A Reader is a Writer: Meg Waite Clayton, author of The Wednesday Sisters

I was recently tagged on facebook with a "What kind of Book Geek Are You?" list. Although I rarely do the things it appears one is supposed to do on facebook (determine what TV mom I am? give a friend a plant?), I’d been spending days on the same scene in my new novel without too many words actually attaching themselves to the story, and so … procrastination without calories! I thought a slightly shortened version might make a decent introduction of myself as a reader, and who I am as a reader says a lot about the writer in me, too—or the writer I aspire to be, anyway. And what are we, if not our aspirations? That is (I hope) what my latest novel, The Wednesday Sisters, is about. The novel, about readers, writers, and friends, comes out in paperback tomorrow!

I’ll post more later in the week about how I write and how I got published, but for today, without further ado, here’s the Inner Book Geek in me:

What author do you own the most books by?
I have six books by each of Jane Austen, Alice McDermott, Sue Miller, Ian McEwan, and Ann Tyler. I have ten novels by Tolstoy, but eight are in a single volume. Does that count as ten or three?

What book do you own the most copies of?
Aside from my own (I just got 36 copies of the paperback of The Wednesday Sisters from Random House), I have three copies each of The Mercy Seller and The Illuminator by Brenda Rickman Vantrease. She's my best writer-pal; we started critiquing each other's work long before either of us had published anything more than her one travel article, and we now together count six books published or about to be. I drew heavily on our experience together in a writing group for the writing group the Wednesday Sisters form.

Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
They did? I’m actually an ardent admirer of the rules of grammar, but my copyeditor at Random House assures me that the modern novelist needs to be comfortable bending them sometimes.

What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
I do like Will Lasislaw from Middlemarch and Ray from Graham Swift's Last Orders, but my true literary loves are all spunky women: Meg from A Wrinkle in Time, and Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird, Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch, and Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice.

What book have you read the most times?
Middlemarch or Pride and Prejudice.

What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
Since I know how very hard it is to write any book, I'm simply unwilling to trash someone's hard work on a public forum.

What is the best book you've read in the past year?
For the first time? Peter Ho Davies' The Welsh Girl and Michelle Richmond's No One You Know. I've read some great nonfiction, too, including The House of Mondavi and Towers of Gold.

What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
The Wednesday Sisters. (Not for the obvious financial reasons, although I'd spend it wisely, but because movies sell books!)

What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?
Are any Shakespeare plays obscure? Obscure, from my dictionary: "relatively unknown." Where do I sign up for Shakespeare-level obscurity?

Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
Russians.

Roth or Updike?
Roth.

Sedaris or Eggers?
Sedaris.

Austen or Eliot?
Both! I love Middlemarch better than any single Austen, but I like all of Austen put together better than all of Eliot.

What is your favorite novel?
Toss up between Middlemarch and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Play?
Les Miserables. Although I loved Avenue Q, too, and Wendy Wasserstein.

Poem?
The poem I return to most often is Elizabeth Bishop's “The Moose.” My favorite passage from it, ending with my favorite lines in the poem:

A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus's hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses)…

Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

The poem evokes the "sweet sensation of joy" I felt the first time I saw a moose, which was just like in this poem, through the window of a bus late at night when I was a teenager going to canoe in the Quetico. One of the characters in the novel I’m working on now, "The Ms Bradwells," uses it to describe one of her friends.

Essay?

Tim O'Brien's “The Vietnam in Me.” I carry a copy of it in my journal, which I take everywhere. Whenever I lose my courage as I'm writing (and I do), I take it out and reread it.

And... what are you reading right now?

The answer I gave for this one on facebook was Dead of the House by Hannah Green (for Molly's Kepler's Fiction Group), and Kate Brady's The Mechanics of Falling. I've since finished the Hannah Green (great discussion!) and moved on to Amanda Eyre Ward's Love Stories in this Town. I read about 75 books a year, and I keep a list of recent reads on my website. - Meg

Shawna Yang Ryan: Asian American Lit

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month--what better time to start dipping your toes into books by Asian American authors?

