TBR: Negative Space by Lilly Dancyger

 

TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe!

 

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

 

Negative Space is the story of my father’s life, art, heroin addiction, and death—as well as the story of the decade I spent piecing together the truth of who he was by interviewing people who knew him, reading his notebooks and letters, and studying his artwork. There are images of his artwork throughout, and I think of it as a hybrid art book/memoir, with an investigative journalism bent.

 

 

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

 

Negative Space breaks genre boundaries by bringing art and journalism into memoir—and it breaks the fourth wall by including the story of how the book came to be in the book itself. I don’t think writing about the writing of a book in the book always works, but it felt necessary here, to show how my relationship to the artwork and to the process of interviewing people who knew my father changed over time. At first I thought I could maintain the cool distance of a reporter, but the story inevitably swept me away and required me to engage with my own grief and anger.

 

 

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

 

There were a lot of lows! I racked up more than 50 rejections over seven years of querying, and when I finally got a book deal, I ended up canceling it. Then I had another brutal round of rejections (during which I also acquired and then fired an agent) before Negative Space was finally selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of SFWP’s 2019 Literary Awards. I wrote about this saga in detail for Electric Literature if anyone wants the whole story.

 

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

I don’t think I have one! I don’t really believe in maxims, and I think most of the truisms out there about writing end up being limiting. There are so many prescriptions out there about how to be a writer and how to write the “right” way. Most of the process of finding my own voice and routine as a writer has been about unlearning all of the external rules and advice, and getting in touch with what comes naturally to me, and what works for my way of thinking, and working, and expressing myself. I’ve never been a “write every day” writer, for example, and for years I beat myself up over that. I thought I was failing somehow because I didn’t write the way I was “supposed to,” but when I finally stopped trying to force myself into a routine that just didn’t work with my life, I found a much more productive schedule that works for me and allows me to enjoy writing rather than feeling like I’m doing it wrong. (I work in sporadic, intense bursts.)

 

 

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

 

I was surprised to discover how much anger was hiding underneath my grief over my father’s death. Confronting that and letting it complicate the story was a big shift for me personally, and for the direction of the story. I think going through that process is what prepared me to edit my anthology, Burn It Down, in which so many other writers engaged with anger that was hiding under other emotions, or other emotions that were hiding under anger.

 

 

How did you find the title of your book?

 

Titles are so hard! For a long time, the working title of this book was Hunter/Hunted, after a series of deer sculptures and prints that my father made. The concept behind that series ended up being really central to the book, and I came to think of the book as almost a continuation of or response to that series, so I wanted to use the title. But eventually I realized that it only made sense after reading the book, and people I polled seemed confused by it without the context. So I started thinking about artistic principles that were important to both my father’s work and my book, instead, and Negative Space just fit since I was writing around the absence of my father. There’s also a story in the book about how he explained the concept of negative space to me when I was a kid and he was teaching me how to draw that also encapsulates so much of what I was trying to do with the book, but I won’t spoil it.

 

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

 

Not that I can think of… (the only food I mention in the book is from specific restaurants my family used to go to, as opposed to stuff we made at home!). But if pressed, I guess maybe matzoh ball soup with lots of dill.

 

*****

  

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://www.lillydancyger.com/

  

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK:  https://bookshop.org/a/1925/9781951631031

  

READ AN EXCERPT FROM THIS BOOK, “Making Art Out of Dead Things”:  https://bombmagazine.org/articles/lilly-dancyger-negative-space

 

 

 

TBR: Lucy Clark Will Not Apologize by Margo Rabb

TBR [to be read] is an invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released, interesting books who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe. 

 

 

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

 

Lucy Clark Will Not Apologize is an Agatha Christie-meets-The Secret Garden tale. It’s the story of a girl whose life is transformed by a garden and a mystery, and through these challenges, she discovers an inner strength she didn’t realize she had.

 

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

 

One of my favorite parts of writing this book was the research I did—part of the novel is set in a fictionalized version of one of my favorite places, a real-life garden called Chanticleer outside Philadelphia. I interviewed a horticulturist there, Chris Fehlhaber, for research, and we had many long, philosophical conversations about the meaning of gardens and how they can change our emotions. These interviews helped shape several of the characters in the book, including Lucy, Edith, and Mimsy. I also wrote this essay about the experience for The New York Times. Writing is never easy for me, so I think creating every character—and every page!—is a combination of joy and trouble for me.

 

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

 

I spent over five years writing this novel, but the hardest part of the whole process was doing the last revisions during the pandemic, with my two children home in remote school and my husband working from home also. I’ve never before had a more challenging time to write—there were constant interruptions, and to be able to focus, I wrote outside in the backyard a lot, hiding behind the garage. I also wrote in my children’s playhouse, in a tent in the backyard in the rain and snow, and sometimes I’d wait until after everyone went to bed, and I’d write until two or three o’clock in the morning. A few times, when I was working through whole drafts for copyedits, first pass, and second pass pages, I’d stay up the whole night, all the way till 8 o’clock the next morning. The crazy thing is, I actually enjoyed staying up all night so I could have that uninterrupted time. I hadn’t pulled all-nighters like that since college.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

 

My favorite advice is from Lynda Barry, who quotes her own teacher Marilyn Frasca--when Lynda was complaining she didn’t like her own work, Marilyn told her: “It’s none of your business.” I love the idea that how we judge or feel about our own creative work doesn’t matter—what matters is the process of making it.

