Permanently Inked

Summer Debut Authors

2009-07-23T07:19:00.001-07:00

Once again I find myself playing catch-up on Debut author interviews... these six ladies are bringing you books about beauty pageants and mystery, faeries and time travel, family and loss. Whatever your reading desires, I'm certain you can find them in this list, and the Same 5 Questions...

I have a bit of a writer crush on Sarah Ockler. She is one of the nicest people in the world. She is funny and she is a WRITER. I mean it. Twenty boy Summer is the kind of book I want to read (and write). Buy it here.

1. What is your preferred writing brain food?
Coffee. Not really a food but if they sold it in chewables, I'd be all over it! I also love chocolate dipped in peanut butter, but that tends to make a mess of things on the keyboard.

2. What is the soundtrack to your debut novel?
California Stars by Wilco. That pretty much says it all for Anna and Frankie and their summer of twenty boys!

3. Describe your perfect writing space.
I love my current writing space - it's perfect! I finally got my own home office this year, and my favorite husband built me a desk to go with my shelves. I love being surrounded by books -- all of my old favorites and an ever-growing collection of YA titles -- it inspires me. I also have pictures of my loved ones, trips I've taken, and my collection of sea glass. I just need a few more photos and a funky purple carpet, and I'll be all set! Okay, so I wouldn't say no to an ocean or mountain view, but that's just not going to happen in Buffalo, NY. :-)

4. Tell us about one of the secondary characters in your debut novel. How did he/she come to life?
Jayne Perino, Frankie and Matt's mom. She's not related to the main character, Anna, but the families are so close that Anna calls her Aunt Jayne. She was one of my favorite and most difficult characters to develop. Her teenage son dies, and her grief is so impossible and raw and at times all-encompassing, yet somehow, she finds a way to get out of bed each day. And though her mothering took a back seat in the months following her son's death, she truly loves her daughter Frankie, and I love how she tries so hard to come back into Frankie and Anna's lives on their California trip. Aunt Jayne came to life in my mind through many broken-hearted moms I've met over the years; all who have loved and lost and still found a way to keep going. We only get to see a small part of Aunt Jayne in TWENTY BOY SUMMER, through the eyes of Anna, but it's an important part and I loved writing her character.

5. What did/will you do on your launch day?
I don't know yet. Is that bad? I hope to be in NYC, but as long as I'm with my husband, I'll be good. :-) Maybe a little celebratory ice cream and champagne, wherever we are!

I'm especially excited about Mandy Hubbard's Prada and Prejudice right now because I get to meet Mandy this weekend, and do a signing with her... she came all the way from Washington! Also, you may know this already, but Abigail Breslin is reading Mandy's book right now.

1. Diet Coke. Lots and lots of Diet Coke. Gummy Bears or Blowpops when I remember to pick them up!

2. I can't list all the songs without making it obvious what happens later, but in the opening chapter, "SEE YOU AGAIN" by Miley Cyrus fits my character. One of the lines in the song is: "The last time I freaked out, i just kept looking down, I st-st-stuttered when you asked me what I'm thinking bout, felt like I couldn't breathe, you asked what's wrong with me, my best friend leslie said-- oh she's just bieng Miley."

That is definitely the person Callie is in chapter 1!

3. My perfect writing space is my office at home, on a day when it's completley pouring outside so I don't want to be out there (sunny days are just horrid for writing) and no one is around to interupt me, and I have lots of soda and candy.

4. Victoria is a middle-aged Duchess, and the mother to Callie's love interest. It wasn't until the very last round of editing that I really came to understand her--and it was due to a seemingly unrelated plot change! I can't say much without spoiling it, but I hope readers will get to know Victoria in a whole new light by the end of the novel.

5.I'm going to drive around to bookstores and look for my book, and maybe sign some stock if they will let me and not kick me out of the store. :-)

Cynthia Liu has not one but TWO books coming out this year. And she is in charge of the amazing Author's Now site... Paris Pan Takes the Dare is available here.

1. What is your preferred writing brain food?
Diet Dr. Pepper and Snickers bars (together!).

2. What is the soundtrack to your debut middle grade novel PARIS PAN TAKES THE DARE?
A Simple Plan's "Welcome to my Life"
"Unwritten" by Natasha Beddingfield
"This One's for the Girls" by Martina McBride
"Man, I feel like a Woman" by Shania Twain

3. Describe your perfect writing space.
I can write practically anywhere. But I always dream of a cabin in Maine, snow outside, and Bambi-esque deer outside my window.

4. Tell us about one of the secondary characters in your debut novel. How did he/she come to life?
Mayo is the embodiment of every mean-girl I ever did meet in elementary school and junior high. She does just enough to break people down without other people noticing.

5. What did you do on your launch day?
I wanted to bring PARIS PAN out in a way that really fit the book and who I am as an author. It's called Take the Dare: Show You Care. As a result of the PARIS PAN launch party, we raised $15,000 for a Title I school in Tulakes Oklahoma. The party rocks on at www.cynthealiu.com. Latecomers are always welcome!

Leaving them behind

2009-06-06T08:11:00.000-07:00

I am deep in the middle of my novel-in-progress, What He Left Behind, which means I have finally found a way to let the characters of TIWIWTTY go and spend time with some new characters in my head. On the page. It is exhilarating to be in a new book but, there is something devastating about leaving characters behind, not knowing where they ended up. I recently read a really wonderful book of poems called The Pajamaist by Matthew Zapruder. There is a series in here called 'Twenty Poems for Noelle' and I find such solace in reading them. I imagine this is *my* Noelle, a little bit grown up, and now I know where she is. I find relief in knowing that she is okay, that someone else loved her with the same sort of desperate sadness that she loved Parker. Is that silly? It does make me feel better. Here is one poem for Noelle, according to Matthew Zapruder.

Night, one hears sounds
under the pavement,
something is always
being repaired, under
the red painted table
that Aztec Camera
tape lies where it fell,
its label with drawings
in pencil of little flowers,
Noelle were you ever cool,
that is aware that somehow
not to be aware is the only
lasting form of awareness,
you live in Brooklyn,
a green hexagon
floats above your head, now
everyone sees it, my problem
is I would like to be there
some kind of preferably
gentle sorting without me.

Debut Author Extravaganza

2009-06-05T05:56:00.000-07:00

Last weekend authors, booksellers, writers, book lovers descended upon new York for the annual Book Expo America (fondly known as BEA). I did not take part in the festivities... mostly because I was still trying to recover from sleep lost at a beautiful Roman wedding and a New England tour of colleges, complete with three charter buses and 150 16 year olds (these are stories for another time). I did, however, get to have lunch with fellow debut authors Shani Petroff and Megan Crewe and it was perfect to come home to New York for eggs and bacon with some of the debut authors who have made this year what it is... and SPEAKING of debut authors. Here are four more to add to your list.

This cover rocks and Sarah Cross is quite amazing and Dull Boy, I know, is the next big thing in boy superheroes. Buy it here.

1. For Dull Boy it was a lot of green tea & chocolate. Other necessary fuel: good books & comics to stay inspired, and lots of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance sessions. ( http://marvelultimatealliance.marvel.com/#/Home/ ) Destroying digital barrels while you pretend to be Wolverine is good for the soul.
2. I actually posted a Dull Boy playlist here: http://sarahcross.livejournal.com/9066.html
Top picks: "Iron Man" by Black Sabbath, "It's not my time" by 3 Doors Down, and "Umbrella" (any version will do).
3. Open, well lit, somewhat quiet, not freezing.
4. My general rule with secondary characters is to remember that *this* character could be someone's favorite. So I never want to give the secondary characters short shrift; I want them to be just as essential and interesting as the main character. They all have something at stake, too.
5. Stalk my book until I finally see it in the wild. And then maybe get ice cream.

Since she is already a New York Times Bestseller, Aprilynne Pike may need no introduction here. But there are still some things you may not know about her! Buy her book here.

1. What is your preferred writing brain food?
Has everyone else said chocolate already? How about salt and vinegar potato chips.:)
2. What is the soundtrack to your debut novel?
My children playing (and hopefully not screaming) in the back ground. I rarely listen to music while I write because I find myself typing the lyrics. LOL! I have, however, been listening to the Broadway musical Wicked a lot lately and find it very inspiring.
3. Describe your perfect writing space.
Comfy chair, nice light-colored desk, one cup of tea and one can of diet root beer at one hand, and a snack at the other. The door is closed and the overhead fan is one, giving me a nice light breeze. Mmmmmm . . . .
4. Tell us about one of the secondary characters in your debut novel. How did he/she come to life?
I have this secondary character named Chelsea and when I first started writing her I gave her the quirk of basically being very blunt and saying whatever came into her head. This was so fun and refreshing that in every scene I wrote with her it was like, "Hmmm, what would Chelsea say about this or that." And it became almost like a game. And now she is the character that som many of my readers relate to.
5. What did/will you do on your launch day?
I was on tour on my launch day so I didn't really have much control over my schedule, but I did go over to the Borders across from my hotel and saw my very first floor display! I also had a very lovely dessert at dinner that night!
Thanks!!!

I haven't read this one yet, but I can't wait to. Not only beacuse I've heard amazing things about it, but also because C. Lee Mackenzie is the kind of writing whose generosity and warmth makes you want to just know more about her.

Danielle Joseph and I are Flux-mates. But her first book, Shrinking Violet, came out with MTV this spring, joining the world just about the same time as her beautiful new daughter.

1. What is your preferred writing brain food?
Gimme chocolate!
2. What is the soundtrack to your debut novel?
I have a play list up on my web site, check it out, www.daniellejoseph.com
3. Describe your perfect writing space.
My office when it is very clean or my laptop on the coffee table in the family room.
4. Tell us about one of the secondary characters in your debut novel. How did he/she come to life? Audrey is Tere's best friend. She came to life early on because everyone needs a loyal best friend that you can just be yuorself with.
5. What did/will you do on your launch day? I plan to go to my local Borders and wave to my book on the shelf. It better be there:)!

This Is What I'm thinking about right now

2009-06-03T09:59:00.001-07:00

lying on this beach and writing stories in a notebook. With a pen.

Summer here I come.

Phoenix. The silver kind.

2009-05-13T08:13:00.000-07:00

Cindy Pon's debut novel, Silver Phoenix: Beyond the Kingdom of Xia is getting a ton of attention and I'm so excited to interview her here. I haven't had the chance to read it yet, but I know she is a generous, dedicated, innovative writer and just check out this beautiful cover.

For Cindy, the same 5...

1. What is your preferred writing brain food?
pastries!

2. What is the soundtrack to your debut novel?
reality bites soundtrack.

3. Describe your perfect writing space.
lots of light. loads of shelves. a huge desk for writing and painting. ergonomically correct! a room with a view.

4. Tell us about one of the secondary characters in your debut novel. How did he/she come to life?
li rong. he's chen yong's little brother. i really love him as he makes me laugh. and is just a huge flirt, but has a good heart. he added the touch of lightness that we needed in a very difficult journey.

5. What did/will you do on your launch day?
gosh. i plan on holding a big contest on my blog. i'll probably be fretting and surfing aimlessly.

Buy Cindy's book here and visit her here.

Sequels... not really.

2009-05-11T07:57:00.000-07:00

I received an email from a reader this weekend. She said some nice things about my book, asked me what I was working on, and then said very plainly that she hoped it was a sequel.

I've said this a few times, but when I started This Is What I Want to Tell You, it was a very different novel about the twins' mother and her love affair with their father. I'm not going to write a sequel because I'm not yet sure where the characters went. They have to grow up and I want them to do so in the imaginations of the readers. I love where I left Nadio and Noelle, poised in this uncertainty, and while I miss being with them, I think I've told their stories as fully as I can.

Their mother, however, I am still working with. Her story is so full in my mind. I know who she is and where her affair led. I also think it is interesting that she was 17 when she met the twins' father, just a little bit older than they are. Her story at their age is one I might tell. It's certainly not a sequel, not really a prequel, but a story that is linked. I wonder if it would take away from their story, though. Lace as a teenager is a very different person and I want readers of This Is What I Want to Tell You to always see her as mother to the twins.

I'm not sure, but I'm intrigued.

Things I am looking forward to

2009-05-10T10:27:00.000-07:00

There are about a million things I'm looking forward to... summer vacation, west coast road trip, 4th of July in Vermont, Chloe's third birthday, sharing What he Left Behind with Eliot and Marie (my favorite new writerfriends, more on this later), reading reader reviews of This Is What I Want to Tell You (my favorite kind of reviews)... but mostly. Right now. I cannot wait to go here.

I have a love affair with Rome... it's a complicated kind, the best and worst days, the saddest and fullest but I am so full of the memory of that city and the people I knew there... Kate and Branch gave me my first look at Rome, from their courtyard apartment to old Bridge Gelato, the view of Trastevere... even just the winding streets around Piazza Navona

and the best trips to Santorini and Siena, Todi to Cairo

and bless them they chose this city to get married and bring us all back together... H sent me a quote from Andre Aciman today that says it all...

"One always longs for the other home but home, as one learns soon enough, is a place where one imagines or remembers other homes."

Two weeks.

Neesha.

2009-05-09T07:34:00.001-07:00

I have done a lot of these debut author interviews, and I will do them all year... but this one (belated though it is) is especially dear to me. See, publishng a book is a crazy thing. It's scary and disappointing and thrilling and confusing... so many emotions and ideas come along with it. For me, one of the amazing things has been the people I've met along this journey. And Neesha is one. From the first conversation over black coffee and vegan scramble, to a sweltering day at the Brooklyn Festival of Books, to a workshop on Healthy Teen relationships, Neesha has been a source of support, humour and guidance. She is a beautiful writer with a fierce committment to justice and truth. She's a mother of two amazing girls. She is the kind of friend we are lucky to find... perhaps most important, though, her book, Shine, Coconut Moon, is a must read. The narrator, Sam, struggles with family, identity, friendship, love, prejudice in ways that are honest and absolutely unique and real. 'The same 5 Questions' for Neesha Meminger.

1. You mean my inspiration? Hmmm...I'd have to say it's watching documentaries and films that stir me up and make me want to create, to be part of the energy out there that's helping shape us as a global community. And I love difference -- I thrive on difference, so I look for things that are unusual, unique, whispered, spoken in hushed tones, or generally off the beaten path. And I guess they fuel me to create things that are also about breaking silence, breaking barriers, and creating change.

2. The Joshua Tree, by U2. Particularly the songs Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, and Where the Streets Have No Name.

3. Sunlit, quiet, nature outside, preferably a view of a body of water, large wooden desk, kitchen close.

4. Molly is Sam's best friend in SHINE. I loved writing Molly because she was kind of a synthesis of all my best friends in high school. She's spunky, fun, warm, loyal, and has her heart in the right place.

