For my fourth week mentoring in the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, I’m giving my writers a prompt for a personal essay or short story. I’ve found that it can be difficult to write about the big moments in our lives without getting overly sentimental or morose. But often if we come at those moments less directly, a story can bubble up more subtly – and be more effective as a result. So I’m asking the writers to try this:

1. Think of a big moment in your life that you shared with someone, say the birth of a child, or the loss of one. (Can you tell I’m about to send my youngest off to college?)

2. Think of a small moment that includes that same person and that makes you think of that big event, or the emotion of that big event. It might be anything. Something as simple as, say, taking a child to pick out a holiday decoration.

3. Now try writing about the small moment, but in doing so keep in mind the big event. See if you can’t capture the essence of the big event in telling about the small moment.

One example of this – and the reason I chose the examples of a lost child and taking a child to pick out a holiday decoration – is an amazingly moving short piece titled “Along the Frontage Road” by Michael Chabon. It’s a story in which, in taking a child to pick out a pumpkin for Halloween, he deals with the emotion of a miscarriage from which his wife (and he) are recovering. I read the story in 2001, and still remember it vividly.

With apologies that I can’t link to the story – it’s behind the New Yorker paywall – I offer also a much less worthy example in the first piece I ever published, “What the Medal Means.” It’s about a training run I did for a marathon, and about my dad’s support in helping me recover from failure. It’s flawed, for sure (for starters, two paragraphs in a row start with “then”). But I’m using this excuse to trot it out because … well, its publication was the first time I saw “by Meg Waite Clayton” in print, fourteen years ago this month. And seeing it still makes me smile. If you haven’t been there yet, trust me, it’s a special moment. If you have, you know what I mean.

So is it your turn to see your name in print if you haven’t already, or even if you have? As many of you know, I’m generally wary of writing contests, but I came across a few in the most recent Poets & Writers. They are fee-free and offered by reputable groups or publications – with deadlines coming up:

University of Iowa Press Short Fiction Award – Award-winning manuscripts will be published by the University of Iowa Press under the Press’s standard contract;

Real Simple Life Lessons Essay Contest – the prize here is $3,000, publication in Real Simple, AND a trip to New York to meet the editors; and/or

The Writer’s Center Emerging Writers Fellowship – from the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD (a wonderful organization), but you do have to live within 250 miles to qualify

Good luck, and happy writing! – Meg

On the whole, the past year was a pretty good one for literary women: Huerta Mueller won the Nobel, Hilary Mantel the Booker, Annette Gordon-Reed the National Book Award, and Elizabeth Strout the Pulitzer. We appear to have come “a long way, baby” since the days when Nathaniel Hawthorne declared that “[a]ll women, as authors, are feeble and tiresome” and Norman Mailer wrote “[t]he sniffs I get from the ink of women are always fey, old-bat, Quaintsy, Gaysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic.” (Too dykily psychotic?) But the fact that women are winning major literary prizes makes it all the more troubling when the books magazines continue to give the most attention to continue overwhelmingly to be those written by men.

Publisher’s Weekly “first-ever Top 10”­ was a list of books written exclusively (that’s ten out of ten) by male authors. Newsweek last summer, in a 50 books list of “What to Read Now” included only nine women; this year, the number of women included in their “What to Read Now” piece was a little higher, but not much. Amazon, in its “Best Books of the Year,” included only two books written by women in the top ten – both sporting male protagonists – and in its longer list of 100 books included more than three times as many books written by men as by women. And now we have a lot of excitement over Jonathon Franzen getting the cover of Time.

