Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2014 i The Writer

THE NIGHT I MET UP with novelist Glen Duncan, snow was pounding down in New York City. An eerie patina bathed the streets, and the chill was driving people indoors. The evening seemed less crowded than usual: a quick seat in the bar, instant table at the restaurant, fast service. I noticed these details because of Duncan’s book By Blood We Live. The book is about vampires and werewolves and lunatics (literally), and all of that had made its way into my forward imagination. Which means I was thinking about the book whenever I wasn’t reading the book. I found myself wondering: What if? That heightened sensibility comes with reading certain books. Certainly, Stephen King and Tom Robbins (featured in this issue). But also Toni Morrison. Jess Walter. Jane Austen.…

If you’re interested in early publication, some Internet searching will likely turn up the title you need. In the interest of going straight to the source, I like to start with an author’s official webpage. There’s usually a list of publications. If the publication dates aren’t included, do a quick search at a website that sells books. The publication date should be listed in the product details. If you’re interested in looking at work that hasn’t been published or collected into a book, the search becomes trickier (and perhaps more of an adventure). You might investigate whether the writers’ archived materials are housed in a library. For example, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin houses the archive of author David Foster Wallace. The archive includes…

PILLOW Catch a quick power nap between chapters with this pillow adorned with well-loved book spines such as Charles Bukowski’s Women, Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The stylish pillow, designed by photographer Cassia Beck, is sewn by hand and individually cut, and comes with a faux down insert. Starts at $27. society6.com KEYBOARD Wrists stay limber and ready for action with this ergonomic keyboard. Kinesis’ Freestyle2 design with a zero degree slope splits the keyboard in two for optimal flexibility and reduced wrist extension. The compact design is perfect for office or travel. Available for Mac and PCs. Starts at $99. kinesis-ergo.com COFFEE MUG Fuel the writing binge even on bleary-eyed summer nights. This coffee mug from Etsy designer LennyMud offers a typewritten reminder to tackle…

Apparently, I’d forgotten how to write. I was a novice news reporter with an uncommon education. After three years of law school plus another in the legal trenches, I’d ditched the law firm freeway for journalism’s bumpy road. The way I’d figured it, I’d rather illuminate than litigate. But as I pounded out paragraphs, my editor glowered. Where I saw verse, he saw verbiage. “Jack,” he said, “lose the legalese.” Ivory towers are claustrophobic. In the prime of my 20s, I’d spent most of 33 months reading little except arguments and opinions of mostly white, male, privileged judges and attorneys. Case law was technical, dense, verbose and humorless. To pass a class, much less the bar exam, I copied the cadence, vocabulary and style of jurists whose writing rhythms remained…

GLEN DUNCAN CAUGHT ME BY SURPRISE. I’m not typically drawn to the popular genres of vampire and werewolf fiction. But By Blood We Live sucked me in. Here’s the first line: “It’s better to kill people at the end of their psychology. They have nothing left to offer themselves or the world.” That’s Remshi, the (I imagine) irresistibly handsome 20,000-year-old vampire of this love story that mates him (kind of) with Talulla, his ancient werewolf lover. The plot gets complicated with all the neck bitings and blood feedings and family life, but the narrative is solid. And yes, you read that right. Family life. Duncan puts these supernatural beings in pedestrian settings of the home with the same kinds of worries about children, dinner and medical problems that the rest…

ROBBINS’ REDUX: 9 QUOTABLE QUOTES “We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.” “A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.” “There is no such thing as a weird human being. It’s just that some people require more understanding than others.” “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” “The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.” “There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.” “As a child,…

Phillip Margolin, an attorney turned novelist, has published nearly 20 best-selling legal thrillers since 1994. Yet before he began his career, he suffered from a crippling case of “non-writer’s block,” a disease that he says “keeps many potential writers from taking the step from having an idea to writing it.” It’s an insecurity that many aspiring writers are familiar with: the fear of writing, often caused by the fear of failure. In his article, “How to Deal with Non-writer’s Block,” published in the June 1994 issue of The Writer, Margolin helps writers overcome the hurdles that stand between them and the desk. “The most important part of the writer’s anatomy is not the brain, where ideas are born, or the hands that transfer those ideas into concrete form, but the…

