After a lengthy, miserable bout with depression, last month I finally went to my doctor and got a prescription for an anti-depressant. I’ve been feeling lousy for quite a while now; I couldn’t even tell you how long, months and months and months. At first I thought I was just having post-partum depression, but I just kept sinking and sinking until I finally reached a point, a couple months ago, where I realized that I had never been so depressed in my entire life and that, more important, I couldn’t bear the thought of living the rest of my life feeling that way.

I hesitated about going to the doctor, though, because I was afraid that nothing would work. Silly, right? I know it is, but I had this intense fear that I would get on medication after medication and just keep feeling the same, until I would finally have to accept that this is all there is for me, now, and that things will never get better. I had to force myself to schedule an appointment by reminding myself that my depression affects not just me but my husband and daughter, too. It’s one thing to choose to wallow in your own misery, but it isn’t fair to make other people wallow with you.

So here’s how I’d been feeling: empty, numb, uninterested in everything. I was eating a lot, but not because eating made me feel better. I suppose I had this idea that if I ate that candy bar or cookie, it might make me feel good, and then when it didn’t, I would eat another, thinking maybe the second time would be the charm. I wasn’t listening to much music. I wasn’t reading. I wasn’t writing. I watched things on Netflix, but with the exception of American Horror Story, which for whatever reason seemed to be the only thing that was able to really engage me during this dark period, I would just sort of sit and zone out to whatever I was watching, not really enjoying any of it.

Obviously, this was very distressing. It’s not like I’m normally little miss sunshine, but I’m usually able to focus on the things in life that I think make life worth living—good literature, good movies, good music, writing. Writing has been like an anti-depressant for me for many years. When everything else feels grim and pointless, I can always count on getting lost in my own creative process as I invent other realities, other people, other lives. In fact, I’ve found in the past that when I go more than a week or so without writing, I tend to start feeling listless and depressed.

But this time, my depression stopped my writing cold. I didn’t have any desire to do it, and when I would try to force myself, it didn’t feel good. Didn’t feel like anything.

It’s not even an issue, really, of productivity. It’s not because I envision myself as a writer, and when I don’t write, I don’t feel like myself (although that’s true), and it’s not because I have all these writing related goals, projects I want to complete, achievements I want to reach. The reason why it matters so much is because writing helps me deal with the world. Writing is my life vest, my buoy. When I’m not writing, I’m drowning.

So I got a prescription for sertraline and started the slow, anxious process of waiting to see if it would work. And you know what? It did, or at least, it’s started to. I don’t feel back to 100% yet. I’m still not writing or reading as much as I usually do, but I’m feeling better. Work doesn’t feel like such a burden anymore, and the little tedious “have to”’s of life don’t feel so all-encompassing. Life is beginning to feel manageable again, in other words, and I am starting to daydream again about my writing. I’ve been pacing around the house, with music playing, and thinking about the novel I’m working on. It’s a good feeling—feeling anything at all is good—and I’m so glad I finally took the step to do something about my depression.

This past year at AWP, I spent the majority of my time perusing the booths and tables in the book fair. Though I actually tend to enjoy panel discussions and lectures—even though there’s rarely ever anything new said at this point in the game—my favorite part of AWP (not counting seeing old friends) is the book fair.

This year at the book fair, I took a slightly different approach than last year. Last year, my primary interest was as a submitter. I wanted to see the variety of places I might submit. While I bought quite a few books and journals, and I bought only ones I was truly interested in reading, I also only bought ones that were published by venues I was interested in submitting to. I wanted to get a better idea of what these particular editors liked.

I believe this is precisely what most people do at the AWP book fair. The journals and presses know it too. They plan for it. They have on the ready printouts with their submission guidelines; they advertise their upcoming contests on glossy postcards.

But when you really think about it, it’s kind of sad. Here you have this huge market, full of hundreds upon hundreds—surely thousands—of books for sale, many of which are difficult to find in brick and mortar stores, yet the people shopping in the market are interested mostly in selling their own wares. There’s this great disconnect between what the publishers want—to sell the customers their books or journals—and what the customers want—to get published.

This year, when I hit the book fair floor, I didn’t do it as a writer, but as a reader. I wasn’t looking for places to submit. I didn’t care about upcoming contests. I just wanted to spend my leftover Christmas money on some good books and journals; I wanted to find some great stuff to read. Some of the journals I bought I would never consider submitting to—like Kugelmass, which publishes entirely literary humor. I don’t write humor, but I thought I might enjoy reading it, so I picked up their latest issue. And I bought books not because I was considering submitting my novel to that press, but because, simply put, the book looked good.

