Book Tour Warrior by Michael Morris

Book Tour Warrior
By Michael Morris

 

It’s been ten years since my first novel was published. For the most part the publishing business still mystifies me. However, one thing is certain. If you have a friend who needs to be humbled, encourage him to fight the battles to get published and then send him off on a book tour.

My journey began in Raleigh, North Carolina where I was living when my first novel, A Place Called Wiregrass, was published by a small press. My wife and I decided that we would scour the southeast, driving from town to town. We would be like Loretta Lynn and her husband. Doo, in the movie Coal Miner’s Daughter. Instead of looking for radio towers and bologna sandwiches we were hunting for independent bookstores and Subway sandwiches.

I was fortunate that the Raleigh newspaper did a big Sunday feature on my novel. The night of the event one hundred people were on hand and not all of them were family. It was a magical night and I decided right then and there that I loved book tours. But that was before the next event.

The following day I walked into a bookstore in distant city where one hundred folding chairs were placed – the difference was no one was there. Not one single chair was filled. “People are probably just getting off work,” the nice community relations manager reassured me. My wife, sensing my nervousness, took a copy of the book and walked up and down the store aisles, raving about the book and adding, “The author is actually here tonight.” God bless my wife. She was able to rope one poor soul into taking a seat on the front row. The other ninety-nine chairs remained empty.

The community relations manager was dressed up and her hair was perfectly coiffed – I think she had even been to the beauty shop. When I offered to sit down and have a one on one conversation with the lone potential reader, the community relations manager protested. She seemed determine to deliver the introduction that she had typed up special for the occasion.  “The show must go on,” she said and cleared her throat. Standing before the podium, she fanned her arm toward the sea of empty chairs. “Good evening everyone,” she began.

After I gave my talk, the potential reader clapped extra loud. “How much is the book?” the reader asked. “Fifteen dollars,” I said. Maybe I can at least make one sale, I thought. Then the potential reader bit her lip. “Hmmm…are you going to be back next week? I get paid next week.” I quickly handed over my personal copy and thanked her for being kind enough to fill a chair.

The tour went on and the numbers for my events never reached the hundred mark again. But I learned a few things. Book tours are important because they give us an opportunity to meet the store owners and staff and to thank them for their support. If they like you, they will at least look at your book and if they like your book, they will hand sell it.

And just when you feel like you might give up, someone comes up to you at an event and says that they read your book. They might even tell you that it spoke to them. The encouragement gives you the fuel to move on to the next bookstore, to eat another Subway sandwich and to realize once again that writing is not so much a choice as it is a calling. We do it because we have to, just like we have to breathe.

We battle on and appreciate beyond measure the bookstores – particularly the independent bookstores – that stand on the front lines, opening their doors to writers like me with unrecognizable names. The independent bookstores are the real warriors. They face battles just to stay in business, with a conviction to connect books with the right readers. So in September I’ll get in my car with a new novel in hand and hit the road, thankful for the store owners who will give me another shot and set up another event — whether I can bring in one person or one hundred.

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A fifth-generation native of Perry, Florida, a rural area near Tallahassee, Michael Morris knows Southern culture and characters. They are the foundation and inspiration for the stories and award-winning novels he writes.

Upon graduating from Auburn University, Michael worked for a US senator
and as a sales representative for pharmaceutical companies. It was then that he decided to follow a lifelong desire and began writing in the evenings. The screenplay he penned is still someplace in the bottom of a desk drawer.

It was when Michael accepted a position in government affairs and moved to North Carolina that he began to take writing more seriously. While studying under author Tim McLaurin, Michael started the story that would eventually become his first novel, A Place Called Wiregrass . His debut won a Christy Award for Best First Novel and was named an Indie Next List Great Read by booksellers across the country. Michael’s second novel, Slow Way Home, was compared to the work of Harper Lee, Flannery O’Connor and Mark Twain by the Washington Post. It was nationally ranked as one of the top three recommended books by the American Booksellers Association and named one of the best novels of the year by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Birmingham News.

Michael is also the author of a novella based on the Grammy-nominated song “Live Like You Were Dying,” which became a finalist for the esteemed Southern Book Critics Circle Award. In addition, his work has appeared in Sonny Brewer’s Stories from the Blue Moon Café II and in Not Safe, but Good II, an anthology edit by Bret Lott.

Michael and his wife, Melanie, live in Alabama.
http://www.MichaelMorrisBooks.com
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Borrowing From the Dead by Francine Mathews

Borrowing From the Dead

By Francine Mathews

A long time ago, before I was a journalist or an intelligence analyst or the mother of two boys, I was a graduate student in History atStanfordUniversity.  As part of the ordeal that was my third year, I was expected to do nothing but Read for Orals.  This is a hoop through which every grad student must jump—seven or eight months of sitting in the deep chairs of a campus library, staring blindly at texts, preparing to answer any question a panel of experts might pose.  I gave up somewhere in month two and read Dorothy Sayers instead.

I discovered, however, that I love history not for the statistics or the dates or the succession of events it records—but for the characters that it brings to life.  Lives of glamour or suffering; lives of crazy triumph.  Lives of utter evil, unredeemed by a plot twist at the close.  Lives, maybe, like yours and mine…except for that fact that they’re over and done with.  History.

