What is a writing community and why be part of one?

There was a full house at Interabang Books this week as Dallas’s newest independent bookstore and the Writer’s League of Texas hosted a panel discussion about community building for writers. And we hadn’t even known there would be cupcakes! (Those arrived courtesy of irrepressible panel member, author and community organizer, Arianne “Tex” Thompson, decorated with the names and logos of local writers’ communities.)

No, we were there because, despite the Hemingwayesque stereotype of writers as antisocial loners – possibly hard drinking ones at that – the local authors on the panel –

l-r, Lenhardt, Kent, Kimzey

Thompson, Kathleen Kent, Melissa Lenhardt, and Blake Kimzey – extolled the necessity of connections.

“It is so important for every industry to own its issues,” Thompson said. “For football, it’s brain injury. For ballet dancers, it’s eating disorders. For us it’s –”

“Hemorrhoids,” an audience member shouted.

Well, at least anxiety, Thompson acknowledged, when the laughter had died down. “You writers, there’s something seriously wrong with you!” (More laughter, some slightly self-conscious.) “It’s important that we need a counterbalance to the word hamsters running around in our heads. You need a writing community if you’re going to stay healthy and stay in the game.”

And that, if in more chaste language, was the tone of the discussion, was the tone of the discussion moderated by the League’s member services manager, Jordan Smith. 

“Why is it important for writers to be in a community?” Smith asked. “And how do you find a community?”

Kimzey agreed. Now a prolific short story author and founder/director of Writing Workshops Dallas, he confessed to starting his writing career as an alternative to his day job.

“I was nodding off in a cubicle 10 years ago,” the author of “a lot of vignettes,” but no completed stories until he found a creative writing workshop at Brookhaven Community College. 

“It was transforming for me. There I was, getting feedback for the first time.”

He and the other students – mostly college freshmen and sophomores years younger than he was – took a second course together because they formed such strong bonds. (Kimzie would even take the course a third time, and end with nine completed stories.) “Now I have my gang of four, all at different stages. It’s important to have a cohort.”

“I started by going to the DFW Writers Workshop,” Lenhardt said, where she was able to grow her Stillwater mystery series and award winning historical novels. “They ‘got’ me in a way my family didn’t.”

The stay-at-home mom went to her first workshop meeting and thought, “Oh, my God, nobody asked about my kids.” It wasn’t that workshop members didn’t care about her kids, she said, but that her relationship with them was being built as a comrade, not on the family connections which had previously dominated her life.

Kent, on the other hand, already completed the manuscript that would become her New York Times bestseller, The Heretic’s Daughter, on her own. She has said in other contexts that she kept her writing a secret from almost everyone except her mother, fearing the eyeball rolls if she confessed to it, with another career and well into middle age. “I wish I’d had a group like that.”

Which doesn’t mean it’s ever too late to start, either with writing or finding a community.

“Unlike, for instance, downhill skiing, writing is something you can begin at 50,” she quipped.

(Next time – tune in for suggestions on where to find that community of fellow writers we dream about, and an intriguing offer from the ever-cheerful Tex Thompson.)

Voodoo and oil: Will Clarke’s Dallas homecoming

Saturday night at Interabang Books in Dallas looked like a home coming for author Will Clarke as he read and signed copies of his third novel, The Neon Palm of Madame Melançon to a standing room only crowd. There were a lot of hugs, a lot of well-wishing, more than a little wine flowing.

Will Clarke

Madame Melançon (and Clarke, her creator) had just received a glowing tribute from Dallas Morning News writer Robert Wilonsky. Clarke himself looked no older than he had when his first book, Lord Vishnu’s Love Handles, appeared more than a decade ago. He was all smiles at Interabang, the city’s newest (and chicest) independent book store. Even the low-hanging thunderclouds outside couldn’t dim the luster of the occasion.

Clarke’s books are the written equivalent of a dizzying roller coaster. Which way is up, which way is down? How fast are we going? Will we survive? Who knows? All we can do is hang on for the ride.

His talk was the verbal equivalent of that roller coaster, as he treated the audience to reading, to slide projections, to a discussion of a book that includes the darkly comic philosophy of Kurt Vonnegut.  (A character in The Neon Palm channels Vonnegut, and is even a former clarinet player like Vonnegut.) Then there’s a British Petroleum-like oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and of course, the city of New Orleans. And a character who’s just looking for his mom, the Madame Melançon of the title, “a crime boss of sorts,” who’s gone missing.

Inspired by Vonnegut’s late-life essays about the future, Clarke launched into that topic.

“How this book got started was as a TV show,” he told his audience. “I used to go out to LA and sell all these really bad treatments. In 2010, there was the BP spill. When you watch what happened in the Gulf, you see the future.”

Not that he sees it as impenetrably dark. “I’m an eternal optimist,” he said.

But why oil spills? audience members asked. Why New Orleans? To answer the first, he noted that his interest in oil stems from his father’s work as a petroleum geologist, his interest in New Orleans because he’s from Louisiana and after all, why not New Orleans, with its legacy of corruption and death, beauty, music and magic.

As to why put all this in a story instead of, say, journalism?

