Writing. Life. – Page 11 – Reflections on Creative Nonfiction, Life-Writing, and the Essay

February 2, 2012February 2, 2012

“If you can read this book and not shriek with delight, your soul is dead”: On Authors Praising Authors

The title of this post comes from an essay by Alan Levinovitz called I Greet You in the Middle of a Great Career: A Brief History of Blurbs. He quotes George Orwell, who was a strict enemy of blurbs, calling them “disgusting tripe.”

The article is an interesting history of praise of authors by authors. And Levinovitz does a good job cataloguing the sins that the publishing industry has committed (for centuries, it would seem) in the process: corruption, cronyism, hyperbole, and the practice on the part of some publishers to provide sample blurb templates.

As authors become better known, they inevitably find themselves overwhelmed by blurb requests. Often these come from publicists, but some come from authors themselves. Ignoring a publicist is one thing, but turning down a fellow writer can be awkward. Even more awkward is reading a colleague’s book to find that you can’t give it a a positive blurb. Many accomplished authors deal with this by having a no-blurb policy. Others, like Camille Paglia, have publicly called for an end to the practice all together.

In To Blurb or Not to Blurb, Bil l Morris asks the question of whether or not blurbs sell books. The answer appears to be a qualified yes. Praise by an author you know and like may indeed get you to pick up a volume from a display table. That said, Morris also finds that a blurb by an author a reader distrusts or whose work she dislikes may be a turn off.

Last spring I got a note from my publisher that it was time to start seeking out pre-publication praise for Epistolophilia. I swallowed my pride and started to cast about for writers to contact. In some cases, I was met with silence. In others, I received kind notes that explained, with an apology, that the writer had a no-blurb policy. (One answer arrived long after the due date for jacket copy, and though I didn’t get a blurb, I did make a valuable and friendly new contact with whom I continue to correspond. So even this most humbling of processes can bring unexpected rewards.)

Getting turned down didn’t surprise me. Nor did the silences. What surprised me most was getting three sincerely positive blurbs for my book. One of them is from David Bezmozgis. His blurb for Epistolophilia: “An intelligent, humane, and noble book that rescues from obscurity an intelligent, humane, and noble woman. It stands as a testament to the power of reading, writing, compassion, and extraordinary courage.” Wow. That even impressed my publicist.

Is the process of blurbing cynical and corrupt? Sometimes, yes. But it is also a way for established writers to help unknown ones.

The first time this occurred to me was when I heard Stephen Elliott (The Adderall Diaries) talk at the AWP Conference last year. When Roddy Doyle blurbed his book (writing, “You don’t just read The Adderall Diaries; you fall right into them. You read as if you are a few words behind the writer, trying to catch up, to find out what happens, to yell at him that he’s doing a great job. And he is. It’s a brilliant book.”), he changed the game for Elliott. Far from a cynical move, such a blurb is a gift.

The same is true of Bezmozgis. He didn’t have to read my book, or even answer my email. He didn’t know me or owe me anything, and goodness knows, he has enough on his plate. But he read it, found it valuable, and said so. It was an act of generosity that I’ll never forget.

Perhaps one day I’ll get the chance to do the same for someone else.

Your thoughts on blurbs?

[Photo: Praise the Sun by Omar Eduardo]

This post is part of a weekly series called “Countdown to Publication” on SheWrites.com, the premier social network for women writers.

January 26, 2012January 26, 2012

“Let us now praise famous men”: On Breaking Conventions and Women’s Biography

This morning I read a really interesting conversation with Michael Scammel, the biographer of Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn and Arthur Koestler. A lot of what Scammel said about his path to biography resonated with me. He describes having wanted to become a fiction writer in his twenties (just as I did), only to find that he “didn’t have the stamina for it.” The urge to be a biographer crept up on him without his realizing it. And the questions of biography — of how tell a life in an engaging and instructive way — came to him naturally (just as they have to me).

Scammel talks about what a biographer must do: wear learning lightly, entertain as well as instruct, write what is genuinely fact-based, and hone the novelistic skills of setting a scene.

