Debuting DEFUNCT: a hand-bound, letterpress book

/dəˈfəNGkt/

no longer living, existing, or functioning

Defunct: A Resurrection is a book of my paintings and mini-essays about all things defunct, from my vintage Polaroid camera to my Ellis Island ancestors. It is being letterpress printed and hand bound in a limited run of 60 copies by the Book Arts Collaborative in Muncie, Indiana. It will be released this Friday, April 12, 2019 as part of their Interrobang festival!

The prototype of the book with the awesome “word Coptic” binding. Rachel reported spending 2.5 hours making this binding!

Who remembers typing on a typewriter? Watching filmstrips in school? Dialing a rotary phone?

There are objects that become such a part of our daily lives that they are embedded into our memories through sensory experience long after they’ve been replaced with the latest technology. And seeing, touching, or hearing the object again seems to transport us back in time.

Printing presses are a link to our past. When I was invited to give a reading at Ball State University in fall 2017, one of my first questions was, “Can I visit the Book Arts Collaborative while I’m there?” I’d read about it online and, having taken a letterpress workshop in NYC, was eager to see this makers’ space for book arts and letterpress printing. I was smitten from the start. A few months later when Prof. Rai Peterson asked if the students could make a book of my writing and paintings, I could barely contain my excitement.

I wasn’t originally sure what the focus of the book would be, but when I looked back at my daily paintings, I realized how often I returned to a particular subject: the vintage objects I keep in my home. My 1940s phone, 1950s camera, 1960s pencil sharpener, 1970s globe. These once-functional items don’t serve much of a purpose anymore; they are defunct. But they are alive to me. They carry messages from the past: reminders that things can be beautifully designed and well made; warnings that we are making and consuming too rapidly.

• 

  Paging through the prototype before text was added. My 1960s pencil sharpener has a face!

• 

  Painting of a mysterious postcard written by my ancestor from Belfast in the 1920s.

• 

  My 1972 globe; my 1940s phone.

And what better mode of publication for a book celebrating defunct people, places, and things than letterpress?

The title page and epigraph after they were printed and before the students “killed the chase” (returned the letters to the cases).

In both content and form, this book is a meditation on materiality and ephemerality; on the objects we love and the stories we tell. It is a celebration of the handmade, the skilled trade, the human touch.

Book Arts Collaborative and Rob and Kim at Tribune Showprint Posters have resurrected defunct letterpress machines, salvaged them, and made them functional again.

One of the greatest aspects of this whole experience is that I feel like an honorary member of Book Arts Collaborative! I have loved spending time with Rai and the students, and witnessing the students’ excitement and pride as they learn new skills and old techniques, make amazing books and journals by hand, and work together to run a business.

They have all devoted hours and hours to this book, and have given my paintings and words the most beautiful home I could imagine. I can’t wait to celebrate with them at Interrobang this week!

Here are the students working on a Saturday! They’re almost finished!

Book Launch Party!

for The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová! There will be Czech beer, snacks provided by Evil Czech Brewery, and trippy video footage of Prague. Thursday, 11/17/16 at 7pm at Langlab in South Bend, Indiana.

“Parker Ervick has transported me to Prague and shown the blending of fairy tales, history, and cultures laying the groundwork for Kafka’s surrealism (and exported far away, magic realism). With a touch of her magic, Parker Ervick plays with the shrouds of mystery surrounding Božena’s life and origins.”

– Josip Novakovich
author of April Fool’s Day, finalist Man Booker International 2013

“the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war”

Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.

James Baldwin

On election day I was weepy all morning. My Facebook feed was full of images of friends in pantsuits and suffragette pins, of women bringing their sons and daughters to vote, of Susan B. Anthony’s stickered grave. I didn’t expect to be so moved by the potential history-making moment of electing a woman President, but I was.

Election night was obviously a very different story. I had an essay about women’s lives – how we write and talk about them – scheduled to be published the next day at LitHub, and I was asked to write an introduction that linked it to the election. Some protest words. Here it is:

How We Talk About Women’s Lives

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s life is a case study in the limits imposed on even the smartest, most driven of women. Arkansans had never seen a First Lady like her, and she quickly learned to get rid of her glasses, use some hairspray, pluck her eyebrows, and take her husband’s last name (she had kept her own until then). Today, the most experienced Presidential candidate, man or woman, has lost to a philandering, pussy-grabbing, name-calling, interrupting, disability-mocking former pageant owner.

