………………………………..

34
I knew I could do it.

I’d seen every season of “Dexter.” I’d watched “CSI”
for years.

Las Vegas and New York.

Have you ever Googled the term “undetectable poison”?

Poor, sickly José.

Mi Amigo.

I would bring you blankets for warmth.

I would fluff your pillows for comfort.

I would tuck in your sheets for security.

I would bring you green tea.

I would bring you chicken soup.

I would bring you undetectable poison that would
disappear from your system soon after causing
symptoms of a heart attack, you would rot and bloat
in your apartment for days until the rancid smell
became so intense your neighbors would complain to
your landlord who would faint upon opening your
door and inhaling the putrid stench of decaying
flesh, urine and feces, your smiling face resting
comfortably on your fluffed pillow, under your warm
blanket, secure in your tucked sheets.

Eaten by maggots.

Adios, Amigo.

35
Two weeks later, that’s exactly how it happened.

The literary world was stunned.

His doctor in Mexico City was not surprised, calling
him delicate, fragile.

His doctor in New York City was not surprised,
calling him chronically ill, living on the edge.

Dead man walking.

His father had died from a heart attack at age
thirty-nine.

Lucky coincidence for me.

No trace of poison at autopsy.

Natural death from a heart attack.

Irreplaceable voice in the literary world.
Tragic figure for the ages. The Tiger Woods of
literature.

Tribute blogs clogging the Internet.

Previously undiscovered manuscript.

Posthumous publication.

Runaway bestseller.

Movie rights.

Spanish translation.

Paperback rights.

International distribution.

People magazine cover.

36
Margaret appeared on “Charlie Rose.”

The interview was supposed to focus on her rise in
the publishing business.

It focused on a deceased Mexican imposter instead.

Brilliant.

Singular talent.

Sensitive and insightful.

Tragic.

I clicked the remote when she started to cry.

37
Had I killed the Golden Goose?

I
WROTE
THOSE
NOVELS.

And all I had to show for it was two translation
credits and a “thanks” in the foreword Margaret
wrote for the third novel to be published after his
death.

I had to talk to Margaret.

38
As agreed, I arrived at four o’clock.

She met me at the private back entrance to her
office. She told me she had a meeting at the Waldorf
Astoria at five o’clock. She seemed distracted as we
sat on her sofa.

Her new office was elegant. A major step up from the
converted warehouse in Brooklyn.

I told her we needed to talk about José.

She thought I meant the ad campaign for his final
book. A book tour doesn’t work when the author is
dead. We had to be creative about promoting his
final work. We all hoped, and assumed, it would be
a bestseller, but you never know for sure in the
publishing business.

“Not the ad campaign,” I said. “His writing.”

I had decided to work into the topic one step
at a time. I was not going to mention the two
translations. I was going to speak only about the
final book, the novel written in English, the one
currently being promoted.

“Did you know he had writer’s block?”

She was surprised.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

I had her attention.

“He hadn’t written a word in six years.”

“That’s a little hard to believe, Milo. He never
mentioned it to me.

“I’m glad he was able to get past it and write his
final novel – it’s a wonderful legacy for the world
of literature.”

She entirely missed the point.

“Margaret, he never got past it.”

She looked bewildered. Before she could say anything,
I blurted it out.

“I wrote that final novel. It’s my work, not his.”

She began to chuckle.

“Milo, Milo, Milo.

“I know I don’t appreciate you the way I should. I
never really thanked you for helping José compose it
in English – I’m sure you were a great help to him.
It had to take a lot of time and a great deal of
patience. I know how José could be.”

She was gaining a head of steam.

“But really, let’s not be silly. I can’t name a
single American author who writes with his passion
and intensity. No one struggled and overcame
obstacles like José. No American writer reflects
that type of perseverance and determination in their
prose.”

She hesitated for a moment.

“I was going to wait and surprise you with this later,
but I might as well let you know now, Milo, as long
as you keep it just between us until the official
announcement. The rumors are true. I’m taking the
company public with an IPO, probably in late July.
You’ll get 10,000 shares as recognition for everything
you’ve done for the firm. At $30 a share . . .”

She was interrupted by her personal assistant,
Christina, who had knocked and entered the front
door of her office.

“I’m sorry, I thought you were alone. I wanted to
remind you about your five o’clock meeting at the
Waldorf.”

“It’s okay, Christina. It’s only Milo. And he was
about to leave, weren’t you dear? We can talk more
later. And don’t wait up for me – these meetings
could go well into the night.”
I kissed her on the cheek without saying a word.

39
I waited in the front lobby.

“It’s only Milo.”

