TBR: Voices in the Air by Kasia Jaronczyk

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

 

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

 

On April 30, 1982, two women and their families hijack a Polish passenger plane flying from Breslau to Warsaw in a bold attempt to escape Martial Law in Communist Poland and find safety in West Berlin. Inspired by real events, Voices in the Air is told from the point of view of four women hijackers: a cotton spinner, whose husband wants to avoid a long prison sentence, a schoolteacher with a sick daughter, a pregnant fourteen-year-old who has visions of the Virgin Mary, an ambitious young filmmaker, and a stewardess in love with the married pilot. Will they find happiness beyond the Iron Curtain or was the hijacking not worth the risk?

 

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why?

 

I had the most fun creating the character of Ania, the flight attendant. I immediately loved her irreverent, provocative voice, especially in her interactions with her inhibited and rural cousin, but underneath that bravado was a woman desperately in love with a married man and willing to do anything to be with him. After the hijacking I felt great sympathy for her stubborn belief, in spite of everyone, that her daughter will one day be able to respond to her and communicate.

 

And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

I struggled with writing about Julia (the filmmaker) the most. I knew that she would be a witness to the hijacking, and that years later she would interview the women involved, but I didn’t know what her story would be. I felt that I already had all the perspectives I needed in the other female characters, until I realized that Julia would have a daughter Zuza who was, in a way, “hijacked” by her grandmother who acted like she was her mother. Julia would have to decide between Zuza and her chance to stay in the West. Julia’s story also required the most research, as the movie industry in Communist Poland was an involved process, complicated by the many levels of censorship involved. The themes of ambiguous morality,  censorship and self-censorship became very important in the novel.

 

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

 

Before I wrote Voices in the Air I had published a short story collection Lemons (Mansfield Press, 2017), edited an anthology of Polish-Canadian short stories, Polish(ed): Poland Rooted in Canadian Fiction (Guernica Editions, 2017), and wrote another novel, which remains unpublished. I spent a long time querying that first novel, and after receiving no offers, I gave up on it. In the meantime, I wrote Voices in the Air, and again, I had a few full requests from agents, but ultimately it was rejected. I was growing very frustrated and depressed because nobody seemed to want my novels. I switched gears and queried small presses in Canada and some in the US, which one can do without an agent, and with which I’ve had good luck before. I eventually received two offers of publication and accepted one. Palimpsest Press publishes great poetry and stylistically innovative novels, and Aimee Parent Dunn is an amazing editor. A big positive of publishing with a small press is that the author has more influence on the book design, cover and interior, which I appreciate very much.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

Write first, edit later - the first draft is a bad draft. This lets you actually finish your work without letting the inner critic sabotage the process.

 

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

   

Sometimes during writing your mind spontaneously comes up with an unexpected and yet perfect solution to a problem, or a connection, or something that happens that you know is just right. It is a magical moment and feels amazing. The creative process is hard work; you are consciously inventing characters or a plot, choosing between different possibilities, following different paths that might lead nowhere. And then, all of a sudden, you receive this surprising revelation like a gift from the writing gods.

 

How did you find the title of your book?

 

Titles can be so difficult – they need to indicate what the book is about, the tone of the work, the genre, but at the same time they can’t be too obvious, too obscure, or misleading. The choice becomes even more complicated when the novel in question is written about a different time and culture and the title needs to be more explanatory that it would have been if it were published in the same country and language. Certain phrases and words can have different connotations and be less obvious to a different audience.

 

I had a running list of titles, including Escape to the West; Flight over the Iron Curtain; Escape to Western Paradise; Hijacked to the West, but they all seemed too obvious and too general, plus they implied an action/adventure/thriller genre, which might attract readers who would be disappointed to find out it is a literary novel told from a female perspective.

 

I then came up with Women Hijackers, (which actually would have worked better in Polish, as a single word Hijackers in the feminine form), and finally, The Wives of Hijackers, which seemed an intriguing, sellable title, but perhaps a too gaudy. Air Partisans was too mysterious.

 

It was my writer friends who suggested Voices in the Air. I feel like this title indicates a literary novel, it may be too subtle, but it encompasses the female voices, the plot, the themes of the novel, as well as its unconventional structure which includes documentary film-style interviews with the hijackers. It also evokes a feeling of loss, an echo, and regret, which reflect the mood of the novel.

