Raising funds to support Inprint programs, while delivering a memorable and high-quality evening that celebrates the power of creative writing and reading, has always been at the heart of the unique annual black-tie event and what has made the Inprint Ball a favorite gala for many patrons. Although the Inprint Ball looked a little different this year, gala supporters and their guests were able to enjoy the festivities from home.

The presentation portion of the evening began at 7:30 pm CST featuring welcome remarks by Inprint Board President Marcia West, followed by a video tribute in memory of recently departed Inprint founders Glenn Cambor and Karl Kilian. This was followed by what is often a beloved part of the evening for many attendees—a series of short readings by Inprint fellowship and prize recipients, all of whom are MFA and PhD students and alumni from the University of Houston. Five Inprint fellows, including Raquel Abend van Dalen, Lauren Berry, Matthew Salesses, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, and Sasha West, each read excerpts from their new work and spoke about how Inprint’s support has impacted their writing life.

As a special treat, gala attendees then had the opportunity to enjoy brief remarks from Inprint National Advisory Council members Sandra Cisneros, Richard Ford, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Salman Rushdie, who each spoke eloquently about their own connection to Inprint and the importance of supporting the organization.

Executive Director Rich Levy followed by introducing MacArthur Fellow and Booker Prize winner George Saunders, the featured speaker of the gala. Saunders, also a member of the Inprint National Advisory Council, gave a moving talk about the role of storytelling in cultivating compassion and how Inprint’s work is doing that in a variety of ways in Houston. Afterwards, Saunders participated in a lively conversation with Ricardo Nuila—Inprint Advisory Board member, Baylor College of Medicine physician and hospitalist, and director of the Baylor Narrative Medicine Program. Saunders and Nuila also touched on some of the themes in Saunders’ new book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. Nuila had been a salon reader during the 2020 Inprint Poets & Writers Ball and guests were thrilled by his participation again this year. Many also enjoyed the music provided by renowned Houston guitarist Edward Grigassy and his ensemble Latin Carnival.

In addition to the presentation portion of the gala, the Inprint staff arranged private Zoom salon sessions for six tables with visits from George Saunders and Inprint fellowship and prize recipients. Several guests also opted to enjoy a three-course dinner and wine catered by A Fare Extraordinaire, included with each seat and table level contribution. Most dinners were picked up curbside on Saturday afternoon at The Revaire.

As a thank you gift, all attendees received a signed, limited edition chapbook of George Saunders’ I CAN SPEAK! created by Fiona McGettigan and Alan Krathaus of CORE Design Studio. Others also received a copy of Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain.

Donors and guests responded to the evening very enthusiastically.

The program was interesting, amusing, compelling and deeply moving.

The virtual gala was brilliantly executed, but the big takeaway was the mission. That came through loud and clear.

Congratulations to everyone involved, especially the Inprint staff, on last’s night’s triumph…. It was wonderful just how inclusive our program is. Thank you Inprint for all that you do for our community. We look forward to celebrating in person next year.

A special thank you to lead 2021 Inprint Poets & Writers Ball donors: Chinhui and Eddie Allen; Nancy Allen; Anne and Albert Chao; Liz and Steve Crowell; Mary S. and Jack Dawson; Susie and Joe Dilg; Randi Faust and Carl Herman; Edward and Helen Oppenheimer Foundation; Caroline Kerr and Andy Lusk, Sabria and Kevin Lewis; Franci Neely; Sidley Austin LLP; Phoebe and Bobby Tudor; Michelle and Rishi Varma; Mark Wawro and Melanie Gray; Marcia West and Ron Lewis; and Nina and Michael Zilkha.

Proceeds from the Inprint Poets & Writers Ball make possible a wide range of literary performance programs, community writing workshops, and fellowships and prizes for creative writing students, all of which have continued virtually during the Covid-19 pandemic and serve thousands annually.

The post The 2021 Inprint Poets & Writers Ball celebrates Houston’s literary spirit with George Saunders and others first appeared on An Open Book - The Inprint Blog.

The true mark of a great writer is his or her ability to take the reader into a different world

To me the true mark of a great writer is his or her ability to take the reader into a different world, a distant time period, an alternate reality, and to somehow make that world, time period, or reality feel completely relevant and familiar. In seconds we can go from being absorbed in our work responsibilities, family life, and the provocative news headlines of the day, to becoming absorbed in the lives, struggles, and emotions of the characters we are reading about.

