The Boost of the Olive Tree

Okay all you bookish people out there, it's time to rally the troops. My good friend Courtney Miller Santo has a major book release next Tuesday, Aug. 21, with The Roots of the Olive Tree (William Morrow). She has a lot of author events upcoming in places like San Francisco, Seattle, Nashville, Portland, Oxford and Asheville, so if you're in any of those cities, get out there and support her. And tell your friends!

Courtney also needs some reviews circulating out there, so give the book a read and tell the world what you think. Doesn't have to be long, just a few sentences, a paragraph or two, on your connection to the characters and stories. Now, we here at Urf! are big on books - paper, binding, covers, the whole package - but for those of you who like to download a novel and read it on your computer phones, the publisher has a great deal for you. For the rest of this week only, you can download The Roots of the Olive Tree eBook for only $4.99. You can do that right here. So go do that, I'll wait ...

Now, once you've read it, say something about it at the following sites (your review can be copied and pasted into each site to make things simpler):

Barnes & Noble (Scroll to the very bottom of the page to review)

Amazon (You can review the electronic copy now, but not the hardback)

Books-A-Million (Scroll to the lower third of the page, account creation required)

Reviews are also accepted at the Apple Store if an iPad or iPod are your preferred mediums

I was lucky enough to read an advanced reader's copy back in the spring and said a little something about it here.

I also wrote a feature on Courtney for The Commercial Appeal that ran in the paper on May 31, 2012. I'll copy that below so you can get a feel for where Courtney's story began and how it evolved. If this isn't enough, you can read her winning story for the 2012 Memphis Magazine Fiction Contest right here.

Thank you all for your help!

Writer's first novel followed storybook path to publication

Courtney Miller Santo grew up in conditions fertile for a burgeoning writer, a conservative Mormon household with seven children where there was no television to be found. Instead, the large and close family told stories and created plays. They interacted in ways almost unheard of today. And they read.

"My dad was always reading, he would go to bed at 9, and he would always have a book," Santo said of her father, an elevator mechanic.

Santo, the oldest of those seven children, describes her childhood just outside of Portland in Milwaukie, Ore., as "chaotic," yet a bookish manner set in and has paid off for her in a big way as she prepares for her debut novel, "The Roots of the Olive Tree" (William Morrow), to be released in August.

The story is threaded along one olive-growing season, taking a look at the lives of five generations of firstborn daughters and Anna, the 112-year-old matriarch, who wants to be the oldest living human being in the world.

The story, set at Hill House and the family's olive groves in northern California, centers on a geneticist coming to study the longevity of the family just as the youngest, Erin, returns home alone and pregnant.

It's a combination that, the dust jacket of an advance reader copy explains, "ignites explosive emotions that these women have kept buried and uncovers revelations that will shake them all to their roots."

It's a novel with a road to publication almost as intriguing as the tale within the pages. Santo entered her manuscript in Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award competition in 2011. Out of 5,000 entrants, she made it to the semifinals and the remaining 50 hopefuls. And then she was eliminated. But that's only the beginning of the story because she was then contacted by an agent with the Janklow & Nesbit Associates literary agency who had read the manuscript excerpts posted at Amazon, and wanted to represent Santo.

It is on the West Coast where olives grow and fantasies are realized, and it was there in summer 2011 that Santo's life changed. "I was in the middle of this cross-country vacation that had been planned forever ... and the day after we get home to my grandmother's house in Vancouver (Wash.), she (the agent) calls me and says, 'Sit down, I have an offer, and it's a really good offer,' and she told me the offer, and I was glad I was sitting down because I did not believe it."

That offer was that the book, along with an unwritten second book, would be sold to William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins, for six figures. Foreign rights for "The Roots of the Olive Tree" have already been sold to Italy, England, Spain, Germany, Holland and Turkey.

Santo doesn't downplay luck in this adventure. "It just doesn't seem real; it didn't seem real for a very, very, very long time," she said. "This is the dream; this does not happen that you get a company that is so excited about a debut novelist that they put this much publicity and effort into it. I feel crazy lucky."

