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GENERAL WRITING Life organ donation

Postcard….

April 18, 2016

Caitlin, summer 2014

 

I asked my daughter Caitlin to pose for this photo almost 2 years ago. She has said “ok” to my posting it to raise organ donor awareness during organ donor awareness month. Caitlin has been on the waiting list for a double lung transplant since April 24, 2014. Two years! And she’s not alone in her wait. 121,000 people are currently waiting for organs in the USA.

Are you a donor? I’ve been one since age 16. It takes two secs to register. You can’t take them with you but you can leave a bit of yourself behind and save a life.
http://www.organdonor.gov/becomingdonor/stateregistries.html

–Maryanne

GENERAL WRITING Life

NEW YEAR, NEW STORIES, NEW QUESTIONS

January 3, 2014

At my desk, working on this new novel, and wondering where it will be a year from now? Finished? In good shape? How will the story have changed, as it surely will? And wondering, too, what personal stories will fill my notebook this year..

My daughter knows I like to have little “talismans” that relate to stories as I write them. For Christmas, she gave me this photograph from Copenhagen, 1967, and a Czechoslovakian coin from 1967.  One of my characters has important experiences in those places, during those years. The back of the photograph says, “Town Hall Square, Copenhagen, Denmark, 7/67. Dot Ogilvy.”

Who was Dot Ogilvy and how did she end up on eBay and then in my Christmas stocking?

PRAGUE THINGS

CASCADE Life

POSTCARDS FROM CASCADE

June 29, 2013

The newsreel that the visiting crew had filmed on Independence Day in Cascade played in theaters the week of July 29, and America sighed. Because what small town did not have a Criterion Theater? A Brilliant Lunch Bar? A tiny cemetery with rain-worn tombstones toppling over behind a steepled church? And who could conceive of the destruction of such permanence?

–From Cascade

CASCADE GENERAL WRITING Life

“HE’D MADE LUNCH FOR US. HE HAD WINE.”

March 15, 2013

A few weeks ago, the wonderful shereads.org site asked me to write about Cascade, but to write about something “true.” I wrote down a story that readers at my events always love to hear:

Way back when Cascade was a short story idea—an idea about artists in New York in the 1930s—the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum put me in touch with a few people who had painted for Roosevelt’s “New Deal” art projects during the Depression. I was interested in the fact that the government, for the first time, had said, 1, that putting artists to work was just as important as putting bridge builders to work, and 2, that art was for everyone.

One of the artists, James Lechay, lived down on Cape Cod. I arranged to interview him one summer Saturday, and although I was looking forward to it, I dreaded the five-hour round-trip trek. My plan was to zip down as fast as I could, interview him, then zip home in time for my evening plans.

But when I arrived in Wellfleet, the loveliest man was eagerly awaiting my arrival. Indeed, he had planned his whole day around it.

James Lechay was 91, and he would live only another three years, but nothing about him seemed particularly old. Even his house was cool and edgy—gunmetal gray, with modern lines and a flat roof, built to his specifications years earlier. He himself was tall, elegant, with soft white hair that fell to his shoulders. Inside, the house was serene and spare. A wall of glass overlooked pine thickets and the distant sea; his semi-abstract paintings lined other walls.

I saw that he’d set the table. He’d made us lunch. He had wine.

No, I didn’t zip anywhere that day. Instead, I spent a long and precious afternoon talking about New York in the thirties, and painting, and about the drive to create that never gets quite satisfied and which never goes away. In fact, I later read that he painted right up until a few days before his death.

My interview with him and two other artists turned into an article for an arts magazine, not a short story. But years later, I incorporated much of that research into Cascade. Some of James Lechay’s spirit inspired the character of Dez, and he completely inspired the novel’s last line.

The nicest true thing? Last year, when Cascade was in production, my husband and daughter gave me one of his paintings, the above “Barrels on the Beach,” for Christmas.

CASCADE GENERAL WRITING Life

POSTCARDS FROM CASCADE

December 5, 2012

Outside, the day was grim and overcast, a few stray snowflakes starting to drift down from the sky. It was the kind of day that would turn to night without fanfare, with a gradual extinguishing of light, the kind of day that pierced you with melancholy and reminded you it was only December, that a whole winter had still to be gotten through.

–From Cascade

CASCADE GENERAL WRITING Life

A WRITER’S FIRSTS

September 11, 2012

Writer David Abrams runs a great blog called The Quivering Pen (Zola!). He’s extremely supportive to other writers and back in July, featured Cascade‘s book trailer in his Trailer Park Tuesday column.