It is even more impressive when that said writer is able to breathe new life into a centuries old epic and turn that seemingly archaic story into a captivating novel. In The Forest of Enchantments, Houston author and American Book Award winner Chitra Divakaruni accomplishes this and so much more.

Growing up in an Indian Hindu household, the epic story of the Ramayana was very familiar to me, or so I thought. I had read the comic book versions my parents had given to me as a child. I had heard religious leaders speak about it with great fervor, and I had watched episodes of the weekly series that aired on Indian television channels. Like stories of Greek mythology that I would later come to read in college literature classes, the Ramayana has everything that makes for a juicy story. There is family drama, a love story, war, a celebrated hero, a damsel needing rescue, the evil antagonist, jealously, revenge, sacrifice, Gods capable of special powers, and more.

Even though I had been told that there is much we can learn from the Ramayana—about how to make decisions at difficult crossroads in our lives and about the importance doing one’s duty as a member of a family and a member of our respective community—I never really connected to it in the way I had seen many of my elders connect to it. Frankly, Ram—the protagonist of the story that we had been taught was an incarnation of God—felt pretty flawed to me. How else can we justify the fact that he abandons his wife. Sita—Ram’s wife and celebrated as the epitome of what all Indian women should aspire to be like—felt like the docile victim of a patriarchal society and culture. And the constant focus on being virtuous felt very outdated.

When I heard last spring that Chitra’s next novel The Forest of Enchantments would be the retelling of the Ramayana from Sita’s perspective, giving her the voice of the narrator, I was pleasantly surprised. The versions I had been exposed to always focused on the male characters, Sita was never given much agency and I was curious to see what the story would become in the hands of such a gifted writer.

In the prologue Chitra says, “I’m going to write the story of Sita… because I’ve always been fascinated by the Ramayana…. She’ll fill in the gaps between the adventures undertaken by the male characters in the epic, their victories and defeats. She’ll tell us what inspired the crucial choices that directed the course of her life. What she believed in. What interested and moved her. How she felt when faced with the deepest of tragedies. And what gave her the ability to overcome them.”

Chitra flawlessly does exactly what she sets out to, resulting in what feels like a truly groundbreaking piece of literature. Chitra’s Sita is not at all like the Sitas I was use to hearing about. This Sita has a powerful voice, has martial arts skills and a knowledge base of herbal remedies. She is a complex character that knows how to navigate multiple relationships, bring people together, and question injustices. She isn’t quiet and meek like I had naively assumed her to be, in fact she is smart, loving, generous, and courageous. She is by no means perfect, which is how she had always been portrayed and which is also what makes this characterization of her more relatable. She gets angry and happy, feels lonely and joyous, loves and hates. And Chitra is careful as a writer, she avoids placing modern stereotypes and clichés on Sita and all the other characters, keeping the story true to the context and feeling extremely authentic.

Through Sita’s voice, the reader becomes immediately absorbed into the plot of the novel. Many other aspects and characters of the story that are rarely shared in popular depictions of the Ramayana are brought to the forefront – characters like Urmilla, Sita’s sister, and Mandodari, the wife of Ravan (evil king antagonist). You feel like you are on this long journey with Ram and Sita, like you are in Ayodhya and Lanka. You start rooting for them, and even though you may know better, you start hoping for a happy ending. Without giving too much away, the novel is a thrilling page turner, and until the very end I continued to find myself refreshingly surprised.

If you know the story of the Ramayana, this novel will make you see the characters and the plot in a whole new light. If you are unfamiliar with the Ramayana, this breathtaking and well-crafted version is one of the most fascinating depictions of it you can read. What I learned in the end is that the character of Sita is not at all about conceding. From her we can learn so much about how to gracefully face the circumstances life throws at us and how remaining true to oneself is what will give us strength to do that, especially as a woman.

Chitra Divakaruni will be a featured speaker and talk about The Forest of Enchantments on Saturday, September 14, 2019 at JLF Houston 2019, a two-day festival with internationally acclaimed authors and thinkers engaging in a range of provocative panels and debates.

Chitra Divakaruni will be a featured speaker and talk about The Forest of Enchantments at JLF Houston 2019 this Saturday at 10:45 am. Produced by Teamwork Arts in partnership with Inprint, Asia Society Texas Center, and the Consulate General of India, JLF Houston is a two-day festival with internationally acclaimed authors and thinkers engaging in a range of provocative panels and debates, September 13 & 14. It is the Houston rendition of the Jaipur Literature Festival, one of the world’s biggest literature festival drawing half a million people to Jaipur, India annually from all over the globe. For more information and to purchase tickets, click here.

The post Author Chitra Divakaruni enchants us with an astounding new novel first appeared on An Open Book - The Inprint Blog.

On traveling to a Midwest summer writing conference and remembering the literary community I come from

Writing in Solitude

I love to write at my desk and to write in my bed, my couch. It’s true that when it comes to writing, I prefer the privacy of being home. Here, I can walk freely in circles, talking to myself about the particular conflicts I’m working through in a novel. I know how to circumvent the coffee table and couch, the rug where my cat tends to stretch in the sun.

Don’t get me wrong: I certainly like to write in cafés and libraries, on the Metro—anywhere, really. I’ll take whatever time I can get! But there is something to be said about being able to recite aloud a draft without being concerned that someone beside me is trying to enjoy her newspaper or blueberry bagel, unruffled by my performance.

Writing at home is a luxury I don’t take lightly. Writing among a community of writers who also share a passion for your craft is yet another. This summer I was reminded of the privilege of not only being a writer, but of living in a community that values writing.

In June, I left Houston to attend a writing conference in Minnesota and returned with a renewed appreciation for the city whose support of the arts is something that nurtures me as a person and helps foster the work I make.

Writing with Others: A Houstonian Reunion

I attended the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference in Bemidji, Minnesota, with my dear friend, the poet Chelsea B. DesAutels. Chelsea earned her MFA at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program (UH CWP) and is a recipient of the Inprint Verlaine Prize in Poetry. We became friends shortly after I moved to Houston to begin my PhD in Literature and Creative Literature in 2017.

From the first workshop I took at UH, I was not only drawn to Chelsea’s poetry but stunned by how well she read what I was doing—or trying to do—in my own work. As a student enrolled in a writing program, I am grateful for the community I have at UH; as a resident of Houston, I am likewise grateful for the literary community the city affords. I don’t take for granted the relationships I have with writers with whom I can consult closely about my work and whose work I feel as though I am also able to offer constructive feedback about. From my first semester at UH, Chelsea quickly became one of those writing friends for me.

While we were used to exchanging work over email, we weren’t accustomed to the prospect of not being geographically close enough to meet to discuss the poems we shared in person. Because Chelsea relocated back to Minneapolis with her family after she finished her degree, our plans to attend the Minnesota Northwoods Writers conference not only allowed us an opportunity to spend time writing together, but to participate in the workshop of a poet whose work we first bonded over.

Before I even arrived at UH, I had read Ada Limón’s fourth book, Bright Dead Things, numerous times, and considered her an enormous influence on my work. Given how Chelsea and I connected over our mutual admiration for Ada Limón’s work, it seemed only natural that she and I apply to this specific conference in the hopes of studying with her. That Ada Limón herself had read at Houston’s own Alley Theatre alongside Gregory Pardlo as part of the 2016/2017 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series made our participation in her workshop come full circle. Yet one more Houston connection? Poet Sean Hill, a UH Creative Writing Program alum, also an Inprint fellowship recipient, serves as the Minnesota Northwoods Conference Director.

The Minnesota Writers Conference hosts an astonishing array of faculty and participants from Minnesota and beyond on Bemidji State University’s (BSU) campus for a week of workshops, readings, and craft talks. The week was comprised of our participating in a twelve-person workshop with Ada Limón and attending craft talks and readings by such luminaries as Terrance Hayes, Camille Dungy, Peter Orner, Dustin Parsons, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. BSU is located on the shore of Lake Bemidji; a single street separates the dormitory where we stayed from the lake. To write and study writing in such a beautiful place has influenced the work I began at the conference and continue back in Houston.

Spending time elsewhere and returning to where you come from can really land things in the creative process. Fostering relationships with a different community of writers for seven days of writing-focused opportunities allowed me to see my work and my role as a writer in the world differently. Writing is not only what fuels me as a person, but it is also what brought me to Houston. How lucky are we that we get to live in a city in which the arts are so embraced? More than ever, I have a deeper appreciation for Houston and the relationships we make. One of the themes I noticed coursing through the craft talks and readings, as well as Chelsea’s and my own conversations—and, by extension, this blog post—is gratitude. This balmy summer in Houston, I am brimming with gratitude for living in a community rich with readers and writers.