 

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

 

Voices in the Air is a nostalgic book for me, as it takes place in Poland, where I was born and lived until I was 14 years old, so of course I mention Polish dishes that I particularly love. One of them is pickle soup, made with kosher pickles and cream, and bigos, a thick sauerkraut and cabbage stew with meat, sausages and wild mushrooms. I recommend them both; they are delicious and not that difficult to make. Here are the recipes:

 

https://www.thekitchn.com/polish-pickle-soup-recipe-23628556

 

https://www.polishyourkitchen.com/polish-hunters-stew-bigos/

 

*****

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://kasiajaronczyk.weebly.com

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS PUBLISHER: https://palimpsestpress.ca

 

ORDER A COPY OF THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://palimpsestpress.ca/books/voices-in-the-air-kasia-jaronczyk/

 

 

 

 

TBR: Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop by Paula Whyman

Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

 

 

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

 

Bad Naturalist is a memoir about my attempts to restore native meadows on a mountain in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, about the obstacles I encountered, the (many) mistakes I made, the failures—and a few successes—and the discoveries I made along the way.

 

What boundaries did you break in the writing of this memoir? Where does that sort of courage come from?

 

Hahaha, courage? Maybe it was foolishness! For me, writing a book-length memoir was something I hadn’t done before, and I was a bit of a reluctant memoirist in that I didn’t feel comfortable focusing on myself. The only way for me to do that was with humor, which is how I like to write anyway. I needed to feel free to make fun of myself. So if there is a “boundary” that I crossed, it’s that apparently it’s somewhat unusual for there to be humor in nature writing. And I wanted to bring nature, um, down to earth...for people like me.

 

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

 

Well, for one thing, selling my book on proposal was an incredible high point and so different from the process I was used to, since my first book was fiction. I’ll also say that there has been a lot of interest in this book, which I really appreciate! I think the low point was when I was trying to figure out how to write the book, as if there was some special rule of approach, a key to writing memoir--and not exactly a traditional memoir, but one that tells a story not just about me, but about the natural world--a key that I didn’t possess because I hadn’t done it before. (There is no key, and every book is different. Heavy sigh.) But I guess it worked it out in the end?

  

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

Write about what you’re curious about -- that interest and passion will come through in the writing, and your enthusiasm is contagious. Don’t worry about writing what you “know”—but get to know it, so that your reader can get to know it, too.

 

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

  

That I got it done! I was doing the work and the research on the mountain at the same time that I was writing about it. Both the project and the writing involved a lot of uncertainty, a lot of waiting, a lot of trial and error. I never knew what was going to happen on the mountain or if it would happen when I needed it to happen, so I hardly ever knew whether I’d be able to write about the aspect I was hoping to write about, particularly in time for my deadline. The exciting part for me was often the surprise of seeing what did happen—what grew in a place, what new interconnections I found. I took those surprises in the field and brought them to my writing desk, where I teased out further connections when I sat down to write. I was also intent on finding ways to describe plants and insects and birds that I hope are entertaining and accessible, to describe elements of the natural world so that an interested novice like me would be able to envision and connect with them, and I was often surprised by the ideas that occurred to me, like comparing a flower to a weird swim cap my grandmother used to wear. Where did that even come from?

 

Who is your ideal reader?

 

People who are curious and interested in reading about encounters with the natural world that are written with a sense of humor; armchair travelers who would enjoy reading about an adventurous endeavor that doesn’t always go right! I think the book will prove inspiring for those who are drawn to take on an ambitious project in an area that’s totally new to them; for those interested in trying something completely new in mid-life; and for readers who like the idea of reading about someone else’s foibles and failures, watching someone else mess up in what is still a hopeful story.

 

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

 

Oh gosh, there are actually a lot; there are a number of food plants that grow on the mountain that I mention in the book, including paw-paws, persimmon, cherries, blackberries, wineberries, and black raspberries. Starting in the 1830s, the apple was one of the most important crops grown in this part of Virginia, and, as I describe in the book, the mountaintop was covered with apple orchards for more than 100 years.

 

I’m always looking for apple pie recipes to impress the fam on Thanksgiving. This year, on a whim, I tried a new one, and it was a hit. This apple-cranberry-orange pie, which incorporates caramelized apples, was in the Food section of the Washington Post shortly before the holiday. I modified it a little to make it gluten-free, substituting cornstarch for flour when I made the filling, and I used a gluten-free crust. And, to keep it dairy-free, I used Earth Balance instead of butter and almond milk instead of cream. It won kudos all around (even without the butter)!

