This time of year, everyone’s rounding something up, whether it’s the top 10 albums of the year, the top 5 books of the year, or the top 7.2 olive oils of the year. Creating a “top” list is inherently problematic; none of us is well read, well listened, or well oiled enough to be able to speak for all cultural productivity for a year, and grouping work by base numbers of ten is clearly convenient rather than meaningful.

This year, I thought I’d make a list for myself. This list is titled “Some of the Fiction that I Read and Enjoyed this Year.” Okay, it’s not as catchy as “The Only 10 Relevant and Worthy Books of ALL TIME,” but I rather like a small gesture, don’t you?

A few statements before I get into this list:

1. I do not possess complete world knowledge, so this list is a limited endeavor. These are just books I read and enjoyed. Not all of them, not the most important of them, just good books.

2. This list is based solely on what I read this year, not on what was published this year. Some of these books are a bit older than others.

3. While it’s awesome for reader/writers to encourage one another, it makes me nauseated when I see lists in which reader/writers simply mention everything their friends published in a year. So, while I’ve met some of these writers, I do not personally know any of them, and I listed their books for no back-scratching purpose.

4. Yes, this list is all fiction, this time. I have a number of reviews of poetry forthcoming, so I’ll let those reviews speak for themselves.

Some of the Fiction that I Read and Enjoyed this Year Read the rest of this entry »

Birthdays are always a little bit of a conflicted time for me. It’s not that I’m tremendously concerned about the idea of getting older (though, seriously–what are these wrinkle thingamajiggers doing creeping up on my face?). It’s that I find it hard to avoid using the day as a natural pause to do some soul-searching, assessing the ways I’ve spent time and what I’ve managed to accomplish since the last such mile marker.

This year, I had one major goal: finish the current novel-in-progress. Obviously, I also needed to meet the goals of being a good editor at LAR, a good teacher to my students, a good partner to my husband, and a good friend to those I care about. But in terms of goals that were purely for my own sake–my totally selfish goals–I just wanted to finish this damn book. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s that time of year again–changing seasons, Halloween, Thanksgiving, whatever. I’m talking about its being time for The Los Angeles Review’s fall issue!

This fall, it’s our 10th issue. That’s right: we’re in the double-digits, folks! And while I know I have a habit of declaring favorites among our editions, I really do think that Issue 10 is a standout among our publications over these past few years.

Because I co-edit poetry for LAR, I’m particularly pleased with the wide array of poetic voices we have in this issue. We have ekphrastic work from Terrance Hayes, beautiful formal pieces from Jennifer Givhan and Nick DePascal, knock-the-wind-outta-you poems from Benjamin Sutton and Colin Pope, impressive long poems from LaTasha Diggs and James Allman Jr., and quiet and tender poems from Brandon Courtney, Todd Kaneko, and David Wagoner. And that’s just the beginning. (I’m tempted to name every poet in the issue, but I’ll show some restraint.) Read the rest of this entry »

I love banned books. I love reading them, I love teaching them. My contrary streak may have begun in my conservative high school, in which we got to read some banned books, but with the bad words slyly redacted in black Sharpie. Or maybe with my mom’s throwing out my copy of Siddhartha, because it was based loosely on the life of the Buddha. Or it could be the hilarious scowls I got riding the high-speed rail in Portland while reading The Satanic Verses.  Whatever made me a rogue reader, all someone has to say to me is that a book is banned, and I am off to the bookstore to buy myself a copy.

In honor of banned books week at the end of September, I had my 9th and 10th graders take a look at a list of books we’ve read together, and that they’ve enjoyed: The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Lord of the Flies, Night, Wise Blood, A Separate Peace–the list went on and on. When I told them what the books had in common, that people in various locations across the country and the world cannot access these books because a school system of a library has deemed them dangerous and immoral, they were perplexed. Read the rest of this entry »

This September has been an exciting month for me. Not only did I have the enormous pleasure of seeing my best writing buddy and fellow Los Angeles Review editor Tanya Chernov ink a fabulous book deal with a fabulous press, I also came, at long last, to the 18-month mark before publication of my own book.