The post From the Bayou City to the Northwoods first appeared on An Open Book - The Inprint Blog.

Abbigail N. Rosewood was born in Vietnam, where she lived until the age of twelve. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. An excerpt from If I Had Two Lives won first place in the Writers Workshop of Asheville Literary Fiction Contest. The novel follows a young woman from her childhood in Vietnam to her life as an immigrant in the United States and her return to her homeland. I loved the book so I’m ecstatic that she will be in Houston presenting If I Had Two Lives on Thursday, May 30 from 7 – 8 pm at Blue Willow Bookshop.

If I Had Two Lives is a luminous debut novel which follows a young woman from her childhood in Vietnam to her life as an immigrant in the United States and her return to her homeland. Part historical fiction and ghost story, where the ghosts take on several forms such as history, memory, and trauma. She will be presenting the book on Thursday, May 30 from 7 – 8 pm at Blue Willow Bookshop.

In this interview, I asked Abbigail about her book, her craft, and how the process of completing and publishing it changed her.

THU: What kind of books do you like to read? What are you reading now?

ABBIGAIL: I embrace all genres: fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. When explored in-depth all genres begin to intersect, to weave together a vision that is beyond itself. This isn’t limited to writing, but also visual arts and music. Categorizing art may be useful to distributors and consumers, but I don’t think artists function this way. Fiction can wrestle with philosophical quandary, essays can have narrative arcs, poetry saturates the mind with music without playing a single note. I appreciate all artistic expressions whether or not I agree with them. Right now, I’m reading The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, The Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell, a friend’s manuscript, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, and the magnum opus graphic novel Kabuki by David Mack.

THU: Does your reading influence or inform your writing?

ABBIGAIL: My writing is a combination of intuition and distillation of everything I’ve ever read. My first piece of writing in high school sounded like a bad Victorian, gothic knockoff. I emulated for years until I found my creative voice, or rather it found me.

THU: The novel reads like a ghost story. The ‘ghosts’ take the form of history, memory, and trauma, and they haunt the main character. Tell me how you gave life to these themes.

ABBIGAIL: I love that observation. I’m interested in all manners of haunting, literal ghosts or as you say, memories and trauma. For the child narrator, haunting tends to be more literal, like pretending to be her father’s ghost. All her actions reflect her knowledge of death at a young age. For the adult narrator, her memories of her before-life are so vivid that they are constantly present–they haven’t been digested by her subconscious and are always within reach. It doesn’t take much for her memories to resurface. In a way, they are much more real to her than her immediate surrounding. Her reconstruction and reenactment of memories is part of the effort to comprehend her past and how she has become who she is. As I wrote, I was always asking myself questions: How does trauma secrete into ordinary moments like washing the dishes? Can you abandon someone you really love? Is love possible for a character who has known only loneliness?

THU: The novel focuses on the narrator’s relationships to her mother, a little girl, and a soldier. I love how you’ve written it to where the reader focuses on her relationships yet an entire world coexists linearly. You have to imagine yourself from their perspectives to capture the full scope. What can you say to that?

ABBIGAIL: Thank you so much! Bits of me are in all of my characters, including the mother, the soldier, the little girl, and even the little girl’s father. I believe that compassion is the only key that fits everyone–I try to afford every character a kind of god-like compassion so that they are free to live out their life on the page, to make decisions that seem ugly, but all the more human because of it, and therefore beautiful too. There’s always a risk in holding back judgment completely, for example, to imagine violence–its perpetrator and victim–this is also the privilege of art. Many things in life, such as politics or love, fail due to a lack of imagination.

THU: Can you describe your journey into writing?

ABBIGAIL: I’ve loved to write since elementary school, but I didn’t see it as a career option until my second year in undergraduate. I still remember the first flash fiction piece I wrote using something resembling my own voice. The Humanity of Sunflowers was about a widow receiving the news of her husband passing in combat. I didn’t write it for class or for anything other than the drive to create. In the beginning, all my characters were automatically white. I was looking outside of myself for material. For my first creative writing class, I submitted The Foreign Dream, a story about a woman who sold helmets on the sidewalk of Vietnam, had a one-night stand with a white man, and gave birth to a half baby. It was my first attempt to depict Vietnamese lives. The short story was published in a literary magazine. I think that was the point when I began to search inward for material and when I realized that my characters didn’t have to be white, they could be like me.