 

*****

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR:

https://paulawhyman.com

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR STACK:

Politics & Prose Bookstore: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781643262178

Or

Bookshop.org:  https://bookshop.org/p/books/bad-naturalist-one-woman-s-ecological-education-on-a-wild-virginia-mountaintop-paula-whyman/21471113?ean=9781643262178

 READ AN EXCERPT, "Paradise in Progress: On Creating a Natural Refuge in the Blue Ridge Mountains": https://lithub.com/paradise-in-progress-on-creating-a-natural-refuge-in-the-blue-ridge-mountains

SUBSCRIBE TO THE FREE, MONTHLY BAD NATURALIST NEWSLETTER: https://badnaturalistnewsletter.beehiiv.com

 

 

 

2024: Best Books (I Read)

Time for my annual list, along with the accompanying list of caveats: these are, simply put, the best books I read over the course of the year. I try to narrow things down to 10ish books, which is awfully hard. I definitely read (and ADORE!) books by my writer friends, but I try to keep those books off this list. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: ALL lists are subjective. In my personal definition of “best,” I mean some magical alchemy of this book at this time that hit me this way. The order is chronological, so don’t spend time parsing out why one book is first, another last. Also, I had to eliminate some VERY EXCELLENT books to keep my list tidy, and YES, I feel terrible about doing so.

 

THE GUEST by Emma Cline

I pretty much spent the entire year recommending this dark and suspenseful book about an aging “party girl” who needs to find a way to get through a week in the Hamptons now that she has nowhere to live. Crashing parties, making bad decisions, meeting the wrong people, a phone she doesn’t fix…this book isn’t for everyone, as the reader needs some tolerance of characters you’d like to shake sense into. But this book I succeeds extraordinarily at carrying suspense until (literally) the very last word on the page. (And beyond, honestly; I thought about the ending for days.) I could never get enough of Cline’s nuanced—and tart—observations about socio-economic class and girls/women. This book is one of two on this list that earned a place on my Favorite Books bookshelf…which is saying a lot, as that shelf is jam-packed!

  

I AM ONE OF YOU FOREVER by Fred Chappell

Fred Chappell was a beloved North Carolina author, and this book—about growing up in western, rural NC—is possibly his most beloved book. Not exactly a novel, not exactly a collection of stories or essays, reading this book is like listening to a master storyteller weave tales about way back, carrying your mind to a time and place you can’t imagine actually existed even as you utterly believe it did. Flirting with magical realism, using an episodic structure which may not appeal to everyone—but persevere and you’ll be rewarded by delightful humor and insights into human nature. If you’re  a writer, here’s a master class in dialogue. Not to sound obsessed with last words and final lines, but when I mentioned on social media that I was reading this book, at least a dozen people commented that the last line is perfect. They’re right!

 

JAMES by Percival Everett

There should be more awards so this book can win them all. A novel in conversation with Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—but don’t stress if you haven’t read Twain or if it’s been a while because James (aka Jim, the runaway slave in Huck Finn) is his own man here, with his own agenda and agency. This book is smart in every possible way, written with an understated writing style that’s never show-offy, only perfect. Some hard, awful things happen in this book, as one would expect given the subject matter (so be warned), and that understated writing serves to make them all seem more awful. (A master class in writing about trauma.) This book absolutely must be in any conversation about The Great American Novel.

 

EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU by Celeste Ng

Lots of levels to this novel, which I picked up at a used book sale. At first I thought I was getting a juicy story about family dysfunction in the 70s Midwest, complete with a missing girl, but the book expands to ponder secrets and love and women’s roles and racism. Don’t let the five (!) points of view scare you—Ng handles them all with panache. I was utterly immersed in this novel.

  

TRUE GRIT by Charles Portis

I admit that I’m a horrible person for wondering why Charles Portis rated a volume of Collected Works in the Library of America series. I mean, come on! The True Grit guy…really? Then I read this book, and now I know. What a stunner! Great voice, clear vision, funny as hell, so much plot (but not too much), awesome characters down to the minor folks. I hadn’t seen the movie before reading the book (I know…what’s wrong with me?), so then I watched the Jeff Bridges version. That movie gets 5/5 stars for sure, but the book gets 10/5. My husband wearied of my saying, “Well, that scene is much funnier in the book.”

