Tanya Chernov

Every now and again I come across someone who, tickled by my profession of writing, reveals that he/she has harbored thoughts of “getting a book published and making a bunch of money.” I want to tread carefully here because I never, ever wish to discourage anyone from pursuing an artistic inclination, however I can’t help but squirm with great irritation at the widely held beliefs that 1) Writing is easy enough to just pick up one day on a whim, 2) Publishing a book happens all the time, so how hard can it be, right? And 3) Writing a book = making money. These notions are fallacies, I am sorry to say, making those of us who are persistent and passionate enough to really make an earnest effort to do the work of a writer a much heartier bunch of folk than most would assume. Almost anyone can writer, but there’s a reason not just anyone can be a writer.

Again, I do want to be clear on what kind of line I’m drawing here and where I’m drawing it: I think everyone could benefit from experiencing the written word, in some form or another. The act of writing has long been good medicine for the soul, and there is something truly cathartic about processing a thought into words and seeing it suddenly exist in tangible form before your eyes. Anyone who truly wishes to commit themselves (pun intended) to the art of writing has my full and unabashed support. But that commitment to do the work of a writer is significantly more intense than most non-writer types could ever guess. Not only must you constantly study the craft, read and absorb as much literature as your brain can hold, sacrifice nearly all spare time and money to support the career, teach and speak and publish to build enough of a marketing base to keep your head above water, but you must do all of that in the face of constant doubt and rejection. And unless you are Stephen King or a celebrity author, you do it all for peanuts. I haven’t even mentioned the emotional turmoil and strife that, historically speaking, attach themselves to the life of a writer.

  Read the rest of this entry »

To say that a writer’s life is full of surprises would be the hyperbole of my adult life. To say instead that writing consistently knocks me on my ass in the most wonderful and unpredictable ways and in doing so reminds me that, why yes, I think I do believe in some greater cosmic force in this life, might be a more appropriate statement.

Fifteen years ago, I took a trip toNew Orleanswith my dad to do some camp recruiting and also to enjoy that region of the country in all its pre-Katrina splendor. While we were there, we ate the most incredible foods, soaked in the rich culture, and spent a good deal of our time exploring our shared interest in photography, taking pictures that even now still decorate my walls with timeless intrigue and beauty. Dad and I loved travelling together whenever we had a chance, and I recall that particular trip being the most memorable because I was finally maturing enough, a junior in high school, to really participate in intelligent conversations with my dad on a peer-to-peer level.

  Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been ten years. Ten. Ten years since my father died. Ten years living as the person I am now, the person I was made into when he died. Ten years of missing him, ten years of wondering if he knew I loved him or if he knew how big the hole in me would be when he left. Ten years without him to talk to, confide in. Ten years knowing that the only person who would ever love me the way he did will never be coming back. Ten years as a fatherless child.

Every year when December hits, I can’t help but return in my mind to the winter, now ten long years ago, when my dad died. The seemingly endless Wisconsin winter, the days and nights spent at his bedside, the constant fear and turmoil. It’s hard to believe that ten of these anniversaries, these nostalgic melancholias have passed, each one a little different. Some of them have snuck up on me, while others loomed in the foreground like some long-awaited and predestined winter storm. I suppose I wasn’t sure what to expect this year, but at the very least I knew it wouldn’t be easy.

As this past Friday, December 16^th approached, I planned to lie low for the day and maybe watch Dad’s favorite movie, Jeremiah Johnson and maybe even build a fire though it never really gets cold enough here in Seattle to actually need one. Usually on Dad’s birthday or the anniversary of his death, I try to do things that he loved doing—watch Star Trek and Jeremiah Johnson, eat spicy Thai food, play with the dog outside, do some writing and reading. It makes me feel good to find some joy in what would otherwise be a devastating day by carrying on the silly traditions that made him so happy, and it makes me feel twice as good when, every year, I realize that those are the very same things that make me so happy in my everyday life.

  Read the rest of this entry »

Whoever’s job it is to come up with collective nouns for birds must have a hilariously good time. A parliament of owls. A nye of pheasants. An unkindness of ravens. Meanwhile, a  collection of starlings is called a murmuration.

