Christi, Author at Christi Craig

July 2, 2014June 30, 2014

#AmReading: Megan Stielstra’s Once I Was Cool

The healing of the body begins with words.
~ Megan Stielstra in Once I Was Cool

I first heard about Megan Stielstra through another author I admire and loved her first book, Everyone Remain Calm, from the minute I opened the cover. We spoke a while back on the blog (read her Q&A part 1 and part 2) about Everyone Remain Calm, where she said, “all of these things that I see or read or live…get stuck in my head, and what do you do with all of it?—You give it to characters. You find the story.”

Stielstra has written a new collection of stories, essays in Once I Was Cool about what it means to be a grown up and a mother and a teacher and the truth we find in looking back on those moments that get us from there to here.

I love this quote from “My Daughter Can Read Just Fine:”

I write stories because I love reading, and I love reading because my mother put books in my hands, read them with me, asked me what I thought about them, listened as I told her….

But it’s in this excerpt from “Stop Reading and Listen” where Stielstra hits on the importance of stories: how they affect us and why we share them:

Yelling and fighting at 2 a.m., immediately followed by gunshots. My husband called 9-1-1, and we watched out the window ‘til the sirens came; first police, then fire trucks, then an ambulance. Our bedroom was filled with red and blue light. A small crowd collected on the sidewalk next to the Aragon, and later, we’d find out a teenage boy had died. I wish I could say it was the first time it had happened. I wish I could say it was the last.

An hour later—quiet now, and dark—I got back into bed and began the tricky, foggy work of talking myself back into sleep. I don’t know how long I was out before the crying started. No, not crying, that word’s too weak; this was a wail. A male voice, wailing. Low and desperate and destroyed, deep at the base of his throat. Maybe at first, I dreamt it, but soon I was sitting up, fully awake, and back to the window.

Three stories below, the boy’s father stood where his son had been shot. He stood there all morning—3 a.m., 4 a.m., 5 a.m.—and the whole time, he wailed. A single, raw sob; a few of beats of silence; then another. It made me think of contractions—the pause between the pain. My husband and I sat on the bed, wide awake and listening. We sat there in all of our privilege: our newborn son alive and healthy and asleep in his tiny turret bedroom; our safe, warm home; our middle class upbringings and middle class lives, our education and jobs and insurance; our families; our skin color; our faith; all of it so enormous and so puny in the face of all that pain. I considered reaching into the nightstand to grab the little foam earplugs I used sometimes when the Aragon opens its windows because sometimes the noise is too much, the music and the traffic and the violence and the loss. It’s easier to drown it out, to change the channel, to read something else, to believe the same old story, to stick my fingers in my ears and say Lalalalala instead of listening to a grief I couldn’t fathom and the truths in the world that I don’t want to see.

I sat there, listening.

I imagined people awake, listening, up and down the block. Awake, listening, all across Uptown. Awake, listening, across the city, maybe the country.

Are you awake? Can you hear it?

Stop reading and listen.

You can listen to Megan Stielstra read the beginning of this essay online at Poets&Writers HERE (and everyone should hear her read).

Then, check out her website or find out how to purchase a copy of Once I Was Cool.

[Reading] starts the dialogue. It opens my eyes to things I haven’t seen before. ~ from “My Daughter Can Read Just Fine”

June 25, 2014June 25, 2014

Naomi Elana Zener on Writing from Experience

We hear it all the time, write what you know. For today’s guest blogger, Naomi Elana Zener, this is a paramount step to beginning a story, but it isn’t the key to the end.

Write from Experience

By Naomi Elana Zener

“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
– Albert Einstein.

I’m an attorney by training and trade, having studied in depth Trusts and Estates Law, but my practice has been focused on Entertainment Law. My debut novel, Deathbed Dime$, delves into the underbelly of the dark world of the greedy survivors, who’ve outlived their dearly departed “loved ones,” deciding want to do with what’s left in the corpse’s coffers, after all debts, taxes, and the funeral have been paid off. Greed, set against the backdrop of the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, are the hallmarks of the world in which Deathbed Dime$ is set.

The novel’s protagonist, Joely Zeller, is a young lawyer in her thirties, navigating the choppy waters running through the world of beneficiaries, hopeful, intended and otherwise, trying to get their hands on the deceased’s money, while trying to have a life herself. The themes of being a young woman trying to carve out a place for herself in the world, establish a successful career, find love and marriage, while maintaining a semblance of self, are all themes with which most women can identify. I would be lying if I said that these were not themes I’ve addressed, analyzed and grappled with in my own life.

Apart from the area of estate litigation and the fact that Zeller comes awfully close to reading as Zener, the similarities between the protagonist and myself end there. However, this is the entrée point into my personal belief as a writer that the best writing comes from writing what you know. Write from your soul. Mine your experiences. Open the floodgates and express yourself free from inhibition. In the end, editors are there to help you sort through the words to help you find the forest through the trees.

