Gail Godwin’s “Publishing: A Writer’s Memoir” is a graceful meditation on the author’s years aspiring to publication and her subsequent decades navigating an increasingly cutthroat, capricious industry. Wisdom, perseverance and faith lurk amid the lines of her spare, droll writing, making this an understated yet inspiring read.
Godwin exemplifies a keep-on-keeping-on ethos in sharp contrast to writers like Harper Lee, whose concerns about topping past popularity prevented her from continuing to create new work. From a sales perspective, Godwin’s career peaked in 1982 with the publication of “A Mother and Two Daughters,” which sold more than 1 million copies and was a National Book Award finalist. But she’s still writing today and has published 14 fiction and nonfiction books since.
“Publishing” opens at the University of North Carolina in 1958 with young Godwin presenting five pages of her novel-in-progress to scouts for Alfred A. Knopf. The pages were rejected and Godwin muses: “As I slogged along inside my bubble of failure beneath the Great American Novelist’s ancient trees, it struck me for the first time that I was nothing new, just the latest model of a young person hungry for success, and possibly one of the very many who was not going to make it.”
Of course, the reader knows that Godwin did indeed make it. She went on to publish more than a dozen novels, becoming a National Book Award finalist three times. With a light pen, Godwin uses “Publishing” to offer some insight into how she did it. She highlights deep-seated personal ambition, the role modeling of her writer mother, and the encouragement of teachers and friends. She colors it all with a bit of drama and no shortage of good humor.
The quick read, illustrated with pen and ink drawings by architect Frances Halsband, offers helpful perspective for aspiring writers, all of whom are likely to meet much frustration and rejection along their own publishing paths. The lesson Godwin imparts by sharing her story is that it is how you greet the challenges over the long haul that matters.
For years, Godwin battled insecurity, humiliating failures, and the sense that time was running out on her writing career. Still, she simply kept writing, learning, connecting. “I wrote the next chapter of my remote novel that wouldn’t sell enough copies, and trudged home under the starlit canopy of obscurity,” she wrote of her response to yet another rejection.
She learned this tenacity in part through the example of her mother, who wrote plays during her own studies at Chapel Hill, sold love stories to pulp magazines when rearing Godwin, and wrote novels under a penname while raising three younger children from a later marriage. Some of the most endearing parts of the book feature Godwin and her mother making up stories together, acting out scenes based on people from their church and reading rejection letters her mother received from publishers. They made a duet out of a particularly vexing one:
“Writes like the angels!” (soprano)
“With notes of monstrous tedium!” (alto)
“Merry Christmas to you!” (soprano)
“If you pare the fat!” (alto)
This same sense of levity and steadfastness served Godwin well after she finally won her first book deal in 1968. Her tangled publishing journey since then has included seven different editors and as many publishers, thanks to untimely deaths, industry upheavals, and intractable egos. With great candor, she writes of coming to understand the fear plaguing publishing today and of learning to brace herself for calls announcing the firing of her editor or publisher or both. She also sheds welcome septuagenarian perspective on questions of what’s new and what’s not in today’s publishing environment.
“Publishing as a family business, as a literate, gentlemanly occupation, had already taken on the sepia hues of nostalgia, but the new publishing, whatever that creature would turn out to be, hadn’t reared its head yet,” she writes of the early days of her publishing career. “Not one of the seven houses that wanted to publish ‘A Mother and Two Daughters’–eight, counting Knopf, who reserved the right to match the final bidder–stands by itself today. Six of those bidders are now subsumed into two of the ‘big five’ publishing corporations.”
Throughout “Publishing,” readers can gain a glimpse into the deals, publicity campaigns and industry maneuverings that bring books to the public. One section describes how a book meant to be titled “The Red Nun” wound up with a bodice-ripper-evoking misnomer “Unfinished Desires.” Aspiring writers can take heart at Godwin’s evidence that frustration, rejection and adversity are just a part of the journey–even for some of the most successful writers.
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Tara Mohr is on a mission to help women speak up and influence the world for the better. She says her lifelong calling is ”to recognize where women’s voices are missing and do what I can, in my corner of the world, to help bring them in.”
