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

I’m reposting this because I just finished Elizabeth Brundage’s A Stranger Like You and, really, you want to win this book! These are all such intelligent, beautiful books, so enter by tomorrow. Details how to do so in the post. [Please Note: The Contest is Now Closed and the winner have been drawn and notified. Thanks for Participating!] – Meg

Yes, you’re in the right place for the 1st Books Book Giveaway! Read on!

When you pick up a book and look at the back, what you usually see are some nice things other authors have said about the book in your hand. In the business, those are known as “blurbs” (a term I don’t think I’d ever heard before my first novel sold, but now know all too well). Where do they come from? From the kindness of strangers, mostly, and sometimes from the kindness of friends. So this post is a little ode to kindness – which will end in a giveaway of books from four writers who have helped me with kind words, and whose work I love.

As you can imagine, it’s an awkward thing for an author to go literary hat in hand to ask another author to spend days reading your book in hopes they will have kind words to say when they reach the end. At least it was for me. I try to remember that every time someone asks me to read a book for a blurb, and try to say yes as often as I can. I don’t get to everything, but I do try.

Anyway, I was pretty relieved when most of the names on my editor’s list for blurbs were folks I had no connection with, that she would approach herself. There were two authors I mentioned I knew that my editor loved, though. Long story short, not only did they read for me, but they read at lightning speed, and came back with wonderful enthusiasm for The Four Ms. Bradwells. Which I would be grateful for under any circumstances, but given that they are both very busy with their own new novels, I am doubly so.

Katie Crouch, author of two wonderful novels, the New York Times bestseller Girls in Trucks, and the just-released Men and Dogs, says of The Four Ms. Bradwells:

“It’s rare that I come across a book that I immediately want to give to my best friends. This was one of them. A heartwarming page-turner about smart women and the complicated nature of female friendships. By the end you’ll wish that you could join the Ms. Bradwells for lunch.”

and Elizabeth Brundage, whose latest amazing novel, A Stranger Like You, was published Thursday, calls it

“A fine, smart, compelling novel about the deep friendships that guide and nurture our most difficult choices.”

I’m squeeing with joy, obviously, to have such wonderful praise so early in the publication process – from writers whose work I so admire.

So to say thanks, I’m going to give away free copies of Katie’s and Elizabeth’s novels, as well as copies of novels by the first two authors who blurbed my first novel, The Language of Light.

The books:

Katie Crouch’s Men and Dogs (hardcover)

Elizabeth Brundage’s A Stranger Like You (hardcover, signed and personalized, thanks to the fact that she’s reading at M is for Mystery on Aug 19)

Katharine Weber’s latest novel True Confections – which is out in hardcover, and coming in paperback this December. This one is a signed first edition!

and Manette Ansay’s Good Things I Wish for You – just out in paperback .

I loved them all (or in the case of Elizabeth’s, am reading and loving, and have loved her first two). They are all wonderful novels, and great book club choices.

To enter to win, just:

and in doing so help me spread the word about these four amazingly and generous writers. Please, only one entry each! I’ll close the contest next Sunday, August 15, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, and pull random names of winners. – Meg

“Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.”
— Iris Murdoch

And a quick reminder that Friday the 13th might be your lucky day!

I first met Rosemary Graham on the chat at the sadly now-defunct Readerville.com. She’s both a lovely writer and a lovely person. I’m just thrilled to have her guest-posting this week as her newest novel, Stalker Girl, comes out! Her earlier books Thou Shalt Not Dump the Skater Dude and My Not-So-Terrible Time at the Hippie Hotel have been among the International Reading Association “Young Adults’ Choices,” the Chicago Public Library’s “Best of the Best,” and the New York Public Library’s “Books for the Teen Age.” And I’ve heard Stalker Girl is even better – and can’t wait to read it myself! – Meg

Five years before publishing my first novel, I was deeply immersed in the so-called  “scholarly conversation” about Walt Whitman. To enter the academic conversation (i.e., get published & get tenure), you need to find a new angle on a subject about which thousands of books, articles and dissertations have already been written. While I knew full-well that my continued academic life depended on it, I was pursuing a question I actually cared about personally. “Where did Whitman, who loved men, get his ideas about female sexuality?”

By examining the medical and pornographic  literature available to him, I came to believe that Whitman had been inspired by the eighteenth-century pornographic novel, Fanny Hill. This was—and still is—a pretty bold idea and I still remember the moment I discovered it. I was sitting in the UC Irvine library (visiting my future husband, who was enrolled in the MFA program), in the first days after the Northridge earthquake, surrounded by studious UCI math nerds. The building was swaying from aftershocks and every once in a while we’d all look up, laugh nervously and get back to our work. Suddenly, I started to see similarities between this fictional autobiography of an 18^th century prostitute and “Song of Myself.”

Hey, busy math majors, I wanted to say, did you know that one of the greatest American poets cribbed from porn? Walt Whitman borrowed from Fanny Hill! No? You have an exam tomorrow? Okay.

I wrote up my theory and had it accepted for publication in ELH, English Literary History. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press, ELH is considered top-notch. It was a perfect venue from which to rock the Whitman world.

Hah. The response to my radical suggestion was silence. Literally. While my article has since been cited in more articles, and listed in Whitman and Fanny Hill bibliographies, I never heard a word from a single established Whitman scholar.

Of course it doesn’t really happen that way in scholarship. If I wanted recognition, I’d have to go out and work it, present at conferences, hob-hob. But I had never liked the conference scene. Old men in tweed exchanging scornful glances at the eager young men and women in jeans and t-shirts.

It turned out that for me, the pursuit of the question and the ah-hah moment in the swaying UCI library were enough. I felt I’d gotten very close to Whitman the writer, that I’d discovered something about the act of creating this amazing poem he gave the world.  He’d probably bought a cheap pirated copy of Fanny Hill on the streets of Brooklyn or Manhattan. The part where a plucky prostitute named Harriet describes her first sexual experience on the banks of a river one summer afternoon must have stayed with him, because a very similar scene, echoing words and images from Max Cleland’s novel, appears in his greatest work. Cool. (If you’re dying to know the details, I still have most of the 50 off-prints I optimistically ordered when the piece came out. Just ask, and I will send.)

That article did the professional work I needed it to do. It got me tenure in June of 1997. A month after that, I got married and by the end of that summer, I was pregnant. After my daughter was born, I found I was done with scholarship. But wanted, very much, to write. I started writing memoir and personal essays and had some success publishing them—in The Santa Monica Review and The San Francisco Chronicle. When I started work on the project that became My Not-So-Terrible Time at the Hippie Hotel, I had no intention of writing fiction or even a whole book. I thought I was writing a personal essay about a long-ago summer. When I was twelve years old, my brother, sister and I spent two weeks during the summer with our father at hotel on Cape Cod that was set up for divorced parents and their children. Can you imagine a worse idea for a vacation? I started trying to write about my actually kind-of-terrible time at that place but found myself less interested in my own experiences than in the fictional possibilities of that situation.

I decided to turn it into a novel for teenagers. It’s strange to think back at that time. On the surface it was quite possibly the worst time to try to become a novelist. I was a new mother, I was running the Composition Program at Saint Mary’s, I didn’t have any truly “free” time. Paradoxically, writing was the only time I felt truly free. That novel was the one place that was just mine. – Rosemary