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Writing In New York – Part I

March 12, 2018 1 Comment

by Nora Shychuk

Like so many others, I had moved to New York City with a dream to write, to be at the center of things and pay attention. But such a reality, even in the service of a great dream, is a hard and often lonely one. I knew it wouldn’t be an easy move to make, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t harder than I guessed it would be. I was out of my element and struggling to find my place. I knew very few people. To say that I was overwhelmed and scared on a daily basis would be an understatement.

I remember, just twenty-four hours before, feeling completely exposed walking through Times Square. Peddlers tried to sell me tickets to comedy shows and shoved CDs in my hands. The rumble of the subway underneath my feet was jolting, the perpetual traffic and honking became its own temperamental rhythm. I felt as if I was on another planet.

But the West Village is, comparatively, quiet. It was an early October afternoon. The sun shined, the blue sky above was soft and cloudless.  As I walked, people were few and far between.  I could hear my footsteps and birds in the trees. Colorful leaves blew across the cozy streets, drawing my eyes to the red brick buildings as I made my way to Bank Street.

I had an appointment. I was set to interview Carol Hebald, author of the novel A Warsaw Chronicle. We had exchanged e-mails for months, setting up a time and place to meet to discuss her new book. As a young, emerging writer just having arrived in the cultural, literary hub of the world, the chance to sit down with a seasoned writer and lifelong New Yorker struck me as a great professional opportunity.

And I suppose it was. But it was so much more than that.

When I arrived, Carol had food ready and waiting on the table. After a warm welcome, she asked if I’d like coffee, tea, or wine. Having to work later that afternoon, I passed on the wine and opted for coffee. While she got it ready, we talked about New York and my recent year and a half abroad in Ireland where I earned my graduate degree.

“Do you miss it?” she asked me.

She smiled easily and when I spoke her eye contact was unwavering. She was a woman – and writer – who knew how to listen. I felt at home immediately.

“Yes,” I said. “I really do.”

When my coffee was ready, I walked it to the living room where Carol and I both sat down on her couch at opposite ends.

A Warsaw Chronicle follows Karolina Heybald, an American exchange professor teaching at Warsaw University during the inception of martial law in 1981. Always present in the novel is the conflict between the Communist party and the Solidarity movement.  Karolina finds herself in the midst of political turmoil as she tries to find a missing cousin. Everywhere she looks, there is danger, real and unavoidable.

Carol and I started the interview by looking back. Amazingly, A Warsaw Chronicle was inspired by very true events. From 1981 to 1982, Carol was the visiting American exchange professor at Warsaw University in Poland. She had just received tenure as an associate professor at the University of Kansas but jumped at the opportunity to go abroad.

She explained that at the time, Poland was behind the Iron Curtain. Politically, it was divisive and violent. Many people asked her why she’d ever want to travel to Warsaw. She was doing well professionally. Didn’t she know the risks? But her reasons were never professional. They were personal and close to the heart.

Her father was born in Krakow and died when Carol was only four. To go to the country where he was born presented her with an opportunity for closure. Not to mention, she saw it as an opportunity to challenge herself.

“I was very naïve in many, many ways,” Carol told me. “Two classes and a handful of students in each. I’d have a world of time to write, I thought, [but] I was in something of a shock when I got there.”

When she arrived in Warsaw, it was sunny and clear. “People looked at me as though I was crazy because they were having such a difficult time,” she said. “It was only two or three months before martial law was declared and I didn’t realize what was happening politically. They kept saying, ‘why did you come here? Why did you come here? Nobody wants to come here.’”

She recalled waiting in long lines for food and how there was never enough to eat. She went hungry herself, a feature common in A Warsaw Chronicle.

Some of the characters in the novel are drawn from life. Karolina’s tutor, for example, is real. When Carol arrived in Warsaw she met him immediately. The two are still in touch today.

Another driving force in A Warsaw Chronicle is Marek, Karolina’s star pupil who dreams of becoming a poet. Their connection entangles Karolina in a high-stakes conflict concerning Marek’s fate. The relationship between the two is fully formed, fully realized. But, Carol told me, Marek is complete fiction.

“I shouldn’t say complete,” she clarified. “There was a meeting somewhere around November right before martial law was declared when a student raised his hand and asked a question I remember having at his age. [He asked] about great work. Does it come from a great idleness or does it come from an enormous amount of work. Which was true? And I just remembered that I had asked that question myself. I looked at him and his face remained in my mind. I never saw him again, but he became Marek.”

Carol went on to say that she felt the closest to Marek, that his character was the most her. He developed organically, as all her characters do. Instead of planning and plotting, Carol allows the moving pieces and voices of her novels to develop naturally, to come to her when the time is right. “[Marek] became a character who was very much alive. And my part was already there. And then I created the father. I don’t know from where. I didn’t consciously sit down and decide to write what I wrote.”

The father, first Lieutenant Maciesz, is a ruthless presence in A Warsaw Chronicle. But, Carol said, he’s a part of her, too. “They come out of me. The father. His cruelty, his bitterness, the fault in his thinking that because he has suffered so much, he knows more.”

The novel developed from old journal entries Carol wrote during her time abroad. Every day, she was chronicling observations about life in Poland. “I simply made diary entries every day and the story took off on its own.”

I told Carol I worked much the same way, going off of notes, feelings, and observations rather than outlining down to the very last detail. I told her I barely ever made a conscious decision in terms of pace or what’s best, practically, for plot. Instead, I go with my gut and allow a certain emotional tug to sway me.  I let the ideas grow as I work.

“Yes,” she said. “You have to listen. You have to have the confidence. If someone tells me, for example, in the writer’s group, that they lost interest in a certain moment, I’d be interested in that because there is, in a novel, necessary places where you want to insert certain information and want the reader to be bored. You don’t want to get rid of too much of [the reader’s] energy. You’re writing and listening at the same time and you’re saying ‘I’ve had enough of this and want to get back to the action.’”

And only the writer knows their characters and how they must navigate through life as the story develops. For Carol, it can’t be all gunfights and obsessive love triangles. Writing is about life, and that includes the mundane, the slow, quiet moments of the every day. “Deep down,” she said, “you know when a moment should drag. It lets the reader rest so they have the energy to feel more when the next crisis comes along.”

It was easy to talk about the process of writing with Carol, about the importance of feeling a story and understanding our characters and where they come from. Personal experience always helps, too. For her, A Warsaw Chronicle was always waiting to be told. It formed from isolation and the reality of displacement. “It was the loneliness that I felt,” she said. “There was very little teaching that went on there. It was mostly waiting in line for food. It was mostly waiting for the day to end.”

But she remembered her time in Kansas and knew that her reason to leave was warranted. “It certainly didn’t do me any good professionally, but Kansas was more of a foreign country to me than Warsaw could ever be. I was a lot lonelier in Kansas than I was in Warsaw. I’m from New York City. Born and bred. And Warsaw was another city, at least. And my father was from there; I wanted to explore where he lived. I wanted to forget him – that was the central thing in my life because he was so much a part of me.”

At this point in our conversation, Carol stopped and looked far off. I followed her line of sight. She was looking out the window, at the streams of autumnal light. Whatever she said next would be carefully considered. She took a deep breath.

“This is hard to explain,” she said. “He was on my mind all the time. He died when I was four years old. And I wanted that to end. I thought if I went I could put it all behind me and just get on with my life as a woman, you know? I was nearly 50 at the time.”

I spoke openly about my own readiness to go abroad to Ireland two years prior. Of course, Ireland was much safer and free of any comparable political upheaval, but it was still a drastic move that few people I knew had ever taken. I wanted to get out of Florida and away from the people I never understood. I told Carol that, quite similarly, I felt the need to leave in order to understand something larger. I moved four-thousand miles away and felt immediately more rooted. I felt like a better version of myself.

