CANR
WORK TITLE: TRY TO GET LOST
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://joanfrank.org//
CITY: Santa Rosa
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 251
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1949, in Phoenix, AZ; married Robert Duxbury (a playwright).
EDUCATION:Warren Wilson College, M.F.A., 1996; also attended University of California—Berkeley.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Teacher and lecturer at colleges, including San Francisco State University, and other venues; juror for fiction competitions; gives readings on radio broadcasts.
AWARDS:Scholar, Aspen Writers’ Conference, 1990; grant, Barbara Deming Money for Women, 1991; fellow, MacDowell Colony, 1991 and 1999; Pushcart Prize nomination, 1992; first prize, Iowa Fiction Award, 1998; resident, Dorset Colony House, 2000; Fiction Award, Emrys Journal, 2002; Michigan Literary Fiction Award, 2006, for Miss Kansas City Ludwig Vogelstein Grant recipient; Dana Portfolio Award, 2008; Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, University of Notre Dame Press, 2010, for In Envy Country: Stories; Book of the Year Award, Foreward Reviews, 2011, for In Envy Country: Stories; Literary Artist of the Year, Sonoma Arts Council, 2011; Juniper Prize for Fiction, University of Massachusetts Press, 2016, for All the News I Need; River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize, 2018, for Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place.
WRITINGS
Work represented in anthologies, including The Book of Eros, Crown Publishers (New York, NY), 1995; Good Life: Mastering the Art of Everyday Living, Utne Reader Books (Minneapolis, MN), 1997; From Daughters to Mothers: An Anthology of Letters, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1997; What I Never Said: From Daughters and Sons to Fathers, Story Lien Press (Ashland, OR), 2001; and The Writer’s Reader, 9th edition, edited by Donald Hall, Longman/Pearson (New York, NY), 2002. Contributor of essays and short stories to periodicals, including San Francisco Chronicle, Confrontation, American Literary Review, Iowa Review, Emrys Journal, Baltimore Review, Salmagundi, New Millennium, Antioch Review, Folio, and Chicago Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Joan Frank is an award-winning American author of novels, short story collections, and essays. As noted in a Press Democrat Online profile by Diane Peterson, Frank “spent the first half of her life gathering material for the second half of her life.” Until she was about forty years old, Frank spent time in various exotic locales, from Africa to Hawaii and Italy. “Then she slid quietly into a late-blooming career as a literary fiction writer,” Peterson noted.
“The books I write are like a bird’s nest,” Frank told Peterson. “I draw from childhood memories and busted relationships … and I’ve stolen madly from everyone. All of it takes on the aura of a numismatic talisman. You’re in a holy state when you’re making it. … I love languages, and it’s a gift genetically. I was accused of gushing as a kid. And I still gush, but I go over everything, hundreds of times. My job is to clean it up and cut it down.” Among Frank’s works are the collection of essays, Desperate Women Need to Talk to You; the story collection, Boys Keep Being Born; the novels The Great Far Away, Make It Stay, and All the News I Need; and the 2020 essay collection, Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place.
Frank’s first book, a collection of essays titled Desperate Women Need to Talk to You, focuses primarily on the author’s observations about life, including essays about dating and the possibility that she may remain childless. A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that the author “is at her best in a longer piece describing her pain at her mother’s death.”
In her collection of short stories, Boys Keep Being Born, the author presents thirteen stories focusing primarily on lonely women in their forties reminiscing about their pasts, from affairs with married men to issues of fidelity. Three of the stories feature male protagonists, including “The Guardian,” which a Kirkus Reviews contributor called “a small masterpiece.” The story is about a man who learns that a legal secretary who was so kind to him when he was just a boy was actually his father’s longtime mistress. The Kirkus Reviews contributor called the collection of stories “well-crafted and relentless.”
In her novel The Great Far Away, the author tells the story of two couples whose innocent love for each other in a small 1970s California town fades as they face difficulties in marriage and parenthood and their small hometown becomes suburbanized. “Frank’s prose style remains deft, and she creates secondary characters … [who are] vibrant,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor.
Frank returns to a small-town California setting in Make It Stay, a short novel about relationships between spouses and friends. The novel is narrated by Rachel Blum, a writer who married Neil, a straitlaced lawyer, later in life. Years before, her husband’s best friend, Mike Spender, saved Neil’s life during a trip to the South Pacific. Since then, Neil has been intensely loyal to Mike, helping him and his family through an assortment of health, legal, and marital difficulties. In the process Rachel is left with the vague sense at times that she is an intruder—a feeling intensified by Neil’s own doubts about his marriage. She is further disturbed by Mike’s womanizing and by the dishonesty of Mike’s wife, Tilda, the character in the novel with a mean streak. When tragedy strikes one of the characters, Rachel’s marriage is thrown into turmoil.
Reviewers were enthusiastic about Make It Stay, a title that refers to one perfect moment when all is right with the four characters and they hope that they can “make it stay.” Cortney Ophoff, in a review in Booklist, admired the novel for being “deeply insightful,” and she found the characters “memorable and authentic.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor, calling the novel “first-class fiction,” particularly admired its language, writing: “Frank wraps the reader in a cocoon of finely spun images and rich similes that makes one want to return to the beginning of the book just to savor the language all over again.” A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that the author’s prose “has the impressionistic quality of poetry.” The reviewer further observed that Frank “breathes life” into the relationships she depicts and that she “skillfully distills the zeal and alienation of a midlife love attenuated by distance and grief.”
