Author Archives: Jennifer Bort Yacovissi

Book Review: Hard Cider

This review originally appeared in Late Last Night Books on 20 July 2018.

I’ve often written about my admiration of and appreciation for small, independent book publishers, those folks who are in the business much more because of their love of books than their pursuit of the next big blockbuster. Publishing these days has an ever-slimming profit margin amid fierce competition, and that makes things even more challenging for those who do this for love.

A small publisher that has drawn positive attention for its business model and a gratifying level of success is She Writes Press. In 2016, books from She Writes Press were awarded seventeen medals at the Independent Publisher Book Awards, the most awards to one press in that year. Under the guiding hand of publisher Brooke Warner, the press has gone from a catalog of eight titles in 2013 to an impressively long list for both spring and fall in this, their six year.

One of the titles being released this fall is Hard Cider by Barbara Stark-Nemon. Stark-Nemon is an alumna of She Writes Press, which published her award-winning debut novel, Even in Darkness. (See my review of that book for LLNB here.) Fans of the first book—a historical novel covering many decades leading up to, though, and beyond World War II—should expect a quieter, more intimate, contemporary portrait here. What remains the same, though, is the focus on a single family through the eyes of a strong female protagonist.

Abbie Rose Stone is a mature woman who, having built and raised her family through a number of trials, is now ready to take on a challenge entirely for herself, simply for the joy she feels it will bring her: starting a business producing hard cider in northern Michigan. Her husband and three grown sons have trouble understanding her desire and even more trouble being supportive of it.

Abbie tells her own story, which she starts by recounting the trauma of losing their house to arson. She weaves in the details of building her family with husband Steven through infertility and the painful journey of treatments and disappointments, including a brush with surrogacy that Abbie cannot bring herself to repeat. Instead, over time, they adopt two boys, Alex and Andrew, and then end up having one of their own—the third boy, Seth—without any intervention.

From the outside, Abbie seems to have a comfortable, successful life in her early retirement, with a house in Ann Arbor and another on the northern peninsula, with time to spend on various quiet projects now that all three kids have established lives of their own. But the cracks are there. Each conversation with Steven or the boys is an exercise in eggshell-walking, in which Abbie carefully reads tone and sometimes body language in her attempts to navigate through the rocky shoals of each relationship. She mentions eyeing, and sometimes reaching for, the scotch bottle, and though she seems to drink in moderation, there’s a hint that the impulse is something she wrestles with.

Alex in particular represents her biggest maternal struggle, and perhaps failure. A strong-willed child who tested boundaries all along the way—though we never quite learn how—Alex’s parents finally felt that sending their troubled adolescent to boarding school was the answer. As an adult, his troubles stem primarily from his desire to protect the underdog, so that his best impulses cause the greatest issues. Now, as Abbie tells it, Alex has built a good life for himself a few states away, and she pushes to strengthen her connection with him.

As she spends an increasing amount of time at her northern retreat, learning the ins and outs of the hard cider business, Abbie meets a young woman, Julia, who seems to have a particular interest in Abbie’s family. The mystery of Julia’s attention becomes the book’s central question, though the true journey is Abbie’s reaction to what she sees as an assault on her family and on the delicate balance that she still struggles to achieve and maintain within it.

Stark-Nemon’s writing pulls us along, keeping the pages turning as we make this journey with Abbie Rose. For women of a certain age who have their own stories of dreams deferred in service to family, Abbie’s story resonates. Many readers will bring their own understanding of the landmines lurking when a wife and mother works to carve out a role separate from the centrality of family.

There are some opportunities that Stark-Nemon misses. One of the traps for an author of first-person narration is the tendency to tell more than show. Abbie describes her relationship with Steven and alludes to their issues far more than we see or experience them for ourselves. Often, it feels as though characters are talking at each other rather than to each other, making their points but not necessary striving for mutual understanding. Emotional scars left by trauma—the arson, Alex’s feelings of abandonment—are only tangentially explored.

