I’m working on a movie!  FARAH GOES BANG makes its internet home here.

FARAH GOES BANG tells the story of Farah Mahtab, a woman in her twenties who tries to lose her virginity while on the road campaigning for presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004. Farah and her friends K.J. and Roopa follow the campaign trail across historic Route 66 on their way to Ohio, the central battleground state of 2004, seizing control of this charged moment in their lives and the life of their country.

FARAH GOES BANG is a valentine to contemporary feminism, youth in revolt, and the passionate politics of idealism. It is the travelogue of three women out on a highway belonging not to suicidal housewives or bubblegum pop stars, but to young women as agents, as doers, as authors of their own American odyssey. In this way, FARAH updates the classic American tradition of the Western, telling a new trail story–whose subjects are both cowgirls and Indians, both heroines and outlaws–in a diverse, powerful, and hilarious female voice.

Also, check out our Kickstarter campaign!

The four teenagers who make up the suburban Minnesota all-girl hip-hop group Sister Mischief might not seem to have much in common. Esme, our narrator, is lesbian, Jewish, and riddled with abandonment issues from her mother’s long-ago departure; Marcy, her lifelong friend and fellow motherless misfit, is Catholic, straight but the epitome of a teenage tomboy; loyal teen-queen Tess is the only one of the group who fits into the town’s SWASP (straight white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) majority; and Rowie, short for Rohini, is brilliant, Hindu, and the embodiment of the phrase “still waters run deep.” When their school introduces a policy to ban all hip-hop music and attire from school property, the girls fight back by founding a school group dedicated to studying hip-hop as an art form. Additionally, a secret love affair blossoms between Esme and the deeply closeted, questioning Rowie. Footnotes incorporate a background babble of text messages, Facebook updates, and lyric snippets scribbled in notebooks, playing with the omnipresence and multi-threadedness of text culture in modern teen life; the group’s lyrics are provocative and smart while still believably teen-written. The book is distinguished by its ambitious engagement with issues of race, both in the complexities of white girls appropriating hip-hop as their mode of self-expression, and in its exploration of the racial, religious, and socioeconomic divisions that fragment the town and the school. The image of a white, middle-class midwesterner laying down rhymes like “She ain’t no prima donna, Michelle Robinson Obama/ An educated mama who’s a mama role model” brings up a wealth of issues, but Goode lays them right out on the table, allows her characters to put forth their own arguments for and against their right to use the music and language that speaks to them, and leaves it to readers to decide whether they agree or not. An odd yet appealing combination of programmatic and subversive, this eminently discussable debut novel captures the vibrancy and messiness of teen life. CG

–Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, Sept. 2011

Goode’s debut is a provocative, authentic coming-of-age story that explores of the power of language in shaping identity, structured around the subversive, expressive nature of hip-hop music. “Word nerd” Esme is a 16-year-old Jewish lesbian in the “sterile minivan parade” of Holyhill, Minnesota. She and her friends — butch Marcy, religious Tess, and Indian Rowie — are hip-hop crew Sister Mischief, who write rhymes to confront issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality. When the principal outlaws “violence-inducing culture,” including hip-hop, the girls plan a guerilla performance to bring awareness to the masses, while Esme’s and Rowie’s burgeoning relationship sends them spinning in new directions. Esme’s flowing, slangy narrative is expressive and idiosyncratic, and her relationship with Rowie is sweet and seductive. All of the girls realistically defy stereotypes, and their strong relationships with each other and
their families (particularly Esme’s and Marcys’ amazing dads and Rowie’s mom) are the linchpin of the story. Goode sometimes tries too hard to deconstruct hip-hop culture, and the slang may trip up some readers, but overall this debut is full of big ideas, big heart, and big poetry, with a positive, activist message. Sex, language, and alcohol/drug use limit this to older teens.

– Krista Hutley, Booklist, June 1st edition (starred review)

I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.

–Sherman Alexie

I am not what I seem to the world to be; a fine-looking fellow in the prime of life, big enough and strong enough to do almost anything he wants to, a talented writer and the rest. No; I am a haunted artist like the others. I know what the monsters know, and shall know more, and more than any of them if I can survive myself for a little while longer.

–J. Dickey

I learned [from my mother] … to listen with patience and care, and never to interrupt even when people were having great difficulty in explaining themselves, for during such halting and imprecise moments … people are very revealing—what they hesitate to talk about can tell much about them. Their pauses, their evasions, their sudden shifts in subject matter are likely indicators of what embarrasses them, or irritates them, or what they regard as too private or imprudent to be disclosed to another person at that particular time. However, I have also overheard many people discussing candidly with my mother what they had earlier avoided—a reaction that I think had less to do with her inquiring nature or sensitively posed questions than with their gradual acceptance of her as a trustworthy individual in whom they could confide.

-Gay Talese

Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind.  Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognizable deed.

–G. Eliot, Middlemarch

Bay Area peeps: take my poetry workshop at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto in July/August!

More info here, please forward widely.

Finding The Found: Poetry Intensive

Instructor: Laura Goode
Contact: laura.goode@gmail.com
Number of Sessions: 6
Meeting times: Wednesday evenings July 13,  27, and August 3, 10, 17, and 24 (skipping July 20 for Laura’s book party!)
Course fee: $350, with $100 deposit to reserve space in the class.

Description: “It is difficult/ to get the news from poems,/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.” –W.C. Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”

What does the reader find in a poem; conversely, what does the poet find in writing it? What must be found in order to create a new poem?  What constitutes a “found” poem?  This six-week poetry intensive will embolden students to find poetic matter in the most mundane or unexpected places: in transit, in the home, in minutiae and detritus. Writing exercises will focus on locating inspiration in routine places, creating new poetic language from existing source texts, and utilizing formal constraints to liberate, not restrict, poetic invention. We will also examine various resources for getting your poems published and discuss other venues (reading series, teaching opportunities, other poets) for poetic engagement.  We will read and write hungrily; our coterie will be small and intimate.

Poets of all ages, experience levels, and backgrounds are very welcome.  Please send me your favorite poem by yourself and your favorite poem by someone else with your registration; this is purely for my edification and will not determine your admission to the class.

To drill one hole after another into [language] until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through – I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.

–S. Beckett, Letters

It was at Thanksgiving time that Francie told her first organized lie, was found out and determined to become a writer.

–B. Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn