Woodworking 101: The Craft Comes Alive at Nick Offerman's Woodshop

By Sean Tuohy

Offerman Woodshop, located in Los Angeles and helmed by comedian and “Parks and Recreation” star Nick Offerman, has been described as “kick-ass” and is filled with extremely talented and skilled artists. With the help of RH Lee, I was lucky enough to learn more about what it takes to design an original piece of art from a slab of wood.

Matthew Micucci

Matthew Micucci (All photos courtesy of Drift Journal and Offerman Woodshop)

ST: How did you get into woodworking?

MM: When I lived in New York City I was lucky enough to get a job at the Public Theater as a set builder. I had no deep desire to build but the job was a welcome change after working in the service industry. I quickly discovered that there is a unique bond that forms among your co-workers when you are working physically with each other on a project. It was unlike any other job I've had (and I've had a lot!). You become a family. When I moved to Los Angeles a few years later I knew I needed to find a gig that was similar in order to find my “people” in an otherwise very strange town. So, long story short I am a woodworker simply because I wanted to live a life with people that have a physical job, work with their hands, and create things simply because I knew they'd be nice folks. My theory turned out to be true.

ST: Is woodworking a hobby or passion for you? 

MM: It's not a hobby. It's my way of paying rent. It's my main social group. It's my reason for enjoying life in Los Angeles. When I'm doing it I'm certain it's not my passion. It's a job. But when I go home for the evening and I'm sitting on the couch sipping a whiskey getting excited about tomorrow's part of the project and looking forward to being with the crew again I wonder...Maybe it is a passion? Nah, can't be.

ST: What was the first item you made out of wood? 

MM: The first thing I made was a birdhouse when I was little with my Uncle Pete. We eventually blew it up with fire crackers years later because a hornet’s nest started taking it over. That's how we handled things in the crazy 1990s. 

ST: Do you have any pre-woodworking rituals?

MM: Coffee.

ST: What advice would you give to a first-time woodworker? 

MM: Measure twice cut once. Measure three times...Just have Nick cut it. 

ST: Is there a piece you have made that you are most proud of?

MM: I'm very proud of a few pieces. One that comes to mind is the Zeus Wagon Wheel, which is a seven-foot diameter circular table made from recycled wood with a mahogany Lazy Susan. We all worked as a team on that and it turned out amazing. The client was extremely gracious and excited about it, which is always icing on the cake. However, I think I'm most proud of maintaining and taking care of the shop. When the machines are clean and running smooth, the air filters are clear, materials are well stocked, and the shop floor is organized I feel a strong sense of pride. It's the little things. 

Zeus Wagon Wheel

ST: What is your dream item to make out of wood?

MM: Currently a dream would be to make a dining table for myself. It's hard to find the time and energy to make things for yourself when you're at the shop most days of the week working on other projects.

Thomas Wilhoit

Thomas Wilhoit

ST: How did you get into woodworking?

TW: I came to woodworking by dabbling in many related fields. I grew up on a farm and spent a bit of time logging, putting up fences, and doing barn repair and other construction projects. I was an actor, and through that got involved with set construction, having an abundance of experience using tools. Finally, in college I did some sculpture and wood, naturally, became my favorite medium. Eventually, when I moved to Los Angeles, I stumbled upon OWS, and it was unlike anything I had encountered in the city (or have since), so I decided I had better become a woodworker for real and lock that shit down. To have an opportunity to work with such an amazing collection of people is a rarity.

ST: Is woodworking a hobby or passion for you?

TW: Hm, well, those seem awfully similar to me, and I don’t think either is entirely accurate. Presumably most people are passionate about their hobbies, since they pursue them for pleasure. Woodworking is my occupation, so it certainly isn’t a hobby, by the very nature of the word. I like to think that I’m passionate about it, but there are also plenty of moments when I get frustrated flattening a slab or during a complicated glue up and just want to go collapse into a comfortable chair and drink a beer. Most people’s experience of woodworking is limited to the realm of the hobby, so it’s natural that they assume full time woodworking is just like getting to work on your hobby all week, but like any job, it has highs and lows. So, if you mean passion in a slightly archaic sense, then yes, I feel a range of strong emotions about woodworking.

ST: What was the first item you made out of wood?

TW: That’s digging deep—I used to make myself toys out of wood. I know that makes it sound like I grew up on a tenant farm in the 1870s, but I guess I was always dissatisfied with the toys that you could buy at the store. So, I would make all kinds of stuff, like wooden knives and swords, castles, boats, that sort of thing.

ST: Do you have any pre-woodworking rituals?

TW: No rituals, per se, but I like to start the day at the shop with a glass of water and some beef jerky. And, of course, I like to get pretty handsy with the wood while I plan a project.

ST: What advice would you give to a first-time woodworker?

TW: Don’t wear gloves when using tools; it’s a serious safety risk. Just accept that splinters are part of the job and toughen up.

Also,  be prepared for frustrations and failures, and be flexible—you have to work with the wood, you can't just impose your will upon it. 

ST: Is there a piece you have made that you are most proud of?

TW: We did a massive round table out of glulam for a client, and it was completely beyond our shop’s capabilities. They just don’t make much equipment for dealing with those dimensions. Because of that, we had to think on our feet and do a lot of creative problem solving, and that’s what I love most about woodworking. And, it turned out pretty gorgeous in the end.

ST: What is your dream item to make out of wood?

TW: I don’t have a “dream project,” but it’s hard to beat working with a beautiful slab. Frankly, if my goal was simply to make things, I wouldn’t choose wood as my medium—it has a whole host of complicating factors that make it a real pain in the ass. I’m a woodworker because I enjoy working with wood, dealing with the natural quirks that give it such unique beauty. It might sound a little cheesy, but I try and think less about some conceptual form or item that I want to produce and more about the potential in each piece of wood. So, I definitely don’t have a dream item, but I can point you toward a number of dream slabs that I want to work with.

Nick Offerman

Nick Offerman

ST: Can you explain what “traditional joinery and sustainable slab rescue” is?

NO: “Traditional joinery:” Missionary position? The knee bone connected to the thigh bone, knuckling under or above, having one’s nose in or out of joint, etc.? Or you may be referring to methods of joining the discrete implements in a piece of wooden furniture to one another without fasteners such as nails or screws. For example, the four sides of a Shaker blanket chest are traditionally joined to one another by cleverly interlocking dovetail joints at the corners. Traditional “post-and-beam” or “timber-frame” construction heavily utilizes the mortise-and-tenon joint, which can be exemplified by making a “vessel” (mortise) with one hand, and inserting the index finger (tenon) of the other hand into it. Repeating this traditional action brings us full circle to the missionary position.

“Sustainable Slab Rescue” refers to the practice of re-using local trees that have been felled by storms, nature, or construction needs, by milling them into table slabs and other lumber. Many urban trees become landfill fodder, or at best, firewood, while woodworkers and homebuilders rely upon lumber companies to harvest forest products from distant locations and then expend even more fossil fuels to transport those two-by-fours to our lumberyards. By setting up a local milling service, we can give our local trees a valuable second life as furniture and home decor, while burning a hell of a lot less diesel shipping in Douglas Fir timbers from British Columbia.

ST: How did you get into woodworking?

NO: I grew up in a farming family in Minooka, Ill., learning to use tools for carpentry and mechanic work from a young age. I framed houses for a summer, then did some roofing before learning to build professional theatre scenery. I made a good half of my living in Chicago building scenery by day and acting in plays at night, which further honed my competence in working with tools in a shop. Once I moved to Los Angeles in 1997, I began to construct decks and cabins in peoples’ yards, which included teaching myself post-and-beam construction, particularly inspired by the local works of the architects Greene and Greene. One day I was chopping out a large mortise, when I realized that traditional furniture utilized the exact same joinery just on a smaller scale, and I was bewitched. A friend gave me Fine Woodworking Magazine and I devoured it, a matriculation that continues to this day.

ST: Is woodworking a hobby or passion for you?

NO: This question confuses me. It seems to presuppose that one may not be passionate about one’s hobby. To my way of thinking, a hobby can be precisely described as a productive diversion in one’s life about which said person is passionate. As in, “Fred’s probably out in the garage building one of his popsicle-stick ‘Star Wars’ vehicles. It’s his passion.” If you mean to ask if woodworking is a hobby as opposed to something more, say a vocation, then I would have to say it is a vocation. It is a discipline. A true woodworker is more than a hobbyist, if one considers “hobby” to represent a diversionary activity like repairing antique pocket-watches, or photographing and cataloging local bird species. Woodworking, I think it’s safe to say, requires a greater commitment than any mere hobby. What I mean is that woodworking is a craft that, once begun, continues to hold the woodworker in its grip, rewarding her or him with a progressive accumulation of knowledge throughout a lifetime of craft. If I were to simply enjoy building birdhouses in my spare time, with no interest in heightening my skills or tool knowledge, then I would consider myself a hobbyist who uses woodworking to make my charming product, but I would demur at being referred to as a “woodworker.”

On the other hand, if one is besotted with the tutelage of all the great woodworkers who have come before and left for us their instruction in books and periodicals, or simply in their works in homes and museums, then I would consider woodworking an obsession and a vocation. This is the case with me. I began, as many do, by building a box. Then I built a box with a lid. I chose each new project based upon some new joinery technique so that my knowledge and skills would progress equally apace. Then I built a table, then more tables. I built a small four-foot lapstrake rowboat as a cradle. I built a canoe. I built another canoe. Then I built a ukulele. I am itching to get back to my shop to build several more ukuleles so I may then graduate to acoustic guitars. Beyond that, I may build more boats or instruments—the mandolin and the violin are both calling my name from afar. In a few months it looks like I will get to take a Boston workshop in building a traditional Windsor chair, and that has me bristling with excitement, as the techniques involved are not yet ones that I wield in my personal bag of tricks, and in woodworking, every new technique becomes part of the invaluable body of knowledge that allows the woodworker to solve each unique problem as it arises.

ST: What was the first item you made out of wood?

NO: In truth, a crappy tree house down by the creek with my pal Steve Rapcan. My father and I also built a small barn at our house before I began framing houses. The first item I made once I got turned on to woodworking was a jewelry box for my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time.

ST: Do you have any pre-woodworking rituals?

NO: No specific rituals per se, although consuming a bounty of bacon and eggs doesn’t hurt. Woodworking requires a clear head and perspicacity when it comes to safety around the tools and materials.

ST: What advice would you give to a first-time woodworker?

NO: Plan to make mistakes. Practice joinery and get to be comfortable with your tools on scrap wood before you ruin some expensive walnut.

ST: Is there a piece you have made that you are most proud of?

NO: To date, I am most proud of my first canoe, Huckleberry, built with the techniques I learned from Ted Moores in his book CanoeCraft, and his plans from Bear Mountain Boats. That noble vessel, my main ride, also served as the canoe of Ron Swanson on my television show “Parks and Recreation” until the series finale in which he paddled into the sunset in my second canoe, Lucky Boy.

Huckleberry

ST: What is your dream item to make out of wood?

NO: The next one. At the moment it’s more ukuleles.

Josh Salsbury

Josh Salsbury

ST: How did you get into woodworking?

JS: I always liked building things when I was growing up. As a kid, I played with Lego all day long. In college, I ended up studying music at the Eastman School of Music and UCLA and then had a brief professional trombone career. After feeling unsatisfied with the freelance Los Angeles music life, I enrolled in a woodworking class at Cerritos College on a whim. I was instantly hooked and dove into fine furniture making. I enjoy woodworking because like music, it still has a creative element but the end result is something that is physically tangible.

ST: What was the first item you made out of wood?

JS: My first memory of making something was taking a bunch of nails and hammering them into a scrap of wood in the shape of a happy face when I was a little kid. My father set me up in the backyard with blocks of wood, nails and a hammer and said, “Have fun!”

ST: Do you have any pre-woodworking rituals?

JS: I don’t have any rituals per se, but whenever I walk up to a tool, especially a power tool that wants to eat me, I make sure I am aware of my surroundings and that I’m in a proper state of mind to operate it. Things can go wrong in an instant if you allow your mind to wander! I always respect the tools.

ST: What advice would you give to a first-time woodworker?

JS: I would advise new woodworkers to enroll in a class. If you are in Southern California, the program at Cerritos College has semester-long courses. Or if you just want to get a taste of woodworking, check out Off the Saw in Downtown Los Angeles. Taking a class is a good way to learn how to safely use the tools and meet other like-minded creative people.

ST: Is there a piece you have made that you are most proud of?

JS: I recently completed a coffee table made out of a Bastogne walnut slab with an ebonized eastern walnut base. The slab was one of the more unique pieces of wood that I have had the opportunity to work on and had a lot of interesting figured grain. The overall design of the table was simple, but it allowed the beauty of the wood to be the focal point of the piece.

Bastogne Walnut Coffee Table

RH Lee

RH Lee

ST: How did you get into woodworking?

RL: There was an after school program at my elementary school called Kids' Carpentry. That's where I learned to employ hand tools and soft pine to make pretty much anything I wanted. My beloved grandpa Sam was an amateur woodworker (in addition to being amateur hunter, beekeeper, photographer, chemist, and psychedelics enthusiast). He was paralyzed by a stroke when I was little and so from a young age he asked me to be his woodworking proxy. I like to think he would have been proud to see me now.

ST: What was the first item you made out of wood?

RL: Hard to remember the exact chronology, though many of my “rustic” early works are still kicking around my parent's house in Berkeley. 

A cutting board they still use even though its just a piece of one-by-eight pine board that I cut with a handsaw in 1984, the skateboards I built and road down to splinters, a small chair I built in our basement, and various wooden toy walky-talkies and high tech spaceship consoles with bottle caps for buttons.

ST: Do you have any pre-woodworking rituals?

RL: Unless I am making a delivery or a lumber run, I always ride my bicycle to the shop in the morning. From my house I take the Los Angeles river bike path and small neighborhood streets. I find that my best creative ideas and problem solving happens in this quiet pre-work ride between the river and the interstate.

ST: What advice would you give to a first time wood worker?

RL: Start by making things for yourself and your loved ones, and continue to do so even as you start to find paying work. When you make your own furniture, you get to figure out your own standards—you can let go of perfection and accuracy and let simple accidents guide you to your aesthetic. Then as you live with the piece, you learn what works and what doesn't over time. Since we strive to build furniture that will last for generations, the knowledge of the functionality and temporality of your work is invaluable to informing design. 

ST: Is there a piece you have made that you are most proud of?

RL: I worked closely with the Outdoor Gallery at the Exploratorium Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception developing a new set of outdoor exhibits for public interaction. I'm particularly proud of the mobile museums that I built with friend and engineer Jesse Marsh. Together we engineered and crafted a mini interactive museum console mounted on a Dutch tricycle chassis. Museum educators did public science outreach by riding the museum on wheels out on the Embarcadero.

Museum on wheels

ST: What is your dream item to make out of wood?

RL: I've always wanted to build a mobile tiny house—something simple but fully tricked out with low-tech multipurpose modular components. Every square inch would be a completely economical and functional use of space.

To learn more about Offerman Woodshop, visit its official website or like its Facebook page.

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Fiction Sleuth: 10 Questions With Author Ingrid Thoft

Ingrid Thoft (Photo credit: Doug Berrett)

By Daniel Ford

Author Ingrid Thoft’s Fina Ludlow series has everything a Writer’s Bone reader loves: a strong, fearless female private investigator, a story with emphasis on characters and relationships, and a Boston setting. Her newest novel Brutality, which comes out June 23, features Boston P.I. Ludlow tracking down an assailant accused of assaulting a soccer mom in her kitchen.

Thoft recently answered some of my questions about her early influences, writing about Boston, her new novel, and what’s in store for Fina Ludlow.

Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

Ingrid Thoft: My mother thinks my path was clear when I decided at a young age that despite getting our small town newspaper, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times delivered every day, there was a hole that could only be filled by my own newspaper. I distinctly remember creating copies on a typewriter and illustrating them myself. Articles covered things like world hunger and Jimmy Carter’s peanut farm—real hard-hitting stuff. 

As I got older, I knew that I wanted writing to be the mainstay of my work, but you don’t generally become a novelist the day you graduate from college. Instead, I wrote in various settings including a non-profit, an interactive company, and in the human resources office at Harvard University. Most of the work I did was geared toward employees, and although the content of my current writing is very different, I developed skills like meeting deadlines and adopting the style of writing to suit the audience, both of which have served me well.

I can’t talk about writing without talking about reading. I’ve always been a voracious reader, and reading is to me like breathing, eating and sleeping—essential to survival. Being able to spend my time on both sides of that equation—reading and writing—is a tremendous privilege and a source of much satisfaction.

DF: Who were some of your early influences and current favorites?

IT: I sound like a broken record, but I can’t overstate the importance of the Nancy Drew books by Caroline Keene. The series has it all: intrigue, danger, suspense, and strong, smart female characters. Reading those books taught me that women can not only be detectives, but also write detectives. I also love the fact that Nancy is shared by multiple generations; my mom loved the books, my sisters and I loved the books and my nieces love them, too. Other favorites from childhood are the Encyclopedia Brown series and the Choose Your Own Adventure books. 

My current favorites are many of the names you might expect; Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, Ace Atkins, Reed Farrel Coleman, Ann Cleeves, Chevy Stevens, and Elizabeth George. I recently enjoyed Suitcase City by Sterling Watson and Now You See Me by S.J. Bolton. On my TBR list is Vanished by Joseph Finder.

DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline? Did your process change at all between your first novel, Loyalty, and Brutality?

IT: I never listen to music when I work. I find it too distracting. I like quiet with the exception of the soundtrack of downtown Seattle, which is just outside my window. Sirens, car horns, and the occasional street musician serve as good background noise.

My writing process can best be described as “herding cats” in that I always wish it were more straightforward, but I don’t think that’s the nature of the beast. I start with a general concept that raises lots of interesting questions. For example, in the case of Brutality, I was fascinated by the relationship between sports, health, money, and our sense of identity. As the body of compelling data grows, why do we continue to participate in activities that compromise our health? How do we define entertainment? What are we willing to sacrifice in the name of toughness, and what happens to our identities when certain activities are no longer a part them? Once my brain is working on the questions, I come up with a general plot and then write extensive character studies to populate the universe I’m creating. I can tell you all sorts of things about the characters that will never explicitly show up on the page, but I believe their backstories make them more three-dimensional. When I start writing, I know where I want the story to end up, and I usually outline the first chunk of pages—30 or so—and continue to do that as I progress. Lots of things change during the actual writing phase, and I may alter the course while I write, but I couldn’t sit down and start without some kind of plan. I liken it to captaining a sailboat; you should have a map and compass with you, but if conditions change, you need to respond accordingly. I like to think of it as a loose framework that fosters creativity.

The most significant change from one book to the next is that I’ve gotten more confident about the process itself. At those moments when I feel like I’ll never finish or a plot point will never be resolved, I can remind myself that I’ve felt that way before, and it’s always worked out in the end. 

DF: How did the idea for Brutality originate?

IT: I’m always keeping my eyes open for a good story or usually just the kernel for a good story. This entails reading the newspaper, reading news online and watching true crime television shows. The entire book writing process takes a year so I have to find a subject matter that holds my attention. I can’t expect readers to be interested if I’m not!

I don’t remember the exact moment that I got the idea for Brutality, but I had a general sense that there was an interesting turning of the tide that was happening in terms of sports and concussions. This is to me an extremely juicy topic, and my goal is always for my books to pose complicated questions for readers with no easy answers. I especially like situations where one’s theoretical and practical responses might actually be different. Maybe you’ve read the research and decided your child shouldn’t play football due to the risks, but what if you were raised in a football-loving family? What if the family rituals certain around football? What if you identify strongly as a fan? It’s between that rock and a hard place where the most interesting stories live.

DF: How much of yourself ends up in your main character Fina Ludlow?

IT: This is a tough question for me to answer since she wouldn’t exist without me, but we are different in many ways. I have only sisters, no brothers, and I had a great relationship with my father when he was alive and have a wonderful relationship with my mother. I think that the qualities we share are being independent, determined and hard workers with a strong belief in standing up for what we think is right. We differ in that Fina says things I’d like to say, but I’m way too polite to actually utter them! That’s the great thing about fiction; you can make people say and do exactly what you want them to without any real-life consequences!

DF: Since you’re a Boston native and that’s where your books take place, what details of the city did you want to capture and what clichés about Beantown did you hope to avoid?

IT: One of the things I love about Boston that I wanted to convey in the books is the breadth and depth of the city in terms of its people and their passions. There are so many world-class things about the city: its medical facilities, higher education, the arts, professional sports teams, as well as a strong sense of pride and history that shows up in things like the multiple generations of families who serve in the police and fire departments. People from all over the world come to Boston, and on any given day a visitor could be seen by a specialist in a top-notch hospital or watching a baseball game sitting above the Green Monster. I wanted Fina’s adventures to reflect that diversity. She may spend time interviewing a potential client in the ICU at Mass General or visiting the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, but you’ll also find her at Kelly’s Roast Beef eating fried clams and a lobster roll. It’s fun for me and readers to ride along with her.

I wanted to avoid the misconception that everyone from Boston or its environs has the typical Boston accent. Lots of people do, but lots of people don’t. This was an interesting issue when we were casting for the audiobook. Some of the contenders had badly done Boston accents—trust me, there’s nothing worse—and it was really distracting. The voice actress who has recorded all three audio books, Rebecca Soler, does a terrific job without the accent. She’s also from Boston, which proves my point that the accent isn’t a given!

DF: We did a podcast interview with Boston P.I. John Nardizzi who also used his professional skills to develop a writing career. What did you learn through your program at the University of Washington that helped you create your series?  

IT: I learned a lot of practical information in terms of detection that Fina employs, like how to mine information from public records and how to conduct effective interviews, but the thing I was most surprised by was my shifting attitudes toward personal injury attorneys. One of my instructors did a lot of work for the kinds of attorneys who advertise on television, like Carl Ludlow, and I learned that in certain circumstances, those attorneys are the only thing saving victims from financial ruin. Perhaps a single mother is injured in a car accident that wasn’t her fault, but if she doesn’t have health insurance or other safety nets, the dominos in her life can quickly fall. Maybe she misses work to go to physical therapy, but then she can’t pay for day care, and then she loses her job, but has no one to watch her kids when she looks for a new job, and what about all those doctors’ bills? Many of us are lucky enough to have layers of support that keep us from the brink—both financially and emotionally. For people who don’t have that, personal injury lawyers can be lifesavers.

One of my primary motivations for earning the certificate in the UW program was so that I could create a character who knew her stuff. Fina breaks the rules and some laws, but that’s always a conscious choice on her part. She’s not incompetent; she just marches to the beat of her own drummer!

DF: Now that you have three novels under your belt, what’s next?

IT: I’m putting the finishing touches on book number four in the series, which will be published in June 2016 with the plan to continue the series. The first two books are in development at ABC to be a television series, and although I don’t have any involvement in the creation of the show, I’m really anxious to see the producers’ interpretation of the universe I’ve created. I always enjoy the opportunity to meet readers and look forward to doing even more of that this year. I’ll be attending the Bouchercon Convention in Raleigh in October and speaking at the Book Group Roundup in Colorado Springs in November. It’s particularly energizing to interact with readers when I’m starting the next book in the series; their excitement is contagious!

DF: What’s your advice to aspiring authors?

IT: I like to quote Winston Churchill when giving advice to aspiring writers, but with a caveat. He said, “Never, never, never give up” and I believe that may be the only difference between a frustrated unpublished writer and a published writer. The caveat is that you have to learn to accept criticism and to incorporate feedback so as to improve your work. You need to be thick-skinned to be a writer, and if you can’t bear to hear negative feedback or are convinced that your work can’t be improved, you might be in the wrong line of work. The critical question to keep in mind when fielding criticism and suggestions is: “Does this make the work better or just different?” Better is better, but different is just someone else’s book.

DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?

IT: As a sixteen-year-old, I worked the 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. shift at a small local AM radio station. I did everything—wrote copy, called police and fire stations for news, and delivered on-air segments, including sports. I pity the Red Sox fans who had to suffer through my game reports. I read copy from the wire, but I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about, and I have to imagine that was obvious!

To learn more about Ingrid Thoft, visit her official website, like her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter @IngridThoft.

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A Conversation With Brutal Youth Author Anthony Breznican

Anthony Breznican 

By Author Steph Post

When I first set about reading Anthony Breznican’s debut novel Brutal Youth last fall, I have to admit that I was skeptical. A book about freshmen attending a Catholic high school? Really? I’m a high school teacher. I spend all day with teenagers. Did I really want to read about them as well? The book came so highly recommended, though, that I thought I’d give it a try. What the hell? It had a cool cover, which included a blurb from Stephen King. The title came from an Elvis Costello song. I’d see what it was all about. I cracked it open one night and within two days, stunned, I had turned the last page.

I was consumed. I was floored. This is not just a book about high school. Brutal Youth is a story about growing up, about good and evil, about love and friendship and, oh yeah, badassery. It’s about the bullies and the underdogs and the monsters and the heroes. It’s about right and wrong and the gaping gray space in between, the space that we move within, teenagers and adults alike.

I’ve been lucky enough to meet a lot of authors over the past year, but I’m proud to say that Anthony Breznican quickly moved from fellow writer to sage advice giver to good friend. Brutal Youth came out in paperback earlier this month and so if you haven’t read it yet, now is the time. I interviewed Breznican for my personal blog right after I fell in love with his book and I’m thrilled to bring you a second interview for Writer’s Bone to celebrate his success and future.

Steph Post: Brutal Youth landed in the hands of readers almost exactly a year ago and is now available in "bendy form."

Anthony Breznican: I love that. “Bendy form.” I think Caroline Kepnes, the author of You (which is out in paperback soon) coined that one.

SP: As I am very aware, having gone through a debut release myself this past year, having your book arrive on the scene is just the beginning of a whirlwind of emotions.

AB: Yes, and I’m going to turn this interview around for a moment and say everyone should go find your novel A Tree Born Crooked if they want a crime thriller with smarts and nerve. Richard Price better watch his ass, because you are coming for him.

SP: Well, thank you! Is there any one book-related moment from the past year that stands out for you? A moment that you'll never forget, that you may be able to look back on one day and say "damn, that was good..."?

AB: My favorite thing in the world is when somebody reads it and comes back with a reaction that has exclamation points on it. A reader named Marna Moore sent this tweet at me:

@Breznican Brutal Youth was the most fucked up book I've ever read in my life-and I think I'm going to read it again. Well done.

— Marna Moore (@magicmarna) July 3, 2014

I’ve gotten a lot like that from readers, and I just want to hug them.

As far as single moments go, meeting a 12-year-old girl at Comic-Con who went through a lot of the teasing that’s described in Brutal Youth made it my turn on the emotional roller coaster. She also turned to the adults at her school for help and was told “boys will be boys” or some nonsense. I’ve met and heard from many, many people—both kids and teachers—who have witnessed first-hand that this kind of social Darwinism is real.

SP: I can read my share of books in a year but Brutal Youth has stuck with me all this time. I couldn't tell you the character names of half the books I've read in the past, but I don't know that I'll ever be able to forget Peter, Noah, and Lorelei. In so many ways, I felt like I knew these characters, that they could be students walking down the halls of the high school where I work.

AB: That means a lot to me, Steph, because I know you’re a teacher who invests a lot in her students (and having you care about my troublemakers makes me feel like they’d be in good hands in your classroom.)

I tried hard to make sure everyone had a distinct presence. I was recently asked to come up with a list of books these characters would love, and it was a fun exercise because it gave me a chance to revisit these kids and tell five new little micro stories about them. It was like … when you know someone really well, it’s not hard to pick out a birthday present for them. Do you know what I mean? I’m happy when a reader feels they’re distinctive, too.

SP: I've known teachers, too, who could easily be Mr. Zimmers and Ms. Bromines, but thankfully never a Father Mercedes. Have you had any readers tell you the same thing? Have you connected with any readers who felt the pull and the weight of your characters as I did?

AB: That’s funny because Father Mercedes is based on a real priest from my town who was embezzling money. The real guy’s name was Father Benz, so I didn’t even change him that much except to reduce his larceny to about a tenth of what the real guy stole.

I’ve known a lot of Mr. Zimmmers—the teacher who sticks his or her neck out for students in trouble, even if they end up absorbing some of that drama and difficulty as a result. And Ms. Bromine…I love when a reader says, “You know people like this…” She’s the little Napoleon who wields whatever power she has like a weapon.

The one criticism that truly irritates me is when I see a teacher on Goodreads say, “This kind of bullying would never happen. Not at my school.” All I can think is, “Yeah, right. You’d fit in great at the school in the book, where the teachers have convinced themselves of the same thing.” Whenever I see a news article about a kid who was bullied mercilessly I know there are teachers like this in that kid’s orbit.

SP: Which is despicable, but I agree with you, true. This is why we need students like your character Noah Stein, who aren’t afraid to stand up to these types of teachers. And though Noah will always be my hero from in Brutal Youth, the one character who I know I will never be able to forget is Colin Vickler. Perhaps because of the striking opening scene with Vickler standing on the roof of St. Michael's High School, threatening to take his life, or perhaps because of the pathos surrounding him, an outcast boy misunderstood and bullied mercilessly, "Clink" is a character that I found particularly moving. 

AB: I’m glad about that, too! Colin Vickler is introduced mainly as the worst-case scenario for the new kids coming into the school. He flips out in catastrophic fashion and starts pushing stone statues off the roof onto his classmates below. Then he disappears—or, rather, is disappeared by the school. The main question is whether Peter, Noah, or Lorelei will become like him, but I hoped the reader would still wonder and worry about him a little. He has a dangerous meltdown, but I wanted him to be sympathetic when you realize what led to it.

SP: I know you've mentioned before that one of the main characters of the novel, Lorelei, is a favorite. But are there any minor characters who hold a special place for you? Do you ever wish that you could have given these characters a more prominent role in story?

AB: There’s a character named Hector Greenwill, who is overweight, a great guitarist proficient in everything from punk to classical, and also the only black student at this all-white Catholic school. He has a prominent role in the Brutal Youth, but I’m eager to explore him more in the sequel. He’s one of the few main characters who come from a happy home, although it’s got its own challenges, for sure. His mother, whom we don’t meet in Brutal Youth, is really awesome—engaged and smart about when to let her kid fend for himself and when it’s appropriate for Mama Bear to intercede. His father’s more aloof, a tough-guy steelworker who has had to deal with a lot worse discrimination than his kid has faced…yet. Green also has a partially deaf brother, who, like Peter Davidek, is a good kid who is very susceptible to crossing over into a bad place. None of this is in the current book, but it was in my head and I can’t wait to explore his dimensions more in another story. Meanwhile, I hope Green’s arc in Brutal Youth is one people like, too.

SP: I’m pretty sure I just heard the word “sequel” there… but I’ll let that go for the moment. Brutal Youth is most certainly a book to be read and enjoyed by adults, but in the past year it seems that you've made a definite connection with young adult readers.

AB: I was surprised by that. Brutal Youth is set in the early 1990s, and the publisher felt it was too dark and too long ago to connect with YA readers. That has proven to be wildly off-mark. Young readers have written some of the most passionate reviews and been the biggest supporters of it.

