Endless Knots

Who says an unknown novelist can't make it?

David Mehegan, who writes features on authors for The Boston Globe, has a heartening piece about a first-time novelist whose book is on the best-seller list. "Best seller out of the blue" is the story of David Wroblewski, whose book, The Epic of Edgar Sawtelle, has taken off. Improbable, yes, but at a time when everyone is whining about it being next to impossible to publish, no less, sell books, this is a very good story. Thanks, again, David, for another great piece of work.

Solstice MFA Reading Series July 11-18, 2008

Enjoy hearing great writers in an intimate setting? This reading series from the Solstice MFA program is always terrific. Some of my fave writers, again, including Roland Merullo reading from his newest, American Savior. I was able to get my hands on an Advance Reading Copy and - how do I put into words the gesture where you put your fingers to your lips, kiss, and whip that smooch into the universe with a wave of the arm? I promise to post about the book itself - it's canny, timely, and very funny. I do hope the NY Times Book Review catches this one. Here's the press release from program director, Meg Kearney, who's also reading and, worth noting, a supremely good reader herself:

THE SOLSTICE MFA OF PINE MANOR COLLEGE ANNOUNCES ITS JULY READING SERIES

[Chestnut Hill, MA, July 1, 2008]  The Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College announces its July Reading Series. The following writers will read from their work at 7:30 p.m. (unless otherwise noted) in the Founder’s Room of Pine Manor College, located at 400 Heath Street in Chestnut Hill. All readings are free and open to the public; copies of the authors’ books will be available for sale and signing before and after the readings. Plenty of free parking!

Friday, July 11: Fiction & nonfiction writer Randall Kenan (The Fire This Time, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Century, and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead), & novelist Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Shutter Island, and the forthcoming The Given Day).

Saturday, July 12: Graduating MFA student Kirsten Blocker, poet Kathleen Aguero (Daughter Of, The Real Weather, and Thirsty Day), & novelist Sterling Watson (Sweet Dream, Baby; The Calling; and Weep No More, My Brother).

Sunday, July 13: Graduating MFA student Adam Eisenson, Program Administrator and fiction writer Tanya Whiton (published in Crazyhorse and Northwest Review), plus novelist & young people’s writer Laban Carrick Hill (America Dreaming: How Youth Changed America in the 60s, A Brush With Napoleon, and Casa Azul).

Monday, July 14 at 4:30 p.m.: MFA student readings.

Tuesday, July 15: Graduating MFA student Maryann Jacob, MFA Program Director and poet Meg Kearney (An Unkindness of Ravens, The Secret of Me, and the forthcoming Home By Now), and poet, essayist, & short-story writer Ray Gonzalez (The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande, The Underground Heart: A Return to a Hidden Landscape, and the forthcoming Faith Run: Lyrical Poems and Cool Auditor: Prose Poems).

Wednesday, July 16: Graduating MFA student John Theo, Jr., YA novelist Laura Williams McCaffrey (Alia Waking and Water Shaper), and special guest novelist & nonfiction writer Roland Merullo (In Revere, In Those Days; Golfing With God; A Little Love Story; and the forthcoming American Savior).

Thursday, July 17 at 4:30 p.m.: MFA student readings

Thursday, July 17: Poet & fiction writer Steven Huff (A Pig In Paris, The Water We Came From, and More Daring Escapes), fiction & nonfiction writer Joy Castro (The Truth Book), & novelist Helen Elaine Lee (Water Marked, The Serpent’s Gift, and the forthcoming Life Without).

Friday, July 18: poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar (A New Hunger, Small Gods of Grief, and The Hour Between Dog and Wolf), YA novelist An Na (The Fold, A Step From Heaven, and Wait for Me), and essayist & memoirist Michael Steinberg (editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction; author of Still Pitching).

Directions to Pine Manor College, complete bios of our authors, and more information about the Solstice MFA Program can be found at www.pmc.edu/mfa.

Re: Dymaxion Man - The New Yorker and me

It's always a happy day for a writer when the words "The New Yorker" and one's name appear on the same page, especially when it's the magazine itself bearing the logo. In this issue, my Letter to the Editor appears in response to Dymaxion Man, a profile of Bucky Fuller (link takes you to the index of my many posts about Bucky and Margaret Fuller) by Elizabeth Kolbert. This was my first time out sending such a letter to The New Yorker so I hadn't before experienced the magazine's prodigious fact-checking procedure.

Here's the tiny behind-the-scenes: On Tues of this past week, I received an email saying my letter was under consideration, asking if I was OK with their edits. Frankly, I'm not that picky when it comes to editors choosing my words. My rule on this: Unless they've turned me into a liar or a lunatic, I go with what the editor suggests. They asked me to call or write. Those who know me can guess what I did.

Yes, I called (as soon as I was able to duck out of the workshop I was giving for a few moments) and suggested only that it be more explicit about Bucky's influence on the field of chemistry. (Three chemists shared the Nobel in 1985 for their discovery of the buckminsterfullerene, a new class of molecules, which is explained in full, I now see, by Richard Wolfson's letter, the one that appears before mine.) Next, I received an email asking for detail around two "facts" in the letter, which fortunately I was able to produce as soon as I returned home. Then came the email saying mine would appear today. Which it does. Thank you, New Yorkers, especially Scott.