I began to look at the Dead through a different lens.  They’re all characters, waiting to be used, their remarkable lives better than fiction.  History is written by the victors, of course; which is another way of saying that history is a fabrication, an interpretation, a riff on what might have happened…or the basis for a novel.  Where would Hilary Mantel be without Thomas Cromwell?  Or Philippa Gregory without that Other Boleyn Girl?

I’ve written twenty-two books over the past two decades, half of them about Jane Austen.  I’ve taken liberties with Virginia Woolf and Allen Dulles and Queen Victoria, and none of them has complained.  My latest—JACK 1939, which follows a college kid named Jack Kennedy through Europe as it teeters on the brink of war—feels like the most audacious borrowing I’ve done yet.  But these books work because they begin with a plausible what-if: a moment of doubt in the official record, a gap in what is known.  Virginia Woolf goes for a walk on March 28, 1941, with a dubious note propped on her mantelpiece; but her body isn’t pulled from the Stour until twenty days later.  What if she boarded a train that March afternoon, instead of killing herself?  What happened during the subsequent three weeks—and why did she end up in the river?

Now that’s an interesting story.  I called it The White Garden.

For these parallel universes to feel plausible, however —for the true suspension of disbelief—I think it’s essential to hew as much as possible to fact.  When I start to mold history, I first want to know the facts.  If I’m seized by a what-if, seduced by its novelistic possibilities, I immerse myself in research until I’ve educated myself on the subject.  Take JACK 1939, for example.

The facts: Jack Kennedy skipped the spring semester of his Harvard junior year to research his senior thesis.  He traveled alone for six months through Europe as Hitler was mobilizing to invadePoland.  He interviewed anybody official, Nazi or otherwise, who could understand English or his execrable French.  He was inLondon,Paris, Val d’Isère, Danzig,Prague,Munich,Berlin,Warsaw,Latvia,Moscow.  We know roughly when he was there from the letters archived in the Kennedy Library.

The fiction: Jack, the son of theUS ambassador toEngland, is tapped by Franklin Roosevelt to act as a spy while he travels through Europe—because the Nazis are trying to buy the 1940 election for Wendell Wilkie andRoosevelt has absolutely no intelligence service.

It’s the architecture of the plot that marries fact with fiction.  I set myself parameters when I’m working with a real life: If I place Jack inMoscow, it must be roughly when he was actually there; but his documented trip toJerusalemfit nowhere in my plot, and was therefore elided.  Yes, I give him guns and secret codes and a bombshell sidekick, but I strive to be true to my sense of who Jack was as a young man—which is somewhat different from the President he became.  In researching young Jack, I’m struck by his chronic and severe illness; by the weeks he spent in hospitals as a kid; by the loneliness of confronting mortality at a young age; by the incessant reading his isolation and boredom encouraged.  If you’re going to borrow a character from the Dead, you have to make him your own. My Jack is analytic, yearning, desperate for connection but fearful of loss; a boy who uses his charm and his smile to keep the world at arm’s length.

In the end, it’s the characters we follow—they act as our guides in how to live.  It’s the characters who keep me writing.

That, and a History habit I just can’t kick.

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Francine Mathews also writes as Stephanie Barron.

Over My Shoulder by Kevin Desinger

by Kevin Desinger, Author of The Descent of Man

I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.  —Twain

When my agent Gail agreed to represent my manuscript, she said there was a rule of thumb that such books shouldn’t be longer than three hundred pages. At the time mine was that plus one, and—this being my first published novel—I assumed we were almost there. Alas, we were not almost there. In the next nine months she and I each reread the entire manuscript three times and removed seventeen pages of clutter.

Fortunately for me, the first round of cuts dealt primarily with what I think of as scaffolding: material needed (by this writer, at least) to construct a first draft. I can’t know until later drafts whether this or that scene or character will matter, so it or he or she remains and gets developed and polished along with the rest. And now, after years of working alone, I had someone basically reaching past me to point at a paragraph and say, “Why is that there?” If I hadn’t seen it as scaffolding, some of those early phone sessions may have grown a little warm.

One afternoon, after a half hour of rewording and tightening, Gail said, “You’re going to kill me for this,” and suggested cutting a full page of dialogue on which I had used everything from massage oil to a spike maul to make it just right. I loved that exchange, but to her it was nothing more than an aside. She had been unerring on her other edits so, stifling a mix of defensiveness and heartbreak, I selected the whole thing and dragged it into a separate file, which I titled “Cut,” and tapped the save button on my keyboard. Without working up a transition, and keeping in mind that I could always put things back the way they were, I reread the chapter. I didn’t miss the conversation in the slightest. It was almost disappointing.

Later, I realized that all the time we were on the phone I had been waiting for her to target those lines, was just beginning to think that I would get away with keeping them when she said, “And one last thing…” I’m sure that part of my attachment came from having worked so hard on them. And part of why I had worked so hard was because they had always seemed somewhat extraneous.

This became a model for the rest of my work with her, and later with Greg, co-publisher at Unbridled Books: before wasting energy over the sense behind an edit, I dragged the material in question into my Cut file, saw that the sentences leading into and away from the removal were contiguous, and reread the section. If I didn’t notice a difference, I simply moved on.

