Recently in good news Category

I am so knocked out by the talent of my former students!

Faye Rapoport DesPres's lovely, wise essay, "Up to Nothing," appears in the Summer 2010 issue of Hamilton Stone Review.  Anyone who's ever cared for an elderly relative will resonate to the narrator's attempt to reconnect with her husband on a hiking trip--while dealing with the fact that they've left behind his mother, who doesn't want to be left. 

Faye's essay "Forty-Six," which examines the narrator's feelings about the loss of youth, also just appeared in the marvelous online journal Ascent.  Congratulations, Faye!  These must be heady days for you. 

It was my privilege to work with Faye when I taught at Pine Manor College in Boston, and I hear that Pine Manor MFA student Jim Kennedy's beautiful, beautiful essay "End of the Line" was a finalist in a contest at Creative Nonfiction and will soon be published in an issue of that journal. 

Graduate Faye Snider's lovely essay "Goldie's Gold" was accepted recently by Alimentum, and if you're a foodie and don't know about that journal, you should definitely check it out.  Hurray, Faye!  I look forward to reading "Goldie's Gold" again. 

By the way, I learned that Pine Manor is now offering fellowships and need-based scholarships, and I think that's kind of rare for a low-res program, so if you've considered pursuing an MFA and money has been an obstacle, you might want to check out their program.  I'm no longer teaching at Pine Manor, but I love the people there and think they've got a great thing going--which is obvious from the success of their graduates!

Here in the Ph.D. program at UNL, Tom Coakley, an active-duty military officer, wrote an essay, which appeared in Fourth Genre 12:1, that contends with the impossibility of describing/critiquing things that are classified.  (Most of us worry about what our mothers will think if we publish this or that.  Tom worries about being court-martialed.)  His Fourth Genre essay, "How to Speak about the Secret Desert Wars," is brilliant, and if you can lay your hands on it, it will knock you out.  It's incisive, critical, authoritative, experimental, beautifully written.  He makes art out of a hell that should never have been.

The lovely John Chávez had 3 poems in Issue 5 of Palabra.  Here's one I love:

Just North of Nowhere

There is only one heart in my body, have mercy on me.
--Franz Wright

Often the changes one yearns for,
one has to suffer.  Unless,
waiting near the undershade, the elderberry,
the aster, etc.,
     the world is close to blooming,
heart-drawn in minor notes, tuned to the open sun.

Then, how simple to assemble it all (the breaks
in the human vessel).

Like a boy gripping rain on white branches,
you will build

                     a reliquary in your chest.
Fill it with two watts of light.

Once filled, the moon will exit like a lullaby
          from your humming rib cage's hollow.
There you will find a heart,
& waiting nightly you will sing it to sleep.

I like the way it moves so fluidly among modes prophetic, imperative, even elegiac--and casual, too ("etc.").  John's vision is both tender and clear-sighted. 

Aside from publishing his own work, John is actually already in the process of editing (with Carmen Giménez Smith) a collection of Latina/o writing that explores where the field is moving now.  So ambitious!

What is wonderful is when you can feel it a genuine honor to work with your students:  when you can admire them and learn from them as well as offer what you have.  I love teaching.  It is a gift.

Gentle readers, it doesn't have the sparkle or brevity of "Paris," but I have been spackling, sanding, taping, priming, and painting since we parted. 

Little Office, as I have unimaginatively dubbed her, needed to be ready for the phone date my agent and I are having this week about the last (please, the last) changes to THE DESIRE PROJECTS.  Nutshell:  he loves it--yey!  he almost never loves anything:  he's a tough, approval-withholding agent--but the manuscript is still not, if I'm understanding correctly, sufficiently foregrounding the suspenseful parts.  I'm not sure; I'll know more after we talk.  And then it will be time to make final revisions.  He thinks I can finish by the end of my summer break and we can have it out at publishing houses by early fall.

Moreover, we are this close to signing the contract for ISLAND OF BONES, the collection of essays, and then I'll have some time to make revisions to that manuscript as well.  As soon as the ink is dry, I'll divulge all the details, including the two phenomenal writers who served as outside readers for the manuscript.  Their imprimatur is as exciting to me as the contract itself!

