Hop Hop Along With Faye!

Hello, and good morning! Today it's my turn to be a part of Faye Rapoport DesPres' blog hop to celebrate the release of her memoir, Message from a Blue Jay.

To be honest, I've never figured out what memoirs were good for… after all, if you don't have to say how it really was, would you still do it? You can call it a memoir and make up all kinds of stuff.
I did read Faye's memoir though. I did it mostly because she's a fellow author at Buddhapuss Ink, and I was curious to see what kind of author my publisher had signed.

And I fell in love. No, I hadn't planned it.

I fell in love with Faye's fluid prose, with her gentle insights and beautiful descriptions.
So, to celebrate the release of Message from a Blue Jay, here's my review. 

A Memoir to Enjoy

Normally, I don’t like reading memoirs. They seem full of self-pity, half-lies, and extenuation. People who write memoirs want to make money by telling their–more or less–exciting life story. I've never understood the concept of writing a memoir. 

Why would anyone want to read someone else’s life story, unless that someone is Henry Kissinger or Kofi Annan?

What could there be in a normal person’s life that would make it so interesting that someone else would want to buy and read it? Why would I read how a stranger travels to London, visits a dying mother-in-law, or tries to save a feral cat? What is the allure?

Here’s the thing:

Faye has written a memoir, and it’s about all those things: traveling to Europe, dealing with uterine cancer too early in life, watching her mother-in-law die, and yes, talking to a blue jay in the middle of a downpour on a lonely road.

She writes about growing up and feeling ugly (don’t we all!), and about herself as a young woman, trying to find herself in a world full of turmoil and imponderables. 

What sets Faye’s memoir apart though is that she looks beyond what meets the eye, is apparent, and finds meaning. She is not afraid to learn from what she encounters. Every essay in this collection tells a small story, but each is also a lesson that Faye learned, and shares with us.

That blue jay on the road? It teaches acceptance. We don’t have control. We don’t control our deaths, we don’t control much in our lives. We need to accept them as they come. Life isn’t about control; it’s about letting go, about gracefully and patiently accepting what comes our way.

Faye Rapoport DesPres is an excellent writer. 

In fact, she’s one of the best writers I’ve read. Her style is poetic, lyrical, observant, and lush, but never excessive, never florid. Her sentences have a lovely cadence, a natural flow, that make them dance easily through the reader’s mind.

A memoir? Yes, Message from a Blue Jay is a memoir. A memoir I thoroughly enjoyed.

Born in New York City, Faye Rapoport DesPres was raised in a rural area of upstate New York. Her maternal grandparents emigrated to the U.S. from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s and settled in the South Bronx, where her mother was raised. Her father, a Holocaust survivor, arrived in New York as a teenager after World War II.

This was the eighth stop on Faye Rapoport DesPres's Virtual Book Tour. 

Don't miss the next stop on 5/26 at This Is Who I Am!

The publisher is offering a personalized, signed copy of Message from a Blue Jay plus swag to the winner of their Virtual Tour Giveaway.
We invite you to leave a comment below to enter.
For more chances to enter, please visit the Buddhapuss Ink or Message from a Blue Jay Facebook pages and click on the Giveaway Tab!

Spillworthy – A Book Release

Today is the release day for Johanna Harness' YA novel Spillworthy, I'm proud and happy to be part of her blog hop to celebrate this release.

Johanna is an amazing person; she is generous, supporting, always fun, always kind. She has helped many a fledgling writer to find their way into publication, and she was always patient, loving, joyful, doing it. 
Johanna has sheep. And she has chickens. And she's a homeschooling mom. She also has very curly blond hair. And she lives on a farm in Idaho. She loves cowboys, and the history of the Wild West. She adores her coffee!

And we love Johanna. So – many, many congrats, you sweetheart girl! 

Here is the interview I did with Johanna, and my review of her book, Spillworthy.

Hi, Mariam.  Thank you for inviting me to your blog today.  I’m so happy to be here.

Mariam: Tell us about yourself, Johanna. What’s your favorite drink, TV show, computer game, your favorite song, and which cake do you like best? Which color is your car? And what do you most like to do on a summer evening?

Johanna: Right now on my desk, I have a coffee mug filled with dark roast, and a juice glass full of milk.  Caffeine wakes me up, but protein helps me think more clearly.

My favorite television show would be either Justified or Longmire, depending on which one I’m watching at the moment.

I don’t play a lot of computer games, mostly because they’re addictive and I can blink and lose a huge chunk of my day. Right now I settle for quick games of Creepy Crawley Solitaire. The best part about playing is the meditative effect. It’s a great escape when I need to empty my mind.

 Song: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” is like gospel for me. I close my eyes and cry.

Cheesecake. 

Car color. Hmm. We can’t really agree what color it is. It’s sort of a silver-beige thing. It’s not a color you can remember when you close your eyes. If The Silence were a color, it would be the color of our car.

My perfect summer evening includes time spent around a campfire with my family. That’s where we tell our over-the-top stories and laugh until we fall out of our chairs.

Mariam: Why YA and not an adult novel?

Johanna: I write middle grade and young adult novels as a way of including more people. Neither type of novel excludes adult readers, but adult novels do exclude kids. I really enjoy writing stories my kids can read.

Mariam: What makes your YA novel different from all those others out there?