My Cut file grew.

Publishing a novel has been likened to sending a child into the world. It’s time for you to let go now, time for it to begin life away from you, the creator, you who put so much time and effort—so much of yourself—into helping it become what it is. Eventually, you hope to hear that it is doing well.

For me any real sense of this didn’t sink in until after Gail decided it was time to send it around. Greg made an offer, we accepted, and he became my second editor. Because Gail and I had worked so meticulously—questioning the existence of each word, it seemed—once again I thought we were almost there, that with a few tweaks it would be ready. Wrong again. Now working under the deadline of a release date, in the following three months we reread the manuscript another three times and cut another seventeen pages.

We were two phone conversations into the process when I realized that we were no longer working on my novel (and here I felt a brief panic); we were working on our novel. I stopped in the middle of whatever I was saying and let the information penetrate. I wonder now if Greg can sense this as it happens, when the first-time novelist suddenly realizes that the once privately owned piece of writing has become community property.

Toward the end of the process, as we were ironing out the tiny details, I apologized for missing some pretty obvious errors. (How many times can I look at “I was just working on it just now,” and not see the repetition?) Greg said, “Well, you must be snow blind!” Indeed, I was staring into a blizzard of meaningless words.  With the deadline looming, I completed the final adjustments and gave a parent’s sigh.

Now that the book has been published the Cut file is no longer active. Along with other files created around that time, it is tucked into a folder whose title I don’t recall. For the sake of this essay I considered looking, but it’s more true to my effort here to shrug it off. I imagine if I were to try reading through all those sentences and paragraphs, I would wonder why any of it ever mattered to me. I won’t, though, not even out of curiosity. I have no interest in opening the door to that dusty room.

Read our review of The Descent of Man; http://wp.me/p2DwkQ-7L2

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Kevin Desinger graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop before moving to Portland, where he wrote for the Willamette Week, the Oregonian and a number of regional publications. An earlier short story appeared in The Missouri Review. This is his first novel.

Outbreak

Outbreak

Overview

In this month’s column, I’d like to discuss a serious medical issue. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people suffer from this grim condition. It’s not going away, hopefully catching, seldom malignant, and often inconvenient. My significant other and I both suffer from this disorder, and its brought us closer together, as we have started to spare others the awesome devastation brought on by our outbreaks.

Simply put, we are word whores.

Symptoms that indicate word whores, or double dubs, include texting each other obscure words, such as cariad, plinthite, bouncebackability, toposequence, slickensides, or revanche; using “big words” in conversation; asking each other’s favorite words; and reading books that don’t include Stephanie Plum, Bella or Jacob.

Diagnosis and Tests

You know you suffer from double dubs when you find yourself looking up words you don’t know in the dictionary. You also may own a thesaurus or have one bookmarked on your web browser. People may tell you that “normal people don’t talk that way,” or a quizzical look, cocked head, and blank stare may occur following a conversation at the bar over beers. Due to your love of words you may be ostracized by friends and loved ones, given strange looks when speaking in public places, and take to reading the dictionary alone in the bathroom at 3am, especially during serious outbreaks of double dub.

Treatment and Care

There is no cure for word whores. Usually this disease is present in young children and persists into adulthood. Symptoms may alleviate with age, may wax and wane as life progresses, but as of this writing no cure has been discovered by medical professionals.

Home Remedies

Alleviation of symptoms through home remedies is so far the most effective option. Alternatives for lessening the indications this disease include reading Jane Austen, George Eliot, Salmon Rushdie, or books on quantum theory. Herbal teas, namely ones with complicated names, have been shown to ease the anxiety that comes from the public ridicule and snubbing by family members. Also the reading French cookbooks and learning the proper pronunciation of Steak Provencal has been shown, in some unofficial studies, to reduce symptoms in some sufferers.

Other treatment methods include implementing a multivitamin and yoga routine to help control spontaneous outbreaks of verbosity. A diet consisting mainly of vegetables and fruits, with grass-fed meats, free-range brown eggs, and whole grains, with plenty of water and teas, also aids in controlling symptoms. The most important thing is to stop word whore symptoms before they start. Curb your tongue at parties and keep a varied and balanced diet of words, from science, classics, and popular books. Above all, no matter what, do not read while walking. Traffic accidents involving double dub suffers have been reported nearly eight times the national average, especially in front of libraries and post offices.

Finding Help

The important thing to remember, fellow double dubs, you are not alone. Reach out to the greater word whore community. Really, we are everywhere. Reading the Wall Street Journal, stuck in book stores, even custodians cleaning toilets and hiding in the men’s stalls with yesterday’s newspaper and Soy Bean Journal. This is not a disease you have to suffer in silence. It’s time we no longer live in shame. While there is no cure for being a word whore, the best treatment options include voracious reading, attending spelling bees if you have children, and taking a pillow and lavender tea with you and the dictionary to the bathtub at 3am.

