Tag Archives: publishing

Writing Wednesday: Passion and Proximity

8 Feb

When I was an English major in undergrad, I didn’t have English major friends.  Most of my friends were premed or computer science (blame my proximity to Harvey Mudd on the latter) or a variety of random majors: history, American studies, French.  I was friendly with my classmates in the English department, but we weren’t a really close-knit clique.

That’s not to say I didn’t have any word-minded friends when I was in college.  I spent a lot of time in “The Dungeon,” what we called the basement office to the indie newspaper where I worked, and perhaps based simply on the fact that we had to spend a lot of time together, I cultivated friendships there.  When you work the graveyard shift, things tend to get a little silly around 3 am.  It bonds you, whether you like it or not.  Just recently one of the women I worked with came to NYC for a visit, and it was so much fun to catch up with her over brunch at Beauty & Essex.

When I graduated from undergrad, many of my relationships continued to be based in the literary world once again by virtue of my chosen career.  Work kind of dominates your life.  You spend most of your waking day at your job.  You might as well make friends there.  Outside of the friends I made at the publishing house, though, I gravitated towards people with very different careers than mine.  People who worked in graphic design, banking, real estate, you name it.

Being in a creative writing MFA now, it would seem natural that I should have a lot of writing friends.  Life doesn’t always work that way.  While everyone’s headed out for red wine after our classes end at 10:30 pm, I’m shuffling to the subway because I have to get up for work the next morning.  You can’t be bleary-eyed when it comes to editing books.  The friends I have made there, though, are awesome.  It’s so great to connect with writers, who understand the whole juggle of life and work and writing and who totally get it when you say you wish you didn’t have a passion to write.

I wonder if friendship is based more on proximity and circumstance or on mutual interests.  For some, those two might intertwine, but for many I don’t think it always does.  I think that’s because our passions aren’t always our biggest priorities.  I don’t mean that in the negative sense that our passion isn’t meaningful and important to us.  I just think other things can be as meaningful if not more meaningful, and we gravitate toward those who share our same values and personality over people who share our same activities.

Tags: , , , , ,

Military Tanks

22 Dec

It’s late in the morning, and I’m drinking a cup of black coffee that has turned cold because of how slowly I’ve been drinking it.  I’m sitting Indian style on my chair and editing a book on military tanks.

Normally, a weaponry book would get on my nerves.  I’d wonder what choices I’d made in my career that got me to the point that I’m editing books so far from my own gushy interests of literature and birds and art.

Today, though, I’m reminded of another morning.  I remember riding the bus into Manhattan with my dad, passing the Teaneck Armory, and my dad telling me about his days serving in the Greek army.  My dad’s rather private, a trait that runs deep in the family, and I had never really heard him talk about being in the army.  Even though it’s required of all Greek males to serve in the Greek army, the detail that my father served in the army never really cliqued in my mind.  It made me realize how some details in our lives slip away, forgotten until triggered by a source outside us.

Some stories we share over and over again, til the point our friends roll their eyes from having to hear it again.  Other stories we burrow away.  Maybe because they’re painful to remember.  Or maybe because they just seem insignificant.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Writing Wednesday: A Blurb Job

14 Dec

When Joan Williams asks William Faulkner to blurb her book, it takes an ugly turn.  In telling the story of their affair (a story also told by Lisa C. Hickman in William Faulkner and Joan Williams: The Romance of Two Writers), Glen David Gold makes a compelling argument for not sleeping with writers in “On Not Rolling the Log,” in The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Gold goes on to say:

How confusing it is to entangle acclaim and love. How much of a balancing act to determine your real value to another person. When you cultivate a literary friendship, it’s good to remember — and hard to prove — that it’s the work which is a commodity, not you.

An editor was telling me recently that Ken Kesey asked Jack Kerouac to blurb one of his books and he refused.  He was very protective of his name, his brand.

Some writers whore out their name.  Others keep it under lock and key.  The book business is a small and incestuous one, and a blurb from the right author can propel sales.  But at what cost?

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Happy Birthday, Teddy Roosevelt!

27 Oct

Happy birthday, Teddy Roosevelt!

On October 27, 1858, Theodore Roosevelt was born right here in New York City.  I had the opportunity to visit his birth home a few years ago and write the introduction to his classic book Hunting the Grisly and Other Stories, published by the Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading.

I am opposed to hunting for sport, and in my introduction I highlight the fact that although Roosevelt was a hunter he was also a conservationist who set up fifty-one wildlife refuges.

Roosevelt’s Hunting the Grisly is available for purchase in both paperback and ebook format.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Writing Wednesday: Brooklyn Book Festival 2011

28 Sep

New York’s largest free literary event took place on Sunday, September 18.  That’s right — the Brooklyn Book Festival!

