Book Clubs Cometh; or, Hurrah for People Who Like to Read!

Yesterday was a good day for me: I booked my first book club discussion of KEOWEE VALLEY, down in Greenville, South Carolina. Hurrah for the Wednesday Afternoon Book Club!

Granted, this meeting-in-which-my-novel-is-discussed-by-awesome-ladies will not occur until early 2013, but I'm still jacked. The fun is beginning.

And if you, dear reader, would like to read KEOWEE VALLEY in your book club, and have me there to talk to on the day you discuss it, just let me know. If I'm close enough, I'll come in person. And if not, let's arrange a Skype date. I truly love to talk books with booky people.

From Coffeee: It's History, Cultivation, and Uses, by Robert Hewitt, 1872

Book clubs are a fabulous invention, and they've been around for a long time. (Or at least "long" in American time. Europeans consider the 1700s the recent past.) Scholars may debate, but I believe much of what we recognize as the modern idea of the book club--meeting to talk of all things literary--began in the European coffee houses of the late 1600s and early 1700s. Folks had always gathered to talk literature and politics and writing--no Kardashian gossip or what-actress-has-the-biggest-baby-bump for these guys (although there was probably a version of this sort of gossip, maybe something like "who is the king beheading today?")--but suddenly these gatherings exploded. This is because three new items appeared on ships from the Far East and other exotic places.

These three things are now a bastion of modern life. They certainly make my life happy. They were:

1. Coffee
2. Tea
3. Chocolate

From Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson

No one needed much of an excuse to gather to eat and drink these things, and so they did. Or, only the men did, at first, though the women would beginning gathering publicly just a short time after. These coffeehouses were different than taverns: for one thing, they were "men only" gatherings. Sort of latter-day versions of the "No Girls Allowed" sign in the treehouse.

 Any man, of any social class, could enter the coffeehouse. But there were a few rules. According to The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, a penny was usually charged for admission. And, "Some establishments posted rules of behavior stipulating that all customers were deemed equal and prohibiting gambling, swearing, quarrelling, and mourning over lost love."

I love this. Basically, no one could bash their exes or brawl in the coffeehouse. (Or, at least, were encouraged not to. But those wigged men, I'm sure, could throw down.) However, these were places for partaking of all the good things, including books, newspapers, and other assorted treatises. (People wrote treatises back them, tacked them up on trees and buildings around town. Now we blog.)

 

In the 1700s, especially in England, coffeehouses became so popular and important that like-minded folks gathered in specific places: ship captains and assorted seaman in one coffeehouse, politicians in another, businessmen and doctors in yet another. Rank and class seems to have not been much of an issue.

Today, book clubs meet--usually in someone's private home or in a coffee shop around town--and they are grand things. A list of books is drawn up, books are borrowed and bought, and then read and discussed. There're usually good things to eat and drink at these gatherings, including coffee--and soemtimes wine. Sometimes the authors arrive to add an extra element to the discussion. In our blindingly fast-paced world, a world in which many of us spend in artificial light, typing at a keypad or Ipad or Iphone, book clubs are a chance to slow down, to engage the brain and the imagination, to enjoy fellowship with other book lovers and friends.

A while back, I was a member of a book club I adored. Called "The Unconventional Book Club," we were an assortment of ages and backgrounds, we read books of all genres (fiction and nonfiction) and we met monthly in each other's homes. There was good food to be had, and wine and coffee to be drunk. And, more often than not, there was chocolate.

Sadly, busy schedules got the better of us all, and we disbanded. Now, I'm back in grad school, in a MFA program surrounded by other writers and teachers, all readers. At my first residency, there were inpromptu "book clubs" meeting everywhere, at all times: in the dininghall at meals, walking to lectures and readings, during and after workshops, and in the dorms. We shared beloved book titles and authors, talked writing into the wee hours. We are carrying on the traditions of the coffeehouses, only ours aren't segregated by gender.

However, there is still wine, lots of coffee, and chocolate.

   Amen.





Just Call Me Alexander



Cover art from the children's book by Judith Viorst

"I think I'll move to Australia."