In All the News I Need, Frank delves into themes of love, sex, and mortality in the friendship between Frances Ferguson and Oliver Gaffney. This is an unlikely comradery. Fran is fifty-eight, a widow and former newspaper columnist who lives alone in California’s wine country. Ollie is sixty-two, a shy, single, gay man living in San Francisco following a career as a preschool teacher. Ollie has a tendency toward the negative, with panic attacks and a feeling of fatalism. The friendship between these two was initiated because Ollie was a close friend of Fran’s late husband, Kirk. Where Ollie is shy and withdrawn, Fran is out front with her feelings, a woman who enjoys her drink and is unconcerned about her graphic swearing. The pair travels together to Paris with surprising results that changes their lives and delivers them back home with a new outlook on life. Fran suggests the trip to Paris, eager to visits sights she last saw with her husband. Though the two get on each other’s nerves, this trip ultimately creates a bond between these two that is life-altering.
Reviewing All the News I Need in the online Coffee Spew, Bob Wake termed the novel a “deep dive into the heart of friendship, of memory and regret, of aging and loss.” Wake added: “Frank has gifted us with two unforgettable characters in a novel filled to bursting with hard truths and shimmering beauty.” SFGate reviewer Alexis Burling was also impressed by the novel, commenting: “Let’s be clear about this: ‘All the News I Need’ is a keeper. It’s one of those rare reads you’ll read and pick up again a decade later, this time with a new perspective. … The last section of the book really turns the tables. Here’s a hint: Uplifting isn’t even the half of it.” Writing in the online Writing Wife, Ronda Bowen similarly observed: “If you’re looking for a beautifully written novel that gets to the core of some of the deeper questions we experience as people living in a world filled with other people, this book comes highly recommended.”
In Try to Get Lost, Frank collects sixteen essays “on travels that map psychological interiors as much as they do geographic landscapes,” according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Here she writes of travels to France and Florence, Italy, as well as a return visit to her Arizona hometown. She discusses the ups and down of traveling, the anxieties and exhilaration, as well as the behavior of Americans abroad, and personal reactions to loss.
“For all its attentiveness to beauty and loss, this wise and humorous collection is also a moving record of anticipation and expectation,” noted a Kirkus Reviews critic of Try to Get Lost. The critic added, “Philosophical, sophisticated literary forays that are a pleasure to dwell in.” Similarly, the Publishers Weekly contributor concluded: “Frank’s rich, imagery-driven prose lends immediacy to her observations. This is a perfect book for readers to take on their travels, even if they’re only going as far as the armchair.”
Frank once told CA: “I would offer for my own modus operandi, Katherine Anne Porter’s description of one of her stories: ‘a moral and emotional collision with a human situation.’ In writing it, one seeks to grasp it. If you get it right, something of that collision’s essence, its mystery and dignity, are conveyed in the depiction. By being as scrupulously true to her perception of the human event as she can—by allowing it to open in her hand to some degree—the writer offers it into a kind of ‘dimensionalizing’ amber. She gives it a resonance that, however small, will stand. Eventually something is grasped or felt by both writer and reader that was not available when both set out.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 15, 2012, Cortney Ophoff, review of Make It Stay, p. 20.
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2001, review of Boys Keep Being Born, p. 1147; February 15, 2012, review of Make It Stay; November 15, 2019, review of Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place
Publishers Weekly, August 8, 1994, review of Desperate Women Need to Talk to You, p. 420; December 11, 2006, review of The Great Far Away, p. 46; January 30, 2012, review of Make It Stay, p. 33; November 11, 2019, review of Try to Get Lost, p. 49.
ONLINE
Coffee Spew, https://coffeespew.org/ (February 9, 2017), Bob Wake, review of All the News I Need.
Joan Frank, http://joanfrank.org (December 14, 2019).
Farsickness, http://farsickness.com/ (December 14, 2019), author interview.
Pen American Center, http://www.pen.org/ (August 22, 2007), information about author.
Press Democrat, https://www.pressdemocrat.com/ (December 1, 2019), “Santa Rosa Author Joan Frank Writes on Love, Sex and Mortality in New Novel ‘All the News I Need’.”
Red Room, http://redroom.com (November 15, 2012), brief author profile.
SFGate, https://www.sfgate.com/ (June 9, 2017), Alexis Burling, review of All the News I Need.
Triquarterly, http://triquarterly.org/ (November 15, 2012), author profile.
Winning Wife, https://www.winingwife.com/ (July 5, 2017), Ronda Bowen, review of All the News I Need.
Biography
Joan was born to New Yorkers in Phoenix, Arizona. She studied with author Thaisa Frank (no relation) at the University of California in Berkeley, CA, and holds an MFA in creative fiction from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC.
She is a MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Ragdale Fellow; a Pushcart Prize nominee, recent winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction and of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize.
