LA Times Festival of Books Party: Come on Over!

Starting Saturday April 20 with a party at a terrific bookstore with some great folks. In Los Angeles?  Come on over. I'll be there and would love to meet you.

Also on Sunday stop by the Rare Bird Booth #065 at the LATFB

I'll be signing books from 2:00 to 2:30. 

Monday April 22, 7:30 PM: Beirut Fiction Night w/ Eduardo Santiago, Richard Kramer, and Mary L. Tabor

Pi On Sunset (Next to Book Soup)

8828 Sunset Blvd.

West Hollywood, CA 90069

(310) 657-1774

Should be fun... Hope to see you there ...

The Next Big Thing: Is it a book or could it be a magazine about books or both?

Last month, I posted The Next Big Thing and am reposting today because I've added, yes, two more books and authors you're gonna wanna check out. And the new Shelf Unbound is now out!

Poet Derek Walcott said in a 1997 lecture, “All art has to do with light.” And that’s what each of us, in this game of tag, is doing: Shedding light on literary works we love.

The Next Big Thing is a game of tag among literary folk.

If you’re lucky, someone loves your book and tags you to “PLAY.” Playing means you love the art of the novel, the poem, or know the best reader of both.

I was tagged by Anne Marie Ruff who wrote Through These Veins: Scientific intrigue, love and a look into the cure for Aids. We’ll be talking soon on the  Rare Bird Radio Show where we’ll get more of the scoop on her writing life. Link back to her and see her answers to the ten questions that, with some variations as needed, are part of this game of literary tag.


Catch them if you can:

The marvelous Margaret Brown publishes Shelf Unbound and it is The Next Big Thing. Brown has a blog to go along with the mag. Margaret Brown is doing what every published writer who has worked in the solitude of a literal or metaphorical attic could hope for: She reads to find the next big thing. She’s inspired by stories that matter and by writing that cares about the way that language expresses our humanity. She has created a digital magazine that is so gorgeous you can’t resist opening its pages on your computer, your phone or you iPad and every book she discovers links to the place you can buy it—and Shelf Unbound is free. Did an angel send her?

Cuban novelist Eduardo Santiago loves to play. Read Tomorrow They will Kiss, where Cinderella meets her match in New Jersey among the Cuban immigrants who struggle to hold body and soul
together. You gotta love his women and him! He helps literary folk as if it's his mission. And in 2006 he wrote an op-ed for the LA Times that includes one of the funniest, most candid bits I’ve ever read on meeting Fidel Castro by accident in the offices of CBS news! And here’s a scoop: He’s got a new novel coming soon.

Sarah Harwell, poet, author of Sit Down Traveler writes evocative poetry that will haunt you. In Sarah's book, you’ll hear echoes of T.S. Eliot, Kafka, Pablo Neruda and, believe it or not, Tarot cards and the evocative question of predicting the future. In one of her poems, the speaker says, “I have the number of a psychic,/ but when I phone, I answer.” She explores life, love: The good, the hard and the unpredictability of it all with the Tarot Cards as her guide and ours.

Ravi Shankar, poet, is a philanthropist of the heart because he sheds light on other writers wherever his name appears. He’s written Thirty Stills, a seamless collection where, like Wallace Stevens, Shankar creates “his unreal out of what is real” and amazingly blends the poems of this book into another: Deepening Groove that won the 2009 National Poetry Review Book Prize. The link here is to his literary journal Drunken Boat. We'll find out soon, where he will play and shed light.

Jaki Scarcello wrote Fifty & Fabulous. Jaki quotes Joan Erickson, the wife of psychologist Eric Erickson. On her 94th birthday Joan said, “Our bodies wear out, our thoughts come more slowly. But our life cycles are our most creative effort. We can’t ever not be in them, right? The struggle is to try and obtain a sense of participation in your life the whole way through.”

Jaki is a living, breathing example of this spirit. She'll be my guest on Rare Bird Radio on May 8 at 4 pm eastern time. Tune in then or go to the Goodreads book club and listen after it's run.


Douglas Rogers wrote the memoir The Last Resort, that recounts the harrowing story of his parents and their farm in Zimbabwe. His first book by this established journalist has been widely and well-reviewed. Douglas will be my guest on Rare Bird Radio on April 10. Tune in live at 4 pm eastern time go to the Goodreads Book Club to hear the interview once it's run.

Here are my answers to the Ten Questions that are part of this literary game of tag (Writers I've tagged will adjust their q.s as needed so that this all makes sense—or so we hope):

What is the title of your book?

Golly, thanks for asking. Who by Fire

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I saw a fire in Iowa, a controlled burn of an old wooden storage bin, and I knew I would write about it. But lost love is closer to the heart of the book.

