Shelly Lowenkopf's Good News and Bad News

In the 56th in a series of posts on 2014 books entered for The Story Prize, Shelly Lowenkopf, author of Love Will Make You Drink and Gamble, Stay Out at Night (White Whisker Books), explores the upside and downside of having a book accepted for publication.

In what may be the oldest joke in publishing, an aspiring writer learns from his or her literary agent, “There’s good news, and then there’s bad news. The good news is, you’re going to be published.”

At this point, the aspiring writer wonders what downside could impact this extraordinary event. “Ah, the bad news,” the agent says. “The bad news is, you’re going to be published.”

Of course the irony is lost on the aspiring writer, who now has visions of transition from aspiring to emerging. After some long, arduous sessions, the writer has performed chiropractic on the original concept, adjusting, twisting, and reshaping it to the point where an agent has agreed to represent it, provided the following matters are resolved. Thus the writer learns of editorial notes.

But what could go wrong now? What could turn the good news into bad news, now, of all times, when the contract has been signed, and the publisher’s check for the advance against royalties has cleared the bank?

What, indeed?

The aspiring-now-emerging author is soon to meet the editor who, in fact, is taking a risk to her own emerging career. The meeting is in the form of a memorandum, either snail mail or pdf file, by no means something as terse and business-like as a mere email. The eager author reads it, then telephones the agent.

 “Why,” the author asks, “would they take my novel on if there is so much wrong with it?”

“Ah,” the agent says. “I see you received your editor’s notes.”

“This is like—"  the author says, “—like going to a doctor to have a splinter removed, then being diagnosed with stage III cancer.”

“Could we please,” the agent, all patience, says, “dispense with the metaphor and get on with the work? Oh, and by the way, welcome to the club. When you’re finished with the editor’s notes, you’ll be a writer.”

Several myths shatter in this imaginary scenario, which is not so much imaginary as it is a compression of my own experiences as an editor, with authority to contract titles, for general trade, mass market, literary, and scholarly book publishers.

You might think, then, that my experiences would preclude the phone calls or emails to my agent when, as a writer, I’m on the receiving end of editorial notes, or that I even get editorial notes. Go ahead—think that. But you’d be wrong. To set the record straight, I would not want to publish with a house that did not give notes and suggestions. This statement is made with the memory of a call I once made to my agent where I said, in a bowdlerized version, “They want me to spell out—to freaking explain—what the reader will all ready know.”

Agents being agents, mine said to me in reply to my outburst, “Maybe if you got through in time, we could meet for dinner.”

Yet another myth for shattering, this one being that writing is a lonely, solitary business, one screenwriters and dramatists retreat to after such traumatic experiences as a producer once wanting me to write in a part for his girlfriend’s Golden Retriever.

Golden Retriever: Bit part?

“Not the brightest dog in dogdom,” I said. The producer smiled.

 “You’ll understand when you see my girlfriend.”

When I’m doing the thing I most enjoy, which is telling stories, I’m grateful for the occasional hours I get alone, with no interruptions, no deadlines, no suggestions. If I’m lucky, I might get in as much as an hour before some character doesn’t see his or her part the way I do, or some editor, often my own inner editor, takes exception to a word choice or a line or, sometimes, an entire paragraph. “You call that story? You call that dialogue?”

I’m often delighted to learn my literary agent has a full plate at work, because then I won’t have to listen to her telling me about an editor she knows who’d be perfect for the novel we’ve been discussing. When an old sales manager pal from earlier publishing days reminds me to keep my ear to the ground, I try to make light of the situation by telling him, if I do keep my ear to the ground, all I’ll hear is the D Train to Yankee Stadium. But I know what he means. He means, listen to the public.

The good news is, I hear the public; the bad news is, I hear the public too much, drowning out my own. I have, in fact, spent the past several years trying not to listen to the public for marching orders, rather to listen to it for ideas.

“Good,” your sales manager buddy, whose name is Fred, and who has on occasion, given you blurbs for your books, says. “You got to move beyond midlist.”