I started writing Deathbed Dime$ in 2009, as a bucket list item. After sharing it with a very close-knit group of people, which obviously included my parents and husband, all of whom gushed over my talent (very little of it existed in the first draft, I assure you), I decided that maybe writing was something I should pursue. My manuscript made many trips back and forth, to and from the proverbial shelf and desktop computer, before I finally decided to take it seriously and work on in it in earnest, when I went on maternity leave in 2011. Somehow, after my first child was born, a creative switch flipped on in my brain, and thankfully the writing has consistently poured out of me ever since. So much so that I started my satire blog, www.satiricalmama.com, which I fill with short stories intended to humour and spark discussion.

It is on my blog where I really expose myself, for I satirize everything taboo that we are raised never to discuss in mixed company: religion, politics, sex, money, and anything else that would light a fire under controversy’s proverbial tush. In my four-part series entitled “Scenes from a Marriage,” each one of those pieces came to me as a result of something that arose in my own happy marriage – not verbatim of course, but rather my husband would say something funny or irritating, or leave the toilet seat up, and inspiration would be triggered and I couldn’t stop myself from writing if I tried.

“Kosher Pickles” was written as a reaction to a manifestly misogynistic religious dictate stating that in Judaism (for the record I’m a Jewish woman), a husband can take a ‘kosher concubine’ when his wife either cannot or refuses to procreate and will not grant him a divorce. The wheels churned in my mind about how would it feel for men if the shoe was on the other foot. Furthermore, I believed that it would be funny if I flipped the situation on its head by placing it in the context of speed dating for a ‘mancubine.’

“Hell Hath No Fury” was inspired by my mother, who is a well-respected psychiatrist, and what would happen if Satan was undergoing analysis.

“Guess Who’s Coming to Seder” was a spoof on the famed movie with a similar title starring Sidney Poitier and many a family’s struggle with interfaith marriage.

Last, my piece “What a Messiah You’ve Made” was roused by both going through my own birthing experiences and what would’ve happened if the alleged omnipotent one was not the only one to divinely touch Mary (she was married to Joseph after all).

At the end of the day, with everything I write, I take a piece of me and start from there, whether it be a personal belief, a reaction to something I’ve read or experienced, my family, the legal profession, or anything I read and how it makes me feel. My works are a combination of writing from what I know and have lived, and whatever happens to inspire me in a given moment. Then, like magic, my creative spirit embellishes upon that catalyst, spicing up the story with the right ingredients, allowing it to marinate long enough in my mind such that the words flow through my fingers and on to the screen (or page if I’m writing in my notebook, which is often the case with a first draft). I don’t know how to write any other way. The idea of not using my personal experiences doesn’t lend itself well to my being able to continue to write and entertain. So, here’s hoping that my life remains rich and colourful, rife with characters from all walks of life, which enrich my world, and most importantly, my imagination.

Naomi Elana Zener is a new writer with a fresh satirical voice. Naomi writes satire and fiction on her blog, Satirical Mama. Her vociferous blogging has been read and appreciated by industry bigwigs such as Giller Prize winner Dr. Vincent Lam and New York Times best-selling author and journalist Paula Froelich. Naomi’s articles have also been published by Erica Ehm’s Yummy Mummy Club. Naomi is also a practicing entertainment attorney and lives with her husband and two children in Toronto. She’s currently working on her sophomore novel.

About the book:

Deathbed Dimes exposes the reality that if you can outlive your relatives, friends, and sometimes even strangers, your odds of hitting the inheritance jackpot are better than playing the lottery.

Joely Zeller is a beautiful and ambitious 32-year-old attorney who is the only daughter of a Hollywood firm royal. She’s determined to build a successful career, find love, and get married, all without her family’s help. To emerge from under her parents’ cloud of notoriety, Joely fled to New York upon graduation from Stanford Law School to practice Estates and Trust law at a blue-chip Wall Street law firm. Enduring 90-hour workweeks for the next eight years, she sacrificed her love life (jilted by her fiancé for his best man) only to have her career efforts foiled by her incredibly incompetent male counterpart.

Joely then sees her golden ticket to self-actualization. A serendipitous encounter with a former professor reminds her that with the impending, inevitable demise of aging baby boomers, an unprecedented wealth transfer is beginning to take place. With her experience and her Hollywood connections, she could start her own law firm back in Los Angeles. Alongside her two best friends and former law classmates as partners, Joely sets about helping the recently disowned, dispossessed, and penniless sharpen their claws as they stake their claims to the fortunes of their dearly departed.

CLICK HERE to purchase Deathbed Dimes.

