Last Chance: Vote for the New Yorker Story of the Year

My last post for 2011 is a reminder to vote, if you haven't already, for the New Yorker Story of the Year. Polls close at midnight tonight, Blogger Time. The poll is in the right sidebar. For a full rundown of the Top Ten stories, go here:

Vote for the New Yorker Story of the Year -- The Top Ten

The Year in Books — the Best of 2011

Although I read a lot of books in 2011, I certainly didn’t read all that were published in 2011, and I didn’t read exclusively books that were published in 2011. So a “Best Of” list is a strange thing to produce. Necessarily, it is a list of the best books I read, not the best books that were published. I read pretty widely, too, so I need to break this down into categories. And to hedge my bets, most categories have runners-up!

Best Novel (published in 2011): Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks, reviewed here.

Honorable mention: Family Fang by Kevin Wilson; and To Be Sung Under Water, by Tom McNeal, reviewed here.

Other 2011 novels I enjoyed: Blood Clay by Valerie Nieman; The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes; One Hundred and One Nights, by Benjamin Buchholz; and Whale Man, by Alan Michael Parker, which I reviewed here.

Best Novel (published prior to 2011): The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver

Honorable mention: Shanghai Dancing by Brian Castro, reviewed here.

Best Short Story Collection: Accidental Birds of the Carolinas by Marjorie Hudson

Honorable mention: Burning Man by Ed Falco.

Best Young People’s Literature: Eddie’s War by Carol Fisher Saller, reviewed here.

Honorable mention: Catcher, Caught by Sarah Collins Honenberger.

Best Memoir: Witness by Curtis Smith.

Honorable mention: Caged by Cameron Conaway, reviewed here.

Best Buddhist Book: Confession of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Batchelor

Honorable Mention: Buddha Standard Time by Lama Surya Das

Best Liberal Book: Aftershock by Robert Reich

Honorable Mention: Unequal Protection by Thom Hartmann

I'm looking forward to more good reading in 2012!

2012: The Year of the Lit Mag

What if we declared 2012 to be the year of the Lit Mag? For years I have been subscribing to a lot of literary magazines. Currently I have many piles of them on the floor in my office, most of them unread. In the last week alone, 5 more have have arrived, so there's a new stack growing on the corner of my desk.

This won't necessarily solve the problem of where to put all these magazines, but one of my resolutions for 2012 is to do a better job of reading the magazines that come in. I know the publishers appreciate my subscription, but I think they'd also like me to read the darn things.

So here's what I plan to do. In 2012, you'll be seeing a lot more discussions of literary magazines on this blog. I probably won't be able to do daily posts, but I'll try to do Lit Mag posts a couple of times a week. If you are the editor of a magazine and want me to feature yours, leave a comment or send me an email. If you're an online magazine, I'll try to do the same. Or, if you're a reader of Lit Mags and would like to do a guest blog on a magazine you like, let me know.

Stay tuned for 2012: The Year of the Lit Mag!

Tips for Writers: Get Back to Work!

’Tis the Season for New Years’ Resolutions, and, like a lot of writers, my resolutions touch on my writing goals, although mostly they circle around writing: reading more/better literature will help refine my own style; reading more literary magazines will help me understand better what the journals are looking for; staying off the Internet will free up time for everything else. (I could probably tie in the eating better/exercising more resolutions, too.)

It all boils down to discipline. And the search for discipline explains my attempts at meditation and my reading on that subject—still waiting for that to work. But part of my effort to improve discipline involves goal-setting.

I know writers who set daily word-count goals, and I do that sometimes, such as during a NaNoWrimo push. (My goal for this November was 2500 words per day, and I stuck to that for most of the month, easily surpassing the overall goal of 50,000 words.) When I’m in revision mode, I may set a page-count goal rather than focusing on the number of words. I did that in August when I was at a writing retreat in France, working on the revision to my novel manuscript: the number of pages I had to get through divided by the number days available. That worked well.

Most of the time, though, I’m floundering. I hate to admit that, but some days I sit at my desk and I don’t know what to write. It’s not writer’s block, exactly. It’s more fundamental than that. It’s not knowing. It’s not being ready to move on in the given project. And so on days like that—days like today, for example—I write something else: a blog post, like this one; a book review (I did that yesterday); ideas for something I might want to write in the future. If I’m really struggling, I might read something relevant to writing—I just started The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler.

But what I don’t do is leave my desk, at least not during the hours I set aside only for writing. I don’t go run errands when I should be writing. I don’t do housework. I don’t read magazines or books unless they’re related to the work. Or, if I do let my attention wander into other realms, I remind myself, like a student of meditation, to begin again. In other words, even if a word-count goal or a page-count goal isn’t feasible, then my objective is simple: get back to work. And that, basically, is my New Year’s Resolution for 2012. 

