Fall 2008 Newsletter
In this issue:
Grand Opening - Book Club with House Blend - 100 Years of Anne - Kids Review: Going, Going, Gone! - Craft Book Review: A Greener Christmas - Author Interview: Claire LaZebnik
After years of planning and preparation, sisters Amy Jernigan and Laura Hill have opened their own bookstore in downtown Dickson. A product of Amy’s accounting background and Laura’s work in independent bookstores, Reading Rock Books offers a wide selection of new books. The store also carries journals, locally-made pottery, elegant bookmarks, Bearfoots bear figurines from Big Sky Carvers, and a small selection of book-related toys.
Officially open for business on August 1, Reading Rock Books had its Grand Opening on September 6, following a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Sept. 3. The Grand Opening was an “open house” held at the store from 10AM to 7PM.
Coinciding with the Grand Opening, Reading Rock Books kicked off its IndieBound program. IndieBound is a network of independent bookstores, all members of the American Booksellers Association, that promotes shopping locally and supporting other independent businesses. Similar in focus to the Dickson County Chamber of Commerce’s “Be Local” campaign, IndieBound celebrates small businesses and their great financial impact on and contributions to the community.
As part of IndieBound, Reading Rock Books will have monthly displays featuring titles from the Indie Next List, which have been chosen by other Indie stores. Copies of the Indie Next List will be available as well.
Reading Rock Books and House Blend, the popular downtown coffeehouse, are starting a book club. The club will meet once a month to discuss a different book.
Each month, that month’s selected title will be available at Reading Rock Books for 15% off. Meetings will be held at House Blend on the last Tuesday of the month at 6:30PM. The first meeting will be on Sept. 30.
This month’s selection is Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, a quietly moving novel about a 67-year-old man remembering the summer he was 15 and WWII had just ended. Winner of several awards, including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Where: House Blend
What: Book Club discussing Out Stealing Horses
When: Sept. 30, 6:30PM
Discount at RRB: 15%, on selected title
by Amy Jernigan
One of my all-time favorite books is Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery. When I watched the 1985 TV movie version, I was hooked. My grandmother told me that as a child her grade school teacher had read the book to the class and she loved it. She recommended that I read the book since I loved the movie so much. I took her advice and found that the phrase “the book is better than the movie” is definitely the case here. As much as I loved the movie and how it captured the essence of each character, the book could go so much deeper and explore more of the characters personalities. Once I read Anne of Green Gables, I had to read all the rest of the fourteen books in the Anne series.
For those who have not read Anne of Green Gables, it takes place in the small town of Avonlea on Prince Edward Island, Canada. Siblings Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, both unmarried and in their sixties, live in their family home of Green Gables. They decide to send for a boy from the local orphanage to help them on the farm. The orphanage mistakenly sends Anne Shirley, an eleven-year-old girl instead. Matthew is immediately taken with Anne and convinces a reluctant Marilla to keep her. After a short trial period, they decide to keep Anne permanently. They enroll her in school where she excels with the help of her teacher Miss Stacey and the rivalry she formed with Gilbert Blythe to be the best in class. Anne also forms many lasting relationships, but none more important than her best friend and kindred spirit Diana Barry. Anne of Green Gables is a wonderful timeless book that is suitable for any age and will make you laugh and cry at the same time.
In 1994, I had the wonderful opportunity of visiting Prince Edward Island (PEI) with my family. We were able to see many of the landmarks that are mentioned in the book, including the original home that served as the inspiration for Green Gables, the “Lake of Shinning Waters” and a visit to Charlottetown. After having read all fifteen of the Anne books, I felt as if I could have found my way through Green Gables. I could imagine Anne standing at the “Lake of Shinning Waters” with Diana. I was continually overwhelmed with the beauty of PEI and then understood how Montgomery could come up with the beautiful descriptions of the scenery.
2008 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Anne of Green Gables. On Prince Edward Island there is a year-long celebration with a long list of events. For more information you can visit www.Anne2008.com.
In the month of September, Reading Rock Books will have its own celebration of Anne with a display of 100th Anniversary edition books and Anne collectibles. Please come and join us!
