Alexander Chee's Blog

The Queen of the Night, my new novel out February 2nd, has made the best of 2016 preview lists for Book Riot, Bookish, Bustle, BBC Books, Huffington Post Books, Brooklyn Mag and Entertainment Weekly.

Last year at this time my biggest fear was that I could work on a novel all this time and no one would care. I’m incredibly happy and grateful about this reception.

Some early praise for The Queen of the Night has come in also.

“A night at an opera you’ll wish never-ending.”

–Helen Oyeyemi, author of Mr. Fox and Boy Snow Bird

“One doesn’t so much read Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night as one is bewitched by it. Beneath its epic sweep, gorgeous language, and haunting details is the most elemental, and eternal, of narratives: that of the necessities and perils of self-reinvention, and the sorrow and giddiness of aspiring to a life of artistic transcendance.”

–Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life and People In The Trees

“The Queen of the Night is a luminous universe into which its lucky readers can dissolve completely, metamorphosing alongside its shapeshifting protagonist. Lilliet Berne steals her name from a gravestone and launches into a life of full-throated song; her voice is an intoxicant, and this book is a glorious performance. Chee’s enveloping, seductive prose is perfectly matched to the circus world of the opera.”

–Karen Russell, New York Times Best Selling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires In The Lemon Grove

“Alexander Chee packs his extraordinary second novel, The Queen of the Night, to the seams with music, love, misery, and secrets. The kind of book—world—characters—you could live inside, happily, for days and days and never once want to come up for air.”

–Kelly Link, author of Get In Trouble and Magic For Beginners

“A luminous tale of power and passion. Chee gives us an unforgettable heroine and a rich cast of characters—many of them real historical figures. The story dazzles and surprises right up until the final page.”

–J. Courtney Sullivan, New York Time’s Best-Selling author of Maine and The Engagements

“Richly researched, ornately plotted, this story demands, and repays, close attention.”

–Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“Chee’s lush and sweeping second novel uses a strikingly different setting from his accomplished debut, Edinburgh, but shares its musical themes and boldness… a moving meditation on the transformative power of fate, art, time, and sheer survival.”

–Publisher’s Weekly

When renowned soprano Lilliet Berne, the toast of Belle Epoque Paris, is offered the role of a lifetime in an original opera, she is shocked to realize that the libretto seems to be based on her own life. After reinventing herself and carefully shrouding the secrets of her early years, she believed she had moved away from the scandal, shame, and intrigue of her youth forever. Reaching back into time, she recalls her Minnesota childhood, her escape to Paris, her adventures as a hippodrome rider, her career as a courtesan, her stint as a spy, and her meteoric rise through the cutthroat ranks of the opera world. In order to unravel the mystery of who has betrayed her, she reviews her entire entangled history, recalling the twists and turns of her own life as well as the sweeping history of an era along the way. Peppering the unfolding plot with real-life events and figures, Chee provides a suitably operatic backdrop for the mesmerizing novel.

–Booklist

If you’re just arriving to this blog for the first time after reading one of these items, thank you and hello. You can pre-order the novel here at your favorite bookseller.

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Once back when I was a young writing student I wanted a little more than my own college experience was offering, and so I signed up for and took a summer writing workshop at Bennington College between my junior and senior years.

It was one of the best adventures I ever had.

I had no idea what to expect. I found a beautiful, slightly haunted Vermont college town with melancholy war memorials and a beautiful river with white stones where I soon learned to pass the time, drinking a beer and cooling off in the water. I had signed up to study first with Toby Olson and then with Mary Robison. I remember Mary Robison and James Robison sitting on the stage like rock stars, wearing sunglasses indoors due to the stage lights. Mary’s hair was crimped, and it made her my hero right away.

This was my first time experiencing the joys of, say, standing in line for beer behind Joy Williams, or watching Joyce Carol Oates write all the way through someone else’s reading.

This summer, if you are up for it, I’m teaching in two summer programs, two very different experiences, and both have a few spots left. The first, June 1-12, the Mont Blanc workshops, is in the French Alps, in Chamonix, and promises to be a quieter more retreat-like experience, with classes for a few hours each day during the week (weekends off), and of course, the stunning mountain scenery.

