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.

So what did I do? What do most people do when they feel no longer in control? I started to glean facts. I read anything and everything I could lay my hands on about Russia, then in the year 2000 two Big Things happened: my mother died and I finally fell totally in love with Russia. In an odd sort of way I felt I had now inherited her story—and that I mustn’t waste it.

That’s how The Russian Concubine and The Red Scarf came to be written. I wanted to bring together my emotions for my mother and for the grandmother I never knew and to celebrate the Russianness of my ancestry. Like anyone who is newly in love, I wanted to shout about it. To write about Russia and to show people what a breathtaking country it is. Literally, it takes my breath away. Its history, its culture, its politics, its geography, above all its people, and now… its future.

The Russian Concubine was the start. Though set in 1928 China in a fictional city called Junchow—which was really Tientsin (now Tianjin), where my mother was brought up—the opening chapter is in the snow-bound heart of Russia. And it is this chapter that provides the motivation and the turbulent events that drive the rest of the book. One of the characters is a great Cossack bear of a man who for me came to represent the intractable independent spirit of Russia.

But now I found myself on a rollercoaster, a gruelling ride, but exciting. And I didn’t want to get off. Not yet. I wanted more peaks, more lows, addicted to my passion for Russia. So The Red Scarf was born, a story set entirely in Russia, immersed in its culture and its communism of 1933, exploring how the powerful bonds of love, friendship and belief shape people’s lives.

The therapy is working. I have a clearer sense now of who I am. Where I came from. I am happy to have a colourful polovik under my feet and kolbasa on my table. I have travelled by road from Minsk to Moscow, from Novgorod to Petersburg, and seen for myself the enthralling Winter Palace, the astonishing summer palace at Peterhof and the primitive wooden villages in between. I can read their beautiful Cyrillic alphabet, even if I don’t understand what it says. All these experiences inform my writing and my comprehension of what I’m doing.

But am I ready to move on? No, I think not. Not yet. I am at the moment writing the sequel to The Russian Concubine and still leap out of bed each morning to rush to my desk and head straight for Moscow. At some deep level I need this, to merge myself and my Russian ancestry into one strong united whole, and one of the joys of it has been that a Russian publisher has bought The Russian Concubine. It will be translated into Russian. My writing came out of Russia and now, turning full circle, it is going back there. Going home.

(author photo by Max Danby)

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.

I did not read Middlemarch until I was married and had a daughter, until I had, at some cost, found a paddle and steered myself into relatively calm and happy waters. I began the novel out of duty—how could an educated person, one whose job in life was writing, not have read Middlemarch?—I finished it transformed, awash in possibility. Here was a novel that resonated—here was a story of a passionate woman who didn’t commit suicide or throw herself under a train. Here was a novelist who understood sex. More than sex: ardor—intellectual and physical, who had wrestled with it herself. Not only in personal terms, with questions of self-fulfillment, but in moral terms: how does this ardor affect the world? How does it translate beyond the self?

And there was something else. This was a writer, I sensed, who also understood love, who understood the richness of domestic bliss, the pleasures, physical and emotional, of partnership. A writer, moreover, for whom love was not the only thing that mattered, but for whom it was bedrock. Three-quarters of the way through the book, I was consumed with anxiety. I had to stop reading; I didn’t think that I could survive if Dorothea didn’t get her guy. So I skipped to the end, reassured myself, and kept going.

I did this despite understanding that Middlemarch is far more than a love story. It is a novel in which George Eliot conjures a world in flux, where the railroad had diminished distances, where factories and mines had displaced fields and meadows, where geological time was supplanting biblical time; a world, in its convulsive changes, not so different from our own. The issues her heroine faced were identical to those facing women of my generation: how to make room for love and meaningful work, how not to lose one’s self in marriage, how to live—in a moral sense—a good life.

So I finished Middlemarch and read Daniel Deronda, and read it again, and I began reading biographies of Eliot. I was struck, and deeply moved, by the discrepancies between her real life and the lives she gave her heroines. Marian Evans—George Eliot was her pen name—in real life had no children. She did not marry until she was sixty, though for twenty-five years she lived, very happily, with George Henry Lewes, a writer and critic and a married man whose wife was kept busy producing babies with her husband’s best friend. She called Lewes her husband; he was her partner in all things. She took his first name as her pseudonym, not because it was difficult for a woman to achieve success as a writer, but because she believed that without him she would not have been able to write fiction at all.

But though Eliot wrote heroines who were powerful and complicated women, she could not give them lives of their own. If in her books they had done what she had done—become writers and artists, lived with the love of their lives however irregular the situation—Eliot knew, from her own, bitter experience, that these characters, and their novels, would have been rejected and reviled.

