Valerie Nieman v. 3.0

A big thank you to James Tate Hill, my colleague at North Carolina A&T State University, for inviting me on this blog tour, My Writing Process. His post appeared last week at this site. It’s always interesting when people ask us to step back and explain exactly what we’re doing, what I’m doing there in the corner in front of the computer, early in the morning or into the night, typing in words in uneven bursts. 1)                    What are you working on? Right now, I’m engaged in far too many projects. I am completing final edits to a new collection of poetry, Hotel Worthy , which will be published in the spring by Press 53. I’m pretty pumped about that – the best of ten years’ worth of poetizing. The editing has been light from the publisher, but I have to skinny down three formal poems – a ghazal, pantoum, and sestina – to fit the page width. Free verse and prose poems are not an issue...

Our State magazine is one of the gems of North Carolina - a state magazine that is chock-full of information and entertainment. I was so pleased to see Blood Clay get  such a nice notice there. Blood Clay by Valerie Nieman | Our State Magazine

I was up early, watching a UNC-EX program on the crocodile god in Egypt. Lots of images of sand sifting through ruins, and archaologists digging layer by careful layer. I've been asked lately about how a book begins, and it seems at least for me it begins only when there is enough history accumulated. What happened when I was 5 or 11 or 23 or 36 is still there, like the ruins buried in the desert. Then something new occurs that reaches right back through the layers like a shaft dug straight into the past. It's a certain slant of light .... a note from an old bell ... the way a dirt road curves into a forest and the sky reflects from a crescent puddle. Then, and only then, my senses and emotions awakened, is there a sense of a story waiting to be told. And interviewers have asked, of course, how much overlap there is between author and character. Does Tracey in Blood Clay represent my feelings in her sometimes caustic comments? Is she me ? Well, no. But she has some parts ...

It's one of those family stories. My father, with two girls but no boys, being kidded by his brother-in-law, with four sons (and a daughter) in his family. He answered, I'm told, that "it takes more skill to create what you don't know than to duplicate yourself." That remark has stayed with me as a writer, because as parents to our fictional children, we both replicate our own experiences and pull in threads of all we have seen, known, encountered, read, remembered, overheard, and imagined. I've worked all along the spectrum, from newspaper reporter to writer of fantasy, and know how tough it is to thread the needle of plausibility, whether in trying to faithfully recreate the scene at a fatal traffic accident, or imagine the lives of people in the worlds of never-has-been. In an argument about the nature of the novel today, David Shields writes, “There is the commonsensical assertion that while the novelist is engaged on a work of the creative imagination, t...

It's only five weeks until the release of Blood Clay , yet this morning I had another title ghost through my head. There's something about naming the child that is difficult, sometimes impossible - the right name has already been taken, is too close to another, too plain, too exotic. Just like in families. One aunt has a lovely name but an unfortunate history. The father loves Angela and the mother loves Helene and the great-aunt chooses - Zenobia? Blood Clay started life with a working title of Feral , which links to the behavior of cats, dogs, people, and communities - but also conjures up images of horror movies. I tried Birds Without Nests - maybe it was the negativity, but that didn't fly. My publisher loved the book but hated the title, and there was a flurry of email as we tried various options. Finally, a recurrent image in the text provided a path. But should it be Blood/Clay ? Clay/Blood ? Blood and Clay ? We settled, at last, on Blood Clay . And I like it. You c...