Author Archives: Jennifer Bort Yacovissi

Book Review: Church of Marvels

This review first appeared in Washington Independent Review of Books on 19 May 2015.

In her richly rendered debut novel, Church of Marvels, Leslie Parry comes close to making her readers’ eyes water from the stench of the outhouses and open-air abattoirs, the crush of livestock and unwashed crowds, and the overall grit and grime of 1895 New York City. Her vivid description of daily life among the underclass and outcasts of the Lower East Side and Blackwell Island’s asylum may make you feel the need for a shower to scrub off the dirt. Oh, but then you’ll be back to soak up more of Parry’s delicious language.

The title refers to a Coney Island sideshow theater run by Friendship Willingbird Church (or Bird), a young woman who has always led an unconventional life. She started early by passing herself off as a boy so she could fight for the Union Army and avenge her brother’s death. Unconventional is definitely the byword in this tale of folks who, at best, are at the very edge of society, if not firmly latched onto its underbelly.

The prologue is delivered by Bird’s daughter Belle, the headliner of the show, loved by the crowds for her beauty, showmanship, and utter fearlessness. We immediately learn from Belle that the theater has burned down, Bird is dead, and that Belle herself has run off to the big city, leaving her twin sister Odile behind. Just in case that isn’t enough mystery to unravel, Belle also mentions she no longer has a tongue: “I’ve stared at it in my own cupped hands, stiff and bloody and fuzzed with white, gruesomely curled as if around a scream.” Finally, she explains that the upcoming story is not about her, but rather about how her actions and decisions have affected other people. She is true to her word: we don’t hear Belle’s voice again until the epilogue.

Instead, the novel follows three primary characters who are not immediately connected to each other, but whose threads become increasingly intertwined as the story unfolds. One, of course, is Odile, whose slight handicap keeps her forever in a supporting role to her star sister. Nevertheless, the two have always been inseparable until Belle runs off (not long after Bird’s death), leaving a two-sentence note on the kitchen table. When an alarming letter finally arrives three months later, Odile decides to make off after Belle, even though she has no clear idea where to look.

The second major player is Sylvan Threadgill, a man whose origin is a mystery even to himself. As a young boy, he was taken in by the family who found him living in their cellar, and years later, when they are all carried off by a citywide wave of consumption, he picks up odd jobs in between underground prize fights. One of those odd jobs is as a night soiler who slops out the street privies. When we meet Sylvan, he has just found a baby abandoned in the muck that he is shoveling.

Alphie, the third character, is the biggest mystery. Who is she? Why has she apparently been hauled off by her mother-in-law and thrown into a women’s asylum? Where is her husband in all of this? And how does she connect to the rest of the story?

There are many questions big and small to be answered throughout the book, and virtually every character has a secret to protect. Parry has woven an inventive and ingenious plot that carries the story along and builds to a fine level of suspense. A few plot points strain credulity, but in the main it hangs together very well.

My only complaint is that at times it felt as though character was being sacrificed to plot. The characters were interesting enough that I, for one, wanted to know them better. Parry does, however, paint an empathetic picture of how difficult life was for those who by nature, choice, or circumstance did not conform to convention in a rigid society.

In the best sense, this book cries out to be made into a movie; the richness of visual and aural detail is practically screen-ready: “Knitting needles tsked from unseen hands,” “a dimpled chin like a pat of butter someone had stuck their thumb in,” “eyes bulging like two boiled eggs from their sockets.”

She describes Odile’s crooked neck and spine, saying, “As a girl, she’d been made to wear a brace, a horrible thing like a metal corset, with a tin collar that trumpeted up her neck and flared beneath her chin. She looked like some kind of Elizabethan monster, clanking down the boardwalk in the ocean fog.”

Parry has fully imagined the Church of Marvels nestled in the quirky seaside carnival that was Coney Island, a world away by ferry from the wretchedness of a city summer. Church of Marvels is just the book to accompany any reader who has plunked down in a beach chair, toes in the sand, ready to be transported to another world.

Direct Submissions: Traditional Publishing, No Agent Required

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This blog post also appeared on the Indie Book Week blog on 27 May.

