New Year, New Goals, Reviewing, Readings

Reading at The Library of Congress, July 29, 2017 (photo credit: Kundiman)

For the last few years, I’ve written annual goals, reflecting on the previous year, and it’s extremely helpful. I used the Writer’s Workbook 2019 by Annette Gendler, and also used her workbook last year. You can download her workbook for free by going to her website and signing up for her newsletter, which comes rarely and has good information in it.

In reviewing 2018 and 2017, I made note of two milestones I want to remember. They are both readings, and they were both videoed.

1. In 2017, I read from one of my essays at The Library of Congress, as part of the Smithsonian Asian American Literature Festival. It was a tremendous experience, and the readings were recorded. Mine begins at around 1:18. You’ll hear a bit of poet and Executive Director of Kundiman, Cathy Linh Che, introducing me. It’s the largest audience before which I’ve read.
2. In 2018, R. gave his first reading: before an audience of 700. Here’s the link. He’d never done anything like that before. He was in a show called Listen to Your Mother, and he had to write something original and audition to earn a spot in the cast. R’s piece was very moving, and I’m proud of him for venturing so far outside of his comfort zone. The reading is much shorter than mine. Feel free to comment—I’ll pass along any words to him.

 

Late Fall 2018

Our front yard (backyard has the yellow, front has the red-orange)

So many of the leaves in our backyard are yellow. It’s early November now. I have been cutting the rosebushes back, but not the rest of the flowering plants in our yard: geraniums, hydrangeas, and these delicate pink flowers I don’t know the name of.

I haven’t posted for months (it was a rough first half of the year, then recovering), and now where to begin? I’ll begin with news.

In June, I learned I was the recipient of a 2018 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) / New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA) Fellowship in Fiction. This was a huge event in my life for a couple of reasons. I’ve applied for it before and not gotten it. That’s the way it works and I wasn’t expecting to get it this year either. It reminded me to persist. Two, the news came at an important time, when I was feeling discouraged about not being further along in my writing life.

The NYFA website quoted me in a recent post, and I’ll also include my words below:

If your stories are like mine, they might be described as non-traditional, experimental, and poetic. You might start to doubt that what you do has relevance, that it is understood, and worth reading. It doesn’t fit neatly into a category. The news about the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship came after I had received a few rejections in a row for other things. I mentioned this string of rejections to a friend, and she said whenever that happens to her, it means there’s a big yes around the corner.

I’m also quoted in an earlier post about what getting the NYFA meant to me.

Screenshot from the Literary Hub article about 15 Asian-American writers to know about.

In early October, an article in Literary Hub surprised me. Here’s the link:  “The Newest Wave of Asian-American Writers You Should Know.” It’s a list of 15 Kundiman writers. And I am on that list. I love both Kundiman and Literary Hub. Thank you, Tamiko Beyer, for this article.

I spent most of September in Oaxaca City, Mexico, staying with my friend Wendy, who is teaching there this semester. It was terrific to get that much time with Wendy and to work on our writing projects together. While there, I completed an essay on invisible disability I’ve been working on since July. Wendy’s edits made the difference, as did my deadline. My essay will be published in Jan/Feb 2019 in the Kenyon Review Online and I’m very happy about that.

In mid-October I began teaching a new class out of my home—advanced creative nonfiction—part study (we are reading and discussing an excellent anthology of essays by women called Waveform—I recommend it), writing exercises (imitations) and writing workshop. I’ve been working with the same writers for a couple of years now and it’s a pleasure and privilege to do so. I learn from them, too. There’s room for a couple of more writers to join for the next session—which will be in winter/spring 2019. 

Exactly one week ago, I organized the first  Kundiman Northeast reading in western New York (Rochester). The Spirit Room (fierce poets and owners Rachel McKibbens and Jacob Rakovan) generously hosted us: our readers were poet Albert Abonado, activist, filmmaker, and writer Mara Ahmed, and Kundiman Fellow, poet, and essayist Chen Chen. It was a wonderful evening—a chance to hear Asian American voices through the work of three very different writers. Though organizing anything is a lot of work, this event was worth it. And poet and Kundiman Fellow Nghiem Tran drove over from Syracuse and one of my favorite local writers, Ravi Mangla, came, too.

Mara Ahmed, Sejal Shah, Albert Abonado, and Ravi Mangla

Poet and essayist Chen Chen reads at The Spirit Room

A couple of days ago I had tea with my friend Irene, whom I hadn’t seen in a year. She’s also a writer and we were talking about writing and time—we are both working on books. She reminded me of a poem I had sent to her once. I needed to hear it again and she recited it and then sent me a link to it later. Naomi Shihab Nye’s “The Art of Disappearing.” I’ve mentioned it in my blog before—two years ago. I’ll post it here though the line breaks might not be right.

