These cool, hot poems about women and girls in danger and on the prowl, coming of age and being of age, are full of startling detail and vivid setting. Meitner’s range, wit, compassion and her alertness to the moments where domestic and collective experience intersect, make these poems memorable. This book is a seriously good read.
Thanks to Carol O’Hare, the Friends of the Morgan Hill Library, and the Association of American University Women for hosting this Silicon Valley Reads event at Morgan Hill Public Library. Thanks to Marty Cheek for videotaping the event. This video includes a discussion of The Year of Fog, along with a Q&A.
Not long ago, I was sitting with my young son, telling him a story, when he interrupted me to ask, “Where did that story come from?”
“I just thought of it,” I said.
He was not satisfied. “But where did it come from?”
“From my imagination,” I said.
“Where’s your magic nation?”
“In my mind,” I said.
Oscar’s question is a variation of the same one I heard again and again from graduate students during my years teaching creative writing, the same question I hear every time I do a reading or visit a book club: where do stories begin?
I imagine every writer would have a different answer. For most, it involves some kind of percolation. Something occurs to you in the shower, or during a walk, or while down in the garage doing laundry. Days later, or weeks or months later, that original idea surfaces in the mind, and something else is layered on top of it. If the idea seems urgent enough, you get yourself to the notebook or the computer and write it down. It is possible to go for months of creative drought, but I’ve learned not to get too discouraged. Humans are born storytellers. I always trust that something will come; eventually, I’ll find my story.
When I’m feeling particularly uninspired, I try to find something mind-blowing to read. Sometimes, if I am very fortunate, I happen upon a book or essay that jogs my imagination, something that loosens the rust around the synapses and gets a story moving.
A couple of years ago, I was about fifty pages into the novel that would become No One You Know. I had a basic plot, and a melange of ideas around which to construct the story. I knew, for example, that I was interested in the fine line between fact and fiction, the way stories shape our lives. I knew that I wanted to capture the spirit of San Francisco, my adopted home. I knew that the story would be told by Ellie Enderlin, a coffee buyer in her mid-thirties who had lost her sister Lila–a math prodigy at Stanford–to violent crime twenty years before. Lila’s murder was sensationalized in a true crime book written by Ellie’s English professor, whose version of events derailed the life and career of a mathematician named Peter McConnell, with whom Lila had been working to solve a centuries-old mathematical puzzle.
During this time, I had lunch in North Beach with a writer friend and teaching colleague–Juvenal Acosta. We got to talking about our favorite books. Juvenal had high praise for Graham Green’s The End of the Affair, and couldn’t believe I’d never read it. I went right out and checked the book out from the library; six months later it was still sitting in my office, full of post-it notes. Eventually I returned it, paid the fine, and bought my own copy. It is one of the most bedraggled books I own. Bedragglement is evidence of a book’s high standing in a person’s life. A book that has been well-loved bears the marks.
The End of the Affair is the story of a love affair gone wrong, with the mystery of the beloved’s death front and center, but it’s also a book about writing, about finding one’s story and figuring out the best way to tell it.
Like most novels, No One You Know grew out of several ideas that had been percolating over a period of time. But ultimately, it was The End of the Affair that provided the opening impulse for the book. Greene’s novel begins with the line, “A story has no beginning and no end. Arbitrarily one chooses the moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” Twenty years after the tragedy that has defined her life, Ellie must decide for herself, as we all must, where her story truly begins.
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.”
Erika Meitner is one kick-ass poet. Imagine my excitement at discovering that she has a new book out! It’s called Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls , and here’s what Daisy Fried has to say:
During this time, I had lunch in North Beach with a writer friend and teaching colleague–Juvenal Acosta. We got to talking about our favorite books. Juvenal had high praise for Graham Green’s 
, and couldn’t believe I’d never read it. I went right out and checked the book out from the library; six months later it was still sitting in my office, full of post-it notes. Eventually I returned it, paid the fine, and bought my own copy. It is one of the most bedraggled books I own. Bedragglement is evidence of a book’s high standing in a person’s life. A book that has been well-loved bears the marks.
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