Community of Writers Books and Authors

New Books In The Bookstore

2010-09-30T06:57:00.000-07:00

Our tiny bookstore housed its usual collection of Great American fiction, poetry and non-fiction this summer. One of the new books I bought and am excited to read is Michael Jaime-Becerra's This Time Tomorrow. Booklist's Deborah Donovan writes "Packed with details of his characters’ barely scraping-by existence, Jaime-Becerra’s heartfelt debut brings an entire community vividly to life." The book sold out after Michael's powerful reading this summer. As a debut novelist, selling hard copies is tremendously important and, in this economy, tremendously difficult. I was so pleased that Michael's writing inspired so many, but equally impressive was the willingness of the Community to support such an important new work of fiction from a talented new novelist.

Michael Jaime-Becerra grew up in El Monte, CA, a working-class suburb of Los Angeles. He received his MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and currently teaches creative writing at University of California, Riverside. His short story collection, Every Night Is Ladies' Night, was named to lists of the years' best books by The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle. It was awarded a California Book Award, the Silver Medal for a First Work of Fiction. Michael lives in El Monte, CA.

I will be adding more about our new authors and books very soon!

A Poem

2010-08-17T19:59:00.001-07:00

The Layers
by Stanley Kunitz

I have walked so many lives
Some of them my own
And I am not who I was
Though some principle of being abides
From which I struggle not to stray
When I look behind as I am compelled to look
Before I gather strengths to proceed on my journey
I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon

And the slow fires trailing from the abandoned campsites
Over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings

Oh I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections
And my tribe is scattered
How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends
those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn, exalting somewhat with my wings intact
to go wherever I need to go
and every stone on the road precious to me

In my darkest night when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage
A nimbus clouded voice directed me, “Live in the layers. Not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written.

I am not done

with my changes.

Tribal Gatherings

2010-08-09T11:30:00.000-07:00

Glen David Gold, the author of Sunnyside and Carter Beats the Devil, opened with a speech that reminded us all of why we are here. His story about the U.S. troops stationed in Russia during Napoleon's invasion in 1812 relayed the underlying sense of urgency felt by fiction writers in these times. Glen elaborated on the rarely discussed U.S. history that involved fifty eight thousand American troops facing an army of more than a million. They endured one very cold winter before the retreat.

“Don’t worry if you don’t remember this,” he joked, “the Russians still do.”

Supposedly the men took to singing a jovial, albeit eerie marching tune, “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here…”

Did I mention Glen David Gold has a good singing voice? He does. He also has great insight into what it feels like to be a writer at this particular intersection of time and place. Through the cathedral windows, wind shook the aspen leaves and odd shaped clouds pointed down from the sky looking mysteriously like eggs lined up in a grayish carton. Weather accents the words here. Yesterday we saw a giant rainbow.

Glen told another story about how his fear of flying developed in early 2002, which is the year that I think many of us developed a similar phobia. One memorable flight that year happened to be on a plane with a very large group of cheerleaders—that was the good news. Just after landing, however, all of the girls on the right side of the plane began squealing and pointing causing the other half of the girls to rush out of their seats and run over to the windows. A plane lay stranded on the runway, tipped to one side, fire flaring out of the windows. An ominous scene for sure, but it was during this pandemonium that Glen noticed that one of the members of the cheerleading squad was not at the windows pointing and shrieking.

The chaperone of the squad was sitting in her seat reading a novel. The novel that had her so engrossed despite the surrounding chaos happened to be his wife’s novel, The Lovely Bones.

If "Why do we write?” was ever a question, then the answer was revealed in this moment on the plane. Even when everything appears to be falling apart around us, refuge can be found. Catharsis even.

Isn’t that reason enough?

Afterward, the room was dark except for a row of colored paper lanterns. I passed through the office on my way to the car. "We're here because we're here because..." streamed through my mind. The picture of Oakley Hall hanging above Brett’s desk caught my eye. A dialogue bubble is Scotch taped to the glass that says, “Try not to fuck up!” These are mantras to live by.

Luis Alberto Urrea

2010-06-02T16:53:00.000-07:00

It's always a great pleasure to see my two favorite book worlds collide on the pages of Bookshop Santa Cruz Readers' Summer Guide. We are excited that Luis Alberto Urrea will be joining us for this summer's fiction conference. A 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Award winner, Urrea is the best-selling author of 13 books of fiction and non-fiction and his latest novel, Into the Beautiful North, also comes Highly Recommended as a "good-humored road novel" by the book aficionados at Book Shop Santa Cruz.

Into the Beautiful North, released this month in paperback, tells the story of three young Mexican women living in a small town where all the men have immigrated to the United States. Inspired by a film (The Magnificent Seven), they hire a gay escort to help them cross the border. Their plan is not to leave their homeland forever, but rather to get the men to return to Mexico. Library Journal describes the novel as "surprising, inventive, and very funny...while the politically charged undercurrent of the novel pulses with a compassionate vision of future."

I loved the historical, mythical drama of The Hummingbird's Daughter, published in 2005, with the unforgettable Teresita, who was described in The New Yorker review as "a mestiza Joan of Arc." Urrea is one of those crossover authors who can satisfy the erudite critics of The New Yorker while at the same time appeal to readers like my beloved sister, who is primarily a fan of the romance genre, and my dear friend, who has succumbed to years of self help and parenting books. Both my sister and friend loved The Hummingbird's Daughter, as did the editors of the The New Yorker.

In The Devil's Highway, Urrea recounts the non-fiction story of a group of Mexican Immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, an account which is exceptionally poignant given today's political climate.

For more information about Luis Alberto Urrea and his books visit the author's website.

Anne Lamott

2010-05-01T08:55:00.000-07:00

I'll call this student Doug, a 20-year-old community college student with a criminal record, who can rattle off analysis of books and art and current events more masterfully than several faculty members I've encountered recently, but I can see, by his spotty attendance and the look in his eyes, that Doug is hooked on drugs. Oh, he'd never admit this to me, himself or anyone else—at least not yet—but I know and, ultimately, he knows, the truth.

And yet our relationship—as instructor and student—is based on the denial of this truth, which I find puzzling and disconcerting. One thing I know for sure: Doug will fail my class and, this late in the semester, after so many missed assignments, I'll be surprised if I even see him again.

I know this about Doug because I was a college student in the late 80s, an extraordinarily drug infested time to come-of-age—if you need to be reminded of this fact go check out the ridiculously obscene, hilariously funny movie Hot Tub Time Machine. In the 80s drugs were as prevalent as kegs at a frat party and, as the night wore on and the taps ran dry, much more easily procured.

I know my boundaries in the role of college instructor, but what would I do if Doug was my son? What would I do if I was a recovering addict and my child was hiding an addiction from me?

Leave it to Anne Lamott to explore this difficult terrain in her new novel, Imperfect Birds .

"To crudely paraphrase Tolstoy," writes Julie Meyerson in her NYTs review of the novel, "all addicts’ families are alike, and when it comes to teenage drug abusers they’re unnervingly alike, right down to the last battering detail."

Imperfect Birds is now at the top of my summer reading list. I am sure that part of the reason I want to read this book is to help me process the sadness of witnessing such a capable kid drift away from his own potential. The confidence I have in Anne Lamott's restorative powers also characterizes her ability as a writer. She is one of those writers we turn to time and time again knowing that, no matter how tough the problem, she will help us through.

Paperbacks to the People

2010-04-05T10:08:00.000-07:00

The Smithsonian published an interesting article tracing the lineage of paperback novels way back to the moment when soon-to-be Penguin Founder Allen Lane was searching for a good read in a train station after spending the "weekend in the country with Agatha Christy" during the Great Depression. Lane's failed search combined with his worry about the hard hit publishing industry, and the still sizzling memories of his weekend with Agatha (okay, so the sizzle part wasn't in the Smithsonian article) inspired Lane to come up with the idea of a 'dimestore' novel. Wallah! The paperback book was born.

The article explains how Lane's employer, a British publishing house, opted not to back his idea, so Lane started up Penguin with his life savings—creating portable, high quality fiction at a cost that enabled mass market consumption. Lane's concept of printing and distributing great fiction for the "price of a pack of cigarettes" took off. Authors like Hemingway and Christy enjoyed widespread audiences and more and more people found reprieve from trying times by reading great fiction. As the constraints of the Great Depression faded, the portable paperback industry continued to flourish even as war wreaked havoc on the international scene. The article cites a touching 1945 Saturday Evening Post report of an injured World War II soldier reading Willa Cather in his foxhole.

The publishing world and the public have reaped the benefits of Lane's inspiration ever since and, the article points out, our century's sequel to the Great Depression has also inspired a profound publishing incarnation—the paperless book:

"Allen Lane stated that he “believed in the existence…of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it.” Seventy-five years later, we find ourselves in a situation not unlike Lane’s in 1935. Publishers are facing plummeting sales, and many are attempting to launch new models, chasing the dream to be the next Penguin. New e-readers have been unveiled recently, including the iPad, Kindle and Nook. Digital editions are cheaper than paperbacks—you can buy the latest literary fiction for $9.99—but they come with a hefty start-up price. The basic iPad costs $499, and the two versions of the Kindle are priced at $259 and $489. Not exactly the price of a pack of cigarettes—or, to use a healthier analogy, a pack of gum."

The Smithsonian article makes a very good point: the cost of electronic gadgets required to read electronic books doesn't fit the mass distribution model of Lane's inexpensive paperback and really fails to offer any substantial change to publishing in our own dismal economic times. Although I had hoped that Apple's iBooks application would open up the book world to the masses, in much the same way the paperback did, despite heading up a company whose March 2010 stock market value surpassed $200 billion, Steve Jobs has opted to keep his iBooks application to himself, and those who can afford the IPad's hefty price tag. Maybe Jobs needs a sizzling weekend with Agatha for more inspiration.

Read the Smithsonian Article for more...

For David Foster Wallace Fans...

2010-03-19T14:25:00.000-07:00

Genus comes to mind whenever I think of David Foster Wallace. For a glimpse inside the workings of his brilliant mind, check out the new Harry Ransom Center's online archive collection at the University of Texas at Austin website where you can look inside digitized versions of books and manuscripts from DFW's private collection. The scrupulous annotations made throughout some of his favorite books reveal the deep connection DFW had to making meaning of texts, but also how one of the greatest writers of our time viewed American fiction as a genre worthy of deep reflection on form, style and substance.

The majority of the DFW materials is being processed and organized and will be available to the public in fall 2010, according to the Henry Ransom Collection website, but there are a few preliminary documents ready for previewing right now, such as DFW's personal commentary on the reviews page of Don Delillo's Players. DFW's handwritten comments range from "Eat shit off a wooden stick" to "recondite somantics" and "Office drudgery: a room full of mold eyes" and cue us into his keen awareness of reviewers and their tendencies, but most dominate on the page is his unmistakable sense of humor—a tone that DFW would be the first to point out as ironic given the darkness of depression that plagued his life and led to his tragic death. Zoom in a couple of times on the image and you will be surprised, startled and awed by the wit and intelligence driving his candid commentary. Also on digital display will be his painstaking writing process as recorded in the margins and line edits of his working manuscripts, handwritten notes, childhood writing, a copy of his dictionary with words circled throughout and his heavily annotated books by Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, John Updike and more than 40 other authors.

The Community of Writer's beloved Michael Pietsch, Executive Vice President of Little, Brown and Company, was DFW's editor on his 1000 page manuscript Infinite Jest and is quoted on the website as saying,"Little, Brown and Company is happy to donate all of our correspondence and internal memos relating to 'Infinite Jest,' 'Brief Interviews with Hideous Men' (1999), 'Oblivion' (2004), 'A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again' and 'Consider the Lobster' to the Ransom Center. David's letters are delightful to read in themselves, and we hope that scholars will benefit from finding his notes to his editors and copy editors in the same archive with his draft manuscripts, journals and other correspondence."
If you are a DFW groupie, be sure to bookmark this site:
David Foster Wallace Collection

ZZ Packer

2010-02-27T13:19:00.000-08:00

I had never heard of Z.Z. Packer when I first read her short story Brownies, but after reading this story, I read her collection and then several of her non-fiction articles, and now she is one of my favorites. Brownies is one of those stories you cannot read only once. You must read through a second time powered by a disturbing sense of awe. You must read it a third time to figure out how the hell she produced such a masterpiece. And you read it a fourth time a year later just to relive that emotional wallop yet again.

Here is the first line of Brownies:
"By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909."

And thus the hilarious, poignant and startling story about a troop of Brownies as summer camp begins.

But this collection isn't one to stick to one subject or point of view. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere roams emotional terrain far and wide.

"Opportunities," my father says after I bail him out jail. He's banging words into the dash as if trying to get them through my thick skull, "You've got to invest your money if you want opportunities" writes Packer in Ant of the Self, which was the second story she had published in The New Yorker, and is written from the point of view of a young boy who gets talked into going to the Million Man March by his delinquent father.

The title story is told from the point of view of an African American freshman during her first year at an Ivy League campus and another powerful story, Speaking in Tongues, is told from the point of view of a 14-year old Alabama runaway on the streets of Atlanta. In just a few pages Packer renders worlds taunt with the emotional resonance that novelists strive to achieve in hundreds of pages. The variety leaves you breathless, never quite knowing what this writer is going to throw at you next.

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is one of those books that you won't loan out because someday you will reach for it again, and it would be too great a loss if it wasn't there.

Not many writers can claim The New Yorker among their first publication, but before Z.Z. Packer's debut collection of short stories was first published she had not only appeared in the New Yorker (twice), but also Harper's, Ploughshares, Zoetrope and the 'late' great Story. Rumor has it Z.Z. is currently working on a novel about the Buffalo Soldiers. We'll have to ask her all about it this summer.

Sue Miller

2010-02-12T21:21:00.001-08:00

I don't understand how they do it. How do they write so many damn novels? I just tried to count and I got dizzy.

I read Sue Miller's debut novel, The Good Mother, a couple of years ago and I became an instant fan.

If you liked Crazy Heart, you'll like this story about Anna, a recently divorced Mom, whose choice of boyfriends isn't nearly as bad as Bad (in Crazy Heart), but that fact doesn't save her from a turn of events that darkens the undertones of this novel, and offers disturbing insights into motherhood and relationships rarely captured in fiction. The beauty of this book is found in Miller's depiction of Anna and her three-year-old daughter's vulnerability after Anna falls for an artist, whose lifestyle tests the boundaries of acceptability. Our evaluation of Anna is shaped by our own notions of what defines a "good mother," and as Anna's trust in her lover increases, we are forced to navigate this definition in increasingly difficult terrain. The tension crescendos as we witness this "good mother" pay a ruthless price.

I highly recommend this novel and reading it again after watching Crazy Heart makes for an interesting comparison that would lead to a great book club discussion.

"SUE MILLER'S [Lost in the Forest]secures her place in the company of writers like Anne Tyler and Alison Lurie, whose best books pull off the trick of being highly readable even as they lend a certain gravitas to contemporary domestic realism. These narratives convince us that the worlds they depict, albeit separate and specific and small, bear a weight of truth and meaning that complements the bigger, more self-important canvases of a Tom Wolfe or a Jonathan Franzen. Less concerned with identifying the larger patterns of our increasingly manic, morphing society, they address a subject that evolves as slowly as the human species: the intrigue of familial and romantic love. "
—By KATHRYN HARRISON, NYT Books

Oprah's Pick ....

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And her most recent...modeled after Clinton's escapades, but even more timely in the wake of what seems to have become a trend of infidelity in politics.

Jason Roberts

2010-02-02T11:23:00.000-08:00

Something terrible has happened to my eyesight in the last couple of years. A trip to the optometrist revealed this development is just another one of the many horrors related to the inevitability of aging. Bad eyesight, that is destined to only get worse. How lovely.

I'll never forget how the optometrist peered into my eyes with that funny looking headlamp strapped to his forehead, squinting as he said, "I'm surprised you've gotten away with not wearing glasses for this long." He flicked off the light and stared at me in a peculiar way. "It must be difficult for you to put on your eye make-up," he commented with a wry smile.

I responded that I'd never noticed any real difficulty in that department, but thanks for the concern.

His amusement at my expense became clear when, after arriving back in my car with newly purchased over-the-counter reading glasses, I peered into the rear view mirror for a closer look. At that moment I learned why some people pay to have their eyebrows plucked. Thankfully, I have a good sense of humor, without it I would have most definitely burst into tears at the realization that I had been walking around in public (for how long now?) with eyebrows that look they'd been ravaged by insects.

Well, if you think it's difficult to pluck eyebrows with diminished vision, just try traveling around the world without any vision at all. That's what Jason Roberts so deftly illuminates in

A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became the World's Greatest Traveler

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this vibrant biography of James Holman (1786–1857), Roberts, a contributor to the Village Voice and McSweeney's, narrates the life of a 19th-century British naval officer who was mysteriously blinded at 25, but nevertheless became the greatest traveler of his time. Holman entered the navy at age 12, at the height of the Napoleonic Wars. When blindness overcame him, Holman was an accomplished sailor, and he engineered to join the Naval Knights of Windsor, a quirky group who only had to live in quarters near Windsor Castle and attend mass for their stipend. For many blind people at the time, this would have been the start of a long (if safe) march to the grave. Holman would have none of it and spent the bulk of his life arranging leaves of absence from the Knights in order to wander the world (without assistance) from Paris to Canton; study medicine at the University of Edinburgh; hunt slavers off the coast of Africa; get arrested by one of the czar's elite bodyguards in Siberia; and publish several bestselling travel memoirs. Roberts does Holman justice, evoking with grace and wit the tale of this man once lionized as "The Blind Traveler." (June)

If you need a great book, and an inspiring story to get you going. Read this one.

To read more reviews and interesting commentary about books and life in general check out Jason's website. Jason is also a brilliant musician. Next time you're up in Squaw and you are wondering who Jason Roberts is, he's the guy playing the stand up bass.

Honors

Finalist
National Book Critics Circle Award

#3 Nonfiction Bestseller
S.F. Chronicle (No. California)

A Best Book of the Year:
Washington Post
San Francisco Chronicle
Kirkus Reviews
Saint Louis Post-Dispatch
Rocky Mountain News (Denver)
School Library Journal

For those of you tuning in from Los Angeles...