What genre does your book fall under?

Dare I say literary fiction? It’s a love story but so unconventional that I can’t call it a romance.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Since I recently met the gorgeous Lena Olin and since I love all her work and since Lena is the name of my main female character, it’s gotta be Olin. She has a husband and you’ll have to pick an actor who can stand up to Olin. I don’t dare. Lena has a lover named Isaac, aka Pierce Brosnan. Isaac is married to Evan, such a dear soul that I see Laura Linney in the role. But this is all make believe and wishes and dreams.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Love and betrayal and the interminable chain of longing may lead to forgiveness if you’re willing to search for heroism in the ordinary.

Was your book self-published or represented by an agency?

Agency: Outer Banks Publishing Group

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Two years and then eight more to figure out how the narration works.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I hope I learned something from Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair but somehow I think D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love is deep in my unconscious mind.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The deep-seated fear that I was losing the man I loved.

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

This excerpt, I hope: I’ve heard that color can’t be remembered or that color memory is a gift like perfect pitch. Whether or not one has perfect color memory, color evokes memory, the way of all the senses. Like the scent of apples and pears—her skin. Like the sound of the first four notes of the Schubert in G flat—the echo of her climax in my mind. The red-orange-pink of the tiles I see in the old brick in the buildings where I live on 21st Street—her mouth when she slept and then when she was gone, when all that was left was memory and my obsession with fire (blue, red, white, green, black fire) and with perspective.

Bonus: Margaret Brown, publisher of Shelf Unbound, the magazine that is in the business of shedding light, was my guest on Rare Bird Radio on March 27. Here's the interview with this visionary for books
Radio Interview with Margaret Brown

Here's the April/May cover.

photo credit: Theron Humphrey, www.maddieonthings.com 

Discover more books that matter.

The Next Big Thing: Is it a song, a radio show, a movie—or could it be: A BOOK or Magazine?

The Next Big Thing is a game of tag among literary folk. Poet Derek Walcott said in a 1997 lecture, “All art has to do with light.” And that’s what each of us, in this game of tag, is doing: Shedding light on literary works we love.

If you’re lucky, someone loves your book and tags you to “PLAY.” Playing means you love the art of the novel, the poem, or know the best reader of both.

 

I was tagged by Anne Marie Ruff who wrote Through These Veins: Scientific intrigue, love and a look into the cure for Aids. We’ll be talking soon on the Rare Bird Radio Show where we’ll get more of the scoop on her writing life. Link back to her and see her answers to the ten questions that, with some variations as needed, are part of this game of literary tag.

Catch them if you can:

The marvelous Margaret Brown publishes Shelf Unbound and it is The Next Big Thing. Brown has a blog to go along with the mag. Margaret Brown is doing what every published writer who has worked in the solitude of a literal or metaphorical attic could hope for: She reads to find the next big thing. She’s inspired by stories that matter and by writing that cares about the way that language expresses our humanity. She has created a digital magazine that is so gorgeous you can’t resist opening its pages on your computer, your phone or you iPad and every book she discovers links to the place you can buy it. Did an angel send her?

Cuban novelist Eduardo Santiago loves to play. Read Tomorrow They will Kiss, where Cinderella meets her match in New Jersey among the Cuban immigrants who struggle to hold body and soul together. You gotta love his women and him! He helps literary folk as if it's his mission. And in 2006 he wrote an op-ed for the LA Times that includes one of the funniest, most candid bits I’ve ever read on meeting Fidel Castro by accident in the offices of CBS news! And here’s a scoop: He’s got a new novel coming soon.

Sarah Harwell, poet, author of Sit Down Traveler writes evocative poetry that will haunt you. Sarah doesn't have a blog so her tagging will appear back here with me. In Sarah's book, you’ll hear echoes of T.S. Eliot, Kafka, Pablo Neruda and, believe it or not, Tarot cards and the evocative question of predicting the future. In one of her poems, the speaker says, “I have the number of a psychic,/ but when I phone, I answer.” She explores life, love: The good, the hard and the unpredictability of it all with the Tarot Cards as her guide and ours.

Ravi Shankar, poet, is a philanthropist of the heart because he sheds light on other writers wherever his name appears. He’s written Thirty Stills, a seamless collection where, like Wallace Stevens, Shankar creates “his unreal out of what is real” and amazingly blends the poems of this book into another: Deepening Groove that won the 2009 National Poetry Review Book Prize. The link here is to his literary journal Drunken Boat. We'll find out soon, where he will play and shed light.

