Code Name: Erin Orison

Part four of the ASP (www.alansquirepublishing.com) series. McFerrin is the author of Dead Love. Join her and ASP authors Joanna Biggar and James J. Patterson for a book launch event on tomorrow at The Writer’s Center.

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Talk about spooky characters! I am sitting at a coffee shop in Washington D.C., talking to Oleg Kalugin, former head of KGB operations, getting a warm, fuzzy, feeling … and it is creeping me out. This friendly man, in whom I find it so easy to confide, once received high honors for the assassination of Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov; though KGB chief Yuri Andropov probably ordered the hit. Admittedly, I’m already in a heightened state of excitation, having just visited the International Spy Museum, an operation dedicated to the art of espionage, for which Mr. Kalugin serves as an advisory director, but still ….

I am actually in Washington on government business, helping an agency give money away to arts organizations all over the country. It is a tedious affair trying to slice up a pie that is nowhere near big enough. The International Spy Museum and the chat with Oleg Kalugin are my idea of adding a bit of—how shall I say it—a thrill to the visit. The museum and the chat have been thrilling. I have an almost unhealthy interest in investigation, particularly of the clandestine variety, as part of my work as a writer and certainly in relation to my novel, Dead Love. In Dead Love, The Consortium, an evil organization run by the dastardly Christian Orison, is threatened with exposure and strikes back in nefarious ways with the help of a shape-shifting ghoul. My book is a global supernatural thriller with an international chase full of torturous twists and turns, and I need to know plenty about covert operations in order to make it real.

At the International Spy Museum I have learned about bugs and drops and micro-devices and, most significantly, about creating what spies call “a cover.” The fabrication of a fictitious personality and a past that supports it—from sales slips for items never purchased to passports, entire families, and tickets to events never attended—strikes me as the essence of what writers must do when creating a character. I know that my characters often become so real that I have trouble confining them to the works for which they were generated. A really well drawn character will speak to me, maybe even start making demands. Erin, Christian’s daughter in the novel, who almost becomes a zombie, now has her own website where she blogs every day on The Daily Slice. She’s even been a guest blogger for other sites. Clément, the aforementioned ghoul and master at assuming identities—he changes bodies like humans change clothes—is demanding top billing in a book of his own. In other words, a well-invented character has an authenticity that it should be hard to question.

My website features a quote by Jessamyn West: “Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.” Uncovering the truth that lies hidden seems to be at the root of the most alluring tales. Writers are experts at this, and it is a known fact that inventive writers make very good spies. One of my uncles was an American war correspondent and a spy. When he died at an advanced age; the real stories were buried with him.

When I think about it, a lot of my favorite authors were spies. Anthony Burgess, who wrote A Clockwork Orange and Tremor of Intent worked for British Army Intelligence in WWII. John le Carré (real name: David Cornwall); author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Smiley’s People; and more, worked for British Intelligence during the Cold War. Ian Fleming worked for British Naval Intelligence and our own André Le Gallo, Left Coast Writer and author of The Caliphate served as the National Intelligence Officer for Counterterrorism for the CIA.

There is one little problem for both spies and authors, particularly writers of fiction. When you are inventing people and worlds, the line between truth and fiction seems to blur. But haven’t we learned, post Einstein, that everything, including the truth, is relative? Well, that opens up a whole can of worms, many of which like playing with the characters in Dead Love. As for me, I’m recruiting for my own spy ring, the Z.I.A., or Zombie Intelligence Agency; their mission is to report to me on all matters zombie. How to join? It’s no secret. Just send Erin a note on Facebook.

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Poet, travel writer and novelist Linda Watanabe McFerrin (www.lwmcferrin.com), is the founder of Left Coast Writers®. She has been traveling since she was two and writing about it since she was six. A contributor to numerous journals, newspapers, magazines, anthologies and online publications, she is the author of two poetry collections, an award-winning novel (Namako:  Sea Cucumber) and short story collection (The Hand of Buddha), and the editor of a travel guidebook (Best Places Northern California, 4^th ed.) and four literary anthologies.

A past winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, she teaches and leads workshops in fiction and creative non-fiction. Her latest novel, Dead Love, is available now from Stone Bridge Press.

