Tag Archives: literary fiction

New Release: Frieda’s Song

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It’s clear that Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s imagination is captured by historic buildings that hold the unique and intriguing stories of the lives indelibly imprinted within them; it’s also clear that she is just the one to tell those stories. Her first novel, The Bowl with Gold Seams, focused on the role of the Bedford Springs Hotel in Pennsylvania as the holding location for a group of high-level Japanese prisoners at the end of World War II.

FRIEDA’S SONG, Ellen Prentiss Campbell, Apprentice House Press

In Campbell’s latest novel, Frieda’s Song, the building is a cottage, designed in the 1930s by and for renowned German psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichman, on the grounds of the Chestnut Lodge Sanatorium in Rockville, Maryland; here, she lived and worked for more than twenty years.

The cottage serves as the anchor point for a parallel narrative in which we follow Frieda’s story and, 70 years later, that of therapist Eliza Kline and her teenage son Nick, who are renting the cottage even as the acreage of the old sanatorium is being given over to high-end suburban housing.

The novel opens with Frieda’s first-person narration, as she is forced to abandon her successful hospital in Heidelberg in 1935 as the Nazi noose tightens, leaving for America with her best friend and fellow therapist Gertrud even as her mother and sisters refuse to leave Germany. We meet her younger, estranged husband Erich (who is destined to become even more famous a therapist than his wife), and learn that Frieda is fated to grow deaf, just as her mother and father had—an impossible handicap for a psychotherapist.

Shifting into the near-present day of 2009, Eliza drives to pick up Nick from summer camp, where he’s been kicked out for starting a fire. A single mother, Eliza is drowning in the deep end of attempting to raise a sullen, isolated teenage boy, her training as a therapist seeming to offer no help to her in her own situation — especially since she has committed the cardinal sin of lying about Nick’s paternity. She finds herself talking to Frieda’s portrait as her own form of therapy, and later discovers a trove of Frieda’s journals, the source of that first-person account. Eliza takes comfort in Frieda’s quiet influence as she attempts to steer a course for both herself and Nick.

Campbell lets us in to Nick’s head, too, which is a jumble of anger, confusion, and inarticulate longing that he tries to assuage with matches and razor blades. For the reader, experiencing the world through Nick’s eyes makes it even clearer how little Eliza is truly seeing and hearing her son.

This concept of close, active listening — of the healing value that it offers, and of the damage caused by its absence — is one of the novel’s continuous threads. Frieda is painfully aware of her encroaching deafness, when her entire practice is based on establishing trust with patients through careful listening.

For her part, Eliza is stymied by the check-the-box, quick-turnover approach to therapy mandated by modern insurance guidelines. There is no time to listen to patients deeply, practically no time to listen at all. With Nick, unfortunately, she is taking shortcuts as a parent that she does not countenance with her own patients, both forgetting how to listen and practicing the age-old parental dodge of willful blindness.

As the title tells us, Frieda’s Song is steeped in music as well — both listening and playing, and the healing properties of both. Her song, by the way, is Mendelssohn’s “Lost Happiness,” part of his Songs without Words. Frieda is able to recapture some of her lost happiness in the success she has with her Chestnut Lodge practice.

For Eliza and Nick, recapturing the equilibrium in their relationship demands hard truths and a very literal trial by fire.

Campbell delivers a compelling story filled with captivating, humane, and thoroughly human characters. It’s intriguing to realize that Campbell was herself a psychotherapist practicing in Rockville, who lived close enough to the grounds of the sanatorium to be awakened by sirens and the smell of smoke the night it burned down in 2009.

And, not only had she studied Fromm-Reichman’s Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy early in her career, she later realized that Frieda died in her Rockville cottage the same day that Campbell, her parents, and her brother moved into their new Rockville home in 1957. It’s as though Frieda were making sure that Campbell would be the one to tell her story, knowing that she would be in very capable hands.

Book Review: Transcendent Kingdom

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on October 21, 2020.

Transcendent Kingdom

Yaa Gyasi

Knopf

288 pp.

I first read Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing, when I served as a judge for the 2016 National Book Critics’ Circle John Leonard Prize. The candidates that year were uniformly exceptional, but Gyasi’s was a book apart. At the time, I wrote that it was “stunning in its scope and complexity.”

