(Soon) Headed to the AJC Decatur Book Festival

Three years ago, I was there, at the AJC Decatur Book Festival, one of the happiest book events there ever could be. I arrived alone. I stepped into the hotel lobby and I wasn't anymore. Suddenly I was in the company of Jessica Shoffel (my Jessica Shoffel, I like to say) and Doni Kay, who walked me to the Little Shop of Stories (the epicenter of this event), sat with me over tea, invited me to meet Tomie dePaolo (images of all that here), to have dinner with him later. The next day I took an early morning walk and discovered the tour de force that is Diane Capriola out and about, so we talked. I needed some shoes, so I bought a pair that remain my favorite to this day. A few hours later, I sat beside the very brilliant Stacey D'Erasmo (a writing heroine, truly) and, before a packed house, we talked about memoir and intimacy as if no one else was in sight. I found Nancy Krulik on a stage after that. A long conversation with the smart DJ MacHale was had in the ride back to the airport.

Two days I'll never forget.

Next weekend I return to Decatur, this time to sit on a Terra Elan McVoy moderated panel with writers Ami Allen-Vath and Alexandra Sirowy. The topic will be Aftermath stories in the realm of young-adult books. I'll be talking, specifically, about This Is the Story of You.

Word is that my dear former neighbor, Shirley, will be there in the audience mix. That, perhaps, one of my favorite rediscovered friends of high school, will be there with his literary daughter. I'm looking forward to you, Decatur, and I thank Chronicle Books and Lara Starr for making it possible for me to be there.

My event is here, should you happen to be in town.

Sunday September 4
2:00 PM
Teen Stage
Aftermath
Ami Allen-Vath, Alexandra Sirowy, Terra Elan McVoy
AJC Decatur Book Festival

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Trumpeting Summer Reading and Announcing Two New(ish) Book Blogs

A number of weeks ago, I was asked to take a photograph of my TBR pile. And so I did, joining many other authors in this wonderful photo diary posted today on Mom.me. I can proudly report that I've read a number of the books pictured in my stack since snapping the picture. I must also report that I recently took nearly 60 new hardcovers to my local library for donation and my house is more book stuffed than ever.

I'll never get ahead.

You probably never will either, because there are so many great books to be read. And if you're looking for even more temptations, then I recommend two book-savvy bloggers to you.

First, meet Anmiryam Budner, who kind of sort of blew me away last Saturday at Main Point Books with her deep knowledge of authors and stories. There we stood, in that lovely space, pointing to this book, that book, this one. She'd read them all. I'd read enough of them to talk at length. She gave me room to complain about the unfair review of Stacey D'Erasmo's Wonderland in the New York Times Book Review, and anyone who lets me do that is golden. That woman knows this business, and she talks about it and the books she loves here, on My Overstuffed Shelves.

Second, here is Elizabeth Law, a children's publishing giant now in the business of book editing and ushering. For her first blog post ever she wrote about ten books she loves and why. Fascinating insights, with more—on word count, editorial letters, and publishing magic—to come. She's a fresh new voice on the book blogging scene, and so we welcome her in.

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The Meaning of Maggie/Megan Jean Sovern: Reflections

Imagine this: A manuscript arrives on the desks of two exquisite editors at the same time. It is read through at once, loved at once. A tug here, a tug there, and it finds a home at Chronicle Books with Ginee Seo.

The other exquisite editor is named Tamra Tuller. Soon she will leave one coast to go to another to work at this same fine place called Chronicle. This book—this The Meaning of Maggie by Megan Jean Sovern—is now doubly loved in the same house by two editors who read it early on.

Since I'm lucky enough to know both Ginee and Tamra, I made it a point, not long ago, to snag a copy of this middle-grade novel for myself. What an absolute start-to-finish delight it is. This Maggie is going places—just ask her. She's the future president of the United States. She wins science fairs. She loves education so much that she calls those headed off to summer school the lucky ones and when her mother wants to take Maggie out of school for a special day, Maggie doesn't smile at the thought. She worries about what new knowledge she might miss.

