Devourer of Books » Author Guest Post

The Attraction of Cults – Guest Post by Peggy Riley, author of Amity & Sorrow

Apr 182013

Peggy Riley is the author of the incredibly intriguing Amity & Sorrow. Although I have not reviewed Amity & Sorrow here on the blog, I did write it up as a feature for the She Knows Book Lounge. Peggy is here today talking about cults and utopias.

I was five when Charles Manson was given the death penalty for the Tate-La Bianca murders committed by his followers, The Family. I was too young to understand how a longhaired, crazy-eyed man could inspire such passion in his commune of young female hippies, but I wouldn’t forget his face. I was thirteen when I saw the bodies of nine hundred and fourteen worshippers strewn across the dirt of the jungle compound of Jonestown; they had drunk poison at the command of their leader, Jim Jones. In between there were catastrophes: earthquakes and oil spills, riots and serial killers, even as the Beach Boys still wished everyone could be a California girl, singing at rundown county fairs between hog calls.

When I was born in California, people were still moving west, still pursuing the American Dream at its very edge. Even before it was a state, California was the destination for dreamers: pioneers and gold diggers, wannabe movie stars and fanatics, Midwesterners and émigrés’ intent on political, economic, and religious freedom. It was also a hotbed for cults.

The Summer of Love filled California with utopian hippies, cut off from their families and looking to be a part of something. From the Midwest came Charles Manson and Jim Jones, both with their own troubled family backgrounds: Manson’s mother sold him for a pitcher of beer then put him into care; Jones’ mother believed she had given birth to a messiah. Both were intent on becoming charismatic leaders, creating new families through communal living, left-wing political activism, and lots of sex. In California, they found a state full of fresh-faced and down-and-out followers, people with a great capacity to believe and a greater need to belong. In Manson and Jones, in charismatic leaders throughout history, they found a modern messiah, able to be both father and God. We all want to belong to a person, a family, a group. I can understand the yearning, if not the commitment to the violent outcome when all that utopia goes wrong, as it always does – as it must.

So is it a Fantasy? – Guest Post by Beverly Swerling, author of Bristol House

Apr 042013

Beverly Swirling is the author of Bristol House. For more about Bristol House, see the book description or Nicole’s blurb in April’s Bloggers Recommend newsletter.

The question of genre – what kind of a book is it? – frequently drives new writers crazy. Sometimes it’s not easy to answer even for those of us who have been at this for a while.

Personally, as a reader, once I start a book that draws me in, that hopefully I enjoy, maybe even love, I could care less what label the publisher has chosen, how the book business is marketing the title, or even the genre stamped on the spine if it’s a paperback. But as a writer I admit, the whole business sometimes looms large. Particularly with Bristol House. From the first day I started working on this book – four years ago now – I knew a lot of publishing people and many readers would see it as fantasy. How can it be anything else since it features two ghosts who speak to the present from the past? Nonetheless, that’s not what I intended it to be. Rather, I see it as a speculation.

“Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past.” That’s T.S. Eliot in a poem called Burnt Norton. It was always in my mind that I was writing about the nature of time.

What if the mystery implicit in God’s answer to Moses when Moses asks to be told the divine name – “I am who am.” – is in a way its own solution? The need to label things, to have everything be clear and go in a straight-line progression, maybe that’s all man-made nonsense.

And what about Einstein’s theory of time as a river, with everything present simultaneously, but past and future hidden around bends that lie behind and ahead of us?

What if time is just something we made up, a kind of crutch? Merely a prelude to eternity.

How do we wrap our heads around that?

Some people insist with absolute certainty that such speculation is absurd. There are no ghosts, there is no life after life, time does not bend. None of it can possibly be true. If you can’t see it or touch it or hear it or smell it or taste it, it does not exist. End of story.

