Adam Gopnik on prison silence

My tremendous respect for Adam Gopnik, a New Yorker staff writer, is well known by readers of this blog.  Gopnik seems preternaturally equipped to take on any topic and make it both new and compelling.  He astonishes me with his breadth and depth—writing gloriously, absolutely, but never sacrificing idea to style.

This week Gopnik has a New Yorker essay entitled "The Caging of America:  Why do we lock up so many people?"  He's talking about process, procedure, and principles here.  He is raising the twin issues of common sense and compassion.  He is suggesting, among other things, that "the scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life."  He is reporting that, for example, more than four hundred teens are serving life sentences in Texas, and that "more than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives."  He continues: "Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850."

We have to think harder, after reading this story.  We have to investigate our personal prison politics.  We have to read again, and imagine: 

That's why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling.  Time stops.  A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded.

Read more...

the glory we give to ourselves

The downpour here has lifted. There's a buzz of gold coming in from the north.  I've been writing, happy, all morning.  Give me two hours of uninterrupted time—three if you want to slide me right on up the heavenly stairs.  Give me time, and my mood is glory.

We talk too much, out here, about the business of being published.  About the size of contracts, the size of tours, the ways in which houses show their faith.  It's easy to get caught up in the details, too easy to feel slighted or less than.  Hey, I've been there.  I know.

But if we let all that get to us we let the wrong forces win.  We forget the radiance that comes from the writing itself.  From putting the words down, one after the other.  From watching as a story reveals itself.  One feels the mind spiraling out, Milky Way style.  One feels the fresh spray of paint.

That's being alive.  That's the good that we give to ourselves. 

Read more...

The Fault in Our Stars: the goodness of John Green

A few years ago a friend told me about the long drive she'd made with her teenaged daughter to see John Green.  She described the lines that had wrapped the streets near the bookstore, the legions of teens and how they screamed for this rock-star writer.  I hadn't read Green yet, but shortly after that I did.  I understood.

Last night and early this morning I read The Fault in Our Stars, Green's new novel about teens living with cancer. Not long ago I interviewed a girl in recovery who was destined to make it—she told me her plans, she was certain—and didn't.  You can't forget a girl like that.  Nor will you forget Green's teens. 

It is true, perhaps, that Green's characters have a tendency to speak and think alike—that they are all, even the minor characters, equally witty and in the same gentle ways witty—but I'm not sure that matters here.  What matters is that John Green creates characters we care about, and that he allows them to think deeply, and that he sets them on life's course, which is to say that he can't protect them, he can't save them, and sometimes they can't save themselves.  What he can do is give them what we all need, which is to say love.  John Green writes from a place of goodness.  His stories are soul-centric.  They move us because they are not afraid of kindness, gentleness, tender affections.  They don't bother to wrap themselves inside the hard casings of excessive irony or gore, the aren't-I-outlandish, the please-look-at-me.  They may take some unusual plot turns, but they're not trying to pretend.  They're trying to love.  And they are succeeding.

There are so many lines in this book that are worth quoting.  I'm going to quote the simplest one.  "She is funny without ever being mean."

Yes.  And why not?  And why not more goodness like the kind we encounter in John Green?

Read more...

no one like us. the Penn campus, yesterday.

Over the course of ten minutes yesterday, 130 photographs were taken of the Penn campus by a classroom of students and their teacher.  That's 130 brand new photos—pictures that will never be taken again—not precisely, not ever.  The clouds won't whip that wide again, that pedestrian won't ignore that sign so unknowingly again, that man standing in the corner watching himself be watched by a camera has already disappeared.

And that's the point, when we're writing memoir—or at least that's part of the point. No picture like this one.  No day like yesterday. No one like us.

How to write it all down, then, and how to make it matter?

Read more...

street artist: approaching the blank page

I found him in Berlin.  I watched him work—fearless before every single blank page.  A quick idea, a suggestion—a tightrope walker, say—and the color was rolled and sliced, the painting set to dry.  It was that easy.