Did she think she could dismiss me so easily?
“10,000 shares.”

Did she think she could simply buy me off?

“No American writer.”

Bullshit.

“His passion and intensity.”

My passion and intensity.

40
The Waldorf Astoria was an easy six-block walk from
the office.

If nothing else, we could do a walk and talk. I
would have her undivided attention. I wondered why
she hadn’t suggested it.

Maybe I would have to take a different approach.
After all, I had the proof. I still had a copy of
my original manuscript. It was typed on my old Smith
Corona with my handwritten edits. Its pages were
yellow and faded.

Maybe I would keep quiet and simply produce a new,
even better manuscript. I did not necessarily do my
best work during my southern New Mexico period. Some
of my recent novels were richer in detail, larger in
scope.

More intense.

More passionate.

José struggled for thirty years. I struggled for
sixty.

I didn’t see her come out of the elevator.

41
But I saw him enter the building.

Howard Rush.

The firm’s cash cow.

Rainmaker.

Publishing superstar.

His recent novels had even outsold José’s, nearly
two to one.

Of course, his writing was shallow, his plots were
simple, his style was uninspired.

He was the best-selling author in the country.

Intense?

Passionate?

Time called him the “natural successor to Michael
Crichton” after M.C.’s death. I imagine they meant
it as a compliment.

He was the primary reason Margaret was able to move
her firm to Manhattan. He was the primary reason
Margaret would be taking her firm public in July.
He was the primary reason Margaret would be a
multimillionaire by the end of the summer.

He was there to meet Margaret.

42
He was Margaret’s lover.

I could tell by the way their bodies met in the
center of the lobby, a familiarity from intimacy.
I could tell by the way he gently caressed her
cheek, lightly held her wrist.

I could tell by the way he sloppily kissed her eager
mouth and cupped her ass with both paws.

I followed them to the hotel.

43
There was no business meeting.

No shit, Sherlock?

They picked up their key from the concierge.

They drank champagne.

They ate caviar.

They put the “Do Not Disturb” sign on their door.

I didn’t wait up for Margaret.

44
Here was the score.

Howard:
Young,
Handsome,
Talentless, skirt-chasing, arrogant, egotistical,
best-selling author.

Millionaire.

Margaret:
Much older than Howard,
Much younger than Milo,
Attractive,
Backstabbing, two-timing, duplicitous, self-serving
cougar bitch whose boy toy was a young, handsome,
talentless, skirt-chasing, arrogant, egotistical,
best-selling author.

Soon to be a multimillionaire.

Milo:
Much older than Howard,
Older than Margaret,
Balding,
The talented victim, whose life partner was an
attractive, backstabbing, two-timing, duplicitous,
self-serving cougar bitch whose boy toy was a young,
handsome, talentless, skirt-chasing, arrogant,
egotistical, best-selling author.

Thousandaire.

WAS
THAT
REALLY
FAIR?

45
Howard had to die.

Margaret had to die.

Milo got to live.

Only Milo.

46
It would not be easy.

Killing Margaret and Howard would not be as simple
as disposing of my sickly young amigo from Old
Mehico. He had lived a solitary life and was already
at death’s door without my help. They lived an
increasingly public existence full of glamour and
paparazzi.

Detailed planning. Perfect timing. Flawless
execution.

I wanted their affair to remain private. I wanted to
act as surprised as the rest of the world. I wanted
someone else to have a motive for their deaths.

I wanted revenge.

…………………………………………
To be continued …next week!
Only Milo, winner of the 2010 IPPY Gold Medal for Popular Fiction, is published by Inkwater Press (© 2009).

Author of Felicity and Barbara Pym, Harrison Solow appears at the festival on October 9th from 9-10:15am for a writers workshop in room B118, and on October 9th at 11am on the OEA Stage

“You ask me again why you should read literature. I feel I should not answer you…Why ask me? I did not choose your course of study. You could have taken sociology, physics, or architecture. You have circumscribed your own world, for the coming semester at least. There is no point to the question if you yourself cannot answer it. Why should you read literature?

Perhaps you should not.

However, I suspect you feel you would like to, and that is the basis of your irritation with silly men, mousy women, tea, religion, and quotations, in the novel. Is this worthy of the august company of Dante, Proust, Dostoyevsky?

It may interest you to know that Barbara Pym felt as you do, when she was about your age – reading Aldous Huxley, and imagining herself in a more glittering, a more significant, world. And so to protect herself from an unbearable exclusion from that world, she wrote a novel, Young Men in Fancy Dress, in hope, her biographer says, of becoming part of it.

