Jon Sealy, Debut Novelist and Seriously Literary Guy

I've been lucky enough to get to know Jon Sealy recently, right as he is poised to have many people get to know him, too. His first novel, The Whiskey Baron, comes out from Hub City Press on April 1. In chatting with Jon in Richmond and at The Virginia Festival of the Book, he casually mentions basically every great book I've ever read or wanted to read. The guy is serious about literature. See below: his goal of reading one hundred pages a day and writing one thousand words is not only more prescriptive than many writers I know, but also more sincere. He means to become a better writer. I don't know of a higher goal. And, although I haven't yet read The Whiskey Baron, I gather from the stellar reviews that he's already an excellent one. Wiley Cash called The Whiskey Baron, “a simmering powerhouse of a novel.” Ron Rash said it evokes “the pleasures of both mystery novel and literary fiction.” And Donald Ray Pollack called it a “gritty, superbly crafted novel.” I can't wait to read it and am glad that Jon Sealy was willing to answer a few basic questions about his writing process and publishing success:

VP: People are always curious about the origins of a novel and sometimes writers have to say that it just “came to them.” But, I’m especially curious in your case if you thought of this tale because of having lived in the area where it takes place? Did the setting nudge you to write a story there?

JS: Absolutely. This novel is set in a South Carolina mill town during the Depression, and the place and time were both critical for me. As you note, I did grow up in South Carolina, and some of my family members came out of the cotton mills there. I know the area today well, but I was curious to know more about life back in my grandfather's childhood. I've never been sure whether to think of the book as "historical fiction," a term that for me evokes Medieval England or some other completely fabricated era. The 1930s are a complete fabrication for me, being born a half-century later, but the oldest among us actually experienced that era. I was able to talk with folks about life back then, and hear their speech patterns, that sort of thing. It wouldn't be possible for me to do that with a book set even a few years earlier, so I see the 1920s and 1930s as kind of a hinge, where experienced life fades into history.

VP: You have written short stories for some time and had a number published in good places. What led you to decide to write a novel instead of sticking with a form you obvious know so well? Do any of your earlier short stories cover a similar territory as The Whiskey Baron?

JS: I actually don't think I know the short story form that well. I wrote stories in graduate school for a number of reasons. For one thing, it's easier to workshop a story than a chapter of a novel. For another, there's a a kind of cult of the short story among graduate students that I suppose I got swept into. Don't get me wrong; I love reading a good short story. But the novel is the form I live for.

VP: Hub City seems like the perfect press for your novel since it is located in the South, near the mountains. How did you come to find them or vice versa? Was yours a long path to publication or a straight shot?

JS: Hub City is a dream. The organization is a boutique press that focuses primarily on regional literature, but they also have a great bookstore in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Perhaps because they have a bookshop, they know books well and they know the business, and I really feel at home with them.

They've been on my radar for years. They published Ron Rash's first book of poetry, Eureka Mill, in the late 1990s, and they also published an anthology of short fiction, New Southern Harmonies, that included a few stories from George Singleton. I stumbled onto Rash and Singleton when I was about 19 and looked up everything they'd written at that point, which led me to Hub City.

Fast-forward ten years, and I had a novel that was going nowhere with the agents. A former professor suggested Hub City might be the ticket, and here we are. I suppose every debut novelist has a tale of woe about breaking through, but it's all the same story: work, work, work, rejection, rejection, work, work, work, rejection, rejection, and eventually you get a lucky break.

VP: Betsy Teter, who runs Hub City and is a wonderful person and visionary, came up with the terrific idea of helping first time authors launch their careers. Her press only published first novels. That’s just great as a writer is poised for their debut, but then comes the question: what’s next? Do you have another book up your sleeve and any thoughts about the path it might take?

JS: It's true. Hub City does a great job with first novels. Every other year, they run a contest for first-time novelists in South Carolina, and in the off years they publish work from the broader region. By sticking with one novel a year, I think they're able to really give it a go and set the novelist up for a successful career. My job, then, is the what-next. I do have another finished novel, which is with my agent. I think he'll be shopping it around soon, which means my job is actually the what-next-next. It never ends!

VP: And finally, any tidbits of advice for aspiring writers? This is your chance to share your do’s and don’ts.

JS: The business of a novelist is to read a lot and write a lot. Period. I've heard some rules of thumb—like, it will take you about a thousand pages before you get your first short story published—but they all come down to getting the work done. If you set yourself a goal to read a hundred pages every day and write a thousand words every day, five or more days a week, and you make an honest effort to accomplish that goal over ten years, you will probably have a book ready for publication. Everything else is just noise.

China: No Longer of my Mind, but the Real Thing

I just got back from China. Such a breezy thing to say, and yet it's taken me a lifetime to go. I lived in Hong Kong between ages two to three, was carried through the crowded alleyways on the shoulders of our aged “House Boy,” a Chinese grandfather whom I loved. But, before this trip to Shanghai, I had never set foot on the mainland before. And yet, as I walked down the crowded streets of Shanghai, I felt oddly at home. I don't know the language, knew no more than a few people in a city of 24 million, and yet, didn’t feel one bit ill-at-ease. I had heard that Shanghai is a relatively safe city, but I don’t think that was why I felt so comfortable there.

As I suggested in the Author’s Note at the end of River of Dust, families pass down wisdom and pain in equal measure—an inheritance that translates in ways we don't even realize: for me, that inheritance apparently includes a sense of belonging in China.

In the older parts of the city, which mercifully still exist but may not for long, elders still sit out on stools, eating soup, playing cards, chattering in angry voices that no doubt aren't angry at all, but only sound that way to my untrained ear. Laundry is left to dry everywhere. I wish I’d taken more photos of clotheslines, because the Chinese were wildly inventive about where they place them.

As I roamed these familiar-seeming streets, I had to wonder if China had appeared the same when my father grew up there, or, even before that, when my grandfather arrived in 1907.

The new parts of Shanghai are so space-aged and oversized as to be unrecognizable as particularly Chinese. Except, in a way, the view from The Bund across to Pudong seems quintessentially Chinese: showy, shiny and all about façade. We used to call it “Chinese gaudy,” a style that I had assumed went out with the Cultural Revolution, but seems to be reincarnated in the massive city of the future across the river in Shanghai.

My hosts at the Shanghai International Literary Festival were friendly and welcoming and I loved meeting fellow authors and learning about their books. My old friends Tina Kanagaratanum and Patrick Cranley of AsiaMedia shared their longtime ex-pat knowledge of Shanghai to help demystify the place. And, on top of more memorable experiences than I can count—an excellent hotel with staggering views, great quantities of Shanghai dumplings consumed at all hours of the day—I also somehow managed to meet and chat with Mick Jagger!

Sir Mick was in town for three shows and, on his first night, he visited the beautiful, important M on the Bund restaurant and Galmour Bar where the Shanghai Lit Festival events also take place. (Pictured here is Michelle with Mick at her restaurant on the night of the siting). When we got word that he was there at the bar, several of us sidled over and I ended up standing right next to him. In the course of introductions, he shared some quips about his audience and I asked him how he handles jet lag. As he told me his recipe of sun lamps, Vitamin D, melatonin and water, my mind was screaming: you're talking with MICK JAGGER!

And so I was. Yet it felt strangely on par with the rest of this trip of a lifetime that may very well turn into a hint of things to come. The Lit Fest has kindly invited me back next March to their Beijing site, so the China barrier has been broken for me for good. I can’t wait to return again to that strange, yet familiar, land.

Debut Novelist Elaine Neil Orr Shares the Story Behind A Different Sun

When Elaine Neil Orr's debut novel, A Different Sun, came out last spring, Lee Smith wrote that it "shines in the mind like a rare gem," and Philip Deaver described it as a “beautiful novel, exquisitely written, perfectly complex, true to the past, relevant today, unforgettable.” I was especially curious to speak with Elaine about her book because, like my own novel, River of Dust, it tells the story of American missionaries in a foreign land. A Different Sun is set in Nigeria where she was raised as the daughter of Baptist missionaries. I knew that she had written a memoir about her childhood and was curious why she turned to writing fiction as well. I find her story-behind-the-story especially inspiring. VP: Your novel, A Different Sun, is not your first book. Can you tell us about your previous publication, your memoir, Gods of Noonday?

ENO: Actually I wrote two scholarly books before I wrote my memoir. But let's not dwell there! In my early 40s, I was diagnosed with end-stage renal disease. I was already a full professor at NC State University. The only writing that seemed important to me to write then was the story of my beginnings. For all of my adult life, I had felt an outsider in the US, an exile passing as a native Southerner. In fact, my parents were missionaries and I was born and grew up in Nigeria. As a young adult and graduate student, I thought this was a story to bury rather than to tell. The scandal of colonialism! Baptist missionaries! Oh the horror. But in burying all that I almost lost touch with who I really was. In my illness, my memories demanded their place. I began to write. As I wrote I remembered. Then I wrote more. The dreams began. I almost lost track of where memory stopped and dreaming began. I lived in the world of my writing as in a snow globe. Everything I needed was in that other world of my youth and health and joy: the warmth of West Africa, a particular crystal clear river, the Yoruba people we lived among whose style of life was so graceful, the sound of drums all day and night. I had to do dialysis four times a day but I wrote. I have a strange gratitude for that illness that resulted in two transplants (a pancreas and a kidney) and a new life (that was thirteen years ago). I'm not sure I would have written Gods of Noonday: A White Girl's African Life in my forties or ever if I hadn't become ill. A shock like that takes you down to the very bare essentials. What must I have to live is one question. Another is: what do I want to leave if I'm going to die. The answer for me was: a story that explains where I came from and who I am. There is no more essential question than that: Who am I?

VP: I’m curious if there’s a logical path you took from the previous books to this one? What were you not able to do in your memoir that you are able to do in A Different Sun?

ENO: There was a connection. As I was working on the memoir, doing research everywhere—the family photos, my university library, my childhood writings—my mother gave me a copy of the diary of the first woman missionary to Nigeria. Her husband was a former Texas cavalryman-turned-evangelical! They left Georgia in 1853 and she kept this diary for the three years of their first tour. Because I was thinking in terms of memoir and because in a “mission family” other missionaries are your aunts and uncles, it seemed to me that the writer of the diary was my great great great grandmother, closer to me historically than my biological grandmothers in South Carolina. The diary is very brief. Can you imagine? After living in your Victorian dress all day, searching for your next meal, encountering friendly and unfriendly people, fording rivers by holding onto calabashes, camping at a way-station: this woman pulled out her diary and made a few notes. A few sentences arrested me: “feelings deeply wounded; have been sad all day,” for example. At first, I imagined a creative non-fiction book in which I would imaginatively fill in the gaps. But eventually, I realized that what I really wanted was to imagine this woman’s life as it might have been. I was off and running in fiction and loved it.

