When I found out that the Boston Globe had assigned the brilliant Caroline Leavitt to write the review for Cascade, I was thrilled—and relieved. You hope that the kind of person who is asked to judge your book will also be the kind of person who will ‘get’ your book. And she did.
I am doubly thrilled to be featured on her blog this week, as she asks questions about how I came to write Cascade.
Writer David Abrams runs a great blog called The Quivering Pen (Zola!). He’s extremely supportive to other writers and back in July, featured Cascade‘s book trailer in his Trailer Park Tuesday column.
He also runs a My First Time series, where he asks writers to talk about their first writing-related anything–first rejection, first acceptance, first success, failure. I’d wanted to do one for a while, but I’d also had so many writing firsts that it was hard to choose.
I could write about my first rejection letter, which was also a handwritten one from the New Yorker, and how at my fiction workshop, we passed it around like a pie we all wanted to bite from. I could write about my first acceptance–from Redbook magazine, back when Dawn Raffel was the editor and they still published serious fiction. There was even a big check involved (a first AND last). First surprise rejection: the time the Missouri Review asked for two rounds of edits, then said, um, sorry, no. First crushing disappointment: The New Yorker editor who left me a voice mail asking me to call, and when I did, heart batting against my chest, had this to say: “I just want you to know I fought for this story.” Then she quit the magazine.
As an editor at Ploughshares, I had many painful firsts. It’s never pleasant to reject someone’s effort, and particularly hard to reject an almost-right story, or a famous person, or an editor that published you. The best parts of that job were always discovering a wonderful surprise by a new writer, and then seeing that story end up in BASS or Pushcart.
So many firsts. How to choose? Well, it turned out to be easy, in the end. I received my first copy of Cascade from Viking, solid and real. A book with an ISBN number, a book that is catalogued at the Library of Congress. I experienced my first, joyous, book event and that my friends, is My First Time.
“It was all happening so fast. Her paintings, even now, were being rushed into production, printed and duplicated, ready to be shipped off all over America.” –From Cascade
My fictional town of Cascade, in my novel of the same name, faces drowning. What’s not fiction is that flooded towns happened everywhere, all over this country—Florida, California, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas. And they happened all over the world. There’s a lake in Italy, Lago di Vagli, that is actually a hydroelectric dam. In the forties, water authorities flooded a stone village, and every ten years, when the lake is emptied for maintenance, the village emerges from the water like a ghost.
I was honored when Julianne Douglas asked to review Cascade for her beautiful book blog, Writing the Renaissance, and then when she asked me to write a brief guest post.
So much fascinating research went into the writing of Cascade that I had a hard time choosing a topic, but finally decided on “Why the 1930s?”
What really stands out for me about the 1930s and now, aside from all this “magic” we’ve learned to live with as if it is our birthright: not much else is really all that different.
Here are my thoughts on “Why the 1930s:” link
Wow, so it’s publication day. WOW! Today I do an interview for Boston Public Radio, WBUR Radio Boston with Anthony Brooks, then I’m going to go do my volunteering at the Brigham so I don’t have to obsess about me, me, me.
I want to thank everyone who has been so supportive: everyone who pre-ordered the book, who will come to events, who will spread the word, and who will write nice Amazon and Goodreads reviews before the cranky, mean, crackpots do.
I feel so fortunate and grateful today. Writing a book is lonely and an act of faith, and the response I’ve had from so many of you has made me extremely happy to be a creative human being alive on this lovely and magical earth we all inhabit.
And for anyone who is doing that uncertain thing—writing a novel with no real knowledge that anyone will ever read it—let me tell you: there is NOTHING BETTER than hearing this song while you are in New York meeting your publisher. So keep at it. xxx
IF I CAN’T SIGN YOUR BOOK IN PERSON…….I can sign and send you one of these: the beautiful bookplate my brother, the ever talented Michael Bavaro, designed for me. Postcards play a part in Cascade, so a postcard bookplate was the perfect design choice.
Ex-libris means “from the books,” a loose identification of a book as belonging to an individual’s collection. To see some more beautiful bookplates, check out The Stanford University Libraries–Bookplate Exhibit. A little history from their site: “The earliest known use of bookplates took place in fifteenth-century Germany. The Latin phrase “ex libris” was common in early bookplates, which typically featured monochromatic shields of arms of the individual or institutional owners and sometimes contained warnings of the fate that would befall book thieves.”
Another bookplate I’ve admired since I was a child is the Rockwell Kent bookplate my uncle used for his Arctic collection of books. Rockwell Kent also designed the Viking Press logo. Synchronicity! It was a bit startling, like finding a piece of the past, to discover that the correspondence between Uncle Pete and Rockwell Kent is archived at the Archives of American Art.
