When I was in Anaheim, William Taylor of Ingram Library Services interviewed me on the exhibit floor, asking me about my new book, One Nation, Under God. You can stream or download the podcast by following this link. There’s a point about two minutes in where I completely lost my train of thought, but it really picks up after that.

Memo to myself: if, when being interviewed, you completely lose your train of thought, it’s far better to say “I just lost my train of thought” than to repeat the thing you said before you lost your train of thought.

Sunday, June 29, the morning of the Booklist Adult Books Readers’ Advisory Forum: Post-9/11 Fiction (that’s the short title; I’d give you the longer version but we’d have to change this blog’s hosting plan to include more bandwidth), I thought I’d look over my remarks one more time while I ate breakfast. So, I went downstairs, got a table for one, and, as I tucked into my Denver omelet, I turned my mind once more to the dark day of September 11, 2001. Then I heard a voice. It was singing.

If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.

The voice was coming from the speakers in the ceiling. It was distracting but, after a sip of my fresh-squeezed orange juice, I refocused my attention on the paper in front of me.

A gang of white-aproned waiters surrounded the table next to me, clapping their hands and singing:

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay
My, oh my, what a wonderful day
Plenty of sunshine headin’ my way
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay

More challenging, but I tried to tune it out. After all, I’m a professional. I read with even greater ferocity, amending my words here and there for improved flow.

I finally gave up when a six-foot-tall chipmunk–I’m not sure whether it was Chip or Dale–walked up to my table.

Yes, Disneyland’s a strange place to talk about September 11.

The panel went very well. Our allotted two hours flew by, and I know I’m not the only one who could have stayed longer–several people told me the same thing. Carolyn See, Janette Turner Hospital, and Ellen Gilchrist, despite the similar themes of their most recent novels, all have such different personalities and speaking styles, and all of them had very rich food for thought.

Carolyn See spoke powerfully and honestly about grief, about writing There Will Never Be another You near the bed where her life partner lay dying. On September 11, she said, she saw the nation mourning for strangers and thought (I hope I’m getting this line right–I didn’t write it down), “You people know nothing of grief!” She echoed this intensely personal reaction later, when she said:

I’m unable to see the larger picture because I don’t believe the larger picture.

and

The only way for this woman to understand things is to bring it down to a personal level.

She also said, speaking of the ”war on terror”:

This is a fight with clouds. 

(She also said, “Communism went the way of green jell-o,” but I don’t think I can recreate the moment enough so you’ll understand why it was so wonderful.)

In a way, quoting her out of context seems unfair, because the horror of September 11 causes some people to get angry with people who don’t react in the “appropriate” way. But I love Carolyn See for her honesty. I have to say, it was just amazing to meet her and hear her. Regular readers know I’m not given to this sort of statement, but she struck me as being what they on the Left Coast call a “wise soul.” Gracious, funny, self-deprecating, and unafraid to speak her mind.

Janette Turner Hospital spoke at length about her previous book, Due Preparations for the Plague, and its origins in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Though it’s often interpreted as a take on September 11, she said she had written all but the last 50 pages when September 11 happened. She stopped writing for months, but returned to the book and gave it a new ending, different because of what had happened.

After that, she said, the last thing she wanted to write about was terrorism. Inspired by the street musicians who play in Boston’s subway stations, she planned to cast one in a love story. But that book, Orpheus Lost, ended up being about terrorism, too. Such are the times.

Hospital was so gracious and refined, and despite saying “I’ve been told I have a mind like the floor of a birdcage,” she showed her experience in the classroom by weaving a fascinating talk together on the fly. She also said that after reading all of our books in a “binge,” she had been inspired to assign them to her students this fall. I think a mark of a great writer is that, despite her own considerable accomplishments, she is always ready to welcome something new, to try change, to avoid repeating herself. And Hospital is truly a great writer.

Ellen Gilchrist was breezy and conversational, occasionally interrupting the other speakers to ask a question, and when she spoke, she referred to the notes she’d been making throughout. She talked at length about A Dangerous Age’s origins in something that happened to her pilates instructor and the National Guardsman who does her landscaping, and she talked about the idea of genre, making some funny remarks that of course I couldn’t write down fast enough.

But essentially, she said, genre was a bunch of people taking on the same thing. With Vietnam, she said, serious writers were tackling it, and then Tim O’Brien nailed it (with The Things They Carried), “and every writer worth his salt was not jealous. We thought, ‘It’s done.’” And then “we all began to write post-apocalyptic books, and then Cormac McCarthy wrote The Road.’”

