49 writers weekly round-up

I'm not sure what happened to May. If anyone can round it up and bring it back this way, I'd appreciate it. So far I've only been able to catch glimpses of it fading fast in my rearview mirror.

One thing I did manage to catch was a great series of posts from featured author Brett Dillingham. One more goes up next week, and then it's on to Dana Stabenow, 49 Writers featured author for June. In typical Dana fashion, she has written and submitted her posts already - I'm not telling how long ago she wrote them, but let's just say she must be every editor's dream. I'm also not giving up any spoilers - you'll have to read along with the rest of us.

Three huge writing events hit Alaska in June: the Alaska Book Festival in Fairbanks, the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference in Homer, and the Last Frontier Theater Conference in Valdez. And they're all at the same time. I understand this concept in box stores: Lowes builds next to Home Depot because traffic drifts from one to the other. But I must confess I don't get it with writers' events. I'd think writers, especially those from Outside, might benefit from these conferences being contiguous rather than overlapping. But what do I know?

At any rate, there's a great line-up of authors at each of these events. In addition to special guests Willie Hensley and Brian Garfield, the Book Festival, themed "Historically Alaska," features thirty writers. The event opens with an authors' reception on Thursday, June 11, followed by Hensley's address at the UAF Davis Concert Hall. I'd love to see an informal 49 Writers social event, maybe afterwards at the Pump House, as I know we've got lots of readers in Fairbanks, and not all of them will be at this year's reception. Email me at debv@gci.net or leave a comment here if you're interested. And look for me to get your ***free!!!*** 49 Writers pencil. All the cool writers have them.

The Kachemak Bay Conference opens June 12 with keynote speaker Li-Young Lee. On the faculty are eighteen writers, many of them Alaskan. Neither Andromeda or I can make KBC this year, but rumor has it our 49 Writer pencils will be out in force, so make sure you get one. And even though the pencils don't work for jotting emails, we'd love some live reports from attendees.

The Last Frontier Theater Conference opens June 13. At last count, there were 28 distinguished literary and theatrical artists in the Last Frontier Play Lab. Sadly, the pencils won't make it to Valdez this year, but again, we'd love a guest post or two on the conference.

Amid all this conferencing, make time to read our 49 Writers book club selection Tide, Feather, Snow by Miranda Weiss of Homer. We're anticipating a lively online discussion at the end of June.

Every so often, Andromeda and I meet up, face to face, to remind ourselves that we're real people behind all this electronic nonsense, and to talk about where we are with 49 Writers and where we'd like to be. We're getting ready to meet again, and of course we'd love your input. How can we best serve you, as writers and readers? What would you like to see more of? Less of? New ideas? We're open. Leave your comment here or email me at debv@gci.net.

Are you showing yet?

When I was pregnant with my first child, I wanted to tell everyone as soon as I took the drugstore test -- in the bathroom of a Chinese restaurant, actually, because I was too impatient to drive home. And I didn’t regret telling people even in the next few weeks, when I had signs I might lose the pregnancy. (I didn’t.) I didn’t understand my mother-in-law’s softly spoken unease with the idea of sharing pregnancy news so early. My own mother kept me a secret from family members for several months. I didn’t understand that either.

I’ve been working on a new novel since January. I like to pretend that I’m skipping the second novel problem – the difficulty sophomore novelists have getting published and favorably reviewed -- by jumping ahead to the third. That’s a flippant way of saying that my flawed second novel is sitting in a box and probably won’t ever see the light of the day.

I loved that novel, I struggled with it, I traveled to Europe and the Middle East in order to write it, I questioned everything I knew as a writer working on it, and through trial and error (and error, and error), I learned a lot about issues of pov and voice and character and chronology and theme. But though I finished it, the novel came out with a weak heartbeat. The intensive care of several rounds of radical revision didn’t save the story’s life. With apologies to anyone who has had serious fertility problems or who may take offense with the metaphor, my second novel was stillborn.

Here is why my mother-in-law and the women of her generation often didn’t share news of their pregnancies until the end of the first trimester and certainly didn’t buy early baby presents: because miscarriage in those first months is so common. Make a big fuss, make a lot of announcements (as I did with both my first pregnancy and my second novel) and you’re bound to be a little embarrassed if things don’t work out.

Here is why my mother kept news of her pregnancy quiet for as long as she could: not because she was afraid of calamity, but because she wanted to savor the experience. I get that now, too. Working on my current novel following the difficulty of my last one, and knowing better now how many projects stop and start and flounder, I’ve been enjoying those quiet kicks and flutters of a new story that might – might -- just be healthy enough to make it. I’ve enjoyed feeling creative without any pressure from future readers, real or imagined. I’ve tried to provide a quiet, safe place for this new baby to develop.

At some point, though, the news gets out. You start to show.

I started showing earlier this month when I was awarded a Rasmuson fellowship in connection with this novel-in-progress – a huge honor, and a much-need financial and emotional boost. The fellowship will pay for a family research trip to Italy this fall, without which this new little novel wouldn’t make it through the next growth stage.

Many writers have been kind enough to offer me congratulations for the award. They’ve asked about the novel, and I’ve started to tell them. “The Discus Thrower” is set in Italy, in 1938. The story takes place over three intense days as a young German art cataloguer attempts to transport an ancient statue that has been purchased by Germany – over the objections of many -- from Rome to Munich. Political backdrop and some criminal tensions aside, the novel is about one man’s struggle with his own life, past and present. Art history and the 1936 Olympics, body image and eugenics, brotherly and passionate love are all part of the story.

At this point, I still worry about a literary miscarriage, even as I creep steadily toward the middle of Act II. Maybe the second act will bog down (as second acts often do). Maybe I’ll be satisfied with the finished project but the publishing world won’t welcome my latest addition. I know several fine authors with fine, viable projects who are getting more “nos” these days than ever before. Doubt and faith are equal parts of creation. Anything could happen.
But I guess at some point, you simply have to move forward. You have to ditch the old jeans and wear the stretchy ones. You have to get used to people patting your belly. It feels a little good, actually, this time around…

Next week, I’ll share some more thoughts on the novel’s factual origins.

Notes from the Road -- Guestpost by Miranda Weiss

Miranda Weiss will be appearing at Title Wave Books in Anchorage tomorrow, Thursday May 28, at 7 pm.

I’m writing from San Francisco, the third stop on my Tide, Feather, Snow tour. After sunny, balmy days in Seattle and Portland, it is, of course, cool and foggy in the city by the bay. (Did Mark Twain really say: “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”?) Tide, Feather, Snow is my first book and these past months have been my first experiences with book promotion. The learning curve is steep and long. There is always something else to do—another email to send, a call to make, a pitch to hurl into the world…It’s been a whirlwind—my voice has gone hoarse, a blister has formed on my left little toe from pounding the pavement between book sellers, and I got a new zit in time for a 4-minute television spot on “AM Northwest”—the “Regis and Kathy Lee” of Portland, I am told. (See for yourself.)

I’ve learned a few important things on this trip—be nice to everyone, meet as many people related to books as you can, friends can save you, and bringing smoked salmon to share at readings doesn’t hurt at all. I’ve recorded two radio interviews, one in Seattle, and one for KBOO, Portland’s ultra-lefty community station. While Portland’s Regis and Kathy Lee asked me about Sarah Palin during a commercial break, the interviewer, Crystal, at KBOO in Portland wanted to know about our governor on the record. Crystal, who had lived for a time in Alaska during the 1960s, was curious about climate change and politics in Alaska, about the future of our largely undeveloped but finite state, and how these questions play out in the book.

Attendance at my book events has waxed and waned. At my first Seattle event with my friend, the writer Margot Kahn (Horses that Buck, 2008), her friends packed the place. The next night, I walked into a Seattle Barnes and Noble and found 150 chairs set up for my reading. Only one person (besides two friends and bookstore staff) showed up, but Margot (diligently in attendance) was at the ready with Five Reasons Why This Didn’t Totally Suck as soon as I was through and feeling obviously disheartened: 1. It was good practice. 2. I signed about 30 books, which they’d ordered for the event. (I’ve heard that once they’re signed, they can’t be sent back to the publisher…) 3. The Barnes & Noble staff felt badly for me and would push the book. (“It would make a great present for grads,” one of the staff members said after the event as a sort of consolation prize.) 4. My book and the event had been advertised on their website, calendar, and on a poster at the store entrance with an unnervingly large photo of my face. And 5. The one guy who came, who was buying the book as a gift for his dad, a frequent traveler to Alaska, wouldn’t forget the personal connection we’d made.

I’ve talked to lots of booksellers and author event planners at bookstores. This has helped me understand how they think and why they do what they do. I met Sally, one of the owners of the wonderful independent Broadway Books on the East side of Portland. She had heard of the book, thought she might like it, hadn’t yet ordered it, but would, especially now that I’d stopped by. I met a young guy from Kenai in a white butcher’s coat working at the famous Pike Place Fish Market, where they toss slippery sockeyes in front of ogling tourists (like myself.) I told him about my book and he wedged one of my book postcards into a display of fish marinades and recipe books.

