Jean Ryan4 Comments

Opening Day of SURVIVAL SKILLS

Today is a big day for me: the official release of SURVIVAL SKILLS!

For those interested in stories involving animals and the natural world, I think you’ll enjoy this collection, particularly if you enjoy this blog. For a sample, please download the opening story, “Greyhound.”

http://www.ashlandcreekpress.com/download/SurvivalSkills_Excerpt.pdf

And thank you for visiting this site. Your comments, likes and follows are much appreciated. Best of all, they provide me with a handy way to meet other bloggers and readers who care deeply about this planet and all its fascinating creatures.

Wishing you all a happy spring.

Jean Ryan7 Comments

Betting on Books

Next month is the long-awaited launch of my short story collection, SURVIVAL SKILLS. Soon I’ll be joining the ranks of all the other authors who are hoping their newly published books will find an audience.

In the past several months, many of us have been doing what we can to get the word out, mostly through social media: Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Pinterest. How successful these marketing venues have been for us remains to be seen. All we know is that exposure is key, and the more we like and follow, tweet and retweet, post and share, the greater our chances for recognition. For those of us who were not brought up in the electronic age, learning the tricks involved in setting up blogs and author pages is challenging to say the least, and it doesn’t help that technology is constantly jumping ahead of itself. Writers of any age would rather be writing than cyber networking, but we enter the fray and do our best.

The most daunting reality I’ve experienced thus far is the sheer number of us. Racing toward the same goal, we are teammates competing with each other. After all, there is only so much recognition to go around, only so much money to spend on books. It’s a selling frenzy and a buyer’s market, with books selling for less than a dollar, or being given away, by the thousands, in hopes of actual sales. Publishers in this country, electronic and otherwise, churn out 800 books a day. In this galaxy of productivity, what sort of odds does one book, my book, have?

And where do buyers begin? With self-publishing having eclipsed conventional forms, how do readers determine quality? Can we trust bloggers and reviewers? Stars and likes? Considering the many ways a web presence can be manipulated, does 15,000 Twitter followers mean anything at all? The internet is a monstrous game of chance and everyone is placing bets.

I’ve no idea how one separates the wheat from the chaff. And of course, one man’s chaff is another man’s wheat. I have zero interest in vampire novels, however well written, but who can dispute their  popularity? I like literary short fiction, a genre not known for blockbuster sales (which is ironic when you consider our tight schedules and short attention spans). I’ve asked people about this and they tell me that short stories don’t deliver, that they just don’t have enough meat on the bone. Well, I think there are plenty of meaty stories out there, stories that amuse and amaze, stories that will break your heart. You just need to know where to look.

So what can I say about SURVIVAL SKILLS? What bare truths can I give you? I can tell you that this an honest offering, that these stories evolved over several years and required my best effort. I can tell you that most of them originally appeared in reputable journals. I can tell you that my publisher, Ashland Creek Press, is committed to promoting quality literature that explores our connections with the natural world.

The characters in SURVIVAL SKILLS are not heroes. Like you and me, they are just trying to outlast the perils that surround them, taking what comfort they can on the way and often acquiring some strange companions. You won’t come across any vampires in these tales, but I’m betting you’ll enjoy them anyway.

http://www.ashlandcreekpress.com/books/survivalskills.html

Survival Skills Cover

Jean Ryan5 Comments

The Next Best Thing Project

As part of The Next Best Thing Project, I am answering some interview questions concerning my collection, SURVIVAL SKILLS, which will be published by Ashland Creek Press in April 2013. Many thanks to JoeAnn Hart for tagging me for this exciting venture.

http://joeannhart.com/

I am tagging these other authors so that we can continue to connect with one another and discover new works.

Jennifer Simpson, Director of DimeStories International  http://akajesais.com

Dyane Forde, fantasy writer   http://goo.gl/8VkTz

 

What is the title of your book? 

SURVIVAL SKILLS

Where did the idea come from for the book?

Most of the stories were inspired by something I had read or a show I had seen. “Migration” issued from the real story of a Toulouse goose that lived in a park in Los Angeles and became smitten with one of the visitors. “Looks for Life” also came from real events—a co-worker told me about a friend of his whose life changed after a plastic surgeon rebuilt his face. “Waiting for Annie” followed a special I had seen on coma, the “silent epidemic.” Improved emergency response techniques and sophisticated life support machines are keeping more and more lives in this eerie state of suspension. Especially intriguing to me is the mind’s ability to make connections by itself, to persist without the complement of consciousness. “Paradise” emerged from a program I had watched about intelligence in birds, parrots in particular. One bird had acquired a prodigious vocabulary and this stirred my imagination. I thought it would be fun to work this creature into a story, to use him in fact as a main character. In order to create conflict, the parrot in this tale is malicious as well as brilliant. The extravagance of Palm Springs, its artificial overlay, seemed an apt parallel to the various indulgences that Max enjoyed in his man-made abode.

