Voracia: Goddess of Words

Pittsburgh in Words: Essays in Honor of the City's 250th Anniversary

2011-03-13T09:15:00.000-07:00

I'm originally from Pennsylvania (the South Central portion, near the Maryland border... not Pittsburgh, although my parents are from Johnstown, which is closer) and I've recently heard (from my boss here in Albuquerque, who is from Pittsburgh) that Pittsburgh is a pretty cool place to live these days. I may have the chance to visit it in a week, because I'm going home to attend a wedding in Erie, and the next day I'm flying out of the Pittsburgh airport, which is about two hours away.

I found out through Creative Nonfiction Journal that this year is Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary, and so CNF has put together a website called Pittsburgh in Words to celebrate the city. The website hosts a collection of essays about Pittsburgh. It includes clickable tags so that you can find essays on whatever topic you happen to be looking for. I've had a fun time browsing the site, and thought I'd pass it on. I'll post an update if I end up visiting Pittsburgh this weekend!

Kim Addonizio

2011-03-09T07:03:00.000-08:00

I'm no poet, and not much of a poetry reader. I absolutely adore Pablo Neruda, and I occasionally browse through poetry collections. I just heard of a poet named Kim Addonizio who seems super cool. I'm interested in checking out her poetry collections; she has also written novels. Another unique thing about her is that she writes about tattoos! So I plan to check her writing out whenever I have the time (oh, time, what a silly, annoying thing to have to plan around!), and I will update with my thoughts.

Here is a great quote from her website:

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
~Ray Bradbury

Lawyer-Turned-Writer Realizes Dream Despite Disease

2011-03-08T12:47:00.001-08:00

Loss of Speech Evokes the Voice of a Writer: An Article on Lawyer-Turned-Writer Neil Selinger

My father has a favorite saying: "Life is short; sometimes, suddenly short." He said it a few months ago when the toddler-aged son of a family he knows from church chocked to death in his sleep, on his own vomit. The parents, of course, never had any warning that his death was coming, and they found him too late to save him. "Life is short; sometimes, suddenly short."

He said it again recently when a girl my family has known for years was involved in a fatal car accident in our hometown. Her sister is my age and was a friend throughout school; she herself was my brother's age and a friend and classmate of his. This girl was riding in her fiance's vehicle, on a main road in that town that they probably traveled on nearly every day, when it collided with another vehicle. She and the driver of the other car, an elderly man, were pronounced dead on the scene. Her fiance was transported by air to an out-of-town hospital where, last I heard, he was in stable condition. "Life is short; sometimes, suddenly short."

Today I saw this article on Neil Selinger in the New York Times Review of Books, about a man who retired early from the practice of law to concentrate on writing, only to be diagnosed with a debilitating disease. Undeterred, he writes on. I could relate to this author, mainly to the following quote: "He went to Columbia University planning to study literature, but practicality won out and he went to law school." I've always loved to write, but I also valued financial independence and security, and so I wanted to write while also working. I went to law school and into the practice of law with the goal of saving up a lot of money so that I could retire early, to just write, and travel. Looking back, that goal may have been a bit naive, as the law, as it has so often been said, is a jealous mistress, who is constantly dangling that carrot and doling out rewards for longer and harder work. Still, I don't plan to be a lawyer forever; I plan to be a "writer." Sometimes, though, I wonder if I'll ever reach that stage. I sent a link containing the article to my family, and my dad responded with his saying. "Life is short; sometimes, suddenly short." At least Mr. Selinger realized his goal of focusing on writing and other pursuits, before it was too late. Therefore I think his story is sad but inspiring.

Books Read in 2011

2011-02-17T10:08:00.000-08:00

My goal is to read at least two books a month in 2011. (Wow, that's really not a lot at all. But it is so rare that I get the time to sit down and read!) So far, I'm on track. I will post the books I read here, with approximate start/end dates, and links to my reviews, once I post them (sometimes it takes awhile for a review to follow my completion of the book).

January

1) December 27 - January 3
Loose Girl by Kerry Cohen *** 1/2
(Nonfiction: Memoir: Women's Identity/Sexuality)

2) January 13-19:
A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick
(Fiction: Novel: Historical)

February

3) February 12 - 16:
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
(Fiction: Novel: Science Fiction)

4) January 3 - February 23:
Dancing After Hours by Andre Dubus
(Fiction: Short Stories)

Hills Like Black Elephants

2011-02-02T22:44:00.000-08:00

I'm taking a short story writing workshop class at UNM Continuing Education. Last week the teacher put us in groups of three and gave each group an assignment. My group's assignment was to write a short story similar to Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants." He asked us if we knew the story; two of us did, one of us did not. So the other woman who knew the story started to explain it to the woman who did not know it. She said, "It's about this guy and girl who travel all around together. The guy's about 35 and the girl's about 19. The girl just had an abortion and she's really not particularly happy about having done it, but she accepts that she did, because she wants him to be happy with her and he wanted her to do it; it took a lot of pressuring on his part but she finally did it."

That wasn't at all how I remembered the story, other than it being about a man and a woman traveling, and talking about the landscape and talking about the woman getting an abortion. As I listened to her, I thought, "huh?", as if she had just tried to convince me that the story was called "Hills Like Black Elephants." I just re-read it and it turns out I was "right"-- there's no mention of the couple's respective ages; the woman hasn't had an abortion yet; the man definitely wants her to, and she wants to make him happy, but he repeatedly tells her not to do it if she doesn't want to.

But was I really "right" about what happens in the story? My classmate remembered it one way--not the way it really was, but how it is in her memory and what the story means to her. That was her version of the story, at that moment, and as I read it again, I began to see that it was in fact a very plausible version.

To me, that's what makes a good short story; every reader approaches it and individualizes it in his or her own way. My classmate obviously cared enough about these characters to give them ages; she cared enough about this story to remember what happened in it, even if her memory of the sequence of events was slightly askew. And the funny thing is, she is probably "right" in her interpretation of the story, if only that she read into the story more than what was written, but what was really there. I'd bet you anything this guy's quite a bit older than this girl, who comes across as very inexperienced when she asks what Anis del Toro is and whether he will love her again and will like how she compares white hills to elephants after she has an abortion. And he is pressuring her to get it, even if his words are saying otherwise. (At the very least, he won't stop talking about it when she repeatedly asks him to, which is a form of pressure if I've ever read it.) And she probably does end up getting the abortion and not being happy about it. So my classmate's version could be very accurate; she was just telling about events that weren't mentioned in the story but that are clearly there, at least according to how she sees the story.

And that is why I love literature. From the moment it was published or given to someone else to read, "Hills Like White Elephants" no longer belonged to Hemingway, but to the reader. It doesn't belong only to me, just because I've read it. And my memory of it and feelings about it won't necessarily remain the same. Years from now I may remember it a different way, or I may have adopted my classmate's version as the story I chose to remember. The story belongs to me, and to her, and to everyone who reads it, and to whatever ways we end up personalizing it and remembering it. So if you haven't read "Hills Like White Elephants," or haven't re-read it lately, I encourage you to do so... because until you do, you won't know what the story means to you, or means to you this time, in this moment.

Book Review: Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity, by Kerry Cohen

2011-01-28T13:56:00.000-08:00

High on Sex, Low on Love: A Book Review of Loose Girl by Kerry Cohen

This book is basically the true story of a young woman who slept with quite a few random guys, without really giving two diddly-doos about what (or whom) she was doing or why. The title term "Loose Girl" provides a negative connotation for this behavior, and I guess the book could have been just as easily called "Slut" or some other provocative term. As a preliminary matter, then, I didn't really agree with the author's assumed notion that someone who has commitmentless sex is worthy of name-calling or necessarily lacking in self-esteem. To me there was really nothing new or shocking in the book and I think a lot of women (and men) have had experiences similar to those of the author. In fact I think people have done way worse (at one point she feels particularly worthless for doing it "doggy style" -- why doing the dirty in this position with a near-stranger is supposed to be any more slut-worthy than it is in regular ole missionary position was lost on me).

What made the story unique, though, and almost a little annoying sometimes, was the level of self-awareness and honesty with which the narrator told it. I think she only acquired this level of self-awareness after she had lived the story, perhaps while she was writing it, instead of having it all along, but that is something I wish would have been clarified more. I think the author (or her editor or whomever makes these important decisions nowadays) may have chosen to call it "Loose Girl" instead of some other derogatory name for "woman who has unattached sex" because she was in many senses floating around without a connection, without an anchor, just looking for something to hold onto. I wish she would have explored this metaphor more throughout the book, but, then again, there are only so many metaphors one can explore--no pun intended--when it comes to sex, and Kerry pretty much touches--no pun intended yet again--on all of them. To me, though, it didn't seem that the narrator was trying to fill her empty void with sex per se but instead with men. She wanted "boys" (as she calls them) to like her and think she's pretty and want to be in a realtionship with her. To me she was more of a relationship junkie or wanna-be junkie than a "slut."

Although I did have some issues with the book, it was a fast and gripping read for me, and definitely kept me interested. Kerry describes growing up in a well-to-do house with parents who were unable to connect with her or with anyone else for that matter. After her parents divorce when she is eleven, her self-absorbed and dramatic mother ends up going off to medical school in the Philipines, and she and her reserved and goth-like sister go to live with their emotionally distant father who exemplifies the empitomy of the term "boundary issues" and who is also just plain odd. Kerry doesn't have any role models or anyone to really connect to, so she turns to boys to fill her emptiness and to look for love.

I could really relate to how she hated that she needed other people so much. Again, I was wondering if she really knew this at the time or if a lot of it was reflection learned while looking back on everything. She seemed so self-aware throughout the book, to the point where at times the tone of her writing made her seem as distant and unsympathetic as the parents she hated. I can see how she learned a lot about herself looking back, and if I read the book in this vein, I liked it a lot more. But most of the time I just plowed through it--no pun intended--without analyzing it, because I liked the theme and the style.

I admired Kerry's straight-forward and honest telling of her story. It didn't seem like she held anything back and it in fact seemed like she was a bit disconnected from who she was or had been--which is something else I can relate to--so that she could tell her story as if she was talking about someone else. I could also relate to the way she wanted to be loved and accepted, without having the capacity to really love or accept someone back in the right way, therefore perpetuating her continuous cycle of bad relationships.

And that leads me to the next segment, which is, my disappointments about the book. As I mentioned at the beginning of my review, I don't necessarily like the notion this book seems to put out--no pun intended--there that there is something "wrong" with a girl who likes to have sex. I do get that Kerry thought, or now thinks, there was something wrong with her because of it, and I get that in her case she was searching to fill a void, and she felt she was too needy. Still, I thought she missed a lot of opportunities to stress her bigger issue, which was wanting an emotional connection, and that she down hard on herself in the places she did write about it, as if wanting to be emotionally close with someone you're physically close with is such a horribly wrong thing. I get that for her a lot of it was about wanting and not being able to connect to someone, like her parents. And I was totally aghast that she took absolutely no precautions to protect herself against things like rape, pregnancy or disease, even after many of these things happened to her or almost happened to her! To me that was the biggest sign of her lack of self-esteem and her totally out-of-controlness. I also get that she gave up a lot of other life pursuits because she was obsessed with "boys," and that for her it was like an addiction.

Still, I don't think she emphasized quite enough that her issue was actually with her desire to feel loved by someone else and to have boys like her--which is no different than a relationship addict or someone who stays in a bad relationship for the wrong reasons--and not really with the physical act of sex. She certainly seemed to get enjoyment out of sex in that she mentioned things like pleasure and orgasm, which to me (and hopefully to anyone?!) are good things, so I found myself thinking that her issue was far more emotional. Perhaps she heaped the emphasis on "sex" to glamorize the book and make it more trendy, when she was really just a girl wanting to be loved. I was more worried about her relationship problems--wanting a guy to love her, only to break his heart rather callously (yes, I can relate, sadly)--than about the fact that she liked the occasional or daily romp in the hay (don't we all?!). I guess her job wasn't to psychoanalyze all of this stuff, but, since she did do a lot more telling than showing (which was another one of my gripes with the book -- I kept wanting to scream "more scenes, please!"), and a lot of self-reflection which is another supposed no-no in memoir writing, I would have expected her to make these distinctions a bit more clearly.

I was disappointed with the ending (and this isn't really a spoiler if you read the author's brief bio on the back and realize she's married with kids now, and she's a therapist), not because I wanted some pat, cut and dry ending but because Kerry wrote that she loved her husband and was happy to be getting married and I just wasn't convinced. It made me sad for her because I felt like she was still searching for fulfillment outside of herself, except now she had resigned herself to settling down with one guy because she no longer wanted to be a "slut." She says that as a therapist now she doesn't believe people can change and she still deals with many of the same issues, but now she is just more self-aware. I really think that if she had spent more time single/alone, she would have continued her self-growth and perhaps changed for the better even more. Of course that's just my opinion, but her writing style about her husband was not convincing. There was little to no description, emotion or action that showed me why she loved him. And when she glossed over being a traditional bride all of a sudden and caring so much about invitation font and wedding dress styles, I wanted to scream at her, this isn't who you are either, you are fooling yourself. (Okay, maybe I was projecting after having fairly recently gone through the same wedding-planning-frenzy only to end up canceling my own wedding... so sue me.) It seemed to me that she wrote about her husband much the same way as she wrote about the other men she had been with -- disconnected, distant, blase -- and that made me sad because it was like nothing much had changed.

Other than those quibbles, I really enjoyed the book and it caused me to think a lot about the relationship between "promiscuity" and self-esteem, and other related issues such as the inability to truly love oneself or someone else. It's definitely a "sexy" topic (yeah, I said it) and I read in the author interview section at the end of the book that Kerry said she was surprised that no one else had written this book first, and I agree with her. I guess there are some others like it (the nonchalant tone reminded me somewhat of "Bare," that stripping memoir, which I didn't enjoy nearly as much as "Loose Girl") but this is a very candid expose which I'm sure it took guts to write and for which I admire the author. I give this book 3.5 stars and would recommend it to just about anyone, especially someone who has struggled to find love and fulfillment externally instead of internally. (By the way, I think other writers would enjoy reading this book because Kerry writes a lot about how writing changed her life and also about her experience in her MFA program.)

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Don't Save Yourself/ No Te Salve

2011-01-21T11:00:00.000-08:00

It's been quite awhile since I've posted. Happy 2011. I have been reading and writing, and plan to post more often again. Here's a poem I find very inspiring and beautiful.

Don't Save Yourself
(Translated from the Spanish “No Te Salves”)

by Mario Benedetti

Don't stay motionless by the roadside,
don't freeze joy or love halfheartedly.
Don't save yourself
now,
or ever.
Don't save yourself,
don't become
serene.
Don't keep only a still corner in this world,
don't let your eyelids droop heavy
like judgments.
Don't stay without lips,
don't sleep without dreams,
imagine you're bloodless
or judge yourself in haste.

But if
after all
you can't help it
and you freeze joy
and you love halfheartedly
and you save yourself,
become serene,
keep a still corner in the world
let your eyelids drop heavy as judgments
and stay without lips
and sleep without dreams,
imagine yourself bloodless,
judge yourself in haste and
stay motionless by the side of the road,

and you save yourself
then
don't stay with me.

Book Review: The Wife and Other Stories, by Anton Chekhov

2010-05-24T10:26:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting to read Chekhov' short stories for quite some time. I was finally prompted to start when Francine Prose, in her excellent book Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them wrote that Chekhov's short stories were her favorite and that all aspiring writers should read them. Prose wrote a lot about Chekhov's stories, especially about their well-crafted language, character descriptions, and how they broke common rules.

Maybe my expectations were too high, but I was a tad disappointed with The Wife, and Other Stories. I do admire Chekhov's character description and his description of nature, particularly the Russian landscape. For me, though, a lot of his plots fell short. Some of the stories in The Wife, and Other Stories had no real beginning and no real ending. Rather they were inter-connected parts of other stories that were included in the volume, and read like a novel told in serials, with one short story picking up where another left off. It was interesting to read about the day in the life of a 19th-century Russian official, and to read his philosophical meanderings related to peasantry and education and the like, but some of the stories consisted of only that, and after awhile parts of them became rather redundant and boring. To me Tolstoi's Anna Karenina, which I have been reading off and on for some time (way too long!) now, contains everything that most of these short stories did, and more, because it sticks with the same engaging characters and has a moving plot, even if some of it gets bogged down with the same philosophical meanderings. Perhaps if I hadn't read Tolstoi or Dostoevsky I would have really loved Chekhov, I'm not sure. At this point in time, though, although I liked him, I didn't like him as much as those two authors.

I liked the stories contained in the beginning of The Wife, and Other Stories more than the stories at the end; perhaps it was due to the redundancy factor. My favorite was "The Grasshopper," which was about a young woman who was married to a rather boring, older doctor, but her heart was with the theater and with the dramatic and famous people she hung out with. Eventually she has an affair and leaves her husband, and in many way this is a timeless story about relationships, that could have been told yesterday as much as it could have been told in Chekhov's time. The story seemed so realistic that I did some research into Chekhov's life and found that he married an actress named Olga (which is the name of the wife in the story) and that there were many other similarities between his life with her and the life of the couple in the story.

I will read more short stories by Chekhov and thus far my conclusion is that I really enjoy some of them and I don't really enjoy others. So it may be one of those experiences where I read everything to find the gems. I did enjoy The Wife, and Other Stories although I didn't love it as much as I was expecting to. I give it 3.5 stars.

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Book Review: The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers

2010-04-30T10:30:00.000-07:00

Wanting to Belong: A Book Review of The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers

This is such a strange little book. I loved some parts and didn’t love other parts. It revolves around Frankie Addams, who is twelve and a half years old. For me this was a really significant age, and I think the book does a great job of encapsulating the feelings and experiences associated with that age: Frankie’s no longer a child, yet she’s not yet a woman. She feels like she doesn’t belong anywhere, and she’s trying to figure out who she is and who she wants to be. So the first thing I loved about The Member of the Wedding was its theme, although I think some would criticize it for not having much of a traditional plot.

The second thing I loved about The Member of the Wedding was its setting. Frankie lives in a small town in Georgia during World War II. Loneliness surrounds her. Her mother died during childbirth with her, so she has never had a mother or siblings. Her father works a lot and when he is home, he is in his own world of books and newspapers, and really doesn’t pay her much attention. Her only good girl friend moved away, and she’s not a member of the “club” of popular girls at her school. She used to be part of it at one time, but as she got a bit older it’s clear that she’s different from those girls. Sexual identity is explored in the book: Frankie wants to be a pretty, grown woman, but, with her dirty elbows, her crew cut, and her hyper (some would say obnoxious) personality, in many ways she looks and acts more like a boy.

