Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2015 i The Writer

NAMES Adam Ellis YEARS BLOGGING 4 GENRE Humor WEBSITE booksofadam.com BOOKS Books of Adam: The Blunder Years; Tiny Hats on Cats What compelled you to start Books of Adam? I started blogging and making comics because I didn’t have enough to do at the design job I had at the time. It opened a lot of doors, and I was actually able to quit that job a couple months later and focus on my own projects full time. You’re a talented artist, and your illustrations add depth and heart to your stories, but you also have a witty and relatable narrative style. How did you develop your writing voice? I’ve always been glued to the television, and I think my sense of humor is directly influenced by everything I saw…

So you have your characters: compelling, quirky, obsessed. They’re doing stuff: active, dramatic, in motion. At the end of it all, you hope your reader will feel a certain Aaah. That deep, satisfied, readerly sigh is the result of theme. Theme can be hard to talk about, write about, wrap our brains around. It is a bit too big, sometimes: Veering into abstraction or pedantry, it feels like it might take away from the story. We don’t necessarily want to reduce our complex, gorgeous narratives to something so basic as “loneliness” or “modernity.” Nevertheless, theme is necessary: It is what connects your particular story to the universal. Without theme, you don’t have a narrative; all you have is a string of anecdotes. But how can you come up with themes…

SIDE A: NOW ANY WAY I TELL THIS STORY is a lie, so I ask you to disconnect the device in your head that repeats at intervals how ancient and addled I am. It’s true that – at fifty to your twenty – my brain is dimmer. Your engine of recall is way superior, as you’ve often pointed out. How many times have you stopped me throwing sofa cushions over my shoulder in search of my glasses by telling me they’re tipped atop my own knobby head? The cake we had on that birthday had twelve candles on it, not ten; and it wasn’t London but Venice where I’d blindly bought and boiled and served to our guests a pasta I mistakenly believed was formed into the boot of Italy.…

Do you get emotionally attached to your characters and, if so, how does this affect your writing? Yes, I definitely have a very closely woven attachment to my characters. Some characters just come to me. It’s almost as if you see a pair of shoes and then just start describing those shoes. The characters really do present themselves. Most of them have come to me that way. I fall in love with my characters, and so it’s very difficult for me to let them go. I rewrite and rewrite, and that’s why, I’m sure, it took so long for me to give my book to an agent. I’m overly attached. I still have two more books to spend with these characters, and I’m so grateful for that. And I also…

In the short story “A Deadly Diet,” we meet Scotsman Frank Biggins munching through his workday. He’s a hungry man who ventures from his desk to grab a carby snack and gets more than he pays for when he discovers a piece of his past in his newspaper-wrapped order of chips – or fries, as we call them on this side of the pond. Author Wendy Robertson, who lives in Scotland, keeps the reader guessing about what might happen next. And isn’t that the muscle behind most crime stories? Who is on the deadly diet? What’s got Frank Biggins so agitated? What happens next? Robertson draws the reader with fine details, spunky dialogue and a killer plot. That’s what we were looking for in our CRIME PAYS short story contest,…

WHEN YOU’RE ABOUT TO HAND A MANUSCRIPT OVER TO ANOTHER SET OF EYES FOR REVISION AND EDITING, YOU WANT IT GOING TO THE RIGHT EYES. WE ASKED AUTHORS ABOUT THE CHARACTERISTICS THEY LOOK FOR IN A GOOD EDITOR AND WHAT THEY WANT FROM THE PROCESS. “What I hope for from an editor is basically the same thing I would want from a lover and/or grandmother. I know she knows more about truth and beauty than I do, but for some reason she’s more interested in my work than her own. I should add that I don’t expect editors to always be this way, but the best ones I’ve worked with were just so: deeply talented, stunningly brilliant and endlessly, selflessly generous.” —Matthew Batt, Sugarhouse “A good editor nurtures my work…

Publishing personal stories that include people in your life does not always produce satchels of fan mail. Just as few people look at photographs or paintings of themselves and exclaim, “Wow, what a gorgeous likeness!” most folks, particularly relatives, don’t react joyfully to their portraits in print. As the artist John Singer Sargent put it succinctly, “Every time I paint a portrait, I lose a friend.” From someone else’s point of view, “personal” can all too quickly careen into “too personal.” Plumbing their own lives, first-person writers inevitably draw family and friends into the net. Suddenly, the next family reunion is unpleasant. As Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet, once said, “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” To that, New Yorker writer and sometime memoirist…