What genre does your book fall under?

Literary short fiction. I love the short story form, how quickly the reader is pulled in. Poised between poems and novels, short fiction aims for precision and intrigue. I think the quality of writing in literary short fiction is often superior to the writing in novels. Novels can become weighted down with exposition. Short pieces must get to the point quickly. This urgency requires distillation, which is a challenge I revel in.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

As SURVIVAL SKILLS is a story collection, this is a tricky question to answer.  But if I had to cast one story, it might be “The Side Bar,” for which I would choose Helen Hunt as the narrator, Jeff Daniels as Ronny, Kristen Wiig as Carla and Cate Blanchett as Louise.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

“Ryan writes of beauty and aging, of love won and lost—with characters enveloped in the mysteries of the natural world and the animal kingdom.”

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

These stories were written over a period of several years. As they began to gel into a collection, I was able to understand what interests me most as a writer: the natural world and the vulnerability and interdependency of all living things. I enjoy exploring the connections, the synchronicities, the quiet miracles underlying the world we see. Fear and the relative fragility of the human mind fascinate me in particular.

 What other book might you compare to SURVIVAL SKILLS within this genre?

While there are many excellent contemporary collections—Jean Thompson and Antonya Nelson are brilliant short story writers—the closest match to the nature content and unusual relationships in SURVIVAL SKILLS might be BIRDS OF A LESSER PARADISE by Megan Mayhew Bergman.

Who or What inspired you to write this book?

I am endlessly inspired by natural phenomena and the many ways people find to survive their difficulties.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I hope readers will enjoy what they might learn about the natural world; I certainly had fun doing the research. I also hope that the humor will make them smile along the way. I think people are reassured by humor; it makes them feel better.

 

 

 

Jean Ryan2 Comments

An Excerpt from LOST SISTER

The first thing I do is pick up Barbie, who has fallen from the dead ficus and is lying face down and naked on the grey dirt, one arm stretched over her head. Judging by the tan and sky blue eye shadow, this one must be Malibu Barbie, or whatever they call her these days. Not much has changed: she still has pointy breasts, a freakishly small waist and heels that never touch the earth. Bald and smudged, her lipstick gone, her toes chewed off, this Barbie is a long way from Malibu.

I push her tired arm down to her side. “Is this your doll?” I ask Ginger. She shakes her head.

“Where did it come from?”

“I don’t know. It’s been here for a long time,” she nods.

“Do you like Barbie dolls?”

She makes a face, shakes her head again.

“I didn’t either,” I tell her.

It’s true. Dolls bored me; I didn’t understand them. I wanted cap guns and cowboy hats, microscopes and sea monkeys. It was my mother who, in an effort perhaps to reshape my destiny, foisted Barbie on me. I didn’t know what to do with her; she couldn’t even bend. All she could do was lean up against the vinyl wall of her livingroom, which was also her carrying case, and wait for someone to change her clothes. Her life was pointless. Hoping to nudge my homemaking instincts, my mother redoubled her efforts and bought me a Ken doll. He only made things worse. I couldn’t respect Ken: he had no skills, no life apart from Barbie. Once or twice I pressed them against each other but it didn’t work for them and it didn’t work for me. Not until my friend Sara left her Prom Barbie at my house one day did the game become interesting. My doll was the Malibu model, the most popular one at the time. She was the more daring, I decided, of the two, and not at all embarrassed when I made her kiss Prom Barbie. They both enjoyed this and so I laid them down. There they were, their eyes locked in amazement, shy Barbie in her scratchy pink dress, reaching upward, and bold Barbie, in a red bathing suit, poised on tip toes above her. Ken was completely useless after that and I forgot all about him.

Ginger doesn’t want the doll and so I slip her into my backpack where she can enjoy a few hours of hard-earned privacy. At some point I will wrap a cloth or newspaper around her and put her in the trash, and eventually she’ll end up at a dump surrounded by legions of other lost dolls whose hard plastic bodies will not let them leave this earth.

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Great Examples

When I was in college I spent two semesters in a creating writing seminar. We had been selected for this course based on our writing samples. I must have shown a little promise, at least to the professor, though you wouldn’t have thought so had you listened in on one of our sessions.

To be fair, nearly everyone in that class was criticized, and savagely—that is the way of writing seminars. You compose a poem or story, read it aloud to a pack of students and one by one they savage it. This toughening process is supposed to be good for you, in the long run. Only a couple students emerge unscathed. I think of these seminars as being identical in universities around the world. There is one gifted poet sure to achieve stardom immediately after graduation; there is another student who has lots of rough talent but seems to care less (this is the one the professor has a crush on); there is a person who writes painstakingly adequate prose; there is a girl who cries.

