Abi Maxwell answers our Top Five

Abi Maxwell is the author of the debut novel Lake People (Knopf). Library Journal writes:  "Maxwell's writing has a whispery, brooding, atmospheric feel that conveys Alice's fragility while capturing both the lushness of the region and its claustrophobic effect on Alice. Literary fiction readers will be moved by this quiet yet compelling work." Maxwell is reading and signing at the bookstore on Tuesday, March 5th at 7pm. To get a signed copy, click here.

Q: What's on your nightstand right now?

A: Vampires in the Lemon Grove, by Karen Russell. I just love it--and all of her fiction--so much.

Q: How do you write? 

A: I write pretty much full time--I begin in the morning, and go for as long as I can. I like silence, and I always write the first draft with paper and pen in order to get the story out. After that I move to the computer and start looking at structure and sound and all of that other stuff. 

Q: Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.

A: That was the first time I wrote a short story--instead of a children's storybook. I was fourteen, and I could not stop. I worked on it on the school bus, in my bed at night-- everywhere, for every moment I could until it was finished. I was enthralled by every part of the process--I wrote it on lined notebook paper with a cheap Bic pen that I had to press really hard into the paper, and I remember that I just loved the feel of all those indented pages. 

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Another book set in a small NH town--this one about two sisters, a barn, old secrets ... we'll see where it goes!

Q: Favorite recent find?

A: I think that would be snowshoes. Winter is my favorite season, and I have finally realized that snowshoeing is such an easy way to just be in the woods in winter. 

Jennifer Miller answers our TOP FIVE.

Jennifer Miller is the Brooklyn-based author of the novel The Year of the Gadfly (which I totally loved, review TK), coming May 8th from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. We'll be hosting her at the bookstore on Thursday, May 10th at 7pm.

1. What's on your nightstand right now?

The New York Times Sunday Style Magazine, New York Magazine, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon, and Rosebud Lip Balm. There is also quite a bit of dust, because it is impossible to keep a New York apartment clean no matter how many times a week I swiffer.

2. How do you write?

I write full time and split my day between fiction and journalism. I try to get in about five hours of writing time a day, but if I'm in the middle of a revision I'll end up sitting at my desk until eight or nine pm. I often need to get out of the house in order to motivate, so I'll circulate through a handful of coffee shops in my neighborhood. Being around other people who are also working helps keep me focused. There are two pitfalls in working away from home. First: I generally eat my way through the day (also to keep myself motivated!) and coffee shops get expensive. Second: people don't seem to realize that a coffee shop is NOT an actual office and when they take extended business calls, I have to start giving them the stink eye.

3. Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.

Probably when I was in the third grade and I wrote a book of poetry with my best friend. One of our poems was about purple underwear. So, basically, I was a child writing prodigy.

4. What are you working on now?

I'm writing a second novel about a young woman who runs away from her fiance when he returns from Iraq with PTSD. She ends up on a cross-country motorcycle trip with her Vietnam Veteran father. The book was inspired by reporting I did for The New York Times on motorcycle-riding vets in 2005.

5. Favorite recent find?

I'd love to recommend the book Missing by Lindsay Harrison. It's a gripping memoir. Also, the Lincoln Memorial, and specifically, Lincoln's second inaugural address, (which is on the wall at the Memorial) and is one of the most moving and powerful pieces of writing I've ever encountered.

Lauren Grodstein answers our five questions

Lauren Grodstein is the author of A Friend of the Family (Algonquin) and will be interviewed by Stephen King this Saturday as part of the Algonquin Book Club, live and in person at the Cooperative Middle School in Stratham, and streaming online at www.algonquinbooksblog.com.

1. What's on your nightstand right now?

There’s always lots on my nightstand: a few toddler books (lately Good Night, San Francisco and Harry the Dirty Dog), four or five old New York Times Magazines with the crosswords half-filled in, my Lonely Planet Guide to Vancouver, which is as close to Ambien as a book can be, my grandmother’s copy of Einstein’s Ideas and Opinions, and lately, for serious no-bones-about-it reading, Russell Banks’s The Lost Memory of Skin.

