Small Press Hero: 10 Questions With Author Clifford Garstang
Clifford Garstang
By Daniel Ford
Author Clifford Garstang's day jobs might be more interesting than his excellent prose. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in South Korea, earned an MPA in International Development from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and worked as a legal reform consultant in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Why wouldn’t you try your hand at writing after all that?
The best part of Garstang’s writing career is that he’s earned high praise and impressive literary awards for his personal and moving stories published by a small publishing company. It proves that quality fiction always wins out no matter the publisher’s size.
Garstang talked to me recently about his early writing career, why he loves writing short stories, and what inspired his award-winning collection What the Zhang Boys Know.
Daniel Ford: Did you grow up wanting to become a writer or did the desire to write grow organically over time?
Clifford Garstang: I read a lot as a kid, and so, yes, I did grow up wanting to become a writer. However, adventure, work, and a career intervened, and I didn’t do anything to pursue my dream until quite a bit later.
DF: Who were some of your early influences?
CG: Hermann Hesse was the first writer who struck a deep chord with me. Others were Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Heinlein, Saul Bellow, and Joseph Heller. But when I actually started writing, the people I was reading were Russell Banks, Tim O’Brien, Grace Paley, Robert Stone, Elizabeth Strout.
DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?
CG: My routine is pretty standard. I write every morning and sometimes also in the afternoon, depending on what else is going on in my life. I only listen to music if I’m working in a coffee shop and need to drown out distractions, and then the music is pretty eclectic, as long as it’s only instrumental.
My experience with outlining has varied. Usually with short stories I do not outline, preferring to let the original spark for the story lead me where it will, then going back to shape the material that has resulted. A story that hasn’t worked quite yet is one that I did outline, and I think the problem with that one is that I need to free it from the outline’s constraints. On the other hand, with novels I do feel the need to outline, although not with a great deal of detail. I’ve needed to use the broad-brush outline as a guide, but not as a map from which I won’t stray.
DF: How did you develop your voice? Are you able to slip into it during the writing process or is it something you find while you’re editing?
CG: I think voice comes most naturally to me during the rough-draft phase, although of course it will be refined during editing. But the early stages for me are very much like going into a trance and letting the voice take over. This is especially true for me in the short story because I’m only going to be with that character for a relatively short period of time, so my stories do tend to be more voice-driven.
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?
CG: I love the opportunity to visit new characters and new situations often. It’s also rewarding to linger with a character in a novel, but inhabiting diverse psyches can be thrilling, for both writer and reader. In both of my collections I’ve enjoyed portraying this diversity—in gender, race, sexual orientation, occupation, location. Beyond that, the crystalline form of the story is also invigorating, distilling an idea or a moment to its essence.
DF: What were some of the themes you wanted to explore in your award-winning short story collections?
CG: I generally don’t like to talk about theme, preferring to let readers discover them (just as I did in the process of writing), but in my first collection, In an Uncharted Country, it seems to me that I was compelled to write about people struggling to find a place for themselves, in their families, in their relationships, in their communities. And in the second book, What the Zhang Boys Know, the stories are looking at how a diverse range of people cope with loss, although I’d like to think the book is taking on a lot more than just that.
DF: Speaking of awards, your collection What the Zhang Boys Know won the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction in 2013. What was that experience like and what inspired the work?
CG: The work was inspired by several things. The stories in that book, which I think of as a novel in stories, are set in a condo building on the edge of Washington D.C.’s Chinatown not unlike a building that I used to live in, and I was struck by the building’s diverse population as a microcosm of D.C. itself. At the time, I’d been traveling to China for my job and happened to witness a memorial ceremony in Nanjing for the victims of the Nanking Massacre, so that was part of my thinking as well, and the reason for my choice of the primary protagonist. And a friend of mine had recently been killed in an automobile accident on the Washington Beltway, leaving a wife and two children, so there was that, too, behind the book.
