Brunonia Barry: She must have read the lace...

HALLIE: I heard the buzz about Brunonia Barry and her remarkable first novel, The Lace Reader, long before I had the pleasure of meeting her. The book was a publishing phenom.

Brunonia had started writing it in 2000. Finished a draft and began revising in 2002. Self published in 2007. The book did spectacularly well, and soon major publishing houses were bidding seven figures for it. When HarperCollins brought it out again, it shot onto the New York Times best seller list. What a ride!

Aside from the wonderful writing and a mystery that keeps you guessing, it has two great things going for it. The setting, Salem, home of the witch trials; and the notion of a psychic who reads the future in pieces of lace.

Here's a snippet from the book:

The Lace Reader must stare at the piece of lace until the pattern blurs and the face of the Seeker disappears completely behind the veil. When the eyes begin to fill with tears and the patience is long exhausted, there will appear a glimpse of something not quite seen.

In this moment, an image will begin to form… in the space between what is real and what is only imagined.

How did you come up with the idea of reading lace, or is this something people really do?

BRUNONIA: The idea came to me in a dream. We had just moved back to New England from California and were renovating the tiny kitchen in our Victorian fixer-upper, knocking down walls to enlarge the space. It was going to be a dusty job, so I wasn't unpacking much, basically just the bedroom furnishings. Included in one of the boxes was an old piece of bobbin lace that my grandmother had given me when I was a teenager. I put it on my bedside table.

That same night, I had a dream that I was looking through the lace in an effort to see what the finished kitchen would look like when the walls came down. Only in the logic of dreams would this make

sense. Instead of seeing granite countertops and stainless steel appliances, I saw a field of horses. This was confusing imagery at best, but it was also anxiety provoking, because I am severely allergic to horses. I woke up covered with sweat, heart pounding. I couldn't get back to sleep.

The next morning, the construction crew arrived and was preparing to knock down the walls when I overheard one of them complaining: "I hate this old horsehair plaster. It gets into the air, and you can never get it out." Evidently, the plaster of that era contained horsehair. We stopped the job immediately. I think that first "lace reading," saved me from a trip to the emergency room and a house that might have become uninhabitable for me.

At the time, I assumed that lace reading was a real thing, something I'd heard about but had forgotten. Living in Salem, I thought that I would be able to find someone who practiced lace reading, since they read just about everything else here, from tarot to tea leaves to the bumps on your head. I've searched for years, not just in Salem, but elsewhere, and have never found anyone who reads lace, although, since the book came out, many of the Salem witches are doing it. They're pretty good.

HALLIE: I'm fascinated by how you used book groups to hone The Lace Reader. What kinds of changes did you make?

BRUNONIA: When I finished the second draft of my novel, I went to my local bookstore (Spirit of '76 in Marblehead, MA) and asked if they knew of a book club that would like to help a fledgling author. I had come from the world of software where we often used focus groups, and I wanted to do something similar, to see what people thought. It took a while to find the right group, but, eventually, I hosted ten women at my house. When they arrived for our book club night, I asked them to be brutally honest about their opinions. At first they were reluctant, but, gradually, they began to tell me what they thought of the story. I had a list of questions, the most important of which was "Where did you lose interest and stop reading?"

After taking many notes, discussing pacing and POV, I asked my final question. "Would you recommend this book to a friend?" It was a scary question, because we had already uncovered a number of flaws I had to fix, but it was one I had to ask. I was surprised when most of them said yes. In some cases they had already recommended it.

I repeated this process three more times with different book clubs before we published the manuscript. By the time our edition hit the shelves, there were thirty-seven book clubs waiting to read the book, all recommended by the initial four.

HALLIE: Your new novel, The Map of True Places, also takes place in Salem. It tells of a woman who reluctantly returns home and finally deals with difficult family history. I was fascinated by the information in it about Nathaniel Hawthorne and pirates--you have a knack for mixing in fascinating information. Are you a historian by nature?

BRUNONIA: In Salem, we walk through our history every day, so it just seems a part of life here. Because the city's economy relies so heavily on tourism, things from the past are preserved and celebrated. Most tourists visit because of the witch trials, but that is such a small part of Salem's history.

At one time, Salem was the richest port in the New World with hundreds of ships that sailed the globe, opening trade routes to far ports. The Phillips Library holds more nautical history of China and Japan than their own countries do, so Salem regularly hosts research scholars from those areas. The architecture around the city documents America's history. On a corner near my house, you can look to the left and the right and see five architectural periods represented. I couldn't write a book about Salem without including some aspects of a history which seems to work as both character and metaphor in my novels.

When the curator of The House of the Seven Gables found out that they played a big part in the story, she invited me to write The Map of True Places there, so, of course I took her up on that immediately.

HALLIE: Would you recommend that other authors go the self-publish-first route that you did?