VP: How long did it take you to write your novel and was it your first?

ENO: A Different Sun is my first novel. I began it before I ever wrote or published a sentence of fiction. I had to teach myself by attending workshops, going to Bread Loaf, reading the best fiction in the world and studying the craft of the very greats like Henry James and Michael Ondaatje and Marilynne Robinson. I joined a writing group. So I had mentors. But it was a risky project to take on: to dedicate years of my life to a project that had no guarantee of success. I never even took Fiction 101. I’m a little surprised that I undertook it. From start to publication, the book took about eight years. I actually wrote for about five or six years, primarily in the summer.

VP: Novels often have a long, circuitous path to publication. Was your path straight or windy?

ENO: I’ve talked about this a bit: how I started out thinking it would be a book of CNF and then decided to “take the lid off” and write fiction. And of course there were drafts and drafts and drafts. Many generous readers helped me, including Sena Jeter Naslund, Jill McCorkle, Wayne Caldwell, Angela Davis-Gardner, Phillip Deaver, and Susan Ketchin. But the road wasn’t really windy in terms of my goal. It was windy in terms of my apprenticeship. I had to learn how to get characters in and out of rooms, how to figure out point of view (at first I was just all over the place with point of view!), how to find the narrative arc and push ahead! I think that building narrative momentum and keeping tension on the page (almost every page) was the biggest learning curve from memoir to fiction. Memoir can meander some; it can win the reader through the language alone. Readers appreciate style and beautiful language in fiction, but they want a story too.

VP: Can you tell us a bit about A Different Sun? I’d love to know what you feel most succeeds in it. What you can tell works. It’s great practice for us writers to look at the positive in our work!

ENO: The novel begins in Georgia with a young Emma Bowman, daughter of a plantation owner. She has an unusual friendship with an old “saltwater” African slave who lives in a cabin behind her house. When she is still young, he is unjustly punished by Emma’s father. This moment is her awakening to evil in the world and the first trigger in the plot. Later Emma marries Henry, who has come to her home town looking for a wife to accompany him on his African mission. Three months later, they sail. Most of the novel occurs in what is now Nigeria, in the region occupied by the Yoruba people where I grew up. The young couple’s fragile beginnings are quickly tested. They lose a child to malaria. Henry is an adventurer. He’s forever traveling, his heart intent on converting the “Mohametans.” He also suffers bouts of serious illness, sometimes accompanied by hallucinations when he is “out of his head.” Emma wants to settle down and create a home. When they move further inland, Henry hires an assistant, a young Yoruba man, educated, handsome, and Emma’s age. She is drawn to him yet highly perplexed by her feelings. So we have a triangle: a beloved but sometimes belligerent husband, a smart young woman in a new world, and an intelligent black man whose appeal is unfathomable. A lot can happen here and it does!

VP: Now that A Different Sun is out, how’s it going? Are you doing lots of book events? In what types of settings do you particularly enjoy sharing your novel?

ENO: I did a book tour that sort of went on and on because I wanted it to. I love independent bookstores. Book clubs are also wonderful because everyone has already read the book and we can have a real discussion. A Different Sun was the book-in-common for fiction students at the Spalding University Brief Residency in Writing Program in Louisville in May 2013. I loved meeting with sixty brilliant young writers to talk about my first novel. I’ve had great fun at book festivals: the Atlanta Journal Constitution/Decatur Book Festival and Southern Festival of the Book, for example. It’s been wonderful to be hosted by NPR-affiliated radio shows. I’m getting ready to go up to Vermont for New Voices 2014, a local event that’s gained a national reputation for bringing in half a dozen writers each year to showcase their work. I’m so grateful to have been invited to all of these venues.

VP: Any last anecdotes or insights you’d like to share with aspiring writers and your interested readers?

ENO: Read the best writers; read writers from the past. Read Faulkner and Hemingway and Wharton. Read writers from the country where you are setting your fiction; know the literature of that place. Do enormous amounts of research. It’s fun and you fill your mind with images and learn so much about land and culture. Even though I had grown up in Nigeria, I took three trips back to trace the journey of my characters. It was astonishing to me how I saw differently—because I was looking for clues to my story. One day I stumbled into a sacred baobab grove. It gave me details and ideas for my novel that I never would have found in any other way but by going there. Fiction writing is treasure hunting. Clues are everywhere but they are especially rich in the places where your story is occurring. Dig an inch and you’ll strike gold.

Hemingway’s Havana: An Invitation to the Imagination

Fifty-three years after the Revolution and with Cubans still suffering from poverty, depravations, and an uncertain future, Havana evokes the imagination with its tangled history and complex aura. I can see why Hemingway loved this place where past and present weave an ongoing story that’s best understood after several strong mojitos. The country feels fecund to the point of rotting. Old buildings in Havana have been crumbling for decades; elaborate Colonial facades crack and fall daily. Wild vines envelope the shells as sunlight pours in where roofs once shaded. A beleaguered past reveals itself in those deteriorated structures, as well as in the architectural details that have lasted, and in the antique American cars that still function with 300,000 miles on engines built and rebuilt.

Those cars, which we've all seen in photos, aren't just a tourist attraction, but a way for their owners to make a better living than the twenty-dollar-a-month salaries paid by the government to three quarters of the population. Tips from tourism, the black market, and money sent from relatives overseas are among the only ways to get by.

Artists and writers who sell their work outside the country are better off than most—outranking doctors and lawyers and what’s left of a professional class. But, I'm not a political scientist or an historian, so I'll leave it to others to describe the economics of this tiny county which has three currencies.

Instead, I was struck by how Cuba beckons the imagination and invites creativity. Hemingway knew it. He lived on the island for close to thirty years, drank in the Havana bars and then, at the insistence of his new wife, moved out from the center of town to what is now part of the dilapidated sprawl. (More about Finca Vigia and the Hemingway Collection is pictured here: The Ernest Hemingway Collection)

His house sits on a shaded hill and from his turret writing room with windows on all sides, he would have watched over the city he loved and the sea beyond. Now, tourists line up at the threshold of the main house and lean in the open windows that line the porch.

We're no longer allowed inside and while I thought that would bother me, it didn't. In a way, it just added to the feeling that this was a pilgrimage culminating with the supplicants gazing in at the ghost of our deity, as embodied by the Big Man's floral reading chair, his many crowded bookshelves, and all those African big game heads peering back.

I was left more than a little speechless by the sight of his two typewriters. Up in the many-windowed turret sat a simple desk and on it, his tiny war correspondent's typewriter. I could imagine his large fingers pecking out For Whom the Bell Tolls on those stiff black keys.

And then, even more moving, was his second Remington—none too large, either—sitting atop one of his bookshelves, so that when he stood at it, he faced a white, imperfect plaster wall. No view of the sea. No view of the garden. Just that wall before him.

As he wrote, he planted his bare feet on an African animal skin. Its brown fur is matted and threadbare now, and it isn’t very large. If he happened to lose his balance—which, hung over as he often was, he very well might have—he would have stepped off and onto the cool tile floor. He believed the animal skin brought him strength, clarity, and the mojo to write. Clearly, it did.

He had escaped the noise and bustle of Havana, not to mention the lure of the bars, to find something like peace in that cool, quiet house. Biographers can describe how his marriage was going to hell, or how his liver was being pickled, or he was entangled with Castro, or the FBI, or both.

But, his place and the whole island, feels to this day like a paradise for the mind—haunted and inviting and rich with stories not yet told. Fellow writers, book your trip.

China of My Mind Starts a Lively and Moving Conversation

On the next to last day of 2013, my essay China of My Mind came out in The New York Times Draft Opinionator blog and prompted over a hundred posts. Perhaps that's routine for that column. The Times, after all, has such a wide reach. But, for me, it was the most immediate gratification I’ve received as a writer. Suddenly, all sorts of readers from my hometown of Boston to the far reaches of Nepal by way of Saint Louis and San Francisco had something to say to me. But before I share the feedback, I’d like to summarize my piece, in case you haven’t read it (though I recommend you do!). It asks a question: do I need to go to China to write about it? I answer by saying, “Of course not!” because I didn’t to write River of Dust. I cite several literary authors on the power of the imagination. My first writing mentor, Annie Dillard, told us to read about a place instead of visit it. Alexander Hemon said, “Expertise is the enemy of imagination.” My essay is a rallying cry for that very power: of the mind to bring together disparate influences as we create. I reminisce about my connection to China—the Chinese objects d'art I grew up with, the novels about colonialism that I read, as well as my grandfather's journals from his time in China. They all melded together to help me create River of Dust.

The responses to China of My Mind generally divided along two lines. Those who said, “Good Grief! How come you have waited so long to visit China? It is not like trying to visit North Korea!!!” Or, “Virginia, do yourself a favor. Spend a few thousand to get yourself to China for a visit.” Versus those who argued the opposite: “Kafka never went to Amerika.” Or, “You can do anything you like, it’s fiction.”

I was delighted to see that the question sparked a conversation—one that went off track in a number of posts, but still, was a good one. I had the strange sense that I was overhearing people talk about me at a party. I stood quietly in the corner as they exchanged repartee, which only once or twice turned snarky: “I wonder if I could review Ms. Pye’s book without reading it?”

I found it exhilarating to have initiated a conversation that people felt strongly about. Some defending experience, while others stood up for the imagination.

But more moving than even those were the emails I received from readers who must have taken the time to come to this blog, then to my website to track down my email address. Over the next week, I had exchanges with readers in Spain, Nepal and nearby North Carolina. A genuine friendship developed with an erudite scholar and a true thinker in Spain.

But the email that touched me the most began like this: “Thank you for your beautiful essay of ‘China of My Mind’ on New York Times, whose immense kindness, deep understanding of people and places, and silk-tender femininity brought me almost to tears...These wonderful elements actually help me understand better why America is so vibrant, charming and strong...BTW, I was born in Tibet, grew up in the rugged fringing land of Gobi and farmed there during the ‘cultural Revolution’....  I’m American now, I love both countries. People like yourself make a place and a country loveable and lovely and hopeful. Thank you, I mean it with my whole heart.”

When a writer writes, they do so for a lot of reasons, but one of them is the hope to somehow reach out into the world and meet people half way. The feelings of isolation and loneliness that can a person to write are contradicted by the hope of connection that writing provides. This reply from the reader who came from the Gobi and now loves both China and America is that gift that I’ve waited for as a writer. To know that when I reach out, someone else’s hand is reaching back. Thank you, to that one reader, but to The New York Times as well, because its reach is vast and its arms wide. I’m glad to be part of the conversation.

