I've got news for the remaining eight people who might know about this blog. It's good news. Super news.

Harper Perennial bought my second novel BAD MARIE. It will be released summer 2010. The book is being pitched as Mary Gaitskill meets "The Hand That Rocks The Cradle." I like that. It's both accurate and it's not. Marie takes rank as my favorite fictional character written by me. Sorry Sue. Sorry Chloe.


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More immediate news: I've got a short story in the new issue of Knock. It's edited by the fantastic writer Jonathan Evison (ALL ABOUT LULU), who I first met through Myspace, and there's lots of great work by many, many  terrific writers, including Kim Chinquee, Pasha Malla, Greg Downs, Monica Drake, Keith Dixon, and also an interview with David Liss.

I'm co-editing the Spring issue of the Mississippi Review Web. Here's the call for submissions. Please feel free to forward this to any and all interested parties, and to post wherever appropriate.

24 Words Per Second: The Movies Issue
We are writers who watch a lot of movies. Maybe it's no surprise that the films we see have a way of seeping back into our fiction: plots that echo silent film, narrative gimmicks borrowed from the French New Wave, characters who spend too much time at the multiplex or model their lives after movie stars. For the MRW Spring issue, we are looking for short stories with a cinematic bend. What that means, exactly, is up to you. Perhaps your story references Aki Kaurismäki, moves like a screwball comedy, or features cinemaniacs trying to kick the habit. Maybe it's narrated from the perspective of Natalie Wood's ghost. As long as it's inspired by the movies, we're interested.

The deadline is March 15. Send submissions (3000 words max) to mississippireview.movieissue@gmail.com.

Pagan Kennedy wrote a funny, smart essay about her experience with MySpace for the New York Times Book Review. She quoted me. I got an entire paragraph.

More than a Times mention, what I loved was getting a MySpace message from Pagan Kennedy.

Way back, when I was one of those college graduates, an English major living in San Francisco (there were a lot of us), I went to see Pagan read. It was at the BookSmith on Haight St, down the street from my apartment (one of the best I've ever had, across the street from Buena Vista Park, all by myself, a big bay window.) Pagan exemplified the kind of young woman writer I wanted to be.

More than a decade later, a published author in my own right, I found my signed copies of 'Zine and Stripping on my crowded bookshelf -- in Astoria, New York. Those books have traveled far. 

Trisha, who has an amazing book blog on MySpace - News and Reviews for Book Lovers - posted a lovely piece about Twins.

It's a fascinating review, because it's about a lot more than my book. It's all about Trisha, too, what was going on in her life while she was reading the novel.


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Also, it's summer. The city of New York has done something that I like: free evening lap hours at the Astoria pool. Yes, I have to walk ten minutes to the subway, ride two stops, walk another ten minutes, but it's worth it. To me. I get to see the sun setting under the Triborough Bridge while I'm doing the crawl. I took the picture with my camera phone. That is my finger at the bottom of the image.


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Kasi Lemmons' wonderful Talk To Me opened the same weekend as Harry Potter. I hate that, when small movies are released on the same day as the big the blockbuster. Don Cheadle practically bounces off the screen, hilarious and heartrending, as radio DJ Petey Greene in the sixties in DC. I hope people see it. (I am not against people seeing Harry Potter, by the way.)

Also, highly recommended, and way smaller, harder to find: Colma: The Musical.

Three months after she finished reading Twins, book blogger Anne Ferham (member of the Lit Blog co-op) felt compelled to write a review.

"A fun, hilarious, and touching read," she writes.

And says other nice things too, including an interesting digression about Liev Schrieber in his Hampshire College days. Read more.

For the record, it pleases me when reviews continue to pop up on the Internet. Feel free.

Sarah Polley is one of my favorite actresses. She wrote and directed Away From Her, a remarkable adaptation of the Alice Munro short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain."

My admiration for Polley increased. She answered questions about the film screened at MoMA festival of Canadian film. (This was about a month ago, sometimes I am slow.)  After the Q&A finished, she mingled, talking to people in the theater, and at one point, I stood right behind her.

