A friend of mine is a librarian in the Chicago system.  She’s actually second-in-command at my favorite branch, the Bee branch in Bronzeville

Overton Hygienic Building in the 1920's, hq of the Chicago Bee newspaper, now the Bee branch of the CPL

Recently, the librarians made a retreat.  In one of their workshops, they were each asked to speak for ten minutes on a book that had changed their lives.  My friend chose Their Eyes Were Watching God.  She can’t remember when she first read it, but she’s read it many many times, and it electrifies her life now as it has for many years before.

Oddly, most of her fellow  librarians chose non-fiction, in fact, most chose “how to” books.  She couldn’t think of one other work of fiction.  I was surprised, because it’s fiction that almost always touches me in that way that makes me feel as though someone were pulling me up by the roots of my hair.  In my teens, Portrait of the Artist affected me with so much intensity that I could hardly sleep for the need to plunge into it over and over. Although I’ve lost some of my adolescent intensity, there are novels like Gilead or A Blessing on the Moon where I reach the end and have to start over again at the beginning at once.

What books have changed your life?

“It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” This is the captivating opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Mr. Darcy?

If you want to write a bestseller and are too lazy to think of anything original yourself, you are pretty well guaranteed success if you tamper with Jane Austen.  Especially with Pride and Prejudice.  We’ve had at least twenty spin-offs in the last few years, including Mr. Darcy’s Daughters, Bridget Jones’ Diary, and The Bar Sinister, in which Mr. Darcy has fathered an illegitimate child on the Pemberly estate.  Austen believed Darcy to be a moral and ethical person, but what did she know?

I am baffled by the trend of taking other people’s work, or lives, and using it for one’s own fiction.  I think of such books as vampire books, where someone else is sucking the blood of the original creator.  Do people do it because they don’t have confidence in their own creative ideas?  Is it a form of laziness?  Or does it stem from a desperate search for common cultural markers in a world where we’re inundated with Twitters and Faces and Jerry Springer and a host of other shouted comments?

I confess, too, to a dislike of novels based on historic figures.  It feels both like an invasion of privacy, to take over another person’s life, and a limitation on one’s own creativity: the ending, indeed, the trajectory, are already determined.  As my granddaughter, then seven, said when her mother wanted to take her to see Gibson’s movie, The Passion, “I already know how it comes out.”  

A few years ago, I read a book whose author claimed to know the effect of the Manhattan Project on Fermi and his family.  It wasn’t based on Fermi’s life or letters or the memoirs of others who knew him, but on the author’s anger over the development of the bomb, projected back on to Fermi.

Fermi in the Italian Alps

Searching around for a book topic? Make up your own physicist. It will allow you to explore the human experience more fully if you’re not constrained by a pre-determined outcome.  Make up your own Regency family.  And make up your own damned Zombie!

I’m back from New York, where I spent an energizing morning with my publishers, talking about plans for the publication of Hardball, the next book in my V I series.  It will be on sale on September 22, and, given how whole years seem to go by while I’m blinking, that’s pretty much just around the corner.  Putnam has done a great jacket–it says “Chicago” in a bold, PI kind of way.

Before going into the city, I spent a day upstate with a beloved old friend, Dorothy Salisbury Davis.  Dorothy is 93 now, frail, but still with a tough, insightful mind.  I leave  her always with new insights into life, living, and writing.  I leave her always with a painful wrench–parting is so hard that it’s sometimes hard to bring myself to visit in the first place.  Dorothy was one of the great masters of crime fiction in the fifties, sixties and seventies.  Unfortunately, her books are no longer in print, although Christina Pickles just read from one of them on Selected Shorts.  Look for Dorothy’s books in your used bookstore or your library–she’s so insightful, such an economical storyteller.

I could write for days about Dorothy and not exhaust what I know about her, or my love for her, but I’ll just tell you two of the many suggestions she’s given me: if you’re stuck in a book, if the story isn’t working, stand it on its head.  If you like the basic story, turning it upside down, in structure, or in whose narrative viewpoint you’re embracing, can sometimes shake things loose.

The second insight is that you are your best source of material.  What you’ve lived, how you’ve lived.  Of course, Dorothy’s life holds richer physical material than most: she was the daughter of a poor immigrant mother and tenant-farming father, and her first job out of school was as a magician’s assistant in the middle of the Depression; after she married and moved to New York with her actor husband, Harry, she landed in an exciting milieu of writers and artists– she knew Elia Kazan, Paul Robeson, Joanne Woodward, Hortense Calisher, Carson McCullers and a host of other names we conjure with.  

She’s written about her childhood, and her magician boss, often.  But she really means, your emotional life is your goldmine.  Understanding yourself, being prepared to perform surgery on your emotions in public–that is, on the page–is the only way to write in an authentic voice.

I hope everyone saw The Bookwitch’s tribute to Pete Seeger, who turns 90 today.

It’s Sunday night in Chicago; I leave for New York early Monday.  I’ve been proofing galleys for my upcoming novel, Hardball, all weekend, and I’m bleary-eyed but now must pack.  I’m meeting with my publishers this week to talk about how to support the novel in the absence of book reviews and bookstores–a kind of Alice moment, or perhaps Edward Lear: As I was sitting in my chair, I saw the bottom wasn’t there, Nor legs nor back but I just sat, ignoring little things like that.

I hope to return to “Alchemy” soon.  I seem to spend all my waking hours working, either on domestic projects or on work at hand .  Marcus Aurelius said, “Nowhere, either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble, do we retreat than into our own souls,” into what Melville thought of as “that quiet, grass-growing place” where a writer ought to work.  I need the time, the spaciousness, to find that grass-growing place so that I can bring Alchemy and a dozen other creative projects to life.  

YES, WE CAN!!!

This is a post by Kevin Guilfoyle, a fine writer, whose posts and thoughts are always deeply helpful to me.  Here’s a chance to see one or more of your favorite crime writers at an Independent bookstore on May 1.

A week after his first novel The Rachel Papers came out, Martin Amis saw someone reading it on a train. He didn’t say anything to the person because he assumed, now that he was a novelist, he would be constantly encountering random people enjoying his work on trains and planes and park benches and waiting rooms. It didn’t happen to him again for 15 years.This Friday, May 1, thousands will recognize the Buy Indie Day holiday by stopping in at one of their favorite independent bookstores and making a purchase. A few weeks ago, I asked readers to do that, but also to announce ahead of time where they will be going. The point, after all, is not some one-day indie bookstore stimulus package, but to remind people of their local indies and to raise awareness about the best independent booksellers around the country. You can find an indie bookstore near you here or here.  

 Below is a list of stores where a number of writers will be on Friday, not as authors promoting their books, but as readers buying a book. If one of those writers sees you holding his or her book you will likely make their day because it really doesn’t happen as often as you probably think, even for the big guys. If they don’t notice, feel free to make the first move. I will continue to update this list all week, so authors please write to me (kevin[at]guilfoile.net) if you want to be added. And I’d encourage everyone to give some love to your favorite indie bookstore by telling us in the comments where you’re going to celebrate Buy Indie Day. And tell folks on your blog. And on Facebook. And at your book club. The holidays are no fun to celebrate by yourself.

KAREN ABBOTT Sin in the Second City will be at McNally Jackson Bookstore

Tasha Alexander, Tear of Pearl, will be at the Mysterious Bookshop 

ROSECRANS BALDWIN You Lost Me There. McIntyre’s Fine Books 

SEAN CHERCOVER Big City, Bad Blood and Trigger City Partners In Crime

BARBARA D’AMATO and Michael Dymmoch will both be at the many indie dealers at Malice Domestic

Kevin Guilfoyle will be at Centuries and Sleuths in River Forest

Sara Paretsky will  be at the Seminary Co-op in Hyde Park

To see more of your favorite writers and where they’re going to be for Indie Fest, read Kevin’s complete rundown at the Chicago Outfit blog

A friend of mine went to DC for Barack’s inauguration, and I just received her pictures.  I know the glow has faded under the unrelenting economic misery, but the pictures bring back such a happy memory, I thought I’d put up a few.

Sara actually received the invitation but couldn't attend

JoAnn on the mall listening to Barack

Watching the Inauguration

At the Home States Ball

Shirley and friend at the Home States Ball

Judy Krug died on Saturday, April 11.  As a fierce advocate of the 1st Amendment, she began the Freedom to Read Foundation, which supports U.S. libraries in their ongoing struggle with censorship.  I didn’t know Judy well at all, but I took part each year in Banned Books Week, another of her brainchildren, where we read from and celebrated books that have been challenged or banned at libraries in the United States.  My favorite of the banned or challenged books I learned about through Judy was And Tango Makes Three.  Tango relates the true story of two male penguins in New York’s Central Park zoo, who became lovers, hatched an abandoned egg, and raised the chick.  

Judy Krug was a hero and a model for me, someone who was not afraid to speak up, not afraid to take abuse in defense of our most fundamental freedom.  All of us who cherish the written word are lessened by her death.

The family would like donations made to the Freedom to Read Foundation, at 50 East Huron Street, Chicago, IL  60611.

Passover starts at sundown on April 8.  We’re supposed to “leave the House of Bondage.”  I think about the things/feelings I’m in bondage to–my fears, my obsessions–and wonder how I can leave them and enter the House of Freedom.  

I just attended a concert by Leon Fleischer.  Fleischer, who’s 80 now, lost the use of his right hand when he was about 35, and spent the next 30 years performing the left-handed repertoire, conducting and teaching.  When he was almost 70, a cure was found for the neurological disorder that afflicted him, and he’s now back to performing with two hands, and playing more passionately and beautifully than anyone else I’ve heard recently.

He says he never was bitter, and I wonder if that’s true.  I wonder what the process was.  I imagine panic, followed by some years of agony, and then moving to a new place in his career.

I have a friend in Houston, a poet and a woman, who was diagnosed with late-onset MS.  Her first two years with the condition, she tried to work out in psycho-therapy what fears made her fall over.  I wonder if a psychiatrist suggested to Mr. Fleischer that he was afraid of appearing in public and so had lost the use of his right hand.  Or do those suggestions only get made to women?

Every time I sit down to write, it’s with a renewed sense of inadequacy.  I just read D T Max’s portrait of David Foster Wallace in the March 9 New Yorker.  Do only great writers get to be depressed about the quality of their work?  Should someone like me just put on my big-girl underpants and move on?  What is the exit from the House of Bondage?

I need a hobby.  In some ways, my time is overbooked, with volunteer work, family obligations, and working on my writing, but I don’t do anything relaxing or fun with other people on a regular basis.  I have a lawyer friend who drives a bobcat around her little farm.  

the bobcat out clearing brush

My cousin Barb, off now to Ukraine, kayaks with friends off the coast of Alaska.  

kayaking off the Alaska coast

Yet another friend plays clarinet in a volunteer orchestra

how did they train her?

I know I’d write better, explore more of the ideas circling my brain, if I did something with other people–something besides good works, which, I confess, don’t refresh me.  I know farming and kayaking are not for me.  I’d like to know what works for other people.  How about you?