Have you ever watched a cat shut in a room? The cat will keep pawing at the door to get out. Let the cat out and shut the door. You know what will happen! You’ll hear the cat on the other side of the door pawing and scratching to get back in.

Well, the imagination is like a cat. When your imagination gets stuck it’s always pawing the door to get out. Here’s my advice. Let your imagination out. Give up on the story or the essay or the book and stop torturing yourself. Just let the thing go.

Then watch what happens. In a few days or a few weeks, you’ll hear your imagination pawing at the door, trying to get back in. Open the door. Welcome your imagination back and pick up your work again.

The hardest thing about imaginative work is quieting down in order to begin.   Life is so distracting.  Groceries, errands, taxes, stressful phone calls, kids’ homework crises–the list goes on.   If you want to do some serious thinking, you have to find a way to quiet your mind.  Some people practice yoga.  Some drive to isolated cabins in the woods.  Some seek out artists’ colonies.  Some travel to exotic places.   Some listen to music.  Some cook or clean.   My best advice is to write down everything you have to do along with everything that’s bothering you.  Leave the list on your desk.  Then go for a long walk or swim and start writing away from your desk–at a coffee shop or in the library.  Repeat if necessary.   This works for me, unless I’m terribly stressed.  What do you do to quiet your mind?

That story I kept trying to write–the one I started 9 or 10 times is now finished and will be published in the next issue of “The New Yorker”. It’s called “La Vita Nuova.”

Strange how these things happen. I don’t want to sound too Coleridgish, but I’ll tell the truth: I’d completely given up and then had a dream after which I figured out what to do. I woke up, finished the story and my agent sent it off. Within a few days, I was answering queries from a fact checker. Yes, they even fact check fiction–just to see whether it all makes sense! I love that about the magazine.

I got my page proofs electronically, printed them out, marked them in green, scanned in full color and emailed them back. This is quite different from years ago when we used to Fed Ex things back and forth. But the fact checking and the meticulous copy editing have not changed.

Just back from Princeton, where I gave the Carolyn Drucker Memorial Lecture.  What a lovely campus–especially when the trees are all in bloom.

No one mentioned “The Other Side of the Mountain” even though that book was listed on the poster.  This was a relief, because I was only prepared to speak about the books I’ve actually written.

Joyce Carol Oates came to my talk and I had a chance to meet her afterward.  She said she enjoyed “Intuition.”  I wanted to ask her–how do you manage to write so much and teach full time AND read new books.  But I figure she’s bored with that question, so I spared her.

I wonder if we are beginning a tremendously literary age. People are writing more than ever, and not only that–they are listening more than ever before to the spoken word.

Audio books are a case in point. Once upon a time people sat around and read aloud to each other. If you look at early printed books you can even see that at the end of a page, the word on the overleaf is printed small at the bottom so you don’t have to pause when you turn the page. Now with audio books, you can listen to the most amazing performances in your car or at the gym or on your walks. Novels, poetry, history, plays, books for children. Even as I write this my 7 year old daughter is listening happily to Roald Dahl’s “Witches” read by Vanessa Redgrave. She says she doesn’t like reading. She actually told me once (defiantly), “I am not a book worm, I’m a TELEVISION worm.” And yet she’s completely hooked on listening.

I love this old / new gateway to literature.

“Entertainment Weekly” includes “The Cookbook Collector” on their list of 18 books they can’t wait to read this summer.

Here’s the link.

http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20355856_20358746_13,00.html

Perusing the list, I’m struck by a couple of evocative titles: “The Peculiar Sadness of Lemon Cake” (yum!) and “Girl in Translation.” I will read those and the Nathaniel Philbrick asap.

A few years ago I was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. I had a little office on the third floor of an old building and the wonderful novelist Katherine Vaz (“Our Lady of the Artichokes”) had an office nearby. The scholar Leah Price, who had an office downstairs said that the two of us working under the eaves reminded her of Sara Crewe and Ermengarde in their garret in “A Little Princess.”

Katherine and I were starting new novels. Mine was “The Cookbook Collector.” Every once in a while we’d meet on the stairs or in the hall and we’d confess we were slightly nervous. We were both doing a good bit of research and the question was–when do you stop researching and start writing? At one point I told Katherine–with a confidence I didn’t feel–”Don’t worry! Stop reading and start writing. Just plunge in and forge ahead.”

After that, whenever we met, Katherine would say quite solemnly, “Plunge in and forge ahead. Plunge in and forge ahead.” At some point I confessed that I didn’t really know what I was talking about and I was feeling pretty muddled myself, but the mantra was working for her. Katherine kept saying it, and after a while, so did I.

The truth is that when you’re starting a new project you have to do whatever works. If writing 80 pages by hand on legal paper with a fine point purple pen is working for you, stick with it.

If going to the same coffee shop every night works for you, keep it up.

If you find a mantra that comforts you, keep saying it. I think I can. I think I can.

I’ve discovered that “The Cookbook Collector” got a starred review in “Library Journal.” It’s a lovely review, although there are two funny errors in it. The reviewer says that my book is about a young woman named Emily Markowitz and her sister Jessica, when in fact the sisters are named Emily and Jessamine Bach. I do kind of love that the reviewer conflated these sisters with those in my early book, “The Family Markowitz” as though all my characters are somehow related. I guess in some sense they are.

You can read the review here:

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6722285.html?q=allegra+goodman

Mistakes like this happen a lot. The poster for my April 20th talk in Princeton lists “The Other Side of the Mountain” as one of my books instead of “The Other Side of the Island” even though the poster includes a big color photo of the actual book cover. Ah well!

I’ve seen my first book “Total Immersion” called “Sudden Immersion” and even “Fatal Immersion” in journal articles. I don’t mind. All the extra titles make me feel more prolific.

There is something about Passover: the long meals, the restricted diet and limited activities that is, shall we say, rather confining! The end really is liberating.

I have never felt so motivated as I do now to work and work and work. Too bad the weekend is already here! I’m more than ready for some serious time at my desk.

GRRRRR . . .

My novel “The Other Side of the Island” has just been published in Hebrew–always fun!

As with translations into French, I know just enough to sorta kinda read my own book–but only because I know what’s going to happen.

The funny part about Israeli publications is that even now, I’m still a little surprised to find my Hebrew name on the cover: Alyza, instead of a transliterated Allegra. Oh we diaspora Jews!

I got a thoughtful review in “Ha’aretz”:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1160687.html