5. Eat some yummy food, spend time with my kids and Hollis, and somewhere in the day I will take a few moments to close my eyes and just stop. Savor the moment. Breathe it all in -- this first novel going out into the world. A moment that will never happen again.

Buy Neesha's book. And visit her here.

Breathing... you should read it.

2009-05-09T07:26:00.000-07:00

Cheryl Renee Herbsman is a fellow debut author. She wrote a love story of the sweetest kind-- its inspired by her own. Her characters, Savannah and Jackson, are the kind that stay with you, the kind that you envy and believe in. You can learn more about Cheryl here and buy her book here. And you should, you really should. Reading it is that kind of dream state nostalgia that the best books are made of. For Cheryl, the same 5 questions...

1. I usually have peanut butter and jelly on an english muffin for breakfast. Then I don't eat until I'm done writing. Chocolate is usually necessary at that point :)

2. I think there are two songs by Taylor Swift that work together here: Love Story and A Place In This World.

3. I have this image in my head of a deserted, gorgeous beach with a huge bed in the sand where I write. But the truth is I get too distraced outdoors. I write on my bed (in my bedroom) with candles and incense burning and an inspirational object, picture, or quote nearby.

4. All my characters seem to come to life on their own. I don't plan them. Jackson appeared on the beach in one of the earliest scenes. I got a sense just from "seeing" him that he was a good guy. Then his character unfolded with the story. Parts of him are inspired by husband. I think we all deserve a Jackson :D

5. By the time this is posted, I will know the answer to this question. At the moment, I'm still in shock over the whole idea. I'll definitely celebrate with my family and have a giveaway on my blog. Other than that, I don't know yet!

Back... with fellow debut authors

2009-05-02T07:11:00.000-07:00

As I am apparently known to do... I fell off the radar. I fell off the blog tour. I fell out of commission. In what I hope will be a flurry of catch-up, good news, juicy tales and reading recommendations, I want to tell you about a BUNCH of fantastic new books out there. Check out the following titles and 'same five questions' from some amazing debut authors...

Carrie Ryan, author of The Forest of Hands and Teeth, which you can buy here.

1. What is your preferred writing brain food?
I wish it were brain food but when I'm in deadline mode I eat pumpkin seeds and drink diet coke.

2. What is the soundtrack to your debut novel?
I wish I had a soundtrack but I can't listen to music when I write so I'd have no idea what music would work!

3. Describe your perfect writing space.
Just somewhere cozy and comfy. When I'm writing I love to just let the rest of the world fall away. But when I'm doing anything else I love sunlight and fresh air.

4. Tell us about one of the secondary characters in your debut novel. How did he/she come to life?
One of my secondary characters is Cass, the protagonist's best friend. Like most of my characters she came about out of necessity. Originally she was going to play a totally different role in the book but changed as the story developed.

5. What did/will you do on your launch day?
I had such a fun time on my release day! I was lucky that I ended up in Ireland at a castle with other YA authors and we had a fantastic dinner and popped champagne. I wrote a blog post about it here: http://carrie-me.blogspot.com/2009/03/how-to-spend-your-release-day.html. It's going to be really hard to top next year :)

Deva Fagan, author of Fortune's Folly, which you can buy here.

1. What is your preferred writing brain food?
Tea and toast.

2. What is the soundtrack to your debut novel?
An excellent mix tape of Renaissance music my friend Jenny made.

3. Describe your perfect writing space.
A spacious sunny room with purple walls, gauzy white curtains, a beautiful old-fashioned roll-top desk big enough to hold my computer, a nice big cork board crammed with visual inspiration, and a comfy armchair where I can go to brainstorm in my journal. So far, all I have the curtains. But I'm working on it!

4. Tell us about one of the secondary characters in your debut novel. How did he/she come to life?
The second character who really came alive for me (after Fortunata, the main character) was Fortunata's father. The thing that defined him for me, right from the start, was imagining the horrible, grotesquely ugly shoes he created (having "lost" his shoe-making skills after the death of Fortunata's mother). I knew he loved beauty more than almost anything else, but that he was a meek and gentle soul and would not fight or get angry over the loss of his skills and the changes in his circumstances. That would be up to the more hot-headed Fortunata!

5. What did/will you do on your launch day?
On the day my book actually comes out I'll just be doing my normal write/go to the day job/walk-the-dog routine. But I am planning to celebrate on the weekend following the release by going contra-dancing with friends, visiting a botanical garden, having an indulgent dinner out with my husband, and taking our dog to one of our favorite off-leash parks. And of course, visiting a bookstore!

Sydney Salter, author of My Big Nose & Other Natural Disasters, which you can buy here.

1. What is your preferred writing brain food?
I try to drink just tea, but I love a yummy BLT for lunch. And I do reward myself with chocolate.

2. What is the soundtrack to your debut novel?
Oooh! Lots of stuff like LCD Soundsystem, Sleater-Kinney, My Morning Jacket, The Raconteurs, Vampire Weekend, White Stripes, Smiths, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Andrew Bird, Modest Mouse, Fleet Foxes, and Richmond Fontaine.

3. Describe your perfect writing space.
Oodles of bookshelves, light, and a great view. A few cats lazing around. I kind of have that now, but it's in my living room (and my desk is always a mess!) I'd love to have an attic to myself!

4. Tell us about one of the secondary characters in your debut novel. How did he/she come to life?
One of Jory's friends is Megan, a girl who appears to have it all. I had amazing high school friends who seemed so much more accomplished than me. I often felt like I lurked in their shadows. I combined several of their traits and gave them to Megan--and then I, um, let her have a downfall. That never happened to my own friends, but it makes for better fiction!

5. What did/will you do on your launch day?
Pinch myself!

Cynthia Liu, author of The Great Call of China, which you can buy here.

1. What is your preferred writing brain food?
Diet Dr. Pepper and Snickers bars (together!).

2. What is the soundtrack to your debut novel?
You can listen to it on the "movie" soundtrack. (http://www.cynthealiu.com/books/movies)

3. Describe your perfect writing space.
I can write practically anywhere. But I always dream of a cabin in Maine, snow outside, and Bambi-esque deer outside my window.

4. Tell us about one of the secondary characters in your debut novel. How did he/she come to life?
I needed a good contrasting character for Cece and Jessica seemed about right. She's bold, brash and says things that would never come out of Cece's mouth!

5. What did you do on your launch day?
I held a big party online and hundreds of guests came to celebrate. I had the best time EVER! Snoop and I decorated my web site, served up some Chinese food and set up games. That also when the book trailer debuted (see question #2). And you can still enjoy the food here at http://www.cynthealiu.com/food). And sign my guestbook! (http://www.cynthealiu.com/guestbook). Latecomers are always welcome!

J.E. MacLeod, author of Waiting to Score, which you can buy here.

1. My favorite food in the world is probably breakfast cereal. Yummy. So since I generally write before my son' school ends, that would be my fuel, right? I eat the same cereal every day for weeks, or months until I get sick of it and then move to a new one. Right now it's this granola mixture with pumpkin seeds and it's so tasty. Yup. Pumpkin seeds are not just for Halloween anymore.

2. Oh man. This is a hard one. How about Rock n Roll Part 2 by Gary Glitter. Totally a hockey song.

3. My perfect writing space is where I am right now. In the living room on the couch, with my laptop perched on a cushion in my lap. Footstool in front to stretch out on. Yup. I'm good. Bad posture and all that, but comfy....

4. Jane, who is Zack's "Goth Girl", came to life pretty much the same time Zack did. The girl he is crushing on. In many ways she's very different than him, but they are sort of reluctant soul mates. Reluctant on her part because she hates hockey players. Her back story which doesn't come out until much later in the book explains a lot about why she is the way she is. It's all about looking beyond the surface in Waiting To Score.

5. I plan on pigging out. Seriously. I don't drink alcohol anymore so champagne is out. I thought to my self, "self what is the next best thing?" and the answer I came up with was chocolate cake from the Cheesecake Cafe. One slice is about a billion calories-- it's about as tall as a size 12 foot (but tastes much, much better) I'm taking along my hub and Superson for help. I'll probably giggle a lot that day, too.

Leigh Brescia, author of One Wish, which you can buy here.

1. What is your preferred writing brain food? Chocolate (or anything sweet, really. I don’t discriminate. If it’s sugar-laden, I’m there).

2. What is the soundtrack to your debut novel? Probably the soundtrack to Grease. Lots of Broadway show tunes and oldies, because Wrenn is an “old soul” when it comes to music.

3. Describe your perfect writing space. I have to be comfortable, which I am, because I write in the living room in my club chair. But if I could design my ideal space, I would put my writing chair and footstool in a sunroom (with tons of windows and natural light), with the added bonus of a fireplace (for winter).

4. Tell us about one of the secondary characters in your debut novel. How did he/she come to life?

Zoe is Wrenn’s best friend. I created her because Wrenn really needed a voice of reason. She’s an artist and has had a pretty unconventional upbringing, but she’s very down to earth. She causes her share of drama, though, when she decides she wants to meet a guy she met online.

5. What did/will you do on your launch day?
I have *no* idea. I keep dropping hints to the guy I’m sorta married to but not allowed to talk about online that I want to celebrate with dinner at a local Japanese Steakhouse (because I love me some Hibachi chicken and shrimp). I might head to the local bookstore to see if my book is in stock . . . or I may be stuck inside grading papers and sending out plagiarism warnings all day. . . . We’ll see. :)

And tomorrow... the amazing Neesha Meminger, my support in this crazy writing journey... please come back for more. I promise I'll keep writing. And check out all of these amazing lady writers.

The good The bad and The good

2009-03-06T05:49:00.000-08:00

Inevitably I have been alternately terrified of bookstores and combing Young Adult sections eagerly for a sign of MY title. This is exciting. The possibility that something I wrote could be for sale on a shelf among other things that other people wrote. Exciting.

Not exciting? I have yet to see it in a single store. My beautifully supportive friend Neesha reminds me that this journey is what I should relish, that I wrote this book and published it and this dream is what I should relish. She's right, of course. But I'd still like to see it in a store. So I'm just saying, if you have a copy, and you happen to be in a bookstore, just kind of prop it up next to the fancy titles, snap a pic, and send it to me. I'll never be the wiser.

On the other side of celebrating, I am starting to feel a little bit giddy about the party I'm throwing next weekend to celebrate all of this... there are temporary tattoos that have just arrived and lobster stock being frozen in preparation and train schedules and flight times reviewed for family arrivals and bathrooms to clean and sheets to wash for house guests. I'm thinking of wearing a feather in my hair, a la Steven Tyler.

I can read.

2009-03-05T08:28:00.000-08:00

So. As much as I stand in front of a room full of students every day I am terrified at the thought of being in front of a room full of strangers. Of people looking at me. Compound this terror by asking me to READ my very own raw wide open words and you have last night. I had my very very first reading from This Is What I Want to Tell You at the Jefferson Market Library in Manhattan. I read with some other wonderful writers (Donna Freitas, Sarah MacLean, PE Ryan and Siobhan Vivian all moderated by David Levithan and supported too by the awesome Sarah Ockler in the front row) who were so funny and supportive and the range of voices and stories among us was impressive. I was in good company for my first public appearance and, while my voice and left foot seemed to be shaking uncontrollably, I am assured by my stunning and incredible friends that I seemed confident (I assure you. I was not).

I read Noelle to the world for the first time and what buoyed me up, what steadied my voice and amazed me and carried her out to all of these ears in the audience was the faces of my other family in the back row, the Vermont Stones who are not my relation by blood but by all other ties, the poet and musician Vermont Stones there reminding me of all the stories Ive told in 20 years and giving me strength... two beautiful Bard faces who looked up at me and gave me confidence, two Emma Willard faces who said yes we remember high school and we're here with you, and faces new to my life who still said we're here, tell us Noelle's story.

So I did. A little bit of it. And I feel sort of brave now. And so ridiculously thankful.

This Is What I Want to Tell You. Available today.

2009-03-01T07:36:00.000-08:00

My family is my collective hero. This is the conversation I imagine happened at my brother's house this morning.

Dad: Hey Ruthie, your Aunt Heather wrote a book. It comes out today.
Ruth: That's awesome, Dad. Gimme five!

I was supposed to interview Sarah Maclean yesterday

2009-03-01T05:14:00.000-08:00

But I messed up. Brought to you by the Debs Blog tour, my friend and neighbor, Sarah Maclean! Sarah Maclean is a fellow Brooklyn-ite who loves The West Wing, is an amazing bible of book publicity knowledge and wants to be a Romance writer when she grows up... wait. She is a Romance writer. Her debut novel The Season is out this month and it has all of the details-- intrigue, scandal, gossip to keep you turning the pages. And o, the costumes. 'The same 5 Questions we Always Ask'...

1. What is your preferred writing brain food?
dried apricots and pretzels. oh, who am i kidding? cupcakes.

2. What is the soundtrack to your debut novel?
The Waltz Symphony Orchestra plays Johann Strauss, Jr.'s most famous waltzes. Nothing gets you in the Regency mood like Strauss. Even though he didn't come until a few decades later.

3. Describe your perfect writing space.
I have an office in my apartment, but the juices flow best when I'm sitting at our dining room table. I'm out in the open, with husband and dog milling about, sitting at a table covered in books and paper, but I'm really happy there, always.

4. Tell us about one of the secondary characters in your debut novel. How did he/she come to life?
Nicola Salisbury is one of Alex's longest-standing friends, not a best friend, but one of those people who you know will just always be in your life. She's smart and fun and isn't at all interested in what the rest of the ton thinks of her. She's the only one of my characters who is directly modeled on a person I know...a dear friend whom I've always admired for her self-awareness and self-confidence. I wanted readers of The Season to see a character with that kind of pluck. She's one of my favorite parts of the novel.

5. What did/will you do on your launch day?
Well, as many know, my launch day kind of snuck up on me! The books just appeared on shelves a month early...so I squee!d on my blog and started a "Spot The Season" map to track where it's been seen/bought/read...and then took a walk to my local B&N to visit with the nearest copies.

Learn more about Sarah and her work here.
And go buy The Season! Here or here.

Something strange is happening

2009-02-24T08:13:00.000-08:00

Something very strange. I am, somehow, impossibly and thrillingly, becoming a writer who might be read by strangers, a writer whose book hits shelves and tables and UPS delivered boxes in places I've never seen... I can't quite hold on to the reality of this though I know quite certainly that I've imagined it for more than twenty years. This Is What I Want to Tell You has just been spotted at Borders on 33rd street. This means it is not a trick... the story of Nadio and Noelle is out there in the world. I hope you want to read it. I mean hell, I might just go read it again. Just so I know its real.