Here are my answers to the Ten Questions that are part of this literary game of tag (Writers I've tagged will adjust their q.s as needed so that this all makes sense—or so we hope):

What is the title of your book?

Golly, thanks for asking. Who by Fire

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I saw a fire in Iowa, a controlled burn of an old wooden storage bin, and I knew I would write about it. But lost love is closer to the heart of the book.

What genre does your book fall under?

Dare I say literary fiction? It’s a love story but so unconventional that I can’t call it a romance.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Since I recently met the gorgeous Lena Olin and since I love all her work and since Lena is the name of my main female character, it’s gotta be Olin. She has a husband and you’ll have to pick an actor who can stand up to Olin. I don’t dare. Lena has a lover named Isaac, aka Pierce Brosnan. Isaac is married to Evan, such a dear soul that I see Laura Linney in the role. But this is all make believe and wishes and dreams.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Love and betrayal and the interminable chain of longing may lead to forgiveness if you’re willing to search for heroism in the ordinary.

Was your book self-published or represented by an agency?

Agency: Outer Banks Publishing Group

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Two years and then eight more to figure out how the narration works.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I hope I learned something from Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair but somehow I think D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love is deep in my unconscious mind.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The deep-seated fear that I was losing the man I loved.

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

This excerpt, I hope: I’ve heard that color can’t be remembered or that color memory is a gift like perfect pitch. Whether or not one has perfect color memory, color evokes memory, the way of all the senses. Like the scent of apples and pears—her skin. Like the sound of the first four notes of the Schubert in G flat—the echo of her climax in my mind. The red-orange-pink of the tiles I see in the old brick in the buildings where I live on 21st Street—her mouth when she slept and then when she was gone, when all that was left was memory and my obsession with fire (blue, red, white, green, black fire) and with perspective.

Bonus: Margaret Brown, publisher of Shelf Unbound, the magazine that is in the business of shedding light, will be my guest on Rare Bird Radio on March 27. Here's the bonus scoop: her April/May cover.

photo credit: Theron Humphrey, www.maddieonthings.com

Shelf Unbound: What to Read Next in Independent Publishing

I write in gratitude. My thanks to Margaret Brown, the publisher of Shelf Unbound: What to Read Next in Independent Publishing. Margaret Brown read my novel Who by Fire. She found it worthy and interviewed me in a two-page feature of this fabulous and gorgeous publication.

This journalist, who is a lifetime member of the National Book Critics Circle, has a quarter century of experience in the book publishing and magazine editing worlds and she is re-inventing how we approach magazines while discovering writers who are not coming out of the big six publication houses.

Her questions show how deeply she read the novel that I wrote about in a post on this site that Margaret refers to in her interview:

Margaret Brown

Who by Fire, a novel: What if no one reads it?

Shelf Unbound's February/March issue takes us on journeys from The Odyssey to Stanley Kubrick—and I got in there somehow. 

Those of us who choose to write in the solitude of our attics expect anonymity even when we hope to close the round through publication. I feel lucky when a friend or family member chooses to read me, am deeply humbled by that extraordinary gift of time and, yes, effort. 

So, when a complete stranger does what Margaret did, I must thank her, express my indebtedness and recall how important it is for me to help others who struggle in solitude: The reason I taught for so many years, the reason I have tutored for free, the reason I have worked so often for no compensation, or as with George Washington University, where I taught for more than a decade, with virtually no compensation (something very few if any of my students ever knew) and the reason I continue to do so.

Magaret Brown has now agreed to be my guest on Rare Bird Radio on March 27, 2013. 

You can access all the links to my interviews with poet Dana Gioia; novelist Eduardo Santiago; poet, memoirist and historian Molly Peacock; journalist Michael Johnson (He not only read my novel; he reviewed it); poet Ravi Shankar; poet Sarah C. Harwell; self-published author (some 15 books!) Derek Haines; journalist Jacquie Kubin; NPR's "Voice of the Book" Alan Cheuse, who's been the master of discovering the best of the best, by joining the Goodreads Who by Fire Book Club. 

Here's the paradox: Rare Bird Radio owns the book club site and the owner's choice has been to say that we'll be discussing my novel, something I've not done on any show so far. That means you don't have to read the novel to join and find all the links to the radio interviews of folks who fascinate.

But Margaret Brown did read my novel and for the rest of my life and breath I will be indebted to her.

Jacquie Kubin, journalist: The interview

Did you ever think, I'll never get to ask ____ the things I really want to know? Jacquie Kubin, Chief Communities Officer and Executive Editor and the architect, meaning she built it and they came, of the Communities at The Washington Times, never sleeps, is so busy that getting an interview with her seemed impossible. But on January 30, we talked and she was a WOW, to say the least. She talked about her faith in women, about the digital revolution where she's a key player, her views on what the word "journalist" should mean, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, whether writers need to be politically conservative (I'm not) to write for her, writers she adores and how and why she home-schooled her son.

