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I am focusing hard on the corporate work these days—doing the projects that arrive, finding the projects that don't even know they need me yet. Beth the Marketeer. Beth (yes, some of them call me this) the Machine.

We do what we must.

There'll be little time for my own literary work during these days, and so I look forward to easing my mind away from work pressures with books I bought or acquired long ago and never had the time to read. Books like Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers, Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds, Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being, Louis Greenstein's Mr. Boardwalk, Jayne Anne Phillips' Quiet Dell, Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Violet Kupersmith's The Frangipani Hotel, Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins, Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife.

I owe these writers my time. I feel like less than me because it has taken so long. If it still takes me a terrible (not beautiful) forever to report back on these books, know that I am doing all I can.

So far, I can tell you this: 50 pages into Kushner and I'm in awe.

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You know how it is when you steal that time to read the book you desperately want to read? I have been stealing that time.

Among the many wonderful people I met at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference (a conference I attended so that I could spend more time with the great Jayne Anne Phillips)—Brooks Hansen, Anne Lamott, Jane Satterfield, Leslie Pietrzyk, Jay Kirk, Olena Kalytiak Davis, my first editor, Alane Salierno Mason (W.W. Norton), my second editor in chief, Janet Silver, Grace Paley, even—there was a young scholarship winner named Susan Tekulve, who hailed from the south and told intriguing tales. Through the years Susan and I remained in touch as she published short stories and built a reputation as a fine teacher at Converse College in Spartanburg, SC. She traveled to and taught in Italy. She spent time among the Appalachian hills, where my great grandfather had left a mark. She brokered fascinating details. She was always humble and she, like me, loved chocolate, cats, and gardens.

Not long ago, Susan won the South Carolina First Novel Prize for In the Garden of Stone, which will be released in a beautifully designed package by Hub City Press in late April. Kirkus gave it a huge star. Library Journal named it as a Spring Break. None other than Robert Olmstead, Thomas E. Kennedy, and Josephine Humphreys have sung its praises, and I asked for an early copy.

This is the book I've been desperate to read, and my joy for Susan, my enthusiasm, my deep respect, I'll use the word "awe"�it overflows. I'm 100 pages in and now must leave it for a spell to do some corporate work. I'll write a full response in a few days. But for now let me say that this generational book about the south and southern Italy (yes, they combine to perfection here) is so brilliantly built and quietly affecting that I could choose any single paragraph and it would impress you.

Here's just one. It's 1924, the first evening of a southern honeymoon.

Around the mountain pool, the butterflies flattened themselves against long, polished stones, drinking the water held in their dimpled surfaces. Emma took off her shoes and walked across the slippery rocks. Water sprayed her face and arms as she dodged the drinking butterflies and stood at the pool's edge, watching the giant trout swim around the pool. Dark blue and mottled, they skulled just below the surface, gulping up butterflies and water, their stomachs filling like empty buckets. She saw now why her husband had released them. She, too, was satisfied just to know that they were there.

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The other day I wrote about the conundrum one faces when finishing a novel and about a conversation I'd had with my son.  Many of you took the time to comment and, as always, I am so appreciative of your thoughts.

For those of you who wondered (and for the record), I did indeed think I knew how I'd end the book (a novel for adults) before I spoke with my son.  But the language, as often happens, took me elsewhere.  The speed and rhythm of the words, the returning motifs, ultimately sent me back to Prague, where an early chapter of the novel takes place and where, it was clear, the book had to return. 

Fortunately, I had my photo albums to help me, old notes I'd made to myself, pictures like the one above. It was in Prague—so many years ago—that I met Jayne Anne Phillips, Gish Jen, Carolyn Forche.  It was in Prague that some of the images of this novel were born.  It takes that long, I find, to write a book.  It takes remembering, as much as imagination, to write fiction. 

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The Asian American Writers Workshop is celebrating its 20th anniversary by hosting the third annual Page Turner literary festival. The all-day event will take place on Saturday, October 29th at Brooklyn’s powerHouse Arena. Follow this link to view the full schedule.

Here’s more from the release: “Multi-dimensional program includes: a staged reading directed by Ralph Peña; artist Wangechi Mutu (MOMA, Guggenheim) talking about immigration; an open mic featuring Jen Kwok (Date an Asian), Negin Farsad (Nerdcore Rising) and others; stories from twenty years of the Workshop; and hard-hitting conversations about Occupy Wall Street, Islam and the West, the rise of China and India, and the national crackdown on immigration.”