A perfect summer evening at Solstice Summer Writers' Conference

Regular Endless Knotters know that I'm a great fan of Solstice Summer Writers' Conference. And not just because my friends are involved. Three years ago, I attended the inaugural session of the conference; nine months later, I'd finished a novel. Rocket fuel for writers. Among the gifts of the conference, the evening reading series. Here's the line-up for this year's conference, which begins this coming Sunday at Pine Manor College, Chestnut Hill, Mass, just outside Boston. Choose any evening and you'll be amply rewarded. Here's the press release:

THE SOLSTICE SUMMER WRITERS’ CONFERENCE ANNOUNCES ITS JUNE READING SERIES

[Chestnut Hill, MA, May, 2008]  Pine Manor College announces its annual Solstice Summer Writers’ Conference Reading Series. All readings begin at 7:00 p.m. unless *otherwise noted, and are held in the Founder’s Room of Pine Manor College, located at 400 Heath Street in Chestnut Hill. Copies of the authors’ books will be available for sale after all readings; cash-bar receptions will follow the readings on June 22, 27, & 28. *Plenty of free parking!

Sunday, June 22 at 7:30 p.m.  Francisco Aragón & Julia Glass
Francisco Aragón (author of Puerta del Sol; editor of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry) & Julia Glass (author of The Whole World Over and 2002 National Book Award winner Three Junes).                           

Monday, June 23 at 7:00 p.m.  Cleopatra Mathis & Tor Seidler
Cleopatra Mathis (author of White Sea and What to Tip the Boatman? winner of the 2001 Jane Kenyon Award) & Tor Seidler (author of the forthcoming Gully’s Travels; Publisher’s Weekly Pick of the List The Wainscott Weasel; and Mean Margaret).

Tuesday, June 24 at 7:00 p.m   Meg Kearney & Steven Huff
Director Meg Kearney (author of An Unkindness of Ravens and The Secret of Me) & Steven Huff (author of the forthcoming A Pig in Paris and More Daring Escapes).

Thursday, June 26 at 7:00 p.m.  Patricia Spears Jones, Lee Hope, & Eric Gansworth
Patricia Spears Jones (author of Femme du Monde and The Weather That Kills), Lee Hope (Pushcart Prize-nominee and winner of the Theodore Goodman Award for Fiction), & Eric Gansworth (author of Indian Summers and Mending Skins, winner of the 2006 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles National Literary Award).

Friday, June 27 at 3:15 p.m.   Brenda Prescott & Tanya Whiton
Program Administrator Tanya Whiton (published in literary journals including Northwest Review and Crazyhorse 63) & Brenda Prescott (published in literary journals including Crab Orchard Review and The Louisville Review).

Friday, June 27 at 7:00 p.m.   Marina Budhos & Stephen Dunn
Marina Budhos (author of The Professor of Light and House of Waiting; Rona Jaffe Award winner) & Stephen Dunn (author of fourteen collections of poetry, including Everything Else in the World and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Different Hours).

Saturday, June 28 at 7:00 p.m.  Barbara Hurd & Dennis Lehane
Barbara Hurd (author of Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains and Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark, a Library Journal Best Natural History Book of the Year) & Dennis Lehane (author of the forthcoming The Given Day, Mystic River, Shutter Island, and Gone Baby, Gone).

Congrats, Xujun

There's nothing like the first time. I'm talking about books here.

Xujun Eberlein's first story collection, Apologies Forthcoming, had its debut on Saturday in her lovely garden at her home near where we live. Thus, we made a point of stopping by to enjoy the moment, commune with her friends, and taste some delicious food.

Here, Xujun with one of my very closest of friends, none other than the hubby, Jeff Stamps, appropriately attired in the T-shirt that matches his vehicle.

May this book party, X, be your first of many. And, to my readers: I've read the collection and recommend it without reservation. Original and compelling.

Apologies Forthcoming by Xujun Eberlein

Reciprocal interview at inside-out china.

Four years ago, I joined Zoetrope, the online writers community started by Francis Ford Coppola. I hope the day comes when I can thank him in person. None of us knows the number of writers who've benefited from his sponsoring this free, immensely useful space where writers exchange reviews of work-in-progress, pass along writing and publishing tips, and provide endless encouragement to one another. One requirement of Zoetrope is this: for every story you submit, you must review five others. I was getting a bit discouraged with my initial reviews (the first stack is assigned, after that you can choose) when, anxious to submit one of my own stories for dissection, I encountered Xujun Eberlein's "Swimming with Mao." I hate quoting myself (sort of :) but all this time later, I stand by what I wrote then: "This is a magnificent story, well rendered...and will be published. Good luck!"

(Clears throat) Right again. That story does not appear in its original form in Apologies Forthcoming, this fine  collection by Xujun. But "Feathers," its cousin, does, and it alone is worth buying this book. Never mind that the book won the Third Annual Tartts Fiction Award, which is how this volume came to print. With my laudatory review of Xujun's work, we struck up a friendship. Learning that we lived only a few miles apart, we agreed to meet in the garden of the Newton Public Library one sunny October day. Since then, we've visited each other's gardens but...mine pale next to hers. For example, the three-summers'-long-in-its-building "Chinese Garden Wall" as Xujun and her husband, Bob, call it:

What impresses me most about Xujun's work is not her fine writing or her rare eye for the unusual twist or that she's writing about a subject most of us know nothing about: growing up during the Cultural Revolution in China. It's that she's in the small, elite group of prize-winning writers who are not native speakers in the language that they write. Born in Chongqing, China, she moved to the US in 1988, earned her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from MIT, worked as a software developer, then chucked it all only a few years ago to write. Her list of publications and awards is significant. Just a few weeks ago, she won an Artist's Fellowship from the Massachusetts Arts Council.

