Chances Are, Novel by Barbara Eknoian

Congratulations to Barbara Eknoian — author of poetry that appeared in the Silver Birch Press SILVER ANTHOLOGY and the Silver Birch Press GREEN ANTHOLOGY – on the May 2013 release of her novel CHANCES ARE.

BOOK DESCRIPTION: It’s the l950′s. Thirteen-year-old Susie Di Pietro lives near the projects in New Jersey. Bookies stand on the corner by the candy store and sound like characters from Guys and Dolls. Everyone plays the numbers, even young Susie. Throughout her high school years, she’s painfully aware that her pal, Ginger, and she are wallflowers. Susie shares her romantic tribulations, her trials with her teachers, and funny incidents that happen to her while she is growing up. Chances Are is a charming coming-of-age novel that will take you on a nostalgic trip: dancing to Johnny Mathis, Elvis, and The Platters. It will trigger fond memories for some readers of their teen years, and give younger readers a picture of that special era, “The Fifties.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Barbara Eknoian lives in La Mirada, California, with her extended family. Originally from New Jersey, she was forever homesick until she joined Donna Hilbert’s poetry workshop in Long Beach. Barbara was the first recipient of the Jane Buel Bradley Chapbook Award for her collection Jerkumstances (Pearl Editions). A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee for poetry, her story “Crazy Mom” was featured in the 2009 6th Annual Emerging Voices Group Show produced by Sally Shore‘s New Short Fiction Series.

CHANCES ARE is available in paperback and Kindle editions at Amazon.com

Joan Jobe Smith Poetry on City Lights Blog

On May 7th, poetry by Joan Jobe Smith — author of the Silver Birch Press release CHARLES BUKOWSKI EPIC GLOTTIS: His Art, His Women (& me) – was featured on the City Lights Blog. Congratulations to Joan!

Since Joan’s poem tells the story of a unique mother/daughter adventure, it’s great that we can feature it on Mother’s Day.

GOOD WIVES DON’T DRIVE

by Joan Jobe Smith

My father refused to teach my mother
how to drive his car, he said it
wasn’t ladylike in 1949, a woman driver

was no better than a streetwalker she was
to take the bus and be a good wife like
his mother was so my mother took secret

driving lessons, the instructor man
coming every day in his grey sedan
to show her how to let out the clutch

just right so the car wouldn’t jerk, how
to work the choke and the radio, make
turn signals, arm bent up for right

straight out for left, down for slow
me in the backseat watching as we drove
the L.A. streets: Firestone. Rosemead

Sunset Boulevard, Pico, La Brea and
Santa Fe and the day she got her drivers
license she bought her self a green 1939

Ford coupe and waited in the front seat
in the driveway for my father to come home
honked the horn at him when he arrived

and said Hey handsome, need a ride?

Photo: 1939 Ford coupe (a green one!)

Joan Didion Reads Honey Bear to Quintana Roo

In this charming photo from 1969, novelist/screenwriter/essayist/writing icon Joan Didion reads HONEY BEAR by Dixie Willson to three-year-old daughter Quintana Roo Dunne. Since Didion is a writer par excellence, we are assuming that she picked only the best books to read to her daughter — and it follows that Honey Bear is a classic.

Wow! Yes! None other than Tom Wolfe — author of one of my favorite novels THE BONFIRES OF THE VANITIES and many other fiction and nonfiction works — claims that Honey Bear by Dixie Willson was the piece of literature that inspired him to become a writer (no kidding!). Because Wolfe’s take on Willson’s book is so fascinating and informative, I’m including an excerpt from his musings below.

From “The Books that Made the Writers” (YALE ALUMNI MAGAZINE) by Tom Wolfe:

“…I was… galvanized…by a writer who never rated so much as a footnote to American literary history: Dixie Willson. Dixie Willson wrote, and Maginel Wright Barney illustrated, a book called Honey Bear in 1923. My mother used to read it to me at bedtime long before I knew one letter of the alphabet from another. Over and over she read it to me. I was small, but like many people my age I had already mastered the art of having things my way. I had memorized the entire poem in the passive sense that I could tell whenever Mother skipped a passage in the vain hope of getting the 110th or 232nd reading over with a little sooner. Oh, no-ho-ho…there was no fooling His Majesty the Baby. He wanted it all. He couldn’t get enough of it.

