The Rose Variations - July's Debut Author Pick

Rose MacGregor laughed and shouldn't have. Frances, it seemed, was going to cry. Frances Dupre, leaning against the kitchen counter of Rose's sublet in a twisting old neighborhood in St. Paul on a muggy August night, held a full wine glass that she didn't seem to be drinking from, but rather posing with as the tears trickled down her face. She wept because Rose was lucky in love, while she, Frances, was not. This was ridiculous, something Frances had invented out of thin air.

Thus begins THE ROSE VARIATIONS, a novel penned by Marisha Chamberlain (SOHO Press), a playwright, poet, and now novelist from Minnesota. The story follows the professional struggle of Rose MacGregor, a fledgling composer who navigates the wily paths of academia during the mid-seventies, a decade when women were just beginning to break through the 'glass ceiling' of promotion and tenure. The theme explored throughout is the balance of heart and mind, and how to find fulfillment in both. Rose is determined to stay independent, which gives her plenty of room to struggle with loneliness, ambition, and even at times love. Her quest is all too human - to answer the complex question of happiness.

A number of colorful characters support her journey: Alan, gay department colleague discovering his own balance in life and love; Frances, secretary of the Department who has a love affair with the married Department Chair; Lila, the bearded cello prodigy who returns from self-imposed sabbatical to play Rose's compositions; Guy, the stonemason who triggers love and lust in Rose; Natalie, Rose's unbalanced sister who has a niece out-of-wedlock; and the mysterious piano tuner.

The writing has moments of lyricism, especially when the author waxes eloquent on music. Indeed, there is a lilt to the story, a fine melody that wraps around the reader. I love music, was myself a performance major for a year, and this focus was what initially attracted me to purchase the book. Dialogue provides momentum; Chamberlain's playwrighting skills are enviably illustrated in her first novel.

That said, I found much of the story predictable, particularly the events shaping the relationships between the characters, some of which bordered on cliche. The conclusion left me vaguely unsatisfied, for it provided no new insight into the perpetual dilemma faced by ambituous women who wish to 'have it all'.

Rose has so much to share; this was a rare instance when I wished the story was told in first person or, at the least, close third. But the story is narrated in a rather formal third voice, staying true to Rose's point of view most of the time. But there are times when we (satisfyingly) get into Rose's head, like when she allows herself to experience love:

She needed stillness in which to sink down. Instead, she felt herself going up and up, groping upward in her mind, past Frances, up past tenure, up, up, groping her way up the face of the moon, no handholds nor footholds, just a dazzling, slippery surface, and an upward urge no one could sustain.

The Author... Marisha Chamberlain is a playwright, poet, and fiction writer who lives in Minnesota. Scherazade, a stage play, won the Dramatists Guild/CBS National Award, and her book of poems, Powers, won a Minnesota Voices Award.

The Press... Soho Press is a New York based independent publishing company that "place(s) a high priority on publishing quality unsolicited materials from new writers." Their list is eclectic and edgy, with a strong emphasis on crime fiction (they're the US firm pubbing Stuart Neville's THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST - yay!) and literary fiction. Read their Blog. This is a press whose offerings I covet for my shelves.


Sing your way to the closest indie bookstore (or click yourself directly to the source) and enjoy THE ROSE VARIATIONS.

Peace, Linda

Fabulous Flash Fiction - Forty For Free!

Available NOW for your reading pleasure -- The Editor Unleashed Flash Fiction Forty Winners.

Featuring:

--Defection (Yours Truly)
--Mirror, Mirror (Greta Igl)
--Pure White (Stephen Book)
--Rough Trade (Stephen Nicholson)
--Sportsmen (John Towler)
--Unscrambling Love (Angel Zapata)
--Ten One-hundreds of a Second (Deborah Bundy)
--The Mercantile Exchange (Kim Beck)

Peace, Linda

Writing What You Don't Know?

The conventional wisdom is to write what you do know. If so, then my stories should be rife with middle-aged women undergoing middle-aged crises of work, heart, and soul. But they are not. Instead, for some strange reason I write from the perspective of young men (very young men who most would argue are really on the cusp of adulthood) who have very different life experiences and situations than myself.

Why do I write what I write?

This fascination with young men likely stems from my total lack of understanding of what drives them. Males in their late teens and early twenties are mysterious creatures and, I sense, conflicted ones: how does one become a man in this society?

Aboriginal societies send their pubescent males into the wilds for walk-abouts. Other tribal groups will circumcise, conduct trial by fire challenges, or encourage duels to death. American society sends young men to college and/or work and tell them to provide for the family they will create. But now, with women sharing the load - and sometimes taking the lead in resource provision or even choosing to go solo - young malehood seems to be at a crossraods.