Xujun is currently doing a "virtual blog tour" (see below for explanation); today is my turn. Since others are reviewing her book and asking her traditional questions that writers get once they cross the line to "author," I decided to query her about the connection between gardening and writing, passions we share:

You're doing a blog tour with your new book. Could you explain what this is and why it's advantageous for authors?

It is an experiment – so I’m not sure how advantageous it is yet. We'll see. A blog book tour is a low-cost alternative for a physical book tour, which I'm sure you have more experience with it than I do. In a blog tour, a writer traverses from blog to blog instead of city to city during a concentrated period.

Blogs that participate in the tour are referred as "stops." At each stop the blogger either interviews the author-on-tour or reviews the book or does both. The idea is mutual promotion as both sides are motivated to drive traffic to each stop. Ideally a participating blog gets exposure from the author's network and the author gets exposed to the blog's readers. Seems a good idea, right? However, in reality things don’t always work that well. For example, the topic of the book may not be attractive to the blog's readers; blog readers are not necessarily book lovers [ed. note: mine are!]; popular blogs are difficult to book while eager bloggers might not have much of a readership yet, etc. So, while a blog book tour does not cost the author much other than lots of organization and preparation time, it may or may not be effective.

A main advantage of a physical book tour is that its stops usually take place at bookstores or literary bars or someplace with a similar nature, which means the audience is book lovers. But such a tour is expensive and most small presses are not able to organize let alone pay for these tours. Everything has two sides, as ancient Chinese wisdom believes.

The Fullerenes on Margaret's 198th birthday

First things first. If you're going to film at Mount Auburn Cemetery, obtain a permit. Although I'd let the office there know that I'd be making my annual trek to the Margaret Fuller memorial on May 23, I'd failed to mention that a camera and sound equipment would be accompanying. Shortly after we finished and while I was shuttling Kim Romano, who did sound, back to the gate, one of the groundskeepers waved me down and politely admonished me for failing to obtain a permit. Turns out that since the advent of YouTube, people have engaged in strange antics at this gorgeous preserve where are buried many of America's artists, writers, politicians, and others of storied lives. So, no filming there without letting the office know what you're up to.

That said, here are a few photos, most taken by Annie Marascia Luongo, of the festivities, with thanks to her, Ron, Kim, John, Robert, Ruth, and Jeff, who always accompanies me on this journey -- and to Margaret for the inspiration and example of living the committed life.

Calm beauty of America's "first garden cemetery"

Where the Fuller lot is situated

Bucky and Anne Fuller's markers

Ron Mortara at work

Annie Marascia Luongo and Ruth Nemzoff

Kim Romano, Ron Mortara, and me, reading from Margaret's Woman in the Nineteenth Century

John Halamka playing "Banshiki," Japanese mourning song on his Shakuhachi

Robert Todd and John Halamka

Jeff Stamps

Margaret Fuller profile

Book Launch 2.0: "My blog. I'm guessing no one reads it"

Struggling and/or successful authors, bloggers, and anyone else trying to get the word out about what they're doing, ahoy. This video by Dennis Cass pretty much summarizes what it means to be lost in today's world. Make that Today 2.0.

April '08 book club: Old School

Oooops, forgive me. I missed the post on Old School by Tobias Wolff, the pick of the Fiction Book Club for April. I have an excuse. I couldn't attend due to work-related travel - not even a vacation. The group, I am told, liked the book very much, as did I, if only because it takes place in my hometown. I recognized the school (The Hill School, then a private boys' school educating the likes of James Baker, a 1948 alum and this year's graduation speaker), the "village" (Pottstown, Pennsylvania, a borough in actuality), and even the picture on the cover of The Hill School dining hall, where I first ate broccoli with hollandaise sauce. My friend, Mary Hartman, lived at The Hill because her father taught there.

Wolff's book is about belonging and authenticity and how simple smudgings of the truth can result in massive consequences. That the book is also about three authors and about students as writers made it even more appealing. The writers in question were "names" who visit the school for the annual lecture, having chosen in advance the work of one student to celebrate: Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway. The send-up of Rand is hilarious and refreshing, given how truly venal Rand's view of humanity is. The appearance or lack thereof of Hemingway is the trope around which the story unwinds. Good stuff. Well done, Mr. Wolff. I bet we passed each other on High Street when you went off-campus and perhaps you were even at the dance where I wore my first black velvet gown.

"Feeling Numb" - Ars Medica

"Feeling Numb," my essay about MS in Ars Medica, Vol 4, No 1.

Download ars_medica_feeling_numb.pdf

With thanks to Allison Crawford, Ian MacKenzie, and Liz Konigshaus of Ars Medica.

Contact Ars Medica.

More from Endless Knots writers - Roland and Ron

In History Rechanneled, Roland Merullo reviews Tony Horwitz's A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World in today's Boston Globe. Master of the beginning and end, Roland's conclusion (I posted final words from his Agni essay, Visions of Gerard, yesterday) five stars Horwitz's book:

...Which only serves to prove the author's point. Our story, our real story, is as painful, shameful, and grim as it is uplifting and grand. We have doctored the events of the past to make ourselves feel good about them. All cultures employ this collective denial mechanism, ignoring crimes and failures both ancient and recent in the name of an upbeat patriotism. It makes you wonder what we will say about ourselves 100 years from now. And it makes you think that "A Voyage Long and Strange" - disturbing, honest, wonderfully written, and heroically researched - should be required reading in every high school in the land.

