Love Bomb/Lisa Zeidner: Reflections

Lisa Zeidner's intelligence precedes her.  You hear talk about it, you read it in her books, you see it in her brilliantly crafted reviews for the Times, Slate, GQ, and then, one day, you meet her.  She'll be surrounded by students, most likely, on the Rutgers University campus in Camden, where she directs the M.F.A. program in creative writing. She'll be goading, and at the same time loving.  She'll be flabbergastingly quick on her feet.  She'll be defending the campus from New Jersey politics, if that's what's required at that hour, and talking about film, Italy, new books, and old, all at the same time.  And she'll make you feel right at home.

I don't actually remember when I first met Lisa, nor can I accurately count how many times I've joined her on her campus to read from a recently published book or to teach memoir or to discuss the current standing of young adult literature, and young adults.  It's true, I have to cross a bridge to do it, and I have to drive the Schuylkill in rush hour.  But that's the kind of thing I'll do for Lisa—the kind of thing many of us do to share in her company for a while.

(Don't give me grief about my driving, Lisa.  Don't.  You.)

For the past many years Lisa, already the author of four novels and two collections of poems, has been at work on a new novel—a lacerating satire, a comedy of non-manners, a pointed commentary on the colossal ambitions and personal jitters of the very people (mental health professionals) who are supposed to save others.  Called Love Bomb, it is a hostage story that unfolds at a bride's family home on her wedding day.  Tess may be ready to tie the knot, but another bride, this one more demanding, has shown up, too, bearing ammunition in a white lace gown, a gas mask, and steel-toe boots.  This masked bride wants answers, apologies, confessions, and no one is sure who she is or how much danger she has packed.  Confessions, accordingly, ensue.  Public presentations of insecurities and secrets among ex-lovers and continuing rivals and, oh yes, a bunch of shrinks.  One by one, and consequentially, the guests come clean, and still the hostage taker waits—for the right words from the right person.  If only she would say who that person is and what has driven her to this act of suburban terror.

What do people reveal, in those up-against-it hours?  Who dares to be a hero?  Is the language of therapy even vaguely annealing among those who are certified to use it?  How does one find air to breathe in a room so small and crowded with excess guilt and shame?  Who loves enough to step forward?  What will restore peace to this inverted day?  Lisa Zeidner's language is (of course) highly intelligent—that razor-sharp wit forever leavened by her poetic bent.  Her perspective is (we expect nothing else) fierce.  Her satire is (no question it would be) smartly calculated. When Lisa sits down to write a novel she doesn't tremble.  She writes sentences like these and invites us in to a festering room on a ceremonious day that may, in the end, but we have to read to find out, still cling to some vestige of tradition:

If they were a tribe in unforgiving terrain, if life were hard and short, there would be an excuse for people to festoon their hair with feathers and machete the suckling pig.  People in love?  Let's eat!  But here?  It was silly.  Why sanctify their love with a ceremony?  Especially a ceremony performed no in a church but in a suburban backyard, by a friend who made a point of alerting everyone that he bought his ministry license on the Internet.

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You know those glasses I lost, that camera? ...

They have been returned!  Yes.  Here was the very last photograph that had I taken before I whimsically (obviously) decided to leave the camera at the Rutgers-Camden podium and head off for a slice of cheese.  Never to return to the podium and leaving the mess of finding the camera/glasses and returning them to me to the very dear and always precise Lisa Zeidner (she's in this photograph, hiding) and her contingent of Rutgers/Camden security folk.

I am happy, in my reunited condition. And grateful.

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That is my heart

Sunday, 8 PM.  A day of writing behind me, which is to say, a day of reworking what had already been worked.  In the coming week, You Are My Only will launch.  On Tuesday I will name the winners of the You Are My Only Treasure Hunt.  On Wednesday, I will return to my friends at Rutgers-Camden (thank you, Lisa Zeidner, hello, Daniel Wallace) to teach, to lecture, to critique, to read.  On Thursday evening, at Radnor Memorial Library, thanks to the good graces of Pam Sedor, I will gather with my dear friends and reflect—those festivities made even brighter by the goodness of Elizabeth Mosier.

One waits a long time for a book to find itself, and a long time (too) for a book to find its way into the world.  One hopes for things, and by my blogger friends, my reader friends, my writer friends—my friends—I have been blessed.

I found this single fuscia leave today on my long walk.

That, my many loved ones, is my heart.

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What's Next in YA? Tell me what you think. (And come see me live.)

Yesterday, my gorgeous niece Claire called, as she will, from time to time.  She had a school project on the docket, questions for my husband about his life in architecture, but I got to talk to her, too (it was part of the deal).  Claire is the niece who shares her love of books with me.  The sixth grader with a huge vocabulary and a very empathetic heart.  She'd just acquired a handful of new titles from Borders.  I sat on my deck, phone pressed to my ear, as she read the jacket flaps to me.  Together, and quite craftily, we speculated.

Not long ago, at a cocktail hour, someone said, indicating me, "Oh, don't talk to her.  She just writes kids' books for a living."  It was half a joke, but I suspected it wasn't really.  It was a prejudice I thought we'd snuffed, this ghetto-ization of YA writers.  I think of dear Claire whenever I think of those who want to make YA books a lesser category.  I think of the giants of the craft.

I'm going to be thinking out loud about the YA genre—the rise of fantasy, paranormal romance, dystopia, and steampunk, the ever-continuing importance of contemporary realism when handled by those who care about kids and about craft—during a few upcoming appearances.  I'm going to be talking about what I think is next.  In the meantime, I'd love to know what you think is next.  What you think is necessary, what is called for.  What trends are over and done for you?  What stories do you miss?  What books would you give my bright, loving, beautiful niece Claire, if you had the privilege of being her aunt?