Why Saundra Mitchell is like Mickey Rourke

2009-02-23T09:30:00.000-08:00

Last night the brilliant Sean Penn won a well deserved Oscar for his work in Milk and he said something like "no disrespect to my fellow nominees but god bless Mickey Rourke". This is kind of how I feel about Saundra Mitchell, the latest guest on the Debs Blog Tour. Saundra Mitchell's debut novel Shadowed Summer is out this month. It is a carefully crafted, lovely, haunting, thrilling novel about ghosts, the boundaries of friendships and family secrets. Saundra is a filmmaker, a super mom, and perhaps most importantly, she has the biggest heart in the publishing world. She is a cheerleader for her fellow writers. She is unfailingly supportive, unbelievably generous, boundlessly kind and just straight up hilarious. You should read her book for all of these reasons but mostly because it is just plain good. Suspense. Sensual detail. Truth. For Saundra Mitchell, "my brother" on this debut novel journey, 'the same five questions we always ask'.

1. What is your preferred writing brain food?

I just need cocola! Everything else is negotiable.

2. What is the soundtrack to your debut novel?

You can actually listen to my entire soundtrack for Shadowed Summer for free on my website! It includes songs by k's choice, Kelly Clarkson, Beausoleil, Fountains of Wayne, and more!

3. Describe your perfect writing space.

I'm pretty sure that ideally, what I need is a 10X10 box with no windows, no doors, and no Internet access. That would be perfect to actually, you know, get some writing done.

4. Tell us about one of the secondary characters in your debut novel. How did he/she come to life?

In the beginning, Ben Duvall was there, but he was extraneous. He had a purpose to serve, he served it, and that was that! After lots of revision, I still had a line in the book that said, "That's all there is to Ben."

My editor left a particularly exclamatory note there pointing out it was WAY too true. It wasn't until late drafts- probably the very last one, that Ben got to be an entire person.

5. What did/will you do on your launch day?

I gave away Extremely Haunted, Somewhat Haunted, and Slightly Possessed Gift Bags on my website to celebrate my debut!

Learn all about Saundra here... and, even more importantly, buy Shadowed Summer here.

The Best Kind

2009-02-15T06:10:00.000-08:00

The stories I tell are inspired, always, by truth. In each character I create, slip the details, whether odd habits or favorite songs or crooked smiles, of people I’ve known somewhere. I think I am imagining and most of the time that imagination is infected with memory. I know that J and M have become part of characters—J in the devotion with which Parker prepares his meals and the careful, unspoken dedication Nadio has to his family. M in the strength with which Keeley fights and the truth Nadio searches for. And now I am writing a story that has impossibly and unexpectedly become a love story and once again I think of them. And I miss Sunday mornings in a sunny kitchen when J made coffee and M leaned on the counter and they planned a day and let all of us in on this perfect pair they’d made. I hear rumours that today is a special day for them and anyway, it’s a Sunday morning and they’re on my mind.

Erin Dionne likes the Red Sox but you still must read her book

2009-02-14T16:19:00.000-08:00

Erin Dionne wrote a book called Models Don’t Eat Chocolate Cookies (which you can, and should, and will be so glad that you did, of course, buy here) that I wish every girl I know could have read just before entering high school… why, you ask? This book is especially important to me because, well, it’s about the work I do. I wrote a thesis once, when I was an undergraduate at Bard College, and it was about (in a nutshell) how girls can learn to tell our own stories out loud and on paper to each other and, in so doing, save confidence esteem and strength so often lost on the eve of entering high school. Models Don’t Eat Chocolate Cookies’ Celeste tells her story, giving voice to this quiet confidence in faith. And Erin Dionne is behind all of this. She’s a baseball fan, mom to a beautiful new baby girl, married to a terrifically supportive husband, teacher of writing, promoter of fellow writers and all around amazing woman. For Erin Dionne, ‘the same five questions we always ask’.

1. What is your preferred writing brain food?
Chocolate chip cookies. YUM!

2. What is the soundtrack to your debut novel?
There are two original songs for the book, "Ruby Red Hair" and "Dreaming Without You" that my friend, Dann Russo, wrote. You can even download them from my website!

3. Describe your perfect writing space.
In my make-believe world, it'd be a room with a wall of bookshelves, a view of the ocean, and no Internet access.

In reality--it's my dining room table, a view of the neighborhood, and lots of snacks at hand.

4. Tell us about one of the secondary characters in your debut novel. How did he/she come to life?
Couscous, a chihuahua, was inspired by a story that a high school friend of mine told. I filed it away, and as I was working on MODELS, I decided that I needed a little more levity in the story. So Millie got a dog...with a lot of issues.

5. What did/will you do on your launch day?
Hang out with the dog and the baby, head over to Barnes and Noble to stalk people in the section, and pop open some champagne!

Download Dann Russo's songs and learn more about Erin here.

Sunday, a day of writing

2009-02-08T06:51:00.000-08:00

I try to keep to one rule a week, and that is that I write on Sundays. This happens in a public place with a large cups of coffee, floor to ceiling windows that beg distraction, baked good breaks, and the indispensable Darci M, my writing right hand. Today, I feel especially ready because I woke up early, ate a waffle, did some yoga, had a perfect cup of this

and, maybe most importantly, have figured out how to outline. The story is in place. It looks like this

Im ready.

Behind the scenes in Houston, Texas. That's where Jenny Moss is.

2009-02-05T17:29:00.000-08:00

Author Jenny Moss is my second guest in the internal Debs Blog Tour, conceived by the inceredible debut writers here. Jenny's novel, Winnie's War, came out this month and you should buy it now. Here. Why, you ask? Because Jenny Moss is a multi-talented writer who can put you in the midst of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic or a 1960's folk festival (more on this later). She can teach you creative writing and she used to work for NASA. That's why. Winnie's War transports you to a tragic moment in our history and yet is ultimately redemptive. Most importantly, Jenny's storytelling will wrap you up. And so, for Jenny Moss, the Jane magazine inspired 'same five questions we always ask'.

1. What is your preferred writing brain food?
Chocolate and diet coke or coffee

2.What is the soundtrack to your debut novel?
I intentionally didn't listen to music when I was writing. Winnie's War is set in 1918, so listening to my CDs would take me mentally out of the time period.

3.Describe your perfect writing space.
Crowded restaurant or my quiet bedroom

4.Tell us about one of the secondary characters in your debut novel. How did he/she come to life?
Mr. Levy was in my mind from the beginning. When I was a child, the father of a friend played chess with me. As an adult, when I looked back at those moments, I was touched he spent that time with me. The two of us didn't have the close friendship of Mr. Levy and Winnie, but out of that memory came the character of Mr. Levy.

5.What did/will you do on your launch day?
I'm having a book launch party at B&N on the Saturday following release. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do on release day. :)

Read more about Jenny and her work here!

Accidentally Noelle

2009-02-02T16:31:00.000-08:00

"The party was at Jessica Marino’s older brother’s loft. It was loud and dim and dirty, the way lofts are in your imagination. Jessica and I both wore black eyeliner smudged in thick clouds around our lashes and tore our tank tops into jagged pointy Vs. Jessica’s brother mostly ignored us and we hung in the corners of the room, trying, without admitting it, to make our faces pout and suggest like all of the faces we saw around us like all of these faces who seemed older and better and barely noticed us."

Noelle is an accidental designer. Terrified to be noticed in a crowd, uncertain of everything in her closet, uncertain of each step she takes and where to look she follows Jessica Marino, tucking into her shadow. She cuts her t-shirts to make them look like someone else's clothes. Somehow, this way, they become hers. Check out the sometimes easy, oft-inspiring, always edgy fashion tips here. Noelle could bring out your inner fashionista.

Stacey Jay is a rockstar

2009-01-27T06:06:00.000-08:00

And I mean it. Stacey Jay is a super mom and a writer who can slip into an impressive range of voices, characters and settings. I'm so excited to interview her right here as the very first guest in the 2009 Debs Blog Tour... where I'll interview a series of amazing debut authors, we'll talk to each other in fact. All year long. Keep coming back for more...

So Jane magazine used to do this spread 'the same five questions we always ask' when interviewing celebrities… so my Debs blog tour page is Jane magazine inspired… below 'the same 5 questions I always ask' for Stacey Jay, author of You Are So Undead to Me which debuted on January 22nd. Buy it here!

1. What is your preferred writing brain food?

Coffee! Does that count as a food?

2. What is the soundtrack to your debut novel?

"In over my head" by The Fray. Megan's in over her head and I'll be honest, this hasn't been an easy road. I was pregnant or had a new baby for most of the process and, at times, it's felt like I wasn't going to make it to the next step. I'm just so excited to finally see it releasing and be able to say "yes! I did it!". And I'm hoping the baby will start sleeping through the night before my first signing so I can manage to stay awake until 9pm. Lol!

3. Describe your perfect writing space.

Small, cozy room, bookshelves on the wall all around and the smell of books filling the space. There's a coffee machine that spits out cappucinos on one wall and a massage chair on the other and time stands still inside so that the time I spend writing doesn't eat up my time with my kids or my hubby. That sounds like the best space ever. Sigh...

4. Tell us about one of the secondary characters in your debut novel. How did he/she come to life?

Monica is Megan's nemesis and she's just a big, hairy B. But also very smart and great at her job and, at times, helpful and nice. She's just the perfect bad girl, the kind you can't quite bring yourself to hate but drives you absolutely insane. I wanted to make her more than the stereotypical meanie and I hope I succeeded.

5. What did/will you do on your launch day?

I'll probably take my baby out to the bookstore and stick the copy of YASUTM in the stroller with him and take a picture of my two new arrivals and then scream and nerd out and...then go home and get back to work so I get to do it all again soon. Lol. :) I'm really looking forward to it!

Check out Stacey's site and her upcoming projects and seriously... read about her zombies! She knows her stuff!

How to save the world

2009-01-19T06:20:00.000-08:00

"I had a routine. It was every minute. I knew the things I wanted to do. This year I quit the food pantry. I actually really liked being there, Molly or no Molly—there was something therapeutic about stacking can after can of green beans, box after box of Stovetop, and something comforting about packing boxes for distribution… one of everything, knowing the meals that would come out of that box would be so much more important than any meal I ever ate."

Nadio feels better, somehow, when he is doing for others. Whether his mother, his sister, his girlfriend or the town's aging Vietnam Vets. He can't explain what drives him to the work he does but it makes him feel full somehow and he can set the rest of the things that confuse him aside. Something about being around him, you want to do the work he does. Check it out: you can volunteer with the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, to help affect policy, serve and deliver meals, or use your professional skills to promote the organization's mission. What are you doing this weekend? They could use your help and you'd maybe get a taste what Nadio means... that peace he feels.

Little One

2009-01-14T10:17:00.000-08:00

In 2008 my brother and I both finally achieved something we had dreamed about for most of ever. I sold a book and he became a dad. While I admit, watching my brother and sister in law grow a family has been INFINITELY cooler than selling a book, it has been a big year with so much to celebrate. I can't believe that it has been a year since I wrote this post and since This Is What I Want to Tell You was called Permanent Ink and Parker had a different name.

But yesterday Ruth Nightingale turned 1 and she is freaking amazing.

Happy Birthday to my favorite girl!

Stuff Keeley Likes

2009-01-13T08:05:00.000-08:00

"I saw a flash of Keeley, years of Keeley, little kid Keeley—taking off on her bike, leaned into my sister’s ear whispering, leaned over a pile of construction paper, scissors, torn magazine pages, she was always making something. A collage, a poster, on her knees over a pile of paper and glue in our kitchen and then her eyes welling up when her parents would come to get her. I don’t wanna go, she never wanted to go."

Some of you who read this page may not know that Keeley is Noelle's best friend. Keeley is Nadio's first love. Keeley is at the heart, or at least the core, the hard to find center of This Is What I Want to Tell You. And she's an artist. Her handmade books and photographs and collages paper the walls of the story and remind the twins about days and moments they'd forgotten. She thinks you should check out this very cool site on diversity in photography, meet some new artists and delve into the history of photography. It's maintained by a beautiful Brooklyn-based artist named Qiana Mestrich. You should check out her work too. Keeley thinks so.

Back to Life

2009-01-11T12:57:00.000-08:00

This blog is confused. It is forging it’s identity. It is quiet and outgoing all at once.

No longer. As of today, Permanently Inked has officially been re-imagined within the dawn of 2009, the year This Is What I Want to Tell You hits the world.

Permanently Inked will, from now on, bring you:

-Regular entries
-Thoughts from Keeley, Nadio, Parker & Noelle
-Playlists, art, recipes, musings
-Thoughts, excerpts, characters and questions from the recently revived No Happy Endings.
-Street art
-A full year of interviews with fabulous debut authors brought to you by the International Debs Blog Tour
-And of course, some pictures of my nieces, birthday tributes to my dearest, and the inevitable musings on writing and working in high schools all at the same time.
-No more confusion. At least not all the time.

Welcome.

Aches and Resolutions

2009-01-07T08:58:00.000-08:00

I don't believe in resolutions, not really. But it is seven days in to the new year and I'm lying in bed wrapped in quilts surrounded by tissues and teacups and I can't help thinking about the things I should be doing instead of being sick in bed, the things I must do this year, the things... you know.

So I have this book coming out. In less than two months. I'm sure there are things I should be doing. Can I come to your school? Can I read in your bookstore? Can you buy a copy? And, most importantly, can I get over this crippling fear of reading in public? It's time.

My head hurts.

When it snows it snows

2008-12-22T10:00:00.000-08:00

I started something brand new.

And its a sad story. I'm not sure why it is that I'm best at writing sad stories, but I am.

On Friday there was a snowstorm and Queens was blizzard white.

It looked like this.

I think the graffitied streets of Rome are officially on hold.

Loss

2008-12-09T16:16:00.001-08:00

I've been thinking a lot about loss. When we lose someone to death it is often a slow, loud, tragic wrenching loss. But one we can begin to understand.

We don't always talk about the other kinds of losses; the quiet drawn out losses that come because of geography, growing, leaving, loving... the losses that come because your lives go in different directions and the things that were important become... replaced. By other things that are important.

I'm not very good with loss. The way I pack suitcases and boxes and move from coast to continent, you'd think I'd be better at it. I never seem to get better. And the saddest losses are inexplicable. We grow up. We need different things. We move. We gain. We lose.

I'm sad. But it's in a reflective way. Loss is part of it all. Part of the lives we live and the people we become.

