Vote for GIRL TROUBLE!

My book is one of five titles currently in contention to be the December Book Club selection on the website AUTHOR EXPOSURE. Please go to the link below by Thursday, November 9th to vote for Girl Trouble:

http://www.authorexposure.com/

Thanks!

The trouble with GIRL TROUBLE

I'm home from what's left of my official "tour" for Girl Trouble. Last Saturday I signed books for most of the day at the Kentucky Book Fair, a task made pleasant by the presence of fellow writer Karen McElmurray, author most recently of the novel Motel of the Stars (Sarabande)--we worked together for two years at the Sewanee Young Writers' Conference--and Bethany Griffin, author of the young adult novel Handcuffs. I met nice people, got the book out to some folks who were already curious about it, and even, miraculously, sold a couple of copies to people who were merely on the browse. I say "miraculously "because it became apparent to me, that day more than any other, how badly my book's title is getting misinterpreted. Several people looked at the cover, read the back copy for a few moments, and then said something to the effect of, "Oh, I thought that my 12-year-old might like this, but I guess not." One group of three women, all huddled around one copy of the book, finished their perusal by making horrified faces, then shaking their heads as if to clear them of troubling images. "I don't need anyone getting any ideas," one of them said, smacking the book back down on top of a stack.


And then there were the men. "Now, I don't have anything against chick lit," one said.


"It's not chick lit," I told him. "It's a book of literary short stories."


"About women?"


"About women and men."


It got kind of ridiculous. As soon as a man approached my table and made eye contact, I started declaring, "Now, this isn't chick lit! It's actually rather dark. There are as many male point of view characters as there are female characters." It's not that I was even so desperate to sell copies, though of course I wanted to make the giant pile look at least a little smaller after seven hours of table duty. I just wanted to be understood. I wanted my book to be accepted or rejected based on what it is.


Secondary to this desperation and frustration, I feel guilt. In adamently rejecting the label of "chick lit," am I suggesting that there's something wrong with chick lit or with domestic fiction more generally? "Domestic" seems to be the literary label for women's writing, and I'm not sure what that even means anymore. I mean, I hear Alice Munro occasionally referred to as a writer of domestic fictions, but could you possibly apply that label to recent stories such as "Dimension," "Child's Play," and "Free Radicals"? Is what makes them domestic the fact that they center on female point of view characters?


Some folks are upset that Publishers Weekly's round-up of the ten best books of 2009 features only male writers.


http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6704263.html


I've only read on that list Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply--and I have to say, I loved it--so I don't want to disparage the other writers by implying that their slots should have gone to Lorrie Moore or Margaret Atwood or Jayne Anne Phillips or Jill McCorkle (and of course I'm just listing fiction writers). I don't know if mention of the PW list even belongs in the same meditation as my "girl trouble" troubles, though I guess I'm suggesting, in a roundabout way, that a woman writer automatically battles the perception that her work is designed only for women, making it lesser. Of course, in a way all fiction is designed for a primarily female audience, because women are book buyers. Women control the industry. I was delighted to no end when I realized, scanning the credits on my back cover, how many women were involved in making the book happen. A woman took the cover photo; another woman (my friend Morgan Miller) took the author photo. A woman designed the cover. A woman acquired and edited the book. A woman agented it. A woman publicized it. My dearest mentor is a woman. My dearest friends and readers are women. This is cause for celebration.


But the book Girl Trouble isn't about teenagers talking on the phone about boys. It's just not. Maybe the biggest insult to me and to my fellow women writers is the assumption that "girl trouble" is lesser trouble, trifling trouble. Would the response have been much better if I'd titled the book Woman Trouble? I doubt it.


I talk about this issue a bit in my recent interview with BOMB magazine:


http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=5927


What constitutes female fiction? Domestic fiction? What do you think about PW's "Best of 2009" list?

Guest blog at the Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/holly-goddard-jones/women-gather-to-celebrate_b_326871.html

Boy, are my arms tired.

