Cathy Marie Buchanan, author of The Day The Falls Stood Still, offers an impassioned plea to preserve the environment and natural beauty of Niagara Falls and prevent the planned high-rise development at the brink of the Falls.....

Lady Howard of Glossop, in her travel journals, published in 1897, describes Loretto Academy as "superbly situated on the highest ground, just above the Horseshoe Falls, commanding the whole bird's eye view of the Falls."   Because of its choice setting, Loretto was host to a steady stream of visitors including literary luminaries, ecclesiastical dignitaries and even, in 1901, the King and Queen of England.  Unfortunately, its choice setting has come into play once again, this time with a hotel developer planning three high-rises for the seven acres of treed green space surrounding the academy.
          
The idea of concrete and glass replacing the foliage that today frames Niagara Falls does not sit well with me.  I was born and bred in Niagara Falls and have stood at the brink of the falls countless times, filled with wonder, filled with awe.  What's more, my debut novel, The Day the Falls Stood Still, opens at Loretto Academy in 1915, and I'd spent countless hours immersing myself in the history of the place.  And I have a natural conservationist sensibility.  How could I not, after growing up with a natural wonder of the world in my own backyard?

I set out to learn more and discovered the high-rises will spoil more than just the view.  Their shadow will fall upon the parkland surrounding the Falls and the Falls themselves, and will likely increase the number of rain-like days at Niagara Falls, as has been demonstrated by recent high-rise development downriver of the Falls.  The idea that I must use whatever public profile I might have to stop the ill-conceived development came to me as more of a responsibility than a choice. Friends of Niagara Falls was born, a nonprofit organization working to preserve the environment and natural beauty of Niagara Falls.  Our first task:  To stop the high-rise development at the brink of the Falls.

Visit FriendsofNiagaraFalls.org to learn more, and please add your voice to those opposing the development by signing our petition.

Thank you!

Cathy Marie Buchanan

Cathy Marie Buchanan's debut novel, The Day the Falls Stood Still, is a Barnes & Noble Recommends Selection, a Barnes & Noble Best of 2009 book, and a New York Times bestseller. Steeped in the intriguing history of Niagara Falls, The Day the Falls Stood Still is an epic love story as rich, spellbinding and majestic as the falls themselves. Born and raised in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Cathy Marie now lives in Toronto.

Elif Shafak, the most widely read woman writer in Turkey whose books include The Bastard of Istanbul, explains how Sufism influenced her latest book, The Forty Rules of Love ...

My interest in Sufism began when I was a college student. At the time I was a rebellious young woman who liked to wrap several shawls of "–isms" around her shoulders: I was a leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, anarcho-pacifist.... I wasn't interested in any religion and the difference between "religiosity" and "spirituality" was lost to me. Having spent some time of my childhood with a loving grandmother with many superstitions and beliefs, I had a sense the world was not composed of solely material things and there was more to life than I could see. But the truth is, I wasn't interested in understanding the world. I only wanted to change it.

I loved books. I had started reading fiction and writing short stories at an early age, not because I wanted to be a professional writer at the time, but because I found my life dull and boring. I enjoyed living in the stories I wrote. I was an only child. I was raised by a single, working mother who could not spend much time with me. Due to my mother's profession we lived in different countries. Wherever I went "imagination" was the first suitcase I took with me.

Little by little, I had built a private world, an inner space where stories floated freely. This was my life before college and when college started, old habits did not change. Whenever I could I retreated into that private space and I read, read, read. Books were the bridges that connected me to the world. It is no wonder, then, that my interest in Sufism, too, began with books.

It wasn't one particular book, but a series of books. I started reading on Sufism out of intellectual curiosity. One book led to another. A scrap of information in a footnote in one book guided me to another book. The more I read the more I unlearned. Because that is what Sufism does to you, it makes you "erase" what you know and what you are so sure of. Then you start thinking again. Not with your mind this time, but with your heart.