Annecy, a beautiful lake village near Chamonix.

In this one, for the hardy crew there, I’ll be functioning a bit more as a mentor, the teaching will be more direct, and I’ll be offering writing prompts, and writing professional tips in addition to craft instruction, ranging from how to pitch editors and agents to social media for writers. It’ll be more of a mentoring experience. It won’t be solemn but it will be a good getaway. Other faculty for that session includes Ann Hood, Michael Dahlie, and Erin Belieu.

The second, June 28- July 10, in Lisbon, Disquiet International, will be a larger group and has fewer class meetings, but includes some guest stars like the amazing Mary Gaitskill, who will visit my class and talk to us about the writing of “The Other Place”, a favorite story for me of hers. This program has a secondary focus that includes learning about Portuguese literature and Portuguese writers in Lisbon, and while a little more urban as a result, promises to be an adventure.

The Torre de Belem in Lisbon, which I fully intend to explore.

I can’t say we will sneak into some Portuguese historical site, but I can’t say we won’t either. Other faculty here includes Leslie Jamison, Stefan Kiesbye, and Eileen Myles.

If you’re interested and afraid of last minute summer airfare costs, consider booking a roundtrip through Dublin–flights round trip right now are about 600 dollars through Dublin–and then book your own connecting flights on low-cost local carriers like easyjet or Aer Lingus or Ryanair on to Geneva for Chamonix, or Lisbon for Disquiet. That’s what I did. And for those of you who are already in Europe, well, it is cheaper than traveling to the US to study with me. I hope to see you there.

Going through the proofs at last. Pub date: 2/2016. Available for pre-order now.

You could call your storage stuff memorabilia, or, material. We will talk about ways of turning the one into the other.

Over at the Center for Fiction, I’m offering a class in Autobiographical Fiction. The idea behind it is approximately that there are many more approaches to writing fiction using your life than most people consider. Some people think writing autobiographical fiction is as easy as writing down what happened and changing the names—and sometimes, it is—but we will examine many approaches to making use of the writer’s lived experience and history in a work of fiction. Topics will include the ethics and methods for writing about the living; borrowing formally from memoir, diaries and letters; researching your own life and memories; researching and using family histories. We’ll read selections from a mix of autobiographical fiction—James Baldwin, Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, Colette, George Sand, Chris Kraus, Edmund White, Maxine Hong Kingston, Renata Adler—and workshop work from students.

We’ll read examples of different approaches, and there will be writing prompts based on each approach to help the writer develop some new material–and methods they can use afterward, wherever they go.

That class is full. Interest was such that I’m also offering this online version, for those not in the New York City area.

The course will be 12 weeks, beginning this Thursday, with 6 sessions, two weeks between. There would be weekly prompts and readings, an essay from me on the topic, and workshop work would go up on a private password protected class blog–a blog called Generation Atari, a science fiction blog of mine I never used, that I have decided to take out for a spin as my online writing school.

All student workshop work would be taken down at student request at the end of the class so there won’t be any concerns about the security of the work. Or, it can remain, complete with class comments.

There would be one to two pieces up for workshop each session. Stories would go up a week before they are critiqued. I will read and comment on all your exercises. On workshopped pieces, you would get a workshop letter from me and comments also, within the manuscript. Cost is 450.00. If you’re into it, write to me, and we can discuss it if is right for you. You can pay via Square or Paypal. There are still some spaces left.

Here below, the pre-homework for the class, an expansion of my column over at Center for Fiction. They are 5 research tasks to do either in the first two weeks, or over the 12 weeks, to help build the ground for what you will write.

Research Your Life

One of the most important exercises Annie Dillard had us do when I was her student in literary nonfiction as an undergrad was to research your own life.

You want to write about your life, she said, approximately. How much do you know about your life? Do you know the major industries of your hometown? When was the town settled? Do you know the seasons, the flora and fauna, the population size, the climate… on and on she went, rattling off points for us to check. And off we went, to research our hometowns.

