Monday, February 27, 2023

TBR: Where Are Your People From? by James B. De Monte

TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe.

 

 


Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

 

The book is character-driven, told in the second-person point of view, and contains 19 stand-alone chapters, all centering on retired coal miner and first-generation American, Giacomo Agostini. It is not chronological. It does include moments from Jackie’s youth living in a coal- and clay-mining immigrant enclave in eastern Ohio; his late eighties while he is still hearty and independent; and the end of his years as he awaits death in a nursing home.

 

Which story did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which story gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

The stories I most enjoyed writing probably came at the end. I wrote versions of most of these years ago (and rewrote them again and again). By the time I got to the end, I knew Jackie and his world well enough that it came more quickly and naturally. I knew a lot about how he and the others would act in particular scenarios that the writing became a lot of fun in the end. An example would be “The Progress of Man”—a piece of flash fiction really—where the characters (Jackie and his cousin, Moon) are sort of playful.

 

The story I had the most trouble with is “Dago Red.” There are a fair number of references to death throughout the book—the loss of Jackie’s father, his mother, etc.—but this is the only story where the Jackie finds someone dead in the moment. I wrote a version of this story many years ago and was never quite satisfied with it. It was hard to pull off. Then, I shifted and decided to lay it out at the beginning. The full title of that story, in fact, is “Dago Red, or, Here’s How Cousin Moon Came to Die.”

 

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

 

I have been interested since my undergraduate days (two decades ago) in telling versions of family stories about my relatives who worked in coal mines, who died in coal mines, who hauled moonshine as little kids during prohibition, and so forth. Then, during my MFA program in the NEOMFA and Kent State, my full thesis was about 150 pages of stories like these, all with one central character. My advisor at the time, Varley O’Connor, was very helpful as I shaped these.

 

In the decade that followed, nothing much came from these and I went on to write other things, though every few years I would go back and rewrite or revise some of the individual pieces. I even submitted a shortened version of the whole thing in the early 2010s to various small presses, and it ended up being a finalist in some contests, but nothing more than that. Flash forward to March 2020. I found myself working from home once COVID hit, no longer commuting an hour each way to work, so I used the extra time to get up before 5 and write for a few hours each morning at my basement workbench. I became entirely focused on this book, writing some new pieces for it, rewriting existent ones, and even scrapping others. After about a year or so, I started sending it out again and, fortunately, Cornerstone Press at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point was interested.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

It’s simple, but my undergraduate advisor, Frank Tascone, told me to write every day, if possible. That hasn’t always felt possible, but I’ve had my best periods of production when I’ve tried to heed this advice, getting into a routine and staying focused.

 

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

 

I love that idea. From now on, I’m going to say that’s my favorite piece of writing advice.

 

In this book, I knew Jackie’s life would start to come unraveled. Some of the earliest stories I had written were of him in a nursing home. I’ve spent a lot of time in those throughout my life, visiting older relatives, older neighbors, and others. Originally, that’s where I thought the unraveling would be shown. Then, while working on these again, I started seeing Jackie in his home just before going into a nursing home, figuring out those moments where everything starts slipping away from him and he knows his days are numbered—some kind of purgatory. Specifically, I ended up showing him drawing pictures of long-dead relatives in coal dust and mud on the cement block of his basement walls. I never imagined that at all until I started typing the sentences.

 

How did you find the title of your book?

 

Originally, I called this Dago Red. One chapter has that title and there’s death throughout; plus, the title seemed original and interesting to me. But after writing and rewriting over time, it did not quite make sense for the full book in the same way that Where Are Your People From? does.

 

I can remember many times over many years, hearing older relatives—my grandparents and great-aunts and uncles—ask this about others: Where are their people from? What nationality are you? etc. This mattered to them, to know other people’s roots, what brought them here. Most of this generation of my family were children of immigrants, some of them having spent part of their earliest days back in Southern Europe—in Trentino and in Sicily. These identities were dug deeply into them and shaped how they saw and experienced the world, even though they spent almost their entire lives in America. This, along with the second-person narrative voice throughout most of the book, led to the title as it is.