Well, that’s not the end of this story. And if that’s what you believe – if you’re absolutely sure that death is death and nothing follows – this is probably not a book for you. But if, like most of us, you go back and forth, sometimes more and sometimes less sure of what you believe, if you live with the fact that your doubts and what you have of belief are all jumbled up together, if you’re interested in how sometimes preposterous-seeming beliefs motivate others to do truly heroic things, I think my story – which touches down on Einstein’s river and attempts to incorporate Eliot’s words charged with meaning – will resonate with you.

This is not, I have to add, a religious book, despite the fact that it features two rabbis, a Dominican priest, a Carthusian monk, and a lot about the pervasive horror of anti-Semitism across the centuries. In the section that takes part in modern London, neither Annie the American, nor Geoff the Englishman is a practicing anything. But both are seekers of truth, and both have a big investment in righting old wrongs.

In the part of the book that takes place in the time of Henry VIII even the monks scheme and lie, and the goldsmith persecuted for simply being a Jew sometimes behaves like a tyrant. Together they sow the seeds of a plot that six hundred years later will threaten the lives of Annie and Geoff and many others. And they also plant the clues for its unraveling. Because, after all, what is time? And can we ever escape the burden of old sins?

Yes, this story says, we can. In the end everything moves toward the light, and forgiveness is always possible as long as we first learn to forgive ourselves.

February 2013 Reading Wrap-Up

Feb 282013

So I read 13 books this month, including 5 audiobooks. This was a total of 2700 pages and about 57 hours of audio. I could have easily finished one more book in print, but I had to stop myself so I could get some work done. I’m hoping March – when I’ll have more day-to-day help with the kids – will mean more work getting done during the day and thus more reading done in the evening.

What I Reviewed:

Audiobooks
The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch, narrated by Dan Bittner
Parlor Games by Maryka Biaggio, narrated by Leslie Carroll
The Good House by Anne Leary, narrated by Mary Beth Hurt

Fiction
The Promise of Stardust by Priscille Sibley
All This Talk of Love by Christopher Castellani
Every Trick in the Book by Lucy Arlington
The Comfort of Lies by Randy Susan Meyers

Historical Fiction
Shadow on the Crown by Patricia Bracewell

Nonfiction
Literary Rogues: A Scandalous History of Wayward Authors by Andrew Shaffer
Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy by Emily Bazelon

Other Posts:
D.E.A.R. (D.E.A.L.) February 2013 – Sound Bytes
D.E.A.R. – February 2013

Pick of the Month:

Emma Straub, Cookies, and a ‘Best of 2012′ Sneak Peek

Dec 112012

In exactly ONE WEEK I will reveal my ‘best of’ list of 2012. Just in case you absolutely can’t wait, I have some details to reveal today. First of all, there are five categories: audiobook, fiction, speculative fiction and mystery/thriller, historical fiction, and nonfiction. Each category has five picks (well, except for audiobooks, where I couldn’t narrow it down from six) and today I’m going to give you a spoiler and tell you that one of my fiction picks is Emma Straub’s Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures.

( lauralamontfull picture UPDATE: That’s not a spoiler anymore, as the list is now up)

As a celebration, and in case you have any holiday parties you still need to bake for, Emma’s here today sharing her famous chocolate chip cookie recipe with us.

—————————-

People love to talk about how much I love to bake, but the dirty truth is this: I have exactly two tricks up my sleeve. There are my brownies, which I have written about before, and then there are my chocolate chip cookies. I don’t quite understand the idea of baking if there is no chocolate involved. I cannot claim any responsibility for the recipe below, though I will vouch for it a thousand times over. These are my go-to cookies, and even if you mess up and bake them for a minute or so too long, they will still be delicious. The most important thing to remember is that fancy chocolate and butter are your friends.

