Want to read Margaret Atwood’s new book? You’ll have to wait… for 100 years

If you want to read Margaret Atwood’s latest piece of writing, Scribbler Moon, you will have to wait a while, say, for about ninety nine years.

Artist Katie Paterson accepts the first Future Library

manuscript from Margaret Atwood

Photo (c) Kristin Von Hirsch 2016

Atwood is the first contributing author to the Future Library project, for which Scottish artist Katie Paterson and The City of Oslo have planted a thousand trees in a forest just outside the city. As I said in my blog post last October when the project was launched, the trees will be looked after for one hundred years, until 2114.  In each of those hundred years, one author will be commissioned to write a manuscript of some sort and that piece of writing will be placed, unpublished, in a secure and specially designed room in the new public library being built in Oslo. They will all remain unread until the collection of one hundred manuscripts is complete. Then in 2114, the trees will be cut down and the wood will be used to supply paper for a special anthology of books in which 100 years of writing will be published.

The Canadian author delivered her manuscript to Katie Paterson this week, deep in the heart of the Future Library itself, in the Nordmarka forest just outside the Oslo, but it remains a secret as to whether it is a poem, short story, novel or memoir. No one else will know until 2114.

"There’s something magical about it," Atwood said as she handed over her work. "It’s like Sleeping Beauty. The texts are going to slumber for 100 years and then they’ll wake up, come to life again. It’s a fairytale length of time. She slept for 100 years.

"I am sending a manuscript into time. Will any human beings be waiting there to receive it? Will there be a ‘Norway’? Will there be a ‘forest’? Will there be a ‘library’? How strange it is to think of my own voice – silent by then for a long time – suddenly being awakened, after 100 years."

David Mitchell

The next contributor to Future Library will be David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks. 

He said, "Imagine if the Future Library had been conceived in 1914 and 100 authors from all over the world had written 100 volumes between then and today, unseen until now. What a human highway through time to be a part of. Contributing and belonging to a narrative arc longer than your own lifespan is good for your soul."

Katie Paterson created the image below to symbolize the Future Library. A tree trunk with a tiny blue "2014" at its center, 100 growth rings expand until, at the top right outside edge, there is another tiny blue date, 2114.

Katie Paterson's Future Library icon

As the hundred years pass, future contributors will be announced year by year. Some will be familiar to us now, though it is startling to realize that many will not even have been born yet.

For more information, visit Future Library here.

I've joined the Inprint blogging team with a celebration of young writers

One of Houston's most important literary resources is Inprint, the fabulous literary non-profit organization that supports and engages Houston's readers and writers. I am delighted to have just joined the team contributing to the Inprint blog - An Open Book. 

My first contribution was posted today and is a celebration of the first graduating class of Creative Writers at the High School for the Visual and Performing Arts and you can read my article on An Open Book.

The HSPVA Creative Writing Class of 2015

The Writer’s Voice – Never Met, Never Parted

I am thrilled to have won a place in The Writer’s Voice. Thanks to Brenda Drake, Mónica Bustamante Wagner, Elizabeth Briggs, and Krista Van Dolzer for hosting the competition and for giving so many of us the chance to take another step towards literary representation and publication.

My Query

In the spring of 1945, a severely burned German prisoner-of-war is delivered to a Scottish farm to work. Lorna, the farmer’s teenage daughter, soon discovers that in wartime, your family and your allies might not actually be your friends, and your enemy might turn out to be the love of your life. Lorna’s friendship with Paul, and their developing love for each other, is challenged by Lorna’s own prejudices and by the intolerance of her soldier brother and her friends in the village. Ultimately, the events which bring peace to Europe will tear Lorna and Paul apart.

Never Met, Never Parted is a YA Historical novel of 107,000 words. The first book in a pair, it ends as Paul is taken away with the other POWs from Lorna’s village. The second book will follow Lorna across war-ravaged Europe as she tries to find him again.

I am a Scottish writer now living in Houston, Texas. I am an active member of SCBWI, and in 2014 won the SCBWI Joan Lowery Nixon Award for this story. As my prize, I have had the honor of a year's mentoring from Newbery Winner, Kathi Appelt. I am the mother of three teenage readers and writers.

Never Met, Never Parted - First 250 words

Lorna was ankle-deep in cow-shit and milk when she first saw the boy with the steel-gray eyes and only half a face.

