BOMB: The Author Interviews

Who better to ask a writer about writing than another writer? For more than 30 years, BOMB, a magazine of essays, literature and visual portfolios, has been publishing in-depth interviews with artists conducted by artists of all disciplines. In BOMB: The Author Interviews, publisher and editor Betsy Sussler collects 35 of the best conversations between influential and intellectual authors of world literature.

The Q&As are intimate and delve into aspects of the writer's craft, including the importance of sentences, rhythm and pacing, creating characters, narrative shaping, literary influences, editing and revision, the publishing industry and the demands of the writer's life amid more mundane concerns. They are intimate and give rare insight into the creative processes, feelings and work habits of contemporary prose writers and poets such as Sam Lipsyte, Steven Millhauser, Courtney Eldridge, Amy Hempel, Tobias Wolff and Jeffrey Eugenides. Each conversation differs in topic and tone. Clipped, clever banter infuses the exchange between Kathy Acker and Mark Magill, while a host of the Q&As convey mutual admiration, as evidenced when Junot Díaz and Edwidge Danticat discuss their ancestry and what it's like to be "book obsessed."

Articulating the complexity of the craft, the challenges of the writing life and the impetus behind certain works sometimes proves difficult, but each dialogue sheds light onto the act of writing itself and the profound satisfaction in having created something lasting on the page. Such revelations are bound to be helpful and insightful to readers and other writers intrigued and mystified by the process.

Bomb: The Author Interviews by Bomb Magazine; Betsy Sussler, ed.

Soho Press, $40.00 Hardcover, 9781616953799, 480 pp

Publication Date: November 4, 2014

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (11/3/14), click HERE

This review was also featured (in a much longer form) on Shelf Awareness: Book Trade (11/3/14). To read the longer review click HERE

Dog Songs

Dog Songs is a collection of new and favorite poems by esteemed, popular poet Mary Oliver. The 35 poems plus one longer prose-poem-essay that cap off this slender volume, revolve around dogs and all they mean personally to Oliver, while elevating to more universal themes of the human-canine bond and how the companionship of dogs anchors people to the natural, "heaven of earth" world.

Pen and ink drawings by illustrator John Burgoyne mirror the unadorned language that makes Oliver's poetry both intriguing and accessible. Each poem evokes poignant, thoughtful observations about the dogs that have enriched Oliver's life and work. Often in just a few, carefully chosen phrases, simple dog pleasures such as daily walks, frolicking in the grass, smelling flowers, chasing mice, darting ahead and going off leash depict a dog's ability to live joyfully in the moment without the anxieties of the past or the future. These vivid metaphors inspire human counterparts to also seek a more vibrant richness of life.

Oliver's poems about her beloved dog Percy—named after Percy Bysshe Shelley, the English Romantic poet—are succinct and clever. Percy's evolution is creatively explored with insight, compassion and humor as he mischievously eats books, has a rendezvous before he's neutered and even keeps the author company while she does her income taxes. "I am trying to live...the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine," writes the poet. Dogs, in their carefree, unconditional friendship and adoration, offer Oliver—and readers—a hopeful respite.

Dog Songs by Mary Oliver

Penguin Press HC, $26.95 hardcover, 97801594204784 , 144 pp

Publication Date: October 8, 2013

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (10/22/13), click HERE

New Year Resolve

May Sarton

To stop allowing the clutter
To clutter my mind
Like dirty snow,
Shove it off and find
Clear time, clear water.

Time for a change,
Let silence in like a cat
Who has sat at my door
Neither wild nor strange
Hoping for food from my store
And shivering on the mat.

Let silence in.
She will rarely speak or mew,
She will sleep on my bed
And all I have ever been
Either false or true
Will live again in my head.

For it is now or not
As old age silts the stream,
To shove away the clutter,
To untie every knot,
To take the time to dream,
To come back to still water.

"New Year Resolve" by May Sarton, from Collected Poems 1930-1993. © W.W. Norton & Co., 1993.  Reprinted with permission.  As featured on The Writer's Almanac 12/30/12 

Purchase more of May Sarton's work HERE

Poem for a Summer Day

As a writer, I try to read a poem-a-day...So admiring of the form - the rich choice of words/imagery, the cadence, the compression of ideas.  It's not easy to write a great poem, but this one reads perfect!

Want to read a poem a day?  Check out THE WRITER'S ALMANAC with Garrison Keillor

In the Moment by Maxine Kumin

Some days the pond

wears a glaze of yellow pollen.

Some days it is clean-swept.
The trout leap up, feasting on insects.

A modest size, it sits
like a soup tureen in a surround of white

pine where Rosie, 14 lbs., some sort
of rescued terrier, part bat

(the ears), part anteater (the nose),
shyly paddles in the shallows

for salamanders, frogs
and little painted turtles. She logged                              

ten years down south in a kennel, secured
in a crate at night. Her heart murmur

will carry her off, no one can say when.
Meanwhile she is rapt in

the moment, our hearts leap up observing.
Dogs live in the moment, pursuing

that brilliant dragonfly called pleasure.
Only we, sunstruck in this azure

day, must drag along the backpacks
of our past, must peer into the bottom muck

of what's to come, scanning the plot
for words that say another year, or not.

"In the Moment" by Maxine Kumin, from Where I Live. © Norton, 2012. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) 

Bronze Medal

When it comes to contests, who doesn't want to win?  But if you don't win, can you still feel a sense of pride and accomplishment if you at least make the winner's podium?

Such was the case for me in the MAUREEN EGEN WRITERS EXCHANGE AWARD, an honor bestowed via Poets & Writers magazine.  I recently learned that a short story of mine (actually a self-contained  excerpt from a novel of domestic fiction, in-progress) garnered second runner-up. 

Each year, poets and fiction writers from one state, who have never published a book (or no more than one book), are invited to apply for the award. Winners are selected by outside judges based on individual manuscripts. This year, the annual prize, which introduces emerging writers to the New York City literary community, was awarded to a writer who resides in the state of New Jersey.  While I am disappointed that I didn't win first place, I was very pleased to learn that Nahid Rachlin served as contest judge.  I have long admired her beautiful prose and how her work successfully conveys the complexities of family relationships. Therefore, I appreciated her comments about my piece, which included, "This story effectively conveys issues of betrayal and family loyalty." 

You can't win them all, but a word of encouragement from an accomplished writer always helps when you return to your writing desk, roll up your sleeves and once again, try to wrestle words down onto the page. 

Congratulations to the winners! Link HERE to read their work.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Head, Heart

Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.
Hearts feels better, then.
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head. Help heart.

--a short story by Lydia Davis

There's been a lot of buzz over The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis recently released (as a 752-page tome) by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The longest story tops out at nine pages (3-4 is the average), while others are as short as a single sentence. Each story--long or short--is a gem. The range of Davis's prose is intellectual, insightful, witty, poetic and always profound. It takes surgical-like precision to work in such brevity, and Davis is a master of language and form.

The New Yorker recently ran a feature on the book, as did The Village Voice.