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I've been a blogger slacker; I confess. It wasn't meant to be this way.

But I've been rolling through and over rugged landscapes in these past weeks, and sometimes it's better to think and to do, rather than to speak.

But now I'm speaking:

Following thirty years of chasing projects in corporate America I am calling off the chase. I loved what I did, the people I met, the meaty, beautiful, complex projects I was entrusted with, the client projects that still sit proudly on my shelves. But in recent years too much has changed—a disheartening disrespect and disequilibrium has entered in. It's a demand and disappear environment out there these days. It's phones ringing after dinner with early AM deadlines, nights tapping away, and the next-day news: Whoops. Sorry. We were wrong. Didn't need that project after all. 

Didn't need you.

I have lived my life putting my family and friends first, my students second, my corporate clients second, too, and me a distant something. I would do it all exactly the same way again; I have no regrets. But going forward I know what I want, where I am happiest, what I must be, must have. More time with books. More time with people who write and read with noble purpose. More time spent beneath a blooming, bursting cherry tree, or on a farm, or by the sea.

More time being the me I need.

Not long ago, in New York, I sat with someone I have grown to love, the great editor, Lauren Wein. Later, writing to me, she wrote words that ricocheted through me. After so much frank unkindness from corporate America, after too much time spent in the claw and crawl of it all, I had this sudden sense of being seen.

  seeing you i thought again what i thought the other time---beth has such SHARP EDGES. in the very best way. your virtual presence is so much about generosity, encouragement, positive reinforcement--for other writers and artists, for your family, for your students. in person, the other side comes out. and it's equally compelling---it raises the stakes somehow, in the best way! it's still positive, lyrical, poetic Beth, but there's also a tension there--the sense of an oppositional pull. the bold, unexpected shoes to complement and subvert the elegant, basic black.

Being seen. How simple that sounds. How great the journey.

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This Is the Story of You, my monster storm Jersey Shore story, launches tomorrow. Out into the world.

Whoosh. There you go.

But in the days leading up to now, I've been spending time with the stories of others. For who among us will ever believe that our own work is the work? Who should believe that? Who does not think that, at the end of it all, the best thing about being a writer is finding the excuse to curl up with someone else's fine tale—the story another loved, hoped for and through, and found a way to launch?

Today I want to celebrate:

Cordelia Jensen's Skyscraping, a novel in verse to which I have previously alluded on this blog. Before I met Cordelia a few weeks ago in New York (odd to be meeting her there, for she lives not far from me here), I knew that she was my kind of writer—soulful, attuned to language, serious about producing lasting work. Skyscraping tells the story of Mira, who learns the secret of her parents' marriage during her senior year in high school and needs to find a way to forgive her father before he is gone from her world. Some novels in verse are just novels written with shorter lines and white space. This is a novel in actual verse, written by an actual poet, who has pondered this story for years. This is a novel whose narrator understands time and stars, the cosmos and the particulate, but is never safe (no one is) from hurt. Mira is speaking here about her mother, who has been absent for much of Mira's life:

I used to imagine she saw us as a train
she could ride at will,
instead of a station,
fixed, every day.

I wonder now if maybe
a family is neither of those things
but something stable,
yet always changing,
because the people inside it are.
 

Peter Gardos's Fever at Dawn, sent to me by Lauren Wein, an editor you know I love. It's a story based on the real-life tale of the author's parents—Hungarians who, in 1945, find themselves in Swedish hospitals miles apart. They are not well. They have been seared by death camps, racism, horror. They allow the letters they write to one another become their most extravagant form of hope. Miklos sends a blurry photograph to Lili, so that she cannot see his metal teeth. Lili stashes the political book Miklos has sent—unread. They know nothing about each other, actually, until, increasingly, they are nothing without each other. They are seducing each other, even as Gardos, in a book that seems (but isn't) utterly simple, seduces us:

That evening the men sat out in the courtyard with the radio on the long wooden table. The light bulb swung eerily in the wind. The men usually spent half an hour before bed in the open air. By now they had been playing the radio for six hours without a break. They had put on sweaters and coats and their pyjamas (stet) and wrapped blankets around themselves. They sat right up close to the radio. The green tuning light winked like the eye of an elf.

