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I am always terrified when I read aloud.

Just a quick post to say that the event in Stamford last night went swimmingly.

I got to hear some poets whose work was new to me and I read from Beware the Hawk, which is always nerve-wracking yet fun. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it. I’m pretty much always terrified whenever I get up to read, but by the time I leave the podium, I’m fine. I think it’s probably the same for everyone who reads. In fact, I think all authors who read from their work should wear a tee shirt that says “I’m  terrified” on the front. (Although on the back maybe it could say it “Now I’m fine,” or maybe the front of the tee shirt could change, like a mood ring or something, mid-reading. Unfortunately this is not technology that has been made available to me by Zazzle.)

Some old friends (including a former student and someone who reads this blog!) came out, and I met some new friends in the Stamford poetry community. I’ve been told that I simply must go to Curley’s Diner in Stamford for the poetry. Which is news to me. Previously, I went there for the fries. So that might be a cool field trip for me to make.

There are some photos of the event, if you’re interested, on my Facebook Author Page. Please, go over there and “like” me, even if you don’t actually like me.

Also, please vote to name the protagonist in Beware the Hawk. Voting will be over on Sunday, but I could be persuaded to keep the polls open for longer.

Oh and a correction. Remember how I said a few days ago that the Stamford Barnes & Noble used to be on a much-debated hole in the ground  downtown? I was mistaken. The hole in the ground is still there. it’s across the street from the B&N. I guess Stamford politicians are still talking about that hole in the ground.

 

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Reading next Monday at Barnes & Noble in Stamford Town Center.

Hello everybody!

This is a reminder that I am going to be appearing at a bookstore near you. Well, if you live in Stamford, Connecticut, that is. And I sincerely hope you do, because next Monday, at 8 p.m., I will be the featured reader at poetry night at the Barnes & Noble in the Stamford Town Center.* I will be reading from Beware the Hawk. 
This is a big deal for me, because I used to report the news in Stamford and I was there all the time. I covered the schools there. I spent a lot of time in municipal meetings. I remember when that Barnes & Noble was a hole in the ground. Literally. It (and most of the  recent downtown development) was a hole, and there was a lot of argument in city meetings about it. That Barnes & Noble and I go way back.

Anyhow, I’m really looking forward to being in Stamford next week. I will have a bunch of books for sale as well. I’m also working on some other appearances in Connecticut and one in Massachusetts as well. I will keep you all posted on those.
Hope to see you next week.

I’d also like to encourage you all to keep voting on the name of the protagonist in Beware the Hawk. Voting is open until August 19, so vote as often as you’d like.

I have to apologize for being MIA lately, but I’ve been running crazy this month. I will be back soon with more announcements and posts.

* Much thanks to poet and fellow MFAer Nicholas Miele, who helped me set this up.

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Reading in Mystic tomorrow – with some very impressive writers.

Tomorrow, at 4 p.m. on Enders Island at Mystic, I’m giving a reading with three of my published fellow Fairfield University MFA alumni. Each of them has achieved a huge career milestone this year. And when I talk about “huge,” I mean Godzilla-huge.

Our line-up tomorrow almost sounds like a joke: “So a HarpersCollins memoirist, a Oprah-endorsed writer and the inventor of a poetic form walk into a reading.”

What’s the punchline? That I get to join them up there. Me and Beware the Hawk are joining this trio!

Allow me to introduce them:

David Fitzpatrick was the first person in our MFA program to get a book contract. David was also one of the first people I remember meeting when I joined the Fairfield University MFA program. And he was a member of the first class to ever graduate. Always first, that David Fitzpatrick. He’s also the nicest guy, so when his book contract with HarperCollins was announced, the entire program was beside itself with pride. His memoir, Sharp, which documents David’s battle with mental illness, will come out later this summer. I’ve heard him read parts of it before, and I can’t wait to read the whole thing.

Deb Henry’s novel The Whipping Club made it onto Oprah’s summer reading list. Which is crazy, because during my very first residency, I workshopped with Deb and she gave us the very first chapter of The Whipping Club to read. And now Oprah’s recommending it.