I landed at a Barnes & Noble inside Portland’s Lloyd Center mall. After not finding my book in any obvious location, I headed straight for the Customer Service desk where I met a young woman named Mariah. She showed me the single copy of my book shelved in “Nature.” Luckily, this one wasn’t at the usual ankle level (the curse of a last name that starts with “W”). I signed it and we chatted for a bit. Five minutes later, she had put a request in for four more copies to be ordered and had taken the single copy of the book and propped it up on a stand right at the Customer Service desk.

Sometimes, this promo business gets me down. I always feel like I’m not doing enough, and I don’t really have a sense of what’s “working” and what’s not. But then I’ll meet someone like Ellen Blassingham, a volunteer at Evergreen Radio, a radio service for the blind in Seattle, which has some 15,000 listeners. We recorded a half-hour interview in a tiny studio for a segment called “Literary News.” Ellen had read my book carefully, and had dozens of colorful sticky notes feathering off the pages to prove it. And she’d loved it—she’d loved the passages in the book that I most care about: the lyrical ones, the slow ones, the ones that riff off the richness of the natural world. For me, meeting and talking with someone who has been touched by the book is what this is all about.

Love, Stories, Books and Children

My entire life has been surrounded by great storytelling and wonderful
books. I grew up in the Midwest in the United States. During the
summers, my family traveled to northern Mexico and lived in an adobe hut
with a dirt floor in a village called Nacimiento. The population was
about 250 Seminole Indians, Seminole blacks, and Mexicans. Once or twice
a week my family, and villagers wishing a ride, drove two hours into the
city to get a block of ice to keep vegetables and milk fresh. We had to
drive across a river twice to get to town - through the water because
there was not bridge! Once we made it to town we drank cool limonadas
(lemonades made with lime instead of lemon) in the plaza. Late into the
evenings, when we were back in the village, we listened to stories told
by the village mayor, Esteban, and by my parents. My brothers and sister
and I would drift off to sleep with stories in our heads.

Father used to tell stories while driving or at the dinner table. Mother
tucked me in every night until I was in my teens; she was always
reading, singing, telling family stories, or listening to stories I made
up. My grandmother Una Wilder told me lots of stories as well. She
taught us to "pass it on." I think that’s how I became a storyteller.

The neighborhood I grew up in was rather run down but had a wonderful
old Carnegie library. I remember my first visit, walking through the
great stacks of books towering over my head. I was alone. It was almost
too dark to read the titles and see the covers. I would have been
frightened except the dark walls that surrounded me were made of
stories. I grabbed a load of books like a hungry man grabbing food at a
free buffet. The next thing I remember was sitting at a table reading
about an African boy who had changed into a giant fish and was swimming
down the river. My mother came and said it was time to go. I was very
sad because I thought I had to leave the books behind and would not be
able to finish them. “Oh no, Honey, you can bring them all home with
you.” I couldn’t believe it! All those books - for free! I knew then that
for the rest of my life I would never be bored or too poor to have fun -
there would always be libraries with free books!

My grandfather Wilder had his own library. It had a big orange chair
with a reading lamp next to it. Grandpa would drive to work in the
morning and I would go sit in his orange chair and read. Grandpa would
come home and be startled to see me sitting in his orange chair, focused
on whatever book had taken over my imagination. He always asked what I
was reading and we would have a chat. When Grandpa passed away, he left
me his orange chair.

I have lived in Alaska since 1981. It is a very wild environment; black
bears roam the streets in the summers and it is not uncommon to look out
the window and see killer and humpback whales swimming in the channel.
My book Raven Day was inspired by the giant black ravens that soar the
skies, cawing and tricking people and animals out of their food.
Performance Literacy Through Storytelling, which I wrote with Dr. Nile
Stanley from the University of North Florida, is our dream of providing
teachers with the definitive text to teach children how to write and
tell their own stories - my passion in life (other than my family!). It
is how I try to “pass on” the lovely stories and adult caring and
wonderful library I had as a child. Perhaps those I touch will pass it
on in turn and our lives will always be rich.

Guest post by featured author Brett Dillingham

49 writers weekly round-up

Here comes the first big three-day weekend of summer, with all of us reeling from a better-than-expected spring. In true Alaskan summer form, we're rounding up mostly sunshine and good vibes, but while you're out and about, don't forget to pick up your copy of Tide, Feather, Snow for the 49 Writers book club discussion next month.

We've got a lot of fine authors here in Alaska, but none evidently fine enough to "collaborate" with governor Sarah Palin on her upcoming book. Lynn Vincent, features editor for a conservative Christian magazine, will have that dubious honor (and large paycheck). I'm sure my former high school students wonder why my definition of "collaboration" wasn't the same as it will be on this project. Ah, well. The reading public is apparently still fond of clear and complete sentences, and for that we should be thankful.

We celebrated earlier this week with Andromeda, Nick Jans, and Catherine Rexford over their Individual Artist Awards from the Rasmuson Foundation, but let's not forget that the good folks at Rasmuson also awarded project grants to five writers. Christine Byl, a literary artist from Healy, will receive $5,000 to complete her manuscript, 'Dirt Work: An Education on the Ground,' and attend the Breadloaf Writer's Conference. Mei Mei Evans, a literary artist from Anchorage, will receive $5,000 to finish her novel. Jessica Golden, a literary artist from Anchorage, will receive $3,871 to revise, complete, and submit a manuscript of poetry for publication. Olena Kalytiak-Davis, a literary artist from Anchorage, will receive $5,000 to focus on writing poetry. And Vera Starbard, a literary artist from Anchorage, will receive $5,000 to continue writing her novel and attend a writer's workshop. Wonderful projects, all.

And just because it's summer, there's no need to go all non-literary on us. On Monday, June 1 at 12:00pm and again at 4:30p.m. at the UAA Campus Bookstore, poet Tom Sexton will discuss his life in poetry and recite chosen work in his presentation, "For the Sake of the Light: One Poet's Journey from Imagism to Closed Form." Sexton's latest collection of poetry, For the Sake of the Light, was published in 2009. For more information contact Rachel Epstein at 786-4782. This event is free with complimentary parking.

We'll give all of you regular readers a break on Monday, but we'll be back bright and early Tuesday morning with a great guest post from Brett Dillingham. Enjoy the holiday!

Two Review journal

A glossy and impressingly professional-looking poetry and creative nonfiction journal arrived in my mailbox recently. Two Review is the work of two UAA MFA grads -- Brendan Noonan (2005) and Jeremy Edward Shiok (2003). It is packed with the work of international authors and some big names, including Marge Piercy.

An Alaskan, Toby Sullivan, provided the volume's singular essay, "In Fallujah," an excerpt from a larger work in development about Sullivan's four trips to Iraq as an embedded journalist. Sullivan continues to write and fish commercially from his home on Kodiak Island. I'm always looking for more of his work and glad to see it here.

It's easy to slap some literary content onto a website, but Shiok and Noonan have chosen the more old-fashioned path, gathering this volume's material with great care, and creating an attractive bound book as a result. If you're a poetry lover, check it out. And if you have your own work to submit, note their guidelines for the next issue.

In his first post for the Anchorage Daily News online, new Alaska Voices blogger Bill Sherwonit reveals a fact that surprised me, even though I've known the Anchorage nature writer for well over a decade. Sherwonit says that up until his 40th birthday, he'd never imagined writing a book. Now he has 11 (with a 12th on the way) to his name. That's inspiring.

Proving again that an old dog can learn new tricks, Sherwonit -- who'd probably rather be hiking the Chugach than embedding links -- is entering the blogosphere to champion the causes (both literary and environmental) that don't get as much newsprint in these dwindling-ADN days.

In his first post, he mentioned he reads few other blogs regularly, except one: 49 writers.

Alaska Dispatch, the online news and features site that premiered last August, has redesigned yet again. In this major year of transition, I find myself as confused as everyone else about how we'll get our future news, but really hoping alternatives like Alaska Dispatch stay afloat. I'd love to hear other people's evolving thoughts about how the mix of Alaska blogs, websites, and print sources are serving -- or failing to serve -- our needs. Where do we, as readers, go from here?

Alaska and Beyond: A guest post by Mike Kincaid

If you attended the Sisters in Crime International Bouchercon in Anchorage a couple of years ago, you may have met up with retired Alaska State Trooper-turned-author Mike Kincaid, who was part of a panel on real-life police work in the North. He's lived all over the state, including McKinley Park, Talkeetna, Valdez, Glennallen, Fairbanks, Bethel, King Salmon, Girdwood and Palmer, places where he says he "hiked, fished, hunted, skied, snowshoed, mushed dogs, flew Bush planes, chased bad guys, protected the wildlife of Alaska, and built log cabins deep in the woods." Here, Mike checks in with a guest post on his new digs and his books.

Greetings from Coeur d’ Alene. Nope, this isn’t in France, but a town in the northern part of Idaho. I still have trouble saying I live in Idaho instead of Alaska, but after retiring from an exciting career with the Alaska Department of Public Safety, I found a decent compromise between Alaska and the real world. Still missing the Last Frontier, I’ve found this a fine place to continue my romance with seaplanes, and hiking without a squadron of bugs has its advantages.

In an attempt to tell one view of the tough and unique job of an Alaska State Trooper, I wrote ALASKA JUSTICE. That adventure follows Trooper/Bush Pilot Jack Blake across the frozen tundra of the Last Frontier, where he's challenged by glaciers, grizzlies, blizzards, plane crashes, and crazed-killers. Based on actual cases, this tale is “novelized” for legal and other reasons. A.J. continues to do well, with the audio version coming out recently. Ivan Calhoun wrote a movie script for what they call in the entertainment business a “short.”

