April 6, 2010
The Lambda Literary Foundation has arranged a series of readings, and I’ll be doing two of them.*
April 13: Hormel Center, San Francisco Public Library (site)
100 Larkin Street (at Grove), San Francisco, CA 94102 (map)
There is a reception at 5:00 pm, and I’m told there will be excellent food. The reading itself begins at 6:00 pm in the Latino-Hispanic Room.
Featuring: Malinda Lo, Kevin Killian, Z Egloff, Minal Hajratwala, Elana Dykewomon, Dexter Flowers, Matt Dean (me!), Randall Mann, Karin Kallmaker. Hosted by Tony Valenzuela, Katherine Forrest and Karen Sundheim.
April 22: LGBT Center, New York City (site)
208 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10014 (map)
The reception begins at 6:30 pm, and the reading begins at 7:00 pm.
Featuring: Dale Peck, Rakesh Satyal, Rob Byrnes, Frank Anthony Polito, Matt Dean (c’est moi!), Christa Orth, Gabriel Rivera, Donal Mosher, David Ciminello, Bobbie Geary, Ana Bozicevic, Julie Abraham, Emma Marie Perez and Douglas A. Martin. Hosted by Don Weise and Antonio Gonzalez.
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At the moment, these are the only public readings I have planned, and because there are so many of us, my reading at each event will be brief. It’s not much of a book tour, heaven knows, but it does at least encompass my two favorite cities.
Oh! But! By pure, joyous luck, I will be able to have lunch with other writers at readers at the famed Algonquin Round Table. This is bucket list stuff. Zing!
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* Three other readings will be held in May, in Chicago on the 4th, in Los Angeles on the 10th, and in New Orleans on the 15th. I wish I could do them all.
April 1, 2010
So, hey, I’ve been doing this writey bloggy thing for over a year now. Woot!
I wrote my first-ever post (cleverly entitled “First!”) on March 26, 2009. In that post I wrote mainly about Carol Bly and the book of essays, Letters from the Country, from which I took the name of this blog.
This jumps out at me:
Many of Carol’s schemes for improvement seem rather hopeless and naive. Wouldn’t it be nice to think that the whole culture could be reformed just by having Enemy Evenings everywhere every month? Nice to think of, except that I’ve been to an Enemy Evening or two (called by a different name, of course), and I’m pretty sure no one convinced anyone of anything. In fact, in my experience, the various sides bring their peeps, and the audience breaks up into “us” vs. “them” camps, reinforcing the kind of thinking that Carol intended the Enemy Evenings to cure. Of course, maybe the point is that these things need to happen more often.
After the town halls, the protests, the invective, the violent rhetoric, and the open-carry demonstrations of the last 12 tumultuous months, I’m thoroughly convinced that one of Carol’s Enemy Evenings would end in fisticuffs or gunfire–or possibly tarring and feathering. I’m officially pulling the plug on the whole Enemy Evening idea.
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March 23, 2010
Another installment of my sporadic series of rants and raves on book design. These’ll be relatively short.
These people look as if they’re at an air show. Todd has dragged me to any number of air shows. I do not like air shows. You stand outside in the heat with the sun pounding down on you and sweat dripping down your face, and your neck gets stiff from looking up at tiny specks of glitter flippety-flopping across the sky. Ugh.
The book cover’s quite good, though.
A similar design: photograph, people facing away from the camera, lots of sky, simple type treatment. I like it a lot. The typefaces are quite handsome.
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March 16, 2010
Today, I feel like this:
For you see, this morning’s email brought me some very good news: The River In Winter is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in the Gay Fiction category.
I’ve already bought tickets for the awards ceremony and the benefit that follows. It’s improbable that mere words can express how excited I am to attend.
Happy!
March 8, 2010
That cover design I posted a couple of weeks ago just never seemed quite right. I did a little more looking around and found some photos of an old globe.
I think I may have had a globe much like it when I was a kid. My parents gave me a Replogle globe for Christmas one year. That name always seemed so strange to me: Replogle. Almost, but not nearly, a rhyme with “global.” I remember that it came with a little booklet describing experiments one could perform with a globe. With a flashlight and a rubber ball, for example, a proud globe owner could simulate a solar eclipse.
But I digress.
Here’s my design-of-the-moment for The New World and the Old:
Don’t fall too much in love with it; by this time next week, I’m sure I’ll hate it.
March 3, 2010
I finished The Big Rock Candy Mountain last night. Here’s my Goodreads review:
I hope it’s not sacrilege to say this, but I found Stegner’s writing style a bit uneven. At times he strikes an elevated, epic tone. At other times he slips into a more casual, second-person narration. Now and again a sentence or line of dialogue is a cringeworthy clinker. The first chapter is the most polished and best written, but also (for me) the slowest and hardest to get through. If the entire book had matched its tone, I’d have respected the novel more, but I’d have liked it less.
