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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.

Fiction Attic launches with Albanian story collection

I’m excited to announce the launch of Fiction Attic Press, which will distribute fiction of exceptional literary merit via the ebook format. The press’s first publication is a collection of short stories in translation by the writers whose work launched the magazine Fiction Attic nearly a decade ago.

Winter in Tirane: The Stories of Jiri Kajane, is now available for Kindle, Nook, and all ebook formats.

About the book: Winter in Tirane brings together for the first time twelve interconnected and enigmatic tales of bittersweet love, absurd politics, and comic hijinks, set against the final days of the Albanian empire. The stories chronicle an unnamed narrator–the Deputy Minister of Slogans–and his young friend Leni as they attempt to navigate their way through a landscape of shifting political alliances and complex personal affairs.

About Fiction Attic:

During its three-year run, Fiction Attic featured the work of Steve Almond, Stephen Elliott, Gloria Frym, Katia Noyes, Vanessa Hua, Michelle Tea, Kevin Phelan, Bill U’Ren, and Anita Garner, among others, as well as interviews with such literary luminaries as Kate Braverman and fiction in translation by the celebrated Italian writer Mario Rigoni Stern (translated by Elizabeth Harris).

Fiction Attic’s final issue, #20, devoted entirely to flash fiction, was published in 2004. In the winter of that year, the magazine’s editor, designer, and sole reader had a baby. A rather long silence followed.

In the ensuing years, online literary journals have exploded, and the world of online publishing has become far more vibrant and diverse than anyone might have imagined nearly a decade ago, when Fiction Attic first began accepting submissions.

The goal of Fiction Attic, as always, is to be relevant, interesting, and utterly unique. We refer you to the meaning of attic, which explains pretty much everything:

attic salt (phrase): a poignant, delicate wit, peculiar to the Athenians
attic (noun): a story or room directly below the roof of a building
attic (adj) : characterized by purity, simplicity, and elegant wit

Help me map the fog

Some time ago, I began building an interactive map of THE YEAR OF FOG, so that readers can follow Abby through the streets of San Francisco as she searches for Emma. The map contains images, text from the novel, and personal reflections on places that hold a special meaning for me. Now, I’m looking to expand the map, with your help. If there’s a specific location from the book that you want to see incuded, please send me the page number and any text from the book that you would like to accompany the marker. I’m also trying to build an image gallery for the map, so any personal photographs from readers would be much appreciated! Please email images and suggestions to fogtalk at g mail dot com; please include your name so that I can credit you. View the complete map, along with a list of mapped locations and street view capabilities, here.

View Interactive Map of San Francisco, based on the novel THE YEAR OF FOG in a larger map

Research & the Novel

In July of 2003, I found myself in the Central Highlands of Costa Rica, sequestered away with five other writers and artists in a small colony situated on a hill above the small town of Colon. I arrived in Costa Rica with little more than an idea for a novel, the first impressionistic strokes of an opening scene. As it turned out, my second-floor studio was too beautiful, the setting too sublime, my fellow colonists too interesting.

I ended up doing more walking and wandering than writing. I also took a few side trips, most notably to the small surfing town of Hermosa, where I rented a filthy room on the beach for twenty dollars a night. During the day I hung out on the beach, watching the surfers brave the spectacular waves. Nighttime was less pleasant. My room had bugs, my sheets were grimy, and the communal bathroom was a few hundred yards away up an unlighted staircase. One night a wild storm came through, soaking the bed and floor beneath my small, screened-in window. But the window looked out to the ocean, and it was a beautiful sight. I’d be staring out into darkness, the wind and rain whipping at my face, and suddenly a flash of white lightning would rip through the sky, transforming day into night, illuminating the wild gray water.

Well, you see now, as I sit here writing this, I’m getting all worked up by the surfers, and the beach, and dirty room, and the storm. And that’s just what happened a few months after I returned home to San Francisco from the writers’ colony. There I was, typing away in my fog-bound house, having arrived at a point in the novel where I didn’t know where to go, or how to get there, or how to get myself out of the mess I’d made, and, quite without intent, I found myself writing about Costa Rica.

The novel that I was trying, and failing, to figure out during that month in Central America finally made its way into the world in 2007. Since then, many readers have asked me if I went to Costa Rica to conduct research for The Year of Fog. In fact, I went to Costa Rica to write a novel about San Francisco. And I did, in the end, write a novel about San Francisco, which happened to take a pretty lengthy detour to Costa Rica. I file this in the Happy Accidents drawer of my writing life. Truth be told, some of my most rewarding research didn’t feel like research at the time I was experiencing it; it just felt like life.

Take, for example, a bus ride through China a decade ago. I was in China for a couple of months on business, but ended up doing a lot of solo traveling. As my bus limped into Xian, I found myself talking to a Chinese geologist who was very concerned about the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. Several months later, at home in New York City, I began writing a novel set on the Yangtze River, against the backdrop of the Three Gorges Dam. Dream of the Blue Room would never have come into being had I not found myself alone in China, eyes and ears open.

Not all of my research has been quite so unplanned. Ellie Enderlin, the narrator of my third novel, No One You Know, is a coffee buyer. When I was choosing her occupation, my reasons were not purely literary. I happen to love coffee. I mean, really love it, with a deep and sometimes irrational passion. In the interests of verisimilitude, naturally, I had to drink vast quantities of the stuff and hang out at the best Bay Area coffee houses. My research also involved visiting a coffee warehouse in South City, participating in a cupping, perusing William H. Ukers’ classic 1922 text The Story of Coffee (all 800 pages of it), and rereading my notes from a small coffee farm I visited in—yes, Costa Rica—several years before.

Perhaps I felt the need to balance the pleasure with pain, however, because my research for No One You Know was two-fold. While the narrator is a coffee buyer, her sister, Lila, who died twenty years before the novel opens, was a math prodigy. My love for coffee is matched only by my absolute fear and loathing for math. Apparently, it wasn’t punishment enough to make one of my characters be a mathematician, and a brilliant one at that. For some reason, I had to actually insert Lila’s old math notebook into the plot—a notebook filled to the brim with mathematical formulae. For a mind-boggling year I was knee-deep in math: biographies of Ramanujan and Erdos, explanations of Hilbert’s famous unsolved problems, brain-busting histories of infamous theorums. The upside to all of this is that, if you ask me to explain the Goldbach Conjecture, or why a doughnut is, topologically speaking, equivalent to a coffee mug, I can give you a pretty good answer.

Ideally, the research you do, whether accidental or intentional, will deeply inform your story, but it will feel as if it comes from the characters, not the author. Perhaps the most useful piece of advice I can give about research is something I heard from a fellow San Francisco writer a few months ago during a panel discussion, which he, in turn, had heard from another writer on another panel some years before. “Do a lot of research. Then put almost none of it in the book.”

This piece originally appeared in the May 2008 issue of the Glimmer Train newsletter Writers Ask.