May 5, 2012

84, Charing Cross Road | The story that successfully uses a comma in the title.

By Cassie

“you leave me sitting here writing long margin notes in library books that don’t belong to me, some day they’ll find out i did it and take my library card away.”

Thanks, Katie dear.

During my letter writing month, Claire kept suggesting I read 84, Charing Cross Road.  I don’t usually enjoy books written in letter form, but in this case, it’s a true story of a woman writing letters to a bookshop (and its many characters, mainly Frank Doel).  I think I can get on the bus for a book of letters that is really about books, which inevitably makes it a book about books.  Perks of Being a Wallflower kind of failed that test.  I never even got through The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (sigh).

I felt so much like myself reading these letters, as if it had suddenly appeared in the library stacks and eeked out of its glossy plastic cover and asked me to dance.

While most of the times I find small bits of camaraderie with characters in the folds of the pages I read, in this book I felt utter completeness with Helene, as if I was her only in a new life where I could skype my way into British bookstores and buy the Doel’s nylons at the grocery.

Helene is a character you love from the first page – she’s both pushy, and darling.  I particularly loved when she typed in all caps to show her hurried excitement, or sarcasm.  In every way, I felt like this could be a woman who shared a piece of soul with me as if a soul can be broken and misplaced, or borrowed.

Interrupters, worse than tax collectors in Shakespeare’s day.

Earlier today, Swamplandia left a small post-it note on its cover for me, and I imagine Claire’s push for me to read this book was much like this post-it note.  It’s as if she knew I would perfectly relate.

84, Charing Cross Road is a book you read aloud.  Depending on your mood, and your attitude, you will read it aloud in a British accent.  (You may even drink tea, pinky up).  I was lucky enough to read most of it in the closed off space of a car (pity I wasn’t going through a car wash at the time, I do so love to read, and dance during the car wash.  See, the accent is already taking over my typing).  Either way, I am always moving my lips while I read.  I hardly move my teeth at all, but even as I type this I am making out the words with my lips.  It’s slight, mostly upper lip, and it usually keeps interrupters away because they know you’re clearly busy having a conversation with a paperback.  That soft hiss of spit at the corner of your mouth when you’re moving your lips so fast because you can’t wait to read what happens next, that’s when you know, you’ve successfully scared them all away.

Reading the correspondence between Helen Hanff and the bookish few of 84, Charing Cross Road was like reading into a past life.   I like to believe bookish people automatically have old souls.  Bookish people have been through so much in their four-thousand past lives that they can really appreciate the quiet of words, the soft sweep of turned pages, the pencil smudges in the margins.  It’s the little things I suppose.  A small history can be drudged up from just a highlighted page, or a note reading, “here, happy,” or “gender notions.”  I like to think bookish people are also passive aggressive which leads to a lot of angry notes shoved under bedroom doors.  (I think my mother can attest to my being this way, especially from ages 13 to 16).

I don’t know anyone with a love of books who shouldn’t read 84, Charing Cross Road.  Helene’s love of books is undeniable and she writes Mark & Co. staff during a time when everything is unreasonable.  There are rations on all kinds of foods in England, especially eggs and meats.  Imagine a life without cake, and yet, the bright spot in every person’s life is this bookstore that lives through food droughts, wars, deaths, and in the end, closes before Hanff can ever get into its doors to smell the dust, and myrrh of antiquarian books. (We had to get Biblical in order to really understand that smell).

84 Charing Cross Road, Marks & Co.

There’s so many things to love in just 97 pages.  Side note: I love books that end on an odd number, solely because I think it takes someone unafraid of superstation to pull this off.

After recently reading Jillian’s blog at A Room of One’s Own I’ve been thinking about my own mark on things here in the book blogger stratosphere.  She discusses her stance as a book blogger and her stance on recommendations about books.  She holds to the statement that she would rather not be considered some sort of “elite reader” that people follow.  I have to be honest and tell you that I follow Jillian because I can’t really stand many of the Classics and she seems to inspire (in me) a reason to search through their coy pages.

Anywho, while reading 84, I was touched by how much Helene’s love of books really inspires the reader to form bonds with characters.  I was ready to jump into John Donne and visit the cobblestones of Oxford. (I’m not even sure there are cobblestones, I’m just fantasizing).   I think without even meaning to Helene has inspired a large group of people to read again.

And this is my question: isn’t that what we’re all doing here?  Obviously, part of my blog is to impart my own unique tastes, and statements onto the world, but it’s also to convince people to plunge into books rather than facebook, or Law & Order.  I write this blog because I want to inspire people to scribble their secrets into that small half-inch of space between paragraph and page end.  When Helene discusses this quote:

“I wish you hadn’t been so over-courteous about putting the inscription on a card instead of on the flyleaf.  It’s the bookseller coming out in you all, you were afraid you’d decrease its value.  You would have increased it for the present owner.  (And possibly for the future owner.  I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages some one long gone has called my attention to.)”

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

I find myself pencilling into my diary the page number, and wanting to go home and permanent marker my name into the top of every book on my shelf.  It is so like me to hoard books, but maybe I need to caress them, pencil them, and send them off into the world again.  When I come to a book with a page turned over I find myself wondering if the page was turned in haste; if their bus stop came up abruptly because they were so completely lost in the fantasy, or if later they planned on copying the sentence into their journals.  I copy sentences into a journal so that I never really mark up a book, but why is that?  Why don’t I share with the world where I found my most intimate moments with these characters, my most intimate moments with myself.

