Where Writers Write: Theasa Tuohy

Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

Where Writers Write is a weekly series that will feature a different author every Wednesday as they showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where the authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen. 

This is Theasa Tuohy. 

Theasa is the author of Five O'Clock Follies: What's a Woman Doing Here, Anyway? It published this past October by Calliope Press.

Where Theasa Tuohy Writes

I can write anywhere, and I have. Sitting on the floor of the AP bureau in Oklahoma City with a borrowed computer after the bombing of the Murrah building there in 1995. Taking notes on the run  or scribbling them surreptitiously on a tear-stained napkin cupped in the palm of my hand (funerals and other such sad occasions), but mostly in noisy newsrooms, phones ringing, editors shouting, wires clacking. But now that I'm writing novels, I work mostly in this most wonderful, cluttered but serene space next to my bed. I can roll out in the morn, while still in that half-asleep, half-awake dream state that is so perfect for fiction. You just put your fingers on the keys, and they begin moving on their own, so that by time you're really awake you're not at all tempted to go read the newspaper, or run the vacuum,  or do any one of the millions of things that writers often use as an excuse to avoid facing the  blank screen.

Slightly obstructing my view of the Manhattan skyline through my French-Country blue shutters are balcony baskets of mostly pansies, but also a small azalea and other assorted whatevers.  I'm once in awhile distracted by a buzzing bee, busily moving from flower to flower spreading pollen. But not for one second, have I lost the touch to write on trains, or planes, or city buses, or in the palm of my hand, or on my palm, for that matter, when inspiration strikes.

Check back next week to see where Courtney Mauk does her writing.

Review: This Jealous Earth

Read 12/19/22 - 12/22/12
5 Stars - Highly Recommend / The Next Best Book
Pgs: 192
Publisher MG Press
Releases: Jan 2013

If the quality of literature being published in any given year can be judged by the first book we read, watch out world, because 2013 has incredible things in store for us.

Not only does This Jealous Earth - an amazing collection of short stories by Scott Dominic Carpenter - set the literary bar high for the new year, it also has the honor of ushering in the birth of a new publishing company. MG Press, an extension of Midwestern Gothic, plans to focus specifically on books and authors that are representatives of the Midwest, highlighting the regions mythologies, stories, and culture.

The stories contained within this book, which are broken out into three untitled sections, each exhibit the awkwardly tense and somewhat humorous ways in which we humans experience the world. They also highlight the many ways in which we manage to fuck up even the simplest of situations.

Carpenter kicks it all off with "The Tender Knife", the sweet and squirmy story of a man who is forced to reduce his Koi population. Having grown strangely attached to each and every one of them, he struggles through the process of choosing which ones will go and what humane method he will use. Of course, neither knife nor fish cooperate, and the reader is left to cringe and moan on the sidelines as the torturous story draws to a close.

Not to be outdone in the cruelty-to-animals department, we find ourselves fearing for the safety of four-legged Patch in "The Spirit of the Dog". It's a tale of how quickly the male testosterone-laced ego can turn nasty when it tires of taking orders from a woman and how one weak decision can leave you weighed down by guilt for a lifetime.

In the title story, we pace back and forth as a family threatens to bores us with their last minute preparations for the rapture. The god-fearing mother, vacuuming and straightening up the house while the father hovers in the background, the little sister worrying and fretting over the fate of her hamster while terrified of leaving her non-believing brother behind... until she discovers the one sure way to keep her family together forever.

"Sincerely Yours" contains a set of cutesy correspondences between a man and his power company's incompetent customer service reps. The narrator of "General Relativity" draws connections between a series of "twilight zone-like" events that align themselves with things he's recently read while the main character of "The Death Button" ponders the validity of a scientific experiment that is built around how often you think of the thing they hired you to think of.

Though Carpenter fluidly switches gender and perspectives throughout the collection,  I noticed a tendency for the female characters - whether in the background or the forefront of the story - to be the more dominate, more demanding of the bunch, the men often deferring to them. The wife demanding her husband to cull his beloved koi; the sister's constant belittling over the brother's need to search every box and open every drawer in their father's estate throughout "The Inheritance"; the bored housewife looking for a quick thrill in "Thrift"; the woman who convinced her stubborn husband to bring her to the museum in "Riddles", now left walking around the halls utterly lost and confused. The Eve-like twists I'm alluding to may be given more weight than the author intended but I couldn't help noticing the role the ladies appeared to play in some - not all - of the situations: the temptress to some, the bane of the lives of others.