(The below recipe is adapted from the excellent cookbook by David Waltuck and Melicia Phillips)

Oaty Chocolate Chip Cookies

2 sticks of unsalted butter
1 cup light brown sugar
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
2 eggs
2 cups flour
2 cups old fashioned oats (not instant)
2 cups chocolate chips. I like to use fancy chocolate and chop it up myself. Fancy chocolate makes everything better.
Dash of vanilla

1. Preheat oven to 375.

2. Put the butter and sugar (both kinds) in your mixer, or in a bowl, if you have strong arms muscles and won’t give up until the mixture is all creamy.

3. Add the salt and the baking soda. Mix some more.

4. Add the eggs and the vanilla.

5. Add the flour, one cup at a time. Mix thoroughly before adding the second cup.

6. Add the oats, also one cup at a time. This is when the batter starts to get really delicious, I’m just saying.

7. Add all the chocolate. The dough will be super thick and so delicious that you will have to basically muzzle yourself from here on out.

8. Voila! You’re done! Now throw ‘em on a baking sheet and bake for about ten or eleven minutes. One batch makes a whole lot of cookies.

—————————-

Now, OBVIOUSLY I couldn’t recommend this recipe to you, or let Emma recommend it, anyway, without trying them myself. I made these cookies with regular old chocolate chips because I didn’t have any fancy chocolate, but let me tell you, these cookies make everything better even without it. You see there in step 7 where Emma says that the dough will be “super thick?” Yeah, the first time I made these I actually SNAPPED a wooden spoon in half while stirring in the chocolate. You know what, though? That spoon was a 100% worthwhile sacrifice. I’m not sure I’ll ever make chocolate chip cookies any other way. I do recommend using a mixer to make them, though, because it will break down the oats a bit, while still leaving some of them whole, which makes for a perfect texture.

Oh, and it wasn’t just me, these cookies were a hit with the whole family. In fact, when Daniel came downstairs before I did one morning he decided to have one for breakfast.

IMAG0085 picture IMAG0087 picture

What Hildegard Means Now – Guest Post and Giveaway from Mary Sharratt, Author of Illuminations

Nov 062012

newauthorphoto2 picture Mary Sharratt is an American author living in England. Her books include Daughters of the Witching Hill and Illuminations. She has previously guest blogged for me on the connection between Catholicism and witchcraft in England.

Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) was a visionary abbess and polymath. She composed an entire corpus of sacred music and wrote nine books on subjects as diverse as theology, cosmology, botany, medicine, linguistics, and human sexuality, a prodigious intellectual outpouring that was unprecedented for a 12th-century woman. Her prophecies earned her the title Sybil of the Rhine.

Pope Benedict XVI canonized Hildegard on May 10, 2012—873 years after her death. In October 2012, she will be elevated to Doctor of the Church, a rare and solemn title reserved for theologians who have significantly impacted Church doctrine.

But what does Hildegard mean for a wider secular audience today?

I believe her legacy remains hugely important for contemporary women.

While writing Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen, I kept coming up against the injustice of how women, who are often more devout than men, are condemned to stand at the margins of established religion, even in the 21st century. Women bishops still cause controversy in the Episcopalian Church while the previous Catholic pope, John Paul II, called a moratorium even on the discussion of women priests. Although Pope Benedict XVI is elevating Hildegard to Doctor of the Church, he is suppressing Hildegard’s contemporaries, the sisters and nuns of the Leadership Council of Women Religious, who stand accused of radical feminism.

illuminations picture Modern women have the choice to wash their hands of organized religion altogether. But Hildegard didn’t even get to choose whether to enter monastic life—she was entombed in an anchorage at the age of eight. The Church of her day could not have been more patriarchal and repressive to women. Yet her visions moved her to create a faith that was immanent and life-affirming, one that can inspire us today.

Too often both religion and spirituality have been interpreted by and for men, but when women reveal their spiritual truths, a whole other landscape emerges, one we haven’t seen enough of. Hildegard opens the door to a luminous new world.