Continuing in the Trooper Jack Blake series, ALASKA & BEYOND follows Trooper Blake to the Lower 48, creating a serious case of culture shock for a guy much more comfortable in the Bush than in a city of ten million. Jack’s mission is to track down a rogue trooper bent on evening up the odds for the little guy using the most creative of methods. Meanwhile, his new wife and fellow trooper, Jet, go undercover to catch a serial killer in the wilds of Alaska.

Many folks in this part of the world love Alaska lore and have welcomed me to book stores for signings and to interesting places for presentations and chat. This week I’m flying to Portland in a Widgeon amphibian airplane to push books, then we will visit the big city of Idaho, Boise, for two book signings, with a stop in the mountain village of McCall. Later this summer there are scheduled book signings in Idaho and Washington, including a beachside event in Sandpoint. Hopefully, we’ll make it to Alaska for signings and family visits in the fall.

Celebrate!

What fun to open Sunday's Anchorage Daily News and find the front page of the Life and Arts section devoted almost entirely to Alaskan writers. There's a great write-up, complete with photos, on Dan Coyle and his new book The Talent Code (you read about it here first, remember?). Oh, and there's the reprint from the New York Times, "Practice really does make perfect," also about Dan's book. We're celebrating with you, Dan, and not just because we've got something other than crazy politics getting recognition for Alaska.

We're also celebrating, with much hoopla, toasting, and chocolate, the three Alaskan authors who were awarded $12,000 each in unrestricted funds under the Rasmuson Foundation's Individual Artist Fellowship program: Nick Jans of Juneau, Catherine Rexford of Anchorage, and our own (extra whoops and hollers) Andromeda Romano-Lax. Nick, who has published nine books and hundreds of articles, editorials and poems, is embarking on a novel. Catherine Rexford (Anchorage) plans to complete a manuscript of poetry, digitize historical photographs from Kaktovik, and complete a stage-play, "The Namesake." Andromeda Romano-Lax, my co-blogger here at 49 writers, will travel to Rome for research on a novel in progress.

If you've been hanging around 49 writers for any length of time, you know that we've got some astounding creative talent in these parts, and we're so fortunate that the good folks at Rasmuson have embarked on this ten-year program to invest in it. Nick, Catherine - if you're reading, we'd love to hear more about your projects. Andromeda, we definitely know where to find you. And we expect virtual postcards from Rome.

So here's to deep practice, motivation, and great coaching - talent factors identified in Dan's book. Our Alaskan authors are putting them to good use.

49 writers weekly round-up

I'm back, happily back, from an unexpected trip Outside, attending to the death of a loved one. It was my first trip to the Midwest since Palinmania began, and it saddened me to discover that in those parts - an hour or so from Sarah's last Right-to-Life jaunt - Alaska is now synonymous with Palin. He held off for a few days, but by the time the visitation rolled around, even the funeral director couldn't keep from asking what it was like, living here with Sarah. The setting was an all-too appropriate backdrop for my reply.

But our guv has a book deal, and if you haven't checked out the title contest at Mudflats, you're missing some great laughs. The poll is open through Saturday; good luck trying to pick. After you've voted, hop over to the write-up of last week's party celebrating Alaskan author Helen Nienheuser's fifty years in Alaska. Helen's a great friend, and I'm sorry to have missed her celebration.

May must be the month for good food and friends. On Wednesday, May 20, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., Alaska Sisters in Crime will hold a potluck at the home of Dee Ford, 11001 Hideaway Lake Circle, Anchorage 99507. Please bring your favorite dish to share. For directions, call 346-1135.

As part of the Anchorage Public Library's Community Plan development, Special Collections librarian Michael Catoggio invites you to share your ideas and opinions about the Alaska Collection in a community focus group discussion on Monday, May 18th from 6:15pm to 7:45pm in the Loussac Public Conference Room (1st Floor). Because the number of participants in the session is limited, please contact Clare Stockert at 343-2983, or email me catoggioML@muni.org if you plan to attend.

It's not too soon to pick up your copy of Miranda Weiss's new memoir, Tide, Feather, Snow, which is this quarter's 49 Writers book club pick. Our online discussion will be in late June. Miranda's book is a May Notables in the Indie Next List, where you'll not find Sarah's upcoming book, regardless of how hilariously it's titled.

Laureates Gather: A Guest Post by State Writer Nancy Lord

Three poet laureates on Block Island (left to right, from Indiana, New Hampshire, and South Carolina), plus Alaska's Nancy Lord, second from right.

The Writer Laureate Meets the Poets Laureate

Here are a few things I learned last month when I spent a week at a gathering of state poet laureates, where I was the only writer laureate:

• The plural of poet laureate is poets laureate. (I like simply being called state writer.)

• Rhode Island calls itself The Ocean State. Someone we met pointed out that Rhode Island is the only place you’ll ever be that’s exactly the same size as Rhode Island, and someone else pointed out that Alaska is the size of 548 Rhode Islands.

• There’s a lot of history in Rhode Island. We had lunch one day at a home that was built in 1684, and we also visited a library (the Redwood Library in Newport) that has been in continuous use since 1747. Stone walls run everywhere, and the granite headstones in cemeteries are covered with lichens.

• Some state poet laureates are appointed for life, like judges.

• State poet laureates are often asked to write poems for special occasions, like inaugurations of their governors. Some get stipends but most (as in Alaska) hold honorary positions. Most of them seem to make a lot of school visits.

• I can fake it as a poet if I pretend that some of my very short essays are prose poems and maybe even have line breaks if I read them that way.

The gathering, called Poetry for Hope (“Celebrate April. Celebrate poetry. Celebrate you.”), was the fourth time (in eight years) that the state poet laureates have gotten together. Although forty states have poet/writer laureates, only nine were able to participate this time (the economy, you know, plus timing—it was Poetry Month and many of them were in demand in their home states.) Each gathering has been hosted by one of the poets and his or her state; each has been different, but in every case poets have both spent time together and have shared poetry with communities in those states—at schools, libraries, and elsewhere. This one was organized by Rhode Island Poet Laureate Lisa Starr, who lives on Block Island, an hour’s ferry ride from the mainland.

We started there, on Block Island, presenting weekend writing workshops in a program Lisa runs, called the Block Island Poetry Project. From there we “toured” the rest of the state, speaking in schools and other venues, with multiple events every day and evening. Lisa is an inspiring advocate for poetry (and the arts generally) and did an outstanding job of programming us with music, young people, and political officials. We read in a church with a choral group, drummers, and a folk guitarist. We read at Providence City Hall with a group of hip-hop artists from a youth organization devoted to non-violence, with writing students and more musicians at a college, and at a cocktail party with chamber music and the governor. We celebrated “poetry and the sea” in a Seaman’s Church next to a lobster pound. In groups of two or three, we visited classrooms and talked to school assemblies; my visits included a Catholic elementary school, a very impressive inner-city charter high school, and an inner-city elementary school that was in such run-down and ill-equipped condition I wanted to run away with all those beautiful and neglected children.

The Rhode Island tourism people were our primary sponsors, so let me say that, for anyone venturing to the east coast, Rhode Island is definitely worth a visit. The coastal communities were really lovely in April, off-season. (Block Island, for example, has 700 winter residents, and 20,000 people on a typical summer day.) The mayor of Block Island took us birding, and we spotted great egrets and black-crowned night-herons as well as shorebirds familiar from Alaska. If you like old mansions, Newport has an unbelievable collection all along its waterfront. Brown University in Providence has a gorgeous campus. There’s cool theater doing original plays and adaptations in Pawtucket--Mixed Magic Theater. And very nice people everywhere.

And poetry. Yes, we celebrated poetry, and people came to hear it and to write it. I took along favorite Alaska poems, and so the words of John Straley, Derick Burleson, Mary TallMountain, and others are resounding on Rhode Island shores.

Sarah Palin gets her book deal

I'm still recovering mentally from my relatively minor 2007 book tour. All that travel, talk prep, a few radio shows, prepublicity, postpublicity, endless emails for weeks (months?) before the tour and follow-up after. Whether you get a crowd or nobody shows, it's still a heckuva lotta work. I got my first batch of gray hairs.

Did I mention that writing the actual book took a little time, too?

But our governor has always managed to live several different lives at once. According to today's news headlines, she'll be paid something like $11 million (she won't say how much, exactly) to whip out a book by 2010, which means the manuscript will be written primarily -- what, this summer? Well, good thing manic Alaska summer has gotten an early start this year.

You can point out she'll be leaning heavily on a ghostwriter, but she'll still be logging a lot of hours -- all off the gubernatorial clock, she claims. And then there's the promotion, which in this humble writer's opinion, will take more time than the authoring. The Anchorage Daily News reports Sarah saying, "I really look forward to promoting the book. My goal of course is to have a best seller and, schedule permitting, when it comes out we'll discuss with publishers how and where and when I will be promoting it."

I'm starting to understand the Republican position on "limited" government. If you're a politician with lots of other hobbies and sideline vocations, it makes sense to espouse the view that you shouldn't be overly involved in affairs of state.