No matter who or what prompted it, it's in the decisions one makes, or is forced to make, that Carpenter finds the magic that gives this collection of stories its glue. A highly recommended read that I anticipate topping 2013 "best of" lists this time next year!

The Audio Series: Robert Ostrom

Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." is an incredibly special one for us. Hatched in a NYC club during BEA week, this feature requires more work of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.   



Today, Robert Ostrom reads a poem from his newest release The Youngest Butcher in Illinois. He is also the author of two chapbooks, To Show the Living and Nether and Qualms. He lives in Queens and teaches at the City University of New York and Columbia University.

Click the soundcloud link below to experience a poem from The Youngest Butcher in Illinois as read by Robert Ostrom.






The word on The Youngest Butcher in Illinois:

Here is some sorcery, not necessarily explicable. Here is the invisible; Robert Ostrom traffics in it. The poems of The Youngest Butcher in Illinois are some of the most gifted I’ve ever read.

“We are not safe,” he writes—but nor would we ever, for a moment (here) want to be. There’s something oddly shy about the way these poems comport themselves, but the imagination is brazen with yearning. The authority of craft is bracing: the lines are sutured but there are no scars.

The dark, passionate, miniature universe Ostrom has composed is seductive and whimsical. This is a new voice—edgy, stricken with attentiveness, soft-spoken, numinous. Take him at his word.
—Lucie Brock-Broido
*Lifted from Goodreads with love

Joe Hefferon Takes it to the Toilet

Oh yes! We are absolutely running a series on bathroom reading! So long as it's taking place behind the closed  (or open, if that's the way you swing) bathroom door, we want to know what it is. It can be a book, the back of the shampoo bottle, the newspaper, or Twitter on your cell phone - whatever helps you pass the time...


Joe Hefferon, a single dad, father of two, retired police captain, author of two books (a novel: The Sixth Session, and a personal growth manual: The Seventh Level - Designing Your Extraordinary Life), took the potty challenge. This guy wins the internet for Most Creative and Stomach-Churning Euphemisms, pants down!

(Disclaimer: This one's not for the weak-stomached or easily offended. If you fail to find potty humor...well.. humorous, I advise you to skip this one. It's particularly raunchy!)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So what do I read while in the throes of a bowel movement? To quote my imaginary friend, Colonel Jessup, "I have neither the time, nor the inclination."

The truth is, since you asked, I'm not one to dawdle in the john. It's not a cigar lounge, it's a place of business - doody business. It's a tidy, confined and convenient place to expel excrement, rinse and move on. I don't look at a bathroom visit as an event, just a necessary and noxious evil.

When you bring a book to the bathroom, especially at work, it's an announcement. "Hey everyone, I plan to squeeze, push, kegel, poot, marvel at my accomplishment and then sit in a confined space in my own colon vapors for a long stretch so that's why I'm lugging along this almanac."

And heaven forbid you spend one nanosecond of extra time in a public potty. Can you imagine the audience of lecherous microbes from the last thousand men that are clinging to the walls and leering at your every pinch? If you stall in the stall they jump onto to your back and work their way down into your crevasse where they defile your exit wound with cross-bred fecal gent germs.

How can you even think of bringing a national treasure like a Cormac McCarthy novel into a rump evacuation clinic? I have a hard enough time knowing my kids brush their teeth in there. The human has created an endless list of names for the slippery stool. There's the arse biscuit, butt nugget, doot, loaf, log, shiznot, turd, turtle head, wolf bait and stink weasel. All were fashioned to make light of the cocoa-colored specimen, something which, as early as our precious infancy, can be so vile as to make new dads puke right into their kid's diaper.

Speaking of the kids; don't we have cutesy names for their log to make it palatable (poor word choice) to them? Words like, poopie, poo, number two, stinky, BM and dead-beat dad?

I know I'm not the only one who cringes at the idea of prairie-dogging as evidenced by the long, brown trail of euphemisms we've created to lessen the blow of the daily purge: we drop a deuce, park a custard, drop the kids off at the pool, hang a root, give birth to a sewer bass, cut rope, have a morning grumpy, bake brownies and my personal favorite, barking back at Rumsfeld. OK, I made up the last one.

Read in the bathroom? Well I suppose I have, if I simply must confess, used my smart phone to read texts, check stock quotes, review my calendar and toss a few angry birds, but that's it, I swear. It's just not my thing to equate the bathroom with reading pleasure.

But wait.. Hang on just a hot steamy second. Maybe I'm wrong. Given the amount of time, mental energy and ingenuity that went into creating the toilet lexicon, perhaps I should give the act a higher standing in my day. Maybe I should plan around it, make a pot of coffee, call an old friend, write a letter to Santa, and then waltz in there with time on my hands and Time in my hand.

