Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category:

This time around, my photo (the one here on the site) caused me great anxiety. I was nine months pregnant. I had only one shirt that fit and was decent enough to wear. I had to go buy lipstick—I felt like I was thirteen—because I don’t really wear makeup anymore. Luckily I was able to find a salon to blow out my hair early in the morning before the photographer arrived. And I managed not to give birth during the shoot. Success!

When my sisters and I was young, on particularly gorgeous spring mornings, my mom would fling open the windows and say, “Remember this day, girls!” My mother is an optimistic lover of life, and, the older I get, the more I appreciate her indomitable attitude.

So on this random, winter-dragging Tuesday in March, I thought I’d follow her example and remember this day:

I, too, have a novel that ended up in a drawer. It was called Raise Plow, started in a workshop the second year of my MFA program in 2000. It was about a precocious twelve-year-old girl named Mary who lives in rural Illinois in 1960, who runs away with a slow seventeen-year-old farmhand named McCabe. It was very dark, kind of Badlands-esque.

There’s no way around it. Readers often want to know what’s “real” in novels, what’s taken from an author’s life. With my first two novels I got asked this in various ways at readings all the time. It seems a natural curiosity. So I’ll let you in on a few things.

I’ve often borrowed from my life. I don’t mean to suggest I write veiled autobiography, but I have used my experiences as foundations from which to create fictional worlds. A stint answering phones at an escort service in Salt Lake City was the basis for my first novel. A correspondence with a teenage murder suspect led me to write my second novel.

I haven’t been able to explore the Twin Cities as much as I’d like to with the arrival of first a baby and then winter, but as a follow up to the last post, here are some things I love about Minneapolis:

I’m not from anywhere. I don’t have a hometown. When I go home to visit my parents, it is to Bluffton, SC, a place I have never lived. I have lived in twelve different cities. I was restless in my twenties, which accounts for some of the stints, but I have also come to understand that perhaps there is a parallel in jumping around and being a writer. I am comfortable being an outside observer. I love discovering a place and its quirks.

I’m a sucker for a good title. A title, like a cover, has the power to seduce me into reading a book. What makes a good or bad title? It’s subjective, of course. What appeals to me might cause you to roll your eyes. Some titles I love:

A few years ago, while waiting to pick me up at the airport, my mom befriended another mom waiting for her daughter, a historian working on a piece about the orphan trains. My mom asked me if I had ever heard about trains that relocated children from the East Coast to the Midwest. I hadn’t, but I soon learned about this fascinating nugget of American history. And thus lodged the kernel which became Mothers and Daughters.

I’m not getting much writing done these days and sometimes I worry about having lost the ability. If I start thinking too much about the process, it all seems impossible. But I keep a list of things to remember—rules, I guess—which usually helps get me in the mood to write. I hope other writers might Read the Rest…