BRUNONIA: Actually, I don't recommend self-publishing. I was incredibly lucky. I always tell people that we were emboldened by our ignorance when my husband and I decided to self-publish. We owned a software publishing company which had started small and developed until it was picked up by Hasbro for distribution. Since we were already publishers, we thought it would be easy to do something similar with a book. We soon found out that it wasn't the same at all.

At the time, print on demand publishing was not well regarded by bookstores, so we started a small press and manufactured the books ourselves. The issue of distribution was challenging. For credit and accounting reasons, book stores usually purchase from large distribution companies. They were not willing to carry one title by a small press, and distributors did not want to take on a one-book company. Eventually, we found one that made an exception. Even so, the process was expensive and time-consuming. After hiring editors, designers, and a PR company, and then paying for printing, we could have lost a great deal of money.

Since that time, things have changed, of course, and e-books are making it easier to self-publish, but there is one question that is common to both scenarios. How do you distinguish your book from the hundreds of thousands that come out each year? The big publishers are good at this, but an individual can get lost. I think e-book self publishing might work better for non-fiction if an author has a platform to promote, but fiction is more difficult to distinguish. For a well known fiction author with a well established brand, it might make sense.

For a writer starting out, I wouldn't recommend it.

HALLIE: You seem so smart about using the Internet to promote your writing. What has worked for you?

BRUNONIA: I am learning the process as I go along and, luckily, I have a very Internet-savvy assistant who helps keep me up to date.

Things are changing so fast. Something that works one month does not necessarily work the next. When I started my blog, I believed it was something I would contribute to every day. It hasn't turned out that way, partly because of a rather aggressive book deadline, and partly because I just don't have something interesting to say every day. I wish I did. So, for me, blogging is a bit sporadic.

What seems to work best is that I regularly contribute to a few other blogs, posting once a month to each. I do better on a day to day basis with Twitter. It's quick and easy. I like to follow people and topics and comment where appropriate. They often start following me, and our fans begin to overlap.

I also Skype with book clubs. Since my books have been translated into many languages, I am able to keep in touch with international readers online, particularly on Facebook, which, for me, is the best benefit of that application. I do targeted ads where they make sense. I'm a big fan of book trailers. William Morrow did a wonderful and very evocative one for The Lace Reader. I am writing a mini-screenplay for my next trailer, which I will probably produce myself. I already have some of the footage.

HALLIE: Can you share a little bit of what you're working on now?

BRUNONIA: I'm not allowed to say much about it, but I can say that I'm moving away from Salem for this next book. It is set in Boston, Italy, Ireland, and New Orleans. It's part mystery, part psychological thriller.

HALLIE: Finally, growing up, what were 3 of your favorite books?

BRUNONIA: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, and The Catcher in the Rye.

HALLIE: Brunonia will be here today, so chime in -- lace reading, self publishing, publishing, promotion, or whatever her words sparked.

Near death with Gary Braver's "Tunnel Vision"

HALLIE: I've always been fascinated by the phenomenon of the "near-death experience" -- people who see themselves hovering, out of body, over the operating table, able to watch dispassionately as surgeons try to revive them. Then they wend their way through a tunnel toward a bright light. Only to be wrenched back into their bodies and survive to tell about it.

I've always wanted to use it in a novel, and now Gary Braver has beaten me to the punch with his new thriller "Tunnel Vision." His eighth novel, it tells the story of a young man, Zack Kashian, who experiences near-death after an accident while riding his bike on Boston streets. From the book:

**

In a fraction of a second, Zack was suddenly looking down from someplace above, seeing himself lying crumpled across the curb with his head at the base of the pole and his bike on its side, the front wheel at a crazy angle. In that sliver of awareness, he knew he was viewing things from an impossible perspective.

**

Months later, Zack emerges from a coma that no one expected him to wake up from and finds himself surrounded by a team of neuroscientists who are all too eager to use his experience to show that heaven is real.

Gary is launching "Tunnel Vision" twice. At Stellina’s Restaurant (47 Main St. Watertown) June 23, 6PM

and at Brookline Booksmith (279 Harvard Street, Brookline), June 30, 7PM. But we're getting a preview here at Jungle Red.

Gary, how did you get interested in near-death experience?

GARY: I’ve never had a near-death experience myself, unless you consider a few English Department meetings. But I’ve always been fascinated with the NDE phenomena, because it relates to one of the two greatest mysteries of human existence—where we came from and where we ultimately go. And since I’m a lot closer to the latter than the former, I decided to write about NDEs.