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Axie Barclay, is a Michigan writer with a cow-habit. Having discovered the joys and potential for growth inalternative agriculture, she quests ever longer and harder for ways to combine farming and writing into a business. When not milking cows, making disgruntled noises at the latest disgusting thing the heeler dogs dredge up, riding horses, or keeping the fence up around her small beef herd, she’s holed up reading an eclectic array of books or tapping out pages. When not working, she enjoys kicking back with her honey, family, and friends at a bonfire with some beers. Chat her up on Twitter and Facebook, /axieb, or http://barclayfarmsandlit.blogspot.com where she delves into literature and agriculture with a relish… and occasionally ketchup. Soon to be homemade.

Blogger Power

Blogger Power

By Sandra Brannan

Imagine someone trying to murder an 80-year-old woman in hospice during her last mile in life’s journey.  You’ve just envisioned the first chapter of Widow’s Might, the third book in my Liv Bergen mystery thriller series.  What would possibly motivate a person to take such a risk when the only gain would appear to be a handful of days difference in the timing of the woman’s ultimate demise?  She’s already in a drug-induced semi-conscious state to combat the pain, too far gone to realize her husband was murdered three days earlier.

I asked myself that question, a seemingly implausible ‘What If’, to create a plot with the goal of suspending a reader’s disbelief.  I use this technique with creating all my stories.  The premise for In The Belly Of Jonah, my debut novel in 2010, was whether or not I could convince readers that a jet stream of water could be used as a murder weapon.  Or more accurately, as a sculptor’s chisel for a very disturbed artist.

Lot’s Return To Sodom, the second book in the Liv Bergen series, was inspired by the all-too-real Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, an event hosting a half million bikers who descend annually on a tiny town in South Dakota, twenty minutes from my hometown in the Black Hills.  As a teenager, my softball coach – an FBI agent – told me stories of his work at the rally, stories that weren’t common knowledge or told to the press.  Each year after the wave of leather-clad tourists ebbed, the bodies of a woman or two who’d gone missing were found in the woods.  Of course, like so many others where I live, I assumed the murderers had to be one of the many motorcycle gang members attending the rally.  In fact, they weren’t responsible.   So I used the concept of pre-judging outlaw bikers to create a ‘What If’ sceneraio.  What if a local resident used the infamous motorcycle rally as a cover for a murder or two?  And why not frame a biker gang member in the process?

My ‘What If’ scenarios double as the base for a query letter or ‘pitch’ to agents.  The readers decide if I successfully executed the storyline around the unlikely premise.

As crazy as the idea sounds for Widow’s Might – a killer attempting to accelerate the inevitable end of an 80-year-old – the early reviews are offering me a whole lot of love for my efforts.   Starting with ‘crazy’ and ending with ‘love’ is the formula for my success as a writer.

First, I was crazy enough to think I could actually write, considering I’m an engineer, operating from the left side of my brain.  But I loved writing so much, I wrote ten novels before ever getting published.  Second, I was crazy enough to think I could actually be one in a thousand writers who ever get published and loved achieving within my first month the 7% of published authors who ever sell more than 2,000 books.  Finally, the craziest part of this journey is that I attribute my success in no small part to two very important segments of the book world who are often overshadowed by their Goliath-like counterparts:  independent booksellers and bloggers.

Because of the ABA’s Indie Next List Notable award for In The Belly Of Jonah in September 2010, I had instant credibility as a debut author and my books found their way in stores nationwide.

But being in stores isn’t enough to sell books.  Someone has to drive readers to buy the book while shopping at those stores and bloggers were kind enough to do that for me.

I had the distinct honor and privilege to attend the First Annual Bloggers Convention following BEA in New York City in May 2010 and it boggles my mind how I ever ended up there, of all places.  I remember not having a clue what it was all these people did, although I found each and every one of them the most charming, intelligent, and well-read people I’d ever met in my life.  Hopefully, bloggers will forgive me for this, but one notable blogger asked me early in our conversation if I even knew what blogging was or how to blog to which I replied, “No ma’am. I haven’t a clue how to blog, but I know how to clog.  My mother is Irish and she taught all nine of us kids.”

Thank goodness bloggers have a sense of humor and appreciate honesty!

Two years later, I am releasing my third book, Widow’s Might, on August 7^th, 2012, working on my fourth, because of bloggers.  I definitely know what blogging is now and greatly appreciate the power bloggers have to spread the word about authors like me.

Call me crazy, I love bloggers!

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Sandra Brannan debuted as an author in 2010 with In the Belly of Jonah, the first installment of her acclaimed Liv Bergen mystery series. The novel was chosen as an Indie Next List Notable by independent bookstores and librarians across the country and went into a second printing just one month after its release.

Sandra’s success in the literary world led to her being named one of the top 25 most fabulous women by Black Hills Magazine.

Much like her character Liv Bergen, Sandra has spent her career in the mining industry. Working her way up from day laborer in the company her grandfather founded to a top executive in the family business wasn’t easy, as Sandra often received threats from those opposed to mining. These life experiences gave her a first-person perspective into the high-stakes scenarios of which she writes.

Sandra was raised the seventh of nine children in loving home not far from Rapid City, South Dakota. After living in Colorado (the setting for In the Belly of Jonah), Wyoming, Washington D.C. and Washington state, Sandra returned to her hometown where she lives with her husband. Their budding family consists of four boys and three grandchildren.