Today the fog lifts slowly.  I'll grab the train, walk 30th to 40th, meet with a student, then set off for my class. Three new young writers will be joining us this week.  We'll talk diaries, Joan Didion, Chad the Minx, Dawn Powell, Judith Malina, Joyce Carol Oates.  We'll wade through definitions.  We'll preface Geoffrey Wolff. 

And then we'll take our cameras, and we'll walk.

Read more...

Unglue.it: Changing the future of E-books and Libraries?

My brother, Jeff, the famous juggler, ran with an extraordinary crowd.  The top performers at our Radnor High.  The electrical engineers and physicists of Princeton and then Stanford.  I never really knew what any of his friends were talking about, but I liked hanging out with them, feeling smarter than I was or ever will be, and if I sometimes typed a paper for one or the other or (amazingly) caught one of their Frisbee throws, they didn't mind too much if I later  joined them for bike rides in Palo Alto, walks through redwood forests, evenings on the glorious Princeton campus.

Eric Hellman was in the mix—a smart guy with a laconic sense of humor who went on to do bold things as a physicist before he fell in love with the idea of being a book entrepreneur.  Recently our paths crossed again as I became intrigued by Eric's newest business, something called Unglue.it—a new model for digitizing and sharing books that might, in the estimation of some, redefine the future of libraries...and of authors.

Today my feature story on Unglue.it runs in Publishing Perspectives.  I encourage authors who own the rights to books that have not yet been digitized to take a look.  There's opportunity here. 

Here's how my story begins.  Please consider reading the whole.

People, Eric Hellman is fond of saying, have a funny relationship to books. They’ll cram them onto shelves, stuff them several layers deep. They’ll talk about their love for them, defend them, take them to bed. They’ll buy several copies of their personal favorites and parcel them off to friends. Maybe books aren’t people and people aren’t books. Still: The line is thin.

My other stories for Publishing Perspectives can be found here:



The Value Rubric:  Do Book Bloggers Really Matter?

The Attraction-Repulsion of International Literature: My conversation with Alane Salierno Mason

Transforming Children's Book Coverage at the New York Times: My conversation with Pamela Paul

Success is when the world returns your faith:  My conversation with editor Lauren Wein

Between Shades of Gray:  The Making of an International Bestseller 
 

Read more...

a few cautions, now, about the wily "I"

The thoroughgoing first person is a demanding mode.  It asks for the literary equivalent of perfect pitch.  Even good writers occasionally lose control of their tone and let a self-congratulatory quality slip in.  Eager to explain that their heart is in the right place, they baldly state that they care deeply about matters with which they appear to be only marginally acquainted.  Pretending to confess to their bad behavior, they revel in their colorfulness.

                       

Tracy Kidder

Read more...

Gabrielle Giffords: Brave. Beautiful. Honest.

Read more...

New York Diaries: 1609-2009, ed. Teresa Carpenter/Reflections

I should be writing up my study guide for The Duke of Deception, the Geoffrey Wolff memoir my Penn students are reading.  And I will.  I should be going past paragraph three of the annual report I started writing at 4 AM this morning.  And I'll get there, too.

But right now, right before I leave for church, I want to share these few words from New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009, edited by Teresa Carpenter, a book Dwight Garner heralded a few days ago in The New York Times.  I went off to buy Diaries just hours after reading the review, picking up American Gods and The Fault in Our Stars in the process.  I started reading it before I got home.  We're working on journals in class, among other things.  I felt the book could be significant.  It is.

Garner describes the book as "the most convivial and unorthodox history of New York City one is likely to come across."  Garner continues, "This book's editor, Teresa Carpenter, a longtime Village Voice writer, has had the ingenious idea to comb through hundreds of diaries, written by the famous and the unknown in New York, and to liberate these chronicles of their crunchiest and most humane bits."