Miranda Weiss memoir is our next online book pick

The voters have chosen. In about six weeks, we'll be discussing Tide, Feather, Snow by Homer author Miranda Weiss. I know where and when I'll buy my copy -- at the author's Title Wave talk on May 28. See you there in May, and/or see you here in late June. If you're a reader interested in Alaska books, please join us.

The artistry of the endurance runner

We're pleased to bring you this guest post by Megan Nix, an editor at DiningOut Magazine and a student in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Alaska Anchorage. You might recall that we mentioned Megan in connection with the Fourth Genre prize. You can follow her musings at www.megannix.com.

A few weekends ago, I watched Luke, my fiancé, complete his fourth marathon. As usual, it was disgusting. The bloody nipples sending streaks of pink down white t-shirts, the limping, the cringing, the bodily fluids made shamelessly public where the soiled sock meets the ankle. At mile 22, Luke passed me with a pale grimace/smile and without stopping, sang at me, “I'm losing my miiiind.” The next morning, as he was getting off the couch with the hips-first slow rise of a woman nine months pregnant, I asked him if this was his last one. “No way,” he said, with the same crazy-eyed grin. “It's worth it every time.”

The rest of the weekend, while pulling him in and out of the car by his armpits, I reiterated: “You're crazy.” But I understand him. Running and writing or being an artist of any kind require the same masochistic streak. We train ourselves to surge uphill against the I-can't-do-it hurdle and the where-the-hell-am-I-going-and-why debate. Any artist who has struggled to produce goes through the same torture as a runner: we must be self-productive in a world that wills us to blindly consume. We struggle to swim upstream against laziness, bad literature, and the temptation of too much fried food. The muscles of the body and the brain are more similar than we might think; our awareness of failure produces odd exercises. Not only do we push ourselves to fatigue in order to regenerate energy, we hurt ourselves to feel most alive.

We’re affected by the weather, but we must convince ourselves that we’re not. We have electric highs and confounding lows. Then there’s the issue of time. When will I have time to organize my mountains of notes, my life, and still have the time to train? I learned from Luke the art of scheduling, that producing what you've set out to create must be a priority. On his oversize desktop calendar, the runs shout out the mandatory miles: 8, 12, 7, 21. If I wrote this many sentences on so many days, I might have written three books in the last two years. When he double knots his shoes and starts his watch, I ask him if he’s ever reluctant. “Every time,” he says before I see the back of his soles under his flexed and fluid calves.

If I could run marathons, I would. I love the acrid taste of challenge balanced by the hush that ushers up from fallen carpets of leaves and snow. I crave tension made physical: when capacity and intent bring out their fisticuffs as aches and cramps. The secret to running is it's a craft: keep training, and intent will win. While I'm 26, with four knee surgeries under my skin, at least one more on the way, and a doctor who told me I'll probably have arthritis by the time I'm 30, I don't want to stop running until he (or my body) tells me I absolutely can't. As an athlete/artist (are they separate?), I am striving to touch the things that have been relegated to an out-of-reach shelf: the impossibility of a perfectly functioning body, the ideals, the big questions with no answers. At the end of the race and the end of the essay, there’s a sweet soreness born of completed exertion. This painful pleasure becomes an addiction.

When I told my brother I was going to grad school for writing, he said, “Are you sure you want to do that?” I ask Luke the same thing before all of his long runs. What we share is the belief that nothing worthwhile is effortless—you suck and you soar and you have no control over when you do which one. Writing is an emotional rollercoaster; running is a physical one. At a literary reading a year ago, the successful fiction writer Ron Carlson warned, “You are never writing alone. Doubt is before you, after you, and sitting right beside you the whole time.” Every runner races the same demon. They, however, continue to tie their shoes.

And so I love watching marathons. Here we have big and small, first-timers and professionals, all pushing their flaws towards a nearly inhuman goal: 26.2 miles. By our society’s standards, there’s something wrong with people who set out to complete such a punishing task. You could call it unhealthy or hubris. This last time, embracing Luke in his pain and quiet glory at the finish line, I realized what it's called:

Commitment.

I, too, am of this world

A guest post by this month's featured author, Brett Dillingham

I recently took a trip to a Gwich-in (Athapascan) village just north of the Arctic Circle. I flew from Fairbanks in a single engine eight-seater. We landed in a small village of about 200 people. As soon as the plane hit the snow, ice and gravel runway, four-wheelers began buzzing and roaring towards the plane, reminding me of dung beetles in the desert flying and running over dust and sand to their resource base (dung). The villagers came to unload sacks of bloody fish and moose, newspapers, mail, crates of oranges. They came to pick up Uncle Jimmie, who spent the week in Fort Yukon with other relatives, or Donita who had some teeth pulled in Fairbanks. They came just to see who was coming or going, to smoke a cigarette and watch people live. Fifteen or twenty buzzing, roaring, or idling machines, exhaust floating above the snow, ciggies puffing, eyes watching. I sat on the plane and watched this churning social milieu. Then new passengers boarded and off we flew to another village.

Much the same scene as before greeted us: four-wheelers roaring and gouting exhaust while cigarettes hung from lips or pumped to and from eager maws, burlap sacks full of fish, moose or caribou stained the white fibers and snow red with blood.

The principal was an ex-student of mine. Mid fifties, wide strong shoulders, blonde hair, blue eyes. He smiled lots but was mostly sad- sad that he was stuck in a village of 150 people who were brown, sad there were no available women, sad that his Polish wife left him 13 years ago and he had not dated since. Sad that he put himself in this Village.

When my storytelling work was done the sad blue-eyed principal and I rode his four-wheeler on a trail to the ridge of a near mountain. I saw the tracks of a huge wolf and a medium wolf who had loped for miles on the same trail we drove on. Also fox tracks.

We reached the mountain ridge and drank wine and ate German cheese the sad principal brought in a small pack. The light glowing, the valley white started to fade.

Between the mountain ranges I saw a river freezing to ice. I know that herds of caribou and musk ox trundle in the valley and moose gallop with spreading antlers. Giant wolves and brown bears kill and eat all they can - young, weak, sick, injured. When they are hungry enough they kill the healthy. This is dangerous, because a moose hoof is as big as a plate and sometimes crushes the skulls of their ursine and lupine predators.

The river is full of whitefish and jack fish and salmon swimming lively with pulsing gills. In the future they will be caught in nets and become strips of smoked flesh at summer fish camp.

I saw all this in the valley, yet I am also lying because I really only saw the giant and medium wolf tracks. And the fox.

When I flew out the next morning to Venetie, I sat behind a young man of nineteen or twenty years. He was dressed in a puffy yellow parka with black elbows and stripes. He had earphones on. After we were airborne for about twenty minutes I saw his arms begin to spasm, to jerk like a chicken wing batting the air. I thought he was epileptic and that I should tap on the pilot’s shoulder and warn him of this health emergency. Then I saw the young man’s hands/fingers punching and swirling signs and symbols in the air, his lips synching to some L.A. or N.Y. rap tune, words sound-waving into his ears, his cranium, and I knew his seat-bound St. Vitus dance was a paean to the lofty and far away gods of corporate media meets street pain. This happened a thousand feet above the mountains and tundra where his ancestors and living relatives slaughtered caribou with arrows and bullets, picked blueberries and cranberries in bushes where thousand pound bears slept and ate, where his blood and bone and flesh genetic forebears made love on wolf and wolverine and fox parkas while mosquitoes bit their bare bottoms.

I, too, am of this world.

Our Children, Our Books Part III

Our Mother's Day Special Concludes. Thanks to participants Eowyn Ivey, Cinthia Ritchie, Marybeth Holleman and Deb Vanasse; full bios are available at the end of Thursday's Part I post.

Having children has given me such a wealth of ideas and emotions to write about. What motherhood has taught me is that there is no perfect place or time to write. Sometimes that white noise is the grit in the oyster. ...the experience of raising a child has made me more fearless.


Marybeth: How has being a mother affected or informed your writing--both what you write about (content), and how you write about it (form)? How has that changed over time, as your children grow?

As to content - Many moons ago, I had the great pleasure of teaching a class called "Writing and Motherhood" through UAA's Women's Studies Program. This class arose from conversations with Carol Hult, one of my models for mothering and writing. A group of nine women, all mothers or future mothers, read a list of books--fiction, nonfiction, poetry--by mother-writers. We discusssed, among other things, how mothers were portrayed in these books, as compared with how they had been portrayed in the not-too-distant past, when the only widely-published books with mothers as characters were written by men. I also wonder how our children's ages/developmental stages might affect what we choose to write about.

As to form, I'm remembering talking with Rosellen Brown when she was a visiting writer at UAA. I had just become a mother, and was wondering how to get any significant amount of writing done. She said that when her kids were very young, she wrote poetry - because you could actually get somewhere in the 30 minutes of nap time. One of the students in that class was a poet, who wrote poems while sitting in her car, waiting to pick up her kids from school and various activities. And she's written some damn fine poetry.

Andromeda: Without kids, I would have done more book-length journalism and travel writing – the kind of books that require major solo travel and long spans interviewing other people or having certain experiences, without family disruption. Instead, I wrote books that required research, but the kind of research I could do with kids along, whether it was a sailboat expedition in Baja or a backpacking research trip to Spain. I’m happy things turned out that way, and our family trips matter as much to me as the resulting books.

