The Wednesday Web Browser

The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) has posted its list of accepted panel proposals for the 2011 conference in Washington, D.C. I am so excited that both of my proposed teams will be participating! One session is in the "career advancement" category, and will focus on finding, creating, and succeeding in online teaching jobs. The other, within "the craft of fiction," will discuss issues in 21st-century Jewish-American fiction.

---

If I needed another reason to want to read Anthony Doerr's new story collection, this interview on The Forward's Sisterhood blog, "Anthony Doerr's Fictional Journey Inside a Jewish Girls' Orphanage," gave it to me. (Historical-fiction writers will particularly appreciate/relate.)

---

"Operation Thriller" is bringing thriller writers to entertain members of the military.

---

You should certainly read Dwight Garner's review of Tom Grimes's new book, Mentor, which "is ostensibly about Frank Conroy, the gifted memoirist (“Stop-Time”) and novelist (“Body and Soul”) who was the longtime director of the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa." But as Garner writes, reading the actual book "might make [an aspiring writer] climb a tall tree and leap from it."

---

If you're a blogger, or want to be one, you may appreciate this ProBlogger post: "Crazy Stuff I've Done as a Blogger, and What I've Learned from It All."

Quotation of the Week: Adam Langer

In an interview occasioned by the recent publication of his latest book, The Thieves of Manhattan (on my tbr list), Adam Langer was asked the following:

"Did you meet with early success, in terms of getting your first novel accepted for publication, or was it a long, hard road for you?"

Langer's response offers this week's "Quotation of the Week":

"If I pretended that my first published novel, Crossing California, was actually the first novel I wrote, I'd say that it was easy. I'd say, yup, I finished the book, got an agent, got a contract, and started work on Book #2. But in saying that, I'd be ignoring the fact that my first novel, Making Tracks, a teen detective story written when I was in high school, is still in a drawer. And so is my second novel, It Takes All Kinds, a 300-page long screed about my first week at Vassar. Also, my third novel, A Rogue in the Limelight, a picaresque journey modeled on Huck Finn and The Confederacy of Dunces, never found the right agent, even though some people (well, my mother) have called it my best novel. One of my earliest agents said that my fourth novel, Indie Jones, a slacker comedy set in Chicago's independent film world, would easily find a home at Doubleday, but that didn't happen. And I stopped looking for an agent for my fifth novel, an existential thriller called American Soil, when I realized there was too much personal shit in it and I really didn't want to deal with having it published. But yeah, once I finished Book #6, it was smooth sailing."

Source: The Huffington Post

(Hat tip to Josh Lambert for the interview link.)

The Wednesday Web Browser

Congratulations to our friend John Griswold on all of the accolades he and his novel, A Democracy of Ghosts, have been accruing. Find out more about the author and his book by revisiting our September 2009 interview.
==========
Sometimes, it really doesn't take a whole lot to make me happy. Seeing online appreciations in recent days for two admired authors--Patrick Modiano, whose work I discovered my junior year in college, and Ludwig Lewisohn, whose 1928 novel The Island Within I've written about before--has really helped lift my spirits this week.
==========
It's that time of year again: The New York Writers Coalition (NYWC) is holding its annual Write-a-Thon on Saturday, June 12, in NYC. This year, the fundraising effort to benefit the NYWC's free writing programs for the formerly homeless, at-risk youth, seniors, and others, will offer a complementary (and complimentary) online component for people who wish to participate from afar. (I've participated in and written about the Write-a-Thon in the past.)

Quotation of the Week: Diane Lockward

Asked to offer suggestions/advice for beginning poets, Diane Lockward recently responded:

"Have patience and persistence. Respect your tears; they are often where the poems reside. Learn the craft. Be willing to serve an apprenticeship. Read the masters to learn where you came from. Read contemporary poetry to learn what’s being done today. Buy books by other poets; that’s one way we support each other. Mark up the books and learn from them. When you ask for a critique, be sure you are not just looking for compliments; otherwise, you won’t grow as a poet."

Source: Diane Lockward, interviewed by Nicelle Davis for The Bees' Knees Blog.

A side note: It's still somewhat difficult for me to address Diane by her first name, since for many years she taught English at my high school (my sister was one of her students!). But it has been lovely to refind her in the world of poets and poetry. You'll find her blog, Blogalicious, linked to the right.

The Wednesday Web Browser

HTMLGIANT brings us an interview with poet/translator/publisher Lawrence Schimel, whose Fairy Tales for Writers we mentioned here way back in 2007.
==========
Next, the Huffington Post presents the provocatively-titled "Iowa Writers' Workshop Graduate Spills It All: Interview with John McNally, Author of 'After the Workshop.'" (via the Poetry Foundation)
==========
Then, The Days of Yore website, which "interviews artists about the years before they had money, fame, or road maps to success, and inspires you to find your own," turns its attention to author Gary Shteyngart. (via the Jewish Book Council).
==========
In other-than-interview news, big congrats to Jane Roper, who has just signed a book deal with St. Martin's Press for a memoir loosely based on her Babble.com blog about mothering young twins. This will be Jane's second book--her first, a novel titled Eden Lake, will be published by Last Light Studio next spring (shortly after the release of Quiet Americans, by yours truly!). I'm so happy for Jane, and I know that both of her books will be well worth your attention.

