Literary Treats, No Tricks 🎃
Including an Interview with novelist, poet & editor Kathleen Rooney
Happy Halloween from Pasadena, CA, where last night I heard an owl hooting at about 10 o’clock. This was the first time I’d heard one here, and I wondered if a neighbor was playing some inscrutable prank, but when I went outside to investigate, it did indeed seem to be a bona fide owl hooting—an owlish-looking bird soon flew out of a tree to the east.
As an homage to Halloween’s trick-or-treat tradition, I’m sharing a goody bag of literary morsels. 🎃 🍭
🧁 November’s list of fee-free literary submission opportunities is now up at
. (Thank you, Erika!)🍪 Yesterday, October 30, was publication day for Gioia Diliberto’s excellent new work of nonfiction: Firebrands: The Untold Story of Four Women Who Made and Unmade Prohibition (University of Chicago Press)!
🍫 This Saturday, November 2 at 9:30 AM PT/11:30 AM CT, please join me for the second of two fall meet-ups for Bookish monthly and annual subscribers on Zoom. (Subscriptions are currently discounted 30%.)
Questions about publishing and literary topics are welcome, and I’ll talk a little about whether or not I succeeded in my plan to finish the novel I’ve been working on for the last four and a half years. (Spoiler alert: not quite.) Please reply to this message if you’d like to join Saturday’s Zoom, and I’ll send the link.
—
🍬 An addition to a literary FAQ a couple of weeks ago (accessible here):
I’ve heard I should always aim for top-tier literary magazines like The New Yorker and Harper’s when I’m sending out new work.
Well…I’m of two minds about this. If you feel 99.5% sure you’ve written some strong new poems (3-5 is the number most magazines ask for in a submission), a great short story or essay, and you’ve revised it with the help of at least one or two trusted readers (and have let it cool off for a minimum of a few weeks [or better yet, months] before preparing it for submission), sure, give these magazines a shot.
But as a rule, I recommend sending to periodicals that are less likely to be besieged by submissions—not only from new and relatively new writers, but from the agents of well known writers who have much better odds of being published in periodicals like The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Atlantic. (Even for many much-published writers, the odds are still long.)
If you consult the list of literary magazines in the back of anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prizes, and The Best American Essays, you’ll find the names of periodicals that submit their issues to these series’ editors. I found the journals where I began publishing stories and poems using this method, researching them by subscribing to print versions of several journals and reading some online. (More about this topic can be found here.)
—
🍭 And now…a Jumbo Treat! An excerpt of an interview novelist Kathleen Rooney and I did last year for Newcity Lit. Kathleen Rooney is also an essayist, NBCC member, poet, and founding co-editor of Rose Metal Press.
—
From Dust to Stardust: The Dizzying and Dazzling Literary Life of Kathleen Rooney
It’s difficult to think of a contemporary writer more skilled and steadily productive in a dizzying number of literary modes than Kathleen Rooney. Among her many books as writer, editor or co-editor are the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize-winning collection Where Are the Snows, the novels O Democracy!, Lillian Boxfish Takes A Walk, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, From Dust to Stardust, and works of nonfiction, René Magritte: Selected Writings, Reading With Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America, and For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs.
If you live in Chicago, along with encountering her work in bookstores, you might have crossed paths with her at the Art Institute or other notable public venues, where she was seated behind a typewriter, composing poetry for passersby, as part of Poems While You Wait, an organization Kathleen co-founded in 2011.
I’ve been an ardent fan of her poetry and prose for over a decade, since I first picked up her 2009 essay collection Live Nude Girl after we became colleagues at DePaul University, where she still teaches creative writing full-time for the English Department.
Her fourth novel, From Dust to Stardust, was published in September 2023, and it might be her best yet. Set in Hollywood during the silent film era, it’s definitely her most glamorous (although Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk is a close second).
Christine/Bookish: From Dust to Stardust is both an impressive work of imagination, based on the life and adventures of Jazz Age film star Colleen Moore, whose fictional incarnation Doreen O’Dare is the novel’s protagonist, and a carefully researched story about early Hollywood and the Fairy Castle housed in Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry (Moore’s brainchild and longtime artistic project). Would you comment on how this novel began?