What isn't lucky, though, and what can't easily be explained, is that Maggie's dad isn't well. His legs keep falling asleep. He has had to leave his job. He's supposed to be taking care of things at home while Maggie's mother works the laundry room at the local hotel. But sometimes Maggie's older sisters have to take care of Dad instead. And sometimes there are secrets that everyone refuses to tell. And sometimes things seem to falling apart, even though this eleven-year-old is pretty sure that if you're smart enough you can save the world.

Megan Jean Sovern's Maggie is indefatigable, footnote crazy, and memoir worthy, and this is her story of her quest to find out the name of her dad's condition and to find a way to fix it. It's a charming tale; it's a heartbreaking tale. It's the story of a mom, a dad, and three sisters who—nits and scrambles and sly comebacks aside—want desperately to take care of one another.  

The Meaning of Maggie is a book bound for glory. It was one of three books (including Stacey D'Erasmo's brilliant Wonderland and Beth Hoffman's gracious and moving Looking for Me) that I read throughout the recent storm. Intelligent, beautifully made books are often the best company we have. It's a fact from which I won't be dissuaded.

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Wonderland/Stacey D'Erasmo: Reflections

Stacey D'Erasmo: She did me in. She wrote A Seahorse Year, and I loved it. She wrote a new novel called Wonderland that I've been aching to read ever since Stacey and I talked—privately and then publicly—in Decatur, GA. I was already a huge fan, as readers of this blog know. I became a forever fan in Decatur. There are just some people who know more, see deeper, write better. Stacey, who teaches at Columbia, is one of them, and she brings no arrogance to the aura of her appreciable talent.

But Wonderland—oh, what a book this is, a book richly steeped in the twin geographies of movable time and malleable possibility. It's the story of a rock star of sorts—of a singer named Anna who had once made it quasi big, whose second album bombed, whose chance at doing it all again is now or never. She chooses now. She chooses life on the road, strangers in her bed, the elusive high of a song sung right, an audience discovered. She is the idiosyncratically trained daughter of a sculptor of some renown, and she has been married and she has loved and she has lost, and she's only getting older; she will be forty-five when we see her last. She dyes her red hair now. She loses lines. She sleeps with the wrong guys, or maybe they are the right guys—it can be hard for her to tell. She remembers what she was, others remember who she became, but also, always (beautifully, tragically), she imagines what and who she might have been had she made different choices. When we meet her in Wonderland, she is running out of choices.

I read this book in exile from a storm that had darkened my corner of the world. I read it rivered through with that joy I feel when I've encountered art—real and actual. D'Erasmo doesn't just write gorgeous sentence after gorgeous sentence. She takes an enormous number of structural risks—forges a novel out of wildly imagined fragments without ever losing an ounce of coherency (do you know how hard that is?). Readers of this book get not just a vivid character, Anna, but a full-fledged story and a brilliant meditation on second chances, second-tier careers, secondary love affairs, and fame (borrowed, tenuous, earned?):

And why was I famous, anyway? Fact: I wasn't famous to everyone. I was famous only among certain people. The smart people, the people who pride themselves on being smart. Part of it—let's be honest—was the glamour of my pedigree, and the history to which that pedigree alluded. Everyone knew who my father was. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that everyone who loved my music also loved who my father was. You can't separate the dancer from the dance, and anyway, I never tried. 

The other day, in class, I showed two portraits to my students, asked them to write a single sentence about each that told me what they saw. Capturing the physicality of another is hard stuff; we'd already determined that. Going beyond the obvious, tripping away from cliches, digging in. We want language to be equally alerting and clear. Wonderland is so alerting, so original, so improbable, so spring-water clear. I envy the readers who look forward to reading the novel for the first time. I envy the writers who will study it to shake loose new truths about structure, sentence, form.

And my students? I'm excerpting this, below, for them. Look at how physicality gets done. Look at how much room there still is, if we are patient enough, to render another fully see-able.

Ezra, chatting, laughs his famously peculiar laugh, a kind of Aussie Woody Woodpecker sound. I can't see the stroke on him, the overdose. He looks to me so unmarked, or, more accurately, he is already so marked that I doubt I could tell the recent marks from the older ones. He is not a handsome man, never has been. His face, in the half-light, has an ursine, lumpy quality. What can be seen of his hairline plunges, Ben Franklin style, nearly to his ears; his fringe of hair is wispy, of indeterminate color, and coarse. His face is pitted with acne scars. His eyes are small, tend toward the red. His magic emanates in part from that, from his unregenerate ugliness. He looks like a creature of the night who can hold his own with creatures of the night.

