Kate’s 2¢:” An American tune: a novel” by Barbara Shoup

“An American tune: a novel” by Barbara Shoup

NOTE: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as, describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ merely shares her thoughts about what she reads.  Imho…

   I enjoyed this story and Charles Cooper did a good job of reading it.

   Shoup  showed us several results of young men who experienced the war in Vietnam: one who died, one who came back totally whacked on drugs, and one who receded into his own shell. My brother was in Nam and he never talks about it.

   A few take-aways:

–An achingly poignant account of a family crushed under the weight of surpressed truths.

–Given the skills to succeed, nurtured with kindness and attention, that we begin to see how different our world could be.

–Only working from the indside could you make a difference.

–It was the time of life. Wasn’t remembering the people you loved when you were young, a natural a natural part of the process of looking back on your life; coming to terms with what it had turned out to be.

–…They were buried by life itself.

–Choices come to compose tune of our lives.  

From the WEB:

Barbara Shoup is the author of seven novels and the co-author of two books about the creative process. Her young adult novels, Wish You Were Here and Stranded in Harmony were selected as American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults. Vermeer’s Daughter was a School Library Journal Best Adult Book for Young Adults. She is the recipient of numerous grants from the Indiana Arts Council, two creative renewal grants from the Arts Council of Indianapolis, the 2006 PEN Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship, and the 2012 Eugene and Marilyn Glick Regional Indiana Author Award. Currently, she is the executive director of the Writers’ Center of Indiana. Her most recent novel is An American Tune.

MWW social media intern Rachael Heffner interviewed Barb for this week’s E-pistle.

Rachael: Your intensive at MWW is called Writing YA: Think Like a Teenager. I know you don’t want to give too much away, but can you give one tip on how to “think like a teenager”?

Barbara: That teenage person is still there, inside every one of us. If you’re like me, you can’t help thinking like a teenager, at least some of the time. If you’ve forgotten how to think like a teenager, this workshop will take you right back to that time in your life and put you in touch with the emotional perspective you need to get a YA novel right.

Rachael: You write both YA and adult novels. What’s the biggest difference for you in terms of writing these types of books, or is there a difference?

Barbara: I don’t consciously choose to write one or the other. I write the novels that seem possible to write–some of them are made of ideas that reflect the complexity of adult life; others, the rawness and self-absorption of adolescence. They are equally interesting to me and equally challenging. In several cases, novels that started out as adult novels became YA novels in process when I realized that the strongest voices and most compelling stories were those of the younger characters.

Rachael: You are quite a busy woman. You are Executive Director at the Indiana Writers Center. You’ve just published a new novel called An American Tune. Most writers have to struggle to balance family, work, and writing. How do you do it?

Barbara: I’m extremely fortunate to love everything I do. Everything is of a piece to me and everything feeds my writing, one way or another. Still, it’s a constant struggle to keep everything in balance. Usually I write for a few hours early each morning. Sometimes I escape for a week or so to a quiet place and work nonstop, which is heaven. That said, there are plenty of times when I get overwhelmed and find my real life creeping into the time I need for fiction–which is not a good thing because when I don’t write, I’m just not okay. So I try to catch myself when I feel things getting out of whack. Years ago I read this in a women’s magazine–probably about dieting, but it seemed dead on in terms of everything: “Discipline is remembering what you want.” I want to be a writer, so I choose it whenever I can. Slowly, the pages pile up.

From NLS/BARD/LOC:

An American tune: a novel DBC12181

Shoup, Barbara. Reading time: 14 hours, 7 minutes.

Read by Charles Cooper. A production of Indiana State Library, Indiana Talking Book and Braille Library.

Psychological Fiction

While reluctantly accompanying her husband and daughter to freshman orientation at Indiana University, Nora Quillen hears someone call her name, a name she has not heard in more than 25 years. Not even her husband knows that back in the ’60s she was Jane Barth, a student deeply involved in the antiwar movement. An American Tune moves back and forth in time, telling the story of Jane, a girl from a working-class family who fled town after she was complicit in a deadly bombing, and Nora, the woman she became, a wife and mother living a quiet life in northern Michigan. An achingly poignant account of a family crushed under the weight of suppressed truths, An American Tune illuminates the irrevocability of our choices and how those choices come to compose the tune of our lives.

