Category: writing

“There are only two or three human stories and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” Willa Cather (cq) wrote that in her novel O Pioneers! (cq) and it feels increasingly true to me with time. Maybe that’s the reason we are fascinated with other people’s stories–because they are our own. They give us knowledge of those other people, yes, but they give us insight into our lives, too.

Irene Koronas is a poet and visual artist whose new book, self portrait drawn from many, focuses on life stories of people that interest her. The diverse group –the book’s subtitle is “65 poems for 65 years”–includes Emily Dickinson, Ella Fitzgerald, Hans Arp, Arthur Rimbaud, and Charlie Chaplin appear in tightly drawn, deliberate shapes inside frames of fixed, even margins. Set in what she calls “square paragraphs,” these portraits drawn in spare, unpunctuated writing cross the boundary between the written and the visual, hanging on the page the way they might on a wall.

The minimalist writing feels like a natural outgrowth of her visual art, which most often
incorporates a grid of finely drawn lines.

“There are no shortcuts,” she says. “Once you start, you have to keep doing it–like life. It’s intimate. You have to come close to see the lines and see that each line is different.”

Her word portraits, too, invite the reader to come closer and watch the fragmentary details blur, like pointillist dots, into a picture of a person. A poem titled Louise Nevelson, for example, begins “broken pieces from bureau draws (cq)/fidgets and legs twist hidden in the/bosom of her skirted cities” (cq). And even though the art forms look different to the viewer or reader, in Koronas’s mind the process blends into “writing painting.”

“Painting is easier for me because I’m a visual learner,” she says, but she goes on to describe a similarity of process, with the initial impulse and then the more detached and cerebral re-envisioning.

(An aside here: as Koronas talks about her visual art process I confess I’m jealous. I don’t know a writer who doesn’t long to have “stuff” to manipulate once in a while, something to relieve the stark confrontation with the blank page. Oh, to have colors to mix on a palette or tools to sharpen and arrange or the mantra of drawing line after line rather than having to find word after elusive word.)

Koronas talks, too, about trying to figure out exactly who her subjects were. Joseph Cornell, Einstein, Emily Dickinson–what shaped them, made them tick? And how did they contribute to the way we think? Of Emily Dickinson, for example, whom Koronas refers to simply as “Emily,” she wonders about that famous aloneness and how that affects creativity..

“She had time to be alone with no distractions. So how do I do that?”

How indeed? What do we take from the lives of other people, whether presented to us in words or images? With their ability to show us ourselves do they simply magnify our self-involvement? Or can they make us somehow larger? Maybe they lure us out of our shells and into an empathetic engagement with our fellow beings when we look at the people around us and see (surprise!) ourselves?

rosa parks

too heavily upon her purse it may be
composure the grave old aloe tree
leaves she remains on the front row
seat she remains the beginning
for change

un-related
virginia woolf

inside with sun glasses on my knees
ache my lips blister her voice tidal wave
star marigold petals spiral open with
moisture on my cheeks fallen green
leaves virginia woolf left her hair under
mouth full of slugs solemn rinses
suddenly my life is very exciting her
vision enters and swivels shivers with
whatever buttons a long book

This month of holiday lights and frenetic cheer opened with World AIDS Day, reminding us of a disaster we are in danger of forgetting. It is one I have felt compelled to write about often through the past two decades. That is is what writers do: we refuse to not see.

Every day we wake to newspapers full of new human catastrophes of all types in various places year after year, decade after decade. Bosnia, Aceh, Sudan, Bhopal, blur in our minds into a vague disaster stew. And though we are caring people, we are human and the tragedies are painful. So we ignore. We forget. Unless someone insists on reminding us, as Gloria Mindock does with the civil war that raged in El Salvador from 1980 to 1992 . In her new poetry collection Blood Soaked Dresses, she holds up the events so we cannot look away.

Mindock, the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant in poetry, is the author, also, of two chapbooks and the forthcoming collection, Nothing Divine Here. She the editor of Cervena Barva Press and the online journal Istanbul Literature Review and is the former editor of the Boston Literary Review . The poems in Blood Soaked Dresses began when Mindock had the opportunity to speak with refugees from El Salvador.

