Tag Archives: Carol Cassella

Kitsap Authors Help Write A Novel … Live!

Bainbridge Island children's author Suzanne Selfors takes her turn onstage at "The Novel! Live" Wednesday at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle.

The Novel: Live! is in its third day. It’s a six-day endeavor in which 36 authors with Seattle-area ties — including six from Kitsap — each spend two hours writing a share of a novel before a live audience online at at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle.

The event, in which audience members can purchase character names, is a fundraiser for two Seattle-area literacy-promotion programs. Once the event is over this weekend, the book will undergo a round of editing and then be released for sale as an e-book.

As I write this, “at bat” is Bainbridge Island children’s book author Suzanne Selfors. She’ll be followed, from 2 to 4 p.m., by fellow Bainbridge author Carol Cassella. (You can follow the “action” live here, and read what’s been written so far here.)

Mary Guterson, who lived on the island until last year, takes her turn at 4 p.m. Thursday. (I expect to be on hand at the Hugo House for that, and will share some pictures.) Jamie Ford, the South Kitsap grad who now lives in Montana, takes the stage at 10 a.m. Saturday, and the last turn of the event will be taken by Bainbridge’s Susan Wiggs at 4 p.m. Saturday.

It’s an interesting concept that was most famously tried in the mid-’90s, before the days of streaming Internet, by a group of 13 Florida authors. Their effort was the comic mystery novel Naked Came The Manatee. But The Novel: Live! is different expressly because of its live element, and that has caused some trepidation among some of the authors I know who are participating in this endeavor — authors who are used to writing amid quiet and solitude.

Bainbridge author Kathleen Alcala put in her two hours Monday morning, and I asked her how it went. Her response:

It turned out to be really fun! My personal fear factor was that I would freeze up. I had a “cheat sheet” with me that just named places and ideas for people, to keep me grounded in images. I ended up writing over 2500 words in two hours, which is good for me. I joked with my editor that I should try writing in public more often.

There were around ten people coming and going while I wrote. Two friends stopped by to have a book signed (which annoyed the organizers while I went off-camera to do so), and another friend stopped by while walking her dog, so we had a glass of wine after I finished. More people were watching and commenting online. When I asked for suggestions for names for the twins, seven sets were submitted! So we auctioned that off in the evening.

I asked Jamie Ford about how he was anticipating his coming turn at the literary plate, and here’s what he had to say Monday:

I popped by this afternoon and it’s a really cool set-up. I’m not too worried about the “live” aspect. My first job out of college was working for a newspaper, which helps with the chaos-factor. At the paper I was at a desk, out in the open. Phones were ringing, people were always wandering by, police scanners were going off, that kind of thing. I think the “live” aspect is the best part, since writing is such a solitary job–the change up is exciting. As far as what emerges–It’s my sense that all of the writers involved are taking the story seriously, and the writing seriously, even though the process might be more of a spectacle. And of course it’s for a good cause.

So there you are. Sounds like as much fun to be a spectator, too. Especially since the Hugo House is hosting happy hours from 4 to 6 p.m. and 8 to 10 p.m. each day. You better believe I’ll be all over that. You should too, if you’re in the Capitol Hill area and have the time to spare.

Carol Cassella On Her New Novel, “Healer”

If Carol Cassella had her way, you would not be able to buy a copy today of her new novel, Healer.

Not today, and maybe not any time soon.

“I really had to struggle to discover the heart of this story,” Cassella told me over a recent lunch at the Treehouse on Bainbridge Island. “I started out with such a clear idea of where the plot should go, but the characters I was developing and the emotional impact I was going for kept taking me in a different direction.

“Writing it was a very difficult two years. Just before my deadline, I wanted to rewrite it as a whole different story. But then I had to turn it in to my publisher.”

That being said, Cassella’s editor was happy with what she turned in.

“And sometimes the editor sees that way before the author does,” she said.

And that being said, Cassella had good reasons for her second-novel jitters.

Healer, much like Oxygen before it, started as a medical mystery — almost a genre exercise, she said. Cassella, an anesthesiologist at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, started it when she found herself intrigued by the shadowy world of big money and biotech research. But while Oxygen dwelled in a world she intimately knew — her main character was an anesthesiologist, after all, and the story was split between Seattle and her native Texas — Healer dragged Cassella far out of her self-confessed comfort zone.