SP: And this makes sense, given the high school setting of the novel, but also shows the sophistication of your younger readers.

AB: They are vastly more sophisticated than most grown-ups assume. It’s funny, because Brutal Youth is partly about how adults lose touch with the intensity of that age, and forget how emotional and significant it can be.

SP: I know that genre classification can be tricky, and a pain in the ass most of the time, but would you consider Brutal Youth to be a "young adult" novel or an adult novel accessible to teenagers as well? 

AB: I always just thought of it as a novel, same as I did for The Catcher in the Rye, which was never described as a “YA book” even though it definitely appeals to kids who are Holden Caulfield’s age. But now, I embrace the YA designation. I wrote this book for people who are still growing and changing, regardless of their age. That’s what YA means to me, and it’s a vibrant, lively place on the book world.

SP: With this in mind, who do you think has responded more strongly to Brutal Youth, adults or young adults? Does this have any impact on the novel's perceived genre?

AB: Young readers are definitely more intense about it. I think they are a little more big-hearted and forgiving of the mistakes the characters make, and they understand complexity, the mix of happiness and sadness, in ways they amaze me. Adults tend to want escapism, and they’re the ones who get angry when the bad go unpunished and the good pay a price for doing the right thing. I think that’s funny. Adults want the fantasy. Kids get bittersweet a little better.

SP: So with the school year ending, and teachers slipping into summer mode, I think it's a good time to remember the impact teachers can have on their students. Most of my own high school teachers linger in a faceless cloud, but I still remember by fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Castle, who marked me as a writer from the start and nurtured my creativity. 

AB: The best teachers don’t just teach the kid in front of them. They see the teenager or the adult that kid could become and teach them, too.

SP: In the acknowledgments of Brutal Youth you honor a former teacher of yours, John Carosella. Can you tell me a little more about him? Have there been any other teachers along the way who deserve a shout out for guiding you in the direction of becoming an author?

AB: Mr. C. started at my high school the same year I did, 1990, and he just retired after 25 years. Now he’s going to start his own school for creative arts, which I’m eager to support any way I can. Very early on, he figured out that all my anger and sarcasm and nervous energy could be put to good use in writing. I was a hopeless case in a lot of ways, but he cared about me like I was his own kid.

I was a rotten student. A smartass. Lazy, too. I never did the assigned reading, and when he asked me why, I said I didn’t care about any of these dumb old stories he was teaching. This surprised him because he knew that I liked to read Stephen King, so he said, “What if I teach a Stephen King story?” This caught me off guard, and caught my attention. All I had to do was read a month’s worth of short stories on the class schedule, and then we’d start the next month he would teach a Stephen King story of my choosing. I did it, and eventually the class read “The Reaper’s Image” from King’s short story collection Skeleton Crew. Carosella didn’t have to bribe me again. From that point on, we spoke each other’s language.

He did countless other things to help me too, and he rescued all sorts of other troubled kids who were on the edge. Many teachers are just as happy to let them fall off, but Mr. C…he made sure we never fell too far.

SP: Even though this has been your year to shine, you've been tremendously supportive of other authors. Sometimes the literary community can be a safe harbor for new writers and sometimes it can be a pool of vicious sharks, circling for blood.

AB: That’s true. It’s a lot like starting a new job or starting high school!

SP: Is there anything you've learned this past year that you'd most like to pass on to new authors before they dive into the world of publishing?

AB: If you’re just starting out, it’s okay to wave your own flag. When you get big and famous and rich, then you can be cool and coy and never tweet about your work. But…don’t only tweet about yourself. Use social media to talk about other things, and talk about other authors, too. There’s a Jewish proverb that I think encapsulates everything you need to know about life: “If I don’t stand for myself, who will stand for me? But if I stand only for myself … what am I?” Share the love. You’ll get more in return that way.

SP: I couldn’t agree more! Is there anything you wish that you had known ahead of time to prepare you for the world of a debut author?

AB: As far as the business goes, I learned eventually, but I did it the hard way, and I think that ignorance hurt me at times. Most new writers spend their time devoted to crafting the best story they can, but as you venture forth, be sure to talk to other scribes about the business, too—especially about how to tell a good agent from a bad agent. Agents are your Sherpa through this treacherous landscape, and a lousy one is worse than no guide at all. Be sure you are working with people who believe in you.

SP: And finally, of course, I have to ask what's next. With Brutal Youth just now arriving in paperback and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” which you cover and write about for Entertainment Weekly, premiering this winter, you've got another busy year ahead of you. Still, I'm a selfish fan and already impatient to read more of your work. Can you whisper any details?

AB: About “Star Wars?” Hmm…Everything I know for sure, I write about ASAP. So I’m a little short of scoops here. I’ve heard some interesting things about the new actors and what their familial connection to some of the older characters may be. I can’t say anything yet, because I don’t know definitively, but if it pans out, I think people who love “Star Wars” will be very surprised. Sorry to be mysterious. I’m playing it a little safe because there is so much out there about these movies that is dead wrong.

As for fiction, I'm working on a new novel that's in the supernatural suspense/thriller genre. An old house. A troubled family. A secret history. Things that don't wait around for the night to go bumping around. I'm having a lot of fun playing around in this creepy place. No matter what else I'm doing, I want to go spend time in it. I hope readers feel the same when it's finished.

To learn more about Anthony Breznican, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @Breznican. Also check out Writer's Bone's first interview with the author. 

Steph Post is the author of A Tree Born Crooked , blogger, teacher, music lover, and fervent Writer's Bone supporter! 

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Championing Storytellers: How the Writers Guild Foundation Encourages Aspiring Screenwriters

By Sean Tuohy

There are now a lot of great resources for inspiring screenwriters, but one of the most useful can be found at the Writers Guild Foundation. The WGF is a nonprofit institution designed to help screenwriters learn and better their craft. Managing director Joanne Lammers was kind of nice to sit down and discuss the WGF’s resources and how to help the institution.

Sean Tuohy: What is the history of the Writers Guild Foundation?

Joanne Lammers: The WGF was founded in 1966 as a nonprofit philanthropic institution separate from the Writer’s Guild of America. The WGF Library opened in 1984 as a non-circulating public resource for aspiring writers and scholars. The WGF Archive was created in 2011 to care for the rich history of writers and the WGA. The WGF's mission is to preserve and promote the art, craft, and history of screen storytelling and storytellers. In addition to the library and archive, we also have writing programs for veterans and high school students.

ST: For an inspiring screenwriter what some resources they can find at the Writers Guild Foundation?

JL: We are only the library on the planet devoted solely to screenwriting. We have scripts that range from the dawn of early cinema dating as early as 1908 to classical Hollywood and the golden age of television to the most current web series and video games. We're known for having rare show bibles and development materials such as Shonda Rhimes' pitch outline for “Grey's Anatomy” and scripts for hot new shows such as “Empire” and “Transparent.” The crown jewel of the library is Billy Wilder's personal desk set of every script he ever wrote from “The Apartment” to “Sunset Boulevard.” The members of our enthusiastic reference team all have backgrounds and degrees in film and television history and writing, as well as advanced degrees in archival studies.

ST: What are some upcoming WGF programs that writers could use?

JL: We're currently planning our programs for the fiscal year, but typical events include TV Craft Day, Film Craft Day, and Serial Dramas. Past events have featured panels with the writers of “Breaking Bad,” “The Walking Dead,” and “Mad Men.” We have also held several Write-a-Thons where we kept the library open until 11:00 p.m. during contest and fellowship deadlines. You can check out past events highlighted in our podcasts at iTunes, our WGF Blog and on our YouTube channel.

ST: How can writers give back to the WGF?

JL: We are a non-profit without an endowment and rely on donations to stay open. Even $5 can help us provide more events. Information about how to donate is at our official website. Writers can also volunteer to assist during programs. Additionally, when a writer becomes a showrunner or writes a feature that is produced, she or he can donate their papers to the library and archive to inspire future writers.

To learn more about the Writers Guide Foundation, visit the organization’s official website, like its Facebook page, or follow the WGF on Twitter @WritersGuildF.

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Standing By Every Sentence: 11 Questions With Author Molly Antopol

Molly Antopol

By Daniel Ford

Author Molly Antopol’s short story collection The UnAmericans was longlisted for the National Book Award and was called “beautiful, funny, fearless, exquisitely crafted, and truly novelistic in scope” by author Jesmyn Ward. Antopol was also named a 2013 National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree.

The author talked to me recently about her writing career, what inspired The UnAmericans, and her love of short stories.

Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

Molly Antopol: It wasn’t a conscious decision, exactly. I’ve always read a lot. As a kid, I had a bunch of imaginary friends and my mother says I used to spend full days writing myself into whatever book I was reading. But writing as a career felt to me like a pie-in-the-sky profession, like being an astronaut or a magician. I figured I’d sneak in time to write when I wasn’t working—when I was young I wanted to be a marine biologist or a zoologist.

DF: Who were some of your early influences?

MA: Grace Paley has had an enormous influence on me. I admire her stories for so many reasons: for their intellect, humor, poetic compression, and emotional generosity. I first read Paley in a literature seminar in college, and it was only then that I truly understood how compassionate and direct stories can be without ever veering into sentimentality. And she writes such gorgeous sentences without ever seeming like she’s showing off. Most of all, I love how character-driven her stories are while still giving us a nuanced sense of the larger political landscape—the politics of her fiction feels like such an essential part of the people she writes about that I never feel she’s being didactic or forcing any opinions on me.

The books I read as a kid were also hugely important in my becoming a writer, in particular Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy and Lois Lowry’s Anastasia Krupnick series. I recently reread those books and found them just as fantastic as I had as a kid—both Fitzhugh and Lowry write with so much warmth and self-awareness and what feels like genuine love for their characters. I also loved books about explorers as a kid, particularly Gulliver’s Travels and Call of the Wild—even as an adult, I’m happiest when I’m outdoors, off on some kind of adventure.

DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?

MA: I write on all the days I don’t teach. I write best in the mornings, before my day gets too cluttered. And I always turn off my phone and email—I’m horribly addicted to the Internet and can begin by researching one small (yet essential!) detail for a story can often lead to a three-hour black hole from which I only emerge once I’ve learned everything I can about something wholly unrelated to my book.

I don’t have a lucky pen or anything like that. If I can sit down and get something done, it doesn’t matter if I’m dressed or still in my pajamas, or have my music on or off.

DF: We’re huge fans of the short story genre here at Writer’s Bone. What is it about the format that appeals to you?

MA: I’ve always loved short stories. The stories I admire most feel novelistic in scope, where you can feel a writer pouring everything she has into it until there’s nothing left. I feel that way about so many writers, including Deborah Eisenberg, Alice Munro, Andrea Barrett, Edward P. Jones and Edith Pearlman. Whenever I was struggling with my book, I found myself searching out interviews with them, looking for nuggets of inspiration that might help along the way. I learned about Pearlman’s love of Dickens, that Munro doesn’t show work-in-progress to anyone, and that for Eisenberg, the earliest seeds of a story begin for her with an image or a phrase, and “sometimes a kind of tonality … almost as if I was writing a piece of music.”

DF: How long did it take you to complete The UnAmericans?

MA: Ten years. For many of those years, I basically wrote into a vacuum. I didn’t send my stories out and tried not to think about how the collection would come together as a whole—I just focused on trying to make each story work the way I hoped it would.

It was really important for me to keep my blinders on the whole time. For some reason, the excitement of seeing my friends publish never pushed me to write faster—instead, it just made me want to tune out any writing business-related noise so I could focus entirely on the book I wanted to write, regardless of whether or not anyone would ultimately be interested in publishing it.

DF: Did the ideas for each story originate differently when you were planning out the collection, or did you find ways to connect them during the writing process?

MA: Many of the earliest stories I wrote were set during the McCarthy era and inspired by my family history, notably their involvement in the Communist Party. I was about halfway into writing the book when I realized my stories all explored, in some way or another, the triangle between Cold War-era East European politics, Jewish American liberalism, and the effect they had on contemporary Israel. But that was totally subconscious. And it was only once all the stories were done that I discovered they weren’t linked by setting or character but by a question I hadn’t even realized I’d been asking myself: What are the complicated—and sometimes devastating—effects that one person’s quest to improve the world have on the people closest to them?

DF: How much of yourself—and the people you have daily interactions with—did you put into your main characters? How do you develop your characters in general?

MA: Well, my book doesn’t contain any stories about women in their 30s living in San Francisco, but I do feel that it is autobiographical in the sense that it captures what I cared about, questioned and obsessed over during the 10 years that I was writing it. It was only at that halfway mark I mentioned that I realized that all of the stories were in conversation with each other.

DF: What are some of the themes you tackle in the collection?

MA: Growing up, I’d always associated the word “Un-American” solely with the Red Scare in America, and the 1950s-era stories in my book grew largely out of my attempt to understand what it might have been like for my family to grow up under the shadow of McCarthyism.

As I wrote more stories, I became fascinated by the complicated meaning the word might have to this current generation of Israelis, forced to contend every day with their country’s messy and symbiotic relationship to America. Some of my other stories are about East Europeans immigrating to America. I was really interested in thinking about this notion of “Un-American-ness” for these characters—dissidents and academics, banned artists and writers—who risked their lives for their politics in their mother countries and are then forced to reinvent their identities in the United States, a country where they’re treated as anything but American. I kept thinking about the complicated emotional impact the fall of communism might have had on my characters during that time. I thought about what it might have felt like to dedicate oneself to a cause that, in the course of world events, comes to an end—and wondered whether some people might have had a niggling feeling of nostalgia for that bleak time, simply because they held a significant place in it. For so many of my characters, their entire sense of self is shaped by their political work, and I wanted to explore how having lived under surveillance in Eastern Europe influences their lives once they immigrate to America, where they quickly realize that not only are they no longer being watched—they’re no longer being noticed.

DF: Your book received rave reviews from a variety of media outlets and was longlisted for the National Book Award. What’s that experience been like and what are your future plans?

MA: I’ve found it fascinating to have a book out in the world and to see how people have responded to it. It’s an incredible feeling to read and hear peoples’ responses to characters who had lived solely in my mind for so long. I was incredibly honored (and surprised!) to be longlisted for the National Book Award. It was thrilling to get the news, and to be in such amazing company. Writing is often such a solitary pursuit; it was wonderful to get recognition from people who are not related to me!

As to what’s next, I’m working a novel, called The After Party. It’s set in the United States and Israel. But I’m superstitious about discussing a book-in-progress—I shouldn’t say anything else!

DF: What advice would you give writers just starting out?

MA: That there’s no rush to get published, that it’s okay to spend years reading and writing and messing up, until you feel truly great about the work they’re putting out. When I was first writing stories, an older writer gave me a piece of advice that’s resonated over the years: you only get one chance to have a first book, so make sure you stand behind every one of your sentences.

DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?

MA: They filmed “The Wonder Years” at my high school.

To learn more about Molly Antopol, visit her official website, like her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter @MollyAntopol.

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Writing All Day: 10 Questions With Author Anne Enright

Anne Enright (photo credit: Hugh Chaloner)

By Daniel Ford

Anne Enright, author of The Gathering, The Forgotten Waltz, and, most recently, The Green Road graciously took time away from promoting her new novel to answer my questions about her early influences, her writing process, and what it means to be the first Laureate for Irish Fiction.

Daniel Ford: Did you grow up wanting to be a writer, or was it a desire that built up over time?

