Carole Burns candidate statement, and a few more words

We can't merely sit and watch this election - we all must be involved. This is why I'm running as a Democrats Abroad delegate, and why I'll be asking these questions if I am chosen as a delegate: How can we best help get Biden elected? 

As a published writer and former journalist, I will also seek to write about this election: about the convention, about campaigning as a ground-level Democrat, about the reasons our country has become so stridently divded; and about why this election is so important. 

My candidate statement (with a few missing words added!) is below. My author Website, where you can learn more about me, is www.caroleburns.com

Thanks all! Carole

Name: Carole Burns

Country: United Kingdom

Gender / Pronouns: Female

Candidate for:

At-Large National Convention Delegate - EMEA At-Large National Convention Delegate - Global

Affirmative Action Attributes:

Candidate statement:

As a university lecturer, a former journalist at washingtonpost.com, a freelance journalist and a fiction writer who deals with racial and social justice in her work, I am committed to working as hard as possible to ensure President Biden is re-elected. We are at a critical junction in the world and in our country, and it is absolutely vital that Republicans are not given power again under their current leader. I would spend my time at the convention learning as much as possible about how we Americans living overseas can work toward Biden winning. The strategies used in the past are not working as effectively as they did as recently as Obama’s campaigns. No one answers phone calls from unknown numbers anymore. How can we help in key swing states? How can we keep abreast of the most effective ways of campaigning? How can we recruit others to help?

Margot Livesey Q-and-A Part IV: Writing 'The Boy in the Field'

As well as being a fiction writer, Margot Livesey is an esteemed teacher of writing - she's a professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop - and the author of many essays about writing, including the acclaimed The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing. 

So for our final segment of our interview - which is a mere precursor to our live online Writers in Conversation on this upcoming Monday 15 March, where you can ask questions, too -  of course I asked Margot about the writing itself. 

Be sure to join us Monday night. 

Carole Burns I was struck by how precisely and beautifully written it is. Do you write rough drafts and hone them, or do you craft each phrase very carefully from the very first draft? In other words, what form of self-torture do you practice as a writer?

Margot Livesey One of my aesthetic ambitions was to write a short novel in which a lot happens.  I knew I had to find ways of compressing the material that would make it more vivid, rather than less.  My husband paints large abstract oil paintings; he paints in many layers, waiting for each to dry. With The Boy in the Field, I thought of myself as painting in layers, trying to get a certain depth, a certain resonance.  There were many wrong turns in the plot but once the plot had stabilized, once I knew the arc, I found myself imitating Eric, going over and over certain things, searching for just the right detail to make a scene resonate.  I would begin with nine details and end with two.

Carole Burns Is that different from your usual process?

Margot Livesey Yes. In The Flight of Gemma Hardy and in Mercury, I was considerably more expansive.  In The Boy in the Field moving between the different points of view was a way of leaving out certain things and allowing the reader to intuit them. I was very purposefully trying not to be expansive.

Carole Burns Do you usually go back to scenes and add to them?

Margot Livesey    I always have to do a lot of revision. But one of the things that I've been interested in, in my reading, is how at the opening of a novel, the novelist sets the level of detail. As a reader, you learn to expect a certain rhythm. For instance, Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark is close to 400 pages, and from the very early chapters, Cather describes her heroine in lavish detail.  In her much shorter novel Lucy Gayheart, you can tell within a few pages that she’s going to skate lightly over her heroine's life. I wanted to see if I could set a level of detail that created a world and yet would allow the reader to move fairly swiftly.

Carole Burns What a challenge that must have been.

Margot Livesey Yes! But one of the things I think about with each novel I write is how I can set myself a new aesthetic challenge that has nothing to do with the plot or the characters, but has more to do with the way the story will be shaped and delivered on the page.

Carole Burns Interesting. And by the way, there's no sign in the book of any sort of plot difficulties. It unfolds naturally and elegantly.

Margot Livesey Thank you. But if you could capture my recycling, you would see evidence of many wrong turns, many scenes I wrote that proved completely hopeless, but that maybe, in a small way, contributed to other scenes that were not hopeless.

 You can purchase The Boy in the Field and The Hidden Machinery via IndieBound in USA or Blackwell's or via bookshop.org in the UK - and many other bookstores.  