GRIEF by Matthew Dickman

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what's left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish
you must put aside
and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,
her eyes moving from the clock
to the television and back again.
I am not afraid. She has been here before
and now I can recognize her gait
as she approaches the house.
Some nights, when I know she's coming,
I unlock the door, lie down on my back,
and count her steps
from the street to the porch.
Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,
tells me to write down
everyone I have ever known
and we separate them between the living and the dead
so she can pick each name at random.
I play her favorite Willie Nelson album
because she misses Texas
but I don't ask why.
She hums a little,
the way my brother does when he gardens.
We sit for an hour
while she tells me how unreasonable I've been,
taking down the pictures of my family,
not writing, refusing to shower,
staring too hard at girls younger than my sister.
Eventually she puts one of her heavy
purple arms around me, leans
her head against mine,
and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.
So I tell her,
things are feeling romantic.
She pulls another name, this time
from the dead
and turns to me in that way that parents do
so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.
Romantic? She says,
reading the name out loud, slowly
so I am aware of each syllable,
each consonant resembling a swollen arm, the collapsed ear,
a mouth full of teeth, each vowel
wrapping around the bones like new muscle,
the sound of that person's body
and how reckless it is,
how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.

I have to say it

2008-11-14T09:52:00.001-08:00

There is so much that tells me I am not supposed to wear my political beliefs on my sleeve. As a teacher and as a writer I am around young people every day and all the time, around those of you who are gathering information, understanding truths, forming your opinions, and that these truths and opinions and beliefs have got to be yours. And I believe that. I know that. But I don't think it can hurt to just say a little bit of what I believe. To tell you that each night as I walk home from the subway, the long stretched out blocks from Flatbush to Franklin, and these posters

illuminated by bedroom lights and dining room lights, framed by curtains and fingerprint streaks, in barbershops and brownstones, these posters, I can't lie, make me crazy with delight and, well, hope. Every night. Without fail.

When your book hits a brick wall

2008-11-07T05:31:00.000-08:00

So I was thinking about this project I'm working on, called There Is No Happy Ending, actually, I'm thinking about this project most of the time... and what I'm thinking is. I lost it. I was SO in it and I lost it... what does one do now? It is in the hands, just now, of a reader who might breathe some life into it. But until then. I've never been one to work well on many projects at once. I think it might be time to start another. I feel guilty. But I have this idea. It's about journals and the year Kurt Cobain died. It's about the unexpected relationships that can only happen in secret... but I feel strange abandoning Jacob... can I bring him?

All at once

2008-10-22T18:56:00.000-07:00

I have a fever and swollen glands and that kind of aching back that says no, this will only get worse before it gets better. And I am wrapped in bblankets on one of those wintery nights before NYC landlords turn on the heat... and Im drinking tea. And it occurs to me.

I have ARCs. (translation: Advanced Reader's Copy). I have a BOOK of my book. It is this neat little size. It has a cover with my name on it. It's not copy-edited or anything. It is used for reviews (this part I have yet to process. shhhh) Its sort of mind blowing. And in the same week the UPS man delivered these books to my door, I was interviewed by the amazing ladies here... which was my first real writerly interview. And so, although I am drowning in sick now, last week was pretty real as far as this writer thing goes.

I know I should take a picture of it and post it here... me on a bench reading my own book, my own book tucked on a shelf among other *real* books. And I will, maybe, but much like the dialogue I wrote in the book that is sometimes hard to distinguish from the inner monologues of Nadio and Noelle, the reality of this whole thing is sort of hard to distinguish from imagination. So I'm going to leave the photo out of it for now...

Or maybe I'm just feverish and so. A little delirious

Gypsy holiday

2008-10-11T10:19:00.000-07:00

We all know I have some trouble sitting still. I get restless, anxious being in one place for too long.

I stop writing well.

Now it is official.

We

are going here

for this

What I mean is, that restlessness, those jumpy feet can still some. Because after much stress, an Alitalia flight fiasco, a desperate bank account, it is now official, I am going to Spain for the winter holidays, meeting Kira in Madrid, renting a car, maybe visiting Jaime in Alicante, maybe, hopefully meeting Jocco and Migi along the coastal way, checking out the magic of Sevilla and Granada, seeing Spain, who knows...

Ok. Deep breaths. Trip planned. I'm back.

In Words

2008-10-04T16:16:00.000-07:00

What does graffitti look like in words?

I want to write this

so you can see it on the page, without SEEING it on the page.

But I'm wondering if I don't have it all wrong.

Or maybe I've just been writing the same scene for nine hours.

First Person

2008-10-01T05:12:00.000-07:00

I haven't written here for a long time because I am having trouble balancing my school life with my writer life. I have this pact with myself that, for the most part, I'll keep these posts from being about the school life. I'm sometimes mildly successful... but yesterday I had a long awaited talk with my agent, who is not only a constant source of support and inspiration. She is also, and this I find to be the most important part, HONEST. We talked about There Is No Happy Ending (which, by the way, is a *working* title) She told me what is working. And it is the things I love. It is this crazy cast of characters with their bangle bracelets and jagged haircuts. It is the emotion of everything new and doing things you probably shouldn't. It is the feeling guilty that you get to do things your parents couldn't.

What isn't working? Well, the pacing. Slowslowslow. This I knew was true. I can fix this. And the narrator. Every character in this project is so real. Except Rory. Somehow I neglected to fill her out. And now, she stands at a cold distance from the reader.

What if, I whispered into the phone yesterday, what if I changed the narration to first person?

I really think that could work, agent affirmed. Which I was afraid of.

The narrator seems uncertain of her, agent went on.

Yes, I said. She is. I am.

So what if Rory were the narrator?

Ok. I don't have a good reason for making this story third person. I simply wanted it to work. I wanted to do it well because it is so rare that I read a good story about seventeen that is in the third person. So does this mean I can't do it well? Or does it simply mean Rory needs to speak to the reader, because it is her story being told, because without her voice speaking up she seems cold and flat and made of paper. I'll have to see.

Speaking of first person and COMPLETELY off topic. Please check out this blog. This is a project just beginning at my old job. I used to work with some of these students and I will talk until the end of time about how amazing they are. Look for yourself.

(ps, yes, that is me not keeping school life separate again... I try.)

One million kids

2008-09-02T18:46:00.000-07:00

I went back to school today. Not back to school like pen and notebooks and listening to lectures, but back to school like I do now, on the teacher side of things. I'm at a new school this year. A beautiful brand new building with high windows and sun soaked floors and students from every borough and dozens of countries. Today we drew maps of our past and wrote stories about our names. And we wrote poems about the subway. I love my new commute. Its this long winding elevated ride through three boroughs. And I get to see this along the way...

this amazing place called Five Points in Long Island City. And you can imagine this sends all kind of electricity through Jacob.

Then today we read this fantastic poem called 'Night Subway'.

And we did some work imitating the venerable Katha Pollit. And I admitted that I too always wanted to write about the subway. I once wrote about finishing a book by Jim Lewis on the N train over the 59th street bridge, crying my first unstoppable public New York City tears as the book came to a close with the skyline behind me.

But today. O today. I forgot that one million students went back to school today. And tens of thousands of their teachers and aides and coaches. And the subway platform looked like this.

And the air conditioner in my car was broken. And the sneakers in my bag left imprints on my hipbone everyone was pressed so tight.

But we wrote some pretty fantastic subway poems today.

Because it's too late at night and I have too many lists

2008-08-24T22:56:00.000-07:00

I do more than a few things to make a living. Mainly, I’m a counselor. In a high school. I teach English too. Sometimes I teach creative writing in an after school program. I also wrote a book. And, well, I guess I can say I write books. In the present tense. This week all of these things I do have been crashing together as I prepare to start a new school year at a new school and try to keep to a writing schedule. I spent four days in western Massachusetts last week, studying the theories and practices of a particular very familiar institute and it made me think (intensely, like it is two a.m. and I can’t sleep kind of think) about the way we build writing into our lives. In all of the things I do for a living writing is central. I do it not only to tell the stories that come to me at two a.m. but also to re-imagine the stories I pass on the street and bump into on the subway platform. I do it as therapy. I do it as a way of understanding myself, I teach it as a way of asking questions of yourself. I teach it as a way of understanding texts and making comparisons and digging out new ideas and explaining why you love or hate something. I do it because I can’t sleep and putting together the words to understand why makes my muscles relax and my brain slow slow slow down. I do it because something I’ve learned is that the stories people tell are the way we see the world. So all of these things I do, which sometimes seem to tumble and bang into each other, are actually inherently tied together by this truly simply act.

Then and Now

2008-08-19T18:06:00.000-07:00

So I've been away for a long time. Not away, really but. I had some computer problems. And I moved. And I travelled. And I left one job and started another one. And I got sad. And I had some problems with words. And I want to tell you some stories. But tonight, I'm just going to tell you this one. I went to California.

And in California, I got to do this.

What I mean is, I got to spend 24 hours with some of my favorite people in the world. People who I lived in Rome with, traveled and taught with and wrote stories about and wrote stories for and missed and celebrated. It was 24 hours of laughing and then I thought of something. It reminded me of this.

Because two years ago I was on the deck or hiking a to a white sand beach from a cliff-side house with almost exactly the same people, laughing until too late at night and getting sunburned. We're a little bit older now and this time we read magazines and drank coffee in the silence of people exhausted by not having enough time to catch up, of people holding off the moment, just one more second until we break off in a million directions.

Two years ago we played board games in a house in Greece carved out of a hillside, in the quiet of people who have all the time in the world to spend countries and see island sunsets and whitewashed churches.

I can't help remembering that these people made the sunsets look like this.

And in California, after reuniting, and writing and walking through harbors and lying on beaches and eating tacos and watermelon, the sunset looked more like this.

The beaches were beautiful in California, in the morning, when it was still foggy and only me and the surfers were awake and I ran along the train tracks, but these days I'm sure missing some people.

I'm OK too.

2008-07-23T11:53:00.000-07:00

Along with dozens of writers, YA and otherwise, this week, I want to talk about Margo Rabb’s piece in the Sunday Times Book Review. (and also say, if you haven't read, you should certainly read Rabb's Cures for Heartbreak, which is indeed heartbreaking, and funny and true and beautifully written)

My first instinct is to stand up for my genre, so to speak, to say that Rabb is perpetuating a snobbery that is not nearly so widespread as she thinks. But the truth is, I know exactly how she feels. The words of Mark Haddon and the defenses of Peter Cameron are scarily familiar. Apparently, if you write for an audience who is still in high school, your intellectual capacity is questionable, your literary merit dubious. You get funny looks and awkward silences and conversations come to strange halts. I was in a conversation last week in which an educator, referring to a series of books used for a particular course stated: “This one is a young adult title but I found it very valuable.”

But.

My editor, Andrew Karre, has an approach to YA Literature that is inspiring, comforting and frankly, makes a lot of sense. He believes that “young adult is a point of view, not a reading level.” I can't help but want to ask the YA critics of the world about the novels they've celebrated that were narrated by a child or a teeanager--just not marketed to them.

I had never set out to write a young adult book before I wrote THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO TELL YOU. In fact, it began, as I’ve said before, as a book about the twins’ mother, a very dark and grown-up story. But the more I wrote, the more it changed. What I wanted to write about was intensity and passion and first times and an inability to not tell the truth. I wanted to write a story that was specific about an experience that was universal. And what, I thought, was more universal than adolescence, the raw pain and joy and experimentation. Apparently, this makes me a certain kind of writer.

And whatever kind of writer this is, maybe the kind that won’t be reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement or excerpted in The New Yorker or blurbed by Nathan Englander or Andre Aciman (I note these two authors, not because of anything they’ve ever said about YA Literature, simply because they wrote my favorite books this year), it is the kind of writer I am. I’ve found an actual home in the stories I write now. I may have to defend the literary merit of my books from here on out, but I’m hoping my audience can speak to that.

Moving is like Writing

2008-07-15T04:09:00.000-07:00

I do both of these things all of the time. I mean ALL of the time. One I am exhausted and inspired by. The other I am… exhausted and inspired by.

1. I can’t help doing either one. They’re equally impulsive, natural, crucial.
2. They’re cleansing. In this way that says I am purging and preserving all at once.
3. They remind me, give life to, the millions of worlds out there that I am living, have lived and have yet to live.
4. They bring new people into my life, real and imagined.
5. They make it hard, no, impossible, to think about anything else.
6. They let me create new space—sometimes within the confines of my imagination and four walls and sometimes outside the limit of possibility.
7. They make me crazy and I want to stop forever.
8. They make me exhilarated and I can’t imagine NOT moving/writing.
9. They make me realize I have too much STUFF—both tangible and intangible.
10. They make me realize I will always find a place for this stuff.
11. I feel intensely sad, doing either one, about the things I am leaving behind and haven’t appreciated or realized and the absolute uncertainty about what lies ahead.
12. They’re costly—mentally and financially.
13. I am, apparently, defined by both of these things.

This is what Summer looks like

2008-07-13T20:20:00.000-07:00

While we await summer with this intense hope and giddy anticipation, it tends to fly by in a way that's impossible to slow. And here it is, mid July and I can't recall all of the things I meant to do... I know I'm supposed to be writing and Anna introduced me to this killer Roman street artist who's been inspiring me much.

Kira came to visit and in the middle of one last time at Yankee stadium, too many great meals, a day at the Met and lying in the sun in more than one park, she was the guest of honor at my birthday party, a perfect mix of the very best people and some pretty tasty food and my other dearest guest of honor and in-house entertainer and blue-dressed twin, Chloe.

I've seen some outdoor movies under the majestic shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge and celebrated the 4th with my family and beautiful (and I mean BEAUTIFUL and not even cause we're related) niece, who is just about the happiest girl in the world...

and Darc, who, in the absence of fireworks at our mountain-top cookout, lit sparklers with such enthusiastic delight that it was good enough for all of us...

And then this music filled weekend I listened to the folk-singing tales of Texas musician Steve James at a lower east side club, joined tens of thousands in Central Park for a sing-a-long to the likes of Livin on a Prayer, and spent a sun soaked day in McCarren Pool (and I've got the red shoulders to prove it) revelling in the high school nostalgia of The Breeders.

All in all, not bad so far, even if I can't remember all of the things I meant to do.

An Improbable World

2008-06-30T18:29:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I am not sure how to write the things I want to write here, to give you the details and the pieces that inspire the things I write and yet to save the privacy of the people in my life. But something has been sitting with me since I left work tonight, since I came home on the train and walked the long way in a hissing summer rain and made a salad and sat on my terrace watching the rain move over the skyline. Its dark outside and its still sitting with me, so I'll tell you a story.

