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Blogs become books. Can a memoir become a sitcom?

Moving to the other side of the cash wrap…felt as disorienting to me as Alice might have felt when she slipped through the mirror into Wonderland, landing unawares in…a world populated by Mad Hatters, rushing rabbits, chatty chess pieces, and enormous mushrooms. ~ Caitlin Kelly in MALLED

Behind the scenes. That’s where Caitlin Kelly takes readers in her memoir Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail (out April 14, 2011 from Portfolio). Today, I’m hosting Caitlin here to talk about her journey from an essay in the New York Times, to a memoir, to contract talks with CBS.

From Caitlin’s bio:

The book combines her personal story of moving into low-wage customer service at 50; others, mid-career and mid-recession, taking these jobs and a detailed, national analysis of this $4 trillion industry.

A regular contributor to The New York Times since 1990, Kelly has written for USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Glamour, More, and other publications in Canada and Europe. A former reporter for the New York Daily News, Toronto Globe and Mail and Montreal Gazette, she is the winner of a Canadian National Magazine Award (humor), and five journalism fellowships. Born and raised in Canada, she has lived in the U.S. since 1988, and has also lived in England, France and Mexico.

As a bonus, Caitlin is giving away a signed copy of her memoir. At the end of her guest post, leave a comment to be entered into the drawing for a copy of Malled. Random.org will choose the winner on Tuesday, September 6th, at high noon.

 Welcome, Caitlin Kelly

If you’d told me that taking a low-wage job folding T-shirts in a suburban mall would lead to negotiating a contract with CBS on my birthday for a possible sitcom based on my life, I’d have laughed hysterically.

But that’s exactly what’s happened to me since Sept. 25, 2007 when I was hired to work as a part-time sales associate for The North Face at an upscale mall in White Plains, NY. I hadn’t worked a low-wage job since high school, was 50 and heading into a recession.

My own story quickly became just one of many in this ongoing recession. In February 2009, I published an essay in The New York Times business section explaining how moving from journalism – my only industry since graduating college in 1979 – to retail had turned out, then, to be a good choice for me. I liked the clarity of retail’s reported numbers: how much I sold per hour, my average daily sale, what percentage of my merchandise was later returned. In journalism, publishing and blogging, all judgments of value are totally subjective.

By June 2009, I had found an agent who felt confident we could find a publisher to take my memoir of working in the nation’s third-largest industry and single greatest source of new jobs. It wasn’t quite as quick and easy as we’d hoped, with 25 rejections before Portfolio, the business imprint of Penguin, bought it in September 2009.

I continued working in the store for another three months, taking many more notes than before, gathering as much detail, color, anecdote and dialogue as possible. No one at the company knew I was writing a book, and it felt strange to be writing things down while standing at the cash wrap.

I quit the job December 18, 2009 and began to write full-time. By June I was done, although revisions and some restructuring were necessary. Because retail is ever-changing, I read the business press every day, adding as necessary to keep the manuscript timely and up-to-date.

“Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail” was published April 14, 2011 and received a terrific amount of national attention, with reviews and features in People, Marie-Claire, USA Today, The New York Times, Financial Times and Entertainment Weekly. I also appeared on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show (2 million listeners), Marketplace and The Brian Lehrer Show.

Emails soon started showing up from major entertainment companies expressing interest in it as a vehicle for film or television. I thought they were hoaxes! But by June 6, 2011, my birthday, we had an offer from CBS to option “Malled” as a possible sitcom. They have since commissioned a script. The next steps, I hope, are a pilot and a series; if so, I’m signed on as a story consultant for a few years.

This fairly quick journey from a Times essay to a book to a possible television show is a combination of factors: timing, luck, story, competition, voice and a tough agent. There have only been three other books I’m aware of now on the market that really describe in real time what it’s like to lose a good job, move down the economic ladder and tell the truth about how it feels. I was fortunate enough to find a good agent and an enthusiastic publisher. The book is written as a memoir, but it’s not just my story. I knew from the start that my story alone was insufficient, so it also includes dozens of original interviews with other sales associates nationwide, senior retail executives, Wall Street analysts and others.

One way I managed to get the book produced fairly quickly was – as I also did with my first book, “Blown Away: American Women and Guns” – by hiring researchers. They conducted some of my interviews and gathered statistics.