 

Margot Livesey Q-and-A Part III: Engaging in and navigating the political in 'The Boy in the Field'

We left Margot as we began to talk about the youngest sibling in this novel, Duncan, who begins to search for his birth mother. - nine-time novelist, esteemed professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, beloved mentor to writers around the globe - about her most recent book, The Boy in the Field.  

Margot Livesey - nine-time novelist, esteemed professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, beloved mentor to writers around the globe - will be my guest online at Writers in Conversation on Monday March 15, the reading series I run at the University of Southampton's English department. You can click here to set a reminder to join us on Monday. Until then, I hope you feel enticed by these snippets of our conversation from a few weeks ago. 

Margot Livesey (Duncan is) devoted to his adopted family, but he is curious about the DNA thing.

 Carole Burns And of course, you gave him something else as well - his birth mother is Turkish. Those moments where he begins to notice he looks different from his own family, such as when he looks at his own hands and his adoptive mother’s hand, are very moving. How did you navigate what could have been right now a tricky subject matter for you?

 

Margot Livesey Of course there was a danger of cultural appropriation, but Duncan, in so far as he's modeled on anyone, is modeled on a number of mixed-race people I know in Britain who feel British or English or Scottish. That's never a defense in a novel, but I decided in Duncan's case that ethnicity was going to be a small part of the equation. The thing that race makes possible is the project of finding his mother. Back in the 80s, when Duncan was born, it was quite hard to find information about adoption. Her having a slightly unusual name was a big help in his seaerch for her. But that's a very pragmatic reason. More importantly I wanted him to be someone who looks like an outsider but from the point of view of himself, his siblings and his parents is totally part of the family.

Carole Burns Yes, their love and acceptance was indisputable. For me, what made him most distinctive is how, even as a child, he has the eye of an artist.

This novel seems to be more political than some of your other books – though maybe I'm just reading everything in that way right now. Do you feel your writing has been affected by the intense politics of our times?

Margot Livesey I began the novel in 2015, and I felt fortunate, as things shifted, to be writing about something that could easily be seen as irrelevant, that wasn't trying to deal with the mounting crises on either side of the Atlantic. I had a number of friends who were trying to write overtly political novels, and I thought of my novel as a more covert undertaking - you could see certain political concerns, but you didn't have to see them.  Setting the novel in 1999 allowed me to make a different kind of claim on the reader's attention.

You can purchase The Boy in the Field via IndieBound in USA or Blackwell's or via bookshop.org in the UK - and many other bookstores.  

Margot Livesey Q-and-A Part II: Writing multiple points of view for 'Boy in the Field'

Continuing my conversation with the author Margot Livesey - nine-time novelist, esteemed professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, beloved mentor to writers around the globe - about her most recent book, The Boy in the Field.  

Margot will be my guest online at Writers in Conversation on Monday March 15, the reading series I run at the University of Southampton's English department. You can click here to set a reminder to join us on Monday. Until then, I hope you feel enticed by these snippets of our conversation from a few weeks ago about this wonderful book (you can read the first chapter here for now). 

Carole Burns Did you always know you would write from the point of view of all three siblings?

Margot Livesey At first, I thought maybe I could use the omniscient point of view - something I’ve long wanted to do.  I wrote the first chapter that way. But as I got deeper into the novel, I realised that omniscience was at odds with showing how Matthew, Zoe and Duncan each has her or his own version of things.

Carole Burns And how each of them is affected so differently. Matthew wants to solve the mystery. Zoe pushes herself a bit more quickly, perhaps, out of childhood. And Duncan becomes curious about his adoptive mother. How did Duncan's story come about?

Margot Livesey My parents were both only children and they both died when I was young.  At the age of twenty-two, I was sure I had no living relatives.  But a few years ago, a former student was doing research for me on Ancestry.com, and a woman wrote to her asking if Eva McEwen, my mother, had a living daughter.  It turns out that I have many relatives; they just happen to live in Australia. I had already begun The Boy in the Field, when I went to meet them.  There was a barbecue in my honour.  As I went from guest to guest, I kept wondering if I was feeling something special.  I realised I no longer knew what it would be like to meet someone with whom I shared DNA.  Duncan already existed but I gave him some of my preoccupations. He's devoted to his adopted family, but he is curious about the DNA thing.

You can purchase The Boy in the Field via IndieBound in USA or Blackwell's or via bookshop.org in the UK - and many other bookstores.  

