Off the Shelf: Writers on Writing
November 8, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
Jane Austen mash-ups are fun, and that's about all
"Can you get a bustle under vinyl?"
November 1, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
Off the Shelf: Can I get a little respect, here?
"Introduce yourself! I gotta eat lunch!" The entertainment director at Ghost Town in the Sky hunkered over his burger and fries. I stood on the stage warming up with my sister-in-law, Tomi Lunsford, a Nashville singer-songwriter who performs music to accompany my trilogy of children's novels set in Appalachia. It was mid-July, and we had been on the road for several days in Tennessee and North Carolina on a kind of "O Brother Where Art Thou" family book tour of five adults and four kids caravaning through the mountains.
October 4, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
Off The Shelf: The day Hemingway's Nobel Prize came out of hiding
Last year, the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to the French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. The prize has been handed out annually, with the exception of the World War II years, since 1901, when French poet René F.A. Sully-Prudhomme won the first. Irish winners have included William Butler Yeats (1923) and George Bernard Shaw (1925); Latin America counts Pablo Neruda (1971) and Gabriel García Márquez (1982) among its laureates. America's 11 winners include William Faulkner (1949), John Steinbeck (1962) and Toni Morrison (1993). It may surprise you, then, to know that I myself received a Nobel Prize in Literature. No one was more startled than me.
September 27, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
Off The Shelf: Marry a banker? Why?
My husband, Evan, and I decided to get married during the summer of 1998, between the first and second years of our MFA program. At the time, I was working at a literary agency and had a chummy relationship with many of the clients. One by one, I began telling them -- with the earnest enthusiasm of a 26-year-old -- that I was engaged.
September 20, 2009
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Off The Shelf: Finding the pieces that turn writing into poetry
When I was in my early 20s, living in Berkeley and drifting toward a PhD in Russian literature, I started writing poetry. It was a completely unexpected development. I definitely hadn't been one of those kids in high school who worked for the literary magazine and wrote moody poems. In college, I took one poetry class, my last semester, which I nearly failed because I kept skipping it to get drunk and hang out with my friends.
September 13, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
Off The Shelf: How I inhabit the Earth
Back when my knees could handle it, my friend Kitty and I used to meet at the bottom of Fern Dell Drive and hike up above the Griffith Park Observatory to Dante's Peak. From there, on a smog-free day, we could see all the way to the Pacific on one side and to the Angeles Crest on the other. Staggering to think we lived in this beautiful place, but I wondered every time how it was that a vista here, a vista there, struck me as an accident of nature, whereas the human spirit, wailing, sputtering, pining to put that view into words (or pictures or music), might be evidence of the divine.
September 6, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
Off The Shelf: What to pack for a trip? Great times -- and tomes -- in Europe
Packing for vacation offers special challenges for a family of bookworms.
August 30, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
Off the Shelf: Adventures in language, in the land beyond 'literal'
" 'I must not,' said Jane, 'think of rats.' And proceeded to think of them as hard as she could." Bland, boring sentence, right? When I tell class after class of writing students that this one sentence -- plucked many decades ago from a children's book whose author's name I can no longer remember -- set me on my way to becoming a writer, they look at me as if I've lost my mind.
August 23, 2009
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Off The Shelf: History and her story finally meet
I was on a roll. I knew my topic: living in a historic neighborhood. I knew my purpose: an opening for a collection of essays I'd been publishing as stand-alones over the years. All combined (I realized recently) memoir with history and politics, including the politics of writing narrative nonfiction. If this new piece worked out as I hoped, I might just have a book called "When History Gets Personal."
August 9, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
In her dreams, she writes. But these days, she can't sleep.
Dear Reader,
August 2, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
For so-and-so, with love
"For Sherrell, Who's helped show me the way from my earliest recollections, and whose love and spirit -- abundant in every way -- are a large part of the life behind this book and the life in this book. My Love Always, Roy. Old Chatham, NY, 12/25/82."
July 26, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
Speak, memory
In the early stages of writing my memoir "Slow Motion," I packed my bags and prepared to spend a month at Yaddo, an artists' community in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. I had never been to Yaddo before and was feeling intimidated. James Baldwin, Truman Capote and Sylvia Plath had been guests there. A composer I knew had told me a story about his first visit: The man helping with his luggage brought him to a music studio that overlooked a crystalline lake. "Aaron Copland composed 'Appalachian Spring' here," the man called over his shoulder as he left. "Best of luck!"
July 19, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
It can be 'tough' to be a female in Morocco
Two years ago, I was invited to give a reading from my novel at a university in Ifrane, in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. One of my cousins immediately suggested I hire a driver to get there, but I laughed off his suggestion. I can drive myself! I'm not some helpless princess!
July 12, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
Finding inspiration across the room
"Have you ever tried Okinawan sake?"
June 28, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
Can't say no
I get called a slut a lot. This appellation, alas, mostly has to do with my publication record.
June 21, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
The truth about writers
Ask a writer what she values most in her creative life, and she is likely to respond, "Time to write." Not many of us have the luxury of writing full- time; we have spouses, families, day jobs. To the people closest to the writer, "writing time" may seem like so much self-indulgence: Why should we get to sit around thinking all day? Normal people don't require hour after continuous hour of solitude and silence. Normal people can be flexible.
June 14, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
Give me an E
My interest in the letter "e" began when I was in second grade and learning that accursed writing style known as cursive. I did not quite learn how to hold my pencil correctly, had terrible handwriting, and the additional requirement of learning to write in cursive felt like I was learning to climb Mt. Everest. I sat beside my classmates, who seemed to have no trouble forming the a's, q's and p's. I found myself, in rebellion, adding several loops to a capital E.
June 7, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
Yoga opened doors she had long ago closed
Except for some false starts, I stayed clear of yoga for years. Around 2001, my then-husband renewed his interest in it and began going daily. To do this meant he was away for the morning and then spent a few more hours looking exhausted.
May 31, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
How spell-check changed my life
Spelling bees and dodge ball, I was the first one out. I like to blame both ineptitudes on the lateralization of brain function, the left-brain / right-brain thing. I am left-handed. Everyone knows that lefties can't spell well and that when a big, red ball is coming right at us, we're invariably looking the other way.
May 24, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
Will Facebook kill literature's 'leave the past behind' themes?
Behind every American coming-of-age story stands a single passage, in which George Willard, Sherwood Anderson's alter-ego, sits in a carriage of the B&O railroad, waiting to leave Winesburg, Ohio:
May 17, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
Dungeons & Dragons, and iPhones and pizza
I stood at the end of a dark passageway, illuminated by a strange blue glow. To my left slouched an injured dwarf and a shifty paladin, both drinking a miraculous energy-restoring potion. Behind me stood a half-elf who, I'd been told, was "the One" and his companion, a gnome with a pronounced desire to kill anything that moved near his friend. Me? I was your average time-traveling human who had seen things in the future and the past that made this moment fraught with danger.
May 10, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
A room of her own
I began to write when I was in high school, in the 1960s, in Ahvaz, an oil town in Southwest Iran. I still can vividly see the room in which I wrote. It was one of a row of bedrooms, on the second floor of our two-story house with a wrap-around balcony. I had furnished my room sparsely -- a wooden desk and chair, an iron bed covered by a quilt my grandmother made, a rust colored Persian rug on the floor. But the room had a window overlooking Pahlavi Square, full of discordant color.
May 3, 2009
OFF THE SHELF
When second novels go bad
I'm having a love affair with "bad" second novels. Not "Rabbit, Run." Not "The Crying of Lot 49." Many writers do knock it out of the park on their second try -- and good for them. But those aren't the novels I mean.
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
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