In the coming months, I’m going to review some of the journals I came home with here, on my blog. I decided to do this partly because it will encourage me to actually read the journals all the way through. Also, though, I hope to share my experience reading them with you. If I find a great gem in the batch, I want you to know about that gem. Likewise, if I come across a journal that I don’t think is that great, I’ll tell you why and let you decide for yourself if you want to read it or submit there.

I read a book recently, or actually, I read the first couple hundred pages of it before giving in to the voice nagging away at the back of my mind saying, “This book is not worth it.” It’s always a difficult decision to stop reading something. This has always been true, but the more involved I got in my own pursuit of the designation “Writer,” the more difficult giving up on a book became. I want to afford every writer the same faith and patience I hope readers will offer when reading my stuff, and I well know that sometimes you have to slog through a work for a bit before it gets good. Still, there are far, far, FAR more worthwhile books than I will have time in my one measly lifetime to read, so there’s a point where I have to realize reading time spent with a bad book is reading time wasted.

But anyway, this book. Here’s the thing about this book: it was lauded all over the place by other writers. The front and back covers of the book were crowded with blurbs praising the book’s wit, plot, and language use. Maybe that’s why I stuck with it for so long. Ultimately, I found pretty much nothing praiseworthy—or even read-worthy—about this book. The author’s attempts at wit fell embarrassingly short, and neither the characters nor the plot engaged me in the least. On top of that, the language was bland and uninspired. If I were Roger Ebert, I might write an entire book about it myself called, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Book.

But I’m not mentioning it to convince you to hate the book too. Like I said, I gave up halfway. Maybe the next two-hundred pages dazzle. I can’t, not having read the entire book, in good conscience write a review of the book here (or even tell you what book it is), but the experience did get me thinking about blurbs, those often overzealous little quotes used to market books.

How much can we trust blurbs?

When I found out my book was going to be published, I found out, also, that it would be up to me to track down a couple of choice blurbs for the back cover. I don’t know that I had ever really thought about it either way before that, but if I had, I probably would have guessed the publisher tracks down impressive blurbers for a new book. Maybe that is what happens at a major press, who knows? But at a small press, it’s the author’s responsibility to convince a couple of fellow authors to read, and write a useful quote about, the book.

I had no idea where to begin, so I read some online articles and blog posts about how to procure blurbs. The gist of my research was that you should compile a list of authors whose work you feel is similar to your own and contact them and just, you know, ask. You should aim high, I read, because nobody really cares about blurbs unless they recognize the author whose stamp of approval is being proffered. So I made a short list and painstakingly crafted letters that felt precariously close to fan mail. I explained to each author why I respected his or her work and why I felt my work had been influenced by that admiration. Then I described my book, noting its award, and offered to send a free copy if they were interested.

I didn’t hear back from a single one.

I’m still a little embarrassed about it.

Later, I received an email from the Editor-in-chief at Autumn House, reminding me they were waiting on these blurbs and telling me, because he knew this was my first book, that usually, you just ask previous professors or well-established friends.

Oh!

I promptly asked my two fiction professors from UAF, whose work, I should point out, I do admire, whose names I’m more than proud to have on my book. Both are strong, honest people, ethical people, and I don’t believe either one of them would have agreed to blurb the book if they didn’t feel the book was any good. I know I can trust every word they said in their blurbs. It’s not that they would want to hurt my feelings, but I know they would be willing to rather than lying about the book.

But I don’t know that the same can be said of every author who has ever blurbed another author’s book. Part of that controversy I talked about last week deals with the issue of dishonestly promoting friends’ books. While I disagree with the idea that people should make public posts about how they dislike their friends’ books, I do agree that you shouldn’t claim to like something you don’t like. I also agree that people are probably doing just that—to be nice to their friends, or to maintain useful connections with the people in their network.

To be honest, this seems almost inevitable, since blurbs, as it turns out, are so often written by people who have some sort of personal connection to the author. If someone you know personally asks you for a blurb, it’s very, very difficult, I’m sure, to tell them you didn’t like their book and that you don’t feel comfortable blurbing it. That’s the right thing to do, of course, but it takes a very strong sort of person to stand up and do it.

Literature is subjective, of course, and it could be that the authors who blurbed the awful book I tried to read saw something in it that I just didn’t see. But I doubt it. It was that kind of bad that I think most discerning readers would recognize, and the truth is, I felt a little duped by all those authors with their shining, enthusiastic blurbs. Would I have bought the book without the blurbs? Maybe. Probably not, but maybe.

But it isn’t really the blurbers’ faults, even if they knowingly lied about the value of the book in their blurbs. The truth is, blurbs are just advertising tools. Just like I don’t believe the narrator in a toothpaste commercial who tells me using X brand of toothpaste will change my life, I shouldn’t put too much stock in blurbs.

