Tim Kreider in NERVE, on New York and “Home”

By Jennifer Finney Boylan | Published: June 30, 2010

My dear friend Tim Kreider has a piece in Nerve about New York, Baltimore, and the search for home:

I took this photo of Tim at the tomb of H.W. Woolworth, in the Bronx, in the heart of the time he writes about in this column.

Welcome

by Timothy Kreider • June 30, 2010

When I left New York for Baltimore in the spring of 2007, I’d made up my mind that I wouldn’t be coming back. For years, I’d migrated between a cabin on the Chesapeake Bay and various sublets in New York City, and yet I’d never felt like the city was my home. “I can tell you’re not from here,” a barmaid once told me. “You look too nice.” She told me it took ten years to acquire a New York face.

It also took a whole new wardrobe — Levi’s 514s, cashmere sweaters, a black overcoat — just to meet the minimum public sartorial standards and pass un-despised in the streets. Back in Baltimore, acquaintances, seeing me in my new getup, assumed I had become flamboyantly gay. Or they wondered whether I’d gotten sick, or, conversely, if I had started working out. (All that had happened was — for the first time in my life — I was wearing shirts that actually fit.) In New York, I felt drained at the end of every day by the din of all the creative, ambitious egos clamoring for attention here. I learned that loneliness can physically hurt.

In short, living here, I felt like I was dating out of my league. New York was my gorgeous but cruel girlfriend who knew she could treat me callously because I’d always come crawling back to her. She was like: Where else you gonna go? Philadelphia? Yeah right.

(click here for the article in its entirety)

Note bene: the link was down for a while, but they appear to have fixed it.  If the link goes dark again, let me know.  J


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from the Franklin County Bulldog: JB at DDG Bookstore 7/13

By Jennifer Finney Boylan | Published: June 24, 2010

This piece appears in today’s Daily Bulldog. You can read it in its original context here. 6821_527778276095_15401715_31444090_6832301_n

FARMINGTON – On July 13 national bestselling author Jennifer Finney Boylan will be coming to Farmington to share her sensational new Young Adult Fantasy, Falcon Quinn and The Black Mirror. The Falcon Quinn series mark a new chapter for the author as her prior books have been bestselling memoirs such as She’s Not There and acclaimed novels such as Getting in.

Since on July 13 the world will be made up of two kinds of people, those who have read Falcon Quinn and the Black Mirror already and those who have not, the event will be in two parts. From 6:00 to 7:00 Jennifer will participate in a reading group discussion of the book. Everyone is invited! Afterwards, at 7:00, she will read from the book and sign copies. Both events will be at the bookstore, DDG Booksellers that is. Event details arehere. To help kick things off Jennifer was gracious enough to agree to a hard hitting interview!

KB: One of the themes of your new YA fantasy novel is the issue of fitting in, its relative merits or lack thereof in a specialized school environment. If Falcon Quinn and the Black Mirror went to a school for books what are some of the books which would be in its class, and of its classmates which would be its best friend and which its worst enemy?

Jennifer: I think that Falcon Quinn, at a School for Books, would hang out with Stuart Little, Catcher in the Rye, and the Big Friendly Giant. I am not certain that these are the books most “like” Falcon Quinn, but I think they would be good company. Falcon is about the search for identity, which is something middle schoolers undertake, whether they’re aware of it or not– well, we all undertake that journey. So, like Catcher in the Rye, its about a young man who is not sure who he is. On the other hand, like Big Friendly Giant, the story is also funny and gentle. And some of it is just plain uncanny, like Stuart Little

Its worst enemy might be Harry Potter, because people would always be comparing the two, and in fact they don’t have all that much in common, other than that it is about a hero who is different and a school for people with differences. But Falcon is a monster– he’s not really all that thrilled about what he’s turning into, unlike Harry, who’s just crazy about being a wizard. Mostly. And Falcon is about American values and American schooling– unlike H.P., which is based around the conceit of British boarding school culture. And most importantly, Falcon is written in the spirit of comedy–even though its central conflict is quite serious. Let’s just say there’s no quidditch. But there is an angry vice-principal who is half Mr. Rogers and half The Terrible Kracken.