Only dimly aware of the rumble of a truck lurching up the lane, Lorna tried to push Caddy and Canny away from the reeking, steaming mess with the broom. The dogs, however, dodged around her and continued to lick up the milk from where it had puddled in the deep crevices between the cobbles, a rare treat for them. Like the dogs, Lorna kept her head down. Her father was raging at Nellie, which made a nice change since it meant that, for once, Jock Anderson’s ire wasn’t directed at Lorna.

“What in the Devil’s name did you think you were doing, you glaikit girl? Can you not even carry a bucket without dropping the damn thing?”

The great farmer’s bulk cast a threatening shadow over Nellie who looked so petite, even in her Land Army uniform of baggy fawn breeches and thick green sweater. Lorna felt a little guilty about not sticking up for her, but Lorna knew Nellie was made of stronger stuff, so she carried on sweeping.

“But Mr. Anderson,” Nellie began, “it was an accident, I—”

“If you’d been concentrating on the matter in hand, lassie, you wouldn’t have all these accidents. Particularly when the matter in your hand is a big bucket of my cows’ milk. This is not an accident, let me tell you, it’s a tragic waste.”

Happiness for Beginners - and having tea and cake with the author is a good start

Katherine Center
Photo credit: Karen Walrond

 What more could a writer and book-lover like me ask for on a sunny Saturday afternoon but the chance to spend a couple of hours sitting at a table covered in sandwiches, cakes and tea, listening to an author tell us about her new book? Not much more, I can tell you.

I was delighted to be included this weekend in what, I suppose, might have once been called a literary salon. Houston author, Katherine Center, gave a group of book-loving women the chance to hear about her new book, Happiness for Beginners, and about her approach to her work

She told us about how she had written her first novel when she was in 6^th grade – a blockbuster about how all the members of Duran Duran had fallen in love with her when their car had suffered a flat tire right outside her home. Though it occurred to me that some of the younger women at the table might never even have heard of Duran Duran, there were certainly several more like me who nodded vigorously, no doubt having shared similar fantasies themselves round about 1983 or ’84.

Katherine also admitted to becoming a closet Romance novel fan in recent years, and she talked about the profound effect that had on her own writing in general and on her approach to Happiness is for Beginners in particular. 

“I like the feeling of being happy when I read a book,” she told us, “and that is something I got from reading Romance novels. I started thinking about it with regard to my own writing. Though I don’t write actual “Romance” novels, I do always have a nice juicy, highly delicious love story in anything I write, because frankly I like that stuff. I’m interested that magical connection than can happen between people, because there’s something very special about those moments, so I started trying to harness that goodness in my own books.”

“I realized that in a lot of the books that I’ve read in my life, the thing that has pulled me through the book is worry. Writing teachers will actually tell you to do that, to make your character worry or make your readers worry about the character. But when I became a mom, I discovered that I don’t like to worry. I do a ton of worrying now that I have kids, living with that constant churning in my stomach, and I don’t like it.  What I like about those Romance novels is that what pulls you through them is not worry, but a delicious sense of anticipation, and the knowledge that you are moving towards something good. Even if the hero and heroine have been thrown into a dungeon by pirates, you know it’s going to be okay in the end. Bad things might happen, but you do have this overwhelming feeling that you are moving towards something good.  Though I suppose it’s the bad stuff that gives the good stuff its meaning.”

But how did this epiphany made a difference to Katherine’s approach to her new novel?

“Happiness for Beginners is the first book I have created as a writer since having that realization as a reader. Writing a story is really something you do to a reader. You are making them have feelings so that they invest in your characters, and you lead them through a simulated experience. You are in charge of what you want your readers to feel. I want my readers to feel hope and happiness, and perhaps get a little misty-eyed, but I want them to come out of it feeling grateful and inspired.”

“I try to give people hope, to make them happy, and to make them laugh. And perhaps I can offer them a way to look at the worst situations and see the best way through them.  When I was reading as a kid, it was all about trying to have something to look forward to, and that’s what I’m now trying to give to the world now. If I’m doing it right, I am putting out the kind of books that a reader just can’t stop reading once they’ve started, but also ones that will offer them a new perspective on their own life too.”

Katherine Center’s new novel, Happiness for Beginners, is published by St. Martin’s Press and is her fifth book. Her previous novels are The Bright Side of Disaster, Get Lucky, Everyone is Beautiful and her 2013 novel, The Lost Husband, which is recently been optioned by a movie production company.

For more information about Katherine and all her novels, please visit her website at www.katherinecenter.com

Inspiring Houston Women - Dorothy Gibbons of The Rose

I am delighted to have posted another interview on my other blog, Inspiring Houston Women.