The Member of the Wedding takes place during the summer, so Frankie’s not in school and she spends her days hanging out at home—mostly in the kitchen—with her black housekeeper Berenice and her seven-year-old cousin John Henry. The constant kitchen setting causes the book to lag and feel like it’s dragging on; I think I would have liked it even better if it was a long short story or an even shorter novel. At the same time, the drawn-out kitchen scenes show Frankie’s daily life and how it’s filled with boredom yet comfort. (“They sat together in the kitchen, and the kitchen was a sad and ugly room. John Henry had covered the walls with queer, child drawings, as far up as his arm would reach. This gave the kitchen a crazy look, like that of a room in the crazy-house. And now the old kitchen made Frankie sick. The name for what had happened to her Frankie did not know, but she could feel her squeezed heart beating against the table edge.”)

Frankie longs for change and adventure, and at the same time she longs to fit in with someone somewhere. (“The spring of that year had been a long queer season. Things began to change and Frankie did not understand this change. After the plain gray winter the March winds banged on the windowpanes, and clouds were shirred and white on the blue sky. April that year came sudden and still, the green of the trees was a wild bright green. The pale wistarias bloomed all over town, and silently the blossoms shattered. There was something about the green trees and the flowers of April that made Frankie sad. She did not know why she was sad, but because of this peculiar sadness, she began to realize she ought to leave the town. She read the war news and thought about the world and packed her suitcase to go away; but she did not know where she should go.”)

All of this leads up to Frankie’s recent obsession: running away with her brother and his fiance after they get married. She has been invited to be in their wedding, and she is so happy to “belong” to something that she really gets very carried away in a fantasy of living a new life in a new place with the newlyweds. She changes to her name to “F. Jasmine,” she finds a pretty pink dress that her father buys her for the wedding, and she goes around town telling everyone her plan to move away with her brother and soon-to-be-sister-in-law. All dressed up for the wedding and on the verge of womanhood, she looks much older, and is invited out on a date with a soldier, which she accepts with a mixture of hesitation and excitement.

What I didn’t love about The Member of the Wedding is that there’s a lot of slow build-up without too much action or delivery. Most of the book takes place over just a couple days, but they feel like years. (I guess that’s how it feels for a twelve-and-a-half year old, too!) I enjoyed the scenes featuring Frankie, Berenice and John Henry in the kitchen, savoring delicious-sounding Southern food and talking about everything from love to race relations to what they would change about the world if they were God. (“Now hopping-john was F. Jasmine’s very favorite food. She had always warned them to wave a plate of rice and peas before her nose when she was in her coffin, to make certain there was no mistake; for if a breath of life was left in her, she would sit up and eat, but if she smelled the hopping-john, and did not stir, then they could just nail down the coffin and be certain she was truly dead. Now Berenice had chose for her death-test a piece of fried fresh-water trout, and for John Henry it was divinity fudge.”)

After awhile, though, I was anxious to have Frankie get out there and experience the real world. I suppose that that was the point of writing the book like that, so the reader could feel what life was like for Frankie. Although it may appear to an outsider—even the reader—that not much is going on, to Frankie, a lot is happening. She is bored and excited, fearless and fearful, lonely and comfortable with the familiar, happy and sad and up and down. That’s all because she’s at the crazy in-between age of twelve and a half. I loved that about Frankie but at other times she seemed very contradicting and hard to figure out. At one moment she would seem so thoughtful and mature, and the next moment she would be stomping her feet and saying cruel things to the people she loved, and seeming very immature and annoying. I guess, again, that’s because of her age and her transitioning. At times Frankie–or F. Jasmine–is confused about her own expressions and mannerisms. At one point she is upset with Berenice for not telling her about a grown-up matter, but happy with Berenice for ironing the little pleats around the collar of her pink wedding dress. “She would have liked for her expression to be split into two parts, so that one eye stared at Berenice in an accusing way, and the other eye thanked her with a grateful look. But the human face does not divide like this, and the two expressions canceled out each other.”

What I absolutely loved about The Member of the Wedding was its language. McCullers has a way of describing the small, even mundane, things in life in a completely lovely and relatable way, and then of course she describes the big, mind-blowing things in life the same way. (“The twilight was white, and it lasted for a long while. Time in August could be divided into four parts: morning, afternoon, twilight, and dark. At twilight the sky became a curious blue-green which soon faded to white. The air was soft gray, and the arbor and tress were slowly darkening. It was the hour when sparrows gathered and whirled above the rooftops of the town, and when in the darkened elms along the street there was the August sound of the cicadas. Noises at twilight had a blurred sound, and they lingered: the slam of a screen door down the street, voices of children, the whir of a lawnmower from a yard somewhere.”)

For me this book is best read all at once if possible. When I put it down and picked it back up it seemed rather boring, like not much was happening, but when I read whole parts straight through, I became so wrapped up in the language and tone that it felt magical. I would like to read this book again when I have time to read it all in one day or weekend. Although I really liked it the first time around, I was trying to cram it in, in between selling my fiance’s house, renting out my house, moving into a new house, planning a wedding, traveling to Vegas, etc. It seems to me to be one of those books that gets better with re-reading.

The tone and strangeness of The Member of the Wedding reminded me in some ways of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, while the age and oddity of the narrator reminded me of Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Jonathan Safron Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. This book is certainly unique, though, and stands out as something entirely of McCullers’s creation. It’s the first book I’ve read by her and I look forward to reading The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

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Headed to Vegas for the weekend

2010-04-22T08:11:00.001-07:00

I'm going to Vegas tomorrow for the weekend, for one of my best friend's bachelorette parties. My fiance's parents and his sister also happen to be in Vegas, so I will be seeing Jersey Boys with them on Sunday night, after the bachelorette party ends.

Things have been crazy busy for me, as you can probably tell from my lack of posts. We are under contract to sell my fiance's current house and buy a new house (our closing/ moving date is Tuesday, right after I get back from Vegas!) I also just rented out my townhouse to new tenants. Plus, we're planning our wedding. And working!

With all of that going on, I haven't had too much time to read or write, which always makes me feel bummed. I recently re-wrote a flash fiction piece so I could enter it into the Our Stories writing contest. It still needs some work but I'm happy to be making some process. I'm currently reading three different books whenever I have the time to fit any part of any one in, which I'll review here as soon as I finish them! I'm excited to be having a mini-vacation even though it's in the midst of the chaos.

Book Review: The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton

2010-04-19T07:01:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, a Let-Down: A Book Review of The Wednesday Sisters, by Meg Waite Clayton

I had high hopes for this book. (Maybe I had such high hopes that I had raised the bar too high?) I had read somewhere that Ms. Clayton used to be a corporate transaction attorney at a large law firm. After she ceased practicing law, she wrote this book. As a lawyer and aspiring writer, I was drawn to it from that angle. Then there was the fact that the book is about a group of aspiring writers, who form a writing group and try to publish. That sounds like me, so I thought I could relate. Finally, the book takes place in San Francisco starting in the 1960's. The interview I'd read with Ms. Clayton said she'd scoured old newspapers and magazines for historical tidbits to include in the book. How exciting! I thought.

Well... I have to say that the beginning of The Wednesday Sisters: A Novel really didn't meet my expectations at all. I found the first third of it quite dull. The characters all seemed stereotypical and flat to me. And it seemed like the story was dragging and almost nothing was happening! I pushed on, thinking a big part of it was that I just couldn't relate to these women. They admitted that they had put their dreams on hold, or permanently curtailed them, to marry their husbands, and their lives revolved around their children. It's not that I didn't want to read a book about housewives, but I think that many housewives, in real life and in books, are awesome. Many have confidence, charisma, interests and hobbies. But these women were so self-defacing that it was annoying. The main character, Frankie, tells the entire story, and she's always saying things like, "I can't imagine that I could actually write a book... I'd like to, but I'm no good, and what would these other women think?" We're not talking about writing a masterpiece novel here, or publishing, just writing in general. I wanted to scream at her, it's not that hard, just get a little self-esteem and try it! I really didn't understand the big deal.

Knowing the author's background, and that she was both a lawyer and a mother, I started thinking that maybe the problem was that she was writing what she didn't know, and it didn't seem real. But even the historical parts weren't that interesting in the first third of the book. The characters were on the outskirts of society, seemingly purposefully left out from everything exciting that was going on. They would see feminist protests on the news, but not attend. (Then Frankie would couch the events by saying something like, "We didn't know what to think of these crazy women on TV... we are just little stay at home moms who don't know anything about the world." Honestly, if I were a housewife I would be offended at the way that women in my profession/position were portrayed by the characters in the book!) Then there would be tidbits of history dropped in all too conveniently, like, "we read in the news that this happened..."(couched by Frankie in terms of "not that we understand what it all means, of course"), which to me isn't all that exciting. It's like too much historical data was given without the main characters really being a part of the context.

I kept reading The Wednesday Sisters since I had had such high hopes. Towards the middle, the book started to get better. And then the last third turned into a pretty good read. I think it's because the characters were actually doing something, making decisions instead of letting life just happen to them. For the first time, some of them seemed like separate characters, instead of all being lumped into one stereotypical housewife. (Some of them still fell flat to me even during the exciting parts). And they also went out into the real world and took part in some of the historical goings-ons, which made the historical parts a lot more interesting.

In the end, I think that the best parts of The Wednesday Sisters make for kind of a stereotypical chick-lit-for-mature-chicks read. Like, ladies that belong to knit clubs and church socials would probably like some of this book. But I bet even they'd be bored with a lot of it. It just doesn't go anywhere, or do anything, until near the end, and I don't know if a lot of people would hang on that long! I hate to give negative reviews, so I'll throw in something positive and say that this book has a lot of interesting parts about writing and the writing process, and it includes some good quotes and tips from famous writers. But even that part is annoying, because one of the women, Bret, will say things like, "Well, you know, Mark Twain always said..." at the beginning of their writing groups, causing Frankie to must out loud "How does Bret have such a good memory and always remember what all these great writers said?" Still, The Wednesday Sisters has some appeal for writers, so I recommend it, with reservations, to other writers. For this reason I give it two stars.

Book Review: My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

2010-03-05T09:26:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer: I neither read nor enjoy much bestselling contemporary fiction. There are exceptions (I like Elizabeth Berg, John Grisham, and some Stephen King) but in general, these books are not my cup of tea because I feel that they sacrifice good writing for popular plot twists and edge-of-the-seat drama. I especially steer away from "chick lit" and even more some from family-based drama that is about a mother and her children, because I usually find that it's overly cutesy and I just can't relate to it.

But. My mom had been telling me I need to read My Sister's Keeper, and she sent it to me. Even my sister, who hates to read, read and enjoyed the book. Then, a movie was coming out about it with a concept that looked new and interesting: one sister was created so that her other sister could live. I thought, I'd better read the book.

Well. What can I say? I guess My Sister's Keeper was everything I had expected to be. It had an interesting theme and some dramatic plot twists, but lacked good writing (for the most part) and character depth.

The main character is Anna, who is supposed to give up a kidney to save her sister from dying from cancer, or at least to prolong her life a bit longer. Anna has been doing similar things since she was born and her umbilical cord was used for a transplant for her sister. Her parents had purposefully created her to save or prolong her sister' life. At the beginning of the book, Anna has decided to fight back and has hired a lawyer to file a lawsuit for rights over her medical decisions (the legal aspects of the book are pretty murky).

The story is told in different first-person points of view, with each chapter being told by a different character, whose name is plastered on top, and, get this, the font type and style even changes with each chapter so you know it's being told by someone else. Gag.

I felt that Anna's voice was interesting and pretty convincing for a young teenage character. This made it feel like a young adult novel, but hey, I like young adult novels so I wish the entire book were told by Anna; I might have liked it a lot better. I hated the parts that were told by the mother because I was mad at her for having a baby for her own selfish purposes-although some may not think that keeping another child alive is a selfish purposes). Try as I might to grasp it by reading her sentimental and overly-protective dribble, I wasn't convinced that a mother, let alone this mother who was telling the story, could really do such a thing, and feel no shame or doubts about it. My own mother could relate to the mother of the book more than I could, so maybe it's a mother thing. Still, the mother came across as a self-righteous know-it-all to me. I didn't believe that she had had a successful law practice before beoming a mother, and I didn't feel any real love between her and her husband.

Speaking of the husband, the chapters that were told by him and his son, Anna's brother, read horribly for me. I just wanted to skip them. He's a fire-fighter, which I thought was conveniently contrived and also very unrealistic (who is paying for this family's luxury when the father is a fire-fighter and the mother is a stay-at-home mom who only practiced law briefly before having kids and is therefore probably in a lot of student loan debt?). He seems more ambivalent about the family's decision to have one child to save another child, but he comes across like a spineless wimp who's afraid of expressing his opinion to his wife, or, worse, like he doesn't care enough to do so. And the brother, Jesse, is a juvenile delinquent, which also feels very contrived, who is out roaming the streets and starting fires that his father has to put out without knowing that his son started them (see the irony? har har). His character does the best job of capturing the anger and angst that I'm sure Anna was feeling and that most of the readers would be feeling. Still, he comes across as superficial and stereotypical. The voices all blend together and do not sound like individual characters, a pet peeve I have when an author tries to do different points of view. Anna's came across as the strongest but the rest of the narrators--including the guardian ad liten and Anna's lawyer, both of whom get a turn--all jumbled together into one indistinguisable or trying-too-hard voice.

The legal sub-plots of the book didn't seem realistic, although I did enjoy the character of Anna's lawyer and his German Shepherd dog named Judge. He (the lawyer, but also his dog) seemed to be the only rationale character while the rest of them were floating around in no-man's-land.

I did enjoy the plot of the book and it was a very easy read. I read it during a rainy camping trip where I had the luxury of laying in a tent all day. I wanted to find out what happened, and at times there was a piece of beautiful writing included. Most of the time, however, the writing was gimmicky and overly sentimental and I felt like I was just pushing through to see what happens, like in a movie, not a well-written book. And then when I got to the end I was so annoyed that I seriously wanted to throw the book out into the mud. I won't include any spoilers but it was the worst ending I think I have ever read, and such an easy way out that I htink Picoult should be ashamed of herself. I hadn't planned to read any more of her books because I was more interested in the concept of this one than the writing, but, having gotten to the end only to be let down as a reader in such a huge way, I am 100% sure that I will never read anything else by her. Yes, I was that mad at how she wrote the ending! Grrr.

So, I give My Sister's Keeper two stars because there were parts of it that I enjoyed, but the rest of it was downright awful. I cannot in good conscience recommend it, but I think it's one of those books that people read because everyone else is reading it and talking about it (which is never a bad thing, people talking about books), and because there's a movie, all of which were reasons I read it, so, read it and see whether you agree with my many critiques or if you find something redeeming in it. By the way I later watched the movie and enjoyed it. The ending was much better than in the book although they did leave some things out from the book's plot that I missed. I would recommend the movie over the book, which I rarely do, but, there you have it. I guess in the end my foray into popular family-drama chick lit proved to be what I thought it would be: mostly empty, with a few splashes of interest and annoyance.

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Quotes from "My Sister's Keeper" by Jodi Picoult

2010-03-04T08:35:00.000-08:00

Coming soon, my review of this book. For now, here are quotes from it that I flagged:

"In my family, we seem to have a tortured history of not saying what we outght to and not meaning what we do."

"[My sister] and I are Siamese twins; you just can't see the spot where we're connected. Which makes separation that much more difficult."

"True love is felonious. You take someone's breath away. You rob them of the ability to utter a single word. You steal a heart. It's not a misdeamnor... once you're in, it's for life." (paraphrased)

"The human capacity for burden is like bamboo-- far more flexible than you'd ever believe at first glance."

"Summertime is a collective unconscious. We all remember the notes that made up the song of the ice cream man; we all know what it feels like to brand our thighs on a playground slide that's heated up like a knife ina fire; we all have lain on our backs with our eyes closed and our hearts beting across the surface of our lids, hoping that this day will stretch just a little longer than the last one, when in fact it's all going in the other direction."

"When you are a kid you have your own language, and unlike French or Spanish or whatever you start learning in fourth grade, this one you're born with, and eventually lose. Everyone under the age of seven is fluent in Ifspeak; go hang aroudn with someone under three feet tall and you'll see. What if a giant funnelweb spider crawled out of that hole over your head and bit you on the neck? What if the only antidote for venom was locked up in a vault on the top of a mountain/ What if you lived through the bit, but could only move your eyelids and blink out an alphabet? It doesn't really matter how far you go; the point is that it's a world of possibility. Kdis think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut."

"It's impossible to believe that the laundry I once folded for her was doll-sized; as if I can still stee her dancing in lazy piroutees along the lip of the sandbox. Wasn't it yesterday that her hand was only as big as the sand dollar she found on the beach? That same hand, the one that's holding a boy's; wasn't it just holding mine, tugging so that I might stop and see the spiderweb, the milkweed pod, any of a thousand moments she wanted me to freeze? Time is an optical illusion-- never quite as solid or strong as we think it is."

Book Review: The Wife by Meg Wolitzer

2010-02-28T06:24:00.000-08:00

The beginning of this book really grabbed me. The voice was moving and the early plot was interesting: a woman is on an airplane with the husband she had been with for a long time, and has decided at that very moment to leave him.

Of course, such a decision is never made at that very moment. A lot has gone into such a decision. And so the narrator takes us back with her through the history of the relationship between her and her husband. We find out that it began in the 1950's, when she was his creative writing student at Smith College and he was married. That's rather cliche, and so are a lot of things about their relationship. I thought that Wolitzer did a convincing job of showing me that this is what it could be like for a couple who began in such a way, as cliche as it may have been.

There were other cliched parts of The Wife, though, that I didn't think she portrayed so well. Essentially this is supposed to be a story about a wife who sacrifices everything for her husband. The first part of the book is the strongest in my opinion, because the reader can easily see how she sacrifices the approval and support of her parents and her college education for this selfish, haphazard, impulsive man who doesn't truly love anyone, including himself. The reader can see how he is so caught up in his ambitions of writing that he is incapable of being much else. (The "selfish writer" is a theme I always find interesting, in Andre Dubus's short stories and in biographies of Raymond Carver, etc., because it does seem that being a successful writer requires a narrowly-focused, internal, solitary drive, to the exclusion of most everything else in life.)

What wasn't convincing in The Wife, however, was that the narrator was supposed to be giving up her own writing ambitions or her "career" for her husband. The problem was, she never really had any writing ambitions until her professor-turned-husband encouraged her, for the sake of starting an affair with her of course, and she never reveals that she has any desires to have a career outside of the home. In the flashback scenes to her early and mid-married life, she either seems content to be a housewife or she is bitter about the fact that her husband is cheating on her.