When we are young, and by young I mean seventeen or so, everything, I mean all of it, is at once possible and impossible. It is so easy to imagine greatness. And it is so easy to give up. Because we have no idea how its going to go. And we've barely been tested. And some of us have only been failed. And yet we have endless potential. And the fear of success, and the fear of this world cripples us from unveiling this potential. Sometimes, when we are younger, say seventeen, the sadness in our eyes can sort of paralyze the people around us because they just want to help. They just want to say, look, it passes, it gets better, you can do this, but they know they can't say a word, because we have to learn it ourselves by living it.

That's all I wanted to say. That. And this.

The Summer I Was Sixteen
by Geraldine Connolly

The turquoise pool rose up to meet us,
its slide a silver afterthought down which
we plunged, screaming, into a mirage of bubbles.
We did not exist beyond the gaze of a boy.

Shaking water off our limbs, we lifted
up from ladder rungs across the fern-cool
lip of rim. Afternoon. Oiled and sated,
we sunbathed, rose and paraded the concrete,

danced to the low beat of "Duke of Earl".
Past cherry colas, hot-dogs, Dreamsicles,
we came to the counter where bees staggered
into root beer cups and drowned. We gobbled

cotton candy torches, sweet as furtive kisses,
shared on benches beneath summer shadows.
Cherry. Elm. Sycamore. We spread our chenille
blankets across grass, pressed radios to our ears,

mouthing the old words, then loosened
thin bikini straps and rubbed baby oil with iodine
across sunburned shoulders, tossing a glance
through the chain link at an improbable world.

Life gets in the way

2008-06-28T06:03:00.000-07:00

It's been a pretty good year... I moved back to new york. I found an apartment with a TERRACE. I started working at an amazing school. I sold a book. I stuck to a workout schedule. I played on a beach in mexico. I became an aunt. I started another book. I had all this TIME. Not being a teacher meant I had all this TIME. I came home and I wrote and I slept in late and I had long brunches with friends and then wandered 5th avenue boutiques without worrying about the piles of grading I had waiting for me at home. I read novels, many of them.

As summer dawns hot and a little bit sticky, all of the sudden the walls are creeping in on this time. Things are changing, in all good ways of course, and I need to remember being busy. I need to stick to schedules and do laundry. I need to not let my writing suffer because most of all, in the empty spaces in the lists and plans I'm making, I'm afraid that TINE is going to get lost. Remind me about it here and there, will you?

I spent the morning making a few last changes on This Is What I Want to Tell You. I have such a strange relationship with this book-- like I'm deeply in love with it but the romance is gone. So we are going to take a little break and get the romance back.

The week of July 7th I am teaching a workshop for these guys. I miss teaching writing so intensely that I just cannot wait. But refining the curriculum on this beautiful summer day. What do we want to write about in the summer versus during the school year. Don't we approach the craft differently when its hot and bright and free outside? These are the things I'm thinking...

Addendum

2008-06-18T18:01:00.000-07:00

I take back everything I said about Kobe.
So does my bro.
The end.

Why outlining is against nature

2008-06-18T07:19:00.000-07:00

The kind of writer I am is at odds with the kind of writer I need to be just now.

Once upon a time I was the definition of organized, deadline conscious, motivated by details. With age (experience?), this has changed. The way I write now, is by scene. I have a scene in my mind, I write it. I know the characters, I know their lives, I know, in theory, where this scene will fit, when the bits and pieces are written in around it. But I am, it seems, incapable of putting a book together with any kind of chronology or order. And I am hopeless without deadlines.

What I need to be, now, is organized. TINE, as you’ve heard about here and there, is this project of passion. And I can write pages and pages of Jacob’s art and his diatribes and Rory’s quiet wonder and the details of Roman side streets… but how to link this all together around the details of a plot… this is where I struggle. And so I sat down two weeks ago to write a scene by scene outline. An outline I could follow and fill in. And what happened?

I was so bored. This story comes as it comes. I know the details of the lives inside out, how can I create the things that will happen. Don’t they just happen? This, you see, is my problem. I struggle with the idea of forcing the process and, to me, this is what outlining does. I write extensive character sketches and thematic driven narratives. I know what the story is about, yet I want the details to come organically. And so what often happens is 50,000 words of intense scenes based in the central conflicts and inner monologues, without the smaller details to fill in the spaces. The day-to-day details if you will. So I’ve started to go back to the roots of how I wrote, the way I teach my students to write, by watching… in the hallways of my school and on the steps out front and classrooms and coffee shops and overheard phone conversations… in all of this I hear the daily details and so I take a little bit and re-shape in and fill in the intensity.

I’m working on it.

And another thing… remember when you were a little kid and someone was coming to visit—your grandparents or your best friend from summer camp or your cousin from Chicago, and you’d hang out the window watching all the cars, waiting and dancing up and down with excitement. That’s how I feel right now because in 9 ½ hours Kira is gonna be in NEW YORK!!! And I get two whole days off of work.

Dad's Day

2008-06-15T10:22:00.000-07:00

The amazing thing about this year, is that there is this little girl in our lives, who is funny and sharp and beautiful and has made all of us look at every day differently. And because of her, today my brother celebrates his first Fathers Day.

And my dad celebrates this day, for the first time, as a grandfather.

Happy loving to all of you dads... especially mine.

I still Love This Game

2008-06-13T09:04:00.000-07:00

I am still in a place, and I hope I always will be, where my years begin in September and end in June. I live on a school calendar and I mark life transitions based upon summers—where was I and how was I living and what was I dreaming about and reading and who was I in love with and where was I subletting… I also remember these transitions around one other thing.

The NBA Finals.

I remember sitting on the floor of South Union Street on a hot dusky summer night, before we had furniture, boxes and beanbags, with H and Brennan, the only light in the house the tv screen glare while my then beloved Chicago Bulls trounced the Utah Jazz. That summer we were always listening to Public Enemy's He Got Game and every night was sweltering even at dusk… I remember a dingy basement on South Willard Street, a tear-streaked Michael Jordan curled on the glossy court floor hugging the championship trophy to him (I still reeling on the joy of his return). Those LA years in the smoky backrooms of the Roost in Atwater Village eating stale popcorn and cheering on the Kings—thank god for Peja—even in this Lakers territory. I remember when I still liked Tim Duncan—I liked his compsure and his quiet command of the court and this unstoppable pair of he and David Robinson, who seemed to have been on basketball courts since before I was born.

But mostly, I remember this.

The UntouchaBulls anyone? I fell in love with basketball watching the Chicago Stadium battles against the Blazers. My summers began when Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Horace Grant, Scott Williams, BJ Armstrong, John Paxson (you get the idea) started taking over. Nothing sends shivers down my spine like that ubiquitous image of Jordan’s shoulder shrug after his 6th three-pointer in game one against the Blazers. I love nothing more than lip-reading the trash-talk between Jordan and Barkley when ESPN Classics re-runs the ’93 Bulls-Suns Finals. I feel exhilarated at the thought of these series. I’d never been an athlete. I grew up in a Chicago sports house, though, and in 1991 I started to get it.

Last night my brother and I sat on the phone together watching the fourth quarter of the Lakers-Celtics game—he in his Vermont living room, me on a 20 second delay on a live feed on my laptop (I don’t have tv…). It really was a fantastic 4th quarter. I’m a Kevin Garnett fan but don’t feel any great passion about the Celtics. And the Lakers? Despite the obvious coach connection, I have a lot of years of Laker animosity. Ok, Kobe animosity. But something really strange happened last night. I was kind of, for the first time in my life, pulling for the Lakers.

“Listen, Heath,” my brother said, as I bemoaned the MJ comparisons. “He’s no Jordan. But he really is unreal. And he’s the closest—no one has even come close until now.” And then we watched silently for a while.

He kind of is unreal.

I couldn’t help thinking, if I were 15 years younger, and I was just falling in love with basketball, would it be all about this?

Instead of this?

Either way, the finals are almost over, the summer is beginning, this one I’ll remember by a Brooklyn rooftop view, a cross-continental visitor, a sweltering week in June, a birthday party in the Park and the Celtics and the Lakers.

Brooklyn to Wichita

2008-06-07T06:09:00.000-07:00

Last night I was falling asleep and the air was night-time cool. I had a long week and felt exhausted so when my phone rang, I didn’t want to answer it. But I looked down. It was Mikey and I haven’t spoken to him in months. So I answered.

Mikey was sitting on his porch on a sticky-hot summer night, halfway to the other side of the world in Wichita, Kansas. He was holding his son, Vincent, who didn’t seem to want to sleep.

Mikey and I talked about fatherhood and the realization, the moment of realization when you know it’s just you who has to figure it all out. We talked about making decisions when the decisions aren’t about you anymore. We talked about writing a book, and the reality that comes, somehow, with selling it, with knowing people are going to read it.

Mikey and I have been having late night talks—about the confusion we stand in and the possibility in new jobs or relationships and the theories of why it all is the way it is—we’ve been having these conversations for more than 12 years but last night, sitting on my Brooklyn window-sill and Mikey on his Wichita porch, caught me off guard. It occurred to me that the stories I write come from the possibility in these conversations. These kinds of conversations. Evaluating. Asking “what would it be like if…” and so, to figure it out, I make up characters and scenes and moments where that “if” exists.

I suppose I’ve known, all along, that this is what I do. But when Mikey asked me what this book I’ve written is about, I thought of a dozen conversations he and I had in college and I thought of the title, the new title, which I was uncertain and timid about and now, I know its perfect. This is What I Want to Tell You. Because, most of the time, in those late night whispered conversations with your closest friends, you would say some of it, but you almost never say out loud, to near strangers or the ones who are leaving your life This is what I want to tell you…

Why the best narrators are sixteen

2008-05-26T16:16:00.000-07:00

Why do you write? How do you get the ideas for your book? How much do you consider your audience? These are the questions we ask of writers, the truths we want writers to answer. And so I cannot help thinking about these truths. And refining the answers.

For a long time I thought I knew what kind of writer I was—or wanted to be. But to this day I can’t tell you who that was. I know I wrote stories that were always, inevitably, about sadness or solitude and the strength of a flawed yet perfect friendship and there were always self-consciously naked bodies and self-consciously whispered confessions and everything, I mean everything, had impossible endings.

When I started to write the story that grew into THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO TELL YOU it was a story about a single mother who had five year old twins and a newborn and a long-ago love affair she couldn’t let go and a fear of losing herself in her children. I couldn’t put myself inside her, though, not in the places I wanted to, I was lost in the story of her adolescent love affair. And suddenly, almost without my knowing, the twins grew up and the story became theirs. And I realized that, all this time, what I have wanted to write about is the beginning of things. In high school we are beginning to understand the world we live in in a brand new way, yet often being told we are not ready for it yet. The emotions and interactions we experience, however, can be intensely real and mature and so often teenagers handle all of this with a grace and an honesty we don’t give them credit for. I wanted to write about this.

The good news is, it seems to be the right time for this kind of storytelling. Recently Newsweek did a story on young adult readers, their literary interests and attitudes toward content. I think, in a way, teen readers—still at a place where they can read what inspires them and what strikes them—are speaking for another generation of writers, who are maybe too busy or too critical to let books do what they once did. One thirteen year old reader, in the Newsweek article, has it right on in my mind. “The great thing about literature is that it promotes the expansion of thought and the opening of minds."

Right?

Get Well.

2008-05-23T05:27:00.001-07:00

The thing about being a writer. And a gypsy. And (theoretically) practical.

2008-05-16T18:13:00.000-07:00

The thing about being all of these things, is that they constantly pull against each other. And that I find myself wanting so many (often contradictory) things at once. Upon writing and selling this novel that fills up so much space in my mind and heart these days, I find that the dream of being a real live writer suddenly seems just a little bit possible. And it is all I want. I’ve finished revisions on PI (for which the title has changed. More on this to come.) and my brain and heart, while still with the twins, is also filled and focused on Jacob and Rory and the twisting side streets of Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood… which brings me to the gypsy part. Because I lived in this neighborhood, and found myself quite ready to leave it a year ago for this beloved New York. And what I find now is this deep and physical longing for this Rome. And Berlin. And the Santorini hillside where I spent one of my very best weeks, and the thin crowded “beach” of Anguillara and a rainy camping trip to Monte Argentario and a strange and terrifying overnight bus through central Turkey. And the places I’ve never been. Baltic beaches and Bulgarian mountains.

I want to sell everything. How can I own a couch (quite practical) when I am quite incapable of staying still for more than ten months? (it used to be two years but, well, the older I get…) and where can I go next? But o. The practical. Because I’m not quite so young as I once was. And my resume is close to three pages. And each job—significantly different from the one before. And I’m not particularly good at any one of these chosen pursuits (gypsy-ing and writing stories don’t count) And shouldn’t I have a savings account? Shouldn’t I have a career? Shouldn’t I have a plan?

But really. The greatest feeling in the world is when I am writing a story (by hand. With a pen) and the sun feels hot on the left side of my face. I’m on a plane. I’m in the window seat. I’m going somewhere I’ve never been. It’s summer.

The One Person

2008-05-14T05:52:00.000-07:00

It's my mom's birthday. What I remember most about May 14th is the lilacs that grew up the side of our house and on the morning of May 14th, or Mothers day, whichever came first and they sometimes fell on the same day, we would make a breakfast of muesli and toast and orange juice (mixed with water, she always liked her orange juice with a little bit of water) and pick stems of lilacs and put them in a jelly jar of water and carry it all upstairs to mom, still sleeping, and the room smelled of lilacs.

"Are you hungry? Do you want a sandwich" my friends say when we talk about my mom. Because whomever walked in the door, she would feed her. Sliced apples and peanut butter and tuna salad with dill and apple pie and popcorn and chees and Stoned wheat thins and hummus sandwiches. She'd bring us trays of snacks and lemonade, whether we were 10 or 25, my brother and I and our friends, lounging with our feet on the round newspaper scattered coffee table.

Later, as I got older, my mom and I have sleepovers. We make big salads and watch movies (usually with devastating ending that leave us both red-eyed and sniffling). My mom calls me every Saturday and sometimes we talk for an hour and sometimes, by the way I say hello, she says "You're in a bad mood. I'm going to call you later." She has an instinct. There is an unspoken language between us that is perfect understanding. What I have with my mom grows and evolves every year of our lives, but we're some of the same person and some two parts that push each other and what she teaches me is pure love without boundaries and absolute truth and that if I just wait and stop and breathe, one breath slowly after the other, it will be ok.

When I gave my mom a copy of my book she printed it and tied a string around it and put it on her dining room table. "We just have to get used to each other, get to know each other a little bit before I start reading," she said. She knew the book was like a new person in my life, she just wanted to get to know him.

I love you, mom. Happy birthday.

More birthday tales

2008-05-13T08:29:00.000-07:00

Since the very first minutes I met J, he has proudly proclaimed his advanced years as testament to the wisdom he has to offer me. More years, more wisdom I suppose.

