B.A. Goodjohn's Blog

I've moved! From May 23rd, my new online home is here:
www.bunnygoodjohn.com





















:)

Anticipating Gatlinburg, I readied for hard core historic…for plaques about battles and declarations, bronze memorials to the fallen. Maybe a diorama, a restaurant with waiters and waitresses in period costume. I imagined a library with sepia maps and an Information Center with CD tours for rent.
So I felt a right prat when I found Gatlinburg packed with people buying sugar and carbs--candy, taffy, ice-cream, corn dogs, burgers, whiskey, moonshine—from stores shaped like castles and pirates and prisons. I smiled at the balconied “Vape” stores, restaurants selling burgers, pizza, ribs, Chinese buffet. It had stores where you could pose as characters from the Wild West, where you could have your initials put on anything, where you could buy your girlfriend a sexy nightie, your dog a biker jacket, your son a Confederate poster for his bedroom.
You couldn’t buy real things…like kettles or matches or six-packs of Pepsi.  There were no banks or Realtors, no chiropodists. No library. No book store. There were no African Americans or Asians or Latinos. 
Gatlinburg won’t be pulling at me this week, tempting me away from my work. Small mercies.

Signed and dedicated copies of THE BEGINNING THINGS available for preorder $11:95plus shipping.

“It’s hard,” she said, “when things change. It’s hard to know what to do when things aren’t what you think they are.” He joined in, teaming trousers with matching shirts and ties, the entire outfit bulging on one hanger. “It’s a mucking fess."Tot to her grandfather in The Beginning Things
I grew up when society was pushing fathers towards a larger role in childrearing and my dad seemed to struggle with that. We kids knew he loved us, but that knowledge came from what he did (worked hard, fixed shit) rather than from what he said. When he did speak, it seemed he was comfiest when he was being funny with his puns and spoonerisms.  
He’d read me signs: “Dorry, No Sogs,” “Ho Dawkers!.” At dinner, he’d demand “A Tug of Me!” and “Spore Muds, Mother!” When I got older, he became more risqué: “Billy Sugger!” he’d cry. “For Sod’s Gake!”
My dad would never have said that something was a “Mucking Fess” but I like to think he probably thought it.  
Dank you, Thad. I yuv lou loads.

Signed and dedicated copies of THE BEGINNING THINGS available for preorder $11:95plus shipping.

I've always made things. As a kid, I sewed doll dresses from scraps lifted from mum's mending box. I knitted cardigans for babies: miniatures in pink and blue. I made Madeleines--sweet sponge "turrets" brushed with jam and rolled in desiccated coconut—and served them to my parents while they watched the wrestling on the telly.

As a teenager, I made plans: how I'd marry someone with TIME; how I'd live in a house with a lawn all the way around; how my husband would love me more than anyone he would ever meet. Ever.

As a woman, I made mistakes which brought me howling into truths about myself and into change..and into prose and poetry. I howled into stories, into poems, into novels.

Last year, I visited my sister in Greece and she taught me to crochet. We sat watching the ocean and I crocheted pot covers threaded with evil eyes. When I came home, I began to crochet little “give away” bookmark for The Beginning Things.

I have some amazing friends. I blogged a week or so ago that I adored the cover art for my book The Beginning Things and was sad that the artist was “unknown.” The image of a girl on a chair came from a stock photograph company, and no artist was tied to the painting.
This week, I opened a Facebook message from Debbie Spanich, a good friend and colleague. She cryptically announced herself as my “fairy godmother” and sprinkled me with a link. The link was to http://www.123rf.com, a site that sells royalty free stock photography. And down there on the twelfth line of a page showcasing a Russian artist’s work was my girl on a chair. 
I’ve Facebook-friended the artist. Let’s hope I get a reply. If I don’t, I’ll try something else. But the main thing is that we get to credit the artist on The Beginning Thing’s back cover.
Here's another from the same artist.


And next week, Debbie gets to share how she tracked down the girl on a chair (I’m guessing some image-recognition software as opposed to divination or the smoking of magical herbs). Either way, Debbie IS my Fairy Godmother. She’s turned an image into a story. 
Abracadabra—that’s magic.

Art is hard work. Whether it’s writing or sculpting or painting or making killer cupcakes, creating is hard work. And all too often, the creator receives scant acknowledgement.
When Underground Voices and I decided on the artwork for The Beginning Things, I wanted to acknowledge the artist in some way…like include her name on the acknowledgements page…give her a big shout-out on social media…or send her a copy of the book.
But it turns out that the artist is unknown. UV discovered TBT’s gorgeous girl on a stock artwork site, and for whatever reason, the site owners were unable to let us know who painted her. 
I would love to somehow hunt the artist down. There’s a part of me that wants to buy the original and have it hanging up on my wall. I know that somewhere it exists. It might be tiny – a little 8 x 4 pastel sketch. Or maybe it’s bigger—some huge canvas. Or maybe—horror of horrors—the artist photographed the original and submitted it to the online artwork site, and somehow, the original was lost or destroyed. 
Hunting down an artist from an artwork is nigh on impossible, but the possibility haunts me.