Quotation of the Week: Cate Marvin

"[S]ome of your best poems may never appear in a journal, and you have to trust your own knowledge that the poem is good despite the fact no one has 'picked it up' (a phrase I hate)."

Source: Cate Marvin, interviewed by Brian Brodeur for How a Poem Happens (via The Writer's Center)

Short Story Month 2010: The Collection Giveaway Project

UPDATE, 5/31: Congratulations to commenters #24 (John Vanderslice) and #2 (Cara Holman), who, with some help from Random.org, have triumphed and emerged as winners of our short story collection giveaway project offerings. John and Cara, please e-mail me and let me know which book you prefer (first e-mailer gets first choice). Please include your mailing address--I will order the books and have them shipped to you asap. And thanks to everyone for participating!

Remember last month, when I stumbled on the National Poetry Month Poetry Book Giveaway? Well, all of the wonderful energy and ideas behind that project made me think that a similar enterprise should be undertaken for May, which has lately become something of an unofficial Short Story Month (as Poets & Writers recently noted, crediting organizations such as the Emerging Writers Network for the development).

Because I have such huge respect for the work of Anne Stameshkin and the entire team over at Fiction Writers Review (FWR), I contacted Anne to see if FWR might want to take on the considerable work involved with hosting a multi-blog "Short Story Collection Giveaway" this month. Fortunately, Anne agreed, and FWR is the hub for the project, and that's where you'll be able to check the full list of participating bloggers (improve your chances for winning by entering multiple giveaways, and get to know some bloggers who love short story collections in the process!).

Now, following the rules that FWR has come up with, I am happy to recommend to you two story collections. On May 31, I'll announce the names of two winners selected at random from the comments section for this post. And then I'll purchase two books and mail one to each lucky winner.

To participate in Practicing Writing's portion of Short Story Month 2010: The Giveaway Project, I'm asking you to add a comment here, telling us about (or at least the name of) a collection you love or one you're looking forward to reading. Comments that don't mention a specific collection will not be eligible for the giveaway. Comments should be submitted no later than noon (U.S. Eastern) on Monday, May 31 (Memorial Day here in the U.S.), and I'll have the winners' names posted before midnight.

And now (drum roll, please)...I am delighted to announce the two story collections that this practicing writer will be purchasing and sending to two lucky winners:

First, we have Who I Was Supposed to Be (published in 1999 by Simon & Schuster), written by Susan Perabo. One of the bright lights that sustained me through my MFA program was my friendship with Susan Perabo, a gifted teacher (her "large group" workshops and craft seminars were among my very favorites) and equally gifted writer. I read Susan's debut collection, Who I Was Supposed to Be, very soon after meeting the author at my first residency in May 2001. And then I reread it, bought it for friends' birthdays, etc. I even mentioned it right here on the blog three years ago. And now I'll buy a copy for one of you.

Meantime, in preparing this post, I discovered a terrific interview with Susan that I hope you'll all take a few moments to listen to. If you're very time-pressed, skip ahead and read through some of the praise that the book received from The Los Angeles Times and The Baltimore Sun. Who I Was Supposed to Be was named a "Book of the Year" by the Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, and The St. Louis Post Dispatch.

Moving on to the second book I'll be delighted to purchase and send to a lucky winner, allow me to present The Pale of Settlement (published in 2007 by the University of Georgia Press), written by Margot Singer. This is another book I have mentioned here before. (I've also written about it for Kenyon Review Online.) Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, and the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, The Pale of Settlement is also another book that I've been unable to stop recommending to others.

But don't just take my word for it. Read excerpts from one of the stories on the National Endowment for the Arts website. Check out interviews with Margot Singer in The Southeast Review Online, Reform Judaism magazine, and the old Nextbook (now Tablet) site. And listen to Alan Cheuse discuss the collection for NPR.

Want to win one of these books? Remember, to be eligible, you need to submit a comment to this post, telling us about (or at least the name of) a short story collection you love or one you're looking forward to reading. Comments that don’t mention a specific collection will not be eligible for the giveaway. If your comment doesn't link to your personal site, please leave your e-mail address for me to use if I need to contact you about your prize. I look forward to reading all of your recommendations, and I thank you for participating in any way you are able: commenting, joining the giveaway project as a participating blogger, or even simply spreading the word.

Persistence and Purpose: An Interview with Charles Conley

PERSISTENCE AND PURPOSE: AN INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES CONLEY

By Erika Dreifus

One July day back in 2004, I arrived at the Prague Airport to begin two weeks participating in Western Michigan University's Prague Summer Program (PSP). Among the first people I met as the PSP contingent gathered to board a bus to the city was Charles ("Charlie") Conley. It turned out that Charlie and I had been assigned to the same fiction workshop. Back then, Charlie was an MFA student in the program at the University of Minnesota. I've followed his progress post-Prague, and since there has been so much to follow - including multiple fellowship and residency awards - I asked Charlie if he'd be willing to be interviewed for the newsletter.

Charles Conley, born and raised on Long Island, is currently a fellow with Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York and was a 2008-2009 fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, The Harvard Review, and Canadian Notes and Queries. He is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant in 2010 and a SASE/Jerome Grant for Emerging Writers in 2007. In May, he will be attending the Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Bulgaria.

