The stories behind three authors' first books: Spring 2009 Writer's Life series, co-sponsored by the National Writers Union and the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

(notes by Barbara Beckwith)

Christina Thompson wrote her historical memoir, Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All - A New Zealand Story (Bloomsbury, 2008) "as a way to use my life story to look at history." Writing through the lens of her marriage to a Maori man whom she met when she was an American grad student in Australia, Thompson shows conveys through her own experience the stereotypes and misunderstandings of Polynesians that persist to this day. She dealt with the challenges of writing about real people by laying out at the start of the book what parts are true, which are modified, and by using the real names of her immediate family. To protect the people of the small New Zealand town in her book, she changed their names and didn't show them the book until it was published, only to discover that some people were angry that she HADN'T used their real names. She was also was unprepared for criticisms of the way she spelled certain Maori words.

Rishi Reddi's Karma and Other Stories (Harper Perennial, 2009) won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. For the most party, her stories are set in suburban Boston; her characters range across three generations of South Asians living in the U.S. Reddi, who was born in India, started out writing novel-length fiction, but then "I took one chapter and shaped it a bit so that it was a short story." As for writing about real people, she says: "I write about people whom I know but who don't recognize themselves: you filter them through you. Others will read themselves into my book." Writers need "the ability to take editing," said Reddi. "You need someone to take a critical, honest eye to your work. You also need someone who can "convey criticism in a way that you can hear it." She writes in the morning "when I'm more in touch with my unconscious."

Salvatore Scibona's The End: a Novel (Graywolf Press, 2008) was a finalist for the National book Award. The novel, which revolves around an incident that takes place in 1953 in an Italian immigrant community in Cleveland, took 10 years to write, as Scibona learned about craft and plot. Nineteen publishers rejected the manuscript, but he got a section of his novel into the Harvard Review; and that piece was selected for a best fiction of the year anthology. He worked more on the book during a fellowship at the Fine Arts Workshop in Provincetown. Even after getting a contract with a deadline, he didn't finish it until the title was in the publisher's catalogue. He was careful to granting only First North American Serial Rights to journals that took sections of his book; to keep the right to later reprint them as a novel or story collection. His publisher, Graywolf Press, is small but high-quality. "Some of the smallest presses are some of the best presses. The editorial board and the marketing people will actually read your book." Graywolf is based in Twin Cities but its books are distributed by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Scibona was told, "You'll have trouble selling your book if you haven't been published before," but he points to Frank Conroy's Stop-Time (1967) as perhaps the first memoir by a writer who hadn't published a lot before.