If there was a complaint to be made, it was that we never got to spend enough time with each beautifully drawn character as the book moved chapter by chapter through generations on either side of the Atlantic. Though that struck me as Gyasi’s point — how so much of these people’s humanity was lost to posterity through the barbarism of slavery and its aftermath — it remained that readers longed to spend more time with her pointedly rendered characters.

In her sophomore outing, Transcendent Kingdom, Gyasi has countered that complaint with an intimate first-person narrative that pulls us back into the Ghana-U.S. connection — and so much more — through the lens of a single family.

When the story opens, the narrator, Gifty, is nearing the end of her Ph.D. program in neuroscience at Stanford, and her mother — for the second time — has tumbled into a deep and abiding depression. Gifty and her mother have been a family of two since first Gifty’s father left them to go back to Ghana and, later, her beloved brother, Nana, died of a heroin overdose.

In her lab, Gifty works with mice, searching for the physiological switch that causes “issues with reward seeking, like in depression, where there is too much restraint in seeking pleasure, or drug addiction, where there is not enough.”

She wonders if one day her research will truly help people: “Could it get a brother to set down a needle? Could it get a mother out of bed?” The greater focus of her research, however, is to understand what keeps addicts coming back for more, no matter the risk and pain.

Gifty is an outsider in so many ways: She is a woman in a man’s hard-science world, a Black among suburban whites in Alabama — and then extra-privileged whites at Harvard and Stanford — an American daughter of immigrant parents, and a scientist with a fundamentalist Christian background.

Even in her own family, she understands that she is an outsider. Her parents and brother are from Ghana. Nana was the golden child, beloved by all, the reason his mother sought opportunity for him in America, while Gifty was the unwelcome, burdensome surprise born into the struggling family adrift in a cold new country.

Gifty grows up absorbing this otherness, the drumbeat of her own lower status in her family often drowned out in the cacophony of the subtle and unsubtle racism that bombards them all every day — at work and at school, on the street and on the soccer field, in their all-white Pentecostal parish.

Under that hateful glare, her father tries “to shrink to size, his long, proud back hunched as he walked with my mother through the Walmart, where he was accused of stealing three times in four months.” Eventually, when Gifty is 4, he escapes back to Ghana, his assurances of returning a hollow promise.

Gifty’s response is to do everything she can to be good in a way that will appeal to her deeply religious mother. She reads the Bible cover to cover, memorizing scores of chapters that she can still recite decades later. She tries to radiate with the glow of God’s light.

Nana — six years older, the soccer star, the delight of his father — gives up playing once he realizes his father’s absence is permanent. In junior high, his height and pure athleticism put him on the basketball court. A bad injury and a prescription for OxyContin put him on a path to destruction.

Gifty is only 11 when she ends up alone with her mother, whose brutally long hours of low pay as a home healthcare worker have made her absent, tired, and even more emotionally distant than is her natural inclination.

“I only wanted Nana,” her mother tells her as she descends into depression, “and now I only have you.” For her part, Gifty considers, “I understood and I forgave. I only wanted Nana, too, but I only had my mother.” She also notes, “It’s those who stay who are judged the harshest, simply by virtue of being around to be judged.” This is equally true of Gifty’s view of her mother as it is of her mother’s view of her.

We watch as Gifty draws more tightly into herself, shedding her few friendships as an act of will; moving into the world of facts, clear answers, evidence, and control; and practicing isolation, perhaps as a form of penance. Deep in scientific exploration, she does not know how she feels about the God who, with Nana’s death, abandoned her family but never seems far away.

When her favorite laboratory mouse — an inveterate lever-presser that has developed a limp from the shocks he receives as he desperately chases another hit of Ensure — finally, because of her intervention, refuses to press the lever, it is as though she is witnessing a rebirth, the light of salvation that may course through all of us.

Throughout Transcendent Kingdom, Gyasi tackles a complex web of themes, weaving together a story that inches toward a quiet redemption. Along the way, it is a joy simply to delight in the language she uses in her close observation of life, the quotidian details made fresh:

“Most of the boys I knew growing up were shorter than us girls until about fifteen or sixteen, when they rounded some invisible corner in the summertime and returned to school the next year twice our size, with voices that crackled like car radios being tuned, searching for the right, the clearest, sound.”

She has found that right, clearest sound, and it is transcendent.

Book Review: The New Inheritors

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 23 August 2018.

