Category Archives: BookEnds pods

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. 

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.

 

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. 

Slack Therapy: How My BookEnds Pod Became My Writing Support Network

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As the new BookEnds cohort gets underway with podwork, 2020 Fellow Colleen Curry reflects on working with her pod during the fellowship. 

By the first time I met my BookEnds podmates in person, I’d already read their works in progress. I was so impressed — and intimidated — by how good their books were. I was so nervous to meet them. When BookEnds co-founder Susan Scarf Merrell excitedly introduced us at the Southampton Writers Conference, I realized how powerful it was to be introduced to writers through their work. Something formed instantaneously around us, something like being on a team, or part of a family. These were my people. I would root for every possible success for them, and help them achieve it — not because they were helping me in return, but because their work mattered to me.

During our fall semester, we meet biweekly for three-hour video calls, and in between those meetings, we Slacked — pretty much every day, nonstop, sharing all our ups and downs of the writing life. My BookEnds work was focused on revision — I had a lot of work to do on plot and scenes — but that fall with my pod was also about learning how to be a writer. When I started BookEnds, I’d brought a lot of my anxiety and insecurity into my work, and into my pod meetings. My voice was uncertain, on the page and on screen.

A few weeks into the fall semester of my BookEnds year, I sat down to work on my revisions and decided to check Slack before I got started. There was a barrage of messages waiting for me. “Guys,” April had written, “I’m alive, but barely.” An emergency doctor’s appointment had derailed her week, and her pages were going to be late. “But how are you guys doing? Hanging in there?”

This wasn’t unusual. We were all feeling the pressure of writing as fast as we could, with every ounce we had toward our submission deadlines while balancing jobs, parenting, illnesses, and the rest of the responsibilities of adult life. And this was all as the clock was ticking down to a global pandemic that we had no idea was coming. 

Jenn was quick to respond. She’d had a time like that, when she was struggling to balance workload and life, and she promised it would get easier. The fact that we’re writing at all through these moments is a testament to us, she said. “That gives me hope,” April had written. “Thank you so much, poddies.”

Jenn had been getting up before dawn for weeks to revise her novel’s structure, and she’d just cracked open a pivotal scene between two of her characters. “Heartbreaking,” she’d written. “I’m so proud of you,” April responded.

And then there were questions from them both: “How’s it going with you, Colleen???”

I had avoided responding for a few days — and I had been avoiding my book for more than a few days. Every time I sat down to rework a scene, or write a new one, I was flooded with doubts: Was the work ever going to be good enough? Was I smart enough to actually pull this off? Had I read enough good books? Did I even know how to write?

I reread our messages a few times, noticing the effect they were having on me, the sense of comfort and solidarity and inspiration from a few brief messages. I wrote back to my podmates, and then I turned to my work, buoyed, ready to tackle my revisions.

Each time I submitted work, Jenn and April arrived to our meetings with pages and pages of notes — careful, gentle, thorough, brilliant insights into what I was trying to do and how I might try to do it more effectively. They spoke to me like friends, but also mentors who had read and written a little bit more than I had, who had seen some writing tics and could tell me how to get rid of them, who could point me toward authors who might help me figure out a better way to show what I was trying so hard to show. And they shared their struggles, their worries about their work, about their books, about how to fit writing into their busy lives. And slowly I began to see that I could write — and not only that, but I could revise, work hard, and fit writing into my life. As the weeks went by, I grew more confident. With their support, I realized: Hey, maybe I can actually do this.

Then the pandemic happened, and our already intense year received an enormous, world-altering shock. Susie and our other BookEnds co-founder, Meg Wolitzer, swooped in with heroic, superhuman support: our cohort met weekly to talk about how to proceed — and sometimes, how we just couldn’t proceed at all. And all the while, Jenn and April kept Slacking, kept texting, kept checking in with updates. Life got even crazier for all of us, writing became even harder, but somehow, we made it through our year with manuscripts that were ready for agents to read. More than that: we made it through with a new support system for our writing lives. 

It’s been nearly three years now since April, Jenn, and I first started our work together, and we just met a few weeks ago for a video chat about Jenn’s latest stories. It’s such a joy to continue reading her characters after so long. This time when we met, I wasn’t anxious or uncertain. I was excited to see my friends, and to spend a couple of hours together talking about writing. As long as we’re all writing, and reading, and Slacking about it, there’s too much to be grateful for to waste time worrying. That goes for the writing, too. I don’t show up to the page worrying anymore, at least not the way I used to. I can do this work. I have enough supporters in this program who have told me that — over and over again, for years — and I’ve decided to believe them. 

My BookEnds book is on its way. It was like a little egg back in 2019, a fragile egg I was carrying around very carefully trying not to break. It took awhile for me to realize that I had to break it in order for the thing inside to emerge, to grow into the thing I wanted it to be. There was no better nest than my little pod. It transformed my relationship with writing, and with myself. 

Colleen Curry was a BookEnds fellow in 2019-2020 and is working on her first novel.