Year End Writing Redux: Departures Essay Reposted

The TSA attendant hands my children back their boarding passes and before they shuffle over and start to remove their belts and shoes, they look back and wave. “It’s OK,” my teenage son mouths through the glass as his college-aged sister blows a kiss and offers a smile. “They’ll be fine,” my husband says as he takes my hand. I press my fingertips to my eyelids and realize it isn’t our kids I’m worried about. It’s me. Our son and daughter are leaving the family vacation early, as we had planned it, while my husband and I stay on for another week at the rental cottage up in Maine. The kids are old enough to manage on their own back home; old enough to have anticipated in advance that one week with the whole family would be just the right amount of time.

As we head toward the lone escalator in the Bangor airport, I find myself watching people saying their farewells on the threadbare carpet. I see a somber young man in desert camouflage kiss his girlfriend goodbye. A gangly preteen twirls a cheerleader’s baton with pink plastic ribbons on the ends and calls for her daddy to watch one more time before he steps beyond the stanchion. A young mother helps her father pry his grandson off his leg. The toddler cries and the mother tells him they’ll visit again at Christmas, no doubt a vague eternity to the boy. How, I wonder, do people manage the everyday heartache of leaving?

I remember my father idling in our station wagon in front of Logan airport as my mother and I hugged goodbye on the sidewalk. In my twenties, I was leaving again, far too soon, she said. She brushed back a few tears and complained that they never saw enough of me anymore. I felt a surge of longing as I pressed up against her. Some part of me ached at the thought of saying goodbye to my childhood, but then I pulled myself free. Without pause, I turned and hurried into my new, young life.

My husband and I walk out into a drizzly Maine morning. Almost immediately, the kids call and say their flight’s been delayed. We decide to kill time near the airport: before we drive the hour and a half back to our rental house on the coast, we want to be certain that they are safely on their way. The rain comes in great sheets and we call the airline many times over the next six hours, first to learn about the grounded plane’s mechanical failures, and then about weather delays up and down the East Coast.

We also exchange texts with our children who sit waiting at their gate. They watch movies on their computers and read from their summer book lists. Each time we contact them, they tell us the latest updates, that they’re doing all right. They eat vending-machine snacks and manage. They’re more independent now, with all the glamour that entails. Despite the inconvenience, I sense they’re relishing their freedom. So long as the flight isn’t cancelled altogether, they’ll be fine. The last thing they want is to return with us for another night. We all agree it was a great vacation together, but the kids have places to go now. They’re ready to be on their way.

Years ago, when I had turned from my mother and dashed into Logan, I couldn’t bear the sight of her missing me before I’d even gone. I didn’t yet grasp what she must have already sensed: that even though we would continue to see each other regularly for visits and vacations, this was an ending. I hated the pained look in her eyes and so it seemed best to leave quickly and without a fuss. Back then, with no cell phones, I couldn’t send a text to reassure her that I’d made it to my destination. I might not even have called home for several days. The break was clean and allowed us to experience it separately, and alone. I understand now, it must have been miserable for her.

As the rain continues and we wait for our children to take off, the pain I had blithely tried to avoid back then revisits me full force. My children are departing and my parents are gone now, too. My father died five years ago, but this is our first summer trip to Maine since my mother’s death a half a year ago. As we ate lobster, took invigorating hikes and viewed glorious sunsets from rocky shores, I had a searing urge to tell her all about it. As an adult and a parent myself, I had called her often, especially from wherever we traveled, to reassure her that we had made it and were having a good time. Our kids stranded in airport limbo would definitely have been worthy of a phone call mention. My mother found pleasure in our happiness, or felt concern for our concerns, even when we were far from her. Now, with my own children poised to leave, I appreciate her generous, long-distance attention more than ever. I also understand that she had had little choice. She had to learn to love me from afar.

With her gone, I’m beginning to fathom that I must learn to love her from the greatest distance of all. I notice that without her, and without the kids, I feel rudderless. I hadn’t realized that the ropes that tied me to my mother also helped me set sail in the first place. Because I counted on her to be my pole star, I came and went with some ease.

In our last phone call on New Year’s Day, I told her about the special dinner we’d had with friends the night before. She seemed distracted, even disinterested. I asked if she was feeling tired. “Oh, yes,” she said, “very tired.” Before I could inquire further, she added, “I have to go now.” We said we loved each other as we always did, and then said our goodbyes. When I hung up the phone, I told my husband that something was wrong. My mother had said, “I have to go now,” as if someone on her end of the line was insisting on it. Twelve hours later she died.

The sorrow of departure is woven into family love, although I had wanted to avoid feeling it for as long as possible. My children don’t experience it the way I do, but perhaps they will someday with their own children. I hope to keep them tethered to me, although with a rope that will necessarily stretch longer and grow finer with each next step they take.

Their flight finally leaves Bangor after dark. Later that night, they text and tell us that they made it home. I reply cheerfully, “Great. Have a good time!” From this distance, it’s the only choice I have.

"Departures" first appeared in Brain, Child on November 4, 2013. You can see it with a different photo of my children at: http://www.brainchildmag.com/2013/11/departures/

What A Literary Life Really Means

This week, news came out that a group of scientists has proven, once and for all, that reading literary fiction increases one’s ability to empathize with others. For some of us in the writing biz, that’s a no brainer. Still, it’s nice to have our sense of things confirmed. The scientists explained that literary fiction, which shows the interior life of characters, teaches us how people think. Commercial fiction, which they contend focuses more on action, doesn’t achieve this. Over the years, I’ve heard writers and publishing professionals define these types of writing, but never with such authority. Perhaps it helps to be outside the world of books to see it more clearly.

These days, I’m so in the midst of a "literary life"—writing or reading, attending conferences and festivals, meeting fellow writers and publishing professional—that I can forget why I do this in the first place. It makes me wonder, what does a literary life really mean?

Last night, the car radio helped me remember the answer. I sat in my driveway in the dark and listened to the BBC World Service report on literary happenings around the globe. Not a reading by Salman Rushdie in some hallowed, ivy-covered hall. Not interviews with Jhumpa Lahiri or Dave Eggers on their latest books. But instead, reports from distant outposts—villages and hamlets way off the beaten path. And each brief story illustrated the power of literature in a deeply powerful way.

In Somaliland, children crowd around and elbow each other to get their hands on books. This remote region of a war-torn country has set down their guns. Adults and kids alike sit with their heads bent over books. For obvious reasons, their favorite is War and Peace.

In Afghanistan, women write their stories—tales that are uniformly horrific and yet they’re eager to share them. Near the end of the interview, though, a teenage girl says she is tired of women writing stories of rape, incest and murder. It is time, she declares, for them to instead write a new history of their country.

A different reporter visits Shakespeare & Company on the Left Bank in Paris, a bookshop crowded, floor to ceiling, with books. Joyce and Stein, Hemingway and Camus, all hung out here. The warren of rooms feels more like a library than a store, a sacred setting of literary history. (I remember my first visit there at age eighteen and have been thankful each time I’ve returned to find it unchanged.)

Mules laden with books make their way across rough terrain to Argentine villages, offering a popular mobile lending library. In Kenya, schools are mobile as well, so that nomadic sheepherding tribes can learn to read and write. In the sandy soil, sheep droppings are used to spell out the alphabet.

In the South Pacific, an elderly British trader is forced to finally toss away his books: Captain Cooke’s travel diaries, Robert Louis Stephenson’s volumes, Robinson Crusoe, James Michener, and dozens of others, have all been ravaged by humidity and bugs. The old trader says, You have to know what you’re up against here. His ruined books seem to illustrate what he means.

And in a city square in Morocco, one of the last dozen storytellers in the country shares a scene from A Thousand and One Nights. For over 1,000 years, stories have been passed down in this way. In a country with a 40% illiteracy rate, the tales are now being digitally recorded and saved for posterity.

These are the stories of literary life that I want to try to remember the next time I check my Goodreads account or Amazon author page. Books, as the scientists have now proven, help us understand the human heart. In settings where life is harsh, that understanding is crucial. Here in the comfort of home, it offers a vital life line to what matters as well.

Debut Author David Samuel Levinson: A Publishing Odyssey and Other Hard-Won Wisdoms

David Samuel Levinson's debut novel, Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence, came out from Algonquin Books last spring to high praise. The brilliant novelist Caroline Leavitt called it an, "extraordinary, shocking, funny novel about writing, art, fame and mystery," and Entertainment Weekly noted its "great melodramatic scenes, full of delicious prose." If there is such a thing as a typical first novel, this isn't it: as another reviewer put it Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence is a "smart, page-turning genre bender." David and I have become fast friends since our books came out at the same time and I was thrilled when he agreed to share his writerly smarts with us here: VP: Because my first novel had a long back story behind it, I often assume that other authors have gone through similar trials and tribulations to reach publication. Apparently, that’s not always the case. But, in your instance, there’s a true saga that led to the eventual publication of your fine first novel, Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence. Can you share the publication story behind the story?

DSL: Everyone has his own journey to publication. Some journeys are easier than others. Mine was atypical, and here's why: back in 2007, my agent sent the manuscript of ALBTS around to the big publishing houses of NYC. A few editors were interested and there were calls set up in which I spoke to them on the phone. There was a small bidding war and in the end I went with an editor at Harcourt (before the merge). She had a solid reputation for being a good though ball-breaking editor and she had a successful track record with first-time authors, so I thought, Why not. Besides, I couldn't pass up the amount of money she offered. I'd been living on about $12,000 a year in New York and while my advance wasn't ginormous, it was enough to change my life for the interim. I could finally take a breath and relax, or so I thought.

I met my editor for the first time in August of 2007 at her house in upstate NY. We had a grand time, smoking cigarettes and drinking ice tea at a picnic table in her backyard. I liked her a lot. We discussed my novel, going through it page by page. But then halfway through it, she set it aside and said, "The rest of it needs a thorough rewrite." To make a long story short, I spent the following year rewriting and rewriting and rewriting—all of it to her specifications. Each chunk of pages I sent her were met with stony silence, then absolute dismissal. "You're rushing," she told me once in an email. She was right about that, so I slowed down and took my time. But even this wasn't good enough for her. My last correspondence with her was in May of 2008. Ultimately, the contract was dissolved and I went to Chuck Adams, who was kind enough of buy the book from Harcourt. I say kind enough because ALBTS might never have found another home had it not been for Algonquin. So the book I wrote is the book that was published, more or less. I'm thrilled with it and I'm equally thrilled that I'm with Algonquin.

VP: Through that experience with your first editor, you had to stand by your vision of your novel. Do you think that you learned something not only about publishing, but about yourself as a writer that will be helpful going forward with future books?

