bases and collectible decorated snuffboxes, the better to wrap my head around the objects described in French. I even paid visits to auction houses. On the whole, I’m very thankful to be a translator in the age of Google.

Châteaureynaud wrote “Delaunay” in 1988, and Words Without Borders published my translation in November 2005: the author’s English language debut. The discussion that follows may perhaps be most rewarding for those who've had a chance to read the story. Its plot ****SPOILERS**** is simple: the narrator, antiques dealer Edmond Thyll, obtains the services of the titular Delaunay, a broker noted in the business for being able to procure almost any item, down to the last detail, that a client might demand. Delaunay, is, in essence, that magical figure able to make dreams come true (in this case, within the admittedly narrow bounds of antiquarian collectibles, but chalk that up to Châteaureynaud’s sense of humor). No wonder, then, he excites the curiosity and cupidity of the narrator, who takes it upon himself to violate Delaunay’s sole stipulation: that he never ask where Delaunay gets his goods. Sneaking into Delaunay’s apartment, he finds Delaunay’s unsettling, even horrifying diary of the ordeals he suffers in the other world from which he procures his objects. Naturally, Delaunay leaves Thyll’s service, and in the end Thyll is left alone with a copy he made of the diary, “the only diary of the fantastic in the history of literature,” which it seems he will contemplate for the rest of his days.

There are several ways to read this story. One that immediately leaps to mind is as a variation on an age-old cautionary tale: don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. If curiosity does not, in this case, kill Thyll, it leaves him haunted and bereft. As in fables, action and moral are somewhat predictable, speaking to the perennial, if lamentable human desire to ruin a good thing. But is that all we can get from the story?

Châteaureynaud’s skill at sketching character with economy, sympathy, and precision is such that we might also deepen our appreciation of the tale by subjecting it to a realist reading. The realist short story is generally said to “reveal character,” and the psychological exploration of character and motivation is often cited as a goal of “literary” rather than “genre” fiction (scare quotes denote the "common wisdom" aspect of these definitions, rightly contested). Through this lens, the denouement of “Delaunay” has the inevitability of the well-told tale. Instead of speaking to a universal human failing—-ceding to temptation—-the story plots, step by step, the specific ways in which Thyll’s weaknesses prove his undoing. Right from the outset we get hints of the narrator's character from his behavior: vain, snobbish, easily flattered, grasping, envious, and mistrustful. The latter qualities are expanded on when he reveals how he first became acquainted with the private eye that he hires to follow Delaunay: he’d once hired the same man to follow a former lover. There's also direct reference to the narrator's homosexuality, his attraction to Delaunay, and his inability to have lasting relationships. Seen this way, the story becomes an investigation of the drive to covetousness and curiosity in which the fantastic element is merely a device, comparable to a more realist conceit, to shine a light on the operations of these emotions.

Ah, but what about the mysterious Delaunay, who’s never developed? What about the harrowing world he visits, so coyly referred to as “crossing the bar” (no reference to Tennyson intended)? For realists, this is the elephant in the room, and must at least be boiled down to metaphor, if not psychology. But in the literature of the fantastic, the fantastic is the raison d’être. The abiding richness of a fantastical element may in fact lie in its resistance to explanation and its refusal to be reduced to metaphor. It simply is. As Brian Evenson puts it in his preface to A Life on Paper, “Like Kafka, Châteaureynaud has little interest in explaining away the fantastic or in dulling its claws: the dreamy strangenesses to be found in his stories simply exist and must be taken at face value.”

“Delaunay,” then, presents us with a perfect example of story of the fantastic in its classical form, in which an impossible and inexplicable phenomenon, usually the crux of the tale, is briefly visited upon the protagonist. As critic and Surrealist Roger Caillois would say, the fantastic “manifests itself as scandal, rift, or tear, an uncanny, almost unbearable irruption into the real.” Sometimes the light that shines through this crack lays us bare, leaves us shriven. Other times, darkness comes through instead, making us unsure of the world we think to know when suddenly we find it shrouded in shadow.

Finally—and I owe this reading to my friend Ken Schneyer—“Delaunay the Broker” may be taken as a religious allegory. Any broker is a go-between, but one endowed with the power to fulfill desires becomes, in such a scheme, the intermediary between some unknowable Other, like God, and the world of flawed mortals like the narrator. His diary describes experiences tortured and ecstatic as those of mystics, and that other world where “all things are the same” but “the same as what I cannot say” resembles a Platonic world of forms. But in return, Delaunay asks trust: a leap of faith the narrator can't make. When the narrator betrays this trust, he is left with the writings of the prophet Delaunay: holy writ and scripture, a host and reliquary from which the incomparable, uncapturable spirit has moved on.

If you’ve had a chance to look at this story or any others by Châteaureynaud, what are some of your interpretations? Do you read realist and fantastical work with different mindsets or expectations? Share your personal narratives of reading in the comments section!

A Translator's Journey

noreply@blogger.com (EGauvin) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:35:00 +0000

A doctor tells a man he’s dead, so he goes home to inform his family and arrange his own funeral. A taxi driver has the best night of his life on a street off all the city maps, but what awaits when, years later, he finally finds his way back? A father tries to ease his obsessive grief over his wife’s death by taking several photos of his daughter every hour of her life. A poet in a mid-life crisis stumbles into a museum devoted to his past, present, and… future? Returned from abroad and weary of war, a king tries to reconstruct a pavilion remembered from his distant childhood. An antiques dealer meets a scout who can furnish any item a client might desire. A fortunetelling parrot frightens a glove merchant contemplating suicide in one of the automated firing-squad booths conveniently installed around his city. To please his new girlfriend, a translator must give up the humming mummy he keeps in a double bass case. A musician returns to his hometown to discover his childhood sweetheart has committed suicide… but then again, the river Tartarus doesn’t just run through everyone’s hometown.

