Welcome Reminders from “The Writer’s Life.” Thank You, Annie

Tags

Annie Dilliard, inspiration, writing, Writing advice, writing life, writing process

I’m finding it harder to blog these days, harder to paint, to play piano, to clean house, to do most anything but write, rewrite, and write again.

And yet, despite this, I’m trying to keep the blogging going at least. The painting is on holiday until I start an acrylic and oil class this summer. But the piano, the poor piano! I feel guilty each time I walk by. She so wants to play.

And the house. Well, let’s not talk about the house.

I’m explaining more than complaining. I set this rigorous writing schedule myself. A “scaffolding” Annie Dillard calls it. A “blurred and powerful pattern.” It is all that.

Here is her full quote:

What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being: it is a life boat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.

She also writes about the writer’s precarious relationship to a work in process which I’ve found to be quite true:

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.

A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight . . . . As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room.

Another quote relating writing and dying strikes at the heart of the writer’s task:

Write as if you were dying . . . write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. What would you begin writing if you knew you should die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Push it. Examine all things intensely and relentlessly. Probe and search each object in a piece of art. Do not leave it, do not course over it, as if it were understood, but instead follow it down until you see it in the mystery of its own specificity and strength.

Who but an artist fierce to know—not fierce to seem to know—would suppose that a live image possessed a secret? The artist is willing to give all his or her strength and life to probing with blunt instruments those same secrets no one can describe in any way but with those instruments’ faint tracks.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.

I read the above quote daily as a reminder: Push, pull, probe, go deeper, page by page. Leave nothing unturned. Don’t do what’s easy. Do what’s hard.

And finally, another reminder when the writing seems so slow and never-ending:

You are writing a book. . . . you do not hurry and do not rest. You climb steadily, doing your job in the dark. When you reach the end, there is nothing more to climb. The sun hits you; the bright wideness surprises you; you had forgotten there was an end.

“Do not hurry and do not rest.” Yes. Got it.

“There is an end.” Thank God!

Photo credit: Mary Pickford, public domain.

Advertisements

Life through a Lens, What We Gain & Lose, Redux

Tags

Family, life, Philosophy, photography, writing

How much of our lives do we view through a narrow lens, whether through the lens of a camera, our own limited viewpoint, or the stories we tell about ourselves and each other?

When we walk through life with a perpetual camera around our necks, we are tempted to see everything through that narrow focus, framing everything we see–the city streets, the sunsets and landscapes, the people we pass, the objects that come into view. As we frame what we see and take photos, it helps us to notice things we may have overlooked otherwise, and to see these things in a new light. It intensifies our ability to discover the extraordinary in the ordinary, and allows us to capture and preserve those visions.

But it also breaks the whole into parts, raw experience into the photo-worthy and not-so-much.  We experience things not as a participant, but an observer, a spectator or voyeur at worst, a curator of the significant at best.

When we were sailing around the world, I wish I had done more of that capturing and preserving. There were no digital cameras then, and film was expensive and hard to store in a hot, damp climates. So now I have only a handful of photos from hikes through the enchanted valleys of the Marquesas. Three or four of our stay in legendary Bora Bora, a dozen from our three months in Samoa. Now I wish we had dozens more photos of each place to view and remember.

On the other hand, by the time my first grandchild was born we had a digital camera.  Because I saw him so seldom, when I was with him I photographed him almost continuously, following him everywhere and capturing every sweet smile, every cute incident, every new thing he did.

Until I stood back one day and realized that by indulging the urge to “frame” everything for posterity, I was missing out on now, on just being with him–soaking up his presence, our time together–in the moment, raw and unfiltered.

Now though, I do not regret all those photos I took. For I am able to relive those moments with greater clarity and in more detail that I might have been able to do so without them.

It’s all a balancing act, I guess.

As writers we do that too—viewing the world and our experiences through a mental lens, framing things for posterity, seeing images, events, interactions, as fodder for our stories. We couldn’t write without doing that, consciously, or unconsciously.

