All posts by Leslie Pietrzyk

Interview with Julie Marie Wade

October 28, 2024Blog#CNF, #interview, #writinglifeLeslie Pietrzyk

Reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

The Mary Years is a nonfiction novella that chronicles one young woman’s quarter-century love affair with The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Part bildungsroman and part televisual ekphrasis, this is the story of Mary Richards re-seen through the eyes of Julie Marie Wade.

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?

My students tell me about writing fan fiction, how satisfying it is for them to take characters that exist in books and films and video games and create additional stories, even alternative stories, for their lives. Mistakenly, for years, I’ve thought I didn’t know anything at all about fan fiction, but the truth is, The Mary Years is a work of fan nonfiction, and I think I felt compelled to write it for similar reasons to those that inspire fan fiction: I wanted to explore how a fictional character (many, actually—a cast of fictional characters) can have as much influence over our lives as the real people who live and breathe alongside us.

Maybe we all live between real and fictional realms anyway, so this memoir, arranged in chapters that were individually published as “essays in episodes,” is my attempt at showing the ongoing straddle between my personal history and the television show that has been a touchstone for it since The Mary Tyler Moore Show first premiered on Nick at Nite in 1992. I’m not sure if the writing of this collection exemplifies any kind of courage, but I knew I had to write the book after Mary Tyler Moore, the real person who embodied the fictional character who deeply informed my real coming-of-age, passed away in early 2017. The Mary Years is nothing if not an elegy to her and for her as well.

I loved writing each essay in episodes, considering my own childhood in an insular Seattle suburb called Fauntlee Hills as an analog to Mary Richards’s Roseburg, the fictional Minnesota town where the character was from (“Fauntlee Hills Was My Roseburg: An Essay in Episodes, Prairie Schooner, 2020); exploring my first residence as an autonomous adult in Pittsburgh, the early years of wondering whether my partner Angie and I would “make it after all” in a place neither of us had ever visited before moving across the country together and starting a new life there (“Pittsburgh Was My Minneapolis: An Essay in Episodes, Tupelo Quarterly, 2018); and of course these more recent years in Miami, my life as a professor and mentor, taking on a kind of work where I might become a role model for others in the way Mary—both the person and the character—became a role model for me (“Miami is My Tipperary: An Essay in Episodes,” The Normal School, 2020). Let’s hope!

I might have had the most conspicuous fun writing “Lamonts Might Be My WJM” (Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, 2019) which explored my first real job—the one that wasn’t babysitting or teaching piano lessons or walking neighbors’ dogs—the first job where I earned a proper paycheck on a grainy blue background with those little perforated tabs you have to tear along the sides. The Mary Tyler Moore Show kindled in me a desire not only to work as part of a professional team but a desire for the friendships and camaraderie that might be forged because of working together. At seventeen, just before graduating from high school, I was hired by the (sadly now-defunct) department store Lamonts as a sales associate. Even the title sounded fancy to me! And I started meeting all these people—mostly middle-aged and older women—who had so much life experience in addition to their decades of retail experience, and most of whom were more than willing to share that experience with me. I wanted to bring my initiation into that workplace—but also into that new realm of womanhood—onto the page. I still think so often about my colleagues at Lamonts, who were really mentors, and all that I learned from them. They didn’t seem like Mary Richards, not one of them, but they shaped my life in significant ways, too. And when I finally left that job and moved onto a commissioned position selling shoes for JCPenney, I remember one of my mentors hugged me good-bye in the break room and said, knowing my deep love of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (everyone knew about that!), “We’re going to miss you, our sweet Mary girl.”

Probably the hardest part of this book to write was near the end of the essay-chapter “Miami Is My Tipperary,” the night I learned Mary Tyler Moore had died. I was teaching when it happened, which seemed fitting—I was doing the thing I love most—and my phone was filling up with voicemails and texts offering condolences from people across my life. But I didn’t see these messages until hours later. Usually, as a writer with strong commitments to memoir, I’m writing at a distance from my memories, not trying to document events so close to when they actually happened. As I was writing that part of the essay, splicing the messages I hadn’t seen yet with what we were talking about in class—ekphrasis, of all things—writing in response to various kinds of art, including television—I realized I was crying. Tears were pouring down my face as I typed. It may be the first time I have ever experienced such an immediate and intense catharsis while shaping memory into scene on the page.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

I’m actually astonished—and so grateful, beyond grateful—that Michael Martone chose this book for the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize in 2023. I don’t remember offhand how many times I circulated the book to various possible publishers—mostly memoir and nonfiction book prizes—or even what possessed me to send The Mary Years to a novella prize. It’s about 40,000 words, so it qualifies as a novella length-wise, but I wasn’t sure if novellas were restricted implicitly to fictional works. Then again, Mary Richards is a fictional character, and WJM is a fictional workplace, so certainly this is a nonfiction work that interacts in a sustained way with fiction—just the fiction of someone else’s creation!

I was astonished every time one of the individual essay-chapters found a home in a literary journal (and ultimately, they all did), but I wasn’t sure if the idiosyncratic nature of my project would set it apart from other manuscripts in an enticing way or a limiting way. As writers, we never really know, do we?

I circulated this book as a book for far less time than many of my other collections, and I’m used to waiting a long time for a project to find the right home. So I think it was all highs really, the biggest high being the fact that I wrote it, the homage I needed to write, and in the process, I discovered so much about my own history that I would never have learned without my eye poised to the lens of the MTM kaleidoscope.

Sometimes people ask memoirists, or those who work broadly in the self-referential arts, how we don’t “run out” of material. I think it’s not about the quantity of material at all but about finding new ways of looking at our lives and considering all the lenses we have available to facilitate that looking.

