Tag Archives: Sheena MJ Cook

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.

 

BookEnds Alumni Speaker Event: Expanding the Writer’s Life and Practice with Rebecca Morgan Frank

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Fellow Rachel León on our March 2022 BookEnds alumni group author event 

Rebecca Morgan Frank works across several genres and brought this interdisciplinary approach to her talk, entitled “There Were Nine Muses: Expanding the Writer’s Life and Practice.” She’s the author of four books of poetry, most recently Oh You Robot Saints! (Carnegie Mellon University Press), but she also writes short stories, essays, and reviews, and collaborates with composers. Drawing on her rich artistic background, Morgan explained that not only can we draw inspiration from painters, composers, choreographers, and other non-writer makers, but also we can learn from them, and even “steal” their approaches. She gave us several examples, including prompts from Gregory Halperin’s The Photographer’s Playbook to see how to apply them to our writing. 

It was an idea I hadn’t considered. While I grew up writing stories and dabbled in poetry as a teenager, I’d always seen writing and visual art as separate spheres and resisted the idea the two could overlap, partially because I saw them at odds. I attended college on a significant art scholarship and was in the middle of taking studio classes for my art major when I had my first child. It was like I’d given birth to a new creative brain in the process: I felt unable to draw, sculpt, or paint, but inexplicably wanted to write fiction. I tried to describe my predicament to my art professor—I just can’t anymore… but it was inexplicable. I’ve long tried to make sense of it (could it have happened out of necessity as writing can be done quietly and in spurts, whereas I painted while listening to loud music and needed hours at a time?) but the reason matters less than the aftermath: I abandoned visual art in favor of writing. 

After Morgan’s talk, we had an informal discussion about the way we’d all switched to writing from another discipline—the contrast of the collaboration of music theater versus the solitude of writing and the physical limitations of the body to return to the demands of ballet in middle age. As a recent alum, I’m still getting to know those in the cohorts before my BookEnds year. I’ve been friends with Jennifer Solheim for years, so I knew she was a bassist, singer, and songwriter in several indie punk bands. But in conversation with Morgan, I discovered that Sheena Cook and April Darcy studied classical music prior to writing; Daisy Alpert Florin was in musical theater; Sue Mell, like myself, was first a visual artist; and like our guest speaker, Marian Donahue was once on track to become a professional ballerina. It was delightful to learn all of us shared a creative lineage that didn’t start with writing. 

We also discussed how returning to art forms—or exploring new ones— can help our writing practice. For example, Marian’s novel is structured like an art exhibit, and she’s begun delving into art herself. Sue returned to visual art to design the cover for her novel, Provenance (out July 2022 from Madville Publishing) and Jennifer’s novel Interstitial centers around a rock band. April recently returned to playing the piano, while Daisy is taking lessons and finds comfort in the freedom to do it for enjoyment without the pressure of having to be good at it. This is something I could relate to: I took up dancing on my fortieth birthday for nothing but my own pleasure. 

Creating for enjoyment is something we can lose as writers when we get mired in the goal of publishing. Another thing Morgan addressed was the two sides of the writing process: the creative side, where our imaginations reside, and the publication realm, which is task-driven, applying, submitting, and getting our work into the world. While both spheres are necessary, we want to keep them separate when we’re creating. One way we can do that is through bodily practice—the physicality forces us to leave behind things like social media, which is notorious for distracting us, yes, but also pulls us into the marketplace of competition. She quoted the late Martha Graham, modern dancer and choreographer, who said, “This is not competition, there is no competition. You’re in competition with one person only and that’s the individual you know you can become.”

Being part of a supportive writing community like BookEnds and the alumni group helps remind us of that quote. Despite how it can feel—particularly with social media—we aren’t in competition with other writers. Rebecca Morgan Frank’s nourishing and inspiring talk reminded us of that, and how we each have a unique sensibility and can draw from our past creative backgrounds. Perhaps writing and visual art aren’t as antithetical as I thought when I was a new parent. Maybe it’s time for me to return to see how these art forms speak to each other through my own practice. 

Rachel León is a writer, editor, and social worker. She serves as Fiction Editor for Arcturus and Reviews Editor for West Trade Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Chicago Review of Books, Fiction Writers Review, Entropy, Nurture, Necessary Fiction, (mac)ro(mic), The Rupture, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere.

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.

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: Suzzy Roche on letting the note fail

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Fellow Sheena MJ Cook reflects on our May 2021 BookEnds alumni group author event.

