Fall 2024 News Round-Up

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2024 has seen the publication of two BookEnds novels: Nora Decter’s What’s Not Mine (ECW) was published in April, and you can watch the BookEnds BookClub featuring Nora in conversation with her mentor and program co-founding director Susan Scarf Merrell here. Joselyn Takacs’ Pearce Oysters (Zibby Books) was published in July, and Joselyn was in conversation with her mentor and other program co-founding director, Meg Wolitzer, at the BookEnds BookClub in September. Check out their conversation here.

2022 Fellow Giano Cromley’s BookEnds novel American Mythology is forthcoming with Doubleday in Fall 2025, while 2023 Fellow Miranda Shulman’s BookEnds novel Harmless is forthcoming with Dutton in Spring 2026. Another BookEnds novel is under contract and will be announced soon, while several other BookEnds novels are out on submission, and we expect more happy news to come! Several Fellows from our recent and incoming cohorts have also signed with agents this spring. 

Further doings, honors, and publications:

Jeanne Blasberg (2022) published her BookEnds novel Daughter of a Promise with SheWrites Press. 

Elisabeth Chaves (2022) received the Nancy Zafris Short Story Fellowship from The Porches. 

Sheena Cook (2019) was longlisted for the World of Interiors writing contest.

Sam Corradetti (2024) had a short story published in this summer’s issue of Fourteen Hills.

Vanessa Cuti (2018, author of BookEnds novel The Tip Line, and a BookEnds mentor) has a short story forthcoming in The Harvard Review. 

April Darcy (2020) has a short story forthcoming in Water~Stone Review. Another story was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, the Disquiet International Literary Program, and the CRAFT Short Fiction Prize. 

Kathleen Gibbons (2019) was longlisted for the Granum Foundation Prize in 2023 with a novel-in-progress, and two stories from her BookEnds linked story collection have received Pushcart Prize nominations. She will be in residence at the Ragdale Foundation in 2025. 

Sarah Haufrect (2022) was published in June by West Trade Review, and the story will be coming out this month as an audio exclusive on the magazine’s Youtube channel. 

Maggie Hill (2019) published her BookEnds novel Sunday Money with SheWrites Press earlier this year. 

Craig Holt (2023) has a short story forthcoming in MicroLit Almanac. 

Suzanne LaFetra Collier (2023) attended both Community of Writers and Bread Loaf earlier this year. 

Rachel León (2021) is editing an anthology about Rockford, Illinois, with Belt Publishing, and has just been named Managing Editor for The Chicago Review of Books. 

Sue Mell (2020, author of the BookEnds novel Provenance) published her short story collection A New Day with SheWrites Press. 

O. Edwin Ozoma (2024) published a short story in Harpur Palate.

Melanie Pierce (2021) has a short story forthcoming in Moon City Review. 

JP Solheim (2020, BookEnds Associate Director) was in residence at the Ragdale Foundation this summer. They were longlisted for the Granum Foundation Prize in 2023. Their short stories have recently been published at MQR: Mixtape and on the Midwest Weird literary podcast.

Hannah Thaggard (2024) had a short story published in Harpur Palate. 

BookEnds alums are also busy and active in their communities, with new works in progress; supporting one another through daily and weekly Zoom writing sessions; giving each other advice, feedback and support on query letters and the query process; and—of course—through our BookEnds blog. Check out this new post from 2024 Fellow Caitlin O’Neil on cutting characters with her mentor Meg Wolitzer (and remember to check out Meg  as the host of Selected Shorts!)

We look forward to bringing you more great news soon. To learn more about BookEnds, check out our Fall 2024 Open House!

What My Mentor Taught Me: On Cutting Characters with Meg Wolitzer 

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2024 Fellow Caitlin O’Neil discusses her work with BookEnds our co-founding director Meg Wolitzer. 

My BookEnds journey began with a missed e-mail, then a missed call. Somehow, Susie Merrell,  the co-director of the BookEnds program, finally found me and my messy manuscript, and told me, “This is a book.” What writer doesn’t want to hear that? What I didn’t understand yet was how little of what I had written belonged in that book, and how much excavating it would take to find the book within those pages. 

