Which came first - The writer or the mama?

In the south, it’s not uncommon to hear this expression: “Don’t you have people?” This refers to the hired help a woman might have to help keep up with her domestic bliss. Nannies. Lawn Service. Housekeeper.
I don’t have people. However, I have kids (ages 3 and 4), a house, a lawn, and dust bunnies with squatters rights. All of these things make me a better writer. I write during naptimes and after my children go to sleep. My laptop is perpetually open on the kitchen counter. Sometimes it’s ignored. Sometimes it’s there so I can capture a thought I want to work on later. I don’t have time for the muse to appear. I just write.
Joyfully, I am not the only writer/mama to employ this practice to great effect.

Here are a few more moms who discovered that if you love to write – you just might be more prolific after procreating.

JODI PICOULT, best-selling author of twelve novels and mother of three
“I would be with kids all day long and would write until ten or eleven at night. I learned how to write quickly and efficiently, and have never had writers block. Anyone who has ever been pressed to write knows you don’t have the luxury of wandering around waiting for your muse. Some days, I write pure dreck, but I can always edit that the next day. I just plough through and then go back and edit.

As soon as my kids were in school, I had daytime hours to write even though I was interrupted, taking one or the other to and from school at different times. I was writing plots on laundry tickets!

For more check out: http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/sep01/picoult.htm

MARY HIGGINS CLARK, best-selling author of twenty-four novels and mother of five

“When my children were young, I used to get up at five and write at the kitchen table until seven, when I had to get them ready for school. For me, writing is a need. It’s the degree of yearning that separates the real writer from the “would-be’s.” Those who say “I’ll write when I have time, when the kids are grown up or when I have a quiet place to work,” will probably never do it.”
For more check out: http://www.simonsays.com/content/destination.cfm?tab=1&pid=352932&agid=8

J. K. ROWLING, best-selling author of the seven Harry Potter novels and mother to one

“I wasn’t a struggling single mother all the time that I was writing the first “Harry” book. It was only during the final year of writing that I found myself poorer than I’d ever been before. Obviously, continuing to write was a bit of a logistical problem: I had to make full use of all the time that my then-baby daughter slept. This meant writing in the evenings and during nap times. Nobody knows better than I do that I was very lucky — I didn’t need money to exercise the talent I had — all I needed was a Biro and some paper.”

For more check out: http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/1999/03/cov_31featureb.html

So all of the writer/moms out there, I salute you. Put down that laundry right now and go write your next sentence. Maybe it will be about laundry angst. Maybe it will be the first sentence of the next best-seller. You never know. And then drop me a line and share your writing practices and what works for you.

-

Karen Harrington is the author of the psychological thriller, JANEOLOGY. Read an excerpt at www.karenharringtonbooks.com

Overheard at a booksigning

Hello, HerCircle friends. As you might recall, my debut novel Janeology launched last month and I have been out and about promoting the book. So today, I’d like to share some of the most memorable exchanges that have taken place at my various book signings. Enjoy!

Of my books on the signing table.

“Are these complimentary?”

Of the topic of filicide.

“I can’t read this. I read The Lovely Bones and I hated it.”

Of my pitch that it’s about a man trying to understand his wife by way of understanding the family secrets and ancestors in her family.

“Oh, we all have black sheep in our family. My brother’s wife just left him and he’s now realizing it had something to do with her mother.”

Of my description of the book to a kind old man.

“Sounds good. Let me go ask my wife.”

Of my offer to sign a book for a woman.

“Oh, are you the author?”

Of my introduction to the next person who approached my table, “Hi, I’m the author Karen Harrington.”

“Hello the author Karen Harrington.”

Of the mints on my signing table.

“What are these for?”

Of the puzzle on my signing table.

“Why did you cut up your cover like that?”

Of the woman who ran over to my table with her hubby and told me her name was Jane.

Hubby: “If I read this, will I understand my wife better?”

Me: Huh Huh. Maybe. Here’s a bookmark.” (She leaves. Returns 10 mintues later.)

“OMG! My husband’s name is Tom!” (See, the couple in my book are Jane and Tom.)

Of my accidental penning “Very best pictures” (Doh! Should have written WISHES)

Me: “Oh, I’m so sorry. We were talking about pictures, and, well, ha ha…well, if I become famous, one day this will be very valuable.”