Many writers hate to leave their desks. They are secure there and comfy in loose clothes, and technology is their enabler. Why leave the laptop when the Internet makes research so easy and interviews come via email? But does this facilitate the best writing? Not always. When the isolated writing approach is not working, it’s time to pack up that laptop, walk out the door, and do the research, interviews and writing on location. “Location” is where skills advance on several levels. During a face-to-face interview, we discover the inevitable story behind the story. We notice the Purple Heart certificate on a baker’s wall, adding character dimensions beyond the baking abilities we’re discussing for a wedding magazine. Working on location, especially for those in-the-field stories, yields better descriptions, too. For…

Johanna Harness @johannaharness 5:45AM here in #Idaho. #amwriting time is short this morning, but I’m taking what I can get. Sic Santos @owwsiccc So many plots in my mind. Too little time to write~ Melissa Vazquez @TheSecondRealm No closing time for the creative minds. #amwriting #latenightthoughts Julius Smith @theJuMovement Nighttime is the write time. Haven’t written in a while. Jacqueline Yeager @JackieYeager I did it! Woke up at 5:00am and wrote until 6:30am when the kids got up. 1100 words before the sun came up. #amwriting Laura Howard !-BVSB)PXBSE Last night I lost track of time, the writing was just flowing!!! Love that :D A. B. Keuser @ABKeuser At work an hour early = extra writing time. Now I just need my tea to kick in so I can have…

“Why don’t you write books people can read?” was the question Nora Barnacle asked her husband, James Joyce, who, it turns out, wrote the one book that always towers in the neighborhood of “best book of the 20th century.” Joyce’s Ulysses was published in 1922 by Sylvia Beach, the American bookseller and publisher in Paris. Its leading man, Leopold Bloom, wanders the streets of Dublin on June 16, the one day during which the book takes place. There are others in the book – for instance Stephen Dedalus (an aspiring poet) and Molly Bloom (Leopold’s wife) – but it’s the story of Leopold the Jewish salesman that resonates as the primary narrative. His journey is a wander and wonder through symbolic time, history, language and, depending on how you read…

Selling books may be the natural outcome of writing them, but authors never tire of grumbling about book promotion. Whether we crisscross the country on a multi-city tour or read at our neighborhood bookstore, publication season brings a familiar push-pull between our private and public selves, between the small-w writer and the capital-A Author. Working on a book, I’m a stay-at-home in jeans and bedroom slippers, searching for just the right word, polishing and revising. But when a new book is launched, voila, the homebound, inner-gazing, slipper-clad writer must transform into the limelight-seeking, question-answering, decently dressed Author, ready for interviews and public appearances. As an Author, I’m suddenly concerned with commerce and sales, print runs and advertising budgets, media and three-minute elevator pitches. I’d crossed the line from writer to…

Lawyer and first-time author Herschel Cobb didn’t have it easy growing up. The first few chapters of his recent memoir Heart of a Tiger: Growing Up with My Grandfather, Ty Cobb detail a violent and harrowing childhood, guided by a neglectful, alcoholic mother and an abusive, terrorizing father. There were times, he says, when he wasn’t sure he would survive another day. Luckily for Cobb, he found a soft place to land with his grandfather. Ty Cobb is often grouped with players such as Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle and Jackie Robinson as one of the greatest to ever take the field. He wasn’t known for his gentle demeanor or soft touch. In fact, his reputation, even today, is as an aggressive player who didn’t adhere to the generally accepted code…

Six years ago, novelist Eowyn Ivey attended the Kachemak Bay Writer’s Conference to “learn from other writers, hear what they’ve gone through and what processes they’ve used,” she says. The Alaskan writer left with a notebook full of information. And an agent. Ivey’s mother, a poet in her own right, encouraged Ivey to attend a 15-minute agent interview with Jeff Kleinman, one of the founders of Folio Literary Management. Ivey recognized the books he represented and decided to ask him for advice about her unfinished novel, The Snow Child. During the interview, she showed Kleinman a different writing sample and told him about her work in progress. Intrigued by the concept and impressed by her work, he asked to read the first 100 pages of The Snow Child – which…