I remember experiencing Kent Wascom’s 2013 debut novel, The Blood of Heaven, almost as a physical onslaught. Savage and searing, it was also gorgeously written. I remember, too, being stunned that the author was only 27; he wrote like a man who has lived several lifetimes.

Blood was the first in a loosely cast series of books that traces the Woolsacks, starting with bloody-minded Angel, through most of two centuries of Southern, dark-souled American history. And while the first sprawled across years and geography, the second, Secessia, had a completely different tone, kept its lens more narrowly focused — on a New Orleans occupied by Benjamin Butler’s Union troops — and unspooled in less than a year. Still, it remained as unsettling and foreign-seeming as the first.

Here, then, is the third of Wascom’s Woolsack novels, picking up in 1890 and bringing us closer to a more recognizable era just beyond the Great War. Again, this book feels completely different than the other two and yet — now that we know his writing — is fully identifiable as belonging to this author.

The first thing to set it apart is that a Woolsack is not the main character. Instead, Wascom brings us into this story through Isaac, an orphan torn from the one woman — not his mother — who cares for him, but is later adopted by another woman and her family, who fully embrace him as their own. His idyllic childhood and early adulthood on the Mississippi Gulf Coast awaken in him a talent as an artist, and his subject is the natural world he discovers around him.

That’s the second thing that sets this book apart: that any of it might be described as “idyllic.” Stretches of the novel are infused with a sense of light, air, and hopefulness that are entirely missing from the first two.

It’s a setup, certainly, to provide a contrast between the surface beauty and the ugliness that lurks just out of sight (“They were young and white and had money, and this combination could put you a good ways out of the path of the world’s great reaping. But not in every case”), as well as a contrast between the time before, in happiness, and the time after, in misery. Still, we, like the characters, can bask in the golden light while it shines.

Gradually, we’re introduced to the Woolsacks, who spend summers on their own island just across the sound from Isaac’s family. We met Joseph and Marina as troubled children in Secessia, and here they are as adults with three troubled children of their own: Angel, the carefully closeted eldest, named for his notorious grandfather; Kemper, the girl, named for her grandfather’s adopted brother; and George, apparently named for no one, described as a “puny boy with blood-red hair,” nicknamed Red, who spends his life attempting to live up to his grandfather’s unhappy example.

When, freshly arrived home after years of southward travel, Isaac finally meets Kemper, she is stealing crabs from a trap, and he is entirely smitten. He seeks her out the next day and finds her “on the beach shooting arrows into the back of a parlor chair…She looked like the wild survivor of some near-apocalypse, careless of the value that things once had, as if somewhere not far she had a smoldering pile of banknotes for a campfire.”

Wascom is a careful student of history, and his portraits of America are riven with many of its seamier episodes. Sometimes these are used as telling asides, and other times they are woven seamlessly into the backdrop of his stories. Kemper remembers “hearing her mother say that the U.S. had dressed Cuba as a woman in torn clothes on the verge of being raped, then kindly shoved Spain out of the way and took our turn.”

Joseph Woolsack’s money, built on his father’s wealth from slaving, has steadily increased through his own involvement in the Caribbean and Central and South American fruit trade, a notorious business in which ruthless U.S. corporate involvement directly gave birth to “banana republics.”

Kemper, aware of the stained wealth, removes herself from her family but is guiltily willing to take its money to support herself and Isaac. She is also haunted by her role in driving her beloved elder brother from the family after Red’s venomous revelation to them that Angel is homosexual. Once the Great War breaks out and Isaac’s refusal to serve puts him in prison, she is completely alone.

Red, for his part, is haunted by voices in his head. After having to teach himself as a child how to smile in an attempt to cover up his otherness, he begins to hear the voices in early adulthood and learns how to cover that up, too, though he listens to their violent instruction.

This is a family not destined for happiness.

The novel moves at various times through the eyes of Isaac, Kemper, and Angel, with a touch of Marina and too little of Neda, the woman who cares for Isaac through his first four years. The pieces of Red’s story come primarily through the eyes of his reluctant enforcer, a well-read black man named Rule Chandler.

Each one is trapped, one way or the other, by expectations they can’t meet and would refuse to anyway, and by circumstances that someone else has dictated for them.

If there is a weakness to The New Inheritors, it’s an unevenness in pacing that makes it feel at times that Wascom is in a hurry to move on. I, for one, did not want him to hurry; the beauty and richness of his observation and detail when he dives deep made me long for more.

