Robin Antalek

'REALITY FICTION': Ripped-From-The-Headlines by Elizabeth Searle

2011-11-03T08:51:00.000-04:00

Please welcome Elizabeth Searle to the blog. She's a fantastic writer, a contributor to a new anthology from Other Voices Books, Men Undressed and the author of Girl Held In Home from New Rivers Press. Her voice is fresh and funny and satiric and somber. Elizabeth Searle has it all -- and I'm thrilled to have her here.

REALITY FICTION': Ripped-From-The-Headlines by Elizabeth Searle

Headlines have always grabbed me-- and recently in my writing I have grabbed them back. Following my Headline-happy heart , I have found new adventures and a new level of attention in the realm of what I call Reality Fiction.

photo credit : Barry Weiss

Like it or not, 'reality' rules. Reality TV leads in ratings and nonfiction titles lead in sales. I have always loved news stories, especially scandalous ones. As book columnist Jan Gardner noted in the Boston Globe-- tying together my stage work TONYA & NANCY: THE ROCK OPERA and my newest novel-- I 'find inspiration in lurid crimes'.

And especially in the headlines which accompany the crimes. I grew up on TV News: Walter Cronkite dined with my family every night. I think in headlines. The title of my new novel GIRL HELD IN HOME takes the form of a headline. The libretto to my rock opera is filled with 'lurid' headlines-- 'Gillooly Colluded' and 'War Between the Skates!'--chanted by the chorus as they tell the tabloid tale of ice skaters Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan.

photo credit: Mark Karlsberg

GIRL HELD IN HOME --out now from New Rivers Press-- was also inspired by a real crime. In our own neighborhood in Arlington.MA, in 2001, a woman was ‘held’ as an unpaid servant’ in the home of a family that controlled her visa. In my version of her story, a teenage boy discovers her situation and falls in love with the ‘GIRL HELD IN HOME’.

In GIRL, I imagined my story based on a real incident. In my libretto for TONYA & NANCY, I used the real stranger-than-fiction facts and real newspaper quotes from the 'characters'. The show drew national media on Good Morning America, CBS, NPR and more. I found myself interviewed on ESPN Hollywood (surely a first for a literary fiction writer!).

GIRL HELD IN HOME, fresh off the presses, has drawn attention too from its ties to an all-too-real crime. I've been given the chance to discuss on radio and elsewhere the shocking fact that many women facing immigration issues are 'held' in this way.

So for fellow fiction writers looking for a Reality Fix, you may need to look no further than the latest headline to grab you. Grab it 'back' and you may find your resulting work making a few headlines of its own.

Elizabeth Searle's new novel, GIRL HELD IN HOME, is based on a real crime and her stage show, TONYA & NANCY: THE ROCK OPERA, which drew national media attention, is based on the Harding/Kerrigan skate scandal. Elizabeth's previous books are A FOUR-SIDED BED, re-released in a new paperback version in 2011, CELEBRITIES IN DISGRACE (produced as a short film in 2010) and MY BODY TO YOU. An excerpt from GIRL HELD IN HOME appears in the new anthology MEN UNDRESSED: WOMEN WRITERS ON MALE SEXUAL EXPERIENCE.

http://www.elizabethsearle.net

http://www.tonyaandnancytherockopera.com

GIRL HELD IN HOME BOOK TRAILER:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dfgh_lebQdA

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/gfrangello/2011/10/the-six-question-sex-interview-men-undressed-edition-elizabeth-searle/

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Girl-Held-in-Home/119666584806061?v=info#info_edit_sections

http://literallyplop.wordpress.com/category/elizabeth-searle/

http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2011/09/23/the-word-street/U7v3jBJJYXDHSeyqe5AJHJ/story.xml

Rosebud Ben-Oni: 8 Reasons Why I Adore Hong Kong Heartthrob Louis Tin Lok

2011-10-21T11:14:00.001-04:00

Please welcome Rosebud Ben-Oni to the blog with a hilarious post on her not-so-secret obsession for a certain Hong Kong Heartthrob. Rosebud is a contributor to the anthology: Men Undressed: Women Writers and the Male Sexual Experience (Other Voices Books) http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9781936873081-0 described as fictional cross-dressing this anthology explores male sexuality from a female perspective and features a powerhouse collection of women writers so freaking talented, I'm thinking of starting a fan club. If that description doesn't want to make you click the link immediately, then I don't know what will.

8 Reasons why I Adore Hong Kong Heartthrob Louis Koo Tin Lok

(And You Should Too)

Louis Koo, aka Mr. Cool, aka The Man with the Tan, aka the Mullet Man, aka...okay, you probably don’t know him. Although this actor-(questionable)-singer-(definite)-brand-hawker is not as well known in the West as other Hong Kong actors like Andy Lau or Daniel Wu, there are many a reason you should go out (NOW) and rent a Louis Koo flick.

(1) While his romantic comedies vary from the forgettable Love on the Rocks to the inane Whi Me Sweetie? (which is worth seeing just as a lesson in overacting), most of his collaborations with auteur Johnnie To were the beginnings of Louis Koo, the Actor, especially in his role as Jimmy Jai in Election and Triad Election. While some critics believes his acting is mechanical and lacking in range, the public voted him as Most Beloved Actor in the 2006 Hong Kong Film Awards for Traid Election. I consider this a feat in itself, considering the beloved Jimmy Jai hacks up a rival gangster’s lackey, puts his limbs through a meat grinder and then feeds it to dogs chained to other gangster lackeys locked in small cells. Then, once that message is served, he has dinner with the surviving gangster lackeys.

(2) Speaking of Johnnie To films, there are two types of people out there: those who believe Throwdown couldn’t have been made without Lous Koo and those who think he was miscast as the jaded-then-repentant Szteo Bo, whose finally-“seeing-”while-going-blind journey has all the appeal of spam floating in dishwater. But I would argue here he’s most convincing when he takes a beating for Cherrie Ying after winning big-- and losing it all-- in a gamble den. (See the scene here.)

(3) Louis Koo is all over Mainland China though he can’t speak a lick of Mandarin. In fact, his very name has come to mean “bad Mandarin.”

Did you see that commerical where he’s caressing a tire with a creepy yet sexy smile on his face, singing the merits of lun toi instead of lun tai (because only Koo can change a “tire” into an “egg embryo”). This reminds me when I tried to thank a friend’s Auntie for a delicious Lunar New Year dinner in poetic, magniloquent Mandarin, but ended up saying something akin to, "Fishing dog, my friend, apple you bye bye." See the infamous commercial here.

(4) Which is The Real Louis Koo? Try to guess in the first few seconds in this announcement from Madame Tussauds, just in time for the 2011 Lunar New Year.

(5) Say what you want about acting, but as evidence in this photo I took in a Shanghai “bodega,” as well as these random ads from an in-flight magazine from Shanghai to Beijing, Louis Koo makes a mullet look good.

(6a) So he can’t sing-- for better or worse, this song is still catchy and the video features lots of Koo close-ups.

(6b) Tone deaf? Most likely. But at least you can see the passion in his face here in this live performance

(7) Although many of his earlier movies are prospective fodder for MST3K, I highly recommend the following: Street of Fury (triad drama featuring Tsui Kam-Kong with dreads);Super Car Criminals (Simon Lui Yu-Yeung’s facial expressions are priceless as he seduces a woman in an exercise room); The Suspect (poor Simon Yam Tat-Yah looks so uncomfortable here) and God.com (so much is so wrong you just have to see it). And one could argue he has the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

going on, as even early on he has shared the screen with some icons like then-newcomers Daniel Wu in Born Wild, Bullets Over Summer with Francis Ng who can make any melodrama moving and lastly, the triad staple Century of the Dragon which also stared Heavenly Kind Andy Lau Tak-Wah and with a plot not unlike that of Infernal Affairs (which Lau also stared in). Oh, and don’t forget to see the very good-looking, very incomprehensible For Bad Boys alone. (Another reason to see these is he really doesn’t want you to.

(8) His “Before I was Mr. Cool” laugh will haunt your dreams at 0:35.

Rosebud Ben-Oni is a playwright at New Perspectives Theater; she is currently developing a new play with the company. Recently, her short story “A Way out of the Colonia” won the Editor's Prize at Camera Obscura: A Journal of Contemporary Literature and Photography, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has recent and upcoming work in Anobium, Review Americana, Existere, Arts & Letters, and Men Undressed: Women Writers and the Male Sexual Experience.

Harper Collins e-book Sale!

2011-10-04T09:29:00.000-04:00

In celebration of National Reading Group Month The Summer We Fell Apart, along with some other really fine titles from Harper Collins, is on sale for $2.99 in e-book form. YIPEE! Time to load up the kindle! http://www.bookclubgirl.com/book_club_girl/2011/10/my-entry.html

Love in Mid Air by Kim Wright Paperback Release

2011-07-13T18:05:00.000-04:00

The lovely Kim Wright has received many accolades for her debut novel and now I'm please to announce it's out in paperback.... I invited Kim back to the blog for a guest post... and she wrote an honest eye-opening account of how writers really read....

How Writers Read

Recently someone asked me if the publication of my first novel, Love in Mid Air, changed how I read. It’s an interesting question. Because the long process of putting a novel together, taking it apart and putting it together again and again, does tend to make one hyper-aware of how stories are constructed and the many choices an author makes along the way.

In a way this knowledge does spoil – well, I shouldn’t really say that. Knowing how writers put together stories doesn’t exactly spoil your experience of reading, but it changes it. I ballroom dance as a hobby and recently I was watching a young girl in my studio proudly model her new ballgown, which had been purchased from a taller girl and altered to fit her. She looked magical as she twirled and glided in a sea of blue chiffon. But the seamstress, standing beside me and watching too, kept muttering about how a certain seam puckered or wondering if the hem was too deep. Sometimes when you understand the construction of something too well, you can’t stop seeing that construction and a bit of the magic does get lost.

Like, for example, last year I was at my mom’s beach house and in the back bedroom is a big bookcase crammed with books my mother’s friends have brought to the beach in summers past, read, and then left for future visitors to enjoy. I grabbed a paperback at random – apparently a favorite, judging by its humidity-swollen pages, broken spine, and sunscreen-smeared cover – and carried it out to the sand with my beach chair.

It was the lightest of all light reading, but for some reason, the book bugged me. I felt that I could see every decision the writer made along the way, just as the seamstress could see the faulty stitching on the ballgown. The foreshadowing was so heavy that when I finally flipped to the predictable ending I was so irritated that I walked to the edge of the ocean and flung the book in. I still don’t know why I did it. Ordinarily, I’d have too much respect for both books and marine ecology, but I was just coming off a long stint of revision and it irked me to come across a writer who had – at least in my opinion – taken the easy way out.

As I turned back to my chair I saw my mother and all of her friends sitting under their beach umbrella, mouths gaping. All I could think to say was “I REALLY hated the way she ended that book.”

But it can work the other way too, that knowing more about writing can elevate your appreciation for a book that’s been well crafted, and taking my own hits in the publication process has definitely increased my respect for anyone who survives it. I was never a harsh reviewer, but now I can hardly bring myself to publically critique another writer. Whether their book was my personal cup of tea or not, I know how hard they worked to write it, and to get it published.

So what’s the overall change in my reading since I’ve published? While on one level I enjoy books a little less, I now bow more to the effort each one required from its author. Which is why, even if a copy is slowly drifting out to sea, I send it off with a little prayer of “God Bless.”

Here's Kim's website: http://loveinmidair.com

And a link to purchase Kim's delightful book http://www.amazon.com/Love-Mid-Air-Kim-Wright/dp/0446540439/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1310593978&sr=8-1

Michele Young-Stone author of The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors

2011-07-08T14:52:00.002-04:00

Michele Young-Stone is a writer's writer. Her debut: The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors has been a top Publishers Weekly pick as well as an emerging author pick at Target. Her characters: beloved, tender, flawed and damaged, the overwhelming sense of place and her gift for language that lifts off the page are trademarks of someone who was born to write. All I can say when I think of this marvelous writer is: More, please.

Please welcome Michele to the blog -- pick up her book if you haven't already done so -- and, as always, I'll see you in the comments!

Don’t judge me.

It’s gospel: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone…” (John 8:7)

I grew up with a mom who, seriously, cast no judgment on anyone. If I told her that someone was having sex or using drugs, she’d say, “I feel really bad for her.” She’d pray for them and hug them even harder the next time she saw them. Most of the parents I knew would’ve said, “Stay away from her,” or “It’s because her parents are such a mess,” or something along those lines.

I know that we all—to some extent—judge other people, but I really try not to do it. The cliché about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes is a cliché because it’s true.

It’s so easy to judge others instead of looking at our own quirks and failings. And even if you take a good hard look at the things in your own life, and you discover that you’ve done something less than admirable, say, “I’m sorry,” and to quote one of my favorite Disney movies, Meet the Robinsons, “Keep Moving Forward.”

Life is too short to wallow and be filled with regret.

And don’t judge your friends. Hug them even harder the next time you see them. Say a little prayer for them. Do something nice!!! Put some positive vibes out there.

The characters in my novel have been described as, “endearing losers,” and they are. Whenever someone tells me about how tough they’ve had it, I say, “I’m right there with you. Life can be hard.” Yet another cliché: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Chin up. Smile. You’ll feel better. I promise.

Michele Young-Stone is the author of The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors, a Target Emerging Author pick and a Publisher’s Weekly top-ten debut. Her next two books are under contract with Simon and Schuster. She is currently working on her third novel—The Saints of Los Vientos.

Michele lives in Virginia with her husband and son, a very sweet dog and some ornery fish.

What Does the D Word Mean?

2011-06-22T11:02:00.000-04:00

The wonderfully talented Michele Young-Stone author of The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors invited me to guest post on her blog today! Follow the link here: http://micheleyoung-stone.blogspot.com

And if you haven't yet read her fabulous book (it's out now in PB and in Target) add it to your reading list and prepare to do nothing else!

Something for Everyone Reading Series

2011-05-02T12:39:00.000-04:00

Happy to be asked to be a part of this reading series... if you come on the night of May 16th there will be cookies. Promise.

Just Because

2011-04-15T15:24:00.000-04:00

I have never wished to go back in time until I came across this photo.

Happy Friday.

Meg Pokrass author of DAMN SURE RIGHT

2011-03-28T09:56:00.000-04:00

Meg Pokrass is a mistress of flash fiction, her new book, DAMN SURE RIGHT has been praised by Frederick Barthelme, Kyle Minor, and my friend Jessica Anya Blau, among others. Meg is a rare voice in the crowded room of fiction: honest, brave, funny and tender: she says it like it is without apology or explanation and I think that is what makes her work so breathtaking. Meg has written a guest post about the writer in public. It is one thing to write your truth, it is entirely another to say it out loud. Please join me in welcoming Meg... see you in the comments!

The Serious Writer and her Pussy 

 The serious writer has embraced the word “pussy”. Other words for this part of the female anatomy are repugnant, carnivorous.   

A pussy has a life of its own. A secret life. One can smuggle drugs inside a pussy.   

As a serious writer, in mid-life, she must master speaking the word “pussy” with confidence and authority. She practices doing so out loud for her next book store reading. The serious writer is starting a book tour to promote her new novel which is bursting with ‘pussy'.   

She practices reading in front of the mirror, engaging her slightly furrowed brow... medium voice...  

"'I love your pussy,' Ian says softly to Trina, his hooded eyes at half mast," the serious writer reads to her refection in the mirror.  

“'I love cock', Trina offers, imagining his range of movement.”   Her dialogue is raw. Edgy.

The serious writer is known for this.   

"'You're huge, Ian... my my my...' and she is touching it through his cords. She is feeling its neck, perhaps its beak... but doesn't want to frighten Ian by admitting to her deepening fear...her hunger,” the serious writer reads.

  "'My god. You're damp,' Ian says, stroking her muff, her moistened ball of hair, the underwear covering Trina's pussy," the serious writer says, her voice tiring.  (The serious writer is sick of the adjective “wet”. She is experimenting with other adjectives. She wonders if a man would really say ‘damp'... Not just any man... but Ian, the vegetarian with an occasional weakness for farm raised fowl.)  

She looks at her face in the mirror. It is a successful face, one that has accepted three Gertrude Smallwood awards. A face that should not have any trouble with the word 'pussy' for fuck's sake.  

“Pussy,” she says it again. She says it, right to her face.

Meg Pokrass is the author of Damn Sure Right, a book of 88 flash fiction stories from Press 53. Of "Damn Sure Right," Frederick Barthelme says "Meg Pokrass writes like a brain looking for a body. Wonderful, dark, unforgiving". Meg’s flash fiction, poems and animations have appeared in The Rumpus, Wigleaf, Gigantic, Used Furniture Review, Joyland, PANK, Big Muddy, Gargoyle, The Pedestal, Keyhole, Moon Milk Review, Annalemma, Mississippi Review, FRIGG, Smokelong Quarterly, elimae, Bananafish, Ramshackle Review, A-Minor Magazine, Monkeybicycle, Everyday Genius, 3AM, Foundling Review, Mud Luscious, Juked, Eclectica, Word Riot and various upcoming anthologies of flash. http://www.megpokrass.org

Katrina Kittle author of THE BLESSINGS OF THE ANIMALS

2011-03-15T08:30:00.000-04:00

I'm thrilled to have Katrina Kittle as a guest on the blog. The author of Two Truths and a Lie, Traveling Light and the latest, The Blessings of the Animals, the award winning Kittle writes passionate stay-up-late-at night stories with vivid, wonderfully poignant characters. She has the uncanny ability to write about the quiet moments in life that fill our days with wit, passion, humor and empathy. The moments that make us human. In the following post she writes of the inspiration for The Blessings of the Animals. It will endear you to Katrina, an animal lover, gardener, cook, teacher and writer even more... and if you haven't read the book yet, I predict you will very, very soon. As always, I'll see you in the comments!

A Horse, A Cat, and a Man (or, the initial inspiration for my novel, The Blessings of the Animals)

I had a horse, a cat, and a man in my life for the same fifteen years.

And, then, within a year, I lost them all.

The horse and the cat died. The man simply decided he didn’t want to be married anymore.

The horse and the cat helped me deal with the loss of the man.

The man was brooding and moody, essentially unhappy. Why that is so appealing to a young woman is beyond me, but I fell for it. He also loved books, was an intrepid traveler, and made a mean mocha. He attended every single performance in the run of a show I was in when we met.

The cat —Montgomery—was no bigger than a fist when I stopped at a red light and saw him nearly drowning in a rain-filled gutter. He had the gumption to hiss at me when I opened my car door and plucked him out of the storm. Within seconds of being wrapped in a fresh-from-the-dryer saddle pad, he was unconscious. When he woke, hours later, we fell in love.

