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/

Shortly before my first novel was published, I walked through a bookstore with my son. "Once my book is published, I'm not going to be able to do this any more," I told him. Wander into a book store and pleasantly meander the aisles. It was hard to articulate, but suddenly I realized that the next time I walked into a bookstore -- and likely all the times thereafter -- I would be self-consciously focused on one thing: my own book. Did they have it? Where was it placed? Should I offer to sign it? (Was I presentable?)

And it was true ... Going in and out of bookstores became stressful, loaded with angst. I felt I'd been robbed.

But now -- now that I've four novels published and am writing my fifth -- I've discovered that it is possible (sometimes!) to return to that pure reader-state once again, to completely forget to check to see if my titles are in stock. Or even, if I do see them there, to chose not to offer to sign them (feeling like a lazy author, feeling that I'm shirking my responsibility). Authors are not movie stars by any means, but going in and out of a bookstore incognito has a certain thrill, I confess.

But there is, as well (another confession), a thrill in being recognized. The bookstore clerk who asked, "Have you been waiting long for the new Sandra Gulland?" (Yes, I have!) The bookstore owner who told me her staff had titled a certain customer look of furious frustration when told a book wasn't in "The Gulland look" -- because that's how their customers responded when told that my books weren't in stock. The drugstore clerk who took my Visa and said, "There's a good author whose name is Sandra Gulland."

This is the fun part -- and it helps off-set the readings where only three people show up (and one falls asleep, snoring).

But becoming published surprised me in other, much more significant ways. I never expected the connection with readers to be so profound, so intimate. Letters from readers sometimes make me weep.

While I was writing the second novel in the Josephine B. Trilogy, a man wrote to me that his mother had read and loved the first in the Trilogy. How soon would the next be published? She was dying, he confessed, and she longed to read it. My heart sank: Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe wouldn't be out for well over a year, and so ...  And so I sent her the unfinished draft I was working on. Drafts are messy, and I dearly hope it didn't disappoint her.

One writes very privately, for years. Curiously, I never expected readers. They are an important part of my personal universe now, angelic presences, wishing me well  ... cheering me on. I rarely meet them, but when I do, it's very special.

--- Sandra Gulland


Sandra Gulland is author of the Josephine B. Trilogy, internationally best-selling novels about Josephine Bonaparte, now published in 14 countries. Her most recent novel, Mistress of the Sun, is set in the 17th century court of Louis XIV, the Sun King. Deemed "dangerously seductive," it too has been on best-seller lists and is presently published in 7 languages. For more information about the author, her research and her work, see her website: sandragulland.com. She can be contacted online in a number of ways: she blogs at sandragulland.blogspot.com, and can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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.

Almost every published author will tell you that they got fistfuls of rejection letters before their first book deal; many other would be authors have never received anything but. First time author Maya Frost explains how stepping off the treadmill of convention not only led her and her family into an amazing new debt-free, international lifestyle (despite putting four children through college in almost as many years) but also led to the publication of her first book (a book, I should add, that I've read cover to cover and back again, and already recommended to at least a dozen friends!) - Davina, BookBrowse editor.

I've spent the last decade teaching people how to pay attention, and it never ceases to amaze me how difficult it is to trust our own intuition about what matters most.  Whether we're worried about our child's education or our next career move, we tend to stick with conventional wisdom rather than listen to our hearts.

During the last four years, I've had two remarkable opportunities to see what can happen when I walk away from "normal" and trust my instincts.

In 2005, my husband and I decided to sell everything and leave our suburban American lifestyle behind in order to live abroad. The tricky part: we had four teenage daughters to usher through high school and into college. Most people thought we were sabotaging our girls' education by yanking them out of perfectly good schools at such a critical stage of their lives. We had our doubts, of course, but we also had a hunch that this would be an amazing experience for our family and allow us to save thousands of dollars for college costs.

It turned out to be the smartest decision we have ever made. We stumbled upon some stunningly advantageous options that any U.S. student anywhere can leverage to leapfrog over their test-dazed classmates. Within months, our daughters had joined the new breed of global American students: those who are releasing the old "four-by-four" model (four years of high school, plus four years of college), laughing at the lunacy of the college-prep mindset, and gliding into the global economy at 19 or 20 with a red-hot U.S. or Canadian college diploma, fluency in at least one foreign language, outrageously relevant experience, and no debt.

What do these students have in common? Though their paths vary dramatically, these Bold Schoolers are trusting their own ideas about what is most important in their education. They are flexible, curious, self-directed and absolutely on fire about what they are learning.

But let's face it: it doesn't take much to talk a kid into skipping the SAT, shortening the time until graduation, or studying abroad.  My challenge was to help parents come to terms with the idea of stepping off the traditional track so that their kids could reap the benefits.   Parents are fearful--we tend to stick to what we know even if it's not working. Those who trust their instincts about what's best for their kids are free to help them design a personalized and exhilarating education that allows them to soar.

