JENNIE FIELDS

Jennie was born in Chicago and raised in Highland Park, Illinois. She received her BFA in creative writing from the University of Illinois, and an MFA in fiction in 1976 from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which helped to toughen her up for her next career: advertising. After 32 years of writing McDonald’s jingles and dreaming up green moths to help sell sleeping pills (all the while writing novels), she left New York to live with her husband in Nashville, Tennessee, and write fiction full-time. Her latest is Atomic Love, released in 2020.

At the moment, the books by my bed include:

Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath by Kate Moses and A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano. I was on a panel with both at the Key West Literary Seminar and am looking forward to enjoying their writing. I also have:

Richard Russo, That Old Cape Magic. Still on the pile. About a professor, Jack Griffin, driving around Cape Cod with the ashes of his deceased parents in the trunk of his car. From a review in Publisher’s Weekly: “Crafting a dense, flashback-filled narrative that stutters across two summer outings to New England (and as many weddings), Russo (Empire Falls) convincingly depicts a life coming apart at the seams, but the effort falls short of the literary magic that earned him a Pulitzer.”

Sue Miller, The Good Mother. I have read it again after many years. I still think it a watershed book — one of the best books about women written in the last 30 years.

Ian McEwan, Amsterdam and Saturday. Oh how I loved Saturday. What tour de force: the entire book takes place in a single day! Amsterdam is dark and funny. It almost feels written by a different author. Worth reading, though.

Joyce Carol Oates, The Falls. This is my favorite Oates book so far, not that I’ve read every single one — but maybe ten. Who could read them all? She’s the most prolific writer in the universe!

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, and Home. Robinson is extraordinary, poetic, one of a kind.

And all of Edith Wharton — which isn’t exactly by the bed. Edith has her own two shelves in my bookcase. I read her again and again. I am also reading The Buccaneers. Sadly, she died before finishing it, and someone else (Marion Mainwaring) attempted an ending — probably not a good idea!

I also go back to Stegner, Carol Shields, Anne Tyler, and Colm Toibin, and Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.

In the queue are:

T.C. Boyle, World’s End and When the Killing’s Done. I tried to read World’s End and couldn’t, hence it’s no longer in the queue. Too Quixotic for me. Instead, I’m almost done with When the Killing’s Done. Terrific. Boyle’s often SO good, it floors me!

Ethan Canin, America America. He’s a great short story writer. I don’t know what to expect of this.

Ian McEwan, In Between the Sheets and The Comfort of Strangers.

Scott Spencer, Man in the Woods. I love Scott Spencer’s Endless Love, one of the greatest books ever written, and a book completely destroyed by the bad movie version.

Marina Fiorato, The Glassblower of Murano. I just had a lovely trip to Venice. Maybe this will bring it back to me. I’m not even sure where I picked this up.

Billy Collins, Ballistics: Poems. Billy was also at the Key West Literary Seminar. He’s the most entertaining poet I’ve ever seen. At the same time, he’s quite subtle, quite brilliant.

Oh, and I just ordered another Iowa classmate, Mike Harris’ new book, The Chieu Hoi Saloon. Looking forward to it. Mike was so kind to come to a reading of mine in San Diego, miles from his home in L.A., and I’ve yet to read his book. I am a bad person.

HARVEY FREEDENBERG

Harvey practices intellectual property law and litigation with a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania law firm. In 2000, he took a six-month sabbatical from his law practice and studied creative writing with novelist Susan Perabo at his alma mater, Dickinson College. Four of his short stories have won prizes, and he has written an as yet unpublished novel. Harvey, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, reviews both fiction and nonfiction for BookPage, Bookreporter.com, Shelf Awareness and the Minneapolis Star Tribune and writes a monthly column on books for Harrisburg Magazine. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.

I’m in the happy situation of living in a house where the nearest book is never more than a few feet away, but our overstuffed bookshelves bear witness to the difficulty of finding room for all of them. Though a Kindle has helped stem the tide, it’s inevitable that small islands have surfaced next to more than one bed.

Since I began reviewing in 2005, my bedside table has become the resting place for an ever-shifting array of titles that remind me of the deadline-driven reading that lies ahead in the next few weeks. Right now that space is occupied by: Canada, the new novel from one of my favorite writers, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford; liberal commentator E.J. Dionne’s Our Divided Political Heart, an election-year analysis of our pervasive political gridlock; What Happened to Sophie Wilder, Christopher Beha’s novel about belief and doubt; and new essay collections from two very smart people —Marilynne Robinson’s When I Was a Child I Read Books and Jonathan Franzen’s Farther Away: Essays.