This is a bit of a jumbled mess, but I think as a book blogger I do dedicate myself to books and in that way I dedicate myself to words, and readers, and sharing, and margin notes, and dog-earred triangle flaps, and the statements I put out there about the books I read.  In a way I always feel personally indebted to these books that I just want to hold in my fists and breathe in like a child’s soft head.  I’m not sure how I can remove myself from my opinions and the opinions I sometimes force on this blog.  As a reader of my blog you have to realize that the push of my opinions is from the physical thaw I feel after reading a story that literally changes me in some way.   I either miss myself, or push myself, or feel myself again after a long withdrawal.

Visit Vincenzorizzo’s etsy page (by clicking this image) to see his other prints. They’re amazing.

On this blog I share books that make me remember myself, and make me expect difference, or expect change.  84 Charing Cross Road is easily one of these books.  If nothing else it inspired me to write more letters, and read more books.  Isn’t that the only thing we can ask from books and from book bloggers, that they inspire the sense of reading, that they inspire us to live in two worlds; one of reality and one of fiction.  Countless people have said that writers are good liars, but what’s to say that readers aren’t, we are always living double lives.

This blog is very much – a girl on the page, and a girl walking about the world.

42 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in book reviews, books

May 1, 2012

Newsday Tuesday

By Cassie

Favorite Tweets:

I just love this question because it’s a good one.  We all keep books on our nightstand (or in my case the poor-girls book basket by the bed) or on our bookshelves in our rooms, but where else?  Do you like to read meta-fiction by the toilet, or magical realism in the kitchen?

(I’m just really hoping Miss Bolden ended on “bud.”)

Favorite Search Terms:

  • mona lisa with cat: I just love that you came to my blog with this.  It seems I am discussing the right things.
  • books that have food contests: You’re looking for the State Fair.  Look for the red and white checked picnic table cloth.
  • the cat lady book by roald dahl: How is it that I had never heard of this before this search term came up?  Disappointed in myself.
  • how to decorate a love poem: You do this with gushy sentimentalities.
  • what is a catchy title for a science fair project about recycling paper?: I got nothin’.  Anyone have anything?
  • ninja takes out the trash: is he wearing all black? did he have to judu-chop the lid?

Book News:

6 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in book reviews, books

April 29, 2012

Project 365 | Week 17

By Cassie

And we’re back.

Still sickly, but didn’t stop my mother from making photos of us with the self-timer.

Day 112 | Do you know why a raven is like a writing desk?

I’ve been drinking a lot of flavored tea with this cold.  This one is raspberry which is spelled with a p.  I like the way the tea ink seeps into the sugar like a puddle pushing along the sidewalk.

Day 113 | World Book Night

A giver came to the teen center and now we’re reading Ender’s Game for Book Club. Does anyone out there adore this book?

Day 114 | What is it like to be a woman listening in the dark?

I do a lot of art in art class.  This week, I made a pop-up card of lovers dancing in the moonlight.

Day 115 | Wuthering Heights

Reading Anne Carson’s “A Glass Essay.”  It’s linked in my Short Fiction 2012 page.  Everyone should read it, she’s fabulous.  And she’s a classics’ professor – I never even took a classics’ class.

Day 116 | Seriously, Mom?

Weekly cat photo.

Day 117 | Like Mother Like Daughter

My mom is so cute, people.  She wanted to take photos because she was wearing a necklace my brother gave her and she wanted to prove on facebook that she’s been wearing it.

Day 112 | Stopping to Smell the Roses

How pretty is my momma?  A vibrant, and gorgeous redhead at [age undisclosed].

47 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in books, Photography, poetry, Project 365

April 28, 2012

When in Doubt. Be Bookish.

By Cassie

My Workspace | Infested

So, I had a bad night.  It may be due to the picture to your left where tissues are crowding my mug of raspberry tea and my Downy napkin poetry.  I’ve been sick with a cold for just two short days and yet, I’m a cosmic mess.  At least tissues and napkins are pulling double time: snot and words.  Hopefully the two are not blurring one another.  Due to my lack of composure during creative writing discussions (which was more so the reason for my no good, very bad day) I took a mild trip to the bookstore.  By mild I mean I only purchased one book.   Quailridge isn’t exactly the place to go when you only want to purchase one book, it’s the place to go when you want to become a serial book killer.  It’s an instant mood lifter, it’s like the mood ring of bookstores – you walk in and you’re instantly violet-blue.  See the mood ring manual here.

I did the usual: ran my fingertips along the hardcover spines, through F,G,H,I and then poetry, travel, literary journals.  I looked through the card section, found quotes for friends in other hemispheres.  I cheered myself right up from that crying jag.  I joke with my friends that when I’m pregnant my husband will have to run out and get books, not tacos, or pickles.  Maybe a book on pickles.  Do they have such a thing. Today, I bought a book on birds (typical).

Let me introduce to you, The Conference of the Birds (retold and re-illustrated) by Peter Sis. I have a thing about bird books, or the word bird in titles.  I also have two birdish tattoos, and a nickname of “little bird.  It’s kind of my thing; birds and books.  Any title with “birds” or “birdies” usually lends itself right to the register.  This book spoke to me from clear across the room.  It was face-up towards me, it’s printed on this unbelievable grid paper, and the whole back sleeve is birds.  It didn’t take me long to designate this book, “the one” and marry it right on the spot.  In this case, I’m polygamous. This book is amazing.