In the past few weeks, I’ve spoken as the closing keynote at a retail conference in Minneapolis, celebrated the sale of “Malled” to China, where it will be translated, and chatted with the veteran screenwriter who’s now creating his characters, one of them based on me.

It’s all a little surreal, kind of exciting and a lot more fun than folding T-shirts.

~

Entertainment Weekly calls [Malled] “an excellent memoir” and USA Today says “Malled is a bargain, even at full price. Kelly is a first-rate researcher and storyteller.” Original interviews include consultant Paco Underhill, retailer Jack Mitchell and Costco CFO Richard Galanti.

Read more on Caitlin Kelly by visiting her website and her blog, Also, check out another book by Kelly, Blown Away, on American women and guns. Don’t forget to leave a comment, as well, for a chance to win a copy of her memoir.

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Writing Yourself Home….A Guest Post by Lise Saffran

I’m thrilled to welcome Lise Saffran here today. In her beautiful guest post, Lise talks about writing, with your hands in one place and your heart in another.

Her essay brings to mind my favorite bookmark, a bumper sticker that describes me in two words: Misplaced Texan. At twenty-two years old, I fell in love, uprooted myself, and moved north. While I’ve lived in Wisconsin long enough to have earned my stripes (surviving frigid temperatures and eating cheese curds, a strange phenomenon), in my heart, I am still from Texas. That fact often shows up in my speech and occasionally in my stories, and it has made me the writer I am today.

Lise’s essay shows us how strong sense of place is integral in a story, as well as in a writer’s life.

~

Writing Yourself Home:
A Mid-Western Novelist Yearns for the West Coast
by Lise Saffran

The cicadas were everywhere in Mid-Missouri this summer.  Crawling up from the ground, rattling the branches of the trees, dive-bombing bicyclists and looking for love in all the wrong places (the office where I write, for one). Our local ice cream parlor whipped up a batch of nationally famous cicada ice-cream.

At one point I realized I had even begun to measure my life by cicada hatchings.  Thirteen years ago, when the parents of the current crop were abandoning their husks in several-inch deep piles under the trees, I had an infant of my own and a brand new MFA from a Mid-western university.  While the baby slept I wrote stories about a former drug addict living in a converted school bus in Humboldt county who manicured pot for a living, a San Francisco girl preparing to leave the Bay Area for Sri Lanka and a home for troubled and homeless youth in wealthy Marin County.  The first of those stories to be published, Men and Fish, was about a woman who wrote a fishing column for a local paper.  And by local, I mean the San Francisco Bay Area.

This year, Cicada Brood XIX emerged to find me with two children and a first novel, Juno’s Daughters, on the shelves.  The novel concerns a single mother and her teenage daughters who participate in a summer production of The Tempest and it is set on San Juan Island, off the coast of Seattle in the Puget Sound.  The cast of characters–both onstage and off—features a collection of potters, weavers and musicians that would be instantly recognizable to the individuals who roamed through my earlier stories or indeed to most people who had found themselves hiking over Mt. Tamalpais in California or soaking in Oregon’s Cougar Hot Springs.

Driving my elder son to camp this weekend on interstate 70 we passed endless flat fields, many filled with the gold lamé of tassled corn.  A barn sported a painted advertisement for Meramec Caverns and multiple billboards urged us to visit Lake of the Ozarks. My son was born in Missouri and this is his countryside but to me, even after all these years, it feels exotic.  No matter how long I have been away, when I step off the plane in San Francisco, Portland or Seattle I feel that I’m home.  The air smells different when it is laced with pine and salt.  Shadows cast by mountains are distinct from the shade of a broad tree on a wide field.  If writers are often accused—rightly so—of writing the same story over and over again, that story, for me, has unfolded primarily in a western landscape.

It is partly separation from the region in which I was raised that makes it such an attractive subject. Beginning writers often fail to include sensory details in their fiction because they figure that such shared experience is sure to be boring to their readers. Why describe an orange, they wonder, if everyone already knows what an orange is like?  Well, everyone knows what love is like and what loss is like and what it is like to want something desperately, too.  It is the writer’s job to make that longing—and when important to the story, the orange, too—present on the page.