I miss seeing my friends all the time. And I also know I can’t be out and about too much right now—I need to scale back, draw back, stay home to do this work. And it’s fall when we gather ourselves, and for me that gathering is inside. (It’s western New York after all.) I’ll leave you with Nye’s important poem.

The Art of Disappearing

When they say Don’t I know you?
say no.

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

If they say We should get together
say why?

It’s not that you don’t love them anymore.
You’re trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven’t seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don’t start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

 

 

Betsy, Tacy, Sejal, Tib

Do you remember the YA books you read when you were in middle school? In some ways, I never got over them. In my essay, “Betsy, Tacy, Sejal, Tib,” I wrote about growing up South Asian American—which really meant growing up Gujarati in the 1980s—and I wrote about the books I loved as a child and those I came back to again. These included books in a series like The Chronicles of Narnia, A Wrinkle in Time, and books that were geared specifically for girls: Nancy Drew, Anne of Green Gables, Sweet Valley High, Trixie Belden, The Girls of Canby Hall, and the Betsy-Tacy books.

“Betsy, Tacy, Sejal, Tib” appeared in an anthology called Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America (Seal Press, 2004, Ed. Pooja Makhijani). What became “Betsy, Tacy, Sejal, Tib” began as a short story in my MFA thesis in fiction, but what I was really interested in doing was exploring what it was like to grow up Gujarati and Indian American in a predominantly white suburb of Rochester, New York. I sent the original story to writer and editor Pooja Makhijani, who had a call out for submissions to her anthology, Under Her Skin. Pooja was interested in the story (which was entirely autobiographical), and she suggested expanding it. Through the process of revisiting and expanding the story, it became clear to me that this was a different kind of writing—a marriage of both archeology and choreography; both artistic and imaginative—a personal essay—and it grew into one of my first creative nonfiction essays.

This week I spoke to a class at the University of Rochester about “Betsy, Tacy, Sejal, Tib” (PDF in link).  My essay has been part of the reading for this course for the last two years and this will be my fourth time coming in to talk to UR graduate students in the Warner School of Education. I realize now that only some of the YA books I allude to are well-known—often because of re-releases or film versions of the books. Roxane Gay has written about Sweet Valley High; Anne of Green Gables was made into a three-part series in Canada and broadcast over PBS, and Nancy Drew was re-released as series now using first person narration instead of the third-person point of view in the original books. A film adaptation of Madeline L’Engle’s classic, A Wrinkle in Time, hit the theaters this year.

But the Betsy-Tacy books are not as well-known. Here’s a quick description thanks to Wikipedia:

The Betsy-Tacy books are a series of semi-autobiographical novels by American novelist and short-story writer Maud Hart Lovelace (1892-1980), which were originally published between 1940 and 1955 by the Thomas Y. Crowell Co. The books are now published by HarperCollins.

Betsy-Tacy and Tib (1941) is the second volume in the Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace. This story introduces the character of Thelma (Tib) Muller, a German-American girl who becomes friends with Betsy Ray and Tacy Kelly.

The series follows the adventures of heroine Betsy Ray, who is based closely on the author, and her friends and family. The first book, Betsy-Tacy, begins in 1897 on the eve of Betsy’s fifth birthday, and the last book, Betsy’s Wedding, ends in 1917 as the United States prepares to enter the First World War.

I particularly loved Betsy-Tacy and Tib, because of the friendships I remembered from growing up on my street. In all of those books, much as I loved them. I never saw a character who looked like me. From my essay:

In the books I read growing up, there were always words I couldn’t quite imagine. I remember, with a specificity that surprises me, the foreignness of certain colors: kelly green, strawberry blonde…How these series come back to haunt me now, with their sense of ownership over the world, with the ways in which they defined a world…We read these books, but there was no one like us in any of them. Did we think of writing our own? I want to see us. To see the girl I was, the girls we were, back when we lived at home.

Within the “Betsy, Tacy, Sejal, Tib,” essay, I wrote the beginning of an imagined YA book—one that my husband and other friends have suggested I write someday. And I can imagine doing it now—what does it mean to write yourself in a narrative—into a world where you never saw yourself?

The Betsy-Tacy series was set in Mankato, Minnesota and covered the late 1800s into 1917, far away from where and when I grew up but this resonated with me and I wrote “a series about two best friends from the same street who made room for a third. No one felt alone past the second chapter.”

Sejal Shah lived alone with her parents on Pelham Road in western New York State, in a city that had seen better days (“Lion of the West”), that had housed stops on the Underground Railroad….

