A couple weeks ago, I read “12 Star-Powered College Roommates” on Mental Floss, and among the roommate pairings were Frank O’Hara and Edward Gorey.
Gorey was described as a “creepy illustrator” and not knowing who Gorey was, I Googled him because such a description piques the interest, no? Lo and behold, Gorey’s illustrations are indeed creepy, but in a fun way, like Chistina Ricci as Wednesday Addams.
I’m a homicidal maniac, they look just like everyone else.
I checked out The Unstrung Harp at the library and as it turns out, The Unstrung Harp is about the writing process! How serendipitous is that?
I think every writer should read about the hilarious trials and tribulations of Mr. Clavius Frederick Earbrass as he embarks on his latest novel-writing journey. I read it in all of 20 minutes while sitting in the parking lot at my niece’s high school waiting for her cheerleading practice to end, and I laughed so much I bet it would embarrass my niece if anyone saw me and knew we were related.
Mr. Earbrass’ tale sums up the tale of every writer I know (which is a little unnerving, seeing the book came out in 1953) and his visit to the second hand bookstore, the antiques store, and his opening and closing lines for his book are moments to savor in this little story told through pictures. Lovely. Just lovely (In that good creepy/lovely kind of way).
So, for those of you still looking for a good book to buy for your loved ones, here are eleven books by Literary Mama editors and two more that I give the Riley stamp of approval to (it’s kind of a big deal on certain small islands):
1. Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood & Academic Life
Edited by Elrena Evans and Caroline Grant
A literary anthology of deeply-felt personal narratives by women both in and out of the academy, writing about their experiences attempting to reconcile bodies with brains. These essays voice stories of academic women choosing to have, not have, or delay children, and make recommendations on how to make the academy a more family-friendly workplace. Candid, provocative, and sometimes with a wry sense of humor, these essays speak to and offer support for any women attempting to combine work and family.
2. Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined
Edited by Amy Hudock and Andrea J. Buchanan
This unique collection features the best of Literary Mama. It celebrates the voices of the maternally inclined, paves the way for other writer mamas, and honors the difficult and rewarding work women do as they move into motherhood.
3. Peeking Under My Skirt
by Stephanie Hunt
From intimate peeks at marriage to ruminations on candlelight, to an expose of the mayhem surrounding the annual extended family beach trip, Peeking is both lyrical and light-hearted.
4. A Ghost at Heart’s Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption
Edited by Susan Ito
Fifty short stories and poems reveal the sometimes heartbreaking, often affirming tales of adoption, written by birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees.
6. Losing Kei
by Suzanne Kamata
Jill Parker is an American painter living in Japan who must choose between freedom and abandoning her child. Told with tenderness, humor, and an insider’s knowledge of Japanese family life; an exceptional expatriate voice.
7. Love You To Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs
Edited by Suzanne Kamata
The first collection of literary writing on raising a child with special needs, Love You to Pieces features families coping with autism, deafness, muscular dystrophy, Down syndrome and more. Here, poets, memoirists, and fiction writers paint beautiful, wrenchingly honest portraits of caring for their children, laying bare the moments of rage, disappointment, and guilt that can color their relationships. Parent-child communication can be a challenge at the best of times, but in this collection we witness the struggles and triumphs of those who speak their own language—or don’t speak at all—and those who love them deeply.
8. Generation
by Sharon Kraus
Generation maps the survival of a traumatic childhood. Kraus masters the toxic fall-out of abusive experiences by rendering them fiercely meaningful, almost as a dance or a biblical drama.
9. Strange Land
by Sharon Kraus
Chronicling the life of a woman embarking on marriage and contemplating motherhood, these poems wrestle with the narrator’s violent childhood and work to reconcile her past with the course of her future.
10. Real Life and Liars
by Kristina Riggle
As a wilted flower child, Mira Zielinski has never been one to follow orders. Not from her husband, not from her boss - not even from her oncologist. Mira has her own idea about handling her newly diagnosed breast cancer, and it does not involve hopping up on the operating table. Her grown children will no doubt object — when she gets around to telling them.
11. The Maternal Is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change
Edited by Shari MacDonald Strong
Exploring the vital connection between motherhood and social change, The Maternal Is Political features forty-four powerful, hard-hitting literary essays by women who are striving to make the world a better place for children and families—both their own and other women’s—in this country and globally.
13. A Thousand Dollars for a Kiss
by Cindy Bokma
Dark chick lit comedy about what happens when a celeb-obsessed gal ignores everyone in her life to pal around with her favorite music star.
1. Come up with exciting things to keep the kids busy while they’re out of school, like hang gliding off the roof with a couple umbrellas and a baseball bat. Hey, MacGuyver could do it.