2010-01-28T09:00:00.000-08:00

Please attend this night of readings, music and dancing to raise money for medical aid to Haiti. The evening will feature readings from Will Alexander, Gloria Alvarez, Tisa Bryant, Percival Everett, Sesshu Foster, Veronica Gonzales, Jen Hofer, Doug Kearney, Chris Kraus, Maggie Nelson, Abel Salas; plus live music from Ceci Bastida and Domingo Siete and DJ sets from Glenn Red, Concise, and Gomez comes alive. It will all get started at 8pm this coming Saturday at Trópico de Nopal Gallery in Echo Park. All the money raised will go to Partners in Health, which has been providing free medical care to Haiti's poor for the last two decades.
The details: Saturday January 30, 2010 at 8 p.m. Trópico de Nopal Gallery 1665 Beverly Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90026 - $10 at the door (more if you can spare it!)
If you won’t be able to attend Saturday, please consider donating directly to Partners in Health.

I discovered this post on a really GREAT literary book blog. Check out Mark Sarvas's The Elegant Variation.

Victoria Patterson

2010-01-21T20:32:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to past participant Victoria Patterson for winning The Story Prize in Fiction! I'm very much looking forward to reading this provocative collection of short stories set in Orange County.

Here are a few of the many positive reviews...

From the SF Chronicle

By Michael Leone

In "Drift," Victoria Patterson's extraordinary collection of interlinked stories, she introduces us to an unexpected Newport Beach, where many flounder among the shimmering beach vistas and yacht-clogged harbors of Orange County. Most of Patterson's characters are outcasts, alienated - sometimes intentionally - from family and friends. They are teenagers, waiters, divorcees, transvestites, vagrants, adulterers, alcoholics and drug addicts, but the reader will feel something for each of them.

The rich who inhabit these stories - a man who fired his brother from the family business, only to have him commit suicide; a soused widow who preys on the pity of the customers who frequent the posh restaurant established by his wife's fortune - have little self-worth and, despite their bursting bank accounts, not much stability or courage. Almost all resent their self-absorbed parents. "I used to imagine Dad had a timer on his shoulder," one character says. "I had sixty seconds to say what I wanted before I lost his attention."

Patterson gives us a John Wayne, but he bears no relation to his real-life prototype; perhaps, in gentle mockery of the Duke, who plowed Newport Bay in his yacht, the cowboy who appears in these pages is a homeless skateboarder suffering from brain damage. Thus, "Drift" is a portrayal of the American Dream as hangover.

The prose is so accomplished, so effortlessly nuanced and suggestive, that more than once I had to check Patterson's bio to make sure this was her first book. (It is.)

Read more

From The Los Angeles Times

The female characters in this debut collection inhabit some of the more disorienting landscapes in Southern California -- Newport Beach and environs. Waitresses, single mothers, teenagers -- their bodies are often described in the language of Cubism: planes and angles and unreliable, shifting surfaces. The proportions of things, from utensils to emotions, often fail to fit the environment -- the hallways and beaches and temporary living spaces meant to contain Victoria Patterson's characters. Light glows in their blond hair as though it is trapped; sexuality and cannibalism are discussed in tandem; punishments and guilt often come long after the character's transgressions. Things are out of sync, making these stories infinitely disturbing. What happened to childhood? Is numbness the most a girl can hope for? "She wonders how she will function this day, the next, and all the days that follow." Even wondering, in this memorable collection, is a form of prayer.

- Susan Salter Reynolds

Starred review from Publisher’s Weekly

Patterson illustrates how deceiving initial impressions can be in her dark debut, a collection of 13 interconnected stories. At first glance, the characters seem to be blessed, living in tony Newport Beach, Calif., but Patterson quickly scrapes off the glitter, examining the complicated lives of Rosie, a confused teenage girl; John Wayne, a brain-damaged, homeless stoner; Anne, a lesbian psychologist in love with Rosie's mother; Melody, a trophy wife cheating on her husband, Henry Wilson, who has a secret of his own; and Joe/Christina, a transvestite. The majority of the stories feature Rosie, a nerdy teenager whose attempts to make sense of her life lead her down increasingly self-destructive paths, though she remains touchingly aware of others' suffering. In “Winter Formal: A Night of Magic,” Rosie and a seemingly perfect blonde princess have a nightmare evening; in “The First and Second Time,” Rosie violently loses her virginity. Later, in “Joe/Christina,” Rosie, now an alcoholic community college student, finds an unlikely savior in the local transvestite. Patterson's unflinching account of the seedy side of a real-life Xanadu is frightening, immersive and wonderfully realized. (June)
You can read more about the book on Victoria's Website

Edward P. Jones

2010-01-17T08:44:00.000-08:00

Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize, The Known World centers on a black slave owner, Henry Townsend, but instead of flushing out only one man's story, the novel zeros in on several unique narrative vantage points formerly "unknown" in literature, and history. With his careful weave of narrative, place and time, Jones illuminates the many dimensions and complexities that existed in the antebellum South.

An excellent interview with Jones on the Harper Collins website offers us a peek inside the head of this brilliant writer. Not only does the interview reveal the seeds of inspiration for the book, but also offers insights into the novel’s unique form.

There is a touch of the supernatural in events [in the novel]. How do you explain these incidents in the larger scope of your novel?

I was raised among a people who believe that if a person is killed on a city street, the blood of that person will show up on that spot every time it rains. Even years and years later. I was raised to believe that one's hair should be taken from combs and brushes and burned (my mother did it in an ashtray) because the hair could somehow get out into the world where birds could find it, make a nest of the hair, and give the person headaches. Those people believed you shouldn't rest your hands on the top of your head because it will shorten your mother's life.
Given all that, it's easy to create a situation where lightning runs away from a man because the lightning doesn't think it's time for the man to die. The cow with all the milk came from hearing law school friends talk in the 1970s about a court case where a man sued his neighbor to get back a cow he had sold him after the cow began producing milk again. So the supernatural events are just another way of telling the story by someone who grew up thinking the universe did weird things all the time.

Your account of antebellum Manchester County, Virginia, is by no means linear; you weave different strands of the story together and return to them at various phases of the novel. Why did you choose this format for your book?

I always thought I had a linear story. Something happened between the time I began the real work in January 2002 of taking it all out of my head and when I finished months later. It might be that because I, as the "god" of the people in the book, could see their first days and their last days and all that was in between, and those people did not have linear lives as I saw all that they had lived. What Tessie the child did one day in 1855 would have some meaning for her 50, 75 years later. She might not be able to look back and see that moment, but her creator could. That, perhaps, is why she says something about the doll her father made for her to Caldonia and Fern in September 1855 that she will repeat on her deathbed, some 90 years later; she might not even remember the first time she uttered those words, but I can't afford to forget if I'm trying to tell the truth.

Women in The Known World wield roles of extraordinary power, whether assuming the typically male responsibilities of the plantation like Caldonia Townsend; educating the illiterate like Fern Elston; inspiring violence, passion, and grief, like Celeste and Minerva; or creating art that transcends the brutal realities of slavery, like Alice Night. How important was it to you to give voice to women's experiences of slavery in this work?

I didn't set out with any agenda. When you are raised by a woman who had it hard and you are sensitive to how hard a life she had, you don't necessarily look around and think of women as fragile creatures, whether slave or otherwise. You develop the belief that they can "make a way out of no way." The hardy women of today had predecessors, I'm sure. It would have been insane for me, of course, to write a novel about a black woman who was president of the U.S. in 1855, or even a senator. But a black woman who becomes the head of a plantation due to the premature death of her husband who was helped along the way by the wealthiest white man in the county, that is believable. It is also believable that Fern Elston could make part of her living by teaching free black children; there were educated black women back then, and not all of them would choose to stay in the shadows, especially one with Fern's temperament. And no doubt there had to be people like Celeste who tried in their small way to fight something they were forced to live under; perhaps she, of them all, understood how Moses got to be that way: He was not born hating the world, she would have said. And I suppose Alice would have said that as well, had she not been so focused on escaping alone.

All Aunt Hagar’s Children

New York Times Bestseller and Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, Jones's latest collection includes five stories that were first published in the New Yorker. If you are an admirer of the short story, you will be stunned by the fine art displayed here.

Lost In The City

Lost In The City was a National Book Award Finalist and won the PEN/Hemingway Award—not bad for a first publication. Set in Washington D.C., this collection of short stories delves into the lives and communities occupying the space outside the spotlight in the nation’s capitol. Here again, Jones reveals the emotional epicenter of humanity.

You can also read The First Day, published in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories. It is one of those stories that you read and reflect on and reread and reflect on again.

Lucille Clifton

2010-01-15T10:00:00.001-08:00

My heart is sad for the Haitians. Sometimes only poets can speak for us in times like these...
Here are a couple of stanzas from our beloved Lucille Clifton:

prayer

lighten up

why is your hand
so heavy
on just poor
me?

answer

this is the stuff i made the heroes
out of
all the saints
and prophets and things
had to come by
this

new bones

we will wear
new bones again.
we will leave
these rainy days.
break out through
another mouth
into sun and honey time.
worlds buzz over us like bees,
we be splendid in new bones.
other people think they know
how long life is
how strong life is
we know.

