• Salt Office Life » 10 Ways to Take a Bad Author Photo
  "1. Firstly, let us prepare our general attitude towards portraiture. Remember that how you appear to your readers is fundamentally unimportant and has no impact on sales or your profile. Serious writers don’t do portraits. Those great photos of Auden, Beckett, Carver, Donaghy, Eliot, Hughes, Isherwood, well, those great photos did nothing to help us remember these writers, nothing at all. Put them in a gallery and we’d be lost. ‘Who are all these people?’ we’d say. ‘They sure don’t look like famous writers.’…"

  So funny.

Coming up: Two Readings and Book-signings at New Dominion Bookshop

Thursday, July 16, 12:15 PM: Joanna Beth Tweedy, The Yonder Side of Sass and Texas

Friday, July 17, 12:15 PM: Peter Selgin, Life Goes to the Movies

Joanna Beth Tweedy will discuss her debut novel

The Yonder Side of Sass and Texas

Thursday, July 16 at 12:15 PM

Raised deep in the Shawnee Hills amid hogback bluffs, a roundabout river, and unending family, two divergent sisters share a colorful journey: first through childhood in a place both blessed and cursed by the hybrid footprints of the Appalachia and Ozark regions surrounding it, and then into the wide world beyond, compelled by their shared wanderlust.

Arkansas (Sass) and Texas MacTerptin weave the tender backroads of youth, protected and exposed by their fertile home-soil in a sunken part of a foothilled fraction of the world where seasons are still sacred as a river, and roads with crooks and creeks in their names are the chosen routes. Catechized Catholic in the midst of Baptist brimstone, backporch fiddle-fire, and backwoods corn-shine, the girls are heavily influenced by the lower-cased catholicity of their spitfire French granny.

When travels land them on the yonder side of fugitive grace, the sisters discover that the sheltered bluffs of their youth are vastly removed from the broad ground beyond. Mapping their way through the wrinkles of exploration and Mystery, they find themselves on a truly foreign journey, separated from familiarity by an ocean. By way of the gravitational tug of home that dwells without end deep in the folds of notion, the sisters realize amid their travels the depth of native soil and its tangle of roots.

“Joanna Beth Tweedy has conjured up a world as familiar as childhood memories and as strange as the Sahara. The prose crackles like a splash of water on a hot skillet and there’s a surprise on every page.” — Robert Hellenga

Joanna Beth Tweedy, an ardent foreign-adventurist with chronic and gravitational home-soil leanings, was born and raised in Little Egypt—the southernmost region of Illinois leapfrogged betwixt the Ozarks and Appalachia, whose geography belongs to the former and idiom to the latter. Joanna Beth’s work gives voice to this distinct region and its sundry wonders both merciless and steeped in grace.

Tweedy’s poetry and fiction have been published in literary journals and anthologies and have received honors from Glimmer Train, the Southern Women Writers Conference, Alsop Review, New Millennium Writing, the Ray Bradbury Creative Writing Contest, and Long Story Short. Past readings and speaking engagements have taken place in Cambridge, Louisville, and St. Louis.

With degrees in education and English from the Universities of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and Springfield (UIS), Joanna Beth has taught creative writing, literature, and educational leadership, and has served as faculty-in-residence for the Capital Scholars Honors Program at UIS. She is presently an associate dean of academic affairs at Benedictine University in Springfield, where she is also the founding editor and host of Quiddity International Literary Journal and Public-Radio Program in partnership with Illinois Public Radio’s hub-station, WUIS.

__________

Peter Selgin will discuss his novel

Life Goes to the Movies

Friday, July 17 at 12:15 PM

“Dwaine grabs my hand and holds it. He does it nonchalantly, the way you might pick up a bright shell from the beach. I don’t say a thing or react in any way, I’m too surprised to react. After a while it seems perfectly natural, him holding my hand that way, like we’ve been holding hands forever, since we were five years old, like we were born to hold hands, Dwaine and I.”

When Vietnam-veteran-turned-filmmaker Dwaine Fitzgibbon (“D for Death, W for War, A for Anarchy, I for Insane, N for Nightmare, and E for the End of the World”) takes Nigel DePoli under his wing to teach him about movies and life, Nigel thinks he’s found the perfect antidote to his small-town, immigrant child’s upbringing. But Dwaine is arguably insane, and the greatest movie they’ll ever collaborate on is the one he produces in Nigel’s gullible, hero-addled mind.

Their erotically tinged friendship is the subject of what one sly reader has called an “anti-homophobic” novel, a bond strengthened but also tested by their mutual love for Veronica “Venus” Dwiggins, a beautiful albino costume designer. With Dwaine less and less able or willing to distinguish between reality and cinema, Nigel must choose between sanity and loyalty. The story climaxes with Nigel’s gambit to rescue Dwaine from the psychiatric ward where he has taken flight, a scheme involving a considerable budget, a cast and crew of hospitalized V-vets, and the world’s most famous soft-drink.

“Life Goes to the Movies is the irresistible account of a passionate friendship between two young men, both star-struck by art. Selgin’s vivid account of New York in the 1970s, his richly complex characters, his encyclopedic knowledge of film and his sense of how small the gap is between good luck and bad make this an utterly absorbing novel. A wonderful read.”