Annabelle Moseley is a poet whose book, The Clock of the Long Now, was published earlier this year. A few weeks ago, she caused a stir when a reviewer realized she’d invented a new poetic form: the Mirror Sonnet. You can read more about the resulting discussion and what exactly a Mirror Sonnet is here.

I can’t even believe I get to share the stage with these writers. Check them out. If you can, come to Mystic and check us all out.

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Announcement time: Stamford appearance and reading in Mystic.

It’s on the Internets, so I feel like it’s probably time to announce this here:

  • I will be the featured reader at the Stamford Town Center’s Barnes & Noble Poetry Night on Monday, August 13. The event starts at 8 p.m. There will be other readers before me and after me, but I will be reading and I will have books with me. Need more info? Here’s the announcement.

It feels weird to be announcing an appearance in Stamford, when I live so close, because I make “appearances” in Stamford fairly often. Some of my recent “appearances” include a) picking up a new battery at the Apple Store b) that time when I sleepily and mistakenly got off the train from NYC at the wrong stop and c) once when we met some cousins for dinner.

But it’s also really cool to be appearing in Stamford because that’s my old coverage area. (For the uninitiated, “coverage area” is  reporter-speak for “the town in which I used to cover board of education committee meetings.”) I used to spend a lot of time in Stamford. I even covered the work of local authors there, so it’s pretty cool to be headed there for a reading myself.

I totally have to thank my MFA colleague Nick Miele for setting this up for me. He’s a poet and he will also be reading.

  • Speaking of the MFA…. I will be reading on Thursday, July 19 in Mystic, at my MFA program’s  Alumni Day. I will post something separate about this, but the readings will run from 4 to 5 p.m. in the Chapel at Enders. I will be reading with David Fitzpatrick, Deb Henry and Annabelle Moseley. It’s auspicious company, to say the absolute least. I will blog more about this later in the week, because oh my god. All three of these colleagues have reached insane career heights in the last year and you need to know more about them.

Lastly, you all have three days to get name suggestions for my main character to me. Then the voting begins.

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My sorta-secret side job.

I like to claim that I have no secrets.

About a month ago, I was talking to my mother on the phone about how open I am about certain things. In fact we were probably talking about this blog.

“Mom,” I said, proudly. “I have no secrets.”

Maybe it’s my background in journalism that makes me not want to have secrets. I’ve seen secretive people suffer for hiding parts of their lives. As a sort of defense, I’ve tried to be open about just about everything. But of course, that’s impossible, even for a big-mouth with Internet access. Everyone keeps some secrets. I knew I must have some.

I just couldn’t think what they could be.

Until this past weekend, when I had to travel for business, and I found myself reluctant to explain to those who asked where I was going and what I was doing for all of Saturday and Sunday. I never really thought of this sideline as a secret, because plenty of people  – especially people I’ve known for a long time – know that I do this.

I started doing this thing as a teenager. In fact, when I was younger, I was very proud of this job and talked about it often. I advertised it, actually, because it brings with it a certain kind of attention. But as I’ve gotten older and taken more responsible jobs in different fields,  I’ve stopped doing this. I’ve also stopped telling people about it because I’m worried that this job will affect the way they will view me in other areas of my life. More unfortunately, this job also causes people to want or expect certain things from me, and the things that those people want and expect can be draining.

But shame and fear are never a good thing. So last week, when someone asked me if I was going to be around on Saturday, and I began a complicated throat-clearing campaign in an attempt to stall until someone else changed the subject, I knew I was going to have to start being open about my sorta-secret side job once again.

Where better to do this than on the world wide web, where everyone can see? So what is this thing that I do that causes me so much angst?

Read more

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June: 2012 goals

I should have posted this days ago, but we were traveling and then I had to go away for a job this weekend. I probably could have blogged this from my phone, but I was lazy.

Speaking of which, lazy was the name of the game in May. I don’t think I got anything accomplished goal-wise. We were gone for two weeks on a road trip to Texas, and – as I always am when I travel – I was optimistic that I’d be writing during the whole trip. That’s because I like to ignore a very basic fact about myself: I can’t write when I’m traveling.