Margot Livesey Q-and-A Part I:How 'The Boy in the Field' Came to Be

Margot Livesey - author of nine novels, esteemed professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, beloved mentor to writers around the globe - will be my guest at Writers in Conversation on Monday March 15, the reading series I run at the University of Southampton's English department. 

I interviewed Margot recently, and so, to entice readers and writers to our online Writers in Conversation,  I'm going to include a few answers every other day or so, until the night itself.  Do join us on Monday 15 March 7:30 pm London/2:30 om ET. 

Carole Burns The Boy in the Field feels completely apropos to our times: a novel that explores the aftermath of three young people confronted with the reality of violence, after they step in and help a stranger who has been attacked. How did the story begin for you?

Margot Livesey A few years ago an old acquaintance got in touch after several decades; we’d attended the same school in Scotland.  I had lunch with him and his wife in New York. He told me that as a teenager he’d wanted to be a doctor, but one afternoon he had come home from school to his tiny village - a place where no one locked their doors - and in his garden found the body of a young woman.  She had been murdered, it turned out later, by her boyfriend.

Those few seconds changed his life. He gave up on studying medicine and, after several false starts, found his way into a very different profession.  What stayed with me was not so much the awful crime but the way he talked about that fault line in his life; it was something I knew I wanted to write about.  By fault line I mean one of those moments that profoundly change a life.  A person looks like they're going from A to B, along with their friends and family; suddenly they head off to G. I am one of those fault-line people.  Everyone I grew up with lives in the UK; I teach and mostly live in the US.

I also liked the idea of writing about young people and their moral clarity. Greta Thunberg wasn't around when I started writing the novel, but she became a rising presence.  People often forget how much teenagers know.

Carole Burns You could have centered a story around the effects of violence on one person, but you expanded the story to feature three characters. It seems like a really wise choice.

Margot Livesey I always knew that the origin story was not the story I wanted to tell.  I've read too many books which begin with something terrible happening to a woman and I didn’t want to add to their number unless it was unavoidable.  I also wanted to write about the way in which members of a family can live under the same roof and yet see the world very differently.

Carole Burns  At the same time, the novel also features elements of a mystery story.

Margot Livesey I wanted the opening to be a version of a British detective story …  a field, someone injured.  I liked the idea of having a crime in the background, with a real detective working to solve it, while in the foreground would be Matthew, Zoe and Duncan, each on their own quest.  I read an interview with a writer of detective novels - I think it was Louise Walsh - and she said one reason detective novels are so popular is because the detective goes into the Valley of Shadow and brings back order. I found that idea very helpful in thinking about the genre, and also in departing from the genre.

 Set a reminder for our talk on Monday 15 March, so you can ask Margot questions, too.

Lorrie Moore, the generous critic

The characters in Lorrie Moore’s fiction – from the story collections “Self-Help” (1985) and “Like Life” (1990) to her novels “Who Will Run Frog Hospital?” (1994) and “A Gate at the Stairs” (2009) – are intelligent, sympathetic, and witty sometimes to the point of acerbic.

Her upcoming book of reviews and essays, “See What Can Be Done,” highlights a more generous character: Lorrie Moore the reader.

In more than 60 of her reviews and essays — many from The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books — Moore explores, analyses, weighs up, all with an openness to the work at hand. Interlaced with pieces about politics and current affairs, there are reviews of books by John Cheever, Amos Oz, Ann Beattie, Donald Barthelme, Richard Ford, Darryl Pickney, Peter Cameron, three pieces about Alice Munro, and many others -- a reader's dream.

From my interview with Moore for The Washington Post, here's one of my favorite exchanges:

Carole Burns: I am wondering if, in conversation at work or with friends, if you come up with the witty, biting repartee we all wish we'd thought of on the spot, or if, like the rest of us, you think of them the next day - or when you're writing.

Lorrie Moore: I don’t think of there being witty, biting repartee in my work or my life. My recollection is that there are mishearings and misunderstandings, slips and falls into the cracks of disconnection, and general awkwardness. There is despair that rises up and causes the mind to go to forbidden places. Humor is almost always an accident or a desire to be kind and jolly and one can discover it all around—in the world of one's fiction and outside of it as well. As for my friends—we are all brilliant and amusing when not tired.

Jennifer Egan at 'Writers in Conversation'

I was thrilled to have Jennifer Egan start off her U.K. book tour for Manhattan Beach, her first novel since winning the Pulitzer for A Visit From the Goon Squad, by speaking to my students in "Writers in Conversation," the reading series I run for the English department at the University of Southampton.

