Welcome to the hinterlands: a narrative nonfiction blog

Feeling all grown up? Enter the Real Simple essay contest.

Candidly, I'm still waiting for this moment, but if  you've had that "Well, now I'm a grown-up for sure" epiphany then put it to paper and send it to Real Simple's second annual Life Lessons Essay Contest, which offers  a $3000 cash prize plus a trip to NYC and more. 

From Real Simple:

The Life Lessons column, which reaches more than two million readers monthly, has featured noted authors such as Mary Gordon, Jane Smiley, Ann Patchett, and many others. We invite all non-fiction writers to submit their work for consideration and potential publication in Real Simple, in the company of these distinguished authors.

The topic of this year’s essay is: When did you first realize that you had become a grown-up? Whether the experience was difficult, funny, easy, or bittersweet, share your lesson and you could win.

The winning essay is scheduled to appear in the April 2010 issue of Real Simple magazine. The winner will also receive a $3,000 cash prize; roundtrip tickets for two to New York City, hotel accommodations for two nights, and tickets to a Broadway play; and lunch with Real Simple editors.

To enter, please send a typed, double-spaced submission of no more than 1,500 words, preferably as a Microsoft Word attachment, to lifelessons@realsimple.com. The contest is open to legal residents of the U.S. who are 19 or older at the time of entry. It began at 12:01AM this past May 1 and runs through 11:50PM on September 7, 2009. For complete contest rules, please visit realsimple.com/lifelessonscontest.

The truth about writers

Was someone spying on my workday? 

Books on my list

I'll be updating this post regularly to note books that I'm interested in reading for one reason or another.  If/when I read one of the books, I'll also post an update.

Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead by Peter Manseau.  Who can resist "a global odyssey in search of the 'dismembered toes, splinters of shinbone, stolen bits of hair, burned remnants of an anonymous rib cage, and other odds and ends' belonging to saints and other sacred figures." (Joshua Hammer, NYTimes Sunday Book Review 05/31/09

Driving Like Crazy: [subtitle too long to bother typing] by P.J. O'Rourke.  What can I say?  I shouldn't, but I can't help myself.  I find O'Rourke very, very funny despite the fact that I can't abide his politics.  Or as Neil Genzlinger writes in the 5/31/09 NYT book review, "Sure, he's responsible for the impending death of our race and planet, but at his best...the guy's hilarious."

The Family Man by Elinor Lipman.  This one's fiction.  I'll  start reading it in the middle, no doubt.  But a "screwball plot" social comedy is what I need. 

Rodale's Ultimate Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening (various editors), Understanding Perennials  by William Cullina, and Well-Preserved: Recipes and Techniques for Putting up Small Bathces of Seasonal Foods by Euginia Bone.  Because I hope that someday I might have the time to do any of these things.  Because scratch me and you find the child of 9 or 10 who in the early 70s dreamed of becoming a hippy homesteader in Vermont, with a peasant blouse and hair down to my waist, wading through fields of sun-drenched wildflowers.  (Then my mother gave me a modern homesteading book and the section on castrating goats rather gave me pause. Also, I really don't like winter.)  In the meantime, if at the end of the growing season my progress (native plants in the ground, soil incrementally improved, wisteria and English ivy fought to a temporary draw, surprise annual return of black cohosh) outweighs my regress (see: wisteria, English ivy, maddening squirrel compulsion to bite off the branches of oakleaf hydrangea), then I try to take the long view of things and recognize that I have done something, at least.  Also, the birds, chipmunks, toads, worms, and squirrels, plus the occasional snake and rabbit that show up (but not together) all seem to approve. 

Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference & literary competition

For the competition held in conjunction with this Texas literary conference, the deadline is June 1 to submit your manuscript, so hurry on down to your neighborhood FedEx.

Here's the conference press release:

UNT’s Mayborn Conference accepting entries for literary competition  -  Prizes include a book deal and $15,000 in cash.

DENTON (UNT), Texas – Since 2005, the University of North Texas’ Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference has awarded four book contracts to emerging authors.  This summer could be your chance to get published.