That said, Hard Cider is a warm and inviting book, which may make readers long to spend some quality time in northern Michigan, enjoying the seasons on Abbie Rose’s lakeshore retreat.

Requiem

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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:

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.
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.
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.)

Book Review: Laughing Shall I Die

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 20 June 2018.

Here are two take-aways from Tom Shippey’s latest book: One, “Viking” was a job description, not a racial or ethnic designation; and two, a quality demanded of those Vikings was a finely honed, mordant sense of humor that perhaps we modern nine-to-five cubicle-dwellers would find difficult to understand.

That sense of humor includes composing, on the spot, even as the composer is being bitten to death by a pit-full of adders, a beautiful song that will be handed down through the ages. The song concludes with the line, “Laughing shall I die,” primarily because the dying Viking knows his sons are coming to wreak vengeance on the king who put him in the pit and will subject said king to a longer, slower, far grislier demise.

It’s pretty funny, apparently, if you’re a Viking.

For the rest of us, it’s funny because the death song’s composer is named Ragnar Hairy-breeches, and one of his avenging sons is named Ivar the Boneless. It turns out, though, that while Ragnar may be mostly the stuff of myth and legend, Ivar is not only an historical figure, he is a significant one.

As for the “Boneless” part, no one is quite sure of the nickname’s origin, but one theory is that he was being compared to a serpent — which to the Vikings meant a dragon — so it’s actually a compliment.

The author’s stated purpose in this book is to explore what gave Vikings their edge, when they had fewer people and resources than most of the populations they came up against, as they swept across Britain and mainland Europe into Russia and the Middle East over a distinct 300-year period. He argues that their edge was “the Viking mindset. To put it bluntly, it’s a kind of death cult.” Their disdain of death made them hard to beat on and off the field of battle.

Shippey also notes that his book is meant for “the reading public.” What’s interesting, then, is that Shippey appears to be using his general lay reader — who should be forgiven for not being up on the latest battles within the learned academia of Viking lore — to engage in an argument with scholars on the other side of the divide (one of whom is his former tutor).

The effect is a bit like stopping by a friend’s house and finding yourself used as a go-between in an argument you’ve blundered into (“Could you tell him that?” “Oh, yeah? Well, maybe she should know…”), when you all you wanted was some wine.

To summarize his side of the spat, Shippey believes that modern academia finds its delicate sensibilities affronted by the less culturally refined aspects of the marauding Vikings, and has worked to ignore, bowdlerize, explain away, and generally discount what it sees as a cartoon version of the Viking ethos. These academics compare Viking legend with the overblown mythology of America’s Wild West. Shippey works to dismantle that view.

To do so, he draws heavily upon the great sagas, from which we derive much of our knowledge of the ancient Norse traditions, culture, and religion. Many of those sagas are thought to be far older than the Viking period itself, which is dated to 793, the point at which the outside world became aware of the pillaging Norseman — vikingr, or marauder.

Before written language, the sagas and traditions of eddic and skaldic poetry provided exceptionally well-developed oral histories of Scandinavia, embellished, of course, with many supernatural elements. Eventually, those oral histories were written down by Icelanders and then rediscovered by the outside world at the end of the Middle Ages.

In Viking lore, great deaths are assessed based on how stoic the victim is and what laconic wit he shows as he goes down. One Bui the Broad, having had his lower jaw hacked off, is recorded for posterity as having said (hmm — that seems like a bit of a trick), “The Danish women in Bornholm won’t think it so pleasant to kiss me now.”

The first part of Laughing surveys four sets of characters and their stories to give us an up-close feeling for the well-known Viking heroes of the old sagas. Chapter five, for example, is called “Egil the Ugly and King Blood-axe: Poetry and the Psychopath.”