 

Unless, of course, the blurb is by Nick Hornby. That guy’s never steered me wrong.

I want to finally talk about Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, which I read a few weeks ago. This book, remember, was one of three finalists for the fiction Pulitzer this year—one of the few years in Pulitzer history that no fiction prize was awarded. I was particularly interested in reading this one because, while the other two books had surface level or publication related issues that may have prevented them from earning the prize, the only thing standing in the way of this book winning would have been content problems—problems with the book itself.

The short response is I liked the book. My long response, of course, involves a “but”: but I can understand why it didn’t win the Pulitzer.

First, some praise: the story is very compelling; the characters, though quirky to the point of not being believable, are likeable and interesting; and the plot really drives you forward, with some exciting and unexpected turns. I don’t want to give anything away—because I DO strongly recommend you read the book for yourself—but there are some dark and quite painful elements to this book, which is, at its core, the story of how two poor (as in financially) kids from the swamp come to learn what the real world is.

The book is divided into two separate threads: the story of Ava Bigtree, our thirteen-year-old first-person narrator, and that of her seventeen-year-old brother, Kiwi, who runs away to the mainland to get a job in the hopes of sending money home to his family and forestalling the impending foreclosure on their swamp. The book gets off to a plodding start, and my biggest complaint about it is that the first hundred or so pages do little more than establish who these characters are and what their pasts are like. It reminded me of the first hundred or so pages of the much criticized The Girlwith the Dragon Tattoo—which book, for the record, I actually liked. But the first hundred or so pages should have been trimmed. Same here. There’s no reason why these important, establishing details couldn’t have been worked into the story itself, instead of starting with a hundred pages of establishing stuff, then beginning the plot.

I also have problems with the quirkiness of the characters (particularly Ava and Kiwi’s sister, Ossie, who believes she is in contact with the undead). I’ve met a lot of people in my life, and I’ve never met people who are as over-the-top quirky as the characters in some of today’s popular books, movies, and TV shows. I just don’t think that kind of quirkiness is realistic.

And, as many of the reviewers on Amazon mentioned, the writing is very show-offy. Note that show-offy writing is not the same as beautiful writing. Some of the writing is beautiful, but much of it is so overly poetic that I kept being taken out of the story to either A) marvel at what a unique way of saying what she’s trying to say Russell has, or B) read and reread a sentence trying to figure out what the heck it means. Even when it was A, which seems like a good thing, you have to remember I was being pulled out of the story each time. It got tiresome. I couldn’t just get sucked in—isn’t that what we all hope for when we begin reading a novel?

But I want to repeat that I DID like the book. Once the plot really gets going—particularly once Ava’s plot really gets going, which doesn’t happen until around the halfway point of the book—I really cared about what was happening, and I felt moved, saddened, genuinely wounded at certain points in the narrative. I loved the ending, loved the way both Ava and Kiwi (and to a lesser degree, their sister Ossie) have been so irreversibly changed by the events that have taken place. Love the fact that I genuinely believe that Ava, our narrator, has grown up—in a sad, a very sad way—by the end. I also loved some of the imagery, loved the writing itself at points, when it wasn’t too over-the-top, and I do think Russell has a lot of talent; she’s a writer whose name I’ll definitely watch for from this point forward.

But I couldn’t help but compare Swamplandia! to last year’s fiction Pulitzer winner, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. I didn’t think A Visit from the Goon Squad was the best book I’d ever read or anything, but it was a good book with a lot of interesting, intricately woven themes. It’s structure was interesting too, and not necessarily in a gimmicky way (like, say, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which was good, but the peculiar structure really didn’t add much, so it ended up feeling like a cheap gimmick). Egan is a much better writer than Russell. At least, right now.

Russell, though, is at the very beginning of her career. I agree with Pulitzer fiction judge Michael Cunningham that Swamplandia! is impressive for a first novel, and I have no doubt Russell will just get better and better as she goes along. Russell, by the way, is my age—she’s exactly six months (to the day) younger than me, actually (I looked it up). Her first book came out when she was like 25—the year I entered into my MFA program. She’s already off to a great start in her career, and even if Swamplandia! wasn’t quite good enough to win the Pulitzer, it was a good book, and I won’t be a bit surprised if a Pulitzer is in Russell’s future—just not for this book.

I recently borrowed one of Steve Almond’s self-published books, This Won’t Take but a Minute, Honey, from a friend. Having read Almond’s two-part article on his experiences self-publishing in Poets & Writers a couple of years ago, I was very interested to actually read one of Almond’s self-published books (I haven’t, it should be noted, actually read any of his non-self-published books. This Won’t Take but a Minute, Honey was my first journey into Almond’s work, though I assure you it won’t be my last).