Among all the Sufi poets and philosophers that I read about during those years there were two names that moved me with their words: Shams of Tabriz and the great Rumi. In an age of deeply-embedded bigotries and clashes, they had stood for a universal spirituality, opening their doors to people of all backgrounds equally. They spoke of love as the essence of life, love that connected us all across centuries, cultures and cities. As I kept reading the Mathnawi, Rumi's words gently removed the shawls I had wrapped around myself, layer upon layer, as if I was always in need of some warmth coming from outside.

I understood that whatever I chose to be, "leftist", "feminist" or anything else, what I needed truly was the light inside of me. The light that exists inside all of us.  

Thus began my interest in Sufism and spirituality. Over the years it went through several stages and seasons. Sometimes it was more vivid and visible, sometimes it receded to the background, but it never disappeared.          


Elif Shafak was born in Strasbourg, France, in 1971. She is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read woman writer in Turkey. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Her English language website, including a comprehensive biography, can be found at www.elifsafak.us/en/

The dedication in Roses has inspired interest. It reads: For Janice Jenning Thomson . . . a friend for all seasons.  Readers ask: "Who is she and why a friend for all seasons?"

Without Janice--her encouragement, faith, and belief in the book from its inception--Roses might not have been completed. Our friendship is going on thirty-two years.  She is thirteen years my junior.  We met when our husbands were serving as pilots in the US Air Force.  Bonds were established immediately--I, a teacher, and she, an attorney.  The years brought many changes in her life, but never was I one of them. She once said, "Friends come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime."

At my age, I know what she means. Friends can be for all time, but not necessarily for all of a lifetime. They can appear only for a moment on our journey, or walk with us for a certain period of time and then, as many of us have experienced, "way leads on to way." But then there are those who travel with us all our days and are good for any season of the year.  My friend Janice is one of those.



Leila Meacham is a writer and former teacher who lives in San Antonio, Texas. Spanning the 20th century, her novel Roses (Jan 2010) takes place in a small East Texas town against the backdrop of the powerful timber and cotton industries, industries controlled by the scions of the town's founding families. Publishers Weekly describes it as "an enthralling stunner enthralling" and "delicious doorstop epic", and Library Journal rates it "highly recommended" in its starred reviews saying that "readers who like an old-fashioned saga will devour this sprawling novel of passion and revenge."

More about Leila, and an excerpt from Roses at the publisher's website

It's been snowing here since before Christmas. Not much for some parts of the world, admittedly (I sent a picture of my kids sledging to a friend in Canada and she emailed back 'nice frost') but, for us on the south coast of England, it's a totally new experience.

Things I like about the snow:

1. The quiet. No cars, no school run, just that all-enveloping white blanket. Comforting and scary at the same time.
2. The kids playing outside all day in a huge feral gang. This is what childhood should be like (this attitude gets me into trouble at parent/teacher evenings)
3. Not having to shop.
4. The beautifying effect. Our garden is full of rusty toys and dead plants – under the snow it looks like a winter wonderland.

Things I don't like:

1. Worrying about my mum, who is housebound. Luckily she is just an hour's trek away and I've done this every day. Her first words to me: 'where are the mince pies?'
2. Being cold.
3. Having to wear hundreds of layers. Getting ready to go out is a major undertaking and earmuffs are not a good look on a forty-something woman.

I'm trying to write a book. It's the third in the Ruth Galloway series and is tentatively entitled The House at Sea's End (my publishers invariably don't like my titles). The trouble is, it's set in the spring and I keep wanting to make it snow...

My favourite snow scenes in books:

1. Lucy meeting Mr Tumnas in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Apparently C.S. Lewis suddenly had a vision of a faun in the snow, carrying parcels and an umbrella – this was the start of the whole Narnia series.
2. James Joyce The Dead
3. Lorna Doone "...the snow came on again, thick enough to blind a man..."
4. Any detective story where they are snowbound in a spooky old house but, especially, C J Sansom's Dissolution.
5. Any scene in Anna Karenina – I bet she never wore ear muffs.

