7 July 2008

Kate Furnivall on the Road to Moscow

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Authors turn to historical fiction for a variety of reasons—for Kate Furnivall, whose second novel, The Red Scarf, comes out this month, it’s all about coming to terms with the surprising revelations of her own family history, and understanding a cultural legacy that she didn’t even know about for most of her life.

Writing is therapy. There’s no question about it. Scratch any author and she or he will tell you it’s true. Writing The Russian Concubine and The Red Scarf helped me to accept who I am.

I was in my forties when I discovered I was part Russian, that my grandmother had been a White Russian in St Petersburg. It came as a shock. Her name was Valentina and she fled from the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution in 1917, down into China with her three-year-old daughter—my mother. Well, you could have knocked me down with a babushka.

So how do you deal with a discovery like that? When you learn you are not after all the pure English rose you’d always thought you were? It felt as if someone had pulled the rug out from under my feet and replaced it with a polovik. I had to rethink myself. But first I had to find out what being Russian meant. I had a preconceived notion, of course. Russia meant images of scary tanks strutting their stuff in Red Square, presidents who get drunk and topple over in public, and red-cheeked dolls that swallow each other like the whale and Jonah. Yes, I’d read my share of Tolstoy and Chekhov in years gone by, cried over “Lara’s Theme,” and even waded through Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archilpelago in the 1970s. But I was aware that the depth of my ignorance was greater than a Siberian oil well.

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2 July 2008

Deborah Weisgall Finds Modern Resonance in George Eliot

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In The World Before Her, Deborah Weisgall contrasts the life of Marian Evans—known better to generations of readers as “George Eliot”—and a (fictional) contemporary sculptor, both of whom travel to Venice during moments where their personal and creative tensions have them at a crossroads. Why Eliot? Weisgall explains what she found in Eliot’s novels that spoke to her own literary concerns.

Of course I read George Eliot in high school. Tenth grade: Silas Marner, Adam Bede. The Mill on the Floss my senior year. These were harsh tales: passionate young women paid with their lives for their appetites—physical and emotional. Fates not so different from those that befell poor Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. For a young and passionate woman trying to navigate the rapids of heart and mind, these stories were further examples of impossibility.

I was not wise enough to perceive that there was a difference—a difference of sympathy. George Eliot gave her women an ardor, an appetite, that went beyond the physical, a yearning that was emotional and intellectual—that struggled with moral issues as well as the strictures of society. It was not until I was a grownup that I understood how she was writing about love.

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8 June 2008

Maryann McFadden Makes Her Second Debut

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I first came across Maryann McFadden when she told me about her hyper-pink book cover in response to a GalleyCat item I’d written about a “literary” novelist with a disdain for women’s fiction. McFadden’s book has just been published… although, as she explains in this essay, this isn’t the first time. (And, as you may know, I’m a sucker for self-published success stories…)

I felt like a fraud the night of my book launch for The Richest Season. I stood at the window, early as usual, waiting for people to show (hopefully!), while trying to quiet the butterflies swooping through my gut like little stunt pilots, as the evening sky lit up with a roar.

Despite a monsoon of biblical proportions, and a guarantee of walking in drenched as a sewer rat due to very little parking, people came. Lots of them. I actually filled the historic front parlors of Centenary College in my small New Jersey town, where twenty years earlier I’d been an adjunct writing instructor who dreamed of being a novelist.

I stood at the lectern and began telling the crowd of my long journey to this moment. Freelance writing and teaching a bit during my first ten years after college. Then leaving writing completely while I pursued a real estate career, and more money, to help support my growing family. Years later, when I had time to actually miss writing, deciding to go back to school for a master’s degree, as my own children headed off to college themselves. And finally, how The Richest Season began as my thesis about a lonely corporate wife who longed for more in her life. And there I was, a grandmother, finally entering my own “richest season.”

I was kissed, hugged, backslapped, and congratulated. And then I sold and signed 100 books!

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21 May 2008

Leonard Mlodinow on Publishing’s Vagaries of Chance

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Leonard Mlodinow’s new book, The Drunkard’s Walk is about the surprising and misunderstood role that randomness plays in people’s fate, and, as Mlodinow himself observes, “Those who study randomness—or write books for Pantheon about it—are not immune to its effects.” He reports on some of the odd twists that have befallen other researchers into randomness: The 16th-century scholar Gerolamo Cardano, who couldn’t find a publisher for his Book on Games of Chance, made a fortune as a doctor based on a recommendation to one patient that didn’t really work; Blaise Pascal’s breakthroughs in probability theory emerged from a gambling habit he developed on what was supposed to be a restful retreat in Paris; Adolphe Quetelet went to Paris to study astronomy but got sidetracked into statistics and made his reputation in that newly developing field; Edward Norton Lorenz’s elaboration of the butterfly effect was the result of an attempted computational shortcut resulting in massive errors. “These lives might be outliers,” Mlodinow says. “Or they could be archetypes.” In the meantime, what’s going to happen to his book? The only thing he knows is that we just don’t know.

Now that I have finished this book, it is time for me to stare randomness in the face myself, to adjust my thinking and my expectations according to the principles I have espoused. Will this book succeed? Like most books, it was a labor of love. But all I can control are the words, and now that those words are almost completed Pantheon is focusing on what they can make happen, formulating the very plans that, through some chain of events, eventually led you to read this. These days a publishing plan represents an effort so thoroughly thought out and researched that even if you are only interested in this volume because you thought The Drunkard’s Walk would be a self-help book, the marketing department has probably accounted for you in one way or another. And so as I prepare to relinquish my offspring to their earnest efforts, I must confront the tendency to believe that they are in control, and later another tendency to judge my work on the basis of how many people cared to read it, or what might be said (or worse, not said) about it.