Divided into two parts, “Stories” and “Essays,” This Won’t Take but a Minute, Honey is essentially a manual for fiction writers that includes a series of flash fiction examples to illustrate the points he discusses under the “Essays” section.

While some of his points are overstatements, in my opinion (most notably, that “metaphors almost always suck,” which Almond himself seems to disagree with as not only does he admit to admiring the work of writers who use metaphors, but he himself uses plenty of metaphors in his own writing), overall, I agreed with and enjoyed reading Almond’s guidelines for good fiction writing. Perhaps because each “essay”—though they’re really not stand-alone essays but more like a series of brief chapters, each which builds on the chapters that came before—is so short, I flew right through the writing guide.

There are a few repeating points that Almond makes throughout the book, one of the most important of which is that you should “never confuse the reader.” Almond complains about writers who withhold information, who begin the story with dialogue without saying who is speaking, who use a lot of pronouns right off the bat, who jump around needlessly in time. Again, here I think he overstates some of his points, but in general he’s right—good fiction shouldn’t be confusing. I’m not of the mindset that non-linear chronology or pronouns are inherently confusing, but I see his point: sometimes they are, and they almost always are when handled by novice writers (the same is true of the metaphor issue, for that matter).

Almond offers some valuable insights into how to write well, and what I particularly appreciated about the book was his blatant disregard for what is often taught in advanced workshops. Almond seems to favor simplicity and plot over beautiful sentences and interesting ideas (in fact, Almond says, “I don’t want your stinkin’ ideas,” and points out that while good fiction does explore interesting ideas, “these ideas arise from—and are vitalized by—the emotional lives of the characters.”).

But my favorite point that Almond makes appears in his “essay” titled “As Close as We Get to Song,” in which Almond describes those writers—we all know at least one—who claim that writing is a heavenly experience, one that just carries them away in feelings of happiness and easy productivity. Good for them, but “for the rest of us, writing is basically flagellation, an undertaking that promises ecstatic release but mostly feels like torture.” Sure, sometimes I feel the other way, the heavenly, carried away on a cloud way. But often I feel the torture way, and it’s always reassuring to hear successful, published authors who feel the same.

I really enjoyed the book and think I’ll get a copy for myself, so I can refer back to it from time to time. But as much as I liked the book as a whole, I do have to say that it could have benefitted from a professional editor. As is often the case with self-published books, there were far more errors and typos than I would expect to find in a book published through a traditional publishing house (the most shocking was when Almond referred to “whip cream,” meaning “whipped cream.” No offense to Almond, but that’s the kind of mistake my freshman comp students make).

Ohio University, which is home to the graduate creative writing program local to my area, hosts an annual literary festival each spring. Last year the headliner was Tobias Wolff, and the year before, George Saunders. We’re talking big time names. There’s always a lot of excitement in the air during the festival, and since I know several people who are affiliated with the program, I get to hear a lot about the authors who come—what they were like during lunch and the genre specific colloquiums they run with the grad students.

This year, I had never even heard of most of the people coming. Amy Hempel, I was told, was sort of the headliner, but Susan Orlean is hugely famous too (having written, it turns out, The Orchid Thief, the book that’s being adapted into a screenplay in the film Adaptation), as are Denise Duhamel, Richard Rodriguez, and Terrance Hayes, this year’s obligatory sexy male poet, who I actually was previously aware of, but only because he had been a visiting writer at the University of Alaska Fairbanks when I was in the MFA program up there. 

Regardless of the fact that I was shamefully unfamiliar with this year’s amazing cast of writers prior to their coming, this year was, in my opinion, the best Lit Fest I’ve attended—and I say that even though I only, really, was able to go to Amy Hempel’s events (though I caught a little bit of Terrance Hayes and Denise Duhamel—completely missed Susan Orlean and Richard Rodriguez. Rodriguez, I hear, was absolutely REMARKABLE).

I’m not, as you probably know, a student at OU, but my friend Jolynn, who is going for her PhD in fiction there, got me into Amy Hempel’s fiction colloquium. During the colloquium I pretty much kept my mouth shut because I hadn’t read any of Hempel’s work and didn’t, as a result, know what to ask her. I kept my ears open, though, and very much enjoyed listening to her answer the questions the others asked about her writing process, her experiences publishing, and so on. She’s a real sweetheart, Amy Hempel, and incredibly friendly and down-to-Earth.

