I had lunch today with Chris Bigelow, my publisher at Zarahemla Books. It was fun, as it always is. We shared gossip and talked about future projects, both joint and individual, and about my recent review of Doug Thayer’s book The Tree House (also published by Zarahemla Books) — and about the fact that we seem to be running out of ideas for ways to publicize No Going Back.
Here’s a short list of some of the things we’ve done:
So I have one more short but positive review to add to the list. This one appeared in last Friday’s St. Paul Pioneer Press, in a book column titled “Worthwhile midsummer fiction from Midwest writers.” You can follow the link to the article by clicking here, but there’s no real need to bother since I’ve reproduced the two paragraphs about No Going Back below:
So I did my appearance at King’s English bookstore in Salt Lake City as part of their Local Author Showcase. And it was a lot of fun.
A somewhat different version of this column, oriented more toward broader questions related to the YA literature genre in the Mormon market, is posted at A Motley Vision website under the title “Some Definitional Thoughts About YA (Mormon) Fiction.”
Who’s the intended audience of No Going Back? In particular, does No Going Back fit the definition of a young adult (YA) novel? That’s proved to be a tricky question.
So guess what? I’m scheduled to appear at King’s English bookstore in Salt Lake City at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, July 13, as part of a Local Author Showcase. The way I understand it, four other authors and I will each read for up to five minutes from our books, answer questions, and sign book copies. Woo-hoo! My first reading/book signing! For more details, read here.
Here’s a somewhat belated addition to my series based on insights from writing my first novel, No Going Back. For the complete list of columns in this series, click here.
Cross-posted from A Motley Vision website.
If art is, in part at least, the imitation of reality, it’s an imitation that’s largely bounded by and grounded in artistic convention. That’s something I’ve long been aware of from a literary/critical perspective, but writing a novel myself — and then seeing the reaction of different readers to the specific choices I made about where and how to be “realistic” — has borne that truth in on me in a particularly vivid fashion.
A year and a half ago, I wrote the following as part of my Writing Rookie series at A Motley Vision website:
I’m a socially motivated person. I like spending time with people, talking to people (face-to-face or at a distance), getting to know people. Part of what I’ve always liked about literature is the feeling of truly getting to know the people I’m reading about. Characters are my friends.
Writing stories, I find, is the same kind of activity—taken to another octave of intensity. The horrible vulnerability that comes in story-writing is the flipside of this desire to reach out and connect to other people on the kind of personal level that comes with creating something that touches your readers.
Every couple of days, I google “Jonathan Langford No Going Back” just to see what’s out there. It’s kind of a game to see if I can locate something that Google Alert hasn’t already told Chris Bigelow (my publisher) about. Usually I don’t find anything. But today there was a link to a review in the Spring 2010 GLBTRT Newsletter, a publication of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered Round Table of the American Library Association. Here’s what it said:
The last week or so has been kind of bittersweet from my perspective. The Whitney Awards were announced, and while I was very pleased to have been a finalist, I was unsurprised to discover that I didn’t win the award in my category. (The person who did win the award, Jamie Ford, is a very fine author whose book, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, is the one I thought probably would win, so I’m not complaining.)
Talking with Readers
Saturday, August 28th, 2010One of the best parts of having written No Going Back has been the chance to have conversations with readers of the book: Mormons, non-Mormons, ex-Mormons; literary readers, nonliterary readers, occasional readers; those with firsthand experience of homosexuality, those with secondhand knowledge, and those with little direct knowledge. Partly that’s because I think the themes of the book are important, and I like talking about them. And partly it’s because I find it fascinating — and instructive — to find out what my own writing looks like through other people’s eyes.
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Tags: homosexuality, Jonathan Langford, Mormon, No Going Back, North Star, reader comments, reader responses, readings
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