The book is thick but doesn't feel that way. Voices appear again and again—enchanting refrains.  Dawn Powell, Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt, Simone de Beauvoir.  Andy Warhol.  Small bits.  Big bits.  Love reached for.  Love cast off.  The dying of a cat.  9/11.

What makes a good journal entry?  It's a question we'll be asking and answering on Tuesday, after we discuss Joan Didion's "On Keeping a Notebook."

What made me love many of these passages in Diaries, and skip over others?

It's this:  I want to believe and trust that someone took the time to make a sentence new and fresh, which is to say:  I lean toward those who approach this life with their senses wide open.

Here's Dawn Powell in a room in 1942.  It is September 28:

Old battered furniture looks very startled and terrible here but I will not give in to this place and pleasure it with that white decoration sort of thing—the bare tasteful simplicity of the places meant for the bare, tastefully bleak personalities.

If you can see a room this way, you are one step closer toward becoming a writer.

And if you can trust language to move like Chad the Minx trusts language, shortly after the twin towers fell, well, then: There's room for you here.

this evening (downtown): still bright, still barely cloudy, still moving, still whispering my name with a look.

Read more...

Waiting for "Superman": heartbreaking. important.

We talk about going out to see a movie, but it's cold and late and we don't.  We watch documentaries late at night instead, and last night we watched this one.

I could not sleep the rest of the night.  I was—in a word—heartbroken.  So many kids with dreams.  So many forces against them. 

Please watch this movie, if you haven't.

Please reach out to a kid.

Be a bridge.

Help.

Count your own blessings.

Read more...

a brief appreciation of William Gass: Prague, years ago

Years ago, as I have sometimes written, I set off to Prague with my family for a writer's workshop.  It was my second experience among writers; my first had taken place the year before in Spoleto.  This is how it was, then—me sneaking my literary education into a family vacation.

Jayne Anne Phillips led my workshop, and when Jayne Anne announced the names of two writers selected for an individual consultation with William Gass, I found myself among them. 

I was working on a novel that took place in El Salvador.  I had brought twenty pages with me.  This was duly submitted to Mr. Gass in advance of my consultation, and as I climbed the many stairs to our meeting room, my heart was (as they say) in my throat.  I did not know the language of literature then.  I hardly knew what I was doing.  The stairs were narrow.  The room, in memory, was empty but for him—such a head of white hair—and a spill of yellow sun.  I sat across from him—I must have sat, though I can't recall a second chair—and waited for word.

I waited.  And I waited for word.

It seemed that an hour passed before Mr. Gass spoke.  When he did, he said (and about this I'm certain):  "There is a typo on the top of page 13."

I nodded, duly.  Waited for more.

"Otherwise," he finally said, "this is very good."

And that was it.  That was the consultation.  That was all I had and everything I had as I continued to work on that book.

Later that night, Mr. Gass would read at a bar in the center of Prague—a long passage about a candy shop.  My son, seven or so at the time, was sitting on my lap in well-behaved silence.  When the story stopped, and before the applause could begin, my son announced to the jam-packed room:  "That was waaaaaaaaaay too long."  Mr. Gass looked our way through the dark and slightly smiled.  My son, the young critic.

My Salvador novel was never published, by the way.  After 15 years of work I stripped away the fiction and wrote the Salvador memoir that became Still Love in Strange Places (W.W. Norton).  Sometimes very good is simply not good enough.

I write all of this today in honor of Mr. Gass, whose new book, Life Sentences, about language and style, is so intelligently reviewed by Adam Kirsch in the New York Times Book Review.  Mr. Gass cares about sentences, and so, frankly, do I, as I indicate in my own Chicago Tribune Review today of American Dervish.

Call it a bad habit, this caring about sentences. But it's not one easily shrugged away.

Read more...

This is Seville, the setting of Small Damages

This is Seville.  This is the city that inspired Small Damages, the book that I wrote and wrote and wrote until it was right.  The book that Tamra Tuller of Philomel will bring out this July.  Watching this film is like being in that gorgeous, inspirational city all over again.  So many of my scenes happen in places made gloriously visible here.