 

LESS by Andrew Sean Greer

I read this on my birthday, which is perfect because at its core, it’s a book about age/aging and love/loving, though it’s also a sparkling, funny book about a writer on a crazy book tour where everything goes wrong, trying to outrun his broken heart. This book won the Pulitzer, which surely is a minor miracle—not because it didn’t deserve the honor, but because those committees are always so Serious & Important. Good for them for finding Serious & Important in the guise of funny and charming.

 

RULES OF CIVILITY by Amor Towles

Anyone who’s been following my lists knows I’m a sucker for this plotline: “girl comes to New York City to work in publishing.” So how could I not love this novel set in 1938 about a working class girl with gumption and sass who charms her way through Manhattan, first in the typing pool before eventually becoming an editor, all the while running with a glamorous crowd? I’m not saying this is the most literary novel ever written, but I found it literary enough with appealing characters. I know Amor Towles is a wildly popular writer, and I certainly understand why.

 

LIGHT YEARS by James Salter

One of those books that writers are always insisting writers should read. I listened to this sage advice and bought the book…so long ago that my copy contains a bookmark that refers to the bookstore in the World Trade Center. (!) All these years later I’ve finally cracked it open to read, and wow! The first paragraph caught me, promising an extraordinary book ahead. While the plot (such as it is) seems basic—the story of a marriage—this book’s ambition is to capture life in all its seasons and complications, which it does exquisitely. Yes, it’s episodic—yes, there’s a weird lack of transitions—yes, I found myself wondering if this book would survive the gauntlet of agents and marketing departments today—yes, this book requires close and careful attention. Yes, this book went straight onto my Favorite Books bookshelf.

 

THE LINE OF BEAUTY by Alan Hollinghurst

Oh, the power of the New York Times Book Review and its list of the 100 best books of the 21^st century. Somehow I had never heard of Alan Hollinghurst, which surprised me as I like to think I’ve at least heard of everything and everyone! (I haven’t, but as I said, I like to think I have.) So, off to the library to check this out, in every sense of the word. I found the going slow at first—too many characters; set in 1980s London, so I lacked a frame of reference for many allusions; the pace felt leisurely aka tediously slow. And yet. Such smart sentences! Such depth of character! I persevered, and about 2/3 of the way through I encountered a brilliant and hilarious chapter (summer holiday in France, if you’ve read the book), followed by another brilliant and even more hilarious chapter (party with Margaret Thatcher), and I was ALL IN to the end, which was so brilliant and perfect that I sobbed. So, I returned the book to the library and bought a duplicate hardback edition from AbeBooks so I could have my own copy forever.

 

TRANSIT by Rachel Cusk

And, again, the power of the New York Times Book Review and its list of the 100 best books of the 21^st century which also included Rachel Cusk. I have heard of her, but I realized that I perpetually confuse her with Rachel Kushner, whose work I’ve read and not connected with. So, I thought I should see what’s what with this other Rachel. Oh, goodness—lots! Zero confusion now! (To be clear, this isn’t the book that was on the NYTBR list, but this is the book the library had.) I found myself admiring the autofictional feel of this novel—the second in a series about a recently divorced writer/mom living in modern Britain, basically getting through modern life (in this book, moving into a new [and awful] flat). But beyond those concrete concerns, the book ponders movement and “transit” in a brainy, thinky way that creates an elegant arc. One of those deceptive writing styles that feels so natural, that’s actually hard AF to pull off.

 

Three endnotes:

 

For my short story book club, I did a presentation on the Irish writer William Trevor, whose stories are stealthily devastating. If you’re not familiar with his work, here are three that will turn you into a fan:

“A Choice of Butchers”

“After Rain”

“A Day”

 ~~~

I have a standing free-flow writing date on Thursday afternoons, and I start each session by reading poetry (a strategy I highly recommend). Here are the books that kept me company throughout 2024 (to be transparent, these are writers I know IRL). If you’re looking for more poetry in your life, I suggest starting here:

 

CHARM OFFENSIVE by Ross White

WHIPSAW by Suzanne Frischkorn

BORN BACKWARDS by Tanya Olson

IF IN SOME CATACLYSM by Anna Leahy

A LITTLE BUMP IN THE EARTH by Tyree Daye

~~~

Finally, I'll indulge myself and mention some recently published novels/story collections/essays by friends that I absolutely ADORED:

 

