Guest post by: David Rocklin

Author of The Luminist, David Rocklin appears at the Wordstock Festival on Sunday, October 9 at 2pm on the Wieden+Kennedy Stage and is leading the workshop The How of Where: On Setting as Character in Fiction on Sunday, October 9 at 4:30pm

What are you reading now?

 Haunting Bombay, by Shilpa Agarwal. She’s a friend and a wonderful writer.

Who is your favorite new author?

 So many! Right now, I’m pretty taken with the voice Justin Torres brings to We the Animals.

Which writers have most influenced you?

This is always such a tough question, and I’m going to answer it this way: I can tell you that the books I’ve read in my life that still truly resonate in me are A Gesture Life by Chang Rae Lee, The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer, A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, A Separate Peace by John Knowles, Catcher in the Rye (do I even need to say who wrote it?), Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler, and so many others.

What are you working on now?

A new novel that emerged from the research I did for The Luminist. Tentatively called The Daylight Language, it’s about a young boy taken from his country after it is invaded by the British Army in 1868. He’s brought back to England and becomes a ward of Queen Victoria. As with The Luminist, it’s very loosely suggested by historical events.

What is your favorite website for writing and literature?

 I love and frequently haunt Rumpus (http://therumpus.net/), The Nervous Breakdown (http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/), PW (http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/home/index.html), and also read Galley Cat and Shelf Awareness daily. For reviews, I read Salon (http://www.salon.com/), NYT and The Daily Beast (http://www.thedailybeast.com/). If I’m feeling for a bit of snark – and also for a reminder that writers are maligned and made fun of – I’ll check out Slushpile Hell.

What is your favorite children’s book?

The Little Prince. I have an original copy that my mother received as a gift from a sick girl she’d visited in the hospital (she was a singer and would stop at children’s wards in cities she visited on tour). The girl passed away shortly after underlining all the sentences that were important to her. That’s how my mother received it – full of underlined sentences. I love that story, and I love that I can see where the little girl found words in it that were so important to her.

What is your favorite food?

Dim sum!

Do you have a connection to Portland or the northwest? Do you live here or have you visited? If so, what is your favorite thing about it?

My favorite thing about Portland is my publisher, Hawthorne. They’ve been amazing to me and to the novel. I couldn’t ask for better people to work with, and when I visit the city now, I’m reminded of how fortunate I am.

For more info about David Rocklin and his book,  please visit www.davidrocklin.com  or the book’s FB page. Also you can follow him on Twitter: @drocklin

Guest post by: David Rocklin

Author of The Luminist, David Rocklin appears at the Wordstock Festival on Sunday, October 9 at 2pm on the Wieden+Kennedy Stage and is leading the workshop The How of Where: On Setting as Character in Fiction on Sunday, October 9 at 4:30pm

I recently returned from a place I still haven’t been to.

My novel, “The Luminist,” comes out on October 1, 2011. For the last few years, I’ve been immersed in its story arcs, its characters, and its setting. That latter element was the greatest challenge for me in writing this novel.

Set in nineteenth century Ceylon, “The Luminist” tells the story of Eligius Shourie, an Indian boy whose father is killed by English soldiers. He becomes a servant in the house of Catherine Colebrook.

Independent and driven, married to a fading Court Director, Catherine is losing herself in the yet-to-be-born art and science of photography. Eligius becomes her apprentice, and a bond neither of them expected is formed while around them, unrest between the native populace and the colonials occupying their country threatens to break open.

When I first began to consider the overarching story and how to research the time period it would occur in, I felt overwhelmed. I lacked even a passing familiarity with India’s caste system, or the intricacies of the East India Company, or the mechanics of early photographic devices. That daunted me. Then I realized the obvious. The Ceylon of this story no longer exists. I could travel to what is now Sri Lanka and I would not find it.

Research ensued. A lot of it. I drew out the rims and borders of the country as it would have been. The names of villages and (to the extent available) where one was in relation to another. The trade to and from. The vagaries of weather. Food, jobs, trees, words – it all helped me fill in the gaps in that short hand we have with the places we know from experience. What I was missing, though, was that sense of having lived there, of feeling it at that level.

