May 2009 Archives
Literary Positions of All Kinds
Ah, the intrigue. Oxford University or not, why folks would fight over an $11K position is anyone's guess, but I do find it interesting that the first woman named to the chair-of-poetry post in hundreds of years, Ruth Padel, would ultimately be outed for outing (or at least refreshing in everyone's memory) her rival Derek Walcott's apparent propensity for sexually harassing his creative writing students. "Imagine me making love to you," he allegedly said to a Harvard student. "What would I do?"
Well, I guess that's one way to challenge a student's imagination. Imagine me taking you to court, another student responded 14 years later. Walcott settled.
But speaking of positions in the literary world--and this one's much closer to home: As the lovely Nickole Brown steps away from her post to write and teach full-time, the literary publisher Sarabande Books is looking for a new marketing director. Sarabande is a great press, and even the application process (list your 15 favorite contemporary books) sounds fun. If you're interested, it cannot hurt to try.
Well, I guess that's one way to challenge a student's imagination. Imagine me taking you to court, another student responded 14 years later. Walcott settled.
But speaking of positions in the literary world--and this one's much closer to home: As the lovely Nickole Brown steps away from her post to write and teach full-time, the literary publisher Sarabande Books is looking for a new marketing director. Sarabande is a great press, and even the application process (list your 15 favorite contemporary books) sounds fun. If you're interested, it cannot hurt to try.
Seeking: MARKETING DIRECTOR
Sarabande Books, an independent, nonprofit, literary press
established in 1994, is seeking a Marketing Director/Development
Assistant. We are looking for an individual with a strong commitment
to contemporary poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction, as
well as superior organizational and public relations skills. Minimum
BA, MFA, and /or experience desirable. Candidates must be
self-starters and highly attentive to details and deadlines.
Job responsibilities include marketing and publicity for each of ten
annual titles, attendance at three annual book conferences, and twice
yearly visits to NYC book reviewers. Some fundraising activity is
also involved, depending upon need: assisting Editor-in-Chief Sarah
Gorham with letter campaigns, tracking donors, and two-to-three small
local parties.
The position includes full-time salary, health, dental, and
retirement benefits, private office equipped with a Mac, and ample
marketing budget.
Sarabande's work atmosphere is busy, but friendly. Vacations are
generous and staff turnover is extremely rare. Louisville is an
affordable, culturally rich, medium-sized city.
Please send letter, resume, three phone references, and a list of
your top fifteen favorite contemporary poetry, fiction, and creative
nonfiction titles, by June 15 to:
Sarah Gorham
sgorham@sarabandebooks.org
| Tweet | ||
Attica Rising
In my ongoing (and agent-mandated) quest to educate myself by reading literary thrillers, I recently had the very good fortune to stumble upon the soon-to-be-released debut novel by Attica Locke, Black Water Rising. Set in Houston in the 1980s, it features Jay Porter, an African American lawyer who accidentally gets tangled up in more than he bargained for. I love the way Locke depicts her protagonist Porter, who was an outspoken, up-front activist during
the civil rights era, as having shut down since then due to the
betrayal and violence he experienced and witnessed. Cynical and
wounded, he just wants to have a quiet, safe life, keeping his head
down, focusing on his wife Bernie and the baby they're expecting. But in Black Water Rising, life calls him to do more. Locke has an extensive, successful background writing for film and TV, but this is her first novel, and it's terrific. It opens with a scene on Buffalo Bayou that is rooted, as an afterword explains, in one of Locke's own childhood memories, a disturbing episode that ended safely for her own father and family but to which she applied the writer's obsessive question, "What if?" Black Water Rising is the result of her ruminations, and we're lucky she explored new territory.
During the 80s, I was in Texas, but way over west in San Antonio, a world away from Houston. I don't know much about Houston during that time period, and I especially don't know much about black-white race relations there at the time, so it was interesting to learn (effortlessly, pleasurably) about that time and place, and Locke, who's originally from Houston herself, really builds her novel's world with thick, thorough description. And despite the fact that it's set decades ago, the novel's exploration of race and rights, money, greed, politics, and Big Oil makes its concerns feel utterly timely.
Locke employs the present tense throughout the novel, and it works well to amplify the action's sense of immediacy. And this is only one little additional thing, but I was impressed that the book--particularly given Locke's professional background--doesn't have the feel of one of those written-for-immediate-film-adaptation novels. I won't be surprised if it gets optioned fast, but it's very much a novel, not a glorified treatment, and I recommend it highly as a solid, entertaining, and illuminating read. I really love this book.
