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March 11, 2015

Wonderfully Random List of Great Books by Women

This is Celebrate Women Month.  Of course, we should be celebrating women ~ and men and everyone in between ~ all year long, but this got me thinking about some of the books by women that have had a huge impact on me. Here they are, in no particular order. They might add a little variety to your reading list.


  • Caroline Lockhart’s diary Liberated Lady, 1870-1962.  I read this in middle school, and it was eye-opening in so many ways. First of all, she had a ranch up in Dryhead near where we ran cows in the summer. Second, she was friends with Buffalo Bill Cody. Third, she was a writer and a newspaperwoman. And fourth she had nude photos taken of herself as a teenager. Talk about your liberated lady! This diary is amazing and even mentions my grandmother.
  • Willa Cather’s Oh Pioneers! I love Willa Cather, and in fact a mentor once told me I write like her. The ultimate compliment! I love how she went there ~ in her life, in her writing. She reminds me of my grandmothers and my sisters. The main character Alexandra made a huge impression on me.
  • Gwen Petersen’s Ranch Woman’s Manual. I read this when I was young. It’s an Erma Bombeck take on living on a ranch, and it’s heeee-larious! “And then the adventure begins where your man says, …” She both glorified the job of ranch wife and made it funny. She made it cool to be female in a way nothing else did.
  • Anything by Virginia Woolf, particularly A Room of One’s Own. I adore VW.  My two favorites of hers are Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Her portrayal of interiority and of relationships is so sensitive and real and wonderful.  She does what I try to do, which is to show what it’s like for two people in a room, all the tensions and subtext. And A Room of One’s Own is her manifesto.

  • Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. This is a history that reads like great fiction.  I read it when I was very young. I don’t remember much about the plot but that it was minor nobility in turbulent times in France.  I loved the politics of it, how the family tried to stay out from between the warring sides. Such drama. This was perhaps the first hard history book I read, and I’ve been hooked on history ever since.
  • Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.  Given my fascination with gender, it’s only natural that I would love The Left Hand of Darkness. I also read her Earthsea series and loved them.  Ursula, like many of the authors in this list, broke the mold with her writing. But the thing is, women break that mold all day every day by just living their lives. The mold is a fantasy. And that’s what I love about Ursula and her writing ~ she makes us question what’s given.
  • Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy. Mary Renault is da bomb.  One of the first books I read with a gay protagonist, I think.  I just got swept away with the story of Alexander and loved it. History come alive. I should read more of her work.
  • Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. My sister Nikki pressed this book on me, but she didn’t have to work very hard. It’s an amazing book.  It starts with the main character sitting on the counter with her feet in the sink, staring out the window of a run-down castle.  What I loved about this book ~ and about Pippi Longstocking too ~ was how quirky everyone was. I come from a quirky family, so I can relate.

  • Margery Kempe’s The Book of Margery Kempe. I did my undergraduate thesis on Margery Kempe.  She was never sainted, but she tried really hard to be. An amazing woman. She married, had a bunch of kids, and then convinced her husband she needed released from her bonds of wifedom. No sex. Then some monks adopted her as a cause, and she was almost sainted. This book is her hagiography.  I admire her so much for her unconventiality and her determination.
  • Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs. Oh, I just get warm shivers just thinking about this book. So comforting.  If you like happy endings, you’ll love this book.  Sarah was a contemporary of Willa Cather’s, but where Willa is hard, Sarah is soft. She portray the dying fishing industry in a New England town, mostly from the eyes of widows and women. If there’s one book I would press into everyone’s hands, it would be this one. This was suggested to me by my prof Beth Loffreda for my reading list exam.
  • Bette Bao Lord’s Spring Moon. I don’t remember much of the plot of this book, as I read it in grade school, but I remember being moved. And then I had a friend of Japanese descent (though this is Chinese), which made it even more real.
  • Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. Oh, the injustice of being a woman in a country that does not believe women need to be educated! I read this for the single best literature class I ever took ~ and I’ve taken a bunch of amazing lit classes ~ postcolonial literature with Janice Harris. We met every Wednesday night at Dr. Harris’s house for three hours, and there were just enough great friends to be amazingly comfortable but just enough competition to keep everyone on their toes. 