Anne Enright: I am beginning to think that “writer” is a word like “woman” or “heterosexual” or even ‘Irish.” We think of it as some essential characteristic, when “being a writer” is just a question of typing. A writer is someone who puts words on a page and then turns those pages into a book and then publishes that book. I could spend half my day “being” a gardener, but no one would notice, much (I spend at least five minutes a day “being” a mother). I write all day. I work. I mean I work on my sentences; how they move and what they mean. I find writing things like this interview quite painful, because the prose is so provisional, the insights too easy. But I am not sure I spend much time “being” a writer. 

I used to write at school, and then I wrote out of school, a bit, and then I kept writing whether any one wanted to read the stuff or not. And then they did want to read it. The last few months are the first in maybe 30 years when I haven’t been working on a piece of fiction. It feels okay.

DF: Who were some of your early influences?

AE: The houses of poets were pointed out to me when I was a girl. At least two respected poets lived near us in Dublin—one wrote in Irish, the other in English, Máirtín Ó Díreáin and Austin Clarke. Kitty, the woman who came to “do” for my mother on a Friday, used to walk up and down the hall imitating W.B. Yeats on his walk around St Stephens Green. Writers were known, respected, slightly transgressive figures in my childhood. Meanwhile, I read everything I could lay my hands on, from the age of four to, maybe 28. When I started writing I read less, but for those two decades I read maybe a book a day. Maybe.

DF: What is your writing process like? Has it changed at all since you first started writing?

AE: I work all the time. I have always worked all the time. I am slightly more productive after 30 years, but not much more productive. Every time I start a book I face the same wall I faced the last time out. I spend a lot of time looking at the wall.

DF: You haven’t tied yourself down to any one genre in your career, writing everything from short stories to essays. Is that a reflection of your personality or were you just following where your stories led? And do you have a particular favorite genre?

AE: I wrote non-fiction in order to fund my fiction writing and to maintain a profile in the three or four years between publications, so it started as a practical thing, but I came to enjoy working a non-fiction voice. I don’t like feeling stuck. I used to keep a number of things on the go so, if I hit an impasse, I would switch and work on something else for a day or two. By the time I came back, many of the apparent problems would have solved themselves. They say a change is as good as a rest, and this works for me. Changing formats is my idea of a rest. 

DF: Your novels have explored a mix of family, sex, relationships, and Ireland’s past and present, and that trend continues in our most recent novel, The Green Road. What is it about those themes that keep inspiring material for you, and what were some of the other themes you explore in this novel? 

AE: Actually, I don’t think I am writing about Ireland, sex, family, I think of myself as writing about some more fundamental problem like “compassion.” This was my chief concern while writing The Green Road. Ireland, and the rest of it, is just the stuff I have at hand. It is in my life, it is all around me. People said The Gathering was about family but it was about history, memory, and imagination. The reader psychologizes all the time, the critic historicizes. I think my problems are more...philosophical. I mean there is some question I have to figure out, so I sit down and write a book so as to see what the question might be. That problem is not “Ireland.” It is not “sex” or “family.” The problem is bigger, more vague: like, “How do we live?” “Who are we when we are alone?”

DF: Where did the idea for The Green Road originate, and how long did it take you to finish it?

AE: I started writing in June 2012 and “finished” in, say, September 2014. It is hard to say when a book is finished there is so much small work on galleys and proofs—this went on until December 2014—and besides the book isn’t ever finished so much as “published.”

As to where the idea came from, can I quote the poet Michael Longley by saying: “If I knew where I ideas came from, I would go back and get some more.”

DF: The book revolves the Madigan family’s matriarch, Rosaleen, who watches her children grew up and struggle in a variety of different ways throughout the narrative. Where did Rosaleen and her brood come from in your imagination, and how much of yourself ended up in each character?

AE: These are great mysteries. I see aspects of myself in each of Rosaleen’s children, and I see myself in Rosaleen towards the end of the book, perhaps, when she is a small figure in the landscape. I mean, I wrote the book, so in a way it is all me, and not me at all.

DF: In January 2015, you were named the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. Congrats! What does the position entail, and what has it meant to you personally?

AE: It is a great honor, and has meant a great deal to me personally. For three years I will represent Irish fiction. I will give some lectures, curate some events. I will also teach in University College Dublin and, in the spring of 2016, at New York University.

DF: What advice would you give aspiring authors?

AE: Forget prizes. Ignore the world, engage the world. Do not become an object to other people; your book is a shifting, living manifestation of the subjective self. It happens not for the crowd but for one reader at a time. It happens not in the room but in the reader’s head.

DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?

AE: I like gardening.

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Precision Fiction: 9 Questions With Done in One Authors Jan Thomas and Grant Jerkins

By Daniel Ford

As you can see above, Done in One has a cover that compels you to pick up the book. I saw bullets on the cover and immediately knew it would be something Sean Tuohy and I would love (I plan on putting the book in his hands after he gets back from his globetrotting).

I’ll have more to say about the novel, which features a sniper working for a California S.W.A.T. team supported by his equally badass wife, in our upcoming 5 Books That Should Be On Your Radar, but in the meantime, enjoy my interview with authors Jan Thomas and Grant Jerkins.   

Daniel Ford: Did you grow up wanting to be a writer or was it a desire that built up over time?

Jan Thomas: In my case, I’ve just always been a writer. Even in my earliest memories, when people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said “a writer” (The jury is still out on whether I’ve actually grown up or not!). I was just born with it. I thought everyone could write poetry with words that rhyme or craft sentences with symmetry and cadence. I believed everyone could spell big words, and/or inherently know how to pronounce or spell new words. It just came naturally to me.

I wrote greeting cards, award certificates, poems, songs, short stories, speeches, training manuals…anything and everything. No matter what else was going on in my life, writing was with me, always.

Grant Jerkins: I always wanted to be a writer. I can’t remember ever wanting to be anything else. My big regret is that I didn’t start putting any real effort into it until later in life. I figured all my odd jobs and wild ways would be enough credentials, but it turns out you have to practice.

DF: Who were some of your early influences and current favorites?

JT: Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Joseph Wambaugh, Jack London, V.C. Andrews, and Archie Comic Books were all favorites growing up. These past few years, my reading has been almost exclusively true crime and some of those great writers are M. William Phelps, Ann Rule, Gregg Olsen, and Aphrodite Jones.

When we started getting blurbs or quotes from other authors about Done in One, I vowed to read at least one book by every author who so generously helped us along the way. In so doing, I happily stumbled upon John Gilstrap (and am blazing through all of his books!), John Verdon, John Burley, and others, like, oh…say, Grant Jerkins! I realized I’d been missing all sorts of fun and cool stuff while my brain was filled with serial killers and crime scene tape.

To this day, Stephen King sells me a hardback every time he publishes anything. Dean Koontz is another who can easily get my head out of the crime stuff and into some fun and excitement. They are both incredibly gifted and vastly prolific writers. Just the thought that something I wrote might be read and enjoyed by Stephen King is like the golden ring on the carousel. To evoke emotion in either of these authors would be my wildest dream come true.

GJ: I’m a big King fan, too. My favorites are James M. Cain, Hemmingway, Matheson, Ketchum, Octavia Butler, Lawrence Block, Salinger, Flannery O’Connor, Larry Brown, Horace McCoy, Jim Thompson, and tons more.

DF: What are your individual writing processes like, and how did you collaborate on Done in One?

JT: I spent 15 years writing a weekly humor column for the Mountain Democrat (a California newspaper). I had learned the power of a well written first person essay in high school (thank you Mr. Purdy!) but having to write weekly and also having to make sure the material was funny seemed daunting at first. But I was able to hone certain skills about crafting the piece.

So, much as a stand-up comedian might, I would riff about topics in the news or personal things that I would notice and then point out. I often did it out loud first. I would usually see something ridiculous and then start adding commentary about what was going on (in accents, if need be, whatever it took!). Or I’d verbalize captions to a picture or commercial. Grist for my mill seemed to be everywhere! I would often finish my verbal venting by saying “And that is this week’s column!” My sniper never had to read my work, he was living it with me!

Another great benefit to writing so much so often was that once I wrote something down, it was out of me. I know some of you other writers will know exactly what I mean. Much like writing a letter you’ll never send, or keeping a diary (or journal), once it was written down, whatever bad feelings I had about a situation were out of me and on the page. I no longer had to labor over it or reflect on it. It became finished business. Writing can be a great stress reliever. It’s like having a weight taken off of your shoulders. 

For screenwriting, I see ideas everywhere. So I keep pens and paper everywhere so that when inspiration strikes, I can capture it in a few lines and then stick it in a file, like adding a gem to a treasure chest. Often I’ll find that ideas have something in common and then I have a whole new concept and a motivation to write more of the story. I write it all down. Editing things is simple. So I keep snippets of everything that moves me in any way (anger, sorrow and frustration included!) and use it in my work. Some of it is never read by anyone but me, but I still grow as a writer in the process.

GJ: When it comes to writing, I’m either all in or all out. Full steam ahead, or dead stop. So, we didn’t do a whole lot of passing the manuscript back and forth. It was hard for me to start/stop like that. I needed to always be moving forward.

DF: Where did the idea for Done in One originate?

JT: This story is based on my real life. I’ve been trying to tell this story for 15 years. It began life as a screenplay. I wanted the world to know that there are snipers among us and no one seems to notice them. When snipers are discussed, most people think about the military and/or Black Ops guys. But on every S.W.A.T. team in America there is a highly trained and skilled sniper. This story was a way to out all of them without outing a single one of them, since snipers treasure their anonymity above all else. They just want to get in unnoticed, handle their business and get out unnoticed. And the reason this story is so important, (important enough to keep trying to tell it for a decade and a half) is because I am married to a S.W.A.T. sniper.

Grant and I “met” (not in person yet!) over this story when it was a screenplay. He understood the material right away and he’s the one who eventually suggested we use the screenplay like a template or outline and turn it into a novel. He said we could flesh out our characters and give them room to grow and show us who they are. I could never have told this story without Grant. He is an incredibly gifted writer and I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to work with him. Grant’s dynamic plot twists and brilliant writing are things I will always treasure.

Our collaboration method seemed odd at first, with both of us writing chunks independently and then, with those chunks in place, we gave notes to each other and then we refined it. We edited and added until we fell into an easy routine, using the screenplay as the outline reminding us where we were going and where we needed to end up. We talked on the phone several times, but mainly we communicated through e-mails, sometimes several times a day. The truth is we are both present in every single sentence of the book. We both wrote it as one.

And even though we collaborated, our voices seemed to mesh throughout the entire process. As I so often say, “Alone, neither one of us could have told this story, but together we couldn’t fail to tell this story.”

DF: How much of yourselves ended up in your main characters?

JT: For me, personally, this could easily be a non-fiction book. The main characters are based completely on my sniper and I. When we decided to give Done in One a try as a novel, I committed to dig deep and bare my soul in the process. In order to show how it works, being married to a “professional killer,” I had to give as much of myself to Jill as possible.

It was actually kind of fascinating the way it all transpired because my sniper retired shortly before Grant proposed the “let’s try it as a novel” thing. It wasn’t until a few years after my sniper’s retirement that I fully realized the incredibly regimented way we were living.

GJ: Since this was based on Jan’s life, not a whole lot of me ended up on the page this time around. But I was very interested in getting everything just right and making sure things rang true to Jan’s ears.

DF: The crime/thriller genre has certain built-in tropes that can deter some writers from taking the plunge, but Done in One has a good hook. How did you two ensure that your tale was original?

JT: Because we knew all about the snipers in our midst and the public seemed completely oblivious. Even today, in the wake of “American Sniper,” people are slow to make the connection that “Holy cow, that cop we know who lives down the street…isn’t he on the S.W.A.T. Team? He could be one!” With the story being based on actual events, it kind of tells itself.

Grant makes a great analogy between Done in One and “The Godfather” and he is spot on. I think I’ll leave that for him to elaborate on so I don’t screw it up!

GJ: Yep, at some point, as we got deeper and deeper into this secret society, it occurred to me that we were doing something similar to what Mario Puzo had done. We were pulling back the curtain on a world and a culture that most people are completely unaware of. I felt honored to be a part of it, that Jan and her husband trusted me enough to share these intimate details. And what is more intimate than death? The giving of it, and the receiving of it.

DF:  Did you go through multiple drafts for Done in One?

JT: We didn’t go through multiple drafts. I’m sure it’s partially due to the benefit of the story already having an outline and being based on real events. Coupling that with the incredible way our voices meshed, had us of like mind 99% of the time.

GJ: Agreed. As the fine novelist John Farris said, “I don’t like rewrites, and I don’t do drafts.”

DF: What advice would you give to aspiring authors?

JT: Dare to dream it, hope it, reach for it or go for it, and be prepared to work hard. As I’ve said, I’ve been trying to tell this story for 15 years. That takes stamina, patience and an “I don’t quit…ever” attitude. Learn the submission rules of your chosen field and follow them. Then, start sending your work out there. What’s the worst that can happen? They say “No, thank you.” Well, if you never asked the question at all, the answer would still be the same so what harm is there in that?

 And at some point, finish your current project. I harken to something another writer once said “A novel is never finished, it is abandoned.”

DF: Can you both tell us one random fact about yourselves?

JT: I have a serious pen fetish. It has to write in black ink (left over habit from medic days). But other than needing black ink, I love them all! There is no such thing as too many pens! I burn through them. My sniper prefers pencils, but as I so succinctly point out “Pencils come with erasers. Pencils are for people who make mistakes. When you write in ink, it better be right!” This usually results in a pencil being hurled in my direction. Okay, I made that last part up.

GJ: Here’s a weird, spooky one: In 1999 (or so) I collaborated on a screenplay in which the central plot event involved terrorists crashing a hijacked Concorde into the World Trade Center, bringing down both towers and devastating lower Manhattan.

Jan Thomas

To learn more about Jan Thomas, visit her official website.

Grant Jerkins

To learn more about Grant Jerkins, visit his official website.

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A Conversation With Best-Selling Thriller Author Melissa Miller

Melissa Miller

By Sean Tuohy

Best-selling author Melissa Miller’s path toward becoming a published writer was not your average journey. Miller practiced law and became a small business owner before sitting down and dedicating herself to the writing craft.

Miller took some time away from her thrilling Sasha McCandless series to sit down and talk with me about how she became a published author, her research process, and how being a lawyer helped her writing.

Sean Tuohy: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

Melissa Miller: I was one of those kids who was "writing" stories in kindergarten. Even then, I was a fan of the mystery and thriller genre. One early work involved mysteriously disappearing food. Spoiler: a raccoon was the antagonist.

I was a literature/creative writing major in college, but by then "writer" no longer seemed to be a viable career path. So I didn't complete my first (terrible, hidden in a drawer) effort at a novel until I was in my late 30s—a practicing attorney, a small business owner, and the mother of young children.

ST: How did your career in law affect your writing style?

MM: My legal background comes into play in the Sasha McCandless series and, to a lesser extent, in the Aroostine Higgins series. I don't think being a lawyer affects my writing style, per se. Legal writing and fiction writing are dramatically different creatures. And, as a lawyer, I could never fictionalize one of my client's situations because that would be a breach of ethics. But being a lawyer does make the legal research I do for each book much easier than it would otherwise be. And, while I know many lawyers who write romance or historical fiction or what have you, I think my legal career affected my choice of genre in the sense that I write what I enjoy reading.

ST: How much of yourself do you find in your main heroine Sasha McCandless?

MM: I joke that, like Sasha, I drink entirely too much coffee, but that unlike Sasha, I cannot kill you with my bare hands. There's truth in that, but it's also true that at least in the very early books in that series, the non-life-threatening situations that she had to navigate—big law firm politics, balancing work and live, maintaining a relationship in the face of career demand—were drawn from my own experiences. Sasha doesn't always respond the same way I would, of course. And as time has gone on, our paths have diverged dramatically. She's a danger magnet, and, to date, there hasn't even been a single attempt on my life!