I'll let you know how it all comes out, wait - I mean the thing about the election. Oh and by the way, spell-check was interesting for this post.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear god, did I really just post this on the blog?! What have I unleashed?! Maybe I'm flushing my BLOG down the toilet......

Where Writers Write: Lynn Melnick

Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

Where Writers Write is a weekly series that will feature a different author every Wednesday as they showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where the authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen. 

This is Lynn Melnick. 

Her first book of poetry, If I Should Say I Have Hope, is recently out with YesYes Books.

Where Lynn Melnick Writes

My couch looks like hell, with more ink stains than a Rorschach test, and far more problematic stains than ink. It has several tears. A guy from Sears tried twice with all kinds of equipment to rescue it from us, but after $90 it still looked about the same.

Our couch was gifted to us over ten years ago and it was where both my babies napped when they were infants, they’d fall asleep nursing and I’d just shift them off of me and put them down on their little knit blanket on one of the cushions and then I’d try to write.

I live in a small apartment with another poet and two messy little girls. My husband writes on the floor. I write on the couch.

Essays, and anything else expository, I can write directly onto the computer. Poetry goes in a notebook, in the same notebook where I keep frantic lists of things I need to do, and things I’m forgetting, and things I’m failing at.

To write poems I need stillness and quiet, so it usually happens when my girls are in school or in bed. Once I know what’s happening with a poem, I can revise if the room is on fire, or, more likely, if the sound of clanging toys or squealing girls eclipses everything.  Maybe I’d rather revise in the quiet but maybe I don’t even know if that’s true anymore.

I get nervous when I write, my heart pounds, I feel like I’m free-falling so to be always on the couch is very grounding for me. If the poem is going to marry me or slit my throat, at least I’m tied to what makes me me, all those imperfections.

Check back next week to see where Theasa Tuohy finds her inspiration to write.

Review: The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories - Volumes 1 & 2

Read 12/18/12
4.5 Stars - Highly Recommended / mondo cute factor
Pgs: 83 and 123, respectively
Publisher: !t Books

How adorable are these?! Born of an internet collaboration under the nurturing hands and minds of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and mysterious cohort "wirrow", The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories Volumes 1 and 2 are a product of Gordon-Levitt's HitRECord production company.

Initially self published in 2010,  !tBooks - which focuses on celebrity authors and picked up the cutsie collection - released Volume 1 just in time for it to make its way into everyone's Christmas stockings last year and dropped Volume 2 this past November.

True to their title, these books, which are about the size of my hand from palm to fingers, contain super-short, super-smart illustrated flash fiction. According to HitRECord, it doesn't matter which came first , people from around the world were encouraged to upload stories and illustrations - sometimes a story was submitted for a specific illustration, sometimes an illustration was submitted for a particular story. And out of a total of 23,515 submissions, 129 tiny stories married themselves so perfectly that they made their way into the two collections.

As with any collection, large or small, some of the illustrated stories spoke to me louder than others. Among my favorites?

From Volume 1:
"Ok, I'll admit, I have a few skeletons in my closet; but they weren't skeletons when I put them in there."
"I collect flickering stars in old pickle jars, poking holes in the lid so they can breathe."
"I know other worlds exist. I can see them in my peripheral vision."
"If I read our story backwards, it's about how I un-broke your heart, and they we were happy until one day, you forgot about me forever."

From Volume 2:
"Your kisses are like snowflakes: each one is unique. They land on me, before they melt away and leave me cold."
"I just need some time away to remember why I stay".
"You have reached the edge of the world. Please stand behind the barrier and take no photos."
"As my story came to a close I realized that I was the villain all along."
"No one was even aware of its existence, but when it sounded out we all knew..."
"And in the morning they shook their pillows violently, hoping all the dreams they lost that night would tumble out."
"Your heart has a little empty corner. You won't even know I'm there - I'll be very quiet."

The magic of the Tiny Stories volumes is the tender and moody atmospheres the drawings and words create as they come crashing together on the page. The blushing cheeks of the little emo-boy, the violent red of the wolf's severed head against the grey and black background, you really have to see the way the words and the pictures compliment each other on the page. Click here to sample volume 2. 

A book, a miniature work of art, a thing to have and hold. 

The Audio Series: James Boice

Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." is an incredibly special one for us. Hatched in a NYC club during BEA week, this feature requires more work of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.   