The cornerstone of Hildegard’s spirituality was Viriditas, or greening power, her revelation of the animating life force manifest in the natural world that infuses all creation with moisture and vitality. To her, the divine is manifest in every leaf and blade of grass. Just as a ray of sunlight is the sun, Hildegard believed that a flower or a stone is God, though not the whole of God. Creation reveals the face of the invisible creator.

“I, the fiery life of divine essence, am aflame beyond the beauty of the meadows,” the voice of God reveals in Hildegard’s visions, recorded in her book, Liber Divinorum. “I gleam in the waters, and I burn in the sun, moon and stars . . . . I awaken everything to life.”

Hildegard’s re-visioning of religion celebrated women and nature, and even perceived God as feminine, as Mother. Her vision of the universe was an egg in the womb of God.

According to Barbara Newman’s book Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine, Hildegard’s Sapientia, or Divine Wisdom, creates the cosmos by existing within it.

O power of wisdom!
You encompassed the cosmos,
Encircling and embracing all in one living orbit
With your three wings:
One soars on high,
One distills the earth’s essence,
And the third hovers everywhere.
Hildegard von Bingen, O virtus sapientia

Hildegard shows how visionary women might transform the most male-dominated faith traditions from within.

Interview with Kristina Riggle, author of Keepsake

Jul 112012

Kristina Riggle is the author of four novels, the most recent of which is Keepsake, which is the story of a hoarder trying to clean up her act and the family who attempts to help her. I previously reviewed Riggle’s other novels: Real Life and Liars, The Life You’ve Imagined, and Things We Didn’t Say. I emailed with Riggle recently to talk about Keepsake and her writing career. Please see the end of this post for a giveaway opportunity.

Jen: How did you choose to write about hoarding? What about it sparked a story for you?

Kristina: Inevitably, I will write about something that fascinates me. Years ago, I saw an episode of Oprah about a compulsive hoarder. Her personal appearance was immaculate, and the exterior of her home was beautiful. By all appearances she was an intelligent, rational, articulate woman. When she opened the door to her home, inside was a horror show of filth and debris. Even more striking was when she showed the producers an empty garbage can. She could not bear to ruin the “perfect” garbage can with trash, though the rest of her house was, in essence, a trash heap. When I was brainstorming new book ideas, it seemed like a natural topic that would be perfect for the type of character-driven story I like to write. It also turned out — not deliberately — to use some of the same themes I covered in an earlier unpublished manuscript, which also featured two sisters with opposite temperaments brought together reluctantly.

Jen: Did you have to do a lot of research about hoarding to write Keepsake?

Kristina: A fair amount. I read books and articles, and watched the currently popular hoarding reality shows, of course. The most interesting thing I did was to fill out a hoarding self-help workbook “in character” as Trish. There are many varieties of hoarder, and this exercise helped me fix her character in my mind. I also worked with a former college roommate who is a clinical psychologist like the Seth character. I already had his character in the works when my friend and I reconnected. That was a great bit of serendipity.

Jen: Your first book, Real Life and Liars, had at its core a physical illness, but your three books since then deal with characters with more psychological diseases: gambling, alcoholism, hoarding. Is there something that attracts you more to characters with problems of the mind, rather than solely of the body?

Kristina: Even Real Life and Liars was a book about the characters’ emotional lives, though a physical illness was the crisis at the center of the book. People fascinate me, especially when they don’t act in rational, logical, sensible ways. We’re all screwed up some way or another, and I don’t think my characters are all that different than people in general. It’s like that old slogan from the Biography TV show. “Every life has a story.”

Jen: How does it feel releasing your fourth book? Is it much different than releasing your first?

Kristina: It does feel a little more normal, now, going to book events and talking to readers. But I still — and I’m sure always will — get a thrill out of fan mail, and signing books. I’m a little more anxious, too, in some ways. The longer I do this, the longer I want to do it. Forever, if I can. As long as my fingers can type. That’s a tall order in today’s publishing climate. But I’m hopeful for a long career.

Jen: Can you share one piece of advice for aspiring writers?