Thank you, Victoria, for spreading word of these breathtaking five minutes.  We had many fine meals there together.

Read more...

My Chicago Tribune Review of American Dervish

Many are talking about American Dervish, the Ayad Akhtar novel that has already sold in close to two dozen countries and is, I suggest in my review for the Chicago Tribune, set to gain the popular momentum of The Help. 

You can find my thoughts here. 

Thanks to Elizabeth Taylor for trusting me with the book.

Read more...

when, exactly, did you become an adult?

Adulthood.  It sneaks up on you and then, in a flash, it not only is, but it persists.  There is no going back. 

Or is there?

Can books turn back the tides of time?

This morning I received a note regarding a post entitled:  11 Books to Celebrate on Coming-of-Age Day.  The classics are here, along with a few modern titles.  Since I've read and loved many of these books, I share the list with you.

What would you add to the list, if you could? 

Read more...

how I write, and a small scene from Berlin

At work on a new novel set in Berlin for Tamra Tuller of Philomel, I stop (breath held) to read the first 75 pages through. I return to photographs. I skinny things down, reverse the order of scenes, change the sound of a voice, then (breathing again) write forward.

It is the way it goes.  The going back to move ahead.  The shaving away to make room.  All the way through the writing a novel I am held in suspense.  Can it be?  Will it?

I think it can.  I hope it will.  But it is one page at a time, and, often, it is disappearing pages. I hold onto scenes like this:

The Turks have been out since dawn, the Gastarbeiters.  The caravans are busy, the little corner shops, the wood smoke piles, the minced lamb man and the dill weed man and the lady who sells the sesame kuver.   The air is a mix-up of factory bells and machine scree, the wide wallop of Arabelle’s bike wheels across the cobblestone streets, the songs of the Chaotens and the wind in the plane trees.  The cars are pissed, the buses are crowded, the U-bahn chinks on its rails.  When we finally hit the platz, Arabelle takes her big booted feet off the pedals and conks her legs out straight, letting her coat catch the wind.  She hee-haws like a donkey.

“Safe again!” she says.

Read more...

Can Book Bloggers Change a Life? A Definitive Answer in Publishing Perspectives

Anyone who follows this blog knows just how important book bloggers have been to me.  As first readers, as confidantes, as bright and rustling wings. 

I was recently given the chance to tell that story to Publishing Perspectives, an on-line magazine spearheaded by Ed Nawotka and sponsored by the Frankfurt Book Fair that covers the book industry here and around the globe.  I had thought, when I began to write, that I might list all the bloggers who have been so instrumental in my career.  It quickly became clear that that would be an impossibility—that I would consume all allotted characters on blogger URLs before I had a chance to fully explain.  You all know who you are, of course.  Many of you appear permanently on this page.  I hope you know how much you matter. 

(Please also see Ed's call for responses to the book blogger question here.  Perhaps you'll lend your voice to the conversation.)

Today I would specifically like to thank a certain Danielle of There's a Book, who has been a pillar in my writing life—a buoyant, thoughtful, endearing advocate who has cared deeply about these stories I tell and has—in her own time, just because she is who she is—found ways to spread the word.   I didn't know this until last night, but Danielle also named You Are My Only one of her top reads of last year, one of the books she most recommended to people in 2011, the most beautifully written book she read in 2011, and the book that had the greatest impact on her. 

Danielle also named Small Damages, due out in July from Philomel, as the young adult book she is most anticipating in 2012.

See all of Danielle's thoughtful recommendations here. 

I'm not sure that any writer could hope for more than that.  I am sure, however, that anyone who questions the value of book bloggers has not had the privilege of meeting Danielle.

Great thanks again to all of you who have made such a difference in my life. 

