Spring News Round-Up

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The first great news from BookEnds: we received close to 60 applications this year! Thanks so much to all of the amazing and talented applicants for their interest in the program. We’re immersed in so much great reading.

We’ve also had some remarkably great news from our fellows and alums:

  • Vanessa Cuti had a short story featured in Best American Short Stories, a second story was included in the Distinguished BASS list as well. 
  • April Darcy is the recipient of a 2022 Individual Artist Award from the New Jersey Council on the Arts and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. April was also given an Honorable Mention for the Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Award.
  • Alison Fairbrother’s BookEnds novel The Catch is forthcoming with Penguin Random House on June 21, 2022.
  • Daisy Florin’s BookEnds novel My Last Innocent Year is forthcoming with Holt in January 2023.
  • Kathleen Gibbons has been nominated for two Pushcart awards for her debut short story publications.
  • Haley Hach won Carve Magazine’s 2021 Editor’s Choice Award.
  • An excerpt from Maggie Hill’s BookEnds novel Hoops was published in Cleaver Magazine. 
  • Celine Keating and Greg Phelan are co-leading the Novel Incubator, a yearlong program offered by Project Writer Now, a writing studio Greg co-founded. As peer artist leaders, they are having a lot of fun drafting a new novel along with the 10 participants.
  • Sue Mell’s BookEnds novel Provenance is forthcoming with Madville Publishing on July 21, 2022. Sue also won the Chestnut Review 2021 Chapbook Prose Prize.
  • Coco Picard’s BookEnds novel The Healing Circle is forthcoming with Red Hen Press on August 16, 2022.
  • Jennifer Solheim was longlisted for the Granum Foundation Fellowship Prize.
  • Rachael Warecki had a MacDowell Fellowship in autumn 2021.
  • Dan White is launching a new literary journal called L’Esprit.
  • Nearly a dozen additional BookEnds fellows have found representation with agents, and are either on submission or will be very soon.

BookEnders are also busy at work 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—of course—through our BookEnds blog. We look forward to bringing you more great news in 2022!

What My Mentor Taught Me: Scott Cheshire on Scene, Line, and Sequence

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2021 Fellow D.W. White on working with longtime BookEnds mentor Scott Cheshire. 

My novel The Seachamber follows a young woman, Elizabeth, during the extended weekend of her younger sister’s wedding in 1994 Santa Monica, California. When I first started the project, it was written in a fairly conventional third-person, which did not add much to the book’s goals. By the time I started BookEnds, it had developed into a very close third, focused on Elizabeth, and exploring high modernist mechanical techniques and theory — in the vein of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Lucy Corin — something that, although very effective in rendering Elizabeth’s thoughts and realizing the themes of memory, time, and individuality, were challenging and demanding. Further, I was very invested in centering The Seachamber narrative in its literary ancestry, in conversation with the books that had inspired it. 

Scott was the ideal mentor for these concerns. We spent several meetings discussing books I should read (for example, he’s a great fan of Don DeLillo), and I was able to begin exploring areas of literature new to me. 

We  also worked on the deeper issues of perspective and pacing within The Seachamber itself. In particular, he helped me address the progression of scenes that take place during family meals. In these scenes, the narration doesn’t employ summary  or time-jumps. The Seachamber employs and relies on temporal compression to give weight to the plot, so there is always the danger of running aground on the shores of ennui. In fact, this had been a considerable issue for me in the novel’s early drafts: how to keep the reader engaged even when the protagonist is disaffected or bored. Although this problem was largely resolved through future revision (essentially, Elizabeth ended up having more going on during the weekend), the meal sequence presented a similar risk. 

Scott pointed out that in order to avoid redundancy and reader fatigue, I might sequence them to make each one build in some way on the rest, despite the fact that they occur at intervals throughout the narrative. This consisted of taking each meal scene — there are four in total, spread out across the book — and thinking about them as a linked progression, rather than isolated scenic moments. Scott’s idea was deceptively simple — progress each of the four different meals my course, and treat them in revision as if they were all one long meal. 

Thus, during the first dinner, the narrative entity focuses on the wine, and the time signature (to borrow narrative theorist Gerard Genette’s term) is distended during the ordering and serving of drinks. In the second, several chapters later, the narration places an emphasis on appetizers, main course, and desserts. To do this, I used a few techniques, the first being “pause” (another term from Genette) to slow down the movement of the narration. There is, essentially, a higher text-to-fictive-event ratio, the amount of space used to narrate each minute or second is increased in these moments relative to others. This space is then usually given over to a detailed rendering of Elizabeth’s consciousness, which in turn is accomplished in what comparative literature scholar Dorrit Cohn terms “quoted monologue,” the first person present tense running of a character’s thoughts within a third person narrative moment, which allows unfiltered access to the character’s interiority and mental state. Finally, I increased the amount of detail for the portion of the meal in question. In these ways, I was able to indirectly emphasize certain parts of each meal — which was the goal for this process — while also allowing more space to explore my protagonist Elizabeth’s mind at certain moments of heightened plot intensity — which is a goal for the book as a whole. 

