Literary Hub

My Essay on Literary Hub

I wrote a piece about what really happens while writing a book (especially fiction, but this can apply to memoir, as well), and Literary Hub—many thanks to them!—published it on the day that MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH came out. I think a lot about the impulse that many writers, especially beginning ones maybe, have toward ten-step lists and formulas, and what this says about how writing is taught. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with lists and trying to find a concrete pathway through the sometimes murky terrain of creating something, but rather that the fever to plan everything out and know in advance what is going to happen—either in terms of the trajectory of the narrative or even what will happen to the book itself—can indicate a desire to dominate a process that is only partly concrete; the rest is mysterious, thankfully, and often out of our control. This is excellent and good news. Click here to read the essay on LitHub.

Meditation for Writers Remote GrubStreet Class

My upcoming GrubStreet workshop is Meditation for Writers, happening through March. I did a short class on this in October—and I’m amazed that these months have gone by (the last blog I wrote was in July). There was a need to both quiet-down and expand in other directions, and I think so many of us during COVID have experienced this, the opportunity (the demand, maybe) to do things differently. It’s been an intensely creative time, as I’ve been working on my next book and projects, and so there was on the one hand the outer—and sometimes inner—turmoil of this time period and ferocity of politics and disease, but on the other, also exciting things happening and the joy of making.

But back to this class! I became a certified meditation teacher because of this exact possibility: bringing it into the writing workshop. It’s hard to express how much I’ve loved this process, seeing what a difference meditation can make to writers, and in particular, how much effect it can have on VOICE. What I often encounter when working with writers, either in workshops or one-to-one, is a challenge around voice, and the accompanying ideas: the right to speak, the right to explore ideas, the right to play, be curious, give life to the vision that’s inside the mind (the one that writers often long to work with but hold back for various reasons). Writing can be so damn tough. Not everyone is called to create, and certainly not everyone is called to be a writer; it often requires enormous stores of energy, grit, a willingness to be intensely vulnerable (and I don’t necessarily mean here the baring of souls; this vulnerability can simply be a fear of working with an authentic voice, being true, a fear of being seen as different or unconventional). Because that’s what happens when we work with the real voice, the deep one. We end up discovering aspects of our own originality, and that can sometimes mean the writer is required to really stand in who they are.

Enter meditation, and this online class, which is for any genre of writer and any level of meditator. We’ll be covering foundations of meditation and mindfulness practice, and exploring each week how these ideas can be applied to writing. For more info and to register, click the button.

Memoir Voice Class!

I’m giving a new GrubStreet class (which will be on-line), coming up on August 6th—a four week memoir workshop that focuses on voice, and I have to say I’m really stoked about it. I love talking with other writers about their process and with all the social distancing, etc., of these last few months, I’m looking especially forward to seeing people and getting to talk shop.

The idea for this class came directly out of the last two workshops I gave before COVID rolled into town. We had been talking about Mary Karr’s notion that the most central aspect of memoir—the one that counts the most—is voice, which led to fascinating investigations about what exactly voice is. We all know a great one when we read hear/read it. There are certain concrete elements to it; after all, the narrative voice only exists through the details we write down. But the most intriguing part of voice is the mystery and atmosphere of it, the workings that are harder to define, yet carry so much power.

At my last workshop I wrote The Right to Speak on the board and there was something like an electrical pulse that rippled through the room. The writers seemed to have instant recognition and connection around this idea, and their personal struggles with it: the right to tell their story, the right to be themselves, the right to make time to develop their project and the right to finish it. It’s interesting that in a part of the world where we have a certain amount of freedom with regard to what we can write (relative to other places where a writer might be routinely jailed, or worse), so many fully grown adults still feel a lot of hesitation in their work, sometimes even consciously or unconsciously wanting to be granted permission or a kind of passage.

So, this four week investigation will uncover what voice is and how to better connect with it (amplify it, play with it, really use it—because it’s there to be used). This is about courage, maybe, or understanding what makes a particular writer tick and how to allow that energy into memoir through the most natural conduit there is: voice. If you’re interested in taking this class, here is a link with additional information and registration at GrubStreet.  

Molly Falls to Earth... advance copies!

I’ve been busy with the beginning of teaching a class, and so haven’t posted yet in January, but this happened on Saturday: the postman delivered, while I was having a winter’s nap, a parcel containing the ARCs (advance reading copies) of my novel! Et voila, here she is, with her dynamic cover. Much excitement and gratitude.

There’s a palpable shift from reading a manuscript in word-processor form to reading it as a bound book. Seismic, really. The book form has a new authority, a personality and a kind of permanence (or an illusion of permanence, anyway, in an impermanent world). It’s on the heftier side, too, being a longer book than my previous two.

So here we go! Molly is beginning to make her way.

