Love Is In the Air: Susan Tepper and From the Umberplatzen

When I think of love, I think of stories of love, stories that capture the heartbeat of relationship. No writer does love better than Susan Tepper: writer, editor, actress, and community-builder. With her latest book, Susan proves the best things in life do come in small packages.

In FROM THE UMBERPLATZEN, a collection of linked micro-fictions, Tepper tells of love tender and ruthless, fulfilled and denied, between Kitty, an American who has left her unhappy marriage, and M, a German physicist obsessed with silk kites. They meet in the park where the Umberplatzen trees grow, where M's kites tangle. Told in flashback after Kitty returns to the States, each story features a letter or gift M mails her daily, a gift emblematic of a shared instant.

In this book and in many of her other stories, Susan Tepper understands the romance of love--and the way love can hurt. She writes of the small moments of a relationship, the quirky ones, and the quiet ones. The moments that matter. This little tome will make you chortle, will make you get misty, will make you nod your head, knowing, but most of all it will surprise you.

I had a chance to chat with Susan about the creating of FROM THE UMBERPLATZEN. In her own words...


Susan, how did the concept of From the Umberplatzen first come to you?

Linda, I wish I could say I was struck by a lightning bolt of inspiration and visualized the book unfolding, or even parts of it. But that's not the case. Because I never know what is going to come out of me and onto the page. I sat down, as I am doing now, and started typing. These words appeared: "From Germany he sends me leaves from the Umberplatzen tree." It became the first sentence of what grew into a piece of flash fiction.

I had no idea what an Umberplatzen tree was, or if one existed and I'd somehow stored it in my unconscious memory. But I did know Germany, somewhat, having spent a lot of time touring that country as a tour guide for an airline. That was two decades ago. I saw a lot of the world during that period, doing mostly stringer-type jobs I picked up at four different airlines, while I struggled with an acting career that wasn't winning me the Academy Award.

After the first story, which I titled "Leaves," I wrote another and called it "Crash Landing in the Umberplatzen." So I had those two little pieces of flash that tied together. Two characters I'd named M and Kitty Kat. Lovers. And I instantly got hooked by them and their dilemma.


You have dedicated your book to Marcus Speh, a wonderful and generous writer, and of course, your male protagonist goes by 'M'. What role or influence did Marcus have on this book's conception? Did he play the role of muse or editor? And what does he think of your story? (of course, I may go ask him myself!)

Marcus is a dear and generous friend. He took both stories for his kaffe in katmandu. I sent them to him because of the setting being Germany, and because I love his whole concept of the kaffe and what it represents to writers. Just seeing those rucksack bags full of spices always makes me heady. I wasn't conscious of Marcus when I made the decision to call my male character M. Of course it could have been an unconscious choice.

In the course of interviewing Robert Olen Butler for The Nervous Breakdown, he offered to read the manuscript of "From the Umberplatzen" and he ultimately blurbed the book. Robert told me that I'm an "intuitive writer." But I kind of knew that. I am a tad psychic--remember I am Madame Tishka! As for Marcus, no, he didn't edit the book. Was he a muse? Perhaps. I sent him stories along the way as I wrote the book and he offered his encouragement. And I "lifted" certain things from him, such as objects at the kaffe in katmandu, placing them in some of the stories (chapters). Marcus has a particular reverence for the Irish poets and that theme does come up in this book. But, I do draw from everywhere. Be careful, Linda, or you may appear in my next book!


I would be honored to show up in one of your books, even a cameo role! So as a writer I am, of course, curious about the process surrounding the writing of this book. How long did it take you to get the first draft? How did you approach revisions? Did the stories change much from initially conceived to final product?

Stories # 1 and # 2 came out pretty fast. Remember, each is a one page flash. They are snapshots of memory, Kitty Kat's memories, of their time spent together in Germany. It all gets filtered through her. When the book opens, M is left behind in Germany and she has returned home to the states. Once I got hooked, I pretty much wrote a story a day. Forty-eight stories that mesh into one complete tale of love and passion and conflict and disruption. All the things that make up a love relationship. I didn't do much editing, they came out mostly as they are now. I may have fixed some typos but it was a stream of consciousness type of writing. Kind of a blur, or what they used to call "flow." Yes, it was a flow state and all a little blurry when I look back on the actual writing process.


Ah... flow. The brass ring. So close at times, but so elusive. So many of your stories, these included, have a delicious tension to them. For instance, in most of the forty-eight gems in From the Umberplatzen, there is a line about what M mails to the narrator, a token that symbolizes the event or interaction they shared. In the 1 or 2 stories without the mention of a mailed item, I was left almost aching--I felt the foreboding, the tension, due to the lack of that connection between the characters via the mail. As well, the placement of the mailed item in the body of each story is telling. Did you manipulate this convention purposefully, or did it just bubble out of your subconscious?

