Author Archives: Jennifer Bort Yacovissi

Book Review: Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review on March 14, 2018.

Steven Pinker wants us to stop being so pessimistic.

While it’s true that we are besieged every day by voices trumpeting the many ways things are bad and getting worse, Pinker makes a compelling case for why we need to adopt a more constructive outlook.

First, to believe that things are worse than ever is objectively wrong; second, by over-focusing on the negative, we waste energy that should be invested in solving fixable problems; third, in buying into the downward-spiral narrative, we reinforce it.

Case in point: the election of a president whose toxic brand of populism harks back to a golden age that never was. This book serves to disabuse us of mistaken nostalgia and point us all in a forward-looking direction.

Pinker is a cognitive psychologist, linguist, Harvard professor, and the author of a host of books on language, culture, and humanity. He brings us Enlightenment Now as a follow-up to his controversial 2012 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

In that work, Pinker argues that human life held little value throughout the ages, and that the dramatic deepening in our understanding of human dignity can be traced back to the Enlightenment.

The author discovered the extent to which people refuse to believe the “good news,” no matter how tall the pile of objective evidence (oh, the quirky charms of human nature). Enlightenment Now takes another run at the argument and is organized into three sections: “Enlightenment,” “Progress,” and “Reason, Science, and Humanism.”

“Progress” consumes the lion’s share of the book, with chapters devoted to topics such as health, inequality, the environment, peace, terrorism, democracy, quality of life, and existential threats.

Each chapter is an enthralling read on its own. Throughout, Pinker presents quantifiable specifics — with tables and graphs — to underpin his arguments on the substantive, measurable, global progress we’ve made in all these areas, many of which presented problems once thought to be intractable.

In the chapter on health, for instance, Pinker lists the estimated number of lives cumulatively saved by the discovery of blood types (1 billion); the chlorination of water (177 million); and the successful campaign to eradicate smallpox (131 million).

Pinker quotes Richard Carter to remind us of 1955, when Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was declared safe: “People observed moments of silence, rang bells, honked horns, blew factory whistles, fired salutes…”

Our success in making infant and childhood death a rarity in the U.S. has led us to a place where people who’ve never experienced the horror of an epidemic dismiss the value of immunization and, in fact, make vaccines the villain.

It’s this general lack of perspective — we didn’t live through it; therefore, we can’t know how bad it was — that Pinker attempts to remedy. He’s fighting against the concept that, to be taken seriously, both people and institutions (like the news media) must focus on all that’s wrong. To highlight the many ways that things continue to improve is to be dismissed as a Pollyanna.

Pinker acknowledges there are true existential threats to our wellbeing: Climate change tops the list. The crisis seems to defy solution because of its enormity and complexity, coupled with the ticking clock of a fast-approaching tipping point.

It’s a huge problem, yes, but a solvable one, according to the author, if we agree to bring our collective ingenuity to bear. That willingness may have slipped forever out of reach, though, when climate change became a partisan issue.

For those who imagine Pinker as a liberal elitist, some of his positions may seem surprising. He is a fan of intensive industrial agriculture, arguing that density is far more productive and less wasteful of land and resources than small, organic farms. In the climate-and-energy debate, he is a proponent of nuclear power and of fracking.

He holds in contempt “the environmentalist groups, with what the ecology writer Stewart Brand has called ‘their customary indifference to starvation,’” who cause significant harm, primarily to developing countries, with their vilification of genetically modified foods. Humans have been developing GMOs (both accidentally and on purpose) for thousands of years.

Yet when discussing existential threats, the author reaches a bit, and his willingness to let technology solve our problems tends to skip past the Law of Unintended Consequences. Personally, I don’t need to be convinced of the improbability of an apocalyptic robot war, but I’m interested to hear Pinker’s thoughts on the more pedestrian threat of technology companies’ increasing control over information flow, which continues to ratchet up even as we experience the damage it causes.

Enlightenment Now might generally be preaching to the converted, but its thought-provoking and wide-ranging analysis of the state of Enlightenment-era ideas and values might spur some of the converted to greater engagement in problem-solving.

I can’t help feeling, however, that Pinker continues to be flummoxed that his rational arguments don’t carry the day, ignoring or discounting the streak of irrationality embedded in human nature. He seems nonplussed, for example, that even the most coldly rational people have trouble dismissing the existence of a higher power.

It’s not surprising. No matter that humanity and its attendant self-awareness is the random and improbable outcome of a long evolutionary trail, or that each of us is simply one of 108 billion creatures to be born human to date. Each of us still harbors that innate longing to know it is we who are special.

The Plot Thickens

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This column originally appeared in Jenny’s “Write Now” book blog in the Washington Independent Review of Books on February 15, 2018.

