The Circuitous Tale of a (Finally) Successful Book, Part 1

I've mentioned here and there on this blog that I've created a collection of stories--half historical in nature--all set on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.  I received the wonderful news not long ago that the book has been accepted for publication by Dialogos/Lavender Ink, a press run by the legendary poet and novelist Bill Lavender, who worked for so long for the University of New Orleans press.  (Yes, that's him in the picture.) As a general rule I hesitate to say that everything happens when it's supposed to--because that's kind of like saying everything happens according to God's will (which is a lie)--but in the case of Island Fog being accepted for publication, I have to say that I am glad it's happening now rather than, say, five years ago.  And thus begins my tale of how this collection came to be.  I'm going to break it into two parts, because the tale will take some time.

I started several of the stories in Island Fog perhaps twelve or thirteen years ago--during a trip I made with my family to Nantucket.  As is my wont, I was up before everyone else each day, trying to get a little writing done along with downing some come-alive coffee.  I hadn't planned on writing about Nantucket before I went, but ideas for stories just started coming to me.  In fact, I had so many story ideas--and was so afraid I might lose them--that I did something I've never done before: I started a brand new story each day of that vacation, writing as far into a story as I could before the family awoke and then leaving that story behind to begin a new story the next day.  In this fashion I laid down the tracks for the stories that now make up the second half of my present book.  But I hardly thought of them as a book back then.  They were just stories I wanted to nail in place in order to get back to later.  And I did, struggling mightily to read my atrocious handwriting, which turns from ordinary small/bad to illegible during the fury of engaged composing.

Eventually, I finished every one of those stories and in the years that followed I edited them mercilessly, revised a few significantly, and kept sending them out to various magazines.  A few were accepted and were long ago published (but not the title story, one of my favorites, which is one of the many reasons I'm so happy the book will appear).  A story about a plumber who hears some painful facts about his wife's death during a breakfast at a diner was published in 2005 in the now defunct Dana Literary Society Online Journal; a story about a couple struggling through the emotional fallout of several failed pregnancies was published in the journal Oasis, also in 2005; a story about a ghost tour leader haunted by his former male lover was accepted by Seattle Review and, after a wait of numerous years, finally appeared in 2009. 

It wasn't too long after the Nantucket stories began to be accepted by journals that it occurred to me I had a neat little set that could form a solid portion of a story collection.  Not enough pages to make a whole collection, but perhaps a half.  So I gathered together some non-Nanucket stories I thought worked all right together and combined them with the Nantucket stories to make a book I called--tah-dah!--Island Fog.  To the non-Nantucket stories I added the section header "Off-Island"--using stories that I thought had an enhanced sense of place--and the Nantucket stories were given the section header "On-Island."  Very clever, I thought.  The headers, and the organizational strategy they highlighted, would make this disparate group of fictions seem to belong together.  Well, in truth they didn't.   At least not enough to convince me or any of the many contests and small presses I submitted the book to.  Not knowing what to do, deciding the collection was a misft, I finally put it aside.  I didn't do anything with it for a long time except to occasionally submit one of the Nantucket pieces to a seemingly appropriate journal.

Well, what should happen except that I returned to Nantucket in 2011--for the first time in several years--having more or less finished my Van Gogh novel, having started this blog, and suddenly having historical fiction on the brain.  Lots of new ideas for Nantucket stories came to me, except this time all of them were historical in nature.  Like the first time, I started as many of the stories as I could while I was on the island, but I think I only managed to get three underway.  Later I drafted a fourth and, still later, a fifth. Certain characters I just could not get out of my head.  I had to write them: a retired whale ship captain who long ago was stranded at sea and forced into cannibalism (inspired, I know, by the real life story of George Pollard, commander of the Essex); a whaling widow who feels the first inklings of lesbianism; an African-American schoolteacher walking through some mid-island streets on a foggy afternoon, early in the twentieth century; a self-satisfied twelve year old, the son of a sheep farmer, who has befriended a half-Indian boy early in the nineteenth century.  I fleshed out these characters' stories, having a ball with them, and at some point--I can't remember when-- it occurred to me: I've got a new Island Fog book now.  The real Island Fog.

