Tag Archives: Write Now blog

Requiem

This column originally appeared in Jenny’s “Write Now” book blog in the Washington Independent Review of Books on July 5, 2018.

I have no memory of a time when I didn’t know John McNamara. I was eighteen months old to his two and half years when my family moved into our little Cape Cod whose backyard touched catty-corner with his. He and his siblings went to Catholic school while my brother and I went to the public school across the street, but we spent virtually every day of our summers together as we grew up.

In about 1971, which would make me nine and John ten, a handful of us — including my brother Chris, John’s brother Tom, and our friend Thomas — decided to put out a newspaper. Hanging out on our screened porch, we wrote copy by hand and typed it up on an old manual typewriter; copies were made using carbon paper. We put out a few issues by the end of the summer. So John started in journalism even earlier than you may have heard.

Of John, I can truly say that we have been lifelong friends.

(The photo above shows him at an early 90s Halloween party dressed as Fred Flintstone, something for his young colleagues he would term an OCR: “obscure cultural reference.”)

He and his wife, Andrea, celebrated their 33rd wedding anniversary in May, and I don’t know another two people who are a better match for each other. As Andrea recently said, their biggest argument was about which of them was the luckier to have the other. He was set to celebrate his 57th birthday at the end of this month.

Though John was unabashedly a sports guy, I can’t think of a single subject we ever talked about on which he didn’t have an informed perspective. He was a citizen of the world: knowledgeable, engaged, intellectually curious.

The last time I talked to him — Saturday, a week ago practically to the minute as I write this, at my nephew’s engagement party — we were discussing the upcoming Tuesday primaries and the endorsements his paper’s editorial staff had made. I live in Anne Arundel County, and the Annapolis paper that John wrote for, the Capital Gazette, addressed local races and candidates that matter to me.

In attempting to hold up my end of the democratic bargain of being part of an informed citizenry, I fully appreciate how lucky I am to still have a functioning local newspaper that actually covers those races.

The last time I talked to John was also five days before he and four of his colleagues were shot to death while simply trying to do their job to get that daily local paper out.

In the scant 48 hours since we learned the worst, when I manage to drag myself away from obsessively searching for and reading or watching everything I can find that mentions John, I wonder at how he and his colleagues arrived — through these most horrific circumstances — at the confluence of so many of the hot-button issues of our current moment in the American story.

I will set aside for this moment the hottest of the hot-button issues — gun violence, the one category in which the United States can claim unrivaled, zero-competition primacy — though I have always wondered at the insistence we have on calling each new mass shooting a “tragedy,” when the correct word is “massacre.”

I will even leave aside the president’s savagery of the mainstream news media, and the increasing threats of physical violence that many journalists report receiving, though I will point you to Katy Tur’s descriptions in her book Unbelieveable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History of the then-candidate whipping his crowds into “cheering about the idea of killing journalists,” a la Vladimir Putin.

Instead, in tribute to John, my focus is on the crucial, unique role that local newspapers play in maintaining our democratic process.

In his latest book, Overload: Finding the Truth in Today’s Deluge of News, Bob Schieffer notes in alarm the dwindling number of small city papers, the ones we have traditionally counted on to keep an eye on our state and local elected officials. Perhaps even more concerning are the papers being bought up by wealthy patrons with the intent of driving a specific agenda on and off the editorial page.

It seems less and less that all politics is local, when the politics coming out of the White House and Congress consumes so much of our limited attention span, and as it becomes increasingly difficult for well-intentioned citizens to find non-partisan, fact-based information about the entire slate of candidates we vote for.

And yet, it’s our local officials who typically have the greatest immediate impact on our daily lives, from choices on local policing tactics to the manner in which to enforce federal statutes. We need local papers for their ability to focus our attention on our immediate communities, on which the rest of our world is built.

I joked with John that I subscribed to the Capital primarily to do my part to keep him employed. Sometimes it didn’t feel like a joke. In the 20 years I’ve lived in Anne Arundel County, I’ve watched in alarm as the paper continues to shrink in every figurative and literal way; it’s even printed on smaller sheets of newsprint now.