I spoke of my own mother next. She died of lung cancer when I was ten. Carol’s father had also died of cancer. We both knew the pain of untimely death, of lives cut short. When such a loss disrupts your life, it’s not hard to understand the simple but heartbreaking fact that life doesn’t last forever. We’re not guaranteed long, happy existences. It was clear to both of us, in the quiet way in which we remembered them, that our parents passing away triggered something in us: the need to make our days count.

Nora Shychuk, Pact Press contributor
Nora Shychuk

“My mom is in everything I write,” I told Carol. “It’s interesting, the loss of a parent.  There’s so much you don’t know, but it still impacts so much of what you do.”

“Everything,” she said. “When I was three I was alone in the house with him. My mother took over the store, my sister was in school. There was a nurse taking care of me, but we were alone for an entire year. My dad and I. And even though I don’t know remember all the details of that year, it’s a central part of my life. I remember, shortly before he died, I asked my father what I should be when I grow up. He told me to be somebody.”

In 1984, after she returned from Poland, Carol resigned her tenure and moved back to New York City to write full-time. I told her that a lot of people would consider such a move reckless, to give up comfort for a life of instability and uncertainty. But Carol knew what it was like to struggle and scrape by. Poland proved that to her. She wasn’t afraid of being poor or of struggling all over again. As long as she was doing what she wanted to do, it was worth it.

“When I was in Brooklyn I was writing full-time in a little room which was about $275 a month, so you can imagine it was in the middle of nowhere. But that’s all I wanted, that room to write. If I wrote well I felt well.”

She paused and smiled again, remembering. “It was my whole life.”

“And what did you learn from devoting your life to writing?” I asked next.

I expected an answer that is heard quite often. A mixture of “never give up on your dreams” and the value of hard work, the earned freedom of going after what you love and want to do. That worthwhile joy of a life spent seeing, feeling, and experiencing. But Carol’s answer was surprisingly refreshing and true: she learned nothing.

“I’ve learned nothing, except that books make books, not experience, not human relationships. Books. And that’s the same advice I’d give anybody who was just starting out: Read! Read! Don’t stop reading! Read what you hate, read what you love. Decide why you love it, how you can borrow from the structure of a novel. You’re not doing anything but borrowing a way to tell a story. You’re trying to learn to tell a story.”

You’re not doing anything but learning to tell a story. Yes, that’s nothing—but everything all at once. By learning to write, you’re learning about yourself.

 

A Warsaw Chronicle is  available from Regal House Publishing.

PART II, to be posted forthwith.

Nora Shychuk has an M.A. in Creative Writing from University College Cork and a B.A. in Film Screenwriting and English from Jacksonville University. Her writing has appeared in The Lonely Crowd, The Quarryman Literary Journal, The Rose Magazine, and Pact Press’s Speak and Speak Again Anthology. In 2017 she was shortlisted for Cork, Ireland’s From The Well Short Story Competition and was also awarded one of two full Alumni Awards to attend the Iceland Writers Retreat (IWR) in April 2018. She lives in New York City.

Filed Under: Book Bound, Regal Authors Tagged With: A Warsaw Chronicle, Carol Hebald, Nora Shychuk, Regal House, regal house publishing

On Writing ‘Path to the Night Sea’ by Alicia Gilmore

February 9, 2018 Leave a Comment

Alicia Gilmore, Regal House authorI have always loved reading and creating, with words, with paint and pencils, from joining a Creative Writing class as a child – as an asthmatic and more than a little uncoordinated, team sports were never my forte – to studying art and then writing at university. Since childhood, when I realised that someone had created the book I held in my hand, I have wanted to write. To create. Perhaps it was reading Little Women and wanting so fiercely for Jo to succeed, to be Jo, or alternatively her sisters and enter the Marsh household. Perhaps it was Alice in Wonderland and wanting to throw myself down that rabbit hole. Books were a perfect escape when I was indoors with another bout of bronchitis. They gave me the world. From those tame beginnings to discovering books could not only captivate and inspire me, but thrill me and scare me, keeping me up at night reading under the blankets with a torch. Books introduced me and immersed me in new worlds.

