Gayle Brandeis: Guest Blogger, author of Delta Girls

Today, I'm pleased to welcome Gayle Brandeis as a guest blogger. Gayle has a new novel, Delta Girls, out today from Ballantine. Gayle and I met in graduate school, and we have gone on to become one another's early readers. Those of you who write know what an essential, and special, relationship this is. Both Gayle and I have novels out this summer that we helped one another with, and we wanted to not only share our work with you, but share some of our relationship with you. I wish all of you writers such a gift. Without further delay, please welcome Gayle!

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My novel Delta Girls marks a period of real flux in my life. In the two and a half years between the time I started writing the novel and the time it was released, I found myself with a different agent, a different editor (a series of three editors total for the book) and, most surprisingly, a different husband. It’s amazing to me how much can happen within a short span of time. In a recent four month period alone, I gave birth, lost my mom to suicide, bought and started renovating a house and lost my mother in law to a sudden heart attack. One constant through all of this intense, life-altering change has been my amazing friend and first reader, Laraine Herring.

I met Laraine when we were getting our MFAs in Creative Writing at Antioch University. I was immediately wowed by Laraine’s deep talent, her honesty and wisdom and absolute commitment to writing and its power to change the world. After graduation, we started sharing our writing on a monthly basis; this has been such a touchstone for me, such a gift. Laraine and I get each other’s work in a way that is so beautiful to me, so rare; sometimes it almost feels as if we’re the same person—we both love writing about writing and the body, and we approach language and voice in a similar way, so reading her work almost feels like reading my own, but with more clarity (and it teaches me to see my own work more clearly, as well). After taking some time off due to life chaos, we are reviving our work sharing this month, and I am so excited to have the gift of her eyes on my work again (and the gift of her incredible writing in my eyes.)

Laraine helped me find my way into Delta Girls (originally titled Pears.) I was a bit gun shy when I started writing the book; my editor at Ballantine had just rejected my novel, My Life with the Lincolns, which I had thought would fulfill my contract there, and I was given a year to write a new novel. (It’s helpful to remember that sometimes good things come from rejection—My Life with the Lincolns ended up getting published as a novel for young readers by Henry Holt, plus I probably wouldn’t have written Delta Girls otherwise, and now they’ve both found their way into the world around the same time. I love that both Laraine and I each have two new books out this year.) Because I was still stinging from the rejection and scared that whatever I wrote next would get rejected, too, I could only write in fits and starts. The first draft of Delta Girls was composed of chapters that were only a page or two each, almost like little prose poems, all I found I was able to write at the moment.

The book (which was inspired by a combination of dreams, breaking news and a friend’s stories about growing up on a pear farm) explores two alternating, but eventually intersecting, story lines—we follow Izzy, an itinerant farm worker, and her 9 year old daughter, who land at an organic pear farm in the Sacramento Delta, and Karen, an Olympics-hopeful pairs figure skater as she gets increasingly involved with her new bad boy skating partner. The back and forth rhythm was pretty extreme at first, one or two pages with Izzy, then one or two pages with Karen, and so forth. Laraine helped me see how this format could cause the reader whiplash, and didn’t give the reader a chance to sink deeply enough into either character’s story—just as she was starting to care about one of the characters, the focus shifted. Thanks to her notes, I was able to consolidate some of these micro chapters into longer blocks of narrative and create a better flow for the reader. Laraine also helped me see where some of my characters were a bit two dimensional, a bit cartoonish. I couldn’t stop smiling when I shared a new draft after I had worked hard to flesh the characters out and she wrote something like “Yay! They’re all a people now!” There were a few sentences that I particularly enjoyed writing, metaphors that surprised me as they came out of my fingers, and I was thrilled when Laraine made special note of them. The book is so much stronger and richer than it would have been without her touch. My whole life is so much stronger and richer for having her in it. I tend to be a fairly solitary person, but the writing life can still be a bit isolating; what an expansive, affirming experience it is to share the path with someone who both knows the terrain and is eager to explore uncharted ground. Laraine keeps me humble, keeps me honest, and makes me braver than I ever would have been on my own.
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Gayle is giving away a signed copy of Delta Blues. Please tell us about your favorite (or least favorite) rejection story in the comment section of this blog. Please make sure there's a way for me to contact you to get your information to Gayle for your book. We'll select a winner at random.

