Monthly Archives: December 2019

Favorite Books

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At this very moment, subject to change and future whim, here are my five favorite books of all time:

The History of Love, Nicole Krauss

Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner

My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout

The Great Gatsby, F.Scott Fitzgerald

The Fixer, Bernard Malamud

OOPs, make it six:

A Gentleman in Moscow Amor Towles

 

A Discovery!

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Oh, nirvana, I just discovered an artist I have never encountered before! Felix Vallotton’s work has been around for over a hundred years, and I have not known about it. Where have I been?

See for yourself: Here are two pieces, an oil of two lovers, and a woodcut he did during WWI.

I think I just fell in love.

Why I wrote Come the Morning

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It takes many years for me to write a novel and it challenges more than anything else in my life. At times I think I’m not up to it. Then  I remember why I do it: to tell the sort of stories I like to read, stories that are well written, hard to put down, written with beautiful prose, played out with full-bodied characters, books that usually come highly recommended.
   Each story sets itself up in its own particular way, comes with its own particular place and time, with its own particular voice and character. There’s where things get delicious and all of this is what I try for.
   With Come the Morning, I thought I wanted to tell the story of the struggles of a group of American artists working at the beginning of the Twentieth century. But it wasn’t the group, after all, just one of them yanked me by the scruff (a seduction, really).
   Robert Henri became one of the most inspirational and important artists America has ever produced. I fell in love with him, a man who died almost a century ago. I wish I had actually known him, smelled him, asked him questions, gone with him where he went. I feel I do know him now, at least a bit.
   Though Henri and most of his group of artists are real, the story is told through the eyes of Ezekiel Harrington, a fictional gallery owner. Both Harrington and Henri are characters readers might think are controversial, agreeable, disagreeable, courageous, wrong-headed, or likeable. No matter, they both face life with tremendous verve.
   My fondest wish is that Come the Morning sweeps readers up into the times at the turn of the century and brings with it an intimacy with the  characters’ peculiar drives, wants, successes and foibles. And I hope Come the Morning grants readers some understanding of their own lives.

A Lot of Work and Learning

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You would think there’s not much to do on your book, once it publishes.

Ah, not so. If anything, there’s more. There’s a ton more If you want to get you books “out there”. I’ve read that 10% of a writer’s time is devoted to actual writing, the rest–90%–is eaten up with editing, contracting, dealing with publishers, agents, rewriting, and a whole lot more

The real thing: every action you take has its own requirements, idiosyncrasies and quirks. Nothing is direct, nothing standard and it’s extremely time-consuming and intense. You have to respect your work a lot to put this much effort into it. I do, so I do it. And all of it keeps Alzheimer’s at bay, that’s for sure.