I think of this often, especially in context of my ten-year old son whose legs grow ever more lanky and whose jawline sports soft blond fuzz. How will he become a man?

This wondering must be why characters Ben and Clay and Kevin bubble up through my subconscious, demanding to Be.

The writing... a preoccupation these past three weeks. Almost finished GONE, a story I am very proud of because I stretched in so many ways. Polishing my opening of PURE for submission to my writing workshop starting July 25. Working on three HINT FICTION pieces due in August, as well as some garden-inspired poems for another deadline. Also playing around with a non-fiction book proposal on prescription drug abuse...

The reading... Finished MIDDLEMARCH - yay! Am in thrall with a fantastic anthropological study RIGHTEOUS DOPEFIEND by Phillippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonboem which follows homeless heroin addicts in San Francisco. The authors get close and personal with camera and interviews. The writing is phenomenal and very accessible, and the photographs heart-breaking. Finishing up July's debut author write-up - look for it next week - the monthly hump was bumped due to my writing frenzy...


The awards... Shellie of Layers of Thought and fellow blogger from Project 100 sent me a Heartfelt Award. Thanks Shellie - glad you and others feel warm fuzzies in my little blog room. My turn to nominate:

Deborah: Makes the world of writing and riding come alive from the foothills of North Carolina. And she's a damn fine friend to boot.

Paige: Artist, photographer, poet... her blogs are fine places to settle with a glass of wine.

Greta: Fabulous writer - and foodie. Her recipes and prose both make me drool.

Hope: Writing with a dash of humor of lots of compassion.

Peace, Linda

Farming...

For some time now I've felt the saturation of too many words, of too much life, crowding my heart and head. Mornings, when I wake with the chortling birds, the words have come reluctantly, exerting their own tug-of-war that not even two cups of coffee can overcome. I have a short story due the end of July for an anthology and, as of last week, not a sentence committed to paper. Not even an idea. So when I left for North Carolina last week, I left sans computer, sans files, sans everything but a few stories written by friends. I decided to BE - in the moment, in the breath - for a few days.

On Sunday morning I stole away with my husband to the daylily farm a few miles from my parents' house. The air was swollen with moisture. While my husband chose his specimens, I paced the lanes between furrows of flowers, their reds and oranges, lilacs and pinks richer in the overcast. I walked for exercise - it was a large field as daylily fields go - and to release the tensions that continued to dog me. Workers pulled plants from the ground and tended the lilies still striving toward a distant sun. In the back field, a young man and woman clambered from a pick-up truck and began to harvest hydrangea blooms. Watching them as I walked, the muse snuck in and whispered: Clayton Oxendine Pettigrew, and the story unfurled.

I am smitten with my new character and his story, and hope to constrain GONE to its 2500 word limit - I have not written a 'proper' short before. But I like the sprawl of a novel, the luxury of space a long story affords, so who knows? For now, Clayton plants the red clay of Eastern North Carolina and I farm my words...

Peace, Linda

What Grows in the Garden

The peak of summer. My garden is lush with foliage, flowers, and the buds of many edibles: blueberries and service berries, hazelnuts fat for the squirrel to pick off, sugar snap peas late this year from the chilling spring rains. The asparagus have sprouted into high feathery fronds that hide my children and the rabbits, and the raspberries sport small white flowers that buzz with bees.


This year, for the first time, the kiwi trees droop with fruit, although the white peach is sparse after last season's bountiful crop.

We spend a lot of time in our garden. My husband is the primary caretaker; the garden is his genius genesis. I play supporting actor by weeding and dead-heading his prize daylilies, harvesting the bounty and making it part of our dinner staple. Caring for our outside living room, preparing the peas and berries, slows me down, puts me in a meditative frame.

Like my garden, my words slow, become more lazy yet purposive at the same time, unlike the manic rush of writing in the early dark hours of winter.

How does your garden grow?

**

The Writing... PURE trucking along at a steady pace. I am preparing work for the Harbinger*33 anthology, which has me confounded - what to submit? Something new? Something old and tweaked? I'm running out of time, and my head is full...

My short story DEFECTION placed well in the popular vote in the Editor Unleashed Flash Fiction 40, and snagged a spot in the anthology. I'm grateful for the feedback from readers, and especially thrilled that so many of the stories penned by my writing peeps (especially my Nudgers) will snuggle between the covers with mine.

The Reading... Finished Middlemarch and starting in on The Corrections (Franzen) and Lady Chatterly's Lover, among others. Also grooving on Best American Short Stories 2006, picked up at a yard sale for a dime. Short stories are one of those writing groups I don't eat enough of.

