A New Writing Group
October 10, 2024
I’ve recently joined the Boston Athenaeum Writing Group, and I’m looking forward to my first critique in about a week! Let’s hope they like Moose Crossing.
- A New Novel
Introducing
Loqui tries to gasp for breath, but the water tugs her under as it hurtles her along. She’s so turned around, she doesn’t know which way she’s facing until her forehead scrapes against the stones at the bottom of the stream. A stream that’s now a roaring river, flooded by the ceaseless rains.
She kicks off from the bank and comes back to the surface. A huge gulp of air. Then once again, she’s swept downstream.
Coughing, sputtering, she strikes out with all four legs and her hoof hits something soft – a rotted log? – and she’s born upward toward the light again. The rain is pelting down so hard, it’s almost impossible to see. But, could that be a grassy bank that’s sliding by?
With all her might, Loqui tries to swim against the current, but the water is too strong. It carries her past the land she saw, until she snags – at last – on a small outcrop of rock.
She chokes out water and sucks in a lungful of air. Then she tries to shift her weight. If she can get her balance back, if only for a moment, maybe she won’t be swept away. But just as she struggles to stand, her hooves are knocked out from under her. Careening out into the middle of the stream, she hits her head on a flat stone.
Down, down she goes. This time will be her last. She has no more air. Then, suddenly, the stream swerves sharply to the right, and she’s cast out like leaf debris upon the soggy ground.
Loqui lies, her ribs heaving, as the rain continues to pound down. She’s one waterlogged moose calf. But she’s still alive, trembling in the cold, wet mud.
Why did she ever say that she was sick of all the sun?
Loqui never thought she’d miss the stifling heat, with all its biting flies.
It was inescapable until two days ago, when the sky opened up and dumped all of the water in the world down onto her head. Lying all alone and shivering like this is such a lonely place to be. Now, she wouldn’t even mind if a nasty fly buzzed down and bit her on the nose.
Even a fly is company.
Why, oh why, did her mother have to die?
And why did Nimwé’s words – practically her final words – have to be so grim?
As Loqui drags herself to higher ground, she still can hear her mother’s voice. “Things are changing in the Green Peaks, and not for the better,” Nimwé told her urgently.
“Really?” Loqui shook her head. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely, little calf. With our long legs and thick skin, we’re built for winter weather and deep snow. And we just can’t tolerate the heat.”
“Well, maybe –” Loqui stomped her hoof. “Maybe next summer will be cooler.”
“No, no. That won’t happen.” Nimwé sighed. “Each summer is hotter than the one before. And now it’s just too hot. Too hot for moose, at least.”
“That can’t be true!” she cried. Three whole moons have passed since she was born, and the Green Peaks is her home. The only one she’s ever known.
“Oh yes. Now promise me, Loqui. Promise me you’ll leave.”
Loqui did promise. Anything to calm her mom. But she didn’t leave.
Wherever would she go?
The hero of Moose Crossing is Loqui, a plucky moose calf born in a time of turmoil.
She’s an outsider – too curious, too independent, too funny looking to fit in.
But Loqui is also a pathfinder. A deadly disease has struck her community.
So she studies the signs and realizes that the Moose of The Green Peaks must move north to a healthier, cooler clime.
I’ve recently joined the Boston Athenaeum Writing Group, and I’m looking forward to my first critique in about a week! Let’s hope they like Moose Crossing.
Today, I meet with four more agents — Reiko Davis with DeFiore and Company, Jennifer Chen Tran, with Glass Literary Management, Eric Smith, with P.S. Literary, and Sorche Fairbank, who has her own firm, Fairbank Literary Representation. We’ll see what they think of the first 5 pages of Moose Crossing!
I am lucky enough to be attending Grub Street’s respected writer’s conference, The Muse and the Marketplace, 2024. Today, I met with the agent Kelsey Day, an associate literary agent at Aragi Inc., and had drinks with the agent Leslie Zampetti, who launched Open Book Literary, and the editor Abby Muller, with Abrams Press and the Overlook Press. Plus hors d’oeuvres!
My name is Jenny Attiyeh, and I began my career in 1987 in London as a freelance reporter on the arts for the BBC World Service Radio. I remember my first interview for “Meridian”, as the program I worked for was called. It was with Placido Domingo, and I’ve never been so nervous since.
After my work permit ran out, I returned to Los Angeles, my home city, and continued as an arts reporter for KCRW, an NPR station in Santa Monica. While there, I reported and produced an award-winning documentary on Japanese-American internment during World War II.
Shortly after, I was accepted to a National Public Radio residency, which brought me to Washington, D.C. and to WBUR, an NPR station in Boston to report stories for NPR’s Performance Today. I later attended the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.
After that, I remained in New York City for 9 years, during which time I worked primarily as a reporter for television and radio. I covered local politics and the arts for NY1 News, a cable television station , and then moved on to WNYC radio, where I worked in the news department, covering mayoral politics.
I next hosted and produced a weekly arts and culture segment for WNYC TV, a PBS station, until it went out of business. Before the lights went out, I managed to produce a mini-documentary on the making of a Philip Glass opera, “Les Enfants Terribles.” I worked next as a correspondent for a nationally televised PBS program called “Freedom Speaks” which focused on the media, until it too was taken off the air. (I detect a pattern here…)
I then moved to Maine, where I lived by the harbor in Kittery, and worked as a reporter for New Hampshire Public Television. There, I covered the ’99/2000 New Hampshire presidential primary season, and interviewed the major presidential candidates. I also participated as a panelist in nationally televised presidential debates, hosted by Peter Jennings and Tim Russert.
Following the conclusion of the New Hampshire primary season, I moved to Boston, where I did freelance writing on academics, the 2004 presidential campaign and the single life, among other subjects. From this base, in early 2005, I launched ThoughtCast. ThoughtCast is an ideaspace for interviews with authors, academics and intellectuals, hosted by Jenny Attiyeh. We partnered with The Forum Network, a PBS/NPR site devoted to academic content, and Harvard University Extension School.
Then, after a long career as a reporter in public television, public radio, podcasting and print, I decided to cross the dividing line between fact and fiction. So now I’m writing a novel, Moose Crossing, and it’s proving to be the most challenging assignment so far – and the most rewarding.