I realized that the elements I mentioned above, that have been so critical to other stories (“A Passage to India” is a prime example) were not what brought this story to me. “The Luminist” at its heart is about the moment before photographs ever existed in the world. It’s about what it felt like to see the first image come, and how the quest for that moment changes Catherine and Eligius.

So, after months upon months of research, I turned to photographs. Some were taken by the actual woman who formed the inspiration for Catherine (Julia Margaret Cameron). The first photograph of hers I’d seen is now the cover of the novel. Another (not hers) of a boy at a distance, walking along a mountain path under an outcropping of rock, placed me so intimately into my imagined path for Eligius – the way he walked to and from his home village to the Colebrook estate – that I dreamt of it one night. Research, lived in for a lengthy period of time, began to feel like a memory of my own from a time when I was younger. The setting began to feel intimate.

I’m in the midst of research now, for the next novel. Abyssinia, 1868, and Queen Victoria’s Court in England. I haven’t been to either place. They no longer exist as I will write them.

Still, I am looking forward to visiting.

***
I would love to hear from you – what kinds of research do you do? Have you ever written about a place you’ve never been to? How did you find that – challenging, or liberating? Finally, when I see you at Wordstock, remind me to tell you about my “Final Analysis” fear!

For more info about David Rocklin and his book, please visit www.davidrocklin.com  or the book’s FB page. David Rocklin is also on Twitter: @drocklin.

Guest post by: Scott Nadelson

Author of Aftermath, Scott Nadelson appears at the Wordstock Festival on Saturday, October 8 at 1pm on the Wieden+Kennedy Stage and is leading the workshop In the Beginning: Crafting Compelling Story Openings on Saturday, October 8 at 3pm.

In the late spring of 1993, just after my junior year of college, I had a miserable job selling newspaper subscriptions over the phone. This was in northern New Jersey, where my fellow salespeople were all far more aggressive than I, and far more successful. In the cubicle beside me was a dapper old guy in his seventies, who had a deep musical voice and higher commissions than anyone else. He wore suits and ties and reeked of gin.

Whenever he talked to anyone who wasn’t a customer, he spit out near-insults, as if couldn’t be bothered with any nicety that didn’t contribute to his paycheck. He once looked me straight in the eye and said, “You’re the worst salesman I’ve ever seen.”

But it wasn’t only the job that made me miserable. The young woman I’d been seeing the previous semester was at her family home in Long Island, less than a two hour drive away, but she kept making excuses not to get together. It was obvious she was pulling away from me, hinting that she’d reconnected with a high school boyfriend, but I didn’t want to believe it. I kept hanging onto a futile hope, calling her every few days, leaving messages, waiting for her to call back. I spent my nights watching basketball, pinning my romantic dreams on the unlikely event that my Knicks would win a national championship; if only they could pull off the impossible, I thought, then the girl would come to her senses and find her way back to my bed by the start of the next semester.

That summer, with its painful oscillations between hope and despair, stayed with me long after it was over, and for years I wanted to do something with the material. But there wasn’t much of a story in it. The drunk, grouchy old salesman and I hardly spoke. All summer we stayed isolated in our separate miseries, until I quit the job and went back to school. The Knicks lost, and the girl left me.

Still, I couldn’t let situation go, and while working on an early draft, I knew that the old man’s failures and disappointments would have to be central, that they would provide the soft nudge that would send the narrator in a new direction, though I didn’t yet know what that direction would be. Since I already had the Knicks in mind, basketball provided a logical starting place, but the turning point came as a total surprise. One day, with the story still going nowhere, I was idly reading about New York Jewish basketball players of the 1940s and discovered this small detail about the career of Dolph Schayes, one of the game’s early stars: during college, Schayes had broken his arm in the middle of a season and kept playing, learning to shoot left-handed rather than sit on the bench.

As soon as I discovered this detail and imagined the old man playing beside Schayes as a teenager, I knew what the story was about–an impossible striving toward unattainable goals, and the mixture of dignity and humiliation that follows. In the shadow of Dolph’s greatness, the old man can’t cease striving and failing, and punishes himself as a result. Faced with the old man’s suffering, the narrator relinquishes his own hopes and abandons an essential part of himself, the part that desires and strives and accepts each new disappointment as it comes. Soon after finding the detail, I had a complete draft of the story, “Dolph Schayes’s Broken Arm,” which became the first story in my new collection, Aftermath.

