Alison McGhee

For most this amazing day

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granny-and-grampa-on-the-farmAs she left the church of the non-churchy a few weeks ago, she was a little late in joining the line of people filing out, because she had to gather up the strands of wool and knitting needles and stuff them into the bag containing the Scarf of Endlessness, so named because she does not know how to cast off, meaning that she will be knitting it for the rest of her life.

The scarf could also be called the Scarf of Continuing Mistakes, given that she cannot remember how many rows she’s knit and how many she’s purled, nor how to tell the difference between the two, and also she keeps dropping and adding stitches at random, but that’s a topic for another day.

Anyway, because of the scarf mess, she could not follow her usual routine, which is to leap up and exit the church of the non-churchy rapidly, before, God forbid, she might have to talk to anyone.

She loves this church because it is so beautiful, in its word and song and sermon – yes, even the sermons, even, especially, the sermons, which she still finds kind of shocking – and most of all because of its acceptance, even of people like her, who sit in the pew knitting away on a mistake-ridden scarf and then leap to their feet and exit rapidly without partaking of the social hour.

As she stood in the line of people filing out of the church, holding her program in one hand, ready to deposit it into the reuse-it-for-the-next-service basket, she noticed the necklace the young woman in front of her was wearing. Or rather, she noticed the chain of the necklace, since all she could see was the back of the woman’s neck.

She stood behind the necklace-wearing woman, clutching her program in one hand, mess of a scarf in the other, anxious to be out in the sun, idly observing the fragile gold links of the necklace and the way they curved around their wearer’s slender curved neck.

Then time did one of its  weird, loopy, out-of-time pauses, and everything slowed down.

The church, with its enormously high ceilings, hushed. The murmurs of the congregants hushed too. The dust motes in the air hung suspended in the golden light of the windows. The woman in front of her took one step forward, and she did too, still looking at the necklace.

But now everything was different. She saw the necklace, and the wisps of light brown hair escaping from the clips that held it to the back of the woman’s head. She saw the earrings the woman was wearing, dangling stones on hoops, and the pattern of her sundress.

She looked at the man in front of the woman, and the mother to the left holding the child’s hand.

Someone loves them, she thought. Or she didn’t think it, but that was the feeling that came flooding through her. Each one of these people is loved. Cherished.

But it wasn’t entirely that, even. What was it? She stood there, feeling as if she might cry. This feeling was too huge. She couldn’t hold it inside herself. Everything surrounding her, and every aspect of the people in that room with her, was beautiful. The old man, the young woman, the child, all of them filing out through the double doors.

She could love all of them. She already did, on some level that was far below the surface of her life. That was it. Not that she did love all of them, consciously – she didn’t know them – but that didn’t matter, because this was a feeling that was beyond her. She didn’t matter in this equation.

The beauty of the sensation – that all around her was such tenderness – was unbearable. She was too small and human to hold it beyond that one moment.

Time started up again. The woman with the necklace reached the recyle basket and dropped her program into it, and she followed suit. Out the doors, down the marble steps, and outside.

Now, weeks later, she closes her eyes and tries to remember the sensation, conjure it again. The church, the dust motes dancing, the sudden hush and pause, the certainty of love and its possibilities.

Book Give-away

Posted on by alisonmcghee

It’s publication time for the brand-new “Bink & Gollie,” a book for young readers that I co-wrote with Kate DiCamillo, and to celebrate, I’ll be giving away three copies. Bink & Gollie contains three stories about two friends, one tall and skinny, one short and loud. We had tons of fun writing this book and I hope you have fun reading it.

To be entered, either send me an email or hit “like” on my Facebook author page. Rest assured that even though I can’t reply to everyone individually, your name will be added! The drawing will be this Sunday night (September 5), and I’ll mail the books out on September 12, so that you get them by the publication date.

BONUS: For every new friend you encourage to hit “like” on my Facebook author page I’ll add your name to the hat twice. (What a deal!) Just tell your friends to let me know you sent them. Please forward this email  – my goal is to have 1000 Facebook friends by the end of September.

DOUBLE BONUS: For each friend who “likes” my author page, I’m donating $1 to Life and Hope Haiti, a wonderful, tiny non-profit that built and supports the Eben Ezer school in northwest Haiti and provides education, food and medical services to the students and their community.

