I've just been thinking (ruminating) about the unassuming open. Two came to mind (Mohsin Hamid's "Exit West" and Ann Napolitano's "Hello Beautiful") that I hesitated to mention in class because I didn't want to suggest that these giants write shyly. But I meant to say that these openings I love have a quiet confidence. There's no elaborate tap dance only to be subsumed by a quiet stroll up the hill. No need to draw unnecessary attention to itself. Just an invitation.
I used to be obsessed with figure skating and grew up in the Michelle Kwan era. Her poise, fluidity of movement between the axels and spins, connected to the music and the feelings she showed so plainly on her face. She was a storyteller. I'll remember the young ones who defeated her in the Olympics for their powerful jumps. (And my massive resentment that they stole her crown because I'm petty about that still.) But I remember Kwan's skating for the totality of her performance.
Scrapped versions of my own opening didn't work because they didn't have continuity with the story that followed. As an outsider to the literary world I think I've felt the need to really grab the reader by the collar or do a lot of unnecessary verbal contortions to prove my chops. Which is to say I didn't yet have that confidence to let the story speak for itself. But the older I've gotten the more I realize that how I write isn't as important as what I have to say. That if I've got the content clearer in my mind, then the form and structure follow more organically. Even the language. And hopefully the opening, although I haven't yet found an opening for my novel that I love.
Lots of great food for thought from yesterday's class and some ideas for how to re-read those openings I love to see how the heck they did it.
"quiet confidence" is such a beacon. EXIT WEST is a fantastic book-- so quiet but so so powerful. Yet in the first paragraph, we get the stakes right away. The city is swollen with refugees...but the city is still mostly at peace. At this point, people, like Nadia still have the luxury of wearing mostly what they want. It's the use of "still" twice that shows where the stakes lie, these are the breadcrumbs leading us toward what is to come...
See everyone this evening for the workshop! I am late to the party but in the interests of being part of this opportunity to share and learn, see below the novel I have begun querying to agents in the past two weeks. I've worked and reworked the first pages again and again but open to learning more as I want to get these right.
Title: Rescuing Annie
Genre: Literary fiction
Description: After ending a thirty-year marriage to a man with a chronic case of failure to launch, Annie, at fifty-five, is on the verge of getting everything she’s ever wanted: a deal to publish her debut novel and life lived on her own terms. But trouble has a way of following Annie around. With her widowed mother in the grip of dementia, and siblings who can’t or won’t help, Annie must come to the rescue. Yet no sooner is her mother settled in her Florida condo when her twenty-something daughter calls from Paris, distraught over the sudden death of her best friend. Annie sees no choice but to fly to Paris with her mother in tow. Trying to juggle it all—her increasingly disoriented mother, a bereaved daughter she can’t seem to comfort and a publishing dream vanishing with every missed deadline—Paris becomes an irresistible diversion, especially when a romance begins to bloom with a handsome French artist who reminds her that part of herself is still very much alive. When her daughter disappears, and her alarmed ex takes the next flight out to Paris with an ulterior motive—he wants Annie back—complications reach a crescendo. There simply isn’t enough of her to go around. As her mother slips further away, Annie must confront what it really means to choose herself after a lifetime as the good daughter, the good wife and the good mother—learning that freedom was hers for the taking all along.
Page One:
The howler monkeys woke her with their deep, throaty growls burrowing through her dreams. Annie pushed aside the sheets and climbed out of bed, stepping out onto the small balcony. The air was hot and still, barely a breeze. The howlers’ low-pitched roars were coming from the thick upper canopy of the ficus tree outside her hotel window but she couldn’t spot them. Beneath her, vacationers in straw hats holding umbrella drinks stood at the bar at the hotel’s beach restaurant, their chatter rising on the wind. The sun was low in the sky; it would be setting soon. Annie had fallen asleep after the shuttle van dropped her at the hotel from the airport in Liberia. The flight from Miami to Samara on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast was only three hours but she’d arrived exhausted, carrying, it seemed, the weight of her hard-won divorce in her luggage. Now she felt buzzed with aliveness. The ocean always did that for her.
She opened her suitcase and pulled out the two-piece bathing suit she’d chosen with Sam’s help after a grueling couple of hours in harsh dressing room lighting. Buying a bathing suit after reaching a certain age was an ordeal she could only endure with her best friend. They’d finally settled on a blue floral bikini with a generous bottom that covered the fifteen pounds of post-divorce weight. Annie pulled it on now and after a cursory glance in the full-length mirror, she slipped on the white linen sundress she’d bought as her reward for the bathing suit agony. She tossed a towel, her wallet and a paperback into a cloth bag and took the two flights of stairs down to the lobby. She was allowed a drink before a swim, she decided. Isn’t this why her girlfriends had sent her to Costa Rica? It wasn’t just their sweet invitation of a beach retreat to push through the publisher’s deadlines for her debut novel, but a rite of passage to launch her new chapter after the end of a thirty-year marriage.
This description is just A+ and I love the opening pages-- starting with the "howler" monkeys is so threatening and interesting and makes us absolutely have to read on.
Description: An unassuming wine phenom with a perfect olfactory memory, searching for her missing fiancé, uncovers a treasure of rare wines, a web of deadly deceit, and the truth about herself.
Page 1:
Luc hurried. Heart racing, he thought of his cryptic note sent... a clue for Eugenia. All his plans relied upon her.
Without a sound, he vanished into the shadows of his cellar. The smothering clamminess of the caveau mixed with the rich aroma of the aging oak barrels and the acrid scent of his anxiety... The plan must work... He serpentined among the rows of bottles, each one holding the culmination of his sacrifices – family, friends, and now, Eugenia. He had poured his life into creating this collection where now, only the sound of his pounding heart cascaded across the dark space.
A bead of sweat crawled down his forehead as he wiped his damp palms against his pants, his eyes darting across the room, wary of discovery and failure. They might be closing in on him but he could still make it, and save everything. He gulped down the stale air of the cellar, clenched his jaws, and continued to his destination.
Time was running out. He navigated quickly and quietly, through the labyrinth of wood cases, wine racks, and aged casks, the low arched ceiling descending like a coffin lid. The cracked stone floors sweated subterranean dampness and the ancient brick walls absorbed all traces of light while amplifying every sound. The dankness of the cracked stone floor and the oppressive darkness of the ancient brick walls intensified his fear. If he failed, this vault, once his sanctuary, would become his tomb.
Stress began to surge through his veins as he searched for the chosen bottle, a decoy to mislead them. His skin prickled with unease, a sense of being followed, setting his shoulders on edge.
Thoughts of Eugenia propelled him forward as he tiptoed across the worn stones. His future depended on the bottles hidden within his cellar. He halted in a narrow hallway. He couldn’t be found. He had to disappear. He turned and retreated into a vast, shadowy room.
There, amidst his workshop of bottles, he found it. The key to his secret. With resolve, he stopped before the small bin, knowing that the right bottle would serve as the perfect clue to uncover his hidden treasure. Eugenia had to come.
His trembling fingers closed around the chosen child, a rare creation of a special bottle. Luc cradled the treasure as he raced around the corner, moving deeper into the heart of the cellar, and rested under an expired light bulb dangling like a hanged man. The engulfing darkness swallowed him as he vanished.
Title: In the Shelter of Pigs; The Conversion of a Heathen
Genre: Memoir
Description: Pigs as creatures are deemed dirty and filthy and yet yummy to eat, while "pig" as a word stands in for all kinds of pejoratives. At a formative time the author moved from a pig farm to suburbia, where her older brother and her younger sister became heroin addicts, and the author barely managed to graduate from high school. After traveling the country she converts from heathen to Christianity and marries a brilliant preacher who would also become a lawyer. The memoir follows cross country moves, cancer, marital turmoil, and the faith that holds her together. It follows a forty year marriage that may or may not survive.
PAGE 1:
I often return to a place of mental shelter, a pigpen with 16 shoats and I’m snuggled among them, soft grunts, a few tail biters. Most settle down around my legs in a soft pattern like argyle socks. One is taking a drink at a hose that drips into a trough. Drip Drip Drip, I hear thee water drip. Drip Drip Drip, it’s time to take a sip. I’m ten years old and have read Charlotte's Web five times. The shoats are quicker on the uptake than Wilber and at least one is a poet.