What a biographer must never, ever do, Scammell underlines, is lie. “The oath is against invention,” he stresses, “if you’re not sure of something, you don’t put it in.” The one way around uncertainty is to speculate, but honestly. “You have to confess and say, ‘This is what I think may have occurred, but I can’t prove it.’ And that way you have your cake and eat it too.”

All in all, it’s a great conversation. Reading Scammell’s descriptions of his process, I recognized many of my own struggles writing Epistolophilia, but, I must admit, that something was nagging at me as I read this interview — I couldn’t help wondering: well, what about women?

In the whole conversation, only one female biographer, Janet Malcolm (author of many books, including Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice) is mentioned. And, interestingly, she’s held up as an exception in her approach to biographical writing, since her books “aren’t biographies in the usual sense.”

This is no coincidence. It seems to me that there’s a gender divide in biography.

Women writing about women almost always produce texts that aren’t “biographies in the usual sense.” This is because women’s lives (and here I’m thinking both of female biographical subjects as well as female biographers) are structured differently and have different rhythms and arcs than male lives (or, I suppose, “usual lives”). It’s something I grappled with in a chapter called “Writing a Woman’s Life” in Epistolophilia. Here’s an excerpt:

Why have women traditionally written so little when compared with men? And what needs to change in women’s lives in order to make writing possible? Why have women been so absent from literary history? The answer, Virginia Woolf tells us in A Room of One’s Own, lies in the conditions of women’s lives. Women raise children, have not inherited wealth, and have had had fewer opportunities to make the money that would buy time for writing. Women rarely have partners who cook and clean and carry (or share equally) the burden of home life. Our lives have traditionally been and largely continue to be fractured, shared between child care, kitchen duties, family obligations. To write, what a woman needs most is private space (a room of one’s own), money and connected time (that only money can buy). Woolf wrote her thoughts on women and writing in the 1920s, a time before all the ostensibly labor-saving devices like washing machines, slow cookers, microwave ovens, dishwashers and so on. Most North American women now work outside the home, and most can probably find a corner in their houses to call their own. Problem solved? No. Despite all this, we still find ourselves fractured and split.

Women biographers often enter into the text to dialogue with their subjects, instead of vanishing in the shadow of her creative achievement (which, Scammell’s interviewer Michael McDonald reminds us, used to be the mark of a good biographer). Increasingly, we do not take up Ecclesiasticus’s call, “Let us now praise famous men.” Instead, more and more of us answer the faint call of foremothers to excavate their invisible and unknown lives out of the detritus of the past.

When Scammell explains his reasons for abandoning an initial attempt to insert himself into Koestler’s story, choosing instead to write the biography in the “usual third-person style,” I respect his reasoning. First-person narrative, in his context, may indeed have been distracting and mightn’t have added much value to the text.

In a weird way, I sympathize accutely, because I desperately wanted to write a “straight biography” of my subject, Ona Šimaitė in the “usual third-person style.” It didn’t work.

“The conventions are there for a reason,” says Scammell. Perhaps.

And they work very well for certain tasks, like praising famous men. They don’t, however, work so well for telling the lives of obscure women.

I learned this the hard way.

After reading this interview, I’m left with many questions. Here I am on the eve of publishing a biography of a woman, and I wonder about the gendered aspect of the genre that has chosen me. Will women biographers, feminist biographers, and archaeologists of the feminine past forever be considered exceptions, curiosities, and breakers of convention? How wide must the margins grow before they finally touch the centre? Will women’s biography ever become simply biography “in the usual sense”? And if it did, what would we think?

[Photo: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, by openDemocracy]

This post is part of a weekly series called “Countdown to Publication” on SheWrites.com, the premier social network for women writers.

January 19, 2012January 19, 2012

This is Who-Man: On Writing, Play, and Fun

This is Who-Man. My son and I invented him over breakfast this morning.

Who-Man is a superhero whose arch-enemy is a many-eyed monster called “Crime.” Who-Man wears a bumpy suit (as you can see in Sebastian’s rendition of him above). The suit can shoot fire, but our hero rarely has to use this weapon. He has other ways of defeating his enemies: confusion.