Roland Merullo's political novel, "American Savior," will be published this summer.

And Ron Currie's pictured in today's NY Times SundayStyles at the NYPL Young Lions event. Unfortunately, the Times doesn't run these photos online...but the subhead today on the "Evening Hours" section where a full page of NY nightlife photos runs each week is "Town and Gown." An inspiring aspect of Ron's story is that he is just a writer. No college degree, no MFA. Just a writer.

NYPL Young Lion Currie in pictures

As per below

Before

Accepting

Ron signing for Brian O'Byrne, actor who read Ron's story, "Indian Summer"

Sierra Currie, Ron's niece, and Aaron Eckhart, Ron's fan

 

Zoetropers David Fromm, Anne Elliott, Don Capone, moi

 

 

AGNI: "Visions of Gerard" - Roland Merullo

In AGNI 67, lit journal hosted at Boston University, born at Antioch College, there is a Roland Merullo gem, "Visions of Gerard:"

Gerard and I were friends for thirty years, from a September afternoon in 1973 when he broke a tube of toothpaste against the door of my college dormitory room--a typical Gerardian introduction--to a July day in 2003 when he was dying in his bedroom in Arizona. I called that day and happened to catch him in a lucid hour, and we had the last in a long series of talks...

So begins Roland's courageous essay about his best friend and himself. The cracked toothpaste tube has stayed with me since reading it (similar to the toast in In Revere, In Those Days). Walks through the years of their friendship, Gerard's many sufferings and irresponsibilities, Roland's disappointments and persistence, one spiraling down, the other never giving up, Gerard's dependence, R's growing up, their difficulties in connecting.

...There was just too much trouble there, in him, and in slightly diluted fashion, in me. The trouble was like static on a phone line, growing louder as the conversation went on, two brothers laughing and fighting and pointing out the misery in the world, trying, via different routes, to come to terms with the pain inside them, to make contact, soul to soul, or to sustain a contact that had been made, struggling to do what it is that we have been put here to do: sort through the mess in us and learn to love.

That's how it ends. Honest and squirm-making as you (I) see your(my)self. Thanks, again, RM.

Readers: Search over in the next column for posts on "Roland Merullo."

AGNIans: I hope you put this one online.

Update: Turns out today happens to be Gerard's birthday. 

Love those links

Been adding links: Octavian World by Cesar Brea, my co-panelist at Enterprise 2.0, What Blogging Brings to Business; Here We Are. Now What from Terrence Seamon, "learning and OD guy," whom I know as Portfolio Manager at American Management Association; Five Star Literary Stories, which reviews the best pieces in the literary mags, from my Zoetrope friend, TJ Forrester; and Liz Barron Coaching (Washington, DC) from my friend, Liz Barron, whom I know as Director of Leadership Programs for Brookings Executive Education. Will do my best to showcase the rest of you newly added linkees soon - and the rest of you: check them out!

Ron Currie: Young Lions Fiction Awardee 2008!

NYPL lion from ForgottonDelights.com - thanks! Event photos to come...Photo of Barbara Currie by David Gerard Fromm.

On the steps of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street sit two massive marble lions. My mother loved her joke about them, told it frequently: They roar whenever a virgin walks by. Last night they did roar when Ron Currie won the NYPL’s Young Lions Fiction Award for God is Dead.

Actor Ethan Hawke and a group of his friends (Rick Moody, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, and Hannah McFarland) started the award in 2001 for writers under 35, making Ron the eighth winner. Hawke was MC in the Bartos Forum of “this wonderful building,” a banquet hall with a glass "saucer dome" ceiling and marble walls. We sat at round tables, ours all the way to the left in front of the stage, the one with the Ron Currie tent card. At tables next to ours, the other nominees: Ellen Litman (The Last Chicken in America); Peter Nathaniel Malae (Teach the Free Man); Dinah Mengetsu (The Beautiful Thing that Heaven Bears); and Emily Mitchell (The Last Summer of the World).

Hawke was exuberant, congratulating the nominees regardless of the outcome. Ron's mother, Barbara, had brought along a stunning picture of her husband , Ron Currie Sr., who passed away last December.

Four actors read excerpts from the works of each nominee, Ron’s “Indian Summer” was first, read by Brian O’Byrne, star of “Coast of Utopia.” Brian took a wide stance, right hand in his pocket, sometimes carving the air, weight shifting, knee bending, leaning into the tough parts of the story adding more punch to the raw prose, his mouth just an inch or two from the mic, dressed in black jeans and a charcoal sweater much as the characters in the story might have worn, he not that different in age from them. The story is awful and riveting, the same excerpt Ron read at the book party last summer (well, apparently, I never revealed in these pages that we hosted a book party for him here last July when the book came out so this link will have to do). "Indian Summer" will stand as the emblem of hopelessness, hilarious yet so raw that each time I hear it, I wish Ron had never written it because of what it must have taken out of him to do so. But, horrible as it is, it fits the book as a whole - and everyone lunges for it, readers and reviewers alike.

The other excerpts were wonderful - two emigré stories, one Russian, one Ethiopian, a jail story that had Ron’s not preceded it would have been even more powerful, and a portrait of Edward Steichen - all beautifully written, as one would expect from nominees for this award, humorous, and all well read by Hawke, Amanda Peet, and Michael Shannon - but when Brian finished, I felt sorry for the other nominees. Ron’s work is a different kind of original and that, I’m certain, is why he won.