Her irritation with silly men was no different from yours, or mine, or anyone’s really, you see. The only difference is what each of us regards as ‘silly.’  Literature, or at least, books  (I will not presume to add Pym to the Masters, as you call them – although surely there are degrees of literature) offer a way out – out of a time, a space, a life, a status, a level of experience that is unsatisfactory to the reader. Not by virtue of escape, but by metamorphosis, via instruction…And although you may not now want to arrive in such a place, you have chosen it as your destination. But I suppose you must. After all, it does not make sense that you should have chosen to enter a fictional world you find irritating.

Oh ― but see what Miss Pym’s Huxley had to say in Those Barren Leaves:’ If we wrote it ourselves, we might find Etruscan literature interesting.’

Does it have to be your world, Felicity, in order to be habitable, respected, interesting, relevant? ‘It’s so provincial,’ you complained to me of Some Tame Gazelle in your first letter.

But you see

…provincialism does not signify in a writer, and may indeed be the chief source of his strength: only a fool or a prig would complain that Defoe is cockneyfied or Thomas Hardy countrified. But provincialism in a critic is a serious fault. A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist. He has to have a wide outlook, or he has nothing at all…”

__________

Harrison Solow is a Pushcart Prize winning writer, professor of literature and writing and a writer for the professions. For more information about Harrison, please see:

http://redroom.com/author/harrison-solow

http://lamp.academia.edu/HarrisonSolow

For more information on the recently released Felicity & Barbara Pym, please see:

http://felicityandbarbarapym.wordpress.com/

BIO:

About the Author

Pushcart Prize winning American writer and one of the two best selling UC Press authors of all time (at time of publication) Harrison Solow has received many awards for her literary fiction, nonfiction, cross-genre writing, poetry and professional writing. Her most recent award is First Prize for Short Fiction in the Carpe Articulum Literary Review International Competition for 2010.

Harrison has lectured at a number of universities, colleges, arts and cultural institutions in the United States, Canada and Great Britain. A former faculty member at UC Berkeley, she accepted a lectureship in the English Department of the University of Wales in 2004 and was appointed Writer in Residence in 2008.

She is a strong proponent of the traditional Liberal Arts, the Fine Arts and the Utilitarian Arts as separate and equally respectable entities, an advocate for Wales and a patron of literary endeavours.

Harrison speaks various varieties of English as well as intermediate Welsh and rusty French. She is a member of The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers, The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, The National Association of Scholars, The Women’s Faculty Club of the University of California, Berkeley, The Association of Welsh Writers in English, The Claremont Institute, The Association for Core Texts and Courses, The Red Room, The Association of Writing Programs, The Welsh Academy, and The National Coalition of Independent Scholars, where she served on the Board in 2009 and 2010.

Harrison lives in the United States and Wales with her husband, Herbert F. Solow, the former Head of MGM, Paramount and Desilu Studios in Hollywood. She has two incomparable sons.

Author of Ronnie’s Dream, Niall Griffiths appears at Wordstock festival on Saturday, October 9th at 11:00am on the OEA Stage.

At the time of writing, our leader has just been visiting your country to meet your leader. I’m sure he did it without the toadying, sycophantic, desperately undignified mien that the previous PM sported, but please don’t think that Cameron is representative of Britain; he’s posh, private school, filthily rich, and part of a coalition that nobody voted for. The Welsh writer’s visit to Wordstock will show a side of Britain that is anathema to Cameron. Which is a Very Good Thing. This is a small but tremendously diverse country, as I’m sure you know, and we’ll be representing a part of it that the mainstream media tends to miss. Wales is a province attached to England—or, as it’s been more pithily put, England is a pimple on the arse of Wales—that has it’s own language and customs, and once fought a series of protracted and bloody wars for an independence from the crown which it never achieved. It’s a mountainous country full of mist and castles and dark lakes. I live at the foot of a mountain called Pendam, in a village called Penrhyncoch, a few miles inland from a seaside town called Aberystwyth. My full address, when translated into English, means ‘low on the hill in the enclosure for wild beasts on the red headland at the mouth of the twisting river’. Pure poetry, eh?