If you didn’t already know, I’m obsessed with Shaun Tan books.  If anyone in Australia wants to send me his new sketch journals, I will not be opposed.  I own every single one (The Red Tree is in my nephews room though because I gave it to him for a holiday not even thinking it wasn’t very childish. It’s actually quite depressing).  Since my love affair started with Tan in Australia, I have yet to find illustrations, or illustrated books for adults that measure up to Tan.  I think in color, and oddness, The Conference of Birds matches. Just check out some of the images that Penguin gave as an excerpt to NPR.

I was delighted to find this book.  It only takes one page of something delicious to perk a bookish girl up (boys take note.  Maybe read the little diddy “Date a Girl Who Reads” so you can know the truth about love and devotion). Once I did some research, I found that last year Sis was on NPR “All Things Considered” to introduce his dream world of birds to adults, not children. Anywho, that’s not really why I’m writing. I never wrote a blog about how wonderful my Month of Letters was in March and Claire reminded me to blog about it.  A month of letters was a really lovely way to get to know bloggers out there and realize how your brain works in the stream-of-concious.  I often stream-of-concious for fiction and poetry exercises during my daily writing, but I don’t often enough write about my own life this way.  It’s interesting to decide what you’re going to write to a stranger, or how you’re going to present yourself, or if you’re just going to write about the glass in front of you and the orange eye make-up you’re wearing that day.  I wrote a lot of letters about coffee and food.  I was almost always hungry when I started writing.  I filled every first letter with the same note as well:

It's in my notebook called, "Bad Experiments" based on a post-it note I found.

“For it is said, you know, that a letter will always seek a reader; that sooner or later, like it or not, words have a way of finding the light, of making their secrets known” (Kate Morton, The Distant Hours).

I think there’s something about the honesty in writing letters that you don’t get through an email.  How easy is it to just slide your pinky to the delete key and let everything go blank again, start fresh.  With a letter, unless you feel like digging and scraping your pen across a page (who writes in pencil other than Nikki Finney anymore), it’s a lot more work to delete ink than the georgia font on the screen. I like letters because I always feel like myself when I write them.  I’m never pretending to be someone else because I know if I do, then it’s all fake.  In letters I can scrawl my bad, loopy, half-trying-cursive handwriting, my unknown and aggressive commas.  (The page looks like people are on the comma egg hunt).  My bad spelling and lack of acceptance of the “i before e” rule.  I tend to be the mess that I am when it comes to letters.  Usually, the blog world doesn’t see that mess because I try to focus (sometimes it comes out though, like this blog, it can’t be restrained). It wasn’t just me who celebrated the art of hand-writing, but tons of ladies wrote me back.  Here is what came of that:

My best friend Sars sent a montage of birds, her wedding, and New Zealand. She’s the one doing 365NZ.
She also sent a cat card.
Katie sent me an ugly doll card (totally not knowing I had a keychain). Anna sent me a card on stationary I almost bought two days before I received her card. And Chris drew me a bouquet.

Muzette's Tiger and my favorite drawings by Claire's two children.

Emerson Graduate School - Red Letter from Katie B. that turns into an envelope. All stuck into my 2012 Book.

Whitney is not only a darling human-being with passion, she sent me a magazine creation. It was lovely.

These are assorted letters. One is my to-do list with letter writing on it. One post card of a famous tiger. One fashion card. Two child drawings that are both hilarious, and wonderful. Pink trees in the upper right. Thank you to Claire, Muzette, and Chris(tina) for these.

Two out of Three from Claire. We're going strong.

Thank you to Claire, Jen, Whit, Muzette, Lauren, MyMeanderingMind, Riki, Tracey, Chrissy, Ever, Kate, Katie, Kristine, Cindy, Chris, Sars and Anna.  I got more cards than this.  Haley sent me this rad owl card that I unfortunately have misplaced.  I think my dad moved it from the kitchen counter where I last saw it.  It was very hippie Harry Potter, as she is.  In fact, I think I just described her in three words.  Thank you to everyone who participated with me, or helped me to create a global community of letter writing/penpal-dom. It’s a revolution, get on the bus.

46 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in book reviews, books, Photography, poetry

April 26, 2012

Arcadia | Ex Umbra En Solem

By Cassie

Halfway through Arcadia by Lauren Groff I had this to say:

At the point in the story that I said that – Bit is a teenage boy who teaches me that George Eliot is actually a British WOMAN writer and not a man.  This is a fact, I’ve googled it.  He’s the too-smart boyfriend.  The LSD is the drug of choice, beyond the simple natural high of marijuana, the smell of fields and burnt grass blades in your throat, the pond water aftertaste like algae and a distant gulp of bullfrogs.  (This is all in my imagination, of course).

It wasn’t until the end of the book that I really felt the truth of my final description, “an acre of dandelions to breathe flight into.”  There’s something so honest, so haunting, so invisible and sacred about this book.  I was wholly moved by this novel and I wasn’t expecting it, which made the change in my chest when I finished that last line, wonderful.