He grew into one of those giant yellow toms with boxing glove paws—complete with the extra toes. He understood the concept of tag. He sat on my chest for nine hours when I returned from surgery for a broken nose, dashing away to eat or use his litter box only when the man was with me. When I wrote, he had an unsettling habit of watching my face as I typed as if he were listening to the story being told.

The horse—Degas—belonged to my friend Judy. A leggy elegant bay thoroughbred like the racehorses in Degas paintings, he’d been abused at the track and had an unpredictable, jittery edge. Always seething, he once took another horse by the throat and tried to kill it.

Many a time I sat atop a more seasoned horse watching Judy and Degas whirl around on a muddy trail, hashing out a disagreement about whether we were going forward or back to the trailer.

I didn’t question Judy’s devotion to him, though. I’d ridden him. The fluid gliding walk, the floating trot, the forward momentum—riding any other horse felt like a dull chore after being on Degas. Plus, his resentful wariness was a challenge. I had a sullen man, after all.

One day, after grooming him, I turned to leave his stall and he grabbed my fleece jacket in his teeth. After my pulse stopped racing, as he held the fleece and tugged, I realized he wasn’t trying to bite me—he was saying, “don’t go.” When he did it again the next day, my jacket was unzipped and I shrugged out of it, to see what he’d do. He held the jacket out of my reach for several minutes, playing “keep away,” then dropped it…only to snatch it up again just as I got close.

Between the playful interactions, he’d return to his ears-laid-back, teeth-bared fury. He continued his tantrums on the trail, insisting on being the lead horse, treating every ride like a race, unable to relax.

Then, one day, for reasons known only to him, Degas released the anger of his past. I rode him, a periwinkle sky above us, the woods spicy with the tea-like odor of moist decay, the confetti of saffron and crimson leaves falling down all around us. At a narrow place in the trail, we fell behind Judy and the horse she rode. I expected Degas to fume. He’d been known to bite the butts of horses who blocked him from the lead.

But he sighed. His staccato jerkiness smoothed and slowed. I scratched his withers, the reins long. His hooves crunched an even cadence through the fallen leaves. When Judy called, “You okay?” I was startled to see we’d falled nearly twenty yards behind. Degas’ ears were floppy and sideways. He didn’t hurry to catch up. He was just ambling.

Judy and I worried that he must be ill. We felt apologetic about our assumptions later when it became apparent that he was simply…happy. After years of fretting and fussing and being enraged, he just let it all go.

Degas became as reliable as any other horse in the barn. He loved to have his tail scratched and would stretch his neck giraffe-like and snap his teeth together, the equine equivalent of a dog thumping his leg when you scratch just the right spot. Like an impish kid, he loved to pull my jacket from a hook and toss it on the ground, then crane his neck and look away, feigning innocence.

I took great solace in Degas when Montgomery grew ill. The cat became aggressive and foreign—jumping on me in my sleep, snarling, seeming not to recognize me, even biting me. He began to have seizures that left him bewildered. Once, sprawled in my lap, he experienced a seizure that lasted a full, tortured minute, during which he urinated all over me and the couch. Another seizure sent him tumbling down a flight of stairs.

The vet discovered an inoperable brain tumor. I lost something palpable as I watched all evidence of Montgomery’s presence slide away—the cat’s euthanized corpse immediately looked nothing like him. Some part of my heart left the room that day as clearly as his being did.

No sooner had I planted impatiens on Montgomery’s grave but Degas went lame. The horse had Cushing’s Disease and was prone to founder—inflammation in his legs. He had to be kept on a dry lot and denied sugary treats like apples or carrots. He developed laminitis, which caused the bottoms of his hooves to swell. He walked in a small, cramped shuffle. His coat, unable to shed, curled into sickly-sweet smelling, sweaty cowlicks.

When he could no longer walk, he’d let me sit crosslegged in his stall, with his head in my lap.

When he had to be put down, I felt as if I’d had a limb amputated.

I experienced that feeling again a month later when my husband told me he didn’t want to be married anymore, packed his car, and left.

I was unraveled with sorrow. Flattened. Leveled. But once I put myself back together, like Degas, I was pissed. I carried my anger and betrayal like a pack on my back. I had been done wrong, and it colored everything I did—every interaction I had, every action I took, every word I said.

Months later, exhausted, unhappy, too thin and haggard, I heard someone (not referring to me) speak of a “bitter divorced woman” and felt my limbs fill with ice water. Had I become one? That pack on my back was heavy.

And I thought of dear Degas and that moment on the autumn trail.

I could be the angry victim…or I could be happy. Dragging that damn pack around kept me connected to my ex, kept a direct line open to the heartache.

I dumped the pack. Abandoned it right there on the trail.

Oh, occasionally it would catch up and find me again, secure itself to my back, but each time it did, it weighed less, and each time it became easier to shrug off.

I didn’t reduce Montgomery’s memory to the final act of peeing and convulsing in my lap—I could remember him for the time he fell into the bathtub with me, for the way he wiggled his way cocoon-like under the fitted sheet to nap, for his junkie-thief ability to locate and retrieve catnip no matter how thoroughly I’d hidden it in the house. I didn’t reduce Degas’ memory to being unable to stand for three days—I could remember Degas for lifting my ginger ale can and tipping it back, drinking it like a person. Or for the way he loved the blue chicory that grew in late summer and could “get” me every time, jerking his head down to snatch a snack as we strolled in a field. Or for the silly way he liked to paddle in the creek with a front leg, soaking me with his splashing.

So why had I reduced my history with my ex to one cowardly act on a snowy day?

I eventually came to remember the gifts of my marriage, those times we cherished each other. It was easier to remember our awe as we stood watching a grizzly walk away from our tent in Alaska than to be angry. Or the way, when camping, we’d forget every time and give each other bug-sprayed kisses that made us spit. I could remember my ex for the way he curled his toes inward, monkey-like, when he sat reading, or the way he loved to nap in hammocks, or the filet he could grill to perfection. I could remember him following on foot over a mile to take my favorite photo of me and Degas in the creek. I could remember the flowers he bought me the day we buried Montgomery.

Remembering helped. You never forget the pain, but it helps also not to forget the love.

Katrina is the author of Traveling Light, Two Truths and a Lie, and The Kindness

of Strangers, and the newly released The Blessings of the Animals (August 2010).

The Kindness of Strangers was a BookSense pick and the winner of the 2006 Great

Lakes Book Award for Fiction. Early chapters from that novel earned her grants

from both the Ohio Arts Council and Culture Works. The Blessings of the Animals

was an Indie Next pick (August 2010), a Midwest Connections pick (September

2010), and chosen by the Women’s National Book Association as one of ten Great

Group Reads for National Book Group Month (October 2010). Katrina is thrilled to

announce that her first "tween" novel, Reasons to Be Happy, will be published by

Sourcebooks Jabberwocky in Fall 2011.

She has taught high school and middle school English and theatre. She has also

worked as a house cleaner, a veterinary assistant, a children’s theatre

director, a costumer, and as case management support for an AIDS Resource

Center.

When not writing, Katrina enjoys gardening, cooking, traveling, acting, and time

spent in the presence of animals (especially horses). She lives in Dayton, Ohio

with her fat cat and a kickass garden.

www.katrinakittle.com

www.facebook.com/KatrinaKittleFanClub
http://twitter.com/#!/katrinakittle

Emily Gray Tedrowe author of COMMUTERS

2011-03-07T10:54:00.001-05:00

Commuters (HarperCollins 2010) was the first book I was asked to blurb so it will always hold a special place for that reason, but also for the delicate beautiful story of two people falling in love at the end of their lives. For those of you who have not read Emily Gray Tedrowe's book, I am not giving anything away. The main characters are in octogenarian territory, one close, one already there, and this new union causes anxiety for every person in their lives, except them, mostly for selfish reasons. Emily writes of this passion, of taking second chances, so effortlessly, so engagingly, you will be drawn into the world of this late-in-life couple and won't want to leave. Among the notables that agree with me in this stellar debut novel are the Chicago Sun-Times, The Chicago Review, Kirkus, Booklist, Entertainment Weekly (Best New Paperback) as well as Target who named the book to their amazing Breakout Book program.

Please welcome Emily to the blog, as always, I'll see you in the comments!

Moments in parenting, in writing: a mother reflects

1) My first child, my daughter, is three weeks old. I’ve moved past exhaustion into a nether-world of too-bright colors, too much caffeine, and very little humor. When my mother-in-law offers to come over once a week to give me a break I’m so relieved I probably cry. I cry a lot in those days. It would be the first time I separated from my daughter—she even slept in bed with my husband and me—and the very idea is sad, is exhilarating. What do I want to do? My mother-in-law asks. Take a nap? Go to a movie? See a friend?

Write, a voice inside me says, against every inclination I have to sleep, sleep, sleep. So that first day I trudge to a coffee shop down the block. For a while I just sit there, off balance from the sudden proximity of other people. I just want to be in bed. Or holding my baby. In bed holding my baby. After a while I open my notebook. Whose thoughts are these? Bit by bit, I pick up the thread and find my way back into the story.

(Thank you, Karri, for the gift of that time.)

2) She is now one year old. I’m caught up in a short story about an imagined day in the life of Jim Croce, the (real) singer-songwriter. What I need are photos, biographical details, music sheets—and I find them, online, but that’s not enough. I push my daughter in her stroller up twenty blocks or so to the main branch of Chicago’s library. Her face lights up at the sight of the looming gargoyles, but today we don’t go to the children’s room. Instead, I hand her toys and rattles and contraband Cheerios while paging through reference materials, scribbling whatever looks useful, steadfastly ignoring the glances that come our way. My daughter strains against her stroller straps, makes noises that are cheerful, and then agitated. I unbuckle her and she crawls around the floor while I flip through Jim Croce’s liner notes. She cries and I breastfeed her, sitting at a table with researchers and street people. It’s a race against time now to get home before her nap, so I copy whatever I can, writing left-handed when I need to, a sweet girl on my lap and a story in my head.

(Thank you, library guard, for your patience that day.)

3) 5:15 am, my alarm goes off. This is the worst part, I tell myself, that painful sound and the climbing out of a warm bed. If I can make it through these moments (I can’t always, especially after nights where we’re up with a crying child), the rest gets easier. Coffee helps. And a quick bleary tour of the internet. Soon enough I’m writing, slow at first and then faster, better, as the caffeine kicks in and I wake up to my novel.

We have two girls now, one infant and one preschooler, and they are sleeping upstairs while I write at my desk for this one hour before the sun comes up. When it does, they’ll be awake, and loud, and need milk and breakfast and diaper changes. But for now, it’s quiet. I’ve shut off the baby monitors; my husband will hold them at bay if they wake up too early. I can work now, one eye on the clock, both hands on the keyboard.

(Thank you, Courtney, for those mornings.)

4) My youngest is two and a half. She’s in her high chair, waiting for a snack. I’m snappish, discombobulated, wishing I could be alone. My novel has been on the market for three weeks, and I’m not handling it very well. Several times, I get my heart broken when an editor says she loves the book, but eventually passes on it. I check my email forty times an hour. I bark at my kids. I can’t sleep.

When my cell rings, I’m spreading peanut butter on apple slices for a hungry, fussy toddler. At the sight of my agent’s number on the screen, my heart skips a beat. She tells me that we have an offer for my novel, from an editor and a publishing company I hadn’t dared to hope for. Phone wedged between cheek and shoulder, I shriek and laugh and dance, to the delight of the startled girl in the highchair. Minutes later, I get off the phone, dazed. My daughter is puzzled; she’s holds up what I’ve given her—a butter knife. Later, we discover apple slices in the cutlery drawer.

(Thank you, Alice, for sharing motherhood and work with me. And for that life-changing phone call!)

5) It’s a hot late-spring day and I fear I’ve already sweated through my fancy new silk blouse. The girls are absorbed by a kids craft project but we’re smack in the middle of a packed book fair and the crowds are making me nervous. I’m also worried; will my husband make it from work in time to watch them before my panel begins? It’s the first event for my book tour, and I so wish I didn’t have to be mom right now. I don’t have the luxury of pre-reading nerves, because I’m fending off two sets of glitter-glue hands from my black pants.

Courtney arrives, and we all go into the small auditorium. I meet my fellow “first time author” panelists, and note that none of them have brought children. In fact, there are no other kids in the rapidly filling room, aside from mine. Crap. Not for the first time, I doubt my ability to balance this hybrid mom/writer life.

While my youngest is kept busy (and quiet) in a discreet back row with my husband’s iPhone, my older daughter, now 7, chooses to sit in the very first row. Directly in front of me. She clutches a copy of Commuters and beams at every word I say. My heart fills, and when it’s my turn, I find myself reading to her. With love.

(Thank you to my daughters. For everything.)

Emily Gray Tedrowe lives in Chicago. Her first novel, Commuters, was named a Target Breakout Book and an IndieBound Next Notable pick. Visit her on the web at

www.emilygraytedrowe.com

Greg Olear author of Totally Killer and Fathermucker

2011-03-01T08:27:00.000-05:00

Greg Olear and I met on The Nervous Breakdown where he is a senior editor. He and I are also published by Harper Collins along with Jessica Anya Blau (Drinking Closer to Home)
and Susan Henderson (Up From The Blue), a talented group I still can't believe I belong to.... and it's been great getting to know all of them as we navigate the publishing world together. If you hear writers are a snarky, unsupportive bunch, well, I haven't met any of them, quite the opposite.

Enough about us, this is about Greg, and I can't be more excited about his hilarious guest post. Greg is one of those writers who is articulate as he is witty, possesses an unnerving understanding of the celebrity sub-culture as reported by US Weekly, all the while being well-versed in a variety of topics both political and social and can write his way out of a damn paper bag. I had the honor of reading his forthcoming novel, FATHERMUCKER, http://www.amazon.com/Fathermucker-Novel-Greg-Olear/dp/0062059718/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298985840&sr=1-1 about the day in the life of a stay-at-home dad who finds out his wife may or may not be cheating on him, and was honored to offer a blurb. I could compare Greg's writing to a combination of Nick Hornby and Tom Perrotta, but I fear I would be doing Greg a dis-service, because his voice is distinctly his own. Funny, at times tender, and always achingly and accessibly human, you will run to get this new book. For now, until October 2011, we have Greg here on the blog. As always, I'll see you in the comments!

Eight Reasons Why Stay-at-Home Dads Are Better Than Stay-at-Home Moms

By Greg Olear

A quick caveat, before you hit me with a rolled-up Ms. magazine: I don’t really think stay-at-home dads are better than stay-at-home moms. That was just a ruse, to get you to click the link. Besides, everybody knows that the ideal child-raising set-up is not to have just one parent at home, but rather to be adopted by the Jolie-Pitts.

That said, if necessity dictates that one half of the couple remain at the hearth to keep the proverbial home fires burning, there are some advantages to having that person be Dad. To wit:

1. We can fix stuff.

Although there are probably dozens of women adept at re-tarring roofs and snaking drains, home repairs tend to fall under our bailiwick. If something stops working in our house, and I’m not around, here’s what my wife does: she calls me in a panic. “The wireless router isn’t working,” she’ll say, or, “The thermostat is on the fritz,” or, “Help! There’s a bug,” and that will end her involvement with the problem. If Dad is the first responder, we can have the Internet humming, the furnace serviced, and the spider crushed before Mom even knows something’s wrong.

2. We’re good with heavy lifting.

A friend of mine summed up the balance of power in married life thus: “All husbands are good for is schlepping stuff.” He’s divorced now, but he makes a good point. Not that women can’t haul stuff—y’all do Pilates and yoga and spin class; you’re strong—but I think even Betty Friedan would concede that when it comes to lugging canvas bags laden with $200 worth of juice boxes, tomato sauce jars, kitty litter, and cases of Caffeine Free Diet Coke, we’re more genetically suited to the task.

3. Our material needs are simpler.

Stay-at-home moms have a reputation for dowdiness that is completely undeserved. You may keep your hair short, but you still get it cut, and colored, and blown out—not to mention the obligatory mani-pedi—with far greater frequency than the minivan gets an oil change. And just because your clothes are “comfy” doesn’t mean there aren’t closets full of them; my wife has more workout pants than I have articles of clothing period. We SAHDs are simpler. A pair of jeans, a modest rotation of ironic t-shirts, a decent pair of shoes, a fifteen-minute trip to the barbershop every two months, and we’re good to go.

4. We won’t take up with the help.

Painters, exterminators, plumbers, gardeners, landscapers, pool boys, UPS guys, electricians, movers—pretty much everyone who comes to work on the house during the day is a dude. Overworked and undersexed stay-at-home moms might be tempted by the strapping young buck with the weed whacker. Not us. Remember the bohunk who painted the Sopranos’ dining room and wound up getting all flirty with Carmela? Something tells me he wouldn’t have put the moves on Tony.

5. Our presence makes our kids more confident.

An important study at Harvard (Or was it Stanford? I don’t remember, and I can’t find it on Google, but I’m pretty sure someone posted it on Facebook a few months ago) found that having a father prominently involved with raising a child during the first two years is a big boon to said child’s confidence going forward. Daughters in particular really benefit from having Daddy around. In short, the more time we spend with our little girls, the less likely they are to wind up on the sixteenth season of Teen Mom.

6. We’re immune to mommy politics.

Your friend Jen is pissed at your friend Lisa because Lisa never commented on, or even “liked,” the photo Jen tagged her in on Facebook, and this afternoon, both of them are coming to a playdate at your house, so the contents of the diaper may hit the fan. This is the sort of thing that drives SAHMs insane. Not us dads. No one expects us to choose sides in internecine mommy battles. We’re like the chaperones at a high school dance—we stand idly by the bowl of punch (or pot of coffee, as it were) and watch the drama unfold.

7. It’s in our nature.

Pop culture is full of these alpha males—the Gordon Geckos and Don Drapers, the Donald Trumps and Jack Welches—who get off by brokering million-dollar deals before breakfast (as the bearded douchebag in Die Hard so eloquently put it), just as the lion is generally thought of as King of the Jungle. In actuality, male lions just hang out while the females do all the hunting. Male humans have the same inclinations. We may put up a good front—here a sexist comment, there a war cry—but secretly, we like being househusbands. Most of us do not aspire to robber barony. Don Draper? We’d rather be Kevin Federline.

8. One word: lollipops.

You’re all about, “Hey, try this delicious hummus,” and, “You know what would be good? This organic kiwi.” We’re more liberal with the yummy treats. There’s a reason it’s called a Sugar Daddy.

