Small Press Pick: The Playgroup
About halfway through Elizabeth Mosier’s The Playgroup, the narrator describes the struggle involved in turning the events of real life into fiction: “What intrigued me was reality: Sarah’s guilt over her brother’s death, Linda’s postpartum depression, Bryn given up for adoption, Maggie’s son found blue and still in his bassinet. Was it even possible, I wondered, to capture their losses in words?” Fittingly, it’s Mosier’s own gift for turning such losses into a sense of yearning that makes this work of fiction so compelling. Her characters are a handful of mothers whose uncertainty and ambivalence about motherhood is rivaled only by the pressure they feel to put on their best happy faces and pretend for the world that they know exactly what they’re doing at all times. Yet when a member of the group learns that the child she’s carrying may have developed a cancerous mass, the facade of perfection becomes almost impossible to sustain. The resulting crisis forces the members of the group to take stock of their lives and to come to terms, each in her own way, with the myth of the perfect mother.
The Playgroup is one of several titles in Gemma Media’s new Open Door series, a line of books designed to promote adult literacy. Participating in this endeavor, Mosier is in good company. Other Open Door authors include Roddy Doyle, Nick Hornby, and Maeve Binchy. While the narratives are short and the prose straightforward, the subject matter and themes of these works offer much to consider, as evidenced by Mosier’s honest, complex treatment of motherhood in The Playgroup. Indeed, if Mosier’s writing is any indication of the quality of other titles in the series, then the Open Door library is definitely worth checking out.
-Review by Marc Schuster
Getting the Most Out of a Writing Group
I know a lot of people who are interested in started writing groups, but one issue that frequently comes up is how to ensure a productive meeting. Here’s a worksheet I usually use in order to get the most out of any writing group I attend:
Hand a copy of your manuscript to each of the other members of your group. Read through all of the manuscripts that you have been given. Pay special attention to the following issues.
1. Who should I care about? What do they want?*
- Put a star in the margin when you figure you who you, as a reader, are supposed to care about.
- Put two stars in the margin where you figure out what they want.
2. Engagement/Distractions
- Put an exclamation point next to any passage that pulls you in. Briefly explain why.
- Put a question mark next to anything that gets in the way of your full immersion in the story. What breaks the illusion? Briefly explain.
3. What’s at stake?
- In your own words, explain what’s at stake in this story.
4. What’s lurking?
- Where is this story’s untapped potential? What remains to be explored? How might the author draw out some of this “lurking” material?
5. Where’s the sense appeal?
- Make a note wherever the author does a good job of appealing to the senses.
- Make a note wherever the author has missed a perfect opportunity to appeal to a particular sense.
Once you’ve had a chance to read the manuscripts of everybody in your group, report your findings to the author. Discuss the work of one author at a time. Go around in a circle until everyone has spoken. The author may take notes but may not comment until everyone has had a chance to speak.
*I lifted these questions from Steve Almond’s This Won’t Take But a Minute Honey. If you’re interested in writing, this is a great book to read on the subject.
Small Press Pick: Working Class Represent
The first dozen or so poems in this charming collection by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz read like something a slightly more urbane version of Pam from NBC’s The Office might write if she lived and worked in New York City. Topics in this portion of the book range from the poet’s love for her morning cup of coffee to an odd talent for answering all phone calls with a sunny disposition. But then the collection takes a turn when a poem about 9/11 recasts all of the previous poems in a new light; there used to be something light and bouncy about working a dead-end job in NYC, this poem and those that follow seem to say, but in the wake of 9/11, it’s time to for the poet to get her priorities straight. In this case, it’s a matter of deciding to leave the relative comfort of a steady paycheck and health benefits in favor of the poet’s hand-to-mouth lifestyle. Needless to say, there’s no moment where the poet says, “And then I decided to focus on poetry because 9/11 put everything into perspective for me,” but the structure of the collection makes the lasting effect of that pivotal moment in both world and personal histories difficult to ignore. What follows, then, is a series of meditations on the place of the poet in society: poems about being a touring spoken word poet, poems lauding the efforts of baristas to hold off on making steamed beverages until there’s a pause between poems, poems lamenting the failures of other poets, and ultimately poems about falling in love with Shappy Seasholtz (no poetry collection is complete without at least a handful of these). Other topics covered in this collection include the “outsider” art of Henry Darger, college cafeterias, first words, abandoned words, and the exquisite sense of schadenfreude involved in seeing a rival poet fail. From tragedies both global and personal, Aptowicz expertly milks equal amounts of pathos, humor, and self-awareness. What’s more, there’s a story in this collection, a subtle narrative about priorities, about anxiety, about the myriad performances we put on throughout the day. And, ultimately, about finding one’s place in the world.