This great advice helped me to change the reading experience for each of the meal scenes while retaining the authenticity of their happenings. This type of thinking, too, helped with other areas in The Seachamber where I worried about redundancy, and so Scott’s advice was key in bringing the manuscript to a more advanced state. 

Each precise sentence-level decision in a novel comes with a world of literary theory, history, and philosophy behind it. By finding a new way to incorporate the type of Modernist techniques that aid in the rendering of consciousness, not only was I able to depict the meal scenes in a fresh way, but I was able to continue to explore the core raison d’être of my novel. Elizabeth’s setting and struggles as a character are emblematic of the transition from the Victorian and Edwardian novel to the Modernist one—the rise of individualism and the fracturing of traditional society—while also suggesting a parallel between the pre-9/11 world she inhabits with the European interwar period that spurred the elevation of consciousness in art and literature. By incorporating these techniques into The Seachamber, I hope not only to render my protagonist with greater verisimilitude and depth, but also to weld her technical foundation to her literary ancestry as a fictive entity and her intellectual pursuits as a character, thereby unifying the book’s philosophy. 

D.W. White is a graduate of the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at Otis College in Los Angeles and Stony Brook University’s BookEnds Fellowship. Currently seeking representation for his first novel, he serves as Editor of L’Esprit Literary Review and as Fiction Editor for West Trade Review, where he also contributes reviews and critical essays. His writing further appears in or is forthcoming from The Florida Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Rupture, The Review of UnContemporary Fiction, Fatal Flaw, Necessary Fiction, Chicago Review of Books, Southern Review of Books, and elsewhere. A Chicago ex-pat, he now lives in Long Beach, California, where he frequents the beach to hide from writer’s block. He is on Twitter @dwhitethewriter. 

In Treatment?

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Fellow Daisy Alpert Florin on when therapy scenes work in a novel, and why they often don’t—yet are still invaluable to the writing process.

In an early draft of Sheena Cook’s novel, A Tender Hate, Scottish detective Iris Larkin is ordered to go to therapy when her personal issues threaten her ability to do her job. If therapy was a way for Iris to work out her issues, it was also a way for Sheena to discover what those issues were.

“I was trying to work out on the page the secrets Iris wasn’t telling anybody, the secrets I didn’t even know,” Sheena, a BookEnds fellow, said.

There were seven therapy scenes in the draft Sheena submitted to her mentor, Meg Wolitzer, at the end of 2018. At Meg’s suggestion, she cut them down to three. But when the book went on submission, one editor suggested cutting the scenes altogether.

“She told me the scenes did not move the plot forward,” Sheena said. “It was a surprise, and I was sad to take them out.”

When I heard Sheena’s story, I was well into a revision of my own novel, which included scenes where my main character, Isabel, goes to therapy in the aftermath of a sexual assault. At the time, I considered whether or not to cut the scenes but, in the end, decided to keep them.

The scenes remained in my draft throughout my BookEnds year and were still there when the book went on submission. It was only when my editor, Caroline Zancan at Henry Holt, did a close edit that she suggested I remove the scenes. 

“I think you needed to write those scenes to get insight into Isabel’s character and motivations,” Caroline wrote, “but you don’t need to spell out those motivations so neatly for us.”

Like Sheena, I was surprised, but when I looked closely at the scenes, I could see the novel didn’t need them. Aside from a few exchanges, which I reassigned to other characters, I scrapped the scenes entirely.

All of which got me thinking: do scenes of therapy in novels ever work? 

“Therapists work well in fiction when they are used to move the action along,” said Sandra Leong, a BookEnds fellow and practicing psychotherapist. “They work less well as a form of exposition about a character.”

Therapy is central to the plot of BookEnds fellow Jennifer Solheim’s novel Interstitial, about a rock band on the rise. When Nate, the band’s lead singer, passes out on stage during a performance, he goes to therapy to understand what is happening to him. His therapist, Kathleen, is a former musician and working with Nate brings up issues for her about her lost music career. Therapy works in Interstitial because it is crucial to the central question of the novel: it defines Kathleen as a person after she leaves music. She plays a pivotal role in the band’s story, but—as Sandra explained as crucial to the role of therapists in novels—she also has a fully developed storyline of her own.