“Our operating system is actually stories,” he said. “Think about the narratives you’re telling and the narratives you’re exposing yourself to. (They) can create a road to follow.”

I first heard Clarke speak at the Dallas Writer’s Garret, when it was housed in an upstairs room at the old Paperbacks Plus store in East Dallas. He was the hot young Dallas writer who first two self-published novels, Lord Vishnu’s Love Handles and The Worthy, had been picked up by a major publishing company. Clarke read from his second novel, The Worthy. That must have been about 2007, after the novels had just been published on his own Middle Finger Press. Clarke appeared to be making notes to himself as he read. And although we would-be writers in the room hoped the press might be available to publish our books as well, it turned out at the time to be dedicated solely to Clarke’s work, and would no longer be needed, as his books had just been picked up by publisher Simon & Schuster. (Clarke has since revived Middle Finger to publish The Neon Palm.)

The local press loved him, Rolling Stone gave him favorable reviews, there were Hollywood movie options. There seemed no way to go except up. Then came 2008, with its meltdown of all things that needed financial backing.

I heard nothing more about Clarke until about three years ago, when I met a woman at a book review discussion in Klyde Warren Park. Her last name didn’t register with me until the Dallas Morning News editor we had gathered to hear mentioned that she was Will Clarke’s wife.

The Will Clarke? Yes, she said. They were back in Dallas, and Will was writing. And he has.

Want more Will Clarke? He’ll be appearing at another independent bookstore, The Wild Detectives, 314 W. Eighth Avenue, Dallas, at 7:30 p.m. this Thursday, August 17, as well.

And for something different tonight, check out the 48 Hour Film project, starting at 7 p.m. tonight (August 15), at the Angelika Film Center, 5321 E. Mockingbird Lane.  It’s a series of short (really short – 4-6 minutes!) films from 10 indie film companies, all written and filmed over a single weekend (which explains the 48 hours part). Disclaimer: Frank St. Claire, a friend from the Dallas chapter of Mystery Writers of America, has a hound in this hunt, and gave me the info when we met again at Clarke’s reading.

Wordcraft – Independent bookstores in Dallas, a new edition

Clicks on my December 2, 2013, post “Independent bookstores in Dallas,” led me to realize the list needed some serious updating. In a world of big, big, big, sometimes small is best, especially when it’s live and local and within Dallas city limits.

First, the best news: the arrival of The Wild Detectives, brainchild of Spanish civil engineers Javier Garcia del Moral and Paco Vique. In Dallas for a job, they decided to stay and open a space based on their love of books, music, and yes, food and drink. The result was The Wild Detectives, housed in a bright orange bungalow at 314 W. Eighth Avenue in Oak Cliff, Dallas.

Open from 2 p.m. to midnight daily, the store shelves about 1,500 books in English and Spanish, included translated works from authors around the world – and local authors.

And since what is reading without a cup of coffee, a bite to eat, a beer or a glass of wine, The Wild Detectives serves drinks and light snacks for in-house enjoyment. It also hosts readings, panel discussions, music, and children’s storytellings. Check here for upcoming events, including a reading tonight (April 19) by Nick Scott and Noa Gavin, authors of Practical Applications for Multiverse Theory. (Your high school science teacher might not approve.)

Other indie bookstores still open for our reading enjoyment in Dallas include:

Keith’s Comics, 5400 E. Mockingbird Lane, Suite 120, in a shopping mall across from Mockingbird Station, on the courthouse square in Denton, and at select other North Texas location. It offers comic books, books about comic books, and comics-related toys and gadgets.

Lucky Dog Books, with locations in the Oak Cliff (911 W. Jefferson) and Lochwood (10801 Garland Road) neighborhoods of Dallas, as well as its Paperbacks Plus affiliate at 108 E. Davis Street in Mesquite. Although Lucky Dog’s major focus is on used books and music, it hosts a number of community events, including tomorrow’s Wednesday night open mic storytelling at its Oak Cliff branch.

And then there’s Half Price Books. Yes, this is a chain. Yes, it has stores outside Texas. But at least in the store closest to me, at 5803 E. Northwest Highway in Dallas, it hosts a stream of community events as well as signings by new, local and offbeat authors, including an appearance this Saturday, April 23, by actress/author Amber Tamblyn.

Both Half Price Books and The Wild Detectives feature food as well as books, knowing how much reading and eating go together. Lucky Dog Books also offers limited beverage service and is exploring a possible café opening. Sad to say, however, food and books were not enough to save Chapter Two, the chic lifestyle-oriented bookstore in Highland Park Village which I reported in the 2013 post. Despite its affiliation with an adjacent café, it closed within the next year. Its site is now occupied by a grocery store.

…

So many literary events this coming weekend, I wish I could clone myself. Along with Earth Day, The Wild Detectives celebrates World Book Day this Saturday, April 23, 8:30 a.m. – 6 p.m. and offers children’s storytelling, “Kids in the Cliff – A Bad Case of Stripes,” from 9:30 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. the same day.

The North Texas Teen Book Festival is also April 23 in the Irving Convention Center, 500 W. Las Colinas Blvd., Irving (near the Irving DART station). Panels start at 8:15 a.m. – 3 p.m. Check the books for sale (from Half Price Books) and budget accordingly!

