Authors Electric

 " ... The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die."   -- Marcel Proust, Swann's Way    From Stepanie Heuet's 2019 graphic novel adaptation It's been twenty five years since I last dove into Proust. I was living in San Francisco. The Millennium was still a couple of years off. I had my first cell phone, a nifty flip device. Looking back, I see that I was living  in two worlds - at least. I stretched myself between a demanding Silicon Valley start-up job and being an over-age, doting, divorced dad to a precocious, late-in-life eight-year old.  It was no more harried a lifestyle than that of many single parents, mostly moms, but that didn't make it any easier. I had zero time for much of anything reflective, enlight...

  I know, I know, I'm preaching to the converted here, but hear me out. In order to be a good writer, one must first be a voracious reader. Hands up if you agree with that. Perfect we are all on the same page then, so this will be a short post. Well, no, actually.  'What?' I hear you say. We do need to be voracious readers. Yes, you are right and before you think I am going mad, let me explain. I am a voracious reader. I've been reading since I was three years old -- I was an extremely early reader. I'd read my way through the entire children's section of the local library before I was ten and was fortunate enough to be given an adult library card. Don't ask how that happened. I think it involved sacrificing chickens and my mother spending many hours wrangling with the head librarian. To be honest, I think the librarian gave in just to get this mad woman out of her library.   Anyways, I had read my way through the following series -- Cherry Ames Nursing Boo...

  I was wondering what to write about this month. I’ve done very little in the way of writing (or music, or work) due to illness – some nasty bug that had me confined to bed for over a week. Not Covid, but still not very pleasant. It did give me a chance to catch up on my reading, though – after the first four days or so, I was reading an average of a book a day. I also listened to a lot of radio, and that’s what inspired this post. Unbeknownst to me, it’s the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses . It’s one of those books that I’ve never read, and never been sure if I even want to, so when a series of programmes were playing on Radio 3 I took the opportunity to listen, and see what all the fuss was about. The initial programme didn’t exactly fill me with a burning desire to read it. Almost a thousand pages describing the course of an ordinary day where nothing much happens. Still, I continued to listen – after all, there was nothing else to do. Over...

Charles R. Johnson Charles R. Johnson puts the goal of our latest issue of Chicago Quarterly Review in clear, beguiling simple terms. "So one has to ask," he writes in his introduction to the black American writers' issue that he edited: "how did our black storytellers , poets, essayists and artists sing the world in the last year and a half?" Johnson asks -- in poetic uniquely American terms that echo Ralph Ellison and Walt Whitman: "What kinds of worlds do black creators sing in the twenty-first century?" Johnson is the guest editor" who produced -- curated in the most meaningful sense -- CQR's latest special issue, just released -- Volume 33 devoted to African American writing. As Johnson describes it in the issue's powerful introduction: "Moving as a phenomenologist would through the contributions of twenty-seven poets, storytellers, essayists and artists in this special issue of Chicago Quarterly Review - of profiles on our li...

Reading great and good literature, I thought, could help us regain our balance when the mind is distressed or out of equilibrium as a result of illnesses, disabilities or traumatic events encountered in the course of an ordinary life. I had read Montaigne, Dante, George Eliot, and a number of more modern authors like Jay Griffiths on the subject and I wanted to test the idea that our emotional health could benefit from reading and discussing novels and poetry in a learning situation and that this could directly affect our wellbeing. Mark Edmondson in  Why Read?   (2004) says that we can construct ourselves from novels, poems and plays and that like Proust, writers can get the reader to feel what they feel.  I set up a project with adult education students to test my idea. The course was free and took place over five weeks with students advising me how to plan it. One came up with this: 'Reading can enhance our life: reading poetry/novels can lift us out of our...

Sir Walter Scott's Waverley Novels As well as being an author, I also have the honour of being the President of the Scottish Association of Writers. Amongst many other duties that the role entails, I sometimes travel to visit writing groups in all areas of Scotland. This week I am in Thurso and Wick visiting both Caithness Writers and The Write Place 2b, which I have to say has been exciting. Both groups made me extremely welcome. It's encouraging to see so many new and established writers, which brings me to my slice of literary history of the title. Scotland has a long literary history with some high profile writers and books. Reading has always been important with Andrew Carnegie building libraries and promoting reading and literature. As a reader I love to visit libraries when I visit new places, so visiting both Wick and Thurso Libraries was high on the agenda. Thurso has moved from the old Carnegie library, which is now an art gallery, and into a former school cal...

UT ponders process at AWM Six years in Chicago and I no longer feel like a tourist. Still, I like it when visitors come and give me an excuse to rubberneck the Windy City's attractions. I doubt this will wear off. I lived in San Francisco for 30 years and never tired of taking friends and family around, always discovering something new. I was ready for another round this July when my eldest daughter, Alicia and her husband Brian paid my inamorata Eleanor and I a visit, as they do from time to time. They were on their way home to Mexico City, where they run American and English literature programs at an international school, having done that sort of thing on four continents. They had just spent fortnight in Ireland visiting Brian's mother. Right off, Brian, an author and musician as well, announced in his lyrical Irish brogue: "I must see your Writers' Museum." "Writers' museum?" I hesitated. "I didn't know we had one." In fac...

Iago and Othello I got to fretting over my fictional villains again the other night after flipping off the news (in more ways than one.) Too many real ones at the gates now. Though Trump and his barbarians are nothing new, their arrogance is more flagrant than any in my lifetime. The Death Star of demented greed appears at perigee, bloated with obscenely-financed self-assurance. You can't make these bastards up, even as parody. They're complicating my novel. Just when I think I've got the right shade of dystopia, my near-future narrative needs to turns darker. I've always found creating villains daunting. The memorable ones - from Iago, to Moriarity, to Voldemort - seem more challenging than heroes, particularly the multidimensional ones with whom we can empathize or at least identify with, like Medea, Lady Macbeth, and Raskolnikov. Not that villains are always needed. Protagonists can be their own worst enemies. A suitably sinister villain does, however, ap...