 He means I have to work my way closer to the front pages of the publisher’s catalogue. He means well; I know that, and I love him for it. Another writer we both know well has listened to the public and as a result, her books are frequently on The New York Times bestseller lists.

My literary agent has never welcomed me to the club or told me I was a writer now; she took me on because she assumed I already was in the club, which, for her, means I write at least two thousand words a day.

Fred’s and my friend who hits The New York Times Best Seller list once attended lectures I gave at a writers’ conference, and I once saw her, her back so messed up, that she had to sprawl across the width of her bed in order to reach her laptop, down on the floor, to get in her pages. I have a blurb from her on a previous book of mine.

There’s good news, and there’s bad news. The good news is, you’re getting published. The bad news is, you’re not alone. 

Christian Winn and the Search for Meaning

In the 55th in a series of posts on 2014 books entered for The Story Prize, Christian Winn, author of Naked Me (Dock Street Press), shares a story from his collection that exemplifies quest.

I’ve written stories for a long time—expansive narratives, and short narratives, and many in between, about who and how I am in this world, and (hopefully) about who and how we all are—but I didn’t know precisely, in actual words, just how to define this elemental need and practice for many years. What did it all mean?

Hemingway, or Twain, or some wise screenwriter in early Hollywood said if you are going to write, then your highest goal is: “A good story, well told.”

Flannery O’Connor proclaimed: "A story is a complete dramatic action—and in good stories, the characters are shown through the action and the action is controlled through the characters, and the result of this is meaning that derives from the whole presented experience."

Meaning. Meaning. Meaning?

The meaning came to me most profoundly with these words from Tim O’Brien: “Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”

The remembering makes it now… There’s meaning in that, for me.

I wrote this short-short story below, “Molly Ringwald,” which has ultimately ended up in my collection, Naked Me, about that search for meaning—in time, in lives, in pop culture icons, in my sister and all that life years ago. Thanks, Mr. O’Brien, for letting me understand further just why I wrote this short piece, and why I still love that I did. Thank you all for writing the stories you do, and thanks to the Story Prize for championing this highest endeavor of our search for meaning. Here’s to finding the stories.

Molly Ringwald

Twenty-five years later I’m watching Pretty In Pink on Christmas afternoon while my sister sleeps on the suede couch behind me, our parents gone off to church, her daughter in a side room talking to her new American Doll. It’s raining hard all over So Cal, and the season seems remotely complete—with me here alone, again, and now the television singing and whispering, disappearing the years as I sit up close eating red M&M’s understanding scene by scene that I will never get over Molly Ringwald, or those OMD cassettes, or that fat spray-paint graffiti head shouting at Duckie while he’s down and wading in his love for Molly beside TRAX, the Smiths record store. I mean, the way she bites her lip, and sneers at James Spader in his white linen sport coat. The way she’s smart and precious and a little too thick at the ankles—I love her, too, Duckie, I fucking love her. We’re all still in the middle of it, those Psych Furs and New Order songs and Harry Dean Stanton waving surrender, surrender, I gave my life for you—it’s what you wanted for breakfast, right? 

Somehow I got lost in all that Midwest urbania, lost in the dim hopes of big hair and the tiptoe prom dance where the Pogues played the purest future on a three-string mandolin and nothing was easy, but dying was impossible, and I was with you Molly, walking the looming echo of the high school midway and running hallways past the locker bays where Duckie drew blood for you, Molly, because he couldn’t imagine his future self without you, and we, all of us, couldn’t imagine anything but the joy of the bell ring and the next slow-dance.