But we have to know when to see things through the writer’s mind, as observer, spectator, curator, and when to put away that lens and become a participant in the raw experience that evolves around us. To “step barefoot into reality” as the poet Wallace Stevens once evoked.

It’s harder than we might imagine, to put away all the filters through which we experience life, and just “be” it. Life itself. Unfiltered.

NOTE: I wrote this post six years ago, but it shows, even then, my keen interest in photography, and even more in how we capture and reflect experience, limit and distort it. As you know, I’m researching a new novel with photography and the creative endeavor at its core, and the reading I’m doing meshes quite nicely with what I wrote here. So I thought I’d share this, my own take on this subject, before sharing what I’ve gathered from others. 

On Photography – Researching My Sequel

Tags

amwriting, books, creative process, Novel, photography, writing, writing process

I’m working on a sequel to my novel From the Far Ends of the Earth, mostly research and note-taking at this time. The sequel will be following the “missing” mother’s journey of self-discovery and re-invention through the lens of her camera as she travels through Mexico to the tip of South America.

The mother’s photography plays a key part in the first novel. It becomes an obsession for one of the main characters, the son, a struggling drug addict. He receives packets of his mother’s photos, black and white glossies, with no notes or explanations of why she’s sending these to him. They are stark, often disturbing images, wildlife mostly: a horny-head lizard, mean face, wicked eye, flash of tongue; a nasty looking rooster perched on top a fence post, its wings in a flurry, beak open, eyes wild and furious.  Another of a dead tree, all bare limbs, like outstretched arms, like someone shaking its fists at the sky, or trying to tear it to pieces.

He doesn’t know what to make of these and pins them on a wall to study. In his drugged haze, he comes to see the photos as pieces of his mother she’s cut from her own body and sent to him to put back together. If he does, she’s saved, and he’s saved, and she come home. If he doesn’t they’re both doomed.

I love photography but have never studied it professionally, so I have a lot to learn before writing this. I began my research by  foraging through all my bookcases, large and small, tucked in various corners of the house to discover any books I might already have on the subject. I was delighted to find a few gems:

On Photography, by Susan Sontag. A collection of essays about the art and its cultural significance and influence.

The Joy of Photography, by the editors of the Eastman Kodak Company. A 1979 guide to the tools and techniques of good photography.

Ansel Adams’ Examples -The Making of Forty Photographs. He describes equipment, techniques as well as the inspiration and vision that guided his art in making these. Fantastic photos too!

The Family of Children  A 1977 collection of photographs about childhood around the world  from the greatest photographers of the time. This is a sequel to the iconic The Family of Man collection curated by Edward Steichen and Carl Sandburg published in 1955.

Photography and the Art of Seeing by Freeman Patterson. A visual perception workshop for film and digital photography.

In addition, I’m reading the The Age of Light, a novel by Whitney Sharer based on the life of Lee Miller, a fashion model who becomes a photographer, studying with the famous surrealist painter and photographer Man Ray. Eventually she becomes his muse and lover. She goes on to establish herself as a noted photographer as well as the first female war correspondent embedded with the Americans. She was there when they freed the concentration camps and took photos of herself bathing in Hitler’s bathtub, after his suicide.

I’ve also ordered a book by the photographer Sally Mann, Holding Still: A Memoir with Photographs. She caused quite a stir in 1992 when her book of photographs Immediate Family was published. Although highly acclaimed as one of the greatest and most influential photography books of the time, it was also criticized for the extremely intimate and personal photographs of her children, some unclothed.

My character begins her journey in the year 2000, before digital photography was popular.

What kind of camera would she have had? Could she create a dark room and develop her own film in the back of her camper?

How would she earn a living as a traveling photographer?

How would she advance enough over the course of two years to earn a cover story in the National Geographic, which she has done by the end of my first novel?