KB: Speaking of Mr. Rogers, reading Falcon Quinn brought back a very old childhood memory for me, namely listening to a Mr. Roger’s song circa 1969 with the song You Can Never Go Down The Drain. The lyrics ran, in part….

You can never go down
Can never go down
Can never go down the drain.

You’re bigger than the water.
You’re bigger than the soap.
You’re much bigger than all the bubbles.
And bigger than your telescope

Now in Falcon Quinn it comes out that not only can you go down the drain, but one of the teachers at the school, Mr. Hake, considers it a good time. Did Mr. Rogers get this wrong? Did a generation of children grow up under a false pretense of bath time security?

Jennifer: Yeah, I’m afraid Fred Rogers was wrong, bless his heart. Okay, well a child can never go down the actual drain. Because of issues of physics. But there’s a lot of perils that wait for people, including young ones. And some of the worst perils wait for you in your own heart. Fortunately, the solution to those perils tend to come from the same place.

In fact, didn’t Stuart Little go down the drain, I mean the actual drain? More evidence. On the other hand, Fred Rogers was right about a lot of things, including the fact that it is indeed, a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Even if there are Sasquatches and ghouls and giant enchanted slugs in it.

KB: The scales have fallen from my eyes. Your book is really fun and challenging to try and read aloud, with all its humor and snappy dialogue. Did you read it aloud while you were working on it?

Jennifer: Yes, this book was actually written for and with my middle school age boys. Every day they’d come home from school and ask me to read that day’s work (out loud), and then they’d critique it– sometimes quite harshly. (They made me change the ending of Book 2 completely.) But yeah, the book is full of funny voices. I can do them all, of course, so this reading I’ll be doing at DDG Booksellers will feature all of those.

KB: I was hoping you’d say that! If you happened to find Aladdin’s lamp and spent one of your wishes on making everyone in the world read one book, which would it be?

Jennifer: Well, for kids’ books, Charlotte’s Web is pretty amazing. That was the first book that ever made me cry. I still remember that– eight years old and Charlotte dies? What kind of bloody story is that? It opened my eyes to the very real sorrows of the world. Which of course, make the joys that much richer– because of course, Wilbur does get saved by that love in the end. I mean, hello, the book begins with the line, “What’s that ax for, Daddy?” Some pig!

KB: Very true. I feel that way about Where The Red Fern Grows too. Falcon Quinn and the Black Mirror is the first book in a series. Can you tell us a bit about how many books are planned, and any interesting tidbits that wouldn’t be spoilers?

Jennifer: We will keep this a state secret for now. I will note that Book 2, which comes out next summer, contains the song, “I Wish They All Could Be Zombie Mutants,” which begins:

Oh the Sasquatch girls are hip, I love their fur all splotched with crud;
And the vampire girls with the way they bite, they knock me out when they suck my blood;
Egyptian pharaoh’s daughters’ really make you lose your head,
And the Chupakabra chicks on the coast of Peru, they bring their boys back from the dead!

i wish they all could be zombie mutants
i wish they all could be zombie mutants
i wish they all could be zombie mutant girls!

KB: Song noted! Thanks Jennifer.

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Updike: “Bring what is peculiar to the moment to glory.”

By Jennifer Finney Boylan | Published: June 21, 2010

Today’s NYT carries a fascinating advance look at the soon-to-be available Updike papers at Harvard. The link is here. The author of the article is Sam Tanenhaus.