Yesterday, a friend tagged me in a tweet to offer up #firstlines, a popular hashtag that gets passed among writers. Her tweet offered the opening line of her upcoming novel. I looked at the first line of my work in progress, winced, and immediately went to find the beginnings of two of my favorite novels. Here they are:

“When the lights went off the accompanist kissed her.” Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (HarperCollins, 2001).

“On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones.” A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra (Hogarth, 2013).

So many questions erupt from both. There’s a frisson of sex and mystery in Patchett’s opening, with the sudden darkness and the lyrical tongue-twister of “accompanist kissed.” The missing comma underscores the suddenness.

Marra’s sentence juxtaposes horror with a jarring note of beauty and innocence, and its own poetry: “woke from dreams of sea anemones.”

It’s useful for a writer continually to remind herself of what brilliant writing looks and sounds like when she’s in the middle of trying to pull off the same thing — useful and often demoralizing.

But just as a junior tennis player gets better by competing against those higher on the ladder, every writer needs to read voraciously above her skill level to understand how it’s done.

I happened to read both Bel Canto and Constellation at about the same time, while I was working on my first novel. (I came late to Patchett, though I’ve since made up for that lapse by reading all her novels and a solid chunk of her nonfiction.)

Both books made a big impression. At the time, I was in particular awe of Marra’s debut, in which he demonstrates his trifecta mastery of language, character, and plot. In each case, though, it was the author’s ability to weave a complex, multilayered plot that truly stayed with me. Neither one was showy or loud, simply stunningly executed.

By definition, literary fiction is character-driven, but Patchett has made this point herself: Plot is the crucial differentiator between merely lovely writing and writing with a purpose. A writer needs to give her beautiful language and finely wrought characters a place to go.

Writers sometimes describe themselves as either planners or “pantsters” — that is, those who write by the seat of their pants. Perhaps because in my day job I get paid to plan, my writing is a decidedly seat-of-the-pants affair. But does that mean I can’t conceive and execute a tightly woven plot that gives my complex characters a run for their money?

We’ll see.

To be fair, though I don’t outline or storyboard, I typically do work things out in my head before I try to write. If the ideas percolate long enough, by the time I sit down to put them on paper, they have coalesced into something like coherence.

Interestingly, that’s exactly how Patchett wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars. She composed it in her head over the course of a year while waiting tables at T.G.I. Friday’s.

In my head, I have worked through most of the plot points that drive the narrative of my current novel, including a critical one that’s been bugging me almost since I conceived of this particular story, and on which its credibility hinges. I kept asking myself, “Is it because…?” or “What if…?”

The answer came to me out of nowhere while I watched the bluebirds fluttering at the feeder. Maybe I could have gotten there faster if I’d storyboarded — I seriously doubt it — but then I would have missed the bluebirds.

So, what about that first sentence? I rewrote it before tweeting it out to #firstlines and immediately realized that I needed to rewrite it again. I’m sure I’ll rewrite it plenty of times before I’m done, attempting to invest it with intrigue, unanswered questions, and perhaps a little poetry of its own.

Another Busy Book Season

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Hope you’ll join me for one or all of these upcoming events:

MWA Howard County: “You Only Debut Once: What Every Author Needs to Know Ahead of Publication”, Thursday, March 15th, 7-9 p.m. at the Owen Brown Community Center, 6800 Cradle Rock Way, Columbia, MD 21045-4809. Join me at this free event as I share some of what I learned before and after the release of my novel in 2015. Learn how to make the most of the publication calendar, and be prepared to make the very most of your launch, because yu only get one chance to have a first release.

Maryland Writers’ Association 2018 Writers Conference, Friday and Saturday, March 23rd & 24th at the BWI Airport Marriott. I’ll be presenting a two-part talk called “Publishers, Publicists, and a Reading Public” just before and just after lunch. That second part better be pretty scintillating. I’ll be discussing the importance of knowing your publication goals, the pros and cons of small press publishing, and what to expect in working with a publicist.

2018 Washington Writers Conference, Friday and Saturday, May 4th & 5th at the College Park Marriott Conference Center (Friday from 6-8:30 pm and Saturday 8-5). I’m chairing this conference, which is one reason I’d love to see everyone there, but I’m also moderating a panel on debut authors across genres–including biography, memoir/journalism, novel, and short stories–and publication paths.

Book Review: A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on February 21, 2018.

Bill Glassley spent his formative years in Southern California, skipping class so that he could surf. In college, he looked for a path that would allow him to keep surfing and maybe put in a little time as an oceanographer.