The judges considered 142 books, chose five as finalists, said Paul LeClerc, NYPL president, before receiving “the envelope, please.” Not a second between his opening it and his “Ron Currie.” We erupted, we being his mom, Barbara, his niece Sierra (who got to have her picture taken with actor Aaron Eckhart), and three of my Zoetrope friends - Anne Elliott, Don Capone, and David Fromm. Congratulations is a small word for what this means to Ron and for his career. And lest I overlook one detail: Prize = $10,000 for Ron; $1000 for each of the other finalists.

See also: Don Capone's Hit List, Paper Cuts (NYTimes book blog), NYPL Young Lions site, GalleyCat

Pub day

Writing's rewards are protracted - a draft, 800 more drafts, waiting, acceptance, corrections, pdfs (used to be page proofs that took weeks to arrive), publication, waiting, hard copy in hand.

Two waiting last night:

The Handbook of High-Performance Virtual Teams, all 764 pages of it. Big cheers to editors Jill Nemiro, Michael Beyerlein, Lori Bradley, Susan Beyerlein - and to my fifty authors who never met. Not even a mega conference call. Virtualteamspedia. And you can download tools, frameworks and even a spreadsheet with a taxonomy for all the significant studies on virtual team leadership. Our bit is last, The Virtual, Networked Organization.

"Feeling Numb," my essay on MS in Ars Medica, the medicine, arts, and humanities journal from Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. Will post once scanned. Have read several stunning pieces so far - "Two Minutes with Zack: A Found Poem" by Zachary Faceman and Ben McGren, and Myra Sklarew's "Lie Perfectly Still."

Literary agent on collaboration

My Google alert set to collaboration typically brings news of yet another tech geegaw for collaborating faster, more easily, better than anyone could possibly imagine, etc. But today comes a post from Miriam Goderich of Dystel & Goderich, the literary agency handling my friend Lisa McMann's new book that hit the NY Times Best-seller list on April 6 (Wake) and another title: Dreams from My Father by one Barack Obama (heard'a him, peut-etre?).

Goderich's points are excellent guidelines for any collaboration, not just for writers. Quick summary:

1. Think twice before agreeing to the collaboration as it is likely to be more difficult than you can possibly imagine.

2. Clarify each person's role - key to any collaborative activity, as lack of role clarity is more times than not the cause of project failure based on our research.

3. Get the legalities straight from the get-go - copyright holder, financial arrangements and the like. 'Nuf said.

4. Engage your most mature self, the writer you wish you were when you start screaming at your collaborator, which typically happens first in your own head.

5. Be prepared to walk away if it turns out to be a disaster. Nothing's worth it. Not even a best-seller.

Thanks, Miriam. Excellent list.

Read this book: Incantation by Alice Hoffman

Many years ago, my literary agent at the time invited me to a party in Cambridge at the home of "Alice Hoffman," whose work he also handled. I put her name in quotes because she was already a phenom and I was still a long year away from seeing a book with my name on it in print. Memories of that party have stayed with me over the years, including a conversation I had with Alice that night. In retrospect, it was really nothing extraordinary but as a young writer in the company of another young writer who'd already made a mark, what she said left an indelible memory such that I can even quote it today. But I never read her work.

Then serendipitously, a friend who occasionally sends a note to someone saying "meet my friend, Jessica" sent such a note to Alice last week. In the volley of emails that preceded it, I'd mentioned that I was reading People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks's new novel about the Sarajevo haggadah, the order of service for Passover, that survived for centuries even as the Jews it belonged to did not. Alice replied a short while later, saying that if I were interested in the Inquisition, I might want to read her book, Incantation.

Which I just finished and which I implore you to read. It's short, gorgeous, gripping, grotesque, and, in large measure, true. Not true in the way that the characters were historical figures but true in the way that evil sweeps through cultures, insanely, burning books and bodies and believers of the wrong faith. The intimacy of young girls, inseparable friends, smashed by jealousy and betrayal; sudden immutable love; ancient rituals practiced in secret; the genesis of genocide; and what would otherwise be called magic but instead is deep reverence for the beauty of the natural world and its ability to transport us even in moments without any light to luminous higher realms ... all this in 150 pages, beginning with what must be one of the strongest openings in the history of the novel:

If every life is a river, then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face.

My name once meant daughter, granddaughter, friend, sister, beloved. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out: Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness.

I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.

Thank you, Alice. Now on to more of your work. And seriously, friends. Read it.

Mother and Daughter Pastan, reading, together

My friend Meg emailed last week: "Wondering—I know this is last-minute—if you’d be interested in going to hear Linda Pastan read on Monday night at Blacksmith House. She’s a kick-butt poet and is reading with her daughter, Rachel, whose novel came out (with great reviews) last year."

Truth: I'd never heard of either of them and this is shameful, as I learned last night. What talents. Rachel read first from her new novel, Lady of the Snakes, which begins with Jane, a Russian literature scholar, in labor with her first child. Linda, author of many books of poetry and former Poet Laureate of Maryland, followed with complementary readings -- first from Queen of a Rainy Country and then from her other works, including a new manuscript -- about giving birth to Rachel, about family, about the window to the future closing (not precisely the words).

These were readings where (this doesn't always happen) the mind sparked, the heart beat a little faster than is comfortable, and where eyes leaked as words pulled together, sentences completed themselves, whole paragraphs took shape, and, when I left, an entire piece was ready to be written. Inspirational, motivational, and a strong reminder of how much we all have to say.