I’ve kept words for fifty years, beginning the first year I read Charlotte’s Web. I received a lockable diary but the lock scratched my right wrist and the tight binding kept closing. Eventually I found steno pads and spiral notebooks, a wide open binding as important as the meaning I poured into them. I wrote during the high school classes that I didn't skip and in code as a way to hide the truth from diary peepers. Eventually I realize that code had the advantage of modulating the scenes of the day even to myself.
Forty years later the notebooks remain unopened. I dread meeting the girl who wrote them. She was the middle child, and both her older brother and younger sister became early-teen heroin addicts. And both of them were gay, before it was an open thing, so the girl in the notebooks was the Marylin Munster who never fit into the Buddhist/Atheist family, since her gay sibs brought home gay friends and she brought home a Christian preacher. Her whole life she wondered about the better lives she saw in folks who attended church. They seemed to have a lighter step, more smiles. She doubted God existed only once when she learned about how Catholic Popes turned a blind eye to the Holocaust. She left home at 17 for the Grand Canyon, then to Hawaii to follow a boyfriend and then met the preacher.
Our grandpa molested my sibs and me. My brother got the worst of it. Maybe that’s why he found
a new narratives in heroin. But I didn’t remember the crimes until I was in my twenties, after my oldest was born, like an awake dream with flashes of him hovering over me with an erection. This was the first of many times that I didn’t protect my sister. I was six and she was four. When he didn’t receive satisfaction from me, because I stretched and rolled over, he walked around to her side of the bed and I lay paralyzed not knowing what to do. I called my sister when I was 24 and she confirmed that it was a real memory.
Description: The year is 1999 and 17-year-old Reyna Shulman, an Orthodox Jew, is experiencing a sexual awakening with her boyfriend, Ezra. Or, as much of a sexual awakening as she will allow herself, anyway, given that she’s been told what she does with her body today will determine her happiness tomorrow and, possibly, the eternal fate of the Jewish people. Reyna is coming of age in New Jersey at the turn of the millennium, a place and time of unprecedented peace and prosperity for the Jewish people. How to balance the electric charge of her body and mind with her community’s expectations of what she will do with them? What to make of her education in the cyclical nature of Jewish history, the idea that, while the players may change, Jewish precarity remains a constant?
Page One: Reyna, 1999
And it came to pass that Reyna Shulman and Ezra Redlich were taking each other’s clothes off in the backseat of Rey’s mom’s Jeep Grand Cherokee, which was parked in a dark corner of the Provident Bank parking lot, when a police officer knocked on the window, scaring the wits out of them both. The bank, owned by New Jersey real estate magnate Mitchell Lang, was across town from the kosher supermarket, and kosher pizza store, and all the other Jewish shops and restaurants where Rey and Ezra could have conceivably been seen by people who knew them. And so that bank parking lot was their spot, so empty at night and guarded by trees that Rey had finally stopped turning her head every couple of minutes to make sure no one was watching. You’re being paranoid, Ezra always said when she did that. Nobody’s here and nobody cares. We’re just teenagers fooling around, the most common thing in the world.
But the officer was in fact there and he did appear to care enough to prove that appearing normal, like everybody else, was no guarantee of safety. Wasn’t it always the case that just when the Jews started to feel comfortable there would come a menacing knock? That was the thing to remember, to never forget. When Rey tried to lower the window from the back seat, she found that the child safety feature was enabled, and so she had to climb into the front of the car and face the officer there. Her trembling index finger pressed the button, bringing the driver side window down just as Adam Duritz’s mournful voice faded out and the five-disc CD changer of which Beverly Shulman was so proud switched to its next disc, an album of religious songs sung by a boys’ choir. To Rey’s horror, the sweet, prepubescent voices escaped into the peaceful suburban night, announcing to the officer and anyone else in earshot that Jewish kids were somewhere they were not supposed to be.
If it's not too late, I'm attaching my first page.
1. Title: Broken Places
2. Genre: Literary fiction
3. Summary: A third year medical student has a psychotic break and winds up in the psych ward of the very hospital he'd been doing his training. There he meets another Indian patient, a pianist, who seems to know her way around a little too well. He gets entangled with her which leads to more problems in the end.
4. First page:
“Why do you want to be a doctor?”
Raj shifted in his seat. He felt keyed up from lack of sleep. He’d awoken at four that morning to drive from Ithaca to Rochester for the interview. His fourteenth since August and one of his last chances to get into medical school next fall. Last week his advisor warned Raj he needed to loosen up, work on his chairside manner, and convey poise and aptitude if he hoped to turn his losing streak around. What qualities did Raj seek in his doctors? Embody that, he said.
Dr. Stern, the interviewer, stared at Raj through gold-rimmed glasses. They’d both dressed well – Raj in a pinstriped suit and tie, Dr. Stern in suit jacket and slacks, with a navy bowtie. Raj had offered Dr. Stern a firm handshake, focused on every word he spoke, and sat up with his back straight, legs relaxed, and hands folded. No twiddling. No dropping the fixed façade of calm. While inside, his body rocked with fear.
“Um,” Raj said. He cast his gaze downward, away from Dr. Stern’s face. He knew better than to hesitate or show unease. But he couldn’t put together a single thought.
Raj had rehearsed his answers in the car. While the vineyards unfolded on one side of the view, Cayuga Lake on the other, he focused on the road, the hum of the steering wheel against his palms, affecting the steely gaze of a man in charge. He replayed his advisor’s talking points during their last prep session. Raj had a 3.8 GPA from Cornell. Research experience at NIH and a Hughes Scholarship, both projects on mitochondria. Volunteer work for the Red Cross, certification as an EMT, and two years working at Cayuga Medical Center. Everything he needed to succeed, except confidence.
He tried to keep his gaze fixed on Dr. Stern’s hairline, to maintain the facade of eye contact. Instead, he peered behind him at the window. A blue, cloudless sky mocked his
Description: Arthur Plaid's once revered restaurant has fallen on hard times. To keep his business going he convinces his wildly wealthy best friend Dale Fender to sell his father's wine collection. But when the wine turns out to be damaged and ruined, they are undeterred and conspire to make and sell painstakingly forged facsimiles of rare wine to New York City’s wealthiest collectors.
DECEMBER 15, 2017
Anyone who knew me knew not to call at 8:30pm on a Friday night. Certainly not a Friday night in December.
My phone vibrated as my corkscrew punctured the cork in a bottle of 2005 Dujac Malconsorts. The bottle of wine was for Lamar Tent, recently the subject of the article The King of Wine Collectors, featured on the NY Times Sunday Magazine’s cover. His spritely assistant had called earlier, charged more than I made in a month to Lamar’s card, and asked for the bottle to be opened and decanted two hours prior to Mr. Tent’s reservation. His reservation was in thirty minutes. I could say I’d been too caught up in service, lost track of time. I’d worked dining room floors for over twenty years and could toss off a casual lie to cover up a service misstep as easily as I could put one foot in front of the other. But when it came to Lamar Tent, I was equal parts terrified to see him and deeply annoyed that despite my best efforts to stash myself in the kind of tired, off the radar restaurant I’d spent my entire career avoiding, he’d found me anyway. Since the call with his assistant verified that his reservation wasn’t some elaborate prank, I’d been tracking time on the TV in the bar, the reservation system at the maître d stand, the point-of-sale terminals in the service station. I knew the time. I guess I hoped that by not opening his wine, I’d send some sort of cosmic smoke signal into the frigid New York night, and he’d decide to dine elsewhere. My entire year had been jammed full of wishful thinking. Why stop now?
I cradled Lamar’s bottle at a forty-five-degree angle with my left hand, its white label fading to yellow at the edges, and twisted the screw in with my right; the delicate and damp cork gave way too easily, started to crumble. Of course, the damn bottle wasn’t cooperating. I gripped the corkscrew tighter, sweating. If I pushed too hard, the cork would snap. If I didn’t push hard enough the point wouldn’t catch and I’d end up forcing the cork deeper into the neck of the bottle. There was no back up; not many restaurants in the world still had the wine on their lists period. From the inside pocket of my suit jacket, my phone kept buzzing.
Best wishes for a speedy recovery, Courtney, and long blissfully-uninterrupted nights of sleep.