I picked up a copy of her first book, Reasons to Live (I know, great title!) and had her sign it for me, and I slowly worked my way through the stories last week. I say “slowly” and “worked” because, though these stories are incredibly short—most of them would definitely fall into the category of flash fiction—they are dense, and not in a bad way. They’re the kind of stories you have to sit and reflect on after you finish, the kind you read more than once just to make sure you caught everything, or because the ending sends you back to the beginning with a new filter through which to process the prose.

The most striking thing about Hempel’s writing is her close attention to the rhythm of each sentence. She said she focuses on the sentence, not the story as a whole, and you can definitely see this shining through in her stories. She, like me, is the sort of writer who begins with a line, a killer line that you just have to get down and that you know will inevitably lead to another line, and another. But, unlike me, she is able to feel her way through her language the way a poet can—in fact, many of her stories read as much like prose poems as they do like flash fiction.

She also knows exactly what not to include, how to give the reader just the bare minimum and let him or her put it all together from there. Hempel’s style of writing would be frustrating, I would argue, if she were a novelist. But she isn’t. She has never, she told us, had any interest in writing novels. She wouldn’t know how to go about it, she said. And as a short story writer—particularly a short-short story writer—her bare bones, sentence over story style works fantastically well.

Once, in a workshop, one of my UAF professors, David Crouse, mentioned that he could see his own writing as being on the same plane of existence as Rick Bass’s, but another writer—I can’t remember, now, which one—was on a different plane of existence altogether. He could admire what she was doing (I do remember it was a female writer), but knew he could never do it himself. That’s the way I feel about Amy Hempel. Hempel is, perhaps, the first writer who I felt that way about. Other writers whose work I admire I’ve admired in that, I-can-see-what-you’re-doing-and-I-think-I-can-learn-to-do-it-too sort of way. Not that I think I’m as good, say, as Rick Moody, but I feel like I can understand the mechanism behind Moody’s work, and if I keep at it and keep practicing, maybe someday I’ll be able to pull off what he can. Hempel’s work, though, is so unlike anything I would ever write, could ever write, that it really is like we exist on two completely different planes: I can see her from where I am, but as much as I keep walking forward, I’ll never reach her.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn from her.

I love this idea of focusing on the sentence. It’s, to be honest, a fairly foreign way of writing to me. From the workshops I’ve taken, with the varied and all fabulous workshop instructors I’ve studied under, I’ve grown accustomed to looking at story more than sentence. Character. Scene. All of these things tend to come before sentence. Focusing so much on each sentence is much more of a poet thing, I’ve always thought, but I think there’s a lot to be gained from picking a story apart the way you would a poem—paying careful attention to each individual word, each image, spending as much energy deciding what to leave out as what to put in.

A Tale of Two Movies

Yes, this week’s post has a title. I couldn’t resist. Even though it’s a bit dorksy.

Anyway, as you can probably tell from the (dorksy) title, I want to talk this week about a couple of movies I watched recently, both based on novels I had read previously. The Hunger Games, as everyone not living in a cave probably knows, is the first in an insanely popular (and startlingly good) trilogy by Suzanne Collins. The film adaptation hit the theaters a few weeks ago. The Ruins by Scott Smith is probably the best horror novel I’ve ever read. The movie version was released in 2008, but I only just got around to watching it (I picked it up used for $3 worth of trade at my local music/movie store, Haffa’s. The price should give you an idea of how popular the movie was.)

Both screenplays were at least partially written by the original book authors. Suzanne Collins is credited with three other screenwriters for The Hunger Games, and Scott Smith is listed as the sole screenwriter of The Ruins. It’s no surprise, then, that both movies remain pretty true to their respective books (although in both, the screenwriters had to change some small details to fit the film format).

Watching movie versions of books I love in such short succession of each other really got me thinking about the differences between novels and movies, and the problems that arise when the former is adapted in to the latter. It’s true of most movies based on novels that if you ask just about anyone who read the book and watched the movie both, they’ll tell you the book was better. This is not snooty or pretentious or a means of bragging about having read the book (though sometimes it comes across that way).

The truth is, this reaction is almost universal because when these novels were written, they were written for the literary format. The characters, plot points, etc. were all structured with the knowledge that the reader would likely spend a few days working his or her way through the story. The pace is much slower. In a movie, you have to somehow tell a complete story, develop your characters, establish tension, and so on, and you have to do it all in a couple of hours. The pace feels ridiculously fast in comparison, so the same sort of scope you can work with in a novel simply will not work for a movie, in my opinion. You have to zoom in, narrow your focus. It’s a lot more like a short story.