Arcadia by Lauren Groff

I found this book so impeccable because it was weaving too many histories together.  It’s as if every continent has an Arcadia.  In the US, Arcadia is in Downstate, New York.  I asked my parents (who are from Buffalo) about it earlier today.  Not only is she weaving history, but she has this organic way of making nature and wilderness the heart of the story, rather than the characters.  I’m sure I’ve thought about it, but lately, I’ve been thinking more about the way space defines humanity.  Since Philadelphia I’ve been thinking about space, setting, and how one person has effect on a setting and that setting has a different effect on every one person.

I’ve found myself growing up in a suburban neighborhood with similar floor plans in every house, children with too-large helmets pushed back on their neck, double swing sets.  How my life has been polite and more importantly how I’ve grown up surrounded by the lush of oaks, their veins showing through the leaves like the ones through my wrist.  I know the seep of sap down bark, and the smell just before snow when the air is crisp and lonely and gray.

But what if I grew up with Philadelphia surrounded by metal and abandoned row houses, or India surrounded by people who share the smog, or Hawaii where I surfed all day without fear of salt water in my eyes or the jaws of a shark, or anywhere really.  What is it to develop in space, certain space.  What is it to know trees, or clean air, or white sand.  I don’t know. I can physically tell my home has made me safe, made me have control over myself that I wouldn’t otherwise. However, I haven’t grown enough to really see how it’s affected me rationally, or emotionally.  I think it’s been easier, but who am I to judge the weight of burden.

Lauren Groff has this delicate way of getting at how nature defines and how we are barefoot and lovely within it.  Obviously she had to dive into Bit’s growing up in a hippie commune (Arcadia) and the way it’s affected his future.  She weaves him so seamlessly in as a helper and this doesn’t change once he leaves Arcadia as he grows and aches.  He’s still compassionate.  Arcadia has an effect on everyone within it, Helle is still wild, still unforgotten, still bereft.  Hannah is stilled to sorrow over and over, and still in love with Abe.  Abe is all man, bearded, forceful.  They all stay this way past Arcadia which is an ode to the way our setting, our childhood, our environment stays within us.

This isn’t a foreign concept, I’m sure everyone has seen themselves in the light of their home but it’s just now dawning on me how much of ourselves we fold into the envelope of home, or blame on home, or find in home.  Miranda Lambert gets at this in her song The House that Built Me.

“I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could just come in I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me”

How much does our past, our home, those porch steps that my father calked together, crumbling at the sides, half covered in ivy and those night slugs in summer build us?

And then the question is: What do we do with what’s built?  Do we leave and collide back with home, with the smell, and the hardwood?  Do we stay always, pack photos and shadows in boxes in the garage and keep living?  Do we leave and not turn back, never think about how we’re formed?  Do we build stronger, sturdier houses, or similar houses, or completely divide ourselves between people of that home and people of this new one, this strange one, this one without the smells of my mother’s hairspray and the burnt food below the stove coils?

I don’t know. I wanted Arcadia to answer these questions, but it didn’t, and that was okay.

Arcadia tells the life of Bit which seems an odd choice for a name, but then he’s this bit of everything, this bit of everyone,  and this bit of history, a newborn had in a snowstorm.  He’s the purest child of Arcadia filled with everyone’s sorrow, or missteps, or mumbled words.  He spends a childhood hovering over his mother while she sleeps.  He is the child who doesn’t speak and everyone thinks is “retarded” because he holds the damn of everyone’s sadness and until they are awake and brilliant again, he holds it in, even laughing in silence.

Bit is just a wonderful human being and he’s a great character to spend three-hundred pages with because you want to know him, and he seems to have the recipe for strength.

With Bit is his mother Hannah who comes off in the beginning as a fold of skin and sunlight, but then by the end is this archetypal older woman.  Her husband, Bit’s father is Abe who is very much Abraham Lincoln as a hippie in a commune with a work ethic of an ox.  Handy, who I haven’t even talked about yet, is the kind of the King of the Commune, almost reaching into cult-king.  He spends his days with his wives who are created solely through sex, instead of working like his beehive of hippies that keep up the bakery, the house, the gardens and farms, etc.   Then there’s the minors, the friends, and in the last part (of the four) is Grete who is Bit’s daughter.  She ages from baby to fourteen in the last half of the book and holds the best of all his worlds.  She is obviously, the continuing of Arcadia in a vibrant world of NYC.

It’s interesting to think about this concept (I won’t drown it with analyzation) but what do we carry of home, and what do our children then carry of our home.  What do they keepsake?  I write a lot of stories about my grandparents (mostly grandmother’s) because I keep those tidbits that my mom shares of Grandma Shealy, or the gentle rocking of Grandma Celestina.  I’m not sure why. If you asked me today what I think when I type her name, I’ll say the yellow velvet king chair in the bedroom of my Aunt Nancy, at the top of the stairs under the red light of the room.  My Aunt Nancy said in passing, “that chair she always used to sit in” and now I live it in my head.  I never even met her.

Just something to think about. I’m full of over-analyzation tonight.

I know now after finishing Arcadia that it’s less about the drugs, the naked gardeners, the expanse of a house that fits two-hundred families, and more about the place.

When you’re young you think, “I want to live in a place that….”

  • has a moat.
  • has no reptiles.
  • owns a chocolate factory.
  • holds the golden ticket.
  • is green.
  • is happy.
  • has faeries.
  • inhabits Dr. Suess’ characters.
  • serves marmalade.