Kathleen Rooney: Unbeknownst to me, the novel began when I first laid eyes on the Fairy Castle in the Museum when I was eight years old. Its image stayed in my mind’s eye for decades as one of the most enchanting objects I had ever seen. In late 2016, when I was feeling particularly disenchanted, that image came back to me as I was deciding what I wanted to write next. The frame of the book is that Doreen is at the MSI in the late 1960s, recording the audio guide for her castle.
In honor of that kind of spark that takes half a lifetime to kindle into a fire, I have a passage in chapter twelve that mentions the distant sounds of a school group that also happens to be there on the day Doreen reflects, “Into the silence that follows the recorder’s click, the kids’ voices from the corridor continue, with a slight shift in timbre: the nearly imperceptible difference of children who have been fed. Most of them will carry no particular memory from this day; one or two, perhaps, will have seen something that steers the course of their lives.” I didn’t know it yet, but seeing the Castle changed the course of my life and led me to write this book.
CS: Doreen O’Dare called to mind your 2017 novel Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk’s heroine. Doreen was Hollywood’s original flapper, and Lillian is based on Margaret Fishbach, who became the highest-paid woman in advertising in the 1930s. This is maybe a little corny, but I’m wondering, since you wrote both novels in first person, did you feel at any point as if these women were speaking through you? I ask this in part because Doreen believes in fairies, and there is a magical quality to this novel and to Lillian Boxfish.
KR: It’s not corny. Making art of any kind takes a huge amount of spiritual energy. Some of that energy comes from within the artist, obviously, but some of it comes from actual spirits—the memories and traces of people who came before. Even as a little kid, I had an affinity for the past, I think because it’s so sad that we all have to die. I’ve always wanted to resurrect people and things that are beautiful and forgotten. It seems so unfair to be biased against someone just because they’re dead. Or to consign a prior way of living to obscurity just because it’s old.
Being a novelist who takes on historical subjects is a chance to haunt yourself—and if you are lucky to haunt other people. Doreen’s grandmother believes in the Celtic idea of “thin places” where the veil between this world and the eternal one becomes permeable. In a way, the magic is in that—by writing as these bygone people, I slip into their world and they slip back into this one.
CS: Doreen is indomitable. She’s also a progressive thinker who is helped along the way by other progressive women. Her mother Agnes, however, is a wet blanket, never missing an opportunity to discourage Doreen as she works hard to become a success in Hollywood. How much of Agnes is based on Colleen Moore’s own mother? Or did you take a novelist’s license with Agnes’ characterization?
KR: By all accounts, Colleen Moore’s mother was supportive and understanding, and quite proud of her daughter’s achievements. I needed to make the story more interesting, and also to convey what a radical rebellion against the repressive rules placed on women these so-called flappers like Doreen fomented. It seems quaint now, but flappers truly were scandalous because they were strong-minded young women making decisions for themselves, not just waiting around for some man to ask them to dance, then whisk them away. They were liberating themselves.
CS: This novel is set in 1968, when Doreen has been asked to provide the narration for her Fairy Castle at the Museum of Science and Industry before this exhibit opens. Doreen is interviewed by museum employee Gladys, and along with the practical details about the castle’s creation, she describes her trajectory from an unknown who moves to Los Angeles at age fourteen to major Hollywood star. Was this your narrative structure from the beginning?
It was. Novels are the most architectural form of creative writing. I have to have a blueprint before I can begin. I wanted the book to be organized chapter by chapter around the rooms of the real-life Castle—the Library, the Small Hall, the Drawing Room, and so forth—to provide a way to toggle between Doreen’s journey from the middle of nowhere to superstardom and this monumental work of visionary art that she ended up building.
The Castle is a masterpiece of intuitive art, and the fact that Colleen Moore (and Doreen) put it to use by touring it to raise money for children during the Great Depression is so moving. I like that ancient technique of the memory palace—an imaginary location that you build in your mind to store mnemonic images that let you recall information. So I thought it would be fun to have a structure where the Fairy Castle is Doreen’s memory palace incarnate.
(The full interview is accessible here at Newcity Lit.)
Fine post, Christine. I'm going to try and join you on Saturday. Please send link.