My work at BookEnds was largely that of paring away. First, the plot. There was way too much, and not enough that mattered. Then, point of view. There were too many perspectives where only one was needed. By the time I was paired with my mentor, co-director of the program Meg Wolitzer, my story was already transformed. What, I wondered, could happen next? 

My book is the story of former Senate staffer Franny Goff, who has wormed her way into her boss’s political family to become caretaker of their summer home on Cape Cod. When Meg read the current draft, the story was overstuffed with characters, both living and dead. In addition to Franny and her senator, there are his children Julia and FX, and two wives, Eileen (dead), and Helen (living).

So next, of course, came character. All my previous cutting away—my mantra became that of a baker who burns her cookies, “You can always make more”—made space for a story that mattered more to me and my many characters. I was generating reams of new prose; it was as exhausting as it was exciting. 

As we began our work together, Meg seemed to sense my fragility. I’d lost perspective on what was actually still in the story, what belonged and what didn’t. Meg, however, could see.

During our mid-term check-in, Meg gently guided me forward to the next phase of revision. I often found myself frantically typing during our calls because I never knew what part of her excellent advice would resonate and when. Her statements were always simple and logical, but I wasn’t always ready to hear them. Meg encouraged me to further refine and focus my thinking, to write “a crystal clear, very readable book.” To this end, she asked me to think about each of my characters. “If it feels busy, who do you need? And why do they matter?” And then, in a casual aside, “There may be other things, like Helen, that have to go.”

Our discussion was a brief to condense, focus, and think of the reader. The book was coming together, though because of all my many changes it now lacked an ending. Meg was urging me forward so I might write that ending. 

It wasn’t until hours after our phone call that her aside came back to me. There may be other things, like Helen, that have to go. She hadn’t told me to cut Helen, the senator’s second wife, but I felt that she had placed it there strategically, knowing I needed to hear it, but sensing I wasn’t ready. Of course, Helen had to go! How had I not seen it? 

I took her out of the book that afternoon in no less than ten minutes. That it was so simple to remove her made her superfluousness clear. And the effect on the book was immediate. The strife between Franny and her old boss Frank was immediately clearer without Helen playing interference, and Frank’s late wife Eileen hung over the book in new, more haunting ways.  Without Helen, the themes of the book rose to the surface and the plot began to sail.  

Who do you need? And why do they matter? These questions were simple questions, but profound in their wisdom.  In cutting character, I both unlocked and opened up the story I wanted to tell.

Caitlin O’Neil was a 2023-2024 BookEnds fellow at The Lichtenstein Center of Stony Brook University. Her work is published in Massachusetts Review, Kenyon Review, Indiana Review, and other publications. A graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University, she is an associate teaching professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Spring News Round-Up

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Following the publication of several novels last year, 2024 sees the publication of two BookEnds novels: Nora Decter’s What’s Not Mine (ECW) was published earlier this month, and you can watch the BookEnds BookClub featuring Nora in conversation with her mentor and program co-founding director Susan Scarf Merrell here. Joselyn Takacs’ Pearce Oysters (Zibby Books) is available for preorder now. Joselyn’s novel will be featured at the BookEnds BookClub in September, in conversation with her mentor and other program co-founding director, Meg Wolitzer.

We are proud to announce that 2022 Fellow Giano Cromley’s BookEnds novel American Mythology is forthcoming with Doubleday, Summer 2025! Several Fellows from our recent and incoming cohorts have also signed with agents this spring. 

BookEnds alums are also busy and active in their community, with new works in progress; supporting one another through daily and weekly Zoom writing sessions; giving each other advice, feedback and support on query letters and the query process; and—of course—through our BookEnds blog. Check out this recent post from 2023 Fellow Suzanne LaFetra Collier on serving as a BookEnds selection committee reader.  

We’re also delighted to remind everyone to check out program co-director Meg as the host of Selected Shorts! 

We look forward to bringing you more great news soon. To learn more about BookEnds, check out our Fall 2023 Open House!

Reflections of a BookEnds Selection Committee Reader

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2023 Fellow Suzanne LaFetra Collier reflects on serving the other side of the BookEnds process.

