Ephemera Archives - Page 3 of 5

and all the ships at sea

I wanted to share an interesting email I received last week from a reader:

I’m a Marine stationed over at Camp Pendleton in California. While I was on deployment, I found The Year Of Fog in the small ship library…I was a part of an expeditionary unit sitting off the coast of Burma last year after their country was ravaged by a natural disaster. I mean this in the greatest sincerity when I say that reading and finishing your story was truly all I looked forward to the 2 months I spent sitting on a ship, counting the days until I could come home. I’m not sure what it was, but I found myself very sympathetic and attached to the main character. I almost wish the story hadn’t ended. Or at least had ended the way I was expecting. Again, thank you for your story.

…

Yes, Christine, you can begin writing at 60!

A few days ago, a reader named Christine emailed me the following question: Do you think a person can begin being a writer at age 60? You’re so young and have such a solid educational background in literature. I know I want to write, and have a folder of snippets, unrelated, but think I’m crazy to start at this age!

Well, I should admit, first off, that I’m not really that young. I grew up in the South, where a lady is never supposed to reveal her age, but since the publisher of my first novel decided to put my birthdate on the title page, it’s pretty much out there. Matters of youthfulness or lack thereof aside, I get a lot of questions from aspiring writers, frequently about publishing, sometimes of the “I want to write a book, and I’m sure it will be a bestseller if you introduce me to your agent” variety. I found Christine’s question particularly refreshing, because it wasn’t about the business of writing, but the process of writing, and, more specifically, the beginning of writing–you know, that thing you actually have to do before you go out in search of literary fame and fortune. So I thought I’d share my response here: …

Good Reads

Just out today, a new novel by Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share without Knowing. I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of this book, and, though I’ve never met the author in my life, this was an easy book to blurb: From the frantic streets of Tokyo to the surreal silence of rural Japan, Christopher Barzak spins the familiar yarn of the everyday world into a magical universe. Following in the themes of his stunning debut, One for Sorrow, Barzak once again tackles loneliness and longing, and elegantly blurs the divide between the living and the dead. The Love We Share Without Knowing is haunting, strange, and utterly surprising from the first page to the last.

Sometimes you go through dry spells when it comes to reading–you know what I mean–those weeks, months even, when you open book after book, unable to find anything that really moves you. For some reason, the past two weeks have been the opposite of that. I keep finding books to love. Here are a couple of them.

The Theory of Light and Matter: Stories by Andrew Porter.
Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, this collection of ten tautly constructed stories is quiet, moving, sometimes funny, and marked again and again by genuine emotion. What impressed me most about these stories is the way they unfold at a casual, told-by-a-friend pace, very direct and simple, before hitting you straight on with some insight that they’ve been subtly working toward all along. From “Storms,” in which a young man watches his sister self-destruct:

In the books the psychologists had given to Amy and me as children, I remembered reading stories about people who claimed that after one of their parents died they were just never happy again. I understood this to be the case with my sister and sometimes my mother. Life goes on, but it’s different now. It’s softer, duller. The highs are less high and the lows seem to have an endless depth to them, a depth you have to be wary of falling into…it occurred to me that Amy had probably spent most of her life on the edge of that depth, unwilling to let herself fall in, but frightened all the same by its presence.

Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O’Nan
One of the best books I’ve read this year. Although this is a story in which very little happens, one man’s struggle to end his years of service to The Red Lobster with dignity, and to be a decent human being in the process, kept me spellbound.

Another story collection that I devoured with hardly a trip to the kitchen for coffee and Hydrox cookies was Pia Z. Ehrhardt’s Famous Fathers.
These stories are as seductive as their heroines, dripping with the mystique of New Orleans, tense with the characters’ often-failed attempts to rein in their larger-than-life desires. A spectacular Christmas gift for the Scorpio in your life, or for anyone to whom you want to send a message about infidelity, jealousy, or the perils of family.

In Praise of Grace Paley

The iconic short story writer and essayist Grace Paley died yesterday at her home in Vermont. I have long been an admirer of her work, and have been such a disciple that my students over the years have probably become bored with the refrain, “If you want to learn how to write dialogue, read Grace Paley!”

I first read Paley in 1993, while living alone in a miserable little duplex in Knoxville, TN. I’d just accepted a job as a copywriter at an ad agency. I remember being snowed in during my first scheduled week of work, reading Paley on a set of Salvation Army sofa cushions I’d arranged on the floor as a bed. The crazy neighbors were screaming at each other, the snow was coming down, and I was bundled up in scarf, hat, and layers of sweats because I couldn’t afford to run the steam heat. That’s where I met Paley, in Little Disturbances of Man. I was mesmerized. Reading Paley was what taught me to write short stories. More on Paley in coming days…