An ekphrastic lens is so exciting and revelatory to me that I’m actually building a multi-genre graduate seminar around this expansive concept. In “The New Ekphrasis,” I want to consider with my students some recent innovative works of contemporary ekphrasis including—but not limited to!—Ander Monson’s Predator: a Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession, Hilary Plum’s Hole Studies (literary ekphrasis), Patricia Smith’s Unshuttered, Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Till They Kill Us (aural ekphrasis), Sibbie O’Sullivan’s My Private Lennon: Explorations from a Fan Who Never Screamed.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

I’m not sure it was intended specifically as writing advice—maybe as life and writing advice—but when I was graduating from college and preparing to head to my first graduate program, one of the great mentors of my life, Tom Campbell, said this: “Let nothing be wasted on you.” Tom was my undergraduate English professor and advisor, an exemplary teacher who I still channel in my own classrooms.

I take his words to mean, simply put, use everything; learn from everything; value everything. If you love a particular television show, write about it. If you have a strange or surprising hobby you think no one would else appreciate, write about it. Whatever is important to you in your life can be shaped for a reading audience. Your reader will care if you care enough and are artful enough in translating your own experience to the page.

And in another sense, don’t let rejections and disappointments (which every person and every artist experience) stop you from pursuing what you love. I am thousands of rejections deep in my 21 years of submitting work for publication. I have lost far more contests than I have won or could ever hope to win—as is inevitable—but I work hard to learn from those rejections, to let them spur me forward rather than hold me back.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

Oh, that’s wonderful advice! I’m always surprised when writing. I look forward to being surprised. In The Mary Years, I was surprised by the small things I discovered through sustained attention. For instance, I discovered that WJM, the newsroom where Mary Richards works for all seven seasons on the show, mirrors my own name’s initials, each time I am asked to print my last name first, followed by first and middle. Also, after all those years watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show and reading biographies (and autobiographies!) about her life, I had realized the framed picture on Mary Richards’s table, the one just outside her balcony doors, was a picture of her real-life son, Richie Meeker, but it did not dawn on me until writing this book that her character’s last name Richards was most likely an homage to her son, whose given name was Richard.

How did you find the title of your book?

My book’s title—The Mary Years—comes from an idiosyncratic reference that I have used since I first became a devotee of the series as a twelve-year-old. On The Mary Tyler Moore Show, we meet Mary Richards when the character is 30 years old, and the series ends, seven seasons later, when she is 37. So all those years as I was moving through my adolescence and then through my 20s, I was anticipating my own “Mary years,” wondering what my 30s would be like—and how they would differ from Mary’s. I always talked about people, specifically women, in that age range as being “in their Mary years.”

Here’s a sweet story that also appears in the book: when I entered my own Mary years, I was a PhD student living with my long-time partner in Louisville, Kentucky, and some of our friends from my academic program conspired with Angie to surprise me with a Mary-themed birthday party. Our friend Carol hosted, and she served Brandy Alexanders as the signature cocktail—which all you MTM fans will recall is the drink Mary asks for on her job interview with Lou Grant when he insists she have a drink with him. Our friend Elijah listened to the Mary Tyler Moore theme song “Love is All Around” so many times that he learned the song by heart and then brought his band to Carol’s house to play that song as I walked through the door.

Then, when I reached the end of my own Mary years, Mary Tyler Moore passed away, and I knew it was time to write—from the other side of that milestone era—what my own journey toward and through “the Mary years” had meant to me.

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.juliemariewade.com

READ MORE ABOUT THIS PUBLISHER: https://texasreviewpress.org/submissions/

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://www.tamupress.com/book/9781680033885/the-mary-years/

READ A SELECTION FROM THIS BOOK, “PITTSBURGH WAS MY MINNEAPOLIS: An Essay in Episodes”: https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/prose/pittsburgh-was-my-minneapolis-an-essay-in-episodes-by-julie-marie-wade/

Interview with Ellen Birkett Morris

October 16, 2024Blog#authorinterview, #Fiction, #novel, #WriterslifeLeslie Pietrzyk

by Bradley Sides

Memorable characters guide much of the work of Ellen Birkett Morris. Her story collection, Lost Girls, gave us a splendid cast of female protagonists dealing with loss, grief, and acceptance in and around Kentucky. Her new novel, Beware the Tall Grass, goes even further in developing strong characters. It tells the story of the inexplicable connection between Eve Sloan, a modern mother whose young son has past life memories of war, and Thomas Boone, a young soldier in Vietnam. This is a book ripe with the truth of its characters; this is a book that successfully explores the big themes of life such as loss and love and family. As we read page after page, we want to know–have to know–how the stories of Thomas and Eve will end.

It was a pleasure to be able to talk to Morris about her writing.

Bradley Sides: Ellen, you are so good at creating and building characters. I want to start by asking you about them. As you begin a project, whether it’s a story or a longer project like Beware the Tall Grass, how do you find your characters? Do you feel like you know them well as you get started? Or do they develop as the project grows?

Ellen Birkett Morris: Thank you. I built the character Eve with the idea that I needed a character who would have the hardest time with the uncertainty and pain of her young son being traumatized by memories of war. Eve had a rough childhood and dreams of giving her son the perfect childhood, so Charlie’s challenges were a nightmare for her. I have come to believe that my job is to develop a character with specific traits and then put them in situations that test their nature in every way, forcing them to find a new way to look at the world.

