Word Strumpet

When a Novel Grips You

I'm reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson, and, like an obsessive lover, I can hardly keep my hands off it.   I steal moments during the day to read it, I read it at night and I wake up thinking about the book.

This kind of getting lost in a book doesn't happen often to me anymore.  As a writer, I'm constantly absorbing what the author I'm reading is doing as I read.  This makes it difficult to simply get lost in a book.  Instead, I'm analyzing: how did she make that scene so snappy?  Why did he put the backstory there? And so on.

One way to get around this is to read books completely unlike that which you are writing.  Bury yourself in a science fiction title if you're writing a mystery, for instance, or read an historical novel if you're writing science fiction.  Thus the tendency to compare and contrast is somewhat reduced. 

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a mystery, and while what I'm writing is completely different, that is not why I chose this book to read.  I can't even remember how I happened upon it, but I found it on Amazon and after reading the rave review there, I bought it on a whim.  For once, the Amazon reviews did not let me down.

The novel is a traditional closed-room (not even sure if that is the correct term) mystery, though in this case it is a closed-island mystery.  It is set in Sweden, and makes me long to go there, activating my Danish genes.  The characters are complicated and flawed and yet full of integrity and righteous indignation about injustices which translate to action. 

There are also reasons the book shouldn't work for me: long stretches of narrative, some of it inside our hero's head; scenes that go on forever with talking heads; that weird switch from third to first inside a character's head that drives me nuts.  But, for whatever reason, I love this book and I'm thrilled that the second in the series is due out in the states in July.

Sadly, Stieg Larsson died a few years ago or a heart attack when he was only in his early fifties. The good news is that he had turned in the manuscripts for three novels before his death.  He was a graphic designer (like a character in the book), a magazine publisher (like the hero of the book) and an expert and campaigner against right-wing extremism and racism.

So that's my report on my reading.  Now excuse me while I get back to it.

Reason Number 5 Gazillion for Writers to Be Happy This Week

Obama is literary.

He writes his own books and they are good--I just started reading The Audacity of Hope this week.  And even though I make most of my living as a ghost-writer, I applaud the man for writing it himself.  Honestly?  I do a great job of getting people's voices on the page, just as an actor inhabits his role, but there still is no substitute for the voice of the writer himself.  Okay, I can think of instances where this is not true, but in Obama's case it is.

Obama actually reads.  An AP story tells of the time he phoned Nobel laureate Toni Morrison to ask for her support, but first he told her how he admired her work and how much it had meant to him.  The story goes on to talk about Morrison's admiration for Obama's writing.  To quote, "Writers welcome Obama as a peer, a thinker, a man of words — his own words."  The article also quotes Pulitzer Prize winning author Jane Smiley and novelist  Ayelet Waldman.

 My buddy Roy just sent me a snippet from Poets and Writers, headlined, "Will a poet read at Obama's inauguration?"   In 1961, Robert Frost read at John F. Kennedy's inauguration; James Dickey read at Carter's in 1977, and Bill Clinton, of course, featured Maya Angelou.  So who, if anyone, will Obama choose?  According to Poets and Writers, poet laureate Kay Ryan has the inside track.

What Do You Know About Ethics?

What do you know about ethical behavior?

If you are like me, the answer is probably not much--except, like art, you know it when you see it.

Given the current madness of the financial markets and its cause, good old fashioned greed, all of a sudden the topic of ethics is looking positively hot and glamorous.

So I've got a hot book idea for you.  Its called The Ethical Executive, and it is by a wonderful man named Bob Hoyk.  The book is grounded in practical science, and has an easy-to-read format (short chapters!  You gotta love 'em!)

Head on over the The Ethical Executive website and check out more about it.    Also watch for a page with more information to be posted at my companion site, bookstrumpet, and a full review will be coming soon over there.

Announcing...Bookstrumpet

You may have noticed my periodic call for people who would like to become contributors to a new book review site.   I am pleased to announce that the new site is live and ready to roll.  Here's the site url:

http://wordstrumpet.typepad.com/bookstrumpet/

This is only the very modest beginning.  Expect more to come, with additional reviews from a roster of fabulous reviewers and essays about books and interviews with authors to come.

So go check it out.  And if you decide you want to be involved, email me!

Reading and Writing Redux

It has come to my attention that May is Get Caught Reading month, which seems timely since I just did a post on Reading and Writing.

Anything we can do to promote the cause of reading is a good thing as far as I'm concerned, though I don't share the common view that there is less and less reading going on these days.  Look at the statistics--millions, if not billions of people are blogging, resulting in uncountable words being released into cyberspace.  Somebody, somewhere, must be reading all these words.  I know, I know, blogs are not the same as books and never will be, but still.