The New Yorker: "Creative Writing" by Etgar Keret

January 2, 2012: “Creative Writing” by Etgar Keret

This is a very short little story that writers, especially, will appreciate. It’s about Maya and Aviad, a couple coping with Maya’s miscarriage. Maya takes a creative writing class to give her something to do, and her work is well received by her instructor. She writes three stories, each of which is possibly a commentary on her own life and relationship with her husband. Aviad seems to be somewhat jealous of Maya’s success with her stories, so he secretly signs up for a beginning course (taught by someone else). In his first class, in a free-writing exercise, he writes a story about a fish. And this story also seems to reveal something about Aviad.

Based on the Q&A with Etgar Keret, we suppose that the stories mostly reveal that both Maya and Aviad are exploring their feelings toward one another in these stories, but don’t know exactly how they feel. It does seem that Aviad is more certain than Maya, but then he’s only written one story so far.

Is that what we do as writers? Explore our own feelings through our characters? Keret says he is all of the characters:

When I write a story, I am all the characters in it. I can’t write a character I don’t feel some emotional identification with, even if it is the hired killer who murders the protagonist’s pregnant wife. Since all those characters exist in my head, they have to be me, in some sense, to have a “real” body in the story world. 

I don’t think that’s true for me. Some of my characters certainly must be the “other” even if I do try to imagine how they would feel and to empathize with them.

What about you?

eBook Prices Are Too High

When Amazon launched the Kindle, we were told that eBooks would be $9.99 for most new releases, with many other books available for less. That was true, for a while. Amazon had set the price and everyone else—publishers, authors, and readers—had to live with it. Considering that new hardcovers sell for $30 or more in the bookstore (although considerably less on Amazon, of course), the eBook price seemed like a pretty good deal. Pricing has changed now, however, and the publishers, for the most part, set the prices.

eBooks have lots of advantages, of course, all well documented: portable, space-saving, searchable. But there are also disadvantages. While some books can be lent (to other Kindle owners), many cannot; and of course lending to a non-Kindle or Kindle-app user is out of the question. Some of us still like reading actual books, turning actual pages, feeling the paper in our hands. And I happen to like more information about what’s coming—I like to know how far from the end of a chapter I am, or how many pages there are in the book. I also like being able to go back and read sections over if I’m confused about something. While that’s not impossible with a Kindle, it’s not as easy as merely flipping pages. And sometimes, when I’m done with a book, I like to sell it or give it away. Can’t do that with an eBook.

But today I’m thinking about prices. I recently had a gift card to spend on Amazon. There were a couple of new release hardcovers I was interested in, so I bought them. The first was Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. It retails for $23.95 (although it’s only 175 pages) in hardcover. (Terrific book, by the way.) Amazon sells it for $14.37. The Kindle price is $11.99, a difference of $2.38. I also got The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. Amazon’s price is $15.28, with a list price of $28.00. The Kindle price is $12.99, a difference of $2.29. Weighing the costs and benefits of the eBook, it seems worth it to me to pay a little extra to have the hardcover—especially if there’s the theoretical possibility of selling the book once I’ve read it, or giving it away. In fact, I’ve found many instances where the Kindle price for a book is actually higher than the discounted price of a paperback. (Shipping must be taken into consideration, of course, but my purchases usually total over $25, in which case shipping is free.)

So, as a reader, I’m not at all happy about eBook prices.

On the other hand, there are many books available for much less (and I’m not even talking about self-published books, many of which are free or sell for $.99). For example, my publisher, Press 53, sells most of its eBooks, including mine, for $3.99 on Kindle and Nook. The paperback list price for my book is $14.00 and the Amazon/B&N discounted price is $12.62. So, the eBook savings over the discounted price is $8.63. That’s significant.

All of which is considered solely from the reader’s point of view. As an author, I’m not sure what to think. I want to make more money from book sales, but at some point the price is too high and inhibits demand, and in a competitive environment that’s the last thing I need!

Prime Number Magazine: the latest update

Prime Decimals 13.7 is live! This update includes work by Rachel Unkefer, Craig Fishbane, Bryan Shawn Wang, Carolyn Moore, and Penelope Scambly Schott.

And we are actively reading submissions for Issue 17 and beyond. We need full-length stories and essays up to 4,000 words, flash fiction and nonfiction below 1,000 words, poetry, short drama, craft essays, book reviews, interviews, and cover art (reflecting the prime number of a particular issue). Please check out the submission guidelines for more information.

New Yorker Story of the Year: 5 Days Left to Vote

Read all about the Top Ten New Yorker Stories of 2011, and then vote in our poll in the sidebar at right. Voting will close at midnight Saturday, December 31, and the winner will be announced on Sunday, January 1.

Guest blogger: Okla Elliott

Editor's Note: Okla Elliott's book, From the Crooked Timber, a novella and stories, was recently published by Press 53. I asked him to tell us a little something about the book.

Okla Elliott:

I have been asked to offer a brief and informal discussion of “The Names of Distant Galaxies,” the novella in my short fiction collection From the Crooked Timber. First off, let me thank Clifford Garstang for that generous offer. Mr. Garstang is a first-rate practitioner of the short fiction form and a champion of literature, so I was honored when he asked me to do this little piece.

