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www.LitPark.com
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This site is a service of PublishersLunch.com,
the daily e-mail newsletter now known as "publishing's essential daily read."
Join the nearly
40,000 people who read Lunch every day.
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writer, editor
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Susan Henderson
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LitPark Interview: Editorial Cartoonist, Jimmy Margulies
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Susan Henderson, LitPark
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Today on LitPark.com: Jimmy Margulies, editorial cartoonist who regularly appears in Time Magazine and MSNBC.com, talks about his long road to success, and how the internet is changing how he must find work. Please stop by and leave him a question or a comment. Also, don't miss the very moving discussion happening in the comments section, regarding the endurance required to have a career as a writer. And as per Robin Slick's Publishers Marketplace post, I'm also thinking I'll quit my PM membership soon, but will let you know other ways to find me before I do.
SUSAN HENDERSON is a contributor to NPR’s newest literary venture, DimeStories, produced by Jay Allison of This I Believe, and is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets award and a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. Her work has—twice—been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Publications include Zoetrope, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, South Dakota Review, The MacGuffin, Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies (nominated for a Pushcart Prize, 2004), North Atlantic Review, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, Opium, Other Voices, Amazon Shorts (nominated for a Pushcart Prize, 2006), The World Trade Center Memorial, The Future Dictionary of America (McSweeney's Books, 2004), The Best American Non-Required Reading (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), Not Quite What I Was Planning (HarperPerennial, 2008), and Online Writing: The Best of the First Ten Years (Snowvigate Press, 2009). She blogs at LitPark.com, and occasionally at Huffington Post and Brad Listi's The Nervous Breakdown. Her husband is a costume designer, filmmaker, and tenured drama professor. They live in NY with their two boys.
   
Not sure how LitPark works?
LitPark Question of the Month - Best-selling authors and unpublished writers chime in on these topics:
Foolish * Halloween * Bookshelf * Promise * Memorable Trips * Ask a Literary Agent * Annoying Habits * Born * Question of the Month: A Peek into Your World * Books and Film * Dice * Rejection * Masks * Driving * Six Words * Tomorrow is THE LIAR'S DIARY Blog Day * Public Transportation * Clown * Loss (and CONTEST ALERT) * 2008 * Teacher * Murder * Cry * Guts * Travel * Costume * Culture * Kiddo * Love * Tattoos * Whatcha Been Up To, Friends? * Phobias * Near-Death Experience * Where? * Mistakes * Writer Communities * Hope * Now What? * Independent Press * Generosity * Nice! * Zodiac * Style * Professional Jealousy * AWP * Controversy * Hair * 80s * Luck * Collaboration * The Pitch * Vacation * Balancing Art and Family * Fantasy and Science Fiction * The Book Tour * Snippets * Telling Mom * Setting * High School Secrets * Your Hidden Side * Out-of-the-Box * Aliases * Obsession * Self-Doubt * Risks of Truth-Telling * 9-11 * Your Space
LitPark Interviews - Don't miss my favorite drag queen, the history of Neil Gaiman's hair, or my smokin' book cover designer, Tommy Kane, who is responsible for these:
   
3 Trees * 60 Writers Quiz * Adrienne Brodeur * Alexander Chee * Amy Bryant * Amy Wallen * Amy Wilentz * Angela Stubbs * Anthony Marais * Anthony Tognazzini * Aquadisiac * Aurelio O'Brien * Bach-Boy Henderson * Backspace * Barry Eisler * Bonnie Glover * Brad Listi * Brian McEntee * Bridgett Davis * Bruce Bauman * Bruce Benderson * Buck Lewis * Cameron McGill * Candice Night * Carrie Hoffman * Chuck Collins * Claire Cameron * CLMP * Corey Mesler * Create Now! * Daisuke "Dice" Tsutsumi * Dan Conaway, Literary Agent (Part 1) * Dan Conaway, Literary Agent (Part 2) * Daniel Handler * Danielle Trussoni * Danny Gregory * Dan Passamaneck * Daryl Darko * David Habbin * David Morrell * DimeStories * Douglas Preston * Dr. Dot * Elizabeth Crane * Ellen Meister * Emily Maguire * Enrico Casarosa * Eric Spitznagel * FAWM (Songwriters) * Frank Daniels * Gayle Lynds * Gerard Jones * Gina Frangello * Green-Hand Henderson * Greg Downs * Halloween Special * Harper Perennial Lit Chicks * Heather McElhatton * Heather O'Neill * Heather Pena * Hillary Carlip * James Brady * James Spring * Jeff Swanson * Jeffrey Lependorf * Jessica Brilliant Keener * Jill Gurr * Jim Tomlinson * John Warner * Jolene Siana * Jordan Rosenfeld * Josh Kilmer-Purcell * Joy Nicholson * Karen Dionne * Karen Dionne 2 * Kate Gale * Kelly Braffet * Ken Barris * Kevin Dolgin * Kevin Sampsell * Kimberlee Auerbach * Laura Benedict * Lauren Baratz-Logsted * Lauren Cerand * Lemony Snicket * Lori Oliva * Marcy Dermansky * Maria Dahvana Headley * Michael Stusser * Mikel K Poet * Mom * Monica Drake * Mr. Henderson * Neil Gaiman * Norman Mallory * Olympia Vernon * Oronte Churm * Owen King * Pasha Malla * Patry Francis * Paul Green * Pearl Harbor Pop Pop * Peter de Seve * Pia Z. Ehrhardt * Pierre Berg * Porochista Khakpour * Rachel Resnick * Ritchie Blackmore * Robert Westfield * Robin Lerner * Robin Slick * Ron Currie, Jr. * Ronnie Del Carmen * Roy Kesey * Samantha Dunn * Sarah Hall * Sci-Fi Humorists * Scott Snyder * Seth Greenland * Shawn Decker * Smith Magazine * Stephanie Lessing * Steve Erickson * Susan Henderson * Susan Straight * Suzan Woodruff * Tao Lin * Terry Bain * THE LIAR'S DIARY Blog Day * The Man Eating Neil Gaiman * The Very Hot Jews * Thom Didato * Tish Cohen * Todd Zuniga * Tom Jackson * Tommy Kane * Thriller Panel * Watch Josh! * Wayne Yang * Where Are They Now? * Writer's Relief * Xujun Eberlein * You
LitPark Monthly Wrap - My wrap-ups have led to discussions about patrol camp, hitchhiking, and peeing on apples. Have a look:
Times We Turned Pink * Our Most Pathetic Halloweens * Our Book Collections * A 30-Year-Old Letter Arrives * Field Trip * LitPark's Weird Day * Annoying but Lovable * How We Come into the World * Faking Confidence * Winners of Charles Shaughnessy's Morning Song Contest * You Know I'm Busy When I Can't Even Come up with a Title * Rejected But Not Defeated * This Is Not Actually Copping Out * Creative Writers, Creative Drivers * We Can Say a Lot in Six Words * Staggering Generosity * Penn Station * Some Fabulous News * The Flip-Side of Loss * Making a Difference in 2008 * Our Favorite Teachers * The Murders We Remember * The Shoulders We Cry On * We Are Gutsy * Oh, the Places We Go * Playing Dress Up * Our Ancestry * Our Toys * How We Love * The Ways We Are Marked * We've Been Busy * Summer Vacation '07 * Close Calls * Where We Live * Mistakes that Changed Us * Community * Hopeful * Taking Our Next Steps * Independent Streaks * The Tysha Effect * Joy and Pain * Our Signs * We Got Style * We Want a Turn * How We Make Use of Conferences * Our Controversies * Authors and their Hair * Our Lives in the 80s * Just Our Luck * Group Effort * Our 2 Sentences * How We Balance Our Time * Our Favorite Spec Fiction * Introverts at the Microphone * Our Unfinished Brilliance * Our Mothers * Places that Capture Us * Our High School Days * Our Hidden Selves * We Don't Like Boxes * Our Disguises * Our Obsessions * Pummeling Ourselves * Who Owns Our Truths? * Our Shared Trauma * My Space, Your Space
You do not need to be a writer to play at LitPark. All book lovers, artists, directors, singers and people who love to talk about the creative process are welcome. Stop by and join the conversation!
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TRADE REFERENCES
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Susan Henderson's debut novel THE RUBY CUP is elegant and engrossing. Like a modern-day Scout, Henderson's child narrator Tillie Harris is both tender and tough, charming and filled with wonder by the difficulties she must overcome. Henderson is a talent to watch.
- Danielle Trussoni, author of Falling Through the Earth
Tillie Harris, Susan Henderson’s courageous young heroine, is vibrant and true. Her voice fills the pages of THE RUBY CUP with a bittersweet song of innocence and longing as she navigates her way through her perilous life—a life dominated by her mother’s desperate unhappiness and her father’s frustrations. I wanted to hold Tillie tight then release her with a smile, so I could watch her set the world on fire with her hard-won wisdom and sparkling energy.
- Laura Benedict, author of Isabella Moon and Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts
THE RUBY CUP is a rare literary page-turner full of shocking discoveries and twists. Susan Henderson has created a remarkable narrator – as memorable for her feistiness as for her tenderness. THE RUBY CUP is going to be one of this year's major debuts.
