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Want to know what it's like to lead the glamorous life of the freelance writer? Read this and weep.
Via Old Hag.
August 31, 2005 · 09:59 AM · Misc. · Comments (0)
Fall Dance
The Chronicle asked me to tackle the upcoming dance season for the paper's Fall Arts Preview, which was published in the Pink section yesterday. My list is not a selection of "critic's picks" or recommended shows, but a roster of just about every quality Bay Area dance performance I could think of or find for the coming four months. It won't whittle things down for you, but it will give you the (nearly) full fall landscape, and I hope my descriptions are helpful.
To see the Chronicle's fall dance preview, click here.
August 29, 2005 · 09:57 AM · Dance · Comments (1)
Recommended this Week
I’ve just returned from the Yerba Buena Gardens in downtown San Francisco, where I led a lecture and Q and A with Yannis Adoniou, artistic director of Kunst-Stoff. The Yerba Buena Gardens have commissioned a fresh take on Fokine’s iconic “Les Sylphides” from Adoniou, which he has set to the original Chopin and titled “Less Sylphedes.” I’ll admit I’m not fond of postmodern puns, and the whole premise might sound either promising or appalling, depending on how sacrosanct you hold your classics, and how well you know Adoniou’s work. But I saw the new piece in the studio yesterday, and again in excerpts on the outdoor stage this afternoon, and I think Adoniou’s approach is quite remarkable. The ethereality of Fokine’s fantasia of romanticism dissolves into carnality—but it does so gradually, with great craft and gathering force.
There will be two versions of Kunst-Stoff’s new “Less Sylphedes”: a lower-tech outdoor setting, and an edition with video projections to be presented during the company’s home season at ODC Theater September 22-October 1. But first you should get yourself to Third and Mission Streets, where the work will be danced at 12:30 p.m. tomorrow, Friday August 26, and at 9 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. All the performances are free; click here for more info.
As for the September home season, one of the luxuries of having three dance writers at the San Francisco Chronicle, even if all of us are freelance, is that I can participate in a lecture like today’s and then recuse myself from reviewing the work until I feel I’ve recovered sufficient objectivity. But I’ll be at ODC Theater for Kunst-Stoff’s season next month, and in my non-objective opinion, you should be too.
August 25, 2005 · 03:33 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Back in San Francisco and powering through one more reading tonight, at 7 p.m., at the Borders on Union Square. Then I get a break from the readings for a bit--and you faithful blog readers get a break from hearing about the memoir. I've got great dance stuff on the horizon--I promise!--including the San Francisco Chronicle's Fall Arts Preview, which hits the stands August 28th.
Santa Barbara was a lovely whirlwind that sent me straight from a book party at my gracious in-laws' house to a reading at the downtown Borders. Thanks to the fellow College of Creative Studies alumnae who came out, and to the cafe barristas whose ears perked up during my reading and who came by afterwards to buy the book and have me sign.
Also at the reading was Mr. Henry Babcock, a very good friend to my brother Emmet during his Army deployment to Mosul, Iraq. For those who have been keeping my brother in their thoughts, my mother and I received word today that he'll be moving to Kuwait (and out of harm's way) in just ten days, and coming back to the States a few weeks after that. We're proud of him, saddened by the losses of many good soldiers, and counting down every day until we see him again.
August 18, 2005 · 03:05 PM · The Lost Night · Comments (1)
My friend DJ Palladino--my first real editor, after my brief stint at the UCSB Daily Nexus--has written a very sweet profile of me for the Santa Barbara Independent:
"Rachel Howard’s The Lost Night is a riveting book about growing up in the wake of her father’s murder. Stabbed in the throat near or in his bed, Howard’s beloved dad, Stan, stumbled through their Fresno home, a scene she, then 10 years old, horribly witnessed. The murderer has never been found. The act and its psychological aftermath—a mix of memory and denials—are the subject of Howard’s lucid book, written almost entirely without cant or self-pity.
The book—set mostly in California’s Central Valley, an often forgotten and seedy corner of our glorified state—chronicles her attempts to fit in after the traumatic events of 1986, in a troubled home life with a druggy stepfather named Howdy and an adolescence plagued with sexual tension. Escaping south to UCSB, Howard, who is now working on a novel, took fiction-writing classes but also tried her hand at the Daily Nexus. She interned at The Independent in the late 1990s, and became a writer and dance critic (I was one of her editors, and we are still friends) before being named our calendar editor. Though her talents quickly became obvious—a clear, incisive writer blessed with an uncommon work ethic—journalism was always a kind of second career choice. She explained, “I just wanted to write books. But when you live in a place like Fresno, it’s not one of those things people tell you you can do.”