It’s why books like The Secret Garden were written, Alice in Wonderland, any Dr. Suess Book, Where the Sidewalk Ends…We let these homes, these plots, these small spaces of the infinite universe share their stories with us while we build ours on their soil and in my case, Carolina orange mud.

Isn’t it the most correct thing that we’re given a place at birth, one cleaved blank space in the world?

24 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in book reviews, books, poetry, Travel

April 24, 2012

Newsday Tuesday (& An EXCITING Q&A)

By Cassie

Favorite Tweets:

This is sarcasm:

Favorite Search Terms:

  • what did people eat in uk circa 1800: Beans.
  • spanking themes in young adult literature: You got my blog?  That freaks me out a little, a lot.
  • farting competitions in bed: haha, welcome to my life.
  • virginia woolf car: She didn’t drive, she walked into the sea.
  • metaphors for instructor of yoga: the sun is like a window to heat.  my legs are like strong sticks; soft and golden as hay, crossed at the knee like two branches intersecting at a nest.  (BAD POETRY).

Book News:

———————————————————————————————

Loved by Kimberly Novosel

Earlier this week I had the loveliest chat with new author Kimberly Novosel.  I feel like her last name pretty much explains why she’s a novelist since it seems a distant twin to the word itself.  She’s the author of upcoming book, Loved and has created a Kickstarter campaign to get the book printed.  Normally, I’m a snob about self-publishing and prefer publishing houses and agents, but the theme of her novel, Loved, is dear to my heart.  You’ve all heard me rant about self-esteem, usually in the young adult genre, but Novosel has written a novel dedicated to struggling women in their twenties.

We did a quick Q&A from questions I pondered while reading her bio and learning about Loved through the Kickstarter campaign.  I feel like everyone at readings always asked, “What inspired you to write?” or “What do you recommend to young writers?” Instead of asking these questions, I asked questions about Novosel’s own upbringing and how it influenced her writing as well as how other authors have influenced her.  Read our Q&A below:

How has being a small town girl gone big city shaped your writing?  What did the small town give to you as gifts for writing, and what did the city give?  And with this what are your favorite writers from both places and landscapes?

Audrey Niffenegger, who wrote The Time Travelers Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry, is from South Haven, Michigan and has lived near Chicago most of her life.  A small town to a big city, like me.  I think in these cases the small town develops a unique kind of imagination, learning to fill the quiet with your own thoughts.  Living in a bigger city as an adult helps to surround you with more stimulation, more fodder for stories, new ideas and personalities and backdrops.  Nicole Krauss, who wrote The History of Love, was born in Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn, where I live now.  If you read The History of Love, her deeply rooted knowledge of the city and the people who come to live there is apparent.  I think both can develop strengths in a writer in their own way.  What matters most is that the best writers write what they know.

What were some of your favorite mystery books as a girl in Pittsburgh and did this shape Loved?

I read a lot of Nancy Drew books and ghost stories, though the names escape me now.  I loved that stuff!  The little girl who is haunted by the girl who lived in the old house before her.  One favorite from those days is Ouida Sebestyen’s The Girl in the Box, about a girl who is kidnapped and held underground in a dirt hole with nothing but a little bit of food, water, and a typewriter.  I’ve obviously never been afraid of darker material, even as a pre-teen.  I also liked some fantasy stuff like A Wrinkle in Time, The Phantom Tollbooth and The Giver, which I recommend even to adults.

Why did you decide to self-publish Loved rather than shop around for agents and publishing houses?

My goal is just to put the book out there into the hands of readers. I’d love to be published on a large scale, but that wasn’t my immediate goal.  First I want to see how it does, what kind of impact it has.  Maybe big publishing will happen with this book or maybe the next one, as I continue to grow as a writer.

How did you come to novel writing?  Have you tried poetry, short fiction and other genres before ultimately writing Loved?

My earliest memory of writing is changing the words from the willow tree poem in the movie “My Girl”, and then writing new lyrics to Mariah Carey melodies.  I was probably ten or twelve.  Then I started to write my own poetry.  That turned into writing lyrics with musician friends at Belmont University, and then I jumped right into the process of starting this book.  I’d love to do short stories eventually, for literary magazines or my own full collection.

How did you come to the title, “Loved?”

Coming up with a title was one of the most stressful parts of writing this book.  There was one title in the beginning, and as a different theme began to emerge I came to a second title and stuck with that one a good while.  In the end I felt there was a better fit, and in the absence of coming up with the perfect clever title, I landed on Loved.  I just kept coming back to that word.  It just felt right to me, summing up the theme and evoking the right emotion, so I had to go with succinct over poetic.

What is your favorite quote from Loved and from literature?

From literature…oh how to choose!  I love so much of the mother’s dialog in White Oleander.  She’s such a fascinating character to me.  She has this one rant in which she says, “If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”  She’s practically evil but sometimes what she says rings true. Fascinating!  I don’t know the exact quote for this, but in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller, a young Pippa follows a man she’s attracted to down the street and into a café.  In such a short time, she imagines their future together, and when he leaves with out speaking to her, she’s heartbroken.  That is amazing writing.

This is one of my favorite quotes from Loved:

“The thing about secrets is that they can hurt you more than the person you’re keeping them from.  It’s like eating the last piece of caramel candy, a delicacy for you alone to experience.  You hold it on your tongue, savoring the layers of salty sweetness.  It makes you so happy while it rots your teeth.”