Perhaps it's that times have changed or perhaps it's that I can't relate to a character that I can't see myself being, but I just didn't understand why she put up with it. She seems to be resentful of the fact that her husband thinks he is some God when it comes to writing, yet she obviously encourages such thoughts by placating to him, encouraging his writing career and staying with him even though he doesn't treat her right. If this was supposed to be a book that showed why a woman sacrifices her own dreams (or never fully forms any in the first place) in order to stay with a rotten, no-good husband, it failed. But maybe it wasn't supposed to show me that; maybe it was supposed to just be about this character. Still, for whatever reasons I found those parts very unconvincing and it made me dislike the narrator when she seemed to get whiny and become a "poor-me" victim. The following is a passage that I feel sums up the theme of the book:

"Everyone knows how women soldier on, how women dream up blueprints, recipes, ideas for a better world, and then sometimes lose them on the way to the crib in the middle of the night, on the way to the Stop & Shop, or the bath. They lose them on the way to greasing the path on which their husband and children will ride serenely through life.

But it's their choice... they make a choice to be that kind of wife, that kind of mother. Nobody forces them anymore; that's all over now. We had a women's movement in America, we had Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem... we're in a whole new world now. Women are powerful.

Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives. Wives tend; they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites pricking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaciton. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else.

'Listen,' we say. 'Everything will be okay.'

And then, as if our lives depend on it, we make sure it is."

(Click here for more quotes from The Wife)

The ending of The Wife contains a twist which wasn't incredibly surprising but was nevertheless interesting. I don't want to include any spoilers, so suffice it to say that it adds another layer to the entire analysis about why a woman would do such things for a man.

I did think that The Wife was written well and that the first-person narrator voice, when not overly bitter or victim-y, was intriguing. Although there wasn't much to the plot--basically a history of the life of an unhappily married couple--it seemed realistic and it kept me interested, as I read the book straight through in a couple of days. I would like to read more of Meg Wolitzer's work, especially a book that has a completely different theme, plot and characters. So overall I give The Wife three and a half stars and I would recommend it with some reservations.

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Quotes from The Wife

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Parts of this book reminded me of Women Like Us by Erica Abeel, which is a book about a group of girlfriends who graduated in 1959 from Sarah Lawrence College. Most of them curtailed their dreams and ambitions for the men in their lives. Click here for my review of Women Like Us.

Quotes from "The Wife," by Meg Wolitzer

2010-02-27T10:43:00.000-08:00

I finished this book in December; a review of it is coming soon. In the meantime, here are quotes from it.

"As a rule, the men who own the world are hyperactively sexual, though not necessarily with their wives."

"'Ah, a Sarah Lawrence girl,' he said with pleasure, deciding at that moment she was a highly creative type, her hands damp with both acrylic paint from art class and ambrosia from some middle-of-the-night winter-solstice ritual."

"All first wives are crazy- violently and eye-rollingly so."

"New York City was a spectacular place in which to take a walk in the middle of the night if you were a young, ambitious, confident man."

"Of course she ached to be a writer. Like so many women, she burned for it, all she wanted to do was to publish, and her whole life was leading toward the moment when she found an agent and a publisher and her first book appeared."

"Everyone knows how women soldier on, how women dream up blueprints, recipes, ideas for a better world, and then sometimes lose them on the way to the crib in the middle of the night, on the way to the Stop & Shop, or the bath. They lose them on the way to greasing the path on which their husband and children will ride serenely through life.

But it's their choice... they make a choice to be that kind of wife, that kind of mother. Nobody forces them anymore; that's all over now. We had a women's movement in America, we had Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem... we're in a whole new world now. Women are powerful.

Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives. Wives tend; they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites pricking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaciton. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else.

'Listen,' we say. 'Everything will be okay.'

And then, as if our lives depend on it, we make sure it is."

Writers' Rules for Writing Fiction

2010-02-25T09:44:00.000-08:00

I just found the coolest article online, called Ten Rules for Writing Fiction. Really there are a lot more than ten rules, because each writer gives ten rules (except for the ones who choose to give less... some writers don't have that many rules, I guess. And what about the ones who have more?!)

Here are some of my favorites.

Margaret Atwood:

You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.

Geoff Dyer:

Do it every day. Make a habit of putting your observations into words and gradually this will become instinct.

Esther Freud:

Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don't let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won't matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.

Don't wait for inspiration. Discipline is the key.

Neil Gaiman:

The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it's definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

PD James:

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

Don't just plan to write – write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.

Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.

AL Kennedy:

Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.

Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won't need to take notes.

Rose Tremain:

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

Jeanette Winterson:

Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.

Be ambitious for the work and not for the reward.

And, this one makes the most sense to me!

Philip Pullman:

My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work.

Book Review: Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

2010-02-22T02:03:00.000-08:00

A Chilling Winter Read: A Book Review of Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton

Ethan Frome is set in Starkfield, Massachusettes, where everything is very stark indeed. Much of the story also takes place in the winter, when the New England town is covered in snow and bitter cold. At the heart of the story is, of course, Ethan Frome: a farmer living in the early 1900's who has been dealt a bad lot in life. He had been living away from Starkfield, at college, studying to become an engineer, when his father died and he had to return home to the family farm to care for his ailing mother, Zenobia. He ends up marrying Zeena, the nurse who took care of his mother, more out of duty and gratefulness than love or passion. Before long Zeena becomes a hypochondriac, inventing illnesses and perpetually seeking possible cures for them.

Into this depressing scene steps Mattie, who is quite the breath of fresh air for Ethan. A distant relative—-she was the daughter of Zenobia’s cousin-—Mattie's father had squandered all of the family’s money, a fact which was only revealed after his death. Mattie’s mother apparently dies of the shock and shame, leaving Mattie a penniless orphan. Zeena’s doctor suggests that Zeena find someone to help with the household chores, so Mattie comes to Starkfield to do just that, and also ends up winning Ethan’s heart.

The story is so depressingly tragic that at times I wanted to stop reading it. But it was like watching a scary movie or sitting down on a roller-coaster: you want to stop, kind of, but you also want to keep going. The story starts out by revealing that Ethan was in a freak accident, and then goes back in time, so you know things don’t end up well. The entire feel of the book is incredibly ominous and its pace marches you right on from the sweet tale of a simple and down-on-his-luck farmer who falls in love with a young, care-free girl, to the bad ending you know is coming. The language is simple and no-nonsense, yet it alternatively scares you like Stephen King and pulls on your heart strings like Jane Austen.

There’s a scene near the beginning in which Ethan has gone to pick Mattie up from a barn dance that puts you right there in the middle of their budding relationship, which is technically illicit and wrong, but feels so right that you find yourself rooting for them, even though you know it will end horribly. Ethan watches Mattie dancing, yearning for both Mattie herself and the simple innocence and hopefulness of youth, which is long-lost for him. When the dance ends, a young boy flirts with Mattie and offers her a ride home, and Ethan thinks that soon Mattie will get married and leave him. Yet, she is so surprised and happy that he is there to pick her up, and she reassures him that she’s not going anywhere. The tone of the relationship between Ethan and Mattie is light-hearted, casual and happy, in the middle of this otherwise entirely depressing book.

Despite its tragic subject matter, Ethan Frome is a gem of a book I plan to re-read again and again. I also want to read more of Wharton’s work. This is the first book I’ve read by her and I know that most of the rest of her works deal with the upper class New York society from which she came. I don’t know how she can write so well about a poor New England farmer, so I can only imagine what she writes about those characters that comprise her own element. I give Ethan Frome four and a half stars and highly recommend it to anyone.

Writing and Working: a Career as a Writing Professor

2010-02-18T08:25:00.000-08:00

In an interview in the Fall 2003 issue of Glimmer Train Stories, writer Carol Roh-Spaulding discusses her writing/ teaching life. She is, or at least was as of the time of the interview, an associate professor of English at Drake University, where she teaches creative writing and literature. She says:

"I started teaching in a writing lab as an undergraduate, so I've been teaching as long as I've been writing seriously. They've always been together. And the truth is I've always resented in some way the time I've had to spend teaching because it took away from my writing. Now if you saw me with my students, teaching, you probably wouldn't believe that, but there is a part of me that is so jealous of the time that I get to write that it is very easy for me to see my teaching as--and I'm not proud of this--a distraction. However, I have managed to create a life where I move back and forth between those modalities. And summer is when I can sink deeply into that writing mode. I teach at an institution that expects very high quality teaching, so you can't sink into your writing life every day when you're teaching. I try to earn periods of time when I can do that, devote myself to writing. I think I've fashioned a life where I can pretty much do both fairly well. I'd like to do less teaching. I think most writers would. I also think, though, that having young, eager, talented students really keeps my writing alive and creates part of the excitement that keeps me going, too. Having that community of writers."

Often, I wish I could just write. I suppose most writers probably feel that way. The problem is that it generally doesn't pay well; it's usually no way to make a good living!

I practice law because I like it and it provides me with a comfortable living, and I save a bunch of money so that eventually I will have the option to just write, if I really want to. The law, like many careers, is very demanding and it often sucks up almost all of my time and energy. It seems like what little is left goes to my fiance, lifestyle habits I try to keep up, such as eating well and exercising, family, friends, pets, social and work events, and the occasional relaxing bubble bath or TV show or movie. There is little time to read and write, although I carve out as much time as I can, and aim for an hour and a half a day of consistent writing, editing, or submitting.

Sometimes I think about how much writing (and reading!) I could get done if I didn't have my full-time "day job" of practicing the law. Then I realize I would be broke, and I'd have to have some kind of job to bring in some money. I think, what else would I want to do? Teaching often comes to mind, especially teaching literature, because I think it would be fun to immerse myself in it constantly. Yet here is a writer who gets to teach literature and writing, and she resents her "day job" too. Like me, she would rather be just writing. In a way, it's comforting, to know that other writers feel this way and it's not as if I made a bad career choice; it's just that there is no other career I would like to do other than writing, which isn't feasible right now. And I agree with what Ms. Roh-Spaulding says about the creative stimulation that comes with having a "day job," especially one like hers where you get to interact with other writers and readers. I often think, if I just sat at home writing, how would I get ideas of what to write about? I get them in the real world, although not incredibly often from work, and I'm sure I'd still find them where I already do: by eavesdropping on (or accidentally over-hearing, as I'm changing!) conversations at the gym, by observing people's behavior in the grocery store, by being struck with inspiration by something I hear on the radio, by talking about books and writing with the other members of my writing group. Still, the real-life inspiration is another reason to smile about going to the office every day. It just helps to realize that no matter what I did for a career, I'd rather be writing or reading, but I also have to do something that happens to make a living.

Quotes About Hard Work and Discipline, for Writers and Others

2010-02-16T08:16:00.000-08:00

I've read and heard over and over again from published writers that the only true tip they can give aspiring writers is to write, write, write (and read, of course!) Sometimes life gets so busy or we get caught up in other things that we forget to make writing a priority. These quotes remind us that nothing good comes easily-- even genius and inspiration are nothing if we don't consistently work on our craft-- and that dedication, discipline and hard work are the surest paths to success.

"Inspiration comes of working every day."

~ Charles Pierre Baudelaire, French Poet, 1821-1867

"If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all."

~ Michelangelo Buonarrati, Italian artist, 1475-1564

“Success flourishes only in perseverance–-ceaseless, restless perseverance.”

~ Baron Manfred von Richthofen

"Get up very early and get going at once, in fact, work first and wash afterwards.”

~ W.H. Auden

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."

~ Thomas Edison

"Inspiration is wonderful when it happens; but, the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long."

~ Leonard Bernstein

"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."

~ George Orwell

"Live simply and deliberately."

~ Thoreau

"Be regular and orderly in your life, like a good bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

~ Gustave Flaubert

"Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstancles vanish into air."

~ John Quincy Adams

Virtual LitSpot: Duotrope's Digest - Where Writers Can Find and Track Markets for Submissions

2010-02-15T13:04:00.000-08:00

I've been very impressed with Duotrope's Digest, a site that features fiction and poetry markets and allows you to track your submissions online. From what I've been able to tell with some experimenting, the site includes every fiction and poetry market that's listed in 2010 Writer's Market Deluxe (Writer's Market Online), plus more markets. It includes both paying and non-paying markets. Its online submission tracker is very helpful and reduces the amount of time I have to spend making spreadsheets to track where I've sent what. I can easily find out how often a market publishes, how long they take to respond, how much they pay, etc. The site makes it easy to keep track of deadlines and closed versus open submissions periods, and it reminds you when it's time to follow-up with a market because their usual response time has passed.

The only criticism I have of the site is that it doesn't include non-fiction markets (I guess that would get very cumbersome with all the how-to websites and magazines that run cooking articles, etc.-- but I'd think it could at least include markets that accept creative non-fiction/ essays, for those of us who write in these creative genres). It also doesn't include contests, I guess because there's usually a submission fee and it doesn't include markets that you have to pay a reading fee to submit to. So, for instance, if you look for Glimmer Train Stories on Duotrope right now, it will show it as "Temporarily Closed" although it is open for its fiction contest.

Overall I think Duotrope is tremendous resource to help writers submit and publish their work, and I can't believe it's free! I plan to donate to it soon since I use it so much and I find it to be such a valuable service. I haven't bought the 2010 edition of 2010 Writer's Market Deluxe (Writer's Market Online) yet because I haven't needed it (except that I'll probably need it for creative nonfiction markets) -- so maybe I'll donate the $40 that Duotrope saved me on that book!

Click here to go to Duotrope's Digest

Or, buy Writer's Market 2010:

Persistance Pays Off: One Story Sent to Twenty-Five Markets!

2010-02-13T19:07:00.001-08:00

In the Fall 2003 issue of Glimmer Train Stories, writer Carol Roh-Spaulding is interviewed. She had this to say about her first published story:

"I sent the first story I wrote to the Beloit Fiction Journal. I actually sent it out to twenty-five different places... I knew there was no way more than one place would want the story. And they took it--that was my first publication and it felt wonderful."

Wow. I'm proud of myself when I send a piece out to five literary journals at once. Now I'm going to start aiming high like Carol Roh-Spaulding. It's inspiring that her first piece was published, and I know it wasn't beginner's luck, but good writing and persistence.

Boloit Fiction Journal doesn't even pay. I think I'll stop limiting my first-round of submissions to journals that pay. Most of them don't pay much anyway, and I think that seeing something I've written in print is satisfaction enough.

Book Review: Glimmer Train Stories, Fall 2003, Issue 48

2010-02-13T18:05:00.001-08:00

It's hard to "review" an issue of a literary journal because all the stories are so different. So this "review" more constitutes my notes and impressions on this particular issue. I'm a big fan of Glimmer Train in general and have been since I was in high school.

I'm obviously way behind on my Glimmer Train issues. I devoured this one from cover to cover. Still, I found many of the stories lacking. I think it may be because I rather recently read Best New American Voices 2006 and I've decided I usually like more of an experimental, shocking, grab-me-by-my-throat-and-surprise-me style more than a traditional realist style, which most of these stories were. If a story is pure realism, then I at least want something to happen. Many of these stories seemed more like glimpses or scenes than actual stories.

For example, J. Patrice Whetsell's "The Coconut Lady" is about a girl going off to college and remembering how her mother taught her how to cook. It is mostly full of memories of her mother's cooking and what her mother would talk about when it came to food. There is a very small hint of a story--in which it is revealed that the mother's marriage did not work out--that peeps its head out, but then it's back to shaking coconuts, or whatever. I just don't understand the point of a "story" all about food, with no real plot.

I enjoyed "Mother Knows" by Diane Chang, although the plot could have been thicker for me. It's about a woman who finds out that her son, a medical school student, is in the hospital with a concussion after a Frisbee accident that happened during his school's orientation. She reminisces about leaving him in China when she and her husband first came to the U.S. On the way home from visiting her son in the hospital, she gets her very first speeding ticket, ever. Her husband is basically useless, but she still loves him. It was pretty good writing and it kept me interested, and I do understand that stories can show a slice of life instead of needing to have a pat conflict/ climax/ resolution, but, again, if it's overly realistic and nothing much happens and not much of a conclusion is reached, then I feel like I've wasted my time reading it, unless it's very well written or there's something particularly unique about it. Otherwise I feel like I could have just talked to a friend about an event like this; it doesn't stir me the way I think an excellent story should.

Many of these stories were about families, and death, and loss. After awhile they collectively started to seem a bit depressing and repetitive. Barry Lyga's "Trading Worlds" had quite a different format, involving a bunch of different dream sequences, but I didn't really like it. It was about the after-math of 9/11 and how one man was dealing with it in his personal life. I thought it was a rather over-the-top attempt to show that one really can't wrap one's head around something so huge and devastating. Bilal Dardai's "The Empty Bowl" had a very experimental format, to the point that I didn't even understand what it was trying to do.

One of my favorite stories in this issue was Virgil Saurez's "Lalo's Skin," which was about a man remembering a friend his father had had throughout the man's childhood, who was a liar and a thief, but whom his dad nonetheless continued to help. I also enjoyed Doreen Baingana's "Lost in Los Angeles," about a woman who comes to L.A. from East Africa. Both of these stories, as well as Jonathan Wei's "Mr. Lee's Study"--about an old professor close to retiring, which I rather liked as well--could be categorized as realistic slice-of-life vignettes, but the writing in all of them was very good and the "plots"-- or as much of a plot as each one had-- were interesting. I also enjoyed the interview of Carol Roh-Spaulding, although I haven't read anything she's written.

Karen Kovacik's "Madrigals for a Bauhaus Baby"--about a childless woman whose co-worker miscarried-- and Elizabeth Gallu's "At the Garden"--kind of a "day in the life" of a woman and her husband in Germany--were okay, in my opinion. Nancy Zafris's "Prix Fixe"--about a washed-up cook who used to be a chef in Paris--was okay but it felt much longer than it needed to be. I could not get into Christopher Bundy's "Morning Prayers" at all; I was confused about what was happening and where the characters were, and it just felt rather boring to me, so I stopped reading it. Quang Huynh's "Dust Falling in Daylight"--about a bomb that explodes and kills someone--was unremarkable, in my opinion. Jennifer Oh's "January," about a South Korean woman who loses her daughter during their flight from North Korea's attacks, was interesting and I liked it.

It's strange because although I felt disappointed with many of the stories in this issue, and very few made me feel deeply moved, overall I enjoyed reading the issue and I couldn't put it down. Reading Glimmer Train always inspires me to write and to think, and this issue was no exception. So I give it three stars. Of course I would give certain stories more stars than others, but overall it averages out to three.