Anyway, that's a lot of revising coming up, and I needed smooth, clean--and turquoise, as it turns out; turquoise won the swatch contest--walls within which to write. 

Readers, I'm now intimately aware of why my smarter, better off friends hire professionals to do their house-painting.  (Have I been in here too long, or does spackling compound smell like chocolate?)

Well, the walls are smooth turquoise now, and it looks great.  I'm enrobed in turquoise.  Please forgive my absence from the blog.  The job had to be done.  Thank goodness for Little Office's littleness, and for the HH's help today.

In other news, alas, the inimitable Sonam has abandoned Lincoln, leaving us bereft, but before he departed he kindly gave me modernist Rebecca West's essay "Pounce," and all of you who find cats intriguing creatures should find it.  (I generally don't, frankly, yet I still liked the essay, which is quite a testament to something.)  It's included in The Essential Rebecca West:  Uncollected Prose, which is just out from Pearhouse Press.  West's prose is effervescent, surprising, delicious.  I've always liked her work; this collection offers a chance to read things that never made it onto the beaten path.

And here are a couple of other recommendations, books I've been chomping down since the semester ended:

•  the American Book Award winner When Living Was a Labor Camp, about California's San Joaquin Valley, by Diana García, who was born in a migrant labor camp there.  If you've read or taught with the terrific anthology Latino Boom, you've come across the title poem, but the whole collection is well worth it.  Here's an excerpt from "Valley Fever":

I was a favorite niece, the only daughter
and no virgin:  the valley grew too small.
So I pawned my first flute and typewriter
and headed for a place that had it all--
classy subtitled films, canyon-laced coast,
flamed leaves to the east and desert beyond. . . .

•  One Island, Many Voices:  Conversations with Cuban-American Writers, which includes interviews with, among others, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Carolina Hospital, and Achy Obejas.  Most writers love reading interviews with other writers; I know I'm always fascinated, always panning for gold.  This collection rewarded my eagerness. 

It was also good for me.  Since my own sympathies and views are postnationalist, I'm not naturally driven, as a reader or scholar, by imperatives of cultural nationalism, though that's how the field of literature remains chopped up, so I don't have quite the grasp of Cuban-American literature that I should for someone who teaches in the field of Latin@ lit.  This collection filled gaps for me and offered discoveries, like Dolores Prida, who now fascinates me.

•   Green Metropolis:  Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability.  The title basically says it all.  This book explains, smartly, the rationale for most of the decisions the HH and I've been (fairly inarticulately) making for the past three years.  The book is persuasive without being at all preachy, and New Yorker writer David Owen's clever prose is a joy:  clean, fluid, crisp. 

I'd been longing to read since it came out in 2009.  It was worth the wait.  I highly recommend it.  Unswayed?  You can read the opening here.

•  Lastly, I am loving the stylistic and ethical clarity of Nadine Gordimer's new collection of essays, Telling Times:  Writing and Living, 1954-2008, which just hit the shelves this summer.  PW calls the collection "comprehensive--sometimes too comprehensive," and I can see their point.  It's hefty.  Nonetheless, in the best of these pieces, Gordimer models for me what a writer is supposed to be.  Awake.  Alert.  Speaking.

Hello, hello! 

Note to readers:  This is a mostly personal post, so if you just tune in for the literary things, skip this one.  The next several will be bookish.

That said, the Handsome Husband and I are just back from Oberlin, Ohio, a tiny town with excellent little restaurants, a fine new coffeeshop--the Slow Train Café--and the marvelous vintage Apollo theater, all refurbished to its former glory with help from Oberlin alumni.  The college's architecture is eclectic and beautiful, and the town has a rich history of activist engagement with progressive and liberatory politics, from the Underground Railroad to women's rights.  Lorain, Toni Morrison's hometown, is just to the north.  If you're ever in Cleveland for the day, I recommend a quick side-trip to both towns.

All of which is just context for the fact of my heart, which is that we got to spend 5 days with Grey as he went through graduation.  Every mother waxes rhapsodic about her children, so I'll just hold my tongue and not rattle on about what a sweet, kind, well-liked, talented young man he is.  I'll just say it was wonderful to catch up with him, meet his friends, and observe him in the campus environment that has become his natural habitat these last four years.  It was a joy.  Leaving him behind was (understatement of the year) a wrench. 

