Spokane Bound, Not Your Mother’s Book Club, etc.
I never got a chance to do a write up on my last trip, but the hostess with the mostest has done a better job here Literaticat on the Mandabach, Hopkins, Asher, & Lyga gig
with the San Francisco portion.
Here’s silly me reading:
Tomorrow I’m off for the last stop on my fall 2007 micro-tour, Spokane, WA.
That where my best old friend Sam Ligon lives, and where I’ll appear at Auntie’s books on Friday night. I’ll also be visiting two creative writing classes at two different schools, North Central and Barker Center. This is is my favorite part, I think, becuase it’s so energizing to talk with the kids about writing. I’ll miss my own students, of course, but the new groups are refreshing.
It’s cold and snowy over in Spokane today, but looking at this pic from the area makes me wish I was going to be there in fishing weather. (Though I have fished in the snow!)
Peace, and wish me happy trails!
Great New Reviews of OR NOT!
I’m very thankful today for two new glowing reviews of Or Not!
As if I deserve more than an amazing wife, two healthy and fun kids, a cool (though run-down–hey I’m a writer, teacher, and dad) 110 year old house, and so much more!
Follow these links and comment the first one. (I think for the second one you have to be a jacketflap member.)
Teen Book Reviewer just gives me a heckuva rave, which I love.
And Lisa Chellman really “gets” the book and Cassie more than any other reviewer who’s done a review of this much detail.
Oh, and here’s a picture of my mom and me at the book signing in Alabama! I’m so thankful to have a mom who is a lover of poetry and books and who inspired me so much.
Happy Thanksgiving–Buy NOTHING Day Friday
Do you love to shop? Hate to shop? Indifferent?
Wouldn’t it be nice to give it a rest? A one day shopping fast?
Should there be exceptions? Buy only one special book and only from an independent bookstore? Buy only beer, locally brewed, from the tap? When I think of Katie, the proprietor of Village Books, or Frazer Dobson of Park Road Books, I think I would exempt them. But they’re not in my neighborhood, so I ain’t buyin’ nothin’ tomorrow.
JAY ASHER, BARRY LYGA, ELLEN HOPKINS, AND BRIAN MANDABACH!
WOW. How did I manage to get myself on a bill with these talented and successful authors! Very exciting 
next question . . . from Barrington High School creative writing students
THIS IS ENTRY TWO in my series of questions and answers from senior creative writing students of my alma mater, Barrington High School.
I DON’T KNOW ANYBODY in Barrington anymore except for my high school girlfriend, Claire, and my favorite English teacher, Dale Griffith. So I spent the night in the Barrington Motel, and took a cab over to the high school. My cabbie dropped me off at the wrong entrance, by the gym and the senior lockers, but the garrulous security guard had the authority—after checking his computer—and the technology to scan my Colorado driver’s license and print me a visitor’s ID sticker. Then another security staffer escorted me to the main entrance, and a third called Dept. Chair Jack Bowyer, who collected me and led me up the stairs that hadn’t existed in my day.
Here’s the second question that teacher Maggie Olberg gave me from the class:
What influences you? (Style & content)
Everything I read influences me a lot—or everything I read that’s good and substantial, because the stuff that isn’t just passes through me without leaving an impression. When I read, the language echoes in my mind. So I have to be careful what I’m reading when I’m writing.
Right now I’m reading I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek, and I can hear his voice, very lyrical. The good stuff becomes part of me, the characters are real people inside me, the worlds that are created become real places within me. I like writing that has a deep sense of place, urban or natural or both, and I like characters with a lot of love in them, or perhaps sympathy—with other people, with nature, with music and stories and all the arts. There will be alienation, disconnection, despair—but without what I’m calling love or sympathy, the alienation has no consequence.
Sometimes the language itself expresses love. I think Hemingway did that. One of my favorite stories, which is in a book that I borrowed from the BHS English resource center and never returned, is “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” It amazes me that I was so attracted to that story at so young an age, and I believe that even very young people often sympathize with the loss and disappointment of the age. The sympathy of the waiter in that story, the old waiter, carries the story—and the reader despises the young, self-involved waiter because he has none. Though the old waiter is preoccupied with nothingness, with emptiness, his emptiness is not nihilistic because he still feels the emptiness and sympathizes with those who also feel it.
Was this supposed to be style OR content? I think they are of equal importance. There is no style without content, and since the content is expressed via language, it can’t be communicated without good writing (which is one way to define style) or without a voice that arises naturally from the subject and expresses the content.
And everything influences me. My best friend Sam, whom I met at BHS when I was a junior and he was a soph, influenced and continues to influence me. He’s now the editor of Willow Springs and the author of an excellent novel called Safe in Heaven Dead.
But “everything under the sun”, as it says in the finale of Pink Floyd’s Dark side of the Moon, influences me. Growing up in Barrington, coming back, meeting new students . . . I could go on and on. (And usually do ☺)
OR NOT Sells Out Again! Book Launch Party; Charlotte, NC; Borders
It’s been tough keeping up on postings–just too busy.
I haven’t even told about my book launch party at Hillside Gardens, where we ran out of books.
Then I went to Charlotte, NC for visit to Myers Park HS–amazing students–and a fab party at the Trennings with Park Road Bookstore.
And today, when I did my thing at Borders at the the Chapel Hills Mall in Colorado Springs, they ran plumb out of Or Not!
I guess without the amazing Frazer Dobson of Park Road Books around, I’m a sell-out!
Details later–my friend and I have some papers to grade!
Brian Mandabach is a writer and teacher who lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado. OR NOT is his first novel.