On that first night I met him, I was skeptical of his suntan and his his SoCal wit and his blonde streaks (all-natural of course. The OC sun). I was skeptical of all of my roommates, of moving to this strange city where the language felt so foreign I struggled to order coffee. At first, as these stories go, we fought. We still fight. But fighting with J made me less homesick. And in truth, there is something quite comforting about someone who knows all of the little details that will make you angry enough to yell or rage or just give up and laugh. There is something quite comforting, even, when someone knows you well enough that he will write you into vocabulary quizzes for the students you share. “Miss, they’ll say. “Mr. S says you never clean your bathroom and he always has to do it for you.” And you’re not sure whether to poison his dinner or laugh. There are some amazing things about J. A few months ago I told you how he forces me to tell the truth. He forces me to find humour when I want to be devastated. He always offers to do the dishes or take out the garbage. (okay. The last part is a lie). But in all truth, his generosity is limitless and shows itself in quiet and hidden ways. He is careful. He doesn’t want us to know this soft side of him, beneath the California blonde and the very hip t-shirts and the dozens of shoes—this side that I know I can rely upon, whatever it is I need. I’m just have to tell you its there.

My other favorite thing about J is his photo face. He poses. O yes he does.

Even when he's trying to make you think he's just being casual.

That’s why I love this picture. Sometimes at 244 we could all let our guard down and it was just straight up funny.

Happy Birthday, James.

Mother's Day and Bob Dylan. Obviously.

2008-05-11T20:57:00.000-07:00

It’s mother’s day and I just watched the strange and striking I’m Not There.

If you know me well you know that, well, you know about me and Bob Dylan. Why I love boys who play the harmonica and paint stories out loud and why I always secretly (or not so) wish I were born into another decade, why I wish everyone were honest about our uncertainty and our ego and our ambition and our desire to tell unforgettable stories. This film captures the many faces and sides of bd in somewhat fictional characters, by numerous actors, his music lacing through the film as one constant. It makes me think about the many faces of mom in my life. The so many amazing and loving women who play this role and give face and voice to what I know of being a mama. Happy Mother’s Day. I’m so constantly in awe.

I want to tell you some stories about my own mom, one of these many faces, who makes possible the stories I do tell… but the quite incredible truth is that she was simply meant to be a mom. Not everyone was, but mind and body she was born to do it and I can only hope I get some of that. This year my niece was born and now my mom gets to be a grandmother too. Wednesday is my mom’s birthday and I’m gonna tell some stories. But for now I’ll tell you this, my mom and I listen to Bob Dylan together and sometimes he makes both of us cry. I get it from somewhere.

And because it's mother's day, here's this perfect moment.

It’s one of my favorite pictures in the world. It’s just joy. And I love that my sister in law took it, because she just gets us, because everything about it is exactly how we are. And. Check my mom out. Isn’t she beautiful?

It's in the details

2008-05-08T09:51:00.000-07:00

I love research. Seriously. One of the best things about being in school is writing papers and the digging, reading, highlighting, annotating that is part of preparing to write papers. One of the best things about being a teacher is the reading, watching, noting marking that comes with preparing to teach a new text and developing context.

One of the best things about being a writer is research.

PERMANENT INK did not demand a lot of research. It was straight-up from the gut writing for the most part, with lots of experience and memory and conversation and imagination thrown in there. TINE, however, involves some research. The really fun kind. First of all, it takes place in two (maybe three?) countries. Luckily I’ve been to all three countries but still—perusing photographs, reading memoirs, travelling maybe? Second of all, my characters are multi-lingual. I am not. Third of all, it’s about graffiti. I am not a graffiti artist. And here’s where I have this little conflict.

I am a writer and a storyteller and I have an inherent need to write about this graffiti artist. He’s alive and kicking and bursting with details and so, I gotta get him out there. But what if I do it wrong? What if I have no business writing about this art and lifestyle that some people are passionate about and I have never lived? What if I bring him to life and he doesn’t feel real?

Does anyone ever feel this way—are you ever terrified of writing someone who you don’t know well enough to write? It’s such a bizarre feeling. I wrote this scene yesterday where Jacob is quietly explaining that graffiti originated in Rome—in wall carvings and political messages, just like he is doing in the very same city on some of those very same ancient walls, only in colors, only in vibrant style, only right now. It’s the moment where I first sort of fell in love with him, you know that moment, when suddenly your characters become people in your lives, people for whom you feel so deeply.

I just gotta get his art right.

Speaking of exercise and amazing people

2008-05-03T07:04:00.001-07:00

Three things.

1. I started a new writing tradition on Thursday and it changed my life. I met DM in my old writing class-- and not only is she a design genius, she is crafting the most beautiful, magical, funny and captivating triology I can imagine. She is a stellar writer and a dream reader. We decided to be partners. We're going to meet every Thursday at an undisclosed location to go over each others pages. This Thursday was the first of said meetings. And seriously, it made everything snap into place. We talked about final revisions on PERMANENT INK and the opening pages of TINE and suddenly, thanks to the brilliant DM, I am on a roll... she called out the smallest details and helped me re-form them in exactly the right ways. I love Thursdays. You are going to be hearing a lot more about Thursdays.

2. I am trying to stop coffee. Ok, not STOP. But drastically cut back. One small cup in the morning and that's it. And it means I have pounding, drilling headaches. And the sight of this is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

And the sight of this is the most boring thing I've ever seen.

But seriously, I feel better. Or. Um. I will soon.

3. Since I started revisions for PERMANENT INK (which was about, oh, three months ago to be perfectly honest) I have completely given up all physical activity. Seriously. Yoga. The gym. You name it. And this week I realised I am all heavy, slow, mush. I must reclaim the exercise. So from now on this is back in my life.

And so is this.

And then there is no way I WON'T be more productive and, well, creatively driven. Right?

Uniforms

2008-04-29T08:20:00.000-07:00

I forgot to post something very important last week.

Which is April 23rd was Kira’s Birthday!!!!

Kira and I like to take pictures like this.

And we’ve done so in, I think, five countries and at least twice as many cities. Usually we look the same but sometimes we have better tans or darker hair.

I am sometimes afraid that the older I get the less likely I will make new friends. But even though Kira and I only met less than two years ago, I feel like we’ve gone through life together. It’s just one a’ those things. Kira can run faster than you and she’s probably stronger than you. She can pack for vacation in five and a half minutes. She has the best sense of humour in the WORLD. If you want to try something crazy, she will probably do it with you. And a lot of times strangers stop her on the street to tell her how beautiful her smile is. And also, when she gets home from work she puts on a blue fleece hoodie and grey sweatpants almost every day. That is her uniform. I am a big fan of at-home uniforms. I miss her like crazy and she is COMING TO NEW YORK on June 18th.

Before Kira and I lived together, I was never a big exerciser. But she is a runner. And she started bringing (dragging) me with her to Villa Pamphili park. We’d walk up the path together and then plug in our ipods, then Kira would take off in a cloud of dust and I’d chug along behind her, around the lake and through the park at the top of the city, and then she’d always be waiting when I finished the loop, and sometimes we’d sit on the bench for a while and watch the Italian running clubs in their spectacular spandex or the old men playing cards—sometimes we got caught in the rain and usually people would edge away from us on the tram because we were sweaty and gross.

Elena a character in TINE takes a lot of inspiration from Kira—mostly in her strength and magnetism. Sometimes I feel so full of gratitude for the amazing people in my life. Especially the ones who love uniforms.

Because there was no school today

2008-04-25T13:57:00.001-07:00

Because I'm about six hours from being done with my revisions on PERMANENT INK.

And because today I wrote 4000 words on THERE IS NO HAPPY ENDING (lets call it TINE for now) and I'm unstoppable.

Because Rory, the main character in TINE looks out at this from her window.

Because I just feel like sharing, here's the first page.

It is hard to figure out when Jacob disappeared because, before the last time, he disappeared so often.

In Rome they will keep grieving him. On Via Nazionale, where his parents live, they’ll grieve him with friends and co-workers from the Embassy, but then the grief will become quieter and eventually they’ll move back to the house in Virginia where there is little to remind them of him.

In Trastevere they’ll whisper about him and hold on to each others’ hands when they see his work underneath a bridge or in a doorway. When Jacob was gone the doorways of Trastevere stood quiet and blank. He wasn’t sauntering side streets with his can of spray paint and a crooked cigarette burning in his small fingers. That was how they noticed at first and then they noticed all of the bridges and steps and bars and piazzas where he wasn’t.

In Los Angeles, where he never was, everything makes Rory grieve him.

Earth Day

2008-04-22T11:36:00.000-07:00

I just got the most amazing phone call.

One of my students—a charming, lyrical, funny, curious activist—has been accepted to Bard. This is huge for so many reasons. First of all—I went to Bard and many mixed feelings aside, or considered, it is an incredible place that offers a realm of intellectual experience I had never even considered. And it’s a lot of fun. We never said so then, but it’s like growing up in the country, you have beautiful fields and old houses and a lot of time for creativity. I love Bard. And I am so proud of him. And it is pretty exciting to share this experience.

And the best part is that thirteen years ago on Earth Day I took Amtrak about an hour and a half south from Albany to Rhinecliff, New York and—dressed in my ubiquitous Birkenstocks and homemade sundress, I found myself on the Bard College campus for Accepted Students day. I was lingering, teetering between two worlds—between high school and college and spring and summer and kid-life and grown-up life. While Bard was not my first choice, and I was crabby and hesitant (and painfully shy) upon being there, I couldn’t help but be a little seduced by the bongo-playing boys in patch-work pants and the hand-painted earth day banners and vegan desserts for sale and sunshine-y campus. But I still wasn’t convinced.

And then I met Nicole. I can’t remember how we met exactly, but I do remember we quickly agreed to skip all required activities, take off our shoes and spend the day sitting in the sunken garden at the Hudson river’s edge, learning each others’ history and planning our futures. I still have the journal I carried that year, covered in a faded floral fabric, a page inside bearing a list of book recommendations from Nicole. A sampling

The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda
The Doors of Perception by Alduous Huxley
Yes, I read them both. Today Nicole is married to Mike, who she’d meet in the first few days of our freshman year and they have two amazing sons, Julian and Kai, who are the first Bard kids in our lives.

This time of year is so amazing. It always hearkens back to the last few weeks of senior year in high school. Your exams are over. You’re thinking about college. You’re trying not to say goodbye while trying not to move forward too fast. You’re lying in the grass and your skin is turning pink and everything is so possible. I have to say those days look so strangely blurry now. I might need to read a little Castaneda. Um. Or at least look at some photo albums.

Something Else

2008-04-15T05:39:00.001-07:00

I can’t stop thinking about the Florida girls. And last night I wrote this long, desperate, wondering post. But then I decided I had to breathe. I don’t know what I think and none of this is going away so I decided I needed to focus on something else.

And I finished this story I’ve been writing. It’s called ‘This Place I Don’t Call Home’. And two things were so strange. 1. to go back to the format of a short story, which asks you to do so many things differently than you would do for a novel and 2. to write for a different audience is, well, different. I find myself thinking in teen most of the time but this story has a different kind of voice and a different need. It is about adults facing a very small moment that means something bigger than what they see. But what I realized—the characters have the same kind of sadness as my teenage characters.

I wonder what that means.

The other thing is that I miss Italy desperately. Especially in the spring. Most of the story is set here.

And from my dim early morning Brooklyn apartment it is hard to believe that I spent two years going places like this for the weekend. Eating fresh pears on sea-smelling terraces and swimming in April off a Capri beach and learning to slice the skeleton out of a whole fresh fish in one swift motion, eating on a tiled terrace that hung out over the sea, taking night-time ferries to ancient towns and sleeping with our windows open.

Sometimes I get so afraid I’ll forget these things.

So here is a little bit of the story—so I don’t forget.

She remembers the day, one or a dozen days, when she came home from somewhere late at night—boarding school or college or a faraway job—and it was a black winter outside, the light from the sunroom emanated warmth and from the doorway, dropping duffel bags and kicking the snow from her boots, she could see her mom at the bright kitchen counter, framed by the funny faded gingham wallpaper… peeling apples or stirring spinach soup. She was always so hungry in that house—because she knew she could eat and it would taste like something she remembered.

After breakfast, after everyone is awake and dressed and has drank their coffee and watched the sea and the beach and piazza below them fill with families and busses of tourists, they begin their hike to Ravello. At first they ascend through the town—tourist shops boasting bottles of limoncello and loud t-shirts bearing bubble-lettered Italian phrases and even a tiny ceramic Amalfi built into the hillside—after all of this they truly start to ascend. They are climbing a steep hillside, rocky and wet and winding. Spring is bursting in green shoots and white and yellow blossoms. In some places there are steps and paths built of stones, in some places they duck under the green nets spread wide to catch falling lemons and through the backyard orchards of houses built into the hillside. At one turn they are shuffling through a sun-baked path hung with brass pots, scarecrow dolls and dried chicken feet.

A new kind of violence, a new kind of conversation

2008-04-11T08:10:00.000-07:00

Last night I was sitting in my office; it was near the end of the night and I was getting ready to go home and I hadn’t seen a student in about half an hour, so I was scrolling through the news. My eye caught a headline that said something like “Teens charged in Youtube beating”. I clicked. I felt sick.

I’m not sure what I want to say about this—other than the fact that I feel shocked and a little bit nauseated and then simply naïve. I have worked in high schools since 2001 and I can’t imagine the girls I know exhibiting this kind of behavior. But then I stop myself—can I? I literally feel dizzy when I look at stills from this video taped in a Florida home, which is why I haven’t posted a link here. Because by viewing this video, are we sensationalizing a deeply personal and hurtful experience? Are we contributing to undue fame and recognition for teenagers who have committed a heinous and unbelievable act? Does talking about these things—even writing on this blog—contribute to such events as a videotaped beating of a girl by her peers? I don’t have an answer but there is an underground culture of violence and hunger for recognition that is getting stronger and stronger and that we as a community have a responsibility to combat. I have written about bullying for years—first as a student pursuing my M.A. in Counseling, as a fiction writer, as a school counselor developing curriculum. I have researched and talked about how the way boys bully differs from the way girls bully, how this behavior changes with age and maturity, I have worked with colleagues to develop methods for discussing and punishing the new-ish phenomenon of cyber-bullying, which so often happens off of school grounds. But this is something all new and asks us all tore-examine the way we communicate.

What about this? What about bullying for fame and recognition? This is something that parents and educators alone can only begin to discuss—this poses a question and brings to light an issue that is so much bigger than all of us. There is something very wrong. I know that by writing on this blog, by talking in person, by posting comments and hosting real roundtables and initiating conversations we can only start. But it is the way we use ever-changing technology that needs to be addressed. It is part of education now. It has to be.