Her pending collection, WHERE YOU'RE ALL GOING: FOUR NOVELLAS, will be published in February 2020 by Sarabande Books.
TRY TO GET LOST: ESSAYS ON TRAVEL AND PLACE will be published in the same month, by the University of New Mexico Press.
Past honors include the Juniper Prize for Fiction (the Novel), ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award, Richard Sullivan Prize, Dana Award, and notable others. Joan has received grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and Sonoma Arts Council; been a two-time nominee for the Northern California Book Award in Fiction, and named a San Francisco Library and Berkeley Public Library Literary Laureate. She has taught creative writing at San Francisco State University, and continues to offer private consultation.
Joan also reviews literary fiction and nonfiction for The Washington Post, and other venues. She lives in Northern California.
Four Questions on Farsickness is an interview series with creative writers for whom place is essential to their work. Each writer answers the same four questions—and featured here is author Joan Frank.
1. Share a little about where you’re from. When you were growing up, what place—real or imagined—most fascinated you, and why?
I grew up in the 1950s desert, in a tiny new suburb at the base of the North Phoenix mountains, called Sunnyslope―a very raw, clean place in those years, dry and sweet and tender, full of wonder and magic for a kid. My little sister and I roamed the desert hills all day long (when we were not in grade school), with perfect freedom and innocence. That innocence was obliterated with our mother’s sudden death, probably by suicide, and we moved (me at 11, Andrie at 9) to Sacramento. I’ve written about those years in an essay I hope readers will find, preliminarily in the nonfiction journal River Teeth, and later (it is fondly hoped) in a book of essays about travel and place: working title, In Case of Firenze. As a child―before the sky fell on us―I had only the dimmest understanding that other kinds of places existed―and I do not think I really internalized the shock of this physical fact until I stood upon the first beach of my life (Santa Monica, CA, on a family vacation, my mother then still with us) and beheld the glittering blue ocean. It was like staring at all the riches of the universe―hearing and smelling them―like discovering God, or at least God’s palace, piled with God’s treasures. My sister and I ran shrieking to the water, immediately assembling cannonballs of sand, investigating the glistening foam at the edge of the incoming tide, tiny crabs, mysterious dead jellyfish, bits of shells, sand dollars. I can never, ever forget how electrified we were, vibrating, thrilled with possibility and amazement. So the fascination you suggest, sort of happened post-facto.
Later, I took that same romance with ocean-bound land to an exponential depth by moving to Hawaii for a dozen years. There, for a while, amid similar transplanted friends, the relative safety and beauty of the place gave a lonely, lost young woman a second shot―at feeling legitimate, loved, located. I worked a sweet job there, as typesetter at an investigative weekly tabloid newspaper (where I first began to write); I also had a part-time job, handily, as a bookseller. I had urgent relationships, dear friends, and a few tragedies. Of course, as is true of any place, Hawaii proved complicated―socially, economically, politically, relationally―and after a dozen years, for a number of reasons, I knew I had to leave. I wrote about that time in a slender novel called The Great Far Away, though I transposed the principals and landscape to Northern California. Looked back upon, the period spent in Hawaii proved something close to miraculous, in that it gave me permission to create a life on my own terms. One only understands these things later―in the present tense of it, one hasn’t much of a clue.
2. What travel has been a particular inspiration to your work?
That’s easy: almost all of it: Colorado (on the train, with a Vista Dome view of the glorious Rockies) as a young woman, then Africa with the Peace Corps—the consciousness-altering equivalent of something like electrocution—then the years in Hawaii, which included a voyage to Tahiti: but above all and most especially, travel to Europe, much of it accomplished as the girlfriend/later wife of a teacher who bagged four semesters-abroad in Paris and three in Florence. Wandering those old capitals and the countryside (and countries and sea channels) between, gave worlds of new understanding, wonder, and humility. I tend not to write about travel until after some time has passed: it seems to need to marinate or gestate for a significant while, to be retrievable as a basis for fiction or essays. I try sometimes to jot notes about what I am seeing, but latterly I’ve often abandoned even that. I just let the visuals soak in, and trust that what is necessary or useful will become available eventually. I wait to see what comes floating back after routine life has resumed.
3. Where do you “escape to” to recharge creativity?
Whenever I can manage it, these days, I try once a year to take at least a couple of weeks’ writer’s residency at an artists’ colony like MacDowell, VCCA, or Ragdale. In recent years I’ve branched out and tried out some new, slightly-more-obscure places, because I’m finding the famous ones are ever-more-inundated and becoming harder to enter. These retreats, to me, are just straight-up sublime sanctuaries for blessed, uninterrupted peace and solitude in which to rest, think, dream, read and write, generally giving the writer a room or cabin of her own, and (sometimes) providing at least dinner, where the writer can mingle with co-artists. Usually the setting is one of natural beauty; one can take gentle walks, and so on. You generally make at least a couple of decent friends in these places, so there’s someone to talk to now and again: otherwise, one’s on one’s (blissful) own. Solitude like that, for me, is nourishment so exquisite it’s practically erotic, almost unspeakably luxurious. While living at home, a swim or workout helps, as does time spent at museums and concerts, taking in other forms of art.