Here’s what Amazon has to say about Bink & Gollie, and here’s the link to Life and Hope Haiti.

Thank you so much for your support. Happy reading!

You May Find Yourself in a Beautiful House

Posted on by alisonmcghee

condo-dining-roomShe had a dream last night that she’s had on and off for the last ten years.

The dream goes like this: She’s in a house that she lives in and knows intimately.

But she discovers a whole new part of the house that she never  knew existed, and she goes through it, exploring, and wondering at all the space that has been there, all this time, unbeknownst to her.

The original dream always takes place in a dream-created house, a perfectly round house with bedrooms off the central round hallway. The dream-created round house has a thatched roof and seems to be built up in the air – on stilts, maybe? and it is always dark and cool and shady in the dream-created round house. And the previously undiscovered section is full of sheet-covered furniture and dust.

But last night’s dream was a variation on the original house dream. Last night’s dream took place in a house she used to own, a small white stucco house that she lived in for ten years.

This was the house on Girard Avenue, the one in which she lived before she was married and after she was married, the house she was pregnant in, the house to which she brought two babies home from the hospital and then another one from a far-off land.

It was a small house, a bungalow, and all the rooms were small. Two small bedrooms in the back of the first floor, two more upstairs. A bathroom on the main floor. A tiny kitchen with no dishwasher. She used to do four sinkfuls of dishes a day, back then, when the babies were all babies and toddlers.

Over time, they added a room and a very small slanted-ceiling bathroom upstairs. They finished part of the basement. They redid the tiny kitchen and added a dishwasher and a new refrigerator.

They sold the small house and moved to a bigger one, which conversely had fewer rooms, although they were much larger, and which, strangely enough, did not have as much room for guests.

Since that larger house she has moved four times, despite the fact that she loathes moving, and now she lives in another house entirely, an interesting house in the same neighborhood.

She has always lived within six blocks of that very first small house. She’s tried, during the four-move-era, to force herself to move to a different neighborhood (cheaper, closer to children’s friends, etcetera), but she can’t. She loves her neighborhood, what can she say. She’s rooted here.

The old small house is only three blocks from the house she lives in now, and sometimes, when she’s out walking her dog, she walks past it. Twice now, in the past three months, she has seen the family that bought it coming out of the front door.

She and the wife of the family recognize each other and smile and wave when this happens. The children of the family, unborn when their parents bought the house, are now twelve and ten.

But back to last night’s dream. In it, she was back in the small house on Girard Avenue. Everything was the same as it had been when she left the house and she greeted each room with a combination of loneliness and happiness: oh, here you are again, and here you are too, you’ve been here all along, hello, hello.

Except that there were more rooms. There were five bedrooms on the main floor alone.

And there was a whole wing to the house,  a wing that she had never before noticed – a spacious living room, a family room, another room-room, two bedrooms down a hallway, and a large bathroom. She wandered through this wing, admiring all the space and wishing so much that she had known about it when she lived in this house. She never would have moved, had she known.

The two additional bedrooms were messy. Linens needing to be changed, comforters thrown in a heap, no decorative efforts whatsoever. Same with the big bathroom. All that could easily be changed, though. A few weekends of garage sales and flea markets and thrift stores – her favorite activities – and this whole new big wing would be transformed.

And then there would be so much space. So much space for anyone who wanted to live there or come visit. Plenty of room and privacy for her parents, her sisters, her brother, her  nieces and nephews, her far-off friends – anyone. Come visit!

She woke up.

Why does she keep having this dream? One of her sisters writes down every dream she has, the minute she wakes up. This is a good idea, she thinks, so here she is, writing down this particular dream.

Does the dream mean that there is more room in her house and mind and heart than she thought? Has she ignored all the space and place that’s been there all along?

She wants those empty rooms. Every time she wakes from this dream she wants,  wants, wants all that space. But if it’s there in the dream then it must already be here, somewhere, in life, right? There must be an invisible door somewhere, a door that she can press on and then twirl through to find all that calm and peaceful and empty space.

How can she find that door?

You may find yourself  in a beautiful house. You may ask yourself, how did I get here?

Prompted by a line from a poem by Wyn Cooper

Posted on by alisonmcghee

“The stars have fallen onto the sheets, fallen down to sleep with me.”