Unfortunately, he had to get through undergrad studies first. So he “reluctantly chose geology.”

He was uninterested until a professor, carting students on a required field trip, pulled over and gave an impromptu, mesmerizing lecture on the formation of a particular rock outcropping. Glassley was hooked. (Thank you, professor!)

Traveling along with Glassley here on his explorations of Greenland is likewise just as mesmerizing for those of us who didn’t know we were interested in geology. He is a thoroughly accessible guide whose wonder at the landscape that surrounds him is infectious.

Ten percent of the world’s fresh water sits frozen atop Greenland, rising to a height of 10,000 feet. The land itself is of relatively low elevation, having been ground down over billions of years and multiple ice ages; however, Glassley and his Danish colleagues, Kai Sørensen and John Korstgård, were seeking to prove that mountains the size of the Alps or Himalayas had existed on the land as of about 2 billion years ago.

The ice itself presents a challenge to that kind of discovery, since only a small fringe of land is accessible; however, the ice is “receding faster than plants can take hold,” so there are opportunities for exploration. Their selected research area on the west side of the world’s largest island was a spot about 100 miles wide at the widest point — where the ice begins — and 250 miles long.

When Glassley first accompanies Sørensen and Korstgård to Greenland, the expedition is motivated by the desire to quell a controversy over interpretations of the “areas of intense deformation” studied and reported on during earlier fieldwork. Based on work done in Greenland since World War II, a community of geologists had carefully crafted a theory of the collision of two small continents.

The space in between the landmasses, which is eaten up as the continents approach and finally meet, has to go somewhere. That somewhere, eventually, is up. If that’s true, where are the mountains? Well, even in geology, 2 billion years is a pretty long time, and, as Glassley observes, “Erosion always wins.”

Unfortunately, all the work of Sørensen, Korstgård, and their predecessors had been summarily dismissed as flawed by a team that had been in the field for a single season and cherry-picked its data. Most distressingly, that rebuttal had gained traction within the geological community — apparently, false equivalence happens in more than just politics and journalism.

Though A Wilder Time describes the men’s exploration and explains their findings —their original theory is vindicated, and then some — it is the author’s joy and sense of wonder at the land he’s exploring that makes this slender notebook so compelling.

When the team finds what turns out to be “the very edge of one of the continents involved in the collision,” formed of rock that is 3.3 billion years old, the discovery is also one of the most visually stunning:

“Bands of pink, white, gray, tan, and black, some no more than a fraction of an inch wide, some several feet thick, draw the eye along stretched-out, languid, folded forms, flowing as though the bedrock had once been as soft as butter…From a scientific point of view, it is a treasure. From an aesthetic point of view, it is a masterpiece.”

Glassley is a careful observer of everything around him, and he shares that with us, from the utter silence he experiences on his first midnight walk, to the dense velvet carpet of moss that hides man-eating spaces in between the rocks he’s traversing, to the phenomenon of a stream of fresh water visibly layering on top of denser salt water below, which he is drawn to touch: “[M]y fingers penetrated the slithering boundary layer. Painlessly, I watched as flesh disassembled into a dance of swirling abstractions, my fingers becoming nothing I knew.”

Clouds of mosquitoes and ice-water bathing aside, he makes us long to be there, too.

Write Now: The Year of Writing?

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Three years ago, one of my first-ever blog posts bemoaned my willingness to be distracted from writing because I love to watch the birds at my backyard feeder on snowy days. There was no good place to sit near the window, so I would keep hopping up from my desk to see what was going on.

I fixed that problem. I installed a window seat that overlooks my bird feeder.

Is there a dedicated reader in the world who doesn’t long for, daydream about, fantasize over having a window seat? I don’t know — maybe it’s a chick thing — but I’ve always wanted one. Mine is outfitted with a deep cushion, pillows, and a blanket, and it’s my favorite spot in the house. Whenever I snap a photo of what I’m reading for a #FridayReads tweet, you can be sure the book is on my window seat, where I will be joining it shortly.

So, what books will I be hanging out with in the window seat this year?

I know plenty of people who set reading goals for themselves and participate in numerous reading challenges during the year. Sorry — way too much pressure. Rest assured that plenty of books will be read, but I will not be attempting to meet a pre-ordained number. That is just not how I and my window seat roll.

Nonetheless, I can certainly tell you some of what I plan to read this year. Last time in this same spot, we visited my toppling TBR stack, which, for safety’s sake, is not in the same room as the window seat. There is, however, a short stack of six or seven books on the table next to the seat.