4. Where would you most like to travel to next?
I’m starting to withdraw, these days, from the grip of automatic, all-encompassing travel-fever. My energies are changing. My awareness of that fact, together with my experience of travel as (in essence) paying money to be placed in situations which amount to a kind of limbo of waiting—a sensation I honestly feel it’s almost impossible to avoid, while we travel, for good and for not-so-good—have made me less and less eager, latterly, to want to roam. I find I want more to stay put for a simpler (and heaven knows, cheaper) routine of dreaming and writing. But that won’t easily be possible while being married to a man who is still a card-carrying travel-holic. So I have to pick my battles. Coming up for us is a little field trip to Chicago to soak up theater (he is a playwright), art, architecture, and food. For next fall, we’re looking at the prospect of Toronto and Montreal, likely in tandem with a couple of dear friends, for intense injections of diverse culture, and natural beauty. While these voyages are being planned, I never keep any hard objective in mind—no artistic “assignment,” other than that of the proverbial flâneur: to take everything in and see what roots itself; to always be someone, in the immortal words of Henry James, “on whom nothing is lost.”
Joan Frank is the author of six books of literary fiction and a book of collected essays. Her most recent novel, All the News I Need, won the 2016 Juniper Prize for Fiction. Joan’s last story collection, In Envy Country, won the Richard Sullivan Prize and the Gold ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award; her book of essays, Because You Have To: A Writing Life, won the Silver ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award. A MacDowell Colony Fellow and recipient of many grants and honors, Joan also frequently reviews literary fiction and nonfiction for the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in the North Bay Area of California.
As a child of New Yorkers in then-sleepy Phoenix, Arizona, in a houseful of books and music, Joan loved reading and writing from earliest childhood. But as a young adult she suffered terrible confusion and performance anxiety (her father was a revered, charismatic college teacher whom she longed to make proud). Many strange jobs and all kinds of travel followed. It took until early midlife to grasp that for Joan, writing was absolutely, electrifyingly, the calling and the gift—mandated at a cellular level.
The not-so-good part of this timing: there were suddenly many years to make up for. The fabulous part? Zero doubt. Full-tilt urgency—but most vitally and brilliantly, a bellyful of experience stored up in technicolor detail, as material. Those elements combined and gathered force to produce eight books of fiction, a book of collected essays about the writing life, and an early book of journalistic essays (Joan began as a journalist) that a friend playfully calls Joan’s version of Sex in the City.
Joan studied with author Thaisa Frank (no relation) at UC Berkeley, then took an MFA in Fiction at Warren Wilson College. She is quietly proud of her oeuvre, and of the warm critical response it has gathered. Highlights include: the Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction, the Juniper Prize for Fiction (the Novel), the Dana Portfolio Award, the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, and two ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Awards.
Joan is a MacDowell Colony and VCCA Fellow, a Ragdale Alumnus, and grateful recipient of grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, Barbara Deming Fund, and Sonoma Arts Council. She has taught the short story at San Francisco State University, and still reads and lectures to writing classes and book groups. She also regularly reviews literary fiction and nonfiction for the San Francisco Chronicle. Joan lives in the North Bay Area of California with her kind and patient husband—who is also a playwright, which helps.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Joan Frank’s work of literary fiction, The Outlook For Earthlings, in 2020.
Santa Rosa author Joan Frank writes on love, sex and mortality in new novel ‘All the News I Need’
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Joan Frank of Santa Rosa, shown here in her writing studio, recently published a new novel, "All the News I Need," which won the Juniper Prize for Fiction from the University of Massachusetts Press. (JOHN BURGESS/ PD)
DIANE PETERSON
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT June 19, 2017
JOAN FRANK’S BOOKS
“All the News I Need” — a novel: Published by the University of Massachusetts Press in March 2017. 2016 Juniper Prize for Fiction.
“Because You Have to: A Writing Life” — essays: Published by the University of Notre Dame Press in fall 2012. Silver Award, ForeWord Review Book of the Year, 2013
“Make It Stay” — a novel: Published by The Permanent Press in Spring 2012. Dana Portfolio Award for Novel in Progress in 2008
“In Envy Country” — stories: Published by University of Notre Dame Press in 2010. 2010 Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction; 2010 Gold ForeWord Book of the Year Award; Finalist, 2011 California Book Award.
“The Great Far Away” — a novel: Published by the Permanent Press in 2007. Finalist, 2008 Northern California Book Award in Fiction.
“Miss Kansas City” — a novel: Published by University of Michigan Press in 2006. 2006 Michigan Literary Fiction award; Finalist, 2007 Northern California Book Award.
“Boys Keep Being Born” — stories: Published by University of Missouri Press in 2001. Finalist, 2002 Bay Area Book Reviewers Award; Finalist, 2002 Paterson Fiction Award.
“Despite Women Need to Talk to You” — essays: Published by Conari Press in 1994.
www.joanfrank.org
Author Joan Frank of Santa Rosa spent the first half of her life gathering material for the second half of her life.
Until she was nearly 40, she lived in exotic locales like Africa and Hawaii and worked in journalism in search of authentic, real-life experience. Then she slid quietly into a late-blooming career as a literary fiction writer.