She read from both those books and answered questions from me and our students, some from our BA English programme, some from the MA Creative Writing, and a few working on novels for their PhD.

We've captured the event on our Youtube channel -- Enjoy! .

James McBride: 'Fiction Gives You Real Hope'

The stories in James McBride's latest book, Five Carat Soul, is a quirky collection: with characters ranging from a group of a group of middle school boys in a band called "The Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band" (a song in itself), a insatiable toy collector who might or might not

cheat a poor family out of a valuable toy, and a young African American boy in the Civil War named Abraham Lincoln, it gives a colorful and varied view of American life and its people without falling into the usual simplifications. When a Chinese grocer who shoots a young black man assumed to be robbing his shop, the villains aren't who a reader might think they'd be.

For me, the highlight of my interview with him for the Washington Post involved an exchange about politics, which he says he tries to avoid. Fiction, he said, is a relief from politics.

"Just because you yell the loudest doesn’t mean you’re the smartest. It means you just yell the loudest.

Most of my characters: they don’t yell, they don’t scream. They don’t curse, by and large. They’re good people. And you know what? Good people don’t have to be boring. The really interesting parts of life are the parts we are not witness to. Because the man who decides to shake his neighbor’s hand, or help him cut the grass, they’re the true heroes. Only with disasters like the one in Houston are we able to see our humanity. So these stories give me the room to breathe. Fiction offers some relief from the drudgery of sitting on the third rail of race, where most of us sit or avoid. Fiction allows us to dream. Without dreams what do you have? Fiction gives you real hope."

On turning the age of Mrs. Dalloway

It was sort of shocking, when re-reading Mrs. Dalloway recently, to make this discovery: I was now her age exactly.

I’m not sure why I found this so immediately haunting. In part, I suppose, I’ve always thought of Clarissa and Peter and Richard and Sally Seaton as older than they are – Clarissa’s illness perhaps aging her beyond her years; fifty-one in 1925 being older than fifty-one now (I will offer myself that solace). But the idea that I had caught up to her somehow echoed through me.

I've explored my passion about Virginia Woolf's novel in this essay, published on Literary Hub: The Best of the Literary Internet.

Winchester Writers' Festival: All Sorts of 'Swimming Lessons'

This blog is mainly for the attendees of my Short Story Market panel on June 17 at the Winchester Writers Festival, but first, a few highlights of a weekend filled with great writing and great advice about writing.

The inspiring, inventive keynote address from poet Lemn Sissay included this sentence, which I am going to remember every time I feel this way, and that will be often: For those who think writing isn't hard, or isn't work, remember this, Sissay said: "Every day you face the idea that you’re crap, that you might be crap that day." How many people do that?



Claire Fuller read several beautiful passages

from her new novel, Swimming Lessons. Her work ethic is a model for us all: she has written her third novel, and sold it, already, before Swimming Lessons is even in paperback. One way she tries to keep swimming through the first draft: she tries, each day, to move the story forward. That was also on my mind this morning as I faced down my own new novel.

And the panel on independent publishers, headed by Debbie Taylor, author and editor of Mslexia, was an inspiration for those of us who are trying to write the kind of poetry and prose they are working so hard to publish. A great tactic from the editors of Structo: anyone who submits to their magazine must send in a photo of a recent copy of any literary magazine they have purchased.

So, for the Short Story Market panel, here are links to the books and authors I mentioned (with apologies to Lemn Sissay for using bullet points). Thanks for attending, and do stay in touch!

By the way, I'm linking where possible to hive.co.uk for any book sales. It's a site run by independent booksellers, and you can link your account to your favorite independent, and they get a credit for each sales.

UK resources on Short Story Market:

The Mslexia guide to Indie Presses 2016-27 - congrats to Mslexia for selling all copies at the festival.

The other option: the 2017 Writers' and Artists' Yearbook, also helpful for journalistic freelancing, for those of you who might want to try your hand at book reviewing.

US resources on Short Story Market

Poets and Writers Magazine has a helpful and extensive Web site.

The email listserv, "Creative Writing Opportunities," primarily in the USA -- I believe you can sign up by emailing Allison Joseph, the founder, at crwropps@aol.com.

Highlighted Writers

The writers whose thoughts on revising I included from my own book, Off the Page: Writers Talk About Beginnings, Endings, and Everything in Between, were:

Mary Kay Zuravleff, Charles Baxter, John Dalton, Richard Bausch and Joyce Carol Oates. I also mentioned Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, although I have sadly not had the privilege of interviewing her.

