Books
Groping for Luna
Pam Summa
Mystic River Ink
Other books by Pam Summa
Pam Summa's second novel, entitled The Night Trippers, is a sequel to Groping for Luna, but the emphasis is on: how you manage happily ever after when the before has been such a tangled web we weave, in the context of the day-to-day lives of not-rich-or-famous artists (don't quit your day gig, where's that Muse?, and so on).
The author's third novel, with the working title of Thursday's Child, is a two-part meditation on the vicissitudes of love and coming of age. Set in a small town in Missouri, Part I takes place in 1967, when the main characters--Valerie Jackson, the only hippie in Ajax, Missouri, and Samuel Wheeler, basketball hero and golden boy--are in their late teens. Part II begins in 1986, when Valerie returns for the first time in 19 years.
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Biography
Pam Summa graduated from Mass College of Art with a BFA in printmaking in 1981. She has been a housepainter, a waitress, a muralist, a gardener, and a welfare mother, among other things. For the past 18 years, she has been an academic editor specializing in anthropology and a fiction writer; for the past ten years, she has also been a writing and creativity coach. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts where she is currently playing with her fourth novel.
Writing & creativity coach
To help people get on track (happily) with their writing and/or creative pursuits, even if they don't know where the track is or what the pursuits are...Clients come to my house and sit at my kitchen table; I ask them questions, and listen to their answers. Then I suggest exercises (writing or other). The exercises sometimes come from my own experience--as a person who has been blocked, as a coach, as a workshop participant or facilitator, as an academic editor, or from books--but just as often they come out of thin air, or from the client's muse. In other words, it's an intuitive process. I also do straight editing, or combine editing and coaching. I have run workshops on writing, and also on getting what you really want.
I also give talks on writing, both for academics and for the rest of us, including retired people who want to write memoirs. I like to include a long Q & A section after the talk, where people can ask me about their own specific problems.
Recommendations
The Handyman, by Carolyn See (novel)
Folly, by Laurie King (mystery, suspense)
The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, by Lewis Hyde
The Feminine in Fairytales, by Marie Louise von Franz
The Deptford Trilogy, by Robertson Davies
The Four-gated City, by Doris Lessing
Eva Luna, by Isabel Allende
Hungry Hearts, by Francine Prose
David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
The Vagabond, by Colette
More recommendations
Robin McKinley (fantasy), Kate Wilhelm (speculative fiction & mystery); Ursula Le Guin (fantasy, science fiction, and lit crit); Kate Green (mystery mostly out of print, god knows why); Susan Trott (odd novels, no known genre also out of print); Jane Austen (novels); Alice Hoffman (American magical realism); Susan Cooper (fantasy); Dashiell Hammett (mystery); Dorothy Sayers (mystery); anything' by Isak Dinesen (especially Seven Gothic Tales & Out of Africa)
Events
16 July, 3:30-6:30 P.M., ARTBEAT!
Somerville writers present: A Literary Mashup
Jimmy tingle's theatre in Davis Square
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