“The Names of Distant Galaxies” started as a novel with chapters alternating between the narrator as a boy and his stepmother when she was his age, which was when her neurological disorder, dystonia, set in. The chapters which were focused on the narrator were in first-person and those on his stepmother were in third-, with the idea being that as an adult he was looking back on it all, remembering his own childhood and imagining hers. This got a bit too programmatic, and the style came to feel too much like a lot of southern/rural novels I’d read. Then, some friends pointed out to me how there was this strain in the novel that sounded like an outside commentator’s voice, but still somehow the voice of the narrator, just very distant and unnatural. I started writing randomly in this voice and realized it was the voice of the narrator trying to figure out how to tell his story.

So then I made the not very large leap over to having him do exactly that—struggle with writing this story he had no idea how to tell. So then there were these meta-sections, where he would talk about his current life and the process of writing (and all the troubles he was having with that process). Those sections are as close to my natural talking voice as I could get without losing artistry, so that the reader feels like this is a conversation, but then the sections he writes as part of his novel/memoir are much more “literary”—my point being, in a way, that we stylize our stories pretty radically, and even the intermediary sections that are meant to be in a raw voice are stylized, just differently, in a way meant to mimic my own natural speech (which is itself stylized), and so on. In effect, I wanted to have a few kinds of cake and eat them all. I wanted to write a more traditional literary narrative, and I wanted to mess with the form a bit as well. I have been trying to find a proverbial “third way” between so-called traditional and so-called experimental writing for a long time, and so I have my narrator write an incomplete novel in the traditional psychological-realist style, while I wrote a novella that makes use of various meta-techniques. My issue with a lot of “traditional” writing is that it seems to want to pretend that the 20^th century never happened in terms of literary innovations, and my issue with “experimental” writing is that it too often misses what I think the point of literature to be—namely, to understand better what it means to be human. So, as I say, I tried to find a third way and eat all the cake I could get my hands on, as it were.

This process was less than efficient, in a way. To get what turned out to be about 80 pages in manuscript form, I wrote over 230 pages and re-envisioned it several times. I’ve loved the novella form for a long time and think it’s the perfect genre in many ways—long enough to engage with big stories yet short enough to read in one day—so I am happy to have dedicated so much energy to that piece. I plan on writing more novellas and hope to see a kind renaissance in the form, now that so many small presses are getting more interested in them and with the advent of the Kindle/Nook reading technologies.

Okla Elliot is currently the Illinois Distinguished Fellow at the University of Illinois, where he works in the fields of comparative literature and trauma studies. He also holds an MFA from Ohio State University. For the academic year 2008-09, he was a visiting assistant professor at Ohio Wesleyan University. His drama, non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, Natural Bridge, New Letters, A Public Space, and The Southeast Review, among others. He is the author of three poetry chapbooks--The Mutable Wheel; Lucid Bodies and Other Poems; and A Vulgar Geography--and he co-edited (with Kyle Minor) The Other Chekhov.

Merry Christmas!

I don't celebrate Christmas, so I don't put up Christmas decorations. I like Christmas trees, though, and I especially like trees like the one pictured--still alive and in the ground. I have a tree like this, but without the ornaments . . .

In fact, one of the fun things about my home is the pine forest out back that is on the march. It's an army of little Christmas trees. When I bought the land 11 years ago, it included two pastures--one at the top of a hill and one at creek-level at the bottom. Since I don't have grazing animals and didn't want to rent the pastures out, I've let them go wild. In the upper pasture, the pine trees have gone crazy, spreading throughout, despite the thick grass. (There's an opposing army of wild cherry trees, especially pretty in spring and fall, and the two armies have recently crossed into the other's territory.) Anyway, there are hundreds of little pine trees (and other varieties of conifers, including juniper), which is exciting to watch transform the property.

While everyone else will start thinking about un-decorating tomorrow, my house will already be back to normal.

But for today, Merry Christmas to you! And Happy Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, too.

"The Replacement Wife" in Blackbird

One of my favorite literary magazines is Blackbird, and so I am especially thrilled to have a story in the Fall 2011 issue. Read "The Replacement Wife" here. The story is the latest from my forthcoming novel in stories to appear. The book, What the Zhang Boys Know, will be published by Press 53 in September 2012.

My story is in great company in this issue: fiction by Belle Boggs, Bryn Chancellor, and others; lots of poetry, including work by Erica Dawson and Nick Lantz; plus reviews, essays, readings, and more. There's even a suggested reading order, which I find amusing because it puts my story last, right before the reviews. But it's a great idea, because there's so much wonderful material here that the list will help you manage it without missing anything!

Thanks for reading!

Tips for Writers: Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays! 

No, that’s not a secular festive greeting, that’s the tip for this Friday, December 23, 2011, Christmas Eve Eve. Although the “happy” part isn’t crucial. Miserable Holidays might be even better. Stressful Holidays. Conflicted Holidays.