The conference, which will feature NPR host Ira Glass and be held July 24–26 at the Hilton DFW Lakes Executive Conference Center in Grapevine, is accepting manuscripts, essays and articles for its literary competition.  Additionally, the conference has teaming up with the Writer’s Garret, a prominent non-profit writing organization in Dallas, to help writers prepare their entries for the competition.

The conference and competition are sponsored by the Mayborn Graduate School of Journalism, which will become part of the university’s newly announced Frank W. and Sue Mayborn School of Journalism when it opens on Sept. 1.  The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board granted formal creation of the Mayborn School earlier this month upon recommendation from the UNT System Board of Regents. 

Selected entries will get the opportunity to work one-on-one with industry professionals in conference workshops, which will be held July 24 (Friday) before the official start of the conference.  These entries also will compete for $15,000 in cash prizes and the chance to be published. 

“This conference presents an enormous opportunity for unknown writers to get recognized and published,” said George Getschow, the conference’s writer-in-residence.  “There are established writers who have tried unsuccessfully for years to be published.  This is a rare opportunity.”
Two copies of each entry should be mailed to the Mayborn Graduate School of Journalism at 1155 Union Circle, #311460, Denton, TX 76203, attention George Getschow.  Entries also must be submitted electronically to maybornconferenceinfo@unt.edu.  The deadline for submissions is June 1 (Monday).

Essays and articles should be no longer than 20 pages.  A non-refundable entry fee applies.  Twenty manuscripts and 50 essays will be selected for workshop participation.  Contest winners will be selected from this group of 70 finalists. The winner of the manuscript competition will receive $3,000 and the option to enter a book publishing contract with the UNT Press. The top three entries in the categories of personal essays and mini-memoirs and reporting and research-based narratives that focus on people will receive $3,000, $2,000 and $1,000, respectively.  The best articles and narratives and personal essays will be included in the 2010 edition of Ten Spurs, the conference’s literary journal.  For more entry information visit http://www.themayborn.unt.edu/WritingComp.htm.

To register for the conference, visit www.TheMayborn.unt.edu. Conference fees are $295 for the general public. Student fees are $225. Educator fees are $270. Conference seating is limited.  For more information, call 940-565-4564. The conference is open to the public with no requirement to submit competitive essays or a book manuscript proposal.

For more information about the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference Competition, contact Jo Ann Ballantine, conference manager, at 940-565-4778.

The Unlikely War Bride

Reviewed in this week's NYTimes book review: I Love a Man in Uniform.  The Times calls it "a humorous, moving, and surprising account of married life in today's military."  The setup is that Burana, who, as the PW review notes, has "a decidedly checkered past, from accidental teenage communist to peep-show girl and stripper in New York and San Francisco," meets and falls in love with an Army major.  The two hastily marry before he is shipped off to Iraq, and what follows for Burana is the fallout and coming to terms with her unlikely new life as an Army wife, set against the long folly of the Iraq war.

The book sounds like it has some punch, but I think the publisher picked the wrong cover design.  It's the kind of design that telegraphs insubstantial advice/diet book/lame celebrity biography rather than a memoir that, reviews suggest, is much more substantial.

The Washington Post review:

Although it may sound like a case of opposites attracting -- punky anarchist marries career soldier -- Lily Burana makes clear that she and her husband are really birds of a feather, even if they come from different flocks. When Burana, who made her name with an earlier memoir about working as a stripper, met Mike, an Army officer, she couldn't imagine what they could share, beyond "mutual curiosity." Yet both were smart, funny, driven and idealistic, and, as they grew closer, they found even more in common, including wounds from traumas both military (his) and domestic (hers). Burana can be hilarious, especially when she skewers the Stepford-style advice once given to Army wives. Upon reading a 1940s book declaring that "Army men like feminine frippery . . . furs, snow-white gloves, and high-heeled slippers," Burana retorts, "But what should I wear?" Still, the book shifts easily into more emotional territory as she navigates loneliness and worry when her husband is deployed to the Middle East. "War is hell and waiting is hell and war is waiting," she writes. Even worse can be the marital aftershocks when soldiers return home. As both these spouses battle their demons, it becomes clear that this Army wife matches her husband in grit and persistence, even if she expresses it with more sass than brass.

New nonfiction news - Starbucks picks Crazy for the Storm

The upcoming memoir Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival (release date, June) is the next featured book selection from Starbucks. Here's the book description from the publisher:

From the age of three, Norman Ollestad was thrust into the world of surfing and competitive downhill skiing by the intense, charismatic father he both idolized and resented. While his friends were riding bikes, playing ball, and going to birthday parties, young Norman was whisked away in pursuit of wild and demanding adventures. Yet it were these exhilarating tests of skill that prepared "Boy Wonder," as his father called him, to become a fearless champion—and ultimately saved his life. Flying to a ski championship ceremony in February 1979, the chartered Cessna carrying Norman, his father, his father's girlfriend, and the pilot crashed into the San Gabriel Mountains and was suspended at 8,200 feet, engulfed in a blizzard. "Dad and I were a team, and he was Superman," Ollestad writes. But now Norman's father was dead, and the devastated eleven-year-old had to descend the treacherous, icy mountain alone. Set amid the spontaneous, uninhibited surf culture of Malibu and Mexico in the late 1970s, this riveting memoir, written in crisp Hemingwayesque prose, recalls Ollestad's childhood and the magnetic man whose determination and love infuriated and inspired him—and also taught him to overcome the indomitable. As it illuminates the complicated bond between an extraordinary father and his son, Ollestad's powerful and unforgettable true story offers remarkable insight for us all.

Now Reading

George Being George, an oral history of the life of George Plimpton, which is quite entertaining.  I've only just gotten to the part where he's kicked out of Exeter and goes to Harvard anyway (ah, those were the days).  Apparently, both his behavior and his grades were found wanting.  Reproduced in the book is a two page letter from Plimpton's father, during Plimpton's time at Exeter, exhorting and instructing George on all the points academic and behavioral on which George ought to exert himself.  It's funny and sad at once--a father so intent on making his child the son he wants that he can't see the son he has.  At any rate, that's my 2-cent psychoanalysis.

Here's a PW review:

Starred Review. This superb, exuberant oral biography of editor-author-actor Plimpton (1927–2003) is described by Aldrich as a kind of literary party, George's last. As the subtitle makes clear—George Plimpton's Life as Told, Admired, Deplored, and Envied by 200 Friends, Relatives, Lovers, Acquaintances, Rivals—and a Few Unappreciative Observers—this is modeled after the cut-and-paste technique employed in Edie, Plimpton and Jean Stein's book about actress-model Edie Sedgwick. In addition to Plimpton family members, the 200 voices that speak here include David Amram, Harold Bloom, Christopher Cerf, Jules Feiffer, Norman Mailer, Peter Matthiessen, William Styron, Gay Talese and Gore Vidal. The chronological coverage spans Plimpton's life, from his privileged childhood, education at Exeter and Harvard and life in the U.K. at King's College, Cambridge, to his books, movies and legendary parties. His five decades editing the Paris Review and the inner workings of that publication are detailed in depth. When one scans any page at random in this appealing assemblage of anecdotes, it becomes difficult to stop reading. Plimpton's colorful personality emerges in a high-definition prismatic portrait.

Reading rotation

I seem to read much the way I do projects, which is to say that I start one book, then another, then perhaps another, and the latest New Yorker, and I read them in rotation until I finish or tire of one or all.  I also almost invariably begin reading books in the middle and then start skipping backward and forward until, again, I've finished the book or tired of it.  Also, I always read the New Yorker back-to-front, starting by reading all the cartoons first.  What Does It All Mean?

So, currently in rotation:  Yoga for People Who Can't be Bothered...  along with Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven and an Everest memoir, Dead Lucky, because I can't resist polar exploration and mountaineering stories.

Undress Me.... is a travel memoir by Susan Jane Gilman, in which she and a college friend, both recently graduated, set off to explore China in 1986.  Why they went, I don't know yet, because I started the book  in the middle, of course.  There's been a good deal of gripping drama and adventure from there forward, however.  Without giving the story away, things go awry in a manner that is decidedly unexpected and not your typical kind of traveler's trouble.