Suzzy Roche is a founding member of the singing group The Roches who has recorded over fifteen albums. Her debut novel Wayward Saints (Hyperion/Voice) was a selection of the Spring 2012 B&N Discover Great New Writers Program, and her second novel The Town Crazy (Gibson House Press) was published in 2020. Since she was a teenager, Suzzy’s life as an artist, actor, singer and dancer has interwoven with her writing; the influence of music and lyrics on her writing is part of what we invited her to discuss with us, but we came away with an understanding of Suzzy’s commitment to her artistic process over time that goes far beyond the influence of one practice over another.

During the couple of weeks since the event, while I have been finishing a revision of my novel manuscript, what kept coming back to me was when Suzzy said that as she gets older, she can no longer reach the musical notes she used to. Yet, instead of fleeing from the note, which is her impulse, she makes herself stay there. “Let it fail,” she said. “Let it go where it’s going. Allow yourself to do it ungracefully. Go towards it, stay with it.” It’s that imperfection—the desperation of an attempt at the right note, listening to the singer aim for a note and not quite making it—that breaks open our hearts.

Suzzy talked about Marilyn Monroe having a sorrow about her, how everyone wanted to touch that place of pleasure and pain, the part that was falling apart, utterly human and not “figured out.” 

It made me think of Leonard Cohen’s lines “there is a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in.” It also made me think of the polio in Joni Mitchell’s left hand, which forced her to experiment with open tunings, allowing her to form the chord shapes that still break open our hearts today. Mitchell stayed with the failure, worked around the problem and strengthened a different part of her.

By contrast, I was trained in classical piano and if I hit a wrong note, I got a wooden ruler across my knuckles. It was physically frightening to fail, to hit the wrong note. My mother sang the correct note (with its name: B flat minor!!!!) from the kitchen while scraping mud off a basin of potatoes. When Suzzy told us it was not only fine not to hit the right note—and to stay on it, let it go where it wants to go—I wished she could go back down the years and have a word with my piano teacher.

I reread Lily King’s Writers and Lovers last week, about an aspiring novelist whose editor says, “Linger here. Let the reader feel this.” When she stayed with it, felt the moment, her understanding of it expanded. Things began to thrum across the book.

Suzzy said that if she is beginning to unkindly attack what she’s working on, she takes a break, moves to something else, then comes back to it. “I’m going to sing you again,” she says to her work. When she sticks with it, allowing it to become itself, it always finds its good place. “Let it be you, the gentle, imperfect you.” Sometimes it takes years to open up. She lets go of the intellect and lets in an openheartedness. It makes her vulnerable, allowing herself to be seen, however imperfectly.

As an inflection point, when the group discussed whether or not we listen to music as we write and how it affects the mood of our work, Meg told us that Kazuo Ishiguro thought he’d finished the manuscript of Remains of the Day, but then heard Tom Waits singing “Ruby’s Arms.” The crack in Waits’ voice as the song’s narrator says goodbye to Ruby made Ishiguro allow his emotionally buttoned-up butler a moment of having a crack in his emotions. Here it comes again: the crack in everything. It’s as if the breaking heart of Tom Waits’ soldier funneled itself through Ishiguro, cracked open the heart of his butler and the light got in.

So in my revision work after we met with Suzzy, I decided to do an experiment by listening to a song on repeat during breaks from editing the final draft of my manuscript. I had a scene near the end that wasn’t failing, exactly—it just wasn’t as satisfying as it could be. So, instead of avoiding it, I decided to “Suzzy” it: stay with the failing note, press on it, watch where it wanted to go, be kind to it. The scene is about a character who has helped someone dear to them die. I listened to Lucinda Williams’ “Sweet Old World” on repeat.Williams sings about everything the person choosing to leave the world will never feel again: the breath from their own lips, the touch of fingertips, a sweet and tender kiss, wearing someone’s ring, someone calling your name, somebody so warm cradled in your arms, dancing with no shoes, the pounding of your heart’s drum together with another one. 

In the old draft of the scene, my character only glanced lightly on the emotion behind the act, or rather I, the writer, had only touched lightly on the emotion. I listened to the song on repeat, I felt in my own body what my character might have been feeling, then I went back into the scene and let more emotion in, more senses, more loss. I stayed with the work, treated it kindly, sang it again, let it go where it wanted to, to an imperfect place—and finally, pressed “send” into the hands of a kindly stranger.

Zadie Smith says to “resign ourselves to the lifelong sadness that comes with never being satisfied” with the imperfection of our work. Perhaps this is an oblique complement to what Suzzy said: “It’s a gentle thing, this imperfection that comes with age. Be nice to the thing you’re trying to create and be nice to you, the creator of the thing.”

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.