For more free books, click over to Gayle's blog for my guest post on our relationship and writing my novel. I'm giving away a free, signed copy of my novel, Ghost Swamp Blues, through her site. Simply post in the comment section at Gayle's blog what haunts you. A winner will be chosen at random.

Guest Blogs, Give aways, and Gardening

This weekend we cleared out the garden in the front and back of the house of the plants who didn't survive our unusually cold and wet winter. I bought lots of lavender, some delphiniums, some sage, and a lot of annuals and on Saturday evening after the sun dropped behind the trees, we planted and watered and waited. It was hard to pull up the plants that died. I kept wanting them to come back. Maybe next week they'll bloom, I would think. Maybe just one more day and they'll be OK. After all, the ones that are blooming now looked pretty darn dead a few weeks ago. But it was time. As we were working in the garden, I thought about how much gardening is like writing, especially longer works like novels. You never really know what's going to work. You just plant. You wait. You water. You nurture. You prune away what isn't taking. You leave yourself open for surprises (this spring, my yard was filled unexpectedly with daffodils and tulips that no one I know planted). You trust that things are working underneath the soil that you cannot see. And so you watch and show up and let go. You re-remember that you can't determine how it's all going to work. And when things bloom, every time, you bow your head and say, "thank you."

On to new and exciting things:

I guest blogged today over on Lisa Romeo's website about the creation of Ghost Swamp Blues. Go check it out, and check out the rest of her blog as well. Lisa's forte is creative non-fiction and she offers a wealth of information on her blog. There's an opportunity for you to comment on her blog to be entered to win a free, autographed copy of Ghost Swamp Blues. All you have to do is post a comment on her blog by June 19. I'll also be stopping by her blog from time to time in the next few weeks to answer any questions you might have about the book.

To that end, if you find you have any questions about any of my books, about craft, about publishing, etc, please leave those questions in the comments of the blog or you can e-mail me. I'll be using this blog once a month to answer some of your questions. I might even do a vlog, depending on what the question is.

I'm also thrilled to announce the launch of my updated and redesigned website. Please check it out. Huge thanks to my friends at The Concentrium for their talent, time and generosity of spirit.

And finally, last week, I learned the basics of the FLIP camera and made some very amateur vlogs on some of the concepts in The Writing Warrior. Shambhala had asked me to demonstrate some of the exercises, and I did my best (all alone in a room with a camera that doesn't move and has limited editing functions). I'll get a little better, but probably not much. The intention is to help clarify some of the concepts I talk about in the book. I will also use the vlog to talk about some craft components and also answer some of your questions. Check it out on my YouTube channel. Feel free to subscribe!

I look forward to reading your questions!

It's the Crack that Lets the Light In

We all know no human looks like that woman (or the striped kitty) on the magazine cover, right? But what is perfect? What is it measured against? If perfection means completion, then, as the yogis say, everything is perfect. The perfection lies in the thing's completion, not in its flawlessness.

When we were in San Francisco, I discovered a chest wrinkle. Yes. Bow your heads. For Christmas, Keith bought me a magnifying bathroom mirror (8X magnification!). Some things just weren't meant to be seen. Good thing my eyes don't see well enough to catch everything that mirror does.

 Salvadore Dali, 1955

My right side of my body is bigger than my left -- the arm is longer, the leg is longer, the foot is longer, the eye is bigger, even the hair on the right side of my head fluffs better. Somehow, all together, I look like a human woman, and fortunately, human eyeballs don't magnify everything eight times. But, if you break me apart into right foot and left foot, eyeball with astigmatism, eyeball without, tooth #26, tongue, vertebrae, on and on and on, you'll get a pile of parts. Could be a woman. Could be a robot. Could be a monkey.

