You may have heard that chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall died recently. As a young college environmental reporter, I had the chance to meet her once. Here’s a story that I posted in my blog previously and included in my Meander North book. Not only was Goodall a great scientist and advocate for nature, she was a wonderful human being.
Here’s a link to my story: https://mariezwrites.com/2014/09/23/how-i-got-jane-goodall-to-stick-her-head-in-a-potted-palm-tree/.
We’ll miss you, Jane!
With all the noise in the blogosphere, no one’s probably noticed that I’ve been quieter than usual lately. That’s because I’m working on another book manuscript. This time it’s poetry. I’ve had poems published here and there but never a book of my own. So, I decided to compile my life’s work of poems—yet another good retirement project.
I finished the manuscript last week and sent it off to a local publisher. I decided to choose this publisher because they exist solely to help poets in our area with projects like this, the turn-around is quick, I’ll get to keep the profits, and have control over the final manuscript.
Two days later, I received a “yes”! Now I’m working on fine-tuning the manuscript and getting marketing blurbs ready. Here’s what I have so far:
High Fire Danger: Poems of Love and Nature
In High Fire Danger, Marie Zhuikov meditates on the transformative power of love and the magic and menace of nature. Written over the past thirty-eight years, Zhuikov’s enchanting poems offer unique insights and cutting humor. They take readers from her home in Minnesota to far-flung locales across the Great Lakes, Canada, Scotland, the Caribbean, and even to another planet. These accessible poems are filled with the heat and longing of romantic love, but also a deep love for family, community, and nature. They’ll scorch your soul like wildfire.
In a few months, I hope to have this book out into the world! For info about my other fiction and nonfiction books, please visit my book page.
Superior, Wisconsin, is just across the Minnesota state border from my home in Duluth. A twenty-minute drive down a hill and over a bridge takes me to another state. I used to make this drive nearly every day for work before I retired this spring. Now, I do it less often but it’s for events that are more fun than work!
One such event is a reading and discussion next Saturday (Aug. 30) at Foxes and Fireflies Bookstore in Superior (1401 Tower Ave). It’s billed as a “local author extravaganza,” which I love, especially since there are only two of us doing presentations. 😊
I used to get nervous before these events from self-consciousness and fear of being judged, etc. (By the way, fellow blogger Swabby offers an excellent post today about self-absorption.) But I’ve had enough practice now and done enough presentations about my books and photography that for the last several events, I’ve just winged it.
It’s worked out well, I think. I wasn’t nervous one bit. I’m glad I’ve finally reached this point. That only took over a decade! Public appearances still take a lot out of me, but dare I say they’re even becoming fun. I enjoy learning about the audience members and pondering their questions. And I’m not talking about huge audiences here, so they’re usually intimate affairs. Ah yes, the glamorous life of a local author!
For next weekend’s event, I’ll read from my books, The Path of Totality (magical realism short story collection) and Meander North (blog memoir). I’ll look over notes from past talks beforehand, but I’m going to leave them at home and see how “winging it” goes again.
The other author who’s reading is Gina Ramsey from Superior. Her book is Burnt Gloveboxes. (Two volumes.) She relates crazy but true things that have happened to her family.
Foxes and Fireflies is the first independent bookstore that Superior has had in years since Beecroft Books closed. I used to love going to Beecroft for author events. Afterward, the authors would have the honor of signing their names on a long white hallway. It was my goal to someday write a book and be able to sign that hallway, but the store closed before I had that chance.
Foxes and Fireflies was opened by Maria Lockwood, a reporter for the Superior Telegram, kind of by accident. She was researching a business grant program for a story and decided to submit a grant to see how the process worked. Lo and behold, her project was chosen to receive the funding! She’s been working at the bookstore and at her reporting job, so she has her plate full. She’s so supportive of local authors. Besides books, Maria offers all sorts of other literary paraphernalia and cute little toy foxes.