Part II gives a geographical view of the vast reach of Viking hegemony. Here is where the legends begin to morph into historical reality, and we start to grasp the enormity of Scandinavian influence on the British Isles, the Continent, Russia, and even the Middle East.

Among Shippey’s insights are that Vikings made more successful inroads in England than in Ireland because England had an established bureaucratic infrastructure. There, the Vikings simply eliminated a handful of rulers and stepped into the open slots. Ireland was too chaotic to deal with in a similar fashion; there was no operation to take over.

Part III describes in detail a few of the great sagas, such as Njal’s Saga, to highlight particular aspects of the Viking mindset. The problem is that setting the context requires a long lead-in, which — much like having to explain a joke — drains the energy from the stories.

And therein lies the larger problem: This material begs for a narrative-nonfiction approach, to get blood pumping through the descriptions and perhaps engage the readers’ imaginations more successfully.

Though Shippey tries to keep things jaunty with some of his descriptions, many details are too pedantically academic; it feels as though he’s still playing to his old tutor. As it is, Shippey may simply inspire his readers to binge-watch “The Vikings” (both the TV series and movie) so they can see what they’ve been missing.

Book Review: The Restless Wave

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on June 7, 2018.

Staring down one’s mortality has a way of sharpening focus. We’ve all heard stories recounting deathbed reassessments of choices made, of stinging regrets, and of the urgency to make amends while there’s still time.

And though it’s true that John McCain produced this book under the ticking clock of a brain cancer diagnosis, the reader senses it’s not significantly different than if he’d written it in the pink of health.

McCain fully owns both his failures and his successes, makes no excuses, and begs no forgiveness. He uses this book to record his version of crucial events of the last 20 or so years, but also, as he says, “I want to talk to my fellow Americans a little more if I may.”

It’s worth considering what he has to say. He may side-step some issues, and no one writes a memoir to make themselves look bad, but it’s hard to argue that he is not sincerely considering what’s in the best interests of Americans as citizens of the world.

This is the seventh book that McCain has co-authored with his longtime assistant, Mark Salter, which is perhaps how they were able to pull it together so quickly. While they spend time dissecting McCain’s defeat in the 2008 presidential race — explaining how he was argued out of choosing his good friend Joe Lieberman as his running mate, while never once impugning Sarah Palin — most of the book focuses on the U.S. involvement in the various conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria; foreign relations with the likes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping; and the urgent need to focus on human rights both worldwide and at home.

As chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, McCain travels widely and frequently. He tries to make all trips bipartisan and uses the time and forced closeness to build personal relationships across the aisle. He makes the effort to see for himself the conditions on the ground in places both widely known and obscure so that he can speak from a more deeply informed position.

He’s unafraid to remind foreign officials where their countries are falling short, particularly on human rights and political freedom, whether or not we consider those countries important to U.S. interests. It is rarely difficult to understand where McCain stands on any subject.

Consider, for example, the subject of torture — or, because no euphemism is oblique enough that we can’t make it more so by creating an acronym for it, EIT (enhanced interrogation techniques). Beyond his own personal experiences informing his feelings on the matter, anyone wondering about his unwillingness to support Gina Haspel’s nomination for CIA director because of her involvement in the EIT program, and her approval to destroy recorded evidence of EIT use, simply needs to read chapter three, “About Us.”

Easily the most chilling image in the book describes the torture of Fatima Belhaj, wife of Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a man who found himself on the wrong side of the U.S.’ short-lived reconciliation with Muammar Qaddafi:

“[CIA interrogators] had taken a photograph of her in the interrogation room at the black site in Bangkok. She was seated in a chair, Americans surrounding her, duct tape wrapped around the lower half of her face, her wrists bound, and completely naked. She was six months pregnant at the time.”

McCain’s fight against the use of torture and for the release of an unclassified report concerning the U.S.’ use of EIT is based on the concept that we are supposed to be better than this. “What makes us exceptional?…Our founding ideals and our fidelity to them at home and in our conduct in the world makes us exceptional…This was never about [terror suspects]. It was about us.”