If you could tell women struggling with self-esteem or self-discovery, what would you say?  With this can you give book recommendations for girls or women dealing with these struggles.  

Forget what’s normal or what’s expected of you and decide for yourself.  Are you talking to yourself respectfully? Are you listening to yourself and what it is that you need?  For example, I need more alone time than most people do, and when I thought that was weird or that I was acting out of fear and not health by isolating myself, it actually caused me to be unhealthy.  Now I know it’s ok for me to take that time that I need, and it makes me better around people when I am social.  Write your own rules.

I suggest coming of age stories or stories of survival rather than the typical self-help books.  Study others’ stories of growing and overcoming and you’ll start to recognize your own.  Alice Sebold’s Lucky, Terri Jentz’s Strange Piece of Paradise, Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle, (all adult) Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep (adult or young adult).

What is your six word memoir?

“Present or absent, love moves me.”

——————————————-

Check out Novosel’s blog here.

Check out the Kickstarter Campaign here.

21 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in book reviews, books, poetry

April 22, 2012

Project 365 | Week 16

By Cassie

It’s week 16 and I’m going to do more than just show my week in photos (we all know it’s about my cat anyway).

My best friend is this amazing photographer who has spent her life in the eye of wanderlust.  Right now this means she’s all “mermaid hair, hippie feet.”  She just opened an etsy account where you can purchase prints, cards, and postcards based on her Project 365.  Keep in mind that her Project 365 is glaciers, mountains, sheep, and seas, definitely not cats.  She even had a newborn pig at one point.  Her Project 365 can be found here & the etsy shop can be found here. If you’re too lazy to go to these sites here are some of my favorite photos from the last few weeks.

This next one is by far my favorite ever:

If you’re interested in ordering prints, she has a ton of photos on her website and you’re allowed to order any print you want in a postcard, 8×10 or normal folded card.  They’re beautiful, even if I’m bias.

Onto my week in photos:

Day 105: Welcome Back to North Carolina

I was walking into TJ Maxx minding my own and killed nature parked right down the row from me.

Day 106: Writing Life

My boss needed a pick-me-up.  He went next door to Southern Hospitality @ NOFO and got us glass bottles of soda pop.  I felt so 50′s with my pen, stapler and black cheery fuzz.

Day 107: Baby Birds Flew the Coop

Those baby birds with glossed goose flesh over their eyeballs two weeks ago have now grown up and moved out.

Day 108: Caribou Inspiration Board

I go to Caribou to share opinions on the chalk board because I’m a narcissist.

Day 109: Frustration via Tail

My monster only likes a certain amount of petting.  You can tell by the frustrated tail how much is too much.

Day 110: Silks & Inches

You think you’ve placed them gently on the sidewalk just out the back door, and then surprise! they’re on your finger.

Day 111: Happy Birthday Daddy!

My brother likes to buy my father odd plants for holidays.  A few years ago it was a “Satan” plant and this year it’s a muppet.

22 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Photography, poetry, Project 365, Travel, Uncategorized

April 19, 2012

“Cinderelly, Cinderelly, Got No Time to Dilly-Dally.”

By Cassie

Lunar Chronicles 0.5 - Illustration by Goni Montes

Who knew?  Who knew I would be this deliciously into cyborgs and hover crafts?  The girl doesn’t even have a glass slipper, but instead a robotic foot, six years too small and yet, she’s just as Cinderella as the next gal waving from the Disney Castle.  I was literally number 179 on the request list for this book at the library.  Cinder is the story of Cinderella, in the future, when girls can have grease stained foreheads and lay under the hot bed of a truck mixing wires and nug luts in their tool boxes (that’s right, I know what a lug nut is).

It makes me laugh whenever a girlfriend brags about her boyfriend, or husband, being able to change her tie, or her oil.  How the grease stains on the boy’s hands stay all day and don’t wash off even after scrubbing with that expensive brand name soap that smells like Cucumber Melon.  How manly those grease stains seem to be.  How to spot a husband: look for the dirt under his fingernails, the dregs in his palm’s love line.

Flower Power

Anyway this isn’t about husband hunting, it’s about machinery, and women of power.  I loved this book as a young adult selection for many reasons.  The first is that it can be read and enjoyed by both young adult males and young adult females.  You’d think a refigured fairytale would turn boys off.  On the contrary, the machinary takes on the element of another character in this book. It’s just as important as the over all story telling as the characters are.   While the adventure, technology, and machinery is there for the typical boy this also gives teenage girls the ability to fantasize.  Today we clap-on girls who get stuck on the side of a highway and can change their own tire without having to flag down a conspicuous male or call their daddy, and Cinder is a mechanic.  She makes it acceptable for girls to lie under a truck on one of those sliding boards and pluck at the wires, configure the engine, change the oil.

Disney should take a lesson.  Not all girls have to get crowns, and floating dresses.  Not all girls have to get glass slippers in the end to make it worth it, or live happily ever after.  Some girls are perfectly happy being at the top of fantasy leagues, having happy ever after be a coffee and a good book, or the 53rd Superbowl Game between the Patriots and the Panthers rather than a man and a soft bed.