“I’m very political,” she says. “I get so angry when I see what mankind does to mankind.”

She notes that the book is written in memory of one of the refugees, Rufina Amaya, who was the lone survivor of an infamous massacre in which the entire village of El Mozote, including Amaya’s family, perished at the hands of the government-linked Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) death squads.

“They would hang body parts in the trees. One woman saw her husband’s hand with his wedding band on it and that’s how she knew he was dead,” Mindock says, adding the stories were so horrifying to her that writing about it felt almost like a calling. Now she wants us to remember that as long as there are survivors to remember, tragedies continue to echo long after the news photographs and on-the-scene reports have faded. And if there are no survivors, the facts still remain. And so Mindock has made it her mission to bear witness as centuries of writers, composers, and visual artists have done before.

Blood Soaked Dresses begins in Rufina Amaya’s voice: “Death crawls underneath this world and waits. Who will be next? Three months ago, the soldiers murdered my two little girls….Their screams were like bad music….I talk to them every morning….At night, they invent my dreams.”

Mindock continues her book with the sad indictment that, no matter how high the cost in human suffering, our attention will not be held. We will forget, turn away, move on with our lives. But maybe we can be persuaded to remember, if only for the time it takes to look at a painting. Or read a poem.

El Salvador, 1983

Somewhere, someone is mourning
for the body of a brilliant one.
Man or woman, it doesn’t matter.
The tears in this country, an entrance
to a void…shadows touching skin like frost.

A star fell north of this city. Armies parade around
in their uniforms bragging about the killings.
Dead bodies thrown into a pit, cry.
Flesh hits wind, wind hits flesh.
How many dead?
Finally, they are covered with dirt at noon.
All eyelids are closed.
No one knows nothing.
No breathing assaults to hold us. The bitter ash
weeps over the world, and no other country
wants to see it, taste
the dead on their tongue or wipe away all
the weeping.

As the weather descends into another endless New England winter, I’m thinking of Sundays spent by the fire with a good book. And “book,”for many of us, generally means a big fat novel, not so much because we want a lot to happen as because we want characters we can spend time with, get to know. But a recent conversation with John Fulton has me reaching for shorter fiction.

Fulton makes a strong case for short stories and novellas, those “writers’ writers” literary forms that are, for readers, the road less traveled.

Fulton teaches in the University of Massachusetts at Boston’s master of fine arts program in fiction writing and poetry and is, himself, the author of a novel, “More Than Enough”; a short story collection, “Retribution”; and his newest book, “The Animal Girl” which contains two novellas and three short stories. His work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and citation in The Best American Short Stories. He is particularly fond of the novella, a form that, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was frequently serialized in magazines. Heart of Darkness”; “Animal Farm”; and “Goodbye, Columbus,” are all examples of how the novella’s impact can far exceed its word count.

“I’m a huge fan of this orphaned form,” Fulton says. As a writer he feels, as many of us readers do, that it’s all about the characters, and he appreciates the room a novella gives to let characters develop.

While some fiction writers have the story plotted out from the beginning Fulton belongs to the group that places the people on the page and lets them find their way.

”With a short story,” says Fulton, “as soon as I start I immediately have to think about the ending. In a longer work, I can have more patience with the characters. It’s not as if, in my own process, I sit down and decide I’m going to write a novella or I’m going to write a short story. But after about 10 pages of so I begin to recognize signs of a more expansive story. And then you just follow your characters.”

His tend to encounter incongruity. He may give his students a writing prompt like “a wheelchair on the beach,” noting that, in a hospital setting, a wheelchair is practically invisible. But put it on a beach and it takes on the kind of surreal dimension that gives texture to a story and leads the characters to respond in unexpected ways. In “Hunters,” the story that opens “The Animal Girl,” the reader learns in the first sentence both that Kate is answering a personal ad and that she is dying. It’s the kind of balance between opposing impulses that Fulton relishes.

“What is grief like when it is suffused with beginnings, with the awkwardness of new love?,” he asks. “How do we relinquish life and affirm it at the same time? We rarely experience pure joy or pure fear. More often we may feel hopeful and pessimistic, fearful and expectant.