Oh, and also rejection:
Book Review: The History of My Body
The thing that struck me most about Sharon Heath’s The History of My Body is the deep authenticity of the protagonist’s voice.
The story is told in first person by Fleur Robins–daughter of an extravagantly wealthy fundamentalist nutjob politician father and alcoholic mother–who, at first, exhibits signs of being touched neurologically (never officially diagnosed, her disengaged parents and their far-more-engaged staff assume that she’s autistic).
Though we meet Fleur when she’s barely pre-pubescent, and she recalls her early childhood for us, including her propensity for list making and journal keeping, her friendship with a small, imaginary man named Uncle Bob (from the phrase Bob’s your uncle), with her comatose grandfather, and with language and increasingly difficult books.
When she’s eleven, after her grandfather’s death, she gets a seventeen-year-old male tutor, called Adam, who is also the son of a politician and so a kindred spirit, who turns her on to physicists and philosophers and literature, and from there, Fleur’s life improves, with some wrecking ball detours that I’ll leave to you for the reading.
As the story unwinds, Fleur supplants her masochism with masturbation, finds a remarkable mentor, solace in Campbell’s Chicken Soup body odor, doubt, a relationship with her mother, and finally friendship with a girl her own age.
Somehow, the protagonist’s voice is so genuine that it manages to obliterate any potential pretension in her precociousness, or in her love and grasp of quantum physics, or in her references to Sartre and any number of other famous (and not-so-famous) philosophers, scientists, and authors. Even as the story lands her a highly prestigious scholarly award at a very early age, Fleur is chronically sympathetic.
I will attribute this unlikely success to Sharon Heath’s unbelieveably graceful rendering of Fleur’s very believable cadence, even despite her unthinkable intellect and constant personal and social blunders–at least as she perceives them–, her unique personal lexicon which includes such semantic doppelgangers such as tweeter, flapping, ugga-umphing, voidish, Sister Flatulencia, etc–endears her to the reader again and again.
Too, the vividness with which Heath conjures the emotional experience of being an adolescent female is unfailing. The book is often funny, even when dealing with the dull ache of adolescence, rejection, death.
Heath weaves in social issues like abortion and alcoholism and political issues like war and big oil with equal light-handedness. The narrative never gives the reader a sense of being judged, nor does it indict anyone. Heath manages to garner good will for parties on both sides of each issue (if not for each issue).
Fleur often finds herself personally sullied on both sides of issues, but she does not whine. She introspects. She wallows a little. Then she emerges stronger and just as clever.
Heath manages the crass and the philsophical, the olfactory and mundane with equal aplomb. I have rarely read a book that was so consistently beautifully rendered, and I would implore you all to order a copy today.
Sharon Heath, image used with permission
I leave you with the following passage:
For the next week or so, I was forced to go about my daily routine with the handicap of keeping at least one hand covering my chest (which is not so easy to do when you need to eat, drink, pet Jillily, and wipe your poo and pee) just to make sure Grandfather’s ghost didn’t leak out and float over to Father’s house to haunt him forever for killing our tree–in some respects not such an unsatisfying prospect but for the fact that it would leave me with a chasm in my heart I could never hope to fill.
Sharon Heath is a Jungian analyst and novelist residing in California. Visit her online at http://www.SharonHeath.com
Click her name to listen to the Writers Talk Podcast with Heath.
This post is cross-hosted at www.AprilLineWriting.com
April Fool’s Day Prank: Pulitzer Prize
I’m posting a day before my usual first-Monday post in order to take advantage of April Fool’s Day and to share an incredibly bad joke/pun I came up with:
- First, as grandiosely as possible, say, “Did I tell you about my Pulitzer Prize?”
- Wait for someone to say, “No! Please, tell me about your Pulitzer Prize!”
- Hold out your index finger.
- Say, “Pull it!”
- When the person pulls your finger, fart proudly and say, “Surprise!”
To ensure maximum impact, eat plenty of beans and raw vegetables before attempting this joke.
Writers Talk Podcast with Debra Brenegan
Debra Brenegan
Debra Brenegan is the author of Shame the Devil. Visit her online at www.debrabrenegan.com.
Enjoy our talk about writing, teaching, books, and social media. Debra teaches at Westminster College in Fulton, MO.
Writers Talk Podcast with Sharon Heath
Sharon Heath is the author of The History of My Body. 
Look for a review here early in April.
Read her blog at www.SharonHeath.com.
Enjoy her thoughts in our conversation about her dual lives as a Jungian Analyst and Writer, social media, and the future of publishing.
Small Press Pick: A Thinking Man’s Bully
From the traditional schoolyard variety to their online cyber-cousins, bullies have been the focus of much national debate over the last few years. Gone are the days of turning a “kids-will-be-kids” blind eye to the issue; now, responses to bullying run the gamut from zero-tolerance school policies to efforts at understanding what makes bullies tick. Falling somewhere on the latter end of the spectrum is Michael Adelberg’s honest, moving debut novel, A Thinking Man’s Bully.
