Vaddey Ratner, a distinguished and compassionate new voice

To read my Publishing Perspectives interview with Vaddey Ratner, go here.

This August, readers will be introduced to Vaddey Ratner, a new and important advocate not just for story, but for compassion.  I had the opportunity to see Ratner speak at the BEA on a panel facilitated by Ron Hogan.  She struck me then as the real thing—unpretentious, honorably motivated, deeply committed to unveiling the Cambodia of her childhood.  There was terror, then.  There was great loss.  There was abominable sacrifice.  But there was also beauty, and Ratner, who came to the United States in 1981 as a child refugee speaking no English, has spent years parsing together a story that, if closely aligned with her past, does pretend to mirror it precisely.  Fiction, not memoir, is the right choice here.

When Ratner spoke of Michael Ondaatje as one source of literary inspiration, when she talked about leaving room to understand, when she asserted her decision to learn writing primarily through reading (as opposed to allowing others to shape her voice), I knew I would have to read In the Shadow of the Banyan.  I am doing that now.  I am seventy pages in.  I know, already, that Ratner is the writer she worked so hard to be.

I will have more to say when my reading is done.  This morning I quote from an early page.  The colors of a Cambodian garden, pre-Khmer Rouge, through the eyes of a seven-year-old child:

A tiny pale pink butterfly, with wings as delicate as bougainvillea petals, flew up from the gardens below and landed on the railing near my face.  I stilled myself.  It heaved as if exhausted from its long flight, its wings opening and closing, like a pair of fans waving away the morning heat.  Mama?  In one of her guises?  No, it was what it appeared to be—a baby butterfly.  So delicate it seemed to have just emerged from a chrysalis.

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celebrating Alyson Hagy, a writer we can all root for

For the past many weeks, Alyson Hagy has been touring the country with her fine third novel Boleto, a book that has been celebrated in media ranging from The New Yorker and the Washington Post to the Chicago Tribune and Star Tribune.  Ron Hogan, writing for USA Character Approved, concluded his thoughts about the book with the words, "If there's a better novel published this year, it's going to have to be pretty spectacular." And of course I've been singing about Boleto ever since I sat down at Christmas to read the ARC. 

This weekend, Boleto is the lead novel reviewed in The New York Times Sunday Book Review—an achievement for Alyson that makes me, her friend, incredibly proud.  Bruce Machart was given the responsibility.  He writes, among other things, "Hagy often dazzles with her descriptions of the Wyoming landscape and wildlife. Whether it’s the corral of the Testerman ranch, the rugged passes of the Black Bell Ranch or the depressed outskirts of Anaheim, the settings glimmer with well-chosen metaphors."  He also uses the words entertaining and entrancing to describe her opening pages.

Yes, in fact, that's true.  I've known Alyson for a long time now.  I've read nearly every published word she's written, and I continue to be mystified by her continuing, and continually strengthening, powers.  I'm mystified, too, by the way she finds time to report back about her life amidst her travels, teaching, adventures, her raising of a remarkable, words-bound son.  Alyson has friends all across this country.  She somehow makes time for us all.  And never once—in all that she has achieved, in all that she can do—does she so much as lean toward attitude.  Never once does she fail to ask, "And how are you?"  She's just doing her thing, living her life, finding her stories, and thank goodness the world has noticed, because heaven knows, Alyson Hagy does not trumpet herself, does not ask for that kind of attention.

Alyson Hagy is that quality of person—and writer—we can all root for.

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BEA Buzz Books: The Adult Titles. The Panelists Speak.

My final Publishing Perspectives story takes an inside look at four of the Buzz Authors of adult books—British actress and playwright Rachel Joyce (The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry), Vaddey Ratner (In the Shadow of the Banyan), Susannah Cahalan (Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness), and Antoine Wilson (Panorama City).  Facilitated by Beatrice's own Ron Hogan, the panelists reflected not just on what they write but how they hear the voices that carry their tales.

The whole story can be found here. 

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