Slow Lit

By Joanna Biggar

Part three of the ASP (www.alansquirepublishing.com) series. Biggar is the author of That Paris Year, the second title released by Alan Squire Press. Join her and other ASP authors for a book launch event on Friday at The Writer’s Center.

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Now that revolutionary trends seem to be found in the slow lane, as in the ‘Slow Food Movement,’ I’d like to take a counter-cultural stand for Slow Lit. In an age of Facebook postings, blogs, tweets, e-books and literary twitchings of every sort (and I plead guilty to all of the above), I am deeply pleased to have come out with That Paris Year, a novel that is ‘wrong’ on all those counts.

First of all, it is long – over 400 pages. It is complex. Not only does it have five main characters, five young women who travel to Paris together to study at the Sorbonne, but also a collage of supporting characters, French and American, and it takes place in many locations. It unfolds in one time period, 1962-63, as seen through the lens of another, a decade later. It also attempts to explore ideas – the way travel, close relationships, and love shape identity; the way memory distorts through time – and express them as much through carefully crafted language as through plot.

Moreover, it is physically beautiful. At a time when books are being reduced to cyber-print, Alan Squire Publications ran in the other direction. The richly colored cover, done by artist Greg Robison, well-known to The Writer’s Center, is a thing of beauty. The fonts, print size, heavy paper, the artisanship of the designer and printer all contributed to making it a “real book.” As a bookseller at Book Passage in San Francisco said to me, “You just don’t see books made like this any more.”

But one reason above all others qualifies my novel as Slow Lit: It took thirty years to write. For those who are not yet thirty, this may be hard to grasp. But for those who have hit that landmark and then some, as well as for other writers of fiction, this may be understandable. On the far end of that divide, I once had some time to work on this story, loosely based on experience, but not the writing experience to pull it off. Then I got busy: working, traveling, marriage, three kids, teaching at The Writer’s Center at night. Through all that, I couldn’t ever find the time to “sink into” the book that it required. But I had become a writer.

Then, toward the other end of the thirty years, I found the time and threw myself into the work of writing the story I had carried in my head for so long. Like much that is slow, it was a rich and rewarding experience. I’m glad, too, that it had so long to marinate, for if I had waited until I “knew better,” I probably wouldn’t have dared to undertake a project so complicated, so “old-school.” It wouldn’t have been nearly so much fun to write, and I hope, to read. And I certainly wouldn’t have dared envision the sequels, which I’m already at work on – albeit, not quite so slowly.      

Joanna Biggar is a writer, journalist, and teacher who has published fiction, poetry, personal and travel essays and hundreds of feature articles for newspapers and magazines.
She's traveled solo in the most remote corners of China, chaired a school board in Ghana, worked as a journalist in Washington, DC, and taught school kids in Oakland, California, where she lives. She is married, has five adult children, and six grandchildren who love books. A member of the Society of Women Geographers, the author’s special places of the heart remain France and the California coast.

The Savage Blue Pencil: James J. Patterson

Part II of the ASP (www.alansquirepublishing.com) series on First Person Plural, which will be all this week. James J. Patterson is the publisher and co-founder of Alan Squire Publishers. You can find him at www.jamesjpatterson.com and join him for the ASP book launch event at The Writer’s Center this Friday, October 22. For more details on the event, visit Writer.org.

“But you already have a book, right here,” editor/publisher Rose Solari said as she finished plowing through a stack of essays with the working title Bermuda Shorts.

“I do?”

“Certainly, there’s a strong narrative thread, a consistency of voice, it’s a little uneven here and there but you can correct that.”

You see I had big plans, oh yes I did. Five or six more chapters worth of plans, which would expand the arc of the narrative to a dizzying apogee, before plunging with literary certitude to land the reader gently, back upon his or her feet after having been on a spectacular ride.

When she laid the essays end to end, I was shocked, if not a little horrified. Taking a few hours or a day here and there whenever possible over the course of twenty and more years to write down some ideas, place them within a narrative scenario, find a hook, so to speak, to hang them on, etc., hadn’t informed me that I was writing stories that were essentially autobiographical. Really, it hadn’t crossed my mind. I wanted to save the planet from toxic waste by launching our nukes and poisons at the sun. I wanted to share what I had learned visiting colleges and universities playing music, visiting a hundred or more campuses a year for over a decade. I was mad at the arms industry for siphoning away funds that would have made our society truly great, prosperous, and admirable over the course of my lifetime. I was talking about my ideas, not the wonder of being me.