Speaking of things that aren't the same as books, my partner in the Loft, Terry, had a Kindle.  I must get myself a Kindle. (For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, the Kindle is Amazon's new electronic book reader.)  It is the coolest thing I've ever seen, honest.  For someone like me, who feels compelled to never leave home without five books in tow, it would be a lifesaver.  I foresee the day when I won't have to automatically pay a fee for my overweight suitcase. 

Anyway, why not celebrate Get Caught Reading month and go catch yourself reading?  That is exactly what I now intend to go do. 

(And by the way, thanks to Roy Burkhead for this information.)

Literary North Carolina: Carl Sandburg

This is a photo of Carl Sandburg's home, Connemara, in Flat Rock, North Carolina, which is south (I think) of Asheville, not too far, and is apparently now a retirement community.  I can see why--it is quite beautiful and peaceful and charming.

I never knew that much about Carl Sandburg, except for the "fog creeping in on little cat feet" poem, and, of course, he was pretty much a household name when I was growing up.  But he was a social activist all his life, and a musician and a poet and biographer of Lincoln.  He won two Pulitzer Prizes.

He married his wife Paula in the 1920s and she could well have become a typical wife of the era, not doing much except supporting her husband in his endeavors.  However, she became interested in raising goats and she was the one who instigated the family's move from Michigan to North Carolina, because she wanted more room to raise goats.  And I love this--she became a world-renowned expert on goats.  The farm today still raises goats.

The Sandburgs had three daughters, only one of whom married and had children.  The other two lived with their parents all their lives.  One of them had epilepsy back in the day when nobody knew how to deal with it, and the other was mildly retarded from being hit by a car. 

But what a place to live--the house perches at the top of a green hill that flows down to a pond and Sandburg loved to hike the trails around the house.  On his 87th birthday he partook of his favorite kind of exercise besides walking--lifting an Adirondack chair above his head multiple times.  The house is full of books--thousands of volumes--which are all being painstakingly taken care of, down to preserving his bookmarks in them.    Sandburg's other love was music, and that is much in evidence in the house also, with his grand piano and guitars.  Also many stacks of old magazines.  My kind of place!

Connemara is well worth a visit if you are in the area.

Literary Asheville: Thomas Wolfe

This is a photograph of Thomas Wolfe's grave, which is in Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, North Carolina, where I happen to find myself today.  Turns out that North Carolina is a state with an amazing literary heritage, claiming authors as diverse as Wolfe, Carl Sandburg (more on him later), O Henry, and tons of others. 

But Thomas Wolfe grew up in town, and wrote about it in Look Homeward, Angel, and You Can't Go Home Again.  His work was all autobiographical and people familiar with Look Homeward, Angel, will recall the boarding house in the novel.  It was based on the house he grew up in.  (Do I have any photos of it?  No, of course not, because I forgot to take any.  I still can't get used to having my camera with me.)  But you can see the website here.

Its a pretty snazzy spot, complete with visitor's center that has exhibits and a movie and lots of books you can buy.  The only way you can get into the house is to take a guided tour, but at $1 it won't break you.  However, the annoying tour guide might.    Could we have a little bit of humor, people?  And not be quite so certain that the miscreants you have to guide about the house are going to touch the precious Wolfe artifacts?

Anyway, Tom was 6'4" and when he first wrote about Asheville everyone hated him and was royally pissed.  But then, eight years later, he returned and because he was famous everyone fawned over him.  He was quite a handsome man, but he never married because he was in love with an older married woman, Aline Bernstein.  And alas, our Tom died young, at age 38 from brain tuberculosis.  He was actually on a tour of the west and spent time in Portland before falling quite ill in Seattle.  And then--get this--he had to be taken back home via train, a journey which took 4 days, much of which he spent unconscious or delirious.  He died a short time later in Baltimore.

I am really fascinated with Tom's mother, Julia, who ran the boarding house he grew up in.  Because Asheville was a resort town, the boarding house was really more like the B and B's of today.

Julia was quite the business woman, and because she grew up poor, once she got a taste of making money, she just wanted to earn more.  She sort of turned her back on poor Tom, the last of her brood, because she was busy waiting on her clients and plotting ways to make more money.  She added on rooms to the house willy-nilly in order to have more to rent out and worked the boarding house until her death in 1945, eight years after Tom.

Today the house is surrounded by downtown Asheville, with a Renaissance hotel looming in front of it and some sort of huge building under construction to the north.  It reminds me of a short story I once wrote in which an artist starts adding on rooms to her house because she believes the carpenter she hires is magical and makes good things happen in her life.  Many years in the future, the house is a tourist attraction along the lines of the Winchester Mystery House and the entire city has grown up around it.