Title: Andreja/In the Claws of the Bear (working title)
Genre: Historical fiction
Description: For two years, Andreja, war widow and Partisan commando leader, has evaded her grief by hunting Nazi officers in the hills around occupied Trieste. When her estranged mother, Lidija, a Slovenian politician, enrages Tito, supreme commander of Partisan forces, it’s Andreja’s son Miha, a Partisan soldier, who takes a beating and gets dumped bloody on Lidija’s doorstep. Andreja and Lidija must find a way to work together to protect their family, their city and – if they’re very clever and very lucky – keep Slovenia out of Tito’s newly Communist Yugoslavia. Andreja’s desire to set a good example for Miha drives her to risk everything for the sake of Slovenia, her family, and her own wounded heart.
Page 1: September 8, 1943, Downtown Trieste
I last saw Renzo almost a year ago, just before his unit shipped out to Libya. The army gave us a weekend. Since then, every time I left the house meant a return trip down tidy Via Lazzaretto Vecchio, wondering. Wondering when he might return. Wondering when there might be a letter.
And missing him. Missing the sensation of his hand in mine. Missing our mountaineering and hunting adventures. Missing his smile every weekday morning when I arrived at our office after getting our son Miha off to school.
I’d found myself avoiding our favorite spots. The caffe’ on Via Cavana. The pasticceria in Piazza Hortis. But not the Molo Audace wharf just off Piazza Unita. There I could stand in even the coldest Bora Nera windstorm and imagine his troop ship appearing over the horizon.
It was now a hot September afternoon, nine months since Renzo’s last letter. At least that letter had come from Libya, so I knew he’d made it to Africa without having to swim. Many times I had fiercely imagined him there, in a truck, an armored car, a tank, anything but walking through sand dunes.
The British and Americans were winning, but there should still have been letters. Maybe he’d been captured. Maybe he was in a POW camp, working on his English.
I shoved my building’s old oak door open. I missed the aroma of my neighbor Elisabetta cooking ragu – meat was hard to come by -- and glanced up at my mailbox. Upper row, right corner, number 305. The small glass window showed something there.
I tugged at the front of my cotton frock in a vain effort to cool myself, then slid the little brass key into the mailbox lock and turned.
One letter, from the mayor’s office.
As I tore open the envelope, I had a vague feeling I shouldn’t do this alone. But I couldn’t think of anyone I wanted to be with, who was available anyway. It had been just me since Miha was drafted.
Dear Mrs. Cescutti, this Office offers you and your family our deepest condolences for the loss of your beloved, Royal Army Captain Lorenzo Cescutti, fallen in Tunisia for the greater glory of Italy, in the name of the King, under the orders of the Prime Minister.
Be proud of the glorious offering that must fill your soul with pride and that will comfort you in your pain. We stand with you in this time of mourning.
If this Office can assist you in navigating this difficult period, we beg you to contact us without hesitation.
That night, I started walking. All I could think about was that I had to tell Miha. Last I heard, he was somewhere in Croatia. I carried my mountaineering rucksack loaded with camping gear and food, my hunting rifle broken down and tucked inside.
I learned later that my timing was excellent: The next morning, German tanks rolled into Trieste.
Description: Jessie’s mother is dead, and Jessie’s estranged best friend Dez found part of the body. Can the traumatized women reconcile their past to untangle the secrets hiding the killer?
Dez would consider—in the hours after stumbling upon the body (or more accurately, one grisly piece of the body)—that she should have taken her doctor’s advice. Not regarding physical therapy or pain meds or icing routines, but what he’d said about horses. Handing her the requisite neck and shoulder injury pamphlets as she’d stiffly lowered herself off the exam table, he’d peered at her from under his grizzled grey eyebrows and growled—as if he’d known that as a jockey, she was going to reject his words just like she was going to throw away those handouts—that she ought to stay off horses. For three, maybe four weeks. At least until she got back to Kentucky.
Then again, Dez had never been that good at doing what she was told.
Rising from another night of tossing and turning, still stiff and sore, Dez decided—doctor’s advice be damned—that she’d had enough of recovery, putting air quotes around the word in her mind. Two confining weeks of soul-splitting stillness had been more than enough. Outside of her daily physical therapy appointments (part of her doctor’s advice she’d followed), her inactivity had been broken only by the snap and crackle of Thoroughbred racing magazines, the insistent dinging of texts from horse trainers, the auctioneer-like voices of announcers calling races on her iPad. All of which Dez consumed while alternating between trying to sleep and repeating her therapy exercises as she willed her muscles to heal, restlessness popcorning inside her. And restlessness—much like the mane of fiery red corkscrew curls dancing on her shoulders—was something she’d never been able to subdue for long periods of time.
She slipped silently from her parents’ house in the cool pre-dawn air and speed-walked to her car. Putting her foot to the accelerator, she drove toward her destination like someone making up lost time after being stuck for miles on a two-lane road behind a Sunday driver.
Description: A dual coming-of-age story set both in 1970s New York City and in 1993 Ann Arbor, where a 15-year-old girl embarks on a quest to solve a mystery from her secretive mother’s past.
Page 1: 1993
That night, Jessamyn was searching her kitchen for popcorn.
She was hot, and tired, and losing her patience, and Ellie, hunched over a cassette tape’s liner notes at the kitchen table, was oblivious. But it was Thursday, which meant it was Movie Night, and Movie Night meant popcorn for dinner. This was the rule that Ellie had made when she was five, and Jessamyn wasn’t about to break it. A 15-year-old who still spent time with her mother was to be indulged, to a point.
“Did you move the popcorn?” she asked Ellie.
“Why would I have moved it?”
“I don’t know, but it’s not where it’s supposed to be. Maybe the last time you had Celia over?”
“Mom. I didn’t move the popcorn.” Ellie looked up from her reading to roll her eyes.
Was that necessary, Jessamyn almost said. But she lacked the will for an upbraiding. Her thoughts were still at the record store, which had been slow today. This was part of being a shop owner in a midwestern university town: when the students left for the summer, they took their money with them.
But there was a fine line between slow and dead, and Jessamyn worried, as she always did, about crossing that line and staying there. The prospect of another long July might not have been quite so bad on its own, but her worries preferred to travel in packs. There was also the matter of her new front desk clerk, initially so reliable, who had started arriving late and perfumed with alcohol. There was the Tower Records on the other side of campus, now rumored to be in talks to double its space. And there was the UPS man whose repeated requests for her phone number had to be handled with care, lest some misfortune befall her daily deliveries.
Title: We All Fall Down: How an MS diagnosis blew up my life. And made me strong enough for love. ...with a little help from psychedelics
Genre: Memoir
Description: At thirty-five years old in 2014, I was living the single-girl careerist dream that “Sex and the City” had made so aspirational. I had a great job as a freelance event producer rubbing shoulders with celebrities like Lady Gaga or the casts of Gilmore Girls and The West Wing, with boozy work trips to fancy festivals in Cannes and Monte Carlo. It was en route to South by Southwest, a festival in Austin, Texas, where the story of the life I’d known ended, and another one began.
Prologue
Had I known what was going to happen, would I have boarded that plane?
Chapter 1:
High Flying (Too Close to the Sun)
March 2014
"Ladies and gentlemen, we are on the Stetson & Six-String Express, direct from John F Kennedy to Texas. Buckle your seatbelts snuggly above your brass belt buckles and we’ll be departing shortly. "
No, the pilot did not announce that, but from the number of cowboy hats and acoustic guitar cases stashed (and taking up all the room) in the overhead compartments, that’s what it feels like. Now, we just need a little George Strait piped in as we taxi for takeoff. These aren’t real Texans, mind you. The Western wear accouterments are just business. Cowboy hats and big ‘ole belt buckles are added flair for the black-shirt-and-blue-jean-clad New Yorkers headed down south.
I know another secret about this group. Even though our tickets say we’re going to Houston, Texas, I know that all those guitar cases are ultimately headed to Austin, just like me. Many of us will Oregon-Trail ourselves the two hours from Houston to Austin via bus, friends or rental cars to save on what a flight directly into Austin costs during the city’s biggest event of the year— South By Southwest. This music, film and tech conference has been going strong for decades and only gets more popular. It’s quite a scene—big brands take over every square foot of downtown while small-ish musical acts will vie for the attention of the marketing execs working for those brands. In addition to considerable amounts of alcohol for days on end, also in the mix: indie movies making a stop on the film festival circuit, and tech giants holding court on panels in the conference center, speaking on everything from social media to sustainable local food sources. Sometimes these speakers are my friends, though I’m nowhere near notable enough for anything that would place me on a panel along with tech disruptors or innovators. I’m just going to Austin to throw a party. That was the plan.