Therapy can also work in fiction if it leads to an explosive revelation that causes change in the novel. In Pat Conroy’s 1986 bestseller The Prince of Tides, for example, what is revealed in therapy is a secret so dark and long buried, it clarifies what has happened to the characters up to that point.

But, Leong points out, those kinds of breakthroughs are rare in therapy and can feel contrived in fiction. “More often than not, therapy is a slow drip of information,” she said.

While sending your character to therapy can be a useful exercise, those scenes don’t always need to appear in the final work. When considering whether or not to use therapy in a piece of fiction, Caroline says it’s important to distinguish what you as the writer need to know about your character and what needs to be on the page.

“The things that often come up in therapy,” she said, “are often more powerful as the subtext rather than the text of the novel. It’s important for you to know these things, but let us see them at work in the characters’ actions and interactions.”

In the end, Sheena removed the therapy scenes from her novel, keeping only the most essential points, which she lets Iris muse on throughout the novel. But even though the scenes didn’t stay, she doesn’t regret writing them. 

“I learned so much about Iris by writing those scenes,” she said. “And besides, I love eavesdropping on other people’s secrets.”

Daisy Alpert Florin was a BookEnds fellow in 2019-2020. Her novel My Last Innocent Year will be published by Holt in 2023.

BookEnds Alumni Speaker Event: Pleasure and Faith in Writing with Alice McDermott

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Fellow J. Greg Phelan on our November 2021 BookEnds alumni group author event 

I was having lunch with my mom’s three close friends from childhood. It was the first time we’d seen each other since my mom passed away, and her friends wanted to mark the occasion with a drink. I told them I couldn’t, that I had to keep my wits about me as that night I was going to interview my favorite author on Zoom. 

“Who?” they asked. When I told them, Aunt Kay, my mom’s buddy since junior high, smiled in joy and recognition. 

“Alice McDermott is my hero,” she said. “I feel like I know her, and she knows me.” 

Anybody who’s read Alice’s work knows what Aunt Kay means. (“Aunt Kay’s one of my people,” Alice said, when I told her the story.) 

I’ve been hooked on Alice McDermott’s work since Charming Billy, her 1998 National Book Award-winning novel. I felt like I knew her and she knew me, and my family, too. I don’t know of any other living writer whose work has touched me more as a reader and inspired me more as a writer, to slow down and observe the extraordinary moments of ordinary people, to seek meaning, wisdom, and truth in their stories. 

Her most recent book is her first of nonfiction, What About The Baby?, a wonderful collection of insightful essays on writing and craft based on her lectures at Sewanee Writers Conference, as well as her 23 years teaching creative writing at Johns Hopkins.

What an honor and privilege it was for me to interview her for our BookEnds Alum’s Visiting Writing Series, to ask her variations on the same question: How do you do it? Evoke such richly observed lives with such compressed, beautiful, seemingly effortless prose. Here’s what I learned. 

Alice makes the time and space to write, doing her best to keep distractions and self-doubts out of the room, so she’s alone with the words on the page. She writes badly for as long as it takes—which, she reminds us, is sheer hell—as she works and reworks sentences, keeping the faith that she’ll get where she needs to go in due time. 

The reason she has faith to keep at it is because she’s experienced moments of transcendence herself, as a reader––when, as she put it, “we read something and felt like it changed our lives, hit us in the spine, gave us a new way to look at the world. We just fall in love with a character or a setting or a situation or a voice and we recognize the value of storytelling.” That’s what keeps her going: “This endless hope; it’s not based on nothing. It’s based on what I’ve experienced as a reader.”

She reads and rereads her works-in-progress constantly, looking for patterns, connection, and meaning, like a scholar would. That’s the way she finds the form of the story. “Constantly going back and seeing, ‘Well now, I know this, what do I make of that?’ is part of the pleasure, but also part of understanding the consequence and the logical movement of a story through time.”

Her emphasis on rereading led to my big epiphany, which seems obvious when you hear it out loud: We should bring the same high expectations we bring to reading books to reading our own works-in-progress.  

Indeed Alice advocates reading our own work with the same level of concentration, curiosity, and expectation as the books we love––all the while reminding ourselves, no matter how impatient we are to get it done, that unless we feel the same excitement and sense of discovery reading our own prose as we hope to feel as a reader, we still have work to do. 

“Language is the only tool the writer has,” she writes. 

So how does she do it?