Here’s an example of one of his crime-fighting encounters:

Who-Man hears a bank’s silent alarm and rushes to the scene of the crime. He succeeds in intercepting the robbers just as they are about to jump into their getaway car.

Who-Man: Stop! In the name of Justice and Who-Man!

Robbers: In the name of who?

Who-Man: Who-Man!

Robbers: What?

Who-Man: No, Who!

Robbers: Who?

Who-Man: Yes, that’s me! Who-Man!

Robbers: Oh man, what?

And so on until they’ve wasted so much time that the police arrive and arrest the bad guys.

Sebastian was laughing so hard when we acted this scene out that he could barely talk (he’s definitely ready for “Who’s on First”). Then he said “Let’s write a a book about Who-Man! We can make the first page right now!”

As we giggled and added detail upon detail to our story, I had a feeling in my chest that I recognized. It was the elation of creativity and play. It’s the way I feel when my writing is working.

When I started writing my first book, I spent months reading and researching and sitting on my hands, trying to resist the scholarly impulses that graduate school had hammered into me. I had just completed my PhD, and won a coveted postdoctoral fellowship. I should have written a dry literary study, gotten myself a tenure-track job, and settled into a life of literary analysis. But no.

Instead, I wanted to write something that could never be mistaken for an academic book. I decided not to give in to my training (better to write nothing than to write stuff that made me unhappy, I reasoned), not shush my creative impulses, and allowed myself to do some preposterous things. Some of the more insane ideas got cut during the editing process, but others were just crazy enough to work.

Fun and play are not concepts that would naturally be associated with the kinds of books that I write, because so far, I’ve only written about tragedies and atrocities. (Though Who-Man may change all that!)

For example: my first book (Silence is Death) is about an Algerian author who was gunned down outside his home at the age of 37 in a growing wave of violence against artists in intellectuals during the 1990s. My second (Epistolophilia) is about the Holocaust in Lithuania, and my third (working title: Siberian Time) will be about about Stalinist repression.

Nonetheless (and at the risk of sounding psychologically unbalanced), one of the ways I know I’m on to something good is that I start having fun.

In Silence is Death, I wrote a posthumous interview with Tahar Djaout, the subject of my book. A chapter of almost pure invention (though I still had to do a lot of research), it was great fun to write. I visited then wrote about shrines full of saints’ bones, interviewed nuns about the meaning of relics, and dragged my husband on a weekend trip to a funny little Iowa town called Elkader that was named for the Algerian national hero, Emir Abdelkader. All of this made its way into that first book, which turned out to be my first big step into creative nonfiction.

For Epistolophilia, I recorded the trips I made with my infant son to find my heroine’s various homes, including a French nursing home where Ona Šimaitė (the subject of the book) lived out her final years. I wrote about my pregnancy, compared the pronunciation of my heroine’s name to a Leonard Cohen song, and immersed myself in a friendship that only existed in my head. I circumnavigated the globe, collecting archival documents along the way.

That too was fun.

In the Guardian’s famous “Ten Rules for Writing Fiction,” (or nonfiction, for that matter) Margaret Atwood says, “Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.”

I would add: enjoy it. Living a life of writing is a great privilege. Whatever way you manage to do it, remember to have fun (in the name of Who-Man!) and to play once in a while.

Your writing will be better for it.

[Image: Who-Man, by Sebastian Gurd. January 19, 2012]

This post is part of a weekly series called “Countdown to Publication” on SheWrites.com, the premier social network for women writers.

January 12, 2012January 19, 2012

In Praise of University Presses: How They Work, What They Publish, and Why You Might Consider Them

For almost ten years now, there’s been growing anxiety in the writing community about the “publishing crunch.” Essentially, what’s happened is this: publishers find themselves in increasing financial peril; they need to make money, so they try to make safe bets.

The result for readers is a “narrowing of the breadth and depth and diversity of our culture: the quieting of all but the blandest voices, the elimination of all but the safest choices.” The result for writers is that every year it gets harder to publish. Bestsellers reign supreme, and midlist (or mid-career) authors have been shunted down the pecking order, taking the place that beginning writers used to occupy. As small presses (the home of many first-time authors) die in huge numbers, first-time authors may find themselves out in the cold.

