Book Club Member?  Post your first name, city and state, and number of members in your book club to receive a free signed hardback of Good Things.  Note the postcard tucked inside.  If you like the book, and your club decides to pre-order the paperback, drop the postcard into the mail.  You’ll get a box of more good things, including personalized Club book marks, printed reader’s guides, a recipe for Torte a la Wieck and a 12 oz bag of Fair Trade coffee to energize the discussion!  I’m happy to join you, via phone or web, if our calendars are in sync.  One hardback request per book club, please.

The inclusion of images in Good Things evolved out of a happy accident. I commute long hours by train to my academic job–as does my narrator, Jeanette–so I started photographing my desk (laden with research) and importing the photos into my text documents. It was the closest thing to carrying all my books and papers with me that I could come up with. I’d sit on the train, writing, and then when I got stuck, I’d study the images. After a few months of this, I realized these images were fast becoming cornerstones, essential to the story I was trying to tell.

Incorporating images into my writing (which I’d never done before) made visible what had been previously obscured: the relationship between the novel’s historical figures (Clara and Robert Schumann; Johannes Brahms) and its contemporary echoes (Jeanette and Hart.) Each story became more thematically resonant–and more personally meaningful–as a result.

Want a writing exercise? Collage/combine your own contemporary images (let’s say, for argument’s sake, your oldest child’s birthday party) with a seemingly unrelated historical event that has held your imagination/fascination (let’s say Austin de Iturbe y Green, the two year old Heir Presumptive to Maximilian von Habsburg, who was installed by Napoleon as Emporor of Mexico.) Does a third story–somehow greater than its parts–suggest itself?  Begin.

Write Now

A Craft Intensive Weekend with the University of Miami Creative Writing Program’s distinguished faculty, featuring senior fiction writer Lester Goran.

FEBRUARY 27 AND 28, 2010
9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
CAS GALLERY
1210 STANFORD DRIVE
UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI
CORAL GABLES, FLORIDA

Sponsored by the Creative Writing Program, the Department of English, the College of Arts and Sciences, our community partners Books & Books and the MALS program at the University of Miami.

Join our MFA in Creative Writing Program’s faculty, alumni and graduate teaching assistants at the University of Miami for seminars and workshops designed to break through any writing block and get you writing the great American novel, poetry on and off the page, or the stories of your memoir. Learn what it takes to write what author John Gardner called that “vivid and continuous dream.”

http://www.as.miami.edu/english/creativewriting/lestergoran/writenow