Category Archives: Books I like

Christa Polkinhorn on families, relationships, and her new novel EMILIA

child drawing and writing

Christa Polkinhorn has just published the third book in her Family Portrait series: EMILIA. The other two are LOVE OF A STONEMASON and AN UNCOMMON FAMILY. These novels—set in Switzerland, Italy, Peru, and France—trace the fortunes of artist Karla Bocelli as she grows up, finds her vocation, marries, and has children.

EMILIA begins with Karla discovering she is pregnant again at age forty-five. The birth of the little girl, Emilia, changes everything.

I asked Christa “Why do you write about families?” This is her answer:

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Why families?

I think the seeds of the topics we chose are in our own personal life, no matter how fictional the final story is going to be. How do we choose our subjects, or how do they choose us?

I have always enjoyed reading stories about family and relationships, love relationships, relationships between parents and children, or between friends. When I started to write, this topic kept coming up again and again. I often tried to write in a different genre but never got very far. Perhaps part of this has to do with my own history when it comes to family and relationships.

I was born late into my parents’ life—just like Emilia in the novel with the same title, although the circumstances in my family were very different from the family in the novel. My only sister was eighteen years older. She married and had children when I was still a child myself. Since my sister and my brother-in-law lived right next door, I lived both at their house as well as with my parents. I was an only child with my parents and had “siblings” at my sister’s. So I grew up in a slightly “uncommon family” (which also became the title of one of my books, although here again the family in the novel was nothing like my own family).

AUF Cover sm

In the end, it was growing up in my parents’ house as an only child rather than in a larger family like my sister’s that made a more permanent mark on my character. I became independent, adventurous, and somewhat of a hermit. I moved across continents as a young woman and lived far away from my childhood family. I got married, got divorced, and didn’t have any children. This dichotomy of being my own person yet yearning for and appreciating “family”—the joys, the disappointments, the turmoil, the peaceful times—followed me all through life.

It was at a time of a crisis in my own family in Switzerland that got me started on the first novel I wrote, LOVE OF A STONEMASON, which eventually became the second book in the Family Portrait series. My mother died at the ripe old age of 102, and she was the last person in my immediate family to go, my sister and father having passed earlier. As many of us know, the death of the last member of one’s childhood family is a crucial, painful, and unsettling event. It makes us aware that we are the last surviving member and that we are most likely going to be next.

Another important event was a discussion with one of my nieces in Switzerland. She expressed a fairly negative view of relationships between couples, telling me that so many of her friends were separated and divorced. I couldn’t deny the fact that a lot of couples broke up and relationships were some of our biggest challenges. My own experience with marriage and relationships should be testimony enough for me to agree with her. But because I am an optimist by nature, this whole negative attitude just didn’t sit right with me. Wasn’t “relationships don’t work” just an excuse for our inability (or selfishness or whatever else) to make them work?

I thought about this over the following few days. I started thinking about couples and relationships in my own family and among my friends and I suddenly realized that for every broken one, there were quite a few that survived. My parents certainly didn’t have a marriage made in heaven, but they stuck with each other until “death does us part.” My sister and brother-in-law and many of my married friends stayed married and weathered all kinds of storms. So it was possible.

zen love background

One of the reviewers of LOVE OF A STONEMASON wrote the following quotation she had found somewhere while trying to think of what to write about my novel: “I don’t pretend to know what love is for everyone, but I can tell you what it is for me; love is knowing all about someone, and still wanting to be with them more than any other person, love is trusting them enough to tell them everything about yourself, including the things you might be ashamed of, love is feeling comfortable and safe with someone, but still getting weak knees when they walk into a room and smile at you.” (Review by Misty Baker, Amazon.com)

I couldn’t have said it any better. I guess my novels are a way of exploring both the challenges and joys of relationships. Being close to someone can be dangerous; it makes us vulnerable, it scares the heck out of us, but without it, we live an impoverished existence, no matter how “rich” we are.

Links for Christa Polkinhorn

Website: http://www.christa-polkinhorn.comAuthor Photo 2
Blog: http://christa-polkinhorn.blogspot.com/
Author Page on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Author.ChristaPolkinhorn
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/christa.polkinhorn
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cpolkinhorn
Goodreads page: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4202173.Christa_Polkinhorn

Russell Hoban, a memory

Yesterday, February 4, 2013, was Russell Hoban’s birthday; he would have been 88.  He began as a successful children’s author in his native USA, then moved to London and reinvented himself as a novelist for adults. His books have lingering effects.