As a child, Mohr advocated for an English curriculum that featured more women authors and female protagonists. Today, she’s running a global leadership program and sharing its central tenets with a wider audience through her book, “Playing Big.”
Heartening and pragmatic, the book reads as if Mohr is giving an extended pep talk to an imagined reader who has great promise but craves support. “You are that talented woman who doesn’t see how talented she is,” Mohr declares in the opening pages. “You are that fabulous, we-wish-she-was-speaking-up-more woman.”
The message is a variant of the encouragement she’s given to thousands of women through her coaching practice. The book is a distillation of the best material generated in that laboratory–those exercises and advice that women found to be most helpful in creating the lives and careers they sought.
Mohr’s Inner Critic 101 Training and toolkit of 15 ways to quiet fears are worth the cover price alone. Collectively, the many lists, steps and journal prompts fill the void left by other manifestos that tell women what to do without explaining the mechanics of how to do it. For every grand declaration (“One of the most important mental shifts a woman can make to support her playing big is to start thinking of criticism as part and parcel of doing important work”), Mohr offers multiple tips and tools to make it concrete.
What the book lacks, though, is much of the fire and heart that makes manifestos persuasive and memorable. You’ve got to bring your own motivation to this text because it lacks the spunk of Lisa Bloom calling out women for letting celebrity culture distract us from social ills, or the sharpness of Anne-Marie Slaughter listing the 1,001 ways women are thwarted in efforts to advance. Mohr’s tone is decidedly pleasant (not accusatory), in keeping with her stated belief that “tender friendship” is more potent than criticism. While I appreciate how her writing reflects her gentle ethos, I must admit that saltier approaches make for livelier reading.
In fairness, the subtitle is “practical wisdom for women who want to speak up, create, and lead.” It wasn’t designed to awaken latent aspirations. It’s for the woman who already wants to lean in and doesn’t know how.
That’s not to say the book is just for corporate climbers. The text’s frequent references to women of diverse ages, professions, circumstances and aspirations suggests that the advice is widely applicable and effective. Mohr references women from many walks of life who have practiced Playing Big. For example, there’s a Silicon Valley sales director who wants to launch a new line of business, a researcher emboldened to approach a rival lab about collaborating, a social worker who wants to transition into advocacy, and a literacy specialist who wants to open a camp. The women could not be more different, but they all benefitted from Mohr’s core set of tools for quieting criticism, communicating powerfully and taking productive action.
Mohr’s focus on inner work, versus the details of salary negotiations or other tactics with narrow applications, assures the book’s appeal to a wide range of women. And unlike many women’s empowerment books, these practices are not meant to be deployed in a grab for more power and prestige. Mohr’s stated goal is to help women move past self-doubt to create whatever’s meaningful for them. It could be launching a business or winning a promotion, but it could also be leading a community initiative or writing an op-ed for the paper. As Mohr puts it: “This is the very heart of playing bigger: having the vision of a more authentic, fully expressed, free-from-fear you and growing more and more into her, being pulled by this resonant vision rather than pushing to achieve [external] markers of success.”
One of the most compelling portions of the book describes a conversation she had with her childhood dance instructor, who told her that American women were liberated but not empowered, because they lacked imagination. Mohr understood that to mean that women weren’t fully claiming their freedoms because they lacked a “specific, vibrant, compelling vision” for doing so. In short, they were stuck recreating the status quo of playing small because it was modeled all around them and they hadn’t cultivated the inner capacity to create new, better alternatives. This is a compelling idea that bridges the personal and social dimensions of Playing Big. When more women do it, more will see it and do it too.
At several points in the book, Mohr tries to raise the stakes of women playing big beyond the realm of individual happiness to evoke global import. (“In the minds of women around the globe lie the seeds of the solutions to climate change, poverty, violence, corporate corruption.”) She writes that women who speak up are “naturally” change agents and revolutionaries because today’s public, professional and political lives are “not yet reflective of women’s voices or women’s ways of thinking, doing and working.” This is too much of a leap for me. Sarah Palin speaks up, but what she says is ignorant and divisive. The content and intent of speech matters more than the mere fact of it. The elevation of women’s voices is necessary but not sufficient for positive social change.
