Book Review: The Fault In Our Stars by John Green

When a book seems to be everywhere, gaining critical and commercial attention, I do my best to avoid reading reviews. I aim to remain as neutral as possible and even ignorant of the book's premise so I can read with an unbiased mind. So it was with The Fault In Our Stars. It wasn't until I had it home from the library, reading the jacket summary, did I know it was a young adult novel with cancer as a central cast member.

When a book touches me in a certain way, I seek out negative reviews before writing my own thoughts. I wonder if my emotional reactions have clouded my critical assessment and I look for counter opinions to balance my perspective.

I read through several less-than-enthusiastic Goodreads reviews of The Fault In Our Stars, appreciating some comments, shaking my head at others - as we do in that community. But one review and the intense debate/discussion that accompanied it troubled me greatly. The reviewer, while recognizing the quality of Green's writing, questioned the right the author had to tell the story. Presumably because he had not lost a loved one to cancer, although the book was predicated on Green's experiences as a chaplain at a children's hospital.

What troubled me about this review was the questioning of an author's right to tell a story that he or she had not experienced directly. This is a work of fiction. This is what writers do. Of course many writers fictionalize events in their life, using their experiences as jumping off points for stories, as Green did. But the notion that a writer must restrict his storytelling to first-hand events is preposterous. Should Martin Zusack not have written The Book Thief? Should Cormac McCarthy not have written Blood Meridian? Should China Miéville not construct his steampunk fantasy worlds? Should Shakespeare not have written Hamlet? Okay, you get my point.

John Green wrote a deeply personal and very contemporary story from the first person perspective of a young woman dying of cancer. No, the author has never been a sixteen year old girl with a terminal illness. But he gave voice to her tragedy in a way that has touched thousands of readers. It's is what we trust writers to do: to tell the stories we know, can imagine, or want to hear but do not have the ability to voice on our own.

Another criticism of this book that bugged the heck out of me was the charge that of an emotionally manipulative story. This is a young adult novel about kids dying of cancer. If there is a way to write the story that doesn't involve intense emotions, well, it would not be a story I'd care to read. Adolescents and teenagers feel things deeply. On a scale of one to ten, they experience life at twenty. If anything, in a world of instant feedback and frighteningly short attention spans, I am grateful for a book that takes the young adult reader's breath away, that makes them feel truly, madly, deeply.

And yet another poke at The Fault In Our Stars was the hyper-precocity of its characters. It's true. Teenagers aren't this articulate. In fact, no one I know, no matter how widely read and clever, speaks with the rapid-fire wit and clarity of Hazel and Gus. Then again, no one speaks like characters in a David Mamet play, or a Quentin Tarantino movie, or an Aaron Sorkin television drama. Yet we eat that shit up. Because it's great writing and the characters knock us out. I WANT young readers to hear voices like these. Because young readers are smart. They get this dialogue, these characters. Just because they aren't capable of spouting forth with such erudition (who amongst us is?) doesn't mean they aren't capable of examining and responding to life with sophisticated insight. May I remind those critics again that this is a work of fiction?

I wasn't fully on board with the subplot of elusive and misanthropic JD Salinger-esque author and his strange book - those scenes seemed forced and stilted to me - but I would have gone just about anywhere with these characters.

A beautifully rendered tragedy with smart, funny, honorable characters whose voices are unique and strong. I can think of no greater gift to young and mature readers alike than a powerful story told with grace and feeling.

Answering a Challenge: Five Favorite Reads

I began blogging a couple of summers ago for an audience of approximately one. Me. I still sit here and write mainly to myself because the thought that anyone else actually reads this thing makes me cringe a little inside. The weird moments occur when a colleague tells me his wife read my blog or when the author of a book I've reviewed steps in to say hello. I wonder then if I should go back and scrub clean some of my language or wipe out all the TMI bits or if my family will curse me, or... But mostly it's pretty calm here and occasionally it's magical. Like when you meet a kindred spirit in the blogosphere. And when that kindred spirit just happens to be Irish, as in Living-in-Ireland-Irish, well then you know you aren't here just whistling dixie. My fellow writer and adventuress of the blank page, Edith, who blogs here: In a Room of My Own has been a source of encouragement and inspiration since we chanced upon each other last summer (and Edith, I'd treasure you if you were from Hoboken or Bangkok, you know. It's just that I have this thing about your Emerald Isle!).

Recently Edith tagged me in a lovely challenge: to cite Five Favorite Books and to pass along the challenge to other bloggers whom I admire. A nearly-impossible feat (this naming of only five favorites) but I shall try.

First, let me toss the baton to these wonderful writers, readers, bloggers who inspire me with their writing and life journeys:

mag offleash writing with grace and introspection from a quiet place in the Northeast U.S.

In a Vermont Kitchen a brilliant cook and a passionate reader and writer whom I feel as though I've known forever; someday we shall meet in the flesh!

Grace Makely writer, illustrator, adventuress

Ideas to Words novelist, imaginist, dreamer and doer

Word by Word healing through aromatherapy, inspiring through words in Aix-en-Provence

And now to narrow down a lifetime of reading to five greatest hits:

• Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh Read when I was six years old, this book set me on my journey to become a writer. Never mind that I took a thirty-eight year detour. Harriet and her journal, Ole Golly and her yellow bathrobe, Sport and the sleep in his eyes, Dostoevsky, and tomato and dill sandwiches never left me. Friends once even read my journal and tossed me out for it, further bonding me to my Harriet. My hero.
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen I make it a point to reread an Austen each year, to remind myself that characters carry a story, that language is to be revered, and that at heart I'm just a girl who loves a love story with a happy ending. Jane Austen reminds me that fewer joys are as pure as a wonderful story.
• Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner It has been ten years since I read this, my first Wallace Stegner. I cite it as the book that transformed me from a casual, although avid, reader to an analytical one. The book that set me on the path first revealed by Harriet the Spy. For this novel opened to my intellect the wonder of writing and the power of carefully crafted prose. Reading Stegner made me ache to write; he pulled open the empty space in my heart that has finally been filled by my own acts of literary exuberance.
• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald I find tremendous inspiration and motivation from reading books on the craft of writing. I am grateful to the writers who explore and contribute to the vast canon of helpful advice for those of us still groping in the dark. That being said, if all those texts were taken away and I was left with only one example of the perfect novel, it would have to be The Great Gatsby.

The first four came to mind with ease. The last is torture, for it means excluding dozens upon dozens of glorious reads. And so the last shall be reserved for an ever-changing roster of "The Last Book I Read" even if it was one I did not enjoy. Because literacy and time to read and the chance to hold someone's heart and soul in my hand are gifts beyond reckoning.

This gives me an easy out, since the last book I read was by one of my favorite writers. And in a sweet turn of chance, I begin and end by delighting in the literary treasures of Ireland: a circle that includes my friend Edith whom you met at the start of this ditty, and the author Colm Tóibín, who completes my favorite reads list.

You can explore my reviews of Tóibín's books here in my blog or via my Goodreads page. Tóibín has given reader-me breathtaking, troubling, resonant stories; for writer-me, he is teaching me to see and listen to the empty space between the words. As a mother-to-be, I took my baby's name from one of his stories. If you know my story, you will know I never had a chance to meet that child. After that loss, as in other impossible times, books became my solace. Weeks later I finally began to find words of my own.

Reading has changed my life. How about you? Although I hand this off officially to the bloggers above, I would love to hear about your five favorite reads.

Tag. You're it.

This Round's On Me

I almost bailed. It wasn't just the hangover. I tend to get a little manic in the early half of hangover recovery (I swear my best runs are the morning after one too many glasses of wine). But that night, it was the M. Stansfield, the Lazy Gardener and a shared carafe of sake. And the pork belly dumplings. And the kimchi. I was up early, despite the gin. I went for a swim - endorphins being the best hair-of-the-dog I know - then home to a monster plate of poison-soaking-up pancakes. And I still had hours to sneak in lunch and perusal at Elliott Bay Books before the afternoon writing workshop at Hugo House.

It was more that I'd had a shitty two weeks of writing. I'd kept up with my early morning writing sessions, except for the two days we were out-of-town almost buying a house and then not and then leasing an apartment. And the one morning I was compelled to finish the book that had so enraptured me during a bout of raging insomnia a few hours before. Turning its final pages, I sat on the sofa clutching a gut-scorching mug of coffee and I sobbed.  Then I went to work and quit my job. Didn't get much writing done that day. And then there was the morning after the night before, my brain too hazy with gin and kimchi to face pen and blank paper.

But really, I've churned out some pages. Just not as many as I'd've liked. Weekends have been distracted frenzies of packing and shopping for things that I fear I will need but won't be able to just pop out and purchase once I leave a city of 4 million for a peninsula of 10,000. I missed my February goal of 90,000 total by... oh... 5,000 words. Or so. Not fair. It was a short month by four days. I might have made it, otherwise.