Have you ever noticed that a lot of short stories focus on a holiday? It’s a natural, when you think about it. The holiday is a short period of time, just right for short fiction. It’s an organic reason for people to come together--nothing contrived necessary. They are often emotional and stressful. People come into them with high expectations and generally a great deal of baggage, and when those expectations are frustrated--look out! People often do some crazy things on holidays. It’s a great setup for conflict, and that, after all, is the heart of the short story.

So, if you’re looking to do a little writing during this last week of December, try this exercise: Pick a holiday, any holiday. Imagine a family gathering in celebration of the holiday. But one member of the family brings a guest—an unwelcome guest. Instant conflict! I can imagine countless possibilities here. I may even write a story myself.

Have a great holiday!

Winter Solstice

Technically, the winter solstice comes shortly after midnight tonight (U.S. East Coast), but we usually think of the 21st as the shortest day of the year, so . . . Happy Solstice!

Did you know that the Romans designated December 25th as the Solstice? (Hmm, what else is celebrated on that date?) The date moved in the 16th Century when the Gregorian calendar was adopted. More fun facts about the solstice here and here and here.

Vote for New Yorker Story of the Year

Only 11 days left to vote for your favorite New Yorker story of 2011. Choose from among Atwood, Munro, Coover, Englander, Marcus, Hadley, Saunders, Erdrich, Barnes, and Groff. The winner will be announced on New Year's Day.

For links to descriptions of all ten stories, go to The New Yorker Story of the Year: The Top Ten.

Prime Number Magazine Print Annual--Coming Soon!

We are getting close! The first Print Annual edition of Prime Number Magazine is nearly ready to go to print, and we are extremely excited. The volume will include "Editors' Selections" from the first four issues of the magazine: 2, 3, 5, and 7. The book will be available for order some time in January on the magazine's website, from our publisher, Press 53, and from all the usual online outlets.

Our first year has been terrific and we want to thank all of our contributors and readers.

And now, I'm very pleased to announce the lineup for Editors' Selections Volume 1:

Poetry

James Harms

Sarah Lindsay

Jake Adam York

Susan Laughter Meyers

Mark Smith-Soto

Lola Haskins

Timothy Black

Robert Hill Long

Theodore Worozbyt

Rachel Hadas

Erica Dawson

Barry Spacks

Ruth Foley

Emilie Lindeman

Catherine Staples

M.A. Schaffner

William Reichard

Nonfiction

Maris Venia

Faye Rapoport DesPres

Stephen J. West

Fiction

Kevin Wilson

Scott Loring Sanders

Susan Tepper

Anne Leigh Parrish

Jon Trobaugh

Richard Wiley

Meagan Ciesla

Dennis Ginoza

Virginia Pye

John Flynn

Dan Moreau

Daniel Meltzer

Linda Stewart-Oaten

Paul Hetzler

David Meischen

Tips for Writers: Target your Submissions

You’ve written a story/poem/essay and now you want to get it published. There are a lot of literary magazines out there. Most of them you’ve never even heard of. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of them. So how do you decide where to submit your work?

Good question. The answer depends on your priorities. If making money is important to you, then you might want to limit your submissions only to contests or magazines that pay for work they publish. To get that information, I recommend Duotrope.com. If money isn’t so important, and all you want to do is get your work up on the Internet so you can share a link with family and friends, Duotrope.com can also point the way to even the most obscure online magazines. NewPages.com is another resource that can be helpful in finding magazines that you might not already know about.

But many writers want to have their work appear in the magazines that publish the best work. That alone constitutes recognition that some of us crave, and suggests that your work is worthy of attention by a wider audience. That’s my theory, anyway. I want my fiction to be in the best magazines possible. For me, it’s a career issue. The best magazines (generally in print, although not all) will get the work noticed, even though it is also true that online (generally less highly regarded) magazines may be more widely read.

So, how to find the best magazines. My very own Perpetual Folly Pushcart Prize Ranking (Fiction) is a great place to start. (There’s a separate list for Nonfiction, and I’m in the process of developing one for Poetry.) This list ranks literary magazines by how many Pushcart Prizes and Special Mentions each has won over the last ten years. This is recognition by respected writers and editors who determine the awards. So, using this methodology, I aim my own submissions high on that list, and work my way down until they stick. Because the list also has links to the websites of the magazines, it’s a good way to explore submission guidelines, obtain sample copies, and subscribe to magazines that are of interest.

Because, after all, the best way to get an idea of where your work will fit is to read the magazines where you might want it to appear. It’s pointless to send the same story to every magazine on the list, because each magazine has a different sensibility. That’s what we mean by targeting, but you can’t target without knowing something about the magazines.

The New Yorker Story of the Year: The Top Ten

The nominations are closed and it is now time to begin the voting for The New Yorker Story of the Year.

Voting will occur through the poll in the right sidebar of this blog. Votes in the comments section will not be counted. Votes sent to me by email or through some other method will not be counted. Voting will close at midnight on December 31, and I will announce the winner on January 1.