However, I'm so glad to report that he has found employment--even if it's just washing dishes in an Oberlin dining hall for the summer.  A paycheck is a paycheck, and manual labor is important.   Despite the scary unemployment statistics for people in Grey's age bracket, we really didn't want to encourage the failure-to-launch syndrome by making our sofa too inviting, so we're glad it has worked out.  At summer's end, he plans to move to a very cool West-Coast city to live with friends and look for work more suited to his interests.

But, fair and tender readers, I had barely unpacked, when it was time to pack again.  Due entirely to the generosity of my birthmother, Sharon (whom you might know a little about from The Truth Book), I'm heading out for a voyage across Europe.  My brother--not Tony, the one I grew up with and who figures so largely in that abovementioned narrative, but Sharon's son--is about to marry the Italian woman he fell in love with on a study-abroad program twelve years ago.  Since then, they've been carrying on a transatlantic romance, and now it's time to make it all official.  They'll wed in a church in the tiny Umbrian hill town of San Gemini (which is too small to even show up on any of the maps I've consulted; it's near Terni, if you know the area).  It's a fortress town and very old.

Sharon decided to make an odyssey of it, so I'll be flying with her, her husband, and my sister Lisa from Chicago to Amsterdam this Wednesday, then going to Paris, then Genoa, then the Cinque Terre, then Venice, and finally to San Gemini for the nuptial festivities.  Heavens!  I'm not a person who's traveled very much as an adult--and, if I can confide something a little embarrassing, I've been jonesing for Venice since, as a child in Miami, I was taken to the Venetian Pool in Coral Gables, which I found a utopian bliss-scape.  It's like longing for Paris because you once saw an imitation of the Eiffel Tower in Vegas; not exactly Jamesian, but there you have it. 

So anyway, this is extremely exciting for me.  It's an astonishing opportunity, and I'm thrilled.

The places will be, of course, amazing, but the trip itself--the traveling, the being in train cars and hotel rooms--should be very interesting as well, particularly because I'll be rooming with my sister--my half-sister, technically--for over two weeks, and I don't know her well.  We didn't grow up together, and from what I do know, we're very different.  Very different.  In almost every way.  (Just to sketch a sense:  she's 33, single, and a bartender, whereas I'm 42, long married, and an English professor--the very recipe for staid.  I'll say no more.)  Yet half of our DNA is the same, and I've always liked her when we've spent brief periods of time together.  Two weeks of being roomies, gallivanting across the continent, should be fascinating.

Reports to come (she murmured mysteriously, tossing her red silk dress into her case).

Many thanks to Faye for pointing out the gender of all of the editorial gatekeepers of the 2010 Best American collections in this literary news I completely missed.  Father Knows Best, anyone?

Another essential gem for writers by Tayari.

Congratulations to my cool friend Naca for having her first, gorgeous book of poetry, Bird Eating Bird, nominated for a Lambda award.  I still remember reading it in manuscript and being quietly blown away--before Yusef Komunyaaka picked it for the National Poetry Series.  Good luck, Naca!  Amelia blogs about the Lammys here.

Big abrazos to Belinda Acosta, who was interviewed here on this blog, for winning the International Latino Book Award for Best First Book for Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, her debut novel.  The sequel, Sisters, Strangers, and Starting Over, is due out this July, and it's already making lists of recommended books and getting good press.  Watch for it.

To see all the winners of the International Latino Book Awards, go here.  Marjorie Agosín, whose work I have long loved, took home the award for best biography for Of Earth and Sea:  A Chilean Memoir.

Good things happening for good people!  ¡Órale!

Gentle readers, on Monday I FedExed the new and improved (and improved, and improved) manuscript of THE DESIRE PROJECTS, a literary noir novel, to my agent.  My fingers are crossed!

Here's the elevator blurb for it:

During and after the chaos of Katrina, over a thousand released sex offenders (required by Megan's Law to register their whereabouts with law enforcement) went off the grid.  Nola Céspedes*, a mouthy young cubana cub reporter for the Times-Picayune who grew up in the Desire Projects of New Orleans, gets assigned a feature story she doesn't want:  to explore the human realities behind the statistics on child molesters' rates of recidivism, their rehabilitation, their reception back into the community--just as a seven-year-old girl disappears from the French Quarter.