The second book in her mystery-thriller series, Lot’s Return to Sodom, releases June 1 and revolves around the legendary Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota. Sandra’s forthcoming titles include Widow’s Might and Noah’s Rainy Day.

http://sandraSandra.com/author/

Follow Sandra on Twitter: @SandraBrannan

Writers on Writing: If You Can’t Run…

If you can’t run….

            By Patricia Dunn

“If you don’t love to write, do something else. There are so many things far less painful.” Short story writer and teacher Grace Paley said this at a lecture I attended during my first year in graduate school.

For years I quoted her on the first day of every writing class I taught, and then a student said to me, “I don’t love to write. I just don’t have any other choice.”

Now I tell my students, “If you have a choice not to write, run now, leave this class… We will refund your money… GO… Save yourself.” Of course there will be moments where you will be thrilled with something you’ve written, a sentence, a paragraph, a whole chapter, but these are the suck-you-in moments.  It’s like playing the lotto. That one winning ticket, no matter how small the payoff, gives us the illusion that we will win again and again.

Just like it only takes that one story written effortlessly, yes, we got it right on the first try, no revision needed, to keep us needing to write. After hours of torment spent at our computers with nothing to show for it but aggravated carpal tunnel syndrome and intensified neck and back pain, we need to keep writing. We’re hooked. We don’t have a choice.

Addiction?  Compulsive personality disorder? Out- of-our-freakin’-mind-syndrome? I don’t know the reason why many of us can’t walk away from writing.  I will leave the analyzing to the psychologists, psychiatrists, podiatrists, or anyone else who cares to figure out why some of us can’t walk away from writing, even when it hurts.

Instead, I accept my lot in this life, and offer these words of advice: If you can’t run, and you must write, then don’t suffer it alone; find yourself a writing support group.  Do this now. Fortunately, unlike playing the lottery, if you’re open minded, patient, and willing to keep trying, the odds of finding the winning fit are in your favor.  Still, finding a group of like-minded, like-spirited, and just plain likeable writers that’s the right fit takes time.  For me, it took two years out of graduate school, working with different groups of people, to find the support group I’ve been with for eight years now.  As with revising your work, it can take lots of trial and error, patience and frustration to get it right, but when you finally get it to work, it works.

Of course, you can try other options first. I did. There are books upon books–hardcover, paperback, eBook–that offer suggestions on how to, or what to, write and how to keep writing. I’ve probably read most of them. And many have taught and inspired me, but what has kept me writing through divorce, my son’s battle with cancer, and my self esteem being so low to the ground that it was only visible after I tripped over it, was my writing support group.

Five writers who will critique my work and help me cement the cracks in my plot structure and develop the right balance between my characters’ inner and outer worlds. Writers who offer me the feedback that helps keep my writing alive. Women who also understand that who we are as writers is not defined by any one particular.  We are all the words we have ever written and ever will write– red cells, white cells, platelets, plasma cells and all the other thousands of components that allow us to breathe and bleed and survive the writer’s life.

Every Friday night, and in summer months every other Friday night, I meet with five other woman, all writers, mothers, and partners, and a slew of other things that helps them to get me, and for me to get them. It’s not about what genre we write in or about what subjects and themes we explore. It’s chemistry. A shared connection that inspires enough trust among us that no matter how insane, zany, depressed, zippy, or pissed off we act, we know we will not be judged. Okay, sometimes we do judge each other, but we understand that it comes from a place of respect and the knowing that we’ve all been there and will be there again. We’ve all had that rejection that we couldn’t just “get over.” That one rejection that we crawled up in bed with swearing we would never write again. That’s when my writing support group comes calling, emailing, pounding at the door, and says, “I get it. Now get out of bed and get your ass writing.” Actually, that’s the kind of thing I would say. Gloria says, “I hear you.” Jimin says, “You should write about how you feel.” Kate–“It does suck. It does.”  Alex–“Oh honey, I’m so sorry.” And Deb, “Your work is great. They’re idiots.”

We trust each other. We believe in each other. We have each others’ backs.

Usually, we meet in our living rooms, or at some local eatery where the wait staff doesn’t mind us sitting for hours on end. We moan and cheer about writing, of course, but mostly about life. All that life gives us, takes from us, and at times smashes in our face.

When my son was receiving chemotherapy and living at the hospital more than at home, the support these woman gave me, sitting at my side on brown vinyl couches in the patients’ family room, helped me to write about what I couldn’t talk about. And when a publisher made an offer on my book contingent on edits, these woman were there for me, chapter by chapter, and from one chemo treatment to the next.

We don’t let each other give up. We trust. We believe. And we write.

Go now. Find a group of two, three, four, or five other writers where together you can write through your lives, about your lives, and, when necessary, around your lives.

Let’s face it, running isn’t an option.

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Patricia Dunn’s debut novel, Rebels By Accident (Aug. 16, 2012, Alikai Press) tells the story of a troubled teen sent to Cairo who finds revolution is everywhere, including in ourselves. Dunn was the managing editor of Muslimwakeup.com, America’s most popular Muslim online magazine from 2003-2008. She has an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College where she also teaches.