As for form or perhaps “writing lifestyle,” the main thing I notice is that I can’t immerse myself as deeply in my fictional world as I’d like to. I notice when I have a few days (or even one long day) by myself how much mental work I get done – I can go from shower to cooking or eating and still be mentally writing, playing invented conversations in my head, letting scenes flicker on m y mental screen. It becomes almost a dream state, and I’ll realize I’m not sure if I rinsed the conditioner out of my hair or ate the food that was just sitting in front of me (maybe); Ill find myself wandering into a room and forget why I went there, because in my head, I’m somewhere else entirely. Family members may not mean to interrupt, but just the white noise of normal life does interrupt to some extent, and I’m sure that weakens my writing. But on the other hand, sometimes that white noise is the grit in the oyster. My attention is disrupted (incessantly!), I come back to a problem, and over weeks and months somehow this push-and-pull process creates a story. If I were completely alone in a cabin, I might not manage to conjure an imaginary world at all.

Eowyn: I remember being in a college creative writing class and really struggling with what to write about; what could I possibly have to say that would matter to anyone? It may also be just getting older in general and having more life experience, but it seems that having children has given me such a wealth of ideas and emotions to write about. We had a difficult time getting pregnant with our first daughter and we thought we might not be able to have children. Then, when I was pregnant with my second daughter, we had a scare with some blood tests that showed she wouldn't live to be born. It ended up being a false alarm, but through these experiences I learned a lot about how much I feared not being able to have children or have them be still born or otherwise have health problems, and a lot of this eventually went into aspects of my main character in The Snow Child. I'd like to think that motherhood has deepened my emotional capacity as a writer.

As for form, as I mentioned earlier I think having children forced me to really think about who I wanted to be as a writer. For nearly 10 years, I had worked as a newspaper reporter, but when pushed to the wall -- staying up all night with a cranky infant, spending days alone at home changing diapers and wiping up spit, having little or no time to pursue my own interests and passions -- somehow in the face of all this, I realized that what I really wanted to do was write novels.

Cinthia: When my son was younger I used to write in Chuck E. Cheese. I'd set him loose with a friend or two, strap on my headphones and sit in the corner and write. I was perfectly happy sitting there among those screaming kids and greasy pizza smells. What motherhood has taught me is that there is no perfect place or time to write. Yeah, some writers might have the wonderful desk in the wonderful room with the wonderful view but I've done some of my best stuff while "Barney" and the "Reading Rainbow" blared in the background. I used to think, no, I can only write when it's quiet and the mood is right. Now I write when I have time: A few minutes here, a half hour there. I find that once I begin, I can easily sink down to the right place and mood, no matter where I am.What has changed, though, is how I write. I'm now more fragmented, I write pieces here and tidbits there and then face the agonizing process of trying to smooth it together. Am I a better writer because of this? I don't know. I do know that it's forced me to break down many barriers, and I write no matter if I'm tired or the house is a mess. Mostly, though, the experience of raising a child has made me more fearless. It's forced me to open up and make myself more vulnerable, to see the beauty and hope in situations I might have turned my back on before, and this naturally carries over in my work. I find that when I'm in a bookstore, I flip open a book and read the author bio. If she's a mother, I'm more likely to buy that book.

*
it's always a good thing, a fine and wonderful gift, when parents model useful, meaningful work. I’ve worried a little about our feast-and-famine lifestyle. I feel guilty about that... whenever I see his face--and I know this will sound sappy and silly--but always, always I feel joy.


Cinthia: How has your writing or your being a writer negatively affected your child(ren)?

Andromeda: Overall, I’d say there has been no negative effect, but if pushed, I guess I’ve worried a little about our feast-and-famine lifestyle. We’ve had some years of unexpected reward and comfort, and also some years of involuntary simplicity and extreme financial anxiety. When the kids were very young, they didn’t notice the time – for example – that I had to scrounge dimes and nickels to buy tomato paste to host a very barebones pasta birthday dinner-party for my son. We could talk about bounced checks and the subject itself would bounce over their heads.

But I’m aware that they are old enough now, and even when things are going well, they must hear my husband and me talk all too frequently about how many months of living expenses are in the bank, what we’ll do during the next lean patch, how many more years the broken-down Subaru must last, the perils of having no health insurance, how much we owe the IRS, and so on. If the lesson they learn is that it’s always worth it in the name of love and art, great. If they become financially conservative or timid in any way as a backlash, I’ll regret that a little. But what can you do? I wouldn’t change a single thing, honestly, and I think my children have had a very lucky upbringing, with an emphasis not only on creative self-employment, but also on family time.

Eowyn: I agree with Andromeda about the money. I could be helping to create a more financially stable situation if I had chosen a different occupation. I'm lucky that my husband has a so-far reliable career as a fishery biologist and he has been the main breadwinner in recent years, but we definitely skate a thin line financially. I haven't done anything for college accounts for the girls, and I feel guilty about that. The only other aspect of writing that could maybe be considered negative is that it's a struggle to get time to write and I am sometimes irritable about that. When it's 9:30 p.m. and the girls are resisting going to bed and I'm thinking "this is eating into my few night hours of writing" I have been known to be kind of grouchy. But then I think most parents, regardless of their careers or hobbies, get irritable at times.

Marybeth: Wow. This has always been one of my Big Questions. My choice to be a writer was, in large part, because I wanted to be a Mom. (This choice was made before I could imagine being a wife, which I always thought was goofy, but in retrospect, knowing all the happy, successful, vibrant single mothers that I do, may not be so goofy after all.) I wanted to have a passionate, engaging work life and I wanted to be a stay-at-home Mom. Writing seemed like the perfect solution. That's not exactly how it worked out, but writing--and the other jobs that I've been able to choose as a result--have given me much more flexibility to be there for my son as he's grown.

Some remnant worries: Did I ever put writing before parenting? (Oh those harsh deadlines, that total immersion good writing requires.) Did I ever expose him to too much at too young of an age? (When you work out of the home, at odd hours, there's much more transparency than the parent-off-to-the-office-every-morning model. You can't hide much.) And finally, because for most of the recent years, I haven't been the primary breadwinner, and because I don't go off to an office outside the home every morning, I have worried about that old traditional model of husbands and wives: man goes off to make money, woman stays home and bakes bread. (There were a few times I almost took full-time non-writing jobs because of this very worry.) But (thank goddess) there are many ways to model equality in relationships. And now, seeing him at 17, I think we're good. Now, as he heads off to college to pursue photography, I know that I was right all along: it's always a good thing, a fine and wonderful gift, when parents model useful, meaningful work.

Cinthia: I've never worried that I put writing in front of my son's needs, for I always, always, always dropped whatever I was writing when he hauled out the Monopoly game or wanted to go for a walk on the beach. What I worry about, however, is the impact of his having grown up in so much silence. I am a solitary type, I can happily spend the whole weekend holed up in the house writing, stopping only to run or swim or drive my son wherever he needs to go, and because I am a single parent, well, there is often not much talking going on inside our house. I used to read those studies of how conversation around the dinner table was essential to raising well-adjusted kids and I'd think: Huh? Our table was covered with books and stacks of poems and pieces of essays and doggie bones and god knows what else. We didn't have tradition meals or family time. What we had was a strange type of togetherness that didn't seem to require a lot of speech.

Yet I think I gave him one of the most important gifts: The ability to enjoy his own company. How many people have that?When he started applying for colleges, he did the same thing I do when I send out my poems and essays: He went straight for the top. Forget the fact that the acceptance chances were slim. He believed in himself, the way I believe in my writing, and he wasn't afraid to face rejection. We used to have a joke back when most submissions were sent through the mail, not email. Every day when he checked the mail he would hand me the white envelopes from various literary magazines and count them out: "One rejection, two rejections, three rejections ..." He found this hilarous. Now I wonder how much of it sank in. It's so hard to know. I made so many mistakes as a mother and as a writer, yet whenever I see his face--and I know this will sound sappy and silly--but always, always I feel joy.

Our Children, Our Books

Andromeda Romano-Lax's children, then ages 5 and 2, in Baja, Mexico -- assisting with the research for her 2002 book, Searching for Steinbeck's Sea of Cortez.

Our Children, Our Books Part II

Our Mother's Day Special Continues...
See Thursday's Part I for an explanation of how this roundrobin conversation started, and complete bios for Eowyn Ivey, Marybeth Holleman, Cinthia Ritchie, Deb Vanasse, and Andromeda Romano-Lax.

I'm afraid I'll censor myself... I imagined my own son googling me -- oh dear Lord! I thought that was a little strange. Who really wants to know the inner secrets and inner longings of their mothers? When it gets to publishing stage, THEN you can worry!


Eowyn: Do you all share most of your writing with your children? What have been their responses to it? Have you ever decided to not let your child read something you were working on?

Cinthia: Well, my son is at that age when everything I do is an embarrassment so no, I don't share my writing with him though I do keep him updated. He knows about my novel, knows some of the characters, and as I drive him to school in the morning I'll often talk about the conflicts and problems I'm having with this character or that. How much he hears, how much he retains--well, that's hard to say.

