Marie-Helene Bertino @mhbertino - Tumblr Blog

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I would call this a "review" but it's more of a poetic response to Safe as Houses that equal parts worried and inspired me, drew me in, scared the bejesus out of me and, in the end, charmed me to no end. I've never read a review like this. Would that they were all like this; a little more free-form and daring, a little more joyful.

Good morning! I've been so excited to share this news! My first novel, 2 A.M. AT THE CAT'S PAJAMAS, will be published by Crown (Random House), August 2014! I am over the moon, the stars, the solar system, back to the moon, back to earth, where I sit, typing this to you.

2 A.M. AT THE CAT'S PAJAMAS follows a brassy little girl jazz-singer (and a bunch of other people) over the course of one fateful Christmas Eve Eve in Philadelphia. The first scene I wrote was dated October 17th, 2001.

(Thank you to Claudia Ballard for championing this book. And I know she'll see this because she checks my website every day, thank you to my mom Helene, strongest person I know.)

Dear Brooklyn, please get ahold of yourself.

Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin

May is National Short Story month and like a daffy short story writer, I’ve gone and waited until the last day to remember. I’ve been in novel land and regarding that, I have news I cannot wait to share. But that doesn’t mean my love for the short story is weak. On the contrary. I would, for the short story, do anything. I would present the short story with a bouquet of sharpened pencils. I would let it eat half of my sandwich, and that’s big for me because I really like sandwiches, and hate sharing. I’d better make my offering good because it’s the last day. So as Horace Silver would say, let’s get right down to the nitty gritty.

There are short stories that are anthologized far and wide, that everyone knows, that are safe and riskless and nice and neat and expected. And then there is “Sonny’s Blues.” For my money ($5), the hardest thing to write well, even more than sex and even more than love, is music. The soul, the acuity of language, and the pay off of “Sonny’s Blues” is unable to be replicated or articulated, because James Baldwin managed to wrangle something rare and mythical into these short pages. His gifts can only be explained by a kind god. And so, just as if we were in the presence of a jazz virtuoso, there is nothing for the rest of us to do but shut up and listen.

Happy short story month. Every month is short story month.

Growing up in Philly equips you with a mixed bag of traits. For example, the ability to Roger Rabbit, a predilection for shocking pants, and, like Hemingway said, a "built-in, shock-proof shit detector." I waxed on for too long about my often misunderstood hometown, my never misunderstood dog Fox, and how I am still at heart a mix-tape girl in this interview for The Common with Zinzi Clemmons (huge thanks to both).

"Yes, [Philadelphia is] horrible, but in a very interesting way. There were places there that had been allowed to decay, where there was so much fear and crime that just for a moment there was an opening to another world. It was fear, but it was so strong, and so magical, like a magnet, that your imagination was always sparking in Philadelphia...I just have to think of Philadelphia now, and I get ideas, I hear the wind, and I'm off into the darkness somewhere." -- David Lynch

Holy gravy, SAFE AS HOUSES made it onto the long list for The Frank O'Connor short story prize with fellow Iowa winner Chad Simpson and my hero, George Saunders!!! This means I get to go to the Cork Story Festival in Ireland. Thank heavens for my Irish Poetry professors in college, who warned us not to dare enter Ireland without "knowing your poems." I will finally get to put all of my Yeats to good use...

HYPHEN-NATION, a dispatch from Marie-Helene Bertino

The Common asked me to write a dispatch from a specific location, so I wrote from the hyphen that splits my first name. Directions are included for getting to Marie from Helene. It's (kind of?) a travel piece.

Happy Poetry Month!

Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, please come flying. In a cloud of fiery pale chemicals, please come flying, to the rapid rolling of thousands of small blue drums descending out of the mackerel sky over the glittering grandstand of harbor-water, please come flying. Whistles, pennants and smoke are blowing. The ships are signaling cordially with multitudes of flags rising and falling like birds all over the harbor. Enter: two rivers, gracefully bearing countless little pellucid jellies in cut-glass epergnes dragging with silver chains. The flight is safe; the weather is all arranged. The waves are running in verses this fine morning. Please come flying. Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe trailing a sapphire highlight, with a black capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots, with heaven knows how many angels all riding on the broad black brim of your hat, please come flying. Bearing a musical inaudible abacus, a slight censorious frown, and blue ribbons, please come flying. Facts and skyscrapers glint in the tide; Manhattan is all awash with morals this fine morning, so please come flying. Mounting the sky with natural heroism, above the accidents, above the malignant movies, the taxicabs and injustices at large, while horns are resounding in your beautiful ears that simultaneously listen to a soft uninvented music, fit for the musk deer, please come flying. For whom the grim museums will behave like courteous male bower-birds, for whom the agreeable lions lie in wait on the steps of the Public Library, eager to rise and follow through the doors up into the reading rooms, please come flying. We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping, or play at a game of constantly being wrong with a priceless set of vocabularies, or we can bravely deplore, but please please come flying. With dynasties of negative constructions darkening and dying around you, with grammar that suddenly turns and shines like flocks of sandpipers flying, please come flying. Come like a light in the white mackerel sky, come like a daytime comet with a long unnebulous train of words, from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, please come flying. - Elizabeth Bishop

"Everyone tells you that conflict is required to have yourself a story, but what is more difficult to explain is that it doesn’t necessarily mean: MAN WITH GUN ENTERS STORE OF KITTENS. I thought it did, so I would try to get a man with a gun into every story. It doesn’t help that Hemingway is taught in every damn high school class and he is like the eternal MAN WITH GUN."

believermag

Last chance to vote in the Believer Reader Survey!

