Archive for the ‘Guest Writer’ Category

Jeffrey Eugenides
by John Freeman

For the past fifteen years or so, whenever a novel has been published, John Freeman has been there to greet it. As a critic for over two hundred newspapers worldwide and onetime president of the NBCC, he’s reviewed thousands of books and interviewed hundreds of authors. You might have thought his recent five-year stint as editor of Granta would have slowed him down some, but just weeks ago he was still finding time to sit down with the likes of Jennifer Egan, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, and Aleksandar Hemon as he rounded out the contents of How to Read a Novelist, his book of more than fifty author profiles coming from FSG Originals this October. Over the next two weeks, Work in Progress will publish an exclusive two-part preview of the book. Up first: Freeman’s conversation with FSG’s own Jeffrey Eugenides . . . (more…)

by Maureen N. McLane

What a strange, vital, careening book—what a book for now. Yet also, what a fascinating document of the early 20th century. A Poet in New York, “New York in a Poet,” as Lorca himself glossed it: this is clearly one of the great works of transnational modernism, a cracked Andalucían mirror held up to New York’s crazed, vibrant, and disgusting face. The best poetry is “news that stays news,” as Pound put it. This book seems to me news I can use—registering the skyscrapered canyons of the city, its savage underbelly everywhere humming with reptilian life (all those iguanas and crocodiles running around in the poems), the titanic fraudulence of Wall Street, the vomiting crowds of a Coney Island Sunday. (more…)

Averill Curdy on What Brought Her to Poetry

Wayward: difficult to control or predict; shortened from obsolete Middle English awayward, “turned away.”

I’ve kept a diary, more or less faithfully, for over 30 years. I’ve moved the expanding shelf of filled journals between various apartments in Seattle, and then to Texas, Missouri, Michigan, and finally to Chicago. I’ve copied favorite passages from my reading, noted the rare dream, and jotted down ideas, stray images, or lines for poems; I’ve paginated and indexed them. I mourned when my favorite notebook—an Exaclair sketchbook with 100 pages of 100-gram French paper that loved ink—was discontinued. Writing in one of these was happiness, small, but durable as the cup of coffee my husband makes for me each morning. But I never so much as glance at a single one of those diaries after writing the final words on its last page.

The summer I turned 25 my mother was dying of breast cancer. Long after she died, I broke the middle joint of my thumb fielding an easy ground ball at second base during a softball game. The doctor bent my thumb backwards from the break, binding it into position so that the tendon and joint would knit themselves back together, then sent me home with some Tylenol. That night the pain reduced the little vanities and injuries, desire, and self-regard of my identity to kindling. The next day I was able to get a prescription for codeine and the cessation of that pain was an experience of delicious release from bondage. Afterwards, I was able to think of what my mother must have endured without complaint as the cancer colonized her bones and soft tissues. (more…)

On Willa Cather,
Alfred A. Knopf, and a case of Rothschild

by Jeff Seroy

Twenty-seven years ago, when I was working on the publication of Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice at Oxford University Press, I started to wonder how I had overlooked a writer whose work, in Sharon O’Brien’s groundbreaking study, sounded so interesting and so different from what I had assumed it to be. I began at the beginning—Cather’s stories in The Troll Garden; her first, stiff attempt at extended fiction, Alexander’s Bridge; her two early and perennially popular novels, My Antonia and O Pioneers!—and I read on. There’s a lot of Cather, so if you love her work, you’re in luck, for there’s a lot to love. And it turns out there’s an extensive underground of discerning Cather lovers: her appeal isn’t limited, as the paperback covers of her books often suggest, to girls in grade school.

Just now there is cause for Cather lovers to rejoice: her current executors have authorized a marvelous volume containing 556 pieces from her correspondence, which has spent decades off limits to all but a select cut of scholars. As a publisher, I was immediately drawn to Cather’s voluble interactions with her two houses, Houghton Mifflin Company and Alfred A. Knopf, at both of which I’ve worked. The distinctive DNAs of these institutions were instantly recognizable in her letters, despite the fact that half a century had elapsed between my employment and the day Cather wrote to Houghton’s Ferris Greenslet that “unless you see it otherwise, I shall refuse to say that I have ‘left’ you . . . but that it is true that Knopf is going to publish this next book.” I had always understood that Cather left Houghton for Knopf because she wanted her books more beautifully designed, more handsomely produced—something Knopf has been notable for since its founding in 1915. (They’ve published this newest volume, The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, and it’s exemplary of their expertise. It would have delighted Cather in that regard, though assuredly not in the more central fact of its existence—it was her express wish that her letters be kept from the public eye.) Yes, she grouses about Houghton’s ugly mustard-colored cases, and scrutinizes headbands more than would most writers, but Cather’s letters reveal that she left Houghton for a more serious reason: she felt undervalued and misunderstood by their publicity department. She was frustrated by Houghton’s tradition-bound, buttoned-up, high-minded Bostonianism—she nailed it—and she worried that Houghton didn’t perceive her growth as a writer and therefore acknowledge her potential to reach a broader readership. (more…)

by Mark S. Weiner

On a winter afternoon in 2006, on my birthday, I gave away my library.