What I love about writing stories is how open they are to surprise and improvisation, how a small detail can shift a story’s entire geography, changing its contour and climate. All I needed was that broken arm, and what had been the disordered, drama-less chaos of ordinary life suddenly began to take shape. This is something I learn again and again, whenever I sit down to write: one accidental detail can give form to formlessness, and the most unexpected discovery is often the most illuminating.

More info about Scott Nadelson at his website: http://scottnadelson.com/.

Guest post by: Scott Nadelson

Author of Aftermath, Scott Nadelson appears at the Wordstock Festival on Saturday, October 8 at 1pm on the Wieden+Kennedy Stage and is leading the workshop In the Beginning: Crafting Compelling Story Openings on Saturday, October 8 at 3pm

What are you reading now?

Two neglected little gems I dug up in a used bookstore: Fifty Days of Solitude by Doris Grumbach and The Huge Season by Wright Morris.

Who is your favorite new author?

Well, he’s been around for a while, but he’s new to me: Geoff Dyer, whose range is incredible, from the gorgeous and elegiac But Beautiful to the outrageous and hilarious Out of Sheer Rage.

Which writers have most influenced you?

There are a ton, but I always come back to Isaac Babel, Ivan Turgenev, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, William Maxwell, Leonard Michaels, Paula Fox, Peter Taylor, Mavis Gallant.

What are you working on now?

I just finished my first nonfiction project, a literary self-portrait in personal essays called The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress, which will be published by Hawthorne Books next year. But I’m also always working on stories and have a few new ones drafted.

What is your favorite website for writing and literature?

I don’t spend a lot of time on websites, but lately I’ve been enjoying the book reviews on the Ploughshares blog—they’ve called my attention to titles I wouldn’t have come across otherwise.

What is your favorite children’s book?

I’ve got a one-year-old daughter, so I’m reading a lot of them lately. She’s partial to Hop on Pop, but my favorite is Goggles! by Jack Ezra Keats.

What is your favorite food?

Tapas: a little of this, a little of that.

Do you have a connection to Portland or the northwest? Do you live here or have you visited? If so, what is your favorite thing about it?

I’ve lived in Oregon for fifteen years now, almost as long as I’ve lived anywhere. I’m a New Jersey transplant who happily took root—it would take a pretty big tractor to dig me out now.

For more info about Scott Nadelson, take a look at his website, here.

Guest post by: Alexander MacLeod

Author of Light Lifting, Alexander MacLeod appears at the Wordstock Festival on Saturday, October 8 at noon on the McMenamins Stage.

Most of the short stories in my book, Light Lifting,take place in Windsor, Ontario, the city where I grew up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Located directly across the river from Detroit, Michigan…

…Windsor has a pretty close relationship with the metropolis on the other side of the water and though I never planned it this way, some people have told me that Light Lifting reads like an ‘almost American’ Canadian book. I can understand why they feel this way. The Canada in my stories doesn’t really correspond to the standard images that come up when most people think of the country: there is very little majestic nature to be found in these plots – no Rocky Mountains or wide open prairie – and you can go all the way through the book without finding a single doomed expedition to the high arctic.

Instead, my characters work in car plants…

 

 

 

 

 

…Or they get caught up in the currents flowing down the Detroit River…

Or they race the trains though the rail tunnel that connects the two cities…

 

 

 

 

 

When I was thinking about the powerful images that dominated this landscape, I was attracted by the massive scale of the Great Lakes Freighters…

…And I saw the long lines of eighteen wheelers backed up on the Ambassador Bridge.

I came back a couple of times to the narrative possibilities swirling around a building called the ‘Renaissance Centre’…

…and I love the statue of Joe Louis’s hanging fist so much that I knew I had to find a place for it in my book.

The other American connections are more subtle, but probably more fundamental. When I re-read the stories now, I see just how often this literal or figurative action of ‘crossing over to the other side’ comes up and how much driving takes place and how many references there are to US culture.