I did grow up feeling very alone at times, except for books—our middle school was almost entirely white, middle class, suburban at the time, with only one other South Asian American boy in our grade—and he was a close family friend; my mother and his had grown up together in Nairobi. But there were no other girls—and middle school is all about friendships. And of course there were other Indian Americans in the Rochester area. And so I imagined a series about us—about me and my friends who lived in the other towns around Rochester and went to different schools. Here are some of the imagined titles in the essay:

The Gujarati Girls Go to (Hindu Heritage Summer) Camp
The Gujarati Girls Go Skiing 
The Mystery of the Prasaad Plate (A Gujarati Girls Mystery)
The Gujarati Girls Go to Panorama Plaza (to see the latest Molly Ringwald movie—Gujarati Girls Mystery #13)
The Gujarati Girls Get Malaria (also titled The Gujarati Girls Go to India)

My husband and other friends have long suggested I actually write those books—and I want to do that. Because those early books made an impression on me. I loved them and wondered what it would be like to write my way into a book and bring along others who looked like me, but you couldn’t find us in the books in the library.

It reminded me of an essay I quoted from in the introduction to my MFA thesis: Adrienne Rich’s “Invisibility in Academe”—from a talk she gave in 1984 at Scripps College and later published in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985. I’ve been thinking about this essay in relation to my work right now and about visibility and invisibility:

…whether you are dark-skinned, old, disabled, female, or speak with a different accent or dialect than theirs, when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors. It takes some strength of soul—and not just individual strength, but collective understanding—to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which you are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard. And to make yourself visible, to claim your experience is as real and normative as any other…

And my teachers were wonderful, by and large, but there were moments, there always are—of misunderstanding, and something wounding—and not with teachers, but just by being out in the world—moments with other people—and I wanted to make the life I lived at home and on weekends, with our friends who were more like cousins and the language we spoke, Gujarati, visible. Legible. Normative. Part of the landscape and not even the most interesting part.

***

In Mankato, Minnesota (a few hours away from where I lived in Decorah, Iowa) there is actually a Betsy-Tacy society. And the house I rented in Decorah was owned by J.R. Christenson, who grew up in the Mankato neighborhood where Maud Hart Lovelace lived. My friend Sandhya, who lives in Decorah and also loved the Betsy-Tacy books, and I talk about going to Mankato someday, and I’d love to take that trip with her—driving and talking on our way to visit the neighborhood where these books were set.

In the end, two of my great loves will always be books and friendships.

Good Girls Marry Doctors

The New York City book launch for Good Girls Marry Doctors, at The Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW). From left to right: Swati Khurana, Piyali Bhattacharya, me, Jyothi Natarajan.

In 2016, Jyothi Natarajan of The Asian American Writers’ Workshop invited me to moderate the Q&A for the New York City book launch for Piyali Bhattacharya’s Good Girls Marry Doctors—an anthology of writing by contemporary South Asian American women. Piyali asked me to contribute an essay, but between planning a wedding (not to a doctor), helping to care for my grandmother, and teaching full-time, I wasn’t able to synthesize anything in time…at least not something about obedience and rebellion.

Therefore, I was especially glad to be able to take part in the project and its launch in a small way. Readers that evening included Piyali and contributors Swati Khurana, Rajpreet Heir, Jyothi Natarajan, and Ankita Rao.

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop just posted the podcast. Piyali opens the event with a beautiful history of how the anthology came to me. My introduction comes in at about 15:30 and the Q&A happens after the contributors read their essays. It’s worth listening to the whole program. I loved hearing these essays again. And it’s the first time I’ve been on a podcast!

Here are various links to the podcast, and I hope you’ll take a listen:

Apple: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/aaww-radio-new-asian-american-writers-literature/id1297736720?mt=2

Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/m/Ivrhmd2kann66vbbqahjtqi5wwe?t=AAWW_Radio_New_Asian_American_Writers__Literature

Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=154895

TuneIn Radio: http://tun.in/piGyv

 

 

2017 Summer Roundup

This summer careened by, dizzy from travel (Ohio three times; Mexico; Washington, D.C.; Rhode Island; Pittsburgh) and some enormous changes. My beloved grandmother passed on July 31. Her absence is palpable. I am still trying to adjust to the fact that I can’t eat dinner next to her or braid her hair for her (as she used to do for me when I was young); or bring her a jasmine flower from my plant (she loved the fragrance and would lift the tiny blossom to her face, close her eyes, breathe in, and smile); or just sit with her and talk and laugh. I used to see her most days. My parents’ house feels empty now.

I wrote a poem about her when I was sixteen, first published in my high school literary magazine, then in Hanging Loose magazine, and finally reprinted in the Hanging Loose Press anthology, Bullseye: Outstanding High School Writers. R. posted this photo of my poem on Instagram.

Now, R and I are packing up to move from our first apartment to our first home. We bought a house—I’ll finally have room (I hope) for all of my books.

