Work-in-Progress

Cabin Fever: Feeling Surly about Salinger

2010-02-09T10:34:00.001-05:00

We are still in a state of shock anticipating ANOTHER incoming blizzard, bringing ANOTHER 16 inches of snow. Is this the cruelest and earliest April Fool’s joke ever?

The other side of Salinger’s reclusiveness (from Salon):

“But I think there is another, more insidious reason that the literary establishment is so invested in the fictional, reclusive Salinger. It is a convenient cudgel with which to silence any discussion of Salinger's personal life, particularly any revelation of unsavory truths about one of America's most revered authors. Both Joyce Maynard and Salinger's daughter Margaret were vilified for violating the great man's privacy when they wrote about their own experiences with him and exposed his predatory, controlling relationships with women. Instead of exploring the insights these revelations might bring to readings of Salinger's work (not to mention the women's right to tell their own stories), critics dismissed their books as exploitative, attention-seeking stunts.”

Read the rest here. (Thanks for the link, Lauren!)

***

And Wednesday's anticipated reading in DC by Dylan Landis and Joanna Smith Rakoff, that I mentioned here, has been postponed. Will spring ever come again?

Snowed In: Wintery Reading

2010-02-08T11:07:00.002-05:00

This massive snowstorm—with more to come tomorrow—puts me in the mind of wintery reading, and my old-time favorite is, of course, The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I read it over and over and over, and still have that very same (tattered) edition, complete with my name and phone number printed and cursived on the endpapers. The agony when Pa couldn’t play the fiddle! The horror of hearing the train wouldn’t be running for the rest of the winter! Almanzo and Cap’s lowkey heroism! The constant grind of the little coffee mill!

Though there’s not the same happy ending, I also recommend The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin, a nonfiction account of an unexpected blizzard that swept the plains in 1888 (I’m guessing this might be the same year as the events in The Long Winter). After reading some of these survivors’ stories, you will never complain about being cold again. Interestingly, this event gave rise to meteorology and weather predictions.

The specifics are fuzzy, but I also long ago spent a delightfully cozy afternoon reading Winter by Rick Bass, a memoir of a winter in the Yaak Valley of Montana (no electricity!).

Here are some other wintery reading suggestions that were offered up on my Facebook page (thank you Caroline, Marilyn, John, NC, Diane, and Keith):

Wolf Willow by Wallace Stegner
“Nebraska” by Ron Hansen
Giants in the Earth by Old Rolvaag
Rick Bass short stories
The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrad (polar exploration)

Happy reading…and shoveling!

Work in Progress: Joanna Smith Rakoff on "The Book Tour"

2010-02-04T09:15:00.002-05:00

Fantasies of “the book tour” fill many an afternoon when the writing isn’t going well, usually involving images of stacks of books and crowds hanging adoringly on every word. The reality? Let Joanna Smith Rakoff tell you a little bit about her book tour.

But first, let me tell you a little bit about Joanna: her first novel, A Fortunate Age, is about six Oberlin twenty-somethings, and takes off from Mary McCarthy’s The Group. You can read some very lovely reviews of it here in the New York Times Book Review and here in the Los Angeles Times. She also has a great piece on Slate about answering J.D. Salinger’s fan mail when she worked at the Harold Ober Associates (Salinger’s literary agency).

And, best of all for DC area folks, she and my friend Dylan Landis will be reading here next week on Wednesday, February 10, at THE ARTS CLUB OF WASHINGTON, at 2017 I Street NW, near Foggy Bottom/GWU and Farragut West metro. Details for that reading are here (scroll down). The reading is free and features a light reception following the event. This should be an excellent reading and conversation (see below!), so let’s hope the incoming weekend snow will have melted into a memory by then.

***

On a cool evening last summer, I packed my family—husband, four-year-old, six-month-old—into our rented car and drove from a hotel in San Jose, near my parents’ house, to an affluent town about 90 minutes north, in the gorgeous countryside above San Francisco. We were early, as is my tendency, and so we went into the bookstore and introduced ourselves, and ordered sandwiches at the shop’s café. The idea had been for my husband, Evan, and the kids to come to the reading, but it became clear that this simply wouldn’t work. Coleman wouldn’t be able to sit still or keep quiet. So Evan took the children on a walk and I walked off with the shop’s manager who came to find me. There were two readings that night, he explained. The other writer lived in the area and had written a book about vegetables. He would be reading in the main part of the store. I’d be reading in the annex, across the breezeway. He led me to a lovely, light-filled room, and seated me at a table, across from several rows of chairs. “We never have any idea if anyone is going to come,” the manager told me. “Sometimes we have thirty people. Sometimes we have none.”

“None?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said, shrugging good-naturedly. “We never know what’s going to happen. We can have someone really famous and ten people come. And then we can have someone who wrote a book about wicker baskets and a hundred people come. You never know.”

A moment later, four people walked in the door: a pretty woman of about my age; a couple in their sixties; and a vivacious woman in her seventies, whom I suspected of being a regular attendee of this bookstore’s events. I knew none of them, an unusual phenomenon for a writer of the non-famous variety, like myself. This is great, I thought. Four people already.

Except that no one else came. The six of us sat there for five minutes, then ten, until the manager—a former actor who seriously knows how to work a crowd (or lack thereof)—diplomatically said, “Okay, this is going to be a lovely, intimate evening. Why doesn’t everyone come sit closer and we can just talk.” And the fact is that he was right. It was a lovely evening. None of those four people had read my novel. They’d come for different reasons, attracted by different things, though they shared a common interest in New York, the setting for A Fortunate Age, but also, in a way, its subject (or, as some have said, a character unto itself). And they began asking me about New York, about how I’d approached writing about September 11, about neighborhoods in Brooklyn. We had a lively, great conversation, one that I was glad to have, and when I signed their copies of the novel, I was more than able to write more personal notes than is the norm. But still, I couldn’t help thinking that I’d dragged my family all the way from the bottom to the top of the Bay Area for no reason. I felt a bit silly.

None of this is a new story. Every writer has their tales of traveling to far-flung places and reading to a sea of folding chairs. And yet—and yet—when it happens to you, particularly for the first time, you still feel sort of strange and terrible, you still feel rather like a failure, even if the events coordinator reminds you that it’s Good Friday (as it was the night of my first reading, in Brooklyn, at a store I love) or the last night of the Super Bowl and a transit strike has sent the city into chaos (as was the case on one of the evenings I read in Philadelphia), because for every reading that seems to fail for outward reasons, there’s one that succeeds despite being the day before Christmas or the day after July Fourth (mine, in Los Angeles, which was mobbed).

I was able, in a way, to shrug off that Marin County reading, as I don’t know anyone in the immediate area—and a friend, who gathers huge crowds in New York, had told me only two people showed up for her last reading at this particular store—but I was less able to suffer the low attendance at my other Bay Area readings, at stores closer to my extended family or near the neighborhoods in which friends live.

A couple of weeks later, the four of us sat in the overgrown backyard of my friend Emily Chenoweth’s Portland house, eating hot dogs and fat local berries. Emily’s husband, Jon Raymond, is from Portland and is rather famous in the Pacific Northwest. His story collection, Livability, seemed to be right at the front of every bookstore we visited in the area. So I was shocked and comforted to hear him say, laughing, that he’d just had his first reading at which no one showed up. “What did you do?” I asked. He explained that he’d brought a friend along, so he and the friend simply left and had dinner. It was kind of a relief, he said.

I nodded, for it had been a kind of relief, that reading at which I’d just sat and talked, in part because my worst fears had been realized, and the world hadn’t ended. In part, because it was pleasant to sit and talk with smart strangers, even if it didn’t lead to the thing my publisher kept (and keeps) on talking about: sales and more sales. Over the months that have followed, I’ve had readings big and small, but I’ve tried, as much as I can, to steer them toward conversations. So that, regardless of anything else, at the very least I’d spent an hour getting to know some interesting people.

A couple of weeks after we returned to New York, I found a letter in our mailbox with a California return address. The older woman had read my novel and, she said, loved it so much she felt she had to write. She’d sent a copy to her daughter, she explained, who was closer in age to my characters and might enjoy it even more. The next time I was in the Bay Area, she said, she hoped she could take my whole family out for ice cream. She had seen them, reading books in the store’s kids’ section, and she knew that it hadn’t been easy for me to spend that evening talking with her and the others. A month or so later, an email arrived from the daughter, saying how much she’d loved it. . If I would be reading in Philadelphia, she told me, I had to let her know so she could come. She’d related to the characters so strongly and had hated to say goodbye to them at the end of the novel. Which was, I thought, roughly how I’d felt about the various people I’d met on tour. ~~Joanna Smith Rakoff

About: Joanna Smith Rakoff's novel, A Fortunate Age, was one of Booklist's Top Ten Debut Novels of 2009 and a winner of the Elle Readers' Prize.

Too Many Books, Too Many Books!

2010-02-03T10:15:00.001-05:00

I have very little time for reading books that aren’t on my class list, and yet I’m terribly tempted by a number of new releases:

This New York Times Book Review review of Robert Stone’s new book of short stories made me want to run out and get a copy immediately: "It’s true you might resist wanting to know the people in Fun With Problems or, maybe more tellingly, seeing yourself in them. You might turn away from the uncomfortable truths you don’t wish to receive, from the mature, dissolute, ultimately heartbreaking rites of passage that fill these pages. But a genuine coming-of-age story demands that its subject resist the experience. No book is for everyone, but some books can be fully taken in only when the reader is ready. Fun With Problems is a book for grown-ups, for people prepared to absorb the news of the world that it announces, for people both grateful and a little uneasy in finding a writer brave enough to be the bearer. "

The Washington Post’s Ron Charles—always a thoughtful, trusted reviewer—today brought my attention to the new novel by Louise Erdrich: “Erdrich has done what so many writers can't or won't do in this age of self-exposure: transform her own wrenching experience into a captivating work of fiction that says far more about the universal tragedy of spoiled love than it reveals about her private life.”

Lionel Shriver, one of my absolute most favorite writers, is coming out with a new novel: From New York Times bestselling author Lionel Shriver (The Post-Birthday World, We Need to Talk About Kevin), comes a searing, deeply humane novel about a crumbling marriage resurrected in the face of illness, and a family’s struggle to come to terms with disease, dying, and the obscene cost of medical care in modern America.

And, here, Paula Whyman writes about the new book of linked stories by our former teacher, Kermit Moyer: In The Chester Chronicles, Chester "Chet" Patterson describes what life is like as an Army brat growing up in the 1950s and coming of age in the 1960s. His mother is a seductress and a lush, and his father is an Army officer whom Chet both resents and admires. Moving every two or three years, Chester is a perennial new kid as well as a bookish and movie-obsessed romantic. At the age of thirteen, he falls in love, he thinks, with his own first cousin. Each chapter could stand alone as a story about a pivotal moment, but taken together, the reader gets the whole of Chester's life.