Reading for review: In a reading-taste shift that I would not have predicted, I find that I am drawn as much to nonfiction as to fiction in reading for review. More than half of what I read in 2017 was nonfiction, across an eclectic range of subjects. The last book I finished in December was Island of the Blue Foxes about early Russian exploration in the Pacific. Coming up are two that are due out in February: A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice by William E. Glassley, and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker. I’m a bit less than halfway through Enlightenment, but I’ve already recommended it to a half-dozen people. Stay tuned to find out why.

Reading for a discussion panel: This May, at the Independent-sponsored Washington Writers Conference, I’m moderating a panel on debut authors, all of whom worked in different genres and went down different publishing paths. I’ll be reading their four books in the coming months, and you should feel free to follow along:

Reading for Research: Though I’m sure I’ll read a stack of fiction, since reading exceptional fiction helps to up my own game, I’m going to take a flyer and say that reading for research is where the bulk of my attention is going to be focused this year. Certainly, that’s where it needs to be focused. In the blog posting I mentioned earlier, I firmly stated that I was planning to shave a few years off the five years it took to write my first book. Tick tock, baby.

As I noted here last time, my current work in progress, though it only focuses on the years between 1913 and 1932, covers a whole lot of historical thematic ground. (One of the main characters is a journalist who’s chronicling the fight for women’s and minorities’ rights, the blatant, socially accepted re-emergence of the KKK, and a crackdown by an embattled administration that rails against agitators and paid protesters. I find that researching all this helps to take my mind off of current events.)

And though I’ve accumulated a stack of books on the various forces at work during my chosen slice of history, I plan to do much of my research in the newspaper morgue of the Washingtoniana collection, which is currently spread out in various nooks across DC while the MLK Library is under renovation — but also partly available online. Hurrah! If I play my cards right, I won’t have to move a muscle.

One thing I learned well in writing my previous book, though, is to do writing-driven, just-in-time research. Yes, understand the outlines of the historical forces and timeline, but don’t drill down until you have to. Otherwise, the research swallows the writing.

So, more than any book or online archive, in 2018, it’s my laptop that I’ll be inviting to join me in my cozy little window seat. Writing is what I need to be doing this year. Writing is the reason I installed the window seat in the first place. I still love watching the birds.

Write now.

This column originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 11 January 2018.

Book Review: Island of the Blue Foxes: Disaster and Triumph on the World’s Greatest Scientific Expedition

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At age 26, after three years as Russia’s sole ruler, Peter the Great took himself on a “Grand Embassy” through Europe. With a wink and a nod, he traveled incognito as one of the ambassadorial entourage, giving himself a chance to see other cultures from something like ground-level, which included actually working in the shipyards of Holland and England. He saw clearly that European nations had a strong marine force, whether for trade or conquest or both.

Peter was determined to drag his backward, insular country into the modern age. To help catapult the nation forward, Peter enticed skilled and learned foreigners to move to Russia. One of these was Danish naval commander Vitus Bering, whom Peter chose — almost on his deathbed — to lead the First Kamchatka Expedition.

The Island of author Stephen R. Bown’s title figures only in the final stages of the second expedition, also known as the Great Northern Expedition. His expansive book covers far more territory, though, ensuring readers understand the related history necessary to put both of these massive voyages in context.

Peter’s ambitions for Russia on the world stage were stymied by a lack of access to open water. Much of his Great Northern War was fought to secure one Baltic seaport, St. Petersburg, but the Chinese denied convenient access to the oceans to the east.

The First Kamchatka Expedition was conceived as a means to demonstrate Russia’s equality with Europe in scientific and geographical marine exploration, expand trade opportunities with China and Japan, and consolidate the czar’s hold on his vast, still-uncharted lands, possibly extending them into America.

The only problem was getting there.

To reach the open ocean on the far side of the Kamchatka Peninsula required a trek across the thousands of trackless miles of rivers, mountains, and open tundra of Siberia, carrying virtually everything necessary for a multi-year journey. (And, with the intention of building ships at land’s end, baggage included such inconvenient objects as anchors.)

Of the five years invested in executing the First Kamchatka Expedition (1725-1730), a total of 50 days was spent at sea. Unbeknownst to Bering and his crew, they sailed up and back through the strait that would later bear his name, but bad weather prevented them from ever seeing the coast of America.

Still, the mission proved successful enough to compel Bering to submit a proposal for a second; unfortunately, Empress Anna accepted the proposal and then expanded it beyond all possibility of execution.

It took from April 1733, when contingents of the thousands of people who made up the Great Northern Expedition first left St. Petersburg, until June 1741 before the St. Peter, under Bering’s command, and St. Paul, helmed by Aleksei Chirikov, finally departed Kamchatka for North America.