Today, James Boice reads an excerpt from his newest eShort The Degaussment. James has written three novels: The Good and the Ghastly, NoVA, and MVP (Scribner all). His work has been in places like Esquire, McSweeney's, and Post Road. However, lately when it has come to short stories he has been forgoing the traditional methods of publication in favor of putting them out himself, directly to the reader. He writes them, he makes them, he sells them. They are about $2. You can read them on paper or on your digital thingamuhoo. The idea is independence. You can find them here: http://www.jamesboice.com/shortstories.html.

Click the soundcloud file below to experience an excerpt of The Degaussment as read by author James Boice.

The word on The Degaussment:

A DIY, independently produced short story from the author of the novels THE GOOD AND THE GHASTLY (Scribner, 2011) and MVP (Scribner, 2007). A genius engineer is torn between love, death and his obsession with his work: perfecting a piece of technology that is suddenly obsolete.
*Lifted with love from goodreads

Audioreview: The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor

Listened 11/26/12 - 12/6/12
4 Stars - Strongly Recommended to fans of The Walking Dead on AMC
Audiobook (9 cd's, 11hrs)
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Narrated by: Fred Berman

I am a total sucker for "companion" reading. Once I get hooked on a tv series, sitting around each week waiting for it to run on its scheduled night soon becomes unbearable. Like a junkie with no idea where my next fix will come from, I seek out ways by which I can keep the buzz alive.

I first remember doing this with The X-Files and a few of their "companion guides". It wasn't exactly what I was looking for but I do recall it calming the cravings between episodes. The next series I went die-hard on was Lost. Lost was a book lover's dream. I came to the series a year late, but caught up on the entire first season in a sleep-deprived, feverish mad rush three days before the second one premiered. Not too long after, I nearly died and went to heaven when I discovered the Lost Lit List, realizing the show was based loosely on and influenced highly by tons of incredibly smart and strange books. Hence the birth of my Flight 815er's Goodreads group. Mythology to discuss and books to read?! Both of these elements were welcome additions to the way I experienced the show. And yes, looking back, I see that I may have taken things a wee bit too far with that one. And no, I'm not sorry.

So now, here we are, three seasons into AMC's The Walking Dead, and I'm starting to feel those same awful stirrings all over again. My co-workers are getting sick of talking to me. My oldest called it quits when Dale died and my husband just isn't getting into it the way that I am. And when I found out that the show was taking a two month "mid-season break", I admit it. I started to freak. But someone, let's call him The Walking Dead God, was looking out for me, because while I was wandering the audio bins at my local Book Warehouse a few weeks ago, I stumbled across Rise of the Governor.

Now, yes, I know there were a gazillion TWD comics before the tv series came out, but I'm not really a comic book reader. Something about the whole "cartoons smooshed consecutively into small panels, some of which might contain words, some not" turns me off. But we'll come back to this in a minute. I promise.

Did I mention how crazy the timing of this whole thing is? I mean, not only are we coming up on the mid-season break when I stumble on this audiobook, but we are ONLY NOW BEING INTRODUCED to the Governor. And this audiobook - which was first published last year - just happens to tell the story of how the Governor became the Governor. I mean, could The Walking Dead God have timed this any better for me? No. The answer to that is no.

Rise of the Governor, written by Robert Kirkman (creator of The Walking Dead comics) and Jay Bonansinga, is the first in a series of three books that expand heavily on the Governor's story line. Had I listened to this last season, when it first released, without prior knowledge of Philip Blake and his daughter Penny, the novel may have had a much lesser impact on me. Don't forget, I only know The Walking Dead through the eyes of the TV series. I come into all of this without any prior knowledge or biases. With the introduction of the Governor this season, I happily devoured the audiobook, seeking any and all information the writers were willing to give me on the history behind this incredibly secretive, twisted individual. And Fred Berman works wonderfully as the narrator, his voice perfectly sets the pace and tone of the The Walking Dead universe.

In this book, we learn very little about the zombie outbreak - a theme we're used to, whether we like it or not - and begin following Philip and Penny, his brother Brian, and two of their closest friends as they run from their hometown towards the hope of a refugee center in Atlanta. The group travels from place to place, scavenging what they can, fighting off hordes of zombies, and do their best to try and keep their wits about them. Though told in omniscient "third person" narrative, the book spends quite a bit of time focusing on Brian, Philip's older brother -  a skinny, nervous man who plays babysitter to little Penny throughout most of the story - and, of course, on Philip, our Alpha Male.