 

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?

 

There’s plenty of food referenced throughout, mostly basic Northeast Italian and Italian-American cuisine: polenta with gravy, gnocchi, salamets, tagliatelle, canederli in broth, anise-flavored pizzelles. Canederli, in particular, is specific to South Tirol, where Jackie’s family comes from, but the version his sister fixes is a bit Americanized (using hard salami instead of speck) and heated up in the microwave for him when he stops by. She makes this still, as their mother did, but she’s in her eighties by this point and there’s no one else that will keep it up after her.

 

One version of this: https://www.the-pasta-project.com/canederli-in-broth-south-tirol-recipe/

 

There are simple desserts, too—cakes, pies, doughnuts—all of which are American or some Americanized version of those things. Jackie used to steal apple-and-nut and black-bottom custard pies from his neighbor’s windowsill when he was a little boy, on his way to steal coal from the tops of train cars to bring back home. His mother used to make a chocolate cake with caramel topping on Sundays after having learned of it from relatives closer to the Ohio River, and even served some to a wayward traveler who came begging. And, in the end, Jackie’s nephew picks him up at the nursing home once a week to take him to a local doughnut shop called Taylor’s, the last of its kind in town, where Jackie likes to buy a full bag of day-olds, including apple fritters and other rolls. But they wouldn’t be allowed to call “cream sticks” doughnuts if he had anything to say about it.

 

*****

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS PUBLISHER:

https://www3.uwsp.edu/english/cornerstone/Pages/CORNERSTONEPRESS.aspx

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK:

https://www3.uwsp.edu/english/cornerstone/Pages/BOOKS.aspx (scroll to title)

 

READ A STORY, “Effetto Montagna” from The Showcase: https://theshowcase.substack.com/p/showcase-july-2022

 

 

 

 

 

Monday, February 6, 2023

TBR: Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss by Gayle Brandeis

TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe.

  


Give us your elevator pitch: whats your book about in 2-3 sentences?

 

The subtitle of Drawing Breath gives a clear window into what the book holds—Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss. What it doesn’t tell you, however, is that these essays were written over the span of 20+ years, making this collection a retrospective of sorts, a record of the subjects I keep returning to over time, the steady pulses of curiosity/obsession/devotion within my writing life.

 

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

My 1999 essay, “Spelling” was so much fun to write and makes me so happy every time I read it. It’s about my daughter teaching herself to write as a little girl, and is one of the oldest essays in the book (and I’m realizing I should write about joy more often if I have to look so far back to find my most enjoyable piece! I’ve certainly had fun writing other things since, but this one just felt like pure celebration.) My daughter is in her late 20s now, and is a beautiful writer—I love how that same magic she had as a child continues to sparkle through her. The hardest essay to write in the collection was “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying” from 2012 [see link below]. It was the first thing I had written that looked directly at my mom’s suicide, and the process of getting it onto the page was excruciating. The experience of publishing it was terrifying, too, at least at first, but the warm response the piece received gave me courage to keep going to those hard places in my work.

 

 

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your books road to publication.

 

Since I didn’t have a book in mind as I wrote the essays within it—I just wrote them as they came to me, and later pulled them together—the presence of the book feels like a lovely surprise, an icing-on-the-cake book. I feel like I have less ego-attachment to Drawing Breath than I do with books I’ve wrestled with single-mindedly for years (even though perhaps there’s more of me in this book than any other, since it does cover such a broad span of time). When Drawing Breath was on submission, I found rejections stung less than they usually do, and I feel like I can let this book journey into the world without burdening it with expectation, maybe because most of these essays have already been published, so I’ve survived the anxiety of those being read publicly, and have received sweet support for them as individual pieces. This is not to say I don’t feel any anxiety about the book release—of course I do!—but it’s a less consuming anxiety than usual. A big high of this process has been landing at Overcup Press—they’ve been a dream to work with (and I have Liz Prato to thank for this…she had taken over the Overcup Twitter feed—they had published her wonderful essay collection, Volcanoes, Palm Trees, and Privilege: Essays on Hawai’i—and when I saw what they were actively looking for, I realized Drawing Breath could be a good fit. I’m grateful they agreed!)