And don't forget the DFW Writers Conference April 23-24, with additional workshops Friday, April 22. Or the North Texas Book Reviewers Preview, also on April 23.

Wordcraft -- Independent bookstores in Dallas

My usual December resolutions for writers involve appreciating those who help us. And who better for writers to appreciate than those who sell books--our own or those that inspire us? Even more so if they’re our neighbors.

With that, here’s a list of independent booksellers with physical as well as internet addresses, all within the Dallas city limits. Despite the frequent demise of brick and mortar stores, I found so many, often with inventive ways of maintaining their presence, that this post will give only the briefest information. See booksellers’ websites for more details, although I’ll post more pictures at my Pinterest page, www.pinterest.com/melissaembry01/.

I’m first listing the stores with street side locations, either freestanding or within shopping centers, then those sharing space within other stores.

Chapter Two -- A brand new lifestyle-oriented store at 2 Highland Park Village, facing Preston Road. Small but select, it’s affiliated with adjacent organic café, Number One, with access from the café as well as street side. It offers books and U.S. and international magazines on art, design, interiors, and cooking. What I bought: interior design magazines so difficult to find in Dallas. See http://hpvillage.com/store-listings/chapter-two/.

Keith’s Comics -- I visited the shop at 5400 E. Mockingbird Land, Suite 120, crammed cozily into a shopping mall near Mockingbird Station, but Keith’s also has locations in North Dallas, Garland, and Denton (as More Fun Comics). It offers comics, books about comics, and comics-related toys and gadgets. My grandsons love the Spider Man figure in the front window, but on my visit, the shop was filled with adults, like customer Oliver Puzon, whose picture illustrates this post. What I bought: the day’s splurge -- a volume of 1930’s era Terry & the Pirates comic strips.  Info at 
www.keithsneatstuff.com/.

Lucky Dog Books -- Among the few freestanding bookstores, with Dallas locations in the Lochwood and North Oak Cliff neighborhoods. Under the name Paperbacks Plus, it also includes a store in downtown Mesquite. It offers mostly used but also new works in general fiction and nonfiction, music, and periodicals, and hosts frequent author signings and community events. I visited the Lochwood store, 10801 Garland Road, which also houses the Dallas Writer’s Garret. What I bought: a 1949 LP of "Porgy and Bess," with original cast members.  For information and list of events, go to
www.luckydogbooks.com/.

Now for the “inside jobs” -- the shops with inventive ways of sharing space to maintain their presences:

David Grossblatt Bookseller -- Inside the Forestwood Antique Mall, 5333 Forest Lane, owner, David Grossblatt called himself “the oldest fulltime professional bookseller in Dallas County,” with fifty years of experience. His location inside the enormous mall (ask for directions at the front counter) hosts three thousand books. A separate room within the mall houses including volumes on Texana, the Civil War, and Native American cultures, but more shelves hold general fiction and nonfiction as well, with
prices ranging, Grossblatt said, from “$25 to thousands.” What I bought: The Outlaw Trail, by Robert Redford, actually only priced at $14.49!  Contact on Facebook and at
dgrossblatt@att.net/.

The Dust Jacket -- Another of the surprising number of collectible book nooks nestled inside antique stores, this one inside Lost Antiques, 1201 N. Riverfront Blvd. The Dust Jacket offers antique children’s books, cookbooks, gardening, Texana, classic and modern fiction. I coveted the 1929 edition of “100 Best Detective Stories.”  For more information, including mall Lost's hours, see
www.thedustjacket.biz/.

Hunter’s Bookcase -- Close to Grossblatt’s booth inside Forestwood Antique Mall, 5333 Forest Lane. Specializing in hunting memorabilia, volumes on big game hunting, and hunting trophies. What I coveted: the fabulously fanged skulls! The shop’s website also offers an extensive collection of hunting DVDs, www.huntersbookcase.com/.

Rosedale Rare Books -- Inside Jackson’s Armory, 3416 Rosedale, off Snider Plaza. Co-owner Wrenda Coughran noted that Rosedale’s location inside the armory, a gun shop, is actually appropriate for its emphasis on military history, Texana, exploration and hunting. Also offering literature and antiquarian books. What I bought: Seven Years in Tibet, by Heinrich Harrer. See www.rosedalerarebooks.com/.

Russell Light Books and Art -- Just inside Snider Plaza Antiques, 6929 Snider Plaza, Russell Light offers beautifully bound literary and historical sets, signed presidential books, children’s books, and fine art. I coveted the beautiful editions of Winston Churchill’s histories. The antique shop itself hosts periodic signings by authors of books on antiques. Contact Light at russelllight@charter.net/.

(Next Monday -- independent bookstores beyond Dallas)

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Reminder -- Registration for Mystery Writers of America University is due Wednesday, December 4. Tuition is $50 for the December 14 taught by the likes of Hallie Ephron, Charlaine Harris, and other award-winning mystery writers. See
http://mysterywriters.org/mwa-university-dallas/.

Tuesday, December 3 -- A email today informs me that the MWA university is sold out!  -- Melissa