As many of my readers likely know, my collection Burn This House was accepted by Red Hen Press for publication some time ago. And though I knew I’d have to wait my turn for publication, I was so pleased to have the book accepted at a wonderful press like Red Hen that I would have waited a decade longer to see it in print. (And because I’m a compulsive tinkerer, I enjoyed having a great deal of time to continue to fuss with the poems in the book.) Even though I’ve been polishing individual poems in the book for some time, as my final manuscript delivery date came closer into view, I began to get a serious case of the nerves. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, world. I’m back to the world of the written page, after a wonderful break from teaching and editing. Let’s just say there was sand and warm water. There were giant sea turtles that swam around my ankles. It was very good to take a bit of time off and to spend long days with my husband, and to take an enforced time out from the literary world. Much as I love being engaged with other writers, readers, and editors, sometimes it’s a good idea to remember that literature is a component of life–an important one–but not life itself. One has to breathe from time to time. One has to look up, and look around.

As I was heading back to life, tanned, relaxed, and not a little more portly for all the delicious things I’d eaten on vacation, I couldn’t help but be fascinated by the most recent literary kerfuffle. I may have been the last person in the publishing world to hear about the flap over BlazeVox Books’ latest fundraising efforts (if you, too, were living under a rock and had not heard the fuss, here’s a glimpse at the issue, and the high emotions it called up. A short version: BlazeVox is accepting manuscripts, and, upon acceptance, asking authors to make donations to the press. A host of authors are speaking up, arguing that this practice makes BlazeVox, a bastion of small press publishing, a vanity press, up there with concerns like Publish America.)  But as you may have noticed, I can’t help but rattle my two cents around, even if I’m a little late.

I stumbled on the news about BlazeVox on the same day that I got a Los Angeles Review-related email I’d classify in the second of my three categories: “normal mail,” “snippy and strange mail,” and “hate mail” (the last of which we’ve dealt with here in past blog posts). This snippy email was from a writer who chastised me/the magazine for not offering our issues free online (we’re a print-only magazine). He informed me that, while he’d like to send work to us for publication, he he wanted to read what we’ve done before. And he thought he should be able to do that for free. Read the rest of this entry »

Years ago, I was taking a road trip with my husband. We drove through Southern California, visiting his family and my family, old friends and old haunts. We were both working in different jobs then–I was cooking for a living, and I hadn’t written anything in several years. I’d practically given up on poetry altogether.

I had a book tucked in my bag throughout that trip: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. I’d picked it up on a whim, mainly because I’d enjoyed The Remains of The Day in high school. I read a page or two when I wasn’t on driving duty, but I always got sick while reading in the car, so the book stayed in my satchel (I had to dig around the book, in fact, to field a call back from an interview for my very first teaching job, my cell reception breaking up as we drove through the Sierra Nevada hills). Mostly, I saved the book for nights in hotels along the way.

It was an evening in a hotel in Fresno that I sat for a several-hour reading marathon, tearing through the pages well after my husband had fallen asleep. The novel didn’t just bring me to tears. It made me want to start writing again.

This summer, it’s roughly six years later, I’m dragging that dog-eared, beaten and brutalized copy of Never Let Me Go to another class session. I’m going to attempt to explain why Ishiguro is one of the finest novelists working in the English language. I’m going to point to passages that make me want to sing and dance and stand on the table Dead Poets Society-style. I know there will be some blank looks, though, because some students simply don’t care. I could stand on that table, and some would still rather curl up beneath it and take a nap. Read the rest of this entry »

This past week has made me feel that I work at the proverbial school of hard knocks. My students are, for the most part, a pleasure. But with a fellow teacher resigning in a bit of a bizarre incident (and my needing to train a new teacher to replace said coworker in approximately 10 minutes), new students being dropped in my class with neither warning nor enough textbooks to go around, working 12+ hour days each day, and juggling a handful of life issues, I’ve been struggling to handle everything without breaking a sweat (literal or figurative).