“To get a character acting on the page they have to want something. The story is exploring what they are willing to do to get it. We don’t always know what we want or what we’re capable of doing. Writers have to be aware of what their characters want and let the characters make mistakes.”

Fulton, who is the father of a baby daughter, likens the writer’s role to being a parent. “You want to keep your characters safe but you also have to release them and see what they’ll do.”

Grace Talusan was a little girl when she read Maxine Hong Kingston’s book The Woman Warrior .

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, this exists? A book about a Chinese family that looks like me?’”

And, although Talusan had assumed she would become a doctor like her parents, she found the pull to writing impossible to ignore. Now she is the author of short stories and essays that, following that early inspiration, are often rooted in her Filipino background. And now people tell her how much they appreciate seeing the stories that don’t always get told, with details only a writer immersed in the culture would know.

“Little things like people pointing with their lips,” she says. “These are details my relatives would never be able to see in print unless I wrote it.”

Talusan’s stories usually grow out of an image–some detail, maybe sensory, or an event or scrap of dialogue–along with a pinch of self-deception.

“I don’t say I’m writing a story. When I just ‘play’ and don’t imagine the end product I do a lot better than when I think about the outcome,” she says. “Even at the lowest moments when I felt despair and didn’t know if I’d ever see one of my stories published,” she says, “I would have a story in my head and would want to write it. That’s what makes me want to get up in the morning.”

The recipient of an Artist Grant in Fiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, she teaches writing at Tufts University and a course called “Jump-start Your Writing” at Grub Street, an independent writing center in Boston. She encourages her students to think of writing as something to practice, to put time into, get comfortable with, and build up muscle for like sports.

“I tell my students a draft is like a rehearsal. It’s not the final performance.

“I used to think I needed to be inspired. But then I found myself waiting. Now I write a little every day. I like to think I can do something every day to improve my work. I’m trying to work on being more compassionate for myself, ‘paying myself first’ by working on my own writing first. If I don’t spend time on myself, I don’t give other things my best self.”

Talusan’s drive to work also comes from her family history of cancer. In her award-winning essay Foreign Bodies, which appears in the anthology Silence Kills, to be published in November, she writes:

“As the first grandchild in our family, Joli was the most photographed child in our family’s history. That night, after hearing about Joli’s diagnosis, my father studied hundreds of photos of her. “I didn’t see it,’” my father said. “How could I not see it?”

Talusan says, “I know time is a limited reality. I would like to write books that people love in my lifetime.”

From the essay, Foreign Bodies, published in Silence Kills

My brother Jon was almost two when he fell from the bed, hitting his eye on the corner of the wooden headboard and falling to the floor. It’s taken decades for me to learn the details: How my father carried Jon through the Emergency Room of the hospital he worked at, past the waiting room and nurses’ station. He sat my screaming brother on a bed and pulled the yellow curtain around them. My father didn’t trust the resident on call; apparently didn’t trust anyone but himself to hold the sharp points of the syringe, the threaded needle, and surgical scissors close to Jon’s eye. My mother helped hold my brother down. My father sobbed as he sewed the stitches, but his hand was steady and careful. He understood how important the face is to human interactions, how a scarred and disfigured eye could impact his son’s future. The pink scar drawn underneath Jon’s left eyebrow is a faded testament to close calls and my father’s expert hands.

What are the significant books in our lives, the ones that make a difference, the ones we would urge on our friends? I asked three writers to talk about books that have been important to them.

From Peter Jay Shippy, who teaches at Emerson College and whose verse novel, How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic will be published in November by Rose Metal Press, comes this story:

“On August 21st, my wife Charlotte gave birth to beautiful twin girls, Stella and Beatrix. We had each taken travel bags to the hospital, packed from lists provided by our obstetrician. My list was lean—change of clothes, toothbrush, a flask and a book. That last item required weeks of anxious deliberation. Should I bring my bootleg copy of Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson’s new novel, bought on eBay? Or perhaps a book from my fall classes at Emerson? Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy, our new poet laureate’s prose poems on Joseph Cornell’s magnetic, elusive boxes? Something for my children? Wittgenstein? Beckett? Just kidding? We just moved into a larger home, and for the first time I have a bookcase dedicated to poetry. No more must Robert Desnos rub spines with Don DeLillo! One day as I tried to stare the bookcase into submission, I was struck by the hold James Tate has on my collection. Tate has always meant the cosmos to me. His seminal first collection, The Lost Pilot, was the book that gave me permission to write poetry. These were not grandpa Thomas Stearns’ poems. They were fresh, irreverent, heart-broken, and funny. Poems could be funny? At 20, that was news to me. Life-changing news. So, for the hospital, I grabbed his 1997 collection, Shroud of the Gnome. The first poem? “Where Babies Come From:” “Many are from the Maldives, /southwest of India, and must begin/collecting shells immediately.” He concludes, “In their dreams Mama and Papa/are standing on the shore/for what seems like an eternity, /and it is almost always the wrong shore.” Almost always? Beatrix? Stella!”

Margot Livesey, writer in residence at Emerson, author of novels including The House on Fortune Street, due out next summer, says:

“I’d have to say Jane Eyre was a crucial book for me. I first read it when I was about the same age that Jane is in the opening chapter –10 years old–and I felt immediately less alone in the world. Here was someone who was having an even harder time than I was; the food was terrible at my school but at least we didn’t have a typhus epidemic. And then of course Jane grows up and meets Rochester. The scene of her sitting on the stile at dusk and him riding over the frozen ground and falling at her feet is more vivid to me than many things that have happened in my own life. I knew almost nothing about sex at the time that I first read the novel but I knew a great deal about passion. And I understood at once how Jane feels recognized by Rochester. Just as, later in the novel I understood, instinctively, why Jane shouldn’t marry St. John.

As an adult I have re-read the novel a number of times–most recently last spring–and while I now hugely appreciate the artistry with which Bronte shaped the novel, and see many things in it that I entirely missed when I was 10, the main experience of reading is still an utter immersion in Jane’s life and sensibility, and a passionate desire to see her triumph over adversity.”

Philip Hilts, whose most recent book is RX for Survival: Why We Must Rise to the Global Health Challenge, is struck by a book that finds parallels between 1915 and current world politics

“Muddy subjects can sometimes be made clear as running water by good writers. Globalization is one such subject and Niall Ferguson is the writer who, for me, brought clarity. Ferguson is usually counted as a conservative, and has some cranky attitudes, but he illuminates the big picture wonderfully. In The War of the World he makes it plain that we have been here before on globalization, and the last time we passed this way we botched it-:poor, insular, ignorant leadership led from a moment in 1915 when booming global trade and rising wealth made the future look bright. One terrorist attack, an overblown, misguided reaction, and soon nations that had been partners in progress were at war, in depression, then at war again. What the nations failed to do was cooperate for the common good. After WWII, leaders of several nations determined that cooperation was the better way. The United Nations, World Bank, and World Health Organization were all established and the Marshall Plan set the tone: we’re all in this together, so let’s build a functioning world system together. After some decades of success—though troubled to be sure–we are now slipping back toward that bad moment in 1915 when globalization collapsed. Again it is terrorism, a misguided, overblown reaction, and a broad failure to cooperate that risks all. Ferguson spells out most of this (though not the most recent troubles) in detail in a way I’ve not seen anywhere else. The book is too long so if you’re in a hurry, read the riveting short version in his article “Sinking Globalization” in the March/April 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs. Pair this with the basic ideas in Jeffrey Sachs The End of Poverty, and/or Joseph Stiglitz’s Making Globalization Work, and you’ve got the start of a plan! It would be what George Catlett Marshall would be thinking about if he were the general of the hour now instead of the lesser figures we see on TV now.”

It can be as hard for new books to find an audience as for readers to find new books they will enjoy. So I’ve asked two poets to introduce City Type readers to their new collections. Happy reading!

Richard Hoffman is the author of the memoir Half the House and the poetry collection Without Paradise. His new collection, Gold Star Road (Barrow Street Press, New York, 2007) is the winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize:

The poems of Gold Star Road were written as the country was preparing for war, after the war began, and then while the war continued. Many of the poems ask how we are to respond to the in-your-face savagery not only of this particular war, but of the increasingly militarized and brutalizing culture of avarice spawned by global capitalism. How do we maintain some kind of faith in humanity when we are daily exposed to examples of depravity, deceit, and barbarity? How do we situate ourselves in relation to that knowledge? What does it take to stay sane and see clearly? These questions seem to me to be unavoidable. Of course the poems do not answer these questions, but they are the questions I struggle with, and so they animate the poems.