Most of us never knew that even in the midst of her impressive reporter years here, she was suffering an acute emotional breakdown replete with hallucinations. “A lot of my friends have started to get copies of the book and read it,” she told me over lunch at the Natural Café last week, “people I haven’t seen in years, who say, ‘I had no idea, I feel like I never knew you.’” Even a former boyfriend with whom she was deeply in love called to say he didn’t know her father was murdered. “That’s how much I was trying to keep it from people,” Howard said. "
Alas, the Independent's website is still a bit cumbersome; you can read the whole article here, but you will have to scroll down through all the other arts articles to find it under "Childhood Noir"--or read the other articles, especially if you live in SB!
The occasion for the piece? I'm reading at the Santa Barbara Borders tomorrow night, Tuesday Aug. 16 at 7:30 p.m. For details, click here. If you live near SB, come out and say hi.
August 15, 2005 · 08:51 PM · The Lost Night · Comments (0)
Questionnaires, and Mild Misquotations
San Francisco Examiner film critic Jeffrey M. Anderson interviewed me for the "Why I Write" column in yesterday's paper:
"The Examiner: Why do you write?
Rachel Howard: I've kept a journal since I was 18. If three or four days pass and I haven't written in my journal I feel like my life is just this collection of random experiences going by. So I write to give my life shape and meaning.
Q: Now that you've published your book, you have to talk about the murder more than ever. Is that hard for you?
A: I wanted that to be forced upon me. I had lived for a long time with this fear that when I told someone that my father was killed, they were going to completely change their idea of who I was. And so the more I took control of that, the less I dreaded telling people."
For the full interview, click here. It's always nice to be called lean and striking, so I hope it won't appear ungrateful of me to point out that I was mildly misquoted. First, one of the books I'm currently reading is "Camus and Sartre: The story of a friendship and the quarrel that ended it." And I didn't say I was reading Isak Dinesen because "I like to read fiction." Geez, I write fiction, so you would hope I like to read it. What I said was that I was reading Dinesen short stories because I like to always be reading at least one work of fiction (to keep my mind in storytelling mode).
Ah, to be on the other side of the tape recorder.
Regarding the little factoids about my tastes at the bottom of the interview, the Examiner actually gave me a long list of questions, including "Favorite song/piece of music" and "If I could only retain one book on a desert island, it would be . . ."
"You can't answer those straight, or you'll be a total nerd!" my husband Bill said when I showed him the list. But answer them more or less straight I did, and I'm sure it's just good luck that the Ex didn't print all my replies.
So I'll just share one answer that didn't make it in. "Book I've read lately I'd recommend most?" Nicole Krauss's "The History of Love." Without a doubt.
August 15, 2005 · 11:11 AM · The Lost Night · Comments (0)
You Can Take the Girl Out of the Strip Mall . . .
Note to self: Always use Professional Author voice when speaking to the press. From the Fresno Bee:
"Rachel Howard has a habit of raising the intonation of her voice at the end of sentences that don't contain questions. Her lilt bounces along so merrily that there are moments you might mistake her for a witless mall rat.
Don't be fooled. Howard is no lightweight. She's the author of "The Lost Night," a memoir about the summer night her father was murdered as they slept in their Merced home. She was 10 years old."
The rest of the story is actually quite complimentary, but registration is required to view. If you already have an account with the Bee or don't mind signing up for one (free), you can see the whole article here.
The readings in Merced and Fresno, incidentally, were wonderful. In Merced, where I worried people might take me to task for dredging up bad memories, we had a standing room only crowd. People who knew my father in high school came to share their rememberances--and their yearbook photos. Old neighbors of the house where my father was killed came to say they remembered when the murder happened, and that they were keeping me and Bobby in their thoughts at the time. My grandmother came, my mother, my aunt, and Nanette, my dad's second wife, with her family. Even before anyone had introduced themselves, I could feel a kind and supportive energy from the audience.
Fresno--where I lived after the murder--was less emotionally charged but just as fun. The "good girls" from my years on the Clovis High colorguard were by my side. Special thanks to Heather for playing "interim publicist," and to the good friends I hadn't seen in years who stopped by to say hi.
It was all a much richer--and overwhelming experience than I have time to relate today. I've got a wall to finish painting yellow, a Chronicle story to write, and an apartment to clean before my in-laws arrive tonight. Oh, and also a reading tonight: 7 p.m. at the SF Ferry Building's Book Passage. Come on out. I'll make sure not to talk like a "witless mall rat."
August 11, 2005 · 01:40 PM · The Lost Night · Comments (1)
Recommended this week
With all this plugging of my memoir "The Lost Night," you might think I've forgotten about dance--but not so. In fact, before I head to the Central Valley tomorrow for a few readings, I want to make sure to post about a dance show I'll certainly be catching in San Francisco this weekend.