The claims of dying and coming back to life go back to Plato. Since the 1970s (when the term was coined), a 2001 Gallup poll indicated that some 10 million Americans claimed to have experienced life beyond the grave. A similar poll in England showed that 7 in 10 people believed NDEs happened and constituted evidence of an afterlife. Likewise, scores of books have been written about NDEs by people who suffered clinical death and claimed to have left their bodies, feeling a great sense of tranquility and love, and passed down tunnels into celestial light where they met spiritual beings including dead relatives, Jesus, and God.

So, I came up with the idea of scientists putting subjects into near-death comas to determine if there is anything to all such claims.

HALLIE: Did you talk to people who'd experienced it?

GARY: Yes, and most talked about two things—One, out-of-the-body experiences, seeing themselves from above in operating rooms, for instance; and two, the overwhelming feeling of tranquility and unconditional love. A few people went so far to claim that they felt the presence of God and a great sense of unity with all life.

Of course, I also read dozens of accounts (some in NY Times bestsellers) of people claiming to have passed into celestial light and encountering dead relatives and Beings of Light such as saints, Jesus, and God. One woman told me that her dead mother urged her to go back to life even though she wanted at the moment to remain with her mother’s spirit in heaven. Fascinating!

I also spoke to people who considered themselves spiritual and religious and asked them to describe their sense of higher powers and beliefs in the afterlife. I got a lot of interesting insights from those interviews.

HALLIE: Did you talk to people who consider NDE, as do some of the characters in your book, compelling evidence for life after death?

GARY: Yes, and by people who are religious. And what I learned from interviews and my readings is that near-death experiences are strongly conditioned by a person’s religious and cultural upbringing. Although the central features of NDEs are universally present due to basic human biological and neural systems, the specific imagery and interpretation is determined by the cultural beliefs of the individual. Thus a Christian may see Jesus; a Muslim may sense the presence of Mohammed; a Buddhist may see Siddhartha, a Hindu may see Krishna, etc. Such patterning strongly suggests that NDEs are a matter of consciousness and not metaphysics.

This raises the question if atheists have NDEs and what they experience. Research has shown that religious orientation is not a factor in the likelihood or the depth of the near-death experience. People who have no belief in the afterlife still have NDEs.

All of my books are “high concept” science-thrillers. And finding God is about as high as it gets. In fact, one might discern a progression in the core concepts of my last five novels: Elixir: Develop an anti-aging drug; Gray Matter: Develop a procedure that turns “slow” kids into geniuses; Flashback: Develop a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease; Skin Deep: Get that supermodel’s face you’ve always wanted. Tunnel Vision: prove there’s an afterlife. Do you see a trend the older I get

HALLIE : Indeed I do! (And I can't wait to see where you go from here.) How do scientists explain the experience?

GARY: Pure neurobiology. From what I’ve read, at death the brain shuts down, causing optical centers to affect a tunnel-like perception in the mind; serotonin and endorphins secrete into the bloodstream, making the victim feel a preternatural calm and well-being; and other buffering chemicals produce hallucinations of dead relatives as well as Jesus, Mohammed, the Virgin Mary, and God, depending on one’s cultural conditioning.

Also, neuroscience reveals that some people are truly “spiritual”—that they are wired to find God. We know this from tests on Carmelite nuns, Benedictine monks, Buddhist monks, Indian fakirs, etc. whose brain activities were monitored by fMRI machines while in self-induced “spiritual” trances. The results showed the same rare signature neuro-electrical patterns in areas of the parietal lobe not found in “normal” people. In the book I call this parietal sector the “Godlobe.” In fact, at one time I considered calling the book The Godlobe.

By the way, NDEs originate from these same neuro-mechanisms that produce hallucinations as well as visions of Virgin Mary, dead grandmothers, space aliens.

HALLIE: Did working on this novel change your thinking?

GARY: I still don’t know if there’s an afterlife, but the older I get the more I’m in favor of one.

Many religions promise an afterlife—heaven or hell. They preach that our souls or spirits depart the physical world at death and move into a transcendent state. Hardcore secular science, however, says that death is final, that consciousness ends with the termination of the body. Tunnel Vision brings these two views head-to-head. A surprise twist at the end of the book I think will satisfy both sides of the debate.

HALLIE: I like that - I guess I'm in favor of an afterlife, too. If only!

Gary will be checking in today. Please share your thoughts. Near death experience: neurobiology or theology?

Let's talk typewriters!

HALLIE: I remember my love affair with the Remington typewriter that sat on a typewriter table (remember those?) in our family room. I loved the way its metal body smelled -- a lot like the hood of our Buick. I loved coming to the end of a line, hitting that metal handle, and sending the carriage return flying back to start a new line. I remember how dirty my fingers got when the ribbon ran out, and it was time to reverse the spools. How I wish I still had any of the dreadful stories and, heaven help me, poems, that I rolled off it.

My mother and father were Hollywood screenwriters. They wrote a movie ("The Desk Set") with a computer in it named EMERAC (IBM's was UNIVAC) which Katharine Hepburn refers to fondly as Emmy as it spews reams of useless information and inadvertently (and presciently) fires everyone.