The title Gold Star Road refers to a street in my neighborhood in North Cambridge, but also to all the streets so named in towns and cities across the country: Gold Star Road (or Street or Boulevard) is the designation given to that street whose residents have suffered the greatest number of combat fatalities. It seemed a subtle way to indicate, when considered in light of the poems, that we are, in many ways, all on Gold Star Road, all involved in the repeated sacrifice of the young to the inhuman machinery of war.

Though the book’s concerns are serious, I hope the poems give pleasure too, serious pleasure, providing what Frost called “a momentary stay against confusion.”

Here is a poem from Gold Star Road:

Miracle at Bethany

Why? asked Lazarus.
Why come forth?
Is there peace? Are we now
in the time of justice?

I dream of these things
in the dark, in the earth.
It is my work, brother.
Leave me to it.

David McCann, is Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Literature at Harvard University. His new collection of poems is The Way I Wait for You (Codhill Press, New Paltz, NY, 2007):

I grew up in Cambridge. In a very old picture, I am lying in the stroller my mother has pushed up by the statue of John Harvard. No sign of a shiny toe on the statue, back then. I am always amazed, how poems write themselves through me. They are “about” places I’ve been and people I’ve known, books I’ve read, but they always catch me by surprise, first when I am writing them, and then when I read them again. They are about themselves too. The title poem for the book, “The Way I Wait for You,” is about someone else, and waiting to get back to her after a long journey. But I realize it’s also about the poem and its readers, including me. And my father, when he read it he translated it into French.

I won’t try to fool you
into thinking this poem is about
>the way I wait for you to look
out your window and see.

I won’t spend these precious lines
in rueful anticipation
of the moment someone notes
the lift in my voice, my heart.

Were there anyplace else to go
I would go there and wait
like the domestic cat turning
round and round in a place to lie;

or wander the hillsides,
>climbing the cobbled streets
to find the house with the window
where I know you will be.

I won’t try to fool you
into thinking this poem
is about the way I wait for you.
Look out your window and see.

Nicholas Nixon arrived a little late for our meeting. Seems he had stopped to photograph a dog fight that had broken out just as he cycled past a park in Brookline. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do with the pictures, but no matter. They would become part of the bank of images he draws on that say, “Look at this. Pay attention to this one moment in time.”

Actually, when I asked Nixon to talk with me for this column—which usually concerns itself with words rather than images–I was thinking of that exact challenge that both poetry and photography lay out for us: to look, to look again, to try to see a little more or a little differently.

Nixon, who lives in Brookline, is a photographer whose work is the the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts as well as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, and the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth. In 2005 he had a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, and he has been the recipient of three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and two from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Nixon has done several series of photographs, of cities, of people in family groups, of patients. And every year since 1975 he has taken a photograph of his wife and her three sisters, a series known as “The Brown Sisters.” They stand, each year, in the same order, fascinating us as they change over time.

“It’s all of us,” says Nixon. “Everyone can see themselves in those pictures.”

Part of the reason we can see ourselves more clearly in a photograph than in a mirror is that whole notion of the moment in time. In contrast to those early 19th century photographs whose subjects had to sit unblinking for long minutes in front of the camera, the changes in technology let us see ourselves in the off-moments.

“A photograph usually deals with short ends of time, fractions of seconds,” Nixon says. “If you were sitting there you might not have seen it.”

The result is an image startlingly more “real” than what we see with our eyes. And, even if it’s a picture of someone else, we get the kind of look at ourselves we often find in literature. Truth, after all, does not lie only in facts.

“For you to believe a picture depends on your trusting that it really happened,” Nixon says, explaining that, as in literature, the particular opens out to become universal. When that happens, he tells me, “you can see a woman so clearly that she becomes not ‘Ellen’ but ‘woman’.”

Nixon says he is “waiting for the Alice Munro of photography–someone who can fool around with reality but still leave you feeling you’ve getting something authentic.”