Click here to purchase this issue from Amazon.com:

Go to the Glimmer Train Stories website to subcribe to the journal.

Quotes on Reading and Literature

2010-02-11T13:40:00.000-08:00

These are quotes about reading, literature and books that I've found and liked.

"Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress."

~Anton Chekhov

"I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library."

~Jorge Luis Borges

“At home, I merely used to read. Reading stirred, delighted, and tormented me.”

~Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground (CLICK FOR BOOK REVIEW)

Virtual LitSpot: Literary Rejections on Display

2010-02-04T20:53:00.000-08:00

Feeling down about a recent rejection letter? Visit Literary Rejections on Display, where misery loves company. This blog features real-life rejections from both famous and aspiring writers and features everyone from Kathryn Stockett, whose best-selling novel The Help was rejected by almost 60 agents, to the blogger himself. If this site doesn't lift your spirits when you're feeling like you'll always be met with rejection and never the ever-elusive acceptance, then, sorry but I don't know what will!

Back on the Submission Circuit

2010-02-02T13:04:00.001-08:00

I've heard back from three of the five literary journals where I sent my creative non-fiction piece "Coach K" in September. All three were rejection slips. My fiance suggested changing the name of the piece because apparently there's a well-known college football coach or something named Coach K and it might be confusing. I also thought I could shorten it some (from about 5,000 to 4,000 words) and that that might improve its chances. A few days ago I sent out the latest version of the piece, called "Cadence," to three more literary journals. I'm crossing my fingers.

I also finished a short story called "The Olympia Fiasco," about the wedding industry, and entered it into a fiction contest and submitted it to one other literary journal. Soon I plan to send it to many more places.

I was reading an author interview in Glimmer Train Stories with Carol Roh-Spaulding (it was an old issue -- Fall 2003) who said that her first short story was published, but she thinks it's because she sent it to twenty-five different markets!

Author/ Attorney Louis Auchincloss Dies

2010-01-28T08:37:00.000-08:00

The New York Times reports that Louis Auchincloss died on Tuesday night at the age of 92, due to complications from a stroke. His life was dedicated to literary pursuits despite a time-consuming "day job." Auchincloss had two careers: he was a full-time lawyer and a prolific writer. In his legal career, he specialized in trusts and estates for wealthy clients. In his writing career, he chronociled the lives of wealthy elitists living in mid-twentieth century Manhattan. Both careers reflect his life: he himself was a man of money and power who lived his entire life in New York City.

The NYT article discusses how Auchincloss managed to publish "more than 60 books of fiction, biography and literary criticism" despite being a full-time attorney for most of his life. "I think my secret is to use bits and fractions of time," Auchincloss is quoted as saying in an interview. "I trained myself to do that. Anybody can do it. I could write sitting in surrogate’s court answering calendar call."

Auchincloss' father was an attorney, but when used to visist his law offices, he said he was filled with gloom by "those dark narrow streets and those tall, sooty towers." He went to college at Yale, where he published stories in the literary journal, of which he later became President. He "yearned for a literary life." His first book was rejected by Scrivners and he decided to become a lawyer like his father, thinking that "a man born to the responsibilities of a brownstone bourgeois world could only be an artist or writer if he were a genius." He went to the University of Virginia Law School and then joined the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell.

He joined the Navy during World War II, which is when he wrote his first novel that was to be published. The Indifferent Children was published by Prentice-Hall in 1947, at which time Auchincloss was practicing again with Sullivan & Cromwell. He published this book under a pen name, Andrew Lee, because his mother thought it was "vulgur" and would destroy his legal career. It met with success, however, so he kept writing and publishing. It seems that Auchincloss' pursuit of writing was in some way tied to external rejection or acceptance, because he was dissuaded early on with the rejection of his firt novel, but enthused by the success of his first published novel, which spurred on many other short stories, essays, and novels.

He took three years off from practicing law to dedicate himself to writing, and then went to work for another Wall Street firm, Hawkins, Delafield & Wood. He wrote that at some point he stopped thinking of himself as a lawyer or a writer, and was "simply doing what I was doing when I did it." His novel The Education of Oscar Fairfax, published in 1995, is partly autobiographical and is a story about a "well-born Social Register type who abandons his dream of a literary career to join his father’s law firm."

I have been making it a habit to write for at least an hour (I aim for an hour and a half) every day, before or after work. If Auchincloss could write all of this while also being a lawyer, a husband, and serve on several committees for the city of New York, I can certainly keep writing. Next time I want to complain about being both a lawyer and a writer, I'll look to Louis Auchincloss for inspiration!

A Biography of Louis Archincloss:

Amazon.com Widgets

Book Review: Notes from Underground, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

2010-01-27T11:43:00.000-08:00

I read this book a couple of years ago, and I'm reviewing it now because I'm giving it away on Paperbackswap.com, now that I have it on my Kindle. Even thinking about this book and browsing through portions of it that I enjoyed makes me want to read it again. It was an addicting book.

The first half of it is mainly the ramblings of a former civil servant who lives in an underground basement-type dwelling in St. Petersburg. We quickly find that this unnamed narrator is cynical and detached. He thinks that he is superior to everyone else, but he is also very insecure. He is one of those people who never fit in with everyone else, and who feels angry and isolated because of it. He both hates that fact that he feels different from everyone else, and loves it, at the same time.

Certain parts of the first half of this book were boring and confusing to me. But the overall tone was fascinating, and the language just gribbed me. There are such beautiful and true passages in here! I'm glad I stuck with it because the entire second half of the book is told in a more traditional "story-telling" format. We see the narrator's beef with a former supervisor, we see him at a dinner party with his "friends", and, in my favorite parts of the book, we see him with a prostitute named Liza. At the same time he confides in Liza and uses her selfishly, he also lectures her about why she shouldn't be a prostitute, and how lovely her life could be if she were to leave that lifestyle. The ironic thing is that the narrator's life is empty and unhappy, and he wouldn't even have Liza if she were to take his advice. It's so strange to read because his advice seems so helpful and on point, yet, he clearly doesn't take it himself.

Here I'll post some quotes I liked from the book because the best part of it is its language. It is excellently translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. (I always wonder how translators can capture the original tone and language from Russian, which is so different from English!) There are long passages on marriage and family which I'm thinking of using for a reading at my upcoming wedding in October. I loved this book and want to re-read it and read more by Dostoevsky.

Quotes from Notes from Underground:

“At home, I merely used to read. Reading stirred, delighted, and tormented me.”

“It is impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something.”

“To be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.“

“But anyhow: what can a decent man speak about with the most pleasure?
Answer: Himself.
So then I, too, will speak about myself.”

“I’ve always considered myself more intelligent than everyone around me, and, would you believe, have even felt slightly ashamed of it. At least I’ve somehow averted my eyes all my life, and never could look people straight in the face.”

“Curses on that school, on those terrible years of penal servitude! In short, I parted ways with my fellows as soon as I was set free.”

“With love one can live even without happiness. Life is good even in sorrow, it’s good to live in the world, no matter how.”

“Man only likes counting his grief, he doesn’t count his happiness. But if he were to count properly, he’d see that there’s enough of both lots for him."

“What if everything goes right in the family, God blesses it, your husband turns out to be a good man, who loves you, pampers you, never leaves your side! It’s good in this family! Oftentimes even half mixed with grief it’s still good, and where there is no grief? Perhaps, once you get married, you’ll find out for yourself. But take just the beginning, after you’ve married someone you love: There’s such happiness at times, so much happiness! I mean, day in and day out. In the beginning, even quarrels with a h sband end well. Some women, the more they love, the more they pick quarrels with their husbands...."

“And how good to make peace after a quarrel, to own up to him, or to forgive! And how good, how good they both suddenly feel-as if they were meeting anew, getting married anew, beginning to love anew. And no one, no one ought to know what goes on between a husband and wife if they love each other. And whatever quarrel they may have—they shouldn’t call even their mother to be their judge or hear them tell about each other. They are their own judges. Love—is God’s mystery, and should be hidden from all other eyes, whatever happens. It’s holier that way, and better. They respect each other more, and so much is founded on respect. And if there was love once, if they were married out of love, shy should love pass? Can’t it be sustained? It rarely happens that it can’t be. Well, and if the husband proves to be a kind and honest man, how can love pass? The first married love will pass, true, but then an even better love will come. Then their souls will grow close; they’ll decide all their doings together; they’ll have no secrets from each other. And when children arrive, then all of it, even the hardest times, will come like happiness; one need only love and have courage. Now even work brings joy, now even if you must occasionally deny yourself bread for the children’s sake, still there is joy. For they will love you for it later; so you’re laying aside for yourself.
Isn’t this the whole of happiness, when they’re all three together, husband, wife and child? A lot can be forgiven for those moments.”

“I might not just dangle after you, but simply fall in love with you, and be glad if you merely glanced at me, let alone spoke. I’d watch for you by the gate, I’d stay forever on my knees before you; I’d look upon you as my fiancée, and regard it as an honor. I wouldn’t dare even think anything impure about you. Love! – but this is everything, it’s a diamond, a maiden’s treasure, this love! To deserve this love a man would be ready to lay down his soul, to face death.”

“For a woman it is in love that all resurrection, all salvation from ruin of whatever sort, and all regeneration consists, nor can it reveal itself in anything else but this.”

Holiday Book-Giving Wrap-Up

2010-01-03T12:06:00.000-08:00

I gave a few books this year for the holidays. One of them was John Grisham's latest book of short stories, Ford County: Stories, which I gave to my fiance's father. He already had it! So I am going to keep it for myself and get him something else.

I got my sister-in-law a book called Educating Esmé: Diary of a Teacher's First Year, Expanded Edition, which is the journal of a first-year teacher in an inner-city school. My sister-in-law is a middle school math teacher whose class includes a lot of under-privileged kids, so I thought she might like the book, as well as the "25 tips for teachers" that was included in the updated version. I also got her the Cup of Comfort Devotional for Women: A daily reminder of faith for Christian women by Christian Women book.

I got my dad a lot of running books he wanted on Amazon. My favorite book-related gift I gave was the present I bought my little sister, who is 9 years old. I gave her Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (Barnes & Noble Classics), along with the Alice in Wonderland [TV 1985] movie based on the book that I used to love to watch when I was little. I was hoping we could read the book together and then watch the movie, but of course we didn't get time! I hope she enjoys reading and watching it on her own.

As for books I received, I asked my family for a Kindle Wireless Reading Device (6" Display, U.S. Wireless), and I got it! At first I was hesitant to go electronic because I love the look and feel of real books, I love collecting them and having them near and looking at them. But I don't like toting them around on vacation, and I honestly have way too many of them; they are piled all over our small house. It's to the point where I really can't physically bring in any more books to the house! I also don't like holding onto a bulky book with both hands and pausing in my reading to turn the pages, etc. I decided to give the Kindle a try and became really excited about being able to have a bunch of different books on one small device, which is easy to take with me and easy to hold and read. So far I absolutely love it, and I'll give a more in depth review when I've had it a bit longer.

That took up the bulk of my presents and I didn't really want any more books because I'm trying to cut down and go light. My mom gave me Jodi Picoult's Vanishing Acts: A Novel.

Book Review: Women Like Us, by Erica Abeel

2009-12-12T10:29:00.000-08:00

We are Still Women Like Us: A Book Review of Women Like Us, by Erica Abeel

Although I had some issues with Women Like Us, I absolutely loved it. I should admit my bias up front: this book was written by a Sarah Lawrence College alum, which I also am (class of 2003), and the plot centers around four women who graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1958. I was therefore pre-disposed to enjoy it, but in my opinion, any woman could relate to the plot and characters. That is what makes the book so very readable and also quite depressing. Women Like Us is not a happy story by any means, and its over-arching theme seems to be that women sell out our talent, our ambitions, our own goals, for those of our husbands and our families.

One would hope this is less true now than it was in 1958. At that time most women, including most of the characters in this book, shared the main goal of marrying before age 21 or so. Even intelligent girls from well-off families who went to college did so as something to fall back on, biding time between their childhood/adolescence and the time that their "real" - AKA married -- life would start ("Even at Sarah Lawrence, a caldron of creativity, Art was just an exalted form of occupational thoerapy; you didn't sacrifice romance on its account.")

There are four main characters in Women Like Us-- Daisy comes from a lower class background, having been raised in Queens, but is a very talented dancer who also likes to write. Although the book rotates around the lives of the four different girls, Daisy seems to stand out as the "main" character and I couldn't help but wonder if she was based on the author of the book. Delphine is from a lavishly rich but troubled family, and she is always the center of attention. Franca is tied to men from the beginning and eagerly gives up parts of her soul to be with them. Ginny is the overweight and dorky college misfit, who still somehow fits in with this otherwise seemingly trendy crowd (I never really understood how). The book starts with the girls' senior year in college and then traces their lives through their mostly short-lived careers and the trials and tribulations of marriage to successful and selfish men, and motherhood. Ginny changes her name to Gina and blossoms into the only consistently strong character who continuously follows her dreams into success; I wondered if her character was modeled after Barbara Walters, another SLC alum. Throughout the book Gina is portrayed as self-centered and shallow, and resented by the other three women as incapable of loving anything but herself and her career. To me this represents the two roles into which women have eternally been pigeon-holed: either we are selfless and unhappy (and often "naggy") wives and mothers, or we are selfish and cold career women.

Today it seems more possible to find a middle ground, somewhere where many men lie: we can be family women and career woman, we can have it all. This is what the characters in Women Like Us dreamed of at Sarah Lawrence in 1958, although it didn't turn out that way for any of them. Reading about their horrible experiences in the business world-- most of them went into publishing-- made me feel really lucky that I am living and working today instead of four decades or so ago. In some ways the book made me realize that we have come a long way. In other ways, I realized that many women everywhere are the same. Some of us still ditch our closely-knit friendships as soon as we find a man we think is husband material. And it seems that to many women, a man is still more important than whatever else we used to hold dear: career, education, our own interests and dreams.

I enjoyed reading about this generation of women, and now I want to read books based in similar time periods, such as Mary McCarthy's "The Group" and Rona Jaffe's "The Best of Everything." The women in Women Like Us felt they had been left behind and left out: younger women were marching in the street in the 60's while they were at home nursing their babies and wondering where their cheating husbands might be. They were too early for the women's movement and too late for the old-fashioned notion of Leave it to Beaver and men who had to mean the words "till death do us part." Later they are tossed to the side like used-up goods, left to fend for themselves when they never learned how to do that. That wasn't the way they had planned for things to turn out, but much of their plan involved hitching themselves to men. One thing clear from this book is that a woman only has herself, and she had better not give that up for anyone else, even her husband or children. She has to find a way to hold on to what is important to her and know that she can survive on her own if she has to. The character who comes closest to doing this (besides Gina, who never marries or has children) is Daisy, but it's a hard-fought battle even for her.

Now, for the issues I had with Women Like Us. The writing style is very different from what I'm used to; Abeel often uses short, choppy sentences, or rather, sentence fragmants. From the beginning, I didn't like it and almost stopped reading the book (I'm glad I didn't). But I was annoyed with the style throughout the book, because it made it hard to figure out what was going on. ("Franca offered her own number, mumbling she was overscheduled. A fabrication, Daisy later discovered, to her shame." Why not just say, "Franca gave Daisy her number and mumbled that she was overscheduled, which Daisy later found out was a lie"? This is only one example of many points in the book that drove me crazy by the strange way in which it was written!) Abeel also uses a lot of slang which made the book harder to follow. I think that in this way she limits the appeal of the book to educated East Coast college women. Girls from Radcliffe, for example, are called "Cliffies" (without any explanation, so that the reader has to figure it out for herself), debutantes "debs," locations at Sarah Lawrence and Harvard are mentioned as if the reader has been there before and knows exactly what the girls are talking about and where they're at, and composers and authors are name-dropped without any further definitions.

The entire tone of Women Like Us also gets very over-dramatic to the point of gagging ("She'd been preparing for this concert all her life," "She was persophone sprung from the underworld!"), but maybe this type of over-sentamentality was en vogue in the 50's. The book also bounces around in time and among the different characters' lives, and, even though I read this long book straight through in about a month, I often became confused, wondering what the date was and mixing up the characters. And the most annoying thing for me was how far-fetched the plot was. I don't want to give any of it away but pretend that one girl nearly dies in a plane crash, to be miraculously saved at the last moment, another goes to prison in a case of mistaken identity, the third gets hauled off to a mental institution and the fourth is shot by a bandit in a super-market.... all of that could have easily been thrown into the plot of this book along with all the other crazy escapades. To me this unrealistic drama was unnecessary and cheapened the book; I thought just telling the rather common lives of these four women over time would have been enough of a plot and I'm not sure why Abeel did this. From the blurbs and cover this looks like it was a "popular" book when it was published in the early 90's (which seems to go against some of the isolating or elitist references I was complaining about earlier), so maybe Abeel felt that she had to make the book exciting and totally plot-driven.

In the end, though, Women Like Us' redeeming qualities are that it is completely relatable and completely readable. I devoured it like I haven't any book in awhile, staying up late or deciding to read instead of do something else because I was so intrigued with the current character's situation. I also like how a theme in the book was writing and that Daisy aspired to be a published writer. Overall I give it four stars and would recommend it to any woman, while challenging her to not to be able to see herself or her female relatives or friends in many of the pages.

Click here to purchase Women Like Us from Amazon.com (I will receive a small percentage of the sale):

Book Review: Lucky: A Memoir, by Alice Sebold

2009-11-08T13:49:00.000-08:00

Disturbing Subject Matter but an Important Book: A Book Review of Lucky: A Memoir by Alice Sebold

It's hard to read, let alone review, a book about rape, but I think that this book it is an important one. Lucky
is a memoir about a college student who was attacked and raped in the park by her campus. Despite its difficult subject matter, Lucky reads smoothly. I feel that this is an accessible book for people to read who would like to understand better how to deal with rape, and to see all the ways that it impacts someone.

For me there were four distinct parts of this book (although the writer did not designate them as such – it just felt to me to read like that). The first part was the beginning, in which the actual rape sequence is told right up front. It is hard to digest but is written very clearly and directly. I really felt for the narrator in the next scenes, which immediately follow the rape, in which she goes to the police and is examined and has to tell her friends and family members what happened. At one point she describes something that I imagine must be almost as horrible as the rape itself – having to live the rest of her life as a rape victim:

“I knew exactly what had happened. But can you speak those sentences to the people you love? . . . That question continues to haunt me. After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes.”