It’s hard to overstate the changes to the publishing landscape over the last decade. The doors to the gates that regulated who got published have effectively been blown off their hinges, and authors are now awash in possible avenues to get their work out into world. For those trying to navigate their way through all the choices, the field seems to narrow to two primary options. On one end of the spectrum is self-publishing, where the author is in total control of the entire process, which can be both a joy and a nightmare. On the other end is the traditional two-step of finding an agent in order to find a publisher, in which even the first step can be a multi-year process. There is, however, a third, middle-ground, option, called direct submission.

In traditional publishing terms, direct submissions are often referred to as over the transom, when an author submits a manuscript directly to a publisher without an agent. These manuscripts end up on the publisher’s slush pile; if they are read at all, it is typically by the most junior staff with a few moments free. But there is a growing number of publishers—usually small publishers and university presses—that work primarily or even entirely through direct submissions. These presses expect to work with authors throughout the publishing process, and that close relationship is one of the best things about working with a small press that accepts direct submissions. Authors often have significant input into the design and layout of the cover and interior of their books, something that even big-name authors rarely get. Small presses are often willing to take chances on books that are outside of the mainstream. They aren’t expecting their books to be John Grisham or Stephen King blockbusters. It’s worth remembering, though, that Tom Clancy’s debut novel The Hunt for Red October was a direct submission to the Naval Institute Press, which had never even published a novel before, and which still accepts direct submissions from authors at any time. It’s more typical for small presses to have open reading periods at set times of the year, in which authors can submit manuscripts by a certain date. Others hold contests in which the winner is published. Some publishers charge a reading fee for direct submissions, but that fee should be nominal; you are not paying them to publish your book. Literary Marketplace offers a list of direct submission small presses free to their registered users.

The downside of working with a small press that takes direct submissions is generally a lack of resources. A small publisher might help to develop a marketing plan, but the author will primarily or even solely be responsible for execution. Authors may need to find and pay for their own editing. Even at the big houses, though, it’s the new normal for authors to do a significant amount of their own marketing. As for editing, an increasingly scarce commodity, it is often the agents who do the lion’s share.

As an author, you can certainly do everything a small press would do for you, from cover design to distribution, and you could do it on your own timetable, but for a novice there’s a steep learning curve with lots of potential landmines. For me, direct submission was the right choice: it allowed me a lot of creative control and a relatively short publication timeline, while also producing a product that gets “credit” for being traditionally published, and giving me the peace of mind of knowing that I wasn’t in it alone.

Your Ancestors as Fiction

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This blog post first appeared as a guest post at Romance University on 15 May 2015.

My fascination with my ancestors’ stories was ignited when I was about twelve and my mother gave me her mother’s diary. In it, my grandmother Lillie May Beck captured a brief six months of her life from April to October in 1915 when she was eighteen and nineteen—but what a six months! Even then, I appreciated the lovely story arc of the diary. It starts out as my grandfather Ferd Voith is trying to wheedle his way into Lillie’s affections, and ends with her admitting that she is in fact in love with him. She begins the diary because she’s finally been asked to the Easter dance by one handsome, charming fellow who ends up playing a very small role in Lillie’s daily records. Instead, from the first entry to the last, there is Ferd, proving that persistence pays off. “What a great story that would make,” my twelve-year-old self thought. Forty years later, that story formed the basis of my debut novel, Up the Hill to Home.

By the time I finally started writing, I had collected an impressive amount of original source material from several generations of ancestors. Items included my great grandmother’s far more voluminous diary, and letters from my great-great grandfather, a surgeon who served during the Civil War. In the middle of the project, I unearthed an inch-thick folder in the National Archives that added eye-popping detail to the lives of these ancestors.

Along the way, I learned some valuable lessons about what it takes to fictionalize ancestral stories successfully.