In a literary sense, I wanted to play with time, I wanted to find a way around time so each event could be somehow positioned in the now, so that the narrative could strike out in any direction and return safely without notice. I wanted to do my part in defeating what I call “The tyranny of the personal pronoun, ‘I,’ ” by letting persons, places and things offer up the content of the stories I would write.

At any rate, as soon as the preliminary stage of actually getting the stories down on paper was over, there then was deployed on my behalf, what I refer to as “The Savage Blue Pencil.” In a word, editing.

Get any couple of editors together, turn yourself into a fly and light upon the nearest wall, and the horror stories begin.

EDITOR1: Did you hear? So-and-so’s new book just came out and guess what? That’s right, they spelled her name wrong on the cover!
EDITOR2: No kidding? Typical, so-and so’s book has a typo on the first page!
EDITOR1: Not to mention so-and so, poor dear, her latest came out and somehow all the text is triple spaced!
EDITOR2: Oh, and listen to this, so-and-so opened his new book and when he began to read he could tell something was wrong. Oh yes, they printed his second draft, not the edited final draft we spent six months revising!
EDITOR1: And don’t get me started about Amazon!

Then overhear them getting down to cases on my own book!

EDITOR1: He alternately has reasoned arguments that are interesting and fun to follow and then he, well…
EDITOR2: …he launches into a harangue!
EDITOR1: Yes! He goes into a harangue, not crazy but he definitely leaves his feet for a few moments here and there. He knows he’s doing it too…what t’do?
EDITOR2: We’ll tag the arguments, arguments, and the harangues, harangues, then create categories for them in the index.

Truly great editors, like Rose Solari and Nita Congress, know that they should sing gentle praises into your heart as they draw the bright blue squiggle announcing the deletion of an entire page of text you’ve spent many hours if not days attempting to perfect.

If one is honest, one looks upon the edited text and asks the ultimate question, “does it sing?” If the answer is no, well, it’s back to the drawing board.

And it is in this final return where the magic happens. It is when the last bit of dust and clutter is swept from the page, where the once tangled yarns are now shown to have a pattern. And oddly enough, you realize all at once, as you turn to the next edit, that there is no next edit, which means, it’s finished. It is real.

Let’s Build a Stage and Put on a Show!

Today's guest on First Person Plural is poet and workshop leader Rose Solari. The post is part of the ASP (www.alansquirepublishing.com) series on First Person Plural, which will be all this week. Rose Solari is the publisher and co-founder of Alan Squire Publishers. You can find Rose at www.rosesolari.com, and join her for the ASP book launch event at The Writer’s Center this Friday, October 22. For more details on the event, visit Writer.org.

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It seems to me that there are two kinds of writers: those who are content to make and market their own work, believing, sensibly, that that is plenty; and those whose desire to promote and publish other writers exists in tandem with their own writing efforts. I belong to the latter group, those who, like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Babes in Arms, want to build a stage and put on a show!

It may have something to do with organizational skills. I always get little angry when I hear someone talk about left-brain or right-brain people, and how we creative types, evidently the right-brainers, are supposed to be the flakes of the universe, floating outside the space-time continuum while crafting our deathless poetry or prose. Excuse my language, but that’s bullshit. I love to write and I love to organize, and the two go very well together. Over the years, I’ve put together countless salons and readings, as well as theatrical events, tributes to other writers, and home concerts. It’s been hard work, but it’s also been a blast.

This year, I decided it was time to realize a long-held dream. I’ve wanted to be a publisher since I was ten years old. It was then that I produced my first, very limited editions, folding sheets of construction paper into folios I stitched or glued together. Whether I filled them with my own drawings and poems, or passages of my father’s favorite books, I loved the act of making something, of putting it all together.

Like a lot of young writers, I joined the staffs of my high school and college literary magazines. A post grad school job at a national magazine boosted my writing and editing skills, and when that magazine started a series of anthologies, published by Harper Collins, I quickly took on a co-editor position for that, as well. In the meantime, I was a hired gun on many a book project, from scholarly studies of J.R.R. Tolkien and Shakespeare, to New Age re-evaluations of Jungian and Freudian theory, to a reminiscence by a young photographer who had fallen into a telephone friendship with the aging, reclusive Marlene Dietrich.  I discovered that I had a knack, if you will, for seeing how a book fit together as a whole, for finding the through-line that would snag the reader’s attention, for seeing the arc of beginning, middle, and end.  And how gratifying it was, to see an author move from draft to draft to polished finish, as the book took shape.