Though a few Asian American authors, such as Sui Sin Far, Han Suyin and Jade Snow Wong, broke through to the mainstream in the early to mid-20th century, it was not until Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan that Asian American writers gained major attention. While many early works covered issues of cultural/generational conflict and identity, in the three decades since Kingston's Woman Warrior first came out, Asian American literature has flourished. Asian American writers, with strength in numbers, no longer bear the burden of being the single representative voice of Asian America. We are now blessed with idiosyncratic novels covering every conceivable human theme. 

Below are five of my favorites:

1. American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

This delightful graphic novel entwines three stories--the mythic Monkey King, a sitcom-like plot involving "Chin-Kee," and the adolescent travails of Jin--into a funny and insightful tale of self-acceptance. And you gotta love a book in which the overriding metaphor is a Transformer.

2. Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee

Luminous prose. Intriguing themes. Politics. Stereotypes turned literal in intriguing, smart ways. There's so much going on Lee's 1995 debut--it should be on any list of must-read American novels.

3. Donald Duk by Frank Chin

"Only the Chinese are stupid enough to give a kid a stupid name like Donald Duk," Donald says to himself. "And if the Chinese were that smart, why didn't they invent tap dancing?"

Frank Chin's literary career is perhaps outshone by his infamous feud with Maxine Hong Kingston, but that's a shame because Donald Duk, about a 12-year-old boy in San Francisco's Chinatown is a funny and generous (without being precious) account of how he comes to term with being Chinese  American. There are gods and railroad workers and Vietnam Vets--Chin covers big ideas with a light touch.

4. Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories by Hisaye Yamamoto

The first time I read this, I was struck by how... authentic the stories were. Some of the stories in this 1988 collection date back to the 1940s, and I suppose I was expecting something prim in accordance with the times, but instead I found writing surprisingly modern and honest, and without the stylistic tics that sometimes date mid-century writing. As beautiful as the haikus upon which the title is based.

5. Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun

 Joon is a Korean American runaway and Mun's 2008 debut follows her struggle on the streets in precise, heart-rending prose. This book exemplifies my point about new generation Asian American writing--this edgy, smart story is about an American girl--who just happens to be Korean too.

Again, this is just a sampling. There are too many to cover in a single post. Suggest your favorites in the comments!

I'm so happy to have had a chance to share my thoughts via the Well-Read Donkey! I look forward to presenting my new novel, Water Ghosts, at Kepler's on Tuesday, May 5th at 7:30. It happens to be an Asian American book too--about America's last Chinese town, Locke, on the Sacramento Delta. Richard Fong, the gambling hall manager, hasn't seen his wife in ten years. On Tuesday night, find out what happens when they meet in Locke for the first time in a decade....

Shawna Yang Ryan: Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural

Perhaps the natural next step after fairy tales (see previous blog) is ghost stories. 

Ghosts too have their own evolution, from energies that gain physical shape only when draped in something material (like a sheet!); to apparitions haunting hallways; to the real-but-more-symbolic ghosts of books like Toni Morrison's Beloved.

It was Beloved that I turned to when puzzling out the ghosts of my novel Water Ghosts. Though I love a good, old-fashioned, moss-draped-oak-tree, gothic-style haunting (and my book's setting, the Sacramento Delta, lends itself well to that), I had a historical problem. I set out originally to write a book about Chinese women in early 20th century America. 

But I discovered that there were few Chinese women during this time because of restrictive immigration laws. I then understood that there was a reason why stories of Chinese during this period tended to focus on the men. 

Water Ghosts is set in Locke, California, an independent (unincorporated) all-Chinese town. During the 1920s, when the novel is set, men outnumbered women 20:1.  That means in a population of 500, there were only 25 women. Many of these women, however, were white prostitutes.