For one, the story is set in a fictional Eastern Washington town (basically, a stand-in for one of the more touristy villages in the Methow Valley). For another, Cassella may be a physician, but she said that going into the writing of Healer, the biotech world was as big a mystery to her as it probably is to you or me. Three, the narrator is a doctor who gave up medicine fifteen years before, and because she lacks board certifications, works in a small clinic that handles migrant laborers on a sliding scale. Cassella, by contrast, still works (albeit part-time), and today — release day — is just another day in a white lab coat for her.

More about the story: Claire Boehning, at 43, sees her upscale Seattle world turn upside-down when her biotech-researcher husband, Addison, loses all his venture and personal capital to a gamble on an anti-cancer drug that flunks its early trials. The couple, who have a 14-year-old daughter, are broke. They sell their tony home on Lake Washington and retreat to their ramshackle second home in the tiny town of Hallam. Faced with a looming inability to pay even the most baseline of bills, Claire hauls her medical license out of mothballs. But all she finds is a job of last resort, at a clinic run by an aging, ailing and overworked old doctor. Meanwhile, Addison is desperately traveling the country, meeting with venture capitalists, trying to revive interest in a drug he’s convinced was unfairly derailed. Suspense looms over some big questions: Was the drug flawed, or were the trials flawed? Will big money trump big science? Will some key characters do the easy thing … or the right thing?

As readers of Oxygen know, Cassella doesn’t tilt toward happily-ever-after endings. Nor does she fatalistically throw up her hands in the face of what seems like an impenetrable ethical and moral quagmire. What usually happens in her work, just as in real life, is a tense and deliberate detangling of some serious gray areas. And so, in a sense, the mystery that Cassella said she started out to write remains intact after all.

“I may have started out one way, but I never wanted to write just a black-and-white story,” Cassella said. “I find that the gray zone is a far more interesting place.”

Finding her gray zone came through years of craft development, much of it through Bainbridge’s Field’s End and critique partners in the author community around Kitsap County. As difficult as Healer was to finish, the making of Oxygen, Cassella makes clear, was much longer and harder. She started as one of probably a zillion people in middle age who wanted to write, but had no idea what … or how.

“If you get to midlife and you’re not going to buy a Ferrari or argue the bigger questions, you’ve got to do something,” she said with a smile. “It became obvious that I had to write because I wasn’t going to stop beating myself up for not writing.”

That said, Cassella was generally happy in her career and in her family life, as a wife and mother of two sets of twins, ages 14 and 15. And her motivation for writing at the time was to finish a book so she could say that she’d finished a book … and then put it on a shelf. “I wanted to write, but everything else got in the way. Like folding laundry,” she said. “I learned that I couldn’t wait for time to write. I had to make time to write.”

But, with the encouragement of author friends, she spent three years writing the book, and used Oxygen to shop for an agent, and after that, a publisher. There were rejections along the way, but the book found its home, and continues to be a big success over two years after its release. It’s had about 10 foreign translations, and just recently made a big splash in Canada as Wal-Mart’s “Read Of The Month” up there.

The book’s success meant that Cassella, soft-spoken in person, had to develop a public persona for signing and touring. “It’s not in my natural grain,” she admitted.

But, like thousands of other authors who have likely said the same, she’s found her way. And Kitsapers can see for themselves when Cassella appears 3 p.m. Sunday at Eagle Harbor Book Company to read from Healer and sign copies. (She’s also appearing at 7 p.m. Thursday at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle.) After that, she hits the road out of state for nearly three weeks before making some more stops at bookstores up and down Puget Sound. (Click here for her schedule.)

And then it’s back to work on book No. 3, already in progress.

“My next book will be a medical mystery, about a woman who’s a doctor,” she said. But then she hastens to add: “It’ll have different voices, a different feel and a different theme.”

Just like Healer does. Oxygen it isn’t. And while I’m no critic, I’m confident in saying that it, like the book itself, is a good thing.

Even if Cassella isn’t quite able to admit that yet.