2. Send out last minute cards. E-card or otherwise.
3. Buy last minute presents. And keep them hidden from prying eyes.
4. Partake in a White Elephant gift exchange where you wind up with the clown shoes and bow tie that squirts water. Score!
Whoa, whoa, whoa… wait… what’s the True North contest?
Trust me, you want to enter this (though part of me would prefer it if you didn’t because it would increase my chances of winning).
True North Snacks, nut snacks from Frito-Lay, is sponsoring a contest for everyone to share their True North Story. In 300 words or less. This story should say what keeps you going, what drives you, what you want out of life, that old chest nut (pun intended).
The winning story writer receives twenty-five grand (just imagine how many postcards I could buy with that) and the story will be turned into a 60-minute commercial directed by Helen Hunt and ideally aired during the Oscars 2009 (which will give you TOTAL bragging rights at that Oscar party you usually don’t like attending because all you wind up doing is making fun of the outfits and speculating over movies you haven’t seen).
So what’s My True North Story?
My writing. That really is what I want out of life, to continue to be a writer who pursues her passion with passion, who writes what she loves, who writes words that can change people or move people or, in select instances, cause them to jump up and scream aloud, “Yes, Elvis is the Man!” (or “I’m all shook up”) I am having trouble formulating this story into a compelling string of 300 words, though.
Can you define irony?
Anyhoo, go ahead and check out the site. Seems like a fun thing to enter, and gives you a chance to really ponder the question “What do I want out of life?” and if you ask me, there aren’t enough of us asking ourselves that question these days.
Meet Daniel X, a 15 year old alien hunter ridding the earth of incorrigible aliens. The Dangerous Days of Daniel X is book one of a series, and this particular, um, episode gives us a glimpse of Daniel’s life and family history as well as his encounter with Seth Ergent, number six on The List of Alien Outlaws.
According to the Young Adult Library Services Association, boys more often than girls don’t like to read because they find it “boring,” they “like other activities better” and they “can’t get into the stories.” I checked in with Beth Patin, head librarian of The Holy Cross School in New Orleans, an all boys school grades 5-12, who said, “Boys do read. They just don’t associate themselves with the type of books that most English teachers suggest. Teachers often assign classic novels that are perceived as uninteresting. It would liven things up if a teacher would assign a current story, that maybe has an Ipod in it.”
She encourages her students to read by “Finding out what they are interested in and then making a connection with a book in that subject area. Boys love technology: audio-books, the Amazon Kindle, and electronic books are great formats for guys.”
So will Daniel X make the cut?
I asked Patin to help me out in a completely unscientific survey and asked all the students who stopped by her library during lunchtime whether or not they would read this book based on the description above. Out of ten students, seven said yes, one asked for more details, one said he’d read it already (nerd alert) and one, interestingly, repsonded “I don’t read.”
James Patterson, the father of a ten year old boy himself, aims to give boys something they’ll want to read. Seizing on the facts that boys like action and are more inclined to read comics and graphic novels over other forms of fiction, Patterson included in The Dangerous Days of Daniel X all the action, dialogue, drama, aliens, and superpowers one might expect to find in a comic book or graphic novel, replete with jokes and gross-out material (think scum, ooze, earwax, and the word “spaghetti-like”). Surprisingly, no skateboarding, which I had fully expected.
The Dangerous Days of Daniel X is quick reading and does feel like I’m reading the thoughts of a boy. Some of the dialogue gets a little silly for me, but then again, I’ve overheard boys’ conversations and they sometimes sound silly too (and yes, I’m sure they think I sound ridiculous). As a mother, I give this the mom-stamp of approval for boys. It’s clean and it follows all the basic elements of novel writing, so it’s a good starter book to interest boys in reading before they move on to heavier stuff. All in all, I’ll pass this copy on to my nephew and I think he’ll enjoy it.
Beth Staples is the managing editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review and Marginalia and was kind of enough to do some Q&A with me about the submissions process for her publications. You can read excerpts from Hayden’s Ferry Review here, the publication’s blog is here, and an LA Times review of Hayden’s Ferry Review can be found here. Enjoy!
1. Approx how many submissions do you receive in a month and what is the process for reading them?
Oh boy. Math on the very first question. I’m not sure how many per month exactly, and that probably varies. (Some journals don’t read in the summer, and even though we do, it seems like people submit less during the summer months.) For each issue of HFR (every six months), we receive about 1300 prose submissions (that’s fiction and nonfiction, though about 90% of that is fiction), and 750 poetry submissions (each submission has usually 3-6 poems). We also accept unsolicited art and translation submissions, though the editors for those areas spend a lot of time researching and courting the work for the issue.
