Recently in good news Category
Happy to be home
I'm so grateful for this beautiful profile by Mekita Rivas. Love it! Thank you, Mekita, for making me sound funnier and smarter and more productive than I actually am, and thank you, Las Comadres and Friends, for picking my novel! Because of the profile, HELL OR HIGH WATER saw a wee spike in pre-orders on Amazon, so that was cool, too.
AWP was a wonderful whirlwind, and I've been digging myself out from under the work that piled up while I was gone. I came home with two books I'm particularly excited about: The Train, a classic masterpiece of suspense by Georges Simenon, from Melville House, and Every Last Secret, a debut novel by Linda Rodriguez from St. Martin's.
I'm looking forward to spring break next week, when I'll be hunkered down, working hard on Nola Novel Number Two. I'll live in t-shirts and sweats all week, which will be awesome.
Tomorrow, a short piece I wrote, "The Dangerous Myth of a Room of One's Own," will appear on the #amwriting blog. I'm excited to be writing for them again, and this myth (long-time readers of the blog will know where I'm going with this) is something about which I'm passionate.
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Addendum: Here's the link to "The Dangerous Myth of a Room of One's Own"--with thanks to Joanna Neilson and Johanna Harkness for their comments!
AWP was a wonderful whirlwind, and I've been digging myself out from under the work that piled up while I was gone. I came home with two books I'm particularly excited about: The Train, a classic masterpiece of suspense by Georges Simenon, from Melville House, and Every Last Secret, a debut novel by Linda Rodriguez from St. Martin's.
I'm looking forward to spring break next week, when I'll be hunkered down, working hard on Nola Novel Number Two. I'll live in t-shirts and sweats all week, which will be awesome.
Tomorrow, a short piece I wrote, "The Dangerous Myth of a Room of One's Own," will appear on the #amwriting blog. I'm excited to be writing for them again, and this myth (long-time readers of the blog will know where I'm going with this) is something about which I'm passionate.
-----
Addendum: Here's the link to "The Dangerous Myth of a Room of One's Own"--with thanks to Joanna Neilson and Johanna Harkness for their comments!
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Stunning
Forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press, September 2012:
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HELL OR HIGH WATER Named a Latino Book of the Month
Mil gracias, Las Comadres and Friends National Latino Book Club, for naming HELL OR HIGH WATER a 2012 Book of the Month!
A literary thriller, HELL OR HIGH WATER takes place in New Orleans three years after Katrina. The protagonist, a young Cuban American journalist at the Times-Picayune, juggles her friends, her mother, and the teenaged girl she's mentoring with her hunt for sex criminals and a missing woman. (Oh, and a little romance--if you can call it that.)
PEN/Faulkner nominee Lorraine M. López, author of Soy la Avon Lady, calls it "[a]n irresistible and compelling novel," and Dennis Lehane writes, "Hell or High Water is more than just a mystery; it's a heartfelt examination of a second America--poor but undaunted--that was swept under the rug but refuses to stay there."
I'm thrilled that the national Latina/o reading community is embracing this book. September 2012 will be the month when members of the National Latino Book Club across the country (special shout-outs to Miami, Austin, & San Antonio!) will be reading HELL OR HIGH WATER and when I'll be doing teleconferences for Las Comadres.
But you don't have to wait until September. If you pre-order it now, you'll get your copy by July.
A literary thriller, HELL OR HIGH WATER takes place in New Orleans three years after Katrina. The protagonist, a young Cuban American journalist at the Times-Picayune, juggles her friends, her mother, and the teenaged girl she's mentoring with her hunt for sex criminals and a missing woman. (Oh, and a little romance--if you can call it that.) PEN/Faulkner nominee Lorraine M. López, author of Soy la Avon Lady, calls it "[a]n irresistible and compelling novel," and Dennis Lehane writes, "Hell or High Water is more than just a mystery; it's a heartfelt examination of a second America--poor but undaunted--that was swept under the rug but refuses to stay there."
I'm thrilled that the national Latina/o reading community is embracing this book. September 2012 will be the month when members of the National Latino Book Club across the country (special shout-outs to Miami, Austin, & San Antonio!) will be reading HELL OR HIGH WATER and when I'll be doing teleconferences for Las Comadres.
But you don't have to wait until September. If you pre-order it now, you'll get your copy by July.