The second part of Lucky: A Memoir, for me, described the weeks and months following the rape. I found this part to be lacking because it seemed to me that the narrator wasn’t really dealing with her true feelings. I suppose that that is how it actually happened, though, and she did a good job of making me feel like I was right there with her in that time and that space, even though I often wanted her to do things differently. At times it seemed like she was pushing the rape out of her mind completely, and writing about her college classes and other things that any book about any college student would include. I wanted her to focus more on the issue, but perhaps she dealt with it by not focusing on it. In this part the theme of writing was introduced, which I did enjoy. Sebold dealt with her emotions by writing poetry and fiction. She took classes and seminars by Tobias Wolff and Tess Gallagher. Tess Gallagher is actually a pretty central character in the book, who accompanies Alice to court when she has to confront her attacker (although she’s disappeared by the end of the book without explanation, leaving me to wonder what happened).

The third part of the book, which I really liked, moved on to show how the narrator was intent on prosecuting her attacker. It was easy to cheer for her and she showed a lot of strength and wisdom. She describes the legal process well and at one point she mentions wanting to go to law school so that she can prosecute other criminals (she later decides to pursue teaching instead, and says it became her lifeline and salvation). It seems very fulfilling that the narrator finds some kind of justice and closure in the midst of all her suffering. At the same time, she is still human. I could tell that the rape had affected her and that in some ways it had changed her in a negative way. She seems to use men for own reasons and disregard what they must be feeling. She has a strange relationship with her father that she never quite explores in depth the way I wanted her to. (At times she has a close bond with her mother, who is always anxious and has panic attacks). Through all of these shortcomings, however, for most of the book she seems strong and like someone to whom most readers would be able to relate, despite the horrible thing that happened to her.

The fourth and last part of the book, though, takes a strange turn. I don’t want to include spoilers so suffice it to say that the narrator is no longer the intelligent, strong fighter that the reader had gotten to know and admire. This made me feel like my hunch was correct that she hadn’t been dealing internally with the aftermath of her rape. I was disappointed at her downfall but, more than that, it didn’t seem to make sense to me. I thought that the writer should have spent more time on the last part of the book and less time with the mundane intricacies of college life. I felt there were issues left unexplored in the book.

Overall, I “enjoyed” reading Lucky: A Memoir, although that is a strange thing to say about a rape memoir. I thought it was well-written and that it dealt with some very important social issues. I especially liked how it explored the subject of how different women deal differently with rape, and the need for there to be open dialogue about it. The writing in parts is flourishingly poetic, which was a strange offset for the subject, but it usually worked. I would like to read another book by Alice Sebold to see whether the tone works even better with a lighter subject matter (although, from what I understand, her novel Her Lovely Bones has anything but a light subject matter). I give Lucky: A Memoir three and a half stars and would recommend the book, but be forewarned that the subject matter is obviously difficult.

Click here to purchase Lucky (I will receive a small portion of the proceeds):

Quotes from Lucky:

“No one can pull anyone back from anywhere. You save yourself or you remain unsaved.”

“Poetry is not an attitude. It is hard work.” (Quoting Tess Gallagher)

“Memory could save . . . it had power . . . it was often the only recourse of the powerless, the oppressed, or the brutalized.” (Referring to Tobias Wolff’s own story, This Boy’s Life)

“You never get over some things.”

From an interview with Alice Sebold that is published as a supplement in the back of the book:

Question: People often wonder if writing is therapeutic. If you’re writing about a trauma, does that help the pain of the trauma recede? Susie in the novel [a different book] says something like every time she tells her story, a drop of the pain goes away. But as a writer who’s written about your own trauma and then written a fictionalized version of a similar trauma, is writing therapeutic or do you think that that’s really the wrong way to approach it anyway?

Answer: My feeling is that therapy is for therapy and that writing can be therapeutic, but therapeutic writing should not be published. My job as a writer is to go through the therapy myself and, if I manage to get through it and I feel I have something to share from that, to share it with my audience or my readers. But I don’t’ write novels and seek to have them published so that I can get therapy from having written them. That’s really the responsibility of an individual to do outside the context of their published work.

My notes on the book: At one point, due to the trauma, Alice wakes up with night sweats and sometimes screaming – sounds like night terrors. Dorland Mountain Arts Colony – rural California. Hayden Carruth, Jack Gilbert and Diane Wakowski – poets. Olga Cabral (“Lillian’s Chair”) and Peter Wild (“Dog Hospital”). Raymond Carver. Robert Bly. Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin – feminist writers. She was raised in Paoli, Pennsylvania, near Frazer. She went to Syracuse College in New York. She lived in New York City for some years after college. She spends some time in California. She attends graduate school to pursue her MA in Poetry for awhile at the University of Houston.

Book Review: Mourning Ruby by Helen Dunmore

2009-11-02T20:23:00.000-08:00

There May Be Such a Thing as Too "Literary": A Book Review of Mourning Rubyby Helen Dunmore

This novel is more or less about a mother who is grieving the tragic loss of her five-year-old daughter. But the "more or less" part cannot be overlooked. If it weren't for the title and the ominous cover picture featuring a little girl skipping in the leaves in a red dress, the reader would have no idea what this book is about for quite some time. It begins with a prologue that is a dream sequence, told in the first person, of the narrator--Ruby's mother Rebecca--and Ruby walking along a road. I thought that a novel should never open with a dream; it's a cheap technique, too easily and often used. And unfortunately the book continues that way, although a lot of the techniques are more original. After the prologue, Rebecca describes what happened to her when she herself was a baby, which was that her mother left her in a shoebox outside an Italian restaurant. She was then adopted by parents who seem not to care for her much, and the feelings are mutual. She tells her own story in such a removed and distant way that it is hard to relate to her. Plus, the tone of the writing is confusing and the plot starts jumping all
over the place.

Soon we learn that Rebecca lived with a guy who was in love with her, but those feelings weren't mutual. His name is Joe and he writes historical non-fiction. He's in the middle of writing a book about Stalin's second wife, and this story takes up a good chunk of the first part of the book. That story could be rather interesting, but Joe tells it to Rebecca in a series of long drawn-out conversations, in which he makes clear that she is not interested in what he is talking about. So why should the reader be? I never really figured that out, although I did enjoy reading about collectivist Russia.

We also learn that Rebecca has a husband named Adam, but the relationship between them doesn't seem very convincing. He is a doctor who saves newborn babies, ironically. Some things seem like easy plot devices which aren't very realistic-- such as Rebecca working part-time in a bar while her husband is doctoring.

Another central sub-plot in Mourning Rubyis the story of Rebecca and her boss, Mr. Damiano, for whom she goes to work after Ruby's death. To me he was the most interesting character and his story was the most captivating, albeit even more unrealistic than the relationship between Rebecca and Adam. His family performed in circuses in Madrid, and his little sister suffered a tragedy almost as devastating as Ruby's death. Mr. Damiano likes to re-create "dream worlds"--obviously a theme underlying the novel--and bring pleasure to people as his business. He owns a chain of hotels, all named after minor English poets: Sidney, Lampedusa, Villon, Langland, Sonescu, Cavafy, Sexton, and Bishop. Poetry and written language play a central part in this novel. In fact, an obvious theme is a writer writing about writing, which I found at times to be both interesting and annoying.

For instance, each chapter--and many of them are very short--starts out with a rather strange title and a snippet of a poem, excerpt from a book, or folk song. I found these snippets to be distracting because I wanted to know where they came from and how they related to the book and what the rest of the snippet was all about. Like much about the book, this information is never revealed to the reader, except at the very end, when Dunmore includes a list of "sources," which include her own poetry. Also in line with the literary theme, Joe tells Rebecca near the beginning of the book that the Russian poet Mandelstam once wrote about baby airplanes as a metapher for writing poetry: one airplane in full flight gives birth to another airplane, which then flies off and gives birth to another airplane. Dunmore weaves this theme into the novel, as a way to show how one story gives life to another, and all stories are connected. I suppose that Rebecca is trying to find her own life story, but the rather interesting plot line about her birth and her upbringing as an adopted child is abandoned rather early on. It's hard to care about a book when each story drops off after it gives birth to the next one. Ruby's death is the only main theme that continues throughout the book, but it's hard to connect to because so many other stories are swarming around it.

Most frustrating of all, for me, wasn't the fact that so many stories were told, but rather it was the way they were told. Much of the prose during Rebecca's narration is beautiful (the jacket cover states that Dunmore is a poet and short story writer, so I might like to check her out in these contexts, in which the language and style might work better for me than it did in a novel). The flowery language, however, seemed to detract from the plot for me and made it hard for me to related to Rebecca as a real character. And some of the stories that had the potential to be the most exciting were told in the dullest manners possible. Mr. Damiano's fascinating life story is told--much like the history of Stalin that Joe is writing--in long strings of conversation, which to me took a lot away from the potential captivating action. I was unsure why Dunmore chose to do this, even though I "got" that she had this over-riding theme of writing about writing, and writing about stories within stories.

Mid-way through Mourning Ruby, the point of view changes, and we are seeing Joe, told from the omniscient perspective, without Rebecca there, and also Adam in the same way. To me this was disappointing and destroyed any integrity the novel was supposed to have. It was another easy way out. The last part of the book is part of a novel that Joe sends to Rebecca, ostensibly to help her figure out her own story. I found part of this plot interesting, as it was about a prostitute named Florence who lived in France during the First World War. The Madame of the house was the only strong female character in the book (I thought it was annoying how Rebecca learned everything about herself through the three main male characters), although Florence, by the end portion of Joe's unfinished work of fiction, was starting to develop into a strong character as well. Joe tells Rebecca that he hasn't finished the book and so he encloses character and plot notes, which we the poor readers are forced to suffer through, right when we were into the story of Florence, and quite awhile after we had totally lost track of the story of Rebecca and Ruby.

Overall, Mourning Rubywas one of the most discombobulated novels I have ever read. At first it left me feeling disoriented, and then, once I got my bearings, it usually left me feeling disappointed. At times the language was captivating, and at other times the plot was too. These times were nearly canceled out, however, by the parts that seemed to be told in a hurry of rushed dialogue. The concept is certainly ambitious and I like some of the ideas behind the novel, but I think they were executed rather poorly, with style valued much more than substance. I did enjoy the writing theme, but it was much too much: definitely overkill. I enjoyed reading about the different places and time periods. Most of the parts featuring Rebecca--all of which are contemporary--are set in Cornwall, and some in London (Dunmore is a British writer). I also enjoyed reading about historical France and historical and modern-day Russia (where Joe briefly resides and where Rebecca and Adam go to visit him in a rather twisted love-triangle). So I can't say I regret reading this unique book, but it certainly wasn't one of my favorites. I give it two and a half stars, out of five.

Click on the image below to buy this book now, from Amazon.com (I will receive a small percentage of the sale price):

Here are some quotes and passages from the book that I really liked:

"She understood that she had no rights in the future of a baby she was about to give away. She wanted me to start with a clean sheet."

"I mistrust sensitive people. In my experience what they are chiefly sensitive to is themselves."

"In my view friendship can be rarer and tenderer than love."

"Living with someone, you can't help absorbing what they do. You get the language around you and you start to use it yourself, without thinking."

"When people say you remind them of someone it means that you remind them of themselves, of their own life, of their own concerns. You are a mirror, that's all."

"The circus had taught me the most important trick it possesses: to discover what people want, before they know it themselves, and before anyone else knows it. To discover it first, and act on it. It sounds very simple, doesn't it? You wonder why everyone doesn't find it out."

"You can't free yourself from the past. The past is what you are." [paraphrasing slightly]

"The most important thing parents have to do is to make their children believe that life is good. Or if they can't manage that, at least make them believe that life is bearable. That there are ways to bear it and that they will help the children to find them."

"Here I am sitting in a pool of electric light, with my iBook burning blue. I'm drinking whiskey and I'm about to start writing again. I'm in the territory of bears. They are all around me, even if I can't yet see them. I can sense them, smell them. I'm an indoor man by nature, and words are the kind of bears I hunt."

"The fact that the relationship between you didn't continue doesn't invalidate it- that would be like saying that love isn't real unless it lasts forever."

"For most of my life it felt improbable to me that I had a father at all. I don't remember him any more than you remember your mother. I'd love to have known him. Sometimes I get a sensation in my head, in my moth almost, like a taste or a smell. I nearly remember him, but then I don't. I try not to reach after it too much. The thread that links us is so slender that I'm afraid it'll snap if I strain it too far. it drives me crazy. Maybe there's a sensation like that in your head.

All those months inside your mother's body, those hours when she was yours and no one else's, and you were hers. The fact that the relationship between you didn't continue doesn't invalidate it- that would be like saying that love isn't real unless it lasts forever."

"A field is enough to spend a life in.
Harrow, granite and mattress springs,
shards and bones, turquoise droppings
from pigeons that gorge on nightshade berries,
a charm of goldfinch, a flight of linnets,
fieldfare and January redwing
venturing westward in the dusk,
all are folded in the dark of the field,

all are folded into the dark of the field
and need more days
to paint them, than life gives."

"Someone asked Mandelstam what poetry was like, and he said that it was like an aeroplane flying along which gives birth to a baby aeroplane which immediately begins to fly with its full strength and its own life, and gives birth to its own baby aeroplane. All this happens without any of the aeroplanes missing a beat. All this happens within one poem. Mandelstam's baby aeroplanes never nuzzle and butt around their mothers' bellies. Immediately they are born and they fly off, with their own life."

National Novel Writing Month

2009-10-31T20:29:00.000-07:00

I just signed up to write a 50,000 novel in the month of November, at Nanowrimo, the official site of National Novel Writing Month. Except for a book called "My Grandpa, the Weirdo" that I wrote in 6th grade, I've never finished a whole novel before. I guess there's a first time for everything. Wish me luck!

Oh, and Happy Halloween.

New writing quotes

2009-10-27T08:09:00.000-07:00

The Quotes On Writing section has been updated with new quotes about writing and writers.

Law-Related Quotes

2009-10-26T08:35:00.000-07:00

Here are quotes related to the law, legal issues, law school and lawyers, that I have found and liked while reading books, articles, short stories, or websites.

"Few students enter college with all the points on the map plotted. The premeds commit early, because they have to. The prebusiness types drift into economis and psychology classes. The rest, a hodgepodge of majors, whose interests are vaguely creative, wander from art history class to philosophy seminar to life-drawing studio to the British novel until, one day, they matamorphose into nail-biting, neurotic law school applicants."

- Cameron Stracher, Double Billing: A Young Lawyer's Tale of Greed, Sex, Lies, and the Pursuit of a Swivel Chair

"Law school has become the graduate school for the great unwashed, the final resting place for a plurality of college graduates without an employable degree."

- Cameron Stracher, Double Billing: A Young Lawyer's Tale of Greed, Sex, Lies, and the Pursuit of a Swivel Chair

"For most . . . the decision to go to law school must be viewed as a combination of fear, coercion, curiosity, self-interest, self-delusion, and entropy . . . no one goes to law school at gunpoint. In a perfect world one could win the lottery, marry rich, lack material desires. But the world has never been perfect. The noisy clash between commerce and leisure is not an invention of this generation. Everyone has to work: the flawed, self-deluded, and famous. You look at the world and decide where you fit in, or the world fits you in. You make a guess, take a chance, leap into the void. But it's an educated guess, based on what you know about yourself and the world, which may not be much. Sometimes you guess wrong; sometimes the guess is right, but the world is wrong. In the end, you can change your mind, but you can't change the world. Thus, law school."

- Cameron Stracher, Double Billing: A Young Lawyer's Tale of Greed, Sex, Lies, and the Pursuit of a Swivel Chair

Browse more quotes and more at: Site Map

Book Review: Double Billing by Cameron Stracher

2009-10-25T12:24:00.000-07:00

Not as Dramatic as it Tries to Be: A Book Review of Double Billing: A Young Lawyer's Tale Of Greed, Sex, Lies, And The Pursuit Of A Swivel Chairby Cameron Stracher

Double Billingis a memoir by a Harvard Law graduate who spent a few years in the 1990’s as an associate at a large (fictionalized) law firm in New York City. I bought this book for my fiance’s father, who enjoys legal thrillers by the likes of John Grisham. He had most recently been telling me about Grisham’s book The Associate. So, I thought, here’s a bird’s eye view into the world of a first year associate at a large law firm, a true story told by the former associate himself. The cover looked intriguing and mentioned the usual exciting suspects: greed, sex, and lies (although I wasn’t sure what the pursuit of a swivel chair part was all about).

After my fiance’s father read it, I decided to as well, because it seemed timely. I was working at the local office of a large law firm where I wasn’t happy. I thought that reading this book would help in a “misery loves company” kind of way. (Disclosure: By now I work at a small civil law firm, where I am much happier, so I am biased!)

The contents of Double Billing, however, not only disappointed me but, more often than not, annoyed me. I found the writing to be mediocre and the narrator to be self-indulgent. At some points I wondered if it was the author’s intention to upset the reader, because the book contained some sexist and racist comments, as well as downright condescending ones, such as this little gem:

“In the hierarchy of criminal practitioners, federal prosecutors are at the top, state prosecutors at the bottom . . . In the civil bar, personal injury lawyers—those who handle “slip and fall” cases—are at the bottom; lawyers at large firms who represent major clients are at the top . . . If you asked a personal injury lawyer whether he considered himself at the bottom of the civil law food chain, he would probably deny it and protest vigorously. On the other hand, his denials would have a strong whiff of defensiveness.”

I wondered what made the narrator think he knew so much about the practice of law when it came to making such blasé comments, when throughout the book, he makes a big deal out of the fact that he knows nothing about being an associate at a big law firm. (When given a document review assignment, he lies to a senior associate about having done one before, messes the process up due to his own ignorance, and then remarks, “There was no course called Document Production at Harvard. No one explained ‘Bates stamping’ or making multiple copies or reproducing file labels or sitting in a warehouse sweating your ass off.”) He also comes off as extremely immature at times, and almost disrespectful. (“We drove to the hearing in White Plains in [a partner] Caroline’s Lexus. On the drive back to the office, I drew stick figures on the air-conditioned window while Caroline spoke to [another partner] Eric on the car phone.”)

Having worked at a large and a mid-sized law firm, I had a pretty good idea what Stracher was writing about. Granted, I never worked—-and know by now that I wouldn’t want to work—-as an associate at a large law firm in New York City, but I have had many similar experiences as Stracher. He spends the first few months with little to no work, supposedly reading law review articles all day, which in my experience means you are either lazy or that the partners find you undesirable and you will eventually find your way to the door, by yourself or with an escort. After awhile, however, he does pick up some work, mainly a lot of document review and some discovery requests and responses, which is pretty typical of first year associate work. He even gets to help with a trial, which is a rare experience for a new associate that he at different points in the book appears to appreciate and take for granted.

