A Shed with a View

I want one of these in my backyard-- the ideal writer's studio.

Through Kithaus you can order one and put it together and actually live there... fairytale cottages are the new McMansions. According to this NYT article.

I managed to put together my own faux-Shaker desk in January--New Year's Eve, to be exact-- I wanted to get a fresh start. It came in a box from Target and had screws, knobs and its own L-shaped little tool thingy in shrinkwrap-- and directions in Chinglish. ("Please be contented to affix tight screws.") Assembling my own Kithaus? A breeze.

A Room with (an Edenic) View

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful. ~e.e. cummings

The rain is a godsend--everything has greened up overnight. I'm sitting here at my laptop at the window, looking out onto the garden and it's buzzing with life.

Two hummingbirds are zipping around. A redbellied wookpecker--her head & belly are traffic-cone orange--is flying back and forth from the birdfeeder to the top of the telephone pole where three of her brood wait. She stuffs them with suet and sunflower seeds--flying back and forth, back and forth-- and they're beginning to follow her, and take her lead.

Heavenly fragrant Moonvine...isn't it beautiful? Wish it were a scratch n' sniff pic.

The Fruits--and Veggies-- of My Labor... and the Reading Room

In gardens, beauty is a by-product. The main business is sex and death. ~Sam Llewelyn

Here's the sex part:
Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, cukes, carrots, nasturtium, marigold. And I love the vibrant pallet-- sort of...moorish.

Here's the death part: The lone pumpkin I had was halfway there but the squirrels got it, and there's nothing but a pile of rinds and stems. Savage beauty sounds like a bodice ripper, but it's an apt description for my vegetable garden-- it manages to be both Darwinian and holy.

Makes one wonder if George Bernard Shaw was being ironic when he said:

The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there. ~George Bernard Shaw, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, 1932

And now for something completely different:

Also a reminder of tonight's Reading Room, featuring Joshilyn Jackson and Katherine Min.
7 pm, The Handlebar, 304 East Stone Avenue, Greenville, SC 29601.

EMRYS READING ROOM featuring JOSHILYN JACKSON and KATHERINE MIN Today, 7:00pm Age Policy Tickets
	Published writers read from their works The season begins with blockbusters. Joshilyn Jackson’s short fiction has been published in literary magazines and anthologies including TriQuarterly and Calyx, and her plays have been produced in Atlanta and Chicago. Her bestselling debut novel, gods in Alabama won SIBA's 2005 Novel of the Year Award and was a No. 1 BookSense pick. Between, Georgia was also a No. 1 BookSense pick, making her the first BookSense author to receive No. 1 status in consecutive years. Her third novel, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, was published in March. Katherine Min’s short stories have been widely anthologized, most recently in The Pushcart Book of Stories: The Best Short Stories from a Quarter-Century of The Pushcart Prize. She received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her novel, Secondhand World, (Knopf, 2006) was a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Award. She teaches at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.
	Links: Joshilyn Jackson, Katherine Min, Emrys Foundation $2 for Emrys members, $4 for non-members

The Writing Room's New Schedule

The Writing Room's Fall 2008 schedule of workshops and seminars is up, and registration is running. Visit the website, www.emrys.org for details. (Emrys, a nonprofit arts foundation, sponsors our classes.) Curious? Read our students' testimonials.

Also visit us on Facebook.

We're kicking things off with a seminar from fabulous, hilarious, bestselling novelist Joshilyn Jackson:

Marketing Yourself on the Web at ALL stages of your Writing Career

Joshilyn Jackson

Whether you have just begun to draft your first short story or are currently shopping your third completed manuscript, there are things you could be doing, right now, to build a reader base and create a web presence. As writers we like to think of ourselves as artists, but in the publishing world, we are expected more and more to act as our own publicists and be savvy businessfolk. The Internet has opened up the world to anyone with a modem, and it can be a powerful professional tool for writers at all stages of their career. While the main focus of this seminar is prepublication (especially preparing for submission before one's first book first sale), we will also spend a little time on the crucial period between sale and publication. This seminar is for fiction and non-fiction writers, focusing mainly on those interested in placing book length manuscripts.