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On Sherman Alexie’s official website, directly under an estimable blurb from The New York Times Book Review is another that reads, “Sherman looked more Indian when his hair was long,” a dubious insight that is attributed to “a woman on Facebook.” This comic juxtaposition is one of many examples of Alexie’s humor in the face of pain, or perhaps in reaction to it, and has become emblematic of his work. Alexie, who is Native American, has written six novels, seven short story collections and 12 books of poetry. He is the recipient of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the PEN/Malamud Award. His National Book Awardwinning semi-autobiographical novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, like many of his other…

We asked our Facebook followers: You’re having a drink tonight with your favorite contemporary writer. Who is it, and what is your first question? Readers offered clever, probing responses. We tracked down several authors mentioned and asked for answers. Plus a drink order. ALASTAIR REYNOLDS What is the source of your imagination? “The short answer is that I’m thinking constantly about science fiction, about my ideas, about other people’s ideas, about how to make something new or different. Out of this constant process, story notions tend to generate themselves automatically. I also read scientific magazines all the time and allow their concepts to sink down into my subconscious where they can mingle with other ideas and preoccupations.” Beverage of choice: “A single malt whisky, say a Lagavullin or a Laphroaig,…

“I read Stanley Kunitz’s translation and he translated the last line to: ‘…And he was tied to me.’ If you look at the Russian, what does it say?” asked translator Judith Hemschemeyer. She was talking about translating the line to “And I was his wife” at the end of a poem by Anna Akhmatova. “Do you see what Kunitz did?” Hemschemeyer asked. “He took the poem away from the woman and gave it to the man. That got me so fired me up!” Literary translators bear the weight of many worlds on their shoulders. While reading the works of the Russian masters – Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Akhmatova – we might attribute the English words to the source author when they are, in fact, a rendition of the original. Constance Garnett,…

Given the demands of earning an MFA, most students pursuing one probably feel like they’re in a storm, rather than sheltered from one. But for all the wonderful benefits of writing-immersion portrayed by the 46 contributors to this anthology, the MFA degree remains a bit of a comfortable womb, a warm, isolated nest often more intimate than a family – until you graduate. And then what? What are you going to do with it? And will you manage to avoid the fate of many MFA grads, who eventually stop writing? Now What? The Creative Writer’s Guide to Success After the MFA answers those questions for current MFA students, graduates, those thinking about entering a program and developing writers in general. At the slight cost of $10, the book is packed…

JEAN KWOK HAS A DEGREE in physics from Harvard and a fiction MFA from Columbia. She worked as a professional ballroom dancer for three years, married a Dutch psychologist, moved to Holland, had two sons and, in 2010, published The New York Times best-selling novel, Girl in Translation. This life of success wasn’t earned easily, however. Kwok’s family immigrated to New York City when she was 5, and her whole family was forced to work in a Chinatown sweatshop and live in an unheated apartment infested with roaches. Her first novel, which followed a Chinese immigrant who uses extraordinary intellectual abilities to escape the horrors of poverty, was the first time Kwok spoke publically about the conditions of her childhood. Kwok’s second novel, Mambo in Chinatown, explores the same themes…

It’s unusual to peruse a literary journal and discover a case study of housing developments or business districts, complete with lush photos and site plans. However, the editors at Terrain gracefully integrate – among more traditional poetry and prose pieces – reviews of environmentally and economically viable areas such as downtown Silver Spring, Md. and “The village at Hendrix,” a neighborhood development project based in Conway, Ark. “We’ve published 32 of them,” says editor-in-chief Simmons B. Buntin, who founded Terrain in 1997 as a placebased literary journal. He categorizes the reviews under “Unsprawl” on the publication’s website. “It’s important to explore pedestrian-oriented mixed-use communities,” he says. “These development studies bring in those people who may be visiting just to read the poetry and fiction.” He also notes that planners and…

Ayana Mathis’ national bestseller The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is so carefully and caringly crafted, it feels as if the story is being told for the first time even as it resonates with history, interiority and reflection. Mathis has a “gift for imbuing her characters’ stories with an epic dimension that recalls Toni Morrison’s writing, and her sense of time and place and family will remind some of Louise Erdrich, but her elastic voice is thoroughly her own – both lyrical and unsparing, meditative and visceral, and capable of giving the reader nearly complete access to her characters’ minds and hearts,” writes Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. The story belongs to Hattie Shepherd, who is swept north from Georgia and also swept into a complicated family world. Consider…