Alex Ketley is a former dancer with Lines Ballet and a promising choreographer of ultra-contemporary, stark yet emotional work, usually presented with striking multi-media trappings. About five years ago he co-founded The Foundry with fellow dancer/choreographer Christian Burns; just recently he won one of the Princess Grace Foundation's first choreography awards. Friday and Saturday at ODC Theater he'll be presenting "Syntax," a duet for ODC dancers Andrea and Justin Flores set to the poetry of Carol Snow. Should be challenging, perhaps even beautiful; for full details, go here and follow the link to "The Foundry/Carol Snow."
Also on the dance-writing front, I've just wrapped up the Chronicle's Fall Dance Preview, which will run in the Pink Section later this month. Thanks to those members of the Bay Area dance scene who saw my call for entries on this site; the preview is far more inclusive because of your response.
August 08, 2005 · 11:23 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
A review of "The Lost Night" with a personal twist in the Orange County Register yesterday, written by Scott Duncan, my former editor at the paper:
"I met Howard when she was 23, an aspiring arts journalist and a polished young woman. She applied for a job as an arts reporter here at the Register, where I was an editor at the time. Her writing was advanced for someone her age. Her grades were terrible in high school, she said, and writing became something of a salvation; in fact, it was only through a writing scholarship that she was accepted to college.
We took a chance with her, and Howard worked at the Register for about a year covering the arts. She was poised, talented, fast-learning, mature beyond her years. Reading her book a few years later, I would be shocked at what she lived through. She never mentioned the slaying. There was an air of reserve about her, though; her emotions were veiled by something invisible. "You can't imagine how happy this makes me feel," she said, when I phoned to offer her the job. It struck me at the time as an odd response to a first big break.
Much of "The Lost Night" is gripping reading, as Howard splendidly re-creates her middle-class childhood world of Modesto, Fresno and California's central valley in the 1980s. She assembles and weighs her narration carefully, with a journalist's calibrated sense of veracity. She describes the disjointed memories of the death night - the pools of blood, her father's death struggle, the paramedics charging through her living room - as Polaroid snapshots, "murky images captured and set aside to develop in slow motion."
It's an apt way to describe the entire book, as Howard finally allows these painful memories to develop, then tracks down the principal players in her past to find the truth of what happened.
Howard's lucid storytelling and the simple bravery of the writing make her book absorbing and moving, especially at the time of the killing and the ensuing difficult years. Each word seems honed from half a lifetime of gradual remembering, like water filtered years underground emerging pure and clear from a spring."
The review also ran with an uncanny illustrated likeness of me, which you can see by going to the paper's website here. "Gosh, my childhood was bad, but it's not like my stepfather made me go three rounds with Evander Holyfield while wearing a tutu," I said when I saw it. My husband thinks it would make a good illustration for a New Yorker-style caption contest. If you've got ideas, send 'em in. Best one wins a signed copy of the book.
And I'm grateful to Scott Duncan for his thoughts. He was a rare kind of editor, personally tutoring me, printing out my stories and marking them up to teach me structure and strong, declarative writing. I learned more in a year at the Register than I could have learned in five elsewhere.
UPDATE: A helpful reader informs me that the OC Register requires you to create a free account and sign in before you can view the review/illustration--a small wrinkle in our caption contest. Darn.
August 08, 2005 · 10:30 AM · The Lost Night · Comments (2)
Viva la Virgins
Fresno's not necessarily the purgatory it used to be, as I discovered when I visited my high school friend Heather McLane a few weeks ago. We went out for sandwiches at the Tower District's Irene's, a forties-style cafe where vintage-clad twenty-somethings cruised past on bicycles despite the 100-degree heat.
Not only does Fresno have one pocket of the city with cute coffe shops and actual pedestrians, it also now has a cool entertainment website called Fresno Famous. (I want a t-shirt!) Heather is a freelance journalist of burgeoning talent, so when she told them of my reading in Fresno this Wednesday, they asked her to interview me. We talked, in Heather's words, "of memory, family and how great it is to be a high school virgin.":
"Speaking of high school, I'd like to take issue with you describing myself, and some of our other friends, as "determined virgins."
[Laughing] Oh, but you were virgins, though.
Yes, but putting it into print certainly doesn't help my "lady about town" reputation.
You should be proud to have been a virgin in high school!"
Heather did a great job with the interview. Read the whole thing here.
August 06, 2005 · 05:20 PM · The Lost Night · Comments (0)
It’s been a busy week, but after doing a quick newspaper interview this morning I’m catching my breath. The book party last night was a blast. And the reading Wednesday night at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for books went “smashing,” as my friend Gee from Pets Unlimited would say. In fact, most of the crew from Pets Unlimited, where I volunteer as a dog walker, turned out to radiate good vibes my way. As if that didn’t make them angelic enough, the shelter at Pets Unlimited never puts any of their animals down—they house them and retrain them and talk to them in loving silly-dog voices as long as it takes to find a home. I can’t imagine a better shelter. If you live in San Francisco and you’re ever in search of a pet, make it your first stop: the corner of Fillmore and Washington streets.
