downton abbey. and some smothering dream.

This isn’t a post about Downton Abbey. But it is a post about Wilfred Owen, and he seems to be popping up a lot lately because of Downton. Media Bistro recently published a “Downton Abbey Reading List” and The New York Times even did a piece about Downton and how publishers were using America’s interest in it to promote historical fiction and biographies of the First World War. Both mentioned Owen-Wilfred Owena British soldier and poet who wrote, with horrific imagery, about the horrors of war.

*Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is a line from Horace’s Odes. Roughly translated: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” Wilfred Owen was killed in battle one week before the war ended. He was twenty-five years old.

You can see the original manuscript, and other works, at the University of Oxford’s Great War Digital Archive.

regency

I spent the last few weeks eating pies and watching costume dramas and reading Claire Tomalin’s Dickens Biography. I gained five pounds, discovered the wonderfully squared jawline of a young Douglas Booth, and began to suspect that my favorite Victorian novelist was a wee bit fond of hallucinogenics (see: henbane). I also slept. A lot.

cast your fate to the wind

I’ve been listening to the Charlie Brown Christmas Album and various Vince Guaraldi holiday hits since mid-September. They’re all mildly sedative and put the calm in me.

I spent most of last week in the hospital. I didn’t get there on my own merit – a certain someone decided to have a stroke, and there I was. So there I went. Steph was two floors above me, with her own somebody. (Though my somebody was her somebody too.)

We told each other it was okay to cry. Then made a big exaggerated song and dance of it because we were still embarrassed to be doing it at all. We met at 3:00a.m. for cheeseburgers and doughnuts and didn’t even pretend to care about the heart charts on the wall. And we crashed in the 5th floor waiting room more than once and wondered aloud each time whether we were just that tired or “is that an earthquake causing the room to shake?”

As depressing as it all was, there was a certain kind of comfort in being forced to do it together.

I just went to the Apple website. Steve Jobs has died and, all of a sudden, I feel really worn down again because…if Steve Jobs can die, in spite of himself, then anyone can.

But Vince Guaraldi is on the iPod. And that’s something, I suppose.

she’s the zeal i wish i had

I started running again last week. Because everything hurts when I don’t and because it’s preferable to yoga. Because even though I’m a bit of a sloth, when it comes to exercise, I’d rather move than not. Also, you can’t eagle pose to Eye of the Tiger. That’s just a fact.

Steph drove over this morning and we cranked out three miles before getting distracted by macchiatos and cold black coffee at the farmer’s market. On our way back she did the limbo beneath a lavender tree. I thought about joining her, but didn’t. I’m about as bendy as a brittle old stick at the moment. That’s a sorry excuse for an excuse, I know. Made all the worse, considering Steph.

Steph had major surgery two months ago. Surgery that involved a thirty inch incision. To put it into perspective, she’s only sixty inches tall. She’s the zeal I wish I had. I’m thinking about kidnapping her and forcing her to be my personal trainer and all around cheerleader. That would be ace.

the brief wondrous

Junot Diaz made me cry. Twice. Not his writing . Because, I’ve gotta be honest. I haven’t read any of it yet. (Not yet.) But his voice. I have absolutely zero in common with the man. Our backgrounds are not at all similar. Our lives, current, even less so. But hearing him speak really lit a fire under me. It was one of those ‘remember this moment’ moments. And I shared it with Mal.

sweet dreams

You know stress is getting the better of you when you wake up at 4:00am-screaming. I use to do this routinely. The Euro found it amusing, until he didn’t. Then he started sleeping in the guest bedroom because “you’re going to give me a heart attack and I’d really rather you not, thanks.” But that was then. Tonight he didn’t even budge. Tonight, someone could have killed me in my sleep and he’d have slept right through it.

It’s usually getting attacked by wild animals that brings me to the screams. When I was a kid I use to dream of goats and grizzly bears. I’ve always maintained that goats were little satanic creatures and once, when I was ten, I saw a grizzy bear haul up on his back legs. Hauled-up grizzly bears will scar a ten-year-old for life. I dreamed of that bear for fifteen years, and it was always tearing down walls to get to me. During college I’d dream of being chewed on by a wild boar. A big tusky thing with red eyes. It’d gnaw on my shoulder until I’d wake up in near epileptic fits. Tonight it was a jackal. You forget those things even exist until they start going down your stairs backward, then you remember there was one in The Omen.

I’m using my laptop as a nightlight at the moment and thinking I should probably get one of those dream interpretation books. But the last time I did that, I found out my maternity instinct was trying to eat me alive. I really don’t want to know what backward-walking jackals mean.

mo and kev.

If you’re in London this summer stop by the National Portrait Gallery’s BP Portrait Award Exhibition and see “Mo and Kev” by artist Chris Holt.

I’ve mentioned Chris’s artistic talents before and you’ll see from his bio on the National Portrait Gallery’s website that he’s also a BAFTA nominated director, writer, and producer. So you know right from the get-go he’s a bit of an underachiever.

