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In the summer of 2010, I was at the American Library Association meeting in Washington, DC, when the ever-fashionable Jill Santopolo (who had worked with me on several Laura Geringer/Harper Collins books and had herself edited The Heart Is Not a Size) slipped a copy of Ruta Sepetys's novel to me and said, "I read this on the train and cried. I think it's the kind of book you'd love."
I did. So did the world.
Reading Between Shades of Gray made me wonder about the editor of that book, Jill's Philomel colleague Tamra Tuller, who had taken on Ruta's literary exploration of another time, another place. I had been working on a Seville novel for years at that point. I had come close—very close—to selling it more than one time. My heart had been broken, but I hadn't given up; if I believed in anything I believed in that cortijo, that cook, those gypsies, those Spanish songs. I wrote a note to Tamra—brazen slush pile person that I have often been—and asked if she might take a look.
She did. The rest is history. Two years to the month after my first reaching out to Tamra, Small Damages—far the better book for the conversations Tamra and I had—will be released, on my son's birthday, to be exact. A year or so from now (the timing isn't fixed) my Berlin novel, a book born out of a phone conversation Tamra and I had one afternoon, a book that reflects both our love for that city (Tamra having gone there first, Tamra having sent me thoughts about where I might go, what I might see), will find its way into the world.
And today, for the first time, I meet Tamra, a young woman who has changed my writing life immeasurably in ways both big and small. Two trains, a long walk, a conversation—in person. If I'm lucky, Jill herself will be in sight (and the very dear Jessica).
It feels like going home.
3 Comments on Seville, Berlin, Philomel: At long last, I am meeting Tamra Tuller, last added: 3/14/2012
I talk a lot about how much I love Philomel, Tamra Tuller, Michael Green, Jill Santopolo, and Jessica Shoffel, not to mention the amazing sales and marketing team—but hey, it's not without good reason. Among the many gifts of working with this house is the sense that I have joined an active, loving, functional family. These are people who care. These are people who read your books when they arrive and who send you notes throughout the process—notes that you cling to in the midst of hair-tossing winds.
Among the many gifts that Tamra has given is introductions to two of her own writers—both of whom were heroines of mine long before I ever thought I'd meet them. One is Ruta Sepetys, whose Between Shades of Grayis a towering international success; Ruta and Tamra were just in Lithuania, for example, meeting with the prime minister about that very book. The other is Kathryn Erskine, who isn't just the National Book Award winner for Mockingbird, but a woman of such abiding curiosity and abundant imagination that when you ask, What are you working on these days, Kathy?, you get a series of gorgeous history lessons and a few foreign phrases thrown in to boot.
Both Ruta and Kathryn kindly read Small Damages and contributed their words to the back cover. A few months later, Ruta wrote to say it would be fun to find a way to do an event together (imagine!) and Kathryn asked if I'd be interested in doing an interview for Book Hook, an email newsletter written for parents, homeschoolers, teachers, librarians, and grandparents. The answer to Kathy's question was pretty easy (yes), and today I share the link to our conversation. This was the first interview I'd done for Small Damages, and it was an honor to have had the conversation with Kathy.
I share a snippet below. You can find the whole by going to this link and then downloading the February/March 2012 edition. Between now and then, I share the photo up above from one of my many trips to Seville. That gorgeous kid is the boy I love. In a few months' time, he'll be a college grad. I dedicated Small Damages to him, because it was this young man who, at so many junctures in his life, would sit and let me read aloud from a book that challenged me greatly; he was the one who listened. Write about the living, not the dead, he said one day after I had read a funeral scene. With his words, my story turned. So did my future.
Kathy: You really captured the mood of sultry, sun-drenched Spain. Can you tell us about your Spanish travels?
My husband, who was born and raised in El Salvador, has a far-flung family. His youngest brother lived in the south of Spain for years, and so we visited a number of times. Seville became a city that I could walk alone, discover on my own, a city I loved and love still. We would also drive out to the countryside. During one excursion, I met one of the best known breeders of the fighting bulls of Spain. I set SMALL DAMAGES in a cortijo very much like the one we visited. Miguel is in some ways patterned after that heroic breeder.