Our editors are MFA students in their third year of the program here at ASU. The associate editors are a combination of graduate students in their first two years, and talented ASU staff and community members. The associate editors are the first line of defense, reading through the slush. They decide whether to reject the work or pass it on to the editors. There are usually two editors per genre, so from the passed-on work, they must come to a consensus about what they will accept. I basically oversee the process, hire and manage the staff, and help out with the reading.
2. Do you try to divide each issue up equally among the different forms of writing, or do you find that your issues tend more towards poetry or fiction or…?
We allot a certain number of pages to each set of editors based on a 180-page issue. But sometimes we find that we’ll have an especially wonderful set of stories, or more poetry, or more black and white photography, etc. and the editors can choose to share some of their pages. The issue is sometimes longer or shorter than 180 pages, based on how much good work we receive. Basically, we wouldn’t publish work we didn’t like just to pad the issue, and we wouldn’t send away work that we wanted to publish. The page allotments are fluid, and the editors work together to decide what goes in.
One thing I’ll mention is that we don’t get many nonfiction submissions. For our “Works of Witness” issue (#39), that theme really lent itself to nonfiction, and we published 4 or 5 essays. In our last issue (#42) the editors didn’t choose any nonfiction because they simply didn’t feel strongly about anything we got. We’d definitely like to see more essay submissions.
3. How much time do you spend on your own writing?
Not enough, is the short answer. I’ve only been editing HFR full time since January. Before that, I was an MFA student at ASU, finishing the first draft of my novel for my thesis. The transition from graduate school to the working world wasn’t the easiest one. My alarm hadn’t been set that early in a while. I was tired a lot. I bought a house, so I was also broke. And the absence of that kind of womb-like community of graduate school left me a little scared, I think. I realized it didn’t matter if I wrote or not, not to anyone but me. I’m only just getting used all of that, getting back into writing regularly again. And by regularly I mean a few stolen hours on maybe two weeknights, and a nice little chunk on a Saturday. I also have to vacuum sometimes, and watch So You Think You Can Dance, and eat, pet my cat, go swimming. It feels like juggling sometimes, trying to find time for all of those things. It’s funny, as a writer you never feel like you have “free” time; whenever I sit down to relax I always think, “You should be using this time to write, dummy.”
4. How much reading do you do outside of the reading you do for the journal?
I’ve been making this more of a priority lately. I find it’s really hard to do both – read for HFR and read for “pleasure” (Not that reading the slush isn’t pleasant; I absolutely enjoy it). It’s weird, the more I was reading for HFR, the more difficult I found it was to read already published stuff. There’s a certain editorial mindset involved with reading submissions, a kind of hopefulness or cheerleading as you read a story or poem, and usually the feeling kind of crashes. That is, you don’t love everything you read no matter how much you want to. It’s hard to relax that tendency. And maybe you shouldn’t, I don’t know. But when a book or story is already published, it doesn’t require the simple yes/no answer that editing ultimately requires. Or, necessarily, the cheerleading. In some ways, editing might be hostile to the act of reading for pleasure. But then again, I’m not sure a writer can read strictly for pleasure. I’m always trying to take apart what I’m reading, to learn from it. Did I answer the question?
5. What other jobs have you held that have enabled you to understand writing/publishing process better?
Well, let’s see. I worked as an editorial assistant my first job after college. Except I was working for a medical publisher. I worked on textbooks about otolaryngology and urology. I actually helped put together a chapter for surgeons about what to do with a penis caught in a zipper. Then I worked for a “publishing services provider” called Xlibris. Basically, we helped people self-publish. A lot of those books were really bad, but I still liked working with the authors. I kept thinking, “all these people can write a book. I can write a book.” So I applied to grad school. In grad school, I worked as a teaching assistant, teaching English 101 and creative writing. My third year, I applied to be one of the fiction editors for HFR. And then I got a graduate assistant position working with Salima Keegan, the Managing Editor of HFR (for over 20 years!). When she was retiring and I was graduating, she really pulled for me to take her place. She knew how much I loved HFR. I owe so much to her. Honestly, I was in the right place at the right time. I feel lucky.
6. Is it okay that I said writing/publishing, or do you feel the two are separate, with two separate paths?
I’m not entirely sure I understand the question, but I’ll give it a go. For me, I pursued publishing after college because it was related to writing. I liked to write, but I knew no one would pay me to write short stories. Publishing sounded exciting. Some people who love to write get jobs as journalists or technical writers, but that never sounded any good to me. I didn’t want to get burnt out on writing with a job that required me to write all the time about (potentially) things I didn’t care for. That argument is just academic, though. I know writers who just write and write (for a living, at home), and the more things they write, the better they feel. I don’t think I’m that person. That said, I’ve been enjoying blogging. I usually write at least one post a day, and I like the rhythm of that. It’s been giving me confidence for my other work, I think, regularly producing an (albeit small) piece of writing.
