Mendocino Writers Blog

Ellen Sussman celebrates

This just in from Ellen Sussman, one of the workshop leaders at our 2010 Mendocino Coast Writers Conference:
 
"I just got great news -- my novel FRENCH LESSONS was bought by Ballantine! I'm in NY celebrating -- there was a two day auction -- 6 publishers bidding on the novel!! -- and in the end I chose Ballantine's two book deal. I'm out of my mind excited."

Ellen read an excerpt from FRENCH LESSONS at her Soundings reading in Fort Bragg last year.

What is the last sentence you wrote and why--Benjamin Percy from Esquire Magazine July 2007

"My father came toward me with the rifle.”

Why he wrote the last line: This last line is in fact the first line of the novel I’m working on, The Wilding.

Every time I boot up my computer and hunch over the keyboard for a long, bloody stretch of writing, I review what I wrote the day prior to buff away any scuff marks and plug in to the voice’s current. It’s my way of getting warmed up, the equivalent of cracking my knuckles.

Almost inevitably, my eyes wander to the most important line, the first line. I am obsessed with first lines. I rewrite them over and over. I collect them and carry them around in a pocket of my mind to withdraw every now and then and look at, like precious stones, a lucky feather, a Polaroid of my ex-girlfriend naked and straddling a motorcycle.

I like them epic: “I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice -- not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany” (John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany). I like them funny: “My mother believed that if you go out of your way to be friendly to people, they will take a liking to you, but this philosophy did not work for me, because I was a leper” (Garrison Keillor, “Buddy the Leper”). So do I like them mysterious and shocking and grotesque and sexy and lyrical and wise.

Sometimes I’m struck most by the authors who say the least. “Mother died today,” wrote Albert Camus in The Stranger. That one gets me every time. For a couple reasons. First of all, we’ve got a death, which means I’ve got a reason to pay attention. And then there’s that voice, so blunt and distanced, so stripped down. He doesn’t say Mom, he says Mother. He doesn’t say passed, he says died. Does this guy have a heart, I’m wondering? Already we have action and already we have characterization, the shadows of which hang over the book so forbiddingly.

I’m trying on a similar hat. My novel is, at its heart, about that old father-and-son thing. I’m talking about the pissing contests, the bruised egos, the bloody knuckles and crumpled beer cans and brutish campfire conversations that add up into a pained kind of love. I hope I’ve tapped into that here -- just as I hope I’ve made the reader lean forward and wonder what happens next. I’ve test-ridden a number of first lines, and I think this is the one I’m taking home. We’ll see how I feel tomorrow when I read it again.

About the author: Benjamin Percy is the author of two books of stories, Refresh, Refresh, due out this October from Graywolf, and The Language of Elk. His honors include the Plimpton Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and a John Gardner Fellowship from Breadloaf. His fiction has been read on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” and has been published in The Paris Review, Best American Short Stories, The Chicago Tribune, and Glimmer Train, among others.

Daddy's Got a Gun

Our question: What is the last sentence you wrote and why? Benjamin Percy, author of Language of Elk, gives us a last line that's also a first. Esquire Magazine  July 17,2007

Review of Refresh, Refresh by Benjamin Percy--Susan Bono of Tiny Lights

I haven’t finished reading Benjamin Percy’s Refresh, Refresh, a collection of short stories from Graywolf Press. The 2009 Mendocino Writers Conference gave me too many other things to read and think about, as usual. But after the first three stories, I can already urge you to get your hands on a copy.

Maybe you won’t lose yourself in the stories the way I did, staying up too late and feeling like hell the next morning. Maybe you won’t be fascinated by the young couple in “The Caves in Oregon” whose first home happens to be built over the mouth of a cave, but you just might be shocked by how tolerant Percy can make you for the fist fighting and other blood sports featured in the title story and in the hair-raising “The Woods,” which I read with the literary equivalent of my hand in front of my face, peeking through my fingers, afraid to look, incapable of turning away. Now that I know how these stories turn out, I’m going to have to read them for the utter gorgeousness of their language, to study how the measured cadence of each sentence makes music.

I’m going to include a few examples of Percy’s fine writing here, but how to choose? Every page teems with great sentences, and the accumulated effect is part of the dazzle.

Here are a few, selected almost at random from those first stories:

“In this waterless stillness, you could hear every chipmunk within a square acre, rustling for pine nuts, and when the breeze rose into a cold wind, the forest became a giant whisper.”  (from “Refresh, Refresh”)

“Sometimes he imagines a rotten spot inside her, like a bruised bit of peach he wants to carve away with a knife.” (from “The Caves in Oregon”)

“Once we entered the forest the pines put a black color on things, and through their branches dropped a wet wind that carried with it the smell of the nearby mountains.” (from “The Woods”)

OK, so maybe the guy used up his rock-solid, totally believable characters and irresistible situations in the first three stories. And maybe by the end of the book I won’t feel as if I’ve come closer to understanding and appreciating Eastern Oregon, a geography that’s generally considered pretty much unlovable.  But I doubt it.