~ Judith Viorst, from Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Last Monday, I sprained my ankle. I was trail running, about halfway through my run, and it just happened. Crunch. Stumble. Much cursing. (Unfortunately including the F-bomb. I'm certain I offended the rhondodendron, and I hope they'll forgive me.) It HURT.  

It took me about 40 minutes to hike out of the forest, and though I'd been giving myself a pep talk on the hike (okay, limp), by the time I got to my car I knew it to be true: I'd sprained my ankle badly enough to put me out of exercise commission for at least a week. 

It's difficult for me to sit still on a pretty day. And since I've just returned to trail running over the past few months, it thoroughly annoys me that this (insert Daffy Duck-stuttered expletives here) injury will set me back--in my fitness and weight loss goals. But that, I suppose, is life. The fact that  I haven't sprained an ankle since I was in my 20s doesn't help, either. Oh, and lest I forget: hobbling around on crutches while chasing a 2 1/2 year old is loads of fun.

So, the ankle sprain set me up for a week of sitting, elevating, icing, Advil-popping. I tried to stay off it as much as I could, but this was next to impossible.

You would think, wouldn't you, that this would be the perfect excuse for writing. That I'd embrace my immobility and get cracking on my new novel, or on the pages of creative and critical work I've got to send to my grad school advisor soon... too soon. But I couldn't make it happen. The words just weren't there, and neither was the (gasp) inspiration.

Lately, as I told my husband last night, I've felt a little lost. It's been a difficult period, this time after my first novel has been sold, edited, and is now awaiting publication. I'm a bit worn out. And I crave the thrill and excitement I felt when writing the novel: I miss those 16-page days where I wrote well into the night, on a writer's high. I want them back. 

Over the weekend, my husband took my daughter to see her grandparents on Hilton Head Island, where they live. It was the perfect, rare chance for me to have a weekend alone, just for writing--for me to work hours upon hours on my fiction and grad school assignments and on my teacherly schoolwork, for me to embrace being alone in my house for more than a few hours... something that is so rare I'm not actually sure when the last time was that this happened.

But I was... lonely. Surprisingly so. And uninspired. And really, thoroughly, annoyed about my ankle, which continued to ache. Normally, I adhere to the "suck it up" philosophy instilled in my sister and me by my Dad throughout our childhoods. Yes, it can be brutal. Yes, at times unsympathetic. But it's in me, and it isn't going anywhere. For some reason, though, I couldn't make it happen over the weekend. I had periods of efficiency and productivity, and then I slipped back into petulance. Like Alexander after he'd dropped his ice cream cone.

This is not attractive in a 30s-ish year-old woman, and I'm glad no one was around to see it. (Okay, my dog was there. And she just ignored me.)

I need a cure. A cure for this writerly ennui.

Anyone remember that fabulous Gilmore Girls episode, where Michel decides he's got ennui, and passes it on to Sookie. This is how I feel.

Any suggestions?



Arguments Among Friends

 "The truth springs from arguments among friends."

~ David Hume, Scottish philosopher

I love arguing, especially with my friends. I get a little thrill, a ping beneath the skin, when an argument turns passionate and voices rise. And when the argument rides that wicked edge between debate and fight, I often feel myself coming alive in the blood.

This can be a problem.

Especially when you're arguing with someone who doesn't particularly like the practice. Especially when you're arguing with someone who considers all arguing to be distressing, distateful, or simply fighting. And, I admit, when an argument does cross that line from debate to full-on fight, I've got a fuse that can be extinguished so quickly it leaves my loved ones breathless. I can be ready to move on, and they're still mad.

Like I said, a problem.

But I don't think Hume meant "fights" when he wrote "arguments." I think he meant debate--good, old fashioned, disagreeing debate. We all remember those, right? The kinds of conversations where the speakers kept their minds open, and those minds could be changed?

The American conscious (and conscience) sprouted, grew and flourished because of debate: because smart people argued with each other--smart people who respected each other, even when they disagreed. Smart people who found the debate a useful, changing, and illuminating tool. Who were willing to see past the parameters of their own backgrounds and beliefs. And, like Hume said, the truth sprung. (Can I get an "amen"?)

Today, debate sometimes seems useless. Listeners often seem unwilling to crack the windows of their deeply-held beliefs, even to allow in the fresh air. And instead, in all situations and on all sides, the air grows stagnant, and eventually will stink.

