Jess Walter’s new novel, Beautiful Ruins, has been out for a few weeks and doing great. Does he get no bad reviews? One writer present, Pat Kersey, commented that he never saw an author with such positive reviews. Here are a few photos from last night. Thanks to C.J.Bahnsen for most of the photos, and Travis Barrett for a few others. If you were present, please share what you remember about last night. If you want to hear the radio interviews I did with Jess, go to Writersonwriting.blogspot.com, enter “Walter” in the search box and both should come up.

Joan Schenkar, biographer, playwright and author of The Talented Miss Highsmith, talks about writing biography and Patricia Highsmith on Writers on Writing. If you’ve read or seen The Talented Mr. Ripley or Strangers on a Train, then you know Highsmith’s work, because she wrote both.  And Schenkar’s biography is one of the best I’ve read.  It’s a literary biography.  There’s much to learn here about the form.

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 (Broadcast date: June 20, 2012)

Can there ever be too much to say about rejection? I pulled a book of essays off my shelf this morning, The Writing Habit, by David Huddle. I bought this book back in 1991 and have held onto it ever since because of the gems between the covers. This morning I read the essay, “Let’s Say You Wrote Badly,” in which Huddle compares baseball with writing. I love baseball so I kept reading. He talks about how baseball players deal with rejection, how there is no baseball pitcher who has ever not given up a home run or a batter who has not struck out.  I like this paragraph:

“And what more than failure–the strike out, the crucial home run given up, the manuscript criticized and rejected–is more likely to produce caution or timidity? An instinctive response to painful experience is to avoid the behavior that produced the pain.  To function at the level of excellence required for survival, writers like athletes must go against instinct, must absorb their failures and become stronger, must endlessly repeat the behavior that produced the pain.”

Why do I like this paragraph so much? Because that’s how it is: We writers keep repeating the behavior that produced the pain and sometimes we hit a home run, but too often we strike out.  But we keep playing, we stay in the game, because there’s always the chance we’ll score, and after all, we love playing.

There are so many other good essays in the book.  Grab one from wherever you can.

Jess Walter, author of the new novel, Beautiful Ruins, discusses his writing and work for the entire hour. I’m ecstatic that he will be a guest at the Pen on Fire Writers Salon on July 17, 2012. I loved his last novel, The Financial Lives of the Poets, and I’m reading The Zero now.  We have only a couple of seats left so if you’re interested, act fast. More info here.

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(Broadcast date: June 13, 2012)

A few days ago we came home after spending a week on the Big Island (Hawaii).  I don’t know what I expected, exactly.  I’ve only ever been to Hawaii  on my way to someplace else.  At the Honolulu airport I walked outside, felt the humidity, and got back on the plane.

The Big Island is a geological marvel.  Spent Tues to Weds in the rainforest on the eastern side of the island and now my favorite color is yellow green / chartreuse / lime green because it’s the color of the rain forest.  We walked in the rain to Akaka falls, a 400 foot or so waterfall, and it was so worth it.  I remember every inch of that walk.  I remember the startling shades of green.  There must be a million.