So enough politics. I’ve visited Portland before, in August of last year. I met Willy Vlautin in a festival in Laugharne, in Wales, and several times in London, too, so I knew something about the city from him. I had a wondrous time, and I’m looking forward to going again, this time with my girlfriend. But I’ve got to work madly before I go, and the coming couple of weeks will be frenetically busy; my family, the entire protracted clan, or most of it, have booked a cottage in Pembrokeshire, a stunningly pretty and strange area of southern Wales, for a week, after which I need to go up to Llanystumdwy to teach on a residential creative writing course, in a house called Ty Newydd, which means ‘new house’. This was, once, the family home of Lloyd George, the early 20th century prime minister; he left it to the Welsh Academy after his death, and indeed tutorials take place in the room in which he died. I swear I’ve heard his ghost chuckling with approval as new Welsh creative voices undergo encouragement and nurturing in that room. As well as all of this, I’m working on a novel, called A Great Big Shining Star, which, after two years of working on non-fiction, is torrent-ing out, and which I want to finish at least the first draft of before I fly out to Oregon. Plus there’s liaising to do with film people who are working on making movies out of my books, various reviews, other stuff. It’s a busy, busy life, but I’d be bored if it wasn’t. Luckily, the rain keeps falling (this is a summer in Wales, after all), which means that the temptation to get out of the house and walk up the mountain behind it isn’t there.

And there it is. I live with a wonderful woman called Deborah and a feral cat which I rescued from a barn when he was tiny, after the rest of his litter had been eaten by something – fox, badger, stoat, whatever. At the moment I’m reading Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy, the collected letters of Ted Hughes, a biography of Henry Morton Stanley, and the second volume of Charles Bukowski’s uncollected writings. Soon, I’ll start Marlantes’s Matterhorn, and, in fact, modern American writers are who I most enjoy reading, along with Renaissance tragedies. I was born in Liverpool, and I support Liverpool Football Club. I like to swim in the sea and sleep on mountain tops or in forests. I’m diabetic, but I do not let that be an obstacle to enjoying being alive; I’m fine if I remember to eat a bowl of pasta before I open the first bottle of wine. I write for a living, and that, in a nutshell, is me. Hello.

Author of The Wilding, Benjamin Percy appears at the Wordstock festival on Saturday, October 9th from 12:00-1:15pm for a writer’s workshop in room B119, as well as October 9th at 2:00pm on the Columbia Stage and 4:00pm on the Wieden + Kennedy Stage.

What are you reading now?

The Pale Blue Eye by Louis Bayard—and it’s fantastic.

Who is your favorite new author?

Siobhan Fallon. Look for her debut collection, You Know When
the Men are Gone, this winter from Penguin. She’s going to make a big splash. www.siobhanfallon.com.

What is your favorite book of the year?

Galveston by Nic Pizzolatto

Favorite book of all time?

Blood Meridian

What is your favorite food?

New York strip, medium rare, seasoned with a dry rub.

Which writers have most influenced you?

Cormac McCarthy. Flannery O’Connor. Peter Straub. James Dickey. Dan Simmons. Alice Munro. Daniel Woodrell. Denis Johnson. Stephen King. Harry Crews. Rick Bass. Poe.

What are you working on now?

I always have a lot of irons in the fire. I recently completed a book of fables (all of them illustrated by Eisner-nominated artist Danica Novgorodoff, who adapted my story “Refresh, Refresh” into a graphic novel), which my agent is about to shop. I’m deep into a new novel. I’m pitching a comic book series. I’m hammering out articles for Esquire and the Wall Street Journal (which has hired me on to do these “Weekend Adventure” pieces – so far I’ve gone hang-gliding off the Tetons and scaled a 250-ft old growth fir and hammocked the night in it). I’m working on a book of craft essays (which have been appearing regularly in Poets & Writers magazine). And I’m co-authoring a screenplay with filmmaker James Ponsoldt.

What is your favorite website for writing/literature/etc.

The Rumpus

Author of The Wilding, Benjamin Percy appears at the Wordstock festival on Saturday, October 9th from 12:00-1:15pm for a writer’s workshop in room B119, as well as October 9th at 2:00pm on the Columbia Stage and 4:00pm on the Wieden + Kennedy Stage.

Oregon will eat you. That’s what I told the filmmaker James Ponsoldt (whose excellent Off the Black starred Nick Nolte and Timothy Hutton) before we scouted locations in Central Oregon for the adaptation of my story “Refresh, Refresh.” Every year Mt. Hood crushes people in avalanches, swallows them in snowstorms. Every year hikers vanish in the woods. Every year the riptide sucks swimmers out into the ocean and fills their lungs with water. A wrong step takes someone tumbles off a cliff in the gorge. A wrong turn sends someone down a logging road from which they will never return. I went to school with a girl who skied into a tree and died. I went to school with a boy who snow-mobiled into a tree and died. In Central Oregon, where I grew up, turkey vultures turn in lazy circles, coyotes gnaw on bones, black widows scuttle under porches, and scorpions burrow under rocks.