Of the host of problems and delays to that point, the most devastating was the loss of the supply ship; without it, the expedition’s ships could not overwinter on their voyage as had been planned, but would need to sail out into uncharted waters, explore, and sail back in a single short season.

Already starting late, a full month into prime sailing season, their luck soon turned worse. Within weeks, bad weather permanently separated the two ships. Bering began staying in his cabin, possibly clinically depressed; second-in-command Sven Waxell stepped in as de facto commander.

Our understanding of the sea-based portion of the Great Northern Expedition is due in large measure to the last-minute addition of a young German naturalist, Georg Steller — he of the Steller’s jay and Steller’s sea lion, as well as his now-extinct eagle and sea cow, all observed and described while on this voyage — a man of great natural curiosity and intellect who also thoroughly irritated his shipmates. Both his insights and his complaints are captured in his journal.

Steller was one of the few members of the crew who remained mostly free of scurvy as the voyage began to collapse under the weight of fractured command, poor decision-making, bad drinking water, contrary winds, horrific storms, and fast-approaching winter.

All of that was capped by the scurvy epidemic, during which the bodies of the badly afflicted start to come apart; old wounds reopen, mended fractures separate. Ships hit hard by scurvy often founder or sink because no one remains capable of handling the vessels.

Just this circumstance conspired in early November to trap the St. Peter inside the reef of what is now called Bering Island, where their brutal winter of survival lay before them. Bering died on the island, but a significant number of his crew survived, able to sail back out the next August, thanks primarily to Waxell and Steller.

Though fascinating, Island is oddly undramatic, despite the author’s attempts to gin up tension. Maybe it’s the natural consequence of a story that involves so much waiting for something to happen.

In describing the separate camps that sprang up over the long winter, Bown seems to foreshadow some Lord of the Flies-like conflagration over the crew’s version of high-stakes poker, but it turns out they were just playing cards.

The Great Northern Expedition may have been beset by calamity through most of its ocean-based journey, but it undeniably succeeded in laying the Russian path through the Siberian wilderness and into Alaska.

Perhaps the greatest irony was that it was Steller who finally figured out how to hunt and kill the massive sea cows that fed the crew back to health. The lone naturalist ever to sketch and describe these whale-sized manatees that bear his name, Steller’s ingenuity saved the crew but presaged the sea cow’s extinction, since the slow-moving creatures served to feed the Russian crews that followed in the expedition’s wake.

This book review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 26 December 2017.

Write Now: Withering Heights

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While I was eating breakfast this morning, I finished Island of the Blue Foxes: Disaster and Triumph on the World’s Greatest Scientific Expedition by Stephen R. Bown. In between spoonsful of Rice Chex, I picked up the next book, opened it, and started reading.

My mid-breakfast pick? Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan by Nancy MacLean, which should not be confused with The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition by Linda Gordon, which I ordered online about an hour ago.

They say the first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem. Okay: Hi, my name is Jenny and I’m a chain reader. Like a smoker who lights her next cigarette from the embers of the last, I cannot not have a book to read. I get jittery and anxious. More than once, I’ve started a new book while brushing my teeth. Sometimes I can sate the urges with an issue of the New Yorker, but it’s a temporary fix.

As I see it, my problem isn’t that I can’t stop reading; it’s that I can’t stop adding to my to-be-read pile. At this point, my TBR stack is structurally unsound and represents a danger both to myself and others. My editor has called it a national disgrace. If it were a toxic-waste dump, it’d be a Superfund site. And yet, depthless as it is, it represents but a fraction of the books I want to read.

Why, you ask, does my TBR stack resist all attempts at containment? Among the many culprits:

  • Reading for review: I never get past the top of the stack; mine is a last in, first out system. Sure, this is wonderful when I get the opportunity to read my favorite author or an exquisite debut ahead of everyone else, but the downside is that all its contemporaries are immediately washed downstream by the next flood. Yes, I was a lucky early reader of Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, but now when will I ever be able to fit in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing?
  • Reading for research: In what can only be described as horrifically shortsighted, I mostly write historical fiction. The amount of research-related reading I accumulate, compared to my ability to process it, ends up progressing like a pig through a python. Case in point: My current work-in-progress, a story from early-20th-century Washington, DC, encompasses four administrations, a world war, women’s suffrage, a race riot, the second rise of the KKK, the Depression, and a government-sponsored cavalry charge on its own veterans. I know, right?
  • Independent bookstores: I love indies, even ones that have gotten too big for their britches (I’m looking at you, P&P), and I want them to flourish. My rule is that whenever I visit one, I have to buy a book. Just doing my part for the cause.
  • Used bookstores: I love used bookstores even more than indies. Where else will you find Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature and The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary shelved together? One day I’ll read them together, too.
  • Library sales: Four for a dollar. Stop judging me.
  • Online purchases: We all know I mean Amazon. (Thanks, Jeff, for buying the Washington Post so that every time they say “Amazon,” we have to suffer through the disclaimer of your ownership. Yet you still won’t use your bazillions to resurrect the standalone Book World.)
  • The slush pile: These also-rans aren’t going to read themselves.
  • Books written by friends: Don’t ever become an author, because if you do, you’ll find you have lots of author friends. And of course you want to support them by buying their books. But those books quickly slide so far down in your TBR stack that your author friends think you’re dissing them. Soon, you have no more author friends. (Until you collect new author friends and the cycle repeats.)
  • “Best of the year” lists: My TBR stack contains many notable yet unread books. From 2014. I give up.