Underground Voices recently finalized the cover artwork for The Beginning Things. I love it – it’s understated and seems to have caught the “sense” of twelve-year-old Tot, the novel’s main character. They’ve kept me involved in the process—a move that makes me love working with small independent presses.
UV originally sent three options. I had trouble deciding between two of them: I liked the composition of one (a framed image that allowed the title to stand against a plain background) and the artwork of another. UV combined the two to arrive at this final choice.
There was one further revision: the original artwork showed the girl wearing a slightly cropped sweater which exposed the band of a tiny G-string. While Tot is sexually active (and that’s a big part of her story), she is naïve in many ways: she wouldn’t wear sexy undies. UV responded to my concerns immediately and had the image edited to lengthen the sweater.
They sent me two sets of the original artwork: one portrait image of the front cover only and a landscape image of the front and back cover spread. This landscape version has proved a great choice for promotional postcards. I love Vistaprint!

Recently, I was struggling with ego’s seesaw. I explained to friends that writers are often private people—loners who tend towards isolation. That’s how we get the work done. But once the writing is done, we need to persuade people to back our work…either as publishers, promoters or as buyers. That requires ego.
Of course, everything requires ego to some degree. But promoting and receiving praise for my work engages my ego in a big way, and that can be dangerous for a recovering alcoholic like me.
There are clear connections between ego and my drinking: if someone offers me a drink and I take it, I’ll want the rest of the bottle (or wine box); if someone offers praise, I crave more…and more and more. I abstain from alcohol, but the success of my work doesn’t allow me to abstain from ego.
My pal, D, responded with a copy of “Desiderata” in which Ehrmann says, “enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.”
With ego, the healthy answer rests inside balance. But as with sobriety, the challenge is maintaining that balance.
(Image by Irene Shpak at deviantart.com)

Underground Voices, CA
Lovely emails the past two days from Underground Voices, my publisher. Cetywa sent me mock-ups to consider, and that’s rather magical in itself. Sometimes, the author doesn’t get that opportunity.
I get that though. The process COULD be a nightmare for all concerned. The author might get precious and pooh-pooh each option: it’s easy to be so invested with characters and settings that we already have an image in mind that won’t budge. Or the publisher might offer options the author feels run counter to narrative.
I have four to consider so far. One uses the wrap-round from front to back cover—an approach used on Scott Neuffer’s Scars of the New Order. But while the design is brilliantly stark and edgy, it’s too…coastal. Too American. The others feature girls—all adolescent and wonderfully complicated. We’re playing with a hybrid: the artwork from one and the layout from another.
Now that I’m not freaking about the actual artwork, I’m fussing about typography and resolution. What font takes the story and hands it over? Will the printing process render the type sharply on the card stock? Will I hate the non-matt stock (I have an odd thing about the lovely waxy feel of matt stock)?

When I hear the phrase lyric essay, I think creative nonfiction…Brenda Miller, Sue William Silverman, Amy Fuselman. But I've just finished Elizabeth Hardwick's lyrical, snappy 1970s novel Sleepless Nights and I'm thinking that this too, with its short sections, its dipping in and out, the sharp and acute focus on the moment, shares many features of the lyric. Its moments mimic thought: they are, on the surface, unconnected in the broad sense of the term, each finely wrought with the white space’s pause for reflection/disconnection. But together, they deliver a whole life.

Sleepess Nights makes me wonder. It feels like memoir. It has the flavor of Coatzee's Elizabeth Costello: not so much in terms of content but more in how the main character navigates the material.
Sometimes the universe pushes me where I don’t want to go. Lately, I’ve been writing poems that want to ramble, fiction that keeps showing me, Clockwork Orange style, photographs from my childhood. And I’m reading Sue William Silverman’s The Pat Boone Fan Club. All is pushing me to consider the lyric essay.

How the genre scares me.

(Sleepless Nights arrived in a box of Kitsch love from Charlotte Hall. How I love unbidden books.)

Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is not an easy read. It requires the reader to suspend the need for completion and that can be tough. Hardwick's narrator looks back on her life and examines her intereactions with others, moments, places, decisions. She alights upon each and looks closely and deeply. In many ways, this is a collection of flash fictions, of lyric essays. Once I got my head around that, I settled in and began to enjoy it. I could see this as cinema, albeit avant garde! It's the kind of book I would hope to return to, to reread. It's the kind of book I'd like to think I might try to write one day as memoir...a continual dipping into memory.


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