One way I get to know them as I start is to give them passions (sculpture for Eve, horse for Thomas), past memories, friendships, family relations. These choices begin to come together to form the characters. The more I populate their world with specific detail the more real they become to me and readers.

Eve developed as I wrote, her emotions got deeper, and her understanding of relationships got more nuanced. It was fun to see her develop on the page. I had to take my time to let that happen. The same was true of Thomas, who went to war as a naive boy and had his values tested at every turn.

BS: With the kind of depth they have, do you ever have trouble letting them go once the story is over?

EBM: The women and girls from Lost Girls have stayed with me. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them come up again in short stories. I think I have told the stories of Eve and Thomas to completion. That said, I think of Thomas a lot. I love his character and commitment to doing the right thing.

BS: Expanding just a bit, but how did your writing process differ from creating stories for Lost Girls to creating a longer narrative with Beware the Tall Grass?

EBM: I really considered myself a short story writer when I started writing the novel. I was so used to drawing characters sharply in a small space and dropping in on their peak moments. So, I wrote Eve’s story as a short story first. I was published in Upstreet under the title “Landing Zone Albany.” I was at the Antioch Writers Workshop in Yellow Springs when my instructor Erin Flanagan suggested the story would make a good novel. I knew I needed a way to make myself comfortable with the process, which for me meant pretending I was writing something much shorter and tackling it short chapter by short chapter. I also knew I needed another POV character, so I came up with the idea of a soldier fighting in the same war that Eve’s son Charlie has disturbing memories of. Adding Thomas’s story allowed me to create a braided narrative that had echoes between each section and held more meaning and significance. I also made sure I had a narrative roadmap for each character, a step-by-step sense of places they would go either in the quest to help Charlie with his disturbing memories in Eve’s case or areas/battles in Vietnam in Thomas’s case. I won’t lie, the writing was hard work. I jokingly compare the creation of this novel to chipping away at a mountain with nail scissors.

BS: To play off construction, I’m always so impressed when I read novels that balance multiple perspectives and timelines as well as yours does. Did you write the book going back and forth with Thomas and Eve? Or did you write the stories separately and later combine them to form a cohesive narrative?

EBM: I wrote the novel alternating between the Thomas and Eve sections. I like an intuitive approach and knew that I could clean things up later if needed. The best thing this did for me was to allow for unconscious (and later, in revision, conscious) echoes in the text, repeated images, tone or mood that helped heighten the bond between the different sections for the reader. One example is a section midway through the book where Eve revels in a peaceful evening at home, while Thomas goes walking in the night and encounters deer. Both characters got a moment of grace before the drama ratcheted back up.

BS: Beware the Tall Grass explores the idea of past lives, which I find to be absolutely fascinating. When did the inspiration come?

EBM:In 2014, I was on a road trip with my husband and heard an NPR story on the University of Virginia Medical Center program that attempted to corroborate the past life stories of young children with the experiences they describe. These children talk about being in war, the Holocaust and being present during terrorism. The researchers would hear the stories and look at news accounts and records to see if they matched the details of the story the children told. A surprising number of times they did match. The idea was so big, so fascinating. The only way I had the courage to try to tell a story based on this phenomenon was to let myself off the hook when it came to explaining the unexplainable. I wrote the story in as straightforward a fashion as I could, deeply exploring each character’s experience of it and letting them draw any eventual conclusions as to what was going on. I was anchored in the telling by my desire to explore a truth we all know: the life we get often isn’t the one we expected to get. We are all tested. What matters is how we rise to the test.

BS: In what ways, if at all, do you see your books as being in conversation with one another?

EBM: I think they are both books about courage in the face of adversity and what we will do for love.

BS: Since we both graduated from the Queens MFA program, I think it’s only fitting that I ask you this question to end our time together: How did earning an MFA impact your writing career?

EBM: It reinforced lessons I had already learned about craft and provided me with a wonderful community. The most important thing it did was help me grow in confidence as a writer. One of my mentors, Steven Rinehart, called me a “prose stylist.” Susan Perabo said she believed the truth of what was happening in a short story I shared with class. David Payne has been a great supporter of my work post-MFA. That has been an enormous gift as I have found my way as a writer.

***

Bradley Sides is the author of two short story collections, Those Fantastic Lives and Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood, and the upcoming novella, The Volcano Keeper, which will be out from Regal House in the fall of 2026. His fiction has been featured on LeVar Burton Reads. He lives in Madison, Alabama, with his wife. On most days, he can be found teaching writing and literature at Calhoun Community College. For more, visit www.bradley-sides.com.

Read more about Ellen Birkett Morris: https://www.ellenbirkettmorris.com/

Interview with Jody Hobbs Hesler

September 17, 2024All Journal Content, Blog, Fiction#authorinterview, #Fiction, #novel, #writinglifeLeslie Pietrzyk

Without You Here by Jody Hobbs Hesler

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

When Noreen is eight years old, her beloved aunt Nonie dies from suicide. This loss, compounded by the family’s fears that Noreen will follow her aunt’s troubled path, reverberates through her life, planting doubts about her own judgment and landing her in the novel’s present day. The same age now as her aunt was when she died, Noreen is a young mother stuck in an increasingly precarious marriage whose imminent crisis will force her to choose between allowing history to repeat itself or setting a new course. (More details below!)

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

Both Noreen and her aunt Nonie act as point-of-view characters. Of the two, Nonie arrived in my mind more fully formed. She’s a deeply complicated person who struggles with self-worth and mental illness, but I enjoyed every moment of bringing her to the page. I loved her whimsy, her close-to-the-bone vulnerability, and her big, beautiful heart.