But for the past few decades, Frank, 57, has made up for lost time by producing four novels, two short story collections and two books of essays that have garnered an impressive array of 43 grants, honors and awards, including the Juniper Prize for Fiction for her latest novel, “All the News I Need” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017).
“I really started publishing at age 40,” said Frank, the daughter of two native New Yorkers, an English professor father and an artistic mother, who moved to Phoenix before she was born. “But a lot of my friends say I have more books out than anyone they know.”
The new novel, like much of her fiction, focuses on the interior lives of its two main characters: the acerbic Fran, a lonely widow living in Wine Country; and the erudite Ollie, a painfully shy gay man living in San Francisco. Wielding her polished prose and deep insight into loss and mortality, Frank trails these unlikely friends as they embark on a life-changing trip to Paris, which allows them to arrive back home with new eyes.
Reviewer Bob Wake of Coffee Spew called the book “a deep dive into the heart of friendship, of memory and regret, of aging and loss. ... Joan Frank has gifted us with two unforgettable characters in a novel filled to bursting with hard truths and shimmering beauty.”
The book draws inspiration from Frank’s own tragedies — she lost her mother at age 11 and her younger sister in 2014 — and limns the author’s deep passion for travel and music as well as her clear-eyed inquisition of the undignified realities of aging.
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“It’s an homage to all of my peers who have lived this long with me, and also, a kind of victory lap,” she said. “The book is trying to come up with a proposal of ways to inhabit what time we have left here.”
As the icing on the éclair this year, the California State Library in Sacramento recognized Frank as an important California writer, purchasing all of her papers and the posthumous copyrights to her books in order to create the Joan Frank Collection. That honor has left the under-the-radar author, who has never been published by a major house, both exhilarated and validated.
“It means my work will live on for generations, protected and preserved,” she said. “It may be better than fame and fortune ... may be.”
In addition to writing fiction, Frank regularly reviews books for the San Francisco Chronicle, has been shopping around an unpublished collection of four novellas and is working on a new essay collection about place and travel.
Since 1996, she has lived in Santa Rosa with her husband, Bob Duxbury, a British-born playwright.
We caught up with Frank in a local coffee shop, where her chic, red glasses and black sheath blouse made her appear more like a transplanted New Yorker than ever, while her natural warmth and open spirit revealed her Western roots.
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Q: How did you come up with the title of your new book, “All the News I Need”?
A: It came from a Paul Simon song, “The Only Living Boy in New York.” That song is dropped in at the end of the book. I originally wanted the title to be “You’ve Got the Same Pants to Get Happy With.” Everyone hated the title — editors, friends and family. And I was crushed. Bob and I went for a walk around Spring Lake ... and he came up with this, and I loved it.
People often criticize things as old news. My knee’s gone out. I need glasses. There’s a slogan about aging: when it happens to you, it’s news. Also, the world is in such a disastrous state right now that you can only concentrate on a tiny corner of news at one time. I have reasonable health. I have people who love me. And that’s all I need.
Q: Can you talk a little about your creative process?
A: The books I write are like a bird’s nest. I draw from childhood memories and busted relationships ... and I’ve stolen madly from everyone. All of it takes on the aura of a numismatic talisman. You’re in a holy state when you’re making it.
I start out with a line I carry around with me. For this book, it was “He thinks of chihuahuas when he sees a certain kind of man.” That’s the first line of the story. Who is speaking? What is this person like? Like a periscope, the picture opens. He’s a Giacometti-like figure of a man, tall and thin. That’s Ollie ... And then one thing leads to the next, and the bird’s nest is underway. It’s like pulling thread out of a ball of yarn.
Q: How do you get in the zone when you sit down to write?
A: I read what I’ve got and make myself very quiet and look at the bigger picture. My own DNA is flooding into these people, and I’m stealing freely, and it opens out and deepens the deeper I get. Sometimes I feel like I’m holding a divining rod.
You wish for it, but while you’re in it, you don’t dare talk about it. I’ve learned not to thrash or struggle. I just fool around with it and sooner or later, I find a way forward.
Q: Your sentences seem like polished stones, each one crafted so meticulously. How do you get that fine sheen?
A: I love languages, and it’s a gift genetically. I was accused of gushing as a kid. And I still gush, but I go over everything, hundreds of times. My job is to clean it up and cut it down.
Q: Was this novel an homage to anyone in particular?
A: It’s a work of affection and gratitude for having lived this long, and an elegy for the dead, not the least of whom was my younger sister, Andrea. She died in 2014 at 62. It’s also an homage to my peers who have lived this long ... Art (with a capital A) can go a long way to make what time we have left meaningful. It can save us, but we have to allow it to.
Q: You often write about the power of music. Why does this art form speak to you?
A: Music has played such a passionate role in my life. It has a radiant energy that predicts, translates and interprets one’s experience. It gives a whole new dimension to the word “playlist.” Suddenly, it’s not just people’s favorite songs ... you feel as though music takes you to an edge that is almost any question you’ve ever asked.
Other arts are like that ... but to me, music is the most powerful drug of all. It goes right into the veins, and tears are coming before you know what’s happened. It’s the most mysterious thing of all, but it’s very hard to write about.
