Salvage: Rescue, Recover, Reclaim

"Antique Junk" (photo copyright by Dory Adams)

I’m deep into the mess that is my novel-in-progress, work which had been temporarily shelved more times than I care to remember. I’d fallen into a habit of working on it in fits and starts, waiting for larger blocks of writing time to immerse myself more fully in the writing. Guess what – it will never get finished that way. I finally realized that I have to make the time now, even if it’s only a few minutes each day.

Thanks to the help of Scrivener, I’m pulling together all the bits and pieces existent outside the written chapters: notebooks filled with details for scenes and chapters, character sketches, settings, timelines, lists of changes to be made, notes on structure and POV; index cards with research notes; file folders stuffed with newspaper clippings, post-it notes and scraps of paper; maps and photographs. This has allowed me to see the threads and shape of the story better, to see what is left to be done and not feel so overwhelmed by it all. It became clear to me as I worked with these scattered pieces that even during those times I’d claimed the novel was shelved, it never truly was – it was always with me, tugging at me to come back and finish the story.

It’s likely my posts here will be shorter in the coming months, and the focus will probably be geared more toward the writing process. This week, I’m sharing some interesting pieces I stumbled onto from around the web:

• Cynthia Newberry Martin has a series of posts at her blog “Catching Days” on Jennifer Egan’s book, A Visit From The Goon Squad, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Cynthia’s post “Dear LA Times: This is a photograph of Jennifer Egan” takes the newspaper to task for running a photograph of Jonathan Franzen (who did not win this award) instead of a photo of Egan in their article. Additional posts explaining the photo choice can be found at LA Times’ blogs Jacket Copy and Readers’ Representative Journal.

• One of my favorite books of all time is Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Back when I was teaching, I always managed to work at least one of his stories or essays into the syllabus. Here’s a link to a video of a short interview with O’Brien by Jeffrey Brown at PBS.

• Ira Glass of NPR’s “This American Life” gives lots of good advice in a four-part series on YouTube: “Ira Glass on Storytelling”

• The New York Times announces its digital subscription plan which will go into effect at the end of March.

Going Off the Grid

(photo copyright by Dory Adams)

I’m going off the grid for the month of December to stretch out the holidays. During that time, I’m looking forward to working my way through my immense TBR (to be read) stack of books – or at least dwindling its height. In This Light will be back in January, ready to start off the New Year refreshed and re-energized. Until then, here are some links to enjoy:

• I’ve just finished Franzen’s Freedom and don’t have much to add to what’s already been said about it. It’s an ambitious book but it fell short of the mark, and the awkward device of incorporating an autobiography by one of the main characters didn’t work for me. I liked The Corrections better, and it was due to enjoying that book that I was eager to read Freedom. Maybe I was expecting too much given all the publicity and rave reviews, and I’m certain it would not have received the same coverage had it been written by a female author. Much has been said about gender bias in publishing, including this essay in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by Tawni O’Dell, who was an Oprah pick for her novel Back Roads. You can also read an interview I did with O’Dell in Word Riot (originally published in 2005 in Paper Street, titled “Tawni O’Dell: The Influence of Landscape and the Journey Home”).

• I’m now about midway through Keith Richards’ Life. Sounds of Sticky Fingers and Let It Bleed fill the house to set the mood, triggering my own memories and lots of untapped writing material. If I could relive any decade, it would be the ‘70s. I’ve enjoyed many of the interviews Richards has given recently to promote his book, and was particularly interested in one about how rhythm and sound factored into the edits of the book when Richards had coauthor James Fox read the entire book aloud to him. Richards told the story to Fox, a journalist who gets full credit as coauthor and clearly knew how to prod Richards to capture those tales.

• As inspiration in the mornings, I treat myself by listening to podcasts of writer interviews. After my morning writing is finished, I listen to a fifteen minute segment as I wolf down breakfast before rushing off to my day job. Particularly enjoyable is Shelagh Shapiro’s radio show “Write the Book” which airs at WOMM-LP in Burlington, Vermont. I know Shelagh from the MFA program at Vermont College, having met her there when I was a graduate assistant and she was entering the program. Shelagh recently contributed an essay in the series “What It’s Like Living Here” at Doug Glover’s Numero Cinq blog. Doug was one of my workshop teachers at VC, and I enjoyed this interview he did with Shelagh at ‘Write the Book” in July 2010 about his book The Enamoured Knight.

• Hot Metal Bridge, the literary magazine published online at the University of Pittsburgh, issued the podcast “A Dialogue with Paris Review Editor Lorin Stein” last month. The introduction is by Chuck Kinder, and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette book review editor Bob Hoover asks some questions at the end of Stein’s talk. Stein was the editor for Kinder’s novel Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale when it was originally published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Honeymooners was re-issued last fall by Carnegie Mellon University Press as part of their 2009 Classic Contemporary Series. The CMU Press edition includes “The Lost Chapters” and “The Lost Love Letters” which were cut from the original mammoth manuscript (along with the hundreds of other pages Kinder jokes about in the Hot Metal Bridge podcast mentioned above) and a new introduction by Jay McInerney. You can read more about Chuck Kinder and Diane Cecily’s long friendship with Raymond Carver here. I thoroughly enjoyed rereading this new edition of Honeymooner after catching Chuck’s reading last fall at The New Yinzer Reading Series, which was one of the best readings I’ve heard him give. I’d forgotten how wonderful and funny this book is, and I loved seeing those lost letters and chapters.

• The new issue of Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine is due out in December and includes my short-short fiction piece, “Red-winged Blackbirds at 7:35.”