Volume 5

Submit Your Questions to: dearlee@writersnewsweekly.com.

Robert Santoro at BEA 2010

BookExpo America (BEA) is the largest annual book trade fair in the United States. This year’s BEA spanned from May 25th to May 27th, at the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York, NY. The event has changed significantly this year, taking place over fewer days and in a smaller space. Writers News Weekly recently spoke with Robert Santoro, author of Wrath, the first book in his Deadly Sins Series, about his experience at this year’s newly changed BEA.

WNW: So, what are some of your general impressions of this year’s BEA thus far?
Santoro: It’s noticeably smaller than it has been before. There’s a little more than a quarter of the space being used, which is certainly down from last year. But, they’re still selling hot dogs for 9 dollars each.

WNW: What are some highlights this year?
Santoro: Sarah Ferguson is here and I think John Grisham just walked by. You don’t generally get to see all these people together. I’m looking forward to the ForeWord Magazine awards ceremony, because I’m a finalist.

WNW: What are some negative aspects of the BEA?
Santoro: I think the smaller crowd actually makes it easier to get around, network, meet people, and see more things.

WNW: What do you think about the digital trend in writing and publishing?
Santoro: At first I thought I was going to hate it, but now I don’t know. It really seems to be catching on and making a difference. There’s been quite a buzz about all the new stuff here, but I haven’t gotten to see it yet.

Editor’s Note: Mr. Santoro’s book, Wrath, is the Bronze Winner in the fiction/mystery category of ForeWord Magazine’s 2009 Book of the Year Awards.

Roy Johnson

WNW also spoke with Roy Johnson, sales director of International Book Management Corporation (IBMC), about his experience at BEA 2010.

WNW: So, what’s your general impression of the BEA so far?
Johnson: It’s been good, based on visual displays, booths, and layout. I’ve had a good time and other attendees seem to have a favorable opinion of the event.

WNW: You’ve been to BEA in the past, and this year’s event has changed a lot—smaller size, shorter duration, etc.—how does this year’s BEA compare to past events?
Johnson: The only concern people seem to have is that it was so much shorter this year. There wasn’t a lot going on this Tuesday, so we really only had two days to do everything. There were some really elaborate displays and many attendees put a lot of effort into their booths and their presentations, so it was disappointing having so little time to see everything.

WNW: What were some of the highlights of this year’s conference?
Johnson: There was a stage set up out on the floor with a huge screen set up and it seems there were interviews being conducted up there. I didn’t take too close of a look, but basically, a person would sit up on stage and speak to a crowd of 50 or 60 people and the interview was flashed up on the screen. I assume the speakers were mostly authors. It was pretty neat. People were doing signings over there too.

WNW: Were there any problems or negative aspects that stand out?
Johnson: No. Other than being in a smaller space and taking place over fewer days, it was basically just the same ol’ BEA.

WNW: This year, BEA shared space with the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), a leading eBook conference. Did you attend this event?
Johnson: I passed by and heard bits and pieces of the discussions going on there, but I’m not particularly familiar with the digital trend in the literary world, so I didn’t spend time at this event.

Roy Johnson handles ancillary rights of existing literary properties. He attended BEA on behalf of SterlingHouse Publisher, Inc. and the interests of other publishers. You may contact Roy Johnson by phone, at 203-460-6400, or by email, at rjohnson@internationalbookmanagement.com.

By Sarah Benjamin

On first learning about the new social networking site, Twitter, I laughed. Who would possibly want to read posts written by other people about seemingly insignificant occurrences in their life? And better yet, who would take the time to post what they had for breakfast or why they hate wide ruled paper? I, for one, thought it might be the biggest colossal waste of time ever invented.

Ever a moderate, I signed up anyways, just to prove a point. I figured I had nothing to lose. I needed some sort of experience with this infamous application in order to lend some justification to my raves. So I made a username and a cute little page. I haughtily scrolled up and down the site, watching as tweets flew in. Some were as I predicted. But others were actually worth reading. It was crazily addictive. I turned to my page, ready to post something equally cool.
Five minutes later, I still didn’t know what to post. I wasn’t witty enough, wise enough, or interesting enough that I felt that any of my posts would be relevant.