I did the mandatory read-through of Ghost Swamp Blues now that the real book is in my real hands (yes, I held it in my right hand). And of course, I found the errors. Six professional people read through the manuscript. I proofed it four times between March and April. Still. Errors. Nothing major. No big engine replacement. Nothing heinous like a whole different novel showing up on page 50 just to see if you're really reading. Just some errors. I knew they would be there. They always are. Every book I've got has errors. I keep a list, and when the magic "next printing" occurs, we can fix them. The errors don't alter the story. They don't make you scratch your head for days, but they're there. And of course, the six professional people didn't see them, so every other reader on the planet will see them. It's the unwritten law of the universe.

Still, the story is a whole, not a letter, not a page break, not a spine, or a bio, or an italicized word. The story is Lillian and Hannah and Roberta and Gabriel and the Four Sirens. The story is North Carolina. The story is a ghost story, a redemption story, a surrender story, a regret story. All these imaginary folks had the courtesy to get together in my heart for a decade. We duked it out. Lived together. Ate together. Slept together. Fought together. Ten years. Still, they hung out in the trees, in the swamp, in the old house by the creek.

I read the last sentence of the novel, for the four thousandth time (only a little hyperbole), with my fifth cup of coffee (no hyperbole) this afternoon at the Raven Cafe. I had been making my obligatory list of the typos. But I read that last sentence, for the four thousandth time, and those imaginary folks still sat at the table with me. I put the book down and looked at them.

"You did good, sugar," said Lillian.

"Wash it away now! Wash it away!" said Number One.

"It's in the river now!" said Number Three.

"It's that darkness," said Gabriel. "It's that darkness you brought into the light. Darkness can't get out without a crack. Until darkness gets out it can't go no place. Can't go away if it's trapped."

"We're all put together now," said Roberta. "You can move on along."

Hannah, too cool to say anything, smiled over the rim of her double-mocha-skim-latte.

I bussed my table, gathered my book and my notebook, and walked out into the bright Arizona afternoon.

Selling and Salvation

And, um, I have this novel, and, um, do ya wanna buy it? Maybe please maybe please maybe? It's really good. You'll like it. Promise.

No one ever goes out with the person who's wishy washy. Does he like me? Does he really like me? You'll like me, I know you will. I'll be whatever you want. Ick. No one likes that. That person never gets a date, and that person will probably never make a sale.

The promotion phase of the book biz is hard for me. I'm not a good self-promoter. I feel like I need a bath after each dive into Facebook or e-mail I send. Not that I am not genuinely interested in getting the book out to readers. Not that I feel like I'm spamming strangers or hawking a bad product, but, well, I don't know what. I know it's absurd to believe that just because it's published it'll get read. People have to know about it, but when is it bragging and when is it simply conveying information?

"Here's my daughter, the most beautiful, brilliant, talented person you'll ever meet. Don't you want to take her out for dinner?"  (too much!)

Or..

"This is my daughter." (information only)
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"Here's my novel. It's the most breathtakingly achingly painfully gorgeous piece of writing you'll ever read. Don'tcha want it?" (too much!)

Or...

"My new novel is out." (information only)

I try not to do the former. Like most writers, I'm not sure what I even think about the book now that it's a book and not a word file anymore. I already see things I want to change, chapters I want to cut, lines I want to rewrite. I do know that's always the way. It's part of being an evolving writer. It's part of being able to say, "I did the best I could, but that best will be different today because everything is different today" and I have to be alright with that.

I'm finding that self-promotion is a lot like writing. It takes awhile to find your voice with it. It takes awhile to find the rhythm (yes, carry books in your car, slip it into conversation (but only once!), update your FB pages, yes, yes) It takes awhile to find peace with it too. You have to let go of the myth that the publisher will do this for you. That's a hard one. If I wanted to go into sales, I would have. But I'm not in that Dan Brown-world.

