Guest post by Emily Arsenault, author of “The Broken Teaglass”

By admin, on October 11th, 2009

Writing The Broken Teaglass in Losasaneng village, South Africa

I wrote the first draft of The Broken Teaglass while living in rural South Africa. It’s perhaps the farthest place one can imagine from the setting of the book: a New England dictionary company.
My husband and I were serving in the U.S. Peace Corps, working in a cluster of rural elementary schools. We lived in a village a few hours south of the Kalahari desert and north of the original de Beers diamond mine. The nights there were long, quiet, and often uncomfortably hot or cold. We had electricity but no running water and no television. And we had lots of free time. I started writing The Broken Teaglass very casually, about five months into our service. It was, at first, simply a way to fill the evenings.

I began with the vague idea of a mystery at a dictionary company. I’d worked at Merriam-Webster a few years before, so that would naturally be the model for my setting. But the question of what sort of mystery would unfold in such a place—that was the difficult part. I spent a couple of months scribbling out all sorts of crazy ideas—Cold War spy secrets hidden in dictionary definitions, for example. Eventually I gave up. All of my brainstorming seemed ridiculous. (Why would anyone write Cold War spy secrets into a dictionary, after all?)
Weeks later, I was walking on a long, desolate road between our home village and the neighboring village school—a road some locals insisted was extremely dangerous. (“You should not be walking there unless you are carrying a firearm,” one teacher told me.) I was never sure if there was much real danger or people were being overly protective, but I’d often bring a pocket knife just in case. On this particular day, I realized halfway that I’d forgotten the knife. I shrugged it off. I happened to have a drinking glass in my bag. Maybe I could smash it and use the shards as a weapon, if someone or something scary came tearing out of the veldt. Obviously I didn’t take the threat all that seriously, but the thought started me daydreaming about a character who ends up—under bizarre circumstances—using the shards of a drinking glass as a weapon.

I began writing that story to take a break from the dictionary mystery project, which was going nowhere. But eventually I pulled the two ideas together. Sitting in an empty, dusty rural classroom late one afternoon, I wrote a scene in which junior lexicographers Billy and Mona chat in a restaurant about a curious citation they found in the dictionary files. That scene flew out of my pen in a few minutes. I knew immediately I wanted to continue. When my mother visited us a month or so later, I asked her to bring a dictionary.

After that, I wrote for at least an hour a day. I filled seven notebooks. I still have them—ratty from travel and desert dust. Inside, scenes are written and rewritten, interspersed with Setswana vocabulary, a library budget for one of the elementary schools, English lesson plans, school meeting agendas, and odd notes to self (Termite mounds still in library. Cement floor?).Often I’d write it sitting outside at sunset, watching the goats as I nibbled my pen between scenes. I finished the book about two months before the end of our two-year service. When I brought home the rough draft, it needed a great deal of revision—it was too long, and it contained a lengthy cockfight scene, as well as a fair number of goat metaphors. How surreal it was to see the publisher’s glossy cover a couple of years later. For me, The Broken Teaglass will always, on some level, be a set of seven dusty notebooks with poorly-drawn goats and chickens doodled in the margins.

Even when I read the edited scenes now, they bring me back to the very incongruous places in which they were first written—on a mud stoop while a wide-eyed little girl plays with my exotically straight blond hair; under a leaky tin roof in a thunderous downpour; or sitting on a rock by the roadside, hoping a koombi taxi will come and save me the long, hot walk home from school. Writing the book was, admittedly, escapism. We were fascinated by South Africa and met many wonderful people, but it was sometimes a tough place to live and work. We often felt clownishly foreign, as well as burdened by our ineffectiveness in such a complex country. With The Broken Teaglass, I basically created for myself a lighthearted, comfortable world in which to escape once a day. I had a lot of fun with it. Writing it was a form of entertainment. Quite simply, it made me happy. My hope is that it does the same for readers.