INTERESTING STATS

Signings: 3

Books sold: 43

Ratio of male/female purchasers: 30%/70%

A Good Death

by Grace Andreacchi

Enough about the writer’s life, let’s think about the writer’s death for a change. It’s sure to come, after all, for of all things nothing is more certain than death. A big subject, and arguably the starting point for much if not all of the world’s literature. Without death we would have no Wuthering Heights, no Death Be Not Proud, we would have neither metaphysical sonnets, nor lamentations, nor elegies, nor grief and certainly no Sylvia Plath with her poor little head in the oven. Without death it’s questionable whether we’d have any literature at all, as it is perhaps the knowledge of oblivion that tempts us to leave a record, to say – this was my life, this was my time, this my vision, my world. Remember me when I am gone/Gone far away into the silent land…

Is there such a thing as a good, a particularly appropriate and satisfying death for a writer? Without trespassing upon delicate ground of individual conscience and belief, I would suggest there is. Who does not admire the dash of Lord Byron, casting his young life away heedlessly in a Grecian swamp? Who is not moved by the terrifying double suicide of Heinrich von Kleist and the mortally ill Henriette Vogel? Before he died Kleist sat down and wrote eloquent letters to just about everybody he knew, and they make exciting reading. So this to his cousin and close friend Marie von Kleist:
‘Your letter broke my heart, my dearest Marie, and I promise you, if it were in my power, I’d give up this idea I’ve got of dying. But I swear to you, it’s completely impossible for me to live any longer; my soul is so wounded that, I might even say, if I go and press my nose against the windowpane, the very daylight that glimmers there is enough to cause me pain.’ He shot Henriette and then himself on the shores of the Wannsee near Berlin. He was only thirty-four.

Well, count on a German for a good, romantic Liebestod, but the letters are a touch. Surely only a writer feels the desire, nay, the compunction, to sit down and knock off a few choice paragraphs before the big exit. What really was getting Kleist down was the absolute failure of his written work to make the slightest impression on the world. God forbid any of us should take the inevitable rejection letters that much to heart! Better, perhaps, to follow the example of Jean Rhys, hiding out in a cottage in soggy Devonshire, drunk and disorderly, and brandishing against the dying of the light only her best book ever.

Grace Andreacchi was born and raised in New York City but has lived on the far side of the great ocean for many years - sometimes in Paris, sometimes Berlin, and nowadays in London. Works include the novels Give my Heart Ease, which received the New American Writing Award, and Music for Glass Orchestra, and the play Vegetable Medley (New York and Boston). Stories and poetry appear in both on-line and print journals.Her work can be viewed at http://graceandreacchi.com.

An American Writer in Paris

by Grace Andreacchi

Things are different in Paris. The food is exquisite, the apartment buildings, even in the slums, are high, elegant and decorated like wedding cakes, the light is pale lavender all day long, and writers are, quite simply, gods. It makes no difference if you’re published or unpublished, famous or totally unknown, just to be a writer is to be a god. To one accustomed to the usual American response to the shy and unwilling revelation, ‘I’m a writer’, the French response is nothing short of astonishing. People take a step back, overcome with admiration. People say things like, ‘A writer, c’est formidable!’ (They really talk this way in France.) People do not tell you they’re planning to write a novel soon themselves, or their cousin’s written a novel and can you help get it published, or they know this really great story that happened to a friend of theirs and they could write a novel about it but really haven’t got the time, would you like to hear it and then maybe you can use it for your next book? No, you will never hear any of these things cross the rapid-fire lips of the French. People respect you. It’s unaccustomed, and heady stuff.

When I first moved into my apartment on the rue Montcalm in Montmarte I was stopped on the stairs by a curious-looking little man in a state of great agitation. ‘Madame,’ he began, pulling nervously at his hairnet. ‘You walk around the whole night long. You are rolling a ball about in the night, just above my head! Madame, it is impossible for me to sleep!’ I thought for a minute and realised the ‘ball’ he was hearing must be the wheels under my chair. I apologised profusely and explained about the chair, explained that I was a writer and kept strange hours, but would be most careful to walk on tiptoe and not to move the chair. But the little man was no longer interested in his sleep problems – I was a writer! That was something completely different! God forbid his petty complaints should interfere with the functioning of the muse! Could I tell him about my books?

I was turned down in both London and New York for a bank account – not enough reliable income. But in Paris when I asked for a bank account the branch manager asked me shyly for an autographed copy of my latest novel. When I was obliged to seek help from the gendarmerie over a lost passport, the Capitaine showed up in person at my door – I thought he’d come to arrest me on charges unknown, but he’d come with a bottle of Bordeaux grand cru, to chat about literature. ‘It’s always been my dream to talk to a writer,’ he confided. ‘I love watching them on the télé.’ Like I said, things are different. The only problem is, it can go to your head like champagne.