Marian Evans’s real life was in many ways far more modern—and far more subversive—than the stories she could give her heroines. This was one of the reasons—if writing a novel can ever be entirely reasoned—that I wrote The World Before Her. From the beginning, I saw it as two stories: the first, about Marian Evans in the spring of 1880, beginning six weeks after her marriage to John Cross, a young and handsome man, and the second, a kind of retelling of both Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, set a hundred years later. It is a means to bridge distance, to weave connections, to confirm George Eliot’s instinct for the necessity of love. In this age that dismisses romance, my modern heroine’s story, her understanding of the love’s richness, the peace of still waters, the rewards—and the price—of domestic bliss, is in its way subversive, too.

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!

Still, I walked away feeling a bit squeamish. They thought I was “the real deal.” No one there knew my little secret: I had self-published The Richest Season. I’d also told no one about my other secret: The dream that I could somehow get my novel the attention it deserved and become the “real deal,” an author whose book has been “chosen” by a “real” publisher.

For the next six months I was a woman on a mission. I told myself that if I could sell houses (I was an award-winning Realtor), I could sell my book. So I leaped into the bookselling trenches; I started with the independent booksellers, nervous as hell as I walked into each store with a review copy and a plea: Would you like to read my book? It’s getting great feedback. I had no idea back then that they got requests like mine a dozen times a day. But I stood there and kept talking (I learned that selling real estate), asking how their store was doing, had they read a certain book that just came out, and if they might consider carrying my book.

Before a month was out, The Richest Season was a staff pick at Clinton Book Shop in New Jersey, where owner Harvey Finkel said to me “You’re going to be big.” After a six-year journey of always being in the wrong place at the wrong time—and shelving the book three times—that was hard to actually imagine. Then Tom Warner of Litchfield Books in Pawleys Island South Carolina, predicted it would be “a local winner” and invited me to do a book signing. I was up!

I orchestrated my own book tour and headed south, conveniently turning my summer vacation into a whirlwind of book signings, book clubs, and meetings with local reporters, who gave me nice write-ups. Who was my publisher? they’d ask. Small potatoes press, I’d joke cleverly.

With my spirits and courage stoked, I turned to the big guys, the chains. And got nowhere. Barely a glance as they told me they didn’t stock self-published books. Nor would they read one. I plummeted back to earth.

But I kept on going, pursuing the independents, even attending one of their conventions and meeting more booksellers in a day than I could possibly drive to in a week. They were nice, we exchanged cards. But I learned that some independents wouldn’t order my books because they were not returnable. So I became not just the writer and the publicist for my book, I became a distributor, as well. And my books were selling, but I was exhausted. Tom Warner cautioned me: You’ve got to stop selling books out of the trunk of your car and start writing again.

He was right. I was trying to do it all while still working. And I missed writing. So one night as I watched Grey’s Anatomy, I grabbed my laptop and began querying agents again. I typed what I hoped would be the last query I’d ever agonize over for this book. I’d sold more than 2,000 copies, what most literary novels do in a lifetime. I outsold The Kite Runner in a few stores, no easy feat. I met with forty bookclubs, did twenty-five book store signings. I quoted my glowing bookseller’s comments, and the stellar reviews I’d received in the papers. I mentioned my radio and TV appearances. I had an audience already waiting for the next book I’d started writing. Who could pass this up?

I received a phone call the next morning from Benee Knauer, the editorial director for the Victoria Sanders Agency, asking for an exclusive read. Of course I said yes. Later that day, I received more requests. This was a tough moment, but. I said no. I had a feeling.

On June 10, I’ll be launching my first novel, The Richest Season. Again.

This time the launch is being orchestrated not be me, but by my favorite independent bookseller who became my champion, Clinton Book Shop in Clinton, New Jersey. Will I be nervous this time? Have butterflies? You betcha. But it won’t matter.

The Richest Season is being published in hardcover by Hyperion, who bought the world English rights at auction. Five publishers bid in Germany, and a preempt took it in Italy. It’s already been nominated as a BookSense pick, and also got picked by local radio personality Joan Hamburg.

So any butterflies I have this time will be the good ones. Because now I’m “the real deal.”

]]> http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/06/08/maryann-mcfadden-guest-author/feed/ http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/05/21/leonard-mlodinow-guest-author/ http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/05/21/leonard-mlodinow-guest-author/#comments Wed, 21 May 2008 19:17:43 +0000 ronhogan guest authors http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/05/21/leonard-mlodinow-guest-author/

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.

