PowellsBooks.Blog

Last night I did a reading for students at NYU with Lydia Davis and Chad Harbach, two great, literary writers, but also two very funny writers. (I promise you the crowd was really entertained by both of their readings, and I was extremely glad to be the opening act. You do NOT want to follow Lydia Davis.) During the Q&A we were asked several times about being funny. How do you impart humor in your writing? How do you know when something is funny?

I always think life is funny enough without even having to try very hard. I've heard from some people that they think my most recent book, The Middlesteins, is funny, but I've heard from plenty of others that it's extremely sad. It's both, I guess. Last night I said I was a "laugh through the tears" kind of person, which probably describes the essence of my writing too. (Although, sadly, I am also a "laugh when it is totally inappropriate to laugh" person, as well.)

One young woman said that she thought she was writing something that was funny, but then when ...

Well, I know you were all worried from yesterday's blog post: my car passed inspection. Of course, does a car really "pass" inspection if it involves hundreds and hundreds of dollars in repairs? I feel like this car kind of slid by yesterday, as if its daddy bought its way into Harvard.

I can't quite seem to quit this car, even if a few of its parts are actually taped together. No big deal; it's just the stereo face, which kept popping out until I stashed a roll of masking tape in the car, which I ritually apply and remove every time I have a long trip. I make lots of jokes about how the massive dent on the rear left side of the car, acquired when a big rig rammed into me as we simultaneously climbed an expressway entrance, makes me fit into my Brooklyn neighborhood. "No one will ever want to steal my car," I say, like I'm a genius and I planned it all along. Though sometimes I think someone might set it on fire, just to put it out of its ugly old ...

Her name was "Waterloo Sunset," and she wasn't a girl (or a boy for that matter) but rather a song by the Kinks, and I fell in love just the same.

It was the late 1980s, and I was adrift. I was an undergrad at San Francisco State, and after a torturous breakup and indecision about my major, in a moment of clarity that occurs just a few times over the course of a life, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and that was write novels.

Music never sounds better than when you're 19, and with "Waterloo Sunset," I can remember listening to it while looking down on California from an airplane window. It was the song I played when I returned home to my apartment on the night of the earthquake that knocked over my bookshelves made from cinder blocks and boards. It was a song I played on a Sunday afternoon in October 1988 when I was deciding what to do to give my life direction. I have no idea why music makes me want to write novels — rather than, say, play in ...

Lately my life has been a lot of travel, on planes, trains, and in a station wagon that is so beat up I am pretty sure it's not going to pass inspection today. (I'll let you know if it passes tomorrow. Please send your best thoughts to a 1993 Honda Accord station wagon.) And because my life has gotten sort of repetitive, I hope you'll forgive me if I asked for a little help with this first blog post. I asked people via my tumblr to send me their questions about being a writer. If you've got any yourself, please send me an email, and I'll try to answer them another day this week.

I'm for the first time really encountering the tension in sharing process updates with writer-friends. Excited updates/commiseration/feedback-seeking versus quiet head-down work. I'm surprising myself by being drawn to the latter. I wonder if it's not competition but rather needing to remove myself from the insecurity/reassurance cycle that the process-sharing can turn into.

The other day I was talking to a friend who had been offered a writer's residency out of the blue, and he was going to reject it for a number of reasons, but the one that he joked about was this: "My worst nightmare is, at the end of the day, having to listen to a group of writers talk about all the work they had finished that day."

Susan Nussbaum's debut novel, winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, is, as Rosellen Brown says, "a celebration of strength, dignity, and the cathartic pleasure of telling it like it is."

Set in a nursing home for young adults with disabilities, Good Kings Bad Kings mines the lives of seven characters: a diverse group of young people and their caregivers. Nussbaum, who is an award-winning playwright, masterfully channels the voices of her characters, including a disabled Hispanic teen trying to find her way after losing the grandmother who raised her, a wheelchair-bound woman who is seeking new love and new meaning in her life, and a young man who wants to enjoy living and loving independent of any institution. They may inhabit a world unfamiliar to many, but the core of who they are, the heart of their joys and suffering, are intensely universal. Yes, this novel will make you ache, but in the very best way.

Good Kings Bad Kings is a marvel that does what the best fiction does. As Barbara Kingsolver, the founder of the PEN/Bellwether Prize, explains: "Fiction...creat[es] empathy in a reader's heart for the theoretical stranger." Thanks to Nussbaum, ...