I’ve also dipped into a great book of short stories--Downriver by Jeanne Leiby, published by Carolina Wren Press—that is not entirely new but that is new to me. I’m fascinated by the Detroit area, 1970ish setting, and the writing is gorgeous and dangerous: “I love the sharp edges of Jeanne Leiby's tightly packed stories, and how she brings out the dignity of these hard lives without romanticizing or sentimentalizing her characters. Nothing is free or easy in these stories, but there is no self-pity. There is only survival in a working-class world of seen and unseen boundaries. Bargains are struck, compromises are made, secrets are kept, all in the name of survival. All over America, communities 'Down River' struggle to carry on. They are driven past, ignored by everyone who doesn¹t live there. But we can all learn a lot about getting by from the gritty characters populating the community of this rich, unforgettable collection.~JIM DANIELS”

Sigh. All I want to do today is tuck up somewhere cozy and read, read, READ!

The Box of Journals Goes To....

2010-02-02T09:25:00.001-05:00

Congratulations to Lisa in New York who was randomly selected to receive the big box of journals offered in last week’s giveaway. And thank you to all who entered.

Writing the Future Conference on March 20

2010-02-02T09:18:00.002-05:00

The Writer's Center is pleased to announce a special new event to take place on March 20:

WRITING THE FUTURE, a one-day, information-packed conference for writers in all genres and media, reporters, editors, and publishers will explore and explain the transitions and innovations taking place in the literary and publishing worlds. Panelists and presenters will address technological advancements affecting the ways information is delivered to readers, how the content itself will change, and what writers will need to know to remain relevant in the second decade of the 21st Century--and beyond.

Featured guests include:
Nick Bilton, NY Times technology reporter;
Richard Nash, former editor of Soft Skull Press, social visionary, and founder of Cursor;
Peter Ginna, senior editor of Bloomsbury Press USA;
Jack Sallay, VP of marketing for Vook.com;
Carolyn Forche, poet and essayist;
Jeff Kleinman, literary agent, Folio Literary Management;
Sandra Beasley, poet, essayist;
Tom Shroder, former writer and editor, The Washington Post;
Dan Sarewitz, Director of Arizona State University's Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes;
Lee Gutkind, editor of Creative Nonfiction, and author of Almost Human: Making Robots Think.

When: March 20, 8:00-5:00 p.m.
Where: The Writer's Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, MD 20815
Admission: $90. Admission price includes a FREE one-year subscription to the revamped Creative Nonfiction Magazine AND a FREE one-year membership to The Writer's Center. Register today! http://tiny.cc/dn4VZ

5:00-7:00 p.m. Creative Nonfiction Relaunch Party
Following the day's events there will be a launch party for Creative Nonfiction Magazine! Stay and join Creative Nonfiction and The Writer's Center for this free evening event featuring readings by today's best nonfiction writers, free copies of the new magazine, free food and drink, and a chance to talk with Creative Nonfiction's editors.

For a complete schedule for Writing the Future and to register, please visit our web site: http://tiny.cc/dn4VZ

Ian McEwan to Read in DC

2010-02-02T09:17:00.000-05:00

A new event has been added to the PEN/Faulkner reading series. This is sure to sell out, so plan accordingly.

Wednesday April 7, 2010
Special Event: An Evening with Ian McEwan
PEN/Faulkner will host an exclusive reading with Ian McEwan on Wednesday, April 7, 2010 at 7:30 p.m. Mr. McEwan will read from his forthcoming novel, Solar in one of only four readings he will give in the U.S.! The reading will take place at the Folger Shakespeare Library, located at 201 East Capitol Street, SE in Washington, DC.

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My Autographed Copy of Catcher in the Rye

2010-02-01T09:49:00.002-05:00

I doubt that anything I could write could add much to the many words spilled out since J.D. Salinger died last week (this Wall Street Journal article was good, as was this Washington Post piece about a failed book deal with Salinger; and Slate has a number of excellent pieces). But Salinger was my first literary idol, so while his death was unsurprising (I had his birthdate memorized so noticed on January 1 that he was getting pretty old), it still hit me hard.

I read The Catcher in the Rye first when I was 13ish, and thought it was fine, though I believe I was disappointed because it wasn’t “dirtier.” Then I read it again in high school and was, of course, knocked out. In the years after, I became insufferable.

“I think everyone should read The Catcher in the Rye at least once a year,” I would declare. (Guess I’m still insufferable as I hear myself saying the same thing now about The Great Gatsby.)

“I couldn’t date anyone if he didn’t absolutely love The Catcher in the Rye.” (I think I picked up this philosophy from one of the characters in Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York, but it seemed smart to me.) So, I forced Salinger onto several boys, all of whom claimed to “absolutely love” the book. Phonies!

I grew up—a bit—and, ironically, while the man I married did read Salinger for me, he didn’t absolutely love it (he may have called Holden self-absorbed—!!), but I loved him anyway, and that was probably the beginning of my (finally) growing up.

But quite a bit before that, one summer, I maintained a deep flirtation with one of the boys who worked at the movie theatres I was filling in at; he was an usher, and I sold popcorn, and back then, there was only one movie playing at a time so while the movie played, there was a lot of time for talk and teasing. He wasn’t anyone I thought I could ever be serious about—he was in a fraternity, which both intrigued and disgusted me—and he wasn’t especially ambitious or intellectual. He didn’t read much. But he was cute, and, as I said, there was a lot of time to talk.

