Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2013 i The Writer

As we worked on this issue of The Writer, a fascinating theme emerged. Of course, our primary theme is always craft. But as the stories you’re about to read took shape, we witnessed another idea surfacing: influence. That’s a powerful word in our field because it encompasses so many elements. For writers, influence derives from foundational family settings, early exposure to reading, educational access, input from editors, cultivation of senses, fascination with language. The list is long, and much of it is unknowable. In the larger creative world, we call these markers “cultural influencers” – like the visionaries who nudge community life forward in its progress. For our purposes, we might think of influence, combined with talent, as the driving force behind what we do. Consider Vaddey Ratner, whose story…

Michael Thomas Michael Thomas’s debut novel Man Gone Down follows a young African American father’s struggle to keep his family together. It won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Thomas is also the author of the forthcoming family history The Broken King, which examines the lives of the males in his family from the reconstruction era through the civil rights movement and up to the present day. Thomas’ work often focuses on themes of racial identity, class and the roles fulfilled in society by African American men. What’s the most important thing you’ve learned about writing? I’ve learned that I take longer to write things than I think I can. I don’t budget enough time for drafts and fine editing. I don’t write under pressure as well as I thought…

One of the more compelling hashtags we’ve found on Twitter is #amwriting. Those two words contain the world for writers. To be. And to be writing. Unlike many tweets, these don’t demand any action from fellow tweeters. They enter the world simply as acknowledgments: Here I am – writing. A selection of our favorites follows. Kristan Hoffman @kristanhoffman Sometimes editing is like climbing a sheer arctic cliff with an ice axe. Necessary for survival, but slow and scary. #amwriting #amediting Chris Abouzeid @gripemaster Today: While Novel #1 rises, starting to mix Novel #2. Think it will require much kneading. #amwriting Tayari Jones @tayari Bye twitter. I have this book I need to go and write. #amwriting #freedome Kirk Layton @kirklayton My mystery now has a red herring. It was delicious…

The online forum for Camp NaNoWriMo includes posts on camp songs, cabin mates, survival kits and one thread that begins “Young Campers, where are you?!” Sounds alarming, but no one’s lost in the wilderness – not literally, anyway. This camp is virtual, brought to you in April and July by Berkeley’s Office of Letters and Light, the same nonprofit that sponsors November’s National Novel Writing Month that attracts more than 200,000 participants. “We heard from so many people who were busy in November and wanted us to offer NaNoWriMo at another time of year,” says Chris Angotti, program director at the Office of Letters and Light. He describes the April and July events as low-key and fun, a literary adventure in which “people feel supported by our organization, their cabin-mates,…

Introduction by Alicia Anstead The world is split into two kinds of people: those who love The Great Gatsby and everybody else. Gatsby isn’t a gray-area novel. If you fall for it, you fall hard. Many have. The Modern Library ranks it second only to James Joyce’s Ulysses in the list of 100 Best Novels. Of all time. When you love a work of literature, it’s difficult to be on the fence about it. “Are you a Gatsby person?” is somehow a more intimate question than “What are you reading now?” Two questions often follow that initial identifying one: When did you first read Gatsby, and how many times have you read the book? I read it as a junior in high school and remember putting my head down on…

In fiction, we hold these truths to be self-evident: There are no truths. At least none that are absolute and applicable to everyone in a field in which, by its very nature, you make things up as you go along. That’s the whole idea. Writing fiction is the solitary journey of your individual imagination in the pursuit of some, yes, universal truth. But there are no rules for getting there. Still, you could use some guidance. How do you even know if you can string two sentences together? Do you really need an advanced degree to get published? Should you live your life like Dickinson? Or like Hemingway? While you are busy not listening to any voice but the one in your head, we thought we would confuse things by…

The war is still going on, Om Bao, the cook, is suddenly missing, and Raami is concerned. She speaks to Grandmother Queen, wondering about the whereabouts of Om Bao: Grandmother Queen gave me a blank look, seeming only interested in the next life. Anything to do with this one was a huge void to her. I wondered if she even knew there was a war. “People are fighting . . .” “Yes, I know,” she murmured. “There will remain only so many of us as rest in the shadow of a banyan tree . . .” “What?” I stared at her, thinking not only did she look like some kind of spirit but sometimes she sounded like one too, speaking in obscurity. “The explosions,” I persisted. “Don’t you hear them?…