Instead of a long hallway for authors to sign, in the tradition of Beecroft Books, Maria offers a whiteboard. My name is proudly on it.
If you’re in the area, please stop by for the author extravaganza or any of the bookstore’s other events.
I’ll be talking about how I weave science into my fiction stories, with a focus on my science background and my latest book, The Path of Totality, which is a collection of short stories. If you’re in/near Duluth MN, come have a pint and a listen!
The April/May issue of Lake Superior Magazine offers an article about my magical realism short story collection, The Path of Totality. It takes the form of a Q&A, so I actually wrote much of it. 🙂 I was tickled to be able to use a word in the article that I recently learned: eponymous. (Thanks to blogger friend Vickie Smith.) It means a person or thing that gives their name to something. In my book’s case, it’s named after the first story. I was even more tickled that the editor kept the word in the article!
One question from the editor gave me pause. It was: What question have you always wished someone would ask you? I replied that I wished people would ask me if my book had a secret.
It does, and it involves the anchor story, “Invisible Connections.” A few other secrets are scattered here and there, but will only make sense to certain people. If you get a chance, check out the magazine to learn the secret! Better yet, read my book. It’s still offered at a discount at this link.
Note: The time on this graphic is incorrect. The event is beginning at 6 p.m., not 5 p.m.!
Hey, this Thursday at 6 p.m. Central, I’ll be one member of a four-author panel for my publisher, Cornerstone Press. The event is being held at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. If you can’t make it in person, it will also be live streamed and available afterward on their YouTube channel.
I’ll be reading from my speculative fiction short story collection, The Path of Totality. We’ll also be doing a panel discussion and taking questions from the audience.
I’m looking forward to meeting my publisher in person for the first time, along with the other authors!
Bookish things have been happening in my world. First, I wanted to let you know that my speculative fiction/magical realism short story collection, The Path of Totality, (POT) is having a giveaway on Goodreads. Three copies will go to some lucky readers in ten days on March 12.
The second thing is something I learned from one of my fellow writers. He clued me into the WorldCat website, which is where you can see what libraries around the world carry certain books. He looked up POT and told me that it was in seven libraries already. Cool! Of course, I then looked it up and my other books. POT is available in libraries in Omaha, NE; Farmington, NM; Charleston, SC; and Orlando, FL. This exercise reminded me that I should donate a copy to my library in Duluth so that they have it.
One surprising thing I discovered is that my first novel, Eye of the Wolf, is available in the National Library of Qatar, in the Middle East. How did that happen?? Another surprising thing is that my second novel, “Plover Landing,” is available in 233 libraries! I think that might be because I offered libraries free rights to a PDF download of it. Since that happened a few years ago, I can’t recall now what service I used for that.
The last bookish thing regards a signing and reading I had yesterday at a new bookstore that opened in Superior, Wisconsin. Foxes and Fireflies Booksellers is run by a woman who’s also a reporter for the local newspaper. Maria Lockwood began the store as a lark. She was reporting on a business startup grant program and as part of that, put in a grant request to open a bookstore as an experiment to see how the process worked. Lo and behold, she was awarded the grant.
Superior hasn’t had a literary independent bookstore in many years, so the community was excited to see Foxes and Fireflies open. The store is very cozy and is filled with neat items. I probably spent any royalties I made during my signing on a cute little fox toy that is destined for our cabin. Oh, the glamorous life of a regional author! Superior writer Vickie Smith featured the bookstore recently on her blog.
Now that I’m on a countdown to retirement for my day job (not my fiction writing), I figure I’ll have more time to read writing trade magazines. I used to subscribe to Writer’s Digest but quit after a while because the copies just kept piling up and it felt too much like work to read them. I’m wondering what writing magazines are your favorites? I’d appreciate recommendations.
My collection of shorts stories, “The Path of Totality,” is being published this week by Cornerstone Press. It will still be on sale for a few more days for 20% off until the publication date, which is Feb. 11. You can order it from Cornerstone here.