Q: Your books focus on your characters’ interior lives. Why?
A. Many people live to respond. I’m an introvert. I like to try to make sense of how things happen. When I’m formulating a response, I’m as happy as a fish in water. I’m doing underwater acrobatics. Relating externally is a poor second to that.
Most of my books are interior, cerebral, infused with memory and very quiet. I write the kind of book I like to read. I love Rachel Cusk’s “Transit.” She’s just a mindblower, and Robert Seethaler’s “A Whole Life” and William Maxwell’s “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” which is driven by a memory of a childhood tragedy. It’s the same trope as Samuel Beckett’s life is unbearable. “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
Q: You also experienced a childhood tragedy. When did your mother die?
A: She was 44, and I was 11, but I can only be thankful that writing swooped in to save me, and that was a great joy.
Q: You review books for the San Francisco Chronicle. What is that like?
A: It’s like being assigned to eat chocolate cake. I can articulate what makes a work memorable and beautiful while I’m encouraging people to read.
Q: You are working on essays about place and travel. What draws you to those topics?
A. I have this theory that if you get a group of people together, the subject of conversation will eventually devolve to place. Where are you from? Why are you there? Place seems to be linked to identity, your past and future. Who we are and who we want to be.
Bob and I travel to Europe a great deal. I’ve written about Florence and France, I’ve written about my Arizona childhood and the difference between the West and the East (coasts). I’ve got several essays out there already in literary reviews ... The book will be called “In Case of Firenze and Other Travel Essays.”
Q: You recently moderated a panel of young, debut novelists for the Bay Area Book Festival. What role does place play in their work?
A: The Irish writer Colin Barrett said he didn’t lock into the right way to tell his stories until he had his place. Place is the ballgame. I’ve been lucky to have sexy places suggest their stories to me ... Hawaii, San Francisco and absolutely Santa Rosa, as well as Healdsburg and Sonoma. In my new collection of novellas, place is very much there. One of the novellas is set in Bodega Head.
Q: The California State Library in Sacramento purchased all of your papers and posthumous copyrights to your books this year. What does that mean to you?
A: We came to Sacramento when I was 11, after my mother died, and I went to school there and went on to study at UC Davis. So it seems right. They will own the copyrights and have all my letters, emails and manuscripts, and I couldn’t be happier. I already sent them nine cartons.
What means the most is that all my works will live on. Scholars can start there, if they want to research me. I can’t tell you how relieved I am. Our lives are so short, and it’s everything I could want. My late sister and my dad would be bursting with pride. It’s a true valediction, although I’ll write until my last breath.
Q: What advice would you give young writers?
A: Make yourself strong so that you can believe in yourself and push on. No one else is going to do that for you. Inside, you can be tapioca. But outside, be strong.
Staff writer Diane Peterson can be reached at 707-521-5287 or diane.peterson@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @dianepete56.
Frank, Joan TRY TO GET LOST Univ. of New Mexico (Adult Nonfiction) $19.95 2, 18 ISBN: 978-0-8263-6137-0
A gathering of honest, luminous essays on home and travel.
"Place is identity, style, faith, cosmology," writes Frank (All the News I Need, 2017, etc.) in her latest book, the winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. From this assured, thoughtful view, the author reveals how traveling as an older adult has brought shifting perspectives. In a piquant opening essay, Frank considers First-World complaints on the inconvenience of going anywhere paired with the still-held romantic belief in travel's worth. A humorous piece on shopping for the right bag morphs into memories of childhood, linking present and past through ideas of containment, organization, and portability. The sights of Firenze, Italy, inspire separate impressions that show the city as a place both marred and upheld by tourism. Frank skillfully uses the ordinary aspects of traveling to segue into wide-ranging insights on belonging, longing, and home, with occasional familiar laments. These include the embarrassing behavior of Americans and timely comments on the current Trumpian moment ("when surroundings dazzle, Blue-leaning humans romanticize. We assume that a landscape's loveliness seeps into its inhabitants"). It's the autobiographical essays, though, that linger the most. The aching standout, "Cave of the Iron Door," features a return to the author's hometown, Phoenix. Frank overlays a familiar yet alien, desert landscape with memories of her parents' strained marriage. The nostalgic, elegiac movement from childhood magic to hindsight about her mother's isolation in the 1950s is heartbreaking, and the essay culminates in her mother's death from a barbiturate overdose. For all its attentiveness to beauty and loss, this wise and humorous collection is also a moving record of anticipation and expectation. Each place, taken on its own terms, yields up its own flavors and character, but everyone is bound by one eloquent fact: "time is the vastest real estate we know."