When I first read Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, the book struck lightning in some deep part of me. Eyes wide, book held close to face, spine as stiff as a board, I didn’t relax once. It was electric; the book pulsed in my hands. It was the first memoir I read with the same runaway escapism as a novel. Through vivid details resonating with her signature Texan drawl, Karr pulls readers into her world, grabbing them by the neck and not relenting until the last page. I was dizzy in the wake. The Liars’ Club is a Southern gothic Alice in Wonderland, a horrifying, hilarious tour of Karr’s traumatic childhood, which involved a distant alcoholic father and an unstable mother who once made a bonfire out of her daughters’…

“Any way I tell this story is a lie.” Those are the opening words of Lit. We asked Mary Karr why she began her memoir with those words. I guess because I’d been in the business of memory and trying to tell the truth and I wanted the reader to know that I was in that subjective land. And also to sort of feel my way into it. I also was thinking of my son, very specifically of my son, and thinking, how he would look back on, how he might read this book when he was older. And I could just see him saying, “Oh, that’s not how it was, that’s not how it was, that’s not how it was.” Because he’s always correcting me, because he’s younger and…

Chapter 1 Ruby Bell was a constant reminder of what could befall a woman whose shoe heels were too high. The people of Liberty Township wove her into cautionary tales of the wages of sin and travel. They called her buck-crazy. Howling, half-naked mad. The fact that she had come back from New York City made this somewhat understandable to the town. She wore gray like rain clouds and wandered the red roads in bared feet. Calluses thick as boot leather. Hair caked with mud. Blackened nails as if she had scratched the slate of night. Her acres of legs carrying her, arms swaying like a loose screen. Her eyes the ink of sky, just before the storm. That is how Ruby walked when she lived in the splintered house…

BONUS: To read David C. Taylor’s comments on the runners-up, download the digital edition of The Writer. We asked novelist David C. Taylor, author of Night Life (see related interview on page 36), to join our judging team and pick the winners for the Crime Pays contest at The Writer. “These were all good stories,” says Taylor, “and it was difficult to sort out a ranking, as it always is with good stories.” What follows are his comments on first-place winner “A Deadly Diet” by Wendy Robertson. To read the second-place winner “All Things Are Connected” by Orrin Hanratty and thirdplace winner “And Then – This Happened” by Judi Hill, visit writermag.com. Taylor’s comments on “A Deadly Diet” follow. “A DEADLY DIET” is a well-written and well-constructed story. The prose…

March. Cold rain and dark days. Winter still pressing at the city’s back. Spring a distant hope. Cassidy listened. “It was blood, you could tell, you know what I mean? Knew it right away, blood. Come right through the kitchen wall up in the corner over the stove. She’s yelling, ‘It’s a miracle. It’s a miracle.’ I’m telling her, shut up. It ain’t no miracle. It’s blood from upstairs. Don’t never marry someone with religion. She’ll drive you nuts.” Donovan wore an Eisenhower jacket with no shirt and Army issue trousers. His bare feet were in untied shoes. He was unshaven, and his belly tested the jacket’s buttons. “It could’ve been. It could’ve been a miracle, blood through a wall. Like them tears at Lourdes the little girls saw. The…

Writing contests keep your mind fresh, your writing skills sharp and your creativity pumping. And winning could score you new readers, notoriety and even some extra cash. Keep the following guidelines in mind before submitting your work to a contest. 1 Deadline. Research both when the submission period opens and closes, and send your work between those dates. 2 Word count. If a word limit is set, follow it. Even one or two words over could mean automatic elimination. 3 Theme. Be sure your submission matches the requested subject matter. If you have any doubts, the submission readers may as well. 4 Identification. Many contests work on blind submissions, so if you are asked not to put your name and other identifying information on your actual submission – don’t. The…