Kristina: I just heard this quote from the late Ray Bradbury on NPR’s Fresh Air: “By doing things, things get done.” If you want to be a writer, then by all means, write. If you want to publish, then research publishing in whatever form you choose to pursue. The point is, you can’t wish and hope yourself into being a writer anymore than you can anything else.

____

I have two copies of Keepsake to give away to a lucky reader anywhere in the world. Please enter on the form below by the 11:59 pm Eastern on Friday, July 20th.

Loading…

Martha Southgate and Occupy Wall Street

Dec 082011

Martha Southgate is the author of The Taste of Salt, and multiple other novels. She is also a signatory of OccupyWriters.com. Today she is here talking about why she supports Occupy Wall Street. For more information about Martha, check out her website|twitter|facebook.

I had a hard time getting started on this piece. For one thing, OWS is not a movement that I wholeheartedly embraced from the moment it began—I didn’t think they were wrong. I just couldn’t see what they were going to get done. Further, I don’t think of myself as a political writer in any way. None of my fiction engages the great issues of the day (at least not yet). While as an African-American woman and writer, I can hardly ignore the weight of history and of political movements on my life and the life of my family, taking an active part in the political process is not something that I engage with easily by temperament, even though I come from a long line of rabble-rousers. Both parents were active in the civil rights movement and my mother was an abortion clinic counselor in the 1970’s, shortly after abortion was legalized. Following in their footsteps, I became a community organizer in Cleveland in the mid 1980’s. The organization I worked for was built on the model that Saul Alinsky outlined in his seminal Rules for Radicals. Briefly, the goal was to start with getting communities mobilized around a small goal, like better trash collection.

Then over time, as they became more skilled and organized, Alinsky posited that the grassroots folk would make the leap to actions that would change the system altogether. The community organizing that Obama did was in an organization that worked on this model. Mostly the work was phone calls, door-knocking and meetings, meetings, meetings.

Noble work, I still believe. But I hated it. I hated the meetings. I hated knocking on strange doors. Every phone call made my heart contract. Finally, after a few unhappy months. I quit. I never doubted the rightness of the organization. But I wasn’t certain that they would ever reach their ultimate goal of systemic change. And I was not the person to get out there and get my hands dirty finding out. I was too internal, too meeting-averse, too full of other notions. Too much a writer (or at that time, a writer-to-be. I did not start writing fiction seriously until my 30’s)
I’m not particularly proud of walking away from organizing but one thing about getting older is that it forces you to come to terms

with who you are, not who you wish you were. I’m not the activist type. I got out there for Obama (and imagine I will again) but I’m never going to do it in the bone-deep, vivid way that true activists do. And I think that may contribute to my ambivalence about Occupy Wall Street.

Let me say here loud and clear that I have absolutely no ambivalence about the overriding message of the movement. The gap between the wealthy and the poor in this country has reached obscene levels and the breakdowns in the system that have led to it are mind-boggling (in a bad way). The crazed Republicans who hope only to carry out policies that will make everything worse terrify me. There is no doubt who is in the right in this fight.

But it took me a while to get on board. Like many, I couldn’t quite see what was being accomplished at first. They seemed to just be sitting there, with a mass of very vaguely articulated demands and a lot of justifiable anger. Even though I live here in New York, it took me a while before I got to Zucotti park to see what was up—and the night I finally went, frankly, not much was. Drumming. Sitting. Signs.

And I’ll admit that I still have some concerns about what the next step is. In the civil rights movement, which some of the images of OWS directly echo, there was a clear series of more easily specified demands: Let us be full citizens. End laws that prevent that from happening. With OWS, because the roots of the problem are so much more complex and entrenched, it’s harder to see what specific actions can be taken and how they should be taken. I am hopeful that as the winter wears on, that those actions will begin to emerge, just as what started out as vague popular sentiment in the 1960’s ultimately wrought enormous changes in the nation.
I’m not gonna grab a sleeping bag and move down to Zucotti Park. But as the phrase “the 99%” has entered the lexicon and there is discussion, substantive discussion about how this country might begin to be repaired, I have come to believe that this is where change starts. With a rumble. With a noise. With a sleeping bag in a park. With pointing out an injustice and refusing to waver. This is where it starts.

