Member Monday: Gila Green

Canadian Gila Green’s debut novel KING OF THE CLASS is published by Now or Never Publishing (2013). Her novel in stories WHITE ZION, nominated for the Doris Bakwin Literary Award, will be released in spring 2014. She teaches fiction at: www.womenonwriting.com and lives in Israel with her husband and children. Find out more about her at her blog www.gilagreenonline.com.

How long have you been a member of the WNBA-NYC?

This is my first year and I’m really pleased I took the plunge and joined. At first, I wasn’t sure if it made sense to do so from Israel, but it’s definitely worthwhile, and I’m grateful that they allow overseas writers to join the chapter.

Tell us about your involvement in Women on Writing Flash Fiction course.

I’ve been teaching short fiction and literary devices on the WOW site since 2009. They are great to work with, supportive and professional and I love the ongoing opportunities to meet writers from all over the world. Some participants have become valuable friends and colleagues. This year a long-time participant suggested I offer Flash. I immediately took her up on it. The sign-up was even more than I anticipated and I’m offering another Flash course in June.

Your debut novel King of the Class just released in Vancouver and is now available for purchase on Amazon. Congratulations! Tell us about your book and what the publishing process was like for you.

King of the Class takes Israel’s deep internal religious and political divisions to their logical dystopian conclusion. The novel is satirically set in the near future in a post-civil war Israel divided into two states: the religious fundamentalist state of Shalem and the militant secular state of Israel. As writer Michael Chabon asks the question, what if the Jewish people made a state in Alaska? King of the Class asks: what if the real enemy of the Jews is not without, but within? What if the population of Israel wakes up one day to find itself separated into two groups, living across hostile borders? Against this backdrop is a love story between Canadian Eve Vee and South African Manny Meretzky. Their relationship slowly becomes a microcosm for the religious divide around them. Ultimately, Eve and Manny must unite if they want to prevent a tragedy, but can they put aside what divides them when harmony seems to be a thing of the past?

After two years of solid work, the manuscript was complete and finding my Vancouver publisher was remarkably painless. I already had five full years of experience from publishing and I knew the basics: how to query agents, publishers, how to deal with the non-stop rejection and the endless waiting. I also knew that as an overseas writer I was up against it. I’d been told  for years that my chances of traditional publishing these days were low enough and as an overseas writer, practically non existent. I had a few initial rejections and each time I revised accordingly if the suggestions spoke to me.  Within a couple of months I found Now or Never Publishing while surfing the internet, and I knew my chances were higher with a Canadian publisher than with anyone else, so I sent in my manuscript. I still remember my acceptance e-mail: “I think I’m crazy to go for an overseas writer, but what the heck!” I’ve been very happy with them.

What future projects do you have in the works?

I am delighted to tell you that my novel in stories White Zion is coming out in the spring of 2014 with my Vancouver publisher. The collection spans Yemen, British Mandate Palestine, modern Israel and Canada of the 1980s and deals with themes of racism and alienation within the family unit. I am particularly excited about it because my father is a Yemenite Jew and I have written a lot in both a male and female Yemenite Jewish voice, something I believe is sorely lacking in Jewish literature, which is dominated by the Ashkenazi Jewish voice of Eastern Europe and North America. I’m also working on a sequel to King of the Class.

What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

My advice is to decide on your goal with your writing. Second, find a mentor, someone who has accomplished more than you in the writing world. It is very important to have at least one person who not only believes in your work, but who has also “been there”. Third, persevere, persevere, and persevere. Be professional. Remember that no one is rejecting you; it is your work that does not meet their needs at the moment and there could be dozens of reasons for that.

What’s your favorite word?

My favorite word balagan. It’s a slang Hebrew word many English speakers have adopted. It means disorder, disarray, confusion or mess, but somehow still manages to have both a positive and negative connotation. If a party is a balagan it would be a really fun enjoyable mess, but if the kitchen is a balagan, that means a lot of clean up. I like that balagan can be both positive and negative because in English it’s always negative and a little disorder isn’t always bad, is it?

What are you currently reading?

I am currently reading  Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys.

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Member Monday: Hello, Rachel Slaiman!