THU: An excerpt from the book won first place in the Writers Workshop of Asheville Literary Fiction Contest and it’s your debut novel, could you describe the process of writing this novel?

ABBIGAIL: The way a novel comes to fruition is similar to the birth of a baby–the idea was planted, germinated, and grew until it must be born. Once I found the voice, I sat down and wrote over thirty pages in one sitting. I submitted these pages to my workshop at Columbia. This was a mistake because receiving criticism this early on completely stalled my process. Once classes ended, I continued on my own until I have eighty pages. By then I knew I had a novel. I was lucky to have a supportive thesis advisor who pushed me relentlessly. At the time I was working at an insurance company, I wanted to go into zombie mode at the end of the day, but my advisor demanded that I turned in twenty pages every four weeks. I wrote after work and I wrote every Saturday and Sunday. I did nothing for many weekends except writing. I hated my job¾it was the most corporate of all corporate jobs, situated on Wall Street of all places, but it gave me the drive to finish my book. Looking back, it was one of the most beautiful time of my life and I didn’t even know it.

THU: Now that the novel has made its way into the world, do you have a sense of where your writing will grow?

ABBIGAIL: My second novel is finished and still looking for a home. Stylistically it is very different than my first. I wrote it quickly in a state of despair so it doesn’t have the compassion of If I Had Two Lives. It is a voice full of envy, desperation, and grief. Perhaps it is more brutal and so all the more selective of its readers. In many ways, I feel doomed that my pool of readers will inevitably narrow down with every work I put out. I give out slices of nightmares, which I consider gifts, but not everyone wants to confront such darkness. It is enough to reach a few readers. How can anyone expect more than that? I feel incredibly lucky. From here I hope to write more daringly, to delight, to make more unexpected connections between things.

THU: In your acknowledgements, you wrote: “This novel was born out of the aching pleasure of rearranging memories, reinventing the past–a personal need to solve my childhood mysteries, figure out how I’ve arrived here, and give myself emotional conclusions that real life doesn’t afford.”

This novel was born out of the aching pleasure of rearranging memories, reinventing the past–a personal need to solve my childhood mysteries, figure out how I’ve arrived here, and give myself emotional conclusions that real life doesn’t afford.

I think imagination is to a child as writing fiction and storytelling is to an adult. Children use their imaginations as vehicles to questions they don’t have the answers to whereas writing fiction and storytelling to an adult tap into the same place. It reminds us that we’re still children that cannot fully realize answers either. Is writing something you do for yourself?

ABBIGAIL: Absolutely, I have only ever written for myself. This sounds self-centered, but art has to be if it were to have any chance at truth. Publishing is necessary for a writer, but secondary to the process. My personal artistic measurements ask many questions including, Is the work original in some way? Does the artist risk something to accomplish her vision? Can the work be done by her and her alone? I will always write what only I can write.

THU: Do you think it’s possible to re-write this story?

ABBIGAIL: No, I don’t think so. I have recurring obsessions that will emerge in all of my writing, but this particular story could only be done once.

The post Abbigail N. Rosewood’s diasporic ghost story comes to Houston first appeared on An Open Book - The Inprint Blog.

When you work at a place like Inprint and are surrounded by talented writers, you are lucky to have many friends that have their books published. There is something extra special to me about reading a book written by a friend. Not only are you proud of her or his accomplishment, but you can’t wait to dig in and read the story they have created. For me, reading Sehba Sarwar’s novel Black Wings, on the one hand, felt like spending the evenings with an old friend, a friend I miss dearly who use to live in Houston, a friend I have laughed with, partied with, and shared many important life conversations with. The beauty of a good writer however, is their ability to take you into another world, a world you absorb yourself into, a world that stands on its own, whether or not you know the writer. Black Wings excels at this and so much more.

Many Houstonians know Sehba Sarwar as the founding director of Voices Breaking Boundaries. As a writer and artist, she creates essays, stories, poems, and art that tackle displacement, migration, and women’s issues. Her writings have appeared in publications including New York Times Sunday Magazine, Asia: Magazine of Asian Literature, Callaloo and elsewhere while her short stories have appeared in or are forthcoming in anthologies with Feminist Press, Akashic Books, and Harper Collins India. Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, Sarwar is currently based in Southern California. Her novel Black Wings was originally published in Pakistan. She will be reading from a second edition of the novel, published in the United States for the first time by Veliz Books this Monday, May 6, 7 pm at Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet. Free and open to the public, click here for more information about the reading to order a copy of Black Wings.