As for whether writing and publishing are the same for me as a writer, that’s of course no. You have to just write what you believe in. Write and write and don’t think about whether anyone else will like it, last of all a “publisher.” Write the story you have to tell. When you’re done, you send it out. Getting it published doesn’t make it good.
7. How did you first get into writing?
It’s the same kind of corny story a lot of people tell. I wrote as far back as I can remember. When I was a kid, I wrote poems that rhymed and fables about animals. I used to narrate my every-day activities as if I were in a book. That way it felt like someone cared about every little thing that I did. That sensibility has stuck with me – an attention to the little things, a desire to chronicle moments so that they’re not lost, writing as memory.
8. Who are your favorite writers?
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. George Saunders. Nicole Krauss. Jose Saramago. Kelly Link. Vladimir Nabokov. The way Nabokov writes is so amazing to me. You can just see that he has it, The Gift. (Ah! That’s a joke, because that’s the title of one of his novels!) I love the magical and strange, anyone who can make me laugh.
9. Any editor pet peeves that writers should know about, personal or general?
That’s tough, because I think the things that annoy me are highly personal. A few things do get under my skin: I’m always highly suspicious of stories that take place in trailer parks or at religious revivals. They’re a kind of “white trash” story I see a lot, often accompanied by the characters speaking in some strange version of a southern accent. I rarely like stories about writers or teachers of writing: they often seem like a failure of the imagination. And don’t explain your story in your cover letter; always a red flag. I can think of exceptions to all of the above, though. Anything can be done well.
10. Are most of the editors you know also writers?
I don’t really know many other editors. The few I do are writers. Editing is another one of the ways to be employed doing something you really care about. I love my job. I get to work with and in support of writers and artists all day long.
11. I’ve heard the criticism of MFA programs that they focus so much on craft they lose sight of the creative process? Sour grapes, or do you have any thoughts on this, for writers considering an MFA?
I’ve heard tons of bad things about MFA programs. Is it possible that someone could come out of an MFA so wrapped up in the technicalities that s/he has lost sight of the joy? I suppose. Do I think that MFA programs could better prepare writers for the real world? Perhaps. Do I think some are too competitive? I’m sure. Do some encourage group-think? I guess it’s possible. None of that happened to me. This is what I’ll say of my MFA experience: I was given three years to spend most of my time writing. Someone else paid me to do that! ASU gave me a community of people who valued what I did, people to talk about writing with. I worked with brilliant teachers and writers. I learned that I could teach. I traveled to China. And I found my way into a job. All of that is pretty amazing. To be given the time, space, and support to simply write as much as possible – that’s a dream come true for a lot of writers. I feel grateful for the experience.
12. What prompted your decision to create a blog for HFR?
This question actually prompted me to write a blog post. What I said there was that a blog seemed like a good way to supplement the work of our printed issues, a place to talk to our contributors and learn more about their work. It helps us to both deepen our readers’ experiences with what we publish, and broaden the reach of our contributors. And since our mission is to support emerging artists, the blog also gives us a chance to do more of that: to talk about writing and visual art more. The implication is that the reach of the printed copies of HFR is limited. This is, of course, true. We are not only limited by our ability to find our readers out in the world, but also by the number of copies we can afford to print. The blog, ideally, helps us find more readers for our printed issues, and furthers the whole of our mission. And, it’s fun. And, you know, a strong internet presence seems to be kind of important.
13. And just so that all the writers out there can remember that as an editor, you’re also a human, how about your most embarrassing moment?
Okay, here it goes. This is pretty gross. I was on a kind of “date” with this guy I met at a bar. It was my first year at ASU, and I was trying to get to know people. He worked on campus, so we met on a concrete bench next to a palm tree for coffee. I had a cold. We were sitting and talking for a while, and my nose started to get runny. I didn’t want to get up to ruin the moment, so there was a lot of sniffling. As things escalated, I tried to check for drippings by casually running my finger under my nose. All the while, maintaining a witty banter. (In my mind, I replay this like that scene in Better Off Dead where John Cusack and that character “Beth” both think they have something in their noses while they’re talking. Except worse.). Obviously, there was something emerging, because when I pulled my hand away, a giant strand of snot – like a tight rope – connected my nostril to my outstretched hand. At this point, I was able to excuse myself. I went to a bathroom in the nearest building to clean up and calm down. When I returned, in typical ‘me’ fashion, I remember saying, “I peed while I was in there, just to make sure I won’t go in my pants.” I thought that was funny. Now that I’ve typed it, I’m not so sure. I’m engaged now, so eat your heart out, fellas!
This concludes the interview. Once again, here are the links: excerpts from Hayden’s Ferry Review here, the publication’s blog is here, and an LA Times review of Hayden’s Ferry Review can be found here.