Although Mohr’s rallying cry fell flat for me, the book’s practical advice remains valuable. It succeeds in equipping ambitious women, if not rousing them.
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Jim Trelease’s “The Read-Aloud Handbook” is so much more than its title suggests. Sure, it explains what to look for in storytime selections (no dialect, obscenities or weak plots, for starters). But its real strength is a smart and compelling explanation of why parents should read to their children early and often, from infancy onward.
Raising a lifelong reader is the single-best investment a parent can make, Trelease insists. Enthusiasm for reading ensures the range of knowledge and learning capacity that kids need to face challenges in school and beyond.
Importantly, Trelease urges parents to provide reading inspiration, not reading instruction. In his view, parents don’t have to learn the ins and outs of phonics and phonemic awareness or even do alphabet drills in order to lay the groundwork for their children’s academic and life success. Quite the opposite, Trelease posits that parents’ first and most important work is merely introducing their children to the world of print in ways that make them want to read. That is, cuddling up daily and enthusiastically reading great books. No specialized training or fancy curriculum required.
In fact, the book argues that much of what kids need to learn about reading from their parents is more “caught than taught.” That is, it comes through consistent exposure, not explicit instruction. Our efforts during the thousands of hours before children enter school — and outside of school in later years — set the tone for their lives. A steady diet of read-aloud time at home can spark sufficient reading inspiration to render much of the school-time remediation we call reading instruction unnecessary.
“Contrary to the current screed that blames teachers for just about everything wrong in schooling, research shows that the seeds of reading and school success (or failure) are sown in the home, long before the child ever arrives at school,” he writes.
As proof, he offers academic research and anecdotal accounts of parents who inspired their children to read through daily reading and role modeling. Kids who are read to, encouraged to discuss books, see a wide variety of printed material at home, see their parents reading, and have ready access to pencils and paper fare better than their peers raised without a literacy emphasis, he says.
Now in its seventh edition, the book has grown in depth and includes stories of people who have put Trelease’s ideas to work and experienced great results. Stories like that of Erin Hassett, whose parent started reading to her on Day One in 1988 (and documenting the books and her reactions), enrich the book. These real-life examples remind us that raising a reader is a years-long process and give parents a vision of the results they may attain with dedicated daily reading.
To nudge readers from contemplation to action, he devotes the latter half of the book to a treasury of thoughtfully vetted books to read aloud to children from infancy through high school. Authoritative, but not definitive, it’s meant to jumpstart reading aloud by pointing to some appropriate and accessible titles, including picture books, novels, poetry and folk tales. Each entry includes a recommended listening level to give you a sense of the text’s difficulty and appropriateness for your child.
While much of the book’s content was not new to me, I closed the book with a sharpened focus on what I should do with the information as both a parent and a citizen. My commitment to daily reading with my daughter was strengthened, as was my drive to advocate for libraries and community-based family literacy programs. “The Read-Aloud Handbook” offers persuasive arguments that reading starts at home and a welcome wake-up call for us all to spread the word.
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I celebrated Dr. Seuss’s 112th birthday by donning a red and white stovepipe hat and reading “The Cat in the Hat” to eager first graders at University of Texas Elementary School.
On my way over, I worried that the book selection was too young for them. As the mom of a four-year-old, I knew the elementary schoolers should have mastered Cat in the Hat vocabulary years ago. They’re beginning readers, I thought, but they’re veteran listeners too. A chapter book might better capture their attention.
Continue reading “How to Be a Read-Aloud Rockstar”June is a big month in this literary town. Austin’s African American Book Festival celebrates its 10th anniversary on the 25th. Swing by the Carver Museum and Library (1161 and 1165 Angelina St, 78702) between 9:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. to take part in the program, which promotes literature by and about African Americans. The festival features young adult author Sharon Flake and also provides a platform for new, emerging and self-published authors to pitch and sell their work.