(Incidentally, Gilchrist also said, “I wrote The Road, only I called it “Black Winter”–referring to a long, bleak short story that she was repeatedly advised not to publish.)

But why do writers turn to these bleak subjects?

We’re trying to take charge of this catastrophe and make it have a better ending.

There’s been a bit of discussion lately about writers whose publishers pressure them to write a new book each and every year (”Top writers feel heat from publishers’ presses,” by David Mehegan, Boston Globe). And, no doubt about it, the author-as-brand-name is a growing trend. In some instances, it feels like we’re seeing a new book each and every month.

But, in the Guardian’s theblogbooks (”The Great American Pause“), John Freeman reminds us that Americans, despite the widely predicted imminent death of our attention spans, still have a soft spot for books whose gestation periods are in the double digits: Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire, and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.

Of course, once Marilynne Robinson’s publisher learns about James Patterson, he’s going to demand that she step up her productivity–to one book per decade at least.

Trying to catch up on my reading. In an examination of David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague and Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends, Michael Saler declares that the War between the States (of fiction, that is, literary and genrefied), is over. Almost over. Well, the end is in sight. (”The rise of fan fiction and comic book culture,” The Times Literary Supplement):

Genre films and books are no longer a minority interest. They top the bestseller lists and popularity polls: we are all geeks now. The establishment’s disdain for genre, and the populists’ suspicion of experimental techniques, are largely things of the past. Generations weaned on cultures “high” and “low” have become the producers and arbiters of the arts, enabled by the expansion of the internet since the early 1990s.

In the Guardian, sf writer Charles Stross (Halting State, 2007) tells general fiction to get with the program, already (”Tomorrow’s everyday,” by Damian G. Walter):

“I think that if there’s one key insight science can bring to fiction,” he says, “it’s that fiction - the study of the human condition - needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn’t immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever. If it was, we’d still be living in caves rather than worrying about global climate change. To the extent that writers of mainstream literary fiction focus on the interior landscape exclusively, they’re wilfully ignoring processes and events that have a major impact on our lives. And I think that’s an unforgivably short-sighted position to take.”

I agree with Stross that fiction can’t afford to be solipsistic–that mainstream, “literary,” or whatever-you-want-to-call-it fiction should engage with the issues of the day, whether political, scientific, cultural, or some combination of the three. But this goes against what many budding writers are taught. In writing workshops, teachers will caution against topical references that will “date” the material. And young writers are especially liable to be trying to create the timeless work that will ensure their immortality. A common assumption, I think, is that the human condition is timeless, and that writing about human beings will never age. The irony is that writing about humans who aren’t engaged with the modern world ends up having a trapped-in-amber quality that is more antique than ageless.

It’s not easy for writers to engage the ever-changing world without putting a sell-by date on the writing, but it’s not impossible. Focus on the big issues, avoid brand names, keep the characters real–and above all, don’t be too literal–and it should all work out.

Even the most successful authors can still learn a thing or two. From The Onion (”Now That I’ve Learned About Foreshadowing, I’m Going To Use It In All Of My Stories,” by John Grisham):

Guess what? There is this really neat literary device I just learned about, and it’s called “foreshadowing.” It’s this thing where, in the beginning of the story, you put in all these little “hints” about stuff that’s going to happen later on. I can’t wait to try it out!

I think the best part about foreshadowing is that it doesn’t come right out and tell everyone what’s going to happen. Instead, it does this thing called “planting a seed” in the reader’s mind, so that the ending will still be a surprise but also seem logical. At least that’s what it said on WritersZone.com, which is a really good site with lots of fun tips on writing.

Foreshadowing is awesome.

(Thanks, Mary Fran!)

Well, this is cool. I’m pleased to find myself in very good company–alongside Booklist associate editor Donna Seaman and Booklist reviewer Mark Eleveld, to name two–in the NewCity Lit 50, published to coincide with the Chicago Tribune Printers Row Book Fair.

And speaking of Printers Row, if you’re in Chicago and you’re planning to attend, you can catch me on Sunday, June 8th on the “Thrill of Mystery” panel at the University Center’s Park/Fountain rooms. I’ll be appearing with Joseph Weisberg (An Ordinary Spy), Raymond Benson (Sweetie’s Diamonds), Jonathan Santlofer (The Murder Notebook), and Ellis Goodman (Bear Any Burden). Bill Savage will be the moderator.