No matter. I could look at the books in my TBR stack as constant reminders of my failure to keep up. Instead, I think of them as acquaintances I nod to from across the way. One day, we’ll pull up a chair and get to know each other.

My wish for you is for a 2018 filled with wonderful books. Happy reading!

This column originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 7 December 2017.

Book Review: Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York

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You don’t need to read the New Yorker to instantly recognize a Roz Chast cartoon: Her lumpy, myopic Everymen and Women with perpetually bad hair always look as though they are vibrating into dust from the general angst of daily life. Her humor isn’t terribly edgy, but rather sharply observant of the quotidian, perfectly capturing the idiocy and indignities we all suffer.

In her latest book, Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York, we see a rare side of Chast as she shares her sense of joy about the place in the world she loves the most: Manhattan. The book started out as “a small booklet I made for my daughter before she left her home in Suburbia to attend college in Manhattan,” the place where Chast had spent her first years as an adult and always felt the most at home.

“Or maybe, that it’s the place where I least feel that I don’t fit in.”

Perhaps what’s most surprising about Town is how well it would actually serve as a guidebook. It offers basic, concrete information about how Manhattan is laid out, how to use the various forms of transportation, and how to puzzle through getting from where you are to where you need to be — all without a hint of condescension. (“A term you’re going to hear a lot is CROSS-STREET.”) Her primer on the various subway lines is reason enough to use this as your go-to reference.

She shares which parks and museums top her list of places to visit, and her reasons why Grand Central Terminal is her favorite building in the city. This is the book that any loving mother who’s also a world-famous cartoonist would sketch by hand for her college-age daughter heading into unfamiliar territory. I, as a hopeless rube from DC suburbia who’s spent a cumulative total of perhaps six days in Manhattan, plan to bring a few of Chast’s pages with me the next time I venture into the Big City.

As a bonus, this love letter also gives us a bit of insight into the formation of Chast’s talents as that sharp-eyed observer. She confirms what we have suspected all along, that she is a hopeless people-watcher, a voyeur:

“I like to watch and eavesdrop on people…I like to look at people, but in the sly, indirect way that people look at other people in the city.”

Her preferred mode of transportation is walking, because of all that is out there to be discovered: “There’s SO MUCH MATERIAL…If you’re feeling antsy or out of sorts, pick a street and walk across it from coast to coast. Any street will do. (Wear comfortable shoes.) The more nondescript your street is, the greater chance you have of making your own discoveries.”

As a random example of the sorts of discoveries you can make if only you open your eyes, she offers up a wild selection of standpipes. These are included as a series of photographs so we won’t think she is making them up. Of a blinged-out gold-and-red assembly that absolutely resembles the torso of an S&M-favoring stripper, she says, “This one goes by the name of ‘Trixxxi’.”

Ah, yes. Only in New York.

It’s also somewhat of a healing relief to accompany Chast on this journey in which she shows off the geography that brings her joy, especially for those who were with her through her much-lauded but harrowing memoir of 2014, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? There, she offered not only an unflinching account of her parents’ decline through advanced old age into death, but also of her isolated childhood and painfully fraught relationship with her mother.

In Town, George and Elizabeth Chast take minor and benign roles as the middle-aged, mildly bickering parents who only rarely and reluctantly take the subway trip from Brooklyn “into town” to see a play and then immediately return home, brooking no exploration.

Still, the central illustration on the front cover is Chast’s interpretation of a photo taken of her and her mother when little Rosalind was perhaps 4 or 5. (The photo itself is on the last page of the book.) The sketch shows a smiling mother and daughter holding hands in front of a subway-token booth, dressed and ready for an adventure, going into town.

This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 5 December 2017.

NaNoWriMo: Yes or No?

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Grant Faulkner, Executive Director of NaNoWriMo, in an 11/14/17 tweet: “I just stumbled on this quote and thought it was good advice for this point in NaNoWriMo. ‘One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going.’ — Goethe . . . Sometimes you have to write as if you’re Mr. Magoo.”