At one point, he notes that his treatment from his captors in Hanoi was, in comparison, more humane than the perversions exhibited by American guards at Abu Ghraib.

All of this may seem odd coming from a reliable hawk, but McCain has a fully nuanced, well-sourced view of the proper application of force. He walks his readers through his thinking on all of the conflicts in which we’ve been involved (or failed to be involved) since the early 1990s.

He calls out what he sees as the significant foreign policy failures of the Obama Administration, most notably Syria, but allows that multiple administrations are responsible for the unchallenged rise of Vladimir Putin into the pantheon of the world’s great tyrants.

For those who may be wondering, The Restless Wave contains any number of thoughts on the wrong-headedness of the current administration. McCain worries that we are now actively working to abdicate our role in the world order we worked hard to create after World War II, and notes that our allies are increasingly learning to work around us or entirely without us, which should cause us concern.

There are a number of issues where McCain remains silent. While he goes into some detail to explain his thinking on the most recent healthcare vote — observers outside the Senate saw his thumbs-down gesture as more dramatic than it actually was — he remains silent on his vote with the entirety of the Senate Republican bloc on a tax plan that is widely understood to add $1 trillion to the national debt. That’s the agenda item I’d really like to hear his thinking on.

My respect for McCain was cemented when he pointedly refused to demonize his political opponent, Barack Obama, in the 2008 presidential race. As improbable as it may have been then, that sort of restraint seems positively quaint these days.

That McCain’s name continues to be invoked in the president’s ongoing campaign-style rallies as a sure way to prompt the boisterous crowds to boo is one of the more gob-smacking features of this most unpredictable of administrations. One longs to ask, “To what possible purpose?” but none of the likely answers are reassuring.

Professional politicians like John McCain are in increasingly short supply, and we are worse off because of it. We need people who grasp what “proper order” is and why it’s important, and are willing to explore good-faith bipartisan approaches to solving complex issues. We need members of Congress who understand that principled compromise is the way to get the people’s work done.

I miss him already.

Room to Write

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This column originally appeared in Jenny’s “Write Now” book blog in the Washington Independent Review of Books on May 31, 2018.

My husband and I live in a relatively small house with few interior doors. I have an office in the basement where I do his and my business paperwork (yes, I’m the unpaid secretary of one business, president and sole employee of another), and other un-fun things like taxes and bill-paying. A combination of those unpleasant associations and the fact that it’s the basement makes me feel like I’m being punished when I have to spend time down there.

Thus, my writing space is upstairs, where it’s brighter and more open, and also smack in the middle of our living space. I’ve set up shop at a lovely, beat-up old dining table that sits between our living and dining rooms. I’m scanning it now in despair; it’s a complete eyesore, and my stuff, stacked in piles by project, has begun to migrate to other flat surfaces in the area.

I can try to tell myself that I don’t actually live like this, but who would I be fooling? (Angie Thomas, author of The Hate U Give, recently posted a Twitter thread about hiring someone to clean up her workspace; she says it’s the best thing she’s done for herself in a long time.)

Since I started writing with more seriousness about ten years ago, my husband has taken to drawing little cartoons of me, usually stick figures with goofy heads. He always draws them wearing earplugs. As I mentioned: small house, few interior doors. And even though there are “only” two TVs in the house, when either one is on — as one inevitably is when he’s home — the sound is virtually inescapable.

Space and time: the two halves of the writer’s holy grail. Their lack is what we seem to bemoan the most. Certainly it seems that every writer’s fantasy is to have a tidy, isolated space, separate from the rest of humanity, and stretches of uninterrupted time in order to fully concentrate on writing.

I am forever in awe of the women who are able to create stunning stories and novels even as they have small children at home. Really, Celeste Ng (just to pick a random example), how is that possible?

Of course, there are plenty of essays by writers who’ve finally secured both space and time, only to be driven a little bit insane by the silence and the empty minutes ticking by with nothing to show for it.

Everything you need to understand about writers is contained in a single “Pearls Before Swine” cartoon, where Rat (my alter ego) sits down at 8 a.m. saying he’s going to write 10 pages today, after which he spends the entire day doing everything but writing, then sits down again at 8 a.m. saying he’s going to write 20 pages today. Yup.

Part of my objective in my Year of Writing is to clear space — physically, virtually, and psychically — in support of my objectives. That includes taking a step back from my volunteer work in the writing community (the same volunteering I wrote about last time in this column), meaning that I will be handing over leadership roles to others and stepping into smaller, supporting roles. With luck, that will also allow me to box up lots of notes and office supplies and hand them over to the next person, which ends up being a twofer, space-clearing-wise.

As we move from spring into summer, the writing community generally slows down just a touch; conferences and festivals don’t start up again until fall, but summer is the high season for writing residencies. These residencies sound seductively magical in the literature, but I’ve discovered that I don’t do well (for myself or my writing) when I’m surrounded by someone else’s structure in a space that’s supposed to allow me to write. For many creative types, the environment gives them a big jolt of energy that amps up their creativity; for me, it’s an energy sink.

So I’ve decided to do my own writing residency. Next week, in between a trip to Rockland, Maine, with a friend who is looking at houses, and presenting some workshops at the Historical Writers of America conference in Providence, Rhode Island, I will be hiding out in a little cottage — just me, my laptop, and I — seeing what I can do to whip this current work in progress into something that’s more like a credible draft. If it works out well, I may just do it again later this summer.

I’m feeling practically giddy. Wish me luck that I make the very most of my room to write.

Little Town, Big Exposure: A Visit to the 9th Annual Gaithersburg Book Festival

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This column originally appeared in Late Last Night Books on May 20, 2018.

In the opening hours of the Ninth Annual Gaithersburg Book Festival, the skies were an ugly steel gray and the precipitation shifted across mist, sprinkle, drizzle, and steady rain — and still the book lovers came out in force. Sporting umbrellas and rain ponchos, they were ready to hear their favorite authors read from and discuss books at the different literary tents, browse the new and used bookstores and independent booksellers, get their books signed while chatting with those favorite authors, grab something tasty from the food vendors, and go back again for more.

Of the many book festivals that the Baltimore-Washington area now enjoys, Gaithersburg is my personal favorite. Though it often draws over twenty thousand attendees and attracts many nationally known authors, it still has a very intimate feeling. At Gaithersburg, it’s entirely possible for a book lover to chat with an author they’ve admired for years as they both stroll the grounds and take in all the activity.

Participating in the Festival

This year, I was at the festival for more than just simple enjoyment. I’m a board member of the non-profit Washington Independent Review of Books (WIRoB), which is a sponsor of the festival, so I helped to staff our booth to get the word out about our review site.

Even better, though, I had the pleasure of being on two panels. The first was with Elliot Ackerman, whose second book Dark at the Crossing was a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award, and which I had the pleasure of reviewing for WIRoB. Elliot is a journalist, a White House Fellow, and a Marine, having served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His first two novels take place in and around both of those wars, as well as in the conflict in Syria. His intimate and empathetic stories recognize the shared humanity of all concerned, including those that he once fought against. One point that Elliot made was that we are running out of Afghanis who remember life in peacetime, before the Russian invasion, so that we now have generations for whom war, rather than peace, is the natural state of being.

Shifting gears completely, I moderated a panel called “Drugs, Relationships, and Power,” with two wonderfully talented authors, Kelly J. Ford and Eryk Pruitt. Both of their novels share settings in the South, and both have had their work called “Southern Gothic”.

Kelly’s debut novel, Cottonmouths, centers on a young gay woman who has washed out of college and is forced to return to her parents and their small Arkansas town to pick up the pieces. But she is also drawn back into the orbit of her old unrequited love, Jody, who happens to be running a meth lab on her property.

