The first of my readings for Echolocation is tonight at Newtonville Books, an awesome bookstore which is supportive of independent presses. Go, Newtonville!
Here are my responses to the Newtonville Books Questionnaire.
Hope to see you there!
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Joy to the World
13 DecHas been an up and down sort of time for my family. As already noted, we lost our beloved pet recently and on top of that we’ve all been sick. And yet, there is so much to celebrate. That we are together. That we are whole. That we love one another.
And yesterday, all of the blurbs for my book came in; joy to the world, indeed! I’m truly grateful to these writers who have lent their names to my book. Thank you!
“Myfanwy Collins tells a deep and resonant story about people she loves, and along the way shows us how to love them as well.” —Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedweller
“Fearless, elegant, and accessible, Echolocation is literary fiction at its best. With heartbreakingly beautiful prose, Myfanwy Collins tells a gripping and tender tale of broken souls yearning for wholeness. These are characters who will stay with you long after you turn the last page. It’s a dazzling debut!”
—Ellen Meister, author of The Other Life
“Myfanwy Collins has the goods. It’s that simple. Echolocation is about love in all its magnificent slipperiness; it’s about how secrets bind us rather than rend us; it’s about the endless series of personal reinventions we call a lifetime. And these are things we had all better be thinking–and reading–about, if we plan to try and get out of this alive.” —Ron Currie Jr., author of God is Dead and Everything Matters!
“Myfanwy Collins’ debut novel calls to mind the grim and radiant work of Daniel Woodrell. From page one, I was chilled by the landscape, caught up in the trouble, and riveted by these women of northernmost New York who slam back together and figure out how live with what’s missing.” —Pia Z. Ehrhardt, author of Famous Father and Other Stories
“A moving and delicate novel, tracing the poignant destinies of women who long for a home they never had.” —Laila Lalami, author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and Secret Son
“Get ready to fall madly, sadly in love with the fiction of Myfanwy Collins.” —Benjamin Percy, author of The Wilding and Refresh, Refresh
And then there is this beauty–give it a listen:
Like this:
The Burning House, by Paul Lisicky
8 NovIsidore Mirsky, the narrator of Paul Lisicky’s gorgeous novel The Burning House, desperately wants to be a good man. He loves his wife. He loves where he lives. He wants to do good work. He wants a purpose. He wants to be good. The problem is that Isidore doesn’t really know who he is anymore outside of his lusts and fears and indiscretions. Indeed, it seems he has lost the ability to function in the moment.
Even as he feels his wife, Laura, falling away from him into illness, he also pushes her away–out of fear, and, ultimately, lust. The one person who brings Isidore back to life is his sister-in-law, Joan. It is as if the two women are halves of one perfect woman for Isidore–a person who has never existed and can never exist.
Told in gorgeous, hypnotic language, we follow Isidore through his travails and hope that he will come back to living within the moment, which he does. For in the end, after all seems lost, it is Isidore who is found as he listens to his wife sing once more:
So she lets go and gives voice to everything coming at her: the love on the way, the love left behind. And good health. The possibilities. What more could a good man want? And how very nice for the weary traveler, who’s had enough of the same old thing, who could stand a little refreshment every now and then.
It’s a beautiful book. Read it.
Like this:
my novel, ECHOLOCATION, available for pre-order!
12 SepAbsolutely thrilled and delighted to announce that my novel, Echolocation, is available for pre-order here: Echolocation
here’s the first beautiful blurb:
“Fearless, elegant, and accessible, Echolocation is literary fiction at its best. With heartbreakingly beautiful prose, Myfanwy Collins tells a gripping and tender tale of broken souls yearning for wholeness. These are characters who will stay with you long after you turn the last page. It’s a dazzling debut!”—Ellen Meister, author of The Other Life
20 years ago and today
10 Aug20 years ago, I was finishing up my first summer out of college. I was teaching summer school (a miserable experience for both the students and me) and I had much to look forward to. I had finished writing my first novel and my agent at the time was sending it out to publishers. I had a handful of stories upon which my creative writing professor had written, “If you keep writing, you will get published. I promise.” I had a double degree in Secondary Education and English and I was on my way to grad school. I had a plan. Things were happening.
Then: Things happened. I left grad school degreeless. I stopped writing for a while. I went within. People loved me. People fell out of love with me. I fell out of love with people. I fell in love with people. I moved in. I moved out. I worked at this job. I left that job. People told me secrets. People stopped talking to me. I stopped talking to people. People moved away. People stayed close. People got sick. People died.