I was especially moved by these words:

“We do not need men like Proust and Joyce; men like this are a luxury, an added fillip that an abundant culture can produce only after the more basic literary need has been filled,” Updike wrote to his parents in 1951, when he was 19. “This age needs rather men like Shakespeare, or Milton, or Pope; men who are filled with the strength of their cultures and do not transcend the limits of their age, but, working within the times, bring what is peculiar to the moment to glory. We need great artists who are willing to accept restrictions, and who love their environments with such vitality that they can produce an epic out of the Protestant ethic” — a prescient formulation of what he would later achieve in the Rabbit novels and his Pennsylvania short stories. “Whatever the many failings of my work,” he concluded, “let it stand as a manifesto of my love for the time in which I was born.”

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The Writers’ Mise en Place

By Jennifer Finney Boylan | Published: June 15, 2010
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Belgrade Lakes, Maine, June 15, 2010. Indigo (left) and Ranger wait for the typing to stop. Note the laptop on the right hand arm-rest, the coffee cup on the left, and the blue ball-chucking device on the ground.

Facebook friend (and New Yorker writer) Susan Orlean is up at the Macdowell Colony, I think, if I’m following the “updates” properly… Mcdowell being one of those places where writers go to be surrounded by absolute quiet and to focus on their work. This got me thinking about my own writing-space, which is funny because on one level, I already live in a place some would consider idyllic for writing– a house by a lake in rural Maine. (Although the presence of teenage boys who come in and out of the house at random, leaving a trail of pizza slices, Dunkin Munchkins and bowls of cereal does make it a somewhat different environment from, say, Macdowell, or Yaddo, and more akin to, say, a Zits cartoon.) There are plenty of times the isolation of a place like Macdowell has seemed extremely appealing to me–but the place itself feels awfully like the one I’m already in.

I have always laughed a little bit at the idea of writers creating their work in idyllic surroundings. There used to be a TV commercial, in fact, which showed some young woman quitting her job in New York, and winding up (within the span of 60 seconds, and after buying some product), at the end of a dock in a place like Maine. The last thing we see of her is her typing the words CHAPTER ONE. As if, well! That solves THAT.

For most of my professional life as a writer I have worked in windowless caves, by choice. The idea of sitting by a lovely lake at the end of a dock seems to me like the worst possible thing for a writer to do, because of course, then you’d be thinking about that lovely lake, instead of the story. When I give myself in to the world of the story, my surroundings disappear. Even I disappear a little bit. A sentiment which led to a recent Facebook line of my own: “When i am writing, I am nine feet tall, and blue, and living in an imaginary world. When you interrupt me, and bring me back to this world? I am back in a wheelchair, gasping for breath.”

And so. I have tended to work in basement rooms, places without windows, places where I will be undistracted. A beautiful view, like the one I have from my desk in the 2nd floor atrium here at the summer place– that can be trouble.

But here’s the complication. For the last few months, I’ve been using voice dictation software, owing to my ancient arms and wrists generally giving out. So I really can’t work in the heart of the summer place with the rest of my family about– because all that slow talking is guaranteed to drive anyone who has to listen to it crazy.photo

(It drove me crazy too, when i first started; hearing my own voice speaking out loud was itself an interruption and a distraction from the work I was trying to create. Only recently have I gotten to the point where I can easily talk my novels out loud to my computer, although I continue to suspect that it’s a very different part of my brain that is doing the creating by voice right now than the part i used to use, when I wrote in silence.)

All of which brings us to this morning, when I realized I couldn’t do the days work in my usual place, because the house (in which sound travels easily) was full of sleeping souls.

So I took the laptop and went outside. There in the wooded space between the house and the lake was my adirondack chair. I thought– can I really sit and work here? Am I not that woman in the commercial again, typing CHAPTER ONE, and then unable to focus on the job at hand?

Also, it was cold. So I walked further down through the woods to the dock. Where there was another Adirondack chair. In which I sat, and fired up MacSpeech, and tried to concentrate. The wind blowing against the microphone began to generate text all by itself, the program mistakenly thinking the wind on the mike was speech. And so, in a weird version of Coleridge’s Aolian harp, the computer began to write its own poetry. I think it was something like, “Hush what hey the hark hush stew.”photo

I retreated from the dock, beginning to suspect I would never get anything done today, back up to my chair in the wood, and gave it another try. And amazingly, I managed to do some good work. The dogs came by, confused by my sitting by myself talking out loud, and they dropped the tennis ball at my feet, and so I got into this rhythm, of dictating today’s scene, and throwing the tennis ball, and drinking coffee.