First of all, I get car sick, so typing a novel from the passenger seat of a moving vehicle is out. Secondly, I’m usually too busy taking in the trip to dream up any fiction. Usually the writing really gets into high gear when I come home. I have big hopes for this week.

Let’s look at my lack of progress, goal by goal.

Finish the second draft of my novel by April (September.) Revision went swimmingly in April. Then May happened. I had a lot of final-grading to do and then there was vacation. So not much progress there. None, actually.

Get it sent to agents before summer. Let’s try to get it sent in before fall, shall we?

Send out at least three short stories. I sent out one last month and was rejected. I sent out none this month, so I wasn’t rejected at all and that’s sort of a plus, right?

Read one two novels a month in 2012. I don’t think rereading my favorite bits of Dune counts. I did begin reading Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, but due to the aforementioned carsickness, didn’t make much progress.

Make at least $20 off a piece of fiction. Done in March.

Other goals: I also set to work on two of my big conflicts this year: My feelings about my faith and my issues with anxiety. Although traveling the U.S. tends to make one feel a little more spiritual, I don’t think I worked out any real faith-related issues. I did some work this past weekend that requires both faith and an ability to be spiritual – more on that in another blog post – but I wouldn’t say I reached any personal resolutions. As for anxiety, I did a lot of relaxing in May. Does that count?

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Writing like crazy. And when I say “crazy,” I mean it.

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If I haven’t posted here much in the last two weeks, it’s because I’ve been writing, and when I’m writing every day, I’m barely fit for human company outside of my writing groups and my paid work. In fact, writing and teaching is all I have energy for.

I don’t call. I don’t write. I spend all my time upstairs in my office, pacing or typing. Laundry piles up. If we have food in the house, I snack constantly. If we don’t, I live on tea and iTunes playlists. I don’t vacuum until I’m regularly having asthma attacks. If I do get dragged to a social event, I’m a bore, because I’m likely to talk about people who don’t exist and things that never happened. I forget to wish people a happy birthday on Facebook.  It all goes straight to hell.

Despite the fact that writing turns me into the modern-day equivalent of Jane Eyre‘s Mad Bertha, I really like this state. If I’m writing 500-1000 words a day and teaching well, I feel like I’m doing my job.

I have this fictionalized idea of myself writing 1000 words a day, teaching, but also updating the blog regularly and doing things like laundry. That person doesn’t exist. Maybe someday she will, but not now.

That said, I do have some things I want to post on the blog sooner rather than later. I have to update the store with a new tee shirt, which I am working on, and I also read from Beware the Hawk at last Friday’s Fairfield University MFA reading at the Fairfield U. bookstore (thank you, Phil Lemos, for your reading slot.) I recorded myself reading the first few pages of the book. If the recording is any good, I will edit it together and post the link… if I’m not typing and talking to myself, that is. No promises.

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Pics from last week’s reading at the Watertown Library

The official photographer* has sent me photos from my e-book talk and reading of Beware the Hawk at the Watertown Library last week. I’m only going to share a few shots with you here because there are something like 20 very high-res photos and, also, I know all of the people in the photos, so reading the captions for all of them would read like a trip down memory lane.  But here are a few shots. Let me know if you can find the hawk circling outside the window. I’m told it was there, but I can’t find one in the photo.

Deborah Weinberger, president of the Watertown Library Association, speaks about the library's new collection of e-books and provides the introduction. Note the "e-book" balloons to the right and left.

I speak about e-books, clutching my index cards as if I could absorb all the information written on them through the skin of my fingers.

Me with one of my parents' neighbors during the book signing. I used to get in all sorts of trouble in her yard. I fell out of one of her trees, I accidentally injured her daughter's bunny, I contributed to the decay of shrubs on her property by building a fort in the hedge... In fact, now that I think about it, it's a wonder she came out to the reading.

