women writers

The Writing Process: A Blog Relay

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Read Women 2014 by Joanna Walsh

Read Women 2014 by Joanna Walsh

The writer Rosalie Morales Kearns asked me to participate in a blog relay Q&A about the writing process. She is the author of Virgins and Tricksters, a collection of shimmering short stories that combine erudition and whimsy, a sly feminist wit and a sense of melancholy. Rosalie is also the founder of Shade Mountain Press, a new literary press dedicated to publishing women, which in 2014 will publish two books: Egg Heaven, a collection of haunting and lyrical short stories by Robin Parks; and my own novel, Her Own Vietnam.

Check out Rosalie’s blog to learn about her writing process and see what she’s working on now.

Writing Process Q & A

Question 1. What are you working on?

I’m putting the finishing touches on Her Own Vietnam, which will be published this fall. The novel is about a woman who served as a U.S. Army nurse in Vietnam, and decades later must confront her wartime memories and the fractures in her family life as the country prepares for the war in Iraq.

At this point, the writing is completed and the book is in the design and production process. In the next few weeks Rosalie will send Advanced Reader Copies to review outlets, and then the book will go through a final proofreading before it goes to press. I’m lucky that Shade Mountain Press invites its authors to participate in all of this, from discussing the cover design to considering different styles for the chapter headings to thinking about which publications and websites might review the book.

Question 2. How does your work differ from others of its genre?

Her Own Vietnam is my third novel. All explore in different ways the terrain of women’s friendships. My characters tend to be politically engaged in the world, and recognize the gravitational pull of public events on their personal lives. I bring a lesbian sensibility to the work, which means a sensitivity to women’s experiences and the struggles of all outsiders to resist the undertow of other people’s definitions of them.

Question 3. Why do you write what you do?

My writing tends to start with a question. What would happen if…? What would it feel like to…? For all three of my novels, the central question of the book has come to me while I was walking. Clearly I need to walk more often.

Question 4. How does your writing process work?

I always envy those writers who say the words just come to them, and admire the writers who outline everything beforehand. For me, writing is an act of exploration: I write to see what will happen next. I start with what I think is the beginning of the book, and keep writing, seeing an inch or two farther along the path with each writing session. I generally don’t know where I’m headed until at least halfway through the first draft. (Sadly, this is also how I drive.)

Writing a novel is a little like being in love; there’s a current of energy constantly running just beneath the surface of your daily life. For that reason, I always carry a little notebook and a pen, to jot down ideas that occur to me throughout the day. Somehow these ideas lose their potency if I type them into my phone or computer. Paper and pen still have a special kind of power for me.

Passing the baton

I’ve invited two writers to carry on the relay and answer these four questions about the writing process on their own blogs. Please look for their posts next week.

Kristin Ohlson has an impressive knack for writing compelling nonfiction about serious subjects and infusing her work with warmth, humor and drama. Her latest book, The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers and Foodies are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet, was published this spring and is collecting wonderful reviews. The Los Angeles Times called it “an important book and a pleasure to read.” Kristin also wrote the award-winning Stalking the Divine, and co-wrote the New York Times bestseller The Kabul Beauty School. Read her blog here (click on Blog and News):

Adele Levine recently published Run, Don’t Walk: The Curious and Chaotic Life Of a Physical Therapist Inside Walter Reed Army Medical Center. She is a prolific humor writer, but this powerful memoir of her years working with American troops who lost their limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan packs a punch along with the laughs. Read about Adele’s writing process here:

I hope you will explore the websites and work of these extraordinary writers. Remember, it’s still (and always) the year to read women!

 

 

Meanwhile, back in book world…

/ lynnkanter / 8 Comments

 

Photo by Kate Ter Haar

Photo by Kate Ter Haar

A lot has been happening in the publishing process for Her Own Vietnam. Here’s a quick update.

Rosalie, my publisher, sent me her marked-up version of the manuscript. I was not surprised to see that her edits strengthened the book. She noticed all the little writing tics that I’m blind to (like an over-reliance on rhetorical questions – who knew?) and suggested ways to alter them. I had a week to revise the manuscript and send it back to her.