Finally, Cynthia Kadohata's National Book Award winning The Thing About Luck, which wrapped me around its many fingers this weekend. Let's just say this: Anyone who thinks writing for teens is easy should spend some time in the company of this book, which has everything to teach about mosquitoes, wheat harvesting, combines, and dinners on the road—all within the frame of one of the most likable narrators yet written, a young girl named Summer, who discovers, over the course of many exotic bread-basket weeks (yes, I know what I just wrote), that luck is made, not found:

I don't know. I mean, maybe computers and cell phones and rocket ships are more magical, but to me, nothing beats the combine. That's just the way I see things. In a short time, the combine takes something humans can't use and then turns it into something that can feed us.

Before I go, I extend Happy Book Launch greetings to Robin Black, whose collection of essays, Crash Course, debuts tomorrow in grand style. Robin will be taking the stage with grammar queen Mary Norris, at the Free Library of Philadelphia.

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Brian Morton (Starting Out in the Evening, among others) writes about writers. The hopes, the blockades, the pretenses, the indignities, those rare moments of glory. He writes as one who has struggled and one who has taught, as one who has come to believe in stories first, and also in patience, as he noted in this Ploughshares interview:

Nabokov said that there are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. More and more, my only goal in writing is to tell stories—tell stories and bring characters to life. If there’s enlightenment or enchantment to be had in what I write, I’ve come to believe that I can’t force it; it’ll show up or not show up on its own. 
 
But of course, patience is still the most necessary thing. Patience, tenacity, perseverance, stubbornness, devotion—in terms of the writing life, they’re all different words for the same thing. I think the only way to keep going as a writer is to find a way to love the writing process in its every aspect: to take pleasure not only in the moments when it’s going well, but to find pleasure even in the difficulties.

Morton's new novel, Florence Gordon, is about an aging feminist who has just received an astronomical New York Times Book Review, her dangerously affable and endearingly well-read cop son, his perched-to-leave-him wife, and their feeling-guilty-to-grow-up-but-is-growing-up-and-how-we-like-her daughter who is, at the moment, between colleges and assisting her prickly grandmother with research. It's also, as Morton's books are, about New York, where those who master the Manhattan walk may just decide to call the place home.  

Florence Gordon (which was sent to me by my good friends at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is a decisive, deliberate, quick beat of a novel; the pages quickly turn. It is also a novel that slyly defies convention, leaving the reader to imagine conversations and to knot (or unknot) story threads. It made me laugh when I desperately needed to laugh. It put me in mind of writers I have known, of conversations overheard. It is a bright mirror of a time and a place and, also, a career, which is hardly the same as a profession.

It is about success—insidious, embittering, disorienting, impossible, and never enough. From Florence Gordon, just after Florence has received that glorious, late-career-changing review:

Vanessa was a psychotherapist who worked with people in the arts. She proceeded to give a few examples. A painter who, after selling one of his works to the Whitney, began to speak of himself in the third person. A writer who'd so long suppressed her desire for fame, so long suppressed the narcissism near the root of every creative life, that when she finally achieved a bit of recognition, all her hunger for it had come bursting out—a ferocity of hunger that no degree of success could satisfy—and she was plunged into a depression that took her months to recover. Another writer, a woman who'd always seemed a model of tolerance and tact, who, after finally writing a book that brought her a degree of acclaim, felt nothing but anger toward all the people who were celebrating her. Late recognition, Vanessa said, was the stage for the return of the repressed.

Alexandra too believed that success could make you crazy, and she too had a theory. Buried deep in the psyche, she thought, is a sort of lump, a creature that craves nothing except stability, and as far as the lump is concerned, change for the better is just as bad as change for the worse.

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I took a single novel with me to Hilton Head Island—the third novel by Seattle-based Stephanie Kallos, who brought us TODAY Book Club selection Broken for You as well as Sing Them Home, which was named by Entertainment Weekly as one Ten Best Novels of the year.

I was expecting very, very good, for I'd read those books and I know a little about Stephanie. I know how hard she has worked over the past four years toward this story she's called Language Arts. I know that she has broken it apart so that she might stitch it back together. That fortitude was required. And faith.

I'll enjoy this, I thought, as I packed my tiny red roller bag.

I had no idea what I was in for and here's the reason: I had no idea that a book like this was possible.

I spent nearly two hours on the plane this afternoon trying to summarize this book. I cannot. Yes, it's about a high school English teacher with a severely challenged (and now institutionalized) son. It's about the teacher's past, his regrets, a best friendship he once betrayed, the wife who left him, the daughter he loves. A family story, a deeply involving family story. It is absolutely that.