                                   -Ezra Klein, The WashingtonPost

Sitting at my desk this morning and running through all my start-of-day emails and Internet rounds, I stumbled upon a video that snapped me right out of my early morning, overslept-by-45-minutes haze. I saw the reenactment, caught on and made into a lovely piece of film (view it below), of one of my own experiences that I later captured in a poem (read it below), as I—a poet—am wont to do. I inched closer to my monitor, both hands resting on it’s tripod feet against my desk, angling it and shifting it so I could see as best as one can see things on an old desktop computer in a fluorescent-lit office building. It was breathtaking to see my own descriptions of that experience and my own memories of it, come back to life on a screen in front of me, breathtaking in that truest, most literal sense of the word. Magnificent.

I felt an immediate need to get outside. I feel this way often, working my day job inside a dark little cubicle on the seventh floor of an office building that could be any office building. What dim and damp light makes its way from the mid-NovemberSeattlecloud cover often just barely gives the windows of our office a blueish glow, so that the only light I see by is artificial, hollow and plastic in tone. The recycled air gets hot, and stuffy in the afternoons, giving me the intense urge to at least just press my cheek against the cold glass separating us from the outdoors. And when I get home, throw on my wellies and wool hat, clip on Mona’s leash and head back out the door, I feel the evening wind, the kiss of winter, pressing against my cheeks. Then I can breathe again, purge the office stuffiness out of my lungs, and look up to the sky to see what I can see.

Often, I walk during my lunch at work. I’ll go with a friend, or I’ll go by myself, minding no bother to the rain or cold, just to get a break in the day, a dose of the outside into my body. It isn’t much, walking through the city, but it’s something. Indeed, I’ve spent the vast majority of my life living in and loving the outdoors, feeling equal parts capable and challenged by outdoor recreation endeavors. Hell, I spent well over a month traveling by sea kayak through the southeast coast ofAlaskaat the age of 17. I was raised in the wilderness of the Northwoods of Wisconsin, taught to appreciate and respect mother nature. As a child, I spent days on end just enjoying the woods and water—no TV, no video games, no distraction or busywork.

Read the rest of this entry »

Forgive my long absence from the blog, friends. I’ve been taking a nice break from talking about writing in order to actually do some writing. It was as delicious as it was stressful, as torturous as it was satisfying. Facing a very tight deadline to hand my manuscript into my editor at Skyhorse Publishing, I had no choice but to get down to some serious business.

Working on those edits, pulling eight—yes eight—all-nighters in a row, I wasn’t so sure I could make it through to the other side of yet another no-holds barred revision of a manuscript I’ve been working on for nearly ten years. But I did make it, and in fact I’m really rather proud of the work I did during those endless nights.

I learned something about myself as a writer then: I am a warrior. I am a badass. I am a tiger in a hobbit’s body. I am a fierce protector of social justice and preservation of those few remaining, however Liliputian, vestiges of intelligencia and human kindness that cling to life in the modern world. I am a forager. A scavenger fish. An island. A one-woman show. A Holly Go-Lightly with bigger boobs, more common sense but equally poor history with men. I am a girl who wishes she had paid more attention in Latin class in high school and college. I am the kind of girl who takes Latin classes. I am the kind of girl who writes about the experience of taking Latin. At my very core, I am a writer. I can’t minimize or deny that part of my identity any longer, no matter how tough it gets, how much doubt I have, or where the process takes me.

  Read the rest of this entry »

Been thinking about my dad a lot lately, feeling his presence around me pretty heavily as I move forward to publish the book I wrote for and about him. Of course, I think about him every day so having him on my mind is nothing new. But this is such a bittersweet thing, to wish I could share this success with him, and knowing all the while that I wouldn’t have found the path to this sort of success had he lived. My dear friend Victoria, grieving the loss of her own mother, asked me a really difficult question about this very issue just a few months ago.

Victoria came for a visit to Seattle last spring, and on her last night in town we went out for a fun sushi dinner. A couple of sake bottles in,Victoria asked me one of the most difficult questions of my life. She leaned across the table and said, “If you could have your dad back, but be the person you were when he was still alive, would you do it?” The easy answer is “yes.” Yes, I would do anything in the whole world to get him back if even just for one minute, one last conversation, one more hug.

Read the rest of this entry »

About a month ago, I stood in my kitchen with dearest friend and literary super-agent extraordinaire, Gordon Warnock, drinking beers, washing dishes, and shootin’ the shit the way we do. While we cooked a simple dinner seasoned with goodies from my mid-summer garden, we had an honest, realistic conversation about the state of my memoir, which Gordon had been dutifully and tirelessly pitching to publishers for two years to no avail; we’d had no offers on the book in all that time, though I’d managed to set an agency record for the number of publishers who wanted, but then ultimately passed on the manuscript. It was time to face reality, and I knew it.

