Triple Whammy: The Wild New World of Publishing

I'll be reading and signing books at 7 pm on July 12th at the Occidental Center For the Arts in Sonoma County...You won't want to miss this one! Details below.

A Panel Discussion: Wild New World of PublishingFriday, July 12, 7:00 - 9:15 pm

Triple Whammy: A Panel Discussion and Book Launches Celebrating the Wild New World of Publishing

OCA invites writers and booklovers to discuss and explore the exciting and creative new directions of publishing in this new age. Each author will talk about her journey, read from her book, and offer some tips, strategies and writing prompts. There will also be a Q&A and book sales and signings and refreshments.

The authors are:

Jill Koenigsdorf (Phoebe & the Ghost of Chagall), Becca Lawton (Junction, Utah), and Jordan E. Rosenfeld (Forged in Grace). Each author has published her book in a slightly different way: Becca as an e-book with Van Haitsma Literary; Jordan through the writer’s collective Indie-Visible Ink, and Jill through MacAdam/Cage Publishers. The moderator is Susan Bono, Editor at Tiny Lights Publication.

An interesting and informative event for both readers and writers! Free admission but donations are happily accepted.

Share this:

Left Bank Writers Conference, Paris, June 2013

    There are so many reasons we say "no" to things. Fear, finances, time constraints, and the list goes on. In my own life, I had been saying no to too many things for too long. Yet my trying to be "practical," "disciplined," and "realistic," was not having the desired effect. Instead of feeling proud of myself and more secure, I felt itchy, anxious, hungry for the pleasure and the expansion that always comes from new experiences and challenges. 

SO: being a firm believer that nothing feeds the body/mind/spirit like travel, and that all writers benefit from writers workshops, I applied to something alternately called The Left Bank Writers Conference and The Left Bank Writers Workshop. At a workshop or conference,  I get so much out of being amongst my tribe, of immersing myself in words and communing with fellow authors for a full week. And this conference would also satisfy the yearning for France (I had not been back in 8 years.) Through amazing feats of budgeting contortionism, I soon found myself on a plane in San Francisco on June 14th bound for Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris. I would be staying above the best ice cream parlor in Paris, Berthillon, on the Île St. Louis, my favorite part of the city.

It was one of those magic weeks where synchronicity and happy circumstance seemed stationed around every corner. What a diverse group of eight we were! From the deep South to Australia, we had an ambassador from every school of writing: theater, poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. And we were all giddy to be a part of it. There is a little bit of "lost" in all artists, and as Gertrude Stein famously quipped "You are all a lost generation." We channeled Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Eliot, Picasso, Chagall, making daily pilgrimages to their haunts, their apartments, their studios.

We started each day by writing in the Jardin de Luxembourg. We touched the plaque on the bar at Café des Lilas where Hemingway used to write. (I touched the plaque there also dedicated to Man Ray) There is something very powerful about being in a city with so much history. You walk the same streets that others walked thousands of years ago. The age and beauty of the place is quite moving. And we ate long lunches, like the French, with copious crisp bottle of Rosé and unparalleled people watching. There was even a magnificent Chagall retrospective, "Between War and Peace" that perfectly aligned his art with what was taking place in his life at the time.

I came looking for inspiration and found it. Paris renews my spirit. My next book features Madame Curie as a character and sure enough, a block from my petite apartment, on the banks of the Seine, was the very apartment where she lived for a time. On my last night in Paris, the first night of Summer, the streets alive with people dancing and making music until dawn for the Fête de la Musique, I stood outside her building and looked up, most happy that I had said "yes."

Poem In Your Pocket Day

Today is National Poetry In Your Pocket Day. I have chosen the 4th portion of beloved Frank O'Hara poem "Alma" which goes like this:


4
Onward to the West, “Where I came from,
where I’m going. Indian country.” Gold.
Oh say can you see Alma. The darling
of Them. All her friends were artists.
They alone have memories. They alone
love flowers. They alone give parties
and die. Poor Alma. They Alone
/She died,
and it was as if all the jewels in the world
had heaved a sigh. The seismograph
at Fordham University registered, for once,
a spiritual note. How like a sliver
in her own short fat muscular foot.
She loved the Western World, though
there are some who say she isn’t really dead.