Now, Nixon notes, digital technology has added a new possibility, photography as fiction. Skies can be cleared of dust motes and people can be burnished to the kind of impossible perfection that, not incidentally, helps keep our trainers and plastic surgeons busy and our self-images eternally in catch-up mode. What kind of truth that shows us about ourselves remains to be seen.

A couple of years ago I heard a writer I did not know, Lisa Borders, read from her novel in progress. I was riveted–the characters were fully formed from their introduction, the plot sounded like a page-turner. I couldn’t wait to read the book. I still can’t.

There are literary myths about the manuscript plucked from the slush pile to: (a) shoot to the top of the best-seller list, (b) win the National Book Award. (c) be snapped up by Steven Spielberg, (d–fill in your favorite fantasy here). But more often writing proceeds like gardening: the slow and quiet tending of adverbs, weeding of dialogue, crafting of the work. The way Lisa Borders is doing.

Borders is clearly a writer deserving of attention. All the ingredients are there. She has had short stories published in respected literary journals, has been given awards, grants, and residencies, and teaches fiction writing at Boston independent writing center Grub Street. In selecting her novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, for the Fred Bonnie Memorial Award for Best First Novel, writer Pat Conroy called it, “an absolute original by a fresh new voice in fiction.” The book went on to win a Massachusetts Book Award as well.

But literary fame and fortune have yet to find her. She tends her literary garden out of the limelight, taking pride in the body of work she is steadily producing. That is probably the lot of most writers of literary fiction, and it is one she accepts with grace and equanimity.

“Probably when I was younger I had grander dreams,” she says. “It could still happen, but I’ve gotten past the point where I think I’m going to be famous. And I think if that’s a writer’s goal, they’d better do something else.”

Even when her book was selected for the Bonnie award, it was destined to make a more of a small ripple than a noticeable splash: the announcement came on September 10, 2001.

“After waiting years for this news, I had about 18 hours to celebrate before it looked like the world was coming to an end.”

If she did not become an overnight literary sensation, Borders did find that publication of Cloud Cuckoo Land gave her new respect for herself as a writer and allowed her to protect time and energy for writing. Her writing time now takes precedence over her two part time jobs, teaching fiction writing and working in a lab as a cytotechnologist.

“I had had to fit writing around my jobs and now it’s vice versa,” she says. “It’s a difficult juggling act sometimes.”

She also balances long and short form, switching between work on the novel, Fifty-First State, and short stories. And she is feels Cloud Cuckoo Land will have a second life at some point, possibly because of its unforgettable lead character, Miri.

“I think Miri is too stubborn. She’ll make sure her story gets told.”

While readers might imagine writers lusting after literary stardom, celebrity holds little attraction for Borders. While she wouldn’t turn it away, she is clearly focused, instead, on the satisfaction of creating the work.

“I tell my students if you really don’t need to do this you might want to do something else. This will break your heart. You have to be a little delusional and the odds are not in your favor.”

Would Borders herself ever consider giving up writing?

“No, I can’t stop doing it,” she says. “I’m a writer. This is what I do.”

The other day as I finished reading Zadie Smith’s novel, On Beauty, I could feel one of the main characters, Kiki, take up residence in my head. She’s in there right next to Elizabeth Bennett, Scarlett O’Hara, the Wife of Bath, and Charlotte (yes, the writer and web-spinner).

Certainly one of the greatest pleasures of reading is meeting people who are memorable, despite being fictional. What makes them so real for us? I asked novelist Margot Livesey, herself the creator of people who tend to live with readers long after the final page of Banishing Verona, Eva moves the Furniture, The Missing World, or her other novels or short stories.

“I think a lot about character,” says Livesey, who recalls growing up under the spell of the great 19th century characters like Heathcliff and Jane Eyre. “One of the reasons I love to write fiction is that it gives me a different way of looking at the world. I might find myself thinking, ‘Verona wouldn’t like that.’

This day, as we sit in her living room, surrounded by paintings by her husband, artist Eric Garnick, we talk about how a story’s characters can be so real that a reader can identify across lines of gender, race, age, and other details.

Livesey says, “It’s a mixture of craft and luck. I know things I can do, the telling detail, to put a character on the page.”

