10 (ok, 12) Writers I Read in College, Then Never Again & Why Not

Anthony Trollope, too many books

 

John Milton, too lovey-dovey with Satan

 

Samuel Pepys, too much gossip about people I haven’t met

 

Alexander Pope, too rhymey

 

William Makepeace Thackeray, too sharp

 

William Wordsworth, too flowery

 

William Faulkner, too many words

 

William Blake, too ambiguous; experienced or innocent…which the F is it?

 

William Carlos Williams, too William-y

 

Matthew Arnold...though I remain eager to publish my undergrad story about a frat party, title inspired by “Dover Beach”: “Where Ignorant Armies Clash by Night”

 

Jonathan Swift…though I continue to nod in pleased recognition at every newspaper op-ed reference to “A Modest Proposal”

 

Thomas Hardy…though I don’t know why not; I loved his books back then! Maybe too far from the literary crowd these days??

NOTE: I'm taking a summer break from writer interviews and am just going to have FUN with this blog for a month or so.

10 Writers to Road Trip With

 

Hunter S. Thompson, if he lets you drive

Jack Kerouac, if you’re a man

Laura Ingalls Wilder, if you enjoy a slower pace

Madeleine L’Engle, if you tesseract

John Steinbeck, if it’s California or bust

Joseph Conrad, if you think there’s a chance you won’t want to return

Geoffrey Chaucer, if you’re fine with a group rate

Robert Frost, though there are miles to go before you’ll sleep

John Milton, as long as it's not an island cruise

Flannery O’Connor, if you leave the grandmother and Pitty Sing at home

NOTE: I'm taking a summer break from writer interviews and am just going to have FUN with this blog for a month or so.

On Writing: When the "Dark Place" Has You by the Throat

Here’s an essay I wrote about a dark writing time in my not-so-distant past, originally published in the Delmarva Review, and now online, thanks to their partnership with the Spy publications:

Enticing excerpt:

For several years, I had been in a different sort of dark place, the one where every other writer in America had a new book being rave-reviewed and winning A Major Award. I had written a beautiful novel that had been rejected by every publisher in America. This was actually the second novel in a row I had written to be rejected by every publisher in America. The notes from my agent were getting brief. Because I’d focused on writing novels, I didn’t have many short stories to send around for a possible hit of lit journal publication, and anyway, the short stories I did have had been rejected by every literary journal in America. My favorite things about my writing life then were leading workshops, making pronouncements about writing, and watching students improve under my sharp eye. I can still teach, I thought, at least there’s that.

Read the rest:

https://talbotspy.org/delmarva-review-dark-vs-darker-by-leslie-pietrzyk/

(And I'll add that the story in question is included in THIS ANGEL ON MY CHEST: "Chapter Ten: An Index of Food (Draft).")

Researching the 80s Can Be Totally Awesome!

From my essay up at the AWP Writer’s Notebook:

“I researched and wrote a novel set in 1900 Chicago, but what a cinch compared to writing about 1982 Chicago—though I was alive in 1982, with a brain actively recording memories. Some American eras beckon novelists seductively with auras of perpetual cool: Roaring Twenties. Grunge in the ’90s. The Sixties, everyone’s darling. Punk! Other historical times are lesser known, allowing the writer to do exactly what she wants: the 1200s. 1823. The Ice Age. But the time setting of my new novel, Silver Girl, is the late ’70s and the early ’80s, which I found was a challenging historical period to write about. (Yes, forty years ago is “historical fiction.”)…”

Read on to see my tips for how to handle modern historical research:

https://www.awpwriter.org/magazine_media/writers_notebook_view/67/the_80s_are_like_ancient_writing_and_researching_modern_historical_fiction

REVERSING THE RIVER: Serialized Novel Available

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my historical novel is being serialized this summer. REVERSING THE RIVER is set in Chicago, on the first day of 1900, when the city is completing a major engineering feat to reverse the flow of the Chicago River so the sewage moves downstream instead of into the city’s drinking water.

There are only a few more chapters to go, so now is a good time to jump in and get caught up.

You can find REVERSING THE RIVER on Medium: https://medium.com/s/reversing-the-river  There’s a small fee to register for Medium, which is LESS than the cost of a book AND gives you access to all of Medium’s great content. There’s also an audio file.

OR

You can download the Great Jones Street literary app on your phone/iPad; look it up in the Apple Store/Play Store.

Here’s a link to excerpt and more information: http://writingpolishdiaspora.blogspot.com/2017/09/reversing-river-by-leslie-pietrzyk.html

My Online Novel, Serialized!

https://medium.com/s/reversing-the-river

Here’s where you can access REVERSING THE RIVER, my historical novel set on one day in Chicago at the turn of the (previous) century, when the citizens of Chicago completed their massive engineering project to literally reverse the flow of the Chicago River to ensure safe drinking water.

We meet Jozef, a Polish immigrant who is struggling to care for his newborn son and understand his complex relationship with love and family, and Lucy, an affluent young woman who is learning the secrets behind her recent, hasty marriage. How will the course of their lives be reversed on this momentous day?

So…I’m not sure if you can go directly to that link or if you’ll have to sign up for Medium first (do it! It’s a cool site!). You can also download the Great Jones Street literary app and look me up by name (that’s ZYK, not yzk!).

New chapters will be released weekly…or so I hear!

If you try this, and it works—or doesn’t—or you have questions/problems—please let me know. I’m just as curious as you are about how this all will work out! The one thing I know is that it’s a darn good book, and I’m very proud of it.

Link: https://medium.com/s/reversing-the-river

"Beware of Historians": Historical Research for the Fiction Writer

I wrote for the AWP Writer’s Notebook about my experience doing historical research for REVERSING THE RIVER, my novel set in 1899 Chicago, about to be released on the Great Jones Street literary app (free to download for Apple & Android!).

The piece is called “Eight Things This Fiction Writer Learned about Historical Research,” and here’s an excerpt:

Number 1: The concept of “enough.” Perhaps the most important thing that the writer should remember is that one single word: “enough.” There is “enough” research when you’re writing fiction. You’re not going to learn everything about your time period, and, frankly, you don’t need to know everything: you only need to know “enough”—enough to tell your story in a believable way. You’re not writing an authoritative history; you’re writing a STORY. People are reading your book to see what happens next to your characters, not so they can understand trends in Elizabethan England. So, beware of historians. Historians think you should know everything. You really only need to know “enough.” I know what kind of carriage my character Lucy rides in and what the road is like, but I don’t know if there are still posts to hitch up horses in the street. I don’t know if rich people in Chicago preferred black horses or brown horses. Sure, it would be nice to know those things, and if I did, I might throw the information into the story, but it’s not relevant and it’s not necessary....

And here is the rest:

https://www.awpwriter.org/magazine_media/writers_notebook_view/59/eight_things_this_fiction_writer_learned_about_historical_research

Catching Up on Some Good Writing News

Several of my Facebook friends feature "good news Friday," and while that's more of a collaborative effort, I'm going to take over my own blog (which I think I'm allowed to do??) to share three bits of good news in my writing life:

~I don’t think I ever posted the link to my new story in The Hudson Review…because why? Either I’m lazy, which is likely, or I’m still feeling so overwhelmed at seeing my work in this journal, which is iconic and historic and a place I once worked at as a lowly editorial assistant way back when, so to see my own writing in these pages, in this font is, well…overwhelming.

Excerpt from "The Shadow Daughter":

            In college, in the early eighties, money was why I didn’t smoke, drink, or do coke. If I wanted to, I found boys.

            “He’s not good enough for you,” my best and only friend Jess might suggest, her suggestions always commandments. “His face is boring. And that bad breath. Like a dragon. What do you see in him?”

            I spouted clichés about still waters running deep while remembering how the boy drove me to a blues bar on Howard Street, putting down a twenty for as many shots of Wild Turkey as I wanted while the music pulsed my skull. If I thought about that, I wouldn’t think about later, kissing him in his car, when he panted his dragon-breath into my ear and across my eyelids. Or when, with the sun coming up, I trudged to my dorm and its fluorescent-bright, group bathroom, where I jammed two fingers deep into my mouth, crushing hard against the back of my tongue to make myself puke, the way to avoid hangovers, to not feel rotten the morning after.

Link to read the rest: http://hudsonreview.com/2017/01/shadow-daughter/#.WJTislMrK70

(I’m also oddly shy to reveal that the story took second place in the fiction contest!)

Note: Part of this story is taken from one of the writing prompts in my prompt group..."a ton of luck."

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~THIS ANGEL ON MY CHEST is now available in paperback! This development was not an automatic thing as general readers may assume; rather, both printings of the hardcovers sold out and so the demand was high enough to call for a paperback edition. So, THANK YOU everyone who bought a hardcover…now, feel free to buy paperbacks for your friends!

Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/This-Angel-Chest-Heinz-Prize/dp/0822964457/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1489766651&sr=8-1

University of Pittsburgh Press link: https://www.upress.pitt.edu/BookDetails.aspx?bookId=36596

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~Much more about this later, but my novel, REVERSING THE RIVER, set in Chicago on one day in 1899 when years of engineering resulted in reversing the flow of the Chicago River, will be appearing on the Great Jones Street literary app!

Read more about the app here (and download it for free to your phone): https://www.greatjonesstreet.press/

I’ve already got a couple of stories on the app—which bills itself as “the Netflix of short fiction” and boasts “1000 stories in your pocket”—and it’s exciting to be part of the vanguard, as Great Jones Street pushes us into thinking differently about our relationship with story and reading. The future is going to be so much more than drones and driverless cars, folks!