Tag Archives: Writing Life

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!

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.

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.