For Eryk, What WE Reckon is his third novel, and involves the pitched power battle between two fully co-dependent forces, Jack and Summer. The two start out the story with different identities, which they shed like snakeskins, and a kilo of coke in a hollowed-out King James Bible. They are both losing a grip on reality at the same time that they are growing rather tired of each other.

The conversation ranged over issues of identity and the pressure to conform, the sense that even the most seemingly irredeemable characters have redeeming qualities, and the idea that the opioid scourge ravages rural areas in different ways than in urban environments.

Reconnecting with Old Friends, Making New Ones

One of the great pleasures of Gaithersburg for me is knowing that I’ll see a bunch of old and new book-loving friends. I remembered to bring my copy of Leslie Pietrzyk’s acclaimed new novel, Silver Girl, for her to sign for me while we chatted about the challenges of complex plot development. Melissa Scholes Young had already signed my copy of her much-discussed debut, Flood, but she and I were together in the Politics & Prose book tent. And it’s always a pleasure to have a chance to reconnect with Richard Peabody, who continues to be a driving force behind so much of DC’s writing culture.

I’m also a member of the Chesapeake Chapter of the Historical Novel Society, and, because so many of us were going to be there already, we decided to hold our bimonthly meeting right after members Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie finished a panel on their latest book, My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton. (And even after all that planning, I got pulled away and wasn’t able to catch up with the group!)

There were so many exceptional panels and speakers, and I know lots of folks like me were running back and forth between tents to try to catch as many as possible. Bethanne Patrick chatted with one of my all-time favorite authors, Alice McDermott, about her latest book, The Ninth Hour, which I also reviewed for WIRoB. In the Michener Pavilion, C-Span Book TV captured all the panels presented there, including Eugene Meyer (Five for Freedom) and Paula Whitacre (A Civil Life in Uncivil Times) discussing their historical renderings of forgotten figures of resistance with moderator Will Pittman.

I couldn’t drop in on Madeline Miller, since her end-of-day panel was the same time as mine. Author of the acclaimed Song of Achilles, Madeline’s latest novel, Circe, is winning rave reviews from all over, including Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s recent review in WIRoB. But I did get the opportunity to have her sign my copy of Circe and chat with her and Jud Ashman, the festival’s founder and now mayor of Gaithersburg, as the 2018 event wound down around us. (I also got to sign a copy of my novel while standing in Madeline’s line. Photographer Bruce Guthrie offered his back as a flat surface, while others snapped photos. I can’t wait to see those pictures!)

As an extra bonus, many of the huge staff of volunteers participated in an after-party at Greene Growlers, where author E.A. Aymar hosted an episode of “Noir at the Bar”, with a number of festival authors reading from their gritty works. Participants included Con Lehane (Murder in the Manuscript Room), Alma Katsu (The Hunger), Alan Orloff (contributor to The Night of the Flood), Shawn Reilly Simmons (Murder on the Rocks), Aymar (editor and contributor to The Night of the Flood), Owen Laukkanen (Gale Force) and my personal favorites and new-found, book-loving friends, Kelly Ford and Eryk Pruitt.

Save the date for the 10^th annual Gaithersburg Book Festival, May 18, 2019. I’ll see you there!

Volunteering: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

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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!

Book Review: Votes for Women! American Suffragists and the Battle for the Ballot

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on April 17, 2018.

As we prepare for the 2020 celebration of the 100th anniversary of U.S. women receiving federal voting rights, books recounting the suffragists’ long fight are starting to roll out. Winifred Conkling’s contribution, written for young adults, is an excellent history for all readers, detailing the long, tangled, and sometimes violent path to the passage of the 19th Amendment.