I’m having a launch event Feb. 18th, 6:30 p.m., at one of my favorite cafes in Duluth—Wussow’s Concert Cafe. It’s being hosted by Zenith Bookstore. I’ll also be doing a reading/signing at Foxes and Fireflies Bookstore in Superior on March 1 from 1-3 p.m. If you’re in the area, please stop by!
Noted Superior, Wisconsin, author, Carol Dunbar is helping me with the Feb. 18th event. She is way more well-known than I am, having had two books published by a national publisher. She was nice enough to write a blurb for my book, which appears on its cover. She was also nice enough to volunteer for a question and answer discussion with me of our books and careers. We deal with many of the same themes in our writing, so it should be a cool event!
“Booklist,” which caters to libraries, recently reviewed “The Path of Totality.” Here’s what they said:
Love, in its numerous forms: romantic, parental, devotional, inspirational, and desperate, has a lingering presence in Zhuikov’s collection of tales. The title story describes a young couple’s emotional struggles after the devastating loss of a premature baby boy. While viewing the 2017 total solar eclipse, healing suddenly sprouts as something “flipped a reset switch” inside the wife. “Bog Boy” is a comically creepy tale illustrating that love truly has no limits. A teenage girl discovers the long-dead body of a young man entombed by peat in the woods, and the preserved corpse becomes her de facto boyfriend. “The Shower Singer” is a feel-good story about an aspiring musician who receives more than just a much-needed jolt of creativity when he hears a woman in the adjacent apartment singing lovely melodies in the shower. Other characters include a sleuthing widow obsessed with the strangeness of a house who ultimately pays a steep price for her curiosity, a hungry alien life form that stalks a college student in Biosphere 2, and a reference librarian with an extraordinary connection to sentient trees.
Last week, I had the privilege of hearing a nationally known poet read at a local college. Kimiko Hahn was flown out from New York City by the college’s English Department to be part of its annual Rose Warner Reading Series. The college brings in a poet for a day who performs a morning reading and discussion with local high school students and an evening reading for the public. After the morning reading, the students break into groups where a “Northland Writer of Distinction” talks to them about writing and how to find their voice through it.
I was one of three so-called writers of distinction. The other two were Sheila Packa, a former Duluth Poet Laureate, and Nick Trelstad, a published poet and high school English teacher. Having never done this event before, I was a bit nervous. Both the other writers were repeaters; they were also both wearing plaid. I had not received that memo! But now I know in case I get invited back.
I was not familiar with Hahn’s poetry, so I was looking forward to hearing her read for the students. Hahn’s mother died in a tragic car accident, so many of the poems she read in her soothing voice were about that. She also read political poems. But, since I am a science communicator, the ones that caught my attention most were pieces she wrote based on science stories in the New York Times. Hahn commented that she’s bad at science but is fascinated by it, especially entomology (bug science). She often takes a science news story and makes it into poetry. She does this through typical fashion but also using a technique called erasure poetry.
This was a new one on me. In erasure poetry, which began in 1965, writers take an existing text – like a newspaper story or the Declaration of Independence – and blackout or erase words to create a poem. Sometimes they leave the words in their original formatting (with lots of blank space in between) or sometimes they reformat them. Visual artists use the technique, too. Hahn read the students her poem, “Erasing Love.” Then she asked them to figure out what original article’s topic was. Several students mentioned that it was a science or medical story, but I think everyone was surprised when Hahn said it was about a giant fish called an oarfish and that the professor studying it had the last name of Love. (At the end of her poem, she links to the original article.) I enjoy creating found poems (like this one based on Chinese scooter instructions) so I’m definitely going to try erasure poetry sometime soon.
Hahn’s poems delved into grief, love, and science, often containing subtle and not-so-subtle humor. She said she gains inspiration from writing prompts and that she writes as an outlet for her opinions and rambunctiousness. Her reading persona is not rambunctious, but during the q & a afterward, more of her personality shone through.