I ordered my bookplates from www.bookplateink.com. In addition to doing custom work like mine, they have a gorgeous selection of existing designs that they can customize with your name. Hard to choose!
Coming up to my August book launch, my excitement is starting to give way to nerves. It’s funny how a year ago, when Viking bought my novel, I was thrilled. I was sincerely just happy to know that it would be bound, that it would have an ISBN number, that the Library of Congress would mark its existence.
But now, of course, I want people to read it. And to read it, they must buy it, and find it. But the reality of bookselling is that there are fewer real stores, fewer shelves, fewer chances of a new novel finding its way in front of the eyes of people who might want to read it.
I’ve told myself I’m up for the task of finding a readership. I will maintain an online presence, build an author platform, reach out to book clubs.
But sometimes life gets discouraging, as we all know. Last night I woke at 2am to the sound of my daughter’s coughing. She has CF and it’s been a lifelong up and down health issue, but one we are accustomed to and one we deal with in a positive manner. It’s always a shadow though, especially in the middle of the night, and then once awake, all I could do was consume myself with how many interesting-sounding, good-looking books are out there for sale. I imagined my book sinking into a tangle of late summer overgrowth. Finally I willed myself to stop, be positive, and go back to sleep.
This morning, the first thing I saw online was Teddy Roosevelt’s diary page on the morning of his wife’s death–so simple, so stark:
The light has gone out of my life.
I was instantly filled with gratitude for the universe that had sent what seemed like a sign: Fool, rejoice at what you have! The words that matter most are not the words in my book, not really. Didn’t I just write a post about how that book is out in the world and out of my hands?
The words that matter most are “you have your daughter, your husband, your family, your friends.” My husband and I experienced early loss: his beloved brother at 29, my father at 59, so we are perhaps extra thankful, aware that we are all so transient.
“Yes,” the universe then confirmed, “and now here is Nora Ephron’s eulogy in the New York Times for you to read and tear up at.”
I have always felt a silly but real connection to Nora because we shared a May 19 birthday. After choking up at the grief still so palpable on TR’s diary page, my eyes completely spilled over at Charles McGrath’s pitch-perfect eulogy to the woman who could make you smile and cry at once.
Nora Ephron’s writing was of a kind I admire most—the kind that touches at everything that is human and best in us. This ‘last list’ of hers is a list of ‘words that matter most.’ I hope she had pie at the end.
Nora Ephron: What I Will and Won’t Miss
I received a postcard of sorts from California this past weekend. My friend, YA author Janet Tashjian, sent me this photo of galleys of my novel, Cascade, on display at the American Library Association’s annual conference out in Anaheim. I am new to novel publishing, and had no idea that my book would be out there. It was a thrill to see it looking so real and official, set against the glowing orange and white Penguin Group display.
Seeing it out in the world seemed particularly fitting because during the summer heat of last week, I spent a lot of time clearing out ‘the old’ from my attic office. I worked on Cascade on and off for the better part of a decade, and a lot of fits and starts and drafts sat in piles in my bookcase. With the book almost ready to launch, it seemed time to tidy all that paper up, discard a lot of it, and mentally move on to the next project.
But to sort through the old drafts was a revelation! I’d forgotten so much. It was surprising to see the draft of the short story that I originally thought the novel would be. There were early chapter drafts that took place entirely in the present, rather than the 1930s setting I eventually settled with. The characters had different names, and, I realized, entirely different personalities. Henry and Emilia were not the people Dez and Asa turned out to be.
But most of all, I was reminded of just how long I worked on Cascade, and how for most of that time, I had no idea that it would ever be published. Writing a novel was so uncertain; it was isolating and daunting and an act of faith. It was also wonderful—to drop into a world at will, my fingertips on the keyboard my portal to that world, exploring a time period and issues that fascinated me.
To see Cascade on that table out at the ALA conference was to realize that the book is truly on its own now. Some people will pick it up and want to read it; some will simply set it down and move on. The story will resonate with some readers and for others, not so much.
But to those for whom the book does resonate, how wonderful it is, as a writer, to be able to connect with other people like this. I received small tastes of this connection as a short story writer, and always had to blink, surprised and a bit taken aback when someone contacted me. How gratifying it is to know that yes, our writing is out there and people do receive it.
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So much in life happens because one person has a vision, and the will to realize that vision no matter how impossible it may seem.
The recreated Globe Shakespeare Theatre in London exists today because actor Sam Wanamaker had a vision. From the Globe’s website: “In 1970 Sam founded the Shakespeare Globe Trust….the final attempt to build a faithful recreation of Shakespeare’s Globe close to its original Bankside, Southwark location…. While many had said that the Globe reconstruction was impossible to achieve, he had persevered for over twenty years, overcoming a series of monumental obstacles.”
Wanamaker died before the theater was finished, as Henry Folger died before his dream, The Folger Shakespeare Library, was complete.