Earlier this month, Small Beer Press debuted French fabulist Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud in English with A Life on Paper, a collection of short stories spanning the author’s career from his beginnings in the mid-‘70s to his most recent collection in 2005. Handpicked from among the hundred-odd he’s written, these stories—-eerie, wondrous, monstrous, mocking, and genteel—-showcase the variety of subjects, influences, and structures unified by the author’s subtle, graceful style and his principal concerns: nostalgia, the intersections of dream and reality, the ironies of fate, and the painful knowledge of mortality.

How do you tell someone about something you’ve lived with for years in near silence? Where do you start? For so long, it feels like I’ve been the only reader for these stories—-and in a way, I have: there were people I could speak to about them in French, but whom could I talk to about them in English? Whom could I talk about their English versions to? Not editors who’d rejected them, often not even the overworked editors who’d accepted them for publication in literary magazines. After a day of translation at my desk, I’d emerge from work both exhausted and elated, as from immersion in a sea of stories. Now that these stories are finally out, able to be shared with an Anglophone audience, holding this handsome hardcover up to my ear is like standing in a landlocked state and hearing an echo of that distant ocean’s roar. But it's you readers out there--swimmers all--I want to hear from. I want to hear whether the water's warm or cold, clear or murky, calm or roiling. Send me postcards with a few lines about waves lapping at your feet, or radio warnings of riptides, photos of brightly-hued fish in quick schools. What do you want to know about Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud? What can I pass on about him, or from you?

I first came across Châteaureynaud’s work in 2005, in the Zulma reprint of his 1989 collection Le Jardin dans l’île. There are books you pick up that it turns out have been waiting for you, or you for them. Some are there as Virgil was for Dante, to take you by the hand and guide you through a dark wood. There are certain prose styles, of an instantly suggestive music, that sound to me like half a duet. They are waiting for their partner in another tongue to complement them with harmony and complete the performance. No doubt this is a translator’s fancy: coming after German, Norwegian, Danish, Polish, Bulgarian, Greek, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Slovenian, Hungarian, and Croatian, English has certainly kept Châteaureynaud waiting.

What first drew me to Châteaureynaud was his use of the fantastic as an investigation of regret, a theme dear to my backward-glancing heart. But really, the Castelreynaldian fantastic does through indirection, unsettling symbol, or calm account of the impossible the very thing literature is meant to: lend voice to solitary experience or singular witness. How many of us, back from a foreign land, then face the difficulty of describing our time there? How often, over the breakfast table or even a lover’s pillow, have we found it hard to articulate a particularly compelling dream? How do we negotiate our return from the unrepeatable and unprovable; how do we import, intact, what only we have seen back into a social world—-a world of consensual meanings—-and make it matter to others? These concerns are central to the fantastic as a genre, which, as Tzvetan Todorov put it, forces the reader’s hesitation between natural (psychological) and supernatural (marvelous) explanations for the events described.

Here I am, then: back from a foreign land. Someone told me marvelous stories there. Impossible things happen in them, things that cannot be explained except by telling you each tale in its entirety. So I will do just that. I will pass these stories on intact, just as I learned them, but in the language you and I speak to one another.

*********************
Widely known in his native France, Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud has been honored over a career of more than 30 years with the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle, and the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire at Utopiales. His stories have appeared in Conjunctions, The Harvard Review, The Southern Review, Words Without Borders, AGNI Online, Epiphany, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Postscripts, Eleven Eleven, Sentence, Joyland, and The Café Irreal. His work has been compared to that of Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Cortazar, Isak Dinesen, and Steven Millhauser.

A graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop, Edward Gauvin has received fellowships and residencies from the Centre National du Livre, Ledig House, the Banff Centre, and the American Literary Translators Association. His work has also appeared in World Literature Today, Subtropics, Absinthe, Two Lines, and Tin House. The winner of the 2010 John Dryden Translation Prize, in the coming year he will be a Fulbright scholar in Brussels, studying Belgian fantastical fiction.

Guest Post by Joan Frank: When It Is Good

noreply@blogger.com (Aggie) — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Joan with her granddaughters Brittany and Bella (right to left)

A wise friend suggested I list some of the ways in which the calling of writing makes one happy—to ward off evidence that the work brings an apparently limitless supply of frustration, loneliness, difficulty so cunningly intricate it approaches a kind of Escherian sublimity, and in result, anguish.

An answering image comes to mind, from a silly Tom Hanks movie called "Splash." In it, Darryl Hannah plays a modern mermaid, whose fate is to own a pair of (drop-dead) female legs on land but, as soon as she’s in water, to manifest a glorious, scaly, powerfully-tailfinned bottom half. One scene I remember shows her filling a tub, with the bathroom door locked. The next moment we see her blissfully reclined in that tub: a brief retreat from the bewildering demands of humans, her fabulous tail flicking once or twice in peace and contentment. The bath has clearly restored an ineffable, deeply right state of things, down to the DNA.

It feels like that to be sitting at the keyboard.

I’m pretty sure I was imprinted to respond this way by my late father—a teacher who spent endless hours in the simple den he’d built behind our Arizona home. There he’d installed air conditioning, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a first-rate sound system, and a big desk made from a wooden door placed on two low filing cabinets. He burned incense in a little brass Buddha, played jazz, classics, Broadway, and opera on the stereo, and typed his head off—a rich, staccato music of its own, filled with the intensity of his thinking—at a Royal Portable typewriter which later became my high school graduation gift.

The objects, the tableau, the sounds and smells (sandalwood, sweat, books)—shaped me early, at what I’d have to call soul level. Anyone who’d known my father, and then lived to see my studio out behind our house today—its big old wooden desk, shelves of books, Glen Gould on the CD player—would be entitled to laugh, because it would appear I’d done my best to copy my father’s retreat in every detail (except the incense). Most tellingly, to "assume the position"—sitting at the desk, staring at pages or screen—still gives the instant, deep comfort of the fetal curl.

