Behind the Book Archives

Behind the Book: Knitting nirvana

Behind the Book by bookpagedev

"There."

"Like this?"

"No, too styled."

Too styled? I thought that was our mission: "styling" the handknits for the photographs that are to go into our book, Mason-Dixon Knitting: The Curious Knitters’ Guide.

We are in the kitchen of a Victorian house in the Catskills, hunkered around a knitted dishcloth, seeking to capture its soul. There are five of us: Steve Gross, a distinguished architectural photographer who has in a weak moment agreed to shoot our book for us; Sue Daley, his partner who is a gifted stylist; my co-author, Kay Gardiner; my sister-in-law Mary Neal Meador; and me. The kitchen is crammed with laundry baskets filled with stuff we are going to photograph for the book, including the baby burp cloths which are still not finished. Steve’s equipment is a tangle of cables, cases and shiny umbrellas that look like leftovers from a moon mission. It’s not obvious to me how this is going to go.

When we decided to write a book about knitting, Kay and I had a clear vision of what we wanted to create. Ours would be the knitting book we always wished we could find. It would have stories, a wide variety of cool patterns, and most of all, glorious, lush photographs which convey the warm-hearted wonderfulness of handknits. As we worked on the book, certain elements fell into place. Patterns: check. Stories: check. But the photography? Yikes! It loomed like a soul-sucking black hole. We knew nothing about photography. At some point we knew we had to start the photography process, but the word Hindenburg lurked in my mind. There was no way the photographs could come together. We avoided setting a schedule for the shoots. Maybe MAGIC would happen and some beautiful pictures would turn up.

Well, it really was magic. It was like when Penn and Teller explain the trick to you, then do the trick again and you still don’t know how they did it.

We first met Steve and Sue in their Manhattan studio, which looked like Hollywood’s idea of a photographer’s loft: industrial, high-ceilinged, with a huge light table in an otherwise empty room. It seemed impossible that these people would want to work on a knitting book. Surely they were too busy being cool. But they kept talking to us, and they never blinked when we said we would be photographing homely handknits like bath mats and baby bibs. We could not believe our good fortune.

Steve told that us that on a good day, they take 10 shots. This seemed ridiculously slow to us, who rou-tinely take a zillion (blurry) (ill-framed) shots of a sleeve when we’re writing about a knitting project on our blog, masondixonknitting.com. Snipsnap let’s get it to it, we thought.

But months later, now that we’re huddled around that dishcloth, debating whether soap bubbles will photograph well, worrying whether the dishcloth looks sincere enough, I begin to wonder if we will get one shot a day.

We move on. We wander through the house, figuring out where to shoot each item. Steve and Sue communicate at some frequency only dogs can hear. We conclude that they can read each other’s mind. They go 10 minutes without a word, in the tiniest attic bedroom of this rambling old house, climbing into the closet to get the right angle, futzing with the lighting in order to photograph a blanket casually draped around a bedpost. The dozens of black flies swarming in the window behind the bed worry us—a bit too much plague. Steve doesn’t seem concerned.

Kay constantly works on the baby burp cloths. Mary Neal presses hand towels. Never have I felt less necessary.

At intervals Steve lets me look through his lens. From its well-used appearance, his Hasselblad has clearly taken a million photographs, but to me, the small, square image is the freshest thing I have ever seen.

Piece by piece, Steve and Sue transform our baskets of precious, lumpy handknits into one lovely still life after another. Not only do Steve and Sue seem to communicate in some secret code, they also understand instinctively how we want the photographs to feel.

We traveled to four locations with Steve and Sue: the Catskills house, Kay’s apartment, a Manhattan townhouse and a house in Southampton. Today, as I flip through the finished book, seeing all these places lurking in the background, I marvel at the way Steve and Sue created a single mood for these photographs. We cared desperately about the way these pictures ought to look, yet we had no idea how to do it. It was an education to watch Steve and Sue make it happen so easily, and with so few words.

An education, and a relief. The black flies? They vanished in a perfect exposure of bright light from the window. As for the dishcloth? Its humble, tender soul is caught on film, right there on page 19.

A former editor of BookPage, Ann Shayne rediscovered her love of knitting when she left the workplace to stay at home with her two young children. She met her co-author, Kay Gardiner, on a knitting message board in 2002, and the two began an e-mail correspondence that led to the popular blog.

"There."

"Like this?"

"No, too styled."

Too styled? I thought that was our mission: "styling" the handknits for the photographs that are to go into our book, Mason-Dixon Knitting: The Curious Knitters' Guide.

We are in the kitchen of a Victorian house in the Catskills,…

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Behind the book: The price of magic and ‘The Lost Gate’

Behind the Book by Orson Scott Card

by Orson Scott Card

For years, I’ve begun my writing classes with a session called “A Thousand Ideas in an Hour.” I ask questions, the class offers a variety of answers, and gradually we work our way toward interesting, believable, powerful stories.

Usually I start with a character and generate a story out of that character’s relationships and motives. But when time allows, we also generate a fantasy story, beginning with a simple question: What is the price of magic?

Even if magic comes from learning spells or acquiring magical objects, from invoking gods or learning to interpret arcane lore and oracles, what really matters is the cost of using the power. Think of it as magic inflation. If magic has no cost, then there is nothing to keep everyone from getting it and using it as they will.

In my thousand-ideas sessions, we spend a lot of time talking about whether you must pay the price yourself, or can foist the cost of magic onto someone else. Then we have a whole new set of questions that imply more questions, and more rules of exactly how the magic works. What we always demonstrate in these sessions is that the restrictions on magic are the source of good stories. Every nuance of a rule transforms the world and makes new principles of social organization necessary. Story possibilities pop up everywhere.

But I also learned years ago that fantasy works best when the magic system closely (if metaphorically) resembles the ways that power works in the real world. For instance, if your own children pay for your magic use through a stunting of their growth and/or a twisting of their bodies, then magic users have a strong incentive to have children, but then they merely exploit them.

