Book!

I'm pleased to announce that Louisiana State University Press has decided to publish my story collection The Greatest Show as the Spring 2012 book in its Yellow Shoe fiction series.

Why Yellow Shoe? As editor Rand Dotson tells me, the name is from someone misunderstanding LSU fiction as "Yellow Shoe" fiction. I like a press with a sense of humor. Thanks to the good folks at LSU, and especially to Michael Griffith, the series editor, for choosing my manuscript.

Should I read Water for Elephants? Or not?

Circus literature in the news:

1. Water for Elephants, the mega-historical-hit novel, is about to be released as a mega-historical-hit movie.

2. Death-Defying Acts, a poetry collection of testimonies from circus performers, is a finalist for a national award given to books from independent publishers.

Which am I more likely to read? The novel? Or the poetry?

The poetry.

I’d very much like to read the poetry. The publisher, Wordfarm, is a fine young press that first made an impression in my home when my wife brought home a book called Bright Shoots of Everlastingness. It had a stunning cover and essays that included one that had appeared in Best American Religious Writing. Since then, Wordfarm has also published Alan Michael Parker’s funny, tender novel Whale Man.

Why I’m less likely to read Water for Elephants I can’t exactly say. Something about my reluctance feels like insecurity. The book is a big hit. It’s fiction about a circus. I’ve written fiction about a circus. Why compare? When I was working on House of Good Hope, I one day saw another book that put a cold lump in my gut. The Pact was, like HOGH, about city kids making a promise to return to the broken city they love. Their city was Newark; I wrote Hartford. In The Pact, the young men all return home and become medical professionals. It’s a true story, but it seems to me less true to life than the more complicated ending of HOGH. But The Pact has sold better. Much better. It may well be a better book than HOGH, but I haven’t read it.

I tell myself I need to read The Pact. I tell myself to read Water for Elephants. A friend once gave me a novel called The Aerialist. It’s about a circus. My friend recommended it. I should read that one, too. After all, the guy who designs Chevy’s mini-vans must look at Ford’s.

But then I tell myself: chill. Competition in the writing world might follow a different model. Sprinters on a track and field team don’t watch each other. The other runners are a distraction. Instead, runners focus on their own form. They rely on their strengths and try to mitigate their weaknesses. They study and practice and study and practice and when the gun goes off go like hell.

And I do study. All the time I read stories that inspire awe, stories about a serial killer called The Misfit, or a shell-shocked soldier in Italy, or an Irish woman who wants to write about Chekhov and oysters. Those gold-medal stories make me want to clear my desk, open the laptop and aspire.

Still, I wonder. What do other writers do? Read the contemporary books that are like theirs? Or not?

The shortlist for the Scott Prize

Here's some great good news. My short story collection manuscript, The Greatest Show, is on the shortlist for The Scott Prize, an award that carries publication with the fine independent press, SALT Publishing.

SALT is an international publisher, headquartered in the U.K., with a bunch of great books and writers in its catalogue. Congrats to all those who made the shortlist. I've checked you all out, and I’m feeling lucky to have my manuscript among yours.

The Greatest Show came out of my unending fascination with my hometown, Hartford, Connecticut, and its history. On July 6, 1944, a fire erupted during a matinee performance inside a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus tent, killing more than 160 people and injuring hundreds more. My father would have been inside the tent that day had his divorced parents not argued and his mother kept him from an outing with his dad. Years later, when I was an adult, the fire still haunted Hartford's cultural consciousness. My stories grow out of that haunting.

My gratitude goes to the folks at SALT.

Back inside the tent

from Charlie Chaplin's movie, The Circus

This blog started as an experiment, a high-wire walk with no practice and no net. What did I know of blogging? Nada. But I stepped out there and fell and climbed back up and learned something. Then, I pulled the curtains.

It was time for a new show. For more than two years my blogging mojo has gone into HimPlus17, where my wife and I chat about our age difference (I’m 17 years younger).

But I’ve kept this blog in reserve, mostly for the title. It’s the same as a short story collection I’ve been dreaming up. Someday, I thought, I might need a venue for news about the manuscript as it became a book.

Not quite there yet. But that collection is finished ... and I’m hopeful, especially now. Why?

Here’s a hint.

Whitehead, remembered

Had I but world enough and time, I’d leave Baltimore in a couple of weeks and trek to Fayetteville, Arkansas where a little store called Nightbird Books will host “A Celebration of Jim Whitehead: Readings from his Works.”

Jim died in 2003. A fierce, loving man, he was a fine poet and novelist, an offensive lineman, a co-founder of the graduate creative writing program at the University of Arkansas and one of my mentors there. Also, he was a dear friend, and I love him still. This celebration, scheduled for Sept. 9 from 7-9 p.m., marks the release of a book honoring him. For, From, About James T. Whitehead:
Poems, Stories, Photographs, and Recollections, is
edited by Michael Burns, another former student of Jim’s (there are thousands of us), and is the second book with Jim’s name to be published posthumously. The other, also put together with editing by Michael Burns, is called The Panther:
Posthumous Poems. Whitehead was fascinated by the possibility that a Roman Centurion known as Pantera

was the historical father of the historical Jesus, a possibility that has also been studied by the scholar James Tabor, who wrote an introduction for the book.

Jim pushed for work that was both local and universal, and what he saw that combined the two was grace. "All right," he said in an interview a few decades past,

“we do fall apart and then we feel terrible guilt because we fall apart, from time to time. Our bodies and our souls are broken. But we mend, we mend. And I think one of the terrible things about so much contemporary literature is that it’s in this wretched, Freudian bag, with its negative view. It has no place for grace–this is not religious grace in any sense of traditional metaphysics or Christianity, but there is grace in the world. We all know there is grace. And yet, people have tried to convince us that there isn’t.”

Jim made it his life’s work to show readers and students where grace resides. My gratitude continues.

Nightbird Books is at 205 W. Dickson, in Fayetteville.