  • Nella Larson’s Passing. Another great book Beth Loffreda introduced me to.  The idea of passing has been a useful metaphor in my life in areas other than race ~ gender for instance.  And this book is so well written and so moving. A tragedy in the way that The Great Gatsby is a tragedy.  In fact, I’d hold this book up against Gatsby any day, and I love Gatsby.
  • Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Other Stories. Katherine Mansfield was a contemporary of Virginia Woolf’s.  I identify with her in that she was from the country provinces (Australia) and then aspired to be a writer. But she moved to her New York ~ London.  Her stories are amazing, and she died tragically young.
  • Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room. This book was the first feminist work I read.  It was an eye opener.  I kept thinking, no, wait. We’re equal now.  This can’t be real. And it served to open my eyes in a way nothing else did. It wasn’t really until college and my first women’s studies class that I actually admitted the truth in this book.
  • Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. This book has had an impact on my life in so many ways. You know how diaries often are: they’re written for the writer and offer no context. They are indecipherable. Laurel’s genius is in that she decodes this diary and lays out the story of Martha Ballard’s life. It not only is a great book, but it helped me in my master’s thesis.  I studied six 1850s pioneer diaries, many of which were also terse, and I was able to use Laurel’s example to suss out the relationships and attitudes of the writers.

  • Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden.  I read and loved this as a child. I particularly identified with all the nature and the isolation.  And then I recently read this to my kids, and they loved it just as much as I did.  For weeks, they tried to talk like Dicken. Like Harriet the Spy, this book holds up so well. I was afraid when I reread it that I would be disappointed, but my admiration just grew.
  • Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy. I cannot express how much I loved this book when I was in grade school.  I wanted so much to have my own spy route, but I couldn’t because I had to come home on the bus.  She is the reason I use my middle initial in my signature. I had the same independence as Harriet, but I was a good girl while Harriet lets herself be angry.  I only realize now that that was something that probably fascinated me. To this day, I push my anger way deep down inside me, and it comes out in unhealthy ways.
  • Madeline L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light. I don’t remember the plot of this one, but I remember being moved beyond measure. Someone died, and the girl was in grief and she and her family took a trip across Canada.  I remember bawling at the end with the dolphins. The teenage me connected deeply with this book. I wonder what it would be like if I reread it.
  • Emily Cheney Neville’s It’s Like This, Cat. Cheating a little bit here because the protagonist is a boy, but I loved this book. It’s the first book that showed me New York City and probably the first book that showed me divorce.  I loved how the main character talked to his cat. 

  • Sappho’s poetry. I haven’t read it extensively, but I just remember how sensual it was.  And imagine it: an ancient chick has the audacity to speak, to have a voice! Cool.
  • Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. I’ve loved everything of Louise’s I’ve ever read.  I particularly remember the roughness of their lives and how I identified with it. Bad shit goes down, and people try to cope.
  • Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. Oh gosh. I love to cook. It’s an art form for me.  And mixing cooking with the literature of magical realism here swept me away. The tears in the cake. Oh my. And the tragedy.
  • Karen Cushman’s The Midwife’s Apprentice. This is an amazing kids book. I love how the girl wakes up in the pig dung pile at the beginning. And I love how it’s not saccharine.  The person who teaches her is pragmatic. And it’s about a girl giving herself permission to be great. I only read it as an adult, but I bet reading it as a girl would be amazing. Something for which to envy my daughter.

  • Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies. I read this for a college literature class. This is the first time I remember thinking about a utopia of gender. And realizing that women can have opinions about politics and society.  That maybe men weren’t always the default and maybe they shouldn’t always be. And it is amazing for its time.
  • Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles.  This play is all about subtext, and I loved it. I read it for a class. (I’m realizing here how many of these great books were introduced to me in college. One of the many reasons college is life-changing!) It’s about a group of women at a wake who realize that their friend has killed her husband ~ just by the little gendered clues that are left behind. I love how it illuminates and legitimizes women’s world.
  • Toni Morrison’s Sula. An amazing book. We have this idea of how mothers are these soft things with idealized characters. But in this book a mother kills her child to save her from slavery. How amazing, how loving, how horrible. Even before I had kids I understood the utter untenability of it all.  There is a trope through Toni’s work of mothers killing their children, and it perfectly showcases the fraught nature of motherhood.
  • Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. I became obsessed with Mary Shelly.  I do that. I read someone and they spark my interest and then I stalk them. Not literally but intellectually. I read their biography and try to read all their work. I fall in love with minds.  Poor Mary.  Such a tragic life. She lost a lot of babies, and then her husband died tragically young. They were very poor.  Yet she wrote this amazing thing that most people probably think was written by a man. 

There it is. A totally nonscientific, wonderfully random rundown of books by women I’ve loved. Er, books I've loved by women. Nah, the first one: books by women I've loved. The list could go on forever, but there you are!

March 10, 2015

Hanging with the Cool People: Deb Sanders

Me on Ernie

I have the distinct pleasure of visiting Deb Sanders today over on her blog for the Earth's Imagined Corners Bewitching Book Tour!  She asks such great questions, and make sure to check out her books!

Here's a sample:
Earth’s Imagined Corners was a loving project to which you devoted your time, talent and perseverance for years. Now that it is a realized dream, was it worth the effort? Anything you would change about the process?
TL: Great question!  Yes, it took me 15 years from initial conception to publication, and I can say without hesitation that it was definitely worth it.  I don’t even know if “worth it” is the right term.  Writing, especially fiction, is just something I feel compelled to do ~ I don’t know if you feel the same.  There’s nothing scarier than a writer who isn’t writing, and it makes me feel calmer and saner when I’m creating.  Sometimes I love it and sometimes I hate it. Sometimes it comes easy and sometimes hard. The hardest part is getting started after being away from it for a while, but once I’ve started it’s usually a glorious slide down a snowy hill ~ exhilarating, challenging, lovely. If there’s anything I would change, it would be how long it takes me. Seven years per novel seems a little long. I’d love to do a novel year, and I know I could do it. I’ve written a full draft in five months. But the world not only doesn’t care if you’re writing ~ it actively works against you writing, especially if you’re a woman.  It would rather you be doing what it wants you to do. Working, cleaning, cooking, taking care of others, and so on. And it doesn’t just sit back and sigh. It enters the writing room and cracks jokes and suggests you do something else. So that would be the other thing I would change: my ability to block out the world and carve out time to write. I know it’s my own fault too. I’m a good girl and a people pleaser, and it’s much easier to do what the world wants me to do than face my own demons to write.

Click here to read the whole interview.

 Thank you so much, Deb! Stay in touch!

March 9, 2015

The Story Behind the Story, at Mythical Books



I'm so honored to be visiting Mythical Books today on the Earth's Imagined Corners Bewitching Book Tour!  Mythical Books is an amazing advocate for books and authors, and I can't thank them enough for letting me hang out with them!


Here's a little of what we're taking about.

When I wrote the first draft of Earth’s Imagined Corners, I had not visited Kansas City. And so it was a surreal experience to drive through the West Bottoms for the first time after I had so fully imagined it. It was the same but not the same. Today, overpasses lace between buildings that Sara and James would have seen out the cable car window. A wastewater treatment plant and a Fedex warehouse lie next to narrow empty streets crowded with abandoned nineteenth century buildings, their lower windows shattered and their elaborately painted signs still visible behind graffiti. Driving through them, even in broad daylight, feels a little like one of those horror movies where no one’s around and you’re just waiting for something nasty to pop out from an alley.
To this day, I can’t help thinking of all those people who lived and worked in those giant husks, people who felt itchy in wool and got sunburned and loved that early morning splash of water on the face. People like Sara and James, like Frank and Ellen Strong. I look forward to continuing their journey in the next book.