I had brought in my paperback of The Catcher in the Rye to read one slow afternoon, and after some inciting incident or another, it turned out that the other usher scribbled all over the pages. I was not blameless in this in incident—it involved language like “you wouldn’t dare” as a pencil hovered over a page, “okay, I dare you”—but I was still angry that my book had been defaced.

The next day, my boy brought me a brand new copy of the book (the edition with the reddish cover and the yellow typeface on front and back). I thanked him profusely, and then he said, “Look inside.” And there, on the title page, where an author actually would sign a book, he had written in surprisingly polished handwriting: “To Leslie, H. Caulfield.” Yes, he even got the comma!

I still have this book.

In the end, I guess I’m just as “self-absorbed” as Holden, as this anecdote has little to do with Salinger and more to do with me…and yet, without Holden, without Franny and Zooey and Teddy and Esme and all those crazy Glasses and the dusty copies of The New Yorker that I paged through and all the “S” sections of used book stores I searched, vainly hoping for an overlooked first edition—and that Iowa boy who saw me, truly, briefly, perfectly—without all that, I’m not entirely sure who I would have become.

“Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

Guest in Progress: Richard Peabody's Reading List of Experimental Fiction

2010-01-28T09:30:00.002-05:00

Last week's post about reading lists brought Richard Peabody to my email door.

The chances are that if you’re a writer living in the DC area, you already know Richard—or will meet him soon!—because he’s such an essential part of the DC literary scene that it’s impossible not to cross paths with him either personally or in cyberspace. (He has nearly 2000 Facebook friends.) Founder of the wonderful and long-lived journal Gargoyle and the editor of many fine anthologies (see below for details), he’s also a wonderful writer and a gifted teacher. He’s smart and funny and generous and deeply passionate about books.

Anyway…his email alluded to the comment in my post about “books every writer simply should read” and said that for fun, he was sending me his list of books that would fall into that category. Great, I thought, maybe I can post it on my blog, and I opened the attachment.

The list was 25 pages long.

Truly, this was one of the most amazing lists I’ve ever seen, but it was too long to post (though I'm most definitely hanging onto this amazing resource!).

So my self-interest started churning: My knowledge of experimental literature is lacking, and maybe I could get him to cull out a few titles that I might add to my 2010 reading list (which, at the moment, is composed of Moby-Dick). Richard knows the field from top to bottom, past and present, and he teaches a very popular workshop in experimental fiction at Johns Hopkins. So I invited him to come up with the 12-15 titles he would recommend to someone like me, who wants to learn more about what’s being done out there. Here’s what he came up with, another equally amazing and wonderfully annotated list:

I (Heart) Laurence Sterne
By Richard Peabody

My job is to seduce you to the dark side of fiction writing, where as the bumper stickers say, “We have Cookies.” A mischievous mysterious place otherwise known as avant-garde, Post modern, meta fiction, magical realism, PoMo, surreal, whacked out, or the all encompassing moniker “that weird shit.”

Leslie was generous with her Blog but keeping this to 15 or so titles is nearly impossible for a list-maker like me. So I’m cheating by adding the required texts for my Experimental Writing Workshop at Johns Hopkins from this past fall:

J. Austen & S. Grahame Smith –Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

P. Geyh, F.G. Leebron & A. Levy –Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology

Cris Mazza & J. DeShell – Chick-Lit: PostFeminist Fiction

Cris Mazza, J. DeShell & E. Sheffield—Chick-Lit #2: No Chick Vics

Rusty Morrison & Ken Keegan—ParaSpheres 1: Extending Beyond the Spheres of
Literary and Genre Fiction. (ParaSpheres #2 is due out any second)

David Young & K. Hollaman—Magical Realist Fiction

The Young gives you a decent historical grounding in both the Euro and Latin American traditions. The Norton gives you a broad survey of the US scene since the 60s with William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker and the SciFi of Samuel Delaney, Ursula LeGuin and Octavia Butler, while Chick-Lit and ParaSpheres bring you up to speed to the right now. And love it or hate it, what S. Grahame Smith did to poor Jane Austen is legal (you, too, can write though any work in the public domain, as the LANGUAGE poets have been doing for eons) and has created an odd boom of off-the-wall works as writers scramble to add zombies to Huckleberry Finn, War of the Worlds, The Wizard of Oz, and so on. Smith’s work in progress is Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.

I would also add an interesting book on how to write experimental fiction. Lance Olsen—Rebel Yell: A Short Guide to Fiction Writing. Part interviews, part assignments with examples. Olsen is a master writer and thinker.

And for those with an interest in the history of women writing extreme fiction do find a copy of E.G. Frideman & M. Fuchs –Breaking the Sequence—Women’s Experimental Fiction, which gives an overview on the women who were pioneers including Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein.

My picks for a quick dip into the Experimental oceans in the Aughts race beyond the snippets by the masters in the above anthologies and would be the following:

Flann O’Brien – At Swim-Two-Birds
Who can resists a novel about a man writing a novel about a man writing a novel whose characters come alive when he sleeps and rewrite everything?

Jeanette Winterson—The Passion
One of Winterson’s irresistible books from early on in what has become a splendid career. She’s a true original. Part history, part collage, and always fun. And the musical language!

Kurt Vonnegut—Breakfast of Champions
Everybody has their own faves. When the author enters a scene in this book and breaks the fourth wall to talk directly to the reader my young mind was blown.