Block out time to write, putting distractions and self-doubts out of the room. Have faith the work is worthwhile, knowing what you have experienced as a reader. 

Read widely and deeply, bringing the same curiosity and high expectations to your own work-in-progress as you do to any book. 

That’s it, really. Why make it any more complicated?

Alice McDermott shows and inspires us to understand that, simply, there’s pleasure to be had in the work, for us and our readers. That this pleasure is reason enough to keep going.

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 co-founded a writing center, Project Write Now, where he is an instructor and the board chair. He is currently finishing a coming-of-age novel set in the summer of 1964.

What My Mentor Taught Me: On Working with Meg Wolitzer

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2019 Fellow Sheena Cook reflects and speaks with other Meg mentees. 

My BookEnds mentor Meg Wolitzer helped me with my manuscript A Tender Hate, which I had only been working on seriously for about a year when I applied. The manuscript was full of holes, and by the time I got to the second half of the BookEnds fellowship and began my work with Meg, my podmates had helped point out where the holes were and how to fill them with missing scenes. When I first met with Meg after she’d read my manuscript, I knew what I wanted to say, but didn’t know when to reveal which information.

Meg saw the structure from the first. “Well, this novel is in three parts,” she said. “The first part can end with this sentence here, the second part can be the big flashback and the third can be back in the present where the first part left off.” It was as if she had taken me to The Container Store and picked out three perfectly-sized and -shaped boxes, and sent me home to fill each one with what I already owned. I left that January meeting filled with energy. It was a sorting exercise. I could do this.

I had been longing for a structure, an architecture, a template. Meg gave it to me, as if she had intuited what the manuscript needed.

Indeed, Caroline “Coco” Picard, whose BookEnds novel The Healing Circle is forthcoming with Red Hen Press in 2022, said this: “Meg has an uncanny ability to identify the core of a book’s concerns, and how to give those concerns their due space. Working with Meg, I not only realized my propensity to conceal that murky territory but also gained the courage to make it apparent.”

I totally agree that Meg has “uncanny ability” as a mentor to novelists. She plucked a phrase from the middle of my novel and turned it into the title, A Tender Hate—and that title, it turns out, was the essence of the novel, the “core of the book’s concerns.”

Journalist Colleen Curry, who worked with Meg on her novel Married Women through the early months of the pandemic, said these were the nuggets from Meg that would stay with her: “Cut every part that isn’t the reader’s favorite, never stray too far for too long from what the book is really about; there should be something on every single page that delights the reader.” With these simple phrases, Meg sharpened Colleen’s eye toward her own work and reminded her of the purpose of the task.Colleen went on: “Meg’s line edits are so insightful, and her generosity in helping other writers is a model for all of us.”

When Stephanie Gangi came to speak to the BookEnds alums group about freelance editing, she said that what she looked for in an editor was someone to stand shoulder to shoulder, nose to the grindstone in the editing. Over many months and through multiple drafts, this was what Meg did for me. She was shoulder to shoulder with me, nose to the grindstone, generously inhabiting my manuscript and my characters along with me. In the last couple of weeks of my BookEnds fellowship, before the manuscript was submitted for  the agent read, I was in Scotland, so Meg and I were working at a 5-hour time difference which she accommodated without missing a beat. I would send the manuscript to Meg at my bedtime and when I woke up, there it would be in my inbox with a full edit.

At the last minute, Meg saw that there was an important missing scene. I had about half an hour before I was supposed to press “send” to Susie. I would normally mull over a new scene for days, writing drafts long, then reducing, sitting with it until it revealed to me what it wanted to say, but because Meg assumed I could write a whole new scene in minutes, it made me rise to her expectations. I wrote it in minutes and inserted it into its place. Shoulder to shoulder, indeed. 

“It’s Meg’s perception of how fiction works in the minds of readers that left the deepest impression on me,” Colleen said. “She understands why readers come to fiction in the first place, and what makes them sink into a book. Her lifelong study and deep love of stories remind me why I write.”

What a gift, Coco and Colleen and I agreed, to have had Meg’s brain and heart laser-focused on our work.

Sheena MJ Cook grew up on her family farm in the north of Scotland, became a lawyer in Edinburgh and London, then moved to the US and did an MFA in creative writing at Bennington. Her short stories and novel extracts have appeared in Two Serious Ladies, Literary Orphans and The Southampton Review, among other publications. She was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2018 and a BookEnds Fellow in 2018-2019, when she worked on her novel A Tender Hate. Her novel is now on submission in the UK and she is working on the next in the series.