(Excerpted from Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir)

Alice Sebold

2010-01-06T10:02:00.000-08:00

Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones will open in theaters on January 15th. Directed by Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings and King Kong) and co-written by Fran Walsh (Jackson's wife and co-producer) and Phillipa Boyens, the film adaptation features A-List stars, including Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci and Susan Sarandon. I'd highly recommend reading the book before seeing the movie. The book has so many subtle layers that it will be interesting to examine how its depth is transferred to the big screen. In an interview with The Daily Record Jackson agrees that despite his extensive film experience, The Lovely Bones was not an easy novel to adapt. "It's an incredible book that hits you emotionally when you read it, but it isn't structured as a film," he states, "it was a challenge figuring out how to reorganize the events to make them more film-friendly. It really was the hardest thing we've done in our lives." Click here to read The Daily Record article.

I agree with Jackson that The Lovely Bones is an "incredible" book and I'm very much looking forward to comparing the book with the film version. In fact, The Lovely Bones would make a great choice for a book club. Wow! What a great idea. I'm going to suggest a book club/movie combo night to my book club right now...

Here's my brief description of the book that you are more than welcome to copy and send to your fellow book clubbers:

Susie Salmon disappears on December 6, 1973, but instead of leaving the reader to wonder about her whereabouts, Susie's thoughts haunt the pages of the book, fading in and out as her family survives the horrific aftermath of her murder. Susie's presence offers a birds-eye-view of a family coping with unspeakable loss while at the same time conveys the eeriness of a young girl able to view her own murderer. Surprisingly reassuring, Susie's narrative offers a glimpse into the possibility of afterlife rarely found in modern literature.

“If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vacuum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling,” she said, “you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth.”

"This seemed impossible to me.”

But more than rumination over a tragic death, this novel explores the internal drives that fuel relationships, family and sex, in all of their destructive and desultory capacities. Despite its quiet insistence on Heaven, the story centers on the fallibilities that make up life on Earth.

Lucky
Alice Sebold’s memoir shares her experience of surviving rape. The book spent 22 weeks on the Times paperback Bestseller list.

And Alice's latest novel...
The Almost Moon

Sandra Scofield

2009-12-29T10:05:00.000-08:00

Publishing seven widely acclaimed novels is a feat in itself, but Sandra Scofield’s accomplishment is accentuated by the fact that she did not begin to write novels until she was 40-years-old. Since her first publication in 1988 (Gringa),which won the New American Writing Award, Sandra has been a finalist for the National Book Award and received the American Book Award (Beyond Deserving). Her work has also repeatedly appeared on the NYT’s New and Notable lists.

In 2005, Sandra decided to try her hand at writing a memoir.

Here is what she has to say about making the switch:

Q: You found writing memoir to be quite different, then, from writing fiction?

A: Much more than I ever imagined! It’s much harder to impose order. You think, well, I’ve got all this “material,” I won’t have to invent. What you forget is that invention has many faces. First of all, memories are fallible and fragmentary and they float in pictures more than in story, so you do have to invent, in the sense that you have to find a way to put things together coherently. But you don’t know how to put them together if you don’t know what they mean. You have to figure out what the images are telling you; how they connect to events. I kept seeing this picture of myself on a bus in October 1958, running away from the nuns in Fort Worth to go back to my mother in Odessa. I knew it was significant, though that particular image never appears in the book. What it told me was that my desperation to return to her was part of the sinew of my story: She had been declining, I was losing her, because I wasn’t with her. That gave me the key to seeing my whole childhood. I thought I was my mother’s prop.

Secondly, in memoir you’re stuck with a story your history gives you. You don’t have the license to invent in the old, fictional way: you can’t leap to making up things to fill the holes or change the shape of an event. You don’t alter chronology to make a dramatic arc tighter. At least I don’t think you do. What you do instead is dig deeper, into whatever artifacts you have, or you go to the library, or you just confess that you are making a best guess. Readers accept that. I think it makes them trust you. And it teaches you new ways to fashion a story.

To read more of this interview click here to visit Sandra's website.

Becoming Catholic was one of my mother’s notions. A “notion” set her apart from her hard-working kin; it was an impulse that sprang from eccentricity, a torque in her self-perception. She didn’t seem to know who she was.” —Occasions of Sin

“Scofield makes vivid the repressive 1950s, especially for Catholics, specifically for women...a deeply reflective and heartrending account conveying all that is lost when a child loses her mother.” —Booklist

Sandra is a regular Staff Member at the Community of Writers and she also teaches in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

Her craft book gets at the heart of one of the most challenging aspects of writing fiction:

I found all of her seven novels on the AbeBooks website

Richard Ford

2009-12-21T16:32:00.000-08:00

Rumor has it that Richard Ford threw the final Galley of his latest novel in the fire one week before it was due back to the publisher. The unidentified, unverifiable source (yes, this is pure insider gossip) claimed that Richard said:

This is too much damn work! This is the last fucking novel I will ever write!

Or something to that effect.

Anyone who has ever written a novel would certainly agree with Richard, no doubt. But the idea that Richard Ford—a Pulitzer Prize, Pen/Faulkner Award winning author whose work has been translated into 16 languages—still thinks that it is hard to write a good novel, well, that’s just absolutely terrifying.

The Lay of the Land is the manuscript Richard threw into the fire that night. It was also a NYT Book Review Best Book of the Year, but even more telling is the fact that you can give this 485-page book to a man who doesn’t read fiction and he will read it all the way to the end in less than 48 hours (I do have a verifiable source for this fact).

Simply put: The Lay of the Land is a really good read.

And so are his other books
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The Pulitzer Prize Winner:

This book will be Reissued in January 2010. It's about infidelity and golf...hmmm that sounds familiar:

And his first novel:

Richard has also won the PEN/Malamud Award for his short fiction:

This is a great collection put together by Richard...

Louis B. Jones

2009-12-19T07:49:00.000-08:00

If you are old enough to feel nostalgic over the wheat field that's now a Kentucky Fried Chicken or the old Victorian on the corner that's now a strip mall, then you'll understand the underlining of this novel.

But more than about what's physically gone, California's Over ruminates over emotional change—the kind of growing up angst that we all encounter when the shadow that we have formerly occupied shifts, and we are revealed. The greatness of this book is found in it's ability to tackle this nostalgia satirically. "Having James Farmican for a father was like inheriting a fortune in Confederate currency," Peter, an aspiring writer, complains about his deceased father, a renowned Berkeley Poet.

From the Book Jacket:

California's Over leads us down an unmarked road to the coast and then deep into the rotten, labyrinthine house where James Farmican, the famous poet, shot himself to death years ago, leaving behind a legacy of adulation and bankruptcy. Now his family is leaving, and the young narrator — who calls himself Baelthon — has been hired to haul the furniture onto the lawn and sort through the attic and basement. But as Baelthon excavates, he also discovers layers of family mystery and comedy and cruelty, all of it piled too deeply for anyone to sort out: the unexplained disappearance of Farmican's ashes, the unfinished novel that may actually be his suicide note, the opera about cannibalism that his son is writing to rescue himself from obscurity, and, finally, the family's migration to the Nevada desert to claim their inheritance.

And Baelthon discovers Wendy, Farmican's sixteen-year-old daughter, who keeps her checkers pieces taped to the board where she and her father left them before he died. Emerging from her chrysalis of baby fat and self-loathing, Wendy is destined to be both the love of Baelthon's life and the object of his betrayal.
Twenty-five years later, from the perspective of mid- and middle-class life, Baelthon recalls the mistaken selves he and the Farmicans once inhabited. What he doesn't expect — or think he deserves — is the redemption and abiding, against-all-odds love that await him.

“Louis B. Jones's third novel, ''California's Over,'' is a satirical elegy for the age of dime-store Zen, when the pop songs were all about watching clouds go by and pot's reputation for killing motivation was actually a selling point.”
— By Walter Kirn, New York Times

"In Louis B. Jones, as in no other writer working today, a sense of moral outrage, that rare thing, is yoked, oddly and with extraordinary power, to a thrilling gift for lyrical prose."
— Michael Chabon, author of Kavalier and Clay

"The people are so human and written with so original a cunning that they are virtually worlds in themselves."
— Richard Eder

"Louis B. Jones is a skillful satirist, who sees all, knows all, but who is never cruel."
— Newsweek

Because of their experience in worlds so different from our own, scientists often completely miss the 'norms' represented by modern life. I worked for a collection of Astronomers once, and let me tell you if they could write fiction, I'd read it just to get inside their heads. Luckily, Louis is brilliant enough to convey the wacky wisdom of a person who is accustomed to looking at the world through the lens of energy waves and particles. What makes this book so funny is the juxtaposition between two neighbors—one a physicist and the other a failed father and pizza shop owner—neither of whom are remotely close to 'normal.'

From the Book Jacket
Particles and Luck is the story of one night, two men, and an invisible third force that had brought these two men together. Mark Perdue and Roger Hoberman have nothing in common — except the joy of adjoining yards. Mark is a whiz-kid physicist who knows that the "genius" stature and the endowed chair at Berkeley that have been accorded him are bits of dumb luck. Roger is the owner of a pizza franchise whose luck has turned dumb — in financial and marital distress, he has been denied child-visitation rights but not babysitting obligations.