I love books that make these things okay, makes girls guts speak.  As in, sometimes we all get stuck into the crowd, afraid to be unique, afraid to like sports, or wake up and go to school with last nights mascara under our eyes, or no mascara because we’re naked badasses.  We’ll it is okay, we can be badass, naked, never own nail polish, or “healthy glow” blush.

Cinder by Marissa Meyer (unrelated to Stephanie)

I think all this is honky dory for young adult book clubs.  The only problem I had with this as a young adult read was that it was entirely predictable, and there were too many foreshadows to not grasp what was coming.  This may come as a rant to you, but I hate predictable or easy young adult fiction.  Young adults are apt, insightful, and they’re all miniature spies.  If I can tell from page twenty what the plot twist is, every teen in the teen center can tell on page twenty what the plot twist is.  I hate when authors think that young adults are less savvy than their adult counterparts or that they won’t figure it out.  Just because you’ll be published under the “young adult” umbrella doesn’t mean that your book shouldn’t have the equivalent intelligent level of an “adult” read.

You find this with teachers sometimes, that their expectations are lower than what young adults can actually produce and due to that students are less likely to offer their high quality imaginations or insights.  We need to enter the world where we realize what young adults are capable of, and that our expectations for them as readers have turned into sick love triangles, and make-out sessions.  Young adults don’t need that in a book (as you’ll find with Cinder which is impeccable without one awkward tongue make-out scene).  What they need is books that light up the world around them.

While I am disappointed by the Hunger Games love triangle because it’s so predictable, it did tell young adults about politics, about American freedom, or their own countries power, their own governments power.  I was lucky enough to be born in America, but just this morning on BBC News Hour I heard that Pussy Riot (a band) was arrested and has been in jail for six weeks because they wrote a song to Mary asking to take Putin away.  They sang it in a famous religious space, yes, but in the US you could write a song about nearly anything and be safe in your home that very night.

In Hunger Games, teens are brought into a world where no one is safe, no life is one of freedom whether you’re in a rich district or a poor district.  It serves the same purpose as Animal Farm, showing young adults the world of politics, and current events.

Honky Dory isn’t the word I want to use for young adult fiction, I want to use words we use to describe adult fiction: gripping, captivating, enlightening, riveting, intelligent, emotional, “it changed my life.”  All of these words should be the same words we use for all sorts of fiction, every genre.  We don’t want to raise girls who only go from Sweet Valley High to the pink chick-lit section of a bookstore.  Nothing against chick-lit, I love the stuff when I’m sitting in a beach chair and letting the wind whiff my hair.  However, girls need to experience more than romance and dating as young adults and adults.  Boys need to experience more than war novels, adventure novels, and mystery novels.  It would do them some good to read Virginia Woolf, and Jane Austen. It would do girls some good to read Cormac McCarthy, and Mark Twain.

We need to raise a new generation that crosses stigmas, boundaries, and barriers.  We can only do this by promoting books that do this.  Bertolt Brecht says, “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”  Literature has a duty to not only match the minds of young adults, but go beyond their high school lives, their lockers.  It’s duty is to take them to a new culture, experience, a new government, less freedom, less electricity, more life outside of the confines of their own existence.

Sherman Alexie said it best, “The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don’t know.”  Regardless if you’re a kid from a broken home, if you lived under a Seattle railway system because your mother was hooked on crank, if you were brought up with your car insurance paid and your college money in a savings.  Whether you have white picket fences, or chain linked fences, literature should shape your view of the world as something greater than these things.  It should empower you, change you, expand you as a human being.

Cinder does this in ways, and fails in others.  By fail, I mean fail my high expectations of what SOLID young adult books should do.  It’s a sweet read.  Read it if you need a break from the literary, or the mystery.  Read it if you need to go back to sixteen and breathe in the heat of hair straighteners, or the smell of soggy cafeteria hotdogs.  Let your young adults read it because it has less love story, and gives power to the unique.  Don’t expect it to tell you about the world, just expect it to be.  Read Sonya Hartnett, Markus Zusak, and Sherman Alexie to chisel your world.

33 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in book reviews, books, Travel, Young Adult

April 17, 2012

Newsday Tuesday

By Cassie

UPDATE:

TODAY ONLY ON AMAZON the author of TOUCHBACK (now a major motion picture) is having a FREE DAY for the book he wrote based on the movie.  BUY IT HERE.  If anyone is interested.  Let me know that you’re reading this book and after I finish it I will email everyone questions about if they liked it, what they liked, what they didn’t like and we can have everyone’s answers up on my blog along with my review so people get more than one opinion and we see how diverse we are as bloggers and readers.

Favorite Tweets:

Favorite Search Terms:

  • Snow White and Sherlock, Thanks http://curiousatekka.wordpress.com for sharing. These images were created by Colombian advertising agency, Lowe/SSP3.

    bookish wedding ideas: How cute are you?  Get on pinterest, ideas will abound.

  • is it rude for females to talk about bowel movements: No. We’ve entered the age when women leave their house, untie the apron strings and discuss poop at the dining room table.  Even your use of “bowel movements” is polite so I assume you’ll need a manual.  I’ll have to do a blog of recommendations for manner manuals.
  • does the book heat have literary merit:  I wonder if you’re searching for a book titled heat, or whether or not the temperature of the book is hot, literally or metaphorically.  I can tell you that metaphorically Nora Roberts and Erica Jong write “steamy” books.  However, the heat of a book when you hold it depends on how it makes you feel inside that soft spot above your ribs.
  • at the age of six, cassie announced that the idea that a man lived in the sky: I wonder if my mother googled this, or someone is growing up to be a writer.  It’s these search terms that I love.
  • ted hughes bra poems: Everyone comes to my blog in search of Ted Hughes.  This is a SYLVIA PLATH sided blog.

