Check out all that latest on your favorite Wordstock Authors in the news!

Two First Novels, 10 Years In The Making
NPR
Short story writer Jessica Francis Kane spent 10 years on her first novel, which did get published. Her motivation came from a true …

Parallels to today’s wars make Vietnam story relevant
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
When Karl Marlantes pared down his epic novel of the Vietnam War to about 800 pages of realistic prose, he resumed shopping it around to agents and …

‘My Hollywood’: Mona Simpson’s love triangle of a boy, his mom and …
Seattle Times
Book review: Mona Simpson’s funny/sad novel “My Hollywood” is about a love triangle involving a young boy, his overbooked mother and a Filipino nanny who …

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Guest post by: Mrs. P

Author of Mrs. P’s Favorite Stories, Mrs. P appears at Wordstock Festival on Saturday, October 9^th at 5pm on the Target state, and again on Sunday, October 10^th on the Target Stage

The Brothers Grimm wrote some wonderful fairy tales, two of which — “The Frog Prince” and “Sleeping Beauty” — I’ve included in my first book, Mrs. P’s Four Favorite Fairy Tales and Funny Stories, which is coming out this fall and will be available at Wordstock. For every famous story by the Grimm Brothers, however, there are ten you’ve probably never heard of. The Brothers wrote, or at least have been given credit for, more than 200 fairy tales. Some of the lesser-known stories are quite charming, like “Brother and Sister” and “The Six Swans.” Many others, though, are just awful. Here’s my list of the four “Worst of the Brothers Grimm.”

The Ungrateful Son. A man hides a roast chicken because he doesn’t want to share it with his own father. When the father leaves, the chicken turns into a huge toad that jumps on the man’s face and cannot be removed. The man must feed the toad for the rest of his life, lest it eat his face. This story is sort of an early, even creepier version of “Alien.” Yikes!

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Guest post by: Wendy Burden

Author of Dead End Gene Pool: A Memoir, Wendy Burden appears at Wordstock Festival on Saturday, October 9th at 2pm, and again on Sunday, October 10th at 1pm

The irony is that I never set out to write a memoir in the first place. I am not a reader of them; I did not hear the clarion call. Fact is, I was writing a cookbook.

In a past life I was chef/owner of a seasonal French bistro in Seal Harbor, Maine, where the average income of the summer residents is somewhere between a hundred million and a hundred billion dollars. My restaurant was there for a reason. In spite of a cooking school diploma and a stint as grunt at a four-star restaurant in New York City, I was remarkably clueless; but one thing I did know was that even the kitchen staff of the wealthy get a night off a week, and you can eat lobster just so many times a summer.

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Guest blog by Tatjana Soli

Author of The Lotus Eaters, Tatjana Soli appears at Wordstock Festival on October 9th at 11am on the McMenamins Stage, and again on October 9th at 2pm on the Wieden + Kennedy Stage.

I can’t take credit for the title above, but I’ll tell you where I found it: on a great blog by the talented writer, Caroline Leavitt, where she discusses the writing process. Being at the precarious point of having published one novel, struggling through the writing of a second, I found Caroline’s thoughts about finding the beginnings of novels intriguing as I tried to think about my own process.

For me, that first spark that led to my novel was almost forgotten during the long series of drafts (and years) before publication. Talking about the book now often feels like unraveling a mystery: where did this thing start? Because although many answers are truthful, they also are only partial. The real answer is that the parts of a novel resemble a puzzle — the actual first piece matters less than its relation to other pieces that come later. But what are some of the necessary ingredients to start a novel?

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In the penultimate installment of Part One of Barry Smith’s dark comedy about the publishing world, Only Milo, Milo does a Dexter—only to discover his scheme has a fatal flaw.
………………………………..

47
Margaret made a public announcement
of the IPO in late May.

She would be a multimillionaire by the end of July.

I was missing José. For two years I had been revising three of my books for publication in his name. Now I felt left out of the loop.