Philosophical, sophisticated literary forays that are a pleasure to dwell in.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Frank, Joan: TRY TO GET LOST." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A605549612/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2db613a3. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A605549612
Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place
Joan Frank. Univ. of New Mexico, $19.95 trade paper (208p) ISBN 978-0-8263-6137-0
"Place is identity, style, faith, cosmology" notes fiction writer Frank (All the News I Need) in this collection of 16 scintillating essays on travels that map psychological interiors as much as they do geographic landscapes. "Cake-Frosting Country" is a delightful memoir of Frank's many sojourns in France, and the episodic "In Case of Firenze" tracks the highlights and disappointments of an extended stay in Florence. Frank universalizes her experiences as a traveler in essays such as "Shake Me Up, Judy," about the anxieties travelers must overcome to make a trip, but she also reminds the reader that every trip is personal in the book's most poignant selections: "Cave of the Iron Door," about her return to her childhood home in Arizona, where her mother committed suicide, and "Little Traffic Light Men," in which a trivial mishap during a visit to Germany triggers a devastating memory of the death of her sister. Frank's rich, imagery-driven prose lends immediacy to her observations. This is a perfect book for readers to take on their travels, even if they're only going as far as the armchair. (Feb.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place." Publishers Weekly, 11 Nov. 2019, p. 49. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A606484097/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5ceb15f6. Accessed 5 Dec. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A606484097
Book Review: All the News I Need by Joan Frank
July 5, 20172 Commentson Book Review: All the News I Need by Joan Frank
review by Ronda Bowen
My favorite thing about reading is when an author weaves his or her words together to create a movie in my mind. Joan Frank does this exact thing in All the News I Need. Even within the first few pages of this novel, the verisimilitude she creates with her words woven together is quite poetic:
Opens his eyes. Eucalyptus branches. Pearl mist evaporating as he watches, apertures of baby blue. Brine-breath from the beach. Medicine tang of leaves, acorns.
Rubs his cold hands. Should’ve used more lotion this morning. (p.4)
The language in All The News I Need isn’t the only reason that one should pick up a copy of this novel. The tight-knit story delves into the emotions of loss and loneliness while one is surrounded by people. We all have had those times where we’re in a city full of people but still feel like the only ones there. (Or at least, I have had times when I feel like I’m the only person in a room full of talkative people. I just assume others have too!)
In the midst of their pain, the main characters Frances Ferguson, a snarky widow, and Oliver Gaffney, a seriously introverted gay guy, decide to head to Paris together. This results in a crazy adventure that challenges both of them at their core – especially since they are each so dedicated to their own lives and rituals.
If you’re looking for a beautifully written novel that gets to the core of some of the deeper questions we experience as people living in a world filled with other people, this book comes highly recommended. Get inside the heads of her characters, enjoy the beautiful word-music, and indulge yourself in this literary work.
About All the News I Need
• Paperback: 210 pages
• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press (January 17, 2017)
All The News I Need probes the modern American response to inevitable, ancient riddles—of love and sex and mortality.
Frances Ferguson is a lonely, sharp-tongued widow who lives in the wine country. Oliver Gaffney is a painfully shy gay man who guards a secret and lives out equally lonely days in San Francisco. Friends by default, Fran and Ollie nurse the deep anomie of loss and the creeping, animal betrayal of aging. Each loves routine but is anxious that life might be passing by. To crack open this stalemate, Fran insists the two travel together to Paris. The aftermath of their funny, bittersweet journey suggests those small changes, within our reach, that may help us save ourselves—somewhere toward the end.
Praise
“Joan Frank has gifted us with two unforgettable characters in a novel filled to bursting with hard truths and shimmering beauty.” —Bob Wake, Cambridge Book Review
Joan Frank is a human insight machine.” —Carolyn Cooke
“I will be quoting her ‘rules for aging’ at many dinner parties!” —Natalie Serber
By Alexis Burling Published 7:32 am PDT, Friday, June 9, 2017
Joan Frank Photo: Reenie Raschke
Photo: Reenie Raschke
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Joan Frank
From the moment 62-year-old Oliver Gaffney — Ollie — shuffles onto the first page of Joan Frank’s slim but deeply perceptive sixth book of fiction, “All the News I Need,” it’s impossible not to find him endearing. Yes, he’s an obsesser. An incessant kvetcher. A glass-pretty-darn-well-empty sort of chap.
Still.
When we first meet him, he’s scouting out men in a San Francisco park while sitting on his favorite bench. Sort of. Ever since his semi-partner of two years, Ennis, died in a car crash years ago, Ollie’s wanted nothing to do with flirting or dating, let alone sex. In fact, he’s wanted nothing much to do with anything — or anyone.
Except bold, brassy Fran — and even that’s a stretch.
Ollie and Fran became friends by default. Fran met Ollie’s friend Kirk while browsing the aisles of San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore. After she and Kirk got married, Fran basically tolerated Ollie, even though she thought he was a bit of a wet blanket. A “long tall stick-figure of sadness.”
But everything changed when Kirk suddenly keeled over from a stroke while folding laundry. Fran quit her job as a weekly columnist and book reviewer at the local paper and systematically shut down. She surrounded herself with stillness. That “absence of movement, absence of sound. A stopping. Silence in her teeth, in her bones.”
Slowly — eventually — she and Ollie picked up their old routine in Kirk’s absence. They talked on the phone intermittently. Sometimes he’d visit her at the house north of San Francisco. But he never stayed over. He needed his things — his sink, his mattress. Besides, their friendship was just “a habit.”
Eight years later, the two saddish sacks are still stuck in that rut. Going through the motions. On a whim, they plan a three-week vacation to France. As Fran puts it, it was for the sole purpose of “cracking something open. Getting knocked around.”
