book buzzzzz…

Listen Live: Wednesday, July 2, 7 pm

I have an interview airing on Wednesday, July 2, 7 pm on KRCB 91 FM, a Sonoma County public radio station. (You can stream it live by clicking on the above link.) It was a real honor to join host Gil Mansergh as a guest on “Word for Word: Conversations with Writers.” I haven’t heard the edited version, but I think it should be an excellent interview. Gil was an intelligent, savvy host who asked very interesting questions. I was a bit intimidated, and reading his bio, I see why:

Mansergh’s movie review columns appear in four Sonoma County newspapers, and his Cinema Toast radio show has been a Thursday morning staple on KRSH-FM for seven years. Author or Book Doctor of over 50 books, manuals and curriculums, Gil was honored as a Freelance Success by Writers Digest Magazine. He honed his interview skills during five years as Director of the prestigious California Writers Conference [sponsored by the California Writer’s Club] at Asilomar.

In any event, I hope you’ll listen in, either on NPR if you’re in Sonoma County, or online, if you live out of range.

I spoke in Marin County yesterday—to writers

I was back at Book Passage yesterday to speak to the Marin chapter of the the California Writers Club. I had a really great time. My talk was on “Synchronicity and Sensibilité.” I got to talk about one of my favorite subjects—synchronicity—and how it plays into my writing process. I said quite a bit about how I think synchronicity can be evoked. Someone suggested the word, “courted,” and that seems a perfect way of looking at it. The more we court synchronicity, the more it appears and leads us on. I created a PowerPoint slide show to go with the talk and one of the most interesting aspects of doing so, for me, was that I spent some real time taking a look at just how prevalent synchronicty was in the writing of Requiem.

Someone asked if I was going to make the talk available, so I’m looking into creating a little movie/podcast, which will include the visuals. Hopefully I’ll be able to post it in the next week or so—it depends on how agile I am with the technology.

I’m also going back “over the hill” later this week, to Sonoma county this time, for a radio interview on a KRCB 91 FM, a Sonoma County public radio station. That interview will be aired on July 2nd at 7pm on Word for Word: Conversations with Writers.  You can listen online if you’re out of the area.

It does seem that Requiem’s Indie Book Award (see below) is giving new energy to the process of marketing my book, new interest and notice. I’m hoping to continue to establish myself in the Bay Area community of writers. I first moved to the Bay Area in 1970 and have lived there for most of my adult life, moving up and down the Northern California coast, from Mendocino, where I live now, to Boulder Creek in the Santa Cruz mountains a couple of years ago, to Sonoma County when I was a student at Sonoma State, Sausalito in the 1990s, San Francisco in the late 1980s, and the East Bay before that. It feels really good to be making inroads, as a writer, into the greater “Bay Area,” (which in my mind extends from Mendocino to Santa Cruz).

One of the most satisfying aspects of having a book visible out there in the world, is that people keep popping up from out of my past. Yesterday, my ex-mother-in-law came to hear me. We hadn’t seen each other in years. It was really a pleasant surprise. I’ve heard from a number of people; it’s great. I’m also getting to know a lot of new people too, so if you’re inclined to say hello, please do!

In any event, keep your eye on the appearances page, I should be able to update it in the next couple of days with several new happenings. It looks like I might be up in Portland at the end of the summer.

Requiem just won an award!!

I’m jazzed. I’m excited. Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein just won an award. It was given the Historical Fiction Award by the Independent Book Publishing Professional Group, for their Next Generation Indie Book Awards, 2008/09. That’s so wonderful! And, according to their website, the award means my book will be looked at by a New York agent:

To help indie publishers and authors make important connections, the winning books will be reviewed by New York literary agent Marilyn Allen of Allen O’Shea Literary Agency for possible representation to publishers or one of Ms. Allen’s co-agents for possible representation in areas such as distribution, foreign rights, film rights, and other rights.

That’s just such great news!!