So on this day, after my swim and pancakes, after peppermint tea and Advil, I settled at my desk with several days' worth of writing to type into my manuscript. Got the iPod queued up with hours of rainy day tunes and shut down the social media sites. My fingers flew across the keyboard. Then the pounding began. And it wasn't in my tender head.

At first I thought the culprit was the young architect upstairs who introduced himself to our complex last Halloween by throwing a raging party (my neighbors and I don't party. Sometimes the guy across the courtyard yells during football season) that resulted in me calling the landlord at 7 the following morning to have someone clean up the vomit on our patio spewed by a party girl from the balcony above. I'm not a fan of the guy upstairs. And he's a stomper. A small guy who crosses his living room like Charlton Heston in a chariot pulled by water buffalo.

But it wasn't Stomper Boy. It was coming from below the apartment. I discovered the landlord in the basement, repairing the basement ceiling, i.e. my frigging floor. For over an hour, I was subjected to hammering, drilling, thumping. Then the birds that nest in the chimney got going. Soon I was surrounded by a convention of noisemakers, all of whom were clearly aware that this was the first time in days I had sat down at the computer, knuckles cracked, primed to work. I did work, between bouts of cursing, but it wasn't quality - it was a secretarial act, retyping my longhand without registering my intent in the words.

I considering bundling myself, laptop and notebook off to the Queen Anne branch of the SPL, where I spend most weekend afternoons. But then the hangover fatigue hit and I knew after thirty minutes wrapped in the blanket of a warm, quiet Reading Room, I'd be mush. And by the time I settled in, I'd have to turn right around and schlep across town to Capitol Hill and Hugo House to attend a workshop I'd registered for last December in a pique of writerly enthusiasm. Which was now the one hundred percent last thing I wanted to do.

So I gave a "Fuck it" and stomped out the front door.

Ah jeez.

Sometimes I just want to talk about writing. I want to hear other people talk about writing. Workshops are dandy and handy and I nearly always come away with a scrap, or a collection of scraps, that I can mine for story ideas, motivation, contemplation. But I am not a star at writing well on cue - it's gotten easier, as I've mentioned before - but I'm about as skilled a spontaneous writer as I am a speaker - which means I'm better off remaining the mysterious, quiet presence in the back of the classroom. Keep 'em guessing. Never let 'em hear you sweat.

At some point during the afternoon, our guide and conspirator Jonathan Evison, author of the New York Times bestseller West of Here (2011), The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (2012), and recipient of the Washington State Book Award for his debut novel All About Lulu (2008), confessed he'd been dreading this workshop for several weeks. "I'm not a teacher," he proclaimed in the opening minutes of our hours together. "I don't believe you can teach writing. Just ask me some questions."

It wasn't a workshop. It was a talkshop, a thinkshop, a laughshop. The topic was ostensibly the relationship between the writer and the reader, which is first and foremost a dialogue the writer has with herself. What is the effect I'm trying to create with the story? What do I want the reader to walk away feeling, considering, sorting out? We discussed the assumptions we must make about our readers' intelligence.  As writers, we should "understate our expertise" by not engaging in a brain dump of research to ensure our readers get where the story is coming from and how the context informs the present action. This is critical for me to consider, as the very nature of historical fiction is fraught with sinkholes of exposition and backstory.

We talked about allowing characters free rein, to respect the direction characters take and to be prepared to "reverse engineer" the plot when the logic of the story or the logic of the characters' character demands it. I foresee putting on my big girl pants and wading into the muck of my plot for some serious reverse engineering in drafts to come.

We chatted about tension in story arc, the dance between the logic of the characters - remaining consistent with their nature - versus "subverting the reader's expectation" by taking the story in a direction they won't expect, yet by the end, becomes the only direction that is true to the story.

But mostly, we just kvetched. We spilled about the business of writing, about beta readers, editors, publishers, agents and failure. We examined the trajectory of an author who wrote his first novel in 1987, at the age of 19. Many novels and lifetimes later, the first published novel appeared in 2008, when Evison was 40. Twenty-one years of scraping together enough part-time gigs to support a writing habit that now supports a family full-time. To have the opportunity to mine the brain of a hard-working writer who takes nothing for granted blew away the cost of admission.

We compared work styles - Evison is yet one more champion of the first-thing-in-the-morning, long-hand school (I remember a workshop I attended a couple of years ago when the author strongly advocated early morning writing. I still have my notes, in which I scribbled "I'm up at 4:30 to run as it is, how the hell can I get up any earlier to write?" It took me another year to admit to myself I was making excuses about not having the time or energy to write while working full-time. Two years later, I see a novel coming together that will have been written nearly entirely between 4:30-5:15 a.m., one page at a time. This shit works, people. If you can't be there every day, aim for a minimum of 5). Evison revises as he goes, which I'm able to do with short fiction, but I fear I'd never finish if I attempted real-time revision with the novel. He writes a page a day, 320 days a year. A novel is born.

And we talked about what it is to be a writer. Which in the end has nothing to do with anything above. It is the moment you lose yourself in the story, you feel no hunger, no thirst, no pressure on your bladder. When you look up at last, you see that hours have passed. You felt only the characters acting through you; you became a conduit for the story to flow from the universe to the page. How it gets there and who eventually reads it is irrelevant to the fact that the only requirement to be a writer is to write. Jonathan Evison is correct. That can't be taught. It can only be done.

Book Review: White Dog Fell from the Sky by Eleanor Morse

White Dog Fell from the Sky by Eleanor Morse My rating: 5 of 5 stars

White Dog Fell from the Sky is as beautiful and profound a novel about love as any I have read. With grace and power it presents all the forms of love the heart is capable of holding: love born of compassion and of passion, love of family and of country, the blinding, feral love for one’s children, for any child, the helpless love for suffering animals, the love of justice that compels us to act, despite our fear.

The story unfolds in Botswana in the mid-1970’s. Across the border in South Africa the jaws of apartheid are grinding black citizens to bone and dust; those caught rebelling face torture and death in prison. A young medical student, Isaac Muthethe, escapes across the border in a hearse, hoping to create a new life and eventually smuggle his younger siblings into Botswana before apartheid swallows them whole. A stranger to Botswana, with no contacts or destination, Isaac begins walking. Behind him is a dog who appeared out of nowhere and who refuses to be left behind. Isaac names him White Dog and so by naming him, becomes attached to him as a symbol of survival and unconditional love.

By chance Isaac encounters an old chum, Amen, who is a member of the South African resistance movement, the ANC. Amen invites Isaac into his household. Fortuitously, Isaac is hired as a gardener by Alice Mendelssohn, an American woman in a nearby town.

Alice’s story, which begins as her marriage comes to an end, becomes linked to Isaac’s by a spark of compassion. It’s as if her heart knows its way before her head has a chance to object. She welcomes Isaac into her home with matter-of-fact generosity, while her mind is distracted by the stress of a stuttering marriage coming to a cold stall.

To put some distance between herself and her present reality, Alice leaves town on a research trip to the great veldt of Botswana - remote, removed, cut off from her town life. Alice asks Isaac to remain in her home during her absence. He is overwhelmed by her sudden trust, yet determined to be worthy of her respect. Alice is surprised to fall in sudden love with a taciturn British anthropologist, Ian Henry. She delays her return home to explore the possibility of a future with this solitary man, her senior by a generation.

When Alice returns several weeks later, Isaac has disappeared. His beloved companion, White Dog, remains behind, waiting for him, nearly dead from starvation. In the kitchen an uneaten bowl of porridge sits spoiled on the table, as if Isaac had been interrupted at his breakfast.

Isaac’s fate takes the reader into dark and terrible places; Alice’s quest to find him reveals the light of compassion and the depth of love.

In addition to love, the themes of social justice and political realities in Africa play central roles in the narrative. Man-made borders, that between Botswana and South Africa, the separation of blacks and whites, the barriers of language, social class and nationality as well as the fences designed to keep wildlife away from pasture land, create a sense of confinement and claustrophobia that is at ironic odds with the vast savanna of southern Africa.

Eleanor Morse’s prose captures the searing heat and treacherous beauty of Botswana; her characters touch every sense with a Babel of languages, revealing eyes or masked expressions, the salt on their skin, the sweat that clings to their clothes, the hair that shows or belies their ages. The tension she maintains leaves the reader raw and unable to let the book rest – the story compels as much as it shatters.

There is something very classic about Morse's writing style. This is the work of a mature, confident writer – making me think of Margaret Atwood, Shirley Hazzard, Richard Ford, Iris Murdoch. It could have been written thirty years ago instead of last year – there is an elegance, an ease, a straightforward storytelling style that contains not the least trace of contemporary self-consciousness.

I implore you to read this beautiful book. Your soul will tremble, your heart will ache and you will be changed as a reader.

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Book Review: Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The opening paragraph of Sweet Tooth reveals the story's end, which is a tidy way of compelling you, dear reader, to focus on the important parts - the middle and such. You know it ends badly, so you can't possibly be disappointed; therefore, don't worry about it.

