High school sweethearts, Elle and Matt Beaulieu have everything money can buy, except a child. After suffering a string of premature stillbirths and miscarriages, the day after she learns she is pregnant again, Elle falls from a ladder and is pronounced brain dead. Elle hasn’t yet told Matt of the pregnancy, and when the initial trauma examinations miss her pregnancy, Matt is shocked when another test reveals a pregnancy nearing the end of the first trimester. This is when The Promise of Stardust shoots to the stars.

Years ago, Elle filed an informed consent directive that ensures that in case of brain death, her body would not be kept alive by artificial means. Torn by the knowledge of his wife’s no-resuscitation wishes and the possibility of artificially maintaining her body long enough for the baby to incubate to the point of life outside the womb, Matt chooses to save the baby. When his mother, who holds Elle’s power of medical attorney, sides with the paper, Matt’s fight hits the headlines, leads him into court, and nearly tears their families apart.

Within the inter-fused trails of death with dignity, right to life, personal promises, and medical law, emerges a story with the best kind of champion—the unlikely hero who fights for those who cannot speak for themselves.

Born and raised in Maine, Priscille has paddled down a few wild rivers, done a little rock climbing, and jumped out of airplanes. Sibley knew early on she would become a nurse. And a poet. Later, her love of words developed into a passion for storytelling.

Born and raised in Maine, Priscille has paddled down a few wild rivers, done a little rock climbing, and jumped out of airplanes. She currently lives in New Jersey where she works as a neonatal intensive care nurse and shares her life with her wonderful husband, three tall teenaged sons, and a mischievous Wheaten terrier.

Follow Priscille Sibley on Twitter: @PriscilleSibley.

10 Things I Learned as a Writer from Fitzgerald’s Gatsby

I’ve been reading and re-reading Gatsby a lot this year, and finding more novelist’s nutrition in it as a 40-something than I ever found as a high school freshman. A swift read and half the length of most novels today, Gatsby rewards the aspiring novelist looking less for obvious symbols and themes — the prey of the analytical assignment-conscious readerr — than for things like macrostructure and revision, the quarry of the craft-conscious writer.~Andromeda Romano-Lax

Baz Luhrmann, ‘Great Gatsby’ Director, Explains The 3D, The Hip Hop, The Sanitarium And More
By Michael Hogan, The Huffington Post

Shimmying Off the Literary Mantle
By A. O. Scott, The New York Times Movie Review

An Orgiastic Gatsby? Of Course
By Charles McGrath, The New York Times, Summer Movies

The Great Gatsby From Book to Movie: My Top 20 Faithful Things, Part One
By Anne Margaret Daniel, The Huffington Post

A grandiose, colorful, pleasure-drenched night at the movies
By Dana Stevens, Slate

Later this week in #litchat:

WritingWednesday:
10 Things I Learned as a Writer From Fitzgerald’s Gatsby
By Andromeda Romano-Lax, The Huffington Post

Guest Host Friday: 
Priscille Sibley, author of The Promise of Stardust

With luminous prose true to the era and gentle use of the remote region’s dialect, Staley explores the religious, cultural and political edges of the period leading up to the Wright’s successful experiments in human flight. It was the age invention, the turn-of-the-nineteenth century, when two engineering brothers changed their obsession from manufacturing bicycles to designing flying machines.

Staley begins with the fictional Madeline Tate, a smart and spunky unmarried woman on the verge of becoming a spinster. Growing up among the old salts and sea pups of this remote barrier island, Madeline is something of a pearl trapped in an unyielding oyster. She longs for romance, but not with one of the grizzly-faced, whisky-soaked fishermen who overrun the island. When the Wright brothers choose Kitty Hawk as the staging place for their experiments in flight, Madeline’s life takes off. She sees them through eyes of need, desire, and adventure, spinning a romance around one of them that tests him as much as it does her. Conditions may be favorable for flight, and conditions may be favorable for romance, but are conditions favorable for love?

Staley’s debut novel Need to Breathe, published in 2012, was selected as a “LitPick of 2012″ on the popular Twitter forum #LitChat. It was also named a Top Pick by Underground Book Reviews. Staley’s writing background includes undergraduate and graduate degrees in English and Creative Writing, an RWA award for a past novel, and involvement with the North Carolina Writers Network. She is also a founding member of the online writers’ community Backspace.

As a freelancer, her work has appeared in such publications as UNCG Magazine, BizLife Magazine and the Winston-Salem Journal. She grew up, lives, and will most likely die in Kernersville, N.C. She and her husband have two sons, William (who was diagnosed with autism at age 2) and Reese. She also has a cat, a penchant for powdered doughnuts, her very own Leatherman multi-tool, and a professionally framed pencil sketch of the Wright brothers in the guest bedroom.

