Profiling Alane Salierno Mason, my first editor, for Publishing Perspectives

My journey into the land of books began in the way that most things begin with me—by braving myself away from the margins.  I had written in secret for years and without any "proper" literary education.  I had not met my first real writer—Fae Myenne Ng—until I was already a mother.  By the time I finally figured out what writing workshops were and what they might teach me, I couldn't enroll in any of them until I somehow wove them into family vacations. This I did, spending time with Rosellen Brown and Reginald Gibbons in Spoleto, Jayne Anne Phillips and William Gass in Prague, and Jayne Anne Phillips once more at Bread Loaf.

When I sent my unsolicited manuscript to Alane Salierno Mason at W.W. Norton—added it to what must have been a staggering slush pile—I had already been told that my work was too "literary," that it was unlikely to ever sell more than 3,000 copies, and that I should either look for something else to do or change my relationship to language.  Alane didn't say those things to me.  Instead, she called me on my birthday with the news that my first book, a memoir, would be edited by her.

Alane, then, was my introduction to book publishing.  She walked me through the streets of New York City and made sure I made the train home on time.  She introduced me to the Rose Room of the New York Public Library.  She sat with me over the course of many meals, was there for me throughout the National Book Award reading and ceremony (pictured above), and bought two more of my books—a memoir about marriage and El Salvador, and a memoir that called out for parents everywhere to give children more time to dream out loud. 

I have since read and reviewed many of Alane's books on this blog.  I have watched her harness her passion for international literature into the widely respected publishing and education venture, Words Without Borders.  I have read her own beautiful essays, and her reporting in Vanity Fair.  I have cheered as one of her books, The Swerve, went on to win the National Book Award.

A few weeks ago, I had an e-mail conversation with Alane about her life in books, and about the state of international publishing.  That story has gone live today at Publishing Perspectives and can be found here. 

To read my other profiles for Publishing Perspectives, please follow the links below.  For two more photo memories from a night I shared with Alane in 1998, go here.

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...

the first writer's workshop: words from a memoir in progress

In their faces I see the person I once was, though I was nearly twice their age, married, and a mother when I enrolled in my first writer’s workshop.  We’d flown to Spoleto, Italy, for a family vacation, and we’d climbed hills and slipped inside churches and sat beneath rooms where pianos were playing.  There were nuns on the hills, ropes at their waists.  There were market flowers wilted by sun.  We’d arrived late at night and settled into a stranger’s flat (the plates still draining by the kitchen sink, a cloud of smoky moon in the front window), and the next day I’d hauled myself up the stairs of a round-cornered building and sat in the back of the class. 

I’d brought a blank book with gray pages, its cover hieroglyphically embossed.  I’d read the works of our teachers, Reginald Gibbons and Rosellen Brown, and beyond the window, deep in the hills, was the Roman theater and the turreted castle, the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, the shop of silver trinkets and cards from which my toddler son would soon (almost) catastrophically run as a Fiat hurtled by.  The poisonous wasp that would balloon my husband’s hand was out there.  The pizza shop with the festoon of paper flowers at the base of the hill.  The slinking arm of the aqueduct.  The basilica in pale light, its beauty explained by my husband with two words:  forced perspective.  The cemetery where soon the class would go to imagine the lives of those whose names we’d find scratched out of headstones and buffed by a woman bearing (in broad daylight) a candle flame and white handkerchief.

But at that moment there was only the classroom, the squeak-footed chairs, my blank book, the other students, Rosellen, and Reginald, and it was Reginald who began:  “Every difference makes a difference.”  Word for word, I transcribed him.  “The craft of writing is to describe something so that someone else can see it.”  Soon Reginald was quoting Henry James—“Be one of those upon whom nothing is lost”—and then Rosellen was speaking: “I like the sentence that begins romantically, then de-romanticizes itself.”

The sentence that de-romanticizes itself.

I had been a closet writer nearly all my life—my poems stuffed in boxes, my short stories boomeranged back to me via return-envelope mail.  I was taking my first lesson in craft, and what I learned in Spoleto, what I chose to value or come to believe about myself, would shape the way I thought about stories made and lived every thereafter day of my life. 

It would make me want to find a way to pass the knowing down.

Read more...

In preparation for my upcoming Radnor Memorial Library talk I look back and find

...the very first page of the very first notes I ever took, for my very first writing workshop.  I was a mother already.  I was way too old to be a newbie.  But there I was in Spoleto, Italy, in July 1994, and there, before me, stood Reginald Gibbons and Rosellen Brown.  In two too-short weeks they taught me most everything I still know about the making of stories. 

I'll be reflecting on the idiosyncratic evolution of this writer's life, among other things, at the Radnor Memorial Library, November 16th, 7:30.  I hope you'll join me. 

Read more...

Reginald Gibbons, Peter Turchi, and Maps of the Imagination

Fever enshrined, bronchitis wracked, and client focused, I have not, this past week, been an honest bibliophile; the book stack has not diminished. Late this afternoon, however, I began to read Peter Turchi's Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, which has the distinct pleasure of making writing sound like something I might want to do someday or, at the very least, something I still need instruction in doing.

On page 16, I stopped, for there I came upon the voice of Reginald Gibbons, a poet/novelist/teacher/editor I'd met in Spoleto, Italy, in the early 1990s, during my first-ever encounter with other writers. Here, in Turchi's book, Gibbons was, as articulate and eloquent as ever. His quoted words:

"Writing delivers us into discoveries of what, till we had formed some way to articulate it in language, had remained unformed, had been unknown to us. The articulation becomes the knowing; the knowing comes out of the process, and it refuels a further effort at voyaging, comes to us in the exhilarating moments of being in-our-work-in-progress."

Read more...

McEwan on Present Tense

I was in my thirties and helplessly uninformed when I joined Rosellen Brown and Reginald Gibbons for a workshop in Spoleto, Itay. In a small room whose contours I remember still, among people whose faces I won't forget, we talked tombstones, genre, and the trick of tense, among other things. Past versus present versus future. What one loses with each, what one gains.

It's the tense conversation that always floats its way back to me, especially now, as I return to an historical novel that unfolds via multiple voices and tenses.

This morning, I picked up ATONEMENT and leafed through for the sound of it, for insights into its making. I was surprised to find this passage on page 294, surprised I didn't have it stored somewhere in my obviously increasingly sieve-like brain. These instructions to a young writer come from a publisher whom Briony, the book's heroine, has contacted. He has something keenly smart to say about the use of present tense:

"The crystalline present moment is of course a worthy subject in itself, especially for poetry; it allows a writer to show his gifts, delve into mysteries of perception, present a stylized version of thought processes, permit the vagaries and unpredictability of the private self to be explored and so on. Who can doubt the value of this experimentation? However, such writing can become precious when there is no sense of forward movement."

Note to self: Don't ever forget the forward movement.

Read more...