Lines from poems scroll continuously through me. Beginning at dawn, when I wake up, and throughout the day, lines from poems come to me, recite themselves silently in my head, in my voice, like song refrains spoken not sung.

Without poetry I would be a lost person. Remembered lines and fragments calm the wildness of my heart, absorb it into their own wildness and wilderness, translate it into words, corral the inner chaos and make it bearable.

Without poetry I might have to set fire to myself, to make the fire go away. Bless you, you poems, you tiny mantras placing slender arms around the day: I care. I want you.

Which is itself a fragment from a poem. Like all the below, which have been through-threading themselves throughout my mind ever since I woke up today.

* * *

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I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. What I do know is  how to pay attention, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be  idle and blessed.  . .

Whatever leads to joy, they always say, to more life, and less worry.

It is difficult not to love the world, but possible.

The life I didn’t lead took place in Italy.

But one man loved the pilgrim soul  in you, and loved the sorrows of your changing face.

Come up to me, love, out of the river, or I will come down to you.

Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

What will you do with your one wild and precious life?

Today would be your birthday, and I send my love to you across the bridgeable divide.

Sometimes it is necessary to re-teach a thing its loveliness.

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?

Last night as I  was sleeping I dreamt – oh marvelous illusion – that I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures.

At night we consoled ourselves
By discussing the meaning of homesickness.
But there was no home to go home to.
There was no getting around the ocean.
We had to go on finding out the story
by pushing into it —

The sea was no longer a metaphor.
The book was no longer a book.
That was the plot.
That was our marvelous punishment.

I am not done with my changes.

Join us for a one-day creative writing workshop!

Posted on by alisonmcghee

typewriter-have-a-wonderful-dayDo you want to jumpstart your writing? Try a different approach? Lift yourself out of your rut (not that I’m assuming you’re in one)?

Fellow writer Brad Zellar and I will be teaching two one-afternoon creative writing workshops in Northfield, MN on Saturday, April 10.  We’d love to see you there. Here are the details.

Workshop #1: Writing from Place
Date and Time: Saturday, April 10, 1-5 p.m.
Location: Northfield Public Library, Division Street, Northfield, MN
Cost: $50 (includes all materials)

Recall some of your favorite books. What part did the setting and landscape play in making these books unforgettable? Is there a place in your own life that haunts you, that is inextricably bound with your memories and the experiences that made you who you are? All writing, no matter the subject or genre, is made more powerful by a powerfully-evoked setting. This one–day intensive class will help you conjure places of great meaning to you, whether beautiful or ugly, real or imagined, and translate that power onto the page.

Through a series of guided writing exercises, discussion, and analysis of both published and peer writing, you’ll come away with insights and techniques for conjuring place, whether from your own life or a fictive world. This workshop is designed for writers of fiction, memoir, poetry and essays. Open to anyone, all experience levels welcome.

Brad Zellar, a writer, editor, photographer, and former bookstore owner, is the recipient of a 2010 Minnesota State Arts Board grant. His journalism, fiction, poetry and photography have been published in a variety of newspapers, magazines, journals, and anthologies. He is the recipient of awards from The Society of Professional Journalists, The Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, and the Minnesota Magazine Association. Zellar is the author of “Suburban World: The Norling Photos” (Borealis Press, 2008), which the Coen brothers used as a primary setting reference for their most recent movie, A Serious Man.

Workshop #2: The Order in Which It’s Told
Date and Time: Saturday, April 10, 1-5 p.m.
Location: Northfield Arts Guild, 304 Division Street, Northfield, MN
Cost: $50 (includes all materials)

Our clocks and calendars say we live our lives in a linear fashion, but certainly not our hearts and minds. How can you use different chronologies to create the strongest possible story? A story told from the point of view of an eighty-year old man recollecting his twelfth birthday could begin in the middle of the birthday, then flash forward sixty-eight years. Or, it might start on the old man’s deathbed and work backward. An entirely different tone will be set in the story, depending on where in time the writer places the narrative and emotional emphasis.

Through writing exercises, published examples, and discussion, we’ll work with the role of chronology in structuring a piece of creative writing. This workshop helps writers clarify how they want to use time, and the sequencing of key events in their prose writing.