But I didn’t just write the book, I read it. (At least a dozen times). So before I take my publisher’s early excitement over the manuscript too seriously, I remind myself that this is the industry that rejected George Orwell’s Animal Farm, because “it is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.;” turned down Isaac Bashevis Singer because “it’s Poland and the rich Jews again;” and dumped a young Tony Hillerman, imploring him to “get rid of all that Indian stuff.” One book in the 1950s was repeatedly rejected by publishers who responded to the manuscript with criticism such as “very dull,” “a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions,” and “even if the work had come to light five years ago, when the subject [World War II] was timely, I don’t see that there would have been a chance for it.”

That book, Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, has since sold 30 million copies, making it one of the bestselling books in history. And John Kennedy Toole, after his many rejections, lost hope of ever getting his novel published and committed suicide. His mother, however, persevered, and eleven years later A Confederacy of Dunces was published, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and sold 1.5 million copies.

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20 May 2008

Janis Hallowell on Giving Fiction Life (and Fiction Giving Life)

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Janis Hallowell’s She Was comes at an interesting moment—not only has former SLA member Sara Jane Olson, one of the real-world starting points from which the novel takes its own imaginative trajectory, been back in the news this year when she was briefly paroled and then hastily re-imprisoned, we’ve actually had a bumper crop of novels about radicals on the run this season; see Peter Carey’s My Illegal Self and Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions. In this essay, Hallowell explains how a work of fiction can start with something real, then teach its author about imagination’s power to inspire compassion.

She Was has been called ambitious. It felt ambitious to write. But as happens with ambitious projects, I learned a thing or two. Writing She Was, I got to redefine my interpretation of “writing what you know.”

The main story—18 year old student radical Lucy Johansson protests the Vietnam war by setting a bomb at Columbia University that kills a man after which she goes underground for 34 years—is one that was inspired by the lives of several real women, and similar stories had already been written. That’s pretty intimidating, but nobody had written about a student radical fugitive who is arrested during the Iraq War era. The chance to explore the correlation between the Iraq era and the Vietnam era through a story that naturally brought the two together was irresistible.

Because I was only fourteen in 1971 when the catalyzing event took place, the story required me to write about things I don’t know first hand, yet there are millions of people alive who do. Also pretty intimidating. As the book took form and the historical aspects gained importance I imagined my in-box clogged with emails pointing out what I’d gotten wrong in the timeline. I imagined reviewers accusing me of being unqualified to write about something I hadn’t lived through. But I chose to stay with the project because I felt strongly that since Vietnam was the formative trauma of the baby boom generation and generations since, and the chickens from that time were coming home to roost in this decade, I had to join the conversation.

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18 May 2008

Christopher Meeks on Lorrie Moore’s Profound Humor

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I started reading the short stories in Christopher Meeks’s Months and Seasons on a recent plane ride, and was struck by his quiet sense of humor—he’s not a guy who works for laughs, necessarily, but when his characters get to bickering with one another, little spikes emerge from their interactions. In this essay, he explains how he learned to let that part of his writing voice flourish thanks to the example set by one of our greatest contemporary short story authors.

Like many people of my generation, I wanted to write great stories, important stories—stories that made me rich. Then along came reality: I receive little or no money when my stories are published, but I get two copies of any literary journal I’m in. While that hasn’t helped pay my son’s college bills, I’ve nonetheless been awed that I’ve made it into the journals. Also, publication has helped me rediscover my sense of humor.

When I started, great stories, of course, had to be serious. Woody Allen has had this complex, too, which is why he made Interiors and Cassandra’s Dream. He’s wanted to be Begmanesque—as others have been desperately trying to mimic his funny movies and be Allenesque.

I wanted to be Literary with a capital L, but humor kept creeping into my stories. I’d write the first draft, not worrying about my voice, and then later I’d excise humor, such as a character’s funny quip, thus maintaining what I thought was literary decorum. I might change a line of dialogue from, “You like her? She has guppy lips. Her hands are pound cakes” to “You like her? She’s plain.”

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28 April 2008

Ron Currie, Jr. Wins Young Lions Fiction Award

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Last summer, I ran a guest essay from Ron Currie, Jr. that explained how his collection of linked stories was inspired by a screaming child. Earlier this evening, God Is Dead won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, presented annually to a writer under the age of 35.

19 April 2008

Beatrice.com Presents @ The Merc: Opening Night Photos

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Thanks to Jane Kotapish and Ed Park for making the launch of the Beatrice.com reading series at the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction such a fun evening. I’ve got some video from the reading, and as soon as Apple and the makers of The Flip resolve the bugs in the latest version of QuickTime, I’ll upload them for you.

19 April 2008

Don’t Be Alarmed By the New Appearance

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I decided that it was time to upgrade to a new server on my webhost, and that gave me a chance to experiment with WordPress. I realize that things look somewhat rudimentary at the moment, but I’m hoping to learn how to play with the themes when I get a spare moment here and there. And so the front page doesn’t look completely desolate, I’ve added some links to some of the interviews I’ve done at GalleyCat over the last two months.