Please let me know here.  And please come, too, to one of the following events, where I'll be talking about all this and more, while also reading pages from You Are My Only.  I want to see you.  Live, and in person.  It's about time for that. 

Wednesday, October 26, 4 PM - 6 PM 

Rutgers-Camden Visiting Writers Series
Young Adult Lit: It's Not Just Kids' Stuff Anymore
(details here)

Thursday, October 27, 7:30 PM

You Are My Only/Book Launch Party
Radnor Memorial Library, Radnor, PA
(details to come)

Monday, November 7, 6:30 PM
You Are My Only/Lecture and Reading
Haub Executive Center, St. Joseph's University
(details here)

Wednesday, November 9, 7:00 PM

You Are My Only/Reading and Signing

Chester County Book & Music Company

975 Paoli Pike
West Goshen Center, West Chester, PA

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A thank you to my students, a report on the coming days

It is a pleasure peculiar to the teacher that, even after classes end and the students go on their way, so many find their way back to your own soul-er home.  They report on their journeys.  They change the tenor of the conversation you were having with yourself. They make you believe, above all else, that the intensity of what was then matters still, right now.

You students know who you are, and you know that I am grateful.

In other news, I prepare today to meet with the 14-year-old San Francisco-based book club that travels once each year to meet an author who has written of his/her city.  We'll be gathering at Chanticleer garden on Saturday, where two of my books (Ghosts in the Garden and Nothing but Ghosts) take place; we'll talk as well about Dangerous Neighbors. My thanks to Kathye Fetsko Petrie, a writer and writer advocate, who suggested my name to the group, and a warm welcome to Kyle Taylor and her band of reader/travelers.

I prepare as well to meet, on Monday, with the students of the 25th Annual Rutgers-Camden Summer Writers' Conference, which Lisa Zeidner so brilliantly concocts each year.  I'm joining (quite late in the game) a cast that includes the likes of Jane Bernstein, Ken Kalfus, Lise Funderburg, J.T. Barbarese, and Peter Trachtenberg.  I'm offering my thoughts on creative nonfiction.  I'm banking on some time alone with Lisa, whose friendship I have grown to cherish.

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Pictures of You/Caroline Leavitt: Reflections

Lisa Zeidner is not just a beloved writer and essential, smart critic; she's a teacher who has created, at Rutgers-Camden, a place for aspiring writers to burrow in and learn.  I had the pleasure of spending this past Friday with her and among the students of her summer writers' festival; we dug in deep.  Among the many questions that surfaced over our time together was:  How is writerly intimacy achieved by way of the third-person voice?

Saturday evening, alone at DC neighborhood bar where popcorn was a bonafide (and much-ordered) menu item and my salad was wholesome and good, I began to read a book that I've been thoroughly anticipating—Caroline Leavitt's ninth novel, Pictures of You.  Pictures won't be released from Algonquin until January 25, 2011, but that doesn't matter; it's been buzz material for several months now, deservedly so.  It's a story of collisions—a story about an accident on a fog-bound road.  One woman survives.  One woman—a wife and mother—does not.  Accidents are eruptions.  They splinter and derail.  They split the flesh, they burst the heart, they leave lives and strangers raw and entangled.  Leavitt brilliantly captures all of this, placing an asthmatic, camera-toting child at the center of it all, and twisting our readerly expectations.

Many have written about the head-on, page-turning quality of Pictures, and I stand with the chorus; those driving by the Washington Plaza Hotel and looking up to the ninth floor last evening would have noted a light burning bright in an insomniac's room.  That would have been me, barreling through—marveling at the story but also (and here we return to our beginning; I have not forgotten) wishing that I'd had Leavitt's book by my side when the Rutgers-Camden workshop question arose:  Intimacy?  Third person?  How?

Caroline Leavitt, I'd have said.  Exhibit A.  For in Pictures, Leavitt, writing close-over-the-shoulder third-person, gains readers access to the inner-most thoughts and histories of some truly interesting characters.  It's never done for show, never done just because Leavitt can.  It is done to advance the story, to entangle the protagonists, to make plausible and absolute the seismic earth upon which the whole is grounded. Look, for example, at this:

In all the years they've been together, he's never hurt her, never raised a hand or even his voice, but he's smashed five sets of dishes, broken several glasses and a figurine he had bought her as a joke, a Scottish terrier with a tiny gold chain.

Leavitt understands the telling power of the artfully chosen detail—the Scottish terrier with a tiny gold chain, in this instance.  She avoids vapid generalizations, takes no short-cuts, enables us to see not just the things themselves but the ways in which these things are mulled and reconstituted by those who must remember so that they can live forward.  She lets us know what her characters yearn for ("she yearns for cities where people don't make you feel there is something wrong with you because you live there year 'round.") and how those yearnings have been seeded.  Character is story, Leavitt proves again and again.  Suspending our disbelief.  Putting us (right) there.

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24th Annual Rutgers-Camden Summer Writers' Conference

The exceedingly smart novelist-poet-critic-teacher Lisa Zeidner has invited me to join an exquisite cast of writers for the 24th Annual Rutgers-Camden Summer Writers' Conference. Running from June 21 through June 30th of this year and designed to be taken for either undergraduate or graduate credit (or a non-credit certificate), it features the writers Jewell Parker Rhodes, Brenda Shaughnessey, Daniel Bergner, Lisa Tracy, Stephen Dunn, Jonathan Dee, David Shields, Max Apple, Paul Lisicky, Mark Doty, Mat Johnson, Patrick Rosal, and Lisa herself, as well as yours truly.

I'll be there on June 25th, teaching creative nonfiction and doing a reading with the much-beloved Max Apple of the University of Pennsylvania.

I hope you'll join us. To register, or for more information, see the web site.

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