08-25-10:A Live Reading and Interview with Vendela Vida At Bookshop Santa Cruz
"...there was an owl that came into this place we were renting one day..."
—Vendela Vida
The Vendela Vida event at Bookshop Santa Cruz was almost alarmingly easy. I arrived early and had plenty of time to set up, which proved to be quite fortunate. I literally went through three versions of the audio setup, and made a cable run to Santa Cruz Electronics. In the end, I used the standard issue SF in SF setup, and it worked just fine. I even found the mic stand I'd left behind after the Gary Shteyngart event.
With all the audio setup and tested, I still had plenty of time to re-read the novel, glance at my notes and prepare the scene. But what made all of it so easy, in the end, was the wonderful voice and thoughtful perceptions of Vendela Vida. She was for this interviewer a perfect conversational collaborator.
Somewhere in the depths of time, I lost interest in "Asking Questions" in an interview. This is not to say that I don't ask questions, but I rarely write them down. This generally works to my advantage, even when I actually don’t want it to. For example, this time around, I thought that since the phone questions had worked, I'd try to ask them again. But I couldn’t remember them, and was happily distracted by the Vida's answers to what I was wondering about.
The evening began with a stellar reading by Vida from her novel 'The Lovers.' After a brief setup, she plunged us into Yvonne's world. Her voice became Yvonne's in that strange third-person translation that happens when we read. It was riveting and dramatic, immersive in the manner of a great reading, and a grand setup for the conversation that followed.
With no audio concerns on my mind, I was free to follow Vida through her sun-drenched creation of Yvonne's world. Eventually, we brought the audience in, and they responded with great questions of their own. I'm not a book group guy, but if I were, here's a perfect book for groups to read. There are so many shades in the novel and so many levels and opportunities for diverging perceptions of the character and events that it really lends itself to a group discussion. Every answer contains the seeds of another question.
"Permission is the unobtanium of human interaction."
—Paul McHugh
Emerging from the surreal fog that settles when you read Jeff VanderMeer, you're going to ask yourself a very simple question; how do I tell my story?
Paul McHugh, author of 'Deadlines,' doesn't just have an answer to that question. He has a workshop at the Henry Miller Library on Sunday, August 29 where he'll give you the tools to do just that, even if you've never thought about writing anything other than a check to pay down the credit cards that are threatening to eat your life and turn it into their own art project.
McHugh is a veteran journalist who spent umpty-ump years with The San Francisco Chronicle covering the out of doors beat. Since we all find ourselves out of doors, in one sense or another, at regular intervals in our lives, McHugh, who turned his own life story into fiction, is the perfect guy to tell us how to turn our lives into a story. Moreover, you can add a side order of fiction.
I managed to catch McHugh at KUSP on his way back from Big Sur, where he'll be conducting the "Art of the Short Memoir" workshop on Sunday, August 29, from 10 AM (http://henrymiller.org/events.html) to noon. I got him to sit down and talk about what he teaches in the seminar, and about his own sense of story.
This is a phrase that seems to be cropping up more often these days as stories and narratives grow around us and assert their power over our lives. We get so caught up in the plot that is our lives that it is easy to forget that we are writing that plot, creating that plot with every second that passes.
McHugh and I had a very interesting discussion about the place of plot and fiction in our own personal narratives. His workshop helps writers an non-writers alike get a better grip on their own narratives, and in a short conversation he more than demonstrated his point.
"There was a second hoax about a shuttle mission..."
—Mary Roach
Mary Roach is a lot more popular than you might expect a non-fiction genre fiction writer to be, and the reason for this is easy to see — it is Mary Roach herself. She sweats the same stuff as the rest of us, but she also exudes an enthusiasm for her subject that makes her very engaging and entertaining.
While we might enjoy her take on the perils of pooing in space, what we're really laughing at with her is the ability of mankind to undergo the most extreme of experiences with the sort of utter aplomb one brings to the most mundane of daily chores.
I talked to Roach in her home in Oakland, where we sat hunched over the recorder for about an hour that seemed like ten minutes. Roach really knows her own writing, which is not as common as you might hope. She knows the details, but more interestingly she knows not just details that didn't make it into the book, but as well, her own vision. She understands how she puts these books together.
Aw we talked about how she created her latest work of non-fiction genre fiction, Roach's sunny outlook colored every subject we touched upon. She's easy to listen to because she actually likes her subject — humanity. And she likes us not in spite of our faults but because of them. Flaws make the man.
Mary Roach's books, and I have to consciously remind myself that they are not novels, have a goofy, self-deprecating charm because the author herself does. I asked her off-tape if she'd ever consider writing a novel, and she replied that she has no imagination. I'm not sure I believe that, but I do think she is on to one key aspect of her own appeal.
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Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2012 Interview with Sara Paretsky : "Everything in a courtroom is a story; it's not justice, it's combating narratives."
01-18-12: Commentary : Téa Obreht Conjures 'The Tiger's Wife' : The Grammar of Vision
01-13-12: Commentary : Hard Case Subterranean Block : Not from Bob's Basement Tapes
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2012 Phone Interview with Lisa Randall : "...there seems to be some evidence, especially from one of the experiments."
01-10-12: Commentary : Archive Review: Terry D'Auray Catches Lawrence Block and 'The Burglar on the Prowl' : "A show well worth the price of a ticket."
12-29-11: Commentary : My Life in the Bush of Books : Island of Vice by Richard Zacks, Iago by David Snodin, The Coincidence Engine by Sam Leith and The Dipatcher by Ryan David Jahn
12-21-11: Commentary : Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman : From the Seedy to the Sublime
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Three Books with Alan Cheuse : 'Kill Bin Laden' ; Ryu Mitsuse, '10 Billion Days and 100 Billion Nights' ; Michael Crichton and Richard Preston, 'Micro'
12-20-11: Commentary : David Blackbourn Visits 'Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in a Nineteenth-Century German Village' : Externalizing a Culture Clash
12-15-11: Commentary : Ayize Jama-Everett Reveals 'The Liminal People' : The Powers That Be
Agony Column Podcast News Report : The Agony Column Live with Lisa Goldstein and Ayize Jama-Everett, and music by Fenyang Smith, December 10, 2011 : "... let's look at what happens if people have abilities that other people don't have ..."
11-28-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Scott Wallace : "Within months of first contact, these groups experience a huge die-off."
11-22-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Charles Frazier, Part Two : "It's not me telling you, there's this storyteller voice."
11-21-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Charles Frazier : "If we're going in the wrong direction, we could turn around and go back."
11-17-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Gianni Mola : "The only way you can learn, I told them, is to watch me cook it."
11-11-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Karl Marlantes : "...the way I "think" about things, with quotes around think, is I tend to write them down..."
10-31-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Colson Whitehead : "In the Apocalypse, somebody's gonna have to do the grunt work..."
10-17-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Russell Banks : "They are in a sense, permanently marked and thrown into this darkness..."
