Not long before I began my new HRC job, I discovered (thanks to my father’s internet sleuthing) that the HRC held a query letter from my grandmother to the Alfred A. Knopf publishing company. She wrote to them in the mid-1950s to ask if they’d want to publish a novel based on her life — a kind of “female Tom Sawyer story,” as she put it. They didn’t. Twenty-five years later she wrote the memoir manuscript I’m currently adapting; twenty-five years after that, I got the HRC internship.

On our first day of orientation, I had just enough time to glance at the letter and to laugh a little at how Louise-ish it is, how her style hadn’t really changed much in twenty-five years. The rejection letters are filed in a different set of manuscript boxes and are uncataloged. There’s a binder in the reading room, I think, that lists their contents. I’m planning to look for their response to Louise soon, though if it was a form letter, it may not have been saved, I suppose.

This morning the NY Times Book Review ran a story (by a UT professor) about the rejection letters and reader reports in the Knopf collection. Now I just want to sit down and look through all of them.

I had good intentions this summer, I swear. I was going write regularly here and talk in some depth about the memoir project, maybe about my academic work. Instead I wrote three-plus chapters of the memoir and rewrote one conference paper into an article-length piece; I thought about my dissertation project; I read seven hundred pages of Clarissa and a fair number of other books both academic and non-; I picked raspberries and blueberries and strawberries in my family’s back garden; I washed a lot of dishes. Now the semester’s begun and tomorrow is my first full day of work at the HRC.

It’s strange not to be teaching, especially since my classmates are all preparing for their own classes. I feel a bit like I’m getting away with something, even though I’ll be working twenty hours a week at the HRC and four at the Undergraduate Writing Center. I hope I will have the chance to teach my planned class on the rhetoric of popular fiction some time, but I’ll have plenty to do this semester, between my dissertation reading and my exciting new French class. I’m a complete beginner with French, though it’s the fifth language I’ve studied. So far, I can say sophisticated things like “Look at the window” and “Susie is wearing a red blouse,” and I sound like an idiot when I try to make the guttural R, but I still love it (even the funny numbers). I do have to stop thinking “wo” when I mean “je,” though. Zhongwen =/= Français, though in a perfect world I’d be studying both right now.

I still have way too much to do today, considering that it’s the last day of a three-day weekend, so I’m off to work. (”Work” here includes studying French, thankfully.) But I will try to be better about writing here this semester.

A whiplash-inducing reading experience: reading A Long Day’s Journey Into Night after a semester of reading Shakespeare. I haven’t bounced that hard off a text in a while.

I did finish the play, mostly because my grandmother mentions it several times in the course of her memoir. Her family life was nothing like the Tyrones’ in an emotional sense, but the superficial details of situation are similar: a mother with beautiful red-brown hair, a father who keeps throwing money into failed land purchases. She has a habit of making comparisons to works she must have read long ago — she also compares her mother to Isabel Archer at another point, and the only similarity there is that Isabel and her mother were both beautiful and stoic. I’m still tempted to use it as an excuse to re-read Portrait of a Lady, though.

This morning I spent a sunny hour picking sour cherries on a farm five minutes from my parents’ house. It was a stunning crop, the trees all thick with brilliant fruit, and almost all of it ripe. The clusters of cherries looked like Pop Art: stark, amazing, slightly translucent red. We picked nineteen pounds, and it wasn’t easy to stop — there were so many, and they were beautiful and so easy to pick.

Then we came home and I wrote while my parents pitted them. I think I got the better end of the deal.

I’m working on The White Silk Tent, my revision of my grandmother’s memoir. I’ve been reading biographical theory to try to situate myself and my strategies: what kind of voice did I want to use, what sort of other research did I want to do? I thought for a while, and then I started writing. And I’m still thinking, of course. But for now, my version contains three kinds of text:

• Sections of Louise’s original manuscript, very slightly edited for clarity
• Biographical sections based on her manuscript but substantially rewritten and edited, and recast in the third person
• Interpolations in my voice which allow me to comment on her memoir, to add information she didn’t have, to interpret things, etc.