SEX ROMP GONE WRONG by Julia Ridley Smith

A SEASON OF PERFECT HAPPINESS by Maribeth Fischer

OUR KIND OF GAME by Joanna Copeland

MISS SOUTHEAST by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers

THE MARY YEARS by Julie Marie Wade

GREENWOOD by Mark Morrow

~~~

 

Hope your 2025 is filled with good books and a Favorite Books bookshelf that expands an inch or two or ten!

 

 

On Hiatus

My author interview series is on hiatus until January 2025. Keep an eye out for my annual list of "Best Books (I Read) in 2024."

TBR: The Mary Years by Julie Marie Wade

TBR [to be read], a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

 

 

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

 

The Mary Years is a nonfiction novella that chronicles one young woman’s quarter-century love affair with The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Part bildungsroman and part televisual ekphrasis, this is the story of Mary Richards re-seen through the eyes of Julie Marie Wade.

 

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

My students tell me about writing fan fiction, how satisfying it is for them to take characters that exist in books and films and video games and create additional stories, even alternative stories, for their lives. Mistakenly, for years, I’ve thought I didn’t know anything at all about fan fiction, but the truth is, The Mary Years is a work of fan nonfiction, and I think I felt compelled to write it for similar reasons to those that inspire fan fiction: I wanted to explore how a fictional character (many, actually—a cast of fictional characters) can have as much influence over our lives as the real people who live and breathe alongside us.

 

Maybe we all live between real and fictional realms anyway, so this memoir, arranged in chapters that were individually published as “essays in episodes,” is my attempt at showing the ongoing straddle between my personal history and the television show that has been a touchstone for it since The Mary Tyler Moore Show first premiered on Nick at Nite in 1992. I’m not sure if the writing of this collection exemplifies any kind of courage, but I knew I had to write the book after Mary Tyler Moore, the real person who embodied the fictional character who deeply informed my real coming-of-age, passed away in early 2017. The Mary Years is nothing if not an elegy to her and for her as well.

 

I loved writing each essay in episodes, considering my own childhood in an insular Seattle suburb called Fauntlee Hills as an analog to Mary Richards’s Roseburg, the fictional Minnesota town where the character was from (“Fauntlee Hills Was My Roseburg: An Essay in Episodes, Prairie Schooner, 2020); exploring my first residence as an autonomous adult in Pittsburgh, the early years of wondering whether my partner Angie and I would “make it after all” in a place neither of us had ever visited before moving across the country together and starting a new life there (“Pittsburgh Was My Minneapolis: An Essay in Episodes, Tupelo Quarterly, 2018); and of course these more recent years in Miami, my life as a professor and mentor, taking on a kind of work where I might become a role model for others in the way Mary—both the person and the character—became a role model for me (“Miami is My Tipperary: An Essay in Episodes,” The Normal School, 2020). Let’s hope!

 

I might have had the most conspicuous fun writing “Lamonts Might Be My WJM” (Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, 2019) which explored my first real job—the one that wasn’t babysitting or teaching piano lessons or walking neighbors’ dogs—the first job where I earned a proper paycheck on a grainy blue background with those little perforated tabs you have to tear along the sides. The Mary Tyler Moore Show kindled in me a desire not only to work as part of a professional team but a desire for the friendships and camaraderie that might be forged because of working together. At seventeen, just before graduating from high school, I was hired by the (sadly now-defunct) department store Lamonts as a sales associate. Even the title sounded fancy to me! And I started meeting all these people—mostly middle-aged and older women—who had so much life experience in addition to their decades of retail experience, and most of whom were more than willing to share that experience with me. I wanted to bring my initiation into that workplace—but also into that new realm of womanhood—onto the page. I still think so often about my colleagues at Lamonts, who were really mentors, and all that I learned from them. They didn’t seem like Mary Richards, not one of them, but they shaped my life in significant ways, too. And when I finally left that job and moved onto a commissioned position selling shoes for JCPenney, I remember one of my mentors hugged me good-bye in the break room and said, knowing my deep love of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (everyone knew about that!), “We’re going to miss you, our sweet Mary girl.”

 

Probably the hardest part of this book to write was near the end of the essay-chapter “Miami Is My Tipperary,” the night I learned Mary Tyler Moore had died. I was teaching when it happened, which seemed fitting—I was doing the thing I love most—and my phone was filling up with voicemails and texts offering condolences from people across my life. But I didn’t see these messages until hours later. Usually, as a writer with strong commitments to memoir, I’m writing at a distance from my memories, not trying to document events so close to when they actually happened. As I was writing that part of the essay, splicing the messages I hadn’t seen yet with what we were talking about in class—ekphrasis, of all things—writing in response to various kinds of art, including television—I realized I was crying. Tears were pouring down my face as I typed. It may be the first time I have ever experienced such an immediate and intense catharsis while shaping memory into scene on the page.

 