Roger and Mark have just been notified of a claim of adverse possession on their property, effective the next day. Particles and Luck is the story of the Halloween night they spend together trying to imagine how this threat will materialize. Camped out amidst pieces of Roger's Naugahyde furniture, warmed by a pile of Kingsford briquettes, marking boundary lines with Oakland Raiders pennants — this will be a night unlike any other night in contemporary fiction. Loony, humane, and transcendently wise, Particles and Luck is an irresistible comedy of manners and epistemology.

One experiences the characters with shifting feelings of tenderness and exasperation, hope and despair. Hilarious ... gracefully written...[Jones] has created a quirky but wholly real work in which to examine themes of fate and coincidence in a seemingly effortless manner."
— Chicago Tribune

"A lovely and invigorating novel...a domestic farce and social satire. Jones writes [an] engaging novelistic equivalent of a unified field theory -- in this case, a link between the human heart and the behavior of subatomic particles."
— Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times

"Jones is the real thing -- a writer with something to say and his own way of saying it."
— Scott Turow

"What a smart novel "Particle and Luck" is. How good of Louis B. Jones to remind us what a beautiful land -- a terra linda -- we live in, and to remind us of the beautiful universe beyond."
— Carolyn See, New York Times Book Review

Alan Cheuse

2009-12-18T09:20:00.000-08:00

Alan Cheuse is an all around literary aficionado. Whether commentating on NPR, editing anthologies, writing reviews or charting the “searing, tragic, heart-breaking and hilarious business of being alive” in his own widely acclaimed novels, Alan operates at the center of 21st Century literati. This year Alan was also selected, along with Pulitzer Winner Junot Diaz and (One of my Favorites) Jennifer Egan, to judge the 2009 National Book Award in Fiction. (2009 Winner: Colum McCann)

To Catch the Lightening, winner of the 2009 Grub Street National Book Prize in Fiction, is Alan's latest work of fiction. The book imagines the life of Edward Curtis, early American photographer, and his experiences capturing Native America tribes on film. “Bankrolled by J.P. Morgan, befriended by Teddy Roosevelt, and a towering figure in his own right, Curtis's epic work consumes his life.”
—From http://www.alancheuse.com/

“Four pages into the new Alan Cheuse novel and you'll know you're reading a Great American Novel. The Real Deal, not some publisher's-hyped product of the season. To Catch the Lightning is where you should plan on spending your lingering fall afternoons, watching the leaves turn.”
—Rick Kleffel, book reviewer and radio host on KUSP-FM Santa Cruz

Budget to tight for traveling this winter? Vicarious travel has been my latest favorite past time. Alan takes us on a journey where exotic terrain makes for a lovely backdrop for musings over culture, history and the human spirit. This personal exploration pushes the limits of "travel" writing and teaches us just how far we can go when we take the time to absorb more than scenery as we travel.

A Trance After Breakfast

Amy Tan

2009-12-17T12:51:00.000-08:00

There are some authors for whom no introduction is necessary. Amy Tan is one of those authors. Since her reputation proceeds her, I will proceed without adding further hoopla.

I will say that if you have a friend or relative who has read all of the Amy Tan books, or most of them anyway, then they will love reading about the connections between character and inspiration along with the story of the author's life in Amy's Memoir, The Opposite of Fate.

For those who have not yet experienced this master story teller, I suggest starting with the Joy Luck Club and continuing right on through her collection.

And for the little ones...

NYT Best Books

2009-12-10T16:35:00.000-08:00

Guess which one of our past participants just made the Top of the List of NYT Best Books for 2009?

Congratulations Maile Meloy on this huge accomplishment!

Check out the official list in print on December 13.

BOTH WAYS IS THE ONLY WAY I WANT IT
By Maile Meloy

"In an exceptionally strong year for short fiction, Meloy’s concise yet fine-grained narratives, whether set in Montana, an East Coast boarding school or a 1970s nuclear power plant, shout out with quiet restraint and calm precision. Her flawed characters — ranch hands in love, fathers and daughters — rarely act in their own best interests and often betray those closest to them."
—NYT Editors

Scroll down to October 14th to see a complete listing of Maile's books.

Anthony Swofford

2009-12-02T19:22:00.001-08:00

War has been on my mind lately as I grapple with the concept of President Obama's recent decision on Afghanistan. At least the tendency to glamorize, sensationalize, patronize and otherwise glorify the notion of war, and what it really means, has passed. "Grim" seemed to be the media preferred description of the President's announcement. How shockingly appropriate.

Anthony Swofford may have written Jarhead in another era, but his account also departs from the flag waving 'Rambo' action and adventure style standard. Swofford offers us an entirely different perspective of war, one well worth reflecting on as we send off another 30,000 troops.

We have no real way of guessing which contemporary authors will survive the test of time and be placed on the reading lists of the future, but one good indication of your chances of obtaining legendary status is getting picked up by the esteemed faculty in the world of University academia. Chances are you have a few decades of readers to look forward to if these Literary aficionados catch on to your best qualities. Anthony Swofford is one of those authors. Stacey Peeples, University of North Carolina, and Geoffrey Wright, Stamford University, both wrote articles on teaching Jarhead in last month's edition of the PMLA (the English Department’s Bible) promising a renewed interest by scholars and students alike—and providing a real testament to Swofford’s great accomplishments in the realm of war literature.

Signed Copies

I don’t have many signed copies of books mainly because when you work in the bookstore you facilitate the signing and you witness all that infectious enthusiasm oozing from the authors and the fans and it’s all so lovely—every moment a Kodak moment— [no really!]— all that love and exuberance for the art and form and greatness and mutual adoration for the mysteriously powerful world we call ‘literary,’ but at the end of the long night, after the lights fade and the folding chairs are all stacked in the corner, when the author is bleary eyed, and only the most steadfast volunteers and weariest staff remain, when it comes to this time—the time to ask for the autograph—you just feel like a real dolt. You know what I mean? How can you ask for one more term of endearment, one more authentic note from an already worn out, over used slogan?

You can’t.

So why did I ask Anthony Swofford? Well, it’s not every day you meet an ex-Marine number one, especially when you live in Santa Cruz. I think they have unfriendly signs posted at the county line or something, I’m not sure, but I do know a military man is as rare a sighting as a mountain lion around here. You know they exist, but they prefer to remain anonymous. Of course, I loved his books—that's a given. I think the main reason I asked is because Anthony Swofford and I had something important in common—no not the fact that both of our books topped the Bestseller Lists for months prompting an “International Sensation” media declaration, only Anthony holds this distinction. And no it wasn’t the fact that both of our books were made in to movies featuring A-list stars—Anthony again.

Okay, I’ll tell you. It was the year 1998 and Anthony Swofford and I were both Squaw Valley Community of Writer’s work waiver participants! Isn’t that exciting? Anthony reflected on this fact as I rung up his books in the store one night after his reading. He was even kind enough to say, “Oh, yah, I think I do remember you.”

Uh huh, right.

I remember. His job was to take out the garbage, which doesn't sound too exciting, but he said the chore did lead to a close encounter with a black bear. "That was fun," he said. My job was to distribute supplies like toilet paper and soap, which led to encounters with bathrooms. "Not so fun," I told him. "Yah," he agreed.

There never seems like an appropriate time to ask, so I seized this awkward moment to segue into the familiar question: By the way, can I get you to sign my book for me?

I still felt like a dolt, but it was worth it. I will forever cherish my Anthony Swofford signed copy of Jarhead.

Anne Lamott

2009-11-21T08:55:00.000-08:00

I had the privilege of sitting in on a Reading class at West Valley Community College last month. Students were asked to bring a novel of their choice into the classroom.

Guess which one of our authors wins 'Most Popular'?

Answer: Anne Lamott

I was not surprised by Anne Lamott’s popularity. In person, Anne is as insightful, funny and as strikingly bold as she is on the page. Her habit is to explore terrain others shy away from: Alcoholism, God, Failure, Writing, Death and Parenting. Anne’s voice is real and loving and funny and wise and fearless. Her self-deprecating humor sweeps you up and carries you through all of these subjects so that by the time you finish the book you feel fundamentally reassured. Anne helps us pat ourselves on the back. She tells us things like it’s okay not to be perfect. In fact, she convinces us that perfection is down right lame.

Not only are Anne’s books a favorite choice among students, but Bird By Bird is also a class favorite for Writing Instructors. Just as dreadlocks are not typical hair fashion in academia, neither is honesty about how hard it is to write. Reading Anne Lamott in English classes charts a course for instructors to cut through the bullshit and get the real story. I don’t have any research to back this up, but that is not going to stop me from making the claim that: Anne’s essay “Shitty First Drafts” from Bird By Bird is probably one of the most widely used essays in first-year composition classrooms.

“For me and most other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts,” Anne writes.

I can relate to this right now...hmmm. Maybe it's time for a rewrite....

Look for Anne's next book in April 2010...

Critical Mass

2009-11-21T08:46:00.001-08:00

I must confess: I am a perpetual graduate student. Now for the apology: I am so sorry to have neglected the SVCW blog in recent weeks. Three weeks feels like an eon in a virtual world!

The definition of Critical Mass: The amount of matter needed to generate sufficient gravitational force to halt the current expansion of the universe.

Thankfully, my universe is back in the expansion mode.

The good news is that I have had several encounters with our esteemed SVCW authors in academia, so I have much to report. My next few entries will feature SVCW Authors whose writing regularly stars in University English classrooms.

