I have the great good fortune of workshopping a new novel with Jennifer Haigh1 this summer at the Appalachian Writers Workshop! In my writerly dreams I hoped to one day study with Jennifer, and BAM! That day has come!
I almost didn’t apply because I’m buried in researching and writing a nonfiction book with the working title, Along the Ohio: Traveling America’s Dividing Line.2 I didn’t have any fiction “in the drawer” that was good enough to send with my application for Jennifer’s workshop and I kept wondering if I could possibly afford the time to write something new. I reminded myself that part of being a full-grown woman is honoring her priorities, in my case, the nonfiction book. That doesn’t mean I didn’t daydream about how much my writing improve after spending a week under Jennifer’s tutelage.
Can’t I do both? Please?
With only two weeks to the workshop’s application deadline, I was in Paducah, Kentucky, researching a woman who had started a hotel that catered to performers on the Chitlin’ Circuit in the early 1900s. I couldn’t get her out of my mind. With three days to the application deadline, I called a friend and fellow writer, who encouraged me to write the first chapter of a book based on her story. Submitted and accepted!
I think this is a sign. Anyone who doesn’t agree with me or who doesn’t believe in signs can keep their own counsel while I’m over here living the dream. :>
Great Fiction
Aside from a voluminous stack of nonfiction books for my own book’s research, so far this year I’ve read these with my book club: Eastbound, Tom Lake, Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, The Fraud, and North Woods.
The best novel I’ve read so far this year is Metropolis, by B.A. Shapiro. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by a cast of excellent voice actors. I appreciate how difficult it is to invest readers in more than one main character, and Ms. Shapiro weaves six characters’ stories into one. This book has everything I love: intricate plotting, fully developed characters, suspense, and a lot to ruminate over.
Overview: “Six people, six secrets, six different backgrounds. They would never have met if not for their connection to the Metropolis Storage Warehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When someone falls down an elevator shaft at the facility, each of the six becomes caught up in an intensifying chain of events.” ~Algonquin Books
Here are a few others I’ve enjoyed this year:
Listen to These
I get a lot of reading done through my ears! My taste is eclectic, a mix of history, pop culture, economics, and writing/publishing topics. Here’s nine (of about 25) for starters.
For those of you who only get this newsletter in email, look for the triangular play button at the top if you’d like to listen to me narrate it. I also publish on the Substack platform, where you can listen to my narration, as well as to the work of authors who don’t narrate their own, using the app’s artificial intelligence narrator.
Watch This!
I have been telling everyone I know about GUILT from BBC Scotland. Season One begins with two brothers accidentally running over an elderly man in his neighborhood. Will they do the right thing? NO! And it spirals (mostly) down from there in Seasons Two and Three. Oh, the characters, the plot, the drama! Writers, keep track of every plot point, each way the characters reveal themselves, and how to ratchet up the suspense after a moment of tranquility. Plenty of gallows humor to boot.
Guilt’s available through your PBS station/app and Prime Video. I watched each season as it was released, and now I plan to binge-watch the entire series.
A final question. Are you trying to decide what to think about artificial intelligence and creative work like writing? That’s the subject of my next newsletter. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss a thing. It’s free!
Quick bio for Jennifer Haigh: Born 85 miles northeast of Pittsburgh in Cambria County, Jennifer attended Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Her first novel, Mrs. Kimble, won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Since then, she has published six more critically-acclaimed works of fiction, most recently Mercy Street—named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker and winner of the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Published in eighteen languages, her books have won the Bridge Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, the PEN New England Award in Fiction, and a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A Guggenheim fellow, she teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at Boston University.
Her new novel, Rabbit Moon, will be published by Little, Brown in April 2025.
Along the Ohio: Traveling America’s Dividing Line explores the racial legacy of the country’s longest slavery border (981 miles of the Ohio River).
Studying with Jennifer Haigh!