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

 

I’m actually astonished—and so grateful, beyond grateful—that Michael Martone chose this book for the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize in 2023. I don’t remember offhand how many times I circulated the book to various possible publishers—mostly memoir and nonfiction book prizes—or even what possessed me to send The Mary Years to a novella prize. It’s about 40,000 words, so it qualifies as a novella length-wise, but I wasn’t sure if novellas were restricted implicitly to fictional works. Then again, Mary Richards is a fictional character, and WJM is a fictional workplace, so certainly this is a nonfiction work that interacts in a sustained way with fiction—just the fiction of someone else’s creation!

 

I was astonished every time one of the individual essay-chapters found a home in a literary journal (and ultimately, they all did), but I wasn’t sure if the idiosyncratic nature of my project would set it apart from other manuscripts in an enticing way or a limiting way. As writers, we never really know, do we?

 

I circulated this book as a book for far less time than many of my other collections, and I’m used to waiting a long time for a project to find the right home. So I think it was all highs really, the biggest high being the fact that I wrote it, the homage I needed to write, and in the process, I discovered so much about my own history that I would never have learned without my eye poised to the lens of the MTM kaleidoscope.

 

Sometimes people ask memoirists, or those who work broadly in the self-referential arts, how we don’t “run out” of material. I think it’s not about the quantity of material at all but about finding new ways of looking at our lives and considering all the lenses we have available to facilitate that looking.

 

An ekphrastic lens is so exciting and revelatory to me that I’m actually building a multi-genre graduate seminar around this expansive concept. In “The New Ekphrasis,” I want to consider with my students some recent innovative works of contemporary ekphrasis including—but not limited to!—Ander Monson’s Predator: a Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession, Hilary Plum’s Hole Studies (literary ekphrasis), Patricia Smith’s Unshuttered, Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Till They Kill Us (aural ekphrasis), Sibbie O’Sullivan’s My Private Lennon: Explorations from a Fan Who Never Screamed.

 

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

I’m not sure it was intended specifically as writing advice—maybe as life and writing advice—but when I was graduating from college and preparing to head to my first graduate program, one of the great mentors of my life, Tom Campbell, said this: “Let nothing be wasted on you.” Tom was my undergraduate English professor and advisor, an exemplary teacher who I still channel in my own classrooms.

 

I take his words to mean, simply put, use everything; learn from everything; value everything. If you love a particular television show, write about it. If you have a strange or surprising hobby you think no one would else appreciate, write about it. Whatever is important to you in your life can be shaped for a reading audience. Your reader will care if you care enough and are artful enough in translating your own experience to the page.

 

And in another sense, don’t let rejections and disappointments (which every person and every artist experience) stop you from pursuing what you love. I am thousands of rejections deep in my 21 years of submitting work for publication. I have lost far more contests than I have won or could ever hope to win—as is inevitable—but I work hard to learn from those rejections, to let them spur me forward rather than hold me back.

 

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

 

Oh, that’s wonderful advice! I’m always surprised when writing. I look forward to being surprised. In The Mary Years, I was surprised by the small things I discovered through sustained attention. For instance, I discovered that WJM, the newsroom where Mary Richards works for all seven seasons on the show, mirrors my own name’s initials, each time I am asked to print my last name first, followed by first and middle. Also, after all those years watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show and reading biographies (and autobiographies!) about her life, I had realized the framed picture on Mary Richards’s table, the one just outside her balcony doors, was a picture of her real-life son, Richie Meeker, but it did not dawn on me until writing this book that her character’s last name Richards was most likely an homage to her son, whose given name was Richard.

 

How did you find the title of your book?

 

My book’s title—The Mary Years—comes from an idiosyncratic reference that I have used since I first became a devotee of the series as a twelve-year-old. On The Mary Tyler Moore Show, we meet Mary Richards when the character is 30 years old, and the series ends, seven seasons later, when she is 37. So all those years as I was moving through my adolescence and then through my 20s, I was anticipating my own “Mary years,” wondering what my 30s would be like—and how they would differ from Mary’s. I always talked about people, specifically women, in that age range as being “in their Mary years.”

 

