Category: personal

That’s it for me this week. I’ll be in Los Angeles for a few days, attending the L.A. Times‘ Festival of Books, having drinks with friends, and generally causing mayhem.

I’ll be doing some live blogging and a Q&A from the Swink booth, from 3 to 4 pm on Saturday, April 23. I’ll try to bring my camera along and take pictures.

I’ll also be reading at Jim Ruland‘s Vermin on the Mount series on the same day. (The event is co-sponsored by Swink.) Partners in crime include Steve Almond, Ben Ehrenreich, Julianne Flynn, Lisa Glatt, Dylan Landis, Alex Lemon, and my friend Mark Sarvas of TEV. If you’re in town, join us, why don’t you? And come say hi to us afterwards. The Mountain Bar is located across from the Wishing Well at 473 Gi Ling Way in Chinatown. Call 213 625-7500.

Well, that’s it for me this week. The one and only Randa Jarrar takes over tomorrow and every Friday. I will be back on Monday with more news, a review, and another edition of Goodies to Go. Have a good weekend!

It’s hard for me to describe the joy I felt when, in December of last year, my agent called to say that my debut collection of short stories had sold. I had been warned over and over that collections don’t sell, that fiction set outside America, particularly in Africa, was a difficult sell. I’d been writing for years, of course, but I’d spent well over three years on that particular book. I’d left a well-paying job at a great company, put up with my parents’ disapproving comments, and even moved out of a city I loved, just so I could focus on it. So when the call came, it was both a reward and a validation.

Almost immediately after hearing the news, though, I began to worry. My friends often say that if there’s a way to worry about something, I’m always sure to find it. I was having second thoughts about my title, The Things That Death Will Buy, which I’d picked in early 2003. It’s from a poem by Emily Dickinson, and it’s part of this stanza:

The things that Death will buy
Are Room,-Escape
From Circumstances,
And a Name.

The Single Hound LXXII

What attracted me to the line was the idea that death could buy something, that it could be traded for something better. It seemed mysterious and intriguing, and it appealed to me. My characters take great risks with their lives, I thought, so this would work nicely.

By 2004, though, I’d started to have doubts. I felt that the title wasn’t organic, that it didn’t really describe the journey in the book, and that it didn’t entirely fit since my book is a chronicle of survivors’ stories. But I kept my thoughts to myself. It wasn’t until after the book sold that I realized I might have a problem on my hands. I received emails citing The Things Death Will Buy; paperwork referencing The Things That Death Can Buy; and even a wildly enthusiastic note about the release date of What Death Will Buy. Each new variation made me wince and sent me back to my title page.

A couple of months ago my editor finally called and asked how I felt about my title. “Well,” I said, “it’s a bit unwieldy.”

“Some people here think it’s not a good idea to have the word death in the title.”

“Why not?” I asked, rather defensively, I admit. Chronicle of A Death Foretold is one of my all-time favorite novels, and I’ve always loved the title.

“Laila,” she said. “Nobody dies in your book.”

She was, of course, quite right. My characters are all survivors; they’re not victims. What they really have in common is their hope for a better future. It is a dangerous hope, though, because they are willing to risk everything for it.

And so I spent a few, tortured days thinking about alternative titles, until I settled on my new one: Hope And Other Dangerous Pursuits. I liked the juxtaposition of the noun and the adjective, and it feels beautifully descriptive. So there it is: Hope And Other Dangerous Pursuits. At least I won’t have to worry about that anymore.

I went to Hedgebrook full of apprehension-the brochure said that the retreat was quite rural, that residents had to use a wood stove, that bats sometimes snuck into the cottages at night. I’m a big city kind of girl–Portland’s the smallest town I’ve ever lived in. Before I left, I made Alex promise that he would come get me if it proved to be too much. He had a mocking half-smile on his face. He’s a devoted backpacker; he thinks everyone feels at home in the woods. “Whatever you say. But I think you’ll love it.”

Hedgebrook Farm sits on 48 acres of land, on the south side of Whidbey Island, in Washington. Six writers are housed at a time, each in a post-and-beam, shingle-roofed cottage with a loft, a desk, and a comfortable chair. I could tell right away that great care had been put into every detail of the cottage–the L-shaped desk provided the right amount of workspace; the French press doubled as a thermos; the water filter provided just enough liquid for a day; the wood stove was the ideal size for a small place; the bookcase had a dictionary and a thesaurus. It was a place of work, and of love.

I spent the first three days of my retreat struggling to cut off the umbilical cord of my regular life. There was an Internet connection in the pump house, down the road from my cottage, and I’d go there every few hours to check my email and deal with bits of unfinished business. I was still copy-editing the manuscript for my collection, and it wasn’t until I shipped it off that I was finally able to focus on my second book, the novel I went to Hedgebrook to work on.

I started writing A Place To Call Home in November 2003. Set in Casablanca and Los Angeles, it’s the tale of two very different and yet very similar lives, tangled by issues of race, class, and politics. When I arrived at the retreat, I had just a little over 58,000 words of it written. I started to reorganize my chapters, shuffled scenes around, and, after staring at the stuff for a couple of days, I realized I had to cut the first part of the book out–nearly 20,000 words. It was painful. I couldn’t turn around and start writing again right away; I went for a walk, took a long bath, and spent the day reading a book.

barred owl who’d scared one of the residents when he swooped down near her would be tempted to do the same with me.

I don’t know if I’ve managed to conquer my fear of the woods. But I did learn to make a rip-roaring good fire. I watched rabbits and deer. I found out how to tell a cedar from a douglas fir. I listened to the winter wren in the morning and to the bullfrogs at night. Maybe Alex was right. I did enjoy being in the woods. In fact, if the cottage had wi-fi, I might not have come back home at all.

Today is my birthday. I don’t usually look forward to the celebration, since it’s so often associated in my mind with a particular number that moves inexorably up. But this year I find myself very much at peace with myself, enjoying my thirties, and discovering new things every day. I suppose this has more than a little to do with the upcoming publication of my collection–it’s been such a dream of mine, for a very long time, and to finally be able to see it come together has been very rewarding, but I also like to think that I’ve finally learned to just relax and enjoy life. I’m thinking of buying myself something special from Powell’s, spending some time with my Mom, and maybe going to Le Bouchon with Alex tonight.

I was quite interested to read about A Life Full Of Holes: The Strait Project, an exhibition of photographs by Tangier-born Yto Berrada, and quite disappointed that none of the pictures were available online. The photographs explore issues of migration, similar to the ones I deal with in The Things That Death Will Buy: the “harragas”–people who risk life and limb trying to cross the Straits of Gibraltar in order to make it in Europe. The word has its root in the verb ‘hrg,’ meaning ‘to burn’. Those who migrate in this way burn their papers, burn their past lives in hope of new ones. Here’s Barrada on the project:

‘The word strait, like its French – and as chance would have it, Arabic – equivalent, combines the senses of narrowness and distress. The collapse of the colonial entreprise has left behind a complex legacy, bridging the Mediterranean and shaping how movement across the Strait of Gibraltar is managed and perceived. Before 1991 any Moroccan with a passport could travel freely to Europe. But since the European Union’s (EU) Schengen Agreement, visiting rights have become unilateral across what is now legally a one-way strait. A generation of Moroccans has grown up facing this troubled space that manages to be at once physical, symbolic, historical and intimately personal.

Berrada’s exhibition takes its name from the book by Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi (edited by Paul Bowles), A Life Full of Holes. If you are a reader from Liverpool, drop me a line at llalami AT yahoo DOT com and let me know what you think of the exhibition.