But it is also about the Palmer Method of handwriting, a brutalized Italian nun, Janet Leigh, Life magazine, thalidomide babies, and a young student who wears a camera for a necklace and has some ideas about art. Absolutely none of that is decoration, distraction, or tangent; it all counts. How and why it counts is a great part of the genius of this book.

And why you have to read it.

Structurally significant, philosophically whole, unbelievably well written, and please forgive me, Stephanie's best book yet. I could deconstruct this book for days. I could hang the sections by clothespins to a line and lie beneath the fluttering pages, pondering, but I would never be able to figure out just how this book got made. How Stephanie summoned the patience. How she held its many parts together in her head, then put them down for us.

Talk about fluid.

Talk about transporting.

Talk about clever in places and deeply sad in others.

Talk about a stab in the heart, and then a healing.

Language Arts is blurbed by Maria Semple, and anyone who loves Maria Semple (Where'd You Go, Bernadette?) will love this book. It is edited by the very great Lauren Wein of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and anyone who loves Lauren's books (I love Lauren's books) will love this book.

For the rest of you, if there are any rest of you, I give you one small passage about language from Language Arts.

Language left him gradually, a bit at a time. One would expect words to depart predictably, in reverse order—the way a row of knitting disappears, stitch by stitch, when the strand of working yarn is tugged off by the needle—but that was not the case.

Look for it next June.

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I encountered Antoine Wilson at the BEA, where I had gone to find out which adult titles had all the buzz, and why, on behalf of Publishing Perspectives.  Quick on his feet, witty, Antoine was, nonetheless, the author of a book about a "slow absorber"�a 28 year old named Oppen Porter who is recording every millimeter of minutiae about his life and thoughts for the benefit of his unborn son, whom Oppen doesn't expect to meet, stuck as Oppen is, in a hospital, and perhaps dying.  I would need to add a few more commas to that last sentence, a smattering of additional half-steps, not to mention some unexpected profundities, they would have to be funny profundities, but also true, in the way that funny is also true, except that I am personally incapable of conjuring either the profound or the funny, in order to foreshadow the nature of the novel itself, which I have just finished reading, in order to give you a sense for the whole. Or one small sentence of the whole.

I would have to be Antoine Wilson, but I am not.  I would have to be a literary ventriloquist with an obsession with the question, What is a man of the world?, but this is Wilson's terrain.  His Oppen is a Forrest Gump of sorts (minus the super-hero powers and the awesome historic coincidences)—optimistic, well-meaning, highly observant but also stuck in his observing, capable of seeing a lot of the picture, but perhaps not the same picture that so many of us see (because we are rushing, because we have conformed, because we have ceded something of the raw and unschooled in ourselves).  The novel is a monologue, a man talking into a tape recorder while his baby sits coiled within his gold- and white-toothed mom.  It is a circle, and while riding the circle, one meets fast-food workers, big thinkers, exasperated aunts (all right, just one single exasperated aunt), religious zealots, and a talking-cure shrink who cures nothing. 

I'm going to share here three sentences of Oppen's world.  Oppen is tall, you see, and his sleeping arrangements are unfortunate.  He's finding himself slightly fatigued:

I'm not a complainer, I wouldn't have said anything, except that I was concerned I wasn't going to be getting enough rest, that over the course of several nights the lack of rest would add up to a general fatigue, it had happened to me before, it had happened to me in Madera, when I had broken my arm, or rather my arm had gotten broken while playing Smear the Queer with the Alvarez brothers, I had fallen in an awkward way, and because of the cast and the way it was situated I could not roll over freely in my sleep, and as a result I suffered from what your grandfather called general fatigue, which he said was quite noticeable with me, what happened was that in addition to having less energy I was less interested in everything and less friendly, too, I wasn't myself.  At the time I did not know the root cause of the general fatigue but I have since come to realize that without sleep the head gets clogged with other people's words.  The head needs sleep to make everyone else's words into our own words again, it is a conversion process.