DSL: Oh, did I! Mostly, what I learned from all of this is that even if you spend ten years laboring over a book, it can still go out into the world and do nothing. ALBTS is a very ambitious first novel. It's also a book that's kind of out of step with all the other novels around it. First, it's a book about writing, writers, and publishing—three very big no-nos in the industry—and second, it's very self-referential and metafictional. It's a serious book about about serious things. In the 1800s, you could get away with writing about writing and have the end result be serious. In today's world, writing about writing and writers has to be sarcastic and funny if it's going to be met with any kind of exposure. Every book about writing that's been written in the last twenty years, save but a few, have been ironic and funny and light-hearted. I wanted to cross genres, so I wrote a mystery/thriller that used literary tropes. I wanted to twist the genre up and come up with something different, even new. It was an experiment I set for myself and I love the outcome. It's quite Nabokovian, or so I've been told, but I'm afraid that no one really knows what to make of it at bottom. It's a novel about novels, about ideas, about literature. But it isn't slight or light-hearted and it doesn't pander to the reading public. It's a novel about integrity, about where stories come from and who has the right to them and what happens when you steal a story from someone else and make it your own. In this day and age, I thought this was a perfect theme to tackle, given the amount of stories circulating on the internet, etc. But again, I'm afraid this topic just isn't as interesting or riveting as werewolves, zombies, and vampires. So to answer your question: I'm going to keep writing the novels I want to write because there's really no rhyme or reason why this book sells and that book doesn't. The writing seems almost superfluous to the buzz and hype that occurs around certain books. Once a book gets the NY Times stamp of approval, it's all set to exceed expectations and then even some of those books don't go anywhere. Basically, it's a total crap shoot and lots of luck and so you only have yourself and the novels you write to count on.

VP: The actual writing of Antonia took you many years. Can you describe how your manuscript changed and improved through those drafts? How did you use other readers in your process?

DSL: The book was a total mess to begin with, as most first drafts are. Catherine was much older and the style of the writing was fairly stilted, Henry Jamesian. I wanted to write a 19th-century novel and set it in the present. I showed my writing group at the time a couple of chapters and they all said the same thing—it need a facelift. So I gave it a facelift. I made Catherine much younger and I updated the language to make it more germane to the current culture, because of course it's your job as a writer to please everyone but yourself. Haha. But something began to happen when I began to shake the dust off it. It entered a different phase of life, younger, more vibrant, and I thought, I can still write a 19th-century novel because I'm dealing with 19th-century themes and people. All of my characters long to live in a different era, an era before television and the Internet (the book is set in 1991, long before cell phones and the Internet), an era that was far more simple and more connected. I find that our era is so fractured and discombobulated that it's no wonder certain books flourish. They reflect the culture in which we live. Well, I wanted to write a novel that reflected a culture in which we don't live. Even though it might have a similar look and feel to our current millennium, it isn't. It's otherworldly, even old worldly, and the characters in the novel behave as such.

I didn't use other readers in the process, actually. I just gave it to my agent, who then sent it out. Everyone has an opinion about this or that plot or this or that characters and since the book was mine, I thought my opinion counted the most. So, no readers for this one.

VP: Was your first book, the fine collection of stories, Most of Us Are Here Against Our Will, an easier ride—both in terms of the writing and the publication? Did writing it prepare you to write Antonia or do you have other novel manuscripts in your draws that did that instead?

DSL: MOUAHAOW was a much easier ride, yes, and that's because I never wanted to write a novel. I feel far more comfortable in the short form and think I'm pretty damn good at it. I think the topic and themes in ALBTS mirror my frustrations about having to write a longer work, when in reality all I have ever wanted to do was to write short stories. I hate writing novels, actually, and find them ultimately tedious and boring. I like reading them, but I don't like writing them. They take, well, look how long it took me to write Antonia? I don't have that much time or dedication to give another novel. So I'm pretty sure I'll write my next one in ten days and be done with it. And yes, like every other writer, I have a couple of novels that are decaying in a desk drawer. They didn't help me one iota in writing Antonia and I learned nothing from them. Don't be fooled—writing a novel and finishing it doesn't mean that you've unlocked the key to a successful strategy for writing novels at all. It just means that you wrote one. Every novel is different. Every novel comes with its own interiors and its own ulterior motives and it's up to you to tame the fuck out of it before it gets away from you. That's what a novel is to me—an untamable beast that a publisher buys, smacks a dollar sign on, and pushes into the world. Sidebar: I love how it goes from a work of art to a work of commerce in a matter of seconds. It's amazing that shift in thought and design—the spectacle of it all is something I try to nail down in ALBTS. You begin as this unknown person at a desk and you end up having umpteen conversations with your editor about covers. The whole racket is insane!

VP: What advice do you have for aspiring writers these days? What should they not do?

DSL: The only advice I have for aspirants is this: be confident in your convictions or be eaten alive.

VP: So, what are you working on next?

DSL: I'm working on a novel tentatively titled, When Noah's Raven Came to Town. It's my September 11th novel. That's all I can say.

Megan Mayhew Bergman

Birds of a Lesser Paradise made a splash when it came out in March, 2012. It’s not easy to be noticed for a debut novel, more of less for a short story collection which tend to have a smaller readership, so the positive reception by The New York Times and other reviewers was noteworthy. It didn’t hurt that the first story in the collection, which also happens to be one of my favorites, had been included in The Best American Short Stories 2011. Polly Rosenwaike in the Times explained why these pieces work brilliantly and are so memorable: “We want stories to stir our desires. We also want them to lead us to places we don’t recognize and build us a temporary residence there. Bergman provides alluring glimpses into the strangeness, the ruthlessness, of the animal kingdom.” And, I might add, of the human heart as well. I'm honored to be speaking alongside Megan at the James River Writers Conference on October 19-20 in Richmond, Virginia. In advance of that always-wonderful event, I wanted to get to know her better. I’m delighted to share here an interview with Megan about how Birds of a Lesser Paradise came to such rewarding fruition.

VP: Your debut book publication is a collection of short stories. I wonder what drew you to that form and if you’re still as intrigued by it now as you were when you first started writing?

MMB: Perhaps it’s my southern heritage—I grew up with the sound and length of a sermon in my head, a short narrative with a sucker-punch, a focus on sound and distillation. When I was a student, Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty spoke to me from the page, and it was a language I knew. Plus, there was my dad spinning yarns at the dinner table. My inner framework for stories is short, and it’s often southern and sound-oriented.

I love what the short story can do. There’s a mix of freedom and constraint, a bigger burden on the line. For me, it’s all about getting to the heart of the matter, learning how to scour the reader’s soul in twelve pages or less. Hemingway’s first collection—In Our Time—does this for me. There’s a powerful mix of restraint, killer sentences, and brutal stay-with-you imagery.

Justin Torres wrote a phenomenal short novel, We the Animals, and when interviewed about it, he wrote: “I wanted the book to feel a little claustrophobic. I wanted the intensity of concentration. My parents used to buy canisters of frozen orange juice concentrate in bulk and my brothers and I would sometimes spoon the orange stuff into our mouths like ice-cream, not because it was delicious, it wasn't, but because it was intense.”

That intensity is what I love about a lot of short work—it often has characters, and the world for that matter, by the throat.

I think like a short story writer.  We tell short stories all the time:  at the dinner table, in a eulogy, in a song. There’s urgency there. Tell me what matters, tell me now, and make it count.

VP: Over how long a period did you work on Birds of a Lesser Paradise? At what stage did you realize you had a collection-in-the-making?

MMB: I worked on a lot of these stories in my head before they landed on paper. Most of these stories spilled out of me across three years, but the last few came at a very intense time in my life, a period of six weeks I call my Cosmic Bitch Slap. I gave birth to my first child, my husband graduated from veterinary school, his beloved mother died of cancer, and we sold our house in North Carolina and moved to Vermont. It was a period of radical change, and the birth-death continuum was right in front of my eyes. Things that had mattered before no longer mattered. I was thirty pounds overweight, my hair fell out, and I was depressed. I decided right then that I was going to pick myself up and become the kind of woman my daughter could look up to. Another daughter later and I’m still working on that, of course.

During the Cosmic Bitch Slap, material landed in my lap. It choked me. I had profound feelings, a sense of post-traumatic enlightenment as I was walking barefoot in circles around the pasture, cradling my colicky, screaming daughter, missing my own family and my mother-in-law.

As a mother, I saw the human-as-animal. No—I felt it. I saw primal beauty all around me, and I wanted to honor it. The last line of my first story, Housewifely Arts, captures everything I learned those six weeks, everything I wanted to put into my first book, everything I knew to be true.

VP: What was your path to book publication? Your stories had been published and received awards. I wonder if that helped you to find an agent and then a publishing house?

MBB: I do not suffer from visions of grandeur—quite the opposite. The hardest thing for me was (is?) giving myself permission to make art. I was listening to a doctor friend play guitar in his garage a few years back, and I thought—I like listening to him play and sing. He’s not playing because he thinks he’s Eric Clapton or Thom Yorke. He’s making music because he enjoys it, and we take pleasure in the sound. I told myself: MMB, just make art.  Make it as good as you can and don’t worry about who it’s for or how it will sell. There are worse things you could do with your time.

Making art is a gift, and even if we just practice it and don’t offer it up for commercial consumption, it helps us process the world, and helps us become better patrons of other artists.

After I had 4 or 5 good stories out in the world, the agenting inquiries started. I also had some generous mentors and MFA professors who helped me connect with good people.

My agent, Julie Barer, is a magnetic, brilliant, high-energy spirit, and she guided me through the publication process so well, and connected me with a team of editors at Scribner (Kara Watson and Sam Martin) that really understood Birds of a Lesser Paradise. I couldn’t have asked for a more generously-supported debut.

It’s important to find a team who gets you, who understands what you want for yourself and your art and helps you get there. I’m a southerner who lives in rural Vermont. I have goat poop stuck in the soles of my shoes and cat hair on my sweaters. I have kids I want to get home to when I’m on book tour. I get lost in big cities. My team knows all those things and plans accordingly, finds the ways to bring the right people to my book. I’m still lost in a sea of gratitude about all that.

VP: You’ve sold your next book, a novel, to your same editor. I’m curious how you decided to write a novel instead of stories?

MMB: I like challenges, and I have three or four ideas for novels that I’m dying to put out into the world. Of course there’s a learning curve for me structurally, but I’m up for it. I need to write these stories; that’s all I usually need to know to give myself permission to pursue a project. If I don’t get them down on paper, they’ll drive me crazy in my imagination. Writing these books will be a release!

It’s the same for stories, really, and I am always writing short stories, and I imagine I always will be.

VP: Can you offer any advice for aspiring writers who hope to publish a book?

You’re never as brave as you are with your first book. When I wrote my early stories, I never thought many people would read them. I was a little reckless. And sometimes that recklessness gives itself over to a more authentic-sounding voice or narrative, instead of an overly-precious, overly-contrived, taking-myself-seriously voice. Beginner’s enthusiasm is contagious on the page sometimes. There’s energy there. You’re excited to be doing what you’re doing.