Logline: A trauma therapist hunts down the truth about a triple homicide her uncle committed one street away in 1983 when she was five, embarking on a journey of how to heal from a trauma she doesn't remember.
*
THE GHOSTS OF ALDER PLACE
A Memoir
*
“The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection.” - Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
*
The Legend of The Ghosts
Buffalo, New York, July 1983
A Buffalo Evening Times reporter approached the house on Moore Avenue, with its white picket fence, and saw the girl in the red sundress riding her tricycle in the driveway of the house where the murderer had lived.
“Do you know Philip who lives here?” the woman asked the child.
The girl looked up from her tricycle. She thought about saying ‘I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,’ but didn’t.
“He’s my uncle,” the girl admitted instead. “He doesn’t live here anymore.” The girl had a pixie cut, with sandy-colored hair.
“He’s wanted by the police. He hurt some people last night. Do you know where he is?”
The girl stared up at the woman silently, pinching the strong Smurfette figure in the pocket of her red sundress. A green frog had been embroidered on the dress by one of her aunts, as if leaping from the dress’s pocket. The girl did not particularly like the stranger, but she liked getting some attention, so her instinct to run to her mother was interrupted.
The woman had an urgency the girl could feel. Her stance and notepad reminded the girl of Nancy Drew, her favorite detective, except the reporter had feathered hair and blue bell bottoms.
At that very moment, the ghosts of the dead came floating down Moore Avenue.
They had left their house on Alder Place amidst the confusion of the crime scene that morning, floated past the tennis courts at the end of the street, come up along the railroad tracks with the Queen Anne's lace which always bloomed in July, and down along Moore, disturbed and looking for answers.
Thank you, Katrina. I appreciate those specifics. It's so helpful to get impressions on the first page.
Interesting to get clear about how to describe the genre. It could be more appropriate to use "hybrid memoir" alone without the "mosaic" indicator. I'm thinking about it. The work is experimental, made up of fragments, and includes some critical commentary/theory.
I am so excited for this masterclass and thank you so much for doing this! If nothing else, it made me sit down and think really hard about that first page. Wishing you the easiest and fastest recovery and hopefully it'll help!
Working title: The Dark Twin
Genre: Dark fantasy
Description: A haunting story about a witch who accidentally cursed her sweetheart to eternally fight to the death with none other than his own dark twin; and her quest to save him.
First page:
Dicentra felt a stab in her left finger, sharp like the breath she took, and watched a red stain spread on the creamy linen she was holding. It wasn’t much, from a quick needle prick, but the stain was unmistakably there. A bloody mark on her seemingly perfect life. Bad luck, bad luck, bad luck.
Lost, Dicentra looked around the room. Thirteen elder witches sat in a circle, cross-legged, right on the cold hard wood. Their voices rising together with the sun outside the window, singing the song they always sang on wedding mornings, on this land and back on the land they left behind. It was the song of their ancestors, so they sang it without question. The choir would seem ominous to any bystander, but Dicentra knew the meaning of the words. She closed her eyes for a brief moment to let the feeling in her chest bloom and settle.
She held her now stained wedding dress, linen softened by many washes, white but not quite white and could feel the texture gently scraping her fingertips, the folds of the fabric touching her thighs. But her focus was broken and her hand no longer worked on the stitching.
According to their customs, the coven would hand-stitch patterns on all wedding attire. Red guelder berries for passionate love; doves — union eternal; birch leaves — the strength of their coven; periwinkles — for protection. This was powerful magic, and Dicentra needed powerful. Only powerful could save her.
Dicentra’s handiwork was different to others, bright purple, she stitched more periwinkles than anything else. She avoided looking to her right all morning, but now she risked a glance, her face unmoving. Her mother sat there, focusing on her own task. She was working on Hunter’s ceremony shirt. At the sight, Dicentra’s face softened. She unclenched her jaw. The prospect of seeing Hunter so soon made everything better. She only wished her mother stitched more periwinkles on his shirt too. But his shirt was greener than anything, covered in delicate birch leaves.
Her mother, her mother, her mother. Dicentra’s life was polluted by her presence, whether she wanted it or not. But from today, she would no longer live under her mother’s roof, no longer need to say good morning to her, no longer need to pretend that their relationship was whole, loving, sincere. Today, she stepped out of her mother’s house, crossed that threshold, felt the gentle drop from the last step into the green grass beneath — and knew she would never come back. Today, her new life would begin.
Description: Jaime Martelino has a mom who’s disappeared, a billionaire narcissist dad, an asshole younger brother named Miko, and Pompy— a secret potbellied pig who was supposed to be a mini but just kept growing.
Jaime leaves home to save Pompy from being found and sent away by his dad, and to search for his mom, but Miko insists on coming and chaos ensues.
Page One:
I am worried about my pig.
He lives in our lanai and his name is Pompeo. His nickname is Pompy. He’s not officially my pig—my brother Miko ordered him from teacuppiggies.com without telling anyone, and the next day there was a tiny black and white pot-bellied piglet in our living room. He was pretty scared and kept running around on his hoofs that look like high heels, but then he calmed down and it was like he’d always been here.
Miko has never fed him, taken him to the vet, or given a shit about him since he got here, so I took over and now he’s mine. Pompy is still black and white, but the dude who sold him to my brother was definitely lying when he said he was a miniature. We watched him go from 18 pounds to 35…67...110. He’s at least 165 pounds by now and he’s not going to stop growing anytime soon. Which is kind of a problem.
See my dad, who pays for everything in this house and is NOT an animal lover, has no idea Pompy exists. Dad lives in our other house, in the village across from this one on Ortigas Ave. He comes to visit us every day for about five minutes, ten max.
It hasn’t been easy keeping Pompy a secret, that’s for sure. It helps that my dad is the least spontaneous person I know. We always know when he’s coming. Which is probably one reason my mom left him. That’s why my brother and I live in this house by ourselves.
Well actually—there’s our housekeeper Yaya, plus a cleaning lady, a driver, and two houseboys so we’re not really “by ourselves” come to think of it.
So anyway, when Dad says he’s coming, we hide Pompy next to the dirty kitchen and turn the music up to cover any grunts. The other day I left my phone upstairs and didn’t hear Dad calling. I walked into the living room and almost choked on the protein shake I was drinking when I saw him sitting in his emperor chair.
He yelled at me in his usual fatherly manner, glaring at the piles of dirty clothes that hadn’t made it to the laundry room, dumbbells, and other random stuff sitting on the Ming Dynasty opium bed in the middle of the living room.
“Putangina Jaime, do you know how much I paid Christie’s for that bed?! This house is one big garbage can! What the fuck do the maids do all day?! I don’t know how you and your brother can stand it here. You’re twenty years old already, when are you going to start acting like it?!”
I kept my cool. I thanked St Anthony (patron saint of pigs) that Pompy was asleep near the pool, out of Dad’s sight and not snoring, which he does sometimes.
I love the humorous tone of this narrator and the very fact of Pompy and how he is a secret. I felt riveted by the plight of these characters. Such fun and engaging writing. Love it.
😬😃 yes it is! May I also say that given your background in processing intergenerational trauma, it might interest you to know that PIG is actually about narcissism, but you may have already sussed that out 🐷😊
I've just been thinking (ruminating) about the unassuming open. Two came to mind (Mohsin Hamid's "Exit West" and Ann Napolitano's "Hello Beautiful") that I hesitated to mention in class because I didn't want to suggest that these giants write shyly. But I meant to say that these openings I love have a quiet confidence. There's no elaborate tap dance only to be subsumed by a quiet stroll up the hill. No need to draw unnecessary attention to itself. Just an invitation.
I used to be obsessed with figure skating and grew up in the Michelle Kwan era. Her poise, fluidity of movement between the axels and spins, connected to the music and the feelings she showed so plainly on her face. She was a storyteller. I'll remember the young ones who defeated her in the Olympics for their powerful jumps. (And my massive resentment that they stole her crown because I'm petty about that still.) But I remember Kwan's skating for the totality of her performance.