ST: What is your writing process like?

MM: I typically begin with an idea, a topic that I want to write about. For instance, I find the use of drones in military exercises and the use of unarmed drones for commercial purposes to be fascinating. So I knew I wanted to write about that. However, I also realized that isn't a Sasha story—so I wrote Chilling Effect in the Aroostine Higgins series. If I'm looking for a specific “seed” idea for a Sasha novel, I pretty much follow her life trajectory. Each book in that series has a main thriller plot that derives from a legal principle and a subplot in her personal life that ties into that same theme.

Once I've got my theme, things get a little messy. On occasion, I write a synopsis. I sometimes outline; I sometimes don't. I sometimes write in a very disciplined, 200 words a day manner; I sometimes channel my inner law student and do a week of all-nighters. Eventually, through the application of copious amounts of black coffee and dark chocolate, I end up with a finished draft. From there, the process could go one of two ways: My husband (my first reader) reads the draft and gives his feedback. I either agree and accept it graciously or fight with him, whine at him, and ultimately accept it. That's not to say I make all of the changes he suggests, but I do trust him as a reader. After that first painful revision, I'm able to set my authorial ego aside. Subsequent copy editing, line editing, or proofreading changes, don't trouble me. I'll accept them if they add clarity, correct errors, and otherwise improve the story; I'll reject them if I think they interfere with the story I'm telling. But there's no more angsting after the first round of revisions.

At this point, I have several stories (in three different series) waiting to be told, so as soon as I hand off the manuscript to the editing team, I start noodling on the next thing I will write.

ST: Do you do a lot of research before writing?

MM: I do. I probably do too much research. But I'm a researcher at heart, so I enjoy the process of immersing myself in a topic and learning as much as I can. I probably use 10% to 15% of what I learn.

ST: What does the future hold for you and Sasha?

MM: I plan to continue to write the Sasha series as long as it continues to resonate with readers. Spoiler alert: she found out at the end of Book 7 (Irrefutable Evidence) that she's pregnant. Obviously, motherhood is going to create some new challenges for a crime-solving attorney. I have her next two books sketched out. I also have story ideas sketched out for the next books in my Aroostine Higgins series and my We Sisters Three Mystery series. I also have plans to give forensic pathologist Bodhi King (one of the characters from the Sasha McCandless series) his own medical thriller series. So, while I have plenty planned for Sasha, she's going to have to be patient and share my attention with the other voices in my head!

ST: What advice do you give to first time writers?

MM: I don't have anything groundbreaking to add to the annals of writing advice: read widely; write consistently; tell your story. I will say that it's important to avoid the trap of polishing your first three chapters forever. Write down the words and then move on. A finished draft is a huge accomplishment. Three perfect chapters that suck up all your free time and energy are likely to result in an unfinished manuscript that weighs you down. The first draft might suck, but it might not. And even if it does, you can fix it, but you can't fix what you don't write. That perfect story lives only in your head. Commit it to paper in all its imperfection and trust that it will resonate with someone.

ST: Can you tell us one random fact about yourself?

MM: Readers may be surprised to know that my lawyer-husband and I homeschool our children, largely by driving them around the United States in an RV, visiting cultural landmarks, national parks, and historic places.

To learn more about Melissa Miller, visit her official website, like her Facebook page, or follow the author on Twitter @melissafmiller.

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A Conversation About Writing and War With Green on Blue Author Elliot Ackerman

Elliot Ackerman

By Dave Pezza

I wrote in a recent Bruce, Bourbon, and Books that Eliot Ackerman’s debut novel Green on Blue “perfectly balances on the line of critiquing American ideals in a Middle Eastern society and the illuminating the struggle of the honest Afghan men and women who try only to survive in this contested land they call home.”

Ackerman recently answered some of my questions about why he wanted to be a writer and how his involvement in Afghanistan shaped the characters and events in Green on Blue.  

Dave Pezza: Just wanted to say we’re passing our copy of Green on Blue around Writer’s Bone HQ, and it’s really a solid read. It’s not often you get a “war” novel that fights hard to not be preachy or jingoistic. Was this something you purposefully sought after or was it simply a product of your involvement in the conflict as a soldier during your five tours of duty?

Elliot Ackerman: Thank you, I am glad the novel resonates with the gang at Writer’s Bone. I am trying to picture your HQ. My mind projects bookcases filled with scotch, or maybe books…I am also getting a strong mahogany vibe. As to your question, the writing I admire is never didactic but generous. It shows the story instead of telling it, giving the reader room to inhabit the narrative. When I served in Afghanistan, it was exclusively as an advisor to Afghan troops. I wanted to show the war as I think they saw it. I wanted a western reader to stand in Afghan shoes. 

DP: The relationship of your characters, especially between Mr. Jack (the American CIA operative) and Commander Sabir (leader of the Afghan Special Lashkar unit) reads so real, so full of dishonesty and symbiotic necessity. Based on your work as a combat advisor for an Afghan commando unit, are these relationships as strained and convoluted as dramatized in your novel?

EA: The novel is most certainly not my experience, but it is informed by my understanding of the Afghan war. My ambition with the novel was to try to render that war in miniature, an incredibly complex conflict that’s been ongoing since 1979. I wanted to show the economies which surround war, the manner in which war elevates its participants—making them commanders, contractors, informants—and show how once those structures are in place war becomes a force which feeds on itself, often being fought for every reason but its end.

DP: The Afghan population, their poverty, and their struggle to simply make a living struck me the hardest throughout Green on Blue. Has this lifestyle changed at all since American involvement or after it for that matter?

EA: It’s difficult to say whether or not life is better for Afghans before or after the American led invasion of 2001. The only fact of which I am certain is that Afghan life is worse since war came there in 1979. In the novel I wanted to show how that life, one filled with the privation and violence, brings conventional, western notions of right and wrong into question. Very little is black and white when life is lived in those extremes, morality becomes relative to circumstance.

DP: Has writing been a passion of yours? When did you know you wanted to be a writer, and how did that affect your decision, if at all, to join the military?

EA: I always knew I wanted to write. My mother is a novelist so I grew up around it. I studied literature and history at university, taking creative writing classes with Andre Dubus III at Tufts. I also always knew I wanted to join the military. I came into the service as a Marine infantryman in 2003 which, with the beginning of the Iraq War, was an interesting time to be joining. I spent eight years going in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan. I didn’t have the space to write much during this time, let alone to publish. It was only after deciding that chapter in my life was over that I was able to turn to writing full time.

DP: It seems Green on Blue has been getting some good attention, and rightfully so! Did you think that Americans would take so kindly to a war novel told from the Afghan perspective?

EA: I’m not sure what I expected. Writing a novel is a very intimate experience. You have this close relationship with the work for such time, showing it to only a few trusted people along the way. Then on a certain date it is published and out in the world—readers are engaging with it. And, if you are lucky, some of your readers will share the intimacy you had with the work, its characters and the story. If another feels that emotion, if it’s been transferred from author to reader than the book is a success. This type of emotional transference is the goal of all art, and where it has happened with Green on Blue I feel enormous satisfaction. 

DP: What’s next? You’re based out of Istanbul writing about the ongoing Syrian Civil War. Can we expect an equally compelling account of that very complex conflict?

EA: In addition to the reportage I file from the region, I’ve also been working on a novel which is set on the Turkish-Syrian border. It is a love story, and won’t say much more than that.

DP: Any tips for writers and veterans who are trying to get their own work and experiences published?

EA: My father used to tell me that you don’t find a vocation by imagining the best aspects of a job and then deciding you’d like to do it—so you don’t decide to be a musician by imagining thunderous applause at Carnegie Hall, or to be an entrepreneur by imagining your billion dollar IPO in Silicon Valley. He used to say you find your vocation by imagining the worst aspects of a job, asking yourself if you still feel compelled to embark on that type of work, and then, only if you answered in the affirmative, you might have found your vocation. There are parts of writing which are wonderful—the work when it’s going well, publishing, friendships with other writers, interacting with readers—and there are parts which are miserable—the work when it’s going poorly, rejection, indifference from readers. If you see no other way than to write, then write. But success and failure will come hand in hand, so have an appetite for your failures.

DP: Can you give us one random fact about yourself?

EA: How about two truths and a lie? Maybe you can publish the lie in very tiny print at the bottom of this interview:

a)  I once ran with the bulls alongside Dennis Rodman in Spain.

b)  I was once lost at sea off the coast of Mexico.

c)  I collect rare butterflies.

To learn more about Elliot Ackerman, visit his official website or follow him on Twitter @elliotackerman.

Answer: c is the lie.

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Making A Vocation Out of An Avocation: 9 Questions With Author Alan Russell

Alan Russell

By Sean Tuohy

Alan Russell’s best-selling mystery novel Burning Man introduced readers to a new and furry crime fighting duo: wisecracking LAPD detective Michael Gideon and his K9 partner Sirius.

Russell doesn’t write standard tough cop novel; his books are filled with heart and compassion. He also pulls readers in with his crisp dialogue, fast-moving plot, and keeps readers on edge with sudden twist and turns. I was lucky enough to sit and chat with Russell about his writing process and how he learned to play the “what if” game.

Sean Tuohy: What led you to writing?

Alan Russell: I can’t imagine not being a writer. From an early age (seven or eight) I knew what I wanted to do. The only other profession that ever interested me was being a professional baseball player (and after my strike zone got too big, professional basketball player). The major difficulty was making a vocation out of my avocation.

ST: What authors influenced you growing up?

AR: I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in sixth grade and was absolutely wowed. My favorite genres as a young man were fantasy and science fiction. I loved the fiction of Harlan Ellison, Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, and Ray Bradbury. In my early 20s I started reading more crime fiction. John MacDonald was a favorite of mine. I bought every Travis McGee book. I enjoyed Ross MacDonald as well. There was a period of about a decade where I was reading two books a day. As W. Somerset Maugham said, “If I only had the back of a Worcestershire sauce to read, that’s what I’d read.”

ST: Can you explain your "what if" game?

AR: A lot of my novels have been written just because I’ve asked myself the question, “What if?” For example, what if you were the son of a serial murderer (the basis for my novel Shame)? What would your life be like? What would you do to escape your past? Would the “sins of the father” be revisited upon you? Writers shouldn’t be afraid to daydream and imagine. You know you have something when you think “what if” about something, and that idea stays with you and you feel the need to learn more.

ST: Where did the partnership of LAPD detective Michael Gideon and Sirius come from?

AR: Friends of mine think Michael Gideon (my LAPD detective in Burning Man and Guardians of the Night) is more like me than any of my other characters. Gideon and I both certainly like to crack wise. As for his partner Sirius, I grew up with German shepherds. At this time, I also have three dogs. I wanted to write about this teaming of man and dog. Both of them bring something very important into the equation, and both are fiercely loyal to one another.

ST: Will we get to see the crime fighting duo soon?

AR: I am currently working on the third novel in the series and hope to finish in about six months. It’s been wonderful hearing from readers around the world. I could never have imagined the books would be best-sellers (Burning Man was a top ten best-seller, and Guardians of the Night actually hit number one).

ST: What is your writing process?

AR: I try to write every day. I don’t have a goal (such as write a certain amount of words or pages) other than to put in the time. The words will come if you make that commitment.

ST: Do you have any rituals you have to do before you begin a new novel?

AR: My books seem to have the gestation cycle of an elephant (i.e. 18 months). At a minimum, I know I am looking at a year of my life. I might not have any rituals per se, but I think it’s important to approach a book with a marathoner’s mentality. The race will be difficult, and grueling, and there will be times when I’ll hit the wall, but I have to gut it out to the finish line.

ST: What advice do you give to first time writers?

AR: Super Glue your butt to the chair and put in the time needed to write a novel. And know that even established writers often “hate” the book they are working on. The difference between an amateur and a professional is that the pro will find a way to persevere and prevail.

ST: What is one random fact about yourself?

AR: People meeting me are always surprised by my height. They only know me through a small author photo, so they’re not expecting someone who is 6-foot 7-inches. And, yes, I did play basketball in college.

To learn more about Alan Russell, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @ARussellBooks.

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A Worm's Eye View: 9 Questions With Author Jim Shepard

Jim Shepard

By Dave Pezza

Author Jim Shepard’s latest novel The Book of Aron (you can read my review in March’s “5 Books That Should Be On Your Radar”) is available for sale starting today, and the author was kind enough to talk to me about his early influences, his research process, and how he got in the mindset to write about World War II from a young boy’s point-of-view.

Dave Pezza: When did you decide to be a writer?

Jim Shepard: I never really did decide to be a writer; I always knew I wanted to write, but that was a different thing. I was the first one in my family to go to college, so the idea that someone like me could become a writer was not a notion I entertained. What I did know was that I would write, for others or just for myself, however I made my living. I think my secret plan was that I would write, and others would give me food. I wasn’t sure why the latter would occur.

DP: Who were some of your early influences?

JS: When I first started to read I read cartoons like Schultz’s Peanuts, and then soon after that I read Stoker’s Dracula, and Edward Gorey, and Salinger, and a huge amount of nonfiction for kids: history and science. Stuff like the history of the Civil War, or All About Volcanoes. My father was determined that I would go to college and he figured the best way to get me there, besides staying after me about my grades, was to fill the house with books. But since he hadn’t gone to college himself, he figured I should only have books that would teach me something useful, and in his mind that mostly left literature out. Literature was certainly better than nothing, but real information was even more useful than literature. 

DP: World War II has peaked the creative interests of many fiction writers, what about this particular story of Dr. Janusz Korczak and his orphanage brought you write The Book of Aron?

JS: Because I write about so many diverse and off-the-wall subjects, old friends and students are often sending me links with subject lines like, Why don’t you write about this? One sent me that question about Korczak, and I told him it was because I’ve always been wary about writing centrally about Great Men and Women, especially figures who might be considered saintly, like Gandhi or Dorothy Day, since first of all I usually prefer the worm’s-eye view of history, and second, what conflict is supposed to measure up to their saintliness? In this case, though, I did go back to Korczak’s Ghetto Diary, just to check it out again, and while rereading it was struck by the reminder that of course no one in his orphanage wanted to be there. I thought, those poor kids: they must have been terribly conflicted about hating to be somewhere that had saved them. Imagine being the boy who for whatever reason made a saint’s life harder? That sense of feeling that you haven’t adequately appreciated what good fortune you have been given: that I felt like I could relate to. Suddenly it seemed like I had a new and unexpected way into the subject. 

DP: Was this book as hard to write as it was to read? I really enjoyed reading it, but every page brought me closer to what I knew must be coming. It made the ending so hard to read!

JS: Ha! I’d like to hope it was a lot harder to write than it was to read. And I do think that when you’re dealing with a subject like this, dread seems like an appropriate response to try to conjure. 

DP: At the end of your novel you have quite an extensive reference list, can you tell us a little bit about your research processes and how important it is to creating your work?

JS: My research for a project begins before I know I’m doing the project, since I’m always just reading around in weird areas that interest me just because they interest me, and not because I’m intending to write about them. At some point in my reading, though, something snags my interest in emotional terms—nearly always it’s a human dilemma that seems evocative or haunting to me—and at that point I begin wondering if I could write about this. Part of the way I then answer that question is by doing more reading, which either makes writing about the subject seem even more excitingly possible or it has the opposite effect. 

DP: Was it difficult writing from the first person perspective of a young boy, especially in the terrifying and inhuman world of the Warsaw Ghetto? How did you manage to get into such a mindset?

JS: I find it difficult writing from every perspective, but I’m drawn to the limitations a young person’s single first person sensibility, since from within it I can try to evoke the way in which the anxiety of what’s coming is always there in the reader’s mind but is opaque to those in the historical moment. It seems a useful way of addressing the ahistorical revisionist impulse that usually finds voice in the question, How could these people not have seen this coming? I also like the limitations, in terms of articulation, within which you have to work with a young person’s vocabulary: it feels to me like the restrictions poets describe when they talk about the sonnet or another form.  