Thank you, Linda, Rachel, and Meg.

Monique: "It wasn't supposed to turn out this way"

My friend Monique Doyle Spencer has another doozie in today's Boston Globe, Working women, where did we go so wrong?

When my kids were little, my "sister" Judy came to visit. Sister is in quotes because by birth neither of us legally has a sister, which both of us regretted, so after about 20 years of friendship, we adopted each other. Judy was sitting at the kitchen table and I was cooking food to take to my mother in the nursing home (situated one good cry's worth away). I don't remember all the details anymore - but the weekly cooking was only one responsibility (my mother hated the food there so...). I was working full-time, the girls were perhaps 5 and 7 (no further explanation needed), Jeff and I had a looming book deadline, and on and on and on. "You never take anything away," she said. "You just keep adding things."

This is what Monique's piece is about. There are too many pieces for the puzzle yet we keep jamming more in. Thanks, Monique, as always:

IT'S ALMOST the end of National Women's Month and I have a big confession: I think we women ruined the workplace.

Ouch. I don't want to feel that way, but take a look. Once upon a time, when a woman took a professional job, she worked a 60-hour week on average. Her boss was a man and she thought she had to prove herself. She didn't make any more money than the guys who worked 45-hour weeks. She thought this was the glass ceiling, so she started working 65 hours instead. Still, she made no more money. She did, however, get promoted to head of her department. She was the lowest-paid department head in history, so she worked even harder.

Here's the honest truth: Her boss didn't even know what she made. He didn't care, either. She never felt secure enough to negotiate her own raise, so she waited for somebody to notice. They never did. So the extra $10,000 a year that would have made a world of difference to her family never came home. It stayed at the company where it meant absolutely nothing to anybody...

        Monique Doyle Spencer is author of "The Courage Muscle: A Chicken's Guide to Living with Breast Cancer."

Askold and Sven together again

Two of Boston’s great literati (and my friends, which makes them even greater, natch) team up this Thursday night for readings in the Newtonville Books series. Askold Melnyczuk will read from his new novel, The House of Widows, Sven Birkerts from his new work, The Art of Time in Memoir, both published by the powerful little Graywolf Press.

The two mens’ lives intersect most notably through Agni, the literary magazine now published at Boston University. Askold, director of the writing program at University of Massachusetts/Boston and publisher with Alex Johnson of Arrowsmith Books, founded the magazine in 1972 while a young student at Antioch College; Sven, recently named director of the Bennington graduate writing program, has been its editor since 2003.

See you there: 7 PM, Thursday, March 20, Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut Street, Newtonville, Mass.

Photo: Askold reading from Ambassador of the Dead, Fiction Book Club, Feb 15, 2005, my house

March '08 book club: The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa

For those following my Fiction Book Club posts, you know that I've revised my policy (hammered out over many smoke-filled, backroom nights). Instead of just announcing the book, I'm now saying something about the book club's response after we meet. As is the case with most good policies, I failed to observe it in the very first month after my announcement. The reason will be revealed a few paragraphs down. Meanwhile, this month we read (and discussed last night ) Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl translated by Edith Grossman, who's ported much of his work and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's (among other Latin American greats) into English. I'm including Grossman's picture here from a Washington Post interview that she gave with another of her translatees, Mayra Montero. Here Grossman explains her process, or at least comments on it. Why include her picture in this post? As thanks for Love in the Time of Cholera, this book, and many others. A life of translation, exquisite work, of which The Bad Girl is yet another.  

We were missing a couple of our most stalwart members last night (rumor has it that this was the first club ever missed by two of our co-founders, Tom and Emily) yet we survived a discussion in which seven  loved the book, two hated it, and one was mezzamezz. I loved it. In just a few hundred pages, Vargas Llosa manages to span three or four decades, fixate the reader (at least this one) on an obsessive love affair, accurately portray a Paris and London in 1968 that I remember vividly, document Peruvian politics, and bring onto the stage characters who are complex, contradictory, and engaging - just like my friends. Which brings me to this: when I said I knew someone like "the bad girl," I was queried as to who she was. But first: the bad girl (Lily, among other names) is a disturbed, beautiful, exploitative "user," the kind of woman who collects rich husbands. The good boy, Ricardito, as he calls himself in his interior dialogue, becomes fascinated with her when they are still children. Circumstance and coincidence cross their paths over and over through their lives, sometimes by mere happenstance, other times because one or the other, mostly him, seeks the other out.

So whom have I known like the bad girl? I had a gorgeous and brilliant dear friend whose self-esteem and insecurity were so pronounced that she made repeatedly bad choices in men until the right one came along in her mid-30s and she woke up. The bad girl of this novel is not a sympathetic character until you lop off the first syllable - and then her pathetic-ness  is overbearing. She thinks a rich man is going to solve her "problem," provide her security, her problem and insecurity being nothing more than what we're all stuck with - being human. I'm about to lose the whole morning if I don't stop here. Read it and tell me what you think.

And, as promised, why did I not post about the last book? Because I couldn't get past about ten pages, which will make the Cormac McCarthy enthusiasts click right out of this blog. The Road, which uncharacteristically I will not even provide a link to, is another of McCarthy's indulgences. We all know the man can write and that he can write about a father's love for a son (ten pages proves it) but beyond that...good lord, McCarthy. Have you ever written a positive paragraph about a woman? Couldn't you have reduced this to about ten pages? I do not understand this writer's appeal. Or what would possess a writer to spend his/her time this way? With this kind of talent - and living in the times we do that call for all of us to pitch in and help, why are you wasting your talent this way? And why do you get awards for it?