Many, many years ago, I began to write a book about Seville. Or, I should say, a book inspired by my many travels to Seville, where my brother-in-law lived for years. I met an old man named Luis in Seville—a cook with a passion for colorful birds. I fell in love with gypsy song and flamenco, traveled the dusty roads, went out among the bulls with one of the country's most respected bull breeders, climbed the towers, sat in the cathedral, grew obsessed with paella and saffron. Seville was heat in the high summer and a wise men's parade in early January and long rides in a temperamental citroen named Gloria. It was, for me, story.
I wrote that story many ways. I kept looking for its heart. Many times I came close, and then something frayed or fell apart. No one, I suspect, thought I'd keep working at it this long.
Last summer, I believed I had found my Seville story's center, and I sent the book to Tamra Tuller, the Philomel editor whose work—most recently the much-anticipated Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys (translation rights for which sold in dozens of countries long before the book was close to launch) and 2010 National Book Award winning Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine—I'd been hearing so much about (thanks, in part, to my friend Jill Santopolo). Tamra and I began a conversation, and it is with great, great joy and a certain recognition for the many blessings in my life that I can (my agent Amy Rennert tells me today) share the news that SMALL DAMAGES has a home, a beautiful home with Tamra at Philomel.
I am overjoyed.
26 Comments on In which my Seville novel finds its right home, last added: 2/28/2011
How wonderful that you are now able to share this very special story with the world!!! Personally, I can't wait! You inspire us all, not only to persist, but to stay sensitive to our personal journeys and to what, in that, needs to be told.
There are books that one works on for years, then sets aside, then works again for years. Small Damages, my young adult novel of southern Spain, has been that book for me, and when I finished it at last, six weeks or so ago, I felt reprieved. Now I miss writing this book. I suppose that happens.
We drive past groves of olive trees and vineyards, one road, then another to Seville.The landscape grows used up and the air reeks with gasoline, and Miguel and I hardly talk, and when we do, he’s not letting me in on any secrets.When the thick walls of the city are finally in view, Miguel slows down and sits forward and messes with the clutch.He parks Gloria on one of those sidewalky streets, and I open my door and get out.
Above us are balconies and orange-yellow building slopes, the slick of tiles, those lizards.Nothing is tall but still and everywhere the buildings ribbon the sky into blue.We walk along beside the fortress walls, letting the women with the strollers pass, turning our faces from car smoke, stepping out of the way of the streams of dog pee that trickle away from the walls.Everything is different and everything’s the same, and I don’t talk, and Miguel doesn’t talk, and finally he stops and rings a bell.I hear keys in the doors beyond the wall and then one iron grate door opens, and then another one does, and now I’m staring at some old lady in the courtyard of a house.It’s like standing inside another doughnut, this one made of stone.
The air is greenhouse air, hot and muggy.The tiles on the floor are cracked.A miniature fountain is filled up with oranges, half of them rotten, half green. There are white birds like small moths, swooping and perching.A skylight overhead lets in the sun, and the stairs circle around, off to one side; they are iron and thin and they look creaky.Whomever she is kisses Miguel on the cheek and tells him to go skyward, then tells me too, in Spanish.She has been told about me, I can tell.She is glad that my linen dress is ironed.I feel her eyes on me as I climb the winding stairs up high, and now there are steps that twist the other way, and suddenly I’m on a rooftop standing not underneath but inside the sky.
I feel you turn inside me, swim toward the edge of us.
I feel dizzy but there is no wall to hold me.
3 Comments on Small Damages: my novel of southern Spain, last added: 9/15/2010
She names a year: 1939. She names a city: Triana. She tells me about a basement bar thick with people hiding from the bad news of the day. Old corrida posters on the wall, she says. The smoke of bad cigars. Short women with big necks talking crazy with their hands, and men thumbing a short deck of cards. A little stage, up in front, with a stool, and two long tables that you couldn’t walk between at midnight when everyone was sitting three-deep in. The bar was the thing, then. The only thing they had. The best Stella’s parents could make of the city they’d escaped to after they had escaped from Madrid.
“They only knew taverns,” Stella says. “They only knew food.”