The previous week, I owned so many books that I built teetering stacks of them on the floor of my study. I stored the overflow in my wife’s office, and on the shelves next to the treadmill, and downstairs, beside the television. I loved those books, each one, and I had spent countless hours in their company—some I had known for over twenty years. Just looking at them made me feel secure, as though all the supportive friends I had ever known were by my side, ready to offer me their wise advice and comfort.

Then, after my wife and I crammed our ailing station wagon full of white shipping boxes, and drove to the local post office, and lifted each box to the chest-high counter, and watched an agent wheel them behind a wall, they were gone, on their way to a public library that had a use for them. Poof! The process was over surprisingly quickly. (more…)

by Rebecca Miller

I started with one image: a fireman peeing on his front lawn, at the moment between night and dawn, just as the darkness began to drain from the sky. I knew his last name was Senzatimore. I had known a young man with that name—he was, in fact, the assistant editor on my last film—and the grandeur of the name bewitched me. Senzatimore means “without fear” in Italian. It has an aura of the Middle Ages, of our more primitive, real selves, when names could be wishes, or properties of being, and had not devolved to mere accidents of birth. I wanted my man to be a kind of Titan because then his fall—the fall my hunch told me was coming in the story—would be all the more meaningful. And another element came to me as I wrote Leslie Senzatimore peeing on his front lawn: a spirit creature, some mischievous, malevolent entity, which at the time I saw as a soul frozen between lives like a spat-out chunk of bread stuck between two harp strings. I saw him looking down on Leslie, and laughing. (more…)

by Dennis Mahoney

It’s 1990 and I’m a loser. Becoming a novelist hasn’t crossed my mind. I’m a high-school junior who’s shown some aptitude in art, and by aptitude I mean I’m better than classmates who don’t try at all. My art teacher is just happy I do the assignments instead of throwing Exact-o knives into the ceiling.

I had a creative impulse throughout my early life, fueled by supportive parents, Legos, and the original Star Wars trilogy. Relatives raved about my drawings. I got a spaceship illustration printed in the local paper during grade school. And I didn’t really want to be Luke or Han. I wanted to be George Lucas and create something awesome.

But I couldn’t be bothered to develop any skills. Mötley Crüe was big in my life, as were the Commodore 64 video games my friends and I swapped along our paper routes. I had bad hair, just shy of a bowl cut. Major cysts instead of zits. A soft, pale, jean-jacketed body. I’d never had a serious girlfriend because girls have standards, and because I kept thinking my luck might change, which is the best way to ensure it never, ever does. (more…)

On Disney, David Lynch, and Django Unchained

by Eric G. Wilson

In the weeks after the Sandy Hook Elementary School killings, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained—which depicts a freed American slave taking bloody revenge on cruel slaveholders—has faced a lot of media scrutiny. Pundits have wondered if this kind of fictional brutality incites real-life violence. It’s a debate that seems to resurface every few years, but in this case the ideologues can save their energy: Django Unchained is more harmless and reassuring than most old-time Disney flicks. Beside it, Bambi is like a noirish nightmare.

Tarantino’s gore fulfills our moral fantasies. It’s innocuous commotion setting up, and acting as a foil for, a soothing conclusion in which the good are rewarded and the evil are punished. And the more horrific the brutality, the more gratifying the reckoning. Compared to the slaughter of Bambi’s mother, never avenged, this kind of closure is pure Pollyanna.

Tarantino has been careful to distinguish between the artificial violence of his films and actual carnage. In an interview on NPR, he claimed that viewers are tired of movies on slavery or the Holocaust that depict only pain. They welcome fiction in which the victims rise up to be “the victors and the avengers,” “paying back blood for blood.” This aesthetic violence is “cathartic,” “good for the soul.” (more…)

by Sara Wheeler

The happiest moment of my life presented itself one cool February afternoon in the Transantarctic Mountains, many years ago. I was hiking up a valley. Fearful of losing my bearings, I stopped to fish a USGS map from my pack and spread it on the ice. Tracing my route by topographical landmarks (including an especially pointy mountain glaciologists had baptized the Doesn’tmatterhorn), my finger came to a straight line drawn with a ruler and marked “Limit of Compilation.” Beyond that, the sheet was blank. I had reached the end of the map.