Please welcome Charlie Conley.

ERIKA DREIFUS (ED): Charlie, please tell us what a typical day is like for you as a Teachers & Writers Collaborative Fellow.

CHARLIE CONLEY (CC): I do most of my best work when I have a well-established routine, and I've been lucky recently to have fellowships that allow me to do that. The day I'm going to describe to you is representative of probably 80 to 90 percent of my days at Teachers & Writers. I get into the office between 7:30 and 8:30 (how close that is to 7:30 is almost a direct correlation to how my writing is going-the better, the earlier) and drink tea or coffee while I go through my emails and read the Times online. Once my brain is awake, I start writing-for almost all of this fellowship period I've been revising short stories, though I participated with a couple of friends in National Novel-Writing Month in November (I was getting to the office really early that month). I write until about 11:00 and switch over to my fellowship responsibilities.

Teachers & Writers Collaborative is a teaching-artist organization that's been around since 1967. We also publish Teachers & Writers magazine and books about teaching creative writing and literature. My work here has involved researching and writing grant proposals to fund next year's fellowship; working on the "resources" section of our website, primarily the lesson plans; writing for the magazine; observing teaching artists in the classroom; and co-curating (with Carla Ching, this year's other fellow) the 2020 Visions Reading Series. Additionally, I just started co-teaching with David Stoler, an experienced teaching artist, which is just a great experience (as well as being great experience for future work in the schools I might do), and I've had the opportunity to sit in on the planning meetings T&W has been conducting this year in response to the changing Department of Education and funding environments.

ED: For contrast (I suspect!), please tell us about a typical workday at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., where you were a fellow in 2008-09.

CC: Actually, the contrast is not as stark as you'd expect. At Provincetown, I was waking up probably between 8:30 and 9:30, drinking coffee while I read emails and the Times. I'd start and finish my writing later, and the writing day was probably longer in Provincetown (though I suspect I'm just as productive now, despite-or maybe even because of-my fellowship responsibilities). By lunch on most days I'm done with my writing, and if I haven't started by about noon I'm not going to write that day. I've tried, but something essential about the way my mind works just seems to change in the afternoon and anything but the most basic editing makes me feel like I'm working in an unfamiliar language (and not in a good way).

I've never been the kind of writer who can work for eight hours in a row. I try to make up for that with diligence, which is pretty unromantic, and I don't think what anyone pictures when they imagine "the writing life." It certainly wasn't what I imagined.

ED: What changes have you noticed in your writing (and/or writing habits) since you began your journey through residencies and fellowships?

CC: That journey began shortly after I got my MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2006. If I remember correctly, I taught that first semester after graduate school. In what would have been the spring semester, I had two residencies-two months at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center in Nebraska (which I believe you've also been to) and a month at Can Serrat, near Barcelona, Spain-and I've been alternating semesters of teaching, periods of travel and residencies, and fellowships ever since (which I see as three distinct phases).

Even when I'm teaching, it's not a full course-load, so whatever phase I'm in, I tend to have long days with a lot of space in them. In this situation, writing is what grounds me. Getting that day's writing done earns me the rest of the day for myself (teaching a class only earns me money). In grad school-and before grad school, when I had a career-writing was something I squeezed into the free time I found. Now, the day is built around it.

ED: What advice do you have for writers who may just be starting to approach fellowships and residencies?

CC: To find out about these things, Poets & Writers is a great resource, as is The Practicing Writer e-newsletter, where I found out about a couple of things I eventually got. Being friends with other writers and sharing information with them is also helpful (a recent grant and my current fellowship were both word-of-mouth discoveries). Deadlines come year-round, so it's important to keep track of everything in one place-I have a single spreadsheet where I keep track of everything, especially when I've applied in the past and what stories I've sent (so I don't resend work they didn't respond to the first time).

I rarely get something the first time I try, so in my case diligence has paid off. The Fine Arts Work Center fellowship came on the third try. The first year I was a finalist, but the second year I wasn't even a finalist, which was disheartening. Actually, I half-jokingly consider all the applications and story submissions I do as opportunities to practice being rejected. It's one of the essential facts of the writing life-at least mine-and I'm getting better at accepting it.

When I get to a new residency, the first thing I do is figure out what my writing routine will look like in this new place. Where will I actually write? What desk or table is the most comfortable, has the best lighting, has the fewest distractions? How will I get breakfast? Is it provided? If so, at what times? Is Internet available? If not, how will I replace that waking-up part of the routine? (Usually by reading a book about writing before I start writing.) The answering of these basic questions tells me how my routine will go.

Then I try to be friendly. Residencies are a great opportunity to meet artists working in different disciplines from all over the country and the world. There's a real chance to meet people I'd never get to meet otherwise, and I try not to waste it.

ED: Besides your upcoming reading in New York City (on Monday, May 10), is there any other news you'd like to share?