BookEnds Alumni Speaker Event: Stephanie Gangi on Freelance Editing as a Writer

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Fellow Maggie Hill on our October 2021 BookEnds alumni group author event. 

It’s a known secret that novelist Stephanie Gangi (whose second novel Carry the Dog is just out with Algonquin) is also a “manuscript whisperer.” She works with both well-published authors and debut writers, to help develop what’s already germinating in the narrative. Although she’s written a massively entertaining first novel (I devoured The Next in two nights of everyone-leave-me-alone-I’m-reading obsession), it was her business as an editor over the course of the past twenty-five-plus years that was the focus of our Visiting Writer series guest discussion. 

Stephanie broke down how she approaches her editorial work, and outlined how she uses skills such as deep listening, translating with care, and approaching the work with kindness, consideration, and respect. Honesty, charity, patience are also high on her list of how to engage with an author. To use her expression, it sounded a bit “woo-woo” but I believed every word she said. “Every writer is different,” she said. “You have to tune in to where the person is at.” 

Stephanie prefaced her talk with how she is “not a lecturer, but a learner.” She was emphatic about how writers sometimes get to a point where “they are not able to see their own work” and reassured us that this was actually part of the process. What a good editor offers, she said, is “a cold eye that’s helpful.” But there was nothing cold about her, as she tried to articulate a process which is intuitive and subjective, coupled with a lifetime of practical engagement with good writing.  

What she said rang so true for me, as I’ve been on the merry-go-round of submission and rejection for a couple of years now, and even just that day had gotten a head-scratcher of a rejection from a wonderful agent. There are days when I just put my head down and work, and try to forget that this is a business, too. Listening to Stephanie helped me pick my head up and try to blink my way forward again. I’m also about to sit down with a bunch of post-it notes and try Stephanie’s manuscript evaluation technique as a revision exercise. One of the ways she approaches a piece of writing is to “flag, flag, flag” where her attention lags. She will then go back, and do the same for when she is fully engaged and actively reading in the manuscript. Examining every single moment, good and bad, allows her to “look behind the curtain to see how the book works.” 

A question she posed to us was, why do we grant permission for a voice, a narration, to get inside our heads? What is the moment when we grant access to this voice? I thought back to recent books I’ve read to find where and when I was fully on board and gave the author permission to enter my head. One novel that comes to mind right away is Toni Morrison’s SULA. The opening lines had my permission immediately:

In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood….It is called the suburbs now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom. One road, shaded by beeches, oaks, maples and chestnuts, connected it to the valley. The beeches are gone now, and so are the pear trees where children sat and yelled down through the blossoms to passersby. 

The tremendous, sonorous, elegiac voice of Morrison makes a town a character. All of the senses are being engaged right from the start. The narrative is particular, yet the poetry is universal — the full sensual engagement of experiencing this town, and the loss of it, begins in these first few lines. By the time the single paragraph is done, some seven sentences later, I am in church having my soul saved. Ah, I see what Stephanie Gangi is talking about with this permission business…

Stephanie was also adamant about how at some point in the process, we are unable to see our own work anymore—and how that is actually part of the process. “Editing a manuscript is an enormous undertaking,” she said. As such, she will work on (perhaps) two manuscripts in any given month. 

In answer to a question about how this freelance business of editing works, she explained the process of generating either an editorial letter (a one-shot, five-to-seven page editorial breakdown), or an extended period of working with an author on a developmental basis (months-long process of going through the work). “Seventy percent are process problems,” she said, so along with developmental work, she may also offer coaching. 

Summing up her process, she said she sees her work as an editor in part as an active meditation of deeply listening, loving words, and also, recognizing that she’s “a little judge-y.” She is also deeply grateful for how she’s been given chances to publish her novels at a later stage than ‘normal’ so she wants to pay it forward. For her, editing is a way to give back. 

This year, BookEnds welcomes Stephanie Gangi as a mentor for the 2021-2022 fellowship. Learn more about her at www.sgangi.com.

Maggie Hill came from a journalism background, writing about educational technology for Scholastic Professional Magazines, among other freelance clients. Her book reviews, essays, stories have been published in The New York Times, The Daily News, Persimmon Tree, and Flatbush Review. A 2018-2019 BookEnds fellow, she worked with Amy Hempel on completing her first novel, Hoops.

What My Mentor Taught Me: Meg Wolitzer on Unjamming the Narrative

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2021 Fellow Coco Picard on her work on two manuscripts with the BookEnds co-founding director.