That moment flashed into my mind when my editor suggested a volume of Selected Writings to ‘celebrate’ (ha!) my fiftieth birthday. I could see the point. While my chief endeavor, in my work, has been books: travel books, biographies, and a lumpy mix of the two, over the decades there have been many hundreds of essays, reviews, and squibs, written along the way for love and for money. So I emptied the six cuttings drawers in my crammed office in north London – and was amazed at the yellowing clips that tumbled out. One of them told that map story. I was happy to be reminded of it. How long ago it seemed. (more…)

Obviously, the best novel of the year is Ellen Ullman’s By Blood, the best nonfiction book Richard Lloyd Parry’s People Who Eat Darkness, the best manifesto Jeff Speck’s Walkable City, the best travel book (and the best-titled book) Rosecrans Baldwin’s Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down, the best vampire book Brian McGreevy’s Hemlock Grove, the best memoir Davy Rothbart’s My Heart is an Idiot, the best debut Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.* (more…)

by Sarah Scire

Picking favorites is almost always tricky business. For the staff of FSG, crowning just a few of the many books they read “the best of 2012″ seemed close to impossible.

There were last-minute additions, half-hearted apologies for self-interested choices, lengthy disclaimers about how all of the books they’d worked on were their favorites, and multi-part questions about eligibility (“This book was written almost two decades ago but first translated in 2012—with the exception of an excerpt two years ago. Does it count?”).

Restricting everyone’s favorites to books published in 2012 seemed unfair (and likely to start an uproar) so we chose to ask three questions we hoped would shed light on the staff’s diverse reading habits: (more…)

by Philip Hensher and Stephen Weil

Philip Hensher’s charming and informative new book, The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting, was released in the United States last month by Faber and Faber. Taking inspiration from the New Statesman, we asked some of the folks involved in its publication here at Faber and Faber/FSG to write out a favorite short excerpt from the book. Here are the results, with insightful commentary from Mr. Hensher himself:

What a beautiful hand! This is a really nice, personal continuation of the classic American cursive hand as taught in schools. The loops are absolutely efficient, contributing to the speed of the writing. The letter forms are completely classic but with plenty of Jennifer’s own style in them—I love the f, the upper case J, the gorgeous single movement of the d, the beautifully formed o. Interestingly, almost the only break within a word is in “hand writing”—I get the impression that Jennifer has thought about handwriting, paused slightly at this word, and enjoys writing by hand.

With the decline of cursive as an ideal, a lot of younger Americans have discovered that a print hand is much more readable, easy to execute, and actually quite stylish and modern. Steve’s hand is slightly unusual in that it contains no ligatures at all, but is entirely printed. In addition, he likes to form his letters out of a number of quite different strokes—the d and the y and (maybe) the b as well are formed with lifts of the pen in the middle of letters. The result, to my European eye, is quirky and charming—I’m sure he manages to write this print hand with efficient speed through practice.

Like Steve’s, Chantal’s hand has developed towards printing, though she sustains a few cursive features on the borderline of extinction—her y sometimes loops and sometimes doesn’t. Unlike him, she has some ligatures—her t, interestingly, often joins at the crossbar rather than from below. (Some handwriting teachers regard that with great disapproval. I don’t know why). She almost never takes more than one stroke to form a letter—only once does she use two strokes to form a y. It is a neat, efficient hand, stripped of unnecessary ornament and very lucid. That looping y will have gone in five years’ time. Her print hand leans very slightly to the right; Steve’s leans very slightly to the left. A graphologist would say that she was more outgoing than he is, but there’s not much in it.

Abby’s hand is a development of the cursive hand she was probably taught in school—the upward sweep beginning the m and the o’s looping formation show this. But she’s moved away from it towards some printed features—her letters join up or separate very unpredictably. The six letters of “moment” are all joined; all but two of the seven letters of “improve” are printed. The untidy look of the hand suggests someone warm and impulsive to me.

This is an unusual hand. The European style combines with an interesting and rather American pattern of looping, and some features of the hand have, I think, been evolved by the writer independently. It’s unusual to see a t which very consistently links to the next letter with its t-bar rather than from the bottom. There’s no reason why not, of course. The hand is neat, small and highly efficient. There is a limited but genuine keenness about ornament—I very much like the upper case S and the elegant z. I’d like to see more of this, and in particular an upper case T—the upper case F suggests to me someone who gets things done.

Philip Hensher is a columnist for The Independent, an arts critic for The Spectator, and one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. He has written one collection of short stories and eight novels, including The Mulberry Empire, King of the Badgers, and The Northern Clemency, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. He lives in South London and Geneva.

Stephen Weil works at FSG. You can find him online @WeilsyWeil.