Finding time in the daily swarm of grading and lecturing and reading to actually work on my book(s) has been a challenge–a challenge that I’m not handling well by quantitative means, as I’ve only gotten a half a chapter written this month. I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to cope with reading LAR submissions when we open in two weeks. Either neither book will be worked on whatsoever, or I will not cook, see friends and family, or sleep until late September. I’m leaning toward the latter.

But there’s a funny thing that happens when you’re working this hard and investing so much in each class, each publication, each manuscript: you really quit caring about strangers’ critiques of you. As I was checking my LAR email as I consumed my vat of coffee before work today, I was greeted with a nice, early-morning hate email. From time to time, people decide to email me snide things about LAR, about our guidelines, about myself personally or editorially, or, in this case, about our mission statement. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me a bit to be confronted by complete strangers behaving badly (what would their mothers say!?), but I’m noticing that there’s such a thing as a critical mass of hard knocks. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m back to the world of the living, or of the living dead, perhaps? (this world is also known as the world of Those Who Teach All Summer Long.) I’m finally getting my feet beneath me during this summer quarter, and am inuring my relatively introverted self to lecturing for 5 consecutive hours each day, though, luckily, I can retreat into the comfort of the red pen on college-rule paper for the final three-plus hours of the day. Tough as it is to go from my weeks split between writing, editing LAR, and teaching to days of teaching only, I’m pleased to say that all my students this summer are smart, engaged teenagers, and that I’m happy to talk with (at?) them every day.

We’ve been reading some fantastic, non-Sparknotsable books thus far, and while I’m pleased to say that those books are turning some reluctant readers into enthusiastic readers, I have been finding that keeping up with my classes’ books has left me with little time to spend with books that I myself want to read.

And so it was with great guilt that, last weekend, I purchased my first ebook. Let me repeat: great guilt. I’m old-school when it comes to books. I believe that a book comes with covers, that delicious smell of paper, and with foldable edges. It doesn’t come on a digital device I’m terrified that I may drop. But just as I’ve asked my students to withhold judgement on the books I’m asking them to read, I decided that I, too, could withhold judgement of the ebook at large, or, at least, finally experience that which I’ve held in negative view for so long.

In buying my first ebook, I had some ethical considerations: Read the rest of this entry »

The Huffington Post isn’t known for publishing the most well-considered commentary, at least in terms of literature. One Anis Shivani, for example, had quite a mouthful to say about the Best American Poetry Series, calling it “incestuous,” and suggesting that only a closed cadre of writers ever appear in BAP (my friend Caleb Barber, a phenomenal, blue-collar poet who works in a machine shop by day, would find it news that he is counted among “the quaint artifacts and robust machinations of the Old Masters” because he appeared in BAP).

Shivani seems very unaware of how the series is actually put together (he appears to believe that David Lehman personally edits every year’s collection–a quick check of the cover would show the guest editor changes yearly), and goes so far as to say that poets like WS Merwin have contributed “little unwanted turds” to the collection. When my mentor, David Wagoner, was the guest editor of the series, I was the beneficiary not only of many a literary magazine he’d culled through in search of his picks for the anthology, but also of his thoughts on the purpose and methodology of compiling such a group of work (in short, he told me he thought it ought to be called “some of the good poems published this year,” rather than “Best American Poetry.”) When he showed me some of the poems he’d selected–I think I may have known some of his picks before the poets did–on several occasions, he’d hand me a poem, then say with great pleasure, “I don’t know anything about this poet. But isn’t this a remarkable poem?” (Not my idea of an incestuous coterie.)

To me, Shivani has always seemed like an angry, bitter sort of guy who couldn’t be bothered to investigate his topic before writing about it–just a poorly vetted one-off of a columnist for whom I’d have to forgive HuffPo.

But The Huffington Post went even farther afield in their recent piece about this year’s Orange Prize winner, Tea Obreht, for her novel The Tiger’s Wife. Ruth Fowler, whose biographical information describes her as an “author, screenwriter, and journalist,” appears to have been on call for HuffPo when Obreht was named the winner. Read the rest of this entry »