The first creative writing class I ever taught at Phoenix College came as a surprise. I hadn't finished my MFA yet. I hadn't taught anything where people paid actual money. The program director called. The instructor bailed. Could I teach it? It started in two days. So I said yes, because of all the faults I may have, saying yes when opportunity falls in my lap is not one of them. I was terrified I wouldn't have anything to say. I overprepped. I over-everythinged. But I soon learned that teaching is less about knowing and more about being. If I was authentic in what I said, I could say things that made no sense and be given the chance to restate or explain or retract. If I was fake, over-confident, or arrogant in my delivery, no one would feel safe with me. No one would trust anything I said.

You may have heard this saying: When you get to the end zone, act like you've been there before. 

I try to do that, and pretty soon, I'm not acting, I am in the end zone, and I'm making it my own experience. So I have this novel out now. That's my football, and I can stand still or I can run with it.

Here's an excerpt.

You can buy it anywhere books are sold. You can buy it from me. Send me your e-mail through the comments section and I'll tell you how to do that. If you're in Phoenix, I'm coming to Changing Hands in Tempe on August 13 at 7 pm to do a reading. You can buy the book there and support the fabulous independent bookstore that Changing Hands is. I'm also doing a writing workshop from 2 - 5 on August 14. You'll need to preregister for that through Changing Hands. The workshop costs $35.

I promise I will not be using every blog post to promote. But today, I'm in the end zone, and I've got to run.

Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream

There's no place like San Francisco.

In five days, we:

- experienced camping in Union Square (our hotel's bed was more like a bedroll, slanted, and with pointy springs, and if Keith and I were obese, we couldn't have fit in the room together)
- heard dozens of languages on a single bus ride
- saw amazing silk embroidery art at the Asian Arts Center in Chinatown
- ate and ate and ate and even drank one meal (which was not as bad it sounds -- we just ate too much in the middle of the day and ended the evening with only a glass of wine and a piece of sourdough bread at the wharf)
- race/walked 2 miles from Castro and Market to Powell and Sutter to catch a play at 8 pm (the buses were too full and weren't stopping and the underground was down). I can apparently do 2 miles in 30 minutes. Take that, marathon-running people! Funny, how I can walk and walk and walk on concrete, but put me in anything that even appears like "the wild" (like an overgrown park, perhaps) and I can't walk 30 feet.
- browsed bookstores with cats who live in them
- walked past the con men and the homeless -- often not the same thing
- saw a man typing on a Remington in front of Ben and Jerry's on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. Name your price, name your subject, and he'll type a poem.
- saw more ads for the iPad than ads for Starbucks
- saw a man walking down the street with a live chicken on his head
- went to Ocean Beach and froze in the sunlight
- had dinner with two fabulous friends (and when we couldn't identify some of the food on the menu, they had both iPad and iPhone options for us to look up the food) Oh, how I want an iP.... stop it! Stop it!
- saw hundreds of people trying to get to the Civic Center on Saturday night in tuxes and gowns for the annual Black and White Ball (and without Muni service it was fascinating to see how fast those women (and some of the men!) can go in those heels)
- watched the ferries depart from the Ferry Building as the fog fell at dusk
- were serenaded one morning by a man singing "This Little Light of Mine" on the sidewalk beneath our hotel/campsite
- saw too many accessory dogs and nowhere near enough cats
- ate dinner at 10:30 the night of the Infamous Two Mile Walk. In Prescott, your only dining choice at 10:30 at night would be Denny's. In San Francisco, well, it hadn't even gotten started yet.
- used the fire escape as a refrigerator because, yes, the hotel/campsite did not have a mini-fridge

What is it about San Francisco?