In between house hunting and later-stage hospice, I taught a seven-week creative nonfiction class, which included reading and writing in response to Eula Biss’ Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays. It feels important to be writing about race, place, responsibility, privilege, ambivalence, what we love, what we struggle with, what we hope will change about our country, and how we are part of all of it. If you haven’t read this book yet, please do.

Next on my list to read, re-read, and teach: essays by James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. What are you reading to help you get through this particular time? Please comment and let me know.

Here’s my writing-related news update—

Writing:

My story-essay, “Skeleton, Rock, Shell,” will be published in Conjunctions 69: Being Bodies (Fall / Nov 2017). R took the screenshot of the table of contents (in-progress) above. Yes—that’s Rick Moody and Anne Waldman in the same issue (!!!). I love Conjunctions, and have been published by them online, but this will be my first time in their print journal.

My story collection, How to Make Your Mother Cry, was selected by Paul Yoon as a finalist for the 2017 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction from Sarabande Books. Sarabande will publish the winner of the prize, Tiny Heroes, Tiny Villains, by Robert Yune.

My essay collection, Things People Say, was named a finalist for the 2017 Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Essay Collection Competition, selected by Renee Gladman. More info in the link.

Readings, Festivals, & NYFA:

Some of the audience saying hey. Those are the other fellows smiling at me in the first row.

In June, I was a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshops. Here’s a photo from the fellows’ reading, where I shared my essay about a former teacher, the poet Agha Shahid Ali. When I remember to, I like to take photos of the audience. This was a great one.

Reading at The Library of Congress, July 29, 2017 (photo credit: Kundiman)

July: I also read the essay (published this past April in Mad Heart Be Brave: Essays on the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, edited by Kazim Ali, University of Michigan Press) at the Library of Congress, for the Smithsonian Asian American Literature Festival, with Karen Tei Yamashita and Kundiman Fellows Vt Hung and Mark Keats.

It felt significant to read in our nation’s capital at the Library of Congress, as an Asian American writer myself in front of an audience of mostly other Asian American writers, scholars, poets, and readers. Several people came up to me afterward or emailed me to say that they were moved by the essay and reading. I felt that way about the events I attended, too.

To buy a copy (and/or ask your library to buy a copy) of Mad Heart Be Brave, head over here.

In August, I took part in the NYFA (the New York Foundation for the Arts)  2017 Artist-as-Entrepreneur Bootcamp. Lots to learn about as I gear up to begin offering private writing workshops and mentoring in 2018. If you are a writer or artist in New York State, I recommend applying to this program, which is offered several times a year around the state—the next one is in Albany.

Thanks to Brooklyn-based writer Roohi Choudhri, who told me about the bootcamp. She teaches privately and has a terrific set of in-person and online offerings for writers. Check out her website here.

Other Nice Stuff:

Every once in a while I Google my name to see what the internet rolls back at me. I found this mention on a website library discussion board called LibraryThing. Here is what one user posted about writers of South Asian origin:

6 cindydavid4: Though I’m a big reader of Indian-American writers (or, more broadly, American writers of South Asian origin), and I’ve read some [Chitra Banerjee] Divakaruni, I’m not a fan of her work. I can’t pinpoint why exactly because I haven’t spent enough time thinking it through. I only know that, after forcing myself to get to the end of her collection of stories Arranged Marriage: Stories, I have not picked up another of her books.

These days, the most interesting writing by Indian-American (or writers of South Asian origin) women writers I am liking are: Nina McConigley, Tanwi Nandini Islam, Tahmima Anam, Mira Jacob, Sejal Shah, Tania James, Jade Sharma, and more.

With male writers of South Asian origin, these are most interesting to me these days: Amitava Ghosh, Akhil Sharma, Vikram Chandra — whose Sacred Games is going to be a Netflix series, Kanishk Tharoor, Karan Mahajan, Anuk Arudpragasam, Sunil Yapa, et al.

I’m flattered to be in such company. The other folks have books. I’m working on it.

 

 

 

2017 Winter-Spring Roundup

Reading at Rochester Spoken Word’s Inaugural Speak Easy Salon, Cheshire Cocktail Bar. January 8, 2017. Photo by Jamie McFarlan.

After I reached my 2016 goal of blogging twice a month (twelve columns for The Kenyon Review Blog) plus other posts on my website—I took a break. My last post of 2016 turned into an essay, an article, a repository of links, lists and quotes—not so simple after all. Writing and revising took many, many hours. I wrote about assembling and creating a manuscript, and then two manuscripts, from individual essays and stories—what I spent the better part of my year doing. I worked hard to compile some resources I had found helpful. Many people read “On Ordering Essay (& Story) Collections: To Try & Try Again,” and let me know that. Erika Dreifus also linked to my column in her terrific Friday Finds for Writers. Thank you, Erika! You set the bar high for literary citizenship.

