Switching Books

In late March, I had started the first draft on my second novel in the “Every” series. This was right around the time I heard the great news that the first book in the series, Every Secret Thing, had won the St. Martin’s/Malice Domestic Award and would be published by St. Martin’s Press. (Every Secret Thing has now been retitled Every Last Secret.) I had been working on character and story for the second book, Every Broken Trust, doodling around as I must at the start of any book, but this news sent me to the page (or at least the computer).

I took a break from drafting Every Broken Trust to attend the Malice Domestic Conference and again later to go to New York with Ben to the Poet’s Prize and to meet with my editor, Toni Plummer. Toni only wanted a few changes, but they were the kind of edits that require rethinking some elements of the story. I also had an extensive author’s questionnaire to complete for St. Martin’s. They wanted a tremendous amount of information, but since they wanted it in order to plan marketing strategies for my book, I wanted to give it all to them. Toni had also asked for some photos of the small towns on which I based my fictional town, Brewster, Missouri, to give the cover designer ideas. So Ben and I took some drives around Kansas City.

My fictional town is based on features from college towns Parkville, MO, Lawrence and Manhattan, KS, and from county seats, Independence and Liberty, MO. Deacon County is also a fictional county, squeezed in between Jackson and Platte.

My fictional college, Chouteau University, is based on Park University, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the University of Kansas, and a number of other colleges I’ve known.

Last week, I sent in the completed author questionnaire and photos, and yesterday I sent in the last changes for Every Last Secret. Now, unless Toni has further changes she wants me to make, Every Last Secret is out of my hands until we get to the copy-edits. It will go through all the stages of the production process and come out in May 2012. All terribly exciting, but my mind is already elsewhere. I’ve turned back to its sequel, Every Broken Trust.

I thought that some readers of this blog might find it interesting to follow the process of shepherding one book through publication while writing the other. (Although, technically speaking, it’s Toni who’ll really be shepherding the one through publication.) So this is a beginning.

Next post--back to my Writers of Color series.

The Garden Wars

It's spring in Kansas City. As many of you may recall, last year I was summoned to court by the city over my garden. I said then that I would take photos of it in bloom in the spring to show the next time that happened, and I promised to post them on this blog.

So here we go. And here's the list of what my gardens contain, front and back, though not all of it is blooming now, of course.

Plants In My Garden

Southernwood

White peony

Bowl of Beauty peony

Yellow iris

Purple iris

Various bicolored iris

Peace rose

Large old species rose

Chocolate mint

Native daylily

Native goldenrod

Butterfly bush

Lamb’s ears

Costmary

Mugwort

Fennel

Rue

Lemon balm

Peppermint

Oregano

Tansy

Sweet Annie

Sage

Wild strawberry

June-bearing strawberry

Red clover

Various hybrid daylilies

Various hybrid Oriental lilies

Missouri primrose

Black-Eyed Susan

Purple coneflower

Bouncing bet

Wood sage

Sweet autumn clematis

Naked ladies/ American amaryllis

Liatris/gayfeather/blazing star

Columbine

Mayapple

Lily of the Valley

Yellowbells

Periwinkle

English ivy

Honeysuckle

Gladiolus

Petunia

Marigold

Wax begonia

Wormwood

Daffodil

Various colored tulips

Violet

White clover

Rose of Sharon/American hibiscus

Hen and chicks

Sedum

Marigold

Portulaca/Moss rose

Red and purple salvia

Hardy chrysanthemums

Sunflower

Much of that will not be blooming for another month or more, and the woodland plants bloomed much earlier. I should have taken these photos a few days earlier before the rains knocked blooms off the peony and the iris. And, of course, many of the native plants I have don't bloom until much later. As you might expect, I have a wide variety of birds, including bluebirds, goldfinches, and hummingbirds, plus butterflies, four kinds of bees, etc. visiting and living in my yard.
I also mentioned when I was battling the city last summer that a different department of the city was trying to persuade everyone in my part of the city to put in gardens much like mine in place of the environmentally destructive grass lawns they all love so much. The folks at the court had not heard anything about this, but I was able to bring in brochures and correspondence to prove it, and that helped. Still I had to pay a fine and plead guilty to having a nuisance yard. The city prosecuting attorney made it as low as possible, but given the city's ordinances, he had no other choice than to go for it. (In Kansas City, any plant over 12 inches tall can be declared a nuisance by your neighbors or the city yard police, even roses, peonies, iris, etc.!, and they can do all kinds of terrible things, including throw you in jail for it.)
Now, to the punch-line.

That other arm of the city governmental bureaucracy sent me a letter saying they wanted to put a raingarden in my yard. $450 worth of native plants--they gave me a list to choose from and I already had two-thirds of them that I had been cited for growing--plus the cost of the topsoil and sand and additives and all the labor of digging and planting. I said sure and chose all the native plants I didn't have. Here you see the raingarden they just planted in my backyard.

Already, my next-door neighbor, who hates nature, has been leaning over the fence pointing to the newly planted raingarden, so I expect something from the other arm of the city soon. I have all the correspondence on the raingarden, and this time, I have an ally--the guy who planted it using EPA money given to the city just for this purpose. He will come to the court with me and explain.

So, the garden wars continue. How will I fare this year? Being the fool that I am, I am hopeful. Being as old as I am, I am wary. But so far, I consider myself undefeated. Honey, the South ain't got nothin' on me!

Another Great Writer of Color: Lorraine Lopez and her Gifted Gabaldon Sisters

[This is a review of The Gifted Gabaldon Sisters by Lorraine López that I posted on this blog a while back. I'm bringing it forward into my Books of Interest by Writers of Color series. I will be looking at her newest novel soon also.]