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Two Quick Things & the Happiest of Holidays
Dear lovely readers, thank you for another lovely year. I can't tell you how excited I get when I look on the world map of readers of this blog and see that not only my long-time stalwarts like Massachusetts and California are tuning in, but people from Edinburgh and Dubai and Berlin and Dakar and Singapore and Oslo and Taiwan drop by as well. How amazing is that?! It's as exciting as having pen pals when I was a kid, and it kind of blows my mind. Welcome, everybody!
The two quick things are no less wonderful because I'm going to be brief. (Grey arrives in the wee hours of the morning, and I've got homey holiday things to do.)
First, I'm proud as punch to be able to brag about my long-time friend Dr. Edie Simms and her new college consulting firm. At any stage of the process--high school students choosing a college, college graduates applying to law school or grad school, or grad students trying to make it through the thesis- or dissertation-writing process--Edie provides warm, smart, highly informed advice.
We were colleagues together at Wabash College some years ago, and I always admired Edie's ability to help the students plan their programs and their lives. I was (am!) a lousy academic advisor (my heart's not in it), and I turned to Edie repeatedly for help. She was always sane, organized, upbeat, and efficient. She loves the work. If you know anyone who's wrestling with any of those stages of academia, I recommend her firm highly. Edie is generous, warm-spirited, and extremely knowledgeable. I really love how she gets genuinely invested in the success of other people. It's not a business strategy; it's truly her nature. She's ideal for this kind of work; her heart is in it.
Second, thank you to all the people who helped publicize my column over at #Amwriting! "The Memoir as Psychological Thriller" had many enthusiastic readers (and a great comment), so I'm grateful for your help. It explains my one biggest piece of hard-won advice about writing memoir.
I have a couple of cool things coming up on the blog here. I need your help choosing an author photo from the recent shoot, so I'm going to put the top 5 up and see what you think. Also, the fantastic Anita Mumm from the Nelson Literary Agency is going to answer my grad students' smart questions about how to choose an agent and what to expect when you do.
Soon! In the meantime, have very happy, warm, safe, hilarious holidays. Love to everyone!
The two quick things are no less wonderful because I'm going to be brief. (Grey arrives in the wee hours of the morning, and I've got homey holiday things to do.)
First, I'm proud as punch to be able to brag about my long-time friend Dr. Edie Simms and her new college consulting firm. At any stage of the process--high school students choosing a college, college graduates applying to law school or grad school, or grad students trying to make it through the thesis- or dissertation-writing process--Edie provides warm, smart, highly informed advice.
We were colleagues together at Wabash College some years ago, and I always admired Edie's ability to help the students plan their programs and their lives. I was (am!) a lousy academic advisor (my heart's not in it), and I turned to Edie repeatedly for help. She was always sane, organized, upbeat, and efficient. She loves the work. If you know anyone who's wrestling with any of those stages of academia, I recommend her firm highly. Edie is generous, warm-spirited, and extremely knowledgeable. I really love how she gets genuinely invested in the success of other people. It's not a business strategy; it's truly her nature. She's ideal for this kind of work; her heart is in it.
Second, thank you to all the people who helped publicize my column over at #Amwriting! "The Memoir as Psychological Thriller" had many enthusiastic readers (and a great comment), so I'm grateful for your help. It explains my one biggest piece of hard-won advice about writing memoir.
I have a couple of cool things coming up on the blog here. I need your help choosing an author photo from the recent shoot, so I'm going to put the top 5 up and see what you think. Also, the fantastic Anita Mumm from the Nelson Literary Agency is going to answer my grad students' smart questions about how to choose an agent and what to expect when you do.
Soon! In the meantime, have very happy, warm, safe, hilarious holidays. Love to everyone!
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Brevity
"I tend to like people who don't go on and on and on."
~Chrystos
Me, too. So I'm honored and thrilled to be guest-editing a special issue of the gorgeous journal Brevity, which specializes in very short creative nonfiction (750 words max) and is edited by the wonderful Dinty W. Moore.
This special issue responds to the revelatory results of the 2010 VIDA count, which looked at gender in literary publishing.
With this issue of Brevity, we're offering you (if you're a woman) a chance to write back to the current situation. Here's the call for submissions on Submishmash, and we're reading pieces now.
If you send something, shoot me an email and let me know. I'll keep an eye out.
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Giddy Post-Thanksgiving Fog
Readers, our five days with Amara were wonderful. Very smooth, very cheerful. Also, we were not stabbed in our sleep. I'm calling it a success. I hope you, too, were unstabbed (and stabbed no one) over the holidays. However stabby you may have felt.