I once attended a writing conference where an agent held up a manila envelope stuffed with a thick manuscript. “This is how much time you’ll have to get an agent’s attention,” he told the crowd, and lifted the first page a few inches, just enough to read the opening paragraph. He paused, then released the page, which slid back down into the envelope. He flung the whole thing aside with a flourish.

A BookEnds applicant does not get the manila envelope treatment. I know, because I spent much of the winter reading manuscripts from the first page to the last. Each manuscript is read by several people, including alums, all of whom are experienced readers. There isn’t a checklist or list of attributes we’re supposed to flag; reading is a subjective experience. My approach was to note the strengths and weaknesses in each manuscript, consider potential fixes for the problems I saw, and determine whether those issues could be resolved via BookEnds’ revision process. 

As a writer, it was enormously instructive to read lots of “almost there” manuscripts because it underscored some key elements that make stories work, even when they’re not yet ready for publication. I also found myself surprised (and comforted) at some­ of the things that landed a story in my YES pile, even when the manuscript had significant problems. 

So, as both a reader and writer, here are my takeaways. 

Character Matters

The characters populating the manuscripts I read were as varied as thumbprints. The ones that grabbed me were conflicted, inside and out. It didn’t matter that their arc wasn’t fully fleshed out, as long as they had personality and were flawed.

Another key element in strong drafts was a protagonist with agency. Passive protagonists who were like passengers in a car, watching their worlds go by, came off as underdeveloped. Characters who grabbed the wheel— even when they drove off in the wrong direction—crackled.

Characters with agency—who acted—shaped the story. In contrast, when the writer was the puppet master, marching hollow characters through a carefully constructed plot, things fell flat. I’m all too familiar with this problem in my own writing, which occurs when I don’t know my characters well enough yet and/ or I’m clinging to plot elements I’ve painstakingly constructed. A manuscript with a passive protagonist was a sign that a writer still had work to do.

Novel Writing 101 tells us that a protagonist must want something, and there must be obstacles—external and internal—standing in their way. But if a protagonist’s goal was still fuzzy, that wasn’t a deal-breaker for me. Sometimes, there was a tiny seed in a character’s backstory that had yet to blossom into a full-fledged inner conflict, but I could see the potential was there. I know from experience that figuring out a character’s desire can come quite late in the process.

Plot vs. Sensibility

We’ve all heard about bestselling novels that are “propulsive,” where every event causes another, like cascading dominos.

Reading the application manuscripts, I assumed that causality between events would be essential. Instead, I found that what mattered more than tight plotting was the writer’s sensibility and aesthetics, and whether I felt held by the worldview the author was creating.  

At the start of my BookEnds year, I presented the events of my story to the cohort. “And then X happened, and then Y, and meanwhile Z was happening over here….” I understood immediately that the story was not propulsive. Even though the events were connected in my mind, they hadn’t yet been developed to be causal. 

A propulsive narrative can’t be established until a writer homes in on character motivation, which requires time. My BookEnds year offered me the space to work on this critical element in my book, while helping me cultivate the flexibility to restructure my narrative in order to make it more propulsive.

Generosity

There is a subjective You-Know-It-When-You-Feel-It quality to a manuscript, something  BookEnds director Susan Merrell called out as “generous.” A generous story is one that feels written for the reader. 

Heavy-handed manuscripts that were trying to make a point didn’t come across as generous. Neither did those that seemed preoccupied with showing off the writer’s cleverness. Those drafts are for the writer. Sometimes, writers need to work through a few rounds before they can just tell a good story.

Manuscripts that obfuscated and withheld necessary information in an attempt to create “mystery” usually left me feeling frustrated. Similarly tiring was a parade of information that showcased a writer’s research, when it didn’t connect directly to the story. I have a note over my desk with WOO THE READER in all caps, to remind me that a good book entices readers, giving them enough—but just enough—to keep them turning pages.

When I was reading manuscripts with that generous quality, the story’s problems didn’t trip me up so much. Plot holes didn’t bother me, nor did wonky timelines. It wasn’t a deal-breaker when a book hadn’t quite found its structure. Even an unanswered central question like What is this story really about? didn’t disqualify a manuscript. In my own as-yet-unpublished novel, I have struggled with those big picture questions, and it was reassuring to remember that answering those questions is simply part of the novel-writing process.