Her writing has appeared in Global City Review, where she edited the post-9-11 International Issue. Salon.com, Women’s eNews, The Christian Science Monitor,
The Village Voice, The Nation, L.A. Weekly and other publications have featured her writing.

Her work is anthologized in Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies, from Kent State University Press (2006); Progressive Muslim Identities: Personal Stories From the U.S. and Canada, Muslim Progressive Values; and most recently in the bestselling anthology, Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women, Soft Skull Press. She is featured on WISE Muslim Women.

Dunn was raised in the Bronx, became a political activist while living in Los Angeles, has traveled throughout the Middle East, and lived in Jordan and Egypt before settling back down in New York where she lives with her teenage son and her toddler dog.
Website: PatriciaDunnAuthor.com
@shewrites Rebels By Accident
JKSCommunications

Interview with Rick Niece, Author of The Band Plays On

PBR: The Band Plays On is a heartfelt tribute to your father, Lewis Niece. Describe the legacy he created in DeGraff. What made him so beloved among his students? What is he doing now?
Rick Niece: My father taught music to all students, grade 1-12, in DeGraff’s one-building school district that housed all grades under the same roof. His wide range of conducting/teaching responsibilities included the concert band, marching band, chorus, and Music Appreciation courses. His success as a teacher involved one simple formula: care about your students and show them respect, and, in return, they will care about you and show you respect. When my father was the music teacher in DeGraff, the high school averaged 150 students. From that number, his bands averaged 80 players and his choruses 100 singers. Although quality was important to my father, participation and a life-long respect for music were even more important.
My mother passed away a few years ago, and my dad still mourns her loss. Now retired, he lives six months a year in Tucson, Arizona, and six months in Arkansas, renting the guest house beside the President’s Home on the University of the Ozarks’ campus in Clarksville. He still cherishes being around students.
My father continues to play the piano, and quite remarkably, he has memorized six different programs, with thirty songs per program, of music from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. His new “mission” is to play for nursing homes and retirement center residents who appreciate hearing the music of their past. Even though he is 89, Dad still plays a mean piano.

PBR: You are a lifelong educator and a university president. What lessons did you learn from your father? What influence do you hope to have on the students in your charge at the University of the Ozarks?
Rick Niece: At first, I was hesitant to become an educator because I feared I would spend my career in my father’s shadow. In time, I established my own credibility and, as an administrator, eventually took a different path than my father did.
From my father, I learned a simple, yet often forgotten lesson—students always come first. Students are the purpose for schools and education. I never, in all my different roles within this magical profession, have forgotten that.
The influence that I hope to have on students as a University President is being a servant leader. I am not embarrassed to have students see me do menial tasks: making coffee, moving chairs, picking up litter on the sidewalk, etc. In order to teach the principles and rewards of servant leadership, you have to be a servant leader yourself.

PBR: The Band Plays On is filled with so many captivating memories and stories. Which is your favorite? Why?
Rick Niece: Selecting a favorite story or memory from my book is a difficult challenge. They are all important, and that is why I have kept them carefully pocketed over the years.
On the humorous side, I like my recounting of the elementary school years and my teachers. My second-grade experience was a riot to remember, but a nightmare to live through at that tender age.
The tragic story of “Miss Hucklecindy” was the most difficult one for me to write, but I captured that day and what I felt throughout the ordeal in a meaningful, respectful way. A couple of years ago, I asked Teri, the sister of Cindy (Miss Hucklecindy), to read the chapter. I wanted to be certain she was comfortable with my personal account of that horrid day. She appreciated how I captured the events and memorialized Cindy and her father.

PBR: Twice in the book, you address the death of dear friends. How does losing a loved one change a person? How did it most affect you?
Rick Niece: Losing a friend at any age is difficult, but through the eyes of a child, it is mystifying and without logic. People are not supposed to die young. The best way to describe how the deaths affected me is to quote from the book.
“When friends die, especially when they die young, their deaths stay with you. I sometimes wonder why I was given a full lifetime and they were not. I do not have an answer, but I am grateful to live the question.”

PBR: What’s next in the Fanfare for a Hometown series? After you retire in 2013, what’s next for you and Sherée?
Rick Niece: This year is my last year in the magical profession of education. Forty-five years are enough for one career. For the first ten years I was a teacher. The past thirty-five years I have served as an administrator, with the final seventeen as a University President. I have been blessed by my career and with Sherée, my wife.
Although Sherée and I are both Ohio natives, we will retire in Arkansas. We love the friendly people, beautiful environment, and accommodating weather. We are retiring in Hot Springs Village—located about twenty minutes from historic Hot Springs—a village of 15,000 inhabitants located within 26,000 acres of forest. We are preparing the Hot Springs Village house for our arrival—a house with a 38 mile view of acres of forest and two mountain ranges.
We have already purchased one piece of furniture for our new house—in which we will move after my retirement on July 1, 2013—and that is a writing desk. The desk will sit in the middle of our sun room, a room with a big window and an even bigger view. I am looking forward to full days of writing, as opposed to my current schedule. Now, I try to steal an hour or two to write while waiting in airports, flying on planes, or while Sherée chauffeurs us to visit alumni, donors, and friends of the University of the Ozarks. Book 3 in the Fanfare for a Hometown series will be produced during my newly found, greatly appreciated retirement days.
We have two other long-dreamed about plans. We will travel more widely and more frequently, something we love to do. And when at home, we will dine alone. That will be a welcomed luxury. During our years at Ozarks, we have hosted over 40,000 guests at the President’s Home for dinners, receptions, and picnics. That is a lot of “Guess who’s coming to dinner” guests.
In our new home, we are planning to convert the dining room into a piano room. We will not own a dining room table. Our plan is to dine on two TV trays. And, on occasion, we may not even answer the door. If you want to visit us, you will need to call ahead for reservations.
Read Portland Book Review’s review of The Band Plays On