If I understand correctly, there is one more book expected in the Woolsack series, which should bring us close to or into the present day. Since the only next-generation Woolsack children belong to schizophrenic Red, it appears he is to be the patriarch ushering the family into the latter half of the 20th century.

Given that Wascom makes an art of illuminating the many ways that America’s history belies the vaunted ideals on which it was founded, it should be riveting to watch him take on the more recent moments in the American story.

Book Review: Hard Cider

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This review originally appeared in Late Last Night Books on 20 July 2018.

I’ve often written about my admiration of and appreciation for small, independent book publishers, those folks who are in the business much more because of their love of books than their pursuit of the next big blockbuster. Publishing these days has an ever-slimming profit margin amid fierce competition, and that makes things even more challenging for those who do this for love.

A small publisher that has drawn positive attention for its business model and a gratifying level of success is She Writes Press. In 2016, books from She Writes Press were awarded seventeen medals at the Independent Publisher Book Awards, the most awards to one press in that year. Under the guiding hand of publisher Brooke Warner, the press has gone from a catalog of eight titles in 2013 to an impressively long list for both spring and fall in this, their six year.

One of the titles being released this fall is Hard Cider by Barbara Stark-Nemon. Stark-Nemon is an alumna of She Writes Press, which published her award-winning debut novel, Even in Darkness. (See my review of that book for LLNB here.) Fans of the first book—a historical novel covering many decades leading up to, though, and beyond World War II—should expect a quieter, more intimate, contemporary portrait here. What remains the same, though, is the focus on a single family through the eyes of a strong female protagonist.

Abbie Rose Stone is a mature woman who, having built and raised her family through a number of trials, is now ready to take on a challenge entirely for herself, simply for the joy she feels it will bring her: starting a business producing hard cider in northern Michigan. Her husband and three grown sons have trouble understanding her desire and even more trouble being supportive of it.

Abbie tells her own story, which she starts by recounting the trauma of losing their house to arson. She weaves in the details of building her family with husband Steven through infertility and the painful journey of treatments and disappointments, including a brush with surrogacy that Abbie cannot bring herself to repeat. Instead, over time, they adopt two boys, Alex and Andrew, and then end up having one of their own—the third boy, Seth—without any intervention.

From the outside, Abbie seems to have a comfortable, successful life in her early retirement, with a house in Ann Arbor and another on the northern peninsula, with time to spend on various quiet projects now that all three kids have established lives of their own. But the cracks are there. Each conversation with Steven or the boys is an exercise in eggshell-walking, in which Abbie carefully reads tone and sometimes body language in her attempts to navigate through the rocky shoals of each relationship. She mentions eyeing, and sometimes reaching for, the scotch bottle, and though she seems to drink in moderation, there’s a hint that the impulse is something she wrestles with.

Alex in particular represents her biggest maternal struggle, and perhaps failure. A strong-willed child who tested boundaries all along the way—though we never quite learn how—Alex’s parents finally felt that sending their troubled adolescent to boarding school was the answer. As an adult, his troubles stem primarily from his desire to protect the underdog, so that his best impulses cause the greatest issues. Now, as Abbie tells it, Alex has built a good life for himself a few states away, and she pushes to strengthen her connection with him.

As she spends an increasing amount of time at her northern retreat, learning the ins and outs of the hard cider business, Abbie meets a young woman, Julia, who seems to have a particular interest in Abbie’s family. The mystery of Julia’s attention becomes the book’s central question, though the true journey is Abbie’s reaction to what she sees as an assault on her family and on the delicate balance that she still struggles to achieve and maintain within it.

Stark-Nemon’s writing pulls us along, keeping the pages turning as we make this journey with Abbie Rose. For women of a certain age who have their own stories of dreams deferred in service to family, Abbie’s story resonates. Many readers will bring their own understanding of the landmines lurking when a wife and mother works to carve out a role separate from the centrality of family.

There are some opportunities that Stark-Nemon misses. One of the traps for an author of first-person narration is the tendency to tell more than show. Abbie describes her relationship with Steven and alludes to their issues far more than we see or experience them for ourselves. Often, it feels as though characters are talking at each other rather than to each other, making their points but not necessary striving for mutual understanding. Emotional scars left by trauma—the arson, Alex’s feelings of abandonment—are only tangentially explored.