Black Water Rising won't be released until June 9th (thanks for the ARC, Indigo Bridge Books!), but you can pre-order a copy or get it on CD. Locke has a June tour scheduled, starting in L.A., hitting Chicago, Houston, and St. Louis, and winding up in one of my all-time favorite bookstores in the world, Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi (which will turn 30 this year, by the way), so if you live in any of those cities, you can go see her for yourself and get your copy signed by the author. I wish she were coming to Lincoln! Already being compared to Dennis Lehane and endorsed by James Ellroy, she's a writer to watch.
| Tweet | ||
Categories:
Home, Happy, and Ready to Write
The Gloria Anzaldúa conference was a great experience! I met some cool people, saw the hypnotic art of Chilean immigrant Liliana Wilson, and got to see Alicia Gaspar de Alba (author of Desert Blood, a novel about the Juárez femicides) and theorist/creative writer Emma Pérez speak.
It was also a pleasure to give a pedagogical paper on a panel with my great UNL colleagues Amelia Montes and Ariana Vigil. We talked about ways of teaching Gloria Anzaldúa's book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, which has been called one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century but which often meets with a difficult reception in the classroom, not only because of its ruptured, mixed-genre surface and incorporation of untranslated Spanish and Nahuatl, but also because it can feel threatening to people who've enjoyed social privileges due to their class, gender, race, or sexual orientation (and that manages to hit most people, one way or another). Since it pushes every one of those buttons, and students can get defensive in response, it can be kind of challenging to teach. (At Wabash and here in Nebraska, I have yet to teach a class full of working-class, queer Chicanas. If I did, they'd probably all weep with joy upon reading it.)
Our panel was fortunate enough to draw a beautiful audience of professors from institutions all over the country. During Q&A, they shared strategies and ideas of their own, so it was really cool.
And now I'm back, blessedly back. I love home, and I'm excited to get to work revising THE DESIRE PROJECTS, the novel I drafted last year. And I do mean drafted. I wrote the whole thing, about 360 pages, very quickly, in about two and a half months. Some of it I still love; some of it's thin. Honestly, some of it's even cheesy! Totally cringe-worthy! But this way, I can see the whole thing. Now I can go back in and make changes, thicken characters, alter sequences, and so on.
(This is apparently the way I work. The whole draft of The Truth Book came out longhand in three quick weeks, at my one-and-only writers' residency, and then sat in a drawer for nine months while I taught, and then I revised it for about four months. This is probably not the best process for writing a book-length work, LOL, but it's evidently mine.)
If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might remember that, long about the winter holidays, my agent (who'd been reading the draft, bless his soul) said I needed more suspense, and so I set myself to reading novels both literary and suspenseful. I've done that now. In case you're in the market, Kate Atkinson and John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, were the best authors of literary thrillers that I found, and I recommend their books, which are great beach reads or cozy-up-with-cocoa reads that don't insult your ear.
Having done my homework, I'm ready to dig back in, and with the exceptions of brief teaching stints at the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference and the Pine Manor MFA residency, the whole summer stretches out, fat with writing time.
As those of you who've visited me know, I don't have a separate room of my own to work in; my husband and I share 600 square feet of living space in our apartment in downtown Lincoln. So in one corner of the living room, my computer is set up on a tiny table. I sit on the sofa (or in bed in the mornings) and write by hand. Then, when I've got a solid chunk of pages, I go to my nook and type them in. It's a little hard to concentrate sometimes, with James passing to and fro, but he respects my cone of silence, LOL, and I learned as a young mother/grad student to write anywhere, any time. I realized then that if I waited for my surroundings to be perfectly conducive, the writing would never get done. In contrast to waiting until late at night for your toddler to fall asleep or sitting in an empty corridor on campus between seminars, occupying a whole corner of a sunny living room feels like luxury.
Virginia Woolf famously wrote that, in order to be a writer, a woman would need five hundred pounds a year and a room of her own--but hey, Virginia Woolf had servants all her life, too. And no children to care and provide for. Five hundred pounds of independent income a year in Woolf's era works out to be more than $40K today--and by independent income, she meant unearned. Trust fund. Inheritance.
Back when I first read A Room of One's Own in grad school, I knew that would never be me. Yes, it sure would be nice if all artists received that kind of support, but I take much more inspiration from the example of single-mother Meridel Le Sueur, Woolf's contemporary, who would come home from factory work, picket lines, and protest marches to care for her two daughters at night. In order to stay awake to keep writing once they were asleep, she would dunk her head in cold water.