Alison McGhee is a #1 New York Times bestselling writer and Pulitzer prize nominee who writes novels, essays, picture books and poems for all ages. She is the recipient of many awards, including four Minnesota Book Awards, a Best Books for Young Adults award, and three Booksense 76 picks. She is also a professor of creative writing at Metropolitan State University.

To register for either class, please email me at alison_mcghee@hotmail.com. Each class limited to 15.

So Many Days

Posted on by alisonmcghee

so-many-days-coverA while ago, years probably, the way things are blurring together, someone gave you an idea for a picture book.

“Doorways,” was the idea, which was passed along to you in a three-degrees-of-separation kind of way.

That’s the kind of idea you like. A better word for it would probably be “challenge.” One word, nothing too specific, bedeviling in its abstraction.

Doorways. Look at it long enough and it looks weird, dour even, maybe because of that beginning DOOR.

You picture some of the doorways you’ve known in your life, the literal ones: the many-paned one that led from the kitchen to the dining/living room in the house you grew up in, the door that was never closed because the house was “heated” from the woodstove in the kitchen.

The small door that led to the tiny triangular bathroom in your first one-room apartment, the door that people who didn’t know you assumed led to the rest of the apartment,  the “real” apartment.

The doorless doorway of your friend’s childhood bedroom.

The doorway of your youngest child’s room, hung with beads.

The chained door that you’ve thrown yourself against more than once.

The door that you tried and tried to open, only to come away with the knob in your hand.

These are a few of the doors you’ve known. Passages from one place to another, doorways that you step through. Now you look down at your feet, those long feet that have walked you from one place to another all your life, some you wanted to go to, others that you didn’t but had no choice.

How do you write a picture book about doorways? What can you say? What does it even mean? Think of a song. Make up a little song. Make up the kind of song you used to make up when your children were babies.

“So many doors in all your days

So much to wonder about –

Who will you be and where will you go?

And how will you know?”

You didn’t think much about who you would be and where you would go, way back when. You wanted to go everywhere, and you were young, and you went far, and often alone.

The age you are now seemed unimaginable when you were young, but you don’t feel much different. You’re more patient now, not by nature but by necessity. You’ve let go of some of the things you wanted so fiercely, not by nature but by necessity.

You’ve gone places you longed to go – children and books and friends and loves – you’re lucky. You’ve gone places you never wanted to go, never would have chosen to go – funerals and heartbreak, loss that felt too painful to bear – you’re human. To be human is to love what is mortal.

How do you go from one place in life to another when you don’t know what’s coming? How do you keep going? How can you fit a lifetime of wonder and longing and heartbreak and love into 32 pages?

Can you?

You keep trying. You think of your own children. You don’t want them to hurt, to go through those sudden terrifying doorways that they, being human, will someday have to go through. Will they know that you are watching over them?

You imagine a bird, a kite, earth and sun, the unimaginable depths of that dark ocean. You keep returning to that refrain: How will you know? Sometimes you won’t, is the answer that comes back.

So many doors in all your days

So much to wonder about

Who will you be and where will you go?

And how will you know?

You think of your children again. Please, let them know that you will always be watching over them, no matter where you are, where you have gone.

You are loved more than you know.

And finally it’s a book.  “So Many Days,” illustrated by the quietly brilliant Taeeun Yoo, edited by the wonderful Caitlyn Dlouhy, due out next week from Atheneum. Up top there is the cover.

Two one-day creative writing workshops, Northfield, MN, 24 January 2010

Posted on by alisonmcghee

typewriter-have-a-wonderful-dayI’m pleased to announce two one-day creative writing workshops, Writing from Photographs and The Art of Writing Picture Books, to be held in Northfield, MN on Sunday, January 24. Fellow writer Brad Zellar and I will be teaching the workshops concurrently. See below for details, and please forward this email to any friends and writers who may be interested. Thanks!

Workshop #1: Writing from Photographs: Inside and Outside the Frame
Date and Time: Sunday, January 24, 1-5 p.m.
Location: Northfield Arts Guild, 304 Division Street South, Northfield, MN
Cost: $50 (includes all materials)

It’s said that every picture tells a story, but that’s only true if we apply our memories and imaginations to reconstructing or re-imagining the constellation of circumstances and details that literally frame all photos. In a sense, then, a photo is actually a mere scene from a story –a beginning or an end, perhaps, or a mysterious, poignant, or telling incident that unlocks the story’s secrets.