And then, likely, documentary material — text and photos from the trunk of family memorabilia she left to accompany the manuscript, and maybe things from the HRC, as well.

My goal for the summer is to get three chapters completed and polished, so that I’ll have a sense of the process involved in writing the book and the amount of time I’ll need to complete it. And then I’ll need to get back to working on academic projects and thinking about my dissertation — which may also be related to biography. (I’m reading Paula Backscheider’s Reflections on Biography now with great interest. And on that note: you can find my new Goodreads page here.)

Some news, as I surface briefly between end-of-semester projects:

I’ll be working at the Harry Ransom Center as a public services intern for the next two years. I’m thrilled about it — everyone I’ve met through the interviewing process has been wonderful and I’m terribly excited about the work I’ll get to do. Expect many more posts gushing about the wonder of its books and manuscripts.

This means I won’t be teaching for those two years, at least not as my main source of support. I won’t be teaching this summer, either, despite my plans to. Instead, I’ll be in Oregon for much of the summer, spending time with my parents, who are heading back to Ashland themselves this weekend from the Stanford Medical Center. My dad’s stem cell transplant has been going well, but his cancer is back, too, and we’re all in limbo waiting to see what his new immune system will do, and what can be done oncologically. I’m going home to see them and to work on The White Silk Tent, my next novel project, which my father is eager to see.

But now I’m in the middle of a project on Austen’s modal verbs, and another on Aaron Hill’s King Henry the Fifth, and another on English perceptions of Dutch in the late Restoration. And grading. I’ll be done around May 16.

1. Chasing deer out of the backyard: a picaresque adventure, full of entertaining incidents, naughty language, and large-gauge plastic mesh fencing.
2. Briefly touring the coast of Oregon (between Reedsport and Newport) and spending two days in Eugene. If you’re wondering why I spent two days in Eugene — well, so am I. The actual town part of it isn’t much larger than Ashland, nor is it half as charming. Yachats, however, has one of the most wonderful coffeeshops in the world, a strange little wood-paneled place called Ye Olde Green Salmon, where we had the following lunch: egg, tomato, and mushroom sandwich; cream of onion and potato soup; raspberries, mascarpone, honey, and powdered sugar on little baguette slices; and a maté cocoa.
3. Reading A Room of One’s Own, and then Moll Flanders, which was rather like eating a tart lemon ice and following it with a huge sticky-sweet cloying cinnamon roll bought from a Cinnabon in a regional airport. I loved the Woolf unreservedly (more later on this, I hope), and pestered T. with sections read aloud; I loved Moll too, but it left my mental fingers sticky.
4. Finishing the text correction of my grandmother’s memoir. Now I need to figure out how to revise or alter it to make it work. Expect more posts on this front later. Other things to expect soon: photos from our coast trip and my presence in Portland some time in the next 2.5 weeks.

Today I’m down at the local university library with a pile of art books, as I’ve just started a small data entry project for a professor, labeling eighteenth-century-related images to be used in lectures at UT.

What have you been doing lately?

Anna Genoese talks about GLBTQ publishing and genre fiction, and why it might be better from a publishing standpoint to write a genre-marketable book with queer characters than to market one’s book as “queer fiction.” For a counterpoint, focused on literary fiction, see Edmund White’s Village Voice article on the recent flowering of gay fiction (via Bookslut).

Also via Bookslut and regarding gay fiction: Neil Gaiman reviews Alan Moore’s forthcoming Lost Girls, a graphic novel which has upset the hospital which owns the rights to J. M. Barrie’s estate. To his credit, Alan Moore doesn’t seem to care. I think the book sounds stunning.

I’ve finished scanning my grandmother’s memoir and am correcting the text — I’m about a third of the way done with it. As I work I’ve been thinking about what I want to do with the manuscript: revise it? Rewrite it substantially? Fictionalize it? In this interview with Alice Munro (yet again, via Bookslut — can you tell I’m catching up on my blog-reading?), she talks about writing her most recent book, partially based on the history of her family:

Q: The View from Castle Rock draws upon material relating to both your paternal ancestors and your personal recollections. In your 1994 “Art of Fiction” interview with Paris Review, you spoke of how William Maxwell had written about his family in Ancestors, and you said: “He did the thing you have to do, which is to latch the family history onto something larger that was happening at the time—in his case, the whole religious revival of the early 1800s. . . . If you get something like that, then you’ve got the book.” Might you comment on this in regard to your new collection?