The other place we visited was Carl Sandburg's house, but I'm too tired to write about it tonight.  Oh, and the cemetery where Wolfe is buried is very close to the grounds of the Highland Hospital, where Zelda Fitzgerald lived while F. Scott was out in California, writing screen plays.  She died there in the fire that destroyed the hospital.  The way they identified her body was by the single slipper of hers that remained under the bed. 

And on that cheery note I will end this post. 

In The It's-The-End-of-The-World-As-We-Know-It Department

Yes, I know its Sunday and I promised the results of my survey, which I'm not even going to bother to link to because I've hyped it mercilessly already and you've already had your chance to enter. 

But first, I just had to write about this god-awful book I found.  I'm sorry, there is just no other way to describe it.  The book is called, My Beautiful Mommy and it is a picture book that explains to little kids about their mothers having plastic surgery.

Gag me.

The book is by Dr. Michael Salzhauer, who is, of course, a plastic surgeon.  He says he was moved to write the book after many of his patients had "mommy makeovers" (could the term be any more patronizing?) and didn't know what to tell their children.

"It sounds like a joke, but there really is a need to address this issue," Salzhauer told Reuters.

Doesn't sound like a joke to me, it sounds like a nightmare.  Here's the link: Mom's Having Tummy Tuck?  What to Tell the Kids.

Read it and weep.  Or decide to go live in a cave somewhere.  I might come join you.

How to Write a Book

Yesterday I finished the final corrections on my most recent ghost-written book, which, I have to say, turned out to be a wonderful project, working with great people who communicated clearly and paid quickly.  Best of all, they have more books they want me to write!

While writing a bio for the Loft today I started counting up how many books I've written and realized it is close to a dozen.  Three of them I can name: Beautiful America's Oregon Coast, Beautiful America's Wyoming, and a forthcoming book on writing successful fundraising letters from Atlantic Publishing.  The rest of them are ghostwritten projects on subjects such as global warming, Voodoo, your digestive system,  public speaking, marketing ebooks , dementia, and more that I can't think of at this moment.

I wrote several of the books in very short periods of time, and I'm not kidding when I say that.  Three of them were 50 pages, single spaced (the web standard, unlike the traditional double spacing on manuscripts), and I wrote each of them in five days.  Yes, five days.  Let me also add that I started cold--with no knowledge of the topic beforehand.

So I've learned a little bit about writing a book along the way. 

These days, everyone needs a book.  If you want to speak to promote your business, you'll find that everyone will ask you if you have a book.  If not, they won't be interested.  A book is a sign of credibility.
So, if you have a non-fiction book you want to write (fiction is a whole different story), here are some tips:

1.  Gather your information.  If it is your information, say, from your business, go find all those scraps of paper and throw them in a box.  If you are working on an assignment, go look around the web or wherever you're getting your info and get your sources lined up. 

2.  Organize it.  I know, duh.  But you'd be surprised how many people launch in before completing this vital step.  I'm a big fan of keeping organization as simple as possible.  If you simply made piles of papers that were all on the same topic and paper-clipped it together, I'd consider you organized.  Don't get bogged down in this step. 

3.  Write an outline.  Come out from under your desk where you are cringing in horror at the thought.  Its not that bad.  Again, it can be a very loose outline.  It actually should be a very loose outline, because it will probably change along the way.  Take a legal pad and write the numbers one through ten (as a rough starting point), leaving room in between, and then beneath each number, the letters A through E.  Now take your piles of paper and assign each one a number, in order if you like but it doesn't have to be.    Now you have 10 topics.  Go through your stacks of paper and organize the info into five sub-topics, which you write in the A through E slots.  Now you have your chapters fleshed out.

4.  Assign research.  Go through your research and make notes as to where it fits on your outline.

5. Write a rough draft.  And when I say rough, I mean rough.  Write fast, and don't worry about writing pretty.  Get the information down on paper.  When you get to the end, stop and then go fix yourself a martini.  Because guess what?  You have a book.  All  that is left to do is....

6. Rewrite it!

Woo-hoo!  You're done.  Wasn't that easy? 

A couple notes:

Please, please, please make careful notes for your research and be sure to cite your resources.  Plagiarism is not cool.  You also need to rephrase and rewrite things.  Don't take anything verbatim unless you have permission.  I know you know all this, but it doesn't hurt to be reminded of it.

If you are having issues getting your book written, even with this stellar run-down, I can help you.  I'm in the process of setting up my coaching website, and one of my packages is going to be a Book Writing Boot Camp.   Email me at the address listed on this blog, or leave a comment.

By the way, stay tuned, because tomorrow I announce the results of my survey and the lucky winner of a free coaching session.

America's Favorite Books

I ran across an interesting story the other day.   The Harris folks did a poll on American's favorite books. 