GREG OLEAR is The Nervous Breakdown's senior editor and the author of the novels Fathermucker (Harper, October 2011) and Totally Killer (Harper, 2009), now available in French (Éditions Gallmeister). He is a speaker at the Quais du Polar noir festival in Lyon.

Please follow him on Twitter (@gregolear), friend him on Facebook, visit his website (the cleverly-URLed gregolear.com), and, if it's not too much trouble, compose a Miltonic sonnet in his honor.

www.fathermucker.com

Jessica Anya Blau author of DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME

2011-02-14T10:47:00.000-05:00

Jessica Anya Blau is one of the most daring writers I know. Her first novel, THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES was lauded by critics and readers alike for her depiction of a young girl coming of age in 1970's Southern California. I was fortunate enough to read an advance copy of DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME, Jessica's amazing second novel. Jessica returns with a story of a family gathered by their mother's beside after a heart attack in a story that moves between the present day and the past that shaped them. The story is honest and heart wrenching and laugh out loud funny.

Today, Jessica is guest posting with a piece that showcases her unique view of the world. I adore how this woman thinks... and I know you will too. After you read this piece I'm pretty certain you're going to want to talk about it... so I'll see you in the comments!

FLUFFY VAGINAS

Here’s the setting: a hundred-year old house with a wrap around porch that is so big it has actual furniture on it: rugs, wicker with blue floral cushions, lamps on standing tables that are covered with chintz that drags to the ground. It’s late afternoon, spring, the light is so bright that that everyone is washed clean: wrinkles erased, zits irradiated into obscurity. On the rolling green lawn the girls from my daughter’s class, all in their blue and white uniforms are playing badminton, and chase, and lying in the grass picking clovers. The mothers look over the porch rails, lemonade or wine in hand, eating little homemade things that have names I can’t remember (they’re goo-goo balls, my grandmother used to make them), everything in an appealing shape and arrayed beautifully on plate with white paper doilies beneath them.

I turn to one of the mothers, Heidi, her face is dewy, glowing, velvety smooth. Her blond hair is so glossy it looks like she’s being lit for a Pantene ad. Something is different about her, but I can’t quite place it. She always looks pretty, but now, she looks radiant.

“Are you getting Botox?” I ask.

“No. Do I look it?” Heidi touches her face, smiles; she’s not offended by the question.

“There’s something different about you. You look fabulous.”

“Well I got my vagina fluffed,” she smiles and swaggers a little, like she’s drunk.

“What do you mean fluffed?” I lean in closer, hoping to get details before someone else joins the group and the conversation is shut down.

“You know, fluffed!” Heidi lifts her elegant manicured fingers and flickers them, as if a vagina is a feather pillow that just needs to be aired.

“I don’t understand-” the porch is growing more crowded, the teacher whom we are honoring for his birthday or some-such nonsense has moved to a wicker rocker; a gathering follows. (This guy is hot and so gets little parties like this thrown by the room mothers who wear flirty sheer tops and platform shoes to pick up their kids from school. Believe me, Madame Bellows, the French teacher with hair like a silver Brillo pad is not getting birthday parties like this.)

“Fluffed!” Heidi says. “Fluffed!”

“What did it look before it was fluffed?” I am imagining shriveled dried bean pods or old banana peels or maybe hanging red wattles like on a turkey.

“It was long.”

“Your labia, you mean?”

“Yeah, the lips. They were sort of hanging there. Dead.”

Heidi is the archetype of the private school mother. Blond, smart, quit a brilliant career to stay home with her kids. Her mother went to this school and so did her grandmother. Her husband and brothers went to the boys’ school across the street. When I moved to Baltimore, we had to find a private school for my daughters as the public schools had things like metal detectors, armed guards, and no library. I grew up in Southern California where just about everyone went to public school—we walked there, we walked home, our parents never showed up, there was no such thing as a class party. So my ideas about private school and some cushy private world with hushy-hush rich people were based on bad TV shows and the Friday Night Movie of the Week. What I didn’t realize, and what I discovered after about a year of showing up at that place seventy-eight times a year for only a fraction of the events, was that these rich private school, country club people are just as freaky as the rest of us. They have drug-addicted siblings, affairs, divorces, self-loathing, insecurities, and most importantly a great sense of humor that can make any fundraiser fun. And Heidi, like the rest of them, has a life way more interesting than her good looks reveal.

“So what did they do to them?” I asked

“They fluffed them!” she said. It was clear I wasn’t going to get the diagram with the knife cuts, the lifting, the fat injections.

“Amazing that you get your vagina fluffed and your face looks like you’ve been air-brushed or something.”

Our conversation ends when more mothers join us and we are forced to talk about things like arthroscopic knee surgery and husbands who refuse to take out the trash. But my mind is drifting. Why is it, I wonder, that when we do something that makes us feel great, our face readily broadcasts it, like a TV screen that just can’t lie. And, when, I wonder, did a fluffy vagina become such an asset? Does the generation above me know this? For all we know, all those pretty old ladies with twinkling eyes, are really just women blessed with naturally fluffy vaginas.

Jessica Anya Blau is the author of newly released DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME, which has been called "a raging success" and "unrelentingly sidesplittingly funny." Her first novel, THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES, was picked as a Best Summer Book by the Today Show, the New York Post and New York Magazine. The San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers chose it as one of the Best Books of the Year. Jessica lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College.

On Consciousness and Freedom

2011-01-20T09:40:00.000-05:00

I came across this snippet of a speech that David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College and wanted to share it with you....

On Consciousness and Freedom

But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

David Foster Wallace, Commencement address at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, May 21, 2005.

New Books!

2011-01-12T11:58:00.000-05:00

One of the absolute best perks of being a "published" author is that I have been asked to blurb advance copies of books! Woot! Among the books I have blurbed two are coming out this month and the others spread out over the year. I urge you to check out these talented authors!

DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME by Jessica Anya Blau (January 18, 2011) the author of the outstanding: THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES returns with a family tale like no other as the siblings of an eccentric mother and father are called to their mother's hospital bed. http://www.harpercollins.com/books/Drinking-Closer-Home-Jessica-Anya-Blau/?isbn=9780061984020

UNDER THE MERCY TREES by Heather Newton (January 18, 2011) when Martin Owenby's brother disappears he must leave Manhattan for the rural life he escaped. http://www.harpercollins.com/books/Under-Mercy-Trees-Heather-Newton/?isbn=9780062001344

HOME TO WOEFIELD by Susan Juby (March 8, 2011) YA author Juby ventures into adult fiction as she weaves together a cast of misfits all searching for their place in the world. http://www.harpercollins.com/books/Home-Woefield-Susan-Juby/?isbn=9780061995194

THE BIRD SISTERS by Rebecca Rasmussen (April 12, 2011) debut author Rasmussen tells the tale of sisters Milly and Twiss and how they became The Bird Sisters. http://www.thebirdsisters.com/

FATHERMUCKER by Greg Olear ( October 4, 2011) author of the fabulous TOTALLY KILLER, http://www.amazon.com/Totally-Killer-Novel-Greg-Olear/dp/0061735299 Olear returns with the day in the life of a stay-at-home dad whose wife may or may not be cheating on him. I laughed, I cried. This book is going to be HUGE. You can "like" FATHERMUCKER here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Fathermucker/139831399398492

James Claffey on Process

2011-01-03T17:02:00.000-05:00

I met James Claffey the way a lot of people meet: Facebook. I put out a call for writers to use my blog and James responded with this incredible peek into his daily writing routine. I am always curious to know how a fellow writer works and James certainly has an inspiring way to start his day. I want to know about your process, what you need to get yourself in the creative frame of mind. Leave a comment below!

On Process ... James Claffey

These days we live in New Orleans, my wife and I, close by the bayou, where Marie Laveau practiced her dark arts. I’m finishing the last year of my MFA program at LSU in Baton Rouge and we decided we had to live in New Orleans for the last of the program’s three years.

Tuesdays and Thursdays we drive the eighty minutes to the State capital, where I teach a course in undergraduate fiction writing, and she teaches a full load of composition courses and one intro to poetry class. These days are not days devoted to writing. Instead, the other five days of the week are habitual in their unfolding.

Awake at five, the dog is upside down on the bed, feet aloft, her long teeth bared, the occasional twitch of the feet perhaps her dreaming of chasing gophers about the ranch. When I switch on the coffee maker and wait for the final death-gurgle of the brewing water, I realize how lucky I am to be able to look at the sunrise over the rooftops of New Orleans.

This is my view as I attend to my pages in the same black notebook I always use. My predilection for this particular notebook, the precise time, the .05mm nib pen, the familiar coffee mug, is a direct throwback to my childhood, when I was a fastidious, almost-OCD little boy who fretted about having his shirt tucked in, sleeves folded just-so, hair parted exactly in the same place before going out into the wet Dublin streets.

On my way to school the cracks in the pavement used terrify me—knowing that if I trod on a line it meant the morning would be a bad one, probably one with a beating in store, or one where my lunch money would be “borrowed” by Smelly Tobin, because I was too afraid to say no. How I would squirm in my school jumper, the scratchy wool irritating my neck. But I never told my mother.

Now I am older, my wife, Maureen, considers me to be “fastidious.” She means “careful.” A creature of habit—when I find something I like I buy it in twos so I can have a standby if something happens to the first one. My writing notebooks are uniform—Moleskin, hardcover, 240 pages, lined. At three pages a day this means I complete each one in eighty days, unless I’m sick or otherwise unable to show up to the desk. When I’m done, I date the outside with a white sticker—beginning date to ending date. Maureen makes fun of my process. She uses any sort of notebook or journal, unlined preferably, adding illustrations of me, our dog, my little boy (her stepson) Simon. She is a “go with the flow” outside the lines type of woman. I was crestfallen when recently, Maureen and our friend, Britt, informed me I was categorically, not, a go with the flow type of person (between you and me, I think I already knew!).

So, I write, every morning, in my notebook, stream of consciousness, vomiting my thoughts out, clearing the way for me to work on my book. Does it work? Not always. There are mornings when I chafe against the task and take forever to scribble what I must.

Lately, I’ve migrated to writing in bed, a break from my hard-wired desk routine, a sign I am becoming, maybe not a go with the flow guy, but at least loosening up and breathing a little easier. The words come easier now, the thoughts flow from the nib, and I watch their progress so I can take the label and stick it to the cover when I’m done.

My morning writing routine sweeps the attic clean long enough to attend to the story—the unfinished novel, my MFA thesis, demands my attention. Chapter by verse, paragraph by peristalsis, my eye roves, picking here and there at the weeds, the self-referential “I” that peppers my text, the weak metaphors, the odd fragmented sentences, the issues that demand a clear head and a tight hold in order to be properly addressed.

I’m excited to make these edits, applying a little spit and polish to the words, my mind purged of the things I worry about—changes to the English Department website, Christmas presents for family back in Ireland, what route to take driving back to California this holiday season, how tall my four-year-old, Simon, will be since we last saw him in August, why my teeth sting for no good reason whatsoever.

And with the slate scrubbed off, the Scrivener file opened to “book,” I hunt and peck my way around the keyboard looking for apt ways to say ordinary things. The novel comes and goes with no rhyme or reason, some days words torrentially spill their way onto the page, and other days they are clogged good and proper. Still, the art is in the showing up.

James Claffey is a writer/educator living with his wife, also a writer and artist, Maureen Foley, in New Orleans, LA.

His website is: www.jamesclaffey.com

james compass points toward the future; his glass bottom toward the sky; and his bluebird eyes are two wars poignant, flitting for an avocado ranch. a master of french letters, james slipped out of Ireland one night when the moon turned a lonely ball shade of blue. he has never chanced back. his compass points toward the future; his glass’s bottom points toward the sky; and his bluebird eyes are two wars poignant, flitting for an avocado ranch. the moon still dangles beneath like an unused homeland. james’ letters are renown for their firmness and girth of meaning. like an irish elephant, he has not forgotten his many lost loves and he flies close to the rim of the world maintaining a mighty hold on his thick quill pen.

An Explanation For My Absence

2010-12-09T10:30:00.003-05:00

I've written a piece for The Nervous Breakdown that attempts to explain where I've been for so long.

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/rantalek/2010/12/writing-your-next-book-is-like-bad-sex/

I hope you'll forgive me.

Justin Kramon author of FINNY

2010-10-11T09:42:00.000-04:00

There are books and then there are books. Finny by Justin Kramon falls into the latter category. It is a sweeping tale of one young woman's life -- while some might label this book coming-of-age -- the narrative carries the main character, Finny, (actually Delphine) well beyond her post adolescence. With humor and compassion, through Finny's story we experience it all: life, death, love, loss, betrayal and triumph. Without becoming maudlin or histrionic, Kramon handles the most emotionally charged scenes with tenderness allowing Finny to draw you into her world so deeply you will emerge blinking at your surroundings and that is simply the best kind of book.
During a marathon read this summer I finished this book in a day. I'm pretty sure I ignored everything and everyone to do so. When it was over I simply could not stop thinking about this book and so I did what every person does in the technology age -- I googled the author. I found his site, http://www.justinkramon.com/ (with fabulous drawings of the characters) and "met" him on FaceBook. When I asked him to guest blog and he accepted I was thrilled.

You need to buy this book http://www.amazon.com/Finny-Novel-Justin-Kramon/dp/0812980239/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1286803473&sr=8-1 and then you're going to want to talk about Finny with your friends. We can start below in the comments. It's that good. Trust me. It's that good.

Please welcome Justin to the blog where he talks about one of his (and mine) greatest literary influences. The incomparable Alice Adams.

ON ALICE ADAMS by JUSTIN KRAMON

I picked up my first Alice Adams story collection at a used bookstore in Iowa City, when I was in grad school, and looking for something to get me out of a writing funk I was in. I’d read one of her stories in an anthology a few years before, and remembered liking it. I thought Adams was very famous, since most of the stories in the collection had been published originally in The New Yorker, and I’d seen her name in a number of fiction anthologies.

The collection, a book called To See You Again, was fantastic. I admired the technique – the crispness of the writing, the fluidity of the transitions, the elegance of the narrative structures – but more than that, I had a huge amount of fun reading it. The stories were absorbing, filled with humor and incisive psychological observations, unsentimental but respectful of the significance of everyday dramas and losses. It was like reading gossip by a close friend, only much smarter and funnier than any gossip I’ve ever read. And it felt just as real – the characters, the scenes, the settings – like I was being led into some secret viewing room on other people’s lives.

I was amazed by the range of emotions Adams could create in the course of a single conversation. In a story called “Snow,” a man named Graham looks across the dinner table at his daughter’s girlfriend, a woman named Rose, and Adams writes:

She looks almost pretty at that moment, but not quite; looking at her, Graham thinks again, If it had to be another girl, why her? But he knows this to be unfair, and, as far as that goes, why anyone for anyone, when you come to think of it? Any pairing is basically mysterious.

In three meticulous sentences, Adams captures a story’s worth of tiny disruptions and adjustments in Graham’s mind: a slightly homophobic resentment toward his daughter’s romantic choices, followed by a surprising moment of acceptance, and capped off by the realization of a sort of universal truth about the mystery of romantic relationships. Adams transitions seamlessly between the story’s narration and Graham’s interior thoughts. All of this in a glance across the table.

Adams never calls attention to herself. Her language is unpretentious, and I’ve always had a respect for writers who can express complicated emotions in simple language, language that has a conversational tone to it, that welcomes readers in rather than pushing them away. She’s not imprecise or careless, just not formal. Her impulse is to include you rather than impress you.

There’s remarkable restraint in the stories. In other writers’ work, an intense moment of realization like this is often followed by a dramatic fight, or tears, or at the very least, a space break. But Adams transitions right back into the conversation, and there are ten more moments just as vivid and honest and jammed with insight before the end of the scene on the next page.

I’m a big fan of Alice Adams’ work, both the stories and the novels, so it’s been sad for me to find out that not many people read her anymore. She died in the late 1990’s, and a number of her books are out of print. I don’t know if it’s because her characters and themes seem dated, but if that’s the case, I hope it passes. I don’t think most people read quality fiction for its politics, but rather to be absorbed by the stories.

Adams reminds me of what I want to do in my own work, of the priorities I have for myself in my writing, and the kind of writer I’d like to be. My fiancée and I have passed Alice Adams books to each other for years, and by now we’ve gone through most of them. There may be one or two I haven’t read, but I think I’ll save them for a time when I’m feeling down about my own work, and I want to pick up something inspiring, something I know I’ll love.

Justin Kramon is the author of the novel Finny, which the Baltimore Sun has called "the rare authentic coming-of-age novel," and of which the Boston Globe has written: "Dickensian...a talented young novelist...a dickens of a first novel." Justin's work appears in many magazines, and has been honored by the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, The Best American Short Stories, the Hawthornden International Writers’ Fellowship, and the Bogliasco Foundation. Now thirty-years old, he lives in Philadelphia. You can read about Finny, watch the book trailer, and view sketches of the characters in the novel at Justin's website,www.justinkramon.com.

Kim Wright, author of Love in Mid Air

2010-09-29T20:42:00.000-04:00

Kim Wright has been generating a lot of notice for her novel: Love in Mid Air. A gifted writer with an eye and ear for the nuances of our everyday lives, Kim took something close to her heart and said: what if?

People Magazine had this to say about Love in Mid Air : Wright understands female friendships, the interplay of love and envy, the way one woman’s change of fortune can threaten the group’s equilibrium. Astute and engrossing, this review is a treat.”

(People Magazine [three and a half stars])

Kim was a recent guest at the UCross Retreat in Sheridan Wyoming and she's written this wonderful post extolling the virtues of the artistic retreat. Please join me in welcoming the lovely and talented Kim Wright to the blog!

I’m attaching this picture because I don’t think without a visual aid I can adequately describe what an idiot I’ve been. This is the view from my writing desk at UCross, a creative retreat for writers, visual artists, and composers in Sheridan Wyoming.

UCross is Crayola-colored, as simple and touching as if it was drawn by a child. Blue sky, green grass, red barn. Writing colonies are often situated in places much like this – maybe not the west but someplace simple and silent, far from the madding crowd. They are these wonderful enclaves where artists can go – usually for periods from two to six weeks – and have unlimited time to work. The size of the colonies varies; there are only eight residents at UCross, but there were twenty-four when I was at MacDowell in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Large or small, colony life tends to follow a pattern: Everyone meets for breakfast and then you scatter to your various studios to work all day. Someone brings lunch and leaves it at your door. Around six, everyone converges back at the main house for wine, conversation, and a dinner lovingly prepared by the staff. You can get an insane amount of work done. The conversations are electric – one person I met called it intellectual wi-fi, this strange humming energy you tap into that makes you think of things you’d never think of on your own.