The festival will feature appearances by Junot Díaz, Amitav Ghosh, Jessica Hagedorn, Kimiko Hahn, Hari Kunzru, Jayne Anne Phillips, Suketu Mehta, Min Jin Lee, Mark Nowak, Amitava Kumar, Granta editor John Freeman, and Guernica editor Joel Whitney. Attendees will also get a chance to hear from two stand-up comedians, five National Book Award finalists and seven Guggenheim Fellows.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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There are, it sometimes seems, not even six degrees of separation in the writing world.  Today, during Alumni Day at Kelly Writers House (University of Pennsylvania), I shared this moment with the tremendous KWH deputy in charge Al Filreis (I would take one of his extraordinary classes, but I'm afraid I'm not quite smart enough), Alice Elliott Dark (whose short story, "In the Gloaming," was selected by John Updike as one of the best of the last century, and who read from it beautifully today), and Moira Moody, a writer and almost bride, who was Al's student before she was mine, and, after Al and I sent her on her way, a student of Alice's at the Rutgers-Newark Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program created by none other than our mutual friend, Jayne Anne Phillips.

But that's not at all.  Dear Moira was also the inspiration for "Moira" (is inspiration too broad a word for such a flat-out stealing of a name and persona?)—the star of the zany corporate fable, Zenobia, that I penned with then-Shire CEO, Matt Emmens.  

Altogether, then, on a gorgeous meander of a day.

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These words appear toward the end of Charles McGrath's recent NYT profile of Don DeLillo:

Mr. DeLillo is 73 now and considers himself a late bloomer. He didn’t publish his first novel until he was 35, after quitting a job in advertising and after what he calls “a golden age of reading,” in which he would “consume fiction as if it were breakfast cereal.”

Asked why his first book took him so long, he answered: “I don’t have any explanation for that. All I know is that one day I said to myself, ‘I think I’m a writer.’ I started making sentences I didn’t know I was capable of.”

I think I'm a writer.....

I am reminded of a certain correspondence that sprung from a certain 1996 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, to which I'd gone at the invitation of Jayne Anne Phillips, whom I'd come to know the year before in Prague. I met Brooks Hansen, the extraordinarily imaginative, genre-hopping author of such books as The Brotherhood of Joseph, The Chess Garden, The Monsters of St. Helena, John the Baptizer, and Caesar's Antlers, at Bread Loaf. We exchanged a few notes afterward, and in one, Brooks—perhaps inadvertently—shifted the way I thought of myself, insisting that it wasn't what one had published that rendered one a writer. It was what one could do with words.

Not a writer yet, is what I had thought of myself up until then, for I only had short story and essay publication to my name, no book. Becoming a writer, is what I began to understand—a category that I continue to slot myself into today: still becoming.

For how boring it would be, how anti-climactic, to have already arrived.

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All through the night, there's been rain and howling wind, and now, in the dark, I gather my things for a day trip to Wall Street.

I remember a day, years ago, when Kate Moses, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Camille Peri, and I were all headed uptown to give a reading from the Salon.com anthology, Mothers Who Think. Rain had overtaken Manhattan, and every subway stop was flooded through, and from stop to stop we ran, Reiko the transplanted New Yorker leading the way. We were to meet Jayne Anne Phillips and others at a bookstore. We were not to be late. We put our trust entirely in this gorgeous green-eyed, dark-haired physicist-athlete-writer, and she did not let us down.

I'd never met Reiko before that day. She became and now remains one of my very best friends. Whenever I go to New York City, I think first of her, and how it was that she got us safely through.

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Yes, this is a photo of San Francisco, just beneath that great and golden bridge, and yes, Penn is urban and east coast and miles from any bay. But this photo is the right photo for my present mood, for I've just returned from the University of Pennsylvania, my alma mater, where I travel now not as student, but as teacher.

Those of you who follow this blog know how many different ways I've danced the syllabus through. You know how many books I re-read before selecting passages to share ("Autopsy Report," by Lia Purpura; a snatch of Livinia Greenlaw: the opening homage to a photograph in Jayne Anne Phillips' Black Tickets). You know how much music I listened to before I chose the songs that would inspire a piece about weather and mood, (a Soweto Gospel Choir classic) or the jib and jab of conversation ("Arrimate Paca" by Eliades Ochoa). But what you didn't know, perhaps, was how eager I was to meet the students, whose work I had the privilege of reading over this summer.

Today I met the students. They are as fine as the weather we were granted.

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I have been at work on a book off and on for two years, as I have previously posted. It's an historical novel, deeply researched, and three voices carry the plot.

Here is the lesson of a multiply voiced novel: Collisions are essential, and they should not look like coincidence. The collisions (between characters, within moments, across voices) must carry meaning. They must signify.