There’s far more to this experience as a BookEnds reader; importantly, there were terrific manuscripts that strayed outside my subjective guidelines. Being open to what was in front of me, willing to go for the ride the writer was taking me on, was the most delicious part of the process. As long as the story had energy, if there was a beating heart in there, that was enough to carry me through. All other issues seemed workable. After all, writing is revision. 

Suzanne LaFetra Collier’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Creative Nonfiction, The Sun Magazine, Brevity, Smokelong Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Juxtaprose, on the San Francisco NPR station, as well as in fifteen anthologies. She co-directed the award-winning documentary film, FREE: The Power of Performance, which aired on PBS.  She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and was a ‘22-23 BookEnds Fellow. She lives in Berkeley, California, and is finishing a novel, a dark comedy about late capitalism. More about Suzanne on her website: https://suzannelafetra.com.

 

 

 

When Things Fall Apart: The Pod as Foundation

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2023 Fellow Suzanne LaFetra Collier reflects on working with her BookEnds pod.

Writing a novel is such a long, strange process. The non-writers in my life tilt their baffled heads in pity: why go through all that? At least at BookEnds, we don’t have to do it alone.

During my first BookEnds residency, we were sharing our outlines, and it was suddenly painfully obvious that my manuscript had major issues. I came away from my outline presentation and discussion with a task list that seemed insurmountable. The novel lacked focus. It needed a single protagonist, and it had to be told from the point of view of the deeply dysfunctional business-owning family at the center of the story. The novel I had submitted had twelve different point-of-view characters, including a prison warden, a nun, a nine-year-old boy, and a drug kingpin, in addition to the entrepreneurial Fisher family. Furthermore, I had constructed a complicated Rubik’s Cube-like plot that locked the story into place, and it seemed to me that to disassemble any one section meant the whole thing would crumble. 

I felt crushed. The story over which I’d labored for so long, the story I believed was nearly finished, had to be taken down to the studs. “I’m open to making changes,” I said to my pod, Rose Afriyie and Katie Kalahan, “as long as I can do so without completely blowing up the plot. Ideas welcomed.” They commiserated and made encouraging cooing sounds. I knew I was in good hands because they didn’t laugh in my face. Instead, they suggested I reach out to the program co-director, Susie Merrell, who reassured me. “Stop worrying and start writing,” she said, and explained that the people who were most successful in the program were those who didn’t cling to previous versions of their work. She gave me an assignment: Write 20 pages, by Thursday, every week. Messy, vomitous, rambling pages and I shouldn’t worry one bit about the plot or where things started or ended. “Just write,” she said. 

So, I wrote twenty pages that week. And vomitous they were. I did the same thing the next week, and the next, writing as fast as I could from the Fisher family’s point of view, exploring without conscious thought to the sequence or propulsivity or humor or conflict or stakes. Characters mostly ruminated and remembered and wandered. I wrote of Steven’s recollection of his mother peeling an orange, Amanda’s memory of playing Mousetrap as a kid. 

I was reluctant to share the pages at first, because I worried all those memories and ruminations were just wheel-spinning. But my pod said that these set pieces, memories, and deeper dives into the psyches of my characters added context and tension. Rose told me that she fell in love with Adam the moment he shoved a carving knife into the Christmas goose’s back. Katie told me that it crackled when the grandmother was in the room. They loved the new omniscient perspective that made the story feel epic. They reminded me that readers cared about what happened that terrible Halloween fifteen years ago; they wanted to know how in the world a mother’s relationship with her son became so fraught.  

For eight weeks I generated 1000 words a day and the story of the Fisher family began to emerge. I made a list of things my characters could do instead of ruminating and remembering: sneak around, threaten one another, plant a kiss on a stranger, have a drink after ten years of sobriety. I went back through the vignettes and added action, and some of those snippets became actual scenes. But was it a book? I worried I wasn’t moving the story forward. 

My pod showed me that I was, in fact, putting stakes in the ground. The scenes began to line up in surprising ways. Suddenly, they had so many questions: Will Corinna die? Will Amanda’s lie be exposed? How far will Adam go to get what he believes is his? 

Katie assured me that writing “forward” might look like writing backwards sometimes, or downwards or inwards. Rose reminded me that there was no shortcut; writing a novel takes time. We brainstormed plot ideas for all of our books, and talked about trusting ourselves, diving into the depths, and nurturing our spirits while doing the emotionally charged work of novel-writing. They cheered me on. 