And oh yeah, these places are free.

The reason I’m an idiot is that it took me so long to get on the colony circuit. My friend and fellow novelist Alison Smith had told me years ago I needed to start applying to colonies but I demurred. They’re hard to get into I told her. Which is true. They’re all located twenty-eight miles from nowhere. Also true. And then I told her that I didn’t think that a colony stay would be all that helpful to my work. I’m the sort of writer who gets up and goes at it hard for three or four hours each morning. It seemed like colonies would be most helpful for binge writers, who would go on great tears of work, dashing off whole books in a single wild-eyed, caffeine driven sitting. But for someone like me, who begins to reap diminishing returns after a few hours at the computer, it seemed like a waste.

And in that I was utterly, terribly wrong.

Here’s what I didn’t figure in. A colony allows you to get totally away from your life. The good stuff as well as the bad stuff. I wept when I left my dog and I miss my friends and my exercise routine and my ballroom dance lessons and pretty yellow desk. But the truth is, if you want to break new ground in your work, it helps to break away from it all – the comfortable as well as the annoying aspects of your day to day life at home. In the middle of my first colony stay, it suddenly hit me that a retreat isn’t about writing more. It’s about writing differently. A few days out of my normal rut and I begin thinking things I’d never think back home. I become experimental, open, looser, more fearless and direct. I may still be writing four hours a day but they’re four completely different hours than I could manage at home.

Looking out as I’m writing this, deer and wild turkeys are literally passing right beside my deck. It’s an hour away from suppertime and it’s my turn to bring the wine. The bad angel on one shoulder is whispering “Don’t post this – it’s hard enough to get into these places as it is.” But the good angel on the other side is saying “All writers should go to colonies. It will give you more confidence. It will transform your work.”

So….get thee to the nearest Google and type in “writing colony.” What pops up could change your life.

Kim Wright is the author of the novel, Love in Mid Air and has been writing about travel, food, and wine for more than 25 years and is a two-time recipient of the Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Writing.

You can contact Kim at kwwiley@aol.com.

To see Kim on the Love in Mid Air trailer, visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDzUay7RqBw

Susan Henderson's Debut Novel UP FROM THE BLUE

2010-09-20T20:40:00.000-04:00

Susan Henderson's debut novel UP FROM THE BLUE is going to break your heart. The young narrator Tillie Harris will take up residence in your soul as she searches for clues to her mother's disappearance. The writing is lyrical, and the voice, simply irresistible.

I met the lovely Susan Henderson in New York City at a reading I was doing at Pianos Lounge on the Lower East Side. I was thrilled for the chance to get together with Susan and two other Harper authors, Greg Olear and Jessica Anya Blau, since we are published by the same imprint at HarperCollins. You could say we have a mutual admiration society going -- each are talented writers with books I'd urge you to buy -- TOTALLY KILLER (greg) and THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES ( jessica) and now we can add the arresting UP FROM THE BLUE.

INSPIRATION AND THE WRITING PROCESS

by Susan Henderson

I've always been in awe of those writers who think up a big, marketable concept for a book and then set out to write it. My own process is much more chaotic.

http://www.amazon.com/Up-Blue-Novel-Susan-Henderson/dp/0061984035/ref=sr_1_1?s=gateway&ie=UTF8&qid=1285028532&sr=8-1

UP FROM THE BLUE haunted me the way dreams do with puzzling images that felt desperately important dropping into my consciousness. I'd start to fall asleep and I'd get an image of a little girl's hand on a door knob, afraid to turn it. The same thing would happen when I was driving—I'd see a girl on her front porch with stickers all over her face, waiting to see if someone would notice her.

I don't even know how long I was in this phase, just collecting images and moments: a silver tooth, bells tied to shoelaces, a mustache that hid the expression on the mouth, a dead copperhead in the sink.

And then one day, I was searching for something—maybe a pair of scissors or some tape—and I opened a drawer to find it full of little slips of paper with just a few words written on each of them. It was utterly ridiculous. Why did I write these things down? Why couldn't I throw them out? And what on earth was I planning to do with them?

I learned quickly that there was no way to take these random pieces and somehow organize them into a big coherent picture as if creating a mosaic out of spilled tiles. (Believe me, I tried.) And yet, there was something about these images and the characters who'd formed from them that nagged at me. I couldn't get them out of my head. So I decided to take the one image—the girl with her hand on the door—and I had her open it.

Inside that room was an entire world—a Pandora's box filled with fears, delights, memories, imaginings, and hope. And there were so many questions to answer: What do you do when someone vanishes from your life while so much between the two of you is still unresolved? What of the tension between wanting to be accepted and the insistent calling to be yourself—a self that is so terribly disappointing to others? How is it possible that people living in the same house can experience an event so differently? And what is it (both within and outside of you) that carries you through hard times?

In the end, the fragmented way this story came to me made sense. This was a child who felt disoriented and haunted by the way her mother vanished from her life, and she'd dissociated from the emotions that were too overwhelming. My job was to give her a voice, to help her tell a coherent story that she was too young to fully explain or communicate—a story she needed adults to hear. And I was very glad to discover, as I walked beside this child, that beyond the grief was understanding, love and grace.

I'm curious to hear about your own writing process, especially those of you who don't feel you have a linear approach or a clear roadmap. What is it that inspires you? And how do you go about finding the story you're needing to tell?

Susan Henderson is the author of UP FROM THE BLUE (HarperCollins). She blogs at LitPark.com

Susanna Daniel: Stiltsville

2010-09-14T07:50:00.000-04:00

I was first introduced to Susanna Daniel in the very best way: an afternoon browsing in my favorite bookstore where I picked up her debut novel, Stiltsville. I was drawn to the story because I too had grown up in a much different Florida than exists today -- and Susanna's novel is about a community of houses on Stilts off of Biscayne Bay -- Stiltsville - a place that now lives only in the memories and photographs of those who once inhabited the houses. I read this novel in a breathless rush -- and then I did it all over again. And then I contacted Susanna to tell her how much the book meant to me. It's that kind of book. The writing is lush, gorgeous, the characters of Frances Ellerby, Dennis DuVal and their daughter Margo are as compelling as any character in contemporary literature and getting to spend twenty-five years in their lives is a beautiful, heart wrenching gift of the very best kind.
Please welcome Susanna as she talks about what it takes to write that first novel and get it out into the world -- as always -- I'll see you in the comments section.

Novelists: More Swagger, Less Stutter

In my more optimistic moments, I describe novel writing as a sort of game, wherein I have the pieces and have to put them together. In my less optimistic moments, I describe it as a grind and a mystery. The scary kind of mystery. The kind where you're scrambling through the darkness toward either a highway or a cliff.

In between -- and this is where I live most of the time, neither optimistic nor pessimistic, neither dark nor light -- I describe it as an act of faith.

Anyone who's been around a lot of writers know that they tend to be a confident lot. Overconfident, even; some might say arrogant. When I first dipped a toe into a writing community, in my first semester as a graduate student, this was a big turn-off. I liked the people a lot, actually, but when it came to listening to writers (almost all of whom had more experience than I at writing and talking about writing) wax on about their own work, I found it unseemly.

In college I had a friend who was a flutist at Julliard. I went to see her play, and on stage my sweet-natured friend became a bit of a diva: she gesticulated grandly with the music, scowling or looking euphoric as the music rose and fell. After the performance, I asked her about this theatricality, and she said it was par for the course. She rolled her eyes. "It's expected," she said. "If you don't do it, the teachers don't take you seriously."

This was shocking to me. I thought the music should speak for itself. The musician was a blank canvas, I thought, or should be. Similarly, the author should be a blank canvas for the novel.

Apparently, this is one of the many things about which I'm just plain wrong.

I published my first novel, STILTSVILLE -- the debut, as it's called -- with Harper last month. STILTSVILLE has gotten many very good reviews. I've heard from dozens of readers who devoured it in one sitting, who say it's one of the best books they've ever read, who cried buckets at the end. This is all very complimentary, and I'd be lying if I said this kind of thing didn't matter to me -- it matters a lot, in fact.

Still, when it comes time to talk about my own work, I clam up. I've been interviewed over the phone by reporters, over email by book bloggers, and twice so far in a radio studio, for taped segments. And every time, what comes to mind is that experience of listening to my classmates talk about their own work, their self-satisfaction and self-indulgence, and feeling strongly that I do not want to come off that way.

But the fact is, it would be better for me if I could toot my own horn, now and again.

I have never felt in describing STILTSVILLE that I've done it justice. As everyone knows, the novel is like the baby -- and how do I describe my own two-year-old son? He has alarmingly blond hair, fat peachy cheeks, and two legs that surprise me every day in how closely they resemble the legs of a grownup human being. When the other day he shouted, "Mom!" and then made a fish face -- puckered lips and hands flapping at his ears -- I was so surprised that I dropped a plate to the floor. Now, you tell me, how am I supposed to summarize my baby? People ask me about him, and I give a vague and stilted description: "He's a delight. He's starting to be willful. He's running and jumping and talking." This is not only a thin, unhelpful summary, but it's such a tiny and bland slice of the whole as to be more or less a lie.

The only criticism of STILTSVILLE that has lodged itself in my mind was from a woman who loved the book, but said that she thought the jacket copy was misleading. This haunts me. I wrote the jacket copy, more or less. What does it say about me that I can't even write a few paragraphs that accurately describe my own book?

There are a few skills that are independent of writing but still useful for a writer. These days, being able to promote with a little panache, verbally and in print, is crucial. I don't wish my book were different in any way -- I love it as is, for what it is and what it is not. But I wish I were different. I wish I were comfortable talking about it in a complex, meaningful, and inspiring way. In a very real sense, I wish I were a little more smug and self-satisfied.

I look back on that uneasy feeling it used to give me, listening to my classmates describe their stories in fawning terms, and I wag a finger at myself. Not only will that talent or skill or whatever it is they have -- and I don't -- serve them well as they publish and give interviews, but also, who am I to judge them? I, who can't answer a question about my book without stuttering or making a self-deprecating joke? I, who finds it gut-wrenching to answer the simple question "What is your book about?"

Writing a novel is, more than anything else, an act of faith. And the bottom line is that it starts with having faith in yourself -- not just a little, but a lot. Some might even say an unseemly amount.

Susanna Daniel was born and raised in Miami, Florida, where she spent much of her childhood at her family’s stilt house in Biscayne Bay. Her novel, Stiltsville, was called an "exquisite debut" by Publishers Weekly, "lushly descriptive and complex" by Booklist, and "a perfect beach and book club read" by Miriam Tuliao of the New York Public Library. Susanna is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives with her husband and son in Madison, Wisconsin, where during the long winter she dreams of the sun and the sea, and of jumping off the stilt house porch at high tide. She is at work on a second novel.

Gina Frangello: Mommy's On A Book Tour

2010-09-07T17:59:00.002-04:00

My introduction to Gina Frangello was a series of riveting pieces she wrote about her father for The Nervous Breakdown and then we got to meet in person at Pianos Lounge in New York City when she invited me to read with her on the Slut Lullabies tour. Her writing, fiction and non-fiction alike, is both immediate and thought provoking. Combine this with a unique voice that speaks to what it means to be a writer, an editor, a woman and a mother in the twenty-first century and you know that Gina is the real deal. Please welcome Gina to the blog where she talks about the paradox of being a stay-at-home mom and writer.

Not Now, Honey, Mommy’s on a Book Tour

There are mothers who work outside the home. There are mothers who stay at home. And then there are mothers like me: who work “outside” careers but “inside” our homes. Such is the life of a mother/writer/editor.

The pros are obvious. I can take my kids to school in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon. I’m in the house, so unlike some busy career women, I’m here when my kids have playdates; I’m here to make dinner, pack lunches, help with homework, drive them to soccer. I’m here . . . well, with the exception of the 4 hours per week when I teach a class at a university downtown . . . pretty much all the time.

Wait, was that a “pro?”

Because that, itself, may also be the con. Since I am home, it would seem crazily indulgent to hire a nanny to do all these things that women who work outside the home hire nannies to do. You mean my nanny would be doing our laundry, cooking meals for my kids, helping them with math, all while I’m . . . sitting here a room or two away?

Even if I could get past that emotional hurdle (okay, that might not be so hard), there are other hurdles. Even more-successful-than-I-am writers usually don’t earn money on a novel or other book until after it’s finished and sold, the process of which can take anywhere between 1 year to 10 years depending on the writer and the book. My own average is 3-4 years. With what 15 bucks per hour would I be hiring this said nanny to chauffeur my kids around, exactly?

Loan the fact that I can’t even stand the radio on when I’m working, much less some adult non-family-member nanny-person occupying my space.

So for me, this has been the compromise. My kids are out of the house 6 hours per day, which gives me a mostly-uninterrupted 30 hour work week . . . when school is in session, that is . . . when nobody is sick. Because since I work from home, if there’s an orthodontist appointment, a call from the school nurse, it’s a given who will be handling that. My husband works in finance, earning the money that allows me not to have to embark on a more “stable” career, and so his work hours and responsibilities usually take priority over mine—a situation that benefits me, and so about which I can scarcely complain. And so, my life is a mainly happy paradox of simultaneously enjoying the geographically relaxed lifestyle of a stay-at-home mom, along with its accompanying luxuries of knowing my kids’ friends and teachers and having daily control over my own home environment . . . all while I also run an independent book press, an online literary magazine, write fiction, review books, and blog in addition to my teaching.

“I don’t know how you do it,” my stay-at-home mom friends like to say. “I’m so impressed!”

But is it my imagination, or do they say this with a slightly pitying air as though they all concur I am some weird form of masochist but nobody has the heart to tell me?

As I write this, my kids are playing Leggos outside my office. They’re mainly quiet. They whisper as they build. They know better to turn on the television (though we have one upstairs they could watch, they seem to prefer proximity to me—I try not to think of this along rhesus monkey analogies.) My office has no door: its frame is too wide. We pretend it’s a separate room, but really, it is a nook at best. We live in the city. I am lucky to have a nook. It’s late August. The last time they were in school was mid-June. They were in a part-time day camp, but that ended at the end of July, and for a while there was a lice scare and I kept them home, and then some pipes exploded at the park district and camp was cancelled for a few days, and then everyone in our house got sick, and then there was a family vacation . . .

This has been going on for 9½ years.

How many books would any of us have written if we did not have children?

The question is one of apples and oranges. After nearly a decade of motherhood, to imagine a Me who had never met my children would be like asking how many books my next door neighbor would have written . . . uh, if she happened to be a writer. It’s unanswerable, unknowable, based on something that is Not. No matter how true it is that women have every right not to define ourselves through motherhood, the truth is that human beings do evolve and identify largely by who we love and who has touched our lives—that we change with each new love and each new touch.

The “me” who would have written those books, in that parallel reality, does not exist anymore.

Recently, a discussion on She Writes, a popular online community for women writers, book tours were discussed. Many women in the discussion group expressed that there was simply no way they could tour with small children at home. One of my authors forOther Voices Books, Zoe Zolbrod, brought up her anxieties about her forthcoming tour for her debut novel, Currency, but stressed her belief that touring was important for her book, for her as a writer—that this could be part of what she wanted to model for her children, too: living her own life and pursuing her dreams.

My second book, a collection of stories called Slut Lullabies, was released (by Emergency Press) the same month as Currency, so Zoe and I toured together as much as we could swing it. From May to September the cities on our itinerary included Austin, New York, Los Angeles, Bakersfield, Iowa City, Portland, Seattle, Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor, and for her Pittsburgh and Boston; for me Madison, Denver and Palm Springs.

I confess that our tour had an air of prisoners on a day pass from the jail into town. Zoe and I bought packs of cigarettes wherever we went. We drank early in the day. We wore heels in which we would not carry our toddlers, and silk dresses that normally would not stand up to small, greasy fingers. Perhaps there was some occasional flirting with literary colleagues or old boyfriends. Yet whenever we saw women with babies on their hips, we felt woozy with longing. We tended to book our return flights home as early in the morning as we could possibly find, knowing our eagerness to return to our children could rise to dangerously acute proportions if we spent too long unoccupied, waiting for an evening flight.

As the tour reached its final stages, we felt proud of ourselves for how hard we had worked it. When my first book came out in 2006, I was 9 months pregnant and then spent the next 7 months nursing, unable to leave home for more than a few hours at a time. Our travels this spring and summer seemed a monumental (I actually typed “momumental”—talk about a Freudian slip!) achievement.

Yet when I think of some of my favorite male writers—Joe Meno, Steve Almond and Stephen Elliott come to mind, whose careers, it might be fair to say, were in part made by their hardcore and innovative touring tactics—the “big tour” Zoe and I managed threatens to feel suddenly paltry and haphazard, spread out far beyond the short-lived buzz most books can really hope for and pieced together in-between family emergencies and kid-friendly beach vacations. Our grand act of doing something for ourselves and our careers, which so many on a women writers’ site didn’t feel they could even undertake, threatens to feel like the middle-aged-mom friendly version of the guerilla marketing for which indie writers (like us) are supposed to be known.

Between April (the AWP Conference) and June (Los Angeles), my four year old son, Giovanni, who had been toilet trained for a year without incident, began having “accidents” at preschool and, up to a few nights per week, wetting his bed.

What does it take to write a book? Truly? Virginia Woolf claimed, in an era perhaps less long-gone than we would like to believe, that it required a certain base level of independent means, and a room of one’s own. Yet I, at the dawn of the new century, am still making due on my husband’s income and a nook without a door. In this fashion, I have written two novels since my children were born, along with the bulk of a short story collection and other new stories. I have launched a book press, guest-edited several books and magazines, and blogged, reviewed and interviewed my ass off.

At times, it has felt like pulling teeth. At times, it has felt like a struggle to hear the voices in my head above the click of Leggos outside the door.

At other times, it has felt like transportation to another world. At times, the veil between the world of my fiction and the world of my family has felt so thick and impenetrable that I have had to fight by the moment to part the curtain and get back to my real life, lest I fall under the deep waters of the world inside my mind and make mistakes that would render it difficult, if not impossible, for me to find my way back.

What does it take to write a book? We revise expectations and needs as we go along. Perhaps it takes a school schedule—a mercifully decent public school education that does not cost me money and allows me to inhabit that other world for x hours per week without my having to pay someone else to manage my children while I do it.

Perhaps it does not take even that. Women have done it with less. Have written poems with a crying child on their hips and a pot on the stove. Have done it with no money for rent, addicted to drugs, or grieving a death. Despite my love of Woolf, there are no real rules.

Because writing can be born of either luxury or desperation, or both. It is alternately an indulgence and an act of heroism. Like being a mother and an artist at once, it dwells in perpetual contradictions and complements.

