Aloha. I started writing poetry when I was nine years old. I remember writing in bursts. I had a wonderful teacher that year, and she was encouraging us to write beyond what the class assignments required us to do for the poetry unit. I first learned about haiku and sonnets and I was hooked! I wrote anywhere and anytime, and on any surface — from napkins to spiral notebooks. By…
Aloha. K.A. Doore wrote an essay yesterday about the reader’s buying power and how the support of an independent bookstore helps save jobs and sustain a vibrant literary community. I have nothing to add to her excellent work – she said it so eloquently. I want to say that I’m so deeply grateful I have the love and support of Counterpoint Press. This amazing independent press was brave to embrace…
Aloha: It’s tax season and this is a perfect time to remember that unless your last name is GRISHAM or KING, it is difficult to make a living writing books. Don’t let it deter you: creating a writing life is a noble calling, it just doesn’t pay well for the aspiring or newbie writers. It doesn’t pay well for poets. You should know that it’s madness in a way, to…
As a Deb this year, I’ve had the enormous privilege of working with four amazing, super-talented writers. And I’m so pleased to be able to finally sing the praises of Martine Fournier Watson’s debut novel, The Dream Peddler. I love this novel so much! It is dreamy, spooky, suspenseful. A sleepy town awakens when a young boy goes missing and the Dream Peddler arrives. The intertwining stories between the townspeople…
I’m so honored to be with these debutante ball authors this year – terrific writers with stellar books coming out. Today is Kai’s launch day!!!!! K.A. Doore has written a page-turner of a novel: The Perfect Assassin. Happily for all of her readers, it’s the first of a trilogy — so we have a splendid continuation to look forward to. Book Two will be out in October! I’m not your…
In my novel, The Atlas of Reds and Blues, I tried to capture the real world — the nonfiction world of the main character — from her earliest memories to the day she is shot by police and lays bleeding in her driveway. It’s a short novel. I tried to capture what she remembered, what she lived through — it was a pleasure to include such iconic moments as Woodstock…
If The Atlas of Reds and Blues were a major motion picture….Let’s see. (BTW, I love this:) Archie Punjabi as Mother with makeup to make her have a few wrinkles and graying hair, and, Brad Pitt as hero, in soft-focus to make him look a little younger. Shabana Azmi as as Mother’s mother. Glenn Close as Mother’s mother-in-law. Priyanka Chopra as the Baby Sister, with makeup to make her look…
I want to go on record as saying that I have nothing to add to K.A. Doore’s perfect post yesterday. 🙂 Being part of a literary community is the best thing I writer could wish for. Writing itself is a solitary and lonely, and often isolating, endeavor. But if we’re really lucky writers, we learn some craft techniques and make friends along the way. Then you have people in your…
We are thrilled to have Rachel Howard as our guest author this week at The Debutante Ball! Rachel Howard’s novel THE RISK OF US, described by Jenny Offill as “an emotionally complex and amazingly suspenseful novel about love and fear,” will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on April 9th. Rachel earned her MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College and is the author of a memoir, The Lost Night….
I don’t have any magic formulas for the books I selected and used as comparable titles — except if you consider reading, as I do, as a superpower. A few years ago I wanted to start sending out my own book. I attempted to take stock of what I loved to read and re-read, the books I kept returning to for inspiration and solace: The House on Mango Street by…
