+ Echolocation, Engine Books, fiction, I Am Holding Your Hand, Myfanwy Collins, novel, PANK Little Books, Roxane Gay, short stories, Victoria Barrett, writers, writing books
20 years ago and today
20 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.
Told 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.
I am so lucky to live in a town (or a town neighboring to a town) which values literature and reading so much that each year for the past six years it holds an annual literary festival.
Today began for me with reading for Paul Harding’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel Tinkers
As for today, Harding was utterly charming and engaging from beginning to end. I got itchy when he said he was going to read for 20 minutes (too long, imo, for most people to read… unless you are Dorothy Allison and can really, really READ and engage and make it a performance) but Harding was terrific and I was completely focused on what he was reading from beginning to end. He was a great and low-key performer. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
The Q&A was equally engaging. I was inspired by his story of bringing Tinkers to publication. And then charmed by the description of his revision process which he describes as akin to a roomba vacuum.
Next up for me was the Book Bloggers. They spoke about their beginnings as bloggers and how they established their individual brands but the most important message coming through was how much they all love books. During the Q&A at the end of their session an author (whom I recognized as she is local to the area but will not name here and, really, she has nothing to worry about given the quality of what she writes) said how fearful she is of book bloggers because her publisher has told her she must get in with all of them (paraphrasing) and she feels like a fish out of water. But the bloggers were all very gracious to her and encouraged her to talk to them after.
Finally, I went to see Andre Dubus III at the Unitarian Universalist Church (one of the most beautiful buildings in our town of beautiful buildings). The place was packed and Dubus showed up just a few minutes late (because he’d been shuttling back and forth between his sporting events for his three teenagers) and ran down the aisle at the last minute. Perfect. Townie: A Memoir
Russo’s point was that if you are trying to settle a score then either don’t write it at all or write it and don’t publish it. Either way, Dubus asked himself that question and found that he was not writing it to settle a score. He simply wanted to tell this story of his hardscrabble youth in Haverhill, MA. What he had not accounted for was how difficult it would be for him to unearth his family secrets. In the end, though, as in with the reader’s experience with the book, it has all proven redemptive.
Just a great day. Can’t wait until next year.
+ books, food, memoir, nonfiction, parenting, storytelling
Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
When I turned over the last page of Gabrielle Hunter’s debut memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
This is not to say that the book does not end well or just as it should, rather I had grown accustomed to Hunter’s company and I knew that when the book was finished I was going to miss her. Yeah, she’s not perfect. In fact, she can even be sort of an asshole sometimes, but from page one of this gorgeously written book, filled with honesty and life, I knew that I would love her forever. And I do.
To me there should be another subtitle: motherhood lost and found for within motherhood and food and feeding are intertwined just as they are (or can be) in life. Even when my own mother was emotionally lost to me, she always fed me. In fact, the smells of my own kitchen now are what remind me the most about her. Just as Hamilton describes her relationship with food: all returning back to that first kitchen.
The book begins when Hamilton’s mother and father divorcing, and with Hamilton’s mother moving to Vermont leaving Hamilton rootless and motherless. From there Hamilton rebels, she screws up, until eventually learning to nurture and mother herself and put herself on a path to find her way. In the years before she opens Prune, she works as a caterer and enters an MFA program in Michigan, where she takes a second job working with a woman who will become her cooking mentor. In short, she finds a stand-in mother for a time. And like Hamilton’s own mother, the relationship circles around the cooking, the food.
Finally, it is through her sad marriage that Hamilton meets the uber mother stand in: the Italian matriarch. Though she and her Italian mother-in-law don’t speak the same language, they learn to communicate with each other through cooking. And in the end as Hamilton’s marriage more fully dissolves and as her mother-in-law’s life winds down, Hamilton and her mother-in-law very nearly become one–just as one does with a child in the womb–as finally Hamilton is passed the torch to be the next Mamma.