This is what he has to say about his own work:

The real reality, the flickering of seen and unseen actualities, the moment under the moment, can’t be put into words; the most that a writer can do—and this is only rarely achieved—is to write in such a way that the reader finds himself in a place where the unwordable happens off the page.

In January 2011, I published my first Huffington Post piece, titled “Russell Hoban: A Great American Writer.”  That was an audition blog—the one that determined whether I would get blogging privileges.

About two months later he contacted me via a Yahoo newsgroup I belong to called the Kraken, who are fans of Hoban’s work. His daughter in Connecticut had read the Huff Post piece. He wanted to talk to me, he said. Would I call him at his London home?

I thought it would be a short conversation, but it was a long one. We talked about writing and books; he gave me title after title, and author after author. I scrawled the names on scrap paper, which I still have.

He was 86 and had a number of health problems (he would die in December of that year). On the phone, however, he sounded  like a man of thirty—both in his tone of voice and in his enthusiasm. That is how I will remember him.

In the words of blogger Christine Bissonnette: “Screw time and all its rules.”

Since 2002, fans around the world have celebrated Russell Hoban’s birthday by writing lines from his novels on yellow paper and leaving the paper in various places to be found by strangers. (Yellow writing paper figures in his first novel Kleinzeit.)

Coming upon a Hoban line unexpectedly is in my opinion the best way to discover him. You can see some striking examples here.

Russell Hoban: SA4QE 2012

Russell Hoban was one of the great modern writers—for both children and adults. For the 10th year running, fans of his work (aka, the Kraken) are celebrating his birthday today: February 4.

The Slickman A4 Quotation Event, or SA4QE for short, was dreamed up in 2002 by Krakenite Diana Slickman. This is what she wrote about it:

We each, on February 4, write our favorite passage, of any length, from any Russell Hoban book, on a piece of yellow paper and drop it somewhere public and then walk away, leaving chance to do the rest … I would recommend leaving it someplace rather than just dropping it on the ground … The paper should at least include the name of the book and Russell’s name … leaving chance to do the rest … let the mystery of things take it from there, let the paper find its way (or not) to some receptive (or not) person who would then go seek out the book (or not) and become another fan (or not)…

You could be taking a walk, catching a train, browsing in a bookstore, hanging out in a bar—and there a piece of yellow paper lies waiting to be discovered.  It is beautiful thing to do for a writer. I am going to leave a quotation somewhere in the real world — am not sure where yet.

The Writer’s Rest 2012 quotation:

Dream: A rushing in the air behind the visible world.
—Fremder, 1996

Two books were in the works when Russell Hoban died on December 13, 2011. They are slated publication in 2012:  the YA novel Soonchild (March 2012) and for children, Rosie’s Magic Horse (October 2012).

Russell Hoban, in memorium

Russell Hoban passed away yesterday. His editor David Lloyd wrote this tribute, one of many.

“Dear brilliant Russell. We took it in turns to read to him at the
end. His wife read Bassho. His son read Elmore Leonard. I read Robert
Louis Stephenson. The world will sound so different without him.

“Thank you Russell.

“Your words have been our delight.”

The following s is a post I wrote in January 2010. I’m a fan. I always will be.

The Sun Over the Water

And I think of the sun over the water, the sun through the water, the holding the sun, being held by it with no thought and only the rhythm of the going. . . . Then it doesn’t seem hard to believe. It seems the only way to do it, the only way in fact to be: swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun, no sharks in the mind, nothing in the mind.

Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary, 1975

Sometime in the 1980s Turtle Diary and I found each other. The novel’s  theme is “the things that matter don’t necessarily make sense.” I could relate and still can.

This is what he has to say about his own work:

The real reality, the flickering of seen and unseen actualities, the moment under the moment, can’t be put into words; the most that a writer can do—and this is only rarely achieved—is to write in such a way that the reader finds himself in a place where the unwordable happens off the page.

In his search for the moment under the moment, Russell Hoban can make you laugh, too. He’s good at it.

An example: In his vampire novel, Linger Awhile, the hero is an 83-year-old man who falls in love with a girl in an old black and white movie. The man goes to one of the scientist-technician-sorcerers that pop up in Hoban novels now and then, and asks him to bring the girl back to life.

