Tag: fiction

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Susan Bacon’s The History Teacher

During the blizzard of 1978, a woman is discovered face down at the edge of her Delaware estate. When a young Columbia University professor, Emma, gets a phone call informing her of her grandmother’s death, she’s drawn into a web of intrigue that reaches into CIA meeting rooms and the New York’s Upper West Side. It’s a lot for a history teacher to handle.

Susan Bacon

So begins The History Teacher, the debut novel from writer and Memphian Susan Bacon. Though the new novel of Cold War-era intrigue is her debut as a novelist, Bacon is no stranger to working as a writer. She’s a journalist, ghost writer, and an award-winning copy writer, and she will celebrate her debut as a novelist with a booksigning at Novel bookstore Sunday, September 22nd, at 2 p.m.

Originally from Delaware, Bacon moved to New York, where she studied at Barnard College before working, for a time, at a magazine there. After her time in the Big Apple, she moved to Memphis, left to work in Washington, D.C., and then returned to the Bluff City. “That’s my trajectory,” she says.

In college, Bacon studied history, and her concentration was contemporary European history, which comes into play in The History Teacher. “I had intended to study journalism in college, but I went to Barnard College in New York and they didn’t have a journalism program,” she explains. “So I just went ahead and studied history, and then I went I worked for a magazine briefly in New York.”

“I’ve written several books on my own, and then I have ghost written some books,” Bacon says. “I started out as a journalist here in Memphis at Memphis magazine.” She has written speeches and books about the politics of parenting, and she has ghostwritten books as well. Are Our Kids All Right?, her second book is, of her nonfiction, her personal favorite. “It was a pretty heavily researched book on the quality of child-care in the United States.”

All that time, ideas were quietly gestating. Settings from Delaware, bits of history, politics, and academia — though The History Teacher is by no means an autobiographical novel, Bacon’s experiences have informed it.

Perhaps owing to her history degree or her work as a journalist, meticulous research is still a part of Bacon’s process. “I sprinkle news stories throughout the book. I tried to do a lot of research so that the history is accurate. In the end, I ended up weaving in an awful lot of reality.” Still, she says, “I’ve always wanted to write a novel. It’s really a treat for me. I had an awful lot of fun. As you may know, it’s hard to be tied to facts all the time.”

Still, though Bacon draws much of the novel from her imagination, there’s a strong foundation of fact and history that makes The History Teacher feel grounded in reality.

“Back in the ’90s, when I was in Washington, between my two books, I got really interested in the Alger Hiss case.” Hiss was an American government official who was accused of being a Soviet Union spy in 1948 and convicted of perjury in connection with the charge in 1950. “That was a long time ago, but I kept the manuscript I was working on and that became the seed for this story. When I first moved to Memphis, I wrote a novel, kind of an experiment, and I put that in a drawer and then I said I’m going to take that Hiss story and I’m going to build something from it.”

Bacon also took inspiration from the classic thrillers of the 1970s, and there’s a whiff of the Cold War espionage of John Le Carré. Don’t misunderstand. The History Teacher stands on its own, but there are familiar notes. For one thing, I don’t remember The Spy Who Came in from the Cold starring a young professor. Bacon subtly sidesteps stereotypes as she introduces her cast of characters. Emma, CIA agents, no one feels flat or manufactured. Emma is an excellent example. Rather than invent a private investigator or a spy, Bacon chooses a professor as her protagonist. She’s not exactly a detective, but she is a historian. Research is her bread and butter. She’s no stranger to the long struggle to uncover the truth.

All in all, Bacon has crafted a satisfying page-turner with her debut, and the ending is perhaps the most satisfying facet of all. No spoilers here, but this is no tea cozy mystery devoid of real consequences and implications. The novel examines the cost of privilege and wealth — and the interconnected worlds of politics, business, and high society. It’s well worth a read.

Susan Bacon signs and discusses her debut novel, the political thriller The History Teacher, at Novel, Sunday, September 22nd, at 2 p.m.

For updates on The History Teacher, visit susanbacon.com.

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Memphis Magazine Fiction Winner Announced

Abe Gaustad has won the grand prize in the 2007 Memphis Magazine Fiction Contest for his story “The Torso.” It will be published in the December issue of Memphis.

An honorable mention winner in 2002, Gaustad holds a master of fine arts in creative writing and expects to receive his doctorate in English in 2008 from the University of Tennessee.

Gaustad’s work has appeared in a variety of nationally distributed literary magazines, including Other Voices and New Orleans Review. He has also won awards for his fiction from the University of Tennessee, Orchid: A Literary Review and Glimmer Train magazine. He is looking for a publisher for his book of short stories and working to complete a novel set in Brasilia and Memphis, tentatively titled Building Cities in the Dark.

Honorable mention winners this year are Marsha L. McSpadden and Court Ogilvie. The annual contest, now in its 18th year, is sponsored by Burke’s Book Store and Davis-Kidd Booksellers.

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Free Fiction Workshop at University of Memphis

Memphians with a manuscript: Here’s a chance to work with novelist and short-story author Richard Bausch, holder of the Lillian and Morrie A. Moss Chair of Excellence in English at the University of Memphis.