Grace Andreacchi was born and raised in New York City but has lived on the far side of the great ocean for many years - sometimes in Paris, sometimes Berlin, and nowadays in London. Works include the novels Give my Heart Ease, which received the New American Writing Award, and Music for Glass Orchestra, and the play Vegetable Medley (New York and Boston). Stories and poetry appear in both on-line and print journals.Her work can be viewed at http://graceandreacchi.com.

Is All Fair

by Grace Andreacchi

I recently heard an interview with the writer Orhan Pamuk in which he was asked - had it changed his life much, winning the Nobel Prize? I’m a little bit in love with Pamuk these days (those big brown eyes, those labyrinthine torture gardens of the mind…), and listened eagerly for what he would say. Oh, dear Orhan, please don’t be a schmuck, please don’t tell us how great it is to be totally famous. ‘I thought it wouldn’t change my life at all’ he said, ‘but I was wrong, it did. My family started speaking to me again.’ If you’ve read his ravishing Istanbul: Memories and the City then you know the many reasons the Pamuk clan had to take umbrage. And yet this deeply honest, self-searching, wildly sensitive account of le petit Orhan and the people and places that helped make him is one of the best things I’ve ever read in the genre ‘portrait of the artist as a young monster’. Pamuk spares neither himself, nor his mother, nor his father, nor his big brother (who claims most of it’s made up anyway), he shows a little bit of reserve towards a former girlfriend, which I find rather gallant of him. Is it fair to treat people like this? And, if it isn’t fair, what on earth are we to write? How are we to write?

It’s a question of genuine moral import, and every writer must wrestle that angel on her own. I make it a rule not to say anything in print I wouldn’t say to a person’s face, at least if I had the gumption to face them. It’s of some comfort to know that when you do ‘put’ people into books, they often don’t recognise themselves, but of course others may, and draw their attention to it. Then there are those who insist on seeing themselves where they are not. And those who do recognise themselves may call you on it. I’d say as a general rule that ex-lovers are fairly safe territory, as long as they’re firmly ex. They’re unlikely to risk a painful rendezvous merely to complain that it didn’t happen like that and you’re telling it all wrong. But a neat vivisection of the writer’s Christmases Past is sure to bring the roof down around one’s ears. Of course, if, like me, you already enjoy a relationship with your family on the outermost edge of the deeply estranged and totally dysfunctional then by all means go for it. What have you got to lose? You might even win the Nobel Prize.

Grace Andreacchi was born and raised in New York City but has lived on the far side of the great ocean for many years - sometimes in Paris, sometimes Berlin, and nowadays in London. Works include the novels Give my Heart Ease, which received the New American Writing Award, and Music for Glass Orchestra, and the play Vegetable Medley (New York and Boston). Stories and poetry appear in both on-line and print journals.Her work can be viewed at http://graceandreacchi.com.

The Bakery Lady

by Grace Andreacchi

The writer’s life is, essentially and not incidentally, a lonely one. You shut yourself up in a room, ignore the tempting sunshine, unplug the phone, and even refuse to come to the door when you’re ‘working’. You keep unsociable hours, skip meals, refuse invitations all in pursuit of the grand illusion. A consent to the absurd proposition that the reality inside your head is, for the duration, more important than the ‘real world’ is the sine qua non. All of this can get to be a bit much.

For a while I lived in an apartment on the Anzengruberstraße in Berlin, directly over a bakery. There were many advantages to living over a bakery. The bakery lady was everything a bakery lady should be, she was round and smiling, pink-cheeked and maternal. When I stopped in towards the end of the afternoon for my daily Brötchen she’d often insist on giving me two of three for the price of one. ‘You need to eat more,’ she’d say, shaking her head. ‘Too thin!’ Germany was ahead of the curve in the world obesity epidemic (this was the mid-nineties), and my naturally slim frame was rare enough to be considered exotic. In my lonely pursuit of the chimera it was enormously comforting to have this bakery lady looking out for me.

On those nights when I’d lost all track of time and lingered, bent over the page (we still wrote on paper in those far-off days) till the wee small hours, when that hour arrived when the world seems not so much asleep as dead and the over-active imagination begins to fear – there is nobody else on the planet left alive, I’m the only one… at that terrible hour when the blood freezes, ghosts walk, and fear eats the soul, at that very hour the bakery lady and her husband would arrive downstairs. I’d hear them clanking about as they opened the shop to begin another day of mixing and kneading and baking the bread, rolls and cake for the hungry hearts and stomachs of the neighbourhood. So I’m not the only one left after all, I’d think. The bakery lady is here. And with a sigh I’d lay down my pen and crawl into bed, drifting off to sleep to the elemental odour of baking bread. If you ever have the chance to live over a bakery, jump at it.