Long since had passed those dreams of having my booked picked up a mega-house like Harper Collins or Simon & Schuster, earning seven-figure advances, and making the New York bestseller list (hey–a girl can dream). Though I never stopped believing in the value of the story, I was prepared to face the possibility of not seeing my life’s dream accomplished—at least not this round. Gordon and I once again promised each other to keep doing what we could to promote the book, for a little while longer at least, and then went back to our halibut, beers, and Jeopardy.

Over the next few days, I indulged in some serious existential crisis-ing, allowing myself to question my place in the writing world, doubt the quality of my writing, and generally feel thoroughly, pitifully sorry for myself. But after a few days of this nonsense, I snapped out of it and remembered something important. I remembered that I love writing (warts and all, almost 100% of the time) and that just because my memoir wouldn’t be my debut book, didn’t mean it wouldn’t still happen for me some day, somehow.

Most writers have at least one book in the drawer before getting a book deal, and I was certainly prepared to have a shitty manuscript (or several) rendered unusable and tossed aside during my career, but I just didn’t want it to be this book sitting in the darkness of that proverbial failure drawer. The story of this book—my family’s story—is an important one to tell, and I’ve built my life around it; seeing it fail inevitably rattled my sense of self-worth.

Still, I love being a writer, and if continuing on this path meant letting go of my memoir, at least for the time being, I was willing to do it. On my way home from work that Friday evening, I decided that I would do my best to let it go, place it longingly in that drawer, and hope I’d be able to get it out to the world at some later, more established point in my career. God willing.

But later that day, that very same day, I got an offer on my book. Gordon called, I cried, and suddenly the whole world turned upside down in the most delicious way. Just like that. I blew out the candles on my 30^th birthday cake knowing that I’d done it—I was going to be a published author, straight-up legit and for realz. And then another offer came in, and for a glorious moment in time, there were several publishers fight over my work. I feel incredibly lucky to have found such a good home in Skyhorse Publishing, and can’t wait to represent their name in the world.

So today, my dear friends and family and readers and colleagues and internet folk, I am so thrilled and proud to shout from the digital rooftops that A Real Emotional Girl will be published in the Fall of 2012, made possible by Julie Matysik at Skyhorse Press. My book, at long last, will exist! In hardcover, no less…

  Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t say that I’d want to write every book this way, but living with my current project as long and intensely as I have been these last two years has been incredibly fascinating. At every turn, just when I think I could not possibly be more firm or confident in my next step, something seems to always pop up and steer me otherwise. And even though these arterial turns can be rather exhausting, the change or evolution that results from that change in direction is always far superior to whatever my original plan would have been.

Stephen King says that “Good books don’t give up all their secrets at once.” I think he is correct about this in two separate aspects, actually. Good books don’t give up all their secrets at once for both the reader and, as it happens most often in my experience, for the writer as well.

The kernel of the idea that eventually mutated and grew into what is now my nearly completed novel has taken quite a few turns since it first appeared in my imagination almost 20 years ago. But since that initial inception, the theme and overarching message of the book and the whole series (it’s gonna be a trilogy—if I can muster the courage and persistance) has remained largely intact and untouched. Until now.

  Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I received some news that is both good and bad, and in the complex amalgam of emotional responses that I experienced upon hearing said news, I realized that my life would never again be the same. I’ve learned that there are all different kinds of loss—some big, some small, some real, and some imagined. I suppose this one is rather small on the scale of life, but it sent me reeling nonetheless.

I’ve been pretty vocal about my lifelong insomnia, especially here on this blog, because consistently getting only two hours of sleep a night is pretty tough to ignore; sleep deprivation is no joke, my friends. Aside from feeling exhausted, nauseated, dizzy, unfocused, and creatively impotent, I noticed that in a really bad bout of insomnia, my body often issued it’s own form of protest by succumbing to a malady of ailments. My immune system tends to shut down pretty significantly after about eight days of insomnia.

Of course, I have tried just about every homeopathic and homespun remedy, have humored every well-intending piece of advice, all to no lasting avail. In the end, I had resigned myself to the fact that if I want to sleep like a normal human being (i.e. more than two hours each night) I would have to take sleeping pills every single night for the rest of my life. This all seemed pretty standard practice according to my doctors, and I really had adjusted to the routine of taking my pill every night (a non-addictive, low dose medication—totally safe) and waiting for it to kick in.