I love Woolf's work, and I hope for the day when every writer does have leisure and space, but I'm so proud of all the writers who have proved and continue to prove Woolf wrong.
Let that be you. Even if you only have twenty minutes, write. Do it. Don't make excuses, because they'll become a self-fulfilling prophecy: If you tell yourself you need pristine or particular conditions, then you will need them.
Let go of all that. Do your work.
It was also a pleasure to give a pedagogical paper on a panel with my great UNL colleagues Amelia Montes and Ariana Vigil. We talked about ways of teaching Gloria Anzaldúa's book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, which has been called one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century but which often meets with a difficult reception in the classroom, not only because of its ruptured, mixed-genre surface and incorporation of untranslated Spanish and Nahuatl, but also because it can feel threatening to people who've enjoyed social privileges due to their class, gender, race, or sexual orientation (and that manages to hit most people, one way or another). Since it pushes every one of those buttons, and students can get defensive in response, it can be kind of challenging to teach. (At Wabash and here in Nebraska, I have yet to teach a class full of working-class, queer Chicanas. If I did, they'd probably all weep with joy upon reading it.)
Our panel was fortunate enough to draw a beautiful audience of professors from institutions all over the country. During Q&A, they shared strategies and ideas of their own, so it was really cool.
And now I'm back, blessedly back. I love home, and I'm excited to get to work revising THE DESIRE PROJECTS, the novel I drafted last year. And I do mean drafted. I wrote the whole thing, about 360 pages, very quickly, in about two and a half months. Some of it I still love; some of it's thin. Honestly, some of it's even cheesy! Totally cringe-worthy! But this way, I can see the whole thing. Now I can go back in and make changes, thicken characters, alter sequences, and so on.
(This is apparently the way I work. The whole draft of The Truth Book came out longhand in three quick weeks, at my one-and-only writers' residency, and then sat in a drawer for nine months while I taught, and then I revised it for about four months. This is probably not the best process for writing a book-length work, LOL, but it's evidently mine.)
If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might remember that, long about the winter holidays, my agent (who'd been reading the draft, bless his soul) said I needed more suspense, and so I set myself to reading novels both literary and suspenseful. I've done that now. In case you're in the market, Kate Atkinson and John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, were the best authors of literary thrillers that I found, and I recommend their books, which are great beach reads or cozy-up-with-cocoa reads that don't insult your ear.
Having done my homework, I'm ready to dig back in, and with the exceptions of brief teaching stints at the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference and the Pine Manor MFA residency, the whole summer stretches out, fat with writing time.
As those of you who've visited me know, I don't have a separate room of my own to work in; my husband and I share 600 square feet of living space in our apartment in downtown Lincoln. So in one corner of the living room, my computer is set up on a tiny table. I sit on the sofa (or in bed in the mornings) and write by hand. Then, when I've got a solid chunk of pages, I go to my nook and type them in. It's a little hard to concentrate sometimes, with James passing to and fro, but he respects my cone of silence, LOL, and I learned as a young mother/grad student to write anywhere, any time. I realized then that if I waited for my surroundings to be perfectly conducive, the writing would never get done. In contrast to waiting until late at night for your toddler to fall asleep or sitting in an empty corridor on campus between seminars, occupying a whole corner of a sunny living room feels like luxury.
Virginia Woolf famously wrote that, in order to be a writer, a woman would need five hundred pounds a year and a room of her own--but hey, Virginia Woolf had servants all her life, too. And no children to care and provide for. Five hundred pounds of independent income a year in Woolf's era works out to be more than $40K today--and by independent income, she meant unearned. Trust fund. Inheritance.
Back when I first read A Room of One's Own in grad school, I knew that would never be me. Yes, it sure would be nice if all artists received that kind of support, but I take much more inspiration from the example of single-mother Meridel Le Sueur, Woolf's contemporary, who would come home from factory work, picket lines, and protest marches to care for her two daughters at night. In order to stay awake to keep writing once they were asleep, she would dunk her head in cold water.
I love Woolf's work, and I hope for the day when every writer does have leisure and space, but I'm so proud of all the writers who have proved and continue to prove Woolf wrong.
Let that be you. Even if you only have twenty minutes, write. Do it. Don't make excuses, because they'll become a self-fulfilling prophecy: If you tell yourself you need pristine or particular conditions, then you will need them.
Let go of all that. Do your work.
| Tweet | ||
Categories:
Heading South!