This is Mr. Fava, formerly of Watertown High School. I was assigned to his study hall as a freshman. I did no homework in this study hall. Instead I wrote novels. I am proud to say that you will never, ever see any of those novels.

And that's my grandmother.

UPDATE & CONFESSION:  I misused an apostrophe in the original title of this post; the one that went out to Twitter and Facebook as a status update. I wrote “weeks'” instead of “week’s.” I know. Not a big deal. Still, I’ve posted about apostrophe abuse so often that I feel I must own up to all apostrophe crimes. Feel free to report me to Strunk & White.

* My dad.

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Last night’s author event at the Watertown Library.

Photo taken by my husband during a smoke break.

Wow. I’m still a little overwhelmed by last night’s reading at the Watertown Library. Going into the event, I was having nightmares that I’d walk in to see hundreds of folding chairs and that only a few would be filled by my family and by the folks who work at the library.

In reality I walked into a room decorated with balloons bearing the world “e-book.” There were just barely enough seats for the people who came out to hear the lecture and reading. And those people included my friends’ parents and siblings, my neighbors when I was growing up, the people who employed me when I was a teenager, a high school teacher and his wife, and of course my family.*

I was kind of nervous, even with all the familiar faces. I’ve done readings before – but always as part of a group. This was just me, and part of the event was a lecture about e-books. I’ve been doing a lot of research about e-books lately and I had note cards and everything, but there was this one dreadful moment when everything I knew just disappeared and I accidentally entered that blank-slate state of mind that I’ve been trying – and failing – to cultivate during meditation. Holy horrible timing, Batman. But then the moment passed, and everything from that point on went smoothly.

One of the most thrilling things about last night: there were people I don’t know in the audience, including a 13-year-old writer who wants to have his own book published someday. I used to be the 13-year-old going to readings with my parents. I don’t think he could possibly know how much it meant to me to sign his copy of Beware the Hawk (even though I told him to wait a few years before reading it.) It’s the circle of life, people.

Speaking of circling, I read with my back to a huge window, and I’m told that a hawk was flying around on the other side of the glass during the reading. As I posted on my Facebook author page last night, I want to try to duplicate this experience by naming future titles after animals that might appear outside of a library window. I’ll name the next one Beware the Squirrel. Or something. There is an interesting discussion about possible common-animal book titles going on over there right now.

Thank you so much, Watertown Library, Friends of the Watertown Library, and people of Oakville and Watertown. You’ve made me so happy.

*My father took scads of photos last night. I will post them when I get them.

 

 

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My first reading is today.

Today is a big day for me. It will be my very first “author event,” a reading and discussion of e-books at the Watertown Library. 

I posted once that I get stage fright before every class I teach. Well, I’ve got stage fright now.

Part of my brain is babbling incoherently about having to stand up in front of a bunch of people who probably knew me as a child, and ohmygod, what if the nun who taught me in the fifth grade is there and I forget to bleep myself out while I’m reading? What if my shipment of books doesn’t come in this morning and I have to go to a signing without them and what if my car breaks down or I have an allergic reaction to my lunch or my one print copy of Beware the Hawk spontaneously combusts and I lose my voice and pass out?

Another part of me knows that’s just stage fright. I hear that kind of nonsense from my brain at least three times every week.

A third part of me – the part I’m paying attention to – is so very excited to be going back to my hometown to read from a book that I wrote and that a company published. I can’t wait to get up to that podium and talk about e-books. I can’t wait to see Watertonians that I haven’t seen in ages. I can’t wait to sit down and sign some books.

And if the books don’t come in? I’ll sign Post-Its instead.

And if I lose my voice? I will use large poster boards to deliver the talk silent-film style.

And if I forget to bleep myself out and my fifth grade teacher is really in the audience? She’s heard those words before. Probably from kids who were published for saying them. I’ll just have to resign myself to having my mouth washed out with soap.

The reading/talk will take place at 7 p.m. today at the Watertown Library in Watertown, Connecticut. If you are free, come by. Maybe you’ll get to see me get my mouth washed out with soap. Maybe not. Either way, it should be a blast.

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