The women of her novel might be illustrated by a photograph Santo keeps in her office, a tiny concrete bunker on the University of Memphis campus. It's one of her and her daughter flanked by her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. Santo is a collector of stories. "My mother is a storyteller," she says. "I come from a long line of storytellers on both sides." Some she recalls verbatim in her fiction, those from decades of family lore, and others from time spent as a journalist, and others she presses like olives for the oil and essence that add flavor to her characters.

Though her love of reading and the idea of writing began in the Pacific Northwest, at the age of 18, she "decided to get as far away from home as possible" and went to school at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. She met her future husband, Charlie, there and studied journalism. "I'm very practical, so to say something like, 'I want to write a book' seemed very stupid; it's like saying 'I want to be an astronaut.' Whereas being a journalist, you get your name in print every single day and you automatically get the title of writer. I think sometimes writers have a hard time owning that title."

She worked for the Roanoke Times and the Charlottesville Daily Progress. From those days as a journalist, Santo learned to love fact-checking and says that when she gets writer's block now, she does research. "Whenever I would get stuck, I had this huge stack of books that I checked out from the library about olive cultivation, and if I got stuck writing, I would just pick it up and start to read about how to take a branch from one olive tree and splice it into another olive tree, or about blight."

She would eventually end up in Memphis, where her husband took a job as associate professor of city and regional planning with the U of M, and it was here that she really began to own that title of writer. She worked as the editor of The Lamplighter, the newspaper of the Cooper-Young neighborhood, and was accepted into the Moss Workshop in Fiction, a community writing workshop with novelist Richard Bausch. "Once I got into his class, I realized all kinds of things, like there was such a thing as an MFA program," she said, laughing. "So Richard encouraged me to apply, and I got in and I got serious about writing."

The Moss Workshop took the idea of being a writer, in her mind, from being "abstract and foolish, to something that seemed plausible. But even though it seemed plausible, it's still not something I ever expected to happen in the way that it did." Through the MFA program, she met and worked with mentors such as Tom Russell and Cary Holladay.

"Cary really taught me that if you're going to write for somebody besides yourself, it comes down to revision," Santo said. "You have to be willing to roll your sleeves up and get into the prose and redo it, it's never perfect the first time out."

"She really listened, and she can recognize a good suggestion, and then she can just tear into it," Holladay said of her student and friend. "She's a very aggressive reviser of her work and, of course, it helps that she's got terrific talent and she's extremely well-read."

Last year was a good year for Santo, who also won the 2011 Memphis Magazine Fiction Contest for a short story that will appear in the upcoming June issue. "Her stories are just fun to read," Holladay said. "They're rich, and they're revelatory in terms of human character and experience."

Santo has her hands full with two children, Sophia, 9, and C.J., 7, and the writing of her second book as she anxiously awaits the release of "The Roots of the Olive Tree." But she loves teaching and intends to continue doing so with her undergraduate fiction and literature classes, saying, "I'm a better writer because I teach; it keeps me honest. It's very difficult to critique a student's work and see an error, or a way that it could be written stronger, and then not go back to your own work and recognize every single mistake that you've made."

Says Holladay: "I was eager to get her in the classroom, and right away I saw how comfortable she was as a teacher and how much her students liked her."

Though she writes these days in a place far from the Pacific Northwest, it's a land fertile with writers, where the streets teem with character. It's where her family has put down roots and made a home. "I feel like if you're on the right track, you get little nods along the way," she says. "So I feel like we made the right decision to move to Memphis as a family, and it's been the best decision we've made personally and professionally."

Look At The Billion Year Old Birdie

When I first moved to Midtown Memphis in 1989 or '90, the very first day I was driving to my new apartment on Belvedere with the key pressed in my sweaty little hand, and while stopped at the corner of that street and Union Ave., I saw an old man vomiting on that apple pie slice of grass right there at the Shell service station. It was the middle of the day and I remember thinking to myself, "Welcome to Midtown."

