MediaMonday: Getting Personal–How Much is Too Much? July 8, 2013
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in MediaMonday.Tags: Joyce Carol Oates, Pam Jenoff
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The internet and social media has fulfilled Marshall McLuhan’s promise of a global village, but it’s also created a reverse Big Brother culture where people stand on virtual street corners broadcasting the minutiae of their lives.
Author blogs and chat sessions such as #LitChat connect authors with readers. #LitChat provides a platform for authors to talk about their books, about the process of writing, about the journey to becoming a published author. Yet readers often want to know the story behind the story. Sometimes they even believe the author’s own story is buried amid the fiction.
Some authors are open books—their online personas reveal where they live, the names of their children, where they are vacationing, what they ate for dinner last night, and how many cavities they did nor did not have at their last dental check-up. You know their political opinions, their religious beliefs, their favorite brand of whiskey.
Last week author Joyce Carol Oates, a literary stateswoman of critical and commercial renown, drew fire for her tweeted opinions about Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood. Was she unfairly singled out because her opinions called out religion—specifically Islam as anti-feminist and permissive of a rape culture?
Pam Jenoff photo by Dominic Episcopo
Novelist Pam Jenoff writes in a July 5, 2013 Publisher’s Weekly essay how editors increasingly ask authors for personal stories.
“It seems that for the article to actually place well, it typically has to give insight into not just the writer’s work or views, but her life as well,” says Jenoff in the essay.
In addition to this reverse Big Brother mentality, we have the NSA spying on private citizens. Which leads to this week’s #LitChat MediaMonday topic, “How much personal information shared over social media is too much?”
Wall Street Journal, Speakeasy: July 5, 2013
Joyce Carol Oates Tweets on Egypt, Rape and Religion Draw FurorFollow Joyce Carol Oates on Twitter: @JoyceCarolOates.
Publisher’s Weekly, Soapbox, July 5, 2013
That’s Personal! A Writer Ponders the High Cost of Publicity
Follow Pam Jenoff on Twitter: @PamJenoff.
Catch the conversation beginning at 4 p.m. E.T. in our dedicated #LitChat channel: www.nurph.com/litchat.
Plot Points in History: The Holocaust August 29, 2011
Posted by Carolyn Burns Bass in bestsellers, commercial fiction, historical fiction.Tags: historical fiction, Holocaust, Pam Jenoff, World War II
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Pam Jenoff
This week in #litchat we’re debuting a reoccurring theme called Plot Points in History.” History is rich with the drama, conflict, romance, humor and mystery that makes good reading. Creating a theme tied to specific points in history allows us to examine the era and the books that have sprung from that period. We understand that these critical events are more than just scenarios for authors to use as plot fodder, and we never want to trivialize the milestones, both tragic and triumphant, that have shaped human history. Our first theme in “Plot Points in History” is The Holocaust.
Pam Jenoff, guest host of #litchat on Friday, September 2, is author of five novels. Her debut novel, the Quill Award winning bestseller, The Kommodant’s Girl, set in motion a career for writing historical fiction with specific interest in the European theater of World War II. Her most recent novel, The Things We Cherished, takes that theme into Nazi concentration camps, while also weaving through history. The Things We Cherished tells the story of Charlotte Gold and Jack Harrington, two fiercely independent attoreys who find themselves slowly falling for one another while working to defend the brother of a Holocaust hero against allegations of World War II–era war crimes. The defendant, wealthy financier Roger Dykmans, refuses to help in his own defense, revealing only that proof of his innocence lies within an intricate timepiece last seen in Nazi Germany. As the narrative moves from Philadelphia to Germany, Poland, and Italy, we are given glimpses of the lives that the anniversary clock has touched over the past century, and learn about the love affair that turned a brother into a traitor.
Pam Jenoff was born in Maryland and raised outside Philadelphia. She attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and Cambridge University in England. Upon receiving her master’s in history from Cambridge, she accepted an appointment as Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army. The position provided a unique opportunity to witness and participate in operations at the most senior levels of government, including helping the families of the Pan Am Flight 103 victims secure their memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, observing recovery efforts at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing and attending ceremonies to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of World War II at sites such as Bastogne and Corregidor.
Following her work at the Pentagon, Pam moved to the State Department. In 1996 she was assigned to the U.S. Consulate in Krakow, Poland. It was during this period that Pam developed her expertise in Polish-Jewish relations and the Holocaust. Working on matters such as preservation of Auschwitz and the restitution of Jewish property in Poland, Pam developed close relations with the surviving Jewish community.
Pam left the Foreign Service in 1998 to attend law school and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. She worked for several years as a labor and employment attorney both at a firm and in-house in Philadelphia and now teaches law school at Rutgers.
Follow Pam Jenoff on Twitter: @PamJenoff.
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