A Good and Happy Child — Review by Chris

Do you believe in demons? Demonic possession? What would you need for irrefutable evidence of such a thing? And exactly what would you do with the information when you got it?

Some perfectly good books let readers off the hook, let them set down the book and shake it off because "it's only a novel." By the end of A Good and Happy Child, readers who are brave enough will ask themselves what they could permit themselves to believe — and admit only to themselves at the end of the day as they shut off the light on the nightstand.

The book begins when George is 30 years old and has a son whom he cannot touch or even approach. Being in the same room with the infant frightens him, and he literally cannot be alone with his own child. After six months, George agrees to see a therapist. In their first encounter, George eludes to a childhood experience that might have affected his current situation, which the therapist asks him to record in notebooks.

The novel is a tapestry that weaves the notebook content with George's current life experiences. Author Justin Evans moves deftly between the two times. While I'm with the adult, I can't wait to get back to his childhood. When I am reading about the child, I'm compelled to wish myself forward to see how it all winds up.

The writing is fresh and vivid. I am able to picture the situation, the location, his home, his friends, his family. I am there, and I am captivated. There are many moments that require reflection, and these are a pleasure to contemplate. Even now, long after the last page has been turned, I still think about a scene, or a conversation, and what it ultimately meant to the characters in the novel.

The novel begins at a comfortable pace and accelerates as the story progresses. When I got to the part where the police began searching the nearby woods, I read with my mouth agape, fearing that my prediction was correct. I can understand why the ending made the author's wife wake up screaming in the middle of the night after she read it. (Of course, she read multiple iterations, so I can only imagine what previous drafts might have contained.) However, for me, it was the material that immediately proceeded that gave me my nightmares. As the tension built, I suspected the worst, and that's what I got. It was creepier and more moving than I expected, but it was perfect, sheer genius and blood-curdling.

Frankly, this reads more like a rich memoir than a novel — which is fabulous for the reader but makes me worry deeply for the writer. When we ask how much the writer delved into his own psyche for material, I pray he did not. I pray that his long conversations with Jesuit priests in the dark quiet of the office after hours, the obscure materials he might have dredged up on Lexis-Nexus, his own quirky perspective of stories he read as a child, maybe even stories told around the campfire in his native Virginia, are what make this story so compelling.

Virginia Festival of the Book — The Original Playlists: Poetry Anthology

Anthologies are strange creatures. How do you decide the focus? How do you choose content? How do you secure rights to the materials? And how in the world do you get this work into print? Anthology editors offered perspective and insight into the craft of a collected work, and it was a delightful conversation in the University of Virginia Bookstore.

Nickole Brown, who works at Sarabande Books and is the editor of a number of anthologies, was very concise in the series of steps anthologizers must take. With Saraband, a non-profit publisher (which leads most poets to group all poetry publishers in that category), successful anthologies require much forethought, effort during the process and energy after the finished product hits the shelves.

Brown identified two different types of anthologies: theme-based or collective anthologies. “Each anthology presents its own set of issues,” she noted. She had done both, including a collection of her own poems. Choose a theme-based anthology cautiously she warned: “You think you like the topic, but by the end you might not, so you have to really, really like it.”

Her advice? “Create the anthology you can’t find.”

Gathering the materials is the next challenge. Soliciting poems is different than “open-call” submissions found in many writing magazines. Some editors have poets create pieces for specific anthologies, which sounds more like a slam-dunk than it is — anthologies take on lives of their own, and content or focus can change in the process.

Heather McHugh, editor of Best American Poetry 2007, said the selection process changed when she found “poems started making decisions for me.” Her idea of making "a book of poems I liked" evolved when poems “started with grabbing my ear like a grandmother in the Balkans, then grabbing my heart.”

The selection process also does something to the editor, she noted: “Your taste is corrupted or perverted by reading that much poetry.” Inundation alters a reader’s ability to read and pass judgment. However, that inundation also allows for exposure to incredible work and connects it to other excellent poems in a number of ways: style, sound, theme, title andmore.

What happens to the poet contracted for a poem that winds up not making the anthology? This kind of thing enters into academia when publishers want outrageous prices for printing excerpts in scholarly essays, McHugh said. Authors “can’t afford to buy the permission,” she said, “so they don’t read closely and quote” extensively or thoroughly. This skimming affects scholarship, she noted.

Technology limits bad poetry and affords the inexpensive publishing of good poetry, the panel agreed. “Quality and the making of print books self-limits bad poems,” Brown noted.

McHugh agreed, noting, “I think there are too many poems, but I’ve been teaching for 35 years.” She also pointed out, “There’s great stuff online and not in print. The Web allows for flexibility and exposure.”

I enjoy thumbing through anthologies of many different types of literature — poetry, stories about time travel or horror, horror stories, essays, even Chicken Soup collections from time to time — and I’ve often wondered how they got that way. This panel presented some interesting information on the challenges and rewards of gathering materials for anthologies.

Virginia Festival of the Book — Tales that Keep You Up at Night

What scares you? Chances are, it’s the same thing that scares your favorite author. Three Virginia horror writers discussed that — and much more — in the Christian Inspiration area of the Charlottesville Barnes & Noble.

For Beth Massie, who’s been writing for decades, she was “creeped out” by a lot of things as a child (including an older sister’s efforts to scare her as a youngster). Now, she writes for a number of reasons, including an opportunity to “delve into human emotion down to the bone” and the “rush” of being scared, as well as her sensitivity to everything around her.