These are just a few of the questions I have. If any of you know the answers or can suggest other reading or research material that might help, I’d be most appreciative.

Doing research for a book is one of the easiest, most rewarding and inspiring stages in the process of writing a novel. I’m a little bit in heaven.

 

Endings & Beginnings, A Writer’s Life

Tags

Deborah J. Brasket, Publishing, revision, writing, writing life, writing process

Like Two Lovers in Conversation, by Deborah J. Brasket

Well, I just finished rewriting the ending of my novel as requested by a publisher. We will see what they think.

Either way, I believe this new ending is stronger–still hopeful, but less certain. More in keeping with the way things are for most of us when things we love go missing, or when struggling with our own demons and addictions.

I’ve decided something else too. Quite a few publishers have wanted to see more of the missing mother in my story, yet I wasn’t willing to do that. It would have unraveled the very premise of my novel, which was, how do we cope when the center holding everything together falls apart? When that upon which we most depend disappears?

I wanted the mother to be part of the puzzle, not a presence herself, but that “absent” presence we feel, even yearn for, but cannot quite pin down, and never really know for certain.

Do any of us ever, really, know our mothers? Don’t we only know them through our own often faulty and incomplete perceptions of them? What they’ve allowed us to see, or what we choose to believe? All knowledge is partial and open to revision. We may know the facts that lay before us. But do facts a person make?

Yet even while I’ve resisted the call to add the mother’s perspective to this novel, I can understand how a reader might want more of her, to hear about her journey as she travels away from her family and through South America. What does she learn as she discovers the world through the new lens of her photography? Does it lend insight into her past? Into herself as a mother and wife and now an artist? How does it shape her anew?  Where does it take her?

So I’m beginning a “sequel” to From the Far Ends of the Earth, if we can call it that, since it will cover the same time-space as the first novel.

I think it might be fun to give the mother her own voice and space, to see what shaped her past and how her journey shapes her future.

It’s the thing I love most about writing, discovering what I never knew I knew before I began to write it, as if the words themselves are drawn from some inner well of insight or vision I never knew I had.

“We create ourselves out of our innermost intuitions,” so writes a sage.

I believe that. And I also believe our characters are created in much of the same way. I wonder if we all contain multiple characters within us that make themselves known to us through our writing? Or are we just writing our larger selves?

Perhaps all the selves of all the people we’ve come to know, to experience, in this wider world, once known, become part of us, at least partially?

I believe there is a collective consciousness that we tap into from time to time, and writers, perhaps, most of all.

Sometimes I don’t know where I end and another begins.

My son says I have boundary issues. No doubt he’s right.

2018 – A Look Back, a Look Forward

Tags

art, Blogging, Novel, painting, personal, travel, writing

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The end of a year always signals a kind of reckoning for me, the urge to look back and assess and celebrate, and to look forward and gauge where I want or need to go next.

Looking back through my blog posts, I see three major themes: travel, art, and writing.

Travel

It started with A Slice of San Francisco and a look at the Fascinating Faces and Divine Bodies at the Asian Art Museum.

Then I took a sharp turn left turn in Romancing Europe. I wrote about Dancing through Time & Space, and Tasting Life Twice. I took readers on a tour through Segovia and Bruges, and into the Musee d’Orsay, the Casa Battlo and Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, and Down the Rabbit Hole with Salvador Dali.

Art

Art was a big theme with all the museums I visited, but also on a personal note with my own painting. I heralded my New Home Studio with a tour, and bragged about my first public recognition for my art. I showed off  Flowing Leaves, Tangled Limbs, Folding Hills, and Trees and More Trees.

My most popular post this year was the Art of Living, A Reminder.

Writing

I started off in January with a post on why I write in Walking each Other Home. In May I celebrated finding an agent for my novel From the Far Ends of the Earth in Pinch Me! In June I wrote about Following the Yellow-Brick Road to publishing, and in December I wrote about Happy and not so happy Endings in novel writing and life. In this last post and an earlier one on A Walk on the Wild Side, another theme that weaves through the underside of much of my writing in one way or another surfaces, the heartbreak of addiction.

