Stretchhhhhhhhhhh

Overheard: My 6 year old daughter while watching a show about the Universe:

"Daddy, I want to stay away from those black holes."

"Why is that, honey?"

"My legs will stretch too far and I'll have to buy new pants."

Peace, Linda

Hey You! Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is... HURRY DOWN SUNSHINE

Every month, around hump-day, I'll feature a recent read - a novel or memoir - that somehow moved me to tears or joy or frustration. Of course, my featured pick will relate to the meanderings of the head, the heart and their intersection.

In addition, I will apply one final, important criterion: this book will be a debut work, preferably published by a small press.

Why these constraints? Because new writers are the first to be neglected in the new economy. Because small presses are folding - or on the brink. Because new authors and small publishing firms take inordinate risks without the resources or attention.

I walk my talk - I will BUY my books, and buy them from an INDEPENDENT BOOK-SELLER. I challenge you to do the same - support the little guys.

January's pick up is the first book read in 2009: HURRY DOWN SUNSHINE by Michael Greenberg. Published by Other Press. Let's get to it, shall we?

Enjoy. Peace, Linda

NB: And if you know of other offerings which fit my bill, please - make a recommendation.

---
"I feel like I'm traveling and traveling with no where to go back to."

HURRY DOWN SUNSHINE is the true tale of a father's experience watching his 15-year old daughter suffer a psychotic break. A taut, spare tale told over the time frame of a single, sweltering summer in New York City, this unflinching memoir gives an honest portrait of bipolar disorder from the inside and out. Greenberg adeptly balances his daughter Sally's descent into madness and her treatment travails with his own horror as a parent realizing his child is deathly ill.

As a mental health researcher, the story rings true. The author did his research on the condition and doesn't lead the reader down faulty paths. (You cannot imagine how many times I find - in edited books from the big houses - grossly erroneous medication descriptions and spellings).

As a parent, I appreciate Greenberg's honesty. So many stories - true and otherwise - about mental illness sugarcoat the condition. Indeed, bipolar disease is the disease du jour in many social circles, a popular excuse used by celebrities and non-celebs alike to excuse bad behavior. Conversely, the author avoids demonizing the disease, another frequent failing of like-minded novels and memoirs.

As a writer, well... wow. Greenberg brings his small cast of characters to life: the bohemian ex-wife crafting cakes in Vermont, a landlord with literary aspirations, the author's brother struggling with his own mental maladies, the unorthodox shrink, the young shoteh whose manic visions confound his Hasidic family. And then there's Sally, the winsome teen who inhales Shakespeare, churning out her own poetry, convinced genius is childhood, a genius lost as we age. But central to the story is Michael Greenberg himself, a generous narrator who pours his hurt and bafflement and frustration on the page like Chinese tea leaves muddled in a saucer.

Greenberg's prose sings throughout, in ways large and small. In the opening:

It's something of a sacrilege nowadays to speak of insanity as anything but the chemical brain disease that on one level it is. But there were moments with my daughter when I had the distressed sense of being in the presence of a rare force of nature, such as a great blizzard or flood: destructive, but in its way astounding too.

HURRY DOWN SUNSHINE is an important book, one to place on the bookshelf alongside Jamison's AN UNQUIET MIND and Kaysen's GIRL, INTERRUPTED. It provides a sensitive detailing of the horrors and gifts of manic-depression.

Read it.

---

About the author: MICHAEL GREENBERG is a columnist for the Times Literary supplement (London), where his wide-ranging essays have appeared since 2003. His fiction, criticism, and travel pieces have been published in O, The Oprah Magazine, Bomb, The Village Voice, and the Boston Review. He lives in New York. This is his first book.

About the press: OTHER PRESS "attracts authors who are guided by a passion to discover the limits of knowledge and imagination. We publish novels, short stories, poetry, and essays from America and around the world that represent literature at its best. Our nonfiction books--should they be history, current events, popular culture or memoir--explore how psychic, cultural, historical, and literary shifts inform our vision of the world and of each other."

I like OP's catalogue - ballsy, important, lush offerings, fic and nonfic alike.

More Reviews:
--NEW YORK TIMES
--THE VILLAGE VOICE
--NEW YORK MAG

Hard, hot numbers...

More Americans reading LITERATURE!

Yes.

Two points make a trend, and I'll take every speck o' good news I can.

Peace, Linda

Down with the economy, up with literature!

Or some optimists believe.

As Geoff Dyer says, "Anyone who has an eye on the market is not a writer but a whore." READ IT HERE

So write what you want to write, dollars be damned.


Peace, Linda

Emerging Markets...

Or How To Put Your iPhone to Best Use.

From the New Yorker.

And The Millions put forth their picks for reading in 2009. Anticipation.

Peace, Linda

Manic Monday Musings

Manic because it's the first day back and my multi-media inboxes stacked high. Finally wading out...

Writing moms, tell the truth - weren't you slightly euphoric watching the kids get on the bus today? Come on, don't lie... it's hard work doing all that family togetherness for two straight weeks... so hard, I'm taking the last three days of THIS week off to recover.

THE WRITING... On January 2, BRIGHTER THAN BRIGHT turned 3. A toddler with, hopefully, a more sophisticated vocabulary. I celebrated by reading the first completed draft, finished June 15, 2006 and clocking in @ 183k words. A hefty tome, laden with adverbs and backstory and telling and... she reads much better now. Funny, though... many of my key scenes begin and end almost verbatim. There is something about that first draft establishing voice and narrative...

