Category Archives: Jean Zimmerman

April 13, 2012 · 2:05 pm

Turtle Time

Painted turtles basking in the sun across the swamp on a mat of downed reeds. Their black backs shine. One of these days they’ll come wandering over our driveway to lay their eggs. We found one scrabbling in the dirt last year, digging her her personal birthing hole. Oliver the pit-hound went into the swamp and brought back a painted in his jaws, holding it gingerly, but he dropped it on command. It probably didn’t taste too good anyway.

Another day a snapping turtle found the cabin, a monster of a reptile, standing there frozen when we approached and disappearing magically when we came back to check on it later. It could have been a geezer, as old as thirty.

Common Snapping Turtle

This is a quiet time for me too, between efforts to get the word out about Love, Fiercely and The Orphanmaster, taking a break from Savage Girl. The sun shines hot on Cabinworld and it’s a lush life out on the patio, keeping an eye on those turtles.

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Filed under Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature

April 12, 2012 · 11:37 am

Dutch Women

Dutch women of the 17th century were extraordinary. Free to marry whomever they chose, to get a basic education, to inherit equally with men, to represent themselves in court and to engage in commerce as they wished, they were powerhouses. Visitors to the Netherlands marveled at their moxie.

Van Gogh, Peasant Woman With a Bucket

I have posted an excerpt from The Women of the House that lays all this out in some detail, for those who want to know whether Blandine the she-merchant is exceptional in her independence. Well, Blandine is exceptional, of course, but she takes her place among a century of independent women.

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Filed under History, Jean Zimmerman

April 11, 2012 · 2:58 pm

Beauteous Libraries

An amazing collection of pictures: for twenty of the world’s most beautiful libraries, click on http://www.oddee.com/item_96527.aspx

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Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Photography

April 11, 2012 · 1:04 pm

Libraries: Check It Out

This week is National Library Week, and yesterday was National Library Workers Day. Hurray! I have always depended on the kindness of librarians.

Libraries have been at the center of my imaginings for as long as I can remember. I recall being around 11 and taking out tall stacks of books at one time — we had a big leather club chair at home and I would lounge there and go through the books one by one when I probably should have been outside playing. One volume in particular excited me, about Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, and other supernatural oddities — I don’t recall if the witika was in it.  I remember being enthralled by E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It.

The town where I grew up had a new library with a splendid view of the Hudson River. A place I spent a lot of time pursuing my Virginia Woolf and Tristram Shandy obsessions in my teens.

By the time I was in college I realized that no one was going to come hang me if I kept books out longer than their due dates. Once in a while there was an amnesty, which saved me from paying huge fines. I loved the mellow aroma of book paper in the darkened stacks, creeping around to find what I needed or sometimes just creeping around for the mysterious fun of it.

As a professional writer I have relied upon libraries and librarians of all stripes — local, academic, the Westchester Library System (which is great), the New York Public Library, archival collections. Book stores are great and you can get many sources on line these days, but nothing matches the depth of library collections for getting the information I need. I remember when I first stumbled upon The Iconography of Manhattan Island, by I.N. Phelps Stokes, a source I have relied upon for my last three books, at a college library near my house, it was like finding gold. I could never afford the six giant vintage tomes but I could stand at the copy machine and make duplicates of hundreds of pages if I wanted to. Which I did.

I am looking forward with excitement to a conversation I will have on line this afternoon with librarians, to discuss The Orphanmaster. I know the questions will be perspicacious, penetrating and illuminating.

Click here to join in the conversation: http://penguindebutauthors.earlyword.com/episode-1/

If you don’t catch it the first time around, the chat will be archived at the same link.

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Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Writers

April 10, 2012 · 11:37 am

Wattle’s Up?

Turkeys gobbling wildly on the hill above the cabin.

They’ve taken up residence just this year. A turkey explosion has hit the greater metropolitan area of New York. There’s even a female down at Battery Park, waddling her way across streets, turning heads and stopping traffic. Is the bald eagle the most American of birds, or is the turkey the true icon?

And what in fact is a wattle? A fleshy dewlap or caruncle, it is  mating catnip, apparently. A large wattle has been linked to high testosterone levels. When the tom is excited, its wattles and a fleshy flap over the beak, called a snood, can enlarge to the extent that they obscure the eyes. Its head turns blue.

But you’ve heard enough about the turkey’s secondary sex characteristics, I suppose. What about the gobble? The sound can carry for up to a mile, but toms also yelp, purr, spit, cackle and whine. The females I guess sit placidly by, foraging for acorns, amused by their ridiculous turkey suitors. Waiting for them to fan their tails: yeah, go on, impress me.