Donald Barthelme –Sixty Stories
Barthelme was one of the reasons people read The New Yorker in the 60’s. His stories exist sans arc. They’re flat from beginning to end and endlessly fascinating. Like Charles Addams on acid.

Juan Rios – Loves That Bind
A Spanish writer who is as inventive as he is talented. Twenty-six letters to 26 women. Each is a literary character from another author’s work. Each chapter in the style of the existing novel. D is Daisy. L is Lolita. Z is Zazie. Can you figure them all out?

David Mitchell – Cloud Atlas
Mitchell wiped out everybody with this one. A frolic through time and space and identity. Critics compare him to Philip K. Dick, Umberto Eco, and Haruki Murakami. Michael Chabon calls it, “The novel as series of nested dolls or Chinese boxes, a puzzle-book. . . .”

Octavia Butler—Bloodchild and Other Stories
Buy it for the title story alone. Butler always investigated race and sexuality and the idea of male pregnancy at the whim of another species is way out.

Mark Z. Danielewski--House of Leaves
A self-published ghost story about a haunted house with all sorts of odd typography, different colors of ink, drawings, that gathered such a following that a major house picked it up and reproduced it. Not for the faint of heart.

Eurydice – f/32
What happens when a woman is disassociated from her vagina, which runs off on its own adventures?

Kelly Link –Pretty Monsters
Absolutely one of the cleverest writers out there right now. She runs her own litmag and small press (with her husband) and writes stories that you will never forget. She’s like the second coming of Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, and all of those other Twilight Zone staffers, with a big dose of James Tiptree thrown in for spice.

Jasper Fforde—The Eyre Affair
Sort of Monty Python meets Douglas Adams meets LitCrit 101. Thursday Next, a Special Operative in literary detection, has to enter into the text of Bronte’s novel to find the absent Jane Eyre. Loads of fun. And there are sequels.

Karen Elizabeth Gordon—Paris out of hand (a wayward guide)
A completely invented guidebook to Paris, which is still somehow an emotionally connected tribute to all things Parisian.

Katherine Dunn—Geek Love
There are always rumors that this will be a movie someday but I have no idea how anybody could film it. Terry Gilliam? Maybe? I wish Dunn would write another novel but how to top this? The ultimate weird circus.

Ted Mooney—Easy Travel to Other Planets
Infamous for a scene in which a woman makes it with a porpoise but so much more than that. An alternate earth where things are coming apart.

Gilbert Sorrentino—Mulligan’s Stew
A tribute to all things James Joyce which begins with Sorrentino’s rejection letters from editors and publishers for the novel. Characters are grabbed from Dashiell Hammett and Joyce and swirled together into a brand new confection.

Hope these tickle your fancy.

But what about Borges, Calvino, Cortrazar, Garcia-Marquez, Grass, Pynchon, Keri Hulme, Rushdie? And how to resist Tibor Fischer’s The Collector Collector, told from the POV of a 5,000-year-old Sumerian pot?

Ahh. So many books out there. The above is tonight’s list. Try me tomorrow and it’ll be something completely different. ~~Richard Peabody

About: Richard Peabody wears many literary hats. He is editor of Gargoyle Magazine (founded in 1976), has published a novella, two books of short stories, six books of poems, plus an e-book, and edited or co-edited eighteen anthologies including: Mondo Barbie, Mondo Elvis, Mondo Marilyn, Mondo James Dean, Coming to Terms: A Literary Response to Abortion, Conversations with Gore Vidal, A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation, Grace and Gravity: Fiction by Washington Area Women, Alice Redux: New Stories of Alice, Lewis, and Wonderland, Sex & Chocolate: Tasty Morsels for Mind and Body, Kiss the Sky: Fiction and Poetry Starring Jimi Hendrix and Gravity Dancers: Even More Fiction by Washington Area Women. Peabody teaches fiction writing for the Johns Hopkins Advanced Studies Program. He lives in Arlington, Virginia. You can find out more at www.wikipedia.com and www.gargoylemagazine.com

What the iPad (Might) Mean

2010-01-27T17:48:00.000-05:00

From BoldType, a concise and helpful take on Apple’s new iPad.

Raymond Carver: "A Persistent and Steady Glow"

2010-01-27T09:10:00.002-05:00

From The Paris Review Interviews, Volume III—an interview with Raymond Carver in 1983.

Interviewer: How do you hope your stories will affect people? Do you think your writing will change anybody?

Carver: … Good fiction is partly a bringing of the news from one world to another. That end is good in and of itself, I think. But changing things through fiction, changing somebody’s political affiliation or the political system itself, or saving the whales or the redwood trees, no. Not if these are the kinds of changes you mean. And I don’t think it should have to do any of these things, either. It doesn’t have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it, and the different kind of pleasure that’s taken in reading something that’s durable and made to last, as well as beautiful in and of itself. Something that throws off these sparks—a persistent and steady glow, however dim.

Apply for the Norman Mailer Writers Colony

2010-01-27T09:08:00.001-05:00

I really, really, REALLY want to go here:

The Norman Mailer Writers Colony is pleased to announce its call for applications for the Second Annual Norman Mailer Writers Colony Fellowships at Provincetown, MA.

The Mailer Fellows have been created to honor Norman Mailer’s contributions to American culture and letters and to nurture future generations of writers. In 2009 seven Fellows spent four weeks in Provincetown, Massachusetts where they wrote, discussed their work, and were visited by writers such as Don DeLillo; editors and writers from leading publications such as the New York Review of Books and Vanity Fair. In 2010 Gay Talese will visit the colony as well as other leading writers to be named.