But perhaps Hillary Clinton’s life narrative is the true embodiment of Miss USA: the most qualified woman is forced to compromise her goals, change her name, and smile prettier—and she still gets called a Nasty Woman.

I wrote this essay a month ago, as the tapes of Donald Trump’s comments about grabbing women were being revealed, as women were coming forward with sexual assault lawsuits. Back when it seemed impossible that he would be President of the United States of America. All of which is to say: this essay about how we talk about women’s lives reveals only a fraction of the fury I feel today.

* * * *

Growing up I had a boy’s life. Or least that’s how I think of it now. I played co-ed soccer and basketball. I was the first one picked for gym teams. I could throw a perfect spiral, and I kicked home runs in cul-de-sac kickball. In college I was goalie and MVP of a nationally ranked Division I soccer team. But a year after I graduated from college, I got married, and a year after that I got pregnant. My life as a woman had begun.

The rest of the article is at LitHub.

Na zdraví! Publication day for ‘The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová’

The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová by Kelcey Parker Ervick
is one of the least bitter, most loving books I have read in a long time,
and it’s beautifully made.

– Kate Bernheimer
author of How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales

Still Life with Books and Beer

 

Today is publication day for The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová! My journeys in the Czech Republic and Slovakia took me to this book, and this book has taken me on its own journey. It’s my first book-length work of nonfiction, and it includes a series of postcards I wrote to Němcová about my travels, my Czech language class, my Slovakian family, and, well, my failing marriage. I quote from my favorite Prague-based letter-writers: Franz Kafka’s Letters to Milena, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, Bohumil Hrabal’s Letters to Dubenka, and Vaclav Havel’s Letters to Olga.

What I am probably most amazed about is that this book also includes collages and paintings I made, published in beautiful full color. The first two here are images from my travels to Česká Skalice, where Božena Němcová grew up. I was lost, and these were the not very helpful signs. The third image is of a photo on a bulletin board at Shakespeare and Sons in Prague that addresses anxieties one might feel about publishing a strange hybrid beast of a book such as mine.

But you can help make the book a bestseller! It is now available for purchase from Rose Metal Press, Small Press Distribution (SPD, where it is a Handpicked selection, 20% off in November), Amazon (ugh, this will update soon!), Amazon’s Kindle (live and ready!), etc. It costs $17.95, which is pretty amazing considering the color images.

If you read and like it, please consider posting a review on Amazon, Goodreads, etc. If you’re even thinking of reading it, you can mark it as “want-to-read” on Goodreads. All this helps libraries and other potential readers know about the book, and make it an even-better-seller.

I want to end with a major thanks to Abby Beckel and Kathleen Rooney at Rose Metal Press. I’ll say more in a future post, but they did SO MUCH GOOD WORK  make this book the beautiful object that it is. And thanks to Heather Butterfield for her stunning design work.

Celebrating The Guineveres by Sarah Domet

Fifteen years ago, a group of unpublished, aspiring writers met in McMicken Hall at the University of Cincinnati and spent the next several years drafting and discussing stories, reading and analyzing literary texts, drinking and smoking, dissertating and job-marketing. One by one we got jobs and moved away and kept writing and started publishing, and whenever we can, we get together to celebrate one another’s accomplishments (and catch up on our personal lives!).

Last night was one of those nights of celebration, in this case of Sarah Domet’s debut novel, The Guineveres, which has been featured in, oh, you know: People, Elle, O. Magazine, and, last week, in the NY Times book review, which called it “deft and lovely.”

To which one might add, smart and magical and IMPORTANT in its emphasis on the lives of a group of girls at a transformative time of their lives. (I think of the line from Kathryn Davis’s Hell: “Two adolescent girls on a hot summer night—hardly the material of great literature, which tends to endow all male experience […] with universal radiance… Mightn’t we then permit a single summer in the lives of two bored girls to represent an essential stage in the history of the universe?”) Sarah endows her Guineveres with universal radiance, and the lives of girls is great literature indeed.

As we toasted several times last night: Cheers to The Guineveres!

I have a book trailer! (how I made my book trailer)

First, I tried to get someone else to make my book trailer.

When that didn’t work, I got other people to HELP me make my book trailer. As I writer, I don’t often get to collaborate on creative projects, and it turned out to be a blast.