One final thing.  Panorama City is a Lauren Wein (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) book.  Lauren, whom I am proud to say is a friend, continues to produce some of the most interesting books around.  Read Shards, if

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My friends:  I'll be at the BEA on Tuesday, June 5, 2012, working for Publishing Perspectives, the fabulous book news pub for which I have written about Pamela Paul (New York Times Book Review children's book editor), Jennifer Brown (Shelf Awareness children's book editor), Lauren Wein (Harcourt Houghton Mifflin editor), Alane Mason (WW Norton editor, not to mention my first editor), and others.  I'll be getting the inside scoop on some important stories.  But I'll also be looking for you.

If you'll be there, let me know?

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As some of you know, I have been having a lot of fun writing for Publishing Perspectives—interviewing book editors like Michael Green, Tamra Tuller, Lauren Wein, and Alane Salierno Mason, review editors (and trend makers) Pamela Paul and Jennifer Brown, and technologists/book lovers like Eric Hellman.

On May 31st, I'll have a chance to represent for this fine publication as one of the speakers at the inaugural Children's Publishing Conference 2012, to be held at the Scholastic Headquarters.  I'll be joining (among others) Pamela Paul of the New York Times Book Review, Jacob Lewis, CEO of Figment, Kevin O'Conner, who directs business and publishers relations for Barnes and Noble, NOOK Kids, and agents Rosemary Stimola and Ken Wright.

I hope those of you interested in the future of children's books will consider registering for this event.  I know that I am looking forward to it.

For a full press release, please go here. 

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Two nights ago, just after I'd slipped the steaks onto their plates, a gold-dipped wine glass tumbled from a top cabinet shelf, just like that.  I hadn't touched it.

The glass, the gold, scattered to all ends of the kitchen and out into the hall.  I spent a long time collecting the pieces, and then yesterday, illuminated by the spot of sun that wedges through the front door, I discovered that the shards had multiplied overnight; they were still there, still bristling with danger.

I was thinking of that shattered glass early this morning as I finished reading Shards, the debut novel by Ismet Prcic.  I bought this book because I know Lauren Wein, its editor.  I bought it because others have expressed their astonishment.  I bought it because it has the word "propulsive" in the jacket copy.  I like that word.  It doesn't belong to me or my work, it may not ever, but it absolutely belongs to Prcic and Shards.

My word, where to begin?  First, as I noted here in a previous post, you're not going to find many sentences in any book, anywhere, like the sentences you find here.  One after the other after the other.  Prcic makes use of preposterous and somehow dead-on analogies and allusions, profanities and profundities.  He celebrates the hieroglyphs of punctuational tics, smears words, elevates typefaces, deploys footnotes, diary entries, memoirisms, blasphemy, theater, treachery, vulgarisms, and you know what?  It works.  It's not cute.  It's not invention for invention's sake.  It's not ponderous:  Prcic needs every thing that language surrenders to tell his heartbreaking, rude, surprisingly compassionate, and still violent story about a Bosnian refuge who is trying to make sense of his new life in southern California.  What did Prcic (for indeed, that is the character's name) leave behind?  Who did he leave behind?  At what cost, his own survival?

I could write a mile-long review and fail at explaining this book.  Frankly, I think any reviewer would feel the same way, or should.  There's an easy explanation for this lack of explanation:  this book cannot be explained.  It is to be experienced.  Sentence by sentence, scene by scene.  I quoted a favorite early passage in that blog post of the other day.  Here I'll quote another:

Movies don't do it justice—that's all I'm going to say about the thought-collapsing, breath-stealing sound a spinning shell makes as it pierces the air on the way down toward the center of your town, in between three of the busiest cafes and a little bit to the right of the popcorn vendor in the midst of hundreds of citizens who are pretending that everything is okay, that the war is winding down.  But I didn't know that yet.

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Ever since Dana Spiotta reviewed Shards in the The New York Times Book Review a few weeks ago, I have been eager to get a copy for myself. Consider, here, what Dana says:

The novel is constructed of fragments — shards — seemingly written by its main character, Ismet Prcic. Ismet grows up in Tuzla and manages to flee shortly before his induction into the “meat grinder” of the Bosnian infantry. He has survived and made his way to America, but is fractured by what he left behind. The novel comprises mostly segments from his therapist- ordered memoir (or memoirs) and excerpts from his diary. These shards employ several narrative strategies. There are asterisked footnotes, italicized interruptions and self-reflexive comments about unreliability. There are first-, second- and third-person narrations, sometimes switching back and forth within a paragraph. This is a novel about struggling to find form for a chaotic experience. It pushes against convention, logic, chronology. But its disruptions are necessary. How do you write about war and the complications of memory? How do you write about dislocation, profound loneliness, terror? How does a human persevere?