An encyclopaedist is a person who compiles or contributes to an encyclopedia. In the quintessentially solo pursuit of novel-writing, Christopher Robinson successfully broke with tradition by coauthoring a novel with a friend and fellow writer, Gavin Kovite. Their book, War of the Encyclopaedists, was published to much acclaim in May. It follows the friendship of two millennial men, one of whom goes to fight in Iraq when his National Guard unit is deployed. Robinson was a finalist for the Yale Younger Poets Prize, and Kovite is an army lawyer who previously served as an infantry platoon leader. Their writing has been praised for its fresh and sometimes wry treatment of subjects as weighty as modern warfare and for its commentary on the millennial generation. WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING…

"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft." —H.G. Wells NEVER-ENDING CLIPBOARD This new Mac app allows you to maintain and search everything you’ve ever copied and pasted. Never beat yourself up again for saving a document or clearing your clipboard only to realize the picture-perfect conclusion you cut has been lost to the depths of your circuit boards. Free. pasteapp.me CHARGING ON THE GO No need to lug around your bulky laptop charger with Dart, the world’s smallest laptop charger. Compatible with most devices, this small, colorful 100-240V charger can be used worldwide. Consists of a 65W laptop and 2.1A USB port to charge tablets and other devices simultaneously. $89. finsix.com USB MUG WARMER Keep your coffee warm while you spend hours…

“I felt like I had invented the Internet,” laughs Jessica Fechtor as she thinks back to the first post she published on Sweet Amandine, a blog about food, cooking, family and life. “Well, hello,” began that first post, published in January 2009. “It’s strange introducing myself to a big white empty text box, but I suppose I have to start somewhere.” Fechtor launched Sweet Amandine just as food blogs were really starting to “have a moment.” She wasn’t looking to piggyback on a trend. Rather, as she shares in her book Stir: My Broken Brain and the Meals that Brought Me Home, Fechtor started the blog in an attempt to heal and feel strong and confident in a body and brain that had recently let her down. Five months before…

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. Louise Glück, “Nostos” AT UNEXPECTED POINTS in life, everyone gets waylaid by the colossal force of recollection. One minute you’re a grown-ass woman, then a whiff of cumin conjures your dad’s curry, and a whole door to the past blows open, ushering in uncanny detail. There are traumatic memories that rise up unbidden and dwarf you where you stand. But there are also memories you dig for: you start with a clear fix on a tiny instant, and pick at every knot until a thin thread comes undone that you can follow back through the mind’s labyrinth to other places. We’ve all interrogated ourselves – It couldn’t have been Christmas because we had shorts on in the snapshot.…

“All Things Are Connected” By Orrin Hanratty Orrin Hanratty lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he works as a machinist. He recently received his MFA from Hamline University’s Creative Writing for Children and Young Adults program. This is clearly not a children’s story. “‘All Things Are Connected’ started out just as the narrator’s voice. I knew he was going to be violent and monstrous, but I wanted that to come from a place of love. The very worst things we can do are always because of love.” “And Then – This Happened” By Judi Hill Judi Hill is founder and director of Wildacres Writers Workshop, a 25-year-old conference held in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. She has published seven short stories and several nonfiction pieces. She is currently…

Dinty W. Moore, director of creative writing at Ohio University, started Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction 18 years ago. Five years into his own writing career, he remembered editors who had helped him place his first stories and hoped his work on Brevity would assist other writers in publishing work. “People said online literary magazines wouldn’t ever be taken seriously,” Moore says. “Brevity has grown to be an enormous journal in terms of readership and number of submissions. It’s exciting and gratifying to see people’s opinions change.” Tone, editorial content Literary and craft essays and book reviews in Brevity cap at 750 words. Subjects are far ranging: relationship issues, medical challenges, gender, same-sex marriage. “We don’t do very topical things,” Moore says, “because of our eight-month lead time.…

As an animal expert, Nikki Moustaki is largely known for her numerous books and articles about the care and training of animals. However, her talent extends beyond the how-to genre. She has taught writing and is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and an accomplished poet. With The Bird Market of Paris, published earlier this year, she adds memoir to her resume. In The Bird Market of Paris, Moustaki deftly interweaves several story lines as she recounts her lifelong love of birds, her relationship with her grandfather and her recovery from addiction. The result is an engaging and poignant read. MEMORY I kept a journal for many years, but it was lost – along with the rest of our house – in Hurricane Andrew in 1992. But just the act of…