But you should watch it first:

Now that you have seen the trailer and know that The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová is about a Czech fairy tale writer, you will understand why it is important that I happened to be in Prague this summer taking students on a study abroad trip. I was accompanied by my gentleman friend, whom I dragged around the city with a camera, and he helped me film moving shots of still statues (check out the opening pan up), and still shots of moving statues (Kafka’s swiveling head at minute 1:05!). We got footage on trams and of trams, on bridges and of them. We got a lot of footage.

Next, I wrote a script. Then rewrote it a few more times.

In the meantime, I contacted the Indiana University South Bend Instructional Media team and asked, “Can somebody please help me make a book trailer?” And they were like, “Sure, we can do it.”

Joel laid the ground rules. Joe would record the voices. Sky went to work on sorting through the video footage.

But we still didn’t have any background music to set the tone.

One night my gentleman friend and I watched a weird German movie, The Strange Little Cat, and we loved the music. So I did what you do: I googled the band and emailed the record company asking permission to use the music in my trailer. No answer. I wrote again. This time I got a response from Kim at Monotreme Records: “Yes, that should work!”

A few more email exchanges, a small fee, and the next thing I knew I had the rights to that hauntingly awesome music that plays throughout: “Pulchritude” by Thee More Shallows.

Meanwhile, we recorded the voices, which include my daughter (the first and last voice), my gentleman friend, and me. Sky was making great progress on the video editing, and the next thing I knew it was almost done. We just needed some audio for the credits.

Luckily, back in Prague, when I filmed Božena’s grave at the National Cemetery, I recorded the church bells as they rang and rang throughout the cemetery.

Did you watch all the way to the end? The bells are so beautiful.

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The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová is now available for pre-order at Rose Metal Press. Free shipping!

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Letters to Dead Authors: Jac Jemc to Ellen Raskin

How does a writer go about constructing such an elaborate puzzle, pacing out the clues without it feeling cheap, tying in character names without hitting the reader over the head with the answer?

Dear Ellen Raskin,

I wanted to write you a note of gratitude for writing The Westing Game, because it felt like a real milestone of a book for me when I was a kid. Even though it was short, it felt challenging and it built my confidence in a major way. I felt ready to read anything after that. But then I got nervous.

What if I’m misremembering? What if the book is full of racism and weak female characters and I was too trapped in the story to notice when I was 9 or however old I was when I read it? I mean, let’s be honest, I’ve only started noticing that sort of stuff in the past decade after years of looking, only now am I beginning to see some of it. Even a whole grade before The Westing Game, when I read Jean Marzollo’s Soccer Sam, whose purpose it is to talk about accepting people from other cultures, I was like, “We can all like something new!” I didn’t get that it was about racism. I was oblivious, but that doesn’t mean those lessons weren’t there, quietly doing their work.

But, you! You accomplish so much with such a light hand. Turtle Wexler, the youngest character in The Westing Game, is a strong, female kid: a whiz at investing, a marvel of self defense tactics, defiant of authority in her refusal to conform to her mother’s prescribed beauty norm, but still sympathetic to her older sister who has fallen prey to that sinister web, Turtle is 100% role model, and your editor, if the story is true, was smart to tell you to amp up her presence. Turtle provides an easy point of access for kids, allows them to believe a kid is on the same level, if not superior to all the adults teaming and scheming throughout the book. But you don’t stop with Turtle. Judge Ford is cast as a single woman of color. The immigrant character, Mrs. Hoo, is way smarter than people give her credit for. The disabled character is multi-faceted and afforded plenty of agency. The book provides opportunities to talk about all of these different identity definers, but the book isn’t actually about any of these issues—they exist as facts of the characters lives, just like in real life.

As a children’s bookseller at a feminist bookstore in Chicago, parents would often ask for recommendations of books showing kid characters of different races and family structures and economic backgrounds. They were always grateful when I handed them books that weren’t Heather Has Two Mommies or a biography of the childhood of Martin Luther King. They didn’t need an education; they just needed some diversity in the background of the whodunit. Of course, you stopped short of having a queer couple in the book, but you still pushed boundaries, ones that I’m sure seemed risky in 1978, and sadly still bear discussion today. But you let the mystery lead the way, and the details of identity fill up the stakes.

