My novel, Old Music for New People, is driven in part by its characters’ thoughts and feelings about specific songs and musicians (baseball and food also have prominent roles in the plot). Many of the stories I write, whether long or short, have music painted into them. Sometimes I wonder if I’m a bit too hopeful about the idea of using words to describe what music does to characters emotionally and philosophically–and what it does to readers as well in their everyday lives.
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A slightly different form of this essay was published in Medium.com
One morning nearly ten years ago, a voice showed up in my head as I was walking up the stairs to my 3rd floor writing room. They were offering the beginning line of a story. By the time I sat in front of my laptop, the voice made it clear that I needed to get to work immediately. “She” absolutely was not going to leave me alone.
No one told us we were going to have a summer-long visitor until the night before that visitor arrived.
Ivy Scattergood
A few months before that, I’d gone back and read a bunch of young adult coming-of-age stories. This was around the time I was becoming acutely aware of the fact that our youngest son was about to leave home for college. I suppose that because I’m a writer going back to my reading roots made sense. Maybe others return to old music, long walks, or pre-parent hobbies.
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My coming-of-age novel, Old Music for New People, will be published by the independent publishing house The Story Plant on December 7th. Go here or click on the cover widget (near the top right on the screen if you are using a big screen; probably down low on the scroll if you are using a small screen) to go to the book’s landing page. You’ll find all the links you could ever need to pre-order the paperback and digital versions now. Reviewers with NetGalley accounts can now also access the ARC (Advance Reviewer Copy) at the NetGalley site. This is my first official novel, so I can use any and all the reviews I can get.
So what’s the book about? Well, there’s a big conversation going on in this country right now about gender identity. Mainstream media tends to focus on silly issues like the bathrooms people are allowed to use and whether transgender girls should be permitted to play sports with other girls.
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Along with the rest of the world, 2020 was pretty crappy in our household. [I originally wrote a long paragraph here about all the things we failed to do and how miserable we were, but what’s the point in that? Seriously! We’re still here and we’re vaccinated AF, and there’s really nothing else to say than: “Let’s go!”]
So, while a good portion of life certainly sucked here at the dead-end of our little street this past year, I managed to publish a number of short stories and flash fiction pieces with a broad spectrum of literary publications — large, small, well-known, obscure, etc. In addition to which, I signed a book deal in early January 2021 to write three novels over the course of the next several years.
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I was so happy to see my story, “Animals with Nowhere to Go”, published this month (January) at Jerry Jazz Musician. I wrote “Animals” specifically to enter the Jerry Jazz 55th short fiction contest last fall. Even though it only wound up short-listed (go to “Chromesthesia “ here to read the wonderful winning story by Shannan Brady) it is an honor to see my work alongside so many other great creative people’s.
I discovered Jerry Jazz about fifteen years ago while researching material for my novel Notes on the Golden Country (still a few years to go before it’s out). At the time, I was writing a rather freeform essay on the effect that Ralph Ellison’s work had on American literature. You can read that brief essay here. JJM is a wonderful repository for all things Ralph Waldo Ellison. I’d found my people.
I am a writer who has a tendency to connect his fiction and essays to musical questions and mysteries. I often go find the Jerry Jazz Musician website whenever I’m feeling beat up and ragged out from projects I’m working on. It’s a great source of inspiration for jazz culture lovers on all sorts of levels with poetry, essays, fiction, photos, videos, and book reviews on everyone from John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk to James Baldwin and jazz chronicler Gary Giddins.
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My new story “MANY WAYS TO FIND OUT” was featured at the BULL magazine website earlier this week. Bull specializes in quality fiction (and some essays) directed in varying ways at the complexity and dynamics of masculinity here in 2017.
There’s a theory out there that men don’t like to read “serious fiction.” I think a lot of men just don’t like to read crappy stories that have little to do with them. I might be wrong. Who knows?
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I want to add something to the endless discussion about why it’s important to read literary fiction. The discussion is important.
You may have graduated from high school English class and feel like you never want to go back again, but you didn’t graduate from Life. Too many people have stopped reading quality fiction that makes them think about Life these days. That’s why this endless discussion about books and their import continues — taking the time to think about life is essential for all of us. Books assume that’s why you’re reading them — especially literary stories by anyone from James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to Joy Williams and James Salter.
You can find a lot of essays and blog posts out there on the value of novels, short stories, and plays because they teach empathy and help people understand another person’s point of view. Indeed, the written word in general is still the most effective way to express all the nuances of human emotion. These days, it feels in some ways that people are losing touch with emotional reality and concern for how other people feel in any number of social situations. Could it be that fewer people are reading quality fiction these days? Maybe people are spending less time with books and more time with porn and video games.
You can also find arguments on how readers of serious fiction are proven to be more intuitive, better problem solvers, superior communicators, and higher achievers at Continue reading
I finally finished Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 last month (912 pages in English; 1,136 in Spanish). It represents a year of reading for me (with some other stuff thrown in, but nothing I stayed with or finished). The beauty of books, as opposed to TV and movies, is that you can take your time and just tackle two or three pages a night for fifteen to twenty minutes at a shot. TV and movies make us think we have to eat whole stories quickly. If you can disavow that habit, and feel comfortable with the slow pace of reading, you will probably extend your life by at least eight years, maybe ten. Besides, 2666 is considered one of the most important novels of the early 21st century. It probably can’t be read quickly no matter who you think you are.
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I have discovered the work of Chilean poet/novelist/essayist, Roberto Bolaño, in the past year. For years I stayed away from this dude because it seemed like he was probably one of those difficult writers who made a reader’s journey very time consuming and dicey. Boy, was I wrong!
I want to admit here first that I’m mesmerized by what Bolaño produced in his all too short career. I can’t say I’m an addict, but I do love reading pretty much anything he’s ever written. The experience is uncanny. He tends not to overload sentences. Tends not to get too lyrical or philosophical. Most certainly he does not take himself or whatever work he’s doing too seriously (not too seriously does not mean he writes frivolously).
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