It’s a kind of death of the middle class, but within the microcosm of our industry.

There are many reasons for the crunch: the publishing industry’s antiquated returns systems, the growth of the big-box store and mega-distributor, the rise of e-books and internet retailers, and the influence of ever-larger publishing giants.

A writer calling herself Jane Austen Doe, described the crunch for Salon.com in 2004:

In the 10 years since I signed my first book contract, the publishing industry has changed in ways that are devastating — emotionally, financially, professionally, spiritually, and creatively — to midlist authors like me. You’ve read about it in your morning paper: Once-genteel “houses” gobbled up by slavering conglomerates; independent bookstores cannibalized by chain and online retailers; book sales sinking as the number of TV channels soars. What once was about literature is now about return on investment. What once was hand-sold one by one by well-read, book-loving booksellers now moves by the pallet-load at Wal-Mart and Borders — or doesn’t move at all.

So what is a junior or mid-career writer to do? Perhaps you’re not ready to jump into self-publishing (and I think there are many reasons not to), yet find yourself agentless and therefore shut out of the above-mentioned conglomerate publishing world? Perhaps you don’t want to write about vampires or celebrities or weight loss. Well, there’s one corner of the publishing world that remains a meritocracy (that is, publishing decisions are made largely based on the literary value of a work) and where good writing can still find a home. This is the world of the university press.

U niversity presses publish a large number of books that would never see the light of day otherwise. These presses and the texts they disseminate are important for our culture, our memory, and for the way that future generations will regard us.

Contrary to popular belief, university presses don’t only publish dry treatises and technical works. In fact, a huge number of university presses publish non-scholarly texts. Many publish creative nonfiction, memoir, poetry, fiction, and even children’s and Y/A literature. Most publish regional fiction — the University of Nebraska Press has a series about the American West; Indiana UP about Indiana; Queens-McGill UP about Canada.

When I was looking for a home for my first book, Silence is Death — it’s a hybrid text (part memoir, part literary analysis, part biography) — I submitted proposals to 13 university presses. 12 said no thanks, but the University of Nebraska press asked to see more. Nebraska is a major publisher of creative nonfiction and memoir, as well as colonial French history, so we seemed a good fit for one another. I ended up publishing the book with them, and my editor at the press made it clear that she was interested in anything else I wrote.

Now, to a writer, there’s nothing quite as valuable as having a champion for your work.

While struggling to finish my second book, I had coffee with my U Nebraska editor who had been so supportive of me the first time around. I was feeling frustrated. My book had stalled while I was trying to force it into a form that seemed more mainstream to me, but it hadn’t worked. Finally, I’d given in and started once again to write from my gut. I was having fun, but the book seemed weird, and this worried me.

“I wanted to write a straight book this time around,” I confessed.

My editor laughed and shook her head. “Why would you want to do that, when you can do what you do?”

I went home with renewed energy and confidence and finished the book.

Long story short: the manuscript sailed through peer review at the University of Nebraska Press (if you don’t know this works, see my earlier post here), and here I am, many months later, waiting for the birth of my second book, Epistolophilia.

University presses will not be an appropriate match for every writer. If you write genre fiction, for example, it won’t be a good fit. But, if your stuff is smart (calm down, I’m not saying that genre writers and writing aren’t smart, just that these are not what university presses publish!), researched, and literary, you may find a home there, and you will find yourself in good company. (My own press, for example, publishes a former US poet laureate and two Nobel Prize winners.)

When submitting to a university press, you generally don’t need an agent. Go to their website and read their submission guidelines carefully, then follow them to the letter. At the proposal stage, send out as many queries as you want (but always according to each press’s individual guidelines). Once a press has solicited your MS (that is, they ask to see the entire book), the accepted etiquette is to send the entire book to only one press at a time.

