Recovery often calls on belief in a power greater than oneself. And if ever there was a man in need of a higher power, Cuthbert is it. It offered more than intoxication, more than a release. It took you rippling across whole new planets of purple-white euphoria. Few of the animals are better off than before. But he does, in fact, free the otters:. It was as though they were, together, the last and most precious thing in England to be emptied from it, a half-water and half-earth being made of golden-brown jewels and smelling of stolen foreign flowers.
The two become an unexpected team. And for a moment, as the long night ends, the spirit of the Greenwood makes an appearance, transforming Astrid, briefly:. It resembled Astrid, but it was larger, untamed, like a wild, long-limbed yew tree spotted with tiny red berries. A hallucination? A miracle? What is important is that Cuthbert has made connections — with his beloved animals, and with Astrid, as a true friend — something Cuthbert has lacked all this time.
What I loved best about the British books I read as a child was how close to the surface of everyday life the mysticism lurked. In the absence of any other belief system, that was more than enough. In the absence of anything Cuthbert might have to hope for in his world, he can talk to the animals. And — because Broun has given us a thoroughly British novel — they can talk to him. One editor writes you a harsh note, attacking the story as indicative of what is wrong with MFA programs and saying that your story demonstrates you have nothing to say.
When you tell a friend that no one wants your story, she asks you what The New Yorker said about it. You admit you have not sent it to that magazine, and your friend laughs. She says you were supposed to start with The New Yorker. So, on a Thursday, you send the story there, and the next day Roger Angell , the fiction editor, calls you — early enough that he wakes you up — and says he wants to publish it.
You do not believe him: you are a poor grad student, behind on your rent, and you think the caller is really your landlord trying to trick you into talking to him. And you doubt the magazine reads stories so quickly. Half-a-dozen years later, the magazine reprints it in an anthology, Nothing But You. Your name is in the table of contents between Jean Rhys and John Cheever. That story helps you get an agent, but you and she later part ways and it takes more than 20 years before you finally publish, at age 47, a book under your own name, a collection of stories called Single, Carefree, Mellow.
You are elated you have a book out in the world, but then the book brings you significant attention, especially for a debut collection of short stories. Glamour and Elle exhort their readers to buy it. You were just continuing to live your life and write — write a lot. It was just that most people did not notice. When you were growing up, you were different in some crucial ways from everyone else in your family, who are all scientists. You were raised in Midland, Mich.
You write: So many experiences were new to him! He did not know that shampoo could cost forty dollars…and he jumped every time the GPS spoke in the car…He had never seen a Wii before [and] had never seen Jurassic Park. Having no other idea what to do, you apply to two graduate writing programs: at Columbia University and at the University of Iowa. At Columbia, you also take a workshop with Rick Rofihe , in which you write the story you will sell to The New Yorker.
You read the unsolicited novels that people send in, mostly thrillers, and write reports on them. This is what you are doing for a living when Roger Angell calls, and why you do not have enough money to be current with your rent. The magazine pays you an unimaginable dollar a word. After you publish the story in The New Yorker , it does not change your life in any significant way but, contrary to what the Times writer later says, you do not disappear from the literary scene: you continue writing, and your work appears in some of the best journals in the country, including Narrative , Ploughshares , Greensboro Review , Glimmer Train , and others.
You also sell stories about young girls and their unrequited love to Sassy and Seventeen , and a publisher for a series of young adult romance novels contacts you to ask if you would like to try writing a book in the series for them. You write more than 20 romance novels.
You do it largely because the money is good; compared with what you are earning as a waitress, it seems a fortune. If you have the structure and you are not just meandering along, it makes it easier. You get there. You regret having to stop, but you do, and then you have a second child, and then family life means you cannot go back to it, but you continue writing short stories.
A few years ago, you decide that you feel at sea without an agent, so you find a new one. She asks you to send her what you have. You send her something files, all the stories you have, not organized in any fashion. In the middle of editing the collection, you have an idea for a new story. I will do anything for a joke. She agrees, making the final count eleven stories in all.
Your collection will also have a third story in the second-person, about a mother staging what turns out to be a nearly disastrous eighth-birthday party for her son, where the mother is groped by a nearly inept magician she hires for the event who perhaps is naked beneath his robes.
Your work is, in fact, marked by humor; but also secrets and sometimes a gentle sadness. The jokes: some of them are wry observations your characters make. Your fascination with secrets arises from your own life. After you start seeing the man you eventually marry, he confesses that he is actually an MI-6 agent, something you cannot reveal to anyone, not even your family after you marry, because it can endanger your husband and perhaps your entire family.
In the title story, the character tries to hide from her boyfriend the fact that she wants to leave him, at the same time she is discovering that perhaps he is really too good for her. So now, almost a quarter-century after the day that Roger Angell called you with the news that he wanted to publish your story, a book with your name on it is at last out in the world and bringing you acclaim that surprises you.
The attention is good, and you appreciate it, but then you go back to work on the novel you are writing for next year because, as you once said, there are few things better for a working writer than to be writing.
You say: [Writing] is such an important part of my identity. Click here to listen to an audio interview with Katherine Heiny.
This piece was produced in partnership with Bloom , a site that features authors whose first books were published when they were 40 or older.
On the surface, it may seem that Paul Harding made a safe choice when he settled on the territory for his new novel, Enon. It shares the same geographic setting as his debut, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers — both take place in the fictional New England town that gives his second novel its title — and centers on the same family that populates that earlier novel.
