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LA Times Festival of Books! Day One

Photo by Carolyn Kraft

One week after a great day at YALLWEST, I was off to the annual LA Times Festival of Books! It was like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire for those of us who love being burned alive. By books. By writing. By mangling a shopworn adage into a tough leathery bit on which to chomp so as to contain our excitement and not draw the attention of USC Campus Security.

Anyway…

Congrats to LATFOB for celebrating 20 amazing years! Once again it was a privilege to attend, and as always the panel discussions I sat in on were nothing short of compelling and provocative. Did you go? What was the highlight for you?

Here’s a taste of what I heard on Day One:

“I thought I’d like to start a story with someone getting decapitated on a roller coaster, which I did. It’s on page 3.”

“I feel like it’s possible to fall deeply in love while also grieving a great loss.”

“What we remember about the books we love are the characters.”

“I’m an evangelist for fiction.”

“A big part of my writing process is forgiving myself.”

“Write what obsesses you.”

“To be a successful writer you have to be extremely disciplined.”

“Every book is a different labyrinth that somehow I have to get to the center of.”

“How do you learn to write a novel? You read a lot of them and then you write one.”

“I write so much because I’m hyperactive. I have the metabolism of a weasel. I have to eat my body weight every day.”

“There are probably 300 writers in America who make a full-time living from writing.”

“You owe it to yourself to be a big supporter of independent bookstores.”

“We have to practice and behave in the literary world we want to live in. We have to be good literary citizens.”

“I think we’ll look back on this time as a golden age of fiction.”

“I have a weird memory; I remember all of my parents’ license plates.”

“It’s more fun to draw something horrible and ugly.”

“New Yorker cartoons are like a magazine within the magazine.”

“People told me that when I went through the process of selling my parents’ house all the questions I had about who they were would be answered. But there was nothing; it was like they were spies.”

“The mistakes and the problems can become the greatest thing in the book.”

“You just have to draw a lot and then eventually you die.”

WHO SAID THIS STUFF: Robyn Schneider, Emery Lord, Meg Wolitzer, T.C. Boyle, Lord, Wolitzer, Sarah Dessen, Lord, Boyle, Boyle, Stephen Morrison, Sandra Dijkstra, Dan Smetanka, Morrison, Roz Chast, Mimi Pond, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Kaplan, Chast

Festival of Books 2013 – What Struck Me Part 2

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Photo by Carolyn Kraft

That’s right, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is simply too magnanimous to contain itself to one day. Did you go? What struck you about the event? Here’s the writerly wisdom and wit I collected on Day 2, with a few snippets of conversation I couldn’t help but overhear:

“When I get drunk I get more affectionate.”

“Writing is very intuitive. Sometimes we know something’s wrong in a story but not how to fix it.”

“An influential pastor in Princeton, New Jersey circa 1905 once said ‘We do not entertain any new ideas here.'”

“Theodore Roosevelt was often considered a traitor to his class–meaning he wasn’t a bigot.”

“She went to his wedding even while she has having an affair with him.”

“Genre writing is pleasing for a literary writer.”

“Historical fiction is always about the present as well as the past.”

“Literature is a way of evoking sympathy.”

“Writing is crystallized improvisation.”

“When I say books you say books! Books! Books! Books! Books!”

“It’s important that the reader doesn’t know everything about the character but suspects that the author does.”

“When I say past you say tense. Past! Tense! Past! Tense!

“I’m into being interesting.”

“When I say Voyage of the Dawn Treader you say C.S. Lewis. Voyage of the Dawn Treader!…”

“Kurt Vonnegut is the original YA author.”

“I started writing at 7 or 8 years old and I was awesome. All of my sexy vampire stories were published under the pseudonym ‘Anne Rice.'”

“That sounds like diarrhea.”

“Books on writing make the invisible visible.”

“There’s always more to say about verbs.”

“Bad writing reveals what we don’t know.”

“The way writing is taught in the U.S. is completely wrong-headed.”

“The drama comes from the verb choice.”

“Recognizing your own habits and upending them is very refreshing.”

“As soon as I get comfortable with a draft, I must get suspicious of it.”

Progenitors of the quotes above include: two women sitting behind me in the Bovard Auditorium; woman in the shade near the YA Stage; Joyce Carol Oates; D.C. Pierson; Sean Beaudoin; Elizabeth Eulberg; Amy Spalding; Thomas Curwen; Constance Hale; Ben Yagoda

Thank You Barney Rosset

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Henry Miller

Admittedly, I didn’t know who Barney Rosset was until I’d heard he died earlier this week. But after reading his obituary in the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday, I wish I could have had the chance to thank him while he was alive for his courage to publish writers deemed too far outside the “mainstream” and his unwavering defense of free speech.

Mr. Rosset was the founder of Grove Press, which not only introduced American readers to Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Eugene Ionesco, but also championed the writings of William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Marguerite Duras, and Malcolm X.

Rosset also successfully fought against American censorship laws to publish pure, unedited versions of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. The former was found not to violate U.S. anti-pornography laws, while the latter was judged to not be obscene because it had “redeeming social value.” Both books went on to become classics.

While certainly pleased with the ultimate outcome of his court challenges, Rosset was not a fan of the “socially redeeming” argument, and I admire and wholeheartedly agree with what he told NPR back in 1991: “My grounds has always been that anything should be–can be–published. I think that if you have freedom of speech, you have freedom of speech.”

Thank you Barney Rosset for standing behind your principles and fighting for literature that not only provokes and protests against the status quo, but also enriches our lives.