Noreen’s character demanded more from me. The sweep of the novel’s timeline encompasses a much broader swath of Noreen’s life than Nonie’s, following her from eight to twenty-seven years old. Rendering her character consistently, but with believable growth across decades, was tricky. Sometimes I resorted to writing letters to her in my journal, posing questions about her personality and motivations. Asking the questions implied answers could exist, so the rhetorical exercise nearly always yielded them.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

By the time the world started opening up again after pandemic lockdown, I had two books ready to shop around—my story collection What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better and Without You Here. I’m a careful vs. high-volume submitter, so I curated my way through lists of agents before turning to small presses and curating my way through them, over months and months. Without You Here came awfully close to acceptance at a different publisher in spring of 2021. That rejection after a particularly close call, punched me in my hopes. I felt like I’d already queried the universe, so where was I meant to turn now?

In a wacky turn of events, Cornerstone Press accepted my first book, the story collection What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better, in September of 2021, then that December, Flexible Press accepted Without You Here. Going from zero books to two within three months after achingly long years of near misses, new projects, rewrites, and busts, knocked me sideways—in the best possible way. For a long while, it felt like a few hamsters were galloping on their wheels in my head, stopping short every now and then to say to each other, “Two books? Two?” before hopping on again. And both presses have been truly lovely to work with.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

I have a couple. In a writing conference workshop, someone asked Tim O’Brien about how to avoid sentimentality, and he said, “Don’t worry about sentiment. Worry about fraudulence.” Which I love, because a lot of writers favor action over poignancy or skew in the opposite direction by overtelling emotional reactions. So don’t avoid feeling, embrace it. Show its ugly neediness or extravagant beauty with precision and honesty.

Another favorite comes from Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners: “It’s always wrong of course to say that you can’t do this or you can’t do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.” Which is something I tell students and fellow writers when they’re trying something wild and new. Yes, it could work—Don’t let anyone tell you something’s impossible just because it hasn’t been done—but don’t expect it to be easy.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

The final (hard-won) draft of this book follows a nonlinear structure. I knew from early on that maintaining the pressure of a past event over the course of twenty years of Noreen’s life would require something different structurally, but I had no idea what. Jane Alison’s craft book Meander, Spiral, Explode, which explores a host of nontraditional plot shapes, assured me that an asynchronous timeline could work, and my adult children helped input chapter descriptions into a spreadsheet then organized them into a potentially functional sequence. I wasn’t sure until I’d finally fit all the pieces together that this spiraling timeline could achieve what I’d wanted it to; realizing that it did was a happy surprise.

Along the way there were plenty of other surprises. Nonie and Noreen are bigger risk takers than I am, so I had to create misadventures for them that I would never have joined. I was always surprised, and relieved, when those episodes rang true. It was also interesting and surprising when snippets of my own life experience showed up in a scene here or there, disguised completely as belonging to the characters in the book.

How did you find the title of your book?

For the longest time the title was Little Angel, which is Nonie’s nickname for her niece, and that title worked for me because it showed their fondness for each other and the depth of their affection despite the obstacles in their story. But it also accidentally made me think of those Hallmark Precious Moments angel figurines, which, pardon to anyone who likes those, but they strike me as cutesy and saccharine. This isn’t a cute story, so I didn’t want anyone making the same association.

A late-stage revision generated a scene where Nonie says to Noreen, “Without you here, I’d think this was someone else’s family,” and that line resonated right away. The whole novel is about a broken connection, about the absence that Nonie leaves behind. Almost as soon as I wrote the line, I knew I’d found the title.

****

Interview with David Ebenbach

August 19, 2024Blog#authorinterview, #Fiction, #writinglifeLeslie Pietrzyk

reprinted with permission from Work in Progress

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

A loner teen accidentally unlocks a social life with his sense of humor—but can he unlock meaningful happiness that way, too, or will he first have to face and understand himself?

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

The book is told from the point of view of Jacob—that loner teen from the elevator pitch—and I really enjoyed spending time with him. He’s based (very loosely) on a teenaged me (and the book is set back in the late 80s, when I was a teenager), and so it was like hanging out with a version of my younger self, getting to observe all of the hopeful foolishness and chaotic earnestness—but from a semi-safe distance this time around.

His friends were harder to write, because of the particular nuance I was trying to capture: that these characters could be perfectly great people, and yet still struggle to supply whatever it was that Jacob ultimately needed. In that way, folks can be disappointing without actually being at fault.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

Well, the lowest low was when my agent told me that the book wasn’t to his taste and didn’t feel like he was the right person to submit it to presses. Yeah—that was a low point. He said it nicely, though—he’s still my agent—and he told me it was okay if I wanted to take it out to presses myself. He’s not a possessive guy. And so I did take it out myself, and luckily found people who connected with the book more than my agent did.

In particular, Regal House Publishing got excited. So one big high was them sending the contract, and me signing it. After that, there were the usual rounds of editing and proofreading and finalizing a cover and so on, all of which were smooth. And then, finally—I started working on this book back in 2016—Regal House sent me a physical copy of the book. That’s a very high point right there. As Salman Rushdie writes in his excellent new memoir, Knife, “the best moment of the whole process of book publication is this one, the moment when you hold your printed book in your hand for the first time, and you feel its reality, its life.”

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Don’t write what other people want you to write; write what you have to write.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

This is such an interesting question, and a hard one for me to answer. In a certain sense, everything surprises me when I write a book—I never know how it’s going to play out before I get to the page. Or at least I never know that I know. Because, in another sense, nothing about the process surprises me. In fact, I typically write not toward surprise but instead toward whatever is most emotionally difficult for me to get into. The hard stuff that’s already there and that maybe I’m somewhat aware of, the way that you’re aware of shadows in the room, but that I haven’t been willing to look at directly. And so, a lot of the time my writing process is more about uncovering than about discovering. Maybe the surprise, each time, is that I’m able to go there—and come back out unharmed.