Rachel Slaiman is currently a freelance and blog writer for LatinTRENDS Magazine, with an M.S. in Publishing from Pace University.  She writes about events that she attends around the city and articles that are geared toward the Latino community.  Her two passions are reading and writing.

How did you become involved with WNBA-NYC?

I became involved with WNBA-NYC in June 2010 through Pace University, where there was a meet and greet about the organization.  I knew that being part of a professional organization was important to advancing my career in publishing. What I enjoy most about the organization are the events and being able to network with others through them.

How did you get into freelance writing? Is this where you always thought you’d end up career-wise?

I got into freelance writing about two years ago with LatinTRENDS Magazine.  I wanted to be more involved with the magazine.  When I finally moved to New York/New Jersey area, the editor wanted us to blog.  Knowing that I had never blogged before, I pitched the idea to my editor, asking her if I was allowed to blog about attending events around the city.  She was hooked, and since then I have been doing that.  On top of blogging about events, I still continue to write articles and book reviews.

I never thought that freelancing would be so prominent in my career.  I had always believed that you needed to have a “specialty” so-to-speak and real work experience. No one ever knows what the future holds, but one thing is certain, I always said that I wanted to be published in a print magazine and I was able to do that through a non-traditional route. 

Has your perspective of the publishing industry changed since working as a writer?

Being a writer takes patience and dedication.  It is one of those careers that either “you love it, or you hate it”.  I can’t honestly say if my perspective has changed or not since I am still new in the industry, but I am enjoying the process so far and there is still more to come.

As someone who’s completed a post-graduate program in publishing, what advice can you give others that want to do the same?

The advice I would give others is that if you want to be in the industry then really go for it. I gained interest in this career after taking an introductory course to book publishing my last semester of college. Looking back now, I am doing what I love to do, based on what I have talent for and not going for something that just makes money or is the “it” career.  I went for passion, not what everyone else was doing.

What’s your favorite word?

I have never been asked this question before, but if I had to say, it is determination.  Determination is one of those words you can use as a motivator, as a quality and a definition to live by.

What are you currently reading?

I am currently reading The One-Way Bridge by Cathie Pelletier. Several others are sitting on book shelf.

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Member Monday: Newsletter Updates

Talia Carner, author of Jerusalem Maiden, is expanding her reach and has accepted a speaking invitation in Paris, France in April and an appearance in Jerusalem in July. For details, please check her website, www.TaliaCarner.com

Barbara Foster recently presented A Dangerous Woman: The Life, Loves, and Scandals of  Adah Isaacs Menken to the New York Victorian Society and Fort Lauderdale Women’s Executive Club.

Amy Hill Hearth‘s novel, Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women’s Literary Society (Atria Books, 2012), is a book club pick for Simon & Schuster, a Reader’s Digest Select Edition, and a main selection of the Pulpwood Queens, a book club with 550 chapters. The novel is set in Florida in 1962.  

Lucine Kasbarian‘s The Greedy Sparrow: An Armenian Tale (Marshall Cavendish/ Amazon Children’s Books) won the 2013 Nautilus Silver Award in the Children’s Picture Book category. Formal announcements about all winners will take place at BookExpo America.

Daphne Kalotay, co-president of WNBA-Boston, will be reading from her new book, Sight Reading, at NYC’s Posman Books, Wednesday, June 5, at 7:00PM. (Chelsea Market, 75 9th Avenue.)

Melissa A. Rosati, CPCC now represents the Institut Van Gogh, Auvers-sur-Oise, France, as the Managing Director, Strategic Partnerships, USA. She is organizing a $50 Million Dollar Campaign titled Van Gogh’s Dream for the U.S. market.

Harriet Shenkman won second place in the National WNBA poetry contest for her poem, Mirror, Mirror. Harriet is a Professor Emerita at CUNY who has several published poems and many educational articles.  Her creative writing was honed at the Hudson Valley Poetry Center, the Unterberg Poetry Center and Sarah Lawrence College. She is writing a novel called The Camel Tamer.

Rachel Slaiman has two articles in the print edition of Latin Trends Magazine: Turning Your Home Into an Efficient Office Space and Current and Classics: for stronger finances, body and mind.  Her two newest blogs are Book Discussion: The Economic Development of Latin America since Independence by Jose Antonio Ocampo and Doing Business in Brazil hosted by Latham and Watkins LLP.