I love my friends. I've got friends with whom I agree on just about everything: politics, literature, religion, football. I've also got friends with whom I disagree, on all the above. Most of my friends are willing to enter the argument: to talk, exchange ideas, to laugh with and at each other when it all grows ridiculous. I'm lucky for this. And I have friends with whom I've learned simply not to broach certain topics for the sake of the friendship. And this, too, is okay--though I long to enter the argument, I want to do so if only I could be assured its outcome would be that our friendship be unaltered.

DKG and me, after she signed my ripped event ticket because I'd loaned out her book

In the Fall, I was lucky enough to sit very close to a stage where Doris Kearns Goodwin, reknowned American historian and bestselling author of Team of Rivals, et. al.--also one of my very favorite writers--regaled a large audience with tales of ex-presidents, baseball, and history. In that audience sat folks of all ilk and belief, and Goodwin was a rock star. And I'm quite certain that everyone in the audience, be they Democrat or Republican, Manhattanite or mountain-dweller, Christian or Hindi, had a marvelous time. That they (we) all learned something. That we walked away from the presentation of an historical debate the better for having engaged in it.

I'm still working on my problem of enjoying the argument a bit too much. But the truth is, it's in my blood. And I hope beyond hope, that when it comes to most debates, my mind is open. That it may be changed. And that if it's not, that out of the argument the truth will spring in all its glory, and I'll catch a bit of it in my hands.



Rick Bragg's South

Author Rick Bragg & his mother, from the May 2012 issue of Southern Living

I get a little thrill when my latest issue of Southern Living magazine gets slid through the mail slot on my porch. Granted, this wasn't always the case: the Southern Living of my youth never really appealed to me, with its pastel-colored covers of cakes and table settings, its interior seemingly directed at ladies closer to my Grandmama's age. But the Southern Living of the past couple of years (perhaps longer) is a horse of a different color.

After some editorial changes--and the fold of Cottage Living, my formerly favorite "home" magazine--Southern Living has become something that very much appeals to me, a modern Southern woman in my 30s: it's cool, colorful, fun, and fresh, with vignettes of great writing that curl my toes.

My favorite spot in the magazine: "Southern Journal," recently taken over by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rick Bragg. This is a section that used to be filled by freelancers, a place I dreamed of one day seeing my writing. When Southern Living stopped using freelancers a few years ago, I was frustrated and sad that the chance had been lost to me.

But in stepped Bragg, a storyteller as real and scarred and soulful as the Southern landscape. I've put away my disappointment and petty writer's jealousies as I've quickly fallen in love with each and every piece he writes in the "Southern Journal" section, located on the last page of each issue.

If you haven't picked up the May 2012 issue, you should--Southerner or not, writer or not. It's heartbreaking and elegant, painful and immediately warm--like a grown-up sip of Jack Daniels. And it's about a South that's fast disappearing, though the remnants remain. And though Bragg is much older than I am, I can feel my own memories--some very different from his--surround me as I read his words, thick as early August heat in the air. So much of what he says, too, seems pertinent to me... especially as I cast my ballot in local elections this morning.

Though the piece itself isn't available yet on the magazine web site, it's called "My Brother's Garden," and I had to pass along a taste.

Here's a bit from the middle:

"The South, like chiggers and divinity candy, is everlasting. It will always be, though it will not always be as we remember. The South of our childhoods rusts, peels, and goes away. Brush arbors have left no trace on it. Preachers who thrust ragged Bibles at bare rafters now shout politics from the pulpit. Civility, toward even those with whom we do not agree, is an heirloom. Quilts, the kind made for warmth instead of cash, as a thing of antiquity, their patterns a mystery slowly fading in an old woman's eyes. Young men can play 5,000 video games but cannot sharpen a pocket knife; lost are the men who tested their truck's electrical system by holding to a coil wire. I listen for the past, but I cannot hear it. The juke joints fall silent, cotton mills wind down to a final, solitary thread, and a last buck dancer shuffles off into the mountain mist. Then I see my brother Mark in his garden, and know that not everything must fade away."

Get thee a copy, reader. You'll enjoy it.