Here’s a list of university presses that publish in areas other than strict scholarship:

Baylor University Press nonfiction, children’s books
Capilano University Editions poetry, anthologies
Carnegie Mellon University Press poetry, fiction, short stories, nonfiction, drama
Cleveland State University Poetry Center poetry
Harvard University Press poetry, fiction
Kent State University Press poetry, chapbooks, fiction, nonfiction
McGill-Queen’s University Press poetry, nonfiction, art, photography, drama
Miami University Press fiction, poetry
Michigan State University Press poetry
Northeastern University Press poetry, fiction, nonfiction, photography
Northwestern University Press poetry, fiction, nonfiction
Ohio State University Press poetry, short fiction
Ohio University / Swallow Press poetry, nonfiction
Oxford University Press USA fiction, nonfiction, children’s/YA books
San Diego State University Press poetry, fiction, nonfiction, art
Southeast Missouri State University Press fiction, nonfiction, poetry
Southern Methodist University Press fiction, creative nonfiction
Stephen F. Austin State University Press poetry, fiction
Temple University Press art, coffee table books, sports
Texas Tech University Press poetry, fiction
Trinity University Press regional nonfiction
Truman State University Press poetry
University of Akron Press poetry, nonfiction
University of Arkansas Press poetry
University of Chicago Press poetry
University of Iowa Press poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction
University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press fiction
University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books poetry, memoir, creative nonfiction
University of New Orleans fiction, poetry
University of South Carolina Press creative nonfiction
University of Tampa Press poetry
University of Tennessee Press fiction
University of Utah Press poetry
University of Virginia Press regional nonfiction, poetry
The University of Wisconsin Press poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction
University Press of Kentucky poetry, regional nonfiction
University Press of Mississippi regional nonfiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, photography
Wesleyan University Press poetry, nonfiction
West Virginia University Press/Vandalia Press poetry, fiction, nonfiction
Western State College Press poetry, fiction, nonfiction, anthologies
Utah State University Press fiction, poetry, folklore, regional nonfiction

[Photo: RellyAB]

This post is part of a weekly series called “Countdown to Publication” on SheWrites.com, the premier social network for women writers.

January 7, 2012January 4, 2020

A Look Back at 2011: Reflections on Preparation, Homesickness, Travel, Language, and Love for a Little Boy

Ah, another year. Like most families, perhaps, ours does a year-end review on New Year’s Eve. We go through our calendar and reflect on what we’ve accomplished, experienced, and learned over the past 12 months.

Looking back over that 2011 calendar, I realized that, for me, it was a year of laying groundwork: I prepared our house for tenants; planned our travels to Malta; crunched numbers and made budgets; liaised with our local school so that we could register our son in our absence; searched for and found cat sitters; planned for my book’s 2012 appearance; started lining up 2012 speaking and signing engagements; wrote and submitted two still-in-production essays; and forged ahead on book #3, the one about my grandmother’s life in Siberia.

It was a year with moments of shock and sadness too: recently my dear friend’s small daughter was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor. Months of helplessness have followed as we witness her treatments from afar. May 2012 bring good health.

So, I greet the new year with hope, anticipation and a bit of melancholy. Yes, book #2 (my new baby) will be born this year, but my other baby is no longer one. As I cradled Sebastian on my lap the other day, I felt like I was rocking a goat. His arms and legs are so long and his body so lean and heavy that soon I’ll no longer be able to carry him. His health and robustness, I now realize more than ever, are miracles.

If (as I wrote last year) 2010 was the year of linguistic gifts from my son, then 2011 was one of discovery and growth. Our landing in Gozo was, in some ways, a hard one. My little one was homesick, and found the adjustment to life on a small Mediterranean island difficult. His calm temperament turned tempestuous and fearful. Slowly, and only over the course of weeks and even months, did my kinder, gentler boy return.

But last week: something new. We made our first trip to Sicily, where after four days, Sebastian declared his homesickness once again. But this time it was different — he was homesick for Gozo. The discovery that he loved Gozo too (that he could love his home in Montreal AND this temporary one on this beautiful island in the sea without betraying the former) was a revelation.

Part of me knew that this 8-month stint would be tough. We would be bored. We would be cold in this drafty stone house (and, boy, have we ever been lately!). Sebastian would lose some of his French skills (he claims no longer to understand the language, though I don’t believe him). But, in planning this adventure to a new and unfamiliar destination, I’d hoped to give my son other gifts. I wanted him to learn early on in life that there are many ways to live on this earth, many ways to speak, and many different kinds of beauty.