The most important advice I have for aspiring writers is to be a good literary citizen. Read constantly. Buy most of your books from independent bookstores. Support a few of the journals you want to publish your work—that’s only fair.

Consider giving your time to one of your favorite journals as a reader—many of them need volunteers, and it’s a great way to take the pulse of the slush pile. I’ve done this a few times, and man, the slush pile doesn’t lie. I formed so many writing philosophies reading the slush pile—you realize the sheer importance of first paragraphs, the danger of wind-up. The themes and character prototypes you think are tired you’ll see are REALLY tired, and you’ll never convince yourself you can get away with a Manic Pixie Dreamgirl. You’ll also be inspired by how many good stories there are in the world, how many great writers. And that makes you work harder to distinguish yourself. It made me wonder, what do I have to offer the world? What makes my words worthy of a reader’s time? When you can answer those questions, you may have a book.

David Abrams: Debut Novelist and Literary Citizen Extraordinaire

David Abrams’ debut novel about the Iraq War, Fobbit, was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2012 and a Best Book of 2012 by Paste Magazine, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Barnes & Noble. It was also featured as part of B&N's Discover Great New Writers program and has received much well-deserved love and attention. But I first came to know David because he is such a kind and encouraging literary citizen. Before River of Dust was published, he invited me to contribute to his blog, The Quivering Pen. I wrote for his “My First Time” column in which writers describe their first experience with success, or failure, in writing and publishing. For someone who is relatively new to the world of publishing himself, David has a way of shepherding the less experienced along with him. Perhaps it's his military past that taught him to think about the whole and not just himself, or perhaps it's because he is a father who has raised three children he calls "the small apple orchard of my eye." But in any case, I'm grateful to him for his support and friendship, and I know that many other authors feel the same way. In this interview, I ask him about his experience before his fame with Fobbit. As you might expect, he encourages aspiring writers to "stick with it and believe in yourself." VP: Your readers know that you served in Iraq and that your wonderful novel, Fobbit, is set there. But, I’m curious about your background as an aspiring writer before and during that time.

DA: I like to tell people I was born a writer, not a soldier. Military aspirations were the farthest thing from my mind in the mid-1980s when I joined the Army. I was the proverbial 98-pound weakling, timid, preferred the solitude of books, that sort of thing. At the time, I had a bachelor’s degree in English, a rewarding (if stressful) job as a reporter for a newspaper in Montana, and a couple dozen poems and short stories published in literary magazines with microscopic readerships. I was convinced that, given enough time and circumstances, I could write the next Great American Novel. Such are the pathetic dreams of young, struggling writers. I had ambition, but I also had student loan debt, grocery bills, and a third child on the way. So I joined the Army and was soon indoctrinated into the world of straitjacketed writing for the military. For the first years, I had a lot of fun writing feature stories for the military base newspapers—writing which tapped into my creativity—but it wasn’t long before I was confined to drier writing for reports and technical journals. I compiled training plans and got really good at doing PowerPoint presentations. All this time, in my off-duty hours, I continued to work on my fiction—stories that were deeply influenced by Raymond Carver, John Updike and Flannery O’Connor. I got a lucky break when one of them was published in Esquire but that was about as big as it got back in those days. I earned my MFA from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks while I was working full-time in the Army, squeezing intense writing jags on my thesis between field training exercises in sub-zero weather. In a way, I always felt like my job in the Army was my “sideline” and that writing was my real career.  Such was the state of my life in 2005 when I deployed to Iraq with the 3rd Infantry Division. I was, in a way, primed to write something like Fobbit.

 VP:  I saw in another interview that you had correspondence with your agent while over there. You sent him pieces of writing about your experience. For many writers, getting that first agent can be a huge challenge and a dream-come-true when it happens. We all want to have a literary partner and hope that our agent will become that person. It’s lovely to imagine you sending off your writing to your agent while in Iraq. Can you tell us how that came about? And how working with that person helped shape the book you came to write? 

DA: First of all, I need to send out a song of praise for Nat Sobel. As an agent, he had faith in me for nearly six years while I was working on Fobbit. It’s incredible to think he kept me as a client for all that time without having anything in hand to sell. It’s kind of a touching love story, actually. As soon as I arrived in the combat zone, I started keeping a journal. It was a creative record of everything I saw, heard, experienced—I just poured everything into it in a daily brain-dump. At one point, I sent a few of those journal entries to my friend (and now Dzanc Books publisher) Dan Wickett. He posted my Baghdad diary to his blog, Emerging Writers Network. Nat Sobel, legendary agent of Sobel-Weber, happened to read what I wrote and contacted Dan who then played match-maker. So, picture me there in that internet café on Camp Liberty after a long day at work, opening up my email, and seeing a message from Nat Sobel saying he was interested in my work. My head immediately inflated to the size of a hot-air balloon and I went around strutting like a cock-of-the-walk. I had a literary agent! Life was good, I immediately felt bullet-proof there in that combat zone. Surely no harm could come to me now that my writing career was finally on its way. Nat and I continued to correspond with each other that year. He was the one who planted the seed of Fobbit in my head. Early on, we both saw that writing a straight memoir about my time in Baghdad wouldn’t add much to an already-overpopulated field of Iraq War memoirs. Near the end of my tour, Nat wrote to me: “I've come to believe that only in fiction will this insane war finally reach an American reading public.” I went back to my trailer that night and started noodling around characters invented whole cloth out of my imagination, placing them in some real-life situations with which I was familiar. 

VP: So did you write Fobbit while there or when you returned? I’m curious when and how you had the time to work it and how long it took you to write? Would you say that yours was a straight path to publication or were there hairpin turns along the way?

DA: As I mentioned, Fobbit grew organically out of my journal—like a new green shoot sprouting out of a tree limb—so in one sense, the novel started the day I set foot on Iraqi soil. While other soldiers went back to their “hooches”—their trailers and tents—after work and played Xbox or cleaned their weapons or hung out with members of the opposite sex, I went back to my room and wrote for two to three hours. It was good therapy—that and reading a crapload of books that year—everyone from Elmore Leonard to Cervantes. I stole my writing time in snatches, little sips of time during the day and late at night. Fobbit the narrative didn’t really get going until the very end of my time in Iraq, and I really went to town on it once I returned stateside. Like most of my writing projects, it had its ebbs and flows, periods of time when it languished and I made sorry excuses for not sitting down at the keyboard on a daily basis. For the most part, though, I think Fobbit’s path to publication was pretty straight. Once Nat and I were happy with the final draft and he started shopping it around, it went pretty quickly, at least by my standards. Grove/Atlantic came back with an offer less than a month after Nat sent it out, which is pretty amazing to me.

VP: I can’t resist asking the question that must come at all writers who write about war: do you, like Hemingway, feel that people need to have major life experiences in order to have something to write about? Or, do you agree with Eudora Welty that, “a quiet life can be a daring life as well, for all serious daring starts from within?”

DA: Would I have written Fobbit if I hadn’t actually gone to Iraq and been immersed in the day-to-day reality of war? Probably, but it wouldn’t be the same book. It wouldn’t have that intensity of truth. I would have been guessing (and probably guessing wrong) at the things I actually experienced. That being said, I just spent 20 years working on a novel about a midget who gets a job as a stuntman in 1940s Hollywood. I’ve never been a midget, never lived in the 1940s, and only spent two days in Hollywood as a tourist—but somehow I was able to pull it off. On the whole, my life has been pretty boring, bland as a cardboard cutout—no running of bulls, no deep-sea fishing off the coast of Cuba, no hairy-chested Hemingway adventures—but I do have plenty of unexplored worlds in my head. That’s where I find an interesting life to write about.

VP: What advice do you have for aspiring writers who strive to have their debut novel published?

DA: It took me nearly 30 years to get a novel published, so I suppose saying “Stick with it and believe in yourself” might not be what most beginning writers want to hear. I can certainly understand the desire to have something published now and not decades from now. Lord knows that was my dream and frustration for 30 years. In all that time, though, I never stopped believing someone somewhere would be interested in my writing—it couldn’t be that bad, could it? You have to have faith in your work—especially in those dark, lonely days when it seems like no one else does. Eventually, if you keep writing and keep pushing against the tide of negativity and rejection, something will happen. And if it doesn’t, what’s the worst that will have happened? You’ll have brought some beautiful words into the world, even if they’re only beautiful to you.

Coming Home to Several Cities

There's a lot to be said about the importance of coming from somewhere. Being of a particular place. Right now, I'm very much of Richmond, Virginia. On Tuesday, May 7, I'll hold my Book Launch Party here. This morning as I listened to my local NPR station, I heard my name announced along with the details of that party. I shouldn't have been surprised, but I am. Both by the miraculous fact of launching a first book, but also by being noticed for it in my hometown. Style, Richmond's excellent weekly alternative paper, has run a preview of River of Dust and the high-quality glossy monthly called Richmond offers a Q & A with me. I gather that our daily paper, The Richmond Times Dispatch, will post a review of River of Dust next weekend in their Books Section. I am immensely grateful for this coverage because it will encourage people to read my novel, but also because it helps me to see quite plainly that this city is my home. Wonderfully enough, though, five days later, I travel to my other home: Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'll be doing my first ever Book Talk at the Center for International Studies at MIT. That may seem like a strange place to start a novel's book tour, but it makes perfect sense. My father, Lucian W. Pye, taught in the Political Science Department at MIT for more than forty years and I will be speaking in the Lucian Pye Conference Room. I'm truly honored and touched to be doing my inagural event there.

In the evening of May 10, I'll do a second event at Back Pages Books in Waltham, the next town over from where I grew up in Belmont. I can't wait to see the friends and family who come out for it, and can't imagine a better homecoming. And maybe that's the point: like many people, I have many homes. I've lived in Hartford, New York and Philadephia, and have family in Washington, DC, so when I visit those cities and share my work there, I'll feel welcomed home, too. Having moved a number of times, I realize that I could live just about anywhere and make it work. The joy, though, is when you realize you've set down real and lasting roots, even long after you've moved away.