Read the whole piece here.

March 6, 2015

Making People Real to Themselves

For the Earth's Imagined Corners Bewitching Book Tour, today I'm hanging out over at Creatively Green Write at Home Mom! I'm so honored! Thank you, Wenona!

Giuseppe Magni
I've been manning our grade school book fair all week, and I love it.  It's in the library, so I'm surrounded by new books and old books and people who love books. And I get to watch the kids and their enthusiasm.

There's nothing like a kindergartener, all bright eyes and pudgy hands, squealing with delight over this object, this thing that I, too, love. And the jaded lanky fifth graders, coming in all cool, and then they grab a book and sit in a corner and get so absorbed or show off books to their friends. 

I've realized something over the course of the week: my job as book fair person is to bear witness.  A kid will come up to me all excited and discuss the pros and cons of a book. Or they'll ask for help finding something.  Or three of them will cluster around me, pulling my sleeve and vying for attention. They'll explain about how they're buying this for their little sister who is only three, or they'll ask how much a book is and whether they have enough money. All the microcosms of society are there: every once in a while a kid will try to steal something but then there's many more generous kids who are paying for their friends' books.

And it's my job to listen and affirm.  But what I realized is that that's my job in all areas of my life.  It's my job to affirm my family. It's my job as a marketer to affirm the educational institution I work for. It's my job as a writer, too. I'm telling the stories of characters, of people. I'm listening to the world and then mirroring it back, trying to show the world itself.

And in the process I'm trying to affirm myself.  That's something I felt was missing in my childhood. No one listened, and I believed almost until I was thirty that I was invisible.

And so, in addition to being the keeper of memories, we also make people real to themselves.

(Hey, that's also what I do as a parent!)

March 5, 2015

All Stories Are Ghost Stories

I'm so honored to be over at Fangtastic Books today as part of the Earth's Imagined Corners Bewitching Book Tour talking about how all stories are ghost stories. I'm so honored to hang out with Roxanne today! Check it out. 



All Stories Are Ghost Stories
I recently read Kelly Link’s great short story “Two Houses” in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume Seven. It’s also in her new collection Get in Trouble
It’s such a great story. Two sister ships are sent out into deep space, and one of the ships disappears in the blink of an eye. Years later, the crew of the second ship awakes from hypersleep for a birthday party and to tell ghost stories. There’s the story of the ghostly people looking up from the table in the meadow. There’s the little girl cut in half by a falling tree. There’s the rich aristocratic boyfriend who lived in two identical ghost-ridden houses. I won’t tell you the end, but it gives me the chills just to think about it. 
That got me thinking. Someone much smarter than I said that all stories are ghost stories, and I think that’s true. We writers are in the industry of memory. We take our own emotional memories, and we bleed them out on the page. 
Our best writing comes from those things that haunt us, the make us uncomfortable, that embarass us, that shake us to our bones. One of my mentors, Steve Almond, once said, “Run screaming toward the pain.” It’s so true. We writers have to embrace discomfort and pain in a way others can avoid. We have to “go there” in our minds, experience things, in order to write about them. If your character is dying, you have to experience what that’s like in order to write about it, even if it’s just research. You have to imagine it. You have to imagine the worst possible scenarios to make them real on the page, and the more fully you imagine them and convey that, the better the work is. 
Read the whole guest blog here.

Do you think it's true, that all stories are ghost stories?





March 4, 2015

Alyson Hagy on the Roots of Fiction

Today in the Earth's Imagined Corners Bewitching Book Tour, I get to hang out over at Lisa's World of Books. Thank you, Lisa! I also came across a great interview with one of my mentors, the wonderful Alyson Hagy on Whole Beast Rag.