I don’t have any opinion on whether he deserves the cover or not; the book isn’t out yet. But I did receive by email (compliments of Ilana DeBare) the following list of authors who’ve made the cover in the past:

Stephen King – March 27, 2000
Tom Wolfe – November 2, 1998
Toni Morrison – January 19, 1998
Michael Crichton – September 25, 1995
Scott Turow – June 11, 1990
Neil Simon – December 15, 1986
Garrison Keillor – November 4, 1985
Erma Bombeck – July 2, 1984
John Updike – October 18, 1982
John Irving – August 31, 1981
Mario Puzo – August 28, 1978
John Le Carre – October 3, 1977
Marabel Morgan – March 14, 1977
Alex Haley – February 14, 1977

In case you don’t know who Marabel Morgan is (I had to look her up), her bestseller, A Total Woman, offers the advice that “A Total Woman caters to her man’s special quirks, whether it be in salads, sex or sports,” and proposes we great our husbands at the door after their busy days at work (while we’ve been, say, home eating bon bons?) wrapped in clear plastic wrap.

Which is not to say there aren’t exceptions. The Los Angeles Times lists come to mind.

And it’s not to say that there aren’t reasonable explanations either, ones that don’t necessarily wrap misogyny labels around the editors putting together the lists.

The world of American literature has been historically dominated by men: male writers, male publishers and editors, male prize committees and critics and, indeed, male magazine editors choosing covers and listing books which far more often than not address the stories of male protagonists. It should be no surprise that American readers, steeped in the history of a literature largely shaped by men, might have a male bias in deciding what new books deserve to be labeled the best.

Clearly, prize committees have begun to question those biases, and found much to praise in women author’s books. But I’m left wondering how many of the rest of us have. I’d like to think that Anita Brookner was right in refusing to participate in the Orange Prize for fiction – a prize reserved for women – on the rationale that “literature is without gender.” Surely it is. And yet … here’s an NPR piece about reviews in the New York Times, suggesting that from January 2009 to February 2010 95 percent of US authors reviewed in the publication were white, and 87 percent were male.

The title of this piece is borrowed from a piece in Harper’s a dozen years ago, The Scent of a Woman’s Ink: Are women writers really inferior? It’s written by Francine Prose, who put me onto these discrepancies 15 years ago, at the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. I commend it to you as, sadly, still relevant.

Okay, climbing off my soapbox. - Meg

Seven months till publication of The Four Ms. Bradwells! Seven months. Not seven years. No broken mirrors or bad luck here. No need for Stevie Wonder songs.

So we had the first of what in my lawyering days we called “all-hands” meetings today – or the first I was involved in. It’s quite clear every time I talk with the folks at Ballantine that the Four Ms. Bradwell gears are turning in New York long before my morning alarm rings.

A few weeks ago, my agent and I had a lovely chat with the head of publicity at Ballantine (who, a few days later, was named director of publicity for the Random House Publishing Group). She was not only delightful to talk with, but also incredibly savvy, and left me very excited about their thinking for the book. Today’s call was with the team who will actually knock on doors and leave calling cards: Katie Rudkin and Lisa Barnes at Ballantine, and Kathleen Carter Zrelak at Goldberg McDuffie.

Already, advanced reader copies of The Four Ms. Bradwells have gone out to “the trades” – places that people in the book business look to for early information but that the rest of us can’t afford: Publisher’s Weekly; Library Journal; Kirkus; Booklist. Will we get reviewed? Or the much-sought-after (knock on wood and throw salt over my shoulder for even mentioning the word) star? Most of the writers I know would like to fast forward through the wait for early reviews, or perhaps have a full mouthful of root canals instead.

So the chat today was mostly about the other ways books get attention: magazines, newspapers, radio, book tours and the like. Terms such as “pitch cover letter,” “release,” and “Q&A” were bantered about, along with “review” and “long-lead” and “feature piece,” “galley list” (which has nothing to do with stocking kitchens on boats), and “finished book.” Everyone had great ideas, including my agent, Marly Rusoff, who was mentioning facts about Myra Bradwell that I didn’t know!

My biggest contribution was to ask, when someone mentioned “six months lead time” and “October” in the same sentence, that October was … um … five months before March by my math? (This in my politest, who-am-I-to-question tone.) Long pause before someone very kindly explained that since The Four Ms. Bradwells comes out March 22 – about the time April magazines hit bookstore shelves – it’s those they are looking at. Sigh. I have so much to learn. And yet I know so much more now than I did for The Wednesday Sisters.

