Joshua Henkin

April 15, 2008

2008-04-15T16:05:44Z

It's tax day! Here's to hoping there are lots of taxes to be paid next year on book revenues (I need to keep myself off the streets!) In the meantime, reviews, reviews, reviews. It's late, true, but this is certainly a case of better late than never, when it comes from Carlin Romano, the Philadelphia Inquirer book critic and former president of the National Book Critics Circle, and it's as big a rave as this is.

March 4, 2008

2008-03-05T02:44:09Z

Now that my book tour is over and I'm back to some semblance of normal life, one of the things that I've been doing a lot of is visiting book groups that have been discussing MATRIMONY. Mothertalk, and MATRIMONY was recently selected by the online book club at Ladies Home Journal as its book of the month for March, and that discussion is getting under way too. If you want to join these discussions, or merely wish to see what's being discussed, click on the links.]]>

Monday April 7, 2008

2008-01-03T03:02:01Z

Get Lit @ the Gershman Y Conversation with Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer Book Critic admission: $15 7PM Gershman Y 401 South Broad Street Philadelphia, PA 215-446-3021

November 29, 2007

2007-11-30T03:03:31Z

Some really nice news: MATRIMONY was just named one of the Top 100 Books of 2007 by the New York Times. For the complete list, see the December 2 issue of the New York Times Book Review. And check in next week, when I'll be starting to blog again much more regularly. Really. I promise.

November 12, 2007

2007-11-12T15:11:23Z

I'm back after a long hiatus, thanks to a very long book tour. Things are settling down (sort of), so this blog should start to hear from me more regularly soon. In the meantime, though, I wanted to let you know that I'm the guest blogger all day today on the Elegant Variation. I hope you'll log on and participate in the discussion. http://www.marksarvas.blogs.com

October 14, 2007

2007-10-15T16:29:12Z

I've started my book tour and it's a whirlwind. If it's Sunday, it must be Madison. I'm in Chicago tonight, Manhattan tomorrow night, Brooklyn on Wednesday night, and Cambridge on Thursday night. I'll blog more about the tour in upcoming days, and if you want to see me when I'm in town, look up the tour under "Events." For now, though, I want to mention some good news. here. And how about this week's review in People? I can't find a link for that, so I'm pasting below. And more good news. MATRIMONY's been out for less than two weeks and it's already gone back to reprint. So get 'em while they're hot! People Magazine, October 22, 2007: "College Freshmen beware. Those first friendships and flings can change the rest of your life. In Henkin's charming novel, waspy Manhattanite Julian Wainwright arrives in '86 at Graymont College, befriends brash Carter Heinz and falls for Jewish Mia Mendelsohn. MATRIMONY follows both the friendship and the marriage over the years, through loss, betrayal and reconciliation. Henkin keeps you reading with original characters, witty dialogue and a view that marriage, for all its flaws, is worth the trouble."]]>

October 3, 2007

2007-10-03T15:23:22Z

Matrimony, though I said I changed many of the details. But which details, and why? What's the role of autobiography in fiction? ]]> How do you balance lived experience with imagination in order to come up with art? I teach writing to undergraduate and MFA students, and that's one of the questions that I get asked most often. Should you be writing about yourself? How personal should it be? There's of course no easy formula (if only there were!), but I think there are ways to think about the question that can be helpful to people starting to write. Among the students I've taught, I've seen a whole lot of talent, but also at times a real underconfidence (What writer isn't insecure? Believe me, that feeling never ends, even if you encounter some success), this feeling that you're young and what do you have that's important to write about, that could interest anyone but you and your friends. There's a grain of truth there, in that I think it takes time even for a really talented writer to mature. You don't see eight-year-old writing prodigies the way you see eight-year-old violin prodigies or eight-year-old ballerinas and figure skaters. It's a different learning curve, and some people think that as long as you're under fifty you're still considered a young writer. At the same time, I like to remind my students of what Flannery O'Connor said--that anyone who has lived until the age of ten has enough material to write about for a lifetime. The question, though, is how to turn that material into art? Do you write what you know or what you don't know? That's always the question a writer faces, and it's the question my students ask me. And what I like to say is that you should write what you know about what you don't know or what you don't know about what you know. I know--that sounds like some nightmare GRE problem. But conceptually, it's not as complicated as it sounds. Writing what you know about what you don't know is taking a situation that's unfamiliar to you and imagining yourself in it, and writing what you don't know about what you know is taking a situation that's familiar to you and imagining someone different from you experiencing it. The idea is to have the benefit of both closeness and distance. You want what you're writing about to be close enough to your own experience that there's heart in it but not so close that you aren't able to realize the ways you can use imagination to get at a deeper, more authentic truth. It's this balance between closeness and distance that's essential to me as a writer and that I try to convey to my students.

October 2, 2007

2007-10-02T04:08:52Z

It's official! Publication date has arrived! Get your party hats and streamers and pop the champagne corks. Go out to the bookstore and buy a copy. Buy another for a friend. But two, while you're at it. The holidays aren't that far off. Buzz has been great thus far. Matrimony has been selected as a Booksense pick for October and a Borders Original Voices pick. Michael Cunningham calls Matrimony "a beautiful book." The Washington Post this past Sunday called it "truly an up-all-night read." There have been great write-ups already in Vanity Fair, GQ, and the Phildelphia Inquirer; the L.A. Times is reviewing it this coming Sunday, and there's lots more to come...