My BookEnds mentor Meg Wolitzer helped me with two manuscripts, The Healing Circle, (Red Hen Press, 2022) and a nascent work, The Other Jane Dick. In looking at these projects with Meg’s generous and laser-sharp attention, I discovered my propensity to pack in the jokes. “Give them space,” Meg said. To let them land. Not only to provide the manuscripts a broader range of emotion and depth, but to let the reader enjoy the experience of reading without (my words) being force fed. 

Because I have a visual art background, I think about scenes and narrative like a painting: ranging contrasts and saturation are important in a picture. It’s essential that the individual components that make a composition serve rather than dominate the whole. Colors respond to one another. The relationship between shapes must be harmonious. My tendency, I discovered, was to try to make every part of my composition (or novel) a punchline. Meg and I talked about this. “Probably it’s because someone somewhere along the line liked that.” 

I realized that one way I mitigate my insecurities about longform fiction is by pushing the scenarios into absurdity, almost as a way of sublimating my own anxieties driving character dilemmas. So, for instance, The Healing Circle began as a nonlinear story of a hospitalized woman searching for a miracle cure. The Other Jane Dick is about a heartsick, low-rung art curator, who accepts an invitation to attend a globe-trotting, “branding” junket. In both books, the initial drafts kept everything on the surface. It was as though each narrative arc and its contextualizing world was described in saturated, dense colors, all sardonic, jokey, self-aware, and hard-nosed. In both instances, my characters refused sympathy as a result. They exhibited little emotional range and consequently denied that range of the book, withholding what was at stake in such a way as to ultimately refuse admitting a reader into the watery marshlands of vulnerability, change, and consequence. 

In recognizing the ways that I jam jokes, I was able to recognize that tendency in other formal decisions. Meg helped me prioritize certain aspects in each book over others. She encouraged me to reduce the waxing philosophic monologues (a little goes a long way) in The Healing Circle and make the individual threads of that book linear, even if different time frames punctured the fictive present. Similarly, in The Other Jane Dick, Meg helped me add space between elements to more fully highlight the difference between contemporary art culture and influencer culture so that my protagonist’s imposter syndrome came across.

Meg has an uncanny ability to identify the core of a book’s concerns, and how to give those concerns their due space. Working with Meg, I not only realized my propensity to conceal that murky territory but also gained the courage to make it apparent. My characters—all of them—are significantly more compelling and complex because of that mentorship and the space it afforded. 

Coco Picard was a BookEnds fellow in 2020-2021. Her novel The Healing Circle won the 2020 Women’s Prose Prize and is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Comics and criticism have appeared additionally in The Paris Review, Seven Stories Press, and Hyperallergic, among others. She is the author of The Chronicles of Fortune(Radiator Comics, 2017) and founded  the Green Lantern Press in 2004. www.cocopicard.com

What My Mentor Taught Me: Karen Bender on Setting

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Following graduation, 2021 BookEnds Fellow Rachel León reflects on the focus of work with her mentor.

In her brilliant memoir In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado states, “Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.” 

Machado reminds us of the exchange that should be happening between story elements. Setting affects plot, which affects characters, which affects point of view. All the elements should be in conversation with one another. Except they all must be present for the exchange to work, and setting was largely absent from the draft of my novel I submitted in December, the one my mentor, National Book Award finalist Karen Bender, read. 

Karen provided thoughtful, generous notes on my manuscript, offering me a clear map forward to make the novel stronger. The manuscript was in good shape structurally, though I had too many point-of-view characters (thirteen at the time). My two main tasks were compression and expansion. There was plenty to cut, but also so much I needed to build. Karen noted how my characters were floating in space; they were rarely grounded in scene and setting, which I’d shied away from because I’d thought no one would want to read about my city. 

The novel is set in my hometown of Rockford, Illinois, which often finds itself on lists like “Worst Places to Live in America.” Rockford is known for its high crime and unemployment rates, but what I think defines the city is its eternal optimism and dedication to improvement. I hadn’t considered how Rockford’s determination to triumph against-the-odds echoes the themes of my novel, which Karen described as a book version of The Wire focused on the foster care system. 

Because I had so many characters and storylines, Karen suggested opening the novel with an overview of Rockford in a way that could introduce the different characters. Was there a way I could bring everyone together? Not really. The intersection of the characters’ lives happens gradually by circumstance. So I played around with the idea before writing an opening narrated by the city itself. I loved it, but ultimately, had to scrap it. Karen was right: it didn’t quite work. I needed to start with characters, in a scene incorporating the setting. Karen had said she’d love to see more of Ebony, a queer white teen in foster care. It turned out Ebony’s sarcasm and view of Rockford was the perfect entry point into the story. 