Elly Griffiths' is the author of the Ruth Galloway novels which are set on the Norfolk Coast of England. The books take their inspiration from Elly's husband, who gave up a city job to train as an archaeologist, and her aunt who lives on the Norfolk coast and who filled her niece's head with the myths and legends of that area. Elly has two children and lives near Brighton. The Crossing Places, the first in the series, is just published in the USA, and has received extremely positive reviews from BookBrowse's members. Visit Elly online at ellygriffiths.co.uk

When I worked in publishing just after college, my fellow peons in the editorial department used to play a game where they'd walk into a random bookstore and see who could pull the most books off the shelf that thanked them in their acknowledgments. I never played the game, and I always suspected I would have killed at it. Ever since then, I have always turned to the acknowledgments first when beginning a book, just to see who I can see. And in turn, I've become a huge appreciator of the genre.

My all-time favorite acknowledgments are in one of the best nonfiction books I've ever read, Timothy Tyson's Blood Done Sign My Name. In order to understand the acknowledgments, you've got to understand the book. Tyson, then a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote about the civil rights movement with a muscular, hard-hitting argument: violence, or the threat of violence, played a far more central role in desegregation than we generally would like to admit. But this is no distanced academic treatise. The book opens with a sentence that Tyson's childhood friend uttered to him one spring day when he was ten: "Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger." Tyson grew up in Oxford, North Carolina, where his father was a white Methodist preacher, and his history is also a deeply personal memoir of his family's experience of a racially motivated shooting and the riots and activism it prompted. To understand everything that happened, Tyson would go on to study history at Duke. He would write his masters' thesis on the events in his hometown, and he would eventually rewrite it all from a personal perspective of anguish, outrage, and pride. The making of Blood Done Sign My Name literally drew on every aspect of Tyson's soul, as a child, as a student, as a teacher, writer, and scholar. The acknowledgments burst with heart and passion. They run to eleven pages.

But long acknowledgments, as it turns out, are controversial. In 2006, Ian Jack, the editor of Granta, wrote a curmugeonly piece disparaging a four-page acknowledgments section at the end of a book of short stories. He argued that thanking every member of every writing workshop you've ever attended "only serves to remind us of the underlying effort, the pain given for our pleasure. Above all, why should the writer imagine we care about any of them? Might it be (and this is the most ungenerous thought of all) that he is mighty pleased with himself--that he thinks his work is so brilliant that its worth needs some explanation?" What rubbish! Who says writing a book and receiving other people's help is painful? Also, hasn't Jack ever experienced gratitude, and the expansive pleasure that comes from discharging a debt of gratitude with a thank you? Furthermore, didn't it occur to him that those acknowledgments weren't directed toward him at all but to the people named within them--yet that he might be enriched by witnessing that reciprocity?

(Ian Jack's comments, which originally appeared in Granta and were later republished in Harper's, are not online, but you can read a rebuttal from Christopher Coake, the fiction writer whose acknowledgments so irked Jack, here).

I turned to a book by my friend Aaron Sachs for his take on the matter. He is a professor of history at Cornell and author of the brilliant and acclaimed The Humboldt Current, and he himself was criticized for his nine-page acknowledgments (which is too long by at least one name, my own, for I did nothing at all). Sachs inverts the genre's rules. He starts by thanking his wife, though spouses usually come at the end. His young son gets the entire second paragraph, and only then come his academic advisors, grad school colleagues, and research librarians. He ends by thanking his parents. And then he does something even more genre-breaking: he thanks his subjects, the 19th-century explorers whom he has just spent 350 pages introducing to us, particularly the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt: "As I struggled to find a vision and a voice, his basic human decency gave me hope, and his books helped me finally articulate my desire to blend scholarship and creativity, analysis and narrative, argumentation and suggestion, scientific precision and artistic intuition." When someone affects you that deeply, how can you not acknowledge him or her? In fact, how is it possible to produce a meaningful book without opening yourself up to other people's influences, without incurring the kinds of debts that require effusive acknowledgments?

Sometimes, though, acknowledgments don't need to be long in order to be touching. One of my favorite short thank-yous comes at the end of Jackson Lears' modest two-page acknowledgments in his fantastic first book, No Place of Grace. In a parenthesis, he thanks his young daughter Rachel for "important stapling."

Amy Reading

True to her last name, Amy Reading makes a living reading, freelance editing, and writing. She has recently completed a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University and is working on a book that grows out of her dissertation, a history of American con artistry. Books reviewed by Amy at BookBrowse.