First and foremost, I want to emphasize that earning a place of honor in English Departments across the country is no small feat. I attended the Modern Language Association last year and let me just say: These people are obsessed with good writing. You could never imagine how they can carry on, and on, and on about literary minutia. I kid you not— it was astounding to me how many people can kill a whole day talking about things like “Phenomenology of Aesthetic Judgment,” whatever the hell that means. My personal favorite was the seminar about “Phallic Mothers, Raging Sons and Wounded Bodies.” You gotta give ‘em credit for a title like that.

Not only was I impressed by the number of syllables these people can string together, but their fashion sense— Wow! The Eyewear Collection modeled behind the podium begs for a feature in the NYT Fashion pages. Who knew it was possible? Let’s face it—English teachers ain't known for their snappy outfits—but these MLA folks got style.

Oh right, this is a book blog. Allow me to re-adjust my designer bifocals...
Up next: Anne Lamott, Anthony Swofford and Amy Tan

More Good Advice...

2009-10-30T13:44:00.000-07:00

Need some inspiration for your weekend writing habit? Listen to this year's Whiting Award Recipient talk about the "big picture."

Michael Chabon

2009-10-18T09:02:00.000-07:00

Question: Who made both the Sunday New York Times and the Fashion and Style page of the New York Times in the same week?
Answer: Michael Chabon.
Enough said.

"Michael Chabon is not an author I want to think less of. He is the great and gifted man behind the expansive and inventive novels “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” and “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” So it’s a relief to say that “Manhood for Amateurs” isn’t really Dad Lit, at least not in the Xtreme sense that its user’s-manual-like handle indicates. While it bears some of the hallmarks of the genre — there’s unbridled bris talk, some scenes from the sex life and the altogether gratuitous announcement “I have a rudimentary third nipple” (Why, Mike, why?) — the book is a closer relation to Joan Didion’s “White Album.” That is to say, it’s not a chronicle, but rather a vaguely themed collection of thoughtful first-person essays (most, in this case, originally published in Details magazine) that capture a certain time and mood. The theme: maleness in its various states — boyhood, manhood, fatherhood, brotherhood. The time: now, juxtaposed frequently with Chabon’s 1970s childhood. The mood: wistful.
The wistfulness creeps up. On the surface, this is a lighthearted collection, rife with Chabonian fun and mischief; who else would take down Hanukkah as an “example of voluntary group self-deception,” a second-tier holiday “elevated beyond its station”?
But cumulatively, these essays impart a sad feeling of something irretrievably lost, a sense that “The Wilderness of Childhood” — to use the title of a particularly lovely piece — has been robbed of much of its romance and mystery by the current parenting regime. “The sandlots and creek beds,” Chabon writes, “the alleys and woodlands have been abandoned in favor of a system of reservations — Chuck E. Cheese, the Jungle, the Discovery Zone: jolly internment centers mapped and planned by adults with no blank spots aside from doors marked Staff Only.”
This wilderness, vanishing as alarmingly fast as the Amazonian rain forest, is not a literal one but simply any place where kids can unmediatedly be kids, without the requisite caregiver security details and OSHA-compliant play spaces. Chabon argues that books like “The Hobbit” and “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” captivated young readers like himself not because they came off as wildly transporting works of imagination, but because they seemed faithful to kid life as his and previous generations knew it. “Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger and sometimes calamity,” he writes. Done right, it is a journey undertaken with only a “fragmentary map” constructed “out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children."
—David Kamp (Excerpted from the October 15, 2009, Sunday Book Review, New York Times)
Click here to read the rest of the Review

And From the New York Times Fashion and Style Section:
Parents Burning To Write It All Down
By Malia Wollan

Published: October 16, 2009 Berkeley, Calif. — Days before the missing “balloon boy” saturated cable news channels, the novelist Michael Chabon and his wife, Ayelet Waldman, were having a lighthearted argument. He wanted to host his son’s bar mitzvah in a blimp hovering high above the San Francisco Bay.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

“It’s not happening,” she said, having no desire to float in a helium airship nor remain alone and grounded while her husband and four children took flight.
The commingling of the fanciful and the mundane is a house specialty in this picturesque Arts and Crafts bungalow in Berkeley with Barack Obama signs still staked in the yard. The literary duo’s primary assignment here — he a Pulitzer winning novelist, she a Harvard educated former lawyer and best-selling writer — is raising their children, Sophie, 14; Zeke, 12; Rosie, 8; and Abe, 6.
Read the rest...

Darwinian Writing Advice

2009-10-16T07:14:00.000-07:00

Have you checked out Mediabistro? Here is a snippet from an interview with James Ellroy answering a question posed by Mediabistro Editor Jason Boog: What will happen to writers as the publishing recession continues?

Maile Meloy (Past Participant)

2009-10-14T21:44:00.000-07:00

My first year working for the Hall family, I was in charge of the Housing, which feels a lot like putting together a giant human jigsaw puzzle.

Of the many names that I plotted and replotted into this room and then that room—I distinctly remember the name Maile Meloy. I didn't know her then. This was way back in the late 90s, several years prior to her short stories being published in the New Yorker and the Paris Review and the publication of her widely acclaimed debut story collection Half In Love in 2002. Meloy has been busy ever since. She backed up her short story success by writing two interrelated novels Liars and Saints in 2003 and A Family Daughter in 2006.

I have no idea what relevance my memory of Maile's name has, but in my quiet non-acclaimed life this detail still resonates. By placing Maile Meloy in a large master suite with a view way back then, maybe the muse will look kindly upon me for my consideration and care of such a great (and at the time still undiscovered) artist. The problem is, I'm not sure I placed her in a master suite. I certainly hope I didn't put her in a bunk bed.

In Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It, Meloy returns to the short story form and rave reviews in 2009.

LA Times Reviewer Scott Martelle writes, " The strength of Meloy's stories lies in their touch of the familiar. She moves among sibling rivalry and adultery (several times), but also writes about a young woman's murder and her father's drive to learn the details, which become knives to his heart. Another story details a grandmother's drop-in visit to her grandson -- who believed the woman had died long ago. The stories share a rootedness, a sense that these could be real. And as in real life, sometimes endings are beginnings, certitude becomes tenuous and ambition can, on the cusp of attainment, turn out to be whim."

Curtis Sittenfield, New York Times, writes, "Meloy's prose is so clear, calm and intelligent that [her character's irrational] behavior becomes eminently understandable....Meloy is such a talented and unpredictable writer that I'm officially joining her fan club..."

I'm another official member of the Maile Meloy fan club.

Visit Maile's Website for a great compilation of reviews on all of her work and while you are there check out the FAQ section where you will find interesting tidbits like this one:

2)What advice do you have for writers who have trouble focusing?

Set aside time to write, even if it’s only an hour or two a day, and think of the time as the requirement. So you just have to be there, and it doesn’t matter what you finish. I think it takes the pressure off the individual story or chapter, and you’ll end up working on the ideas that seem most promising. I start many, many stories and abandon most of them, but eventually some pay off.

Sands Hall

2009-10-13T15:25:00.000-07:00

“Catching Heaven is a rich and vibrant novel that captures the ever-changing landscape of family and those who define it.”
—Ballantine Books, Reader’s Circle

Have you ever felt like no matter how hard you work, the pay off isn’t nearly as glamorous or lucrative as you had once hoped? Has an ex-lover ever made you feel annoyed and attracted at the same time? Have you ever wondered what it feels like to come from an “ordinary” family because the one you have just doesn’t fit the mold?

Then you will love Sands Hall’s debut novel, Catching Heaven, as much as I did.

When forty-something Maud Maxwell rejoins her younger sister, Lizzie, in Marengo, New Mexico, she exchanges her stalled Hollywood acting career and spineless boyfriend, for a job playing the piano at the Red Garter in small town USA.

Like most sisters, these two each have reasons to be envious of each other: Maud longs for the bond Lizzie shares with her children and Maud’s freedom to pursue acting reminds Lizzie of her own shelved dreams. Lizzie, a painter, once hoped to make art in Paris, but instead supports her three children by working for a greeting card company.

New York Times Reviewer Kimberly Marlowe writes, “Sands Hall's first novel deftly reveals the push and pull between two sisters who love each other dearly, but who face new tensions when their lives collide in midcourse.”

These tensions are complicated when handsome Jake Arbole, the father of one of Lizzie’s children, returns to Marengo. Jake and Maud’s friendship prompts an uncomfortable reckoning between the sisters that captures the essence of family, but also sheds light on the inevitable heartbreak that accompanies individual hopes and dreams.

Added to this mix is a whole cast of quirky characters who interact so naturally in this small town setting that when the book was over I was sad to leave Lizzie and Maud and I was also sad to leave Marengo. In looking back, I realize now that Catching Heaven not only conveyed the community of a small town, but also brought me inside the open door of the Maxwell family—an extended, openly flawed, and truly loving family— which was a comforting place to be. Catching Heaven is a book that will come back to time and time again.

SANDS HALL has recently published stories in the Iowa Review and Green Mountains Review. Her work as a playwright includes a stage adaptation of Alcott’s Little Women and the comic drama Fair Use. She is also the author of a book of writing essays and exercises, Tools of the Writer’s Craft, and has an essay in the anthology Writers Workshop in a Book. Sands is currently Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Please visit: www.sandshall.com

Dorothy Allison

2009-09-25T16:41:00.000-07:00

Dorothy Allison gave such a rousing talk, What We Know That We Do Not Know, on the opening day of the craft talks that we immediately sold out of all but a few copies of her books. By the time she appeared on the Narrative Voice panel the next day, we were completely sold out.