CC: Thanks for mentioning the reading, which is something I'm really looking forward to. [Co-reader] Steven Polansky was a professor of mine at the University of Minnesota, and he taught a class called "English Prose Style" that profoundly affected the way I think about my writing. The reading is a celebration of his newest book, a novel called The Bradbury Report. I just found out I will be one of ten fiction writers attending the Sozopol Fiction Seminar in Bulgaria at the end of May. I've been applying since the first time the seminar was offered, three years ago, and was a semi-finalist both times. So once again, persistence proves my greatest virtue.

At the end of June, I have a two-week residency up in Pocantico [site of the Rockefeller family estate] as a part of my T&W Fellowship. The Rockefeller Brothers funded this year's fellowship, and this is an additional benefit they've generously offered. Then in early August I'll be heading to South America to (re-)learn Spanish, travel, write, and research, particularly a story set in La Paz, Bolivia. The Elizabeth George Foundation was kind enough to provide the funds for me to stay through the end of the year.

In all this, it's sometimes easy to mix up the ends with the means. I pursue these opportunities because they fuel my writing (with time and ideas and interactions with new people), not the other way around. I just finished a story I'm very excited about and feel pretty near the finish line on another. Making each story as good as I can and then doing my best to find readers for it is why I do all the rest.

ED: Wise words to end with, Charlie. Thank you so much, and safe travels to you!

A version of this interview was published in The Practicing Writer.

The Wednesday Web Browser

Zachary Watterson's excellent interview with Charles Johnson focuses on literary mentors and friends. (And don't miss the link to Johnson's take on writing workshops at the end.)
==========
Want some tips on how to write a good profile? Check out this advice from Linda Formichelli.
==========
I was happy to see that Creating Van Gogh (a.k.a. John Vanderslice) took me up on the recommendation to read Kathryn Stockett's The Help, and even more pleased to read his own thoughtful response to the book. Another recent post reminded and convinced me to get my hands on William Styron's posthumously-published The Suicide Run.
==========
Gina Barreca and Steve Almond may have written two entirely different pieces about the recent Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Denver, but I found one interesting convergence in their posts. (Do you see what I see?)
==========
I really liked Robert Lee Brewer's Monday poetry prompt: "Pick a city, make that the title of your poem, and write a poem." And then I realized/remembered why I might appreciate this particular prompt.

Friday Find: Hitting It Out of the Park--An Interview with Kim Wright

(A version of this interview also appears in the April 2010 issue of The Practicing Writer.)

HITTING IT OUT OF THE PARK: An Interview with Kim Wright

By Erika Dreifus

About seven years ago, when I was completing a low-residency program in creative writing, Kim Wright was brought in to talk to the graduating students about freelancing. Her talk that day helped fuel and organize my own post-graduate freelancing efforts, for which I have remained very grateful.

So when I saw that this veteran freelancer had become a debut novelist, I was intrigued. I asked Kim if she'd be willing to be interviewed. Happily, she agreed!

Kim Wright lives in Charlotte, N.C. She has been a nonfiction writer for 25 years, and Love in Mid Air (Grand Central Publishing, 2010) is her first novel. She is an adjunct faculty member of the low-residency M.F.A. program in creative writing at Queens University of Charlotte, and her hobbies are travel, wine collecting, and ballroom dance.

Please welcome Kim Wright!

ERIKA DREIFUS (ED): Kim, although you are a "debut" novelist, you are a veteran freelancer. When did fiction-writing become a part of your writing practice, and how did you begin to pursue it?

KIM WRIGHT (KW): Yes, I worked 25 years as a freelance nonfiction writer, but I always played around a little with fiction on the side. "Played around" may be the wrong term since I desperately wanted to write a novel. It's just that fiction is so tough to publish - relative to nonfiction, at least - that it always seemed like a bit of a pipedream.

I started Love in Mid Air about eight years ago and worked on it hard for two years. Then I put it down for two years and that break turned out to be really important in the life of the novel. Because when I picked it back up I was able to read it more objectively, almost as if someone else had written it. I slashed whole scenes, did a major revamp of the structure, cut out characters...all things that would have been hard to do earlier.

And through this whole process I continued to work on the craft elements of fiction by going to conferences, studying with people like [Queens MFA director] Fred Leebron, and creating my circle of "writing buddies" who are now my first readers and most trusted counsel. There are really three women scattered across the country who are my lifeblood in this process and I can't imagine having gone through this without them. A month I spent at MacDowell Colony was also pivotal, both to building my confidence and connecting me to some fellow writers whom I respect. My single biggest piece of advice for aspiring writers - especially novelists who work on things for so long at a time - is to assemble a support group. Open the door and walk out. You have to know people and I don't just mean people who can introduce you to their agents, although God knows that helps. I mean people who can help you survive the actual writing.

ED: Love in Mid-Air features a late thirtysomething protagonist, Elyse Bearden, who lives in Charlotte. As the novel opens, Elyse is on a flight and becomes acquainted with a fellow passenger (Gerry). The rest of the novel follows from this encounter. I'm curious about the sequence in which you wrote the book. Did you actually begin writing with the airplane and airport scenes? How challenging was it to integrate the several significant flashbacks (I'm thinking especially of scenes involving Elyse and her longtime best friend, Kelly) with the forward-moving narrative?