Much of Double Billingcame off as whiny to me, and perhaps I have been numbed by the corporate law firms to which I sold my soul, but I don’t think anything he described was that bad. For one thing, as far as his rant about document production goes, paralegals have done the "bates stamping and multiple copying and reproducing file labels" work at all three of the firms where I have worked, and I can only imagine a large law firm having even more support staff on hand for these types of tasks. The “lies” he mentions are basically instructing a witness not to speculate about a situation if he or she doesn’t remember what was said or done, and playing discovery “games” with the other side by stalling or objecting before producing important documents. These situations and others have bothered me at various points in my career, but, as Stracher pointed out, that’s the way that practicing law sometimes works, and nothing that he saw violated the law or any professional or ethical rules. He also talks about partners giving busy work and tasks that he himself views as unnecessary to associates so that the firm can keep billing as many hours as possible. This complaint also has merit, but one person’s “busy work” is something another person deems necessary, and I wanted Stracher to deal with these important issues in a better way than casually mentioning them and then moving on.

As far as “sex” goes, there was little to none, and certainly not enough for a book that has the word in its subtitle. One of Stracher’s co-workers is secretly dating a paralegal. (How exciting.) More puzzling to me are Stracher’s sporadic mentions of his own personal life, without ever letting the reader in to the whole story. The book starts when he’s out to dinner with his girlfriend, having just passed the Bar, and ends when his girlfriend finally persuades him to change jobs. In the middle, there are random mentions of times when he has to cancel plans with her or leave her lonely at home because he has to work so much, and other times when she nags him to change jobs and stop working so much. Apparently they had been together for quite awhile and I kept waiting for some detail into their relationship beyond this surface level, and especially for resolution one way or the other-—a marriage proposal or a break up—-but there was none. I was left wondering why he even brought the girlfriend into the book at all.

And the swivel chair in the sub-title? Another disappointment. The entire story can be summed up as: his chair broke and he had to put in a request with the office manager, which was last on her list because he was a lowly associate and not a partner, and eventually, right before he quit, he got his chair. This plot line about sums up the excitement contained in the book as a whole.

If you are an attorney who has worked at a large firm before, or probably any sized civil firm, you will be able to relate to many parts of this book. At some points I was like, “Oh, yeah, exactly,” but other times I was bored because it was so commonplace. If you aren’t an attorney, but are interested in legal books, movies, TV shows, etc., you may like the insider’s view that this book presents. My fiance’s father liked it and it gave us some good conversation material, such as billable hours and different types of attorneys and areas of practice, etc. The book is definitely an easy and fast read. I wonder, though, if some of the legal mumbo jumbo may be confusing or frustrating to non-attorneys. The way that Stracher tries to describe legal issues was pretty annoying to me, full of dramatic language and unnecessary capitalization. (“Imagine: you’re the General Counsel of a Very Big Corporation that has just been sued by an Extremely Nasty Corporation for Unimaginable Injuries.”)

I assume that the intended audience of Double Billingis the general public—-readers who want to know what it’s like to be a young, big wig attorney at a large law firm. On that premise, this book does deliver, although I think the entire “spend a lot of hours doing seemingly useless work, until you can pay back your law school loans and go in-house” spiel could have been told with a lot more excitement.

I recommend this for people who are in law school or thinking about going to law school because in my opinion it gives a realistic portrayal of being a junior associate at a big law firm. The problem is that those big law firms are boring and stuffy, so the book is a little bit like that, too. Still, I think many people go into good law schools (and a lot of debt) with a lot of ambition and high hopes, only to find out that they must sell their souls to large law firms to be able to pay for their education, and this is not the kind of work or the kind of environment they had in mind when they signed up for the gig in the first place. A bit depressing, really, but also remember that not all law firms/ law jobs are like that. In my opinion this book seems to accurately depict large, big-city law firm life. To that I can only say "blah" -- to the idea and to the book!

Rating: I give this book two and a half stars -- I didn't really like it but some people might and it's not absolutely horrible.

Read: March – April, 2009

Buy this book at Amazon.com (I will receive a small percentage of the proceeds):

Index of Book Reviews -- By Genre / Category

2009-10-24T13:11:00.000-07:00

(Last updated on January 28, 2011 with the addition of Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity by Kerry Cohen)

Fiction

* Classic

--> Novels
---> Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
---> The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
---> Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

--> Short Stories
---> Flappers and Philosophers: 8 Short Stories By F. Scott Fitzgerald
---> The Wife, and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov

* Contemporary

--> Novels
----> My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult
----> Mourning Ruby by Helen Dunmore
----> The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton
----> The Wife by Meg Wolitzer
----> Women Like Us by Erica Abeel

--> Short Stories
----> Best American Short Stories, 1991 Edited by Alice Adams and Katrina Kenison
----> Best New American Voices, 2006 Edited by Jane Smiley, John Kulka and Natalie Danford
----> Glimmer Train Stories: Issue # 48, Fall 2003

Non-Fiction

* Creative Non-Fiction

--> Memoir
----> Loose: A Memoir of Promiscuity by Kerry Cohen
----> Lucky, a Memoir by Alice Sebold
----> Double Billing: A Young Lawyer's Tale of Greed, Sex, Lies and the Pursuit of a Swivel Chair by Cameron Stracher

--> Instructive
---> Career and Corporate Cool: How to Look, Dress and Act the Part-- at Every Stage of Your Career by Rachel C. Weingarten

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Wake Up Call: First Rejection Letter for Coach K Arrives

2009-10-17T10:17:00.000-07:00

I've been waiting to hear back from the five literary journals to which I sent my personal essay/memoir piece "Coach K" almost a month ago. I received an email from Creative Nonfiction inviting me to view their website and receive a discount on a subscription. Although it was obviously a form email, it included my name and the title of my piece, which gave me hope. It said they take up to six months to respond, though, so I went back to waiting.

Every day I check the mail to no avail. Except last night, after getting home from a bar with my fiance and one of our friends, my fiance checked the mail for me and there was an envelope from Alaska Quarterly Review. Sure enough, it was a rejection letter. :( A standard form one stating that my work does not meet their needs at this time. Someone did write "Re: Coach K" and "With Thanks" on it, which was a nice little gesture, but I didn't even notice that until this morning I was so bummed, which the alcohol didn't help, so I just tossed the letter to the side and pouted. I just wanted to go lay in bed and cry. I had to smile, try to ignore it (I did whisper to my fiance that I got a rejection letter -- he looked genuinely surprised and crestfallen, which was sweet, and then he said something funny like "Those fools are stupid for not recognizing your talent!") and play Beatles Rock Band.

Lately I'd been thinking more and more about whether I could ever leave the law to be a writer, and if so, when. I had been joking wih my sister while I was in PA over the weekend that if I were hit by a car and bleeding to death on the side of the road, I wouldn't think about my legal career, accomplishments, downfalls, etc. at all. I'd think of my family and friends and then I'd think, "I never got to publish a book! I didn't spend enough time writing!" We were laughing and she was going, "Help me officer, I'm bleeeeeeeeding and I just want to publish a book!" But then on Wednesday after I returned home I was actually involved in a scary car accident in which my tire blew out on the highway on the way from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. I thought I was going to die but I walked away completely fine. I called my sister and told her we shouldn't joke about me being in a car wreck! But since then I've had this eery feeling, like life is trying to tell me something.

Of course, last night, when I received the rejection letter, my first thought was, "Good thing I have a good day job!" It would be really hard, if not downright impossible, to rely on writing to pay the bills. And I do enjoy my job and the law. So maybe life is trying to tell me to continue to write and pursue publication as much as I can in my spare time (which is very limited) while being grateful for my legal career during most of my waking hours. ????

On the other hand, I know that rejection is just a part of the writer's life. Did I really think that the first literary journal that I sent my piece to was going to say, "wow, what a literary genius, we must publish her immediately!" I guess I kind of did. ;) But that obviously isn't very realistic.

For laughs, I enjoyed this cartoon on the stage of rejection that writers go through: From Writer, Rejected

Book Review: Career and Corporate Cool

2009-10-09T01:24:00.000-07:00

Tries Too Hard To Be "Cool":
A Review of Career and Corporate Cool (TM): How to Look, Dress and Act the Part--at Every Stage of Your Careerby Rachel C. Weingarten

I'll give this book credit for marketing. It really attracts attention and looks like the total package, complete with pink letters on the cover! But inside, it reads like a bunch of articles in Seventeen Magazine. (It even has cutesy chapter titles like "Career-o-rama," and cartoon cutout-like drawings of fashionably dressed women at work). Instead of advising you on what to do on your first date, it tells you how to be cool and sophisticated at work. Because the writing is anything but sophisticated, I didn't find it very convincing. It was really hard for me to take a book seriously that is supposed to be about a professional, mature career image but projects the image of a 16-year-old.

The sub-title of the book is deceptive, because this book does't talk at all about "every stage of your career." Instead, it seems to assume that everyone has a glamourous job but still somehow needs to figure out how to fit in. Much of the advice contained in the book is just plain common sense. The description in the inside jacket (which I should have read before the rest of the book, and then maybe I wouldn't have bought it) states, "While an off-color joke generally won't play in a cubicle environment, it can be a job requirement for a professional comedian. Fortune 500 companies tend to frown on perceived sexual harassment in the workplace while massage therapists touch naked strangers on a daily basis." Oh really, Rachel, you don't say?

Speaking of the dear author Rachel, she writes the entire book with a super chatty tone, like a thirteen year old, I guess in an attempt to relate to the reader (who is supposed to be caring about their professional career). But I found it condescending at some points, and downright annoying at others. She touts her own horn to no end. On page 169 of the book, she is still reminding us how "cool" she is: "I'm not a doctor (thought I'm known as a heck of a spin doctor and freuquently revive brands that are on death's door), and I'm certainly not a nurse (though I regularly nurse clients' and colleagues' bruised egos, and nurture projects from concept to fruition.) I am a marketing strategist and consultant who works on
high-profile projects and glamourous launches and events." I don't know about most readers, but I certainly do not care how many times Rachel wants to remind me of what she does and how important her work is. What I want to know are tips to succeed in my own career.

And that's where her book falls completely flat, in my opinion. My biggest objection is that it's all fluff and no substance. It also seems to jump from one topic to the next unrelated topic and back again. For example, Chapter 3 is called "Culture Club" and the index at the front states that it will teach you how to "understand and adapt to your firm's unique corporate culture without becoming just another clog." But Chapter 3 has one section called "Follow your bliss," which belongs more in a section about choosing a job or profession, another section which advises you to "be yourself" (gee, thanks for the tip) and the last and longest section is about email etiquette.

Finally, Career and Corporate Cool (TM)just seems out of touch with reality. It doesn't contain many practical tips for the typical career girl. Instead, it seems to think we all live in Hollywood and have jobs that involve throwing elaborate parties for famous people. Under a section called "publicity," Rachel writes, "If your event is newsworthy, then promote it--but first create an outstanding and newsworthy story. Court and invte key media and create individual pitches and stories for their particular publications. Follow up with details that make the story juicy, fun, or relevant. For instance, yet another party on Oscar night might not be newsworthy, but an event that boasts 12 celebrity chefs, with 12 major designers creating the table decor, and boasts such an ubercool guest list that Jamie Foxx, the night's winner in the best actor category, gets turned away at the door along with throwns of celebrites--well, that's a great party story! The extremely pricy launch party for another luxury building in Manhattan? Not a thrill. The launch party for another luxury building in Manhattan, at which one attendee wins a multimillion-dollar penthouse apartment? Now that's a great story." (No, I did not make this paragraph up. That is seriously a paragraph taken from this so-called "career guide." Now you see why I had so many problems with it.) The book also includes a strange chapter on how to dress your guy for your successful events, which includes having his eyebrows waxed and teaching him how not to be afraid to go to the spa to get a facial. At that point, I would think even a teenage reader would be thinking, WTF?!

The only parts of this book that I didn't totally hate were the small splatterings of advice on organization and productivity. And the "what to wear to work" section was okay. But you can get much better advice on the former topics in Women for Hire's Get-Ahead Guide to Career Success (which I will review soon, because it is a much better career guide than Career and Corporate Cool (TM)!), and much better "fashion for work" advice in Dress Smart for Women. There is nothing in Career and Corporate Cool that isn't in any other career book. And there is a lot of annoying stuff that isn't in those other books. So my advice is to skip this book unless you happen to be buying it for a 17 year old who has the means to organize a launch party complete with a multimillion-dollar door prize.

My rating: 1.5 stars (out of 5) - I pretty much hated it.

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Website Review: Paperbackswap.com

2009-10-06T16:09:00.000-07:00

Click here to go to Paperbackswap.com!

The other week or so, I had what I thought was a unique idea -- what if there was a website where people could swap books? Alas, I didn't have the time or money to create such a website. Out of curiosity, though, I typed in "swap books" on Google and, much to my amazement, such a website already existed! It's Paperbackswap and it's pretty cool. I may be the last person in cyberspace to have heard of this site, but I told my mom and my former office manager, both who love to read, about it, and neither of them had heard of it either. Apparently it is five years old, so word is slow to spread... at least to me and my mom and my former office manager!

Paperbackswap is kind of like eBay or Amazon -- you just enter a book you want, and it comes up, but you can "order" it for free, with credits. You get two credits for listing ten books, and then one credit thereafter for every book that you send to someone else. (You type in a book that you want to list and add it to your "bookshelf" for other people to browse). Despite its name, it doesn't deal in just paperbacks. One paperback or hardback book cost one credit, while audiobooks cost two credits. The only thing you have to pay for is to ship the book to whoever orders it (which is why it's beneficial to trade paperbacks). There are no other fees or charges.

The great thing about Paperbackswap is obviously that you can get free books! The only negatives I have found so far are few in comparision to that fantastic fact. But, for the sake of full disclosure, here they are. For one thing, someone doesn't always have the book you want to order, online on Amazon or usually eBay. In that case you can put it on your "wish list" and be notified when someone lists it. I have so many books to read that I don't mind the wait. But if you want a brand new, popular book that a lot of people have added to their wish lists (you have to wait in line behind whoever requested it first), this might not be the place you should look. Likewise, if you list a bunch of hot-off-the-press bestselling books, you may be inundated with a flood of books you have to mail, because everyone else has wish listed them and requests them right away. This was not my problem, by the way. I guess I have obscure tastes because no one was in a rush to order my books. I listed ten about a week ago and have sent two out. So, in my case, it's harder to get credits than if I were a fan of the latest thrillers or what have you.

All of that, I can work with. The only thing that really bugs me is that it seems to take much longer to get a book from Paperbackswap than from other book sites. When you order a book, the seller is given *five* days to click a button saying that they will mail it "now" (within 2 days) or "later" (within 5 days, I think). Plus everyone only mails media mail since they aren't getting paid for the book OR to mail it. So if you need a book in a hurry, this is NOT the site where you should order it. I ordered two books with my first two credits, both by Andre Dubus. Maybe this can be blamed on my comparatively obscure taste, but the owners of both of these books took the full five days to respond. One responded at the last hour that they would mail it within five days. The other one never responded, in which case the request goes to the next person in line who listed that book. That person, bless their heart, did respond and send out my book right away. I think it's a bit ridiculous that people have *so* long to send a book they list as wanting to trade, just because it's a trading site, whereas on other sites a reasonable confirmation response and shipping time is expected.

Despite that complaint, I really love this site and plan to get most of my books on here from now on (since I rarely need them in a hurry and rarely feel like buying a hot-off-the-press book). I recommend it to any reader! If you do sign up, please mention my name (voracia) because then I'll get a credit as a referral bonus. :) For everyone who has tried this site, what do you think? Has it been a positive experience or a negative one? Do you recommend it?

Click here to go to Paperbackswap.com!

Read To Me Corner

2009-10-02T22:16:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I volunteered to read to children at the New Mexico State Fair, through the Albuquerque Business and Education Compact (ABEC)’s “Read To Me” program. My assignment was to lay out a blanket and a bunch of books by a tree and a sign that said “Read To Me Corner.” I arrived at the designated spot, the “Kids’ Pavilion,” to find that it was placed smack in the middle of a lot of entertaining activities for children – the petting zoo, an outdoor science museum with experiments like making bubbles out of a humongous wand, a tunnel to walk through, games to play, and an arts and crafts tent right beside me. Even though my love for reading and books started at a very young age, my first thought was, “What kind of a kid is going to want to have a book read to him when there’s all of this other fun stuff to do?”

The kids proved me wrong. And they proved to me that reading as a form of education and entertainment is as alive and well as when I was their age. My first “customer” was a baby named Theo, who literally crawled over to my blanket and pounded his hands over the row of books I was still laying out. His parents laughed and told me he loved books. He sat cross-legged and enthralled while I read him Dr. Seuss’ Oh, the Places You'll Go! and when I read the line, “you have feet in your shoes,” he grabbed his tiny little shoes.

A girl of about seven sat straight and tall, while I read her a book called Recycle Every Day! by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace. The book is about a bunny rabbit named Minna who has a school assignment and contest to make a poster about recycling. It’s very entertaining but shows the rabbit family recycling every day of the week, and I was afraid that my listener might start to lose patience. Instead, she listened carefully until I finished the book and Minna had won the contest for her poster that said “Re-re-re-member to re-re-re-cycle every day.”

I loved seeing the children interested in reading, and I must admit I enjoyed browsing the book selection (which was provided by ABEC). Many of the children loved the book Emma Kate by Patricia Polacco, which is about a little girl and her imaginary best friend elephant (the illustrations are superb). Another favorite – one little boy knew it by heart and said his teacher read it to him – was Beatrice Doesn't Want To, by Laura Numeroff. It was about a little dog who doesn’t want to go to the library with her big brother, until she discovers a book she likes about roller-skating. Another good one was A Pocket Can Have a Treasure in It, by Kathy Stinson.

I would like to volunteer to read books to children again in the future because I think it’s something that both I and the kids enjoy. I am not sure if all state fairs have something similar to a Read To Me corner, or only New Mexico. I found this opportunity by visiting the mayor’s website of upcoming events that need volunteers – at the Mayor’s Office of Volunteerism and Engagement. But there were many similar opportunities at volunteermatch.org – it’s just that many of them require a weekly commitment that I honestly don’t have the time to give right now. I think that projects like this are great volunteer opportunities for people who love to read and write! It’s refreshing to be able to bring a smile to a child’s face by doing what you love to do anyway.