Tinkers tells the story of the last days of the life of George Crosby and Enon that of his grandson, Charlie, who appears briefly in the first novel. Beyond those surface elements, the narrative mechanism of both books turns on a similar event — the death of an important figure.
Following those openings, both trace the deterioration of their protagonists. Finally, we see Charlie breaking into the homes of elderly residents who, he suspects, will have drugs he can steal to numb his pain. Despite these marked similarities, however, Enon is, in a number of ways, just as risky a venture as was Tinkers and gives strong evidence that Harding is a writer who, despite the considerable accomplishment of his first novel, is serious about continuing to test himself.
With any project I always have the sense that I am not a good enough writer to write the book I want to write. But then the only way to become a good enough writer to write the book I want to write is to write the book I am trying to write. He had no takers. Nobody wants to read a slow, contemplative, meditative quiet book. The novel appeared in when Harding was 42 and once it was out in the world, it began accumulating fans. Like Tinkers , which weighs in at around 40, words, Enon , at roughly 70,, is a relatively short work.
Despite their brevity, the two novels are sprawling, in both scope and ambition. Subscribe to receive some of our best reviews, "beyond the book" articles, book club info and giveaways by email.
Photo: Krysta Ficca. Daniel Orozco Biography. Books by this author. More about membership! Readalikes All the books below are recommended as readalikes for Daniel Orozco but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed.
So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right. How we choose readalikes. View all 6 Readalikes. Find out more. He grasps the hose, snaps it once, twice, three times until it clears. And just as he's turning around to give Whale the thumbs-up, a woman appears before him, inches from his face.
She passes into and out of his view in less than two seconds. But in Baby's memory, she would be a woman floating, suspended in the flat light and the gray, swirling mist. The witnesses said she dived off the bridge headfirst. They said she was walking along when she suddenly dropped her book bag and scrambled onto the guardrail, balancing on the top rail for a moment, arms over her head, then bouncing once from bended knees and disappearing over the side.
It happened so fast, according to one witness. It was a perfect dive, according to another. But her trajectory was poor. Too close to the bridge, her foot smashed against a beam, spinning her around and pointing her feet and legs downward.
She was looking at Baby as she went past him, apparently just as surprised to see him as he was to see her. She was looking into his face, into his eyes, her arms upstretched, drawing him to her as she dropped away. In early spring, a friend went for a walk in the woods and, glancing down at the path, saw a snail. Picking it up, she held it gingerly in the palm of her hand and carried it back toward the studio where I was convalescing.
She noticed some field violets on the edge of the lawn. Finding a trowel, she dug a few up, then planted them in a terracotta pot and placed the snail beneath their leaves. She brought the pot into the studio and put it by my bedside. Why, I wondered, would I enjoy a snail? That sense of extremity seems to be working alongside a sort of intimacy in the way you render place and character. How do those qualities come together for you, while you write?
I love landscapes, landscape paintings. I love looking at stuff from a promontory somewhere. For me, getting an overall sense of a place, and selecting the details that give a sense of what the landscape looks like, is not just a writerly challenge but a way of pinning down the tone and mood that I want. Part of the precision and the concrete detail in the writing comes from my tendency to be that visual. I see it enough to find the details that I want on the page.
Whenever I begin a story, in the early stages, it usually begins as an effort to engage some kind of narrative exercise, something that I want to try and do, or pull off. I work on either finding inherent in that exercise some kind of situation or scenario, or on coming up with one. Then I start developing a character who can be taken through that situation. I tend to work with a character from the outside in. Hopefully, the process of discovering these characters has some of the same kind of vibrancy and energy for the reader as it did for me discovering them as a writer.
In some stories, we never learn the names of your characters. Sometimes only the peripheral figures get names. What informs these decisions? It seems to be an intuitive choice on my part. The workers actually give each other nicknames.
If you work on the Golden Gate Bridge and you get a nickname, you're stuck with it for as long as you work on that bridge. And that is kind of who you are. Saying a name over and over again makes the character not just a character, but someone iconic, like Jesus Christ, or Charlie Brown.
Style is intrinsic. Style and structure are kind of the same thing for me. I move forward in that way. I wondered if a story could arise out of police blotters, which are a series of discrete events, both important and unimportant.
There is, though, especially at the beginning of that story, a sense of accrual and accretion. That was the impetus there, but that story also has a blatant dramatic throughline because of the love story. I wanted to have elements of a story accreting and accruing, simply by piling up one element after another. I was questioning whether or not I could use juxtaposition to figure out what the pace and movement of a story could be, and how to have these things peak and rise by moving elements of the story around.
How can I stop, use second person, and then move and use second person again. These stories were written over fifteen years before they were published, so each story was a discrete project. It could happen everywhere, and anywhere. For me, the autobiographical revelation has to do with place, this notion of a particular place that resonates.
It really does come up a lot. I wanted to de-romanticize, de-sentimentalize, de-melodramatize this phenomenon of people killing themselves on that bridge.
The bridge in the story is never called the Golden Gate Bridge but everybody knows which bridge it is. These guys have figured out how to work on it. The bridge workers, besides the revelation that they occasionally talk down and witness suicides, in a sense are just steel workers. They work on the bridge in small pieces. It gets repainted every seven years. It must be repainted forever to keep it from corroding.
0コメント