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from Short Stories and Other Imaginings for The Reading Spot
by J.D. Holiday
All Rights Reserved
Copyright 2014 by J.D. Holiday
A small boy laid there, motionless. Unlike the leaves around him he lay undisturbed by the wind gust.
Max stepped away. It was just a little kid. He looked asleep, his dark skinwas a shade of blue and purple, almost translucent. Thin parchment spanning a fragile frame.
The boy wore black jeans and an orange T-shirt with a ‘Save The Oceans’ logo across his chest. A crusted gash was on his forehead. Any time now he’d move, open his eyes and jump up, laughing.
“He’s dead,” Tony said again, this time contemptuously, his eyes wells of tears.
Max’s chest felt crushed like the time he’d fallen on his back from the school yardjungle gym and he couldn’t pull air in. He managed to say, “Maybe he’s not.”
Tony shook his head. “The little piss head. Dumb shit! He didn’t do whathe should have and now he’s dead. Stupid kid!”
Max stared at the kid. For a moment he sawTonylying in the boy’s place.Max choked. “He’s sick or something.” He hedged closer and squatted down, hesitantly touching the boy’s face. The skin was unusually cold, and the cheek dented in easily, like clay. Max jumped back falling on his backside.
“He’s dead. Can’t you see that cut on his head? They smashed him with something.Hard!” Richie loudly told him, his hands clutched at his side.
“No. Maybe it was an accident. Or a car hit him.”
“Grow up, Max. It happens,”Tony said softly now, grabbing Max’s sleeveand jerking him to his feet. “We have to tell.”
On his feet again, Max let Tony continue pulling him toward his own house. At the front door Tony using his key, lead Max inside.
They softly moved through the silent house to the kitchen in back, bright light from the many windows illuminating their way. Nothing was ever out of place there. Alwaysa bleachy smell in the air as if someone wiped off everything to disinfect and kill all the germs before they contaminated the inhabitants of the house. This house gave Max the creeps. There was something missing from it. What it was Max knew well, though things have changed since his stepfather now sucks it all up in their family. There was no love and what was there, felt like old toast taste; brittle, crackly and harsh. Most times Max could get Tony to come over to his house and hang out.When Max was here though, at Tony‘s, he felt it. Something always spooked him, only worse this time. Finding the boy did it, never having seen someone dead before.
He could almost see Tony getting beaten up here. Marus broke Tony‘s leg with thebaseball bat Tony usually kept leaning inside the garage door. Tony said he was batted to short stop, the patio doors calling him out. His parents told people he’d fallen from a backyard tree. Afterwards, Tony put the bat through the lattice work decorating the front porch, out of sight under the stairs so Maris couldn’t use it again.
Copyright by J.D. Holiday 2014
0 Comments on From the short story: The Boy In The Leaves by J.D. Holiday as of 4/17/2014 3:05:00 PM
Yessenia Lopez has been through Juvie and now finds herself at ILLC – Illinois Learning and Life Skills Center. Disabled, orphaned and wheelchair-bound, she is full of anger and hostility. Soon she meets other disabled youth – Cheri, who becomes her friend, and Teddy and Mia – a troubled couple. Joanne – also disabled and the secretary at ILLC, and Jimmie – one of the house parents, also become friends.
But this isn’t just Yessenia’s story. Good Kings Bad Kings is told from all of these perspectives and more, as the corruption at ILLC is revealed. As they get to know each other and learn of the horrors perpetrated at the institute, they recognize that change is needed, and become determined to force it.
Good Kings Bad Kings is a powerful commentary on how society views the disabled, and does little or nothing to care for them. Through these characters’ eyes, their story is told with brutal honesty. For the YA reader, caution may be needed due to language and sexual situations. This is not your casual beach read. Instead, you may find a lingering disturbed feeling and an urge to check up on your institutionalized friends and relatives. 2012 winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.
Reviewer: Alice Berger
0 Comments on Good Kings Bad Kings as of 6/3/2013 1:11:00 PM
A young girl named Me’ma makes a daring escape when the Baron’s men invade her village. Aided by a wolf named Bright Eye and her two purple leaf dolls, Xetacu and Tchesue, she heads up the river toward the Great Mountain. Grandfather told her that the land beyond was beautiful, free from all cruelty. Me’ma decides this is the place she longs to settle and sets off with determination.
Along the way, she meets some interesting characters: a man with a head that tilts off, and needs to be held in place (he had been hanged), a woman whose body is split in two, and one half falls off the other when not belted securely (she had been sawed in half), and various mounted, stuffed, and skinned animals who have learned the ability to talk. And finally she meets the Baron and his henchmen, face to face, in a great showdown over the Serpent.
While Me’ma journeys toward the Great Mountain, her overriding concern is the for the native people, plants and animals of the area. Respecting nature comes easily to Me’ma, and she wants everyone to be treated safely and fairly. And since the Baron and the Serpent are the enemies of all, Me’ma particularly wants him stopped. Symbolizing the way native peoples were removed from their land, this story reminds us that nothing good can come from such violence. Me’ma and the Great Mountain is a lesson reminding us of our obligation to treat others with fairness and kindness, allowing all to remain free.
Reviewer: Alice Berger
0 Comments on Me’ma and the Great Mountain as of 11/9/2012 9:36:00 PM
One thing I really like about my friend Laura Miller is that she, like me, is fascinated by literature and technology, and interested in the places they meet. Sometimes that intersection feels like a lonely place to hang out.
We both have iPads and (though we’re appalled by Apple’s employment practices) are excited about the potential of tablet computers. But we haven’t found many sites that talk about them in the way we would like would like them to be talked about. So we decided to start The Chimerist: Two iPad lovers at the intersection of art, stories, and technology. My first post is here, and, if you’re also a tablet lover, we’re looking for your screenshots.
Kate Christensen has an essay in the latest Elle on writing “In a Man’s Voice.” (She’s an expert on the subject; three of her novels, including the upcoming The Astral, are narrated by a male character.)