Through a process that combined my own favorites (I did, after all, read all of the stories) and reader nominations, I have determined a list of the Top Ten stories of the year. Several writers this year had multiple stories nominated: Alice Munro, Robert Coover, Ben Marcus, George Saunders. So that they wouldn't be competing against themselves, and to be as inclusive as possible, I allowed only one story per author in the Top Ten.

The Top Ten New Yorker Stories of the Year are (in chronological order):

"The Years of My Birth" by Louise Erdrich (January 10)

"Going for a Beer" by Robert Coover (March 14)

"Clever Girl" by Tessa Hadley (June 6)

"Home" by George Saunders (June 13 & 20)

"Above and Below" by Lauren Groff (June 13 & 20)

"Gravel" by Alice Munro (June 27)

"Homage to Hemingway" by Julian Barnes (July 4)

"What Have You Done?" by Ben Marcus (August 8)

"What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" by Nathan Englander (December 12)

"Stone Mattress" by Margaret Atwood (December 19 & 26)

Latest Update to Prime Number Magazine: 13.5

Prime Decimals 13.5 is now live! The latest issue features flash fiction by Curtis Smith, Christy Strick, and Cezarija Abartis, as well as poetry by Nandini Dhar, Steven D. Schoeder, and Wendy Vardaman.

Issue 13 has one more update, due out on New Year's Eve. Issue 17 will debut in mid January.

Prime Number Magazine is also open for submissions for future issues. We're specifically looking for fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, short drama, book reviews, interviews, craft essays, and cover art. Please visit the Submission Guidelines for more information.

The New Yorker: "Stone Mattress" by Margaret Atwood

December 19 & 26, 2011: “Stone Mattress” by Margaret Atwood

The New Yorker’s Holiday Present to you—a story (and quite a good one, at that) that isn’t behind the paywall. This story reminds me somewhat of the Alice Munro story, “Axis,” from earlier in the year, since it involves the passage of a long time after youthful sex, and also deals with a geological formation that plays at least a symbolic role in the story.

Here, sixty-something Verna is on an Arctic cruise, thinking of getting back in the game after taking some time off following the death of her fourth husband. She’s calculating and smart, and she knows she’s better staying away from the married men. But she notices one, a “Bob,” and makes her approach. 

Although he doesn’t remember her, she remembers him quite well—he raped her some 50 years earlier when she was 14. She’d been a sheltered girl up until that point, but she became pregnant, had to give the child up, and never recovered. She begins to plot her revenge . . .

Don’t read the Q&A with Margaret Atwood until you’ve read the story, but be sure and read it. There isn’t much more to say about it beyond what Atwood says. And I won’t discuss it further to avoid spoilers. (Usually in New Yorker stories that doesn’t matter much, but it does in this one.)

Indie vs. Self Publishing

I just came across a very thorough discussion of a new terminology debate that has arisen in the publishing world. Increasingly, authors who have published their books themselves have abandoned the term "self-published," which has some negative connotations, in favor of "indie published" which, so the argument goes, sounds better. But it sounds better because true indie publishing is different from self-publishing, in my view, and self-published authors are using the term in order to hide something.

An independent publisher is a small or micro-press that isn't part of a publishing monolith. My book, In an Uncharted Country, was published by Press 53, a small independent publisher. They will also publish my new book, coming out in Fall 2012. That is indie publishing. But an author who publishes by him or herself, even if that author sets up a publishing company for the purpose of publishing the author's book, is self-published. And while some self-published books are just fine--especially those that have undergone professional editing--many (most?) are not. I actually have nothing against self-publishing. There are lots of reasons an author might choose to go that route. But as a reader I am wary of such books because I've seen too many that are simply awful.

So, I object to this blurring of the line between "self-published" and "indie-published." Nonetheless, I recommend this article: Self-publishing and the Definition of an Indie Author.

Press 53 Special Offers! (And get a postcard from me . . .)

Press 53 has some great deals this holiday season.

First, there's Books for Soldiers. Buy a book from Press 53 (like mine, for example, In an Uncharted Country, or choose from the many other terrific story or poetry collections, novels, memoirs, or anthologies) and at no extra cost to you, Press 53 will send a book to an active duty soldier. It's a great gesture on the Press's part, and I hope lots of people will support it.

Second, there's the Holiday Special deal, where for a mere $53 (plus shipping), you can get a bundle of books: 5 story collections, 6 poetry titles, or choose from several other combinations. That's a lot of books. Another great deal.

Plus, if you buy my book, let me know and I'll send you an autographed postcard of the book's cover!

Tips for Writers: Finding Time to Write

I used to have a great job. It was very demanding, and I often brought work home with me. I also traveled a lot (long overseas trips). So, even though I had completed a draft of a novel before I took that job, and managed a little bit of revision while I was in the job, I used the job as an excuse for not getting any new writing done. Too hard. Too busy. Too tired.

I feel kind of guilty about that now. Lots of people manage to hold down demanding jobs and still write. On the other hand, I did manage to create an opportunity for myself to put that life behind me in order to write all the time, so that’s a good thing.