Through John, I heard the blow-by-blow of the paper’s acquisition by the larger but also struggling Baltimore Sun, and winced at the realization that the acquiring newsroom now got first dibs on the plum assignments, including the sports desk. Still, on his new beat, John continued to tell human stories, as he always had, elegantly and eloquently.

One was of a Crownsville man who, after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre, crushed his assault rifles with heavy construction equipment and posted the ceremony on YouTube.  Another recent story remembered the crowds that gathered in Bowie and elsewhere in Maryland 50 years ago to witness Robert Kennedy’s funeral train as it traveled from New York to Washington, DC.

But John also did his share of reporting on the local political races, his final printed story being on the projected outcome of the Prince George’s County Executive race.

For those of you who have been following the story out of Annapolis of five people who died because they worked for a newspaper, and want to know what you can do to help, here is my best advice on how to honor these people:

  1. Subscribe to the local paper closest to you. Call them on it — in something better than four-letter words — if you find opinion leeching into their news stories, but support them in getting it right.
  2. Do your very best to be an informed, involved, engaged citizen. It is not an easy task, but make a concerted attempt to understand who is running for which offices — county council, sheriff, board of education, judiciary — and what positions they hold on the issues they will be involved in and that you care most about.
  3. Vote. In a democracy, choosing not to vote is never the right choice.

I will always remember John in his element, telling a story with that twinkle in his eyes, gesticulating with an open hand or a pointing finger to further the tale, getting his whole body into the telling of it. As many of his friends have noted, we could count on his dry, observant wit to cut to the heart of any issue with surgical precision. He always made me laugh.

I leave you with this thought, which comes directly from John. In one of his last Facebook posts, on June 10th, he offered this:

To anyone reading this: I cannot urge you strongly enough to see the two documentaries now out featuring Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Mr. Rogers. Seeing these two films will do you some serious good. Both are marvelous and moving. And, in these troubled times, when the forces of darkness seem to have gained the upper hand, it’s nice to be reminded that there is still justice and kindness in the world. You can thank me later…

John, I thank you now, later, and always. Godspeed.

(Read more of John’s most recent stories here. And find out more about the fund has been set up to help the victims’ families here.)

Volunteering: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

This column originally appeared in Jenny’s “Write Now” book blog in the Washington Independent Review of Books on April 26, 2018.

If you’ve spent more than 20 seconds on the Independent’s website in the last month or two, you may have noticed that our sixth annual Washington Writers Conference is coming up next week. (We tend to mention it. Frequently.)

The Independent is a nest of book lovers, both from the reading end and, often, from the writing end. (A number of our folks offer serious authorial cred, like immediate past president David O. Stewart, whose Impeached was a clue on “Jeopardy” last year.) As nonprofits, both the Independent and the conference rely heavily on volunteers.

One of those volunteer positions is conference chair, and this is the second year I’ve served in that alternately exciting and nerve-wracking role. As I noted in my last column, I am not normally a joiner, and yet here I am doing some heavy lifting in the participation department.

Why? you might ask (and, believe me, I’ll be asking myself that question around 3 a.m. on conference day). The answer is that I am a firm believer in writers — and readers — getting out and participating in the writing community as a way of making opportunities for themselves. Contributing with a spirit of generosity and supportiveness has a way of opening doors.

There are few successful DC-based authors more generous with their time than Alice McDermott, winner of the National Book Award. She teaches at Johns Hopkins, is on the board of the Writer’s Center, and is happy to contribute a large chunk of her afternoon to be with us next Saturday to share her writing wisdom. She models what “giving back” looks like.

She has also long been one of my favorite writers. For the Independent, I had the pleasure of reviewing her latest novel, The Ninth Hour, and I’ll be introducing her when she is “in conversation with” Get Lit, D.C.’s Tayla Burney. As I mentioned on the conference Facebook page, I hope that my fan-girling doesn’t embarrass all concerned.