Luis Rodriguez at Cotton Auditorium

Luis Rodriguez will speak at Cotton Auditorium in Fort Bragg, Friday, July 31, 6:30 p.m.. It's free, but tickets required.

Tickets are available at Leaves of Grass (Willits) Super Chavez Market (Ukiah), Mendocino Book Company (Ukiah) La Bamba (Fort Bragg), Cheshire Books (Fort Bragg), Gallery Bookshop (Mendocino), College of the Redwoods, (Fort Bragg) and All That Good Stuff (Boonville). Tickets will be available at the conference too. More information: http://www.mcwc.org

Download the poster for Luis Rodriquez's event! 

ONLY 1 MORE DAY TO REGISTER FOR THE CONFERENCE-- There's are a few tickets left so get your's now!

Smokelong Quarterly--Stefanie Freele

The Summer for SmokeLong

The summer is the perfect time for tasting short fiction. Between a dip in the river, after an early morning hike, during a tall sweet-tea, under an umbrella, over a raft (well, maybe not with a laptop), below the fan, next to the breeze, in front of the ocean – it’s all the time to read. And, read something quick between the next run for ice cream, the next bicycle ride, the next watering of the garden.
The latest issue of SmokeLong Quarterly has just been released, featuring 18 fantastic pieces of flash fiction from these authors: Cynthia Helen Beecher, Pam Bolton, Z.Z. Boone, Dan Chaon, Frank Dahai, Natalie DeClerck, Steven Gullion, Mary Hamilton, Joan Harvey, Tara Laskowski, Dorianne Laux, Amanda Nazario, Darlin’ Neal, Ryan Ridge, Gail Louise Siegel, Ray Vukcevich, Lindsay Marianna Walker, Brandon Wicks.   www.smokelong.com

SmokeLong Quarterly is dedicated to bringing the best flash fiction to the web on a quarterly basis, whether written by widely published authors, or those new to the craft. The term "smoke-long" comes from the Chinese, who noted that reading a piece of flash takes about the same length of time as smoking a cigarette. All the work published in SmokeLong Quarterly is precisely that—about a smoke long.
Oh, and it’s a darn good issue, this latest SmokeLong Quarterly. There is something for everyone and many places to go. Africa, rats, balloon rides, deserts, Mexico City, flying pens. What else do you need?

After each story is a brief interview with the authors with questions such as: Why this title? Why this story? Who are these characters? What are your writing habits? All that stuff we want to know when we read a darn good piece of fiction.

Enjoy the summer. Enjoy short fiction. Enjoy the breeze from the ocean. Have it all at once.
Stefanie Freele is an editor with SmokeLong Quarterly.

ONLY 9 DAYS LEFT TO REGISTER--GO TO THE WEBSITE AND THE REGISTRATION PAGE.
http://www.mcwc.com
 

Billie Holiday is my muse. . . from Carole Weatherford

Billie Holiday is my muse and she herself enlisted me to write the book Becoming Billie Holiday. The work is a fictional verse memoir, combining elements of poetry, biography and a one-woman show. The jazz icon's early years unfold through 97 poems written in her voice and titled after songs from her repertoire. The experience of writing the book was somewhat magical. After listening to her early recordings and reading several biographies, I began writing. The poems poured out of me in six weeks, as if I channeled the 25-year-old Billie.

The book made several best book of the year lists and won a Coretta Scott King author honor from the American Library Association. Here's an excerpt from the book's penultimate poem.

If Dreams Come True

 

I will bathe in spotlights

and sleep on satin.

Gardenias will bloom

year round in my backyard.

Sadie’s rib joint will make

rich folks lick their fingers.

“Prez” and I will do ten dozen duets.

Crooners will sing my praises

between the lines of songs.

Hornmen will trumpet my arrival

and claim me as their own.

Piano players will secretly

pine for me as my solos

move them to tears.

. . .

Cats will groove to my blues

long after I’m gone. . .

 

 

At least part of her dream came true. At last count, Amazon offered more than 500 Billie Holiday albums.  July 17 will mark the 50th anniversary of the singer's death.