There’s something about making lists. In or about 1928, Father Ronald Knox, a founding member of the Detection Club (a group of British mystery writers), formulated his Decalogue – 10 unbreakable rules for writing detective fiction. He was not entirely serious; he knew that there are more than 10 rules and that they can all be broken. But to a Roman Catholic priest, the idea of the Ten Commandments was ineluctable. In the ensuing eight decades, readers’ tastes and writers’ interests have changed, so I decided to update the rules for the mystery writer of today, with the same caveat: There are many more than 10, and they can all be broken. But only by a skilled writer, and for a really good reason. Here, in no particular order, is…

INFORMATION in this section is provided to The Writer by the individual markets and events; for more information, contact those entities directly. F = Fiction N = Nonfiction P = Poetry C = Children’s Y = Young adult O = Other $ = Offers payment WriterMag.com Subscribers to The Writer have online access to information on 3,000+ publishers, publications, conferences, contests and agents. Go to WriterMag.com and click on Market Directory. AGENTS F Y BLUE RIDGE LITERARY AGENCY Handles romances, mysteries, women’s fiction, historical, suspense, thrillers and other sub genres, plus YA and middle grade fiction. Submit a synopsis and the first three chapters by email. Contact: Dawn Dowdle, Blue Ridge Literary Agency. query@blueridgeagency.com blueridgeagency.com F N Y THE COOKE AGENCY Represents literary fiction, commercial fiction (science fiction, fantasy and…

In 1985, I moved to Brooklyn. The residents were primarily workers at the Domino Sugar factory down the street, as well as junkies, prostitutes and the Satmar Hasidim. Adjacent to the rusting Williamsburg Bridge was this blonde, 24-year-old lesbian making her entry into a dream of the New York City writer’s life. The words “dream” and “dreaming” have many connotations. To dream of your future is to envision it, as I was envisioning my writing life. To dream of making the world a better place is to keep the hope for justice high in our sights. “Dreaming” can also mean the fantasizing we sometimes illicitly allow ourselves during daytime. To dream at night, and to remember, is to have an open window to our unconscious and imagination. It turned out…

James Joyce’s Ulysses, widely considered the greatest novel of the 20th century, follows Dubliner Leopold Bloom on a single day, June 16, 1904 – known to the literary world as Bloomsday. Three writer-educators talk about lessons from the masterpiece. “Ulysses is a vast compendium of human experience. All styles are there, all emotions. A writer can learn everything from it, as long as he or she is not afraid of it. It’s a daunting work at first, but it reveals that beauty can be slowly released through difficulty. It is the greatest novel of our times.” – Colum McCann, author of the forthcoming novel TransAtlantic “James Joyce’s Ulysses is the old and new brought together (‘Make it new!’ screamed Ezra Pound from the rooftops). It is the return home, the…

I’m so tired of writing characters who are a version of myself, but when I try to branch out, I end up freezing. Do you have any suggestions? IT SOUNDS LIKE you’ve found your comfort zone. While that can be a useful place to linger and explore, it’s often a good idea to launch yourself out of it to continue growing and developing as a writer. Below, you’ll find some exercises you might try to make this experiment seem less daunting. CHARACTER QUESTIONNAIRE: Sometimes writers are stumped because they simply don’t know where to start. Consider creating a list of questions you might ask about a character and then fill it out, keeping in mind you’re working toward a character unlike yourself. Start with a difference that is basic –…

The pipes are clank, clank, clanking. My husband John is still in deep sleep, where I would like to return to. But those pipes. I’m sure one of them will burst. Maybe not today, maybe not even next week, but definitely soon. I ought to buy some earplugs. It’s 5 a.m., and I beckon slumber. Come back, come back, I plead within my own head. The incessant banging of the pipes grows louder. Poe’s relentless Tell-Tale Heart comes to mind, beat, beat, beating, slowly driving him mad. A vision of a house appears, not this one but a different one, sitting high atop a hill, enveloped in a billow of menacing, ashen clouds, its imperious walls rattling with the echo of old clanking pipes. The alarm goes off. Somehow 45…