My dad... Thanks all who have shared your concerns and sent good thoughts and prayers. He starts a Phase II clinical trial that may help slow tumor growth. We leave this week to spend some vacation time with him and my mom...

My kids... turn 10 and 7 this week! My little sprouts, my joys, they grow with abundance like our garden.


Peace, Linda

(Garden by Henry, pictures by me)

The Last of Lasts...

Father's Day swept in this year on a bittersweet wind. I couldn't be with my father this year to honor him in what may likely be his last such celebration. But in my garden three hundred miles away, the currants hung, red fleshy globules. I spent the afternoon picking the lip-puckering berries, cleaning them, boiling them into juice. When I visit in two weeks, I will have jars of glistening ruby jelly for him to enjoy. His favorite.

Father's Day, Memorial Day, 4th of July... the flowering dogwoods, beach trip, my childrens' birthdays... the hummingbird, the taste of roast turkey, solid food, a day without morphine...

The last of lasts.

I am not sure next summer I'll be able to harvest currants without crying.


**


The Writing... HABITS DIE HARD up at Boston Literary Magazine. Kudos to writing friends Stephen Book, Greta Igl, Doug Mathewson, and Jane Banning, whose drabbles grace the same page.

DEFECTION continues to hang tough in the EDITOR UNLEASHED/SMASHWORDS Flash Fiction 40 Contest. I'm pretty flabbergasted - the popular vote ranks me in the Top 5 out of 280 entries, but the Pit Boss (Maria Schneider) decides the grand prize winner - as she should. Take a peek - tons of talent, and a fabulous lesson on writing concise fiction. Most gratifying? Every one of my Nudger writing buddies ranks in the Top 40!

HARBINGER*33 sets sail! Quite an honor to be a member of this amazing crew. More later, but the journey promises excitement - and fun.

Of course, still plugging away at PURE, prepping my submission to the summer workshop at Lesley University. Waiting to hear on several poems and flashes out for submission. Fingers crossed.

The Reading... Thirty pages from Middlemarch's grand conclusion. What fun sharing the epic reading with my Filling In the Gaps 100 Project reading buddies. Also made more fun by finishing the last two books on my sleek and sexy Kindle Dx. Next up... The Corrections (Franzen) and the July Debut Indie Pick.

Read hard, write hard... live and love hard. The days and the people who fill them pass too quickly...

Peace, Linda

Repeat After Me - June Indie Debut Pick

I MET DA GE ON A TUESDAY AFTERNOON IN THE FALL OF 1989. New York was orange and confident then, leaves breezing the curb and towers poking above the skyline. I was teaching English as a second language at a school called Embassy when he arrived two weeks and fifteen minutes late. He stood in the doorway watching the class with an expression it was hard to identify -- some combination of grin, smirk, and sneer. I thought he might be shy.

Thus begins the relationship of Aysha Silverman, ESL teacher rebounding after a college breakdown, and Da Ge, an engimatic, troubled dissident who fled China in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Despite language and cultural differences, the two develop a sensitivity to the other's harbored secrets. Aysha falls in love with Da Ge long before he asks her to marry him as a step toward attaining US citizenship. Aysha becomes pregnant, but before she can share the news with Da Ge, he commits suicide.

The story spans two decades and continents, and Rachel DeWoskin bridges these spans with rich detail and evocative prose. Beijing comes alive, it's own character, as does the less foreign but equally exotic New York City. Besides the settings and cultures, the strong ensemble of secondary characters are not easily forgettable: Aysha's best friend Julia One, Embassy Student Xiao Wang, De Ga's father Old Chen, and Julia Two, the perky tween-age daughter. Most believable is well-drawn relationship of Aysha with her mother.

Da Ge haunted me days after I finished the book. Tough, vulnerable, secretive, I turned pages to find out what made him tick. His character and blunt insights on life Chinese and American are revealed best in the essays, submitted to his 'Teacher', that preface each section. Rereading these excerpts a secnd and third time reveal layers of Da Ge unnoticed the first time through.

This is a quiet novel, complex in it's rendering of love in all its forms. The story meanders from time period and country, at times without sufficient guideposts to orient the reader. But the prose itself is straightforward and honest, and interesting enough to give pause for appreciation. For me, the story comes alive when Aysha relates the breakdown leading to her hospitalization and withdrawal from Columbia.

She asks: How do people know what to filter out and what to leave in? maybe we're permeable, and insanity is the loss of that membrane; everything floods in and out, uncontrolled.

In truth, the mental illness angle surprised -- and delighted -- me; from the front flap cover, the only inkling is of Aysha's "nervous breakdown". But both protagonists suffer psychiatric maladies, and it is in this suffering that their relationship is idealized and consummated. As someone who purposively seeks out books that explore the intersection of the unquiet mind and the restive heart, the central theme of mental unwellness was a bonus.