No, I didn't manipulate the stories in any way. Some had gifts or items he sends her through the mail while other days she gets nothing from him. Perhaps it's M doing the manipulating on his end. He wants her back in Germany desperately. I suppose I made the gift choices out of items that appeal to me, since I was writing the voice of Kitty Kat and she was getting the presents. So in a sense I also got pleasure when these wonderful gifts arrived--like the purple feather boa and the box of lace trimmed panties and a satin garter the color of melting ice. I do like very much what she received, for the most part.

Occasionally M would get the upper hand and send something less appealing--like nails. He sends her nails in one story. But that was integral to a particular memory she had. I can't really distinguish between the gift and the memory--because it did all bubble out in a burst for me, as you said. It was an emotional writing time. This was written during a hot summer of violent unpredictible weather. That, too, may account for some of my choices for these characters. I'm very affected by weather. But aren't we all?

***


Yes I am affected by weather. I also am affected by these stories. Published by Wilderness House Press and available now, just in time for The Day of Love looming around the bend.

Susan Tepper lives and writes from New Jersey but considere New York home. She has published well over 100 stories, poems, essays and interviews in journals worldwide. She writes a bi-monthly interview column called MONDAY CHAT on the Fictionaut blog, as well as the advice column "Madame Tishka Advises on Love & Other Storms" at Thunderclap Press. Tepper curates the reading series FIZZ at KGB Bar in New York City, and has received six nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Deer, the title story of her collection, was nominated for NPR Selected Shorts.

You deserve some love, don't you? Treat yourself--and a loved one--to a collection of stories as sweet and complex as a high-end box of chocolates. Peace...

To Be Sung Underwater (Review)

The man sits hidden among pines on a bluff overlooking the grid of farms and county roads lying north. It is hot. Several times now the man has moved his three-legged camp stool to maintain full shade. That is how long he has been waiting and watching and drinking. He watches through a scope, a 3 x 9 x 40 Bushnell, the one he has used in his lifetime for large, wary prey – deer, for example, and sometimes antelope.

So begins TO BE SUNG UNDERWATER, a novel by Tom McNeal (Little Brown). But the man is not waiting for game but for a woman, the woman he loved twenty-five years earlier as a seventeen year-old transplant from Vermont. This is the love story between Willy Blunt, a young carpenter with pale blue eyes, and Judith Whitman, a driven young woman who comes to live with her father in Nebraska. In one summer, they fall in love and to Judith, marrying Willy seems the natural next and best step in her life. But when college takes her to California, Judith pursues her dream of a film editing career and forgets Willy. She marries a successful banker, has a daughter, and lives a dream life. But her marriage has secrets, some of them kept from her, and Judith becomes dissatisfied and restless with her life. She remembers the sweeter and slower times she had with Willy in the wide-open Nebraska plains. This story is about what happens when a woman trying to remember love reaches back into her past to find the man who never forgot her.

To Be Sung Underwater is both lush and transparent. The prose sings without drawing attention to itself. McNeal paints the beauty and harshness of Nebraska, as well as the rush and sparkle of Los Angeles, with enviable ease. The story alternates from past to present, and he weaves the two time periods seamlessly. For a man, McNeal writes girl good, especially when he writes Judith as a teenager. Here, the writing shines with wit and irony and the right touch of rebellion of every young person. This, when Judith first meets Willy, who has come to roof a neighbor’s house:

Judith watched him follow her in and didn’t stop watching until the door closed behind them. When she turned back, the station wagon was still there and the bearded roofer was looking her way. The red brim of his Purina seed cap was stained dark with sweat, and his amused expression seemed to suggest he knew a little bit more about this country and about this farm and possibly even about her than she ever would. It was quite an irritant. With all the hostility she could muster, she said, “What’re you looking at?”

The roofer made dropping his gaze seem like an act of deference. “Well, I was looking at you,” he said, then raised his eyes again and let them settle even more fully on Judith. “And I’ll bet I’m not the first.” He was smiling again.

Judith gave him a stony stare and said,” Are you half-witted or just easily amused?”

She expected this to send the roofer into retreat, but it didn’t. His smile in fact loosened slightly. He raked his fingers through his beard and said, “Just exactly how old are you, anyway?”

“Seventeen,” she lied.

He nodded, stared off for a moment, then turned his face to her again. “Well, then, I’d call you dangerous.”