I’m so determined to convince you — all of you, men not exempted — to read it that I sought, and got, permission to run an excerpt. Here’s the opening:
The phrase “dick for a day” used to be bandied about quite a bit by me and many other women I knew, mostly fellow writers, back in the 1980s, when we were young and ambitious but unsuccessful, our tone somewhere between wistful yearning and pugnacious wrath: “If I had a dick for a day, I’d show them” — “them” being overrated male writers, ex-lovers who’d treated us badly, and, frankly, men in general. They had all the luck. We were stuck being women.
I grew up in an all-female family — two sisters and a mostly single mother — and we often bonded, in part, by disparaging men and feeling superior to them. My charismatic, handsome, intelligent, crazy father, a Marxist lawyer, disappeared from our lives (led off by the cops in handcuffs for beating my mother; I was the one who called them) when my little sisters and I were young, three years after my mother had divorced him. After that, my mother struggled to raise us without child support or help, during a time when she was working toward a doctorate in psychology from Arizona State University.
As my family saw them, men were untrustworthy, weak, and selfish. Our mother taught us to get along without them, to get along without much of anything, and to live well and have fun anyway.
But even after he was gone, I still loved my father. I looked Norwegian, like him, with a long face, strong jaw, thin mouth, and flashing eyes. And, like him, I was verbal, easygoing, and low-key on the surface, and, deep down, proud, socially paranoid, full of self-loathing, and prone to rage at injustice. Until I was nine, I was my father’s “son,” the one he could talk to. And after he left, I still felt like the boy — the ambitious, hotheaded one. I never liked dolls or played house. I read and wrote, climbed trees, collected rocks, rode my bike, and befriended boys, platonically. Although part of me yearned for a husband, a house, and kids, most of my brain was single-mindedly determined to do whatever it took to be a successful published novelist, and that part of me felt male.
In spite of my family’s attitude toward men, I loved, admired, and identified with them. I envied them, too — their power and autonomy, their freedom to be selfish, to walk away, to start over, to get angry, to speak frankly without appearing to give a damn what anyone thinks. Men were assholes, women were victims; men were active, women passive. Given the choice, I would have preferred to be an active asshole. Instead, I kept writing.
After a lot of floundering around, post-MFA, with bad relationships and worse jobs, I published my first novel, In the Drink, when I was 36. Its first-person narrator was a woman, but I was writing in a consciously male genre I privately called Loser Lit. I wanted my female narrator, Claudia Steiner, to join the ranks of Lucky Jim, Gulley Jimson, and Peter Jernigan. Claudia is a hard-drinking ghostwriter who’s in love with her seemingly unattainable male best friend, in debt, hapless, and bleakly, comically gritty. As I wrote the book, I was sure I was breaking new literary ground. Reviewers (all of them female) felt otherwise: When it came out, In the Drink was lumped with two other recently published, superficially similar books by women; ours were collectively hailed as
I recently submitted a short story to a literary magazine and received a positive rejection:
Great submission. I loved the colorful voice and vivid, detailed scenes. Not really a TMR [The Missouri Review] style story, but good luck publishing it elsewhere.
Any time an editor takes the time to handwrite a note like this it’s a good sign. Most writers receive form rejections (the same worded rejection sent to all others rejected by a publication). The rejection I received gave me hope that my story could be published in another literary journal. I need to research more to find one that’s a better fit.
I had a story published in a literary journal years ago and would be thrilled to sell another. Typically, I write for children, but I also enjoy writing fiction and nonfiction for adults, both literary and commercial. Among the genres I’ve written in are mystery, adventure, romance, inspirational, and humor. I’m a “little writer,” one without a string of New York Times bestsellers or contractual obligations to write so many books a year. I’m free to write what I want. While big writers focus on developing a “brand” (a kind of writing they’re known for), I’m free to experiment. No pressures. No deadlines. No limits.
Years ago a friend and fellow author, Charlotte Adelsperger, said to me, “Little writers have more fun.”
In honor of April Fools’ Day, fake publishing news has been circulating the Internet all day. We rounded up a few examples. Above, we’ve embedded that Harry Potter/Dangerous Minds parody skit from College Humor.
Smashwords revealed plans to purchase Amazon to create Smashazon.com, a site dedicated to making “your eBook, your way.”
Author Jane Friedman offered her funny predictions with The Future of Publishing: Enigma Variations. She imagined that authors James Patterson, Stephen King, and Dan Brown will create United Authors, an collective earning $11 billion by 2016.
Apropos of Miriam’s post on the euphoric reception to Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, at least two novelists have cried foul. Not about Franzen’s book per se, but the case, advanced by Jodi Picoult and seconded by Jennifer Weiner, that the NYT Book Review favors writers who are “white and male and live in Brooklyn.” Good news for this fairly sizeable demographic; Brooklyn boys with literary leanings can now rest easier knowing that their eventual literary efforts will receive proper critical attention.
I’ve followed the ensuing discussion over the last week with interest. In the Atlantic, Spiegel and Grau editor Chris Jackson weighed in with “All the Sad Young Literary Women.” A female colleague asked him to name some female novelists whose work he had read recently, and he confessed that for a moment, he couldn’t think of any (turns out, however, that he had read at least one). This prompted me to go through my own recent reads, seeing how I measure up.
I tend to read plenty of books by women authors, but I’ve never bothered to quantify or implement a quota system. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been in something of a Y chromosome rut, reading Evelyn Waugh, whose books, aside from Scoop, I’ve not read before—Brideshead Revisited, his World War II Trilogy. Fine writer, that Waugh, but something of a snob. I did, however attempt to balance the scales by reading some Muriel Spark, in order to get a female perspective on the foibles of British bluestockings.
How about you? What do you think of Picoult’s charge? How does your own reading compare?
I'm surprised, since I did a blog post not long ago when I realized that my reading— which is mostly literary fiction— is fairly well-divided between the genders. Looking at the stack of to-be-read novels on my coffee table, I see an even split. There is Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Herta Müller, Virginia Woolf, Audrey Niffenegger, Robin Black, Yiyun Li, Hilary Mantel, Doris Lessing, and Louise Erdrich.
If a reader of literary fiction is not reading many women writers, they're doing it deliberately. And missing some great writing.
I don't tend to read books by gender, but by content. I do think it's a problem if in the professional world, there aren't enough female writers being recognized for what male writers are being recognized for. There should be equal opportunity in that department, and reviewers should recognize the influence they may have on the industry and on readers.