- Josh Kilmer-Purcell, author of I Am Not Myself These Days and Candy Everybody Wants
Susan Henderson makes real the magic and terror of childhood with such vivid uncanny accuracy that I can almost imagine being a child again. She takes readers back into the world of children like no other writer today—without cloying sentimentality, and without the wild hysteria of memoir. Funny, smart, innocent, and wicked, her narrator is one of the most memorable voices to show up in fiction in ages.
—Jim Daniels, Pushcart and Brittingham Prize winner, and author of No Pets, Detroit Tales, Places/Everyone, Punching Out, M-80, Niagara Falls, Blessing this House, Blue Jesus, Night With Drive-by Shooting Stars, Digger's Blues, Show and Tell: New and Selected Poems, Letters to America: Contemporary American Poetry on Race
Here, finally, is a contemporary writer willing to embrace the pathos, the ache, the hunger of human life in fiction that's luminous and moving and transformative. In the character of Tillie, Susan Henderson pursues the shadows of childhood without allowing herself to be obliterated by the potential, there, for darkness; her fictional creations are beautifully flawed and hence gorgeously human. For me, Susan Henderson is one of the most important writers to come along since Carson McCullers. Like McCullers, she turns her eye upon the sadness, the poignancy, and the grotesqueries of our world, evokes them with a keen and unswerving vision that is tempered only by understanding and love. A remarkable writer...and a brilliant one.
— Terri Brown-Davidson, assistant editor at Zoetrope: All-Story and author of Marie Marie, Hold on Tight and The Carrington Monologues
Using perfect prose as a weapon, Sue Henderson's THE RUBY CUP burrows into you, so that if you put the book down, you will soon feel compelled to pick it back up, and when you have read the final word, you realize that you will carry this story with you for the foreseeable future.
—John Warner, editor of McSweeney's Internet Tendency and co-editor with Dave Eggers of Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans, contributor to The Future Dictionary of America, and co-author with Kevin Guilfoile of My First Presidentiary: A Scrapbook by George W. Bush, and Fondling Your Muse
I would love to be able to talk about Susan Henderson's book, THE RUBY CUP, without using the word "awesome." But the truth is, I can't do it. I'm in awe of the big-hearted love of a daughter for her mother. I'm in awe of the all-too-human Tillie with her brilliant imperfections, with her truth-telling, with her outrageous simplicity. I'm in awe of the breadth and scope of this book. I'm in awe of how Susan Henderson makes it seem as if there's nothing small in the world. I know you'll agree. THE RUBY CUP is no less than awesome.
—Terry Bain, O. Henry award-winner and author of You Are a Dog: Life Through the Eyes of Man's Best Friend
Susan Henderson deftly conjures that surreal kingdom known as childhood, a realm teeming with tactile mysteries, hourly epiphanies and ineffable longing. And Tillie is as brave and winning a narrator as we could wish for, caught in a painful intimacy with her disturbed mother, but also embarking on the necessary adventure of defiance. THE RUBY CUP is a wonderful book, always evocative and often funny, fashioned with a delicate touch and a riddler's humor.
—M. Allen Cunningham, author of The Green Age of Asher Witherow
Susan Henderson writes with the sort of honesty, clarity, and attention to detail that makes you forget for a moment that you are reading fiction or even reading at all. It is a sign of the greatest level of art: to erase the artifice that separates the reader from the experience. The stories in this book do this with admirable skill, creating a world of vivid sadness and beauty.
—Grant Bailie, author of Cloud 8
In luminous, economical prose, Susan Henderson tells the story of Tillie, a lonely child in a family of loners, doing her best to please her high-ranking Pentagon scientist father, her literary, unstable mother and her scornful older brother, all of whom have secrets she wants only to understand. She grows before our eyes in deft, layered chapters that are at once painful and funny. Neglected and demanded too much of, eager to please and rebellious in equal measure, Tillie embodies the very spirit of late twentieth-century America, and we can't help but love her. Indeed, Henderson's greatest gift to the reader—and there are many— is the evidence that love, though it surely does not conquer all, makes forgiveness possible and hope inevitable.
—Maryanne Stahl, author of Forgive the Moon and The Opposite Shore
Riveting! Bravo to Susan Henderson for plumbing the depths of this complex family dynamic with prose that elevates and inspires. "THE RUBY CUP" is a treasure.
—Ellen Meister, author of The Smart One and Secret Confessions of the Applewood PTA
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PROJECTS ON OFFER/ PROPOSALS AVAILABLE
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Don't Turn Out Like Me: A Troublemaker Starts a Family - synopsis.
