Spring Showers…Ideas Blooming…Book Tours in the Rain
Dear Friends,
Welcome to April’s Substack.
Since publication of my novel The Far Side of the Desert in March, I’ve enjoyed meeting old friends and new readers as I’ve traveled to bookstores and other venues. I’ve also enjoyed meeting online. I look forward to future events and hope you’ll join me. If you are engaged by the novel, I appreciate your leaving a review at an online bookseller. The reviews are read and help!
In Book News I share features, including The Far Side of the Desert listed in “The 10 best new books of March 2024” by The Christian Science Monitor, some YouTube recordings of events, and a calendar of future events.
In my blog “Spring Showers…Ideas Blooming…Book Tours in the Rain” I consider the importance of ideas, independent bookstores, and freedom of expression.
The Writer at Risk section focuses on the case of Pinar Selek, Turkish writer, academic and activist who has been pursued by the Turkish prosecutor for 25 years on a charge from which she has already been acquitted four times.
In Books to Check Out are highlights of two compelling novels by award-winning novelists Paul Lynch (Prophet Song) and Alice McDermott (Absolution).
In the Scenes section you’ll find a few photos of settings, along with text from The Far Side of the Desert.
I hope you enjoy these and other features and share this monthly Substack with friends. Subscribe if you haven’t already. On the Yellow Brick Road Substack is free!
Honored to have The Far Side of the Desert (Oceanview Publishing) included among The 10 best new books of March 2024 by The Christian Science Monitor.
The Far Side of the Desert, by Joanne Leedom-Ackerman
Alliances – familial, situational, political – gird this engrossing thriller from novelist Joanne Leedom-Ackerman. U.S. foreign service officer Monte disappears during a visit to Spain; the search to find her, spearheaded by older sister Samantha, ricochets from Morocco and Egypt to Washington. Monte’s captivity is brutal, but there’s resilience, too, as both sisters slay old demons and chart new paths.
The first chapter of The Far Side of the Desert is published in the Johns Hopkins Review along with the Author’s Note about the origins. You’ll find ordering information for the book by clicking the title above.
“A thoroughly enjoyable read. I hesitate to call The Far Side of the Desert a page-turner, but only because it's so much more, with characters that will stay with you long after you finish.”
—James Grippando, New York Times best-selling author, Code 6
I kicked off my Spring Book Tour with a virtual event at Malaprop’s Bookstore and Café in Asheville, NC. You can click the link to view and hear the recording on YouTube. Another conversation at Kinokuniya Bookstore in New York City with Salil Tripathi can be found on YouTube by clicking the bookstore link. And you can check my website for videos of other past and future events.
I hope you’ll find of interest this interview with Deborah Kalb.
A big thank you to Novels Alive for the 5-star review of The Far Side of the Desert.
My novel Burning Distance (Oceanview Publishing, 2023 and recent paperback in 2024) has been honored by Reader Views with a Silver Award in the Thriller/Suspense category.
“I entered the world of Burning Distance and I didn’t want to leave. The narrative voice unfolds the story both poetically and realistically.”
—Azar Nafisi, New York Times best-selling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran
Below is a calendar for future events around the publication of The Far Side of the Desert. More events will be added and details for past events and for the events below can be found on the Speaking page of my website.
Thank you to all who came together and shared the March celebrations of The Far Side of the Desert.
Spring Showers…Ideas Blooming…Book Tours in the Rain
Four out of the first six book events for my new novel The Far Side of the Desert occurred in the rain with downpours in two cities. Such is the peril of a March pub date, but better than snowstorms in January. A pleasant surprise was how many friends and new readers showed up anyway. A cozy bookstore on a rainy day or evening has its own appeal.
Still on the road, I’m grateful to all those who value books and ideas and friendship and particularly the independent bookstores that host the gatherings. However one comes into contact with ideas and with the experience of others, horizons open and thought expands, both for the writer and the reader. Expanding thought and perceived experience is how we grow.