Jacquie Kubin

To say the least, this reluctant interviewee was fascinating, but here's the thing: She was candid and totally lovable. 

See if you agree and leave a comment if you do or don't, what you liked, what you didn't. Join the conversation and I'll respond. I bet Jacquie might too.

The interview is on (click to get to the show) Rare Bird Radio.

She even asked writers—"It does no good to scream from you basement", she notes—to contact her. My thanks to the lovely Jacquie Kubin.



To hear all the radio interviews I've done, join the Goodreads Book club and hear poet and professor Dana Gioia, Cuban author Eduardo Santiago, poet and author of The Paper Garden Molly Peacock, poet Ravi Shankar, self-published author Derek Haines (he told how he publishes and why he does it without help! Get the scoop), and coming up February 20, NPR's longtime "Voice of Books" Alan Cheuse will be my guest. 

Maybe you'll be next. Contact me if you want to be on the show.

I want to know what you think. So comment here and at the book club.

Sarah C. Harwell, poet: The Interview

I had the honor and pleasure to interview the evocative poet Sarah C. Harwell on Rare Bird Radio where you can hear that conversation.

Sarah C. Harwell is gorgeous inside and out and she writes evocative poetry that will haunt you. We discussed her work, T.S. Eliot, Kafka, Pablo Neruda and, believe it or not, Tarot cards and predicting the future. Of course, even T.S. Eliot was no stranger to the Tarot deck as The Waste Land so richly proves.

I urge you to buy Sarah's book Sit Down Traveler and be blown away as, indeed, I was.

Here is the poem she read during the interview and that appeared in The Washington Post on Sunday, May 11, 2008, in the column "Poet's Choice," introduced by Mary Karr. This poem on motherhood is brave and insightful on the gentle, inexorable burden we who have children find suddenly thrust upon us in the hope and challenge that we can protect our charges, keep them safe and love them well.

DEAD
     for Hannah

The way my daughter sleeps it's as if she's talking

to the dead. Now she is one. I watch her eyes roll

backwards in her head, her senses fold

one by one, and then her breathing quiets to a beat.

Every night she fights this silent way of being

with all the whining ammunition she has.

She wins a tired story, a smothered song, the small

and willful links to life that carry her away.

Welcome to the Egyptian burial. She's gone to Hades

with her stuffed animals. When she wakes,

the sad circles disappeared, she blinks

before she knows me. I have listened

to one million breaths of her. And every night

my body seizes when she leaves to go

where I am not, and yet every night I urge her, go. 

I urge all my readers to join the Goodreads Book Club (Bless you, Sarah, for honoring me by joining) where I am interviewing OTHER artists—not as the site asserts (Rare Bird Radio owns the book club site; I am the interviewer and moderator for the book club)—I repeat: not to discuss—my just released novel Who by Fire. I talk about why I say: not to discuss my own work in my blog post entitled Who by Fire, a novel: What if no one reads it? Some day a discussion of my own work might be worthwhile but here's what keeps me going: The writing of the book was the gift. I hope what I've written in that post encourages all who work in the attempt to create art in the silence of their attics to be encouraged no matter what. The attempt to do so affirms that the search for meaning matters.

Sarah C. Harwell will make you believe, as I do, that that last statement is indeed so. This is a collection of poems worthy of reading and re-reading. Buy it!

And do let me and Sarah know what you think about the poem posted here, or anything we discussed in the interview. I want to hear you!

On Twitter after the inauguration: I saw this tweet by @jaktraks 

A Washington Post Journalist’s Derisive, Wan Opinion That Poetry Is Dead bit.ly/UUJDC0 #poetry #poems #poet
— jaktraks (@jaktraks) January 23, 2013

Is poetry dead? I think Sarah C. Harwell belies this view. What do you think?

Who by Fire, a novel: What if no one reads it?

I've written a novel entitled Who by Fire, ten years in the making, and I'm pretty sure not many folks will ever hear of it or read it. Should I be discouraged? Should I give up? My answer I hope will encourage you to choose the path that leads to the work that gives you breath and life. Choose the light!

 Joseph Conrad said, “In art, as in no other form of endeavor, there is meaning apart from success.”

Who by Fire is published by a small, independent publisher, Outer Banks Publishing and is distributed by the non-profit, devoted-to-the-arts distributor Small Press Distribution.