 

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

 

My favorite chapter is one in the middle called “Sea Change.” Writing it was one of those moments when it sort of just poured out. It felt like it came from the deepest part of me.

 

How do you approach revision?

 

All my best work happens in revision. I do very messy, long first drafts, often handwritten, and then I edit the hell out of it for years. Even with shorter pieces like essays or book reviews, I spend an enormous time editing and revising. I also keep handwritten notebooks for all the characters in my novels, to get to know them better. Little bits and pieces of writing from the notebooks always do end up in the final book. 

 

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

 

Food is a huge part of Lucy Clark—part of her journey in New York is eating many delicious things she’s never had before, and having a sort of awakening through food. There’s a meal in the chapter “Sea Change” that’s at a fictional café that’s based partly on two restaurants I love: Buvette in the West Village, and also it’s based on a life-changing meal I had at Curtis Duffy’s Grace restaurant in Chicago. Here is the chef at Buvette making “Anchoiade Tartines”—they’re very simple, with butter, anchovy, and caper berries. They’re delicious!

 

https://www.marthastewart.com/867796/anchoiade-tartine

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.margorabb.com

 

BUY THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: Signed and personalized copies can be ordered and shipped here from one of my favorite indie bookshops: http://www.childrensbookworld.net/rabb-lucy-clark-will-not-apologize/

 

 

 

TBR: Wait for God to Notice by Sari Fordham

TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe!

 

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

Wait for God to Notice is about growing up in Uganda during and after the dictatorship of Idi Amin. It’s also about a daughter getting to know her Finnish mother while considering their shared past.

 

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

 

I broke boundaries with point of view. When we first moved to Uganda, I was about one and a half years old. I have a good memory, as everyone in my family will tell you, but it doesn’t go that far back. To write about our arrival, I had to sort of hover over our family, much like a fiction writer would, using material I gathered from interviews, photographs, letters, newspaper articles, visits back to Uganda and of course the stories I had heard my parents tell. The challenge was finding a nonfiction voice that allowed me to inhabit that space and write honestly and authentically. The older I get in the narrative, the more fully I inhabit my point of view, but occasionally I make the imaginative leap into another perspective. My favorite was briefly considering our family from the perspective of the monkeys who were harvesting the tomatoes from our garden.

The courage came from reading memoirists who successfully did the work I was trying to do. I returned to Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje and Out of Egypt by André Aciman over and over again. The courage also came from the urgency I felt to write this story.

 

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

 

Completing this book took a lot longer than I expected. I got a job. I got married. I had a kid. Lots of good life stuff happened, none of which lent itself to long stretches of writing time. I shifted over to writing essays because they were more manageable. They had the added advantage of helping me rediscover all the things you can do with form, and I was able to return to my book manuscript and solve the structural problems I had encountered.

Sometime after I completed my manuscript, I noticed one of my Twitter acquaintances had a book published with Etruscan Press. Intrigued, I visited the Etruscan website and saw they were publishing 50 Miles by Sheryl St. Germain. Sheryl was my professor at Iowa State University. Etruscan had an open call for submissions and so I sent in my manuscript, which they accepted. Their executive director, Philip Brady called me on the phone before I signed the contract, and he talked about my memoir exactly the way I wanted readers to think and talk about it. And that was that.

 

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

I like Pico Iyer’s advice, “I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within.”

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

The book’s final structure surprised me. I had planned to move back and forth between Uganda and Finland, which sounds great, but I couldn’t make it work. There just wasn’t enough happening in the Finland sections to justify my original structure. I transitioned over to a disrupted chronological structure that focused on three separate parts—each with its own theme--and that allowed me to move deeper into the narrative.

How did you find the title of your book?

This book had a lot of different titles, none of which felt right. Julie Schumacher, who was my writing teacher at University of Minnesota, advised me to read through my manuscript draft and underline every phrase that caught my eye. I underlined like a freshman in college—so much underlining—and then I came to a line from one of my mother’s letters and I knew that was it. She wrote, We just found out that the price of one roll of toilet paper is $5.00, and its size is not enough to use a dozen times. I’ve read that the sellers rarely have bananas and beans. Wait for God to notice.

 

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

In my memoir, I write about how Idi Amin put our family under house arrest, and how after he had walked back his threats, my mother used all the rice and flour in the house to make piirakka, a Finnish staple and an extraordinary treat since food was so scarce. My father was in Kenya during the house arrest and she was hoping he would smuggle some flour over the border—which he didn’t—but he was alive and we were alive and we all ate piirakka.

In Finland, piirakka is eaten daily. Most households buy them from a store or bakery because they’re so time consuming to make. After my mother died, I spent years trying to replicate her recipe, which she had carried in her head, and for a long time, I was very unsuccessful. I now finally have a good recipe and I make piirakka for Thanksgiving and Christmas. My piirakka looks rustic, but I know my mother would say it’s delicious. 

This link is a good one: https://www.saimaalife.com/recipe-finnish-karelian-pies/

*****

 

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://www.sarifordham.com/

 

 

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK:  https://bookshop.org/books/wait-for-god-to-notice/9781733674157

 

 

READ AN EXCERPT, “Driver Ants”:
https://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/past%20issues/brev20/fordham20.htm