The summer I read The Great Gatsby, I was in love. A young college student thirsting for literature, I prepared to read one of the greatest stories ever written. I read it. I liked it. And I immediately forgot it. A few details would cling to me: eggs and eyes and a quiet swimming pool. But even as I put the book aside, I suspected that F. Scott Fitzgerald had told me a secret, a truth I couldn’t quite grasp. Not long ago, my mother brought The Great Gatsby home from the library, a yellowed copy with a woman in moonlit gauze on the cover. She read it and gave it to me. “It’s so sad,” she said, a catch in her throat. “It’s beautiful.” After a few days I…

Nick Arvin: “I have been re-reading the books by a Swedish writer named Pär Lagerkvist, who wrote back in the 1940s and ’50s. The Dwarf and Barabbas are fantastic. It’s interesting to study what he could do with a style that is very plain and transparent, and yet he builds this enormous emotional and metaphorical complexity out of it.” George Saunders: “I’m not sure there is one. More important that the person tap into a lineage that feels really alive for her. I mean, I think Anton Chekhov is a must – but so is Tolstoy and Joyce and Babel and on and on. But I think part of the task for a young writer is to find that person who means something to her – even if (maybe especially…

Favorite music: My taste is eclectic, from hip-hop and pop songs that my 12-year-old daughter introduces me to and shares from her collection, to classical pieces by Mahler and Bartok, to more contemporary renderings by Yo-Yo Ma, to Khmer folk music and Cambodian rock and roll of the 1960s, now revived by this phenomenal band called Dengue Fever. Places you go to relax or vacation: Anywhere by the water – rivers, lakes, oceans. I simultaneously fear and love water – such impenetrable mystery. I feel my own shallowness in the presence of water. TV shows you like to watch: Probably like everyone else, I’ve been addicted to Downton Abbey. Watching it, I believe I’m English, and I imagine myself very much like the formidable, sharp-witted and sharp-tongued Dowager Countess Lady…

Can a literary magazine create cultural change? Fans of The Paris Review, The New Yorker and more recently Adbusters would answer in the affirmative. It’s this type of transformation that editors Elizabeth Murphy and Dan Monaco aim for in their 6-year-old journal The Straddler. “What would it take for us to release ourselves from the fetters of the current condition?” Monaco says. “Ours is a project which involves a people examining and collaborating and producing insights that can act within the culture to try to throw off some of the negative conditions under which we’re currently living.” The Straddler comes out biannually online, full of prose, poetry and art. The post-election issue (winter 2013) includes Daniel Schensul’s essay, “Can’t Lose Counterfactuals: On Elections, Commentary, and Comparisons,” and “Muddling Toward the…

Jenna Blum’s New York Times and No. 1 international best-selling novel Those Who Save Us captures a complex mother-daughter relationship in World War II Germany: the guilt of heritage and a past that haunts the two women through the decades. Blum, named one of Oprah’s Top 30 Women Writers, is a self-proclaimed perfectionist, devoting years of research before putting her pen to paper. She spent six years chasing tornadoes in preparation for her second novel, Stormchasers. A graduate of Boston University’s creative writing master’s program and former editor of AGNI Literary Magazine, she lives in Witchita, Kan., where she is working on the screenplay for Those Who Save Us. Blum offered a glimpse into her coffee-charged writing routine. Why: The characters feel like real people to me, and I’m the…

In Polishing Your Prose: How to Turn First Drafts into Finished Work, sibling writers Steven M. Cahn (a professor of philosophy) and Victor L. Cahn (a professor of English) present 10 principles for effective composition and then scrutinize three extended paragraphs with tips on how to improve them. In the conclusion, the authors acknowledge that editing is not a straightforward activity. “The process of writing and rewriting is unending,” they warn. “Careful writers can tinker forever, so that anyone who vows to submit only a perfect manuscript is doomed to despair.” Before you hit the despair wall, consider the Cahns’ 10 tips and get polishing. 1. Use concrete subjects and verbs. 2. Avoid too many adverbs and adjectives. 3. Avoid jargon and bombast. 4. Avoid redundancy. 5. Use transitions to…

After his home was battered by Hurricanes Irene and Sandy, Scott Kaplan of New York took The Writer on a much needed getaway to the Turks and Caicos Islands. Kaplan writes screenplays and short stories when off-the-clock as president of a fitness center. Writer Joni M. Fisher’s trip to Key West, Fla., naturally included a visit to Ernest Hemingway’s house, where she paused to read the latest issue. “While the spring break crowds began their morning pub crawl, we took in a tour,” she said. WHERE DO YOU READ THE WRITER? Send a photo of yourself and a short description of the location to tweditorial@madavor.com.…