She will be reading from a second edition of the novel, published in the United States for the first time by Veliz Books this Monday, May 6, 7 pm at Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet.

The novel is set during post-9/11 times in Houston, Texas and Karachi, Pakistan. The story is revealed through the voices of mother and daughter Yasmeen and Laila. After a family tragedy, followed by many years of separation, Yasmeen and Laila confront family secrets, broken relationships, and a sense of alienation from their immediate and global environments. I caught up with Sehba before her Brazos Bookstore reading to ask her a few questions about the novel, how it has been changed in this latest edition, and about coming back to Houston.

KRUPA: Black Wings was originally published in Pakistan in 2004 and this is the first U.S. publication of the novel. Did you make extensive changes to the novel, and if so, what led you to make the particular changes you selected to make? 

SEHBA: When I signed the contract with Veliz Books, I thought I’d tinker with the text a little bit, but once I opened the document, I began to scrub the text. The process took me six months—much longer than I had anticipated. This is because the book was published almost 15 years ago, and my writing style has become much leaner since then. I also am a mother (my daughter was born a few months after the first edition came out), so I have grown emotionally. And finally, my editor Minerva Laveaga is excellent. She gave good feedback, and we went back-forth quite a few times. That was different from working with Alhamra Books in Pakistan for the first edition. Back then, my agent Gail Hochman helped with edits.

KRUPA: Black Wings deals with so many complex issues. One of the main focuses of the novel is loss and the way different characters navigate loss – loss of a sibling, loss of a child, loss of a marriage, loss of a sense of home, loss of connection, loss of country, etc. Do you have a sense of what led you to make this a central focus of the novel? Personal experiences, observations, incidents?

SEHBA: Yes, loss is a huge part of the novel. Years ago, when I finished the book, I realized that I was writing about the death of my uncle, who passed away before I was even born. He was barely 30 years old when he died, and his death devastated my father’s family. His photograph—much like Yasir’s in Black Wings—was in every family home in Karachi. When writing the novel, I didn’t know how much my uncle’s death had impacted me and my family. And then of course, because I live away from my “home,” Pakistan, I am aware of the loss that I experience. And my family has also experienced that loss because both my mother’s family and my father’s family had left the cities of their birth in India after the 1947 Partition and had migrated to Pakistan. I’m still processing that loss – now through my memoir-in-progress, On Belonging.

Years ago, when I finished the book, I realized that I was writing about the death of my uncle, who passed away before I was even born. He was barely 30 years old when he died, and his death devastated my father’s family…. When writing the novel, I didn’t know how much my uncle’s death had impacted me and my family.

KRUPA: Do you feel the story you were hoping to share in 2004 with Black Wings, when the novel first came out, is the same story you are hoping to share now in 2019? 

SEHBA: I think that the text is much tighter, but the content is the same. The book came out post-9/11, so the world had changed between the time that I started Black Wings, and by the time it was published. The first chapters in both Book One and Book Two open in airports and airplanes, and the narrative reflects the challenge of movement across continents, which has changed as has our relationship to flying. I don’t write thinking of a message or a story – I let the story unfurl, so in that sense, the second edition is the same as the first.

KRUPA: Has the reception to the novel in 2019 been similar or different to the reception to the novel in 2004? What about the difference between the reception in the U.S. and Pakistan?

SEHBA: The first edition of the novel was published in Pakistan, and I gave readings in Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad, and the book was available in bookstores all around Pakistan. Reviews also appeared in Pakistani newspapers and magazines. At the same time, because I was based in Houston, I did bring copies to Houston, and Brazos Bookstore carried some. I also read for my organization, Voices Breaking Boundaries, and at random spaces mostly around Houston, but I never toured the novel in the US. My daughter was born a few months after Black Wings was released in 2004, and her birth has been the most life-changing event I have experienced. So the book was superseded by Minal. With this new edition, I’m actually doing a U.S. tour, and the book is now available all around the country. Universities and colleges are interested in the novel and faculty are reviewing the work as a possible textbook – so because of the availability of the second edition and the fact that I’m able to market the novel, Black Wings is getting a wider readership already.