I admit, I do gender balance my reading - as well as ethnicity, try some translations, different time periods...I guess I feel in the current *ahem* political climate (maybe, make that last 10 years' worth of political/cultural climate), I feel the need to push my reading a little...dammit, I can't stop any wars, but I can at least be a "peacemonger," in my reading...
Picoult and Weiner have a point. The problem is "women's fiction" sells better than "literary fiction" so women's books are often marketed that way when they're just as literary as the works of Y-chromosome persons from Brooklyn.
I wonder if today Muriel Spark wouldn't be dismissed as "chick lit" because she employed so much irony and humor. And Evelyn Waugh certainly wrote some funny books. I doubt a female Waugh living today would ever be taken seriously. They'd slap on a pink cover and a cartoon girl in a flapper dress--if any agent would even take it on. Smart, funny books by women are pretty much considered toxic, aren't they?
Oi oi oi. I've been following the arguments, but all I've gotten out of it is that I really need to open a couple of issues of the NYT and see what the balance is.
Re: my own reading, I do read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, which is dominated by male authors. However, there are a lot of great women writing in those fields as well, and a lot of my more mainstream reading is evenly divided between male and female authors. The current book and the last several I've read are by men, but the next few I plan to read are all by women. (I'm moderating the fantasy panel for a local literary festival next year, and all of the authors I've gotten for it are female as well! And the SF and graphic novel panels I helped plan are pretty evenly split between the genders, which is awesome.)
I agree with a lot of Picoult's and Weiner's, and Anne R. Allen's above me, points. Fiction by women does seem like it has to work harder to "prove" itself, and seem more disposable in the long run; the ones that become classics seem to much more often be written by men. Without pulling up any actual data to back up my perceptions, it seems that women will read more authors of both genders, but fewer men frequently read books by women unless they've become huge sellers.
Anonymous said, on 8/28/2010 4:00:00 PM
I think it's interesting that when a man writes a book about a family it's called sociocultural and millennial and when a woman writes a book about a family it's called domestic and miniaturist.
Happy summer, everybody! For the next while, there are going to be some absences from the blog as we take vacations, but we'd hate to leave you guys hanging. It's no secret that we blog much more now than when we started this baby, and there are far more of you reading than there were way back when. So we thought we'd bring back some blog entries of days gone by that you may have missed if you just joined us in the last year. If you have any favorites you think your fellow readers might enjoy, give us a shout below!
by Jim
It didn’t surprise me when someone asked me recently what the differences are in how I handle the projects I love and the projects I work on for money. It did, however, irritate me. The question came loaded with the insinuation that there are two kinds of books—the ones people should read and the ones they actually do. Often, I find that literary and commercial fiction are pitted against each other, as though they’re totally different beasts that serve entirely separate purposes. But is that really the case?
Too often, category fiction is treated like the bastard stepchild of the written word. But, frankly, I’m a whole lot more likely to pick up Stephen King’s new book than dive into Thomas Pynchon’s latest doorstop. Which isn’t to dismiss literary fiction, either.
Years ago, I was getting a ride to a train station from an MFA student in Massachusetts, and we talked about the challenges of fiction writing and writer’s block, not to mention how competitive the marketplace is. And then he unleashed this on me: “I could knock out the sort of mystery novels that sell hundreds of thousands of copies, but I’m better than that.” If he weren’t behind the wheel of the car, I would have smacked him upside the head. I mean, really. Do you honestly think the only thing holding people back from becoming bestselling authors is…integrity?
As I patiently explained to him (who am I kidding? I sounded like a howler monkey in heat), it takes a lot of talent to write a fantastic mystery, just as it does to write an amazing literary novel. They just happen to be very, very different talents. Anyone who thinks that just because someone is a wonderful writer means they can pull off working in other genres clearly hasn’t read Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days. I recommend they keep it that way.
And let’s not get too far without mentioning that literary and commercial are not exact opposites. There are plenty of authors who mix the two forms freely. One can see this by reading the stunning, bleak mysteries of Dennis Lehane or the thrilling horror of Clive Barker. And is it just me, or is the award winning Cold Mountain as much a retelling of The Odyssey as it is a historical romance novel?
What I’m saying is, let’s let the snobbery go. Reading Madame Bovary can be as entertaining as reading Valley of the Dolls and vice versa, and there’s nothing wrong with that. To those people who consider genre fiction to be “guilty pleasures,” let it go. I grew up on a steady diet of Stephen King, Charles Dickens, Jackie Collins, and Victor Hugo, and I’ll happily debate the merits of Lucky Santangelo and Esmeralda any day. I’m the guy on the subway reading The New Yorker and Romantic Times.
The lines for me just aren’t that sharply drawn. So whether I’m pitching a new cozy mystery or a collection of interconnected stories previously published in literary journals, you can know one thing links them: I love both.
Thanks for reposting this. Still definitely relevant! As a former MFA poet who's currently working on a YA paranormal romance, I've seen these attitudes pitifully frequently. In fact, I had a conversation with a former classmate a few nights ago where he said something along the lines of: "At first I thought it was a joke that you were writing a novel about a merman. But then you wouldn't drop it!" Then he added some stuff about how it's smart of me to "go commercial" and try to tap into "hot markets." And how maybe he should try to write for teenagers--despite the fact that he's completely unfamiliar with their reading tastes.
Over the years, I've learned to be a little less angry about that kind of comment. A little. But it hasn't been easy.
I am so glad this got reposted, for those of us who are newer blog followers. I think every writer of genre fiction has faced something like this at least once, no matter what stage of the writing/publication process they're at. This kind of prejudice and snobbery is what kept me from pursuing a creative writing degree (and later was the big reason I decided not to go for an MFA) because it was so prevalent in my college program. It doesn't bother me too much coming from the average layperson, because I can't expect them to know, but it does irritate me when teachers come out with that stuff.
Glad to see this repost, too. And I think it's important to point out that "Madame Bovary" was the "Valley of the Dolls" of its time. The boundaries between literary and commercial are permeable, and often blur with time.