Stacey D'Erasmo, congratulations. This image, taken in Berlin of a young metal-working artist, is for you.

Wonderland will be released from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on May 6. I received this galley at the ALA Midwinter event. Begged for it, basically.

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The Apartment/Greg Baxter: Reflections and Instructions for Writers

When both Stacey D'Erasmo and Adam Langer review a debut novel in The New York Times and urge a reader toward the work, I pay attention. Stacey is one of the smartest critical minds around; I know this for a fact. Moreover, I learned about the art of book reviewing years ago while apprenticing (so to speak) under Adam at Book Magazine. More accurately, I watched him write great reviews while I wrote dozens upon dozens of the just so-so variety.

In any case, I bought Greg Baxter's debut novel The Apartment because it had tugged at both Stacey and Adam. Yesterday afternoon and evening, I read it.

It's the most electrifying bit of sustained stillness and near violence that I have held in my hands.

What happens? An ex-military man goes apartment hunting with a young woman in a blurry, probably European town during a snowy day. The details of the day are highly absorbed and precisely communicated. Here is the snow, here is the cold, here is the girl, here are they, together—not boyfriend and girlfriend, not father and daughter, not anything you might presume—and here is the bus they take, the roads they walk, the things they say. Descriptions with diamond points. Sentences that weather a world:

Here, in this city, intense joy and intense sorrow are extinct. The place is too old for that kind of naivete. Everyone here responds to these extinctions by opening doors for each other, or making room at tables—they are generous and polite. I admire this—to celebrate the extinction of hope with ritual and composure. To place coats on the shoulders of women. There isn't a thought left. There isn't a sentence. There isn't a human being. 

It's intense, surely, but it feels sequential, almost straightforward, except when the unnamed narrator tumbles back into the spaces he has left behind—a dirty war, a possibly selfish existence, unnamed crimes against.... Creatures like thoughts. Thoughts like creatures:

I was spending lots of time in museums, especially art museums, and one of the things I gradually became more and more aware of was a ludicrous but entirely spooky sense, which presumably no one else shared, that human beings are unwanted disturbances, that the various works hanging nakedly on walls, for instance, are desperate to evict the living, because to have to watch us plodding around them is torture, and that day it occurred to me that the same could be said for the Aeneid, doomed for eternity to be read by students, snobs, and imbeciles.

This Greg Baxter—how does he know what he knows? About violins. About the Iraq war. About the way a street light works? About mothers who mourn the death of their daughters? The Apartment is so incredibly grounded in the tactile and the known and so equally fantastical and strange that readers must submit to it; Baxter gives us no other choice. We want to know—desperately—if this man will get his apartment. We want to know if he'll be able to exist with his memories. We want to know if he knows more than we do about what it is to live with the truth.

I was not happy, initially, that no bookstore that I visited had a copy of The Apartment. I only reluctantly downloaded it to my iPad, for I'm still a real-book girl as much as possible. But at the end of my read, I found my e-book reward—a Q and A with the author, which is, my writer friends, as valuable as the novel itself.

Among the gems from that Q and A is this:

If an author resists the temptation to type his or her characters, those characters will usually contradict themselves and become vital. If the characters act consistently, they're useless or they're props. No character should fill space, and no character should have a defined role before they appear in a book—they should not serve a purpose. Janos could have been more or less important. Manuela too. They turned out how they turned out. Importantly, I think, a character is worth putting in a novel only if they are—or could be—worthy of being the main character of another novel. No character should ever be, by nature, minor.

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four women: looking back on conversations with Dani Shapiro, Liz Rosenberg, Stacey D'Erasmo, and Debbie Levy

My journey these past many months has been extraordinary—taking me to places far and wide, introducing me to writers and readers who embody the best of the now. For all of you who have taken the time to share some time with me: thank you.

I've been especially blessed by the opportunity to spend time in conversation with leading writers and thinkers. And so today, as I look toward one final Handling the Truth event in the year of 2013 (more on that below), I want to say a special thank you to four women with whom I shared the stage and who were everything I'd hoped they'd be. And more.