Writing Acknowledgments

Last week was Thanksgiving, and I’ve been thinking a lot about gratitude and expressions of it. Eckhart Tolle says, to paraphrase, that being grateful for something is to pay attention to it—the thankfulness can be wordless; the point is the quality of attention. Gratitude has definitely developed a public face and something people post about on Facebook or Instagram. I’ve seen various friends over the years with a daily gratitude practice that then becomes their social media update; it becomes clear that the posting of thanks is something deeply separate from the original practice and maybe even undermines it. Not to knock the saying of gratitude out loud, of course, and we all feel good when someone thanks us (don’t we?), especially when we weren’t expecting it (or demanding it on some subconscious level). But we all know true alignment when we see it, and genuine gratitude, too. Maybe thankfulness is best when it’s a somewhat private affair, spoken between two people or to no one in particular—or not spoken but felt—and maybe that’s when it has the chance to be the most powerful, and something like a wonderful secret. Maybe that’s when it’s more of a practice, something quiet and without agenda.

I’ve been thinking of the last tasks of writing MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH, all the signals that a book is coming together, and creating the acknowledgments is one of them; and so I had to come up against whatever feelings I have about public thank-yous. And it made me wonder if, at the same time that I sometimes enjoy reading the acknowledgments for a book (maybe because you can get another sense of the writer, one that you didn’t glimpse in the rest of the work), I’m a bit uncomfortable with long ones, especially at the end of novels where they can seem over-the-top and unhinged from the real. They can seem to have a competitive heart. Nonfiction is possibly the exception (and I seem to recall the acknowledgments for KNOW THE NIGHT as running to the longer side, in part because it was my first book; would I write it shorter now?)—there tend to be numerous sources to thank and point out, permissions people, even institutions. So maybe what I’m saying here applies more to fiction. 

When I see long acknowledgments, I sometimes wonder if what I’m seeing is really the immense pressure, unconsciously expressed, for status that’s driven by social media (nothing against social media per se; everything has a dualistic nature and a shadow side), something like a desire to protect oneself with a complexly-rendered shield of helpers. Or at least to give the appearance of it. #squadgoals. If I thought that the gratitude was simply gratitude—that is, without another intention behind it—I wouldn’t be writing this. And I would have to include my own experience here, which is that when I’m writing my gratitude I find it impossible to escape the social-construct aspect of it and that the enormous thankfulness I may feel (and most certainly do) and its nuances and surprises, how it is often aroused by very simple occurrences, has little to do with the expectations and social conformity of writing the acknowledgments page. At the same time, getting to that point feels like a privilege, something to be considered deeply and savoured... but then let go of. You say your thanks and hope it is enough. But for whom? The people you’re thanking, the readers, yourself, the cosmos? I noticed in Ali Smith’s latest novels that she simply makes a list of names and that’s it. No indication of what position the person behind the name fulfills, how they rendered help, or how close they are to her. There’s a very spare hierarchy in that it’s a list, but that’s all the hint you get. And I really, really like that. It seems a very Ali Smith thing to do, too. 

Anyway, in the end, to each their own. It would certainly be a shame if all acknowledgments could only be a few words (though using only a few words has become so decidedly unique, that it now seems radical) or had to be any particular way. If someone has really dug down and done their work and made a long acknowledgments that rings with whatever in them is genuine, then who am I to suggest they shouldn’t? It would be amazing, though, to see other, completely different expressions. What if the acknowledgments was just an image—maybe even an abstract one? 

When the day came that I sat down to write the acknowledgments for Molly, I decided to go toward the short, if not the bare list of names. I’ve been practicing metta (also called lovingkindness) meditation, and it suddenly came to mind and seemed appropriate. But whatever I wrote down is only a shade of the real experience. How do you say, once you’ve finished a book, everything there is to say about what goes into it and the people—not to mention chance opportunities, the sheer luck—who helped you along the way? 

Which is maybe exactly why many writers choose to devote pages and pages to it... 

Completing a Novel... Part Two

Photos for MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH

A space forms after a big project; small ones, too, actually. I’ve had this feeling after finishing short pieces, like a story or an essay, and it happens especially after finishing a book. And it happens in stages, because finishing happens in stages—you complete a round of edits and there it is: a space forming, or a pause that’s both bright and shadowy. The world had been full of words and then suddenly it isn’t. Or the words have changed, maybe, neglected ones coming to the surface, or maybe it’s images or sensations. Something, anyway, is different.