But I began posting anyways, the first thing that came to my mind. There was a certain sense of validation, of importance, as I clicked “tweet!” on my screen. And there it went, my little message shooting across the technological atmosphere, colliding with the tweets of others. Others who were witty, wise, and interesting. Somehow, in that moment of imagined shoulder rubbing, I felt smarter. I felt like I was making some sort of impact. I was following big companies, making new friends, and finding people with similar interests.

Don’t get me wrong, I still don’t think I have become smarter, more funny or more interesting, per say, but I was pleasantly surprised at how neat of a tool Twitter turned out to be. I was soon finding other things on the internet worth looking at – articles, blogs, freebies – that I didn’t know existed. As I “followed” other people, they began to follow me. Me?

Twitter can easily go both ways though – a gateway or a black hole. It opens the doors to other people, other ideas, and even a few free books. It also seems to suck your time, attention, and maybe some of your life, into a virtual abyss from which only an Office Space-esque computer-mob-hit will free you from. My experience so far has been pretty good, though I still get annoyed when people post about their lunches, their crazy parties, or other inane things…but I do get a good laugh when Conan O’Brian posts something, or when Flashlight Worthy Reads gives a good recommendation I will give the book a second look. So I guess I’ll be here, carefully walking the edge between the gate or black hole, letting my tweets launch into the universe.

If you want to continue this talk, you can contact Sarah at sbenjamin@internationalbookmangament.com …or on Twitter: sbenji496