Did I learn from this class? A couple things. I clearly remember two comments made by the teacher after I read a poem about the sea (comments that elicited much laughter, by the way). In this poem I compared an eel to a phallus, using three examples of the likeness, and the teacher remarked, wryly, that I had “done that poor eel to death.” Which was true. In the same awful poem, I wrote that a sea urchin was “swaying, and praying” for a fish to swim past and the professor put his arms on the table and cradled his head in them and said, “Never ever ever make a sea urchin pray.” Which was also true. I deserved what I got that day.

Aside from those lessons, I’m not sure I took anything away from that class but scars. I actually wound up majoring in English Literature because I was afraid of the math requisites for my preferred interest: marine biology. In retrospect, I am certain that this writing seminar was more brutal than any math course. Creative writing classes taken in college are especially harrowing as kindness is not a foremost concern in our callow youth.

The question has been bandied about: Do creative writing classes really teach people how to write? To a degree, yes. Seeing where we have failed can be very helpful. What can’t be taught is the knowing, the writer’s ear, the certainty one feels when a phrase is exactly right.

I am a better writer now than I was in college, an evolution I attribute mainly to continued effort and constant reading. I read authors whose skills take my breath away. When we read, we learn. All those great examples sink in over time. Which is how life works on every level.

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If You Haven’t Read These

I love the short story form, the distillation it demands. Poised between poems and novels, short fiction offers the best of both: precision on the one side, intrigue on the other. While the quality of writing in literary short fiction often surpasses the prose found in novels, most folks prefer the latter. “Why?” I’ve asked them, and invariably they tell me that short stories leave them feeling short-changed. Unsatisfied.

Here are some of my favorite collections, stories that will stay with you long after reading. Satisfaction guaranteed.

REASONS TO LIVE by Amy Hempel  −  Starling and poignant

DANCING GIRLS by Margaret Atwood  −  An adroit sampling by a long-admired author

BABE IN PARADISE by Marisa Silver  −  Great characters, fresh insights

DO NOT DENY ME by Jean Thompson  −  A stunning collection by an awesomely talented writer

ANOTHER MARVELOUS THING by Laurie Colwin  −  Tales of adultery, perfectly rendered

BIRDS OF AMERICA by Lorrie Moore  −  A delicious blend of wit and wisdom

IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT by Helen Simpson  −  Wicked fun

IT’S BEGINNING TO HURT by James Lasdun  −  Elegant and entertaining

NOTHING RIGHT by Antonya Nelson  −  Simply superb

CLOSE RANGE: WYOMING STORIES by Annie Proulx  −  Innovative and powerful

And speaking of brevity here are two short novels you absolutely must read:

TURTLE DIARY by Russell Hoban  −  An exquisite story of two social misfits with a common goal

A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY by J.L. Carr  −  Gentle, evocative writing

Enjoy!

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In Our Own Time

“It’s too early for most things and too late for almost nothing.”

Is that a great quote, or what? I don’t know who first uttered those words, but each time I bring them to mind I am filled with fresh resolve.

We’re all brought up on a time table, expected to accomplish certain things at certain ages: walking at twelve months; talking by the age of two; driver’s license at sixteen; high school diploma at seventeen. The more time that passes before these hurdles are cleared, the higher they seem to become.

Writing, a chosen pursuit, carries no such expectations. Some authors, canny enough to make a living off their words, must mind their contracts and calendars. For the rest of us, writing is a labor of love and we proceed in our own time, rewarded or not.

Unfettered by demand for my words, I still worry now and then that I haven’t written enough of them. I consider the prodigious outputs of Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike, or the early success of Michael Chabon, or the sheer brilliance of Yann Martel, and I feel like a hopeless straggler.

Fortunately this wasteful brooding passes quickly. Life gives me a nudge and I am back where I belong. I remember the story I’ve started and there is nothing to do but pick up my pen and continue working. There are millions of writers in this world and there is room for every one of us. No one can write this story but me.

Jean Ryan6 Comments

Relaxing into Writing

I used to log onto various online writing sites with a username I thought wonderfully apt: wordchaser. That term epitomized the writing process for me, a sometimes rewarding and always frustrating hunt for the best words. There were no shortcuts, scant rewards, certainly no room for fun.

Over time, my thoughts on writing began to change. While the process will always be a challenge, I’ve come to realize that it needn’t be an adversarial arrangement. I can actually relax a bit, loosen the reins. The words I want are out there and if I am patient and attentive, I can coax them in, if not now, then soon. I can even rise from my chair and do something else, and while I am sleeping or eating or vacuuming, the words arrive on their own. I go back to my desk and the sentence I had rewritten a hundred times is suddenly, strangely, there.

The well is always filling. I can trust it. I can look up from the page and enjoy another view, and no harm will come to the story. There will be more words and more stories.

Oh, I still hunt now and then, but these days I do more word charming than chasing.