Kids’ Review: Going, Going, Gone!
by Colton Jernigan, age 8
In Going, Going, Gone! With the Pain & the Great One, Jack (the Pain) and his older sister Abigail (the Great One) go to the beach during summer vacation and they go to the store and get boogie boards, but only one of them wants to ride the boogie boards. They also go to the mall with their dad and the Pain gets lost and goes “down the Up escalator” to get back to them when he hears his name on the intercom. My favorite part is when the Pain says his favorite breakfast cereal is “Cream of Wheat because it’s white. I only like white foods.” I really liked this book because it was funny and fun to read!
Craft Book Review: A Greener Christmas
by Laura Hill
It may not be time to hang the twinkle lights just yet, but crafters are already getting in gear for Christmas. Making gifts takes time. With Sheherazade Goldsmith’s new book, A Greener Christmas, creating the perfect gift may also be a chance to get outside and see what natural craft materials you can find—for free.
Goldsmith’s book is environmentally friendly, but it’s not a didactic approach. She doesn’t guilt you into making gifts with things you’d rather throw away. Instead, it feels more like it could’ve been titled How to Have a Homespun Christmas. Goldsmith’s beautiful book is filled with projects that bring the outside world into your home and repurpose quality materials you already have.
In her section covering tree decorations, Goldsmith has examples of various ornaments made from dried fruits and leaves. Not only are they pretty, but the combinations of such things as dried orange slices and cinnamon sticks would smell terrific. If dried fruit isn’t your thing, you might like her blanket-stitched felt bird or iced gingerbread ornaments.
Goldsmith’s ideas for gifts include chutneys and jellies, flavored alcohol, and homemade lip balm. Her slippers made from an old scarf look warm and adorable. Along with ideas for the gifts themselves, Goldsmith gives tips on how to wrap your presents without using store-bought wrapping paper, which “constitutes one of the biggest sources of waste over Christmas.”
Best of all, the directions in A Greener Christmas are very well done. There’s a photo for almost every step, something that is often lacking in books of this nature. The photos are beautiful and the projects would be appropriate for beginning to expert crafters.
Author Highlight: Claire LaZebnik
Claire LaZebnik is the author of three novels, including the recently released The Smart One and the Pretty One, and is co-author of the non-fiction book Overcoming Autism.
RRB: All your novels take place in Los Angeles. How does setting figure into your writing process? Your bio says you grew up in Massachusetts. Do you find it easier/more fun to write about your current location than your previous one?
CL: Much, much easier, for two reasons. One is that I have an awful memory. Truly dreadful. I'm the kind of person who has to be introduced to someone ten times before I'll remember his name and story. So even though I lived in the Boston area for the first twenty years of my life, I have trouble reconstructing it in my mind. That's partially because of reason number two: I didn't learn to drive when I was in Massachusetts. I got my license in LA. It's amazing how much better you get to know a place when you can drive (other than Manhattan or other walkable cities). I have a pretty good sense of LA geography at this point but I can't find my way from point A to point B in the Boston area.
I did start a novel at one point that was about a young woman who moves from Cambridge, MA to LA in the course of the story and I was going to really explore the differences between the two places and what it's like to be from one and move to the other--but that idea ended up getting nixed for other reasons and I went on to write The Smart One and the Pretty One, which is all LA all the time.
RRB: Sisters and sisterhood are important in all your novels. How much of your personal life would you say is responsible for that? What do you think it is about that dynamic that makes for such good reading?
CL: The first question is easy to answer: I'm the youngest of four girls (and one boy) so sisters loom very large in my life. I wrote a personal essay for SELF magazine last year that was all about how hard it's been for me to define myself without comparisons to my sisters and how that's affected who I am today. So it wasn't a huge leap for me to focus on the sibling relationship in this novel.
In my first novel (Same as It Never Was), the protagonist (Olivia) ends up taking care of her half-sister (Celia), but even though they're sisters, I always felt that their relationship was really a metaphor for young motherhood. I wanted to convey that feeling you sometimes get when you're a mother (especially at the beginning) of "Wait, how did I end up here, with this kid, living this life?" Most of us can stop and say, "Oh, right, I chose this," but since Olivia can't, it really exaggerates that almost panicky feeling of finding yourself suddenly responsible for another human being.
I guess my second novel (Knitting Under the Influence)WAS about sisterhood, as you put it. But friendships are pretty different from sibling relationships because you get to choose your friends and you can walk away from them if you don't mesh anymore, whereas sisters are sisters for life. Which means you can piss each other off and be furious and stop talking--but still call on each other for help in an emergency. Because nothing can make you NOT siblings, sisters can be far more honest with each other than friends can. And, like parents, your sister will tell you exactly what your problems are in the hopes of getting you to fix them. (Whether that's truly helpful or not is open for debate.) Friends mostly just accept you the way you are.
