Grub Street Rules! - Panel on "How To Tell a True Ethnic Story"

Last night I attended a marvelous panel discussion on telling an 'ethnic' story, hosted by Boston's Grub Street creative writing center in downtown Boston, overlooking the Public Garden. It was a warm summer night, so the windows over Boylston Street were open. Amid the riveting discussion laced with many many laughs, we heard Mounted Police horses clip-clopping down the sidewalk, and motorcycles racing to catch the light before it changed.

The evening started with panelists Rakesh Satyal, Rishi Reddi, and Ru Freeman reading from their new books. Each reading and author commentary brought fresh perspectives to writing about their chosen worlds. Grub Street's Executive Director Christopher Castellani moderated the panel, asking great questions, prefacing it all noting that in a way, there is no such thing as 'ethnic writing' per se. Every story, ethnic or not, is set in a unique world, and we must deal with the craft of telling the story correctly in that world. His insightful questions helped pull together the wide-ranging and free-flowing discussion, and he artfully pulled things back to how we might want to consider the issues in our own work. The issues included nitty-gritty points like when to italicize foreign words, as well as over-arching concepts like the pressure on so-called ethnic writers to get trapped into believing their work has to represent their entire culture, rather than just telling the story they want to tell. I could only buy one book - and I chose Ru Freeman's, A Disobedient Girl.

I was deeply inspired by the panelists, the moderator, and Grub Street. How lucky we Bostonians are to have this institution!

Now, back to querying agents.

Harvest Gold in Spring - Short Story in the Aroostook Review

My short story, "Harvest Gold in Spring" just came out in the Aroostook Review, a literary journal produced by the English department at the University of Maine - Fort Kent. The story is set in northern Maine.

Essay in Down East Magazine

Above is the link to an essay I wrote for the "My Maine" column of Down East Magazine. I wrote it last September for our writer's group, and with edit feedback from the group, my big sister Jo Grossmann (who is on the editorial committee of Open Spaces Magazine) and my dear husband Gary, I sent it off and was delighted when it was accepted. I wrote this when I first began querying in earnest and received my first important rejection from an agent to whom I had a referral.

The agents I pitched to at the Maine pitching session in June didn't ultimately pan out, though I highly recommend the experience. It gives you the chance to get instant reaction to your book concept, as well as your platform. I came away with feedback that helped me boost my query's effectiveness and have had a markedly stronger response ever since. Staying positive, I'm back in the game!

Story published, and a close encounter with a loon

The Aroostook Review accepted my short story "Harvest Gold in Spring" and I'll link to that when it's up on their website.

Meantime I'm beginning work on a new book - not sure where it's going yet. But it's set in Fez. The Maine woods envelop me these days. The woods are soft, inspiring, mysterious and quiet. Strange how I'm writing about Fez here, with all its tumult, noises, smells and chaos, amid the quiet of the woods. Last night I caught a white perch off the dock using a worm and bobber. As I pulled the fish in, a loon followed the fish underwater toward me. It dipped and dived so beautifully - and when it was clear I was getting the fish, it popped up to the surface about two feet from me and just looked at me! It had been tagged on each foot - red and blue tags. I've never seen one that close. We think this might be one of a nesting pair down the stream from us.

Kareem Roustom in the Tufts Journal

My profile of Kareem Roustom came out in the Tufts Journal today. Link to the story here.

Kareem is a rising star - a multi-talented composer and musician who works in many musical genres. He composes everything from pop-star arrangements to classical concert music, film scores and choral works. He also does arrangements of classical and folkloric Arab music and leads the Tufts University Arabic Music Ensemble. He graciously let me sit in on oud with the group this past winter semester - and it was a pleasure to see him in action. We had our recital last Sunday. We shared the stage with the Tufts Klezmer Ensemble, which was a hoot since we had to fit into the right half of the stage, pie wedge style! We loved the pieces we learned from Beth Bahia Cohen who subbed for Kareem in a couple of sessions. She taught us several songs by ear in the old Middle Eastern tradition. We really sounded fine on those songs, since we'd internalized them so directly. It feels good to have this story picked up and out in the world. Kareem has some incredible projects coming down the pike...the film score for Mosque in Morgantown, and Amreeka. Check him out on his MySpace page.

Note: Photo by Alonso Nichols

Mechanical Owls and Literary Pursuits

Rewind to the early 1960's to the suburb of Boston where I grew up. The local theater, to which we could walk from home, showed double features about the "East" after school and on weekends - matinees for children. In my memory, they were black and white films. They usually involved choosing three wishes from a genie. They had elaborate, fanciful 1,001 Nights plots, exotic settings, and fabulous costumes. At home afterward, my mother listened patiently as I would try to tell her the entire plot, getting overly enthusiastic about the wonders of the story in the process. In my memory there were a lot of talking animals in these films. One had a fascinating mechanical owl. The term 'mechanical owl' is now a family joke - for when I get excited about a complicated story or plot.

If someone asks me when I first become a writer, what should I say? Should I confess that I was a storyteller at a young age, relating these unlikely plots to my mother at the kitchen table? Or that I loved to listen to ghost stories told around a campfire? I wasn't one to spend afternoons at the library reading. I'd more likely be outside playing in a massive game of Capture the Flag, catching turtles with a net, barefooted, or hosting a dress-up 'tea party' with the neighborhood girls, all of us bedecked in second hand prom dresses mailed from my older cousins in Iowa.

Once my novel finds a life in print, I wonder if I'll need to polish the story of my childhood so it sounds more literary. But how do you trick out a mechanical owl? Any ideas, let me know.

Early April Update and Musings

It's truly spring now - the spring peepers are singing in our local wetlands. The Daffodils and Christmas Roses are blooming, and the lawns are greening up. Such a miracle to watch the world renew itself in just a few weeks each spring.

As I'm polishing DRIVING DREAMS and sending out query letters to agents, I'm stirring up ideas for another novel. I have several in mind, but some part of me wants to take on a very focused, smaller story and theme, you know a nice thin book that someone can finish off during a trans-Atlantic flight. An author recently told me we each have a 'set point' in terms of word length and manuscript scope. DD is about 155,000 words now, and while I'll keep whittling away at it, this length isn't completely outrageous since it's a multi-generational saga. I'm also writing short stories, to practice telling stories in about 2,000 words. It's fun to be limited by size. I've sent three of them out...none of these are about the Middle East.

In the meantime, I came across THE WRITING ON MY FOREHEAD by Nafisa Haji. It deals with many of the same themes in DRIVING DREAMS, in the context of an Indian family. The author's website is one of my favorites.