Why I've Never Gone to a Writers Retreat: Guest Post by Lev Raphael

LEV RAPHAEL:

Why I've Never Gone to a Writers Retreat 

Fans often ask me if I go to writers’ retreats. I’ve never really wanted to because I live in one. 

The cozy mid-century house I bought over 30 years ago in a heavily-treed subdivision is extra quiet because it’s dead center, even though there are some major roads on three sides. That means you can’t hear any road noise whatsoever whether you're inside the house or sitting out on the patio or the deck. There’s also very little traffic through the subdivision itself, sometimes none at all. 

What you can hear is bird song of all kinds: chickadees, robins, goldfinches, mourning doves--and of course we see our share of hummingbirds because they like our Rose of Sharon trees. Oh, and I also hear people biking by, neighbors with strollers chatting on their phones, minor stuff like that that forms a pleasant soundscape. 

Yes, there are lawnmowers in the Spring, leaf blowers in the Fall and snow blowers in the Winter. But as someone who grew up in New York, that seems close to silence. For a few years when I lived in Queens, I was directly under a flight path to LaGuardia Airport, and sandwiched between the roar of the Long Island Railroad and the craziness of Queens Boulevard. 

My street is lined with maples that form a canopy when they leaf out, and a sculpture garden after the leaves fall. From my study window, whatever the season, I have a view of a tall, graceful Gingko tree. If you don’t know this tree, they have succulent green fan-shaped leaves that turn a Napoleonic yellow in the Fall and can drop all in one day like gentle snow. It has special resonance for me because there was Gingko near my elementary school in Manhattan. But there's also a large maple and an equally tall oak. 

I can see the trees down at the base of the driveway while I write at my PC and while I make corrections on printed-off manuscripts sitting in my reading chair. It’s just one of the majestic trees around the house and it symbolizes home for me. As does the enormous oak at the very back of our yard which a former neighbor told us was standing here in the 1920s when a 400-acre farm was subdivided into lots for houses. Sometimes, if the weather is just right, I like to do handwritten notes on a printed-off text outside on our deck looking at that tree for inspiration. 

Growing up in New York, I had very little sense of the change of seasons, but here I can watch it change by the day--and sometimes change back, because as people in many states say, "If you don't like the weather here, wait an hour." 

The trees remind me that Michigan is where I became an author, not New York. I experienced a five-year drought after publishing my first short story in a national magazine and it was only after moving to Michigan that the drought ended and my work started being accepted again. I apparently needed a major change of scene to blossom. 

In Michigan I was fully free to become the writer I turned into, someone multiply anthologized, publishing across genres, taking the lessons my college writing mentor gave me into the classroom at Michigan State University and then beyond. I now work with writers online at writewithoutborders.com, mentoring, offering individualized workshops, editing manuscripts of all kinds, and enjoying an even greater level of freedom than I had before. 

I know that one of the appeals of a retreat is escape from where you are, but I don't need that. And people also go to commune with other writers, but I had that intense experience for two and a half years in my MFA program and I've hung out with writers at numerous conferences across the country. I once interviewed Julian Barnes and asked who his writer friends were and he said, "They're next door, in my library. They're my oldest friends." 

The books in the shelves around me in my study--biography, history, fiction-- inspire me as much as the quiet of home. This is where I’ve taken root.

***

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in a dozen genres ranging from memoir to mystery. His most recent book is Department of Death, which Publishers Weekly called "immensely enjoyable" in a starred review. (current photos from his front and back yards)

Travels with the Nick Hoffman Series: Guest Post by Lev Raphael

LEV RAPHAEL:

TRAVELS WITH THE NICK HOFFMAN SERIES 

I was fascinated by mysteries in junior high school, reading everything I could find in my upper Manhattan library by Agatha Christie, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, and John Creasey. 

But even though I dreamed of being an author, I never imagined writing my own mysteries. Short stories were my passion and I read classic authors in high school and college like Chekhov, Poe, de Maupassant, Maugham, Woolf, James, Wharton, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. My first book with St. Martin's Press was a collection of short stories that had been published over the course of a decade. When it won a prize, that seemed to confirm my career path. ​

But there was a story in the collection that continued to nag me. The narrator, Nick, was a college professor furious because his partner had helped an ex-lover get hired at their university. It was a comedy, but what if the ex- got murdered? Wasn't there a book in that?​ And maybe even a series? 