I knew it was important to get this message out to parents, but once again, I had to listen to my heart and ignore the obstacles:

1. I had zero contacts in publishing
2. I lived a hemisphere away from any English writers' conferences or other schmooze-fests for aspiring authors
3. I had no platform as an expert in education

I followed the old adage, "write what you know" and looked at the questions people ask me most often:

• "What possessed you to move abroad with four teenage daughters?"
• "How did your girls manage to graduate from college at 19?"
• "By what miracle did you pay for four simultaneous college educations with a mid-five-figure annual income and no loans?"
• "How did your daughters get such interesting jobs around the world in such a terrible economy?"
• and my personal favorite: "How on earth did you get past the naysayers who made you feel like a bad parent for doing things differently?

I emailed a three-paragraph query to ten agents I'd researched online. The agency websites posted disclaimers along the lines of "We receive a thousand queries a week, so don't expect to hear from us," but what did I have to lose?

Within 24 hours, I received responses from five of the ten I'd contacted--all asking for a full proposal!  Fueled by adrenaline, I got a little bolder. I decided to listen to that impish little voice--and write directly to the publisher of a similar book to see if she might like to publish mine.

This is a big no-no in publishing, but it shifted things into high gear immediately.  Three weeks later, I had an agent, an editor and an advance from Random House. I wrote the entire book, The New Global Student: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition, and Get a Truly International Education, from my living room sofa in Buenos Aires, and didn't meet my agent or editor in New York until my book was on the shelves 17 months later.

What's next? I'm playing with writing a novel. The last fiction I wrote was a fourth grade creative writing assignment about my cat. The odds are stacked against me--it's a tough market to crack, and even though I have been published in nonfiction, my agent assures me that I'm basically starting out as an unknown author in a new genre.  

But I'm paying attention to that same little voice calling out to me, the one I've learned to trust during these last four years. I'm going to follow my heart and forge ahead, diving into unknown territory yet again.

I can't wait. 

You can find more information about Maya, her family and her book at mayafrost.com.

For many authors, writing a novel and getting published is the easy part; the challenge comes in building awareness among readers in a world over-crowded with new books. Savvy authors know that the publicity department of their publisher can only do so much, and such authors look for ways to reach out directly to their readers. One novelist, John Shors, has spoken to about 2,000 book clubs in the past three years!

Dear Reader,

In 2004, the hardcover version of my debut novel, Beneath a Marble Sky, was released. I was blessed because, over the next year, Beneath a Marble Sky did quite well--garnering wonderful reviews, winning a national award, and attracting significant interest from Hollywood. Due to all of these events, I was able to quit my day job and become a fulltime novelist.

I was grateful to readers for their support, and decided that I wanted to do something to support readers in return. So, when Penguin released the paperback version of Beneath a Marble Sky in 2006, I decided to add a letter to the back of the book that invited book clubs to invite me to their evenings (all they needed was a speakerphone). I included my email address.

Well, due to the novelty of what I was doing, my book club program started to get a lot of media attention, and was featured in Newsweek Magazine and on The CBS Evening News. I wasn't sure what kind of interest the media coverage would generate, but now, about three years later, I am happy to report that I've spoken with approximately 1,500 book clubs. Most of these clubs were based in the U.S., though I've spoken with groups in Canada, France, Columbia, and Kenya. I'm fortunate in that readers enjoy Beneath a Marble Sky, and are therefore happy to talk with me about it (I spend fifteen minutes with each group). This simple fact allows my program to flourish on many levels.

During the past three years, I've learned a great deal from readers. For instance, some clubs have said that they would have liked a map to be included in Beneath a Marble Sky (which is based on the story behind the creation of the Taj Mahal). And because of that feedback, there will be a map of Vietnam in my new novel, Dragon House (which is set in modern-day Saigon, but also features other parts of Vietnam) (read BookBrowse member reviews of this book).

Talking with up to eight book clubs a night hasn't been easy, but it's been important. I've done my best to give something back to the readers who support me. And in this age, when books have so much competition with other forms of entertainment, I feel that authors need to go the extra mile to encourage reader/author interaction. I'm trying to get other writers to create similar book club programs, as my experience has been so positive.

I continue to do book club calls (though I am now encouraging two book clubs to get together for each call). I have also created three videos on YouTube that readers can access. This way, people don't have to be in book clubs to see and hear me answer questions about each of my novels (Beneath a Marble Sky, Beside a Burning Sea, and Dragon House).

If readers, librarians, booksellers, or authors are interested in my book club program, I may be contacted through my web site at www.dragonhousebook.com.

I wish everyone the best.

John

John Shors is an internationally bestselling author, whose books have won multiple awards and have been translated into more than twenty languages. He and his books can be found at:
Beneath a Marble Sky: Website; YouTube
Beside a Burning Sea: Website; YouTube
Dragon House: Website; YouTube