My review of Martin Stannard’s Muriel Spark biography appears at Barnes & Noble Review today. One of the things that struck me while reading is just how easily Spark — one of the finest and funniest novelists of the last century, or of any century — could have continued to write poetry and criticism and not tried her hand at fiction at all.
She wrote her first story at thirty-three, almost by accident; she needed money and the Observer was sponsoring a contest. After publishing her first novel at thirty-nine, though, she completed the next few books astonishingly quickly, at half-year intervals, as though some part of her mind had been readying itself for the challenge.
Despite its sprawl, Stannard’s biography is a fascinating read for Spark fans. And if you haven’t read Spark yet, please get cracking. I recommend starting with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, or my personal favorite, Memento Mori. Or maybe with her first book, The Comforters, or her last, The Finishing School… Just plunge in; it’s hard to go wrong.
The Arkansas Literary Festival will take place next weekend, April 8-11, 2010 in Little Rock, AR. If you’re anywhere close, please come!
Books, theater, music, comics, books, games, chess, puppets, origami, Shakespeare, books, authors in the schools, authors in the library, authors just strolling around, books, authors everywhere, panels and workships, art and illustration — and did I mention, books? And authors?
This year, I’ve served as the Co-Chair of the Children’s Programs for the Literary Festival and it’s been great fun planning the event. We tried to find a mix of activities relating to literacy and tried to schedule it so that families can take advantage of the range of activities.
My friend James Hynes’ Next is a departure from his prior novels in many ways, not least in that the action is set in a single day. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Tod Goldberg says the book, is “wildly inventive, stunning… an essential piece of American literature that is both of its time and ultimately without present compare.” Michael Schaub calls it “a shocking, original masterpiece.” Janet Maslin praises it for the New York Times.
I’m able to enjoy Next at last, now that my Muriel Spark extravaganza is winding down (for me, not for readers of this site), and as I read I am privileged to post Hynes’ characteristically charming and smart day-in-the-life reading list.
There are all sorts of reasons to write a novel — personal, political, religious, economic, or any combination thereof — but sometimes it’s technical. In other words, the writer wants to try out a certain structure or technique that he hasn’t attempted before, just to see if he can bring it off. It’s usually not the only reason, of course, but often it’s the motivating one, the proximate cause of the book. I heard once that Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men as a play that was meant to read like a novel, and I’ve heard something similar about Henry James’s The Aspern Papers. In the case of my new novel, Next, I wanted to see if I could write a day-in-the-life novel, a narrative that would be set in a single day, or part of one, and by working backwards and forwards through flashbacks, encompass the entire life of a single character. There are lots of previous examples of this, including, of course, two of the most famous novels ever written. I wish I could say that I’d made a thorough study of the genre, which would make the following list vastly more instructive and rewarding, but the fact is, in the reading I did to psych myself up before and during the writing of Next, I pretty much limited myself to the Big Two famous ones and a couple others. And, in the interest of comprehensiveness, I’ve included in the list several other books that also had a big influence on me, but aren’t actually day-in-the-life novels.
Ulysses, by James Joyce. The Big Kahuna, the great white whale, the Everest of day-in-the-life novels. Like a lot of serious readers, I’d attempted it without success several times over the years, never getting past the first fifty pages or so, but by time I was in the early stages of Next, I told myself that I couldn’t write a day-in-the-life novel and not have read Ulysses. So one summer a few years ago, I took a running start by rereading Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (both of which, truth to tell, I still prefer to Ulysses), girded my loins with a copy of Anthony Burgess’ Re Joyce, and started once again to scale the face of Ulysses. This time I made it all the way to the top, and, for the most part, enjoyed myself, though it was often slow going, and I never would have made it without Anthony Burgess. How useful reading Ulysses was to me in the writing of Next, however, is unclear. Ulysses is a big toolkit of a novel, as a brilliant young writer sets off to encompass all of Western culture in one book, set during one day, with only two main characters, all the while showing off, with each new chapter, his vast erudition and his mastery of nearly every literary technique you can
Special shout out to Robyn Campbell and Katie Salides in thanks for the recognition on my blog :) I love awards!!! They are right up there with new blog followers, FBfriends, Twitters following my tweets, blog comments, and oh yeah - gifts....presents. (wait, does that sound bad???)
Mostly, I love awards because I can pass them on and share other great blogs I follow :)
Award #1: Kreativ Blogger Award(with a capital K. BTW, leave it to me to get the award that is spelled wrong. :) Hey - if you saw my new line edits, you would understand why!)
Here are the rules: 1. Thank the person who nominated you for this award. 2. Copy the logo and place it on your blog. 3. Link to the person who nominated you for this award. 4. Name 7 things about yourself that people might find interesting. 5. Nominate 7 KreativBloggers. 6. Post links to the 7 blogs you nominate. 7. Leave a comment on each of the blogs letting them know they have been nominated.
7 (really boring) things about me.....that you probably don't care to know and could definitely live without.
1. I used to sing in a jazz band. I actually always thought I'd be a professional singer.If only I was not too old to try out for American Idol. I guess there's always America's Got Talent :) (I didn't know in my heart yet that writing professionally was even an option for me. Until I was out of college, I thought all writers were dead. Don't ask me why.)
2. I love to do Bikram Yoga. The hotter the better. For those of you who do not know, it is yoga done in 108-112 degree room. It is amazing!!! At the end of my class, they always hand out frozen lavender-smelling washcloths. Before I had kids, I did this yoga at least 5 times a week and had a rock hard body. Not so much anymore. (sorry to hubby!) I hope to return soon. :)
3. My husband is from UK. And, yes he has a sexy accent. He's actually from a small town in Wales. After we first got married, his company messed up his Visa and he was sent back to UK for 8 weeks until the British Consulate redid his passport. I spent a whole day (and night along with a few bottles of wine) thinking he was dead in a ditch somewhere b/c the airline would not inform me he was detained. I even got pulled aside in Atlanta Hartsfield Airport by security for "creating a scene" which really meant I was crying too loudly. What can I say it was after Sept 11th, so I guess my wailing spooked some people.