A: I think that that’s very helpful, because otherwise what you’ve got is family history, and that’s very interesting to you and other members of your family perhaps, but not generally. This book has a lot to do with a certain part of Scotland which had also undergone an interesting religious phenomenon, although not exactly a revival. The Protestant faith there had taken hold in a very austere form, and it had a total effect on people’s lives.

With my grandmother’s story, the two strongest thematic threads are the experience of the Depression, and her care for and obsession with animal welfare and environmentalism; the Depression history is more gripping, though based on the manuscript’s wacky final chapter, I suspect my grandmother would’ve chosen to emphasize her fears about the future of the environment. Still, I need to think more about how to evoke the breadth and meaning of which Munro speaks.

I read Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial a few days ago, and am just finishing Julia Child’s My Life in France — both of them have me thinking about how to manage large chunks of exposition. Child’s book has the looseness of dictated memoir; Gorodischer sets up an equally loose episodic structure, jumping centuries between chapters. My grandmother’s manuscript, in its current form, goes beyond loose and episodic to completely messy, and it’s her management of exposition, I think, that will require the most work. When she writes scenes she generally does them well.

And now I’m off to finish Julia Child’s book and daydream about cooking classes at Le Cordon Bleu. More later.

Today, I am scanning. More specifically, I’m scanning the approximately three-hundred-page manuscript of my grandmother Louise’s memoir — or however much of that manuscript I can manage today before I go entirely nutty with boredom. This manuscript is the basis of my next writing project. I’d read a bit of it before and remembered it as being poorly written, so I’d only been hoping to get material for a novel from it — but, despite being a structural mess, it’s got chunks of snappy prose, sharp digs of wit, and a fascinating historical sweep. (The most obvious bit of historical interest: she lived with her family in a tent during the worst of the Depression.) My new plan is to edit her text and buttress it with some of my own writing, either fictional or non-, about Louise and my family. My father, especially, is excited about this plan — we spent an afternoon this week going through all the old photos Louise kept to accompany her manuscript (yes, I am very lucky, research-wise). I never knew Louise, since she died while my mother was pregnant with me, but I’m getting to know fragments of her now.

The best part, so far, has been the letter she included with the photos, instructing future family members on how the thing might be published; she admits to some roughness, but believes it might be edited into shape, and suggests that “perhaps the best way to handle it is through an agent. Libraries will always have ‘The Literary Market Place’ or something like it, giving names of agents and the whole procedure to follow, sending a m.s. 4th class special and all that.”

My publishing-savvy grandmother; I think we would’ve gotten along well.

In other news, the National Books Critics Circle blog has been interviewing authors who responded to the NY Times best 25 survey and asking them why they chose the works they did. So far, nobody’s explained a vote for Blood Meridian by admitting to a passionate love for conjunctions. “And” — it’s just so sexy!

Also, Sarah Monette is talking about Ursula Le Guin’s review of Hav, and discussing the similarities between Le Guin’s view of sf and her own concept of “hard fantasy.” These lines of Le Guin’s, which I’m stealing from Monette’s citation, interested me:

Hav is in fact science fiction, of a perfectly recognisable type and superb quality. The “sciences” or areas of expertise involved are social - ethnology, sociology, political science, and above all, history. … Serious science fiction is a mode of realism, not of fantasy; and Hav is a splendid example of the uses of an alternate geography.

I’m picky about the disciplines I label “sciences”; that happens when you’re the child of geologist parents. I consider history not a science, even in the broader sense in which Le Guin uses the term, but a liberal art, and therefore I’m a little more likely to agree with Monette’s label for this sort of work, since I think of the thought experiments I do as fantastic rather than science fictional. But, to contradict myself, I still find sf terms helpful when talking about all sorts of fiction — I thought of my second novel as a kind of first contact book, except with Greek gods rather than aliens.