Alice Munro and Peter Higgs: Nobel Laureates and Damned Fine People

In these, the darkest days of December, I give a vigorous nod to two luminaries of our time. I'm a writer of short stories, novels, and essays and have always favored the work of the Canadian writer, Alice Munro, who just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Such a thing. And, judging from the Nobel interview with her (she was too frail to travel to Sweden to accept the prize in person), she is filled to brimming with the finest karma.  Modest, smiling, genuinely thrilled at her winning, and still beautiful at eighty-two, she dishes out wisdom by the shovelful without even noticing. He message: She won the prize because she loves to write and did not give up despite early failure and discouragement, nor did raising a family interfere with her determination. She knew she was a writer from the beginning and and she wrote until the end. Her fiction is simple, profound, earthy, and accessible.

Peter Higgs, on the other hand, won the prize for work that is unimaginably complex and inaccessible. He, with help from brilliant colleagues, figured out why the Universe has mass. His theory was proven beyond much doubt by the workings of the large hadron collider, that produced the particle, and will allow further investigations that may launch an entirely new field of physics. 

In the end, though, I think both of these brilliant thinkers--geniuses in the real sense of the word--travel in their minds to places the rest of us can't imagine.

Book Awards, Albuquerque, and the Unfettered Mind

The Great Physicist Richard Feynman: He claimed his I.Q. was 125

 

 

I'm in a hotel room in Albuquerque, seeking the illusive freedom of an unfettered mind. It is a struggle to get unfettered with all the buzz and hubbub and guilt and remorse, not to mention joyful stuff, too, all this detritus we have sticking to us after nearly sixty-seven years of living.

 

I seek freedom by writing, and I'm researching/thinking about my next piece for The Prague Revue which will be about the unfettered nature of geniuses like this wonderful genius pictured above. Meanwhile, I flew out west here for the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards banquet which is this evening down in a meeting room at this hotel (the charmingly quaint Spanish-Pueblo Hotel Albuquerque).

 

Brothers of the Fire Star is a finalist in three categories--historical fiction, adventure fiction, and young adult fiction, and could, I suppose, actually win something, although being a finalist is actually winning because you get to put that big Finalist sticker on your book's cover, which I have done, and now I don't know where I'll put anymore stickers because there has got to be room on the cover so you can read the title and see the author's name.

 

In any event, I'm playing here with words and sentences and it feels good to trample on the rules of grammar once in a while. Writing a run on sentence can be an exhilarating experience, like shooshing down a steep ski slope without concern for consequences.

 

Today, after working a while, I'll take a long walk around town and breathe in the cool desert air and have a real Mexican lunch. Albuquerque is wonderful to me because it is a town in the desert and deserts are so very different than the wet and green I am used to.

 

The Pond in Autumn

 

 

Flew to New England yesterday to connect with family. Got here a little late for the foliage but there is still some left. Cold and clear this morning, mist rising up from the water, ducks and two Canada geese out there swimming, church bells in the distance. Built a fire, made coffee, took a short walk.

 

Eli and Bailey and baby Anders (he with the croup) are here for a week and I'll see Dad as often as possible. Last night wine and laughter and getting reacquainted, pulling together again.

 

This is the setting for my next book: Red-Winged Black Bird on a Joe Pye Weed and it will be good to pick up details of New England that I have forgotten, like the feel of the cold on the forest and the smell of the air and the sound of walking on dried leaves and the fine and rich sadness of it all.

Here's the New Problem: Where Do I Put All Four of the Awards Stickers on the Book Cover?

 

Here's what it looks like with just two stickers. Now what?

Every writer's dream is to write something that wins awards. If you work very hard and are very lucky, this can actually happen. It happened to me after many decades of I-don't-care-if-I-never-get-published-I'm-going-to-keep-writing writing. A short story of mine was finally published, soon after, another won an international writing competition in Paris, and then, years after after that, a novel was accepted and years after that after two more novels. Then, the next one, the fourth one, the one pictured above, won a finalist award in ForeWord Reviews national book awards. 

So far, where to put the sticker was pretty easy: lower right hand corner will do fine. Then, last week, I learned that the book has been selected as as finalist in three categories in the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards (Fiction-Adventure, Fiction-Historical, and Fiction-Young Adult). Of course, I was excited and in fact, blown away, and  so set about deal with a small, lovely problem: Where to put four awards stickers on the cover.