Fiction and non-fiction writers can apply for a 28-day residency in Provincetown, Massachusetts, near Mailer’s home beginning July 5, 2010. Once again, seven Fellows will be selected. In addition, as many as 66 applicants will be offered scholarships to one week writing workshops in Provincetown during May, June, August and September, 2010.

Information about the Fellowships, including an application, can be found at http://www.nmwcolony.org/curriculumPrograms/overview/.

Applications must be received by March 13, 2009.

Want a Free Box of Literary Journals?

2010-01-26T09:30:00.001-05:00

I accumulate a number of literary journals through subscriptions and purchases and freebies, and after I’m done with them I try to find ways to pass them along, usually involved with a class I’m teaching. But my class this spring doesn’t lend itself to my usual lit journal project, and the stack is teetering and spilling over….

So, here’s my thought: I will pack as many of them as I can into one of those set-price boxes at the post office and mail it to one random reader selected from all who enter. If you’re interested, email me your name/address (U.S. only; sorry!) with the subject line BOX OF JOURNALS.

I’m not sure how many copies I can fit into one box, but I’ll have to take a moment and brag that I do an absolutely amazing job of packing a car for a road trip, so I bet it will be more than you expect. Journals include Shenandoah, Tin House, Gettysburg Review, Review, One Story, and I won’t send anything older than 2(ish) years.

Deadline to enter this exciting competition is Friday, January 29, 6 PM EST!

Legalese: Your entry email will be promptly deleted after this contest ends, and your name/info will not be added to any lists.

Workshop Your Whole Novel Ms.

2010-01-26T09:15:00.000-05:00

Richard Peabody is a legendary DC teacher…here’s your chance to workshop your entire novel with him and a small class of peers:

Critique Your Complete Novel--
Not Just a Couple of Chapters
Peabody’s Novel Class

Limited to 5 students. We meet every two weeks on Wednesday day nights 7:30 until 10pm at my house in Arlington, Virginia. Four to five blocks from Virginia Square Metro station.

1. February 1
2. February 17
3. March 3
4. March 17
5. March 31
[afraid we have to skip 3 weeks so longest novel will be last]
6. April 28
7. May 5

Cost is $500 to be paid before the first night. Due to people dropping the class at the last minute and forcing me to cancel the entire session I now require that $125 of this fee be non-refundable and paid before the class begins.

Every participant turns in their complete novel the first night along with 5 copies for everybody else and me. That way you get handwritten notes on everything from everybody. And you should feel free to recommend cuts, improvements, make suggestions, mark the manuscripts up at will. That's what this class is all about. By meeting every two weeks each participant should have plenty of time to complete their critiques. If you can't attend every meeting (which I demand save for unforeseeable illness or death in the family as it's a question of fairness and honor) please don't bother signing up.

Why do I teach this class? Because you can go to your favorite bookshop and lift any number of contemporary novels off the shelf and read a few chapters only to discover that they fall apart at chapter four. Why? I’ve found that most MFA programs only critique the first three chapters of your manuscript. Plus, I’ve learned from the hands-on experience of teaching this course that a complete reading and critique is absolutely the best way (dare I say only way) to go.

What’s the advantage of a small class like this one? There’s nothing quite like having five people discuss your characters as though they were living people for 2 ½ hours. What sorts of novels are eligible? Generally I handle serious literary fiction (both realism and experimental works), but the class has included YA, Sci-Fi, Mystery, Horror, Thriller, and Romance novels.

If you are interested do please email me a chapter and a synopsis. I'm only considering completed novels in the 250-350 dbl. spaced page range. (That’s one-sided, double spaced, 12pt. in Courier font.) Anything longer than that is pretty much wishful thinking right now due to grim market economics and politics. Most first novels are 300 dbl. spaced pages which equals 200pp. in book form. Simply a fact of the biz. Second novels are frequently a different story.

Alumni from Peabody’s 23 years of university, Writer’s Center, and private classes with filmed screenplays, books in print (or forthcoming) include: Mark Baechtel, Doreen Baingana, Toby Barlow, Maggie Bartley, Jodi Bloom, Sean Brijbasi, Peter Brown, Robert Cullen, Priscilla Cummings, Katharine Davis, Lucinda Ebersole, Cara Haycak, Dave Housley, Alma Katsu, Catherine Kimrey, Adam Kulakow, Nathan Leslie, Eric Lotke, Redge Mahaffey, Charlotte Manning, Meena Nayak, Matthew Olshan, William Orem, Mary Overton, Carolyn Parkhurst, Sally Pfoutz, Nani Power, Lisa Schamess, Brenda Seabrooke, Julia Slavin, and Yolanda Young.

More details: (703) 525-9296 or cell (703) 380-4893
Email: hedgehog2@erols.com

Richard Peabody wears many literary hats. He is editor of Gargoyle Magazine (founded in 1976), has published a novella, two books of short stories, six books of poems, plus an e-book, and edited or co-edited eighteen anthologies including: Mondo Barbie, Mondo Elvis, Mondo Marilyn, Mondo James Dean, Coming to Terms: A Literary Response to Abortion, Conversations with Gore Vidal, A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation, Grace and Gravity: Fiction by Washington Area Women, Alice Redux: New Stories of Alice, Lewis, and Wonderland, Sex & Chocolate: Tasty Morsels for Mind and Body, Kiss the Sky: Fiction and Poetry Starring Jimi Hendrix and Gravity Dancers: Even More Fiction by Washington Area Women. Peabody teaches fiction writing for the Johns Hopkins Advanced Studies Program. He lives in Arlington, Virginia. You can find out more at www.wikipedia.com and www.gargoylemagazine.com
.