2. How do you write?

Writing is about half my job (directing the MFA program at Rutgers-Camden is another half, as is taking care of my three year old son, as is folding laundry and doing dishes and buying groceries, but I have nothing too interesting to say about women’s work, so I guess I’ll stop there…) The best time for me to write is in the morning – say 5:30 or 6:00. This is mostly because I’m a morning person, but I also write early because neither child nor student is likely to bother me at that ridiculous hour, and I feel positive and excited about what the day might bring. By three o’clock in the afternoon I’m usually shot and good only for folding laundry, buying groceries, etc.

3. Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.

I always knew I liked to tell stories – when I was a little kid, before I could even spell, I would take sheets of my mom’s sketch paper (she’s a painter, so we always had art supplies in the house) and lie on my stomach in my bedroom and draw characters and tell their stories out loud. So I’ve been creating fiction, in a way, since before I was even able to write. But as for feeling like a professional writer – I don’t know. I think I will always feel like a bit of a fraud, like I can’t believe people are really willing to read the stuff I make up. Maybe I shouldn’t say that? But it’s true – I’m always amazed, and always so grateful.

4. What are you working on now?

I’m editing a novel that remains nameless – I’m pretty bad at titles. It’s about a fight over evolution on a college campus.

5. Favorite recent find?

Okay, this might seem ridiculous, but lately I’ve been in love with a small internet framing company called Framesbymail.com. I’m sure this is symptomatic of early motherhood, but bear with me – you can order a print of your kid, pick out the mat, pick out the frame, and have it delivered to your doorstep all assembled and ready to hang. It’s kind of addictive, mixing and matching photos of your adorable toddler with a series of adorable frames. So there’s that, and Words With Friends, and a British sitcom called Peep Show I can stream on Netflix. Throw in a half bottle of red wine and I’ve basically got my best possible Saturday night.

Kate Whouley answers our Author Questionnaire

Kate Whouley lives and writes on Cape Cod, in the home that inspired her to write Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved. A Book Sense Book of-the-Year nominee in the nonfiction category, Cottage for Sale received kudos from booksellers and reviewers, and is a popular selection for reading groups.

An avocational musician, Kate has played principal flute in the Cape Cod Conservatory Concert Band since 1995. "When I began working on the new memoir, I thought I was writing a book about the band and my personal musical journey. But as I began to write, I couldn’t help but notice that my mother was turning up on every page."

Many booksellers know Kate from her work in the book industry consulting with bookstores on design, renovation and other matters for her company Books In Common. Her latest book is Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words: Travels with Mom in the Land of Dementia.

1. What's on your nightstand right now?

Alexander Maksik: You Deserve Nothing

Charles Dickens: Great Expectations

Orhan Pamuk: Other Colors

Emberto Eco: Baudelino

Milan Kundera: The Curtain

Mavis Gallant: Paris Stories

2. How do you write?

My working life has been spent in the book business. I know the crush of books, the confusion of titles, the way that publishers push a few big books each season—mostly by established authors and celebrities. I know how difficult it is for any book to find an audience. I know that some folks believe that books and bookstores may soon be obsolete. When I begin to write, I must forget everything that I know about the marketplace for books, and choose, instead, to learn the truth of the story I am telling. I work in a separate silence—away from my desk, away from the telephone, and away from my desktop computer. Wherever I open up my laptop, I have a cup of hot white tea—and if I am lucky, a black and white cat—within arm’s reach.

3. Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.

I was first published—at age fourteen—in a magazine for collectors of insulators—those little glass and porcelain knobby things that used to sit on the crossbars of telephone and electric poles. In the years since, I’ve written Hallmark cards, radio commercials, catalogue copy, publicity material, feature articles, personal essays, a long-running column in a bookselling magazine, and I’ve authored, edited and contributed to several professional books. Yet—and this may be because I have worked in the book business, too—I didn’t consider myself a “real” writer until my first memoir—Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved—was published. Around that time, I revealed this secret to a magazine editor. He corrected me: “Kate, you aren’t a writer. You’ve crossed over. You’re an author now.” Seven years later, I am still processing that information.