Prologue to Woes of the True Policeman

by Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas
Translated by Natasha Wimmer

Woes of the True Policeman is a project that was begun at the end of the 1980s and continued until the writer’s death. What the reader has in his hands is the faithful and definitive version, collated from typescripts and computer documents, and bearing evidence of Roberto Bolaño’s clear intention to include the novel in a body of work in a perpetual state of gestation. There are also a number of epistolary references to the project. In a 1995 letter, Bolaño writes: “Novel: for years I’ve been working on one that’s titled Woes of the True Policeman and which is MY NOVEL. The protagonist is a widower, 50, a university professor, 17-year-old daughter, who goes to live in Santa Teresa, a city near the U.S. border. Eight hundred thousand pages, a crazy tangle beyond anyone’s comprehension.” The unusual thing about this novel, written over the course of fifteen years, is that it incorporates material from other works by the author, from Llamadas telefónicas (Phone Calls) to The Savage Detectives and 2666, with the peculiarity that even though we meet some familiar characters—particularly Amalfitano, Amalfitano’s daughter, Rosa, and Arcimboldi—the differences are notable. These characters belong to Bolaño’s larger fictional world, and at the same time they are the exclusive property of this novel.

This brings us to one of the book’s most striking and unsettling qualities: the fragile, provisional nature of the narrative (desarrollo narrativo). If in the contemporary novel the barrier between fiction and reality, between invention and essay, has been toppled, Bolaño’s contribution takes a different path that perhaps finds its model in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch. Woes of the True Policeman, like 2666, is an unfinished novel, but not an incomplete one, because what mattered to its author was working on it, not completing it. And this brings us to a series of reconsiderations. By now we’ve accepted the rupture of linearity (digression, counterpoint, the blending of genres). Reality as it was understood until the nineteenth century has been replaced as reference point by a visionary, oneiric, fevered, fragmentary, and even provisional form of writing. In this provisionality lies the key to Bolaño’s contribution. We may ask ourselves when a novel begins to be unfinished, or when it hasn’t yet begun to be unfinished. When the author is in the middle of writing it, the end can’t be the most important thing, and many times it hasn’t even been determined. What matters is the active participation of the reader, concurrent with the act of writing. Bolaño makes this very clear in his explanation of the title: “The policeman is the reader, who tries in vain to decipher this wretched novel.” And in the body of the book itself there is an insistence on this conception of the novel as a life: we exist—we write, we read—so long as we’re alive, and the only conclusion is death. This consciousness of death, of writing as an act of life, is part of Bolaño’s biography, since the Chilean writer was condemned to write his limitless fiction against the clock. In Woes of the True Policeman there are a number of concrete references to this fractioning and provisionality: “a crucial feature of the French writer’s work: even if all his stories, no matter their style (and in this regard Arcimboldi was eclectic and seemed to subscribe to the maxim of De Kooning: style is a fraud), were mysteries, they were only solved through flight, or sometimes through bloodshed (real or imaginary) followed by endless flight, as if Arcimboldi’s characters, once the book had come to an end, literally leapt from the last page and kept fleeing.” This is faithful to the itinerancy, to the frequently fruitless searching and the fleeing, that mark Bolaño’s writing. This is why Amalfitano’s students understood “that a book was a labyrinth and a desert. That there was nothing more important than ceaseless reading and traveling, perhaps one and the same thing.” This provisionality gives the writer great freedom, since he permits himself the same risks as his most daring contemporaries with whom he explicitly identifies himself; but at the same time his texts maintain traditional suspense, full as they are of nonstop adventure. That is, his novels never stop being novels as we’ve always understood them. And the fracturing is what obliges the editor of his unpublished works to respect the legacy of a writer for whom all novels are part of one great novel always in progress and always in utopian search of an ending.

So far as the title is concerned, it also lends itself to a series of reflections. Woes of the True Policeman is certainly the least characteristic of Bolaño’s titles, and nevertheless it is clear, from typescripts and computer texts, that it is the definitive title. We are presented with a descriptive phrase, long, lacking the rhythm to which Bolaño has accustomed us, and not provocative or surprising at all (what can savage detectives or killer whores mean?). And yet it hides a clue in a text full of clues, a metaphor that transports us not only to The Savage Detectives but most particularly to another scarcely characteristic title, that of Padilla’s unfinished novel, The God of Homosexuals. Each contains a clue: as previously stated, the true policeman is none other than the reader, relegated from the start to the woe of constantly uncovering false clues, in the same way that the king of homosexuals is none other than AIDS, a metaphor for the fatal disease that prevents Padilla from finishing his novel.

Thus we have here a “detective,” who is Amalfitano, the critic, around whom the whole metaliterary dimension of the novel turns. There’s a policeman, who is the reader. And there’s a true protagonist, who is Padilla. Detective, reader/author, herald of death: these are the protagonists of a search that never ends (that has no ending). This obliges us to focus even more intently on the development of the narrative, which suggests that the suspense lies not in the denouement but in the unfolding of events. This is the same way we read Don Quixote, a novel that remains alive despite its ending, since it isn’t the knight errant who dies but the mediocre squire.