Some writers have the next book already queued up, so one project is simply exchanged for another in a seamless word fabric. When I finished my story collection, I was in that position, having already started MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH because it began, literally, as one of the stories before I understood it wanted to be something bigger and removed it. But I still took a pause, or rather the pause took me, and there was that space again, both welcome and uncomfortable. If you’re too hooked on doing, the space can be disconcerting. Somehow boundaries have shifted, gotten bigger and maybe unwieldy. New terrain, or old terrain that had gone unseen for a time. But I know better than to avoid spaces and pauses; they’re maybe the most important “thing,” for not being a thing.

Anyway, the photos above. They’re of Washington Square Park. Molly, my novel’s protagonist, is a contemporary dance choreographer who has a seizure on a sidewalk in Manhattan—right on the edge of WSP. Her seizure lasts seven minutes, which is the crux of the book, as she experiences a confluence of her past and her present, including her secrets, and the people who have gathered around her. WSP is the kind of smallish park that seems big in memory. It has an outsized history and presence and colour. The trees and plantings in it are wondrous. The people, too. The wanderers and settlers and chess hustlers. There’s an enormous English elm that’s perhaps 300 years old, and there are some 20,000 people buried beneath the park’s surface. Walkways weave through that are made of hexagonal pavers. There’s the fountain, of course, and the gleaming white arch, and the beginning of Fifth Avenue. It’s been the scene of untold protests and subversive gatherings, and you can feel that energy when you’re there, all the possibilities.

So, the photos. I took some of them in summer and some in winter. Naturally, the park changes dramatically and when the branches are bare and you can see the curving shapes of them against the sky, there’s a spookiness and atmosphere. Not unfriendly in the least, but certainly stopping. The photos I took are mostly very simple, and quiet, and I avoided shooting people or the arch or the fountain. I took numerous shots of the hexagons, and some of the chess pieces, and a couple of pigeons; also various bits of litter: an old crossword, a folded blue-lined paper, a crumpled napkin. A small delicate white feather. When I shot there in summer, I was with my husband, and the park was full of movement and people. I was busy, focused on my camera, with my gaze mostly to the ground, looking for interesting items. I missed, according to my husband, the bare-chested woman sunning herself on a bench very close to me. And no one paying much mind, this being New York.

Back to space. I realized the photos are a kind of space or pause. The mind can’t help making its interpretations, it has to come up with a story or a meaning of some kind when it sees a picture—it’s almost helpless to the process, I think—but at the same time the image in amongst prose forms a void, or it can. And that’s one of the reasons that I find images within novels and short stories so fetching. There’s a shift, even one that’s in a blink, and something opens up that feels, if you’re open to it, almost eternal. Or something like that.

Completing a novel... Part One

Introducing Molly…

to be released

April, 2020

It’s done!

Complete!

This is my third book, but my debut novel (yes, friends have joked with me about writing a book in each existing genre). MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH is now complete, even the acknowledgments. All the larger edits have long been done, and the copyedits, too, and then a proofreader read the manuscript after that (which is when you really know you’re done). And this being my third go-round, I can say that the copyediting still astonishes me, and maybe a little more so than the general editing, which is its own kind of magic for sure, but one that I more or less expect. The fineness of the copyedits is what I’m talking about here, how every tiny decision in terms of commas and paragraphs and eccentric wording is accounted for, every character (meaning both characters and the letters on the page) noted and gone over numerous times. There are, too, the ensuing discussions in the margins and by email of what is meant by something and should it stand or be changed for something else. It’s a beautiful process, in part because it means you’re almost done, and it involves other people, including ones you don’t know, after you’ve spent so much time (months, years) of being with the ideas and story mostly alone (apart from, in this case, the wonderful company and astute mind of my acquiring editor, and then a few writing friends besides). And if you can get over the closeness of the inspection, how you’ll be questioned on things you’ve taken for granted, the process itself becomes enjoyable, even if it’s arduous (and you don’t want to do yet another read-through, but you must…). It becomes easy to see that great copyeditors are a godsend, and their attention to detail is an art form. And did I mention that it signals completion? Done-ness!

And the jacket design, too. If you’re very visual (I am), maybe that’s the best magic of all. More collaborations and mulling and going back and forth with the (long-suffering) designer. I’ve loved each jacket I’ve had, and the process of finding the right image, the right font. In the case of MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH, the chosen design was one of various iterations, all of them attempts to get at the topsy-turvy atmosphere in the book. The other arrangements and colour schemes were completely different. As the author you get a bit of say, if you’re lucky, but the jacket decisions tend to fall to the larger team, including, naturally, the marketing department. I did campaign for certain things, though, including the title font that you see up there, which, for whatever reason, makes me absurdly happy. If font can make one happy, which I can guess it can. I’ve realized fairly recently that I have a thing for typography and book design and all the small but entirely big details. (WHEN WE WERE BIRDS has a tiny pair of bird scissors on the dust jacket and then a tiny pair of bird scissors embossed on the actual spine, which blew my mind.)

… more to come…