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The Los Angeles Times  hosted its 34^th Annual Book Prizes ceremony over the weekend, honoring 50 writers in 10 categories for their 2013 books. The Times’ book critic David L. Ulin hosted the event at at the University of Southern California’s Bovard Auditorium.

Susan Straight received the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement and John Green took The Innovator’s Award. We’ve got the entire list of winners after the jump. continued…

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For many weeks I had looked toward this weekend as a time to read some of the many books that have come to me from friends, or that I bought myself.  In the wake of Friday's news, I have, like you, been paralyzed.  There simply are no words.  There is less goodness in the world.

I don't know how any of us move forward—how we leave those suffering behind in our thoughts.  I was grateful for church this morning.  I was grateful for the dark mist of sad weather, for sun would not have been right today.

The book that I have managed to carry with me through this weekend is Between Heaven and Here, bought from a New and Noteworthy shelf at a nearby bookstore back in October, by my long-time friend Susan Straight, who has won countless awards and prizes—deservedly.  She lives in and is inspired by her own Riverside, CA.  Since the very start of what is now a stunning novel career, she has looked toward what most of us cannot see—the lives of those imperiled by gangs, crack, meth, poverty, injustice, prejudice, and bittersweet (but mostly bitter) histories. 

Between Heaven and Here is part of a trilogy framed by A Million Nightingales and Take One Candle Light a Room.  It is a small book with a large cast.  It sweeps back and forth over many years and two states, and through horrific crimes present and past.  It centers on the death of Glorette Picard, a beautiful streetwalker and crack addict whose son, Victor, studies SAT words and is determined to forge a path out of a proud but battered lineage.  Faulkner-like, it circles Glorette's burial—nearly impossible given the hard sheen of a sun-dried earth.

Susan has always written sentences that crackle and steam.  She has fabricated characters whose talk is so real and whose conditions are so palpable that we are sure that Susan herself has sat among them, genuine and listening.

In this novel—a novel of assembled parts, of intersecting stories, of clocks moved ahead and moved backward, then stopped—Susan's sentences stunned me at most every turn.  Here are just a few of them.  Here's what Susan Straight can do with an image:

Gustave touched her collarbone.  The knob of bone where it had healed, after she'd broken it falling from an orange tree.  He couldn't touch her hair.  When she was fourteen, the flesh of her body had rearranged itself, and her eyes had grown watchful under the fur of eyebrows and eyelashes.  Her hair had come out of the braids his wife made every morning, and she had coated her eyelashes with crankcase oil and painted her lips, and disappeared into her room.  The fear of her beauty wound its way through his entrails.

The Santa Ana was so shallow and clear that he waded across it, kept on through the sandy earth past the river, the willows that smelled medicinal, and came to the eucalyptus windbreak all along the citrus.  

"Whatever," the boy said.  Felonise let herself look at him.  Reddish-brown hair in shiny spikes, like a wet cat sat on his skull.

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The Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) dedicated an entire week of essays to Joan Didion and her new memoir Blue Nights. Six writers shared their thoughts about the new book; one essay was published each day this week.

The group includes LARB senior fiction editor Matthew Specktor, Take One Candle Light a Room author Susan Straight, literary journalism professor Amy Wilentz, Cool Shades author Amy Emphron and LA Times columnist Meghan Daum. The last piece, written by Los Angeles Without a Map novelist Richard Rayner, will be published tomorrow.

LARB editor-in-chief Tom Lutz gave this statement in the release: “Didion is an icon of literary L.A. despite living in New York much of her life. In 1976 she wrote that ‘[t]o shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.’ That attention to style, structure, perspective, and meaning animates the essays we’re featuring this week.”

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I began my travels to southern Spain more than 16 years ago.  I met an old man named Luis, who cooked for me when I was sick.  I found a bathtub full of oranges high up, on an old, odd roof.  I met one of the King's best friends, southern Spain's finest breeder of bulls, and he took me out in an open jeep, where the unsuspecting herd was chewing.  I watched the flamenco dancers dance; I climbed the towers; I studied the bridge. I read of the war, and I read of survivor, and I tracked down old memoirs from the Franco era, preserving the recipes I'd find clenched within the pages.  Seville was home to my brother-in-law, Rodi, his wife, and their children, and so to Seville my husband, son, and I would repeatedly return.  I walked through doors few do.

For years, I worked on a book I called Small Damages, except for the years during which I thought of it as The Last Threads of Saffron.  The novel evolved over time—became a story of gypsies, a story of the deaf, a story of an old cook's love affair.  Last summer, just about this time, I shared a draft of the book with Tamra Tuller, an editor at Philomel Books, whose Kathryn Erskine (Mockingbird) would go on to win the 2010 National Book Award and whose Ruty Sepetys (Between Shades of Gray) would appear on the bestseller list in her debut week earlier this year.  Tamra had ideas about Small Damages.  She encouraged me to keep working.  She emerged as one of those rare editors who agrees to read again, who quietly and gainfully encourages. 

Tamra shares, with me, a love of travel, a love of exotic foods, even a love of the TV show "Top Chef."  Tamra is also, as of today, thanks to the announcement (below) in the PW Children's Bookshelf, the editor of Small Damages.  I don't think I can express just what this means to me.

Tamra is kind, and she is smart.  She works within a team—which includes my dear former editor Jill Santopolo (who introduced me to Tamra by way of Ruta's book) and the remarkable Michael Green—that makes a writer feel at home.

My great thanks, then, to Tamra, to Jill, to Michael, to Philomel, and to my agent, Amy Rennert.  My thanks, too, to Kate Moses, Susan Straight, Alyson Hagy, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, and Ivy Goodman, who read this book over time and kept me believing in it.  Maybe it took ten years and eighty drafts to write the book that Small Damages finally is.  But the book feels brand new and just right and full of hope in the hands of Tamra Tuller.

Tamra Tuller at Philomel Books bought world rights to National Book Award finalist Beth Kephart’s YA novel Small Damages, a coming-of-age story set in southern Spain about the difficult choices a teenaged girl faces when she gets pregnant. The publication is scheduled for summer 2012; Amy Rennert of the Amy Rennert Agency brokered the deal. 

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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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