I produced a short video to celebrate the festival’s big milestone and explain why it’s worthy of our community’s support. “Our festival is important because it brings readers and writers together,” founder Rosalind Oliphant says. “It creates a space for conversation, for dialogue, for creativity, and hopefully in those discussions we’re expanding our thinking, our creativity, and our activism.” Click below to learn about the origin and impact of the small and mighty event.
Continue reading “Must-Attend Austin Literary Events (June 2016)”A recent visit to Chicago for BookExpo America transported me back to 2005, when I visited the offices of historic black newspaper The Chicago Defender. At the time, I was a grad student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, visiting to interview then-editor Roland Martin about his plans for reviving the paper at its 100th anniversary.
Martin peered over a sleek silver laptop, surrounded by books and papers, and opined in an authoritative staccato about newspaper lifecycles and the coming convergence of print, radio, television and web media.
With his signature mix of substance and swagger, Martin recast the 18,000-circulation daily — known at that point for delivering yesterday’s news tomorrow — as a formidable American brand on the cusp of ascent.
Continue reading “The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America”Hello, it’s Maya, and I’m back with another five-star read. The year’s half over, but I still would like to spend today talking about Shonda Rhimes’s “The Year of Yes.” This is a fantastic book that’s not really just about saying yes to everything that comes your way. It’s really a book about pushing through discomfort to do some of the things that are really worthwhile for your personal and professional development.
The kinds of yeses Shonda is giving are unlike anything most of us are experiencing. She’s saying yes to [appearing on] Jimmy Kimmel, yes to giving a commencement speech at Dartmouth in front of 10,000 people. Those aren’t the sorts of yeses most of us can say, but I still think there’s a benefit to reading her story, and learning to push past the things that scare us, whatever they may be.
Continue reading “Year of Yes”I read picture books to my daughter for nearly five years before I gained a deep appreciation for the form. Sure, I read them daily and with enthusiasm (mostly). But I read them the same way I would read a chapter book or an illustrated dictionary. That is, I read them as if the pictures were servant to the text, secondary and utilitarian.
If I referenced a picture at all, it was to capture Zora’s attention with quick questions like: What color is her shirt? or How many ducks do you see?
Then I attended one of Carmen Oliver’s picture book seminars offered through The Writing Barn in Austin. Oliver, author of Bears Make the Best Reading Buddies, teaches the art of picture book writing, but her seminar was just as valuable as a picture book appreciation primer.
Continue reading “Watch What Happens When You Give Picture Books a Fresh Look”Grace Bonney’s In the Company of Women offers inspiration and advice from 100 women who are makers, artists, and entrepreneurs. Rather than telling long, drawn out life stories of the women, it really cuts to the heart of their stories by asking some specific questions about what inspires them, what obstacles they’ve overcome.
The candid responses she received are really inspiring to readers, and also the fact that there are so many different women offering these insights into pivotal moments in their lives. I think that the compilation of their voices is something really special.
In addition to the words on the page, the photography adds a whole other dimension to the book. We’re able to see the women in their spaces. We’re able see their personal style, how they dress, how they wear their hair, but also the objects that are valuable and inspiring to them. All of these elements work together beautifully, and I think that’s a testament to Bonney’s experience developing Design*Sponge.
In the Company of Women is just what its title promises. It is a community of sorts on the page. It’s women sharing their stories in the hopes of inspiring other women. It’s women reading those stories and taking away something from it, and connecting with the women around them.
I really enjoyed this read, and I hope that you can find some inspiration within its pages as well.
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Hi, it’s Maya, and I’m back with another 5-Star Read. I’m so excited to share Patricia Bell-Scott’s, The Firebrand and the First Lady,” with you.
This book is wonderful for so many reasons. In particular, I really loved that it’s a portrait of a friendship. The two people in the friendship are these extraordinarily influential historical figures. On one hand we have Eleanor Roosevelt. Then, on the other hand we have Pauli Murray.
Continue reading “The Firebrand and the First Lady”