But then you remember that you are reading Ian McEwan, master of unreliable narrators and oft-tricksy endings, and you wonder - am I being told the truth of the ending as it is, or the truth as the narrator would have me see it? And suddenly you are on edge, tense, looking for clues. Oh, Ian, you clever, clever man.

The plot is playful: a young co-ed, Serene Frome (rhymes with Plume), flops a bit in her maths degree and flounders after graduating Cambridge in 1972. Although well-bred and well-read, Serena's ambitions are limited. But she is recruited, by way of an affair with a retread professor, into the secretarial pool of MI5. Seeing her pliability, borne of boredom and upper-middle class ease, her superiors envelope her in an undercover operation, code-named "Sweet Tooth." Sweet Tooth is a cultural op - its mission is to identify and promote British writers who demonstrate anti-Communist philosophies. The writers are led to believe a literary foundation is behind the generous financial support and their only responsibility is to write away, honing their brilliance. Serena's assignment is to recruit a young writer and English professor, Tom Haley, into the scheme. It's not such a difficult mission, as it's hard to imagine any struggling writer turning down a pot of cash from a well-known foundation which has just stroked his ego until he is as content as a cat with a bowl of cream. But Serena manages to muck things up royally, by falling in love with her target.

Sweet Tooth isn't really a Cold War cloaks and codes thriller, as much as its pretty and pretty vacant heroine would love it to be (she's a simple girl who just wants to have fun. Or, if she can't have that, she'd be happy curling up in her dreary bedsit with a novel - Jacqueline Susann is just as good, if not better than, Jane Austen, thank you very much). It's a slowly unraveling set piece, chock full of deceptive aplomb, in which everything turns to custard with surreal glee.

Unfortunately, there are all sorts of draggy parts in the middle. But don't you dare skim, because you'll miss the clues that'll catch you in a cross-double cross that I dare not spoil here. And lots of author self-indulgence, as McEwan weaves in snippets of his short stories and real life characters from his early career; it's a satirical rewriting of the author's own history. The short stories within the story are terrific and the spy agency-funded rise and hilariously ironic fall of a writer - based on a true story - is fascinating.

Hang out with the fact that Serena stops sounding like a young woman coming of age in the early 1970s and starts sounding the way a man would imagine a young woman would think and behave; McEwan is particularly adept at writing women and I couldn't quite accept a failure here (Blue's Clues!) File away as interesting asides, but let off the hook, the red herrings of the IRA and Russian double-agents and jilted MI5 bureaucrats. They won't get you anywhere. And sad is the case of Tony Canning, one of the most interesting subplots - the one that could have turned this book from writer's folly into legit thriller: his story dead-ends with nothing but a nosebleed to show for all the trouble.

I'm equivocating - I can't quite commit to saying that I think Sweet Tooth is a great book - I found it a bit too smug to buy a theme of the power of literature (as some reviews have claimed) - there was too much stifled laughter and indulgent sweet (tooth) ness for something so grand. It also wasn't that great of a thriller, which it doesn't pretend to be, (but again, other reviews have found a John Le Carre note that I can't carry). But it is terrifically entertaining - all plummy accents and witty repartee that make Americans swoon in equal measure for Downton Abbey and 007 - and McEwan's fine, fine writing is irresistible.

And then there is that Absolutely Fabulous ending.

Enjoy Sweet Tooth. Seriously. Don't read heaps into it, just enjoy the read.

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Book Review: Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“First of all, you can’t fall into hating the people you are killing. Because you’ll carry that hate with you longer than you will the actual killing itself. It is only by the grace of God that you are on one side and your enemy is on the other side. I often think, ‘I could have been born in North Vietnam.’”

Matterhorn author Karl Marlantes, August 20, 2010 The Times (London).

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War launched onto the bestseller lists in 2010, when United States was entrenched in two unpopular wars in ill-understood and seemingly hopeless places: Iraq and Afghanistan. Neither of these wars is comparable to Vietnam in terms of tactical warfare, terrain, volume of casualties and mis-treatment of vets by their fellow citizens, but the cultural divisions at home, the politicizing of the conflicts and the anger and sorrow over the loss of soldiers and civilians remain the same.

Matterhorn tells the Odyssey of Second Lieutenant Waino Mellas as he leads Bravo Company through the jungle near Vietnam’s border with Laos, just beyond the DMZ. The company’s mission is to secure a remote hilltop base: the fictional Matterhorn. This novel is a living thing. It breathes and pulses, it horrifies and heartens. It is a brilliantly written tribute to combat veterans and a searing examination of the fog of war.

Bravo Company becomes a collective Sisyphus, at the mercy of the gods of the Fifth Marine Division. It spins in circles in the jungle, trying to make sense of the quixotic orders of base commanders more concerned with their careers than the lives of the young men in their charge. The soldiers of Bravo Company endure the unbearable: jungle rot, immersion (or trench) foot, man-eating tigers, near-starvation and dehydration, and of course, the horrific wounds of war: bullets, grenades, mines and shrapnel cut down the company throughout their journey.

The narrative has many themes: the adventure of battle and the camaraderie of soldiers; the value of a well-trained militia in sharp contrast with inherent unjustifiable nature of war; the racial tension between black soldiers and white that brings the conflicts of home to the battlefields of Vietnam; and the truth of military politics - the power struggles between reserve and regular officers and “lifers” on the ground and with their commanding officers, who adjust casualty numbers and keep up a pretense of victory to look good to their superiors and to the press at home.

Marlantes writes with clarity and authenticity, in a style that is raw, vivid and surprisingly readable. Matterhorn flows with fully realized characters whom you come to love or revile with ferocity, your heart breaking with each loss. He provides breathtaking detail; the combat scenes are rendered in a minute-by-minute reel and you experience the soliders' fear, adrenalin and pain.

It took Karl Marlantes, a decorated Vietnam veteran and accomplished civilian (Lieutenant, USMC; Rhodes Scholar, Oxford) thirty years to write, rewrite and find a publisher for Matterhorn. Although I would not wish such an arduous journey to publication on any writer, I believe that telling this story now, in a new century, to a generation for which the Vietnam War is an anecdote or a chapter in an American History textbook, benefits the book's readers and its subject.

Among the most precious and devastating aspects of any war are the soldiers’ stories. No one who has not served in combat can understand what a soldier suffers physically and emotionally. For Vietnam veterans, who returned home only to face insults and shunning, the stories remained locked inside. Writers who record their stories speak for the millions who cannot. In 1977, journalist Michael Herr published Dispatches, an account of his experiences in Vietnam in 1967-68 embedded with platoons; Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien offered the beautiful and compelling The Things They Carried in 1990. Twenty years later - and thirty-five years after the end of the war in Vietnam - Karl Marlantes reminds us that the stories of young soldiers in the jungles of Southeast Asia are as devastating and relevant now as they were to a generation once removed - our fathers, brothers, uncles and grandfathers  - who still live with these experiences tormenting their hearts.

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Book Review: Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I got a table at the Rainbow Room I told my wife I'd be home soon Big ships are approaching the docks I got my hi-fi boom box Mashed potatoes in cellophane I see my life going down the drain Hold me baby and don't let go Pretty girls help to soften the blow

Palm trees; the flat broke disease And LA has got me on my knees I am the bluest of blues Every day a different way to lose

The Go Getter I'll be the Go Getter That's my plan That's who I am The Go Getter Yeah the Go Getter

The Go Getter The Black Keys

I have a complicated relationship with social satire. I give the vulgar and violent (thinking here of South Park and Chuck Palahniuk) a wide berth –– but the bizarre sensibilities of Monty Python, the gentle humor of Garrison Keillor or the politician-skewering tirades of Stewart and Colbert tickle me. I have the hardest time appreciating modern literary satire. When I commit to spending a few days with a book, I want story. Good, old-fashioned, beginning-middle-end story, not cynical commentary wrapped in wit.

Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins is the marriage of gentle social satire with old-fashioned story-telling; a marriage that gives life to a delightfully original and brave novel. Like any skilled satirist, Walter creates a world that is slightly off-kilter – not bizarre, not unbelievable- just a sense that something, somehow is slightly amiss. The reader is always a bit wobbly – guaranteeing she will take nothing for granted in the narrative.

The title Beautiful Ruins refers to one of novel’s central themes: the inevitable crumbling of youth, of promise, of dreams. There are so many beautiful ruins in this story, which takes place in 1962 Italy and present-day Hollywood, with a bit of contemporary Spokane and Edinburgh and 1970’s Seattle tossed in, not to forget a slight detour to the Sierra Nevada mountains in the 1850’s.

Among the ruins we find the village of Porto Vergogna and the dreams of its most ambitious resident, hotel owner Pasquale Tursi; the actress Dee Moray, who comes to Porto Vergogna in 1962 to convalesce; Alvis Bender, a war veteran turned writer who can’t write past his first chapter; the legendary movie producer Michael Deane, who has made a beautiful ruin of his face with Botox and plastic surgery; Deane’s assistant Claire Silver, whose love life and career represent everything she hates about sell-out, superficial Los Angeles; former Seattle grunge rocker Pat Bender, a mid-life shamble of addiction and self-loathing; and aspiring screenwriter Shane Wheeler, who delivers one of the book’s most surprising chapters, a pitch for a movie about that great ruin of the American frontier spirit: the doomed Donner party.