The pull of that professional reading means that worthy volumes of short stories by Deborah Eisenberg (Twilight of the Superheroes: Stories), Max Apple (The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories), and George Saunders (In Persuasion Nation) I once placed there with the best of intentions have been relegated to a second stack, along with T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and the slim book, Slow Reading, by John Miedema, which seems like a rebuke to the whole notion of a TBR pile. Short stories and poems remain there because somehow they seem less intimidating, more approachable, than a fat, untouched novel would in that space, but I don’t delude myself that I’ll get to them anytime soon.

The more interesting collection is the one I’ve assembled in what used to be my daughter’s bedroom, converted to a branch library/guestroom a few years after she left for college. I’ve gathered this group of books with some care and like to picture it as a pile of stones marking a path through the woods or a signal fire in the desert. The books that have made it there are ideal to pick up for a few minutes of pleasurable reading before dropping off to sleep or for companionship in the middle of a restless night:

J. Peder Zane’s The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books is a compilation of the favorite books of more than 100 authors, while Leah Price’s Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books is a mini coffee-table book boasting gorgeous color photographs highlighting the libraries of writers like Jonathan Lethem, Gary Shteyngart, and others. A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry, edited by Czeslaw Milosz, rests atop a pile that includes essay collections by Donald Hall (Eagle Pond); Joseph Epstein (Narcissus Leaves the Pool and In a Cardboard Belt); Ian Frazier (Lamentations of the Father); and the ultimate bibliophile, Nicholas Basbanes (Editions & Impressions: My Twenty Years on the Book Beat), alongside the timeless Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. All are rich with wisdom, inspiration, humor and consolation, some of the rewards we seek when we reach for a good book. What more could one ask from a dozen or so volumes? It’s enough to make me want to tiptoe over there for some late night reading and my only wish is that our guests appreciate them as much as I do.

CATHERINE GAMMON

Catherine was born in Los Angeles, California. She earned a BA in philosophy at Pomona College, and an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1976.

Catherine was a fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 1977 and 1981, and worked for many years in the type production department of the New York Review of Books. In 1991 her novel Isabel Out of the Rain was published by Mercury House, and in 1992 she joined the faculty of the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh.

Her fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, The North American Review, Kenyon Review, Manoa, Central Park, Fiction International, Other Voices, and other journals. She served as fiction editor for Cape Discovery, an anthology of fiction and poetry by Fine Arts Work Center fellows. Her latest novel, Sorrow, was just released by Braddock Avenue Books.

Catherine has received NEA and New York Fellowship for the Arts grants for her fiction, as well as a creative research fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society for work in the Esther Forbes Papers and the Cotton Mather collection in preparation for a novel about the Salem witchcraft trials.

In 2001 she left both the academy and the literary marketplace to begin residential training at San Francisco Zen Center. In 2005 she was ordained a Soto Zen priest by Tenshin Reb Anderson, and in 2010 served as Shuso, or head monk, for the spring practice period at Green Dragon Temple/Green Gulch Farm.

In January 2011 she returned to Pitt’s MFA program as a visiting professor, and hopes to continue reweaving her life in writing into her life in Zen.

When Eric Olsen came to interview me for We Wanted To Be Writers, I didn’t give him any titles for “Books by the Bed.” My reading at that time was entirely devoted to dharma study, and I didn’t think reweaving her life in writing into her life in Zen.

When Eric Olsen came to interview me for We Wanted To Be Writers, I didn’t give him any titles for “Books by the Bed.” My reading at that time was entirely devoted to dharma study, and I didn’t think those books, wonderful as they are, were quite what this feature was meant to be about. But a few things I’ve been reading lately move me finally to step up and offer a few words.

Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule. It’s no longer by the bed because I loaned it to someone to read. I loved this book. It was so satisfying to read a novel so well written, so warm, so intimate with and respectful of its characters, so wise, so mature, so full of life and darkness and heart. I had just before read A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, which was a good read, timely and smart, even made me cry somewhere along the way, but on some level, it felt kind of like watching well done, intelligent television — and I can be an addict of well done television, don’t get me wrong — but what was the literary appreciation about? I didn’t get it, and I felt kind of helplessly, hopelessly out of the cultural loop, even over the hill. Perhaps I exaggerate. After all, my taste has always been a little, or a lot, out of synch. But then I picked up Lord of Misrule. I hesitate to use the word redemption, but there it is. A long shot that became a winner. And full of love.

Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Irreversible climate change is already happening — does this surprise anyone? Bill McKibben’s account, already a year out of date, makes the case so clearly, I recommend it as a must read. McKibben’s perspective is global and his argument is that we already live on an altered planet, no longer the earth we’re accustomed to (hence the gimmicky nod to renaming, Eaarth with two A’s) — that no matter what we do now to respond we will not be able to do business or culture or politics as they have been done until now. But this possibly depressing news is only the first half of the book.

The second demonstrates with example after example the capacity of people joining together locally in work (and protest and play) to create resilient and sustainable ways of living that respond to the change. I found the book’s tone occasionally a little glib and snarky, but only occasionally and only a little, not nearly so much as to undermine the informed, wise, and inspiring insight offered. And relating this book to the ongoing conversation around writer as public figure, I can only point to McKibben as a writer who fully takes that responsibility on.

Derek Jarman, Chroma: A Book of Color. A tale from the fuddling, failing side of memory — collecting my stored boxes of books, left behind in Pittsburgh during my ten years in California, sorting, deciding what to keep and what to pass along, I come to Chroma. I remember it, but vaguely. I read around in it, I think, but not cover to cover. I will pass it on, but in particular — it is right for my daughter, a filmmaker, Heather von Rohr, or my friend the painter Deborah Morris. I email them together, would one of them like it? My daughter loved that book and has it in storage and says if Deborah doesn’t want it she’ll take it and give it to someone. Hmm. Heather, I write, could this copy be yours? No, she’s sure it’s stored. But maybe she gave it to me? Oh, yes. I think she’s right. I’m not sure that this confusion can be appreciated if your own memory is not beginning to lose itself this way. But by now I’m deep in the colors, Jarman’s haunting mix of memoir and meditations on color, a slim assemblage of brief quotations, contemplations, and personal stories, written as he was dying, profoundly simple, straightforward, and formally inspiring. One short little chapter each night. When I finish, it goes to Deborah.

Blake Butler, There Is No Year. Butler is new to me. I don’t know how long he’s been a star or how widely he is read, especially among my Workshop generation. I recently discovered him during a short stay in Provincetown, browsing the wealth of literary magazines in the fellows lounge at the Fine Arts Work Center. His words stood out from the pages, the rhythms and tones. Now this. This novel is a mystery. Old-fashioned, I wish it were printed on plain white paper, instead of on gray. The words are enough, and the gray is discouraging to aging eyes. Maybe the aging aren’t meant to read this book. But try, old eyes and all. I haven’t finished, have yet to see where the journey is going. But it goes, and there is magic in it, compelling and strange.

Few pleasures are as personal, or rely as much on word of mouth, as reading. Each of us owes a debt of gratitude to someone for urging us to pick up a book we’d never heard of, and end up loving. Cheryl and Eric Olsen have done every reader in the world an invaluable service by compiling in one book a treasure trove of such recommendations, from some of the most passionate and discerning readers in the world: writers. My to-be- read pile has become a mountain — and I couldn’t be happier about it.

— David Corbett, prize-winning author of The Art of Character

When I finish a good book, I miss the author in my ear. I nearly get upset with him/her for not telling me what to read next, how to go on with my life. In Best of Books by the Bed #1, 25 writers share the books they keep in their most intimate place, beside their beds. Go there with them.

— Matthew Salesse, Fiction Editor/Columnist, The Good Men Project, author of I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying and The Last Repatriate

A writer’s nightstand is a towering and precarious place, a pile of can’t-waits and shoulds, research and leisure, classics and debuts and guilty pleasure. A revealing peek into the minds of writers before the lights go out!

— Nichole Bernier, author of the novel The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D

Read this book not only for its voyeuristic insights into writers’ private reading, but for its encouragement. Best of Books by the Bed #1 inspires us to explore new directions for our own reading and writing.

— Elizabeth Craig, mystery writer

Best of Books by the Bed #1 brings the reader the great prurient pleasure of seeing behind the closed bedroom door. And what treasures can be found there! Nabokov, Faulkner, Carson McCullers, even Arnold Schwarzenegger.

— Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk

Remember those nights when you used to read books under the bedcovers by flashlight after “lights out”? And remember that feeling like warm syrup spreading through your chest when you found a book you truly loved and couldn’t wait to tell others about it in the morning? Books by the Bed re-kindles that happy glow of biblio-love through its lists of well-read books enthusiastically endorsed by readers and writers. Reading Books by the Bed is like being able to crawl under the covers with fellow book lovers and come away with a whole stack of new reading material. Flashlights not included.

— David Abrams, author of Fobbit