Read an interview by #litchat’s Carolyn Burns Bass with Tara Staley in the Huffington Post.

Follow Tara Staley on Twitter: @TaraStaley.

When someone asks about the novel you’re reading or writing, how do you respond? Do you say: “A middle class woman too smart for her own good and a proud aristocrat fall in love despite their initial first impressions.” Or do you say: “It’s a story about the fallacy of first impressions and how love conquers all.”  If you say the first example, you would be describing the plot. But if you say the second example, you would be explaining the theme.

Plot is what happens in a story: character + conflict + resolution. Theme is what goes on between the lines,  the subtext or meaning drawn by the reader. Theme can be meticulously woven into the fabric of the story, or it can develop unintentionally in simply telling a good tale. Today in #litchat we’re discussing theme and how to identify and weave it into your fiction. Listed below are some resources to refresh your understanding of this important element of fiction.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg: Index of Theme-Plot Integration

Lerner.org Interactives: Analyzing Theme

The Editor’s Blog: What is Theme

Purdue Online Writing Lab: Theme

Holly Lisle: Finding Your Theme

Writing Forward: Fiction Writing Exercises for Exploring or Developing Theme, by Melissa Donovan

Find Your Creative Muse in Ficiton: Elements of Fiction–Theme, by Dave Hood

Desser: Mostly I think as an editor you have to listen, to water the soil, and simply not get in the way. Sometimes you do say something completely idiotic, and there’s an explosion. Well, but maybe that might not be so terrible—if something great gets produced as a result. What do you think about that? How do you deal with the things I say that get stuck in your craw, maybe especially with this new book?

Chatscript from this MediaMonday is here.

Later this week in #litchat:

WritingWednesday for May 8, 2013

What is Theme? Resource links here.

Guest Host on Friday, May 10, 2013

Tara Staley discusses her new novel Conditions Are Favorable.

While Laura Bates was fighting to take her Shakespeare program into solitary confinement, one of its most notorious inmates was staging a violent uprising in the very same prison.

Early in her academic career Bates declared maximum security prisoners “beyond rehabilitation.” To prove her point, she began volunteering in Chicago’s Cook County Jail literacy program. Not only did Bates’ opinion change, but ten years later she would take her Shakespeare program to the toughest offenders of them all. Bates shares this journey in the memoir, Shakespeare Saved My Life.

Armed with her newly minted Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and photocopied handouts from Richard the Second, Bates finally broke into “supermax,” the long-term solitary confinement unit of Wabash Valley Correctional Facility in Indiana. To screen prospective prisoners for intent and motivation, Bates first handed out a survey worksheet with a soliloquy by the imprisoned King Richard II, which included the line:

“I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; and for the world is populous and here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it.” (Richard the Second; Act 5, Scene 5)

Bates asked the prisoners to read the passage and then respond to the excerpt. Most prisoners returned brief remarks, but one prisoner’s response revealed college-level close critical reading through his keen personal insight and explication of the literary passage. That prisoner was Larry Newton, the mastermind of the uprising in supermax that nearly blocked Bates’ opportunity to enter the unit with her program. A convicted killer with a sentence of life without parole, he had stabbed a guard during the uprising, placing him in the extreme disciplinary section of supermax.

While Shakespeare Saved My Life is a mosaic of prisoner stories paralleled by Bates’ own life, the greater picture is of Newton. A brilliant man whose abusive upbringing in a Muncie, Ind. ghetto pushed him through a revolving door of runaways and juvenile detention, the last grade he successfully finished was the fifth, and by the ninth, he had dropped out. At the age of 17 he and three friends kidnapped a college student, robbed him, then shot him dead. The brutality of the crime saw Newton tried as an adult, with rights for appeal waved. Wasting away in disciplinary lockup, Newton was angry and suicidal. Then he read King Richard II’s agonized speech and found a hero in Shakespeare.

As the prison Shakespeare program grows, so does Newton. Bates includes passages from Newton’s writing, revealing scholarly understanding as well as street-level sagacity. Bates makes it clear that at no time did she move from professor to advocate, yet her guidance is clear as Newton progresses from the prison of self and into the liberty of knowledge. Shakespeare Saved My Life is a captivating look at the transforming power of story.