KW: In the beginning, the book covered a three- year time span. It started with Elyse separating from her husband and moving out with her child. She met the lover Gerry about mid-point in the book. I realized I needed more tension...plot and structure have always been the toughest elements of craft for me and, I suspect, other writers who come out of a literary background. So I tightened the time frame to nine months and had Elyse meet her lover before she leaves her husband.

This created two new problems. Some people might consider a woman who has an affair while married inherently unlikeable. Oh well, I can't help that. But the other problem was just as you say, that the tight time frame and faster pace made inserting the flashbacks trickier. I worked some of the flashback info into real-time conversations between Elyse and Kelly and tried to insert the other flashbacks into points where people tend to ruminate in real life, i.e., when Elyse is taking her walks, in the shower, or driving a car. Isn't that when we all start to think about the past?

ED: At some point in my reading, I began to discern connections between Love in Mid Air and Madame Bovary. Both books present us with a female protagonist, unhappy in her marriage, who is a mother to one child (a daughter). Both protagonists are married to health professionals (Charles Bovary is a quasi-medical doctor, and Elyse Bearden's husband is a dentist). Both Dr. Bovary and Dr. Bearden are loving fathers and basically decent men, if perhaps unfortunate matches for their wives. And, for their respective eras, both books include some pretty steamy material. Then, late in your novel, Madame Bovary actually becomes part of a discussion among Elyse and her friends. With all of that said: Did you deliberately give Elyse Bearden the same initials as Emma Bovary? To what extent were you conscious of previous literature dealing with infidelity and/or divorce and how did those works inspire (or limit) you in the writing process?

KW: I don't think anyone else has noticed the EB connection between Elyse Bearden and Emma Bovary so go to the head of the class!!! (Editor's Note: My undergraduate and graduate teachers in French history and literature will be pleased to hear this!) Yes, I was very conscious of Madame Bovary while writing the book and a lot of the connections you've commented on were deliberate. When the women read Madame Bovary for their book club I have Elyse say that she thinks Emma would have gotten away with it if she'd only had a cell phone. I've always liked that line because it's the sort of thought that triggered my desire to pay homage to Flaubert's book in the first place. Would a modern-day Emma Bovary not only survive, but thrive?

ED: Where were you when you found out about the starred review Love in Mid Air received from Publishers Weekly? (A starred review that begins, I may add, with the words "Wright hits it out of the park in her debut....") What was it like to receive that review? What happened after that in terms of plans to promote and publicize the novel?

KW: I sold the book in December of 2007 and Grand Central said they'd bring it out in March 2010. It seemed like I was going to have to wait forever. Then 2008 and 2009 were pretty bad years for me, not just because of the long countdown to publication but because of all sorts of things that happened in my personal life. I was in a major funk.

So on Monday, January 4, the first working day of the new year, I get up, get my coffee and stumble into my computer and there it is waiting in my in-box, a starred review from Publishers Weekly. I literally screamed. And to make it even better, I had said to a friend at a Christmas party, "All I really want is for somebody somewhere to tell me that I knocked it out of the park, but no one ever says that in publishing. Publishing is about always feeling that you're getting closer but you're never there. They just never pay you those kinds of full out, no holds barred compliments." And then there it was in the review, a first line saying the very words "hits it out of the park." It changed my life. Everyone started paying more attention. And I have the feeling 2010 is going to be a bloody great year for me.

ED: Is there anything else you'd like us to know, Kim?

KW: That I am the most accessible person in the world. I'd love to speak to book clubs, either virtually or in person, I'm always available for interviews online or in any other format, and I love to speak to groups. (Editor's note: Anyone who would like to arrange an interview, signing, book club meeting, etc., should contact Kim's publicist, Elly.Weisenberg[at]hbgusa[dot]com.) And also that I'm working on both a second and a third book. One is a sequel to Love in Mid Air, told from the point of view of Kelly and advancing the story ten years when the women are almost fifty. The other is about the world of ballroom dance. Kind of Love in Mid Air Meets Dancing With the Stars.

ED: Sounds great! Congratulations and thank you, Kim!

To learn more about Kim Wright and her novel, please visit the Love in Mid Air Web site and/or join the novel's Facebook fan page.

The Wednesday Web Browser

Dzanc Books has announced which authors will be included in Best of the Web 2010 when it is published in June.
==========
Poet and professor Kimiko Hahn on inspiration, cultural identity, and the language of science. (Stay tuned for an interview with Kimiko Hahn in The Practicing Writer within the next few months, focusing on her new poetry collection, Toxic Flora.)
==========
Cate Marvin on poetry, motherhood, and the James Merrill House residency.
==========
This is another year when, alas, I will not be attending the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference, which gets fully underway tomorrow. But thanks to Twitter, I'll be following what attendees have to say about it using hashtag #awp10.

The Wednesday Web Browser

Two posts I read a day apart but which seem to me an interesting pair: Sage Cohen on "The Life Poetic: Shifting Our Lens from Poverty to Prosperity" and Allison Winn Scotch's response to a reader's question on "Saying Sayonara to Your Day Job."
==========
On InsiderHigherEd.com, Serena Golden interviews Robert Burns Stepto on his forthcoming book, A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama.
==========
Especially for my fellow Francophiles/Francophones: "De 1980 à 2009, les livres qui ont marqué la vie littéraire française." (via The Literary Saloon, which offers the astute observation that "in quite a few cases...there's a case to be made for other titles by the selected authors.")
==========
Links to some of Jewish Woman magazine's recent content on Jewish women's writing.
==========
Follow me on Twitter!