Everything Philip does is driven by his desire to protect his daughter and you get the sense that he is barely straddling the right side of sanity as the decisions he makes for the group push them further apart and deeper into danger. When they finally make it into Atlanta, and discover there is no rescue, no refugee center, no escape from the streets that are teeming with the dead, they meet up with another small group of survivors. Penny and our guys settle in nicely and things start looking up.. until Philip falls in love with one of the women and takes things way too far. In an instant, Philip single-handedly ruins what was, up to that point, the best thing the group had going for them, and as they're sent on their way with no supplies and no weapons, we begin to discover the monster within him that has been tensing itself just beneath his skin.

As the group makes their way out of Atlanta and seeks out new shelter, Brian and Nick (the one remaining friend), worry over Philip's mental state. Their increasing concern only agitates Philip more, and it all comes to head when their newest "home" is raided by a bunch of druggie survivors who want what they've got. It is here that we uncover how little Penny turned, and it is here that we watch, helpless, as Philip descends completely and uncontrollably into madness.

The story wraps itself up in the town of Woodbury, an off-the-beaten-path town that our dazed and damaged group manage to stumble into. A settlement of disconnected survivors that appears to be run by no one, Woodbury offers our men a place to call their own, and is the scene of the story's greatest twist.

Though you can certainly see it coming, Rise of the Governor will deliver fans of the show - those who have not read the comics - a sucker-punch shot straight to the solar plexus. It will immediately change the way you view the show. And although I've been told this book follows the story line of the Governor as written in the comics, I have a hunch that the TV show is splitting off from the comics and giving our Philip a life he never lived...

When I finished the audio, I read through a few of the reviews that were posted to Goodreads. Do I agree with the masses about the fact that the authors dwell a little too much on what everyone, zombies included, is wearing? Perhaps. Is the writing sometimes as clumsy and awkward as the shuffling, re-animated, rotting corpses? It very well may be. (Is it as bad as that analogy I just tried to pull off? erm....) Am I ashamed to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed the back story and insight into he-who-had-been-named "Villain of the Year" when he debuted in the comics? Absolutely not. None of that mattered to me because I wasn't expecting this to be the next Nobel Prize Winner. I was craving more of The Walking Dead and this story satisfied my hunger more than Penny's bucket of bloody hands and fingers ever could. Rise of the Governor is the ultimate guilty-pleasure read and a kick-ass companion guide to the TV show.

Even better than that, now that I've gotten a taste of the what the show is hiding, it's turned me on to the comic books. And if you think this book is a game-changer... you ain't seen nothing yet!

Benoit Lelievre Takes it to the Toilet

Oh yes! We are absolutely running a series on bathroom reading! So long as it's taking place behind the closed  (or open, if that's the way you swing) bathroom door, we want to know what it is. It can be a book, the back of the shampoo bottle, the newspaper, or Twitter on your cell phone - whatever helps you pass the time...

Benoit Lelievre, the man behind the Dead End Follies, wins the internet for being the first to take it to the toilet:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

How I came to read The Hockey News on the john

I can’t stay on the toilet for more than five minutes. It’s not my fault, I have a good metabolism. It likes to purge. I was kicked out the bathroom once, true story. Back in the days where my girlfriend lived with her roommate, we went out one night and partied way too hard. We woke up the next day with major hangover and the bowels like the last days of Babylon. Naturally, because of my good metabolism, I went to the john’s first.

Big mistake.

                

About three minutes in recreating the Vesuvius’ last eruption in Pompeii, roommate knocks on the door.

               

“Ben.”

“It’s busy.”

“Ben, it’s an emergency, I need the bathroom.”

“Can you-“

 “Now.”

                

I swept the crime scene, flushed, got out and braced for impact. Roommate ran into the bathroom and started retching her life way. For the following fifteen minutes, all I could hear was: “You’re a fucking pig, Ben. BLEEAAARGH. I fucking hate you, motherfucker,. BEEEEEURGH. There’s still poop smear at the bottom. AAAARGHEEEU.” Did I mention I forgot to turn on the fan? You know, hangover and all.

That said, I can’t read a novel on the crapper. Not even short stories. I tried, believe me I tried. I even tried to read Proust’s Swan’s Way there. Didn’t work. But by the time I was done doing the deed, I had a page and a half to three pages done. I don’t know about you, but I’m the kind of guy who always finishes his chapters. So reading stories or novels was asking for an anal fissure or some other bathroom calamity.

                

So I do my magazine reading on the throne. Being a healthy and normal Canadian male, I subscribed to The Hockey News for this very purpose. Not the most uplifting stuff, I admit, but when my bathroom smells like the seventh circle of hell, I prefer thinking about the Habs’ top six conundrum and how they can possibly get rid of Scott Gomez, rather than try to grasp the beauty of Haruki Murakami’s prose. I reserve this privilege to my couch or for backyard reading.