That said, Hard Cider is a warm and inviting book, which may make readers long to spend some quality time in northern Michigan, enjoying the seasons on Abbie Rose’s lakeshore retreat.

Little Town, Big Exposure: A Visit to the 9th Annual Gaithersburg Book Festival

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This column originally appeared in Late Last Night Books on May 20, 2018.

In the opening hours of the Ninth Annual Gaithersburg Book Festival, the skies were an ugly steel gray and the precipitation shifted across mist, sprinkle, drizzle, and steady rain — and still the book lovers came out in force. Sporting umbrellas and rain ponchos, they were ready to hear their favorite authors read from and discuss books at the different literary tents, browse the new and used bookstores and independent booksellers, get their books signed while chatting with those favorite authors, grab something tasty from the food vendors, and go back again for more.

Of the many book festivals that the Baltimore-Washington area now enjoys, Gaithersburg is my personal favorite. Though it often draws over twenty thousand attendees and attracts many nationally known authors, it still has a very intimate feeling. At Gaithersburg, it’s entirely possible for a book lover to chat with an author they’ve admired for years as they both stroll the grounds and take in all the activity.

Participating in the Festival

This year, I was at the festival for more than just simple enjoyment. I’m a board member of the non-profit Washington Independent Review of Books (WIRoB), which is a sponsor of the festival, so I helped to staff our booth to get the word out about our review site.

Even better, though, I had the pleasure of being on two panels. The first was with Elliot Ackerman, whose second book Dark at the Crossing was a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award, and which I had the pleasure of reviewing for WIRoB. Elliot is a journalist, a White House Fellow, and a Marine, having served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His first two novels take place in and around both of those wars, as well as in the conflict in Syria. His intimate and empathetic stories recognize the shared humanity of all concerned, including those that he once fought against. One point that Elliot made was that we are running out of Afghanis who remember life in peacetime, before the Russian invasion, so that we now have generations for whom war, rather than peace, is the natural state of being.

Shifting gears completely, I moderated a panel called “Drugs, Relationships, and Power,” with two wonderfully talented authors, Kelly J. Ford and Eryk Pruitt. Both of their novels share settings in the South, and both have had their work called “Southern Gothic”.

Kelly’s debut novel, Cottonmouths, centers on a young gay woman who has washed out of college and is forced to return to her parents and their small Arkansas town to pick up the pieces. But she is also drawn back into the orbit of her old unrequited love, Jody, who happens to be running a meth lab on her property.

For Eryk, What WE Reckon is his third novel, and involves the pitched power battle between two fully co-dependent forces, Jack and Summer. The two start out the story with different identities, which they shed like snakeskins, and a kilo of coke in a hollowed-out King James Bible. They are both losing a grip on reality at the same time that they are growing rather tired of each other.

The conversation ranged over issues of identity and the pressure to conform, the sense that even the most seemingly irredeemable characters have redeeming qualities, and the idea that the opioid scourge ravages rural areas in different ways than in urban environments.

Reconnecting with Old Friends, Making New Ones

One of the great pleasures of Gaithersburg for me is knowing that I’ll see a bunch of old and new book-loving friends. I remembered to bring my copy of Leslie Pietrzyk’s acclaimed new novel, Silver Girl, for her to sign for me while we chatted about the challenges of complex plot development. Melissa Scholes Young had already signed my copy of her much-discussed debut, Flood, but she and I were together in the Politics & Prose book tent. And it’s always a pleasure to have a chance to reconnect with Richard Peabody, who continues to be a driving force behind so much of DC’s writing culture.

I’m also a member of the Chesapeake Chapter of the Historical Novel Society, and, because so many of us were going to be there already, we decided to hold our bimonthly meeting right after members Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie finished a panel on their latest book, My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton. (And even after all that planning, I got pulled away and wasn’t able to catch up with the group!)

There were so many exceptional panels and speakers, and I know lots of folks like me were running back and forth between tents to try to catch as many as possible. Bethanne Patrick chatted with one of my all-time favorite authors, Alice McDermott, about her latest book, The Ninth Hour, which I also reviewed for WIRoB. In the Michener Pavilion, C-Span Book TV captured all the panels presented there, including Eugene Meyer (Five for Freedom) and Paula Whitacre (A Civil Life in Uncivil Times) discussing their historical renderings of forgotten figures of resistance with moderator Will Pittman.

