News and Confirmed Gossip from the Writing World

Buccaneers!

I’m anchored in Rockaway Beach, finishing my novel (two chapters to go) and have been derelict in my Captain’s Logs. But the writer’s life for me! Here be your latest news, confirmed gossip and tip for the week.

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If you’re curious about what’s really going on in the world of publishing, you must buy the October issue of Vanity Fair and read the article (not published on their site, though), “The Book on Publishing,” a tell-all, current story about how one book was published. Includes anecdotes (an agent on crack? Really!) from inside the publishers world. Shocking. Amazing. Bewildering. Nevertheless, writers will always have to write. Whether they go with the traditional route of publishing is another story.

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For book lovers who want their authors live and wish to sail in the same seas as them, here’s your chance.

Wordstock Festival!

This weekend, Oct. 6^th – 9^th

Portland Oregon Convention Center, 777 NE MLK Jr. Blvd.

Wordstock Festival presents a super fest of authors and publishers, small writing workshops and BIG readings. Here’s the schedule of authors and workshops. These are just a few of the amazing (and my favorite) people who will be there. Huzzah!

Steve Almond

If you’ve never heard of this zany, brilliant guy, you’re missing out. He just published God Bless American and here’s the blurb from his publisher’s page:

From a “gifted storyteller” who delivers “always enjoyable, often hysterical stories” (New York Times Book Review) comes a meditation on the American Dream and its discontents. In his most ambitious collection yet, Steve Almond offers a comic and forlorn portrait of these United States: our lust for fame, our racial tensions, the toll of perpetual war, and the pursuit of romantic happiness.

His satirical book trailer is worthy of pirate praise and future lore as he subverts the robber barons at Fox News:

 

Diana Abu Jaber & Julia Glass

Double your pleasure with two of the best. I loved Diana’s Arabian Jazz  and Origin, and her new novel Birds of Paradise is garnering rave reviews and sits in my reading stack.

Julia Glass is author of one my all-time favorite novels Three Junes. A blurb: An astonishing first novel that traces the lives of a Scottish family over a decade as they confront the joys and longings, fulfillments and betrayals of love in all its guises.

Michael Ondaatje

Yes, the one who wrote The English Patient. ‘Nuff said.

Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her reporting as Chicago bureau chief of the New York Times. The award made her the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African American to win for individual reporting. The Warmth of Other Suns  is her first book. Check out this video.

David Rocklin

My new favorite, David Rocklin rocks with his new novel The Luminist. From Powell’s website:

In Colonial India, at a time of growing friction between the ruling British and the restless Indian populace, a Victorian woman and her young Tamil Indian servant defy convention, class, and heartbreak to investigate what is gained and lost by holding life still. Suggested by the life and work of photographic pioneer Julia Margaret Cameron, David Rocklin's novel The Luminist (Hawthorne Press) examines 19th-century Ceylon through the lives of an English woman and her Tamil apprentice.

Check out Unabridged Chick for a saucy review. She compares the writing to A.S. Byatt's.

What’s With American’s Sexual/Literary Hangup?

If you like sex, both in your life and in your literature, here’s a panel that is primed to talk about it on Sunday at 11:00 a.m.: Cheryl Strayed, Steve Almond, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Viva Las Vegas.

So sail to Wordstock and find a ransom of writerly gold. Meet you in the conference bar at 5:00!

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From Kurt Vonnegut—advice on what you should write about if you’re a writer:

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way -- although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.

Full sail ahead!

Captain Val

If you haven’t tried naming my Muse, you have two more weeks! Thanks to all who have guessed. Here’s a hint for those who have tried:  Forget gender; one word. Now try again! There could be a little prize involved. Har-har!

Coming Up!

Gobsmacked Wins Awards, Gives Awards, Starts the Buccaneer Award!

FINALLY! Interview with Jan Eliot, creator of Stone Soup—and it’s a good one!

What It Takes to be a Writer (besides a serious masochistic streak!)