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Home Excerpts Reviews & Events Soundtrack Changelings Underground Writing A Double Life |
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June 26, 2007 Three Three years ago this week, the news came from Regal Literary that they were interested in the manuscript of "The Stolen Child." From that moment to this, the whole experience of publishing a first novel has been surreal and beyond expectations. A big thank you to all involved. First, to Nan Talese and everyone at Random House on the hardcover side and the good folks at Anchor Books for the paperback. The attention and care of the book and the writer have been exceptional. And the reception by readers and critics exceeded my expectations. The Stolen Child was nominated for a Quill Award, Borders Original Voices, QPB New Voices, the Crawford First Novel from the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, the Mythopoeic Society Award for Adult Literature, and the International Horror Guild Novel of the Year. It was a BookSense Pick for May 2006, appeared on the New York Times Bestseller (extended) List, and was a Best Books 2006 pick from Amazon.com readers, The Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kansas City Star, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Locus Magazine, and the Library Journal. The novel was featured on Amazon's "Fishbowl," National Public Radio, and just recently on YouTube. The novel was also published in a Large Print edition (Center Point) and came to life as an award-winning audio book from Recorded Books, Inc. Twentieth Century Fox has purchased the film option, and we hope that a feature film is forthcoming. Foreign rights have been sold in 25 countries, and editions have appeared from Jonathan Cape/Vintage UK, Rizzoli in Italy, Husets in Denmark, Gyldendal in Norway, Yuan-Liou in Taiwan (where it also hit the bestseller list), and Dastan in Indonesia. Coming this summer from C. Bertelsmann in Germany and Arena in the Netherlands. The biggest thank you goes to the readers and listeners. Hearing from you and meeting you at bookclubs, through blogs and email, and in bookstores across the country has been a rich and rewarding experience. At the heart of connecting readers and books are the booksellers, whose enthusiasm for The Stolen Child makes all of this possible. So many thanks for a wonderful three years, and here's to the three ahead. April 23, 2007  Lifting the Anchor, Setting SailWith the publication of the Anchor Books paperback edition just around the corner on May 8, 2007, The Stolen Child is nearly one year old, and it has been an extraordinary and thrilling experience. Hatched in the imagination, a story develops slowly over time, unfolds itself day by day, and then flies away suddenly. Since May 2006, I have had the opportunity to witness the book take wing and more or less live on its own. The story takes on the apercu of no longer belonging to its author alone but to its audience, and I have been touched by the stories that readers have shared at bookstores and through email--moments when the novel connected with their own lives in unexpected ways. Now, it begins again. Anchor has arranged for a nine-day, nine-city tour which will give me the opportunity to meet more readers across the country. McDaniel College upstate in Maryland has assigned The Stolen Child to its incoming freshmen class, and I'll have the chance to talk with hundreds of readers at once. The book has been published in the UK, Italy, and Denmark, and will soon arrive in Taiwan, Holland, and many more countries, and a screenplay is being written for a film. The best thing about all of this is the chance for the story to find more readers. Without you, I'd be talking to myself. I'm wrapping up a new story, this one about a woman, whose daughter has been missing for a decade, and the visitor who changes her life. As with The Stolen Child, this new novel readily accepts the proposition that in stories anything can--and often does--happen. The magic in stories--the magic of stories--matters most to what it reveals, the human life hidden behind the curtain. So, May 8th, the paperback will be in a bookstore near you. I hope you'll visit and find a little magic for yourself. September 8th  A Danish ChildHusets Forlag, Danish publishers of THE STOLEN CHILD, will publish the novel as Skifting (Changeling) on September 16. Another brilliant interpretation for the cover art, and inside it is fascinating to see the language, not that I read Danish, but to make out the names of the characters: Igel becomes Pindgris, Speck becomes Plet, Aniday becomes Hverdag. "Little treasure" is lille skat. "Don't call me a fairy" becomes "Kald mig ikke en fe." "I am gone" is "Jeg er væk." Perhaps the changes and echoes from one language to another ring more clearly for me because I have just finished reading Francine Prose's book Reading Like a Writer in which she asks, "Can creative writing be