We had to drop Amara off at the detention center on Sunday, but the gears of the state are churning away, and we'll probably be picking her up soon--for good, this time.
In other news, I'm excited to report that DTV, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, a German publisher that has very pretty little movies on its website, has acquired the rights to HELL OR HIGH WATER, my debut novel. A German-language edition will appear by October, 2013. Too cool. (I hope they will make a pretty little evocative movie for my book.) A publisher-friend asked if I'd like to go to the Frankfurt Book Fair with her next year, and I'm thinking about it seriously.
--Ooh, I have registered for my very first Bouchercon, btw. It's a conference that's sort of de rigueur for crime writers, apparently, and I'm grateful to publicist Dana Kaye for telling me so. (But sigh. I've finally developed a strategy for surviving AWP each year, and now here's a whole 'nother conference to navigate? Bring on the beta blockers.) Elizabeth George, whose craft guide Write Away I highly recommend to anyone attempting the crime genre, will speak at the conference, so I'm looking forward to that.
Speaking of publicists: for the last couple of months, I've been embroiled in the interesting process of finding an independent publicist (in addition to the in-house ones that will be assigned by the publishers for HELL OR HIGH WATER and ISLAND OF BONES). I've been waiting to discuss it with my agent, and it looks like today might be the day. I'm very excited about it. I've gotten proposals from five awesome firms with really excellent, creative ideas, so making a decision is hard. I trust my agent's good judgment, so we'll see what he says.
I'm excited about this new center for life-writing at Oxford. If you're a memoirist or a biographer, you might want to check it out, and you can follow them on Twitter @OxLifeWriting.
Tonight, my wonderful, talented graduate students are giving readings of their new memoir work in class. Giving public readings may be old hat for some of y'all, but not everyone has done it, and since we fear public speaking more than death, yadda yadda, I thought it would be good for all of my students to get just a wee bit of experience under their belts before the semester ends. By this point, we've sort of become a small, supportive community of writers, so it won't be the same as reading in public, but I'm hoping it will be good practice nonetheless. We'll also be workshopping their cover letters tonight, because they'll be sending out work by the end of the semester, and a good cover letter makes a difference. In the spring, I will miss them. They're a merry band.
May I just say I am loving Raymond Chandler? I feel a little guilty. I thought no one could make me stray from Dashiell Hammett's side. (Mickey Spillane was such a joke; I just waved him & his clunky prose style away.) But this Chandler guy... I don't know. It could be serious.
Lastly, this is clearly where I need to do my grocery shopping. This is obviously what has been missing from my life.
xo, sweet readers!
We had to drop Amara off at the detention center on Sunday, but the gears of the state are churning away, and we'll probably be picking her up soon--for good, this time.
In other news, I'm excited to report that DTV, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, a German publisher that has very pretty little movies on its website, has acquired the rights to HELL OR HIGH WATER, my debut novel. A German-language edition will appear by October, 2013. Too cool. (I hope they will make a pretty little evocative movie for my book.) A publisher-friend asked if I'd like to go to the Frankfurt Book Fair with her next year, and I'm thinking about it seriously.
--Ooh, I have registered for my very first Bouchercon, btw. It's a conference that's sort of de rigueur for crime writers, apparently, and I'm grateful to publicist Dana Kaye for telling me so. (But sigh. I've finally developed a strategy for surviving AWP each year, and now here's a whole 'nother conference to navigate? Bring on the beta blockers.) Elizabeth George, whose craft guide Write Away I highly recommend to anyone attempting the crime genre, will speak at the conference, so I'm looking forward to that.
Speaking of publicists: for the last couple of months, I've been embroiled in the interesting process of finding an independent publicist (in addition to the in-house ones that will be assigned by the publishers for HELL OR HIGH WATER and ISLAND OF BONES). I've been waiting to discuss it with my agent, and it looks like today might be the day. I'm very excited about it. I've gotten proposals from five awesome firms with really excellent, creative ideas, so making a decision is hard. I trust my agent's good judgment, so we'll see what he says.
I'm excited about this new center for life-writing at Oxford. If you're a memoirist or a biographer, you might want to check it out, and you can follow them on Twitter @OxLifeWriting.
Tonight, my wonderful, talented graduate students are giving readings of their new memoir work in class. Giving public readings may be old hat for some of y'all, but not everyone has done it, and since we fear public speaking more than death, yadda yadda, I thought it would be good for all of my students to get just a wee bit of experience under their belts before the semester ends. By this point, we've sort of become a small, supportive community of writers, so it won't be the same as reading in public, but I'm hoping it will be good practice nonetheless. We'll also be workshopping their cover letters tonight, because they'll be sending out work by the end of the semester, and a good cover letter makes a difference. In the spring, I will miss them. They're a merry band.