Within a few months, I had completed a new draft. Now the novel told the story of the Fishers and their family business. Many characters and elements from the earlier draft remained, but now there was a clear plot line, narrative thrust, and an emotional heartbeat. 

Without the support of writers to read, cheer, coach and commiserate, I might have given up when I realized I had to smash my manuscript to smithereens. But my pod helped me understand that when things fall apart, that’s just part of the revision process. It’s a sign of progress. 

Suzanne LaFetra Collier’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Creative Nonfiction, The Sun Magazine, Brevity, Smokelong Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Juxtaprose, on the San Francisco NPR station, as well as in fifteen anthologies. She co-directed the award-winning documentary film, FREE: The Power of Performance, which aired on PBS.  She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and was a ‘22-23 BookEnds Fellow. She lives in Berkeley, California, and is finishing a novel, a dark comedy about late capitalism. More about Suzanne on her website: https://suzannelafetra.com.

Pod Rewards: Writer Geeks, Unite!

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2023 Fellow Craig Holt reflects on working with his BookEnds pod. 

I have always been impressed with the way the writing community supports its own. Whether it’s online or in flesh and blood, we recommend each other’s books to friends, review one another’s books, celebrate each other’s successes, and listen to each other lament the inevitable slowdowns and five-car collisions on the long and winding road to a finished draft. 

The bulk of our time, though, is spent critiquing each other’s work. 

I’ve had the good fortune to participate in some excellent writers’ groups and I have exchanged plenty of pages with wonderful peers in my MFA program. I even have a coven of reliable beta readers in my life. I’m grateful to all of them. But as a novelist I always wished I could exchange entire books with other authors and take a deep dive into each other’s revisions over the course of months. I always assumed that such a dedicated gaggle of authors would be difficult to come by and impossible to sustain. How would you structure it? Who has the time? Where do you find peers generous enough to devote that much time to other people’s projects? 

The answer, for me, was BookEnds. 

BookEnds was – and continues to be – an exceptional learning experience anchored by an unprecedented level of mutual support between writers.

First of all, there is the question of scale. Instead of going over ten or twenty pages of one person’s work every few weeks or once a month, my amazing podmates Miranda Shulman, Fae Engstrom and I started by reading each other’s entire manuscripts. We spent our first three meetings talking through our initial impressions and learning what the author was trying to achieve with the book. Thereafter, we gathered every week on Zoom, often for three hours or more per session, to go over one podling’s book. 

We started by addressing big picture issues and then worked our collective way over the course of six months down to line edits. We weren’t obligated to meet every week, but all three of us had been encouraged to essentially run our novels through a woodchipper and reshape the splintery, resinous hash into a new draft. Having read each other’s manuscripts in their entirety, we were eager to see each other’s stories reborn. 

But there was more to it than just the quantity of feedback. There was also the quality. I was struck by the depth of insight Miranda and Fae brought to my work. They are experienced authors and careful readers, and they came to every session with a wealth of ideas, many of which surprised me. Their feedback came from a place of real understanding of my characters, and an enthusiasm for helping me create the story I had intended to write. They were relentlessly honest and unflaggingly encouraging. Miranda and Fae put as much into my story as they did their own, and it was a pleasure to do the same for them. 

Before the program began, I worried that spending so much time on other people’s books would wear me out. Instead, working on Miranda and Fae’s stories energized me. In thinking critically about their work I gained insight into my own story, and their remarkable progress inspired me to slog onward. 

Even after we began work with our mentors (for more on that happy topic, take a look at Daisy Alpert Florin’s excellent post on working with program director Susan Scarf Merrell, among many other posts on working with mentors) our group continued to meet regularly. We continued to go over pages, but we also touched base to talk through slowdowns in our plots or float ideas for alternate narrative routes. Sometimes we got together to listen as one or the other of us lamented being blindsided by self-doubt or just shook our tiny fists at the literary sky. We guided each other to our BookEnds destination, and beyond. 