The Funny Side of the Writing Life

2010-01-25T09:24:00.001-05:00

Need a laugh? Here’s a daily writing-related comic that gets all the details right:
http://boscafelife.wordpress.com/

Study with Richard McCann at Atlantic Center for the Arts

2010-01-25T09:20:00.001-05:00

Here’s your chance to work with Richard McCann (bio below), a wonderful and generous teacher, when he’s the artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. He will be in residency from May 17 through June 6, and his residency statement sounds enticing:

"I'd like to work with prose writers-whether of fiction, nonfiction, or some combination of the two-whose works derive at least in part from autobiographical sources, so that we can explore some of our common concerns, such as what it means to work from memory and what we need to do as writers in order to transform the raw material of life into stories that have the power to move others. It's my hope that in our three weeks together--bivouacked, as it were--we'll form an attentive and generous critical community, so that we can encourage one another to take the sorts of risks that allow us to grow as writers. In the mornings, we'll write a lot; for two hours each afternoon, we'll come together for workshop sessions, individual conferences, and writing exercises that are designed to carry us to places that we hadn't necessarily thought to go. Whether working in fiction or nonfiction, you should bring with you either a work-in-progress or the desire to begin something new."

More details about the Atlantic Center:

Since 1982, Atlantic Center's residency program has provided artists from all artistic disciplines with spaces to live, work, and collaborate during three-week residencies. Located just four miles from the east coast beaches of central Florida, the pine and palmetto wooded environment contains award-winning studios that include a resource library, painting, sculpture, music, dance and writers' studios, a black box theater, and digital computer lab. Each residency session includes three master artists of different disciplines. The master artists each personally select a group of associates - talented, emerging and midcareer artists - through an application process administered by ACA. During the residency, artists participate in informal sessions with their group, collaborate on projects, and work independently. The relaxed atmosphere and unstructured program provide considerable time for artistic regeneration and creation. Atlantic Center for the Arts provides housing (private room/bath with work desk), weekday meals (provided by ACA chef) and 24-hour access to shared studio space. Financial Aid is available to qualified applicants.

For more information on how to apply, go here or email program@atlanticcenterforthearts.org or telephone ACA at (386) 427-6975 or (800) 393-6975 (domestic US only).

And you’ll have to hurry: the application postmark deadline is February 5, 2010.

More about Richard McCann: Richard McCann is the author of Mother of Sorrows, a work of fiction, and Ghost Letters, a collection of poems (1994 Beatrice Hawley Award, 1933 Capricorn Poetry Award). He is also the editor (with Michael Klein) of Things Shaped in Passing: More 'Poets for Life' Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in such magazines as The Atlantic, Ms., Esquire, Ploughshares, Tin House, and the Washington Post Magazine, and in numerous anthologies, including The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007 and Best American Essays 2000. He is currently working on a memoir, The Resurrectionist, which explores the experience and meanings of illness and mortality through a narrative exploration of his experience as a liver transplant recipient.

Work in Progress: Reading Lists

2010-01-21T10:33:00.002-05:00

I’m going to be teaching a literature class at Johns Hopkins this semester, so I’ve had the pleasure of putting together what I think is an excellent reading list. The class is called "Voice in Modern Fiction," and it’s as much of a writing class as a literature class, as the assignments are creative responses rather than papers.

All the books are supposed to have been published (roughly) within the last thirty years, so that was one parameter. Of course I wanted to include books that I believe in, even if they may be flawed (imagine having to come up with a list of “perfect” books!). And of course I wanted to offer a breadth and depth to the authors, even in such a small sample (5-10 total were expected for the course).

And then there was the idea of voice: how to show what “voice” is when that single word can be used to illustrate the attraction of Henry James and Ernest Hemingway, united in that single word just as they’re separated by about everything else possible? What books can illustrate the various components of “voice”?

Here’s what I came up with:

Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles
Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Best American Short Stories 2009, edited by Alice Sebold: selected stories

I’ve also recently spent some time working with the Converse College Low-Residency MFA program students, helping them put together their reading lists for the semester. Again, that’s a useful exercise for me and for them: what books should they read that will be similar to the work they want to achieve? What books are so different that they will offer a stretch, a possibly jarring but eye-opening experience? What books simply should be read because every writer should read that book (in my opinion)?

When I started researching my historical novel, I came up with a list of books to read, including Sister Carrie, The Jungle, Devil in the White City, and the speeches of Frederick Jackson Turner ("The Frontier in American History"). It was helpful to have that guidance and to feel that though I wasn’t actually writing at that time, I was still “accomplishing” something. (Is anything more delightful than checking something off a list?)

Though my reading for this semester is mostly outlined above—the joy of assigning a reading list is getting to revisit all those books!—I do think that before summer rolls around, I need my very own reading list. First book on it: Moby-Dick, which I have shamefully missed for all these years, even though it seems to me that every writer should read it.

Great Job at a Fabulous Magazine in a Wonderful City!

2010-01-20T11:47:00.002-05:00

It’s no secret that I absolutely love The Sun magazine, so I’m happy to spread the word about this job:

"We need a Digital-Media Director at The Sun, a nonprofit, ad-free magazine in its thirty-sixth year of publication. Duties include directing The Sun’s digital-media efforts; writing and editing online copy; recommending and producing digital formats for magazine and book content; producing e-mail ad campaigns; and overseeing The Sun’s computer network. The job requires editorial and/or project-management experience (preferably in an online environment), a thorough understanding of social media, and HTML skills. This is a full-time position in our editorial office in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. No phone calls, e-mails, faxes, or surprise visits, please."