Here are similar moments, gathered in a free-association search:

Intervals at the desk when it occurs to you that you don’t know what’s going to happen, and that you’re writing to find out. Your heart pounds.
Finding a way through heinously painful passages that must nonetheless be told: being “accurately alive” to the framed experience, to borrow a fellow writer's words. Getting it right gives something and eases something, but I won't call it psychotherapy, because it's not.
Rereading work after a long time away from it and feeling extreme relief to see that it still reads as it should.
Feeling not ashamed but loyal, even grateful toward prior work. It was necessary, and you can stand by it.
Driving alone in the car, and suddenly understanding what the title must be. (Titles are such a strange and delicate business—you seek them as if setting out to bag Tinkerbell in a butterfly net.)
Swimming or walking or washing dishes or sweeping or staring at nothing, and understanding, of a sudden, what needs to happen next.
Going into a piece of work to clean it up, and in some blessed flash seeing where certain material can naturally fall away. The unnecessary words almost turn a lighter shade before your eyes.
Getting up from the desk as if from a long sleep, with only the dimmest sense of how much time has passed.
Being unwilling to stop, even to eat. It happens. (And I really, really love food.)
Bothering to turn on the light at night to jot the needed words, even if they wind up getting dumped. (You may insist you can remember without jotting. Good luck with that.)
When life appears to be rocketing to hell and the known world exploding into gumball-sized shards, you can begin to write about it. The act is private, costs no money, keeps you company, gives validation, context, and some degree of control: a precious, slim tether to the sanity you feared for.
Images and words surface like golden carp: from memory, from an odd photograph, from dreams. A kid’s face. Camellias in half-decay. A dead robin. A painting. An argument on a beach, long ago. A phrase—fitting the need to hand like a little key.
Weirdly, there’s even satisfaction in getting stuck. It's a signal you’re underway. Somehow you'll dig out, or wander accidentally through a side passage—often unaware you did, until later. There’s excitement in the trust you learn to place in that process, in making yourself receptive to it.
Stumbling into reading that helps, in some way, what you’re working on.
A note arrives like a “message in a bottle,” telling you someone was reached and moved by your work.
You send a note to someone whose work has reached and moved you, and (as frosting) receive a warm response.

Many of the above sound like the habits and consolations of a junkie: while the comparison’s a bit violent, it may not be completely inaccurate. But the tradition—of needing a writing life to survive—emerges from a long, distinguished, and not-so-distinguished past. Flaubert called it “a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.” Somerset Maugham said that after a good day’s writing, regular life struck him as “a bit flat and pale” by comparison.

I recall a "Saturday Night Live" sketch years ago, showing a couple strolling happily through a city park. As they did, a voiceover declared quietly, “These two people have not used any commercial product to make themselves more attractive to each other.”

In the same spirit: none of the above-described pleasures has much to do with publishing.

Joan Frank

Guest Post by Joan Frank: If You Really Want to Hear About It

noreply@blogger.com (Aggie) — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 13:00:00 +0000

In my alternate life as a book reviewer, I come across a practice that’s more and more pervasive, and it happens like this:

A first novel by a very bright, up-and-coming young author arrives for review. At the back of the novel the publisher has attached a section called (I'll invent a title to camouflage it) “Additional Info and More About Me.”

This section features the writer's photo—way handsome—followed by a little snack-tray of personal chat: a self-deprecating, witty narrative about his life, background, the writing of the book, and a quick tour of the books he's presently reading. For a farewell flourish he lists all the titles he'd first wanted to give the novel in my hands, and his funny reasons for rejecting each.

The purpose of these sparkling riffs is of course to draw readers. The “More About Me” section—promised in a shiny, medal-like sticker on the book’s cover—offers a literary amuse-bouche.

Of course I skip straight to this section, the same way I leaf through gossip magazines at the supermarket checkout. And in an instant, I want to tell the writer (and his publicist) with a groan: No, no, no. Please don’t do this.

It isn’t that the author's small talk isn't fun or tasteful: it's downright demure, compared with the antics of many websites and trailers. But a website or a video trailer—so far, anyhow—exists in a separate physical (or virtual) space. If you make a sandwich of the actual novel slapped up against the author’s jolly scrapbook-noodling, it strikes me that you not only devalue the novel—you make it almost irrelevant. Why should a reader bother with a flimsy, made-up story when she can zero in, between the same covers, on the tasty dirt of the writer’s life?

My guess is that most readers will skim the novel after having sucked up the more salacious stuff at the back—and only then if there happens to be nothing else to do.

And there’s always, always something else to do.

To survive, literary fiction—last time I checked—must create urgency, even inside the quietest tale. A reader’s got to need to push through, compelled by the story’s voice, or because she's curious about what happens next, or both. She’s got to care. One of the lines that still reverberates across decades, from J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, is Holden Caulfield’s tense refrain: If you really want to hear about it . . . Those words served as Holden’s sword and shield—and bait. Very few, he understood, really give a toss. It's a story's job to lure them.

I’m not arguing for piousness, exactly. I like the junk food of gossip as much as anybody, and to be fair, reading about artists' personal struggles (in their letters, for example) can inspire as powerfully as their works. Just, please—invoking that famous old New Yorker division between its advertising and editorial departments—can't we keep the elevator doors separate?

A writer offers a piece of fiction by way of saying Here is a dream I made. The reader takes it into her hands, answering I accept your dream for the duration of its reading—if it can hold me. The dream is a world. Unlike a website, film, or television show, a book doesn't commend itself to dreams when bound together with a series of outtakes, commercial tie-ins, funny bloopers, action figures, key chains, and the author tweeting what he ate for breakfast. Those latter forms of outfall may show up—but please, don't leash them to the art.

Introductions and acknowledgment pages aside—when personality profiling is packed cheek to cheek with fiction, it strikes me that the primacy of the “real” voice nearly always trumps. Some delicate membrane dissolves, a little sickeningly. Readers' sympathies naturally flow toward the "actual"—melting fiction's dream, rendering it gossamer, sometimes even silly. What's more, a reader can sneak back anytime and check out those dishy pages whenever she gets bored with the story (the poor story!)—like porn stashed in the back of a textbook.

So when that delicious suspension—okay: for this moment, this dream and no other—is punctured, what's left? The novel becomes an infomercial or larky exercise, winking the neon message Ha, Just Fooling Around.