As a thank you, IBM sent my parents one of the first electric typewriters. (We once got a case of Baskin & Robbins ice cream when they put that in a movie; ah, for the days before paid product placement.)

She used that electric typewriter for years to type out movie scripts, the lines centered on the page, with three carbon copies. White-out and copy machines hadn't been invented.

I remember everything about that machine, and especially that there was no lever to make the carriage return. Just a button that sent if flying (they hadn't yet invented the key ball).

And then, how sleek my first portable electric seemed, the one I took to college. In those days you have to remember, we thought bowling balls were portable, and this thing weighed only slightly more.

When I see those bracelets made of old typewriter keys (I have one) it makes me sad to think of all those mutilated typewriters, moldering away somewhere.

Do you all remember your typewriters, and was it a love or hate relationship?

ROBERTA: Oh boy, Hallie, you're making us show our age! But I did get a little black typewriter (not electric!) in college, most notable because it had keys with French accents on them that were specially attached. I majored in French literature and had to write a big junior

paper in French and then a senior thesis--so this was a necessary luxury! It was a very cute machine and I wish I'd kept it.

I don't have such fond memories of the key punch machine we had to use to record hundreds and hundreds of data points for my graduate school research. Though it was fun when that tedium was over and you got to slide the stack of cards into the machine and watch the results come out.

JAN: I remember when I started my first job at the News-Tribune, we had IBM typewriters. I remember swearing, A LOT. The first thing I noticed when I converted to a word processing system at the Worcester Telegram, was that I no longer swore when writing. There was no frustration. So no, no fond memories of typewriters, except..... My brother who passed a way tragically at age 26 used a typewriter to write letters. And he always made a carbon copy. He was a prolific letter writer and I have all his carbon copies. So I thank the typewriter for that!


ROSEMARY: I don't remember typing that much - I must have been a terrible student! My typewriter was a small, orange portable as I recall. My sister had the same little number in blue. We shared one long desk that my uncle had made and with the orange and blue it must have looked like the office of the Mets or the Knicks.

As it happens, while cleaning out the home of a recently deceased aunt, I just scored a beautiful old Royal and it's now in my office. It still works and the old dear even had extra ribbons, $1.29.

RHYS: My relationship with typewriters was much more hate than love. Having to retype a page with 3 carbon copies when one made a mistake, which I did frequently having never taken a typing course.

I was editor of my college newspaper and we had to type skins for the duplicating machine. Ah, the swearing that went on in the early hours of the morning when that blankety blank skin had to be retyped.

Then I was doing PR for the California Nurses Association (yes, I've had a chequered career) and had to turn out a newsletter every night after the last session of their convention, again on a wretched duplicating machine. By then my language had become even richer.

I remember applying for a job in Hawaii and having to take a test on a Selectric. I complained that I'd only ever used a manual typewriter. The large Hawaiian lady put her hands on her hips and declared, "Honey, there ain't a manual in these whole islands." Didn't get the job.

The day they invented PCs was bliss for me. Now I can type as fast as I can think and changes are so easy and I never, ever swear! Well, hardly ever.

HANK: My Gramma Minnie taught me to type...gosh, back in 1959? I bet it was. She had an Underwood, I think it was, that came in its own boxy suitcase. You'd flip it open, put it on the table, and type away. I LOVED it.

Here's how long ago it was. I practiced by copying out jokes and essays from her stack of Readers Digests. So funny to think back on that. I was big on doing the vocabulary words---what was that section called?

And of course when I started as a reporter, you could hardly hear anyone talk over the clatter of the typewriters in the newsroom. Now--it's silent.

DEBS: My parents worked from home, so the clickity-click of my mom's typewriter and the ding of the carriage return were very much part of my soundscape when I was growing up. I, however, didn't learn to type until I took a break between institutions of higher learning (my very checkered educational career.) My parents sent me to secretarial school so that I would learn to do something that "could actually make me a living." We used IBM Selectrics, and I passed all my secretarial courses with flying colors, except--typing. I could never get my speed up to the required level with no mistakes.

Now I type faster than I can think, and I don't bloody care if I make mistakes. I think word processing was the greatest thing ever invented. And I do make a living typing, which I think is nicely ironic. No nostalgia for typewriters here, although I do have a wonderful vintage Underwood that was a gift from friends. I keep it on the same desk as the computer, just because I like the juxtaposition.

HALLIE: Oh, Debs, your description took me back. Whenever I got home from school, I knew if my mother was home from the sound of the typewriter, too. That, and the smell of Kent Cigarettes. Didn't we all once-upon-a-time smoke? A blog for another time...

Please, share your memories fond and otherwise. The QWERTY lives!