As for the food: Hamilton should not be mistaken for a foodie. In fact, she would like (paraphrasing) people to just eat and shut up about it. She’s equally ambivalent about celebrity chefdom, even though she sends herself farther down that path with the release of this book.
It’s a terrific book. Filled with humor and exotic locations and hard work and sad times. There’s also a lot of love.
Read it.
After she finished reading Andre Dubus III’s new memoir Townie
And so what of this place where my friend, and Dubus, and I now live? This place is the north shore of Massachusetts, once known for its down-in-the-mouth mill and fishing towns bordering the Merrimack river but which is now gentrified and not only a commuter location for those working Boston but also its own happening place to live and work.
Not so in the days when Dubus and my friend were coming up.
Son of a hard-living writer and a hard-working mother, Dubus suffered the same fate of many of us living our childhood in the 60s and 70s when helicopter parents did not exist, that of benign neglect. Our parents meant us no harm; they had grown up in difficult times themselves–many born into the Great Depression or into war. They learned how to survive and that’s what they taught us, mostly by leaving us alone. And that was really okay, actually. Like Dubus, we either learned how to survive and thrive or we didn’t.
You might assume that this book is going to be about what it’s like to be the child of one of the 20th century’s best writers, but in actuality that Dubus’s father was a writer is only a fraction of the tale. At its core this is a story of this son’s redemption and, ultimately, of his awakening. Indeed, some of the most poignant moments within this narrative are when Dubus realizes what he has become (a brute) and what he might become (a murderer) and then, most importantly, what he wants to be and will choose to be (a creator/a husband/a father).
The pivotal scene occurs when instead of heading out to the gym as he would normally do after a day’s hard labor, Dubus makes him self a cup of tea and sits down at his table and writes. In this moment and in this act, he (perhaps unconsciously) saves himself:
I blinked and looked around my tiny rented kitchen, saw things I’d never seen before: the stove leaning to the left, the handle of the fridge covered with dirty masking tape, the chipped paint of the window casing, a missing square of linoleum on the floor under the radiator.
I stood and closed the notebook. I picked up the pencil and set it on top like some kind of marker, a reminder to me of something important I shouldn’t lose.
He does not use writing as therapy, rather he uses it as an act of survival. Of turning the eye outward, so that vision might reflect back inward. For me, this scene was keenly familiar to my own experience in which I, too, picked up the pen as a means of saving myself, of pushing myself away from darkness into the bright glare of awareness.
In fact, so much of the book feels familiar, not because of how I lived and live now but because what Dubus taps into is something common to the human experience: the choices we make that allow us to survive. The choices we make that bring us one more rung up the ladder from merely surviving up to thriving. As such, this book is not about blame or self-pity; it’s about examining the darkness within you so that you might share your own light.
Read it.
The stories in this new printing of Randall Brown’s debut chapbook, Mad to Live, absolutely sparkle with desire—for life, for love, for something unnamable. They are stories about sons and fathers and husbands and wives and lovers—all burning with want. I found words for this want in one of the “bonus track” stories entitled “Out of Love” in which the narrator says:
“The ache of longing is better than the nothingness of before.”
Within that line is the kernel behind all of the stories. It is better to want and not receive than to feel no desire at all or, worse, to feel your self unworthy of even desiring another person or thing. To live without desire is not to live at all.
Brown writes with such brave honesty in this space of these lives in flux—children who are lost, parents who are needy, parents who are cold, husbands who leave, come back. Wives who were never there. But mostly, he writes about love. About those people who love the people who hurt them and those people who love the people they will hurt or are hurt by. And from this love comes understanding, growth. This is living. This is truth.
From the title story, we see a man who becomes a boy once again in wake of his father’s death—revisiting the scenes from their past in his father’s empty classroom where he teaches himself the truth about his father:
“I begin to sense the irony of my father’s position, drenched in uncertainty, yet convinced of the rightness of his beliefs. He thought he knew, but he was just guessing. And what if he guessed wrong?”