Scrapped versions of my own opening didn't work because they didn't have continuity with the story that followed. As an outsider to the literary world I think I've felt the need to really grab the reader by the collar or do a lot of unnecessary verbal contortions to prove my chops. Which is to say I didn't yet have that confidence to let the story speak for itself. But the older I've gotten the more I realize that how I write isn't as important as what I have to say. That if I've got the content clearer in my mind, then the form and structure follow more organically. Even the language. And hopefully the opening, although I haven't yet found an opening for my novel that I love.
Lots of great food for thought from yesterday's class and some ideas for how to re-read those openings I love to see how the heck they did it.
"quiet confidence" is such a beacon. EXIT WEST is a fantastic book-- so quiet but so so powerful. Yet in the first paragraph, we get the stakes right away. The city is swollen with refugees...but the city is still mostly at peace. At this point, people, like Nadia still have the luxury of wearing mostly what they want. It's the use of "still" twice that shows where the stakes lie, these are the breadcrumbs leading us toward what is to come...
Exit West, yes! And Hello Beautiful (not friend). My brain is not on this morning!!
Thank you Courtney. This made my day😀
See everyone this evening for the workshop! I am late to the party but in the interests of being part of this opportunity to share and learn, see below the novel I have begun querying to agents in the past two weeks. I've worked and reworked the first pages again and again but open to learning more as I want to get these right.
Title: Rescuing Annie
Genre: Literary fiction
Description: After ending a thirty-year marriage to a man with a chronic case of failure to launch, Annie, at fifty-five, is on the verge of getting everything she’s ever wanted: a deal to publish her debut novel and life lived on her own terms. But trouble has a way of following Annie around. With her widowed mother in the grip of dementia, and siblings who can’t or won’t help, Annie must come to the rescue. Yet no sooner is her mother settled in her Florida condo when her twenty-something daughter calls from Paris, distraught over the sudden death of her best friend. Annie sees no choice but to fly to Paris with her mother in tow. Trying to juggle it all—her increasingly disoriented mother, a bereaved daughter she can’t seem to comfort and a publishing dream vanishing with every missed deadline—Paris becomes an irresistible diversion, especially when a romance begins to bloom with a handsome French artist who reminds her that part of herself is still very much alive. When her daughter disappears, and her alarmed ex takes the next flight out to Paris with an ulterior motive—he wants Annie back—complications reach a crescendo. There simply isn’t enough of her to go around. As her mother slips further away, Annie must confront what it really means to choose herself after a lifetime as the good daughter, the good wife and the good mother—learning that freedom was hers for the taking all along.
Page One:
The howler monkeys woke her with their deep, throaty growls burrowing through her dreams. Annie pushed aside the sheets and climbed out of bed, stepping out onto the small balcony. The air was hot and still, barely a breeze. The howlers’ low-pitched roars were coming from the thick upper canopy of the ficus tree outside her hotel window but she couldn’t spot them. Beneath her, vacationers in straw hats holding umbrella drinks stood at the bar at the hotel’s beach restaurant, their chatter rising on the wind. The sun was low in the sky; it would be setting soon. Annie had fallen asleep after the shuttle van dropped her at the hotel from the airport in Liberia. The flight from Miami to Samara on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast was only three hours but she’d arrived exhausted, carrying, it seemed, the weight of her hard-won divorce in her luggage. Now she felt buzzed with aliveness. The ocean always did that for her.
She opened her suitcase and pulled out the two-piece bathing suit she’d chosen with Sam’s help after a grueling couple of hours in harsh dressing room lighting. Buying a bathing suit after reaching a certain age was an ordeal she could only endure with her best friend. They’d finally settled on a blue floral bikini with a generous bottom that covered the fifteen pounds of post-divorce weight. Annie pulled it on now and after a cursory glance in the full-length mirror, she slipped on the white linen sundress she’d bought as her reward for the bathing suit agony. She tossed a towel, her wallet and a paperback into a cloth bag and took the two flights of stairs down to the lobby. She was allowed a drink before a swim, she decided. Isn’t this why her girlfriends had sent her to Costa Rica? It wasn’t just their sweet invitation of a beach retreat to push through the publisher’s deadlines for her debut novel, but a rite of passage to launch her new chapter after the end of a thirty-year marriage.
This description is just A+ and I love the opening pages-- starting with the "howler" monkeys is so threatening and interesting and makes us absolutely have to read on.
Title: The Reluctant Wine Detective
Genre: Mystery Thriller
Description: An unassuming wine phenom with a perfect olfactory memory, searching for her missing fiancé, uncovers a treasure of rare wines, a web of deadly deceit, and the truth about herself.
Page 1:
Luc hurried. Heart racing, he thought of his cryptic note sent... a clue for Eugenia. All his plans relied upon her.
Without a sound, he vanished into the shadows of his cellar. The smothering clamminess of the caveau mixed with the rich aroma of the aging oak barrels and the acrid scent of his anxiety... The plan must work... He serpentined among the rows of bottles, each one holding the culmination of his sacrifices – family, friends, and now, Eugenia. He had poured his life into creating this collection where now, only the sound of his pounding heart cascaded across the dark space.
A bead of sweat crawled down his forehead as he wiped his damp palms against his pants, his eyes darting across the room, wary of discovery and failure. They might be closing in on him but he could still make it, and save everything. He gulped down the stale air of the cellar, clenched his jaws, and continued to his destination.
Time was running out. He navigated quickly and quietly, through the labyrinth of wood cases, wine racks, and aged casks, the low arched ceiling descending like a coffin lid. The cracked stone floors sweated subterranean dampness and the ancient brick walls absorbed all traces of light while amplifying every sound. The dankness of the cracked stone floor and the oppressive darkness of the ancient brick walls intensified his fear. If he failed, this vault, once his sanctuary, would become his tomb.
Stress began to surge through his veins as he searched for the chosen bottle, a decoy to mislead them. His skin prickled with unease, a sense of being followed, setting his shoulders on edge.
Thoughts of Eugenia propelled him forward as he tiptoed across the worn stones. His future depended on the bottles hidden within his cellar. He halted in a narrow hallway. He couldn’t be found. He had to disappear. He turned and retreated into a vast, shadowy room.
There, amidst his workshop of bottles, he found it. The key to his secret. With resolve, he stopped before the small bin, knowing that the right bottle would serve as the perfect clue to uncover his hidden treasure. Eugenia had to come.
His trembling fingers closed around the chosen child, a rare creation of a special bottle. Luc cradled the treasure as he raced around the corner, moving deeper into the heart of the cellar, and rested under an expired light bulb dangling like a hanged man. The engulfing darkness swallowed him as he vanished.
Title: In the Shelter of Pigs; The Conversion of a Heathen
Genre: Memoir
Description: Pigs as creatures are deemed dirty and filthy and yet yummy to eat, while "pig" as a word stands in for all kinds of pejoratives. At a formative time the author moved from a pig farm to suburbia, where her older brother and her younger sister became heroin addicts, and the author barely managed to graduate from high school. After traveling the country she converts from heathen to Christianity and marries a brilliant preacher who would also become a lawyer. The memoir follows cross country moves, cancer, marital turmoil, and the faith that holds her together. It follows a forty year marriage that may or may not survive.
PAGE 1:
I often return to a place of mental shelter, a pigpen with 16 shoats and I’m snuggled among them, soft grunts, a few tail biters. Most settle down around my legs in a soft pattern like argyle socks. One is taking a drink at a hose that drips into a trough. Drip Drip Drip, I hear thee water drip. Drip Drip Drip, it’s time to take a sip. I’m ten years old and have read Charlotte's Web five times. The shoats are quicker on the uptake than Wilber and at least one is a poet.
I’ve kept words for fifty years, beginning the first year I read Charlotte’s Web. I received a lockable diary but the lock scratched my right wrist and the tight binding kept closing. Eventually I found steno pads and spiral notebooks, a wide open binding as important as the meaning I poured into them. I wrote during the high school classes that I didn't skip and in code as a way to hide the truth from diary peepers. Eventually I realize that code had the advantage of modulating the scenes of the day even to myself.
Forty years later the notebooks remain unopened. I dread meeting the girl who wrote them. She was the middle child, and both her older brother and younger sister became early-teen heroin addicts. And both of them were gay, before it was an open thing, so the girl in the notebooks was the Marylin Munster who never fit into the Buddhist/Atheist family, since her gay sibs brought home gay friends and she brought home a Christian preacher. Her whole life she wondered about the better lives she saw in folks who attended church. They seemed to have a lighter step, more smiles. She doubted God existed only once when she learned about how Catholic Popes turned a blind eye to the Holocaust. She left home at 17 for the Grand Canyon, then to Hawaii to follow a boyfriend and then met the preacher.