That’s a heckuva lot of characters (and there are more, far more!) and this is a heckuva lot of story. Yet it works, in all its madcap and poignant twists, thanks to Walter’s crisp writing and efficient plotting. You fall in love with these characters – Walter gives them such soul, your heart is constantly tugged. This is a book you could read in the space of a Sunday, not because it’s simple, but because you simply don’t want to put it down. I waver and withhold a fifth star because the Hollywood scenes feel a bit thin and fantastical to me - there's that satire twitch of mine - and I couldn't quite connect with Claire, who holds a pivotal role, until she, well, I don't want to spoil things.

If you don’t care for Hollywood endings, you might feel cheated by Walter’s wrap-up of his intertwined story lines. Me? I’m a sucker for spoonful of sugar to make the medicine of satire go down.

Richard Burton makes a brilliantly comic cameo; it is in fact this famous actor for whom the book is titled, after Louis Menard’s piece in The New Yorker: “[Dick] Cavett’s four great interviews with Richard Burton were done in 1980….Burton, fifty-four at the time, and already a beautiful ruin, was mesmerizing.”

Jess Walter uses his characters and their exploits to poke firmly but not cruelly at the bubbles of pop culture, our adoration of celebrity and beauty and the fickle nature of the film and publishing industries. Not to mention the fickle and fleeting nature of love. He shows the folly of great expectations and the beautiful ruins of unfulfilled hopes and dreams. It is a charming literary mosaic. View all my reviews

Book Review: The Round House by Louise Erdrich

The Round House by Louise Erdrich My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On two successive nights this week I woke suddenly, yelling out in fright. In my dreams I was moments away from becoming the victim of a horrific assault. Shaken, I turned on the light, shifting uncomfortably in sheets soaked in my sweat, and I reached for The Round House. Louise Erdrich’s profound novel haunted my dreams and moved me to tears and laughter in my waking hours.

Geraldine Coutts, an Ojibwe living on a reservation in North Dakota, doesn’t escape from her nightmare. On a gentle spring Sunday in 1988 her thirteen year old son Joe and her husband Bazil, a tribal judge, peel her fingers from the steering wheel of her car and speed her unyielding body to the hospital. The front of her shirt is covered in vomit and she reeks of gasoline. Raped and nearly burned alive, Geraldine escaped when her captor went in search of matches.

Geraldine’s physical wounds heal in time, but the spirit of this proud, vibrant woman is crushed. She tumbles into depression, refusing to leave her bedroom, barely eating, escaping her terror through the false protection of sleep. The Round House opens with this crime and it becomes the incident which ushers Joe, the novel’s narrator, out of the smooth waters of his childhood into the murky depths of maturity.

The Round House is more than a coming-of-age story. The novel has many layers, each beautifully rendered in language that is so pure it belies the complex themes. The search for Geraldine’s attacker propels the narrative and in this, it is a tense literary thriller. It is an exploration of tribal law and the protracted effort by the federal government to chip away at Native American sovereignty. Tribal political and judicial limbo is a chord that resonates throughout Erdich’s works, yet when told through the perspective of a child it becomes the character’s discovery of his legacy and not the political agenda of the author. It is a novel rich with history, mythology and adventure.

But more than these themes, this is a novel of family. The tight union of Bazil, Geraldine and Joe forms the familial core. Erdrich’s portrait of a strong woman collapsing dug so deeply under my skin – this cold reality was the source of my nightmares. But the ways a husband and a son respond to the woman they love as she falls apart, how hard they work to lift her up and save her, are heartfelt and poignant. Erdrich captures each character’s emotions and reactions in vivid and graceful detail.

The theme of family extends through the tribal community. Erdrich reveals daily life on a reservation. She shows us what we think we know: the poverty and alcoholism on the inside, the marginalization and racism from the outside. But she also conveys a sense of community that few of us will ever experience, no matter how idyllic our childhood. Within the tribe everyone belongs to everyone else – the definition of family is not limited to blood relations. The communal responsibility demonstrates a solid foundation built on shared history and beliefs.

Despite the violent crime that churns the plot, there many moments of levity and sweetness in The Round House. The novel’s comic foil is Mooshom, Joe’s ancestor and tribal elder. And I do mean elder. He’s entering his second century as salty as a sailor and with libido to spare. The many scenes Joe shares with his besties Cappy, Angus and Zack are ripe with thirteen year old boy hormones, antics and tenderness.

I can’t sing loudly enough my praises for The Round House. I also can’t believe this is the first Louise Erdrich novel I’ve read. It has been a year of celebrated-American author discoveries for me: Terry Tempest Williams, Cormac McCarthy, Louise Erdrich, not to mention the astonishing debut of Amanda Coplin (The Orchardist). That they are each deeply connected to the American West is significant to me as a reader. Through their words I have developed a deeper understanding, love and compassion for my enormous and complex backyard.

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Book Review: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy My rating: 4 of 5 stars

They passed through a highland meadow carpeted with wildflowers, acres of golden groundsel and zinnia and deep purple gentian and wild vines of blue morninglory and a vast plain of varied small blooms reaching onward like a gingham print to the farthest serried rimlands blue with haze and the adamantine ranges rising of out nothing like the backs of seabeasts in a Devonian dawn.

I read this and I marvel. How does one writer, equipped with the same words, the same semantic possibilities as any, know to string these particular words together in just this way, paragraph after paragraph, page after page? My copy of Cormac McCarthy's 1985 classic Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West is mauled by dog-eared pages and inked underlines as I seek to capture and remember his revelatory images of the borderlands of the Southwest and the astonishing employ of English that feels primordial under his pen.

Once again, Cormac McCarthy tears me apart, digs at the darkest corners of despair and depravity in my mind, poking and prodding with a sharp stick as I wince and try to turn away. Yet unlike The Road, a black and white dystopian nightmare which offers redemption through the steadfast love of its principal characters, Blood Meridian is merciless Technicolor nihilism. Each character explores the vast possibilities of evil as McCarthy pulls the reader through the reeking entrails of history.

They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fireblacked paloverde tree. They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they’d been roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes. Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down their chests.

Blood Meridian is based on historical accounts of the Glanton Gang, a band of mercenaries that roamed the Texas-Mexico borderland in the mid-19th century, trading scalps for gold. Their initial objective was the pursuit of hostile Indian warriors who reigned by terror throughout the Borderlands. Eventually the crew of ex-soldiers, escaped slaves, convicts, marginalized immigrants, disenfranchised Indians and plain old thugs extended their quest for carnage to peaceful, agrarian Mexicans and Native Americans on both sides of the still-disputed border.

To read three hundred and fifty pages of unrelenting brutality, I have to give myself up to the prose, which is beautiful and original beyond compare, and to what I think the author sought to accomplish with his symphony of violence. I believe McCarthy offers the absolute opposite of the glorification of violence – he depicts horror to force the acknowledgment of it. His stories are blood-curdling pleas to recognize that we – as a nation, as a measure of humanity - are built on the back of history’s corpses. He decries the chest-thumping patriotism that is endemic to nations which claim moral superiority, generally by citing some sort of divine right. Scholar Sara Spurgeon in a critical essay of Blood Meridian (“The Sacred Hunter and the Eucharist of the Wilderness: Mythic Reconstructions in Blood Meridian”) declares the novel a “a sort of antimyth of the West.” There are no good guys in McCarthy’s depiction of the American West: there are only amoral murderers and the victims of their bloodlust. “Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn.” Cunning words, spoken by a character who is the book’s Satan incarnate, its maniacal resident philosopher.

The danger of a book like this is that the reader must detach to make it through the gore. In comparison to The Road, where humility and love are present on every page and you have a sense the writer is suffering and weeping with you, the substance of Blood Meridian risks being subsumed by its intense and unrelenting style.

But without question Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West is yet another McCarthy entry in the canon of Great North American Literature.

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Delightful By Contrast*

Routine is a ground to stand on, a wall to retreat to; we cannot draw on our boots without bracing ourselves against it. ~ Henry David Thoreau

So much for taking advantage of a few hours' comp time. I managed to leave the office at noon as planned, but then I made the unfortunate decision to check work e-mail as my lentil soup warmed on the stove.

It’s now after 4:00 and my iPhone sits on the counter beside me. I‘m waiting for responses to several e-mails and phone calls, hoping to douse Friday afternoon embers before they spark into weekend fires. IT malfunctions prevent me from accessing the database I need to fix problems flinging themselves at my inbox. The frustration winds into knots that cramp my shoulders and throb in the base of my neck. The tension headache pulses just behind my eyes. This was to be my time to write, to reconnect with my manuscript. Instead I'll pound some random thoughts into submission and force them to coalesce into a blog post.

I’ve been thinking about the fine line between routine and rut. I've been thinking about it a great deal since returning from Ireland. Because I seemed to have escaped the latter, yet I now struggle to regain the former.