Theasa Tuohy‘s novel, The Five O’Clock Follies, has been shortlisted for ForeWord Review’s 2012 Book of the Year Award and nominated by the Oklahoma Center for the Book award for its fiction prize. The harrowing story, set in 1968, of a female correspondent during the Vietnam War, is published by Calliope Press.

Bette Ann Moskowitz will be reading from her new book, The Room at the End of the Hall as part of the Valley Writers, Ink. at the WIRED GALLERY in High Falls, New York, on Friday, May 10th from 7-9 p.m.   Details are on Facebook.com/WiredGallery or www.TheWiredGallery.com

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Member Monday: Introducing Quressa Robinson

by Tqwana Brown

Originally from San Francisco, Quressa Robinson devours whole books in a single day. She has taught University Writing and an introductory fiction class at Columbia. Quressa also worked in Columbia’s Writing Center as a Writing Consultant. She received her MFA from Columbia in Creative Writing with a concentration in Fiction in 2010. She is currently working on a novel, blogging, editing books for an indie publisher, and figuring out digital publishing.

Welcome to the NYC Chapter of the WNBA! How did you become involved with the organization?

I always knew I wanted to be in publishing and knew I needed to be in New York to really make a good effort at finding the right job. After living here for seven years, finishing up my MFA program, and still not having a foot in the door at a publisher, I decided to work on building my network. I found the WNBA listed on bookjobs.com and decided to join.

Tell us more about your job with Hay House, Inc.

I’ve been at Hay House for a year now. It’s a mid-level indie publisher of self-help and inspirational products. I work as an editorial assistant in our company’s New York satellite office. There are only six of us here, and four of us work on the editorial side of things. Because our company is so small, I get more hands-on and advanced level editorial exposure. I’m actually managing my first few projects now. One I’m simply overseeing through the production process and the other I’m working on developmentally editing with the author.

Can you tell us more about your writing? Are you working on anything specific at the moment?

I received my MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Fiction from Columbia a few years ago, so fiction is my thing. I do like writing personal narratives and essays and plan on trying to build my online presence by submitting some ideas to a few online mags that I read frequently.

I’m also at work on a novel. It’s a bit of a coming-of-age story (aren’t all first novels?) about a girl in her mid-twenties. Her mother died in childbirth and her father refuses to tell her anything about her mother. She discovers some love letters to her mother from another man and seeks him out hoping that he’ll have information that he can tell her about what her mother was like and who she was. But, when they meet they develop a damaging symbiotic relationship. I’m just at the beginning state and hoping to have a first draft done by October.

You have the unique perspective of working in the industry. How do you think that will help you as an author?

I’ve learned so much already in my first year in publishing, but I think the most important things I’ve learned about publishing that will help me as an author are all about the sales, PR, and marketing perspective. Seeing writing as a business, not just an art form is an important distinction that many writers, especially fiction writers, struggle with.

It’s also easier to see the emerging trends when you’re working in the industry as opposed to on the outside looking in.

And, I’m working on building my network to include other editors and agents, especially those up-and-coming who are in the same place as I am career-wise. It already makes sense to have those strong bonds as an editor, but as a writer it makes even more sense. It means I won’t be a faceless name when my manuscript crosses their desk, hopefully.

What’s your favorite word?

Achievement

What are you currently reading?

I’m on the Great Group Reads reading committee so my plate is pretty full, but once we’ve completed the process, on my to-read list are A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich, Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan, The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker (which I just found out is being adapted for the big screen), Quiet by Susan Cain, and The Safety of Objects by A. M. Homes.

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Member Monday: Say Hello to Jill Wisoff!

by Tqwana Brown

Jill Wisoff is best known for songs and score for Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse, a Sundance Film Festival winner. A graduate of Bennington College, she has co-starred in film, performed off and off-off-Broadway and in musical stock, and has had screenplays optioned and in development.  She produced, co-wrote and directed the SAG feature film Creating Karma, which won two best feature comedy awards on the festival circuit before its official theatrical opening in Los Angeles. Her documentary about downtown Manhattan after 9/11, The Day After, is in the permanent archives of Tribute New York and the library of the USS New York, built with the steel from the World Trade Center. She is currently writing novels, lives in Greenwich Village with one cat, and has begun a blog at http://www.jillwisoff.com.