My other stories for Publishing Perspectives can be found here:

The Attraction-Repulsion of International Literature: My conversation with Alane Salierno Mason

Transforming Children's Book Coverage at the New York Times: My conversation with Pamela Paul

Success is when the world returns your faith:  My conversation with editor Lauren Wein

Between Shades of Gray:  The Making of an International Bestseller 

Read more...

Everything in This Country Must/Colum McCann

Ivy Goodman—writer, teacher, and quite loved friend—sent me a book over the holidays.

She does things like that. 

Every book that Ivy has ever sent has been considered, right.  Most of the time these are books that I hadn't known I needed.  Often, they make the trip to my classroom at Penn.  This newest one, The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story edited and introduced by Anne Enright, is no exception.

Last night—too tired to write, too early for bed—I turned to Ivy's gift and thumbed through toward the end, where Colum McCann, a writerly hero of mine, has a very short piece titled "Everything in This Country Must."  The first lines sound like nothing he has ever written, and for the sound of this story alone, it must be read.

A summer flood came and our draft horse got caught in the river. The river smashed against stones and the sound of it to me was like the turning of locks. It was silage time and the water smelled of grass. The draft horse, Father's favourite, had stepped in the river for a sniff maybe and she was caught, couldn't move, her foreleg trapped between rocks.  Father found her and called Katie! above the wailing of the rain. I was in the barn waiting for drips on my tongue from the ceiling hole.  

But there's far more than mere style in this brief McCann tale.  There's brilliance.  There's devastation.  It's the sort of story that feeds a hungry mind for a week.  I keep returning to it. 

Read more...

The business of teaching memoir, excerpt from a work in progress

As the semester begins, I look back on a work-in-progress:

This is no casual enterprise—this business of teaching memoir.  We are speaking, after all, about voice.  We are speaking about how we shape what we have lived, what we have seen.  About how we honor what we love and defend what we believe in.  Makers of memoir dwell with ideas and language, with themselves.  They counter complexity with clarity.  They locate a story inside the contradictions of their lives—the false starts and the presumed victories, the epiphanies that rub themselves raw nearly as soon as they are stated. 

Read more...

A kind citation by Main Line Today

It is possible that magazines don't know how happy they make authors when they pay attention to the books that authors write.

For the record, this citation by Main Line Today and Emily Riley made me exquisitely happy, and I have a certain Kim (she's gorgeous, perhaps you'll someday meet her) to thank for letting me know.

From Main Line Today, then, which chose You Are My Only as a staff favorite:

With a story seemingly ripped from the headlines, the award-winning author and Main Line Today contributor spares readers the sensationalism and, instead, seamlessly weaves the dual narratives into a plot that races toward a stunning finish.  

Read the whole thing here.

Read more...

Yes Yes Y'All and other books on my son's syllabus

My son's major is advertising.  His special interest is the world: How does an ad that plays well in Mexico, for example, play in France?  How must it be adapted?  How do cultural expectations and local myths influence how people both look for and receive messages?

It's a line of inquiry that he has come to on his own, a course of study magnificently facilitated by a university that offers courses with titles that could be lines torn from poetry.

Case in point:  This semester, my son will be studying the history of hip-hop.  I didn't quite know what that meant until I received the book list from the book store (and that only because the books were bought with my credit card).

Don't you just love a course that asks its students to buy titles like these?

Black Bourgeoisie
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism
Hard Core
Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh
Reinventing Africa
Sound Clash
Yes Yes Y'All

Read more...

Don't Breathe a Word: the words have power video

Holly Cupala should be a movie star.  Click on the frame above; you'll see what I mean.

But I digress.

Because Holly Cupala also has a brand new book out—a second young adult novel called Don't Breathe a Word that has lit up the blog-o-sphere with high praise from enthused Holly fans.  I can't wait to read this book about life on the Seattle streets myself.  Holly puts her gorgeous heart into every sentence she writes.