And as in Don Quixote—that is, as in the best contemporary fiction—the fragment is as important as the potential unity demanded of the novel, with this addendum: the fragments, the situations, the scenes, are discrete units that nevertheless make up a greater whole that isn’t necessarily visible. It could almost be said that we are returning to the origins of literature, to the story, or rather to a succession of stories that build upon one another. Naturally there is a thread that links Amalfitano, his daughter, Rosa, his lover Padilla, Padilla’s lover Elisa, Arcimboldi, the Carreras, the singular poet Pere Girau; and—elsewhere—Pancho Monje, Pedro and Pablo Negrete, and Gumaro the chauffeur. The same is true of the different geographic spaces we traverse, be they Chile, Mexico— Santa Teresa and Sonora—or Barcelona, all familiar to readers of Bolaño. There is even a very strong link between the beginning and the end of the book, between Padilla’s passion for literature and the final discovery that Elisa is death. But what makes the novel memorable isn’t its unity (facilitated by the growing protagonism of Padilla, a victim, like Don Quixote, of literature and love—in this case the morbid love of our times), but the different situations and what each of them suggests.

We find ourselves, as so frequently in contemporary fiction, in the realm of violence, alienation, estrangement, outrageousness, illness, sublime degradation. The stories follow one after another: about the stewardess and the mango juice, the recruit and the confusion caused by the word kunst, the informal dinner with the Italian patriots, the visit to the numerologist, the communicative striptease, the five generations of María Expósito, the dead man in the servants’ quarters, or the Texan and the Larry Rivers exhibition. There are send-ups of the Potosí school of Maestro Garabito, of Rosa’s teachers, and, prophetically, of frustrated writers like Jean Marchand, who decides to give up his literary ambitions to devote himself to the careers of other writers: “He sees himself as a doctor at a leper colony in India, a monk pledged to a higher cause.” And purported saviors aside, literature has—as it always has had in Bolaño, beginning with Nazi Literature in the Americas—an ambiguous and crucial presence, in which homage mingles with criticism, veiled and therefore doubly harsh as well as hilarious. This is the ambiguous light in which Pablo Neruda appears in By Night in Chile or Octavio Paz in The Savage Detectives, in Mexico City’s Parque Hundido. But certain writers, represented here by the poetas bárbaros—today’s poètes maudits, already present in Distant Star—interest him particularly to the extent that they are poets of impurity, an impurity that closely resembles the kind that interests Ricardo Piglia. In fact, all of Bolaño’s characters are impure, victims and privileged witnesses of violence in all its forms, which here reaches its height in the section “Killers of Sonora,” and also in the god of homosexuals, that is “the god of those who have always lost,” “the god of the Comte de Lautréamont and Rimbaud.” And there are Arcimboldi’s brilliantly summarized novels, of course, as well as Padilla’s unfinished novel, and the letters that Amalfitano and Padilla write to each other. More than metaliterary, we might call these texts intraliterary, since everything is part of the plot.

Woes of the True Policeman is of special interest because of its close links to the best of Bolaño—its wealth of invention, its identification with losers—because of an ethic unhampered by ethical principles, because of its lucid reading of authors close to Bolaño, because of its radical independence, because it offers us a modern novel that doesn’t relinquish the satisfactions of plot, because of its fierce loyalty to the places where Bolaño spent his formative years, its loyalty to a cosmopolitanism that is the expression of a way of life, and its loyalty to a joyful and desperate surrender to creation, far from social imperatives. His writing is always extremely clear, and yet it springs from the darkest places (sex, violence, love, exile, loneliness, breakups): “It’s all so simple and so terrible,” because “true poetry resides between the abyss and misfortune.” And it’s no coincidence that he’s especially attracted to poets: it’s they who give his prose the capacity to express tenderness, unhappiness, and rootlessness. How can so much humor exist amid such desolation, so much decency amid such violence? Because in each of Bolaño’s books we ultimately find, as we clearly find here, the best Bolaño. An author horrified by our century’s violence, from the Nazis to the crimes of the north of Mexico; an author who identifies with the losers, and who makes of his work an autobiography, which in large part explains the mythification of his persona—because the great absence represented by his death is made into presence over the course of a series of works that culminate in 2666, where he seems to elaborate upon and condense all his experiences as a human being and as a writer. In Woes of the True Policeman we once again encounter a Bolaño who has become as familiar to us as he is indispensable. It remains bone-chilling to discover in this book an extraordinary vitality constantly threatened not only by the consciousness of physical illness but also by the moral sickness of an era. Vitality and desolation are inseparable.

Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas is a Spanish translator, critic, and professor. He teaches in the Masters of Creative Writing program at the University Pompeu Fabra, has translated Cesare Pavese, Giorgio Saviane, Carson McCullers, Djuna Barnes, and Vladimir Nabokov, among others, and is a literary critic for La Vanguardia. Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas lives in Barcelona.

Natasha Wimmer has translated many works of fiction and nonfiction by Spanish-language authors, including Mario Vargas Llosa, Laura Restrepo, and Rodrigo Fresán, as well as Roberto Bolaño.

On Thursday, Nov. 29, which would have been Madeleine L’Engle’s 94th birthday, the Diocesan House of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on New York City’s Upper West Side was dedicated as a Literary Landmark in honor of the nearly four decades that she wrote and worked in its library. L’Engle is the author of A Wrinkle in Time, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year, among numerous other titles. Leonard S. Marcus, author of the oral biography Listening for Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L’Engle in Many Voices, made these remarks:

In 1966—three years after winning the Newbery Medal for A Wrinkle in Time—Madeleine L’Engle volunteered to serve as Cathedral librarian here at St. John the Divine. The job she took on was an ill-defined, more or less full-time position that had nothing much to do with the Dewey Decimal System. For the next thirty-plus years—for as long as she had a steady connection to New York City—L’Engle, when she was not out of town, would arrive at the Cathedral each weekday morning by 10, greet school groups or other visitors, respond to her sack-loads of fan mail, pause for lunch, and then, if no one else happened by to talk with her, would write all afternoon. “People who needed to use the library would wander in,” her editor Sandra Jordan recalled, “as would people for whom Madeleine served as a spiritual adviser. She had a great many of those relationships, including with a number of people whose lives had been hard or complicated or who had suffered great losses. She felt a responsibility to people in need,” Jordan said, “as well as a responsibility to people who responded to her writings from some deep place in their lives.”

The arrangement suited her in part because it provided L’Engle with a room of her own that was not far from her always bustling West End Avenue apartment. It also worked well because the office next to hers belonged to her spiritual adviser and good friend, Canon Edward Nason West.

Canon West was a deeply thoughtful and wildly theatrical man who, some said, had been at the Cathedral since the time of the Anglican Reformation. He had a long, impressive beard, dressed in Rasputin-like cassocks and capes, and shared L’Engle’s flair for the grand gesture. Like her, he was a spiritual quester and, deep down, he too was a church of one. He filled his apartment with Russian Orthodox icons. She kept a small Buddha on her desk as a reminder that denominations mattered less than deeds.

L’Engle published more than 30 books during her time as Cathedral librarian and Canon West was among the few people she trusted to read them as works in progress. For years, they taught an informal class together, a kind of public conversation, during Lent. The Canon’s assistant, Don Lundquist, remembered: “One night Canon West began by saying, ‘Okay, Maidel’—he never called her Madeleine. ‘Tonight we’re going to talk about Saints Damian and Cosmas.’ To which she replied, “Oh, Edward, where did you ever get that idea?’ ‘Well, just tell me what you know about them,’ he said—and off they’d go for forty-five minutes.” She took her revenge by writing him into four of her novels, once even assigning Canon John Tallis a cloak-and-dagger role as a secret agent for Interpol. Don Lundquist recognized the private joke behind the reference, noting that the Canon, who was the world’s reigning authority on Anglican liturgical matters, also had a fine ear for gossip. “People,” he said, “would sometimes wonder out loud just where he had gotten this or that tidbit of information. Canon West never divulged his sources! He would only say, ‘My spies report to me.’”

L’Engle once declared that she took the bible too seriously to take it literally, and spoke of writing as an “incarnational act.” When literalists attempted to ban her books, or to block free access to the books of any writer, she vigorously opposed their efforts, first as an individual and later as president of the Authors Guild. At the Cathedral and elsewhere, she led writing workshops for every imaginable demographic, acting on her conviction that storytelling had the power to draw one closer to one’s own best, most authentic self, and that everyone had a story to tell.

Among those who attended her memorial service, held here on November 28, 2007, was Helen Stephenson, executive director of the Authors Guild. “The cathedral organ,” she recalled, “had recently been repaired following a major fire, but the rear portion of the sanctuary was partly blocked off where reconstruction work was still under way. I remember thinking, This is so typical: the cathedral is still ‘under construction.’ They got the organ fixed, but it still isn’t perfect. It occurred to me that Madeleine always knew how to deal with ‘it isn’t perfect.’ Then I looked all around, and I said to myself, ‘Oh my goodness. Where’s Madeleine? Where is she?’”

