Dear Readers,
Here’s a literary interview I did–re: which writers have influenced me and which I’d like to have brunch with–for Wichita’s newspaper F5. Their motto is, “Work like a farmer, party like a rock star.” Can’t go wrong with that!
Enjoy the interview.
xoxo,
Jenna.
Dear Readers,
Do you miss the THOSE WHO SAVE US characters? Do you, like me, fall in love with books and want to see more of their people after the back cover is closed? Then this story is for you. Called “Max & Josephine,” it’s what I call a “shrapnel story”–a short story I wrote after THOSE WHO SAVE US was finished, when the novel and its characters were still working their way out from under my skin. It’s about the Good Doktor Max Stern and what his life was like in the early days of the Reich in Weimar–and what kind of peril he was in.
To read “Max & Josephine,” please click here!
I am much obliged to Boston University’s 236 Magazine for publishing this shrapnel story so readers can get more Max.
xoxo and happy reading!,
Jenna.
Dear Writer-Readers,
Do you dread writers’ conferences? Picture them as seething seas of competitive writers jockeying for position, throwing elbows, pushing each other’s faces into the primordial literary ooze? Me too. But they’re not really like that. Why you needn’t dread them and why you should go: 12+ reasons I gleaned from this year’s AWP in Boston.
My new Writer on The Road column for Grub Street, live now!
Enjoy–and write on.
x Jenna.
Dear Readers,
Just about every writer (myself included) has dealt on tour with Invisible Audience Syndrome: the readings where NOBODY SHOWS UP. But some writers have had much more hair-raising experiences than that. In honor of so many friends publishing books this spring, I’ve compiled a Best & Worst of the Book Tours column for Grub Street. Here are some of these moments, featuring thieves, stalking exes, jail time, and ghosts.
Best & Worst of the Book Tours: Writer(s) on the Road
Enjoy!
xo,
Jenna.
Lone Bolt, CO–one of the images in the show.
Dear Readers,
I’m utterly thrilled–and a little shy–to announce my 1st-ever photography exhbition, “Ain’t That America Somethin’ To See,” comprised of photos I shot while stormchasing.
Lone Bolt, CO
The show will open at the Bluff Country Artists’ Gallery in Spring Grove, MN, on Saturday, May 18, 2013. First I get to do an author/ photographer presentation, sponsored by the Spring Grove Public Library, at the Spring Grove Theater at 2 P.M. Then there’s the exhibit, opening at 3 P.M., at the gallery, where there’ll be a meet, greet & signing. And those of you who have so kindly said over the past few years that you’d buy my photos–now you can.
How fun is that?
Where my show will be: Saturday, May 18, 2013, 3 PM CDT.
Spring Grove, MN is where my great-grandfather, Frank Joerg, met my great-grandmother, Anna Foss. He was a professional photographer, traveling from town to town to take people’s portraits. Anna was working as a waitress/ barmaid in the Ballard House, then a hotel, now a Norwegian Heritage Center in Spring Grove. Frank was captivated. He stayed.
So the location of the show is extra-meaningful to me.
My grandfather on my dad’s side, Joseph G. Blum, was also a professional photographer.
I feel a little greedy branching out into images when I’ve had so much luck writing, but I hope this show pays homage to Frank and Joe.
And it is also for all of you who have encouraged me in photography as well as writing. At the risk of sounding like a PBS telethon, your support means everything! I started taking photos while on the road researching THE STORMCHASERS, then while writing THE STORMCHASERS, then while on tour for THE STORMCHASERS. I consider myself so lucky to have seen parts of the country most of us never see, tucked away as they are in the grand wide-open spaces that are so hard to get to. To have seen Nature’s mightiest and most frightening displays. I began sharing the images on Facebook, and thanks to your encouragement, I got hooked on it. Now I have an exhibit.
Aspiring photographer with inflow hair.
If you are anywhere near SE MN on May 18, please come visit them! And me. The exhibit coincides with Spring Grove’s Norwegian Heritage Fest, Syttende Mai, so I may be presenting in my Viking helmet. In case you needed additional incentive.
xoxo
Jenna.