Imagining yourself deeply into a story is an act of conjuring that relies on an unpredictable combination of memory and invention.  Longing can often work like a switch.  Describing the orange on your desk is one thing.  Describing the taste of an orange when you’re dying for one and haven’t had one in years is quite another.

Elements of landscape and the sensations they produce also work like trapdoors into wider memories that enrich my fiction.  The way that eucalyptus trees drop their pods like little missiles on the ground reminds me of camping out at Grateful Dead shows when I was a teenager reminds me of the feeling of freedom and possibility and danger of being a late adolescent. I have now lived most of my adult life away from eucalyptus trees (not to mention the Grateful Dead) and that, in itself, works to underscore the passage of time, another fertile topic for stories.

My current work-in-progress is a second novel set on the San Juan Islands, but lately I have begun taking some tentative steps to write about Missouri, as well. In a recent story, Water Witch, the body of water that figures prominently in the action is an Ozark stream rather than the Pacific Ocean.  I am eager to explore this new setting and there may even come a day when I will describe myself as a writer from the West Coast rather than of the West Coast.  However, I can no more picture a time when my fiction will be unbuckled from my geographic origins than imagine it free from lessons learned in childhood about family, betrayal, adventure and loss.

In thirteen years, when the sleeping children of Brood XIX emerge from the ground again and my own children are off living their lives, where will I be?  Chances are pretty good that I will still be in Columbia, MO where my husband is a philosophy professor and where we have dear friends and deep roots.  Chances are better than good that at least some of the time I will be sitting at my desk in Mid-Missouri surrounded by coastal fog and dry yellow hills, the sound of the waves crashing in my ears.

~

Lise Saffran is the author of the novel JUNO’S DAUGHTERS, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and Hedgebrook. Her work has appeared in literary journals, Poets and Writers and the Granta Anthology FAMILY WANTED.  Not only does she live full-time in Missouri, she is part-owner of 60 acres in an Ozark county where there are rumored to be more copperheads than people.

Read more about Lise and her novel on her website, follow Lise on Twitter, and friend her on Facebook.

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Guest Post by Lisa Rivero: Down She Went

What would you do if you were given a stack of daily diaries written by a vibrant woman, who saw the importance of recording simple yet rich details about the world around her? You’d read them, sure. Not many can resist diving into the pages of first-hand experiences about the past. And, if you’re Lisa Rivero, you’d see the value of their imprint on history and turn those diaries into a story.

Every Tuesday, on her blog Writing Life, Lisa posts flash narratives — very short excerpts of the story that lies within the pages of her Great Aunt Hattie’s diaries. Lisa’s narratives are beautiful pieces that will draw you in and leave you hungry to know more about the life of Hattie Whitcher. Today, I’m honored to host Lisa here, where she shares the third installment of a series based on Hattie’s experience on Memorial Day in 1933. Click these links to read part one (“A Nice, Bright Day”) and part two (“Cracklings”).

Memorial Day Weekend, 1933:
“Down She Went”

She knows what will happen only a moment too late to stop it. Her foot slips on the rain-soaked bank of dirt the men had thrown onto the path, and down she goes into a newly dug, half-finished toilet hole, her left leg buckling beneath her in six inches of water.

At first, she feels nothing but surprise and wonders only how she will heft herself out of the four-foot deep hole, but when she tries to stand up, the pain in her left leg lashes through her body like a whip, causing her to collapse against the earth wall. She tries again to stand, this time on her good leg, and braces both arms on the ground at her chin level.

“Bill! Help!” Her voice is shaky. She hopes he is not asleep in his chair, as usual.

Her arms keep slipping on the mud, and she clutches at wet clods of earth, trying to prop herself up so as to project her voice. “Bill!”

She sees him then, rushing from the house.

“Goodness, Hattie! What did you do? Give me your hand.”

He tries to pull her up first by taking her hands, then by grabbing her under her arms. She bites her bottom lip when her leg hits the side of the hole. After three more attempts, she manages to get out. She sits on the ground to catch her breath.

“I’m going to carry you into the house,” Bill says.

“No, I’m too heavy.” The image of her brother’s hauling her across the yard is more than she can bear. “I’ll crawl.”

Using her arms and her right leg, she crawls to the house, issuing small cries of pain with each labored movement. Her dress grows heavy with mud, slowing her down even more.