What were your three favorite works of fiction and poetry published in 2012? Email [email protected] by March 21st to let us know.

We’ll share the results in the May issue.

Take a peek at last year’s results for some inspiration.

In which I teach the rules of writing...

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."

-W. Somerset Maugham

I have the pleasure of teaching in two very special capacities this Spring and Summer. First will be a visit to Ithaca, New York for the inaugural year of Ithaca College's "New Voices Festival," organized by the uber-talented Eleanor Henderson and Chris Holmes. During what promises to be an exciting week, I will guest lecture and do readings and no doubt overuse the word amazing, as I am wont to do. Please see my EVENTS page for more details.

A few years ago I spent some time writing in Ithaca and it quickly became one of my favorite places in the world. My childhood best girlfriends came up to visit and we discovered truck graveyards, gleaming gyms, great food, friendly hippies, an Art parade, wineries, lakes and these things called "gorges," which are...well, lovely. Just look at this beautiful tractor! (Please remember I am a city girl and we do not have beautiful tractors in the city.)

In July I'll be returning to lead workshops for the third year of One Story's Writers Workshop. This intensive week of class, lectures and panels was my (and Michael Pollock's) baby when I was the Associate Editor for One Story, and I love participating every year. If you are an emerging (people hate the word emerging but I don't mind it as I think we are all still emerging until we stop emerging, that is to say, die) writer who is wondering: how on earth do I put together a career out of these scribbles I love so much, consider joining us at The Center for Fiction this July. For more information, here is a silly blog I wrote about it after the completion of the first year, in which I overuse the word amazing.

New York is Always Hopeful

From Dorothy Parker's essay, "My Home Town"

McCall's, January 1928

(With thanks to Margaret Zamos-Monteith for sending this to me)

It occurs to me that there are other towns. It occurs to me so violently that I say, at intervals, "Very well, if New York is going to be like this, I'm going to live somewhere else." And I do — that's the funny part of it. But then one day there comes to me the sharp picture of New York at its best, on a shiny blue-and-white Autumn day with its buildings cut diagonally in halves of light and shadow, with its straight neat avenues colored with quick throngs, like confetti in a breeze. Some one, and I wish it had been I, has said that "Autumn is the Springtime of big cities." I see New York at holiday time, always in the late afternoon, under a Maxfield Parish sky, with the crowds even more quick and nervous but even more good-natured, the dark groups splashed with the white of Christmas packages, the lighted holly-strung shops urging them in to buy more and more. I see it on a Spring morning, with the clothes of the women as soft and as hopeful as the pretty new leaves on a few, brave trees. I see it at night, with the low skies red with the black-flung lights of Broadway, those lights of which Chesterton — or they told me it was Chesterton — said, "What a marvelous sight for those who cannot read!" I see it in the rain, I smell the enchanting odor of wet asphalt, with the empty streets black and shining as ripe olives. I see it — by this time, I become maudlin with nostalgia — even with its gray mounds of crusted snow, its little Appalachians of ice along the pavements. So I go back. And it is always better than I thought it would be.

I suppose that is the thing about New York. It is always a little more than you had hoped for. Each day, there, is so definitely a new day. "Now we'll start over," it seems to say every morning, "and come on, let's hurry like anything."

London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it. There is excitement ever running its streets. Each day, as you go out, you feel the little nervous quiver that is yours when you sit in the theater just before the curtain rises. Other places may give you asweet and soothing sense of level; but in New York there is always the feeling of "Something's going to happen." It isn't peace. But, you know, you do get used to peace, and so quickly. And you never get used to New York.

Photo by my friend Cindy Augustine. Find more of her work here.

Thank you

The happiest surprise of publishing Safe as Houses has been the people who have reached out to me at readings and on all sorts of social media (is that how you pluralize that?) to tell me how they appreciated the stories. "Sometimes You Break Their Hearts, Sometimes They Break Yours" seems to have particularly resonated with a few people who have, like me, gone through a period of time feeling like an alien on the earth. I wrote that story during a difficult time when I needed to make myself laugh. It was beyond worth it if it helps anyone else. Though I've written back and bent the ears of anyone who has reached out to me, I want to say again: your words are not lost on me. I think you are so brave and I thank you for sharing your stories with me. So many people seem to have had the experience of being ostracized for being different that I feel certain we "aliens" are never truly alone.

Early Spring has me traveling like a carney of fiction with a hobo pack of words. I will be in Boston, Baltimore, Iowa, and good ole NYC. Someday soon I hope to confirm a reading in my hometown but thus far Philadelphia has been elusive and moody. It will make it all the sweeter when I return in a glittery explosion of Rocky theme music and Federal Donuts. Until that day, I look forward to talking books with people in all of these other lovely towns, getting to hear amazing readers, and putting a few more miles on the odometer. Is there anything better than driving around America? The answer is no. Would love to see you along the way...

The Story Prize named SAFE AS HOUSES an Outstanding Collection of 2012! I am DELIGHTED BEYOND REASON, in awe of the company my little book keeps on this list, and so thankful to University of Iowa Press Short Fiction & Poetry.

tayarijones

Great opportunity for a writer under 40 who is working on her/his first book of prose. $10K and two months at Lake Forest College, and a book contract. What’s not to like? [Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize]

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