Wide appeal is the name of the game. If reading good fiction over the years has taught me anything, it’s that any story can be made broadly appealing: it’s all in how you tell it. But people forget that what makes a family story interesting to them doesn’t necessarily translate well outside of the immediate family. It’s as though the author is telling an inside joke and is surprised that no one else is laughing. My beta readers helped me to understand this when they protested my inclusion of large swaths of my great grandmother Emma’s diary. They were right, of course. While possibly interesting to her descendants and an historian or two, the diary got in the way of moving the story forward. I eliminated most of it, and carefully selected the entries that remain for the specific information they supply. For the people who might be interested in the entire record, I published the whole diary on my website.

Consider whether your ancestors’ lives intersect in some way with larger historical events. You may find that your family’s story is simply a good launch point for a wider-ranging narrative, and takes you in a direction you didn’t realize you were headed. Allowing the story to unfold organically is the path to writing appealing, engaging fiction, ancestors or not. This brings us to the next point.

Yes, truth is stranger than fiction. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction often makes the better story. This is a corollary to the point above. Often, people are motivated to write about their ancestors when they think, “Wow, you can’t make this stuff up. A book would practically write itself!” But it’s crucial to remember that you still need to structure your story using all the normal elements of good fiction: a protagonist who wants something, an antagonist who is blocking the way, an inciting event, rising action, a climax. So even though you know the story, you’ll probably need to step back and consider how to translate what you know into an effective story arc. It’s here that you sometimes discover that knowing what really happened—and sticking with that—can get in the way of discovering the better story that’s hiding somewhere underneath. Again, I learned this valuable lesson as I wrote my own book. At the beginning, I imagined that if I knew the “true” version of events, I would use that version. What I found as I spent more time inhabiting the story and getting to know the characters was that I needed to make a choice between relating a family history and telling a richly layered, nuanced story that wasn’t necessarily the way things actually happened. It didn’t take long for me to come down on the side of the better story. This was especially true of the story’s ending. Once again, it was my beta readers (bless them!) who made it clear that the original ending—whether or not it was true—was unsatisfying, and in fact undercut the story that had come before. I spent more time rewriting the last four pages of the book than I did on any other part of the novel, because I needed to discover the real ending, the correct ending, rather than the one I had carried in my head all those years.

You’re putting your ancestors in the public domain. Remember that your ancestors belong to more than just you, and not everyone may be happy that you’re writing a story about the family of which they are members also. Generally, the closer your story is to the present day, the more concerned you’ll need to be about raising hackles, and you should think about whether anything you’re writing might be considered libelous. In particular, if the story you want to tell “belongs” more to other people in the family than it does to you, tread carefully. Consult with them ahead of the project and along the way, and do what you can to garner their support for your effort. After all, the rest of your family may be a great source of additional information. My uncle had done extensive, well-documented research into our ancestry long before the advent of the Internet. Having that information gave me a starting point of factual data that saved me years of work. Most crucially, he was able to capture childhood stories from the last generation I was writing about. By the time I started my book, a number of those folks were no longer with us. There were nine children in that generation who then produced a legion of offspring—me, my siblings, and all my cousins—and I put out multiple data calls in order to collect up the photos, letters, legal documents, and other artifacts that had been distributed among all those kids, especially to those whose parents had died. Finally, a number of my cousins were beta readers of my book, which allowed them to be close to the project. Plus, it was wonderful to hear their perspective on the stories we had all heard growing up.

This takes more than Ancestry.com. Depending on the historical period and geographical setting, you’ll need to do a lot of homework to get the details of time and place correct. Historical fiction is very popular now, and fans are sticklers for accuracy. My own book covered almost one hundred years, which demanded a lot of fact-checking. I found that Wikipedia was my best friend for avoiding anachronisms when I needed to know when zippers were invented or when petroleum jelly started being called Vaseline (answer: that was its original name). The Internet is truly a boon for historical writers, if you use it prudently. Many historical archives are now digitized and available online so that you don’t always have to visit them physically. Online access to these original artifacts, like those available through the National Archives, as well as to information about different libraries, databases, historical societies, and other source material is the best use of the Internet for historical research. The key is to find original source material. I recommend against relying upon other people’s online interpretation of historical events without additional reliable verification. To the extent that you can, visit archives in person that may contain source material about your ancestors and the time period or events you’re describing. I am lucky to be writing about Washington, D.C.—a document-heavy town if ever there was one—and I live nearby so it was easy for me to spend a lot of time culling through original source material. As I mentioned, I found a treasure trove of information concerning my great-great grandparents from his Civil War records and post-war government records, and from her application for a pension from his war service. The most surprising discovery from the official archives? That their daughter, my great grandmother, held a patent for a device she invented early in her career with the Post Office. No one in my family knew that story before, but we all know it now.