By Christopher Stokum

He was soaking in a blue inflatable kiddie pool in the back yard when Susan came to get her things. He heard her car in the drive, and getting out and drying off seemed the proper thing to do. Plus, he’d run out of cigarettes, and there was another pack in the house somewhere, so getting out was bound to happen soon.
“How long have you been out here?” She had come around the side of the house before he could move.
“Hour or two, maybe,” he said.
“I’ve got some things inside I thought I’d pick up,” she said. “I was around, so I thought I’d stop by and do that.”
He considered offering to help but couldn’t reconcile helping her move out with his wanting her to move back in. He stood up and picked up his towel. It’s still the proper thing to do, he thought, regardless of what either of us want here.
“Is Paulie home?” she asked. They walked in through the back door. He wondered if he should’ve gone in first, since it was all his house now, but then she might’ve gotten the idea that he saw the house as being unquestionably his, that there was no possibility that it could be even partly hers again. Which may not have bothered her or changed anything, sure, but it may have.
“I don’t know,” he said. He sat at the table and listened to her move around the house. It had thin walls, the house, so he didn’t have to talk too loudly for her to hear him, for which he was thankful. “I don’t know if Paulie’s home. I haven’t seen him outside today, but that doesn’t mean anything.”
“I might stop over there before I go back home.” He rubbed his thumb over the patch under his chin where his beard had never fully grown in. She paused in the kitchen doorway with two cardboard boxes that he didn’t know he’d had. “I want to make sure everything is square between the two of us. And the two of you.”
“Between all of us,” he said.
“Right, between all of us.”
+++
She really did have a lot of things at his place. There was some kind of order that she collected the things she had at his place in: expensive or sentimental or otherwise valuable things first, then mass-produced but nonetheless cherished things – e.g. the Fiestaware from her grandmother, the inflatable bed that she’d slept on when they’d stopped sleeping together, which he supposed held some kind of odd nostalgic value for her – then general things that there wasn’t much of a reason not to take, cooking pans and utensils and the combination VHS/DVD player that he hadn’t realized was hers. He couldn’t decide whether the order was conscious, but he guessed that it probably wasn’t.
He went upstairs and changed out of his trunks and put on some cologne in the bathroom. When he got back to the kitchen she’d carried everything to her car except for a few things that wouldn’t fit in the boxes that he figured she could get without his help, just a stack of books and the big broken clock that had been in the closet that she had absolutely fucking refused to put in the trash.
“Hungry at all?” he asked when she came back from her car. “I could make some sandwiches.”
“Coffee will be fine,” she said, “if you have it.”
He tried to remember how strong she liked her coffee and if she took cream and was surprised to find that he didn’t know. He was sure he had known at some point. She didn’t take sugar, at least; he was sure of it. She couldn’t taste it well. It was something to do with her taste buds that was the cause of it, maybe, or a problem with her neuro-connections. He’d been smoking a lot when they went to the doctor to have it looked into. The whole memory was hazy. Still, he was sure she couldn’t taste sugar well, like cats, so it wouldn’t make much sense for her to want it in her coffee. She sat down at the table.
“Where’s this apartment again?” he asked.
“Ulster Ave.,” she said. “Off of Lincoln, by the magistrate’s office there.”
“Nice place?”
“Nice place.”
“I’m happy for you,” he said. He wished that the conversation seemed stilted, but it wasn’t much different than the ones they’d had before she had moved out.
“Are you?”
“Of course. I’m glad you have a nice place. Setting makes all the difference.”
“It’ll be nice to get something on the walls,” she said. “I took some pictures down. I took the one from above the fireplace. I don’t know if you remembered that it was covering that hole because I didn’t.”
“Neither did I,” he said. “It should be easy enough to find something that will take its place. It’s a small enough hole.”
He found her a clean mug and filled it and left the coffee black, which she didn’t seem to mind. They sat sipping the coffee and looking at the things on the table. He wanted to reminisce since she was there. Not with her, out loud, just to himself or maybe for himself. He’d thought that seeing her would help bring it back, but it was the same as before. He could recall the facts just fine, but they didn’t carry any weight. No more weight than anything else he could remember did. Being introduced to her at the botanical garden was about on par with taking a bus the day before, making the coffee. It hadn’t been at the time, of course. Looking back, though, he couldn’t tell what had made meeting her any bigger than anything else. He didn’t know if there was a word for temporal parallax, but he felt that there should be.
“I still don’t know what you bought this clock for,” he said. “It was practically broken when you got it.”
She fingered the clock’s hands gently. He rubbed the patch under his chin. “It used to be really grand,” she said. “I knew that when I saw it. Its grandeur has just sunken down a bit. Or maybe the sediment’s just gotten stirred up and made it hard to see. It still is grand, kind of. It’s funny what time will do to things, even clocks.”
“What’d you want to see Paulie for?”
“I thought he should know why I moved out of here,” she said. She watched his eyes, like she always did. People don’t do that much anymore, he thought. It makes it disconcerting as hell when she does it.
“I told him,” he said. “You remember.”
“I remember that you told him to stay away from me. I remember you told him that moving away from here would be the smartest thing he could do.”
“Safest thing, I said.”
“Well, I wanted to explain what you were trying to say.”
“You love him?” he asked.
“Since the fourth grade, alright?” she said levelly. That was absolutely not a question, he thought. “I’ve loved him since I met him.”
“Don’t get snarky, Suze.”
She shrugged and set down her coffee. “I’m going over now to see if he’s there. Please take care of yourself.”
“You know I will.”
“I know.”
+++
He followed her to the door and watched her pack the last few things into her car. The sky was dotted with clouds, and he hated it because it wasn’t clean, because it was fragmented by the tufts of moisture, because it wasn’t together in the way that he felt it should be.
“Do you love him for his scars?” he asked. He appeared calm. Susan had told him once that a dog bit Paulie on the face when Paulie was a kid – eleven or twelve years old, probably, because it was after Susan knew him. She’d visited him at the hospital and Paulie’s brothers had laughed and said Paulie had a girlfriend, which Susan had apparently been alright with.
“Drop it,” she said and turned to face him.
“Or do you love him for his meth? Because he can’t remember your name most times you see him?” He wondered if he was being cruel. He didn’t want to sound cruel, just frank, but sometimes the two are hard to distinguish.
“I love him because he’s not what he’s got,” she said. “And because nobody understands that, I have to love him.”
He nodded and watched the kids down the street play catch. The fat one never caught the ball, never, but the other kids liked him anyhow. Behind the kids, the sun was setting, and her rays exploded into the sky with compassion, and he wished that he had worn sunglasses, and his eyes ached and he closed them.