A five-year-old accidentally kills a kitten and brands herself a villain. As she grows, she hoards the secrets of her dark side, as if proving to herself that she is too reckless to be trusted with anything innocent or delicate. Despite her anxiety she is compelled to start a family of her own, and when she does, fears that her children will turn out just like her - a troublemaker. But her growing children teach her something she never knew when she was a child: that childhood is all about mistakes and trouble and redemption. Part comedy, part tragedy, Don't Turn Out Like Me: A Troublemaker Starts a Family is a story about learning to be an adult, about making peace with past mistakes and peace with one's own nature. Told as a series of often laugh-out-loud essays - many performed alongside editors from humor magazines like McSweeney's, Opium, The Morning News, and Modern Humorist in clubs around New York City and at Philadelphia's 215 Festival - Don't Turn Out Like Me combines humor, tenderness and heartbreak with a David Sedaris-like bite.
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SPECIALIZED TRAINING, WORK EXPERIENCE, HONORS
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Schooling:
Carnegie Mellon University (B.A.)
Vanderbilt University (M.Ed)
Work:
Upcoming: Guest, NPR's DimeStories
Former managing editor, Night Train literary magazine.
Former writer for ABC News Multi-Media Literacy project.
Former crisis counselor at Pittsburgh Action Against Rape.
Radio and podcasts:
Podcast interview:
podcast discussion between me and Paul A. Toth re: truth and memoir
(find podcast #23, Feb. 1, 2006, then click on the mp3 link)
Interview, NPR (KRCB):
Listen to my NPR (KRCB) Interview, 2004 about the unique funding strategy used at Night Train literary magazine. (WARNING: this takes a couple of minutes to download; turn the sound up while you wait.)
Story reading, NPR (KRCB):
My Christmas story "The Kid Has a Letter for Santa" was read on National Public Radio (KRCB ) on Dec. 15 as part of a holiday special.
Interviews:
Write Free
Inside-Out China
Eight Diagrams
The Publishing Spot
David Niall Wilson interviews me about my writing themes, my blog, and more
Mark Pritchard interviews me for his series called What Are You Working On?
Guest Speaker at BACKSPACE.
2004 Interview with SmokeLong Quarterly with comments on Googling
Another 2004 Interview with SmokeLong Quarterly with comments on my trip to China
Some Past Readings:
NYC, KGB Bar, for launch of NPR's DimeStories, 2008
Cape Town, South Africa, Off-the-Wall, 2006 - with Liesl Jobson, Ken Barris, Mike Cope.
NYC, The Back Room, 2006 - with Pasha Malla, Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Grant Bailie, Jim Nichols, Roy Kesey, Darlin' Neal, Todd Zuniga, Gail Siegel, Kevin Dolgin, Claudia Smith, Lindsay Brandon Hunter.
NYC, Happy Ending bar, 2006 - with Bruce Bauman.
NYC, Happy Ending bar, 2005 - with Todd Zuniga, Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Rose Gowen, Jim Ruland, John Leary, Dave Barringer.
Petaluma, CA - Zebulon's Lounge, 2005 - with Michelle Richmond, Bruce Bauman, Dave Fromm, Jordan Rosenfeld
NYC - Galapagos Art Space, 2005 - with Felicia Sullivan and Whitney Pastorek
NYC - An Evening with Opium Magazine, 2005 - with Pasha Malla, Todd Zuniga, Mike Sacks, Pia Z. Ehrhardt
NYC - Cornelia Street Cafe, 2004 - with Todd Zuniga
Kings Park, NY, Union Square Tavern, 2004 - with John Warner, John Leary, Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Jeff Landon, Terry Bain, Paul A. Toth
PHILADELPHIA - 215 Festival, 2004 - with Michelle Orange, Samantha Hunt, Todd Pruzan, Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Jim Hanas, Leonard Pierce, Dan Kennedy
NIGHT TRAIN literary magazine in the NY TIMES
As managing editor of Night Train, and together with marketing manager Tom Jackson, we created a unique way to fund the magazine that received quite a lot of buzz. Here's an excerpt from a half-page article on our work in the NY Times:
KINGS PARK CATCHES THE IMAGINATION OF A LITERARY JOURNAL
By Julia C. Mead
Literary magazines are generally known for their stunning inability to turn a profit. Often proceeding with an optimistic lack of a business plan, their editors drum up just enough financial backing to publish a few times before the journal disappears, appreciated only by a small, rarefied and fickle audience.
Then there's Night Train, devoted to keeping alive the waning art of short-story writing through a cunning marketing technique......
My favorite books at the moment:
Nicole Krauss, The History of Love, Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son , Tim O`Brien, The Things They Carried, Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow, Jim Daniels, Detroit Tales, Homer (Fagles translation), The Iliad , and Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.
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AGENT
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the monstrously-talented, and also very hot, Dan Conaway
Writers House
www.writershouse.com/
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