when the government can't work, smart book people do: Maiden Lane Press and Shorefast Editions

On a day in which the U.S. Government (should I capitalize that?) can't seem to find a way to move forward, to lead, I am celebrating two new presses—Maiden Lane and Shorefast Editions—both created by friends of mine, both emblematic of what can happen when smart people take matters into their own hands.

Maiden Lane is the creation of Marly Rusoff, an agent who has worked with some of the most interesting writers of our time: Pat Conroy, Patricia Hampl, Arthur Phillips, Adam Langer, Meg Waite, Robert Clarke, Thrity Umrigar, Lisa Tucker, and Ron Rash, among them. I met Marly years ago, when she helped support the launch of my first book. I've stayed in touch, marveled at her eye and ear, applauded her literary moxie.

And so, when Marly told me about her brand new press—her desire to produce beautiful books that fully reflect on the author's work—I felt the pride I feel when cool people do cool things. Marly once bound books in her father's bindery. She cares about the case, the jacket, the design, and (of course) the words. And for her first foray into this publication effort she chose Moonrise by bestselling author Cassandra King. Moonrise has received much notice across the country and in the south, for the quality of its writing and story (a fresh haunting of du Maurier's Rebecca) and for the beauty of the book itself. It is doing spectacularly well—distributed widely, reviewed by the major trade publications, celebrated by many honors, and selling like hotcakes. A new press is born.

Colleen Mondor is another woman—writer, advocate, reviewer, blogger—for whom I hold much respect. Her beat is Alaska. Her memoir, The Map of My Dead Pilots, is featured in Handling the Truth and continues to sell well long after its publication.

But Colleen is always thinking beyond herself, and, together with Katrina Pearson, a bookseller and publicist in Alaska, she has created Shorefast Editions to help restore to print books that Colleen and Katrina feel are critical to the history of the land they love.

Their first effort in this regard is a reproduction (gorgeous!) of The Flying North, a book written by Jean Potter and originally published in 1945. Potter was a researcher who traveled across that snowy region interviewing the pilots who first flew north of the Arctic Circle, first landed on Mt. McKinley, and pioneered equipment that facilitated takeoffs and landings on sandbars, glaciers, and mudflats. Shorefast isn't just reproducing these historic titles in beautiful packages. It is making sure that bookstores have copies, that magazines are telling the story, that the book itself is being featured prominently at book festivals. They are, in other words, going all the way to make sure that books they believe in find their public.

We can have faith in people when our institutions fail us. We can keep on believing in books, because cool people keep inventing ways to keep this treasured industry alive.

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celebrating Patricia Hampl and other fine memoirists in HANDLING THE TRUTH

In returning the proof pages of Handling the Truth to Gotham yesterday, I relinquished all further control over the story.  No more changes.  No allowable regrets.  The book will soon be set in stone and released next August.

One of my greatest joys, in writing Handling the Truth, was the chance it gave me to celebrate the many memoirs—true memoirs, not autobiographies—that have inspired me throughout the years.  Natalie Kusz is there—the author of the first memoir I ever read.  C.K. Williams.  Marie Arana.  Mary Karr.  Anthony Shadid.  bell hooks.  Katrina Kenison.  Darin Strauss.  Dani Shapiro.  Rahna Reiko Rizzuto.  Buzz Bissinger.  Colleen Mondor.  Sy Montgomery.  Chris Offutt.  Elizabeth McCracken.  Lucy Grealy.  So many others. 

But no book about the making of memoir would ever be complete without a celebration of Patricia Hampl, who has done so much to shape the form.  Here, above, is a glimpsed moment.

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I dare you, I tempt you

Patricia Hampl's I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory remains, for me, the best book on the topic, even all these years later.  My students are reading the first two chapters this week.  They'll find passages like this one:

Maybe a reader's love of memoir is less an intrusive lust for confession than a hankering for the intimacy of this first-person voice, the deeply satisfying sense of being spoken to privately.  More than a story, we want a voice speaking softly, urgently, in our ear.  Which is to say, to our heart.  That voice carries its implacable command, the ancient murmur that called out to me in the middle of the country in the middle of the war—remember, remember (I dare you, I tempt you).

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You can't teach memoir without introducing Patricia Hampl

I never do teach the same thing twice, but that doesn't mean I forsake the classics in favor of novelty.  The one, single essay that I have carried forward into every memoir class is Patricia Hampl's "Memory and Imagination," found within I Could Tell You Stories.  You just don't teach memoir without it, or at least I don't.  These words, then, for today, from Hampl, as I head out into more snow (there's always snow, it seems, on teaching Tuesdays), for the University of Pennsylvania campus.