The bottom line: many exciting possibilities were bantered about. But – as you may have realized already – I’m a superstitious gal; I’m not going to mention the particulars unless and until they come through, lest I jinx myself.

(And if you’re wondering where the “All-True Story” post #13 went, let’s just say I haven’t had great luck with publicity in the past, and, really, plenty of buildings seem to do fine without thirteenth floors.) – Meg

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I gave my Afghan Women’s Writing Project workshop a third prompt this morning, this one meant to jump-start a personal essay. The prompt goes as follows:

1. Think of something you have done in your home. It can be anything. Maybe you made a blanket with your mother. Maybe you had a fight with your sister. Maybe you read your first book or wrote your first poem. Maybe you met your husband, or your best friend. Don’t worry too much about what it is. But do choose one specific event. For example, don’t think of all the fights you’ve had with your sister, but rather one specific fight you had on one specific morning. And you aren’t writing yet, you are just remembering.

2. Choose one specific physical thing in your home, in the room you associate with the event you chose in step #1. It can be anything at all: the molding around the front door; the panes of a window; the kitchen sink; a blanket or piece of furniture or a rug; the inside of a closet.

3. NOW pick up your pencil, or go to your keyboard, and write at least one sentence describing how the thing you chose in step #2 looks. Try to keep in mind how you felt during the event you choose in step #1, but only describing the physical thing: the sink or the blanket, the closet. Be specific in your description. Don’t say “the color is beautiful.” Try for something more like F. Scott Fitzgerald description of Gatsby’s bedroom in The Great Gatsby: “two hulking patent cabinets … held his massed suits and dressing gowns and ties, and his shirts piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high … shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue.” (And if you can write that well, you don’t need my help!)

4. Now close your eyes and touch the thing. Write a line about how it feels, perhaps comparing it to something else.

5. Put your face right up to it and breathe deeply. What does it smell like? Write a line about that.

6. Now begin a new paragraph with the line “When I was [whatever age you were in the event you chose for step one], I _______.” Then tell the story of what you did. Try to use the details of your description with which you have started the piece, and add new ones, as you tell this story.

Happy writing!

-Meg

I just came across a rejection letter from the Museum of Art, politely declining the donation of a painting by an artist. The letter is dated October 18, 1956, and the reason stated is “severely limited gallery and storage space.”

The artist is no less than … Andy Warhol. The painting was titled “Shoe.”

His paintings went on to sell for as much as $100 million.

And just in case you’re thinking this was his early work and perhaps not quite up to snuff, rest assured that MOMA eventually found room for not just a single “Shoe,” but for 18 of them – and a total of 137 works by Warhol.

Keep writing – or whatever you do to express yourself creatively. If you don’t believe in yourself, how can you expect anyone else to? – Meg

I’ve just given my second writing prompt to the workshop I’m heading up at the Afghan Women’s Writing Project this month. I tried to do something very simple this time, in hopes of prompting some of the quieter members to write. This is one I learned from some of the wonderful teachers who helped my sons become the lovely writers they are. My email to the writers copied in full below. Enjoy! - Meg

Dear 102 Writers,

For this week’s prompt, I am going to suggest a simple poem exercise often done with young children, with a grown-up twist.

The Poem Exercise: Write a poem of 8 or more lines, with each line starting with the words “I am.”

The twist: Don’t say anything the way you first think of it. Try to think of a more evocative way to say the same thing.

So, for example, I might think: I am 51 years old. But instead of writing it that way, I might write: I am almost the age my grandmother was when she died, many years before I was born.

I might think, I am 5 feet 4 inches tall. And I might write: I am a head shorter than my sons, whom I used to cradle in my arms.

If you really like one of your lines very much, you might break the poem into stanzas and repeat that line at the end of every stanza.

And be open to anything that comes to mind. One of my favorite lines I’ve seen from this kind of poem exercise is: “I am fishsticks, crinkle-cut frozen french fries and frozen mixed vegatables”!

Have a great writing week!

Warmly,
Meg