Manjula Martin

There’s a lot to like about Manjula Martin’s memoir/environmental lit/history of California The Last Fire Season as she chronicles the year 2020. She packs a lot of fascinating local history, literary references, and philosophical commentary in as she navigates a horrendous physical injury due to medical errors and the threat of wildfire to her home. For all of her mea culpas about belonging to the white, colonizer, middle-class, I found her need to vaunt her superior nature (I read James Joyce, I listen to reggae and jazz, my husband and I have philosophical discussions, etc.) somewhat insufferable. Readers who approach this book as a memoir with environmental themes may find Martin easier to take.… (meer)

Just how do writers make a living? How do they go from debt-ridden students (mostly) to property owning, wine drinking and caviar eating human beings? Or at least how do they manage to make ends meet? Or, really, do any of them manage that? Few enough do for this to be a live question — a question that some publisher thinks enough would-be writers will be wondering about to warrant publishing a collection of essays on just this topic.

Everyone in this collection has “made it”, so to speak, in one way or another. They range from people who are barely eking out a living by combining their writing with adjunct professorships and jobs in taverns, to those who’ve been at the top of the bestsellers lists for years and years. Given that range you might expect more variation in the stories told and messages to pass on to young writers hoping to make their ways in the world. But in fact the advice here mostly boils down to 1) have a lot of gumption and sticktoitiveness; 2) write what you love (and love what you write); and 3) be lucky. Mostly being lucky seems to be the most consistently useful attribute to have.

Despite the somewhat saminess of the essays, I still enjoyed them. But by far the essay that stood out as a singularly impressive piece of writing in its own right was Kiese Laymon’s, “You Are the Second Person.” That one was worth the price of the book by itself (had I not got my copy from the public library).… (meer)