Book Review: Best New American Voices 2006

2009-09-28T00:06:00.001-07:00

Fresh is Right: The Unique Stories in Best New American Voices 2006
Edited by Jane Smiley
Series Editors: John Kulka and Natalie Danford

This is the first book I've read in the Best New American Voices series, which I didn't know existed until I was at Borders with my mom in Pennsylvania in June and I saw it on the dollar clearance rack. This series accepts entries from top writing programs and workshops around the country, and chooses the best--in this book there are 15 stories--to publish. I started reading this book on July 25, 2009. A week later, during a camping trip at Vallecito Lake, Colorado, I finished it. Having been a big fan of the Best American Short Stories series for a long time, I was a little skeptical about the Best New American Voices series, thinking, "these writers were just in graduate school when they wrote these stories, how can they be as good as the stories from long-established writers?"

Boy, was I wrong. Granted, some of the stories show signs of amateurism; but then I wondered, "would I even think that if they weren't in this book?" I don't know. Other stories to me seemed to come from tried and true "professional" writers (whatever that means), and I was surprised to know that the authors were just emerging.

Overall, I like this book even better than some of the Best American series I've read, and almost every story grabbed my attention from beginning to end. Sometimes I feel jaded about the Best American stories, which the series editor supposedly picks without knowing the author's name but which happen to feature particular authors over and over again. Sometimes, especially--it seems--depending on the series editor, I think, "what in the world is this story doing in here? It's not even good." But the stories in Best New American Voices were obviously chosen without regard for who the author was, as long as she or he was in a writing program or workshop.

I think my favorite story in this collection is "Alice's House", by Jamie Keene from the University of Oregon. It's about a man who has recently divorced his wife and is getting ready to sell their house and move in with his girlfriend, when his ex wife comes to his house for an unannounced midnight visit. I also liked "Lyndon", by Amber Dermont from the University of Houston, about a young woman whose father recently died. The narrator continues her and her father's tradition of visiting the birth places of U.S. presidents with her mother, with whom she has a strained relationship.

Some of the stories feature quite unique formats, such as "The Jupiter's In", by Sarah Blackman from the University of Alabama, in which each scene starts and ends with missing words or letters, much like the sign on the run-down inn. This story features colorful, unique characters and has a distinctly southern feel. "Begin With an Outline" by Kaui Hart Hemmings from Stanford University is about a narrator attempting to tell an emotional story in a forced outline format. The setting for that story, or at least its background, is Hawaii, and the imagery is very vivid and gripping. "Useless Beauty, or, Notes on Esquire's 'Things a Man Should Never Do After the Age of 30'" by Albert E. Martinez from New Mexico State University (of particular note to me, since I live in New Mexico) is a story told interspersed with excerpts from the article, such as "own a futon," "live with someone you don't sleep with," and "use the word 'party' as a verb." The story itself involves a guy who just turned 30 and who is still hung up on his ex girlfriend. It is set in San Fransisco and, to me anyway, is a commentary on the late 20's/early 30's urbanites who live there.

There are many stories in this collection told from the point of view of a child or young adult, such as Michelle Regalado Deatrick's "Backfire" and Matt Freidson's "Liberty." There are also many stories about the death of a parent, such as Jennifer Shaff's "Leave of Absence", Amber Dermott's "Lyndon", and Sian M. Jones' "Pilot". Story notes from each story follow below, but because they may contain mild spoilers, I've saved them for the very bottom of the page.

All the stories in this series fit the title, being fresh and invigorating reads. I hope to find and read more books in this series and would recommend it to anyone who likes short stories and anyone who wants to read the newest works coming out of America's writing programs.

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Story Notes:

1. Leave of Absence, by Jennifer Shaff -- Emerson College
Spock comes to visit a young woman whose parents died in a car crash, while she is on leave from her teaching job due to grief, slowly turning into madness.
Setting: Evanston, Wisconsin.
Character's profession: Teacher.
Jewish characters.
Themes: Sibling bond (brother/ sister), Death of parent (both), Sports - Packers football.
Very far-fetched yet unique.
7/10 - I liked it. Very unique.

2. Lyndon, by Amber Dermott -- University of Houston.
Girl's father dies and she thinks her mother is pregnant with another man's baby. Mother and daughter continue the former father/daughter tradition of visiting birthplaces of presidents.
Setting: New Jersey and Johnson City, Texas
Character's career: Investment baker
Working moms
Themes: Death of parent (father), father/ daughter relationship, mother/ daughter relationship
Anxiety/ night terrors/ nightmares
8/10 - I really liked it.

3. A New Kind of Gravity by Andrew Foster Altschul -- Stanford University
Guard in women's domestic abuse shelter befriends the young daughter of a resident.
Character's profession -- guard
Domestic violence. Children.
9/10 -- I loved it.

4. The Rust Preventer by Jessica Anthony - George Mason University
Man is stuck in the jungle after war is over, forgotten.
Animals - monkey
Wars - World War II
Setting: Malay Archipelago
Death - main character's
8/10 -- I liked it. Very unique.

5. Trampoline by Vanya Rainova - University of San Francisco
Family living in post-communist Bulgaria has trampoline business at beach. Son falls in love with woman who has cancer and a young daughter.
Setting: Bulgaria - Slancher Briag
Beach
Love Family
Cancer
Music
9/10 - I loved it. Unique.

6. Watermark By Melanie Westerberg - California College of the Arts
Girls whose twin sister disappeared visits the shark room of the aquarium where she works, in the middle of the night.
Animals - Octopus, shark
Bad dreams
Sports - swimming, diving
Character's professions - Aquarium worker
5/10 - I didn't really like it.

7. Useless Beauty, or Notes on Esquire's Things a Man Should Never Do After the Age of 30
By Albert Martinez - New Mexico State University
Man who just turned 30 lives rather cliched social urbanite existence, trying to get over a recent break-up.
Setting - San Fransisco
Breaking up
8/10 - I really liked it. Pretty unique.

8. The Jupiter's In by Sarah Blackman - University of Alabama
A playful experiment with style, where the first words or so keep dropping more and more off the beginning of each sentence of every section, mimicking the letters fading from the sign on the inn owned by Miss Flora Jean. Her son is lazy and is purposefully gaining weight, with the goal of becoming the fattest astronaut in space. His girlfriend is pregnant. A tragedy occurs with a guest at the inn.
Setting -- South (never says where, but it's obviously in the South)
Characters' occupation - Innkeeper
Obesity
children
Relationship with parent - mother/ son
8/10 - I really liked it. Very unique.

9. Alice's House by Jamie Keene - University of Oregon
Breaking up
Divorce
Houses
10/10 - I loved it.

10. Liberty by Matt Freidson - Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing
Teenage boy in delinquent youth's prison in Vietnam falls in love.
Setting: Vietnam - Hanoi
Love
Music
Friendship - men
Teenagers
Prostitutes
8/10 - I really liked it.

11. Twinless by Gregory Plemmons - Sewanee Writers' Conference
Sister locks twin brother in cellar before going to their father's wedding after their mother's death, so he can't ruin the wedding. Then he disappears.
Siblings - twins, brother/ sister
Teenagers
Death of parent - mother
Wedding - of parent
7/10 - I liked it okay.

12. Backfire by Michelle Regalado Deatrick - University of Michigan
Young boy's friend sets fire to his own house, killing the boy's sister, and the boy is blamed for it, although it was not his fault.
Siblings - brother/ sister
Death - of sibling
Character's profession: Insurance industry
Setting - Sacramento, California
Children
Fire
8/10 - I liked it.

13. Begin With an Outline by Kaui Hart Hemmings - Stanford University
A young woman is questioned during the investigation of her father for selling/ growing pot. She tries to establish a relationship with him but can't.
Father/ daughter relationship
Setting - Hawaii
Character's occupation - college student
Drugs
8/10 - I really liked it.

14. Going After Lovely by Sean Ennis - University of Mississippi
A young boy's sister runs away. He stays with his dysfunctional family, featuring a well-meaning but over-reaching and hapless father, and crazy mother.
Family - dysfunctional
Mental health
Siblings - sister/ brother
Father/ son relationship
Unhappy marriage - parents'
9/10 - I loved it.

15. Pilot by Sian M. Jones - Mills College
A young woman thinks she hears her mother talking to her after her mother had a stroke.
Stroke
Death of parent - mother
Grief
Siblings - sister/ brother
Religion - atheism
7/10 - I liked it.

(Book was read in July 2009 - camping at Lake Vallecito, on bus on way home from work, etc.)

The first of the "Daddy Issues" pieces - submitted!

2009-09-21T13:07:00.001-07:00

I went through a period, last winter and spring, where it seems that all I could write were essays about my father! Even when I tried to write about a totally different topic, such as moving to Albuquerque or my brother's engagement, or a totally different person, such as my mother, there was my dad, popping his head into my piece! So I decided to just go with it and perhaps I can eventually compile all of these stories into a book called "Daddy Issues," or something!

The short memoir pieces featuring my father seem to flow easily, and everyone in my writer's group always likes them. So I just revised one of the pieces, called "Coach K," which deals with my relationship with both my father and running, and decided to send it off for publication. It's nearly 5,000 words long and includes a lot of personal snippets. I've been toying with taking out a lot of the personal stuff and focusing on the running aspect of it--how I was pushed into running by my father at a young age, and always hated it, but now as an adult, I love it--and sending it to Runner's World, one of my favorite commercial magazines, or some other magazines for runners or women, that might pay pretty well. But, as the hostess of my writer's group bluntly pointed out (she's pretty blunt, that's what we love about her!), it's not like I'm a starving writer who needs to live off my writing, so why not send it like it is to literary journals that don't pay much? In its present state, that's where it would best fit, because it's more of a memoir, and more about me, than it is a piece about running, for any other runner out there.

I was reading a blog yesterday that said something like, you should always send out your piece to at least 5 markets at once. So, I chose five literary journals from Writer's Market--mostly alphabetically, narrowed downs to the ones that accepted creative non-fiction--and off I sent my first piece about my dad that I'm trying to get published. I'm crossing my fingers!! And working on the next piece.

Kathryn Ma -- Attorney Turned Author

2009-09-15T09:13:00.000-07:00

I have just discovered a delightful blog called 1st Books: Stories of How Writers Get Started. And I could really relate to one of the posts, which featured an interview with Kathryn Ma, a former lawyer who left the law firm she worked at to open up a "writing office" and concentrate on her writing. Now she is the winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award for her book of short stories, All That Work and Still No Boys. The way she described practicing the law and then leaving it for writing sent shivers up my spine, because I could relate to it so much, and it's what I want to be able to say myself one day: "I liked being a lawyer, or parts of the job, anyway, like the teamwork and the libraries and the paycheck, and had worked hard at it until I couldn’t stand not writing anymore, and so I packed up my Bekins boxes and set up a little office a half-mile from my house where the siren call of the laundry basket wouldn’t lure me to my doom."

Ms. Ma is my new idol! I have loved to write ever since I can first remember. I always wanted to be a writer - just a writer. But I also needed to make a living. I'll be honest: I wanted a comfortable, secure living, and I wanted to be self-sufficient and independent, relying only on myself and not my parents or a signficant other. These goals obviously competed with my desire to be "just" a writer! So I explored other career options and decided to enter the law because it does involve a lot of reading, writing and thinking, all things that I enjoy, as well as a steady paycheck. I told myself early on that I would work hard, save up a lot of money, and retire early, so that I could just write and travel, like I've always wanted to do (and did in college).

Somewhere along the way, I lost writing for a little while, or maybe I just lost myself. I hated the first year of law school -- I had moved half way across the country, to a state I had never even been to before (to attend the University of New Mexico School of Law) and knew nobody and couldn't figure out what was expected of me or how to get the good grades I had always been used to in high school and college. I finally figured all of that out and came to love New Mexico(but never law school!) and did quite well in law school, when all was said and done. But I just totally stopped reading for fun, and pretty much stopped writing. I had no time for it after all the legal work. I rarely felt creative or drive, and instead just felt like I was trying to keep my head above water and master the legal stuff.

Towards the end of law school I moved in with my boyfriend and let my life totally revolve around his. I was into all of these new things like watching football and playing poker. We skiied/snowboarded together, which I'd always liked, and went on road trips together, and had a grand old time, but I had lost myself. I had given away most of my precious book collection before I moved in with him, without really thinking twice. I never wrote. I did pass the Bar and get a job at a big firm.

A couple years later, I woke up and thought "who am I?" I did the best thing ever then -- I joined a local writer's group and made myself start writing again. I switched firms and was working for an even bigger one, and it was very demanding and stressful and I was miserable. I had enjoyed practicing law at my first firm and I knew I was good at it, but all of my former energy and passion for certain areas of the law was being sucked right out of me, and I was questioning my entire profession and decision to practice law. I thought many times of just quitting and trying to be a freelance writer, or working at a bookshop or as a waitress so I could spend the rest of my time writing.

I suddenly realized that if I wanted to be a writer, I had to really be one. I couldn't waste my days hating my day job and wishing I had time to write, without actually writing much at all. I still entertained the thought of becoming a full-time or at least part-time writer, but I decided that first I would have to make the time to write, in the here and now. I tried to write every day, and I found that I did have the time when I made it, even while I was still working at the big firm. It also made my job there a little easier, because at least I had something going for me in another area of my life.

Probably the best thing that could have happened to me, which felt like the worst thing at the time, happened: I got laid off from the big firm, during the height of the recession. It sucked but it forced me to make a change I knew I had to make, eventually, anyway. And it forced me to make a decision: did I want to continue in the law, or did I want to be a writer? Well, I wanted both. And I did not think (and still don't think, at this point) that being only a writer was a viable option. I do not have the financial wherewithal right now (even with my severance package!) to depend on writing. And I also enjoy practicing law. I knew I would enjoy practicing it even better now that I was forced out of the firm I hated anyway. But I wanted to be a writer too, and I wanted to have enough time to devote to that. No more ridiculous billable hours and crazy pressure.

I was very lucky to find a job at a firm that does "big firm" work but is very small, and very laid-back compared to my former firm. It is the perfect balance, in terms of pay, challenging work, the partners that I work with, hours, etc., between my first firm and my second firm. And most of all, I can much more easily make time to write (I'm still not saying it's easy -- there never seem to be enough hours in the day!), because the hours and the workload aren't so demanding.

I still have moments where I would love to do what Kathryn Ma says she did -- leave my law firm (as much as I enjoy this one) to be a full-time writer. I know I will do it one day, and sometimes I get frustrated wondering if that day will ever come. Law is a demanding profession, and also a trap in a way, because the further I progress in it, the more money I get paid, the higher up on the "partnership" ladder I move, the more connections I make, the more it feels like I should stay in it. (Moving anywhere else to practice law, for example, even at this juncture, would be hard because I have slowly built up a name in this city, and would be nobody in a new city.) But at least I have found a balance, where I can be myself and be a writer *and* an attorney (and I still enjoy watching football with my boyfriend, and our regular ski trips, etc. ;)).

I will just write (and read, which really helps my writing) as much as I can while I practice law, until I am in the financial and emotional position to just focus on writing. Kathryn Ma says it took her ten years to write the stories in her first book. (I don't know if that includes the time period when she was still practicing law or not). I have definitely learned that nothing good comes easily and everything requires hard work and I cannot count on some pie in the sky dream of waking up one day and being a published writer. It seems to me from reading the interview that Ms. Ma had definitely saved up money and had independent resources before she made the decision to leave the law for writing. So it is nice to read about someone actually doing what has been my goal, and being successful at it.

I plan to buy and read Kathryn Ma's book All That Work and Still No Boys and will review it here after I do! But in the meantime, I will keep reading and writing, and being inspired by lawyers-turned-writers, because I eventually plan to be one myself!

Index of Book Reviews -- By Title

2009-09-13T19:19:00.000-07:00

(Last updated on January 28, 2011 with the addition of Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity by Kerry Cohen)

1. Best American Short Stories, 1991 Edited by Alice Adams and Katrina Kenison

2. Best New American Voices, 2006 Edited by Jane Smiley, John Kulka and Natalie Danford

3. Career and Corporate Cool: How to Look, Dress and Act the Part-- at Every Stage of Your Career by Rachel C. Weingarten

4. Double Billing: A Young Lawyer's Tale of Greed, Sex, Lies, and the Pursuit of a Swivel Chair by Cameron Stracher

5. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

6. Flappers and Philosophers: 8 Short Stories By F. Scott Fitzgerald

7. Glimmer Train Stories: Issue # 48, Fall 2003

8. Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity by Kerry Cohen

9. Lucky, a Memoir by Alice Sebold

10. The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers

11. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

12. My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

13. Mourning Ruby by Helen Dunmore

14. The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton

15. The Wife, and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov

16. The Wife by Meg Wolitzer

17. Women Like Us By Erica Abeel

Back to Blog Index/ Site Map

LitSpot - Book Store Review: Ocean City, Maryland

2009-09-10T09:37:00.000-07:00

Bookshelf Etc. -- Ocean City, Maryland

I just returned from a vacation in Ocean City, MD with my family over Labor Day weekend. We have been going there since I was a kid. My mom doesn't like the beach, but like me she likes to read, so I looked up some bookstores for us to go to. The list was longer than I would have thought. We only went to one, a charming little used bookstore called "Bookshelf, Etc." on the Coastal Highway. Earlier in the day, my dad and I had ran along the Coastal Highway and I saw its cute little storefront and checked to see if it was open because it was a Sunday -- and it was.

It is a small bookstore, which looks like it's in a renovated little house, but perfect for the vacationer who wants to explore the literary world while at the beach. It sells mainly popular fiction titles (the woman behind the counter, who was very nice, told us that they can't get in enough Jodi Picoult to satisfy all the customer requests) and some classics and poetry, also some non-fiction such as cooking, history and weight loss books, and some children's books. All of the books are used and most of them are half off the cover price, unless specially marked. Like most things at the beach, the book prices were higher than I would have expected at a used store, but they were still better than at Border's or some other regular bookstore.

The store also sells old collectibles like post cards, magazines, covers of Rolling Stone and other pop culture magazines, posters, art, and old playing cards and the like. I guess that's where how the "Etc." entered into its name.

I highly recommend Bookshelf Etc. for the literary traveler. Its address is 8006 Coastal Hwy, Ocean City, MD 21842 and its phone number is 410-524-2949.