May I just say I am loving Raymond Chandler? I feel a little guilty. I thought no one could make me stray from Dashiell Hammett's side. (Mickey Spillane was such a joke; I just waved him & his clunky prose style away.) But this Chandler guy... I don't know. It could be serious.
Lastly, this is clearly where I need to do my grocery shopping. This is obviously what has been missing from my life.
xo, sweet readers!
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Feeling Grateful
Judith Ortiz Cofer is a writer's writer and a friend to writers, as anyone who's been fortunate enough to have been befriended or mentored by her can enthusiastically attest. She's as kind as she is talented, as funny as she is smart, and as generous to writers as she is prolific. There's no one I'd rather have endorse my new collection of essays, ISLAND OF BONES, than the author of the gorgeous breakthrough books Silent Dancing and The Latin Deli and so many more wonderful works since then. So I'm thrilled to share her comments with you, and I am so moved and honored by them. (At some point in the book production process, a shorter version will appear on ISLAND OF BONES itself as a blurb, but here's the whole lovely shebang.)
Replete with a quiet wisdom, Joy Castro’s essays are powerfully focused revelations, as in the lyrical examination of a creosote bush, word by word; she trains our eyes to see beauty in pain, “Yet observe for a moment the grace of the creosote bush, hollowing as it grows, stretching and bending under an empty sky.” And along with the writer “you cry here it is!” In the author’s journey from abused runaway child to a fulfilling life as a wife, mother, writer, and professor, we see the flowering in an arid desert landscape, the miraculous flowering of the creosote. The power of these personal narratives resides in Joy Castro’s ability to invest every telling detail of every sorrow and every joy with her piercing attention, until each scene reaches a transcendental clarity. We are moved out of our complacence quietly but steadily by a voice that must witness and will testify. We come to a new awareness of what it means to triumph over unimaginable obstacles, and to the empowerment that comes of forgiveness. Joy Castro has achieved in these essays what Emily Dickinson called “the Truth that must dazzle gradually.”
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Cool News from All Over
Tracy Seeley, whose work I love, will be at Chapters Books & Gifts in Seward, Nebraska this Thursday at 5:30 to read from her new memoir, My Ruby Slippers: The Road Back to Kansas.
Grey Castro, whom I love completely, has begun blogging about his three-month trip to work on an organic farm and skateboard the island of Okinawa at Dirty Nails, Dirty Wheels. He's all Zen and funny, and there are photos. He can see the ocean from his little trailer.
My awesome poet-friend Naca, author of the award-winning collection Bird Eating Bird, wrote this great piece, "Eating Lorca," for Poetry. (Grey, a vegan, would not approve.)
Up next: Wendy Call's new book No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy.
Grey Castro, whom I love completely, has begun blogging about his three-month trip to work on an organic farm and skateboard the island of Okinawa at Dirty Nails, Dirty Wheels. He's all Zen and funny, and there are photos. He can see the ocean from his little trailer.
My awesome poet-friend Naca, author of the award-winning collection Bird Eating Bird, wrote this great piece, "Eating Lorca," for Poetry. (Grey, a vegan, would not approve.)
Up next: Wendy Call's new book No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy.
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Awesomeness & Hope
Folks, I am having these gorgeous blurbs tattooed on my face.
From Lorraine López, winner of the Miguel Marmol Prize and a PEN/Faulkner finalist, author of several great books including Soy la Avon Lady and Homicide Survivors Picnic:
From Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, and Shutter Island (among others) and a writer for HBO's The Wire:
In addition to being known for his work's sense of justice on behalf of the violated and vulnerable, its angry sensitivity to class issues, and its strongly rooted sense of place, Lehane is the author of six books featuring Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, my favorite male-female investigative duo since Hammett's Nick and Nora Charles: witty, sexy, tough.
So I'm wowed and incredibly happy to have these two endorsements from writers I admire so much.
Eventually, these blurbs will show up on the back of the book, which is due out in hardcover and e-book in July 2012, but for right now, they'll be in my editor Karyn's hands when she goes into her big in-house meeting at her publisher's next week.
The point of having the blurbs ready so early is to rouse enthusiasm for the book among her fellow editors, the sales & marketing folks, etc., so the book will get the biggest push possible from the publisher.