A Look Ahead – What I Want Most

A happy ending for my son.

A happy ending for my novel.

More novel-writing, more painting, more blogging.

More artful living.

More Love. Lots and lots of love, for all of us.

A happy new year to you all!

 

10,000 Thank-You’s! A Blogging Milepost

Tags

Blogging, blogging community, Community, Graditude, Love, milestone, writing

I have so many things to be grateful for, not least among them the ten-thousand people who, for whatever reason, took a moment to click “follow” on my website. I reached this blogging milestone just a few days ago.

Each follow  I’ve received over my 7 years of blogging has been received as a gift of love, a “micro-moment of positivity resonance,” as Barbara Fredrickson defines love in her book on the subject. Each click translates into  a smile, a hug, a friendly wave, a nod of encouragement, a cheerful thumbs-up, a coin of appreciation tossed to a fellow blogger, a way of saying I see you and like what you are doing.

I know most of those clicks were from friendly people who in their breeze through the blogosphere stopped for but a moment to wish me well and rarely returned. I certainly do not get 10,000 views on my posts each week, not do I expect to. But the fact that they took the time to make that click, for whatever reason, is deeply appreciated.

Many who are following this blog have become part of what I think of as my blogging family, a mutual admiration community I meet with online. It is you who I am “breaking bread” with each week when I send out my posts, read your comments, and visit your sites to see what you are up to.

My first blog post featured in the “Freshly Pressed” column was about “Blogging and the Accident of Touching“, which is how I see blogging, a way to reach out and touch others and be touched in return by your responses and posts.

Thank you for helping me reach this blogging milestone.

Today I am blowing ten-thousand kisses back to you.

Painting by Emil Nolde

True Tales Growing Up in a Haunted House

Tags

Ghost Stories, Halloween, Halloween reads, Haunted House, Hauntings, memoir, nonfiction, Supernatural, writing

Have you ever had any ghostly encounters?

Each year around this time, I like to reblog a series of tales about my encounters with the ghostly and unexplained, starting when I was a child, and later full grown with children of my own. The first is printed below with links to the others.

While ”intellectually” I don’t believe in ghosts, demons, and the like, I have experienced such. And I cannot deny that the phenomena which I and others–indeed, all known cultures and societies–have laid claim to, are “real.” The reality they seem to have is unexplained, often unverifiable, and usually fleeting and ephemeral. And yet they persist in haunting humanity.

I can neither explain, verify, nor dismiss the reality of the experiences that I relate here. I can only state that these things occurred as I remember them, or as others I trust related them to me. And most were witnessed by more than one person

Happy Halloween!

Our House on a Haunted Hill

When I was a kid “House on Haunted Hill” was my favorite spooky movie. I first saw it a few years after my own family had escaped, just barely, from a haunted house experience. While living there I was not aware of all the horrors that house contained, and only learned the full account when my mother felt I was old enough to learn the truth.

I was eight years old when my parents rented a home set on a hillside in an older, respectable neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska. The attic had been converted into two rooms, a tiny room overlooking the back yard and garage; and a huge room overlooking the front yard. This larger room had been recently renovated and then abruptly abandoned, it appeared. The high pitched ceiling and walls were covered in a richly varnished, knotty pine paneling. Finely crafted drawers and book cases had been built beneath the eaves. But the floor, made of rough, unvarnished planks of wood, had been left unfinished. And a large reddish-brown stain that looked like a puddle of blood had soaked into the wood.

This was my bedroom and I loved it. Being an avid fan of Nancy Drew mysteries, the giant blood stain only added to the allure of the room–that and the trap door on the floor of the walk-in closet. While the door had been nailed shut, I could still probe the cracks with a ruler, detecting steps that led downward—to where, no one knew. My discovery sent chills of delight down my back.