I couldn’t drop in on Madeline Miller, since her end-of-day panel was the same time as mine. Author of the acclaimed Song of Achilles, Madeline’s latest novel, Circe, is winning rave reviews from all over, including Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s recent review in WIRoB. But I did get the opportunity to have her sign my copy of Circe and chat with her and Jud Ashman, the festival’s founder and now mayor of Gaithersburg, as the 2018 event wound down around us. (I also got to sign a copy of my novel while standing in Madeline’s line. Photographer Bruce Guthrie offered his back as a flat surface, while others snapped photos. I can’t wait to see those pictures!)

As an extra bonus, many of the huge staff of volunteers participated in an after-party at Greene Growlers, where author E.A. Aymar hosted an episode of “Noir at the Bar”, with a number of festival authors reading from their gritty works. Participants included Con Lehane (Murder in the Manuscript Room), Alma Katsu (The Hunger), Alan Orloff (contributor to The Night of the Flood), Shawn Reilly Simmons (Murder on the Rocks), Aymar (editor and contributor to The Night of the Flood), Owen Laukkanen (Gale Force) and my personal favorites and new-found, book-loving friends, Kelly Ford and Eryk Pruitt.

Save the date for the 10th annual Gaithersburg Book Festival, May 18, 2019. I’ll see you there!

Need Some Advice?

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This column originally appeared in Jenny’s “Write Now” book blog in the Washington Independent Review of Books on March 22, 2018.

It’s funny to me how many authors bemoan the solitary nature of writing: how hard it is to forsake all society, to turn our backs on friends and family; how the isolation makes us a little ragged and churlish.

For me, the isolation of writing is one of its great attractions. I’ve never been much of a joiner to begin with, and friends of mine would probably agree that churlish is a good description whether I’m writing or not.

Still, however much I enjoy solitude, there comes a time when even I need to get out of my own head and bounce my work off of other people. Though many of my writing friends are in critique groups, even considering that kind of long-term commitment makes me claustrophobic and panicky.

Instead, I joined a small writing workshop that meets six times in 12 weeks, with the opportunity to submit up to 150 pages for critique.

(This is the second time I’ve had the chance to work with DC-based author and writing coach Mary Kay Zuravleff, and, at this point, my writing and I would follow her over a cliff.)

Writers are a prickly bunch. We need a lot of advice, but we’re often not that great at accepting it. Typically, we’re far better at seeing the weakness in others’ writing than in our own. When we read anyone else’s story, we can see what works, what doesn’t work, and often why.

All that insight evaporates when we turn a critical eye toward our own pages. Even when we know it’s not really working — or perhaps especially when we know that — we hug that ugly baby even tighter.

Here, though, I find it’s energizing to use a draft that is still pink and raw from the birthing process to be reminded of everything I already know about what makes fiction work. Advance the story with every sentence! Reveal in action! Make every character want something! (Even if, as Kurt Vonnegut assures us, it’s just a glass of water.)

Knowing, of course, is not the same as executing, but seeing and hearing it again ahead of trying it again brings me that much closer to success.

One of the first conversations we had in the first session of the workshop was about favorite books of writing advice. Mary Kay pulled out her marked-up, dog-eared copy of a relatively new addition to the writing advice canon, Benjamin Percy’s Thrill Me.

At the end of a discussion about managing multiple plotlines, she handed me her copy and said, “Read the part about flaming chainsaws.” Instead, I read the entire book, and promptly went out and got my own copy.

Have you ever noticed how many books there are that give advice to writers? You can fill a decent-sized library with all the volumes that attempt to explain writing, either to those who have no clue or to those who need some reminding.

(Many of them purport to give advice on both writing and life. It’s alarming to think that admitting you could use help with writing signals that you’re struggling all around.)

I have a couple theories about why there are so many advice books. One is that every moderately successful writer is grilled to explain how they did it, as every editor and agent is beseeched to reveal the key to their book-accepting hearts. And the other is that writers secretly hope that stacking these books up next to their laptop will somehow magically relieve them of the need to do the actual writing.

Now that I have my own marked-up copy of Thrill Me, I’ve also pulled my collection of writing-advice books off the shelf and picked up a few new titles suggested by friends. I know they aren’t going to do the writing for me, but I find it helpful to choose one from the pile and read a section ahead of starting to write.

I’ve had my copy of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction for 20 years. Seeing a photo of it that I posted, she noted that mine is a fourth edition, and the ninth edition is in the works. Perhaps it’s time I upgraded, but then I’d have to re-highlight. I like it for the extended excerpts and practical commentary.