Interview with David Nicholls, author of One Day

Aug 102011

OD 1Sht picture On August 3, I was lucky enough, along with a group of bloggers, to be able to speak with David Nicholls his novel One Day, and the movie adaptation. For a giveaway, as well as my thoughts on the book and expectations for the movie, see my review post.

——————

Jen: You have written both books and screenplays, how does the process compare?

David Nicholls: It’s a long time since I wrote a book, unfortunately, because I’ve been sort of tangled up in these various screenplays, which I love. But, the hardest thing is, when you write a novel, you create the characters. You kind of cast them in your head… You’re very much the director, the designer, the music coordinator, the editor. And when you move on to a movie, you have to kind of spread that load. You might get asked what you think of a particular location or a costume design, but it isn’t your responsibility.

And that’s not a bad thing. That can be quite liberating to know very precisely what the parameters are of your role. But, inevitably you can feel as if you are losing a little control. And so, on this movie, I felt that much less than I have in the past….
The other difference is you lose a lot of your equipment, if you like, your technique. It’s very hard to do an internal thought process.

A lot of what happens to Emma in the three years she leaves University happens in her head. And unless you use acres and acres of voiceover, minute after minute of long, protracted voiceover, you can’t really get a thought process. You can’t really get an interior monologue onto the screen.

So, there’s this terrific pressure all the time to move things forward and to concentrate on what people say and what they do rather than what they think and feel. And that can be quite tough…

And finally, I suppose there are the budgetary and scheduling restraints. I mean, the most obvious example of this, and I’ve used it before, is if you write in a novel, you know, “it’s raining,” then it’s sort of just words on the page. It’s nothing. And if you write “it’s raining” in a screenplay, then suddenly they’ve got to hire all this equipment, stand around in the rain all night, and it costs an extra 200,000 pounds. It’s not your 200,000 pounds. And someone is going to ask, “Does it really need to be raining?”

Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway as Dexter and Emma

Jen: I’m really interested in Emma and Dexter’s relationship, because it’s this grand relationship and there are all these obstacles in the way, but they never feel like you’re just throwing obstacles for the purpose of throwing obstacles. And they’ve got this love that’s this great cross between romantic love and friendly affectionate love.

David Nicholls: Yes. I mean, this is the great conundrum for the writers of modern love stories. You know, what are the obstacles? What are the modern obstacles to people getting together? The sort of golden age love story, there are kind of class divisions and family feuds and all of these very powerful barriers, the kind of Romeo and Juliet barriers. And now, what are those barriers? And I think they’re to do with temperament and personality.

And in One Day, there’s a mixture of plot driven obstacles, like letters that don’t get sent and phone calls that don’t get answered and a single stupid remark that pushes them away from each other for a period of time and being with someone else….
Those things are fun to plot, but the main obstacles are to do with their growing up. There’s a period of time where Emma is just much too self-involved and lacking in self-confidence and much too depressed, I think, for it to be the right time with Dexter. I know definitely a long period of time where Dexter is just too immature and just too self-involved and too foolish, really, to be the right match for Emma.

David Nicholls

And that seemed to me to tally with real life, with the observation of the relationships between my friends, that often the process of getting together was incredibly protracted, incredibly complex, incredibly complicated because it wasn’t quite the right time. And I think maybe that’s the great modern obstacle, that we all take a lot longer to settle into a relationship and to settle into thinking that it’s the right time.

This post was written as a result of an interview set up at the behest of Big Honcho Media

Authors Helping Authors – An Interview with Authors Kim Wright and Sarah Pekkanen

Jul 212011

Recently, authors Kim Wright and Sarah Pekkanen sat down to talk about their experiences in publishing. Both have just published their second novels: Love in Mid Air and Skipping a Beat, respectively.

