Jane Austen Made Us Do It!

Friday, October 21, 2011

Actually - my wonder-boy-agent, Mitchell Waters made us do it... or at least lobbed the suggestion that we contribute to an anthology of short stories about or including Jane Austen. We thought it sounded like fun, and a great place to test a couple of urbane married-to-one-another amateur sleuths we'd been thinking about creating. Together we joined forces (and keyboards) and created a short story called, "Faux Jane" for the anthology, "Jane Austen Made Me Do It".

And we'll talk about all of this with Scott Simon on National Public Radio this coming Saturday morning! Frank and I even share a reading! Yikes!

Most Weekend Editions seem to play between 8am and 10am on Saturday morning, but check your local listing and tune in!

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Jane Made Me Do It

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

A little more than a year ago, my agent, Mitchell Waters, invited Frank and me to be part of a project he was agenting: Jane Austin Made Me Do It, an anthology of short stories about or around Jane Austen. He suggested that we try writing it together and we thought the idea sounded like fun. It was!

Our story is called Faux Jane, it’s about a con that attempts to pass off a copy of Pride and Prejudice inscribed by Jane herself. And the couple who uncover the sham might remind you of another pair of spare time sleuths. They’re glamorous, witty and very urbane and we enjoyed the process of inventing them so much, we’ve decided to do more. But for now – we hope you enjoy our story!

Buy it on Amazon here!

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Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner (and Cocktails)

Thursday, September 22, 2011

About a year ago, Mitchell Waters suggested that he might want to try placing a short story or two of mine. To his surprise, I quickly admitted that I'd never written one. Having an agent ask for submission is reason alone to give a new form a try - and I did just that. But first, I asked Frank Delaney, my live-in writing authority for direction.

"A short story," Frank said, "unlike a novel, should be something you can completely walk around. It's a morsel you can hold in your hand and turn over. And, ideally, it's utterly digestible." How could I not consider the dinner table as an option. One of my favorite movies, My Dinner With Andre, holds out an entire world for your consideration in the rich conversation of two very different friends.

Dinner was born of that insight. My first short story. Lunch and Breakfast developed from the conceit, which I continue to appreciate as a device to bring folks together and force them to talk to one another.

Cocktails, on the other hand, was lifted whole, as a full chapter, out of a novel I'm working on right now. And, at least for me, it seems to have that rare quality of being able to stand on its own, without the rest of the book. I hope you agree. Given the fact that the content of the stories in this anthology seem to be focused around "Meals", we thought the cocktail party theme might allow us to sneak it in as a bonus for you.

The basic theme holding all of the stories together is neither food nor company; but rather, the idea of "positioning" as a deliberate and creative expression of life. In my first book, The New American Wedding, the expression of personal style as an authentic and powerful gesture in ritual, became immediately apparent to me. And certainly the lesson Joy Harkness runs into in The Season of Second Chances, is that style is a mark of emotional importance. Not something to be scorned as domestic and insubstantial, but rather, the "texture of life".

All of these stories serve up some level of personal, positioning for scrutiny, but I present them, I hope, with some, admittedly skeptical - if not wholehearted, reverence. If my brand of reverence is more ironic than what you might imagine to be encouraging, forgive me. It's my mark.

I've done a lot of thinking about this. Sondheim was wrong. It's not "Children and Art". It's only Art. Your children are going to do what they're going to do and your credit can and will only go so far. But along with your discovery of zutonium and the symphony you wrote in your junior year, your personal, authentic style, is all you really have to leave on this earth. The way you did it. The way you seasoned the soup. Or folded the napkin. The still life you've assembled on the dresser that mixes uour grandmother's pitcher with the little plastic gorilla who spits fire when he walks. The music that plays through dinner. The color of your socks. This is your art. If you're vigilant and let them speak, all of these things have a chance to say something about you. Not about fashion or this year's colors - but about you.

And my stories, I hope, encourage that kind of courage.

Buy Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner on Amazon!

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Dinner: Slip of the Tongue

Thursday, June 09, 2011

Third in the Series of Three Short Stories: Breakfast, Lunch. Dinner (ORDER HERE)

A very good editor can manage, without ripping your heart out, to trim the tics and cringe-making bits of style you persist in sprinkling through text that was “just good enough” to have caught their eye in the first place. But a great editor can also spot the thing you do especially well, and get you to do much more of it. I was lucky. I had that wonderful kind of editor in Marjorie Braman, who shepherded The Season of Second Chances into print.

After a lifetime of watching clients try to remove the best and most original things from our work, I knew how rare a spirit it was to be drawn to and not put off by the more original stuff of talent. In my case, Marjorie took pages and pages of story and asked me to re-write them. My heart began to sink. “There’s nothing wrong with what you have here,” she said with firm authority, “in fact, it’s really good. But dialogue is very hard to do well. Very few authors make it work.” I remember assuming that I was about to hear that I was one of those many writers who couldn’t make it work. To my surprise she continued, “-- but you do it really well.” Holy smoke. “What you need to do is show it off more.” Talk about motivation.

Once, a long time ago, after a particularly wrenching tumble, I saw an orthopedic surgeon, who approached me with the greeting, “Swimmer?” I must have looked surprised, because, of course, that’s just what I was – far more at home in water than on land. He listed his observations: short torso, powerful upper body, extra-long limbs, hyper-extended knees. “If you’re not a swimmer,” he said, “you should be, because you were designed for it.” Designed? I must have queried. And he said something like – “great athletes often exploit the deformity.” It was a shocking line. The deformity. “Well,” he explained, “the baseball player with the double-jointed shoulder, the basketball star who is seven feet tall, the swimmer with extra-long, hyper-flexible legs… these things aren’t normal... but these are the things that often create an athlete’s advantage.”

So –a long way of explaining or excusing that Slip of the Tongue is nothing but dialogue. My homage to Malle’s My Dinner with André, uses the conceit of a piece where there is, essentially, no action at all beyond the ideas raised in conversation over dinner. Keep your ears peeled as a table full of media, art and publishing types meet at the Waverly Inn and haggle over the meaning of positioning and establishing value in contemporary life. References to Sontag and Barthes, Chanel, Hermes and Henry James bounce around, as we decide what’s real, what’s necessary, what’s status, what’s stature. And - is it the most important question, the difference between self-protection, self-deception and self-indulgence? Or is that just another question about comfort in one’s skin, a prickly tangent to the necessity of positioning and its part in creating opportunity.

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