Kirkus called it "an ambitious and intimate coming-of-age novel." (Is this a new Kirkus policy to bill memoirs as novels?  For the record, the author notes that only names and distinguishing characteristics of characters have been changed.) 

Dead Lucky is mountaineer Lincoln Hall's memoir of being left for dead high in Everest's "Death Zone." Following a successful summiting of the mountain, Hall became increasingly incoherent and then, at 28,000 feet, apparently unconscious from cerebral edema.  The Sherpas struggling to get him down the mountain tried desperately to revive him for several hours, even poking him in the eyeballs without getting any response, before finally they had to leave him in order to save their own lives as night fell.  After a night without shelter or oxygen,  a night during which his family at home in Australia was informed that he was dead, inexplicably Hall was found alive and reasonably lucid the next morning in the precarious perch where he had been left.  (Pictures and an interesting on-the-scene account from one of the climbers who found him are here on EverestNews.com.)

Subtitled "Life After Death on Everest," the book grapples interestingly with the question Hall can't answer: how was it possible to be virtually dead in one of the most inhospitable places on the Earth and yet somehow live? 

Three essays into Yoga for People Who Can't be Bothered to Do It (the cover design to the left is not the design on my copy, though there isn't any particular reason you need to know this) and I'm thoroughly enjoying it, though to say that it lacks an apparent narrative arc would be a considerable understatement.  So far, the author has idled through several points on the global map—pre-Katrina New Orleans, Cambodia, and Indonesia—without a single incident of great pith and moment unfolding.  And yet there's something oddly engaging about this narrative of drift, and I'll put it down to  Geoff Dyer's writing, which is observant, frank, and  unsparing, with a mordant wit.  His writing reminds me a bit of Jim Knipfel (who has a new novel coming out, and we here in the Hinterlands are not so churlish as to refuse to give it a plug simply because it's fiction). 

Comes the spring

"And do you propose," I asked myself, "to summarily abandon the Nonfiction Faction when here you have set yourself up as its champion?" 

"Forsooth," said I.  Also possibly "Gadzooks."

So I'm back at the post.  True, we haven't had an Unmasking of the Memoir Followed By Handwringing and General Decrying of the Genre to comment on in a while, and no really juicy entries for the Fiction vs. Nonfiction Smackdown, but every two weeks Kirkus loads up another long list of new nonfiction releases, and I just hate to let it all pass unremarked.

The books on the bedside table right now run heavily to the historical, as the Junior Member of the Household has been tasked with a report on a "Founding Father." The JM of the H's "FF" is Alexander Hamilton.  Not surprisingly, the biographies of Hamilton considered appropriate for tender young minds pretty much leave out all the good stuff--to wit, it's difficult to tell when A. Hamilton found time to be a Founding Father when he seemed to spend so much of his time being a philandering father.  So I have been reading  selections out loud from Willard Sterne Randall's Alexander Hamilton: A Life, which is really much juicier.

I have also been making my way through Blake Bailey's Cheever biography, which portrays Cheever as a deeply unlikeable narcissist.  At least, that's my read.

So I need to lighten up, and I'm holding high hopes for Geoff Dyer's Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It.  Now THAT is a nonfiction title I like.  Anyway, I've been reading a New Yorker review of Dyer's work which has made me keen on reading Yoga...  So I'm off to the library in a few to hunt that one down.

Also, I recently re-read Bryson's Shakespeare bio (see under "Recent And/Or Notable Reads column to the right).  Because the JM of the H's class was doing a little Shakespeare study, and I was looking for some good stuff to liven up the learning a bit.  Whose education is this anyway?

Shrouded in sheets

Like a summer home drowsing through winter, the Hinterlands is currently idling while I consider its raison d'etre.

Words from the biz

Recently laid off PW editor Sarah Nelson on resentment towards the book business:

“I think it’s because many, many, many, many people think they can write and that they have a book in them,” she said. “And they are very, very resentful of someone else who has a book come out. … I think everybody thinks that there but for the luck of knowing a New York editor goes their memoir.”

http://www.observer.com/2009/media/pw-s-sara-nelson-saw-book-crowd-coolest-earth