Next post: The process of getting done, getting it out, and getting it accepted.

Over the pond and keep going

While I continue with my summer fiction writing course at UCA, and while I'm getting close to the bottom of the stack of novels from my spring Novel Writing Workshop class, I am also furiously working out last minute preparations for our trip across the ocean to UK's Great Writing Conference, which will be held this coming Saturday and Sunday at Imperial College, London.  My wife's cousin, Brendan Pettei, is kindly hosting us for the weekend at his flat in Chelsea.  (Brendan is on semi-temporary assignment in London for a New York-based financial services company.)  It will be great to be met by family so far from home.  Meanwhile, the conference is shaping up to be a stunner.  America's AWP Conference prides itself on being the largest creative writing conference in the world--and it sure is that--but AWP cannot match Great Writing for its international flavor.  As many as fifteen different countries will be represented at next weekend's gathering, including Japan, Finland, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, Portugal, South Africa, South Korea, and Jordan.  As one might expect, there will be numerous speakers from England, Scotland, Canada, and the United States, along with several from Australia and New Zealand.  It won't be an AWP-sized event (thank goodness), but it appears to be the biggest Great Writing ever, and perhaps one of the best.

Like many of the presenters, I will wear dual hats: moderating a session on Saturday morning and then presenting in a session Sunday afternoon (the final slot of the conference).  The theme of the Saturday session will be "Gothic Surrealism."  The readers in that one are all creative writers (and academics) from England: Tim Rhys, Paul Houghton, and Lisa Mansell.  They are, respectively, two novelists and an avant-garde poet.  I'm very much looking forward to the session.  Not only does their individual work sound fascinating, but it's a special pleasure of the Great Writing Conference to meet and hear writers one would otherwise never have the opportunity to encounter--or even know about.  

My session on Sunday is an intriguing mixed-bag with each speaker embracing places, people, or writers from the past.  I will read from a historical fiction set on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, part of a collection I have developed called Island Fog.   The second presenter, Sarah Penny, a native of South Africa and a lecturer in creative writing at London's Brunel University, is the author of a series for children called The Bundu Bashers.   (That's her in the photo below.)  In her presentation Penny will recount her experience interviewing Ouma Una.  Ouma Una was part of a community of Khomani San (bushmen) who once lived in a section of the Kalahari Desert before the South African government forced them off the land in 1931 and turned it into a national park.  The South African government then required the Khomani San to work for white farmers in the region and forbade them from speaking their native language, N/uu.  Penny interviewed Ouma Una as background for one of her books and based one of her characters on the woman.   At the time of the interview, Ouma Una was the last person alive to have lived in the park before the explusion and one of only two remaining speakers of N/uu.  Sounds fascinating.  The final presenter, Tatheer Faiq (pictured above), is an academic from Griffith University in Brisbane.  She will discuss the work of the nineteenth century Arab writer Mohammad al-Muwaylihi.  According to Faiq, al-Muwaylihi, "promoted a culture of resistance to a prescribed ideological standpoint."  (Always a good thing.)  Faiq will go on to explain that al-Muwaylihi's notion of nationhood was one in which "an idealized Occident met the Orient in a global context."  Sounds like Great Writing in a nutshell!  And thus a perfect last paper for the conference.

When we're done at Great Writing it's off for a little R and R in France, where we will be joined by my brother Jerry and his family.   Well, semi-R and R, I should say, because I will at the same time be reviewing the final projects of my summer fiction writing students--who will email them to me--and then figuring and posting their semester grades.  Sometimes you just have to be very thankful for the internet.