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Filed under Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature

April 9, 2012 · 2:33 pm

EarlyWord Interview

Nora Rawlinson and I had a very nice conversation about The Orphanmaster, which is being aired on line in advance of a live chat that will be open to interested librarians (and anyone else, I guess) on Wednesday, April 11 between 4-5 pm. Check it out.

http://penguindebutauthors.earlyword.com/episode-1/

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Filed under Fiction, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, The Orphanmaster, Writing

April 8, 2012 · 1:03 pm

Hog Heaven

Ham or lamb, lamb or ham, the eternal question for the Easter cook.

Lamb, traditionally, because the new spring lambs are out and about and, not so important to me, because lamb represented the “Lamb of God,” Christ.

Ham, because at least in the past the hogs of fall had been successfully cured and were now ready for cooking. Also because hogs were thought to represent luck.

We feel lucky to eat our ham, smeared with a paste of a third mustard, a third marmalade and a third brown sugar. Stuck with a few cloves and a few dried apricots. Irresistable.

No eggs this year, though Maud is pining for them. Gil is underwhelmed, he says.

The patio of the cabin is soaking in sunshine as we drowse and wait for dinner.

Happy rebirth.

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Filed under Cooking, Jean Zimmerman

April 7, 2012 · 3:53 pm

Greening Up

In the woods today:

A tiny curled shoot emerging from a bed of moss. Only the lightest shading of green across the canopy. Spring seems reluctant to take another step forward, which is just how I like it.

I remember years ago I was between books and broke beyond broke. I threw myself on the mercy of a local caterer who put me to work chopping onions, frying crab cakes, rolling out biscuits, etc. It was just before Passover and Easter, and we were knee deep in brisket. I loved to cook, but not like this.

After a few weeks of aching feet and minimum wage rewards, a book job came along, saving me from the scullery.

I’m making frozen lime squares for Easter, a recipe I hijacked from that kitchen, something good that came out of the experience — although I also believe that the book job came karmically out of my willingness to do that dreck kitchen work. Do something you’re not crazy about doing and get something you want. Something like that.

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Filed under Cooking, Jean Zimmerman, Nature

April 6, 2012 · 6:22 pm

Poetry Makes Nothing Happen

“Life is just one ecstasy after another.” Margaret Anderson

Oliver the pit-beagle found a dead, stiff, contorted snake on the ground as we made our way around the “walk” for the first time this season and raised it gleefully in his jaws until Gil took it and tossed it in the slough.

That’s the second snake we found, the first one, larger, embedded like a fossil in the grit of the little road leading to the cabin.

I returned from Boston to find the magnolia blossoms resurrected and all the grass greened up.

Having left behind bookishness for a bit, with bookseller dinners and conferences behind me and a draft of Savage Girl put to bed, I’m ready to… read! But what to read? My Alice B. Toklas, awaiting me. Perhaps some more Stein. Also poetry. Gerald Stern? Frank O’Hara?

I need recommendations.

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Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Poetry

April 5, 2012 · 6:08 pm

Cedar Cathedral

GUEST BLOGGER: Gil Reavill

Jean invited me to fill in for her while she is on the road to Boston, meeting booksellers.

A road crew is out working on the private dirt road that leads to our cabin. It’s not as simple as it sounds, fixing a pothole in a dirt road. Dig it up, fill it in and–here’s the important part–pound it flat. Six pieces of heavy machinery, including two front loaders, a mini steam roller, a couple dump trucks. The workers (whom we had no hand in hiring, the road being the purlieu of our neighbors) all Hispanic, which made me wonder how many of them were undocumented. Difficult not to see it as a small political tableau playing out right next door. Some folks in this country would render these workers, unless they had proper documentation, persona non grata. Check their papers, jail ’em, ship ’em off home.

Robert Frost is down for good fences, but I think good roads make for good neighbors. There’s a political movement abroad that would have none of this. The angry ones drive to their demonstrations over tax-supported roads to complain about high taxes. Gary Trudeau, in one of his strips, had the GOP candidates testify what they think there’s too much of in America. Romney, said, “Taxes!” Santorum said “Government!” but Ron Paul said “Roads!”

Right off the road where the workers were, along our driveway, there is a great stand of cedars that is one of my favorite places in all of Cabinworld. A stand of cedars that catches the light in a new way every day. No photo can do it justice, but here’s one anyway.

