Lessons from Paris
everyone is an expert and has imposter syndrome
Bonjour, mes amis!
I spent a week in Paris! I was thrilled to have been invited to teach a class for Lauren Grodstein’s After the Novel Workshop. (I think that going overseas to take any bitter pill is a wise choice).
After the Novel is an incredible, useful, warm, understanding series of interactive and very intimate lectures with a Big 5 Editor, a spectacular major agent, and three bestselling novelists. It promises a query letter and a full manuscript consult—and it delivers. My Creativity Spa was a luxury at the end of four days of gently but firmly holding authors accountable to bringing their complete manuscripts to market.
Having just had the editor’s meeting, in which it was made abundantly clear that a book is a product, it was easy for me to respond to a starry-eyed sixteen year old relative writing their first novel.
The ask was random and out of the blue -
“Can you help me?” text more or less said, “I am being asked by my editor to do something I do not want to do.” It was 2am in Paris. I wanted to turn in.
My response, however, was to ask for more information.
(A future blog post might be about the fact that I do many things out of kindness which steal sleep from me.)
My young person said:
“The editor asked for 3000 words but I was inspired to write an entire novel! I sent the first 6000 words to my editor for their notes and they did not respond well. I’m so discouraged. Would you read my novel? I need a lot of help.”
Here is what I replied:
“Your editor is a gelato shop owner who put out a contest to see who could come up with a new flavor of gelato. You showed up in their store with the best hamburger anyone has ever grilled. The gelato owner is trying to tell you that while this may be a perfect hamburger, what they want in fact is gelato.”
This penetrated. I told them I would read the finished manuscript but I wouldn’t advise on works in progress, that this was a skill that needed to be practiced to develop.
I did, however, spent a hot minute pining for the days when I would just start some art project without once second-guessing either my ability or how people might receive me in that role.
Then I got on a boat and went to see the Orsay Museum.
Everything old is new again.
WRITING NEWS
I was published in print in Lithuania, and now the full text is available on the web!! This may not be the earth-shattering exciting news to you that it is to me, but I am absolutely beside myself that not one but at least TWO of my stories are out or coming out in translation in various Literary magazines. I warmly welcome anyone who speaks Lithuanian fluently to give this story in Šiauės Atėnai a read! It sounds so incredibly highbrow in Lithuanian. I had to look up some of the words! Hats off to my translator. Lithuanian is the most inherently gendered language that is currently spoken I believe - there are, if I recall correctly from high school, seven gendered parts of speech. Not only gendered nouns, but adjective, adverbs, and more. But she managed to match the original - two of the three characters are an indeterminate gender. Not androgynous, but simply undefined on the page. (Did you notice when you read it in English? Neither the narrator nor Tyler has a clear gender in “Still Life with Summer Cherries,” only the dead neighbor.
Anyway, here is the link to the piece that Šiauės Atėnai publshed.
And I just got the fantastic news that a second story (Cineplex) is coming out in Kultūros barai, which is an independent monthly journal of culture that regularly covers wide cultural areas: general cultural topics (cultural theory, history, and criticism), art, theatre, music, dance, film, architecture, cultural tendencies abroad, etc.
It is published in Vilnius, Lithuania, and has a circulation of 3000 copies.
Truly, it has been an extraordinary week.
Also if you are in Portland OR, we are participating in the Willamette Writing Festival on July 31. And by ‘we’ I mean Pen Parentis - Laura Wheatman Hill will be at the table to greet you and tell you all things Pen Parentis!
Oh! And if you’re curious, there are at least 100 photos of Paris on my Facebook author page. Subscribe and/or just poke around and enjoy my quirky photography!
Random Final Thought
WHERE DID SUMMER GO? HOW CAN IT BE MORE THAN HALFWAY OVER?
And your book is gonna be a beauty.
That tracks.