The Moss Workshop in Fiction, with space for 10 students, is free and open to anyone with the talent and the time. Classes will meet on Thursdays from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., January 3rd through March 6th. Location to be determined.

Those interested in taking part in the workshop should act now and submit a fiction manuscript no longer than 20 pages and no later than December 20th. Those accepted into the class will be notified before Christmas.

Send your manuscript to Richard Bausch, Department of English, 429 Patterson Hall, University of Memphis, Memphis, 38152. And be sure to include your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address.

For more information, call Jan Coleman at 901-678-4692 or contact her by e-mail at creativewriting@memphis.edu.

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Get Surreal at Burke’s

The press release reads: “This inaugural issue contains dream stories, horror stories, monster stories, insanity, magical realism, the distorted, the peculiar, the impossible, the irrational.”

Must be the South, the surreal South, we’re talking about and as envisioned by a bunch of contributors in an anthology of short fiction and poetry called Surreal South (Press 53, $19.95).

And a good bunch they are: Robert Olen Butler, William Gay, Joyce Carol Oates, Chris Offutt, George Singleton, and Daniel Woodrell. Writers Laura Benedict (author of the new novel Isabella Moon) and Pinckney Benedict too.

The Benedicts are the editors of the anthology, and they’ll be signing (and reading from) Surreal South at Burke’s Book Store (936 S. Cooper) on Saturday, November 10th, from 2 to 4 p.m. Contributors (and husband and wife) Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly will be on hand as well to read from their work, beginning at 3.

For more information, call Burke’s at 278-7484.

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Outreach

Poetry and prose. Fiction and nonfiction. If you’re interested in the state of the art of writing and if you’re into meeting with and hearing from some authors of note, beginning this week and continuing into November, you’ve got some good pickings. All of them are thanks to the creative-writing department at the University of Memphis, and all of them are free and open to the public.

For starters, what was once River City is now The Pinch, a semiannual literary journal sponsored by the U of M. In its pages, you’ll find fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and photography, and the fall 2007 issue is ready. To celebrate, Burke’s Book Store is hosting a release party on Saturday, October 13th, from 6 to 8 p.m. The event promises readings by visiting authors (as of this writing, Claudia Grinnell and Margaret McMullen, among others), and this issue of The Pinch includes pieces by Lee Gutkind and Dinty Moore, plus an interview with poet Linda Gregerson.

September will also see the announcement of the winners in the journal’s national contest (sponsored by the Hohenberg Foundation) for poetry and fiction. Make that “international” contest. According to assistant managing editor of The Pinch (and MFA student) Matt Pertl, this year’s contest received some 300 submissions worldwide, and that includes authors from the Czech Republic, Denmark, Great Britain, Australia, Columbia, Bolivia, and Japan. Judges Pam Houston (in the short-story category) and Linda Gregerson (in the poetry category) had some reading to do. You’ll have some reading too when The Pinch hits bookstores here and nationwide. Just look for the artful cover by U of M graphic designer Gary Golightly.

For more information on The Pinch, go to http://cas.memphis.edu/english/pinch/home/home.htm.

Care to hear from memoirist Joyce Maynard, novelist Charles Baxter, and poet C.K. Williams? They’re all about to be in town as part of the U of M’s River City Writers Series, now in its 30th year.

Maynard will be reading on October 24th at the Holiday Inn University on Central. Baxter (his The Feast of Love just hit movie theaters, starring Morgan Freeman and Greg Kinnear) will be reading at the Galloway Mansion in Midtown on October 29th. And the Pink Palace will be the setting for a reading by Williams on November 15th. What, no classroom time? Yes, classroom time, when the authors follow up their readings and signings with interviews inside Patterson Hall on the U of M campus.

But according to Rebecca Skloot, who arrived at the U of M this semester to teach creative nonfiction, the idea this year is to get the visiting authors out of class and into the community. “Arts-friendly” venues is what Skloot calls them, and they’re designed to make the writers series more inviting, more accessible — to turn them into a public event.

“When you’re at a reading,” Skloot says, “you want to be in a beautiful place. You want to ‘feel’ the art. You want to have the opportunity to mingle, talk.” She means the readings to be fun.

For more information on this fall’s River City Writers Series, go to http://cas.memphis.edu/english/rcw/season.htm.

What’s more? More poetry — at the very accessible P&H Café when former U of M students read from their work: Burke’s Book Store owner and Flyer contributor Corey Mesler and former Flyer staff member and teacher at the Memphis College of Art Mary Molinary. Onetime professor of English at the U of M and Commercial Appeal columnist Frederic Koeppel will also be reading. So too Matt Cook, a poet from Milwaukee who professes to write poetry for “people who hate poetry.” The reading at the P&H (1532 Madison) is on Thursday, October 11th, at 7 p.m.

Can’t make it to any or all of the above? Doesn’t mean you’re not on the lookout for new writers. See then: Best New American Voices 2008, a collection of short stories just published by Harcourt and drawn from university writing departments, workshops, and conferences. Nationally recognized novelist and short-story writer Richard Bausch is this year’s editor. That’s the same Richard Bausch who teaches creative writing at the — that’s right — University of Memphis.