It’s worth noting that every one of our panelists and speakers at the conference is volunteering her or his time, from McDermott to veteran broadcaster Bob Schieffer, to Brookings Institute senior fellow/syndicated columnist/Georgetown University professor E.J. Dionne. That’s some major firepower aimed at supporting fellow authors along their writing path.

The Washington Writers’ Publishing House is likewise all about establishing a supportive community of local writers. They exclusively publish winners of their annual fiction and poetry contests, and previous winners then help to coordinate the next contests and shepherd winners through the publication process. Their entire model is built on the concept of community-building and giving back so that others can experience that same success.

I mention all of this because WWPH’s 2016-2017 fiction winner, Jacob Weber, will be at the conference discussing the journey to publication of his short-story collection, Don’t Wait to Be Called.

Examples of supportive volunteerism abound within the Independent’s ranks, too, like longtime contributor Ed Aymar, who will be on our “Writing a Page-Turner” panel. Ed is heavily involved with the International Thriller Writers, most especially in their “the Thrill Begins” program to support debut thriller writers. He also coordinates regular Noir at the Bar events in DC and elsewhere, gathering local noir writers to read their work in the dark, noisy, alcohol-soaked environments that infuse their stories.

I started volunteering for the Independent after the 2014 conference, beginning as an assignment editor (matching reviewers with books), then reviewing books and later writing this column, then helping out with the conference, then becoming chair. All of those roles opened doors for me that I would not have experienced otherwise. (Plus, it gets me quoted on Lit Hub and in the industry blurbs on Amazon. Sorry, that’s just cool.)

When I conduct workshops at conferences — which I was not yet doing when I volunteered in 2014 — I use my experience at the Independent as an example of how participating in the writing community pays dividends. Not the least of those dividends is the building of your own network of supporters who will celebrate your successes, expand your horizons, and open up ever more opportunities.

As the clock ticks down to conference day, I admit that the time involved is interfering with my writing schedule, and I look forward to getting back to the Year of Writing starting May 6th. But I also look forward to the infusion of energy that the Washington Writers Conference engenders; in last year’s conference video, Stewart likens it to being near a nuclear reactor.

That energy comes from reconnecting with friends from earlier conferences, making new ones, meeting and hearing from some of our favorite authors, and possibly clicking with the agent we’ve been searching for.

There are infinite ways for writers to engage with the community. Look around and find the one or two that resonate most with you, because enjoying the experience is crucial to making it a success for you and those you’ll be working with. While you’re looking around, you might want to look here.

See you at the conference!

Need Some Advice?

This column originally appeared in Jenny’s “Write Now” book blog in the Washington Independent Review of Books on March 22, 2018.

It’s funny to me how many authors bemoan the solitary nature of writing: how hard it is to forsake all society, to turn our backs on friends and family; how the isolation makes us a little ragged and churlish.

For me, the isolation of writing is one of its great attractions. I’ve never been much of a joiner to begin with, and friends of mine would probably agree that churlish is a good description whether I’m writing or not.

Still, however much I enjoy solitude, there comes a time when even I need to get out of my own head and bounce my work off of other people. Though many of my writing friends are in critique groups, even considering that kind of long-term commitment makes me claustrophobic and panicky.

Instead, I joined a small writing workshop that meets six times in 12 weeks, with the opportunity to submit up to 150 pages for critique.

(This is the second time I’ve had the chance to work with DC-based author and writing coach Mary Kay Zuravleff, and, at this point, my writing and I would follow her over a cliff.)

Writers are a prickly bunch. We need a lot of advice, but we’re often not that great at accepting it. Typically, we’re far better at seeing the weakness in others’ writing than in our own. When we read anyone else’s story, we can see what works, what doesn’t work, and often why.

All that insight evaporates when we turn a critical eye toward our own pages. Even when we know it’s not really working — or perhaps especially when we know that — we hug that ugly baby even tighter.

