Writers and Their Notebooks

I'm pleased to announce that my essay "Clearing the Decks" is included in the anthology, Writers and Their Notebooks (University of South Carolina Press), which has now been officially released.

To compile the book, editor Diana M. Raab solicited essays from writers who keep--and rely on--a journal.  Contributors include Sue Grafton, Kim Stafford, Dorianne Laux, John DuFresne, James Brown and Michael Steinberg, to name a few. The foreword is written by the world-renowned personal essayist, Phillip Lopate.

Diana recently featured more about the book on her blog and has reprinted an excerpt from the introduction.  LINK HERE to read the intro...and be sure to link to Diana's website to learn more about her prize-winning writing and the workshops she teaches on memoir writing, journaling and poetry at UCLA and across the country.

"Wonderful Journey"

Okay, it's official. We're one month into the new year . . . 32 days in.  Where are you in fulfilling the goals you've set for the next twelve months?  Are you on track?

If you're Danielle Villano, a student of creative writing (and an avid photographer) at the State University of New York (SUNY Purchase), you've continued on a path of discipline already started in 2009.  Danielle has made a personal commitment to document her first year of life as a college freshman. Her mission, her challenge--each day for more than 138 days, so far--has been to publish one photograph and write a short accompanying description about something in her daily life - whether unique or mundane.  She posts these entries to "My Wonderful Journey," her own personal photo-journal on Blipfoto - a very modern way of keeping a journal in the multi-faceted media age. Danielle finds it is the perfect place to preserve a slice of her own personal history and share it with family and friends, while sharpening the talents she has for both writing and photography - two creative disciplines that can serve as inspiration for each other.

So whatever goals you've set, keep at it. Don't give up. Thirty-two days of the new year might be gone, but there are still another 333 to go!

Photo "Day 84 - Blue" by Danielle Villano (used with permission)

Finalists for The Story Prize Announced

Finalists for the The Story Prize have officially been released.   They include the work of three debut writers:

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (W. W. Norton)

Drift by Victoria Patterson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

The awards will be presented at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 3rd at The New School in New York City (66 West 12th Street). That night, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Victoria Patterson, and Wells Tower will read from their short story collections and discuss their work onstage with the director of the prize, Larry Dark. At the end of the evening, the winner will be announced and receive a $20,000 prize.  Each runner-up will receive $5000.

The three finalists were selected from a total of 78 short story collections published in 2009.  Link to THE STORY PRIZE BLOG to learn more. 

Strangers by Anita Brookner

In an Anita Brookner novel, readers are drawn into a world where they feel as though they are wandering a rain slicked London street at three a.m., peering at lights in windows.  Brookner is a master of human nature and the inward voice. She is an underrated novelist, brilliant in articulating the feelings, memories and longings of contemplative, often wry, complex and solitary characters - those whose expectations of life have gone unfulfilled.

The focus of Strangers (Brookner's 24th novel) is Paul Sturgis - an emotionally-reserved, 73 year-old retired banker and bachelor who lives a self-contained existence. He has been successful in his professional life and while he has great depth and substance, loneliness colors the way he navigates through the world - he studies the weather in order to be able to make conversation with strangers. When his last link to any sense of family dies (a cousin by marriage), the prospect of Sturgis's own mortality and the possibility that he may someday "die among strangers" begins to shape itself into reality. Should Sturgis take off for Paris to live out his remaining days or should he marry one of two women who unexpectedly cross his path? One woman is an energetic, if rather flighty and impulsive, divorced woman 20 years younger than he whom he meets on a plane to Venice - an attempt to escape the merriment of the holidays. The other is an old flame, now feeling the effects of aging herself, who once lashed out at Sturgis for being "too nice." Twenty years before, she considered Sturgis's "niceness" a fault that made him an unappealing candidate for the long-term. But now? Sturgis, conflicted when confronted by the past, begins to consider if perhaps his "niceness" might explain his life-long failure at having had successful intimate relationships.

The presence of these two, very different women force Sturgis to face his existential fears and make a choice for his life. Should he invest in companionship or reconcile himself to a life where he goes it alone? In true Brookner form, the plot of this quietly-paced, gracefully-constructed novel once again reveals how introspection and self-examination--and subtle, interior shifts--can ultimately have the power to change exterior worlds in unexpected ways.

Strangers by Anita Brookner
(Random House, Hardcover, 9781400068340, 256pp.)
Publication Date: June 16, 2009
To purchase this book via INDIEBOUND click HERE

32 Days to a Perfect '10

Ann Patchett (author of the memoir Truth and Beauty and the novels Bel Canto and Run, among others) recently wrote a column for the Washington Post about resolutions in the new year - especially the need for writers to treat writing as a job they show up for every day. "Whatever a person (does) with thoughtful consistency for the first 32 days of the year sets the course for the entire year," she states in the essay, reinforcing the underlying theme of how the more hours you spend working, the more work you actually get done.