Dorothy Gibbons is co-founder of The Rose, a non-profit that provides high quality breast healthcare to women regardless of their ability to pay.  

“For every three insured women who come through our doors for a mammogram we can take care of one uninsured woman. We could do more free screenings, if one diagnostic exam was all that was needed, but by the time they come to us, many of these uninsured women are also certain to need ultrasound and biopsy too. I always tell my staff that until we don't see women with late stage cancer anymore, our job isn't done.”

To read my interview with Dorothy, visit the Inspiring Houston Women blog 

Inspiring Houston Women - Chris Cander

I am delighted to have posted another interview on my other blog, Inspiring Houston Women.

Author, Chris Cander, has just published her second novel, Whisper Hollow. She is the mother of two children and also teaches creative writing to elementary school children through Writers in the Schools. Being with children, she says, has brought new insight to her writing: “I have loved looking at the world again through a child's eyes. What we writers do is observe and talk about our observations, so for me to be able to slow down and see things stripped of my prejudices and my knowledge and my experiences has been wonderful.”

To read more from Chris, visit the Inspiring Houston Women blog.

The fine art of saying thank you

Today’s task is to write thank you cards for all the gifts and hospitality we have received over the Christmas period so far. I have written a list for each child, and for myself, which sets out what present they got from which friend or family member, and there are a dozen different styles of thank you cards laid out on the dining room table all ready for them – cards with thank you printed on the front, cards with their initials, cards with pictures, and cards they can decorate with stamps and inkpads. There is even nice notepaper in case they want to write someone a whole letter. And there are colored pens and pencils for those more artistically driven. There are even stamps and airmail stickers too – for once, I am that organized!

This is something we do after every Christmas and after every birthday, so it really shouldn’t have come as a surprise. And I am proud to know that I have three amazing writers here – my kids are already very successful poets, novelists, screen writers, playwrights and journalists – so writing a handful of single-sided thank yous should not tax them at all. Lucky me!

Yet, when I told one of my kids (I won’t tell you which one) last night what we would be doing first today, I was met with, “But writing thank you cards is boring!” and my heart sank. Have I truly failed, in all these years of writing thank yous, to get them to understand what an important life skill to have this is? Clearly I have.

But then I wondered whether I was the same at 13, moaning about wasting a morning saying thank you for something I could have been playing with instead. I must ask my parents about that. And I must also say thank you to them too, not only for the cool jacket they bought me this Christmas, but also for instilling in me the desire to be grateful for other people’s generosity, and to remember to show it. I know for sure that this habit of writing to say thank you was because all through my childhood they set out the thank you cards, envelopes and lists of gifts for me, and coached me on the best kind of wording and the right way to address an envelope. It is because of their teaching that I place such value on writing – and receiving – thank you cards. And I also know for sure that the vast majority of other people were not lucky enough to have parents doing that same thing for them. Sadly.

I know that, because I can tell you straight away of only one person who without fail has written and mailed a thank you card after every single event he came to at our house. In fact, since he moved away to another state this year and therefore did not come to our Christmas party (though 120 other people did), I actually noticed that the December mail did not bring the usual lovely handwritten note from him thanking us for including him in our gathering and saying how much he enjoyed knowing our family and always feeling that he was welcome in our home. James, if you ever read this – I’ve missed you!

Obviously, I have no right to have a go at those non-card writers I know – and of course I was grateful for the couple of texts and emails that I received to say thank you – but I will allow myself the indulgence of some frustration after the two training courses I gave earlier this year to some mature students. In both training sessions, I stressed the importance of saying thank you, both in their professional lives and personally. What little effort does it take to drop someone a quick note – electronically or in hard copy – to say you appreciated their time, effort and hospitality when they had done something kind for you or had included you in their party? And how big is the impact on the recipient of that thank you, to know that someone was grateful and was not too busy or lazy to let them know? In fact, I stressed this point at least five times in each session, and yet, do you know how many thank yous I received afterwards?

One.

So that set me wondering whether these students (not self-centered teenagers, they were all in their twenties and thirties) had actually paid as little attention to everything else I had been instructing them on. Oh well, time will tell.

So I am heading downstairs now to herd my kids to the dining room, cracking the whip while they moan their way to the table. But I also know that once they get going, this exercise in sharing their gratitude will silence their moans and they will begin to realize how much they received, that it is kind to say thank you. What they might not yet understand, however, is that they are also learning the fine art to saying thank you.

But one day, I know for sure that they will be asking me where the cards are kept because they have a thank you they really want to write.