“Hattie, be reasonable,” Bill pleads, walking beside her, his hands helpless at his sides. She just shakes her head.

Once on the porch, she allows Bill to help her into a standing position. She leans on his right shoulder and, step by step, makes her way to the first floor bedroom. The thought of what her dress will do to the quilt makes her cringe, but she cannot imagine removing her clothes, so she tells Bill to lower her to the bed. The relief of finally being off her feet combined with the pain in her leg brings tears to her eyes. Bill gets her some aspirins and a glass of water, then disappears.

Hattie spills water on her chin and wipes it with the sleeve of her everyday dress, smearing mud on her face. “Bill?” she calls.

He brings a hot pan of water he poured from the kettle on the cook stove that she had been keeping warm for cleaning the kitchen and places it on the floor. After removing Hattie’s shoe and stocking and gently moving her leg off the side of the bed so that her foot soaks in the hot water, he says, “Stay here. I’m going for help.”

“But–”

“No buts, Hattie!” She rarely hears this sharp tone from her gentle brother. He puts his hand on her shoulder. “I’m going to Tom’s to get a car.” Over his shoulder, as he leaves the room, he adds, “Don’t move.”

Bill runs west to their brother Tom’s house. On the way back, at the bridge, they meet LeRoy Kropp and his wife, Jerome Jamison and his wife and their two children, all coming from Winner in their car, and they follow Bill and Tom back to the house.

Just as the cars pull into the yard, Will and Narvin return. They prepare Hattie for the trip to Rosebud Ashurst Hospital, their only stop being for Hattie to use the slop jar at a neighbor’s place. Because of the Memorial Day weekend, there are no workers and no power at the hospital to take an X-ray until the next evening, when it is found that the long bone above her ankle is broken.

From her hospital bed the next day, she is keen to learn from Will of the holiday’s events, which she writes in her diary:

May 30, 1933: Will and Thomas went to O’Kreek this morning to the Legion Program, then George O’Conners took Will in his car to Mission to help decorate graves and then back to O’Kreek to dinner. Will then went on to see me at hospital. It was my wish that he do all he could, also the boys. William and Narvin did fine with lunch. Will said that all the meat is put in the basement and the kitchen is cleaned and mopped. All the pork is cooked and in jars, covered with fryings and lard, so the men can batch awhile.

 *****

"Although a windy afternoon, I managed to walk to the Car, first time on crutches. W. J. has his pipe in vest pocket, was told to put it in his mouth, but he covered it with his hand. Maggie and Will took me to Winner, and I enjoyed the trip."

Hattie stays in the hospital for two weeks, and for several weeks afterward she remains on a sanitary cot at home, leaving it only “when they take me out to sit sideways at the table to eat.” She has a live-in helper, Maggie—“the best helper we could have”—for one and one-half years, at which time she can walk with one crutch and a cane.

Hattie will eventually be diagnosed with diabetes. Her left foot and leg will heal slowly. We can only imagine the damage done by her crawling to the house and the jostling car ride to Rosebud before the leg could be set. She will battle infection and poor circulation, and her leg will never again be pain free. This is her last entry, from June 2, 1957:

South wind was quite strong. I feel bad with pains in my left foot. Will put my bedding from the front-room chair back on my bed and elevated my left leg, but it pained more than ever, so Will brought the bedding back to the front room chair. I gave an insulin shot to myself and ate oatmeal toast and apricot sauce and had hot water to drink.

She never writes in her diary again, and, four days later, part of her foot will be amputated. The next Memorial Day in 1958, twenty-five years after having broken her leg, Will—her husband, friend, companion and helpmate—takes Hattie to the hospital, where she will stay until her death.

~

Lisa Rivero

Lisa Rivero lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where she is a writer, teacher, indexer, and speaker. Her professional and writing interests include gifted education, home education, creativity, literature and the humanities, and the challenges faced by all families in this fast-paced and often perplexing 21st-century life. Her published books include Creative Home Schooling (Great Potential Press, 2002), The Homeschooling Option (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), A Parent’s Guide to Gifted Teens (Great Potential Press, 2010), and The Smart Teens’ Guide to Living with Intensity (Great Potential Press, 2010). She is currently writing a novel based on the Great Plains diaries of her great-aunt Harriet E. Whitcher.