A Culmination: First Bookstore Reading and High School Reunion

On May 10, I return home to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for my high school reunion. My four closest girlfriends from that time will also come in from across the country: from Tucson, Chicago, New York, and one who stayed in Cambridge. And me, I’ll travel from Richmond, Virginia, where I’ve lived for more than a decade. For years we’ve kept up with each other’s lives through conference calls, group emails, and the rare gathering at a beach house or in one city or another for non-stop talk marathons. This time we’re combining our small group reunion with the full school affair. Now, at this point in our lives, we see that life has had its ups and downs for each of us in our own way, and any false hope still alive at earlier reunions of being spared difficulty is gone with the years. Instead, we can now fully relish our shared past and honor the kids we were by having some drinks, laughing a lot, and maybe even dancing. I feel especially excited this year because I return home having accomplished what I hoped for most as a high school girl: the publication of my debut novel, River of Dust, which comes out the very same week as the reunion. The timing invites more than a little self-reflection and thankfulness. It was with these girlfriends that I first shared my bookish self. When we wandered around Harvard Square looking for boys and good finds at used clothing stores, I carried Anne Sexton’s poems in the back pocket of my jeans. I quoted Denise Levertov and Sylvia Plath to anyone who’d listen. To their credit, my friends didn’t tease me, but instead seemed to know before I did what my life’s goal would be. I am moved that they’ll be with me at my first bookstore reading of River of Dust to be held at Back Pages Books in Waltham, just down the street from our high school.

The Harvard Square of our childhoods was dotted with new and used bookstores. I remember wandering into them with a sense of great anticipation, and then easily losing myself in the aisles. There is still nothing as satisfying as picking up an unfamiliar book and leafing through its pages, becoming acquainted with new authors by serendipitously plucking them from the shelves. I remember wiling away hours in the Harvard Book Store, something that luckily one can still do today as that store continues to be a home to both writers and readers. Just a few years ago Back Pages Books owner, Alex Green, opened his store in the likeness of City Lights Books in San Francisco, where the Beat poets first congregated. He’s given a great gift to the City of Waltham by envisioning an independent bookstore as a community center, a place to inspire the next generation of high school kids looking for books they didn’t even know they wanted to read, let alone to write. I’m honored to hold the first reading of my novel there, and deeply satisfied to be accompanied by my supportive long-time friends and classmates as I read aloud my own words, adding my voice to the many voices of that literary corner of the literary state of Massachusetts.

One Month Till Book Launch!

Richmond is bursting with blooms in that crazy way it happens here in April, and I am every bit as wired and beaming. One month from now, we'll finally get to celebrate together the launch of my debut novel, River of Dust. If you are anywhere near Richmond, Virginia, on the evening of May 7, I hope you'll get off the highway and come on by. The book launch party is to be held in the simple and elegant rooms of the Candela Gallery, a fine art photography gallery that always has excellent work on the walls. Kelly Justice from Fountain Bookstore will be selling copies and everyone is welcome to inbibe, eat Chinese food from Sticky Rice, hear a brief reading from River of Dust, followed by a book signing.

A few days later on Friday, May 10, I'll be in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I'll be honored do a book event at M.I.T. in the Lucian W. Pye Seminar Room, named after my father who was a long-time prominent professor in the Political Science Department. I will be touched to see his former colleagues and students, and to meet a more current crop of China watchers.

On Friday evening, May 10, I'll be at Back Pages Books in Waltham for my first book store reading. I hope you can join me at one of these joyous inaugural events!

Advice from Writing Mentors #1: Allan Gurganus

Here at 4 and 20, I've focused on debut novelists and the back stories behind their first books. But now, I'd like to share advice from authors whose writing about writing has been helpful. I'll start with Allan Gurganus who I was lucky enough to study with at Sarah Lawrence College in their MFA program. I learned a great deal from him—not only on the page, but about being a writer and a citizen. I admire how he seems to balance his life elegantly. On his website, he says he rises early each morning to write and garden. He is also a social activist. I'm happy to hear that a long-awaited follow up to Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All will be published in September. I can't wait to read it.

In this interview from several years ago, Allan reminds writers how lucky we are to get to do what we love to do. I also love that he says novelists' lives begin at forty. That's my kind of math!

Allan Gurganus:

"What I do is, I get up in the morning and I write the way a bird sings. The bird doesn't say, "Just think, there'll be the collected hits.” They just twitter, twitter, twitter and some of the twitters are better than others and you get clusters and you see how this is related to that and then you have the twitter symphony. It comes out in a way, like yard goods, you mete it out. It's a very intuitive and extremely inefficient process, this business of writing fiction the way I write it....

"It's seasonal work. It comes and goes and I have been very well paid for books and I have also given books away. The great privilege is to be able to get up every morning and do it. How many doctors would go unpaid just for the privilege of being in the examination room with patients everyday? That's what most American writers are doing, they are not writing for money, they are writing because writing is a clarifying experience. It's a second form of dreaming. It's a cultural intuition. It's a way of having the world make brief sense for yourself. It's very hard to give up. If somebody came and told me, "You'll never earn another penny from doing this and you've got to find three day jobs," I would not be able to stop. I have a lap-top on the airplane, as I am on this tour. It's not that I am writing a great masterpiece, it's like a bread maker, I just have to have my hands in the yeast....

"John Cheever used to say, ‘Fiction is a force of memory misunderstood.’ Genuinely—when it's working—when you are in the zone, it is truly like remembering something fourteen times as vivid as anything you have ever lived. It's given to you. All you have to do as a good secretary is just transcribe it and get it down and polish it....

"I'm only fifty, and I feel a novelist begins life at forty. So I'm only ten, really. I'm just getting my sea legs. I have a lot of energy and I have a tremendous sense of commitment. I don't have a career, I have a mission. I'm from a long line of ministers, so I've applied my status as the black sheep—the fallen, queer one—to transforming myself into the ultimate pulpit-pounder."

Thank you, Allan. Now, back to the keyboard we go!

Debut Novelist Interview: Elizabeth Huergo

Elizabeth Huergo's debut novel, The Death of Fidel Perez, has just been published by Unbridled Books and I'm very excited to read it. As none other than Oscar Hijuerlos has said of her book, "There is an erudition of language and a wealth of dramatized history in this novel. Both a portrait of the realities of the revolution and a speculative fiction as to what has happened to the Cuban soul with the event of Fidel Castro’s rise and—in this scenario—what may well happen with his passing, The Death of Fidel Pérez will reward both a general audience looking for a lively read and the discerning reader who truly cares about literature: in short, a heartfelt and well-written novel, with a provocative premise.” As always, I'm interested in the story behind the story, so I asked Elizabeth how her first novel came to be:

VP: Your novel, The Death of Fidel Perez, is set in your country of origin, Cuba. I wonder if you wrote stories or earlier pieces prior to this book that helped lead you to it, perhaps ones that are set there as well? I'm also curious if there was a long gestation period for your book, or did the characters and plot come to you quickly?

EH: No, I didn’t write earlier versions of the novel. There was a long writing process--eight years, but a story, of whatever length or genre, comes to me as a whole and very quickly. I have a moment when I see the entire novel in my mind’s eye. In a flash the story becomes a beautiful architectural space that I can move through. I see this space in my mind’s eye, but I can also sense my movement through it. The flash is both a blessing and a curse because I end up pursuing this vision in a very Romantic or Shelleyan sense.

I went to Cuba, and when I returned to the US I began this novel. In her stories about Remedios, Cuba, where she grew up, my mother sometimes talks about Saturnina, a crazy woman who decided one day to put on all of her skirts and live in the streets. One day, during my visit, as I was walking through l’Habana vieja (Old Havana), I peered into a building covered by mosaic tiles.

I didn’t realize, however, that on the other side of the tiled façade most of the building was in rubble. I peered inside and found, at the top of a barely intact stairwell, an old woman in a rocking chair, the morning sky behind her, wearing everything she owned, and appearing to me as an ancient Madonna in a grotto.

I was expecting a grand foyer, one more example of the island’s rich architectural history that I could photograph. Instead, I had this deeply mystical experience as I peered across that threshold. I let go of the camera hanging around my neck. I wanted to apologize, but here was nothing for me to say. This fragile old woman, a bundle of rags and bone, nodded at me like a monarch on her throne.  It was almost as if she were giving me permission or forgiving me for the intrusion.

I named her Saturnina, and she haunted me all the way back to the United States until I wrote down what had happened, first as a journal entry, and then eventually as the first chapter of The Death of Fidel Pérez.

VP: Many first time novelists have a long path to publication. I’m curious about your backstory. You had published short stories before and some of them have been anthologized, but I wonder if The Death of Fidel Perez is the first novel you ever wrote?

 EH: Yes, the The Death of Fidel Pérez is the first, and it took me eight years to complete because I wasn’t just writing. I was teaching myself to write a novel. It’s also a very elegiac story. My own relationship to the manuscript was emotional: I was recreating something that I had lost, but also something that I was finding through the process of storytelling. I had to surmount the fear in myself that telling the story would be too painful. I had to teach myself at a visceral, cognitive level that the story would heal me.

I learned from reading Nadine Gordimer’s work that the short story can serve as a sketchbook of sorts for a longer, more complicated form. So my short stories served in that manner, especially “The Cigar Box,” which I wrote practically in one sitting. And the story came about because I was reading, not only Gordimer, but Heinrich Böll, who was the post-war writer of his generation who took on the political and social history of Germany, a daunting task for a German, and a task similar to Gordimer’s, a writer who takes on the social and political history of South Africa, of apartheid.

Gordimer’s short story sequence, “Six Feet of the Country,” and Böll’s short story, “The Rucksack,” taught me something about the viability of history as a character. In fact, I quote Böll directly at the very beginning of “The Cigar Box,” and the completion of that story, and especially the generous response of Eamonn Wall to the story, gave me confidence and propelled me forward. Eamonn, an Irish poet who has lived in the US for many years now, happened to be the guest editor of a volume on exile in Natural Bridge, a literary journal published by the University of Missouri, St Louis. He really could not have been kinder or more helpful.

VP: How did it come to find a home at Unbridled Books?

EH: My first impulse is to laugh and explain that I have no idea how the universe works except that it seems to require surrender at every point. We control so little, really. My second impulse is to tell you a story about how deeply I listened to a writer and mentor, Richard Peabody, and how that seemingly passive action led me to a wonderful agent and then a publisher.

Toward the very end of his novel seminar, Richard talks about the critical elements of a cover letter, the sort of cover letter that will pique an agent’s curiosity, despite the endless piles of queries she receives. “You have to describe your novel in one sentence,” Richard insisted. The students in the class pushed back. He answered their questions, but he stuck to his point and went on to elaborate on other, rather counter-intuitive aspects of the cover letter.

The following week, everyone came to class with their draft cover letters, the focus of that last class discussion. All of the letters were two- and three-page descriptions of plot or writing process, long explanations about the writer’s heart-felt devotion to the beloved manuscript. On some level, conscious or unconscious, the students seemed to feel that they knew more about the industry, about the culture of agents and publishers and writers, than Richard did.

Me? I took him quite literally—in large part because I have spent so many years teaching writing and observing the energy students often misspend in resisting instruction, even when that resistance is not conscious. I struggled all week and finally boiIed my novel down to one sentence, the opening sentence of my cover letter: “The Death of Fidel Pérez is a tale told by Che Guevara and overheard by Italo Calvino.”