Download An American tune: a novel

Kate’s 2¢: “All The Western Stars” by Philip Lee Williams

“All The Western Stars” by Philip Lee Williams

NOTE: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as, describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ merely shares my thoughts about what I read.  I’m just

saying…

   Bob Askey is one of my favorite readers/narrators and he did his usual fabulous job of presenting this story.

   You have to love these two old codgers, who aren’t ready to lie down and die in a nursing home. I’ve often thought that too many people are put ‘away’ in a nursing home too soon before their time.

   I enjoyed the humor and the extravagant tales Jake and Luca make up as the need arises.

A few take-aways:

–A memorable story filled with universal fears and truths.

–Jake and Lucas are running from their pasts, from their mortality, from the fear of dying unfulfilled.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

( biography of a living person needs additional citations)

www.philipleewilliams.com[dead link]

Philip Lee Williams (born January 30, 1950) is an American novelist, poet, and essayist noted for his explorations of the natural world, intense human relationships, and aging. A native of Athens, Georgia, he grew up in the nearby town of Madison. He is the winner of many literary awards for his 21 published books, including the 2004 Michael Shaara Prize for his novel A Distant Flame (St. Martin’s), an examination of southerners who were against the Confederacy’s position in the American Civil War. He is also a winner of the Townsend Prize for Fiction for his novel The Heart of a Distant Forest and has been named Georgia Author of the Year four times. In 2007, he was recipient of a Georgia Governor’s Award in the Humanities. Williams’s The Divine Comics: A Vaudeville Show in Three Acts, a 1000-page re-imagining of Dante’s magnum opus, was published in the fall of 2011. His latest novels are Emerson’s Brother (2012) and Far Beyond the Gates (2020) from Mercer University Press[clarification needed]

Biography[edit]

Philip Lee Williams was born in 1950, one of three children of Ruth Sisk Williams (1924–2008) and Marshall Woodson Williams (1922– ). He, his parents, and his older brother John Mark Williams (b. 1948), moved to Madison, Georgia, in 1953, where Marshall Williams had accepted a job as a chemistry teacher at Morgan County High School. Williams also has a sister, Laura Jane Williams, born in 1959.

Williams began his creative work by composing music and writing poetry while still in his teens. He graduated from Morgan County High School in 1968 and from the University of Georgia in 1972 with a degree in journalism and minors in history and English. In 1972, he married Linda Rowley. They have two grown children and four grandchildren.

He finished more than half of his master’s degree in English at the University of Georgia before sustaining a serious back injury in 1974. After that, he spent 13 years as an award-winning journalist before becoming a science writer at his alma mater in 1985. As a journalist he worked for The Clayton Tribune (Clayton, Ga.), the Athens Daily News (Athens, Ga.), The Madisonian (Madison, Ga.), and The Athens Observer (Athens, Ga.)

Williams retired in 2010 from the University of Georgia, where he was a writer and taught creative writing.

In 2010, Williams was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, alongside Flannery O’Connor, Martin Luther King Jr., James Dickey, and fellow University of Georgia graduate Natasha Trethewey.[1] In addition, he is a recipient of the Georgia Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award.

From NLS/BARD/LOC:

All the western stars DB28203

Williams, Philip Lee. Reading time: 9 hours, 17 minutes.

Read by Bob Askey. A production of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress.

Psychological Fiction

A novel about two old men who escape from a small-town Georgia nursing home and head West to live out their cowboy fantasies. Jake Baker, a Mississippi-born former construction worker, and Lucas Kraft, an award-winning poet and novelist, find they have much in common: thirst, lechery, a hankering for risk, and a desire for freedom. Strong language and some descriptions of sex.

Download All the western stars