I’m pretty taken with my routines. I guard them jealously. These are the small bits of my day I can control while the rest of life swirls heedlessly around me. The precious hours between 4 and 7 a.m. when I write, run, contort my limbs into camels and plows; that hour before bedtime when I settle in with the book of the moment; the Saturdays when miles of pavement pour forth in front of me and I race to the finish, knowing a quiet day of writing is the only other item on my to-do list.

I started my manuscript in early July and quickly settled into a productive pattern: writing every morning before and most evenings after work, all day Saturday after my long run, a few hours on Sunday in between errands and cooking. I planned my writing around Brendan’s interminable work days, making the most of the little time we have together.

The beauty of a long holiday is the chance to step out of the well-trodden path that threatens to harden into a rut. Yet, one of the things I love most about travelling is the creation of a little world that only you and your travel companion inhabit - a world of private rituals and routines that shape your adventure and later, your memories.

Simplicity defined our Kerry Way routine. And in this simplicity we found our bliss. I would rise while the B&B was yet asleep and make a cup of dreadful coffee from the Nescafe instant packets tucked into the tea service tray in our room, then creep barefoot to the guest parlour to write. To write until I could smell bacon frying, to write until I could hear the dog barking, to write until footfalls overhead told me other guests were waking. Brendan would collect me and we padded with feet still sore from the previous day's miles to the dining room, our stomachs whimpering with hunger, forced to wait until the civilized hour of 8:30 to be fed.

After a breakfast of - wait for it - muesli with whole milk, soda bread slathered with butter and orange marmalade, scrambled eggs and smoked salmon on toast (for her); scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage with toast (for him); a full pot of coffee, black, our work began. And what a job it was: to hike 12-20 miles along the Kerry Way to the next bed and breakfast, to a hot shower, a dinner of fish and chips or lamb stew and pints of Guinness and Bulmers, to reruns of American shows we've never seen, to that day's Irish Times and one or two pages of our vacation reads, and at last, to our pillows where hours of fresh air and hard walking led to instant, sweet, deep sleep. Rinse. Repeat. 180 miles. Eleven days on the trail, five more mucking about Co. Galway.

I showed up at the page every morning. Routine maintained. But the thoughts I thought I would have during those long hours on the trail  - of my  characters, their plot still in a tangle - I had not. I thought, in fact, of little else but my next footfall, for deep bogs, rocky climbs, meadows strewn with gorse marked our way. I thought of the hot shower and cool pint that awaited a few hours and many miles away.

In other words, I broke out of my rut of living days, months, years into the future, and explored the precious path of Being in the Moment. I let go. It almost hurts to look back at the photos Brendan and I took of each other along the way, for the peace and happiness we found is writ large in our eyes and limbs. There was nothing more on our minds at those moments than the quiet joy of being where we were, doing what we loved most, with the only other person we could imagine sharing the moment.

But one cannot spend the rest of one's life on holiday. Unless one is Sir Richard Branson.

So, it's back to the grind. Or not.

I wish I could have picked up where I left off, stepped right back into that productive pattern, that familiar routine. But life has gone a bit pear-shaped since our return. Our work schedules have yet to right themselves. Frustration distracts me. The diminishing light and cooling temperatures mean no more late afternoon writing sessions on the patio, my back warmed by the summer sun. I still have so many hand-written pages to transcribe into Scrivener that I'm producing little new material. I feel scattered and disconnected, as if an essential part of myself is missing. Left in the west of Ireland, on the side of a hill made of granite and covered in gorse.

Just yesterday, three weeks after our return, I felt a spark. I gave my brain free rein as I transferred early morning scribbles from September 16 into my computer manuscript. I stopped playing secretary to my notebook and returned to being a writer.

Which was my plan for this afternoon. Until I looked at that cursed e-mail inbox.

While I wait for my phone to ring, I may as well peruse our vacation photos. To see what peace looks like. Join me, won't you?

The Kerry Way Slide Show

*All of us, from time to time, need a plunge into freedom and novelty, after which routine and discipline will seem delightful by contrast. ~ Andre Maurois

Book Review: The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin

The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It is a rare read that cuts through the surface noise of daily life and becomes the one sound you can hear clearly, like a church bell on a still winter morning. It commands your full attention and you willingly shut out the world and surrender to the power of its images, characters and the force of its story. Amanda Coplin’s debut novel, The Orchardist, is one such book.

Set in the early years of the 20th century in the golden valleys and granite hills of Chelan county in north-central Washington state, The Orchardist is a fierce and poetic story of the Northwest frontier.

William Talmadge, the orchardist, has led a secluded, solitary life since he was a young man. Orphaned in early adolescence, he and his younger sister Elsbeth, worked on their own to maintain acres of apple and apricot orchards in the Wenatchee Valley. When she turns sixteen, Elsbeth vanishes. Whether she is taken or disappears of her own volition is a question that will haunt Talmadge as the century turns and he enters the later years of his life.

Talmadge provides refuge to two young women who appear in his orchard one day, filthy, starving and pregnant. By inviting them into his home, he opens the door to great tragedy and profound love. Talmadge is a nurturer – it is an undeniable facet of his character that he seeks to repair what has been damaged by neglect or abuse, whether it is sapling or a human heart.

But, as Talmadge learns, even the most tender care, the strongest scion of love and compassion, cannot heal all wounds.

Coplin’s prose is exhilarating. She composes with quiet confidence, her narrative rich in period detail. And although she describes of ugly circumstances– the suffering of women trapped in desperate conditions, a time when deprivation and disease swept through communities with shocking regularity – she writes with such empathy and beauty that the heart is reminded to hope. And the heart is rewarded. And it is shattered.

Coplin’s writing is uniquely and brilliantly her own, but a few favorite authors came to my mind while reading The Orchardist: Toni Morrison, for her evocative and dark period pieces and haunted women; Ivan Doig for the warmth of his characters and his passion for the West; Kent Haruf for his restraint and gentleness; Tim Winton for his truth-telling about the complicated nature of family.

I always hold my breath when encountering a familiar setting or terrain in a book: will the author have a feel for the place, its light and colors, its scents and temperatures? Will she follow the undulations of its land and the shapes in its cities? Coplin, a native of the Wenatchee Valley, not only conveys the beauty of the sage-steppe of the Cascade mountain foothills, the gold of its valleys, the shimmering glory of its aspen forests and glacial lakes, she erases the damage wrought by the past one hundred years of development. She takes you to a time when the air and water were so pure, the land so unscathed, that you cry in homesickness for a place you never really knew. The names from my home, Wenatchee, Cashmere, Ellensburg, Methow, Walla Walla, Chelan, Okanogan, Stehekin, Dungeness, are renewed and flow through this novel like poetry.

This is one of those novels I want to carry around to show everyone, to bring up in every conversation even tangentially related to reading or the Northwest. I cried when I turned its final page. I wept for the characters, for the past, for the gift of reading sentences so beautifully and thoughtfully constructed. I reckon this will be my top read of 2012. Brava, Amanda. Thank you. View all my reviews

The Story Takes Flight

  I clicked on "Compile" and Scrivener, the writing project management program I'm using to write my novel (italicized because I feel so goofy saying it, the cliché that I am as I tap away on my laptop in this Seattle coffee shop, with my travel mug at hand. At least it's not raining and I am drinking decaf) pulled together a multitude of scenes, a handful of chapters and the lump of Part One into a WORD document, formatted, paginated, appearing to be something so much more than it is.

And now it sits beside me, 159 pages in dreadful Times New Roman font, the 31,900 words I have written since July 7. I just had to see what all those words looked like on 8.5 x 11.

If I flip through the pages and don't read the actual sentences, it looks like a real manuscript. Paragraphs are indented, quote marks indicate dialogue, there are even chapter headings. Scrivener helpfully (hopefully?) created a title page for me, though I do believe I changed the "A" in my title to "The". Hmm. Scrivener. Must fix that. One simple word shifts the meaning and tone of the story.

If I read the pages more carefully, I see scenes that end in mid-paragraph, ellipses where I left a sentence dangling. I see "NAME", which stands in for a character (as in, "NAME crouched next to de Castelnau's supine form") who is a John Doe until I decide what he should be called. I see tenses that shift mid-page, I see notes to myself typed in a scene instead of into Scrivener's handy sidebar. I see what Anne Lamott assures writers they will create in a project's early days. I see a shitty first draft. The first third of a shitty first draft. There is far more excrement to be written before I even attempt revision.

But I see some wonderful things, too: tension and surprise, attraction and intrigue. I see darlings I'm certain I'll have to murder in future drafts - those bits and pieces a writer thinks are the best things they've written, those clever turns of phrase and evocative descriptions that really only get in the way of the story. But they are fun to look at. I'll save the assassinations for later.

I compiled and printed this happy mess out of curiosity, but also out of anxiety. I am stepping out of rhythm with the tango my story and I practice every day. It's holiday time. In a short while (I've since left the coffee shop and type at you now in the dark of my living room, the wee light of dawn still hours away), I will heft a bag full of hiking gear into the trunk of a car and Brendan and I will make our way to the airport, through security, and onto the train that will whisk us to the North Satellite and our flight to Dublin.