I pulled myself back up. I kept writing. I got published once and twice and a bunch of times. People believed in me and kept believing in me. I began to believe in myself. I took a chance. I put my work out there. Some people liked it. Some didn’t. There was much rejection and some success. Those who would have broken me, did not break me. I kept writing and people who mattered to me said yes to me and to my words.
Now: in less than a month I begin back at grad school. I will not leave again until I have my Master’s degree.
Now: in March 2012 a novel of mine will be published. Thank you for saying yes to my words, Engine Books!
Now: In August 2012 my short fiction collection will be published. Thank you for saying yes to my words, PANK Little Books!
As for you: don’t you ever give up on yourself. Keep going. You, keep going. Don’t stop. Do not stop.
Nahoonkara by Peter Grandbois
21 MayTold from many different points of view Peter Grandbois’s stunning new novel Nahoonkara
Basically, the story begins as it ends: with the voice of the one great narrator, Killian, who pulls together all of the other voices in the narrative. He is the one who shows us that there are no real individuals—only parts of one larger whole. Therein lies the message: we can stand alone, but eventually we will come back together to form the chorus.
Getting yourself to this message, you will find a world that is both brutal and magical, beautiful and deadly. It is a world you might recall from your own childhood, inexplicable visions and memories that seem as though they are still occurring. All the while, you will be guided by a writer of extreme skill.
If you are used to reading straight-forward novels, you will likely find yourself puzzled at first about this book: what is it exactly? Is it a poem? Is it a play? Is it a novel? The answer, in my mind, is that it is all of these and more. It feels almost as if it should be read aloud by a fire. It feels like a story in the great tradition of story telling—of passing a narrative on by speaking it aloud. In that, I would encourage you to not be intimidated by this book if it is different from what you are used to. I encourage you to open yourself up and let it happen to you. You are in good hands.
Read it.
Bad Marie, by Marcy Dermansky
18 FebBad Marie
It is that good.
So what about Marie? Who is she? She’s a nanny. She’s an ex-con. She’s a fuck up. She’s also got a big, twisted heart that wants love and healing and happiness and yet all of the people she’s ever loved have let her down; basically, Marie makes bad choices about who to love. Except for one. And that one is the little kid she babysits for, Caitlin. And in this relationship between caregiver and child is the crux of the story.
Of course, being a two-year-old there is one crucial moment when Caitlin does disappoint Marie because she cannot possibly respond in an adult. In that moment, Marie first decides to respond in her typical way, but finds she can’t do it. She has grown. She has learned to put this child’s needs above her own. And that, my friends, is pretty close the love a parent feels.
Okay, so Marie is still not technically doing the right thing in that she kidnapped Caitlin from first her mother and then her father, but her heart is eventually in the right place. Ultimately, she does feel guilt and does want what’s best for Caitlin; she just lacks the skills to figure out how do the right thing.
Here is a book that is both literary and plot driven, humorous and heartbreaking. Here is a book that makes you feel for the protagonist despite the horrible things she does. After all, she is still that hard luck kid whose friend’s mother took pity. Okay, she is a grown up and she’s doing a horrible thing by keeping this child from her parents, but, in the end, her intentions are sort of good. In the end, I believe she will bring Caitlin home.
This is not to say I want to befriend Marie or have her watch my kid (and sleep with my husband), but I do understand her a bit more. I do feel for her. With that said, I was extremely anxious as I read the final 20 or so pages of this book and felt that I constantly needed to make sure that my kid was okay. As such, I finished the book sitting on the couch next to him as he watched Cyberchase with his bare feet tucked up under my leg to keep them warm. I did not want to let him out of my sight.
All this is to say, it’s a book that stirs up a lot of complex emotion and it’s a brave book. There are readers, I’m sure, who will judge the book solely on the actions of the character. If they did so, they would be missing out. Bad Marie
The Wilding, by Benjamin Percy
4 JanOn the surface, you might consider Benjamin Percy’s chillingly brilliant new novel The Wilding
Commonly, we understand frontier times (and consequently the literature of that time) to be about (white) human beings conquering the land and conquering those (man and beast) who inhabit the land. The Wilding has a kinship to the frontier—an exploration of the American far West, a land both mountainous and arid, where old-growth forest meets high desert. A wild place that many people have not visited and yet it is now on the fringe of expansion as more and more towns, like Bend, push beyond their boundaries into the wild.
has a kinship to the frontier—an exploration of the American far West, a land both mountainous and arid, where old-growth forest meets high desert. A wild place that many people have not visited and yet it is now on the fringe of expansion as more and more towns, like Bend, push beyond their boundaries into the wild.Within The Wilding, there is a family in crisis—generations of fathers and sons and a fractured and fragile shell of a marriage—and there is a man in crisis—the creepily and yet not unfeeling drawn war vet, Brian. There is also a landscape in crisis—a once wild place about to be developed. Any one of these three would make the great basis for a novel but all three of them together, set this novel on fire. I typically read before bed but there were times that I was so on edge with reading this book that I had to put it down and pick up another so that I can make sure I would sleep. It got under my skin.