The point is, lack of time is an excuse, but it’s not a reason for not writing. I’m reading a book right now called Writing a Novelwith Scrivener by David Hewson. It’s about using the software Scrivener to organize the pieces of a novel (which I’m doing for my new project). In a chapter called “Work in Progress,” Hewson relates questions that he gets constantly from people, including this one: “I can’t find the time to write my book, what do you suggest?”

His answer: “Get up earlier, work later.”

Hah! It’s true. That’s it. Get up earlier, work later. Excellent advice and my tip of the week.

Another answer, though, is “Get organized, and get focused.” And with that I refer you to my post from earlier this week on how to “Bring theRetreat Home.”

Bring the Retreat Home

I recently completed a two-week stay at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. VCCA is a wonderful place in a beautiful location, and I always get a lot done when I’m there (this was my seventh residency there, eighth if you count the two weeks I spent at VCCA’s French outpost in Auvillar this summer). 

Since I’m a full-time writer (minus the occasional short-term teaching or freelancing gig and my volunteer role as a magazine editor), I always wonder why it is that I can’t get as much done at home as I do at a colony like VCCA. This blog post is an attempt to understand this phenomenon and to consider what steps I might take to replicate the writing retreat experience at home.

[I feel especially guilty about this because I live just 60 miles from VCCA, in a setting that is very similar, in a large house out in the country that I’ve got to myself (and my dog); I’ve even got my own land and woods on which to take walks, just as I do at VCCA.]

I should say at the outset that I don’t think it’s possible to do this on a permanent basis—it’s like constantly running a marathon. But for relatively short bursts of a week or two or three, I think it is absolutely doable. And that’s good, because around Christmas I’ll begin edits on a novel and I will need/want to be fully engaged in that process for as long as it takes.

Let’s start by understanding what happens at a colony. I’ve only been to three and they were different in important ways. But I’ll use VCCA as my example and point out the differences as I go along.

It’s away from home. At VCCA you get a bedroom with a shared bathroom plus workspace in a separate studio building. (At Kimmel Harding Nelson you share an apartment with another artist, and your studio, if you’re a writer, will be a separate room in the apartment.) There are other artists around. At VCCA, there are about 25 artists in residence at a time, split roughly between writers and visual artists, plus a couple of composers. (At VCCA France there are only four artists in residence; at KHN there are five.) Someone cooks for you. At VCCA, breakfast and dinner are served in a dining room in the residence building, with lunch delivered to a kitchen in the studio building. (At VCCA France and KHN you’re on your own, although there are adequate kitchen facilities for food preparation.) No one bothers you. There are optional presentations that the residents arrange in order to share their work with the other artists, but if you don’t want to attend, you don’t have to. The phone doesn’t ring; there is no mail; the internet connection is spotty.

I work pretty steadily from 8 to 12 and 1 to 5, minus an afternoon walk (and breaks to make coffee/tea), and then in the evening from 7 to 10 (although that’s usually reading).

All of which contributes to FOCUS. If, like me, you don’t have a full-time job, your problem at home isn’t time, it’s what you do with your time that slows your writing down. (Having kids in the house is a special challenge, since they can’t be ignored; just don’t use them as an excuse not to get any writing done.)

Focus is something I struggle with a lot, and I know that many of us do. We try to do too many things at once, and while we may give the appearance of productivity, I believe the writing suffers. So in considering how to “Bring the Retreat Home,” it’s really creating an environment for focus that I’m most interested in.

So, how to create focus at home?

Dedicated Workspace. You aren’t going away from home, but maybe you have space in your home that is dedicated to your writing. (Or, if you’re really lucky, you’ve got a cabin/shed/studio on your property). I’m fortunate in that I have a large spare bedroom/loft upstairs that is my office, with room for books, a reading chair a large desk, and my dog’s bed (a loveseat). To create focus, though, I plan to remove unnecessary clutter, especially on my desk, and remove piles of books and magazines.

Interact with Other Artists. As inspiring as it can be to be around other artists, it isn’t a daily need, and it can be distracting. On your weekly outing (see below), stop by a gallery or a bookstore, or meet a fellow writer for coffee.

Scheduled Meals. This isn’t a big time-eater for me. Get in, clean up, get out. Since I’m eating alone, there isn’t much reason to linger at meals, so, in fact, they take less time than they do at a real retreat. The important thing for me is the schedule. Breakfast at 6:45, lunch at noon, dinner at 6:00. (The schedule is enforced by the dog, too.)

Limit Distractions. This is the big category for me, since home is filled with distractions of all kinds.

TV. I don’t have TV service anymore, so this isn’t a problem for me. If you can live without it, I recommend dropping it. Get Netflix instead so you can take a movie break once in a while.