Quotation of the Week: Ben Fountain

The new issue of Ecotone celebrates the journal's fifth anniversary, and it includes a wonderful interview conducted by editor Ben George with Ben Fountain. At one point, having earlier alluded to the global vision of Fountain's short-story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, and discussed several of the stories within it, George comments:

"[Malcolm] Gladwell writes that the stories about Haiti are the strongest in your collection, that they feel as though they were 'written from the inside looking out.' But I think the lead story, for instance, which we mentioned earlier, feels every bit as much inside Colombia as the Haitian stories feel inside Haiti. Whereas you've been to Haiti about thirty times, you've never been to Colombia (or Sierra Leone or Myanmar). What is the difference for the fiction writer between having been there and not having been there?"

To which Fountain responds:

"It's better to go. It would have been better if I had gone to Colombia, it would have been better if I had gone to Sierra Leone. You never know what you're missing. You never know what you don't know until you go. But you can't always go. You don't have unlimited time and unlimited money. And so you do the next best thing—you try to imagine yourself into these places. The way I did it was to read everything I could get my hands on and to talk to other people who might have information. If there were helpful movies or documentaries, I sought those out. I was just trying to soak it all up and imagine my way into it using that basic research and my own experience in similar places or similar situations. People write historical novels all the time, and in those the writer has to imagine himself or herself into a different era. I think it's just as valid an exercise to try to do that with space, with the caveat that it's always better to go if you can. But if you can't, I think with diligence and a lot of work we can get close to it."

Source: Ecotone 5.2 (spring 2010). Happily, Ecotone has posted the full interview online. Read and enjoy!

The Wednesday Web Browser

John Warner's recent interview with author and professor Philip Graham is one of the best interviews I've read in awhile. The kind of piece that makes you wish you'd had the chance to study writing with the interviewee yourself.
==========
Need a bit of humor to get you through the week? Check out this Rumpus piece on lit journal publishing, featuring a particularly amusing set of "submission guidelines" from Jane Roper.
==========
Tayari Jones reminds us that it's almost high season for retreats and colonies. She recommends Nova Ren Suma's collection of writers' quotations on colony experiences, too.
==========
On the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog, Sina Queyras reflects--and shares others' views--"on the matter of career."
==========
On the Hugo House blog, Karen Finneyfrock describes the path to publication for her latest book of poetry.
==========
Last, but definitely not least, Lisa Romeo offers some terrific suggestions on ways to support the authors in your writing community.

An Interview with Memoirist Melissa Hart

Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood: An Interview with Melissa Hart

Interview by Erika Dreifus

Melissa Hart is the author, most recently, of the memoir Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood (Seal, 2009). She teaches journalism at the University of Oregon and memoir writing for U.C. Berkeley's online extension program. Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Advocate, High Country News, Orion, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Writer's Digest. She lives in Oregon with her husband, their young daughter, and too many cats and dogs.

Melissa is ALSO, like yours truly, a contributing editor for The Writer magazine. (I always enjoy her "Literary Spotlight" columns profiling individual literary journals.) I am thrilled to present this Q&A with Melissa here.

Please welcome Melissa Hart.

Erika Dreifus (ED): Melissa, Gringa is your second memoir. Can you please describe the connections between the two books, as well as what motivated you to write Gringa specifically?

Melissa Hart (MH): I wrote my first memoir, The Assault of Laughter (Windstorm, 2005) as my Master of Fine Arts thesis at Goddard College. Inspired by teachers Jacqueline Woodson and Mariana Romo-Carmona, I wanted to tell the story of the first year in my life after my mother came out as a lesbian and lost custody of me and my two younger siblings. This was 1979; throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, women who came out routinely lost custody of their children to homophobic court systems. I thought it was critical that my story, as representative of many, come to light.

But . . . I was a young writer, and I felt that I could tell the story more skillfully a decade later. I wanted to explore the idea of growing up Anglo, heterosexual, and seemingly devoid of identity in multicultural Los Angeles with a lesbian mom, a brother with Down syndrome, and a deep desire to be a Latina. I expanded the year in Assault to include all the years of my adolescence, from the day my mother left my father to my post-college graduation trip with her to Spain. I'm indebted to Seal's senior editor Brooke Warner for helping me to shape the memoir as a coming-of-age story and a history of my mother's and my relationship, which prevailed in spite of homophobia on the part of both the legal system and my father.

ED: Both of your memoirs reveal a great deal about your family members. How have they reacted to your writing about and publishing your collective stories? How have their reactions affected your writing processes?

MH: My father and I have been estranged for almost two decades. My stepmother and I e-mail occasionally, and she felt that Assault, in particular, gave her insight into our troubled relationship. My mother is a writer, as well, and she's incredibly supportive of my work. She accompanied me on part of the book tour for Gringa. It's worth noting that she asked me not to write about a few elements of our story, and I honored that. My sister is also deeply supportive; she's told all her friends about the book and helped to organize a reading/signing event in her hometown. My brother has Down syndrome, and he doesn't read, but he does enjoy telling and retelling stories about how my sister and I used to dress him up like a girl.