When I was a kid, each year my parents loaded my brother and me into a tiny car and hauled us to Florida's Disney World. I spent the days that followed singing the theme song to the ride "It's a Small World" while my family tried to plug their ears or drown me out by turning up the car radio. No trip was complete without a trinket — something to say we'd been there. One year I got a pink plastic figurine of Tinkerbell and a curious hat with ears on it. These items, though utterly commodified representations of a false world built on the bounty of a real one, contain a kind of magic. They remind. The unusual color and feel of the plastic Tinkerbell figurine remains unforgettable to me.

Today I make a new kind of pilgrimage when I travel. I visit thrift shops and yard sales that offer me interesting windows into cultures not my own. If urban and suburban landscapes had not been taken over by homogenous strip malls of national franchises, I might not be so drawn to these suburban curiosity windows. But ...

For seven years Mikey and I have been exploring a few pledges. We pledged to no longer make decisions based on money, to live from waste and from nature (both are free!), to make all our goods instead of buy them, and to share what we learn with others to keep knowledge free and open.

The pledges have led us to discover new ways to explore the world. We discovered an abundant life in which materials and knowledge come free of charge. June marks the start of a book tour. We're out promoting my new book, The Good Life Lab. The same pledges we made while living in New Mexico continue to guide us toward an abundant life even while on the road.

Our tour includes visiting bookstores, Maker Faires, hacker spaces, fab labs, and tech shops. At each stop we meet makers of all variety, people working with metal, wood, plants, glass, food, technology, and textiles. It is easy to notice that makers have a different view of the world than buyers of things. For one thing, makers know materials because they have to source them, ...

I was lucky enough to have a fantastic Shakespeare professor in college. She brought the material to life with her vast knowledge and brought students to tears with her brilliantly structured lectures. Every year she split the class into groups of five, assigned each group an act of a play, and had students stage a production all over campus. It was my first and only appearance as Hamlet, but I did get the big graveyard scene. The experience stuck with me forever.

So when I sat down to write a novel about a Shakespeare professor, out this month called Elizabeth the First Wife, I borrowed liberally from my own exceptional teacher. Except the vast knowledge of Shakespeare part. I quickly realized that being a Shakespeare enthusiast is not really even in the same ballpark as being a Shakespeare scholar. There was almost no academic question I could cook up for my fictional professor to study that hasn't already been beaten to death by those in the know, in books, blogs, and message boards. I couldn't compete with the real deals, even in fiction. So I decided ...

Wildcrafting in Washington

Mikey and are looking forward to hiking the Northwest in search of wild edible plants. Wildcrafting is our favorite way to explore a new place. When we head out into nature, we know we'll have an adventure, gain knowledge, and if we're lucky, acquire food or medicine that will last a winter or two. Unlike the goods for sale in the mall, those found in nature are free and so is the adventure. The knowledge obtained while having the adventure is priceless.

While in the Northwest, we hope to find plants that are not available to us where we live in the Chihuahuan Desert. Osha, for example (a.k.a. wild lovage or bear medicine), is a mountain plant that likes moist soil rich in organic material. There is little chance of it popping up in the dry caliche floor of the desert we live in. Osha resembles poison hemlock and so it must be carefully verified before consumed. Osha's pungent, celery-like smell can be used to verify it as authentic. Wildcrafters are well served by knowing the circumstances surrounding the plant. For example, bears, who use the plant to help them awaken from a winter of hibernation, can often be found hanging out near osha (thus one of the plant's nicknames).

When my editor at Sasquatch Books pitched Full Rip 9.0: The Next Big Earthquake in the Pacific Northwest to higher-ups in the publishing world, they weren't enthusiastic.

"Is there anything positive in it?" they asked with dismay.

It's a good question. Who wants to read a depressing litany of the ways in which we are doomed?

As I see it, though, the story is a hopeful one.

Knowledge is power, and thanks to the work of a generation of geologists, we finally know our region's true seismic nature.

Less than 30 years ago, no one could have imagined that Oregon, Washington, Northern California, and British Columbia face the same type of monster quake and tsunami that slammed Japan in 2011. Today, governments, businesses, schools, and utilities are making upgrades and mapping out what still needs to be done to ensure that the region will be able to bounce back from a catastrophe that is inevitable.

"We cannot avoid the future earthquake, but we can choose either a future in which the earthquake results in grim damage and losses and a society diminished for a generation, or a future in which the earthquake is ...