McNeal shows great affection for his characters. They come across as honest, flawed, and compassionate. Judith is the girl of the seventies, a time when women began openly to flex their brains and muscles. She doesn’t quite trust relationships, even with Willy, due in large part to her own parents’ failing marriage. Willy uses big language and once had big dreams, but finds his talent and his lot in carpentry, in building things. This love estranges him from his father, who wishes nothing more than for him to take over the family farm.

Summer in Nebraska is full of lazy days drinking beer at secret swimming holes, making out in Willy’s truck, Thursday afternoon trysts in Judith’s bedroom while her father is away. Willy drinks beer in almost every scene, and I wondered why Judith, astute in most other ways, never questions his constant drinking. Her neglect of this detail plays a significant role in their relationship and in their ends. Without giving away too much, the finale has a Hollywood feel, perhaps too closely scripted and contrived relative to the rest of the novel. You sense the oncoming tragedy, the tension palpable.

McNeal writes a gorgeous, devastating tale, one which will make you rethink what is important in your life. It is a story of living a reflective life, even if that soul-searching comes too late for redemption. It is a story of choices made, and how to gain some happiness by returning to those wrongly made choices. Reading To Be Sung Underwater often left me in a state of peace, of serenity, an almost spiritual place. If this is what Rufus Sage, Nebraska feels like, then take me there. Transport me, the way this book does, to a place of greater grace.


About the Author: Tom McNeal's first novel, Goodnight, Nebraska, won the James A Michener Memorial Prize and California Book Award. His short fiction has appeared in the The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize XXI. He lives near San Diego with his wife and sons. To learn more about Tom and his writing wife Laura, check out their website McNeal Books.

Peace, Linda

March Debut Book Pick: Still Alice

Even then, more than a year earlier, there were neurons in her head, not far from her ears, that were being strangled to death, too quietly for her to hear them. Some would argue that things were going so insidiously wrong that the neurons themselves initiated events that would lead to their own destruction. Whether it was molecular murder or cellular suicide, they were unable to warn her of what was happening before they died.

I love the poetic sensibility of this epigraph opening Lisa Genova’s debut novel Still Alice, a haunting tale about a poorly understood and largely untreatable condition - Alzheimer's Disease. A form of dementia, those afflicted suffer a slow, cognizant decline in memory, control of language and thought, and full functioning in every day activities most of us take for granted.

The author inflicts this dread illness on Doctor Alice Howland, a Harvard Professor of Psychology who, at age 50, has reached the pinnacle of career, family and love. Alice represents the state-of-the-art in her chosen field cognitive psychology, so when she blanks out on the words of a rehearsed lecture and forgets to attend meetings, she chalks her deficits to stress, exhaustion, and menopause. It isn’t until she loses herself in Harvard Square, a place she crosses daily, that she realizes something is amiss. She discovers she has early onset Alzheimer’s Disease - and there's little she can do to stop the condition’s advancement.

We follow Alice's slow spiral into dementia and her grappling with the consequences of the disease on others: her eldest daughter Anna, desperately trying to become pregnant, son Tom in medical school, and rebellious Lydia, the youngest daughter making her way as an actress in Los Angeles. But it is her husband John who struggles the most, torn between his own career and the needs of his increasingly debilitated wife.

There is a lyricism to much of the writing, especially near the end when Alice experiences rare, lucid moments:

I miss doing everything easily. I miss being a part of what’s happening. I miss feeling wanted. I miss my life and my family… I miss myself.

The author writes the story in third person from (largely) Alice’s point of view. This perspective allows some distance between the character and the reader, creating an interesting dynamic. At first, I wanted to sink in Alice's head, really feel her progression into madness; indeed, this inability to really be with Alice frustrated me at first. But about half-way into the story, I was relieved for the distance; Alice's mental instability made me squirm, the horror too close for comfort.

The medical facts and science are spot on - the author is, after all, Doctor Lisa Genova, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist. As a scientist myself, I’m always grateful when the facts in fiction are indeed facts.

This is an important and beautifully written book tackling a difficult, stigmatized subject. Read it – the story will move you.

About the Author... Lisa Genova is a neuroscientist, actor, and writer who lives in Massachusetts. Visit her at STILL ALICE.com

About the Press... I know, I know - Simon and Shuster is a tad bigger than the small, independent presses I prefer to feature. I made an exception this month because I feel this book is so important for understanding this brain disease, and because Lisa Genova initially took the smallest possible press approach – she originally self-published STILL ALICE in 2007. Hers is a story of what talent coupled with persistence can achieve.

More Reviews…
--AARP Magazine
--Powell's Book
--Boston Magazine

Peace, Linda

PS. I'm double-blogging today - check out my guest post at EDITOR UNLEASHED on Blogging for Books