So all that's interesting to me. And then you add in the fact that families really do tend to label their children, even if no one sets out to do that. The more one kid prides herself on her intelligence, the harder her siblings are going to look for something else to take pride in. It's just too hard to compete. And parents often make the problem worse, saying things like "this is our athlete," or "this one's our reader." They don't mean to set up comparisons, but there's still an unspoken rebuke to the other kids. Families are wonderfully complicated, aren't they?
RRB: What was it like having Same As It Never was turned into the TV movie "Hello Sister, Goodbye Life"? Your sister was one of the movie's writers. How did you feel about the choices she made with your story?
CL: My sister wrote the first draft and was really torn, because the network wanted her to change pretty much everything about the story and she felt a lot of loyalty to me. In the end, they brought another writer in for the next draft--Nell was trying too hard to salvage my original story, I think, and that wasn't really what they wanted. To give the network credit, though, they paid me for the rights to the book, and given how far the movie ended up straying from it, that was really decent and kind of them.
The original book had two main stories: Olivia's growing acceptance of Celia's presence in her life, and her two-suitor love triangle. The network kept some of the sister stuff but completely altered the romantic story and that was really painful to me. I loved the romance--I had based it a bit on Emma's relationship with Mr. Knightley and how he's so quick to teach and correct her that it takes her a long time to realize there's love there, too. Olivia's dawning realization that she's loved and loves the guy back was my favorite part of the book, so to have it all taken out of the movie was agonizing. Welcome to Hollywood, I guess.
Still, it was an exciting thing to have a movie based on my book, and I'd do it again in a second. The movie was shot in New Orleans, just two weeks before Katrina, and my husband and I actually went to visit the set. It was an amazing trip made unspeakably poignant by the destruction that followed so soon after. So that's something else the movie gave me: a visit with the old New Orleans.
RRB: How is your writing process different when you're writing nonfiction? Do you find that one or the other, fiction or nonfiction, is easier or more natural?
CL: Fiction is more fun, nonfiction is more like doing homework.
The good part of writing the non-fiction books is I get to do that with a writing partner, Dr. Lynn Koegel. Most of the time, Lynn will start a chapter off, getting the important information down, and then pass it on to me--I add my parts and do a little editing and rearranging. So Lynn saves me from ever having to stare at a blank page and think, "How am I going to start this thing?" and I think I save her from fretting over whether her stuff is absolutely perfect, because she knows I'm going to take a look at it and fix anything that needs fixing. It's been a really easy, fun, and productive partnership--long may it last.
With the novels, I'm on my own. It's me and the computer screen. But I love to think about the novels, even when I'm not actively writing. It's a bit like daydreaming: I can be doing something boring and let my mind wander to stuff like, "What should the characters say in the next scene? What should her mother be like? Is there a twist I could put in somewhere?" That's all fun and lively and imaginative. And you don't get that with the non-fiction--you have to stick to the facts, ma'am. But I've had amazing e-mails from people who have found our books on autism really helpful, and that more than makes up for not getting to be imaginative.
I'm so lucky to get to do both!
RRB: When you wrote Knitting Under the Influence, did you already know how to knit? How did you come to make knitting such a big part of your book?
CL: Believe it or not, it was my husband's idea to have the girls knit together. I was trying to think of some reason to get these women together on a regular basis and he said, "I've noticed a lot of young woman are knitting these days--why don't you have them do that?" He's a writer himself, by the way--a TV writer, currently on "The Simpsons," so he's always helpful with anything I'm working on.
It was the perfect solution because I was already a knitter. I taught myself to knit in high school, from a book, and kept it up into adulthood. Unfortunately, once we had a lot of pets and kids, I found it hard to keep knitting--the cats and dogs always got tangled up in the yarn and the kids would accidentally pull the needles out. So I actually had stopped for a while, but when I was working on KUI, I started knitting again, and it was great. It's so therapeutic! I'm currently knitting my husband a sweater, but I have to admit that I take a lot of breaks from it to make scarves. Scarves are so satisfying because you can finish them quickly. I have this one pattern I love--it uses short rows and that makes the scarf get all twisty. I've made a bunch of those.
