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  • Yes, Christine, you can begin writing at 60!

    A few days ago, a reader named Christine emailed me the following question: Do you think a person can begin being a writer at age 60? You’re so young and have such a solid educational background in literature. I know I want to write, and have a folder of snippets, unrelated, but think I’m crazy to start at this age!

    Well, I should admit, first off, that I’m not really that young. I grew up in the South, where a lady is never supposed to reveal her age, but since the publisher of my first novel decided to put my birthdate on the title page, it’s pretty much out there. Matters of youthfulness or lack thereof aside, I get a lot of questions from aspiring writers, frequently about publishing, sometimes of the “I want to write a book, and I’m sure it will be a bestseller if you introduce me to your agent” variety. I found Christine’s question particularly refreshing, because it wasn’t about the business of writing, but the process of writing, and, more specifically, the beginning of writing–you know, that thing you actually have to do before you go out in search of literary fame and fortune. So I thought I’d share my response here: (more…)

  • Writers Reflect

    Jason Roberts compiled writers’ reflections on John Updike today for The Rumpus. There are contributions by Andrew Sean Greer, Andrew Foster Altschul, Rick Moody, and yours truly, among others.

  • “A celebration of risk and failure”

    Elizabeth Stark, filmmaker and author of the award-winning novel Shy Girl, has written a great piece on redroom about why the “growth mindset” matters to writers. Read it here.

  • Good Reads

    Just out today, a new novel by Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share without Knowing. I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of this book, and, though I’ve never met the author in my life, this was an easy book to blurb: From the frantic streets of Tokyo to the surreal silence of rural Japan, Christopher Barzak spins the familiar yarn of the everyday world into a magical universe. Following in the themes of his stunning debut, One for Sorrow, Barzak once again tackles loneliness and longing, and elegantly blurs the divide between the living and the dead. The Love We Share Without Knowing is haunting, strange, and utterly surprising from the first page to the last.

    Sometimes you go through dry spells when it comes to reading–you know what I mean–those weeks, months even, when you open book after book, unable to find anything that really moves you. For some reason, the past two weeks have been the opposite of that. I keep finding books to love. Here are a couple of them.

    The Theory of Light and Matter: Stories by Andrew Porter.
    Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, this collection of ten tautly constructed stories is quiet, moving, sometimes funny, and marked again and again by genuine emotion. What impressed me most about these stories is the way they unfold at a casual, told-by-a-friend pace, very direct and simple, before hitting you straight on with some insight that they’ve been subtly working toward all along. From “Storms,” in which a young man watches his sister self-destruct:

    In the books the psychologists had given to Amy and me as children, I remembered reading stories about people who claimed that after one of their parents died they were just never happy again. I understood this to be the case with my sister and sometimes my mother. Life goes on, but it’s different now. It’s softer, duller. The highs are less high and the lows seem to have an endless depth to them, a depth you have to be wary of falling into…it occurred to me that Amy had probably spent most of her life on the edge of that depth, unwilling to let herself fall in, but frightened all the same by its presence.

    Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O’Nan
    One of the best books I’ve read this year. Although this is a story in which very little happens, one man’s struggle to end his years of service to The Red Lobster with dignity, and to be a decent human being in the process, kept me spellbound.

    Another story collection that I devoured with hardly a trip to the kitchen for coffee and Hydrox cookies was Pia Z. Ehrhardt’s Famous Fathers.
    These stories are as seductive as their heroines, dripping with the mystique of New Orleans, tense with the characters’ often-failed attempts to rein in their larger-than-life desires. A spectacular Christmas gift for the Scorpio in your life, or for anyone to whom you want to send a message about infidelity, jealousy, or the perils of family.

  • What’s Borges Got to Do With It?

    Jeff VanderMeer recently interviewed me for Omnivoracious, the Amazon editors’ blog. VanderMeer peels back the cover for a look inside No One You Know. Subjects discussed: the influence of Borges and Paul Auster, math as a labyrinth, the joys of coffee and a blank page, the difficulty of getting the cornbread right, and what you can do to get yourself invited to dinner. Read the interview here.

  • literary hot spots

    Author and editor Jordan Rosenfeld (Make a Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time) pays tribute to San Francisco’s “literary hot spots” in this article for Writer’s Digest. Jordan mentions the historic Caffe Trieste (this is the place that local writer Junvenal Acosta, among others, sometimes refers to as his office), the Mission-district watering hole The Makeout Room (home of the Progressive Reading Series), and Vesuvio. While Caffe Trieste and Vesuvio are in North Beach, Jordan’s pick for the most beloved bookstore is Green Apple (see my “found at Green Apple” posts) on Clement. Living as I do in the Richmond district, Green Apple is my neighborhood store. (I couldn’t help but give it special mention, gnome and all, in my new novel!)

  • Doris Lessing on Winning the Nobel in Literature

    as reported by Publishers Weekly

    “I can’t say I’m overwhelmed with surprise. . . . I’m 88 years old and they can’t give the Nobel to someone who’s dead, so I think they were probably thinking they’d probably better give it to me now before I’ve popped off…This has been going on for 30 years. I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I’m delighted to win them all. It’s a royal flush.”

  • In Praise of Grace Paley

    The iconic short story writer and essayist Grace Paley died yesterday at her home in Vermont. I have long been an admirer of her work, and have been such a disciple that my students over the years have probably become bored with the refrain, “If you want to learn how to write dialogue, read Grace Paley!”

    I first read Paley in 1993, while living alone in a miserable little duplex in Knoxville, TN. I’d just accepted a job as a copywriter at an ad agency. I remember being snowed in during my first scheduled week of work, reading Paley on a set of Salvation Army sofa cushions I’d arranged on the floor as a bed. The crazy neighbors were screaming at each other, the snow was coming down, and I was bundled up in scarf, hat, and layers of sweats because I couldn’t afford to run the steam heat. That’s where I met Paley, in Little Disturbances of Man. I was mesmerized. Reading Paley was what taught me to write short stories. More on Paley in coming days…

  • On the Difficulty of Editing Well

    “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”
    Blaise Pascal

  • A Toy and an Amusement

    Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.
    ~Winston Churchill

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