Number one, across all genders and demographics, was the Bible, big surprise.   I really have to read that book one day.  Since I was one of 10 people in my age group who were actually raised Unitarian (interestingly I met another club member yesterday) I've never read it.  We Unitarians learned about starving children in Africa instead of psalms. 

The choice for the number two book on the list diverged dramatically for men and women. Men chose, not terribly surprisingly, Tolkein's Lord of the Rings.  But it did my heart so much good that women chose Gone with The Wind.  We still read that book!  Reading that book was a rite of passage back in the dark ages when I was in elementary school.  I actually have a scene in my novel where a young girl is reading Gone With the Wind and I hesitated before I wrote it because I wasn't certain young girls still read it.  So, hooray for it still being read.  I actually watched part of the movie on TV a couple months ago--do you know that it is three hours long? 

However, in people aged 18 to 31, the second choice for favorite book was the Harry Potter series.  And for 31 to 42 year-olds it was either The Stand by Stephen King, or Angels and Demons by Dan Brown.  I'm actually a huge fan of The Stand.  I read it avidly years ago, and then sat through the mini-series, too.  But Angels and Demons?  I have to admit I've not read it, but, um, I read the DaVinci Code, and, well, I had to restrain myself from throwing it across the room.  I prefer my characters a bit more realistic, I'll just say, and leave it at that.

Another interesting point was that favorites varied by region.  Southerners and Midwesterners chose Gone With the Wind, while easterners chose Lord of the Rings and westerners chose The Stand (yay for westerners). 

The rest of the top ten including To Kill a Mockingbird, and Atlas Shrugged, and Catcher in the Rye.  It might be fun to re-read, or read in a couple cases, the top ten list.  But then I always start projects like that and abandon them when a glittery new book catches my eye.

Here's a link to the USA Today story:  Bible is America's Favorite Book:  Poll.

By the way, since you've read this far, let me remind you of one more thing--I'm running a survey with a prize drawing a the end.  Check it out here.

Friday Addendum

A few items as we wind up the week:

First of all, be certain to check out the great guest post by Roy Burkhead today, which is part of a new series which I hope will be a regular Friday feature.

Next, it has come to my attention that I'm having link issues, and no I don't mean golf, I mean internet links.  I guess there are worse fates than having links issues, but they are a bit of a pain.  I'm pretty sure it happens when I use the Mozilla Firefox browser, which for some reason does not seem to get along very well with Typepad.  So as long as I remember to open Explorer, this problem should be dealt with.  I hope.

Finally, I found another good article about the whole memoir/hoax brouhaha this week, and you can read it here.  The article is called "Stranger than Truthiness" (truthiness being a word James Frey coined to describe the not-quite-factual events he related in his memoir).   The article is actually a post, and it appears on the New York Times blog about books called Paper Cuts, which seems worth checking back to read often  (It cracks me up that all the newspapers are embracing blogging.  Our local newspaper is full of headlines and teasers about stories that will only appear in the blogs.  However, I applaud their efforts--newspapers must do something to keep up with the internet.)

Rachel Donadio wrote the blog about this week's memoir hoaxes, and these lines caught my eye as being especially apropos:

"As any publisher will tell you, memoir sells better than fiction. But why? Here, I think, we run up against the question of sincerity and authenticity. Memoirs are seen as more authentic than novels. And we earnest Americans, raised to value hard work and plain talk, will always choose faux authenticity over real artifice. (Mark Twain understood that better than anyone before or since.)"

We are a nation that loves reality shows, too.  But why is it that we don't understand that even reality shows are scripted?  And memoirs are shaped into books that conform to the rules of story-telling, which may not coincide with the truth.  Every novelist I know will tell you that that the number one rule of writing fiction is that it be truthful, even though it is not relating real events.  What novels do is create "real artifice" (which is my new favorite phrase) in the service of telling a great story.  And, I, for one, still prefer to read a novel over a memoir.  I've been burned by too many memoirs that promise a great story and end up being a  chronological recitation of someone's boring childhood. 

Guest Post Today!

Today marks the start of what I hope will be a regular feature--the guest post. I'm thrilled that my first guest poster is none other than Roy Burkhead himself. I have Roy to thank for my career in teaching, since he hired me originally to teach at the Loft. He's a damn fine writer himself, as well as a dad and a corporate technical writer and a Hemingway fanatic, too. Read his post and then scroll down to the end to read his bio. You might also want to visit his website while you're at it, too.

And now, I'm tossing it over to Roy, who talks about the movie and the book version of My Dog Skip.

My son brought me to “My Dog Skip.”