Case in point, look at The Hunger Games (SPOILER ALERT!): Because the movie stays so faithful to the book, a lot of ground is covered in a very short period of time. In some cases, a feeling of knowing and really caring about the characters is sacrificed. In the book, Katniss and Rue are together for several pages. We spend enough time with Rue to really feel that we know her, and her death is so, so painful as a result. In the movie, Katniss meets Rue, really meets her for the first time, then in the next scene they separate. When they reunite, Rue dies. They spend I would guess not much more than five minutes of screen time together because almost immediately after they meet, Rue dies. There’s no time there to build any kind of a connection with Rue. The movie relies on viewers either A) having read the book, so they already know and love Rue, or B) caring about Rue’s death solely because Rue is young and adorable.

In the book of The Ruins, the majority of the book is really about these kids going stir-crazy, trapped together atop the mound. That doesn’t mean the vine isn’t a genuine threat or that it isn’t scary, but what’s really scary is watching the mental states of these kids get slowly more and more unstable, until it becomes clear that the real danger is the one they’re posing to themselves. The movie stays close enough to the book to maintain some of that, but it’s impossible to really recreate the psychological twists and turns the book takes when we’re not able to climb inside the characters’ heads.

Both movies were good movies, don’t get me wrong. The Ruins in particular really caught me by surprise, I suppose because I went into it with fairly low expectations (although I should point out that the ending to the movie version of The Ruins is lame—I’m not sure why Smith changed it—and as freaky as the vine is in the book, you just can’t make a plant scary in a movie. At times, in fact, it looks sort of silly). But yes, if you asked me, I’d tell you the books were better. Waaaaaay better.

As much as I’m a movie lover and an advocate for the value of short fiction, I do love to get lost in a novel. I love the scope of novels; I love to spend days getting to know the characters, so I can really, really care about the things that happen to them. From a technical perspective, I still think short stories make better use of the craft elements taught in MFA programs. But from an emotional perspective, the longer form is better suited to make the reader really engage with the characters and their plights. There’s something that absolutely cannot be replaced about spending a few days slowly consuming—and in the best cases, being consumed by—a really good novel.

A friend of mine out here in Ohio, Kelly Kathleen Ferguson, published her first book a few months ago: My Life as Laura: How I Searched for Laura Ingalls Wilder and Found Myself. Kelly has agreed to let me interview her regarding her experience publishing the book, which I plan to post sometime in March. (She also talks a little bit about the process at the end of the book, if you’re interested.) 

In the meantime, I wanted to talk a little about how much I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed the book. It’s funny and poignant, sad at parts, but that plucky, you-can-get-through-this sort of sad. The book details Kelly’s exploits retracing the Ingalls family’s journey west, at the same time exploring Kelly’s relationship with a man she refers to as “My Manly” and her desire to figure out what it is she wants out of life.

Part of the reason I was so pleased that this book was so good was because I remember, a couple of years ago, talking to Kelly about the book while she was writing it. This was not long after I had met Kelly, not long after I found out that Kelly’s first fiction publication—that’s right, her very first—had appeared in no less than the Gettysburg Review. (That same story ended up being nominated for a Pushcart, and it got her noticed by an agent!)

I remember it very clearly: a small group of us were having lunch at Casa Nueva—a highly overrated restaurant in my town, which serves food that kind of, sort of, if you really squint your eyes and hold your nose, resembles Mexican food—and Kelly was talking about working on the book. She really should be home writing, she said, but she knew the second she got home she would probably just curl up on the couch with the cats and take a nap. She was joking around, of course, but the sentiment behind the joke rang true: sometimes she just didn’t feel like writing. She had to get this thing done, she told me, because she’d already lined up a publisher for it. Still, there were definitely days when she had to force herself to get to work.

Cut to a little over two years later: the book is out and it’s fabulous. The work she did definitely paid off, and based on the number of Amazon book reviews it’s already garnered (my book’s been out more than a year and only three people have reviewed it on Amazon), I think it’s selling pretty well. And as I was reading it, I couldn’t stop thinking about that day at Casa, how she hadn’t felt like writing. She hadn’t felt like writing, and yet when she sat down and forced herself to do it anyway, this lovely book is what resulted.

I find it all very reassuring, don’t you? ALL writers have to force it sometimes, even the really, really good ones like Kelly. Nobody walks around in a constant state of inspiration. Some days we stare at the blank screen for what feels like hours, willing the words to come. Others, we have trouble even getting that far. But it’s the writers who sit in front of that computer anyway who eventually produce excellent books like My Life as Laura. We should all take a page out of Kelly’s book.

Sorry, kitty, no nap for me today. I’ve got work to do.