Ponsoldt was unimpressed with Bend, Oregon. It reminded him too much of California with its Land Rovers and too tan platinum blondes and bubble tea and clothing boutiques. Even Tumalo now had a wine bar. When I visit there now, when I see how much the area has changed, I realize that I am writing historical fiction. He wanted—for the film—something rougher, truer, not crowded with high-end restaurants and million-dollar condos, but snarled with barbed wire, splashed with whiskey, so I took him to Prineville, where we bombed up and down streets snapping photos, knocking on doors, knowing we had found the ideal town for the shoot, a town that felt more like the Oregon I remembered.

He wanted more. He wanted to see the Oregon that would eat him, as I had promised. I took him to Smith Rock, to Lava Butte, to the Metolius. I took him down back roads, hiked him through dry canyons. And then we drove to Hole in the Ground, which has a recurring and sinister role in my story and the screenplay. Bad shit happens there. For those unfamiliar with the site, Hole in the Ground is commonly referred to as a meteor crater—several hundred feet deep and nearly a mile across—but is in fact a geologic formation.

This was January. The road to Hole in the Ground was closed. But we had driven more than an hour—and the snow didn’t look particularly deep—and this was one of the critical locations for the movie—so I slammed on the accelerator and blazed down the road. The SUV rocked violently over the ruts. The tires broke through ice and into a slushy water that splashed against wheel wells and doors. I began to wonder if this was in fact a wise decision, but said nothing and four miles later the woods opened up and the ground fell away and we parked at the edge of the crater. The cavernous space, frosted with snow, appeared lunar. We hiked around and snapped photos and talked about how to get a caravan of grips and costume designers and makeup arts out to this remote location. And then we hopped back into the SUV and I keyed the ignition and rolled forward, driving through a snowbank.

The SUV lurched. There came a noise from beneath us like the dinosaurs in the movies make when angry. I cancelled the ignition and we climbed out to discover we had run over a boulder and were precariously balanced on top of it, none of our wheels touching the ground.

We had no cell signal. The temperature was hovering around freezing. The sun was setting and the world was going inky around the edges. We hadn’t eaten since breakfast. We had a four mile walk down this access road—and then a thirty mile walk to La Pine, the nearest town. I turned to the line producer, who was riding along with us, and poked him in the chest and said, “I’m going to eat you first.”

Life was imitating art. Oregon had eaten us. But rather than eat each other, as I proposed, we tried our best to figure out what the hell to do. And what followed was a little like a Survivor challenge. We had a collapsible shovel in the trunk and we used it to claw rocks from the snow and frozen ground. These we stacked under the tires, creating a wobbly bridge. With the jack, we were able to tip the vehicle—and then, with a stomp of the gas, with the jack spiraling like a weapon through the air, with the undercarriage scraping horribly over the boulder, we were free. “I wish we had a camera,” Ponsoldt said. “We could have put this in the DVD extras.” He was smiling, but his fingers were bleeding and his mouth trembled a little at the edges.

My novel, The Wilding, is a literary thriller that follows multiple storylines set in motion by a golf course resort that is going to be built in Echo Canyon in the Ochoco Mountains. Like James Dickey’s Deliverance, it is about the sometimes jarring intersections between wilderness and society, the moments like the one Ponsoldt and I found ourselves in, at the edge of the crater, with the darkness falling all around us, trying to laugh even as we scrambled about and bloodied our hands and felt terribly, vulnerably human.

Author of Little Green, Loretta Stinson appears at the festival on Saturday October 9^th at 4pm.

If you could have told my fourteen-year old self that one day I would hold two Masters degrees and have a published novel to my name I would have said you were crazy. Things like that don’t happen to girls like the me I used to be.

I ran away from home when I was fourteen and didn’t go back to school for real until I was in my early thirties—that was after the restraining order, the divorce, and the year of hiding out that I did to stay safe from the man I was married to.  His addiction and the resulting violence that accompanied it were my reasons for leaving but it took me almost sixteen years before I walked out for good. I left just about everything I owned—house, car, pets, that summer afternoon in 1991. I started over from square one, and one of the things I started over was my education. I’d always been a big reader but I regretted not having a diploma, just a GED.

During my last year as an undergraduate at Portland State University, I took a beginning fiction writing class. I loved it from the start. The class ended at 4 and I would ride the bus home already thinking of the assignment at hand—what the first line would be, how I wanted the reader to feel and think about my characters. I worked harder than I ever had at anything, but it was the kind of work that gives you energy and won’t let you go.