After four years of animation, talking animals, superheroes, puppets, and Lord knows what all else that I had…enjoyed since Seth’s arrival, I approached all child movies with caution. As is the case with some medications, kid movies (for me) could only be taken on a full stomach. But his mother started a nursing job at nights on the weekends, leaving we men to entertain one another.

So, along with mac-n-cheese, corn on the cob, and fried chicken, watching “My Dog Skip” became a Friday night ritual lasting almost a year. Seth loved watching the movie, and I loved watching him watch the movie.
I had been aware of the writer Willie Morris, and while Harry Connick, Jr. narrated the movie fifty-two times that year, I became increasingly curious about how much of the book made it into the flick.

I finished the book during lunch today, and comparing the memoir to the movie is an interesting case study in the art of adapting books into movies. The entire plot of the movie is made up: invented. It is a vehicle used to deliver Willie and Skip to the audience. As I read the book over the past couple of weeks, I saw how the screen writer plucked this section and that bit out of the book and bent and reshaped the material to fit the little tales into the newly-created plotline.

For many readers and writers (or at least the ones I know), watching their favorite books materialize on the screen is an unofficial hobby. I have vivid memories of seeing “The Hunt for Red October,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “Possession,” “Wonderboys,” and so many others—all the while remembering the scenes and comparing them on the spot to what was flickering in front of me. And I am sure we all have a private list of books we secretly hope will make it to Hollywood. Myself, I would love to see someone translate Donna Tartt’s The Secret History to the big screen.

But, of course, there’s always the chance that the movie will smell so much that it damages memories of reading the book. I mean, how many stinkers have been made from A Christmas Carol? Anyone with a spare noun and an apostrophe feels entitled to hack away at Scrooge.

A friend from Mississippi now lives in northern England, and he was delighted in seeing our copy of “My Dog Skip,” and I was delighted in sharing it with him. My wife no longer works nights, and my son is a bit older, but he has a baby sister now. I suspect that there will be a time not too far from now when Seth and I will spend a Friday night with her and skip, along with some mac-n-cheese, corn on the cob, and fried chicken.

A Kentucky native and longtime Nashvillian, Roy Burkhead has published his journalism, poetry, and prose both online and in traditional print media, but he is perhaps best known as a passionate promoter of the arts throughout middle Tennessee. After earning a MFA in Writing from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, Roy founded The Writer's Loft, a creative writing program at Middle Tennessee State University, as well as created, edited, and published the program's literary journal, The Trunk. Currently, Roy is working on his novel (his MFA creative thesis) and may be found online here.

Fabricated Memoir Redux

It has happened again, this time in my own backyard. 

You'd think after the brouhaha that surrounded the James Frey case a couple years ago that both authors and publishers would be extra careful about what they put into a book called a memoir.  I mean, c'mon people, when you call it a memoir we expect it to be true.  That's true, as in, it really happened.

But apparently such is not the case, because yesterday the news broke that yet another sensational "memoir" had been proven to be fabricated. 

The book is was called Love and Consequences, and the author's name is Margaret B. Jones, who in reality is Margaret Seltzer (I'm a little vague on the details of that name shift).  Jones was supposedly a half-white, half-Native American girl who grew up in a not-so-great part of LA and ran with the gangs.

But in reality, Jones grew up in Sherman Oaks, attended a private school, and later attended the University of Oregon (where I got my undergrad degree).  She claimed to have actually graduated from U of O, but that was made up too.  She now lives in Eugene, which is a couple hours south of Portland, the city which is home to U of O.  And let's just put it this way--Eugene sits at the foot of the Willamette Valley which is far more famous for growing grass seed than either ethnic diversity or anything having to do with gangs.   Next door to Eugene lies Springfield, which is the inspiration for the  Springfield in The Simpsons (despite that interloper which one the  movie contest last summer), and one of Eugene's biggest claims to fame is that Matt Groening spent a few years there attending the U of O.  (But I can top that--I actually went to the same church as he did, the First Unitarian Church in downtown Portland, which is why he is always making jokes about Unitarians.)

Anyway, the brief aside about Eugene is over and back to the story of Margaret B. Jones.  Here's the sad part: she actually did work in gang prevention in LA and she  apparently really did know an awful lot of folks who  ran in gangs.  And if she had just told that story--the story of how she got into that, what the work entailed, some of the tales from people she had met--she could have had  a book which was just as successful.

The upshot of all this is that the publisher has yanked the book and offered anyone who bought it their money back.  Guess this means that ole Margaret won't be making her scheduled reading at Powell's tonight, huh?

Here's the take-away quote from the story.  "The business of publishing is so difficult, so challenging, and so elusive at times that people will do anything," said Lee Gutkind, author of Keep it Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Non-fiction.