Rereading The Westing Game as an adult, I caught onto some clues of the puzzle a little earlier than I did when I was a kid, like the “America the Beautiful” word game that drives most of the plot, and the delicate wording of the will, but my maturity only allowed me to marvel at these gymnastics all the more. For one: how does a writer go about constructing such an elaborate puzzle, pacing out the clues without it feeling cheap, tying in character names without hitting the reader over the head with the answer. The short version of my question is, “Where did you begin?” You must be an outliner. I’m not, and your book makes me mourn the years I’ve lost not trying to cultivate this skill, not because I think I could approach your genius, but because this book is such a clear example of the value that’s added by structure and surprise, meting out narrative pleasure in such perfect intervals.

I found a copy of the copious notes you took while planning the book and I’m really just floored by the thought you put into each character’s name and the way you mapped the clues. Even more though, I’m impressed at the extent to which you thought carefully about the design. Of course, you were also an illustrator, so it makes sense that you sketched your idea for the cover early in the process, but you went so much farther: You recommended the margin width to match that of an eleven-year-old’s thumb so they could hold the book open easily. Say what? That takes some some serious UX consideration. You wanted to break up the text, adding lots of line breaks and bullets so that readers could rest their eyes and not become fatigued by monster blocks of text. As an adult reader, I can tell you I appreciate such courtesies even now. My favorite books are generous with the line breaks. It’s an intuitive choice—give people the space to think while they’re reading—but it’s a tactic I use myself now often and always breathe a sigh of relief at finding in the books I pick up to read.

It seems like an obvious thing to say that writing a children’s book is a lot harder than it looks. The pacing has to be spot on. The characters have to be credible and silly at the same time. There’s no option to leave mysteries unsolved or loose ends untied, but lots of pressure to teach lessons and leave the reader with an easily summarized moral. If pressed, The Westing Game could be said to be a book about greed, about the importance of sharing. One might also say it’s about pushing ourselves not to think the lazy thoughts, but to dig deeper: into our consideration of others, as well as into each problem posed to us.

Thank you for writing a book that holds up so well, that was so compassionate and smart, and that demonstrated such faith in your readers. I’m sure I’m not the only child whose confidence was shored up by this book. Thank you.

Your devoted reader,

Jac

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[This is the latest post in the new Letters to Dead Authors series.]

Jac Jemc is the author of The Grip of It, forthcoming from FSG Originals in 2017. Her first novel, My Only Wife (Dzanc Books) was a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award, and her collection of stories, A Different Bed Every Time (Dzanc Books) was named one of Amazon’s best story collections of 2014. She edits nonfiction for Hobart.

Ellen Raskin was a writer, illustrator, and designer. She was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and grew up during the Great Depression. She primarily wrote for children. She received the 1979 Newbery Medal for her 1978 book, The Westing Game. Raskin was also an accomplished graphic artist. She designed dozens of dust jackets for books including the first edition of Madeleine L’Engle’s classic A Wrinkle in Time.

 

 

Letters to Dead Authors: Michael Griffith to Eudora Welty

And oh, the momentum of your thoughts, and of your prose.

“Keep Miss Welty Weird”

 

Dear Miss Welty:

I guess I’m writing you, a “Dead Author,” to express my thankfulness that in your case that phrase doesn’t fully apply. I mean, sure, yes, I acknowledge that you’re no longer a living, breathing, aboveground Mississippian—but a Dead Author, as opposed to a Dead Person, is one who’s no longer read and delighted at and grappled with and mulled over, and I’m here to say that that’s not the case, at least wherever I can help it, and to plump for it never to be the case.

“fierce and funny and wondrous-strange”

I made a mistake along these lines once, back in 1998. You were still a Living Person, but the Library of America seemed to declare you, three years prematurely, a Dead Author. What were they doing, I wondered, giving you the full grand LoA treatment that should be reserved for the Canon of the Dead: glossy black cover, your name in an elegant script; miraculous tight binding that makes the books little bricks, little tombstones along a shelf; that paper not onionskin but kinda-sorta in the direction of onionskinny; and, most of all, the built-in ribbon of bookmark like the one in my grandmother’s Bible? I was indignant on your behalf. No doubt you were frail, given that you were coming up on ninety, and I had no idea about the likelihood of your ever writing again and thus no way of arguing against the logic of what they did. But it seemed at least a little, you know, icky—like they were chivvying you toward the door, a literary instance of “Here’s your hat what’s your hurry?” Did they not realize that you must embalm before you immortalize?