Still, I’m thinking about whether or not it’s actually worth the time it takes to blog. Then I read a post by Ravi Mangla called 2016 Link Roundup, and it’s brilliant—simple links to writing he’s published in the last year—easy access to his work for those who are interested. I wanted to do something similar in this post—an update of sorts—since 2017 has been eventful so far (and otherwise I forget things, my own publications, and what I’ve been reading—time seems to only speed up as I get older).

The year began for me with a reading in January:

• Rochester Spoken Word’s Inaugural Speak Easy Salon This was a terrific start to a beautifully organized reading series. Invitation only and RSVP required. It really had the feel of intimate salon away from the social media trumpeting before or after. Music, craft cocktails, popcorn, a program, a Q&A. A relaxed Sunday afternoon, time to talk and mingle afterward, receptive audience.
• My Advanced Creative Nonfiction class and I will be reading at Cheshire (the cocktail bar) at the July edition of the Speak Easy Salon on Sunday, July 9^th. More info here.

Publications Thus Far in 2017:

Mad Heart Be Brave: Essays on the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali (University of Michigan Press, 2017/ Ed. Kazim Ali). I wrote the lead essay in this just-released anthology about the lasting influence of my former MFA professor, the poet Agha Shahid Ali. You can order Mad Heart Be Brave here. Read an earlier version of my essay, “The World Is Full of Paper. Write to Me.,” online here.

Rochester Magazine (scroll to second essay, “From a Distance”). This was my 1^st publication in the Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester’s daily newspaper—Rochester Magazine is a monthly supplement to the paper) in over 20 years (I had another publication when I was in college). The 2017 essay is about my wedding, and the ambivalence I felt about so many traditions associated with getting married.

The Asian American Literary Review‘s special issue on mental health: Open in Emergency. I contributed a short story, “Watch Over Me; Turn a Blind Me,” and a creative annotation of the pieces that made up the “Hacked DMV: Asian American Edition.”  The title link has more information on how to order Open in Emergency, and about the project more generally—it can be used as a tool in classrooms and community settings—a kind of social justice and educational intervention.

Redux: My short story, “Dicot, Monocot,” about friendship in middle school, originally published in the print literary journal Pleiades in 2002, is now available online. “Dicot” is one of my first fiction publications. Thanks to the wonderful editor, Leslie Pietrzyk— for creating a venue for work published in print journals to have a second life online. Leslie is another true literary citizen. On Redux, you can also read a brief, reflective piece I wrote as a companion to “Dicot”—the story behind my story.

Other:

My friend and former student Katie Duane published a lovely Literary Guide to Rochester. I’m thrilled she chose to feature an excerpt of my story, “The Half King.” This story is one of my favorites as well as a valentine of sorts to my hometown.

Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2017!: I admire John Madera, the editor of the website, Big Other. He’s an example of an excellent writer who is also a real literary citizen, contributing to the larger community of writers and readers. It’s refreshing to see writers championing other writers after the sometimes relentless self-promotion that authors need to do. John sent out a request to writers in 2016 to contribute to his list of new books to look forward to in 2017: my contributions include new books by writers Geeta Kothari and Nate Pritts.

Speaking of other people’s writing, here are some essays and articles I recommend—terrific resources and thoughts by smart, committed writers I know. By posting links here, I hope I can refer back to the essays and that others might read these essays, too. Please let me know if you do—and let the writers themselves know, also. It’s sometimes lonely writing into the void.

Links to essays I recommend:

Karen Craigo’s brilliant and necessary essay, “May I Have Several Hours of Your Time?”  (Thank you, Karen, for writing this. Everyone—at least every woman and every writer and every woman writer—should read this. Let me know what you think. Or better yet, let her know.)

On a similar note, thank God for Melissa Febos’ essay in Catapult: “Do You Want to Be Known for Your Writing Or For Your Swift Email Responses” (relevant especially to women—or maybe relevant especially to me).

Heidi Czerwiec‘s essay, “Anatomy of an Outrage,” in ROAR: Literature and Revolution by Feminist People. You have to read the essay—I can’t summarize it. Heidi and I met at the NonfictioNOW conference in 2015 in Flagstaff, Arizona. In her essay, she references a 2016 column I wrote for The Kenyon Review Blog on trauma and privilege.

Claudia Rankine’s “I Think We Need to Be Frightened” (highlights from a talk she gave at BAM, published in LitHub). On her thoughts on the current political climate and reality in the US. A must-read.

Ravi Mangla‘s creative nonfiction essay, “Seven Months,” made me cry. In front of him. Just after reading this piece, I burst into tears. It was embarrassing (crying in public), but you should read it. His essay appears in the beautiful, newly-launched magazine, LitMag.

Thank you, Neil Aitken, for this blog post in de-canon: “Writers of Color Discussing Craft—An Invisible Archive.” There are links to SO many important resources and articles here. Please take a look and bookmark it. I was glad to see a link to The Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, which hosted a forum about Yi-Fen Chou and appropriation—one of my essays is included here.