Hear, hear.  My wise friend Sue recently told me that she had come to realize that writing in and of itself is a useful activity.  Yes, she still desperately wanted to be published, but she also was coming to see how very valuable the act of sitting down and putting words on the page is--it contributes to our own mental health and that of the world.  So perhaps all of us should remember that and proceed from that notion.  Process, not product. 

In other words, don't be so desperate to get published that you'll lie.  Or if you feel compelled to lie, that call it a novel, for God's sake.

Here's a link to the Reuters story:  Gangland Memoir is Fabricated: Publisher.   

And here is a story in the New York Times: Tracking the Fallout of (Another) Literary Fraud.

Book Review: Girl Talk by Julianna Baggott

Julianna Baggott is my new idol, at least in the way she approaches the writing life.

I discovered her at AWP, where she led a panel about women's fiction, the title of which was, I think, something along the lines of "Beyond Chick Lit.: The Branding of Women's Fiction."  The panel was really good, with the panelists discussing how writing about women becomes political. 

How? In the way that women's fiction is constantly branded.  For instance, I just wrote "women's fiction."  But when I discuss the latest work of Cormac McCarthy I don't do it in reference to "men's fiction."  Have you ever even heard the term?  Along the same lines, chick lit is always disparaged, just the same way that Oprah books are often dissed.

One of the other panelists, who I believe was a novelist named Anne Ishi, talked about how female authors don't get the same attention that male authors do, and she had an interesting theory about it that goes like this:  although the vast majority of readers of fiction are female, the biggest demographic for film is male, particularly young males.  Getting a book made into a book gives a film cachet and buzz, but because of the movie demographic, most of the books getting made into films are by males or male oriented.  (Or they are branded as romantic comedies or date movies and again disparaged.)

Emily Franklin, who writes young adult novels, discussed how the need to categorize women's fiction debases the readership and makes it narrower, and Quinn Dalton talked about how male characters are allowed to be unlikeable--but female characters must always be likable.

So it was a great panel, and I enjoyed it.  I really loved that Julianna Baggott is so prolific that she writes adult novels, children's literature,  and poetry, teaches in the Florida State University creative writing program and  also edits the Southeast Review. Oh, and she has four small children.   Oh, and she is such a prolific novelist  and she got tired of being branded a chick lit author so she decided to  brand herself and is now going to write chick lit under the name Bridget Asher  and continue to write "serious" fiction under her own name.  As my sister would say,  Gee-Zus.

So with all of this recommending her, I picked up Baggott's book Girl Talk and read it on the plane to and from LA.  I'm a little disaappointed to admit that I am not wildly enthusiastic about the novel.  I liked it, but I didn't love it.   Girl Talk is sort of two stories in one--it has a contemporary frame story with the heroine Lissy as a pregnant adult.  She looks back on her life, to one particular summer, and that story forms a coming-of-age tale that is by far the most compelling of the two. 

The problem I had with the novel is that the adult story really never amounted to much.  I didn't feel that the adult Lissy grew or changed or came to terms with her situation, and I ended up thinking that this adult story was an excuse to pad out the other one.  At the end of the novel, I was left with the feeling, wait, I read the whole book just for that? 

So I had a mixed reaction to the novel.  But its author is still my new idol, at least until someone else comes along to usurp her spot.

Book Review: The Madonnas of Leningrad

Last week I finished reading The Madonnas of Leningrad, by Debra Dean.   I'd always been interested in reading this book because Dean is a Seattle author and I happened to be in Seattle when her book was released.  I remember sitting in the window of my room on the eighth floor of the Red Lion Hotel, and reading a review of the book.

Of such emotional memories and connections are desires to read books born.

I picked the book up a couple times in the bookstore but never actually bought it.  But then my friend Julie read it and raved about how much she loved it and so when she was finished I borrowed it from her. 

I read it relatively quickly, for me, as I am generally reading several books at once.  (For instance, I'm currently reading The 3 Pillars of Zen by Philip Kapleau, The Yoga of Discipline by Swami Chidvilasananda, and re-reading The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley.  Do we detect a theme here?)  And while there was much that I did like about the book, I was a bit disappointed in it, also.

Perhaps my disappointment speaks more to the power of expectation than anything else.  Because I expected to love the book I had developed a bit of a pre-conceived notion about it that wasn't borne out.  So hence my disappointment. 

The book has a sure-fire, high-concept premise.  It tells the story of the Siege of Leningrad, during World War II, through the eyes of Marina, an employee of the Hermitage Museum.   The amazing backstory to the novel is that, as the Germans closed in on the city of Leningrad employees of the museum packed away all the precious pieces of art in this huge museum and put it on trains or trucks to be taken to safety.  The story goes that they removed paintings from their frames, leaving the frames on the wall to signify that some day the paintings would be returned.