By: Christopher Stokum

I entered my first college fiction class clutching my story proudly to my chest and radiating confidence. Fifty minutes later I emerged confused, panicked and not a little embarrassed. I had thought that I could write, really write; I thought my words flowed from the muses, through my heart and out of my pen uninterrupted and pure.

While reading my story aloud in class, though, I’d choked on those words. My sentences were awkward, my characters static and my plot convoluted and contrived. The story was missing something essential, which means that as far as my skills went, I was missing something essential. In short, I learned the first lesson that any good writing class should teach a budding author: humility.

The second lesson came a few classes later. The professor passed around a sheet that listed the “Don’ts of Fiction.” Commandment-style, they forbade using more than two exclamation points in four pages, beginning a story with “And then I woke up,” ending a story with “And then I woke up,” and so on. What’s this? I thought, Writing doesn’t have rules.

I was partially right. Writing doesn’t have rules beyond those of grammar, syntax and the like. The point of the class, however, wasn’t to teach me to write – they assumed that I had learned that in approximately the first grade – but to craft. It’s crafting that the rules are for, and it’s crafting that makes strong writing of all kinds.

It’s hard to imagine the literary giants of the past writing according to a rulebook. It seems that Twain and Faulkner and all the rest were made to break rules, not abide by them. Something a guitar instructor of mine once said comes to mind here. He told me to practice the modal scales until I memorized them, and then to practice more. I worked until I could start on any note of the scale, anyplace on the neck, and find the rest of the notes without hesitation. And then he told me to forget every scale I had learned. Good guitarists, he said, know the scales forward and back. Great guitarists forget that they know the scales.

It seems that crafting a piece of writing – be it fiction, nonfiction or poetry – works in much the same way. My professor didn’t intend for me to write-by-numbers or eliminate all experimentation from my writing. Rather, he wanted me to learn the rules and to write with them in mind, and then to forget the rules ever existed and just write. For if a writer learns the rules well enough, they’ll show up in his work whether or not he or she remembers them.

What am I to do when I’ve learned the rules and forgotten them, when I’ve integrated them into my craft so that there’s no longer a need to make them explicit? The answer is, I find more rules to learn and forget. There’s no convergence to a writer’s craft. Hemingway said that writers are apprentices in a craft that no one masters. And if we’re willing to see ourselves as craftsmen instead of artists, as learned instead of divinely inspired, we can do just fine as perpetual journeymen.

Jacquelyn Regis was born into extreme poverty in Haiti to a single mother who tried to offer her children a better life. Her family endured daily struggles and poverty living in a small hut in the l’Arsenal region of Haiti, but they were continuously supportive of each other. Regis herself eventually came to the U.S., attended college, became a lawyer, and fulfilled her mother’s desire for her to have a better life. The Daughter of L’Arsenal, her memoir about these experiences, is her first book and recently received “Honorable Mention” in the Eric Hoffer Book Award Memoir Category competition. You can find more information about the author and her book on her webpage, http://blog.regisbook.com.

By Christopher Stokum

When Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth was released in 1919, literary and intellectual circles had just one question: who is Emil Sinclair? The novel is profound and passionate; the ideas expressed in it show the touch of a master in their elegance. Yet no one could seem to locate Sinclair, the supposed author. It seemed as if the genius had left the moment he arrived.

As it turns out, Demian was written by Hermann Hesse. Determined that the novel not be read in the context of his previous works, which the author believed he had written in a state of incomplete self-realization, Hesse adopted a pseudonym. If Hesse’s claim that he had attained some form of enlightenment by 1919 seems pretentious, one need only look to his novel for proof of his sincerity.

The novel begins with Sinclair’s early childhood in a middle-class German family. From these early years onward, Sinclair is acutely aware of two opposing worlds: the realm of light – which contains his family, Christianity and so on – and the realm of dark – a world of crime, temptations and unrestrained thought. An experience with a bully at school forces Sinclair to, for the first time, enter into the realm of dark. The tension between the two worlds is somewhat eased by Max Demian, a new boy at school. Demian is odd – he interacts with adults as if he is their superior and he seems to be able to read others’ minds. Demian advises that rather than choosing one world or the other, Sinclair find a way to embrace both light and dark, good and evil. This marks the beginning of Sinclair’s journey toward self-realization, which, guided by Demian, occupies Hesse for the rest of the novel.