How long have you been a member of the WNBA-NYC? How did you get involved with the organization?

I’ve been a member for about a year. I got involved when members of a “sister” organization to which I belong, New York Women in Film and Television (NYWIFT), were invited to sign up for the query roulette.

As an aspiring author, how important are organizations like the WNBA to learning about the industry, getting published, making connections, improving your craft, etc.?

WNBA and similar organizations give grounding to aspiring writers. They disseminate information about jobs and writing workshops. They offer dozens of networking opportunities (as well as a directory). Writing is a solitary path. Many of us spend much of our waking lives doing it.  It’s important at times to babble about our process and reciprocate, to step away from our computers, to share our writing lives with others who have the same passion. WNBA is a wonderful support network that cultivates readers, writers, and the professional industries that service both.

At a seminar on children’s literature, the lively discourse between industry heavyweights, successful authors and aspiring writers, was a real-world education on what sells in that genre. Every month, members are invited to do book reviews of new releases for the WNBA newsletter, The Bookwoman; recently, I had such a review accepted for publishing. I call that an opportunity!

Can you tell us more about your writing? Are you working on anything specific at the moment?

I’m working on a novel and its sequel about teenage girls, best friends from the East Village, who struggle to overcome their legacy of neglect when they’re torn away from New York City.

As a musician, I performed with many who came out of the original New York punk scene. The tragic consequence of the “sex, drugs and rock’n’roll” lifestyle on the children of some is what moved me to write these stories.

What has the transition been like moving from working on screenplays to writing novels?

I didn’t spring into the world a screenwriter like Athena a warrior, full grown and armed from Zeus’s forehead.  I’d studied play-writing and had experience as a director of playwrights, gently guiding them from first readings through polished Equity showcases. I moved into screenwriting following a stint as a film composer. I’d talked a producer into developing a film based on the story of a Maasai warrior and, unable to secure writing talent with a looming deadline to produce or lose rights, volunteered myself. Six weeks later I’d finished my first full-length script.

I intended to produce my next on a minimal budget with minimal actors, on the cheap. I sat down in front of my laptop and something wasn’t clicking. In an odd twist of logic I decided to write a novel first and adapt that to the screenplay. Soon after, I read Kerouac’s On the Road, embarrassed I’d not earlier as it was a staple of my generation. It reset something in my brain chemistry, sort of zapped my “writing-on” button.  From that day forth I would wake up writing, fall asleep writing. The novel became the thing, not the Franken-screenplay I’d planned to extricate in a manner akin to ripping organs from a healthy body.

Unlike playwriting and screenwriting, literary prose is a much vaster, richer and challenging medium.  I’m extremely humbled at the amount of effort, revising, and sheer sweat-work that goes into creating literary fiction. Grammar isn’t the baby thrown out with the bathwater as it can be in a script. I look forward to waking up every day to write. I love it so much I decided to go back to graduate school for my MFA in Creative Writing. I’ve been accepted into the New School, to begin in the fall of 2013, with a concentration in fiction.

You’ve attended Query Roulette for the past 2 years. What were those experiences like? What was the most valuable thing(s) you learned?

I received one-on-one time with well-respected literary agents. I received advice on my pitch, novel excerpt, and what a publisher looks for as far as genre and “voice”. The most valuable thing I learned is to write a pitch so any moron can understand it – to create a hook that’s short and packs a punch. At both Query Roulettes I received an agent offer to submit my work for consideration.

Can you give us a preview of your Bookwoman book review?

“In Ashen Winter, Mike Mullin’s sequel to Ashfall (his well-received first novel of a YA dystopian trilogy about a neo-ice-age) an explosion of the Yellowstone super-volcano has cooled Earth’s atmosphere…In this niveous landscape, sixteen-year-old Iowan, Alex Halprin, living with sister Rebecca on Uncle Paul’s farm in Illinois, ventures forth to find his parents….”

What’s your favorite word?

Pusillanimous. It’s a word I memorized while cramming for the GREs in my last term of college and it stuck; a word for a haughty dowager that would only appear in a fictional world of flounces and petticoats.

What are you currently reading?

The Horned Man by James Lasdun, The Copyeditor’s Handbook by Amy Einsohn, and This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman.

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