The nights in Triana were blue, Stella says. The milk was thinned to blue. The mussels had a blue attitude and were lazy. The bread was sometimes all there was—bad bread and cheap rojo, cracked from barrels. There were already so many dead and those who weren’t dead were like nothing people, dead in the eyes, loose around their bones. It was October 1939, and the war had been over since April, but Spain wasn’t the Spain any of them had known for it now belonged to Franco. It was the church against the people, the anarchists against the nuns, the Civil Guard against civilians, the extremists forcing politics onto farmers and working stiffs. It was dead people hanging from chopo trees. Doctors who weren’t allowed to practice. Teachers selling charcoal in the street. Lawyers sleeping in cemeteries. Priests without churches. Spain was the Moors of Maria Luisa Park who said they’d been tied to the wings of the German planes.
“Tied to the wings?”
“Imagine.”
There were not enough bars, Stella says. There was nothing for anyone to do, nowhere to go, it was nothing hoping for nothing. Stella was eighteen, the cook. At night the people came for what they could find, which was wine and poor tapas and flamenco. “Hating Franco,” Stella says, “made us one people.”
2 Comments on Excerpt from that novel still in progress (but getting there, at last), last added: 6/15/2010
I have spoken, often, of this book that I have carried with me through a decade of rework, reconfiguration, enough half faith not to give up on it entirely, but still. Tears have been shed. Papers tossed across the room. Favorite sections and characters hacked out all to preserve: What?
The mood and the flavors and the dust and the flamenco and the carnations thrown from the rooftops of Seville.
I have spoken of this book, and oh, I have fought with it. You want to know where self-doubt lives, in a writer like me? It lives in the books I don't know how to finish, in the sentences that seem marred, in the static of first-person present, in the over-stress of conjunctions.
A few weeks ago, close to what seemed done to me, a very special reader read the book. She encouraged. She had questions. Ever since—through the throes of snow, client work, and a fever—I've been working to find answers, to move through the text one more time, to move through it newly.
I was struggling with rhythms as I made plot changes. I was mourning yet more favorite passages lost. I was intrigued by the introduction of two new characters—brand new and ultimately welcome. Finally, I thought, I was getting somewhere, and this morning, I rose again at that strange, sacred hour, to read the whole book through.
I think I've gotten somewhere.
8 Comments on Moving Past Self-Doubt, Toward Final, last added: 3/2/2010
I hear you! It never fails to amaze how your opinion of your work can change from day to day ... I bet there's a word for that in latin... Yesterday I was the mournful writer, today, not so. tomorrow who knows? 'Plod on!'(as my dad would say)
This must be such hard work, knowing what to keep and what to cull. I think you must have an ear like a musician, to know just where the dischord lies. But then comes the even harder part - knowing how to fix it so it's harmonious again.
"A writer must have a place to love and be irritated with. One must experience the local blights, hear the proverbs, endure the radio commercials, through the close study of a place, its people and character, its crops, paranoias, dialects, and failures, we come closer to our own reality... Location is where we start."
— Louise Erdrich, quoted in A Jury of Her Peers, by Elaine Showalter
Outside my window at this hour the smoke billows up from the neighbor's chimney and the pink sky goes sweet blue, toward black.
This is my home, my view, my slice of somewhere, and again and again, it appears in my books.
I write about suburban Philadelphia because as a teen I lived here and as an adult I returned here. I write about Juarez because once, in 2005, I took a trip across the El Paso border that changed my life. I write about a cortijo in southern Spain because I've been there, because once a man tall as royalty took me out into his dusty hectares in an open-to-the-sky jeep and said, Might I introduce you to my fighting bulls? I conjure a secret poet at Radnor High School because I once was one of those, and I story ghosts through a garden much like Chanticleer, down the road, because I spent two years walking through, week after week, and because a stone I had made for my mother rests there, beneath the katsura trees, and because I don't know where I'd be without seeds and all they beget.
I write where I've been, who I've been, what feels like mine. I have this place that I love. I begin here.