4. What are you working on now?

In the book tour whirlwind, I’m mostly working on showing up at the right place at the right time. But as the travel begins to slow down, I plan to return to a fiction project set in the ninth century. (When that one sees print, maybe I’ll be able to introduce myself as an author.)

5. Favorite recent find?
My cat, Mojo, although he found me. Formerly feral, he now enjoys the full privileges of Cat-of-the-House.

Joni B. Cole answers our Author Questionnaire

Joni B. Cole is the author of the new essay collection Another Bad-Dog Book: Tales of Life, Love and Neurotic Human Behavior. (PublishingWorks). She (and her own bad dog) will be at Water Street Bookstore tomorrow (Saturday, 9/24) at 4pm to talk about her new book, writing and bad dogs.

“Joni Cole’s voice may be brutal, but readers, drawn to turn to the next page, will be rewarded: She is funny and so is her gutsy book.” – New York Journal of Books

1. What's on your nightstand right now?

I’m assuming you’re asking me about what bookish things are on my nightstand, and not the earring I took out last night and forgot to put back in, or my miracle face cream or dirty cereal bowl. At the moment my nightstand has on it David Baldacci’s paperback The Sixth Man (eager to start it!), Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, an excellent book except that I hate reading it on Kindle. (I vowed after Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad I’d never buy another book on Kindle—it seriously diminishes the reading experience for me, so why did I make this same mistake?) FYI: fallen under the table is a hardcover of Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants. Loved that book!

2a. How do you write?

I teach writing workshops and consult with writers and give talks at conferences, so I have to fit my own writing in around that work schedule. But I make it a priority, preserving entire mornings or afternoons when I can, getting up at 4 a.m. when I need to, and making the most of all those fifteen- or thirty-minute windows of opportunity while I’m waiting in the car for my two daughters to finish their field hockey practices or piano lessons or whatever.

2b. Do you require a completely silent, empty room, or do you listen to music?

I can write in silence or with noise, if that noise is the buzz of a coffee shop or a bunch of kids running around downstairs. But I don’t like music playing when I write at my desk. That said, music does serve my creative process, because I get a lot of my ideas when I’m jogging and listening to my iPod. So I’d say the soundtrack of my new book is a mix of Maroon 5, Garth Brooks, Flo Rida, the Zac Brown Band, Kesha, Cat Stevens, Cher, Pit Bull, Josh Grobin….

3. Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.

Hmm. I can’t think of a particular moment. There are times when I am burbling with professional self confidence, and reread something I wrote and think, “Man, that was good writing.” But there are just as many times when I’m struggling to put something, anything, on the page, and think, “Well, I used to be a writer.”

4. What are you working on now?

Snippets of essays, an article I want to propose for The Writer magazine, blog posts for a an online magazine where I’m a regular contributor. I’m uncomfortably aware that I am not immersed in a new book at the moment, but that’s the creative process. It takes its own sweet time, but something will gel, likely another essay collection, as long as I show up at my desk.

5. Favorite recent find?

Two recent life enhancements: Lemon Cloud dessert and the FX original series “Justified.” As for exciting stuff, I’m truly excited about this upcoming “season” of promoting my book. It’s fun to see it in stores and meet readers and booksellers. I want to appreciate every moment of this.

Cornelia Read answers our Top Five

Cornelia Read, author of the novel, Invisible Boy, answers Water Street Bookstore's Top Five:

1. What's on your nightstand right now?

Ah, my faux-Deco mirrored nightstands from Target up in fashionable Greenland... Well, let’s see:

Half a glass of Cran-Grape Crystal Light (pint glass with the PEA lion-rampant seal imprinted on the side, acquired last September for a buck from the sale table in the school bookstore.) And oh, how I wish it were filled with Guinness instead...

Nicotine lozenges (I quit smoking four years ago, but can’t seem to give up the alternative. Hey, it’s my last remaining vice. Um, well, other than sloth, lust, and being generally chaotic enough to have fully earned my ex-husband’s description of me as “the lightning rod for entropy in the universe.”)

A tiny bronze sculpture of a shoe with

mouse ears on it,

by my cousin Susie Read Cronin (image link).