Perhaps it's because we get to the City on BART and leave on BART, so we have to emerge from underneath the earth to be in San Francisco, and then descend back into the earth to return to our "regular" world. That makes everything mythical from the first steps. Perhaps because so much is happening every millisecond, we are forced to forget the regular world and must adapt immediately to this extraordinary world. Perhaps because the City feels real -- the light with the dark, the creativity with the destruction, the abundance with the scarcity -- nothing feels hidden away. We can't forget that there are 6 billion other worlds. We can't slip into complacency without a lot of effort (or substances).

The City keeps pulling you back to it. Back to the concrete and the earthquakes and the crack pipes and the uber-chic-vegan-gluten-free-sushi-places. It pulls you back to all the possibilities available to you. It pulls you out of routine, out of predictability, out of stagnation.

You have to move, but even if you hop on the wrong bus, another one will be around eventually to bring you back. How's that for magic? Click your heels, baby. You had it all along.

Powell Street BART/MUNI station

Keezel and I at Ocean Beach

Poignant end-of-movie scene (cue Bette Midler song) where Girl and Monkey look out at Vastness of Ocean and discover Important Truth about Self and World and Impermanence. 
San Francisco, you are the Wind Beneath My Wings.

Next Stop: San Francisco!

Tomorrow, we're leaving for San Francisco. Every time I go there, I think of the opening scene from Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City (Harper Perennial 1978). (...) indicates text deleted for purposes of the blog.

Mary Ann Singleton was twenty-five years old when she saw San Francisco for the first time. She came to the city alone for an eight-day vacation. On the fifth night, she drank three Irish Coffees at the Buena Vista, realized that her mood ring was blue, and decided to phone her mother in Cleveland.

'Hi mom, it's me."
(...)
"Mom, I want you to do me a favor."
(...)
"I want you to call Mr. Lassiter and tell him I won't be in on Monday morning."
(...)
"I'm not coming home."
Silence.
Her mother began to cry. "You won't come back. I just know it."
"Mom. Please. I will. I promise."
"But...you won't be...the same!"
"No. I hope not."

I've only got one class on campus next semester. The rest are on line. It's a brave new world. "Hello? Yavapai College? I won't be in on August 16. You can reach me during my virtual office hours. Make sure your messages are in .rtf or .pdf format. Thanks!"

Perhaps I would have been gutsier at twenty-five. Still, it's nice to think about.

We will go to the ocean, watch the people, pay a homeless man for a poem, listen to how we are living in sin from the street corner preachers, hug a baby seal for a cause that exists only in San Francisco, buy a piece of turquoise from the vendors on Market Street, go watch a play that involves no sound, admire the costumes in the windows and on the people, visit friends, remember friends who are dead, trip on the earthquake pressed sidewalks, hear the voice of the Muni announcer, wish I had an iphone, stand in front of City Lights Bookstore and listen for Ferlinghetti, count the number of honest-to-goodness books people are reading on the train, watch men playing drums on the corner of Geary and Powell, pay too much for a cheeseburger, pay too little for a hug.

I will listen for my characters, who have been stuck in San Francisco for (in my world) five years. In the book, they've been there a lifetime and more. I will let the clang of the trolley chase the ghosts away and ring in new ones. I will wish Jeffrey were still alive so I could give him a copy of my novel because he read it first, nearly nine years ago. I will be glad my friend Dex is there, and that we will have time for dinner together, and I will be glad I am able to travel, able to walk the hilly streets, able to pay my own way.

I will return to Arizona to market my books, start another one, try to let the last semester slip away. I will water my plants, go to my yoga classes, drink coffee at The Raven, laugh with my girlfriends, and then pack up for New York in a few weeks, grateful again that I am able to travel, walk the hilly streets, pay my own way.

"Hello?  Yavapai College? Thanks for direct deposit. I'll bring you back a flower for your hair."