7 Comments on Writing What I Know and Where I've Been, last added: 2/8/2010
I think underneath all fiction is an element of truth. Our characters and experiences come more alive when we funnel our own truths through them. Beautiful view and places of the heart dear friend. (Hugs)Indigo
I get your posts at night, which is kind of weird - it feels like I'm sneaking a look into the future. Hmm. Sometimes I can't write about a place until I've left it. I love William Saroyan's Places Where I've done time: 'Well, some places are happy places and some aren't, and that's pretty much all you can say on the matter."
"Location is where we start." So often this is what gives an author's work its authenticity, its grounding (as Sierra said). Your sense of place is very strong.
... and this morning I wrote the final words of the novel I've always called Small Damages, save for that two-year period when I knew it as The Last Threads of Saffron.
These words as prologue:
Through the empty arch comes a wind, a mental wind blowing relentlessly over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents; a wind that smells of baby’s spittle, crushed grass, and jellyfish veil, announcing the constant baptism of newly created things.
— Federico Garcia Lorca
10 Comments on Sometimes it takes ten years to write a novel, last added: 2/1/2010
It's like nourishing a child, raising and guiding their path; until suddenly you realize they have been flying on their own for some time. You stand back in awe and wonder at this thing.
I can't wait to read this book that pulled life from you for ten years. (Hugs)Indigo
There's a funny thing about memory: It never gets things just right. My version is not your version, and it is certainly not his.
I was reminded of this the other day, as I began to revisit the hundreds of photographs I've taken of Seville and this specific cortijo outside Seville, where the bulk of the action in the novel I'm now revising takes place. Having worked on this novel for the past ten years, my creating mind has altered my recollecting mind, so that I had begun to remember this place with all the (crafted, fabricated) color and detail that I have ascribed to it in the novel. By now, of course, the real cortijo has little to do with the novel's cortijo. I had, frankly, forgotten that.
Here, for example, is an early scene, in which Jessa, a Philadelphia teen, is seeing the place photographed above for the first time.
Finally Miguel steers left, and the skinny line of road goes lumpy.There are olive trees on the one side, sunflowers on the other, some horses and a lonely mule, a patch of blooming cacti, lizards, and at the road’s end, a wide white stucco wall punched through with a center arch whose stucco rim is painted peach.Above the archway, Los Nietos is spelled out with blue tile, and beyond the archway is a courtyard, and in the windows of the house blue curtains hang, their bottom's brushing the begonias in the peeling window boxes. Everyone I know is at the Jersey shore—Kevin, Ellie, Robb, and Tim—thinking that the sea goes on forever.
5 Comments on Memory Failures, last added: 1/11/2010
Wonderful photo, and I loved reading the excerpt--we spent a little time in Seville during our trip this past fall and found the whole region to be truly striking...Granada...Ronda...Cordoba. I'm still going through our photos but I know just having them will help me crystallize those memories.
I look forward to reading more of the book someday soon!
For many years I've been at work on a novel that takes place in Seville. Last April, finding myself one draft away from sharing the book with editors, I put it aside, again, to focus on other things.
But it's now the new year, and the book beckons—perhaps a dozen small scenes to work in. Printing it out, settling in, is like returning to an old and trusted friend.
Here, below, are the opening lines. But before I get too nested in Seville, I'm headed to the Big Apple today to see West Side Story, a gift from my brother who remembers my ice skating days and my final choreographed performance to "Somewhere," my favorite song from that brilliant show. I love "Somewhere" so much that I scened it into Undercover, my quasi-autobiographical novel about a Radnor High School poet who finds her voice (and one idea of beauty) when she learns to skate.
The streets of Seville are the size of sidewalks, and there are alleys that leak off from the street, and in the back of the cab, where I sit alone, I watch the past rushing by. I roll the smeary window down, stick out my arm. I run one finger against the crumble-down walls. Touch them for you: Hello, Seville.
7 Comments on Returning to Seville, last added: 1/3/2010
seville! i have been there two years ago, you transported me back in time! i love spain.. can't wait to read that novel either.. you have to publish faster, beth. i can't wait that long!
have fun in new york today :) maybe i will meet you by accident (unlikely though).
I will be thinking of you at this meeting, and I will be smiling.
I hope you have a great time.
aw this post is so lovely, Beth.
I'm reading Small Damages right now and loving it just as I knew I would!