June 24, 2017 — The fifth anniversary of the Silver Birch Press blog!

We started the Silver Birch Press blog on June 24, 2012 — and today celebrate our fifth anniversary. Thank you to our community of contributors, readers, and nearly 10,000 followers for making the Silver Birch Press blog part of your daily routine.  Cheers!

For a trip down memory lane, below is a replay of our first post (June 24, 2012).

To me, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is the quintessential summer book. It chronicles the hot months of 1922, when the Great War was over and the Great Depression was yet to come. The 1920s were a blissful time when possibilities seemed limitless — and everyone seemed to be having fun (despite, or perhaps because of, Prohibition). These were the years when the cocktail was borne (to make the booze go farther), when women bobbed their hair and danced with abandon. It was The Jazz Age, as Fitzgerald called it — a name that stuck.

Every time I pick up The Great Gatsby — and I’ve read the book perhaps a dozen times — I am drawn in and enraptured by the book’s poetry and romance. To quote the song Kiplinger plays: In the morning, In the evening, ain’t we got fun. Yes, Gatsby is great fun — even with its sad ending. The story seems fresh and real, even though it took place 90 years ago.

I believe, though, that required high school reading of Gatsby is ill advised. Teens are too young to appreciate the longing and loss portrayed in the book — which is much better read after you’ve suffered some major hard knocks out in the big, bad world.

We all have a Gatsby in us — a hopeless romantic, an impossible dreamer who tries to hang onto the inner spark that makes life worth living. So pour yourself a lemonade (or something stronger), plop yourself in a lawn chaise, and dive into the greatest novel of all time. Happy Summer!

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 119th Birthday Bash! Thursday, Sept. 24, 2015

On Thursday, September 24, 2015, Silver Birch Press will commemorate F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s 119th birthday by celebrating his masterwork, The Great Gatsby, with found or erasure poems from the novel. That’s where you come in! If you’d like to submit a found poem or erasure poem from The Great Gatsby, we’ll be happy to feature it as part our birthday celebration for F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The following info may come in handy:

1. Find a definition of erasure poetry here.
2. Find a definition of found poetry here.
3. Find the text of The Great Gatsby at gutenberg.net.au.

SUBMISSION CHECKLIST

1. Send ONE MS Word document TITLED WITH YOUR LAST NAME (e.g. Smith.doc or Jones.docx). (If it’s an erasure poem, you may send the image in jpg or pdf format.)

2. In the same MS Word document, include your contact information (name, mailing address, email address).

3. In the same MS Word document, include an author’s bio, written in the third person (e.g., Zelda Sayre has been writing since age eight…”).

4. In the same MS Word document, include a note about your poem or creative process (this is optional).

5. Email to SBPSUBMISSIONS@gmail.com — and put FITZ in the subject line.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Monday, Sept. 21, 2015

Thanks! We’re also planning some giveaways, so stay tuned.

New Release: The Great Gatsby Anthology

The month of June marks the 4th anniversary of Silver Birch Press — and the 3rd anniversary of our blog. Our first post on June 24, 2012 featured F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby — so it seems fitting to celebrate these milestones with our latest release: The Great Gatsby Anthology, a collection of poetry and prose inspired by The Great Gatsby. This is a unique collection of material that has NOT appeared on our blog. 

We issued a call for submissions on March 15, 2014 and received submissions of poetry and prose from people around the world. Over a year in the making, the collection features writing from 80 established and up-and-coming authors :

Katie Aliferis
E. Kristin Anderson
M. Ivana Trevisani Bach
Johannes S.H. Bjerg
Julie E. Bloemeke
Karen Boissonneault-Gauthier
Ed Bremson
Tanya Bryan
Ana Maria Caballero
Sam Cha
Jan Chronister
Maryann Corbett
Anthony Costello
Tasha Cotter
Helen Dallas
Tracy Davidson
Susan de Sola
Andrea Janelle Dickens
Michelle Donfrio
Jennifer Finstrom
Ashley Ford
Jeannine Hall Gailey
Shivapriya Ganapathy
Marielle Gauthier
Trina Gaynon
Gary Glauber
Douglas Goetsch
Lois Marie Harrod
Senna Heyatawin
Joanie Hieger Fritz Zosike
Shawn P. Hosking
Veronica Hosking
Mathias Jansson
Jen Cullerton Johnson
David M. Katz
Becca Klaver
Laurie Kolp
Linda Kraus
Jean L. Kreiling
Kathryn Kulpa
David W. Landrum
Samantha LeVan
Stefanie Lipsey
Caolan Madden
Shahé Mankerian
Marjorie Manwaring
John McCarthy
Catfish McDaris
George McKim
Sarah Fawn Montgomery
Christina Murphy
Leslie Nichols
Lewis Oakwood
Alysson B. Parker
Martha Patterson
James Penha,
David S. Pointer,
Christina M. Rau
Suzanne Rawlinson
Patrick T. Reardon
Marybeth Rua-Larsen
Shloka Shankar
Sheikha A.
Edward W.L. Smith
Matthew Oldham Smith
Sherry Steiner
Christine Stroud
Marianne Titiriga
Sally Toner
Lee Upton
Sylvia Riojas Vaughn
Melanie Villines
Rachel Voss
Alan Walowitz
Amy Schreibman Walter
Susannah White
Lin Whitehouse
Neal Whitman
Scott Wiggerman
Matthew Wilson
Theodora Ziolkowski

The Great Gatsby Anthology is available in paperback at Amazon.com — with a Kindle version coming soon.