Books:
Faithful Place by Tana French
Gatsby’s Vineyard by A.E. Maxwell
Hello Kitty Must Die by Angela Choi Life Sentences by Laura Lippman
Secondhand Spirits by Juliet Blackwell
A Bad Day for Pretty by Sophie Littlefield

2. How do you write?
From high school through my first couple of newspaper jobs, I used to listen to EXTREMELY LOUD music while writing. Sometimes it would be early Allman Brothers or Hendrix or The Violent Femmes, sometimes Puccini or Beethoven. I think ultimately it served as white noise—blocking out the noise of traffic and sirens outside my dorm rooms or apartments, neighbors throwing frying pans at each other.

Now that my brain is far older and feebler, I find music too distracting. The toughest moment of writing for me is the transition from my actual life to the butt-in-chair typing part, every single day. It always takes me at least an hour to get some momentum. If I were listening to music, I’m not sure I’d be able to make that segue.

Once I hit the sweet spot/writing groove, though, music would be beside the point—I’m oblivious to everything but (possibly) air-raid sirens. You could drive a clanking tank-tread bulldozer with a payload bucket jammed with shrieking monkeys into the center of my living room, surround it with several dozen Busby Berkeley kicklines of tap-shoed Rockettes, and drag Mahalia Jackson and Maria Callas in for a glass-shattering ABBA playlist sing-off, and the only time I’d look up would be when I got down to the dregs of my iced coffee and needed a refill.

I am blessed in that writing is my full-time job at the moment. I hope it lasts—publishing is the kind of racket in which you are well-advised to practice what I like to think of as “involuntary Zen.”

Career-wise, my Plan B is probably Wal-Mart in Epping. I figure I blew my chances at becoming an international jewel thief when I got fingerprinted one Sunday morning ten years ago in Belmont, Massachusetts, after having been pulled over for a DMV/proof-of-insurance snafu.
I burst into tears when they took my mugshot down at the police station, since I’d only run out of the house to buy milk and coffee cake at Star Market and was wearing mismatched socks with plastic garden clogs, ripped jeans, and my husband’s paint-spattered sweatshirt.
The stern older cop said, “Young lady, crying is not going to get you out of this!” To which I replied, “It’s j-j-just that if I’d... known you were... going to [stifled sob] take my picture, I would have b-b-brushed my hair.”
After that they felt so bad they let me wait in a detective’s office reading true-crime paperbacks until my husband showed up with twenty bucks to bail me out.
So, yeah: Wal-Mart. Plan B.

3. Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.
Probably when I wrote an essay on the injustice of jailing Angel Davis and the Christmas Carpet Bombings of Vietnam. I was in second grade. That was also the first time I used big-kid binder paper—the vertical kind, instead of the wide-landscape pulp stuff with room for a big picture at the top.
My teacher Mrs. Boys told me I’d done a great job on the essay, but then again she taught us Russian folksongs so we’d “know what to sing come the revolution.”

That year I also had a poem published in a local little review, The Poetry Shell. This was a haiku, which unfortunately (as my mother pointed out) rhymed.

4. What are you working on now?

Valley of Ashes, my fourth novel, set in Boulder, Colorado, in 1996. It’s chock-full of: murder, infidelity, autism, toilet-training young twins, arson, utterly annoying hippies, utterly annoying psycho conservatives, and why journalism doesn’t pay. I think it’s going to be THE feel-good book of 2011. Your mileage may vary...

5. Favorite recent find?

A hardcover 1936 auction catalog titled The Splendid Library and Collection of Historical and Literary Autographs of the Late Mr. and Mrs. William A. Read. I found it at Colophon Books on Water Street, here in Exeter--just in time to buy as a forty-seventh birthday present to myself.
William Augustus and Caroline Seaman Read were my great-grandparents (“small preppy world,” as my pal Muffy Srinivasan would say.) Before leafing through this catalog, I’d had no idea the two of them were book people at all.

He founded a Wall Street investment bank that came to be known as Dillon Read. This firm underwrote bond issues for New York City’s first subway line, Germany’s World War I reparations, the sale of Dodge Motors to Chrysler, several sketchy Latin American governments, and the Triborough Bridge.