 

 

Whats your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

I return to Hélène Cixous’ advice all the time: Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.” I used the last two lines of this as an epigraph for my 2002 craft book Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write, and I use another Cixous quote for the epigraph of Drawing Breath. “My body experiences, deep down inside, one of its panicky cosmic adventures. I have volcanoes on my lands. But no lava: what wants to flow is breath. And not just any old way. The breath ‘wants’ a form. ‘Write me!’” (That quote isn’t advice, per se, but it resonates with my experience. Clearly, Cixous speaks to me!) I’ve also held Audre Lorde’s sentence “Your silence will not protect you” close to my writerly heart—it’s guided me through some of my most difficult writing.

 

My favorite writing advice is write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

 

I love this advice—surprise is one of my very favorite parts of the writing process. As I noted earlier, the fact that my essays coalesced into a book feels like a cool surprise in itself. In terms of surprise during the writing process, I’m going to harken back to “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying,” the essay I found the hardest to write. The essay has two parts—the first part is about leaving my first marriage, and the second part is about my mom’s suicide, and I thought the two parts were tied together only by the Belle & Sebastian song I use as the title for this essay, since that song played an important role during both time periods of my life. Then the last sentence of the essay poured out of my fingers and tied the two parts together in a way that surprised the hell out of me and brought me to tears, and I realized “Oh, wow, this is what this essay is about.” My writing is way smarter than I am.

 

How do you approach revision?

 

Revision was a wild process with this collection. I often tell my students to set work aside for a while so you can see it freshly (because that works!), but I usually don’t set work aside for 20 whole years and returning to the older work was quite a trip. I noticed some writerly tics in those older pieces that I needed to smooth out (an over-reliance on the word, “though”, for example), and had to do quite a bit of tightening (including removing the then-standard extra space after each period, which now looks like a big gaping hole to me), but I was glad to see they mostly held up over time. Another revision challenge: I’ll often return to the same stories over the course of several essays, because I still have questions about the experience, or want to approach the story from a new angle, or just can’t shake it from my system, and I had to figure out how to remove repetition of information from one piece to the next so the book wouldn’t become a hall of mirrors.

 

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

 

I adore reading and writing about food, but when I first pondered this question—such a great question!—I couldn’t think of a single dish in the book. Then I combed through the collection and found at least 40 food references (including two discomfiting food “tangles”— “The tangle of shrimp, glistening with butter, looked obscene, like an orgy in the shallow bowl” and “a plate of what they called chow mein looked like a gray tangle of slime.”) I’m not sure how I had forgotten there was so much food in the book, especially since one of the essays is titled “Eating the Food of the Dead” and is about the food my parents and my husband’s mother left behind after they died. Most of the food in Drawing Breath has more emotional resonance than it does any culinary sophistication, but I would be tickled if someone wanted to make my dad’s favorite sandwich: Swiss cheese, mayonnaise, and bread and butter pickles on toasted rye. Buzz sandwiches forever!

 