taught?" Over the past few weeks, as school begins again for my children, the itch to teach again has started in earnest, and reading Prose's guide for writers and readers, I was reminded of the value of slowing down, reading carefully, attuned to both the symphonic sweep of novels and the details in every measure. If you want to write, get yourself a copy of this book. If you want to read better, more deeply and empathetically, for pleasure and understanding, take her advice. Toward the end of this book crammed with examples, she quotes from Chekhov: "You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist." This seems a fair measure for judging a work and the expectations brought to bear on the reader. August 3rd Same Dream, Different Version Last week, Amazon.com announced that they have purchased the film option on THE STOLEN CHILD and are now seeking partners to adapt the story for the movies. Several people have asked me what I think about all of this. Writing -- and re-writing and editing -- a novel is translating a dream into words. You imagine, add, subtract, select, and polish, but essentially, this story crawls out of the imagination and onto the page. Adaptations are the same dream, different version. I'm looking forward to seeing the results, whatever they may be. And I'm pleased that Amazon is involved, for they have been passionate about the story from the beginning. How this adaptation of dreams really works is a glorious mystery. Writing on Samuel Beckett in this week's New Yorker, Benjamin Kunkel observes: "There is a moment in MOLLOY when Moran is attempting to drag himself home, where he hopes to see again his bees dancing near their hive. He describes at length the mysterious buzzing dance of the bees, controlled by "determinants of which I had not the slightest idea." It may be the happiest, most fruitful moment in Beckett: "And I said, with rapture, Here is something I can study all my life, and never understand." With rapture, watching the bees. July 24th Hollywood Baby The good folks at Amazon.com had me on as a guest for the Fishbowl internet show last week, along with Ivan Reitman and Soul Asylum, which pushes up the surrealism meter yet another notch. The show tapes in Hollywood, California, and after some initial confusion at the entrance (Keith Donohue?...I never heard of anyone named Keith Donohue, are you sure you're on the list?), they whisked me off to a dressing room. Taped on the door was a box with four squares labeled: Arrived; Makeup; Microphone; and BM. The last one seemed both mysterious and a little too thorough, until I met Billy Martin, the show's director. While Bill Maher, the host, did his monologue, I had the chance to watch it on TV on the other side of the scrim, standing with Ivan Reitman, the stage manager, director, and about five other people in a space big enough for three. They finished far too quickly with Ivan, and I was led to a chair next to Bill Maher, the lights were hushed, and all of a sudden...you're on the computer. People are clapping and making you feel welcome. The interview flew by and my points...my points...well, it was fun and funny. Maher, an Irish kid from Jersey, had some stories, but he seemed to elide the question of why he still has his cap gun from when he was a boy. We hang onto our personal artifacts because they remind of us who we were. Once upon a time. In la-la land. In the dreams of past life. They snuck me around the back of the audience and I got to see and hear Soul Asylum, tap my toes on the Runaway Train. Then backstage where for about 15 minutes, you rehash your five minutes, and then off you go. Back into that brilliant, merciless Southern California sunshine. July 18th  The Rain, the Sun, the Boy from the FishbowlSince the end of June, havoc descended. The rains raineth every day for a week, flooding everything from the place where I work to the basement of the house. And then the sun came out with a vengeance. We are melting here in Washington, DC. Small puddles of gray suits evaporate quickly in the morning sun. All the while I'm writing a book set in frosty February, just to stay cool. The Italian version of THE STOLEN CHILD was published in June by Rizzoli. They call it "Il bambino che non era vero" - "The child who wasn't really true" - and new art graces the cover. One of the real pleasures of the past year is to see three very different takes from graphic artists responding to the book. This Thursday, July 20, I will be on Amazon Fishbowl discussing the novel with Bill Maher. Fishbowl is a weekly half-hour talk show that you can watch on your computer. Tap on the glass and say hello. June 16th  Happy Bloomsday. This is the date--June 16--that James Joyce chose for the romp of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. June 16, 1904 to be precise.One of the very first celebrations of the event was held in Dublin, on the 50th anniversary, when Myles na Gopaleen, the writer of the daily column "Cruiskeen Lawn" in the Irish Times, got together with John Ryan, editor of the literary magazine Envoy, Paddy Kavanagh, the poet, the critic Anthony Cronin, and Tom Joyce, a cousin and a dentist. Their plan was to re-trace the route of Bloom, by horse-drawn cabs, through the streets of Dublin. Starting out at the Martello Tower in Dalkey, the friends began drinking early in the day. They barely made it back to the city itself, ending up at the Bailey, too drunk to continue. An object lesson in the price of literary fame.  