Mail. I love the mail. My habit is to run out to the mailbox as soon as I know it’s been delivered. I then open everything and deal with it. It’s mostly junk. Even my bills come by email these days, for the most part. What if I let the mail sit in the mailbox a couple of hours and didn’t collect it until dinner? What if I put it all in a basket and disposed of it once a week? (Of course the rare letter would be opened and read . . .)

eMail. Why do I check the email constantly? Why do I answer immediately? Would the world end if I let the email accumulate to be dealt with it all at once? Or maybe a few times a day? What if I looked at it once when I first turn the computer on at 7am, then again when I break for lunch at noon, then at dinner time, then at bedtime. Four times should be more than enough.

Internet. This is a huge distraction for me, so I’ve purchased the program Freedom. When I sit down for a writing session, I turn it on for 3 hours, or whatever period I’ve chosen. Facebook won’t miss me. Neither will the other forums where I spend too much time.

The dog. He will not be ignored. He’s like a kid. So I feed him, I walk him, I play with him. All of that makes a good break for me, a few times a day.

Exercise. At VCCA I took walks every day. At home, my routine, most days, is to go to the gym late in the afternoon, after the work is done. I see people (even if I don’t talk to them), I get exercise. It’s a good thing.

Errands. I jump at the chance to run out and do errands—grocery shopping, a supply run to Staples, a stop at the post office. Sometimes these trips are urgent. Usually they’re not. Limit them to once a week, if you can. If not, combine as many errands as you can.

Excursions. I think it’s important to take a break now and then. It could be something for inspiration—a trip to a bookstore or art gallery, maybe, or a hike in the woods—or it could be connecting with other writers or artists by meeting for coffee or lunch. I wouldn’t plan to do this every week necessarily, but every couple of weeks is probably beneficial.

The telephone. I don’t answer it.

Reading. Even on retreat I’m reading a few books at a time. For me that’s part of being a writer. I generally do that in the evenings. However, for more intensive projects—such as the forthcoming book editing—I might put my other reading aside for the duration.

Other work. Some things can’t be ignored. Freelancing jobs have to be done; the magazine has to stick to its schedule. I add those things to my list of things to do, but I focus on them, just as I would my own writing.

All of which boils down to focus and limiting distractions.

Here’s one more thing. I’m trying to employ meditation techniques to help me concentrate on one thing at a time. If I’m reading, that’s all I’m doing. If I’m writing, that’s all I’m doing.

That’s what a writer’s retreat helps you do, and that’s what the steps outlined above are designed to do when you Bring the Retreat Home. 

The Writer's Center profile of . . . me.

I'm delighted that The Writer's Center chose to profile me in the Winter/Spring 2012 Workshop and Event Guide. Novelist Barbara Esstman conducted the interview, which you can also read on TWC's blog, First Person Plural: Fully Engaged, a Profile of Clifford Garstang.

What the piece leaves out (besides the bio I sent them . . .) is the reason they wanted to do the profile in the first place, and why they asked Barbara to do it. After I moved to Washington, DC from Kazakhstan in 1995 (that's a looong story), I began work on a novel and started taking Barbara Esstman's novel workshop at The Writer's Center in Bethesda. I got a lot out of the workshop, but I missed many sessions because by that time I'd begun work at The World Bank and was doing a lot of travelling to Asia. So I took the class a second time, and managed to make most of the sessions, and finished a draft of the book.

I then connected with a number of other writers who had taken that workshop and others and we formed a writers' critique group that met for years, even after I'd left the area. Anyway, I owe a lot to the place, and I highly recommend its classes.

And thanks to Barbara and TWC for the profile!

The New Yorker: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" by Nathan Englander

December 12, 2011: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” by Nathan Englander

I enjoyed this story more than any I’ve read in The New Yorker in some time. According to the Q&A with Nathan Englander, it is the title story to a collection he’s bringing out in February. And, as anyone might guess from the title, the story has parallels with the great Raymond Carver story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” (Here’s an essay about the Carver story, for anyone who needs a refresher: “Carver’s Couples Talk about Love.”) The connections to Carver’s story are interesting, but Englander’s story absolutely stands on its own.

The story gives us two couples. Mark and Lauren are visiting Florida from Israel, where they have lived for many years, having converted to ultra-Orthodox Judaism (and adopted the names Yerucham and Shoshona). They come to see Debbie, Lauren’s old friend from school, and her husband, the narrator. The narrator at first is bothered by the visitors, and everything about them grates with him. When he offers Mark a drink, though, it turns out that they can share this, at least, and they begin to consume a bottle of vodka. Soon everyone is getting along better, jokes are cracked, etc., and it is then revealed that Debbie and Lauren used to get high when they were younger. And that leads to the two couples smoking dope that Debbie has found in her son’s things, which is a shock to the narrator. But as the four get high, they move into darker territory, eventually playing the “Anne Frank game,” which is speculating about who would and who would not protect you when the next Holocaust comes. This is obviously a serious topic, but on the page it’s quite funny.

Debbie is somewhat obsessed with the Holocaust, and the narrator kids her about it. It would have been a different story, of course, but I might have wanted someone to point out that if a Holocaust comes in America, the signs are pointing to Muslims, not Jews, being its victims. But that’s beside the point. The story also addresses religious purity, and the question of Jewish culture versus Jewish religion.