So in that case, who would marry a magic user, knowing that any offspring they had would be deformed and crippled?

The answer is: ambitious people who care only for themselves. The marriage becomes a conspiracy to have children only to destroy them in pursuit of power. So . . . power only flows to monstrously ambitious people who don’t care if their children are destroyed by their pursuit of power.

In other words, it works pretty much like the real world.

Back when I came up with the magic system for the Mithermages stories, the series that starts with The Lost Gate, I had not yet taught a writing class and didn’t have the advantage of all these years of listening to the excellent ideas and resourceful suggestions of my students. In a sense, I reasoned backward from the real world to find my magic system.

How do farmers gain the power to increase their yields? They nurture the soil. They protect their seed and then their crops. They help the plants they are growing to fight off competition from other plants, parasites, or predators. (To a plant, a sheep is a predator.)

The same principles apply to every kind of agriculture. The cattle rancher might kill and eat the beasts, but first he must nurture and protect them, guaranteeing the maximum number of offspring that reach harvestable age.

If you want to hunt deer, there must be deer to hunt. If you want to eat fruit, then you must nurture and protect the fruit-bearing trees.

It’s a symbiotic system. Yes, you exploit the object whose yield you are trying to increase; but can it not also be said that the beast or plant you’re growing is exploiting you?

Are squirrels exploiting oaks by carrying off their acorns and burying most of them to eat through the winter and spring? Or are oaks exploiting squirrels by getting them to spread their acorns far and wide, counting on a certain number of squirrels to die without every digging up their caches of oakseeds?

So I expanded on that idea, applying it to inanimate objects, and allowing beasts, plants, and animals to behave in ways they ordinarily can’t—magical ways—in order to serve the needs of the person tending them.

Thus a treemage of great talent and skill not only helps trees to grow, but can endow them with enough of his own powers that his trees can walk, or take on even more human attributes. And perhaps the mage can take on attributes of the trees—great strength and sturdiness, for instance. The creatures or objects that you serve become your source of power—and you become their source of power, too.

To apply this to sandmages or stonemages or watermages or windmages, I had to animate these things we normally think of as inanimate. And I also had to figure out how you would go about serving sand. What does sand need? Dryness, I decided. And wind to blow the sand around.

So to serve the desert, you need to become something of a windmage. By blowing sand, the wind becomes visible and powerful, able to scour stone. You speed up erosion. So a sandmage is actually part windmage. You serve the wind by guiding it to use sand to tear away all obstacles that impede its flow. In the process, you serve the sand by drying everything up.

In effect, you’re a sand-herder, a shepherd of the wind.

I went through a similar process with stone, with water. To gain the power that resides within a thing, you serve it, you give yourself to it, and it responds by drawing power from you as you draw power from it.

Does this really correspond to the real world? Of course. We gain enormous amounts of power from oil by releasing it from underground prisons, exposing it to the air, and then heating it to release the carbon long sequestered within it.

We dam up water to make more and more lakes, and then release its gathered power by passing it through turbines or spreading it to places where the water would not otherwise have flowed. We gain from the power of the water; the water gains from our containment and shaping of it.

In a way, all this magic system does is exaggerate, clarify and personify the way the real world works. Instead of mechanical manipulations, you develop a personal relationship. Yet in the real world, our engineers and farmers study for years to learn, one way or another, how to successfully manipulate the elements from which they will derive power.

What is a civil engineer but an ironmage, or a claymage, or both, depending on whether they build with concrete or steel? I don’t know about you, but what they do has the effect of magic to me. I don’t know how bridges are built, but I walk and drive on them with perfect trust that the spells will hold.

It’s a long way from this core principle to the magic system of The Lost Gate, of course. Over the years I extrapolated more and more, until this underlying principle could explain all magics that have ever been believed in throughout history. The Indo-European gods? They were mages of exactly this sort—mages of electricity hurling thunderbolts like Thor or Zeus, mages of plant life bring forth bountiful harvests like Proserpine or Hera.

Then there came the gates. I knew my story needed them, but what was it that a gatemage served?

Then I realized: spacetime. It is the medium through which all other objects move, and yet spacetime only contains them, cannot causally affect them. But ah, what if a gatemage bends spacetime to allow causality to flow through unexpected channels? To bring far things near, and send near things far? Then spacetime becomes an active part of the world, not just the inert recipient of the actions of other things.

And that is where all the possibilities of the Mithermages universe come from. The mages themselves might not understand all of what they do—but to write the stories, I must understand. And to the degree that this magic system feels powerful and interesting to you, I suspect you’re responding to the way it reflects the workings of the actual world.

Orson Scott Card is best known for his best-selling Ender’s Game series. His new book, The Lost Gate, is the start of a new series starring a young mage who discovers his true power after being exiled from his own world.

LOST GATE TRAILER

Author photo by Bob Harrison

Usually I start with a character…

Memoir

Memoir

Behind the book: Finding gratitude—and my way as a writer

Behind the Book by bookpagedev

Although I had wanted to be a writer much earlier in life, when I finally received a powerful inspiration, it wasn’t a call to write a book or even anything that could be described in conventional terms, as, say, an essay or something. Rather, it was an inspiration to be grateful, to notice the good things in my life, and to write thank-you notes for them. Three hundred and sixty-five thank you notes, to be specific. So for 15 months, I was writing, but not really writing a book. The only things I was writing were thank-you notes.

I needed a powerful inspiration to finish a writing project. I had long ago abandoned my dream of being a writer, and, after starting my own law firm in 2000, my life had become completely consumed by my work. But the responses and improvements in my life that sprang from the thank-you notes were immediate, surprising and themselves inspiring. So I kept writing them.

I wrote the thank-you notes first on an Excel spreadsheet. I would record the name and address, and the spiritual or material gift for which I was thankful—a kind of “gratitude list.” Then I would write out a first draft of the note in one of the fields of the spreadsheet. This helped me to organize my thoughts, so I wouldn’t have to repeatedly start over when I started to handwrite the note. I didn’t want to waste paper. In other fields of the spreadsheet, I would make notes, for example, about how someone responded when they received the note.

