All posts by jesolheim

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!

The Thrill of the Unreliable: On Vanessa Cuti’s THE TIP LINE

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In advance of our BookEnds BookClub on Wednesday, May 24, featuring program alum Vanessa Cuti and her debut novel The Tip Line (Crooked Lane, 2023) in conversation with her cohort member Alison Fairbrother (author of The Catch, Random House, 2022), alum Nora Decter looks at Vanessa’s masterful narration. 

All first-person narrators are unreliable, I tell my students every semester, as the writing teachers of yore once told me. It’s a literary foregone conclusion: no one who tells their own story can be trusted. 

Still, it’s a quality I don’t think we laud enough in fiction, this unreliability, perhaps because it’s so universally human a trait we don’t recognize the skill involved in getting it on the page. 

Vanessa Cuti’s debut novel The Tip Line offers readers a daring example of the flexibility of first-person, calling to mind psychological thrillers heavy on the literary gravitas like Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen or Death in Her Hands, whose first-person narrators are richly weird, the stories they tell all the more riveting for that weirdness. Maybe it was The Tip Line’s seaside setting, but I was also reminded of Ann Quin’s Berg, the so-called “working class Virginia Woolf”—something about the particular dark pitch Quin and Cuti give their subject matter. 

All of this to say that with The Tip Line, Cuti has given us the elements of a crime thriller (murdered sex workers, shady cops), added a marriage plot, and then filtered it through a consciousness that genuinely confounds expectations. At thirty years old, our first-person narrator Virginia Carey is unmarried and unemployed, a little behind on her life plan, as her mother would say. When she accepts a job at the local police headquarters, it seems she’s found a solution to both problems. But it’s not the conventional admin job Virginia expected—instead she’s answering a tip line, fielding calls mostly from people accusing their neighbors of being drug lords. Nor is it really a conventional place to find a husband, at least not the way Virginia goes about it. But the setting suits her nature: composed on the surface, with something secret brewing underneath. “Honestly,” she says, early in the book, “I only wanted to stop looking. I could not understand why it was so hard. And so, here we are. The police department.”

In another early passage Cuti gives us a key to understanding Virginia’s motives. Over several pages, Virginia explains her relationship history, how she ended up unmarried at thirty, concluding, “I was always trying to find that little place of darkness in a man. So that when we were quiet, lying in bed, just before or just after, our little darknesses matched up.” 

Virginia’s internal monologue is delivered in a frank, terse tone and we are brought deep into her daydreams, as she fantasizes first about Charlie, a detective, and then later Declan Brady, the chief of police. These fantasies fool us until we adjust to the frequency with which Virginia slips into them. “Not yet. Keep going,” she tells herself after spinning out a scene in her head between her and Charlie. “There were dozens of these,” she says, “These were just a few.”

Virginia is reliable in her unreliability, which is embodied by the increasingly questionable decisions she makes as the plot of the novel progresses. This is especially apparent in her dealings with Verona, the tip line caller who leads police to the bodies of the murdered women on the beach. Verona almost seems a shadow version of Virginia at the other end of the phone. They have in common their relative youth, beauty and the power found in that. But it’s Verona, a sex worker, who is honest, and Virginia who can’t really be trusted. In a remarkably written sequence of scenes, Virginia’s attention shifts from Charlie, the detective she is on the cusp of courting, to Brady, the police chief. Soon Virginia begins to suspect the killer Verona is describing sounds a lot like Brady, and she is drawn even closer to him. Readers remember the earlier passage about wanting a man whose dark spots matched her own. “Those spots—ticking constantly like quartz within us—would be carefully contained, encapsulated, by all the rest of the virtue surrounding them. We were normal people, good people, and we would keep each other’s dark spots from growing, from taking over. This is what relationships were for. What marriages were for.”

Neither the narrative nor Virginia are reliably what they seem. Yes, there are murdered sex workers, but the mystery of who kills them, like the real life Gilgo beach serial murders that inspired the plot, remains unsolved by the book’s end. Yes, Virginia wants a husband, but not for the conventional reasons her friends and family want her to find one. 

But for writers, The Tip Line offers a master class in unreliable narration. The way Cuti writes Virginia is, in the end, even more thrilling than the love affair or the dead girls on the beach. 