Copyright © 2008 Grace Andreacchi Hadas

Grace Andreacchi was born and raised in New York City but has lived on the far side of the great ocean for many years - sometimes in Paris, sometimes Berlin, and nowadays in London. Works include the novels Give my Heart Ease, which received the New American Writing Award, and Music for Glass Orchestra, and the play Vegetable Medley (New York and Boston). Stories and poetry appear in both on-line and print journals.Her work can be viewed at http://graceandreacchi.com.

Say What You Mean

Karen Harrington is away promoting her new release, Janeology. But not to worry! Join guest blogger Grace Andreacchi during the month of April for further ruminations on the the fabulous life of the emerging writer.

It’s a fine gift to be able to say what you mean, and when I say a gift I also mean, of course, an art. The pursuit of this ideal has occupied great minds down the tolling ages. Some writers require for this purpose a vast vocabulary and an infinitely flexible syntax, the liberal use of the semi-colon; in this way they create a scene in the virtual theatre of the mind, enabling us to see, hear, even taste as they do; they press upon us the full richness of the borrowed experience – this is what it is like to be me, this is the colour and heft of my mistress’s hair, this is the sound of her voice, this the exact replica in words of her perfume; thus they draw us inexorably, fastening us with slim golden word chains, the carefully applied cosmetics of adjectives and adverbs, the devious charms of the dependent clause; and now they have hold of us well and truly they draw us under, ever deeper, until we are so lost in the shimmering aquamarine depths of the sentence we daren’t come up for breath in case we get the bends; and so we surrender, plunging right down to the bottom of that resounding ocean. Others do not make use of these methods. They say what they mean quickly, and get out. Both have their points.

For a writer the challenge to ‘say what you mean’ involves daily choices of this kind, and those choices are themselves predicated on the general command of our one and only tool – language. I’d have no rigid corset of rules - language lives and breathes, its beauty is ever-changing, constantly renewed. But a nicely turned phrase, an elegant syntax are as sweet a thing as a Dior gown on the right woman. It’s not enough to mean what you say, ‘Even the gentiles do that.’ We ought to say what we mean, be it with infinite subtlety or disarming candour.

Whether or not a writer means what she says is another matter entirely. It’s possible to mean a great deal more than you say, and, of course, a deal less. For an example of the former, the great poet of Heian Japan, Ono No Komachi:

Seeing the moonlight, spilling down through these trees,
My heart fills to the brim with autumn. (tr. Hirschfield & Aratami)

Examples of the latter we will, alas, always have with us.

Copyright © 2008 by Grace Andreacchi Hadas

Grace Andreacchi was born and raised in New York City but has lived on the far side of the great ocean for many years - sometimes in Paris, sometimes Berlin, and nowadays in London. Works include the novels Give my Heart Ease, which received the New American Writing Award, and Music for Glass Orchestra, and the play Vegetable Medley (New York and Boston). Stories and poetry appear in both on-line and print journals.Her work can be viewed at http://graceandreacchi.com.

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This Writer’s Life

What could you tell about me from this picture of my aunt and mother (right) taken in 1959?Mothers and daughters: these are the relationships I most enjoy writing about. There is arguably no other relationship that is more influential on a young woman than that of her mom.It’s true what that great Irish Proverb says, What’s in the marrow is hard to take out of the bone.With my first book, I began charting the links between family relationships. There are many links in the nature/nurture spectrum. One of the simplest and most evasive is the products our mothers used. Their lotions, detergents and cigarette brands all create a picture of family history, whether we use them today or not. One of my friends even said she recently bought a hand cream and when she got it home and applied it, she realized it was what her mother had used. The scent of it brought back a flood of memories about her childhood and times when her mother held her close. In those times, the fragrance was close and intimate. All these things rushed back to her via a simple hand-cream purchase.Thinking about these questions helped me to chart many of the mother/daughter relationships in Janeology. What the characters chose turned out to be less fascinating than why they chose them.So if I were in your house now, would the products you use tell me anything about your mother?

Ireland’s Rich Literary Tradition

In observance of St. Patrick’s Day, I decided to dust off some of my favorite books penned by Irish writers. C.S. Lewis. James Joyce. William Butler Yeats. Frank McCourt.

Alas, where were the Irish women of my collection? Painfully absent. That is, until now. In preparing for today’s blog, I found many I now want to add to my nightstand reading.

Particularly, Edna O’Brien.