Here, though, I find it’s energizing to use a draft that is still pink and raw from the birthing process to be reminded of everything I already know about what makes fiction work. Advance the story with every sentence! Reveal in action! Make every character want something! (Even if, as Kurt Vonnegut assures us, it’s just a glass of water.)

Knowing, of course, is not the same as executing, but seeing and hearing it again ahead of trying it again brings me that much closer to success.

One of the first conversations we had in the first session of the workshop was about favorite books of writing advice. Mary Kay pulled out her marked-up, dog-eared copy of a relatively new addition to the writing advice canon, Benjamin Percy’s Thrill Me.

At the end of a discussion about managing multiple plotlines, she handed me her copy and said, “Read the part about flaming chainsaws.” Instead, I read the entire book, and promptly went out and got my own copy.

Have you ever noticed how many books there are that give advice to writers? You can fill a decent-sized library with all the volumes that attempt to explain writing, either to those who have no clue or to those who need some reminding.

(Many of them purport to give advice on both writing and life. It’s alarming to think that admitting you could use help with writing signals that you’re struggling all around.)

I have a couple theories about why there are so many advice books. One is that every moderately successful writer is grilled to explain how they did it, as every editor and agent is beseeched to reveal the key to their book-accepting hearts. And the other is that writers secretly hope that stacking these books up next to their laptop will somehow magically relieve them of the need to do the actual writing.

Now that I have my own marked-up copy of Thrill Me, I’ve also pulled my collection of writing-advice books off the shelf and picked up a few new titles suggested by friends. I know they aren’t going to do the writing for me, but I find it helpful to choose one from the pile and read a section ahead of starting to write.

I’ve had my copy of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction for 20 years. Seeing a photo of it that I posted, she noted that mine is a fourth edition, and the ninth edition is in the works. Perhaps it’s time I upgraded, but then I’d have to re-highlight. I like it for the extended excerpts and practical commentary.

Even older is my copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a funny and down-to-earth book that is written as though you, the reader, are sitting in her semester-long seminar.

My favorite feature of How Fiction Works by James Woods is that the top of every right-facing page contains a synopsis of the discussion at hand, such as “Grounded Skepticism,” “Absence in Characterization,” and “The Myth of Solid Characters.”

Madison Smartt Bell, a local author and writing teacher, gave us Narrative Design, which is worth studying for its methodical, structured dissection of a series of short stories in terms of plot, character, tone, point of view, and so on.

My stack contains a bunch of others; I think it’s helpful to find a few that speak to you, that touch on the issues you know are your personal trouble spots. Really, it’s all good advice.

Now, to apply it.

Write Now: Withering Heights

While I was eating breakfast this morning, I finished Island of the Blue Foxes: Disaster and Triumph on the World’s Greatest Scientific Expedition by Stephen R. Bown. In between spoonsful of Rice Chex, I picked up the next book, opened it, and started reading.

My mid-breakfast pick? Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan by Nancy MacLean, which should not be confused with The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition by Linda Gordon, which I ordered online about an hour ago.

They say the first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem. Okay: Hi, my name is Jenny and I’m a chain reader. Like a smoker who lights her next cigarette from the embers of the last, I cannot not have a book to read. I get jittery and anxious. More than once, I’ve started a new book while brushing my teeth. Sometimes I can sate the urges with an issue of the New Yorker, but it’s a temporary fix.

As I see it, my problem isn’t that I can’t stop reading; it’s that I can’t stop adding to my to-be-read pile. At this point, my TBR stack is structurally unsound and represents a danger both to myself and others. My editor has called it a national disgrace. If it were a toxic-waste dump, it’d be a Superfund site. And yet, depthless as it is, it represents but a fraction of the books I want to read.