Wrote two flashes for the 6S Volume II Print Anthology. No tawdry sex and drugs this time, just a couple of dark imaginings relating to being a mother and daughter both. These pieces kind of wrung me out. PURE lies fallow for now...

THE READING... Indulgences galore. One reason I'm not writing is because in four days I devoured PHARMAKON, HURRY DOWN SUNSHINE, and THE KITE FLYER. Pharmakon rang out the year, while Hurry Down toasted the new one in. I'm often leery of books that everyone else raves about, so had put off The Kite Flyer. It kept me up for two nights straight past midnight, sobbing into the sofa pillow. More on these later...

THE BLOG... I'm getting tired of these posts, need to perk it up - ideas? I'm thinking more book reviews, interviews with writers and scientists, and changing to a fuschia background (not!). Bring it on, folks...

LISTENING TO... Spiralling from Keane's PERFECT SYMMETRY. On my new iTouch. Nice.

Peace, Linda

To Look for Joy...

This I resolve in 2009.

Joy can be small and hidden, not always grandiose and pompous. Joy sneaks in on ocean swells, on breaths of air, on thunderclouds.

Seeking joy is no passive endeavor; the journey involves both indulgence and discipline. I am more comfortable with the latter, so this year I will gift myself with the rarest of resources: time, self-kindness, and permission to say no to time- and energy- drainers.

My writing goals are minimal:

--Write every day.
--Read every day.
--Continually market what I have written.
--Seek representation.
--Continue to enjoy the process.
--Build community.
--Give my brutal kindness to my writing group.

Find joy where you can, and hold on tight... Peace, Linda

Peace...

Ceaseless, snow drifts down,
shimmers pure on starless pine -
a choir of silence.

Happy holy days.

Shalom.

Salaam.

Namaste.

Pace.

Peace, Linda

The REAL reason publishing's going to hell in a handbasket...

Chris Goldberg's got it right at HuffPo... dudes don't read but it ain't their fault.

I mean really... can you take any more books involving vampires, knitters, or spoiled Americans finding themselves in (insert exotic location)?

And hey - I'm a girl. Give me Brett Easton Ellis over Stephanie Meyers, any day.

Peace, Linda

Jelly Knees

Today feels like New Year's Eve two weeks early.

Lectures done. Tests graded. Papers marked. Conferences - been there, done that. Chapter for textbook - submitted. Science manuscripts - completed. Promotion and tenure packet and reference letters - in the hopper. Holiday cards - ordered. Dad's 7-week chemo and radiation regimen - over.

I've been weepy all day, my knees wobbly at the notion of not rushing, not worrying, not doing a damn thing.

Except what I want to do.

I write, but I can't put into words the intensity of the past 4 months: the intensity of deliverables, of time, of emotion. Of not knowing. Of the way my brain never stopped, how it kept whirring away lists and worries like a forest of cicadas in July.

THE WRITING... New ideas already jockeying for the freed-up space in my frontal lobe. PURE percolates through the gray matter, as does a children's Christmas story and several 6S flashes due at the end of the year. A new story, a YA about Jess and Zeke, two orphaned brothers, dominated several pages in my Moleskine this morning. And of course, LOVE SONG ON THE INNER LOOP keeps peeping over my shoulder.

THE READING... I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE by Wally Lamb. A reread. So damn good, and primer for his latest which I HOPE is in my stocking.

Peace, Linda

For Men - Some Gifting Advice

OR HOW TO STAY OUT OF THE DOGHOUSE

Hilarious.

My University gifted staff and faculty with furlough days - what's your boss getting for the holidays?

Peace, Linda

Devils in the Medicine Chest

Last week I went to the Centers for Disease Control and banged heads with other public health policy types over this problem: how can we stem the burgeoning epidemic of prescription drug overdoses?

A question near and dear to my academic heart, the one I cut my doctoral teeth on some years ago.

Prescription drug abuse is a huge problem: 1 in 14 US citizens non-medically use medications like OxyContin, Vicodin, Ativan, and Adderall. Where do they get the stuff? Not Mexico, the internet, or even from their docs - Almost 60% report families and friends as their source.

We sat around in a double-tiered u-shaped configuration, a bunch of experts from the FDA, the CDC, NIDA, SAMHSA, DEA, State govs, and the Ivory Towers - even a judge - and listened to each other pontificate on the pros and cons of drug courts, serialized prescription forms, electronic monitoring programs. Yet, despite expansion of these programs, prescription drug abuse continues to rise, even as the use of cocaine, heroin, and rave drugs declines.

Sitting in the windowless room for two days, it occurred to me these programs barely make a dent in the abuse problem because they come at the wrong point in the food chain: after a doc has prescribed, after a pharmacist has dispensed, after a patient has gotten hooked and in trouble.

It seemed to me the solution to prescription drug abuse is pretty damn straightforward: Just lock the stuff up.

And maybe educate everyone that OxyContin isn't quite as innocuous as candy.

***

Last night my 9 year-old son spent an hour on the internet, researching the question of Santa. His conclusion made me weep - why DO they grow up so fast?

The tree’s up, cookie supplies are in, here come the holy days.


THE READING... Ooooh, having so much fun: Wally Lamb, Dirk Wittenberg, Julia Glass, and so on and so on...

THE WRITING… A children’s story – can you believe? And it even has a happy ending. What’s wrong with me?

LISTENING TO... The KILLERS Day and Age. Good stuff. As a writer, though, I just want to edit HUMAN - shouldn't it be dancerS, not dancer?

For the frugal readers among you... FREEBIE BOOKS FROM BLEAK HOUSE and INTRIGUE PRESS

Peace, Linda