All posts by jesolheim

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.

Pod Commitment: Meetings as Part of the Writing Process

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2019 Fellow and Edgar Award-winning novelist Caitlin Mullen reflects on working with her BookEnds pod. 

I’d applied to BookEnds because of a problem I suspect afflicts 99 percent of recently-minted MFAs: I had come out on the other side of my degree with a novel I cared about but the work the novel needed had outlasted my time in the program. I wasn’t entirely prepared for how aimless I would feel without the structure graduate school had provided: deadlines, camaraderie, close mentorship that helped me navigate through the first three drafts of my book. I was working, but deep down I knew I wasn’t doing the kind of work that the book needed: the harder, gutsier revisions that wouldn’t just improve the novel, but that would transform it.

 All of this changed when I started the BookEnds program and met my pod in person. During the program’s kickoff weekend in Southampton, Sheena Cook, Mike McGrath and I bonded over one another’s work, over books we all loved, over the writer’s conference craft talks and readings. And by the time we said goodbye we had firm ideas of the goals each podmate had for their novels and a schedule of work submission deadlines and video chats in our calendars. 

And we treated those deadlines and meetings as inviolable. Over the next four months we FaceTimed every week for at least two hours, sometimes longer. We stuck with our schedule even when we had to work long hours on our day jobs, when we were tired or under the weather, when we felt swamped with family obligations, when we traveled internationally (during one particularly memorable meeting I joined from Dublin, Sheena joined from Edinburgh, and Mike from Portland, Maine.) We showed up not because it was an obligation, but because the process was working. Every time we ended one of our FaceTime sessions I felt buzzed: with the pleasure of my pod’s company, with their good ideas and their own commitment to their work. 

It’s rare to have readers willing to return to your work again and again, who can assess it within the context of that novel’s past iterations and the context of each writer’s strengths and weaknesses, their influences and their goals. We came to one another’s work as advocates, but respected each other enough to be honest and clear in our feedback. And reading my podmates’ novels was both pleasurable and instructive: putting my editorial brain to work in service of their drafts helped me return to my own work with a sharper critical eye. Looking at novel-length manuscripts and their evolutions over these months hastened my understanding of my own project and its needs. A few months before BookEnds began, I wondered if I should walk away from my manuscript, stick it in the proverbial drawer and start something new. A few months in, with the help of Sheena and Mike and with my brain constantly humming with our weekly craft discussions and brainstorms, I could see the novel in its most fully realized form and finally, I understood exactly what I needed to do to get it there. 

Halfway through my fellowship year my book was acquired by a big five publisher. I continued to work on it with my pod as I awaited an editorial letter from my new editor at Simon and Schuster, compiling their suggestions for future revisions. When my editor sent me her notes I found they lined up perfectly with the latest round of suggestions from my pod, which fortified what I already knew: that Mike and Sheena knew my novel intimately, that their suggestions were astute and rooted in the aims of my book, in the potential they saw in it, and in their belief in my ability to get the work done. 

Publishing a book is certainly a gratifying experience in many ways but it also taught me that there is truth in what people say about the necessity of finding pleasure in the process—the only part of a book’s life cycle you have any control over. For me, working with my pod was one of the most singular and rewarding parts of that process. Sheena and Mike challenged me, made me a better writer, and made the book better in more ways than I can say, but it added something even harder to come by in the long and sometimes lonely path to publication: it was a necessary source of commitment, friendship and joy. 

Caitlin Mullen earned a BA in English and Creative Writing from Colgate University, an MA in English from NYU, and an MFA in fiction from Stony Brook University.  She has been the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Saltonstall Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center. Her debut novel, PLEASE SEE US, won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel.

 

What My Mentor Taught Me: Matthew Klam on Finding the Emotional Heart

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2022 BookEnds Fellow Rachael Warecki reflects on working with longtime BookEnds mentor Matthew Klam.

“Do you consider yourself stoic?”

It was early February, three weeks into working with my mentor, Matt Klam, and we were discussing my protagonist’s emotional arc—or lack thereof. My novel, The Split Decision, is a speculative hardboiled noir, set in an alternate version of 1947 Los Angeles in which there are more women than men and California is on the verge of seceding from the United States. Against this backdrop, my homicide detective protagonist, Rita Mitchell, must solve the murder of a man she vaguely knows from her home neighborhood. I’d oomphed up the plot, thanks to help from my BookEnds pod throughout the fall. I’d tied the novel’s themes more clearly into the whodunit. But I couldn’t nail Rita’s emotional journey—the heart of the book.

I described the methods I’d tried so far and where they’d failed. I’d written small moments that were supposed to brim with symbolism and significance, only for them to read as limp and meaningless. I’d tried writing emotions as experienced through Rita’s physical sensations, only to have beta readers ask if she was on the verge of a migraine or seizure (I have these conditions, but my protagonist does not). I’d sidled up to Rita’s feelings, crab-like and obliquely, only to scamper right over them in favor of more plot.

Matt’s follow-up questions felt like a therapeutic intervention, writer-style, and at first I was hesitant to engage. I didn’t see how my feelings related to Rita’s emotional journey, especially since my attempts to imbue my protagonist with some of my own reactions had flopped. I’d followed that old adage, write what you know, but what I knew wasn’t relatable, at least thus far. “I don’t think I know how to write the emotional reactions that people seem to want,” I confessed. “I don’t experience emotions at that volume.”

Which is when Matt asked me if I was a stoic.

That question, and the conversation that followed, allowed me to view my protagonist’s emotional arc in a whole new light: I could let her be cold, dissociative, and alienating to all but a few of the novel’s other characters. Matt told me that Rita didn’t have to project all her emotions to the cheap seats. In fact, it made sense, based on her background and job, that action would be her reaction. But, Matt added, readers needed to understand why this was Rita’s way of dealing with fraught situations, and they needed to understand it right from the get-go.