What does it take to write a book? Emotional risk. Determination. Working your ass off, with no guarantee it will ever “pay off”—pay off ranging from economic to artistic.

Okay, yes, it takes those things. That much we know.

My husband and I fashion a “potty chart,” which our ten-year-old twin daughters decorate. We give Giovanni stickers on days he does not have accidents. After each week without an accident, he obtains a reward: flip top sunglasses; those blasted Leggos. We hold our breaths and wait for my trip out to Portland and Seattle, to see if the system holds in my absence. I hold my child in my arms and tell him over and over again, “I love you, I love you.” I promise that Mommy always comes back. I wish, as I sometimes did when I was a therapist, that it was possible to truly become a tabula rasa for our children (or clients), but instead I am gripped with anxiety: what if my plane crashes and I am lying to my son and Mommy does not “come back?” What can it be that is so important I am going to get inside some metal tube and hurtle across the sky without him?

Thank god for Valium.

School begins in two weeks. Two more weeks and I will have more than a handful of snatched hours while my kids busy themselves, unnaturally quiet indoors on a sunny day or confined to our small, urban back yard, the twins playing Mommies to their younger brother, making sure he doesn’t wander out the gate to talk to any passing stranger with a dog. Two more weeks and they will be back in school like all kids, even those whose mothers do not spend much of their time inhabiting a make-believe world, even those whose mothers “stay at home” in the real sense, and I can stop feeling guilty for insisting on my scant work time because they will be out in the world doing what all children do, what they would be doing no matter what lifestyle their mother chose.

Two weeks. Where did the summer go? Why does it always end too damn soon?

In Wisconsin at our friends’ farmhouse for 9 days, I was going to lavish them with all the attention the book tour had precluded. The house has no internet. My computer remained upstairs in its case, to be taken out only in cases of emergency insomnia. We had spent 10 days here last summer, lazily talking on the front porch, going to the playgrounds that line the river, walking the grounds, taking riding lessons at the horse barn just a couple miles down the road, swimming at the pool in town. That short period last summer shimmers in my memory, and this August it was to be a period of renewal, of rebonding, relaxation after all the stress associated with . . . I was going to say “promoting my book,” but maybe I mean, simply, all the stress of life.

Instead, the house was infested with rodents. Mice in the cabinets, chipmunks in the basement and the walls, and on the last day, a fat, insouciant rat wandering the upstairs hallway, who failed to even balk at my presence. Instead, my daughters and I cowered in a cluster on the couch with all the lights on, and my friend Amy called poison control when the poison we put in the basement ended up—like a carefully stacked gift!—carried back upstairs by the chipmunks and placed, while we were out, on her daughter’s baby blanket. Instead, my husband had to drive up to fetch us, and we fled the vacation early like survivors of the Amityville Horror.

Ah, the best laid plans of mice (er, and chipmunks, and rats) and (wo)men . . .

10.

The potty chart has been retired. It has been a month since Gio had an accident. My editor texts to say that, for the first time in a year, he spent a whole day doing Emergency Press business but did not have to do any work on me. Though I still have stops in Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor, Madison pending, the frenzy is slowing down, and for the first time, the short “seasons” of books begins to seem less cruel, and more a method of preserving authors’ sanity. Come fall, my editor texts, we’ll have to start talking about the next book, a novel he hopes to put out in 2011. Meanwhile, my agent is waiting for me to send her a revision of my newest novel so she can shop it to the big boys (or, as is mainly true of publishing, big girls) in New York.

Amid this, I spend a day at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, listening to my children laugh and squeal at the indoor amusement park, my chest bursting with happiness despite the cheesiness of it all.

I come home from the weekend to 360 emails.

And so my son and I walk a few blocks so that I can leave him for the day at his old daycare center, to catch up on the work I missed in Wisconsin and Minnesota. He fusses, drags his feet, says he does not want to go. “I want a Mommy day!” he insists. It will do no good to say he has had two weeks of Mommy days. In the world of a four year old, every day should be a Mommy day. In my four-year-old world, every day was. So instead, I sing with him the words of songs he makes up and cajole him on his way.

Still, he dawdles. Perhaps because he is in no hurry to arrive, he stops to pick me a flower. When he delivers it to my hands he says, “Mommy, I wish I could give you every flower in the world.”

And I realize, unlike an attorney or a brain surgeon, it is within my power to promise I will pick him up a little early. So a few more emails will go unanswered; that second guest-blog-post unwritten. But because I work from home, because I make crap money anyway, because I am my own boss . . . screw it, the world will not explode.

At my promise, I watch a huge grin bloom across his sun-kissed face.

Pro.

Gina Frangello is the author of a short story collection, Slut Lullabies (Emergency Press 2010) and a novel, My Sister's Continent (Chiasmus 2006). After serving for many years as the editor of the literary magazine, Other Voices, she co-founded its book imprint, Other Voices Books, where she is now the Executive Editor. She also edits the Fiction Section of the popular online literary community, The Nervous Breakdown. Her short fiction, journalism, essays and book reviews have appeared in many magazines, newspapers, books and blogs including the Chicago Tribune, Prairie Schooner, Fence, the Chicago Reader, the Huffington Post, and A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection. She teaches at Columbia College Chicago and Northwestern University's School of Continuing Studies and can be found online at www.ginafrangello.com.

Style, Substance and Soul

2010-09-03T10:46:00.000-04:00

The lovely ladies of StyleSubstanceSoul.com interviewed me recently. The post is up live today http://stylesubstancesoul.com/2010/09/woman-to-woman-our-exclusive-interview-with-author-robin-antalek/
I'd love for you to visit and leave a comment -- it's a great site!

JULIETTE FAY

2010-08-30T09:38:00.000-04:00

Most likely I won't have to introduce many of you to my guest, the wonderful Juliette Fay. Her first book, SHELTER ME, was a huge success. SHELTER ME garnered her accolades as well as a tremendous group of loyal readers who are eagerly awaiting her new novel DEEP DOWN TRUE that will be published in January of 2011. I came to know Juliette when she graciously offered a blurb for my debut novel. But Juliette, in her amazing way, didn't stop there. She offered encouragement and advice and continues to be a supporter of my work. Please welcome Juliette to the blog -- and as always -- can't wait to read your comments!

The Truth Behind Fiction

When my first novel, SHELTER ME, came out, people often asked if it was autobiographical. “No,” I’d reply. “It’s pure fiction.” Sometimes this question came from people who actually know me—even a few who’ve met my very much alive husband. I found that a little surprising since the story is premised on the main character’s husband being dead by page one.

I can’t imagine writing a memoir—happily, my life isn’t nearly exciting and/or horrific enough. But readers often want to know a writer’s connection to a fictional story. Had someone very close to me died? Do I have people in my life like the characters in the book? Is the main character like me? I can’t answer yes to any of these.

Readers also ask if my characters are based on real people. They’re not. It’s much more fun to invent a character than to be limited to the boundaries of a live person. Also it seems like a great way to get yourself into some interpersonal hot water. You can’t write authentic characters if you show only their good sides, but their true life counterparts would rightly hate you if you revealed their less-attractive traits. I do occasionally borrow little incidents, phrases and mannerisms. For instance my son once wore goggles for no apparent reason, as Dylan does in SHELTER ME. Other than that I generally rely on my wayward imagination.

And yet …

There’s a way in which all the characters are vaguely autobiographical. As a writer, I have to be inside the “head” (as it were) of each of my characters, and those mindsets make sense to me in a fairly personal way. How would I—as character X—feel if … fill in the blank? It’s a lot like method acting.

Also, writers write about what interests them. I cooked up a story about a recent widow because of a long-standing worry that something would happen to my own husband. Then I wrote about a woman going through an adult version of middle school, while helping her daughter negotiate real middle school, because middle school was miserable for me. Also I’m fascinated by how adults have to work out identity issues from time to time even though we think we’re “grown up.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay once famously said, “A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down.” Fiction writers may not be recounting factual events, but we often reveal something of ourselves simply by virtue of the stories we choose to tell and the characters we create to tell them.

I guess my “pure fiction” isn’t quite so pure after all.

JULIETTE FAY’s first novel, SHELTER ME, was named one of the ten best works of fiction in 2009 by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, an affiliate of the Library of Congress. It was also one of six novels chosen for Target’s 2009 Bookmarked Club, a Good Housekeeping featured Book Pick,and was included on the American Booksellers Association’s Indie Next List. She received a bachelor’s degree from Boston College and a master’s degree from Harvard University. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and four children. Her second novel, DEEP DOWN TRUE, will be published in January 2011.

Website: http://juliettefay.com/

Newsletter: http://juliettefay.com/newsletter/

Facebook: http://facebook.com/Juliette.Fay.author

Twitter: @juliettefay http://twitter.com/juliettefay

Barbara Ungar

2010-08-24T09:28:00.003-04:00

I believe that a lot of what happens in life is serendipitous. Chance meetings, people passing through, brief introductions that somehow snag in your brain and cause you to remember. I met Barbara Ungar through a mutual friend years ago. I had young children and was trying to balance my creative life with the lives I was now nurturing. Barbara was this quiet creative force -- a poet -- her words stormed off the page. Over the years I would receive occasional updates via my friend on Barbara's work. I knew she had had a child and written a stunning collection of poems on motherhood which I promptly devoured. I went to a few readings. But then, as these things go, I lost track of Barbara until one day I was posting a piece over at The Nervous Breakdown and saw Barbara's name run across the header. Much to my surprise it was the very same Barbara Ungar that I knew -- and I sent her an e-mail, turns out we live in the same town now and we met for breakfast that bled into lunch. When I heard Barbara had a new book of poetry coming out I asked her to guest post. She wasn't so sure that she had anything to say -- until she sent me this beautiful piece loaded with bittersweet ennui about the end of summer.

Upstream by Barbara Ungar

Ever upstream from myself,

I advance, implore and pursue myself.

—Edmond Vandercammen

A friend of mine, when asked her three favorite things about teaching, says, June, July, and August. By this July, I was already in mourning. Already counting the days, computing fractions and percentages in my head. Does anyone else do this? Perhaps it began when I used to swim a mile a day: I would not only count the laps, but in my boredom, constantly compute: 9 laps = ¼ mile = 25 % . . . My colleagues are occasionally astonished by my cheerful response to a casual greeting, “The semester’s already 2/7ths over!” I don’t just do this with work and chores, anticipating the end, but with enjoyable time—summers, vacations, weekends—time I wish I could slow down. Each summer I am acutely aware of the zenith, the Ides of July, and from then on, feel summer ebbing away, sucked into the storm drain of awaiting work. This is one of the great joys and worst drags of teaching. We are kept perpetually childlike, subject to the Sunday-night, back-to-school and work-week ache, magnified, each August.

Late August also brings my birthday, which used to be a paradox: I longed for my party (once-a-year horseback riding with my girlfriends) and presies—almost as much as I dreaded the end of summer. I was swinging on my stomach in the backyard when I first understood that dread—I didn’t want to go back to school. I was 8, returning to third grade. And now it’s upon me again, intensified by the strange fact that time moves a bazillion times faster now than it did then. I am getting older; each summer represents a smaller fraction of my dwindling whole. The summer I was 8 was almost eternal, or at least as slow as Zeno’s paradox. Now the months whiz past so quickly, I barely see them go. What happened to June, for example? Now the message is simple and unified: each birthday brings the end nearer.

This is the end of everything! wails the imprisoned Toad in Wind in the Willows. Every single thing he has lived through falls behind. No matter whether he hops, punts on a stream, ambles in a gypsy caravan, tears through the countryside in a motorcar, or weeps on straw. HERE he always is, balanced on the fulcrum of NOW. It keeps coming at you. Turn the page. You never know what’s coming next. Relax

and ride the waves, watch them come and watch them go.

So here I am, wasting precious late summer hours and minutes and seconds brooding over time. Heidegger wrote that human existence is being-toward-death. The death of each moment as it flies—the barn swallows swooping and chattering, keen black wings and yellow bellies. Gone.

Be Here Now, as Ram Dass said, so long ago. Or, in the sayings of the Jewish Zen Masters,

Be here now, be someplace else later. Is that so hard?

Apparently, yes.

Barbara Louise Ungar’s latest book, Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life, is forthcoming in January 2011 from The Word Works. It can be advance ordered now at: www.wordworksdc.com

(or http://www.wordworksdc.com/books.html#charlotte). She is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Thrift and The Origin of the Milky Way. The latter won the 2006 Gival Press Poetry Award, a Silver IPPY (Independent Publishers’ Book Award), an Eric J. Hoffer Notable for Poetry Award, and the Adirondack Center for Writing Award for Best Book of Poetry 2007 (co-winner). She is an English professor at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York.

ZOE ZOLBROD author of CURRENCY

2010-08-17T16:14:00.003-04:00

I had the pleasure of meeting Zoe Zolbrod at a reading we did together at Pianos Lounge in New York City this past April along with two other talented ladies I hope to introduce you to here soon.

Zoe has written a captivating book heavily influenced by her time traveling in Thailand. You will be transported to another world -- here's the link to purchase as well as to watch a fantastic book trailer: http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780982520437-0

In her blog post Zoe broaches the interesting subject of competition among writers (both alive and dead) for not only subject matter but shelf space, reader recognition and the reader's emotional response to the material. Who is your competition? Leave a comment below-- I'd love to hear your point of view.

THE COMPETITION by ZOE ZOLBROD

In the middle of a conversation we were having about another topic, my friend remembered something. “Oh!” he said. “I read your book!” He said he enjoyed it. He said it was pretty good. He told me he read it in between The Lazarus Stories and As I Lay Dying, and there was a slight pause, which I took to mean: “That’s why I said pretty good.” He said he pities authors. We’re in competition with centuries of writers. We’re in competition with Moby Dick, I think was the one he mentioned. And then we changed the subject.

The conversation rattled around in my mind, where it bumped into a similar dialogue I’ve been having with myself and with a book review by Eric B. Martin that appeared in The Rumpus this past May. Here's the link http://therumpus.net/2010/05/the-blurb-16-hungrier-more-successful-a-bit-ruthless/> In it, Martin offers a pessimistic view about fiction’s necessity, saying that nonfiction killed the realist novel and that, with all the other kinds of media entertainment out there, it’s not enough to write a good book anymore. He states that novels must move with the times and go “bigger or smaller,” that they must either hew more closely to genre or to be more experimentally engaged with language if they are to remain relevant. The commenters tended to agree, and one guy posed the same notion as my friend: As writers, we’re not only in competition with The Wire and documentary, but also with centuries of other writers.

I’m reluctant to get all gender studies here, but is it a male thing? This idea of competing? Of writing in order to topple the greats, upend the apple cart, rise up the charts? I have honestly never thought in those terms.

Of course, on the one hand, I get it. Writers want readers. Readers have limited time and a dazzling number of options. I’m not immune to checking and sighing over my Amazon rating, to gnashing my teeth that it’s many times lower than that of The Beach, another novel about Thailand published when I started writing mine and offering—so says me!—fewer pleasures. But first and foremost, I’m a reader myself. I’m not drawn to genre titles, and I’d be bereft if I only read experimental fiction. My goal was to write a book I would love reading: A page-turner that also explored tough questions; something carefully composed and constructed that also rang true. I don’t care if these kind of books sell only a few thousand copies even if “successful.” My urge to write stems from wanting to converse with the authors and stories I love, not to try to one-up them.

I worked on my novel, Currency, for over ten years, and it speaks to issues that fascinate me: money, class, gender, foreignness, America and the cost of dreams. Long before I set pen to paper, I sought out other writers on these topic—or maybe it’s fairer to say that these issues fascinated me in part because of books that came my way during impressionable moments: The House of Mirth, in which economics as well as character is destiny; The Quiet American, with its devastating critique of American culpability and naiveté; Passage to India, brilliant on colonialism and with characterization; The Color Purple, the first book I read showing that nonstandard English can create both poetry and plot. I returned to each of these old favorites repeatedly as I crafted Currency. When I discovered as I was writing some magnificent books set abroad and featuring cross-cultural romance—Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup, Kate Wheeler’s When Mountains Walked—I didn’t despair at being scooped by better authors. I didn't look at these finds with the squinty-eyed glance with which I sized up The Beach. I felt thrilled—stay-up-way-too-late, hold-you-breath-as-you-read thrilled—to turn their pages. If better books are the competition, they're the good kind. The kind that inspire rather than incite.

I suspect my friend has not read most or even any of the books on my list, that the themes do not call to him, and that my novel is not one he would have picked up if he hadn’t known the author. But if readers searching for stories set in exotic settings and telling tales of cultural conflict turn to Passage to India instead of Currency, I don’t feel beaten. I understand that choice. But I would hope our common interests might one day lead them to my book, and in the unlikely event that it did, I think Currency could stand up well, a modern take with a twist. I guess my aim has been to sit at a table with the authors who have awed me, if only for the day or two that I am visiting the campus. It could be I lack ambition, and that this lack ensures my remove from greatness. Certainly, I’m a touch defensive, perhaps protesting too much that the literary labor of non-greats is not indulgent. But genuinely, Moby Dick has never been my cup of tea.

Zoe Zolbrod’s novel Currency was published in May, 2010 by Other Voices Press, the first in their Morgan Street International Series. Zoe lives with her family in Evanston, IL, and blogs at www.zoezolbrod.com.

Link to buy the book: http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780982520437-0

Michele Young-Stone author of The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors

2010-08-12T08:39:00.001-04:00

I had the pleasure of reading this book several months back and was thrilled that Michele agreed to guest post! For all aspiring writers out there I think Michele offers some practical advice -- speaking from experience and her heart. Please share your stories with us about your road to publication in the comments section!

Practical Advice from a Debut Novelist by Michele Young-Stone

How to publish your first novel in just five easy steps: (This is like a recipe. You might want to write it down.)

Step 1: After you’ve revised your manuscript until you can’t stand the sight of it, set it aside for six months to a year and then revise it again. (This is the most important step!)

Step 2: Research the best agents for your book. I recommend http://agentquery.com You don’t want to query literary agents who aren’t accepting manuscripts or who don’t represent what you are writing.

Step 3: Write and revise a knock-out query letter one page in length that “sells” both you and your novel to the agent. It should zing and pop and make the agent WANT to read your book.

Step 4: Wait and wait and wait. When the rejections come, and they will… think of it this way: “I am one step closer to being published. Rejection is a part of the process.” For each rejection, compose and send off a new query letter. Don’t give up!

Step 5: If, after a year, you aren’t able to find an agent passionate about your manuscript, it’s time to revise again. (Oh, and while you are doing all this waiting, work on something new. Paint. Join a band. Write another book. Even after your novel finds a home, there’s a lot of waiting. Keep those creative juices flowing!)