But the failed attempt at an opening was, of course, not wasted. Not only was I able to rework some of my favorite sentences and sprinkle them throughout the manuscript, the exercise got me searching for places to infuse more Rockford into the manuscript. It also got me thinking about when the story took place, something I hadn’t previously considered. After writing about a citywide celebration held in honor of Rockford native Fred VanVleet after the Toronto Raptors won the 2019 NBA championship, I wanted to include that, too. 

Once I had a time period, I began researching the weather and what was happening locally, information that altered the storyline. The novel opens around Father’s Day, but clarifying it was June 2018 made me realize that was during a torrential storm that devastated some residents and left others unscathed—a story opportunity. It also ended up deepening Ebony’s character as I needed a die-hard basketball fan, and making her a small forward on her high school team meant she could be obsessed with Kawhi Leonard, who was traded to the Raptors in July 2018. Ebony had much more depth when she was good at something beyond being sassy. 

When Karen encouraged me to ground the manuscript, I had no idea focusing on setting would also add character depth and strengthen both the plot and themes of the novel. But like Machado said: places should be more than just places in our work, and that’s now true of my novel’s setting. Karen helped me see how “Rockford” my manuscript is—despite my characters being affected by economic and racial disparities, they rise up, striving for something better, which gives my novel a sense of hopefulness. In fully embracing Rockford as the setting—both the aspects that land it on the worst city lists, and its many virtues that go unnoticed—I finally activated all the story elements and made them work together. 

Rachel León is a social worker and writer whose work has appeared in Chicago Review of Books, Fiction Writers Review, West Trade Review, and other publications. 

What My Mentor Taught Me: Christina Baker Kline on Perspective and Narrative Closeness

Mentors, Novel Tips for Novel Writers, Revision, , , , ,

Jennifer Solheim’s interview with Christina Baker Kline is part of the Reader’s Guide in the paperback edition of Kline’s latest novel The Exiles, out today from Custom House.

When I learned Christina Baker Kline would be my faculty mentor for BookEnds, to say I was excited was an understatement. I had such admiration for her novel A Piece of the World (2017), a fictionalized account of the life of Christina Olson, the woman featured in Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World. Kline’s work is deceptive: her fiction reads like a glide on a porch swing and yet behind the sense of being gently carried along lies a  meticulous engineering. Each section of A Piece of the World reads like a prose poem, yet taken together  the narrative transports you back to the mid-twentieth century, to a creaky farmhouse with no running water or electricity and into the bodily experience of a brilliant young woman who was taken out of school to work the family farm, and whose body grew increasingly incapacitated by an undiagnosable condition.

My novel is set in Chicago in 2001, about an indie rock band in family therapy. I’d begun working in 2012, and over the years, the world of my novel had become far less contemporary. For example, the first completed draft in 2015 included characters sending text messages, something that was impossible in 2001. In the revision Christina first read, I had tried a narrative perspective that alternated between an omniscient narration that took a long view of history—from the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 to the election of Donald Trump in 2016—and close third in the narrative present of 2001, with three of the main characters. 

One of the first things that Christina pointed out was the way the omniscient perspective undercut the action. She suggested I stay closer to my characters in the narrative present, as the heat of the story lay with them, in that time. Furthermore, she said, with three points of view, there were times it was difficult to distinguish one perspective from another. Even though I had written those scenes in the close third person, it wasn’t close enough. Looking back, I think I’d been so concerned about trying to get the historical details and perspective right  that I’d lost sight of the particularity of my characters. 

Christina suggested I try writing a scene or two from each perspective in the first person. I did and was excited to see how the scenes seemed to shake themselves out, unfurl. I began to see  how the words, phrases, and obsessions of each of the point-of-view characters distinguished them from one another.

But another problem quickly became apparent: if I was writing in the past tense, I needed to figure out the point of telling—that is, from where, when and why the characters were narrating the story. So I checked in with Christina again, and her suggestion made perfect sense, but also felt antithetical for a work set in historical time: write not only in the first person, she said, but also in the present tense. 

This was, in fact, how she had written A Piece of the World—from Christina Olson’s perspective, in the present tense. Since Olson, a marginalized cultural figure, was historically elusive, Kline’s first-person present rendering of her life not only brought the reader into her experience, it lent a narrative intimacy with the character that simply wasn’t possible if she had crafted her story with more distance, whether in time, space, or both. 

As I dove into revising the first scenes as Christina had suggested, I experienced a disorientation that manifested as physical vertigo. And yet, after two mornings of revising in the first person present, I was certain this was the way to go. 