Dear Readers:
This morning I got an email from a reader wanting to know what had happened to Trudy after the end of THOSE WHO SAVE US. It’s a fairly frequent question, not just about Trudy but about all the characters–and not posed just to me but, I imagine, to many writers. I was just listening to an audio essay by Stephen King on this same topic, how readers will ask him what happened to this character or that? ”As if,” Mr. King said, “I get letters from them every now and then.”
Character Valhalla?
Like Mr. King (one of my literary idols), I don’t really know what happens to my characters once the book is over. I feel I’ve been spying on them long enough and it’s time to give them some privacy. I do have some glimmer of an idea about each, though, and if you want to know what I think happened to Trudy, or Anna, or the Obersturmfuhrer, or Karena, Kevin and Charles from THE STORMCHASERS, please feel free to write to me and ask.
Once you send a book out into the world, it belongs to its readers, so your guesses may be as valid as mine. Readers, what do you think happened to these people? And writers, do you get this question too? Do you know what happens to your characters once the book is over?
Happy reading, writing, and inspiration this new year!
xo,
Jenna.
Dearest Readers,
I know there isn’t a single person among us who hasn’t been affected by the Newtown shootings. How did you handle it? If you’re anything like me, by grieving–and wondering how you could cry so much for people you didn’t know. My thoughts on why here, for Grub Daily.
Peace be with you and yours this holiday season.
xo
Jenna.
Dear Readers,
If you’re my friend on Facebook and/ or follow me on Twitter, you know that for a few months leading up to the Presidential election, I seemed to have….lost my mind. By which I mean, I was Tweeting my brains out during the debates and posting my political thoughts freely on my wall. Since it’s widely held you should never talk about religion or politics in polite company, and we like to at least pretend social media is just that, social, WHY would anyone do such a thing? And why especially would a writer, who could very well alienate and lose readers based on her vehement political views, take that risk?
The answer in my new Writer On the Road column for Grub Street, up NOW.
Enjoy! & happy recovery from your tryptophan…
xoxo,
Jenna.
Dear Readers,
A former student wrote to me this morning to ask, via turning her historical thesis into a novella (Godspeed!), HOW the hell do you organize the mountains and mountains and mountains of research involved?
Thanks to the sheer amount of information out there, a writer can feel as though she’s standing in the Alps, with no idea how to find her way through.
When I was writing THOSE WHO SAVE US, I think I might have had it somewhat easier in that books were still my primary research source, as opposed to the Internet, which can lead one down such endless paths (and who knows what’s true?). I also incorporated emotional details from interviewing Jewish Holocaust survivors for the Spielberg Foundation–and for visceral detail watched every movie I could find about the era, and listened to German music and took German classes and baked everything that appears in the novel! so I would know as much as possible what it felt like to be my characters from the inside out. I did stop short of sleeping with an SS officer, however.
The sum total of this was 10 years’ worth of research; for my second book, I did the same.
My organizing principle is like Hemingway’s tip of the iceberg theory about writing: I know 90% more than what made it onto the page. And knowing that invisible 90% is what helped give me the confidence in my characters and their situations. I believe that confidence resonates with readers; you’re not showing it off to them, but they feel it by osmosis.
How did I choose WHICH 10% to incorporate? Whatever the novel demanded! I might have known, for instance, that (forgive the grueling nastiness of the image) the rat problem at Buchenwald was so bad because of the dead that the SS had to call in a special team of exterminators from Berlin. But there wasn’t anyplace in the book where I could plug in that particular information, so it’s something I held in reserve (and used in a different story about the same time).
So: read everything you can. Watch and listen to everything you can. Process it in the way that’s best for you; for me, it was to take copious notes, read and reread them, highlight what I felt was most important. Then use what your story demands! It will show you the way through.
Dear Readers,
The one sore spot about my life in The Middle–aside from missing my amazing writer peeps and colleagues at Grub Street Writers–is that I haven’t been teaching. I miss it so badly! But now I have another chance to warp impressionable novelist minds–I mean, be helpful. If I can. (And I will try!)
If you’ve got a novel in progress and want some help wrangling it to agents’ and editors’ desks, please join me at MISA, the Madeline School for the Arts, next August 12-16. We’ll get to workshop on this beautiful island in the middle of Lake Superior! Kind of like Nantucket but with more cows and red barns.
For more information about MISA and how to submit your work for the course, please click here.
MISA: Madeline School for the Arts
I so hope I get to work with you!
xo,
Jenna.