Here’s a secret bonus about reading at A Clean Well-Lighted: The store graciously gives every visiting author one book of his or her choice. I didn’t skip a beat: I wanted Meredith Daneman’s tell-all biography of Margot Fonteyn. Only when I got it home and eagerly dove in did I realize I’d made a pricey selection, with the 654-page brick ringing up at $32.95. My husband Bill swears I planned it: “Why didn’t you just head straight for the coffee-table books?” he said.
If you were hoping to come to the Clean Well-Lighted reading and missed it, I’ve got more on the way: Next Thursday I’m at the Ferry Building’s Book Passage, and the Thursday after that you can catch me at the Borders on Union Square. In the meantime, I’m headed to Merced and Fresno, the two Central Valley towns where much of what’s recounted in the book took place. And though I’m a bit apprehensive about reading true-life stories so close to the source, I’m looking forward to seeing old family and friends.
August 05, 2005 · 03:07 PM · The Lost Night · Comments (0)
Just a Taste
One of the great things about keeping a blog is you can see what your readers want and give it to them with minimal technical fuss. Visitors have been alighting on this site via searches for "The Lost Night excerpt." And so--curtain up--you can now find an excerpt from the first chapter here at rachelhoward dot com. Just look at the sidebar under "The Lost Night: A Memoir" and click the new button for "Excerpt."
August 05, 2005 · 09:20 AM · The Lost Night · Comments (0)
The Reviews Roll In
In the New York Times today, a review of "The Lost Night" by William Grimes:
"As a detective, Ms. Howard fails. She never learns the identity of her father's killer. But as a memoirist, she succeeds brilliantly. "The Lost Night" is enthralling, a skillfully narrated story that begins as a tale of detection but quickly becomes something more. Sifting through her past, Ms. Howard, who writes on dance and books for The San Francisco Chronicle, opens a window onto the miseries that divorce visits upon children, and the extent to which drugs have woven their way into ordinary working-class lives.
She evokes, unsentimentally, the pleasures and funny rituals of middle-American life. Simply and movingly, she chronicles the passage from her childhood to adulthood, from uncomprehending fears, resentments and hatreds to understanding and forgiveness."
Click here to read the full review.
Perhaps I should play this cool, but I'll fess up: When I finished reading, I blasted M.I.A. on the stereo and boogied around the house in my pajamas.
Also a great review from Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. It's not available online, alas. But you can read a thumbnail of it if you scroll down the sidebar of his blog, About Last Night, until you reach the "Top Five."
I'm reading at San Francisco's A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books tonight. Come out and say hello. I won't wear my pajamas and I won't boogie, but I may be in a good mood.
August 03, 2005 · 09:22 AM · The Lost Night · Comments (2)
Appearances this Week
I'll be doing my first reading from "The Lost Night: A Daughter's Search for the Truth of Her Father's Murder" this Wednesday, August 3rd at 7 p.m. at A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco. Click here for details, or here for the full list of my readings and appearances.
--Rachel Howard
August 01, 2005 · 11:00 AM · The Lost Night · Comments (2)
Great review of my just-released memoir, "The Lost Night," in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday:
"In the small farming community of Merced, a little girl wakes up one night to find her father stumbling through the hallway of their home, a kitchen knife embedded in his neck. It's this scene that begins Rachel Howard's powerful memoir, "The Lost Night," and it's this scene that will visit her, again and again, for the rest of her life.
Rachel is just 10 years old when her father is murdered. Although he dabbles in cocaine, and although he's working on his third marriage at the time of his death, he has no known enemies. No drug debts. Angry ex-wives, yes, but none so menacing. The killing, it seems, is entirely random, lacking in motive or design, and from start to finish the reader is as lost for answers as the author herself.
The subtitle of this memoir, "A Daughter's Search for the Truth of Her Father's Murder," tends to cheapen the material; it is less an apt description of its contents than a publisher's shrewd sales pitch. The book is far more intense and real than your typical true-crime story, and if you attempt to interpret the word "truth" to mean Rachel Howard's search for her father's killer, you'll be disappointed.
Instead "The Lost Night" concerns itself with the psychological fallout that accompanies the tragic, sudden loss of someone you love deeply. It is about the role the dead play in the lives of the living and how in order to move beyond our pain, we must first embrace it, as Rachel will, learning in time to "integrate the murder with [her] sense of identity."
Click here to read the full review.
--Rachel Howard
August 01, 2005 · 10:55 AM · The Lost Night · Comments (0)