My writer cohort and I had such a blast zig-zagging through the tents, ducking into readings, creeping close to authors, poring over books, and running into people we knew.  She introduced me to John Woo of the Magnetic Fields.  We ran into another friend from Little, Brown and Company, who instead of going the MFA route is doing his Masters in Publishing at NYU.  I saw Alisa Harris, whom I used to work with at Patrol, and who now has her own book out.

On the speaker side of things, I got to hear my writing mentors Phillip Lopate and Darcey Steinke.  I also got to hear Mary Karr, whom I had also heard speak at FFW.  Plus so many other great speakers.

 

 

I spied my writing colleague Susan E. Isaac‘s memoir on the Greenlight Bookstore table at Brooklyn Book Fest.

 

…as well as Greek American Tina Fey‘s memoir.

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Greek American Film Directory Louie Psihoyos Saves the Whales

7 Jul

Al Gore & co. made it trendy to go green in the millennium.  Back in the mid- to late-19980s, when I was growing up in a small suburb in northern New Jersey, America’s environmental concern was a little more specific.  We all wanted to Save the Whales.  In 1986 the International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling.

For photographer and documentary film director Louie Psihoyos, that dream apparently never went away.  Psihoyos’ Oscar Award-winning film, The Cove, uncovers the all-too-real tragedy of dolphin hunting.  (Oceanic dolphins are part of the suborder Odontoceti, toothed whales.)

The film director more recently discovered that the Santa Monica sushi restaurant The Hump was using the meat of protected sei whales in their dishes.  Whale meat is illegal in the United States and was being imported from Japan, which is still a whaling nation (along with the Scandinavian countries of Norway and Iceland and the aboriginal communities of Alaska, northern Canada, and Siberia).  The meat was linked back to seafood vendor Ginichi Y. Ohira, who pled guilty for knowingly selling the whale meat for unauthorized purposes.  He faces arraignment in September.  As for The Hump, it closed its doors, saying:

The Hump hopes that by closing its doors, it will help bring awareness to the detrimental effect that illegal whaling has on the preservation of our ocean ecosystems and species. Closing the restaurant is a self-imposed punishment on top of the fine that will be meted out by the court. The Owner of The Hump also will be taking additional action to save endangered species.

One such action will be to make a substantial contribution to one or more responsible organizations dedicated to the preservation of whales and other endangered species.

It’s nice to know that photographer/film director Louie Psihoyos hasn’t given up the cause of saving the whales.

Psihoyos was born in Dubuque, Iowa, one of the oldest cities west of the Mississippi River.  (Note to self: today publishing is one of the fastest-growing industries in Dubuque, Iowa.)   He is the son of  a Greek immigrant who fled the communist occupation of the Peloponnesos region of Greece during World War II.

Check back tomorrow to hear the story of a dolphin myth from the Peloponnesus!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Perks of Being a Wallflower

13 Jun

An author dropped by my office the other day with flowers! Aren’t they gorgeous?!

 

 

 

 

In case you missed them, here are some flower-related posts on Protomayia and the Feast of Flowers.

Tags: , , ,

Mediabistro.com Book Club Party: May ’11 Edition

23 May

On Tuesday I attended the mediabistro.com book club party, which was held in the swanky underbar at the W Hotel in Union Square.  The event was hosted by Jason Boog, who presented four diverse readers for the evening: Jamie Cat Callan, Jonathan Franklin, Steve Friedman, and Shana Mahaffey.

Jamie Cat Callan showed up with hot pink casts on her arm and leg.  Even post-accident she looked tre chic.  She read from her latest book Bonjour, Happiness!  In this easy-to-digest and engaging work of nonfiction, Jamie writes about being inspired by her French grandmother to travel to France.  There she seeks out the secret to joie de vivre.

Jonathan Franklin gives a firsthand account of the rescue of the Chilean miners in his new book 33 Men.  The journalist, who was at the mine site during the ordeal, interviewed all but three of the miners and one hundred of the rescuers to tell the real story behind what we heard on the news.  He shared some stories of the personal lives of some of the miners, and it individualized the men who were trapped and rescued.

Steve Friedman read from the chapter “The Ant, the Grasshopper, and Nicole Kidman,” in his new book Driving Lessons: A Father, A Son, and the Healing Power of Golf.  I hate sports and golf especially, and I’m neither a father nor a son, but I have to admit I was rather captivated by the section Steve read.  I picked up a copy and am looking forward to reading it.

Shana Mahaffey was the representative fiction writer and read from Sounds like Crazy.  It’s about a voiceover artist who–wait for it–hears voices in her head.  She has dissociative identity disorder and lots of cats.  It’s a lighthearted read about a woman whose personality becomes fractured.

I also got to meet petite model and author Isobella Jade at the event, who was super-friendly and we talked all about teen lit and making mud pies.