But the older I get, the more I think that, unseemly as it was, they might have had it right. The Library of America wasn’t as skittish or as sentimental as I was about the distinction between person and author. They were acting early on the idea that, as Nabokov expressed it in his early novella The Eye (if you were a live person instead of merely a live author, I’d suggest that you read or reread it, if you felt inclined, so that we might—if you’d consent—chat about it one afternoon next week), “After death human thought lives on by momentum.” They couldn’t save you from small-d death, but they could forestall the damn capital. They had their eye on what you might call an objective of the longer term.

“fuck-you shadow”

And oh, the momentum of your thoughts, and of your prose. That momentum has swept me along for fifteen years without you now, and I expect it will carry me for as long as I can sidestep the reaper myself. I’ll do my best to pass it on, too.

I balk at bumper stickers like “Keep Austin Weird” (or Keep Asheville Weird, or keep weird whatever thing we like to believe in the originality of but see slipping away, changing, perhaps rubbed away by veneration like those old saints’ statues whose noses first get shiny and then get gone), but I had occasion—honestly, the way I saw it, what I had was excuse—to write an essay for The Oxford American a few years ago that might have been titled “Keep Miss Welty Weird.” There are so many people these days who seem to think of you as having been a kind of quaint, elegant, starchy, and above all elderly southern lady, rather than the bold and playful young woman whose fuck-you shadow haunts the foreground of some of those amazing WPA photographs, rather than the woman, fierce and funny and wondrous-strange, who wrote stories like “No Place for You, My Love.”

I read a passage today in Charles Portis’s Norwood in which he says of a cage for a fortune-telling chicken that “it had once served as a humane catch-‘em-alive mink trap, and in fact no mink had ever entered it, such was its humanity.” For some reason that put me in mind of you . . . and in my way of reckoning, it thus saved you both, a little. Don’t think, though, that I’m claiming such thinking is selfless, much less heroic; I think about you because it saves me, too.

Yours,

Michael Griffith

 

——————–

[This is the latest post in the new Letters to Dead Authors series.]

Michael Griffith’s books are Trophy, Bibliophilia: A Novella and Stories and Spikes: A Novel; his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in New England Review, Salmagundi, Oxford American, Southwest Review, Five Points, Virginia Quarterly Review, Golf World, and The Washington Post, among other periodicals. Formerly Associate Editor of the Southern Review, he is now Associate Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati and Fiction Editor of the Cincinnati Review. He is also the Editor of Yellow Shoe Fiction, an original-fiction series from LSU Press.

Eudora Alice Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001) was an American short story writer and novelist who wrote about the American South. Her novel The Optimist’s Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards including the Order of the South. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America. While Welty worked as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration, she took photographs of people from all economic and social classes in her spare time. From the early 1930s, her photographs show Mississippi’s rural poor and the effects of the Great Depression. (wikipedia)

Letters to Dead Authors: Molly McCaffrey to Nora Ephron

“I also didn’t know back then how difficult it is to write the way you did. To write like you’re whispering into the reader’s ear rather than like you’re screaming into it. You made it look so easy I didn’t understand what an accomplishment that really was.”

Dear Nora,

I want to apologize. I want to apologize for not appreciating you enough when I was young.

Sure, I loved When Harry Met Sally as much as everyone else in America did, but, when it came out, I don’t think I understood the significance of what you were doing. At the age of nineteen, I just thought, Wow, I loved that movie. And, of course, I thought the same thing any young person thinks when they see or read something that makes them feel they’ve gotten a glimpse of what real grown-up love looks like. I thought, I want to grow up. I want to fall in love. I want a relationship like that. What I didn’t think about after I saw When Harry Met Sally or any of your other early movies—because I didn’t know—was the fact that you were one of only a handful of women writing and making movies for major Hollywood studios and that you were doing so in an industry that was and still is totally dominated by men. I know that now (in truth, I’ve known it for several years), but I’m sorry I didn’t appreciate your accomplishments sooner.

Molly McCaffrey at 19, not yet appreciating Ephron

I did know I liked your female characters. I liked Sally. I liked Annie and Becky. I rooted for Rachel. I admired the hell out of Karen Silkwood. And I always loved Julia. I also knew I could relate to these women. But I wasn’t smart enough back then—remember I was still a teenager when I was first introduced to your work—to recognize how rare it was to find a female lead in a movie whom I liked or to whom I could relate. I thought there would be plenty of them. But, boy, was I wrong. Now I know how wrong I was. Now I know how hard it is to encounter a strong, independent female lead in a film, and I want to thank you for giving me so many over the years.