A new genre? Possibly. And for some, that might be ideal—but I can't really say I want to hear about it. There's little time, and so much wonderful work out there yet to read.

~Joan

Feature article on Joan's life and work by Press Democrat writer Diane Peterson.

Guest Post by Joan Frank: The Fate of Palomino Boy

noreply@blogger.com (Aggie) — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Joan Frank with her granddaughters Bella, 9 , Brittany 11, and her husband, playwright Bob Duxbury.

Born in Los Angeles in 1918, Don Emblen was one of those tough old believers, a poet, publisher and bibliophile who lived hard. Lifelong friends included Donald Hall, Robert Bly, and the late William Stafford. He worked for what was then the Los Angeles City News Service, chased submarines in the Navy, married three times, had kids and grandkids, taught English Lit thirtysome years at the same Northern California college, and acted as a second father to my husband, whom he hired many years ago to teach there as well.

Don’s passions were myriad. He ran a hand-press; printed chapbooks and broadsides. He drove for Meals on Wheels; grew fruit and vegetables. He hiked and traveled, Nova Scotia to Prague, and wrote about all of it. He held soirées: people read from new work; chamber ensembles serenaded. He published a monthly newsletter called The Reader’s Rejoinder, a literary almanac produced on his outsized manual typewriter. In 1999, he was crowned the first Poet Laureate of Sonoma County.

All this is to describe a polymath, whose driving passion was language. He wrote perhaps 4000 poems, and several books—including an early biography of Peter Mark Roget, creator of the thesaurus. Though frail and wizened toward the end, Don’s verve never flagged. His gravelly voice often popped up on our answering machine with questions about a name or title or phrase. He critiqued our work; left sacks of fruit on our front porch. Don died a year ago. We miss him fiercely.

After his memorial service, I wandered to a table bearing some of his effects. I saw the famous Emblen typewriter, on which he’d scotch-taped the local library’s schedule. Then something else caught my eye: an early book co-written with his first wife, called Palomino Boy, a young people’s novel about a Mexican-American child, hardcover: Viking Press, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1948.

The clear plastic cover had clouded; the pages yellowed around their edges. I looked at the book’s first sentence: Juan was as brown as the side of a mountain.

I flipped to the back jacket flap. There was a stunning young Don, almost unrecognizably handsome, walking the beach with a dazzling first wife, arm tightly around her waist, their hair wind-whipped. They looked like movie stars: an ad for joy. It streamed from their bodies, their faces.

I felt a little seasick.

It wasn’t that I don’t know this is the way of things. Other remarkable friends have died, never attaining anything close to Don’s fabulous earthly score of ninety years. It wasn’t that I didn’t rejoice to see this evidence of a brilliant youth.

It was the book.

Who would remember it? To whom, besides family and intimates, could it now possibly matter? I held it in my hands like Yorick’s skull.

Days later, I looked it up online. A smattering of libraries held copies; bookfinders offered it as an antiquarian title, often for outrageous prices. I found a hand-typed 1948 University of Illinois Library list of new titles coming out that year, dismissing Palomino Boy with a sniff: “not a must.” (It pleases me to think that the sniffer must be long dead.) And I found an old New York Times review—a two-paragraph blurb from 1949. It used dated terms (“Negro”) but its verdict was kind, signed by Cornelia Ernst Zagat, someone I now wish I could have known: “ . . . Simplicity and a poetic quality in the writing and convincing characterization. Eight to ten-year-olds will appreciate this wise and beautiful story.”

The story broaches, with extreme gentleness, the problem of racism, or Other-ness. The orphaned Juan, who lives with an American foster family, worries that he is the wrong color. Animal and human friends, of different colors, teach him otherwise. The illustrations (called “decoration” in the Times review) are dreamily beautiful, like woodcuts.

Don had never mentioned the book. I’d never known it existed. Coming upon it felt like finding a mummy in my basement. The dismay was complicated by my own writing life: kin to the hauntedness I always feel seeping from used-book stacks—the eyeball-stinging smell of aging paper, the curled, flaking pages—but in this instance, more sickeningly personal. Yes, Don wrote other books. But Palomino Boy had been a novel by the young, for the young; an act of life, real and, apparently, au courant.

Now it was a relic.

An adult novelist understands certain things rationally: call it mortal realism. We suppose we grasp the fact of our own eventual deaths. Secular writers can recite all the usual brave existential bromides: meaning is bound up in the process of making, in the richness of the life. But just beneath that sane veneer a wildly stubborn part of us, a magical thinking part, wants things to add up in our favor. And in bald point of fact, things rarely add up—rather, they add up too predictably. That afternoon, I felt with new sharpness (in stomach, lungs and heart) the limits of the artmaker’s quest—which, if we’re honest, is to leave something that will last, something that will continue to pulse with meaning.

What do we think of, these days, as lasting? Fifty years? Five hundred? With novels, we’re speaking of an art form that only found its footing in the 19th century. All I can attest is that sixty years struck me, while I held Don’s book in my hands, as both a very long tunnel, and a handful of sand.

Of course at some level (mostly unspoken) we understand that nearly everyone’s books will go the way of Palomino Boy—all but those of a very well-known few. Beyond them, “the grave’s a fine and private place.” (It was one of Don’s favorite lines.)

Can one stop writing, after the physical reality of this truth enters one’s body?

No.

Is there a way, in face of this, to make sense of the writer’s art, of the calling to make art, that avoids platitudes and specious sentiment?

Maybe. Probably not.

I don’t know.

-Joan

www.joanfrank.org

Guest Post by Helen Simonson: Writers on Tape

noreply@blogger.com (Aggie) — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Helen Simonson hails from Sussex, land of rolling chalk downs and many, many sheep.

