In the comments section, Cliff points us to a post on the Emerging Writers Network by Tara Yellen, about how mentors have guided her during the development of her writing career.

Last week, at  New Dominion Bookstore in Charlottesville, when I stood up to give the first reading on my book tour, I didn’t have a planned opening speech.  Just a few things I wanted to say—thanks to John for the wonderful introduction, thanks to all who came out tonight.  Maybe a quick joke about tax day.

Mostly, I was hoping to avoid two things:

1. singing, which I’m always afraid I’ll do when faced with a microphone

and

2. spouting cliché.

I didn’t sing, which is good, because I can’t.

But before I could filter it, there it was:

“I wouldn’t be standing here without you.”

It popped out….

I was at that reading, and believe me, there was no singing, and no cliche. Listen to the podcast and see for yourself!

Tara Yellen read from After Hours at the Almost Home, which is a May 2008 Book Sense Pick, at the New Dominion Bookshop on Thursday, April 15. Charlottesville Podcasting Network has the recording of her reading and q-and-a with audience members. Yellen is a graduate of the University of Virginia MFA program and currently lives in Washington, DC.

New Dominion Bookshop will host a reading and book-signing by Tara Yellen, who will present selections from her novel After Hours at the Almost Home on Wednesday, April 15, 2008, at 5:30 pm

Edgier than Cheers, as bawdy as Boccaccio’s Decameron and as witty as Muriel Sparks’ The Girls of Slender Means. — John Casey

Tara Yellen’s novel includes plenty of male characters, but it strikes me as a book about women: how they cope … and how making a living is all too often interchangeable with making a life. — Ann Beattie

Tara Yellen presents, with compassion and humor, the lives of people we instantly feel we know—the well-read waiter who can’t seem to motivate himself enough to find a job more fitting to his intellect, the widow so unmoored by grief that she’s unable to parent her teenage daughter, and the brassy, hip girl on the downside of beauty and youth who has never found a companion.

In Yellen’s novel, they all populate the Almost Home Bar and Grill, which is in the midst of the chaos that is Super Bowl Sunday. When the bartender suddenly walks off, she leaves the remaining staff with a real question. Not “Why did she leave?” but “Why do we stay?” While people ponder their choices, only one amongst them gets ready to act. After closing time and on a school night, Colleen’s 14-year-old daughter, Lily, is no stranger to the Almost Home. And she’ll do almost anything to leave, to move her life forward or somehow return to earlier, better times. And almost anything presents itself in this night of too long hours, too many drinks, and too little supervision.

Tara Yellen has a gift for quietly pinpointing emotional truths; a keen eye for the habits and excuses with which we get through our days; and compassion for the dreamers without momentum and the broken spirits who may never mend. But the heart of her novel lives with the one heart that might. In this searing story of a young girl’s coming of age against the most unlikely backdrop, Yellen gives readers an unforgettable character of striking resilience and wisdom. Smart, provocative, and flawlessly on target, After Hours at the Almost Home explores that dangerously revealing time between closing and dawn, and between giving up and gathering strength.

Tara Yellen completed the MFA program at the University of Virginia, where she was awarded the Henry Hoyns Fellowship. She currently lives in Washington, D.C. Yellen has served as a mentor for middle school age girls, an experience that informed the writing of this novel.

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