Level: All levels, Beginner to Advanced
Saturday, August 24
2:00- 5:00 pm
Location: Innovate Building Conference Room, 148 River Street, Greenville, SC
Fee: $50; $45 Emrys member

Joshilyn Jackson’s bestselling debut novel, gods in Alabama won the SIBA (Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance’s) 2005 Novel of the year Award and was a #1 BookSense pick. Her second novel, Between, Georgia was also a #1 BookSense pick, making Jackson the first author in BookSense history to receive #1 status in back to back years. Jackson read the audio version herself, winning a Listen Up award from Publisher's Weekly and making Audiofile's Best of 2006 list. Both books were chosen for the Books-A-Million Book Club. Her short fiction has been published in literary magazines and anthologies including TriQuarterly and Calyx, and her plays have been produced in Atlanta and Chicago. Joshilyn’s third novel, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, a national bestseller, was released in March of 2008. Visit www.joshilynjackson.com and Joshilyn’s popular blog, Faster Than Kudzu, for more information.

Author Interview with Suzanne Kamata

This column appears in my Author to Author column in the Greenville Journal.

The author: Suzanne Kamata
The books: Losing Kei (Leapfrog Press) and Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs (Beacon Press)
The event: Suzanne Kamata will be signing copies of her novel at The Open Book on Saturday, August 16th, 2:00pm. 110 South Pleasantburg Drive, Greenville, SC

After graduating from the University of South Carolina in 1988, Suzanne Kamata was eager to leave the country, to “experience a non-Western culture.” To git, as we say around these parts. She applied to the Peace Corps and was assigned to Cameroon, but, on a lark, decided to head to Japan after being offered a one-year assistant teaching position with Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET), a program her brother had read about in the newspaper. “I figure I'd spend a year in Japan and then go to Africa,” she said. “But one year in Japan didn't seem like enough - there was still so much to see and do and learn.” Kamata decided to renew her contract for one more year.

She’s been there ever since.

Two decades later, Kamata makes her home in Tokushima Prefecture, Japan with her husband, Yukiyoshi Kamata, and their nine-year-old twins. She teaches part-time and writes in her “pockets of free time” when her children are in school. A productive writer, Kamata’s work has appeared in over 100 publications. She is fiction editor at the online magazine Literary Mama and the author of the novel Losing Kei. She has edited two anthologies: The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and the Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs.

“I think mothers all over the world have a hard time finding time to write,” she said. “Much to the dismay of the other mothers [at her daughter’s school], I would often sneak off to a cafe or to the school library for an hour or so to read and write. I wrote my novel and edited Love You to Pieces that way.”

Kamata’s twins were born prematurely, and her daughter has cerebral palsy and is deaf. “I realized, when she was diagnosed that I had no idea how to raise such a child. As a literary sort of person, I first went to books to try to figure out what was going to happen and to try to find solace.” The result is Love you to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs, an anthology Kamata edited about raising children with special needs. The collection includes short stories, essays, and poems by renowned authors (such as Brett Lott) as well as emerging writers about families coping with autism, deafness, muscular dystrophy, Down syndrome and more.

“The best novels, short stories, and memoirs can pull in the lives of their characters and provide a deeper understanding of others,” Kamata said, adding she hoped the book “will serve as a kind of support group in far-flung places…”

Raising children outside her native culture is “bittersweet,” Kamata said. “'I’m happy that my son is bilingual and that my children have been exposed to various cultures. And I'm glad that they have a close relationship with their Japanese relatives.” On the other hand, she misses sharing “simple things like running through the sprinkler in the middle of summer,” or going trick-or-treating. “But these conflicts give me something to explore in my writing,” she said. “ As a reader, I tend to be drawn to multicultural stories, though I also read a lot of fiction set in South Carolina, especially when I'm feeling nostalgic.”

Kamata’s novel Losing Kei, tells the story of a young South Carolina painter who, as an American expat, loses custody of her only son to her Japanese ex-husband and then resorts to desperate measures to get him back. “When I write nonfiction, I feel naked. When I write fiction, I feel like I'm wearing a dress --or maybe a flimsy negligee! But seriously, I like being able to move events around and make sense of them—something that happens more in fiction.” Losing Kei is Kamata’s first published novel—she’s written five—and said she’s excited about working with Leapfrog Press, publisher of Losing Kei, to plan a stateside booktour.

When Kamata arrives in South Carolina this month, she plans to visit family, catch up with friends, and sign copies of her novel.

And maybe run through the sprinkler.