It seems to me that the magazine often saves some of its strongest work for the end of the year, and this story is no exception to that trend.

Story of the year material?

Books for Soldiers (Press 53)

Once again, Press 53 (publisher of my collection of linked stories, In an Uncharted Country, and my forthcoming novel in stories, What the Zhang Boys Know), is running its Books for Soldiers special. It's pretty simple. Buy a book from Press 53--there are lots of wonderful titles to choose from--and Press 53 will send a book to an active duty soldier at no cost to you. It's a great way to show your support for an Indie Press and our men and women overseas at the same time.

"The Face in the Window" in Valparaiso Fiction Review

There's a new magazine on the scene, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and the first issue includes a story of mine: The Face in the Window. The story is part of my novel in stories, What the Zhang Boys Know, which will be published in September 2012 by Press 53. (I'm pleased to say that VFR has nominated the story for a Pushcart Prize.)

The issue also includes stories by Meg Tuite, Bill Lantry, Andrea Dupree, Dallas Woodburn, and Norman Waksler.

New Yorker Story of the Year -- Nominations are Open!

Since I began commenting each week on the fiction in the New Yorker, at year's end I have come up with a "Story of the Year." Once again, I will let readers vote from a list of finalists, which I will determine from my own preferences and the nominations of readers.


To see a discussion of last year's winner (Claire Keegan's "Foster"), go HERE.


All you have to do to nominate is to leave a comment here on Perpetual Folly with the name of your choice. I will then compile a list of the top stories and create a poll. All very simple.


Forgot about the stories? No problem. Review them all by browsing through the posts from the whole year: New Yorker 2011.

VCCA Residency--The End is Near

I’m nearing the end of my stay at VCCA. It’s been a relatively productive period, and I have made a lot of progress on shaping a new novel. (If nothing else, I think I found a killer title for it.)

We didn’t have a lot of artist presentations this week, which I was happy about. I love the presentations, but it’s not so great when they happen every night. Not that anyone is obligated to attend, but I like to support the other resident fellows and, besides, they can be inspiring.

On Thursday we had a couple of brief open studios. First, Margie Nea, a photographer, showed us some of her amazing photographs from her many trips taken on behalf of Bread for the World and other organizations. The accompanying YouTube video shows some of these pictures. 

Then we moved to the next studio where Katherine Fahey did a performance of her “cranky”—a light-box puppet show illustrating a shape-note song about a pioneering Vermont woman. (That description does NOT do the project justice; check out her website to get a better idea of what she’s doing.)

Then on Friday night we had two poets reading in the living room. First Sabra Loomis read from her book and also some newer poems—lyrical and very moving work about family, friends, and landscape. And then Dan Vera also read from his book and some newer poems. Dan’s work is edgy and sometimes political. Both Sabra and Dan were very good readers. Plus, they supplied a couple of big bottles of wine, some chocolate and nuts, and so many of us stayed around after the reading to talk. It was the first night I didn’t go back to the studio in the evening to work.

It’s been a nice stay. As always, I hope I can carry some momentum with me when I resume work at home on Monday. We’ll see.

Tips for Writers: Dialogue Tags—Keep it Simple

“Keep it simple,” he said. “What’s that you say?” she asked.

It is tempting for some writers to load dialogue tags with too much freight. In general, though, the simpler tags are the best. “Said” and “asked” are nearly invisible to the reader, and that’s what the writer wants. They don’t draw attention to themselves; the reader remains engaged with the content of the dialogue without being distracted by some odd delivery. Whenever possible, convey the method of delivery with the words themselves.

If you want to go beyond “said” and “asked,” though—after all, some variety in the work can be nice—be sure that you stick to what I call “speaking verbs,” verbs that describe the action of speaking words (such as “shout,” “yell,” or “whisper”). Some speaking verbs, however, should generally be avoided on the grounds that they tell the reader how the words are being spoken when the manner of speaking could more effectively be shown through the dialogue itself. For example, “commanded” is arguably a speaking verb, but a command is generally inherent in the words spoken. In general, avoid these “telling” speaking verbs.

Some writers go a step further and attempt to build a gesture or an expression into the dialogue tag itself, and that just doesn’t make sense. A character can say words while smiling, but he can’t smile the words. Likewise for “he laughed,” “he pointed,” “he worried,” and so on.

I see these problems all the time in student work, and it’s easily fixed and explained. But the reason I chose to write about this topic this week is because I’ve been reading some short stories by the great story writer W. Somerset Maugham, and he makes this same mistake all the time. Here, for example, is a line from the story “P.& O.” (which I’m reading in the short collection Maugham’s Malaysian Stories):   

“I suppose a woman of forty has no right to mind how she looks,” she smiled, as though he must know what vain thoughts occupied her.

Willie! No, no, no! What were you thinking? She didn’t smile those words! She may have been smiling when she said them, but you can’t smile words.

So here’s the tip: Keep it simple. When in doubt, stick with “said” or “asked.” Even if you’re Somerset Maugham. (That's him in the picture, by the way.)