What would the complete picture have shown that the photo does not? What happened just before the shutter was snapped, and just after? Time is forever frozen in the image, but life went on before and after that particular moment, and that life, and those details, are the proper story of the most evocative photos.

Bring in three photos of your own, ones whose largely untold stories fascinate or resonate on some imaginative level, and we’ll provide others. Through a series of guided writing exercises, discussion, and analysis of both published and peer writing, you’ll come away with insights and techniques for character development, scene setting and storytelling, both real and imagined. All experience levels welcome.

Brad Zellar is a writer, editor, photographer, and former bookstore owner. His journalism, fiction, and photography have been published in a variety of newspapers, magazines, journals, and anthologies. He is the recipient of awards from The Society of Professional Journalists, The Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, and the Minnesota Magazine Association. For as long as he can remember he has used found photographs as inspiration for fiction, poetry, and essays. Zellar is the author of “Suburban World: The Norling Photos” (Borealis Press, 2008), which the Coen brothers used as their primary reference for their most recent movie, A Serious Man.

Workshop #2: The Art of Writing Picture Books
Date and Time: Sunday, January 24, 1-5 p.m.
Location: Northfield Arts Guild, 304 Division Street South, Northfield, MN
Cost: $50 (includes all materials)

Anyone who has ever read a book to a child over and over (and over and over) knows the power of the best picture books, those astonishing collaborations in which illustrations and text both reflect and deepen each other. Text and art are inseparable; two halves make up a greater whole. “Goodnight, Moon,” anyone? “Where the Wild Things Are?”

How does a writer approach the telling of a book in which the illustrations are half the equation? What sorts of subject matter are possible, and how best can you present them? What are the central questions and tension of your story? What’s the best pacing for such a compact (thirty-two pages) book? Through a variety of in-class writing exercises, discussion of published materials, and lecture, you will gain an understanding of the questions, challenges and delights of picture book writing. Instructor will also explain the submission and publishing process of picture book writing. All experience levels welcome.

Alison McGhee is a Pulitzer prize nominee who writes novels, picture books and poems for all ages. She is the recipient of many awards, including four Minnesota Book Awards, a Best Books for Young Adults award, and three Booksense 76 picks. She is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of several picture books, including “Someday” and “Only a Witch Can Fly,” which the New York Times recently named one of the Best Ten Illustrated Books of 2009.

Each class is limited to 20 students. Please email alison_mcghee@hotmail.com to register. Looking forward to seeing you in January!

Now that the old man is gone, she thinks about him much of the time.

Posted on by alisonmcghee

12_slides_0541There are several stop signs in the tiny foothills-of-the-Adirondack-Mountains town (Welcome to the Hamlet of Holland Patent, pop. 300 – don’t you love the word “hamlet”?), but no stop light. Take Route 365 on  your way north or south or east or west and you’ll drive right through it.

You probably won’t stop unless you need gas or unless you’re hungry – there’s one small restaurant, where the portions are upstate New York large, which is something that I personally appreciate.

Small expensive portions that look like pretty little sculptures on a large plate make me  anxious and tense. They make me worry, wondering if I’ll have enough food. Having enough food is important to me. Will I have to ask for another basket of bread and extra butter, just so that I can leave the table full?

I’ll take a diner anytime.

If you’re eleven years old, and walking from the middle school to your 4-H club meeting, held at the Fire Hall – which is a big barnlike place housing the volunteer fire department, a meeting room and an industrial-size kitchen – you can take a shortcut behind a few houses and come upon the Fire Hall the back way.

Wait until the bell rings for the last class of that middle school day. Gather up your books – this is before the days of backpacks or book bags, and long after the days of straps that held them all together – and clutch them to your chest.

What are you wearing? A smocked blue dress. Keds.

Your books are clutched to your chest and you walk the three blocks from school to the Fire Hall to your meeting, which begins right after school, after all the girls gather. You don’t much like 4-H. You don’t much like clubs of any kind, nor will you ever, as it turns out, but you go to 4-H because that’s what you do, and your parents haven’t yet given you permission to quit.

It’s fall. Back then you loved fall because winter didn’t yet fill you with such dread. The maples are on fire and their leaves crunch under your Keds. You are walking alone under a September blue sky, that late September almost-slate blue.