Honey Bear is a narrative poem about a baby kidnapped from a bassinet by a black bear. Maginel Wright Barney drew and painted in the japanais Vienna Secession style. To me, her pictures were pure magic. But Honey Bear’s main attraction was Dixie Willson’s rollicking and rolling rhythm: anapestic quadrameter with spondees at regular intervals. One has to read it out loud in order to be there:

Once upon a summer in the hills by the river
Was a deep green forest where the wild things grew.
There were caves as dark as midnight—there were tangled trees and thickets
And a thousand little places where the sky looked through.

The Willson beat made me think writing must be not only magical but fun…I resolved then and there, lying illiterate on a little pillow in a tiny bed, to be a writer. In homage to Dixie Willson, I’ve slipped a phrase or two from Honey Bear into every book I’ve written. I tucked the fourth line, above, into the opening chapter of The Right Stuff (page 4) from memory as I described how not-yet-an-Astronaut Pete Conrad’s and his Jean Simmons-lookalike wife Jane’s little white brick cottage near Jacksonville Naval Air Base was set in a thick green grove of pine trees with ‘a thousand little places where the sun peeks through.’ Peeks… looked… Ah, well, hey ho…”

Read more of of “The Books that Made the Writers” at YALE ALUMNI REVIEW.

Photo: Joan Didion Reads Honey Bear by Dixie Willson to daughter Quintana Roo Dunne, Los Angeles Times, 1969, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Note: Honey Bear by Dixie Willson is currently out of print, but copies are usually available on ebay (starting at around  $100)…

The Garrick Year, novel by Margaret Drabble, Read by Paul Newman

In the photo at right, Paul Newman reads THE GARRICK YEAR, a 1964 novel by British author Margaret Drabble. Written when she was 24, a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and married to an actor, THE GARRICK YEAR is an insider’s account of a young woman’s life in the theater.

I don’t know if Newman’s face expresses an “Oh, those Brits” reaction to the book or if he’s just squinting in the sun. (Where are your sunglasses, Paul?) Also don’t know if this shot was taken on a movie set or while Newman was racing one of his cars. (It was probably snapped on the set of the 1967 movie COOL HAND LUKE, since Newman looks as if he’s dressed for a chain gang.)

In 2009, Roger Angell wrote a “Summer Reading” piece in the New Yorker where he discussed his love for THE GARRICK YEAR (he rereads the book each summer) — and why he thinks it’s the prolific Drabble’s most “alive” novel. Read Angell’s article here.

Find THE GARRICK YEAR by Margaret Drabble at Amazon.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Margaret Drabble is the author of 17 novels, including The Sea Lady, The Seven Sisters, The Peppered Moth, and The Needle’s Eye. She has written biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson, and is the editor of the fifth and sixth editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. For her contributions to contemporary English literature, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2008.

Silver Birch Press Release Featured on yourdailypoem.com

“What’s in a Name,” a poem from the Silver Birch Press release COFFEE HOUSE CONFESSIONS by Ellaraine Lockie is the April 22, 2013 daily poem on yourdailypoem.com. Silver Birch Press is honored that an excerpt from one of its new releases is featured on this world renowned poetry site! Find out more about the history of yourdailypoem.com at this page. 

Congratulations to poet Ellaraine Lockie for this prestigious honor!

Happy Birthday, Isak Dinesen

Today we celebrate the birth of author Isak Dinesen, aka Karen von-Blixen, born into a well-to-do family in Denmark on April 17, 1885. Best known for her second book, the memoir OUT OF AFRICA, published in 1937 when she was 52 (take heart, late bloomers!), Dinesen was among the few non-native English speakers — Joseph Conrad also comes to mind — who wrote in English.

After winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, Ernest Hemingway wrote in the New York Times Book Review (11/7/1954): “As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy — happier — today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.”

Many people were introduced to Dinesen, her life, and her work through the 1985 movie version of OUT OF AFRICA  starring Meryl Streep — a performance that resulted in one of her many Oscar nominations. (Who can forget the wonderful hair washing scene?)

In researching Isak Dinesen/Karen von-Blixen, I learned that her image appears on the Denmark 50 Kroner note. (And she’s not the only woman featured on Danish currency.) Female authors everywhere salute you, Denmark!

