Book of the Week #10

Hello Goodbye by Emily Chenoweth (NY: Random House, 2009)

"... into light all things must fall, glad at last to have fallen."         --Jane Kenyon

Chenoweth, who lives in Oregon, begins her novel with this epigraph from a New Hampshire poet and sets her story at a resort hotel in the White Mountains.

"In the summer after her freshman year of college, Abby Hansen embarks on what might be a final vacation with her parents to a historic resort in northern New Hampshire. The Presidential Hotel, with its stately rooms and old-fashioned dress code, seems almost unbearably stuffy to Abby, but the young, free-spirited hotel staff offers her the chance for new friendships, and maybe even romance.
However, for her parents, Elliott and Helen, their time spent together in the shadow of the White Mountains has taken on a deeper meaning. By inviting family friends to join them, they open their marriage up to a lifetime of confessions, and they must confront a secret about Helen's health that they have been hiding from their daughter.
Heartbreaking and luminous, Hello Goodbye deftly explores a family's struggle with love and loss, as a summer vacation becomes an occasion for awakening" --Publisher's blurb

LAL Update

Entries in the 2014 Letters About Literature competition have been received and logged at the national competition office. There were 560 letters entered this year by New Hampshire students.

All the letters will be judged by various panels of readers and the semi-finalists for New Hampshire will be selected and sent to the final NH judging panel (which includes authors, poets, educators and librarians from the Granite State) to choose the winning letters.

Our state semi-finalists will be notified by mail in late March 2014 and the state winners will be notified in late April. Once all the students whose letters were selected as semi-finalists have signed release forms allowing us to do so we will make a public announcement of the semi-finalists.

3 on a Theme: Winter

Winter to Winter: A Year of Seasonal Change in the Monadnock Foothills by Jack Kraichnan(Dublin, NH: Snow Brook Press, 2005.)

 Winter Woes by Marty Kelley (Madison, Wisc.: Zino Press Children's Books, 2003.)

Winter Light: Photographs by Fletcher Manley (Lancaster, NH: Fletcher Manley Imaging, 2010)

Book of the Week #9

Telling the Barn Swallow: Poets on the Poetry of Maxine Kumin edited by Emily Grosholtz (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997).

Maxine Kumin was a gifted writer and poet and a tremendous friend to, and supporter of, the book world (including helping out the Center for the Book whenever she was asked over the years) and her recent death is a great loss to us all. Telling the Barn Swallow  gave a variety of writers an opportunity to talk about Kumin's work and what it meant to them while she was still here to read what they said.

"Maxine Kumin's poetry deserves its popularity, for it is hopeful without being sentimental, formal without being contrived, and deliberative without being doctrinaire. Over the past four decades it has consistently and increasingly won a loyal readership, and Kumin is widely recognized as one of the leading women of letters in this country. Yet the critical response to her poetry has not been proportionate to the importance of her art and acclaim, perhaps because her life's geography has removed her from the cultural capitals where poetic reputations are invented. ...in Kumin's poetry the perspective is at once cosmopolitan and local, urban and rustic, human and female. Her subjects are as likely to be her grandchildren as the exigencies of art, the cruelty of barn cats as the follies of her countrymen, the weather afflicting her farm as street fighting in Paris or Jerusalem." (Editor's Introduction, p. ix)

If you are not familiar with Kumin's work I would recommend Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010 as a good collection to begin with. It concludes with Kumin's thoughts on "Death, etc." 

Q&A: Meg Kearney

Meg Kearney, photo by Gabriel Parker

There are a lot of wonderful writers living in our state. As the Director of the NH Center for the Book  I get the opportunity to talk to many of them. This interview series of Q&As with New Hampshire authors here on Book Notes lets me share that experience a bit with my blog readers. 
 
If someone hasn't read your work yet, where should they start? 
It depends on how old he/she is! Adults should start with my most recent book of poems, Home By Now. Teens should start with my first young-adult novel-in-verse, The Secret of Me. And children should start with my picture book, Trouper. (That said, I like to think adults would like all of my books!) 

When did you first think of yourself as a writer? 
I started writing short stories in second grade, and poetry in sixth grade. I think before I finished elementary school I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t dare call myself one until I was in my twenties and published my first poem. Even then, I was a bit shy about using that term.

How did you end up living in NH? 
In 2005, I left the National Book Foundation in New York to found a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, MA. At the time, I didn’t want to move to Boston; I figured this was my chance to own a home in the country. And since I’d been coming to the White Mountains every summer for more than 20 years, New Hampshire already felt like a home away from home. It’s a crazy commute three days a week, but worth it; plus, I stay sane by listening to audio books. 

Where do you like to write? 
My favorite place to write is in a little cabin in Franconia, where I go for a week or two every August. But I have a lovely writing room in my home where I like to write; I also write out on the front porch when weather permits.
  
How important is place in your writing? 
Extremely. Place is sort of a character in much of my work.
 
What do you do when you aren't writing? 
I’m an avid reader, walker/hiker, and cross-country skier. Plus I’m very close with my family, and go visit them in New York State’s Hudson Valley about every six weeks. 

What’s the best piece of advice (writing or otherwise) you were ever given? 
“Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you can’t do something because you’re not capable.”
 
What books do you love and what about them speaks to you? 
Oh, there are too many books to name! I’m always reading contemporary poetry, most of it American though I have an interest in the poetry of other cultures. And I adore nineteenth-century novels. What I’m always seeking is writers/books that inspire me to write, and different writers strike me that way at different times. Probably the number-one fiction writer who inspires me to write poems is Virginia Woolf.

What are you working on now? 
I’ve spent the last two years working on a series of what I call “the bird poems.” There are 100 now all together, and I’m hoping in the end that at least 30 will be worth keeping. But recently I’ve had to set that project aside in order to begin the last book in my young-adult verse-novel trilogy.

What do you want to share that I neglected to ask about? 
One of my great joys is not only reading my work for audiences, but also teaching poetry—especially when my students are young people.

To learn more about Meg Kearney's work please visit www.megkearney.com