I work on the signifiers now. It is slow but fascinating going. I look to the masters to see how it is done—Louise Erdrich, William Faulkner, and now Jayne Anne Phillips in her new novel, Lark & Termite, which got her a starred PW review, for starters, but more than that, it has Tim O'Brien saying:

What a beautiful, beautiful novel this is—so rich and intricate in its drama, so elegantly written, so tender, so convincing, so penetrating, so incredibly moving. I can declare without hesitation or qualification that Lark and Termite is by far the best new novel I've read in the last five years or so.

I'd love to know of other masters of collision, of when you think multiply voiced novels work.

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I posted earlier this week about the gifts of friendship yielded by the mostly private writing life; I wrote, particularly, about Jayne Anne Phillips.

My story was about the time I'd spent with Jayne Anne in Prague; Jay Kirk, that enormously gifted writer whom I've praised in other blog entries (most recently that gorgeous Rwanda piece in GQ) and whom I've benefited so hugely from knowing since 2005, wrote to tell me about the quality of a critique Jayne Anne had given him at Bread Loaf. The email dialogue went (paraphrasically) thusly:

Me: Wait. What year were you at Bread Loaf?

Jay: I was there in '96.

Me: As was I. Grace Paley. Anne Lamott. The gorgeous Olena Kaltyiak Davis. Jane Satterfield. Brooks Hansen.

Jay: Wait. You were in our class? Or were you teaching...

Well, indeed. You get that point. Apparently, I've known Jay since 1996. Apparently, we sat in the same small classroom. Surely, I read pages from his then novel-in-progress; I remember the beating pulse of the guy's talent. And beyond this being one of those ain't-life-strange conjunctions, it raises for me this question:

How do I keep managing to trip up against blazing talents who are also (don't ever take this for granted) hugely good souls? The sort of people I need to know, because without them I wouldn't think nearly as hard. I had the chance to know Jay a long time ago, it seems. I was given (fluke that it was) a second chance. Thank goodness I was finally paying attention in '05. It would have been lousy if I hadn't.

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Jayne Anne Phillips has a brilliant new book due out this coming January. A brilliant book: Faulkneresque. Unblinking. Committed. Not a shred of fear. It's called Lark & Termite, and in a future post I'll be getting to that, but for now, as I sit curled over the galleys, as I sit here celebrating Jayne Anne's unsinkable talent, I remember my first days with this writer, I remember an essay I once wrote. Because she is a rare, living legend, a rare female living legend, I post parts of that earlier piece here today, to provide context for what I'll post next week.

I met Jayne Anne Phillips in a city of puppets, on a night of daggering rain. It was Prague, the summer of 1995. She was across a gilded reception room, near a table piled high with apples and cheese, and I remember watching how she moved through the writers who had assembled there—moved through them, touched a hand to them, but escaped them just in time. Her long crimped hair sat on her shoulders like a cape. She seemed unspoiled by the rain.

Standing there, observing Jayne Anne, I was struck by contradictions, as readers of her work have always been. Here was the woman who had yielded characters who marched straight out of the dark side and spoke: Jamaica, you black doll, wobbling like a dead girl sewn of old socks …. Here was the author of tender reminisce: My mother’s ankles curve from the hem of a white suit as if the bones were water. Here was the teacher with the reputation for being obsessed with the miniscule, the line edit, the word and its hyphen, the punctuation mark. Here was the mother both saddled with beauty—charcoal blue eyes, sun-darkened skin, a photogenic nose and chin—and famously uncomfortable with beauty’s dark allure.

It occurred to her, I never did ask why, to speak to me that night. When had I gotten to Prague? Where was I from? Had I gone to the castle across the bridge? Had I seen the big cathedral? This morning, I said. Pennsylvania, I said. And no, I’d seen neither castle nor cathedral, though I’d hoped to at one point, when there was time. She asked me to call her the following morning at ten. She said we’d go see things together.

We spent the next day jostled by the summer crowds of Prague, Jayne Anne and me, our families. We spent it beneath pinched-high roofs, beside confessionals, in the trapped light behind stained glass. Cathedral and castle. Gardens and walls. Heat, and the sound of singers singing. It was mid-afternoon before we made our way back, over the bridge. We bought postcards and jewelry and architectural miniatures, then parted ways in Mala Strana.

Over the next ten days I got to know Jayne Anne, quietly and slowly. If she was cautious in among the crowds, she was generous in private. If she was guarded about the price of fame, she spoke without pretension. She talked about stories, about words, about the book that she’d been writing. She talked about the carnival that is the writer’s life. She asked questions, too—what it was that made me write, where I thought I might be going, what I hoped to get from books, and over coffee and hot chocolate and one kind of cookie then the next I said that I was writing because I always had, because I couldn’t break the habit. I said I was writing because I believed that words could be morally persuasive.