Dingbats are real

Now Rosalie is working with the designer to design the interior of the book. Even as a published writer and avid reader, I had no idea how many decisions go into designing a book. They are considering elements such as the font for the text and chapter headings, how much space there should be between each line of text, and even what the “dingbats” should look like.

Dingbats are those little symbols that appear between sections of a book and signal, as our designer says, “significant breaks in time, space or consciousness.” They’re used primarily in novels, because most short stories are too concise to call for such breaks.

An invisible art

My theory is that book design – like movie music – is most successful when no one notices it. The design should subtly facilitate the reader’s experience with the book. If you notice the design as you’re reading, it’s too obtrusive.

Building the ARC 

This month Rosalie will print Advanced Reader Copies, or ARCs, to send to review outlets. ARCS are semi-finished versions of the book; for example, they may not be proofread yet.

It generally takes several months for a review to be published. Nor is it certain that anyone ever will review my book; there are far more new books than reviewers or places that publish reviews.

Leaving my hands

The publication process is thrilling and nerve-wracking. There’s also an undertone of sadness, as my book slowly leaves me. The farther a manuscript proceeds through the production process, the more the writer’s role diminishes.

Already the novel is on its way to becoming almost as much Rosalie’s book as mine. Soon it might be yours. And at that point, as you hold a novel in your hands or e-reader, it’s all up to you. In the end it’s the reader, not the writer, who gives a book meaning.

 

(Scary) Update from Book World!

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Three sharp red pencils.

My editor gets down to business. (Photo by Horia Varlan.)

My publisher (who’s also my editor) told me she has almost finished editing my book. She will send me the edited version of Her Own Vietnam on Monday. That means she’s probably bent over my manuscript right this minute, her red pencils honed to scalpel sharpness, the sawdust scent of pencil shavings fresh in the air.

Okay, no pencils are actually involved. She’s using Track Changes.

But still – scary.

Want to know more about this formidable creature, the publisher and writer Rosalie Morales Kearns? (She IS formidable. She’s also warm and hilarious.)

Check out the Shade Mountain Press website below. There you can find info about the press and the publisher; the first official descriptions of my novel and Egg Heaven, the amazing short story collection by Robin Parks; AND a call for submissions for Shade Mountain’s 2015 books.

Are you a woman writer? A novelist who’s a woman of color? Shade Mountain Press is looking for you.

While you explore the website, I’ll just be here, waiting for my marked-up manuscript and biting my nails.

http://www.shademountainpress.com/index.php

 

On rereading “Mrs. Dalloway”

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Can't. Stop. Reading. Photo: David McSpadden

Can’t. Stop. Reading.
Photo: David McSpadden

Every decade or so I reread Mrs. Dalloway, the stunning 1925 novel by Virginia Woolf. Each time I find something new to admire and appreciate.

The novel takes place in London, during a single June day in 1923. World War One is over, but its impact can be felt everywhere. Clarissa Dalloway, an upper class woman in her 50’s, is preparing to throw a party. Peter Walsh, who once loved her and whom she rejected for the more predictable Richard Dalloway, has just returned to London after five years in India. A veteran is going mad in a way that makes perfect sense after the horrors of the war, and his immigrant wife is growing desperate. All of these people, and more, connect and intertwine and pull apart in unexpected ways as Clarissa Dalloway’s past and present collide.

A book for the ages – my ages

I first encountered Mrs. Dalloway when I was in college. I was intoxicated by the novel’s glittering, faceted language, its swirling points of view, its complex sentences and circuitous paragraphs.

I was also struck at 19 or 20 by the fact that this acclaimed novel dealt with something I was just beginning to discover myself: that women of all kinds sometimes fall in love with other women – intense and romantic, even when utterly chaste. The long-married Mrs. Dalloway, looking back on her years, considers the moment at 18 when Sally Seton kissed her as one of the happiest of her life. “Had that not, after all, been love?”

