Tayari Jones's Blog
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May.09.2012
Saturday, May 5, 2:15pm– Boston, Massachusetts Grub Street’s The Muse and the Marketplace Tales from the Kidscape: The Art of the Coming of Age Story Location: Park Plaza Hotel
Tuesday, May 8, 6:30pm– New York, New York Jefferson Market Library Reading and Signing
Sunday, May 13, 2:00pm–...
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Apr.30.2012
Like many people, the biggest impediment to my writing is a failure to sit myself in the chair and try. I recently whined to someone that my writing hasn't been "going well" for the last week or so. I know the person thought that I have been sitting at my typewriter, staring sadly...
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Apr.30.2012
Yesterday, I spent the weekend in Los Angeles to give readings from Silver Sparrow at Eso Won Bookstore and the Los Angeles Times Festival of the Book. For both events, I wore the shoes you see pictured here. I know they aren’t much to look at. They’re not red-bottoms, or Jimmy...
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Feb.10.2012
I was recently attending the meeting of a book club that had chosen Silver Sparrow as their monthly selection. One of the questions raised in the meeting was whether or not the daughters (Dana and Chaurisse) had broken the cycle of problematic relationships modeled by their mothers. ...
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Dec.30.2011
Today, I am renewing my passport. I can't believe that it has been ten years since I made a New Years Eve promise to myself. Things were a lot different then. I hadn't yet published my first book. I was living on a tight budget. I did all my writing in a closet. Not a...
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Dec.30.2011
The new year is right around the corner and I am doing quite a bit of housekeeping. It's amazing, but I am seeing metaphors everywhere. Today, I have been cleaning out my jewelry box. In a tangled jumble, there is about twenty years of assorted gold jewelry. A broken chain,...
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Dec.19.2011
I was reading a student's manuscript recently. I liked it, but I didn't love it because there was something generic about the descriptions. I shared with him a pretty easy fix that will make a significant difference in the draft:
Dear _____________,
Here is an easy suggested to amp up the...
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Nov.06.2011
This Is Not Writing
Many of you know that I am spending the year as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. It’s wonderful here. There are fifty fellows and we are given a full academic year to basically do our thing. My thing, as...
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Aug.31.2011
Last week I blogged about my plan to write my new novel of a sixty-year Smith Corona. I bought the machine on Etsy and the ad promised that it “works.” Well, it did work, a little bit. It worked enough to type my name, but it wasn’t in true working order. The seller thought I just sort of...
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Aug.26.2011
Slowing It Down
My mentor, Ron Carlson, once told me that there are two types of writers—gushers and ekers. The gushers are the ones who write really quickly, producing a lot of words, but also producing a lot of crap writing. On the other side are the ekers—they agonize over each...
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Aug.24.2011
Edan Lepuki has a great post up over at The Millions about a book she wrote that she hasn't been able to publish. If you are in this situation, I definitely recommend that you read the article. Here is the line I like best: "Lastly, these months of rejection have taught me the difference between...
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Jul.07.2011
The day before yesterday, I was on the Diane Rhem show discussing Silver Sparrow. I have been a fan of Diane Rhem for years. (A 2003 interview with Maxine Clair on the show helped me figure out how to write the first chapter of The Untelling). So you can imagine how pleased I was to be...
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May.07.2011
I have started writing a new column over at SheWrites called "Countdown to Publication." I will post every Wednesday about the inside story as I prepare for the launch of Silver Sparrow. I just posted my first piece, which is Five Things I Wish I Had Known When I Published My First Book...
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Mar.25.2011
If you have been following this blog, you know it has been a very very long road.....
Excerpt From Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones
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Mar.16.2011
For Women's History Month, I wrote a blog post about a woman I admire, ROSA PARKS. This is something new for me because I never really *admired* Mrs. Parks. That image of the sweet seamstress who defied Jim Crow, while sill being a lady just wasn't my idea of reisistance. But then I found out...
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About Tayari
Tayari Jones was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia where she spent most of her childhood with the exception of the one year she and her family spent in Nigeria, West Africa. Although she has not lived in her hometown for over a decade, much of her writing...
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