Reviews and Interviews
I’ve been busy these last two weeks. Two weeks ago I was in DC and in addition to presenting at a National Association for Drug Court Professionals conference on Teambuilding and LGBT sensitivity issues had the chance to fence with the DC Fencers club (more on that in another entry) and visited a few bookstores to talk about Open Wounds. I’ve also been doing a lot of interviews – each different in its own way and worth checking out to find out how Open Wounds and its cast of characters came about. I’m going to list them below and give you some background on each.
Two local papers start things off:
The Queens Tribune – Jason Cohen did a piece on me titled Renaissance Man (I’m getting a swelled head already) that is only available in print and not on the internet – so no link. But it’s been fun having some neighbors come up to me and tell me, “I didn’t know you wrote a book!” I didn’t know so many people I knew read the Queens Tribune!
The Queens Courier – Salimah Khoj a wrote a nice piece on their online magazine called Jackson Heights Author Finds Inspiration in Childhood. We had to phone interviews and some written responses in order to get this one down and I think she did a great job.
Followed by two blog interviews:
Nikki Meiggs’ Wicked Awesome Books book blog just reviewed Open Wounds and today put out the second of two parts of an interview (part 1 and part 2) we did together. She has a contest open until August 16th – simply comment on part 2 by answering this question: If you could live in any time period or historical event what would it be and why? She’s giving a free signed copy of Open Wounds to the winner! I met Nikki at BEA in the late spring and she has a great blog on YA books and really loves books. I also love the title of her website – who wouldn’t?
Cynthia Leitich Smith blog Cynsations also just put up an interview called New Voice: Joseph Lunievicz on Open Wounds. What’s interesting about Cynthia’s interview were the questions she asked. There were easily thirty different questions from various categories and I was able to choose two, and only two, to respond to. These are different from any other interview questions and I found them challenging and interesting to answer. She also did a wonderful job with pictures to complement the interview of books I mentioned and supplemental posts I have out on other sites.
And one review…
There’s also a short review of Open Wounds by Jodi Reszotaarski on her blog Book Eater – A novel test kitchen. She’s a high school media specialist in Lake County, Ohio. Thanks, Jodi for the great review!
Next up some fencing stories.
Open Wounds Reviewed by Mathew Rush
Mathew Rush has written a wonderful review of Open Wounds at Afterglow Book Reviews. Mathew has an incredible blog on writing and especially on how to write an effective query letter on his aptly named blog The Quintessentially Questionable Query Experiment. He’s also an avid commenter on many other writer’s blogs and is just a nice guy who really loves to write. I met him through Andrew Smith’s Ghost Medicine blog and both of these writer’s blogs have opened up an online community to me that I really had no idea existed before. Thank you Mathew.
Samurai Story
I just finished grant writing for three projects – two state and one federal. They have nothing to do with my fiction life but they will help me keep my day job which pays for my night and early morning job. It occurred to me in the middle of this – what for me is a hellish process of putting together 20 to 25 pages of times new roman one inch margins narrative about a project idea, capability statement, project abstract, budget and budget narrative, and staffing narrative – that I might actually be learning something about writing while I was doing this.
Wait I’m getting ahead of myself.
The stress of putting these projects together is high, the stakes high (staff and my jobs), and the work hard (long hours for a good week right up to deadline). I did three in a row over a four-week period. During this time I could do little writing that I wanted to do – like work on my latest fiction project.
It reminded me of an old Buddhist story. A samurai goes in search of the meaning of heaven and hell. So like any good samurai he goes in search of a wise man – called a roshi. Well, he meets a roshi and sits down in front of him and asks him about the meaning of heaven and hell. The roshi says, “Why would I tell a miserable worm, a slug of a human being like you? You smell bad. You are worthless. And -” the samurai stood up at this point, feeling rage boil up inside of him. “You disgust me,” the roshi continued.
“Enough,” the samurai yelled and drew his sword, ready to cut off the roshi’s head.
“This,” the roshi quietly said in the moment before his decapitation, “is hell.”
The samurai, really a nice, honest, kind and loyal man, realized what he was about to do – what his rage had drawn him into – and sat down again in front of the roshi. Trembling, tears came to his eyes and the rage dissipated. He placed his hands together into prayer to apologize.
“This,” the roshi quietly said, “is heaven.”
My hell is the process of writing these grants that I have to write. But if I can look outside of this hell and see what it brings to me. The flexing of writing muscles that are different but that will help me to be more concise, more narrative driven, more specific. Then my hell can be my heaven. I can bow my head before the task and let the anger that boils up inside about the task dissipate.
Pema Chodron, in her book, Comfortable with Uncertainty, tells this story and then sums it up. These words stick with me. She said (my paraphrase), “In life we stand in sacred space and everything that comes into this space, good, bad, or indifferent, has something to teach us.”
Man do I have a lot to learn.
3rd Gade Q & A
My son’s teacher asked me to come in to speak to the two 3rd grade classes at Buckley Country Day School this morning. After reading Andrew Smith’s column on going to a high school class for Q & A I have to say I wasnt as sure what to expect from a group of 8 and 9 year olds. Okay. That’s not true. I’ve been to his class before and his teacher is a wonderful reading and writing teacher who keeps the class mayhem to a minimum so I knew the class would be behaved but I was not quite prepared for how focused they were and for how long they lasted.
Now I wasn’t there by myself. Another father who also happens to be an author – Paul O’Donnell, author of Man Up (a terriffic book) was also invited to speak so we shared the space and did a compare and contrast on fiction and non-fiction which, because Paul is so good and natural a speaker – came off well. Then we got to Q & A and man did they come up with some good questions. Here’s a few of them:
- How do you come up with the titles of your books?
- How many times did you have to rewrite your book?
- What do you do if a bookstore won’t take your book?
- Do you write only fiction? Non-fiction?
- What gave you the idea to write the book?
- Will they make a movie out of it?
- What happens to the books that a store doesn’t sell?
- Do you like to write books?
Lunievicz 