Writing Life – Page 2

June 14, 2014 By Sharon Harrigan

Links to New Publications

It’s been a while since I posted links on my blog to my new publications. Below are some of my recent stories, essays, reviews, and interviews, published in Pleaides, The Nervous Breakdown, and Fiction Writers Review.

Tattoo Titans, Mirror Neurons, and Intergenerational Empathy. Read it
here:

Interview with Artis Henderson. Read it
here:

Half, which won the 2013 Kinder Prize from Pleiades. Read it
here:

Review of Praying Drunk by Kyle Minor.
Read it here:

Review of Kids These Days by Drew Perry
Read it here:

Interview with Virginia Pye
Read it here:

Review of Red Sky in Morning by Paul Lynch
Read it here:

May 2, 2014 By Sharon Harrigan

What I’m Working On . . . My Stop on a Blog Tour

Fellow Virginia writer Mark Meier asked me to participate in a “blog tour.” The idea is for a bunch of writers to take turns answering questions about what we are working on. You can see his responses at his blog: (http://www.markmeierwriting.com). Below are mine:

1) What am I working on?

I recently finished a book-length memoir called Playing with Dynamite: A Daughter’s Story. It’s about my father, who died when I was seven. Of course, it’s about me, too. About how I coped with such a huge loss, in my childhood and adulthood, how I have discovered my father’s legacy in me, how I am passing it on to my own children. It’s about taking the myth that my father had turned into and turning that into a portrait of a man–flawed and contradictory, brilliant and funny—but most of all REAL.

My agent is in the process of reading the whole manuscript now. In the meantime, I’m working on some self-contained essays and a novel called Half, based on my short story by the same name. Here is the link to the story: http://www.ucmo.edu/pleiades/news/harrigan.html

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

My fiction has a wide range of styles, but what unifies my work, I think, is the way I like to take risks. For instance, “Half” is written in the first person plural (we) voice, which is pretty unusual. Some examples of this voice are We the Animals by Justin Torres, Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, and And Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. But there aren’t many others. I also have a story in five points of view (it’s published in Louisiana Literature in print only, so I don’t have a link). I’ve never read another story that tries to do that. I’m not sure I would try to do it ever again!

3) Why do I write what I do?

Writing in the “we” voice captures something about childhood that isn’t possible any other way. This device shows the intense closeness of siblings, an us-against-them mentality. I use it to represent the linked consciousness of twins. Though I’m not a twin, I’ve always been fascinated by twins and like to imagine their fused minds.

4) How does my writing process work?

I’m a very fast typist (I won the fastest typing award in high school!) so it’s very efficient for me to work on a computer. Recently, though, I’ve been experimenting with writing by hand, appreciating the benefits of slowing down the fingers, which, in turn, slows down the mind enough to think more deeply. When I spent a year in Paris I befriended a French novelist who writes his books entirely in longhand. He inspired me to try. A little. But it’s hard to change to old habits.

Next week, look for answers to these same questions from two fabulous writers who I studied with in my MFA: Tabitha Blankenbiller and Leigh Camacho Rourks.

Tabitha Blankenbiller is a Pacific Northwest native, originally born in Seattle and raised on the Mt. Rainier plateau. She graduated from the Pacific University MFA program in June 2012 (and was student commencement speaker, a credential that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else but in this web bio). She is a staff contributor at Bustle, Food Riot, PDXX Collective, and Spectrum Culture, and writes The Wordstalker column for Barrelhouse Magazine. Her personal essays have been widely published in journals including Hobart, Passages North, and Brevity. She has written a full-length memoir titled Paper Bag: Tales of Love, Beauty and Baggage, which is represented by Jennifer Chen Tran at Penumbra Literary. Find Tabitha’s blog athttp://tabithablanken.wordpress.com/tag/tabitha-blankenbiller/

Leigh Camacho Rourks lives in South Louisiana and, on her best days, can be found lazing in the sun, doing not much of anything at all. She teaches English at Southeastern Louisiana University, where she is also the assistant editor of Louisiana Literature. Her stories have been chosen as finalists for the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival Fiction Contest (2012) and The American Fiction Prize (2013), and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of journals including Kenyon Review and Prairie Schooner. Find Leigh’s blog at http://lcrourks.com/

March 13, 2014 By Sharon Harrigan

AWP 2014: Overwhelming? Intimate? Yes.

I pulled out Geoffrey Wolffe’s Duke of Deception, and the man sitting next to me on the plane asked, “AWP?”

“How did you know?”

“You’re reading a real book,” he said. “Only writers do that.”

He was reading a real book, too: an anthology of flash fiction by Dinty Moore. He needed to finish it for his panel the next morning. Would I come?

I wasn’t surprised to find someone going to the same venue as me. So were more than 12,000 other people. The annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in Seattle drew a record number of participants this year: writers, teachers, and students. Neophytes, Nobel laureates, and everything in between.

In the space of the five-hour flight, I learned my seatmate’s life story. He told me about his precocious three-year-old daughter and bitter divorce-in-progress. Friends more experienced than I had warned me that AWP would be overwhelming. So many people, I’d get lost in the crowd. But I was already making connections and I wasn’t even there yet. How hard could it be?

Once I landed in Seattle, I got a text from my friend A., who was going to share a taxi with me. “I met two people on the plane,” she said. “OK if they come with us?” The party was already starting.

A.’s new friends had cajoled a limo driver into taking us to our hotels for $15 each. And that is how I landed in the first limo of my entire life.

The limo dropped us off at an alternate universe, where literary greats like Tobias Wolffe and Jess Walters were afforded the celebrity usually given to rock stars. My two roommates met me in the lobby, where we shared beers and I bumped into a poet friend I’d known since I was nineteen. This serendipity would keep happening, with such a density of writers per square foot unmatched on any other place on the planet. I staked out my corner, reunited with friends, and saw how a mega conference can actually be warm and cozy.

Of course, it was dizzying, too. Half a dozen simultaneous readings and panels beckoned in each time slot. I chose mostly memoir, panels on the ethical dilemmas of writing about your father, writing about a subject who is missing, writing about your children, and writing about others. The panelists seemed to be speaking directly ro me, addressing all the technical and moral issues I’ve been wrestling with in in my book. How do you write about someone you know so little about? How do you recreate scenes you weren’t there to witness? How do you arrive at the emotional truth without throwing anyone under the bus?

I also attended a sprinkling of panels on publishing trends, publicity, and journalism and went to an off-site brewery where many of my MFA pals read from new work. Then, in a headline event, Barry Lopez, in his imitable wise way, reminded us that writing, at its best, is about engagement with social and environmental issues.

I had the two most fabulous roommates. See their blog posts on the conference

here:

and

here.

In the picture above, we are toasting Tabitha’s essay acceptance, which she received in person at the exhibit hall.

My exhibit hall highlight was stopping by the Pleiades booth and talking to Phong Nguyen, the journal’s editor. When I told him I was expanding my Pleiades story into a novel, I learned that the journal has a history of launching novels. Zachary Mason published the story that turned into the novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey in Pleaides and Bonnie Jo Campbell’s title story for American Salvage appeared first in that journal, too.

While my roommates were crashing famous authors’ after-parties and sampling whale blubber smuggled over by Alaskan indigenous writers, I was fast asleep. But I did squeeze in a little late-night dancing, as well as an early-morning stroll along the water and a visit to the flagship Starbucks and the city market.

I’d heard so many verdicts about AWP before I came. “It’s a blast.” “It’s competitive.” “You’ll get lost.” “You’ll find exactly what you want.” I realized, on my way back, that there are more than 12,000 AWPs. We each have our own.