We seek a means of exchange, a language which will renew these ancient concerns and make them wholly, pulsingly ours.  Instinctively, we go to our store of private associations for our authority to speak of these weighty issues.  We find, in our details and broken, obscured images, the language of symbol.  Here memory impulsively reaches out and embraces imagination.  That is the resort to invention.  It isn't a lie, but an act of necessity, as the innate urge to locate truth always is. 

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The Perils of Bearing Witness

In a few days, I'll be teaching this online book club discussion for the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania—revisiting familiar texts and reviewing some new ones as we weigh the perils of bearing witness—to our own lives and to the lives of others.  Among the many seemingly "simple" assertions we'll consider is this one, made by Patricia Hampl in her essential text, I Could Tell You Stories: 

Memoir must be written because each of us must possess a created version of the past.

 Agree?  Disagree?

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Myself, Today

Today: Awakened at 1:35 AM, I come downstairs and do not sleep. A few lines make their way to a blank page; I do not know if the lines are good.

Morning, then, and at the gym, I find Ann, an old friend, long lost; I'd once thought forever. In the large group room Teresa, leading the Body Pump class, has chosen the music of men. She turns her barbell into a guitar and sings her Aerosmith loud; the rest of us abide her antics, need her antics, love them. We don't scream the pain we feel. Many times a week Teresa leads this class and yet on Saturday it is as if we are her only students, her passion just for us.

Mid-morning and in my in-box I find the first official review of The Heart is Not a Size. I am overcome. The reader has found within my work just precisely what I hoped a reader would. A faster plot. The smell of dust. The have-everythings who learn from those who possess little.

Noon, and while shopping for the small dinner party that I'm throwing Sunday, I find my father at the Farmer's Market, sit with him while he eats his lunch. Then there is the frenzy of deciding and shopping. Yes, the serrano ham and the lavash, the strange apples from the Lancaster trees, the fatter berries and the insanely rotund scallions, and why not those tomatoes, which cannot decide what size they wish to be.

Mid afternoon, and I sit with the work of my fantastic Penn students, who move me to tears with the way that they think; I sit with Patricia Hampl. And then time alone with the Horace Kephart segments of the Ken Burns film, "America's Best Idea" (go to episode four, plays segments five and eleven). I don't care what you want to say about my great-grandfather. He did this country good. He saved what remained of the Great Smoky Mountains from the avaricious loggers, all the while knowing that once the park was made, it would not be his homeland anymore.

Later, a conversation with Andra. An email exchange with my friend Buzz. A note from Alyson Hagy, perhaps the grandest writing teacher of all.

Later, dinner.

Later, now.

Myself.

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Readerly Pursuits, and on seeing Elizabeth Strout with Elizabeth Mosier

With Dangerous Neighbors, my novel about 1876 Philadelphia, now safely in my agent's hands and Small Damages, my novel set mostly on a cortijo in southern Spain, now fully formed, I can again turn my full writerly attention to the stories that others tell. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz, had me laughing (and marveling) this past weekend. The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol is (at long last) next on my list. After that I'll be reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, just because many have and I haven't; subsequently I'll re-read Paul West's Master Class.

But what is in store for tonight is something truly special—a trip to Swarthmore College to see Elizabeth Strout, in the company of my writer/teacher friend, Elizabeth Mosier. Those of you who read my blog post on Strout's Olive Kitteridge know how deep my respect for this writer runs, particularly for this collection of linked short stories. You know how much I think this collection teaches.

A thank you, then, to Libby Mosier, for alerting me to Strout's appearance. The last time Libby and I ventured out into the world of literature together, it was dark and cold and we were sharing a meal with the spectacular Patricia Hampl, a writing heroine who lived up to every one of my expectations. I expect tonight to be just as glittered.

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The Florist's Daughter

I've written elsewhere in this blog about the magnificent Patricia Hampl, whose various memoirs have elevated the genre, and whose thinking about memory and imagination is required reading for anyone hoping to pin truth to the page. I've taught her essays and I've learned from them, and last fall I won the review lottery when the Chicago Tribune asked for my opinion on the author's latest, The Florist's Daughter. She's made a difference in my life, this writer—in practice and in theory, from a distance.

Last night, thanks to the generosity of Karl Kirchwey, Libby Mosier, and Bryn Mawr College, I had the privilege of listening to Patricia read in a hall so grand she felt, she said, as if she were on the verge of being knighted. I sat while she fielded questions with humility and grace. And then I joined a really lovely group of people for a round-tabled dinner, in which Patricia proved herself to be that rare breed: as human and dignified and smart in real life as she has always been on the page.

Here's to memory and imagination, then. Here's to ahi tuna and bundt cake and to a writer who reaches past herself in the interest of others—with interest in others, with that sort of wanting-to-know that defines our greatest.

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