Kim: One of the things that’s most surprised me about publication is how much writers help each other. Like a lot of people, I’d had some harsh experiences while trying to get published, so part of me figured that the deeper you got into this world the more elbow-slinging and competitiveness you’d find. But the opposite happened.

Sarah: I’ve had the exact same experience. Jennifer Weiner was so pivotal when my first book The Opposite of Me came out. She was, of course, a very established and successful author so it was incredibly generous of her to take an interest in someone who was just starting and a complete unknown. And as I’ve gone along I’ve found that same spirit of helpfulness everywhere.

Kim: There’s sort of a sisterhood among the recently published. I think it’s because writers are expected to promote their own books and so many of us aren’t very good at it. We’re private people who stay home, work in our nightgowns, and talk to people who only exist in our heads. Then all of a sudden you’re published, boom, and you’re expected to know how to establish a platform and interact with the public.

Sarah: Yes, so we’re all trying to help each other and exchange ideas. Things like the blog tours or the giveaways or taking out ads together and splitting the cost. Female novelists will often recommend the work of their peers, saying something like “If you enjoyed my book, maybe you’ll like hers as well….” Or “Here are two books with a different take on a similar issue.”

Kim: Do you think male novelists help each other like that?

Sarah: No.
EDIT 8:30 Eastern 7/21/11: But I certainly don’t mean male writers don’t support each other – or don’t support women authors, for that matter – but I haven’t seen the same formal banding together of male authors on social media as I have among female authors. Several male authors have been enormously helpful to me personally – like the brilliant writer Matthew Quick, who chatted with me on the phone when I was panicking about my second book – and I count many male authors as friends.

Kim: Me either, and it’s just another example of the male ego sabotaging the man. Because people who are readers tend to read a lot. When I go into a bookstore I usually buy two or three books at a time and the Amazon free shipping system is set up to encourage people to buy several books at once. And who checks out one book from the library? You leave with an armful. Writers aren’t really in competition with each other, since if someone buys my book they might well buy yours at the same time. A rising tide lifts all boats, as my grandfather used to say.

Sarah: There’s also the emotional component of providing support for each other. Having a book out is scary and it’s really hard for anyone who isn’t going through the process to understand it. That’s how we met, isn’t it? I remember my publicist raved about your book and sent it to me to read. I loved it too, so we connected on Facebook and one day you wrote something about how you were struggling with your second book. I had just finished my second and could relate so much to what you were saying that I emailed you and offered to talk….

Kim: That’s precisely right. That phone call was a godsend for me.

Sarah: Have you met most of your writer friends through social media?

Kim: Yes. This is kind of funny. When Love in Mid Air first came out I got on a Facebook friending frenzy and sent friend requests to all these established authors. Here I was this total nobody reaching out to all these somebodies. But a lot of them friended me back and some of those relationship have turned into real dialogues, real online friendships, like ours.

Sarah: And then sometimes the people who have met on line meet in person if they all find themselves at a writing conference like the AWP. It’s amazing how quickly these relationships can grow and spread and I think they’re a tribute to the fact writers are sometimes a little bit lonely. We have our friends and families in real life but they can’t completely understand the ups and downs of writing or the kind of pressures writers put on themselves. So I’ve loved using the social media to connect to other writers….we’re figuring it out together as we’re going along.

Kim Wright

Sarah Pekkanen

Randy Susan Meyers’ Oh, D.E.A.R.

Feb 012011

Do you remember D.E.A.R? At my elementary school that meant “Drop Everything And Read,” something we typically did for 10 or 15 minutes every day. Best part of my day, really. As my TBR and Library piles are battling for supremacy and trying to sneak in around the review copies who have staked out places on my calendar, I’m thinking back to the simpler days of D.E.A.R., when I believed I had time to get to any book I wanted. And that, of course, got me fantasizing about a world where I really could just Drop Everything And Read for more than just 15 minutes a day.