A girl can't help it

2008-04-06T19:10:00.000-07:00

When I was first writing PERMANENT INK my friend Jenny read the first few pages. Then she sent me this article. Do you know this guy? she said. I think you have a crush on him.

I'd never heard of him. But I think she was right.

We all have our weak spots. We have a type. We do. We might want to argue otherwise but, well, I just can't help it. I love cooks.

They're supremely undateable. They work 362 days a year and a short day is 10 hours. Their hands look like battelgrounds. Their fingernails can never really get clean. Their forearms are scarred and burned and blistered. They come alive at 2 in the morning. They have a little too much fun. They smell like mussels and fried spinach and garlic and rosemary and burned sugar all at once. They flirt with waitresses and wine reps and customers and bartenders and your best friends. They live for anxiety and heat. Their apartments have no furniture and empty refrigerators and they rarely do laundry. When they do, they send it out and the bag the laundromat returns, with their shirts neatly folded, serves as a closet.

O man, I love cooks. I just read this book. And then this article. All I want to do is read about chefs. And I feel giddy. Because the thing is, in spite of (or in addition to, depending on how you look at it) all of the details I just mentioned, they are the best kind of artists. Because their food means everything to them. They live and breathe it. They don't have time for anything else. They don't have time for the scene or the image or the competition. They are just imagining the food. And then preparing it. They shape it and grill it and saute it and taste it and hate it and revere it. Then they FEED you. Come on. Looking at a painting is nice. A great song can make you cry. A poem can send chills across your shoulder blades. A novel can make you take deep breaths in awe. But a fantastic meal. There's nothing like it.

So today I keep re-writing the meal that Parker cooks because, well, there are so many possibilities.

Writing in a Bubble

2008-04-05T13:28:00.000-07:00

I have to admit something. I get very jealous sometimes. I am a member of some wonderful groups for Debut YA writers and we talk a lot about the biggest and the littlest details of publishing a first novel. But it's little phrases like "my Crit partners said..." or "my genius husband suggested..." or "my darling partner thought I could..." that make me look sheepishly around me for someone to comment on my manuscript. It seems I'm the rare writer without crit partners (romantic or otherwise!) to guide me through revisions and sometimes, no matter how independent a writer you might be, reading aloud to an empty room does not bring new ideas about.

So this morning, H-- who has piles of essays to grade, an amazing daughter in need of mommy time and is preparing to move (read, clearly has nothing else to do) commanded that I meet her on west 12th street for brunch and revision brainstorming.

She is a genius. We went through countless details from my manuscript that H turned upside down for me, twisted, and re-imagined. I feel clear. I feel like I am looking at a new book. She quoted lines back to me and then explained what they might mean to another reader. Oh, I thought, I never saw it that way. And I scribbled notes down furiously.

Most importantly she said, listen. You have to stop being mad at Keeley.

My god, I said. It's true. I AM mad at Keeley. I didn't know you could be mad at one of your very own characters. But I am. And that means I really kicked her out of the end of the book. And she deserves to be there.

So I say, don't clean your bathroom or stare at your computer screen or try to write inside a bubble. Ask someone to tell you the truth about a few of your words. You might find out you're really really mad at your characters and you need to work this out.

And just because.

Did we really look like this once?

A little bit of hero worship

2008-04-02T05:55:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about what to write here for a long time. Twelve days maybe? I am not completely sure what I'm meant to accomplish with this blog. Do you read it? Do you care? Does it have anything to do with this book I am trying to finish revising so it can be published next spring? Am I making inroads into the prolific and well-connected online world of YA writers, booksellers, librarians et al... the answer to most of these questions is a quietly whispered no. But I'm trying...

So let me tell you about Migi. This is Migi. Yes, she is wearing an American flag on her head in the center of Rome the night the U.S. beat Italy in the World Cup playoffs. But she is Albanian and she is Migi. So she got away with this.

She graduated from La Sapienza last week. She studied organizational psychology and worked, for most of the last year, in a shelter for victims of domestic violence, while she completed the research for and wrote her thesis on the consequences that domestic violence have on women's physical and psychological well-being. Migi speaks and writes with fierce passion and great candor (and does so in no less than three languages, quite fluently). Her thesis is written in Italian which makes me a little crazy because I can't read it. But I can take depths of inspiration from her. For most of the time I've known Migi she's been studying. And she's been dedicated with a kind of force and tenacity I've rarely seen. And it was a few months into her job at the shelter, her careful and pointed observations and interviews, that she found the topic about which she would write, that it all came together. She lives in the world and writes from the inside out. And though she's not writing stories, not fictional stories like I am, I want to take something from the way she lives and observes.

Migi included me in the dedication of her thesis. So this humble post is dedicated to her. She's a hero.

Writing when there is no time for writing

2008-03-18T06:10:00.000-07:00

I have spent most of the non-sleeping, non-working, non-eating-my-friend-Andrew's-kind-of-delicious-Irish-dinner hours working on There Is No Happy Ending (tentative title, but I am very fond of it…) and here are some things I learned.

1. It is so easy to dive into a project and never come up for air, when there is another project, a more urgent project, waiting not so patiently above the surface.

2. One of my characters is named Rory and she is living in Trastevere for the summer, which makes me desperate for the sticky heat and Lungotevere tables of a Rome summer. But Rory is also thinking about taking a year off. Both my editor and The New York Times made me think about this. A gap year is a rising trend and one that makes perfect sense to me. At 18, heading to college, we know nothing other than being in school. Why not give ourselves the chance to make footprints in the world and learn what we want—not what we are supposed to want. (apparently, I am now 18 again)

3. Jacob is a street artist. He is American by birth but he has lived in Rome his whole life. He has no idea where he is from. So when he disappears—and the book is about his disappearance—it makes perfect sense because he did not have roots in any one place. He disappeared from somewhere that he never felt exactly at home—he was never even really able to define home.

4. Mornings are perfect for writing. But what happens when I want to write until my eyelids fall closed and then I have to wake up and be a counselor for nine hours before I can be a writer again? What if I lose something?

oops. I started another book.

2008-03-16T10:09:00.001-07:00

About a year and a half ago I went to Berlin. At the time I was living in Rome—a city so richly beautiful in its own right but within minutes of descending from the train and walking the night-time streets of the Kreuzberg neighborhood I felt so alive in Berlin. I knew I had to write a story about there. The thing about the city—for me—was that it felt so intensely pulsing and working and creating. I wasn’t sure what kind of story it was going to be but I knew it needed to tell about the way that everything was very much happening—sort of urgent and curious and intense and challenging. What happened in Berlin, was that I became obsessed with street art.

We went to the Tacheles, an artists’ cooperative that looks like this.

Where people were sleeping on cots in the warehouse behind their canvases and selling paintings and postcards.

We went to the wall. Which looks like this.

And this.

And absolutely blew my mind beyond anything I had ever seen because for blocks and blocks and generations and languages people literally painted their protest and hope and stories on this physical structure that divided so much… the wall was tumbling and broken and faded in places, repainted in others, and mostly now a symbolic structure but the art that it gave voice to told the story, not just of the city, but of each individual who had written or painted.

Then just a week ago I was reading Crissa Chappell’s blog as I am totally obsessed with the descriptions of Total Constant Order and I cannot wait to read it. But then I read this and I thought, NO!, she beat me. Or maybe she inspired me. Because now I can’t stop thinking about Berlin and graffiti and this story.

I have to write about a street artist. He lives in Rome, though, a city whose street art fascinates me. He visits Berlin in the summer with an American girl who is trying to decide if she’ll go to college. And in the end (or maybe the beginning) he disappears.

This is what I’m writing now, while I’m supposed to be revising PERMANENT INK. This artist, I think he has dreadlocks. And he always has ink or paint on his palms.

Mr. Betterly, who changed my world

2008-03-12T19:45:00.000-07:00

My 11th grade U.S. History class was called Cultures in Conflict. You had a choice—you could take A.P, Regular U.S., or Cultures. For me, there was no question. I knew with absolute certainty that the history I had been taught from textbooks was censored and tainted and exclusionary. This was my 16 year old mind at work. I wanted someone to tell me the real truth. I wanted someone to tell me how to repair the mess I saw around me. I wanted someone to tell me how to change the world.

For many of us who attended Emma Willard School any time between, well, 1966 and 2000, Mr. Betterly was exactly this person. On a campus of teenage girls, Mr. Betterly (who I imagine now was probably around 6’3”) seemed to positively tower over everyone else. His laugh was distinct, his voice at once quiet and commanding. His grey hair combed back close to his head was the only sign that he wasn’t positively ageless. His shirts boasted colors and patterns of the southwest—sleeves rolled over his biceps made us imagine that in another year (or maybe, a setting outside our first floor history classroom) a pack of unfiltered cigarettes would have peaked out from beneath the rolled sleeve. His cowboy boots clicked in the hallways. And his jewelry… we’d never seen men wear jewelry like this. Those rings—beautiful turquoise rocks in hammered silver ovals, thick silver bracelets inscribed with birds and symbols that suggested peace and activism and freedom and tranquility and all of the things we wanted in the world. Much of this jewelry, he made.

Mr. Betterly taught courses on religion—on and freedom and the way I wanted to live. He taught me how a classroom should work. But mostly, he taught me U.S. History. And our textbook, while our peers were preparing for the AP, was A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn.

My mind was blown. There was not enough time for me to fight for all of the justice I needed to fight for. There were not enough words for me to tell all of the stories that had been silenced. There were not enough hours for us to talk about the things we read in that book. Mr. Betterly was a teacher in the truest sense. Recently, I have become a teacher. And I strive to live my life and my classroom with the same peace and challenge and humour and inspiration he did.

Mr. Betterly passed away last week and I found my sadness heavy and overwhelming when I read the news today. I had just visited my high school this weekend, and walked its quiet Saturday halls. That was always my favorite classroom, I whispered to Kristen pointing to the corner first floor room where Mr. Betterly’s voice still echoes over the opening pages of A People’s History.

Mr. Betterly, I thank you—with my heart and my words and my mind. I will always remember you as inspiration.

Why not to show your writing to your friends and family until it is published

2008-03-10T12:39:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: no one in my life should take any offense to this. Please. Read item #5 on the list.

1. Because everyone will say “send me your novel! Send me your story! I’m dying to read it!” And you will say ok then, and send it along (blood,sweat,tears,etc) and, for the most part, no one will actually read it. Which wouldn’t be a big deal because your friends and family are busy and have the best intentions. Except said piece of writing is probably your heart and guts so it feels like a big deal and you will take everything personally and feel depressed.

2. A few people will read it. Some will say nice things, some will say helpful things, some will say things that completely contradict what you meant to do and show an absolute misunderstanding of who you wrote your characters to be, and exactly because this is your heart and guts on the page, you will take this super-personally and not be able to sleep.

3. Your book will change SO much between sale and publication. All of the things you try to explain to your readers may be irrelevant by the time it hits shelves.

4. Um. Nobody should ever have the chance to say “o, I read that. I don’t need to buy it."

5. Mostly, you should not show your writing to friends and family because if you have just sold your first book and are in any stage of pre-publication, you are probably highly unstable. And maybe slightly irrational. And re-read reasons one and two.

Three things not at all related

2008-03-06T06:14:00.000-08:00

I know I’m certainly not the first person to talk about this book but… you should read it.

It is somehow one level deeper than first person because not only is Clay talking to you—painting the terrifying (and in such a physical and mental way) picture of his night and his life and his slow-moving realizations, but Hannah is talking to you and Clay—who sometimes feels like you—at the same time. Jay Asher has done this fantastic and inspiring job of bringing his readers into this fictional world, this frightening reality, and at the same time asking his readers to quietly examine our own motivations.

And from a completely other angle, I also suggest you read this.

Because right now Simon Van Booy is the master craftsman in my mind. His stories are sharp and spare and clear and a little bit strange and sensual and sad. He writes sentences like

“The man who sells garlic comes from the south and doesn’t sip coffee with the others at dawn.”

And

“I have always been attracted to the idea of heaven, and that’s why John F. Kennedy International Airport seemed like a good place to live out the last of my time.”

Also, please save this show. PLEASE.

Go here.

I don’t even have tv. But I faithfully watch this online every week—or I did. And yes, I even own season one on DVD. This show is so amazing. The New York Times even thinks so (not that their endorsement is any more valid than anyone else’s. I’m just saying. The appeal is broad). This show is funny—I’m talking laugh out loud funny. And it does a rare and wonderful thing wherein it leads you to care just as much about the parents as you do about the kids. And yes it is about football, wow, I never thought I’d love watching football so much, but it is about everything else too. Gaius Charles as Smash will break your heart—and so will Taylor Kitsch as Riggins but in a completely different way and Zach Gilford as Matt Saracen will make you have a little crush (ok. I do) and Adrianne Palicki as Tyra will make you wonder WHY you didn’t play volleyball or go out with the kind of dorky guy who made you laugh and was nice to you and Coach Taylor. Well. He’s Coach Taylor! I can’t even say much more than that.

So, read some books. Or check out the best thing on tv.

Are you an out-loud? Or on-paper?

2008-03-04T07:59:00.000-08:00

I don’t really know anything about hip hop and as a writer I am the opposite of a performer and I have never been a poet or a lover of the stage.

But I saw the most incredible thing on Saturday night.

These guys host free workshops for teenagers all over the city—on community building and spoken word and performance and DJing. I’ve seen their Executive Director in action, as he used to teach poetry workshops for my program in South Central LA—and his energy and language and ability to make his kids dream so big is inspiring. When I heard they were hosting the city-wide Grand Slam finals—not to mention one of my amazing students was a finalist—I convinced my friend Charlotte to spend a Saturday night in the auditorium of Washington High School watching 23 teen poets (and then some) spill their hearts out. Loud.

And here’s the thing. These kids blew my mind. They were so brave and fierce and confident and powerful and elegant and loud. They gave each other so much support and love. When one finalist walked onto stage and froze, all 23 finalists stood up and cheered and said to her you have this, you can do this and they didn’t sit down until she lifted her voice to the mic. Nobody edited or cut their words. Nobody said you can’t say that or that doesn’t sound right. They just put their words together and threw them out to us. I couldn’t believe how brave and intense it was.

You won’t see me competing in poetry slams any time soon. Nor will I ever teach spoken word and performance well. But I’ll never question its power. And it has me thinking— what are the best ways to teach story-telling? To teach confidence and to develop our own language and voice? Is it always on paper? Or is it sometimes out loud?

Some nights it all sort of feels right, right where you are

2008-03-01T11:10:00.000-08:00

Last night I went out with Joy.

