Wood Angel

Plain Kate by Erin Bow

At first glance this story is bleak. The Heroine, Plain Kate, is orphaned young, left only with talent for carving and her father's tools. She struggles to survive in a world where food is scarce and magic is feared. But through this, with one seemingly disastrous event after another, it turns into a story about love, friendship, family and, maybe most importantly, living with grief.

This is Ms. Bow's first novel. Poetry was her medium before this and I think it shows. Elegant imagery and an understanding of emotion that wrenches your heart are prominent throughout. This is not a light-hearted YA read.

With all that in mind, however, I think Plain Kate is a promising debut for a YA author and, if you're willing to get your heart broken a little bit, a great read.

--Morgaine

(aside note: The title in the UK is 'Wood Angel' which I think is a much better and more descriptive title.)

Ivan Doig

 

A classic came into our store the other day. No, it wasn't published by Penguin and it wasn't an beloved used copy of Great Expectations. It was Ivan Doig. 

There is no better reminder of the heart & soul of fiction writing than a man who writes his novels in longhand, reads them aloud with passion and character, builds relationships with the bookstores who sell his book and continues to draw captivated crowds and dedicated fans.

Thanks for a great event, Ivan!

The Danger of a Single Story

Hello fiction lovers! Here's a little media for your mid-afternoon break.
Right now I'm reading Chimamanda Mgozi Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck, which is a strong collection of short stories about men and women from Nigeria and America. Adichie is part of The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 Summer Fiction series and answers some questions here. Also, last year Adichie gave a TED talk called The Danger of a Single Story. A lot of the themes in the speech come up in her stories. Intersting to think about the stories around us...



Enjoy!
Anna, events

A Follow-Up Question for Michael Downing

A new question from the Seattle Gay & Lesbian Book Club for our author Michael Downing, about his novel Breakfast with Scot. Nick & Co. wanted to know if Scot -- the little boy inherited by the central characters Ed and Sam -- was based "on a real boy." Herewith, Mr. Downing's response:

Michael Downing: As a preamble to my response, I should say that I don't subscribe to the mystical school of writing. I'm never attended by a muse. I'm so conventional that I don't think I really understand what is real about magical realism.That said, I have to say Scot invented himself. It's true. I didn't intend to write a book about a boy. I had latched on to Ed and Sam and the intention to write a comic novel about nosey neighbors--something I know something about, as I have long been one of them.It's gets more complicated. I had actually signed a contract to write Shoes Outside the Door--a narrative history of the San Francisco Zen Center, the first Buddhist monastery outside of Asia in the history of the world. After several months of research and interviews, I realized it was going to be a much bigger project than I'd understood--not least of all because I understood that I didn't understand the first thing about the 5,000-year history of Buddhism, never mind trying to get a handle on the slip-knot of zen.I got depressed and wanted to cheer myself up, and that's when I decided to stop and write a comic novel. The only thing wrong with the many first drafts I ditched was that they weren't funny. Then Scot turned up. He entered my imagination fully formed. He was wearing some really bad red corduroy slacks and dragging a boa. I had no idea who he was or what he wanted with me, but he'd just stand there is his slouchy, hands-on-the-hips way and stare, occasionally widening his eyes to convey his astonishment at my failure to introduce myself and get him a cold beverage.Maybe he was an amalgamation of boys whose flamboyant bravery I'd admired. Maybe I hauled him out of my fear that he was the boy people saw hiding inside of me. Whoever he was, he made it clear he wouldn't go away, no matter how often I raised my eyebrows or sighed audibly to let him know I was too busy to entertain visitors.

An Interview with Michael Downing, Part Two

Further conversation with Michael Downing, author of Breakfast with Scot, the first book being discussed in the Seattle Gay & Lesbian Book Club. To read Part 1, click here.

Brad Craft: Religion is at the center of some of your earlier books, but not so much Breakfast with Scot.

