Wonderings - Michelle Richmond

On Accidentally Finding Your Way

Just up on the Glimmer Train website, my piece about research and the novel.

I should mention hear that Linda Swanson-Davies and Susan Burmeister-Brown are my favorite editors of any literary magazine, anywhere. Back in 1999, they called a completely unknown writer and made her day by telling her that they would be publishing the short story “Down the Shore Everything’s All Right.” I remember standing in our small one-bedroom sublet on the Upper West Side, talking to Linda, absolutely stunned and jubilant at the news. When you’re starting out as a writer, encouragement can be hard to come by. All those rejections, all those stories that end up in the trash. A phone call by an editor can turn it all around, remind you that there is some hope for your life as a writer.

Glimmer Train, The Tanning Salon, & My Love Life: the first time I ever picked up an issue of Glimmer Train, when I was living in Atlanta, making five dollars an hour as a receptionist at a tanning salon, I read a short story by an Albanian writer named Jiri Kajane, translated by Kevin P. and Bill U’Ren. I loved the story, and I flipped to the back of the magazine to see the Last Pages, which feature personal notes written by contributors, accompanied by an old photograph. There I saw a fetching baby picture of one Kevin P., dressed as Bam Bam from the Flintstones.

A few months later, I moved to Arkansas to pursue an MFA in creative writing. On my first day of orientation, a very handsome fellow from San Francisco walked into the room. Weeks or months later–it all runs together now–I realized that he was the translator of the Albanian story, the one whose baby picture I’d admired while manning the desk at the tanning salon in Atlanta. Long story short, we’ve been together for 15 years, married for 10 of them. So you might say that Glimmer Train did some preliminary matchmaking.

And, to complete the loop, I just launched a new press, Fiction Attic. Our first book is Jiri Kajane’s story collection, Winter in Tirane. Co-translated, of course, by Kevin P. AKA Bam Bam

Here’s to another 20 years of Glimmer Train.

Sidenote: “Down the Shore” ended up being the lead story in my first book, the 2001 collection The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress. Later, Linda and Susan published two more of my stories, “The Hero of Queens Boulevard” and “The Boulevard of Heroes.”

Wandering San Francisco with Paul Auster, plus Love in a Ten-Year Key

Has it really been ten years since I walked down the aisle at the little chapel in Yosemite, tripped on my dress, married that boy I met in Arkansas, went a bit too far with the tequila, and spent all night in our room at the Wawona Hotel searching for ghosts in the closet? It has!

Tonight, to celebrate, we’ll spend the night in the city and have dinner at Fleur de Lys. The last time we were at Fleur de Lys was a warm September evening a little more than two years ago, right after I’d interviewed Paul Auster at the Herbst Theatre for City Arts and Lectures. It was a rather surreal evening, as I have long been an achingly devoted fan of Mr. Auster, author of The New York Trilogy and many other wonderful works of fiction. The Gracious Author and I drank single-malt Scotch well into the wee hours, while my husband drank his usual, a single Bailey’s with milk, because my husband prefers his cocktails the way he prefers his entrees: as close to dessert as possible. Mr. Auster told some amazing stories. Some of them, I thought I might have read before in his books, but then I wondered if perhaps his books were so infused with his voice, his own voice so inseparable from his books, that I only felt I’d heard the stories before, when in fact I was hearing them for the first time.

We also talked politics for much of the evening, as the economy seemed on the brink of utter collapse and the presidential election was only a couple of months away. We talked a bit about movies, and houses, and Brooklyn, and Curious George, and an obscure Nathaniel Hawthorne journal entitled “Twenty Days With Julian and Little Bunny Papa.” I believe Slovenia might have been mentioned, for reasons I can’t recall.

Afterward, we went off in search of my Jeep, which I had characteristically misplaced. We walked many blocks and kept doubling back, over and over again, an endless loop. As we were wandering the deserted streets, I kept thinking of that book by Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers, or more precisely the film version of the book, adapted by Harold Pinter, in which Mary (Natasha Richardson) and Colin (Rupert Everett) get lost in Venice, and are rescued by an enigmatic and charming gentleman named Robert (Christopher Walken), who takes them back to his home and tells them some brilliant and terrifying stories. In Pinter’s film, as in McEwan’s novel, things do not end well for the tourists. Of course, this was San Francisco, not Venice, and I was not a tourist but a resident, and I should not have been so hopelessly lost.