This is just a quickie, because I'm packing now for an early morning flight to San Antonio for this great conference held at UTSA Downtown by the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa, whose work I love and have mentioned on here before. Fantastic scholars from all over the place will be there. Our panel is about strategies for teaching Borderlands/La Frontera to students who don't share Anzaldúa's sociological standpoint (and thus often tend to approach her work with wary hostility). The whole conference is dedicated to her work, so I'm looking forward to learning a lot--and also to hanging out in the city where I lived for six years, from 16 to 22, when I was in college and having my son.I really want to write about the new study just released by the MLA, "Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey," which looks at gender in the academy at the associate professor level--why women seem to stall out at that rank, basically, rather than rocketing along to full professor, as men do--because I have a ton of stuff to say, not just about the results but also about the assumptions and norms that inform the study. But I need to save that for when I get back.
Big thanks to all my great creative writing and Latina/o Studies students this spring, both here in Lincoln and out in Santa Monica, who worked so hard and accomplished so much. Summer, with all its creative freedom, beckons gorgeously, but we sure did have a great time!
| Tweet | ||
Categories:
Making Professionalization Painless
Peruvian-American writer Monica Brown, whose award-winning bilingual books for children include My Name Is Celia: The Life of Celia Cruz, My Name is Gabriela: The Life of Gabriela Mistral, and My Name Is Gabito: The Life of Gabriel García Márquez, offers this advice to emerging writers:
Aside from craft, I think that writers just beginning their journey need to professionalize--and that encompasses many things. Join your professional organization--join SCBWI if you want to write for children or the Romance Writers of America, if that's your genre. Then go to conferences and network--and by network, I don't mean stalking editors. Rather, come with your best work and be curious, polite, and friendly to everyone. Open your mind to new ideas and listen!I love Brown's emphasis on friendliness, openness, and passing it on. (The whole Q&A is available in the most recent issue of Latinidad.)
Create a website, get business cards. These are basic things, but sometimes creative people don't want to be bothered--or perhaps just aren't "good" at those aspects of the business. I certainly wasn't. But part of what we do is a business and we need to become literate in that part of publishing as well--networking, marketing, etc. And always--pass it on. It's my privilege now to be able to mentor newer writers the way I was mentored.
Professionalizing yourself as a writer might feel a little awkward (like many writers, I'm sort of introverted and shy, so it has often felt like a high school dance for me), but it can actually be a fun, interesting journey, and you get to interact with so many fascinating people. It widens your world. Having a website, por ejemplo, has allowed readers to write to me from all over the globe--most recently, from New Zealand! And conferences like Bread Loaf, Macondo, and AWP have been great resources, both in terms of learning about writing and publishing and in terms of getting to know writers, editors, and agents.
And here's a surprising truth: you don't have to be good at schmoozing or socializing. I'm (painfully) not. (When those commercials for social-anxiety meds come on TV--you know: with the woman hovering anxiously in the doorway, afraid to go into the party, and the voice-over listing about eighteen social fears--I'm always like, Hmmmm . . . sounds like someone I know all too well. So if I can do this, you can definitely do it.)
Just be sincere, and "be curious, polite, and friendly to everyone." Sure, some people will blow you off--you learn to recognize the way their eyes surreptitiously scan the crowd for someone more important/famous. Seriously! People really do this; it's almost funny.
But more often than not, being sincere and being yourself connects you with really nice, interesting people--the ones you'd want to be with anyway. As shark-tankish and snarky as publishing can be, an astonishing number of thoughtful, kind, generous people manage to thrive within it.
Remember that book editors are looking for writers who have not only a great manuscript but also a great platform. Send out your work. Network. Make friends. Try again. The economy, as you know, is hitting publishing hard. So we have to work harder.
| Tweet | ||
Categories:
Felicidades All Around!
Congratulations and big hugs to Pine Manor MFA student Faye Rapoport DesPres, whose beautiful piece "The Diversion" is a finalist in Writer's Advice Fourth Annual Flash Prose contest (hurray! woohoo!), and to Macondo workshop participant Beatriz Terrazas, whose piece, "When I Found My True Name, I Found My Identity," was published by Dallas's GuideLive and is available here. It begins,
It's always a thrill when former students succeed. I love it that these two mujeres are finding audiences for their creative voices. Abrazos, Faye and Beatriz!
Hey, I have been getting some caca from more than one friend about not blogging often enough, so lo siento, lo siento, but right now I am a one-woman grade-a-thon. Luckily, the papers are exciting and varied in Latino Studies (lost colonias, worksite raids, the latinidad of Roberto Clemente, Selena y Shakira, the Juárez femicides).