Ellaraine Lockie at Two Moon Art House and Cafe, NYC, April 7, 2013

Ellaraine Lockie, author of the Silver Birch Press poetry release COFFEE HOUSE CONFESSIONS, will appear with Rose Auslander in a reading entitled “Bi-Coastal Poetry: California Meets Gowanus” at the Two Moon Art House & Cafe in Brooklyn on Sunday, April 7th, from 5:30 – 7 p.m.

ABOUT THE PERFORMERS…

Ellaraine Lockie, a California resident, was awarded the 2013 Women’s National Book Association’s Poetry Prize, Best Individual Collection from Purple Patch magazine in England, and won the San Gabriel Poetry Festival Chapbook Contest for Red for the Funeral and The Aurorean’s 2012 Chapbook Spring Pick for Wild as in Familiar. Her latest chapbook is Coffee House Confessions from Silver Birch Press.

Rose Auslander, who lives in Gowanus (Brooklyn), is Poetry Editor of Folded Word Press, Editor of unFold magazine, co-editor of the Twitter anthology, On A Narrow Windowsill and author of the chapbook Folding Water. She has read her poems on NPR, her poem “For You Mothers” received a Pushcart nomination, and her “Oh My” was nominated for Best of the Net.

Photo: Rose Auslander (left) and Ellaraine Lockie.

Flannery O’Connor’s Writing Room, Photo by Susana Raab

“I must tell you how I work. I don’t have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing…I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.”

FLANNERY O’CONNOR

Photo: Flannery O’Connor’s desk and typewriter in her bedroom at Andalusia, her farm near Milledgeville, Georgia. Photo by Susana Raab for the New York Times, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

The photo appears in an article by Lawrence Downes in the New York Times travel section (“In Search of Flannery O’Connor,” February 4, 2007.  Find the article at this link. Here is an excerpt, where Downes describes visiting O’Connor’s writing room:

There is no slow buildup on this tour; the final destination is the first doorway on your left: O’Connor’s bedroom and study, converted from a sitting room because she couldn’t climb the stairs [O'Connor was suffering from lupus]. Mr. Amason stood back, politely granting me silence as I gathered my thoughts and drank in every detail.

This is where O’Connor wrote, for three hours every day. Her bed had a faded blue-and-white coverlet. The blue drapes, in a 1950′s pattern, were dingy, and the paint was flaking off the walls. There was a portable typewriter, a hi-fi with classical LPs, a few bookcases. Leaning against an armoire were the aluminum crutches that O’Connor used, with her rashy swollen legs and crumbling bones, to get from bedroom to kitchen to porch.

There are few opportunities for so intimate and unguarded a glimpse into the private life of a great American writer. Mr. Amason told me that visitors sometimes wept on the bedroom threshold.

Happy Birthday, Flannery O’Connor

Today we celebrate the birth of one of the all-time greatest of the great writers — Flannery O’Connor, born in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925. Author of two novels — Wise Blood (1952), which she holds on her lap in the photo at right, and The Violent Bear It Away (1960) — and 32 short stories, O’Connor created a lasting body of work in her short life (she died in 1964 at age 39).

Kurt Vonnegut said of her, “The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor. She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.” (For the record, Vonnegut’s first rule of writing is: “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.” Read the complete list at this link.)

Here’s one of our favorite Flannery O’Connor quotes: “I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both time and eternity.”

A Certain Swirl, Poem by Mary Reufle

A CERTAIN SWIRL

Poem by Mary Reufle

  The classroom was dark, all the desks were empty, 


and the sentence on the board was frightened to 


find itself alone. The sentence wanted someone to 


read it, the sentence thought it was a fine sentence, a 


noble, thorough sentence, perhaps a sentence of 


some importance, made of chalk dust, yes, but a sen-

tence that contained within itself a certain swirl

not 
unlike the nebulous heart of the unknown universe, 


but if no one read it, how could it be sure? Perhaps it 


was a dull sentence and that was why everyone had 


left the room and turned out the lights. Night came, 


and the moon with it. The sentence sat on the board

and shone. It was beautiful to look at, but no one 


read it.

“A Certain Swirl” is found in Mary Reufle‘s collection The Most of It (Wave books, 2008), available at Amazon.com.