Strangely, I got deeper into the work today than I’ve gotten for a while. I don’t know if this is because of the place, but it might be. (Or it might be because I’ve been thinking about this particular scene for a while.)

Anyway. I was thinking about all this and thought I’d blog about it. Now I’m back inside, considering a bike ride. Upon which, I assure you, I will not be typing. I hope.

photo(Astute observers can also see in the second photo above, (the shot of the house itself), the “Twirl-a-Squirrel” from which the birdfeeder is suspended. This is the very device which has given me a temporary victory of the squirrels, and about which I have been writing (at great length) on line. And no, you can all relax. There is no Twirl-a-Squirrel in my next novel.)

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Postcard from Maine

By Jennifer Finney Boylan | Published: June 13, 2010

Down at the town wharf, eatin lobstah rolls, watching the fishing boats go out. We nipped into the Harraseeket lobster shack while waiting for Seans last soccer game to start.

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look, up in the sky

By Jennifer Finney Boylan | Published: June 12, 2010

I was feeling a little blue.  Squirrels in the birdfeeder.  belgrade from the air The phone rang. My friend Jon Gawler said, well, I’m taking up the single engine plane, why don’t you come over and we’ll fly around a little.  I went over to their farm, and he was already in the cockpit, the propellor spinning around.  I got in and off we went.

There we were, 2000 feet above the Maine forests.  Followed the Sandy River toward Madison, then south along the Kennebec, and back to Belgrade.  I had a great big goofy smile on my face.  I guess this is what they mean by “getting a little perspective.”

Landed.  Jon’s wife Ellen (and Zach’s fiddle teacher), was in her garden. She showed me the asparagus and the potatoes and the chard. Gave me some onions.

Now I am home again, preparing to vanquish the squirrels.

Above: Macintyre Pond, in the Kennebec Highlands, as seen from the plane.

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Boylan family update: Falcon, Fiction, & Freedom

By Jennifer Finney Boylan | Published: June 10, 2010

jfb4 Hello, you fabulous creatures.  JB here, just checking in.  I wanted to thank everybody who’s bought and read Falcon Quinn so far.  I admit to not knowing much about how children’s books are marketed and sold; all I know is that it’s a different world from memoirs and novels, where it’s all about reviews and marketing and getting yourself on a TV show and reading pithy little excerpts in bookstores from Bangor to Carson City.  As I understand things, the trick here is to win over school librarians, which I’ve indeed been trying to do.  So far, so good, but it’s slow, which is frustrating for me, since I love FALCON and am hoping he will, in time, take over the world.

Other notes from Belgrade Lakes:  I finished the most recent version of FALCON QUINN II, due out next spring or summer.  And I’ve been looking at some preliminary covers.  (The one I’m posting here is just a sketch, still; I don’t think Falcon’s face is quite right here yet.  Still: gorgeous, as Brandon Dorman’s work always is.)

Uploading Falcon Quinn and the Crimson Vapor has left me free to work on my adult novel due to Random House by year’s end.  This is the second half of the two-book contract, the first book of which was I’M LOOKING THROUGH YOU.  This has meant working on an adult novel for the first time in many years– since before SHE’S NOT THERE, actually, and I am wondering, as I write this novel, how my writing in fiction has changed after about ten years of working on memoir, and then children’s books.  It’s probably not for me to say.  But I’m guessing the voice is a little less panicked, a little darker, but a little gentler and funnier too.  Who knows?  Authors are always the last to know.