Conkling takes a straightforward approach to relating the history of the movement and the women who drove it, many whose names we know, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Susan B. Anthony to Alice Paul, and a number whose fame (or notoriety) has not lasted as long, like Victoria Claflin Woodhull and Carrie Chapman Catt.

The narrative starts with Elizabeth Cady learning that, in her world of early-19th-century Upstate New York, even the most determined girl could not make a contribution equal to a boy, laws and culture being what they were.

However, she was allowed to attend Troy Female Seminary, which offered a curriculum competitive with those offered to men, and she had the benefit of spending summers with her rich and progressive cousin, Gerrit Smith, who gave her freedom to exercise her forward-thinking ideas.

In part, the push for women’s rights was driven by the abolitionist movement, since women wishing to speak in public against slavery were accused of being “unwomanly and unchristian,” because, at the time, it was considered unseemly for women to speak in public.

The movement was also tied to the temperance movement, widely seen as a women’s issue because of the damage men’s excessive drinking caused to families. Without the vote, women had no formal way to press for change.

Newly married Elizabeth Cady Stanton met abolitionist Quaker Lucretia Mott in London in 1840 at the World Anti-Slavery Convention — which, ironically, would not allow women to be delegates. By the end of the event, the pair had made plans to hold their own convention to “form a society to advocate the rights of women,” according to Stanton.

The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 is widely seen as the start of a formal movement focused on women’s rights. Even there, the idea of suffrage was considered outrageous, and Mott shied away from making it a point of discussion.

Since no nation yet recognized women’s right to vote, she feared it would make the women look ridiculous. It appears to be Frederick Douglass’ impromptu speech to the gathering of more than 300 women that allowed the resolution for suffrage to pass.

Susan B. Anthony, a temperance champion, had no interest in women’s rights until she was repeatedly told that, as one, she could not speak at temperance conventions. She and Stanton met in 1851and immediately formed a bond that lasted 50 years.

During the Civil War, women’s suffrage took a back seat to the cause of ending slavery, and it was generally seen to be risking both issues to pair them together. The 13th Amendment ended slavery, and the 14th guaranteed citizenship and civil rights to male former slaves. The dual causes of emancipation and women’s suffrage, which had often supported each other, were now bitterly at odds.

When the issue of the 15th Amendment arose, guaranteeing voting rights regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude — with no mention of gender since it was already in the previous amendment — Stanton and Anthony campaigned against it, Stanton sometimes using racist arguments.

The episode drove a wedge into the unity of the suffrage movement, as did free-love advocate Victoria Claflin Woodhull, whose scandals in the name of suffrage cost the movement significant support and set its efforts back years.

As the century turned and both Stanton and Anthony passed the reins to the next generation, the wind was out of the movement, and it lagged until 1910. Carrie Chapman Catt took over as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, but it was Stanton’s daughter Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch, along with Alice Paul and Lucy Burns — all strongly influenced by the militant tactics of the British women’s movement — who get the most credit for reinvigorating the U.S. efforts.

Paul’s huge march in Washington, DC, in 1913, and the melee that it caused, engendered widespread attention. (Oddly, the author states that only spectators were hurt in the semi-riot, when it seems well-documented that many marchers were taken to local hospitals.)

Paul and Catt’s approaches to winning suffrage were often at loggerheads, especially when Paul’s “Silent Sentinels” began to picket the White House — the first group ever to do so — and later to get arrested. The women’s infamous mistreatment in prison was yet another rallying cry that brought people to the movement.

The “Susan B. Anthony Amendment,” the 19th, was passed in the U.S. House and Senate in May and June 1919, respectively, and was finally ratified in a nail-biter vote in Tennessee in August 1920. Catt, supportive of President Woodrow Wilson and seen as the moderate voice for suffrage, was invited to the White House for congratulations, while Paul, the impatient, rude agitator, was snubbed.

Given the current political engagement of teens embodied in the #NeverAgain movement, perhaps the most useful lesson for this book’s target audience is the unflagging determination with which two generations of women pressed what often seemed like a hopeless cause.