Michael Downing: I’m very bad at religion. I gave it up when I realized my practice was a fantastically complicated method of wishing it weren’t so.
I’m not unaware that one of the few tenets common to religions around the world is the illegitimacy of GLBT people—in fact, it seems to the one of the criteria for ascending into the ranks of the so-called Great Religions of the World. It also helps to have a lot of preposterous advice for women. And I know this has made for a lot of misery. But I wanted to get at something that resides well below the level of stupidity and hate and codified bigotry.
I nixed religion in the neighborhood for two reasons. First, I could. Second, I wanted to place Sam and Ed and Scot in a benign world—a world in which more people than not are trying to get it right. (Cambridge really seems like such a place to me.) I’d read a lot of novels about gay people whose identities were formed in opposition to the culture. I got interested in what was at stake when gay people were embraced by the culture—what was at stake for gay people and for the culture.

BC: Our Book Club host, Nick DiMartino is, to use his own word, "obsessed" with first-person narrators.

MD: I share Nick's obsession.

BC: Your earlier novel, Perfect Agreement and Breakfast with Scot both have narrators who seem to share, for want of a better term, a gay sensibility; bemused, ironic, self-consciously, almost preemptively, self critical.

MD: I love the phrase preemptive self-criticism. It conjures up the cartoonish image of somebody constantly punching himself to beat everybody else to the punch. It's funny while it's happening -- and then you see the bruise.

BC: You've said elsewhere that you "wanted to write a genuinely comic novel about shame."

MD: In the most highfalutin terms. For what it's worth, I wanted to make the literal text of the novel transparent. This was in part a measure of how deeply I had fallen in love with the declarative sentence. And it was also something about my own sense that Scot -- all of us, I guess -- was first and foremost a kid, not a cryptogram or a problem to be solved. I figured if the literal text was plain, readers would be in the position all of the other characters -- especially Ed -- are in whenever they encounter Scot: staring at the obvious and turning it into a Rorschach test.

BC: And a first-person narrator, in this case Ed, puts the reader in Ed's position.

MD: The simple answer is that both Perfect Agreement and Breakfast with Scot are novels about community and the first-person narrator created a natural tension. Both Mark Sternum (the narrator of Perfect Agreement) and Ed are reluctant to surrender their singular sense of themselves.
Also, I think I might feel most confident as a writer—maybe I mean, least self-conscious—when I am inhabiting a character who wants nothing more than to talk, talk, talk to the reader. Frankly, nothing makes me weak in the knees like a good conversation. My most rewarding and intimate relationships are fueled by conversation. After a dinner at our house on the first night of a long weekend with several long-time friends, a relative newcomer said he felt like he’d been shipped off to Camp Can’t Shut Up. That’s my idea of heaven: Camp Can’t Shut Up.

BC: Ed is also very funny. I was reminded of other funny first-person characters, like Bertie Wooster. Ed seems to me to have something of that same innocence when we first meet him...

MD: I am a devoted Wodehouse fan. I’d love to think something of him rubbed off on me besides the ink from all those Penguin paperbacks. And I think it is very generous of you to call Ed innocent. If you mean, Ed is one of those people who is constantly astonished that the rest of the world still is not behaving as he would prefer, I agree.
My sense is that the quality all the characters (in Breakfast with Scot) share is almostness. Sam, as a chiropractor, is almost a doctor. Ed, as an editor at an arts magazine, is almost an artist. The neighbors, the Burlingtons are almost a family. Sam's brother Billy is almost Scot's father. Scot is almost a boy. And so on. You get it, I'm sure. The tragic (or more often in bad novels, melodramatic) version of this quality is a sense of fraudulence, of course. I liked the idea of almostness because it gives credit for people trying, for having ambitions and hopes, for taking a shot at something -- love, style, a neighbor's window -- even though they have bad aim. Unlike fraudulence, which is a lonely, unspeakable secret we carry, almostness is something others can do something about, should they be so inclined. Fraudulence gets solved (if it ever does) by the self. Almostness is susceptible to others, to the possibility that completeness is not a singular achievement.