I also didn’t know back then how difficult it is to write the way you did. To write like you’re whispering into the reader’s ear rather than like you’re screaming into it. To write about things as simultaneously mundane and vital as finding the right apartment or raising your kids. You made it look so easy that I didn’t understand what an accomplishment that really was. And after seven years of studying writing in graduate school—seven years, Nora!—I finally learned that the way you wrote isn’t something we should take for granted. Not only does writing like that not come easy, it also takes courage to have the kind of authorial voice that doesn’t say, Hey, look at me, I’m smarter than everyone else! Or Hey, look at me! What I’m writing about is so big and important! No, you wrote in a regular way about regular things, and I’m sorry, too, that I didn’t give you enough credit for that when I was younger.

Nora Ephron

I certainly didn’t know how hard it was to get people to pay attention to stories about women because I grew up during the height of the women’s movement with a mother who dragged me to every feminist play or talk she could find. So, when I was young, it felt like those stories were everywhere. And I thought they always would be. But then I grew up and learned that not every woman wanted to be called a feminist, and I understood how lucky I was to have women like you (and my mother) in my life.

I guess what I’m saying is I didn’t know how difficult it would be just to be myself. And that’s why I so appreciate having a role model who has shown me how to do just that. Because you were always yourself, Nora—as a writer, as a spouse, as a mother, as a person. Sometimes when I worry about my career (which is really most of the time), I think about women like you who stayed true to themselves and still made it, and, for a few short minutes, I feel better about my future.

Molly McCaffrey today

But I know all of that now—and have known it for some time, definitely since we lost you at far too young an age—and that’s why I feel compelled to write to you today. Yes, to apologize for not realizing it sooner. But also to thank you.

Thank you, Nora Ephron, for being one of the first women to write about strong, independent women who reminded me of myself. Thank you for being a woman who was willing to brave the Hollywood studio system. Thank you for being courageous enough to write in a way that speaks directly to your audience. Thank you for being a wonderful role model for both writers and women.

Thank you.

Molly McCaffrey

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[This is the second post in the new Letters to Dead Authors series.]

Molly McCaffrey is the author of You Belong to Us (memoir) and How to Survive Graduate School & Other Disasters (stories) and the founder of I Will Not Diet, a blog devoted to healthy living and body acceptance. She is also the co-editor of Commutability: Stories about the Journey from Here to There and the forthcoming Stuck in the Middle: Writing that Holds You in Suspense. She lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky, with her husband, David Bell. [Click here to learn more about How Molly McCaffrey Became a Writer.]

Nora Ephron was one of the most accomplished screenwriters of her time. She wrote and directed sixteen movies, including Silkwood (1983), When Harry Met Sally (1989), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), and Julie & Julia, all of which were nominated for Academy Awards. She also wrote two plays and eight books, both fiction and nonfiction. Ephron began her career as a White House intern during JFK’s presidency and then worked as a journalist for the New York Post. She continued to write for various news organizations, including Esquire, Cosmo, The New York Times, and The Huffington Post, until her 2012 death at the age of 71 from complications related to leukemia. She was married three times, and her second marriage to Carl Bernstein was the basis for her novel Heartburn, which was adapted to a film starring Meryl Strep and Jack Nicholson. Her third marriage to screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi was the one that lasted, prompting her to write, “Secret to life, marry an Italian” for Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure. Ephron was also the mother of two children, one of whom made a documentary about his mother’s life called Everything is Copy, which is now showing on HBO.

February is the month of exhaustion; or, happy birthday, Božena Nemcová!

Božena Němcová is the subject of my next book, forthcoming in 2016 from Rose Metal Press. She was a Czech fairy tale writer from the 19th century and I’ve been stalking her for most of the 21st century. I got lost in her hometown and site of her famous book, Babička (The Grandmother). I go to her grave every time I’m in Prague. I take pictures of her statues and former homes. And I make journal pages like the one above, which includes her, her name on her grave, a few of the birds one might find on a visit to Granny’s Valley in Ratiborice, and a bird made out of human bones pecking the eye socket of a human skull (as photographed at the Ossuary in Kutna Hora, CZ).

Němcová died at age 42 on 21 ledna 1862. In Czech, leden is January, the month of ice.

Yesterday was her birthday: 4 února 1820. In Czech, únor is February, the month of exhaustion. Which is the only way to describe February.