That’s it. Looking back, I guess none of these steps are particularly easy, but with faith and perseverance; with a vision and passion, you can publish your book. If an agent reads a manuscript that’s undeniably great, he or she won’t reject it no matter the economic climate or any other factors. Keep writing!

*Michele Young-Stone is the author of the debut novel The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors (Shaye Areheart/Crown, 2010). A fan of the underdog, her characters have been described as “endearing losers,” “complicated, nuanced and sympathetic.” Publisher’s Weekly listed The Handbook… as one of the top ten fiction debuts of the season, and The Boston Globe called it, “an exceptionally rich and sure-handed debut, full of complex characters, brilliantly described. . .”

Michele earned her MFA in fiction writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. Currently at work on a new book, Michele resides in Richmond, VA with her husband, her son, a sweet dog, some hermit crabs and a showy fish. A very long time ago, Michele was struck by lightning and survived.

Visit her at http://micheleyoung-stone.com

SIOBHAN FALLON author of YOU KNOW WHEN THE MEN ARE GONE

2010-08-06T08:56:00.003-04:00

When I put out an open call for writers to share their stories on my blog -- I never realized how exciting it was going to be to introduce you to writers I can't wait to read. Today the amazingly talented Siobhan Fallon author of the forthcoming YOU KNOW WHEN THE MEN ARE GONE (Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam (January 20, 2011) shares her thoughts on the human and not so human babies in her life.

Here's what others have to say about Siobhan's debut:

“Siobhan Fallon is a remarkable debut author whose first collection of short stories, YOU KNOW WHEN THE MEN ARE GONE, signals the debut of a new American talent. I was drawn into a world I had never seen before, and found heartache, courage, and laughter there.”
—Jean Kwok, author of Girl in Translation

"In this poignant and beautiful collection of linked stories, Siobhan Fallon has created a world of characters we need to know. These are our wounded, our courageous, our disheartened, our cynical and our brave. You won't read these stories on the front pages of the newspaper, but still they feel like a news flash about the emotional toll of war. YOU KNOW WHEN THE MEN ARE GONE delivers to us the inner lives of families who fight for our country while fighting their deepest fears and demons. This is a brave and illuminating book.”
—Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion

My Babies by Siobhan Fallon

You often hear writers referring to their books as “babies.” But what if you already have a living, breathing baby with an entire set of hungry, angry, vomit-spewing needs of its own? How do you reconcile the baby-book with the baby-human?

Personally, I like to think of my “babies” as twins (I am apologizing in advance to my friend, January, who actually has flesh and blood twins and is probably not the least bit amused with this long-winded metaphor). I started writing my book, You Know When the Men Are Gone, when I was pregnant with my daughter. Sure, I had the usual bouts of morning sickness and writer’s block, but all in all it was a lovely pregnancy. I felt so fecund and creative, so inspired and dreamy, such flowing plots and storylines, such adorable maternity dresses!

Ah, but then the birth. Then the drama. Then the adorable little babies who had gotten on so well in the womb were at each other’s throats. Baby-human did not want to nurse, have her diaper changed, or sleep. Baby-book did not want to be rewritten, edited, or the least bit revamped. Baby-human wanted ALL of Mommy’s attention, and of course Baby-book wanted ALL of Mommy’s attention too.

You assume that twins will at least distract each other, play together, cuddle on the sofa and share a sippy cup while Mommy is gulping down her first coffee of the day. They are supposed to best friends, right? Mine do not even remotely get along. I would say that they are even deviously at odds, deliberately sabotaging each others’ development. And there is no hope that they will ever get along since my affection and attention to one intrinsically dictates the neglect of the other. Baby-human used to start screaming at the top of her lungs as soon as I turned on my lap-top. Baby-book would send inspiration my way, the perfect sentence or crystal clear imagery, that would evaporate if I didn’t write it down immediately, usually as soon as Baby-human scraped an elbow or pooped herself.

I try to balance their needs, soothe their divergent demands, put one to sleep so I can focus completely on the wild-eyed other. But I can’t help thinking that I would be a much better mother without Baby-book filling my mind while Baby-human is begging me to play My Little Ponies. And I think the inverse, of course, fleeting moments when I imagine the writer I could have been if I had days and nights, hours upon lovely silent hours, to tend to every adorable word and phrase. But ultimately they are my babies, they are my life pared down into two very different beings. There may be a few mild regrets about Baby-human: childhood firsts lost to daycare, one too many hours of Dora the Explorer as I tried to meet a deadline, fun afternoons with Daddy that I had to miss. The same goes for Baby-book: paragraphs too hasty, endings not as perfect as I would have liked, character dialogue that makes me cringe. But I could never possibly regret their simultaneous existence, the push and pull and wondrousness of this motherhood. I’ve done the best I could do and, though there are so many ways I may have let them down, they are each small and lovely miracles to me.

And now?

Baby-human is almost three. I no longer worry about her bumping her head on sharp-cornered tables, falling off slides, swallowing bottle caps. She is articulate and to some degree reasonable, determined to wear pink tutus and cheap glittery shoes, all around delightful.

Baby-book is a few months away from publication. No more edits or rewrites or sudden despair that it is a horrible, unreadable failure. Baby-book is tended by a fantastic and slightly maternal editor and other capable people responsible for Baby-book needs. And my babies no longer despise each other thoroughly but play, a bit warily, side by side. They occupy my waking mind, they always will, but sometimes I look at them and think I didn’t do that bad a job after all.

Though nowadays my mind is a little wrapped up in Baby-book number two, a novel so recalcitrant and willful I can’t imagine ever getting it to sit still on the page. And now, of course, my husband keeps talking about making Baby-human number two…

Bio:

Siobhan Fallon's debut, You Know When the Men Are Gone, is forthcoming from Amy Einhorn Books, Penguin, on January 20, 2011. She lives with her family in Monterey, California. For more, please check out her website at www.siobhanfallon.com

Simply From Scratch debut author Alicia Bessette

2010-07-28T08:07:00.002-04:00

Way back, (or so it seems) when my own book was about to debut, the team at Harper Collins along with my agent, suggested I get a website, perhaps a FaceBook page and build a community on the web. Naturally, having just mastered word, cut and paste and edit options on my computer I balked. Not because I didn't want to -- just because it was way out of my comfort zone. Slowly, I began to comment on blogs I regularly visited and hired myself a fantastic teenager to build a website and yes, waded into FB with the help of a friend who just couldn't bear to hear me moan about it another day and took matters into her own hands and made the page for me.

One of the benefits? Meeting (virtually) this amazing community of writers -- another of which I get to introduce to you here today.

On sale August 5 from Dutton, Simply From Scratch [http://www.aliciabessette.com] is Alicia’s debut novel about a widow, a young girl, and a baking contest that will change both their lives. You can pre-order right here: http://www.amazon.com/Simply-Scratch-Alicia-Bessette/dp/0525951822/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1279978457&sr=8-1

Please join me in welcoming the lovely and talented Alicia Bessette!

A Warm, Sweet Mess

Given the baking theme in Simply From Scratch, people often ask if I like to bake. A German magazine editor recently inquired, “Is baking a calming, meditative activity for you?”

After I got my laughter under control, I explained that I find many activities calming and meditative¾playing piano, petting my dog, yoga sometimes. But baking? Baking kind of stresses me out.

I experimented with baking in my twenties. With many attempts, I forgot to add at least one ingredient. Like the time I made chocolate cake, but skipped the baking soda. Whoops. Or the time I made corn muffins, but skipped … I don’t even know what I skipped. The “corn muffins” were the size, shape, and density of hockey pucks, and tasted like hot sand. (Actually, “tasted” might be too strong a word.)

Thankfully, my baking has improved quite a bit, to the point where I take pride in my desserts. I’m even thinking of serving my famously smooth mini red velvet cupcakes at Simply From Scratch events in August and September. (Click here [http://www.aliciabessette.com/abessette-news.htm] for a complete schedule of my appearances.)

My friend describes Zell, star of Simply From Scratch, as a Jackson Pollack style baker. Lots of dripping! You can glimpse Zell’s baking approach in the trailer [http://www.aliciabessette.com/abessette-simply-trailer.htm].

Zell unexpectedly finds herself a widow at age 34. She and her new friend, a nine-year-old neighbor, attempt to restore a little sweetness in their lives by together entering a twenty-thousand dollar dessert contest.

The result¾besides messy? You’ll have to read Simply From Scratch to find out.

~Alicia Bessette [http://www.aliciabessette.com]

Alicia Bessette was born and raised in central Massachusetts and graduated from La Salle University in Philadelphia. A pianist and freelance writer, she and her husband, novelist Matthew Quick [http://www.matthewquickwriter.com], live near Philadelphia with their adopted racing greyhound, Stella.

The Bird Sisters: Rebecca Rasmussen

2010-07-19T08:20:00.008-04:00

Rebecca Rasmussen is one of the most delightful people I know and soon, you will know her as well when her lovely, lovely novel THE BIRD SISTERS debuts in April of 2011. I had the pleasure of reading an early copy that I devoured in less than a weekend. The writing and the story is an elegant throwback to the masters and mistresses of great fiction and Rebecca has created a fascinating world you won't want to leave. Read more about the book and Rebecca on her blog :http://www.thebirdsisters.com

View The Bird Sisters Book Trailer here..... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGxuPRVtC80
Become a fan of The Bird Sisters on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Bird-Sisters/330935178758?v=wall&viewas=0

Why I Write at Starbucks by Rebecca Rasmussen

I always think I need a desk. My husband and I have lived in more apartments than we can count, from the East Coast to the West Coast to our current apartment in St. Louis, and in each one of these I find a nook—a closet, an attic, an entranceway—to make my own.

My latest nook is not nearly as nice as the others have been. It is an enclosed porch at the back of the apartment. The space is three feet by five feet, the floor is scratched white vinyl, and the walls are red brick, but not in the chic-exposed-brick way, in the man-this-brick-is-ugly way. The ceiling? Dark brown bead board that drips varnish onto my shoulders when St. Louis gets particularly humid. So, say, four months out of the year. There is a nice little spider that lives with me, though. She spins achingly delicate little webs in the corner I’ve given over to her. I call her Fern.

My nook gets unbearably hot in the summer and cold in the winter because it lacks even the slightest layer of pink fiberglass insulation. Either I can see my breath or I can see the sweat ringing its way down my T-shirts. I have a cute bamboo leaning desk from Crate and Barrel that I told my husband I had to buy.

“I’m a writer,” I said. “Writers need desks.”

I have collected a gathering of African Violets and Jades and a plant my daughter grew from a sprouted grapefruit seed she and her father found at breakfast one morning. (We’re all waiting for it to yield grapefruits—each for our own reasons.) I put up gauzy blue curtains to cover the urban sprawl that is our backyard—that sinister field of buzzing transformers that predicts the weather better than any person could or does. When the wires are singing, it’s best not to go outside. Lightning is coming. I put up pictures of birds, from North America, New Guinea, Australia. I mounted my old-fashioned barometer that always says, “Clear skies. Have a nice day.”

I should have been ready to work. And yet, this office, like every other office I have attempted to convert and occupy over the years, goes unused by me, even if the temperature is just right and the transformers are quiet and the light is warm and lovely.

Why?

“I’m writing,” I say to myself at home, which means I should be writing, but instead I’m looking for inspiration in the refrigerator, in the cabinets, in the stubborn wrinkles in my daughter’s dresses. I’ll iron before I write at home. I’ll ponder the vacuum. I’ll think Bach or Yo-Yo Ma will solve this distractedness. Then a cup of tea. Yes, nice green tea. Tea cookies? Do spiders get hungry for something sweeter than gnats or flies? Maybe I should Google that. Maybe I should Google the oil spill in the Gulf and watch the robots trying to patch together the future miles beneath the surface of the sea. Maybe it’s all utterly hopeless and I should just take a nap and hope I dream about ice cream cones and spun sugar. Because in a few hours I have to teach the mildly evil literature class and then pick up my daughter from pre-school and then make dinner and then go back to campus and teach the really evil literature class for four and a half hours. Yes, sleep. It’s all so daunting.

I am a mess at home.

All of my artistic friends can’t believe this truth: that I write my novels at Starbucks.

“Couldn’t you at least pick somewhere a little more artsy?” they say. “The Bird Sisters? At an environmentally irresponsible corporation that panders to the crowd mentality? They don’t even recycle? Don’t tell me you use Splenda, too?”

“I recycle my cups at home,” I say meekly. “I just bought a reusable one.”

“It’s just so blah there,” they say.

What they don’t know is that I write at Starbucks precisely because of its blahdom, because I can sit for hours without anyone bothering me, because the walls are always the same color and the straws are always green, because I hear the same music every day—Sinatra, Sinatra, Sinatra, oh wait, is that Streisand sneaking in there, too?—because even the coffee is anonymous and predictable, and there is something comforting about that.

(I’m here now—writing this.)

The outer me makes way for the inner me here in this short-backed chair. I can sit still here. I can think of all things old here, all the things I really love:

yellowed letters, polished sideboards, hope chests and intricate lacework, promises kept and broken, rolling hills and winding rivers. Sentences that glint like the sun on puddles in the ruts of red dirt roads. I can think of Wisconsin and Minnesota, of girlhood, of forest and farm country, of home.

I am more me here than anywhere else.

What I have to do—teach, cook, mother, worry—falls away and I hear the worries of my characters, their hopes, their dreams, and their startling disappointments.

Although there are no birds here, only here can I hear them trilling.

Rebecca Rasmussen is the author of the debut novel The Bird Sisters, forthcoming from Crown/Random House in April 2011. Her stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, The Mid-American Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in fiction from the Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts. She lives in St. Louis with her husband and daughter and teaches at Fontbonne University.

Introducing Guest Blogger Heather Newton: Under The Mercy Trees

2010-07-12T09:38:00.001-04:00

I had the pleasure of being introduced to Heather Newton when her editor sent me her lovely manuscript

Under The Mercy Trees. I was thrilled to offer a blurb on this lyrical first novel that you can pre-order here: Under The Mercy Trees

When I asked Heather to guest blog she graciously accepted and I am thrilled to be able to introduce her to you here today.

Sense Enough (Not) to Quit by Heather Newton

When I was in the eleventh grade, with no idea how the publishing industry (or the world) worked, I decided I was going to be a writer. Full of confidence as only a kid can be, I submitted a children’s book to Harper & Row publishers. I had forgotten all about this until I sorted through some old files recently and found the envelope in which Harper had returned my manuscript. The rejection slip itself was long gone, but clearly Harper had decided it could live without publishing my story. The envelope, postmarked June 2, 1981, bore the same return address that Harper–now HarperCollins–uses today. I sat down and laughed, because this winter, HarperCollins will publish my novel, Under the Mercy Trees. It got me wondering. What if, when I was seventeen, some winged visitor from the future had told me that yes, Harper would publish my work, but I would have to wait twenty-eight years and amass a respectable pile of rejection slips first. Would I have had the sense to choose another path, or would I have kept writing?

In the years since that envelope arrived, I have been tempted to quit writing only twice. The first was when a short story of mine was one of three finalists in a contest sponsored by a well known women’s magazine. The magazine contacted me and told me that of the three finalists, the winner and one runner up would be published. I had never had a story published and enjoyed a few weeks of hope before the magazine contacted me again and informed me I was not the winner or the runner up. There was something horribly disheartening about getting that close and failing–similar to how it’s more upsetting to miss a plane by two minutes than to miss it by two hours.

The second crisis came when I read a novel that was so good I despaired that I would ever be able to write anywhere near as well. The novel was A Parisian from Kansas. It had that effect on me because it was about a writer writing, and in addition to weaving a fantastic story it revealed the writing process of its author, Philippe Tapon–one of those rare “born writers” who breathe out beautiful prose. It didn’t help that he was only twenty-eight when he wrote it. My work seemed so primitive in comparison I felt there was no point in continuing.

Fortunately, both times, my resolution to quit didn’t last. After about two days, characters started wandering around in my head again and I stopped wallowing and went back to my keyboard. I have learned to celebrate the close failures as steps to something better, and I am so grateful that there will always be other writers more talented than I am whose work I can enjoy.

So, if the angel from the future had warned me, would I have had sense enough to choose a different path? I really don’t think I could have–nobody has ever accused me of having good sense.

Heather Newton’s debut novel Under the Mercy Trees is forthcoming from HarperCollins in January 2011. She is an attorney and mediator in Asheville, NC, where she lives with her husband and daughter. www.heathernewton.net

Something New

2010-07-08T21:31:00.000-04:00

I am a less than prolific blogger -- I start out with the best intentions and then, well, somehow it ends up far below my expectations. And then an idea came to me as I was writing a guest post for someone else's blog (it's just like being on your best behavior in public) I thought -- why don't I do this as well? Open my blog to other writers? So I made a fast list of a dozen or so and shot them off a note asking if they'd be willing -- including the author's of several debuts that I have had the thrill of reading pre-pub and blurbing -- and they agreed -- all of them -- and I couldn't be more thrilled. The posts are beginning to come in and I'm in the process of scheduling them..... the first post should run the beginning of next week. I'm so excited to share these authors with you -- and I'm pretty sure your reading list is going to grow. And that is NEVER a bad thing.

Before the Crash

2010-07-01T21:21:00.000-04:00

There is no doubt about it: I complicate my own life. My old Mac laptop had been chugging along for some time in danger of totally crapping out, when my husband and younger daughter surprised me with a brand new shiny Mac a few months back. There shouldn't be a problem with that -- as a matter of fact I should have hopped right on it and transferred all my files and got on with things. Except I didn't. You see the thing was I was deep into my new manuscript and was sort of leery about jumping ship midway -- I was afraid, even though logically I knew if I had back-up I needn't be -- but still I was afraid to transfer the manuscript. So I didn't. I worked like crazy and complained about my sluggish computer and still the new Mac sat in the box even after I logged on and set up my accounts. When I finished the manuscript a few weeks back I told myself I was going to transfer my files. Goodbye old Mac.
Instead I painted the living room, cleaned out some closets, planned for a tag sale, and read some great books.
Then it happened.
Yesterday I turned on my old Mac. I hear a clunking sound first. Stared at a gray screen for longer than I should have and then when i went to get a cup of coffee and my back was turned it appeared. A flashing file folder with a question mark. My older daughter yelled: what's up with your computer?
I knew before I saw it I was screwed. I knew before I grabbed the manual I was screwed. I knew when I called Apple tech support and the guy groaned that I was screwed.
Don't even ask me why I didn't back everything up on an external drive. Don't even ask me what compelled me to save my new manuscript to a zip drive last weekend (THANK GOD).
So this morning I spent going through my e-mail and downloading attachments and Saturday I go to the Apple store to see if they can save anything.... and if they can't.. well... I should have known better.
I should have known better.

