Michelle Richmond

Editor in Chief: How Obama Fine-tunes His Speeches

GalleyCat brought my attention to this terrific photograph by Pete Souza on Newsweek’s Tumblr. It’s a photograph of President Obama editing his Inaugural Address.

I love the way the President’s hand is positioned on the page, as if he’s moving text around. I think this is a really fascinating glimpse into the way his mind works.

I also love the copious but clear handwriting all over the page (his–or the work of his writer?)

This photo serves as a terrific visual reminder of how a piece of writing comes together. A good revision requires you to take the paragraphs and sentences apart and put the puzzle pieces back together, which is what appears to be happening here.

I am the Common Reader: Virginia Woolf on pleasure, reading, & the survival of literature

Despite her knowledge of Greek and her voracious reading of the classics, Virginia Woolf considered herself a self-taught reader. As a woman, she had been denied the illustrious Oxford education that the men in her family enjoyed. As it turns out, her lack of affectation, her insistence on taking pleasure in reading, is what makes her essays on literature so lucid, smart, and delicious to read.

Reviewing The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 6: 1933-1941, for the December issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Benjamin Schwarz notes that, despite Woolf’s place in “the highest stratum of the English intellectual aristocracy,” her essays were written not for the academic but for the common reader, the category in which she rather modestly placed herself. The common reader, she posited, “reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.”

Here, Schwarz excerpts Woolf’s essay “Hours in a Library”:

A reader must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill…the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading. The true reader is a man of intense curiosity; of ideas; open-minded and communicative, to whom eating is more the nature of brisk exercise in the open wire than of a sheltered study.

For all of her wealth and status–the very condition that allowed her the coveted room of one’s own–Woolf also believed passionatelym Schwarz notes, in the democracy of reading, as evidenced in her essay “The Leaning Tower.”

Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground.

Woolf’s prescription for the survival of literature, which might have ruffled feathers in her time, is no less meaningful today. Literature will survive, she wrote,

if commoners and outsiders like ourselves make that country our own country…teach ourselves how to read and how to write, how to preserve and how to create. …
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The Rumpus Interview with Thaisa Frank

This week, Yuvi Zalkow interviewed Thaisa Frank for The Rumpus. They met at the bar of the Hotel Rex, where Frank, author most recently of Enchantment, talked about where stories come from, among other things. I’ve long admired Frank, beginning with her story collection A Brief History of Camouflage, have often taught her work in creative writing classes, and in recent years have been honored to get to know her.

In the intro, Zalkow says that the interview itself felt a bit like being inside a Thaisa Frank story. If you’ve read her work, you’ll have a vague and disturbing sense of what that means. When stepping into a Thaisa Frank story, it’s almost impossible not to feel displaced, as if you’ve walked into a dark, empty bar and have brought none of the right equipment, not to mention the right frame of mind, to encounter whatever it is you’re about to encounter. When I first came across her stories in a San Francisco bookshop fifteen years ago, I felt as though I’d fallen through the rabbit hole. The stories in Enchantment, magical in every way, unexpected at every turn, seem to come from a different universe.

Read on for some of the highlights from the interview, which you’ll find in its entirety on The Rumpus.

On where stories come from:

I often feel there’s a triggering event that makes me want to start a story. There is a title often, but the title contains the stuff of the story. The title is like a packed piñata, even if it’s made of iron and I have to beat it and beat it for the stuff to come out.

On what happens when the story turns out not to be anything like the story you intended to write:

And it’s the failure of the intended story that usually guarantees, if not success, then the forward motion of the final story.

On surrealism:

Old-fashioned surrealism is where you take one or two extraordinary things and have them in a world that obeys all the laws of reality…I’m also very interested in classic surrealism, where you take one thing that really couldn’t happen —like how Kafka took a guy and turned him into a bug—but after that, everything proceeds pretty logically.