Debbie Levy, author, most recently, of Imperfect Spiral, with whom I spent a sacred Saturday afternoon, in Alexandria, VA, talking about life and birds and truth in fiction. We gave our audience a few writing exercises; we engaged; we learned. And I adore Debbie Levy—an amazing talent and gift to younger readers.

Stacey D'Erasmo, author, most recently, of The Art of Intimacy, with whom I shared a stage at the Decatur Book Festival. Fiercely smart, hugely generous, Stacey is a writer I have read for a long time. I could not believe my great good fortune of just sitting and talking craft with her.

Liz Rosenberg, author, most recently, of The Laws of Gravity, who traveled all the way from her home in Binghamton to Mount Airy to spend a Saturday evening in a crowded independent bookstore to talk with me and with the audience about the book life. Liz and I have had a longstanding correspondence. How wonderful it was to spend some time together.

Dani Shapiro, author, most recently, of Still Writing, with whom I had the enormous pleasure of speaking last evening on behalf of First Person Arts. Dani and I had only met briefly once before. We'd talked once on the phone, emailed occasionally. But last night, in an intimate space, we shared a microphone and a passion for this writing life, and I felt as if I'd known her all my life. Dani traveled far to come to my city. She arrived in the company of her equally wonderful husband, the journalist and filmmaker Michael Maren, whose new film, "The Short History of Decay" (click on the link to see the trailer!), will be the featured film at several upcoming festivals. Philadelphians were blessed to have them both in the house. And so was I.

Thank you. And. That last 2013 Handling the Truth event? It's a First Person Arts Festival workshop called The Spices of Life. We're going to remember and write a kitchen scene. There are a few spaces left. Join us. 

Finally, that photograph above was taken by my friend Melissa Sarno on Saturday afternoon in the New York Public Library, following a really beautiful Bank Street morning. Jennifer M. Brown of Bank Street: You care about all the things that matter. You have a lot on your shoulders. Thank you for taking care of me.

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A Seahorse Year/Stacey D'Erasmo: Reflections

One hour before I was scheduled to meet Stacey D'Erasmo in a hotel lobby, I took a walk through the residential streets of Decatur, GA. There, near the local library, stood this magnificent magnolia tree, bent but not broken, mature but incredibly alive, shadowy and cool except for that break of sun. It was, I thought, like the novel I'd just read, the complex and complexly brilliant A Seahorse Year. 

No doubt every D'Erasmo novel is as rich as this one is—as thoroughly considered, as masterfully developed. I chose A Seahorse Year because it has two teens at its interwoven heart and because it is ultimately about the repercussive impact of one on many. A child gets sick and: His biological parents (Nan and Hal) are stricken. His step-parent (Marina, Nan's lover) finds herself on the margins, and straying. His Dad's new lover (Dan) is not sure he wants to be absorbed into such a broken family. The boy's girlfriend (Tamara) believes (with all the assurance of youth) that she can be a saviour. Tamara's parents are furious, spiteful. Nan's brother does the wrong thing. Everyone separated by degrees. Every catastrophic turn sparking seismic implications. Every nuance nuanced. And somehow Stacey D'Erasmo keeps track of it all. Produces a novel about relationships, which is also a novel of suspense. Writes with such intimate knowledge of her characters and their worlds that it is no wonder that Graywolf Press chose her to write The Art of Intimacy, the book Stacey and I had come to the magical Decatur Book Festival to discuss.

It takes about four years, Stacey told me, to write each of her novels. It is time enormously well spent. She invests deeply in her characters. Knows every detail of their rooms and their souls, the roads they walk on, the paths they walk, the fights they're not having, the words they hoard. She knows the mistakes they make, which are the mistakes we make. She is patient. She allows her stories to evolve. I bookmarked so many passages in A Seahorse Year that I am hard pressed to choose a single one. Because I must choose, I will choose this one, below—proof of what the right details do to illuminate character. Here we see Nan's house as Marina sees Nan's house. We are given the space, we are given two characters. We are given a story:

Flitting through Nan's house, Marina felt like a bird that had flown in and couldn't find her way out. Nan's house, like her bedroom, was slightly underfurnished, not austere so much as elementary, in the way of someone who would think with satisfaction: well, this is everything we need. The only extravagance was in the living room, where more than a few new, lavish books were stacked on the mantel. A thick biography of Madame Tussaud. An entire set of Proust with silvery corners. Otherwise, the house was like a collection of simple verbs: eating, sitting, watching TV. A red, child-size hooded sweatshirt was crumpled against the arm of the sofa. A few little robot men slept, still locked in combat, on the coffee table. Several plastic trucks were suspended in a convoy into the dining room. Standing half-wrapped in the damp towel, Marina's feet were cool on the cool floor. She stood there looking for something, but she didn't know what. Evidence—though the extravagant books weren't it—of some intractable bitterness, strained rope tethered to rusted stake, some wormhole that would end this thing before it had properly begun. She didn't want another complicated wife. Nan, the night before, had been very quiet and determined, like someone building something. Marina thought warily, Why?

My conversation with Stacey D'Erasmo at the AJC Decatur Book Festival will always be a life highlight (a photo here). Stacey's book on intimacy is not to be missed, my thoughts about that here. And look for Stacey's new novel, Wonderland, out next May. It's about an aging rock star, she says, and Stacey went on tour to get the details right. I cannot wait to see what she saw, and how she transformed it all to fiction.

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Tomie dePaola, Stacey D'Erasmo, Jessica Shoffel, Doni Kay, Little Shop, Decatur: Best Book Festival Ever

I left the house at 4:30 AM on Friday morning and arrived at the Courtyard Marriott of Decatur, GA, six or so hours later. As if elves had been working behind the scenes, there stood Jessica Shoffel, the Philomel publicist about whom I so often gush, Doni Kay, a tremendous Philomel sales associate who was a huge supporter of Small Damages, and Gennifer Choldenko, the Newbery Honor winner. Three gorgeous women, just standing there. The start of something great.

I was there on behalf of Handling the Truth, but Jess and Doni immediately took me under their wings, walking the town with me, sitting down at lunch with me, and finding, with me, a copy of Small Damages in the window of The Little Shop of Stories. We stepped inside this amazing store, and at once I was embraced by the shopkeepers, who had been warned of my coming by no other than Judy Schachner, whose image graces the wall of the Philadelphia International Airport (I had snapped the picture at dawn that morning) and whose beauty I was just writing about the other day. They had been told, by Judy, to take good care of me, and oh did they. They were like family, from the start. Diane Capriola (shown above with her daughter, watching Tomie draw), you run an exquisite enterprise. Thank you for your graciousness toward me.

I went off on my day. Heard Clyde Edgerton, that southern raconteur, speak about his writing life. Conducted a memoir workshop on the Agnes Scott campus with an incredible group of writers. Found a text from Jess inviting me to spend the evening with the Penguin crowd—and I did. Walked up the stairs at The Little Shop of Stories and met none other than Tomie dePaola, whose books I had collected through the years and read to my son—perennial favorites. He was drawing an image for The Little Shop. He was telling stories, signing his new book. And then we went off to dinner, a handful of us, to hear more about Tomie's life in mid-century America. DJ MacHale was in the house—the uber bestseller of the Pendragon series, author of the newly released Sylo (the critics say no one does suspense like MacHale does suspense), and a complete class act. So was Nancy Krulik, another children's book star with a massive following. I wasn't really sure what I was doing there among the super stars of the children's book world, but I allowed myself the happiness.

Back in my room I prepared for the day to come—a conversation I have long anticipated with Stacey D'Erasmo. Someday soon I will write here about her brilliant (!) novel, A Seahorse Year. I have already written about her super smart writing book, The Art of Intimacy and I will be the first in line when her new novel debuts next May. I cannot tell you what a privilege it was to spend an hour with Stacey before our talk, to walk to the Courthouse stage at her side, and finally to sit in a beautiful room to talk about uncertainty, memoir, intimacy, process. What a crowd we had. What a day it was.

I'm back home now. In a few days I'll leave for San Francisco. Will see my dear editor Tamra Tuller and the Chronicle team, then plunge into all kinds of Handling loveliness.

I plan to spend today watching movies. But right now, this minute, I want to thank all the people who made Decatur so fantastic. I'll never forget it. It's one hell of a town. Beth Parker and Gina Chung, of Gotham, thank you for making my trip there possible.