Here, the knuckled palm trees sway across the sliding glass, and ocean clouds build towers above the canyons. My sister snores against embroidered silk pillows, and I remember how she wore imitation pearls and checkered Vans and her hair like Molly’s that one year—lopsided and coifed—and I wonder if she ever thinks how I hugged her one morning, told her she was cool, which meant that I loved her, wanted a perfect, kind life for her. I didn’t yet know this was impossible. I wanted it though, more even than Andrew McCarthy does for Molly, who he takes to that shit party where everyone is shirtless, and drinking scotch despite the fact they’re in high school, and Molly’s upset because she doesn’t drink like a rich kid. Molly frowns that round red mouth. Molly tosses insults and takes a stand. And my sister rolls over, ignoring my niece’s back-room whimper, waking only to point at the television and smile above the pile of used ribbons glinting in our dim afternoon. Years fold. And I don’t recognize how the one life became the other. Or, what happened to Molly’s mother? And did Harry Dean ever get that job? What happened to the way we once loved all this bolo-tie menace and our pony-hair shoes?

And fuck, John Hughes is dead, and he left his cities full of taffeta, left his houses’ back doors wide, where someone like me might stumble in to steal his creepers and dance like 1986, live forever on clove cigarettes and mopey antiheroes, and Molly.

But that was only Christmas. It rained all week.

Diane Schoemperlen Works with Words and Pictures

In the 54th in a series of posts on 2014 books entered for The Story Prize, Diane Schoemperlen, author of By the Book (Biblioasis Press), discusses her writing collage process.

Since the beginning of my writing life, I’ve been fascinated by the intersection of word and image. My very first book, Double Exposures, published way back in 1984, was a fictional novella illustrated with old black-and-white family photographs.

My first novel, In the Language of Love, peatured a collage artist as the main character. While researching collage techniques so I could write about them in the novel, I began making some of my own. It wasn’t a big leap to think about including collages in my next book.

That next book, published in 1998, was a collection called Forms of Devotion that went on to win the Governor-General’s Award for English Fiction that year. The stories in this book didn’t much fit any standard definition of “story” and I illustrated them with black-and-white line drawings and wood engravings from earlier centuries. The more I worked with the combination of word and image, the more I felt it added multiple dimensions of meaning and resonance to each piece.

Although I continued to happily write and publish several more “normal” books (that is, books with words only, no pictures) in the following years, I knew I wasn’t finished with the idea of illustrated fiction. In my new book, By The Book, I’ve gone even further in exploring my fascination with fragment and collage, stretching the boundaries of both the text and the illustrations. The stories themselves are drawn in various ways from old books originally published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of these are elementary school textbooks about such diverse topics as nature, geography, history, and hygiene. The title story is based on a handbook for Italian citizens emigrating to the United States in 1900. These stories are in the tradition of the objet trouvé, in that I used the sentences exactly as they appeared in the old books to produce a new kind of found narrative that is an expanded, exploded, and embroidered rearrangement of the original material. Putting the text of the stories together was like doing a jigsaw puzzle and ending up with a picture entirely different than the one on the front of the box.

The collages that accompany the stories are in full color this time, created by much the same process: putting together seemingly unlike and unconnected bits and pieces and seeing what happens. It is the way these fragments, both textual and visual, spark off each other that makes them work.

Combining the creative processes that are activated by working with words and working with images always yields surprising, satisfying, and often humorous results. I like to think it opens up those hidden folds in your brain to which you do not otherwise have easy access. I’m now making a series of small collages that can be used as writing prompts. Starting with illustrations from an art-themed desk calendar as backgrounds, I’ve been adding a selection of smaller images and lines of text from old textbooks about grammar, composition, reading, and spelling.

Perhaps these collages ignite creative thinking because they offer more questions than answers. Can you dig out a story from what is suggested by this picture?

Try it. I can guarantee that you will surprise yourself.

James Nolan and the Singular Element

In the 53rd in a series of posts on 2014 books entered for The Story Prize, James Nolan, author of You Don't Know Me (University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press), discusses the importance of his native New Orleans as a setting for his fiction.

Unlike a journalist or memoirist, a fiction writer tells the truth by artfully lying. The only aspect of these stories that is true—down to every nuance of architecture, climate, culture, and mentality—is the New Orleans setting, which is what inspires the fabricated characters and plots. Somebody once asked García Márquez about his “fabulist” fiction, and he took exception, claiming that just as his regionalist ancestor Faulkner had done with Mississippi, he was “documenting Caribbean reality.” Like García Márquez’s Colombia, New Orleans is the only singular element in this book I couldn’t make up. The rest of the invented details ferment for months or even years in my imagination: artificial toads hopping around in authentic gardens.