Tillie Olsen said in her wise book Silences: ‘Who will read me, who will care?’ It does not help the work to be done that work already completed is surrounded by silence and indifference—if it is published at all. Few books ever have the attention of a review—good or bad. Fewer stay longer than a few weeks on bookstore shelves, if they get there at all. … ‘Works of art’ (or at least books, stories, poems, meriting life) ‘disappear before our very eyes because of the absence of responsible attention,’ Chekhov wrote nearly ninety years ago.

This week, journalist Michael Johnson reviewed Who by Fire. (I must admit I did pray. Who knows, perhaps someone heard?)

Read, if you will, Michael Johnson's review. 

To all of you who may have come here, I thank you and I offer this encouragement: Creativity operates in all endeavors. But creativity in the arts operates against all odds. Do not give up because the odds are not in your favor. Believe this: The process of the creation of something “other” gives life a fullness that I think only the attempt to create art can do. Be encouraged. Speak. Write. I'll be listening.

Here is the first chapter of Who by Fire:

THE FIRE

I

 would have told Lena about the fire I saw in Iowa, but it is regret that writes this, that longs for said things unsaid.

This fire would have amazed her. The heat was so incredibly hot it reminded me of something I learned in physics: the fact that the air around a lightning bolt is hotter than the surface of the sun. It was a barn burning—not with any political or racial overtones, but a necessary burn of an old wooden grain bin in the center of town in Whiting, Iowa, where I grew up. She was a Baltimore-grown city girl who wouldn’t be able to imagine this story of the burning though I suppose it’s a common enough event in rural parts of our country.

That I know something Lena couldn’t imagine amazes me.

I go home to Iowa—rarely—and, as it turns out, after Lena died, fortuitously: the controlled fire.

I grew up in Whiting, the son of a farmer—three hundred and thirty acres of soy beans and corn. When the burn took place, I watched it with my father. It scored me like a knife on wood. It hit me like the Schubert in G Flat, like that score, the staffs of music that I can hear by looking.

Leonard Bernstein said about music, “It doesn’t have to pass through the censor of the brain before it can reach the heart … An F-sharp doesn’t have to be considered in the mind; it is a direct hit.” The fire was like that for me. It made me see how few times in my life I’ve experienced that: a direct hit, the strike to the heart—despite my perfect pitch.

My father and I watched the burn from beginning to end.

The firemen were mostly older and younger men I knew, had grown up with—perhaps a few out-of-towners, sure—but mostly guys I could tilt a howdy finger off the steering wheel of my father’s pick-up—the old blue one I like to drive around when I’m in town, rare as that is now.

My father didn’t see fight-fire in the War, the second big war when he flight tested P-51 Mustangs, the fighter plane, but didn’t shoot its guns.

These guys, the firemen, let me get closer to the fire than most other onlookers—although I was surprised by how they trusted the oglers. They trust their neighbors to have good judgment. That too amazes me because I now live in downtown Washington—the center of politics and corruption.

My mother didn’t come to watch the fire.

My mother’s mouth turns down at the corners. She says she doesn’t smile because there are gaps between her teeth, and indeed there are, but she doesn’t smile because she has accepted what she views as her lot: That my father will rise early and make coffee, that he’ll scramble an egg in the microwave while she sleeps, that she will always make him his peanut butter sandwich for lunch, that she’ll eat her Hershey bar alone in the kitchen while he listens to the evening news, that these will be the things they’ll do and that each time they occur, the daily moments of her life with him, they remind her that she doesn’t love him.

She had nothing to learn from the fire.

I had much to learn. In the danger that the fire comprised and the safety of its control, I began to understand “heroism.” My father did not win the word hero—not in combat, by definition not a hero, no medal of honor, no wound—no purple heart.

“Heroism” is a big word often used loosely. It is a word that is central to this story. I am sure of it the way I am sure that Lena would have wanted to know about the fire. She would not have thought “obsession,” as perhaps you do. She would have understood what I meant when I called the fire “a direct hit.”

I keep a list of heroes, of people who save others, who receive awards for these acts: A man in Nova Scotia saved a man and his seven-year-old son from a fiery auto accident. A sixty-two-year-old man in San Diego pulled his eighty-four-year-old neighbor from a fire. A twenty-seven-year-old man of Centralia, Illinois, rescued a man from a burning house. A twenty-seven-year-old of Dalles, Oregon, rescued two eleven-year-old girls from an apartment fire. A twenty-five-year-old man of Syracuse, New York, a twenty-four-year-old man of Oswego, New York, and a thirty-five-year-old of Webster, New York, together saved a woman from electrocution when a 300-ton crane at a construction site overturned and pulled electrical wires onto her car.

But I am like the woman who, when her house was on fire, rescued her fire tongs.