The final project was to write a short story using a list of props. The props happened to bring back a memory of something awful that I’d experienced during my relationship. In writing the story as fiction, the “real” experience lost its power to hurt me. I found myself writing all kinds of stories about that time in my life. They are indeed fiction informed by what I lived through, but not memoir. At a certain point as I was writing Little Green, Janie, the main character, became her own sweet self.

I wrote that book in order to understand those experiences and because the question asked most often of me, “Why didn’t you just leave?” had so many answers and was so much more complicated than someone never living in constant fear can imagine.

For me writing Little Green was like taking strong medicine. Stories have power both in the reading and in the writing. It’s my privilege to share this with you!

.……………………..………………...

24
Margaret was glowing.
I don’t think she noticed.
No mention of Milo.
None.
NOT
ONE
WORD.

25
When the next segment began, the first novel was
discussed.

Set outside Mexico City. Young police officer hero in a rural village terrorized by a serial killing priest. Innocent children, including the police officer as a young boy, initially received love and comfort from the priest, protection from a world of poverty, hunger and fright.

Sexual molestation.

Serial killings.

Long, hushed pause.

As a boy, José had sought solace from a harsh and
unfair world. The church was his sanctuary, the
priest his surrogate father, the weekly homilies the
inspiration for his poetry, his fiction, his life.
Sexually molested by his priest.
Writing about the abuse. Catharsis.
Finally moving forward.

Long, hushed pause.

Oprah was concerned.

Tears.

Embarrassment.

Breakdown.

Oprah’s gentle touch, soothing words, comforting
smile, genuine hug.

Cut to commercial.

26
Margaret was concerned.

There had been no mention of the pending release
of the second novel. She had agreed with Oprah’s
staff that the new novel’s story line would not be
revealed until the “Oprah” appearance, not even a
well-placed leak.

After the break, José was more composed, but his
energy had been sapped. When Oprah asked about the
upcoming novel, he stumbled with his English and his
words were halting, spoken in fragments.

He mentioned Mexico City. A young political activist
whose violent acts of murder would haunt him later
in life.

Summer in Mexico City.

Six weeks in Mexico City.

Early sixties in Mexico City.

“You mean Lee Harvey Oswald,” interjected Oprah,
“during the summer of 1963.”

Confused expression, telling eyes, slumped shoulders,
quivering lips.

Long, hushed pause.

Finally, “Yes, of course.”

Lee Harvey Oswald.

Summer of 1963.

Mexico City.

Rage killings.

Blackmail.

JFK assassination.

Oswald assassination.

No loose ends.

Cut to commercial.

27
Margaret was satisfied.

She didn’t see what I saw.

She thought José stammered and stumbled about
the plot of the new novel because he was still
emotionally fraught from his breakdown before the
commercial. She thought he was still thinking about
being molested by his priest and about finally
being able to put it behind him through his writing
and through his public revelation on “Oprah.” She
thought he was emotionally spent and had simply lost
his train of thought.

I saw something else.

28
Margaret took me to dinner to celebrate.

In Manhattan.

Steak, lobster, French wine, silk napkins, silver
candelabras, crème brûlée, gourmet coffee, Mozart in
the background.

It was our first date, again.

Margaret felt assured the firm’s future was bright.
Her network was broadening, her revenues were
soaring, her reputation was impeccable, her prospects
were unlimited.

She decided a company on the rise like hers, the
fresh new face in the publishing industry, belonged
in only one place.

In Manhattan.

I helped her look for office space. We took lunch.
I helped her evaluate new submissions. We made love.
I suggested print runs, monitored budgets, hired
readers, negotiated with agents. We became partners.

In business.

In life.

In Manhattan.

29
José returned from Chicago.

I was well into “his” third novel.

His writer’s block was now in its sixth year.
This meant I had chosen another of my novels set in
southern New Mexico to serve as José’s third book.
Since this work would be published in English there
would be no translation needed.

The story line of nuclear waste being hijacked
while in transit to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico
was transplanted to storage sites in the mountains
near Mexico City. The kidnapping and extortion plot
elements from my novel were directly applicable
to José’s third book. Instead of being a Native
American, the protagonist became a Mexican communist.
Quite frankly, this novel would fly off the shelves
regardless of the plot, the characters, the length,
the style, the pacing, the point of view.

As long as the name José Calderon was on the cover.

30
I moved in with Margaret.

We were becoming a team. She knew my work on the two
translations was an integral part of her success.
José told her how much assistance I gave him in
producing his third novel directly in English.
His language skills had improved to the point he was
becoming a convincing liar.