What story about your ancestors do you think would make a great piece of fiction?

Five Traits that Make Characters Memorable

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This blog post originally appeared as a guest post for Fresh Fiction on 12 May 2015.

When you think about the books you’ve loved over the years, usually the book’s characters are the reason why. Setting, tone, plot, and themes all contribute to making a novel stand out, but I find that characters stick with the reader most. In a good book, characters come to life for us. They are fully realized beings we feel we know almost as well as any flesh and blood creature—they’re not always people, after all—in our own lives. For me, it is almost always a book’s characters that make me truly love it and remember it.

In my own book, Up the Hill to Home, every one of the main characters is an ancestor of mine. They were real people. Often, I’ve read diaries and letters that they wrote, and have heard many stories about them. Still, it was up to me as an author to breathe life into them and make them completely three-dimensional, and, I hope, memorable.

What are the traits that make a character memorable for you? Do you want your characters perfect or flawed? Larger-than-life or Everyman? Exotic or familiar? Let’s explore the five traits that make characters memorable.

1. Characters You Love—or Love to Hate: Mysterious, scary, heroic, fascinating, aggravating, evil, charming, sexy: no matter the character you’re looking for, the best ones get a visceral reaction from their audience. It doesn’t even matter whether it’s “I loved her!” or “Oh, I hated her!” Think of Gone, Girl. Author Gillian Flynn went for and achieved the “love to hate” reaction in her readers, who couldn’t wait for friends to read the book so they could discuss their enthusiastic loathing of the characters without spoiling anything. The worst thing you can ever say about a character is not that you hated him but that you found him uninteresting.

2. Characters You Can Relate To: When a character is familiar to you, especially when she reminds you of a person you already know and love, you’re primed to find that character memorable. Some of the most memorable are the ones who remind us of ourselves. I think many women identified with Bridget Jones, the hilariously flawed heroine of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. As a kid, I loved Jo in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women primarily because she so reminded me of me, or at least the “me” I wanted to be.

3. Characters You’d Like to Know: Often a favorite character is one you’d really like to know in real life. You can picture trading stories over a glass of wine or cup of tea or just having a great conversation. As I got to know my own characters in Up the Hill to Home, I found myself wanting to spend time with Charley Beck, a funny, easy-going guy who takes life as it comes. It’s also not uncommon to fall a bit in love with that one character you find oh so appealing. Edward Rochester, the mysterious and distant hero of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, was the first character I ever remember swooning over.

4. Characters who are larger than life, perfect, or ideal: Many readers want to spend time with a character who’s bigger or better than the people they actually know; after all, as a friend said, “I spend all my time with real people. I want to spend my reading time with someone better!” Often, these are the characters we find in genre fiction like romance (Rhett Butler), spy (James Bond, Jason Bourne), and sci-fi/fantasy/dystopian lit (pick one). A “perfect” character can have flaws—typically exactly the right flaws that make him even more attractive.

5. Characters who are completely believable: This is the trait I’m most often drawn to in books that I truly love, and the one I strive to achieve when I write. I want to spend time with fully realized, three-dimensional people. Perhaps my favorite character of all time—and I know I’m not alone—is Atticus Finch, hero of Harper Lee’s timeless To Kill a Mockingbird. For me, Finch hits all five of these traits: we’re viscerally drawn to him, he’s someone we’d like to know, he’s the best version of the person we’d all like to be, he is heroic in the best sense of an everyday person who stands up and does the unpopular right thing, and yet he is still completely believable.

Who are your all-time favorite characters?