Leonard S. Marcus is one of the world’s leading writers about children’s books and the people who create them. His own award-winning books include Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom; Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature; and The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth. His most recent book, Listening for Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L’Engle in Many Voices, is now available.

by Ben Schrank

Writing a novel should be fun. At the beginning, meander. Don’t be afraid to play around. Get lost. Fall down. Get dirty. The stakes aren’t high because whatever is written will be tossed, ideally without fret or regret. When I began to write Love Is a Canoe I thought I wanted to write about a girl who gets advice from her grandfather while paddling around in a canoe. I meandered for over a year before that girl turned into a boy. I wrote additional narratives that wandered far afield of the novel I would eventually complete, built complex lives at a country inn and indulged in pages of imagery and then, when I found characters I believed in (a senior publishing executive who had disappeared into her persona, an unhappy young married couple, a writer who wrote a popular book of advice on marriage) I wound their stories together. But on the way there, Peter Herman, the character who wrote the book within my book, Marriage is a Canoe, officiated at marriages and then got horribly drunk at them. He was attacked in his house by an unhappy married couple. He started work on a novel. I had a wild time at that wedding, was shocked at the violence an unhappy couple can inflict, and I plotted and wrote a lot of Peter Herman’s dirty, indulgent novel. Then I tossed it all.

Most, if not all, writers work through several drafts. The concept of the writer writing and then throwing material away is not new. But they never say they liked doing it. Julian Barnes says of first drafts in an interview with the Paris Review: “The pleasure of the first draft lies in deceiving yourself that it is quite close to the real thing. The pleasure of the subsequent drafts lies partly in realizing that you haven’t been gulled by the first draft.”
 Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan tells us, in an interview with CNN, that when she writes a novel, it may go through 50 or 60 drafts. Egan says: “The key is struggling a lot.”

Some years ago, Alexandra Alter interviewed 17 authors in the Wall Street Journal about process. All shared some variation on this line, from Amitav Ghosh, “It never gets easier; it’s always hard, it’s always a test.” None said, “It’s indulgent and can be messy and I love every minute of it.” Why does no one writer want to admit that the process of writing, while often terribly trying, can also be bliss? Are writers trying to keep this secret to themselves? I don’t mind dwelling for months on plot lines that likely won’t work. I am happy to lose myself for hours in a conversation between characters that isn’t relevant to the story I know I’ll eventually tell. Perhaps the pleasure I take in process makes me unprofessional. I don’t care. I’m rather a Spartan person but I am defensive of the luxury I indulge in by writing this way.

Visual artists often talk about the allure of retaining the qualities of a child. Picasso’s line is most famous and also most representative: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” But novelists only chest-thump about the pain involved in making their work. Why? If they have been attempting to erect barriers to keep would-be writers out, surely all can agree that that attempt at gate-keeping has failed.

I am now meandering again, working with images I find compelling, like a couple arguing on the moon and a woman sitting on her brownstone stoop in summer. I don’t know how that couple got to the moon or when that woman will get off that stoop. I do know I will happily spend as much time as I like building their stories. Then I will blow them apart without ever feeling bad about the time or energy spent. I am not harming anybody. I believe that if you don’t enjoy the actual process of writing, why write? Pressure to publish? How could one possibly feel a thing so ridiculous at a time like this? Writers should admit that novel-writing is a pleasure.

Ben Schrank is president and publisher of Razorbill, a Penguin imprint that is home to many award-winning and New York Times–bestselling books for children and young adults. Ben is also the author of the novels Consent and Miracle Man. He wrote “Ben’s Life,” a monthly column for Seventeen magazine, in the 1990s. He grew up in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife and son. For more information, please visit the author’s website, www.benschrank.com. You can also follow @BDSchrank on Twitter.

Love Is a Canoe, Ben Schrank’s most recent novel, will be published in January. You can read an excerpt here.

(Steps In Reverse Order)

by Matthew Quick

Step 5 – You are going to need a lot of people to purchase your novel—and I do mean a lot! Like, more than you can even imagine. Yes, your father will buy copies for all of his business associates; your mother will tell (in great detail) every single person who comes within a twenty-foot radius all there is to know about you and your work; you will even be contacted by the caretakers of your late grandfather, and they will say he proudly pitched your novel to every doctor and nurse he saw until his last dying breath; your siblings and friends will do everything they can to support you, making signed copies of your movie tie-in edition the standard go-to birthday and holiday gift; but all of this will never be enough—even if your family is enormous and you have impossibly generous friends. You will need complete strangers to buy your work, to fall in love with your words and encourage others to do the same. Sometimes these strangers will write beautiful e-mails that make you ache and believe that maybe you really are on your way, but mostly these strangers will never ever contact you, as you pretend you’re not obsessively checking Amazon numbers and Goodreads reviews. You will have woefully minimal control over the millions of potential book-buyers in the world, even if you tour around; give many TV, radio, and print interviews; speak often; and maintain a healthy web presence. (Even if you miss spending your birthday with your wife for the first time since 1993 so that you can promote the film and MTI.) It’s like trying to control the weather with your hopes and dreams.