Writers on Writing: Unseen Beginnings

UNSEEN BEGINNINGS

By Katherine Webb

Two very different events caused the initial spark of the story that was to become The Unseen to ignite – one which took place almost a hundred years ago, the other just a few years ago.

Firstly, in 1917, was the case of the Cottingley fairies. This was a set of photographs taken by two schoolgirls in the north of England, which seemed to prove the existence of fairies. The pictures show the girls watching and playing with a variety of sprites from tiny, delicate female figures in slip dresses to ugly gnomes in tights and jerkins. As a child I was desperate to believe that the pictures, and therefore the fairies, were real. What fascinated me just as much as I grew up, however, was that so many educated and respected adults at the time the pictures were taken were equally prepared to believe in them.

The more recent event that inspired the book was the excavation of a mass grave of British and Australian soldiers killed at the battle of Fromelles, in Northern France, during the First World War. Archaeologists working with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission made amazing and terribly poignant discoveries as they worked to identify the dead – personal items like tokens from sweethearts, and other things you would never expect to survive so long in the ground. Having travelled to the WWI battlefields in Belgium in the past, I had always been fascinated and deeply moved to learn of the frequent discoveries of unidentified soldier’s remains made near the battlefields. Here, at Fromelles, was evidence that even when uniforms had perished, and ID tags had been removed, still enough could survive the long interment to allow the men to be identified.

And if a bus ticket could survive, then couldn’t a letter? A series of letters? And what if the quest to make such an identification led to the uncovering of more than just a name? What if it led to the discovery of a mystery? The solving of a hidden, long-forgotten crime? This at once became the mission of my contemporary character, Leah; a freelance journalist desperate for a story to take her mind off the disastrous aftermath of a love affair. And the long-dead soldier she eventually identifies…well, he is at the centre of events a hundred years earlier, when life in a peaceful village rectory is turned upside down by a series of escalating events.

This was where my interest in the Cottingley fairies came into play. Perhaps the most famous believer in the pictures was the author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A follower of Theosophy, an east-meets-west spiritualist religion that was growing in popularity, Conan Doyle wrote a series of letters and articles at the time in which, behind all of his careful consideration and evaluation, you can just about smell how desperate he is to believe in the fairies, how excited the idea that here could be definitive proof makes him. Later on in life, the little girls themselves, Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright, admitted that they had faked the photographs with the help of paper cut-outs. All the publicity at the time had made them too afraid to come clean, but to her dying day Frances insisted that there had been fairies at Cottingley, and that they had only faked the pictures to prove as much to the world. This idea really struck me – the idea of using a fake to prove that something is real…

So the character of Robin Durrant was born; a charming and ambitious young man, determined to make a name for himself in the field of Theosophy. This character, and that of Cat, the rebellious, politically astute new housemaid, came to represent all the new ideas and movements that were beginning to shake the solid foundations of the Edwardian world in England. And who better to reflect how hard these new ideas might be for some people to assimilate than a naïve country vicar and his even more naïve young wife? So these four people are brought together in a small village where nothing much ever happens, during the long, hot summer of 1911, and the clock is ticking to find out who will reach their breaking point first.

The Unseen became a story at once about the thrill and healing power of uncovering something long buried, of sharing a secret; and about how dangerous the desire to believe in something can be. It’s a story about just how much the world had changed in the one hundred years between 1911 and 2011; and also about how human beings, in essence, never change. I hope that people will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

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Katherine Webb was born in 1977 and grew up in rural Hampshire, England. She studied History at Durham University, has spent time living in London and Venice, and now lives in Berkshire, England. Having worked as a waitress, au pair, personal assistant, potter, bookbinder, library assistant, and formal housekeeper at a manor house, she now writes full time.

7.1.12: From the Editor: YA-YA Readerhood

YA-YA Readerhood

I love young adult (YA) books, and I’m not alone in that, either. Just ask the 116 million Twilight fans and the 450 million Harry Potter fans. They’re good stories, engaging and striking a chord within each of us in one way or another. Both of those particular series are categorized as young adult fiction novels, but that didn’t discourage readers of all ages to jump on the bandwagon and see what all the lore was about.