On Ordering Essay (& Story) Collections: To Try & Try Again

Ann Patchett’s This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage—one of the essay collections I read in 2016.

Earlier this year, I assembled a hybrid manuscript (short stories and creative nonfiction essays) and an essays-only version and sent both out to several places. My manuscript was a finalist at three presses this spring and summer, which was encouraging. A few of the editors, writers, and friends who read my manuscript generously provided some useful feedback. Then I took some time to consider next steps.

In September, I had lunch with Sabina Murray, a fiction writer who teaches in the MFA program at UMass Amherst. We were talking about the challenges of selling a hybrid manuscript and she said, “Think about when you go to a bookstore and pick up a memoir or a novel. You are looking for a different experience in reading one over the other, right? We have different expectations for nonfiction versus fiction.”

That made sense to me, even though given the interest in books like Claudia Rankine’s Citizen or Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, it is also a good time to be publishing “hybrid” work. For what it’s worth, Edie Meidav, another fiction writer at UMass thought it absolutely possible to shop and successfully publish a hybrid manuscript.

My takeaway: there’s no one or right answer. These are just decisions we make and go from there. The word “essay” comes from the French verb essay—to try. So much of writing is to try. And to try again.

After putting my manuscript aside for a few months, I decided to try separating the stories and essays, which meant shorter collections of each—but I could also see how they read differently.

In December, I picked up Ann Patchett’s This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. As in any collection, I found some essays more compelling than others. Many of Patchett’s essays had been published elsewhere first (and some were the text of speeches), and while there were certainly themes, Patchett has a strong following as an established writer. Readers would (and did) buy the book whether or not the essays all worked together to create a unified whole. Beyond that, of course it’s meaningful and valuable to hold a book in your hand, all the writing there at once, instead of clicking to this link and that link online.

I read Patchett’s book from beginning to end, and did not skip around. I usually skip around. I realized that’s in part why I had a hard time thinking about chronology and ordering my essays or stories—the order of stories or poems or essays in a book usually does not have much bearing on the order in which I actually read them.

On the other hand, seeing the structure, reading an introduction or forward, seeing subtitles (as in Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist and Eula Biss’ Notes from No Man’s Land) did help me to see in part how the writers themselves (and / or their publishers and editors) intended for the book to read. And I appreciated that, could see the value in that.

With a little help from (as Roxane Gay might say) Dr. Google, I found some useful resources:

• Rebecca McClanahan’s terrific and oft-referred-to craft essay, “Forest in the Trees: the Challenges of Shaping a Book (not a Collection) of Essays” in Brevity.
• Nathan S. McNamara’s “How Should You Order a Story Collection?” in Electric Lit.

Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies also has two excellent posts covering recent conference panels on the subject. One is Vivian Wagner’s blog post, “Narrative, Lyric, Hybrid: Crafting Essay Collections into Books.” This post covered the AWP 2015 conference panel of the same title with Renee D’Aoust (moderator), and Rebecca McClanahan, Patrick Madden, Peter Grandbois, and Philip Lopate as panelists.

From Assay:

Rebecca McClanahan began the discussion by addressing the different ways that essay collections can come together. Some books of essays, she said, cohere organically because of subject matter, style, narrative movement, or repeating images. For essays that don’t automatically hang together, however, she said writers have to grapple with a variety of questions. What should one do, for instance, with events that repeat themselves over and over in various essays? Should the writer edit the essays and place a key event once in the collection? What if some of the essays are in present tense and some in past? What about the fact that people in our essays grow up, marriages end, and we ourselves change over time? As McClanahan said, “our reflections may change drastically from essay to essay. There can be several selves on the page colliding with each other.”

Wagner ended her coverage of the panel with this commentary:

I can’t say I came away from this panel with all the answers. I’m still mulling over my yet-to-be-assembled essays. What I did learn, however, is that putting together a book of essays involves more – much more – than just creating a single Word file and piling essays in it until it reaches 300 pages. And that lesson, at least, is a good place to start.

So true. It’s much more than creating a single Word file!

Next, Heidi Czerwiec’s write-up in Assay covered a panel at the 2015 NonfictioNow Conference (I was lucky enough to attend this panel, too): From the post, “Assay@NFN15: ‘Beyond Scaffolding: Constructing an Essay Collection,’”

Audience comment from Heidi Czerwiec: Susan Grimm’s Ordering the Storm contains several theories of how to order poetry books, and Katrina Vandenberg had a great essay in Poets & Writers on how to order a poetry book based on how to make a mixtape, a la High Fidelity. Jericho Parms [panelist] responded that she often looked to poetry books for ideas on ordering.