Why, you ask, does my TBR stack resist all attempts at containment? Among the many culprits:

  • Reading for review: I never get past the top of the stack; mine is a last in, first out system. Sure, this is wonderful when I get the opportunity to read my favorite author or an exquisite debut ahead of everyone else, but the downside is that all its contemporaries are immediately washed downstream by the next flood. Yes, I was a lucky early reader of Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, but now when will I ever be able to fit in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing?
  • Reading for research: In what can only be described as horrifically shortsighted, I mostly write historical fiction. The amount of research-related reading I accumulate, compared to my ability to process it, ends up progressing like a pig through a python. Case in point: My current work-in-progress, a story from early-20th-century Washington, DC, encompasses four administrations, a world war, women’s suffrage, a race riot, the second rise of the KKK, the Depression, and a government-sponsored cavalry charge on its own veterans. I know, right?
  • Independent bookstores: I love indies, even ones that have gotten too big for their britches (I’m looking at you, P&P), and I want them to flourish. My rule is that whenever I visit one, I have to buy a book. Just doing my part for the cause.
  • Used bookstores: I love used bookstores even more than indies. Where else will you find Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature and The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary shelved together? One day I’ll read them together, too.
  • Library sales: Four for a dollar. Stop judging me.
  • Online purchases: We all know I mean Amazon. (Thanks, Jeff, for buying the Washington Post so that every time they say “Amazon,” we have to suffer through the disclaimer of your ownership. Yet you still won’t use your bazillions to resurrect the standalone Book World.)
  • The slush pile: These also-rans aren’t going to read themselves.
  • Books written by friends: Don’t ever become an author, because if you do, you’ll find you have lots of author friends. And of course you want to support them by buying their books. But those books quickly slide so far down in your TBR stack that your author friends think you’re dissing them. Soon, you have no more author friends. (Until you collect new author friends and the cycle repeats.)
  • Best of the year” lists: My TBR stack contains many notable yet unread books. From 2014. I give up.

No matter. I could look at the books in my TBR stack as constant reminders of my failure to keep up. Instead, I think of them as acquaintances I nod to from across the way. One day, we’ll pull up a chair and get to know each other.

My wish for you is for a 2018 filled with wonderful books. Happy reading!

This column originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 7 December 2017.

The Datum is Clear: Language Shifts in Real Time

This Write Now column originally appeared in The Washington Independent Review of Books on  24 August 2017.

Back in June in this column, I ruminated about the decline of editing as a valued element of the book-publication process. That column anticipated by about ten days the brouhaha that erupted at the New York Times when its management decided to eliminate a copy desk and spread its duties out among the remaining editors.

A scathing open letter from editors to Executive Director Dean Baquet and Managing Editor Joe Kahn was followed by a walkout on June 29th by what even the Times characterized as “hundreds” of newspaper staff.

(Lest we think that the term “copy desk” denotes one or two rumpled, ink-stained grammar curmudgeons, the desk under discussion consists of more than 100 editors, who are now forced to compete, gladiator-style, for about 50 editing positions.)

Social media loves to find and skewer the burgeoning examples of copyediting fails, such as the East Oregonian’s now-famous “Amphibious Pitcher” headline (even funnier that the word the headline writer was casting about for appears in the second sentence of the article), and the Kennebec Journal’s headline trumpeting, “Trump warns of ‘fire and furry.’”

The same day as the “furry” headline, I was heartened to see the Washington Post headline, “Data shows an unabated opioid crisis,” not because I’m happy about the crisis, but because I welcome the common acceptance of data as a collective, singular noun. I can’t count the number of times I’ve read articles whose authors and editors have the most tenuous grasp of proper usage but remain punctilious in treating data as plural.

I don’t have the Post style guide in front of me, but I’m guessing they’ve gone all in on data-as-singular, while both The Chicago Manual of Style and language god Steven Pinker (who describes himself as being in the “fussy minority” on this point) sigh wistfully in acknowledging the gradual shift from plural to singular.

Really? Why?

Yes, of course data is the plural of datum, but can anyone define what a datum is, or cite the last time it was ever used meaningfully? (I wonder if Steven would shudder at my use of media as a collective, singular noun a few paragraphs back.)