I recently drove seven hours from my home in the Washington DC area to the Hamptons. Driving alone, with just my dog for company, I listened to a wonderful set of CDs my mother had given me called The Spoken Word: British Writers, one in a series produced by the British Library Sound Archives. On three CDs, famous writers, including Virginia Woolf, Rudyard Kipling and Somerset Maugham, spoke, lectured or were interviewed about writing. It was haunting to find myself barreling up I95, listening to writers, some of whose voices were only just able to be caught and recorded. The recordings are soft, the words often mumbled and the scratchiness of early technology (shellac discs) is evident. None of the writers had been given ‘media training’ and it was fun to hear the long pauses, coughs, striking of pipe matches and clinking of tea cups or train announcements in the background of various interviews. The voices too, spoke an English long disappeared; even from the royal family. They used ‘e’ instead of a short ‘a’ - so that Pall Mall became Pell Mell, and happy became heppy.

In a 1958 TV interview, Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, was asked if the coming of recording technology spelled the end of the written word and if all novels would become spoken. He mused on the economic difficulties of publishing and suggested that the cheaper spoken word might be a way out, though it would require novels to give way to shorter pieces. It was strange to realize that the current debate over the rise of the e-book is really as old as the gramophone. I am comforted that if the eight-track tape recorder did not spell the end of books, that even in the internet age, they will survive. It is one of the joys of my email inbox, by the way, to hear from people who have read me on Kindle, or some other e-reader, and write to tell me they have then rushed out to buy a copy. It seems the books we truly love demand a physical presence in our homes.

In scraps of a 1937 radio piece, the only surviving recording of her voice, Virginia Woolf spoke of English as an ancient language where every word comes freighted with echoes of the ways it has been used before; such that the writer’s task of combining words in new ways is made almost impossible. I thought of the word (and place), ‘Agincourt’ and how difficult it would be to use it without conjuring Shakespeare’s Henry V. I thought of putting a posy under a ‘bell jar’ and how Sylvia Plath had taken those words out of circulation; much as a famous baseball jersey might be retired. Most of all, I decelerated to an unacceptably slow pace for highway driving, as if this might somehow extend the joy of hearing the real Virginia Woolf talking to me.

Meanwhile, Rebecca West, journalist, critic, author and early suffragette, spoke to her interviewer, in 1958, of what a shame it was that so many people were now being taught to read and how this post-war expansion rendered it much less feasible for any one person to distinguish themselves in the art. She seemed to genuinely deplore the mediocre masses being granted access to the treasure of books and education. This was a sad reminder that even the most progressive of people may hold bigoted ideas in some areas. And isn’t it funny how the advancement of others is fought so hard by those who already hold all the advantages? If Rebecca West had been in charge of post-war education, I might have been trained to run a sewing machine instead of being introduced to Shakespeare and Chaucer!

As I walked my dog in a highway rest area or tried to eat a hard-boiled egg while negotiating a toll booth on the New Jersey Turnpike, I thought about all the writers we will never hear on CD – those who lived before the advent of sound recording. I will never hear Jane Austen talk about Emma, or poor Boswell defend his obsession with Samuel Johnson. I gained a new appreciation of the importance of capturing, in sound and video, writers talking about their work.

Accepting that writers belong in a multi-media world is not a easy position for me. I’m not that comfortable on video (no close-ups please!) and I’m suspicious of recording devices – too many politicians have been caught making off-color remarks into open microphones. I want people to judge my work independent of what they might think of me and I’m afraid of being captured and preserved in some awful dress and unfortunate hairstyle (is that Helen Simonson with the mullet and caftan?). However, it was just too wonderful to listen to Somerset Maugham sum up his life’s work and muse, in 1949, whether a few of his stories might survive the ages. I wanted to talk back and let him know he was still read and had a new biography out! I realized that I want to hear and see all my favorite writers and I think this means I need to stop being afraid of the video camera myself. So I’ll be looking for more of these British Library sound recordings and I’ll be seeing you on YouTube, folks!

Guest Post by Helen Simonson: My First Book Tour

noreply@blogger.com (Aggie) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 13:00:00 +0000

At Book Expo America 2010 from left to right: Leslie Sari, Kay Hodges, Helen Simonson, and Marsha Toy Engstrom, The Book Club Cheerleader

photo courtesy of Marsha Toy Engstrom

I’m just back from my first book tour! I published my debut novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, in early March and while not all debut authors are sent on the road, my book did well enough that my publishers, Random House, sent me on five weeks of touring. You are probably wondering what is so blog-worthy about a writer going on book tour? After all, isn’t that what writers do? But this is my very first novel and my very first tour, so I felt like a small child in a pink tutu on her first trip to the big candy store downtown. In security lines at regional airports, I slipped in and out of my ruby slippers. Arriving in new cities, I was as starry-eyed s if my media escort were meeting me with a glass coach rather than a Honda Civic.

I loved the hotels. They looked just like regular hotels, with lobbies and cute little bottles of shampoo and room service, but I didn’t have to pay for them, so they all seem more shiny, and I didn’t have to wait for my husband to leave the room to dive into the minibar (my husband believes minibars do not offer good travel value).

I loved being escorted. I made an immediate pledge to myself not to take unfair advantage of this service and act like some diva. However, I did allow many of my wonderful escorts to drive me around the nicest homes in each city and of course I always asked to lunch in some obscure spot, beloved of locals – but only if it wasn’t any trouble.

I had intended to treat my tour like a spa trip and eat nothing but salad and fish. But some of the obscure local spots had things like biscuits or maple pancakes and it would have been rude not to try them. I also tried to avoid wine, except wherever I was being toasted. I would not have eaten the chocolate-covered coffee beans, given to me by a nice bookstore owner, had I not been desperate for more room in my cute carry-on bag.

I may be making it sound fun, but many authors complain about book tours being very exhausting. I do have to agree. Some days I had to be chauffeured to two appearances, not one, and reading all those pages and signing books until my wrist ached was not easy; even though I am a trained professional. I had to chat with my readers, maintain my best behavior at power lunches with industry folks – and then there was all that flying, with the associated task of buying magazines in airport newsstands. Some days I really could have used an afternoon nap.

I can’t tell you what a relief it was to get home and back to being a stay-at-home mom with laundry and grocery runs and car pools. I welcomed a little relaxed vacuuming and washing the dog after all the hard work.