I sent out my first batch of ten cover letters to New York agents interested in literary fiction and got an 80 percent return, which is outrageous. One of those responses led me to an extraordinary agent at Don Congdon Associates, Katie Grimm.

And having spoken to Katie, I remembered something else Richard said during our seminar. It was almost a throw-away, a casual bit of advice tossed like a message in a bottle: “Get an agent who genuinely believes in your work.” Katie pitched my novel for a full year with exactly the same enthusiasm, intelligence, and work ethic that she demonstrated the first month we worked together. She found Unbridled Books and Fred Ramey, another extraordinary professional.

So, as in The Life of Pi, you have to decide which story you prefer: the spiritual or the rational? I prefer the spiritual one, the story that lies suspended across invisible corners, a vibrating nexus of causes and effects that insist on the essential mystery of life.

VP: I'm sure your readers will be curious what you're working on next. Can you share with us your current project?

EH: I’m almost done with my second novel, Between Ana and Ella, which is a contemporary version of The Grapes of Wrath.

Jennifer Spiegel: Two Books in One Year, Not Bad for a Beginner

Out of the blue, author Jennifer Spiegel wrote to me and said that she had pitched to interview with me to The Nervous Breakdown and they had agreed! What a great way to make a new friend. Jennifer was already doing something incredibly nice and generous in my direction, which turns out to be par for the course for her. When I mentioned what she had offered to do for me, author David Abrams said he wasn't a bit surprised: “Jennifer’s like that. She’s good people,” he said. And now that I've met her at the AWP Writers Conference in Boston I know more than ever that he’s right. We enjoyed a tasty lunch together in which we discovered that our paths to publication had been similiarly long and circuitous. But when Jennnifer finally broke through to book publication, she did so with gusto: she had two books of fiction, not one, come out in 2012!

She’s a terrific writer. I loved her novel Love Slave, the story of a young woman in New York City in the early 1990s. Music, dating, work-life, the bar scene, and a genuinely sympathetic heroine—it all rings true in this wonderful novel, and I should know because, like Jennifer, I lived in NYC at that time. The Freak Chronicles, which I am starting to read and enjoy now, is a collection of stories that explores the question of what makes a person a freak. These stories show that there’s a fine line between the ordinary and the extraordinary.

I liked Jennifer so much and would happily read her writing on any subject. But, in particular, I wanted her to share with us at 4 and 20  her interesting path to publication, and the surprising year of twin book launches!

VP: You have had a remarkable year with two books coming out within months of each other. Can you explain how you came to such an abundance?

Who knows how these things happen? I can tell you this right now: I’m no prodigy or someone who wrote a book on a whim and it turned out to be something magical. Rather, I wrote for a million years, took other jobs, got an MFA, had babies, even gave up briefly, and then lost Dzanc Book’s short story collection contest. Amazing, Dan Wickett of Dzanc called me to tell me, in 2009, that I lost their contest but they still wanted to publish The Freak Chronicles...in 2012. If I were interested. I was.

So, I had to wait till 2012 for things to happen. In the meantime, Unbridled Books accepted Love Slave, my novel, for publication, and it came out less than four months after The Freak Chronicles. Basically, one book was published in June and the other was published in September 2012.

The delay—despite everything—was actually a good thing. The Freak Chronicles had the opportunity for some strong revision (as did Love Slave, really). I wrote three new stories, which were not included in the original manuscript, and I re-wrote two existing stories (one of them almost entirely). My children moved out of the baby stage, which helped a lot. And I had plenty of time to prepare for the wonders of publication. Plus, I have to admit that my philosophy and thoughts on writing and publishing had changed immensely from my first brush with success in my twenties to my eventual publication in my forties.

VP: So your first published book is The Freak Chronicles, but is it the first book you ever wrote? If you have previous manuscripts in a drawer, do you think you’ll be tempted to bring them back out again?

I wrote a novel called So I Slept With Mickey Rourke when I was twenty-five, and it got some attention from Random House. It morphed into “The Mickey Rourke Saga,” a story in Freak, which is about five million times better than that original manuscript (for more on this story, look at David Abrams’ The Quivering Pen author interview series). I have no desire whatsoever to see the original book ever again. Similarly, there was a short story collection that I sometimes forget all about too: The Size of Your Country. I can assure you that they both suck.

VP: How did you decide to keep persisting as a writer when you didn't have success immediately? Did taking on different types of jobs help you in your process, or do you think of those years away from writing as more of a distraction from your ultimate goal of getting a book published?

Well, as I mentioned earlier, I did give up a little. It probably wouldn’t have lasted, but there was a time—right after the birth of my first daughter—when I thought I’d stop trying to publish my work. I had met with multiple failures, rejections, bad agent experiences, more rejection. I also had some pretty complex and warped ideas on what it meant to be a woman and a mother. I felt guilty, in part, about my passion for writing—guilty for thinking of it as a vocation or calling, guilty for this competition I set up in my head between writing and motherhood. It was awful. I was now in my mid- to late-thirties. I was a first-time mother. I was depressed. I didn’t fit in with the other moms. My husband was supportive, but also at a loss for how to help.

Somehow or other, I must’ve entered my book in the Dzanc contest. No doubt my association with Kyle Minor helped. He had originally accepted “Goodbye, Madagascar” for publication in his now-defunct journal, Frostproof Review. He went on to remember me, and put me in touch with the folks at Dzanc Books.

When I lost—but kinda won too—I was, in many ways, pulled from the pits. Like a freakin’ Phoenix rising from the flames! I mean it! Not only did my writing life re-emerge, but also my children were inevitably benefited—as was my marriage, my sense of self, my understanding of what it meant to be a woman. [feel free to tweak grammar if necessary]

I don’t know if I really answered your question. I don’t see any of it as wasted time or distraction. In the final analysis, it was all good. I will say—and I don’t mean for this to sound cocky—I believe that writers who make it are confident in their abilities. They think they’re good. They have to believe this. If you’re going to make it, you have to think, I’m good and people should read me.

VP: What advice do you have for aspiring writers who hope to sell their first book?

Think about it as a life, a vocation, a calling. Ask yourself if you’re in it for the long haul. Ask yourself why you’re in it, for what reason? Try to think deeply about what you’re doing. I don’t know how it happens, but either way: you’ve got to live with yourself. I’m a bit of a nut. I hope that answer is okay.

The China of My Mind: Or, Where Stories Come From

When people hear that River of Dust is set in China the first question they ask is if I’ve ever been there. The simple answer is no. The not so simple answer is yes, in a way. I have never visited mainland China. I did, however, live in Hong Kong when I was three and it was still under British control. My father was a visiting scholar and our family lived in one of the early high-rise apartment buildings overlooking Deep Water Bay. I was sent to a British preschool that terrified me. I remember very little about it, except that naughty children were sent into the corner with a dunce cap on—a tall conical hat made out of paper that later came to mind when I saw pictures of the KKK.

What I more clearly remember about Hong Kong was Ahko (forgive my phonetic spelling). A tall, elderly Chinese gentleman, he served as our butler and house “boy.” I cringe at that term, but it was the word people used back then. He must have been in his sixties. I am told that when I returned home from my half day of school, he served me sandwiches made of difficult-to-procure peanut butter and jelly.

Some days when my mother was busy elsewhere, Ahko walked me to and from school. Although my father stood six foot four inches tall and I should have been used to giants, I remember looking all the way up to Ahko as he looked all the way down to me and took my hand. My favorite method of transport, though, was when he lifted me high and perched me atop his shoulders. From that vantage point, I saw over the exotic spiked plants and down the cliff side all the way to the bay. On the way home in the afternoons, he placed me high again as we cut through crowded streets where people passed quickly by.

I have never been to China, but I remember how Hong Kong smelled and looked from that choice and trusted perspective. The character of Ahcho in my novel is based on the kind man on whose shoulders I sat. And in a similar way, the China in River of Dust is based on the early childhood memories I still carry in my mind. As it turns out, remembered impressions and sensations can be enough to conjure a person or place—if not accurately then perhaps at least in some way that is true.

Still, I look forward to visiting China someday soon.

Persistent and Inspiring Debut Novelist #3: Jenny Milchman

The peripatetic debut novelist Jenny Milchman is covering the country with her new novel, Cover of Snow. I'm looking forward to catching up with her in Richmond, Virginia on February 12, 2013 at a reading organized by wonderful Fountain Bookstore. But first, I was curious to ask her about the long path to her first book publication. VP: You worked on Cover of Snow, which came out in January, 2013, over many years and many drafts. Can you share with us the story behind the story: what helped you as a writer to get to the draft that finally sold, and what helped you as a person to keep persisting to achieve your dream of publishing a book?

JM: The moment when my debut novel came out arrived after thirteen years, fifteen-almost offers, three agents, and eight novels. Cover of Snow is my debut novel, but it wasn’t the first one I wrote. In 1998, I was working as a psychologist-in-training at a rural mental health center. Suddenly my life was like something out of a suspense novel. I was treating a cherubic blond child who’d just happened to kill the family pet; another patient took a gun out during group therapy and threatened to shoot herself.

I began my first novel, and the words just poured out of me. I was lucky enough to get responses to queries, including one single-spaced, packed sheet of paper (snail mail, 1998, remember?) from Jonathan Kellerman’s agent. Among other things he said that he didn’t like spending so much time in my “neurotic protagonist’s head.”

I was stung because, in the way of most semi-autobiographical first novels, my protagonist was an awful lot like, well, me. I hadn’t realized she was—neurotic. Ouch. (I now call this kind of hard-hitting critique ‘neurotic protagonist’ feedback).

Anyway, after I received that rejection, I sat down at my computer and looked at the novel again. And I saw why the agent thought my protagonist was nuts, and better yet, I saw what I could do. I cut 60,000 previously-thought-to-be-essential words in just two weeks.

That novel—however trimmed down—didn’t get published, but it did earn me offers of representation. And so began the next ten years of my life when I was on more or less continuous submission. At a certain point, I said to myself, “Well, published writers write a book a year, and I want to be a published writer, so I’m going to try and do that.” At the very least, it would give me more chances to write something someone might like.

I had been working for three years with the agent I now call my forever agent. We were about out of options. My seventh novel had climbed all the way to the publisher at the helm of the house that was considering it, only to be turned down at the very top.

My agent had said to me, “I am your agent. No matter how you publish, even if it’s with the smallest of presses, no real money to be had, you can count on me.” At the same time, the world had changed. Self-publishing had become a viable option. It had become in some ways, for some writers, a better option even. But it wasn’t a better option for me.