This is an instance where I’m all for the language shifting to what makes sense, not remaining frozen in etymological purity.

These gradual but somewhat predictable shifts are being replaced, courtesy of that pesky all-connectedness of social media — and, perhaps, a lack of editing — by sudden, surprising leaps. I’ve been watching one of these with personal fascination.

For many years, I have wondered about a word that, as far as I can tell, is missing from the English lexicon: one that means the worst, basest form of cynicism, the kind that uses naked manipulation to achieve a morally corrupt end. Given the number of times in modern history that such a phenomenon begged to be described, you’d think that our ever-elastic language would have evolved one.

I kept circling back to craven as having exactly the right sound and feel of the word I’ve been searching for, but, of course, craven — though its origins are cloudy — means cowardly, defeated, abjectly fearful.

A few years ago, however, I was pulled up short in reading an article in which the author used craven in exactly the way that I wanted to use it, even though there is no support for such usage. Sure, great minds think alike, but where was the editor saying, “Wrong word, buster!”?

Suddenly, though, the somewhat archaic word craven has begun popping up in mainstream usage all over the place, and it’s quite the education to watch its usage and implied meaning shift in real time.

Let’s take a walk through just a few instances over the last handful of weeks, ordered to illustrate a shift in meaning (all of these are from my go-to daily, the Washington Post, except where noted):

“Others on the GOP side have as well, but they are — how to put this delicately? — too cowardly in most instances to do anything about it. But McCain? Why should he now — of all times — suddenly stoop to their level, the level of craven politician?” — Jennifer Rubin, 25 July, “Why has McCain returned?”

“There was craven, cover-your-behind politics at work that had high costs and promoted anxiety worldwide.” — David Rothkopf, 9 August, Global Opinions, “A rogue state squares off against a rogue head of state.”

“The least respected of today’s leaders are, of course, politicians. The public largely views them as craven and cowardly, pandering to polls and focus groups.” — Fareed Zakaria, 17 August, “The mealy-mouthed cowardice of America’s elites after Charlottesville.”

“It was a day of craven ignorance and cynicism that moved the presidency of the United States away from global leadership into a narrow little niche of ideological, political self-preservation.’’ — John Kerry, quoted by Matt Viser in the Boston Globe, 2 June, “Kerry says Trump’s decision was ‘a day of craven ignorance’” (on the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Accord).

“Such a cravenly cynical quote — with its tacit acknowledgment that a major change in social policy was announced with partisan advantage in mind — is both breathtaking and scandalous.” — James Hohmann, 27 July, the Daily 202, “Growing GOP backlash to transgender troop ban underscores Trump’s political miscalculation.

“But because the Trump Organization and related companies haven’t seen fit to produce their own goods in the United States, that means either their products aren’t the best or Trump is engaged in a craven manipulation of his fans. Or both.” — Sarah Posner, 17 July, the Plum Line, “Trump’s ‘Made in America’ week is a hypocritical joke.”

It’s Posner’s use of craven in that last instance that nails the new definition (“cynicism manifest in naked manipulation to achieve a morally corrupt end” — J. Yacovissi), but it’s easy to sense the flavor that the word is taking on as it steeps in its new favorite-word status. Certainly, with politics squarely at the center of every one of these uses, the shift in meaning is not a big leap, since so much of politics appears to involve an abject fear of defeat that leads to all sorts of twisted manipulation.

(For an entire article that embodies this new definition of craven, read Amy Davidson Sorkin’s 24 July New Yorker article, “When Anthony Scaramucci fell in love with Donald Trump.”)

What’s most fascinating to me is that we’ve all been drawn, somewhat independently, to the same word. Development of language is much like the development of case law: Once the first instance appears, subsequent ones point back to it as their definitive source.

I do wonder whether this particular shift has been made with the consent of, or due to the absence of, copyeditors. Will language change faster now that editing is less prevalent? Hmmm. Before we can say, we’ll need to collect another datum or two.