ED: Food plays an important part in Gringa, and each chapter ends with an unconventionally-presented "recipe." How did the idea to include these recipes develop?

MH: I fell in love with recipes in the context of prose stories when I discovered Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate. I loved how her recipes reflected the characters' motivations and relationships. Then I came across Ruth Reichl's books, and then Diana Abu-Jaber's marvelous The Language of Baklava. Both authors incorporate recipes into their memoir, and I had these wonderful goofy recipes such as Frito Boats and my mother's Tortilla Flats which were so important to me as a child. I took so much comfort in food as an adolescent--still do, in fact--and I wanted to offer up some of these recipes to readers as one more way to illustrate key themes and plot points in the book. Food also became a symbol of culture, or lack thereof, when I was an adolescent. I adored my boyfriend's mother's authentic Mexican dishes, for example, and being able to make a savory salsa or a dozen tamales became my benchmark of acceptance into his culture.

ED: What was the biggest challenge you faced in writing Gringa?

MH: The biggest challenge I faced in writing Gringa was not knowing quite what the book wanted to be. Initially, it looked like a series of linked essays that were all over the place in content and theme. My agent at the time, Michelle Andelman, reined me in and noted with great insight that the memoir format might work better as a method of telling the story. In Gringa's next incarnation, I included several chapters between "O Christmas Tree" and "Citizens of the World"--chapters which explored further my problematic relationship with my boyfriend--but my editor felt that they disrupted the coming-of-age trajectory of the story. I cut five chapters and wrote five new ones in a two-month period. I'm a really slow writer, so getting these out and polished on a tight deadline was challenging.

Creating the book trailer for Gringa was also extremely challenging. Last summer, a colleague at the journalism school taught me FinalCut Pro and I became writer, director, food stylist, chef, actress and cat wrangler for this rather goofy trailer.

ED: How did Gringa find its home with Seal Press?

MH: Michelle Andelman shopped the book around to a few publishers, and we felt a particular affinity for Seal and for Brooke, in particular. Seal Press publishes exciting books on unexpected topics related to women, and Brooke enjoyed the humorous social commentary that informs so much of the book. I'm so happy to have worked with Seal; this is a dynamic publishing house with a professional and devoted staff.

ED: What else would you like to tell us?

MH: I teach a memoir writing course for U.C. Berkeley's online extension program which is open to all. I post my upcoming workshops pretty regularly on both my website and my Facebook fan page. I love teaching and working with other writers; I come away inspired and excited to sit down at my computer.

Thank you so much, Melissa!

A version of this interview appeared in the March 2010 issue of The Practicing Writer.

Quotation of the Week: Peter Carey, Interviewed by Gabriel Packard

As a fiction writer, I've never been especially inspired by characters. I know that that sounds awful. I simply don't write "character-driven" fiction, and, much to my discontent, I don't ever find myself "possessed" by a character who simply begs to have his or her story told. When I'm lucky enough to find inspiration for a story, it generally comes from ideas and/or circumstances.

Which is one reason why I was captivated by Gabriel Packard's interview with Peter Carey in the new (March) issue of The Writer. Here's some of Carey's response to Packard's question, "What is the process of writing a novel like for you?":

"When I've finished a novel, I always feel so empty I think I'll never have another idea. So when I have an idea, a single idea, I feel blessed....I'll never ever start with characters. They are there to be discovered. Indeed the greatest pleasure, at the end of the novel, is to have made characters who are multidimensional and complicated."

Ah, there's the rub. You still need to come up with characters who are multidimensional and complicated! The ideas alone can't sustain the fiction!

P.S. Carey's new novel, Parrot & Olivier in America, sounds fantastic (and I'm not just saying that because I have a doctoral degree in modern French history and once took an entire class on Alexis de Tocqueville!). It goes to the top of my tbr list.

The Wednesday Web Browser

A depressing, but true column on the sad state of pay rates for freelancers.
==========
Happy to read about the spotlight on literary translation at the latest MLA convention.
==========
Nice interview with Tayari Jones here. At one point, asked "What is the most important idea a writing teacher can teach her students?," she responds with these oh-so-true words: "Revise. Revise. Revise. Also, I try and teach them to bond with their classmates. Everybody needs a community."

The Theory of Light and Matter: An Interview with Andrew Porter

A version of this interview also appears in the January 2010 issue of The Practicing Writer.

The Theory of Light and Matter: An Interview with Andrew Porter
by Erika Dreifus

Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collection, The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and has just been republished in paperback by Vintage/Knopf. His fiction has appeared in One Story, Epoch, The Pushcart Prize Anthology and on NPR's "Selected Shorts." He currently teaches creative writing at Trinity University in San Antonio. Recently, Andrew responded to a series of questions about his work.

ERIKA DREIFUS (ED): Andrew, the Vintage Contemporaries (Knopf) release of The Theory of Light and Matter signals a reincarnation of sorts, given that the book was originally published by the University of Georgia Press as a winning manuscript within the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction series. Please tell us the story of how the collection has come to be republished and describe any changes that may have been made to the manuscript for the newer version.