He also runs a My First Time series, where he asks writers to talk about their first writing-related anything–first rejection, first acceptance, first success, failure. I’d wanted to do one for a while, but I’d also had so many writing firsts that it was hard to choose.

I could write about my first rejection letter, which was also a handwritten one from the New Yorker, and how at my fiction workshop, we passed it around like a pie we all wanted to bite from.  I could write about my first acceptance–from Redbook magazine, back when Dawn Raffel was the editor and they still published serious fiction. There was even a big check involved (a first AND last).  First surprise rejection: the time the Missouri Review asked for two rounds of edits, then said, um, sorry, no.  First crushing disappointment: The New Yorker editor who left me a voice mail asking me to call, and when I did, heart batting against my chest, had this to say: “I just want you to know I fought for this story.” Then she quit the magazine.

As an editor at Ploughshares, I had many painful firsts. It’s never pleasant to reject someone’s effort, and particularly hard to reject an almost-right story, or a famous person, or an editor that published you. The best parts of that job were always discovering a wonderful surprise by a new writer, and then seeing that story end up in BASS or Pushcart.

So many firsts. How to choose? Well, it turned out to be easy, in the end. I received my first copy of Cascade from Viking, solid and real. A book with an ISBN number, a book that is catalogued at the Library of Congress. I experienced my first, joyous, book event and that my friends, is My First Time.

CASCADE GENERAL WRITING Life

WHY THE 1930s?

August 17, 2012

Writing the RennaissanceI was honored when Julianne Douglas asked to review Cascade for her beautiful book blog, Writing the Renaissance, and then when she asked me to write a brief guest post.

So much fascinating research went into the writing of Cascade that I had a hard time choosing a topic, but finally decided on “Why the 1930s?”

What really stands out for me about the 1930s and now, aside from all this “magic” we’ve learned to live with as if it is our birthright: not much else is really all that different.

Here are my thoughts on “Why the 1930s:” link

CASCADE GENERAL WRITING Life

PUBLICATION DAY POSTCARD

August 16, 2012

Wow, so it’s publication day. WOW! Today I do an interview for Boston Public Radio, WBUR Radio Boston with Anthony Brooks, then I’m going to go do my volunteering at the Brigham so I don’t have to obsess about me, me, me.

I want to thank everyone who has been so supportive: everyone who pre-ordered the book, who will come to events, who will spread the word, and who will write nice Amazon and Goodreads reviews before the cranky, mean, crackpots do.

I feel so fortunate and grateful today. Writing a book is lonely and an act of faith, and the response I’ve had from so many of you has made me extremely happy to be a creative human being alive on this lovely and magical earth we all inhabit.

And for anyone who is doing that uncertain thing—writing a novel with no real knowledge that anyone will ever read it—let me tell you: there is NOTHING BETTER than hearing this song while you are in New York meeting your publisher. So keep at it. xxx

CASCADE GENERAL WRITING Life

AFTER DOUBT AND HARD WORK, THE PAYOFF

July 18, 2012

See that middle stack there there on my bookshelf? That slim pile of magazines, journals, and anthologies contains the sum total of my various publications over the years. Every time I published a new piece, I added it to the stack with a sense of satisfaction. It was a slow-growing pile, but it was growing, and I gave it good company by shelving many of my favorite books around it.

That bookcase is adjacent to a fireplace, in front of which my laptop and I spent many wintry hours, struggling with the writing of a novel I wasn’t even sure, for a long time, that I wanted to write. See, the thing about writing short stories is this: there’s always hope in the mailbox. Even if you take your time with a story, like I do, you finish it, you send it out, someone accepts it, you look forward to seeing it in print, and you get on to something new. But by the time I realized I was deep into Cascade, deep into writing in a form I was unsure of, I’d published all the stories I’d written, and I knew it was going to be a long time before my stack saw anything new.

I could write a long post that only other writers might want to read, about the angst and joy of writing Cascade, and about the self-doubt that tried to weld itself onto a slender wire of underlying faith, but it will suffice to skip to #TheEnd:

Last week, I got my first printed copy of Cascade from Penguin. The finished jacket is more beautiful than I’d even imagined, with soft raised lettering and inside flaps that are a surprising and pleasing bright green. My initials are stamped into the front of the hardcover binding: MOH.  Cascade is permanent and real, with a copyright page and a Library of Congress number.

When I get my other copies from Penguin, I will add one to the horizontal stack, but for now, I can’t resist setting this first one apart, shelved like any book, upright and ready to be read.