                

Of course, there’s not only hockey magazines on the toilet’s lid. All the gossip magazines from the house mysteriously find their way to the bathroom too. So whenever I’m done with the NHL problems and waiting for my next issue, that’s what I’m reading. I am up-to-speed in regards of Jennifer Anniston’s marriage obsession, Lindsay Lohan, Rihanna and Britney Spears’ self-destructive ways and Kim Kardashian’s post-Kris Humphries dating activities (she’s dating Kanye West, by the way. A no-brainer, I know. No idea why she didn’t think about this BEFORE having this ridiculous fake wedding).

                

I auditioned other magazines for the bathroom part. Harper’s is too heavy. The Atlantic’s articles are too long. GQ has way too much publicity for a male interest’s magazine. Men are rational creatures who think about efficiency first. It’s all about the content you can take as you’re…you know…letting the bad stuff out.

Short, to the point reporting about something real like sports, that gets the job done.  

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

God help me, if this blog series doesn't solidify my status as "one of the boys" at the break table, I don't know what will!

Where Writers Write: Robin Lamont

Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

Where Writers Write is a weekly series that will feature a different author every Wednesday as they showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where the authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen. 

This is Robin Lamont. She is the author of Wright for America, published in October - a biting political satire and a fiercely funny detective story. 

You may also know Robin Lamont as the voice behind the hit song ‘Day by Day’ from the Broadway show and motion picture Godspell.  Lamont was not only an original cast member, she was one of the creators of the show. Her voice was a beacon for a new generation of theatergoers, and fans continue to follow her. 

Where Robin Lamont Writes

There are two different places where I write.  When I’m crafting a storyline or constructing a scene or a character, I tend to stare into space a lot.  When weather permits, I’ll do that outside on our deck, which sits high on a wooded hilltop.  It feels like being in a tree-house.  You’d think it would be distracting to be in a such a beautiful place, but the leaves, sky and clouds create a repetitive rhythm that’s as soothing as being rocked in a boat.  I need peace when I’m thinking big picture.  

If it’s too windy or cold or rainy, which is a great deal of the time in the northeast, I work at my desk in what used to be the dining room of our house.  Although my desk is cluttered with necessary writing tools – a cup of coffee, thesaurus, a dictionary, my reading glasses, and Kleenex – I keep the wall in front of me bare.  I feel that pictures or photos hung on the wall where I can see them will color my ideas and limit my thinking.  

Once the outline is developed and I’m working on individual scenes, I feel as though I can let more of the world in.  To get going each morning, I’ll re-read what I’ve written the day before.  For me, it’s sort of like getting an old car rolling downhill so you can jumpstart the engine.  Then as I get going, I stay connected to my computer because I will toggle back and forth to other documents where I’ve kept my outline or notes, or I need to look something up quickly on the internet – like, how much does a good size pig weigh?    

Next week, Lynn Melnick shows off her writing space.

The Audio Series: Alexander Yates

Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." is an incredibly special one for us. Hatched in a NYC club during BEA week, this feature requires more work of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.   


Today, Alexander Yates reads an excerpt from his novel Moondogs, which was published by Doubleday in 2011. Alexander has an MFA from Syracuse University, and his fiction and reviews have appeared in Salon, American Fiction, Fivechapters.com and the Kenyon Review.  He currently lives in Kigali, Rwanda, with his wife and cats. His cats fucking love it, and he does, too.

Click the soundcloud file below to experience an excerpt of Moondogs as read by author Alexander Yates. 

The word on Moondogs:

A singularly effervescent novel pivoting around the disappearance of an American businessman in the Philippines and the long-suffering son, jilted lover, slick police commissioner, misguided villain, and supernatural saviors who all want a piece of him. 

Mourning the recent loss of his mother, twentysome­thing Benicio—aka Benny—travels to Manila to reconnect with his estranged father, Howard. But when he arrives his father is nowhere to be found—leaving an irri­tated son to conclude that Howard has let him down for the umpteenth time. However, his father has actually been kid­napped by a meth-addled cabdriver, with grand plans to sell him to local terrorists as bait in the country’s never-ending power struggle between insurgents, separatists, and “demo­cratic” muscle. 