This is because (as probably some of you have been crushed to learn, too) really big publishers bring out so many books each season that even they don't commit lots of resources to every book. As with horse-racing, or any other gamble, they put their dollars on the likely winners. So if you've got the Little Filly That Could, you have to work extra hard to make sure she gets a fighting chance out there on the track.
That's what these blurbs will help Karyn do. We hope. Fingers crossed.
From Lorraine López, winner of the Miguel Marmol Prize and a PEN/Faulkner finalist, author of several great books including Soy la Avon Lady and Homicide Survivors Picnic:
I have been reading, loving, and teaching Lorraine's work for years now, so this blurb is a huge honor.In the tradition of P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, and Lucha Corpi, Joy Castro shows how mystery can be much more than the unraveling of crimes concealed. The Desire Projects is a riveting story of trust betrayed and the struggle toward recovery, an irresistible and compelling novel aptly set in post-Katrina New Orleans.
From Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, and Shutter Island (among others) and a writer for HBO's The Wire:
Gentle readers: what Joy Castro did next, when this blurb came in, was to go drink champagne until she was fizzy and dizzy. (And it is the beginning of a series. I drafted chapter 7 of the sequel this morning.)The Desire Projects is a terrific mystery set in post-Katrina New Orleans. But it's more than just a mystery; it's a heartfelt examination of a second America--poor but undaunted--that was swept under the rug but refuses to stay there. If this is the beginning of a series, I can't wait to see what Joy Castro does next.
In addition to being known for his work's sense of justice on behalf of the violated and vulnerable, its angry sensitivity to class issues, and its strongly rooted sense of place, Lehane is the author of six books featuring Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, my favorite male-female investigative duo since Hammett's Nick and Nora Charles: witty, sexy, tough.
So I'm wowed and incredibly happy to have these two endorsements from writers I admire so much.
Eventually, these blurbs will show up on the back of the book, which is due out in hardcover and e-book in July 2012, but for right now, they'll be in my editor Karyn's hands when she goes into her big in-house meeting at her publisher's next week.
The point of having the blurbs ready so early is to rouse enthusiasm for the book among her fellow editors, the sales & marketing folks, etc., so the book will get the biggest push possible from the publisher.
This is because (as probably some of you have been crushed to learn, too) really big publishers bring out so many books each season that even they don't commit lots of resources to every book. As with horse-racing, or any other gamble, they put their dollars on the likely winners. So if you've got the Little Filly That Could, you have to work extra hard to make sure she gets a fighting chance out there on the track.
That's what these blurbs will help Karyn do. We hope. Fingers crossed.
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Happy to Share
Readers! I'm happy to share the good news that Between Song and Story: Essays for the Twenty-first Century is now available. The collection, edited by Sheryl St. Germain and Margaret Whitford, "celebrates the contemporary essay's capacity to live between the two worlds of lyric and narrative" and "exemplifies the diverse, exuberant, and intrepid forms" that essays take now.
I'm thrilled that my piece "Grip" is included among work by writers I wildly admire: Dorothy Allison, Tom Bissell, Linda Hogan, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Jamaica Kincaid, Naomi Shihab Nye, John T. Price, John Edgar Wideman, and scads more. Joyce Carol Oates. Phillip Lopate. Debra Marquart, Dinty Moore, Michele Morano--stop me. It's just a super-awesome lineup, and I can't wait to dig in.
The editors have offered alternative tables of contents, too, by theme (travel, race & ethnicity, nature, war, etc.) and also by form, so it seems like it would be a great anthology for teaching. Hmmm . . . To read more about the book, you can go here.
Many thanks and congratulations to editors Sheryl and Margaret! ¡Felicidades!
I'm thrilled that my piece "Grip" is included among work by writers I wildly admire: Dorothy Allison, Tom Bissell, Linda Hogan, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Jamaica Kincaid, Naomi Shihab Nye, John T. Price, John Edgar Wideman, and scads more. Joyce Carol Oates. Phillip Lopate. Debra Marquart, Dinty Moore, Michele Morano--stop me. It's just a super-awesome lineup, and I can't wait to dig in.
The editors have offered alternative tables of contents, too, by theme (travel, race & ethnicity, nature, war, etc.) and also by form, so it seems like it would be a great anthology for teaching. Hmmm . . . To read more about the book, you can go here.
Many thanks and congratulations to editors Sheryl and Margaret! ¡Felicidades!
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