How did you find the title of your book?

Coming up with Possible Happiness, the title of this book, was a process. Oy. For a long time I called it Fern Rock, after the Philadelphia Broad Street Subway stop—but that made it sound like the novel was happening in some rural paradise instead of in one of the grittiest cities in America. So I lost faith in that option and just called the book “that high school novel” for a long time. It remained “that high school novel” through failed experiments with titles like Where Do the Children Go (based on a song from the time), Subway-Surface (based on public transportation), and We’re Getting There (the actual, I’m-not-making-it-up slogan of SEPTA, Philly’s public transportation organization, for many years). None of it really suited this particular high school novel.

And then I thought about the scene where protagonist Jacob goes into a kind of occult shop on South Street where all of the purported potions have anti-lawsuit hedges in their names like “so-called” or “alleged,” and he sees something called Possible Happiness Syrup. I thought: that’s what my guy needs. He needs a possible happiness. He needs to stop fighting for some generic kind of happiness that works for everyone else or some magical kind of happiness that only works in the movies. He needs to turn his effort toward getting a real happiness, one that’s possible for him.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?

Well, the main character is a teenager, and not so great in the kitchen, so he’s not the kind of person who produces recipes. When he’s home alone, his single mother working yet another double-shift, he just heats up some frozen mac’n’cheese. So maybe that could make for a good book club treat? Though, if you want to be true to the time period (late 80s), you’ll have to find the Stouffer’s frozen mac that comes in a foil tray, and you’ll have to heat it up in a conventional oven. It takes a while, but it’s worth it.

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://www.davidebenbach.com/

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://regal-house-publishing.mybigcommerce.com/possible-happiness/

Interview with Maribeth Fischer

August 12, 2024Blog#authorinterview, #novel, #WriterslifeLeslie Pietrzyk

Reprinted with permission from Work in Progress

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

Ten years before A Season of Perfect Happiness begins, Claire had a life she loved: She lived in a beautiful beach town, was close to her family, had great friends, and was married to her high school sweetheart. When a tragedy upends it all, she understands that her only chance to have “a normal life” is to start over in a new town. Now, after nearly a decade in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin, she’s finally ready to find love, even happiness. But what of her past does she owe her new friends or the man with whom she falls in love? This is the question at the heart of the novel: What is our most authentic self? The one we try to hide or the one we strive each day to be?

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

I loved writing Annabelle, the ex-wife of the man Claire falls in love with, and Claire’s closest friend. Right there, you have a complicated, tangled relationship. In an early draft, a reader told me she didn’t find it believable that an ex would get so friendly with the new woman. But I’d grown up in a family where my dad and stepfather became close friends, and I knew it was possible. I loved the challenge of making Annabelle and Claire’s friendship believable. Annabelle was fun too because she herself is fun, and funny, smart and generous. But she is also damaged and insecure and so ends up causing enormous damage to the people she loves. So far readers have loved and hated her all at once, which thrills me!

The most difficult character was Claire’s former best friend, Kelly, who didn’t want Claire in her life after the tragedy (which was connected to Kelly). I didn’t always understand why Kelly would be so unforgiving and I had to work hard to figure her out…

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

The highs

· Getting the first email from my editor at Dutton, which began, “welcome home.” Dutton had published my first book 20 years earlier. It felt like a homecoming.

· Seeing the cover for the first time,

· My dad, who was the first one to read the galley, calling in tears to tell me he’d finished it in two days—and couldn’t stop thinking about it.

· A similar call from my older brother and my mom

· Seven months before the release date, having the event coordinator at my local library (Lewes Public Library) and the owner of my local independent bookstore (Browseabout Books) telling my publicist that they wanted to host a launch party for me. Arrangements were made and the event was ready for RSVP’s in a less than an hour. I felt so lucky and grateful to live in the community I do.

The lows

· Redoing a major piece of the plot—and having to do it in ten days. So, basically rewriting the novel in little more than a week. I didn’t, sleep, eat, bathe! But also in this, my husband, when I said, “I can’t do this. It’s not possible,” looked at me and responded, “What do you mean? This is what you do, Maribeth. This is who you are. Of course you can do it.” His saying that, his unequivocable belief in me? That’s another high.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Write big and messy; write way more than you’ll ever need and then edit. Along with this is my favorite quote, by Elie Wisel. “There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages, which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don’t see them.”

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

Near the end of A Season of Perfect Happiness a minor character suddenly sort of stepped out of the pages and came alive in a way that allowed me to see a whole other aspect of him. I didn’t need him to do this 40 pages from the end of the book, but the novel is so much better because he did.

How do you approach revision?

I love revision. It’s part of my “write big and messy.” I meet with poet and novelist, Anne Colwell every week to review our writing (and we’ve been doing this for twenty years) and every place she says, “I could stay here awhile,” meaning, “I want more,” I dive in and see how far I can take the scene she’s questioning or the backstory or the thoughts she wants my character to consider. I write into the story as long and as deeply as I can. I have never not discovered something important that I needed to know in doing this.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

Alas, no…but the book mostly takes place in Wisconsin, so there’s always bratwurst…

****

MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://www.maribethfischer.com/

ORDER A COPY OF THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://browseaboutbooks.com/book/9780593474679

Interview with Merrill Oliver Douglas by Mary Beth Hines

August 6, 2024Blog#Poetry, #Writerslife, AuthorInterviewLeslie Pietrzyk

Merrill Oliver Douglas has kept a journal since the 11^th grade, and her poetry reflects the careful and compassionate attention she’s paid to the world for decades. In her new collection, Persephone Heads for the Gate, winner of the 2022 Gerald Cable Book Award, Douglas resurrects people and places past, interrogates the present, and peers with both curiosity and apprehension into the future. When I spoke with her by phone recently, she had just come off a day of kayaking with friends. And indeed, kayaking and friends show up in the collection along with trains and planes, God, love, New York City, mortality, marshmallows, and more.