As the year went on, and I began to feel better about life, there were times when I would think of going back to writing. Then I would look at my spreadsheet, and see I was behind on my thank-you notes. So instead of writing something else, I would write more thank-you notes.

The book was written in the few spaces I had in my life. While I drank my first cup of coffee at Starbucks. I would finish one cup while typing, get my refill for $0.50, and be off to work. I wrote thank-you notes to two special baristas who would remember my name and my order and greet me on these mornings. Ever wonder what all those people huddled over their laptops are assiduously typing? I was one of them. This is what I was typing.

The book reveals what I could sense about the source of the inspiration at the time it came to me. The man who began the project on January 1, 2008, would not have harbored some of these thoughts. When I started writing the notes, the spell-check pointed out that I could not even properly spell the word grateful.

Writing 365 thank-you notes led me to discover that my life was not nearly the tragedy I saw it as. My life was instead blessed and protected, fostered and defended by hundreds of people who had taken an interest in me, cared about me and at various points along the way, rescued me. I hope that those who read it will find a way to make similar discoveries in their lives.

John Kralik is a lawyer whose 2008 vow to write a daily thank-you note inspired a memoir and a new way of looking at his life. He lives near Los Angeles. Read our review of 365 Thank-Yous.

Memoir

Memoir

Reflections on rising from the ruins

Behind the Book by Dan Woolley

by Dan Woolley

You wonder what you will feel like in the last moments of your life, when you finally look death in the face . . . how your beliefs about death and the afterlife will play out. For me, it moved really quickly from abstract to tangible, given I was buried under six floors of rubble following the January 2010 Haiti earthquake. I will never pretend to understand why God allowed me to be rescued while many others did not make it out alive.

I traveled to Haiti with Compassion International to document the organization’s work to permanently rescue children from poverty. As I was trapped, I found it ironic that I had come to Haiti to rescue children from poverty. Little did I know that I would need rescue.

After a day of capturing footage my colleague and I had just been dropped off and stepped into our hotel when the Haiti earthquake erupted all around us. I was trapped in the wreckage of my collapsed hotel in an elevator car the size of a small shower. My head and leg were bleeding as I fought to stay alive using all the resources that I could—my iPhone and its first-aid app, camera, journal, sock and shirt. In moments of despair, I had time to reflect on how I viewed myself, my marriage, and my faith in Jesus Christ. The earthquake shook loose a lot of things in my life that weren’t important, leaving me with a firmer foundation.

I don’t know why I was spared while others were not—including a Compassion International colleague who was right next to me when the quake hit. I don’t take lightly the difference between my outcome and the suffering of others. But, I tell the story of the 65 hours I spent buried in the rubble of the quake in Unshaken: Rising from the Ruins of Haiti’s Hotel Montana.

As I spend this week in Haiti revisiting the sites and people that I met last year, the sounds and the smells are so familiar as if the island nation was shook by the earthquake just yesterday. Then, I look down at the scar on my leg, a scar that will forever remind me of my time in Haiti and the Haitian people there who continue to suffer and work to get back on their feet post quake.

I have an advantage. Last January trapped beneath six stories of rubble I was taught very literally about how quickly life can change in an instant. I worked hard in the months following the quake to hold onto the clarity and now it share with others through my experience in Unshaken.

Dan Woolley, an interactive strategies director at Compassion International, is the author of Unshaken: Rising from the Ruins of Haiti’s Hotel Montana (Zondervan). In response to interest in the first-aid app he used to save his life, Woolley is currently working on a different kind of first-aid app—one that helps people focus on what matters most. More info at DanWoolley.net.

Rescue photo credit: Los Angeles Times/Rick Loomis.

Return photo credit: Reuters

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Behind the Book: A neighbor’s legacy inspires haunting debut

Behind the Book by Elena Mauli Shapiro

by Elena Mauli Shapiro

Elena Mauli Shapiro was born in Paris and lived there until she moved to the United States at the age of 13. Her first novel, 13 rue Thérèse, tells the story of an American professor who arrives in Paris and finds a box of artifacts in the filing cabinet of his new office. Fascinated by the contents of the box, he begins to piece together the life of the mysterious Parisian woman who collected them. Here, the author reveals the real-life inspiration for her imaginative and beautifully constructed debut.

I grew up at the book’s titular address in Paris, 13 rue Thérèse. When I was a very little girl, an elderly recluse named Louise Brunet lived in one of the apartments upstairs. All I remember of her to this day is the sound of her television turned all the way up, echoing in the courtyard. When the speakers died, she watched without sound. When she died, none of her remaining relatives came to fetch her belongings, leaving the landlord the task of clearing them all out. He saved the best jewelry and silverware for his wife, then asked the tenants to come take whatever they wanted. They scavenged, taking away minor treasures: an embroidered tablecloth, a worn fur coat, delicate glassware. Whatever they didn’t want, the landlord would throw away: old stockings, endless bottles of pain medication, a plastic box filled with scraps of some sort—except my mother stopped his hand as he was about to drop the box down the maw of a big black trash bag. Don’t throw that away, she said, I’ll keep that.

In the box: postcards and letters from the front in World War I, dried flowers, a rosary. A datebook for the year 1928.

Two pairs of fragile lace church gloves: white ones for a little girl, black ones for a grown woman. There were many small objects in the box, all worth nothing but memories. As I grew up, I was endlessly compelled by this collection, by the tiny sepulcher of Louise Brunet’s heart. The fact that I could never know the story behind the objects only made the attraction stronger. I would write a book one day about these mute little witnesses. I had to.

I wrote reams of pages over many years in the process of whittling myself into a writer, but I did not write about the box. I would not get into the box until I was a strong enough writer to do it justice. I don’t know that I could have ever made the conscious decision to start, but I didn’t have to. One day the box came to get me in my dreams. The result was a short, countdown-shaped narrative of the life of Louise’s father that starts with a picture of him old and winds itself down to a picture of him young. I looked at the peculiar eruption that had burst out of me and I thought, uh oh—

Two

One

Zero.