Step 4 - Of course, you will need Hollywood-types to adapt your novel and make a movie. There’s a lot more to this than you would think. First, you will probably be surprised when you learn your literary agent has an agreement with a film agent at CAA. In fact, if you are anything like me, you will be shocked when you get the call from LA and a stranger says you have a movie deal. (“I have a film agent?” was the first thing I said.) Then, for the next four or five years, you will wonder just what it was that Hollywood saw in your work—what made your book jump out from the thousands and thousands on the shelves? It helps tremendously if you can manage to land an Oscar-nominated director, like David O. Russell, and a star-studded A-list ensemble cast. It’s very helpful to have the extremely recognizable (and beautiful) faces of Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper on the cover of your MTI. Names like Robert De Niro and Chris Tucker don’t hurt a bit. When you are sent out by The Weinstein Company to promote the movie, you will learn that the subject matter of your book, mainly mental health awareness, is extremely important to David O. Russell. He had never done a book-to-film adaptation before. The source material spoke to him. It also spoke—on a deeply personal level—to many others involved with the film, all of whom fought passionately to bring The Silver Linings Playbook to the screen. You didn’t know who your art would touch when you were creating it. And now that it’s in the world, you realize that it’s taken on a life of its own—over which you have little control.

Step 3 - You’ll need an editor. And if you can land a famous editor who has her own imprint, even better! Sarah Crichton is my editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I probably didn’t have to tell you that, because The Silver Linings Playbook is a Sarah Crichton Book, after all. It says so on the spine. How did I end up with Sarah? During one of our first meetings, she told me about a meal she had with a handsome Italian editor in a beautiful suit. She asked what was good on the market, and he told her he had just lost a bidding war in Italy. Then he raved about the novel he had failed to acquire; it was called The Silver Linings Playbook. Sarah contacted my agent the next day and purchased the book soon after. A very happy accident! Once you sign with an agent, you really have no control whatsoever; you can only trust your agent. Before you are partnered up with your editor, no matter how much good work your agent puts into your career, you will worry at home and ceaselessly annoy your significant other with unanswerable questions, like, “Do you really think my book will sell or am I a delusional hack?” And your significant other—if you are truly in love—will drip-feed you the verbal reassurance you need every thirty seconds or so, whenever you are not sleeping or adequately self-medicated. Cross your fingers, if you need something to do. (I also recommend crossing toes.)

Step 2 - Secure a literary agent who believes passionately in your work—an ally who will weather the ups and downs of your career without changing his mind about your potential. Douglas Stewart is my agent, and he’s amazing. He gets my work. He gets me. During my agent search, I did months’ worth of research and tried my best to secure referrals. None of that helped. The research led to rejections. The referrals went nowhere. I used to coach high school basketball with a tall man who—if my memory is correct—once played for the Washington Generals, the team that is supposed to lose to The Globetrotters. His name: Doug Stewart. After being rejected by dozens of literary agents, I queried Doug Stewart (the agent)—knowing nothing about him—mostly because the same-name coincidence made me laugh. (I am easily amused.) The universe was amused too. My manuscript was plucked from the slush. Almost immediately, my new agent made incredible things happen for my career. And I have since learned that Doug Stewart the lit agent and I are a perfect match. Another happy accident! You will have minimal control over the agent search. You will do research and send out carefully written query letters, but fate plays the largest role.

Step 1 – You must write a book that is authentically you—a novel in which you believe unequivocally. This is the rally flag you will hoist high in hopes that the right sort of opportunity makers will see it and move closer. It is the hand you extend into the darkness, trusting there will be another to shake; the leap you take off the cliff, believing the proverbial net will appear. The writing should take you to new adrenaline-pumping, heart-pounding states of mind; force you to reveal a hidden part of your identity—it’s a coming out, if you will!—keep you up at night; and make you break out into the occasional sweat. For me, good scotch is necessary to make it through the writing process. If your loved ones are worried about your mental health, this is a fantastic sign—historically, you are in impressive company! Knowing that there will be critics, friends, and family even, who will make you feel ridiculous for birthing these words, who will make you feel as though expressing yourself honestly is the equivalent of doing a striptease in the middle of your family’s Thanksgiving dinner, you do it anyway, because there is no other choice. In many ways, this step is completely irrational, but if it’s in you to do, do it you will! You must. Think of all that may happen! And here’s the most beautifully stunning part: at this point in the process, over the words on the page, you have 100% control. It’s just you. You.

Matthew Quick is the author of The Silver Linings Playbook and two novels for young adults, Sorta Like a Rock Star and Boy21. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, the novelist Alicia Besette. He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter. For more information, visit: MatthewQuickWriter.com.

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