Here's the Francine Prose book that I recommended is Reading Like a Writer. And here's the quote from it about dialogue, that helped me realize I needed to ditch a scene in my novel-in-progress:

“…dialogue usually contains as much or even more subtext than it does text. More is going on under the surface than on it. One mark of bad written dialogue is that it is only doing one thing, at most, at once.”

Finally, the Youtube channel for "Writers in Conversation," which includes videos of writers from the reading series that I hold at the University of Southampton, where I teach. You can listen to Tessa Hadley talk about creating characters, for instance.

How the Past Haunts Us: Gail Godwin's 'Grief Cottage'

Ghosts haunt Gail Godwin’s new novel, “Grief Cottage.” Some are actual ghosts, such as the confederate soldier who sometimes shows up on the South Carolina beach where the story mainly takes place.

But Marcus, the novel’s 11-year-old narrator, visits the abandoned Grief Cottage, he sees a different ghost: the teen-age boy who was its last resident. The boy’s parents drowned in Hurricane Hazel in 1954, and he was never found.

Godwin may flirt with the magical, but she deals firmly with the realism of depression and loss. It’s those less physical, more haunting ghosts that this, her fourteenth novel, is really about.

 

My full review ran in The Washington Post.

The Quotidian Billie Holiday

It’s easy for the rest of us to forget that famous people — actors, athletes, presidents or, in this case, an iconic jazz singer — are just people who happen to be famous.

“Jerry Dantzic: Billie Holiday at Sugar Hill,” a sleek coffee table book of photographs, many never seen before, is a reminder that between the fame and the infamy, normal life happens. 

As I write in my article for The Washington Post, Holiday is pictured walking into the club before a performance; putting on her makeup in front of a dressing room mirror; being licked on the cheek by her Chihuahua; holding her blond-haired godson in her arms; or leaning over a pan in her friend’s kitchen (left).

It's quotidian, as well as quintessential, Billie Holiday.

Dantzic was on assignment for Decca Records, most likely to shoot the cover of Decca's "The Blues Are Brewin' " album, for which, according to the log copied in the book, he earned $25.75.

About 100 of the nearly 400 other photographs taken during that shoot have been collected in this book by his son, Grayson Dantzic, who hadn't even known his father had photographed Holiday.

“What he needed to say, he said in the photos,” Dantzic said.

Richard Russo: Still a Working Class Kind of Guy

Though Richard Russo's new story collection, Trajectory, features a college professor and a screenwriter - both of which he's been - the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist still feels more like the working class characters of his novels.  Maybe this is why: 

Author Richard Russo (Elena Seibert)

"My father and I one summer built an exit ramp off the New York State Thruway into Albany, for years after we could never get off that exit without looking at each other and saying, “You know, that was one long, hot, brutal summer of 12-hour days.” Every time we’d drive it, we’d think, “We built that,” he said in my Washington Post article this week, prompted by the publication of his newest book, Trajectory.

It was one reason he felt Trump won last November: work such as building roads isn't respected enough anymore, he said.

Politics seems to loom large in so many people's minds right now that some of my long interview him that was actually about writing had to be cut.  So here are three questions that I'll share here instead.

What prompted the four long stories that make up Trajectory?

To me the link in all of these stories is each of these characters is trying to figure out why each of their lives turned out the way they did. They each have a sense, as I do with my own life, that if I got to live my life 99 more times, that the life I’m living now would not be repeated again. It’s not the way that it must have turned out, it’s just the way that it did turn out. And these characters are all scratching their heads and saying, “I got here how? Because I had something different in mind.” 

Each story also has someone lurking in the background who is ill, or has a disability, which feels like the story’s secret center.

A lot of my characters in my earlier novels are a decade or two decades older than I was at the time of my writing, and in some ways I’m trying to imagine a future -- or guard against it. In “Empire Falls,” I was trying to write about the most unimaginably horrifying thing that I could, which would have been putting one of my own children in danger in some way.  It’s almost as an amulet against something like that actually happening. Maybe now at this point, at 67, no longer a young writer, maybe these are stories about mortality, or stories about coming to terms with mortality, and that’s explains all the illness.