In fact, I was thrilled to have the whole second story all to myself. Even though the second smaller room could have easily accommodated my little brother, my mother made him sleep down below in the tiny room at the bottom of the stairs. She claimed the small room upstairs was “too cold” and used it as a storage room instead. She filled it with unpacked boxes and unused furniture, forbidding me to play there—which, of course, made the room seem even more desirable.

I remember entering the room often to play by myself and looking out the dusty window toward the mysterious barn-like structure that faced the alley. The structure, which could easily have accommodated several cars, sat empty nearly the whole time we lived there, and my brother and I were forbidden to play here as well. It too was considered “too cold” for human habitation. The one time I did enter, my eyes were drawn upward to the high rafters where, through the rotting roof, splinters of light filled with ghostly dust motes fell to the floor. I did not enter again. When some teenage boys wanted to use the garage to rebuild a car, they moved out after a couple of nights, never to return—even though they had paid rent for a full month.

I thought it strange when my mother kept wanting to move me out of my lovely upstairs “apartment” to a room below and I refused to be moved. She kept asking if I was afraid up there all by myself, but I insisted I wasn’t. This was true. I knew what needed to be done to stay safe, although I never shared this with my mother. It was a ritual that I religiously followed. Every night after my mother heard my prayers and tucked me into bed, I would pull the covers tight over my head and stay there until I fell asleep. I knew somehow that no harm would come to me if I followed this ritual. And no harm ever did come to me.

I might well have been very afraid if I had heard what my parents heard at night as they slept in the room below mine.

Often my mother was woken by the sound of heavy, dragging footsteps lumbering across room over her bed, and she would wake my father and make him go upstairs to investigate. At first he did so wearily, thinking she was imagining it. But once he woke early enough to hear it himself and went dashing up the stairs—but nothing was there and I was sound asleep in my bed.

We moved shortly thereafter. That’s when the neighbors told us about the horrible tragedy that had taken place in the house before we moved in. They hadn’t wanted to tell us earlier and scare us away. Apparently the previous owner of the house had murdered his wife in my bedroom and then hung himself afterwards from the rafters in the garage.

If some other tragic event took place in the small room next to mine upstairs—the coldest room in the house–we never learned. Whatever haunted that room did more than drag its feet across the floor or blow cold air down our spines. During our final days in that home, my mother, to her terror, found this out–with no one but my three-year-old brother at home to save her.

More about this in my next post.

You can read the full series of true ghost stories at the links below which were first posted in 2013

• True Ghost Stories, Part II – Attack of the Poltergeist
• True Ghost Stories, Part III – When the Dead Refuse to Leave
• True Ghost Stories, Part IV – Resident Evil: In the Belly of the Beast
• True Ghost Stories, Part V – A Demon on My Chest
• True Ghost Stories, Part VI – Evil Incarnate
• True Ghost stories, Part VII – Do I Believe This Stuff?

The Poetics of Place: Redwood Speech,Watershed Prayers

Tags

deep ecology, Francis Weller, humanity, inspiration, Language, music, Nature, quotations, The poetics of place, writing

“I want to see our words jump off the ground, erupt from a sensual earth, musty, humid, gritty. I want to taste words like honey, sweet and dripping with eternity. I want to hear words coming from my mouth and your mouth that are so beautiful that we wince with joy at their departure and arrival. I want to touch words that carry weight and substance, words that have shape and body, curve and tissue. I want to feel what we say as though the words were holy utterances surfacing from a pool where the gods drink. . . . .

My language must be redwood speech, watershed prayers, oak savannah, coupled in an erotic way with fog, heat, wind, rain and hills, sweetgrass and jackrabbits, wild iris and ocean current. My land is my language and only then can my longing for eloquence by granted. Until then I will fumble and fume and ache for a style of speaking that tells you who I am.”   – Francis Weller

One of my first blog posts in 2012 featured a speech by Francis Weller that captures so eloquently how the earth, our natural habitat, speaks to us and inspires us to speak. How it shapes our language and the way we express ourselves, not only in literature but in art and music and dance.