Listen in! Interviews and Reviews

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Things have been busy around here! Take a look at what’s been going on:

Review by Gary Garth McCann of Late Last Night Books, 20 April

Interview on Big Blend Radio’s Champagne Sunday with Lisa and Nancy, 3 May **LISTEN**

Review and Interview at Curled Up with a Good Book, 6 May

Highlight on Book Release Daily, 7 May

“Perfect 10” Review at Romance Reviews Today, 8 May

Stayed tuned for lots more coming up throughout May and June!

Calendar of Events

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28 April: PUBLICATION!
29 April: Launch party at Hotel Monaco DC. It was an epic night!
3 May: Podcast with Big Blend Radio, 3:10-3:30 p.m. Listen live or look for the download on my website. Includes a book giveaway for those who participate in the broadcast.
4 May: Night Owl Reviews online chat, 8:00-9:00 p.m; RSVP for a reminder 30 minutes ahead. This is a real-time event, so I invite folks to go to the site to participate. Includes a book giveaway. I have an author page on the site.
5 May: Romance Reviews Today runs the full “Perfect 10” review.
6 May: Curled Up with a Good Book runs its full review, interview, and giveaway.
12 May: Guest blog post on Fresh Fiction. Includes a book giveaway. I’m on the author page.
15 May: Guest blog post on Romance University Weekly Lecture. Includes a book giveaway.
18 May: Foreword Reviews magazine summer issue ships; available at B&N and Books-A-Million.
20 May: Interview posted on Late Last Night Books; see the book review available now.
27 June: Historical Novel Society 2015 Conference book signing event, 5-7 p.m., Hyatt Regency Denver Tech Center.

Book Launch Party Draws a Crowd

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Thanks to everyone who came to the launch party for literary historical novel Up the Hill to Home, held at the Hotel Monaco in D.C.’s Penn Quarter on 29 March, just a day after the book’s official release. Beautiful weather out in the courtyard set a perfect stage for celebrating the big milestone. The Hotel Monaco, with its stunning architecture by two of federal Washington’s most esteemed architects, Robert Mills and Thomas U. Walter, was originally the General Post Office, which plays a pivotal role in the book. The courtyard was where the horses and wagons used for mail delivery were originally stabled. Now it just makes a great spot for a party.

Congratulations to Sam Gordon, the lucky winner of the drawing for a signed hardcover edition of Up the Hill to Home. Sam–who did not need to be present to win–was eligible for the drawing because he had signed up for Jenny’s email list. Stay tuned for the start of another quarterly drawing; everyone on the mailing list is eligible to win, so sign up today!

Book Review: The Other Joseph

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This review was originally published on 23 April 2015 in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

It’s hard to imagine two more disparate plot lines than those found in Skip Horack’s two novels. In The Eden Hunter, a pygmy tribesman — and loving husband and father — is captured and sold as a slave in early 19th-century Alabama. In his latest novel, The Other Joseph, a white man in present-day Louisiana works on an offshore oil rig and leads a solitary existence.

Thus, it’s revelatory to understand how similar they are: two stories of genuinely decent men who’ve had their families taken from them through violence and whose journeys — literal journeys in both cases — take them toward some level of peace and possible redemption.

The conceit of The Other Joseph is that its foreword is written by one Joseph, Thomas Muir Joseph, a Navy SEAL who was lost at sea during the first Gulf War, picked up by unfriendly forces, and held anonymously captive for 20 years before being liberated during the Arab Spring uprisings.

Tommy’s foreword introduces a narrative left behind by his younger brother Roy — the other Joseph — when Roy dove from an oil rig off the coast of Nigeria three years before Tommy was freed. So we know before we ever meet Roy that we’re going to lose him. That knowledge does nothing to prevent our emotional involvement in his story.

Roy opens his narrative by describing the day on the Gulf drilling rig that he lost his pinkie finger in an unguarded moment. The distraction partly arises from the fact that he received an email a few days before from someone claiming to be Tommy’s daughter. The rest stems from the sight of two lovely coeds who are pointedly sunning themselves on the bow of a sport fisherman below him; he considers that he used to be someone those girls might have hung out with.