Though I was surprised by this, I think it’s natural and to be expected. Windsor is, after all, a border town and many families, like my own, are spread out in a local circle that overlaps into both countries. People go back and forth every day and most Windsorites cheer for the Tigers and Pistons rather than the Blue Jays and Raptors. The linkages between the two places are close and the relationship runs back through history – Windsor sent over a lot booze during prohibition, just as it welcomed 1000’s of escape slaves during the time of the Underground Railroad. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea though: it’s not all love and happiness. The differences between Canada and the United States are serious and real and persistent and hardly anybody on either side of the line is scrambling to change their citizenship. We are our own people and Windsor and Detroit are separate places, though they may touch each other in intimate ways. I hope the almost American stories in Light Lifting give a sense of this shared understanding and capture at least some of that special mix of affection and frustration only intimacy can produce.

You can read more about Alexander MacLeod in this interview on “Words With Writers.”

You’re invited to a Hollywood version of a schoolhouse carnival, circa 1954. We’ll have a cake walk, a fortune teller, face painting and more. Come play the ring toss for a chance to win a 2006 Ribbon Ridge Pinot Noir from Archery Summit. Visit firefighters at our kissing booth. Enjoy a Manhattan or a Cosmopolitan snow cone. See what Miss Gracious Pockets, Portland’s beloved Poison Waters, is hiding in her skirt.

Parking is free.

Dress is fun.

Must be 21 or older.

Literal Fun, Wordstock’s annual fundraising event, is Friday, September 30, 2011.

All proceeds benefit Wordstock’s programs serving readers, writers, teachers and students.

Buy tickets here.

Guest post by: Jonathan Hill

Illustrator of Americus, Jonathan Hill appears at the Wordstock Festival on Saturday, October 8 at 2pm on the Oregon Cultural Trust Stage and Sunday, October 9 at 2pm on the Wordstock Community Stage.

What are you reading now?

Ack! I’m not reading anything now. I’ve started the first Game of Thrones book, but honestly, he’ll be done with the series before I finish the first book at the rate I’m going.

Who is your favorite new author?

Like new-new or new to me? I’m a little behind the times, but have you heard of this ‘new’ author I just read, Suzanne Collins? She wrote this crazy series called The Hunger Games. You should check it out.

Which writers have most influenced you?

The other young cartoonists and illustrators trying to make it. We’re all in the same boat, and although there’s a tinge of jealousy whenever someone else gets a project you don’t, or gets picked up, it’s a great support network and really, in our heart of hearts we’re cheering each other on.

What are you working on now?

I have the idea for my next book, but it got sidetracked a bit getting ready for Americus to come out. I don’t want to spoil anything because it’s still in the conceptual stage, but I think I’m going to take a little break from working on comics for a bit and work on expanding my illustration portfolio a bit.

What is your favorite website for writing and literature?

Even though it’s primarily for visual artist, Drawn is a great resource for anyone creative. I would recommend that and then checking the websites and blogs of writers and artists that you admire. These days it’s so easy to come across places where you can learn about people’s processes. It might not be what works for you, but you can learn a lot seeing how people work and come up with their ideas.

What is your favorite children’s book?

Cowboy’s Secret Life by Joan Walsh Anglund. It’s a really adorable little book about a little cowboy and all the things he imagines up.

What is your favorite food?

Being Vietnamese-American, can I get two choices? One for each culture. So it would be pho or a good hamburger. That may sound like I eat a lot of beef, but I don’t eat them that much to make them that much more special.

Do you have a connection to Portland or the northwest? Do you live here or have you visited? If so, what is your favorite thing about it?

Yes, I’m local. This is going to sound really dumb, but one of my favorite things about the Pacific Northwest is Fred Meyer. It’s the best grocery store ever. I can buy myself a Coca-cola classic to go along with the locally made organic pasta, and I don’t have to deal with the hassle of a place like New Seasons or Whole Foods.

You can read more about the process of making Americus on its website http://www.saveapathea.com, or you can follow Jonathan and his other artistic endeavors on his website http://www.oneofthejohns.com

Drums, happy hour
Collaborative haiku
This Thursday at five

Why bother with regular happy hour? We know you want something exciting, and for one night this week we can help, (but you’re on your own for the rest of the time).There’s nothing garden variety about the happy hour event in Green Dragon’s beer garden this Thursday, and nothing humdrum about Portland Taiko’s rhythms. Portland Art Spark brings together Wordstock and Portland Taiko so you can consume haiku, drumming, food, and drink, in equal measure. You can’t beat a combination like that.