I fear I will lose my characters along the way, that the momentum which has carried me these past two months will stall somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean and slip beneath its cold, grey waters. So, in addition to my writing practice notebook - a brand new Moleskine with pages so white and fresh my hand trembles in anticipation - I am packing these 159 pages (double-faced, not to worry - tucked into a manila enveloped and slipped in the outside pocket of my carry-on, you'd hardly feel the weight). Just in case.

I may never once open the envelope in the sixteen days we are away. In fact, I probably shouldn't. We take vacations to escape from our current life, perhaps to rest the body or challenge it in new ways, but certainly always to rest and reinvigorate the mind. Getting some distance from my story's cast and setting, from the sticky plot points I haven't determined how to resolve, may be the best way to ensure I'll see this thing through to the end of its beginning. Because that's all it is. A beginning. My obligatory shitty first draft.

So I bid you farewell. It's 3:30 a.m., finally time for more coffee - the full throttle stuff this time. I've got my morning writing to get done, in my brand new Moleskine. Then I've got a flight to catch.

The Writer's Portable Mentor: Reading About Writing Is The Next Best Thing

The Writer's Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life by Priscilla Long My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I feel the same rush of hands-rubbing-together glee buying a new writing guide as I do a new cookbook (well, almost - if only writing guides had drool-inducing photographs of Truffled Saint-Marcellin or Bucatini all'Amatriciana or Salted Caramel (fill in the blank with anything).

An unread book on the craft of writing is full of possibility, of secrets waiting for revelation, of motivation and inspiration. It may contain the one thing I need to know that will turn my writing life around, the checklist I can follow that will make me a real writer, the advice that will level the uphill road and ensure a rejection letter will never again be addressed in my general direction.

Okay, I'm not that naive optimistic. Still, cracking open an author's literary toolbox and peering inside seems so hopeful and busy, like I'm thinking super hard about writing. When what I should be doing is, well, writing.

Priscilla Long presented at the Chuckanut Writers Conference in Bellingham this past June. She had me at, something -  I can't remember what  - but I adored her. Modest, quiet, funny, pragmatic. And a ridiculously accomplished writer who works. Hard. Every day.

Enough of the preamble, the backstory, the poorly developed characters. Let me get right to the point:

You must read this.

Poring over the opening pages of this book coincided with writing the opening pages of my novel. Only a few weeks ago, yet I've forgotten already which came first. What I remember is finally giving in to the one thing that every author of a writing guide writes in their opening pages: You must write every day. Yeah, I know. I know. But look, I have a day job - writing every day isn't feasible. I already get up at the crack of dawn. Earlier. I'm exhausted by the time I get home in the evenings. When am I supposed to do this writing? When do I get to work on what I want to work on, if I'm having to submit to the drudgery of a 15-20 minute free write, every day?

Excuses. That Priscilla Long finally gave me the courage to stop making. And it was so easy. Now I feel I have no other choice. And I'm thinking that if you aren't heeding Priscilla's advice by page 20, you should just stop reading this book until you can. The only thing that makes a writer a writer is writing. Every Day.

Thanks to my consistent daily free writing by hand, I have pages of scenes, character notes, setting sketches. Every day of scribbling brings me closer to my story, my characters, their motivations. I create and cover plot holes. A random writing prompt leads me to ask questions about my plot, jotting notes in the margins of ideas to pursue, details to research. I regularly transcribe these daily writings into my Work In Progress on the computer and doing so leads to other scenes, ideas and characters.

All that, just from reading Chapter One.

The Writer's Portable Mentor is to a writer - of any level of experience and ambition - as much a toolbox as one of those gazillion-piece Craftsman tool sets is to an automotive repair pro. And Priscilla makes you work - there are no hypotheticals here. You take your own work, you take work of authors you admire, and you examine them, rework them, learning every step of the way.

I now keep a Lexicon notebook (right, so it was an excuse to buy what comes third in my bookstore thrill-seeking - after cookbooks and writing guides: Moleskine notebooks). But I have a growing collection of lovely, evocative, provocative, delicious words and sayings that I will find a way to use or be inspired by: phrases such as back-lit light of polished steel (poet Mary Oliver), marzipan moon (author Hilary Mantel), as tender as an extension cord (Pete Wells, restaurant critic, The New York Times); words like borage, palavering, sump, scialytic. It scares me to think of all the gorgeous words and phrases I've forgotten after forty years of reading!

I have several stories cooling in a drawer. I've chastised myself for not making the time or creating the courage to rework my pieces, research markets and submit them. Turns out I was wise to leave them sit, letting my thoughts sift, before returning to them with fresh, more critical eyes.

With Long's guidance on structure, openings, sentences, paragraphs, punctuation, word choice, and revision, I'm tearing these stories apart and reassembling. And I will submit, resubmit - even those previously published, where possible. Long is very keen that you get your work out there - the creative process is not complete until you have attempted to share it with the world.

I will 'fess up: I did not do all the exercises. I did not comb through books I admire and craft my own sentences and paragraphs based on their models. I'm in too much of a groove with my writing and I don't want to slow the momentum. You can't be dogmatic about these things, any more than you can cook every single recipe in a cookbook and blog about it, then write a bestseller that will become a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep, now can you? Oh, wait...

This isn't the be all and end all of writing guides - there are so many astonishing and revelatory works to discover and reread - several that are on my list to explore for the first time, many others I return to for inspiration and practical advice. But if asked to make a Desert Island decision - if I could take only one book - my choice would be clear:

I'd take my writing-practice notebook. And a pen. Thanks, Priscilla.

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Is It Afflatus? Indigestion? Feels A lot Like Love.

  I wake thinking of you. When I'm not with you, I resent the hours and the obligations that separate us. When I run or swim, I create a mental list of all the things I want to do when I'm alone with you again. Today while hiking, I had a sudden vision of our future that was so potent I stumbled, alarmed I wouldn't get home in time share what so bewitched me. I cursed myself for having no means of reaching you when I needed you most.

There are anxious moments when you don't seem real, pathetic moments when I fear you are beyond my grasp, vincible as I am to the sussurant black angel on my shoulder who fills my head with doubt. Are you really meant to be mine? Will you be fickle or fidèle? My work in progress. My story. My crush.

These first weeks of writing are as giddy as the early days of a new romance. Since that afternoon in the park overlooking Elliott Bay, cradling my Mac in my lap as I typed the opening paragraphs (chronicled here), I find myself aching to work. I've reined in the writing to spend time getting to know my characters, to begin exploring the scope of history and the details of the setting. I downloaded Scrivener - the best invention for writers since the thesaurus (or, you know, Wikipedia) and I'm slowly filling Scrivener folders with Setting Sketches, Research and Character Sketches. I just thought of a new character today - he's what happened while I was hiking. I think I may have shouted aloud when it occurred to me who he was and how the story pivots on his motivations. I've started a Lexicon folder - words and phrases that relate to the eras and settings of the story. I've outlined Scenes for Chapter One, which may be one of the last chapters I write. I spent the better part of one evening deciding on a name for my female main character. And it will probably change.

I'm an early riser. 4:30 a.m. It's my best time to run or unroll the yoga mat. It's also the best time for unfettered writing. I have a book of writing prompts - one for each day of the year - and I spend fifteen or twenty minutes every morning scribbling free-hand in my notebook, writing without stopping to the prompt of the day. Well, I stop to sip my coffee. Nothing happens before there is coffee. But since starting the novel I have directed my morning practice to my story. I write as a character, I write with a specific setting in mind, I write to work out problems, I write to create problems I hope will further the plot. I write to figure out what the hell my plot is. Suddenly, I have ten pages. Barely legible, but still - ten pages that reveal my story when my mind is most open, not constrained by the logic of a scene or the confines of a paragraph. And each day this work grows.

I find that in the late afternoons and early evenings - after I return home from work, the pool, the grocery store, when the dinner dishes are clean and the laundry folded - I am too tired to craft sentences. It's a good time to jot down scene ideas, to add to my character sketches, to muck around with research. Scrivener has a cork board function I'm crazy about. I can pin virtual notecards, insert, delete and rearrange them on my Chapter-Scene cork boards. I'm a visual writer, but I hate clutter. Having several cork boards tucked away within a binder within a program within my computer is a swarm of bees knees for me!

Scene/chapter writing is reserved, at least for now, for long stretches of quiet on the weekends, for hours spent in a cafe, a park or my favorite library branch. It's an indulgence, a respite from the work of building a plot, since I still have so much background work to do. But writing out the meat of the story is a way to let my characters play, to learn how they walk, talk, what they eat, what they are thinking. I spent a couple of hours on Saturday taking a bath and drinking a bottle of wine with my girl, my heroine. Good, clean fun. We were both tired - it had been a long flight -  and a long soak seemed like the thing to do. Oh, and there was a pivotal event just before she climbed into that steaming hot bath with a bottle of wine. But I can't tell you WHAT. You'll have to wait. And wait.