October 1, 2007

2007-10-01T03:28:16Z

By the end of Matrimony, my two main characters, Julian and Mia, are in their late thirties and have just had a baby, but in some way for me the heart of the book--at least the inspiration for it--comes when they're much younger, when they're eighteen and freshmen in college. ]]> Matrimony.

2007-09-25T23:58:59Z

Download Matrimony Reading Group Guide (PDF)

September 19, 2007

2007-09-20T00:26:38Z

I'm blogging again after a hiatus caused by the start of school and by the Jewish holidays. I had my first event last night, though it's still a couple of weeks before the publication of MATRIMONY, and it wasn't a reading but a panel. are me; they make me who I am. Being Jewish on some level probably affects everything I do, but I don't see it as a question of being conscious of being Jewish as I do those things. I was raised in an observant Jewish home, and one of the things I said last night during the panel is that, as a novelist, I am very interested in time, and perhaps that grows out of my relationship to time when I was a child. I associated time with the start of the sabbath on Friday evening and the end of it on Saturday night, the way the sabbath is timed down to the minute, changing over the course of the year as the time of sundown changes. Apparently, when I was six or seven and it was the night we switched to Daylight Saving Time, I said to my parents, "Do non-Jews also switch their clocks?" But is a concern with time a singularly Jewish phenomenon? Is every writer who is interested in time therefore a Jewish writer? There was a lot of talk on the panel about whether Jews are outsiders or insiders, how Jewish literature has changed over time, and, as would be expected, we didn't come to a consensus. I myself am suspicious of measuring Jewish writing and Jewish writers by the Jewish content of their novels. My first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson, was very directly a novel about Jewish identity. Matrimony, though it has some material about Jewish identity, is less directly about that subject. But is it a less Jewish novel? I'm not convinced it is. There's an intermarriage in Swimming Across the Hudson, and there's an intermarriage in Matrimony. In the first book it's the cause of considerable anguish and discussion, and in the second book it's not even remarked upon. That's not because I forgot to do so, nor is it because I've become a different kind of Jew--"less" Jewish than I was when I wrote the first book. No, I was writing about different kinds of Jews and different kinds of gentiles in the two books. Every character, every novel is different, and the writer must take what comes to him and run with it; above all, he must be true to his characters. That, to my mind, is the fiction writer's principal task. ]]>

August 29, 2007

2007-08-29T13:17:18Z

More thoughts about the teaching of writing as the school year begins. If you ask anyone who has been in a writing workshop--and there are millions of such people now--what the main lesson they learned is, they will say, "Show, don't tell." This is unfortunate because "show, don't tell" is a lie. It's not that there isn't any truth to it. Fiction, of course, is a dramatic art, and you do need to show things, to dramatize them, to appeal to the reader's senses. In the first writing workshop I ever enrolled in as a student, more than twenty years ago now, a student wrote, "An incredible feeling of happiness washed over her," to which the professor said, "First, get rid of that 'washed over' cliche, and second, if in the course of an entire novel you can evoke an incredible feeling of happiness, then you've really accomplished something." The professor was right. To say that someone is incredibly happy is a "trust-me" sentence, and though the reader may want to trust you, s/he won't. To say that an apple is "lovely" is not the same thing as evoking that loveliness, and one of the things a good fiction writer does is evoke beauty, loveliness, and other such things so that the reader actually feels them. It doesn't follow from this, however, that a writer should never tell things, that his or her job is simply to show. Telling is an essential part of fiction. I will elaborate on this point the next time I blog, but for now, suffice it to say that fiction is different from movies and TV, it does different kinds of things, and as someone who teaches writing I see the unfortunate consequences of people listening too carefully to the "show, don't tell" edict--lots of unnecessary description, a filmic sensibility that doesn't belong in fiction writing (you can see the camera panning), too many adjectives--you know, the typing sentence, the one that includes every letter in the alphabet--"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs," which is a perfectly good sentence if you want to learn to type but not a particularly good sentence if you're a fiction writer. OK, more soon on this and related subjects.

Expanded Books Interview

2007-08-02T02:59:23Z

Contests

2007-07-29T17:17:18Z

GENERAL CONTEST: Sign up on my mailing list below and be eligible to receive one of five free signed copies of Matrimony. LIBRARIANS CONTEST: If you are a librarian, email me with your name, library, and library address and be eligible to have your library receive one of five free signed copies of Matrimony. READING GROUPS CONTEST: Sign up on my reading groups form and be eligible to receive free copies of Matrimony for your reading group as well as a world-famous Junior's Cheesecake from Brooklyn delivered to your group on the day of the discussion.

Welcome to the Blog

2007-07-25T16:50:04Z

As August comes to a close, I'm inaugurating my blog. It's less than six weeks before the publication date for MATRIMONY, and I'm very busy with preparations for that, but the school year is also impending--in fact, it has already begun at Brooklyn College's MFA program and is about to begin at Sarah Lawrence's MFA program, the two places where I teach--and I have to admit that I'm getting my usual feeling of looking forward to a new class, which I know a lot of people will think is crazy, but it's what happens to me every August. I've been thinking a lot about the teaching of writing, in part because I recently wrote an essay called "In Defense of the MFA," which will appear in the November/December issue of Poets and Writers. ]]> Poets and Writers come November.