MIDLVLMAG - The perfect placement

I’ve worked in a lot of different places in my life - day camps, food co-ops, a medical billing office near Fenway Park just to name a few. I’ve temped and subsequently been referred to as “The Temp from the office” - which made me laugh at the time and can still make me smile.

I recently placed a CNF piece in MIDLVLMAG, the literary magazine of mid-level management. It’s a publication I’ve admired since it's inception and it is the perfect home for my piece, “Acknowledgement.” A lit mag for the 9-5 set? Oh yes. Phenomenal work from people across the employment spectrum? Absolutely.

This former temp is thrilled to have landed at MIDLVLMAG. You can find “Acknowledgement” here, and check out the rest of the publication here.

New Story in Peatsmoke Journal!

I often get incredulous looks from people when I talk about how much I love the editing process. But it’s true - I find revision and editing to be so satisfying. Seeing how a draft takes shape from the first to the last is almost magical.

The story that is out in Peatsmoke Journal today is called Unveiling. The characters for this story began kicking around in my mind over 20 years ago. I’d written different scenes and meandering character studies with them but I never expected that Ira, Zach, Will and Paul would find their way onto the printed page. It feels good!

There is one scene mid-way through the story where Ira is sitting on the steps of the Boston Public Library watching skateboarders practice on the steps below. I first wrote that scene back in 1998, inspired by a moment outside on the steps while I was on a break from doing research work at the library. I can still remember the heat of the day, the sound of the skateboard wheels against the concrete and granite, and the impish grin of one of the skaters - a shaggy boy with sideburns and a beat-up baseball cap.

If you’d like to read the piece, you can find it here.

I really liked working with the editors at Peatsmoke Journal - they gave me excellent line edits and holistic revision ideas and were extremely professional. THANK YOU!

New Work in The Stonecoast Review and the Crack the Spine "The Year" Anthology

I’ve got a piece of creative non-fiction in the June issue of The Stonecoast Review, Issue 15, titled How to Make Marmalade, and my previously published piece, How to Make A Cup of Tea appears in the Crack the Spine “The Year” Anthology. I am pleased that I was able to place the cup of tea piece in both the Lindenwood Review and the Anthology. Thank you to the editors of Stonecoast, Lindenwood and Crack the Spine.

Pandemic Reads

For the past year we have been stuck at home. My world, formerly borderless, is now confined to places I can get to on foot or after weighing the pros and cons of transit or car rides. However, it isn’t all bad, I have plenty of time to read.

Margot Livesey’s The Boy in the Field transported me to the UK, even if this isn’t the year to visit my favorite haunts.

Lily King’s Writers & Lovers took me back to the Cambridge, MA of my early 20s and had me crying with nostalgia and hope by the end.

Steven and I read poetry collections out loud every Sunday, improving our reading skills and feeding our hearts, our souls. We’ve loved the Beat poets, Richard Blanco, Louise Gluck, Neruda, Ferlinghetti, Cate Marvin, Nick Flynn, T.S.Eliot, and countless others. My bookshelves are full to bursting even though most of our beloved new poets have slim collections.

Revisiting old friends

I just finished reading Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel, The Magician of Lublin. I'd never read it before and it was an impulse buy at the SFPL $1 sale a couple of years ago. I've loved Singer for years, since childhood, really, when we would read his stories of the people of Chelm in Hebrew school. This edition is a pocket-size one, and the illustration on the cover, a line drawing of two scantily dressed women and a man in a bow tie, make the book seem much more potboiler-y than it is.

The Magician of Lublin felt fresher than I'd thought it would - shame on me. The story of Yasha, a magician, and his struggle as a Jew, and as a man, juggling his unusual career as well as a handful of lovers. Singer is very good at illuminating the lives of shtetl dwellers, city folks, the underclass and all of the subtleties involved. I heard myself gasp out loud at a particularly sad moment.

The entire time I was reading it, I kept thinking I was reading Bioy Casares or Borges. They have a lot of the same quality in their writing. This has happened to me before, confusing these three literary gents. I'm not sure why, but my interest in Singer has kicked me back to reading Bioy Casares, and Borges is never far from my mind.

I'm now reading Bioy Casares' Asleep in the Sun. It is funny and a little creepy, a good companion read to The Magician of Lublin.