Stegner’s at his best when he’s not too polished, not trying to hard, when he lets himself slip into second person, when his sentences are long but uncomplicated:
The farm was that feeling, too, the sense of straddling two nations, so that even though you were American, living in Canada, you lost nothing by it, but really gained, because the Fourth of July was celebrated in Canada and Canadian holidays like Victoria Day and the King’s birthday were celebrated in Montana, and you got in on both. And you lived in Saskatchewan, in one nation, but got your mail in Montana, in another.
Quibbles about prose style notwithstanding, I did actually like this novel quite a bit. After the first chapter, I was fully engrossed in the story, and I strongly identified with the characters. As the child of a man who always sought the Big Rock Candy Mountain (where the lemonade springs and the bluebird sings), I felt by the end that Bo Mason was my father.
The relationships among the characters, the actions they take, the lifelong consequences of those actions—all of this, Stegner gets exactly right. Some of his sentences may strike a false note, as I’ve mentioned, but his characterization and plotting never do. He may have been writing the story of his own life, but he did so with immense frankness and sensitivity.
It’s a mark of a great writer than in describing the specific history of one family, Stegner is able to touch upon the history of every family.
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February 23, 2010
A few weeks ago, when I posted a design for the cover of my novel-in-progress, I said it was way too soon to be thinking about such things, and sure enough, I’m thiiiiis close to changing the title. And even though I am, therefore (ergo and to wit), on the very verge of proving that it is, indeed, too soon to be considering cover designs, I’ve spent a little time today putting together this cover design:
I’ve had this new title rattling around in my head for a while. I first intended it for a different project, a play that I’ll probably never write. For a while it was attached to a different novel that I may or may not write. But–for the moment, at least–I think it belongs with the novel I’m writing now. At least three overlapping, interconnected story lines will incorporate events spanning some forty-odd years. The thing as a whole is shaping up to be about transition and transformation, about examining the past in order to find a way forward.
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February 20, 2010
Some progress on my 2010 reading list: I finished The Living.
I wrote a review over on Goodreads:
This book is beautifully written. The prose is as fine and as lovely as anything I’ve ever read. The book is majestic and magisterial, as formidable as the densely forested lands that the characters strive to master and tame.
And yet, well, put it this way: one character is said to have written a three-hundred page epic poem in which men battle polar bears and pack ice; although the poet is a rank amateur, I wish I could have read his no-doubt-inept poem rather than this finely wrought novel.
I was profoundly unmoved. I barely cared whether the characters lived or died. I had a glimmer of interest in a sort of antisocial, woodsy Nietzschean named Beal Obenchain, but for him as well as for the rest, I felt very little emotion.
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February 5, 2010
A while back, I posted something about The River In Winter on a message board entitled “Shameless Self-Promotion.” I’d have to say I wasn’t so very shameless; I posted a link to the book’s Amazon page and a couple of links to my site.
Since then, I’ve been getting emails from other writers who’re shamelessly self-promoting their projects. Others are shamelessly shameless. Phrases such as “non-stop thrills” are employed. Iron-clad promises that readers will become “addicted.” Words are described as “jumping off the page.”
Actually, I envy some of these people their willingness to brag. When I was a kid, we used to say “when god was handing out brains, you thought he said trains and told him you’d catch the next one.” One might say that when god was handing out brag, I thought he said slag and told him that didn’t sound very nice.
In any case, I’m thinking I should probably try to get better at this. Here’s my first attempt:
The River in Winter is a book for the ages. With each syllable of each word of each sentence of each paragraph of each chapter, you will fall more deeply in love with its characters, until you find yourself wanting to move with them to California’s redwood forests to create a free-love hippie commune, where Spike will no doubt secure the medical marijuana license.
Huh? Huh? Whattaya think? Love, redwoods, pot. A little something for everyone, yes?
Wow. It’s been almost six months since I did one of these. The long hiatus may have something to do with the fact that during the fall my coffee consumption dropped dramatically. I stopped punctuating all of my errands with stops at either Starbucks or the B&N. Or maybe I’m just a slacker.
In any case, without further ado…
Let me begin with a favorite author, Anne Tyler. Although I don’t really remember how I “discovered” Ian McEwan or Jane Smiley or Barbara Kingsolver or many of the authors I love the bestest, I remember very clearly running across a copy of Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in a Kmart. I bought it because the title and cover art intrigued me.
Sad, then, that in recent years her book covers have come to look like this:
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