Then the students were split into groups with their respective local writer. Hahn was a tough act to follow! For my presentation, I told the students about my professional and creative writing careers. The students were from the same high school that I went to, and I wanted to show them that a career in writing is possible. I described my books and talked about how this blog helped me find my voice. I read them two posts that offer good examples of opinion writing, which I can’t do either in my day job or my novels. These were “The Jayme Closs Case and the Importance of News Headlines,” and “The Christmas City of the North Parade: Socially Sanctioned Child Abuse or Festive Community Event?”
There was no clock in the room. For the first group of students I spoke with, I blathered on about myself for so long, I ran out of time to read the Jayme Closs story, but I made up for that with the second group.
A few writer nerds were in the audience and asked good questions. After my talk, one girl introduced me to Dark Romance. If you haven’t heard of it, either, Dark Romance features kink and violence – darker themes that don’t sound all that romantic to me. I don’t think I’ll be pursuing it in any way.
My main points to the students were to write what they enjoy without worrying about what other people will think, to practice, and get feedback from people they trust. Of course, I encouraged them to start blogs since it’s a good way to practice and to get feedback from a supportive community.
Have you found that your blog is a good way to develop your writing voice?
A young man is mystified by why he can’t see an eclipse. A scammer falls for a woman he’s targeting. A nondescript gray house hides a secret from a curious woman walking her dog. A girl discovers a mummified Viking bog boy while on a birding tour. A college student gets trapped in a biosphere after hours. Hemingway’s stolen stories are found in New Jersey. Singing in the shower takes on a whole new meaning. And a librarian develops her own theories about the influence of trees. United by the power of appearances to deceive and captivate, these tales glisten with the magic and menace of everyday lives.
My next book is a collection of short stories and a novella. “The Path of Totality” is a meditation on the power of appearances to deceive and captivate. It’s being published by Cornerstone Press at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and is now available for preorder at a 20% discount. The books will be distributed in February.
It’s already received some endorsements:
These stories concern everyday people discovering who they now are as opposed to who they once were. A grieving couple come to accept the death of their child. A woman pays too large a price for caring about a neighbor’s son. And in “Bog Boy: A Northern Minnesota Romance”—a gem of a story, a perfect story—a teen falls in love with someone suspended in time. Not all of Zhuikov’s characters find peace and harmony, for the damned soul and the broken heart and the heart’s longing are nothing to fool with. But the few who find love, for instance, Sheila and Peter in the long final story, enter paradise.
—Anthony Bukoski, author of The Blondes of Wisconsin
Richard Powers meets Gabriel Garcia Márquez in a collection that nonetheless could have been produced only by a singular sensibility— one firmly planted in a fully recognizable, verifiable natural world that’s also brimming over with mystery, wonder, and the fantastic. I love Marie Zhuikov’s brain. She’s both a scientist and a dreamer. These stories, rich in emotional metaphors that play out in magical ways, remind us to tread carefully and to always pay attention.
—Cheri Johnson, author of The Girl in Duluth (under the pen name of Sigurd Brown)
In settings strange yet familiar we meet characters who are sincere but possibly duplicitous in this new story collection spun by science writer Marie Zhuikov. Each of the seven, spine-tingling scenarios will delight and surprise, bringing you to unexpected frontiers—in a biodome, a graveyard, the husk of a living tree—all without ever straying far from the yearnings of the human heart. Reader, I defy you not to be curious.
—Carol Dunbar, author of The Net Beneath Us
Marie Zhuikov’s The Path of Totality is a gem of a collection. These speculative stories explore a wide range of unusual situations with humor and insight, with empathy and heart. Readers will get carried away—just like these memorable characters get carried away—into imaginative worlds full of mystery and wonder. She delves into our longing for connections, how we respond in the face of strangeness and mystery beneath the ordinary.
—Jim Daniels, author of The Perp Walk
Please consider preordering while this discount is in place. You’ll be happily surprised come February. And thank you for your support!
Marie's Meanderings 