Good Stuff That’s Coming Up

A look through Kitsap’s September literary calendar:

• Friday, Sept. 3, 9 a.m. through 4 p.m.: Stillwaters Environmental Education Center, 26059 Barber Cut Off Road in Kingston, begins its annual fundraising book sale. At least 15,000 new and used books, covering all genres and subjects, will be sold each Friday through Sunday, through Oct. 3. During the sale’s last weekend, books will be sold by the grocery bag ($5 on Friday, $3 on Saturday and free on Sunday). All proceeds go to support environmental education. For more information, contact Naomi Maasberg at (360) 297-1226 or at naomi@stillwatersenvironmental center.org.

• Sunday, Sept. 12, at 3 p.m.: Eagle Harbor Book Co. on Bainbridge Island hosts Carol Cassella, the Bainbridge author whose second novel, Healer, will be in bookstores Sept. 7. Those wanting a signed copy can order it in advance through the bookstore. (Full disclosure: I was lucky enough to score an advance copy, am about 150 pages in, and can say it so far is every bit the equal of Oxygen … and probably a lot more than that. I’m working on an interview with Carol for this blog ahead of this reading; stay tuned for details.)

• Tuesday, Sept. 14, at 7 p.m.: Liberty Bay Books in Poulsbo hosts Erica Bauermeister, the Seattle author of the novel, The School Of Essential Ingredients. (Of the book, Publisher’s Weekly says: ““In this remarkable debut, Bauermeister creates a captivating world where the pleasures and particulars of sophisticated food come to mean much more than simple epicurean indulgence…Delivering memorable story lines and characters while seducing the senses, Bauermeister’s tale of food and hope is sure to satisfy.”) Bauermeister is a founding member of Seattle7Writers, the literary-and-literacy promotion collective, and will participate in The Novel: Live! fundraising event in October.

• Thursday, Sept. 16, 7 p.m.: The Kitsap Regional Library Foundation hosts Between The Pages, an evening with five authors — Eileen Goudge, Jane Smiley, Joshilyn Jackson, Josie Brown and Tatjana Soli — at the Bainbridge Performing Arts Center. Tickets are $50 for the event, a fundraiser for the foundation, and includes a copy of Brown’s novel, Secret Lives Of Husbands And Wives. VIP tickets sell for $150; that price gets you an invite to a catered pre-event reception with the authors; the latest books bu all five authors and an opportunity to have them signed, among other good stuff. Click on the above link for ticket and other info; tickets can also be purchased through Eagle Harbor Book Co. and Liberty Bay Books. (If, like me, you’re wondering how Kitsap lined up so many literary rock stars for one evening, rest assured that I’m looking into the story behind this event and hope to have a blog soon on that subject. I’m dying to go to this myself, but that damned work thing appears to be getting in the way. Hint, hint, boss.)

• Tuesday, Sept. 21, at 7 p.m.: Field’s End hosts Bainbridge resident Tom Tyner, aka The Latte Guy, who will speak on “The Ins And Outs Of Writing A Weekly Column.” A land-conservation lawyer, Tyner has written his humorous observations on coffee, parenting and island life on and off for The Bainbridge Island Review since 1993. His earlier columns were collected in a book called Skeleton From Our Closet.

• Tuesday, Sept. 23, 7 p.m. (and continuing for the next four Tuesday evenings): Field’s End hosts novelist and University of Washington English professor Shawn Wong, who will offer a workshop on “Beginning Fiction.” (From the website: “Nearly everyone says or overhears someone say, “I have a great idea for a novel.” How do fiction writers get from idea to written pages? How do you give yourself practical writing assignments to meet your goal? What tricks can you play on yourself to move your writing ability from one level to another? How can you be an objective editor of your writing? There is no tried-and-true path to writing fiction, but Shawn Wong’s students for the past 26 years at UW have gone on to write and publish short stories and novels and win writing awards. What he tells them will be compressed into four sessions. In other words, let’s skip the apprenticeship and get straight to the writing.”) Wong is the author of the novels Homebase and American Knees, both literary novels stemming from his Chinese-American experience. The latter book was adapted into Americanese, an independent movie being release this year. Cost for the four-week workshop is $160. For registration forms and other information on the classes, which take place at the Bainbridge Public Library’s meeting room, go to Field’s End online.

Know of any September signings, readings or other literary events in Kitsap County you’d like to publicize here? Drop me a line at thomsen1965@gmail.com.