We are privileged to be able to share books and ideas, a freedom of expression and assembly not to be taken for granted. Ideas are the food of healthy societies, and books are one of the vehicles for these. A tour across the U.S. highlights this privilege which shrinks with censorship and almost disappears if the writer is put behind bars as is the case in too many countries.
Each month in my Substack I feature a writer at risk who is not as fortunate but is targeted by governments threatened by conflicting ideas.
May the power of ideas and imagination and the freedom to write endure and expand.
Pinar Selek (Turkey)
(Sources include PEN International, PEN America, and International Federation for Human Rights)
Entangled in the Turkish judicial system for 25 years, writer, sociologist, and feminist Pınar Selek is facing a fifth trial on charges relating to a 1998 explosion at the Istanbul Spice Bazaar where seven people were killed and 127 injured. Acquitted four times on the charges, Selek confronts a fifth trial brought by the Istanbul Criminal Court which is threatening her with life in prison without parole.
A researcher of Kurdish history, the Roma and other vulnerable groups, Dr. Selek was originally accused by a detainee under torture of participating in a bombing at the Bazaar, but the detainee later recanted his testimony saying that it was given under torture and that he didn’t even know Selek.
Selek spent two years in prison where she was tortured. However, investigators later confirmed that there was no bomb, but instead a faulty gas line. Selek was released in December, 2000. The team of experts issued a report concluding the explosion was caused by the accidental ignition of a gas cylinder. Three expert witnesses assigned by the court also testified.
Prosecutors ordered retrials of Selek on four separate occasions. She was acquitted every time, in 2006, 2008, 2011 and 2014. After each acquittal, the courts ordered retrials. Turkey’s Supreme Court overturned the fourth acquittal in June 2022 and sentenced her to life in prison. In March, 2023 a new trial was set and is now postponed to June, 2024 before the Istanbul Criminal Court. Meanwhile an international arrest warrant has been issued.
Dr. Selek now lives in France where she has received a PhD in political science at University of Strasbourg and is an assistant professor in sociology at University Cote d’Azur in France. She is the author of books published in Turkish, German, and French and is a founding editor of Amargi, a Turkish feminist journal. In 2017 she received French citizenship. Dr. Selek is a member of the French Human Rights League (LDH) and Turkish PEN.
“What lies behind these extraordinary trials could be Selek’s refusal to name people linked to the PKK during her research. It could also be that her commitment to the rights of marginalized people, combined with her sympathies for Kurdish rights makes her a scapegoat. Whatever the reasons, not only has there been injustice against Selek, there has been no justice or reparation for the victims who were in the Spice Bazaar on that terrible day,” according to those familiar with the case.
In 2019, Selek was awarded the Mediterranean Culture Prize, which recognizes contributions to inter-cultural dialogue. In accepting the award, Selek said: “I am here as someone from the Mediterranean, as a woman in exile, as a writer, researcher and activist. I strive to resist with my work… and [am] trying to contribute to the growth of a counter-culture based on freedom, justice and solidarity.”
PEN International argues that “Pınar Selek’s prosecution is linked to her work as a sociologist focusing on minority rights and Kurdish communities in the mid-to-late 1990s and that she is being pursued through the courts as a means of penalizing her for her legitimate research and commentary.”
PEN International and its worldwide centers, LDH, Human Rights Watch and human rights organizations globally have urged the Turkish government to quash once and for all the charges and life sentence against Pinar Selek and end the political harassment.
Action To Take:
Please send appeals to the authorities of Turkey:
· Expressing concern that another trial has been opened against Pınar Selek on charges of which she has already been acquitted by courts of law four times;
· Urging that the charges against Selek are dismissed;
· Calling for the decades-long judicial harassment of Selek to end once and for all.
Send appeals to:
Bekir Bozdağ
Role: Minister of Justice
Address: Ministry of Justice, Adalet Bakanlığı, 06659 Ankara, Turkey
Contact: info@adalet.gov.tr
Send copies to the Embassy of Turkey in your own country. Embassy addresses may be found here: https://cd.mfa.gov.tr/mission/mission-list?clickedId=3
Please reach out to your Ministry of Foreign Affairs and diplomatic representatives in Turkey, calling on them to raise the case of Pınar Selek in bilateral fora.
