Reflections on Creative Nonfiction, Life-Writing, and the Essay
My second book is now a virtual reality at the University of Nebraska Press (never mind that it doesn’t even have a cover image yet! Ha!). I’m expecting the copy edit in a matter of weeks, then proofs, then voilà!
If you’re the kind of person who likes to have all her ducks in a row, click here to be among the first to own Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė.
[Image: virtual reality by OlivIreland]
Today I received the last photograph for my forthcoming book, Epistolophilia.
It shows the translator, Vytautas Kauneckas, at the desk in his Lithuanian summer home. Behind him stands a stack of texts sent to him from France by Ona Šimaitė, the subject of my book.
The photograph is from 1959 and has a few water stains. Yet somehow, despite the fact that his image was captured more than fifty years ago in the USSR, the man in the photograph looks utterly contemporary. When I opened the email attachment my colleague at the Vilnius University archives sent me, I found myself deeply moved.
Since I’ve been reading Kauneckas’s letters for the past decade, he (like Šimaitė) is someone I feel I know. Of course, since he died long before I began this project, I never met him. Our posthumous acquaintance only goes one way, but the eyes in that photo tell me I would have liked him not only on paper, but in person too.
In all, my book will contain twenty-seven photographs and two maps. There are lots of images of the book’s subject, the Holocaust rescuer and librarian, Ona Šimaitė, portraits of her correspondents (like Kauneckas), images of her letters and details from her diaries, as well as the shots of significant landmarks I took in the course of my research: her apartments in Paris and Vilnius, and the camps where she was interned.
The process of finding the archival photographs and obtaining permission to publish them has been complex. It’s required a lot of good will and patience on the part of archivists, who (lucky for me) tend to be kind and generous people. I have to say that it’s been worth the trouble, and I can’t wait to see all the visual materials in print.
I wish I could post the Kauneckas photo here, but I must respect the usage agreement I’ve made with the archive — which doesn’t include posting the image on a blog!
I hope that once they appear in Epistolophilia, these photographs will seduce my readers as much as they have me. And that you too will come to love these marginal, ghostly and paper friends as much as I have.
Epistolophilia
/ɪˈpɪst(ə)ˌlə(ʊ)ˈfɪlɪə/
noun.
Love of letters and letter writing; affection for the art of epistolography; a sickness characterized by excessive letter writing.
***
After much brainstorming, discussion, reading and re-reading of my manuscript, I have arrived at a title for my second book, due out in 2012 with the University of Nebraska Press:
Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė
I’m happy with the title, because it actually says what the book is about: a love of letters, the writing of (oh so) many letters, and the challenge of writing a life on their basis.
I’m busy with final details in the manuscript, but it will be off my desk today. Hurray!
Next step: Copyediting.
As my dissertation supervisor used to say: Onward.
[Photo: nicasaurusrex]
It’s quiet in the house for the first time in days. No feet pounding up and down the stairs, no pleas for more tv, no guitar strains floating up from the basement, and no more hacking cough or sneezing from the nasty cold that visited us. The holiday’s over, and we’re back to work. Sean’s in the classroom today, Sebastian’s at daycare, and I’m back at my desk. Normally, I love a silent house, but today it feels a bit melancholy, so I’m taking a few minutes to readjust and reflect.
2010 was a good year for me as a writer. It was the year I finished and sold my second book — that manuscript that had been so difficult to complete. It was the year of my breaking into newspapers with personal essays, of my trip to Siberia, of winning my second Canada Council grant, and of the appearance of a hard-fought essay. I read some wonderful books over those twelve months, and found a clarity and momentum in my work that sometimes surprised me.
Finally, 2010 saw the birth of this blog. I began it timidly and almost apologetically, but soon found myself enjoying the platform and the discipline it required.
Personally speaking, 2010 was the year my son was three, a magical in-between-baby-and-personhood age, where children say and observe the most amazing things. In this regard, it was one of many beautiful linguistic and emotional gifts. Of course, it was also the year I lost my beloved maternal grandmother, so there’s a sadness overlying that time too.
But I made some very good friends in 2010: writers, poets, and wonderful women whose presence I’m very grateful for in my life. And it was the eleventh New Year that I celebrated with my husband, and for that too I am thankful and a bit humbled.
For 2011, I hope for continued clarity, continued productivity and maybe even a completed third manuscript. Certainly a good essay or two, maybe a few more friends.
