Guest post by: Matt Stewart

Author of The French Revolution, Matt Stewart appears at Wordstock Festival on Sunday, October 10th at 1pm at the McMenamins stage

Serendipity is one of life’s great delights. We’ve all had that experience of floating through a perfect day, bouncing from adventure to adventure with amazing friends. Occasionally, I encounter that kind of day at the computer too, rocketing through pages of fiction in a blink, vivacious stories gushing like Deepwater Horizon.

But those days are all too rare, with a transient sense of joy in the vein of lunar eclipses and traveling carnivals. And my career is far too important to leave up to luck.

Which takes me to the biggest lesson I’ve learned in writing and publishing so far: hustle like your career depends on it. Because it does.

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Guest post by Beren deMotier

Author of The Brides of March: Memoir of a Same-Sex Marriage, Beren deMotier appears at Wordstock Festival as a performer with the TIME OUT comedy group on Sunday, October 10^th at 5pm on the Wieden + Kennedy Stage.

I gave up novel writing when I had kids. I decided I didn’t have the time for long form writing. All I could handle was something that could be finished, finite, and not take years. So after four novels that never got good enough, I began writing humorous social commentary about life as a lesbian mom for GLBTQ publications back when same-sex parenting was a novel idea.

I consider that writing my apprenticeship.

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Guest blog by Margaret Chula

Author of What Remains: Japanese Americans in Internment Camps (with quilt artist Cathy Erickson) appears at Wordstock Festival on Saturday, October 9th at 2pm on the Wordstock Stage

Margaret Chula reading from What Remains at the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, September 11, 2010

“When it snows, the San Gabriel Mountains look beautiful,” the Japanese woman at the front desk of the Los Angeles Miyako Hotel  tells me. “But sometimes there are fires on the mountains.”

Exactly nine years ago on the morning of September 11^th, I awoke in Portland smelling smoke. I searched the house thoroughly. There was no fire, yet I felt uneasy. At that moment, in New York, planes were crashing into the Twin Towers.

Now, on September 11, 2010, quilt artist Cathy Erickson and I are presenting our book What Remains: Japanese Americans in Internment Camps at the Japanese American National Museum. The room fills up early. Many of the audience were imprisoned in internment camps during World War II. Others are second- or third-generation Japanese Americans who learned about the camps in school, not from their parents, who were too ashamed or emotionally scarred to tell them.

September 11^th is a day to reflect on not only the loss of innocent lives, but also the dissolution of human rights. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, over 120,000 Japanese Americans were rounded up and transported to ten concentration camps in desolate areas of the country. Seventy percent of them were American citizens. Fifty thousand were children. Not one was ever convicted of a disloyal act.

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Guest post by: Jessica Francis Kane

Author of The Report: A Novel, Jessica Francis Kane appears at Wordstock Festival on October 10^th at 12pm and again at 3pm on the OEA stage.

The Bethnal Green tube station disaster was the largest civilian accident of World War II, and yet it was a mystery: In all cases death was by asphyxiation; there was only one broken bone among the victims. No bombs fell in the area that night, so why had the crowd panicked? For two days the government withheld information, citing issues of home security and the importance of keeping word about the tragedy from reaching the enemy. Eventually an inquiry was held in secret, the results of which were published after the war.

I first came across this story ten years ago, when I attended an event at the British Library for a new series of books published by the London Stationery Office. The series is comprised of official government reports not previously available in popular form, and the one the series editor held up in his hand—and spoke passionately about for a few minutes—was The Tragedy at Bethnal Green. He sketched the time and setting, explained that conditions were very difficult, morale very low at that point in the war. The magistrate who’d investigated, he said, had done an unusually good job and then had delivered an elegant report. The editor suggested, I don’t remember exactly how, that this was nothing short of heroic. I bought a copy of the book and later visited Bethnal Green to see the plaque that commemorates the accident. I took a few notes and thought I might turn them into a story someday.

That was the fall of 2000.

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