#Painter of the night book professional#
#Painter of the night book series#

She freelanced as a copy editor and briefly worked at a tech startup: “Basically, you kind of scrounge around and make it work. “There were six years there where I was basically like, ‘How do I pay the bills?’” She and her husband-whom she met freshman year when he held the door open for her at Greenough Hall-planned how they could support themselves while she wrote. at the University of Michigan in 2006 and sold her first novel in 2012. She kept trying out different contenders for her “something else,” but the one constant was always “writing on the side.” Then a teaching fellow gave her some advice: “Instead of keeping writing ‘on the side,’ what if you put it in front?” She held on-campus jobs as an editorial assistant for Harvard Magazine (“I very studiously checked the class notes”) and as a server at the Faculty Club, and even ran a crafting business selling her clay miniatures to collectors on the Internet. An English concentrator, she saw a life as a book publisher, an English professor, or maybe as an editor. Ng got to Harvard and her life branched before her in what felt like a hundred different ways. “It was always do ‘something else’ and write on the side.” She thought she’d be a scientist by day and a writer by night. She says, “I knew that I always wanted to tell stories, because that’s how I make sense of the world.”Īs a teenager in Shaker Heights, Ohio, she would spend hours with her friends at the Yours Truly restaurant (linoleum floors, high-back wooden booths), talking about who they’d grow up to be. It started as a child with the Chinese folk tales her immigrant parents told her, and with her favorite book, Harriet the Spy, in which the child protagonist-like Ng-takes notes on everyday moments. Ng’s latest novel, Our Missing Hearts, is her deepest exploration into the power of small stories, but she’s been weaving them together her whole life. “There are small stories, but in another way, there’s this sense of them forming the fabric of the world we live in.” “Now there’s some drama.” A few words sprout intrigue. So-and-So called the police again to report that someone moved his lawn chair from the backyard to the front yard for the third time.” She smiles. For example, 'Send in the Clowns,' one of his signature songs, was originally going to be for the male character (Len Cariou) in 'A Little Night Music.' But after he finished it, everyone knew it had to go to the female character (Glynis Johns) – before it went on to become a hit for Judy Collins and a standard.“One of my small, goofy, weird joys is to get a very, very local newspaper from a small town, like my hometown, and read the police blotter,” says best-selling author of Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng ’02. Sondheim lovers will find many juicy tidbits among the interviews, essays and letters repurposed in Salsini's book. 'I think he looked for affirmation from people,' Salsini said. He has pondered why Sondheim gave him so much time over the years.

#Painter of the night book professional#

'Writing about this episode twenty-five years later, I am still baffled and have no explanation,' Salsini notes in his book.īut their otherwise cordial professional relationship continued through the decade Salsini edited TSR. He called Salsini and burst into a litany of complaints, most of which Salsini thought were overblown or wrong. The explosion was all on the composer's side. Speaking of 'Passion,' a TSR magazine review of the London production sparked the only blow-up between Sondheim and Salsini.

#Painter of the night book series#

'You get attracted to a story, and you do it, for whatever series of reasons, whether they're psychological or theatrical or a combination of both,' he told Salsini in an interview about the musical 'Passion.'

He regularly insisted that story was the most important element to him. In interviews with Salsini and other TSR contributors, reprinted or excerpted in 'Sondheim & Me,' the composer disclosed details about how he worked and why he chose the shows he did. Salsini believes that happened because the magazine 'would always be about the work, not the man.'

The composer-lyricist of 'Sweeney Todd,' 'Into the Woods' and 'Sunday in the Park with George' made time for phone calls for this guy from Milwaukee.

'He obviously considered The Sondheim Review important because it would provide a permanent record,' Salsini writes in his book. TSR also often included a short note from Sondheim, usually with corrections or 'emendations' about a previous issue. In 1994, inspired by the excellent semi-annual newsletter of the Kurt Weill Foundation, Salsini conceived a newsletter covering his favorite living composer's works, which quickly grew into The Sondheim Review, a quarterly magazine of news, reviews, interviews and essays.