A decade later, Myles--also known as Flann O'Brien--would write The Dalkey Archive, in which the protagonist meets the aging James Joyce working as a barman in a pub. Joyce, according to the novel, hadn't died in Zurich at all, but had come back to Ireland, found work pouring drinks, and secretly harbored the desire, late in life, to join the Jesuits.The Irish are a funny people. June 7th  One of the most persistent images in Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" is the scene where the Redcrosse Knight battles the dragon. In Milton's "Paradise Lost," angels--good and bad--do battle for mankind. Shakespeare uses faeries in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," witches in "Macbeth," and magicians in "The Tempest." Folk legends torque into fairy tales, plays, stories, and novels. Mary Shelley creates Frankenstein, Bram Stoker Dracula. Willie Yeats discovers the Celtic Twilight, and Jimmy Joyce solders one day in Dublin to the granddaddy myth of Ulysses.In the mid-20th century, particularly in the United States, literary works turned more toward naturalism, realism or the literal representation of reality, and we are asked to suspend disbelief, as if the story of Jay Gatsby or Atticus Finch or Rabbit Angstrom is real, actually happening as the story unfolds.  But quietly, the magicians are toiling away--Bulgakov in Russia, Flann O'Brien in Ireland, Giordano Bruno, Bruno Schulz, Borges, Kafka. Take a look at Virginia Woolf's Orlando some day and tell me what happened to realism. Where is the verisimilitude in the narrator of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying? Over the past generation, perhaps with the publication of Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or the popularization of the work on myth by Joseph Campbell, writers are returning to the notion of story as the figurative representation of life.Thus, we have cheek by jowl, works that cut across paper boundaries--science fiction in Haruki Murakami and Kevin Brockmeier, ghost stories by Toni Morrison and Alice Sebold, angels in Angela Carter, golems in Michael Chabon. When asked, I resist calling The Stolen Child a fantasy. It's just a story, with a little magic. May 23rd What a fabulous two weeks it has been since the book was published. Over the weekend, I had the chance to go to the Book Expo America here in Washington, DC, where I signed books and audio CDs at the Recorded Books booth and met a lot of readers. Bumped into Tommy Chong -- of Cheech and Chong fame -- on my way out. He was signing advance copies of his prison memoir, I CHONG, and on the side of the podium someone had taped a poster advertising a book by Lynne Cheney. When the irony was pointed out to him, Chong drew a cartoon joint on the banner. Only in America. The latest issue of Zoetrope: All-Story was on the racks and I picked it up because the guest designer is Kiki Smith, an artist whose "idea was to create a counterweight to art that was elitist, secreted away from our daily lives," according to David Byrne. Her MoMA exhibit is well worth the virtual visit. Truth be told, I was at the newsstand to buy the May 29th Newsweek which reviews the Child: My So-Called Double Life... If you are anywhere near Baltimore, come to the reading at the Timonium Border's on Thursday, May 25th at 7pm. The best part of the job is meeting readers. May 17th Return of the Native Heading back to Pittsburgh to read and sign books at Joseph Beth Books on the South Side, Thursday May 18th at 7pm. The hometown papers gave the book rare reviews, and here are links to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette review and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review.  My interest in writing began in earnest in Pittsburgh during my college days. I had the great good fortune to study under the poet Sam Hazo at Duquesne University, who also runs the International Poetry Forum which has brought the world's best poets to the city over the past 40 years.  