I also keep him updated on some of my work stories: "Human remains were found down by the coal facility," I'll say, and then I'll ponder of what this means, who it might have been, how they might have died. But really, how much he hears in the swirling wave of his own hormonal self-importance, I don't know.

When he was younger, in elementary and middle school, I wrote erotica. I was in a relationship with a man I loved dearly, and I was caught in that swim of sensuality that comes when you connect with someone soul-to-soul. I was awash in it, actually, and the erotica was the inevitable outcome. I published poems and stories, some internationally but most in English, nothing pornographic, all decent literary erotica in decent publications. But still!

For over a year whenever I googled myself one particular story came up, along with the first few lines, and oh-dear-lord, the "c" word was included in that opening. I imagined his teachers or parents of his friends googling me to see if I was the kind of parent they wanted their children around. I imagined people reading my newspaper stories googling me to find out who I was, if I had written anything else. I imagined my own son googling me--oh dear lord! It was quite agonizing. Finally,though, I won an award and kept publishing other stories plus news stories and they eventually squashed that "c" story to second and then third and fourth page status. I found I actually missed seeing it there before my name. It was like a sore tooth, that sweet pain, that almost agonizing jolt of recognition. These are the things I hide from my son as a writer.

Andromeda: Cinthia, has your son ever actually asked you about the erotica? I'm guessing not, but I wanted to double-check. I find that my children (ages 11 and 14) take a sort of disinterested stance regarding my published writing. They support my lifestyle, will let me yak about current projects (and are more than happy to accompany me on long-distance research trips to sunny places!) but about the finished project, they don't inquire. I think that's probably psychologically normal, maybe healthy. I probably encourage the mild disinterest by saying things like, "Oh, there's no rush. You can read my books years from now, if you ever want to" -- this comes in response not to their own requests or questions but other adults asking them, in front of me, when they are going to read my books.

But I do wonder what it would be like to have a child or teenager actually ask to read something that might not be easy to digest. It would be easy to say no to a very young child, but I wouldn't be comfortable censoring something for an older child -- because I don't censor anything in our house! I will add that I found out that my son's friend (also 14?) read my entire novel, which had some mildly rated-R scenes and concepts -- I thought that was a little strange. I expect that he is a budding writer and wanted to read an adult novel by someone he knows personally.

Cinthia: Well, my son hasn't asked to read anything I've written for a long time. It's his age, plus I think it's normal: Who really wants to know the inner secrets and longings of their mothers? Even fiction is really about us. I read an article a few years ago where they interviewed writers and none of their children, even their adult children, had read their work. I can understand that. We need to fit our parents and especially our mothers into a very small box: This is who she is, this is why she is. It's for our own safety, I think, part of the way we learn to make sense of the world from a very young age. If my son did read something of mine that was R rated or above, I don't know if he would talk with me about it, not at his age. When he was younger he probably would have, and I hope I would have had the courage to answer honestly.

But writing is so private, it's kind of like sex, and the act is really sort of masturbatory:a person all alone and playing with her thoughts and demons and desires and needs. I can see where reading one's mother's work would be regarded as uncomfortable or even taboo. If my mother had written a book, would I want to read it? Would I be afraid to read it? Would I want to know who she really is since it would forever dissolve what I think she is or need her to be? I really don't know.

Eowyn: One reason I asked the question is because my 10-year-old daughter was a very active part of my writing process during The Snow Child. It's a novel based on a fairy tale and set in 1920s Alaska, and while it is written for adults it is probably PG-13 at most and my daughter was really drawn to the subject. She loves to write, and I talked often with both my daughter and my husband about possible plot lines and character development. The truth is, she gave me some terrific ideas that I used throughout the book, and when I shared a new chapter with her and she responded with excitement, it was worth everything to me.

I'm now starting my next novel, though, and it is really different. It is modern and deals with alcoholism, the struggle with faith, and some other difficult issues. I know my daughter will want to read it, and has already asked to see the first chapter, and I'm torn about what to do. On one hand, I've come to really treasure this time we spend together talking about writing, and I don't want to shut her out, or shut down her enthusiasm for writing. At the same time, I think some of the material will be inappropriate for her age and I'm afraid I'll censor myself if I know she will eventually read it. It's become a really interesting struggle for me.

Marybeth: Cinthia, how interesting... I've never tried to publish any erotica, but as a mother of an almost 18-year-old who googles everything under the sun and then some, I can just imagine...
As a nonfiction writer, I've written many things where my son is a main character. And I've often worried about what he would think of what I write. But I try to follow the adage that I always told my students: don't worry about it, just write what you think needs saying the best you can, and if/when it gets to publishing stage, THEN you can worry! Really, so many things get edited out before a piece ever hits the printed page, that most of my worrying has been needless.

That said - I've never kept anything I've written and sent out to be published from my son. The caveat there: sent out to be published. I figure that if I'm going to let a bunch of strangers read it, I should let him see it too. But I don't set it in front of him. (Well, OK, sometimes I've read him a poem or two...) Mostly I just talk with him about what I'm working on.

When he was younger, he was more interested. He'd come to the readings and book signings, and I loved seeing his pride in his Mom shine through. (My guidebook to Prince William Sound has a picture with him in it. He used to "sign" by his picture!) Now, however, he's not much interested in coming to readings, and while I think he likes knowing what I've got coming out, he doesn't usually bother reading it. He's got enough reading to do, courtesy of his teachers, thankyouverymuch.

In Heart of the Sound, he plays a prominent role. But he was much younger then, and I don't think it bothers him at all that I've written about his three-year-old self. He ain't that kid anymore. Lately I've been working on something that includes him as a teen - and it occurs to me I might be dragging my feet, waiting for there to be some more time between who he was then and who he is now. There are times it's made me wish I was a fiction writer.

Deb: I agree, Marybeth, that there’s a distinction between what we’re working on and what we published. I’ve written a fair amount – and I suspect this is true for most writers – that is not really meant for anyone to see, not in its present state. Once in a while my kids have asked to read what I’m working on, when they know it’s something I’m almost ready to send out, but mostly they read it – if at all – after it’s come out. Since many of my books are written for children, I haven’t had that added worry that I might be revealing too much or that it might be inappropriate for them.

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I don't want to see her get hurt. But I also don't want to take the wind out of her sails. Why would he choose the roller-coaster life of the struggling writer? My best advice to them: 'Choose your spouses carefully.' I always tell him, "I know you don't want to hear this but you are a writer."


Deb: Do your children like to write? How has their writing affected you?

Eowyn: First I want to say that I'm really not one of those high pressure parents, and I don't generally go around bragging about my children, but my 10-year-old loves to write and I think she's pretty amazing. The other night she was in bed, where she usually reads for a while before going to sleep, and I asked her what she was reading. "Oh, I'm writing some haiku," she said, and she was. She writes novella-length short stories for fun, not for a school assignment or at my urging, and she has a terrific vocabulary and understanding of fiction structure and character development. And like I mentioned before, she had a true influence on my novel The Snow Child. She provided many plot ideas and overall enthusiasm that kept me going when I lagged some.

I have to say, she is leaps and bounds above where I was at her age. On one hand, it thrills me. On the other, I find myself cautioning her like my own mother did me -- follow your passion, BUT make sure you can earn a living. Writing is not an easy, lucrative career for the vast majority of us, and I don't want to see her get hurt. But I also don't want to take the wind out of her sails. In her bio for a writing conference story she recently wrote, she said when she grows up she wants to be a writer and work at a bookstore. And of course, my 2-year-old is so far only interested in drawing mice on any piece of paper or book she can get her hands on.

Cinthia: My son is a wonderful writer and has the most refreshing, honest voice. Some of his essays for his college applications caused me to weep, they were so pure and lyrical and not at all the typical college essay fodder. So he has that writerly sense of trusting his voice and the courage to let his voice shine. I always tell him, "I know you don't want to hear this but you are a writer." I think he sees my writing as a partial failure on my part. When he finally decided on a college last week, choosing an expensive, private school that offered him a big scholarship but not big enough, I warned him about having to take out loans. He shook his head somewhat disgustedly and said, "Mom, I'm not going to be a writer, I'm going to have a math or computer career."

Marybeth: When my son was very young, he did lots of drawings/writings/songs. The "Sock Factory" song for when we sat on the bed and matched up our socks from the laundry. The "Mutated Fishies" poem from one of our snorkeling adventures. I can't deny that a part of me wanted him to be a writer, too. But somewhere around the time when he needed to produce papers or journals for school, around the time standardized testing became an annual event at school, he stopped liking to write.

At first I thought it had to do with handwriting. (He should be a doctor, his handwriting is so bad.) But as he moved up in grades and teachers started letting them do all the writing on the computer, he still disliked writing. During his ninth grade year, when I homeschooled him, I focused him on creative writing, trying to break away from the five-paragraph standard. And he did write a couple of great short stories and poems. But he still doesn't like to write. He'll do anything but. I see a link with the school system, but I'm also not surprised, given how he's watched me agonize over my writing. Why would he choose the roller-coaster life of the struggling writer? But surprise of suprises, during that ninth grade year, he developed an interest in photography that has turned into a passion, one he appears to be pursuing. Sometimes I worry about it: he's choosing a field that's even more difficult to make a living in than writing. (I mean, think of the gear expense alone!) But mostly I'm delighted, and not just that some of my creative life has rubbed off on him. I'm delighted that he has found something that he loves to do, and is fearlessly, joyfully, doing it.