So with January 1st just days away, whatever your talent and passion, go for it . . . And keep at it! When you take a measure of your efforts 32 days into the year, maybe February 1, 2010 will reveal a new year with the potential to become a Perfect '10!

Photo "Calendar" by Kathleen Gerard

Angel Time

"A writer can’t know everything about what she writes. It’s impossible. You reach deep down and you bring up what feels absolutely authentic to you as you move along with the book but you don’t know everything about it. You can’t." Anne Rice

Until I picked up Angel Time, I had never read the work of Anne Rice. Vampire stories don't interest me, but angels do - and that's exactly what drew me to Ms. Rice's latest novel. Long before there was The Twilight Saga and HBO's "True Blood," Anne Rice was cranking out The Vampire Chronicles, a whole series of mega-blockbusters. But when Ms. Rice gave atheism the heave-ho and personally reconnected with God and her Catholic faith after a 38-year hiatus, her writing goals suddenly changed and so did her stories. How fortunate for readers with tastes like mine! There have been the Christ the Lord books (Out of Egypt and The Road to Cana), fictionalized retellings of the life of Jesus. Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession, a memoir about her life experiences growing up Catholic, becoming an atheist and her return to the Church. With Angel Time, Rice has written a suspenseful page-turner, a novel about a deeply wounded, contemporary Catholic who is lapsed, flawed and conflicted . . . and utterly fascinating.

Toby O'Dare (Jesuit-educated, age 28) has fled the Church and become a hired assassin. A loner with identity issues, Toby is bitter and rebellious toward a God who has permitted tragic losses to befall his fate. The horrifying backstory and lengthy flashback Rice paints about the protagonist's past is convincing and chilling - and makes the righteousness of Toby's anger at God seem completely justifiable. However, while Toby has outwardly turned his back on God and the Church, Catholicism continues to prey on his psyche - especially in his fondness for frequenting missions and chapels.

Toby says (page 9): "Maybe when you’re brought up Catholic, you hold to rituals all your life. You live in a theater of the mind because you can’t get out of it. You’re gripped all your life by a span of two thousand years because you grew up being conscious of belonging to that span . . . Never ever did I look at the nighttime stars or the sands of a beach without thinking of God’s promises to Abraham about progeny, and no matter what else I did or didn’t believe, Abraham was the father of the tribe to which I still belonged through no fault or virtue of my own."

When Toby utters a sarcastic prayer to God, an angel--Malchiah, a member of the Seraphim--suddenly appears to him in the midst of his performing a hit/murder. Malchiah offers Toby a chance to change his life and work for God rather than the people who hire Toby to kill for a living. “Redemption is something one has to ask for,” Malchiah tells him. The whole scene leading up to this supernatural encounter is masterfully-written and completely riveting that I wanted to stay in the present and have Toby find his redemption in the here and now. However, Rice unpredictably transports the reader back in time to the 13th Century (Norwich, England) where Toby, as a priest, undertakes a Divine assignment to aid a Jewish family facing mob violence.

Angel Time is the first in a proposed set of three novels written as part of the "Songs of the Seraphim" series. When asked in a recent interview to explain her motivation for writing novels about angels, Rice said, "It was time for me to try and make good guys as compelling as vampires...I was tired that the devil is always portrayed as the interesting one." With that as her aim, Angel Time more than succeeds.

Angel Time (The Songs of the Seraphim, Book One) by Anne Rice
(Knopf, Hardcover, 9781400043538, 288pp.)
Publication Date: October 27, 2009
To purchase this book via INDIEBOUND click HERE

Literary Life: A Second Memoir

"I had expected to be thrilled when I received my first copy of my first book, but when I opened the package and held the first copy in my hand, I found that I just felt sort of flat . . . I learned then and have relearned many times since, that the best part of a writer's life is actually doing it, making up characters, filling the blank page, creating scenes that readers in distant places might connect to. The thrill lies in the rush of sentences, the gradual arrival of characters who at once seem to have their own life."

from LITERARY LIFE: A Second Memoir by Larry McMurtry

I don't know if I ever would've discovered the work of Larry McMurtry if hadn't been for the movie, Terms of Endearment (Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger). I loved the 1983 film--a story about a mother-daughter relationship that spans 30 years--and I was surprised to learn it was based on a book by Larry McMurtry. He's always had a reputation for writing literature of the American West, of which I had little interest. But after my Terms of Endearment epiphany (the book was very different from the movie, but just as wonderful), I went on to read the sequel, The Evening Star, and Moving On (a novel about the minor character, Patsy, from Terms).