Midlife Mid Career Writing Advice

So far, for me, midlife (big assumption that this is where I am -- 82 is looking younger all the time!) has been about getting rid of stuff -- whether that stuff is 3-dimensional or emotional or psychological. It's been about accepting that what worked in my twenties (everything from types of food to exercise routines to types of relationships) doesn't necessarily work in my forties. Joseph Campbell said that midlife was about reaching the top of the ladder, only to realize that the ladder was up against the wrong wall. I realized my ladder was up against the wrong wall before mid-life. What's been a slower revelation are the transitions within a writing life and within a writing process as I age.

I was struck this year by the youth in my writing classes. Their fiery energy. Their certainty that there will always be another story, more time, more imagination. Their general lack of interest in revision, in craft, in process. Their drafts were disposable. Their experiments conducted without commitment. There's nothing inherently wrong with this. Compared to my students who are farther along in years than I who are afraid to let anything go, afraid to start, afraid to stop, afraid to create things that aren't perfect, they are a breath of fresh air. My older students are constantly aware that time is not on their side. My younger students think time will always be in service to them. It's an interesting dichotomy to have in the classroom -- the dance between "there will always be tomorrow" and "there may never be another time". The two sides are good for each other, and for me, standing not just in the front of the classroom, but in the middle of these two extremes. The edges help frame my perspective, help me realize what to let go of, caution me against the rigidity that could come next. I am in the middle of the duel between reckless and afraid.

I remember the writer's ego of my younger days. Part of that ego came because I am a good writer. The other part came from believing good was good enough, and that my good-enough would never be challenged. I remember doing just what my students do -- scratching out a draft right before the due date, never looking at the comments from my teachers, believing (sounding surprisingly like that part of me that believes I will be the one human not to die) that I was just not understood by the teacher or the group. I know this place when I see it in my students, and I know it has to run its course. I know that of my 100 students a semester, 5 are serious, fewer than that will make writing their lives.

I remember the urgency to say everything in one play, one story, one poem. The need to shout my perspective from the rooftops and slam the door on those who didn't share it. I remember how angry I was to realize that I had a degree in literature and had only been required to read the works of two women (Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf). I remember the power of the 1st person narrative, and how impossible it seemed (and how ridiculous) to write from any other point of view.

But something shifted. Shouting only made my throat raw. Being attached to how I was perceived and how others perceived things caused nothing but suffering. First person morphed into third person as a primary point of view choice -- perhaps as I morphed from a person whose eye was "I" into a person who could see a larger community, a larger world besides my own skin. The girl who wrote decent drafts in one sitting began to write slower, began to listen for a long time before she even put a word on the page. The girl who had always loved the ease with which the words had come began to notice that the words that came the easiest were not usually the right words. She began to understand the adage "only real writers revise" and began to look not just at the big picture, but at each word in the sentence, the placement of each comma. Her respect for writing grew as her need to be seen within it waned. And then she realized this, which stopped her heart:

The first draft is not a badly executed solution to the problem of the narrative. A first draft is, at its best, a scratching out of the problem itself. The first draft (yes, all 300 pages of it) if you're lucky, will show you the question of the narrative. It will contain signposts for you as you begin to do the rest of the work. It will contain clues. But it is not the solution. It is the submission of the question.

If one is lucky, humility soon replaces arrogance as a writer ages. Where is that fire? She might wonder. Where is the certainty? Was she no longer a writer? But like the rest of her life, the fire has ceased to rage and begun a more steady, constant pulse. And the certainty, well, now she knows there never was such a thing. And the purpose of that first draft becomes the seeking of the question, rather than the attempt to answer it. And because the fire has ceased to blaze out of control, it can become the fuel for the long journey of the novel.

Is youth wasted on the young? No way. My forty-one year old body can not sustain that anger or that energy. My forty-one year old body wants to watch and stretch and drink water with lemon. My forty-one year old body is interested in new writing questions, in the third person point of view, and in building a bridge instead of a wall. And if someone had told my twenty-year old body this, I would have dismissed it, if I'd have even heard it. So when I stand in front of my class of twenty and sixty year olds, I try to channel youth's blaze, use it to fan the waning heat of the others, and keep myself hydrated, flexible, and silent.