Authors Nina Shengold and Alison Gaylin

By Ann Hutton

The best part of this job is that I get to meet talented people and generally ask them anything. And they generously offer up everything about themselves that I question. It’s a great gig for an aspiring writer. One always hopes some of the talent and tricks of the trade will rub off. This fall the Catskill Mountain Foundation (map)’s Readers and Writers Series has lined up an exciting group of local authors, so the mental rubbing ground looks good. Nina Shengold will take the stage on September 29, and Alison Gaylin will read on October 6, each sharing excerpts from their recent works, both willing to engage with the audience to talk about the craft of writing.

Nina Shengold says she “became a writer” on a cross-continent train trip, carrying a backpack and journaling in a notebook. She landed in Vancouver and fell in love with the Pacific Northwest. She wrote her first play during that time, working on it in tents and forest service cabins, as she’d taken a job with the Young Adult Conservation Corp to build picnic tables, clear trails and plant trees in the wilderness. It was a counterculture scenario within the foresting industry. The people she met and worked with were not the big money loggers, but the “bottom feeding, marginal fringe” of free-wheelers who, like Shengold, sought an alternative lifestyle. At least, for a while she did. After working for a year in the great outdoors and at Copper Canyon Press, in Port Townsend, Washington, she made her way back to New York. “It got old living out of a backpack,” she admits, and wanted the advantage of being in the thick of theater culture where her play could possibly be done.

This adventure, in fact, plays into her first novel, Clearcut (Anchor Books, 2005), set in a remote reforesting arena, much like the territory Shengold briefly occupied thirty years ago. It’s a love story of sorts—triangular, just a little raunchy and risqué a la the 1970s. Written from the perspective of a male protagonist, it caused some readers to wonder how Shengold managed speak from this very manly point of view. “Writers are always putting on somebody else’s skin. That’s what we do for a living.” She insists that the story is not “thinly veiled autobiography,” but the fit of Shengold’s voice in Earley Ritter’s fictional body is tight, familiar—like too many shiftless dudes who live off the radar, but not so far that they don’t find themselves entangled with mainstream society now and then. And when Ritter picks up a hitchhiker and then meets his girlfriend, the radar screen comes alive with their mixed-and-matched affairs.

Shengold is an accidental journalist. She submitted a personal essay to Chronogram magazine, which prompted an assignment to do an interview, which became an offer to edit the publication’s monthly book reviews. Her immediate response: “Oh my God, a straight job! I haven’t had one of those in years!” She’d written plays and screenplays, even doing some writing for television movies in the '80s. The opportunity to “do the same thing every month” came at the same time that she was told her agent had sold Clearcut. She took the job at Chronogram, eager to get an insider’s look at the whole book industry, taking advantage of talking to writers and finding out how they work, and how they feel about their work. It’s rewarding to have to read good books. Tough job, but somebody has to do it.

After living for ten years in New York City, Shengold rented a place in the Hudson Valley one summer and never left. Coming here was like discovering the Pacific Northwest as a young woman—it was love at first sight of the mountains and rivers. And the region is rich with literary talent. In 1991, she and a group of seven others formed Actors & Writers, a professional readers company that does staged readings of plays and works in progress. Now 27 talented people strong, they meet monthly in the nineteenth century Odd Fellows Theatre in Olivebridge to review the work done by members and friends, and to entertain the public free of charge. (See www.actorsandwriters.com for events information, including the annual Ten-Minute Play Festival held every autumn.) Meanwhile, Clearcut has been optioned by a Canadian film production company. “Sleep is optional,” Shengold remarks, only half kidding.

Alison Gaylin’s first murder mystery, Hide Your Eyes (Penguin, 2005), was nominated for the Edgar Award last year. Main character Samantha Leiffer’s quirky escapades continued in a follow-up caper You Kill Me (Penguin, 2005). And just recently, foreign rights to Gaylin’s soon-to-be-released Trashed (Penguin, 2007) were sold to a French publishing company. She’s rolling over victims left and right. Yet, an online writer’s group held a blog in which she put out a request for help in coming up with a good title for her current project. “Offer people a free drink and they’ll do anything,” she quipped, amazed at how many responses she received—some of them not bad at all. It seems that success has not spoiled Gaylin’s collegial spirit.

We talk about her two female protagonists, Sam (in her first two stories) and Simone Glass (in Trashed)—how they are both ambitious and city savvy, but how each operates from a slightly flawed ground of being. Gaylin mentions a helpful tidbit she picked up at a writer’s conference: Always give your hero a flaw—it makes her more likable, more believable. Sam is superstitious and Simone is overshadowed by her sister’s fame. Both have overbearing mothers who would like them to be a little more “together” by this point in their lives. Gaylin admits there’s some of herself in both of them, interjecting that while she is not particularly superstitious—just “reasonably neurotic”—her own mother and grandmother were. That’s why she’s attuned to warning signs and creepy coincidences that surely must mean something. She explains, “Superstition is a way to control the uncontrollable. You know, ‘don’t walk under a ladder.’ That kind of thing gives us a handle. Life is unpredictable, and then there’s death. We do whatever we can.”

The other half of that writerly advice is: give your villains a noble quality—it makes the violence they commit more terrifying. “Think of the psychotic murderer who is gentle and loving with his puppy in The Silence of the Lambs,” Gaylin suggests. Deviance and obsession are the elements in a villainous character—fictional or real—that frighten her, plus the fact that violent crime is so often randomly administered. Even so, it’s the drama, the tension of having lives at stake that intrigues her. “Usually when I write, somebody ends up getting killed.”

Gaylin writes daily when she’s on the tight deadline her genre of choice demands. Readers of murder mysteries are insatiable, can’t wait for the next book to hit the shelves. Once they’ve established themselves with a publisher, authors are compelled to produce a book a year—not, as she indicates, like it is doing a literary novel where an author can take a year or two, sometimes more, to finish a story. She also maintains a “day job,” driving to New Jersey twice a week to edit articles for the magazine In Touch Weekly. Gaylin graduated from Northwestern, then studied journalism at Columbia, acquiring skills for a “practical career, a way to have health insurance,” but says writing stories and plays has always been her first love. In that endeavor, she’s also supported by a local writer’s group, which meets monthly.

Both authors agree that interacting with other writers, teaching, working in journalism broadens and grounds their perspectives of their own work. As Shengold reports, “When you’re working alone, you operate instinctively. With others [as in teaching], you have to explain your choices and question theirs” to get at what works and what doesn’t. Both Gaylin and Shengold are well into their next novels. Both are raising children. Both are making some of us (who wished for something beneficial to rub off) feel rather lazy. But they’re both inspiring and awesome talents to meet. That’s reason enough not to miss them at the Catskill Mountain Foundation (map) in Hunter—Shengold on Saturday, September 29 and Gaylin on Saturday, October 6, at 2:00 pm.

The Catskill Mountain Readers and Writers Series is produced by Carolyn Bennett. For more information call 518 263 2000 or visit www.catskillmtn.org.