Even older is my copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a funny and down-to-earth book that is written as though you, the reader, are sitting in her semester-long seminar.

My favorite feature of How Fiction Works by James Woods is that the top of every right-facing page contains a synopsis of the discussion at hand, such as “Grounded Skepticism,” “Absence in Characterization,” and “The Myth of Solid Characters.”

Madison Smartt Bell, a local author and writing teacher, gave us Narrative Design, which is worth studying for its methodical, structured dissection of a series of short stories in terms of plot, character, tone, point of view, and so on.

My stack contains a bunch of others; I think it’s helpful to find a few that speak to you, that touch on the issues you know are your personal trouble spots. Really, it’s all good advice.

Now, to apply it.

Book Review: Don’t Wait to Be Called

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This  review originally appeared in Late Last Night Books on March 20, 2018.

At the Washington Writers Conference coming up in May, I’ll be moderating a panel with four local authors whose debut books made it to publication through very different paths. Each book is also a different genre — memoir/journalism, biography, novel, and short story collection — which means I’m reading four very different books to prepare for the panel.

The short story collection, Don’t Wait to Be Called, is by Jacob R. Weber. Publication resulted from Weber’s winning the annual fiction prize given by Washington Writers’ Publishing House, a non-profit small press that publishes authors from the Baltimore/Washington area. Weber’s roots, which are on display in his stories, hedge towards the Baltimore end of that geography.

Weber’s biography reads like someone who has lived a few different lives, as a Marine, a translator, and an English tutor to adult immigrants, as well as a waiter and a retail clerk and manager. His experiences infuse his stories in fully authentic ways, and are rendered in voices that are unique to each story.

The title of the collection comes from its final, wrenching story, “Dogs and Days Don’t Wait to Be Called,” which is also one of four stories in the collection that highlights the experiences of Eritreans fleeing their home country in hopes of something better than slow starvation. The escape is arguably as bad or worse than staying put, because of the high risk of becoming a hostage of the ruthless Rashaida, who “were like grizzly bears feeding off the salmon run of the Eritrean exodus,” as protagonist Daud notes in the story “Silver Spring.” He lost one and a half fingers to the Rashaida’s favorite method for hurrying the twenty thousand dollar ransom payments: making hostages shriek on phone calls to family members.

Weber’s ability to create fully realized protagonists in distinctly different voices and personas is one of the great joys of the collection. We have no idea who we’re going to hear from next, whether it’s a black high school kid from the projects writing about the Freddy Grey riots in the journal given to him by his earnest teacher from the suburbs, or a young widowed mother desperate just to enjoy one Sunday afternoon with her son, however pitched the battle of wills. The mediocre student in “Mr. Sympathy” decides to become a math whiz to make his dying father finally proud of him.

Chase, the protagonist in “Brokedick,” is a former active-duty Marine tortured by not having been as active as his buddies who went downrange; he earns his shot at redemption whether he feels he has or not. In contrast, the obtuse narrator of “Dawn Doesn’t Disappoint” ends up self-satisfied in a better spot than he started, having learned nothing, and without ever getting the punch in the nose or knee to the groin that he so richly deserves. Life, as we know, isn’t fair in ways that run on a sliding scale from miniscule to unendurable.

In this collection, the top end of that scale plays out most strongly in the example of the two unnamed characters that appear in both “Silver Spring” and “Dogs and Days Don’t Wait to Be Called”. Daud and Helen in the former story, and Hiwet, the pregnant young woman in the latter, have all run afoul of the same two torturers in the Rashaida desert camp. One is fittingly ugly and deformed, but the other is strikingly handsome. “Hiwet had time to wonder why he was raping girls in the Sinai, when he could have been charming them on television.” Daud names him Gallantandregal, and notes that he is the most brutal enforcer among them. Gallantandregal enjoys his job, gets paid well for it, and has an endless stream of refugees to choose from. It’s almost certain that he and his ilk are still at it today.

Unjust? You bet. Jacob Weber’s stories capture life as it is, in which there aren’t always good guys and bad guys, and even when there are, the bad guys don’t always get what’s coming to them. It doesn’t matter, though; Weber makes you want to read about them all.