Here’s a sweet story that also appears in the book: when I entered my own Mary years, I was a PhD student living with my long-time partner in Louisville, Kentucky, and some of our friends from my academic program conspired with Angie to surprise me with a Mary-themed birthday party. Our friend Carol hosted, and she served Brandy Alexanders as the signature cocktail—which all you MTM fans will recall is the drink Mary asks for on her job interview with Lou Grant when he insists she have a drink with him. Our friend Elijah listened to the Mary Tyler Moore theme song “Love is All Around” so many times that he learned the song by heart and then brought his band to Carol’s house to play that song as I walked through the door.

 

Then, when I reached the end of my own Mary years, Mary Tyler Moore passed away, and I knew it was time to write—from the other side of that milestone era—what my own journey toward and through “the Mary years” had meant to me.

 

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)  

 

https://www.liquor.com/recipes/brandy-alexander/

 

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.juliemariewade.com

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS PUBLISHER: https://texasreviewpress.org/submissions/

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK:  https://www.tamupress.com/book/9781680033885/the-mary-years/

 

READ A SELECTION FROM THIS BOOK, “PITTSBURGH WAS MY MINNEAPOLIS: An Essay in Episodes”: https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/prose/pittsburgh-was-my-minneapolis-an-essay-in-episodes-by-julie-marie-wade/

 

 

TBR: The Decade of Letting Things Go (A Post Menopause Memoir) by Cris Mazza

TBR [to be read], a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

 

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

 

It’s about loss… the growing load of losses we carry, some without even realizing, both the expected (parents, pets, relationships, keepsakes, homes) as well as losses we don’t realize are being lost, such as identities (daughter, sibling, even author). And it’s about continuing the search for meaning and contentment through what seems like the loss of hope.

 

Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which essay gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

Perhaps “Northwoods Nap” was the easiest … so did I enjoy it most? It was easiest because there was a particular mini event to supply shape and movement: my dog continually waking me during a nap until I realized what was bothering him. But the writing journey of discovery just in unpacking this small event was both satisfying and comforting -- because it made me feel even closer to my dog.

 

The most difficult could be the last one, “Day of Reckoning,” because while I was exploring how a childhood perception that I was decidedly not the “preferred” child in my family had created unhealthy and even ugly adult tendencies, behavior, and sensibility … something happened in my personal relationship that was so germane that I had to include it, but was something deeply personal to my partner. So I wrestled with it, knowing I did have to include it, but how? … and I ended up putting it into a text box, almost an aside, and said that it might be the biggest day of reckoning of all.

 

 

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

 

The high was definitely being taken by the University of Georgia Press CRUX CNF series. What a powerful list of names came before me!

The lows were being outright ignored by agents and some larger independent publishers, even when I was personally recommended.

 

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

Yours! (Below.) Because it’s how I’ve learned to work. I was probably surprised by something in every essay, then surprised all over again when the essays made a whole story, with repeating characters, threads of continuing story, repeated motifs, etc.  Many times, while writing, the surprise discovery or thought did signal “this is the ending” and I knew to just stop there. Other times the surprise(s) helped me. So I’ll just say your advice in a different way: don’t have a hard-and-fast ending planned before you start to write.

 

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

 

As alluded to above, the biggest surprise was that separate essays written over a 10+ year span – never thinking they would be in a book let alone make a book – were actually a woven-together story. I like to think this is represented in the cover art. I told the designer to look for an image that was a “single line,” where the artist never lifts the pencil until completely finished. It represents the “unbroken-line” threads that can be tugged in one essay to reel-in other parts of the same story in other essays, but also the designer tripled the line, so it represents multiple pull-through threads.

 

What’s something about your book that you want readers to know?

 

I want readers to know that there’s drama, tension, discovery and relief to be found in stories that are not victim-to-victory narratives. Searching for complicity is a foundation of the kind of exploration I do in nonfiction writing. In fact, sometimes realizing one’s own complicity is itself a personal gut punch to stagger away from and then try to stand up again.

 

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?

 

 

In “The Summer of Letting Things Go” there’s a vignette that was originally published in Brevity, titled “Feeding Time.” It describes my family’s custom of family dinner, and ends with a description of having fresh coconut for dessert, starting with the hard brown fruit, progressing through the drilling, cracking it with a hammer, then prying the white meat from the shell.

 

*****

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://cris-mazza.com/

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://ugapress.org/book/9780820367545/the-decade-of-letting-things-go/

 

READ AN ESSAY FROM THIS BOOK, “Oneiric (another word I’ve never said)”:

https://therumpus.net/2014/03/23/the-sunday-rumpus-essay-oneiric-another-word-ive-never-said/

 

 

 

TBR: In the Sky Lord by Mary Troy

TBR [to be read], a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.

 

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

 

A restaurant worker steals from a donation jar meant to collect money for a dying boy; a young woman held up at gunpoint is asked to choose which of her coworkers should be shot; a woman in her fifties suffers near debilitating guilt over all the small things she should have done, the times she looked away; a woman who believes herself to be mean operates a kennel for  stray and dumped dogs against a city ordinance; a newlywed hides her dying husband from his mother; a woman takes her father to the Kalaupapa leper colony for what they both know is a non-existent award; a former Archangel from the Pearly Gates Men’s Cub tries turn her life around as she operates a marina in a poverty stricken area of Missouri. These stories and more are in IN THE SKY LORD. All ten stories are about inventiveness, resilience, survival, yearnings, strength, and hope, but mostly they are about the strong need to connect to another.

 

Which story did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which story gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

The title story, “In The Sky Lord,” gave me the most trouble because the character, Belinda, became more complex with each draft, never stopping to become someone I could grasp. Not for years. And though she is the second oldest woman in here, she changes in unanticipated ways, maybe changes more than others. Because “In The Sky Lord,” was the hardest, it was also the most enjoyable, that is if enjoyable means frustrating and haunting. Also “Rent-to-Kill,” the first story in the book, is about Millie Kick, formerly Millie Holmes who was the protagonist in “Do You Believe In the Chicken Hanger?” a story I wrote 20 something years ago that was one of the runners up for the Nelson Algren Award. It was fun to do a sequel.

 

 

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

 

Oh, IN THE SKY LORD has a great story. In 2018 it was accepted as a collection, nine stories I had published over the previous 6 years as I was working on the novel, Swimming on Hwy N. The publisher, though, soon decided he would prefer to use the new work in a larger book of New and Selected, highlight it as part of the press’s 50^th anniversary celebration.  I was excited, humbled but excited. But the press was connected to a university, and as COVID lingered, the press lost funding. The publisher told me not to worry, at first, as they were getting endowments and would continue to publish as an independent. But alas, that never quite worked. In the meantime, partly because I had just retired and partly because COVID kept me isolated, I decided to take each of the nine stories apart and make them even better. So I did, eventually dropping two of them but writing two new ones. I saw a chance—with lots of changes—to connect the stories, and I enjoyed that, too. So sometime in ’21 I sent the new collection to Braddock Avenue Books.  Why Braddock? I had just read Kerry Neville’s collection, and discovered not only her but also Braddock, a press I’d not heard of yet, but one that does great stuff. Nine months after I sent the manuscript, it was accepted, but set for publication two years away. I continued to refine the stories in those two years, and even at the very last minute added a very new one set in the town of Wolf Pass, Illinois, a town I created for the book.

 

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

True characters are flawed and frightened and weird and absurd and confused and much more, just like us. If they are squinted at just right, though, seen from different perspectives, their stories told “slant,” as Emily Dickinson advised, their uniqueness can come through. Not one of us, not one character, is what they seem.

 

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

 

That the endings changed so from the way they were originally published, that they all now end in a sort of hope. I don’t normally consider myself a hopeful sort, but I believe in the inventiveness and inner strength of all these women.

 

How did you get the title?

 

“Will the Circle Be Unbroken” is a hymn from 1907 or so, yet more than a hundred years later still recorded by Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, The Neville Brothers, the Staple Singers and many others. The lyrics tell us there is a better world a’waitin’,  “in the sky, Lord, in the sky.”  That line always made me laugh. A world in the sky! A better one! I said long ago, someday I will write a book titled IN THE SKY LORD. This was long before I wrote the short story with that title, and decades before the book was even an idea.

 

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

 

Many of my previous books, most especially Beauties, about two women running a café, are about food and recipes. In fact, my cousin makes my meatball recipe from Beauties every year over the holidays, and his children call it Mary’s meatballs. But this book is full of diner fried fish and chips, waffles and home fries, pulled pork and macaroni salad, delivered pizzas, fast foods, canned chili and cheap hot dogs, etc.. I had not realized that until you asked. Maybe because these are all foods I no longer eat but did like at times. Well, “Butter Cakes” is about a man who makes butter cakes for last meals in prisons, but he has not revealed the recipe except to say each contains a pound of butter.

 

*****

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://shop.braddockavenuebooks.com/pages/books/133/mary-troy/in-the-sky-lord