We did not know much, we discovered. I was from a small town in Maine, Cape Elizabeth, on the southern coast, and I felt I did creditably well at the basics without looking: I knew the population was approximately 8,000. I knew there were farms amid suburban stretches, ocean on three sides, two light houses, and abandoned naval installations that I had played inside of as a child. I knew my town was rich, or, parts of it were, and that many of the richest families commuted to work in Portland, sometimes Boston. I knew the winter was long, the summer short, and that the ocean once used to freeze, but no longer did. I knew the shallow water lobster had gone extinct, but that residents once could just find them on the beaches. I knew there were seals and dolphins to be seen in Casco Bay, deer in the woods, and lady slipper orchids I used to stalk in the forest.

I did not know the date the town was settled—1630. I knew it was named for a Queen Elizabeth, but not which one—Elizabeth Stuart, also called Queen of Bohemia, or, Elizabeth of Bohemia, and sometimes, The Winter Queen. This I wish I’d known, growing up—it makes me like it better.  I did not know the lighthouses had been set there in part because of the many shipwrecks, nor did I know the industry, if there even was one—farming was the answer, three major farms, owned by three families, for quite some time. Farming and also tourism—visitors to the beaches, and the two lighthouses. I knew there was a lighthouse museum at one of the lighthouses, and that I had visited the relics there, where I learned first what scrimshaw was, much of it among the relics from the shipwrecks, brought to shore by citizens who would go out on long lines attached to the land to bring back what they could from the dangerous surf.

What I came to find explained a great deal of what had always been a little mysterious to me about the area: the whole town had always had the feeling of farms left on an abandoned station, deep underneath the pleasant suburban surface.

This was an important early lesson for me as a writer: You know the least about your life precisely because, for living in it, you might barely notice it. You are from a place and you believe you know it, but your memories are not just unreliable, they are full of research holes. I returned to this lesson with my first novel, Edinburgh, for example, set partly in my home town, and inspired partly by events from my own life. I was trying to describe a landscape, and remembered there was a red wildflower that I loved in summer. I wrote “red flower” on the page and stopped.

“Red flower” could be anything from a rose to a tulip to a begonia. I went and found a book with the flora and fauna of Maine by season. Orange hawkweed was the name of that flower. Also called Devil’s Paintbrush.

So much better than “red flower”.

As I grew as a writer, I learned the same holds true for yourself: you are the red flower in your landscape. You need to turn that attention to yourself. Research yourself. Where were you born? Why? What were your parents doing at the time? What records are there of it? What are the stories they always tell? Can you interview those who know you or knew you as to what they remember? Is there any documentation? Old letters, old photos, court records. What was in the newspapers at the time you were born? What are your major industries? What is your local population—how many people have you been as you tried to be you, and how many are you? Who are you named after, if anyone, and why?

And once you know all of this, what do you think you can write that you couldn’t write before?

This is all fine for an essay, you might say. How do I use it in fiction? Well, to use any or all of this in fiction, I would start next, for me, with what feels real out of what I want to invent. Using your life in fiction doesn’t have to mean only replicating it. That I call the mistake of verisimilitude. I would start instead with the farms on an abandoned station, the old use of the station unknown to me. I know what that feels like: the sense of old wars and what supplied them, hidden underground. I would begin describing that, and see who shows up to take the rest of the story forward. And once the characters arrive in that landscape, I let them show me the rest of the way.

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Since the self is the starting point for our work for the next six sessions, we begin with background research on ourselves.

There are many reasons for this that will be made plain as the course goes on. But to prepare, I’d like you to figure out where all of the casual and intentional records are that are less deliberate than, say, a diary. Where you can discern a footprint to the self that is not a footprint you meant to make. Instead, it is the footprint you made without thinking. We are looking to catch ourselves when we don’t think we are watching ourselves. You are stalking yourself, in some of these exercises–imagine what you would look for if someone who didn’t know you was researching you.

You don’t have to do all of the following to be ready before we begin Thursday, but take a little time beforehand to begin any necessary preparations, mentally. And while you may find what you need to write without doing all of this–but you may want to do all of it or much of it because of what you might find. Another way of working with these five steps is to do one for each of the two week sessions to follow, so it is less overwhelming.

1. Research the facts around your upbringing. What was in the headlines the day you were born? What was in the news that month, the major events of the year?