Book News:

15 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in book reviews, books, Photography, poetry

April 16, 2012

“…No More a Boy than a Fish with Wings.” – Kate Walbert

By Cassie

The Gardens of Kyoto - Kate Walbert

Swoon.  Sigh.  Let me dust my cheek with my handkerchief and lean my palm against my chin.  My elbow against this balcony.  My eyes against the green stems of the Gardens of Kyoto.  If you can picture this, my bottom lip is out, plush, my hair huffed up with each breath.  This story was a doozy, it makes me want to be a romantic in a dainty cloth dress.  The Gardens of Kyoto spans years of wars, men going insane, or sad.  It spans gardens, Philadelphia, dark slave rooms filled with walls of scratched numbers, mansions, and sisters.  How can you span sisters without spanning generations, without explaining they’re like their mother or their father.  You read Gardens of Kyoto and you see sisters, their span of lives, their similarities and differences.  I love the confusion of sisters, the “why does she do it this way when it’s so clear our duty is this.”

This is a sad book.  Nobody is happy in the end, well Daphne, but Daphne is such a flower name that you can’t make her outcomes ugly.  (NOBODY WON THE PULITZER IN FICTION).

The Pulitzer

*EXCUSE ME WHILE I RANT AND THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE DISAGREE WITH MY OPINION:  The reason no one won the Pulitzer this year, in my humble blogging opinion, is that the art of fiction in America needs to do better.  We are in an age where people are selling e-books and e-stories for pennies and people are self-publishing due to various reasons (some that they can’t find a publisher who will take their story).  Let’s not forget Harry Potter was discarded by numerous publisher’s before a humble small publishing house finally accepted it for publication.  We need to remember it isn’t always in the name.  All of the people up for Pulitzer’s this year had made a name in contemporary fiction.  Does a name mean that the book you published, the trees you killed for that paper, were worth it?  We just need to ask ourselves this before we publish our books.  If I’m going to buy a hardcover, I expect that the book is as good as its binding.

I’m not saying any of the books up for this years Pulitzer Prize were bad (I haven’t read them), I’m just saying that maybe it’s a sign for American fiction.  We need to stay true to our spirit.  Just because a book is outlandish, does not mean it’s wonderful.  Just because your last name is Wallace, does not mean everything you write will turn to gold.  I do love some Denis Johnson though, he gets me every time.  I will read this new novella even though it was not awarded.

I hope the publishing world starts looking for writers in the humblest of places.  We all have a story, but we don’t all want to write it down.  Do you trust publishing houses to tell you what’s wonderful in fiction?  Or do you ever wonder if something great is out there that you’ll never read because it’s been turned down too many times, and the writer is now stuffing it into a drawer, folding a twine string around the parchment, or leaving it to collect dust, for their children to find after their death.  I wonder…I often wonder.

Thank you, Pulitzer committee for making us scared again.  What is writing if not fear?  Fear that we won’t have time to tell our stories.  Fear that these characters will die and disappear.  Fear that the people won’t love you, that the words won’t be beautifully strung together like a back home Christmas wreath on your dying mother’s door.  Fear is what writing is.  Be memorable.

*END RANT.

Gardens of Kyoto is a lovely book if you don’t mind being unhappy for a few days.  The words are beautiful, Kate Walbert has a way of saying something with a choir of bodies that makes you want to scream, bury your face in a pillow and shove the book into the sleeve of the pillow case to dream about later.  I’m especially bias about this book because I have this sick fantasy about being a girl someone writes letters home too.  I think I was meant to be born in the thirty’s, when my father was born.  I was meant to feel a sliver of the depression and then send someone off into the clutches of battlefields, dead trees, winter.

Maybe that’s why I especially love books written from the narration of war widows, or war girlfriends, girls who’ve been pinned and are always waiting.  I have this ideal of running down the dust road to the mail box, missing the pot holes slick with mud from yesterday’s rain.  And while Ellen doesn’t ever get to do this, she does have men who belong to her, but belong more to the war.  Men who gave her a small piece of themselves, but took the rest to be closed and trampled.

I think that’s the thing I loved most of the book, the small pieces of human.  Every character gave Ellen a small bit of themselves.  Her child, who she writes too, gave her the smell of fresh skin, of babies, a murmur.  Her cousin Randall, gave her a goodbye – his hands pressed to the round parts of her face.  Her mother gave her nothing but quiet, to mourn.  Sterling gave her a view of history.  Everyone gave her something of themselves, something of history.  Isn’t that the way though, we will never truly know someone because we won’t know their thoughts.

Southern Belle

In my head, I talk in a southern accent.  I have to be careful it doesn’t come out in my real life but I like to decorate the words, round them, drawl out my conversations with myself.  It’s strange the way we have these small secrets with ourselves.  It must be the reason our imagination is at its best in the night, just before sleep, when we are the most ourself – the most alone with these bodies.

Clearly, mine is a body lying in the sweat of the South.  And yours…

18 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in book reviews, books, poetry, Travel

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 638 other followers