The surge from below was so intense that it was difficult to hold myself together. There was some sorcery about what I was doing, channeling pieces of live people that I knew and loved into pieces of a dead stranger who had haunted me my whole life. My entire being hissed with the alchemy of it. The composite Louise Brunet I was carrying in my body threatened to rend me. I needed to put another body between hers and mine. This is when I made Trevor Stratton, the American academic who finds Louise Brunet’s artifacts and functions as the narrative frame for the story, a frame who helplessly bleeds into the portrait he surrounds. As playful a metafictional device as Trevor may be, he was first and foremost essential secondary containment. I will always be grateful to him for that, though he doesn’t exist.

Neither does the Louise Brunet I collated really exist, though she wears the name and face of a real person. It is my obsession with her image, with the image’s flickering in and out of existence, that drove the book from its inception. Louise Brunet came to embody the parts of ourselves that will never be seen, the stories we tell ourselves about each other that may or may not be verifiable, the memories that are lost and those that are secreted whole around a kernel of something that may or may not have occurred. Trevor’s possession by her was my rendering of the most human of traits: our total inability to see without interpreting and our relentless desire for sense and story, all driven, finally, by our simple need for connection.

Elena Mauli Shapiro is currently working on a second novel, set in Romania. Find out more about 13 Rue Thérèse on the book's website, where you can see more of the artifacts from Louise's box. Find out more about Shapiro on her blog.

History

History

Behind the book: What have the Irish ever done for America?

Behind the Book by Christopher Winn

by Christopher Winn

Christopher Winn is an author and pub quiz master who knows everything there is to know about the history of the British Isles. In his new book, I Never Knew That About the Irish, Winn shares some of the lesser known facts about the country's storied past—including some of their contributions to our own country.

For a people from a quiet, windswept, dazzlingly beautiful little island on the western fringe of Europe, the Irish sure have made an impact. Here is my top 10 of Irish contributions to America.

Great Seal. Designed by Charles Thomson, born Upperlands, Co. Derry in 1730. He moved to the US aged 11 and became permanent secretary of the Continental Congress. As well as designing the deeply symbolic Great Seal of America, he also wrote and signed the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.

Dollar Sign. Designed by Oliver Pollock, born Coleraine, Co. Derry in 1737. He became a plantation owner in Spanish New Orleans and used his connections to supply and finance the Americans during the Revolutionary War. Business was conducted in Spanish pesos for which the abbreviation was a large 'P' with a small 's' above it to the right. Pollock adapted this to the upward stroke of the P running through the S, or $.

America's First National Hero. Richard Montgomery, born Raphoe, Co. Donegal in 1738. He left the British army to settle in New York and in 1775 joined the Continental Army as a Brigadier General. Led the invasion of Canada, capturing Montreal, but was killed during the assault on Quebec, the first American general to die in the Revolution. Gave his name to Alabama’s state capital.

White House. Designed by James Hoban, born Desart, Co. Kilkenny in 1762. He emigrated to America aged 27 and won the competition to design the new 'President's House' in Washington, which he based on Leinster House in Dublin, now home to Ireland's national parliament.

22 Presidents (23 with Martin Sheen’s President Bartlet). Half of the 44 US Presidents to date boast of Irish blood, including Barack Obama, whose maternal ancestors came from Moneygall, Co. Offaly.

Paddle Steamer. Invented by Robert Fulton, whose parents emigrated from Callan, Co. Kilkenny, just before he was born in 1765.

Submarine. Invented by John P. Holland, born Liscannor, Co. Clare, in 1841. He emigrated to Boston aged 30 and invented the world's first practical submersible, the Holland I, launched on the Passaic River, New Jersey in 1877. A later version, the Holland IV, was bought by the US Navy to form the world's first submarine fleet.

Coca Cola. John Pemberton’s tonic was made into the world’s most popular soft drink by the marketing genius of Asa Griggs Candler, whose ancestors emigrated from Callan, Co. Kilkenny.

Mickey Mouse. Walt Disney’s ancestors hail from Co. Kilkenny. His early partner Pat Powers, co-founder of Universal Studios and the man who enabled Mickey Mouse to speak, was born in Co Waterford in 1870.

Golden Gate Bridge. Financed by the Mellon Bank, founded in Pittsburgh by Thomas Mellon, born Cappagh, Co. Tyrone, in 1813. The Mellon Bank also provided the funds to found Gulf Oil, U.S Steel, Heinz, General Motors and the world’s biggest company, ExxonMobil (originally Standard Oil).

Bet you never knew that!

Parenting

Parenting

RAISING A READER

Behind the Book by Heidi Murkoff

by Heidi Murkoff

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon—or even a parenting author—to figure out how to raise a reader. All it takes is a cozy lap, a pair of loving arms, an open book and a few common-sense tips.

Read early. True, newborns don’t know a cat from a hat. And toddlers are more wiggle worms than bookworms. But there’s no better way to get a child in the reading habit than getting off to an early start. Build storytime into your little one’s routine right from the beginning.

Read often. Bedtime is the obvious time for storytime—and a particularly good one, too, especially if it comes after a soothing bath (a wound-down little one is more open to sitting down—and more receptive to listening). Plus, bedtime stories, especially when combined with cuddles, can quickly become a treasured ritual on both sides of the armchair—the perfectly relaxing end to your child’s busy day . . . and yours. Another good time to get a child hooked on books: wakeup time. By catching your bookworm early, while she’s still sleepy, you’ll minimize squirming and maximize attention. And then—there’s any time. Tote a book with you wherever you go and whatever you’re doing and reading will become your little one’s favorite go-to distraction.

Issue an all-access book pass. Keep stacks of books of every variety everywhere in your home—by your bed, on the coffee table, next to the armchair, in the kitchen, in the car and definitely in your child’s room. Don’t make any book (except, perhaps, a very valuable one) off-limits to your little one. Even a toddler who tends to devour literature (as in, bite on edges and chew paper) should be allowed supervised page-turning stints. When shelving your child’s books, keep them accessible on low, open shelves or in easy-to-reach bins.