These stories I love to dream up are usually set off by some ordinary experience, or at least one that seems normal to me, a fifth-generation New Orleanian. A few years ago I was sitting in my French Quarter courtyard listening to classical music on National Public Radio when my landlady’s housekeeper emerged from the laundry room, set down her basket of dried clothes, cocked an ear, and told me the pianist on the radio was her nephew. His name was André Watts. Had I ever heard of him? Evidently this uniformed black lady I saw every day was a famous pianist’s aunt. Then she explained how her musician brother had been stationed in Germany after the war, where he married a local woman, and they had a son called André. She’d only met her nephew once, on a concert tour that took him to New Orleans.

At the time, after an absence of thirty years, I was struggling to reconnect with my own family roots here, especially with memories of a thorny relationship with my father. So the biracial pianist Émile Jackson was born, a character who inherited my war-vet father, my symphony-loving Creole mother, along with my own globe-trotting anomie and longing to belong. But the piano was Émile’s, and everything else in “Hard Freeze,” which I wrote during a January cold front, is made up, although any day you can meet people just like these characters in New Orleans, on the bus or at Antoine’s restaurant.

Speaking of my father, to ground myself after his funeral I went to Mexico, a country in which death is an integral part of life, much as it is in New Orleans. In those days I was living in San Francisco, a city of eternal youth without a single cemetery. On the beach in Puerto Escondido, somebody passed me a joint, and after a toke (okay, maybe two), what popped into my mind was a transistor radio blasting jazz from inside of my father’s buried coffin. I wondered who had put it there, and why. The carnivalesque plot of “Perpetual Care” jumped to life only after I moved home, during my first Jazz Fest in years. I should point out that my mother’s family tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 3 abuts on the Fair Grounds, where the festival takes place, a crypt that one day will be my eternal ringside seat at the Gospel Tent.

That was the one part I couldn’t make up, and it inspired the rest of the story.

I save the specifics of own life for a book-length memoir I’m working on, and seldom write “selfie” fiction, either directly about myself or people I’m close to. That would take all the fun out of lying. I both wrote and read a lot of grimly factual journalism following Hurricane Katrina, but of the two post-storm stories that bracket this collection, the first, a gallows-humor grotesque called “Reconcile,” came from piecing together wacky anecdotes told to me over drinks one evening about a woman I’d met for only five minutes. And the final one, titled “What Floats,” was provoked by a newspaper article about a boy in the Midwest who stayed locked inside the house with his mother’s body for ten days after she died. In that disturbing period after Katrina, I wrote the story to answer the persistent question: “What’s it like to be in New Orleans now?”

My New Orleans, much like García Márquez’s Macondo or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, is a larger-than-life mythic universe, freely reinvented in a way that remains more faithful to its reality than the half-baked clichés invoked to sell the city to mass tourism, regrettably our only industry now. Tourists on Caribbean cruises or Mississippi-coast gambling junkets may suffer similar high-gloss illusions about those places, which we local writers are always at pains to correct. That our wildly fictive lies are the truth, and the shopworn brochure images lies, is the paradoxical edge that keeps us honest and engaged with our surroundings.

You see, our stories become an ongoing love letter to someone you may not know. In the end, my New Orleans characters aren’t the postcard figurines you’d expect and, like the father-conflicted pianist Émile Jackson, might turn out to be people as real and human as you are.

Anne Valente on Fiction and the Language of Film

In the 52nd in a series of posts on 2014 books entered for The Story Prize, Anne Valente, author of By Light We Knew Our Names (Dzanc Books), recounts the inspiration she's taken from the movies.