Audience comment from Robin Hemley: there’s greater importance on the organizing principle, especially on the title of the collection, and how it works as a rubric for how to read the essays together.

I scoured my bookshelves and gathered up books of essays and short story collections and studied them—the titles, where the books opened, the tone of the first line of the first essay or story; how each story or essay closed; where the book ended; narrative arc; whether or not they were divided into sections or parts and whether or not those parts had subtitles. I think it’s worth doing this with any of your favorite books of short stories or essays.

Here are some of the books I looked at (some in great detail and others, just skimming or scanning) listed here in no particular order:

• Joy Castro’s Island of Bones (Essays)
• Adrienne Rich’s Blood, Bread, and Poetry (Essays)
• Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Essays)
• James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (Essays)
• Eula Biss’ Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays and The Balloonists (Hybrid/Nonfiction)
• Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist: Essays
  
• Douglas Watson’s The Era of Not Quite (Stories)
• Lia Purpura’s On Looking (Essays)
• Ann Patchett’s This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (Essays)
• Sonja Livingston’s Ladies Night at the Dreamland and Queen of the Fall (Essays)
• Jo Ann Beard’s Boys of My Youth (Essays)
• Rachel Hall’s Heirlooms (Stories)
• Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams (Essays)
• Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider (Essays & Speeches)
• Rick Moody’s Demonology (Stories)
• Junot Diaz’ This Is How You Lose Her and Drown (Stories)
• Meghan Daum’s My Misspent Youth (Essays)
• Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies (Stories)
• Laurie Colwin’s The Lone Pilgrim (Stories)
• Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever (Stories)
• Susan Steinberg’s three books: Spectacle; The End of Free Love; Hydroplane (Stories)
• Rahul Mehta’s Quarantine (Stories)

Ones I intend to look at:

• Ryan Van Meter’s If You Knew Then What I Know Now (Essays)
• Julie Marie Wade’s Small Fires (Essays)

I found the process of ordering my stories and essays and thinking about how the individual stories or essays speak to one other, themes, etc., to be more challenging than I imagined it would be—even though I had done another version of this process in 2013. Or perhaps I knew it—and this is why it took me many years to do it again.

Finally, I had a really thoughtful conversation over email with Nate Pritts, author of several poetry collections. From his email:

These questions, about ordering, are really so crucial. I think about them a lot. I have much I could say. But maybe first I’d say you should trust yourself – reading those first and last paragraphs to see what resonance there is makes a lot of sense. Also, if your instincts suggest coming up with a structure for sections, I’d say go for it, explore it. For me, sections have always been obvious (ie, series of poems, or seasonal) or mysterious (which is to say, I roughly feel like there is a first and second section and organize poems according to those currents).

Maybe just think about the pieces overall. What shapes or recurrences or narratives define what you’re writing about: interior / exterior, journeying and returning, etc. The question then is, for example, if you can ascertain a rough interior / exterior divide, do you separate them or intersperse them for strengthening?

For poems, I tend to print out ALL the poems and spread them on the floor (or desks, whatever, all over the house) and then just walk around reading them and picking them up as I go as it makes sense, if I’m finding those riffs and connections. If these are shorter pieces, maybe you could do that too? Or maybe you could just start with one piece – is there one that seems like a center or kernel? Then what piece of the other 21 pieces goes before it? Or after it? And start working out organically in waves.

Nate’s advice resonated with me. Before this year, I had no idea how other writers came to this process. Like Nate, I had printed out copies of all the essays and stories and spread them across my office. I could see all of the pieces and move them around as actual physical objects—well before any cutting and pasting on the computer.

Many years ago I ordered the stories in my MFA thesis in the final days and weeks before handing it in and the whole process felt rushed and somewhat random—just putting things together in a word document. In the end, it was a thesis, but not a book.

Maybe assembling a book is a little like taking stock of the year—here we are on New Year’s Eve. What’s your story about 2016? Themes, highlights, recurring images? It’s stepping back and seeing the forest, as McClanahan said— (after, for me, counting up, classifying, and mulling over the variety of trees and various vegetation).

Our country’s story in 2016: The rise of Trump. A loss of heart. The loss of so many gifted musicians and writers.

The to-do list: I still have to research long-term care insurance.

Writing: I bought a new desk and two new file cabinets. I assembled manuscripts and mulled over titles and subtitles and epigraphs.

Obviously, there’s much more to the lists than this, but it’s getting late in the day and this blog post is already long. (And I need to take a shower.)

What’s on your list? What are the important pieces and parts and stories of your year?

I wish you and yours health, happiness, wild creativity, and meaningful order in 2017. And to trust your instincts. And lots of reading and writing.