As for the experience of winning the Library of Virginia Award, I was thrilled to the point of disbelief. When I learned who the other finalists were (The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers and The Right-Hand Shore by Christopher Tilghman) and read the books, I convinced myself that I had no chance to win. These are terrific writers and books and I found it hard to see my book—a story collection from a very small press—in their company. But when I did win, I certainly felt a huge confidence boost and the encouragement to keep writing in the face of a pretty harsh industry.
DF: How much of yourself—and the people you have daily interactions with—ends up in your main characters? How do you develop your characters in general?
CG: I like to think that all my characters are an amalgam: a little bit real and a lot of my imagination. Or maybe a pearl is a better analogy. They start with a piece of gritty reality, but the character grows around that grain of sand. One of my early writing teachers recommends to his students An Actor Prepares by Stanislavski, the great Russian actor and director. A lesson that I’ve taken from that book is that a writer, like an actor, can draw on his own experiences and emotions in order to understand what a character is feeling in a given situation and how he’ll react. In the end, writing a character is not very different from playing the part of that character. That’s the theory, anyway.
DF: What’s your advice to aspiring authors?
CG: Be patient. Writing isn’t a race and neither is publishing. Make your work the best it can be and all the rest will follow. And related to patience is perseverance. Don’t give up!
DF: Can you please tell us one random fact about yourself?
CG: I currently have a family of starlings living in the vent above my bathroom and don’t have the heart to evict them.
To learn more about Clifford Garstang, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @cliffgarstang. Look for his next collection, Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, this fall.
The Writer’s Bone Interviews Archive
First Lady of Revision: 10 Questions With Author Louisa Thomas
Louisa Thomas (Photo credit: Jesse Rudduck)
By Daniel Ford
From Martha Washington and Abigail Adams to Laura Bush and Michelle Obama, the nation’s First Ladies have not only provided insights into the Presidents they were married to, but also reveal much about our country’s tastes, styles, and character.
Author Louisa Thomas’s new book, Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams, shines a spotlight on Louisa Adams, the wife of John Quincy Adams and our only foreign-born First Lady. Based on letters, diaries, and a plethora of secondary sources, Thomas’s work paints a vivid portrait of one of the most overlooked figures in the early republic.
The author talked to me recently about how reading eventually led her to writing, her research process, and what compelled her to tell Louisa Adams’s story.
Daniel Ford: Did you grow up wanting to become a writer or did the desire to write grow organically over time?
Louisa Thomas: When I was a kid, I wanted to be President of the International Olympic Committee (not a joke!). As I grew older, my ambitions were constantly changing: doctor, English professor, lawyer...never a writer. I wasn't one of those kids who wrote stories all the time (or ever). But I was a great reader—and that is probably why, in the end, I became a writer.
DF: Who were some of your early influences?
LT: Virginia Woolf. Emily Dickinson. Don DeLillo. Wallace Stevens. Homer. Before that, Susan Cooper. And I was obsessed with this semi-trashy YA fantasy series, the Alanna series—The Song of the Lioness quartet. Also, my seventh and twelfth grade math teacher, Mr. Harding, and my Latin teacher, Mr. Cox. They were brilliant, funny, world-expanding. They cared about the right things.
DF: You formerly wrote for Grantland (RIP, sad emoticon), and your work has appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, and The Paris Review. Why did you jump into journalism in the first place? How has it changed from when you first started out and what do you think the future holds for the craft?
LT: I was lucky. I didn’t know what I wanted to do after college, and so I got an internship at Slate, which was, then, tiny and still pretty experimental. From there I became a fact checker at The New Yorker and then assistant to the editor, which was basically my journalism school. There was always some new subject to learn about. And I loved words—loved the way they sounded, the way the felt in my mouth. I was lucky to find myself at a place where every word mattered. Journalism has changed a lot since then—The New Yorker didn’t even really have a website when I was there. I think, for the most part, it’s changed for the better. There are fewer barriers to inclusion. There’s more weird and interesting stuff. There’s a lot of trash, but there was always a lot of trash. And The New Yorker is still The New Yorker. I feel very lucky to have come along when I did. The looming threat is economic. No one has figured out the model. When Grantland closed, I lost my job. I worry about how to make a living. But compensation comes in different forms.