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Decatur Festival Bound, and a conversation with the agent, Andy Ross

Whenever I mention the AJC Decatur Book Festival to those who have visited in the past, I get a single reaction: love; people love this festival. There will be more than 300 authors in attendance, including a few of my friends. The conversations, I'm told, verge on the electrifying. And oh the street fair.

And so, in less than 12 hours, I'll face a classroom of 30 aspiring memoir writers, spin a few songs on a CD, and get us going. Tomorrow I'll sit on a stage with Stacey D'Erasmo, a writer and critic whose work is remarkable, and discuss intimacy and memoir. Read A Seahorse Year and The Art of Intimacy and every single one of her NYTBR reviews if you haven't encountered D'Erasmo yet.

But right now, I leave you with this—a conversation I had with the agent Andy Ross, who generously read Handling the Truth and had a number of questions. I had a blast with this, and it's always interesting to hear an agent's perspective on a form I love. Thank you so much, Andy Ross, and congratulations on the memoir you just sold.

Signing out for now.....

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Joining Stacey D'Erasmo at AJC Decatur Book Festival

Readers of this blog know how much I admire Stacey D'Erasmo—her fine mind, her original insights. I'm delighted, therefore, to be joining Stacey on the Old Courthouse Stage on Saturday, August 31, at the AJC Decatur Book Festival, for a conversation titled "Personal Truths: On Writing Intimacy and Memoir."

Details can be found here. 

My thoughts about Stacey's new book, The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between, can be found here.

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The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between/Stacey D'Erasmo

Always a cause for celebration when a new volume in the The Art of series is released by Graywolf Press. Edited by Charles Baxter, the "series is a line of books reinvigorating the practice of craft and criticism." The Art of Subtext (by Baxter himself), The Art of Time in Memoir (by Sven Birkerts—a book I love and teach and feature in Handling the Truth), The Art of Recklessness (Dean Young), The Art of Attention (Donald Revell), The Art of Description (Mark Doty)—these are ingenious encapsulations of a working writer's best thinking on the making of stories, sentences, and poems.

Yesterday, Stacey D'Erasmo's contribution to the series—The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between—was released; I had it on my iPad by dawn. D'Erasmo is a writer and reader worth heeding—an honored novelist, a professor at Columbia, a critic whose reviews are often better than the studied books themselves. Here, in this book, she does exactly what her title promises—explores "the nature of intimacy" and "the space between us" through chapters with titles like "Trying to See," "Meeting in the If," "Meeting in the World," "Meeting in the Dark," "Why Meet?," and "Distance." Old favorites like The Secret Sharer, The Rainbow, So Long, See You Tomorrow, Beloved, and To the Lighthouse are reinvigorated here, reviewed with an eye toward blurred, encapsulated, empathetic, and haunted spaces. Lesser known (to me, anyway) texts such as Dennis Cooper's My Mark, Nella Larsen's Passing, and Yoko Tawada's "The Bath," are likewise studied, quoted at length, turned over like conical shells.

I don't know about you, but I find this sort of thing thrilling—viewing texts through the eyes of a skilled, practicing writer. D'Erasmo has ideas; she makes assertions. "I have noticed that the intimacy we feel as readers is often generated far less by characters turning to one another and saying intimate things or doing intimate things than it is by a kind of textual atmosphere, or maybe one should say a biosphere, a gallery, a zone that both emanates from characters and acts upon them very deeply and personally," she asserts early on.

Later, she addresses her readers as probable writers:

The harm, it seems to me as a struggling writer among other struggling writers, is that piety of any kind is never especially good for art. Characters can, and should, believe all kinds of things, passionately and with brilliant wrongheadedness, but the book is, generally speaking, up to something else, something broader, something less sure of itself. Questions the writer might ask herself as she struggles to bring a sense of intimacy onto the page are, What assumptions am I making about what intimacy is? What received ideas about intimacy am I perhaps unwittingly reproducing?

It's all fascinating to me—elevating my vocabulary as a reader, expanding my girth as a writer. And so, on this morning of vapid fog and gathering heat, I send it out to you, dear readers, as a book to buy and keep.

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