Blog Index / Site Map

2009-09-08T16:54:00.000-07:00

* Book Reviews
- By Author
- By Title
- By Genre / Category

* Literary Lawyers
For lawyers who like to read and write: posts about books, characters, and writers who were lawyers, or books with a law-related theme.
- Author/ Attorney Louis Auchincloss Dies
- Kathryn Ma: Attorney-Turned-Author
- Book Review of Double Billing: A Memoir by Cameron Stracher
- The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton
- Lawyer-Turned-Writer Realizes Dream Despite Disease: Neil Selinger

* Quotes
- Law-Related
- On Reading and Literature
- On Writing

* Reading

- LitSpot (Literary Places)
--Ocean City, MD: Bookstore Review of Bookshelf Etc.
--Pittsburgh in Words: Essays in Celebration of the City's 250th Anniversary

- Virtual LitSpot (Website Reviews)
--Literary Rejections on Display (See famous authors' early rejections!)
--Paperbackswap.com (Swap books for free!)
--Duotrope's Digest - Where Writers Can Find and Track Markets for Submissions

- Misc.
--Volunteering to read to kids at Read To Me Corner of State Fair (10/2/09)
--Hills Like Black Elephants There's no wrong way to read Hemingway (or anyone!)

* Writing
-Publication attempts: Success and Rejection
--First of the "Daddy Issues" Pieces Submitted for publication (11/21/09)
--Wake-up Call: First Rejection Letter for "Coach K" Arrives (10/17/09)
--Back on the Submission Circuit
--Persistance Pays Off: One Story Sent to Twenty-Five Markets!
- Author Profiles and Interviews
--Attorney-Turned-Author Kathryn Ma
--Author/ Attorney Louis Auchincloss Dies
--Carol Roh-Spaulding on submitting her first story to twenty-five different journals

-Books with writing as a theme or writers as characters:
--The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton
--Mourning Ruby by Helen Dunmore
--The Wife by Meg Wolitzer
--Women Like Us by Erica Abeel
--Lucky, a Memoir by Alice Sebold

Index of Book Reviews - By Author

2009-09-08T16:45:00.001-07:00

(Last updated on January 28, 2011 with addition of Kerry Cohen's Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity)

* Abeel, Erica
- Women Like Us

* Chekhov, Anton
- The Wife, and Other Stories

* Clayton, Meg Waite
- The Wednesday Sisters

* Cohen, Kerry
- Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity

* Dostoevsky, Fyodor
- Notes from Underground

* Dunmore, Helen
- Mourning Ruby

* Fitzgerald, F. Scott
- Flappers and Philosophers: Eight Short Stories

* McCullers, Carson
- The Member of the Wedding

* Picoult, Jodi
- My Sister's Keeper

* Sebold, Alice
- Lucky, A Memoir

- * Stracher, Cameron
Double Billing: A Yong Lawyer's Tale of Greed, Sex, Lies, and the Pursuit of a Swivel Chair

* Weingarten, Rachel C.
- Career and Corporate Cool: How to Look, Dress and Act the Part- at Every Stage of Your Career

* Wharton, Edith
- Ethan Frome

* Wolitzer, Meg
- The Wife

Various Authors -- Listed by Editor or Journal

* Adams, Alice and Kenison, Katrina
- Best American Short Stories: 1991

* Glimmer Train Stories
- Issue # 48, Fall 2003

* Smiley, Jane; Kulka, John and Danford, Natalie
- Best New American Voices: 2006

Back to Blog Index/ Site Map

Book Review: Flappers and Philosophers by F. Scott Fitzgerald

2009-05-04T09:36:00.000-07:00

Step Right In and Come of Age in the Early Twentieth Century:
A Book Review of The Genius of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Flappers and Philosophers ( 8 Short Stories) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

This little book of eight short stories took me about a week to read, and now I’m very sorry that it’s over. All of the stories were very entertaining and vivid. In between reading it, I would feel I was a nineteen-year-old girl in the first or second decade of the twentieth century. Many of the stories in this book are focused on girls of that age, and I thought it was quite strange that Fitzgerald could write so well about them. Almost all of the stories can be classified as "coming of age" stories in the early twentieth century.

The book starts off with a strong and rebellious nineteen-year-old girl in “The Offshore Pirate.” That first story was probably my favorite. My second favorite was probably “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” which was also about a nineteen-year-old who was figuring herself out a lot more than the heroine from the first story, who knew exactly who she was and what she wanted. I also liked “The Ice Palace” in which a very vivacious teenager named Sally Carroll visits a Northeastern city in the hopes of marrying, and finds out that she misses the colorful southern town where she grew up.

The last story in the collection, “The Four Fists,” features a manly man who gets knocked down by four punches in his lifetime, each of which teaches him an important lesson, and the story takes him from New York to the oil fields of Texas and the ranches of New Mexico. It’s rather refreshing to read a burly story after all the quite feminine ones, but I truly liked them all. The second-to-last story, “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong,” also features a male character and his descent into shadiness. What I noticed is how differently Fitzgerald writes about male characters than female characters – there’s less internal monologue and descriptions of thoughts and conversations, and more action at a swiftly moving pace. One story, “Head and Shoulders” does a beautiful job of explaining a role reversal of sorts, in which the female character shines and the male character withers.

To read this book was to be transported back to a totally different time – anywhere from the 1890’s to the 19-teens, and to totally different places – usually New England towns, Ivy League educational institutions, and country clubs. I enjoyed the scenes about fox trots and flappers and jazz music and I wished, sometimes, that I could have lived back then. But Fitzgerald had great sympathy for his female characters – “The Cut-Glass Bowl” featured a downfall of one of them, and the strong character of Marjorie in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” explains how they can become withered and unloved housewives, many of whom are disapprovingly interspersed into that story.

In fact, if I carry one thing away from Flappers and Philosophers other than hours of entertaining reading, it is a remark on the position of young women in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. The stories feature girls at the cusp of womanhood who wear rose-tinted glasses and think that life is about dances and social events. Yet the men are the ones getting an education, seeing the world and taking part in all of the action (again with the exception of the uniquely witty “Heads and Shoulders” plot). In this sense I am very happy to be living in the 21^st century and just reading about these female characters in the early 20^th century.

Quotes from Flappers and Philosophers:

“I distrust people who can be intense at this hour in the morning! Morning’s the time to sleep, swim and be careless!” (From “The Offshore Pirate”)

“All life is just a procession towards – and then a recession from – one phrase: ‘I love you.’” (From “The Offshore Pirate”)

“I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.” (From “The Ice Palace”)

“There’s two sides to me, you see. There’s the sleepy old side you love; and there’s the sort of energy – the feeling that makes me do wild things. That’s the part of me that may be useful somewhere, that’ll last when I’m not beautiful anymore.” (From “The Ice Palace”)

“Every person I’ve met on the streets since I met you has made me jealous because they knew what love was before I did.” (From “Head and Shoulders”)

“When you open your door at the rap of life, you let in many things.” (From “Head and Shoulders”)

“At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.” (From “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”)

“Snobbishness is merely good breeding grown dictatorial.” (From “The Four Fists”)

Categories of Stories in Flappers and Philosophers:

Coming of Age Stories: (*Note: Really almost every story in this collection touches on this to some
extent, but these are the ones that entirely focus on coming of age):

The Offshore Pirate
The Ice Palace

Bernice Bobs Her Hair

Dalyrimple Goes Wrong

Stories About War:

The Cut-Glass Bowl
Dalyrimple Goes Wrong

Stories About Love:

The Offshore Pirate

Head and Shoulders

Stories About Affairs:

The Cut-Glass Bowl

The Four Fists

Stories About Displacement:

The Ice Palace

Stories About Family:
Sister and brother – Benediction

Cousins – Bernice Bobs Her Hair

Stories About Religion:

Benediction

Stories About Home:

The Ice Palace

Cities/ Regions:

Florida – The Offshore Pirate

New York City – Head and Shoulders, The Four Fists

New Mexico – The Four Fists

Baltimore – Benediction

Georgia/ the South – The Ice Palace

[Read from April 26 - May 3, 2009]

Quotes About Writing

2009-04-20T02:31:00.001-07:00

Here I collect quotes by writers, about writing. This will be a continually updated post, where I will add new things as I find them.

Last updated: March 9, 2011 (newest quotes always on top)

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

~Ray Bradbury

"Of course she ached to be a writer. Like so many women, she burned for it, all she wanted to do was to publish, and her whole life was leading toward the moment when she found an agent and a publisher and her first book appeared."

~ Meg Wolitzer, The Wife

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."

~ Pablo Picasso

Interview with Joyce Carol Oates:

What advice do you give to budding writers?

Beginning writers should follow the lines of their own natural interests, look and listen hard, note the astonishing variety of personalities and voices in our culture. And of course they should read widely, and they should write every day. Like learning to play a musical instrument, learning to write has much to do with practice.

~ From Readers Read

Interview with Joanna Trollope:

What advice to writers beginning to write?

Don’t be in a hurry — after 35, with experience, is invariably better than before 35… and train yourself to notice. Keep a journal — not a Dear Diary — of scraps of things you notice/overhear/remember/think of. Stick in photos and postcards. Scribble down descriptions and snatches of dialogue. Watch other people like a hawk. And read. All the time, anything, everything. Also try your hand at all kinds of writing — poetry, drama, journalism, short stories — because it’s all part of your very necessary apprenticeship.

~ From Readers Read

"I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best."

~ Flannery O'Connor

"Perhaps we should all give thanks for the inspiration writers draw from each other - one good story begets another."

~ Katrina Kenison, Series Editor, in the Forward to The Best American Short Stories 1991.

"Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. The the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating. As soon as Lenny [a character in her story] began speaking, I knew I had mainlined it. I felt like I was strapped in the cockpit with the stars in my face and the expanding universe on my back. In my opinion, that's the only way a writer should travel."

~ Kate Braverman, in the Contributors' Notes section of The Best American Short Stories 1991, in which she is discussing her story that appeared therein, "Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta."

"I felt that if I could not fight, I might stop breathing, or I might go down: I imagined that it was like drowning; like floating in the lake, and then exhaling all my air, and sinking, and never being heard from again."

~ Rick Bass, "Legend of Pig-Eye," compiled in The Best American Short Stories 1991 (I replace the word "fight" in this quote with the word "write," or "read")

"For years I've been saving newspaper and magazine clippings - science art articles on the behavior of bats or how memory functions, news stories about missing children or a girl caught at the bottom of a well, odd photographs... anything that somehow strikes a chord. I paste the clippings in a big sketchbook where I also jot down writing ideas, and often the articles sit there for years without becoming stories. Sometimes, though, I flip through these sketchbooks when I'm stuck; other times an image or idea comes to me as I'm writing - and only later do I become aware of its origins."

~ Elizabeth Graver, in the Contributors' Notes section of The Best American Short Stories 1991,in which she is discussing her story that appeared therein, "The Body Shop."

See the Blog Index / Site Map for more quotes.

Book Review: The Best American Short Stories, 1991

2009-04-20T01:09:00.000-07:00

A Grab Bag of Great Stories:
A Book Review of The Best American Short Stories 1991
Edited by Alice Adams and Katrina Kenison
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company

You may wonder why I am reviewing, in 2009, a book compiling these editors' choices for the best short stories published in 1991. The short answer is that I am very, very far behind. The long answer is that I used to read this series a lot, in high school and college (both of which were post-1991) but I stopped that habit, which I now find unfortunate. I've decided to continue reading as many short stories as I can, to improve my own writing of them, and because collections of short stories make good reading for me. I can bring the book with me wherever I go, whether to dentist appointments or on road trips, and read one story at a time. It's much easier to pick up where I left off than it is with a novel!

In the Forward to this book, Series Editor Katrina Kenison makes the following observation, which is in line with why I decided to start re-reading short story collections: "Alice Adams reveals in her introduction that reading a good story often provokes her to go and write one of her own. Perhaps we should all give thanks, then, for the inspiration writers draw from each other - one good story begets another."

There are many, many good stories in this book, some of which I found inspirational for my own writing and some in which I simply lost myself. My top three favorite reads, which I hope to go back to again and again, were the following:

1. Charles D'Ambrosio, Jr.'s "The Point." In this story a man reminisces about helping his mom's friends home after parties thrown by his mother at their house. He has memories of very interesting characters, most of them sad alcoholics, yet he seems to have turned out just fine.

2. Charles Baxter's "The Disappeared." In this story a Swedish businessman visits Detroit and meets a religious-crazed American girl who temporarily steals his heart. The main character in the story, however, is truly the city of Detroit. It's amazing how Baxter captures the pulse of a dying city, and makes dreadfully accurate predictions regarding its fate.

3. Elizabeth Graver's "The Body Shop." In this story a man looks back on his adolescent years of helping his creative and entrepreneurial mother run her mannequin design business. It is touching and very realistic.

I also enjoyed Amy Bloom's "Love is Not a Pie," Kate Braverman's "Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta," Millicent Dillon's "Oil and Water," David Jauss' "Glossolalia," Francine Prose's "Dog Stories," and Leonard Michaels' "Viva La Tropicana," a very entertaining and far-fetched yet somehow believable story about a young man who gets caught up with the escapades of his uncle, a former Cuban revolutionist-turned-gangster.

There are stories by some other usual "giants" in this collection - Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, John Updike - but I didn't enjoy them as much as the others I've mentioned. I haven't read much from Munro but I usually like reading Oates and Updike. Both of their pieces in this collection, however, seemed wordy and cumbersome to me, and I couldn't pay much attention. Munro's story was the most interesting to me, and I also like parts of Updike's piece, and feel that perhaps if I read it when I had more time and patience, I would like it more. Perhaps it had something to do with it being the last story in the book!

Although the subject matters of the stories in this collection obviously vary, there are themes that run through some stories, seeming to accidentally connect them. Here are a few that I noticed:

1. Wars. Especially the Vietnam War. And soldiers. And woman, working during wartime. And memories of wars and lingering questions after they are over. Stories with this theme include Kate Braverman's "Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta," Millicent Dillon's "Oil and Water" and John Updike's "A Sandstone Farmhouse."

2. Adults looking back on childhood and family, often after the death of a parent. Stories with this theme from this collection include Amy Bloom's "Love is Not a Pie," Charles D'Ambrosio, Jr.'s "The Point," Elizabeth Graver's "The Body Shop," David Jauss' "Glossolalia," Alice Munro's "Friend of My Youth" and John Updike's "A Sandstone Farmhouse."

3. Dogs. (Always a favorite theme of mine)! This category includes Rick Bass' "The Legend of Pig-Eye," John Updike's "A Sandstone Farmhouse" and Francine Prose's "Dog Stories" (Obviously. This is also a wedding story, which I also usually enjoy. Alice Munro's "Friend of My Youth" also features a wedding, albeit a rather simple one.)

4. Mothers and sons. Including Charles D'Ambrosia, Jr.'s "The Point," Mary Gordon's "Separation," Elizabeth Graver's "The Body Shop," and John Updike's "A Sandstone Farmhouse."

5. In semi-related themes about parents and children, Amy Bloom's "Love is Not a Pie" is a story about a father and daughter, and to some extent, also about a mother and daughter (while additionally touching heavily on the relationship between sisters), while David Jauss' "Glossolalia" is a heart-breakingly sad story about a father and son, and Alice Munro's "Friend of My Youth" is a story told by the narrator about her mother. Harriet Doerr's "Another Short Day in La Luz" is ultimately also about the relationship between a mother and daughter.

6. Americans abroad. And people escaping/ hiding from shady characters in strange situations. Or running to them because they are strangely intrigued by them! And, of course, the seemingly ever-present theme of displacement. These stories include Charles Baxter's "The Disappeared," Kate Braverman's "Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta," Robert Olen Butler's "The Trip Back," Millicent Dillon's "Oil and Water," Mary Gordon's "Separation," Mikhail Iossel's "Bologoye," Leonard Michaels' "Viva La Tropicana," Lorri Moore's "Willing," and Joyce Carol Oates' "American, Abroad."

7. Friendship: This isn't as common a theme throughout these stories as one might expect, but Rick Bass' "The Legend of Pig-Eye" could be categorized as such, in that it tells the story of a teenage boxer being "raised" and trained by a couple to whom he relates half as friends, half as parents. And Millicent Dillon's "Oil and Water" is about a friendship, as is Deborah Eisenberg's "The Custodian."

8. Romance: Again, surprisingly not a common theme, but Charles Baxter's "The Disappeared" touches on this, as well as Kate Braverman's "Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta," Millicent Dillon's "Oil and Water," Leonard Michaels' "Viva La Tropicana," Lorrie Moore's "Willing" and Francine Prose's "Dog Stories." In the realm of affairs, where "romance" always reigns supreme, there's Alice Munro's "Friend of My Youth" and Amy Bloom's "Love is Not a Pie," Well, now that I look at it, I guess romance is a theme that often runs subliminally underneath all the other themes.

Here are some quotes I liked from the book:

From Rick Bass' "Legend of Pig-Eye" (I replace the word "fight" in this quote with the word "write," or "read"): "I felt that if I could not fight, I might stop breathing, or I might go down: I imagined that it was like drowning; like floating in the lake, and then exhaling all my air, and sinking, and never being heard from again."

From Charles Baxter's "The Disappointed"(There have been some men in my life in my past, that I should have said this to): "We? There is no 'we'... there's you and then there's me. We're not a couple."

From the same story (Ditto the above! And it reminds me of that Pink Floyd "fish bowl" song): "Oh come on... we're just two blind people who staggered into each other and we're about to stagger off in different directions. That's all."

From Francine Prose's Contributors' Notes regarding "Dog Stories" (Interesting observation!): "People never talk about nothing, not even when they seem to. There are always secret and interesting reasons for the stories they decide to tell and for the moments at which they choose to tell them."

From Charles D'Ambrosio, Jr.'s "The Point" (I've noticed this when among drunken friends... maybe they've noticed it about me, too!): "Often drunks seemed on the verge of sobering up, and then, just as soon as they got themselves nicely balanced, they plunged off the other side, into depression."

From Alice Munro's "Friend of My Youth" (I think all brides must feel this way during the stress of wedding-planning): "This getting married is even more of a nuisance than I thought!"

From John Updike's "A Sandstone Farmhouse" (This rings true to me, a pat-rack through and through): "He recognized in this accumulation a superstition he had to fight within himself - the belief that everything has value. The birds in the trees, the sunflower at the edge of the orchard, the clumsily pasted-up valentine received years ago from a distant grandchild - all have a worth that might at any moment be called into account. It was a way of saying that one's own life was infinitely precious."

(There are more quotes, about writing, from this collection located in the "Quotes About Writing" post.)

Look at me quoting from some of the same stories I just I didn't enjoy as much as others, which I didn't quote from! Oh well. At the end of it all, I'm glad I picked up this "old" book and I plan to read many more short story collections in the coming months. I love the variety as well as the convenience. It is so easy to escape into a short story, come back out of it, and then get lost in the next one!

Click to browse or buy The Best American Short Stories 1991.