Next up for April '08: Old School by Tobias Wolff, which I can't wait to read. It's set at The Hill School in my hometown of Pottstown, Penna., where I went to my first cotillion and to which I wore my first black velvet dress.

Stone Creek - advance reading copy

I won't do this often as it's very risky but I am so enthralled with Stone Creek, the forthcoming novel by Victoria Lustbader, that I want you all to know about it. The book doesn't come out until late May -- and I'm only a third of the way through -- but if your reaction is anything like mine and that of the editors at HarperCollins (as recorded in the book's ARC, advance reading copy), you will love this book. Beautifully written, it's a multi-dimensional love story with passionate characters, including a grieving husband with a young child, and a woman who, well, I'm not certain what's ultimately happening with Lily, but she's a keen observer of life, of her husband, of a younger man, of children...I wish I could spend the day reading.

Bravo to Victoria, the first of what I expect will be multiple kudos to the author, whom I met thanks to her talented husband, the writer Eric Van Lustbader.

Going home

This one's personal.

When I was fifteen, I was lucky enough to receive a scholarship to George School, one of the US's truly great independent secondary schools. A co-ed Quaker boarding (and day) school in Bucks County, Penna., George School has been much in the news of late due to its unexpected good fortune, when an alumna whose father was a teacher and partner of Warren Buffett's bequeathed the largest gift ever awarded to a private school. The school is deserving and I am forever grateful for my extraordinary education there. As I've written before, college, including my year abroad at Oxford, was easy after George School.

Point of all this is that once I left for George School and except for the following summers, I never really went back to Pottstown, Penna., where I was born and raised. But those summers proved critical to the life I've chosen. When I was sixteen, I was hired as a reporter for The Pottstown Mercury, a daily and a feeder paper for The Philadelphia Bulletin, then that city's leading paper.

Thanks to our daughter's art opening in Philadelphia this past Friday night, we had the chance to go back to Pottstown, snap some pictures, and remember my childhood.

We drove past the two houses where my family lived, stopped at the (unfortunately closed for the season) ice cream shop where my brother, our friends, and I could walk to get penny candy and Eskimo Pies.

We visited the cemetery where my father is buried. As this week is the anniversary of
my father's death (he died on Lincoln's birthday and was buried on Valentine's Day), it was especially poignant to make this pilgrimage.

 

 

My mother is buried next to him, her tombstone bearing a sage line she wrote for us to read at her funeral: Love each other despite differences and because of them.

 

And my childhood friend, Shelly Kostiner, who died when she was twelve, is buried just across the path. I've written - and will continue to write about my parents here. Someday I will publish  "The Zernsville Lions," my short story about Shelly and her death.

 

"Information wants to be free"

In 1984, Jeff Stamps and I taught a course on networking for the first online executive education program. As Steve Teicher commented below, that course brought together interesting faculty, including, while we were teaching, the unusual thinker Stewart Brand. It's a sign of the years going by that when I recently gave a workshop to a group of people early in their careers none had heard of The Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart's early masterpiece.

Stewart's remarks that day (he taught after we did) have stayed with me: "Information wants to be free," he said, an expression that I've heard others lay claim to over the years. He illustrated his assertion with evidence that people were using the technologies available at the time -- rudimentary email and Xerox machines -- to pass information around and no copyright rules were going to prevent people from doing so.

Here we are nearly a quarter-century later and these fires are burning hotter than ever. In the last week or so, three independent bloggers have each brought up the issue again, this time in regard to academic journals. Each takes a different tack but all are getting at the same thing: If information is really important, it wants to - and likely should - get out, which flies in the face of the economic realities of journal publishers. Take a look at these posts and see what you think.

1. danah boyd says she's not writing for subscription-only academic journals any longer in "open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals."
2. David Weinberger is down with the idea that Harvard faculty vote yes on a proposal "to deposit a copy of their articles in an open access Harvard repository even as they submit those articles to academic journals." He just wants it to go further: giving faculty points in their tenure hearings for doing so. See "Harvard to vote on open access proposal."
3. And then there's "You Can Take Your $15 and ...!" over at Paul Levy's blog. He's calling for journals to release important articles with broad public policy implications: "When a respected medical journal issues a press release about a given article that has important public policy ramifications but does not make available the full text of the article, it is a bad thing." He got fed up after an important JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) article was released and unless you have a subscription - or pony up $15 - it's not coming to a website near you.

The Liar's Diary - Blog Day

This post is about the power of blogging. Today more than 300 (not sure how many more by this point) bloggers are teaming up to promote the release in paperback of The Liar's Diary by Patry Francis. Susan Henderson, writer, editor, friend extraordinaire to Patry Francis, is part of the organizing effort that is taking advantage of the incredible power of links among bloggers to mark this as a day in blogging history.

Every writer deserves a little help from her friends; Patry's dogged determination to be published, especially so, as she was working the dog jobs many writers turn to while their imaginations spin and their alarm clocks wake them earlier and earlier each morning until her fate turned. Her book was picked up but then her diagnosis with an aggressive cancer just as she signed her first contract. Thus, hundreds of us are hitting the keys today to spread the word. Her publisher, Penguin (for one book, also Jeff's and mine) is offering a discount through this blogging initiative.