4. I really think I'm going to be on Oprah someday. Yes all my friends laugh at me. But I have had recurring dreams about me sitting on a couch talking to her - about what I don't know - so who knows. Weird huh? After my ex-fiance called off our wedding (2 weeks before the date). I sent in an essay to Oprah on the topic "How I pulled through a bad time." Mine was actually published in O magazine under an article title called "When I was dumped." Nice huh? But hey, I was proud - after all - it was in O magazine! Nothing like the whole world knowing. right? Wait - can I put that in my bio - that I was published in O magazine???
5.I was chosen to be in the show and pet Shamoo at Sea World. Yes, I have it on tape. I even said something brilliant. When asked "what does he feel like?" by the trainer, I yelled into the microphone (obviously not knowing how loud it was) "a tire". I think Shamoo was offended b/c he splashed me. Which doesn't sound bad, except I walked around the rest of the afternoon smelling like a fish. I have it all on tape but at parties I usually only show my parachuting one. makes me look cooler.
6. I traveled through Europe for a month by myself when I was 25. It was awesome. I was attacked on a train by a group of boys trying to mug me. Special shout out to the Italian train conductor for saving my life that night. I got stranded in Geneva without a hotel. And I was stuck in Piccadilly Circus for about 4 hours (11 pm - 3am) b/c I could not get a cab.
7. I have a special power. That's right. I am a superhero. Jealous? Whenever I touch something electronic, it breaks. I must have some kind of overactive magnetic field. Things never break down when my hubby is using them, only me. To give you an example - this was my week - my dishwasher broke (yes I had to wash dishes like in the old west except it was in a sink not a river). my car broke down (a day after we paid for it, while I was driving it. My hubby drovei t the whole weekend and it worked fine. I get in and NOTHING.), my TV broke while my hubby was out of town (yes you busted me, this is why I am caught up on blogs). And my cable broke and then came back on the day they were coming to fix it (we have no idea why).
Man I just realized how boring I am. And those 7 were hard for me to come up with.
Now, wouldn't it be funny if I now told you they were all lies! They're not but it'd be a great joke if "I'm a great liar" was #7. tee hee.
7 Kreativ Blogs
1) Jodi meadows (slush pile reader) - at Words and Wardances, she does a series called Slush stats where she shows her notes on query letters. It is very eye-opening. she is also on Twitter.
2) Frenetic Reader -Khy is a great teen reviewer for children's books, primarily MG/YA. I love reading teen blogs about their view on the books they read.
3. Plot This - My friends and aspiring writers, Katie and SF Hardy, run a great blog together.
4. Lisa and Laura Write - These girls are sisters, they write together (i still don't understand how that works exactly) and they are HIlarious!
5. Lisa's Little Corner.... - Lisa Schroeder is one of my fav authors so I was estatic to meet her in LA (and a little nervous). Her book "I heart you" led me to my tween angel story. BTW, she is as cool and funny as she is brilliant.
6. Dream the Dream - Brit seems to always reach in and find something I am worrying about.So maybe she can reads minds too. Who knows? you'll have to read her to find out.
7. Heather Hansen - Met her in person in LA and she is as funny in person as she is on her blog.
BTW me? a literary award? This may be the only time I ever get that! :)
Here are the rules: 1) Accept the award and post a link back to the awarding person. 2) Pass the award on (the rules differ here; sometimes you pass on to one person, five, or even more). 3) Notify award winner.
I'm only going to do one since I think I just broke something coming up with the last 7.
Congrats on the awards, Shelli! I didn't think those things were boring at all! I hope you had a great weekend and I hope your little girl is enjoying kindergarten. :)
The current issue of Granta includes contributions from Kenzaburo Oe, Mary Gaitskill, Javier Marías, Will Self, Mahmoud Darwish, Lionel Shriver, William T. Vollmann, and more, and I’m looking forward to reading them, but when the package arrived yesterday I (of course) turned immediately to the (excellent) excerpt from RupertThomson’s forthcoming memoir.
The piece, “Call Me By My Proper Name,” ostensibly focuses on Thomson’s smart but difficult uncle, Cedric, whom the author meets for the first and only time at a refuge for older homeless men. More subtly it’s about one of my favorite topics: madness in families. During the visit, Thomson learns that “in the late Fifties, not long after I was born, my grandmother and two of my uncles were inmates of the same mental home — and then there was my mother, Wendy, with her so-called ‘high spirits.’”
A prior excerpt, about Thomson’s reunion with his half-brother, was published in The Guardian last year. In 2007 he told me that he expected the book to be about the avoidance of grief. I can’t wait to see how it all fits together.
Given the intensity and depth of her fiction, and the fact that it was once so popular, I’m surprised that so little has been written about the loss of Like Being Killed author Ellen Miller. Would her death have received more attention if she’d been younger — she was in her forties — a striver, or male?
But here’s Daniel Handler (of Lemony Snicket fame) on her work, life, and death. (Thanks to Ken S.) He reveals that she wasn’t carrying identification when she collapsed and died. It took time for the police to identify her body, which they did only by showing photographs of her tattooes to people in Miller’s neighborhood.
Elsewhere, her former professor Dani Shapiro and friend Ken Foster discussthe memorial, which I really wanted to attend, and Robert Anansi remembers hearing from Miller shortly before her death.
I received great news yesterday: my creative nonfiction piece "Scent of Forgiveness" will be published in the next issue (May 2009) of Perception, a literary magazine. I'm thrilled, as this piece will also make its appearance in the new, longer version of my solo play "Copperheads and Common Women" when it gets a reading -- unscheduled as yet. AND, it is one of my favorite things I've ever written. I did not use my time on the radio last night to shamelessly self-promote this bit of news, so I'm doing it here. The price for downloading mp3 versions of my broadcast sessions has gone up to $2.99, so if you're listening, your best deal is always to tune in for the live broadcast. I'm on every Tuesday evening 7 to 7:30pm Pacific Time. Last night Lillian put me on five minutes early because last week I ran five minutes late ... so, please tune in early so you don't miss anything.
0 Comments on Chapter Five and part of Six as of 1/1/1900
I’m only now learning that Ellen Miller, author of the amazing ’90s junkie novel Like Being Killed, died of a heart attack on December 23 at the age of forty-one.