Here’s the link    Scroll down to the Historical Fiction category.

More News:

I was at the BEA (BookExpo America) in Los Angeles at the convention center this past week and did a book signing there. I don’t know if people knew about the award, but I had a big line of book sellers, librarians and media in line for a signed copy. I signed fifty books in my brief half hour. The way the process is set up, thirty people sign at a time and people line up to get books. It reminded me of being at the airport, lots of roped off alleyways leading to the authors. It was pretty overwhelming, apparently about 35,000 people showed up to the BEA. The convention center is huge. I spent most of the time wishing the place was smaller, and wondering where I was. But, it was a real taste of the industry and I did accomplish a few good things.

Oh, and one other tidbit of good news, the Sacramento Airport bookstore is carrying my book, displaying it face out. So, fly out of Sacramento!! It would be a great read on a long plane flight, really, especially on your way to England or Italy….

I’m giddy.

KPFA Interview Audio Link

Here’s a link to Living Room, hosted by Kris Welsh for May 2nd. Originally, I was scheduled to be on Living Room on May 1st, but demonstrations and labor activities preempted the interview. We actually taped it Thursday afternoon and it ran on Friday. It’s been edited a bit to fit into a half hour, but I’m very pleased with the conversation Kris and I had about the book and the politics behind it. She took me in some very interesting directions. So, here’s the link. I’m going to try to get an audio of just the interview, until I do, click on the audio track for the show and then click about halfway along the audio bar image. You’ll see the time ticker on the right. My interview starts at 29.20 (29 min, 20 secs) into the show and runs about a half hour.

Synchronicity and Sensibilité

I’ve been invited to speak to the Marin Branch of the California Writers Club on June 22nd. I’ll be at Book Passage in Corte Madera, just north of San Francisco, from 2-4pm. I’m really excited to be talking to other writers. If you’re in the Bay Area, please come and let others know. This is the advertising that’s going out:

A Talk by Bay Area Novelist, Molly Dwyer

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.—Goethe

SYNCHRONICITY IS MEANINGFUL COINCIDENCE, an inexplicable paralleling of inner and outer events, and there’s usually a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow—especially if you’re a writer. Committing yourself to a story can awaken synchronicity. Mysterious coincidences begin to occur, forming a fragile, but identifiable structure of guidance and inspiration that can lead to unforeseeable incidents, meetings, and magic—both inside and outside the confines of your manuscript. Molly will share how she learned to recognize and respond to synchronicity, and how it helped her discover deeper truths as she researched her newly released novel Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein, about the life of Mary Shelley.

MOLLY DWYER has been a transformational educator for more than fifteen years, facilitating workshops and teaching English composition, creative writing, and literature classes in community college. Her first writing class was at UC Berkeley with the Irish poet laureate, Seamus Heaney. Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein is the fruit of over a decade of research. Molly’s second novel on the Romantics, The Appassionata, is set in the 19th century Paris of Liszt and Chopin.

Audio Audio

Just a quick note. I’ve posted two audio pieces on my news page.  One is a podcast of the talk I just gave at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. The other is an interview with Cable Radio, Good News Broadcast, out of New York. I’m not sure why the quality of the audio is poor on the interview, but it is. After some effort to get the radio station to correct the problem (obviously unsuccessfully), I’ve decided to post it anyway because there’s some interesting talk in the interview. I’ve got other interviews coming up in the next several weeks, hopefully I’ll get something with better quality that I can post, but for now… this is what I have.

Mary Shelley & Romantic Imagination

For the last several days I’ve felt like I was back in school, preparing a talk on Mary Shelley and the Romantic Imagination that I’m going to deliver on Tuesday evening at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. It’s been challenging and fun, actually. I’m pleased with what emerged. In the course of preparing the paper, I went back and read my A+ paper from Oxford, the one I wrote on Percy Bysshe Shelley in 2004 when I studied at Oxford as part of a summer program. I liked that paper too. So, I decided to make both available to anyone who might want to read them.