Somethings that I thought were interesting: Polley has never met Munro, she has not even spoken to her on the telephone, just an exchange of two messages on answering machines. Munro had not yet seen the film, though it has screened, received raves at The Toronto Film Festival, The Venice Film Festival, and Sundance. I guess you can't do a project for the praise of a writer you admire. I'd want it, though I'm certain that was not what motivated the actress-turned -filmmaker. That is me projecting. Actually, you can read this marvelous essay, written by Polley, published in Zoetrope, that explains her motivation.

Polley did the story proud. It's a wrenching film, on a difficult subject, Alzheimer's, and the performances were wonderful, the direction was wonderful.  d Away From Her comes out in May. I'll have written the review by then. 


(STV of the Reeler took this picture. I tried to take one on
my new fancy cell phone, but failed to get close enough.)


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Another literary adaptaion:
The Namesake. I preferred Mina Nair's film to Jumpha Lahiri's novel. Usually it doesn't work that way.

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In further movie news, I was proud of myself for sitting through an entire screening of Grindhouse. It goes over three hours -- too long -- and there's no intermission because that's when fake trailers are playing. I took my bathroom break during Tarantino's Death Proof.  Women do a lot of talking in this film; I am certainly a   fan of just this. But not in this case. Not at all.

Tish Cohen, whose first novel TOWN HOUSE is coming out in May, had a fun little contest over on the Debutantes Ball. She had readers vote on her favorite books from 2006. TWINS was one of her favorite books, hooray.  The vote was not for the actual book, but Tish's favorite lines from page 83.

My sentence about vomit took third place. Hence the subject line: Dermansky's vomit is in third. The sentence is about throwing up. It's an honor.

For the record, I have not vomited in a great long while. It's a reference to my characters, Chloe and Sue. Hopefully, they haven't been vomiting lately, either. Hopefully they have gotten past all that.

Maybe you are like me and you read Louisa May Alcott's Little Women a gazillion times in your youth. I read that book front to back and then, I would close my eyes and open it at random. I mean, I read that book many, many times.

Last week of the year, I got around to reading Geraldine Brook's March. If you haven't heard of it, well, it won a Pulitzer Price and tells the story of the father who was gone all through the book, a Chaplain during the Civil War. It's a dark and surprising story. At times, Dad is up to some unsavory stuff. He's also virulently anti-slavery. An admirable if misguided person. In his youth, he hangs out with Emerson and Thoreau. It's a marvelous book.

And while I was reading March, I also managed to wander through the Strand and I found on one of those all surprise remainder tables The Little Women, by Katherine Weber. It's a modern day retelling of the novel. Meg, Joanna, and Amy Green (there is no Beth, just a chipped turtle with her name) are cosmopolitan sisters who live in the Upper West Side. Manhattan. These sisters go out for sushi. They flat out revolt on their parents when what they perceive as their perfect family falls apart. The ending of the book, it might meander a little, but I loved it anyway. One of the special charms: the reader's notes. Joanna narrates the novel, but Meg and Amy get to offer their commentary at the end of every chapter and then Joanna gets her rebuttal.

Grown-Up Little Women fans: you, too, can have a fun week reading these books.

An obscure Sarah Polley film sneaked into my annual About.com top ten movies of the year, as did Pedro Almodovar's Volver and Guillermo del Toro's all-engrossing, adult fairytale Pan's Labryinth.



And about Pan's Labryinth: the star, Ivana Baquero, was only eleven years old at the time of filming. There are not many movies this complex that star bookish little girls.

Happy New Year!

Talk. Talk. Talk. I reveals her true opinions about the Olsen Twins and George Clooney at Conversations With Famous Writers, talks about living the writer's life in an outer boroughs in The Queens Chronicle and shares secrets about crafting teen trauma at Bildungsroman.


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Not me:  I read about an invite-only, super elitist writer's retreat in Tuscany. You get to stay with the Baronessa and learn about fresh ricotta. Benjamin Kunkel had a problem, apparently, with flies.