Alyson Hagy
"I was thinking about writers who I thought did a good job writing both genders. It seems to me that it’s more an issue of temperament. I would also say that great fiction often gets written when there are roots of fever or hatred or grief, which says to me that our own failures or fears about love or heterosexual or homosexual interaction fuel our fiction." ~ Alyson Hagy
Read the whole interview here.

March 3, 2015

That Age-old Writer Question: How Do You Get Your Work Done?

As part of the Earth's Imagined Corners Bewitching Book Tour, I'm honored to be hanging out with Roxanne over at Roxanne's Realm today.  Telling interview ~ you should check it out!  But in the meantime, I am so stoked to have my greatest writer friend Jessica hanging out here today! And she's answering that age-old question: How do you get the writing done? She's amazing in her dedication!

Pembroke Sinclair, aka Jessica Robinson

Pembroke Sinclair, aka Jessica Robinson, is a rock star when it comes to getting her work done.  She has two darling boys and a husband, she works full time as an editor for a foundation, and she occasionally freelance edits for publishing houses.  Yet she has six excellent fiction works and two nonfiction books to her name and lots of short pieces, and she’s a model of how writers can get their work done. You should check out her Road to Salvation series—the second of which (Dealing with Devils) just came out—and also her Life After the Undead series, especially if you’re a fan of zombies.

One of the many things I admire about you is that you get your shit done.  You are not only very productive in your personal life and work life but most importantly in your writing life. How do you do it? Maybe talk about your mindset in approaching getting your writing done.

I’m anal retentive and obsessive compulsive and I have no friends.  Ha!

In all seriousness, when it comes to writing—first and foremost—I have to remember that not everything is going to get done.  There just aren’t enough hours in the day, so I have to be OK with what is left unfinished.  And, believe me, I’m fine with floors not getting vacuumed or dishes sitting in the sink for a few days.  All of that stuff waits for me, so I can come back and do it whenever I need to.  

It’s a sense of priorities, really.  And those change on a daily basis.  My family always comes first, but there are times when they can entertain themselves for a while so I can disappear and work.  

What’s your daily schedule of writing? Do you have any rituals? 

My daily schedule of writing is that I fit it in when I can.  Thankfully, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, my boys have wrestling practice, so I have a dedicated hour and a half that I can work on what I want to work on.  When they have tournaments, I work on my stuff in between matches (we’re usually there all day). 

On the weekends, I try to balance my schedule between doing laundry, cleaning the house, and getting writing done.  That usually means I’ll limit myself to writing/editing a chapter, then start a load of laundry, fold a load, or get the bathrooms clean.  Then I’ll do another chapter, and when that’s done, another piece of house cleaning.  To me, writing is a reward after working on my other obligations.

Do you write on the computer or on paper or both? 

I do both.  It’s so much easier to carry a notebook and a pen with me where I go rather than a laptop.  But I do find that when I write on paper, my writing tends to be a bit sparse.  Knowing that, however, means that in the editing process I have to flesh the story out.  

Talk about a project in particular, maybe your latest book.  How long did it take you to write? To revise? What was the process?

The latest project I worked on is called Good Intentions, and it’s the third book in The Road to Salvation series.  That took me 5 months to write, including initial editing.  (At the moment, it’s with the editor, who will no doubt come back with things I need to fix.)  I handwrote that entire story in a notebook before transferring it to the computer.  People keep telling me I got through it really fast, but it didn’t feel like.  Five months felt like a very long time.  I just worked on it every free chance I got and in between all of my other obligations.

How do you get yourself motivated and focused when there are so many other responsibilities and fun things to do?

I’m not going to lie, some days are tougher than others.  Some days I just want to veg in front of the TV or play games on my phone—anything other than write.  And I do.  But writing is a compulsion for me, and most of the time, I enjoy doing it, so it doesn’t feel like work to me.  If it wasn’t fun, I wouldn’t do it.  It’s my escape, my way to explore new worlds.  

