FRESH VOICES
A look at this season’s debut novels and the stories and lives behind the authors
This season’s debut novels and the stories, lives behind the authors
This month, next month — and probably long into the future — if you pay any attention at all to the Chicago literary landscape, you’re going to need to acquaint yourself with a handful of fresh names. No fewer than five debut novels by Chicago authors arrive on shelves this winter, an unusually strong showing. All are talented fiction writers and all have landed healthy deals with major publishers. They tell tales from the Stateway Gardens housing projects, and about women linked mysteriously across centuries. They write about a forgotten science-fiction novelist, and about growing up in South Shore, and about the toxic history between a mother and daughter.
Some have left Chicago, some still live here.
But more important, not one of their books reads like the beginning of a minor career.
Consider this an introduction.
Jasmon Drain, ‘Stateway’s Garden’
Vitals: 44, grew up in Englewood, now lives in Kenwood. It’s about: The interlocking trajectories of a handful of tenants in the now-demolished State Street housing project. Set in the 1980s, and ending with Stateway’s demolition in 2007, reminiscent of story collections from Raymond Carver and Gloria Naylor, this elegant first book begins with a shy child named Tracy, spirals outward to his distracted mother, then gravitates toward an older brother, then their neighbors; by the final story, we’re reading a furious history of an enormous slab of concrete (“a grayish-white color that looked like dirty sheets bleached repeatedly”) that shared a single quality with the millionaire homes on Lake Shore Drive, “condo views of the city” — albeit, without ever feeling as welcome to that city. His story: Drain taught some at University of Illinois at Chicago, a bit at Chicago State, a little at Olive-Harvey College near Pullman. “I hated teaching,” he said, “But I was good at it.” He attended Southern Illinois University, then entered law school at Louisiana State University. One day, not long after he quit his job as a paralegal for a downtown Chicago law firm, he was feeling distraught. “I didn’t know what to do with myself, and you may not believe this, but I picked up a pen and started. I was riding a train north — this is 2007 — and I see they’re knocking down Stateway and I wonder what it must be like to see someone knock your home down. Romantic as it sounds, I got off the train, went to the other side (of the CTA platform), took the next train home, sat and started writing. Eventually, I had a book.” If only the rest went so smooth. He said he never wanted to be a writer; watching his father struggle as a freelance musician, he wanted something more certain than a creative life. “But it is who I am, so I do it.” For years he tried to sell the stories that make up “Stateway’s Garden.” He sold a couple to literary journals for less than $100, total. But, inspired by reservation tales of Sherman Alexie (“the first writer I read who did not run from reality”), and Steinbeck, he continued: “Something’s happened in every book, an overarching narrative affecting its characters. Maybe the characters don’t see it. Maybe we don’t. But if a book is set in ’64, ’78, whenever, something’s there. That’s Steinbeck to me, writing about the time, rather than just having characters go through feelings. He wrote fiction resonant of its time, and I want that.”
What’s next: He’s working on a novel, but Drain admits he’s still uncertain if he wants the life of a writer. “Right now working on something new is the last of my thoughts. I just have to want to do it again first. Someone asked me for advice for aspiring writers of color, and I said, ‘Don’t do it if it’s not who you are.’ You’ll find who are you anyway. But this job will test you.”
Rita Woods, ‘Remembrance’
Vitals: 62, from Homer Glen, where she is a family physician and medical director of the Wellness Center in Mokena serving the Pipefitters Local 597.
It’s about: Four women, linked by the legacy of African American slavery — and their supernatural powers. Pinging across 300 years, from 1791 Haiti to a contemporary nursing home in Cleveland, it’s a historical epic rooted in the horrors of the slave trade, with an intriguing bit of X-Men-like uncanniness attached. One slave develops the power to manipulate space, starting an encampment for the underground railroad sealed off with a force field. No whites allowed. Until the priestess ages, and the town, Remembrance, frays.
Her story: Woods never planned, of course, to wait until her 60s to become a debut novelist. She had grown up in Detroit, wanting to write for magazines, but “my parent’s rule was smart black girls go into professions.” So she became a doctor; at one time, she was on the staff of four hospitals simultaneously. She put in so many hours as a family doctor, there was no time to write, for years. She even trained seriously as a bodybuilder (then decided not to compete).