For Ollie, it had the potential of being “a catastrophic mistake ... Now they’d signed on to be roped together like a couple of Matterhorn climbers. Day and night — dear Lord, the same bathroom — for three weeks.”
Oh boy.
As one might expect from this lead-up, the whirlwind trip to Paris and the French countryside is not the breezy travelogue you’d expect. Sure, there’s the touring of the Parc Monceau, the Musée d’Orsay, Toulouse. The “Greatest Hits tour” of all the stops that meant something to Fran and Kirk when they lived there. (Be warned: one of which is a tearjerker!)
But while all of that is happening, Ollie’s busy fretting over the oddness of the French version of Listerine and scheming how to wrangle another pillow from the hotel front desk clerk. That, and his dubious run-in with a handsome street vendor, followed by a ball-busting screaming match with Fran.
Apparently some people just don’t travel that well together.
From the summary of the plot thus far, it seems as though a better title of Frank’s novel would be “All the Bad News I Need.” But that’s really the fault of this reviewer. In truth, the book is quite wonderful. Fran’s perseverance — and even Ollie’s mutterings about getting (smelling) older and feeling irrelevant — speak volumes about our need for companionship, the resilience of the human spirit, and our connection to time and place.
Frank’s prose is evocative, too. Take her description of the house Ollie grew up in: it “smelled of dust, tapioca, tomato juice, gin and tonics (before dinner each evening), and the nostril-pinching chemicals his [entomologist] father used for specimens.”
Let’s be clear about this: “All the News I Need” is a keeper. It’s one of those rare reads you’ll read and pick up again a decade later, this time with a new perspective. And lest you need another reason to take a gander, how about this: The last section of the book really turns the tables. Here’s a hint: Uplifting isn’t even the half of it.
Alexis Burling’s reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Oregonian. Email: books@sfchronicle.com.
All the News I Need
By Joan Frank
(University of Massachusetts Press; 197 pages; $19.95 paperback)
All the News I Need
Published February 9, 2017 Literature , Novel Leave a Comment
Tags: 2016 Juniper Prize for Fiction, All the News I Need, Joan Frank, University of Massachusetts Press
All the News I Need
Joan Frank
University of Massachusetts Press 2017
Reviewed by Bob Wake
allthenewsJoan Frank’s fourth novel, All the News I Need, winner of the 2016 Juniper Prize for Fiction from the University of Massachusetts Press, is a deep dive into the heart of friendship, of memory and regret, of aging and loss. Frances Ferguson, former newspaper columnist and book reviewer, is widowed after sixteen years of marriage. She’s fifty-eight and living alone in the novel’s lushly depicted wine region of Northern California. Oliver Gaffney, retired San Francisco preschool teacher, is gay and single at sixty-two. He’s prone to fatalism and panic attacks.
Human beings getting on one another’s nerves. Joan Frank has long been a master at showing how the best among us can entertain on occasion the worst of thoughts. All the News I Need is told through vivid third-person intimate narration that toggles between Frances and Oliver. Fran and Ollie. Ollie was close friends with Fran’s late husband, Kirk. The friendship between Fran and Ollie, minus Kirk, is iffy. By Ollie’s estimation:
Fran practices survivor manners, which is to say, none. She plunks her shod feet on the dining table, laughs with a honk, swears graphically, drinks wine chased by beer from the bottle—lifted high with each swig, as if she were taking aim with a spyglass.
The centerpiece of the novel is a life-shifting excursion to Paris undertaken by Fran and Ollie at Fran’s instigation. They will visit sights she remembers from previous trips with her late husband. There will be mishaps. (“Travel beats the living shit out of you,” Fran at one point muses in italicized exhaustion.) Fran and Ollie will each have opportunities to bless one another with kindness, even share moments of transcendence, while still wondering privately what the hell is wrong with the other person. (“Ollie’s insane, but that was never exactly a revelation,” Fran tells herself.) At unexpected moments the city erupts with a kind of quotidian sensuality and grace:
They march to the Place des Vosges, through the shadowy arched entry into the pale sunlight of the square: a time-travel portal. Once through, they stop and stare. Sounds issue at them: splashing water from the fountain, echoes from the cool arcades surrounding the lawn, the demure trees: chatter, music, scents of coffee and roasting meats and fresh bread and perfume, laughter. Couples strewn on the grass, entwined, twirling strands of each other’s hair; mothers and nannies trail young charges who lurch around shrieking, arms in the air, just as they do at the park at home.
At an outdoor Paris cafe, Ollie recalls the AIDS epidemic that took so many of his friends, years during which “he kept two funeral suits in his closet.” Fran talks openly about “the targeted feeling” of sexual harrassment that “never stopped, in one form or another, until, oh, my forties.” Scenes like this give All the News I Need an unvarnished sense of what human dignity under assault looks like and feels like. The relevance is unmistakable. This is not fake news.
“Nobody gives a fuck what we saw or what we ate,” says Fran in morose anticipation of their return home. There will be redemptive and wholly satisfying surprises to come. Joan Frank has gifted us with two unforgettable characters in a novel filled to bursting with hard truths and shimmering beauty.