The first time I read the book, Clarissa Dalloway was older than my mother. Today I am older than Clarissa Dalloway, and I understand and appreciate her character in ways that were unavailable to me earlier. The discursive, stream of consciousness inner monologue; the way Clarissa’s thoughts swoop like birds through time, alighting briefly on instants in her youth, then the present day, then back to childhood; the power and presence in her daily life of people long gone – all of these are familiar to me now.

Laughing out loud

For such a serious book, which broke all kinds of narrative conventions and introduced new ways of creating character, the novel is full of wit. I laughed out loud at this caricature of myself and my activist friends, people whose “causes” had “made them callous”:

Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians, but in private inflicted positive torture, so insensible was she…[S]he was never in the room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be, all her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it…

 Keeping some secrets

Despite many readings, the book has yet to yield all its secrets. For instance, why is the phrase “very upright” repeated so often and in so many contexts, starting with a description of Mrs. Dalloway herself? What is the purpose of the roses that appear in so many scenes?

Of course, there is a tremendous amount of scholarship on Virginia Woolf’s work, and it’s likely I could find the answers to my questions there. But for now I prefer to mine the novel’s meaning myself, through the slow pleasure of reading and rereading.

After all, it is not the book that changes over the years, but the reader.

 

The best book club book of all time

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My book group has gathered every month for more than 20 years to read books by and about women. After all that time and all those books, is it possible we have agreed on a favorite?

Yes. Our favorite book club book of all time is Triangle, a novel by Katharine Weber.

The book weaves together the stories of Esther Gottesfeld, the last living survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire of 1911; her scientist granddaughter; and a feminist researcher who asks Esther to share her memories and then listens a bit too carefully. The novel is riveting and challenging, with complex characters.

Who owns history?

Weber deftly builds both the mystery at the heart of the novel and the tense drama of the Triangle inferno. Small details that at first seem to provide only texture to the story later loom with horrifying impact.

The ending of the novel sent me racing back to the beginning with a new understanding – or at least new questions – about the plot. Triangle does not yield its insights easily, which makes it the best kind of book group selection, ripe for animated discussion.

Who owns history? The person whose story you believe.

 A tragedy and a legacy

The Triangle Shirtwaist fire took place 103 years ago this week. It was a predictable and preventable tragedy that killed 146 workers – mostly young immigrant women – at a clothing factory in New York.

Dozens of the workers leaped to their deaths from the top floors of the blazing building, an image that anyone who lived through 9/11 can conjure all too easily. Even more people burned to death, many of them trapped behind locked doors in flaming workrooms. Others crawled onto rickety fire escapes that collapsed and sent them plunging to the sidewalk.

More than 350,000 people marched in the streets of New York to mourn the garment workers. Outraged by their needless and excruciating deaths, factory workers organized and won many of the workplace safety laws we take for granted today.

A story less known

A year before the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, some 20,000 women who worked in garment factories had gone on strike to demand better wages, a shorter workweek (52 hours), and specific safety measures. These working class women, many of them Yiddish-speaking immigrants, drew the support of New York’s suffragists, some of whom were women from the city’s wealthiest families.

The suffragists raised funds for the workers, bailed them out of jail, and organized mass rallies to generate public solidarity. Across the city, factories conceded to the workers’ demands, acknowledged the unions, and improved workplace safety.

Not the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. The two owners – Max Blanck and Isaac Harris – refused to unionize and refused to address safety concerns, including workers’ calls to leave factory doors unlocked and provide functional fire escapes.

A year later, these safety issues cost 146 people their lives. But they cost the factory owners nothing – in fact, the two men profited from the tragedy. While they settled lawsuits by paying family members $75 for each lost life, the owners received insurance settlements of $400 for each worker killed. The two men went on to run other factories, accumulating and ignoring citations for the very safety violations that had led to the carnage at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory.

Haunted

It may seem we’ve strayed pretty far from the topic of favorite book club selections. But that’s the power of a good book: it takes you on a journey out of your world and into another. And with a haunting novel like Triangle, part of you is likely to remain there for a long, long time.

Triangle book cover