I had every intention of blogging along with the various points of my Girl Trouble book tour: posting pics, passing along funny anecdotes, using my little reunions with old friends and school teachers and so forth as a way to talk about Significant Moments in my writing and reading history, like the time I wrote that poem and the time I drew that picture and the other time when someone lifted me up when I was down. You know, inspirational stuff.


The problem is that bookstore signings are like first dates (not that I've had many of those--married at 19, you may recall). You put on a nice outfit and fix your hair and get all of your good stories ready, and you show up, and either it goes well or it doesn't. There were readings that I suspected would at least be well attended, and I was right about Bowling Green and Russellville, for instance. There were readings that pleasantly surprised me, such as my event at Louisville's Carmichael's, which drew a surprisingly good crowd. My reading at Columbus's Barnes and Noble far exceded my expectations, but I didn't get any pics of it because my husband, back in Greensboro taking classes, wasn't along to point the camera. And, of course, there were those readings--and most of us have heard stories about them--that were so poorly attended that I wanted to go back to my rental car and hide in shame. You start to get a gut instinct for them; you know, driving to the bookstore, that you're about to encounter one kind, embarrassed, shoulder-shrugging events manager and--if you're lucky!--two or three people looking around at the empty chairs and wondering if they've come in on the wrong night.

So there's that. And the other reason I've not blogged is simply that I haven't had the time to. I've been driving or flying between the full-time job of teaching and the part-time job of promoting my book of stories, and when I'm home I'm hugging my husband and my dogs and catching up on episodes of Dexter.

But the occasions shouldn't go without remark. I did events in Lexington, KY (Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Kentucky Women Writers' Conference), Durham, NC, Columbus, OH, Louisville, KY, Bowling Green, KY, and Nashville (Davis-Kidd Booksellers and the Southern Festival of Books). I met lots of nice people and caught up with lots of old friends and family. I met the new crop of students in the MFA program at Ohio State, my alma mater. I read with a former professor (and cried at her beautiful introduction of me--it was so good that I don't know if I could bear to hear it again), drank daiquiris with another former professor, met, at the Southern Festival of Books, writers I've so long admired that I was quaking with nervousness in their presence.

If you'd like to check out a more detailed rundown of my recent Nashville and Russellville, KY, weekend, check out my guest blog at Book Club Girl:

http://www.bookclubgirl.com/book_club_girl/2009/10/national-reading-group-month-and-southern-festival-of-books-guest-post-from-holly-goddard-jones.html

Here's what we didn't have the space to include in that blog, to my disappointment:

Due to a delayed flight and a subsequent missed connection, I didn’t make it to BNA until almost 11 p.m. on Thursday, and I still had an hour and fifteen minute’s drive to Russellville, KY, my hometown. I fell into my childhood bed after midnight, with a pounding headache, and set my cell phone alarm. My mother had turned down the covers and placed a bottle of water on the bedside table. A card was on my pillow. It read, “Holly, sleep good, Love Mom.”

Early the next morning, Mom and I drove over to WRUS, the local AM radio station, so that I could be interviewed by Don Neagle on his program, Feedback. Feedback has been on the air since as long as I can remember, and it’s one of those radio shows that has achieved a beautiful sort of harmony with the small town it serves. Don, who looks much younger than the 70-something years he claims, could do the show blindfolded and with one hand tied behind his back. He is kind, smart, unflappable. He tells me right after we go on the air to let people know who my parents are and who my husband is and who my husband’s parents are. I do.

“Well, now that we’ve got that all straightened out,” he begins, shifting to questions. Don’s questions are good, and he’s read up on me and the book enough to fill more than a half-hour’s worth of air time. But the funniest responses come from the callers, who want to tell me that they know my parents, or that they lived for sixteen years in the subdivision where I’d said I grew up. My fifth grade reading teacher called in. So did my uncle David. So did the woman who worked at the Laundromat where my mother washed clothes.

Here, too, is a photo from my SFB reading with George Bishop, author of the forthcoming novel Letter to My Daughter.