Over the past week or so I read two very, very good books—Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby and Room by Emma Donoghue. Nick Hornby is one of my favorite writers—I’ve read all of his novels and loved every one. This was the second book I’ve read by Emma Donoghue, although I didn’t realize that until the end, when I was looking at the list of other books by her. It turns out she wrote one of my favorite short story collections of all time, Kissing the Witch, which reimagines classic fairy tales through a modern feminist perspective.

Both Juliet, Naked and Room were absolutely riveting, and Room is the best book I’ve read in a looooooong time. One thing that really struck me about both books was the fact that I was so engaged with the characters and plots that the writing itself just faded completely into the background—I hardly noticed it at all. This is not to say that the writing wasn’t good, on a language level. Both authors have an excellent grasp of voice, and we learn so much about the characters by the way they see and think about the world. Especially impressive is the writing in Room, which takes as its narrator a five-year-old boy who doesn’t understand very much about the world (think The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime but even younger and even more confused). Sounds like a difficult, maybe even impossible perspective to get in to, but Donoghue totally pulls it off. It is, in fact, the voice of the narrator that gives Room its emotional resonance. He’s so innocent, so young and sweet. He deserves better than this awful, awful world.

But it wasn’t really the beautiful, flawless sentences in both books that made them so impossible to put down, or at least, it was more than that. It was the combination of everything together: the stories themselves, the characters, and the perfect writing. I had to know what was going to happen next. Would Annie end up sleeping with Tucker? Would Jack and Ma escape Old Nick and leave Room forever behind? I’ve talked in the past about how novels often have their slow patches, and how usually, when I finish reading a novel, I feel as though it should have been significantly trimmed. Not so with either of these books. I was right there with the characters on every single page, and that’s the sort of thing that can only be accomplished by compelling plot and characters, not beautiful writing alone.

On the one hand, there was something mildly depressing about the books, as a writer. Because I could never be that good. Because I’m the sort of writer who gets by on lyrical prose; plot is the biggest thing I struggle with, and it probably always will be. Still, reading these books was a valuable reminder of why I became a writer to begin with. It wasn’t the old “I could do that too” mentality that writers sometimes talk about. I became a writer—I’m sure many of us did—because of books like these. Books so perfect I wouldn’t change a thing. Books I could never have written myself. Books that make the world a better place just by their mere existence.

This holiday season I strongly urge you to buy small press books and literary journals for the people in your life who enjoy reading. I made a resolution last year to buy people small press books as often as possible when it comes time to buy someone a gift, and it’s worked out very well. Here’s why:

Small presses and literary journals need your support. Some of the best writing out there is being published by these venues, but a vast majority of the reading public doesn’t even know these books are out there. Small presses and journals usually operate mostly or entirely using funding from grants. They don’t have much money coming in, and they NEED people to buy copies of their books to keep themselves afloat. But with little or no budget for marketing, every single copy sold is a triumph; every book you or anyone else buys goes to a very worthwhile cause.

That’s right: buying these books is doing a good deed. It is! Small presses and journals are important from a cultural and artistic perspective. They take the chances that major publishers don’t take. They publish work based on its artistic and literary merit, NOT based on how much money it’s likely to rake in. Without these publishers, we would live in a world in which mostly all that’s available to read is the literary equivalent of big budget Hollywood blockbusters. Can you imagine a world without independent films? If the small presses were all to go under, that’s exactly the literary world we’d be stuck with. Sure, there would be a small selection of higher quality books, just like the Hollywood studios put out a few decent movies for Oscar consideration each year, but major studios and publishers alike are driven by the bottom line, and so the bad far, far outweighs the good.  

And if you’re a writer, I shouldn’t even need to explain to you why it’s in your best interest to keep small presses and literary journals out there. Unless you plan on getting really lucky, you’ll likely need to publish in these venues before you can hope to land an agent or a two book deal with a major publishing house (and those of us who are really being honest with ourselves know that the likelihood is that we’ll publish in these smaller places forever).

But culling gifts from small presses and journals is not just a good deed; it also makes for some genuinely awesome presents. Buying small press books or literary journals for your loved ones who enjoy reading will most likely expose them to authors, stories, and books they would never otherwise have heard of. It doesn’t mean you just buy something random that the recipient of the gift won’t even want. There are so many varied small press books and journals out there, you’re bound to find something for every reader on your gift list if you just take the time to look. I LOVE getting a book that looks good but that I didn’t even know existed for a gift. It’s an unexpected treat; it gives me something I never would have known I wanted and often opens up a whole new world of books I want to read when I find a new author whose writing I love.

So why not give it a try this year? To get started, you can find a good list of small presses and literary journals, complete with links to the press and journal websites, at NewPages.com. NewPages also posts book and journal reviews, which might help you pick out what to buy for whom, if you’re having trouble. Go here to look for small presses, and here to find a list of literary journals.

A while ago, on an episode of Science Friday, Charlie Bamforth, author of Beer Is Proof God Loves Us: Reaching for the Soul of Beer and Brewing, said, “Some people say to me, ‘I don’t like beer.’ That’s nonsense. You just haven’t found the right beer for you yet.” This is the way I feel when someone—a student, usually, since I mostly only know academics and writers—tells me they don’t like reading. There are so many different types of books out there, so many different styles and topics and genres and techniques—I just don’t buy that there could be anyone alive who is mentally capable of reading but for whom there is simply no type of writing that would appeal.

But I think that the reason why so very many people don’t believe they like reading is a result of the sort of books that the average person has been exposed to. Consider this: the typical person, who comes from a non-reading family (by non-reading, I don’t mean illiterate, but a family where the parents don’t read for pleasure, and so neither do the kids) for the most part only has easy access to two types of books: canonical classics, which they’re forced to read (or are supposed to read anyway, though many of them just skim or SparksNotes them) in school, and whatever books are being published (and highly publicized) by the major New York publishing houses.

Let’s take the two types one at a time. First, we have the canonical classics. Good books, surely, but often dated. The language is rarely the sort of language we use today, and the writing style matches the style that was popular at the time. These narrators and characters don’t think or speak the way the contemporary reader does, and the plots and settings of these books often leave little to relate to from a modern perspective. Our society is a different society altogether. There are often underlying themes that are still relevant today, but the immediate themes and concerns of the books are usually so far off from what a modern reader—especially a modern young adult, the main group of people being forced to read these books—can relate to that the book, no matter how good it is, might seem tedious to someone who hasn’t yet built up an appreciation for reading.

Then we have what I’ll classify as popular literature, the stuff being put out and heavily marketed by the major publishers. This includes the bevvy of trendy memoirs that come out every year, the vast array of genre fiction that’s out there, and the stuff that bookstores usually classify as “general fiction” because the term “literary” probably seems too stuffy but there are no wizards or robots or ghosts or muscly men baring their chests on the front cover, so “general” seems the only word that really fits. There are examples of good, well written books in all of these popular categories, but the problem is, the good ones—the ones that are actually carefully crafted with attention to detail and language use, with unpredictable plots and multi-dimensional characters—are far, far fewer than the ones that seem to have been sloppily thrown together by some schmuck who doesn’t really know how to write.

You’ve probably read enough of those types of books in your time—I know I have. Those books that are so predictable and cliché, that use way too much exposition (exposition is so boring to read, don’t you think?) and don’t draw vivid enough images when describing scenes. The characters are one-dimensional; the story is bland; the writing is limp and lifeless on the page.

I got lucky at a young age. I got lucky because my parents read for pleasure, so I saw that reading for pleasure is a normal thing to do. Then, in middle school, I stumbled across The Catcher in the Rye, and I never looked back. But what about the people who don’t get lucky enough to find their Salinger, or whoever will really speak to them, amongst the mass of popular books that they have easy access to? Since there are far, far more crappy books on the bookstore and library shelves, the odds are that many people only ever pick up and have a go at the bad stuff. Having only ever read bad books and unrelatable canonical books, is it any wonder that so many people get it in their heads that they just don’t like reading, and, alas, give up?

If I had met Charlie Bamforth before having listened to his Science Friday interview, I would probably have told him, “I just don’t really like beer.” But the truth is, he’s probably right. There probably is a beer out there for me. I just haven’t had enough exposure to beer to have found it, and once I decided I didn’t like beer, I stopped trying it and closed the possibility of me ever finding the “right” one for me. The same thing is happening, I believe, to many people with reading.

I could argue that partially to blame are the major publishing houses, who keep putting out crap because they know it will sell (and please keep in mind that the fact that a book sells well does not mean that people are actually reading and enjoying it, as those of us who have mountains of books we’ve bought and haven’t yet gotten around to reading can attest to). I could say, too, that partially to blame are the teachers who only assign their students to read things their students are not likely to engage with, and partially to blame are the parents who don’t understand that just reading to your kids isn’t enough; you need to set the example and let them see that you enjoy reading for your own pleasure, too. But the whole truth is that this is not really a problem that can be fixed easily. Maybe it’s too late to fix it at all. Maybe TV and video games will always be so easy that most people will never take the time to search for books that they might enjoy reading. Who knows? All I can say is that I think it’s sad, and I wish more people could experience what I do when I get fully immersed in a really good book. I feel bad for them, feel like they’re missing out on something.

Is this how beer drinkers feel about me? Hmm.