The first time I saw one of his portraits was in his parents’ garage. I was helping my not-yet-husband look for a pair of roller skates. And sitting in a corner….“Some stuff Chris left when he moved…I think he did that one in school.” I don’t know who it was, or what it was meant to be to Chris. But I know what it was to me. Preacher Granville Muncey, laying on hands and baptizing down in the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River.

The resemblance really was spooky and put me to wondering if Chris was with that group of English anthropologists who came to West Virginia in the eighties to watch the Pentecostals and write text books about them – because the man in the painting didn’t just look like Granville, he was Granville. But Brother Granville never got out of the mountains…so how did he get into Chris’s head?

It took a while for me to realize that not everyone grew up with the Appalachians shielding them from the rest of everyone else and it was entirely possible Chris could know about things like faith healers and charismatics when I didn’t know about things like Ikea and Father Ted. So I got over the spooky feeling. But just barely.

Artist Chris Holt: Saatchi Online

rare bird alert

Flynn and I have an ongoing fantasy involving Bill Murray and Steve Martin – circumstance throws the four of us together and we live happily ever after on an island in the south pacific, eating cheese and drinking wine and spearing the occasional sailfish. That sort of thing.

On Tuesday I put on my traveling pants and headed to the Tennessee Theatre in Knoxville to watch the very same Mr. Martin perform with the Steep Canyon Rangers. My sister went with me to do things like drive and keep me from becoming a groupie.

Our seats were better than we had hoped for (and not at all what we had purchased) and we spent the evening eyeball-to-eyeball with the man in white. That gorgeous head of hair, a Tom Wolfe suit, and the spotlight full force upon him, made Martin, more or less, a giant reflector. So the only image my point-and-shoot caught was a lovely ethereal glow situated somewhere between Nicky Sanders and Woody Platt.

Martin and the Rangers performed songs from Martin’s self-penned bluegrass album Rare Bird Alert including ‘The Great Remember (For Nancy)’ (one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard) and ‘King Tut’ (dance moves included). There was plenty of insightful comedy like “bad poetry makes good country songs” and “the pros and cons of having no drummer”. And then, of course, there was the music…Martin didn’t win a Grammy for nothing.

All the Rangers were fantastic, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Nicky Sanders. I come from bluegrass, and I know from breakdowns, but I’ve never seen anyone tear up a fiddle like this dude. Crazy.

the girl who would speak for the dead. by paul elwork.

I recently had the pleasure of being introduced to author Paul Elwork whose debut novel The Girl Who Would Speak For the Dead (Amy Einhorn Books/Penguin Group) was released in March. The title and cover are good and gothic and more than enough to pull you in – but it’s the story that keeps you there. I’ll post a review as soon as I have time to do it justice. In the meanwhile, Paul has very kindly agreed to do a little Q&A for the blog. But first, a little about The Girl Who…

In 1925, at her family’s suburban Philadelphia estate, 13-year-old Emily Stewart tricks her gullible schoolmates into thinking that she can speak to the dead. But her game begins to seem like cruel deceptions when adults who have suffered the loss of loved ones start consulting her as a spirit medium. The Girl Who Would Speak For the Dead interweaves Emily’s experiences with those of several generations of family and friends devastated by tragic loss, and paints an unforgettable portrait of individuals traumatized by death and unhinged by grief.

Q. It seems like the paranormal is the publishing world’s Holy Grail at the moment. Were you at all conscious of this when you first began writing The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead?

When I started the book, years ago, there were certainly successful novels about the paranormal, but they weren’t the publishing rage they are at the moment—so definitely not in that sense. The other thing is that while my novel is built on a paranormal notion—communicating with the dead—nothing supernatural takes place in its pages. The Stewart twins in the book are pretending to contact the dead, as the Fox sisters did in the 19th century. I tried to fill the book with personal and historical ghosts for my characters, but no actual ones are rattling around in there.

Q. One reviewer described The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead as a “compelling tale of people coping with loss, and vulnerable to suggestion.” What are some of the other themes explored by the novel?

I think the novel has as much to do with people’s complicity as believers as it does with vulnerability to suggestion. Every one of us, even flinty skeptics like myself, navigate the world mostly through belief, since we can verify so little for certain. In the same way, I think people often choose what they believe, consciously and subconsciously (midconsciously?). The believers in my novel aren’t simply dupes; they bring complex psychological and emotional histories to their encounter with the twins’ spirit-knocking game.

Q. I’ve always been fascinated by the story of the Cottingley Fairies, where two young cousins in the North of England perpetrated a hoax that even fooled Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Where did the idea for The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead come from?

I find the Cottingley story fascinating, too. Conan Doyle was also a big believer in Spiritualism, the belief system predicated on communicating with the dead, started by the Fox sisters of upstate New York in 1847. These girls pretended to contact the dead through phantom noises called “spirit rapping”; the sounds were actually made by cracking joints in their toes and ankles. Their performances spread beyond their hometown of Hydesville and ultimately lead them to tour abroad. Years later, one of the sisters—destitute and alcoholic in the decades following the sisters’ international success—got up on a stage in New York and made a confession, complete with a demonstration of how the trick was done. The true believers in the audience rejected the confession—they thought she had been coerced and/or bribed.