“Great,” remarks the scientist-technician-sorcerer. “You’re old and she’s dead. What do you want from me?”

Celebration

Russell Hoban’s birthday is February 4. Since 2002, fans around the world have celebrated by writing lines from his novels on yellow paper and leaving the paper in various places, where strangers find it unexpectedly. (Yellow writing paper figures in his first novel Kleinzeit.)

I once left a Hoban quotation in a Maryland train station that had an antique locomotive parked on a siding as an exhibit. The locomotive looked more like a prehistoric beast than a machine, and the day was raw and windy.

Coming upon a Hoban line unexpectedly is in my opinion the best way to discover him. You can see some striking examples here.

*Results Not Typical: The Blog Tour

A satirical novel about the commercial weight loss industry is something the world has been waiting for. Luckily, the world has to wait no longer. Catherine Ryan Howard has published *Results Not Typical: A Novel.

My favorite part of the novel’s title is that asterisk.  Brilliant touch. But on to the interview . . .

This novel is fun to read. Was it fun to write?

Yes, very. I think the beauty of satire is that you can exaggerate things to make them funnier without worrying whether or not they’re realistic. And I finally had an opportunity to use all those years of ahem, research that I’d done into the dieting and weight loss industry…

What is the message of this novel?

I don’t really want the novel to have a message as such – I just want it to be a few hours of entertaining reading. I’m not preaching about anything here – I hope. But I think the very fact that I wrote a satire about the dieting industry hint at my views on it, which are that as it exists now, there’s no need for it. We all know what to do (eat less, move more) and if we’re not doing it, it’s not because we’re stupid enough to think that Ben and Jerry’s is healthy eating. It’s because we have a distorted relationship with food for some reason and although we may not be able to figure out that reason or how to address it ourselves, I can say for certain that drinking gallons of water mixed with lemon juice and ceyanne pepper for days on end isn’t going to help any.

You made a name for yourself with two nonfiction books, Mousetrapped and Backpacked.  Is it easier or harder to write fiction?

For me, much, much harder. I’ve heard other writers say they prefer fiction because you can make it up as you go along, but I much prefer having real events. All you have to do then is find the humor in them.  What I especially love about non-fiction is the whole story is already there; you don’t have to do any plotting. Plotting gives me brain ache.

I am glad you choose to write humor because you are good at it.  What is your next project?

I still want to get traditionally published one day (fingers crossed!) so my next project is a novel aimed at making that happen.

What is one of  your favorite quotations?

Oh, I have LOADS. Not sure I can just pick one. Hmm… I suppose if I was confined to just the one, it would be this from E.B. White: “All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.”

I have to ask this question: what do you snack on while writing?

I usually don’t eat while I’m writing because I’m guzzling coffee which kind of dulls your appetite. But I don’t mind rewarding myself afterwards (see? There’s the problem right there!) with “something nice” – at the moment I’m going through a phase of loving Cadbury’s Wholenut milk chocolate bars. If I were in the States and had access to them, I’d definitely be rewarding myself with Oreo Cakesters. They don’t sell them here! (Although, that’s probably a good thing!)

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Results Not Typical on Amazon.co.uk:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Results-Not-Typical-Novel-ebook/dp/B005M33XD6/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1316862559&sr=1-7

Results Not Typical on Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Results-Typical-Catherine-Ryan-Howard/dp/1466224657/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1316862619&sr=1-8

Goodreads Giveaway:

If your readers visit http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/14791-results-not-typical  they can enter a giveaway to win one of five paperback copies of Results Not Typical. Open for entries from September 30th-October 31st. Open to all countries.

About Catherine:

Catherine Ryan Howard is a 29-year-old writer, blogger and enthusiastic coffee-drinker. She currently lives in Cork, Ireland, where she divides her time between her desk and the sofa. She blogs at www.catherineryanhoward.com

 About Results Not Typical:

The Devil Wears Prada meets Weightwatchers and chick-lit meets corporate satire in the debut novel from Catherine Ryan Howard, author of the bestselling memoir Mousetrapped: A Year and A Bit in Orlando, Florida. Through their Ultimate Weight Loss Diet Solution Zone System, Slimmit International Global Incorporated claim they’re making the world a more attractive place one fatty at a time. Their slogans “Where You’re Fat and We Know It!” and “Where the Fat IS Your Fault!” are recognised around the globe, the counter in the lobby says five million slimmed and their share price is as high as their energy levels. But today the theft of their latest revolutionary product, Lipid Loser, will threaten to expose the real secret behind Slimmit’s success…The race is on to retrieve Lipid Loser and save Slimmit from total disaster. If their secrets get out, their competitors will put them out of business. If the government finds out, they’ll all go to jail. And if their clients find out… Well, as Slimmit’s Slimming Specialists know all too well, there’s only one thing worse than a hungry, sugar-crazed, carb addict – and that’s an angry one. Will the secret behind Slimmit’s success survive the day, or will their long-suffering slimmers finally discover the truth? Available now in paperback and e-book editions.

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!

Cookbooks, evil and good

I do not own many cookbooks because I do not have room for many and because I almost never cook from them anyway. What I do with cookbooks is read them. Some are old friends. Some are funny, like a brilliant little volume called Cooking for Your Evil Twin: Devilishly Tempting Recipes for the Modern Woman.

I recommend this book to anyone suffering from an excess of virtue. It will cure you in one sitting, and you don’t even have to cook anything. You will feel better just knowing that Cooking for Your Evil Twin contains recipes such as:

  • Miracle Thigh Open-Face Cheese Sandwich
  • Hansel and Gretel’s Revenge Gingerbread
  • Not Ready for Twelve Step Anything Steamed Chocolate Pudding

Among my small collection are three spiral-bound volumes. You know these books. Church ladies put them out; so do groups wanting to fund-raise for other causes. These three were put out to raise money, respectively, for the Otisco Lake Community Association, the Washington Area Humane Society, and for “individuals and families that are distressed or have had unfortunate events happen in their lives.” (This last purpose belongs to the Ladies of Heart of Eighty-Four, Pennsylvania.)

Country Collection, Hey, Good Lookin’, and Heart Filled Recipes were not created to tell stories, but they do anyway. You can imagine actual people making and eating the food (something I cannot say for other recipes I’ve come across).  Then you can imagine the people.

For example, Heart Filled Recipes is dedicated to the memory of Anna D. Ankrom, who had 7 children, 21 grandchildren, 27 great-grandchildren, and 6 great-great-grandchildren.  Several of her recipes are included, and one of her husband’s for corn pone (“he always wanted to make the corn pone”). She died  in 2008 at age 87, full of years and presumably good home-cooked meals.

Heart Filled Recipes includes two recipes for a Polish dish called halopki. (A halopki joke—a gift from the Canadian sitcom Corner Gas: Oscar: “Do you want to make halopki?” Emma: “Not with you.”)

Country Collection contains something called Sister’s Punch. The author of Cooking for Your Evil Twin  likely would have included Sister’s Punch in her own book had she known about it. It includes, among other things, 20 egg yolks, 2 quarts of rye whiskey, and 2 quarts of heavy cream.

My natural bias is toward the individual,  the unslick, and the particular truths of particular lives. I don’t know whether this is better than other biases, but it is the way I roll. Even on television, the ads I pay attention to are the ones made for little money by people who do not make a living standing in front of cameras. Maybe they are not more truthful than the slick ads, but my gut feeling is that they are.

A Vanished World (again)

A Vanished World is Anne Sneller’s memoir of growing up in rural New York at the turn of the last century. I got permission from Syracuse University Press to quote from it in my novel Cel & Anna. I may be the only person in world who has ever done this, a fact of which I am proud.

My 2010 blog about A Vanished World:

You can read Anne Gertrude Sneller’s 1964 memoir A Vanished World at Google Books, but I don’t recommend it. This book goes best on a porch with a cold drink and slow time. If you open the book hopped up on the click click click, Anne Sneller will calm you down. “Look,” she says. “This is how it was.”

The picture that emerges in A Vanished World  is of a well-loved, extraordinarily observant girl who grew into a well-loved, extraordinarily observant woman. Born in 1883, Sneller wrote her one and only book “in the fullness of time”—a phrase that implies a time completely right.

I found a newspaper account of people lining up around the block, in the pouring rain, to wait for her autograph at a Syracuse department store. Although the book was in print as late at 1994,  its fame stayed local.  I know about it only because I have roots in the world she writes about.