Margaret hired new employees to perform the other duties I had assumed when the need arose: designing covers, working with agents, monitoring budgets, setting deadlines. I didn’t even have an office in her new complex in midtown.

She was traveling with her investment banker,
schmoozing prospective stockholders, illuminating
them on her vision for the firm, driving up the day
one stock price.

I assumed Howard was along on most of the trips.

I had nothing else to do but plot their demise.

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Guest blog by Tatjana Soli

Author of The Lotus Eaters, Tatjana Soli appears at Wordstock Festival on October 9th at 11am on the McMenamins Stage, and again on October 9th at 2pm on the Wieden + Kennedy Stage.

What are you reading now?

Well, the tragedy of my reading life is that I’m a s-l-o-w reader, but my pile of Must-Be-Read-Immediately books is growing crazily. I always split my reading between short stories and novels. Right now I’m reading a story collection, Do Not Deny Me, by Jean Thompson. She is so good I want to read all her other collections, which I already have, but given my slowness it might take the rest of the year. I’m finally reading The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, which is one of those books you know will be so good you delay reading it (if that makes any sense) because you know you won’t do anything else while under its spell. Here’s the first line: “Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.” If that doesn’t make you want to call in sick at work and spend the day reading, I don’t know what will.

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Guest post by: David Biespiel

Author of Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces, David Biespiel appears at Wordstock Festival on Sunday, Oct. 10th at 11am on the Powell’s Books Stage and Sunday, October 10th at 3pm on the McMenamins Stage

I wrote Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces because thinking about creativity is just as important for a writer as thinking about syntax, plot, and metaphor.

What I want to say is, a lot of the time just sticking with it is what this whole business of writing, making art, playing music, making songs, performing, and living a creative life is all about.

I’ve been a faithful adherent to that idea for over twenty years, and during that time one particular experience still inspires me. When I was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University in the 1990s, the social activist and poet Adrienne Rich paid a visit to our workshop. Rich, who had just retired from teaching literature and women’s studies at Stanford, was famous for spending as little time as she could with the creative writing fellows. I always admired her for that. Some of the students were excited that she was coming that Tuesday afternoon to our weekly workshop because they hoped she would look closely at our poems and give advice earned from years in the vineyard. Praise from Adrienne Rich, if it were to be given, would be high praise for sure. A couple of us, however, weren’t much thrilled with that prospect.

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Guest post by Ceri Shaw

Ceri Shaw appears at Wordstock Festival on Saturday, October 9th at 11am on the OEA Stage.

Map of Wales

Hello. My name is Ceri Shaw and despite my presence here I am not a writer. I am, however, the creator of a Welsh American social networking site called AmeriCymru.

One of our main goals this year is to promote Welsh and Anglo-Welsh literature. But what is Anglo-Welsh literature and why should anyone care?  As historian Gwyn Williams once famously said, “The Welsh as a people have lived by making and remaking themselves in generation after generation, usually against the odds, usually within a British context.” For the Welsh-speaking minority in Wales cultural identity is not a problem. The language defines it.

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Guest post by: Thea Cooper

Thea Cooper, Co-Author of Breakthrough: Elizabeth Hughes, the Discovery of Insulin and the Making of a Medical Miracle, appears at Wordstock Festival on  Sunday, October 10th at 2pm on the Wieden + Kennedy Stage

Q: What motivated you to write BREAKTHROUGH?

A: It all began with an article in The New York Times Magazine in 2003, which described in a general way the discovery of insulin. The article was brought to my attention by a colleague, Arthur Ainsberg. I thought how strange it was that although today diabetes affects many more people than polio does, the name Banting is not as well known as the name Jonas Salk. We started doing research.

The research was very exciting. It felt like detective work. We visited medical centers, universities, libraries, archives, and other sites of significance located in twenty-five cities and towns in eight states and four countries over the course of five years. What a cast of characters we discovered! In life as well as in literature, I’m fascinated with people who make unexpected choices. The story of Breakthrough is positively rife with them.

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