With this new edition, I’m actually doing a U.S. tour, and the book is now available all around the country. Universities and colleges are interested in the novel and faculty are reviewing the work as a possible textbook – so because of the availability of the second edition and the fact that I’m able to market the novel, Black Wings is getting a wider readership already.

KRUPA: The novel has two main first person narrators, mother and daughter, Laila and Yasmeen. The story and the way it is revealed demonstrates how much empathy you as a writer have for each’s life situation. You are both a mother and a daughter. Which character was more challenging for you to write? 

SEHBA: The mother—definitely. As I said earlier, when I began writing Black Wings, I had yet to experience motherhood, so I remember asking my mother a lot of questions as I wrote. Switching voices between the mother and daughter made it easier for me to stretch and understand where each character was coming from. In the second edition, Yasmeen, the daughter, becomes softer. I think this is because I have grown and changed.

KRUPA: The idea of home and what it means is something this novel and a lot of your work tackles. For many years, Houston is where you and your family resided, a place you owned a house, a place that in many ways served as your home. How does it feel to be coming back to share your stories and this novel with Houston where it is set?

SEHBA: I had never planned to stay in Houston as long as I did—more than two decades—but Houston became a home for me, and I’m so thrilled to be back and share my work with my Houston friends, many of whom never read Black Wings since the book wasn’t easily available in the US. And I’m happy that I’ll be reading at Brazos Bookstore. That’s the only bookstore in the city that carried Black Wings, and it’s a bookstore where I’ve seen so many writers I love and respect. As always, there won’t be enough time for me to see everyone and do everything because I’ll be swinging between Austin and San Antonio. But I’ve spent enough time in Houston to know that I’ll return soon enough. In the summer, I’ll be doing a Macondo Writers Workshop in San Antonio, and in the fall, I’ll be in Austin for the Texas Book Festival, and I know I’ll dip into Houston. I have to. As you said, this city was my home for so long, and the city is definitely where Black Wings is set. Houston –and actually my East End neighborhood –  is also where my latest short story, “Railway Track,” is set, and the day after I read at Brazos, I’ll be at the Houston Noir book launch with Gwendolyn Zepeda and other friends.

To learn more about Sehba Sarwar and her work, visit her homepage at sehbasarwar.com. 

The post Author Sehba Sarwar talks about the new edition of her novel Black Wings first appeared on An Open Book - The Inprint Blog.

Houston author Chris Cander’s “Dispatches from Book Tour,” a multi-week blog series of reflections and updates along her 17-city U.S. book tour for her new novel 

Friday, March 15, 2019

I blew into the windy city for the final official stop on my book tour. Before my event, I asked my Uber driver to take me to the Brewster Apartments, which was the building I fictionalized in my novel 11 Stories. I took along the miniature piano I photographed in Death Valley while I was writing The Weight of a Piano, and held it up right about where my protagonist Roscoe fell from the roof of the building in the novel. (Roscoe, meet Mini #Blüthner; Mini Blüthner, meet Roscoe.) 

The National Book Award finalist, Rebecca Makkai, whose work I’ve long admired, invited me to be in conversation with her at Women & Children First Bookstore. Her interview format was so much fun; it felt like a continuation of our hilarious dinner conversation beforehand, but with some audience participation thrown in. It was a delightful ending to my nearly 8 weeks of traveling.

I’m so grateful to all the bookstores and booksellers and readers and reviewers who’ve helped contribute to this novel’s success since its release. Thank you, dear readers, for sharing this journey with me, and Inprint, for graciously posting these dispatches. I’ll always look back on this time with gratitude and love.

The post Dispatch 16: Chris Cander and The Weight of a Piano make a final tour stop in Chicago first appeared on An Open Book - The Inprint Blog.

Houston author Chris Cander’s “Dispatches from Book Tour,” a multi-week blog series of reflections and updates along her 17-city U.S. book tour for her new novel 

Wednesday, February 27, 2019

From blizzard to beach: after an early flight to L.A. and before my interview with the legendary Michael Silverblatt for his Bookworm podcast, I put my feet in the sand and watched the blue-green Atlantic Ocean waves roll in on the beach where, in The Weight of a Piano, Clara’s parents took her as a child during happier times.