You can read his whole speech at his website Wisdom Bridge – Modern Pathways to our Indigenous Soul. The excerpt above, my quote of the week, hopefully will whet your appetite to do so.

As you read his speech, you might want to listen again to how nature inspires and shapes music, here in Max Richter’s reimagining of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, one of my favorite pieces.

Recipe for a Painting: Durrell on Venice at Dawn

Tags

art, inspiration, Lawrence Durrell, painting, travel, Venice, writing

Twilight Venice, 1908, Claude Monet

Quote of the Week

“These thoughts belong to Venice at dawn, seen from the deck of the ship which is to carry me down through the islands to Cyprus; a Venice wobbling in a thousand fresh-water reflections cool as a jelly. It was as if some great master, stricken by dementia, had burst his whole color-box against the sky to deafen the inner eye of the world. Cloud and water mixed into each other, dripping with colors, merging, overlapping, liquefying, with steeples and balconies and roofs floating in space, like the fragments of some stained-glass window seen through a dozen veils of rice paper. Fragments of history touched with the colors of wine, tar, ochre, blood, fire-opal and ripening grain. The whole at the same time being rinsed softly back at the edges into a dawn sky as softly as circumspectly blue as a pigeon’s egg.”

Excerpt From: Lawrence Durrell. “Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island.”

I found this exquisite quote on another favorite blog, The Depth of Now, by the lovely Martina Korkmaz. Immediately I was seized with the urge to paint his words, to capture in paint all the shimmering color and effusive joy.

Instead I found this painting of Venice by Monet that captures some, but not all of what I would paint.

More and more I find myself wanting to paint the things I read that move me, like the poem Love After Love that I blogged about earlier this week. Paint a woman greeting herself in a garden on an island home.

I suppose it’s an urge to put into tangible form what I feel swirling around me when I read, what I see splashing against the walls of my mind. Something that will remain long after the words fall silent.

 

Five Debut Novels Worth Sampling

Tags

authors, book review, books, Entertainment, fiction, literature, Novel, novels, Reading, writing

I’ve been putting together a reading list of recently published debut novels that have been making a splash in the publishing world. Perhaps not surprising, given I’m looking for a publisher for my own debut novel.

What is surprising is how many there are, and how intriguing they all sound. So much so I’ve had a hard time winnowing the list down to a readable top five. What helped was being able to download free sample chapters from Amazon onto my Kindle.

Here’s what I came up with.

 There, There – by Tommy Orange

This one is first on my list because I’m already 2/3 through it. And I have to say, it’s living up to the hype, and a lot of it there is: “Orange writes the way the best rappers rap, the way the finest taggers tag. His is a bold aesthetic of exhilaration and, yes, rage.” (Claire Vaye Watkins, Poets & writers, July/August, 218)

“Let’s get this out of the way: Tommy Orange’s debut novel, There There, should probably be on reading lists for every creative writing program in this country. It is a master class in style, form and narrative voice. Orange, who is from the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, utilizes first, second and third-person narration to incredible effect, creating a multi-voiced novel that effectively reflects an entire community. . . .” (Alicia Elliott, The Globe and Mail)

There, There is about urban Indians living in Oakland, California, who know “the sound of the freeway better than [they] do rivers … the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than [they] do the smell of cedar or sage…”

Each of its many characters are heading to an annual powow, which promises to be explosive, according to another reviewer: “[T]he plot accelerates until the novel explodes in a terrifying mess of violence. Technically, it’s a dazzling, cinematic climax played out in quick-cut, rotating points of view. But its greater impact is emotional: a final, sorrowful demonstration of the pathological effects of centuries of abuse and degradation.” (Ron Charles, Washington Post)

Despite this, “even amid confusion and violence, there is the possibility for decency to assert itself,” and novel ends on a note of hope. Or so I’m promised (The Guardian).  I’ll let you know.