Boston and London

2013 promises to be an exciting year of conferencing for me.  It starts in March, as I head to Boston for the annual mammoth necessary insanity of the AWP Conference.   Boston, of course, is one of the great heritage cities of the United States and has the added benefit of being the hometown of my oldest sister.  I'll be wearing two hats at AWP this year.  I'll be there to represent Toad Suck Review, of which I am currently the associate editor, as we share our brand new issue #3 with the world.  (See my previous post for more commentary about this.)  But I will also be speaking on a panel that addresses the subject of novel writing workshops.  Such workshops are a relatively new, but exciting, development in the world of creative writing instruction.  For decades the short story form has dominated fiction workshop activities, and basically for one reason: a class can easily read in advance and discuss in one class period an entire short story (or two or three).  It's a manageable sized bite of work to prepare and process.  Now I adore the short story form--I really do--but it's a fact that most fiction-writers-in-training have their eyes on writing novels eventually (or immediately), and it's also true that novels are typically preferred over story collections in the eyes of publishers.  Most of all it's true that learning to write a successful short story does not really train one to write a successful novel.   They are very different animals.  So what, as creative writing teachers, do we do about this? Do we open up our regular workshop class to both novels and stories?  Or do we create separate classes just for novel writers?  And if the answer to that is yes, can we ask students to write a whole novel in a single semster's time?  Do we expect the whole class to read it?  How do we workshop it?  Does a teacher possibly have time to read 15 or 20 student novels over the course of a semester or at the end of the semester?  These are good, pressing questions, and different teachers--myself included--have come up with their own answers to them.  What we should not and cannot do is fail to encourage our students in their pursuit of longer forms.  That would be a disservice.  By happy fortune, I will again be teaching my Novel Writing course next semester--to a mixed group of graduate and undergraduate students--and therefore I will be able to bring my latest news, and my latest experiences, to the panel discussion.  I'm really looking foward to it.

The wanderings continue this summer when I head off to another of the world's leading cities for the Great Writing Conference, held June 29-30 at the University of London, Imperial College.   The brainchild of Australian Graeme Harper--who studied, wrote, taught, and administered in the UK for decades and does so now in the United
States--Great Writing is in its fifteenth year and going strong.  Without question it is the most important creative writing conference in the United Kingdom and arguably the second most important in the world.  Writers and teachers from virtually every part of the Anglophone world participate.  I submitted both a proposal for a critical presentation--on historical fiction (of course)--and a proposal for a creative presentation.  Graeme later informed me that the selection committee liked both proposals and accepted both, but I had to choose to present one or the other.  As a creative writer, it's my first instinct and my first pleasure to read from my own fiction, so that's what I've decided to do.  I will read from a collection of short stories--half historical and half contemporary in nature--that are all set on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts.  Nantucket is a hisorically fascinating and physically beautiful place, a piece of the United States but at the same time--in rather fundamental matters of personality--not really.  I can't know how many in the audience will have ever been there, but it doesn't really matter.  My job is to bring the island to them.

What an honor to have the chance to speak at both Great Writing and its American predecessor in the same year.  In many ways, Great Writing is a superior experience to the manic, crazy-busy, bacchanalian, writers-on-steroids entity that is AWP.  At Great Writing, the papers seem a tad more thoughtful, the audiences a bit more attentive, and the discussions between sessions more relaxed and more probing.  (Because more time is afforded for them.)  It's a very nourishing conference, and I've missed it.   I last attended Great Writing in 2007, when it was held in Bangor, Wales; the year before that I attended my first Great Writing in Portsmouth.  Both Bangor and Portsmouth are quietly charming locations, cities I was quite glad to get to know.  But it is certainly hard to beat London as a site for a major international conference.  We won't quite stop traffic like the Olympics did, but I like to think that, for a few days at least, Great Writing will something real to the cultural life of the capital.