DP: Do you have any other work in the pipe? Or will you be promoting The Book of Aron for some time?

JS: I have other subjects that I’d like to get to, when I get the time. Now you’ve made me depressed.  

DP: Do you have any advice to up and coming writers, particularly those interested in historical fiction?

JS: Go for it. Learning about the world is a great way of both making yourself a more interesting human being and expanding the arena of your autobiographical obsessions.  

DP: What is one random fact about yourself?

JS: How about the fact that I saw Murnau’s “Nosferatu” when I was 6 years old, and I haven’t been the same since? 

To learn more about Jim Shepard, check out his official website.

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Following Where the Story Leads: A Conversation With Author and NPR Staple Alan Cheuse

Alan Cheuse

By Daniel Ford

You may know Alan Cheuse as a commentator on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” however, he’s also an author in his own right!

Throughout his career, Cheuse has published five novels, four collections of short fiction, two volumes of novellas, a memoir, and a collection of travel essays. All that and he has to find time to read all the books he reviews on the show! That’s true dedication to the craft of writing and creativity.

Cheuse’s latest work, Prayers for the Living, was published through Fig Tree Books and is “an epic family saga about the American Dream gone to pieces.” The author’s lyrical prose makes you feel like you’re at the main characters’ kitchen table, listening to this tortured family tale.

Cheuse recently answered my questions about his work with NPR, his writing process, and how he developed Prayers for the Living into a novel.

Daniel Ford: You’ve been reviewing books on “All Things Considered” since 1980. When did you first fall in love with books?

Alan Cheuse: My first encounter with a book and reading was purely visceral. My father, a native Russian speaker read to my when I was very young from a collection of Russian fairy tales, and I can still hear the shush-and-slide his Russian vowels and the clacking of the consonants, and I can still recall the scent of the book (which he had kept stored in an old trunk sent from Shanghai to his first American address somewhere in Brooklyn)—it gave off the odor of oranges under a warm sun. I never learned Russian, but became a devoted reader of sea-stories and fantastic fiction fairly early on in my primary school days. And went on became a science fiction fanatic in middle school and high school. Though I was curious about some of the books on display in the adult section of the Perth Amboy New Jersey library I frequented after school. There was a novel called Invisible Man that I picked up and read for a paragraph or so. And then I found Arthur Clarke’s work. And early in high school I found D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce in a local hole in the wall bookstore on our main street.

DF: Who were some of your early influences?

AC: The adventure novels and the science fiction opened my mind to what the imagination might create (though I couldn’t have put that into words back then). But probably James Joyce and Lawrence, and later Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf.

DF: How did your training as a literary scholar help (or perhaps hinder) your first writing projects?

AC: I can only say it helped, because it made it possible for me to get a teaching post where I could devise courses filled with all the reading I needed to do in order to become the writer I am—a cycle of narratives from Gilgamesh and the Homeric epics all the way on through Chaucer and Shakespeare and Cervantes and the great English, Russian, French, and Italian novelists. And modern writers from Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson and Joyce and Hemingway and Faulkner and Woolf and Cather—oh, the long, classic line.

DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?

AC: With a novel I write a draft and revise, draft and revise, and so forth over some years until an editor and my best readers (headed by my wife) say I am getting close. With a story I do the same, though the process is more luxurious, because it only takes a few weeks or a few months to complete a story. But music? No. The only writers I know who listen to music while they compose are poets. Makes me wish I were a poet!

DF: You haven’t tied yourself down to any one genre in your career, writing everything from short stories to novellas. Is that a reflection of your personality or were you just following where your stories led? And do you have a particular favorite genre?

AC: I like your image of following where the story leads. After thirty plus years of writing fiction—I started late, not publishing anything until about a month before my fortieth birthday—I think I have cultivated my instinct for knowing what material should be a story and what should become a novel. I feel lucky that I have been able to work with some modicum of success in both the short and the long forms (and the middle length of the novella as well. It’s like being able to compose etudes and sonatas and symphonies, perhaps.

DF: Where did the idea for Prayers for the Living originate?

AC: A news item in The New York Times in the early 1970s told of the suicide of a Long Island rabbi turned corporate head caught in a financial scandal. The notion of a rabbi turning into a successful businessman who became tainted in his work intrigued me.

DF: What were some of the themes you wanted to explore in Prayers for the Living and how did you go about intertwining them with the American Dream and the American Jewish experience?

AC: Some of the motifs come from tragedy—the rise and fall of a talented man with a flaw who rises high and falls far, destroying himself and his family in the process. And some come from contemporary American life, at what I see is the crossroads of American Dreaming. How can someone become both rich and blessed as a soul.

DF: What I found interesting about the structure of Prayers for the Living is that the prose reads very much like dialogue. Your characters’ speech and the prose surrounding their conversations have a lyrical quality to them, which makes the events of the novel all the more crushing at times. How did you develop that structure and did it change at all during the writing or editing process?

AC: Minnie Bloch, one of a number of characters in the first few drafts, eventually rose to become the narrator, and her voice has that distinctive mixture of the lyrical and the raw voice of experience that I first heard in the voices of my own mother and grandmother and aunts around the dinner table in New Jersey while I was growing up.

DF: You created all of these damaged characters for this novel that are reacting to their situations differently. How did you get yourself in the mindset to write each of their stories and how do you develop characters in general?

AC: You try to develop a sense of each character’s strengths and weaknesses—and a diction appropriate for each—and then bring them on stage to make music together. A novel is a drama and a concert, an opera, for which you also have to find the right musical instruments to accompany the leads, sometimes getting down to such radical necessities as inventing new instruments in order to produce certain sounds.

DF: How has your work at George Mason University and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers influenced your work?

AC: The former helps put bread on the table and the latter helps seat good people there to partake of it.

DF: We love to review novels on Writer’s Bone, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you what you look for when you’re choosing books for “All Things Considered.”

AC: I want a beautifully composed work of fiction with a forcefully forward moving story inhabited by fascinating characters whose ups and downs show me things about the world and my own life I have not imagined before reading about them.

DF: What’s your advice to aspiring authors?

AC: Find a master and learn from him or her, and read deep and widely to find those in the past who can tutor you in the present.

DF: Can you name one random fact about yourself?

AC: Everything about me seems random on a bad day; nothing does on a good day. But I write every day, religious and national holidays included, except when I’m traveling. Random, random—I enjoy pushing our grandchildren on swings, very good exercise.

To learn more about Alan Cheuse, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @acheuse.

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Seeking Old School Thrills With Author Tom Claver's Debut Novel

Tom Claver (Photo courtesy of the author)

By Daniel Ford

I'm fairly certain I would have enjoyed Tom Claver’s debut thriller Hider/Seeker even without the rabid endorsement of my jewelry biz buddy Peggy Jo Donahue.

His main character, Harry Bridger, makes a living helping people run from their enemies, however, his life becomes endangered after he arranges for Angela Linehan and her son to disappear abroad from her violent husband in London. Throw in a ticking clock, an ex-wife, and a Central American location and that’s a novel I’m going to finish in two nights (one with the right blend of coffee).

Also, first lines in a thriller tend to be even more important than in literary fiction and Claver lands a beauty: “Harry had sat in the restaurant for over an hour, bloating his empty stomach on grissini and cold Prosecco.” Yes, please. 

Claver recently answered some of my questions about how he first became interested in writing, his writing process, how the idea for Hider/Seeker originated, and how he went about getting his work published (He also earned Writer’s Bone favorite status by referring to me as a journalist).

DF: Did you grow up wanting to be a writer, or was it a desire that built up over time?

Tom Claver: I always wanted to make films since I was small. I used to like drawing comic strips, mainly about the U.S. Cavalry as I was mad about cowboy films, particularly those made by John Ford. But it was not until I was studying for an economics degree in London that I became interested in writing. I enrolled in a creative writing course set up by Dr. Rod Whitaker, a visiting U.S. professor from the Department of Radio, Television, and Film at the Austin School of Communications in Texas. His opening line in his first class caught our attention immediately. “Sorry, I’m late, but I’ve just been on the phone to Clint Eastwood.” Needless to say, I was all ears from that moment onward as he told us about a blockbuster thriller he’d written called “The Eiger Sanction.” Eastwood had just bought the rights and was going to make a film of the book. I think it was right there and then that I wanted to write a thriller as it was something I’d never contemplated before.

Whitaker was quite a character who wrote under the name of Trevanian, although he had several pseudonyms and wrote across different genres. He kept his identity a secret, but didn’t seem to mind sharing it with us in London. Despite achieving best-seller status he avoided interviews and publishers promotions that would reveal his true identity. Sometimes he would send imposters to represent him at interviews, just for fun. However, in 1979 he publicly revealed his true identity in an interview with The New York Times Book Review. He scotched a long-running rumour that Trevanian was actually the thriller writer Robert Ludlum. You can read more about him at my website.

After finishing my degree, my interest fell more in the direction of making films. One 30-minute film I scripted was distributed in British cinemas while another short I wrote and directed was sold to Central Television in the U.K. I started writing feature length scripts, one of which formed the basis of Hider/Seeker. It had another title and was genuinely in an awful state, but the BBC saw something and invited me to discuss it. Nothing happened. I then decided it was time to stop writing and raise a family.

But the desire to write a book never left me. The turning point came just over ten years ago when I decided to teach myself to write a thriller, more as an academic exercise. By reading books about writing and by sending my work for professional critique, I gradually improved. Two unpublished books later, I decided to take another look at the film script I’d sent to the BBC. I re-worked it into Hider/Seeker.

DF: Who were some of your early influences in the crime genre, and which modern crime writers are you currently hooked on?

TC: This is not an easy question to answer. I read thrillers as well as other books of fiction while I was growing up and I think subconsciously they determined the style of writing I have today. It was anything from Raymond Chandler to Philip Roth. I also liked John Updike a lot.

Ian Fleming was compulsory reading for young boys wanting a bit of titillation and action. I also enjoyed the adventures written by Alistair MacLean. But when I discovered Len Deighton, I think that brought it full circle. Deighton’s sardonic hero in the Ipcress File was a bit like Chandler’s Marlowe.

But it was much later in life that I started reading Dashiell Hammett who I then realised was the grandfather of these types of thrillers. The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man are effortless reads. Such perfect economical sentences. It’s something that American writers are good at in my opinion.

But I’m fundamentally a Hitchcock fan and when I saw “The 39 Steps” as a young boy, I thought it was the most exciting film I’d ever seen. It was only when I was on holiday in Scotland in later years that I read John Buchan’s book, which incidentally is a 100 years old this year. I admired the book tremendously because the set-up used by Buchan had such a contemporary feel, providing you could ignore the anachronistic characters he describes in Edwardian Britain. You can read more about Buchan’s impact on thriller writing in a blog I’ve written.

Buchan was the first modern thriller writer and Hitchcock’s rebooting of the story years later paved the way for the chase thriller. I’m a sucker of the man-on-the-run theme and in my debut thriller, Hider/Seeker, I have used it in an inverse way.

Among the contemporary writers, I like Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole series. I’m also a fan of Olen Steinhauer and his creation of Milo Weaver. Similarly, I have a soft spot for Martin Cruz Smith’s Russian investigator Arkady Renko. If anyone ever thinks of remaking Gorky Park as a film, they might like to focus on the second half of the book, which was totally ignored in the original film.

DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?

TC: I work from one-line plots that I collect and file. When starting a new novel, I’ll try out a few of the plot lines to see how they feel. I might play around with the angles or setting, but once a story obviously has legs, I go for it. But I normally want to test out the early chapters and send them for critical appraisal along with a synopsis. I just want to see how the story is coming across to an outsider and whether they flag up something serious that I’ve not thought about. Once I’ve written the book, I don’t look at it for a minimum of six weeks, then read through it again. It then goes to another editor for critical appraisal. A long period, and I mean a long period, of re-editing the book follows until I’m ready to send it to an editor for editing.

You are the second American journalist to ask me if I listen to music while writing. The answer is no! I don’t like my thoughts being influenced by someone else’s mood or words. And it is also a big no to outlining. I prefer my characters to work out the story for me.

DF: Where did the idea for Hider/Seeker originate? 

TC: As I mentioned earlier, it started as a film script some 30 years ago. I vaguely remember watching a television documentary where a divorced father who had been denied access to his son by his ex-wife enters his son’s school unannounced and takes him away. It frightened me at the time, as the boy was clearly alarmed, and I thought it was definitely a scene I would like in my film. Then I worked out a story about why someone would need to take a boy out of school in that way. My aim was to have a story with a 1950s feel but in a contemporary setting. You’ve probably gathered I like older crime novels. However, I feel strongly that novels should be written in the present as this is our time to reflect what is going on around us.

DF: How much of yourself ended up in your main character Harry Bridger?

TC: I’m short and bald. Harry is tall with a mop of blond hair. Perhaps I share his North London wit.

DF: The crime genre has certain built-in tropes that can deter some writers from taking the plunge. How did you ensure that your tale was original? 

TC: Bertolt Brecht, an aficionado of the thriller genre, once said that the aesthetic quality of the detective novel is derived from the variation of its fixed elements. Yes, there is a formula to crime novels but the fun is using these same building bricks that have created this formula in a different way each time. The originality is what the writer does with the bricks that have been passed down to him or her by previous writers. To those of us who love this genre, we know that not all crime books are the same as some literary snobs enjoy pointing out.

The Coen brothers’ “The Big Lebowski” is a slobbish reincarnation of Marlowe. They not only rebuilt the character on a familiar likeable guy, but they also borrowed the premise of the story, i.e. one of mistaken identity, from Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, which Hitchcock also reused in “North by Northwest.”

DF: When you finished your first draft, did you know you had something good, or did you have to go through multiple rounds of edits to realize you had something you felt comfortable taking to readers?

TC: I knew the story was good when it was in a film script form because the BBC invited me to discuss it. So I was pretty confident that people would like it. My main concern was the style of writing. You could present the same story different ways. In the end, I chose a simple linear story as that helped to speed up the action as there were no distractions of sub-plots. This made it feel like the story was being told in real-time. I would not have published Hider/Seeker if the editor said it was not of a publishable standard. I didn’t prompt him, he just came out with it in his final report.

DF: Now that you have your first novel under your belt, what’s next?

TC: Everyone is asking me this. Let’s just say it is set in a very cold place.

DF: What advice would you give aspiring authors?

TC: Don’t give up like I did. It’s a big regret of mine. But at the same time don’t starve or you’ll never write your first book.

DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?

TC: I’m a coffee addict. I have a fantastic Italian espresso machine that makes coffee that would wake up the dead. My favourite brand of coffee is Kimbo Espresso. I recall visiting Balzac’s house once while holidaying in France many years ago and being more fascinated by his coffee machine than his books on display. I know, I’m a complete philistine. Perhaps I am more like Harry Bridger than I thought.

To learn more about Tom Claver, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @Tom_Claver. Hider/Seeker is available on Amazon. 

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Agent Talk: 7 Questions With Literary Agent Rob McQuilkin

Rob McQuilkin

By Sean Tuohy

Literary agent Rob McQuilkin has seen the print world turn digital during his more than 20-year career in publishing, but has always kept his hand on the pulse of the market for his clients. Best of all, he’s a really interesting guy.

McQuilkin took time away from his duties at Lippincott Massie McQuilkin literary agency to sit and talk about what he has learned while helping writers realize their publishing dreams.

Sean Tuohy: Tell us how you got your start in publishing.