About a decade ago, she realized “I had worked 20 years to create this career and it’s not the one I wanted as a kid, and it’s kept my kids in dance and paid the mortgage and paid for vacations, but it was brutal and there was no bandwidth left (for writing). I couldn’t sustain it.” She wrote during early morning hours and self-imposed weekend retreats.
“I realized I didn’t want to just tell a straightforward underground railroad story. Anyone who had the courage to run away from slavery had something else in them anyway. I don’t know if it would be called magic, but certainly a strength of character. On some level though I wanted them to be able to weaponize those abilities, and not necessarily in an offensive way.”
She pictured Remembrance beneath an invisible dome, subject to “an odd physics, where the people inside could walk 50 miles, or could go fishing — as long as they were inside the dome, the space inside was infinite. It was its own world, a parallel universe of sorts.”
She began attending writers conferences and pitching to agents — one of whom assumed the Underground Railroad was an actual railroad. (“He wanted to know if you sat or stood.”) But the very next agent she talked to acquired the book. Then couldn’t sell it. Woods heard it was reminiscent of influential sci-fi novelist Octavia Butler, one of the few African American women in the genre, but that Butler (who died in 2006) never actually sold that well during her lifetime. Not surprisingly, after the success of Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad,” the book sold. Now Woods has a nationwide book tour (a rarity today for a freshman novelist) and multiple bookings on NPR (every debut writer’s dream).
What’s next: Woods is already a hundred pages into her second book. “I’m already getting the ‘We need the next book, we need the next book …’ — but I’m never home.”
Michael Zapata, ‘The Lost Book of Adana Moreau’
Vitals: 40, from Old Irving Park, lives in Lincoln Square.
It’s about: A New Orleans boy named Maxwell Moreau whose father is a pirate and mother, Adana, a Dominican immigrant, writes a surprise bestselling sci-fi novel. Before she dies, she burns the manuscript of her follow-up. Still, nearly a century later, a Chicago man locates an unexpected copy of that lost book in his grandfather’s papers and heads in search of a now-elderly Maxwell, traveling into a New Orleans devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
His story: It’s not so unusual for a first-time novelist to write an entire book (or a few), then throw away the work and start again on something new. Zapata, using a grant from the Illinois Arts Council and money he received after his car was totaled by a drunken driver, moved to Ecuador for a year, rented an apartment in the Andes, in a small town that had been founded by his great-grandfather. He knocked out several hundred pages quickly, over five months. But he decided it was awful. First he erased the novel from his computer, then he hiked to the top of a volcano with a print-out of the book and threw the manuscript into a crevice. “I didn’t want to return to Chicago and dwell on it and try to redo it for years. I wanted to start again.” The manuscript burned? “The volcano was dormant.” So he littered, then?
“It’s so unromantic when you put it like that!”
The good news is, after returning to Chicago — where he is an academic adviser at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, after years of teaching dropouts in Chicago Public Schools (and also co-founding the long-running Make Literary Magazine) — Zapata began writing “The Lost Book of Adana Moreau.” The first line he came up with is still the first line in the book.
“I was always an avid sciencefiction reader when I was young, but when I am not writing I tend to think materially in a way about how economics affects people. I lean democratic socialist and I thought a lot about my experiences teaching sometimes brilliant people who dropped out. When I sat to write, I wanted to tell a story about people between things, not quite accepted. I think a lot of Latin Americans don’t feel fully American or Latin American. I am in constant contact with family in Ecuador (where his father emigrated from) so there’s not the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of a classic immigrant experience. I also think of New Orleans as the northernmost Latin American city. I lived there and it feels viscerally like a parallel universe.”
The result is a evocative blend of folklore, realism and oral tradition (he’s a Studs Terkel fan).
What’s next: His dad worked on Jewelers Row in the Loop, so he’s thought about setting a novel there. But first, “I’m starting work on a book about Chicago in 2050. I won’t give it away, but it’s about a first-generation Ecuadorian who is a census taker and he’s telling a long monologue to an aunt at a black site in Chicago — after a revolution.”
Gabriel Bump, ‘Everywhere You Don’t Belong’
Vitals: 28, from South Shore, now teaching at the University of Buffalo.