Looking at art, being captivated by passages of paint, the use of light and shadow, thinking how did the artist do that? Reading novels and admiring the skill, the clever hints and clues, the beautiful play of words, wondering how did the author conceive of that? How did they do that? There have been more than a few false starts, a multitude of drafts, dreadful poems and sketches that will never see anyone else’s eyes but I love the process, being swept away into another space, another moment, when reality (and the day job and all the ordinary, everyday concerns) subside.

Path to the Night Sea by Alicia Gilmore, a Regal House authorPath to the Night Sea started as a short story in a fiction class with Sue Woolfe. Sue had given the class a selection of photographs and objects to spark our creativity and give us a physical stimulus to write a short fragment. I remember a small glass perfume bottle and a photograph caught my attention. The photo featured a woman in profile, seated at a piano, her hands poised to strike the keys. There was a cat sitting on top of the piano, and I wondered if these were the two most important things in her life – music and her pet. I started to write about this woman who would sit and play, not looking out of the curtained window, but indoors with her cat. Her face in profile, her ‘good side’… The perfume bottle that perhaps had belonged to a woman who would never get hold. A bottle that held scented memories… Ideas and elements came together and what is now a lot of Day One in the novel formed the original short story. Sue read the story, said I had written the start of a wonderful novel and she had to know what happened to Ellie. I realised so I wanted to know too.

Coal Cliff, Australia, setting for Path to the Night Sea, a Regal House title
Coal Cliff

The story became darker the more I delved into Ellie’s world. Seven days seemed the fitting structure for Ellie to be introduced to the reader and for her to seek her path, tying in with the religious dogma she’d heard from her Grandmother and Father. Listening to music by Nick Cave and Johnny Cash helped me establish the mood at times and gave me the impetus to embrace the flaws and the darkness. When I was writing the first drafts, I was living near the beach and the waves, particularly during storms, formed a natural soundtrack. If I peered out from my desk, I could catch glimpses of the ocean. By the time editing was underway, I had moved to a house that backed onto the bush and had inherited a cat. Listening to the raucous native birds, possums scurrying up trees and across the roof at night, dealing with the odd snake and lizards, plus watching the cat, heightened those natural elements of the story.

coal_cliff_viewI was concerned about and for my characters. I needed to ensure that Arthur in particular had moments, however fleeting, when he was ‘human’, and that Ellie, despite her circumstances, not be passive. I found myself going off in tangents in early drafts with minor characters and subplots but judicious readers and editing brought the focus back to Ellie and Arthur, and the confines of restricted world they inhabit.

I had thought of letting Ellie go one morning years ago when I woke up and heard the news about Elizabeth Fritzl kidnapped and abused by her father. In my drowsy state listening to the radio, the reality of her situation came crashing in and I wanted to put my humble writings aside. What was fictional pain in the face of such devastating reality? Even in 2018, the newsfeed this week is full of children being trapped at home by their parents, the neighbours unaware. Path to the Night Sea is my way of using language to explore familial dysfunction, small town horror, and ultimately, hope.

Regal House author Alicia Gilmore

 

Alicia Gilmore lives in New South Wales, Australia. Her debut, Path to the Night Sea, is a contemporary gothic novel exploring the dark secrets hidden within an otherwise idyllic coastal setting. Alicia has had short stories published in Phoenix and Cellar Door. In 2012, she was a contributing writer and lead editor of Burbangana. In 2009, Alicia received an Allen & Unwin / Varuna Publishers Fellowship that included a residency at Varuna, the NSW Writers’ Centre.

Filed Under: Regal Authors, Regal House Titles Tagged With: Alicia Gilmore, Path to the Night Sea, Regal House, regal house publishing

A note from our senior editor

January 9, 2017 4 Comments

Books on the stairsRegal is a marvelous House, founded as it is on Jaynie’s passion for involving literature and her devotion to the authors who write it. When Jaynie asked me to help her lay bricks as the Senior Editor, I was—and still am—over the moon (don’t worry; there’s Internet here and manuscripts reach me even through the sublunary atmosphere). Jaynie and I share a desire—one that drives many independent publishers—to return to a publishing ethos in which authors are treated with courtesy and respect and their works are edited conscientiously and with great care. We meld traditional, intense, editorial engagement with the technology that enables small presses to publish noteworthy literature that might otherwise languish undiscovered and unread.