We crowded around the rickety kitchen table, predicting how each of us would die.
Six of us sat under a naked lighbulb that hung like an interrogation lamp from a thin wire over Margarita’s chipped wooden table. We squinted and leaned phototropically into the empty center, noses almost touching, eyelashes fluttering against the force of the light like the wings of hovering moths. We were checking the count, raising each small, discreet, translucent envelope up to the stark whiteness of the blank bulb. Everything else disappeared. The count was good. The count was the only thing in the world. It was lonely. It was scary. It was fun. It was what I did now, without Susannah.
But before I could even finish thinking the words — with Susannah or Susannah is gone — she was no longer gone. She had materialized into language, inside my head, where it mattered.
Dana introduced me to the book, which I loved, several years back, and it’s grown larger and deeper in my memory rather than diminishing with time.
Paul Zakrzewski, Miller’s friend and editor of the Lost Tribe fiction anthology in which her work appeared, sends word that Miller’s life and work will be remembered by friends and family at a memorial service scheduled for February 8, 2008. All are welcome.
Details are toward the end of Karkzewski’s brief remembrance:
Ellen grew up in the Carnarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn, in a working-class Jewish environment. Her vivid experience of this upbringing formed an important element in her second (unfinished) novel, Stop, Drop, Roll, an excerpt of which appeared in the anthology Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge (2003). She also contributed stories to the anthologies 110 Stories: New York Writes After Sept 11 and Brooklyn Noir, among others.
In addition, Ellen taught creative writing at New York University, Pratt, and the New School, where she was admired by her students and colleagues not only for her mastery of the writing craft and dedication to teaching, but for her remarkable courage and honesty both on the page and in the classroom. Notwithstanding years of chronic illness and other hardships, which she faced with superhuman strength and determination, Ellen lived a rich and creative life and deeply touched many others. In the terminology of her favorite hobby, boxing, Ellen had “a lot of heart.”
She received her BA from Wesleyan University in 1988 with Honors and Phi Beta Kappa and later earned her MFA from the New York University Creative Writing program where she was the recipient of the NYU Creative Writing Fellowship for Fiction. She was also awarded a residency at the MacDowell Colony, among others.
Drafted in a six-month creative burst and published in 1998, Ellen’s novel Like Being Killed enjoyed many critical accolades, including a brief appearance on the San Francisco Chronicle’s bestseller list (after a cover review). Kirkus Reviews noted that “[the narrator’s] voice is authentic in unsparingly illuminating the link between self-protection and self-destruction, revealing a tender inner life that persists despite addiction, depression, and descent into squalor. A bleak, bracing debut.” Meanwhile, her teacher and mentor Annie Dillard wrote: “Ellen Miller hurls herself, along with her readers, into a world that resonates with moral complexity, startling anecdote, humor and good humor, brutality and compassion. Her prose is uncommonly clear, compelling, unaffected, and strong. The range of her narrative concerns — from Primo Levi, Nietzsche, and dead languages to bagels and peach pies -proves that she can make anything interesting.”
She is survived by her devoted partner, Christopher Rowell, her step-father, Scott Hyde, her two brothers Steven and Michael, and her beloved god-daughter, Olivia Francesca Foster. She will be missed dearly by all.
A memorial service in honor of Ellen’s life and work will be held on Sunday, February 8th, 2009 from 4:00 to 6:00 pm at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street (btw 5th and 6th Aves.), New York, NY. Please RSVP (due to limited space) to Stephanie Foster at smfostersays [at] yahoo [dot] com.
Several months ago the L.A. Times’ Carolyn Kellogg pointed out how amazing it is that long-dead authors can “continue to exist, in shadowy form, on You Tube.”
Today I uncovered several videos of the great James Baldwin. The one above is my favorite. It makes me wish he could have lived to see Obama inaugurated.
“Literature does many, many things, and philosophy does one thing.”
Jacket Copy’s Carolyn Kellogg has unearthed an assortment of videos featuring authors who are no longer with us, but “continue to exist, in shadowy form, on YouTube.”
When I was a kid I used to sit in my closet with the light on at night and worry about religion.
What if God was a trap? What if Heaven didn’t exist and being Born Again was for suckers? What if Satan had the real paradise, and only people brave enough to reject the Bible would go there?
(Probably this was all due to being raised a heathen until three, then taken aside one afternoon by newly-converted parents and instructed to accept Jesus — a scary, bleeding man-god who died for my sins — into my heart, and then, when my parents parted ways denominationally a couple years later, being steeped in several different variations of Christianity, each of which rejected the others and insisted that it was The One True Way. [I know, I’m starting to repeat myself more than Margaret Thatcher.])
Beyond Good and Evil my neuroses were not — they were really just a variation on the everybody-else-is-a-robot anxiety — but I have a visceral, almost Pavlovian memory of the fear I felt then.
So Paradise Lost, a sympathetic portrait of Satan, has always held a particular fascination for me. In Milton’s rendering, the fallen angel isn’t a one-dimensional serpent and tempter, but a beguiling creature who at times seems the equal of God, and at times even seems His better.
I’ve been wanting to do a close re-reading, but, between work and writing and blogging and everything else, so far I’ve really only leafed through my collection of Doré’s illustrations. The actual text has spent several weeks collecting dust on my desk at the office.
Enter Twitter. I have mixed feelings about seeing literature broken into text messages and single-phrase tweets, but over the weekend I started looking in on the Twittered Moby-Dick. While I wouldn’t want to experience a classic (and glorious) work like Moby-Dick for the first time in this shattered format, it does highlight Melville’s phrasing and authorical logic in a different way from a more conventional presentation of the text.
And because I want to revisit Paradise Lost as a writer — to try to understand exactly how Milton makes God’s nemesis so complex and compelling — I decided to experiment with the capsule dose.
For the seven others out there who might have interest in collecting fragments of one of the great epic poems of the English language in 1-2 small shards a day: here’s my Twittered Paradise Lost.
(If you know of any other Twittered public-domain classics, email me at maud at maudnewton dot com, so I can follow.)
Thomas Wentworth Higginson is best known as the man who discouraged Emily Dickinson from publishing in her lifetime and butchered her poetry once she died. Editing her work with Mabel Loomis Todd for posthumous publication, he cut Dickinson’s dashes and flattened her language.