Less happily, I also worked on many a promising manuscript that never found its way between covers, or got into print only to be lost in the scramble of a big publishing house’s need for a big seller. A young-adult author I’d worked with told me her agent was looking “for the next J. K. Rowling.” Another agent, responding to a proposal for my own historical novel-in-progress, said he was hoping for something as potentially successful as Umberto Ecco’s  The Name of the Rose. (Gee, no pressure there!) My boyfriend (now husband), a retired singer-songwriter who had moved into magazine publishing, too, dismissed this as laziness, the kind he had seen in the music business.

“The big guys — the big publishers, agents, music companies — don’t want to do their own R & D,” he said.  “And they’re not interesting developing artists over the course of a career. They’re interested in how much money they can make off these artists, and how fast.”

His words had the ugly ring of truth.

Meanwhile I had some very positive experiences with independent presses. My first two books of poems, Difficult Weather and Orpheus in the Park, were published, respectively by Derrick Hsu’s Gut Punch press and Grace Cavalieri’s The Bunny & the Crocodile. At Gut Punch, I joined a list including such terrific poets as Richard Peabody, Sunil Freeman, and Reuben Jackson, feeling like the first girl child in a family of wonderful older brothers. With Grace, I joined an eclectic list that included Michael Glaser, former Maryland Poet Laureate, and also got a peak at how this amazing woman runs her press. In fact, the DC area had no shortage of cool, inspiring indie presses. The husband and I began to talk. We had started and run SportsFan Magazine (SFM) together, and though we had reluctantly shut it down in the fall of 2006, we thought we could apply our energy and our lessons learned to another publishing venture.

Then we had a galvanizing moment. In March of ’09, I was invited to serve as Blackwell Books Poet-in-Residence for the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival. This opportunity was so rich in so many ways, it would be impossible to enumerate them all. But one of the highlights was hearing the publisher John Calder, Samuel Beckett’s great champion; speak about his own life and work. Now in his late eighties, Calder’s enthusiasm for his writers remains undimmed – he called Beckett “the greatest writer in English since Shakespeare.” Asked his thoughts on the current literary scene, he said that the advances in printing technology and access have made for “the most exciting time in publishing since the post-war era” of which he was a part. He added that his only regret was that he might not live long enough to participate in whatever would happen next. Jimmy and I looked at each other — it seemed we’d heard just what we needed to hear.

On the plane home, we devised a plan to start our own press, involving collaborations with other indie publishers we admired, both at home and in the U.K. We’d help each other promote and distribute our titles; we’d share experiences, resources, and ideas. We’d keep the name of the umbrella organization under which we’d founded SFM, Alan Squire Publishing, or ASP. (I’ve always loved snakes.) And as publisher, I decided that the first book I wanted to see into print was a collection of Jimmy’s essays, Bermuda Shorts. It’s a beautiful and diverse group of pieces, many of which have been published previously in magazines and anthologies, and ranges from autobiography to philosophy to gender studies to sports commentary. I saw the whole that these parts could make up, and knew it would be a wonderful book, indeed. Our second title is the gorgeous debut novel of the well-known journalist, essayist, and poet Joanna Biggar, That Paris Year, which follows five young women through a year in France in the early 1960s. Both are published in conjunction with two other indie presses we love, Santa Fe Writers Project and Left Coast Writers. We’re already looking at manuscripts from some U.K. writers we’ve met on our travels there, and establishing collaborations with indie publishers in England, including Chris Andrews Publishing, another husband-and-wife team who make some of the most beautiful books I’ve ever seen. 

And now, all ASP engines are revving for our East Coast Launch, Friday night at The Writer’s Center. James and Joanna will be joined by the dynamic Linda Watanabe McFerrin, author of Dead Love, a very sexy zombie novel, and founder of Left Coast Writers. We’ve got music, video, surprise special guests, and a big party afterward in the Center’s newly renovated Jane Fox Reading room. It’s going to be quite the celebration. As for me, I still have to pinch myself from time to time to make sure it’s real.

I’ve always wanted to be a publisher – and now I am.