Why? First, and most importantly, it allowed me to access my characters with total immediacy—I was dropped into the moment with them, and by writing as if they experienced each  moment,  the world became tactile and palpable, the actions and dialogue of the other characters immediate and visceral. 

This brings us to the second reason why the first-person present can so well serve a novel set in historical time. Where historical events and eras are often written from the perspective of those in power, fiction can bring us into the experience of those at the margins—those whose stories go untold. 

What I learned from my mentor is that narrative perspective is a negotiation of time and space not only between text and reader; but also between character and writer. As Christina and I discussed, we can take these Emily Dickinson lines as an edict for writing fiction set in historical time: “Tell all the truth / But tell it slant / Success in circuit lies.” To bring my story into its time and place, I didn’t need an omniscient narrator to offer a history lesson. Rather, I needed to write my characters as they experienced their present, particular to their own lives, desires, fears, and motivations. 

Jennifer Solheim was a BookEnds fellow in 2019-2020, and now serves as the program’s Associate Director. 

What My Mentor Taught Me: Susan Scarf Merrell on Cutting Timelines and Embracing the Blank Space

Mentors, Revision, ,

Alum Daisy Alpert Florin reflects on working with the BookEnds Founding Director.

I applied to BookEnds with a manuscript I’d been working on for four years. The story of an affair between a college student and her professor, the novel shifted back and forth between two timelines: 1998, when the affair takes place, and 2016, when the two main characters meet again. My biggest challenge was how to combine the two timelines and also how to find the right ending, something that had eluded me so far.

I had tried combining the timelines in a few different ways. I’d put the 1998 section first followed by 2016, a structure used by Susan Choi in her novel My Education. I’d also tried starting with the 2016 section, allowing the novel to unfold like a long reminiscence like Emma Cline’s The Girls. Working with my BookEnds pod, I spent the fall working on braiding the timelines together, similar to Julie Buntin’s Marlena or Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa. This was the version I turned in to my mentor, Susie Merrell, in December. But I knew it wasn’t quite working and I still hadn’t found a way to finish the novel; the draft still had sections marked “FINISH THIS” and “SCENE TBD.”

When Susie and I met at her house in early January, she asked me to bring the whole manuscript printed out and separated into scenes. We laid it across her kitchen floor, the 1998 sections on one side and the 2016 scenes on the other. Right away, I could see how unwieldy it was and also how haphazardly I had incorporated the timelines. I started to worry—how had I worked for half a year and not managed to solve this problem? And what would I do now?

“You know what?” Susie said, looking around. “I don’t think you need the 2016 timeline,” and in that moment, I knew she was right. Susie walked me through the pages and showed me how little information was being conveyed in the 2016 sections and also that the second timeline had no real tension or arc. The story—the real story—was happening in the 1998 sections. I felt instantly relieved, as if I’d been walking around with three arms and someone showed me how much easier it would be to have only two. 

I went home and got to work. Still, early on, I had doubts. Was I eager to discard the second timeline because I just couldn’t figure it out or because it was the right thing to do? But Susie encouraged me to push forward. I worked from January to June on the revision, this time starting in a different place and cutting 55 pages of 2016 scenes. I could feel right away that the novel was sharper and tighter and with Susie’s clear and precise editing, I knew exactly how to get to the end. 

Early on, Susie asked why I had wanted the 2016 timeline in the first place. First, because I wanted the book to have a wistful, retrospective tone, to capture the feeling we have as adults when we look back on the actions of our youth. But Susie showed me I could do that by making it clear that the main character is narrating from a very specific time and place in the future. Whenever her voice intrudes on the 1998 narrative, I made sure it was emanating from this place.

Second, because my book asks questions about consent and sex and power, I felt in some ways obliged to include references to Trump and #MeToo. But Susie showed me how these details threatened to swallow up the novel I was better suited to write. I still think my novel is political, but once I let go of the idea of writing a capital-P political novel, I was able to complete a draft I was happy with.

Do I miss the second timeline? Not really, because it’s still very present for me. I needed to write those scenes for the rest of the story to make sense. Once I knew what was there, I no longer needed it in the same way, and, like scaffolding, it could be removed. Every writer throws out material, but it is never really gone. The 2016 sections of my novel are no longer on the page-—but they still exist in blank space.

Daisy Alpert Florin was a BookEnds fellow in 2019-2020. Her personal essays have appeared online in Full Grown People, Motherwell Magazine and Under the Gum Tree, among other publications. Her essay “Crash” was listed as a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2016. Her novel My Last Innocent Year is represented by Margaret Riley King at William Morris Endeavor.