We talk, too, about how part of the “real-ness” has to be the all too human presence of flaws. Livesey points to Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog as such a story.

“The fact that Chekhov describes his two characters with such confidence, presenting their strengths and weaknesses, their virtues and vices so openly–there is something very persuasive about that. We don’t want our characters to be so saintly. We respond to characters that have flaws. We empathize with their struggle. Many of the great memorable characters are on some kind of journey, large or small. That seems to elicit our sympathy.

“With that kind of well-drawn character, we feel their physical presence, we get a sense of their voice, their language. We watch our own lives and our friends’ lives unfold and we see how people talk in real life. It’s a slow process. Fiction changes the nature of time.”

According to Livesey, watching fictional characters over time gives us a chance to learn about them, get to know them, understand them, even develop expectations about how they will behave.

Livesey’s own stories tend to start with an occasion–someone finding an abandoned baby, as in Criminals, or sustaining a memory-erasing accident, as in The Missing World. Next, she says, she needs to look for a character to inhabit that situation and to figure out where the story is going. -then what she calls a period of negotiation: maybe a character has become too likable or too unlikable.

“I usually have a destination in mind,” she says. With Criminals, for example, she wanted the story to end with a Solomon-like judgment; with Banishing Verona, she was interested in exploring an unlikely love story.

Talking with Livesey, I am glad to learn it is not only readers who miss the characters when the last page is finished. She tells me about procrastinating a little before writing the final chapter of Banishing Verona
.
“I loved being in (the characters’) company and I knew that when I was done, my relationship with them would change.”

As surely as the swans return to the Public Garden it’s time for summer reading recommendations. Summer is somehow never long enough to do all the wonderful things we’ve planned. But it brings at least the illusion of leisure hours and the intention to take time to sit on a park bench or beach chair and lose ourselves in the pages of a good book. This year I’ve asked for picks from area independent bookstores.

Ellen Jarrett, marketing manager for Porter Square Books in Cambridge:
“I would recommend Mameve Medwed’s latest, now in paperback, How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life. Told with wit and humor, this is the story of a single woman who finds out she is in possession of a valuable family heirloom. Skirmishes ensue which lead to the resolution of long-standing family feuds and romance.”

Amanda Darling, marketing manager of Harvard Book Store:
“One novel I’ve really enjoyed is The Birthdays, by local author Heidi Pitlor; it just came out in paperback. It’s a superbly graceful book. The action takes place over a long weekend as a family–an aging mother and father, the two sons and their wives, and a daughter–gather at a summer house in Maine to celebrate the father’s 75th birthday. Pitlor moves between the point of views of differing family members in a way that illuminates their interactions and makes you incredibly aware of what is said, and not said, to the people they love. It made me think about the challenges and joys of interconnectedness, and how small graces (the sound of the surf, the softness of a bed, the pressure of a loved one’s hand) can help us get through the inevitable sorrows of life.

“I’m a sucker for mysteries — a trait I inherited from my librarian mom. Last summer, I was delighted to discover the Homer Kelly mysteries by local author Jane Langton. Set in and around Boston, the novels are well-written, smart and funny. I especially enjoyed Murder at the Gardner and The Transcendental Murder.”

Lori Kauffman book buyer, Brookline Booksmith:
“Laurie Horowitz was raised in the Boston area and her book, The Family Fortune , about a Brahmin family is set in and around the city. Horowitz knows to borrow from the best; her story is based loosely on Jane Austen’s Persuasion. I’m not going to pretend that this is a similar classic for the centuries, but it is just right for reading in the shade with a cold raspberry lime rickey. It is the story of Jane Fortune, editor of the literary Euphemia Review, who was persuaded when she was young to give up on her love for a promising (now best-selling) author. Single and 38, she has lived with her father and older sister in their Beacon Hill home until living beyond their means forces the family to rent it out. As Jane attempts to help her family regain their equilibrium she is both reunited with her first love and enthralled by a new promising young writer. In a blurb I wrote for a staff recommendation I noted that, unlike so many chick-lit (shall we call it popular fiction?) characters who are notable primarily for their shopping skills and dumb luck, it is truly refreshing to find someone like Jane, a character worthy of being called a heroine.”

Happy reading!