Be a borrower (and maybe a lender, too). The best way to keep a fresh stash of reading material at the ready? Make a weekly trip to the library with your budding book buddy. Don’t have a library in your neighborhood? Set up your own book co-op with fellow playgroup or preschool parents.

Get ready to repeat. Most toddlers and preschoolers can’t get enough of a good thing—they find it comforting to hear the same book over and over, night after night, day after day. But there’s another reason why little ones benefit from the read-and-repeat approach to storytime: When you’re new to the language game, repetition helps you pick up skills faster. Being able to fill in the last word in a line or anticipate the so-familiar plot is also super-satisfying.

Do some editing—and editorializing. While you can definitely read a book to your tot straight through, don’t feel obligated to stick to the script verbatim. If too many hard-to-understand words are making your captive audience restless, edit them down or out. Paraphrase. Summarize. Simplify.

Make reading interactive. Even a child who doesn’t yet know an A from a Z can point to the doggy, the boy on the bicycle, the sun in the sky, the monkey in the zoo. Or answer simple reading comprehension questions (“What is the girl eating?” “Where is the mommy going?” “Is the boy happy or sad?”). Not only does interaction enhance learning but it boosts enjoyment and attention span, too.

Read to yourself. Children are master mimics—especially when it comes to their parents—and they’re always more likely to do what you do than what you say. So to raise a reader, be a reader. Never had the reading bug? Try contracting it. Join a book club. Check out reading lists online. And make sure your little one catches you reading often.

Power off. Even books that come with dials, flaps and pop-ups can’t compete with the light-and-sound show of computer games and TV. Wired toddlers and preschoolers—or those who spend too much time zoning out in front of a TV screen—may have a harder time sitting still for words and pictures on a page. In fact, research has shown a 10 percent increase in the risk of attention problems later on for every hour per day of TV a tyke watches now. So limit TV time (the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time at all for the two-and-under set) and computer time. Using the TV for background noise? Power that off, too.

Nurture that love of reading, but don’t push it. If you’ve been a parent for any amount of time you know this above all: Pushing will get you nowhere. Not when it comes to using the potty, not when it comes to eating—and definitely not when it comes to reading. Make reading a part of your family’s daily routine—but also don’t forget to make it fun.

Heidi Murkoff is the author of the What To Expect series of pregnancy and parenting guides that have sold more than 34 million copies. The latest book in the series is What to Expect the Second Year: From 12 to 24 Months. Murkoff lives in Southern California with her husband, Erik, and two children.

Fiction

Fiction

Behind the Book: Finding a story through the lives of others

Behind the Book by Rachel Simon

by Rachel Simon

My sister Beth, who is 11 months younger than I, has developmental disabilities. When she was born in 1960, it wasn’t uncommon for doctors to recommend that parents place children like my sister in institutions, but my parents were strongly opposed to doing that. So my sister grew up at home, and I knew little about institutions.

In my late 30s, I wrote a memoir about my relationship with Beth, Riding the Bus With My Sister, and when it came out, I started getting invited to speak at disability-related conferences around the country. At every event, I met people who’d lived in, worked at, or had relatives who’d been sent to institutions, and all of them were eager, sometimes tearfully so, to share their stories with me.

Over and over, I returned home reeling. The reality of institutions had obviously affected millions of people—yet no one outside of these conferences spoke about such things, or even seemed to know about them. And even I, a sibling who did know, had known very little.

I began thinking I should write a novel that dealt with the material, but the subject seemed so massive that I just put the idea to the side.

Then one day, after a talk in Illinois, I came across a book at a vendor’s table, God Knows His Name: The True Story of John Doe No. 24, by Dave Bakke. Immediately intrigued, I bought the book. In 1945, I learned, a deaf, African American teenager was found wandering the streets in Illinois. No one understood his sign language so no one knew who he was. A judge declared him “feebleminded” and put him in an institution. There he remained for 50 years until he died.

The tragedy of John Doe No. 24 haunted me—and all the more so because I’d come to understand that countless other people had endured similar fates.

Yet I still couldn’t fathom how to present such an emotionally fraught topic.

A few years later, the college where I’d taught part-time for over a decade restructured my department and I was let go. Grieving the loss of a job I’d loved, I was sure of only one thing: I wanted to keep writing.

So in this vulnerable state, I sat down with a notebook, waiting to see what would emerge. And instantly, it came.

It is 1968. Night. A rainstorm. An elderly widow is in her farmhouse, reading a book. Who is she, I asked myself, and then I knew: she was a retired schoolteacher, in a state of grief. A knock comes to her door. Who is it, I asked myself. Again, I knew. Standing before her is someone with my sister’s disability—and someone like John Doe No. 24. They are the love of each other’s lives, and he calls her Beautiful Girl. They have just escaped from an institution—and Beautiful Girl has just borne a baby girl. Then the whole first chapter spilled out, and when I reached its ending, I was as shocked as my readers have been when she says to the widow: “Hide her.”

Then I just followed the story, and it flowed from me in a way that nothing had before.

I’m not sure I believe, as some readers have suggested, that John Doe No. 24 reached out from the beyond and told me about the life he’d wished he’d lived. I do know that I could not have written this book without being Beth’s sister—and without believing, deep down, what my parents taught me from the day Beth was born: that everyone deserves to love and be loved, and to live a life of dignity and freedom.

Fiction, Women's Fiction

Fiction Women's Fiction

The untold stories of military families

Behind the Book by Laura Harrington

by Laura Harrington

Theater writer Laura Harrington based her debut novel, Alice Bliss, on a one-woman, one-act musical she wrote that she couldn't get out of her head. Her desire to dramatize the experience of military families was due to her belief that the story of the war at home and its effect on children, families and communities was one that needed to be told—but it also resonated on a personal level. In a behind-the-book essay, Harrington explains how her family history informed her moving and memorable story of a girl's coming-of-age while her father is deployed in the Middle East.