An attack on a writer, the shutting down of a publishing house, the torching of a newspaper reduce the space in the world where ideas can flow. Freedom of expression is vital to writers and to readers but is challenged daily around the world. Listed here are organizations whose work on human rights and in particular issues of freedom of expression I’ve been engaged with directly and indirectly over the years. Some of the organizations have broader agendas, but all have contributed to keeping space open for the individual voice.
PEN International (with its 147 centers in over 100 countries)
PEN American Center
English PEN
PEN/Faulkner Foundation
Human Rights Watch
Amnesty International
Amnesty International USA
International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX)
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
Article 19
Index on Censorship
Poets and Writers
Authors Guild
International Center for Journalists
This month’s book selections are from two award-winning writers—Paul Lynch and Alice McDermott—both with Irish heritage who consider war—real and theoretic—from a woman narrator’s point of view. Both ground-breaking.
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch arrived in the mail from a friend and activist on behalf of refugees with a simple note: I think you’ll like this book. Winner of the 2023 Booker Prize, Prophet Song had missed my attention. I tucked it in my bag, sent a thank you but didn’t start reading it right away.
When I finally dipped in for a few pages, I quickly recognized I was reading a truly original voice. After the first chapter I was entirely planted inside the world and the consciousness of Eilish Stack, mother of four, professional woman whose husband is disappeared in the first chapter and who is left to evaluate, contend, and make life decisions for her children and her father in a country—Ireland—that is falling apart in civil conflict with a tyrannical government that is changing the landscape she has known all her life. Though the story is fiction and the dateline vague, the dynamic is intense and the story plausible for too many locations.
The journey of Prophet Song is both internal and external. Lynch’s brilliant prose shatters open experience and wraps it around one’s own consciousness in the way that the best literature does, allowing the reader to empathize and feel life from another’s point of view. The sentences run on with little punctuation, keeping the reader inside the text without a break, reminiscent of William Faulkner’s prose.
As Eilish’s community falls apart day by day and her husband and sons are pulled one by one into the maelstrom, she is faced with narrower and narrower choices. The challenges of civil unrest, of government crackdowns, authoritarian rule ascendent, war, destruction, and refugees resonate in today’s headlines and also in headlines from the past.
Prophet Song is a cautionary tale and a cri de coeur to the reader. Its grim trajectory is delivered with the beauty of art and life enduring.
A few passages below:
“You cannot put a stop to the wind, he says, and the wind is going to blow right through the country….”
“…I thought I was awake, trying to see into the problem that stood before me like a great darkness, this silence consuming every moment of my life, I thought I’d go mad looking into it but then I awoke and began to see what they were doing to us, the brilliance of the act, they take something from you and replace it with silence and you’re confronted by that silence every waking moment and cannot live, you cease to be yourself and become a thing before this silence, a thing waiting for the silence to end, a thing on your knees begging and whispering to it all night and day, a thing waiting for what was taken to be returned and only then can you resume your life, but the silence doesn’t end, you see, they leave open the possibility that what you want will be returned some day and so you remain reduced, paralyzed, dull as an old knife…”
“…history is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave…History is a silent record of people who could not leave, it is a record of those who did not have a choice, you cannot leave when you have nowhere to go and have not the means to go there…”
“Your father is with you all the time, she says, even while he’s gone, that is the meaning of the dream, your father came home to remind you that he is always here with you because your father is always alive in your heart, he is here with you now with his arm around you, and he will always be here because the love we are given when we are loved as a child is stored forever inside us, and your father has loved you so very much, his love for you cannot be taken away nor erased, please don’t ask me to explain this, you just need to believe it is true because it is so, it is the law of the human heart.”
“…the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event…”
Finalist for the PEN Faulkner Award in Fiction, Absolution by Alice McDermott showcases the voices of women and their perspectives amidst the escalating war in Vietnam and deftly discloses consequences at home and in country.