And then things get personal.

The blurb still sounds a little wonky to me, but you get the picture.  If you can think of ways to make it more inviting, let me know. 

When I first conceived the project, I thought it would be cool to try to blend literary writing with the suspense of a thriller and the fun conventions of chica lit.  However, no such blending occurred.  What has finally emerged is more like a collision between noir and chick lit.  A five-car pile-up.  Nola, the protagonist, just took over (with nods to Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Walter Mosley, Sara Paretsky, Kate Atkinson . . .).  We'll see.  It wants to be a beach read for smart people.  Or a smart read for beach people.  I don't know.

Many, many thanks to the good friends who read early versions of the book as it struggled to find its feet:  Sandra Scofield, Barbara Brandt, Bryn Chancellor (third one down), Grey Castro, and the Handsome Husband.  THE DESIRE PROJECTS has changed so much, you'll barely recognize it!

Speaking of Baby Greyby, we fly out tomorrow to see him graduate from Oberlin.  I'm todo excited & Mama-giddy. 

Graduation may not be the biggest achievement of his life thus far, but it is by far the biggest achievement of mine--bigger than writing books, or tenure, or anything.  Here's why.  Grey is a sweethearted, artsy, slacker guy who would much rather skateboard than study, bless his heart (as we say in the South).  On the up-side, he breathes, he lives in his body, he's kind and open and thoughtful and non-judgmental--not to mention a great songwriter.  All amazing, wonderful things.

For me, as someone who's always been academically driven and ambitious by nature (or perhaps by necessity)--and who's truly had to fight her own judgmental, impatient inclinations--this has been a tough personal challenge.  How to accept and support who Grey really is, at heart, while still equipping him responsibly for his future? 

If he ends up being able to skateboard and write songs for a living, great.  But if not, he'll need a fallback position.  It's a parent's job to think about that, however uncool or un-fun it makes us.  (And I say this even as a devoted artist.  Publishing stories in little magazines was hardly gonna pay the rent.)

Seeing him graduate from a good school at 21, debt-free, with good grades, has been a long haul, people, but he has done great, and we couldn't be prouder.

Or more relieved.  At the graduation ceremony, I may faint.

So at the tail end of this graduation season, here's to all the parents.  Respect.  Solidarity.  You've worked so hard, and you've made sacrifices no one will ever see.  A good education is probably the second-best gift you can give your children, and it's huge.

Moreover, an ethical, kind, well educated young adult is one of the best gifts you can give to our shared community.  So thank you.




*Yes, Cuban history buffs, her last name is no accident.

Lovely readers, right now, as I type, Lorraine López and the other PEN/Faulkner finalists, including winner Sherman Alexie, are being feted at a dinner at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC.  Congratulations, Lorraine, on the national success of the probing, funny, honest stories of Homicide Survivors Picnic.

Congratulations to poet Carrie Shipers, whose collection Ordinary Mourning is just out (as in yesterday) from ABZ Press.  To read three of her striking poems, go here. 

Also right now, in the USA, an estimated two and a half million women--most of whom are women of color from the global South--labor as domestic workers, making possible the labor and leisure of all those who choose to leave the care of "the most precious elements of [their] lives: their families and homes," to others.  Ai-jen Poo's essay looks at our interconnections, sketches out a feminist bill of rights for domestic workers, and calls for change:

The upside-down concentration of the world's resources and wealth in the hands of a small minority at the expense of the vast majority is in fact unsustainable for everyone. Domestic worker policy demands that we recognize and value the basic care that we all require to live and provides a model for reshaping our economy to serve our collective human needs.

Or drywall, as the case may be:

Yeah, baby.  It's looking good.  Walls.

Everything's seriously under construction right now, including the manuscript of THE DESIRE PROJECTS.  Revising most mornings before work gets started has been a lifesaver; today, I hit page 332, so there are only about 40 more pages to go.  Then I'll put down my pen and start putting in the changes electronically.  Then we shall see.