As for my personal life: parents around here call the period of childhood we’re about to enter the “f**king fours.” Hold on to your hats. We’ll see how it goes.
Happy New Year.
I wish you health, happiness, productivity and twelve months of beautiful linguistic and emotional gifts.
[Photo: Brian Wilson]
I’ve been working with archival materials for more than a decade now.
While writing my dissertation, I sat in archives comparing drafts of novels, tracking authors’ corrections and studying the process of composition and revision. More recently, I’ve been working on diaries and letters, telling the story of a life on the basis of private papers. Archival work can be slow and painful: you have to read some twenty or fifty letters before you find one that grips you, speaks to you, or tells you something new.
Piecing together a narrative from a million seemingly inconsequential details is the hardest literary thing I’ve done yet. You can’t know what will be important, so you have to copy everything, read everything, and take copious notes. The result is a lot of paper, loads of post-its, a stack of storage boxes as tall as me, and a chaotic office. Only after thousands of hours of reading and reflection will a thread start to emerge.
Waiting for the thread takes faith and patience.
Still, there’s little that thrills an archival researcher more than making a connection or accidentally finding a key piece of evidence: these moments of pleasure that make the pain worthwhile.
So here’s where I’m at: after years of work, of mastering my subject’s writings, and having finally completed my manuscript, it dawns on me that I don’t own this material. While writing my book, I had put the issue out of mind, but now that I’ve finished, it’s time to face facts.
And the fact is that it’s not mine to publish. Not yet.
The issue is copyright.
In order to cite from unpublished archival materials, international copyright law requires permission of the author’s next-of-kin. In the absence of an heir, you must prove that you have made a good-faith effort to find one.
To be fair, I have a long-standing and good relationship with the nephew of my main biographical subject who controls the copyright of ninety per cent of the material that is important to my book. But permission for the other ten per cent now needs to be secured. I waited to finish the manuscript before starting the permissions process, because only now do I know what’s important to my story
For the past two days, I’ve been writing emails and making cold calls to Eastern Europe in my good-faith effort to locate the heirs of the authors of additional archival documents I cite.
And although it’s going well, the realization that I’d written a book that I might not be able to publish kept me up all last night.
This is the panic of archival work.
May the heirs be kind and generous.
Fingers crossed.
[Photo uploaded by anvosa]
A while ago I wrote a post on failure and returning to the first-person voice. I told how I’d worked on an essay that got rejected countless times before it found its form and its home.
That essay has now appeared in the journal Feminist Formations, in an issue about the body.
Called “Pregnant Pause: On Ona Šimaitė, Research, Writing, and Motherhood,” my essay explores the riddle of being a writer and a mother. It’s a love story between a writer, her new baby and her biographical subject (a Holocaust rescuer and librarian).
If you don’t have access to Project Muse and would like a copy of the essay, feel free to send me a note via my Contact page, and I’ll get a PDF version off to you.
[Photo: Shutter Daddy]
It’s grant season, so I’m writing my yearly emails asking friends and mentors to act as references in various competitions. I’ve been particularly overwhelmed by the encouragement and unqualified support I’ve received on all fronts, even from writer-friends I’ve never met in person and only know through email. All this literary love, as it were, has gotten me thinking about friendship.
It’s a lot easier to put your head down and keep working when you know you have supporters behind you.
One of my first real literary friends (not counting my husband and my friend, Mark, who reads all my manuscripts) came into my life about two years ago when I published a short piece from my now forthcoming book, Epistolophilia.
It was a bad time. My writing was stalled and I had begun to despair at whether I would ever finish the monster that had already eaten up some six years of my life but whose end was not at all in sight. Then one day an email arrived from another writer, a Toronto novelist, saying that my piece was the most exciting thing he’d read in a particular journal for years.
This note from a perfect stranger who had taken the time to track me down for no other reason than to extend himself in friendship gave me a boost that may just be responsible for my having finished my manuscript.
Literary friendships can be harder to come by than you would think. Writers are loners and they are competitive. We suffer from schadenfreude and pettiness, but our worst vice is, without a doubt, envy. And envy coupled with self-doubt is a very bad combination indeed.
It’s been over a year since I consciously started to try and follow that Toronto novelist’s example, and to extend myself to other writers. To do so, I had to work on conquering my jealousies.
I decided that when another author got an agent, I would be happy for her. When a writer I knew signed a contract, won an award or got a grant, I would celebrate his accomplishment. I would take the success of others to mean that I too could succeed.