1953

from Lunch Poems

I began my writing life as a poet, my first poem at age ten having something to do with moths. I think the first line was "There's moths a-plenty by my bedside now...." I recall also as a young thing looking at the Redbud trees starting to bloom in the neighborhood and writing: "Who knows if these/rows of trees/are really large curd/lavender/cottage cheese?"  I was so proud that it rhymed and was going for the look of the buds on the trees. That's still what I see when I look at a Redbud.

As a rounded peg in the square hole of Kansas Suburbia, I always took great solace during my stormy adolescence from those pleasing, small, transporting poetry books that City Lights put out. They were perfect, the size of a sandwich, and that too made them seem slightly subversive & outré. And man, I was hungry for outré.

On the ladder of writing genres, even though I write primarily fiction now, I have always placed poetry on the top rung. It speaks volumes that at the end of a particularly powerful poem at a reading, audience members emit a sound, something between a moan and a sigh and a whew and an oomph of surprise. I love that this low short guttural sound happens spontaneously and universally, as natural as breathing. I always feel moved to write after reading or hearing poetry. I still write poems myself, but it now it seems saved for the larger events in life: heartbreak, Spring, love, death, longing. When I need to express something and crystalize the verbiage, poetry is the means to get in touch with the essence of things. I admire the distillation and focus that requires.

I always recall what a fellow workshop attendee once said at the Napa Valley Writers Conference years ago. He was a poet and I was in the land of fiction. We got the chance to rub shoulders while waiting in line for a buffet lunch. I said:
"I always try to guess which ones here are the poets and which writers are in fiction."
"Well that's easy," he said.
"How so?"
"The fiction writers are talking about agents and the poets are talking about the food."

LOVE IS IN THE AIR

The birds around my house are starting to hunt for nesting materials and the ones not at that stage are singing their hearts out (the males) trying to impress a potential mate. I always think the males in the human kingdom could learn a lot from birds: the singing, the beautiful plumage....the effort. It is a magnificent sight to see the male hummingbirds soar high in the Spring, then just dive down full speed at the exact angle that best shows off the sunlight illuminating the red plumage at their throats, all to wow the females.  Or the redwing blackbirds with their epaulets in full flame and fluff trilling out their liquid song in the cattails. All this color and song and courtship is a giddy thing. 

For the birds that are at the nesting phase, I put out lint from my dryer screen or hair from my hairbrushes, draping the soft stuff in branches for them to find. I collect abandoned nests and find the practical beauty of them a marvel. The goal appears to be strength and coziness. I have seen them lines with everything from pussywillow buds to horsehair. I love that hummingbirds start gathering spiderwebs for their tiny nests because they are not only strong and soft but will expand at the babies grow! Even now, looking out the window by my desk where I am tugged outside instead of staying put and writing, I can see the birds, brighter than usual, busy and beautiful.

SPRING! ...when the world is mud luscious and puddle wonderful etc.

Yesterday in Sonoma: record breaking high temperatures (we hear this so often now that sadly that phrase doesn't have the oomph it once had)> 78 degrees in mid-March! And it seems the great parade of bulbs and wildflowers has picked up tempo. On the trail today: Indian Warrior Fern Flower, jumbo forget-me-nots, Buttercups, Scotch Broom, Fawn Lilies, ancient gnarled plum trees in an abandoned orchard, stumps covered with lichen, branches lacy with white/pink blossoms. Saw my first Swallowtail butterfly of the season, and the air was humming with newly-hatched gnats. So early to see a garter snake and an alligator lizard sunning, plus the insidious, dreaded, rampant, greasy, deadly poison oak making all hikes in the woods a type of obstacle course.

The beasts and I hiked up to Fern Lake, where we encountered three lads in shorts bearing fishing rods. SUCH memories came rushing at me of my own years by Lake Lotawanna, in Missouri, up at dawn and donning my worm-and-fish-guts-stained orange bikini that I lived in from dawn til disk, all summer long.
I asked the lads "What do you catch here?" "Bass mostly," says they. And at that point I could have talked shop, asked: "Are you using spinners? Rubber worms? Live crickets?" But I just said: "Bass, yum!" and moved on, but not before taking a sidelong inventory of their tackle boxes.
Pleased to report that bait has not changed much over the decades, still decorative floaters and worms and feathered/hooked items, not at all reminiscent of the actual living creature.