The Divining Wand

2010-06-16T10:14:00.004-04:00

Larramie Fg of the wonderful blog: The Divining Wand asks me a few revealing questions today......

Check it out: http://thediviningwand.com/

Bits of News

2010-06-13T12:56:00.001-04:00

The official draft of the new manuscript "The Blooms of Ella Island" is on its way to my agent -- finally! She is the most patient person ever -- there was something about this manuscript that I just couldn't let go and it took me writing to the end four times through to finally see it as a whole. I'm sure there is more tweaking down the road -- but today -- and only for today-- the copy that says "final" means final. Julie-- it's coming your way!

I signed a contract for the Turkish rights to THE SUMMER WE FELL APART this past week -- exciting to see that when it's published!

A few summer dates: I'm going to be at Now Voyager books in Provincetown, Ma, on Saturday June 19th @ 1pm signing copies of The Summer We Fell Apart (http://nowvoyagerbooks.com/Events.aspx)
As well as The BookStore Plus (http://www.thebookstoreplus.com/) in Lake Placid, New York on August 20th from 4-6 pm

This week ( June 16th) I'll be featured on The Divining Wand blog by the lovely Larramie Fg with a fun Q & A, the following week (June 22nd) a guest blog post and (June 28th) review/giveaway. If you don't know about this site you should bookmark this immediately - But a warning: Larramie is a fairy godmother to an amazing group of writers and your TBR list will grow! http://thediviningwand.com/

And lastly, today, June 13th, I'm featured on the blog of the super-talented Caroline Leavitt. http://carolineleavittville.blogspot.com/ Her novel: Pictures of You will be coming out in November but if you just can't wait I strongly suggest you go read her past novels -- you'll be hooked!
http://www.amazon.com/Girls-Trouble-Novel-Caroline-Leavitt/dp/0312339739/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276447469&sr=8-1

One of the greatest honors I've experienced is being asked to read galleys and give blurbs for some upcoming books. I strongly suggest a pre-order for the following titles -- you won't regret it!

Commuters by Emily Gray Tedrowe http://www.amazon.com/Commuters-Novel-Emily-Gray-Tedrowe/dp/0061859478/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276448672&sr=8-1

Under The Mercy Trees by Heather Newton http://www.amazon.com/Under-Mercy-Trees-Heather-Newton/dp/0062001345/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276448759&sr=1-1-spell

The Bird Sisters by Rebecca Rasmussen http://www.thebirdsisters.com/

P.S. Karen -- who left a comment on my last blog post -- you won a copy of The Summer We Fell Apart -- but I need your address -- so get in touch!

Let Me Give You A Book!!

2010-05-11T09:52:00.000-04:00

I've been getting in a lot of car time again and so I've devoured some of my book piles. Here's a partial list in no particular order... giveaway information at the end of the post!

The Red Thread by Ann Hood -- I've been reading Ann Hood since her debut novel Somewhere off the Coast of Maine. Ten books later she tells the very personal story of adopting a girl from China. While this is fiction the author has her own personal connection. Her daughter Grace died when she was five and through the grieving process Hood and her family decide to adopt. A moving story.

Boys and Girls Like You and Me by Aryn Kyle This writer is a dream! For those of you who haven't read her novel The God of Animals you must and this new book of stories is simply stunning. I've already read this book cover to cover twice. When I say a lot of car time-- I mean a lot of car time!

If I Loved You, I would Tell You This by Robin Black -- Story collections seem to be hot right now -- I LOVE the short story form and couldn't be more thrilled. This collection will earn a permanent home on your book shelf along with Aryn Kyle's.

The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors by Michele Young-Stone This is a debut novel that I heard about from my friend Rebecca Rasmussen whose own debut novel The Bird Sisters is out next year. Young-Stone, herself a lightning strike survivor, tells the tale of two lost souls from adolescence to adult-hood while interweaving a manual for lightning strike survivors. The structure of this story is intriguing as you can't help but keep reading to see how the author pulls it all together. A wonderful debut.

The Blessings of the Animals by Katrina Kittle this book was an ARC I received from my publishers, Harper Collins, and I am so glad they sent it to me! This book will be published in August so I suggest you hit the pre-order button on Amazon and hold your breath for your copy. It's that good.

What have you read lately? Comment here and the first five people who tell me will receive a copy of The Summer We Fell Apart!

Today is the Day

2010-05-10T17:00:00.000-04:00

I need to open up the windows and air out the blog -- sorry for such delayed and erratic posting! I have tried to stay off the Internet while I finish the first draft of the new manuscript and today, I can say, I'm finally there. Yes -- there's tons of work to go back in and do -- especially since I find you don't really know the characters until you type that last sentence. Suddenly it clears everything up as well as create fault lines in the early pages. But that's okay. That's the fun part. Going back in and carving out the details and cutting the junk is the best part. It's where the book comes together -- where the characters leave the page and become three dimensional. It's where the book starts to sing.
And right now, it's a pretty sweet sound.
I'll be back tomorrow with some great recent reads and new appearance dates.

Here and There

2010-04-15T13:12:00.000-04:00

I've been really, really trying to get to the end of the first draft of the new manuscript -- to that end I've been ignoring most of my usual Internet haunts. But I just wanted to share with you a link to a site that I'm really excited about. The wonderful Larramie Fg has asked me to join The Divining Wand. Larramie acts as Fairy Godmother to a group of authors far more accomplished than I, spreading the "book Love" so to speak -- keeping readers updated on new books, new happenings, writing advice etc. While I hardly consider myself to be in a place of expert with only one published manuscript to show for my years of labor, Larramie has graciously extended her wand in my direction and I couldn't be more thrilled-- so please-- take a look at her site -- it's chock full of interesting tidbits. http://thediviningwand.com You'll get hooked!

The BIG READ

2010-04-05T10:14:00.000-04:00

In the past few days I logged a lot of hours in a train and in a car -- what better way than to pass the time with a pile of books?

What follows are the results of my "Big Read"....

Something Red -- Jennifer Gilmore: it's 1979 -- (the year I graduated from high school) -- and Gilmore tells the tale of the Goldstein family in a most authentic and riveting way
Kitchen Chinese-- Ann Mah: delightful culture clash with a twist- quick read
Americans in Space -- Mary E. Mitchell: grieving widow raises 14 year old and toddler while coping or rather, not coping
The Infinities -- John Banville: Amazing prose-- inventive-- breaks new ground on old themes
My Before and After Life-- Risa Miller: sisters deal with their father's move to Israel and sudden conversion
Love or Something Like It -- Deirdre Shaw: a novel of displacement-- the first two chapters are stunning

What's next? The Irresistible Henry House by Lisa Grunwald -- I'm rubbing my palms together in anticipation of this one - I cannot wait to begin!

What's on your pile?

Gone Under

2010-03-25T12:06:00.000-04:00

I am deep into writing book two-- submerged is a good word to describe it. I am anti-social and short-tempered. I am ignoring things (husband, children, dogs, friends) I shouldn't, for sitting in a chair or lying on the couch and staring off into space. But I swear to you-- I am working. A critical piece of the story just came to me and I am 90,000 words in -- so all in all -- the book is a book is a book. I mean. You need to know when to call The End what it is: The End. But it's not at all surprising that this far along in my process I finally figured out the missing piece of the manuscript.
And now that I have my head is filled with ship wrecks and whispers of pirates and screams of men who should be conserving their breath before they drown. I've been thinking a lot about a trip I took to California two summers back. About Venice Beach and Santa Monica and the ocean and the surfers and pier and the smell and the taste of the air and the water and my hair stiff from the salty breezes. Of standing still at the edge of the water and allowing my feet to sink deep -- being aware of my dress as it whipped around my ankles, the edges darkened and deckled with water. Of the narrow alley's lined with cottages, pots of bamboo and red painted chairs circle an iron table. A cigarette is left burning in a seashell ash tray. A bad painting sits unfinished on an easel. A surfboard slick with water leans against the gray weathered shingles. A wet suit like a peeled banana left behind on the ground. A dog lifts his head and sniffs the air behind a bright green gate.
I went to Asbury Park this past weekend and now my head is filled with a different kind of water. A different beach. The whispers of buildings, of laughter, of swimmers, of skaters, of carousel horses.

But none of this means anything in this context. What is underneath. What is buried. What lies on the ocean floor. What has come before and what was left behind. Those are the pieces of my puzzle.

Birth + Book

2010-02-26T09:16:00.000-05:00

If I had to point to a time in my life where everything exploded-- where even the expectations of the event didn't come close to the reality-- this would be it. Publishing a book is a lot like childbirth -- publishing has a gestation period as long as mammals-- so I suppose in order of life changing moments I have childbirth -- twice-- and publishing THE SUMMER WE FELL APART.

Just like nineteen years ago with my first child-- I was scared, falsely optimistic and way over my head. There were encouraging voices along the way-- but you never know-- I mean, really never know- what it's going to be like until the baby (or the book ) is born and out in the world. And then the fun really begins. Moments of elation, fear, dread, gidddiness, self-doubt, and back to elation. My God-- it's a hormonal roller coaster of emotions.

But the good news-- no -- the great news- is that THE SUMMER WE FELL APART has gone back for four printings-- and it's in Target store nationwide as of mid- February and I have met -- through the book - some of the loveliest people a girl would ever want to meet. People who the book has touched, helped, soothed. People want to talk about the book. They want to meet the characters. They laugh and cry in all the right places. I've been on a whirlwind of visiting book groups -- and let me tell you -- to have been embraced by these book groups is a fantastic thing. Other than people being related to me ( and yes, family, I know you are all tired of talking about the book, even tho you love me, I know this) the people who I've met through book groups want to dissect character and plot- can talk for as long as it took me to write -- in some cases-- about a particular scene that moved them. It is the best thing that could ever happen to a writer who spends all of her time at her desk dreaming of that day.

Another group of people I absolutely must applaud are the book bloggers! Along with my bricks and mortar tour-- I participated in a "virtual tour" as well. About twenty book bloggers reviewed TSWFA on their sites and did their part to spread the word in a day where fewer and fewer print outlets are reviewing books. These book bloggers read a tremendous amount of books and are a wonderful resource for any bibliophile. So thank you virtual world-- for your amazing support. A list of the participating blogs is on my website -- so go and check them out -- their archives of reviews are a treasure trove of what to read next.

Also -- please go and visit my favorite site on the web: The Nervous Breakdown-- for some of the most interesting writing and writers that are working today. This group of talented people from across the globe-- has been such a support for me during this entire process-- the writing is so good here you will soon find yourself commenting on pieces-- engaging in dialogues and making friends. So I urge you-- go -- but a warning-- it can be addicting-- in the very best of ways.

BULLSEYE

2010-01-20T09:19:00.000-05:00

I am so thrilled to announce that Target has chosen The Summer We Fell Apart as a Target Breakout Book on sale in Target stores nationwide beginning February 14, 2010!!!

What I'm Reading Now....

2010-01-19T17:47:00.001-05:00

Autobiography of a Face by the late Lucy Grealy. It's horrific and beautiful at the same time and you owe yourself this read. This kind of thing gets said often - but this time it really applies. Lucy can paint pictures with her words in an unsympathetic and compelling voice. This book will make you want to close your eyes and look away at the circumstances of Lucy's life. But you won't.

Also please take a look at two books that my fellow Nervous Breakdown contributers have written:
Banned for Life by D.R. Haney and Totally Killer by Greg Olear. You won't be disappointed - you also probably won't get to sleep if you choose to start either of these books at night.

The Big Day

2010-01-06T10:43:00.000-05:00

The Summer We Fell Apart is officially out in the world! It makes me feel like the first day of kindergarten and Christmas morning combined. A little queasy, prone to tears that don't quite come to fruition and crazy excitement.
Except you know what this really means, don't you? I 've got to get back to work.... another book, another set of characters, and another place are all tugging on me to return so they can get on with their lives - and me to mine.
To everyone who has supported me on this journey - to everyone I'm looking forward to meeting along the way who have been touched by these characters, to everyone who has written to me to let me know how much the book has meant to them... I thank you - for all this and so much more!!!

Check my website for a list of places I'll be reading and signing ... up first: Gibson's Book Store in Concord , New Hampshire on Thursday!

Bad Blogger

2009-12-28T11:37:00.001-05:00

Everything and I do mean everything seems to have gotten in between me and the ability to post on the blog! My promised list of Christmas books to buy will have to be a New Year book list ... not entirely a bad thing, right?

My house has been full of family and friends, my older daughter home from college for Christmas break, the ever present pack of dogs ( thankfully we did NOT add to the canine family this Christmas) and beneath it all a disbelief that 2010 is actually going to be the realization of a dream with the publication of The Summer We Fell Apart. Still surreal, but most grateful to all the family and friends along the way who have been such a huge support system - spreading the word - doing anything and everything within their power to help get the book out into the world. I have also, along the way, met a wonderful community of writers who have reached out to me to offer advice along the pre-publication trail. The number of people who have offered a hand is truly mind-boggling and I only hope to one day be able to reapay such a cosmic good deed.

If you'd like - the wonderful people at TLC book tour has kicked off my "virtual tour" with a piece on the book. Here's the link: http://tlcbooktours.com/2009/12/robin-antalek-author-of-the-summer-we-fell-apart-on-tour-january-2010/

The Summer We Fell Apart Trailer

2009-12-22T09:05:00.000-05:00

Up on my website right now is a beautiful trailer for the book made by my oh so talented friend, Jill. It is sooooo beautiful and I am so amazingly blessed to have such talented and generous friends in my life! Please go and take a look....
http://www.robinantalek.com/Video%20Trailer.html

SantaJesus

2009-12-12T12:29:00.000-05:00

I have a new post up over at The Nervous Breakdown that attempts to explain the origins of my complicated relationship with the man upstairs and the man in the big red suit .... http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/rantalek/2009/12/santajesus/

Tomorrow I'll put up a link of great books to purchase for the holidays....

Sharks

2009-11-16T10:20:00.001-05:00

Please head on over to the sparkly and shiny brand new super improved home of the THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN (www.thenervousbreakdown.com) to check out a slew of great stuff - fiction, non-fiction, humor, poetry, arts and culture and so much more... I also have a new post up called SHARKS you might want to read while you're hanging out on the site. Enjoy!

GIVEAWAY!

2009-11-04T12:45:00.000-05:00

I'm giving away two copies of THE SUMMER WE FELL APART on Goodreads. Follow this link to enter: http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/1909-the-summer-we-fell-apart-a-novel

The contest ends on January 5, 2010..... Good Luck!!

PW Review.....

2009-10-26T13:26:00.002-04:00

THE SUMMER WE FELL APART by Robin Antalek

Publishers Weekly

Fiction Review

October 26, 2009

"A preoccupied playwright father and a cult-actress mother are the stars of the Haas family in Antalek's well-crafted and cunning debut novel ... a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and to the importance of family ties regardless of family history, making this an endearing and easy-to-relate-to dysfunctional family drama."

WOW!

the santa cruz beach club 1947

2009-10-25T15:11:00.000-04:00

stories waiting to be told

2009-10-22T10:27:00.000-04:00

Five Chapters

2009-10-22T10:05:00.001-04:00

Five Chapters has a great story this week by Mark Jude Poirer. For those of you who've never visited Five Chapters it's a fantastic site that serializes stories over a five day span. Perfect for quick reading when you just want to clear your head. Make sure you check out their archives as well!

Ghosts

2009-10-20T12:23:00.004-04:00

I have a new post up over at The Nervous Breakdown..... follow the link!
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/rantalek/2009/10/ghosts/

Totally Awesome

2009-10-05T12:03:00.002-04:00

Check out fellow Harper Collins author Greg Olear's debut novel: Totally Killer. It is totally, totally awesome. http://www.amazon.com/Totally-Killer-Novel-Greg-Olear/dp/0061735299

oh wow there's more....

2009-10-05T11:59:00.000-04:00

Martha Moody, author of Best Friends, The Office of Desire and Sometime Mine had this to say about The Summer We Fell Apart.....

"In The Summer We Fell Apart, the four children of an indifferent mother and an alcoholic, self-absorbed father stumble into adulthood. The most moving aspect of this very moving novel may be its author's relationship to her characters. By portraying each sibling's muddled life with tenderness, respect and clear-sightedness, author Antalek proves herself to be the ultimate good parent."

Can I say once again at the risk of being extremely redundant that the generosity of total strangers just astounds me??

just read and re-reading

2009-09-30T10:57:00.001-04:00

I just finished Jonathan Tropper's latest book: This Is Where I Leave You - and it so deserves the great press its been receiving! It manages to take a sad situation (the death of a parent) and turn it into something far from maudlin and contrived as the family sits the required seven days of shiva - that it will have you laughing out loud one minute and dabbing at your eyes the next. Go get it.
Right now I'm re-reading a favorite ( something I do a lot) Lucky Girls by the outstanding writer Nell Freudenberger - a collection of short stories that feature young American woman abroad (Southeast Asia and India) that are simply breathtaking. Granted, I am a sucker for stories set in these locales or written from this point of view (anything Jhumpa Lahiri!!) - but really, setting is the least of the reasons to get this book. Her writing is that good.

More Wonderful Words....

2009-09-28T13:34:00.000-04:00

Elizabeth Benedict author of Almost, and The Beginners Book of Dreams and the recently published: Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives had this to say about The Summer We Fell Apart:

"The Summer We Fell Apart is a bright big-hearted novel about the complexities and heartaches of the way we live now."

I know I say this a lot - but I am truly honored and wowed by the generosity of my fellow writers!

Bookshelves I Have Loved

2009-09-28T13:27:00.001-04:00

For years my mother kept a copy of War and Peace on the shelf in the laundry room sandwiched between the box of Tide and a bottle of Clorox bleach. The book, covered in faded navy blue linen, was worn, and the title printed in gold gothic lettering, had all but disappeared from handling along the thick cracked spine.

I remember the heft of the book in my hands, the tissue paper texture of the pages of which the once upon a time gilt edges bore the wrinkled watermark stains from a laundry room mishap. I never came upon my mother reading the book, although when I asked her about it she said it was there to remind her of the world outside the laundry room. I assume now that she meant that she was more than the mother of two small children struggling to make a living. That somehow, that book reminded her of not who she was, but of who she could be.

In the early 1970’s, when childhood seemed to be more autonomous than it is now, I spent vast chunks of time alone. I was not neglected in any sense of the word, I was simply allowed the freedom of youth and I used that freedom liberally to explore the books my mother kept shelved in a low Danish modern cabinet in a corner of our living room.