I wasn’t lying about being anal retentive and obsessive compulsive, hence the schedule on the weekends about working.  But I feel like if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t get anything done.  As I mentioned earlier, there’s only a certain amount of time in the day, and it’s about priorities.  More often than not, writing is a priority of mine—especially if I have to decide between writing and cleaning a toilet.  Duh!  No brainer!  So being motivated and focused is only about taking the time to sit down.

Any advice for writers on this topic? 

Writing is work.  Words don’t magically appear on the page, you have to put them there.  You’re the one who decides how you’re going to spend your days.  You’re the one in control of your schedule.  If you want to spend it writing, you’re going to spend it writing.  But something will have to be neglected for writing to happen.  If you want to make excuses, that’s what you’ll do.  The world stands in your way.  It doesn’t care if you accomplish your goals.  It constantly keeps throwing distractions at you.  Only you get to decide if you’ll let them get in your way.
 
Thank you so much for stopping by the blog today, Pembroke! And, readers, please check out Dealing with Devils!

 

March 2, 2015

Bewitching Book Tour for Earth's Imagined Corners



Welcome! Today is the first day of my Bewitching Book Tour for the historical novel Earth's Imagined Corners! I'll be hanging out at all the coolest places on the interwebs. I hope you'll join me.

My first stop is Andi's Book Reviews.  I get to chat with Andrea about my relationship to the past. I always joke that I was raised in the 1880s, but it really wasn't halcyon days for women.  But it makes for good fiction! Here's a taste:

I’m honored to be hanging out with Andrea today on the fabulous Andi’s Book Reviews!
She asked me these great questions relating to my historical novel Earth’s Imagined Corners: Why do you feel you belong in the 1800s? If you could blend today's society and that of the 1800s, what aspects of each would you include?
Well, it isn’t so much that I feel that I belong in the 1800s. In fact, I think it would have been pretty tough to be a woman in that time period. You were property in the true sense of the word: for most of the period, you couldn’t own anything because it belonged to your husband or father. You did not “own” or have any legal rights to your kids. You were at the mercy of the men in your life and had not legal or social right to much of anything.
It’s not that I feel I belong there. It’s that I joke I was raised in the 1800s. That’s because I was raised on a ranch in Wyoming that did things old style. Over the summer, we would take cows to summer pasture and live without running water and electricity and ride horses to get pretty much everywhere. Over the winter, we rode the bus 25 miles both ways to get to school, and the pipes would often freeze so you had to go to the outhouse. We had a party line for a phone, which meant you could listen in on your neighbors. There were always dangerous animals around. If it wasn’t my uncle’s buffalo and ostriches and kangaroos (wallaby), it was the bears coming down off the mountain to eat the apples in the orchard across the creek.
Click here to read the rest of the post.

And if you'd like to join me for the rest of the tour, here are my stops. I'd like to thank the lovely Roxanne at Bewitching Book Tours!

Bewitching Book Tour for Earth’s Imagined Corners, March 2 - April 2

March 2 ~ Andi's Book Reviews

March 3 ~ Roxanne’s Realm

March 4 ~ Lisa’s World of Books

March 5 ~ Fang-tastic Books

March 6 ~ The Creatively Green Write at Home Mom

March 9 ~ Mythical Books

March 10 ~ Deb Sanders

March 11 ~ Eclipse Reviews

March 11 ~ Author Karen Swart

March 12 ~ Deal Sharing Aunt

March 18 ~ Shut Up and Read

March 19 ~ BookwormBridgette's World

March 20 ~ 3 Partners in Shopping, Nana, Mommy, &, Sissy, Too!

March 24 ~ More Romance Please

March 25 ~ FictionZeal.com

March 26 ~ feedmeinbooks
www.feedmeinbooks.wordpress.com

March 27 ~ CBY Book Club

April 2 ~ Books Direct

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Goodreads Book Giveaway

Earth's Imagined Corners by Tamara Linse

Earth's Imagined Corners

by Tamara Linse

Giveaway ends April 02, 2015.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

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