My cousin, Jeff, who is a chiropractor and nutritionist as well as the founder of North Suburban Wellness in Illinois (and my new hero!), suspected that there might be an identifiable, underlying cause of this long-running insomnia. After discussing my sleeping habits with Jeff during my last visit home, he ordered some tests for me. Just as he so skillfully suspected, it turns out that I have a cortisol imbalance, wherein my cortisol levels shoot up between 9 pm and 1 am every night, with great consistency; just when my awake-time chemicals should be dipping down for the night, I have this crazy second surge of them, which is why I am always my most productive and creative self during those vampire hours, and why I have trouble falling and staying asleep. Sounds alarming, but this is actually great news because I finally have an answer–all those sleepless nights and fruitless visits to every doctor under the sun might very well be behind me. This cortisol imbalance can be treated and monitored, which will hopefully resolve some or most of my sleep issues (nightmares and such are another matter entirely). Essentially, my circadian rhythm needs to be manually controlled with medication, and this is—to my great delight—entirely achievable. 
 
However, the underlying cause for my adrenal glands to be doing releasing the cortisol hormones so unnaturally is, lo and behold, a rare kind of allergy to gluten. Gluten?! I. Am. Devastated. All my favorite foods! In the long run, of course I know that this is good news because I will likely feel a whole lot better, sleep like a normal person, and loose some weight if I cut out gluten as best as I can. Still, I can’t deny how saddened I am to have to significantly decrease the intake of basically everything I like to eat. Once I complete an expanded food allergy test to determine the exact severity of my gluten intolerance, I’ll know a little more clearly just how strict I’ll need to be in my new lifestyle. For now, I am willing to embrace this gluten-free lifestyle, and am indeed enthusiastic about giving it an earnest go. To be able to put a label of an actual medical condition on something so mysterious and elusive feels incredibly validating, and the thought of getting a full night of sleep without narcotic sleeping aids certainly has me feeling motivated.

  Read the rest of this entry »

Folks, I have been stalled in my writing. Ugh. Groan. Grumble, grumble. I loathe these phases, They don’t come too often, (knock on wood kinahora pooh-pooh, as we superstitious Jews like to say to keep away the bad juju) but they are never good–these times when I can’t seem to get any momentum going in my writing for one reason another. Sure, sometimes I am just plain lazy or tired or whatnot, but it’s another matter entirely when I have the urge and the gusto to write, but find myself stuck anyhow. I’ve said before that on occasion, I find myself in what short forms writer and good friend, Bruce Holland Rogers, calls “the mouth of the Black Dog.” I am not quite in the actual mouth of the Black dog just at the moment, but the Black Dog and I are certainly squared off, testing each other’s nerves over some juicy piece of meat. And I’d like to whoop that dog’s ass clear out of the room.

The last month and a half has been even crazier than usual, which is really saying something. I’ve taken over for my boss while she is on her three-plus months of maternity leave, so my workload has completely changed. Suddenly my days are now filled with meetings and managerial matters galore, and I come home more exhausted than ever, usually working much longer days than I’m accustomed to. I’ve also just finished teaching another poetry workshop for the Los Angeles Review Workshop Series, and was kept quite happily busy in those endeavors. I was sad to see my wonderfully talented students go off into the poetry world on their own, free of training wheels and my constant, encouraging instructions. *sniff*

We’ve put another issue of LAR to bed, and I can’t tell you what a grand feeling it is to close up shop for one short month, and let my brain take a much-needed respite from the never-ending slush pile. Needless to say, I haven’t been able to find a great deal of time for my own creative writing lately, and this is a great and terrible bother. There were more than a few nights when, as much as I tried, I just couldn’t bring myself to sit down in front of the computer again to write, after spending the whole livelong day staring at a monitor, with the sun shining gloriously outside. Ok, so maybe the sun wasn’t really shining because we’ve had one hell of a late Seattle summer, but you get the idea.

So here I am, with an entire month of near-freedom ahead of me. For the month of July, my only responsibilities (besides dog, car, rent, bills, etc.) are my day job and my novel. I can’t even remember the last time my schedule was so clear. I realize, of course, that most people live their lives this way—going to work, coming home, and then hanging out or doing whatever they please. But this is not how I live. No, sir. There is always something else to work on—something writing-adjacent, a whole second day’s worth of work to fit into my evening hours.

  Read the rest of this entry »