Tell me about your journey as a poet. After reading Persephone Heads for the Gate (Silverfish Review Press, 2024), and your chapbook Parking Meters into Mermaids (Finishing Line Press, 2020), I admire how skillfully you bring a lifetime of experience to bear on your poems. How long you have been writing poetry?

I started writing verses in the second grade. They rhymed and scanned because that kind of thing was in the air back then—popular songs and commercials. I picked up on rhythm and musicality early.

I always figured I would be a writer, though I assumed I’d write novels. At some point, I realized I didn’t have the concentration or maybe the knowledge of life you need to create real characters and full stories, so I focused on poetry.

In high school, a teacher told me to go home and write sonnets because that was good practice. I did, and found it was exciting—the way the form forces you not to accept the first thing you write. You must come up with new words or change how you are saying things. That’s where I started gaining a sense of craft.

I kept at it through college. I went to Sarah Lawrence which had a great creative writing program. I took classes and was convinced I was going to be a poet with a capital P.

However, as happens with many of us, competing events took over. I had a child, and held a job that became more and more demanding, so I didn’t write much during those years. When my son left home, and I had more time, I started again.

You are a master of time travel in this collection. Your speakers and narrators observe places, people, events, and objects with a keen eye to past, present, and future. In a way, Time itself is a character. Is that something you did purposefully?

Thank you for that insight! That never occurred to me. I couldn’t have come up with it myself—Time as an important theme. The past is a rich natural resource for most writers. We all have so many stories. It may be a factor that I have kept a journal since the 11^th grade. I have volumes of close observations recorded throughout my life which give me access to memories I might otherwise have lost.

How did you arrive at the book’s structure? Many poets struggle with organizing a collection.

I consulted some of the same books and resources many poets do, though I found much of the advice to be contradictory, sometimes even within the same essay!

I did try one recommended system. First, I weeded out the weakest poems. With the remaining poems, I jotted down major themes and arranged them to speak to each other. I also thought about the physical shapes of the poems, things like putting shorter poems next to longer ones to vary the reading experience.

My poetry workshop group, the Grapevine Poets, with whom I meet twice a month, held a manuscript party once I had a draft. They provided helpful feedback. For instance, they advised that poems about the physical body be spread throughout the collection rather than located together. Still, much of that feedback was also contradictory so I had to go back and figure it out myself.

Ultimately, there’s no magic formula. A lot of it comes down to trusting your gut.

Can you talk about the long poems in Section II? Located in the center of the collection, in some ways they seem its very heart. To start, talk about “Where I Live.” That poem deals with place, place over time, and place from various perspectives— something woven throughout that comes to a crescendo there. What prompted you to write it? Did you write all six parts all around the same time?

That poem began in 2019 in an online Fine Arts Work Center workshop with Ed Skoog. It was a workshop on writing a long poem which is way out of my comfort zone. I discovered in this workshop, that if I was going to write a long poem, I’d have to do it in a series of shorter sections that would speak to each other.

I wrote four of the six sections in the workshop. Ed liked three but advised me to drop one and to write a new one, or to find an old poem on a similar theme and rework it to fit. I ended up taking two preexisting poems that were also on the theme of place, and home, and sense of home shifting, and I fit them in. But I also felt devoted to the section he saw as weak. I improved it, and it’s now the poem’s last section.

“Body Songs” in Section II deals with a speaker’s body from childhood to young adulthood. That exploration of physicality (expanded to include birth, aging, illness, death) is evident throughout the book. Several poems such as “Prepping for the Colonoscopy,” “It’s Not Like I Need it Anymore,” “Thirst,” and “Another Poem about Menstruation,” speak truth about the body, especially the female body, with a wry sense of humor, all while examining existential concerns. Can you choose a body poem and tell me about writing it, what it means to you, and what you hope readers will take away from it?

I’ll talk about “Prepping for the Colonoscopy.” The “bodyness” of this poem is not about the colonoscopy itself but about the yuckiness of the liquid you have to drink in order to clear out your system. I literally had to put drops on my tongue and fling them back one at a time to get it down.

From there, it became a meditation on living in the moment. I began thinking about how we’re always thinking about the future. All the things we do when we’re counting: How many hours till we get where we’re going? How many more days until vacation? How many steps to the top of the hill? How many years till I can retire? There’s all this concentration on the agony of longing for the future, and I began thinking that one way to not worry about the future thing is to concentrate on the thing you must do this minute, no matter how distasteful. Maybe this is a mind-versus-body poem.

Because Persephone won an award (the 2022 Gerald Cable Book Award), I believe readers would like to learn about its journey from submission to selection to publication. Can you tell us how this worked? And how you chose the gorgeous cover art?

I sent the manuscript to 14 contests or open readings. I received five rejections before I learned of the award. I then withdrew it from the remaining eight places.

I submitted it for the contest in 2022 and got the good news in June 2023. That was a faster submit-to-acceptance timeframe than my chapbook had.