Gatsby Summer Night, Erasure Poem by Cathy Dee

For the uninitiated, an “erasure” poem is where you take existing text — in the above case, a page from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald — and mark out some of the words to create a poem. Here’s how the above poem reads when it stands alone…

GATSBY SUMMER NIGHT
by Cathy Dee

Through the summer nights
men and girls came and went like moths
and the stars.
I watched his guests
slit the waters of the Sound,
the city scampered 
like a brisk yellow bug
eight servants left his back door
in a pyramid of pulpless halves.
At least enough colored lights
to make a Christmas tree
bewitched to a dark gold
so long forgotten

###

Learn more about erasure poems at Found Poetry Review.

John O’Hara on F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Fitzgerald was a better just plain writer than all of us put together.”

JOHN O’HARA writing to JOHN STEINBECK,

SOURCE:  The Selected Letters of John O’Hara (1978)

F. Scott Fitzgerald hears from his editor, Maxwell Perkins

F. Scott Fitzgerald was living in France when he completed The Great Gatsby in the fall of 1924. He mailed the manuscript to his publisher, feeling confident that the novel lived up to his vision for something “new..beautiful…and intricately patterned.” Since transatlantic mail traveled slowly, Fitzgerald had to wait nearly a month for a reply. Listed below is an excerpt from the initial response that Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s editor at Scribner’s, sent from New York.

Nov. 18, 1924

Dear Scott:

I think the novel is a wonder. I’m taking it home to read again and shall then write my impressions in full —but it has vitality to an extraordinary degree, and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality. It has a kind of mystic atmosphere at times that you infused into parts of “Paradise” and have not since used. It is a marvelous fusion, into a unity of presentation, of the extraordinary incongruities of life today. And as for sheer writing, it’s astonishing…

With congratulations, I am,
Yours, 

Maxwell E. Perkins

Illustration: Opening section of The Great Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s handwriting.

Raymond Chandler on F. Scott Fitzgerald

He had one of the rarest qualities in all literature, and it’s a great shame that the word for it has been thoroughly debased by the cosmetic racketeers, so that one is almost ashamed to use it to describe a real distinction. Nevertheless, the word is charm — charm as Keats would have used it. Who has it today? It’s not a matter of pretty writing or clear style. It’s a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite, the sort of thing you get from good string quartettes.” 

RAYMOND CHANDLER referring to F. Scott Fitzgerald in a 1950 letter to a friend

Photo: Carl Van Vechten, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Van Vechten Collection, reproduction number LC-USZ62-88103 DLC.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s influence on Ross Macdonald

The Moving Target — originally published in 1949 — features Lew Archer, an L.A. private investigator, who appears in a series of novels by Ross Macdonald.

While reading the work of this amazing wordsmith/poet, I was struck by its similarity to the best passages in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald — and figured somebody somewhere must have written about this. A quick Google search revealed more than I’d hoped.

My research uncovered a fascinating article entitled “Ross Macdonald’s Marked Copy of The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of Influence” by Robert F. Moss. In the article, Moss demonstrates how Macdonald learned from Fitzgerald on a variety of levels, including language, plot, structure, and technique. Macdonald is quoted as calling Fitzgerald “a dream writer,” “our finest novelist,” and “my master.” Read the entire article here.

To give a sense of Macdonald’s command of language, here is the opening paragraph from Chapter 4 of The Moving Target:

We rose into the offshore wind sweeping across the airport and climbed toward the southern break in the mountains. Santa Teresa was a colored air map on the mountains’ knees, the sailboats in the harbor white soap chips in a tub of bluing. The air was very clear. The peaks stood up so sharply that they looked like papier-maché I could poke my finger through. Then we rose past them into chillier air and saw the wilderness of mountains stretching to the fifty-mile horizon.”

Novelist Haruki Murakami explains why The Great Gatsby is so great

In 2006, Haruki Murakami, author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, accomplished a long-standing goal — translating The Great Gatsby into Japanese. Murakami has discussed his reverence for the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel many times over the years — and has written a compelling afterword to his translation. Read Murakami’s moving love letter to Fitzgerald’s masterwork at scribd.com.

Here are some excerpts from Murakami’s heartfelt homage to The Great Gatsby…

When someone asks, ‘Which three books have meant the most to you?’ I can answer without having to think: The Great Gatsby, Dostoevesky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. All three have been indispensable to me (both as a reader and as a writer); yet if I were forced to select only one, I would unhesitatingly choose Gatsby. Had it not been for Fitzgerald’s novel, I would not be writing the kind of literature I am today (indeed, it is possible that I would not be writing at all, although that is neither here nor there).

Whatever the case, you can sense the level of my infatuation with The Great Gatsby. It taught me so much and encouraged me so greatly in my own life. Through slender in size for a full-length work, it served as a standard and a fixed point, an axis around which I was able to organize the many coordinates that make up the world of the novel. I read Gatsby over and over, poking into every nook and cranny, until I had virtually memorized entire sections.

Remarks such as these are bound to perplex more than a few readers. ‘Look, Murakami,’ they’ll say, ‘I read the novel, and I don’t get it. Just why do you think it’s so great?’ My first impulse is to challenge them right back. ‘Hey, if The Great Gatsby isn’t great,’ I am tempted to say, inching closer, ‘then what the heck is?’…Gatsby is such a finely wrought novel – its scenes so fully realized, its evocations of sentiment so delicate, its language so layered – that, in the end, one has to study it line by line in English to appreciate its true value.”

Gatsby and the green light, quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light a the end of Daisy’s dock…Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…And one fine morning –”

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Great Gatsby

Read The Great Gatsby for free! The novel is in the public domain in Australia and is available at gutenberg.net. Happy reading!

Photo: Thorsten Shier