My father was a navigator/ bombardier in WWII, flying missions into Germany from his air base just north of Paris. Both my brothers enlisted in the Air Force in 1966, at the height of the Viet Nam war, directly out of high school and college, respectively. Even though I don’t have a family member serving in the current war, my family has been deeply impacted by war.

My father suffered from what was then called battle fatigue following WWII, a time he would never talk about directly. Nor would he talk about the experiences during the war that had so devastated him. The silence surrounding my father’s war experiences has probably been the single greatest mystery and inspiration in my life. I believe that my fascination with war grows out of my need to understand these experiences and to bear witness to this silent suffering.

I think that making the war personal is important. Telling the stories of those who have a loved one deployed is important.

I chose to write about the family of a soldier in the Reserves in 2006 because in my research I learned that Reservists make up 63% of our armed forces. For the families of Reservists a sense of isolation can be especially acute. They often live in communities where few, if any, of their friends and neighbors are in the military or deployed. Not only do Reservists’ children feel that no one knows their story, they often feel that no one even knows they exist.

There are more than 1.7 million military children and teens scattered across the country. Most of us have the luxury of thinking the war is distant; these children do not. They live with this war, day in and day out; they wake up with it, they fall asleep with it; it is woven into the daily fabric of their lives. They are expected to carry on at home and at school, to pretend that they do not have a parent who is risking his or her life, that they are not consumed with worry, that their daily life is not affected by this absence.

How should this sacrifice, borne by less than 1% of our population, affect the rest of us, the lucky 99% of us? What is our responsibility? Most of us have the luxury to blithely choose to remain ignorant of the war, or simply not pay attention. We can turn the page; we can change the channel. There is decadence in that choice and, I would suggest, a sense of shame, a moral disquiet.

I think that making the war personal is important. Telling the stories of those left behind, illuminating the lives of spouses and partners and children who have a loved one deployed is important.

Stories have the unique power to open our eyes and our hearts to people and to worlds and to experiences that we would not otherwise know. I wanted to find a way to tell the story of this endless war, to shed light on these struggles, and most importantly, I wanted to hear these voices.

I hope that Alice Bliss can help us begin to see this war one child at a time, one soldier at a time, one missing father at a time.

Read an excerpt from Alice Bliss on Harrington's website.

Fiction

Fiction

How Flannery saved the day

Behind the Book by Ann Napolitano

by Ann Napolitano

I slumped onto the couch and told my husband that the novel simply didn’t work. I was a year into A Good Hard Look, and it already felt like a lost year. Maybe I should throw it away and start over, I said.

I didn’t know what was broken, so I couldn’t fix it. The main character, Melvin Whiteson, was rudderless. The story was aimless. There was no spine, no uniting thread.

My husband was seated across from me; he leaned forward. He loves nothing more than to solve a problem, and he’s a writer himself, so he knows what he’s talking about. I’m stubborn though, and I wanted sympathy, not a solution. So instead of listening, I let my attention drift. I told myself I would be fine if I never published a second novel. I imagined possible alternative careers: therapist (too much education required), chef (terrible hours), personal assistant (I had done this for almost a decade; I was qualified, but not interested). I closed my eyes in an act of dramatic self-pity, and listened to my husband sigh in response.

When I opened my eyes I found myself looking at the bookshelf above his head. My eyes fell on a book I hadn’t picked up in nearly a decade. It was a collection of Flannery O’Connor’s letters, The Habit of Being. I studied the spine of the book as if it had something to tell me. And it did, in a way. The thought fell upon me slowly, with the weight of a heavy blanket: Flannery O’Connor should be in the novel.

This seems like a crazy idea, even now. Here are a few reasons why: (1) Flannery is a Southern icon, and I am from New Jersey; (2) I had read her stories in college, and been awed by them, but I’d also found them abrasive and upsetting; (3) I had never even aspired to write historical fiction. Incorporating a real, well-known person into my make-believe world seemed fraught with traps and complications. Could I possibly pull that off?

Despite my skepticism, the words continued to blink in my head. Flannery O’Connor should be in the novel. The idea was certainly intriguing, and what if this was an actual flash of inspiration? I was in no position to turn that away. I decided to approach the idea by reading everything I could get my hands on. I re-read Flannery’s stories (still shocking, still brilliant), her essays and two novels. I read the one existing biography on her, and several critical essays about her work. Then I re-read The Habit of Being, and to be honest, this is when my apprehension began to wane. Flannery’s letters are wonderful—in correspondence she is irreverent and sarcastic, kind and generous. Through the letters, I followed her path away from her Southern town and domineering mother to graduate school. She began her writing life in New York City, where she had dear friends and a life that satisfied her. When she felt her shoulders begin to tighten during a harsh Northern winter, she attributed the discomfort to arthritis. But by the time she arrived home to visit her mother, she was desperately ill. She was only 26 years old when she received the diagnosis that was also a death sentence. She had disseminated lupus—the same disease that had killed her father.

Flannery settled down on her mother’s farm, Andalusia, and poured herself into her work. The doctors gave her five years to live; she took 13. And during that time she produced some of the best fiction we have.

I flew to Atlanta, rented a car and drove to Andalusia. I walked across the speckled grass, and sat on Flannery’s white porch. A story began to grow in my head; pieces that seemed to have no business being in the same room came together. Melvin Whiteson met Flannery O’Connor at a Southern wedding; I held my breath, and followed the characters deeper into the narrative. Flannery, and the bravery with which she lived her life, soon became the spine of A Good Hard Look. Raymond Chandler famously said, “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.” My version of that was to have Flannery O’Connor show up, on crutches.

The novel took six additional years to write; I slumped on the couch in despair many more times, but I never again considered throwing the book away. The crazy idea had become a real, three-dimensional world. Flannery walked among her beloved peacocks, turning her sharp eyes on the world I was creating; my new struggle lay in making sure it met her approval.

A Good Hard Look is the second novel by Ann Napolitano, who received her M.F.A. from New York University and lives in New York City with her family.