As far as more complex recipes go, I feel like I should give you one for cookies, since cookies, I was tickled to discover, appear in four different essays in the collection, and two of those feature thumbprint cookies—some made by my former mother in law in one, my dad’s favorite Pepperidge Farm variety in the other. I don’t think I would have noticed there were two different thumbprint cookies in the book if you hadn’t asked this question—thank you for the fun surprise/discovery! It feels apt to share a recipe for this type of cookie because writing is like a thumbprint, isn’t it? So unique to each writer’s own body/voice. I don’t think I’ve ever actually made thumbprint cookies before (other than helping my beloved former mother in law make hers), but I do want to try this recipe, which works with my various dietary restrictions—https://simple-veganista.com/almond-flour-thumbprint-cookies/ . While both varieties of thumbprint cookies in the book are filled with raspberry jam, I’d like to try the recipe writer’s suggestion to use lemon infused olive oil and rosemary in the cookies, plus I’d add pine nuts instead of the recommended almonds, since one of the most memorable batches of cookies I've ever made were pine nut rosemary shortbread ones from a recipe I found in the Los Angeles Times about twenty years ago (appropriate, given the vintage of some of the essays in this collection). I can still smell and taste that shortbread so vividly two decades later, and am excited to attempt this variation of them soon. I’ll probably fill the thumbprints with a dairy free lemon curd, like the one at https://minimalistbaker.com/vegan-lemon-curd/.

 

As apt as these cookies are, I’m realizing now that perhaps the most fitting reference to food in the collection is the potluck dinner in my essay “Ghosts in the Ecotone.” That essay takes place during a weekend writing retreat, where all of us had brought dishes to share at a communal dinner, and the table was heaped with all kinds of deliciousness. Drawing Breath is a smorgasbord of sorts, itself—a smorgasbord of my writing, and also a smorgasbord of voices other than my own, since I quote a large number of other writers throughout Drawing Breath. I wanted to set a generous table with this book, and hope readers leave feeling well-fed.

 

*****

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.gaylebrandeis.com

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://bookshop.org/p/books/drawing-breath-essays-on-writing-the-body-and-grief-gayle-brandeis/18582442?ean=9798985652710


READ AN ESSAY, “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying”: https://therumpus.net/2012/05/23/get-me-away-from-here-im-dying/

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, February 1, 2023

TBR: Big Man and the Little Men: A Graphic Novel by Clifford Thompson

TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe

 


Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences
?

 

April Wells, an African American writer, is embedded with the campaign of the presumed Democratic presidential nominee when she is approached by a woman who claims that the candidate once assaulted her. If April doesn’t report on this, she will fail in her duty, but if she does, she will help the racist, misogynist Republican nominee. April’s difficulties only begin there.


 

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why?

 

I most enjoyed creating April, because she is the way I imagine my ideal reader to be and also has aspects of myself. She is intelligent and decent, and she is sometimes sad for reasons she doesn’t fully understand. She has a touch of impostor syndrome. She discovers that the world is even more screwed up than she thought it was, and she tries to call it out, even if she can’t do much more.

 

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

 

The high—and it was constant—was just the opportunity to tell a story visually, to sit at my drafting table with old blues on the stereo and spend time drawing the characters I came to love. There were some production issues that would be as boring to hear about as there were frustrating to experience, but those frustrations were learning experiences, and they were far outweighed by the good moments.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

It was spoken by the writer Susan Cheever when we co-taught a writing workshop: “Every ant has to carry a crumb.” In other words, if something is in your essay, story, or poem, it has to perform a job—or be taken out.

 

What surprised you in the writing of this book?

 

Probably the biggest surprise of all is that I got to do it. My first ambition in life was to be a comic book artist and writer; later I turned to prose writing, but the visual-art impulse never left me. About fifteen years ago I started painting, and I joined Blue Mountain Gallery, a New York City–based artists’ collective, in 2020. (My first solo show opens there in late February.) In about 2019 I had the idea to create a graphic novel, and my publisher, Other Press, was on board. So on the cusp of sixty, I have fulfilled the ambition I had when was a teenager. Not everyone gets to say that, and I feel extraordinarily lucky.

 

How did you find the title of your book?

 

Over twenty years ago, I had the idea to call something “Big Man and the Little Men.” It was a title in search of a book—but I was taken with the idea of a charismatic man surrounded by a group of lower-key friends. And there is such a group in my graphic novel: Sam Benjamin is April’s friend from high school and is now the mayor of their hometown. When things get dicey for April, she turns to them for advice.

 

*****

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.cliffordthompson.info

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: www.otherpress.com