Poland!

While I was in Boston for AWP (recap hopefully coming soon), I got some more good news about my novel BELIEVERS: the first foreign rights were sold -- in Poland.

Very happy about this!

24 Bar Blues

I'm very happy to have a story in the newly released anthology 24 Bar Blues: Two Dozen Tales of Bars, Booze, and the Blues.

My story is actually an excerpt from my novel Believers. It's the second chapter, which introduces one of the main characters.

Here's how the story, called "Lonely Man Sitting at Bar," starts:

"It’s one of those bars where there are only two kinds of music on the jukebox: country and western. The best of Waylon, Willie, Merle, Johnny, George, Hank. Men—and it’s always men in bars like this, no Patsy or Loretta or Dolly allowed—identifiable without a surname, the true gods, who have been to the clichéd and well-traveled edge and found their way back. And don’t even think of making the suggestion of possibly maybe broadening some musical horizons with a token smattering of, say, classic rock or a tasteful soul compilation: That’s not what this place—technically The Wishing Well but known to its dedicated regulars solely by the truncated The Well—is about. Here, there’s nothing but reliable songs of lament and loss (and of course drinking) that fit right in with the clientele’s collective state of mind. And that suits him fine tonight. That’s why he chose The Well. Tonight he’s up for plenty of authentic lamenting and losing. And drinking. So why not have the appropriate soundtrack?" 

Published by Press 53, the anthology was edited by Andrew Scott (thanks Andrew!) and includes work by many fine writers, including Robert Boswell, Roxane Gay, Chad Simpson, Karen Brown, Kyle Minor, Holly Goddard Jones, and many others. 

The Memory Thief

I have a new story, "The Memory Thief," in the latest issue of Atticus Review.

This one is a bit of a departure for me. It begins like this:

"Then Duncan decided it was time to steal Sara’s memories."

Novel News!

Well, it happened: my novel Believers recently sold and will be published by Algonquin Books.

Here's the announcement from Publishers Lunch:

"Andrew Roe's BELIEVERS, about a troubled family whose comatose daughter may or may not be performing miracles, and the transformative power of hope on the visitors who line up to see her, to Andra Miller at Algonquin, in a pre-empt, by Michelle Brower at Folio Literary Management."

After years of hard work, it all came together pretty quickly. Throughout the entire process, I was so impressed with my agent, Michelle Brower, who's been very patient and very supportive over the years. 

And I've heard such wonderful things about Algonquin and look forward to working with Andra Miller, who edits Tayari Jones and Caroline Leavitt, among others.

Right now it's looking like the earliest pub date would be fall 2014. 

I'm thrilled beyond words. Just kind of soaking it all in and feeling very, very lucky.

How to Talk to Children About Death

That's the cheery title of a new story of mine over at fwriction.

I also got to pick a song to accompany the story. My choice was Camper Van Beethoven's version of "O Death." I used to joke that it would make a great children's song.

This is another of my more autobiographical parenting stories, and it's a kind of companion piece to my story "Stalling," which was published in SmokeLong Quarterly a while back. In fact, there's a specific reference to "Stalling" in "How to Talk to Children About Death."

Getting intertextual in my old age, I guess...

Failure Was Possible: About George Saunders

There's been a lot of buzz about George Saunders lately. Glowing reviews of his latest collection, Tenth of December, which has cracked the best-seller lists; an amazing cover profile of the man in the New York Times Magazine featuring the title "George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You'll Read This Year"; and he was even on cable news shows... talking about books! Talking about short stories!

It's wonderful to see such acclaim and notoriety for Saunders -- not only because he's been one of my favorite writers for several years, but also because he seems like, well, just about the nicest guy on the planet.

I don't remember the first Saunders story I ever read. It might have been the raccoon disposal one ("The 400-Pound CEO"); it might have been the Civil War theme park one ("CivilWarLand in Bad Decline"; or it might have been "Offloading Mrs. Schwartz."

I do remember that I first heard of Saunders when David Foster Wallace name-checked him in an interview. That was good enough for me. And I've been a mighty fan of Saunders ever since.

In conjunction with an e-book release of his first book (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline), he's written a new preface. He discusses how he came to write the stories collected in the book, and what was happening in his life at the time. As a Saunders enthusiast, it makes for great reading. But it also wonderfully distills the struggles of writing and finding one's voice, as well as balancing the joys and challenges of family life with trying to start a writing career.

Some choice quotes from the essay...

1.

"I had graduated from the Syracuse MFA program in 1988 and had been writing stories that owed everything to Ernest Hemingway and suffered for that. They were stern and minimal and tragic and had nothing to do whatsoever with the life I was living or, for that matter, any life I had ever lived."
 
2.

"We didn’t have any money and were into our thirties and were (maybe, just a little) wondering how it was that we’d missed the boat in terms of this thing called upward mobility...

"At one point our second car broke and we couldn’t afford to replace it, so I started riding my bike the seven miles to and from work, along the Erie Canal. As winter approached, Paula put together an ad hoc winterproofing ensemble for me: a set of lab goggles, a rain poncho, some high rubber boots that, as I remember, had little spacemen on them. Biking along the canal I’d be composing in my head, and might arrive at work with a sentence or two all worked out. Then I’d dash through the atrium, into the men’s room, and try to get myself cleaned up, while not forgetting those sentences. Ah, those were the days.

"But seriously: those were the days.

"Biking back into town after dark, past the cozy colonial houses orange with firelight, I’d think: I have a home. I have people waiting for me, who love me. This is it. This is my life. These are the best years of my life."

3.

"We managed to buy a house. It was small but sweet, and the four of us lived there, happily. What a thing it was, to suddenly have a real life happening to us, to be in over our heads but glad about it. The gratitude I was feeling nudged me to the edge of a thought precipice: Had others, loving this much, had it go wrong? Did that ever happen?... The realization that failure was possible, even for me, had the effect of increasing my empathy."

4.

"Mostly I was using whatever story I happened to have going at the time to get me through the day and give me some minimal sense of control and mastery. They were a secret source of sustenance. If I got a few good lines in the morning, that made the whole rest of the day better."

5.

"I will forevermore, I expect, be trying to re-create the purity of that time. Having done nothing, I had nothing to lose. Having made a happy life without having achieved anything at all artistically, I found that any artistic achievement was a bonus. Having finally conceded that I wasn’t a prodigy after all, I had the total artistic freedom that is afforded only to the beginner, the doofus, the aspirant."

Better yet, you can read the entire preface here.

That Way of Looking

"It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time."

--Raymond Carver, On Writing