1 LOVE MAGNETIC POETRY When grocery lists and appointments crowd the refrigerator door, newlyweds can leave each other sweet reminders of their affection with this love-themed Magnetic Poetry set. Perfect for the budding Shakespeares and Brownings. Starts at $20. magneticpoetry.com. 2 “HAPPILY EVER AFTER” PRINT Every couple deserves a fairytale ending. Silhouettes created by Etsy designer DexMex are customized with the couple’s names and wedding date. Capture your twosome as the hero and heroine of their love story. Starts at $44. etsy.com. 3 SCRABBLE This beloved word game spells R-O-M-A-N-C-E. Writing couples will bond over a friendly match of words and wits. Starts at $15. hasbro.com. 4 SPELL-IT-OUT THROW PILLOWS Modern pillows by Zinc Door bring a chic, typographic flair to the honeymoon suite. Pick up a set of the…

Enroll in one of John McNally’s creative writing classes and he may treat you to a viewing of Abbott and Costello’s iconic “Who’s on First” skit, linking it with the first half of Denis Johnson’s story “Emergency” to examine the use of dialogue, exchange and repetition. Alternatively, you might find yourself watching old Road Runner cartoons. “We look at Wile E. Coyote as a complex character,” McNally told me over the phone in late February. “He’s contradictory, both likeable and unlikeable. He represents us trying to get something that we can’t while being taunted.” McNally, an English professor at Wake Forest University and the author of seven books (fiction and nonfiction), believes in the unwavering pursuit of a goal with a diligence tempered by wit. In his new book Vivid…

It’s the yin and yang of fiction publishing: author and editor. Give and take. Back and forth. But what happens when you add technology to that equation? Do contemporary electronic tools tilt the editor’s role in a new direction? Well, not really, if you ask David Highfill, veteran book editor and now vice president and executive editor at William Morrow. Despite the shift in modern life, the essence of the editor’s role hasn’t changed, Highfill says. “In many ways, the editor’s challenge is to ask the questions that don’t shift with fad or fashion: What are the author’s true strengths, and knowing that, how can he or she make the novel better?” he says. “I don’t think the job has devolved much, though some might think it has. Every editor…

IN 1975, WHEN VADDEY RATNER WAS 5 YEARS old, the Khmer Rouge took over in Cambodia. This was the communist regime that killed between one and two million Cambodians in ongoing purges. For the next four years, Ratner lived through extreme hardship and terror. Her debut novel In the Shadow of the Banyan is told from the point of view of Raami, a child facing the absolute tyranny of revolutionary fervor. First comes a massive evacuation of the city of Phnom Penh, its inhabitants relocated to the countryside to emphasize the primacy of the worker class over privilege and culture. Relocation soon becomes a means of breaking down bonds to place and establishing only one acceptable bond: absolute commitment to the revolutionary cause, the so-called “Organization.” As in Nineteen Eighty-Four,…

AS A FREELANCE JOURNALIST who writes for “recognizable” newsstand magazines and newspapers, I am added to promotional campaign mailing lists and press release blasts by authors. In the half a dozen or so years since I’ve been receiving notifications, requests and, frankly, pleading emails from authors to plug their books, I’ve found a few mistakes occur repeatedly. Are you making any of these? 1 MORE INFO, PLEASE. I was interviewing writers for an article I’m writing for an online writing magazine. An author who has a memoir coming out later this year emailed me to ask if there was any way I could help her out. “Sure,” I emailed back. If not a straight-up review, there’s always the possibility of Q&As or features I may already be writing on the…

Workshops and sea breezes define the experience at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. And maybe a pirate or two. The 41st-annual conference packs a six-day schedule with opportunities for writers to polish their craft and mingle with industry professionals. Limited to 200 attendees, SBWC covers a broad swath of genres, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, screenwriting, children’s and young adult. Attendees have their pick of more than 20 workshops each day with topics ranging from marketing and editing to narrative techniques and humor writing. “Craft and community are the focus of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference,” says conference director Nicole Starczak. “We spend six days reading, critiquing and inspiring each other’s work – and forging genuine personal and professional connections – so that we leave at week’s end with better pages…