Winning a pitched political fight is rarely brief or straightforward, but the victory — almost always — goes to the side that refuses to give up.

Need Some Advice?

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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.

Book Review: Don’t Wait to Be Called

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This review originally appeared in Late Last Night Books on March 20, 2018.

At the Washington Writers Conference coming up in May, I’ll be moderating a panel with four local authors whose debut books made it to publication through very different paths. Each book is also a different genre — memoir/journalism, biography, novel, and short story collection — which means I’m reading four very different books to prepare for the panel.

The short story collection, Don’t Wait to Be Called, is by Jacob R. Weber. Publication resulted from Weber’s winning the annual fiction prize given by Washington Writers’ Publishing House, a non-profit small press that publishes authors from the Baltimore/Washington area. Weber’s roots, which are on display in his stories, hedge towards the Baltimore end of that geography.

Weber’s biography reads like someone who has lived a few different lives, as a Marine, a translator, and an English tutor to adult immigrants, as well as a waiter and a retail clerk and manager. His experiences infuse his stories in fully authentic ways, and are rendered in voices that are unique to each story.

The title of the collection comes from its final, wrenching story, “Dogs and Days Don’t Wait to Be Called,” which is also one of four stories in the collection that highlights the experiences of Eritreans fleeing their home country in hopes of something better than slow starvation. The escape is arguably as bad or worse than staying put, because of the high risk of becoming a hostage of the ruthless Rashaida, who “were like grizzly bears feeding off the salmon run of the Eritrean exodus,” as protagonist Daud notes in the story “Silver Spring.” He lost one and a half fingers to the Rashaida’s favorite method for hurrying the twenty thousand dollar ransom payments: making hostages shriek on phone calls to family members.

Weber’s ability to create fully realized protagonists in distinctly different voices and personas is one of the great joys of the collection. We have no idea who we’re going to hear from next, whether it’s a black high school kid from the projects writing about the Freddy Grey riots in the journal given to him by his earnest teacher from the suburbs, or a young widowed mother desperate just to enjoy one Sunday afternoon with her son, however pitched the battle of wills. The mediocre student in “Mr. Sympathy” decides to become a math whiz to make his dying father finally proud of him.

Chase, the protagonist in “Brokedick,” is a former active-duty Marine tortured by not having been as active as his buddies who went downrange; he earns his shot at redemption whether he feels he has or not. In contrast, the obtuse narrator of “Dawn Doesn’t Disappoint” ends up self-satisfied in a better spot than he started, having learned nothing, and without ever getting the punch in the nose or knee to the groin that he so richly deserves. Life, as we know, isn’t fair in ways that run on a sliding scale from miniscule to unendurable.

In this collection, the top end of that scale plays out most strongly in the example of the two unnamed characters that appear in both “Silver Spring” and “Dogs and Days Don’t Wait to Be Called”. Daud and Helen in the former story, and Hiwet, the pregnant young woman in the latter, have all run afoul of the same two torturers in the Rashaida desert camp. One is fittingly ugly and deformed, but the other is strikingly handsome. “Hiwet had time to wonder why he was raping girls in the Sinai, when he could have been charming them on television.” Daud names him Gallantandregal, and notes that he is the most brutal enforcer among them. Gallantandregal enjoys his job, gets paid well for it, and has an endless stream of refugees to choose from. It’s almost certain that he and his ilk are still at it today.

Unjust? You bet. Jacob Weber’s stories capture life as it is, in which there aren’t always good guys and bad guys, and even when there are, the bad guys don’t always get what’s coming to them. It doesn’t matter, though; Weber makes you want to read about them all.

***

Note: While you’re waiting for Don’t Wait to Be Called to download to your e-reader or show up in your mailbox, you’ll want to check out Weber’s short story, “Directions, Partially Step-by-Step,” which appeared in the January 8th edition of Drunk Monkeys.