Nora Decter is a writer and teacher from Winnipeg, Canada. She has an MFA in creative writing from Stony Brook University and she was a BookEnds fellow in 2020-2021. Her BookEnds novel What’s Not Mine is forthcoming from ECW Press in April 2024.

Girls with Feelings: On Daisy Alpert Florin’s MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR 

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In advance of our BookEnds BookClub on Wednesday, April 5, featuring program alum Daisy Alpert Florin and her debut novel MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR (Holt, 2023) in conversation with her BookEnds mentor and co-founding director Susan Scarf Merrell, alum Rachel León considers the validation of reviews and the power of opening lines.

For many writers, to have our work raved about in The New York Times is a landmark feat, a universally-recognized indication of success. The BookEnds community was thrilled to see alum Daisy Alpert Florin’s debut novel My Last Innocent Year receive such laudatory coverage from reviewer Elisabeth Egan, who writes “My Last Innocent Year is a heartfelt chronicle of a writer who realizes that her stories about girls with feelings matter every bit as much as the ones written by the guy who annotates The New Yorker.” 

My Last Innocent Year centers the protagonist, Isabel Rosen, during her final semester at a prestigious East Coast college as she falls into a relationship with her professor. Set in the late 90s against the backdrop of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, it’s atmospheric and beautiful, a smart and masterfully written novel that examines consent, the cost of our mistakes, and how we reckon with our past.

Egan points out how richly layered My Last Innocent Year is—the multiple threads that are woven throughout the story. And while, yes, the story itself is meticulously plotted, one of the things not noted is the attention to detail on the line level, attention we see from the novel’s very first line: 

“It’s hard to say how I ended up in Zev Neman’s dorm room the night before winter break.”

This sentence does so much work. It establishes Isabel as the kind of conscientious narrator who wants to get this story right, yet admits the fallibility of her account. This is not a narrator who will manipulate the reader. She won’t lie or stretch the truth. But Isabel is relying on her memory to share her account, and memory is inherently flawed. 

The first line also sets up the opening scene, in which the facts of the events can be debated by readers. It’s clearly a nonconsensual sexual encounter; does that mean it’s rape? Zev could be described as a friend; can one be assaulted by a friend? The temporal distance from which Isabel narrates this story forces the reader to consider the limitations of how our culture talked about sexual assault and consent twenty-five years ago, and continues to debate it today. We live in a culture that still blames women victims of sexual assault for “asking for it” if they are wearing clothes that are tight or revealing, if they drink heavily around men, or if they go to a man’s bedroom, as Isabel does. So this one sentence situates the novel’s themes, from the very first line. 

From there the novel builds to a crescendo. My Last Innocent Year has gotten a lot of buzz for being a literary page-turner that prompts important cultural conversations. Its themes and smart craft choices make it a perfect book club novel, and The BookEnds Book Club event on April 5th one not to miss. 

But what ultimately makes My Last Innocent Year such an incredible success isn’t as easily measured. As Daisy told me in a mini-interview on my Substack, she wrote the book she wanted to read. She didn’t rush, she took the time she needed to write this remarkable novel. And in the end, that’s the greatest success we should all hope to achieve.  

Rachel León is a writer, editor, and social worker. She serves as Daily Editor for Chicago Review of Books. Her work has appeared in Catapult, BOMB Magazine, The Millions, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. 

Spring News Round-Up: New Novels, Acclaim, and the BookEnds BookClub!

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The past months have seen the publication of several BookEnds novels to great acclaim: Alison Fairbrother’s The Catch (Random House), which was Selected as an Editors’ Choice in the New York Times and a Best New Book of the Week at People Magazine; Sue Mell’s Provenance (Madville), winner of the Blue Moon Novel Award, a 2022 Great Group Read Selection by the Women’s National Book Association, and a 2022 Best Indie Fiction Pick by the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses [clmp]; Coco Picard’s The Healing Circle (Red Hen Press); and most recently, Daisy Alpert Florin’s My Last Innocent Year (Holt, 2023), a New York Times’ Editors’ Choice Selection, as well as the subject of the Times’ Group Text Discussion in February 2023. 