Rob McQuilkin: As a Columbia undergrad at the tail end of the 1980s, I thought originally that I'd major in art history, with a minor in English. The idea was to go on to work in museums, so the internships I pursued during freshman and sophomore years were all based in the art world: for example, the chairman's office at Christie's and  the Old Master Drawings department at the Morgan Library.

Then, the summer before junior year, I had this wonderful internship at The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., working with the archivist there, Gene Gaddis. At the time Gene was circling a possible book project, a biography of the legendary museum director Chick Austin. And so over that summer of 1989, between all of the labeling of objects and other administrative duties deep in the bowels of the Atheneum, I worked as well to help Gene out with research for the book proposal he was drafting, and to edit the text of the proposal.

It was fun.

Two notions began to take shape in my mind throughout that experience:

First, that the sort of professional latitude Austin had enjoyed back in the 1920s and 1930s (when he was showing and buying the first Surrealists, for example, and building the first International Style museum pavilion, all the while nearly single-handedly re-establishing a taste and a market for Mannerism and the Italian Baroque, which had not been anyone's favorite for quite a while by then) had been, well, a wonderful aberration—a whirlwind of provocation and achievement unlikely ever to happen again in quite that way.

Also taking shape in my mind that summer was the notion that putting together a book project, on the other hand, might allow for—albeit in miniature—just the kinds of risk and reward and, for lack of a better word, "play," that had distinguished Chick Austin's career.

Leaning forward on the edge of my seat as Gene regaled me with stories about the figures he'd been interviewing for this biography of Chick—exquisitely articulate folks like Lincoln Kirstein and Marguerite Yourcenar—or as he brought me up to speed, say, on his latest meeting with a prospective editor (ultimately the project would go to Knopf's Judith Jones), I was soon enough smitten by the process. And it was not long after this that I switched my major to favor English, pushing Art History down into the second spot. Because I began to realize, you know, that publishing was maybe the likelier destination.

Fast-forwarding a few years, I would work first for Jamie Raab, then a senior editor at what was called Warner Books (a decade later she would become publisher of the well-re-named Grand Central Publishing) who, in addition to doing the paperbacks of people like Lorrie Moore and Scott Turow, was publishing huge New York Times best-sellers like Ekaterina Gordieva's My Sergei and Nicholas Sparks' The Notebook. After that I went to Anchor Books/Doubleday, where I worked on the paperback editions of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, edited Anita Hill's Speaking Truth to Power, and acquired Lois Gould's classic memoir, Mommy Dressing: A Love Story, After a Fashion.

One thing that was soon clear during my time on that side of the desk was that I was predisposed to see the author's side of things, and maybe less so the publisher's. One of my bosses (not very happily) pointed this out to me once, and I thought: "Well, she's kind of right." Then again, I'd grown up the grandson and son of writers, and so had some idea of how things could look from the other end of the "supply chain"—just how things could come off to someone who'd spent his or her time drafting, revising and submitting, rather than, say, attending marketing meetings.

Maybe it was inevitable that I would become an agent. Certainly the job felt right the moment I took it on.

I cut my teeth as an agent working for Jill Kneerim and Ike Williams at what was then the Palmer & Dodge Agency—an unusually conceived outgrowth of the intellectual property division at a mid-sized Boston law firm that nonetheless had a staggeringly good list of writing clients, ranging from E.O. Wilson, Joseph Ellis, and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas to Edith Pearlman, Stephen Greenblatt, and Robert Pinsky. Jill and Ike were hugely generous with their time and expertise and helped me to get the hang of things on this side of the desk.

By the time I went out on my own, soon taking on as partners Will Lippincott (previously publisher of The New Republic and strategy + business magazine) and Maria Massie (previously with The Witherspoon Agency and later Inkwell Management), I knew that this was how I was meant to make a living. I also knew how important it was to enjoy and respect both the people you're working for (the clients) and the people you're working with, which means not only the colleagues alongside you within an agency, but also the editors and publishing colleagues with whom you labor to "put on a show."

It's not always the easiest of jobs, this one, but, when it's all coming together smoothly and with the right results, it's pretty hard to beat!

ST: What do you look for when you're reading a manuscript?

RQ: Making a point of keeping an open mind, all practiced skepticism banished for the moment (but not too far!), I dive right into the manuscript before me, you know, ready to be impressed—by language, by wit, by commanding expertise—whatever the fundamental appeal may be, wherever it may lie.

One of those things, though, or some combination, will need to ignite fairly readily, within the first few pages even, in order for the project at hand to seem viable not only to me, but to anyone else I can imagine asking to dive into some form of this same manuscript at some stage down the line.

Best case, there is some sort of ignition in short order; then it just needs to hold, as one turns the pages—to hold and to develop; to take us on a journey of some sort that will somehow reward the reader, be it simply with the power to entertain, with the rush of language working at a high level, or with some new perspective that will leave the reader changed.

It's a tall order, no doubt! And the people lucky enough not only to have the chops to work that magic but also to have hit on just the right idea or subject or scenario in this particular manuscript—an idea or subject or scenario that is genuinely fresh, but also recognizable in its contours and its significance—are, well, few and far between.

ST: What is the most common mistake you see from first time authors?

RQ: Well, I hate "rules," I should say at the outset—you know, do's and don'ts—so am loath to point a finger at particular "mistakes."

It's not that writers tend to do anything wrong, seems to me, at least when we're talking about their work as writers, so much as that they may not end up doing the thing or things that will be uncommonly right.

Having said that, there are some easy bits of advice I can deal out here on a few very basic matters:

First, when querying and submitting to agents, make an effort to familiarize yourself with those whom you're targeting, and try your best to tailor each query in a way that seems thoughtful and not simply rote—let alone half-cocked, with names misspelled, clients misattributed, or your rationale for targeting the agent in question so vague as to be recognizably, you know, one-size-fits-all.

Oh, or perhaps the very worst botch of all: sending out a mass e-mails with other agents in the visible "to" or "cc" field (How to write to a hundred people and receive zero replies).

Farther down the line, assuming you've avoided some of those missteps and begun working with an agent: try and be careful of getting adversarial, for lack of a better word, with that person, particularly at those early stages, before the two of you have even had a proper chance to get to know one another, to find a working rhythm together.

One thing I see again and again are newly signed clients, determined not to be "saps," who feel they ought to run their agents' Author/Agency Agreements through lawyers who may be friends, or come highly recommended as "entertainment lawyers," but who in fact may be entirely unfamiliar with book publishing agreements, industry convention, etc. Not only is this likely to rankle, but it rarely achieves much in the way of concessions, as the vast majority of clauses in any reputable agent's Author/Agency Agreement are apt to be industry convention and thus there for a reason.

The long and short of it, though, is that the agent you're beginning to work with at the outset of a project, and, with any luck, a long-term working relationship together, is at the very center of your publishing team, and you want to keep the emotional baseline of that partnership as friendly and productive and collaborative as humanly possible, right from the start. Sometimes I see authors come into the relationship supposing clearly that they'd be "fools" not to adopt a more jaundiced eye on this new working relationship, and perhaps even an adversarial stance. This of course makes no sense whatsoever! It's just not that kind of business. And it doesn't, in general, attract the sort of individual who relishes that worldview. Least that's the way I see it.

ST: What steps do you recommend an author take when trying to locate an agent?

RQ: This will be, I think, the same answer every good agent gives, but:

1.) Get a subscription to Michael Cader's Publishers Marketplace and make good use of the Deals and Dealmakers database, in particular, in order to familiarize yourself with the agents out there who seem to be having luck with the type of material you see yourself as working in, selling to the types of houses you might imagine appropriate for your work. Let this kind of homework inform the list (not too long, not too short, but always thoughtfully made) of agents you make a point of reaching out to.

2.) Make a habit of flipping through the Acknowledgements section of books you see as being like yours, or what you'd like to see your book as becoming in a perfect world, books you have particularly enjoyed, and that have had the kind of life out there in the marketplace that you'd like to see for your own book. This list of agents should inform the very top of the list of agents you want to query.

And again, make good use of the titles that have brought you to a particular agent. It's one of the very easiest ways to draft a query letter likely to catch an agent's eye, other than dropping the fact that, you know, you're a full professor at Yale or Oberlin, or that you just won a Guggenheim, or have a story being published next month in The Paris Review!

ST: Since entering the publishing world, what major changes have you seen happen?

RQ: Good lord, where to begin?

It's been a period of at once significant growth and painful contraction throughout book publishing these last 20 or so years. At the center of all that flux, of course, is that gruesome American creature that is Winner-Take-All yet boasts a very Long Tail, the beast that broke both the Chains and the Big Boxes, the beast that thrives in this new digital rain forest we find ourselves in now.

With ever more titles being published, by the hundreds of thousands at a jump, the vast majority of them by means of self-publishing or tiny start-ups and glorified vanity presses, the lists within what we see as conventional publishing grow ever tighter, ever harder to sell into, with the good old mid-list a thing of the past.

In a world where everyone's gaze is trained on success, a project that's going to excite one editor is apt to get more than a few others excited, too; one can be forgiven sometimes for imagining that everyone wants the same few things. Just as they do not want everything else. This is not entirely fair, of course, but the perception does engender a certain wariness at every level, every stage, of the publishing process, such that never has "Nope, not interested" been either so reliable a response or so inevitable.

As for the electronic publishing and marketing of books, it is for everyone as much a lifeline as a threat. It is, either way, the reality. The new normal. Few of us, I think, would not prefer to go back to the state of the industry in, say, 1995 or 1997, or 1999, but...here we are. Trying our very best. And still, on a good day, managing to make it work.

ST: Is it possible to predict what genre of book is going to be the next big hit?

RQ: I can't really say, as it's just not the way I approach the business, or my work within it.

ST: What is one random fact about yourself?

RQ: I once performed in a pigskin mini-skirt in an early evening reading of Dennis Cooper's rather transgressive novel Frisk at The Kitchen, on 19th Street, only to catch a cab back up to the fraternity where I was to don a jacket and tie to run the weekly meeting, with all of those musty robes and morbidly ossifying candles: two kinds of drag that went not especially well together!

To learn more about Rob McQuilkin, visit his official website or like his Facebook page. 

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Breath and Silence: Poet Janaka Stucky On Striving for the Apex of His Art

Janaka Stucky (Photo credit: Adrianne Mathiowetz)

By Daniel Ford

I didn’t know much about modern poets before National Poetry Month started, but thanks to Quan Barry and now Janaka Stucky, I’m much more educated about today’s poetry market.

Stucky, whose new collection The Truth Is We Are Perfect was published earlier in April and is a true pleasure to read, recently answered some of my questions about his early influences, his writing process, and his literary magazine Handsome.

For those of you in the Boston area hankering for a good poetry reading after the snowy winter, plan a night out around Stucky’s book release party at The Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., at 9:00 p.m. on May 2.

Daniel Ford: What made you decide to become a poet?

Janaka Stucky: This is a funny question because I never thought of it as a decision before. At some point one simply starts writing poems. If you feel it’s necessary to share them with others you seek an audience. If you’re lucky, and you’re any good, you’re encouraged to write more. After years of dedication you hopefully feel competent enough to call yourself a poet—if that has become how you primarily present yourself to the world. I still feel a little sheepish saying, “I am a poet” though, despite having spent the majority of my life practicing the art of it, obtaining two degrees in poetry, and getting paid on occasion to be one. I wonder why that is? I think, maybe, because it presumes some criteria of success—or arrival. I don’t feel like I’ve arrived. I don’t mean that in the canonical sense; I mean I haven’t arrived at the apex of my art. I think that kind of arrival would mean an end to writing, for me anyway. The poems are the struggle, or the document of the struggle, to attain a certain pure consciousness. If I were able to maintain that altered state—if I were to become enlightened—then I’d feel good about saying, “I am a poet.” But then I wouldn’t need to keep writing. So maybe I am only a poet once I no longer need to write poetry…

DF: Which poets influenced you and what’s your favorite poem of all time?

JS: It would be difficult to define a narrow set of influences, let alone limit the influences to poets. I’m probably just as (if not more) influenced by other elements—music, meditation, sculpture, the occult imagination—as I am by other poets. That said, the strongest influences on me have probably been the French surrealists, the German romantics, a handful of Russian poets, a couple of ancient Japanese poets, and two American poets: Bill Knott and Frank Stanford. Similarly I can’t name a favorite poem of all time—each moment has its own poem—but an important poem to me is “Nocturnally Pouting” by Paul Celan, a line of which is tattooed on my upper right pectoral.

A word—you know:
a corpse

I read this poem during grad school, while I was also working in the funeral business, and it really resonated with me. I ended up writing a long paper on the poem as funeral, a ritual to illuminate the always-already death of language, and titled my lecture after this same line from the Paul Celan poem.

DF: When you sit down to write a poem, is there a set number of words you’re aiming for each time you sit at the keyboard, or does it depend on the type of poetry you’re writing?

JS: When I sit down to write a poem, I simply sit down to write that one poem. I work in increments of time rather than numbers of words, so I sit for 30 or 60 minutes and whatever I have created in that time is the new poem. It’s important to note here that I write from a kind of trance state, which I enter through an intentional ritual. The creative act for me is a kind of waking meditation; the goal is to become empty, not to write something in particular. Whatever exists on the page at the end of the meditation is the poem.

DF: Each of your poems is structured a little differently. Does the process for deciding the form of the poem occur during the writing or editing process?

JS: Neither, really. The form is an organic expression of the breath and silence in the poem. Michelangelo talked about how every block of stone has a statue inside of it, and that it is the sculptor’s job to find that statue. Similarly every poem for me has its own form that gets expressed as the poem materializes. I may refine the form as I edit, but the form is inherent to that poem.

DF: I may be stepping on your random fact with this, but you’re a two-time National Haiku Champion and you were voted “Boston’s Best Poet” in the Boston Phoenix in 2010. What kind of street cred does that give you among poets and what were those experiences like?

JS: I might start by asking: what kind of street cred even exists among poets to have? Which maybe gives you a little bit of an idea how much cred those titles give me… I’m actually a little embarrassed by them because I think they’re false superlatives, but of course they make for good publicity angles so my publisher likes to include them in press releases. The Haiku competitions are really just for fun—I think they’re more about one’s ability to improvise and perform under pressure than they are about the craft itself. After I won the second competition I invented the Haiku Death Match, which I thought was more interesting. Instead of judges each round one poet has to concede to the other, and then take a shot of sake. In this way the competition is more about humility, and the loser is the winner by virtue. As for the Boston Phoenix title, I actually won through a grassroots write-in campaign. Each year, it was always the same old candidate group—comprised of tenured university faculty, poet laureates, etc. The year I won, the official nominees were: Sam Cornish, Robert Pinsky, Louise Gluck, Rosanna Warren, Margo Lockwood, and Frank Bidart. I think people just wanted to see younger options and fresh names on the ballot, so my win was really an act of protest. But it worked! After that, each year the Phoenix started digging a little deeper into the pool of local talent to find the names.

DF: Can you tell me a little background on your literary magazine Handsome and explain what you look for in contributor’s work?

JS: A lot of indie presses start as magazines and then graduate to books; I started Black Ocean and then decided to publish a journal a couple of years later. I’ve come to learn they’re really entirely different endeavors, with their own set of challenges and processes. To run Handsome, I enlisted two incredibly talented poets and writers: Allison Titus and Paige Ackerson-Kiely. It’s really their aesthetic that drives the selection, which is different from the books that Black Ocean publishes. The best way to understand it is to either read their work, or read Handsome. In that sense, we look for contributors who are interested in what we’re doing.

DF: What advice would you give to aspiring poets?