Benicio’s search for Howard reveals more about his father’s womanizing ways and suspicious business deals, reopening the old hurts that he’d hoped to mend. Interspersed with the son’s inquiry and the father’s calamitous life in captivity are the high-octane interconnecting narratives of Reynato Ocampo, the local celebrity-hero policeman charged with rescuing Howard; Ocampo’s ragtag team of wizardry-infused soldiers; and Monique, a novice officer at the American embassy whose family still feels feverishly unmoored in the Philippines. 

With blistering forward momentum, crackling dialogue, wonderfully bizarre turns, and glimpses into both Filipino and expat culture, the novel marches toward a stunning cli­max, which ultimately challenges our conventional ideas of family and identity and introduces Yates as a powerful new voice in contemporary literature.
*lifted with love from goodreads

Review: Grey Cats

Read 11/24/12 - 11/27/12
4.5 Stars - Highly Recommended to readers who enjoy having a good story slap them in the face
Ebook
Publisher: 3 AM / Press
Released: Nov 2012

"In ze night, all ze cats are grey."

Ah, Paris at night. I cannot imagine a more perfect setting for a love story. Nothing could be more romantic than walking hand in hand under the street bridges, following the silent canals that reflect the twinkling street lights, breathing in the smell of bread and cigarette smoke as you pass by the late night cafes, listening to the gentle clinking of silverware and the husky voices of those dining outside.

And yet nothing could be more heartbreaking than waking in the middle of a Paris night to discover her side of the bed cold and empty, throwing on clothes, and hustling out into the lonely dark to wander the streets in search of her.

She is a night person. You are of the day. This is not the Paris you are familiar with and it behaves much like a living, breathing thing. You should be wary of it, and yet, you believe you can tame it. As the city reacts to the threat of an impending ash cloud, you begin to trace the cold trail of her passing based on the words of complete strangers.

Adam Biles's  Grey Cats, a finalist in the 2011 Paris Literary Prize, is tricky little thing. A deceptively delicious tale that is at once tender and twisted, we follow along in the shadows as our narrator moves through this dream-like terrain, spurred on by his intense longing and random encounters with an ex-convict, a roller-skating gang member, and a surly underground sex club pimp. As he picks his way through the dark underbelly of Paris in search of his Melina, we are bombarded by the memories of their relationship - a feisty, passionate coupling that, more times than not, leaves them achingly and emotionally spent. As we are left chewing on their history, he continues to weave his way deeper into the nightlife, and soon the two realities come collapsing in on each other.

Much like what I imagine it must feel like in those first few moments as you slip out of a fevered dream - the blurry vision and confusion wearing off, the slow realization of where you are and what you've just gone through - Grey Cats reads like a soft yet urgent slap in the face. (Are you awake, reader? Do you know where you are? Do you know what year it is? Phew! That was a close one. For a moment there, I thought we'd lost you.)

I dare you to finish it and fight the urge to reread it immediately, filled as you will be with the truth of what just took place. No, on second thought, I want you to. Because it won't be the same book the next time around.

Where Writers Write: Joyce Hinnefeld

Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

Where Writers Write is a weekly series that will feature a different author every Wednesday as they showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where the authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen. 

This is Joyce Hinnefeld. Her work has appeared in a variety of literary and scholarly publications, and her short story collection, Tell Me Everything and Other Stories (University Press of New England, 1998), received the 1997 Bread Loaf Conference Bakeless Prize in Fiction. 

Her novel In Hovering Flight was the Booksense/Indie Next #1 Pick for September 2008. Her novel Stranger Here Below was published in the fall of 2010. She is the recipient of a Christopher Isherwood Foundation Fellowship and is the Cohen Chair in English and Literature at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. 

Where Joyce Hinnefeld Writes

The subject of where I write is a fraught one for me. I seem to be perpetually dissatisfied with my writing space, wherever it is, and not for particularly good reasons. Here’s a photo of my main workspace, which occupies part of a room in our house that we refer to as my study--though it’s also the guest room.

You can see that there are two windows looking out on a lot of green, some photos of my daughter, bookshelves, files. On the wall are photographs from Mexico by a photographer named Ron Terner and a nice black-and-white portrait of my husband by photographer Karen Tweedy-Holmes. Behind that big Dell monitor is my beloved MacBook Pro. I set up the monitor, and the Apple keyboard on a lower tray, and the chair with the back cushion, two years ago, when I had an unhappy incident with a herniated disk and decided I needed to create a workspace that would be easier on my back.