I guard my own sanity by reminding myself that my book’s fate depends at least as much on the vicissitudes of the marketplace as it does on its content, my publisher’s enthusiasm, or their hard work and promotions. I recall cases such as that of The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld, which was hailed by one industry magazine as a “must read” and a “compelling, expertly crafted murder mystery,” and launched with a $500,000 marketing campaign. So high were the sales projections that 10,000 advance seed copies were given away, expected to be a drop in the bucket. As it turned out, not many more drops were contributed by paying customers, and the book sold only about 17,000 copies in its crucial first weeks. Optimists at the publisher might have argued that the bucket wasn’t 99% empty, it was 1% full, but the bucket never filled, and the great expectations died a quiet death.

On the flip side, I also recall Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, by Noam Chomsky. That blessed book required an emergency printing of 50,000 extra copies simply because left wing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez held it up and praised it in a rambling denunciation of the U.S. he made in a speech to the United Nations (had Oprah Winfrey been interested in our quest for global domination the extra printing might have been 20 times that large). And so I take it all, both the good and the bad, with a grain of salt.

With that, as I write these last 61 words, I’m satisfied that in Drunkard’s Walk I said what I set out to say, and I’m content to leave the rest to that ubiquitous toss of the dice. Although I am asking my editor to send a dozen copies of this title to Venezuela in case there’s an open slot on Hugo Chavez’s reading list.

]]> http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/05/21/leonard-mlodinow-guest-author/feed/ http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/05/20/janis-hallowell-guest-author/ http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/05/20/janis-hallowell-guest-author/#comments Tue, 20 May 2008 05:33:09 +0000 ronhogan guest authors http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/05/20/janis-hallowell-guest-author/

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.

The breakthrough came on the day I realized that Lucy’s brother, Adam, was a Vietnam vet and that his cognitive difficulties due to MS caused him to flash back to Vietnam. I got really scared. “Oh my God,” I thought. “I’m going into combat in Vietnam.” How could I—a woman, not a veteran, not even the right age to have been in Vietnam—presume to write about combat there? I really sweated it. During that period my husband would wake up in the morning, see me lying there exhausted after a failed night’s sleep, and say, “are you going ‘in-country’ again today?”

We’ve all heard the adage “write what you know.” The reason I was so stressed was because I was absolutely not writing what I knew—at least on the surface. But the story demanded it and so I waded in. I crawled inside the character of Adam—a gay man, a Marine in Vietnam who, thirty-five years later, is dying of MS—and from inside him, with the structure of the story for, well, structure, I discovered an amazing thing. There was something completely familiar about Adam. Emotionally, I recognized parts of myself in him: his outsiderness, his sensitivity, his difficult childhood, his desire to prove himself, his loyalty, his heartbreak at the cruelties of the world. So many familiar emotional parts. I explored all of that in the writing and then basically downloaded that emotional content to the story.

I’d been doing this all along with all the characters I’d ever written, I’d just never thought about it this way. But I also understood in a new and real way that this is why I write novels: for the chance to live lives so seemingly different from my own, for the chance to live many lives in this one life. It became a practice for me, much like a meditation practice, to step inside of my characters and learn what it might be like to be somebody who committed murder at eighteen years old, or somebody who was a black janitor and died in an anti-war bombing. Writing this way, as in a meditation practice, the opportunity to learn empathy and compassion is there.

In his 2000 introduction to Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, Michael Cunningham wrote, “If it is the activist’s responsibility to depose the tyrant it is the novelist’s responsibility to understand and record what it’s like to be the tyrant.”

Yes, I agree, and I would add that it is the novelist’s responsibility and also her joy to understand and record what it’s like to be the victim, the innocent bystander, the accomplice, the girl who blew up a building in 1971, the janitor who died in the bomb blast, the revenge seeking ex-comrade, the husband, the child and yes, the brother who is a gay man dying of MS, remembering what it was like to be a soldier in Vietnam.

]]> http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/05/20/janis-hallowell-guest-author/feed/ http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/05/18/selling-shorts-christopher-meeks/ http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/05/18/selling-shorts-christopher-meeks/#comments Sun, 18 May 2008 05:35:51 +0000 ronhogan selling shorts http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/05/18/selling-shorts-christopher-meeks/

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.”

As you might guess, the air whooshed out of my literary tires. No one published me. Then two things happened. One was that I came across the now-late Santa Barbara Review, whose entry in The Writer’s Market mentioned they were looking for literary fiction, particularly funny literary fiction. “We rarely see literary fiction with humor,” wrote its editor. “We love smart pieces with wit.” Thus I sent them a story, “Divining,” that had been rejected forty times but it had humor. They published it. Thus started my journey through publishing.