However, in retrospect it was such good fun that I believe most writers must live in constant danger of wanting to be on book tour instead of buckling down to write novels. Why face the blank page and writers’ block when you can instead face the impossible decision between room service and the hotel brasserie!

Guest Post by Helen Simonson: Writing Interrupted

noreply@blogger.com (Aggie) — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 13:00:00 +0000

My writing style can be best described as procrastination plus panic. It took me five years to write my debut novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, and it might have taken a lot longer, had the crashing economy not made it vital to finish my MFA thesis and go find a ‘real’ job. After a slow process in which a single chapter might take me a month to complete, and the computer date stamps showed weeks of inattention, I finished in a mad dash. I endured six weeks of terror in which self-doubt appeared as a very hairy little goblin woman who sat on my left shoulder and screamed abuse in my ear, while my world shrank to the three gray walls of a fabric cubicle and the glow of a laptop screen.

Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes I really like the writing. What I like is the completely blank mind that comes …after I have said aloud the awkward meaning of what I am trying to say, only ungrammatical…and just before the perfect phrase pops up; syntactically shiny and glowing with freshness. Those moments make me get up from my office chair and do a little jig of joy. I also like the thrill of pages fresh and hot from the printer, with numbers in the footer and my name on the top left; Helen Simonson. Imagine then how fabulous it was when I was finally presented with my name in print, on the cover of a real book!

I have written only one novel so far and I am horrified to report that it began with the slightest of ideas. I had a moment of clarity in which I decided to write something for myself, and my mind immediately produced a small brick house in the country and an older man, wearing his dead wife’s housecoat, answering the door to a stranger. I believe this moment of authentic self – in which I refused to care what others would think of me – was important to me and will be to you. We’d all like to be Tolstoy or Chekov, or Alice Munro, and sometimes we want that so badly that we reject our own voice; the one with the tendency towards humor and the distinct lack of interest in alienation, suburban angst, drug addiction - or sex presented as an act of nihilism. However, at best we can expect to produce somewhat competent pastiches of more famous (more depressed?) writers. To write something unique, I now believe, we can only go with the voice we have and hope that it is enough. When I wrote for myself, something sprang to life that I had not been able to create before. Give it a try.

Once I had a few lines, I just tried to keep going. Writing is like making one of those awful mosaic tabletops with broken plates and grout. Small shards of ideas, experience and images seemed to funnel from my head into my fingertips. I wrote linear, chapter by chapter; I also made visual story webs with fat markers on large sketchpads, as if I were in middle school. What I refused to do is to jump around and write all over the place, hoping to fit it together later. Many people like this method but I found it too scary.

I don’t believe it matters whether we write in a writing studio or on a park bench, watching our kids playing. What we all need is just to pile up pages. I find the biggest problem in piling up the pages is headspace. If I so much as look at email, consider the dirty dishes in the kitchen, sneak into the refrigerator or fight with a telephone marketer, my head fills with noise and my writing is over for the day. I try to write in the mornings and to set aside anything else that pops into my head (call the plumber, pay the mortgage, am I picking up a kid or is he going to Crew?) by writing it in a daily planner under the heading ‘call after 1pm’. I also found office space outside of my home. It’s a place I can be ‘writer’ instead of ‘mother’ for a few hours. A coffee shop might do the same trick.

I think that any kind of space and support you can build around your writing will help it survive. A set writing time, a writing class, a weekly editing group, a brief writing window carved out lunchtime at your ‘real’ job– all these can be useful. As my pages piled up, I found that they provided a foundation of support under the idea that I could be a writer. My longtime writing group, with their acerbic edits and my MFA classes with their discussions of ‘craft’, helped make writing an education, while I piled up enough pages to make it a real job. Good luck with your writing!

Helen Simonson

Kepler's Writing Group Member Profile: Kalpana Mohan

noreply@blogger.com (Aggie) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 13:00:00 +0000

The More I Write

For the longest time, my husband and my daughter told me that I should start a blog in which I posted random thoughts and observations. I shrugged. First of all, my family could not advise me. And, I did not have anything interesting to say. My observations were puerile, my conclusions, unoriginal. Who in the world would want to read my musings?

Despite myself, however, I began writing. I gathered the courage to post my thoughts in a blog titled “If the World is Flat, Why am I on Edge?” It was strange. The day I started posting, ideas spammed my brain. Like Google Alert on Permanent PMS, I found myself increasingly on edge, tuning in to keywords, watching the world falter around me, bristling when something cramped my style, scouting the daily news with a sullen giggle.

When I received a postcard with semi-erotica splayed all over it, I started. Was my mailman flirting with me? Why, I wondered, did the postcard shout “Hello Bombshell”? My thoughts on the subject became a whacky post titled “Dear Victoria: Keep Your Secret”. Then, yet another day, I was in San Francisco taking public transportation from Russian Hill to Civic Center. I spun my trip on the Muni into a story about the charm of commuting with strangers from one point to another. My father’s fascination with the lunches I prepared for him simmered into an essay on our interactions during the four months he stayed with me after my mother passed away. Oh, and yet another time, I was furious about how I was treated at a consulate just because I didn’t look like Angelina Jolie in my passport photo. Then a few weeks ago, my pressure cooker burst in my kitchen. The mishap not only sprayed its gravy onto a video blog. It sprouted into a piece of flash fiction titled “The Nerve of My Myrtle” which you can read at the end of this post. Two weeks ago, a friend, a Saratoga councilwoman, passed away after complications from advanced lung cancer. I regretted that I had never really made an effort to know her better. I was amazed at the responses (on Facebook, on email, via telephone and in person) that the words of my post elicited. I could not believe how my thoughts resonated with so many women (many of whom were unknown to me) who said they wished they had taken the time to know the brave and accomplished young lady.

One thing is now clear, I tell you: the more I write, the more I have to write.

The Nerve of The Myrtle

“Rice today, again?” she asked me, her yellow-green leaves unfurling under the growing April sun.