I feel for this guy:

Plant Box Battle Could End Up In Court: Retiree Deems Decision By Homeowners Association Unfair

Video: Upstate Homeowner Fighting For Garden Box In Yard


HOA's--they have their place, I suppose. (But maybe they should concentrate on policing above-ground pools and satellite dishes.) It's a new earth, kids. And there's no better place to read about it that in Michael Pollan's excellent article in the NYT Magazine:

"the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind."

From my own front-yard veggie garden-- the pic of the week:

From the Hammock to the Desk

I spent a week at Tybee Island off the coast of Georgia (near the gorgeous city of Savannah)-- and I'm just getting back to work. Although-- this was a first-- the beach house was wireless, so I kept up with email between watching the shore birds and wading out to watch the dolphins.

I'm in the middle of Susan Choi's A Person of Interest. I'll have more to say about this wonderful novel when I've read the last page. All I can say now: Choi is a writer of enormous talent.

I finished reading Augusten Burroughs' Running with Scissors and Dry. Scissors especially is one of those fascinating memoirs you tear through, thinking, how did this kid survive his family? Dark, funny, honest, shocking. Not since Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle, have I been so absorbed in a harrowing life story.

More later this week. Got lots of writing and revising to do. Not to mention a harvest of tomatoes and peppers to gather and a new batch of weeds to thin.

The Zen of Writing

I'm guest blogging about the Zen of Writing over at A Good Blog Is Hard to Find. Come on over.

When you're in the zone, you're not even YOU, you're watching this story reveal itself (in hard glimmering icy plinks or long, luxurious warm rains-- the story is fickle as the weather), and, then, somehow, you're writing it.

The raindance worked

And our parched red clay earth finally got some rain. Scenes from the garden:

Tomatoes blushing here (hiding there in the foliage) while the sunflowers chortle--they're so gregarious, such flirts.



Meanwhile, the bedroom windowbox is thrillin' and spillin':

Good News and Good Book

Here's the latest good read I just devoured over the weekend:
The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta is a real page-turner. I loved Little Children for its social satire, and the novel's appealing (and conflicted) characters, and I'm happy to say the Abstinence Teacher is a terrific follow-up, with humorous send-ups of suburban soccer moms (and dads), a born-again restless post-80's rocker, and a sex ed teacher who can't bring herself to cheerfully spout a new "abstinence" curriculum. As usual, Perrotta's tale crackles with inside jokes and laugh-out-loud moments, but his send-ups never lack heart, and his characters' internal struggles and conflicts with each other--make for a fascinating read.

Oh, and here's some good news I'm honored to share:

SC Arts Commission
Names 2008-2009 Artist Fellowships

The South Carolina Arts Commission Board of Commissioners has approved the 2008-2009 Individual Artist Fellowship Award recipients. This year, the Arts Commission is presenting awards totaling $30,000 to six South Carolina artists — two each in the categories of prose and poetry, and one each in music performance and music composition. Fellows each receive $5,000 in recognition of their superior artistic merit. Panelists named alternates in all categories.

The 2008-2009 fellows and alternates are:

Prose:	Julia E. Elliott, Lexington County Mindy Friddle, Greenville County
	Alternates: Jonathan Sanchez, Charleston County Stephanie Young, Greenville County

And I'd personally like to send out a big thank you to the " Out-of-State Panelist" for Prose, Mako Yoshikawa.

• A scholar and novelist, Mako Yoshikawa is an assistant professor at Emerson College in Boston, Mass. She has an A.B.D. from the University of Michigan, a master’s degree in philosophy from Oxford University and a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University. Her first novel, “One Hundred and One Ways,” was published by Bantam in 1999. A bestseller in the U.S., it has been translated into six languages. Her second novel, “Once Removed,” also published by Bantam, came out in 2003. She has received numerous honors, including fellowships from the Bunting Institute at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H.

Garden Gargoyles

This one we call Guardian of the Menstrual Hut:

The Third Angel

I just finished reading The Third Angel by Alice Hoffman...a real treat. Hoffman's storytelling is, as always, whimsical and compelling. The novel is divided into three narratives--three characters in three different decades, yet the characters are connected through a London hotel, ill-fated lovers, and each other (although they don't always see how--the reader does, thanks to the capable omniscient narrator). It's an appealing, effective structure (think The Hours and Three Junes).