Meanwhile, the Maine summer has begun, as it always does, with fits and starts– gorgeous, perfect days one moment, rain and gloom the next.  The last week or two has found us busy closing up Zach’s sophomore year of high school and Sean’s last year of middle school.  We have been to an honors assembly (where Zach won  a prize for scholarship) and two middle school band concerts.  Tomorrow is “graduation” from 8th grade.  I could not be prouder of my sons.  Just ahead:  warm days on the lake, lobsters, summer camp, mojitos.

At this hour, that’s the way it looks from here.

(EDIT: 5 PM:  Harper’s asked me to take down the preliminary cover I’d posted of Falcon Quinn II, since it’s you know, preliminary.  Which seems like a fair request, and so instead I have posted up this disturbingly va-va-va voomish photo of me taken at the Falcon Quinn launch party two weeks ago.  A photo taken, in fact, by one AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS.  So how cool is that? Answer:  cool enough.)

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On waffles and waffling. And the heart. And writing. And waffles.

By Jennifer Finney Boylan | Published: May 30, 2010

This post was written for the Inside Colby blog by my student, Annelise Wiersema. It probably speaks for itself.

Waffling and Writing

Annelise Wiersema ‘10 on November 17, 2009
First, Jenny put down the eggs and milk on the seminar table. Our class stared at her, waiting for the analogy. Jenny Boylan’s a fairly eccentric – and, hey, bestselling! – creative writing professor, and this wasn’t the first time we’d been treated to a visual analogy of the writing process in English 378, Fiction Writing II. Our first day of class, for instance, we’d watched the YouTube video where a man juggles to a Beatles soundtrack, a video ostensibly shown to teach us about the importance of sustaining multiple story lines in fiction but more, we all suspected, because Jenny thought it was just fun to watch. (I still always think of those juggling balls when I write, though, so take from that what you will.)

Today, our pre-class conversations tapered off as she withdrew a flour mixture from her bag next, and then a measuring cup, a mixing bowl, and a large plastic ladle. Then came maple syrup – organic and from Maine, nothing better – and a whipped cream canister. Some classmates hurried into the room, their worry about being late fading into astonishment as Jenny heaved a waffle iron out of her bag and placed it with a faint clunk on the table.

“It’s Waffle Day,” she announced matter-of-factly, and handed me the waffle iron extension cord. “Do you mind plugging that in?”

“So, we’re really making waffles?” asked one student. “Here? In the classroom?”

Jenny nodded, pouring milk into the measuring cup.

“Cool! Um…why?”

Jenny paused for just a moment. “Because it just seemed like the right thing to do,” she said finally, beaming at us from above her glasses.

Then, with the background accompaniment of the iron beeping at us every few minutes with a prepared waffle, and a faint column of steam swirling dangerously close to the fire alarm, we got to workshopping stories.

“Are the waffles a distraction?” Jenny asked midway through class.

“The good kind,” we assured her. And they were – delicious. Each waffle had been divided into five little hearts, which Jenny artistically arranged on our plastic plates in various formations, dribbling the whipped cream in the center for us.

And it wasn’t all that distracting, actually. It just made the already friendly writing workshop cozier, like we were around a large kitchen table, our professor cracking jokes and eggs over the mixing bowl while leading discussion. “Do you think we need to know more about the narrator?” Jenny asked us seriously as she prepared the second batch of waffles, ladling the mix onto the spitting iron. A little bit of batter dripped onto the fake wood table, and she looked at it and sighed before continuing, “Or do you prefer the ambiguity?”

As she concluded her final thoughts on one of the stories, delving into faith and character journeys and story arc, she paused. “Let’s pull back for a moment and consider another very important question,” she said, and grinned widely. “Who wants more waffles?”

Colby College: feeding us mind, body and soul since 1813.

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JB interview via online stream…

By Jennifer Finney Boylan | Published: May 25, 2010

microphoneI appeared today (5/25/10)  on a show called Chez Laura.  I didn’t know anything about this show other than that the host, Laura Lavigne, billed herself as a “life coach,” but the resulting interview was kind of a gas, sort of a look back at the gender memoirs I wrote in the 2000s and a look ahead to Falcon Quinn and the future.    You can stream the show here; this link will take you to an archived version of the show. You can stream the show live there, or you can click on the iTunes link in the lower right hand corner of that embedded stream menu, and that will enable you to download it and listen to it in your own good time.