Though favorite novels, short stories, essays, and poems all influence my fiction, film has always been a foundational source of inspiration for me. Some of my earliest memories involve movies, whether watching E.T. with my family—the first movie I ever attended in the theater the same year I was born, and one we re-watched often as I grew up—or huddling under blankets on snow days with How the West Was Won, or crowding around Cujo or Carrie with the lights off as Halloween approached. I loved the lighting of film, the color, the ways shots were composed, and the lilt of the soundtrack as much as I loved the storylines.

In college, I majored in film. Studying English and literature in high school certainly influenced my path to writing fiction as an adult, but I gravitated toward the moving image as an undergraduate. I learned the histories of American and world cinema. I watched Lumière’s 1895 short film, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, and imagined the audience believing it would pop out of the screen. It wasn’t lost on me how magical that was, just as whimsical as Méliès’s silent A Trip to the Moon and as gorgeous as Wiene’s shot composition in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and just as unexpected as Godard’s jump cuts in Breathless. I also had the great fortune of taking an excellent course on film score. I learned of leitmotifs, of diegetic and non-diegetic sound, and of the magic of having a professor play his own piano score to silent film screenings.

The complexities of the moving image—the sound, the cinematography, the mise en scène—have taught me an inordinate amount about the craft of fiction. The choice of film score is not unlike the choice of language and words, the careful decisions of diction and syntax used to maximize emotional response as music does. The placement of furniture and props in film is similar to well-chosen details of setting and environment in fiction. And the impact of image, color and light has taught me more about imagery and the beauty of language than almost any other medium.

I appreciate the silence of a movie theater too, the sensory flood of something larger than life. Every time I go to the movies now—and really, every time I sit down to write—I take with me the quiet dark of a half-empty theater in college, my film professor playing piano beside the screen as black and white images flickered above my classmates and me. I take with me the shadowed solitude of everything blocked out except image and sound, a sensation so similar to sitting in front of the computer screen alone and beginning to write. I take with me the magic and terror of hiding beneath blankets, peeking through the knitting of my grandmother’s afghans to both know and not know what was happening onscreen in the Stephen King movies we watched. And I take with me the breathlessness of quick jump cuts and moving images and rapid-fire editing, the silent explosion of a rocket catapulting to the moon’s surface, the quiet rumbling of a train approaching in the distance. These impressions are for me the language of film and of fiction, the images of cinema that generate the magic of written narrative.

Susan Sherman on the Significance of Place

In the 51st in a series of posts on 2014 books entered for The Story Prize, Susan Sherman, author of Nirvana on Ninth Street (Wings Press), likens a story's locale to a character.

In 1964, I moved into a small three story building in the back of an apartment house on Ninth Street in Manhattan. At the time, the neighborhood was a hub for artists and writers and musicians and filmmakers in what was then known as the Lower East Side (now the East Village). Although it was an ideal setting for the grouping of short stories that would become Nirvana on Ninth Street, it took more than forty years to write. I left Ninth Street in 1968, but the friends and neighbors who lived on it never left me. They were a home to which, through my writing, it was possible many years later for me to return.

The locale where a narrative takes place has always been of utmost significance to me as a writer. For me, the setting of a story speaks dialogue, conveys action, as much as any of the characters that live in it. I even included a chapter in my book titled “Ninth Street Tries to Get a Word in Edgewise” because I believe as essential as it is to make readers empathize with the characters in a story, it is equally important to make them feel part of their surroundings. I am reminded of the “Happenings” in the Sixties, the audience directly participating in the performance because it is not taking place on a proscenium stage, in front and above them, but is all around them. They are immersed in it.

van Gogh's "The Potato Eaters": No place like home

Therefore, I try to always remember the physicality of place that words can evoke. Vincent van Gogh wrote in his letters about evocative color in “The Potato Eaters” that the viewer should be able to sense the “bacon, smoke, potato steam.” Proust famously saw or more accurately smelled his past in a cup of tea. Likewise, I want my readers to wander the streets of my stories, to not be surprised if they bump by accident into one of the many characters that dwell there on their way to the neighborhood grocery store or Tompkins Square Park to play chess or buy fruit at the green market that lines the park on Avenue A on the last mild Sunday afternoon.