Something about the pitch and drawl of her booming voice combined with the raw emotion of her writing resonated deeply with participants. In fact, her talk packed such an emotional wallop about what it means to be a writer that more than a few people sought refuge in the bookstore afterward. Together we tried to regain our composure by quietly thumbing through the paper backs. Sometimes I feel like Squaw is the only place in the world where I'm going to hear people talking about what it really feels like, deep inside, to be a writer, and that's exactly what Dorothy was able to convey. Dorothy is a powerful woman, a powerful speaker and a powerful writer.
>

Robin Romm (Past Participant)

2009-09-24T09:54:00.000-07:00

I am a huge fan of Robin Romm, but I have yet to read her latest gem. If you have read The Mercy Papers, let me know what you think.

Here is what LEAH HAGER COHEN, New York Times Reviewer, thinks...

From the Front Cover Sunday Book Review: January 2, 2009

Rough Crossing

Photo: Jillian Tamaki

The foundational condition of being human is that we’re going to die. Almost as basic a truth is that we seem incapable of believing it. The collision of these inconsonant facts is the spark that ignites Robin Romm’s memoir, “The Mercy Papers,” a furious blaze of a book. The title is inapt: there is little mercy in these pages. As Romm herself writes, “Maybe the problem is God, the lack of God, the lack of mercy, of grace.” Read the rest of the review

The Mother Garden, Robin Romm's debut, holds a place of honor on my bookshelf. I often describe this book as, "My favorite short story collection." (Okay, I'll admit I have a few favorites in this category)

Here is what NYT's Book Review Gregory Cowles has to say about The Mother Garden...
"Despite their confident, straightforward prose and their crystalline surface gloss, which recall Ann Beattie's early slice-of-life stories, Romm's narratives -- call them slice-of-death -- turn out to revel in ambiguities and even a gentle magic....But Romm is a close-up magician, more intimate and less instinctively fabulist, and most of her work leaves room for rational interpretation. No magic here, Romm seems to insist. But of course there is, and it's the oldest kind we know: the ordinary incantation of words and stories to help us navigate the darkness and finally -- for all that this impressive collection protests otherwise -- to hold the end at bay."
— Gregory Cowles
Read the rest of the New York Times Book Review

Here is a review I wrote about Weight, one of the stories featured in this linked collection...

When Your Mother is Dead and Your Father is an Asshole

What happens when forgiveness seems impossible? This is the ground explored in Robin Romm’s short story, Weight. Nested between No Small Feat and Celia’s Fish in Romm’s collection, The Mother Garden, Weight weaves together those moments when anger, remorse, distrust and fear give way to expose the vulnerability and hurt that is humanity.

Weight belongs to the half of the collection that does not depend on magical motifs to get the point across. By sticking to real world absurdities in six of her stories, Romm makes a point about our anything-goes-society. In Weight, Romm’s protagonist opts for a crash diet that involves being locked in “a dark space” while a loved one “berate[s]” her. Absurd? Yes. Impossible? No.

The Mother Garden’s mix of magical realism and morbid reality offers a soothing cadence for exploring the heavy topic of families coping with loss. Where less skillful writers might lose readers inside death’s house of horrors, The Mother Garden makes for a comfortable roost outside death’s door, a place where humor alternates with pain and the living peacefully coexist with the magical.

The titles within the collection are equally ripe with symbolism. Weight literally connects to obesity— a central theme in the story— beginning with the too tight skirt that triggers Lori’s reflection on her own mother’s weight gain. “The clothes she wore, once tailored to show off her narrow waist and long legs, turned to large T-shirts, elastic waist jeans.” Figuratively, the title alludes to the emotional burden Lori carries. “It’s your fault.” Lori thinks after her father leaves. “You drove him away.”

When the zipper tears from her skirt—the superficial armor protecting Lori from her past breaks loose— and the blame she places on her mother is revealed. “…to be fat was the worst fate imaginable, worse even than cancer because at least cancer earned you pity.”

Despite interwoven memories of Lori’s mother, the story centers on the father daughter relationship after the “unorthodox” diet leads to her estranged father. Who better to berate her, then the man who berated her own mother? Weight plumbs the emotional depths of damaged father daughter relationships much more than Lost and Found’s light-hearted sarcasm and the somber disconnect found in Celia’s Fish.

“We stared at each other, the way a deer and a coyote might stare at each other in a field,” Lori says, after her father’s attempt turns into a half-hearted warning that is more an atonement for his own actions than anything else. When Lori’s father finally admits that he made a mistake and never should have left, we too experience a jaw dropping moment as we struggle to identify the reasons behind his decision, and on whom to place the blame.

Ultimately, Weight captures three people in pain grappling with the deeply flawed reality of each other. “I hope someday you can forgive everyone,” Lori’s mother says before she dies. “Including yourself.” This story makes clear that sometimes forgiveness is only possible without the weight of right and wrong.

Dagoberto Gilb

2009-09-23T10:20:00.000-07:00

The Magic of Blood (1993) was first published not in New York, but in New Mexico, and, defying expectations, won the 1994 PEN/Hemingway Award, the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the PEN Faulkner Award. The book is now considered a classic not only of Chicano literature but of the American Southwest. It also created a populist stir among those interested in the virtually abandoned American working-class, and made Gilb a voice of labor and unionism, once even as a headliner alongside legendary folk singer Pete Seegar.
The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña (1994) has been compared more to European novels than American ones. An experimental novel in style and approach, Southwestern in landscape, its speech is both Chicano and ordinary, while its condensed language and composition disguises a deeply layered complexity. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, the novel is well-known to those from Los Angeles to New York who teach cross-cultural "border" issues, be they metaphorical or real.
Woodcuts of Women (2001) has been Gilb's most media celebrated book. A collection of stories about men obsessed with women, this collection overturns the idea that a man can't write stories about women that women will read, admire, and love themselves. Popular and with wide appeal, it is also serious; stories in this volume had been published in The Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, and Doubletake.

The Flowers
by Dagoberto Gilb
A 2008 San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

Published to rave reviews around the country, The Flowers is the latest novel from Dagoberto Gilb, winner of the PEN/ Hemingway Award for The Magic of Blood and most recently a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for his nonfiction collection, Gritos. Gilb, one of today’s most captivating and authentic fiction writers, is much admired for his compact style and socially brazen storytelling, and his fiction has been compared to Raymond Carver’s and Richard Wright’s. In The Flowers, Gilb has taken on the voice of a Chicano teenager looking at manhood. Sonny Bravo is a tender, smart Mexican American who has come to live at the Flowers, where he moved when his troubled and too beautiful mother Silvia remarried an Okie contractor named Cloyd Longpre. Sonny fills many days taking care of the building—sweeping the decks, taking out the trash, and entangling himself with the lives and stories of other tenants: Cindy, an eighteen-yearold druggie who is married and bored; Nica, a cloistered girl who cares for her infant brother; Bud, a muscled-up construction worker who hates blacks and Mexicans; and Pink, who sells used cars in front of the building. As Sonny observes a miniaturized world of prejudice at the Flowers, the neighborhood he lives in explodes with racial violence—and Sonny does what he can to save what’s good in his world. The Flowers is about rules that can be broken like wooden fences, and about the drive to find that which does not fall apart. Dagoberto Gilb, in his most commanding work yet, has written an inspiring novel about the want for love that transcends age, race, and time.

Book descriptions posted above are courtesy of Grove Atlantic Press website.

I read The Flowers last winter and from the first scene all the way to the end of the book Sonny is one of those characters who alternates between exhilarating you with his youthful, infectious energy for life and breaking your heart. He is a tough kid in a tough neighborhood, but Gilb manages to sweep away any stereotype one might bring with them into this reading and replace these notions with a concrete vision of humanity at its best—and worst. Sonny still resonates clearly in my mind as I reflect back on this brilliant novel, and along with the memory of Sonny comes a compassion and understanding that constitutes a void that I never knew I had until after I read this book. This is one of those important books that should be required reading for every American.

Mark Childress

2009-09-23T10:07:00.000-07:00

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARK!

Mark says: I am now precisely the same age as Abraham Lincoln when he took office. I am trusting that my next four years will be lots happier and more peaceful than Abe's, and that I can get through them on one-tenth his wisdom and brain power.

Here is an update from Mark: "Just to let my friends in New York City know, I'll be reading from my new novel on WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 7, at the Freerange Readings series with Jeffrey Gustavson, Claudia Cortese, Aldina Kennedy, and Claire Shefchik, at the Cornelia Street Cafe, 6 pm. Hope to see you there!"

Mark's books are listed on his previous blog posting. Check them out in the archive.

Janet Fitch

2009-09-23T09:58:00.000-07:00

Links for Janet Fitch

Listen to an audio interview with Janet and hear about Janet's call from Oprah, the "collective" experience of writing, suicide and more!

Live "Paint It Black" interview with Tony Du Shane, "Drinks with Tony" on Pirate Cat Radio, San Francisco -- http://www.drinkswithtony.com/janetfitch.html Janet was interviewed by Oprah for her new book "Paint It Black"...