I'm psyched about the offer for ISLAND OF BONES, the essay collection, but the contract is still under negotiation, so I'll restrain myself and be discreet.  I can't wait to announce it, though.  I'm very excited.  I'm really proud of those essays.  Did I tell you that the editor of Fourth Genre nominated "Grip" for a Pushcart?  (I know, I know:  lots of things get nominated for Pushcarts.  Still, I'm excited.) 

Speaking of really proud, my hat is all the way off to emily danforth, one of our Ph.D. students here at UNL, who just got a contract (and a serious advance--I mean like amazing, I mean like way better than lots of my professional-writer friends get) from HarperCollins for her first novel. 

Can you imagine still being in grad school and having achieved that?  Damn.  In grad school, I was still figuring out which fork to use.

Tomorrow's the last day of classes, and I'll be picking up 30 papers from my women's lit students, which I'm actually pretty psyched about reading.  This evening, I meet with my four graduate teaching interns to wrap up the semester.  And my nature writing workshop is winding down, too.  Grades are due in early May. 

It's the denouement, the un-knotting. 

And then comes the reason any writer takes an academic gig:  Summer.  Peace, solitude.  The pen, the paper.

That's this character's motivation, let me tell you.   And then we'll see what gets built.

Gentle readers, the electricians left this morning.  My new office has walls, a door (with a lock), lights, and the Internet.  I'm so happy.  Photos soon. 

It awaits paint and a floor.  Oh, and furniture.  But it's standing, and I love it. 

Thanks so much to whoever nominated one of my blog posts as "Best Writing Advice" for Jane Friedman's blog at Writer's Digest.  The titles of all 20 blog posts look fascinating and useful; link to the list here.  What a nice surprise, to be in such good company.  Thank you!

If you live in Lincoln and need to buy some gifts (or spoil yourself), shop tomorrow, Saturday the 24th, at Ten Thousand Villages in the Haymarket.  Ten Thousand Villages is an amazing enterprise, period, but tomorrow, ten percent of their profits tomorrow go to Voices of Hope, a center that helps survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault.  So get your shop on and do some good.  Thanks, Ariana, for the heads-up.

I'm very excited to have received, just yesterday, an acceptance from Indiana Review of my creative nonfiction piece "Hip Joints."  It's about sexual harassment and strip mining in West Virginia in the '80s, when I was a high school senior and my boss at the factory hadn't yet heard of women's rights.  (Pre-Anita Hill, sexual harassment wasn't a term very many people anywhere knew, and it sure hadn't trickled down to rural Appalachia back when I was sixteen.)  "Hip Joints" (which are what we manufactured at the factory, but you can see the possibilities) is an ecofeminist piece that also incorporates issues of ethnicity.  I'm happy that it's going to have an audience soon.

Here at UNL, there's one week left in the semester, and it's total crazy-time.  Students are writing their final papers, and graduate students are defending their theses and dissertations and taking oral exams--which means we professors should really have cloned ourselves by now to handle it all.   Somewhat counterintuitively, I've taken to revising a chapter of THE DESIRE PROJECTS every morning before the work-day starts.  (I had been revising one chapter a week, and calling it good.)  This makes me much happier.  I can go around blithely, knowing I've paid my dues to writing first. 

In other news, my Little Sister Amara turned 16 this week, my marriage to the HH turned 15, and Grey is counting down the days until his college graduation.  Spring is always such an exciting time.  And damn, it's good not to have to wear a coat everywhere!


 

My beautiful, funny, and generous friend Lorraine López, about whom you've read on here before (multiple times), has just been catapulted into the national limelight!  Her latest book, Homicide Survivors Picnic, a collection of short fiction, has been named a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.   The other finalists are Barbara Kingsolver, Sherman Alexie, Colson Whitehead, and Lorrie Moore.   (Thanks to Tayari's blog for the heads-up.)

Always modest, Lorraine says she's still stunned and ecstatic.  It's going to be a whirlwind until March 23, when the winner is announced.  Wow!