What was the major industry of your hometown, the population? When was it founded and by who? What, if anything, is it famous for? What is the community of your hometown made up of? How long had your family lived there before you were born, or when did you move there? If you had more than one hometown, do this for them all.

Also: make a list of anywhere you have lived.

2. Make or plan a trip to any storage of records going back past the last three years of your life.

These records might be in your closet. They might be a few blocks away. Maybe further.

A storage space of mine flooded last summer, but nothing was destroyed. It was still a chance to go through 12 boxes I hadn’t touched since moving, though, boxes that I’d simply thrown together. “X Boxes”, I jokingly called them, as they usually had a bungee cord, an old cassette tape, some joke gifts and a Christmas ornament. But there were many talismans of memory large and small inside of them. Sometimes, it was the cassette tape—in this case, Def Leppard’s Pyromania, the first album on cassette I ever bought, and a window into the summer of 1984 for me.

In late March, for example, I plan to go to my mother’s and look through her basement. I remember a few years ago finding an old London Fog woman’s trench coat: hers, from the 1970s. In the pocket: an unopened Peppermint Patty, her favorite candy. I brought it upstairs to show her.

This kind of detail is the sort of thing that you can use to make fiction.

3. Look at your diaries, if you have any, but look also to other records. Photo albums, old letters, letters you never sent. Old note books from classes you took. I am an inveterate writer of notes to the person sitting next to me in class, for example, and so my old notebooks are full of side conversations.

4. Your email records, how far back do they go? When did you last look at those first emails? What about your browser tab bookmarks?

Do you use Evernote? Or some other app to keep track of your

My gmail, for example, dates to 2005. As Zadie Smith pointed out in a recent post over at Rookie Mag, she doesn’t keep a diary, but her email account functions as a de-facto diary.

5. With social media, there’s more than email. Are there any phone numbers you don’t recognize in your phone? Do you have text records? Scroll down to see if you can find your oldest texts–perhaps to a friend you are out of touch with, or your oldest texts to someone you are still close to–be prepared to go back several years.

If you keep a blog, go read your first blog posts, your first Facebook posts and messages, first tweets. So often, we recklessly give away ideas or leave lines behind that, if taken back in, could turn into something. Are any of those updates or Tweets first lines?

If you have an Instagram, look at those first pictures. What did you not say about what you photographed because it would have been public?

What did you not photograph, what did you not post?

As you do all of this, take notes, take pictures, and even consider who you might be able to interview about yourself, or about a memory of yours brought up by one of these items: a relative, like a sister or brother, a cousin.

Notice what seems charged and write a list of them–objects, memories, first lines, possible witnesses–and you’ll be ready to start.

Me as I exited the train in PDX, at the end of my Amtrak Residency. I am just now noticing what looks to be a really happy cowboy behind me. Photo by Zac Hug, who met me there.

Best Idea I had in public, where people could hear it: the Amtrak Residency.

Best Semester Away: I spent the spring semester in Austin, TX, as the visiting writer at the UT Austin English Department, teaching in the MFA program there and eating some very fine food–and teaching some exceptional students.

Best Semester Home: In the fall, I returned to the Columbia University MFA program and taught a fiction workshop also with exceptional students.

Best New Trend In My Life: I published two poems–one at The Awl, the other, in Azalea.

Best Ending To A Long Story: I finished the changes to my second novel, The Queen of the Night, with publication planned for 2/16 (please, at that link, mark it as ‘to-read’ on GoodReads!).

Best New, Possibly Less Long Story: I then started a new novel, and have been drafting it longhand, in a notebook. I have over 100 pages of it now. I even used up a pen, something I hadn’t done in years.

Personal Best: I published two new short stories, “The Insincere House”, in Tin House, and in Time Out NY’s Fiction Issue, “Life Model”, my first science fiction story. I wrote reviews, for the New York Times Book Review, Slate, and the Barnes and Noble Review.