I first met Lorraine López at Con Tinta in Chicago earlier this year at AWP, the national conference of writers and university writing programs. López is one of the organizers of Con Tinta, the annual pachanga of Latino writers and their literary allies from around the country. She is also a veteran of the famous Macondo writing workshop. A professor at Vanderbilt University, López is a charming, soft-spoken woman, whose second book of short stories will be published this fall by BkMk Press at UMKC. [This book, Homicide Survivors' Picnic, was a finalist for the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction, making López the first Latina to become a finalist for that prestigious award.]

López’s first novel, The Gifted Gaboldón Sisters (Grand Central Publishing), raised high expectations since her first short story collection, Soy la Avon Lady and Other Stories (Curbstone Press), won the Latino Book Award and other awards, and her young adult novel, Call Me Henri (Curbstone Press), won the Paterson Prize. The Gifted Gaboldón Sisters exceeds those expectations handily. Four young sisters depend on the family’s mysterious and ancient Pueblo servant, Fermina, after their mother’s death. Early in the book, Fermina dies, after promising each girl a gift. Throughout the book, the story of the sisters’ journey to adulthood with the special gifts endowed by Fermina—Bette’s stories, Loretta’s healing, Rita’s cursing, and Sophia’s laughter—alternates with Fermina’s own gripping story of kidnapping and slavery told to a writer long before the girls were born. The two threads come together as the adult sisters, in a time of crisis for each, journey together across the country and into the past to discover who Fermina was and what kind of magic their capricious gifts really came from. López peoples her book with characters so fresh and alive you expect to meet them just around the block. The rich, vivid writing entwines the reader deeply in the lives of the girls, their relatives, and their lovers. Fermina’s story enlightens and interconnects with theirs from the distant past. The book’s theme focuses on the lives of women in the past and present, how the distant past informs their present identities, and how they overcome or make peace with the limitations life hands them. This is a book you will go back to again and again.

[López is one of the most gifted writers of fiction today. She writes from a position of respect and caring for even her most hapless and out-of-control characters, allowing the reader to see through her eyes the possibilities and hope at each one's core.

Her novels are published by a major publisher, and here's the Amazon link. If you'd rather buy Homicide Survivor's Picnic from the small press that published it, here's that link with a video of her reading it, as well. Readers of this blog will know that I always encourage folks to support the small and university presses who publish most of the new writers in this country.]

Back to the usual format of this series on writers of color at the end of the week.

Books of Interest by Writers of Color—Part Three—Lorna Dee Cervantes, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui

This is another in my series of posts on books of interest by writers of color. I am making my way through a long list of great writers. It's also another in my long series of battles with Blogger. This time my photos are working, but my abusive blog-spouse is flailing away at my fonts. Forgive irregularities, please.


Lorna Dee Cervantes, Drive: The First Quartet, New Poems 1980-2005 (Wings Press) Cervantes is considered one of the most important Chicana activist/poets in the last 40 years. Her first book, Emplumada (University of Pittsburgh Press), won the American Book Award, and her second, From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (Arte Público Press), won the Patterson Poetry Prize, the Institute of Latin American Writers Poetry Prize, and the Latino Literature Award. She has won much critical acclaim and many other awards, including the Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Award, and is anthologized widely. Cervantes’ work is simultaneously accessible and complex, dealing with her own Chicano and Native American heritage and with issues of racism, colonialism, misogyny, violence, oppression, social injustice, and love. Cervantes continues to work in the literary and political communities, founding and editing literary magazines and giving readings and workshops to benefit various community causes. For anyone who wants to read more widely among writers of color, she is a priority, since through her activism, her writing, and her teaching, she has been an influence on many later writers. Here's a link to the small press that published her most recent book. Please patronize these indie presses. Without them, hardly any writers of color would ever make it onto the page.



Craig Santos Perez, from unincorporated territory [saina] (Omnidawn Publishing) Perez, a native Chamorro from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam), is one of the most prolific and influential young poets and critics around. His first book, from unincorporated territory [hacha]( Tinfish Press), with his second, from unincorporated territory [saina], forms part of a larger, ambitious work, an experimental poetry of history and resistance, a redefining of his birthland and the countries that have conquered it and tried to erase all traces of his native culture. Perez’s criticism is also a part of this net of language, historical and ecological research, wordplay, and wit that examines and undermines colonial oppression on Guam and in the world of poetry and literature. He manages the difficult task of being avant garde without being deliberately (or accidentally) abstruse and esoteric. Perez is a serious talent in the younger generation of writers—and he can be laugh-out-loud funny as often as he is passionate and erudite. Here's the link to find his most recent book.







Sherwin Bitsui, Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press) Bitsui is Dine of the Todich'ii'nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl'izilani (Many Goats Clan). He has racked up an amazing number of awards for a young poet with just two books—a Whiting, a Truman Capote, a Witter Bynner, and more. Flood Song, his most recent book, picked up both an American Book Award and a PEN Open Book Award. Bitsui’s work focuses on the tension between the Navajo reservation where he was born and the modern white world where he now lives, on the tension between the natural world of unspoiled places and the man-made urban environment. Bitsui uses elements of surrealism and quite specific sensory details, just as he uses both a supple, flexible English and the Navajo language of his childhood and ongoing heritage. He has already positioned himself as a major talent that is shooting for the top. Here's the link for Flood Song.

I'll be traveling, so I'll take a break from this series until the middle of next week. Then, more fantastic writers of color.