Upon selection, I worked on all the business things associated with publishing such as signing contracts. I am grateful to Rodger Moody who runs Silverfish Review Press as he consulted with me on every aspect of the book. He takes pride in what he publishes. He’s taken an active role in publicizing the book too. He sends it out for review, sends publicity emails and helps me approach people about readings. I’m still in the midst of that.

He published the manuscript as it was, without any editing, though he said he sometimes does make suggestions. He also sent me the previous four winners’ books. That was generous and it gave me confidence in the final product. I liked the work of the poets Rodger had chosen and the books were beautiful, so I knew I was with a good publisher.

The story of the cover art is a fun and gratifying one. I didn’t have any idea of how to find something appropriate. My son did the artwork for my chapbook but he’s an illustrator and his style didn’t fit this book. Rodger and I went back and forth a bit before finding the right piece. When I saw a childhood friend’s artwork on her Facebook page (Robbyn Zimmerman Tilleman), I thought it might be suitable and Rodger agreed. We chose a piece, and I asked Robbyn, whom I hadn’t seen since the 1970’s, if we could use it. Happily, she said yes.

Some of my favorite poems are:

“Thirst” because it includes all you do so well. It travels through time, and deals with the body over time, and place over time. It captures the relationship of women to each other, women to children. It’s filled with color, taste, and texture, which serve as springboards to epiphany. And genuine emotion is at its core.
“High” because it’s short, compressed, and highlights the humor that’s an integral part of the collection.
“As if We Could Step Through Someone Else’s Dream” because its range and perspective is ambitious. It highlights the speaker’s desire, and ability, to see the world through others’ eyes, to look at herself from outside herself. It also weaves in art and pop culture.

Can you choose one and talk about your impetus and process for writing it?

I’ll talk about “Thirst.” This is another poem that came out of a Fine Arts Work Center workshop. This one was with Erin Adair-Hodges. The prompt was to take a line from a recent draft that hadn’t worked out and use it in something else.

The line I chose appears in the poem’s second part. I formed the rest of the poem around this idea, this awareness that our bodies age and change, yet in our minds we always feel the same age. My aunt, who was failing and in the hospital at that time, became the poem’s focus. I wanted to convey how it’s both tragic and absurd to be a consciousness in a mortal body. You are yourself, yet your body is breaking down.

The poem’s closing section was sparked by childhood home movies of me, my cousins, our families and neighbors at a hotel in the Catskills. There was a little swimming pool, and the parents were all in their twenties and thirties. They are all gone now, though when I wrote this, my mother and aunt were still alive.

As I prepared for this interview, I realized that some of Persephone’s other poems also came out Adair-Hodges’ workshop, including the title poem, “Persephone Heads for the Gate.” That prompt was to put someone from myth or folklore into a modern setting. I chose an airport because when I’m traveling by myself, it’s one of the times I feel most myself, independent in the world.

Do you have any last thoughts to share, or any advice to give poets aspiring to put a collection together?

Read a lot of poetry. And write good poems! I think of poems like soup. It’s important to let them simmer. Dashing things down and free associating can be a good start, but you need to revisit the draft later, and try different things. Get it to surprise you and do more work than a first draft does. I also want to thank South 85 for giving us this opportunity to introduce Persephone Heads for the Gate to their readers, and for publishing two of the poems that appear in the collection!

ABOUT

Merrill Oliver Douglas’s first full length collection, Persephone Heads For the Gate, won the 2022 Gerald Cable Book Award from Silverfish Review Press. She is also the author of the poetry chapbook Parking Meters into Mermaids (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Baltimore Review, Barrow Street, South 85 Journal, Tar River Poetry, Stone Canoe, Little Patuxent Review andWhale Road Review,among others. She lives near Binghamton, New York.

Mary Beth Hines is a poet, writer, and reviewer. Kelsay Books published her debut poetry collection, Winter at a Summer House in 2021. Her chapbook, After Making Love, was a finalist in Fool for Poetry’s 2023 International Chapbook Competition. Her work appears, or will soon appear, in Slant, Tar River, The Inflectionist Review, Valparaiso and elsewhere. Visit her at www.marybethhines.com

MORE INFORMATION:

Silverfish Review Press: https://silverfishreviewpress.com

Direct link to order the book: https://silverfishreviewpress.com/2022-gcba-winner-1

Merrill Oliver Douglas: https://www.facebook.com/merrill.o.douglas/

Robbyn Tilleman (cover artist): https://www.instagram.com/tillemanart/

Mary Beth Hines: www.marybethhines.com

Interview with Andrew Bertaina

July 15, 2024Blog#Writerslife, creativewriting, essays, Interviews, writingLeslie Pietrzyk

Reprinted with permission from www.workinprogressinprogress.com

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

It’s a bit of a roundabout memoir in essays. The essays take place over about eight years of my life when I went through a lot of upheaval. Elevator pitch, it’s a mid-life crisis novel about parenting, divorce, identity and faith or lack thereof.

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?

I had the most fun writing my essay “On Trains.” [See below for link.] I think it was the first essay where I hit on the idea of just riffing on a subject matter. Thus, it’s about wedding trains, how Einstein used trains to prove his special theory of relativity, a guide to trying to make love on a train etc, all mixed with intersections with trains from my own life. It felt very freeing. At the same time, it was a kind of challenge to scour my memories for train related content.