“My partially cracked poetess,” he called her — another marker of his condescension and cluelessness. Or was it?
Brenda Wineapple’s White Heat examines Dickinson’s complicated friendship with Higginson, whose biography Judith Thurman recently condensed as follows: “a man of letters, a clergyman, a fitness enthusiast, a celebrated abolitionist, and a champion of women’s rights, whose essays on slavery and suffrage, but also on snow, flowers, and calisthenics, appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.”
Dickinson’s poems — shocking, wise, and blunt, despairing but somehow also triumphant — enchanted and confused Higginson. “The bee himself,” he wrote, “did not evade the schoolboy more than she evaded me,” “and even at this day I still stand somewhat bewildered, like the boy.” Wineapple writes:
Emily Dickinson and Tomas Higginson, seven years apart, had been raised in a climate where old pieties no longer sufficed, the piers of faith were brittle, and God was hard to find. If she sought solace in poetry, a momentary stay against mortality, he found it for a time in activism, and for both friendship was a secular salvation, which, like poetry, reached toward the ineffable. This is why he answered her, pursued her, cultivated her, visited her, and wept at her grave. He was not as bullet-headed as many contemporary critics like to think. Relegated to the dustbin of literary history, a relic of Victoriana cursed with geneality and an elegant prose style, Higginson has been invariably dismissed by critics fundamentally uninterested in his radicalism; after all, not until after Dickinson’s death, when the poet’s family contacted him, did he consent to reread the poems and edit them for publication, presumably to appeal to popular taste. Yet he tried hard to prepare the public for her — “The Truth must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind–,” as she had written — and in his preface to the 1890 volume frankly compared her to William Blake.
Dickinson responded fully to the man he thought — and she thought — he was: courtly and bold, stuffy and radical, chock-full of contraditions and loving. For not only did she initiate the correspondence, but as far as we know she gave no one except Sue more poems than she sent to him. She trusted him, she liked him, she saw in him what it has become convenient to overlook. And he reciprocated in such a way that she often said he saved her life. “Of our greatest acts,” she would later remind him, “we are ignorant –.”
To neglect this friendship reduces Dickinson to the frail recluse of Amherst, extraordinary but helpless and victimized by a bourgeois literary establishment best represented by Higginson. Gone is the Dickinson whose flinty perceptions we admire and whose shrewd assessment of people and things informed her witty, half-serious choice of him as Preceptor, a choice she did not regret….
Coincidentally, Stahl and I recently exchanged some email about Iris Murdoch’s letters. I won’t quote my part. Just assume it was really learned and highbrow, and didn’t go anything like, OMG, you’re right, it’s been ten years; haven’t we waited long enough, John Bayley and Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies?!?!!!!
Then my correspondent “had a horrifying thought: Murdoch was a very private — secretive, even — person. I can imagine her regularly having, well, not quite trash-barrel fires, but furtive pokings of bundles of letters into the living room fire. Regular burnings throughout life of incriminating and/or interesting letters, leaving us little to enjoy post-Bayley. Now that I’ve thought of it, it seems plausible to the point of being likely. Oh, I hope I’m wrong!”
We were both briefly immobilized by despair at the prospect, but last week Stahl did some investigating:
I’ve consulted Peter Conradi’s (disappointingly flat) biography of Iris Murdoch to test my supposition that Murdoch may have been a sneaking burner of letters. A quick rundown of what a cursory look at the apparatus reveals:
1) “She left behind edited journals (1939-1996) which constituted an invaluable resource, carrying her unique ‘voice’.” (Hoo, boy — can we see those?)
2) ” . . . although an inveterate destroyer of letters . . . ” Aha! I was at least partially right!
3) Lord! Her initial choice of a biographer was A. N. Wilson, her friend who–perhaps miffed because she didn’t ultimately choose him?–ultimately (2004?) wrote about her and Bayley perhaps the most mean-spirited book I’ve ever touched.
4) Conradi writes, “I had loved her work since finding The Bell in Oundle school library around 1960, and thought, like tens of thousands, ‘These books are about me.’” Which is a thought I’ve never had–yet her writing has been as important to me as anyone’s other than perhaps Anthony Powell, Kafka, Dickens, and Borges. Odd.
5) Of the hideous Canetti, when Conradi mentioned him in 1997, she replied, “His name shudders me with happiness.”
6) “Although Fletcher and Bove’s Iris Murdoch: A Primary and Secondary Annotated Bibilography shows that there are many of her letters in public collections in libraries scattered worldwide, I have relied much more heavily on privately held letter- runs.” Hmm. Odds of us seeing them seem to be falling.
Not sure what this all tells us, except that there are still letters — however decimated by furtive destruction we don’t know - that we may someday see? And there are journals that surely — they’ve been edited!!! — we’ll get to see?
If you have anything to add, or just want to join the Petition to See Iris Murdoch’s Papers Published, email me at maud [at] maudnewton [dot] com.
(it is a fair bet that most of these stories have a bad guy and a good guy, and a crime and a gun)
Not to belabor the point… as I’m ready to move on. But a few people commented, and a few people emailed, and complained that they don’t feel “genre” is formulaic.
And while I essentially agree with them that my definition came across as simplified and overly negative, (because, basically, I’m a snob) I’m going to fight for my assertion of genre as formulaic. Of formula as the defining characteristic of what might be called “genre” writing.
As opposed to readership.
I think formula=genre works pretty well as a definition. But I want to explain a little what I mean by “formula”. I don’t really mean that no good writing is formulaic. I don’t mean that all genre writing is bad. Or that a formula means the writing can’t also be creative and new. I just mean that books from a like “genre” will share elements of plot, craft, set-up, resolution, etc. That’s what I mean by formula.
That books in a particular genre share some kind of lowest common denominator in their actual storyline. The Once and Future King and Pat the Bunny do not share an LCD I can think of.
There are romances that will be categorized as such, but also be shelved with “literary” books. Same for fantasy, detective fiction, etc. But some of the conventions are still there.