Not only that, but thousands of the city's residents took refuge in the basement of the museum, where many of them perished from hunger or the brutal cold. 

The structure of the book is clever and well done, with Marina, now an old woman living in Seattle and struggling with Alzheimer's.   She can't remember what to do with the fork she is holding in her hand, but she can, and does, remember the winter she spent in the Hermitage museum, working on packing the artwork and trying to survive.  One of the "Madonnas" who has worked at the museum for many years, teaches Marina how to create a "memory palace" in her mind.  Going room by room in the Hermitage, she describes to Marina each of the artworks that used to be there, telling her that somebody must retain the memory of them in order to keep them alive.

The themes of memory and imagination and love and survival resonate throughout the whole book.  Oh, and it is beautifully written.  As someone who has written a lot about art, I appreciated Debra Dean's gorgeous descriptions of the artworks. 

I did like the book, I wasn't just rip-roaringly in love with it.  There was a sense of distance that surprised me, perhaps because of the distance between the current-day Marina and the events she remembers.  And Marina's contemporary daughter, Helen, had far less of a character arc than I would have expected.   But, overall, it is worth the read.  As a fellow writer, I admired the craftsmanship of the story--the afore-mentioned description and also the way she structured the plot and kept it clear and cohesive.   There was a dream-like feel to the Russian segments of the novel, perhaps because they were Marina's memories.  But what was missing for me was simply a strong emotional attachment to the characters.  During that long, bitter winter, many people died, including many that Marina was close to.  But so many of them died that after awhile it was business as usual and there was little emotional impact from any of it.

Still, the book is a good novel.  If you are interested in getting an idea about how extensive and vast the Hermitage truly is, watch Russian Ark.  This film was shot all in one continuous take inside the museum, featuring a cast of thousands.  It theoretically recreates the last great Winter Ball that was held in the museum and it is full of amazing images.  Watching it, I had no idea what was going on, because nothing is explained, but damn, it is a stellar film.

Elizabeth Gilbert's Thoughts on Writing

So, I'm currently finishing up reading Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert, which has been on the best-seller list for quite some time.  I generally don't read bestsellers.  It is the anti-authoritarian streak in me, or perhaps more to the point, the I-don't-want-to-do-what-everyone-else is doing streak.  My family knows the best way to get me to do something is to ask me not to do it.  And if someone tells me, "You'll love this movie," or "You should read this book," forget it.  Won't do it.

In the case of Eat, Pray, Love someone did tell me to read it, but it happened to be someone whose opinion I trust.  Thank you, Candace, for insisting.  And be aware that you are the only person in the last dozen years whose advice on reading I have taken.

I'm glad I did.  Eat,Pray, Love is a wonderful book, charmingly written, and it came to me just as I've been renewing my spiritual quest.  It is a memoir about the year Gilbert spent traveling, specifically, four months in Italy, four in India and four in Bali.

Today the thought occurred to me that I might check out Gilbert's website.  It is fun to spin around and waste a few minutes on, but I really loved were her thoughts on writing.   She writes as charmingly about writing as she does about travel and spirituality:

"I believe that --if you are serious about a life of writing, or indeed about any creative form of expression--that you should take on this work like a holy calling.  I became a writer the way other people become a monks or nuns.  I made a vow to writing, very young."

I love that.  It makes me feel better about the long days I spend at my computer.  I love this, too:

"As for discipline, it's important, but sort of over-rated. The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness.  Because your writing will always disappoint you.  Your laziness will always disappoint you."

It is a good essay, well worth reading.

Oprah Chooses Ken Follett

It feels obligatory to write a post when Oprah chooses a new book for her book club.  As if she doesn't get enough publicity already.  But Oprah's choices are often odd and interesting.   And all of us novelists and would-be novelists know its a long shot....but we still fantasize about Oprah choosing our book.  Other, normal, people fantasize about Brad Pitt or George Clooney.  Novelists fantasize about Oprah.  What a world.

At any rate, her highness has chosen and the author is... Ken Follett.  Though the author is best known for his thrillers, this month's Oprah book is Pillars of the Earth, which is apparently about a village in Wales in the 12th century and is reputedly Follett's favorite of his own books.   You can read the USA Today article about it here.

Last week I went to an event called Women and Words or maybe it was Women and Writing.  It was the opening event of Wordstock, a book festival here in Portland, and it featured two authors who had appeared on Oprah.  One of them, Janet Fitch, was a bona-fide Oprah author, since her book, White Oleander, was an Oprah pick.

The other was Carole Radziwill, who wrote What Remains, a memoir of her life with Tony Radziwill, niece of Jackie O and cousin to John F. Kennedy Jr.  The memoir centers on the death of Tony and JFK Jr. and his wife within the space of a few weeks.   