Peter Selgin’s first book of short stories, Drowning Lessons (University of Georgia Press, 2008) won the Flannery O’Connor Award. His book on writing, By Cunning & Craft: Sound Advice and Practical Wisdom for Fiction Writers, was published by Writer’s Digest Books. His stories and essays have appeared in dozens of publications, including Salon, The Sun, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Missouri Review, Boulevard, Poets & Writers, Colorado Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review, and in the anthologies Our Roots Are Deep With Passion (Other Books, 2006), Writing Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2005), and Best American Essays 2006. He edits the journal Alimentum: The Literature of Food, and leads an annual writing workshop in Vitorchiano, Italy.

• How to Write a Book in Three Days: Lessons from Michael Moorcock | Wet Asphalt
  "In the early days of Michael Moorcock's 50-plus-years career, when he was living paycheck-to-paycheck, he wrote a whole slew of action-adventure sword-and-sorcery novels very, very quickly, including his most famous books about the tortured anti-hero Elric. In 1992, he published a collection of interviews conducted by Colin Greenwood called Michael Moorcock: Death is No Obstacle, in which he discusses his writing method. In the first chapter, "Six Days to Save the World", he says those early novels were written in about "three to ten days" each, and outlines exactly how one accomplishes such fast writing…."

  Don't let the crazy title fool you — there's some good stuff here!

• Newsweek's Top 100 Books: The Meta-List | Newsweek Books | Newsweek.com
  "Declaring the best book ever written is tricky business. Who's to say what the best is? We went one step further: we crunched the numbers from 10 top books lists (Modern Library, the New York Public Library, St. John's College reading list, Oprah's, and more) to come up with The Top 100 Books of All Time. It's a list of lists — a meta-list. Let the debate begin."

  Via BookBalloon.com. Where I'm sure the debate will soon begin.

• Practicing Writing: The Wednesday Web Browser: Book Review Edition
  "1) There are lots of ways to learn about new books well ahead of publication (which you generally need to do because most review editors aren't interested in publishing reviews of "old" books). One information source I discovered only recently: Library Journal's Prepub Alerts."

  You'll find more great tips on book reviewing at Practicing Writing.

• “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” author Alain de Botton to NYT book reviewer: “I will hate you until the day I die” « Enter the Octopus
  "I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude."

  –Love, Alain

  Suggested title for Alain de Botton's next book: How to Get a Sense of Proportion

• From 'Summertime': 'Undated Fragments' – The New York Review of Books
  Excerpt from 'Summertime': 'Undated Fragments' — By J.M. Coetzee

  Via the always-fabulous BookBalloon.com

I saw you reading:

What: Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

Where: On the Saunders-Monticello Trail

When: This morning while walking

• Slush Pile: How to Write a Book in Ten Easy…Years
  Is it taking you ten years to write your book? Christina Thompson says that might just be normal.
• Blog of the Week: Family Hack
  Marijean Jaggers (STLWorkingMom.com) joins us for another installment of "Blog of the Week."

  Meet the Davis family, a local family with three young kids who has attracted quite a following with their blog. The blog is called FamilyHack.com and it focuses on money-saving travel tips. The Davis children are home-schooled, so the blog is devoted to figuring out how to best travel the world and work from anywhere while still taking care of your kids.

  "The site started out as a hobby, something to tell our friends about what we are doing. Now we are getting over one million visits a month," said Michael Davis.

• Book lovers trade tomes through Web sites
  "Carly Milner will share hers, if you'll share yours. Her books, that is. In fact, Milner has a whole list of books just ripe for the taking. It includes titles by such hot authors as Michael Chabon and Bill Bryson. All are nearly free for members of BookMooch, a Web site that connects readers interested in "mooching" from other people's libraries."

  I mooch — do you?

• C-Ville: Features – 25 essential Charlottesville experiences for real locals
  "22. Dabble in graphic design, writing, or architecture
  If you’ve lived in Charlottesville for over five years and haven’t headlined an art opening or a book signing, you’re in the minority. Our city must be built on some kind of creative bedrock, because here artistic pursuits are the norm and not the exception. We could estimate how many trust funds have been directed toward amateur hobbies, but you can’t put a price on personal fulfillment."

  And may I just say, if you're going to dabble in writing, there's no better place to dabble than WriterHouse.

• The truth about writers – Los Angeles Times
  "But we writers have a secret. We don't spend much time writing. There. It's out. Writers, by and large, do not do a great deal of writing. We may devote a large number of hours per day to writing, yes, but very little of that time is spent typing the words of a poem, essay or story into a computer or scribbling them onto a piece of paper…."

  So what do we do all day? Click on over and see. (Via HMV)

• Nashuatelegraph.com: School nixes four stories from course
  "LITCHFIELD – Four stories will be removed from an English class curriculum at Campbell High School after a group of parents complained about content that touched on cannibalism, cocaine use, abortion and homosexuality.

  "Stories by satirist David Sedaris, crime author Laura Lippman, horror novelist Stephen King and legendary American writer Ernest Hemingway were pulled from the curriculum a day after parents complained that their children should not be exposed to what they view as objectionable subject matter."

  Yes. The Hemingway story is indeed "Hills Like White Elephants." via http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/

I saw you reading:

What: The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin

Where: Fellini’s

When: Today at brunch