After meeting with my film agent, who’s very excited about the directors and actors who are currently reading, we went to Skylight Books. Helga Kasimoff, the German octogenarian who was so instrumental during my early research on Blüthner pianos was already there along with Russian pianist Sergey Silvanskiy and a mid-century upright that her son had brought in especially for tonight’s event. At points during my presentation, Sergey performed a moving piece by Mikail Glinka, the 19-century composer considered the fountainhead of Russian classical music, another by Alexander Scriabin, and concluded with “DieReise,” the piece by Konner Scott that appears in the novel. The highlight of the Q&A with the standing-room-only crowd was when Helga sat down with me at the piano and talked about her family’s emigration to the U.S. and establishment of their famous Blüthner dealership. It was an emotional moment for me when I was able to personally give her a copy of the novel that has her influence on nearly all its pages.

The post Dispatch 15: Chris Cander and The Weight of a Piano go to LA! first appeared on An Open Book - The Inprint Blog.

Houston author Chris Cander’s “Dispatches from Book Tour,” a multi-week blog series of reflections and updates along her 17-city U.S. book tour for her new novel 

February 21, 2019

Pamela Klinger-Horn is an angel among booksellers. She founded and has, for years, run something called Literature Lovers’ Night Out, a ticketed event that draws usually a hundred readers to hear 3-4 writers talk about their latest novels. She was a big fan of my last novel, Whisper Hollow, and offered early endorsement of The Weight of a Piano, and I was so delighted that she invited me to be part of her literary tradition.

Tonight’s reading was in Stillwater, a quaint little town on the Mississippi River, east of Minneapolis. I was there with the wonderful author Anissa Gray, whose debut The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls has captured the attention of reviewers and readers all over the country. Before the event began, Anissa and I shared fried Brussels sprouts and fish tacos at a great place called Lolo, and found in each other a kindred spirit. Two notable commonalities were that we’d both worked with the writer Alice McDermott when we were scholars at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference two years apart, and neither of us much enjoys the presence or smell of dogs. (Sorry dog lovers.)

After selling and signing many books, we, along with local mystery writer Allen Eskens, said our goodbyes, and headed off in separate directions to continue our respective tours. Tomorrow I’m going back to Houston for a few days, where I hear it’s raining, and it will be good to be home again, if only for a little while.

The post Dispatch 14: Chris Cander and The Weight of a Piano go to Stillwater, MN first appeared on An Open Book - The Inprint Blog.

Houston author Chris Cander’s “Dispatches from Book Tour,” a multi-week blog series of reflections and updates along her 17-city U.S. book tour for her new novel The Weight of a Piano (published by Knopf), continues with Dispatch 13, from

February 20, 2019 

Due to the 9” of snow that fell today, tonight’s event–Literature Lovers’ Night Out in Excelsior Bay, MN–was canceled. So while everyone else bundled up and hunkered down, I shed my outerwear (see previous post re: my actually being a polar bear) and went for a walk in the blizzard. Afterward, I got to spend a few hours in the company of one of my very best friends for more than twenty years, the author Charlie Baxter. We got to toast to the completion of his newest novel and to the publication of mine, and to catch up on the many things we love to talk about. 

It was disappointing to miss the reading, but with such good friends, the snow, and a quiet evening in a comfortable hotel, this unexpected day off in the middle of book tour turned out to be perfectly wonderful.

The post Dispatch 13: Chris Cander and The Weight of a Piano have a day off in Minnesota first appeared on An Open Book - The Inprint Blog.

Houston author Chris Cander’s “Dispatches from Book Tour,” a multi-week blog series of reflections and updates along her 17-city U.S. book tour for her new novel 

February 19, 2019 (Dispatch 12)

It was 0^oF in Minneapolis when I boarded my flight from Houston this morning. Fortunately, I have the constitution of a polar bear, so was delighted. My sister-friend Ellory, whom I met 14 years ago when my husband was at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN to receive a kidney transplant, picked me up from the airport, and we got to spend some time together before tonight’s event.

It was cold enough to thin the herd of readers, but even with the weather, there were close to 20 in attendance at Magers & Quinn Bookstore. The small crowd made for an intimate gathering, and after I talked about and read from the book, my dear friend and fellow Knopf writer Peter Geye led a conversation about The Weight of a Piano. I was moved by a woman in the second row, who said that four years ago she’d chosen Whisper Hollow for discussion at the Minnesota chapter of the American Association of University Women, and had been awaiting the arrival of my next book. Her sincerity almost made me tear up. I’ve always known the transformative power books can have on people’s lives. But recognizing, perhaps for the first time, that my books might also was quite a special moment for me.

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