Andromeda: Well, these parallels are funny. Like several of you, I share both the brags (hey, we're mothers!) and the worries (ironic, because I resented anyone worrying about my career choice over the years). Like Eowyn, I also have a daughter (now 11) who is a self-motivated writer. Last year, she took part in NaNoWriMo (the novel-writing challenge) and made her goal of writing 13,000 words in a month. What amazed me was not just the daily discipline but the structure, pov, and other craft issues she demonstrated. How did she so naturally understand these things I've struggled to teach myself as an adult? ('Lots of reading' may be the answer, because both my children read more than I did.) My son reads even more than my daughter -- he is currently covering the Greek classics, most of them unfamiliar to me, and he shares lots of good tips about dramatic structure! -- but he usually doesn't write except when assigned. When he does write, he also has natural abilities that surprise me.

Note that while we homeschool them, they both strongly resist "age-appropriate writing lessons." When they were very little, I thought we'd have great fun with kid-style writing, including lots of creative prompts -- but they would have none of it, especially when it comes to fiction. In our family, one seems to dabble with fiction independently, privately, soberly.

So far, my daughter talks more about being a farmer than a writer. My son talks about being a visual artist. Talk about trying to find even less profitable careers. (Which is why I chuckled reading about Marybeth's son's photography.) Of couse, I want them to follow their dreams, but boy, I can't help but imagine the perils ahead. My best advice to them (which I haven't yet shared with them but will someday) would be 'choose your future spouses carefully' -- not because a spouse will support you financially, but only because the proper partner (or friends, or social network) will help you weather the storms and create a rich life that doesn't require financial security or stability.

49 writers weekly roundup

Thunder and lightning as I type...you can probably guess I'm not in Alaska at the moment. But even from a few thousand miles away, there's news to report.

First, don't forget to vote for our next book club selection (sidebar to the right). We're planning to discuss the book during the last weekend in June.

Just in time for Mother's Day, Alaska Northwest Books wanted to share this new book trailer (produced by Jessi Gates) for Kaylene Johnson’s new book, A Tender Distance: Adventures Raising My Sons in Alaska. Scheduled for release in late July, the book is "a collection of stories told with wit, wisdom, and a grateful heart," says the publisher.

This month brings several great book events at Title Wave in Anchorage. Tonight (May 8) at 7 p.m., Dan Coyle will be signing and discussing his latest, The Talent Code. On Saturday, May 9, at 1 p.m., Susan Arnout Smith will be signing her new book, Out at Night. On Thursday, May 21, Paul Twardock returns to discuss and sign Kayaking and Camping in Prince William Sound, at 6:30 p.m. The following Thursday, May 28th, Miranda Weiss will sign and discuss her first book, Tide, Feather Snow: A Life in Alaska, at 7 p.m.

Our Children, Our Books: Mother's Day Special Series Part I

Sometimes I chose the homemade cookies, sometimes I chose the poem. The years following the birth of each of my daughters have been some of my most productive as a writer. By the next year I had no time at all, even for a shower, and everything to say, because I had become a young mother. I watched him give up on me. Who did I think I was? My son said he tells all his friends how proud he is of his mom for pursuing her dream.



Andromeda Romano-Lax's daughter flies a kite in the Wadi Rum Desert of Jordan during a 2006 literary research trip to the Middle East.

When my children were babies, and I was struggling to make it as a freelancer writer, I scanned even the simplest author bio at the bottom of local newspaper articles, looking for signs that other writers had young children. I read memoirs by well-known women-with-offspring writers, looking for survival tips. Most of all I wanted to meet a real mother-writer in person. Finally, an Alaska woman fitting that description called out of the blue and asked me out for a coffee -- my chance at last to meet a literary comrade! -- and we both brought our toddlers. Our lattes were still hot when my toddler boy reached across the cafe table and smacked the woman's chattering daughter on the face. My son had never done anything like that. We were all shocked. End of that bonding opportunity.

Years later, I can happily say that I've met many more women who write, and I've learned from them all. (I can also say my toddler is now a very mellow 14-year-old boy with good manners.) But even today, most of us are too busy juggling writing and family to get together and trade stories. So I asked four other women if they'd do just that -- online. We all posed questions to each other, roundrobin style. In the exchange that followed, there is still much more to ask, much more to say, but at least we got a start -- and I respect these four women writers more than ever.

The participants are: Eowyn LeMay Ivey, mother of 10-year-old and 2-year-old daughters; Marybeth Holleman, mother of a 17-year-old son; Cinthia Ritchie, mother of a 17-year-0ld son; Deb Vanasse; mother of a 28-year-old son and 25-year-old daughter; Andromeda Romano-Lax, mother of a 14-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter. For longer bios, see end of post.

To what extent does your identity as a mother and your identity as a writer overlap? Was there a particular moment in your life when the conflicts or harmonies became particularly clear?

Eowyn: It's interesting because in ways I think motherhood forced me to clarify my identity as a writer. With each of my daughters, a few months after the birth I had bouts of panic as I felt my sense of self as an individual slip away. There is something beautiful about the selfless nature of parenthood, but it is also frightening. In both cases, I had this overpowering need to reassert my own identity. And in answer to the question "Who am I?" always came "a writer" as one of the answers, and I would throw myself into a new project.

The years following the birth of each of my daughters have been some of my most productive as a writer, which seems crazy when I think about it. These are not periods of harmony and calm. Instead, I often feel torn in different directions, trying to be a good mom, a supportive wife, and a writer. But somehow it is in that struggle that I realize how important writing is to me. At the same time, I'd like to think that being mother, having that experience of letting go of my ego and completely focusing on the well being of another person, has enriched my writing. That's not to say that to be a good writer you have to be a parent. I just think it is one of many experiences that have opened my eyes to new ways of seeing the world.

Cinthia: Well, my son leaves for college in August so I'm past the writing-and-being-slammed-in-the-head-by-a-Nerf-football stage. In all these years, though, I don't think I could separate my identity as a mother and a writer, they are so intertwined: I am the writer I am because I am a mother. But I do remember the day the harmony became clear. It was four or five years ago, a winter evening, and my son and I were curled on the floor reading Stephen King novels. It was the end of my work week and I was exhausted. But there I was, drowsy, smells of popcorn in the air, my son breathing with his mouth open because he had a cold, when suddenly a heavily accented voice slammed into my head: "Gray horse, gray horse, you not know the way, the way, the way."

It was the Polish grandmother from the novel I had begun and then abandoned, begun and abandoned because I didn't see how I could possibly work full-time, raise a child by myself and write a novel. Who did I think I was? Yet lying on the floor in our aging apartment it suddenly occurred to me that I could have both, I could commit myself fully to both parenthood and writing, I could allow myself that luxury. And if my son ate pizza for dinner three nights in a row because I was writing, so what? If I forgot to do laundry and we had to wear the same clothes the next day, big deal. I was writing, I was saying: This is who I am and I'll be damned if I'll apologize or make excuses any longer. I suffered for it, of course; I suffered terribly. The guilt and shame were maddening. But I kept on writing.

Marybeth: My identity as a writer and as a mother are so intertwined it's difficult to think of them separately. As far back as I can remember, I meant to do them both, and saw them not as conflicting, but as complementary. I had this idealized vision of me sitting at home writing while my child/ren were at school, then being there with cookies and milk when they got home. Homemade cookies, of course.

Now, it didn't work out that way; making a living writing proved to be more like winning the lottery. So then came various jobs, all piled on top of writing and mothering. Sigh. When I was pregnant, I was in my final year of an MFA Creative Writing program. My advisor (and mentor and primary teacher), himself married without children, was disappointed that I, in whom he saw a promising young writer, was with child. I watched him give up on me, as he assumed I couldn't do both well. Meanwhile, a fellow student, mother of two young children, wrote beautiful stories that came straight from insights she'd gained as a mother. I read her stories and thought, my prof is wrong: mothering will inspire my writing.

As with most things in life, the truth stood somewhere in between. Over the past 18 years, parenting has always come first - and often at the expense of writing. There are only so many hours in a day, after all. Sometimes I chose the homemade cookies, sometimes I chose the poem.. And now, as I stand ready for my son to fledge in the fall, off to a far-away college, here's what I think: parenting has probably made my writing self less productive, but I know it has made every word I do write richer, more meaningful, and ultimately (I hope) more useful. And I can't imagine any other kind of life. Which is to say, I have no idea what next year, when there's no kid around to foil my writing plans, will bring...

Deb: Motherhood kept me from writing for several years. My job was too demanding and I was both the primary wage-earner and the primary care-giver and I wasn’t as brave as Cinthia, though I think oddly having another adult in the picture made it tougher to even consider taking the risk of adding writing to the mix. But I always had in mind the twenty-year retirement (that’s what it was for teachers then), and my plan to retire and write full-time.

When my children were young, I wrote like I read – for a few years not at all, and then in ten-minute bites. But I did take the kids Outside for six weeks to work on grad school credits that I needed for salary advancement, and I slipped in a writing institute for credit, which was where I wrote the story that later became my first novel. My son was five and my daughter was two and we stayed in an old farmhouse we’d bought as an investment (it wasn’t) and I wrote after they fell asleep at night, listening as bats crawled around in the walls.