On what’s missing from the teaching of fiction

…one of the things we don’t have in teaching fiction is a true poetics of fiction—a way of talking about fiction without getting tangled up in the content.

Read the Rumpus interview with Thaisa Frank. Visit Thaisa Frank’s website. Visit Yuvi Zalkow’s website.

Writers: Submit your work to the Fiction Attic Press First Novel Contest.

Michelle Richmond Events

Sept. 23, Litquake Benefit

Enjoy Mexican fare, end-of-summer sun, and good company at the home of Phil and Christine Bronstein. Featuring Vikram Chandra, Peter Orner, Alejandro Murguía, Jaqueline Winspear, & Michelle Richmond.
Tickets, $75. Purchase here.

October 13, Litquake Litcrawl

Why There Are Words, Litcrawl, San Francisco, venue & time TBA

October 18, 2012, In Conversation with Louise Erdrich, San Francisco JCC

Join me and Pulitzer Prize finalist Louise Erdrich at 2:00 p.m. for a discussion of Erdrich’s latest novel, The Round House, “an indelible portrait of family and memory, injustice and vengeance, friendship and growing up on the Ojibwe Reservation in North Dakota.” Tickets: $15, or $12 for members. Reserve your space here.

Lafayette Library, A Literary Feast: Annual Authors Dinner, Nov 3, 2012

Join me, Annie Barrows, Tamim Ansary, Karen Joy Fowler, Adam Johnson, John Lescroat, Joyce Maynard, Ellen Sussman, and other Bay Area authors at a gala to benefit the programs of the Lafayette Public Library and Learning Center

July 25, 2012, Mountain View Public Library, 7 p.m.

Join me for a discussion of the writing life, publishing, and process. Bring your book club or your writing group. Q&A.

March 14, 2012, Walnut Creek Library Gala, Authors Under the Stars
Update: the gala raised $50,000 for the wonderful programs at the Walnut Creek Library.

Jan. 13, 2012 : Literary Death Match at the Elbo Room in San Francisco, 647 Valencia Street, 7:15 p.m.

About the event: My third appearance as an LDM judge, along with SF comedic mastermind W. Kamau Bell (check out his comedy album Face Full of Flour) and Pop Up Magazine producer and New Yorker contributor Douglas McGray. Contestants: Litquake founder Jane Ganahl (author of Naked on the Page), writer/activist/showman Chicken John Rinaldi, short fictionist (and LDM SF’s own) Alia Volz, and Jack Wakes Up author Seth Harwood. Read more & order tickets here. Michelle’s other appearances at Literary Death Match: Michelle on Literary Death Match: Episodes 1 (contestant), 5 (judge), 9 (judge), 19, & 42

Jan. 18, 2012: Reading & chat at Hillsborough Town Hall

Free and open to the public, Hillsborough, CA 11:00 a.m. I’ll be discussing The Year of Fog and No One You Know, answering questions, and signing books. Event host: Heather Weir. Book sales: Books Inc., Burlingame

Feb. 13, 2012: Litquake, Love Hurts at the Makout Room in San Francisco

I’ll be joining a cast of San Francisco writers to read truly horrendous passages on love and lust from literature. Yes, this is how we prepare for Valentine’s Day in the City by the Bay.

Feb. 13, 2012: St. Elizabeth’s Home Fundraiser, San Jose, CA

Feb. 26: Feast Your Mind: Fundraise for the Ronald C. Warwick Jewish Day School

Local luminaries, such as Larry Baer, San Francisco Giants president and CEO; Leor Stern, who launched Google’s field operations in Israel; Michelle Richmond, New York Times best-selling author; Jon Jenkins, principal investigator at the SETI Institute; and Akiva Tor, consul general of Israel for the Pacific Northwest, will be among the 16 guests of honor at homes in San Francisco, San Mateo, Burlingame, San Carlos, Hillsborough and Belmont. Open to the public. Click title link for tickets.

Feb. 28: Los Altos High School Writers Week