Catching Up With the Seriously Funny Mary Guterson

It seems like no time at all has passed since Mary Guterson‘s second novel, Gone To The Dogs, was hitting bookshelves. It was just over a year ago, in fact, that the Bainbridge Island author seemed poised to break through in a big way as the Pacific Northwest’s resident comic chronicler of whackbag women.

But a lot can change in a year, and a lot has changed for Guterson. She’s since relocated to Los Angeles, where she works as a freelance writer of copy for movie trailers and is developing an addiction to frozen dinners from Trader Joe’s. (Ouch! Dart to the heart for us Kitsapers!) She’s done some teaching gigs, most recently at the Whidbey Island Writers Association’s MFA program. “And i don’t have an MFA,” she told me. “But they didn’t seem to care. I actually enjoyed teaching there so much that I’m thinking of trying to get myself some sort of teaching gig down here.”

And she’s working on her third novel (following Gone To The Dogs and her equally delirious, delicious We Are All Fine Here), but don’t expect another uproarious tale of a chick with a one-way ticket to Crazytown. Guterson being who she is, however, she couldn’t possibly not be funny in talking about her unfunny work-in-progress.

“For one, it’s not a comedy,” she said. “And for two, the main character is a child. Aren’t you just dying to read it??? An unfunny kid! Who wouldn’t want to rush out and pick up that book?”

She added: “In truth, it’s about the fifth novel I’ve started in the last couple of years, so I’m not at all positive this one will stick, but so far so good.”

More seriously, she elaborated: “I make no plans when I write. I don’t know what I’m going to write until I write it. So, writing a more serious work wasn’t done as part of a plan to stretch myself or to keep from being pigeonholed.

“I just write what I write, and apparently at the moment, I don’t write funny.”

Guterson’s ties to her native Northwest remain strong, and she’s a frequent flyer up this way. In October, she’ll have a short story published in a collection produced through Humanities Washington. And in the middle of the month, she’ll be participating in “The Novel: Live!”

The latter is an exciting experiment in which 36 Northwest writers — including Kitsap writers Susan Wiggs, Suzanne Selfors, Carol Cassella, Kathleen Alcala and Guterson, along with South Kitsap High grad Jamie Ford — spend two hours each writing their parts of a “marathon novel” on the cabaret stage of the Richard Hugo House before a live and participating audience. After the novel is done, it will be published and sold as an e-book in all formats, with profits going to a number of nonprofit Northwest literary causes.

“The Novel: Live! is the brainchild of Seattle7Writers, an authors’ collective of which Guterson is a founding member. Its aim is to energize and promote the area as a reading community, and Guterson is participating in that spirit. (Even if she claims she’s really in it for “free wine.”)

Writing, as we know, is generally a private, protected discipline. So I had to ask Guterson if she was intimidated by the idea of writing on display like a guppy in a fish bowl when her turn comes to take the stage on Friday, Oct. 15 from 6 to 8 p.m. (Cassella’s two-word response to the same question: “Totally terrified!”)

“Maybe I should be,” Guterson said. “But I’m thinking of it as performance art. There’s no thought that we are going to produce a work of beauty. Oh, God, watch, the others will produce a work of beauty and I’ll totally f— it up by writing my usual bulls–t. Now I’m afraid. Thanks a lot, Jim.

“But no, really, I think it’ll just be a fun sort of lark.”

(On her website, Guterson has the following idea for those following her during her turn onstage: “We can make a plan in advance where I say I have to use the ladies’ room, and then you, dear reader, sit in my seat and type away, and meanwhile I take FOREVER to come out of the bathroom! And when I DO emerge, you will have done most of my writing for me. Perfect!”)

(By the way, if you can’t come in person, you can follow the whole thing on a live-streaming website and e-mail suggestions to Guterson as she’s working. More on that at a later date.)

In the meantime, Guterson continues work on her novel without a publishing contract. Which, curiously, is the way she prefers it.

“I was offered a two-book contract for both of my books, but turned down the offer both times,” she said. “I don’t want to be contractually obligated to a creative endeavor. That would kill what little creativity I’ve got.”

It stands to reason that Guterson should have a strong position in making her third book deal, then, when the time comes.

“Gone To The Dogs did very well,” she said. “I believe it ended up selling more copies than my first novel …. My agent tells me that both books sold very well, and that my publishers have been very pleased. And that’s good enough for me.”

Us too.