(I’m putting them up as pdf files, so you’ll have to view them in that format. They’re papers, each around 10-15 pages. If you do download, please remember they’re copyrighted, and attribute accordingly if you quote from them in your own work. Thanks)

MARY SHELLEY AND THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION

THAT POWERFUL ATTRACTION:
SHELLEY AND THE POWER FLOWING THROUGH THE NATURAL WORLD

Here’s just a bit from my talk. I opened with an epigraph from my book, which toward the end I repeat. It sums up what I’m after:

“What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven, and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?” Samuel Taylor Coleridge looked up at his audience; there was a collective murmur. It was difficult to say if it was one of approval.

He found the eager gaze of Godwin’s daughter. Fourteen year-old Mary was enthralled. Well did she remember Coleridge reciting the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner in her father’s house. What happened that night had changed her life, precisely because she had plucked a strange and beautiful flower and awakened to find it in her hand.

Coleridge winked at her. “Imagination owes no allegiance to time or space,” he said.

(The flower was photographed by Diana Redwing, (check out her website) a friend who also took the pictures of me that are on my site and in my publicity. She’s an incredible photographer.)

This excerpt is from the middle, it details the way the Romantics tended to think about the imagination, influenced by Coleridge who lectured on the subject in London—which is what the excerpt from my book is tracking.

ACCORDING TO THE ROMANTICS, EXPRESSIONS OF CREATIVE GENIUS not only reflect our ability to create new unity out of existing things, but to become one with the source of all, that which brings nonexistence into existence. Romanticism tell us that neither the human, nor human imagination stands apart from Nature, that imagination has been present as the power in Nature from the beginning of creation. Imagination is a force, a capacity, not simply to produce imagery, but to manifest, to visualize or speak into being. And God said, let there be light: and there was light. John Keats is credited with some of the most famous—and analyzed—lines about the Romantic Imagination: “I am certain,” he wrote, “of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the Imagination—what the imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth—whether it existed before or not… The imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream—he awoke and found it truth.” Keats is referring to Milton’s, Paradise Lost, (VIII, 460-490) where Adam dreams of the creation of Eve, and awakes to find her there.

The Romantic Imagination is not a human capacity, so much as is the human aptitude for experiencing mystical union, or in more secular terminology, aligning oneself with the creativity of the universe. For the Romantic, imagination is the generating force of the universe. William Blake explained it thus: imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow. Romantic Imagination emerges from the nexus of human consciousness and the fertile void that birthed the Big Bang—what religion calls the Divine.

If you live in the Bay Area and are interested, I’m speaking Tuesday night at California Institute of Integral Studies, at 7 pm in Namaste Hall. Address is: 1453 Mission, San Francisco.

Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Preview

Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein is being previewed in the current NCIBA newsletter. As bookseller, Linda Rosengarten of Cheshire Books in Fort Bragg, CA, told me, “yesterday I received an e-mail from NCIBA; their first “newsletter” from publishers offering advanced copies. Requiem was featured and the first three respondents gets a freebie to test for their stores. So, that’s a VERY good thing — it was chosen somehow.”

New Title Preview: Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein

Copperfield Books Gives Requiem 5 Stars!

“Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein, Author Molly Dwyer. Dwyer has reanimated the life and loves of Mary Shelley in this incredibly addictive, dual time-period novel. While Mary is penning her great works, Anna, in the 21st century is researching Mary’s life and experiencing realistic and primal dreams as Mary. This physical and psychic connection between the women culminates in a profound and thoroughly satisfying conclusion. Five Stars from Diane Honeysett, Copperfield Books.”

Two Reviews

Mendocino Beacon, February 28, 2008
By novelist Charlotte Gullick, Author of By Way of Water;
Recipient of a 2007 Christopher Isherwood Fellowship

•••

Mendocino Arts Magazine, Spring 2008
By Suzanne Byerley, former codirector of the
Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, writer & editor