I don’t know if it’s the new outlook, or if my work has actually gotten that much better, but there’s a lot more literary love in my life since I made the change.
So, to my writerly friends: thank you.
Because of you, I am less alone at my desk.
[Photo: Jenser (Clasix-Design)]
Though it feels like old news now, I realized this morning that I hadn’t yet posted the fact the my second book, a biography of the Holocaust rescuer, Ona Šimaitė, is now forthcoming. It’s official: the contract has been signed, sealed and delivered.
The University of Nebraska Press will publish my second book (as it did my first). I’m currently still using the working title of Beloved Profession, but can’t promise that it will stick.
September will be a busy month for me, what with whipping the MS into its final shape, but then it’s off to production as of October 1, 2010. Once I have a firm publication date, I’ll let you know.
Thanks to all who supported me while writing this book. There’s a special place for you not only in my heart, but also in the Acknowledgments!
[Photo of Nebraska landscape: viking_79]
Titles are my Achilles heel. I’m really, really bad at them.
One problem is that I favour the abstract and poetic: titles whose meaning becomes clear only once you’ve read the book. For example, I wanted to call my first book “Welcome to Elkader” (instead of “Silence is Death”), but that was roundly rejected at the press as being way too obscure.
So what makes a good title?
Judging from what’s floating around the interwebs, conventional wisdom boils down to the following (which, frankly, all seems pretty obvious):
1) A title’s got to be easy to remember.
2) It should be descriptive.
3) It should avoid all the usual pitfalls: cliché, sappiness, clunkiness, being overly literal. . . And apparently, it shouldn’t be a full grammatical sentence (oops).
That said, I do love internet tools when it comes to titles, especially those gimmicky generators, where you plug in a noun, verb, a gerund, etc.
There’s got to be some mathematical calculation or algorithm that will determine success, so when I came across the “Lulu Titlescorer,” I had to give it a whirl.
Here’s what Lulu does (from the website):
The Lulu Titlescorer has been developed exclusively for Lulu by statisticians who studied the titles of 50 years’ worth of top bestsellers and identified which title attributes separated the bestsellers from the rest.
We commissioned a research team to analyse the title of every novel to have topped the hardback fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List during the half-century from 1955 to 2004 and then compare them with the titles of a control group of less successful novels by the same authors.
The team, lead by British statistician Dr. Atai Winkler, then used the data gathered from a total of some 700 titles to create this “Lulu Titlescorer” a program able to predict the chances that any given title would produce a New York Times No. 1 bestseller.
How could I resist? I plugged in a few titles from my long-list in Lulu. (My book is about a Lithuanian librarian who saved Jews during the Holocaust by hiding them in the university library where she worked. It will require a descriptive subtitle not included in the options below.)
Interestingly, my working title, Beloved Profession (what I’ve been calling the book for about five years now), scored highest. And my current favourite, Ex Libris, scored lowest.
The results:
Beloved Profession = 69.0% chance of being a bestselling title
Margin = 63.7 % chance of being a bestselling title
The Good Librarian = 41.4% chance of being a bestselling title
The Librarian = 35.9% chance of being a bestselling title
Ex Libris = 26.3% chance of being a bestselling title
Thoughts?
[Photo: jayRaz]
For a long time I resisted calling myself a biographer. I didn’t mean to write these kinds of stories, or those kinds of books. But, like all the best things in life (cats, love) — biography chose me. Despite myself, and despite having been trained as a literary scholar at a time when the author was dead, when a writer’s intention didn’t matter, and when the makings of a literary life were beside the point, writing lives was what I wanted to do.
I started by telling the story of an Algerian author gunned down in 1993 in a civil war between armed militants and a dictatorship. He was thirty-eight when he was killed, and had accomplished more than most of us do in a lifetime. His name was Tahar Djaout, and the book I wrote about him is called Silence is Death (his most famous turn of phrase).
Next, I wrote the story of a brave librarian who defied Nazism. She left us thousands of letters and scores of diaries in various languages. I used these to write the book I’m calling Beloved Profession. It’s not out yet, but I’ll let you know when that happens.
Now, I’m working on a third project. It’s a personal story that starts in Lithuania, continues in Siberia, and ends in Canada. I’ll let you know more as that develops.
This blog explores the writing of biography, autobiography and life-writing. I’ll share my understanding of the process, and point to others who I think are doing or have done interesting work in this area. We’ll see how it goes.
[Photo by Martin Marcinski]