I took this basic story arc and premise, recast all of the players, kept things on a smaller, neighborhood stage, placed my story in the 1920s to follow World War I, and fictionalized everything.

Q. The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead was first released as a shorter work under the title The Tea House. How did the current version come about?

I contacted suspense writer M. J. Rose about using her AuthorBuzz service to help promote The Tea House (released by a small press, Casperian Books, in 2007). Much to my shock and delight, M. J. took an interest in my writing—long before I ever made any payment to AuthorBuzz—and she introduced me to my agent, Dan Lazar. Dan sold the novel to Amy Einhorn, who wanted me to flesh out more of the family backstory than I had in the original version, and here we are.

Q. In a starred review, publisher’s weekly said “Elwork’s first novel poignantly depicts the desperate need of people to believe in life after death…” I’m a huge fan of southern gothic literature and I think this “desperate need” is at the heart of that tradition. You also manage to leverage the details of 1920s Philadelphia in much the same way southern gothic writers leverage the details of the south. Are there any other parallels?

I’m also a fan of Southern gothic writers, and that tradition certainly influenced me in writing this novel. Southern gothic tones are actually featured in The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead as part of the family’s history, coming out of antebellum Virginia and shadowed by slavery. Being set on the outskirts of Philadelphia, my novel is actually more closely related to that Southern gothic tradition than to any historical writing in urban places like downtown Philadelphia. My novel’s action takes place in an insular setting—on a lonely, storied estate, along dry roads in the summer, and in the woods at dusk.

Q. What scares Paul Elwork? What inspires him?

I fear for my sons’ emotional and physical safety at times. Sometimes I still give myself the creeps in dark rooms, and have to shake it off and remind myself I’m a grown man. I don’t mind seeming goofy or silly (I’m frequently both), or even a little dumb in an absentminded way (again, guilty), but I’m terrified of appearing downright stupid.
So many things inspire me. Again, my sons. Music is a huge inspiration; I often arrange soundtracks in my head as I listen. I don’t have a deep scholarly knowledge of art history, but I love paintings. And storytelling inspires me, of course. I love the sense of “being brushed by the wing of a great feeling” while reading, as Willa Cather put it.

Q. If The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead had a soundtrack, what would be on it?

Cool—soundtracking. Love it. I guess I can’t find a place in here for Rage Against the Machine, which I’ve found myself listening to a lot just lately. I would want music that suits the period, but not so much Jazz Age/F. Scott Fitzgerald soundtracking—more like a haunting and subtle classical score with some traditional hymns thrown in, like “When They Ring the Golden Bells,” one I quote at the beginning of my novel.

Q. What are you working on now?

I’m working on a novel about the making of a fictional Nazi propaganda film in the early 1930s. My idea is that it precedes the historical rise of such films in the mid-thirties. Once again I’m after a tight focus on a relatively few players; a series of events that could have fallen through the cracks of history. Or that could have been buried there.

Q. How would you describe your writing style?

Often sparse, sometimes lush, elegant but not prissy. I try to capture a lot in a few lines.

Q. Can you describe your writing process? What do you enjoy most about it? What do you struggle with the most?

I tend to edit and revise as I write rather than simply write through to the end of a first draft. I both enjoy and struggle with this approach, in that it allows me a deeper perspective on each new scene and slows me down. What I enjoy the most is the exhilaration of getting lost in the writing, of feeling unhooked from time as we usually understand it, and of watching characters do and say things I’d never planned for before I started typing.

Q. Do you have any advice for other writers or debut novelists?

For writers in general: Only things that sound like clichés but are all valid. Be true to yourself. Don’t lose sight of the fact that the work itself is the most important thing. Settle in for the long haul.

For debut novelists: Here’s some advice I’m still accepting myself. Don’t obsess over reviews. Don’t fret over sales. You can’t control either, in the end. You’ve put your work out there—and yes, you need to promote it and make yourself a presence wherever possible—but as far as actual outcomes beyond your control, now is the time to get as Zen as you can in a hurry.

Paul Elwork lives in Philadelphia and is the father of two sons. His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including Philadelphia Stories, Short Story America, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Word Riot. His novel The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead (Amy Einhorn Books/Penguin Group) is available online and in bookstores everywhere. For more information and links to short fiction and other content, please visit www.paulelwork.com or follow Paul on twitter at @paulelwork.

that catherine girl. and the abbey.

Whenever anyone mentions Westminster Abbey around Steph she gets all crazy-eyed and shouts out LONGSHANKS! It has to do with her obsession with William Wallace and a kind of temporary Tourette’s.

London is a pretty camera-friendly place, but there’s no photographs allowed inside the Abbey. Unless you’re Steph. She’s a bit of a ninja and can sneak a shot anywhere. I think she might be posting some of them on facebook tonight, in honor of Whats-His-Face and that Catherine girl and how they’re getting married there tomorrow.

The Euro and I have decided to get up at 5:30 in the morning for a slap up British breakfast. Since Katie Couric and those lot are a bit annoying, we’ll be watching the BBC stream the nuptials. The best part…we’ve even got in some lovely chocolate HobNobs in honour of the royal wedding cake.