In many ways, the novel draws easy parallels to television shows like The Sopranos and In Treatment, particularly in terms of Adelberg’s storytelling. Echoing the back-and-forth banter between Tony Soprano and his therapist Jennifer Melfi, the novel consists of a series of fictive essays in which narrator Matt Duffy attempts to work through some of his “issues” with his therapist/interlocutor Lisa Moscovitz. Indeed, Duffy is so aware of his television counterpart that he can’t help underscoring many of their similarities himself: they’re both from New Jersey, they’re both fairly overbearing, and neither has much faith in the therapeutic process. Over time, however Duffy comes to piece together the elements of his life that have led him into therapy — most notably the suicide of a friend many years earlier and the suicide attempt of Duffy’s son.
What drives Duffy into therapy is a deceptively simple question: Is there something about his personality that drives the people he loves to suicide? Or, to put it more bluntly, is he responsible? What emerges over the course of his therapy sessions is a much more nuanced answer than these questions might, at first glance, engender. Early entries initially come off as one-shot stories about the friends that populated Duffy’s childhood, but as the novel progresses, the narrator starts to see the big picture and recognize patterns not just in his own behavior but in the behavior of his son. The apple, it turns out, doesn’t fall far from the tree.
While the comparison to The Sopranos is easy to see, I was also struck by the structural similarity between A Thinking Man’s Bully and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales — albeit with a slight twist. Where Chaucer depicted a range of characters who each trotted out a basic premise and then told a story to illustrate that premise, Adelberg reverses the formula by having his narrator tell a story and then explore its implications as he visits with his therapist. The effect of this pattern is to allow the reader an added angle into Duffy’s psyche; in addition to watching him dredge up memories old and new, we also see him gain a stronger sense of self-awareness. Ultimately, it’s the narrator’s gradual evolution that makes the novel so compelling.
The material in A Thinking Man’s Bully is certainly heavy, but it’s leavened with deadpan humor and wry observations that make for a highly engaging, bittersweet read, not unlike paging through an old yearbook or a family photo album. Additionally, Adelberg’s straightforward prose works the minor miracle of balancing bluntness and nuance as he examines difficult and complex issues throughout the proceedings. All told, A Thinking Man’s Bully is a superb debut.
- Review by Marc Schuster
Exercises in Character, Part Three: “Out of Character”
As anyone who’s ever read or written fiction knows, characters need to remain relatively consistent. Consistency, after all, is what allows us to get to know people both in real life and on the printed page. At the same time, however, we all probably know people who have done things that we might describe as “out of character.” In other words, they act in ways that aren’t consistent with our expectations. When this happens in real life, we might react with shock or disappointment, but our disbelief can usually be tempered with a simple explanation—usually it’s something along the lines of someone having a bad day or a moment of weakness. When these inconsistencies happen in fiction, however, readers need a slightly stronger explanation. If handled correctly, a lapse in judgment can lend depth to a character.
For this activity, take one of your characters and have that character do something that may at first glance be out of line with who that character is. If it’s a “good guy,” you can have the character do something bad. Conversely, if it’s a “bad guy,” think of a situation in which that character might do something good. (It doesn’t have to be a big thing; it can be a small gesture.) As you write this piece, ask yourself why the character is doing what she is doing. What has pushed the character to this decision? What kind of internal struggle does the character have to go through in order to do something that is not in line with his or self-image? And how does the character react to this action after completing it? Does she feel guilty? Is she proud of herself? Does she try to justify it? For greater effect, think about a way in which one of the flaws you examined in Exercise One might play into it.
Review: My Memories of a Future Life by Roz Morris
Cover
My Memories of a Future Life is the first self-published book I’ve read cover-to-cover. It came out via Amazon’s Create Space in 2011.
The premise is interesting, oozes potential. A professional pianist, Carol, and her two-dimensionally homosexual flatmate, Jerry, stumble into using hypnosis as therapy. Carol seeks to treat chronic pain that’s keeping her from continuing her work as a result of twenty-odd years at the ivories, and Jerry is hoping to relieve his anxiety disorder. Enter Gene Winter, later Robert then Gene again, who is a brilliant hypnotist, and Carol’s aloof sometimes-love-interest.
Jerry bookends the story, dragging Carol along to a hypnotist’s performance in which Jerry is regressed, and visiting gravitas upon the hypnosis paradigm by being effectively cured. The hypnotist Jerry uses is an aspiring self-help celebrity a la Tony Robbins, but with a supernatural edge.