All romance novels are not the same, but you can pretty much bet that genre/romance will have someone who starts out alone and ends up with a lover. Or someone who starts out with the wrong lover, and finds true love. Most will also have some kissing, and the love will, at turns, appear to be thwarted. Do you know of a “genre” romance novel with NO romance?
All detective fiction is not the same, but most detective novels begin with a crime of some sort, an unsolved situation. And by book’s end, a clever (though complicated or flawed) character will have figured out the answer. Whether it’s an old pulp magazine, or The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, on some level, it makes use of a series of plot conventions. Readers have some idea of what they’re getting.
That’s all I really meant.
And think about this– the less a book is plot-driven, the less the formula will make the book identical to other books. I think when a book jumps from “genre” classifications into “literary” classifications, what is happening is that the author is leaving some of the plot/genre conventions intact, but focusing less on plot and more on other elements of craft.
I find myself thinking about fantasy, and that fantasy is perhaps, by definition, less of a genre. I recently read Merlin’s Dragon, and while I didn’t like it much, it’s NOT a book I’d call genre at all. It has, like, no human characters. It’s just about a little dragon creature looking for animals like himself. Weird.
If that’s fantasy, than I have no clue what the fantasy conventions are. Dragons? That’s dumb.
But I’ve read my share of mysteries, and my share of romances, and I’m sorry, y’all… they do, by and large, follow a recipe.
0 Comments on A little clarification on “genre”… as of 1/1/1990
I’m angry today, at the literary academic establishment. Specifically, I’m mad at AWP and Yaddo.
Last week I called Yaddo (nicely) to ask about residencies for authors of kidlit. I was told that I should apply with a submission of my adult work, and that then I could work on whatever I like if I got in. But they cannot fund children’s books, no matter the artistic merit of the work.
Grrrrr. How incredibly stupid is that?
Then, yesterday, I found out that the panel I was on for AWP was declined, a panel about literary fictioneers and poets who also write books for kids. Not shocking I guess. How else will they make room for another panel about (insert boring topic here)?
I’m really disappointed about this. It was an amazing group of writers, and we had a lot of good things to say. Not to mentin being something NEW.
But it’s no surprise, in a climate where many MFA programs refuse to apply kidlit publications to tenure. Because those morons will never realize that some of the most innovative writing– the most genre bending, creative, crazy work– is being done for kids.
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
0 Comments on A rant from beyond the tower walls… as of 1/1/1990
The annual Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival is one of my favourite things about living in Oxford. So many wonderful speakers, so little time. OUP always has a few events lined up, and the first happened last night. To celebrate our soon-to-be-relaunched Oxford World’s Classics, we put together an event called Blogging the Classics, which pitted professional literary critics against literary bloggers in a debate about who offers the best kind of guide to books. It is, as you can imagine, a subject close to my heart - I couldn’t wait… and I wasn’t disappointed.
How to Write a Picture Book
My friend James Hynes’ Next is a departure from his prior novels in many ways, not least in that the action is set in a single day. Writing for the .jpeg?picon=2058)
I’m only now learning that Ellen Miller, author of the amazing ’90s junkie novel 
Paul Zakrzewski, Miller’s friend and editor of the Lost Tribe fiction anthology in which her work appeared, sends word that Miller’s life and work will be remembered by friends and family at a memorial service scheduled for February 8, 2008. All are welcome. 
Thomas Wentworth Higginson is best known as the man who discouraged Emily Dickinson from publishing in her lifetime and butchered her poetry once she died. Editing her work with Mabel Loomis Todd for posthumous publication, he cut Dickinson’s dashes and flattened her language. 
I'm surprised, since I did a blog post not long ago when I realized that my reading— which is mostly literary fiction— is fairly well-divided between the genders. Looking at the stack of to-be-read novels on my coffee table, I see an even split. There is Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Herta Müller, Virginia Woolf, Audrey Niffenegger, Robin Black, Yiyun Li, Hilary Mantel, Doris Lessing, and Louise Erdrich.
If a reader of literary fiction is not reading many women writers, they're doing it deliberately. And missing some great writing.
I don't tend to read books by gender, but by content. I do think it's a problem if in the professional world, there aren't enough female writers being recognized for what male writers are being recognized for. There should be equal opportunity in that department, and reviewers should recognize the influence they may have on the industry and on readers.
I admit, I do gender balance my reading - as well as ethnicity, try some translations, different time periods...I guess I feel in the current *ahem* political climate (maybe, make that last 10 years' worth of political/cultural climate), I feel the need to push my reading a little...dammit, I can't stop any wars, but I can at least be a "peacemonger," in my reading...
Picoult and Weiner have a point. The problem is "women's fiction" sells better than "literary fiction" so women's books are often marketed that way when they're just as literary as the works of Y-chromosome persons from Brooklyn.
I wonder if today Muriel Spark wouldn't be dismissed as "chick lit" because she employed so much irony and humor. And Evelyn Waugh certainly wrote some funny books. I doubt a female Waugh living today would ever be taken seriously. They'd slap on a pink cover and a cartoon girl in a flapper dress--if any agent would even take it on. Smart, funny books by women are pretty much considered toxic, aren't they?
Oi oi oi. I've been following the arguments, but all I've gotten out of it is that I really need to open a couple of issues of the NYT and see what the balance is.
Re: my own reading, I do read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, which is dominated by male authors. However, there are a lot of great women writing in those fields as well, and a lot of my more mainstream reading is evenly divided between male and female authors. The current book and the last several I've read are by men, but the next few I plan to read are all by women. (I'm moderating the fantasy panel for a local literary festival next year, and all of the authors I've gotten for it are female as well! And the SF and graphic novel panels I helped plan are pretty evenly split between the genders, which is awesome.)
I agree with a lot of Picoult's and Weiner's, and Anne R. Allen's above me, points. Fiction by women does seem like it has to work harder to "prove" itself, and seem more disposable in the long run; the ones that become classics seem to much more often be written by men. Without pulling up any actual data to back up my perceptions, it seems that women will read more authors of both genders, but fewer men frequently read books by women unless they've become huge sellers.
I think it's interesting that when a man writes a book about a family it's called sociocultural and millennial and when a woman writes a book about a family it's called domestic and miniaturist.