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

  • Vanessa Cuti’s The Tip Line (Crooked Lane, April 18, 2023)
  • Nora Decter’s What’s Not Mine (ECW, April 2024)
  • Joselyn Takacs’ Pearce Oysters (Zibby, Summer 2024)

We are also thrilled to announce the launch of the BookEnds BookClub!

  • Check out our inaugural event featuring Paul Harding and Caitlin Mullen, in conversation about Paul’s This Other Eden (Norton, 2023).
  • Daisy Alpert Florin will be in conversation with her BookEnds mentor and program co-director Susan Scarf Merrell on April 5 for our BookEnds BookClub. You can order signed copies of both Daisy’s and Susie’s books by the event date by following the link on our BookClub page. 
  • Vanessa Cuti will be in conversation with her BookEnds cohort member Alison Fairbrother on May 24 for our BookEnds BookClub. You can order signed copies of both Vanessa’s and Alison’s books by the event date by following the link on our BookClub page.

BookEnders are also busy with new works in progress, supporting one another through daily and weekly Zoom writing sessions, the alumni meetings and author events, and 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!

Close Reading: Paul Harding’s THIS OTHER EDEN

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In anticipation of the inaugural BookEnds Book Club on Wednesday, March 1, alum  J. Greg Phelan offers a close reading of a passage from program mentor Paul Harding’s This Other Eden. For a link to this virtual event, and to order signed copies of books from our authors in conversation, visit the BookEnds website here!

One of the best parts of working with Paul Harding during my BookEnds fellowship was gaining insight into his writing process. During a recent interview, I had the privilege to once again prod him to reveal his secrets––to ask him how he renders the complex states of being that propel his stories with such clarity and concreteness, in so few words. “I’m fascinated,” he told me, “by how much meaning you can get into a given sentence without being exhausting, exhaustive, or ponderous. To make the book 220 pages long but feel 1200 pages deep.”

Paul provides a master’s class on how to do just that in his extraordinary new novel, This Other Eden, which evokes the breadth and depth of a much longer book. 

Take this passage of a sixteen-year-old maid removing sheets from clotheslines. Describing this everyday chore, Paul effortlessly weaves Bridget’s past, present, and future to precisely render the rich, complex interplay between what she does, perceives, thinks, and feels. Looking closely, we can consider the range of his mastery in a single, nearly page-long paragraph, which he starts boldly with a sentence fragment: 

Bridget in the lowering light, unclipping the sheets from the lines. 

The sole verb––unclipping––connotes an eternal present, as if we are observing Bridget unclipping the sheets both now and forever, if she’d been captured in a painting. It’s a dazzling effect Paul employs throughout the novel. The paragraph continues: 

The lines spring back when taut when she pulls the sheets from them, like the plucked strings on the homemade driftwood fiddles her father and uncles played at night. 

The present tense action pulls recalls the past tense activity played as we drift along with Bridget’s thoughts, mirroring how the mind works, gliding from the activity at hand to impressions of the past.  

She walked along the water with her father, looking for good pieces of wood. He traced the outline of a neighbor’s fiddle on a sheet of paper in charcoal, like Ethan drawing in the meadow.

Ethan is the boy she admires; as we start to intuit, her feelings about him confuse her. Indeed, she’s not yet ready to fully consider him, so we linger in the past:

Her father worked on the fiddle all one winter, when there wasn’t much to do and it was dark most of the time and the wind moaned and fog covered the island and the fairies moaned and wailed out in the dark and knew death, too. 

Did you catch how by grounding us in the concrete detail of the natural world (darkness, wind, and fog) Paul seamlessly carries us into a supernatural world of moaning and wailing fairies? His transition is so smooth, we don’t question but feel. All to prepare us, at last, to drift back to the boy circling her thoughts. 

There is something about that Ethan, with his charcoal and sunburned face and neck, something about him she can’t put a name to.

This sentence warmly and efficiently dramatizes the fact that Bridget’s confused feelings regarding the boy both compel and frighten her. This is the quiet conflict Paul so deftly dramatizes through these successive moments: Bridget is trying to keep a lid on her budding sexuality. In a vain attempt to do so, she returns to the task at hand: 

The sheets are so clean and stiff and crunch when she folds them and places them in the basket. 