Our grandpa molested my sibs and me. My brother got the worst of it. Maybe that’s why he found
a new narratives in heroin. But I didn’t remember the crimes until I was in my twenties, after my oldest was born, like an awake dream with flashes of him hovering over me with an erection. This was the first of many times that I didn’t protect my sister. I was six and she was four. When he didn’t receive satisfaction from me, because I stretched and rolled over, he walked around to her side of the bed and I lay paralyzed not knowing what to do. I called my sister when I was 24 and she confirmed that it was a real memory.
Beautifully written. Thank you for your courage in sharing this with us!
Title: You Shouldn't Know From It
Genre: Literary Fiction
Description: The year is 1999 and 17-year-old Reyna Shulman, an Orthodox Jew, is experiencing a sexual awakening with her boyfriend, Ezra. Or, as much of a sexual awakening as she will allow herself, anyway, given that she’s been told what she does with her body today will determine her happiness tomorrow and, possibly, the eternal fate of the Jewish people. Reyna is coming of age in New Jersey at the turn of the millennium, a place and time of unprecedented peace and prosperity for the Jewish people. How to balance the electric charge of her body and mind with her community’s expectations of what she will do with them? What to make of her education in the cyclical nature of Jewish history, the idea that, while the players may change, Jewish precarity remains a constant?
Page One: Reyna, 1999
And it came to pass that Reyna Shulman and Ezra Redlich were taking each other’s clothes off in the backseat of Rey’s mom’s Jeep Grand Cherokee, which was parked in a dark corner of the Provident Bank parking lot, when a police officer knocked on the window, scaring the wits out of them both. The bank, owned by New Jersey real estate magnate Mitchell Lang, was across town from the kosher supermarket, and kosher pizza store, and all the other Jewish shops and restaurants where Rey and Ezra could have conceivably been seen by people who knew them. And so that bank parking lot was their spot, so empty at night and guarded by trees that Rey had finally stopped turning her head every couple of minutes to make sure no one was watching. You’re being paranoid, Ezra always said when she did that. Nobody’s here and nobody cares. We’re just teenagers fooling around, the most common thing in the world.
But the officer was in fact there and he did appear to care enough to prove that appearing normal, like everybody else, was no guarantee of safety. Wasn’t it always the case that just when the Jews started to feel comfortable there would come a menacing knock? That was the thing to remember, to never forget. When Rey tried to lower the window from the back seat, she found that the child safety feature was enabled, and so she had to climb into the front of the car and face the officer there. Her trembling index finger pressed the button, bringing the driver side window down just as Adam Duritz’s mournful voice faded out and the five-disc CD changer of which Beverly Shulman was so proud switched to its next disc, an album of religious songs sung by a boys’ choir. To Rey’s horror, the sweet, prepubescent voices escaped into the peaceful suburban night, announcing to the officer and anyone else in earshot that Jewish kids were somewhere they were not supposed to be.
I love this. The writing has a pitch perfect tonality and the opening page delivers on the promise of the pitch. Good luck with it!
Good thinking on Phycology Today. I can see a related angle (from our discussion). I so appreciate your feedback, Courtney.
Best wishes for a speedy recovery!
If it's not too late, I'm attaching my first page.
1. Title: Broken Places
2. Genre: Literary fiction
3. Summary: A third year medical student has a psychotic break and winds up in the psych ward of the very hospital he'd been doing his training. There he meets another Indian patient, a pianist, who seems to know her way around a little too well. He gets entangled with her which leads to more problems in the end.
4. First page:
“Why do you want to be a doctor?”
Raj shifted in his seat. He felt keyed up from lack of sleep. He’d awoken at four that morning to drive from Ithaca to Rochester for the interview. His fourteenth since August and one of his last chances to get into medical school next fall. Last week his advisor warned Raj he needed to loosen up, work on his chairside manner, and convey poise and aptitude if he hoped to turn his losing streak around. What qualities did Raj seek in his doctors? Embody that, he said.
Dr. Stern, the interviewer, stared at Raj through gold-rimmed glasses. They’d both dressed well – Raj in a pinstriped suit and tie, Dr. Stern in suit jacket and slacks, with a navy bowtie. Raj had offered Dr. Stern a firm handshake, focused on every word he spoke, and sat up with his back straight, legs relaxed, and hands folded. No twiddling. No dropping the fixed façade of calm. While inside, his body rocked with fear.
“Um,” Raj said. He cast his gaze downward, away from Dr. Stern’s face. He knew better than to hesitate or show unease. But he couldn’t put together a single thought.
Raj had rehearsed his answers in the car. While the vineyards unfolded on one side of the view, Cayuga Lake on the other, he focused on the road, the hum of the steering wheel against his palms, affecting the steely gaze of a man in charge. He replayed his advisor’s talking points during their last prep session. Raj had a 3.8 GPA from Cornell. Research experience at NIH and a Hughes Scholarship, both projects on mitochondria. Volunteer work for the Red Cross, certification as an EMT, and two years working at Cayuga Medical Center. Everything he needed to succeed, except confidence.
He tried to keep his gaze fixed on Dr. Stern’s hairline, to maintain the facade of eye contact. Instead, he peered behind him at the window. A blue, cloudless sky mocked his
This is fascinating-- is "Girl, Interrupted" one of your comps by any chance?
It could be. It’s like a little older version, since they’re graduate/ professional students.
Title: Noble Rot
Genre: Crime (Literary)
Description: Arthur Plaid's once revered restaurant has fallen on hard times. To keep his business going he convinces his wildly wealthy best friend Dale Fender to sell his father's wine collection. But when the wine turns out to be damaged and ruined, they are undeterred and conspire to make and sell painstakingly forged facsimiles of rare wine to New York City’s wealthiest collectors.
DECEMBER 15, 2017
Anyone who knew me knew not to call at 8:30pm on a Friday night. Certainly not a Friday night in December.
My phone vibrated as my corkscrew punctured the cork in a bottle of 2005 Dujac Malconsorts. The bottle of wine was for Lamar Tent, recently the subject of the article The King of Wine Collectors, featured on the NY Times Sunday Magazine’s cover. His spritely assistant had called earlier, charged more than I made in a month to Lamar’s card, and asked for the bottle to be opened and decanted two hours prior to Mr. Tent’s reservation. His reservation was in thirty minutes. I could say I’d been too caught up in service, lost track of time. I’d worked dining room floors for over twenty years and could toss off a casual lie to cover up a service misstep as easily as I could put one foot in front of the other. But when it came to Lamar Tent, I was equal parts terrified to see him and deeply annoyed that despite my best efforts to stash myself in the kind of tired, off the radar restaurant I’d spent my entire career avoiding, he’d found me anyway. Since the call with his assistant verified that his reservation wasn’t some elaborate prank, I’d been tracking time on the TV in the bar, the reservation system at the maître d stand, the point-of-sale terminals in the service station. I knew the time. I guess I hoped that by not opening his wine, I’d send some sort of cosmic smoke signal into the frigid New York night, and he’d decide to dine elsewhere. My entire year had been jammed full of wishful thinking. Why stop now?
I cradled Lamar’s bottle at a forty-five-degree angle with my left hand, its white label fading to yellow at the edges, and twisted the screw in with my right; the delicate and damp cork gave way too easily, started to crumble. Of course, the damn bottle wasn’t cooperating. I gripped the corkscrew tighter, sweating. If I pushed too hard, the cork would snap. If I didn’t push hard enough the point wouldn’t catch and I’d end up forcing the cork deeper into the neck of the bottle. There was no back up; not many restaurants in the world still had the wine on their lists period. From the inside pocket of my suit jacket, my phone kept buzzing.
I love how this is coming together, Ron!
Thank you!!
Best wishes for a speedy recovery, Courtney, and long blissfully-uninterrupted nights of sleep.
Title: Andreja/In the Claws of the Bear (working title)
Genre: Historical fiction
Description: For two years, Andreja, war widow and Partisan commando leader, has evaded her grief by hunting Nazi officers in the hills around occupied Trieste. When her estranged mother, Lidija, a Slovenian politician, enrages Tito, supreme commander of Partisan forces, it’s Andreja’s son Miha, a Partisan soldier, who takes a beating and gets dumped bloody on Lidija’s doorstep. Andreja and Lidija must find a way to work together to protect their family, their city and – if they’re very clever and very lucky – keep Slovenia out of Tito’s newly Communist Yugoslavia. Andreja’s desire to set a good example for Miha drives her to risk everything for the sake of Slovenia, her family, and her own wounded heart.