***

Note: While you’re waiting for Don’t Wait to Be Called to download to your e-reader or show up in your mailbox, you’ll want to check out Weber’s short story, “Directions, Partially Step-by-Step,” which appeared in the January 8th edition of Drunk Monkeys.

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.

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: The Complete Ballet

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This book review originally appeared in The Washington Independent Review of Books on 8 October 2017.

Chances are good that you’ve never read a book quite like The Complete Ballet: A Fictional Essay in FIve Acts, a genre-bending mix of dance criticism and novel/fictional memoir that is unique in concept and execution. It is by turns engaging, illuminating, ridiculous, funny, heart-wrenching, and educational.

Each of the five acts of the subtitle is focused on a famous ballet, the themes of which author John Haskell ties into his running story. The ballets are La Sylphide, Giselle, La Bayadère, Swan Lake, and Petrushka. Not only does Haskell describe the stories the ballets relate, he discusses the history of their creation and famous productions, as well as the outsized personalities who brought them to life.

All the big names are illuminated here: Nureyev, Fonteyn, Baryshnikov, and Sergei Diaghilev, the latter of whom “brought ballet into the twentieth century with the Ballets Russes, which he founded in 1909. Pavlova danced for him and Coco Chanel designed for him and Balanchine choreographed for him.” And he was paired for many years with the legendary dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.

Where did the author’s own interest in ballet originate? Page one introduces the writing of Arnold Haskell, the renowned ballet critic and force behind the Royal Ballet School. Coincidence? If there’s any relationship, it remains unacknowledged, though it would be interesting to know whether something about the shared last name prompted the idea for this intriguing project.

The unnamed first-person narrator, on the other hand, explains almost immediately that his interest in ballet began when his young daughter fell in love with The Nutcracker, and the two began reading ballet stories together.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that we’re not hearing directly from the author. Repeated references to Arthur Haskell’s writing convey the sense that John Haskell and his narrator are alter-egos:

“Unlike Haskell, I’m not interested in writing a guide to dance. I’m trying to find for myself a version of life that expresses itself like dancing, like the moving body thinking itself into existence.”

In its barest outlines, Ballet’s “story,” set in the L.A. of the 1980s, relates, in bits and pieces, how our hero plunges deeply, desperately into debt to some truly dangerous characters, and where he goes from there. At the time, his life is shambles anyway, though he still seems hopeful enough to be seeking that version of himself and his life that might think or move or will itself into existence.

A case in point is the guy he thinks of as his best friend: Cosmo, a good-time schmoozer who owns a strip club. Though Cosmo is not a great role model, our hero keeps trying to act like him, hoping that it will stick and he’ll become that guy, but no luck. “Although his self-sufficient relaxation was worthy of emulation, when I tried to sit like he sat…I didn’t feel what sitting like him felt like.”

At the same time, the object of his hazy affection is one of the club’s dancers, Rachel, who also happens to be Cosmo’s girlfriend. It’s a classic ballet plot.

The narrator uses the stories of the ballets to echo his own, and to weave in details of his life, though it’s the story from an opera, Rigoletto (inspired by a Victor Hugo play, just as Giselle was inspired by a Hugo poem), of a father’s failed efforts to protect his beloved daughter, where he draws the closest parallel to his own life:

“And I don’t know if I ever had a curse laid on me but I remember watching my daughter, on her blue scooter, scooting along on the sidewalk in front of me, and she was a cautious person but don’t take your eyes off her for an instant, that’s what I told my wife and she told me but all it took was that one time she didn’t stop at the corner, and it was like a curse.”

The entire narrative has that breathless, stream-of-consciousness quality to it, helped along by the fact that, though there are section breaks, there are no paragraph breaks. In relating his story, our hero approaches and then backs away from various subjects, then returns to them later from another oblique angle. You can almost see the corps de ballet advancing, retreating, advancing, like waves on the shore.

In virtually every ballet, someone dies tragically. Often it’s the heroine, and very often she dies through the obtuse blundering or fickle-heartedness of her beloved. Sometimes both lovers die, but sometimes there’s a happiness to it, a transformation that allows them finally to be together on some other plane. It may not be as satisfying to the audience as a corporeal happy ending, but finding a measure of fulfillment at the ragged end of tragedy is hardly the worst outcome.

When, in The Complete Ballet, our hero finally achieves his own transformation, paradoxically willing himself into existence by disappearing into a different character, it’s more satisfaction than he or we might reasonably have hoped for.