From Sue Henderson's site:

Here are links to THE LIAR'S DIARY at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Powell's. You can also buy directly from Penguin to save 15% (after you add the book to your cart, just enter the word PATRY in the coupon code field and click ‘update cart’ to activate the discount).

Thank you, Sue, and all the other creative minds behind this initiative. May we see the book right at the top of the charts and happy blogging day to you, Patry.

Update: The number of bloggers covering this story is growing by the hour. Absolutely incredible to watch this roll through the 'sphere.

Call for examples: Is flatter always better?

Jeff Stamps and I are writing a piece about organization design. In that pursuit, we're looking for what the editor calls "vivid illustration" of situations in which flattening organizations - haphazard removal of layers - has led to problems. Have you been in an enterprise that has done wholesale removal of management levels? Have you had a conversation with someone who has? Are you the exec who's made the decision to delayer an organization? We'd love to hear your story and, as always, will credit respondents or preserve anonymity as desired. Please comment here (or email me if you're not the commenting type: jessica[dot]lipnack[at]netage.com).

Text me your novel

I suppose it was inevitable but frankly it's never crossed my mind: writing a novel on my phone. Today's NY Times gives  front page space to Norimitsu Onishi's very good reporting, "Thumbs Race as Japan's Best Sellers Go Cellular."

That's right. Of the top ten best selling novels in Japan in 2007, five were written on cell phones.

Writers, get thee-selves to the thumb exercise gym. Writing your brilliant prose on your phone is the NBT, and if you don't know what that is, click here (oh, no, it's not there: Next Big Thing):

Whatever their literary talents, cellphone novelists are racking up the kind of sales that most more experienced, traditional novelists can only dream of.

One such star, a 21-year-old woman named Rin, wrote “If You” over a six-month stretch during her senior year in high school. While commuting to her part-time job or whenever she found a free moment, she tapped out passages on her cellphone and uploaded them on a popular Web site for would-be authors.

Turns out that writing via this method owes its success in part to "packet death." Huh? This special form of electronic extinction was befalling Japanese cellphone users when their text messaging bills were in the $1000 range. When providers changed their billing methods from charging by the message, the prevailing model here in the US, to charging flat fees for unlimited data transmission, they made it economical for people to post via their phones. Young writers, who got their start posting novels to their blogs, quickly made the transition to writing on their phones.

Thus, a new genre was born. Only the publishing establishment is not so sure it is a genre, which is where the literary tension comes in. Or not. The books tend not to have any, according to the article. Simple love stories, written with a lot of text abbreviations, little character development, and very short sentences seem to be the style.

I better brush up my texting skills. Or i btr brsh up my txtg skls.

Very interesting article. Worth reading.

Blog, sweet blog

Send the guys with the straightjackets, I think. Last night I dreamt that I was running down the street in NY (nothing strange there, I spend a lot of time in the city) but what was I doing? Composing a blog post as I ran and explaining in said post that I always run down the street in NY. Uh...I don't. Any shrinks reading? Hellllppppppppppppppppp!

Come with me, meet an editor

I had a period a few years ago when, on the train to or from New York, next to me was seated a writer. Always. I've posted here about my adventures meeting another writer time and again in the nut aisle at Whole Foods. (We met for coffee there earlier this week, a location she proposed in an email with the subject line, "chock full 'o nuts.")

A few very close to me say it's my fault, that I strike up these conversations, that these poor writers likely cherish their privacy and I'm barging in on their otherwise contemplative lives.

Explain this, then. Yesterday, coffee (though first I had green tea and then water) with Hal Richman, whom I've corresponded with over the years about collaboration, virtual teams, and the like. Hal was passing through on his way from Nova Scotia  to Indonesia and happened to be staying here in Newton, Mass. for a night.

We talked so long that we closed up one joint (don't get excited, closing time is 4 PM on Saturdays) and moved to a second coffee shop, across the street, although, again, no coffee was involved. (He had ice cream, this was when I drank the water.)

Yammer, yammer, we went, what about this connection, what about that...and off I was talking about the trend whereby medical institutions now also are literary publishers (Bellevue Hospital in NY, Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, a few others). Bellevue also publishes books, I said, repeating what I'd read in the NY Times (not just on some unreliable blog).

At the next table were a mother and daughter (also eating ice cream). We smiled and I noticed that she had on a cool brown suede vest with no collar, nice buttons.

"Excuse me," she said almost in a whisper.

"I'm sorry for eavesdropping but Bellevue is publishing books?"

"Um, yes."

She must have seen the question about to come out of my mouth. "I publish a literary journal," said she, poet Jenny Barber, founder and editor of Salamander, now in its 15th year and housed at Suffolk University in Boston.

English teachers, rejoice!

In my mail this morning, a request from a friend to take my harsh pen (turn on tracking, if you will) to some documents. It was addressed to Cruella. Those who've suffered my editing know.

Thus, I want Ron Currie's T-shirt. As would have my English teacher mother (go Daniel Boone High School, where Updike's father was a substitute in the department she ran).

Ron, in case you missed it in my posts, is author of God is Dead, which has made more than one Best of '07 book lists. And, he's got another masterpiece on the way. Stay tuned.

Vote for my favorite medical blog

I keep few secrets especially when it comes to my enthusiasms. As I've mentioned in articles I've written in the past year - including one about my fave blogs, I'm a subscriber to/regular reader of Paul Levy's blog, Running A Hospital. What's so great about it? Self-quoting:

Running a Hospital, the blog of the CEO of a large American medical centre, is informative about health care, as well as funny and controversial, and eve