Eventually we found the Jeep. It is now, as it was then, an old car, and a beloved one, and it had spent a great many days at the beach with me and my toddler, and it smelled accordingly, as if someone might have put a bucket of seaweed and sand crabs in there at some point and sort of forgotten about it. In such a state we transported Mr. Auster back to the hotel, and he, in his graciousness, swore that he could not smell a thing. And on the way home my husband and I remembered a story of a smelly car, in which the smell turns out to be blood, a story set in Albania. The story was written by my husband long before he was my husband, and I happened to have read it in a small literary magazine several months before he walked into a dismal University of Arkansas classroom in his furry Giraudon boots and changed my mind (I was, at the time, otherwise betrothed) and my life. Amen.

Time. I can’t believe it was fifteen years ago that I met that guy with a curl smack dab in the middle of his forehead. Ten years ago that I tripped gracelessly down the aisle at the chapel in Yosemite, to be wedded by one kindly Reverend John Paris, who, for reasons I have yet to comprehend, kept saying that Jesus was like a fizzy tablet, and marriage was a glass of water, and you just had to drop that tablet in the water and see what happened. I know I remember it right, because when he was saying all that stuff I had not yet had any tequila. My husband had not yet had a Baileys with milk, and he remembers it the same way.

Not long ago I found a piece of notebook paper on which I had written our wedding budget. We paid $150 to rent the Yosemite Community Church from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. on January 5; $50 for Reverend Paris; $500 to reserve the reception room at the Wawona Hotel. It was a very cheap wedding, as weddings go. We didn’t have much in material terms; we didn’t think we needed it. We were kids and now we’re not. Now we have more stuff, and more responsibility, and a kid of our own, and the man I married still has a curl smack dab in the middle of his forehead.

He is to this day the funniest guy I’ve ever met, with (hands down) the best hair. Happy Anniversary, Kevin. Here’s to ten more years.

Below: apartment in the Marais district of Paris, 2008, on a trip to meet my French editor and translator.

San Francisco’s Wordslinging Women

Thanks to Mia Lipman for this nice write-up in San Francisco Magazine! In the magazine’s cover story, “A Year in Preview,” Lipman writes that the San Francisco “lit scene gets much of its oomph from wordslinging women, including a trio of established authors with distinctly local voices and new books out in 2011. All three have aged gracefully into midcareer success without the boon of a genre-defying debut or an Oprah pick.”

The authors are Ann Packer (The Dive From Clausen’s Pier), whose story collection Swim Back to Me will be released this year; Carol Edgardian, co-editor of Narrative Magazine and author of the forthcoming novel Stages of Amazement; and yours truly.

“And the kid sister in the mix, Michelle Richmond, who just joined the 40-plus club with an international bestseller under her belt (yes, it’s true, I did just turn 40, but I wasn’t quite ready to see it in print!), will start accepting submissions this month for her new indie press, Fiction Attic. We’ll also see her fourth novel, California Street, land in the fall… “It imagines an outlandish circumstance that’s not really that far-fetched,” Richmond says.

Well, yes, I do have a new book coming out in Fall 2011. Finally! While I’m still keeping hush-hush on the details, I can say that it’s been tremendously fun to write, if a bit daunting (considering the 6 months of research that I ultimately threw out with the bathwater). Like my previous two books, it takes much of its inspiration from location. Although this time, I’ve widened my lens to include a broader California backdrop.

Best books of 2010, London style

London’s News of the World has just published its list of the best books of the year for 2010. The list includes nine fiction titles, a memoir, and three children’s books.

I’m delighted that THE YEAR OF FOG, published this year by Ebury Press, made the cut. You need a subscription to view the page, but you can see the fiction list below:

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis

The Blasphemer by Nigel Farndale

The Kill Zone by Chris Ryan

Worth Dying For by Lee Child

The Death Instinct by Jed Rubenfeld

The Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond

My Name is Memory by Ann Brashares

The Last Letter from Your Lover by JoJo Moyes

The Guardian has also published its year-end list; you can see it here. And the Guardian’s fiction-only list appears here.

Thanks to my my fabulous editor at Ebury Press, Gillian Green, Ed Griffiths, and the whole Ebury team for giving The Year of Fog a second life across the pond!