I invite you to be mesmerized by these stories. Hopefully, you will see some glimmer of yourself and find that you, too, are mad to live.
From the beginning, I’d found Witness
It’s a worst nightmare beginning. But things turn out okay. The child is born. The child thrives. The child teaches the parents so much about themselves. And it is with great tenderness that Smith ferries us through his journey with his son, showing us not just the microcosm of their lives but the macrocosm of our world at large–how all those that will and have done evil were once babies, how all those who are heroic and all those who make bad choices were once babies.
How our own babyhood lives within us still, experienced once again through the lives of our children.
So as I picked up the book late this afternoon, I expected it would end in a lovely way but what I did not expect was the sense of catharsis it would provide me. The title essay, “Witness,” is about the death of Smith’s father and about the importance of father to son, of parent to child:
I understand in my son’s eyes, I am not alloted the luxury of background. A child can’t be asked to comprehend his father’s history; a child’s father is history, an influence so deeply entangled in a child’s own existence that he will take years to separate the two.
I pull my chair closer to my father’s bedside. I am glad I have grown old enough to understand him better–a child of the depression, poor and fatherless, a father himself at nineteen. He gurgles. He twitches in the throes of his final sleep, his history now written and sealed.
I’m confident I can speak for most parents when I say that the second worst thing to losing your child would be to die yourself while your child still needs you. To be an adult and be able to tell your parent they can let go is a gift. And it turns out that it’s a gift both Smith and I share, though I didn’t realize how valuable it had been until this dreary afternoon, reading this essay. So thank you, Curtis Smith.
But lest you think the book ends with sadness, let me tell you no, it does not. Instead, there is a beautiful treat: his son’s first drawing of a man. In that lies all the hope for the future. In that lies the knowledge that someday this boy will be a man standing beside his father, helping him let go.
Bad 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
When they had their first joint show, an art critic dubbed it: “The Diary of a Friendship” and that, too, is what one might call Patti Smith’s achingly tender diary of her relationship between her and her beloved friend, Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids
It’s a book that almost defies classification: It’s not really a memoir/autobiography–it’s more an auto-biography. A combination of the one and the other, a bringing together of the two to form one whole, much like the relationship between Smith and Mapplethorpe. You might find yourself wowed by seeing so many of your personal icons walk through the pages, but I’m guessing you will be mostly just deeply touched by the tenderness, the beauty, the youthful desire, mistakes and lucky accidents, love and sadness.
At the core of this book, is the melding together of these two young artists and how they become one and how they became individuals. The most poignant moment of the book for me (other than the end) was when Smith describes the photo shoot for Horses, as she looks at the photo that became her album cover, she encapsulates what seems to be their entire experience together (and brings me to tears in the process):
“Whenever I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.”
It’s a hard book to write about, other than to say the prose is often beautiful, always concise. It’s a book, like the words and music and images of the two artists it is about, that I can’t imagine not loving.
On the surface, you might consider Benjamin Percy’s chillingly brilliant new novel 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., 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.I 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.
On October 2nd (two days from now) at 2PM, I’ll be reading at Newtonville Books Small Press Saturday. Here are the details:
Sat, Oct 2, 2PM: Small Press Saturday with Ampersand Books, Dzanc Books, Madras Press, Rose Metal Press, and Small Anchor Press.
Join us as we celebrate independent publishing with the editors and contributors to these fine presses:
Ampersand Books: Benjamin Lowenkron will read from PREACHER’S BLUES
Dzanc Books: William Walsh and Myfanwy Collins will read from THE BEST OF THE WEB 2010
Madras Press: Editor Sumanth Prabhaker will read “A Manual for Sons” by Donald Barthelme, the first Madras Press Classic Reprint
Rose Metal Press: Adam Golaski will read from COLOR PLATES
Small Anchor Press: Joseph McElroy will read from PREPARATIONS FOR SEARCH
myfanwy collins 