I ended up writing a new beginning to my second chapter, in which I put my novel’s mystery plot aside and let Rita get messy. I showed why she had worked so hard to cultivate a stable life, and then gave her nine pages in which to feel out of control beyond the parameters of her job, in a situation not of her making, and to lose her shit. When I re-read this chapter toward the end of the semester, I saw how it worked on multiple levels. Not only did it give the reader necessary insight into Rita’s psyche, it also foreshadowed her brutal reactions to later events in the novel, when the case’s chaos upends her sense of normalcy.

Without Matt’s guidance—in particular, that therapy-style discussion of my protagonist, in which I felt seen and normalized and validated as a writer, and which prepared me to get to work—I never would have had the insight needed to write a scene just for the sake of the novel’s emotional journey. It was a concept I returned to again and again throughout my revisions. By letting my characters be more human in ways that aren’t always easily categorized or understandable, I’ve made The Split Decision into a more compelling page-turner, with the novel’s emotional stakes given as much weight and consideration as the intricacies of the plot. 

Rachael Warecki is a MacDowell Fellow whose short fiction has earned recognition in contests held by Tiferet, Glimmer Train, and American Short Fiction, in addition to being published in various literary journals. Her work has also received support through residencies at the Ragdale Foundation and the Wellstone Center. She is a graduate of the Antioch University Los Angeles MFA program, was a 2021–22 BookEnds Fellow, and is originally from Los Angeles, where she currently resides.

The Talking Cure: Pods in Conversation

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2022 Fellow Jena Salon reflects on pod meetings. 

My novel The Way They Whispered follows two sisters, Nina and Cora, after a tragic accident has led to the death of their young brother. Both of them are devastated by the loss of their brother, but while Cora begins to open up into the world outside the family, Nina, undone by her guilt, retreats into her mystical and sometimes dark imagination. 

Coming into the BookEnds program with a complete first draft, I thought  that the success of the novel hinged on convincing the reader that Nina was not evil, but traumatized. They needed to feel for her, and buy into the imaginary world she created. In BookEnds, we send our podmates questions to consider about our work as they read and offer feedback in each three-hour session about our books.

So when I first met with my podmates, Jeff Perkins and Rashaun Allen, this was a question I asked outright: “Do you read Nina as evil?”

But while my instinct was correct—readers did need to understand Nina—I was asking the wrong question. Or rather, the questions I posed to my pod were not producing the answers that were most helpful. 

Instead, it was in the conversations, those three hours of time spent on my book alone every few weeks, that I began to learn what my novel needed. 

Pods are different from your typical readers. In my experience, at least, all the people who had generously read for me over the years would give me fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, maybe an hour of conversation. Maybe they would give me intensive line edits, maybe marginalia filled with love, excitement, confusion. These readers were always willing to answer questions I had, but  it was hard to excavate what I really needed to know. There was a guilt that built up over time when I wanted to ask them just one more small question. I blushed with embarrassment having to ask if my seventeenth version of a paragraph now solves the problem they’d pointed out. And in the conversation, between just me and this other person, I became trapped in my own perspective. 

With the BookEnds pods, time and care are built into the equation. They exist to sit with you in your discomfort, to care about your project. That’s their job. They are like your book’s grandparents, always proud, always interested, always invested, even though they’re not the one’s doing the day-to-day heavy lifting to shape and mold your book baby. Other people lose interest in your book, but not Grammie and Papa. You can ask questions, brainstorm solutions, circle back. Their curiosities, concerns and ideas feed off of each other, so in a way, I became less central. I could sit and listen. It was a luxury. 

It was during those pod meetings with Jeff and Rashaun— three full hours of time and space blocked off from the world, with nothing to do but talk about my book—that the magic happened. When we had finished talking about my specific questions, we had nothing to do but hold my book together. This was where the most useful conversations took place. We talked about my book outside of my expectations, guided by what moved Rashaun and Jeff. And because we were sitting there, with time and space to be in this world, they began to ask small questions which dug in deep, and proved to be the most revelatory.

Through those conversations I realized that my edits were not just about filling out Nina and adding a line of exposition here or there to explain why she had the idea, say, that she needed to get her sister to cut another little girl’s hair. The reader needed to understand the entire universe. Every character, the entire mythology. They needed to understand it viscerally, so that every individual choice made sense within the world of the novel. I loved and understood Nina already. But I needed to do the work of crawling out of my own head, and putting my heart—Nina’s heart—thread by thread onto the page. 

Thanks to conversations with Jeff and Rashaun, I was able to flesh out Nina’s belief systems, why she made certain decisions, what she knew and didn’t know, how she cobbled together her knowledge. We talked through how her thoughts impacted her feelings. We were talking about my characters as if they were human. Doing that forced me to answer questions as deeply as if they were living in the world. 

Jena Salon’s most recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Huffington Post, Litro, Identity Theory, Annalemma, BOMB, and Bookforum. 

Summer News Round-Up: Forthcoming BookEnds Novels

BookEnds novels, Literary Community, , , , , , , ,

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

  • Alison Fairbrother’s The Catch (Random House, June 21, 2022)
  • Sue Mell’s Provenance (Madville Publishing, July 19, 2022)
  • Coco Picard’s The Healing Circle (Red Hen Press, August 16, 2022)
  • Daisy Alpert Florin’s My Last Innocent Year (Holt, February 14, 2023)
  • Vanessa Cuti’s The Tip Line (Crooked Lane, Spring 2023)

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!