Returning to the books of my youth

Some of the best parts of my childhood and young adulthood recently arrived via cross-country POD and my brother's car, carefully packed in boxes from my parent's home in Boston. The boxes arrived and I immediately immersed myself in my old books.

I read a lot these days about parents restricting their kids reading, or about parents wondering what exactly is age appropriate for their kids. I don't remember having any restrictions- if it was in the house and in a public space it was fair game. Same thing at our local library. I read everything I could get my hands on. Sometimes it was great and other times I remember being confused or perplexed by what I'd read, and that is okay.

Boxes from home brought me a copy of Tomas Takes Charge, an illustrated chapter book from the 60s that I've had since I was maybe 9 or 10, no idea where it came from but just seeing that illustrated library edition, with Tomas in his little red striped shirt on the cover, brought back memories. I remember how nervous I felt when Tomas and his sister move in to the abandoned apartment in a mostly empty building, wondering how kids my age could possibly fend for themselves. Re-reading it now, I cried at the end of the book just like I always did, when the kids find a real home with their former landlady and her husband.

And here's my copy of Hard Hearts Are for Cabbages, a novel picked up at a Connecticut diner that used to let you choose a book with your meal. It is a pleasant novel about Gypsy families in California, published in 1959, innocuous enough for a pre-teen in the late 1980s to read on a road trip back from New York.

I read Lady Chatterley's Lover long before I understood 90% of it, and haven't read it since, but I still remember how illicit it felt.

The boxes contain two copies of Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game, a book I still can't read without getting chills up my spine. They join a third copy I bought a few years back at my local bookstore.

The full series of Tales of the City, packed together in one of the boxes. The books that first introduced me to the city I now call home.

My original copies of This Boy's Life and The Bean Trees, read one summer in high school for a municipal summer reading event. Everyone in town who read the books met up at town hall and broke into small groups to discuss the books. My introductions to Tobias Wolff and Barbara Kingsolver respectively.

And then there were the less literary but still just as important books - the novelization of the movie Space Camp, Nancy Drew meets Hardy Boys mysteries, some slim volumes of teen angst I couldn't part with, the books I surrounded myself with as a kid that I can't imagine my life without.

The Cult of Elena Ferrante

I'd been hearing about Elena Ferrante for a couple of years before I finally picked up the first novel in her Neapolitan series, My Brilliant Friend. I never would have read it if not for the repeated urging of my friend Steven - we usually love the same books so when I had the chance to get a copy of the book with a gift certificate from my neighborhood indie bookstore, I bought it. And then I let it sit on my 3 foot tall book stack for a few weeks before I tucked it into my bag on my way into work.

Fast forward a week and I've finished the book - after days of returning late from my lunch breaks, a week of sitting in cafes reading instead of writing.

To say My Brilliant Friend is good is an understatement. It is, on the surface, the story of two girls growing up together in Naples in the 1950s/60s. It is a novel about friendships and family and breaking out of traditional roles. But beneath it all there is a simmering, occasionally explosive tension that pervades everything. The simplest moments are so electrically charged - as a reader I was on fight or flight alert throughout the whole book.

The second and third books in the series - The Story of a New Name, and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay - Are equally as engaging and Ferrante manages to maintain (if not amp up) the tension and underlying anger and frustration that Lenu and Lila endure throughout the series.

Ferrante uses the passage of time in unique ways. She also wrangles an enormous cast of characters and keeps them all relevant throughout the novels.

So who is Elena Ferrante? Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym for the Italian writer. She is a mystery- someone with no public presence, no author photos on her books, someone who inspires readers and reviewers to ask the difficult questions. Is Ferrante even really a woman? Is she an amalgam of any number of other authors? What clues lie in her work to direct us to her true identity?

I don't mind not knowing. I do mind that the fourth and last novel in the series is not due out until September.

Until then, I'll do my best to convert others to the cult of Ferrante, and I'll ration the last couple Ferrante books I haven't read yet and be first in line in September to buy her book.

 

 

Publishing Houses Everyone Should Know: New Directions

If you don't know New Directions, you're missing out.

Some of the best books I've read lately have been from this press. They put out work by César Aira, Paul Auster, Roberto Bolaño, Clarice Lispector, Christopher Isherwood and Julio Cortázar, to name a few of my favorites.

Their graphic design is fantastic, too - sometimes I'll see a re-issue of one of their books and really have to fight the urge to buy it just for the design.

New Directions can be found here.