, there is a family in crisis—generations of fathers and sons and a fractured and fragile shell of a marriage—and there is a man in crisis—the creepily and yet not unfeeling drawn war vet, Brian. There is also a landscape in crisis—a once wild place about to be developed. Any one of these three would make the great basis for a novel but all three of them together, set this novel on fire. I typically read before bed but there were times that I was so on edge with reading this book that I had to put it down and pick up another so that I can make sure I would sleep. It got under my skin.But not simply about suspense, this book is also about human beings: Justin, who has spent his life on the precipice of manhood, never fully able to jump over the line as he has been living under the thumb of his force-of-nature father; Karen, damaged nearly beyond recognition from a miscarriage, she hides her many wounds beneath her physical armor; and Brian, mentally and physically damaged by the war and grieving for his dead father, he gives in to a life time of impulses.
Each one of the main characters has a big decision to make revolving around their very sense of humanity. Will they give into temptation and give up what it means to be human? Or will they let their animal nature push through?
You will have to read to find out. You won’t be sorry you did.
The Other Life, by Ellen Meister
9 DecI am extremely fortunate to have received an advanced review copy of Ellen Meister‘s soon-to-be-released and breathtakingly great new novel, The Other Life
Before I had a child, I often wondered what it would be like to have one and wondered how my life would change if I did. I wanted a magic vision–some way to see what it would be like. But there is no such view into the alternate worlds we imagine for ourselves; experience is the only answer.
At its core this book explores the question of the road not taken. If we are honest we can all admit that there comes in a time in our lives when we wonder what would have happened if we had chosen another path. Most often, we push the thought away, satisfied as we are with our partners and families if we have them or happy not to have them. Whatever the case may be.
But what if you could experience that other life?
During an extremely volatile and emotionally devastating time of her life, Quinn is able to make the leap to her other life. She is able to experience all of the emotion of an alternate life, while retaining the knowledge of her current existence.
It is almost what one might believe of heaven–an other life which allows you your experiences from your true life. And in that other life, you might encounter those who had passed before you, living as they once did.
The problem for Quinn is not in experiencing this alternate reality, and not in choosing which place is the best for her–instead the problem is about what she is willing to sacrifice and for whom. In the end, her decision is based not on holding onto the past, but in believing in the future.
This book will break your heart and piece it back together. Not only is it beautifully written, it’s also a great read. Without hesitation, I say, buy this book for someone you love and I promise you they will thank you for it.
Sorta Like A Rock Star, by Matthew Quick
19 MayThis one is for all of the kids who live outside the edge of normal, all of the kids who have secrets behind what their faces show at school each day, all of the kids who have been picked on, and especially for all of the kids who when faced with the worst, offer up their best.
This one is for all of you who are rock stars of hope, just like Amber Appleton the winning heroine of Matthew Quick’s charmingly heartbreaking YA novel Sorta Like a Rock Star
I’ve been a fan of Quick’s writing for a while now and I expect a lot from his work. I expect honesty and humor and a wacky set of characters doing interesting things: and, boy, does this book deliver all of those things in spades. Most importantly, this book delivers a great big heart, all packaged within the body of Amber Appleton–who is one part Dorothy in Oz, one part Alice in Wonderland, and one part all her own. She’s a girl who has been pushed down into a dark place due to circumstances beyond her control and when life deals her an unfair and devastating hand, even though she wants to give up, she refuses to.
Partly she keeps going because Amber is not alone in her hardships; through her dark times she has her friends (a group of misfit kids, a haiku writing war vet, a Nietzsche quoting nursing home villain, and a Catholic priest among others). In her darkest hour when all she wants to do is be alone, they will not give up on her. They fight for her in the way no one else ever has–not even her parents.
Amber teaches us to never give up yearning for a better future. She teaches us what it means to survive. Most importantly, she gives us hope.
Buy this book for your favorite high school kid. Buy this book for your mother and father. Buy this book for a complete stranger who looks like he is having a crappy day and needs a reason to believe. Buy this book.
