Mondays + Writers = Finally something to look forward to.
March is a fabulous month for book launches; there are more than a few new titles I am eager to add to my shelves and to read. Among these is the brand new debut novel, CEMENTVILLE, by Paulette Livers. The stellar reviews and honors are already mounting up for this book, and if you want to join in on its celebration, you’ll find at the bottom of this post a few of Paulette’s book tour stops. Are you a fellow Chicagoan? Then perhaps you’ll want to head over to the wonderful Women and Children First bookstore for Cementville’s Chicago launch on March 20. Guaranteed good time.
Welcome Paulette!
Did you write today? If yes, what? If no, why not?
Yes. Today I am writing (or rather, crowing) on my website/blog about a story collection I just finished reading, How by Geoff Wyss. I haven’t really jumped into the fray regarding negative reviews—that is a debate I’ll leave to others for the time being. The books I intend to write about on the still-new blog page at PauletteLivers.com are the ones that are so good I simply have to tell people. Sure, there’s a place for the underwhelmed review. But the reviews I look for are about books that grab you by the lapels and make you pay attention, whether they snag you loudly or with lyricism or with somber quietness.
In the throes of all the promotion and publicity for Cementville’s upcoming book tour—which, by the way, has given me a deeper appreciation for the maddening task of the professional publicist—taking time out to spread the word of another author’s excellent work is a refreshing breather for me.
What’s the first thing (story, poem, song, etc.) you remember writing, and how old were you when you wrote it?
You mean beyond the scathing diary entry in which I excoriated my mother for not letting me buy a bra for my practically concave chest? The first real attempt at a story that wasn’t high school blather was something I wrote upon finishing my first reading of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I was 20, an art major, and that book sort of turned me inside out. Pound might disagree with me, but I see Woolf as an imagist; for me she is a painter. I don’t have a copy of it anymore (my story I mean, not Woolf’s, of which at last count I had 3 copies), but I’m sure it was dreadful. In my memory, the thing I wrote turned into a gauzy imagistic tribute to my same brassiere-denying mother.
What are you reading right now?
Gina Frangello’s A Life in Men, which she inscribed for me at her launch a few weeks ago at Women and Children First. It’s making me wonder if I would have had the fortitude to roam the earth at 23, leaving a wake of men behind me, not to mention sporting a pair of really crappy lungs. Frangello’s prose does that lapel-grabbing thing I mentioned earlier.
What’s the most important advice you ever received? (Writerly or otherwise.)
When I was a self-conscious teenager, I did that thing of deflecting compliments, the adolescent version of “What? This old thing?” My mother told me, “Paulette, when someone gives you a compliment, just say ‘Thank you.’” (I’m not sure why the ghost of her is hanging so vehemently around my writing desk today. Maybe because I mention my father more than my mother in a lecture I’m giving later this month at the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta?)
If your writing were an animal, what animal would it be? Because…
This answer is given with more hope than certainty. What I hope for my writing to have is all the languid ferocity of a mother lion. (Okay, Mother, you can pipe down. We get it. You are an influence and inspiration.) I think of female lions as having all the necessary capacities: they can run, laze about in the shade, have sex, give birth, nurture and protect, yawn, roar, and scare the pants of people and other animals. They are just badass.
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Paulette Livers was born and grew up in Kentucky. She lived and worked in Louisville, Atlanta, and Boulder as a painter, illustrator, and book designer for publishers around the country. Her first novel, CEMENTVILLE, has received the Elle magazine Lettres Prize 2014 and accolades from Real Simple, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews along with high praise from her literary peers. She has received awards, residencies, and fellowships from the Artcroft Foundation, Aspen Writers Foundation, the Bedell Foundation, Center for the American West, Denver Women’s Press Club, Key West Literary Seminars, and Ox-Bow Artist Residence. The recipient of the 2012 David Nathan Meyerson Prize for Fiction, her work has also been shortlisted for awards from Britain’s Bridport Prize, Hunger Mountain, and the Sozopol Summer Literary Seminars. Along with Honorable Mentions for the Red Hen Press Short Story Award in 2011 and 2012, the 2013 Writers at Work, and the Kentucky Women Writers Conference’s Gabehart Prize in 2013, her stories have appeared in The Dos Passos Review, Southwest Review, Spring Gun Press, and elsewhere and can be heard at the audio-journal Bound Off. A member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, she now lives in Chicago.
For more information: www.PauletteLivers.com.
And you can join Paulette Livers as she tromps around the country with her new book:
March 18, Atlanta, Margaret Mitchell House, 7pm
March 20, Chicago, Women and Children First, 7:30pm
March 26, Denver, Tattered Cover, 7:30pm
March 27, Boulder, Boulder Bookstore, 7:30pm
May 18, Sunday Salon Chicago, 7pm
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→Thanks, Paulette, for the chat. Have a great book tour! And thanks to everyone, as always, for reading. -PMc←
Patricia Ann McNair 