I returned to Christie, studying her fiendish plots and subtle dialogue. I also read Sue Grafton, Elizabeth George, Martha Grimes, Michael Connelly, Dashiell Hammett, Janet Evanovich, Ken Follett, Georges Simenon and many more crime writers. It was the kind of immersion that I've always enjoyed, whether studying a foreign language like Swedish or taking voice lessons.​ ​ 

My editor at St. Martin's Press suggested academia for my setting because I knew it so intimately. I agreed because the world of the university was a perfect milieu for murder and mayhem. As I once heard a sociologist explain it, "Academics don't have good means of conflict resolution." ​

I located the series in my adopted home of Michigan, creating a fictional state capital of Michiganapolis where my hero taught at the equally fictional State University of Michigan (SUM). Starting out, I wanted the books to be both mysteries and academic satires. ​I had other goals, too. It was crucial that my main character Nick Hoffman had to be seen developing over the course of the books. ​He also had to directly experience the impact of dealing with so much death. 

The second book in the series, The Edith Wharton Murders, scored a rave review in The New York Times and that had special resonance for me. My immigrant mother always did the complex Sunday crossword puzzle to perfect her English. And the Times was practically a fetish object in New York City; we actually learned in elementary school how to fold it to be readable on a crowded bus or subway. 

Thanks to my growing notoriety after that review, I appeared as moderator or panelist at mystery conferences across the country and even abroad. I met fans, booksellers, and dozens of crime writers. These authors are fun to be around because they don't tend to take themselves too seriously despite devotion to their craft. 

I've enjoyed long, deep conversations over meals or drinks with writers like Val McDermid, Walter Mosley, Martha Lawrence, and Anne Perry, talking about everything from career to translations to our personal lives. I owe Val a special debt of gratitude because she spirited me off from a crowded, stuffy lecture room at Oxford when it looked like I was going to pass out from the heat and disrupt the panel. 

While I first became known as a writer of stories about children of Holocaust survivors, my series has let me employ humor that reviewers and fans have enjoyed. It's been a hoot doing readings from these books at colleges and universities where faculty will share gossip with me that can make for great material—suitably disguised, of course. Reading at a college town bookstore on one tour, I was asked if it was believable that someone died in each mystery and Nick's campus was so crime-ridden. Before I could answer, someone shouted, "Kill a whole department!" 

My mysteries earned me a job reviewing crime fiction for the Detroit Free Press where I discovered more writers than I could have found on my own, like the amazing Paula Woods of Inner City Blues and Terrill Lankford of Shooters. Thanks to being a reviewer, I was invited to a star-studded conference at a Caribbean Club Med. When I told the club's CEO that I wanted to set a mystery there, he generously invited me back the following year. I still marvel at the unique experiences that led to writing Tropic of Murder. 

Other reviewing gigs followed both for newspapers and public radio stations. I even ended up producing my own radio show where I interviewed distinguished authors. I also got to be a DJ in that gig, playing music of my choice at the halftime break. 

All the touring for the series further developed my skills as a performer of my own books. An extrovert with teaching and acting experience, I was comfortable with an audience, but none of that ever prepared me to read my own fiction on tour. I learned on the road, sometimes with my spouse giving me director's notes on what played well and what didn't. Those appearances helped me later design conference workshops where I've advised writers how to dynamically present their work. 

Writing the Nick Hoffman mysteries has always felt like going on vacation. I've relished the structure, the return to a familiar place, a familiar set of characters, and the challenge of coming up with a new kind of murder with a new set of clues while introducing new victims. The series has brought me a different audience which was a pleasant surprise. 

The Nick Hoffman books also gave me the confidence to make one of the later books a novel of suspense dealing with the militarization of our police forces. Assault With a Deadly Lie was truly one of those "ripped from the headlines" books because it dealt with the abuse of SWAT teams. That book scored me my first Midwest Book Award nomination and pushed Nick Hoffman to the edge, making the next and final books in the series not just possible but inevitable. 

From the very beginning of my career, I've been fortunate to have truly fine editors, from publishing stories and articles to appearing in anthologies and then publishing books across a dozen different genres. All three of the Nick Hoffman editors have been insightful and inspiring: Keith Kahla, Michael Seidman, and Meredith Phillips. The series has benefited from their expertise at every turn, and they've taught me to be a better editor myself in my roles as a creative writing teacher and mentor, which I now do online. 

Nick Hoffman started out as an anxious un-tenured assistant professor who was only hired because SUM wanted his partner as the writer-in-residence for their English Department. That's a black mark for Nick. He's also not respected for his work as a bibliographer, since bibliographies are helpful and accessible rather than abstruse monographs read by hardly anyone. 