In ENGL 258B, Autobiographical Writing, the students have to send their final, revised pieces out for submission to national undergraduate literary journals, so those assignments are coming in tomorrow complete with cover letters, envelopes, SASEs, and so on. It makes the whole process a little more real and exciting, I think, for the students to know that someone other than just "the teacher" (yawn) will be reading their revised pieces. And one student last year actually got hers published!
In the midst of my stacks of papers, we made time to go see Son del Llano ("classic Cuban son and salsa") last night. They were playing at Lincoln's legendary Zoo Bar, and it was so refreshing to listen to them: it's the kind of musica my Dad used to play (vinyl, por supuesto) when we were little--along with Johnny Mathis and Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, naturally.
Who knew Lincoln, Nebraska would have an old-time son band? Stranger than fiction. You can give them a listen right now, or you can come on out at seven o'clock on May 29th to the DelRay Ballroom down in the Haymarket and dance all night for just ten bucks.
And speaking of dancing all night, I received a CD in the mail the other day from the fledgling Oberlin band Dos Mil Días de Fuego, and I just have to say it: my mother's heart about burst with pride. Was that my kid, sounding all like a grown-up man, rapping in Spanish? Those smart, political lyrics? I tell you, it made my week.
And what's more, the CD arrived on one of those mopey blue What has it all been for? days, too (which are pretty frequent, let me tell you, LOL, toward the end of the semester). I sat there listening with tears in my eyes, a long-distance mama, thinking, This. This is what it has all been for. For this smart young artist, articulate, bilingual, full of passion and power.
(And let me just send a shout-out of thanks to poet & Oberlin faculty member Kazim Ali, who worked with Grey on his January-term project analyzing contemporary formal poetry and writing new lyrics. Working with that child takes patience--I say this with love--so Ali must have the patience of a saint. Respect and gratitude.)
These gorgeous songs are the pudding that the proof is in. I can't wait for them to be stream-able for you.
A name tells a story. It embodies a unique history that can be rewritten with the movement of a single letter. Take one out or put one in, and just like that, a name takes you in a direction you weren't meant to go. This is most true for those of us who have lived outside the mainstream, who've at one time been the "other." I should know.To read the whole thing, click here.
It's always a thrill when former students succeed. I love it that these two mujeres are finding audiences for their creative voices. Abrazos, Faye and Beatriz!
Hey, I have been getting some caca from more than one friend about not blogging often enough, so lo siento, lo siento, but right now I am a one-woman grade-a-thon. Luckily, the papers are exciting and varied in Latino Studies (lost colonias, worksite raids, the latinidad of Roberto Clemente, Selena y Shakira, the Juárez femicides).
In ENGL 258B, Autobiographical Writing, the students have to send their final, revised pieces out for submission to national undergraduate literary journals, so those assignments are coming in tomorrow complete with cover letters, envelopes, SASEs, and so on. It makes the whole process a little more real and exciting, I think, for the students to know that someone other than just "the teacher" (yawn) will be reading their revised pieces. And one student last year actually got hers published!
In the midst of my stacks of papers, we made time to go see Son del Llano ("classic Cuban son and salsa") last night. They were playing at Lincoln's legendary Zoo Bar, and it was so refreshing to listen to them: it's the kind of musica my Dad used to play (vinyl, por supuesto) when we were little--along with Johnny Mathis and Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, naturally.
Who knew Lincoln, Nebraska would have an old-time son band? Stranger than fiction. You can give them a listen right now, or you can come on out at seven o'clock on May 29th to the DelRay Ballroom down in the Haymarket and dance all night for just ten bucks.
And speaking of dancing all night, I received a CD in the mail the other day from the fledgling Oberlin band Dos Mil Días de Fuego, and I just have to say it: my mother's heart about burst with pride. Was that my kid, sounding all like a grown-up man, rapping in Spanish? Those smart, political lyrics? I tell you, it made my week.
And what's more, the CD arrived on one of those mopey blue What has it all been for? days, too (which are pretty frequent, let me tell you, LOL, toward the end of the semester). I sat there listening with tears in my eyes, a long-distance mama, thinking, This. This is what it has all been for. For this smart young artist, articulate, bilingual, full of passion and power.
(And let me just send a shout-out of thanks to poet & Oberlin faculty member Kazim Ali, who worked with Grey on his January-term project analyzing contemporary formal poetry and writing new lyrics. Working with that child takes patience--I say this with love--so Ali must have the patience of a saint. Respect and gratitude.)
These gorgeous songs are the pudding that the proof is in. I can't wait for them to be stream-able for you.
| Tweet | ||