I also published many essays throughout:

In February, a memoir of serving as a caterwaiter in the Buckley household in Apology.
Also in February: a memoir of how I went from being someone who used to joke about MFA programs to studying at Iowa, in the n+1 MFA vs NYC anthology–excerpted on Buzzfeed Books.
I wrote what turned out to be an early essay on the culture of Internet outrage, for Dame.
This September, The New York Times Book Review ran a column from me thinking back to when I gave up reading men for almost three years (and, it was my first time being on the cover).
A look back at the three times I’ve moved to New York, for Never Can Say Goodbye, which I’m happy to say is on the New York Times Best Seller list for travel writing–and which is ironic, because it is about not traveling.

And, speaking of travel writing…

Best Travel Writing: In 2013 I had cover stories for both Departures and Departures Black Ink, on Shanghai’s The Bund neighborhood and the avant garde restaurant Ultraviolet (the Ultraviolet profile was print-only). I also did some blogging for Bon Appetit that year. This year I was pretty busy with the book, but managed to write about sushi in Narita airport for Bloomberg Pursuits, and about the inspiration for the Amtrak residency, for Afar, which honored me as one of their Travel Vanguard.

Best of Me on NPR: I spent a little time on the radio this year. I spoke to Melissa Block about the Amtrak residency. On All Things Considered, I talked about Maggie Shipstead’s Astonish Me. And on the Brian Lehrer show, I discussed my essay in Never Can Say Goodbye, and books that changed my mind.

2014 set the bar really high. We’ll see about 2015. I got started a little, over at Electric Lit, where Benjamin Samuel, partly inspired by my Times column on reading women, asked many of us for our literary resolutions. Mine is here.

Every new novel by Martin Amis now faces its own sort of test, it seems: it must be either his best or sign of a decline. Either way, it must move out of the shadow of his most famous novels, his personality, his famous friends, his famous father, his famous life. Each is, in a sense, a little like he was himself when he debuted with The Rachel Papers, and had to make his name, apart from his father. For this reason, I found I could empathize with Mark O’Connell at Slate when he said he wished, for a moment, that he could read this novel as if it were by an entirely unknown writer, and evaluate it that way.

For all that, I think it is better not to—better instead to see it as a part of a group of books in the neighborhood of this one — Time’s Arrow, his most famous of these thus far, twenty-five years in the past; a nonfiction book, Koba the Dread; and the novel House of Meetings. We should think of them as a group, along with all of his novels, and also think of why we do this to our writers — ask them to perform their personality for us in public, and then, when they do, to hold it against them. We should ask why we ask them to challenge themselves aesthetically, and when they do, tell them they’ve abandoned us as readers.

The editors at the Barnes and Noble Review asked me to take a long look at the newest Martin Amis novel, and I did, with pleasure.

I have long loved Penelope Fitzgerald, ever since falling for her novels The Gate of Angels and The Blue Flower many years ago. The Gate of Angels remains in my mind a paragon for the acute simplicity of its ending–few novels close with that sort of grace.

It was a pleasure then to review Hermione Lee’s new biography of her for Slate Books.

On November 19th, I’ll be participating in a Penelope Fitzgerald event at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, a conversation about her work with Ellis Avery, Margot Livesey, and Hermione Lee. Please join us.

Thanks to the many who have already marked The Queen of the Night as to-read on Goodreads. If you haven’t yet, please consider joining them. Or pre-order with your bookseller of choice.

The above is the photograph used for the cover, with permission from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is from Pierre Louis Pierson’s The Opera Ball, a series of photos taken of the Comtesse de Castiglione, a character in the novel.

1.

I get a new mug, as I begin work on a new novel.

I am working on a new novel because the previous one is finally in production.

2.

A friend writes. She remembers how it was when she first moved on to a new novel, and warns of the way a new draft can depress you after all the long hours on something finished.

I thank her. It would be easy to think I’d forgotten–but I do remember. It was agonizing, and with Queen, seemed to extend for years.

The new novel doesn’t seem to be like that, though.

4.

More specifically: The Queen of the Night is finally, officially, truly on the road to publication. The dates are being discussed but the season will be the Fall of 2015, which for Houghton, extends through February of 2016. I’ll be updating with news here as I get it. I’m very excited to finally share it.

In the meantime, there’s a new novel to work on.

Thank you all for your patience, readers– I’m very grateful for it.