Ever since, I've continued to read McMurtry. I tend to lean more toward his more contemporary-set fiction (Duane's Depressed and the rest of the "Duane" books; The Loop Group; although Telegraph Days, about the Old West, was terrific, too) and his essays (Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen) are first rate. Even though he's won a Pulitzer Prize (Lonesome Dove) and an Academy Award (Brokeback Mountain, screenwriting adaptation from the short story by Annie Proulx), to many in highbrow literary circles, McMurtry is still considered an "outsider."

In reviewing his latest book, Literary Life: A Second Memoir (his first memoir was Books: A Memoir; a third is in the works), Dwight Garner of The New York Times Book Review said this: "A lot of his (McMurtry's) stuff verges on being — how to put this? — typed rather than written. He’s published more guff, over the past 50 years, than just about any other major (semimajor? majorish?) American writer."
Guff? With close to thirty books under his belt (not to mention a slew of scripts), what author wouldn't have a few hits and misses? Does every book McMurtry writes need to have the heft of Lonesome Dove or The Last Picture Show? Is there not room for a writer--a writer who writes prolifically, in the extreme--to switch gears every now and then and lighten up sometimes? I find Garner's assessment harsh and unfair.

McMurtry has never claimed to be anything other than a writer of highly readable fiction and nonfiction who, at times, admits to have written books in order to make money. A "Minor Regional Writer," as he once called himself (which is grossly understated), is exactly the label the literary establishment has persisted in preserving, while continuing to try and undermine McMurtry's credibility and his craft. Thank goodness detractors have not been successful. McMurtry sells lots of book and his fans are numerous - and ardent. In my mind, the greatest gift of this author is his ability to craft authentic stories populated with characters in whom people can relate. He's a storyteller--in the truest sense of the word--whose prose can be brisk and light-hearted, but he's proven his storytelling-ability time and time again. Literary Life: A Second Memoir is a fascinating (and honest) look into the writing life of a dedicated author and how he's developed and maintained his craft all these years. You won't want to miss the passages where he shares insights into his reading habits and preferences.

Best Books of 2009

Lists and lists and more lists of "notable" books. The Top 100. The Top 10. The best of the best . . . Which writers have been selected and by whom? A comprehensive on-line compendium of Best Books of the year has been compiled by LargeHeartedBoy, a great blog about music, books and popular culture. (I particulary enjoy the Book Note Archive, where authors select playlists to accompany their books.) HERE you can access just about every Best Book List of the year from Publishers Weekly to the New York Times - and beyond. It's the perfect place to begin your search this Holiday Season. And while you're there, don't miss the link for Best Book Covers of the Year from The Book Design Review.

The Confessions of Edward Day

"What actors know about emotions is that they come in pairs, often in direct opposition to each other. That’s what it is to be conflicted. We want what we should not want and we know it. We desire that which is dangerous or forbidden and might cause us to suffer. We fear success, embrace failure. We strive to be independent, longing at the same time to surrender to a burning passion. We hold ourselves aloof from the people we need and seek the approval of those who have no need for us . . . "

That's the voice of Edward Day (page 178), a narrator of great depth and contradiction found in Valerie Martin's latest novel, a fictional memoir entitled The Confessions of Edward Day.

It is the 1970s. Edward Day is an aspiring, up-and-coming actor pursuing his dream in New York City. One weekend, he has a tryst (more like a conquest) with a young woman (Madeleine Delavergne) while visiting friends at the Jersey Shore and later that night, while taking a walk by himself, he leans upon a wooden rail on the boardwalk and tumbles into the Atlantic, getting swept up in a riptide. It is Guy Margate, another actor who is also spending the weekend at the beach, who rescues Edward and saves him from drowning. But the hero will later evolve into a menacing rival for Edward--in both the theater and in love. There resides the quandary of The Confessions of Edward Day, a brilliant novel by the ever-prolific Valerie Martin.

Ms. Martin is primarily a writer of "literary" fiction, but I've always found her books to be very accessible and perfectly balanced in terms of plot and character. I most admire her strong, first person narrators--see also Dr. Jekyll's housemaid in her novel, Mary Reilly, and the slave owner in Property--but Edward Day is by far my favorite. He is such a complex character--smart, self-assured, ambitious and shrewd--and I kept changing my mind about him. Sometimes I despised him and his heartless vanity, yet other times, I felt sorry him. In the end, I found empathy for him and his fate largely because Martin skillfully peels away the layers of his outer shell to reveal a deeply wounded man. (His mother, a woman with gender issues, committed suicide, and it is that tragedy that seeps into all arenas of Edward's life and colors his motivations--in life and in the theater.) The book sets up an ever-shifting power struggle between Edward and Guy as they vie for Madeleine's affections. Add to the love triangle details and insights about life in the theater, the psyche of actors, and a very clever tie-in of the characterizations and storyline of Uncle Vanya (a play by Anton Chekhov) and you won't be able to stop turning pages. The Confessions of Edward Day emerges as a beautifully-written, gripping and suspenseful thriller.