Wives and a mother in the early days of the Vietnam War in 1963, Tricia and Charlene live in Saigon with their ambitious husbands. Searching for their roles and negotiating the fraught social structures of the ex-pat community, they get involved trying to do good with unexpected repercussions which play into an unexpected future ahead for them and for the American community.
The story is told as a retrospective tale to the daughter of Charlene and to the reader who is still evaluating America’s innocent/naïve/opportunistic venture into a country halfway around the world. Filled with memorable scenes as the women arrange to have tiny local clothing made for Barbie dolls they sell as Vietnamese Barbies to raise money for their good deeds and have silk pajamas made for women in the leper colony, Absolution exposes the folly and the yearning which shadow and echo the realpolitik of their spouses. Absolution is narrated with the gentle and yet searing insight Alice McDermott brings to this complex period of history.
The destiny and generational aftermath of this doomed conflict are seen anew from the fresh perspectives of these women—American and Vietnamese—who are left in the wake.
“At some point that night, our conversation led us to her night terrors.
They’d plagued her since the twins were born. Not nightmares, exactly, she said, because she knew when they were happening that they weren’t dreams, and moreover, she knew she was not asleep. and yet, she said, whenever she tried to explain them—to Kent, to the doctors he’d sent her to—she always reached first for some description of darkness. These terrors were, she said, infused with a terrible sense of waking darkness. Something like what the newly blind must feel. Or the newly buried.
Impenetrable darkness with its attendant disorientation, missteps, clutches at the air.
And yet there was also this tremendous certainty on her part that something truly worthy of her fear, something as solid as it was horrific, was there, in the darkness. something terrible within it, or maybe just beyond it. It was not sleep, not dream, not nightmare, and she always felt afterward that if she had just managed to pursue it, terrified but resolved, she would have discovered a glitch in the dark veil, a tear in it. She would have glimpsed…she couldn’t say what.”
Sharing here a few scenes and passages of text from The Far Side of the Desert’s opening chapter set in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
(Over the years I’ve accumulated a running list of words I haven’t known from two main sources: WordDaily and WordGenius)
Parisology
/parəˈsäləjē/
Part of speech: noun
1. The use of equivocal or ambiguous words.
Examples:
"The furniture assembly was complicated by the confusing diagrams and parisology in the instructions."
“The lawyer folded so much parisology into her argument, we could barely understand what she had said.”
"My boss is often guilty of parisology — I try to follow his instructions, but sometimes they're too ambiguous to decipher.”
Proficuous
/prəˈfɪkjəwəs/
Part of speech: adjective
1. Useful or profitable
Examples:
“The gas station attendant gave us proficuous directions and helped us avoid the tolls.”
“Let me show you this proficuous trick for pouring sauces without a mess.”
“Buying the stock at a low price last year turned out to be a proficuous investment.”
Consentient
/kənˈsen(t)SH(ə)nt/
Part of speech: adjective
1. Of the same opinion in a matter; in agreement.
Examples:
"We pitched the idea of a new hedge to our neighbors, and they were consentient."
“The city council was consentient with the mayor on plans to build a new park.”
“All passengers were consentient, so we stopped first at the barrier island before sailing to the final destination.”
I’ve spoken at bookstores, university classes, book luncheons and in-person and zoom book clubs and look forward to more ahead. I enjoy giving readings and addressing audiences in many venues and moderating discussions on a wide range of topics and most of all meeting readers.
Click here for a list of future and past public events.
Or fill out the speaking request form to schedule an event.
I like engaging with readers so if you are in a Reading Group or Book Club and read one of my books, I’m glad to be in touch by email, zoom, or when possible in person. I can also suggest discussion topics.
Fill out the reading group form here to schedule a meeting.
Joanne,
Your books and your passionate spirit working in journalism is inspiring!
Yellow Brick Road is a wonderful name for your Substack. I have distant memories
of both of us standing on the Yellow Brick Road.
With love,
Julie