Glen David Gold

2009-09-23T09:43:00.000-07:00

Glen David Gold's newest work, Sunnyside, was published in 2009 and gives us a brilliantly realized figure of Charlie Chaplin at its center. Described as “darkly comic” and “heartrending” the novel captures Chaplin’s enduring personality at a moment when American capitalism and war dominate the social and political landscape. Ron Charles of the Washington Post writes, “Most important, Gold has figured out how to make Chaplin strut and feint and dance in print. His depiction of him as a director -- ordering up sets and costumes and actors one minute, canceling them the next -- rings with all the music of the genius at work. In scenes of rich psychological acuity, Gold captures Chaplin's crippling depression, his sense of being constrained by his audience, his financiers and his own impossible standards, despite living at the center of "a tulipomania of appreciation." He is, as Gold says, "the physic of laughter who could never heal himself." Sunnyside was also featured in the New York Times Sunday Book Review in August 2009.
Gold's first novel, Carter Beats the Devil (Hyperion, 2001) was well received and also featured in The New York Times Review of Books. Carter Beats the Devil is a fictionalised biography of Charles Joseph Carter (1874-1936), an American illusionist performing from c.1900-1936. Gold is married to Alice Sebold, the author of The Lovely Bones and Lucky. The couple live in San Francisco, California.

Karen Joy Fowler

2009-09-23T09:28:00.000-07:00

Nominated for the Pen/Faulkner award and the author of five novels, including The Jane Austin Book Club, which was brought to life on the big screen in 2007, Karen Joy Fowler continually pleases her fans with captivating stories and surprising characters.

Her latest novel, Wit’s End, merges reality with our blog-laden version of reality just as it does mystery with literary fiction. “What strikes one first is the voice: robust, sly, witty, elegant, unexpected and never boring,” writes Margot Livesey in the The New York Times Book Review. “Here is a novelist who absolutely comprehends the pleasures of imagination and transformation.”

Fowler’s intriguing view of modern life allows us a glimpse into the writer’s creative world while subtly drawing parallels with our own ability, via the internet, to draw out our own conclusions—to concoct, or simplybelieve, whatever reality we find most convenient.

Rick Wartzman

2009-09-23T09:21:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles Times reporter and author, Rick Wartzman, artfully weaves the personal and the political in a book that tells the story of John Steinbeck during the era when Grapes of Wrath was the subject of a public book burning in California's Kern County in 1939. Despite winning the Pulitzer Prize, Steinbeck was suffering the strains of his collapsing first marriage, and his personal struggles are set against the larger story of a political and cultural climate that enabled rich local growers to orchestrate the banning of Steinbeck's masterpiece throughout California's Central Valley.

“The burning of The Grapes of Wrath wasn't that big of a deal in and of itself,” writes LA Times book reviewer Scott Martelle, “But it was a symbol of the times, exposing the passions and delusions of the era. And for Wartzman, it is an invitation to explore a formative event in the evolution of California and, indeed, of the nation as a whole.”

Rick Wartzman is Business Editor of the Los Angeles Times. Wartzman has been a writer and editor at The Wall Street Journal for nearly 15 years. He has covered the steel industry, aerospace, the national economy, Washington lobbying and the Clinton White House. His also the co-author, alongside Mark Arax, of The King Of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of A Secret American Empire.

Michael Jaime-Becerra

2009-09-19T21:22:00.000-07:00

Check out Michael Jaime-Becerra's new novel! This title will be released on February 16, 2010.

Michael's last collection of short stories sold out in three days at Squaw last summer.
"If you think southern California is a landscape you already know, think again, and then read Michael Jaime-Becerra. His stories are the ones people need to know, and his craftsmanship is impeccable."
-- Susan Straight, author of The Gettin Place and I've Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots

Michael Jayme is a native of El Monte, California. A graduate of UC Riverside's Creative Writing department, his early work was first collected in 1996 as Look Back and Laugh for the Chicano Chapbook Series, edited by Gary Soto. The following year he began publishing under the surname "Jaime-Becerra" and shortly thereafter, a limited-edition collection of prose poems, entitled The Estrellistas Off Peck Road , was released locally by Temporary Vandalism. He studied in the University of California, Irvine 's Master of Fine Arts in Fiction program, completing work toward his degree in 2001.

Lynn Freed

2009-09-16T15:13:00.000-07:00

Lynn Freed read a powerful story last summer at one of our evening performances. Participant Renee Thompson wanted to know when we would see the story in print.
“Sunshine” will be published in a crime anthology called The Dark End of the Street, by Bloomsbury, in May 2010, according to Lynn.
She says it might be in print sooner, though, and she will be sure to let us know when and where. Her latest novel, The Servants Quarters, was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review last May.
Her Memoir...

Like "Sunshine," the first story in this collection is thrillingly dark.

Here are two books that are only available used despite the fact that they were both widely acclaimed...

Janet Fitch

2009-09-13T12:30:00.000-07:00

Janet Fitch sent photos from Russia yesterday. She is in St. Petersburg researching her new novel!

We sold out of Paint It Black and White Oleander in the book store this summer...
BOOK REVIEW
Paint it Black

Excerpted From Publishers Weekly

Fitch follows her bestselling debut, White Oleander, by revisiting the insidious effects of a powerful, narcissistic mother on an only child. Michael Faraday is a Harvard dropout who paints in the L.A. art world of 1981; his suicide happens a few pages in, and sets the stage for a Fitch's masterful shifts in time and perspective. Josie Tyrell, an artist's model and denizen of the punk rock, had an intense relationship with Michael, but never managed to free him from his mother, renowned concert pianist Meredith Loewy, who moves in a bleak, loveless world of wealth and privilege. Yet their very different loves for Michael bring about a surprising alliance between the imperious Meredith and Josie, a white trash escapee whose inborn grace, style and sense of self sustain her—along with art, music and alcohol. The two find unexpected comfort in each other's shared loss, allowing Fitch to contrast the inner and outer resources of women whose lives couldn't be more different, and to flash back deeply into their histories. Fitch excels at painting a negative personality with sure-handed depth and fairness, and her prose penetrates the inner lives of the two with immediacy and bite. In Josie, she has created an indomitable young woman whose pluck and growing self-awareness beautifully offset Meredith's emptiness. Their relationship transforms a big cliché—the artist's suicide—into a page-turning psychodrama.
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Mark Childress

2009-09-13T12:02:00.000-07:00

Here is an update from Mark: "Just to let my friends in New York City know, I'll be reading from my new novel on WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 7, at the Freerange Readings series with Jeffrey Gustavson, Claudia Cortese, Aldina Kennedy, and Claire Shefchik, at the Cornelia Street Cafe, 6 pm. Hope to see you there!"

Jamie Ford (Past Participant)

2009-09-13T08:37:00.001-07:00

I talked with Jamie in the bookstore last summer and really enjoyed hearing his success story. Jamie told me that he was assigned to Squaw Valley Community of Writers Staff Member Andrew Tonkovich for his one-on-one consultation. Andrew told him to quit his job and finish the manuscript! Jamie eventually did quit his job and published Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet in 2009.
In an interview published on the Random House website, Jamie talks about how a button worn by his father after the bombing of Pearl Harbor drew him into his initial research:

"It really started with the “I am Chinese” button, which my father mentioned wearing as a kid. There was a bit of an identity crisis in the International District in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Many Chinese families feared for their safety, especially as the FBI was rounding up prominent members of the Japanese community." Jaime's research inspired his short story, "I am Chinese," which was accepted for publication by Glimmer Train. Jaime wrote another short story, based on his research on the Wa Mei Massacre, which was a mass shooting in the mid- ’80s at a backroom casino in Seattle's Chinatown, where his grandfather once worked. He says, "I was paging through some old news articles and there was an unrelated mention of the Panama Hotel about the owner finding the belongings of all these Japanese families. When I wrote Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, I dug further into that story and eventually contacted the hotel owner and flew out to Seattle. It was amazing and humbling to see what still remains to this day in that dank, dusty basement."
Jaime didn't know it then, but his journey to a Seattle basement would lead him to a debut novel.

Ron Carlson

2009-09-13T07:34:00.001-07:00

"If there is a smart man in your life who might still be tempted into the pleasures of contemporary literary fiction, "The Signal" could be just the gateway drug you're after"
—Ron Charles, Washington Post

In The Signal, Carlson tells the story of Mack who, after spending a few weeks in jail, convinces his soon to be ex-wife to go ahead with their annual trek into the wilderness. "He felt like a man washed up on the beach after trying to drown himself," Carlson writes.

Ron Carlson “writes like Hemingway without the misogyny and self-parody,” states Ron Charles in his Washington Post book Review. “Given the plot and these cleanly cut sentences, it's impossible not to think of Jake Barnes in "The Sun Also Rises," another fractured young man who retreated into the mountains to fish and pare his life down to a few deliberate routines.

Out of all the craft books on short stories I have read, this one provided me with the most practical nuts and bolts example of how to write a successful short story. The book takes us inside Ron Carlson's mind as he creates one of his stories. If you want to learn from a master storyteller, this is a great place to be! Carlson’s short stories have been published in Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker and Gentlemen’s Quarterly. Carlson also directs the UC Irvine MFA fiction writing program.