Bates has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Comparative Literature, with a focus on Shakespeare studies. She is a professor of English at Indiana State University, where she has taught courses on Shakespeare for the past 15 years to students on campus and in prison. For more than 25 years she has worked in prisons as a volunteer and as a professor. She created the world’s first Shakespeare program in supermax—the long-term solitary confinement unit. Her work has been featured in local and national media, including two segments on MSNBC-TV’s Lock Up. She has been happily married for nearly thirty years to Allan Bates, a retired professor and playwright.

Follow Laura Bates on Twitter: @shakeinshackles.

Setting is the stage for the drama of life. Whether set in a real place; a time past, present or future; or a fictional universe, a novel’s setting can be as crucial to the story’s narrative as characters. This week in #litchat WritingWednesday we’ll discuss how to write vivid settings in fiction. A selection of resources for understanding setting are listed below.

Writers Digest: The How of Where, by Chuck Sambuchino

Author’s Craft: Setting

Education.com: Using Setting and Building Sceneste

McPherson College: The Elements of Fiction—Setting by Bruce McPherson

The Editor’s Blog: What is Setting in Fiction by Beth Hill

Writing World: Four Ways to Bring Setting to Life, by Moira Allen

We’re on a break today, so there won’t be a MediaMonday discussion this week. We’ll be back with MediaMonday on May 6.

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

WritingWednesday: Setting in Fiction

Friday, May 3, 2013

Guest host: Laura Bates, author of Shakespeare Saved My Life

Jon Clinch (photo by Michael O’Neill)

Jon Clinch‘s new novel, The Thief of Auschwitz, departs somewhat from his first two critically acclaimed novels, Finn and Kings of the Earth. Whereas Finn and Kings of the Earth dealt with American stories and voices, The Thief of Auschwitz is set primarily at the Nazi death camp notorious for its atrocities against Jewish people. Furthermore, Clinch chose to self-publish The Thief of Auschwitz, rather than go through a traditional publishing house as he did with his first two novels. The result is the first literary novel to receive critical acclaim with reviews in leading media.

The Thief of Auschwitz begins with the voice of octogenarian Max Rosen: “The camp at Auschwitz took one year of my life, and of my own free will I gave it another four.” A provocative opening sentence for sure. Max goes on to describe himself as, “the last believer in looking at things the way they are, and reporting back.” He’s a renowned painter now living in New York and reluctantly organizing a retrospective of his work at the invitation of the National Gallery. He’s cantankerous and critical, taking frequent swipes at Andrew Wyeth and his Helga.

Unfolding through Max’s craggy impressions of today’s art world come his reflection of the years spent at Auschwitz. Some of the story is told by Max, yet the majority of the story rolls out in cinematic third person.  After evading Nazis for more than a year, Max and his sister, Lydia, along with their parents, Jacob and Eidel, are captured and taken to the Auschwitz work camp. It’s known at the camps that children cannot contribute to the work, so they are immediately exterminated like unwanted pests. Lydia is only 12 and is sorted into the children’s death queue immediately. The women are separated from the men. Max, tall and sturdy for his age of 14, takes his father’s advice and tells the registrar he’s 18.  This is where the story begins.

Throughout his life Max is haunted by the camp, but even more so by self-comparison of his work to that of his mother. A talented and self-taught painter, Eidel carries with her to the camp only one painting—a beautiful portrait of Lydia. This portrait plays a crucial role in Max’s survival, while forging a secret he carries with him forever.

Many authors have written about Nazis and death camps and memorialized the people who died there. Each of those novels have their place in the canon of Holocaust literature. The Thief of Auschwitz rises to the top of that canon, painting the horrors of camp life and survival with elegiac strokes, while portraying shades of humanity behind the Nazi masks.

Having had his first two critically acclaimed novels top-listed by big publishing houses, Clinch has a rare position within the crossroads of traditional and indie publishing paths. Clinch reveals his indie publishing process and offers seasoned advice in a new book, Unmediated Ink now available on Amazon.

Born and raised in the remote heart of upstate New York, Jon Clinch has been an English teacher, a metalworker, a folksinger, an illustrator, a typeface designer, a housepainter, a copywriter, and an advertising executive.

Jon has lectured and taught widely, in settings as varied as the National Council of Teachers of English, Williams College, the Mark Twain House and Museum, and Pennsylvania State University. In 2008 he organized a benefit reading for the financially ailing Twain House—enlisting such authors as Tom Perrotta and Stewart O’Nan—an event that literally saved the house from bankruptcy.

Jon lives with his wife, Wendy—founder of TheSkiDiva.com, the internet’s premier site for women who ski—in the Green Mountains of Vermont.

Follow Jon Clinch on Twitter: @JonClinch.