A concrete, simple description in the here and now, gently invoking her innocence. These plain and powerful details juxtapose with her stream of thoughts and feelings to provide what it might otherwise take pages to convey. Then we return to her inner world, transported by the following wondrous, long and winding sentence without any commas, a marvel really how Paul moves so subtly from the present to her imagined future:

One sheet is her own and she will put it on her narrow bed in her small clean room tonight before lying down to sleep and it will feel crisp and clean and smell clean and good in the heat and she will open a window to let the fresh air in and it will feel so good and she will miss her mother and her dad and her sisters and her brothers so much that the comforts of the sheets and open window and lonesomeness of missing her family will make her cry herself to a dreamless sleep. 

This sentence accretes in a tumult of emotion she feels and knows she will feel. Staving off these increasingly strong, disconcerting feelings, Bridget once again retreats to the task at hand:

She reaches the sheet on the last line and discovers that the side facing the open meadow is covered with flecks of hay and dust from the mowing. Foolish girl, she thinks. You should’ve known such a thing would happen today. Scolding herself comforts her because she hears her mother’s voice when she does. She hears her mother’s voice and she tries to see if she can shake out the sheet by taking it in from the bottom and stepping back and drawing it out and snapping it so the hay will come off. She begins to sing. 

Swift, decisive action and thought has brought us here to the paragraph’s conclusion, in which Bridget being moved to express her feelings by singing.

Throughout the book, Paul painstakingly renders human complexity in countless moments just like these––living, breathing paintings in prose––to construct this powerhouse novel.

J. Greg Phelan was a BookEnds Fellow in 2018-2019 and has an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. His articles, reviews, and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Millions, and America magazine. He’s the co-founder and board chair of Project Write Now, a writing center providing classes and outreach for all ages. In 2020, he launched  book inc., a writing community for memoir and novel writers. 

Fall News Round-Up: Forthcoming BookEnds Novels and More!

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This past summer saw the publication of three BookEnds novels: Alison Fairbrother’s The Catch (Random House), which was Selected as an Editor’s Choice in the New York Times and a Best New Book of the Week at People Magazine; Sue Mell’s Provenance (Madville Publishing), winner of the Blue Moon Novel Award and just selected as a 2022 Great Group Read by the Women’s National Book Association; and Coco Picard’s The Healing Circle (Red Hen Press), recipient of The Women’s Prose Award. 

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

  • Daisy Alpert Florin’s My Last Innocent Year (Holt, February 14, 2023)
  • Vanessa Cuti’s The Tip Line (Crooked Lane, April 18, 2023)
  • Joselyn Takacs’ Pearce Oysters (Zibby Owens, 2024)

Our alumni and fellows are actively publishing stories, essays, book reviews and author interviews—and as BookEnds novels are published, they are writing about one another’s work and interviewing each other! BookEnders are also busy with new works in progress, supporting one another through Zoom writing sessions, the alums monthly meetings and author events, giving each other advice, feedback and support on query letters and the query process, and through our BookEnds blog. This vibrant, supportive community extends to our Alumni Group and Visiting Writers Series, which hosts talks this fall with Matt Bell, Courtney Maum, and Peter Ho Davies. 

Finally, we are thrilled to announce that 2023 will bring The Lichtenstein Center Presents: The BookEnds Book Club! The first events will discuss This Other Eden, by longtime BookEnds mentor and MFA director Paul Harding, in conversation with his BookEnds mentee and Edgar Award-winning novelist Caitlin Mullen; My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin, in conversation with her mentor and program co-founder and director Susan Merrell; and The Tip Line by Vanessa Cuti, in conversation with her BookEnds podmate from the first year of the program, Alison Fairbrother.

What My Mentor Taught Me: Rachel Pastan on Excavating the Story

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2022 Fellow Jennifer Yeh reflects on working with Rachel Pastan.

My BookEnds novel Migratory Creatures follows protagonist Gina Lee over the course of a single day in San Francisco. It takes place on the day when Gina’s estranged husband Mark is getting engaged to his new girlfriend, and as Gina tries to muddle through these difficult hours, she meets up with awkward electrician-trombone player Peter, and encounters a mysterious, appealing amphibious man. When I started this novel, I was inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses and hoped to capture Gina’s entire life and world by describing her thoughts during a single day. 