In a month otherwise dominated in America by Thanksgiving and the increasing notoriety/hysteria that characterizes Black Friday, NaNoWriMo has become a thing, to the point that even non-writers have heard about it. Having originated in San Francisco almost twenty years ago, National Novel Writing Month urges its participants to do one thing: write.

Yes, there are “rules”: the stated objective is for participants to write 50,000 words of a novel within a thirty-day period. For reasons unclear to folks responsible for planning, preparing, and hosting a major holiday—not to mention being on the hook for the one that follows hard upon—that period was chosen as November 1-30. Not April (taxes, I suppose), June (end of the school year), or September (start of the school year). The Scots have copied the concept as “Write Here, Right Now,” with the less-overwhelming objective of producing 28,000 words during February (29,000 in leap years?). Certainly, it’s hard to be overly ambitious in February.

Perhaps the inherent point is that there is never an optimal time to write, and we can all deliver a universe of excuses for why right now is worse than any.

Many structures have sprung up nationally in support of NaNoWriMo—a bureaucracy of sorts—and activities are organized at state and local levels to urge writers forward in achieving their word counts. Oddly, many of these are social activities, on the theory that being around similar-minded folks will serve as a focusing function rather than a distracting time sink. Writers can officially upload content to the NaNoWriMo servers so that word counts can be toted up and graphed, and official prizes are awarded to those who slog or blast across the finish line with 50K words or better.

(I’ve listened in on earnest discussions about the validity of word counts, since it’s entirely possible to cheat, as well as the concern voiced by so many over the possibility that, by uploading their work, someone will steal their words and ideas. Turns out someone has come up with a solution to that anxiety: feed your words into the app and it neatly replaces all the letters with Xs, complete with original word breaks, ready to be uploaded and counted. I wonder if someone programmed that app instead of making their word count.)

People who consider themselves “real” writers are typically dismissive of NaNoWriMo, finding it both laughable and insulting that anyone could imagine they will produce a viable work of fiction banged out over thirty days. These folks are missing the point as much as those who worry about word count cheaters.

I consider myself a “real” writer, but the amount of time I have spent avoiding or procrastinating, forgetting to write or preventing myself from writing, taken together, could legally go out and buy itself a drink by now.

I don’t participate in NaNoWriMo as such—I don’t announce my intention or join any of the groups, nor do I agonize about achieving a particular word count—but I completely appreciate the intent behind the hoopla: Write. Write. Write. Stop over-thinking it, stop pre-editing yourself, stop stopping. Sit down, shut up, and write.

Writers are often asked whether they are planners or “pants-ters”: that is, whether they plan out their story in advance or write by the seat of their pants. My problem is that I’m an inherent pants-ter who somehow believes that it must be preferable to be a planner. But I’ve learned the hard way that forcing myself to plan causes me to freeze into inaction. The best way for me to figure out where to take a story is simply to start writing. I figure out solutions to problems on the fly. Ideas flow, characters and situations emerge onto the page, sometimes fully formed, like Athena erupting from Zeus’s forehead and bellowing a battle cry. I find myself wondering, “Where did that come from?” The answer: it came from writing.

Leading up to this November, I made a pact with myself that I would write something on my novel-in-progress every day, which I have not been doing for the better part of a year. It’s my intent to use my thirty days to re-establish the habit, the discipline, of working on this project daily, because—another thing I’ve learned—that is what keeps my brain working in the background on all those characters, situations, and solutions, so that when I sit down to write, they might erupt onto the page as though I never needed to think them into existence at all.

At the end of November, I will not have a completed novel. Nor, I would argue, will anyone who delivers their official, award-eligible 50,000 words. What we will have, though, is wildly more written material than we would have had otherwise, and—at least for me—a reminder that this is how the work gets done. After all, it’s impossible to get to your second draft if you’ve never written your first.

This column originally appeared in Late Last Night Books on 20 November 2017.

Write Now: What Makes a Good Editor?

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In this space back in June, “Too Big to Edit?” pondered why books from seasoned authors often compare unfavorably to their newcomer counterparts. I argued that the heart of the difference is the investment in editing and, in that column, anticipated the release of What Editors Do as a helpful reminder to cost-cutting publishers that good editing makes good books.

Peter Ginna edited this compendium of discussions from editors representing every possible facet of books and the book-publishing process. If you’d like to know what his job entailed, you can find out in chapter 20, “Reliable Sources: Reference Editing and Publishing” by Anne Savarese.