Dedications

I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I've been thinking about the dedication for my novel, Keowee Valley, for quite some time. Long before it was bought by my publisher, long before I even found a literary agent. The thought of what I'd say, if and when I had the chance to say it, has probably been percolating for years.

I've always enjoyed novel and book dedications. For me, they're a magical blink at an author's real life--a glimpse under a faery raft at an artist's real world. Some are straight-forward, others mysterious; some are sad, some hilarious. And we never really know, do we, exactly what the author is trying to say, and to whom she's trying to say it.

Writing the perfect dedication, I'm finding, is a Herculean task. I honestly don't think anything I come up with will come out the way I want. Especially since this will be my first novel, and it's been a long time coming, and I've got so many folks to thank. I also live in fear that I'll leave someone out.

So, because the editing process on the novel is coming to an end (at least until the galleys, etc), I've had to actually get cranking on my own dedication. I went through my personal library (this, of course, being the stacks and shelves of books positioned haphazardly throughout my house) and picked my favorite books, flipping through to see how other authors have done it. How have they managed to determine just how to thank the people who've supported, encouraged, loved, and downright put up with them during their writing years?

What I've ultimately decided is that I like the way writers like Pat Conroy and Diana Gabaldon do it: they offer a short dedication, and then an acknowledgements page--sort of a supplement to the dedication, wherein they list the folks they can't possibly leave out. So if my editor and publisher are willing, I think--though I, and my book, are no Conroy or Gabaldon--that I'll do it this way, too. Besides, I've always been mouthy.

I'd love to hear about some of your favorite book dedications!

Just for fun, here are some of mine:

"For Jenny, who saved my life,
thus making it possible for me to write this book"
~ Lucy March, A Little Night Magic

"To the Memory of My Mother,
Who Taught Me to Read--
Jacqueline Sykes Gabaldon"
~ Diana Gabaldon, Outlander

"This book is dedicated to my lost daughter,
Susannah Ansley Conroy. Know this: I love you
with my heart and always will. Your return
to my life would be one of the happiest moments
I could imagine."
~ Pat Conroy, My Reading Life

"Lucinda Margaret Grealy
June 3, 1963-December 18, 2002
Pettest of my pets"
~ Ann Patchett, Truth & Beauty: A Friendship

"I    To my cousin, Lieutenant William Porter, the sec-
       ond Sergeant York: he has the courage and the
       bravery, and furthermore he practiced for years,
       firing at targets.
II    To my cousin, Professor B. O. Williams of the Uni-
       versity of Georgia: he has the knowledge and
       the vision and the power to inspire.
III   To my father: he is the salt of the Southern earth."
~ Ben Robertson, Red Hills and Cotton

"This book is for every roadside Picasso who paints heaven on a
weathered board, for every sculptor of found objects who twists a tin
can or a rusty timber saw into an objet d' art, and for all the other
dreamers who have the courage to create something wonderful out
of nothing."
~ Deborah Smith, from the dedication in On Bear Mountain

"Equitare, Arcum tendere, Veritatem dicere"
(To ride, to shoot, to tell the truth.)
~ Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

Images from Keowee Valley

Lee Falls, in the Sumter National Forest

My final (I hope) edits for Keowee Valley have been sent back to my editor, who's in the process of going through the novel for small errors and discrepancies. Then it goes to the copyeditor, and then on to the publisher, and then back to me. This summer, I'll be collaborating (though the publisher, of course, has the final say) on cover art. It's a fascinating process, and I continue to be thrilled by it. I can't imagine that this--seeing my novel come to life--would ever get old.

Since Keowee Valley is such a place-based novel, and in my heart I am very much a Southern writer (and we're obsessed with place) I thought I'd add another page to my website, dealing with images from the novel. Here, I've included photos of places and things important to the story. And while the places in the photos may not look exactly as they did 244 years ago, I hope it'll give readers a sense of the journey my protagonist, Quinn, took--into a gorgeous, dangerous, and wild new land.