So what’s to complain about, right? Well, I wrote a blog post on this topic, or sort of on this topic, last spring (see http://strangerherebelow.blogspot.com/2012/03/my-writing-process-and-my-beautifully.html). Actually, that post was about giving writing advice, and specifically about my own “writing process.” In discussing my own writing space, I referred to my inability to keep my desk cleared of

notes about my daughter’s camps, school field trips, acting and dance and music classes and lessons and performances and recitals; printed email messages (because I’ll never remember them otherwise) and so on from people I need to write to, etc., as part of promoting my novels; receipts; bills; more printed emails, etc. related to my teaching; recommendation letter requests; coupons; publishers’ flyers about books I need to order; tape paper clips a phone nasal mist a camera old printer cartridges notebooks files and a ridiculous number of books, most of which I looked a little something up in, six months ago or more, for the novel I’m working on and which I can’t bring myself to return to the library because what if I need to check one more thing?

I’ll confess that I cleaned the desk up a bit for the photo above. But a lot of those things I mention in that breathless list are still there.

For a while I wrote at this little table in our tiny enclosed porch during the warmer months:

 But then we moved the cat litter box out there.

Eventually, when I felt like I couldn’t bear the clutter of my desk any longer, and that I had to have a clearer space for writing, I reclaimed a little alcove in “my study” (I forgot to mention that for a while my study/the guest room was actually my study/the guest room/my daughter’s play room). This alcove had been filled with my daughter’s toys and drawings--mostly things she’d outgrown some time before. I moved those things out, and at first all that I had in that alcove was a nice, empty table. But now it looks like this:

 More books have moved in, as you can see, all pertaining to various writing projects. Also a lot of manuscript pages (there’s a big stack below the table that you can’t see in this photo). I love what I have on the wall here, all images of birds, including two crows and one thrush, and, in the largest image--the photograph on the back wall (a piece called ‘they wondered where the path would lead” by photographer Krista Steinke)--two more crows, these following two children along a country road and consuming a trail of Wonder bread slices.

My husband Jim, daughter Anna, and I spent a sabbatical semester in Santa Fe, New Mexico back in 2005, and I wrote a good bit of my novel In Hovering Flight in the reading room of the Santa Fe Public Library. I wish I had a picture of that room, with its old leather chairs and its lifesize horse statue and the homeless guys dozing over newspapers. I love libraries. Here is my local public library, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania . . . just because:

(Guys! I know this library! I hit their book sale every other month!)

When the clutter, or the noise, at home gets to be too much, I sometimes write in a study carrell at Reeves Library, the campus library at Moravian College, where I teach. I’ve been fortunate to share this small, enclosed study with my friend and colleague Theresa Dougal for many years now. I don’t think we’ve ever been in there at the same time; when Theresa’s not there, sometimes I peruse her various books on Mary Wollstonecraft. Here’s a picture of my delightfully spartan study carrell desk in Reeves Library:

 Last fall, when we had a freakish snowstorm two days before Halloween and lost power in our neighborhood for five days, Jim, Anna, and I spent a couple days together in that study carrell, reading and staying warm and charging our various electronic devices. Did I mention that I love libraries?

As I get older, I’m realizing something about myself. For a long time I thought that what I wanted and needed was a space in my life that was free of clutter, someplace clean and white and vaguely buddhist, with nothing to distract me from the purity of my own work. But I’ve noticed that no matter how many times I try to create such a space, I always seem to end up filling it with more stuff. I’ve also noticed that, instead of cleaning up my old spaces, I just keep adding new ones. Eventually I’ll run out of spaces to fill, of course. And I’ll have to follow my own advice in that blog post, where I admonished anyone who was reading it just to “shove the crap out of your way, and get your ideas down.”

In other words, learn to write wherever you are. I think I’m getting there, slowly.

Check back next week when we take a peek into Robin Lamont's writing space.

The Audio Series: Ken Sparling (read by Jonathan Goldstein)

Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." is an incredibly special one for us. Hatched in a NYC club during BEA week, this feature requires more work of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.   



Today, Jonathan Goldstein reads an excerpt of Ken Sparling's first novel Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall, which has just been reissued by Mudluscious Press. Jonathan Goldstein is the host of CBC Radio One's Wiretap. He is the author of three books, most recently, "I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow." Ken Sparling is the author of six novels. He is the creator and curator of TheSerialLibrary.com.

Click the soundcloud file below to experience Ken Sparling's Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall as read by  Jonathan Goldstein.

The word on Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall:

From Ken Sparling's intro: "When someone asked me what DAD SAYS HE SAW YOU AT THE MALL was about, it felt like I'd seen a beautiful tree and struggled to describe it to someone, only to have that someone say: 'Yes, but what is the tree about?' You wouldn't know how to answer that question. It isn't the right question. The tree wasn't ever about anything. It was just beautiful."
*lifted with love from goodreads