More details here.

Mark Your Calendar: Book Review Panel

2010-01-20T09:11:00.000-05:00

The DC Chapter of the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) is hosting this great sounding panel:

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE BOOK REVIEW.

Panelists include Washington Post Book World Editor RACHEL HARTIGAN SHEAand Deputy Editor RON CHARLES.

Tuesday, Feb 2nd
6:30 to 9pm
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives
17th & M St., NW
Washington DC

More details are here. This panel is the same night that my class at Johns Hopkins meets (grrr…), so if you attend and wish to write up a report for this blog, please let me know!

Upcoming Deadline #1: Split This Rock Poetry Festival

2010-01-20T09:10:00.002-05:00

Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 10 through March 13, 2010, will feature readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, parties, activism -- opportunities to speak out for social justice, imagine a way forward, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change.

· Registration fees increase after February 10, 2010. Register today! Only $75; $40 for students.

· Scholarships available. Scholarship Guidelines are online. Postmark deadline: February 20.
Lodging in DC is available at a reduced rate:

We are pleased to announce the Beacon Hotel as the "official" hotel for Split This Rock Poetry Festival in 2010. Beacon's rates are modest compared to area hotels.

Reserve a room online or call 800-821-4367 (mention Split This Rock for our reduced rate)

For every reservation that mentions Split This Rock, Beacon will donate 5% of the room rate to Split This Rock.

Reservations at this rate are on a first-come, first-served basis through January 25, 2010. The Wednesday and Thursday rate is $209/night; Friday and Saturday rate is $129/night; and Sunday's rate is $189.

Upcoming Deadline #2: Converse College

2010-01-20T09:09:00.002-05:00

The Converse College Low-Residency MFA Program will be accepting applications for the Summer/Fall semester from potential fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction students until February 15, 2010.

Junot Diaz: No Sudden Miracles

2010-01-19T09:09:00.002-05:00

This article by Junot Diaz is amazing. You must read it, especially if you’ve ever gone through periods of doubt about your writing (isn’t that all of us?). At one point, he seriously planned to give up writing. !!

Excerpt:

“One night in August, unable to sleep, sickened that I was giving up, but even more frightened by the thought of having to return to the writing, I dug out the manuscript. I figured if I could find one good thing in the pages I would go back to it. Just one good thing. Like flipping a coin, I'd let the pages decide. Spent the whole night reading everything I had written, and guess what? It was still terrible. In fact with the new distance the lameness was even worse than I'd thought. That's when I should have put everything in the box. When I should have turned my back and trudged into my new life. I didn't have the heart to go on. But I guess I did. While my fiancée slept, I separated the 75 pages that were worthy from the mountain of loss, sat at my desk, and despite every part of me shrieking no no no no, I jumped back down the rabbit hole again. There were no sudden miracles. It took two more years of heartbreak, of being utterly, dismayingly lost before the novel I had dreamed about for all those years finally started revealing itself. And another three years after that before I could look up from my desk and say the word I'd wanted to say for more than a decade: done.”

The book that came from all this struggle is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which is a vast, stunning, inventive book…and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction.

Read the whole article here. Really. You absolutely can’t skip this one.

(Here’s my report on seeing Junot Diaz give a reading from this book.)

Tom Buchanan in a Tutu?

2010-01-19T09:08:00.000-05:00

Yes…Steve and are just got tickets to the ballet version of The Great Gatsby, playing at the Kennedy Center in late February.

Here’s the description of the program:

Return to the splendor of the Jazz Age and the frivolity of the Roaring Twenties as Septime Webre re-imagines F. Scott Fitzgerald's passionate, thought-provoking, and complex The Great Gatsby. Set to a score composed by musicologist and early 20th century music expert Billy Novick, the artists of The Washington Ballet bring to life this rich allegory of obsession, wealth, and influence.

And here’s ticket information. Personally, I’m especially looking forward to seeing the party scene in dance!

Registration for Writers at the Beach Now Open

2010-01-18T11:26:00.000-05:00

Time to register for the fabulous Writers at the Beach conference. Alas, I won’t be there this year, but here’s just a short list of some of the more than 3 dozen writers, editors, and agents who will be attending: Robert Bausch, Sheri Reynolds, Liam Callanan, C.M. Mayo, and Carolyn Parkhurst.

This conference is special because of its charitable connection: “we will donate 100% of our net proceeds to Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children to help defray medical costs of those being treated there for Mitochondrial disease.

Given in memory of Sam and Zachary Juhlmann [conference founding organizer Maribeth Fischer’s nephew’s] , the funds will be used to defray the numerous and often uninsured costs associated with the treatment of mitochondrial disease.”

And, did I mention that this conference takes place at the BEACH? Win-win-win…how can you go wrong?

Science Poetry...An Intriguing Combination

2010-01-18T11:23:00.000-05:00

Neil and Zara McAlister solicit poetry of all genres for their fourth collection, "Science Poetry." Submissions close 30 June 2010:

“Our requirements for this new book are quite specific. Detailed instructions for authors can be found through the link on our poetry web site”.

[Note: Yes, they are specific, wanting “No “moon – June” cliches. No sloppy, half-baked scansion or lazy, slant rhymes.”]

Details: www.durham.net/~neilmac/travelerstales.htm