Family Album

Allersmead, a large Victorian English Manor House, emerges as the main character in Penelope Lively's latest novel of domestic reality, Family Album. It is a story about how perceptions of a family (and that family's history) differ depending on the viewpoint. The novel begs the question, what went on in Allersmead back in the 1970s when the children were younger? What secret does Allersmead hold? And how has that secret shaped the future lives of each inhabitant--a family (The Harpers) with six children and an au pair. Lively is a master of detail and dialogue, both of which contribute great insight into the unreliability of family life. Through shifting points of view and a narrative that cuts back and forth between the 1970s and the present, Lively addresses the issues and themes of the novel via 16 chapters and short, episodic flashback scenes. As the title implies, events such as birthday parties, family dinners, and vacations are recalled like random snapshots in a family album. Ron Charles, of the Washington Post, said the book is " . . . full of glancing humor and spot-on truths about the way families maintain the peace through a process of willful ignorance and disciplined forgetfulness." However, each revelation, sharpened through contrasting perspectives and shifts in time, paints a clear, compelling--and haunted--picture of family dynamics.

Who really was Jane Austen?

What better way to spend an autumn afternoon than to stop in at The Morgan Library in New York City and check out "A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen's Life and Legacy." It's the first time in more than a quarter of a century that The Morgan has exhibited manuscripts and letters penned by Austen herself. The four novels published in her lifetime have no surviving manuscript versions. But this exhibition features early editions of Austen's novels and the "only surviving complete draft of any of her novels, Lady Susan, an early epistolary tale whose heroine is more Machiavellian than any schemer Austen later imagined." A review of the exhibit was published in The New York Times (11/07/09) and here's some of what they had to say:

...Austen also wrote perhaps 3,000 letters over the course of her 41 years, most to her sister, Cassandra, who burned many and expurgated others that she believed reflected badly on Jane or other family members. Only 160 survive; the Morgan holds 51, more than any other institution. This exhibition offers a healthy sampling, some with pieces cut out in Cassandra’s quest for decorum...

...Because paper was expensive, Austen typically used a single sheet, folded in half to make four pages. But when she had more to say, she would fill all usable space, then (as was sometimes the custom) turn the sheet sideways and write perpendicularly over her own script. She completed one letter here by turning it upside down and writing between the lines...

...And though Austen was very much a private person — her novels were published anonymously at first — there is also a trace here of a public world that she mostly turned her back on, as if it might crassly impinge on her novelistic universe...

The show at The Morgan allows readers and fans of Austen's work to glimpse the woman beyond the page. In addition to the exhibit, there's also a short (16 minute) documentary, "The Divine Jane," which shows some of her letters and manuscripts and features contemporary writers and scholars speaking about Austen's importance. The film is directed by the Italian photographer (and filmmaker) Francesco Carrozzini. You can view the documentary while you're at The Morgan or see it HERE.

Picture of Jane Austen - Anonymous, British School (19th Century) - Morgan Library

A Place of Execution

Masterpiece Theater (PBS) has been airing a two-part film adaptation of A Place of Execution, a novel by Val McDermid, an award-winning British mystery writer.

Both the novel and the movie share a dual plot structure. One plot focuses on the murder investigation as it played out in real time in 1963, while the second plot re-examines the investigation in the present day. One character, George Bennett (the investigator from the original crime) becomes the bridge between the two plots and the two eras. Ms. McDermid's story--on the page or on the small screen--is a multi-layered tale about perception and reality, and it is a fascinating study in psychological suspense. Here is a synopsis of the storyline courtesy of PBS:

Modern-day London: Journalist Catherine Heathcote is making a documentary about Alison Carter, a schoolgirl who vanished from the English village of Scardale in 1963, sparking a major police hunt and making a hero of investigating officer George Bennett.

When George hastily withdraws his cooperation, Catherine is devastated and sets off for Scardale to demand an explanation, accompanied by her rebellious teenage daughter Sasha. As she tries to salvage her documentary, Catherine uncovers new information — but the truth may indict George, the man she so highly admires. A tragic turn of events threatens to silence Catherine's inquiry entirely.

1963: In his first missing person investigation, George Bennett carefully pieces together a case against one of Alison's family members. Incriminating evidence offers a strong link to the apparent murder scene. But under intense questioning, the suspect is unnervingly calm and unwavering — repeatedly claiming innocence.

For a limited time, PBS is enabling viewers to watch the film adaptation online. Part One is available for viewing now. Part Two will be available starting on November 9th. Log on HERE to learn more and tune in.

Photos from PBS.org