In the first half of my BookEnds fellowship, working with my pod, I streamlined the draft and made one especially notable addition: I expanded the role of the amphibious man. Instead of two brief meetings in which he never speaks, Gina has a long, romantic interlude with him. 

Still, when I started work with my BookEnds mentor Rachel Pastan, a lot of the actual drama in the story remained half-buried in Gina’s memories, thoughts, daydreams, and day-to-day life. 

Early on, Rachel noticed my tendency to turn away from the drama rather than toward it. For example, at one point in the original draft, Gina has a pleasant, easy conversation with her daughter while recalling an earlier rocky conversation. Rachel suggested that they have this difficult conversation in a scene, on the page. She also suggested in-scene flashbacks for important moments in the past between Gina and Mark and Gina and Peter, rather than presenting them as filtered memories. In other words, Rachel helped me excavate the narrative and then build it up, largely by focusing more on the interpersonal relationships among the characters. 

We also looked at the protagonist’s arc in the story. Rachel observed that Gina is unhappy at the beginning of the novel, and arrives by the end at a different, happier state. She wanted me to think more carefully about how exactly the events of Gina’s day take her from one state to the other. We figured out that three interactions in the book represent the key steps of Gina’s emotional journey—encounters with the electrician Peter, the amphibious man, and finally her estranged husband Mark. 

Peter’s significance was relatively straightforward. He represents Gina’s attempt to move forward in her life by throwing herself into a new romantic relationship. Gina tries to copy what Mark did, but this is a failure. But what is the role of the amphibious man? This was trickier. Although I can’t help thinking of the amphibious man as real, I simultaneously consider him Gina’s invention, something manifested by the power of her grief, distress, and desire. I told Rachel that I thought of him as a creation of Gina’s—a “wish fulfillment,” in the Freudian dream sense. By contrast, Rachel described him as Gina’s “gift to herself.” This might seem only slightly different, but it was revelatory to me. The idea of the amphibious man as a “gift to herself” made him seem less the sad invention of a lonely person and instead an active attempt by Gina to heal. 

The next question: what does Gina need in order to heal? Rachel immediately saw that it would be sad if all Gina needed was a perfect lover. As I revised, the amphibious man became not only a generous and responsive lover but also an empathetic companion who, among other things, helps Gina fix up her apartment, which is full of empty spaces where Mark took his things away. He helps Gina “find her home again”—which is the same task of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses and Odysseus in The Odyssey. Gina and the amphibious man spend part of the evening rearranging books to fill in spaces in the bookshelves, hanging new pictures on the walls, and sanding down a stuck window. The amphibious man helps Gina begin to put her home and life together.  

The third important interaction takes place between Gina and her estranged husband Mark. In the original draft of my novel, Gina never confronted Mark to figure out with him what happened. Gina ran into Mark in the morning, spoke with him on the phone in the afternoon, and was drawn to Mark’s new home, the site of his engagement party, in the evening. But their interactions were all superficial and brief. 

Following Rachel’s suggestions, I made each of Gina’s interactions with her estranged husband longer and more significant. For example, in the evening, when Gina throws rocks at Mark’s window, instead of sneaking away after, she has a long conversation with Mark in which they finally talk about what happened in their relationship, and how their breakup relates to a family trauma. Doing this work is what finally sets Gina up to move forward in her life.

These changes gave the story more of the tension and urgency it needed. Rachel also helped me find ways to keep the reader curious. Her explanation of how to make a story work was something I thought about many, many times—she said that you have to make the reader wonder about something, and then make them wait to find out what happens. I gradually learned how to make the reader curious about certain questions ahead of time: Is Gina going to call Peter? Is she going to run into Mark? Who is knocking on the window three stories above the ground? Rachel provided frequent guidance with comments such as “she could start thinking about Peter here” or “make the reader wait a little before she sees him” or “what is the reader curious about here?”

In our work together during my BookEnds fellowship, Rachel helped me turn a drifty and shapeless manuscript into a novel with narrative drive and urgency.

Jennifer Yeh was a BookEnds fellow in 2021-2022 and is working on her first novel.