Regarding the issue of representing latinidad, Lorraine says that she "intended to produce stories for [the colllection] that would shift the focus from the performance of ethnicity that essentializes cultural experience. . . ."  The L.A. Times includes a lengthy passage from a lovely 2-page interview, which you can access in full at BkMk's webpage for the book:

Q: Your collection has many Latino characters, and they all interact with characters from other backgrounds. Did you intend this bicultural or multicultural dimension of the book from the start, and do you think Latino writers face any special challenges in writing about Latino characters and culture for today’s varied literary audiences?

Lopez: This is a complicated question, and I thank you for asking it. For me, I did not set out to do more than explore characters beyond their cultural definition. As mentioned, I wanted to avoid that performance of identity that essentializes cultural experience. I am not interested in providing the usual themes, characters, and props that many associate with Latino literature. These do not characterize my experience as a Latina, so why should I artificially simulate such things to validate stereotypic notions? I can think of no reason to do this, except to gratify expectations of others....

I am not out to give anyone (including myself) what he or she might be expecting. In speaking to other Latino writers, I find that we similarly resist gratifying expectations that our characters perform in culturally expected ways, say, rolling tortillas, bopping around the barrio, or gathering wisdom from a sweet abuela. More and more, Latino literature is evolving away from such stereotypes, and becoming more interesting and challenging in the process.

Lorraine's also co-editing a new collection, The Other Latino, that addresses this very issue--the expected performance of Latina/o ethnicity--from multiple perspectives.  It's due out next year from University of Arizona Press. 

In the meantime, lift a glass to Lorraine! 

You probably remember Chris Anderson's breakthrough notion of the long tail, the idea that the future of retail lies in selling unique items in small quantities.  Well, one week ago today, when the snow was thick and the sky was gray (again), I received the loveliest surprise:  an email from a woman who'd been on the editorial staff at Quarterly West 15 years ago, when QW published my little flash piece, "In Theory."

Currently teaching college workshops in creative writing, she wrote:  "I have managed to always keep a copy of that issue close-by so as to teach it, but somewhere in one of my moves, I misplaced my copy."   She wondered if I had a spare I could send.

Who knew?  You see, you might think your work falls into a pool and just lies at the dark bottom of the pond like littering leaves, rotting away, but somebody somewhere might have been teaching it for 15 years!  You just gotta keep the faith.

Well, I made Sophia a pdf file of "In Theory" for her classes, and it's also now here on this website, available to all and sundry. 

Thank you, Sophia, and hurray for the long tail! 

First of all, many thanks to all y'all who've posted kind things about my leaving Pine Manor.  I will miss you, too.

Secondly, fans of Tayari Jones--friend of the blog and friend to my life--will be thrilled to know that her eagerly awaited third novel, THE SILVER GIRL, has found a home at Algonquin. 

Thirdly, Lorraine López's edited collection, An Angle of Vision:  Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots, is now available in paperback from University of Michigan.  Congratulations, Lorraine!  Full disclosure:  the title essay is by yours truly, and the book grew out of a raucous panel at the AWP a couple of years ago called "Trashy Women," which some of y'all kindly attended, thank you much.   (When over 400 people showed up, Lorraine knew she had a racehorse of a topic on her hands.)  The book includes work by Dorothy Allison, Sandra Cisneros, Joy Harjo, Bich Minh Nguyen, Karen McElmurray, Heather Sellers, and other wonderful writers, including Lorraine herself and my own UNL colleague and friend Amelia Montes.  If you've ever been struck by the weird dissonance of class friction--even if you're not a woman or a writer, and even if you didn't end up in academia or publishing--then this book will move you and make you laugh.

Lastly but not leastly--and this is strictly personal--my sweet husband James and I made an offer on a home here in Lincoln.  It's a small condominium downtown, near where we've been renting for the past 2 and a half years, and it's definitely a fixer-upper, which is why we could afford to spring for it.  We're very excited (or is that panic?); I'm not sure if the fluttery feeling is a product of my profound (post-Wabash) commitment-phobia, or due to the hideous old turquoise carpet and popcorn ceiling.  (Alas, the decor is neither retro chic nor dazzlingly of-the-moment, but more like a pathetic from-the-land-time-forgot melange.  But the location is killer.) 

We should be in it by Christmas--the closing is during exam week.   Help!  If you have advice about moving, renovating, contractors, or anything related, please post!