If you’d like to see Donna Seaman (Writers on the Air), she’ll be conversing with Julia Bachrach and Jo Ann Nathan (Inspired by Nature) and Peggy Macnamara (Architecture by Birds and Insects) at 1 p.m. on Saturday in the University Center’s River Room. You can also catch her discussing “The Art of Book Reviewing” with David Ulin (The Myth of Solid Ground) and Elizabeth Taylor (American Pharaoh) at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday in the University Center’s Loop Room.

You could also have watched her having a conversation with Richard Preston (The Wild Trees) at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday in the Harold Washington Library Center multi-purpose room, but Donna just received word that Preston is unwell and won’t be making the trip–the event has been canceled. Best wishes for a speedy recovery!

Now this is my kind of literary feud. There’s been bad blood between Derek Walcott (The Prodigal, 2004) and V. S. Naipaul (A Writer’s People, 2008) for years, but Walcott just took it to a whole new level, debuting a poem, “The Mongoose,” onstage at the Calabash Literary Festival in Kingston, Jamaica. From the Guardian (”Rhyme and punishment for Naipaul,” by Daniel Trilling):

Telling the audience, ‘I think you’ll recognise Mr Naipaul … I’m going to be nasty’, Walcott launched into The Mongoose amid a hubbub of surprised gasps and nervous laughter from the crowd.

A sample:

I have been bitten, I must avoid infection
Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction
Read his last novels, you’ll see just
what I mean
A lethargy, approaching the obscene
The model is more ho-hum than Dickens

This year isn’t going too well for Naipaul. First Patrick French’s biography, The World Is What It Is, now this–and it’s only June. But perhaps Naipaul will have the last laugh:

But Walcott’s attack is unlikely to be ignored. French says that Naipaul will most likely wait until he has devised a suitably literary way of striking back. ‘Knowing Naipaul, he’ll say nothing and then at some point he will lash out. I remember him saying to me once: “I settle all my accounts, I settle all my accounts.” He gets even in his own way, even if he has to bide his time.’

Update: Here’s audio! (It’s at the very end.)

For those of you interested in judging books by their titles, David McKie (”The Great Trimalchio,” the Guardian commentisfree) investigates what playwright Neil LaBute calls “a rarely considered miniature art form”: book titles. Many trivia fans already know that Margaret Mitchell considered calling Gone with the Wind the more pedestrian Pansy–but how many know that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise had a working title of The Education of a Personage?

Four years ago, Bill Ott wrote about working titles in the Back Page, and even offered a quiz on the subject. And if you knew that Farewell, My Lovely had a brief existence as Zounds, He Dies, I want you on my pub-quiz team, if I ever get around to starting one.

Well, I’m not likely to give Publishers Lunch any meaningful competition, but I am pleased to be able to announce an up-and-coming author’s new book deal. From Likely Stories (”Likely Stories Lunch,” by Keir Graff):

In a bold deal brokered by the Endeavor Agency, Random House has acquired Daniel Kraus’s coming-of-age novel, The Monster Variations, with plans to publish it in August 2009. The author, who describes the sales price as “just right,” looks forward to working with editor Beverly Horowitz, noting that people he trusts describe her as “just about the best in the business.”

The plot, which concerns a town terrorized by a hit-and-run truck driver–and three boys who can’t resist breaking curfew despite the killings–makes me imagine a tasty blend of youthful angst and creepy suspense–maybe if River’s Edge had been written by Stephen King? I can’t wait to read it. It’s going to take a lot of willpower on my part to not badger Dan, who works down the hall in American Libraries, for a sneak peek.

Congrats, Dan!

Well, it wasn’t the Hell’s Angels that were the problem, apparently, but still, a recent James Frey book event gave some attendees more than they bargained for (”Crowds Collide,” Page Six):

May 17, 2008 — JAMES Frey - who told Page Six, “I’m trying to break the mold of what readings can be” - had a mini-riot break out at his session Thursday night at Whiskey-a-Go-Go in Hollywood. Six bouncers tried to remove six hooligans who were there more for heavy-metal band Black Tide than to hear him read from his novel “Bright Shiny Morning.” Literary types were horrified as the brawl spilled out to the sidewalk, where it took 20 cops to quell the violence. Three men were arrested.

Word is that no members of Black Tide were injured by disapproving Frey fanatics, although they did endure a severe frowning . . . .