Since completing the program last June, we’ve continued to meet. We’ve gone through another round of edits on each other’s books, and we share notes on the good and humbling process of querying. We remain invested in each other and in our fellow BookEnders. And as part of the active and encouraging BookEnds Alumni group, our support network continues to grow. There is sustenance there. Fuel for the long journey. So, yes, BookEnds helped me improve my book. Just as importantly, it expanded and strengthened my writing family.

People talk a lot about how solitary the writing life can be, but BookEnds showed me that being a part of the writing community is about more than craft. Investing in other writers and their work can make the process a little bit less painful and a lot more rewarding. 

Craig Holt’s work has been published in Hippocampus Magazine, Cutleaf Journal, Psychopomp Magazine, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Best of the Net anthology, and Best American Short Stories. His first novel won the 2018 Independent Publishers Book Award gold medal. He graduated from the Bennington College Writing Seminars MFA program and, more recently, from the BookEnds, where he worked with program co-founding director Meg Wolitzer. 

What My Mentor Taught Me: Creating Compelling Characters with Eve Gleichman

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2023 Fellow Katie Kalahan discusses their work with BookEnds mentor Eve Gleichman, whose forthcoming novel Trust & Safety (Dutton, co-authored with Laura Blackett) is available for pre-order now. 

Sometimes what’s obvious to outsiders is invisible to us. In my BookEnds novel The Flicker, narrator Ida becomes romantically and professionally entangled with Lolo, who might or might not actually care about Ida. Early readers, including my BookEnds podmates, wondered why Ida puts up with and even likes Lolo. 

The question of “why Lolo?” was raised once more when I was paired with mentor Eve Gleichman, co-author of The Very Nice Box (Harper Perennial). Early on, Eve identified one of the core challenges of my novel: how to build tension in a romantic relationship that savvy readers will realize is never going to work. Eve asked me more than once why my narrator liked the love interest, saying, “Is it just because she’s hot?”

Readers tend to like Ida, and since Lolo doesn’t treat Ida particularly well, readers tend to not like Lolo. So how could I make Lolo compelling to my sweet readers who want to step into the novel and save Ida? According to Eve, “being hot” isn’t enough. Eve wanted to be compelled by Lolo the same way that Ida is. They wanted to get it, to understand why Ida keeps returning to Lolo. They wanted to fall in love with Lolo, as a reader, and then have their heart broken. 

Picture me, grumpy in the general direction of this feedback. When I get grumpy about feedback, often it’s because I haven’t done a good enough job (yet!) of teaching my readers how to read my book, leading them in the directions I want to lead them, and being a trusted guide through the world of my novel. 

Eve counseled me to look at novels that create compelling, complicated characters well, including We Do What We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart, and The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, pointing out that in both of these novels, the power imbalance which is in the love interest’s favor at the outset shifts to the narrator by the end. When the power balance shifts, the narrator can see the situation more clearly, and, now holding power, is no longer entranced. 

Likewise, in Eve’s novel The Very Nice Box, co-written with Laura Blackett, the narrator also gets sucked in by someone who turns out to be both less and more than what they originally presented. How, Eve asked me, might I do this in my novel? They asked me the following questions over our sessions, which I copied down close to verbatim:

  • What is it about Lolo that is so captivating to Ida?
  • Why does Ida continue to pursue Lolo?
  • What is Ida getting from Lolo?
  • Why wouldn’t Ida leave? 
  • What does Ida like about being in this situation with Lolo?
  • Why doesn’t Ida demand more from Lolo?

Eve also guided me to commit to telling the story from start to finish, reorganizing the book from the fragmented narrative I had been trying to use into a chronological one. Though seemingly unrelated to making Lolo more compelling (but not less hot), shifting to a chronological structure was key in deepening Lolo’s character. The new structure forced me to slow down, which forced me to spend more time with Lolo. As I moved through revision in this new structure, I considered how the characters moved between scenes and how each interaction led to the next. I had to trust that I could hold the reader’s attention. 

I realized that I had been jumping around in the narrative because I was worried that my readers would get bored if I went step by step. Eve assured me that my readers would not get bored, and that I could linger in scenes and linger in specificity. By telling the story chronologically, I was able to explore more fully the weirdness and awkwardness and fits and starts of their romance. I made Lolo weirder, their interactions more awkward. I lingered in the moments of friction between Lolo and Ida. This way, readers discover Lolo as the narrator discovers Lolo.