It’s about: Claude McKay Love, a South Shore kid, abandoned at five by his parents and raised by a grandmother, yet quintessential ordinary, easily overlooked, polite, obedient, headed for college and uncertain of his place. After a riot, after watching friends shot by Chicago police, then leaving the city for undergraduate world he can’t relate to, what it means to be young and black gathers heartbreaking shape. Bump wrote recently: “I wanted to write a novel for the teenagers riding the Jeffery Local with their headphones on, their hats tuned straight, their minds on girlfriends and forever love, their unfinished algebra worksheets crumpled in their backpacks, their dreams about belonging to a peaceful world.”
His story: “Everywhere You Don’t Belong” reads like something of a response to the history of great literature set on the South Side. Bump read Gwendolyn Brooks, and Richard Wright, but he wondered, rightly, where’s the great South Side literature since the mid-20th century? “Then as an undergraduate (at University of Missouri), I found Stuart Dybek and loved his style, the way his characters popped. Until (Dybek, who made his name writing stories about workingclass communities around Pilsen) I hadn’t read the Chicago I knew.” Which is what Bump tells his own students: “‘Look for blind spots in the canon where you feel you can add something.’ Myself? I wanted something on South Shore.”
Bump, like his hero, Claude, is from Euclid Avenue, in the Highlands of South Shore; Bump, like Claude, took a No. 15 Jeffery to school; and Bump, like Claude, attended University of Missouri to study journalism and left early. But this isn’t auto-fiction: “I was never recruited to be in a gang, and unlike Claude, I didn’t flee for my life from Missouri.” Unlike Claude, Bump didn’t go to school in South Shore; he went to Hyde Park’s University of Chicago Laboratory Schools; his mother is a pediatric nurse, his father is a doctor. (Coincidentally, his parents bought their home from the family of Carlo Rotella, a famed journalist from South Shore.)
While at school in Missouri — after a couple of years of being asked “What’s Chiraq like?” — he decided to return to Chicago, where he studied creative writing at School of the Art Institute of Chicago; then left again to get his MFA at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The first draft of his new novel was his UMASS thesis. “These days, I don’t know how I feel when I return to South Shore. It’s a strange place. Maybe it’s always been true, but it feels darker now than I remember, but then maybe that’s just because I’m a decade older.”
What’s next: Bump has a two-book deal with Algonquin. He recently handed in the first draft of “The New Naturals,” his follow-up, about an underground group of black academics who start a utopian society in New England. (He’s also about halfway through his third book.)
Stephanie Wrobel, ‘Darling Rose Gold’
Vitals: 33, from Darien and Lemont, lives in London.
It’s about: A teenager named Rose Gold who spent most of her childhood being told by her mother that she was so sick she needed a wheelchair, so allergic and ill and full of cancer that she required constant hospitalization. This mystery of sorts picks up five years after Patty, the mom, has done prison time for child abuse. She returns to her Midwest town as a pariah, but then moves in again with her daughter, who appears now to be weirdly forgiving.
Her story: Wrobel, like many first-time novelists, thought writing fiction as a career was an impractical and uncertain way to earn a living. “It was always more of a dream than a plan, so the closest I could get was advertising.” She worked for several years as a copywriter at a pair of Chicago agencies, writing TV and radio commercials for blue-chip brands such as Michelob and Capital One. “As far as writing tight copy goes, when you are used to having five words for a billboard, (that job) taught me the economy of language, but it was also good for me on a skin-thickening level. I am so used to having creative directors draw big slashes through my copy that, comparatively, book editors are pleasant with your feelings.”
The rest has been fast. She got her MFA from Emerson College in Boston, where “Rose Gold” was her thesis. She submitted it to book agents only two years ago, and now publishing rights have been sold in 15 countries. That’s very quick for a first-timer. She plans to stick with suspense, though “I’m less interested in a who-dunnit than a why-theydunnit.”
Her novel began with a mention of Munchausen syndrome: a friend who works as a school psychologist said she suspected that some of her students were feigning illness to see a doctor. “I was intrigued, then shocked to learn the perpetrators are often mothers, but there aren’t many firsthand accounts from the perpetrators, only the victims. The tricky thing with people with mental illness is the general public doesn’t often have much sympathy, so the key to writing Patty was showing that she could be funny and charming and relatable.”
What’s next: Movie rights haven’t been optioned yet but that’s inevitable. (It’s hard reading “Darling Rose Gold” without picturing another screen-eating Frances McDormand turn.) Meanwhile, Wrobel has a twobook deal with Berkley (a Penguin imprint) and is already on the second draft of her next book, about a wellness center “with cultlike tendencies.”