ANDREW PORTER (AP): Well, the Vintage/Knopf deal happened fairly quickly, and I was very fortunate it happened at all. At the time, my collection had been out in hardcover for about four months, and because it had done well in terms of sales and reviews, the University of Georgia Press had offered to publish a paperback edition the following fall. Around the same time, I was approached by my current agent, Terra Chalberg, who expressed an interest in trying to sell the paperback rights to a larger house. The University of Georgia Press was open to this idea, but said that they could only give Terra about two weeks to do this, as they were currently making the final decisions for their fall catalogue. I knew that the odds were against us, but I also figured that there was nothing to lose, so I gave Terra the thumbs up and two weeks later she had managed to attract several offers, all of which included the publication of my novel-in-progress as well.

Anyway, I've been around the writing world long enough to know that this type of thing doesn't happen very often, and I still feel extremely grateful to Terra for making it happen. As for changes, I only made a few small ones, and they're probably so minor that I doubt anyone would even notice.

ED: All 10 stories in The Theory of Light and Matter are told by a first-person narrator. You're probably asked about this a lot, but could you address your obvious affinity for the first-person point of view? What do you find so appealing and effective about it?

AP: I like a lot of things about the first person. I like the intimacy of it, for one, and also the idea of assuming a persona, but probably my favorite thing about the first person is the fact that it's an inherently unreliable point of view. This might seem like a disadvantage to some, but I think that the unreliability of it- the fact that every narrator is telling his or her story through a somewhat biased lens-can actually be a great source of complexity and tension.

ED: What do you consider the biggest challenge of the first-person p.o.v., and how do you, as a writer, negotiate it?

AP: For me, the hardest part of working in the first person is dealing with the obvious limitations and constraints of telling a story through just one lens. When I'm working on a short story, this isn't such a problem, but when I'm working on something longer, like a novel, it becomes increasingly difficult to deal with the constraints and limitations of a single perspective. For example, I'm working on a novel right now, and though I'd initially planned to write this novel in the first person, I soon realized that it was simply too large a story to tell through just one character's perspective, and so I switched over to the third-person omniscient and this has really freed me up.

ED: Although I found all the stories distinctive--in U.S. regional setting, in variations between male and female narrators, etc.--there is one story that seems sharply different from the rest. I'm thinking of "Skin," which, at less than two pages, is by far the shortest story in the collection. But it's not simply this story's length that seems atypical. The accompanying compression seems combined with a shift in tone that I can't quite articulate. I'm curious not only about the inclusion of this short-short story, but also about its placement in the sequence as the penultimate piece.

AP: Well, the stories in this collection are largely about memory and the way we reconstruct memory, and so even though "Skin" is by far the shortest story in the collection, I think I liked the fact that it approached this theme of reconstructing memory in a slightly different way. Not only is it much shorter than the others, but it also uses a very different style of narration, beginning as it does in the present tense, then shifting to the future tense, then ending again in the present, all the while reminding the reader that the events of the story have taken place in the past. This isn't something I really do in any other story in the collection, and so I think that's one of the reasons I decided to include it. As for why I decided to make it the penultimate story, that's a good question. I think I was pretty firmly committed to the order of the first eight stories, and since I knew that I didn't want to end with it, well, there was really only one place left for me to put it.

ED: You've mentioned your novel-in-progress. Can you describe that project at all (and tell us when we can expect it to be available)?

AP: I tend to be pretty superstitious when it comes to talking about works-in-progress, but I can tell you that the novel is set in Houston and that it involves a family going through a crisis. I hope to finish the novel at some point in the next year, and so I guess it might be available as soon as 2012.

ED: Is there anything else you'd like to tell us?

AP: I'll be doing a number of readings in New York, California, and Texas over the next few months. All of the details about these reading can be found at my website: www.andrewporterwriter.com.

Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me, Erika. This has been a lot of fun!

ED: Thanks so much, Andrew!

The Wednesday Web Browser

The Poets & Writers Contest Blog takes a look back on 2009, the year in prizes.
==========
Maile Meloy's Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It really impressed me when I read it last August, so I very much appreciated this new interview with the author on the Fiction Writers Review site.
==========
I'm not sure that I'm ready to go public with my New Year's Writing Resolutions, but I'm glad that poet Diane Lockward is willing to share hers. Her list seems practical and inspiring to me!
==========
This week sees the release of Jonathan Dee's much-praised fifth novel, The Privileges. Dee, whose teaching gigs include one in my former MFA program (though I never had the chance to workshop/work with him), provides a mini-craft lesson toward the end (just past the 12-minute mark) of this interview with Leonard Lopate: "You want to take what Milan Kundera called the reader's natural inclination to judge, and you want to frustrate that....If you want to tell a compelling story, you have to do what you can to subvert" certain preconceived ideas that readers may bring along for the read about your story's characters (like the two main characters of his new novel, for example). This is a good reminder/lesson for me, since I think some of my fictional characters may have remained a bit too true to "type."
==========
Finally, just a reminder to those of you with an interest in writing/literature on Jewish themes to check in with my other blog. Lots of good stuff there lately, if I do say so, myself!

Quotation of the Week: Nadine Gordimer

"Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area."

Source: Nadine Gordimer, interview with Jannika Hurwitt, The Paris Review, Summer 1983