DF: What is your research process like? Were there any hidden gems that didn’t make it into Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams?
LT: It’s long! I read thousands of letters. I read secondary sources—books, articles, monographs, biographies, dissertations, you name it. I read novels, which was more helpful than you’d think. It wasn’t until I reread all of Jane Austen, for instance, that I really understood why Louisa’s father’s bankruptcy had the effect that it did. We treat Austen’s books as if they’re romantic comedies. But they’re so much about money!
DF: When you finally sit down to write, do you listen to music, outline, or aim for a set number of pages? Does your voice come out naturally when writing something like Louisa, or do you find it more in the editing process?
LT: Some days, I wrote thousands of words; some days I only erased. It was pretty feast or famine for stretches. I am a huge reviser. I rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite. In fact, I don’t think I’m a writer. I’m a rewriter.
DF: Early American history produced a plethora of colorful characters. Why did you decide to focus on Louisa Adams?
LT: She had a totally original voice. And because she wrote so much, and so openly, she was accessible in a way that few historical figures are. She made history human.
DF: John Quincy Adams wasn’t exactly the easiest fellow to like or get along with. What qualities did Louisa possess to not only match her husband, but also to carve out her own identity?
LT: She was warm where he was cold, social where he was silent, emotional where he was rational. She would have added: she was a woman where he was a man. Her gender was restrictive in so many ways—even that list of attributes indicates how much of the gendered conventions she internalized—but it was also liberating. So was being not entirely an Adams. She didn’t have to speak for the ages. She could speak for herself.
DF: Louisa has garnered some pretty high praise from the likes of Jon Meacham, Megan Marshall, and Joseph J. Ellis. What has that experience been like, and what’s next for you?
LT: I’m honored and grateful to have had such generous and insightful readers. When you work on for something for so long, and especially when you do it about someone rather obscure, you sometimes doubt yourself. No one was clamoring for a biography of Louisa Catherine Adams. So to feel as if maybe you’ve made a little contribution, it’s wonderful. And a relief. As for what’s next? I don’t think I’m done with the early republic. But we’ll see.
DF: What’s your advice to aspiring authors and historians?
LT: Revise. Revise. Revise.
And revise.
DF: Can you please tell us one random fact about yourself?
LT: I have no idea how I pronounce my own name. Is it LouiSSa or LouiZa? I have no idea.
To learn more about Louisa Thomas, visit her official website, like her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter @louisahthomas.
The Writer's Bone Interviews Archive
A Woman of Words: 10 Questions With Author Lynn Rosen
Lynn Rosen
By Daniel Ford
Lynn Rosen’s debut novel A Man of Genius has all the hallmarks of a hit: an unreliable, playboy narrator, well-written suspense, and, of course, a murderous plot.
Rosen revealed to me that she considers herself more of a storyteller than a writer, and from what I’ve read so far of A Man of Genius, she’s far too modest in her self-assessment. There’s an old school charm and elegance to her prose—perhaps owing to her “long years of a rich life”—that speaks to a confidence authors more than half her age have trouble conjuring.
The octogenarian author talked to me recently about her writing rituals, tips for becoming a storyteller, and what inspired A Man of Genius.
Daniel Ford: Did you grow up wanting to become a writer or did the desire to write grow organically over time?
Lynn Rosen: I didn’t grow up wanting to become anything—except to simply grow up. In my youth, which was many years ago, little was expected of females outside of marriage and motherhood. My desire to write grew from loneliness and finding that those who populated the stories in my mind were great listeners and, best of all, served me better than the dolls I played with, for the characters in my mind were much fuller and more malleable.
DF: Who were some of your early influences?