Even worse, he actually enjoys teaching which doesn't rate high enough when it comes to promotion. And the murders he gets embroiled in invariably create bad PR for his department and the university. I've had fun pitting him against other faculty, administrators, and even campus police as he's grown more confident in himself while becoming more conflicted about the hothouse academic world he inhabits. 

When a professor friend asked me what was happening with Nick in my latest, Department of Death, I told her he was now the department chair and it would be the last mystery in the series. She laughed and said, "Lots of academic careers have ended that way."

***

Lev Raphael is the author of twenty-seven books in nearly a dozen different genres. Raphael is best known as a pioneer in writing fiction and creative non-fiction about the children of Holocaust survivors, which he's been publishing since 1978, before almost any other American author. His work has appeared in dozens of anthologies in the U.S. and England. He's a guest assistant professor of English at Michigan State University. Raphael's academic mystery series has earned raves from the NYTBR and many other newspapers and magazines. Raphael has written hundreds of reviews for The Detroit Free Press, Jerusalem Report, Forward, The Washington Post, The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Boston Review and Lambda Book Report. A former radio talk show host, he also reviewed for several radio shows before giving up on print journalism as well as radio. Follow him on Twitter @LevRaphael. Raphael's web site is http://www.levraphael.com.

ACADEMIA: A Nest of Vipers: Guest Post by LEV RAPHAEL

Lev Raphael: 
Academia: A Nest of Vipers

Over the years and on many book tours for my mysteries, people have asked me "Is academia as vicious as all that?"

The answer is Absolutely. How do I know? Because I not only escaped that world with lots of notes, but I have many friends who are still there, reporting one fiction-worthy incident after another to me.

I'll start with a minor example that shows you how petty and small-minded academia can be. Back in 2011, I was invited to teach at Michigan State University's English department, where I had earned my PhD years before. The current chair had realized via a news story that I had published more books than the entire creative writing faculty put together. He was impressed, and I was flattered.

When I started teaching, the office manager wouldn't order a plastic name plate for my office door, the kind that all the faculty members had. We’re talking about something that costs just a few bucks and is recyclable, for a department with a budget well in the millions. That was as silly as it was insulting.

My current mystery State University of Murder focuses on a charming but dictatorial chairman of an English Department, Napoléon Padovani, who manages to alienate almost all his colleagues in an oppression blitzkrieg. He's a composite of department chairs I've heard about from across the country.

One chair had a bizarre approach to resolving a conflict between two professors: he suggested that the two of them get drunk together at the annual Christmas party and all their problems would be resolved—they would be friends forever! That's on the ludicrous side, to be charitable.

Another held academic cage matches. Adjuncts competing for the possible tenure-track positions that might, just might be opening up each year had to present their work-in-progress every week (!) and put it in the best possible light and hope they might win the prize. The pressure was intense, the competition ugly and brutal. There's a department chair I heard of who revealed personal psychological information about a professor during a department meeting while supposedly "worrying" about her mental state, totally violating that professor's privacy.

There's another who knew a faculty member was going to complain about his disregard for university regulations and not only tried to stop her from a formal complaint at a university committee, but sat behind her at the meeting along with one of his henchmen and muttered derisively when she read her statement.

A religious studies chairman I know of argued with a rabbi teaching in his department as an adjunct that Judaism was absolutely not a culture but could only be spoken about and taught as a religion. Their disagreement was a major reason the rabbi wasn't rehired.

When my office mate at Michigan State University reported that a graduate student in the department who was a former boyfriend had burst into her apartment, knocking the door off her hinges, and roughed up her current boyfriend and threatened her, the chair did absolutely nothing.

And reports from a department I know of are that the current atmosphere is "Stalinist." While there's significant disapproval of actions the chair is taking to limit academic freedom and free speech, those faculty members who disagree are afraid to speak up for fear of harassment and punishment. And the faculty listserv is now off limits to discussion of anything remotely "controversial."

My Nick Hoffman series is satirical, taking real situations and people, extrapolating from them, making them more ridiculous, more threatening--but the emotional core is ultimately true. And the emotional toll this kind of rampant and widespread abuse of various kinds can take is also true.

There's no evidence that George Bernard Shaw actually said “If you want to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh," but whoever is the source, that quote has guided me through my series and will continue to do so.

***

Lev Raphael is the author of 26 books in genres from memoir to mystery, most recently State University of Murder. He teaches à la carte writing workshops at writewithoutborders.com.