Sam also introduced me to the work of Seamus Heaney over 25 years ago, and the hard clash of consonants and rhythms of his poetry were another deep influence. Last October we finally had a chance to meet. Here's Seamus making a point to me with my pen.More than anything else, reading poetry brought me to writing fiction and encouraged me to aim for compression in the line. Listening to poetry blew open my mind. Sam Hazo's latest book of poetry is A Flight to Elsewhere and I also highly recommend to all Pittsburghers, past and present, and to all who value the meaning of home, try The Pittsburgh That Stays Within You. May 15, 2006 The whirlwind keeps a-whirlin. On Saturday we had a small celebration for the book's release, and I'll try to get some photos up on the site soon. Early readings from unknown writers are largely family and friends, and thank heavens for them all. We had about 40 people at Olsson's in DC last week, and this week we're heading for my hometown of Pittsburgh and Joseph Beth Books on May 18th.  Today is the birthday of L. Frank Baum, the creator of The Wizard of Oz, and those of you who know him only from the Judy Garland movie version might want to treat yourself to his books. The very first one in the series is masterful in its evocation of the flat, grey Kansas landscape that Dorothy escapes into the wonders of Oz. Salman Rushdie wrote a wonderful short book for BFI classics. The Literary Traveler has a nice bio of Baum. Recorded Books, Inc. has released the audio version of THE STOLEN CHILD narrated by Andy Paris and Jeff Woodman, each taking the part of the book's two narrators. When the CDs arrived, the kids gathered round the player listening to a story. For a moment, we were transported to radio days. You can get yourself a copy at your bookstore or online.May 11th On Tuesday, May 9th the book was launched, and seeing it in the window of the local bookstore was a real thrill. And I've been amazed at how well it's done on Amazon -- #21 on the list of Popular Titles. Thanks one and all. A busy week with interviews on NPR, XM Radio, and Eye on Books which were great fun, and readings at my old college and at Olsson's Books around the corner from where I work. The most satisfying part of the whole experience is the thought that people are reading the novel. In between, I've read two new novels that I absolutely loved: David Mitchell's Black Swan Green and Kevin Brockmeier's A Brief History of the Dead. All part of a neo-expressionist wave that has blended genres to reenchant storytelling. I also read David Maraniss's bio of Roberto Clemente, a childhood hero. The last baseball game my father and I ever went to was the 1971 World Series in Baltimore, and Clemente's homerun landed a few rows from where we were sitting -- the closest I've ever come to catching a ball at a game. Pure magic. But this week feels just as magical. Upcoming readings in Pittsburgh on May 18 and in Timonium just outside of Baltimore on May 25. Hope to see you there. April 9th, 2006 Welcome underground. A word of explanation about the title of this section--a great deal of THE STOLEN CHILD is set beneath a library where Aniday, through the tutelage of his fellow faery changeling Speck, learns to read and where he later writes his memoirs. Not to further sharpen what is already a fine point, but the locale in the book struck me as a metaphor for all of the subterranean doings of the imagination, the home of the most private self, the dreamscape from which the monstrous little words and images escape to the printed page. Therefore, Underground Writing it is. This happy corner is devoted to a miscellany of commentary on the whole surreal writing and publishing process, blather, keen observations, and other blogumentary. On the rest of the site, you'll find plenty of info on the novel--excerpts, readings, reviews--as well as a bio, interview, and odd bits written by my double. So, here's the story so far. After many a year wishing I were a novelist, I actually sat down and wrote this story in 2001-02, sent it round to a number of agents, and finally, in the summer of '04, a bite. Revise, revise, revise, and a sale later that year to Nan Talese/Doubleday, and revise, revise, revise, and the book hits the streets in May 2006. Whew. Like you, I read a great deal. For this book, lots of stuff on changelings, doppelgangers, Germany, music, and the like. More important, however, are the years and years of simply reading good books for pleasure, to interact with another person's ideas and perspective, to while away the time thinking about something a lot more interesting than the everydayness of every day. Whatever you do--from reading to watching TV to surfing the Internet--seeps into that underground you, and it is no wonder that all those words in so many different styles and presentations inform the story of THE STOLEN CHILD.  The other day on the subway there was a man reading one of my favorite novels, Bulgakov's MASTER AND MARGARITA (another story with two interlocking narratives) and I was reminded of finding it in San Francisco's City Lights Books and being enthralled. Funny how reading a book will bring to mind certain times and places in your life. Much the same way, I am reminded of all the park benches, cafes, and subway cars around Washington, DC, where THE STOLEN CHILD was written. Wherever you are, I hope the novel brings that same sensation for you.Keith |
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