Margaret’s loft in Brooklyn was barely large enough
for the two of us, but we both knew she would soon
be moving to Manhattan. She had opened her new office
in the space I helped her find in midtown, and I knew
she was already searching for an apartment in the
area.

I hoped she would ask me to join her.

We enjoyed each other’s company when we had time to
spend together. Unfortunately, most of my time was
spent finishing José’s third novel. Most of hers was
spent making sure his second would be a blockbuster.
We were both successful.

31
I was still concerned about the “Oprah” interview.
Why did he say the second novel involved “a young
political activist whose violent acts of murder
would haunt him later in life?” That was the story
line from his book, not my Oswald translation.

He was startled when Oprah bailed him out by saying
“you mean Lee Harvey Oswald during the summer of
1963.” I saw the confusion on his face.

I had to confront José.

32
He admitted he almost cracked under the pressure.
The stage was hot, the air was oppressive, the
lights were blazing.

He admitted he became confused and started talking
about his own second novel, not my translation.
He could hardly breathe. He could hardly think. He
could hardly speak.

He admitted he might have revealed our secret had
Oprah not intervened.

I could no longer trust José.

33
I was committing fraud, and José was the only one
who knew.

He was weak. He would crack the next time the
pressure was on. I would be exposed.

I was nearly finished with his third book. It would
probably sell even better than the first two. There
would be book tours and interviews.

Many chances to crumble under the pressure and
reveal our deceit.

He had not contributed a thing. He had not even
learned how to turn on his computer. He had not
written a word in six years, and the two novels he
wrote before that were not worth translating.
He knew every episode of “Seinfeld” by heart.

He should still be waiting tables and driving a cab
in Mexico City.

The untalented wetback was no longer needed.
I would do the world a favor.

José had to die.

…………………………………………
To be continued …next week!
Only Milo, winner of the 2010 IPPY Gold Medal for Popular Fiction, is published by Inkwater Press (© 2009).

Author of Little Green, Loretta Stinson appears at the festival on Saturday October 9^th at 4pm.

Writing is just writing—a practice, if you like, a discipline, an art, a craft. It’s not a mystery. If you write a page a day for a year you will have a first draft of a novel or several short stories or whatever it is you want to write. We sit down with our tools of choice—pad and pencil, laptop, typewriter and become still enough to hear the story that’s ours to tell. It whispers itself to us. It’s a very quiet little voice and if you’re too busy, too loud, too distracted you might not hear it. We practice coaxing the words out by writing so often and with such regularity that we become good friends with the process.  We quiet the mind and simply start regardless of how we feel about it. There is no good or bad, there is only you showing up with attention to listen to the story you need to tell. Later there will be revision of the story and time to shape and fix, but not at first. At first there is only sitting still and listening with openness.

After the first draft, when you know what the story is about (which is rarely what you thought it was when first you started) you will do that other kind of writing called revision, but at first it’s all about sitting down, showing up and being open and attentive.

The other part of the writing process is reading. In order to write well you must read. Read what you love and find books that speak to you. Read the books you love more than once. Study the way books you love are written. Figure out what makes the book so compelling to you. Let yourself fall in love with the beauty of words. Read books that challenge you, but if a book doesn’t keep you turning pages even if it is a classic close it down and start a new one—life is too short to read something you don’t love.

There are some techniques and skills you will need to learn to write a story. You’ll learn these things by reading and by practicing short assignments, not by trying to write a novel right off the bat. You wouldn’t expect to run a marathon if you’d never run short distances. Writing short pieces works like distance training. Short pieces prepare you for the long haul and give you the muscle and discipline to continue.

What are you reading now?

Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan

Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

Who is your favorite new author?

Right now I’m smitten with Julie Orringer, Gina Ochsner, and Amy Hempel.

What is your favorite book of the year?

These four books all fell into my lap this year and I constantly recommend them to others:

Away by Amy Bloom

A History of Love by Nicole Krauss

The Russian Book of Color and Flight by Gina Oschner

A Gate at the Top of the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Favorite books of all time?

I re-read House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, Ceremony by Leslie Silko, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison.

Which writers have most influenced you?

Writers have come into my life and turned it sideways more than once. I’ve always loved to read, and different writers have called my name at different times in my life. First it was John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe when I was about fourteen. Then at sixteen or so I discovered Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey, John Barth, and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove.  I love Raymond Carver, Tom Spanbauer, Sherman Alexie, and N. Scott Momaday.

What are you working on now?

A big wandering novel set in a time and place gone by. It’s about mothers, mothers in law, daughters, daughters in law and granddaughters—and food, lots of food.