Here’s what Laura’s web page said about this show before we did the interview:

Let’s talk about … daring to Change – with a capital C!”

May 25 2010

Best selling author Jenny Boylan knows a thing or two about daring to CHANGE. Born James Boylan, she finally was able to face the potential loss of her career, friendships and even her marriage in order to be true to herself and become a woman.

In her book She’s Not There – a life in two genders, Jenny says that  as professor James Boylan, “ “ I used to stand at the lectern in my coat and tie, waving my glasses around, urging students to find the courage to become themselves. Then I’d go back to the office and lock the door and put my head down on the desk.”

We will also talk about Jenny’s brand new book “The Falcon Quinn” which – in Jenny’s own words – “is about kids turning into “monsters,” and the high price of accepting ourselves.  And the price of not accepting ourselves, which is more.”

In my work as a life coach, I am very familiar with the – sometimes paralyzing -  voices of fear that prevent us from doing what we know we need to do and very much look forward to spending this time with Jenny.

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A few photos from the FQ launch party

By Jennifer Finney Boylan | Published: May 21, 2010

May 20, 2010. Photos by Augusten Burroughs.

jfb.3

The cause of all the trouble: Jennifer Finney Boylan author of Falcon Quinn and the Black Mirror

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Augusten Burroughs, Kimberly Reed, and Amanda Simpson

FQ launch party: Edward AlbeeThe amazing Edward Albee

jfb4

Blinking

photoRichard Russo, Edward Albee, and Augusten Burroughs

jfb.monkey.1Speak No Evil, See No Evil, and Evil.

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  • 4576011240_572c819271

    Jenny Boylan's eleventh book, FALCON QUINN AND THE BLACK MIRROR, now on sale from HarperCollins!

  • Browse Inside Falcon Quinn!

  • PROFESSOR JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN is the author of eleven books, including She's Not There: a Life in Two Genders, and I'm Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted, both published by Random House. A novelist, memoirist, and short story writer, she is also a nationally known advocate for civil rights. Jenny has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Live with Larry King, the Today Show, the Barbara Walters Special, NPR's Marketplace and Talk of the Nation; she has also been the subject of documentaries on CBS News' 48 Hours. and The History Channel. She is a regular contributor to the op/ed page of the New York Times and Conde Nast Traveler magazine. Since 1988, she has been Professor of English at Colby College in Maine; starting in 2010, she will also be the Hoyer-Updike Distinguished Writer at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. She is currently on the judging committee of the Fulbright Scholars, administered by the U.S. Department of State.

    Check out the Twitter feed at JennyBoylan; or join Jennifer Finney Boylan on facebook.

  • Blog Archive

  • The Boylan Family, fall 2007

    IMG_0181 "You hang around our family, you learn all kinds of stuff."

  • Will Forte as Jennifer Finney Boylan on “Saturday Night Live”

    WiFo-Jennifer Finney Boylan-1

  • Jenny with Barbara Walters, December, 2008

    wawa

  • Jenny atop Maine’s Mount Katahdin

    2036947979_34bfbec240 August, 2002.

  • Surrounded

    boylanWith President Clinton and Maine's Governor John Baldacci, fall 2006.

  • JFB and Edward Albee

    edward_albee_by_fred_j_field-150x150

    Edward had been my teacher at Johns Hopkins in the winter of 1986. He visited Colby in fall, 2007. As we took our leave of each other, he kissed me on both cheeks and said, "We have done well. You and I."

  • Jenny and her teacher, the great John Barth

    Boylan_Barth

    Jack was my professor at JHU when I did my thesis, back in the day. After many years, I can now confidently say I finally understand his definition of plot. Which is, of course, "the perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a new and complexified equilibrium."