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....
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
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...
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?
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.
“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 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.
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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.
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.
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 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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 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...
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!"
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.
I have enjoyed putting together our little bookstore up in Squaw Valley over the past four years. We love our bookstore and it has been your support that makes it all possible, so Thank You!
I have received many requests for an online SVCW Bookstore. Some who miss us when they are away, and others who are just tired of lugging all those hardcovers around on airplanes. There are also those writers who are honest about being broke and needing to purchase books at Amazon's discounted prices. As fellow writers, we understand your pain!
For these reasons I thought it would be fun to try our hand at a SVCW Books and Authors blog. I will track down our authors and past participants and post their books, news, reviews and information and link our SVCW books to Amazon. Ten percent of every book purchased through our blog will help support the bookstore. I am looking forward to building an online archive of the outstanding collection of books represented by authors who frequent the Community of Writers.
Thanks for visiting our Community of Writers blog! Stacey Community of Writers Onsite Bookshop Manager
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. 