As writers, we teach readers how to read our novels. The question “why Lolo?” that I had been receiving from readers like Eve was not the question that I wanted my readers to ask. So, in revising my novel under Eve’s mentorship, I explored my own questions about the narrative, in hopes that readers would join me in asking the same questions. When Ida finds herself unaccountably drawn to Lolo, what is it about their dynamic that feels familiar? What feels exciting? How do people behave when they feel as though they don’t have choices? What do we do when we get exactly what we think we want?

Perhaps Lolo is fascinating in the same way that grifters or cult leaders are fascinating. From the outside it’s easy to say that we wouldn’t fall for it, but from the inside it looks like the only obvious choice. To bring readers to the inside with Ida, I’ve found that making the novel chronologically structured allows me to reveal information more intentionally. Although readers will naturally have more distance and perspective than the narrator, by keeping what the reader knows and what the narrator knows more closely aligned, the reader’s experience of Lolo will more closely track to Ida’s experience of Lolo. 

As I continue my revision process now, the question I am facing is: how far am I willing to go? In order to make Lolo break hearts, first I have to make her someone readers might fall in love with. It’s funny, I have to do to readers what Lolo is doing to Ida, drawing her in before she can realize who Lolo truly is. 

My yearlong BookEnds fellowship and mentorship with Eve Gleichman built my confidence, helping me understand that I am sculpting an experience for my readers, and that storytelling includes more than a splash of manipulation. I’m writing a book about two characters who are, in their own ways, manipulative. As I work to illustrate that in the world of my novel, I am coming to terms with the understanding that I may need to use some of their tools in order to tell their story. 

Katie Kalahan (she/they) has a 2021 MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington and a 2013 BFA in Printmaking/Drawing and English Literature from Washington University in Saint Louis. Katie was a 2022-2023 BookEnds fellow at Stony Brook University. Their work is published in Crosscut, Witness, and Split Lip, among others.

Fall News Round-Up

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Please join us to learn more about the BookEnds novel revision fellowship at our annual Open House on Monday, October 16, 2023, 4-5 pm EST. Register here!

Following the publication of several novels last year, 2023 has seen the publication of two BookEnds novels: Daisy Alpert Florin’s My Last Innocent Year (Holt) was a New York Times’ Editors’ Choice Selection, as well as the subject of the Times’ Group Text Discussion and an Alma Award nominee. Vanessa Cuti’s The Tip Line (Crooked Lane) has been received to high critical praise, most recently from Library Journal in an audio book review: “An unnerving psychological suspense about compulsion and corruption.” 

We are proud to announce these forthcoming novels from our BookEnds Fellows!

  • Nora Decter’s What’s Not Mine (ECW, April 2, 2024) 
  • Joselyn Takacs’ Pearce Oysters (Zibby, July 2024)
  • Giano Cromley’s American Mythology (Doubleday, Summer 2025)

This coming spring, we will announce BookEnds BookClub events for Nora’s and Joselyn’s books, along with an event for BookEnds mentor Eve Gleichman’s new co-authored novel Trust & Safety (Dutton, May 2024). In the meantime, you can always watch our first book club events here, featuring mentor Paul Harding’s This Other Eden (longlisted for the Booker Prize), in conversation with his BookEnds mentee Caitlin Mullen; Daisy Alpert Florin’s My Last Innocent Year, in conversation with her BookEnds mentor and program co-director Susan Scarf Merrell; and Vanessa Cuti’s The Tip Line, in conversation with her BookEnds cohort member Alison Fairbrother. 

BookEnders are busy with new works in progress, supporting one another through daily and weekly Zoom writing sessions; the alumni meetings and Alumni Visiting Writers events, this fall featuring Lucy Ives, Melissa Chadburn, and Laura Warrell; giving each other advice, feedback and support on query letters and the query process; and—of course—through our BookEnds blog. 

We’re also delighted to remind everyone to check out our co-founding Director Meg Wolitzer as the host of Selected Shorts! 

We look forward to bringing you more great news soon.

What My Mentor Taught Me: Line Editing with Christina Baker Kline

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2023 Fellow Stefani Nellen talks about working with one of our longtime BookEnds mentors. 