The setting of Keowee Valley certainly inspired the story. Though the novel moves from colonial Charleston, South Carolina, into the South and North Carolina mountain frontier, and into the deepest reaches of the Cherokee country (present-day Tennessee) and back, the main setting of the novel is a place I dearly love: Oconee County, South Carolina. Today, this part of the Upcountry of South Carolina is dotted with recreational lakes, which were incredibly gorgeous and biodiversely rich river valleys and natural gorges flooded in the mid-twentieth century.

It's a land I've been fascinated with since I was a small child, filled with Cherokee place names, rushing rivers and creeks, unusual plants and animals, and those haunting blue mountains--and I always wondered about the powerful and mysterious people who claimed it as home, long before I ever got there. So, in many ways, that's where the story started.

I hope the images add something special to the "About the Book" page of my author web site. And I hope you enjoy them!

Searching for Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman. My hero (ine).

I have been not-so-secretly obsessed with Wonder Woman since I was four years old, when I got to be her for Halloween. It remains my favorite of many wildly creative Halloween costumes (man, my Mom could sew), and included red rainboots, stars-and-stripes Underoos, and aluminum foil magic bracelets. I felt powerful. At four years old. I never wanted to take it off.

It didn't matter that I was a tiny towhead better suited for a Heidi costume: Wonder Woman was my girl. I loved her.

Wonder Woman has followed me throughout my life, and once lived on a huge poster on the screened-in porch of a cabin in the North Carolina mountains that I shared with six other 20s-ish women. We were outdoor educators (basically a fancy way of saying camp counselors and trip leaders), most just out of college, working through the Fall and early Winter on group programs for middle and high schoolers--in hiking, biking, team-building, paddling, climbing, you name it. The cabin wasn't insulated (in fact, the windows were covered with screens, which is interesting in October in the mountains), and we slept in our sleeping bags in a row of bunkbeds, tobaggons on our (sometimes wet) heads and double layers of socks on our feet. On the other side of the cabin lived the male counselors, and though they were a bit smellier than we were (only a bit), we were a big, happy family, silly and raucous and entirely invested in working with kids and teenagers and living an outdoor life.

I have to pause a moment. Man, I loved that life.

Okay. So, Wonder Woman. One of my buddies in the cabin stuck the poster up on our screened porch, so we could see it every time we left and entered the cabin. Wonder Woman began to feel like a welcoming committee, after sometimes days of being out with 6th or 7th graders, or high schoolers, trekking through the Appalachian backcountry. I started imaginging that she smiled at me, that she'd give me imaginary high-fives when I'd return sweaty and dirty and happily exhausted.

Today, as a 30s-ish woman, I've got Wonder Woman magnets on my fridge, and a ridiculously cool Wonder Woman mug (I'm actually drinking out of it as I write this). It says, in bold, slanting black letters, that "This Amazon Princess Will Not Bow to Any Man!" Awesome.

I'm even teaching my two year-old daughter to say "WONder WOman!" with the same inflection as the '70s TV show theme song. And if you ask her who her favorite superhero is, she'll tell you, just like that.

I am so proud.

But lately, I find myself reaching for my Wonder Woman mug far more often (I used to just drink from her on Friday mornings, when I was feeling especially sassy). I need her magic bracelets, her gold headband, and certainly her invisible plane, now more than ever.

Every modern woman, I think, attempts to be Wonder Woman. Most of us have jobs, families, avocations, homes, and some of us have kids. Though the balancing act of being a modern woman has become a sort of cliche, especially in modern media, we're juggling all these aspects of our lives like a Ringling Brothers' clown riding a unicycle center stage and tossing up tomatoes. The spotlights are blaring and hot, and beyond the ring of light the bleachers are filled with the faces of our family members and friends. We don't want to drop anything.

I don't have a solution for this. If I did I'd sell it on t-shirts. At the moment I'm caught up in my own wonderful but bone-tiring roles of writer, teacher, mother, wife, student--and I don't feel that I'm doing anything well.

And so, for the thousandth time in my life--including senior year of college, when in order to graduate, I desperately needed to pass a math test that looked like hieroglyphics; or, for that matter, when I was in labor with my daughter for 20 hours--I am calling on Wonder Woman. I need her back in my life, go-go boots, booty shorts, bustier and all.

Because she's my favorite superhero. Because she deflects bullets with her wrists. Because, I think, she gets me.