I particularly like the ending to “Horseman.” I do too. I don’t mean this to sound egotistical. I’ve always found that the best of my stories, especially if I haven’t read them in a while, I can get lost in them. If the characters feel real to you as a reader, that means as while that for a while they have taken over your life, that you believe in them as much as you believe in your external reality, and so you read about this character and she breaks your heart. That’s the why I felt when I re-read Horseman. It doesn’t get any better than that for storytelling.

A 'Manifesto' From Gillian Anderson, aka Scully

First, for British readers, a newsflash:  Gillian Anderson will not be the next Dr. Who.

Asked about stories that the next Doctor needs to be a woman, which named her as a strong contender, she said: "That is not correct.  It may need to be a woman," she added, "but it's not going to this woman, I'm afraid."

Now, more about my Washington Post interview with the actor who has gone from playing the hard-nosed special agent Dana Scully on the “X-Files” to roles as varied as Blanche DuBois for a production of “A Street Car Named Desire” at London’s National Theatre, and Miss Havisham in a BBC mini-series of “Great Expectations.”

And she keeps surprising her fans.  Her recent round of interviews is to promote a New Age-y book called “We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere,” which you wouldn't think Scully would even read, let alone Anderson write.

Gillian Anderson as Blanche DuBois

But despite high-profile roles playing strong, complicated women on stage and screen, the 48-year-old mother of three says that she’s at times felt fragile. 

“There have been here were maybe two or three points in my life where I have felt like the decisions that I was making weren’t good,” she said in a phone interview from London. “In a way I was my own worst enemy.”

So she and British journalist Jennifer Nadel teamed up to write We: A Manifesto.

Read my full interview with them from the Washington Post.

Rebecca Solnit on 'Mansplaining'

Rebecca Solnit is sometimes thanked — and sometimes blamed — for the word “mansplain.” Solnit’s 2008 essay “Men Explain Things to Me” helped give birth to the term, which has been canonized by the Oxford online dictionary, been translated into multiple languages and inspired countless memes.

In her new book, “The Mother of All Questions,” Solnit continues her incisive commentary on the ways women are silenced and other kinds of repression. In my phone interview with her for The Washington Post, she talked about the evolution of mansplaining and how all of us can learn to be heard.

Photo credit: © Adrian Mendoza

Here's also a question about writing, which didn't make the Post story.

You’re also a writer who uses language quite precisely, whose goal in part is “to describe nuances and shades of meaning.”  Is this a frustrating time for you?
There’s no golden age. It feels like in a legendary time people were more thoughtful. But human folly and glibness has been everywhere. We had McCarthyism when my parents were young, we had Father Coughlin when they were children, who was a right-wing anti-Semitic demagogue. There’s always been people peddling simplistic solutions and people accepting truisms that don’t describe reality. Just to call things by their true name is really powerful, to have lies called lies. Truth and accuracy are things we really need as operating procedures as we go forward.

Listening in a Post-Brexit (Post-Election) World.

"Scoundrel Time" is a new journal founded in wake of Trump's election.

In the words of editor Paula Whyman: "Today there are forces trying their hardest to divide us. In the face of that, art in its many forms can give voice to our concerns, hopes, fears, anxieties—and joys."


I was pleased to be asked to submit a piece about my experience as an American in the UK, post-Brexit, post-Trump. 



Photo credit: Paul Edwards

Do check out the journal, too!

Alice Hoffman Is Most 'Faithful' to Writing

It was a thrill to speak  earlier this week to Alice Hoffman, whose new novel, Faithful, comes out today. Here is my favorite quote from my Washington Post interview with her:

How do you complete a book almost every year?

I work really hard at it, and that’s really the only answer. I do it a lot. I sacrifice things, and sometimes I’m sorry I sacrificed those things. That’s just the way it is. And I have a lot of stories. And not time to tell them all.


And so you feel compelled to write as many as you can?
I think every artist feels compelled to do their art when really they should be walking on a beach on a sunny day. If you’re not compelled to do it, I don’t think you wind up doing it.

Colm Tóibín on enabling the reader to "enter the spirit" of Eilis in his novel 'Brooklyn'

Colm Tóibín seems to me like a writer at the top of his game, with every book in the last decade or so -- The Testament of Mary, Nora Webster, The Empty Family, and Brooklyn, being released this week as a film -- a real stunner.

He dismissed that idea with a laugh in today's interview in The Washington Post, timed to coincide the film adaptation starring Saoirse Ronan.

"You can say that," he told me, "but I’ll have to say to you: Those sentences are written one by one."

