Tag Archives: books

The Monday Book – Eight Hundred Grapes by Laura Dave

Posted on by
Reply

Guest review by Janelle Bailey, avid reader/ever-an-educator/lifelong learner…and also now 7th grade teacher and part-time bookseller

Eight Hundred Grapes by Laura Dave

Though not new (2015 publication), this book’s themes are classic: family and relationships and love and commitment, as well as vineyards and winemaking are all complex and hard work…heart work.

Georgia and Ben are to be married very soon and at her home, her family’s vineyard, about 500 miles away from where they now live. But a pretty big secret prompts Georgia to flee there sooner, only to find things a bit of a mess there as well.

It’s a tangled web they all–we all??–weave and live, and in the de-tangling of this one, relationships are questioned and their truths revealed, painful in processing. And due to the family vineyard and winemaking business, a reader learns much about that as well. Subtle connections between the complexities of grape growing, and even the soil mattering, to “growing” a family and building relationships mattering from the ground up were also detected by this reader. Knowing the history and building the “story” of it matter to both. Living through the tough times and persevering matter, too.

I enjoyed the visit to The Last Straw, the family vineyard established in 1979. For this reader who happens to appreciate as favorite beverages, water, tea, and wine, learning how important the first two are to making the third well at this vineyard was additional and educational enjoyment.

And I appreciated the focus, also, on synchronization, simultaneity, rhythm…and how little we understand as it’s happening why things are exactly as they are but seemingly are…as they are to be.

I say read it! I think you’ll be pleased that you did.

You Ever Feel Stuck?

Posted on by
2

You ever feel stuck?

Sometimes you just do. It’s a good time to eat chocolate ice cream, or go for a walk, or take a bath.

Getting unstuck is usually a combination of mental and physical, which is interesting because feeling stuck is usually entirely a mental thing.

But we’re mammals, so getting unstuck sometimes requires a little physicality. Shaking it off might be literal. Don’t overthink it, just get moving. Enjoy something. Not so much “rest” in the sense of removal from activity, but thoughtful rest in an activity you enjoy.

That was my advice to myself this week when I grew frustrated with my inability to attract a fiction agent. My nonfiction career is going great guns with our seventh edited anthology, thanks, but nobody thinks I have an imagination? I took myself on a long, shady walk in the woods to give myself a pep talk.

Two years now, I’ve been working on a coming-of-age novel set in West Virginia. Two years, the characters have shaped and stammered and grabbed the keyboard from my hands and run amok across it. Now it’s time to edit the opening to make it more of a grabber than an explainer. Something that has never been my forte. But in the personal rejections coming from agents (in a ratio of 1 personal for 3 standard), they pretty much say the same thing: the opening isn’t making me care what happens to the characters.

This is a puzzle to be solved, a craft to be practiced, and I have to remind myself I write because I like writing, because there are things to be said, and because it keeps me from strangling people with my bare hands. So, there’s that. Do what you love because you love it, and remember that’s why you started this journey.

That said, the journey doesn’t have to end down a dead-end alley with the words “your characters are not compelling” written on it. I intend to see that mine does not.

But oh, the energy, oh the strategy, oh the strange masochistic joy of this journey.

If you’re out there writing,too, be encouraged. I’ve published seven books across four lovely publishers, and this is what I have to say about our industry right now: this too shall pass. One way or another, we will unstick. Because, writing.

Get up and try again, kids. That’s my plan.