At this stage of the game, self-publishing precludes or at least sorely limits a writer’s entrance into bookstores and libraries, and for me that was a huge part of trying to publish, as opposed to simply penning stories in my garret. I had this dream of meeting readers and booksellers and librarians all over the country.

I had come to admire many authors during my long road, and one had written a novel in 2010 that particularly spoke to me. She knew about my many near misses, and although she had told me, quite understandably, that she couldn’t read unpublished manuscripts, at a certain point she agreed to take a look at my latest.

It was during the early dark of a January evening, just after my seventh novel had finally been rejected, when this author sent me an email. “Jenny,” it said. “I couldn’t wait to tell you how much I am enjoying your book. If it doesn’t let me down at the end—and I can’t imagine that it will—I will want not only to offer you a blurb or endorsement, but to put it into my own editor’s hands.” That editor turned out to like my book as much as her author did. And that is how I finally came to be published.

What enabled me as a person to hang in there for so long? I would say three things: The belief that dreams are worth going for. A strong support system around me: my husband, my parents, other writers. Being a little bit nuts. I was that neurotic protagonist, after all.

VP: Your path to the book's publication was long and circuitous, and now your path in the months after its launch are literally that way, too. Tell us about your tour and why you're choosing to share your book with readers in this particular way?

JM: Circuitous for sure! My husband, who is responsible for the route-planning, has groaned a few times about driving from North Carolina back up to Virginia even though we’re heading south, or to Colorado before we hit Mississippi. But if you long to get to a certain bookstore, you have to understand the store’s busy schedule.

For the next six months we are going to drive 18,000 miles back and forth and up and down across the country. We’re taking the kids out of school—“car-schooling” them—and visiting as many bookstores, book clubs, libraries, and schools as will have us.

For most writers, connecting with readers is key. And while I appreciate email and Facebook and Twitter for really widening the world of readers we can connect with, the real time, face-to-face dimension is very important to me as well. There is just nothing like that moment when a reader comes up to you and you get to see her face as she describes a scary moment in your book. Or a wonderful one.

Bookstores are very important to me, too, and I hope that by being a part of the day or evening out that a bookstore event can provide, more and more people will come to rely on them, not only as a place to buy their books, but as a way to deepen their connection to their community.  And I hope to meet readers and potential readers—they are the reason I struggled for so long to get published!

VP: What advice can you offer to aspiring writers who may face a wee bit of discouragement as they pursue their craft or delve into the daunting world of publishing?

JM: I think that the fact that it did finally happen for me should offer encouragement. It can take a long time—but when you finally wind up with the book that sells, you’ll probably be glad it was that one, and not a version that came before. I know that doesn’t help much now, so I would also say…

There are more ways than ever to realize your writing dreams. More ways than ever to hone your craft, and connect with readers. For me, it was important to publish traditionally, but I know many, many writers who are having great success on their own. And I have hope that in years to come, there will be ways to publish independently and still have a presence in bookstores and other bricks and mortar venues. I think it’s a wonderful time to be a writer—and I can’t wait to read your book.

Jenny Milchman is a suspense novelist from New Jersey whose short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Adirondack Mysteries II, and in an e-published volume called Lunch Reads. Jenny is the founder of Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day, and the chair of International Thriller Writers’ Debut Authors Program. Her first novel, Cover of Snow, is published by Ballantine Books.

Jenny can be reached at http://jennymilchman.com and she blogs at http://suspenseyourdisbelief.com

Fantastic Novelist Interview #2: Anita Hughes

Author Anita Hughes is on a roll. Her first novel, Monarch Beach, came out last summer and was a Target Emerging Author Pick. Her next novel, Market Street, comes out March 26, 2013, and Lake Como will be published on August 13th, 2013. And she has young children! But Anita has been a dedicated writer all her life. At age 8, she won a writing contest and was named "One of Australia's Next Best Writers.” I asked her if Monarch Beach was the first novel she ever wrote. AH: Monarch Beach is not the first novel I wrote. When I was fourteen I wrote a novel called The Great Book of Suchness. It was about a young prince who must find the meaning of life in order to save his kingdom. After visiting several Utopian societies that ultimately fail, he comes to the realization that the meaning of life is simply: "Such is life." I wrote the full manuscript, typed it up and sent it (unsolicited) to a legendary children's book editor at Harper & Row. A few weeks later I got a revision letter! Can you imagine? If I had known what a rare thing I held in my hand, I would have fainted. But I had just made the cheerleading squad and I didn't go back to it. I wonder what would have happened if I did.

VP: Your second novel, Market Street, is scheduled to come out less than after your first, in March, 2013. Can you share with us the sequence of writing these two books?

AH: When I sold Monarch Beach to St. Martin's Press, I received a two-book deal. I wrote Market Street after getting the deal. I then wrote another book—Lake Como—which comes out on August 13, 2013. I am very excited to have two books coming out in the same year and I hope my readers will enjoy them both. My books have a common San Francisco theme, and I love exploring female friendships with a lot of humor.

VP: Do you have advice for aspiring writers about how to persist and not lose heart in a difficult market? What helped you to persist and achieve the success of having three books in such rapid succession?

AH: My advice mainly is to write what you love. Even when I don't need to be, I am generally writing. Once I get immersed in the story and develop my characters, there is nowhere I'd rather be than in front of the computer screen. I wrote Monarch Beach because I finally had the time to write (I have school aged children) and I really enjoyed it. When it was finished and I started querying agents, I immediately started another book. I do find it helps to set a daily word count goal. If you write 1,000 words a day, before you know it you have a book. Writing daily also keeps me connected to my characters and the story. I think there is a lot of opportunity in publishing right now, and a lot of wonderful books out there. When I'm not writing (or driving my children around) I am generally reading, so I believe there can never be enough good books.

The Next Big Thing from Marian Szczepanski

The Next Big Thing continues with a reply from Marian Szcsepanski, author of the forthcoming novel, Playing Saint Barbara. Here are Marian's answers to the questions posed by The Next Big Thing: Copious thanks to Virginia for generously offering to host my interview post. I have always admired authors who take on stories that require significant research to be ground in a bygone era, far-flung locale, or both, so I’m looking forward to reading Virginia’s novel, River of Dust, forthcoming in May from Unbridled Books.

My debut novel Playing Saint Barbara will be published this spring by High Hill Press.

Where did the idea come from for your book?

Years ago, I read a piece in Poets & Writers that exhorted: write the story only you can write. Ridiculous, I thought, believing it hubris to imagine there was a story out there waiting for me and me alone. At the time, I volunteered at the Houston Area Women’s Center, doing a weekly shift on the domestic violence hotline. The calls ranged from heartbreaking to horrific, and all of them challenged me to empathize with women in demeaning and often dangerous situations that most couldn’t bring themselves to leave. The prospect of writing such a conflicted character intrigued me, but I was leery of appropriating hotline material, even unconsciously, in a contemporary novel. Meanwhile, “the story only I could write” idea resurfaced, and I found myself thinking about my Pennsylvania childhood and stories about my parents’ and immigrant grandparents’ lives in coal mining towns. Everything came together then. I’d go back in time to a landscape I knew well and explore the life of a woman married to an abusive miner, whose violence impacts her and her daughters in very different ways.

What category does your book fall under?

I’d call it a historically based literary novel.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

This question made me laugh, because my daughters have long enjoyed the dinner table fantasy of “casting” films based on my fiction. I’d give the lead role of Clare Sweeney to Tilda Swinton, who so fully inhabits complex women characters, especially those exerting prodigious will to keep their pain from bursting forth and annihilating everyone around them. Liam Neeson has the bulk and workman-like face—not to mention a genuine Irish accent— to play Finbar, Clare’s husband, a miner renowned for his strength. Their daughters: Emily Blunt as dutiful Norah, ever her mother’s protectress; Jennifer Lawrence as headstrong, rebellious Deirdre; and Mia Wasikowska as shy, romantic Katie.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Playing Saint Barbara chronicles the secrets, struggles, and self-redemption of a coal miner’s wife and her three daughters set against a turbulent historical backdrop of Ku Klux Klan intimidation, the Great Depression, and Pennsylvania Mine War of 1933.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

The first draft took two years to write, preceded by two years of research, including three trips to archives in Pennsylvania. When I started to write, I stopped constantly to look up details about daily life from 1929-1941—everything from car models to popular radio programs. I watched old movies, sketching costumes and jotting down slang. I challenged myself to authenticate everything from streetcar routes in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, to the actress on the May 1941 Screen Guide magazine cover. It took five more years of targeted research and countless revisions to produce the final draft.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Two novels that examine historical events through their profound impact on ordinary people come to mind. The focus of fellow Pennsylvanian Kathleen Cambor’s In Sunlight, In a Beautiful Garden is the Johnstown Flood that caused more than 2,000 deaths in 1889. Such historical figures as Andrew Carnegie are characters in the novel, but the book’s heart belongs to the imagined lives and loves of the flood’s victims. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible explores the Congo’s postcolonial struggles through the fictional experiences of a misguided Georgia missionary and his family. Kingsolver also employs a similar structure, devoting each chapter to a different point of view so that events are interpreted by distinctly different sensibilities.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I’ve always been interested in social history and women’s roles in shaping culture. When the ideas for Playing Saint Barbara started to coalesce, the clincher was realizing I knew very little about my grandmothers’ lives.  I’d heard many stories about coal patch life, but when I considered them from an adult perspective, most had an unnaturally rosy glow. I knew there was much more to tell, so I resolved to focus on the lives of Depression-era patch women, about whom little is written. I had to read between the lines while doing research, constantly asking myself how every aspect of miners’ lives might affect their wives and daughters. The more I reflected on this, the more inspired I became to bring those women’s stories to light. While the novel is in no way a family history, writing it gave me a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by my grandmothers and deep respect for their ability to raise families and forge a sense of community under often grueling circumstances.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Early in my research, I was stunned by my mother’s offhand comment: “I remember when they burned crosses on the hill near the schoolhouse.” I had no idea the Ku Klux Klan operated outside the South. Pure serendipity led me to a used bookstore a few blocks from the University of Pittsburgh, where a volume about right-wing extremists in Pennsylvania fairly toppled off the shelf into my hand. The book opened my eyes to the xenophobia sparked by post-WWI immigration and gave me a powerful issue to help propel the story’s narrative arc.

Watch for upcoming posts about The Next Big Thing from these emerging writers:

On January 20, novelist and playwright Sam Havens will post on his blog about his recent coming-of-age novel Farr Point.On January 24, Lane Devereux will post on her website about her memoir The Requirements of Love, an in-the-trenches account of coping with her own grave health issues while adopting and raising an abused child who becomes mentally ill.On January 27, Gretchen Havens' interview about Lean on You, her debut memoir, forthcoming later this year from Timberlake Press, will appear as a guest post on Sam Havens’ blog.