BC: Nick and others have all asked about the movie made out of Breakfast with Scot.

MD: I am so grateful they made it -- I mean both that it got made and that it got made by that particular creative team and not any of the previous people who'd optioned it and seemed not to understand that it was meant to be funny -- that I am a bad reporter. I know that the screenwriter and director and producer were very nervous about showing me the first draft of the screenplay because of the hockey business (the character of Ed goes from being an arts magazine editor to being a former professional hockey player in the movie) -- which I really loved, oddly. It seems to me a genuine idea, and it also had the virtue of turning the project into an adaptation, not a film version of my novel. I love the cast. I wish we had more time with the women characters, each of whom struck me as spot on, as portrayed in the movie. I totally admire Noah Bernett, who plays Scot, and the choice to cast a kid who was not conventionally cute or elegant. I didn't love the choice to make him a great skater. I preferred the idea that Scot didn't come with any compensatory skills or adroitness often assigned to outcasts. And though I didn't love the choice to put Ed (renamed Eric in the film because Tom Cavanagh, who played him, was too identified with his TV show "Ed" -- really) in the closet, though I thought Cavanagh was superb, and I think he put on the screen something really new about what a man will do to himself and everyone around him not to feel what he is feeling.

BC: When are we going to get another novel from you?

MD:All I want to do is finish my memoir, I’ll Make it Up to You, and write a novel. I've been waylaid by the facts for way too long.

BC: Has being labeled a gay novelist limited you at all? Gay fiction seems to be disappearing as a bookstore genre.

MD: As for limits—well, I think the project of my life has been learning to love my limits. I really don’t think my career has ever been adversely affected by my being a gay man or by my choice to write about gay people. There have been three editions of Breakfast with Scot and my publisher is bringing out a new edition of Perfect Agreement at the end of this year. Frankly, the only thing holding me back is what I don’t do every day.
As for “gay fiction”—it occurs to me that genre is a lot like gender. I don’t trust the various categorical distinctions, and I really never think about them while I am writing. I mean, who feels confident about drawing the line between fiction and nonfiction these days?

BC: Thanks, Michael. We'll be checking in again I'm sure before we're done with Breakfast with Scot. Any last thoughts today?

MD: For now: David Geffen throws a million-dollar party for Barack Obama before anybody thinks Obama has a prayer of being elected and two years later Obama invites Rick Warren to say a prayer at his inauguration party—that’s a sublime gay novel just begging to be written.

An Interview with Michael Downing, Part One

Michael Downing is the author of Breakfast With Scot, the first selection of the Seattle Gay & Lesbian Book Club, meeting every Wednesday at 6PM, at Dunshee House, and hosted by our own Nick DiMartino. The novel was made into a movie of the same name, that played here in Seattle just this past Fall. Downing is the author of three novels before Breakfast With Scot, including Mother of God and Perfect Agreement (soon to be reissued,) as well as plays and two nonfiction titles. What follows is an email Q & A based on questions that have already come up in our ongoing Book Club discussion. More to follow in Part Two.

Brad Craft: Thank you for agreeing to do this, Michael. It means a lot to be able to ask questions of the author of our first selection for the Seattle Gay & Lesbian Book Club. Now then, family seems to be the topic, or at least the setting for all your fiction to date. In Breakfast With Scot, that family consists of a young gay couple, Ed and Sam, and Scot, the 11 year old of whom they become the guardians when his mother dies. In the novel, neither Ed nor Sam seem to have much family, other than the reprobate brother of Sam who leaves Scot with them.

Michael Downing: For starters, I most wanted to write about gay men whose relationship to the past was not traumatic. In practical terms, the absence of extended families made Sam & Ed more receptive to their neighbors -- and more vulnerable too. I mean, Mildred (an older neighbor who befriends them) might have been a little less bold had she noticed a woman of her age in the mix next door.