Thursday, September 15th
5:00-7:00pm
@ Green Dragon 928 SE 9th Ave. Portland, OR 97214

Guest post by: Jonathan Hill

Illustrator of Americus, Jonathan Hill appears at the Wordstock Festival on Saturday, October 8 at 2pm on the Oregon Cultural Trust Stage and Sunday, October 9 at 2pm on the Wordstock Community Stage.

One of the biggest challenges in working on Americus was developing a relationship with MK, the writer of the book. I had never worked with a writer before, and MK and we had never met before working on Americus, so there was a little bit of a learning curve involved.

The first couple chapters were spent getting a feel for how the other worked and how to play off their strengths while still being able to do what we do best. This was most apparent with MK’s dialogue and my pacing.

MK’s dialogue is so great. It flows really naturally and is hilarious without being over the top. My biggest thing is I try to be very deliberate with the way I like the action to be paced. At the beginning we struggled a bit to find a way to get both of these things to work out and to find a rhythm with each other.

Look at this page from the first Chapter:

In this page you can totally see those two things competing. First off, you’ll notice the weird layout of this page. It’s completely unlike anything else in the book. I’m trying to pace the scene the way I want to, while working around trying to fit in the principal’s verbose [but hilarious] speech.

Now look at this page later on in the book:

Notice that there is still a lot of dialogue, but at this point we had been working together for awhile and had worked out a lot of the kinks. MK streamlined her writing a little bit and become more conscious of giving me some breathing room to play around with pacing and rhythm, and I had figured out how I would need to break dialogue up in a way to give myself the room I needed.

When we finished the initial draft of the book and I was read through it, I was very conscious of this. I was worried that it stuck out too much and that it looked unprofessional. I totally freaked out at the thought of having to go back and redraw the first chapter. Our editor said it wasn’t a big deal, but I’m pretty OCD, and it couldn’t help noticing it every time I read it. The more I looked at it though, the less it bothered me.

I realized that it’s not about the mistakes – it’s about the process. It sounds totally corny, but if you are conscious of this when you read the book, it’s kind of like watching a video of two people learning how to dance together. They’re stumbling awkwardly in the beginning and stepping on each others feet, but eventually it’s like they’re floating on air, in sync. There’s something honest and really rad about that.

You can read more about the process of making Americus on its website http://www.saveapathea.com, or you can follow Jonathan and his other artistic endeavors on his website http://www.oneofthejohns.com.

Guest post by: Ann Cameron

Author of Spunky Tells All, Ann Cameron appears at the Wordstock Festival on Saturday, October 8 at 11am on the Knowledge Universe Stage and also appears at the Children’s Literature Reading Showcase at the Central Library on Wednesday, October 5 at 5 pm.

I’ve been a Portland six years now, after twenty-five years of living in Guatemala, five or so years of living in New York City, five years in Iowa, four in Boston, and a childhood in a small town in northern Wisconsin. I grew up in a small town on a lake, swimming, riding horseback, shoveling tons of snow in the winter… and a love of nature and an interest in people and how they think and feel, became very much part of me. Portlanders have so much of the appreciation of nature I grew up with. I am very touched by the care people give to their fabulous gardens, and the way the old “heritage” trees of Portland are protected, maintained, and honored with labels saying what kind of tree they are and their age.

At the moment my favorite children’s book is Randall Jarrell’s The Animal Family. I’m inspired by classic writers who are inexhaustible–Hans Christian Anderson and Charles Dickens; and my favorite writer of all time is Anton Chekhov, who was a Russian doctor as well as (I think) the greatest short story writer ever and a magnificent playwright. The greatest writers somehow know how to reach a great depth within readers and shape our consciousness to be more sensitive to joy and pain, more conscious of hurt and of goodness. To be more alive. When I’m writing, I’m more alive, and so I hope I never quit!

When I was a child, I loved reading. I thought authors were like God: they seemed to understand everything about life! They talked about why people did things and what they wanted–topics that were never speculated about in my family. I wanted to be an author to be like God! Then I became an author and found out — well, there are occasional moments when one has a flash of insight and feels like a genius, maybe even like God. There are more moments when one feels frustrated, lost, patient but persistent — more like a dog, more like a Spunky, working hard to take everything in, and keeping his nose to the ground.

More info about Ann Cameron and her books can be found at www.childrensbestbooks.com