  Song of a Captive Bird by Jazmin Darznic

I was drawn to this book because it’s about the life of the Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad who “endures the scorn of her family and society to become one of Iran’s most prominent poets and a film director.” According to the Kirkus Review ” this novel is a “thrilling and provocative portrait of a powerful woman set against a sweeping panorama of Iranian history.”

“Song of a Captive Bird is a complex and beautiful rendering of that vanished country and its scattered people; a reminder of the power and purpose of art; and an ode to female creativity under a patriarchy that repeatedly tries to snuff it out.” (Dina Nayeri, New York Times)

  The Incendiaries by K. O. Kwon

Laura Groff calls this novel “God-haunted.” It is a love story set on a contemporary college campus that “explores faith, religion, and the dangers of fundamentalism” (Poets $ Writers, July/August 2018) An escapee from North Korea who becomes a cult leader is another major character, with disastrous consequences, it seems.

Despite the fact this novel promises another explosive ending like There, There, which may have put me off, it was the prose from that sample chapter that drew me in and made me add it to my list. These intriguing bits added to its allure:

“Kwon’s novel is urgent in its timeliness, dizzyingly beautiful in its prose, and poignant in its discovery of three characters fractured by trauma, frantically trying to piece back together their lives. (USAToday)

“It is full of absences and silence. Its eerie, sombre power is more a product of what it doesn’t explain than of what it does. It’s the rare depiction of belief that doesn’t kill the thing it aspires to by trying too hard. It makes a space, and then steps away to let the mystery in.” (The New Yorker)

  Bearskin by James A. McLaughlin

“A fugitive from a Mexican cartel takes refuge in a forest preserve in the wilds of Virginia. . . .  An intense, visceral debut equal to the best that country noir has to offer.” So begins and ends a Kirkus Review of this debut novel.

I chose this as my fourth debut novel to read in order to get out of the city and into the wild. And also, I suspect, as a serious Justified fan, to get back into the hills of Appalachia with a soft-hearted and hard-fisted alpha male like Raylan Givens. I don’t know if the protaganist of Bearskin, Rice Moore, will live up to Raylan, but the sample chapter I read gives me hope.

Then there’s this: “Bearskin is visceral, raw, and compelling—filled with sights, smells, and sounds truly observed.  It’s a powerful debut and an absolute showcase of exceptional prose.  There are very few first novels when I feel compelled to circle brilliant passages, but James McLaughlin’s writing had me doing just that.”

  Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marsha Pessl

“Sharp, snappy fun for the literary-minded,” so deems the Kirkus Review, and that’s exactly why I chose this to be the last novel on my “top five” list, even though it doesn’t quite fit my criteria for “recent’ debut novels. This came out in 2006.

“Marisha Pessl’s dazzling debut sparked raves from critics and heralded the arrival of a vibrant new voice in American fiction. At the center of Special Topics in Calamity Physics is clever, deadpan Blue van Meer, who has a head full of literary, philosophical, scientific, and cinematic knowledge. But she could use some friends. Upon entering the elite St. Gallway School, she finds some—a clique of eccentrics known as the Bluebloods. One drowning and one hanging later, Blue finds herself puzzling out a byzantine murder mystery. Nabokov meets Donna Tartt (then invites the rest of the Western Canon to the party) in this novel—with visual aids drawn by the author—that has won over readers of all ages.” (Amazon)

I tried a sample chapter and decided this quirky, fun novel is just what I needed to top off this list, which is decidedly heavy in “not fun” topics.

Some strong runners-up on the lighter, fun side are:

The Ensemble

The Kiss Quotient

The Pisces

Let me if you’ve read any of these yet, and if so, what you thought. Also, if you know of any other debut novels I should add to my list.