There is no color like it in all the world. There are no leaves like these on-fire leaves in all the world. These books that you hold to your chest are the only books you will ever need, and this day is the one day, and that sky is without end, without boundaries to hold you in.

Your heart begins to beat outside your body, in rhythm with a bigger beat, a beat so big that it’s far beyond you. You can only be filled with it, and with each step – behind the white house, through the alley, there it is, there’s the Fire Hall – you grow more powerful.

This is my life, you think, there is no end to what I can do with it.

You are walking above the cracked sidewalk now, above the weeds growing through the cracks, you are walking without knowing you’re walking, and the feeling pulsing through you is a feeling you will feel a few more times in your life, but this time, this moment, is the one you will come back to all your life when you hear the word joy, the word power, the word infinite, the word universe.

You are eleven years old.

Later in your life you will think of eleven as the magic age of girls. One day you will sit down to write a novel about an old man, an old man who is walking away from you through snowy pine woods, in far upstate New York, holding a candle lantern in each hand, lighting up the woods for the cross-country skiers.

As you begin to set this image down on paper, a girl will appear in your mind, bent over a school desk, scribbling  furiously on a yellow pad of lined paper. She will not look at you. Long messy hair will obscure her face. She will be angry, and smart, and in her anger and her smartness there will be great power.

What she is scribbling down on that yellow pad of paper is the book you want to write. She will write it for you. Early on, she will write these lines:

Let me tell you that a girl of eleven is capable of far more than is dreamt of in most universes. To the casual passerby a girl like me is just a girl. But a girl of eleven is more than the sum of her age. Although it is not often stated, she is already living in her twelfth year; she  has entered into the future.

She is eleven years old, that girl. The book will become a  novel called Shadow Baby, published by the wonderful Shaye Areheart of Shaye Areheart Books. To this day it feels to you as if that girl, Clara, wrote it. You wish you knew her. You wish you could be her, walking with such purpose down the streets of that little town.

* * *

Shadow Baby has just been re-released in a new edition published by Three Rivers Press. Here’s a teeny photo of the new edition, teeny because I’m a photo idiot and have no idea how to make it bigger.

shadow-baby-three-rivers-edition-cover4

I always saw the cover photo as a girl in a long coat, her arms stretched around a tree from behind. Others have seen it as a pregnant woman, holding her belly. As Clara would say, “Who’s to say? Who’s to know?”

Ever wish you could fly?

Posted on by alisonmcghee

only-a-witch-can-fly-coverAll my life I’ve wanted to fly. On the tops of mountains I lean forward with the urge to jump, and the same with tall bridges, and the roofs of tall buildings.

I don’t want to die. No no no, I don’t want to die.

But I want to fly. How I want to fly.

My best dreams are dreams of flying, ones in which I’m flying low through a valley, drifting on the  wind like a hawk or an eagle, and then suddenly my arm-wings are pumping and I’m swooping up and up and up and the mountain is rushing toward me and I’m pumping harder and harder and then suddenly I’m up, I’m over, I’m high in the sky and the mountain is far below me, and the valleys and rivers are spread like a map on the surface of the earth, and I’m gliding on the invisible wind toward the far horizon, where the river runs to the sea.

That’s my favorite dream, right there. Sometimes I make a wish before I go to bed that I will dream that dream, but so far, that wish hasn’t come true. The dream of flying comes when it will, and it will not be willed.

The closest I’ve ever come to my arms as wings and my body drifting weightless on the wind was the time I went up into the sky in an ultra-light. Or maybe it wasn’t an ultra-light – does an ultra-light have an engine?

Because this tiny little wind-plane did have an engine, not that it mattered much except to get the pilot and me up into the sky and then down again. Once we were up there, it was a different story.

“Should I turn the engine off?” the pilot said to me.

This man was someone I didn’t know. I was in the deep South, driving on a rural road, and I saw a sign that said Ultra-light rides, $30. I was very poor back then, and $30 was a lot of money, but I looked at the sign and I thought about flying, and I forked over my dinner money for the week to this man who came walking through the field when he saw my little red car stop by the sign.

Should he turn off the engine? Why would he turn off the engine? Wasn’t the engine the thing that was keeping us afloat, up here in the almost-soundless sky? If he turned off the engine, wouldn’t we go arrowing toward the ground? Wouldn’t I die?