I also wanted to keep the scale of the novel small -- the lived time is something less than four months -- to preserve the fragile, indeterminate quality of the whole enterprise and of Scot himself. One way to do this was to give both Sam and Ed relatively uncomplicated pasts. This also increased their agency, I think. It put the burden of choice -- their choices about Scot, I mean -- squarely on them in the moment. Finally, I wanted to establish their reasonableness quotients so that most readers would want to be aligned with them -- and find themselves in the peculiar position of having to make judgments and decisions that would affect Scot's sense of himself.

BC: And yet, you have given the boys an extended family of sorts, a "family of choice," consisting of friends and neighbors. Many of us have created just such families in our own lives.

MD: That phrase "family of choice" was absolutely in the air while I was writing (this book,) but the comic possibility I saw was in the inverted idea; the problem of being embraced by families we don't choose, families who choose us. That's really the basis for Ed's brief against Scot during the first half of the novel. Suddenly, Ed finds that he's part of a vast, invasive, opinionated, extended Cambridge family. (The novel is set in Cambridge, Mass., where Downing still lives.) It's as if Ed has been adopted against his will.

BC: We're curious about your own family. The bio. on your website mentions your partner of twenty years.

MD: My pal Pete and I have been together for 25 years -- my bio. needs updating, I guess. We have both always been welcomed into each other's families. Lucky us, huh?

BC: Indeed.

MD: And we've lived in Cambridge forever -- a choice I never regret.

BC: And the rest of your family?

MD: My family story is not easy to summarize -- but whose is? For starters, I am the youngest of nine kids, and my father died when I was three. I'd say more, but I'm madly writing the last bits of a memoir these days, and I have to conserve my words. My childhood figures prominently in the first half of the book, and the second half is about a genetic diagnosis that recently complicated the familiar story of my life. The book's called I'll Make It Up To You, and it will be published at the end of this year.

BC: We'll all be looking forward to reading it. To get back to Breakfast With Scot, we noticed that Scot is yet another "lost" child, an orphan or all but an orphan, and that this seems to be a recurring theme in your fiction. Any thoughts on why that might be?

MD: Here's all I know: orphans and castoffs and castaways instantly evoke my pity and my envy. That's an unusual double-header.

My Annual (Library of America, etc.) Orgy

Every year, not unlike Christmas, our Employee Shopping Days roll around again (thank you management,) and, while I always intend to use this opportunity to buy edifying books for widows and orphans, I instead indulge myself in an orgy of entirely selfish consumerism.  True, I bought a single title, as a token to assuage my guilt, for my partner: Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, by E. Patrick Johnson, but everything else was for me.

And, as I do every year, my first priority is always to add to my collection of the complete Library of America.  I've been collecting this series since they started publication, many years ago.  Every year they publish four or five new titles, so I have to get those too.  Doesn't matter if I like the authors.  Doesn't matter if I will ever read the individual volumes.  Gotta have 'em.  I look at it as an investment.  (These books are the only material goods specifically mentioned in my will -- no lie.)

If you don't know the series, Library of America publishes the classics of American literature and history in an ongoing project to preserve, promote and, I suppose, defend our cultural heritage.  It is an admirable undertaking and done superbly well.  The books are beautifully made, of durable materials, and meant to "last a lifetime."  They will certainly outlast me (thus the provision in my will.)  As a collector, they are my pride & joy.

As a reader, some years are better for me than others, the worst being the year I had to buy Kerouac, Alcott, and Lovecraft.  Very little joy there, I can tell you.  But I did my duty.

This year has been (for the most part) happier:

Collected Stories and Other Writings, by Katherine Anne Porter.

This goes to the top of my night-stand reading pile as soon as I

finish with my reading for my Christmas Readings this year.