I write slowly. I'm a slow writer. It freaks me out that 80,000 78,000 words are in front of me. I know this first draft is supposed to be a brain dump, that should let it pour out, not edit, not fuss.

For the moment, I'm following my own rules. For as Dorianne Laux tells us,

There is so much about the process of writing that is mysterious to me, but this one thing I've found to be true: writing begets writing.

The Liebster Blog Award

A few weeks ago, a writer entered my life via this blog. Her writing journey, her goals, challenges and aspirations so closely mirror my own that I feel this solitary pursuit is neither as quixotic nor as lonely as it sometimes...very often...seems. Her name is Edith, she is a beautiful, inspiring writer and I encourage you to explore her exceptional blog In a Room of My Own I am so proud to have been nominated for the Liebster Blog Award by Edith. The Liebster recognizes new bloggers "worth watching." The sweet thing is, if you accept the nomination, you are an award winner. Ah, if only the writing life were as rewarding and as simple!

Edith wrote  "Julie Christine Johnson blogs about writing, books and her sources of inspiration at Chalk the Sun. Be sure to check her blog out and enjoy basking in the lyrical beauty of her search for the truly perfect sentence."  So gracious, Edith- and so cool!!

Being a recipient of the award allows me the pleasure of nominating and awarding other blogs I think are worth watching.

I present you three blogs created by writers I learn from, am inspired by and whose work I think is worthy of many followers and great accolades:

Practice Makes Better  Dawn is a Seattle writer who chronicles her journey to an MFA program, her reading project and, very bravely, the heartbreak and hilarity of rejection on her smart blog.

DoGreat.net  Élan Karpinski's blog is a forum for creativity, setting goals and practicing compassion. Her writing flows with positive energy and determination.

Civil War Writer Virginia Wood is writing a novel based on her ancestors' experiences during the Civil War. Her blog is beautifully presented; I can't wait to read the story she is crafting.

There are 5 rules attached to this award:

1. If you are nominated for the award and accept it, then you have won!

2. Link back to the person who presented the award to you.

3. Nominate 3-5 blogs with less than 200 followers who you feel deserve the award.

4. Let the nominees know by leaving a comment on their blog.

5. Attach the Liebster award badge to your site.

Thank you, Edith, for finding me in the cacophony of the blogosphere; your generous spirit compels me to reach out and support other writers. We all benefit from the conversation!

Book Review: Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I read novels such as Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, I just want to close up shop, put the cap on all my pens, shred every last page of my notebooks, disconnect the laptop and call it a writing life. 'Cause this is da bomb, baby. This is how to write a STORY.

The novel transcends genre. It is part literary thriller, part Southern Gothic drama and one hundred-percent perfectly crafted, without ever feeling composed. From setting to tone to pacing to character development, there is a sense of oneness. It's like examining a familiar painting close enough to see the individual brush strokes or dots. As discrete marks, they have no meaning. It isn't until you move back again that the marvel of the craftmanship strikes you. That's what a good story does - it offers you a seamless intellectual and emotional reading experience.

What I find most intriguing is the way Franklin uses the atmosphere of his rural Mississippi setting to inform the suspense. Moving between the late 1970s and the late 2000s, the story is shrouded by layers of kudzu and dense forest, where Timber rattlesnakes and Southern cottonmouths lurk in the shadows. The setting is a metaphor for the search for truth, which is mired in layers of suspicion and lies and where innocents are menaced by villains. It also sets the tone, which is grimy with sweat from the thick and languid anticipation or bone-chilling from the rejection of a tiny, cold community. The tension is mostly quiet, the characters move in isolation, the memories private and sad. But within the forest, which looks so cool and peaceful from the outside, lurks a killer. The forest spirits away young women and the clues decay in the hot, wet night.

The setting, at once creepy and bucolic, also informs the complicated history of this region. From its hidden-in-plain-sight legacy of Jim Crow to the intimate nature of community shunning, Franklin never lets the reader relax into familiar clichés. Even the characters you come to trust have black spots that could fester and rot unless they grasp onto the grace of their morality.

The most persecuted character is Larry, a middle-aged white man suspected since high school of murdering a young woman. No body was ever found, no leads ever solid enough to justify an arrest, yet the community cannot forget nor forgive.

Larry lives alone, rising each day to open the automotive repair shop that only strangers ever patronize. He subsists off TV dinners, horror novels and his memories, the happiest of which are of the days in his early childhood when he had one friend. That friend was Silas, a black child who lived with his single mother in a tattered cabin on Larry's father's property. Raised by a single mom, his paternal heritage a mystery, Silas becomes a secret companion to the awkward, bookish, unpopular Larry. The friendship fades as Silas becomes a high school athlete of renown and leaves the area to attend university. He returns many years later to his southeast Mississippi hometown to take up a quiet post in law enforcement in a community where bar fights, meth labs and wildlife poaching are the greatest hazards. That is, until the daughter of the region's wealthiest man disappears. And Larry is once again the prime suspect of foul play.

And that's enough of the plot. It runs too deeply and is too ripe for spoilers to discuss further. For within a murder mystery lie other mysteries -- of friendship, family and community. Like a Russian matryoshka doll, the story reveals a series of discoveries until at last it ends, with the final truth.

I read this in a day. And now I don't quite know what to do with myself. Acts like these are tough to follow.

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Book Review: 11/22/63 by Stephen King

11/22/63 by Stephen King My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's such a funny thing when you tell someone you are reading Stephen King. Eyebrows arch and the voice pitch is tight and high when they respond "Oh, really?" You know what they are thinking.

One of the last King novels I read was "It". Winter break, freshman year of college, 1987. I had the flu and this terrifying and intoxicating story filled my feverish nights with horrific dreams. I had already worked my way through the King oeuvre during junior high and high school and after "It", I lost my taste for blood-spattered spills and thrills. In fact, King's are the only I've read of the horror genre. It's never been my thing.

But Stephen King deserves a category all his own. He always has. He is a freakishly brilliant writer. That he has made a name (and fortune) terrifying generations of readers will probably always keep him apart from the scions of literary fiction, but no one, no one can can deliver the goods - the story, the characters, the pacing, the originality-like SK.

I didn't know much about what SK had been up to since "It", until I read "On Writing" last year. I suffer my way through books by writers about the art and craft of writing, but this one - a combination memoir and fiction-writing instructional - I couldn't put down. King shows us it is the story that matters. He tells us that writing what you know is a rotten old chestnut. Rather, you should write what you want to read, what you love to learn about. So, he succumbed to his intellectual and emotional destiny and set out to write the best horror/speculative/fantasy fiction he could.

11/22/63 brings me back to the writer that I discovered in The Stand. A dense, detailed, thickly-plotted "What if?" There are heaps of reviews if you care to learn more about the plot, the characters, the drama. I won't do that here. It's not horror, so don't let that possibility scare you away. It is a fantastic read with characters who will pull at your heart and suspense that will hold you fast to the page.

First-rate writing from a stand-up guy. "I just want to tell you. I'm your number one fan."

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Book Review: Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life In Music by Judy Collins

Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music by Judy Collins My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The opening notes are unmistakable. The sweet chords in E pour forth from Stephen Stills's guitar, sounding like early morning California sunshine feels: warm and flirtatious, dancing on an ocean breeze as it kisses you awake. It has always been one of my favorite songs. It never fails to transport me to a time beyond my memory, a place that now fades into American mythology: California, late 1960's. It is "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes", first performed by Crosby, Stills and Nash on August 18, 1969 at Yasgur’s farm, two weeks before I was born. Each time I hear this song, I feel I missed the best part of a generation.

How could I not read Judy Collins’s memoir Sweet Judy Blue Eyes? Stephen Stills vividly captured the passion and pain of their love affair in his joyful, yet plaintive epic song. Judy was his inspiration, his muse, the older woman who broke his heart.

Judy Collins’s music conjures up different images. Her voice takes me to the milky, muted greens and blues of my childhood in Oregon and on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula in the early – late 70’s. She is pop radio on rainy Saturday afternoons. She is nap time and tomato soup. Comfort tinged with melancholy.

Ms. Collins, who was 71 when she penned this memoir, does a simple and lovely job of laying out her early years as a budding folk singer, first Colorado, then Chicago, before breaking into the folk scene in New York in the early 60’s. Other reviewers accuse her of name-dropping, but how could she not? She was hanging out with and performing alongside Joan and Mimi Baez, Peter Yarrow, Bob Dylan, Marshall Brickman, the Clancy Brothers, John Phillips- and this is the very early '60’s - '60-'64 - years before the Summer of Love. These were small clubs in Greenwich Village, before Dylan’s plugged-in performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival that heralded a new era in music: folk-rock.

Judy was at the vanguard of the folk music revival, breathing new life into traditional and classic folks songs, and wrapping her rich, mellow soprano around new compositions by Joni Mitchell, the Byrds, Sandy Denny and Leonard Cohen, among many others.