Page 1: September 8, 1943, Downtown Trieste
I last saw Renzo almost a year ago, just before his unit shipped out to Libya. The army gave us a weekend. Since then, every time I left the house meant a return trip down tidy Via Lazzaretto Vecchio, wondering. Wondering when he might return. Wondering when there might be a letter.
And missing him. Missing the sensation of his hand in mine. Missing our mountaineering and hunting adventures. Missing his smile every weekday morning when I arrived at our office after getting our son Miha off to school.
I’d found myself avoiding our favorite spots. The caffe’ on Via Cavana. The pasticceria in Piazza Hortis. But not the Molo Audace wharf just off Piazza Unita. There I could stand in even the coldest Bora Nera windstorm and imagine his troop ship appearing over the horizon.
It was now a hot September afternoon, nine months since Renzo’s last letter. At least that letter had come from Libya, so I knew he’d made it to Africa without having to swim. Many times I had fiercely imagined him there, in a truck, an armored car, a tank, anything but walking through sand dunes.
The British and Americans were winning, but there should still have been letters. Maybe he’d been captured. Maybe he was in a POW camp, working on his English.
I shoved my building’s old oak door open. I missed the aroma of my neighbor Elisabetta cooking ragu – meat was hard to come by -- and glanced up at my mailbox. Upper row, right corner, number 305. The small glass window showed something there.
I tugged at the front of my cotton frock in a vain effort to cool myself, then slid the little brass key into the mailbox lock and turned.
One letter, from the mayor’s office.
As I tore open the envelope, I had a vague feeling I shouldn’t do this alone. But I couldn’t think of anyone I wanted to be with, who was available anyway. It had been just me since Miha was drafted.
Dear Mrs. Cescutti, this Office offers you and your family our deepest condolences for the loss of your beloved, Royal Army Captain Lorenzo Cescutti, fallen in Tunisia for the greater glory of Italy, in the name of the King, under the orders of the Prime Minister.
Be proud of the glorious offering that must fill your soul with pride and that will comfort you in your pain. We stand with you in this time of mourning.
If this Office can assist you in navigating this difficult period, we beg you to contact us without hesitation.
That night, I started walking. All I could think about was that I had to tell Miha. Last I heard, he was somewhere in Croatia. I carried my mountaineering rucksack loaded with camping gear and food, my hunting rifle broken down and tucked inside.
I learned later that my timing was excellent: The next morning, German tanks rolled into Trieste.
Title: The Price She Paid
Genre: Mystery
Description: Jessie’s mother is dead, and Jessie’s estranged best friend Dez found part of the body. Can the traumatized women reconcile their past to untangle the secrets hiding the killer?
Dez would consider—in the hours after stumbling upon the body (or more accurately, one grisly piece of the body)—that she should have taken her doctor’s advice. Not regarding physical therapy or pain meds or icing routines, but what he’d said about horses. Handing her the requisite neck and shoulder injury pamphlets as she’d stiffly lowered herself off the exam table, he’d peered at her from under his grizzled grey eyebrows and growled—as if he’d known that as a jockey, she was going to reject his words just like she was going to throw away those handouts—that she ought to stay off horses. For three, maybe four weeks. At least until she got back to Kentucky.
Then again, Dez had never been that good at doing what she was told.
Rising from another night of tossing and turning, still stiff and sore, Dez decided—doctor’s advice be damned—that she’d had enough of recovery, putting air quotes around the word in her mind. Two confining weeks of soul-splitting stillness had been more than enough. Outside of her daily physical therapy appointments (part of her doctor’s advice she’d followed), her inactivity had been broken only by the snap and crackle of Thoroughbred racing magazines, the insistent dinging of texts from horse trainers, the auctioneer-like voices of announcers calling races on her iPad. All of which Dez consumed while alternating between trying to sleep and repeating her therapy exercises as she willed her muscles to heal, restlessness popcorning inside her. And restlessness—much like the mane of fiery red corkscrew curls dancing on her shoulders—was something she’d never been able to subdue for long periods of time.
She slipped silently from her parents’ house in the cool pre-dawn air and speed-walked to her car. Putting her foot to the accelerator, she drove toward her destination like someone making up lost time after being stuck for miles on a two-lane road behind a Sunday driver.
Very good writing here! The lit girl/horse girl in me thrills to this.
Thank you so much, Courtney--that means a lot! And sending you lots of good thoughts as you continue on your recovery!
Hope you're recovering well, Courtney!
Title: Jessamyn and Ellie
Genre: Upmarket fiction
Description: A dual coming-of-age story set both in 1970s New York City and in 1993 Ann Arbor, where a 15-year-old girl embarks on a quest to solve a mystery from her secretive mother’s past.
Page 1: 1993
That night, Jessamyn was searching her kitchen for popcorn.
She was hot, and tired, and losing her patience, and Ellie, hunched over a cassette tape’s liner notes at the kitchen table, was oblivious. But it was Thursday, which meant it was Movie Night, and Movie Night meant popcorn for dinner. This was the rule that Ellie had made when she was five, and Jessamyn wasn’t about to break it. A 15-year-old who still spent time with her mother was to be indulged, to a point.
“Did you move the popcorn?” she asked Ellie.
“Why would I have moved it?”
“I don’t know, but it’s not where it’s supposed to be. Maybe the last time you had Celia over?”
“Mom. I didn’t move the popcorn.” Ellie looked up from her reading to roll her eyes.
Was that necessary, Jessamyn almost said. But she lacked the will for an upbraiding. Her thoughts were still at the record store, which had been slow today. This was part of being a shop owner in a midwestern university town: when the students left for the summer, they took their money with them.
But there was a fine line between slow and dead, and Jessamyn worried, as she always did, about crossing that line and staying there. The prospect of another long July might not have been quite so bad on its own, but her worries preferred to travel in packs. There was also the matter of her new front desk clerk, initially so reliable, who had started arriving late and perfumed with alcohol. There was the Tower Records on the other side of campus, now rumored to be in talks to double its space. And there was the UPS man whose repeated requests for her phone number had to be handled with care, lest some misfortune befall her daily deliveries.
Title: We All Fall Down: How an MS diagnosis blew up my life. And made me strong enough for love. ...with a little help from psychedelics
Genre: Memoir
Description: At thirty-five years old in 2014, I was living the single-girl careerist dream that “Sex and the City” had made so aspirational. I had a great job as a freelance event producer rubbing shoulders with celebrities like Lady Gaga or the casts of Gilmore Girls and The West Wing, with boozy work trips to fancy festivals in Cannes and Monte Carlo. It was en route to South by Southwest, a festival in Austin, Texas, where the story of the life I’d known ended, and another one began.
Prologue
Had I known what was going to happen, would I have boarded that plane?
Chapter 1:
High Flying (Too Close to the Sun)
March 2014
"Ladies and gentlemen, we are on the Stetson & Six-String Express, direct from John F Kennedy to Texas. Buckle your seatbelts snuggly above your brass belt buckles and we’ll be departing shortly. "
No, the pilot did not announce that, but from the number of cowboy hats and acoustic guitar cases stashed (and taking up all the room) in the overhead compartments, that’s what it feels like. Now, we just need a little George Strait piped in as we taxi for takeoff. These aren’t real Texans, mind you. The Western wear accouterments are just business. Cowboy hats and big ‘ole belt buckles are added flair for the black-shirt-and-blue-jean-clad New Yorkers headed down south.
I know another secret about this group. Even though our tickets say we’re going to Houston, Texas, I know that all those guitar cases are ultimately headed to Austin, just like me. Many of us will Oregon-Trail ourselves the two hours from Houston to Austin via bus, friends or rental cars to save on what a flight directly into Austin costs during the city’s biggest event of the year— South By Southwest. This music, film and tech conference has been going strong for decades and only gets more popular. It’s quite a scene—big brands take over every square foot of downtown while small-ish musical acts will vie for the attention of the marketing execs working for those brands. In addition to considerable amounts of alcohol for days on end, also in the mix: indie movies making a stop on the film festival circuit, and tech giants holding court on panels in the conference center, speaking on everything from social media to sustainable local food sources. Sometimes these speakers are my friends, though I’m nowhere near notable enough for anything that would place me on a panel along with tech disruptors or innovators. I’m just going to Austin to throw a party. That was the plan.