LR: My earliest influence was Inez Haynes Gillmore Irwin, a feminist and political activist who, in the early to mid-20th century, wrote a series titled “Maida’s Little Shop.” Maida has been paralyzed, but with great effort has recovered the use of her legs. Acknowledging her efforts, her loving wealthy father gives her all her heart desires, including a little toy and trinket shop. At the time I met Maida, I was unable to walk as a result of paralytic polio. Maida drew me to a very early realization of the power of literature: the worlds it draws you into, its ability to disclose life’s possibilities, and the mirror it holds up to your own life.
After Irwin, Daphne duMaurier, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, and Laurence Sterne grabbed my attention. DuMaurier and Bronte for their application of the Gothic with its use of the sublime, Austen for her enviable ability to frame a social scene, and Sterne for his awesome control of plot and time lines.
DF: What’s your writing process like? Do you outline, listen to music, etc.?
LR: I do listen to music as I write—in fact one particular piece of music, a disc titled “The Memorable & Mellow Bobby Hackett.” I play, replay, and replay it, over and over again. I’m a very slow writer.
DF: How did you develop your voice? Are you able to slip into it during the writing process or is it something you find while you’re editing?
LR: My voice was established early in the process of writing A Man of Genius. It emerged from my need to develop the work from the outside in—from its binding theme to plot, and character development, which, I hoped, would sustain the theme and contribute to a sense of an organic whole.
DF: What’s the premise of A Man of Genius and what inspired the novel?
LR: The premise of the novel is a series of overarching questions that focus on our relationships with our personal human idols. Who do we elect to revere? What is our criteria for selection? How much of our idols’ foibles are we willing to forgive? All of this inquiry was initiated and sustained by a very old memory of an unexpected meeting I had with Olgivanna Wright at Taliesin, when I was a young undergraduate. For many years I wondered why that particular memory stayed with me. In time, I began to realize the binding force that sustained it was the question of personal idolatry, and what that idolatry says about the idolater. Years passed, during which the memory took on new forms and new perceptions—as memories do. Finally, it emerged in its new form as A Man of Genius.
DF: How much of yourself ended up in your characters? How do you develop your characters in general?
LR: Little of myself ends up in my characters. I develop and move my characters always in support of the over-arching theme that drives the novel.
DF: The unreliable narrator has become a literary trend the last couple of years. What made you decide on that convention, and how did you make your story unique?
LR: I believe all narrators are unreliable; few openly admit their biases, though they usually emerge in time. I believe that the unresolved ending of A Man of Genius demands an unreliable narrator aware of his limitations. If the narrator were presented as reliable, the alternate possibilities that run through the story line would not be sustainable.
DF: What were some of the themes you wanted to explore in the novel?
LR: Idolatry and forgiveness are the major themes. What I wanted most was to bring the readers to a point where exploring the book’s themes resulted in an exploration of the reader’s own systems of moral obligation.
DF: How’s it feel to publish your first novel at age 84, and what was your publishing journey like?
LR: I never thought of myself as a writer—in fact, to this day I haven’t reached that stage of self-identification. I think of myself as storyteller. I love a good story and enjoy sharing one with others. I began writing in my pre-teens during World War II. With my father away in the service, I had a great deal to say and nobody would listen, so I wrote letters to the editor of The New York Times and some were printed, and people began to listen and write back through the paper. Then there were articles about books I read, and some of those also were printed—a short story was published and I wrote several drafts of novels that now sit snugly in files in my office. Perhaps they’ll now see the light of day because I’m beginning to think I just might be a writer. I believe that, whatever one accomplishes in life has little to do with age, and everything to do with attitude. If anything, long years of a rich life, as mine was and is, expands a writer’s possibilities. In the end it all resides in the mind and spirit.
DF: What’s your advice to aspiring authors?
LR: Don’t decide to become a writer and then go poking about looking for a story. Discover a story that you find compelling and become a writer.
DF: Can you please tell us one random fact about yourself?
LR: In my mind I’m 33 years of age. I’ve been frozen there for a very long time. Don’t ask me why. Personally it wasn’t a particularly outstanding year.