After twenty years I retired as planned but there was little money to help the kids with college, so I sold real estate for eight years to earn enough to help them through. As passionate as I am about writing, parenting has always been my first love, and I remember a moment of release when I realized that my children were grown and if I died right then, I’d go with total peace and fulfillment, that having known and loved them would always be my greatest accomplishment and my greatest joy. So perhaps it turned out that parenting took the edge off, and I don’t feel the need to prove myself through Great Writing Accomplishments that are, as Marybeth points out, as much about luck as talent. A couple of years ago, when both my son and daughter had diplomas in hand, I extricated myself from real estate sales to live the (frugal) life of a writer, and I enjoyed another great moment of joy when my son said he tells all his friends how proud he is of his mom for pursuing her dream.

Andromeda: I remember a quiet six-month stretch following completion of a marine science graduate degree (my husband was still in his grad program), when we were living in rural Nova Scotia, with ample time and a gorgeous coastal view of forested islands and a lobsterman’s dock out my window. We had no kids yet. I was already published (magazines plus one travel guidebook) and now had the temporary freedom to launch a more challenging book project. And yet – I couldn’t find quite the right subject, or the burning motivation. I hadn’t lived enough. I didn’t have anything I needed to say. And perhaps I had too much freedom.

By the next year, I had no time at all, even for a shower, and everything to say, because I had become a young mother. We moved to Alaska, and those first years, with one baby and then two, and a dire need for freelance cash, were my apprenticeship. I was desperate, inbetween the long hours of nursing and diaper-changing, to express my feelings and follow my interests.

Like Eowyn, I felt a strong need to develop my own identity through my writing and my lifestyle (including being more physically adventurous though, ironically, having adventures was harder and riskier now, with babies). Everything felt amped up. Seeing the world through my children’s eyes, I noticed things more. Was it sleep deprivation? Living in a new place? Anxiety mixed with bliss? I don’t know, but every walk outside felt like a revelation and I couldn’t sort out my thoughts and feelings without writing – alas, there was never enough time!

The frustration pushed me beyond perfectionism, forcing me to write badly and quickly, to let things go into print even if they weren’t fully realized or triple-checked. Also, my colicky first baby trained me how to manage time: his naps always lasted 40 minutes. If he fell asleep in the car, I drove home quickly to write, take notes or just read, even if for only the 20 or so minutes remaining. Now that my kids are independent and wonderfully helpful to me, I’ve lost some of that early discipline, but our lives together still inform everything I write.

Part II of this conversation will be posted on Saturday. Part III will be posted on Sunday.

Marybeth Holleman is author of Heart of the Sound and coeditor of Crosscurrents North. She's now at work on a collection of essays, and on Off the Map: A Year Away from School and Into the World. Her son turns 18 this summer, and leaves for college this fall.

Eowyn LeMay Ivey is the author of the novel The Snow Child, represented by Jeff Kleinman of Folio Literary Management. She is a former newspaper reporter who now works as a bookseller at Fireside Books in Palmer, Alaska. Her daughters are 2 and 10 years old.

Cinthia Ritchie is a reporter and news editor for Alaska Newspapers. Her work has been published in literary journals around the world, and she's a Pushcart Prize, Rasmuson Foundation and Alaska Arts Council fellowship recipient. She's currently finishing up a novel. Her son is 17 and leaves for Lewis and Clark College this fall.

Deb Vanasse is the author of two young adult novels, three children's books, and two travel guides. Her latest book is Picture This, Alaska, a collection of archival photographs. She's currently revising a mystery set on the present-day Chilkoot Trail and drafting a literary novel, Cold Spell. Her son, Lynx, works as a mechanical engineer in Bremerton, Washington, and her daughter, Jess, is a grad student in Speech Pathology at Portland State.

Andromeda Romano-Lax is the author of a novel, The Spanish Bow, and many travel and natural history books about Alaska. She is currently working on a novel that takes place in 1938 Italy, as well as a film project. Her children, both homeschooled, are 14 and 11 years old.

PROMOTIONATION: Digging in the Dark -- a Guest-post by Miranda Weiss

Miranda Weiss of Homer is the author of the newly released Tide, Feather, Snow, which Publishers Weekly called "a deeply honest memoir." She will be appearing at Title Wave in Anchorage on May 28, and we're very pleased she's willing to share some of her promotional experiences with 49w, including the making of a YouTube video about a truly Alaskan subject.

When my editor at HarperCollins asked me to put together a promotional video for my new book, Tide, Feather, Snow, about my experience moving to Alaska after growing up in East Coast suburbs, my mind began to race. What would that entail? What kind of video would make people want to buy the book? How could I do it? It would be great if the video could, you know, take on a life of its own, my agent said when I mentioned the assignment. You mean go viral? I asked. Yes, she responded. No pressure there, I thought.

Take…on…a…life…of…its…own. Wasn’t this what my book was supposed to do?

This idea conjured images of the few wildly famous YouTube videos I’d seen—the Lolita talking about nothing in particular from the edge of a bed in a nondescript bedroom, the guy who performed unremarkable dance moves in front of landmarks all over the world, the band of cute urban hipsters whose dance video on treadmills I had watched maybe a dozen times.

It would have to be funny, I thought. Somewhat bizarre. Kind of sexy.

I put the idea out of my mind.

Until my husband planned his first winter clamming trip. There is nothing he loves more than digging razors on the beaches of Ninilchik. I consider dipnetting for salmon a much more efficient way to get protein and have never been much good at spotting clam shows. But there did seem to be something promising about clamming in the frigid dark for the video. It did fit the “bizarre” quotient, although there would be no nudity at zero degrees on a windy winter beach. I signed on.

I asked a friend if I could borrow the video camera she uses to record her kids. But once she said yes, I floundered. Could I really put together anything watchable—and in the 2-3 minute range my editor had specified—without editing skills or equipment? In the midst of my floundering, George, a friend of my husband’s who runs the one-man Headwinds Production Company in Homer agreed to help.

We gathered our clam guns, headlamps, and a borrowed Coleman lantern. George started recording as we were getting ready to leave. On the drive up, we discussed what the video could be like. It should be funny, I told George. Maybe play off a caricature of Sarah Palin and the various myths of Alaska. George didn’t say much but once we drove out along the dark beach, he turned his camera on again.

The temperature hovered around zero degrees, and I could see nothing outside the halo of light around the lantern. We lit a bonfire and then got to work. The beach was beautiful on that night. The minus tide had exposed cantaloupe-sized anemones that sparkled with frost. Salty slush lay in puzzle-shape patterns across the sand. An owl flew silently along the edge of my light. An hour or so later, I had three clams in the bottom of my bucket and my toes felt fused together. I wandered back to the fire and sipped off a flask. George had turned his camera off.

The next week, George and I met to talk about the video. I was still caught up in my vision of funny—quirky—cute. That has nothing to do with your book, George said. The video should be like your book, be the same voice as your book. I’m embarrassed to admit that idea hadn’t occurred to me. Wasn’t the consumer world that would hopefully devour the video—and then the book—only attracted to the flashy and quick? My book is slow, gentle, lyrical.

George’s vision felt like a revelation. I didn’t have to reinvent the world of my book. It already existed. What I had to do was use the video to usher potential readers into it.

I wrote and recorded a script that sounded like the book, and George put a rough cut together. A month later, we had a finished product.

What we ended up with is something that feels like the book and gives readers a taste for the world of the book. I shared it with family and friends. They loved it. It made George’s girlfriend cry.

In the final weeks before my book was released, I found myself going over again and again ways to pitch the book, and ways to use new media to get coverage of the book. Instead of being euphoric about the release of my first book, I was a nervous wreck. I slept fitfully and bolted out of bed at 5 AM. My heart felt as though it was in the midst of a two-week-long sprint. I couldn’t even relax enough to read a friend’s beautiful new book that had just come by mail, let alone flesh out the proposal I’d started for my next book.

During those weeks, I had dozens of conversations with fellow writers about how to tap into new media in order to promote the book. We discussed blogs, Facebook groups, online sites that review books, ways to pitch my books with others to increase impact, and commercial magazines that review books. And I took care of the basics: I hired a local woman to design a website, and posted the video there. I posted the video to my Facebook site, and friends posted it to theirs. My publicist planned a West Coast tour; I added events to it and began to get the word out to people I know.

The video has gotten 340 YouTube hits last I checked. Hardly viral. Now I’m trolling around online for sites that might post it. One of the marketing gurus at HarperCollins referred to my video as “the best tool we’ve got” to promote my book. Isn’t that supposed to be the book itself?

I know we live in a new economy that depends on new media. But honestly, I get exhausted by thinking about ways to cast my book again and again into the world so that it might get hooked, at least momentarily. And I’m tired of the idea that in order to succeed as a writer—in whatever way I define that—I’ll have to become deft at using new media to promote my work.

But I’ll go like mad for as long as I can stand it to get my book into the world. I’ve put years into Tide, Feather, Snow and what I really want is for people to read it and to feel something—anything—from living within its 267 pages. And, of course, I want to sell copies so that I can sell the next book and hope to maintain my glamorous lifestyle: a 13-year-old Subaru, a 30-year mortgage, a nasty second hand boot-buying habit. In all honesty, I’m looking forward to getting back to my work.