She added, “There are lots of things in the world that bother me. The things that haunt me in real life give me the seeds for my stories: racism, homophobia…. If it’s well done, it does not desensitize. It sensitizes.”

“You’re probably weirder than you look,” Justin Evans has been told. After hearing someone talk about the truly frightening ending of A Good and Happy Child — and how, the night after his wife read multiple iterations of it, she woke up screaming — I can only imagine what scares him.

He tried writing a spy novel, which fell flat. Even he recognized it: the lack of interest in the subject. Instead, he turned to what did interest him, spending long hours on Lexis-Nexus after work reading about demonic possessions and exorcisms described by Jesuit priests. He admitted, “It came out horror because it was the only way it could be expressed.”

Mindy Klasky was enamored by The Lord of the Rings in seventh grade and write a sequel in iambic heptameter that involved a character that was uncannily similar to herself. That alone scares everyone, including Klasky as an adult.

Years later, during a particularly trying law school class, she wrote another fantasy story about a teenage girl — which, in her own words, was grim. The stories continued on a progressively grimmer path as her main character grew up. After a while, she needed something more fun — and began a series about an unsuspecting librarian who discovers she is a witch. Now she can’t really define what she writes and she finds herself in many camps: fantasy, paranormal, romance, science fiction…. “Genres are getting more blurred,” she noted wryly.

After reading about Queen Betsy and some of the steamiest S-E-X in fiction, I’m sure fantasy is standing on its head with many new genre-bending authors. It’s a thrilling thought and, unlike these authors, not in the least bit frightening.

For those of us who love the rush of being frightened by what we read, these authors prove there's much to be gained from good horror literature.

Virginia Festival of the Book--Author Introductions

Here in Charlottesville, authors are everywhere. Actors/authors/activists Alan Alda and Mike Farrell just passed through the lobby of the Omni Hotel where I'm blogging and attending sessions causing quite the fervor.

Most authors at festivals generally want to talk to people, even if their nature as writers is to be fairly introspective. Authors realize that they need to be available to their readers to sell books. It's a lot of work to travel from festival to convention to book signings. They get introduced countless times, and maybe they get used to the widely varying introductions they receive (not to mention the sometimes truly bizarre questions they receive).

Over the years, I've heard lovely introductions from people who are true fans to just horrible introductions from people who act like they would rather be doing just about anything else to condescending introductions from people who seem to believe it is they who should be getting introduced rather than the author.

Some examples (you decide which category they fit):

"One of the panelists is a former student of mine who has been obsessed with this subject since he was a small boy, and the other has published 13 books for whatever that is worth."

"Um, I'm horrible at pronunciations, so I'll probably get this wrong. In fact, I'll just let the author say her own name."

"We'll have a panel discussion and then we'll take questions from the audience, but hopefully, we'll be out of here in time for the Michigan game."

"I haven't actually read any of the author's books, but I've heard some people say that they are good."

"I'm sorry to those of you who have tried to reach me in the last few days. I have been finishing the book written by the author, and I just couldn't put it down."

What memorable introductions have you been privy to? We would especially love to hear from authors who no doubt have heard it all.

Virginia Festival of the Book - Families Coming Together: Fiction and Memoir

One of the great joys of Charlottesville is poking around the incredible number of bookstores that this town boasts and supports. Used bookstores, independent bookstores, and large chain retailers — C-ville has them all. Many of the events of the Festival are held in these bookstores.

One of my favorites is the New Dominion Bookshop on the Pedestrian Mall. I scored nine new Newbery medal winners before our Friday session began. Nine! As a family, we've been reading Newbery award winners for years, and we strive to own them all. We love to scour bookstores in places we visit to see what we find, and we get excited when we find one of the hard-to-find titles. Scoring nine is really quite the feat. Because there are more than 80 (the first Newbery was awarded for the 1922 book The Story of Mankind) titles that have earned the award, we collect them in paperback. To date, we have acquired more than 50. More about Newbery books in a future post.

An unexpectedly warm day, the bookstore is quite stuffy particularly in the cozy loft area where we gather for our first panel session of the Festival, but we cheerfully fan ourselves as we wait for our first panel discussion to begin.

Novelists Carleen Brice, first-time novelist of Orange Mint and Honey, Kim Reid, first-time novelist of No Place Safe, and Emilie Richards, author of many books, including her latest Touching Stars, discussed the individual choices they made when deciding whether to publish their stories as fiction or memoir.

Reid said that she was encouraged to publish her book as a memoir, but she acknowledged that it leaves you vulnerable. "It's hard to put your business out there."

Richards and Brice both confessed that their works of fiction often reveal issues that they are working through, oftentimes issues they were unaware of. Brice's story features many examples of surrogate families, and she realized that the conflict she wrote between her main mother-daughter characters was really a conflict she hadn't resolved with her father. "You're reading your own words, and you realize, 'Wow!' I guess I'm working through something!" Brice laughed. "Any work of fiction is going to involve stuff that you tell on yourself."

Regarding memoirs, Richards acknowledges that the genre is the "best fodder as research for novelists."

I myself have edited memoirs, and I've been fascinated by the various scandals that have emerged in recent times involving false memoirs, such as A Million Little Pieces and Love and Consequences.

Why did these authors feel that their message would have been diluted if they had published their powerful stories as fiction? Do you think that abusers of this genre have caused irreparable harm to it by casting a dark cloud of doubt over the authenticity of all memoirs? Check out this NPR article "Faking It: What Motivates Fake Memoirs?" and let us know what you think.

Off to the Festival

For the next few days, Chris and I will be attending the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, so look for our posts on the various events we attend.