Collected Poems: 1956 - 1987, by John Ashbery.  A favorite of my dear friend Richard, himself a poet, and someone to

whom I will now be forced to pay more serious attention.

 

Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s, by Philip K. Dick.  This purchased reluctantly and soon to be added to my shelf

of LIAM acquired "more in sorrow..." titles.

I'm disappointed not to be able to add the second volume

of A. J. Liebling to my collection, as, for some unknown

reason, it seems never to have arrived, either at the bookstore or with the

distributors, despite a September publication date.

Finally, (although tomorrow is another Shopping day, as Scarlett might say nowadays,) I rounded out my selection with a beautiful remainder about the great director Jean Renoir, and two handsome volumes of essays by George Orwell: Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays, and All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays, both compiled by George Packer and attractively produced.

Santa has already been better to me than I deserve.

And Then I Turned to Anthony

To begin, a quote:

"Trollope's novels (are) solid, substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting that they were being made a show of."
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne

Now then. Does that make you want to read Anthony Trollope or not? If not, there's nothing I could do to persuade you, I'm sure. For me, that Hawthorne quote all but defines the pleasures of a Big Fat Victorian Novel. Nobody did them better than Trollope.


I am reading The Eustace Diamonds, the third in the Palliser novels, for the second time. (These are his political and high-society novels, rather than the more famous clerical novels set in Barsetshire.) But I'm not reading the series (6 novels) straight through this time. Whenever I need a break from grim modernity and or the thin substance of contemporary literature, I pick up Trollope. If it's been long enough, it may take me a few pages, but soon enough I know just where I am, who is who, and what is most definitely what.


Trollope, for me, is all about familiarity, but that isn't to say that his books aren't surprising still, and very funny. For example, this description of a rather difficult old lady:

"She was slow, or perhaps it might more properly be said she was stately in her movements. She was one of those old women who are undoubtedly old women, -- who in the remembrance of younger people seem always to have been old women, -- but on whom old age appears to have no debilitating effects. If the hand of Lady Linlithgow ever trembled, it trembled from anger; -- if her foot ever faltered, it faltered for effect. In her way Lady Linlithgow was a very powerful human being. She knew nothing of fear, nothing of charity, nothing of mercy, and nothing of the softness of love. She had no imagination. She was worldly, covetous, and not unfrequently cruel. But she meant to be true and honest, though she often failed in her meaning; -- and she had an idea of her duty in life. She was not self-indulgent. She was hard as an oak post, -- but then she was also trustworthy. No human being liked her; -- but she had the good word of a great many human beings."

Now that, to the life, describes any number of elderly ladies in my childhood, not least my paternal grandmother -- though I'd be scared to death to say so, had she not been safely dead these twenty years.

Anthony Trollope was one of the greatest English novelists. He is great good company on a cold Autumn evening still.

"If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles."

The above is a quote from Colette. The other day we bought a stack of used paperbacks by same. (It is a sad and sorry day when the only way to get a stack of Colette is to buy used copies, but let that pass.) These paperbacks are not in perfect shape, but there are titles I haven't seen for years. Someone sold her whole collection of Colette, and some titles had simply been read and reread too often and threatened to fall apart in my hands as I took them from the box. These, with regret, I had to return. But even the survivors can't be sold for much.

I've decided that that is a good thing. Think of finding Colette for the first time, of meeting Sido or Claudine for the first time! At only a dollar or two per book, anyone can discover a great writer.

If you don't know, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (January 28, 1873 -- August 3, 1954) was the greatest modern French writer after Proust and one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century(though born in the 19th, with the morals of the 18th.) She is also witty, amusing, warm-hearted and, as the Brits would say, "dead sexy."

So look for these slim volumes, new or used, when next you're in the bookstore.

I'll close with another quote:

"I love my past, I love my present. I am not ashamed of what I have had, and I am not sad because I no longer have it."

Amen.