I've just finished reading a couple of books: "Look at the Birdie" by Kurt Vonnegut (Delacorte Press, 2009), and "We Are Billion Year Old Carbon: A Tribal-Love-Rock-Novel Set in the Sixties on an Outpost Planet Called Memphis" by Corey Mesler (Livingston Press, 2005). I am embarrassed to say that this is the first book of Mesler's that I've read. It won't be the last. He evokes, in his stories populated with characters such as Johnny Niagara, Camel Jeremy Eros, Madame Sabat and Sweetness Enlight, the mythical Midtown Memphis. He conjures up the feelings I had as a nineteen-year-old watching a man give up his breakfast on the nexus of town, taking late night walks to the Pig, past Decadence Manor and in the near vicinity of The World Famous Antenna Club, an all-night doughnut shop and a small graveyard. There were things going on that were unseen then, yet they were there all the same, in apartments that abutted the sidewalk, their one window that wasn't painted shut blaring music or television, love and argument. There were things within the Pig not to be seen anywhere else or believed by your own eyes.

Mesler captures it all in a time before my time, the Memphis of the sixties, a time of the Bitter Lemon coffee house and a home-grown counter culture that tends to get buried within the world-changing tales of our city's history. It's a love poem (and there is plenty of poetry throughout this book), not just to a city on the river, but to the geographic and soulful boundaries of Midtown. And it's written to the soundtrack of Captain Beefheart, Buffalo Springfield, Furry Lewis and The Beatles. One surprising and delightful chapter gives us a series of reviews of Beatles LPs, from 1964 and "Meet The Beatles" to 1969's "Let It Be" wherein we witness the reviewer's, Creole Myers (Corey Mesler?), love life fall apart over that span of five years and ten albums. The ever-evolving persona and music of the band hearkening a change within Myers's courting, engagement, marriage and dissolution.

I didn't know what to expect from this book though I expected it to be well-written because I know of Mesler's work ethic. It is exciting for me to have an author with so much out there that I have yet to tap into.

It's difficult not to expect a lot when the author's name is Vonnegut. All I have to do is say the name and my mind is filled with passages from "Bluebeard," "Cat's Cradle," "Slaughterhouse Five" and "Breakfast of Champions." These are old friends who I've visited many, many times over the years. The expectation that Vonnegut will bring the most delicious dish to the table is a given.

However, I'm wary when anything, especially short stories, are published posthumously. Perhaps even more wary in this case because of the über-literary name attached to them. Were these stories that were previously passed over by publishers? Did Vonnegut have rejection slips hidden away someplace with these titles attached? Not likely. I imagine he could have called upon any number of publications to print these stories at any time. My guess is he didn't feel they were ready, or they were exercises or, because the author has always seemed like a fairly playful character, simply something with which to amuse himself. Either way, The Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Trust felt it was time for them to see the light of day.

The stories are good. Don't get me wrong, of course they're good. They're just ... different. They put me in mind of some old "Twilight Zone" episodes, replete as they are with a sense of unknown, of dread, and that there is a hand somewhere unseen controlling the players in a scene. And there's a bit of noir here, too, sometimes with a voice more Dashiell Hammett than the Vonnegut we know. A particularly dark story is Ed Luby's Key Club in which a naive and innocent couple out to celebrate their anniversary are caught up in, and falsely accused of a murder. The hopeless spiral downward is one you will feel in your gut and with sweat on your brow. Only a true master, possibly only Vonnegut himself, could accomplish such a feat.

Pick both of these books up for highly engaging and entertaining reads. In fact, pick them both up at Burke's Book Store in Cooper-Young (Midtown).

Reading Local

Roots & Rabbis

Eat local. You can't escape this directive these days, it's there on the screen every time you turn on the internet. To that end there are farmers markets and dinner parties serving nothing but locally grown or butchered fare. The community at large is rallying around the agrarian community.

I've recently made the decision and a concerted effort to read local. Memphis is home to, or has given birth to, many fine writers. The land here seems almost as fertile for short stories, novels, essays and memoirs as it is for tomatoes, okra, radishes and melons. The literary community has roots that run deep in the Delta.

While at the beach last week, I finished "The Roots of the Olive Tree" by Courtney Miller Santo and immediately picked up "The Frozen Rabbi" by Steve Stern. Santo is an Oregon native now calling Memphis home while Stern is a Memphis native residing in upstate New York.

