LIVE! #54
5 November 2023
Agenda
- Why We're Here / Roundtable Rules
- Introduction to Literary Forensics
- Group Discussion
- Further Study
Why We're Here
We writers want to improve our craft
by reading like a writer
We learn from each other
using Literary Forensics
Roundtable Rules
Always refer back to the book
Practice active listening & serendipity
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but not every conclusion
Always refer back to the book
Reading Teaches Writing
Meet today's author: Nell Zink
- Born in California in 1964, raised in rural Virginia, Zink also lived in Washington D.C. and New Jersey before emigrating to Europe in her 30s.
- From 1993-1997 Zink produced the zine Animal Review, featuring music reviews by various contributors and short stories by her about animals.
- Since 1996 Zink has lived in Israel, Germany (2000), and most recently in Switzerland (2022), where she teaches at the University of Berne.
- After fifteen years spent writing fiction exclusively for a single penpal, the Israeli postmodernist Avner Shats, Zink caught the attention of Jonathan Franzen in 2012 with a letter promoting the work of the German ornithologist Martin Schneider-Jacoby and asking for his help to save birds in the Balkans.
- After Franzen learned that Zink had no published literary work he championed her first novel, helping to get it published in 2014.
- Novels
- The Wallcreeper 2014; Mislaid 2015; Nicotine 2016; Private Novelist 2016; Doxology 2019; Avalon 2022
[Bricklaying] was more valuable for my intellectual life than my
entire college career."
- Nell Zink
What do you feel?
What in the book elicited that feeling?
Every feeling and observation is valid...
but every conclusion should be questioned
We practice serendipity
- nothing is too crazy
Always refer back to the book
What do you notice?
Writing Avalon
- Zink's uncle Charlie was a flamenco guitarist who lived in LA and died recently. She says that he was "manipulated by an evil crime family."
- Zink enjoys reading high fantasy novels, and says her favorite novel is The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany.
- About Avalon: "In a weird way it's autofiction. Deeply encoded autofiction. It took me 20 years to get my head around the complexity." "Autofiction of one of the great love stories of our time."
- Having written about 9/11 and the Trump era in Doxology, Zink says that Avalon is set in the early 2010s "right before everything went to hell because it’s very hard to write any kind of book set in the age of Trump or Covid."
- Given her own background, Zink chose to write unsatirically about an impoverished Gen Z protagonist.
- Living in Europe has given Zink a perspective of America that she voices through Peter.
- Avalon is the first of a 2-book deal with Knopf (2024)
Stats & Background
- Marketing: Friendship Fiction, Coming of Age Fiction, Literary Fiction
- Genre: Realistic Historical Long-Form Arch-Plot
- Print Pages: 224; Word count: 59,458;
Reading Grade: 8th
Avg. wds/sent.: 13.42; Lexical Density: 47.38; Flesch Reading Ease: 69.23 - POV: Bran
Person: 1st; Tense: Past - Publish date: May 24, 2022
- Publisher: a Borzoi Book: Knopf, Random House
- Audio book length: (6 hours 21 mins); Narr. Justis Bolding
- For more on Zink, here's a recent inverview and a 2015 New Yorker profile
- Although Zink has a reputation for writing quickly, and she wrote the first 1/3 of The Wallcreeper in 4 days, the remainder took her a year (and not 3 weeks). Zink says that Doxology took her years to write, and Avalon about 6 months.
- Zink says she learned from the Iowa Writers Workshop to now always answer that question with: "9 years."