Aside from Carol’s habit of calling or texting Jerry to tell him what the reader has already inferred, or whining to herself about being replaced by his boyfriend, Tim, or not having treasured their friendship enough when they were younger and life was simpler, Jerry is a fairly minor character. Jerry helped Roz Morris get to know Carol, but Jerry didn’t really need to be in the book.
Gene is an acquaintance from Carol’s youth, he works at her physiologist’s office, and hypnotizes Carol throughout the book, usually at his place, but sometimes at hers.
In each session, she becomes a future version of herself, a soothesayer (yes, soothesayer) named Andreq who cannot Xech. Xeching is revealed to be some kind of smoke ‘n’ mirrors operation, but is fraught for Andreq as the cause of his troubled youth and early profession.
Onomatopoeiacally speaking, xech is the sound a heavy knife makes when slicing through cucumber. But it’s not a proper word. In the book, it’s implied that it’s a mystical skill, not unlike hypnosis, that soothesayers employ to comfort their rich, shrill clients, and that aptitude with which they prize as professional capital.
Carol is pretentious and rude and guarded, and her character arc is flawed/missing. For the first seven-eighths of the book, Carol only wants her hands to feel better and to play again. Then in the last eighth, she just wants somebuddytalove (Gene), to hold some crazy townspeople at bay, and to keep her taped regressions with Gene sacred.
Gene is a sociopath, and until his abrupt disappearance near the end of the book, is also the primary antagonist. He’s also the most sympathetic character, and the least 2-D.
The most interesting bits take place in this town known as Vellonoweth. Vellonoweth has its own complete plot arc, with Carol thrown in the mix. Vellonoweth is where this book really lives. But in the larger story, Carol goes there after Gene who drops her name in the local music shop, after accepting a temporary gig at the nearby hospital, and the music shop owners engage Carol to cover their regular singing teacher’s vacation. Carol explains in this moment that she’d been trained in singing as a secondary specialty in college.
In Vellonoweth, there’s a group of horrible musicians, who Carol makes no end of petty remarks about, and a group of fundamentalist Christian mystics who catch wind of Carol and Gene’s regressions an then go on an aggressive witch hunt of which Carol is the suspect.
Almost everything that happens in Vellonoweth is hilarious and vividly conjured. Still somewhat poorly written, but the satirical feeling of the witch hunt makes the zany crew’s 2-D rendering a little more palatable.
The novel ends in a messy flourish. The last fifty pages of the book feel sort of tacked on, where a reasonably plodding, contemplative story becomes a high drama, action-packed mess complete with a car-chase scene, stylized villains and a secret twist.
Throughout, a lot of the writing is clumsy or overdone.
Here are some examples:
“His reply was an expression so subtle it was beyond unreadable.”
“I took the Vauxhaul out exploring. Rain started to fall, a persistent drizzle that outsmarted my wipers. Intermittent was too slow; faster screeched in protest.”
“Next door there were sounds of footsteps and large objects being pushed across wooden floors. Next door as in the adjacent property, not the bedroom.”
There were controlled tense shifts, and I’m sure the author did them intentionally, but they were distracting. I was looking for some kind of second narrative arc. Some kind of story reason for the change. The present tense sections were always right after Carol’s regressions with Gene. It was gimmickey and amateurish.
Which brings me to my over-arching assessment of this work. It didn’t simmer long enough. It is drinkable pudding. The author did not do enough of the painful, often tedious, whisking to thicken it up, make it delicious.
If you’ve ever made a cooked pudding, you know that the faint trails the whisk leaves in its path as the pudding takes shape are unbelievably gratifying, even though it takes a long time, and for at least the first half, the progress is unnoticeable. It is the same with stories.
This book could’ve benefited from a serious developmental edit. Developmental editors don’t work cheap, but they help us writers tame our egos and find our real stories. They can also help us turn un-sellable novels into true pieces of art. This book could’ve been art.
A developmental editor would’ve told Morris that she should start her story in Vellonoweth, letting those eccentrics guide her to Carol’s involvement and character arc. Or that she should begin the story with Carol’s romantic entanglement with Gene. A developmental editor would’ve shown Morris when her prose was weak, and helped her locate where it was strong; clued her into the fact that wardrobe ticks don’t provide characterization, and that her heroine is decidedly unsympathetic.
I’m posting a self-publishing-help post on this topic at my other blog, and hope you’ll check back here tomorrow for Marc Schuster’s guest post.
Roz Morris
Roz Morris is a bestselling ghostwriter and book doctor. She blogs at www.nailyournovel.com and has a double life on Twitter; for writing advice follow her as @dirtywhitecandy, for more normal chit-chat try her on @ByRozMorris.
My Memories of a Future Life is available on Kindle (US and UK) and also in http://www.amazon.com/Nail-Your-Novel-Writers-Confidence/dp/146108136X/ref=pd_ecc_rvi_cart_2