Johanna:  Spillworthy is on that border between middle grade and young adult.  The language and characters are accessible to a middle grade audience, but the subject matter can be pretty serious. It’s really up to parents to decide when this book would be right for their kids.

A couple things set the book apart.  One is that it respects the intelligence of kids. The main characters are smart people with limited life experience. They’re not dumbed-down versions of adults or silly images of kids the way adults think they should be. 

In my experience, kids see the world much more clearly than adults realize. Spillworthy is different because it opens up discussion points for many difficult topics—everything from homelessness to abuse to human trafficking—but it does so without ever feeling hopeless.  It’s a great starting point for parents to discuss issues with their kids by talking about characters.

Mariam: Why did you decide to go the self-publishing way?

Johanna: Spillworthy is a different book and I wanted it to stay different. Big publishers are risk-averse right now. That’s okay. They have to think about the bottom line and whether accepting the book the way it is would bring a return on their investment. They can’t take into consideration all the intangibles that make a book worth publishing.

As a self-publisher, I get to consider all the intangibles.  I believe this book will reach the people it was meant to reach.

Mariam: Please tell us what Spillworthy is all about!

Johanna:  Spillworthy is about a homeless kid who loves to write. He usually fills journals and throws them away when they’re full because he has no way to save them all. When he does have an idea so good he wants to share it with the world, he copies those thoughts onto used pizza boxes, leaving them in public places for others to read.  These thoughts spilled into the world are called spillworthies. The story itself begins when Ulysses is pulled from the streets and sent to live with his grandparents in Idaho.

Mariam: What’s next on your desk? Another YA novel? A sequel to Spillworthy? Or something entirely different?

Johanna:  During my time out on sub with big publishers, I wrote a few books, so I have some options. My daughter says the next one I should publish is DisasterMinds. It’s about a social misfit who is so smart he’s convinced he was created in a top secret lab. He convinces his childhood friend, a girl who was conceived in the same IVF lab, to go on a road trip with him, to either prove or disprove his theory.

Mariam: Is there anything else you’d like to share with us? 

Johanna: The power of writing resides inside stories and individual voices. When weighty topics scare us, we should try leaning into that discomfort, letting it instruct us.  The value of our profession as storytellers lies inside these intimate moments, shared between the reader and the characters.  Through stories, we can change the world. 

Following Johanna's directions on how to release her book, I gave my copy to my best friend's daughter Connie, who is a Middle Grade English teacher, because I think that Spillworthy belongs in every school library, and in classrooms.

Here's what I think of Spillworthy:

"A note rolled up inside a note, left in the fence: 

Some truths are kept hidden in the basement of our souls. We should never stop trying to find them."


Spillworthy by Johanna Harness has left me baffled, surprised, speechless, and with the deep wish that all schools all over the world put this middle-grade novel in their libraries, and not only one copy, but fifty. Or maybe one-hundred. Or maybe enough copies so every child can take it home and then "release" it into the world so it becomes a real Spillworthy, a piece of writing set free into the world. 
I just know that kids will devour this book, and maybe not only kids. When I began reading I had a text marker in my hand to highlight notable passages, only I gave up a few pages into the book. Every page is noteworthy, full of observations, insight, philosophy.
This: "Maybe we're all supposed to be making music together whether it feels like we belong together or not. Maybe it's not enough to live your own lives with quiet respect for others. Maybe we're supposed to be reaching and connecting – even when it seems like there's no way that's possible."

This novel reminds me of To Kill a Mockingbird; the kids are of about the same age, and sometimes the tone is similar. Then again, it's something completely different, something not attempted before, both in style and form. 

Buy this book. Read it. Share it. It's a wonderful book!



You can buy Spillworthy here: Spillworthy
Find Johanna here: Homepage

Who Wins the Prize?

It's that time of the year again, when every independent publisher and author ( who submitted a project) keeps checking for the announcements of the Independent Publisher Award committee.
It must be happening right now… today, or maybe tomorrow… the excitement and anxiety is nearly palpable on twitter.

Twice now, books that I've written were among the winners, in 2012 and 2013, so you can imagine that I'm not expecting to win anything this year. In fact, I don't even know if my publisher Buddhapuss Ink even submitted Song of the Storm. After all, no one wins three times in a row.

But that's not really what I wanted to write about.
Both times, when my books were winners, my publisher told me, "It's all YOUR achievement! YOU wrote the books!"
And every time I replied, "Yes, but they'd never be published if not for you and my editor at Buddhapuss!"
They never accept the credit. And yet, I know I'm right.
If Buddhapuss Ink hadn't literally grabbed my first book, The Distant Shore, out of my hesitant hands, I'd not be an author today, and even less, an award-winning author. They turned a messy, much too long something into an award-winning novel. They designed the cover, they put the book on the market.
And they did the same for my other books, Under the Same Sun and Song of the Storm.

So what I'm trying to say is, those awards, they're not only my achievement.
They are just as much my publisher's achievement. If anyone deserves to put that award certificate on their walls, it's them.
I can hold those two books in my hands and run my fingers over those award stickers on their covers, and I smile, because I know how lucky I am, to have been signed by the publisher who is just right for me.
And today, on the eve of the 2014 Independent Publisher Awards, I want to give a big shoutout to my editor at Buddhapuss Ink, MaryChris Bradley, and say thank you for an amazing and fun time together.
I hope we'll work together for many, many years to come, my dear!