Where past is present

This past Saturday evening I returned from an extended tour of the east coast visiting family from both sides of our marriage. The trip included a week spent on Nantucket Island, a place I've visited several times with my wife, but not for many years. This year I was struck again, as I always am, by how vivid the past feels as you walk around Nantucket. Or, said another way, you seem to walk at once in two different centuries: the 21st and the 19th. Historian Nathaniel Philbrick says this most eloquently in a film I recently saw about the island. Philbrick says--and I'm paraphrasing here--that on Nantucket ones feels that one is living an imaginary life that has somehow been given body. (The film, written and directed by Ric Burns, the brother of celebrated documentarian Ken Burns, is currently being shown at the Nantucket Whaling Museum.) There's an obvious reason why the past seems so present on the island--the place barely ever changes. In part this stasis is an accident of history, but in large measure it is due to design. I learned from Burns's film that Nantucket, for being such a small location, has a remarkable number of extant pre-civil war houses. These number in the hundreds. The reason being that after the civil war--when in so much of the country industries boomed, populations spread, and old buildings had to be scrapped to make room for new--Nantucket's economy went into a decades-long depression after the collapse of the whaling industry. There was little economic incentive to destroy the old houses; so they just sat there. And when Nantucket's economy revived via a new concentration on tourism, there was every incentive to repair and preserve these old houses.

But this is only part of the story. Just as important, if not more important, are the strict regulations that govern development on the island. A great deal of habitable space on Nantucket is owned by a public trust. This trust buys up land for the express purpose of making sure the land cannot be developed. With extremely few exceptions, no chain stores are allowed on the island. There are no traffic lights--anywhere. The cobblestone streets of Nantucket town center cannot and will not be replaced. Last but not least, any new constructions must be built to fit specific aesthetic standards, with the result being that at least 90% of homes on the island are of similar design and covered with wooden shingles that in the sea air quickly darken to the distinctive deep gray shade that one sees everywhere. In other words, any new building on Nantucket invariably looks old.

I realize that for some this must sound awfully claustrophobic, even socialistic, certainly in contrast with the wooly, no-holds-barred, slash-and-burn state of development in nearly every other part of the United States. But the beautiful result of these various regulations is immediately apparent, even before you step on the island. You can see it from the ferry as you approach. Except for the skyline of Manhattan, I can't think of a more distinctive and recognizable "city" view in America than that of Nantucket town center seen from a ferry in Nantucket Sound.

Finally too there is the fact that Nantucketers have never forgotten the famously vigorous and profitable years of the late 18th to mid 19th century, when the whaling industry reigned supreme on the island and Nantucketers ruled the whaling industry. Reminders of that maritime past are everywhere on Nantucket, not just in the Whaling Museum. It seems to ooze up through the fabric of the streets, through shingles of the houses, and even into the sand at your feet. (Perhaps it is no accident that Nantucket has been called, by various authors and ghost tour guides, "the most haunted place in America.") And given that one cannot escape the past on Nantucket; that at times one feels that one is literally walking through it--in an immediate, real way that places like colonial Williamsburg can only hope to mimic--it should come as no surprise that the island provides, at least for me, excellent stimlation for historical stories. I know of several histories of the island. And I know of one bestselling historical novel--Ahab's Wife--set there. But to date I am not aware of many historical short fictions set on Nantucket. (Suggestions anyone?) Years ago, on a weeklong visit, I started five or six separate short stories, eager to get my characters down and plots started before I left the island. Over the course of the following six or eight months, I finished, revised, and edited each of the stories, many of which subsequently found their way into publication. I loved, and still love, that little group of fictions, and tried to make them the second half of a collection of short stories that never found its way into print. On this last trip I decided that the failure of the collection was a good thing. Because the Nantucket stories--none of which were strictly historical but were certainly informed by history--never quite matched up with the stories in the first half of the collection. And I think now that a smarter choice would be to compose a group of historical stories set on Nantucket and then combine them with my earlier stories to create a full fictional treatment of the place--a mixture of past and present--fitting for an island where former centuries seem to breathe on you in every footstep and around every corner is another imagined life.