The good thing about putting "knitting" into the title and cover of that book is that it gave me an in with women who like to knit, who I think would check the book out just because of that. When I was promoting the book, I'd go to different yarn stores and do readings while women knit there and that was really fun. The bad side of it was that serious knitters sometimes criticized my book for not having "enough" knitting or not being "serious enough" about knitting. But the book was never really meant to be ABOUT knitting--it's really about being young and growing up and having to make decisions and so on. The knitting's just one small part of it.
RRB: I went to a reading you gave at a yarn store in 2006. When you explained that Lucy was knitting her boyfriend a sweater, there was an audible groan reaction from all the women there currently knitting. Did you often get that reaction at readings? What, if anything, did your experiences with knitters teach you about how much we're all willing to give of our time or take risks of that magnitude?
CL: Well, first of all, I made that mistake! I knit a sweater for a former boyfriend. If memory serves me correctly (and it might not, it's been a while), it came out really well. It was a ton of work, and realizing that he would probably never wear it again because we had broken up, and that it would probably end up in the trash or donated to Goodwill for some stranger to wear--that was a little painful. After that experience, it took me a while to commit to knitting a sweater for my now-husband. But we've been together for over two decades, so I think it's pretty safe.
These days nothing is more valuable than time, so putting your free time and energy into making something for someone else is about as intimate a gesture as you can make. Honestly, I think the very act of knitting a sweater for someone forces you to evaluate how strong that relationship is! But knitters are nothing if not committal. I've seen women working on projects that will take more hours to complete than everything I've ever made put together. Beautiful ones, too.
That was the other fun part about going to the yarn stores to read, by the way--I got to see the most incredible projects, like this all-white knitted full-length coat someone had made and was wearing. It made my mouth water, it was so gorgeous. But at this stage of my life, I can't start anything that time-consuming. When I'm older . . .
RRB: What are you reading right now?
CL: I finished "Watchmen" last night! It was fantastic. Very dark but so great. I read a ton of fantasy. I'm almost done with Robin Hobb's most recent trilogy. I also just finished a 5 Spot book, Conversations with the Fat Girl by Liza Palmer, which I really enjoyed. I tend to read a lot of kids' books because my kids like me to read what they're reading and I think a lot of them are pretty great, like Nancy Farmer's books. And of course Harry Potter--I'm a huge Harry Potter fan.
RRB: What writers have had the biggest influence on your work?
CL: That's a hard one! When I was in middle and high school, I'd unconsciously start writing in the style of whoever I was reading at the time. One of my teachers pointed it out, so then I started writing deliberate parodies. I figured if I was going to copy someone, I should do it on purpose. Now I try very hard NOT to imitate anyone.
Stephen King's book On Writing made a huge impression on me--I think it's brilliant and it affirmed my own feelings that if the story and the characters are interesting, you don't need to gussy it all up with fancy verbiage. (Like "verbiage.") I like to say that "Shampoo, rinse, repeat" is the most well-written sentence in the English language--it says what it needs to say with no extraneous words. I really try to write as simply as I can.
And, you know, I love Austen, Bronte, and Dickens with all my heart. But to say they "influenced" me is too grandiose a statement. I just love them.
RRB: What can you tell us about The Smart One and the Pretty One?
CL: My parents always used to joke around about how they were going to marry us off to their friends' kids (which I found incredibly embarrassing), so for some reason I was thinking about that, and it seemed possible to me that, under the right (tipsy) conditions, parents might sit down and write out a marriage contract as a joke. So I thought about what would happen if a now grown-up daughter were to stumble across that contract and feel like she should hold the guy to it. That was the original germ of the idea, but as I started working on it, it felt a little unrealistic to me so I changed it to her SISTER's finding the contract and it became a story about sisters and how they interact and force each other to do certain things.
One interesting side note is that there were three sisters in the original couple of drafts: the smart one, the pretty one, AND the responsible one. The oldest sister even had a husband and two kids. But the novel just didn't feel tight enough at that point, and after my editor and I had talked about the whole "smart one and pretty one" concept, I decided the focus would get much sharper if I just cut the oldest sister and her family. I think it was the right decision but it was a little painful. I really liked them.
Anyway, the point of the book ultimately is that the smart sister is pretty and the pretty sister is smart--they just have to realize and accept that, but they kind of fight it because they've staked out their territories for so long. Along the way, they have romances and they grow up a bit and they realize how much they love their mother and a bunch of other things happen . . . I think it's a fun read with a serious side to it. I hope so.