Her first novel, The Country Girls, is a story centering around Kate and Baba, two childhood friends whose lives go on divergent paths in search of happiness and fulfillment in the 1950s. First published in 1963, this novel and O’Brien’s next five works were banned in her homeland for their depiction of sex in the lives of her characters; and were often criticized for her portrayal of females as victims of their own lives. Only after several decades have Irish literary critics come to an appreciation for her talents and contributions and the ways in which she has laid bare all the stages of a woman’s life – from girlhood to conflicting love affairs. And what resonates with me, is how some readers have expressed shock at the copyright date of O’Brien’s works, in disbelief that her ideas were written four decades ago.

Born in 1930, O’Brien was raised in an Irish convent in 1950s Ireland. Her works center largely on the private yearnings of women and their relationships with men and the repressive society in which they lived. More about her life can be found by reading “A Study of Edna O’Brien As An Exible Author” by Marita Liab.

I hope you’ll join me in adding O’Brien’s writings to your list of must-reads. Or if you have read her novels, let me know your thoughts.

Here are a few quotes from O’Brien.

“When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Mained, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.”

“Inebriations of love, shadows of love, fantasies of love, but never yet the one true love.”

“I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are the most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness.”

Karen Harrington is the author of JANEOLOGY, the story of one man’s struggle to understand his wife and her sudden descent into madness. (April 2008) www.karenharringtonbooks.com

Sex and the Signature

Have you ever wondered how or why many female authors have written under male or gender-neutral pseudonyms? As it turns out, there are quite a few.

James Tiptree Jr. (1915-1987) was the pen name of Alice Bradley Sheldon, American sci-fi author. According to Tiptree’s biography, she was notable for breaking down the barriers between writing perceived as inherently male or female. In fact, it wasn’t until 1977 that readers knew Tiptree was a woman.

Another interesting example is J. K. Rowling. Having no middle name, her first Harry Potter book was published under the name Joanne Rowling. But before publishing her first book in the U.S., her publisher Bloomsbury was concerned that the target audience (young boys) might not buy books by a female author. The company recommended Rowling use two initials instead of her first name. Rowling chose K. for Kathleen, the name of her paternal grandmother.

The consideridation of pairing genre with pen name spurred me to ask a couple of my favorite contemporary authors why they write under their current nom de plumes.

T.K. Kenyon, author of Rabid and Callous

“I’ve been “T.K.” on and off for years, starting in 6th grade where there were 3 “Terri’s” in my home room and two of us got to choose new names. As I had been tagged with a diminutive (my given name is “Terri,” not even “Teresa,”) I went to initials.

When I graduated from undergrad with a bachelor’s in science (microbiology) and was looking for a job, I was told by friends and older people in science to use my initials on my resume because it was harder to get a job in science if you put a female name on a resume. (This was about 15 years ago, but it’s still true.”

Most of my other women friends in science also used initials. Women who sent out initialed resumes got more interviews and better jobs, both because they had more interviews to pick from and, very probably, because they were perceived as less “girlie.” In the scientific fields that I have worked in, and in the West in general, squeamishness and prissiness do not make a good job candidate.

When I did my PhD in virology, I went to “T.K.” for good, even in my personal life. Close friends and my husband abbreviate my initials to “Teke” if they are too lazy to wrap their lips around two whole letters.

In the writing field, using anonymous initials is less jarring to the reader when I write from both a male and female point of view.”

Rosemary Poole-Carter, author of Women of Magdalene

“For my first novel, WHAT REMAINS, I chose to write under my first initial and last name (though my photo on the back of the book was something of a gender giveaway). I reasoned that my very feminine first name might be associated in readers’ minds with romance fiction. There are some romantic elements in my work, but I don’t write category romances and don’t want to mislead book buyers. I write historical novels with some rather dark Southern gothic touches.

For WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, a novel that deals with misogyny in a 19th century ladies’ lunatic asylum, I decided to brazen things out under my own full name as a woman writing from the point of view of a male protagonist. Time to get past those outdated notions about what male and female authors are allowed to write.

I understand the point of a writer having different non de plumes for different types of books–one for the mystery series and one for the horror or romance or nonfiction. That’s sort of a branding device. But at this point in my life, I don’t really foresee my having the time to write multiple types of books. For now, each book is a piece of my heart, claimed with my own name.”

Other famous female writers and their first or career-long pen names:

Charlotte Bronte Currer Bell

Mary Ann Evans George Eliot

Louisa May Alcott A.M. Barnard

Antonia Susan Duffy A.S. Duffy

Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin George Sand

Lula Carson Smith Carson McCullers

Phyllis Dorothy Jones P.D. Jones

Ann Rule Andy Stack

Karen Harrington is the author of JANEOLOGY, story of one man’s struggle to understand his wife’s sudden descent into madness. (April 2008) www.karenharringtonbooks.com

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