June 19, 2014June 18, 2014

Writing Do’s and Don’ts When Contemplating Quitting

A few weeks ago, I spent three days writing in silence. Well, it wasn’t completely quiet. I called home a few times to check in, conversed over lunch and dinner with a few lovely ladies who cooked my meals, and gave a reassuring “Hello, yes, hello!” to the red-winged blackbird that hovered anxiously overhead when I took a walk along the farm roads.

But in those three days, I rewrote the outline for my novel, pushed through the first section where I’d been circling for months, discovered the ending–the ending!–and cried. A good cry.

Absolutely everything went right.

Then, I went home and fell flat on my face.

Okay, that’s not exactly true. I fell into four loads of laundry. Then, I worked too many days at the day job, hosted plenty of after-school playdates, attended a wedding, the reception, doctor’s appointments, baseball games, softball–all good things. Nothing out of the ordinary, really. But somewhere in the mix of living, that sordid thinking about writing–the kind that takes over like a weed if I let it–crept into my daily to-do list: I can’t do this. Writing a novel is a ridiculous idea. I might as well quit.

That, after a great weekend of work! It never fails to amaze me how quickly the tides turn when pursuing a passion.

Anyway, I won’t tell you how many days (was it weeks?) I moped around. Pouted. Felt sorry for myself. What I will tell you is a list of what held me captive in that ugly place of wanting to quit and what pulled (or pushed) me out of it.

The Don’t do’s when you really feel like quitting:

1. Don’t write a list of past, present, and future failures. It won’t change yesterday, and it doesn’t help today. What’s that they say about failing? Here’s a good one:

It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default. ~ J.K. Rowling

Besides, that list usually has little to do with writing the novel, and failing at dinner doesn’t mean you’ll fail at writing.

2. Don’t analyze blog stats, compare your status on Facebook with every other writer on Facebook, or despair over the lack of notifications in your Twitter feed. Comparing and contrasting in the middle of a meltdown is recipe for disaster. Or, maybe a hefty load of jealousy, and…well…word to the wise:

The jealous are troublesome to others, but a torment to themselves.
~ William Penn

Oh, how we writers love to be martyrs.

3. Don’t turn to Netflix. One might argue with me here. If you can watch episode after episode from past seasons of your favorite comedy show and feel inspired to run to your laptop and crank out a post or a short story or a new scene to the novel? Great, chalk Netflix up as Savior and kick it to the Do’s list below. IF, like me, you watch show after show during that last hour of the evening when you should be/could be writing and each hearty laugh carries you into yet another episode so that it’s suddenly 1am and you’re staring wide-eyed at your iPad knowing the next day you’ll be so exhausted you won’t write even if you really didn’t feel like quitting? Then, you know, skip Netflix. Or, at least put a timer on it.

The Do’s: Short and Sweet.

1. Read. Pick up that book that’s been sitting on your nightstand by that author you’d love to emulate and read. Not so much for study as for spark. For passages that leave you satiated and satisfied for a week. Read with a pencil, so you can underline those phrases. And, if you can find a willing audience (or a quiet room), read books out loud. There’s something about hearing the words as well as seeing them that’s feel-good inspiring.

2. Commit. This is, by far, the best advice I can offer for pushing through the quitting blues: get yourself an obligation. Sign up for a writing commitment of one kind or another. Coffee dates, author readings, a writing group (even if you go just to listen)…something that forces you to spend time with like-minded writers, because I guarantee you aren’t the only one feeling like quitting. You know what helped me most in the last two weeks? First, setting a date and meeting with a new writing friend for coffee; she showed me some really cool ways she’s incorporating art with her words. Second, volunteering at a new literary journal. It’s unpaid work, yes, but as soon as I committed myself to do something for another writer, even if it was confined to reading through submissions or editor applications, I could not, in good conscience, pull the plug on my own life as writer.

3. Write. I know, I know, how can you write if you don’t feel like writing ever again? Consider it writing for release. Not those repeated lists of failures, but maybe (if this works for you) a letter to your muse. This blog post didn’t start out as a Do’s and Don’t’s. It started out as a “poor me” letter to whomever was paying attention:

Here’s an honest post. For the last two weeks I have fought tooth and nail to stop myself from pulling the plug. To quit the urge to quit. I do not want to write this post. Nobody likes a poor me post about how hard it is to write.

Then, I sat for a good ten minutes and stared into the white light of the screen. Maybe I checked Facebook….

Not it’s time to go to bed and I still have nothing.

So, I saved the post, shut down my computer, went to bed. The next day, I folded some laundry. I read a submission for this new literary magazine, emailed my thoughts to the editor-in-chief, and I felt better. Rejuvenated. For no good reason, except that I had waited just long enough for the tides to turn again. And, when they did, I sat back down at the computer and wrote for real.

What are your do’s or don’ts when your hand is reaching for the white flag?