In the meantime, I'm delighted to join Justina Chen, Melissa Walker, Stephanie Kuehnert, Sarah Stevenson, Denise Jaden, Lish McBride, Lisa Schroeder, Cynthia Jaynes, Tara Kelly, Joelle Anthony, Stasia Ward Kehoe, Janet S. Fox, Tina Ferraro, and Janet Lee Carey in this video celebration of a theme that runs throughout Holly's book and is so important to us all:  words have power.

Happy book launch, Miss Cupala! And thank you for including me among your friends of considered and special young adult authors.

Read more...

the goodbye road (the twenty-second view from the car)

How we drive, how it goes, as we return our son to his final semester of college. 

Read more...

The Proust Smackdown (Clooney, Damon, Craig, Vanity Fair)

Just a questionnaire, a magazine spread (Vanity Fair, February 2012).  But don't these responses tell you everything?

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Clooney: Laughter
Damon:  My children, happy and within an arm's length
Craig: Awake at dawn with nothing to do.

What is the quality you most like in a man?

Clooney: Loyalty
Damon: Honesty
Craig: A good mustache

What is the quality you most like in a woman?

Clooney: Kindness
Damon: Honesty
Craig: A good mustache

How would you like to die?

Clooney: With dignity
Damon: Peacefully, surrounded by people I love and who love me
Craig: Quickly

Read more...

This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories/Johanna Skibsrud: Reflections

It had entered the realm of the absurd:  I had been carrying Johanna Skibsrud's collection of nine short stories with me everywhere I went. This Will Be Difficult to Explain was so slender, after all, and had arrived unbidden from W.W. Norton.  I didn't know this author, but I was intrigued.  Consider the comparators: Alice Munro and Marilynne Robinson.  Nicole Krauss, even.

The book traveled on the train, to client offices, to Body Combat, to ballroom dance, to the library, and in the passenger seat of the car, just for the apparent heck of it.  Meanwhile, weeks of inane insanity went by—a battle cry of must-do-right-now's.  I had carved out this very afternoon to work on my own Berlin book.  Time, at last, I thought, to advance my novel forward.  And then I decided:  It's now or never for Difficult.  I curled up beneath my patchwork quilt and read.

How very odd, I thought, as I sunk in with Skibsrud.  How delightfully odd.  Not Munro, for the stories aren't nearly that domestic, that relational.  And not Robinson nor Krauss, for the language here is not their kind of lush (I am thinking of early Robinson as I write, Housekeeping Robinson, and I am thinking of all of Krauss). These are stories advanced by oppositions—by things presumed, recanted, tested, withdrawn.  These are characters who want to know things, but, frankly, they often don't.  They want to declare, but is such declaration wise, or honest?  They want to describe, or even understand, but they are missing the words, the signals.

What might have been a series of straight-on tales—about a divorced father seeing his thirteen-year-old daughter for the first time in eight months, about a young maid catering to a strange man in France, about a blind woman speaking French to her English-languaged helpmate, about one ancient Clarence and the young journalist who sets out to interview him—becomes instead a play (and there is play) of juxtapositions.

The stories grew on me, the point of view.  The aperçus I didn't see coming.  The Timothy Schaffert (The Coffins of Little Hope) oddness of, say the title story or "Clarence."  The eloquent stumble toward truth, a la Robin Black (If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This) in a story such as "Signac's Boats." The stories grew on me, and not just a little.  I liked this Johanna Skibsrud.

I'm going to close with the final paragraph of a story I loved.  Tell me what you think.  I'm behind again on my Berlin book.  But I'm glad I took the detour.

From "The Limit":

He knows that on the East Coast and on the West, there is the imposition, always, of objects on other objects.  The sky is interrupted by the hills, the hills by the trees, the trees by more hills, and houses, and so on.  But out here, in the middle, it's possible to find a section of the road to look out at and not see anything for miles.  It is possible just to see and see until it gets hazy and you can't see anymore—and even at that point, at the point where you stop being able to see any longer, it's not because what's out there is covered up by anything, it's just—that's the limit.

Read more...