THE AUTHOR... RACHEL DEWOSKIN certainly has "platform" - educated at Columbia University, she moved to beijing where she worked in public relations before taking a starring role in a Chinese soap opera likened to "Sex and the City." Repeat After Me is her first novel; her memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing was published in 2005.


THE PRESS... Small but mighty, OVERLOOK PRESS has one of the most eclectic portfolios of fiction and non-fiction among all the independent presses. Sympathetic to emerging writers, I troll here frequently, and suggest you pay a visit as well.

Repeat after me - this is a gem of a novel. Read it.

Peace, Linda

Ant you are...

Though once you seemed
to me mighty,
a mastodon,
lifting me through
throngs, across mine
strewn lands stronger
than anyone
or anything.
Rendered wizened
small from weeks of
radiation,
still standing but
weaving stubborn;
brave ant you are.


Father's Day approaches. Mine survived 7 weeks of aggressive cancer treatment last year. But the pain is back and 4 biopsies and a CAT scan later we are waiting. Again.

Hold your father close.

Peace, Linda

Job for Life

Promoted to Full Professor. With Tenure.

A good day.

I am so grateful for all I have: my students, my colleagues, my work, the freedom to think and express what moves me without fear of retribution - or worse.

Peace, Linda

Rejection

Rejected by a literary agent lately? Watch this, then get even... REJECTION

Via The Boy Who Could But Didn't - Ben Leto

Peace, Linda

Playing God

I'm not comfortable playing God in the garden, thinning the clusters of white peaches and picking off the Asian pears. Which to toss in the white bucket, and which to keep on the branch? The runty, dimpled fruit? The large, perfect orb sacrificed for two smaller, better spaced ones? Eeny, meeny, miney, moe? Who's to say the peach I choose for the compost is not the one that, if left to ripen on the sun-warmed tree, would be the most succulent, perfect peach?

I feel this same tension writing. Which character do I cull? What scene to annihilate? My finger trembles before striking the 'delete' key - am I making a mistake? Is that character or scene or word crucial to my story's integrity? How do I know?

But when it comes to my story, I am God. Some writers say their characters 'have their way' with stories. Certainly my characters appear to me at times much like a secret word appears under the divining planchette of a ouija board. But as God I can - and do - alter their characteristics and motivations in ways significant and small: their sexual orientation, their ethnicity, the placement of their tattoo.

When my laptop died last week, I had the opportunity to clean up my files. My hesitancy in editing and revising BRIGHTER THAN BRIGHT is manifest in the 11 gigabytes of notes and revisions and drafts and even documents containing ALL my slices and dices. My first novel may well end up being my 'practice' novel, but this much is true: my confidence as a writer has grown, for no longer to I keep every iteration uttered by my pen for PURE.

***

<==== Speaking of playing God, google decreed my blog dead. I say: long live my blog. I'm rebuilding my cyber web, so please sign my guestbook.

***

May was... a month of passages: a favorite uncle died the day after he entered home hospice, several of my students gained doctorates, dead laptop, murdered blog.

Hoping for a quieter June.

***

THE WRITING... My mind is finally empty enough to write seriously. PURE full-steam ahead, along with two decent shorts and some micro-mini flashes. Have sent several poems out to find homes - fingers crossed.

THE READING... Finished the fourth book of MIDDLEMARCH. Quite enjoying Eliot, though she would've had a very difficult time finding an agent this century: verbose, pedantic and preachy in places, and not sure she 'hooked' me until nearly 100 pages in. Also picked up two Indie debut books from SOHO and OVERLOOK presses, and two more on order from TIN HOUSE and DZANC. Feeling very rich with the stack beside my bed.



Peace, Linda

In Memory - Lost Words Virtual and Cyber

My Dell laptop. Six years of faithful service. This morning booting resulted in nothing but a grey, quiet screen. No signs or symptoms of impending demise, just a peaceful death.

Something nudged at me this Saturday, though; I did a complete backup onto my external hard-drive.

Gotta listen to those gut feelings.

ALSO IN MEMORY - my original blog. Google gobbled it up one day, with no warning. Apparently old code, still lurking in my html and counting away my doomsday unbeknownst to me, was the mal-icious bearer. Reimported much here - looks familiar, hunh? - but lost widgets: lists, followers, contacts, all my creds.

SO PLEASE UPDATE YOUR URL, just add "linda-" before the old name. [linda-leftbrainwrite.blogspot.com]

And please - FOLLOW ME again and pass along your links in comments below if I've overlooked you.

Peace, Linda