Nostalgic writers say the past was better, but Anne Sneller was not a nostalgic writer, nor was she a sentimental one. I think the phrase “good old days” would have annoyed her for its slovenly imprecision.

“You must always have faith in life,” she wrote. She had enough faith to tell what she saw plainly. She wrote about the everyday stuff: relatives, school, sickness and health, holidays, recreation and pleasure. Death, cruelty, overwork, and despair were woven through the fabric of everyday life, too, and she wrote about those with the same full heart, the same clear gaze.

For example, a chapter rightly called “Strange Images of Death” contains this story of a many-years-married pregnant woman, who committed suicide by drowning herself in a well:

What followed removed any doubt that she was entirely sane. All the clothes for burial had been laid out; even her stockings were neatly turned down so that they would slip easily over her feet. There was a long letter of instruction for her daughters, bidding the oldest take the best and tenderest care of the others. But all this was insignificant compared to the astonishing last command. Her funeral text, she wrote, was to be a verse from II Kings, the fourth chapter and the twenty-sixth verse. . . . She had written down the part of the verse that she wished used: “Is it well with thee? . . . Is it well with the child? And she answered, it is well.”

By contrast, this is from a chapter called “Father and Mother and the Farms”:

Mother loved everything about her new home, where the first seven years of her married life were spent. It was truly a storybook place. It was on a crossroad not far from the homes of the relatives, all living within a square mile. If you turned at the corner by the schoolhouse where both father and mother had taught and followed a bending dirt road with orchards on one side and stump fences on the other, you came to a little hill. A spring that never went dry flowed at the foot of the hill and along it peppermint grew in abundance and made a green line to mark the water course.

Most people don’t wait until they are eighty to publish their first book, but even then Anne Sneller was not through reinventing herself. A few years later she married for the first time. She and her new husband both lived well into their nineties.

You can see photos of Sneller’s home land here. You can buy her book here.

Bluegrass music / life among the indies

When I lived in Washington, DC, I discovered that I love bluegrass music. Then I discovered that the DC area was the bluegrass capital of the USA, which sounds extremely unlikely, but was true enough back then. A public radio station, WAMU, played more than 40 hours of bluegrass and acoustic music a week (they do no longer), there was the fabulous Birchmere in Alexandria, and there were many other venues, including Granite Hill in Gettysburg, a top-of-the-line bluegrass festival.

If you like that sort of thing.

I did and I do.

I love it when this music gets high-profile exposure. Steve Martin plays banjo with the Steep Canyon Rangers  and is on tour with them this summer. He and Bela Fleck (the guy wearing the orange tie) performed at the Capital Fourth celebration.

Finding bluegrass and new acoustic music was like stumbling onto a wonderful secret most of the world wasn’t in on. It lives and thrives under most people’s radar.

And the point is?

The point is that I was an indie in spirit long before I became one in fact. I am making discoveries about indie publishing that are similar to the discoveries I made when I found bluegrass music. Such as:

  • There is a lot of good stuff out there.
  • Some indie authors have A LOT of talent.
  • At $1-$3 a book, indies are the happiest bargain since bag day at the local library sale.

Price is king

When I got a Nook Color and started browsing the BN store, prices of conventionally published ebooks put me off sharply. $10-$15 for an ebook?

The second novel by the good and gifted indie writer Christa Polkinhorn, An Uncommon Family (Family Portrait),  reads beautifully and  has characters you root for. (Also it is set mostly in Europe, which nourishes my inner armchair traveler.) This novel is a  pleasure to turn to at the end of a long day. I am enjoying losing myself in it.

Do you want to laugh? I recommend ebooks by Catherine Ryan Howard (Mousetrapped), Sam Torode (The Dirty Parts of the Bible), Michael Harling (More Postcards From Across the Pond), and Tony James Slater (That Bear Ate My Pants!).

All these ebooks sell for $2.99.

So much good stuff, such a bargain. Makes you feel special.

Quotation: Vernor Vinge

The castle was basically a logical structure “fleshed” out with sensory cues that allowed warlocks to move about it as one would a physical structure and though they had no physical reality outside of the varying potentials in whatever processors were running the program, they were proof against the movement of the equally “unreal” perceptions of the inhabitants of the plane.

—Vernor Vinge, “True Names,” 1979-1980. Written more than 15 years before the Internet became a household reality, this is a truly visionary story.