You know I love this! I'm digging the subtitle.
Thank you 😊
The Ghosts of Alder Place
Hybrid mosaic memoir
Logline: A trauma therapist hunts down the truth about a triple homicide her uncle committed one street away in 1983 when she was five, embarking on a journey of how to heal from a trauma she doesn't remember.
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THE GHOSTS OF ALDER PLACE
A Memoir
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“The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection.” - Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
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The Legend of The Ghosts
Buffalo, New York, July 1983
A Buffalo Evening Times reporter approached the house on Moore Avenue, with its white picket fence, and saw the girl in the red sundress riding her tricycle in the driveway of the house where the murderer had lived.
“Do you know Philip who lives here?” the woman asked the child.
The girl looked up from her tricycle. She thought about saying ‘I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,’ but didn’t.
“He’s my uncle,” the girl admitted instead. “He doesn’t live here anymore.” The girl had a pixie cut, with sandy-colored hair.
“He’s wanted by the police. He hurt some people last night. Do you know where he is?”
The girl stared up at the woman silently, pinching the strong Smurfette figure in the pocket of her red sundress. A green frog had been embroidered on the dress by one of her aunts, as if leaping from the dress’s pocket. The girl did not particularly like the stranger, but she liked getting some attention, so her instinct to run to her mother was interrupted.
The woman had an urgency the girl could feel. Her stance and notepad reminded the girl of Nancy Drew, her favorite detective, except the reporter had feathered hair and blue bell bottoms.
At that very moment, the ghosts of the dead came floating down Moore Avenue.
They had left their house on Alder Place amidst the confusion of the crime scene that morning, floated past the tennis courts at the end of the street, come up along the railroad tracks with the Queen Anne's lace which always bloomed in July, and down along Moore, disturbed and looking for answers.
The dialogue and tonality of the children in this opening page is realistic and very well done! I'm riveted.
Thanks, Courtney!
I love the details of Smurfette and the embroidered frog--they take me right back to the 80s. And then the ghosts?? I can't wait to read more.
I'm also curious about the hybrid mosaic memoir structure and what that means.
Thank you, Katrina. I appreciate those specifics. It's so helpful to get impressions on the first page.
Interesting to get clear about how to describe the genre. It could be more appropriate to use "hybrid memoir" alone without the "mosaic" indicator. I'm thinking about it. The work is experimental, made up of fragments, and includes some critical commentary/theory.
I am so excited for this masterclass and thank you so much for doing this! If nothing else, it made me sit down and think really hard about that first page. Wishing you the easiest and fastest recovery and hopefully it'll help!
Working title: The Dark Twin
Genre: Dark fantasy
Description: A haunting story about a witch who accidentally cursed her sweetheart to eternally fight to the death with none other than his own dark twin; and her quest to save him.
First page:
Dicentra felt a stab in her left finger, sharp like the breath she took, and watched a red stain spread on the creamy linen she was holding. It wasn’t much, from a quick needle prick, but the stain was unmistakably there. A bloody mark on her seemingly perfect life. Bad luck, bad luck, bad luck.
Lost, Dicentra looked around the room. Thirteen elder witches sat in a circle, cross-legged, right on the cold hard wood. Their voices rising together with the sun outside the window, singing the song they always sang on wedding mornings, on this land and back on the land they left behind. It was the song of their ancestors, so they sang it without question. The choir would seem ominous to any bystander, but Dicentra knew the meaning of the words. She closed her eyes for a brief moment to let the feeling in her chest bloom and settle.
She held her now stained wedding dress, linen softened by many washes, white but not quite white and could feel the texture gently scraping her fingertips, the folds of the fabric touching her thighs. But her focus was broken and her hand no longer worked on the stitching.
According to their customs, the coven would hand-stitch patterns on all wedding attire. Red guelder berries for passionate love; doves — union eternal; birch leaves — the strength of their coven; periwinkles — for protection. This was powerful magic, and Dicentra needed powerful. Only powerful could save her.
Dicentra’s handiwork was different to others, bright purple, she stitched more periwinkles than anything else. She avoided looking to her right all morning, but now she risked a glance, her face unmoving. Her mother sat there, focusing on her own task. She was working on Hunter’s ceremony shirt. At the sight, Dicentra’s face softened. She unclenched her jaw. The prospect of seeing Hunter so soon made everything better. She only wished her mother stitched more periwinkles on his shirt too. But his shirt was greener than anything, covered in delicate birch leaves.
Her mother, her mother, her mother. Dicentra’s life was polluted by her presence, whether she wanted it or not. But from today, she would no longer live under her mother’s roof, no longer need to say good morning to her, no longer need to pretend that their relationship was whole, loving, sincere. Today, she stepped out of her mother’s house, crossed that threshold, felt the gentle drop from the last step into the green grass beneath — and knew she would never come back. Today, her new life would begin.
Fantastic. The opening definitely delivers on the promise of the premise. Well done.
Thank you so much Courtney! This is really validating hearing from you and I really appreciate you leaving a note.
Hope you’re feeling better Courtney!
Title: PIG
Genre: Upmarket/Book Club fiction
Description: Jaime Martelino has a mom who’s disappeared, a billionaire narcissist dad, an asshole younger brother named Miko, and Pompy— a secret potbellied pig who was supposed to be a mini but just kept growing.
Jaime leaves home to save Pompy from being found and sent away by his dad, and to search for his mom, but Miko insists on coming and chaos ensues.
Page One:
I am worried about my pig.
He lives in our lanai and his name is Pompeo. His nickname is Pompy. He’s not officially my pig—my brother Miko ordered him from teacuppiggies.com without telling anyone, and the next day there was a tiny black and white pot-bellied piglet in our living room. He was pretty scared and kept running around on his hoofs that look like high heels, but then he calmed down and it was like he’d always been here.
Miko has never fed him, taken him to the vet, or given a shit about him since he got here, so I took over and now he’s mine. Pompy is still black and white, but the dude who sold him to my brother was definitely lying when he said he was a miniature. We watched him go from 18 pounds to 35…67...110. He’s at least 165 pounds by now and he’s not going to stop growing anytime soon. Which is kind of a problem.
See my dad, who pays for everything in this house and is NOT an animal lover, has no idea Pompy exists. Dad lives in our other house, in the village across from this one on Ortigas Ave. He comes to visit us every day for about five minutes, ten max.
It hasn’t been easy keeping Pompy a secret, that’s for sure. It helps that my dad is the least spontaneous person I know. We always know when he’s coming. Which is probably one reason my mom left him. That’s why my brother and I live in this house by ourselves.
Well actually—there’s our housekeeper Yaya, plus a cleaning lady, a driver, and two houseboys so we’re not really “by ourselves” come to think of it.
So anyway, when Dad says he’s coming, we hide Pompy next to the dirty kitchen and turn the music up to cover any grunts. The other day I left my phone upstairs and didn’t hear Dad calling. I walked into the living room and almost choked on the protein shake I was drinking when I saw him sitting in his emperor chair.
He yelled at me in his usual fatherly manner, glaring at the piles of dirty clothes that hadn’t made it to the laundry room, dumbbells, and other random stuff sitting on the Ming Dynasty opium bed in the middle of the living room.
“Putangina Jaime, do you know how much I paid Christie’s for that bed?! This house is one big garbage can! What the fuck do the maids do all day?! I don’t know how you and your brother can stand it here. You’re twenty years old already, when are you going to start acting like it?!”
I kept my cool. I thanked St Anthony (patron saint of pigs) that Pompy was asleep near the pool, out of Dad’s sight and not snoring, which he does sometimes.
I love the humorous tone of this narrator and the very fact of Pompy and how he is a secret. I felt riveted by the plight of these characters. Such fun and engaging writing. Love it.
Oh thank you so much for the kind words Danielle, I really appreciate them. Also so happy to hear that you were engaged by Jaime and Pompy 💕
My pleasure. P.S. It's also fun to say 'Jaime and Pompy'.
😬😃 yes it is! May I also say that given your background in processing intergenerational trauma, it might interest you to know that PIG is actually about narcissism, but you may have already sussed that out 🐷😊