With his discovery of mysteriously double homesickness, I think the learning process I’d hoped for is well underway.

For the past year, Sebastian’s become categorical about language. Whereas he once spoke an “alphabet fusion,” switching back and forth between three languages and words of his own invention, in his fifth year, he started to draw boundaries. There was “his” way of speaking (English) that he shared with his daddy; the “school” way (French); and “mummy’s” way (Lithuanian). Out of the jumble of his toddler years, he’d succeeded in making order, and had even become a bit rigid.

The other day — a small Sicilian revolution. Upon hearing his father order pastries in Italian (not “his” language), Sebastian was impressed. If daddy could do it, maybe he could too. Perhaps speaking “another’s” way wouldn’t lead to chaos after all.

“Daddy,” he said, “Maybe I’ll try to learn Maltese.”

Happy 2012. May it bring you happiness, peace, good health and many days of creativity.

[Photo: Oliver Degabriele]

December 29, 2011January 19, 2012

Show Me the Money: Where to Find Writers’ Grants

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I couldn’t have written Epistolophilia without writers’ grants and research fellowships. A number of different arts agencies and institutions — these are listed in the Acknowledgements to my book — helped me pay for plane tickets, get paper for printing, buy time for writing, and (perhaps most importantly) they confirmed that my writerly hunch might be a good one.

I’ve applied for hundreds of grants over the years — so many that it’s now become part of my creative process. Entering grant competitions is one more way for me to work out ideas, test the waters, and see if a project has legs. I’ve had a lot of success partly because I’ve learned how to talk about my work in a way that makes sense to granting agencies; and in part because of the numbers — the more grants I apply for, the better my chances.

I’ve had a few queries regarding grants recently: how to find them; what they fund; how the system works. So, I thought I’d give an overview here.

By far the best resource for grant, fellowship and residency announcements I’ve come across is Mira’s List, a blog kept by the extraordinary writer Mira Bartok (soon I’ll be interviewing her about her new book The Memory Palace, so stay tuned). I recommend signing up for her mailing list or checking her site frequently.

There are a few things to keep in mind when applying for grants. First, grants beget grants. That’s to say that every grant you receive increases your chances of getting another one. Second, granting agencies want to feel confident that they’re backing a winner, so be prolific. Finish your projects and publish them!

So what kind of funding is there to be had?

Of course, there are the big and prestigious awards like: the Guggenheim Foundation, Canada Council for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. These awards are generally for established writers and artists, and even to oft-published authors, applying for them can feel like a lottery. Unless you’re very senior indeed, it’s best to treat them as long-shots, and expect to be turned down so you can be pleasantly surprised (or ecstatic) when you win an award.

Easier to win are geographically determined awards, like the New York Foundation for the Arts, the CALQ (Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Quebec or Quebec Arts Council), and the Ontario Arts Council. Most states and provinces have their own granting agencies, so check out yours. Many cities (Toronto and Kansas City are two examples ) have artists’ grants available to their residents, so check those out too, and mark deadlines on your calendar. Obviously, the smaller the geographic area defining the competition, the better your odds.

Don’t forget to check out the Fulbright Program if you’re a US citizen, have a scholarly affiliation, and need to do research abroad.

Artists’ Residencies are a good way to go for short periods (weeks or months) of uninterrupted work away from home. Some cover all costs; others ask artists to kick in a share of the cost. Sometimes there are small application fees, which annoys me, but perhaps it won’t bother you. There are well-known colonies like Yaddo, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Banff Centre for the Arts. (Here’s a good resource to check out for more artist residencies.) Universities, like McGill University in Montreal, often have writers-in-residence, so keep an eye out for those too.

Library grants can be very useful for those of us doing research. Many public and specialized libraries offer fellowships to writers. A few examples include the New York Public Library Fellowships, Chicago’s Newberry Library Fellowships, and the Laman Library Writers Fellowship in Arkansas. Around Montreal, where I live, public libraries offer fellowships to local writers. See if this is the case in your community.

Other aspects to consider are subject matter and genre. There may be grants available to fund work in a specific genre or on a particular subject area: Yiddish culture, the Holocaust, biography, American history, and poetry are just a few examples of areas in which targeted funding is available.