In Prague I wasn’t a writer yet; I was just a woman, writing. I was just a woman with a writing dream, and Jayne Anne listened to it. After ten days went by, I left for home; after more time passed, I got a postcard. A portrait of a Ferris wheel on the banged-up front, and on the back, a single gesture: Dear Beth, it said, are you really gone? No. No. You’re still here with us.

Being out in the world now with books of my own, I am overwhelmed when I think back on Prague, Jayne Anne, and castles. I know the price of advice, I know the weight of strangers’ manuscripts, I know the urgency behind the questions: Read me? Know me? Teach me? Promote me? Love my book? Make me a writer? When you lean in the direction of another’s work, you lean precariously out of your own. When you attend to the dreams and works of others, you are thrown from the path you had been on. In Prague I was a stranger—unknown, prone, as I continue to be prone, to wrecking sentences with elaborate extensions. I was living on the other side of books—unpublished, unread, linguistically ungainly—and still, on a night of rain, in a city of puppets, Jayne Anne asked if I had seen a castle. She opened a door, and I walked through. I invaded her world with my own.

Like the architect, the writer is a romanticized profession. It is the lavish drunkness of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the outrageous cruelty of Sinclair Lewis, the staggering machismo of Ernest Hemingway, the infidelities, always that. We love the brokenhearted writer. We love the beg for forgiveness, the confession of betrayal, the fragile ego smashed wide apart in the finest final pages. Writing, the myth goes, is tenderness reserved for the book, intelligence transferred to fiction, generosity given over to scene, and the writing life is the life that’s lived subservient to stories. Thieves, writers are, and shadows drag behind them. And wherever writers claim to broker the truth, they cast, instead, a net of lies.

It is the irreproachable loneliness of the writer we’ve come to expect, the miserly way they parcel out their flecks of available love. Those who love too much get nowhere. Those who teach will never sell. Those who give back cannot be classified as genius. Those who cede the stage are thrust aside. Don’t expect a thing from a writer but their books. Don’t look for their decency anywhere but before you, on the page.

Except I cannot prove the myth. Except I have lived within the graces of its polar opposite. I have opened my mailbox to a postcard from Michael Ondaatje, a careful, intricate, telling response to a letter I had written. I have found a pen in my mailbox, too—a gift from a novelist I met only once, after standing in line for hours at a bookstore. A writer friend brought my son paper stars, and another writer sent me seeds, and a writer’s blueberries have arrived as well—overnighted to preserve their wild freshness. And one day an orchid appeared with two dozen purple blooms and, another day, a pillbox from Dubai and always books and, astonishingly, more seeds and three packages of saffron, and a jar of jam and a bundle of photographs, a pen, a chocolate bar, a ceramic dragonfly, a subscription to a magazine. Dear Beth, are you really gone? No. No. You’re still here with us.

It is from the gifts and notes of writers that I have learned what writing is. It is how writers have reached far beyond their books that has rescued me from absurd and brazen dreams and taught me what really matters. What I thought writing was writing isn’t. How I thought writers were at least some writers aren’t. Where I thought I’d take my rewards, I have found nothing worth my keeping. Where I expected little, I’ve been overcome with flavor. If I thought I could write myself into kindness with words, I have learned, from my writer friends to know the extent of the possible. If I thought I’d write my way to truth, I have been helped to redefine my purpose. Memory is not memoir. Truth supercedes the tale. Arfulness induces artifice. And writing a book is not publishing a book. And being a writer sometimes means that one does anything but writing. And.

Lost, often lost in the dispiriting mechanics of publishing, or the disappointments of the trade, or the injustice that can be done to an ambition or a story, I have found my anchor in other writers, in the gifts and cards and emails that have floated in, across the nether. Beth, we are writers by virtue of our stance to the world. Plus the act makes us feel good. Writing makes me like myself. One email, out of many. It is such a scary time, when your novel is tender and green and you feel if it is not tended it must just dry up and blow away. Another. Don’t want to be that famous anymore, so we’ve cured each other, you and me, maybe.

When I was a child aspiring to be a writer, I never dreamed about growing up and knowing other writers; I wasn’t that audacious. I thought about how putting words together made me feel. I thought about riding a train and seeing my book on a stranger’s lap. I thought about the view I’d have from my writing window, and the places I’d go to find story, and the books I’d have stacked around me like old friends. What I knew about writers I’d know from their books; that was the assumption I’d made. Writers wouldn’t have the time, just as I wouldn’t have the time, to talk about books and their making.

But now I am on the other side of books, and what has begun to matter most to me is those who make the writing right. I celebrate the wisdom of writers and what they know. I celebrate the life I live, in writerly company. I celebrate the notes that I wake up to, the attention, the succor, the decency, the humor, the honorable and companionable quality of the endless conversation. It isn’t finally about writing. It is finally about living. It is about reaching out and listening, imagining another.

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