Emily Arsenault has worked as a lexicographer, an English teacher, a children’s librarian, and a Peace Corps volunteer. She wrote The Broken Teaglass to pass the long, quiet evenings in her mud brick house while living in rural South Africa. She now lives in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, with her husband. You can visit Emily Arsenault’s website at www.emilyarsenault.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Emily Arsenault has worked as a lexicographer, an English teacher, a children’s librarian, and a Peace Corps volunteer. She wrote The Broken Teaglass to pass the long, quiet evenings in her mud brick house while living in rural South Africa. She now lives in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, with her husband. You can visit Emily Arsenault’s website at http://emilyarsenault.com/.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

The dusty files of a venerable dictionary publisher . . . a hidden cache of coded clues . . . a story written by a phantom author . . . an unsolved murder in a gritty urban park–all collide memorably in Emily Arsenault’s magnificent debut, at once a teasing literary puzzle, an ingenious suspense novel, and an exploration of definitions: of words, of who we are, and of the stories we choose to define us.

In the maze of cubicles at Samuelson Company, editors toil away in silence, studying the English language, poring over new expressions and freshly coined words–all in preparation for the next new edition of the Samuelson Dictionary. Among them is editorial assistant Billy Webb, just out of college, struggling to stay awake and appear competent. But there are a few distractions. His intriguing coworker Mona Minot may or may not be flirting with him. And he’s starting to sense something suspicious going on beneath this company’s academic facade.

Mona has just made a startling discovery: a trove of puzzling citations, all taken from the same book, The Broken Teaglass. Billy and Mona soon learn that no such book exists. And the quotations from it are far too long, twisting, and bizarre for any dictionary. They read like a confessional, coyly hinting at a hidden identity, a secret liaison, a crime. As Billy and Mona ransack the office files, a chilling story begins to emerge: a story about a lonely young woman, a long-unsolved mystery, a moment of shattering violence. And as they piece together its fragments, the puzzle begins to take on bigger personal meaning for both of them, compelling them to redefine their notions of themselves and each other.

Charged with wit and intelligence, set against a sweetly cautious love story, The Broken Teaglass is a tale that will delight lovers of words, lovers of mysteries, and fans of smart, funny, brilliantly inventive fiction.

WHAT THEY ARE SAYING ABOUT THE BROKEN TEAGLASS!

“Not since A.S. Byatt’s Possession have I come across such a fascinating secret history as the one hidden within the pages of The Broken Teaglass, and the secret histories we all carry inside us.” – Christopher Barzak’s blog

“This debut novel has a delightful premise, crisply drawn characters, and a subtle sense of humor.” – Booklist

“…an absorbing, offbeat mystery–meets–coming-of-age novel that’s as sweet as it is suspenseful.” – Publishers Weekly

EXCERPT:

How did a guy like me end up in a place like this?

Excellent question. It’s the very question that ran through my mind on my first day on the job, and for many weeks hence. How the hell did I get a job at the offices of Samuelson Company, the oldest and most revered name in American dictionaries? In the end, this might strike you as the greater mystery—greater than the one I’d later find in the company’s dusty files: How does a clod like me end up in training to be a lexicographer?

Now that you’ve paused to look up lexicographer, are you impressed? Are you imagining lexicographers as a council of cloaked, wizened men rubbing their snowy-white beards while they consult their dusty folios? I’m afraid you might have to adjust your thinking just a little. Imagine instead a guy right out of college—a guy who says yup, and watches too much Conan O’Brien. Imagine this guy sitting in a cubicle, shuffling through little bits of magazine articles, hoping for words like boink and tatas to cross his desk and spice up his afternoons.

Don’t get me wrong. When I first got the job, I was pretty excited. I’d been starting to doubt my employability, since I’d majored in philosophy. Admittedly, I’d applied for publishing jobs on a whim, having heard some English majors talk about it. No one at the big New York companies bit at my résumé, but someone at Samuelson must have liked all the A’s on my transcript in heady-seeming topics like Kant and Kierkegaard, and they called me just in time—just as I was starting to thumb through pamphlets about the Peace Corps and teaching English in Japan. My interview was with one Dan Wood, a pale, bearded middle-aged guy who didn’t really seem to know how to conduct an interview. He mostly just described the defining process quietly, peering at me occasionally as if trying to gauge my reaction. I guess I didn’t make any funny faces, because two days later Dan called me to offer the job.

Excerpted from The Broken Teaglass by Emily Arsenault Copyright © 2009 by Emily Arsenault. Excerpted by permission of Delacorte Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.