Both books are multigenerational with Santo's Anna Keller, the family matriarch, born in 1894, and Stern's Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr frozen in time in 1890. Both books are also steeped in secrets known and unknown. In "Roots of the Olive Tree," a geneticist comes to Hill  House, the family home set among olive groves in Kidron, California, to study the longevity of firstborn daughters, and clues and hints are gleaned from stories told and blood drawn. In "The Frozen Rabbi," the secrets hidden by Max Feinshmeker are kept under wraps - kept under layers of clothing - to keep him anonymous and alive; Shmerl Karp's equine lair is an intriguing laboratory of pulleys and cranks that will yield the mysteries held aloft.

Both books are also steeped in age - the age of the olive trees and women, the age of traditions and lore - yet driven by youth. When the youngest, Erin, shows up at Hill House unannounced and pregnant, the women of the family rally around her protectively even as family secrets seek to turn her world, and theirs, upside down. There are questions she wants resolved and chapters put to an end before her own child is born. And when the Rebbe ben Zephyr thaws after more than a century, it is 15-year-old Bernie Karp, a descendant of those entrusted with the safekeeping of the frozen tzaddik, who discovers him and introduces him to the present age, ways and culture.

Stern's book, while riddled with more Yiddish than drawl, is nonetheless colored by the South and with recognizable cultural and concrete landmarks to Memphians such as the Harahan Bridge, Pinch District, local newspaper and various city streets. Santo's book takes place almost entirely in the Pacific Northwest, yet its theme of family, storytelling and the tendency to come together over an item of food is instantly recognizable to all of us from the area. In fact, family is at the root of both novels and both storytellers are adept at bringing alive the individual characters and characteristics that detail each tribe as a whole.

Read local. There are nuances and details within these books and stories that one might only get from a local writer, whether they are in a manner of speaking, a reference to an obscure cultural icon, food or even weather pattern. They are details that will leave you nodding your head and whispering, "yes." Any bookstore in the area should have a section devoted to local writers, this is your farmers market. These books may not make up the bulk of your shopping list, but there should be one or two thrown in to add some homegrown flavor to your literary feast. Memphis is replete with good writers from fiction - Stern, Santo, Cary Holladay, Corey Mesler - to nonfiction - Kristen Iversen, G. Wayne Dowdy, Molly Crosby. And then, of course, there are those no longer with us - Shelby Foote, Peter Taylor and William Faulkner.

Buy their books, attend their readings, alert your friends both near and far of the tales they tell. These writers should be staples on anyone's shelf, for the health of our imagination and of our community.

The Frozen Rabbi by Steve Stern
2010, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

The Roots of the Olive Tree by Courtney Miller Santo
Available Aug. 2012, William Morrow

Read more about Santo here

On My Desk

New chapter/short story

Farewell

On that August day in 2010, I'd gone out for a lunch with Andria and wasn't gone for much more than an hour. I came home to find the back door kicked in and a lot of valuable and sentimental items gone. It's an awful, sinking feeling. Among the missing were two laptops, but we were left with a large, prehistoric desktop computer and later that evening I checked my e-mail from it to find that I'd been accepted into the Moss Workshop for Fiction with novelist Richard Bausch. It was a bittersweet day. It was a whirlwind year for my writing, one in which I was assigned my first cover story for Memphis Magazine and The Memphis News, accepted into the fiction workshop and won the Memphis Magazine short story contest. The workshop itself was a roller coaster of excitement and apprehension, fear and confidence. To sit quietly while Richard reads something you've written, and then listen as 10 people dissect it, praise it, trash it and question it, is a test in resolve.

Richard Bausch is moving on to Chapman University in Orange, CA. It's a huge loss for the University of Memphis and a boon for Chapman. He gave a farewell reading last week and I was fortunate enough to be asked to stand up and say something about Richard in lieu of any formal introduction. I was told I would be one of a few. I found I was one of seven, one for each year he was at the U of M. Had I understood beforehand that I was there to represent my group of Mossians, I would have been even more terrified than I already was. I hope I did them proud.

I'm not a public speaker. My heart races in anticipation, my mouth grows dry from anxiety, and I feel I can't concentrate enough to stand on my own, much less recite a prepared speech. But it's something I wanted to do for Richard, to give a little back to him since he's given so much to me.