THE DEADLINE---A STORY BY STEFANIE FREELE Conclusion

THE DEADLINE
Conclusion

by Stefanie Freele

He handwrote, with the hurry-zoom of the chocolate, with the rapid beat of his jiggling knee, with half a cheek on the chair and pajamas pinching his middle. Not pinching like he couldn’t breathe, but pinching in a way he knew he should unpinch and he would feel much better, but that would take time and he had none of that. He wrote page after page after paragraph after line after word after word after word, until the pencil broke with a down-push and he reached for another and stuffed two pieces of cracked chocolate in his mouth to ensure he’d meet the target by morning. Not the morning of daylight, but the morning on the East Coast, the morning that came far before his morning, the morning that would be there before his sun would hit the kitchen and glint off the fruit bowl.

 The cat jumped across the page causing the pencil to skid and he flipped the meow to the side, but she sparked an idea that caused him to circle back to page 73 and edit that section he wasn’t really happy with anyway. He underlined and crossed out and zig-zagged across words that were once valuable. A noise behind him interrupted the flow, was it the wife going to the toilet? He gripped the pencil with his go go go hand and flew back to where he was before only to forget where the thought was taking him, so he bounced the opposite knee for inspiration, ground chocolate between his teeth and said for the love of God, I’ve got to finish this.

The flashlight blinked twice, the light turned yellowish, it weakened, it diluted. The figures. The report. The wordcount. Five hundred words to go. He went back to the beginning and sprinkled adverbs lovingly, quietly, generously, adverbally until he only needed 350. He added buts and therefores and thens. He raced through with liberal adjectives, magnificent, enlarged, contentious. He summarized and quoted and connected and segued as much as he could until the flashlight flickered and petered, leaving him in the darkness again, not the darkness of an empty heart, but the darkness of an empty wallet.

Finishing the page, with 27 words to go and the clear sound of his wife sneezing from the bedroom, he let himself squeeze the final sentence, not like a man squashing a full balloon, but like a man forcing breath from already emptied lungs. He heaved down the last word, placed it on the paper he couldn’t see, adjusted the pinching waistband and called back the cat. Not the command of get over here this very second, but the command of By God, I’ve lost my mind, don’t leave me now.
THE END

THE DEADLINE---A STORY BY STEFANIE FREELE PART ONE

THE DEADLINE   

PART ONE

by Stefanie Freele

As he calculated his figures over and over again, once, twice, then three or four times, as many times as he could, inserting numbers here and there, in between, over and around, adding extras, deleting none, his world turned darker, as if his vision was lessening, dimming, darkening like night, edging closer like wolves around a wounded animal, until he could see no more, just blackness, utter nothingness, not even the page in front of him, or the pencil lead, or even the pencil eraser, in fact not even the pencil itself, he could be writing on the desk for that matter, but he continued to write those numbers, augmenting his spreadsheet, stretching his report, writing, writing, writing, until he felt he'd gone mad, mad from insanity, mad from lack of sleep, mad from pushing the pencil beyond where it ever went before, and he pushed and pushed until his wife turned on the light and said for the love of God, you've got to come to bed.

And so he did, wearing the same pajamas not removed in three days, he lay there blinking until his wife slept the sounds of sleepiness and he crept toward the chocolate, unwrapping the dark pieces and tucking them into the sides of his mouth with the first one under his tongue like medicine to return to the desk with the red emergency flashlight spreading a spray across his pages.

CHECK THE BLOG TOMORROW FOR CONCLUSION

Monsoon Meditation by Sharman Russell--presenter at 2009 conference

May 26, 2009

It rained this Memorial Day weekend, three-quarters inch for a total of one and one half inches for the entire year. The spring here in the Gila Valley has been dry, dry, dry. Already we are talking about the monsoons, when they will come, and how much we long for them to come. This year, right in the very middle of monsoon season, I will be on the Mendocino Coast—and I am very much looking forward to that new place with its new weather.
For anyone interested in weather, the democracy of clouds, Quakerism, and the Transcendentalists—here is what I wrote concerning a monsoon season only a few years ago.
        *    *    *    *
Commonly, the thunderclouds build up in the afternoon, growing darker and heavier until they drop their burden like a woman throwing water from a saucepan, hard and focused on a few choice spots, with flashes of lightning to make the humans run to shut down their computers. We hope to have rain now in the Gila Valley every day for some sixty days. We hope for the majority of our annual, meager twelve inches of rain, and we are always anxious that we might get less, that the rains will not be good this year or may not come at all.

The skies are tremendous, the clouds huge and masted flat-bottomed ships. Fleet after fleet set out for conquest. Majesty embodied. This is true democracy, beauty for everyone. You don’t have to be rich or successful or good. You don’t have to live by the ocean or in the middle of wilderness. This is drop-dead gorgeous scenery, the ephemeral version of prime real estate. This could be your ticket to a mystical experience, and the show runs through the rest of summer, almost every day. This is a grandeur that most of us, most of the time, barely notice, looking up and then away, intent on some errand.