There, you’ll learn that reference works typically start out as ideas that later get married to authors, and that’s just what happened with Editors. Ginna was recruited to spearhead this book by yet another editor, Mary Laur, and he notes, “We got almost dizzy contemplating the complexities of my editing editors writing about editing, and her editing my edits of the editors…”

The result is a revealing look behind the curtain not just into the myriad details of what it means to be an editor, but also into the publishing world as a whole.

As I look back through my highlighted and Post-It-noted copy, here are some of the primary takeaways I’m chewing on:

To the reader, great editing is visible only in its absence. This is the unfortunate paradox of editing: When it’s done well, the reader doesn’t notice it. We only know that the author gave us a great book. As contributor Matt Weiland says in “Marginalia: On Editing General Nonfiction,” “I aim to be useful to the author but invisible to the reader.”

It’s possibly only in comparison to other, less-polished books by the same author that we might come to understand why every author and every book needs solid editing.

To the author, great editing includes remembering who the author is. Last week, I went to hear Alice McDermott in conversation with longtime Washington Post columnist Bob Levey at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. She shared an anecdote about her first agent suggesting an editor she thought would be good because “he doesn’t want to be a writer. He’ll let you be you.” As Alice explained, she had exactly 100 pages of a novel at that moment, “and if he’d told me to put a murder on page 101, I would have done it.”

Several contributors here make a similar point about being sure the editor is supporting the author in achieving the author’s best book, and not attempting to make it the book the editor thinks it ought to be. This is an especially delicate dance for a fledgling author: figuring out what’s worth protecting against a seasoned acquisitions editor who knows what sells. Which leads us to the next point.

“I love it. Now let’s change everything.” It’s fascinating to read the discussions of book acquisition that many of the contributors describe here, since acquisition is a black-hole mystery to would-be authors. A number of editors describe the beginning of book acquisition as “falling in love” with a manuscript, and then getting others on the editorial staff to fall in love, too. As Ginna says, “Unless you’re passionate about a book, publishing it is a mistake.”

The editors then go on to describe, post-acquisition, the process of developmental editing, which often entails stem-to-stern reworking of the manuscript. Plots that don’t hold together, characters that wander aimlessly, and dialogue that no human would ever utter all need fixing. With that kind of heavy-lifting needed to make a book workable, I could only wonder, “What exactly were you able to fall in love with in the first place?” I’m guessing that this is another difference between debut manuscripts and contract deliveries: few editors would invest that kind of effort in a debut.

Like effective journalism, effective editing requires a long apprenticeship. In “Widening the Gates: Why Publishing Needs Diversity,” contributor Chris Jackson says, “Publishing, it turns out, is a job you can learn while doing, if people are willing to help a little.” In fact, according to What Editors Do, it’s a job you can only learn while doing, because there’s nothing else out there that teaches it.

The defining characteristic of would-be editors is a love of books, but after that, it’s a learn-by-working-with-the-master sort of thing. Unfortunately, shifting economics and business models mean the opportunities for that kind of apprenticeship are shrinking. What does the future hold for readers if we end up with successive generations of amateur editors?

The dirty little secrets of publishing for the most part remain secret. Recently, I spoke to a young woman who had been summarily laid off by one of the Big Five publishers in a major cost-cutting move. Many of the people let go had worked at the company for their entire careers.

Like the tyranny of the editorial calendar, these are not the stories you will generally find in Editors. However, there are a few chapters that take on some of the uglier truths of publishing in general. Which leads to my next point.

Aspiring authors, read this book. Also, prepare to be depressed. Far more than a description of editing as a career, Editors is a window onto the business end of publishing. Business equals bottom line, profit-and-loss sheets, sales targets, and return on investment. I’m sorry, did you think we were talking about great literature?

Yes, actually, Jeff Shotts does think we’re talking about great literature. Shotts is the executive editor at Graywolf Press, one of the best-respected and most successful independent presses in operation. In his contribution, “The Half-Open Door: Independent Publishing and Community,” he comments on how the Big Five equate quantity with quality and have sacrificed literature for sales.

Within that reality, “It cannot be exaggerated how rare and how valuable it is for an editor to have the freedom to take on books based on their literary quality and their capability for social change.” But that is generally what indie presses do.

Life is still too short to read bad books. As Jane Friedman describes in “A New Age of Discovery: The Editor’s Role in a Changing Publishing Industry,” much of that role is to “filter and amplify.” That is, in the deepening slough of published material, editors need to help readers wade through the muck to discover what is truly worth their time.

Even if you’re neither an aspiring author nor editor — perhaps just a lover of books — it’s worth your time to read this one. It explains a lot.

This column originally appeared in the “Write Now” book blog in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 2 November 2017.