To learn more about Lynn Rosen, visit her official website, like her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter @authorlynnrosen.
The Writer's Bone Interviews Archive
Love & Other Themes: A Conversation With Couple Mechanics Author Nelly Alard
Nelly Alard (Photo courtesy of Stephane de Bourgies)
By Stephanie Schaefer
If you’re seeking entertainment in the form of a passionate love triangle, skip next season of “The Bachelorette” in favor of author Nelly Alard’s Couple Mechanics.
Library Journal called Alard’s U.S. debut “an intimate, claustrophobic, and compulsive read,” and Kirkus Reviews said it packed “a surprising, emotional wallop.”
Last month, Daniel Ford and I attended a talk with Alard at the charming Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Ma., where she spoke about differing views on love and marriage, Simone de Beauvoir’s influence, and how she crafted her novel’s provocative opening scene.
Find out more about how she develops characters and what inspired Couple Mechanics by reading my interview with the author below.
Stephanie Schaefer: When did you decide you wanted to become a writer?
Nelly Alard: I actually never decided that, it sort of happened. I wanted to be an actress. I started by helping a friend director to write a screenplay based on a story he had in mind. It seems I was not bad at it and the movie got produced and then other people hired me to write for them and I did it, mostly for the money. I was having a hard time making ends meet as an actress and people offered me good money to write screenplays. My first novel Le Crieur de Nuit, was my first attempt to write something “personal” and it was picked up right away by Gallimard, which is the most prestigious publisher in France. And then I realized that not only was I more successful at it, but I actually enjoyed writing much more than acting, at the end of the day. And that’s how I became a writer. I have been incredibly lucky!
SS: Who were some of your early influences?
NA: As a child I would know by heart entire scenes of Racine and Corneille, and I loved reading the great classics pretty early on. So I would say Balzac and Tolstoï. Later, I developed a passion for Proust. I discovered American writers much later.
SS: What’s your writing process like? Does your fiction writing process differ from your screenwriting process?
NA: The main difference is that a novel is really the creation of one single person—the author—from the very beginning (the original idea) to the end, and that singularity is what you’re looking for. To find your unique “voice” is probably what matters most in writing a novel. A screenplay is only a basis for a collective work. Even if you write it entirely alone (which never happened to me), it never stands by itself and will be altered by the director, the producer, or the actors on the set. Also, when you write a screenplay you have to keep in mind the cost of every single scene you write! The word that comes to my mind when I think of novel writing as opposed to screenwriting is freedom!
SS: What inspired Couple Mechanics?
NA: It’s a mixture of different love affairs I’ve either experienced, or seen around me. I wanted to revisit The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir, which was written in 1968 and tells pretty much the same story than Couple Mechanics does, and see how this story would unfold some 50 years later, after the feminist revolution has changed the relationships between men and women so much.
SS: How much of yourself ended up in your characters? How do you develop your characters in general?
NA: Oh, there’s a bit of me in every character. In Juliette, of course, but also in Victoire, and even in Olivier. The chapters written from his point of view were actually the ones I enjoyed writing the most (those chapters were cut out of the English version). It’s fun to become a man for a few pages! All my characters are monsters, and a combination of two or three people I know. They have the feet of somebody, the face of somebody else. And then you grab things here and there, people you know, things you heard. And the character begins to have a life of its own. Most of the time you don’t even know where it comes from!
The process is really very close to improvisation when you’re an actor. You start by imagining yourself being that person, in such a situation, what would you think, how would you react, and then things start to escape you and you find yourself saying or doing things you wouldn’t have thought about. Only, as an actress you’re not often given the chance to play the part of a man, while as a writer, you get to play all the characters in your head!
SS: This is your first novel translated into English. Did that affect your writing or editing process?