This is what I have so far, with just two of them on there. The New Mexico-Arizona stickers are big but, really, I'd like to show off all four of them. I mean, you've got to promote your books. I now see this will be impossible unless I want to cover up the cover, pretty much completely. I'll have to wait until the ultimate winners in the New Mexico-Arizona awards are announced on November 15 before I cover up too much of too many books. If lightning strikes and I actually win the gold, maybe those stickers will be smaller.

Bear with me on this.

Late Night Writer: Siblings, Old Movies, Fried Seafood, and The Next Book

The Gang of Four, Left to Right: Me, Janie, Johnny, Patty: The Original Arvidson Sibs hanging out in Massachusetts, Summer 2013

Spending the day in a creative frenzy doing nothing. Got 104 pages on the next novel written, rough draft form--nearly formless. Trolling the day for epiphanies to explain the plot structure--to straighten it out, adjust the who and where. I do understand The Why. That's the strength now: The motivations of the characters are rock solid: Red-Winged Blackbird on a Joe Pye Weed: form emerging out of formlessness.

Today, to work through my quandary, I didn't push it. Took the Prius to her appointment for oil change, pigged out on fried seafood at a restaurant on Chincoteaque, came home, took a nap, drank a bottle of wine with friend, and then went to dinner and came home and watched an old Woody Allen movie (Manhattan, his classic satire of the neurotic, affected YUPs in The City). Lots of think time. Tomorrow, early up, ready to write.

Got word that Brothers of the Fire Star has been selected as a finalist in three categories in the New Mexico-Arizona 2013 Book Awards: Adventure Fiction, Historical Fiction, and Young Adult Fiction. I'd plan on flying out to Albuquerque again (was there in May for the Southwest Book Fiesta--a bust), but don't know if I could take the possible wash out. Took in in Chicago with deep, painful disappointment at not actually winning Book of the Year, although I understand that just being a finalist means we won. Hell, compared to the thousands of books that didn't make it that far.

Now sleepy and ready for bed.

Image from The Prague Revue: A great online lit zine to which I contribute a monthly piece. Love it. www.praguerevue.com. This is what writing is really all about: the music of words.

Speaking of words: Got word the other day from my publisher--Crossquarter Publishing Group in Santa Fe--that my novel, Brothers of the Fire Star, has been selected as a Finalist in three categories in the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. The categories are exactly right: Historical Fiction, Adventure Fiction, and Young Adult Fiction.

My mother-in-law, my biggest fan, apparently, does not like to have the book categorized in the Young Adult genre. She's afraid it will limit its readership and she says, it really is a "great book" for adults, too. I hope you're right, Frances June, and apparently the judges agree.

The winners will be announced on November 15th at an gala event/dinner in Albuquerque. Maybe I'll go. But maybe not. When the book was a finalist in the ForeWord Reviews 2012 Book of the Year Awards I  spent more than a grand flying to Chicago and staying in an expensive hotel and eating expensive food and didn't win the actual Book of the Year award although just being a finalist out of 1300 books nationwide was pretty (very) cool.

In any event, the only problem with being a finalist in three categories plus the Book of the Year category I already won is that there is not enough room on the book's cover to fit all the beautiful gold award stickers. We'll figure that one out.

Meanwhile, as  I deal with the pesky business of book promotion, I'm reading Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Pynchon's brand new book, Bleeding Edge all the while getting deeper and deeper into my own new novel: 103 pages as of today.

Schools Back in Session and Brothers of the Fire Star is Back in the Classroom, Too

 One of the best ideas I ever listened to as a writer came from a curriculum specialist for a school system: "Doug, you need to develop a curriculum standards-based study guide for your novel. That will make it much easier for teachers to use it in the classroom."

It took me two months--last January and February--here in my Writer's Cave. I used a commercially available study guide for a famous YA novel as a model and got to work. Looking back on it now, it wasn't that difficult, but at the time, I thought I might have gotten in over my head. It was a lot of work. The finished product was 150 pages long and includes such teaching necessities (in this day of heavy teacher workloads and accountability) as quizzes, vocabulary, writing exercises, historical background essays, and even answer keys for chapter tests and the final exam.

After I was finished, I had an small epiphany: Why not make it available to download for FREE on my website? So, it's there at www.douglasarvidson.com under the BOOKS page. Just open up TEACHER RESOURCES and sign up.

And it was worth it. Brothers of the Fire Star is now being used in classrooms. And better yet, students are using the new PREZI method (www.prezi.com) of presenting reports on the book and posting them online. It's fun and looks great.

Bottom line: While curriculum standards-based instruction is controversial, if teachers want to used it, it's there.