How could I write about the “absence” of Chinese women and show that that absence loomed large, even defined life in Locke? 

The old-fashioned way. Ghosts. 

Ghosts are not only exciting story devices, but also lovely metaphors: placeholders, symbols of the longed-for object -- they are the presence still lingering in our hearts.

Ghosts remind me of the Chinese watercolor technique of "leaving whiteness," in which the unpainted areas become objects-- for example, the way painting a mountain around a stream of blank page can create a river.

 

Ghosts became a way to approach this historical and emotional absence. Richard Fong is a gambling hall manager who came to the US in 1918. He has worked his way up from a pear picker to manager. He has been separated from his wife, Ming Wai, for ten years, but one day she appears on a boat that emerges out of the fog. This what happens when he first approaches her on the dock as the rest of the town watches:

Richard feels as if they are all witnesses to his own funeral. Maybe he is already a ghost.

But the real ghost stands at the center, next to Manny. A faded, older version of Richard's wife, Ming Wai, whom he has not seen in ten years. 

Ming Wai? he asks. He stiffens at the hope heard in his own voice, the falter in two syllables.

I'm sorry, she says. I don't deserve to look at you. The voice makes sense now. It breaks its way across time and his memory. It is Ming Wai.

However, ghosts don't work just as metaphors without some good eerie haunting to liven up the page! I've tried to throw in the iconic oak tree (called the Hangman's Tree--it has its own ghost), a fog-draped river, well-placed lightning bolts, a thunderstorm, people (?) in dark rooms.

Ghosts are no good without a few goose-bumps.

In  the 1944 Modern Library collection Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, the epigraph, an old Scottish invocation, reads: 

From Ghoulies and Ghosties

And Long-Legged Beasties

And Things that go Bump in the Night,

Good Lord Deliver us!

(The picture of Locke is from the Library of Congress collection.)

Shawna Yang Ryan: Once Upon A Time...

In 2003, I was in Taiwan, teaching kindergarten (one among many of my random teaching gigs there). I remember being squeezed onto a tiny chair, the children gathered cross-legged on the floor around me, watching and listening intently as I read "The Princess and the Pea." I was enjoying myself too--there was a castle, mystery, a clear protagonist and antagonist, the "reveal" (to use a reality show term--when the "duck" emerges as the "swan")--essentially all the elements of great story.

And I realized that the desire to be enraptured by story--to be awed and entertained--doesn't end at adulthood. 

So I've found myself returning to the tropes of fairy tales in much of my work. To be honest, I don't know if it's because I hope to engage the reader in a similar child-like-wonder way, or if I just love fairy tales.

What's not to love? After my epiphany at the kindergarten storytime, I read the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Andersen--not the watered-down interpretations--for the first time.

Now, it's said that true fairy tales are dark, but I was not prepared for how dark! Beheaded children baked into pies, girls kidnaped to be married to animals, changelings, husbands faking death to test their wives' affection. The real stuff might not get a PG-13 rating!

The concept of animism pervades fairy tales. Everything--rocks, weather, animals--has a spirit--and through this idea, the writers can cannily depict  human behavior. Take, for instance, Andersen's Darning-needle:

There once was a Darning-needle which thought itself so fine, that it imagined it was a Sewing-needle.

"Mind how you hold me!" the Darning-needle said to the Fingers as they took it up, "or you may lose me, and, if I fall, it is a great question whether I shall be found again, for I am so fine!"

As you might guess, the Darning-needle does get lost--in the road in fact--where a wagon runs over it, to its great chagrin.

Fairy tales, despite their talking wolves and proud needles, offer us real truths.  Apollonius of Tyana phrased it well when he said of Aesop:

...he was really more attached to truth than the poets are; for the latter do violence to their own stories in order to make them probable; but he by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events.

Thanks Kepler fans! I look forward to guest blogging for the next few days!

Best Wishes,

Shawna Yang Ryan