Several people have paid tribute better than I - David and Maria, to name a couple - but this is what I said, or what I wrote and meant to say out loud. I'm not really sure what I said when I got up there, but I meant every word of it, or of this, at least.

My wife is not a fan of Richard Bausch. It has nothing to do with his writing, she likes that just fine. But on those workshop nights in the fall of 2010, when I'd stumble in from R.P. Tracks well past midnight on a school night, I had to blame the late hour on someone. And that someone was Richard.


I'd explain that it was all part of the instruction. And it was, too, because Richard's teaching is so wrapped up in who he is, in his stories, his examples, his experiences, his voice and his mannerisms that all we, as learners, have to do is open our minds up wide like a catcher's mitt and absorb what he says. I was determined to stay in that crouch for as long as possible.

The hell of it was, though, that the next morning I could remember little more than a stanza from a filthy limerick he'd recited or the punchline to a story about a car-driving monkey. An entire evening spent with a successful novelist spouting words of wisdom and I couldn't remember a thing.

But there is one thing I remember and it happened on one of the first nights at Tracks after a class. As we all got ourselves situated around a little table, and in the course of ordering a lot of drinks, Richard told the waitress that we were all writers. And he said it just like that, with no qualifier: we're writers. He didn't say we were student writers or novice writers or writing hopefuls. That night, around that table, we were a community of writers.

I must have laughed or made a snide comment because, even though I'd been a freelance writer for a couple of years by then, I never would have referred to myself as such in front of someone so successful doing exactly the thing I wanted to do. Richard must have picked up on this because he got very quiet, and he got very serious, and he assured all of us around that table, again without qualifier, that we were writers, and that we should never think of ourselves as anything less. I think it may be one of the kindest things anyone has ever said to me.


Thank you, Richard.

Hav-A-Tampa

When I owned Memphis's oldest smokeshop (FYI, this shop is now home to The Brass Door, an Irish pub), I met a lot of characters. A lot of people passed through the door looking for this cigar or that tobacco, or just to see the building and get a sense of the city's history. There was some history there, too. History that included local and regional politicians, actors, films, writers and businessmen.

And did I mention characters?

A guy stopped in one day, having walked across the bridge from Arkansas. He was traveling by canoe from Kentucky down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. We talked for a while, he wore thick glasses held together with tape and clothes that looked like they'd been traveling downriver, and he was in to buy some pipe tobacco because the smoke helped keep the gnats and mosquitoes off of him while in his tent. He said canoeing the river was just something he'd always wanted to do.

I wrote a story shortly after that about a man escaping from a tragedy, a man who wasn't on the run from any law, but from a memory and an accident; that's all it was, just an accident. He's canoeing the Mississippi River from his home in Illinois to New Orleans (though he has no real destination, other than "away") and the entire story takes place as he's close to drowning on an island just outside Memphis.

The story is called "Headwaters" and it's never made even a ripple when it comes to being published, but I've always liked the piece. I pull it out and tinker with it from time to time, see how Ben (that's my man in the canoe) is coming along with the water swirling around him and threatening to pull him under.

Since writing that story, I've penned (penciled?) a couple of novels and am working on a third now. Within all these swirling words and papers, I'm also trying to find an agent to sell a book, trying to keep the rejections from filling my lungs and pulling me under. In this search I've come across some blogs (too many to count, really) kept by literary agents and editors across the country, and I follow some of them for their wisdom and insider information. One such blog is called Glass Cases and is kept up by Sarah LaPolla, an agent with Curtis Brown Ltd. in New York. On her blog, she invites writers to submit short-short stories to be featured there. The pieces are to be kept at 1,500 words or less; there is no pay, there is no promise of representation. It's just a place where one avid reader can present a story to other avid readers.

I sent her an excerpt of "Headwaters" - I call it "Hav-A-Tampa" - a while back and she said she'd be delighted to feature it. And so here it is. The excerpt is a memory Ben has, as he's swirling and sinking in the Big Muddy, of a trip to Memphis as a child with his daddy.

I hope you'll enjoy it, I still do. And it's nice to see a home for it, even if it is just part of it. It's nice to know Ben has maybe found a foothold and can breathe again, even if it's only for a short while.