The second important event: I read a story by Lorrie Moore in The Best American Short Stories of the 20th Century, edited by John Updike. The story was called “You’re Ugly, Too,” a funny rendering of a professor who, by the end, may know less than she thinks. The opening line set the tone: “You had to get out of them occasionally, those Illinois towns with the funny names: Paris, Oblong, Normal. Once, when the Dow Jones dipped two hundred points, a local paper boasted the banner headline: ‘NORMAL MAN MARRIES OBLONG WOMAN.’ They knew what was important. They did!”

And I saw what was important, too: humor could bring interest and give comic relief. Shakespeare had known this, but until Lorrie Moore, I felt American literary writers had forgotten that. One could be either funny—Dave Barry funny, Art Buchwald funny—or one could be serious as in Joyce Carol Oates serious or Norman Mailer serious.

The latter were considered literary, the former, entertaining. Couldn’t one be both? Had I forgotten Flannery O’Connor? No, but she wasn’t around and writing anymore. Lorrie Moore not only was writing, but she made it into The Best American Short Stories of the 20th Century.

That led to my reading many more of Moore’s stories. A master of mixing humor and tragedy, she reinforced for me that humor could weave with and contrast drama well and bring balance. In fact, humor may be needed to get through the toughest of subjects—which brings me to the one story I particularly wanted to talk about for this article, Moore’s “People Like That Are The Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk,” which is in her book Birds of America.

This story is about a mother who, in changing her baby’s diaper, finds blood in her baby’s poop, an image that Moore describes as “like a tiny mouse heart packed in snow.” When her pediatrician, his nurse, and head resident all look at the baby, they draw their mouths in, “bluish and tight—morning glories sensing noon.”

As you see, her simile and metaphor instantly engage, seriousness edged with a lightness that gives one hope.

When she takes the baby into radiology for an MRI, the mother considers the machinery: “They are like dogs or metal detectors: they find everything, but don’t know what they’ve found.” As the radiologist puts it, “You don’t know exactly what it is until it’s in the bucket,” meaning surgery.

In short, Moore’s gaze falls on the absurdities of modern medicine and the way we live. We seem to expect doctors will fix anything wrong with us until one magical day when we’re 90 or 105, angels with wings will escort us somewhere—heaven? a heavenly car wash?—accompanied by Beatles music or a burst of nitrous oxide.

In Moore’s story, the doctors find a Wilms’ tumor, saying “‘tumor’ as if it were the most normal thing in the world.” The mother keeps thinking about the bucket.

I could go on and on with specific lines. There are many great ones. The story grows until you sense how the mother is having a crisis of faith, even if she has no religion. She’s bartering with someone. When a person goes through a crisis—and this is an intense crisis—the reader comes to see true character. The humor lets us have relief amid the crisis and get us to think things we normally might avoid. Philosopher Martin Heidegger felt people should consider their own deaths to make it less fearful, and in stories like this, we Americans are kept from our shopping and our forgetting for a moment to contemplate.

This is what a good story can do. I love this story.

By the way, my favorite book to use for teaching short fiction is On Writing Short Stories, edited by Tom Bailey. It happens to have a number of other stories I adore, including “Everything That Rises Must Converge” by Flannery O’Connor, “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, “Lust” by Susan Minot, and “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff.

May you witness a few of these and find some humor along the way.

]]> http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/05/18/selling-shorts-christopher-meeks/feed/ http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/04/28/ron-currie-wins-nypl-prize/ http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/04/28/ron-currie-wins-nypl-prize/#comments Tue, 29 Apr 2008 04:03:04 +0000 ronhogan selling shorts http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/04/28/ron-currie-wins-nypl-prize/ 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.

]]> http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/04/28/ron-currie-wins-nypl-prize/feed/ http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/04/19/mercantile-library-april16/ http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/04/19/mercantile-library-april16/#comments Sat, 19 Apr 2008 05:01:42 +0000 ronhogan at the merc http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/04/19/mercantile-library-april16/

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.

]]> http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/04/19/mercantile-library-april16/feed/ http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/04/19/dont-be-alarmed/ http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/04/19/dont-be-alarmed/#comments Sat, 19 Apr 2008 05:00:23 +0000 ronhogan housecleaning http://beatrice.com/wordpress/2008/04/18/dont-be-alarmed/ 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.

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My interview with Marya Hornbacher appeared in GalleyCat.

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