Finally, don’t sniff at small grants like the awards of between $500 and $1,500 offered by Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation. I won this one just as I was finishing my book, and it paid for the daycare I needed to get the final version of my manuscript ready for review at the press. Remember, grants beget grants, so the very fact of winning a small award improves your position in the next round of competitions.

When writing grant proposals, be as specific as you can. If you can give chapter breakdowns, do so. If you’ve written half the book already, then say so. If you have a publisher interested, underline that. Demonstrate how your project is new, innovative, and important. Show that it contributes to knowledge or culture. Point to your past accomplishments to underscore the fact that you finish what you start.

Above all, don’t despair. The grants system can be capricious and unjust. Brilliant projects can get rejected and duds occasionally get funded. Write the application, put it in the mail, then forget about it and get back to your work.

Which is, after all, the whole point.

[Photo: Cati Kaoe]

This post is part of a weekly series called “Countdown to Publication” on SheWrites.com, the premier social network for women writers.

December 22, 2011January 19, 2012

How Long Should a Book Take to Write? (On a Writer’s Natural Rhythms and Pace)

Recently, a fellow writer (who publishes short essays and pieces of travel writing) told me about a book she’d just finished reading. It was an excellent book she said, but added with wide eyes: “It took him seven years to write! That’s crazy. I could never do that.”

I have this thing I do when I’m not sure how to respond: I involuntarily freeze stone-faced for a few seconds, thus allowing my brain to work. It’s what happened after my friend’s remark. All kinds of thoughts whipped through my head, as I stood there motionless, considering what to say next: Wait, I’ve spent at least that long on my book! What does that mean? Is it really crazy to do that? Am I crazy? Have I wasted my life? Does the fact that my book took me so long to write mean that I’m a bad writer?

In the end, I shrugged and tried not to seem defensive: “That’s how long my book took me to write.”

It was a bit of a white lie. Truth is, it actually took me longer.

I doubt that anyone who picks up Epistolophilia will guess that it was twelve years in the making. For one thing, it’s not even a particularly long book. But even though I didn’t write consistently for twelve years, and accomplished a lot of other stuff during that period, from the first discovery of Ona Šimaitė’s story to the appearance of the book, that’s the amount of time that elapsed.

There are many reasons why it took so long to complete. First, I had to gather research materials from five archives in three far-flung countries. Once I’d collected these, I had thousands of manuscript pages to sift through. What’s more, to read a large portion of these documents, I had to remember how to read Russian (a skill I hadn’t used for some ten years). When I actually started writing, I made some false starts and took some wrong turns. Finally, I had a baby. That slowed things down even more.

Had I known then what I know now, I could have saved myself a few years. But I didn’t, so I couldn’t. Live and learn. Write and get better at it.

How long should a book take to write? My answer: as long as it takes.

Writing, in large part, is an endurance test. The creation of a book is a marathon, not a sprint, so one of the most valuable traits a writer can cultivate is patience – with herself, with the industry, and with the creative process.

Some writers work incredibly quickly. I applaud them and, truth be told, am slightly envious of them. But if you’re like me, and write at a snail’s pace, that’s OK too.

Make peace with your natural pace and rhythms, whatever they are. That’s how the best work happens.

[Photo: cishore]

This post is part of a weekly series called “Countdown to Publication” on SheWrites.com, the premier social network for women writers.

December 21, 2011December 21, 2011

Workshop: How to Be Your Own Publicist (Canada)

The Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC) is offering the Professional Development Workshop HOW TO BE YOUR OWN PUBLICIST in Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary,Vancouver, and Victoria, in February and March of 2012. The workshops take place from 9:30 am to 4:30 pm. For those who can’t attend in one of the participating cities, a 3-hour webinar will be offered, distilling the highlights of the workshop.

Authors Elizabeth Ruth and Ann Douglas will present on traditional but innovative book marketing strategies as well as new media opportunities for writers. Kelly Duffin, Executive Director of The Writers’ Union of Canada, will update participants on the latest evolutions in the publishing landscape.