What a fun night!

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Light at the End of the Tunnel

17 May

For awhile it felt like the light at the end of the tunnel was a train speeding toward me.  All the books I’d been working on at the publishing house came in at once in a raw stage, needing to be edited as fast as my eyes could fly across the type.  Meanwhile, “finals” week approached for my MFA program, and I had twenty-page papers to write and a presentation.

As if my expected workload wasn’t enough, a writing opportunity for a magazine came along that I couldn’t pass up—and I’m very glad I didn’t.

And then there were the lunches.  Usually I try to reserve my lunches for catching up on emails and doing some writing or editing.  Yeah, yeah, I know, nerdy of me, but I try to make the most of my time.  Well, right as all the big projects were landing in my lap, so were working lunches.  I had a lunchtime phone chat with my mentee one day and lunch with my book-publishing mentor another day.  I had lunch with my former editor and a writer, with whom I’d had the privilege of working with.  There were also long-overdue lunches with book-publishing colleagues who’d had birthdays or started new positions.  Each of these lunches were important to me so I found a way to pack them into my schedule.  I love hearing about all the amazing projects everyone’s working on and I get so inspired by them.

Because it was the end of the semester, I also went out after class with my fellow writers to celebrate.  I get to read such personal moments of their lives in the essays they write each week, so it was nice to sit down with them over a glass of red wine and decompress after the end of the semester.  –The end of our first year!  We’re halfway done!  Man, it goes by fast.

I’m also working on a super exciting project for Burnside, which I can’t wait to tell you about.  Soon, I promise!

So, all this to say, I’ve been a bit crazed lately but life is really good.  I love the work that I do and the people with whom I work.  I’m so thankful to my family and friends for giving me the space, encouragement, and prayers to get what I needed to do done.  And I’m thankful to all of you for reading my blog and supporting my writing.

Now, as life returns to a more normal pace, I’m actually feeling a bit anxious about how to handle my newfound time.  Do any of you ever feel like that?  I’m still in the midst of some personal writing projects, but I also have plans for long walks in Central Park, deep conversations over sumptuous meals, choosing which books I want to read.  And, sleeping.

Blogging goes without saying.

Painting I made several years ago.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Christian Resolutions

20 Jan

Part 2 of my look at New Year’s resolutions was published on Burnside Writers Collective yesterday.  In part 1, I asked “Does God Laugh at Our Resolutions?”  Now in part 2, I look at “Christian Resolutions.”  It starts:

I’m tempted to write a satire called Christian New Year’s Resolutions.  It would go something like this:

  1. Pray without ceasing.  Ever.
  2. Don’t watch secular television.
  3. Become a physically fit Proverbs 31 woman.
  4. Read the bible every day and nothing besides it.
  5. Go to church every Sunday.

Is there such a thing as Christian New Year’s Resolutions?

You can read the rest on Burnside.

I started to have some self-doubt about my writing–this piece included but writing in general–and I’m so encouraged by the comments I received on this article.

Larry Shallenberger, author of the books Divine Intention: How God’s Work in the Early Church Empowers Us Today and Lead the Way God Made You, said, “If there were a “like” button, I’d have pushed it.”

Diane Nienhuis, a Burnside writer and food blogger whom I met at the Festival of Faith & Writing at Calvin College (she picked me up at the airport, she’s so sweet!), wrote, “Well said, Stephanie! Beautiful!”  She also shared some of her own resolutions.

Michael D. Bobo, who tackles a highly controversial work of art in his thought-provoking piece “Ants on a Crucifix,” currently featured on Burnside, and as it turns out writes the Claremont Christianity Examiner, which is in the California town where I went to undergrad (small world!), said, “Thanks Steph for getting us back to the basics in 2011.”

And, my editor, Jordan Green, said, “This is tremendous, as if that would be a surprise coming from Stephanie.”  Wow.  Jordan recently cowrote the book Besides the Bible: 100 Books that Have, Should, or Will Create Christian Culture and just wrote what is probably the most thorough review of the new IFC show Portlandia there is.  Incidentally, I once met Jordan in Portland.  (We did not Kombucha tea.) (PS. Check back here tomorrow for a bit of trivia on the Greek influence on Portlandia.)

Anyway, the reason I mention all this is two-fold:::

1.  To show my appreciate for the comments I received, I wanted to promote what all these other talented writers are doing.  Check out their links.  Buy their books.  Leave nice comments for them.  They deserve it.

2.  To encourage writers who struggle with self-doubt.  As I mentioned, I was plagued by insecurity and almost deleted the article.  Sometimes my writing is bad.  That’s the way it goes some days.  But sometimes, and I suspect this is true for other writers as well, my writing isn’t as horrible as I imagine it to be.  Sometimes, it might even resonate with someone.  And that’s why I write.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Newer Entries →