I didn’t know…

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

Characters with secrets—and stories—to tell

Behind the Book by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

In some respects, the germ for Darkness, My Old Friend took hold a long time ago. Its prequel, Fragile, was loosely based on an event from my own past. In high school, a girl I knew was abducted and murdered. The event—a shocking, horrifying thing—reverberated through the small town where I grew up. And I felt its impact for many years. I wouldn’t say the incident haunted me, but my thoughts returned to that time quite often. Finally, the story, or at least a heavily fictionalized version of it, found its way onto the page when I sat down to write Fragile.

During that process, I met Jones Cooper. When he first showed up in Fragile, he was the husband of my main character Maggie and I didn’t think he had an especially big role to play. As it turned out, he was a critical character. The entire book hinged on his past deeds, and how he’d sought to escape them.

When Fragile was done, I was still thinking about Jones. He and I don’t have that much in common. He is an older guy, in his late 40s. He has retired from his career as a detective, and he isn’t totally sure what he’s going to do next. His marriage is under a tremendous strain as he deals with how his past actions have affected his present, and what they mean for his future. He’s in therapy (very reluctantly). I kept wondering: How is he going to move forward? He has this tremendous darkness within him; how is he going to conquer that? What is he going to do with his life? He can’t just putter around the house! He’s too smart, too interesting.

Usually when I have that many questions and worries about a character, I have no choice but to explore him further on the page. And so began Darkness, My Old Friend, the next chapter of the story.

In a safe, picture-perfect town, the very worst possible thing occurred on a bright and sunny day when all was exactly as it should be.

We had to remain in The Hollows, of course, because Jones is part of that place, and it is part of him. This fictional town from Fragile was at first just a place I came up with because it was similar, if not identical, to the area where I grew up—some hybrid of that spot and an ideal town I had in my head. Near to the city but removed enough to be peaceful and close to nature, The Hollows had a hip, picturesque downtown center, safe streets, a coffee shop, a yoga studio. Again, I didn’t think very much of it at first. But it too evolved and became something more than I expected.

As I did with Jones, I came to sense a great darkness within The Hollows. It has a history, a spirit and a personality. It has wants and needs; it has an agenda. It’s not malicious precisely. Not exactly. I’m not quite sure what The Hollows is up to, to be honest. But I delved a little deeper in Darkness, My Old Friend. And I’m not done with it yet. Or, rather, it’s not done with me.

Shortly after I started writing, a girl by the name of Willow Graves appeared in the narrative. All I knew about her was her misery at living in The Hollows; she hated it. "THE HOLLOWS SUCKS," was what she was writing in her notebook when I first saw her, sitting in her English class, bored to tears. Her mother Bethany, a best-selling novelist, had moved them from New York City after a bitter divorce from Willow’s stepfather. Willow was getting into trouble. So Bethany thought that The Hollows, far from Manhattan and all its temptations, was a safer place for her wild child. Little did she know that trouble finds a girl like Willow anywhere, maybe especially in The Hollows.

I had a lot more in common with Willow than with Jones. In many ways, with her quasi-gothic look, and her rebel’s heart, her penchant for—ahem—storytelling, she reminds me of the girl I was a million years ago. She was out of place, the misfit in a small town, filled with lots of self-imposed angst. She was sure that anyplace was better than The Hollows. I felt for Willow, wished I could tell her to just hang in there. And to try, try, to stay away from that dark place inside. If you follow, I wanted her to know, you can’t always find your way home. But most of us have to learn that lesson that hard way, and Willow was no exception.

It’s the juxtaposition of disparate things that fascinates me: Dark and light, death and life, bad and good. The thin, blurry line between those things keeps me up at night, churning out the pages. And when that line exists within a character, as it does with most of the people who populate Darkness, My Old Friend, I am obsessed with it.

I suspect that my obsession with this idea began more than 25 years ago, when I was a girl, not unlike Willow, living in a place not unlike The Hollows. In a safe, picture-perfect town, the very worst possible thing occurred on a bright and sunny day when all was exactly as it should be. I know Fragile came from there, and Darkness, My Old Friend is certainly an evolution of that story. In a way, maybe all my books began there. Maybe I’m still the girl trying to understand all the many different ways something so horrible could happen to someone so innocent on an ordinary day.

Best-selling writer Lisa Unger takes on the dark side of small-town life in Darkness, My Old Friend, her sixth novel. She divides her time between New York City and Florida. Visit her website for more information.

Nonfiction

Nonfiction

Underpaid and undercover: surviving on seven bucks an hour

Behind the Book by Barbara Ehrenreich

by Barbara Ehrenreich

I didn't want to write this book; I just wanted someone to write it. The whole thing started with a lovely $30 lunch paid for by a well-known editor who was interested in my ideas about welfare reform. How are all these former welfare moms supposed to support themselves and their children on the wages available to entry-level workers? Someone, I suggested maybe because I was already deep into my second Pellegrino ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism and get out there and try it for themselves. Great idea, was his response: How about you?

I put the project off as long as I decently could. After all, my idea of research is a nice long day in a library supplemented with a few Starbucks breaks. Nothing, that is, involving my physical self. But with this project, I needed every single muscle I had ever nurtured on a Nautilus machine. In short order, just by taking whatever job I could find in the help-wanted ads, I became a waitress, a hotel housekeeper, a nursing home aide, a house cleaner, a Wal-Mart "associate." I ran, I lifted, I sorted, I crawled around on my hands and knees scrubbing the crud off of toilets and floors.

At first I was vain enough to fear that someone would recognize my name: "Not the Barbara Ehrenreich, the author and essayist!" No one ever did; in fact, once hired, I seldom had a name at all, other than "girl," "babe" or, at best, "Barb." I had also worried about appearing too articulate or educated for the jobs I applied for (although on application forms I slimmed down my resume to "divorced homemaker returning to workforce.") Again, no danger: The only question most employers had for me was: When can you start?