“Okay,” I said.

And he turned off the  engine. And then  it was soundless, high up there, drifting without words in the sky. I looked out the window – the tiny plane was all window – down at the fields and mountains and creeks and valleys of that land where I was a stranger.

He didn’t say anything. He knew how I felt.

We drifted up there a long time, far longer, I’m guessing, than my dinner-money-for-the-week had bought me.

And many years later I wrote this book, Only a Witch Can Fly, about a little girl who dreams of flying. I wish you could see the pictures. They’re by an artist named Taeeun Yoo – gorgeous, haunting woodcut illustrations.

Our book looks like a Halloween-ish book because it’s about a witch, so if you’re a Halloween fan you might like it.

But if you’re a girl, or a not-girl, who wants to be up there among the clouds and the stars, looking far far down – leaving it all behind, if only for a little while – then you’re the one I wrote it for.

Manuscript Critique Service Available

Posted on by alisonmcghee

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Are you a serious writer looking for a careful, devoted reading and critique of your manuscript? We are senior editor-writers with many years’ experience in both writing and editing books of all kinds. Our specialties: novels (adult, young adult and children’s), memoirs, short story collections, essay collections, general nonfiction, mysteries, thrillers and noir.

Critique services

1) an extremely careful reading, followed by 2) a summary critique letter, usually 3-5 pages, detailing the editor’s overall sense of your work and what sort of revisions would make it the best possible manuscript, followed (if desired) by a telephone consultation.
Fees:
$600 for a book-length work of up to 60,000 words.
$800 up to 80,000 words.
$1000 for 80,000-100,000 words.

Line-editing and margin notes are also available for an additional charge of $60/hour.

Testimonials

“Brad Zellar is a writer capable of conjuring character, situations and images that shift fluidly between the painful and the hilarious, always in a way that gives me a jolt of recognition. I love so many of his stories. I treasure his opinions on literature, on music, and on film. As for his editorial skills, the fact is that my graphic memoir Stitches would not exist if it were not for Mr. Zellar.  He recognized in me an ability and a strength that I thought I didn’t possess. He took me (figuratively, of course) by the collar, stared me in the eye, bared a single glistening fang, and dared me to write and draw what turned out to be the book of my life.”
– David Small, Caldecott Award winner and author of Stitches (W.W. Norton, 2009), which Kirkus Reviews, in a starred review, called “Emotionally raw, artistically compelling and psychologically devastating graphic memoir of childhood trauma. . . . Graphic narrative at its most cathartic.”

“Brad Zellar is as precise and economical an editor as he is a writer. He read my novel, The End of Baseball, helped me to see and, more importantly, understand, its strengths and weaknesses – without excessively finagling with the plot. If you want a professional who can help make your prose clean and your characters real, Brad Zellar is your man.”
– Peter Schilling, author of The End of Baseball (Ivan R. Dee, 2008) which the Baltimore Sun called “the best baseball novel so far this century.”

“Thank you for introducing me to Mr. Zellar. When I first read his critique, it was evident he knew exactly what I was trying to do, and say, in my novel. I knew before I went into the critique that I had major issues with a certain area of the manuscript. Mr. Zellar immediately noticed and identified the problem. Through his critique and our subsequent conversation, I came up with a great solution to my problem! What’s funny is that I had strayed far from the course, and he led me back to where I originally began. His advice is invaluable.” – M. Longstreth

“I have worked with Mr. Zellar for almost one year now. In that time, he has edited and made suggestions for revising seven of my short stories and a novel manuscript. He reads everything at least three times, comparing notes he makes with each reading so that his final review is particularly well thought-out and consistent. For some of my shorter pieces he recommended very little change, and for others major reorganization–in other words, he doesn’t use a script.  The scope of his editing services has included suggestions for reading certain novels and short stories to help me understand a suggestion, e.g., a subtle change in a narrator’s voice. I wouldn’t think of sending out a submission of any kind without the advantage of his remarkable critical eye. Please feel free to contact me with any questions (contact info available upon request). – Donna Trump

Payment (via Paypal or personal check): Two-thirds upon manuscript acceptance and the last third upon completion of the edit. Turnaround time is approximately three weeks, often sooner. For more information, email alison_mcghee@hotmail.com. You may send your work as a Word or WordPerfect attachment.