Cumulus clouds form when the sun heats the earth. Packets of warm air rise from the ground, cool, and condense. The cloud’s flat base is the level where condensation begins, as the rest of the air continues to rise into stacks of  puffy white balls. Fair-weather cumulus often line up in cloud streets, clouds on a string stretching hundreds of miles, clouds following each other like ducklings. They live for five, ten, thirty minutes. They are low, perhaps a mile high, and small, perhaps a city block.
In the monsoon season, however, in less stable conditions, these packets of warm air rise through rapidly dropping temperatures, and the cloud develops higher and more vertically, with peaks and towering cliff walls. Inside the cloud, there is further rising and falling, condensation, coalescence, until water droplets become heavy enough to fall. In cloud language, the word nimbus means rain, and a cumulus cloud has just become a cumulonimbus, perhaps seven miles in height and several miles wide. High-altitude winds shear its top, the anvil from which trails of ice crystals spin out in thin, fibrous wisps. A cowboy might call these cirrus clouds mare’s tails. Electrical energy builds up as water and ice particles are repeatedly split and separated. Suddenly there is a flash, brightness, cracks, and rumbles. The force of ten Hiroshima-sized bombs can be released in a single thunderstorm. The Greeks were not wrong to imagine gods.

I walk Sacaton Mesa surrounded by cloud streets, cloud turrets, a small cloud East Asian art museum, cloud doorways arched and dissolving. It is architecture on the move. A storm builds in the east. The cloud cliffs grow taller. The prow of a ship crashes into another. Already there is rain over the Mogollon Mountains, the line clear between where water is falling and where it is not. Already I should turn back and hurry home if I do not want to get soaking wet. 

I feel what the Transcendentalists might have called a correspondence. This beauty is not a doorway into something better. This beauty is my other half. This sky, this majesty, is my other self. I feel the yearning to reunite, join with the sky. In some way, we reflect each other. I am transparent, and the clouds pass through me. I have felt this before on Sacaton Mesa, and I am careful now not to get too excited or try and hold on to the moment with words. The Quaker tradition of silence works best. There is something under the words. There is something calm and whole under the words.

Notes on Self Publishing--by Terena Scott 2009 Confernce Presenter

If the Self-Published Author was a Musician, She’d be a Rock Star

                                           

By Terena Scott

Why is there so much stigma around self-published authors, and yet a self-recorded musician is praised as a creative entrepreneur? Any fledgling, unsigned musician with “Garageband” can make a demo and post it on MySpace. No one looks down on them for doing so; in fact, many great bands have started out underground, collecting a following before signing a record deal.

     It isn't just bands who are allowed to self-produce; writing and producing your own short film is considered cool. Self-publishing the novel you've given five years of your life to is considered pathetic.
     Why does writing have to be legitimized by a publisher while music and movies are allowed to be independent? Is writing so hallowed that it takes finding a golden ticket to be admitted into its league of glorious prose?

     What makes writing so special?

     I once thought that self-published work must be inferior, just as many people still believe; if the book was any good, it would be bought by a "real" publisher. Now that I am a “real” publisher, I’ve discovered that the reasons people self-publish are far more complicated than they couldn’t find a publisher. Many writers love the control self-publishing gives them. The author makes all of the decisions and keeps all the earnings. She decides how the book will look and how it will be marketed; for control nuts, it's the only way to go. Others might dream of being discovered by a big publishing company, but rather than sit around and wait for that day to come, they self-publish their book and start finding readers. Many self-published books are just too niche oriented or controversial for a publisher to be willing to take a risk on. And sometimes the book really is just plain awful, but the author believes in her book so much she is willing to stake her life savings on it. You have admire that kind of dedication.

     After publishing Laura Fogg’s book, Traveling Blind; Life Lessons from Unlikely Teachers, I decided to write a hand book for people interested in starting their own press. I self-published What You Need to Know to Be a Pro: The Start-Up Business Guide for Publishers, because it seemed ridiculous to ask someone else to publish it for me, like I was ashamed of the work my own press produced. But self-publishing my book groups me with self-published authors, which in the hierarchy of the book world, drops me to a lower status, regardless of the fact I am one of those “real” publishers. Does starting my own press and self-publishing my book make me a loser, or an entrepreneur?
     If I had started a band, I’d be a punk rock star.

Terena Scott is the owner/publisher of Medusa’s Muse Press, an indy press located in Ukiah, Calif, and is the author of What You Need to Know to Be a Pro: The Business Start-Up Guide for Publishers. She is a play write, essayist, and mom. Read her blog at www.medusasmuse.blogspot.com