Any fears of appearing "over-qualified" were similarly banished on the first day of work. You think waitressing is "unskilled" labor? Try handling five tables while struggling to master the computerized ordering system and finesse the ever-delicate waitperson/cook relationship. You think only morons take those $7 an hour Wal-Mart jobs keeping the stock organized? Try memorizing the locations of several hundred clothing items (e.g., "White Stag clamdiggers with front pleats") only to see those locations cunningly switched around every three or four days. Even housecleaning, which I have a lifetime's experience in, has been transformed into a science by the nationwide cleaning chain I worked for: Mentally divide each room into sections no wider than your arm's reach, proceed from left to right and from top to bottom within each section and around each room, leave all jars and shampoo bottles with their labels facing outwards.
Not to complain or anything, but the whole thing did serve as an exercise in vanity-abatement and self-esteem reduction. I got reamed out by supervisors. I had food thrown at me by nursing home residents. I screwed up monumentally from time to time, smashing some precious objet in a mini-mansion we were cleaning, and flaming out catastrophically as a waitress. Worst of all, I never did manage to make ends meet, even though I tried working two jobs at once and limiting my diet to Wendy's combos and string cheese. The sad fact is: I wasn't half-bad at most of these jobs, at least after a week or so of experience. I was cheerful, energetic, obedient, but I still found, as my co-workers already knew, that $7 an hour just doesn't pay the rent, even when you're living in a trailer park.

Now I face something very few former cleaning ladies ever experience a book tour. Last time I went on one, I whined the whole way, even threatened to call Amnesty International about the horrors of sleep deprivation and all day, back-to-back interviews. Now I know better. It's a great luxury to sleep, however briefly, in a room that someone else has cleaned, and a huge privilege to be listened to, even when the interviewer hasn't read the book and is busily multitasking as we speak. Doing Nickel and Dimed changed me: I chat with every door-opener and housekeeper and waitperson and porter with whom I have a language in common. And I tip big, really big, like a welfare mom who's just won the lottery.

An award-winning political essayist and one of the nation's most insightful social critics, Barbara Ehrenreich took a variety of jobs waitress, maid, salesclerk to see what life was like for people at the bottom of America's economic ladder. She shares her story in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in Boom-Time America.

Fiction, Suspense

Fiction Suspense

Ending the ‘Child 44’ trilogy

Behind the Book by Tom Rob Smith

by Tom Rob Smith

One of the most exciting challenges in writing a trilogy of novels is trying to create connections that go beyond having a set of characters return. Of course, there are no rules to writing, but it strikes me that if you’re going to stipulate that there are three books rather than an undefined number, you need to make creative use of that decision.

As someone who enjoys wandering around old churches, whether in England or on my research trips to Russia, I’ve seen lots of triptych paintings. The form offers a way of presenting three images that can be viewed in any order, images which exist in their own right but which are at their most powerful when considered together.

The number three has powerful signals for any writer—suggesting a three-act structure, implying that the books are telling an over-arching story that will come to a satisfying conclusion. But a trilogy is not one enormous novel being split into three parts. The reader must be taken on a journey during each individual novel. Furthermore, since many readers will come to the novels in a different order, readers should be allowed to build the experience in their own way. It must be as fascinating for a reader to construct their relationship to the novels by starting at the end as it is for a reader who has followed them from the beginning.

In the broadest sense, my three novels not only tell the history of the main character Leo Demidov, they tell the story of the Soviet regime, beginning with the Stalinist paranoia and fear, followed by the moral confusion that followed the dictator’s death, which is at the center of my second book, The Secret Speech, and ultimately ending with Agent 6 and the depiction of an empire in decay, expressed through the occupation and invasion of Afghanistan.

Yet beyond historical and biographical chronology, the books within a fiction trilogy must reflect upon each other in some way. With Child 44, I wanted to use the criminal investigation to explore the society in which the crimes took place—not to concentrate on the forensic, or procedural, but to look at the way in which Communist Russia tried to claim there was no crime in its Utopian society at a time when a series of terrible murders were taking place. In a sense, it was about a reaction to the crimes, rather than crimes. It was about one man fighting against a political system that refused to allow him access to the truth.

With Agent 6 I mirrored this approach, fascinated by the emotional impact of a brilliant and determined detective trying to solve the murder of someone he loves, in a time when geopolitics make it entirely impossible to reach the crime scene. How do you live with knowing that the investigation has been nothing more than a cover-up—and being unable to petition those responsible, unable even to set foot in the country where the crime took place? Once again detective Leo Demidov comes up against political obstacles in his attempt to solve the most important case in his life.

Going further, I used the structural device of echoes and parallels across the three books to take very different angles on similar ideas. In Child 44 Leo Demidov is an officer of the MGB, part of the secret police apparatus. Leo witnesses the brutality of the secret police, he is part of its brutality and he turns his back on it. In Agent 6, he is sent as a Soviet advisor to Afghanistan, where he is ordered to help create an Afghan secret police. He watches with dismay and despair as a young idealistic Afghan woman makes the same mistakes he did, becoming a State Security officer in order, she believes, to build a better country. It was fascinating to reverse the relationship that I created in Child 44.

In similar fashion, the combination of characteristics that Leo embodies as a young man seen in Child 44 are found in the American Communist Jesse Austin, a character based on the singer and athlete Paul Robeson, in Agent 6. The two are a curious pair, similar on many levels, both passionate believers, yet whereas Leo’s idealism cracks, Austin’s remains unbreakable even when his career and wealth are taken from him, even when confronted with the awful truth of the Soviet regime.

So, with the trilogy at a close, I hope I’ve created three books that not only stand on their own but also dance with each other.

After graduating from Cambridge, Tom Rob Smith spent time as a TV screenwriter before publishing his best-selling debut novel, Child 44, in 2008. In Agent 6, Smith’s Russian hero Leo Demidov takes on his most personal case yet—one that takes nearly 20 years to solve.

RELATED CONTENT
Read a review of Agent 6.

Read an interview with Tom Rob Smith for Child 44.

Read a review of The Secret Speech.

All Behind the Book essays