Commonplace Books & Other People’s Words, Post Election

On the recommendation of two of my students in the advanced memoir / creative nonfiction class I’m currently teaching, I recently went back and finished Mary Karr‘s excellent The Art of Memoir. In Chapter 19, “Old-School Technologies for the Stalled Novice,” Karr suggests keeping a commonplace book: “a notebook where you copy beloved poems or hunks of prose out. Nothing will teach you a great writer’s choices better. Plus you can carry your inspiration around with you in compact form.” She includes other great exercises—memorizing poems, writing reviews, and augmenting a daily journal with a reading journal.

I first came across the term “commonplace book” on a former colleague’s syllabus. Martha and I taught at Marymount Manhattan College, and she showed me her syllabus for Narrative Fiction (English 180?), the introductory literature class I would also be teaching. I loved the idea of this—a reading journal.

Both Karr and poet & editor Mark Pawlak, with whom I read last week, mentioned the practice of keeping a commonplace book, and I feel inspired to keep such a book apart from my regular journal—right now they are combined in one notebook so unless I go back to my journals to flag and cull excerpts from what I’m reading, I sometimes lose those copied out passages. In fact, I wrote out the following quotes from Karr’s book in my journal last week. This post will be a kind of online supplement to my commonplace book—I’d like to try doing that and see if it feeds my writing and teaching at all—making some of this commonplace book visible and available. Ideally, it would also be a potential resource for other writers or my students, but also a resource for me to look back at what I found interesting or inspiring. Here are some of her words that struck me.

From The Art of Memoir:

No matter how much you’re gunning for the truth, the human ego is also a stealthy, low-crawling bastard, and for pretty much everybody, getting used to who you are is a lifelong spiritual struggle. Start trying to bring yourself to the page and fear of how you’ll come off besets even the most forthright. The best you can hope for is to rip off each mask as you find it blotting out your vision. (153)

In her chapter on revision (Chapter 24: “Against Vanity: In Praise of Revision”): “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug,” —quoting Mark Twain

She also quotes from G.H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology (on 217):

I have never done anything ‘useful.’ No discovery of mine has made or is likely to make directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world….Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil, and outside mathematics it is trial anyhow…I have added something to knowledge and helped others to add more; and these somethings have a value that differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the great mathematicians, or any of the other artists, great or small, who have left some kind of memorial behind them.

I’ll add one more quote, not from Karr, but rather from Rebecca Solnit. My friend Gail Hosking showed this to me (pasted into her journal), when I mentioned I’d been crying earlier in the day—still stunned over the results of the election.

The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity, so there’s another kind of success in becoming conscious that matters and that is up to you and nobody else and within your reach.

This helped, to see what Gail had copied and pasted into her journal. I shared Solnit’s words with my students last night too, all such devoted and inspiring writers themselves. I felt better after reading and discussing their thoughtful work.

I’m sharing a couple of blog posts by writer friends, which also helped to deal with the helplessness, despair, and mourning that engulfed me and so many of us this week.

• Holly Wren Spaulding’s thoughtful prayer and post
• Monica Gebell’s letter to her children

Recent News

The Cleveland State University Poetry Center announced that my book manuscript, How to Make Your Mother Cry, was a finalist in its 2016 Essay Collection Competition. The other press that recently awarded my manuscript finalist status is also in Ohio: The Ohio University Press’s 2016 Non/Fiction Collection Prize. What makes this ironic is that the essay I wrote last week for the Kenyon Review was about Ohio and my fear of the Midwest.

In other good news, my essay “Married,” was published last week— in the literary journal Waxwing —Issue 9, Summer 2016. I spent my 20s and 30s going to weddings—over 50 of them (I counted when planning my own wedding last year). I love weddings—they are such joyous events— but there was also a point, in my early-30s, when it felt bittersweet to always be attending these celebrations solo.

My friend Elliot once pointed out that part of weddings is about getting single people in one’s community together—that weddings are a good place to meet people. I met people, but never the right ones. This essay is about that time in my life when I attended so many weddings.

Still of my sister-in-law and me from the wedding video.

“Married,” an essay written about two of many people I did not marry, begins:

We were in the airport. I can’t stay in this moment. You were sweating so much you needed to find paper towels. You found the usual symbol indicating the usual room. I waited for you, by your bags, watched the people on the moving walkway, standing or walking. Here was all of it: the travel and tiredness. The rolling black suitcases and the pale green suits. Read more here.

No One Is Ordinary; Everyone Is Ordinary

Elizabeth McGovern on the left; Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Sutherland, and Timothy Hutton on the right. Robert Redford directed Ordinary People.

Here’s a link to my latest essay for the Kenyon Review, in which I watch a movie from the 80s, get sappy about it, and come out about depression. It posted last week on the Kenyon blog, and I’ve heard from lots of people from different parts of my life—I didn’t know how many people loved and were moved by Judith Guest’s Ordinary People—that it struck a chord for so many.