The cabinet had glass doors with a slot for fingers etched into the center panels. Sliding the doors gave me a secret thrill, as if I were entering a forbidden, adult word. Of course in many ways I was, because while I had been reading since I was four, it took longer to comprehend the meaning. I returned again and again to those eclectic shelves, for my mother was an equal opportunity reader. Valley of the Dolls, Great Expectations, and Emma alongside Catcher in the Rye, which was next to Peyton Place, Ethan Frome and The Great Gatsby. The mysteries noir of John D. Macdonald, near the poetry of Rod McKuen, the classics: To Kill A Mockingbird, Moby Dick and The Grapes of Wrath nestled tightly against Anna Karenina and Lady Chatterley’s Lover and an Oxford American Dictionary that she had purchased at a yard sale that bore a personal inscription, a declaration of love from the giver to the receiver, a love that must have soured enough for it to end up in a pile of forgotten books in a box at the end of a driveway.

There were no priceless first editions, or order to her collection, only her passion for a good story. It was not unusual to come upon my mother at the end of an evening curled up on the couch beneath a circle of light with a book, her eyes darting quickly over the words, her finger poised ready to turn the page, totally captivated by the story of the moment. If she noticed me in the room she would glance up and pat the space next to her, even if it was past my bedtime. Before she could change her mind I would grab whatever my fingers landed on from her shelves and settle at the opposite corner of the couch. I’m certain I never finished one of those books through to the end during those late nights.

Years later, in college, I would eventually get around to really reading some of the classic and not so classic novels of my mother’s generation. Invariably, there would be a moment of the familiar, a portal to the past as I stumbled across a passage that instantly transported me back in time to that couch, that circle of light and the very first bookshelf I ever loved.

The Nervous Breakdown

2009-09-17T11:42:00.000-04:00

I have a post up over at a really great site called: The Nervous Breakdown. It's a collection of writers, voices from all over the globe on any topic you could imagine. It's definitely worth a bookmark....check it out!

the galleys

2009-09-09T15:40:00.000-04:00

More Nice Words....

2009-09-08T09:05:00.000-04:00

I've been so fortunate to have Will Allison, author of the amazing: What You Have Left offer a blurb for my book:

"Sibling love and rivalry take center stage in Robin Antalek's The Summer We Fell Apart, the story of the four Haas children, disconnected and adrift in the world, who somehow find their way back to one another in spite of themselves. Full of the best kind of heartache, it's an unforgettable, big-hearted debut that will make you want to pick up the phone and call your own brother or sister."

And this from Jessica Anya Blau, author of the beautiful novel: The Summer of Naked Swim Parties:

"The Summer We Fell Apart is a thoroughly entertaining and often heartbreaking romp through the chaos and comforts of a large and extraordinary family."

I cannot thank them enough! Since the pre-pub process has begun, the generosity of the community of writers at large is truly an amazing and wondrous thing. When an author whose work I admire so, offers praise to me, it leaves me, frankly, without sufficient words to offer in return. I am honored.

September

2009-09-01T14:32:00.000-04:00

September is a month of beginnings, first steps, new school, new papers, new pencils, new shoes. Is is a month that begs to be separated from the frivolity of August, of sun baked skin, of dog walks at dusk, of ice cream at midnight just because it's hot and we can. September is cool mornings that feel like Fall and late afternoons full of sun that remind us ever so gently of August. The curling brown leaves on the tomato vines, the last few fruit warmed deep orange, thin skin splitting at the touch of a fingertip, the pot of basil so full that even a harvesting doesn't dent the graceful, fragrant green sphere, know that it's September. September means the calendar begins again, with curfews, early bedtimes and alarm clocks. With schedules. September is all business. September is your chance for a do-over. Re-invention. September is the mother of all months. A re-birth, maternal in its calendar number nine and its need for a hearty woolen sweater. September is a month of moving great distances, physically and metaphorically. September.

cruising and crying

2009-08-18T12:02:00.000-04:00

Just back from a two week drive from New York to Marco Island, Florida to celebrate my dad's 80th birthday with family. Well, we didn't drive for two weeks - there was about ten days of vacation sandwiched in between - although my daughters' might disagree and add that it felt like two weeks of driving.

I had a ton of books with me - but it seemed the themes always led to tears. I laughed and cried my way through Kathryn Stockett's The Help - which is amazing and if you haven't read it you must, you simply must. Right Now. It's that good. Followed by two memoirs which rocked my world: Name All The Animals by Alison Smith and A Good Enough Daughter by Alix Kates Schulman followed by Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close which has to be the most beautiful novel written about the aftermath of September 11th that I have ever read. Ever. And The Ruins of California by Martha Sherrill which captured the decades of the sixties and seventies and a young girl's coming of age with achingly perfect clarity.

Needless to say there were a lot of tears during my passenger time in the car.

If you haven't read these books, what are you waiting for? Go get them. Seriously. Right Now.

Everyone needs a good cry now and then, right?

the nicest things

2009-07-24T16:10:00.000-04:00

The title of my book has changed a few times. I thought it would feel odd, but it hasn't. The new title, the one the designers at Harper's have come up with a fabulous cover for is: THE SUMMER WE FELL APART.

I can't wait to share the cover... but in the meantime I can share two blurbs that came in from the most wonderful authors: Diana Spechler author of the amazing WHO BY FIRE and Juliette Fay author of the beautiful SHELTER ME.

From Diana Spechler:

"Robin Antalek's debut is as haunting as it is gripping--a story of events, both mundane and dramatic, that tear a family apart; and of the often inexplicable love that binds a family together. THE SUMMER WE FELL APART is a beautiful, memorable novel."

and from Juliette Fay...

"Reminiscent of The Glass Castle, THE SUMMER WE FELL APART tells the story of the four Haas kids, who are at best neglected, at worst utterly demoralized by their self-centered parents. It's told over the course of fifteen years, point of view shifting from sibling to sibling, as they grow into adulthood. Each perspective is so poignantly etched by Antalek that you can't wait to hear what the next kid knows that the rest don't,what each can tell you about the others, and whether they will succeed in their efforts to rise from the cigarette ashes of their upbringing. With every chapter the story grows richer and clearer, as does your appreciation for their humor, their burdens and their devotion to each other."

I am in awe of their amazing words. Thanks!

so sorry...it's summertime

2009-07-24T10:28:00.000-04:00

THIS IS JUST TO SAY

now what?

2009-07-03T08:07:00.000-04:00

The fourteen year old daughter is bored. Just ten official days into summer and she's more bored than she has ever been in her entire life. (her exact words) Summer used to be fun, she wailed to me from her bed while I offered suggestions that were either infuriating or downright ignorable.

I agree, summer used to be fun. But now it's work. All because I won't hand her money every time she wants to go somewhere, and yes, I will make her empty the dishwasher and do her own laundry and keep her room from being too much of a disaster.

I want her to have fun, but this summer has had a rocky entry. We've had days of unending rain and cool temperatures that don't make wearing a bathing suit very much fun. I'm guessing we'll probably hit our summer stride somewhere in the next few weeks and then you know what that means, don't you? School will be right around the corner.

tug

2009-06-22T15:15:00.000-04:00

What would it feel like to devote time, solid blocks of blissful time to one thing? To write and not think about the laundry, the meals, the dogs, the horrific mounds of dog hair that collect in the corners of our old house, the daughters', the husband....

It would probably feel weird.

loose ends

2009-06-19T12:15:00.000-04:00

One daughter graduating high school, the other eighth grade - we've been crazy this month tying up all the loose ends, except we're really not. This unraveling is just a part of life. Thinking we're controlling it is our way of dealing....

I've been working on a new manuscript about a mother and daughter who have to say goodbye for good. Except the mother isn't quite done teaching her daughter everything she'll need to know.

Even with ( I hope) a full lifetime ahead of me to complete this task...I wonder, are we ever done?

I Wrote That?

2009-06-04T15:40:00.000-04:00

Going through the copy edits from Harper's is an eye-opening process. Their job is different from the editor's who bought my book. Basically, the copy editor gets the manuscript on the way to production and checks for grammar, punctuation, continuity, repetitive words, that the character gets on the right subway car route or mentions the correct address - all the niggling details that can trip someone up as they read if they're not absolutely correct. I'm sure, on their end, it's an especially tedious and thankless job.

For me, I get to see all my lazy traits. For example, I seem to LOVE to use the phrase: the fact that AND add an S on the end of the word toward. I'm really getting a good look at all my writerly quirks and tics highlighted in all their repetitive glory page after page after page.

As I go through the pages I cannot help but get excited. This is really going to be a book...and soon.

It's Official

2009-06-01T15:07:00.000-04:00

From Harper Perennial, the title of my book is now officially: YOU SHOULD HAVE SAID HELLO....I love it!

Time To Go

2009-06-01T11:51:00.000-04:00

Saturday morning at the Farmer's Market I stopped to talk with a fellow mom in my older daughter's class. With one week to go to graduation our conversation quickly veered down the path of: Where has the time gone? Soon, our children, these babies that only yesterday (or so it seemed) needed us for everything, would be gone and on their way to starting lives of their own.

This woman shared with me her own story of leaving home, how, a few weeks after her high school graduation, she was traveling to Europe to work before college. Her mother had never expressed anything other than joy that her daughter was embarking on such an amazing adventure. On the day she was to leave, she had hugged her mother goodbye at the door and got into the car for the airport. It wasn't until she turned around to look through the window and wave one last goodbye, that she saw the tears streaming down her mother's face.

Decades later, as this woman recounted the story to me, she teared up remembering that feeling, and I felt myself choke back tears.

Back in September I had made a promise to myself to enjoy the little things. To enjoy our last year, really, as a close knit family of four, because, despite everything that teenagers bring to the mix, we all enjoy spending time together. I kept reminding myself that next year when daughter #1 is at college, and her sister is relegated to the position of "Only Child", life as we know it would be radically changed.

So we are here, almost, a week from graduation and then a few more months at home before she heads off to college. Did I hold steady to my pledge? Yes and no. Life has a way of getting in the way. Schedules need to be coordinated, surprises always abound. But I tried. I think we all have. Certainly I notice the sisters' getting closer, perhaps knowing that these ordinary nights of ice cream and a movie curled up on the couches with the dogs are going to be harder to achieve when one of them is four hours away.

Inside I'm saying: not yet, it's too soon. Don't go. Stay. Put your little hand in mine and keep it safely there. I want to say: stay, but I know I have to let go. I just wish there was a little more time...

Sounds Good To Me

2009-05-11T08:22:00.000-04:00

From Publisher's Marketplace:

Robin Antalek's Things I Wanted To Do Today, about four siblings trying to grow up and out of their dysfunctional family by making peace with their past and with each other.

Thanks, PM, I couldn't have said it better myself!!

Hello My Name Is

2009-05-08T11:10:00.000-04:00

The space between selling a book and publishing a book is strange. I mean, the hard part is done, right? The writing and then getting someone to fall in love with it enough to publish it - well, that's like climbing Everest. Until you start to realize that the publishing house would actually like someone to buy it and read it which means, unless you are famous, you're going to have to have to push away from the comfort zone of your desk and start introducing yourself and your book to the world.

Insert deep breath here.

Okay, I get this. I mean, it is what I wanted. Otherwise I would have stapled the pages together and given it to a few friends and family and called it a day. It feels like kindergarten a little, you know, the first days where you were sure once you left your mother's side that no one would talk to you or sit with you at snack.

It's been suggested to make it easier for myself and my potential readers I should come up with an easy one or two sentence description of my book that would intrigue people enough to want to read it. This is a perfectly fine suggestion, don;t get me wrong. But when I think about one or two sentences to describe myself I'm lost let alone a nearly four hundred page manuscript.

Wouldn't it be easy if we could just all wear nametags that boiled down the essence of our personality?

Lola Loves Lobsters anyone?

Harder Than It Looks

2009-05-07T11:10:00.000-04:00

So it turns out blogging is way harder than it looks. It feels a little like being stuck on the top of the ferris wheel - your feet dangling in the breeze, waiting for the seats to fill so that the ride can begin.

Giving over control of your own destiny (even if it's for a five minute amusement park ride), is hard. I suppose in some ways it's about having a little faith. Now, I don't mean the down on your knees church kind of faith - but just, faith in general. Faith in mankind, the essential goodness that lies in every human, the faith that the teenager operating the ferris wheel pays more attention to you than the girl he's trying to impress and brings you both down safely to earth.

It reminds me of something my dad once said that I haven't forgotten.

In 1969 my family did the unthinkable: they left a closely knit, large, very urban, very Italian family living just outside Manhattan and moved to the edge of the Everglades on the west coast of Florida. It was beautiful, but desolate and might as well have been the last vestiges of civilization from the way people carried on. Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood and Miami, they knew. But this? The town could only be reached by a dangerous two lane road that stretched across the coasts from east to west called Alligator Alley. Today it is a multi lane highway, and that small town? Grown way beyond it's original borders. But back in the late sixties, seventies, eighties and into the nineties the road was strictly no-service access that cut through the swamps.

As a child I traveled this road infrequently - occasionally to pick a relative up at the airport, or to visit relatives vacationing in Miami who refused to make the trip to the west coast. After all, head on collisions on the Alley were more common than not and in the days before cell phones, emergency help relied on the State Troopers who traveled the route reporting accidents. Fatalities were the norm. But you don't think about those things as a kid, seat belt less and oblivious in the cavernous back seat of a sky blue Delta 88.

It wasn't until I moved away and returned home on a visit, having flown into Miami with a boyfriend that I white knuckled that road. He took to driving the Alley like he was on the Daytona Speedway. Several times, he was nose to nose with a car crossing over the double yellow line, returning to his lane just late enough that we felt the whoosh of air from the passing car. We arrived safely at my parents' house, but the entire time I was dreading the return trip. On the morning of our departure I confessed to my father that I didn't think I could get back in the car. I didn't go into great detail, but I think he knew the boyfriend was a little to blame.

Now my father had been a fighter pilot in Korea and was, in my eyes fearless, even though there must have been plenty of times as a twenty year old in the cockpit of a plane flying in enemy territory that he surely considered the fact that he wasn't going to make it out alive. Getting in the car and crossing Alligator Alley seemed a ridiculous thing to be so frightened of - yet, I confided my fears. To his credit he didn't laugh, he didn't negate my very real fear of dying in a car crash, he instead said to me that I had to have faith. Faith that the person who was in control would do the right thing and make the right choice. He made me realize in that instant that I would have to give something of myself up in order to truly be able to experience a life worth living.

Which in reality, I've come to learn, is way, way, harder than it sounds.

The Way In

2009-03-03T18:29:00.000-05:00

I'm finding my way in. Finding my way here. Struggling a little over this first post even though I'm most comfortable when stringing together words. If, dear reader, through some winding internet path, you have found me, I owe you, at least, an explanation of why I'm here.

I am a writer. My first novel, Things I Wanted To Do Today, will be published by HarperPerennial in Winter of 2010. I've been at this writing thing a long time - forever - if you really want to know. And while it holds probably the worst guarantee of providing a living, ever, I can think of nothing else I'd rather do. Believe me, I've tried.

I was one of those awkward little kids who read early ( barely 4, when I randomly picked up a textbook belonging to my then home from college uncle, and wandered back into the dining room of my grandparents' home where the adults lingered over the remains of Sunday dinner, to read them what I'd found) and spent sunny Saturdays in the library picking and choosing until the librarian tapped me on the shoulder at closing time or my arms were already so full from my selections that I knew I would have to stop several times just to shake the blood back into them on my walk home. And I read fast, my Saturday selections barely kept me till Thursday when I would find myself back at the library again, haunting the stacks.

It was in second grade in 1968, at John F. Kennedy Memorial Elementary school that I first became aware of the writers' who crafted the stories I devoured. At a teacher's urging I wrote my first real love letter to the fictional family created by Sydney Taylor, the author of the All-Of-A-Kind-Family series of books. When Mrs Taylor wrote back and told me how much she loved what she did for a living, a door opened that I have simply refused to close.

But why am I here? Have you lost patience with me already? I'm here because I need to be. I want you to know me before my book is out in the world. Because after all this time of living in my head, I need to be out here for just a while. To blow the stink off, as my Nona would say as she gently pushed me out the door to play on a warm afternoon. And even though I'd sneak a book, tucked beneath my arm, and sit on the swing and read, the sun warming my shoulders and the top of my head felt good. I knew what she meant. Everyone needed a change of scenery, a different perspective. It was good to be out. And so, I hope, it will be good to be here.

Robin Antalek

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Harper Collins e-book Sale!

Love in Mid Air by Kim Wright Paperback Release

Michele Young-Stone author of The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors

What Does the D Word Mean?

Something for Everyone Reading Series

Just Because

Meg Pokrass author of DAMN SURE RIGHT

Katrina Kittle author of THE BLESSINGS OF THE ANIMALS

Emily Gray Tedrowe author of COMMUTERS

Greg Olear author of Totally Killer and Fathermucker

Jessica Anya Blau author of DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME

On Consciousness and Freedom

On Consciousness and Freedom

New Books!

James Claffey on Process

An Explanation For My Absence

Justin Kramon author of FINNY

Kim Wright, author of Love in Mid Air

Susan Henderson's Debut Novel UP FROM THE BLUE

Susanna Daniel: Stiltsville

Gina Frangello: Mommy's On A Book Tour

Style, Substance and Soul

JULIETTE FAY

Barbara Ungar

ZOE ZOLBROD author of CURRENCY

Michele Young-Stone author of The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors

SIOBHAN FALLON author of YOU KNOW WHEN THE MEN ARE GONE

Simply From Scratch debut author Alicia Bessette

The Bird Sisters: Rebecca Rasmussen

Introducing Guest Blogger Heather Newton: Under The Mercy Trees

Something New

Before the Crash

The Divining Wand

Bits of News

Let Me Give You A Book!!

Today is the Day

Here and There

The BIG READ

Gone Under

Birth + Book

BULLSEYE

What I'm Reading Now....

The Big Day

Bad Blogger

The Summer We Fell Apart Trailer

SantaJesus

Sharks

GIVEAWAY!

PW Review.....

the santa cruz beach club 1947

more stories....

stories waiting to be told

Five Chapters

Ghosts

Totally Awesome

oh wow there's more....

just read and re-reading

More Wonderful Words....

Bookshelves I Have Loved

The Nervous Breakdown

the galleys

More Nice Words....

September

cruising and crying

the nicest things

so sorry...it's summertime

THIS IS JUST TO SAY

now what?

tug

loose ends

I Wrote That?

It's Official

Time To Go

Sounds Good To Me

Hello My Name Is

Harder Than It Looks

The Way In