What interested me was the two women's wildly different reactions to her highness, the O person.  Janet Fitch, California dowdy beside New York hip Radziwill and the South Africa adorable Alexandra Fuller (author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight) praised Oprah to the heavens.  I'd have to kill her if she didn't, because Oprah made her career.

But Radziwill was New York cool about it all and said that Oprah only wanted to talk about the Kennedys, when really, her book was about a lot more than that.  And really, it was all just so declasse.  Okay, okay, she didn't say that, but she implied it.  And she later redeemed herself with a story about the most annoying person in the world, Jerry Seinfeld, appearing on David Letterman and how rude he was about the fact that his wife is being accused of plagiarism.  (I know, I am one of only two people on the planet who dislikes Jerry Seinfeld, and since I've never met the other person could he or she please contact me?)

I rarely watch Oprah because I rarely watch TV and I tend to forget that it exists and hence never turn it on, but I do like Oprah and I do read O, her magazine.  And I am of the Cormac McCarthy school when it comes to Oprah books--c'mon, get off your high horse and accept that she's done more for reading than anybody else in the last twenty years. 

McCarthy earned my undying affection (just don't make me read his books) when Oprah chose his novel The Road and he agreed to go on her show--breaking a years-long policy of not talking to the media specifically because he appreciated what she has done for the industry.

So take that, New York hipsters.

And, by the way, I am making a solemn vow at this very moment, here and now: when my novel is published I am not going to diss the publishing industry.  I am not going to be so cool and above it all that I can talk about how awful the industry is and so forth and so on.  C'mon folks, there's about 50,000 of us who would gladly stand in your shoes, without all the whining.

Doris Lessing: List of Books

Just found this link with an extensive (she's prolific) list of Doris Lessing's books.  You can access it here.

A God Is Nominated

This is a good week for us literary freaks, what with Doris Lessing winning the Nobel Prize for Literature today, which you can read about in my previous post here, and the National Book Award Nominations being announced yesterday.

So, let's just cut straight to the chase here--Denis Johnson was nominated for Tree of Smoke.  Have I mentioned that the man is a god yet?  Well, he is.  Tree of Smoke is the definitive Vietnam novel that you didn't know you were waiting for.  I've got the heavy tome waiting for me to read by the side of my bed.  I've read the first few pages of it, and the way the man writes is pretty amazing.

You can read a little more about him here, and the NYT review of his book here.

Plus, I think he lives in Idaho and that automatically qualifies him for coolness.  No, the state is not only home to white supremacists.

And now, for my National Book Award brush with greatness moment.  When I was working on my MFA, I got Brad Watson as my mentor.  He is the author of The Heaven of Mercury and the story collection Last Days of the Dog Men.  It is customary at brief residency MFA programs to have a meeting with your mentor to discuss what you will be working on for the semester.

Well, moments, and I do mean moments, before I had my meeting with Brad, he got a phone call telling him that he had been nominated for the National Book Award. 

Now is that a brush with fame moment or what? 

Not sure what Brad is doing now, but I'm hoping he comes out with another novel soon.

Doris Lessing Wins the Nobel Prize

Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature today.

You can read the Reuters story about it here and the New York Times piece here.

The Times piece has a great photo of her sitting on her front steps in London, surrounded by reporters. She was apparently out shopping when it was announced, and learned of the prize from the reporters when she returned home.

The Swedish Academy described her as: "the epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."

Lessing is 88 years old and I've always thought she rocked.  The Times article mentions how she never finished high school and educated herself through reading.  I bought a copy of The Golden Notebook, her seminal work, this summer at the beach, and this edition has an introduction Lessing wrote in which she describes the benefits of this type of education.

I always loved the idea of The Golden Notebook, because it is the story of a woman becoming whole.  Anna, the heroine, keeps four notebooks.  The black one is about her early years in Africa; the red one about her political life (chiefly communism, which seems rather quaint now); the yellow contains a novel she is writing and the blue one is her diary.  By the end of the book she has brought all four threads together into one golden notebook.

I'm still trying to get all my various notebooks into one.  Let's see, I've got two green ones, a purple polka dot one, a purple striped one, one with a black over and blue letters saying "journal" on the cover, one with a brown cover that started life as a sketchbook....and those are just the ones I can glance quickly around and see.  I think I love my notebooks way too much to coordinate them into one.

But I digress.  The Golden Notebook has inspired legions of feminists.  The Academy noted: "The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th century view of the male-female relationship."

So it is interesting to me that the two males that I've mentioned Lessing's name to today have never heard of her. 

Lessing also writes science fiction upon occasion, and I'm sure that has the knickers of the literary establishment in a twist.  I adore science fiction myself.