5406756456 ffd6943380 m picture Randy Susan Meyers is busy celebrating the paperback release of her debut novel, The Murderer’s Daughters, but she is here telling us about the books calling to her, the books she wants to just drop everything and read:

—————————————————————————————–

My teetering pile of bedside books is matched only my the length of my writing ‘to-do’ list, but as I drill down, these are the books I can’t wait to dig into:

The Report by Jessica Kane

I read an excerpt on Granta’s online site, which drew me in immediately. This is a story of the largest loss of civilian life in the UK in World War II, when 173 people died in a crush on the stairs down to a tube station used as a shelter during air raids. A friend (whose taste I trust implicitly, fellow writer Kathy Crowley) said it was a book that “sticks.”

The Quiet Americans by Erika Dreifus

I read an essay about this recently launched book, (on writer Ellen Meeropol’s blog) which described it as a book she immediately read twice. The collection includes stories of “A high-ranking Nazi’s wife and a Jewish doctor in prewar Berlin. A Jewish immigrant soldier and the German POWs he is assigned to supervise. A refugee returning to Europe for the first time and the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. A son of survivors and technology’s potential to reveal long-held family secrets.” I am drawn to stories of the Holocaust told from all the angles of the prisms

Eden Lake by Jane Roper

Eden Lake won’t be available until May 2011—but other work I’ve read by Jane has been very funny (to wit, this piece from Poets & Writers on what writers really mean in workshops.) The book’s description reads: In 1968, newlyweds Clay Perry and Carol Weiss transformed a sheep farm in central Maine into Eden Lake—a nontraditional, progressive summer camp for children. Thirty years later, at the height of the Lewinsky scandal and the dot-com boom, Clay and Carol’s marriage is long over and the camp has become a pricey playground for entitled suburbanites. When an unexpected tragedy strikes, the Perryweiss children have to decide what role Eden Lake—and all that it stands for—will play in their lives. I am obsessed with summer camp, so this book had me at hello.

5406177711 159dd71e25 m picture 5406784442 18bec18d88 m picture 5406177735 0174319e47 m picture

The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer

I have loved every book Meg Wolitzer has written (The Position, The Ten-Year Nap) so I only had to know she had a new book coming out (in April) to be dying to read it. I know only what I’ve read on the Amazon page, but it has me totally intrigued (a sexual-distaste spreads through an entire town.)

The Memory Palace by Mira Bartók

In the realm of memoir, I was captured by Judith Bolton-Fasman’s Boston Globe review of Mira Bartók’s THE MEMORY PALACE: Bartók’s mother, Norma Herr, was a schizophrenic who felt both haunted and hunted. But Norma was also a musical prodigy whose concert career was abruptly halted after her first breakdown at the age of 19. By the time she divorced Paul Herr in 1963 she had two young daughters whom she shuttled between her parents’ home shadowed with memories of abuse to a dump of an apartment on the other side of Cleveland.

5406191365 d74789355e m picture 5406798300 215c023928 m picture

RANDY SUSAN MEYERS spent eight years as assistant director of Common Purpose, a batterer intervention program where she worked with both batterers and domestic violence victims. Previously, she was director for the Mission Hill Community Centers where she worked with at-risk youth. She is the co-author of the nonfiction book Couples with Children. Her short fiction has been published in Perigee, Fog City Review, and Grub Street Free Press. She currently teaches fiction-writing seminars at the Grub Street Writers’ Center in Boston, Massachusetts.

Buy The Murderer’s Daughters at:

Indiebound | Powells | Amazon *

*These are affiliate links. I received a copy of this author’s book from the publisher for review.

Older Entries

What I Reviewed:

Pick of the Month:

Other Books Read, Watch for Reviews:

Oaty Chocolate Chip Cookies