And some shots from my Russellville and signings:

I am grateful to the stores that hosted me, the events managers and booksellers and (in one case) librarian and her volunteers who welcomed me, the friends, family, and even strangers who came out to support the book, and of course to my publisher for making this possible. I have three more appearances scheduled this fall:

Thursday, October 22, 7:30 PM
Quail Ridge Books
3522 Wade Ave., Raleigh, NC 27607
Thursday, October 30, 2:00 PM

McIntyre's Fine Books
2000 Fearrington Village
Pittsboro, NC 27312
Saturday, November 07, 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM

Kentucky Book Fair
Frankfort Convention Center
405 Mero Street
Frankfort, Kentucky 40601
1:00 p.m.: Reading in the Glass Room of the Capital Plaza hotel
9:00 – 1:00 and 2 – 4:00, Signing in the Convention Center

Feature on Coffee with a Canine

I have an interview up on blogger Marshal Zeringue's "Coffee with a Canine," wherein you'll learn important stuff like

- what I feed my dogs;
- the dogs' favorite toys;
- and how Martha (left) shamed me on the WWW.

http://coffeecanine.blogspot.com/2009/09/holly-goddard-jones-bishop-and-martha.html

It was a lot of fun. Thanks to Marshal for including me.

Lexington

Girl Trouble's official pub date was on Tuesday, but the real fun--scary fun?--starts next week, as I return to Lexington, KY, for the first time in three years to read at Joseph-Beth Booksellers and to teach at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. My husband and I started our married life ten years ago in Lexington, as students at University of Kentucky. What good, oddly fresh memories those are. We honeymooned in August 1999 at Cumberland Lake and Cumberland Falls--four days, paid for by Brandon's brother and mother as a wedding present, that had seemed then an incredible luxury.

Those were hard, poor times, I know now. We were undergraduates, surviving on my Pell grants and Brandon's student loans, and we lived in a dreadful one-bedroom apartment off Virginia Avenue--the kind of place designed for single undergraduates, not young marrieds who might occasionally need an extra room in which to hide from one another. We totaled our car in an accident that first December, and we were overdrawn by the time school let out for holiday break. So we took an extended holiday at our parents' houses, crossing our fingers and waiting for the spring semester check to arrive from Financial Aid. We ate lots of free meals, did lots of laundry. We were still kids, basically. I was 19.

But we were inexplicably happy. I was taking writing workshops and Brandon was in architectural studios. We splurged on Friday night dates that often began at Joseph-Beth, continued at a restaurant like Bella Notte (whose $10 pastas could provide us with two more meals' worth of leftovers), and ended at the movie theatre. Brandon picked me up from class one day with a rose pushed through the band of a wristwatch, purchased to replace the one I'd lost on our honeymoon. He cooked steak in a toaster oven. I poured Boone's Farm into champagne glasses.

There's a part in my short story "Retrospective" when a middle-aged woman, looking at old photographs, remembers the long-ago honeymoon of her one failed marriage:

"They drove into the nearby hills, land bordering the eastern Appalachians, and parked whenever they saw a trail marker that looked promising. They took photos of waterfalls and startling vistas. They took some pictures of each other in front of the waterfalls and the vistas, and when they met another hiker on the trail, they occasionally posed together, faces serious, because the business of marriage was serious."

Yet here we are, in August on our 10th anniversary vacation to the Outer Banks, yukking it up. We take our marriage seriously, and we take each other seriously, but we spend an awful lot of our time laughing.

Brandon has classes that he can't get out of next week, so I'll be traveling back to the Bluegrass alone this time. It's especially disappointing to me that he'll miss my Joseph-Beth reading, after spending so many of his Friday nights following me gamely through the store, encouraging me to buy the books he knew I wanted but that we really couldn't afford.

My Jo-Beth reading, free and open to the public (of course), will be on Wednesday, September 9th at 7:00 pm.

Guest Blog up at ReadingGroupGuides.com

My short essay on "truth" in fiction appears today on the blog at ReadingGroupGuides.com:

ReadingGroupGuides.com - Blog

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