JS: Read. Read books in translation; read contemporary and classical work; read works from different genders and different races; read work from writers much younger than you and writers much older than you; read fiction and non-fiction not just poetry; read comic books; read photography books; read in between the lines and the white spaces in the margins; read with your breath as well as your eyes; read until you fall asleep then read what’s on the inside of your eyelids; read in your dreams; read until you wake up.

DF: Can you name one random fact about you?

JS: When I was a young child I had an invisible friend named Buggy. Whenever I would get caught having done something I shouldn’t have I would say, “Buggy did it.” As I got older Buggy stopped appearing for me, and so I stopped blaming things on him. I stopped drawing Buggy, and the intricacies of Buggy’s personal life faded from my consciousness. But Buggy was very real to me at one point; I don’t think it’s fair to call one’s friends at that age “imaginary.” He was part of the story I told myself to understand the world around me. The random fact here isn’t that I was friends with a scapegoat no one else could see, named Buggy; the random fact is that I’ve come to realize Buggy actually exists.

To learn more about Janaka Stucky, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @janaka_stucky. 

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Master of Disguise: 11 Questions With Author Erica Wright

Erica Wright (Photo courtesy of the author)

By Daniel Ford

I’ll have plenty more to say about Erica Wright’s The Red Chameleon in next week’s 5 Books That Should Be On Your Radar post, but for now I’ll tell you that Wright’s main character, private investigator Kathleen Stone (or is it Kat? Or Katie? Or Katya?), is the perfect blend of brassy, troubled, and master of disguise.

Wright talked to me recently about what she wanted to do before discovering writing, the origins behind The Red Chameleon, and how she fell in love with her characters.

Daniel Ford: Did you grow up wanting to be a writer, or was it a desire that built up over time?

Erica Wright: I wanted to be a zoologist until eighth grade biology class when we dissected a frog, and I passed out. My teacher was close with my mother and thought, "How am I going to call Paula and tell her that I killed her daughter." I survived, though, so they're still friends. I have been writing poems and stories for as long as I can remember, but never considered pursuing publication until my twenties. I grew up in a town of 500 people, and while their professions are varied (the coolest is a beekeeper who owns her own farm), there are no novelists that I know of. So it was a gradual realization that I could write for a wider audience than myself.

DF: Who were some of your early influences in the crime genre, and which modern crime writers are you currently hooked on?

EW: The first book I remember re-reading as a child was Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn. It's not a mystery, but it set the tone for my gothic interests. I've never met a ghost tour I didn't like. In college I went through a Poe phase, but also enjoyed Doyle. (Do we have to say Sir Doyle?) I'm pretty sure that I would still be obsessed with the BBC "Sherlock" if I'd never read The Hounds of Baskerville, but there's also something fun about re-imagining the classic stories. In terms of modern mystery writers, I'll read anything by Sara Gran or Megan Abbott. And I love my press mate M. R. C. Kasasian's Gower Street Detective books, another take on Sherlock Holmes.  

DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?

EW: My background is in poetry, so my favorite part of fiction writing is the routine. With a new poem, there's a lot of work that doesn't feel like work. You're walking around the block, thinking about whether "shatter" or "shudder" works better in stanza three. When focusing on a novel, I set daily goals for myself, say, two hours or two thousand words. While I might have to heavily edit what I produce, the effort is satisfying. I didn't use an outline for the first draft of The Red Chameleon, preferring the so-called "pants-ing" method. Of course, that meant that the first draft needed some overhauls to get the plot in shape. I used a loose outline for its sequel, The Granite Moth, and have a detailed outline for the third book. Maybe next time I'll be done experimenting and can settle on an approach that works every time. Probably not.

DF: Where did the idea for The Red Chameleon originate? 

EW: I started teaching in the English Department of John Jay College of Criminology in the fall of 2006. My students were pursuing careers I knew nothing about. They wanted to be detectives, forensic specialists, CIA operatives, FBI agents. I started researching these fields to have something to talk about during our conferences. Since most graduates would end up in the New York Police Department, I became somewhat familiar with the training requirements and different opportunities. While I hoped that none of them would go undercover, an often dangerous and demoralizing job, I was fascinated with this small part of police operations. I was also reading a lot of mystery writers at the time—Janet Evanovich, Sue Grafton, M. C. Beaton—so looking back, it almost seems inevitable that I started tinkering with this book. At the time, it surprised me.

DF: How much of yourself ended up in your main character Kathleen Stone?

EW: In his book Here Is New York, E. B. White writes, "On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy." I remember reading that opening sentence in the Strand bookstore and feeling a thrilling jolt of recognition. Small town life has its advantages, but privacy isn't one of them. I lived in the city for 13 years, and it was great that nobody knew what I was doing unless I told them. Kat takes her need for privacy to whole other paranoid (rightfully, it turns out) level, but I definitely share that impulse.

DF: When you finished your first draft, did you know you had something good, or did you have to go through multiple rounds of edits to realize you had something you felt comfortable taking to readers?

EW: I fell in love with the characters as I wrote, particularly Dolly. I sat down to write a scene that conveyed Kat's wigmaker, Vondya Vasiliev, as a sort of mother figure. Then Dolly, a drag queen at a famous club called The Pink Parrot, was there, just hanging out. In the books, Dolly sort of insists on being Kat's friend, and that's how I felt about him as a character, too. He insisted on being in the book. What I mean to say is that when I finished my first draft, I knew I couldn't abandon any of these people even though the plot in general and many scenes in particular needed some major rewrites.

DF: The Red Chameleon has gotten some great reviews from the likes of The New York Times Book Review, O Magazine, and Publisher’s Weekly. What has that experience been like?

EW: Fainting goats have nothing on me. As might be obvious from my frog story, if I'm overwhelmed, I fall right over. I managed not to pass out when I read The Times review, but I started sweating and my ears started ringing. It has meant a lot to me that reviewers have written about my book. Not only is it a debut, but it's out from an independent publisher. Even the ambivalent responses haven't bothered me because I know how much effort it takes to read a book and articulate a viewpoint. Book people are the best people.

DF: How do you balance writing and marketing your work (i.e. book tours, engaging with readers on social media, etc.)?

EW: I set aside a little time each week for what I think of as the business side of writing. I see if I have any work that's ready to be sent out, query bookstores about readings, make sure my website doesn't look too amateurish. Last week, I spent an hour creating a newsletter signup form via MailChimp. (My brother's a tech genius, so hopefully he's not reading this. I'm sure that should have taken me about five minutes.) In general, though, I think it's better not to stress about self-promotion. I definitely post to Facebook and Twitter about personal news, but try to make sure that the majority of what I share is about other people. Or, you know, breaking taxidermy news.

DF: What’s next for Erica Wright and Kathleen Stone?

EW: A sequel to The Red Chameleon, The Granite Moth, will be released this November, so lots more shenanigans.

DF: What advice would you give aspiring authors?

EW: Root for others as much as you root for yourself. And if that sounds cheesy, I promise that it's actually kind of selfish, too. If you celebrate the success of friends, you get to have a lot more cake.

DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?

EW: I was named after Erica Kane, Susan Lucci's character from "All My Children." Well, “named after” might be a bit of a stretch, but my mother watched the show and liked the name, so here I am. No Emmy, but I do like a good villain. 

To learn more about Erica Wright, visit her official website or follow her on Twitter @eawright.

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The Storymaker: A Conversation With Novelist John Benditt

John Benditt

By Daniel Ford

Here’s the first two lines of the description for author John Benditt’s debut novel The Boatmaker:

A fierce, complicated, silent man wakes from a fever dream compelled to build a boat and sail away from the small island where he was born. The boat carries him to the next, bigger, island, where he becomes locked in a drunken and violent affair whose explosion propels him all the way to the mainland.

That’s what we like here at Writer’s Bone.

Benditt writes in such an earthy and rhythmic tone and so deftly tackles issues that plague humanity that one forgets his previous profession was as a science journalist for the likes of Scientific American and Technology Review. He answered some of my questions recently about how he developed his voice, his inspiration for The Boatmaker, and how his journalism background helped his fiction writing.

Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer and how did you develop your voice?

John Benditt: I’ve known that I wanted to be a writer since I was sixteen. It wasn’t really something I chose; it chose me. I had other ideas, generally more practical ideas, about what I wanted to be. But that was what I was. I think my voice emerged first by imitating writers I liked and later by just writing and writing, even though what I was writing wasn’t very good.

DF: Who were some of your early influences?

JB: My first influences were poets, since that’s what I wanted to be. The biggest early influence was Robert Creeley. I loved how spare his poems were, how chiseled they were, how much was left out. Creeley led me to William Carlos Williams, whom I loved as a poet, a prose-poet, and also as a writer of fiction. He wrote three great novels about his wife and his wife’s family. More people should read them.

DF: You’re a science journalist by trade, so I’m curious if any of those skills transferred over to writing fiction. What is your writing process like in general?

JB: I think journalism, if it’s done well, enforces clarity and the need to get the reader through the story to the end; those are skills every writer should have. My writing process begins with little bits and pieces scribbled on scraps of paper that later coalesce into something larger.

DF: Where did the idea for The Boatmaker originate?

JB: The Boatmaker began as a short story, written for a fiction workshop I was taking at the New School with Catherine Texier, who is a wonderful teacher. I wrote the story for a collection of short stories I thought I was writing at the time. The story was about a man who builds a boat and sails away from the little island where he was born. Later I wrote a second story about the same character when he reaches his first destination, Big Island. I thought I was done with him. But apparently he wasn’t done with me. That’s when a lot of other bits and pieces of his story began to appear.

DF: How did you go about developing your main character? In the novel, he’s reacting to a lot of things he’s never experienced, so how did you put yourself in his mindset in order to tell your story?

JB: Mostly it was a question of being receptive. The boatmaker arrived with a pretty fully developed personality and way of seeing things. I just tried to stay out of the way of that. I was tempted to prettify him a little, but I tried to avoid that. He is what he is.

DF: Your book touches on subjects that tend to spark intense debate—religion, race, etc. What were some of the ways you made your themes original while also tackling these issues?

JB: The story kept coming in, as I mentioned, in bits and pieces. And it held my interest. So I kept following along. I wasn’t thinking at all about “themes,” such as religion or race, while I was writing. I was just interested in the story of the boatmaker. When I was finished, I realized that these themes were there. But I didn’t pay much attention to them while I was writing, at least as themes. I just wanted to do justice to the story—to make it as vivid and compelling as it had seemed to me.

DF: Your use of language is so earthy and primal. Did that come out during the writing or was it fine-tuned during the editing process?

JB: Something of the tone was there in the original short story, which was called “Big Island.” But it evolved during the writing and editing. It got simpler, and it found a groove. The published book is definitely the outcome of a lot of polishing and weighing individual words and sentences. And a lot of deft suggestions from my editor, Meg Storey at Tin House.

DF: Now that you have a novel under your belt, what’s next?

JB: I have a bunch of short stories I’ve been working on. I also have the first part of a memoir about my father, who was a famous scientist. I suspect that the idea for another novel will also emerge, more or less the way The Boatmaker did. I’ve been blown off course enough times now to suspend judgment when it comes to plans for my writing.

DF: What advice do you have for aspiring authors?

JB: Keep writing. I read somewhere an English writer said: “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t give up.” I like that.

DF: Can you name one random fact about yourself?

JB: If I named it, would it still be random?

To learn more about John Benditt, visit his official website. 

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A Poet At Heart: 8 Questions With Author Quan Barry

By Daniel Ford

I first became aware of author Quan Barry by picking up her novel She Weeps Each Time You’re Born at the bookstore. However, when I emailed her to set up this interview, she mentioned that she is also a published poet!

Soon after, several of her poetry collections landed on my doorstep and I had the pleasure of discovering her distinct use of language and form.

Barry also graciously answered some of my questions about how she got hooked on writing, her favorite poet, and how the writing processes for poetry and fiction differ.

Daniel Ford: What made you decide to become a poet?

Quan Barry: When I was an undergraduate, I lived in a suite with two girls who were serious journalers. As the end of each day I would watch them writing furiously, some of which they shared. I was amazed that people would write things just for fun and not for class. Sure, I used to do that kinda stuff when I was a kid, but I hadn't written like that for years. After watching these two suitemates, I decided to take a creative writing class, and voila! I was hooked.

DF: Which poets influenced you and what’s your favorite poem of all time?

QB: I've always loved the work of W.S. Merwin. As I became a more serious student of poetry, I read his body of work much more closely. It was amazing to see how he evolved from rather formal beginnings to the poet we think of today, whose unpunctuated work relies pretty heavily on the reader to pull meaning out of the text. I once saw Merwin read when I was an undergrad, and I still remember how he ended the evening with this long poem called "Lives of the Artists," which is an amazing poem about the life of a Native American youth. In general, I love the collection by Merwin that contains this poem, a collection titled Travels—there's a poem in it called "A Distance" that I adore, adore, adore. I can't necessarily tell you what's happening in that poem, but it ends with three questions: "what/ are you holding above your head child/ where are you taking it what does it know."

DF: When you sit down to write a poem, is there a set number of words you’re aiming for each time you sit at the keyboard, or does it depend on the type of poetry you’re writing?

QB: Because I also write fiction, I've noticed that my poems have started to get longer and longer. I used to be able to write really short lyric poems no problem, but now sometimes the fiction side of me struggles with this, which means that occasionally I'll decide to write a seven-line poem. I think the seven-line poem is the perfect poem the way an egg is the perfect food. Seven lines gives you just enough time to get something done but not too much time to mess it up.

Having said all this, I don't usually have a line length in mind. I mostly just let the poem dictate how long it wants to be.

DF: It seems to me that word choice in poetry is so important, and you use some great language in your collections. Do you reach for the dictionary or thesaurus as your writing, or do you make choices in the editing process? 

QB: No, I'm not a dictionary or thesaurus nut. In my second collection, Controvertibles, I definitely had some big words sprinkled here and there throughout some of the poems. But they were words that I was fascinated with, specifically by the mere fact that they existed. Words like "recipiscence," which can mean "knowledge after the fact.” That word is basically the story of my life!

DF: Your novel She Weeps Each Time You're Born was published this past February and garnered rave reviews. Why the change in genre and was your writing process any different?

QB: In short, I've always wanted to be a writer, not necessarily a poet or a novelist or a playwright etc., just a good ole-fashioned John Updike-like writer (I wish!). Updike basically did it all, and to me, trying your hand at different genres is one way to keep challenging yourself and to stay fresh.

The writing process between poetry and fiction is vastly different because honestly, I'm now in to place where I can write poems fairly quickly, but writing a novel takes serious amounts of time and revising, both of which are not my strong suit. Narrative and plot aren't that hard for me (i.e. moving my characters from point A to Point B), but I have a load of other problems. In poetry, if I mention something one time, then I can trust my reader to remember it. In general, we tend to read poems closer and more carefully because they're short. In fiction, I can't just mention something once, as is my tendency, and count on my reader to remember it 10 or even hundreds of pages later. I have to give my reader more than I'm used to without over explaining, and since I'm a poet at heart, this is always a battle for me.

DF: Now that you have a novel under your belt, do you think you’ll return to poetry or stick with fiction writing for a while?

QB: I intend to keep writing both. I'm also hoping to do some more work on two plays I wrote a few years back. Someday I'd like to have a play produced, but that's admittedly way down the pike.

DF: What advice would you give to aspiring poets and up-and-coming authors?

QB: Read, read, read, and read broadly. I was just talking about this with the poet Derek Mong. Basically we were agreeing that sometimes young writers just read first books in their genres. This can get to be stultifying. Yes, it's good to know what first books look like and how they're constructed, but if that's all you read, your work may end up sounding like everyone else's and one day it may also read as dated.

DF: Can you name one random fact about you?

QB: It's a definite humble brag, but I'm incredibly fortunate to be able to say that I've set foot on all seven continents.

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