The next generation had a fabulous time squandering his sizeable self-made fortune, but it’s this hundred-eighty-seven-page list of books and documents “the heirs” sold off in 1936 that most breaks my heart: highlights include the first four folio editions of Shakespeare, “highly important letters of George Washington and Benedict Arnold, and a remarkable collection of witchcraft manuscripts,” and a letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Edgar Allan Poe, thanking him for dedicating The Raven and Other Poems to her.
There’s even Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s copy of George Chapman’s The Whole Works of Homer (circa 1616), “bearing numerous notes in his hand... enclosed in a crimson full crushed levant morocco solander.”

The catalog’s foreword claims that “[T]he treasures and delights of a collection such as this... must be seen standing on shelves in noble battalions to be appreciated as the monument it is to the memory of two keen minds whose desire was to build a world of refuge and fill it with the most thrilling records of history and the most glamorous figures of literature.”
I leaf through this catalog, the last evidence left of this couple’s collection, and think “and their kids sold it all off in 1936—so you know they got top dollar. I mean, the height of the Depression? IDIOTS!”

It’s not as though my grandfather was short of cash, at the time. He used to have his chauffeur carry a fresh hundred-dollar bill at all times, so he could blow off paying tolls. None of the tollbooth cashiers in the Thirties could make change for a hundred.
That robber-baron bounty trickled down to my generation about as well as the fruits of Reaganomics did to your average migrant farm worker. As my protagonist/alter ego Madeline Dare would say: “My money is so old there’s none left.”

Our first post

We are devoting our very first blog entry to an author who is coming to the bookstore this Wednesday at 7pm. James Sullivan is the author of Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin. And thanks to the community blog at Newtonville Books for the author questionnaire idea.

James Sullivan answers:

Water Street Bookstore's Top Five

Q: What's on your nightstand right now?

A: On my nightstand: Cardboard Gods by Josh Wilker -- Impressively well-written, much-more-sweet-than-bitter recollections of an oddball, baseball-obsessed childhood in Vermont, told through random images from the author's old baseball card collection. Each card is another madeleine... and I am a bit of a cookie monster! Baseball fanatic, too. Also: God Is Not One by BU professor Stephen Prothero, who makes reading about religion, dare I say it, fun. (Unlike the Monkees, I'm not much of a believer.) Endurance, Alfred Lansing's old book about Shackleton. And Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, by Peniel E. Joseph.

Q: How do you write? (i.e. Is it your full time job, or do you have to fit it in here and there? Do you require a completely silent, empty room, or do you listen to music? If you listen to music, what was the soundtrack for your latest book? etc.)

A: I am, believe it or not, a full-time, independent, freelance writer and author. Bringing home the bacon! (Even if it often feels more like bacon bits.) I have an office-slash-lair in the attic, to which I repair the moment my kids leave for school. I write (and social-network, and surf the web) furiously until they get home, and if possible, until dinnertime, or until someone needs me to throw some batting practice or bring the dog back after he's knocked open the screen door, whichever comes first.

I was a music critic for the SF Chronicle and my second book was about James Brown (The Hardest Working Man), so I listen to lots of music -- all over the map -- while writing. For Seven Dirty Words, I listened to a near-constant stream of Carlin routines (and watched all the HBO specials), of course. I also listened to a lot of music he enjoyed, from doo-wop (I bought a 45 of one of his favorite songs, Marvin & Johnny's "Cherry Pie") to folk-rock (like the Dillards).

Q: Name the first time or moment you realized you were a writer.

A: First knew I was a writer when I read the Middlesex News sports section at age 10 or so, every day, religiously, especially the sports section, and then a few years later pored over the interviews in Rolling Stone. In each case, I could tell that I wanted nothing more than to be -- not the athletes and rock stars, but the writers who described what they did in such evocative language.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Right now I'm working on my Twitter feeds and my sanity.

Q: Favorite recent find? (It can be a book, writer, film, restaurant, music, place, website, video, recipe, person--anything you're excited about.)

A: Favorite recent finds: "Modern Family." Psychedelic South African band BLK JKS. Why New Orleans Matters by Tom Piazza. Gray hairs in my new goatee.