Jaynie and I also share an approach that is so simpatico, it is difficult not to believe that fate brought us together. Our perspectives are almost always in sync, and when they aren’t, they neatly complement each other. We sing either in unison or in harmony. (That’s metaphorical; it is only on occasion or accident that I can even carry a tune.)

The books we publish move and astonish; they tell stories that build their own edifices in the souls of their readers. After an author has worked extensively with Jaynie, the manuscript comes to me. With a fresh pair of eyes, I look for remaining developmental issues and do a thorough copy edit. I put together a style sheet to ensure consistency in spelling, punctuation, the expression of numbers (when to spell them out and when to use digits) and dates, conformity to U.S. or U.K. conventions, and notes on authorial preferences. I check to make sure the chapter titles and the pages given in the Table of Contents match the chapters in the book and that footnotes are sequential. I correct grammar, punctuation, spelling, syntax, spacing, and usage, and make suggestions for diction, awkwardness, jargon, wordiness, paragraphing, and terms that should be defined. I note permissions that are needed, facts that should be verified, and gaps in organization or logic. I believe in the importance of a balanced edit—let’s face it, page after page of corrections can get pretty disheartening—so I also point out what makes the manuscript excel: luminous passages, apt word choices, insightful characterization, intriguing plot points, and evocative imagery.

All this happens in two stages, or “passes.” The first pass I do the old-fashioned way, on paper, pencil in hand. The second pass is done in Microsoft Word using Track Changes. As I incorporate the manual edits into the computer file, I look for errors and felicities I missed during the first read-through. For me, the combination of approaches enables a more thorough edit, one that uses different parts of my brain.

Once the author, Jaynie, and I agree that revisions are complete and Jaynie has formatted the text, I perform a final proofreading to catch the errors that inevitably creep in during re-writes and formatting. Our rigorous editing process is a vital facet of what makes Regal a stand-out publishing house.

Another tool in my editing kit is my scholarly background. I am an independent scholar of Medieval and Early Modern literature. I came of academic age at the end of the New Critical movement and was steeped in the importance of a close reading, a habit of mind I bring to bear as I edit. My own historical inquiries allow me to appreciate the time and effort required to piece together research-rich novels that give new life to past events and cultures while making space in that milieu for the characters and events created in the mind of an author.

An independent contractor, I usually work at home but am known to lurk in coffee houses for a change of scenery. Although I’m not much of an imbiber, one of my favorite editing haunts has become Conor O’Neil’s—sort of Boulder’s version of Cheers. Conor’s serves an out-of-this-world Irish Soda Bread Pudding with absolutely decadent vanilla ice cream lightly sprinkled with cinnamon (and the pudding has eggs in it and the ice cream has calcium, so they count as health food). I am sure that I edit both more accurately and more kindly while consuming this dish. However, tragedy struck when the pub recently closed when its landlord imposed a heavy rent increase. I was distraught. Fortunately, a significant portion of the community shared my distress. A petition and letter-writing campaign succeeded in bringing about a compromise that allowed the pub to re-open. Now I can continue to have my edits sweetened by the congenial atmosphere and my favorite dessert. Huzzah for the power of words to rectify what would have been a sad loss to the community and sent me on a search for a new place to lurk.

The power of words and of language to create new concepts, to persuade us to re-engage with familiar ideas, to forge new worlds and even new civilizations (yes, I am also a sci-fi geek) informs my commitment to supporting authors as they bring forth new works. I couldn’t be more proud of my association with Regal and with Jaynie, nor more pleased to have found a publishing house that shares my faith in the need for literature that opens our minds and broadens our souls.

Ruth Feiertag

Filed Under: Regal House Titles Tagged With: content editing, editing, regal house publishing, ruth feiertag

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