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Filed under Home, Jean Zimmerman

April 4, 2012 · 6:27 pm

Local Heroes

What could be nicer than having the opportunity to meet the booksellers of your home town (and thereabouts). Today I talked with representatives of Book Culture, an excellent store on the upper west side of Manhattan, around the corner from where I went to college and grad school and my daughter now goes to college. I also met people from Posman Books, at whose Grand Central Station location I have browsed away many a delightful hour and came away with many too many books while waiting for my train. Also, the owners of the Village Bookstore in Pleasantville, just a few miles down the road from my home in Ossining, where I often go for book-and-movie dates with my husband (across the street is that fantastic independent film house, the Jacob Burns Center).

Village Bookstore, thoroughly independent

The Orphanmaster will not be published until June, but these meet and greets are to answer booksellers’ questions about the novel, to tell them a bit about how it evolved and why it’s an exciting project (hopefully they will agree!). My publisher, Viking, has gone to all kinds of trouble to put these sessions together on the west coast and now the east, much to its credit. And I get to meet the people behind the kinds of bookstores I like best.

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Filed under Fiction, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, The Orphanmaster

April 3, 2012 · 10:15 pm

A Great Pitch

Strolled earlier tonight into the Barnes and Noble at 82 Street in Manhattan, where I will tour with The Orphanmaster in June, to find

a) a healthy stack of Fiercely’s on the New Biography display up front, and

b) Jim Abbott, the former Yankees pitcher, giving a talk on his new book, Imperfect: An Improbable Life to a rapt standing-only crowd.

Abbott lacks a hand, and was nonetheless able to make it into the major leagues, pitching with his glove tucked under his arm then quickly whipping it onto his good hand in order to field the ball. I admire his athleticism and perhaps as much his ability to captivate an audience at a bookstore.

When you think you can’t do something, you probably can with some original thinking.

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Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Publishing

April 2, 2012 · 6:04 pm

Savage Girl Rising

Had a nice time eating spicy tuna rolls in the city with Maud today and admired the chilly, daffodilly weather all around, but at the same time could not stop thinking of Savage Girl, the new novel, just now getting its hems evened and its hairdo fluffed in preparation for going out to its first reader/editor. It is a strange and I hope irresistable fable that has a colorful cacophany of events and characters. Cross your fingers for Savage Girl as it leaves dark and gentle Cabinworld behind to encounter the white lights and long knives of the real world.

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March 31, 2012 · 5:41 pm

The Haves Who Gave

The New York Times Style section  review of Love, Fiercely,

The Haves Who Gave,is out in in print this Sunday. Pretty cool.

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Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Love, Fiercely

March 30, 2012 · 5:31 pm

An Amazonian Issue

Here are a bunch of satisfied booksellers at the Flying Fish restaurant in Seattle after consuming the molten brownie dessert that was the specialty of the house — and me, off to the right, glad and not glad at the same time to have eaten that brownie, the way you usually feel when you have dessert in a restaurant. Weren’t the fish tacos, tossed salad and halibut with pea shoots enough, after all?

The Flying Booksellers

I learned so much on this trip…that booksellers love books perhaps more than writers do — not surprising, it just never occurred to me before. Books, lots of books, are their reason for being, while one book at a time, for most writers, is their reason for being. Don’t know if that makes sense.

I also heard everyplace I went about the evil of Amazon. Too many reasons to delineate here. But to put it baldly, one on-line book reviewer put it this way: “If you love books, you will not buy from Amazon.” Amazon crushing the independent bookseller and all. A lot to mull over on the plane coming back while nuzzling my Kindle Fire (which one bookstore manager assured me is actually alright, because you can get an app for the Fire that allows you to purchase ebooks from any independent bookseller you choose, as opposed to being limited to evil Amazon).

I would love to hear any thoughts on this issue if you would care to comment.

In the meantime, I returned home and jetted off to “The Steins Collect” show at the Metropolitan, which was fabulous, almost as full of photos of Gertrude and Alice as it was the then-radical paintings they displayed at 27 rue de Fleurus.

American Gertrude

Margaret Anderson, editor of The Little Review, once said, “I dislike Gertrude’s type of egoism; her awesome self-enamouration shows itself either as a comfortable chuckling kind (which isn’t too unsympathetic), or as a grotesque, arrogant kind as when she announced on meeting a Frenchwoman for the first time, ‘I am a genius, one of the greatest in the world today’ – which seemed to me slightly insane. The Frenchwoman said, ‘She frightened me.’ I was also put off by an atmosphere of commercialism that I felt emanating around Gertrude like an aura. It made me uncomfortable, as if I were in a place I didn’t belong.”

That’s why we love her.

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