What do colors feel like? Is there a taste to shape? A sound to form? Our overemphasis on the strictly visual is written about at length by two of my favorite authors, Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space and the architect Juhani Pallasmaa in The Eyes of the Skin, and much of my inspiration in creating vivid imagery comes from poets like Pablo Neruda and Audre Lorde and Joy Harjo, novelists like Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison and the short stories of James Baldwin.

I also enjoy the way precise description allows one to go beyond the everyday and by doing so to enlarge and enhance it. I have just finished reading Martin Dressler for the first time. I was fascinated by the way Steven Millhauser’s description of Dressler’s shops and restaurants slowly and almost imperceptibly grows not only to encompass larger and more grandiose hotels but also to incorporate other more surreal levels of reality.

We writers are all magicians in our own way. For some of us, a piece of the past will come alive through a sleight of hand, for still others, our home is located in distant lands and epochs that we visit and inhabit entirely in our imagination. We all have our homes in different places. When I’m writing I try never to forget where my characters live. Not if I want my readers to live there too.

Marek Waldorf Paints a Picture

In the 50th in a series of posts on 2014 books entered for The Story Prize, Marek Waldorf, author of Widow's Dozen (Turtle Point Press), traces the background of his book's cover.

Jeff Clark’s striking, wonderfully ominous cover to my collection, Widow’s Dozen, has a bit of a “grapevine” story behind it.

Maybe six years ago I visited my friend Hillary Moore’s studio and bought a picture of hers called “The Gift,” the first in a trio she’d painted over old children’s book illustrations. We hung it against the brickface above our living-room mantel, as the dullness of the red brought the colors out best. It was the first work of art I’d bought, and I spent a lot of time admiring it. My brother compared it to Albert Pinkham Ryder; though I didn’t know who that was, when I looked him up, it seemed reasonable enough. I liked the painting so much I put it into the sci-fi novel I was working on:

The scene depicted that sense of eerie serenity right before a storm—although the storm seemed to be there, almost, already … it was hard to know. The lightning-streaks in the top middle-left looked like wind-bent branches of trees, dancing but upside down. Two children were offering something to a small pony with a white star on its forehead, who was stretching its neck towards—perhaps sniffing—an unseen object. An adult riding bareback watches from his perch. The human figures are shapes filled by mixed shades of color, no two the same.

The stories in Widow’s Dozen inhabit the dark conceit of that novel, although only one takes place in the same future time: the penultimate story, “Guiding Lights” (and which, if I had one do-over, I would make the last, to avoid confusion). In any case, the ekphrastic passage above went for the ride along with “Guiding Lights,” into the collection.

When my publisher, Jonathan Rabinowitz, asked me about cover images for Widow’s Dozen, Hillary’s painting was the first I thought of. He noted straight off it wouldn't line up for the spine and we agreed a detail wouldn't quite work either. We moved on to Burchfield, Ryder & other ideas & then the collection got bumped in favor of my first novel, The Short Fall … a year along, I liked what Jeff did with that cover so much I decided to keep my Widow’s Dozen input to a minimum.

“Guiding Lights” is an interstitial story in the collection, and brief … so I was shocked to see the pony of Hillary’s painting transformed into Jeff’s psychedelic, satyr-like Shetlands. And that he would choose that one passage to visualize out of all the rest. I asked Jonathan if he’d sent Jeff the image-file of “The Gift,” but he said no. The unease in Hillary’s painting is insidious but not imposing; whereas Jeff pulls it into the peephole theatrics of “Guiding Lights” and the kaleidoscopic ambit of the collection as a whole. You see, I wanted the stories in Widow’s Dozen, and the stories within the eleven stories themselves, multiplying inwards, to be like facets, sometimes touching or overlapping, but each one (no matter how insignificant) a way to peer through to the others. I’m amazed at how nicely the cover captures that sensibility, and appreciate the chance overlays of painting to writing to design to get us there.