“Why? You have a problem with that?” I snapped. “Not like you eat anything I make anyway. You always eat out.” I don’t like my crepe myrtle prodding me about my cooking.

I hurried back inside the house. I let the door bang. She must have felt the gust of wind. The nerve. This is the problem with everything I’ve tended to gently, adoringly.

She was a bare brown twig just a few seasons ago. Then she was ablaze every May, coquetting pink with everyone who drove by. But all on a sudden, she stopped coloring her branches. I fed her the same thing that I was feeding all my other trees. She began standing there, her claws up and out, an emaciated witch with her broomstick stuck in the mud. I don’t know what was eating into her.

I really didn’t care to discuss my culinary plans with a tree which decided to boss me around simply because I came out several times in the day to hang out in my front yard and get some sun.

On one of those recent mornings when I was out, I heard her bare-knuckled twiggings.

“What?” I barked. I can’t hold it in when I’m miffed.

“Oh, nothing!” she said, swaying a little, may be even sensing my prickliness. But I heard a crack rising in one of her branches. In the past, she had shaken so hard that she lost a glad-load of leaves when she found out I’d overcooked my cauliflower, again.

“The potato was perfect today. Crunchy-roasted. Spicy. Just enough salt and spice,” I said, to no one in particular, standing on my driveway.

“Goo-od.” She rustled the “good” with her fifth branch anti-clockwise and creeped me out, I tell you. Her gnarly sixth branch was about to ask me something.

“Whatttt?” I hissed.

“Heard your pressure cooker burst last week? Was that your third? Or fourth?”

“So? Think I can’t cook without one?” I challenged her, digging my heel into her bed.

“The world didn’t have pressure cookers. People just cooked their lentils for forty minutes or three hours. As long as it took. Pressure cookers are for people under pressure. Not for people like me. Don’t you understand? NOT FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME WHO HAVE ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD. Which is why I am talking to a tree. Can’t you see?”

Just then a strong sheet of wind sailed our way and she shivered and I could swear she quickly bent over to tell my boxwoods something funny because they rippled to the right, all of them together, until seconds later I saw my miniature rose projectile-sputter and scatter its peach-pink flower petals all over my driveway.

The sprinkler came on many times that day. The water ran down my driveway and down the road until you couldn’t tell the tears apart from the real thing.

http://www.kalpanamohan.org

Guest Post by Olga Zilberbourg: Bilingual Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Aggie) — Wed, 26 May 2010 13:00:00 +0000

One of the ironies of my nascent writing career has been that, while I write most of my fiction in English, my publications are primarily in Russian. In the United States, my stories have appeared in a score of online magazines with various levels of affinity toward zombies, vampires, and the preternatural—even though I’m pretty sure I’ve never intentionally written genre fiction. In Russia, my second collection of short stories is scheduled to come out in September from a well-established publisher of literary fiction. The way it goes is usually like this: I write a story, I send it off to family and friends for questions and comments, and the very next morning I receive responses from St. Petersburg. From my mother: “I didn’t understand anything!” and “This is great, but I didn’t understand the ending. Why don’t you translate it to Russian?”—from my father.

I tell them I have no time to translate. I have too many ideas for new stories; for every story I translate, I could write three new ones. My Russian is not that great any more, my grammar is tenuous at best, and my vocabulary is imprecise and dictionary-dependent. I live in the US, I write in English, and wouldn’t my time be better spent focusing on just one language? I should dedicate some time to studying English-language poetry, for example. I read a lot of fiction, but English-language poetry has been a huge blind spot in my education. To this day, the names of Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens run together in my head because, well, don’t they sound similar? If I attempt to write anything in English, I really should crack the covers of those anthologies.

My parents don’t argue, they know better than to pitch their logic against mine. Instead, they go to my brother or to one of their friends who know English okay and are interested enough in my work to spare the time. The next day or a day after (things always seem to move very fast in St. Petersburg), they email me the result with their comments: “I still don’t understand what happened to the main character. Does she hate her daughter or love her?” I look at the attachment. Their translators are competent enough to avoid silly mistakes like translating “mystery” as “mystics” or “public company” as “non-governmentally owned.” No, no, the gist of it is usually all there. But it doesn’t sound like me—neither like I imagine I sound when I write English nor when I write Russian. And when I reread the story, now completely detached from it, I start to wonder: what is going on with that central character? Why can’t the author decide whether the main character loves or hates her daughter?

Even if writing in Russian has become increasingly difficult for me in the 13+ years since I’ve lived in the US, I still remain a competent reader in Russian. Seeing my stories translated into Russian provides the double distance, not only making them less personal—guaranteeing the critical distance so crucial during the revision process—but also making the plot more transparent and allowing me to examine the logic of the narrative and of the characters’ interrelationships with each other. From this point on, the real work begins: retranslating the story in my own voice, revising the ending, the beginning and the middle, then going back to the ending again and making sure it still works. Then, I go back to family and friends, and look for a competent editor to look over the latest draft and to clean it of all the unnecessary prepositions, transform the dependent clauses into adverbial or adjectival phrases that sound more native to Russian.

This process leaves me with a book to be published in Russian, and a bunch of first drafts in English. What I really should do now is go back to the English originals and compare them to the Russian revisions, and to see how many changes I can transpose to the English versions. I haven’t done this work for most of the pieces yet—there are always new stories to be written, but once I do, I can probably start thinking in terms of the English-language collection as well. It turns out that my parents are excellent managers: they are able to get me to stretch my time much thinner and use it more efficiently than when I’m working on my own, without supervision. But I’m also glad they don’t read English very well, because if they did, I never could’ve felt so free writing about them.

Olga Zilberbourg

I am a fiction writer and editor based somewhere between San Francisco, California and St. Petersburg, Russia. In 2006, Neva Press published my Russian-language collection of short stories, "Кофе-Inn." Since then, I have been working primarily in English, and this year my stories are slated to appear in Narrative Magazine, Alligator Juniper, and J Journal. My second collection of stories in Russian will be available from St. Petersburg-based Limbus Press in September. I am a regular participant of the San Francisco Writers Workshop with Tamim Ansary, and this summer I'll be attending Tin House Writers Conference in Portland, Oregon.