My novel THE DREAM THIEF is about a Dutch scientist who falsifies data and is consumed by his fraud. When I came into BookEnds, the manuscript started too early—about five chapters too early, as program director Susie Merrell helpfully pointed out. I ended up rewriting the entire book, Lauren Groff-style. My guess is that, while this approach hurt my hands and wrists, it saved me a lot of time in the long run.  

When I began working with my mentor Christina Baker Kline in the second half of the BookEnds year, she noted things were becoming shaky in the later chapters. This is what will happen when you write a book in a hurry: fatigue takes its toll. Our first conversations focused on how to stick the landing and come up with the effortless mix of pain and exhilaration that allows a reader to make peace with the ending, no matter how open or pat, happy or sad. 

But the ending became an afterthought once Christina sent me an email about my style. The email was kind, clearly prompted by her fondness of my book and her ambition to make it better, but it was also an honest email: I tended to overwrite, some analogies were hard to follow, and metaphors meandered. In places, it was all too much, and nothing stood out anymore. “Do we need to see the fluffy yellow rag?” We would work on this, she said, making it sound like no big deal, which, to a pro writer, it presumably isn’t. 

To illustrate her comments on my writing, she’d line-edited the first chapter of my book. I read the email late at night in bed, and promptly suffered a case of panic. I’m incompetent, how awful, and to think people have looked at this with their eyes…

Rationality returned the next morning, when I processed Christina’s edits with the goal of understanding what she had done, and saw how much her small changes improved the text overall. 

At this point, I should point out that yes, I’m in the habit of revising my work. Extensively. From nixing timelines to eliminating identical paragraph beginnings, I’ve done it all. But I’d never thought of line-editing as a discrete stage in the editing process. Instead, I treated it like a necessary but boring task, to be finished as quickly as possible. 

Having worked as an editor, Christina told me she routinely edits her own work closely—and that the editors publishing her work appreciate her clean submissions. The word clean still stands out to me from this conversation. 

Imagining many happy editors in my future, I line-edited my book. Christina responded to the edits I sent her with praise, encouragement and meta-edits of her own; I picked through our layers of edits and inserted those that passed final muster into my manuscript. One by one. No shortcuts. I never trust reject/accept changes, but especially not this time. I wanted to get a feel for things, the changes under my fingertips.

My hands and wrists hurt again. It was brutal. It was a lot. And yet, when I was done, I saw my work and my task as a writer in a new way. I can’t edit my work the way an outside editor can, but I can make it clean(-er). 

We even had a little time left to work on the ending. 

Removing clunk, junk, and the evil word that wasn’t what I’d expected going into the mentorship term, but it was what I needed. I learned a new skill, gained insight and wisdom on the writing life from a seasoned novelist, and greatly improved my manuscript. 

Looking back, I’m thinking that my initial response to Christina’s editing email was related to the emphasis on brilliance and individuality of expression that is guiding both our appreciation of and our mentorship in the arts right now. And yes, both must be nurtured and respected. But the term with Christina reminded me of Teju Cole, who said: “Originality is important, but competence and expertise are more important. You can’t be an avantgarde violinist without being a violinist.” Line editing gives me the control to say exactly what I want, precisely what I mean. 

Stefani Nellen is a German psychologist who lives in the Netherlands and writes in English. Her short fiction has appeared in AGNI, Guernica, Glimmer Train, The Bellevue Literary Review, and others. She was awarded the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, the Montana Fiction Prize, and had a story in the Masters Review Anthology, Vol IX (selected by Rick Bass). 

Summer News Round-Up: Forthcoming BookEnds Novels

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We are proud to announce these forthcoming novels from our BookEnds Fellows!

  • Nora Decter’s What’s Not Mine (ECW, April 2024)
  • Joselyn Takacs’ Pearce Oysters (Zibby, Summer 2024)
  • Giano Cromley’s American Mythologies (Vintage/Anchor, Summer 2025)

BookEnders are also busy with new works in progress, supporting one another through Zoom writing sessions and #1000wordsofsummer, the alumni meetings and author events, giving each other advice, feedback and support on query letters and the query process, and—of course—through our BookEnds blog.

We look forward to bringing you more great news soon!