I have to admit that the older I get, the fewer single people I know and sometimes I think, wow, where are all the people who want to hang out? But really, the older I get, the fewer people I know who will leave their houses on Friday night. But thank god for Joy. First of all, Joy is just about the coolest person I know. Last night she was wearing silver leggings and a giant red ring that I swear has super powers.

Also, her shoes make her six feet tall. And her laugh makes her six feet tall.

She used to take flowers from the tables at restaurants and put them in her hair. I don’t think she does that anymore. But sometimes she wears a feather. Like Steven Tyler.

Aside from STYLE, Joy has it all over everyone you know when it comes to fun. She makes me laugh so hard, and something as simple as crossing the street or buying a shrimp pattie becomes just about the most fun thing you’ve ever done. Last night, after a series of cab mishaps, we went to see some music. It was really really good. Among a lot of his own stuff, Damian played one of my favorite songs by him.

And I decided that if I ever get married it will be my wedding song. (I’m not going to tell you which song. I feel like that might jinx something) But I kept saying to Joy, this is really good. Why didn’t you tell me? I love seeing music. I just love it when people write songs and then sit down in front of you and kind of spill their hearts out and then you can’t stop humming their spilled hearts for days.

And then we went to a party. We were apprehensive at first because we thought we might not want to see all of the people we’d gone to college with. But we went. The party was at a place that looked kind of like this from the outside.

But behind the gate and, um, courtyard? the inside was sort of amazing. The floors were made of concrete and the ceilings were 50 feet high and there wheelchairs in place of furniture and lots of art—some of it made of Styrofoam and a really cool loveseat made of blown glass. I’d love to see how that is done. And the whole time we were there there was a band setting up drums and amps and threatening to play. And it was actually really fun. But then it was way past my bedtime. And the band was still hanging out with everything sort of half set up. So we left before the band.

And outside it was a rainy New York almost spring feeling night and we were cold and kinda sleepy and had to wait a long time for a cab. And then when the cab driver dropped Joy off and started to my house he took 6th avenue all the way and hit about 47 red lights and it took forever. But I noticed my gypsy soul was really quiet. I think she’s sleeping. I think she’s feeling like maybe she can be gypsy right here in New York.

Why Courtney Love?

2008-02-25T06:19:00.000-08:00

Some people cannot listen to music when they write. Some people can only write when they listen to music. Some simply need music without lyrics. Some people—well. I need music. Sometimes. But most often I need to decide what my characters would listen to. The problem is—I’m often ten years behind the times. Right now, all I want to listen to is this.

I am loving this album. I listen to it at the gym. I listen to it when I’m writing. I put it on while I’m making coffee. It’s so fierce. Noelle would love this album. If she had ever even heard of Hole. So what is it, I keep thinking, that brings me back to Courtney Love and her yelling and torn slips and girl-rocking. Is it because I’m writing about 16 and I was 16 when I first listened to this album… or is it because I want to yell and scream a little bit. I am thinking I’m going to make a playlist that goes through phases of the writing. But for now, I’ll start here—after the first draft, gearing up for real revisions. I should warn you—there is no method or pattern to my playlists. It’s just what I need to listen to. Or what they need to listen to. I mean the characters.

Monday morning February 25th PERMANENT INK playlist

Hole; Celebrity Skin in its entirety
Wilco; Reservations
The National; Apartment Story
Mirah; Don’t Die in Me
Bob Dylan; I don’t believe you (she acts like we have never met)

Fiction Vs. Real Life

2008-02-23T15:33:00.000-08:00

J and I have been sharing work recently. It is sort of strange to share work with someone who knows you better than most people on the planet but has never read your actual writing.

In August of 2005 I moved to Rome. This is a big and sprawling story but the part I want to talk about today is 244. That was my apartment. Blocks from Stazione Trastevere and facing the sprawling Porta Portese market on Sunday mornings our apartment had cool marble floors and vaguely Victorian furniture that might remind you of you grandmothers’ house. Quite unexpectedly I moved into 244 with strangers and met some people (who I’ll tell you a million stories about as time goes on) who became like a family I can’t quite live without. 244 had two incarnations—the first year and the second year but almost all of it revolved around this almost grand dining room table where we took turns cooking meals (some of us were better at this than others) and playing trivia with old cards that had questions about the Soviet Union and leaning out the window listening to the echoing ring of the Number 8 tram.

J would be mad at me. Or make fun of me. If I told you too many stories about him right here. But mostly what I want to say is he keeps me honest. And what I mean is that he calls me out (quite loudly) when I even think about lying about myself. Or to myself. Which is a maddening and amazing thing to have in a friend. This makes writing fiction very interesting. Because when we share this fiction with each other it sometimes seems like autobiography.
It’s not autobiography, he says.
But it is, I say, thinking of all the true stories he’s told me.

But it’s not. It’s just that fiction become supremely complicated when you know the writer.

In any case, what I want to say, is that I miss these guys like crazy tonight.

J, me and K. A fortress town in Malta, accidental Spring Break

The whole family. A little bit sad, a little bit crazy, a little bit uncomfortable having our picture taken in front of a dumpster.

Welcome to the world.

2008-02-20T08:28:00.001-08:00

This is my niece Ruth Nightingale. She is five weeks and three days old. She is absolutely the most stunning amazing beautiful thing I have ever seen. She is part my brother and part my sister in law and she has my grandfather’s eyebrows and when I hold her she stares up at me and sometimes she reaches her hand and puts it against my chin and I know she knows I’m her aunt. And that, unfortunately, one day, those eyebrows might grow together and I will have to teach her about getting waxed. Unless she has her mothers eyebrows, which are lovely and thin and sort of perfect. Every time I think about her I can’t believe she exists and I wish I were closer to her. But she lives on a mountaintop in Vermont where her parents built a lovely yellow house that sort of feels like it sits in this place of peace and calm on top of everything. She is going to grow up and know how to cook the most delicious things with three ingredients like her dad, and make chandeliers and collaged birthday cards and paintings and postcards like her mom and she is going to ride horses and play basketball and be the most beautiful and loved and strong and brilliant girl this world has yet seen.

And one day she’s going to read my book. And I hope it’s the kind of book that tells a certain truth to her. But I also hope that it’s unfamiliar to her. I keep thinking about her now as I’m writing because I’m thinking about all of the things that make Nadio and Noelle real and sad and hopeful to whomever will read them. I don’t want Ruth to ever feel sad over a boy or alienated by her friend or angry at her mom or scared of what she might want or exhilarated by not knowing. But maybe we all feel these things and that’s why we write about them...

But she’s pretty perfect, my niece. I can’t wait to go through this life with her.

Something to Think About

2008-02-17T08:03:00.000-08:00

“We come back to the same people to learn something about how we have changed. We want to be assured that we have changed—that we are different and better and older and thinner and wiser and cooler. We want the maps of ourselves to paint different.”

This is something I wrote almost exactly two years ago. It began as something very true, and then it became a scene in my novel. Which then became something quite different.

Recently some YA writers have been posting first lines. The first line of the first draft of a novel and then, the final first line. This had me thinking about the places where stories begin. For me PERMANENT INK started as another story altogether. And then one day I was thinking too much. And I wrote the lines at the top of this entry. And a new character came to life. And he belonged in this old story. And suddenly, then, it had this brand new breath and fury. The first line for me is sometimes at the end or in the stomach of the story. It’s never the actual first line. It’s the line I write that makes me go, oh, that’s it. I’ve got it. And then I can’t stop writing.

Happy valentines day.

2008-02-13T21:25:00.000-08:00

I have two thoughts today.

One.

Your Catfish Friend
by Richard Brautigan

If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
of my affection
and think, "It's beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
somebody loved me,"
I'd love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
at peace,
and ask yourself, "I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them."

And Two.

Family is not just what you’re born into

2008-02-11T19:51:00.000-08:00

For the past seventeen, almost eighteen years, sometimes (like this weekend) H is the only person I want to talk to. It's so easy. Sometimes we are lucky enough to find that.

I am working on revisions for PERMANENT INK. I am having a really hard time with Keeley. Keeley has always been very clear in my mind. I know exactly what she looks like and what books are on her shelf and that she only sleeps well in her own house and that she listens to Belle & Sebastian. What I am having a hard time with, is filling out the history of her friendship with Noelle—and I mean the history that happened in the lifetime before the pages of the book. I want the page to show how a friendship can be pure joy, how sometimes when we are kids, we meet someone who we were supposed to meet, who is always going to be a part of our lives, who will feel at times like relief, like delight, like anger, like obligation, like Christmas, like birthdays, like the last person you want to see or the only voice you want to hear. I want Noelle and Keeley to look like this picture.

Read This

2008-02-08T14:34:00.001-08:00

Because two years ago I taught a class called English Comp to the most amazing group of students. Most of them didn’t really want to be in the class but they realized pretty quickly that I am a sucker and a few of them even took it semi-seriously. In the end they wrote some truly incredible essays and even paragraphs that still knock the wind out of me.

When I was working with English Comp, I couldn’t teach what I normally taught and I had no curriculum to follow. I dug through boxes of tattered essays and shelves of dog-eared books. I tried it all (who knew they'd hate On the Road? I was schooled. sorry, guys...) What I learned is this: they needed to read something that was written to them—in a voice that was clear and wise and sharp and entertaining and challenging all at once. They needed to read someone who spoke to what they were living that very day and did so with beauty and grace and without condescension. And, most importantly, with an understanding of their secrets.

Because I wish I knew about Jason Brown then. Because what is more raw and real and intense than the moments he captures here? I don’t know. You tell me.

My Gypsy Soul is not being rocked.

2008-02-07T18:25:00.000-08:00

I have lived a lot of places.

It all started here where I was born. Evanston, Illinois, home to Northwestern University. I always thought I'd go there but I didn't have very good SAT scores...

Then we moved here. This is lovely downtown Middlebury, Vermont. This, I suppose, is where I am from. My mom still lives here.

This is where dad lives. I spent summers here, a lot of Christmases and even other vacations. I got addicted to airports flying down here. The south Carolina coast. I have some beach in me, and some mountains.

This is my other home. This is where I went to boarding school. I lived here for four years and I have five zillion stories yet to write about this place. Seriously.

This is the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge. I did not live ON the bridge. But I lived all over the other side of the river while I went to Bard College. I lived in an old gymnasium and you could see the foul line peeking out from under my couch. I lived in the dorms. I lived in what some might even call a double wide trailer. It had a swingset.

I lived here for six months. Home to the most inspiring library in the world.

I really did live here. For almost three years. One day I'll tell you about how I secretly miss LA sometimes.

This was a weird kind of moving "home" for a while. But I did have a really sweet little place on the third floor of a brownstone that looked like the west village even though it felt waaaaay upstate.

Roma Roma Roma. Even after two years my Italian is laughably bad. But O. Roma.

And finally here we are. (this is actually my second time living in NYC but, well, I'm here now...). Homehomehome. My favorite thing is the 59th street bridge at night. Which isn't even my bridge anymore. But you're going home and you're anonymous and alive all at once. And its New York. And its all what you dreamed about.

But MAN my gypsy soul cannot sit still. She is feeling a little nutty.

What I'm Longing For

2008-02-06T14:36:00.000-08:00

“In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the bridges were happier than the ones that came later, but perhaps you will see that as we go along. Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots…” Joan Didion, ‘Goodbye To All That’

There are two things I can’t stop thinking about: the next president. And the desert. I already pleaded with you about the former. But here is what I have to say about the latter: I want to move there. Suddenly I have this almost physical hunger for erie purple skies and endless sandy roads and craggy alien rock formations and no neighbors for miles and maybe a small town where the old cowboys wonder what I’m doing out in that square house with yellow curtains (I’m writing. Of course) I am in love with New York City in a very deep way but lately I have this strange feeling about the desert and all of the stories that are growing there.

I Can't Help It

2008-02-06T06:36:00.000-08:00

I don’t know about the rules of proclaiming political allegiances. I work in a school and I am (mostly) careful to whisper my politics. Unfortunately they always seem to be louder than a whisper. I can’t help it. Isn’t that how it should be, though? Shouldn’t we be so passionately in support of a candidate that we cannot keep quiet? Last night I held my breath for six hours watching voter returns. I stood on tiptoes and squealed a little bit and grabbed the arms of people next to me. Amazing, I said. Or Scary, I said. Depending on what I was seeing. I couldn’t sleep until California was projected. And even then, I couldn’t sleep.
What is going to happen?
I can’t answer that question. If I could, there wouldn’t be all of these excited knots in my stomach. What I can say is there is so much possibility lying in wait between now and November. We should all be passionately about something: speed limits or school lunches or drivers’ licenses or health care access or school uniforms or foreign oil. There is certainly a moment in your life (if you close your eyes, you can recall it) when you worked so hard for something you could barely walk, when you wanted something so badly that it made your stomach hurt, when you were so excited you could only see one thing. Right now, this is all I ask of you. Find that thing. Find the candidate who agrees with you. And fight your heart out for a little while.

2008-02-03T19:04:00.001-08:00

This is my very first blog entry. Ever. And even though I feel quite comfortable calling myself a writer. This feels a little bit weird because… who am I writing to? In order to answer this question I have been reading other peoples’ blogs. Obsessively. And what I think is this—people write to their friends. Or their fans. In some cases these people are one and the same. I don’t think I have any fans. But I do have friends. And they listen to me quite patiently. Maybe in the writing of these entries, I’ll even make some more… which gets me back to the reason I am starting this blog: I JUST SOLD MY FIRST BOOK! (this is me giddy and delighted) which somehow makes me feel, well, legit. So this is my blog. Which I’ll use to write about all things directly or quite indirectly related to my BOOK (and all the books that will come after). So the first thing I want to say is this: when I was 12 or 13 I already knew I was going to grow up and be a writer. But then I read this book called Over the Moon. And I knew I wanted to write a book exactly like that one day. I can still remember the floors of Maddie’s bedroom that she painted with white porch paint and the sounds of her feet on the creaking floor and the sadness Kate felt when her sister left home on a motorcycle, and the first time Kate went to New York alone to see the boy she loved, who had loved her sister. I feel like I walked in Kate’s footsteps from her Aunt Georgia’s house all the way through New York and across the ferry to find her sister and herself and a boy. And then a few years ago the amazing author Elissa Haden Guest (who writes fantastic children’s books now) even took me out to lunch in Santa Monica and sent me a signed copy of the original hardcover version of Over the Moon and I couldn’t believe that I got to meet her and she was so nice and we talked about living in New York City and writing stories and her daughter getting ready to go to college and after lunch I hugged her and walked back to my car and I thought. Whoa. Real people write books.