How he goes from dean’s list LSU college student to roughneck oil worker living with his dog Sam in an Airstream trailer is what we learn in the first part of the story. The short answer is that an icy patch on a river bridge claims both his parents when Roy is still a freshman, and — lost and utterly alone in the world, attempting to pick up the pieces — the still-innocent 19-year-old engages in a series of reckless trysts with a 16-year-old neighbor.

The fact of her aborted pregnancy becomes known in the small community, and her shamed parents demand that Roy be prosecuted. The indelible stamp on his driver’s license, the requirement to register his whereabouts with the authorities and inform on himself to his neighbors all ensure Roy’s isolation, even though we understand that this is not the man for whom those laws were written. The scarlet letter is to be expunged after ten clean-living years, a scant three months away when Roy’s dismembered finger drops through the platform grate into the Gulf of Mexico.

The injury buys him time to do some sleuthing into the startling contact from a would-be lone blood relation, a sixteen-year-old girl named Joni, who contacts him without her mother Nancy’s permission. After a phone call from Nancy confirming that this isn’t a scam, but also that no one is inviting him to become Uncle Roy, he decides to pack himself and Sam into the old LeBaron and head cross country to San Francisco to track down his niece.

In Roy, Horack has given us a compelling and observant storyteller. The author effectively juxtaposes Roy’s current life as a roughneck at the margins of society with his middle-class, well-educated upbringing by two teachers, allowing us to believe this gritty man can express himself with such clarity and feeling. Somewhere on his trip, he pulls into a rest stop, “brick restrooms and some picnic tables, and I couldn’t shake the feeling terrible crimes had happened there…It was as if, with no obvious place to visit evil on each other, man had to go blueprint one.”

He decides to stop in and visit the Marine who had spoken to him earnestly but cryptically at Tommy’s memorial service years before. Roy has tracked him down to a place called Battle Mountain, Nevada. (Fans of the Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten will already be familiar with the town that he described in 2001 as the “Armpit of America.”)

Roy observes, “On the slope of a faraway hill some irony-deficient crew of civic-proud dolts had spelled BM in enormous block letters fashioned from whitewashed rock. The work that must have gone into that. These are my people, I was thinking. I didn’t know what battle was ever fought atop that brown hill, but if this town held the victors I never wanted to see the place the defeated were sent to live.”

Though the story remains quiet, the possibilities for disaster lurk everywhere: in his side-trip with Marine-turned-hunting-guide Lionel, in his dealings with a Russian marriage broker, and — most dread-inducing of all — in his eventual tailing of Joni through the mean streets of San Francisco.

Every so often, we remind ourselves that we’re pre-ordained to lose Roy, even as we know we get his beloved Tommy back in the bargain, and that it will be Tommy’s voice we’re left with. Finally, the heartbreak is that we understand what Roy’s life might have been like if only he’d known that Tommy was still out there, somewhere in the world. It would have made all the difference.

Foreword Reviews spotlights UP THE HILL TO HOME

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Foreword Reviews magazine, the premiere indie book review house in the U.S., has selected Up the Hill to Home as one of eight debut novels to highlight in its summer issue, which will be available at Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million stores starting May 18th. In addition, there will be a bonus distribution of this issue at BookExpo America in May, the American Library Association annual conference in June, and the Beijing International Book Fair in August.

In part, the review says, “Jennifer Bort Yacovissi’s command of language and history make for fluid and tactile reading . . . Up the Hill to Home is an emotionally powerful, gorgeously imparted family saga.”

Kirkus Reviews UP THE HILL TO HOME

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It’s no foolin’ that April 1st was a banner day in the life of Up the Hill to Home, because Kirkus Reviews–that granddaddy of all review sites–published a wonderful online review of the book (just beware the spoiler!). Some of the highlights include:

“The author creates believable characters whose lives contain plenty of passion and tragedy . . .”

“. . . history itself is the novel’s best feature. The author has done her homework, infusing her work with convincing details of 19th- and early-20th-century city life . . . ”

“. . . this student-run publishing house has turned out a good book.”