I asked him about how he creates the quiet intensity of novels such as Brooklyn, in a segment that we didn't have space for in The Post.

Brooklyn, while suspenseful and a page turner, is also a very quiet book, too. How do you manage that?

"I suppose I found a style for the book very early on which were pretty simple sentences, and I was also interested in being in her mind all the time, but not having her reflecting on herself. Merely allowing her to notice a great deal. So she has a real intelligence in the way she notices, sees things, looks, misses nothing, but I don’t give her huge powers of analysis. She doesn’t tend to analyse things as much as notice them. And I moved very carefully with that, so it looks as if you’re moving in on a surface, but what you’re doing is you’re entering as the reader into her spirit, into her mind or her imagination, and almost sort of becoming her. Therefore, if you give her a dilemma – it seems at first as if it’s going to be very simple, that her life in exile will comes right very quickly, but once you set things wrong for her and you give her a dilemma, the reader comes very close to that dilemma because of the way I’ve tried to keep the reader very close in to her.

"For example, if you write in the first person singular, you have this voice, and the reader feels distant. If you her constantly analysing and going over things that have happened, you have the reader thinking, well that’s who she is, I’m not that. But if you have her noticing and seeing only, and you get to know her via how her eyes work, and what she sees, then the reader can get very close in, and start to see, too. That’s would be the theory of it."

I think it's more than a theory, at least when Colm Tóibín does it.

The full interview ran on The Post Web site today.

Erica Jong on 'Fifty Shades':Cinderella With Bondage

The author of the 1973 bestselling book, Fear of Flying, famous for the concept of the "zipless fuck," a no-strings-attached sexual encounter that its protagonist, Isadora Wing, fantasizes about, should know a thing or two about sexy novels.

And in my recent Washington Post interview with Jong about her latest novel, Fear of Dying, I was somewhat delighted to discover she is not a fan of Fifty Shades.

Here was a fuller response to my question than I included in The Post.

Why do you think Fifty Shades of Gray has been such a phenomenon?

I have no idea. It’s a Cinderella story. It’s an old-fashioned story. Many young people haven’t read The Story of O, Justine and Juliet, all the pornographic books. The Story of O is written like Shakespeare compared to Fifty Shades. I think the reputation of the book sells it, rather than the book itself.

People kept asking me about it, so I had to read it. It has nothing to do with anything I wrote, ever. It’s a Cinderella tale. A man who’s much wealthier gives a young woman who’s 18 all kinds of goodies. She can’t afford a computer, he buys her one. She can’t afford a car, he buys her one. In return, she signs a contract to be submissive. She’s a virgin – very realistic for 2015 (that’s irony by the way). He’s a rich billionaire at 25. Very few people become billionaires at 25 but forget that. She’s able to get the Prince because she’s willing to be submissive. He brings her to orgasm, and of course, she being a virgin, he’s the greatest lover she ever had. That’s the story. It’s a retelling of the Cinderella story, with bondage. It is not even copyedited. Shocking to me who is meticulous with publishers. This book, she has an orgasm and she says, “Holy Cow!” or “Holy Shit!” And one on page she’ll say “Holy Cow” or “Holy Shit” five or six times. It seems to me that there has never been a woman in the history of the world who said “Holy Shit” when she came. Also, the book is so poorly edited – it’s not edited at all – that’s it’s an embarrassment to the printing press. It isn’t even spell-checked! I rest my case.

Rita Mae Brown's 'Cock-Eyed Gaze'

Rita Mae Brown, author of the classic lesbian novel “Rubyfruit Jungle” (1973) and the ongoing Mrs. Murphy mystery series, had some provocative things to say about her upcoming Pioneer Award from the Lambda Literary Awards: "I’m not even remotely interested in being gay," she said.

But another part of our conversation for a Washington Post interview might have been my favorite, when we veered into talking about Latin and the subjunctive tense.

"Subjunctive tense: Do you remember when you first had to learn the subjunctive tense? It’s almost vanished in English. I love it. It’s such a fabulous tool. If I say, 'I wish I were you,' you know perfectly well I cannot be well, but we’re going to an area now where I don’t have to prove anything, you don’t have to prove anything, and we can be imaginative and completely free with one another. I just find that one of the greatest intellectual gifts possible, as well as an emotional gift. I’ve been rereading my Lucretius, and whenever he flips into the subjunctive tense, I know I’m in a magic zone."

She receives her award June 1.