As for the hardest, I’d probably say the essay “On Baths.” I was closing in on the nadir of my mid-life crisis, deeply floundering, and I think that essay deals directly with the beginning of that fallout. I honestly don’t like to say any essay is too hard to write. It feels disingenuous when I’ve written the damn thing. Technically then, I’d say the essay “A Field of White,” because I had to find an internal structure to make it work. Otherwise, it was just too scattered. I like digressions; they mirror thought. However, internal structure is still useful, and I borrowed my structural device from John McPhee’s essay, “The Search for Marvin Gardens.” In my essay, the mooring point is a tea party I’m having with my three-year-old and her stuffed bear.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

Risking honesty, I wound up as notable in Best American Essays three out of the last four years. I know notable isn’t in the book, but I thought it might mean people would be clamoring for a collection. As always, my inbox was empty, so I had to figure out how I wanted to proceed.

My editor at Autofocus, Michael Wheaton, is an absolute gem, and he worked with me on finding a cohesive collection of essays. He was generous with his time and editing, and I’m deeply thankful to have worked with him. It ended up all right, but, as always in writing, I discovered the appetite for reading just isn’t that wide. But I have a beautiful book and a great set of essays that I’m proud of. They hold up.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

I don’t own a single craft book volitionally. However, I think consistent writing is useful. Once you have a basic set of skills, it’s getting your butt in the chair. I often don’t, but I tend to feel better when I do. I tell my students who are struggling with it to just set a timer and do thirty minutes a day. That’s it. You can up it to four hours or whatever, but you should start small and build up. My paraphrase is, editing is writing, but you can’t edit nothing.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I think I was surprised, mostly on a reread, with how much I was mentally suffering during the writing of these essays. In a way, it’s almost painful to go back and see so much wild energy and confusion without much purpose. I think it certainly captures something, and it’s not as though I have things figured it out now, but I was surprised at the kind of desperation I was giving off during those years, this mad desire to figure out life.

How did you find the title of your book?

The title of my book came to me in a dream. Okay. That’s a lie. But I like that lie. The title just seemed right. I meditate a bit. I don’t think the self is particularly real, and I think it’s even less solid for some of us, myself included. I have a hard time projecting myself into the future or feeling connected to my past. I have an essay that talks about it. Also, I think about death a bit. That life is temporary can be terrifying or beautiful. Choose wisely.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

I have an essay called “Eating Animals” in the book, but it includes several things that no reader would actually want to cook, including one’s spouse.

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://andrewbertaina.com/

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://www.autofocuslit.com/store/p/the-body-is-a?fbclid=IwAR0xmIb08R6M7sXuZAAeNVv8P9rOpO5nR4sLpVtUpSZcyUy3v2QyF_KiZQ0_aem_Afb-FrxmnqNxojEQPW9ZOlCiA2xorxK8ktsNmdS3FV4yg7FMRBCbueRuRTeTxq-6oCTAJHaNvutOLKDJk0TjjZYr

LINK TO AN ESSAY FROM THIS BOOK, “On Trains”: https://greenmountainsreview.com/on-trains/

We’re Eager to Read Your Work!

June 25, 2024Blogcreativewriting, South 85 JournalLeslie Pietrzyk

Interview with poet Frederick Joseph, author of WE ALIVE, BELOVED

June 17, 2024Blog#Writerslife, creativewritingLeslie Pietrzyk

[reprinted with permission from Work-in-Progress, a literary blog: www.workinprogressinprogress.com]

We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about your work in 2-3 sentences?

I consider myself a storyteller above all else, weaving tales of resilience and hope from the heart of Yonkers to the shelves of the world. My words live across genres, from poetry’s intimate embrace in “We Alive, Beloved” to the calls for justice and understanding in “Patriarchy Blues” and “The Black Friend.” Each sentence I write is meant to help us all become a bit freer, whether that’s in the body, mind, or soul.

Which poem/s did you most enjoy writing? Why? And, which poem/s gave you the most trouble, and why?

I most enjoyed writing many of the poems in “We Alive, Beloved” because each one allowed me to explore different facets of the Black experience and celebrate resilience, joy, and love. However, the poem that gave me the most trouble was “The Odyssey.” This poem is very personal, reflecting on a Black life from birth onward. It attempts to be speculative while also playing on some of the prose found in Homer’s “Odyssey” and other epic poems. Balancing these elements and doing justice to such a profound subject made it a challenging piece to write.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

The journey of bringing “We Alive, Beloved” to life has been filled with highs and lows. One of the lows is that, as I write this, the collection is delayed a week due to printing logistics. Additionally, getting more people to engage with poetry, especially those who are more familiar with my essays and fiction, has been a mountain to climb. Still, the joy of seeing my poetic expressions take shape and the anticipation of sharing these deeply personal pieces with the world.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

As a writer, the advice I can offer is to embrace the power of your authentic voice. Write from the depths of your soul, unfiltered and unapologetic. Authenticity resonates; it has the power to move mountains and touch hearts. Don’t shy away from the raw, the real, and the vulnerable. Let your words reflect the truth of your experiences, the richness of your heritage, and the unique perspective only you can bring.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

What surprised me, deeply and profoundly, was how much certain moments from my past still sit with me. Writing this book unearthed memories long buried, reminding me that our past is never truly behind us; it sits in the marrow of who we are and what we create.

What’s something about your book that you want readers to know?

I want readers to know that I cried after finishing most of the poems in the collection. Each verse is a reflection of our shared struggles, our triumphs, and the silent battles fought in the depths of our souls. Those tears weren’t just mine; they belong to the history, the present, and the future of a people who continue to rise.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?

I love that question! This book is so tied to my grandmother that I would have to say the book reads best with a slice of sweet potato pie. Which was her specialty.

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.frederickjoseph.com

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR STACK: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/We-Alive-Beloved/Frederick-Joseph/9781955905640