Kepler's Writing Group Member Profile: Mary Jean Place

noreply@blogger.com (Aggie) — Mon, 24 May 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Mary Jean Place is our featured writer this month.

Removing the Things

The shelves of read and unread books are only tabs to a life, some real and some imagined. They line the hallway wall, two walls of every bedroom, and study, with random shelves in the kitchen and living room. The 16 large bins of printed photos recording weddings, births, fourth of July celebrations, family reunions, special plants, travel adventures, loved cars, all uncatalogued and begging to be put in order, but must settle for a re-distribution or elimination. The bolts of fabric that were so tempting for a project, that never got translated into a serviceable dress, table cloth, or quilt, stacked in a closet arranged by colors of red, white, yellow, and some purples. The dressing room floor lined with shoes that have given out, refused to fit, or never match a current outfit, suggest a waste of space and money.

The filing cabinets that cradle the brilliant thoughts and records of one’ s business and community life, complete with yearly indexes; the financial decisions one hoped to retire comfortably on, and hundreds of hanging files of family letters including the first letters and notes written by the offspring that are now producing college graduates. Files with descriptive notes covering the recent two years of living in France, the French language tapes, and the letters from the recent French friends, and endless drawers of medical records, medical payments, and letters to MD’s!

The walls lined with art, etchings, lithographs, watercolors, drawings, paintings, some by artist who became famous, and some who never made it. The sculptures of marble and bronze add dignity to the rooms, and the Steinway grand piano and harpsichord dominate the living room, reminding me how much I love to perform music. The CD rows of all kinds of music suggest a love of all cultures, as well as the many forms of American music.

These are just things, and some say they are not important. I find it difficult separating from them, as they are the triggers of my memory. Removing these things is like surrendering my life, because they each have a story that springs to mind as I review them. The cortical area of the brain has plenty of memory, more then my computer, but I need the keys, these things I am thinking of removing. They are the connections to the incunabula of my life.

In a nutshell, a little about me. In my early years after finishing my studies at the university in philosophy and library science, I went to work in Europe as a librarian, 1951-1952. Became a reference librarian at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minnesota after that. My avocation/hobby all my life has been art, though I only do photograph, it consumed my free time. After moving from N.Y. city to the Bay Area, in the late sixties, I opened an art gallery in S.F., and for 35 years I worked as an art consultant putting collections together for corporations and private collectors. However, my interest in libraries continued, and in Palo Alto I founded the Library Advisory Commission for the city of Palo Alto, as well as starting the Palo Alto Library Foundation in 2002, that raises money for the libraries.

I recently lived in France for two years, which I loved. I work one day a week with my six year old autistic grandson, a beautiful child. I have three daughters from my first marriage, and five step children from my second marriage. I have three grandchildren, and three step grandchildren. I served on the Board of the Experiment of International Living for many years, striving to make understanding between cultures a positive force in all our lives. I have an incurable lung disease, which no one knows about. I have a fantastic dog named Lily, and I truly enjoy the dialogue with people, all kinds, except boring ones! I have traveled extensively, and I have one other writing group besides the one at Kepler's. I am a fantastic chef, I love food and cooking. I have always been very active physically, skiing, tennis, yoga, now more walking as I have matured into my later years.

Mary Jean Place

Guest Post by Phyllis Theroux: Meeting Mrs. Chen

noreply@blogger.com (Aggie) — Mon, 17 May 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Recently, I was invited to a luncheon by a good friend in northern California who wanted to introduce her book club to me and my new memoir, The Journal Keeper. The food was delicious, the setting serene, and for several hours I was in the company of eight thoughtful women whose eyes sparkled with intelligence, curiosity and good humor.

One of them was Nancy Chen, a diminutive 82 year old Chinese American who had come to the United States in l948 for graduate school and never returned home. She listened intently as I read a passage from the book about my mother who came to live with me when she was 80, five years before her death.

One evening, while we were having our usual drink before dinner, the subject turned to what it would be like for me after she died. “You may not believe this,” she told me one evening, “but after I’m gone I’ll be even closer to you than I am now. All the barriers will be dissolved.”

When I finished the passage, Mrs. Chen leaned forward with a question. “Did you understand at that time what your mother was telling you?”

“Yes, I did,” I answered.

“I am the most senior person in this room,” she said. “And I can tell you that just before the end of life most people my age don’t understand what it’s all about. They are confused. Your mother was most enlightened.”

I live in Virginia. A good argument could be made that flying 3,000 miles across the country to sit around eating tuna salad with a handful of people – none of whom know Oprah Winfrey or the non-fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble – is not the most cost-effective way to market a new book. I have made that argument myself and I try as hard as most authors to maintain my little tower of importance, and do everything my publisher asks of me. But it is very chancy work.

Strike one: the important NPR interview, secured because I know her best friend, is cancelled, (a recently released Iranian hostage journalist pre-empted me). Home run: the woman napping next to me on a plane, turns out to be a lead reviewer for a major newspaper and she reviews my book. On Monday, you are flooring 1200 people at a major book and author luncheon,. Tuesday, you are in a book store, addressing five people, three of whom came with you in the same car.

Up, down, up, down. There comes a time in the book promoting process when you realize that the entire thing is basically out of your control and you might as well sit back and enjoy the very thing that makes being a writer such a wonderful, soul-satisfying profession. You get to meet people like Mrs. Chen, who are never in short supply. And soon, at Kepler’s Books, I will get to meet you. Or not. People have a lot of demands on their time. Maybe this time, you will not be there. But I have gotten into the habit of passing around a spiral notebook and asking people to please put down their name and e-mail address. It cuts down on the separation anxiety. After we have said goodbye, I have something to look back upon to remind me that you were real, that we were together, and that books are the best way in the world to expand your life. Some people have a limited capacity for new friends. But who would turn down a Mrs. Chen if she presented herself? Not I.

The Making of Book Cover from Kathy Abbott on Vimeo.

Phyllis Theroux