Author of Impatient with Desire, Gabrielle Burton appears on Sunday, October 10^th at 12pm and again at 3pm on the OEA Stage

These days I get two questions a lot.

The first: Do you think you’re Tamsen Donner reincarnated?

The long and the short answer to that is Nope.

Why such a curious question? Well, after writing off and on for over thirty-five years about Tamsen Donner, I won the writer’s lottery, publishing two books about her in one year: a novel, Impatient with Desire, and a memoir, Searching for Tamsen Donner.

Which leads to the second question: You wrote about her for over 35 years?

Well, not every day.

I don’t believe in reincarnation but, for whatever reason or no reason, I have a tremendous connection to Tamsen Donner that has persisted through rejections, moments of despair, and decades of writing about other things, weaving itself into the very fabric of our family identity. A connection that I sometimes felt obliged me to keep on trying forever to honor Tamsen and other forgotten, unknown, or mythologized-to-death pioneer women.

I chanced upon Tamsen Donner and the ill-fated Donner Party of 1846 by accident when I went to Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference with a handful of poems in 1972. One morning, William Lederer, a famous writer and teacher on the Bread Loaf staff, stopped me and said, “Last night, I dreamed you were going to write a book about people surviving without eating each other.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Most people survive by eating each other,” he said. “You’re going to write a book that shows a better way.”

“How do I do that?”

“How would I know?” he answered. “It’s your book, not mine.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but he was a mysterious old man—I see now he probably was 60—a world traveler, wise, a little scary. For years I never told anyone what he had said, but I never forgot it.

Back home, months later, I was writing a short story about a couple making a motorcycle trip from Berkeley to Buffalo. I had five daughters within an eight-year span and wrote in the interstices of a vigorous family life. After many drafts, I realized I had written an on-the-road story without one speck of geography.

One night, I asked my husband, who had driven cross-country a half dozen times, what my characters would see on the way. After some time and reminiscences, he said, “They’d have to go over Donner Pass.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“You know,” he said. “Where they ate each other to survive.”

“What did you say? I said.

But I had heard what he said.

I got out books on the Donner Party—the first time I had ever heard of them—and the name Tamsen Donner leapt off the page.

And so began an almost four decade odyssey/obsession/love affair that turned out to involve my family nearly as much as me.

The motorcycle trip story became a novel and I wove a small part of Tamsen Donner into it. Most everything known about her was myth and I wanted to find the woman behind the myth.

Because I was trying to be a writer and mother simultaneously, my five daughters and husband came with me every place Tamsen Donner had been. We went to Newburyport, MA, her birthplace, to North Carolina where she lost her first family in a three-month period, to Springfield, IL where we camped on her & George Donner’s farm. We spent a summer retracing the California/Oregon Trail. Our dog was named Tamsen.

After seven years of raised and dashed hopes, I put that novel away and with it, I thought, my interest in the Donner Party. Ten years later, after publishing a different novel, I wrote a book about our family’s retracing the California/Oregon Trail. My editor wanted me to reveal more than I wanted to, so that one went to the attic too.

Then in 1996, because I was living in Los Angeles and attending film school at the American Film Institute, my family badgered me to go to the Donner Party Sesquicentennial at Donner Pass. Much to my surprise, my interest was immediately revived. I wrote a screenplay about the Donner Party for my second year MFA project.

A lot of life later, I rewrote—several times—the book about our family’s trip retracing the California Trail: a memoir, Searching for Tamsen Donner, that the University of Nebraska published in 2009. It had evolved into a tale of three journeys: Tamsen’s, our family’s tracking Tamsen, and my own trying to balance work and love. Another chance remark—made at the Sesquicentennial I didn’t want to go to—had led me to Tamsen’s seventeen extant letters, which are included in the memoir.

It’s known that Tamsen kept a journal but it was never found. All of a sudden, after so many starts, stops, and side trips, I felt I had Tamsen’s voice, and the novel, Impatient with Desire (Voice/Hyperion, 2010), is her lost journal imagined—particularly during the four months she was trapped in the Sierra Nevadas with her dying husband and five starving daughters.

I believe that our lives are shaped by genes, environment, experience, desire, and fluke. When you’re young and flailing about and hungry for guidance, a sentence in a book or a conversation can seem so critically important, so meant for you, you copy it down and tape it on your wall, though you know you’ll never forget it. A part of you is wide open at that moment and these words enter. Once, a man stopped me on a stair and said that most people eat each other to survive and I would write a book that shows a different way. Another person—or I at a different time—might have laughed or thought William Lederer’s dream simply curious, but I gave his words tremendous significance and, like Robert Frost’s diverging roads, that made all the difference.