She was also at the forefront of the hard living, substance-abusing lifestyle that characterized so much of the 60s, and which killed many of its brightest hopes. It was lifestyle that nearly killed Judy Collins.

Her father was an alcoholic; Judy fell victim to the disease very early in her career. She became pregnant and married her first husband, Peter Taylor, in 1958, when she was 19. The marriage lasted until 1965, just as her career began to soar and her partying turned to alcohol abuse. Her son Clark committed suicide in 1992 at the age of 33, after a terrible battle with addiction and clinical depression, conditions that Judy fought from young adulthood until she sought treatment for her addiction to alcohol in 1978.

Sweet Judy Blue Eyes tells two stories: one of a long, dynamic moment in time and one of Judy’s experiences within this era. Most of the period she covers in her memoir she spent in an increasingly thick haze of intoxication. By the time she met and fell in love with Stephen Stills in 1967, she was drinking to keep sober. Collins tells her story so brightly, in such a matter-of-fact, linear style, it’s hard to fathom the depth of her self-destruction. There were suicide attempts, deep depressions, a divorce and custody battle and countless love affairs. Yet, inexplicably - because we never really get inside Judy’s head - her star continued to rise. Starting in 1961, she recorded an album a year until 1978 (then started again in ’79). She toured constantly, until the alcohol fried her vocal chords and she had surgery in 1977.

I have to think that the smooth reserve she displays while describing two decades spent on a physical and emotional roller-coaster is because she can hardly remember much of it. It may also be that the years and the happiness she has found since meeting her now-husband have softened her and calmed her need to tell-all; she paints her comrades, lovers and business partners in the softest of colors, and does not explore her despair at failing her son.

Judy Collins's story has the happiest of endings, despite the immense pain of her losses. She met her second husband in 1978, the day before she entered a rehabilitation facility in Pennsylvania. She has been sober and with Louis Nelson since; they married in 1996. She and Stephen remained friends, performing together on her 2010 album, Paradise. She is arguably a stronger, better singer now than she was forty years ago; only her dear friend Joan Baez can make the same claim.

I stopped several times while reading this book (which took but a weekend) to research some of the cast of characters: I read about the life of Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan’s long-time, angel-faced girlfriend, whom he left for Joan Baez in the mid-60s; about Joan’s ethereal sister Mimi and her charismatic husband Richard Farina; I discovered a YouTube video of Joan and Mimi performing live at Sing Sing prison in 1972 - God, they were so beautiful (Joan still is, sadly, Mimi died in 2001 of cancer); I watched an interview with Joan Baez talking about the twisted genius of Bob Dylan; I learned that Stacy Keach was once considered the preeminent American stage interpreter of Shakespeare. I knew him only as Mike Hammer!

I would give this book 3 stars for writing, for Judy's honesty and reflection; 5 stars for reviving my interest in the artists and events of the era. I've a lot of catching up to do...

Time it was, and what a time it was, it was A time of innocence, a time of confidences Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph Preserve your memories, they're all that's left you

So sang Simon and Garfunkel in 1968. It’s a time I will never know, but which I adore reliving through someone else’s memories.

And now I know the way I feel when listening to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” is exactly the spirit which inspired it: longing, tenderness, hope, innocence and love. All the best parts of a generation which lost so much to the worst parts: addiction, cynicism and simply growing old.

Remember what we've said and done and felt About each other Oh babe, have mercy Don't let the past remind us of What we are not now I am not dreamin' I am yours, you are mine You are what you are You make it hard

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Book Review: Sacred County, Rose Tremain

Sacred Country by Rose Tremain My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mary Ward stands shivering in a Suffolk, England field in February, 1952 and realizes she is meant to be a boy. She is just six years old. Within its opening pages Sacred Country promises to take you on a literary journey that will be long and painful. Rest assured, it will also be beautiful and transformative.

Although Mary and her quest for her physical identity are at the heart of Sacred Country, it is a book full of souls searching for emotional purchase. Mary's mother has a tenuous grip on sanity, losing her way at intervals and regaining her footing in a nearby mental hospital; Mary's father is in danger of losing the family farm and slips further into madness borne of anger and alcohol; her brother loses his dream of becoming an Olympic swimmer because he is too afraid to dive. A village friend, Walter, dreams of becoming a country-and-western singer, but must take over the family butcher shop when his father dies. It seems that there is nothing but heartbreak in gray and lifeless post-war Britain, that the future is alive in vibrant cities and on warm continents but in rural England the past rots in small and suspicious minds.

Yet Tremain offers enough light in the gloom that hope propels you on. Mary's awkward courage as she stumbles through her transformation from Mary to Martin makes her so lovable. A small but formidable defense of friends and loved ones surrounds her: her grandfather, who accepts her unconditionally; her beloved teacher who embraces her intellect and shelters her when home life becomes unbearable; the cricket-bat maker who believes in reincarnation; his maid (who becomes his lover, then his wife) and her daughter, Pearl, who breaks Mary's heart and helps it to heal.

Rose Tremain's writing is flawless. Although this is a narrative focused on character development, the plot moves steadily forward. Although there are many characters and several sub-plots, there is a sense of the whole within each part. Vivid details of time and place hold you firmly in each era, the characters evolving with their age, changing with the times. The characters' senses of humor and irony clear the air that could easily turn maudlin under the pen of a less-deft writer.

This is a book about transformation, about letting go of those who cannot change and embracing those who try. Sacred Country touched me profoundly with its humanity, its hope, its brutality and its intense love. It is rare that I close a book and cry at its end. This is a rare book, indeed.

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Me and Mon Ombre

It's been a while since I've travelled alone. In another lifetime, domestic and international travel was integral to my job. It was a groove of frequent flyer miles, hotel points, car rental upgrades; a suitcase that was always half-packed with the essentials, just waiting for the next journey. Being home was the exception, the interlude between dashes to the airport. I've never regretted giving up the hassles of travel, particularly the post-9/11 frantic harassment of airport security and the dismal state of airline service. Happily my travels these days are mostly for holiday, on flights bound for Europe, hand-in-hand with the only person I can suffer to see me through turbulence and jet lag. Brendan and I are viaggiatori simpatici. We dream of the same destinations, push ahead with equal energy levels, become tired and hungry in tandem and bicker over maps and directions without really caring who's right. We always find our way.

But I cannot deny the certain bliss of traveling alone. Undertaking a solo journey abroad is like dumping 1,000 pieces of a jigsaw puzzle on dining room table. It begins as a mission of intoxicating near-impossibility, but as you organize patterns and fit those first pieces together, you covet your independence and encircle your puzzle with protective arms, not wanting anyone to interfere with your reverie.

For a reverie it is. Traveling alone means slipping into a dream state, where anything is possible. With each encounter, snafu and discovery, the surroundings reflect you in a mirror that only you can see. This solitary state makes you vulnerable to the world and somehow floating above it. At any given moment, no one really knows where you are, what you are doing, tasting, hearing, seeing. The delightful and the disconcerting occur. During the private journey you rejoice and suffer alone.

Being a solo traveler is sitting in silence at a café on the Île Saint-Louis, sipping a chocolat chaud and watching the sun set Notre Dame aglow.

It is falling to my knees in the crypt of the Shoah Memorial before the tomb of the unknown Jewish martyr and crying alone in that vast, dark space.

It's being asked for directions to the Censier-Daubenton métro stop by a panicked looking Parisian elementary school teacher who has a gaggle of five-year-olds attached to him by a long strap; then being stopped a few minutes later on Rue Mouffetard by a grandmother, looking for the church where a funeral is about to begin.

It's lugging my suitcase up six flights of a stairs that curl like the inside of a sea snail shell, because I can't fathom squeezing myself into the tiny lift.

It's ordering a second glass of Minervois at a restaurant deep in the Marais, wondering if I'll remember the route back to the hotel in the dark.

It's running at dawn on the beach at Cannes with no one to keep watch over my shoes and socks while I wade in the Mediterranean.

It's meeting a vignernon and thinking how my husband would love this kind, gentle man who makes the most wonderful Armagnac I've ever tasted. And thinking, we'll meet again, and Brendan will be with me...

I fell into a deep sleep on the high-speed train carrying me from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris to Cannes on the Côte d'Azur. There was one change of trains, long into the journey. I awoke with a jolt when my iPod slipped from my lap and fell to the floor, jerking away the earpiece. I caught the tail end of the conductor's announcement of our arrival. In my jet lagged haze, I grabbed my bag and stumbled down the steps of my two-tiered car, knowing I had but a few minutes to make my connection. I climbed a set of stairs and crossed to the main terminal, looking for the departure quay. Then it dawned on me. This compact, bright, calm hall was not the hurly-burly Saint-Charles station in Marseilles. I had disembarked in the idyll of Aix-en-Provence. And my train - the one on which I should have remained - had just left the station.

Likely this wouldn't have happened had I not been alone. Then again, I wouldn't have the memory of those moments with the stationmaster, chatting about hunting wild boar in the vineyards of the Rhône, before being deposited on the next TGV that whisked me away to Cannes.