The dogs almost pulled the leash out of my hands when a female wild turkey crossed our path, with the wattled, impressive Tom hot on her heels. The duck were flapping their wings on the lake's surface, the birds were trilling: everyone was trying to impress. Ah, courtship! We humans could learn something about effort from the feathered ones.

All I want to do these days is plant things. Something so satisfying about filling the little six-packs with soil, marking each compartment with a stick bearing the name of some special heirloom tomato, "Ace," "Princepe Borghese," "Black Cherokee," "Mr. Stripy,""Celebrity,"  and tamping down your tomato seeds, imagining a bountiful summer harvest. There is nothing like reaching your arm into a tomato vine you have started from seed, the little hairs on the vine rubbing your bare arm and leaving that acidic, green scent, plucking off a still warm from the sun tomato and eating it like an apple.

It isn't officially Spring for another week, but the lilacs have just started to flower and my pea vines have flat mini-pods emerging from the white flowers. Rebirth indeed.....

It's mustard time in the Valley....

The weather had been so glorious the past week, all the spring mustard blinding yellow in between the rows of dark, gnarled vines. She thought fondly of the old Herb Caen columns in the Chronicle, one in particular where he wrote, “I imagine heaven to be a lot like Sonoma in the spring.” Phoebe always gave a silent thanks to all the Italians and other dreamers who had settled in the region, for they made sure, hundreds of years ago, when they first started planting the old vines, to sow mustard alongside their grapes for the nitrogen the plants contained. Today, those miles of dazzling yellow flowers all over both valleys were the first harbinger of spring in Sonoma and Napa. 

~Phoebe & The Ghost of Chagall

Writer versus Promo Machine

Well, it's February. A wonderful month. Birthday month, and so green and Spring-y in Northern Cal. The wild radish and quince and narcissus are blooming and soon, the wild mustard will fill in the rows between the vines here in Wine Country. Yet here I sit,  a writer in a quandary. So much of writing these days asks that the writer constantly toot his or her own horn. (Hence this blog) Almost the second I heard that a life-long dream was about to take place and that my novel Phoebe & The Ghost of Chagall was going to be published,  I also started hearing about how much of my book's marketing "in these dire times for publishing" would be on my shoulders. I sprang into action, lassoing blurbs, reviews, readings. I became a sort of promo machine, or my version of a promo machine, which covered all the angles but maybe had some batteries that needed replacing. 

But you know what? I would argue that most writers are not by nature promo machines. We are often quirky soloists who wake up at 5 in the morning with some snippet of dream or morsel of dialogue that sounds so brilliant that we must scribble it down on the piece of paper towel that's handy so that it won't be forgotten. (Then at 8 o'clock that same morning, we read the nugget of excellence on the paper towel and cock our heads in puzzlement.) 

 My point is: writing is a solitary endeavor. Perhaps we write for some future audience, but in the here and now, there is only butt-in-chair-and-fingers-on-keypad. Most of the writers I know, while of course we all fantasize about being interviewed by Terri Gross, are thoughtful word nerds, more likely seen in an animated discussion about the usage of propensity versus proclivity. We are not by and large, the best ad men.  Sure, we want fame or at least rent money, or more accurately, we want people to read & enjoy our books.  And yes, after so many sedentary hours in isolation, we may get a little rowdy at those summer workshops at the end of the day, "letting off steam" after a day of writing five pages to get to one good line.  But all in all, I would argue that all the social media stuff is not second nature to most writers. And therein lies the rub. Once we have a debut novel out on the streets, the last thing we want is for it to die a quiet death. But not many writers can afford the price tags of publicists, and from what I have heard, their affect on books sales is often negligible. And thus, we are required to tap into our own inner barker. (Ever-on-the-ready, I myself carry copies of my book in my truck like the old Fuller Brush Men and foist them upon innocent strangers...) But most writers today must tweet and procure stars and pay their own ways to read at cities with good independent bookstores. Call me whacky, but this sounds to me like a full time job. 

Oh hell, I'm romanticizing the act of writing again, painting it like it's more nobel to commune with the muses and be in "the zone"and mustering the discipline day after day.  I sound like I'm saying nothing should be taking so much time and energy away from the actual writing. And yet, it's 2013 and, apparently,  it does.