Demian is, in some ways, a traditional Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age novel. In the course of the narrative, Sinclair loses his innocence, fights with his family, discovers love and heartbreak, and comes to terms with himself. But to say that this is all the novel is about would be to oversimplify Hesse’s work. The novel is a philosophy book, and it is a religious book. The careful reader will find hints of Schopenhauer, Hegel and Nietzsche (if Demian isn’t an übermensch, I’m not sure who is), and Carl Jung’s psychology makes a number of appearances. Sinclair’s movement between various mentors and his struggle to eliminate dichotomies mirrors ideas found in Zen Buddhism, and his distrust of the God of Christianity calls Gnosticism to mind. Even the divide Sinclair observes between the realms of light and dark refers to the Daoist notions of yin and yang.

In a different novel, such varied themes might become garbled and dense. Hesse does not attempt to merely weave together a number of distinct doctrines, however. He rather extracts the similarities, the common beliefs – the archetypes, as Jung would call them – from the philosophical and religious systems he refers to and constructs a wholly original system from them. At times, Demian seems shockingly irreverent, casting aside beliefs that many individuals hold dear. At other points, though, Hesse writes with unrivaled compassion and understanding. If the reader is willing, as Sinclair is, to struggle through the difficult passages, he will reach calm waters. And if he looks hard into these waters, he will undoubtedly find a deeper understanding of himself.

By Sarah Schiavoni

Alison Bechdel's book, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, was just one in a long list of books required for my English 461 - Critical and Cultural Theory class. When it came time to read it as part of our discussion about feminist writing, I was a little thrown off: comic book format? Typically, when I think of comics, I think of the strips I read in the morning newspaper, the superhero comics with Spiderman and Superman, and the Japanese comics, manga, that I read in middle school. I never considered the possibility of literary comics, but this is precisely what Fun Home is—a graphic memoir about the author's life from childhood to her college days, centering on her relationship with her father.

Alison, a tomboy with no patience for frills and flowers, grows up in a beautiful Victorian home in the Pennsylvania countryside. Her father, Bruce, a high school English teacher and funeral home director, treats their home like a favorite child, spending countless hours renovating and decorating the interior and exterior before he dies. Alison comes to terms with who her father was alive and who he is in death through her recollection of her childhood. She and her father share a strained relationship due to their opposite natures: Bruce plays the feminine role and Alison plays the masculine role. While Bruce relishes in interior design, gardening, and trysts with younger men, Alison enjoys dressing in boyish clothing and playing with her brother in her father's funeral home, nicknamed the "fun home" by the two siblings. As Alison grows older and fails to live up to her father's idea of what a girl should be, she begins to understand her father and herself more. When she finally leaves home for college, she comes to realize that she loves other women and soon finds out that her father loves other men. Their shared homosexuality temporarily unites the two in a manner both bumbling and touching. Their renewed yet fragile relationship is cut short by her father’s sudden death and it is the mystery of his death and the unspoken words between Alison and her father that create tension and that "just can't put this book down" effect when reading Fun Home.

Bechdel's use of a comic book format is a unique and interesting way to tell her story that catches the readers’ eyes. Whereas a typical novel allows the reader to freely interpret the words and imagery, Bechdel's Fun Home outlines what the characters and settings look like and creates a fast-moving dialogue that is easy to get wrapped up in. Looking behind the scenes at Alison's life makes the reader want to understand why Alison's relationship with her father was so strained and highlights the juxtaposition between the two characters and their personalities. Fun Home appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list, was nominated for various awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and three Eisner Awards (one of which it won), and was praised by numerous journals and critics, including Sean Wilsey of the New York Times and Jill Soloway of the Los Angeles Times. The praise Bechdel's graphic memoir has received is well deserved, as her story and the format with which it is told are refreshing and interesting.