Not all YA books capture our hearts, but most of them make a real effort to do so and succeed. That category encapsulates many different genres within itself, such as romance, science fiction, mystery, and so on. There’s really something for everyone. It’s a huge market for the right writer and publisher. I’m sure that many publishers are looking for the next J.K. Rowling, Stephanie Meyer, S.E. Hinton, Judy Blume, or even C.S. Lewis. Even so, YA novels are geared for a teenage audience, usually 12 to 18 years of age. But this is such a broad age group to categorize and to write for. Mostly, these books are written with a teenager as the protagonist, more dialogue than adult fiction, plot and word usage designed to appeal to an adolescent, and ethical or moral values that add meaning to the plot and/or characters. Who wouldn’t love to sit back and enjoy that?

The problem is, because the audience has such a broad age range, it’s hard to know if the book is too “young” or too “adult” to be considered young adult fiction. The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) has some say in what constitutes a YA novel, but really, it runs quite a gamut of educational experience. As parents, we have to be experts-at-a-glance when approving some YA novels for our teens. That’s quite a task – barring reading the entire novel ourselves before our child does – and if your kid is like mine, when she has a book in her sights, she wants to read it NOW! So, good luck with that. I guess there has to be a certain amount of trust in the integrity of the author and publisher that what they are presenting to our kids is age-appropriate and not over the top in divulging the pains of adulthood in a way that we never want our kids to experience…ever. Pollyanna as that sounds, it is sometimes the reality.

The long and the short of it is this: I love to read young adult fiction, and just because it’s titled for one audience doesn’t mean we can’t all enjoy the fruits of the YA author’s labor. And, if you do have kids in that age group, how great is it to read the same book together and actually have something to talk about with them without too much eye-rolling and tsking going on, right?

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M. Chris Johnson is owner and Editor-in-Chief

Writers on Writing: The Writing Process – Get to Know Your Own

The Writing Process – Get To Know Your Own

By Bruce Holbert

 

I am more than a little hesitant when someone bitten by the bug asks for advice about writing.  Having myself read several books and articles on the craft/art/process that, though well-meaning, strike me, as often as not either semi-vapid generalizations anyone with a tertiary knowledge of the craft would have either already gathered or intuited from his or her own reading or simply wrong-headed for anyone other than the person composing the piece or those whose gears turned in a very similar direction.

But I held the Teaching Writing Fellowship at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop and have taught high school for 25 odd years before or since and have maintained a group of friends who look to me for critical input (as I do them).  So I’m either paid or duty-bound to offer such advice.  How to do so without slipping into hypocrisy or sophistry is the trick.

The first piece of advice I can offer has to do with process: get to know your own.  Elizabeth McCracken (In the Giant’s House, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination) can write a book in six weeks.  Once she arrives at that point, she shuts the shades, turns off the phone and says goodbye to her husband and kids and disappears into her book.  But her process requires a few years of simmering to get to that stint. Another writer and friend, Max Phillips (Snakebite Sonnet, The Artist’s Wife), makes painstaking outlines and spends weeks on research and then begins to write, but does not do so linearly.  He will hop through the outline to where he feels the most compelled to work and spend his time there.  As for myself, I don’t want much idea of what happens next.  I need the mystery and the faith that goes with writing in such uncertainty.  I want a source of tension and some notion of the people in the scene, but I also want the flexibility to change a character’s gender or sexual preference if it seems to steer the work into a place that will challenge my expectations of the story.

Though these methods appear diverse, they share much.  First, each contains an element of discovery.  Elizabeth simmers not to plan her books but to know their context, their characters, their places, both geographically and historically.  She wants to argue and laugh with them and when she writes, she writes from that acquaintance, though events remain up in the air.  Max needs to have the events laid out in front of him.  His mode of discovery is his character’s subtle response to them.  Chris Offutt, another friend and a fine writer (Kentucky Straight, The Same River Twice, and screenplays for True Blood, ‘Treme) relies on place, the smell and color and sounds and people, especially their intersection with place and their histories in that place.  His sense of discovery comes from the imposition of the reader viewing such a private knowledge of people and place.

Another commonality is a love of sentences: the sounds of them.  Each carves, shuffles, shakes, shapes sentences into a sound that anchors their work.  Max’s language is tight as a drum; Elizabeth’s turns quirky when you least expect it: Chris’s colloquy as sharp and original as Twain.  Sound suits process, as well; they can’t be separated; it is speaking the language of one’s perspective.

Finally, one should write often, every day, if possible.  Inspiration is a cold and bitter mistress and must be coaxed and seduced into showing herself.  Elizabeth, who takes years to get to her novelistic bursts, is constantly writing stories, articles, reviews and commentaries to keep her language sharp.  Max keeps a journal.  Chris is always in the middle of a screenplay, stories, a novel and various articles.  As for myself, I am a fan of Hemingway’s advice, which strikes me as the best if only because it is the most unassuming: write one good sentence.  Even if teaching and coaching my kids and the daily lifting of one’s burden and carrying it throughout the day exhausts me, I try to write one good sentence.  And then another.

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Bruce Holbert is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and the University of Eastern Washington. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Other Voices, The Antioch Review, Crab Creek Review, The West Wind Review, and Cairn. His recently published western novel, Lonesome Animals, has been praised as “a brilliant debut” by The Seattle Times and Publishers Weekly called Holbert “a master storyteller of formidable skill.” To learn more about Bruce Holbert, visit: http://www.bruceholbertbooks.com.