Whether you are an aspiring writer wanting to develop your audience before publication; an emerging writer who needs to stay visible; or long-published and looking for new tips and techniques, this full-day workshop is for you.

Participants will leave the workshop having gained the know-how and confidence to creatively promote their own future works, and an expanded, inspired sense of what it means to be a writer in the current publishing context.

The price of this symposium is $89.00 and covers costs, including lunch, $75 for members of The Writers’ Union of Canada. For registration information please go to www.writersunion.ca/registration.pdf.

[Photo: Enokson]

December 19, 2011December 19, 2011

Cove Park Artist Residencies: Summer 2012 (Scotland)

Applications are welcomed for Cove Park’s crafts, literature and visual arts residency programmes in 2012. These opportunities are open to emerging and established national and international artists.

Artists on residency are given the time, space, freedom and financial support to concentrate on the development of their work. Cove Park provides a supportive context in which artists can devise new projects, experiment and engage with artists working in different fields or with different approaches to their practice. Cove Park is happy to support and facilitate the production of specific projects during residencies and, equally, to ensure that those artists who wish to develop new ideas without the constraints of the completion of a final piece of work are free to do so. The opportunity for individual research and development is enhanced through the interaction and discussion that takes place between the artists on residency. This is promoted through a series of informal events, talks and presentations.

Application guidelines for all art forms are now available here. The deadline for applications to the crafts and visual arts residencies is Friday 27 January 2012. The deadline for application to the literature program is 3 February 2012.

[Photo: Southside Images]

December 15, 2011January 19, 2012

If You Build It, They Will Come: On Blogging, Service and Platform-Building

I started my blog almost two years ago after attending a writers’ workshop on publishing in the digital age. There wasn’t much talk of e-books or self-publishing from the presenters. Instead, they hammered a single message into us all day: you, as writers, need an electronic presence . . . preferably a blog. It’s how you control the message of who you are and what you do. Your site is Google’s gateway to you and your work.

Like many writers, I long resisted self-promotion, finding the very idea distasteful and embarrassing. But I’d learned from the experience of publishing my first (mostly overlooked) book, Silence is Death (oh! the irony of that title in this context…), that if you don’t advocate for your own work, no one will. I knew that this time around, I had to swallow pride and do things differently. So, in preparation for the publication of my second book, Epistolophilia, I decided to take the workshop’s advice. I bought a domain name (my own name as well as my books’ titles), and started a blog.

Despite my initial reticence, blogging quickly brought unexpected rewards. From the very beginning, I enjoyed the discipline regular posting required, and the way the site grew slowly, like a garden or a manuscript. I’m obsessed with archives, so I love the way blogs are keepers of their own histories. Finally, I have been delighted by the community-building opportunities that a blog creates.

A long time ago, I sat on an academic board that organized a biannual conference whose participants’ median age was going up and up. Board members worried constantly about the organization’s impending death and wondered how to attract younger attendees. “Offer them something,” I suggested. “An opportunity to win a book prize or a shot at a fellowship. Offer them something, and they will come.” So, that’s what we did. Once the association started a modest fellowship program and book prize, youthful scholars began returning to the association (and the financial investment quickly paid for itself).

The same principle works for a blog: offer something, and readers will come.

Blogs need not be navel-gazing, self-aggrandizing, or mean-spirited. When setting up the parameters of my blog, I asked myself how I could serve fellow writers. I decided on a ratio of 1:2. For every post about myself or my work, I featured at least 2 items about someone or something else: a review of a book or essay; a funding announcement or call for submissions; an author interview with a fellow writer of creative nonfiction.

By shining the spotlight (small as mine may be) on another writer, or by giving her a platform to talk about her work, I not only gain traffic on the blog (for every other writer brings friends and fans with her), I also gain insight, contacts, friends, knowledge and the occasional free book.

The more I extend myself to other writers, the more they reach back.

Writers are also readers. We are each other’s colleagues, but also each other’s audiences. Serving writers means reaching readers.

Be brave, be bold, and build. Then open yourself up to others and share.

[Photo: Shoeless Joe Jackson, by John McNab]

This post is part of a weekly series called “Countdown to Publication” on SheWrites.com, the premier social network for women writers.