Truth is, I'd been eager to read Ismet Prcic's debut novel ever since I sat in the office of Lauren Wein, the book's editor, and listened to her read aloud from the opening passage.  The book had only recently been released as advance reading copies and, judging from the number of brilliantly hued sticky notes attached to many of the pages, Lauren was still giving this book her extraordinary editorial attentions.  I loved the sound of what she had read to me.  I could not wait to read more.  And then, caught up in the crazy swirl of my own life, I did wait, not buying the book until just recently.

I am only into the early pages at this point. I am not, as I thought I might be, intimidated by the hybrid of forms, techniques, approaches.  The word "propulsive" has been attached to this book, and that it is, but the book is remarkably resonant, too, often funny, surprisingly accessible, despite all that is original and new.  Here is an early-in example:

I love a girl, Melissa.  Her hair oozes like honey.  It's orange in the sun.  She loves me, mati.  She's American.  She goes to church.  She wears a cross right where her freckles disappear into her cleavage.  She volunteers.  She takes forty minutes to scramble eggs over really low heat, but when they're done they explode in your mouth like fireworks, bursts of fatty yolk and coarse salt and cracked pepper and sharp melted cheddar and something called thyme.  She's sharp.  She drives like a lunatic.  She's capable of both warmth and coldness, and just hanging around her to see what it will be that day is worth it.

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To visit an editor is to walk into a realm—into small offices made labyrinthine by the architecture of stacked books and scrambled manuscripts, posted notes to self, cardboard cutouts, events long gone but living on in the fade of aging posters.  I have been lucky in my travels, blessed to enter in, and time and again, I have been made grateful for those who spend their days leaning their imaginations and hearts against and into the work that they've acquired.  Editors, the best of them, make books better.  They allow books to live.

We hear from authors far more than we hear from editors.  We conjecture about editors' lives more than they know, more than they likely wish we would.  But in recent days, Lauren Wein, an editor at Grove/Atlantic who worked with her team to bring Francisco Goldman's remarkable Say Her Name to light, let us in on her relationship to this book and with this writer in a beautiful essay published in this special editors' forum at The Front Table. 

It's no ordinary retelling, Wein's essay.  It is a reflection that begins with the line "Francisco Goldman is an unlikely Hades" and that yields, over its quiet coursing, insights not just into the novel that Wein helped edit but into the transformative nature of editing itself.  We come to know the book and its author in Wein's essay; we also, magically, come to know Wein, who in August 2005 traveled to San Miguel de Allende (where the above photograph was taken two years later, when I journeyed there myself) to attend Goldman's wedding to Aura, the young woman, sadly no longer alive, who stands at the heart of Say Her Name.  "I traveled there with a colleague, Amy Hundley, and my six-month old daughter," Wein writes, continuing:

I sobbed through much of the nearly 12-hour journey. As a new mother, I was still finding my footing. I could not believe I’d been entrusted with this new life, and what was I doing taking her so far from our comfort zone?


But those days in San Miguel, that wedding, were among the best moments I’ve ever shared with my daughter. It proved to be an empowering journey in every sense—away from home, family, work, caregivers, she and I learned each other’s rhythms, learned to trust one another. We survived, we transcended, we fell in love. Frank and Aura were people who inspired others to leave their comfort zone—they led by example, they dared you to take risks that enabled you to become more than you were before.

Wein ends her essay with lines from a poem.  I won't share them here, for it is my hope that you'll go and read the entire essay itself—that you will, on this day, grow in your appreciation for the hearts and minds of the editors among us.

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I was standing right here, on the edge of an old cemetery, watching the sun light up the earth, when Laura Geringer's final notes on YOU ARE MY ONLY buzzed in on my phone.  I read them through.  I looked back up.  The sun had rearranged itself, and yet the day was bright. 

I began this book three years ago, inspired by the legends of urban explorers and by the haunting stories I had heard about a Philadelphia asylum known as Byberry.  I was encouraged to keep writing by the magnificent Lauren Wein, of Black Cat/Grove, and by my sustaining agent, Amy Rennert.  I was helped to think harder by memorable conversations with Marjorie Braman of Holt.  And after Laura Geringer (Egmont USA) read the book, I reimagined characters into their younger selves and watched to see what might happen.

What happened, in the end, was light.

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