NA: Well, I didn’t know when I was writing it in French that it would get translated so obviously the original version was not affected by it. Now my U.S. publisher Judith Gurewich thought the novel was a bit too long, and she asked me to cut out three chapters, which were, in the French version, the ones told from the point of view of the husband. I trusted her and I accepted. And then I worked closely with Adriana Hunter on the translation to make sure the irony, the kind of sardonic, matter-of-fact, no-bullshit tone of Juliette’s voice came across. Irony is the hardest thing to translate.
SS: What themes were you looking to explore in Couple Mechanics?
NA: I have been trying to explore all forms of violence between men and women, some of them carefully hidden under the words “love” or “passion.” It goes from physical violence to emotional blackmail, but it also raises the issue of imposed paternities, which is to me a gigantic abuse of power on the part of the women. Another theme of the novel is the opposition between two ideas of feminism: the one defended by Simone de Beauvoir nearly 50 years ago and another, newer one, denounced by Elisabeth Badinter in an essay that deeply influenced me called, “Dead End Feminism.” And finally, of course, there is the old conflict between family and passion, the question of knowing if a long-lasting love can exist.
SS: Do you think the novel would have been different if it were set in the U.S. instead of France? Do you believe the countries have different views on love?
NA: I really don‘t think so. I know American people have this fantasy about France and the French that everybody there is having affairs and that it’s okay and that nobody cares, but this is absolutely not true! Being betrayed by someone you love is a devastating experience for everybody, French women included—otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to write 300 pages about it!
SS: Your novel has garnered rave reviews from the likes of The Economist, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal. What’s that experience been like and what’s next for you?
NA: It’s just wonderful. I love the United States and I have spent a lot of time there over the years, I have friends there and that makes me incredibly happy that they’re finally able to read my books!
What’s next? I am working on my next novel, obviously. And I also have several screenwriting projects, among which is the adaptation of Couple Mechanics as a French television series. And, why not, a feature film in English if I can get a U.S. producer interested!
SS: What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
NA: Read a lot. Read, read, read. And then try to write something you would enjoy reading.
To learn more about Nelly Alard, visit her Other Press author page.
The Writer's Bone Interviews Archive
Season in the Sun: 10 Questions With Author Daniel Paisner
Daniel Paisner
By Daniel Ford
Daniel Paisner's novel A Single Happened Thing couldn't be more in my wheelhouse. The novel features a "wax-mustached nineteenth century baseball legend," a struggling creative type in the 1990s, and a Bob Dylan epigraph. Truly a trifecta sure to warm my baseball/writer heart.
The author talked to me recently about Norman Mailer’s influence on his early writing career, being a celebrity ghostwriter, and what inspired A Single Happened Thing.
Daniel Ford: Did you grow up wanting to become a writer or did the desire to write grow organically over time?
Daniel Paisner: I think what changed over time was the kind of writing I wanted to do, but those writing muscles were always there. In the beginning, I wanted to be Woodward or Bernstein. The idea of working in a newsroom, righting wrongs, chasing down stories, participating in some sort of larger conversation. It held enormous appeal. But that changed. I did start out as a reporter, but most of my early newsroom assignments were drudgery—zoning board hearings, pie-eating contests, and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Meanwhile, I'd always written stories, and I started in on my first novel while I was still in college, so I found myself retreating into fiction more and more. Somewhere in there I found I had a knack for capturing people's voice and personalities on the page, so I started doing that too—working in collaboration with actors, athletes, politicians, and regular folks with slightly irregular lives on their memoirs and autobiographies.
DF: Who were some of your early influences?
DP: Mailer was probably the biggest influence—only not in the ways most people mean when they offer up his name in answer to such as this. I'd always admired his novels (mostly Why Are We In Vietnam? and An American Dream), but his long-form, nonfiction reporting was startling, vigorous, completely unique. And then I read The Executioner's Song, and it was so spare, so taut, and so incisive. I came away thinking I wanted to write like that. I was completely blown away. The book had the power and sweep of an epic novel, but the reader was inside the head of this flawed man, in such an intimate way. I'd never read anything like it.
DF: What’s your writing process like? Do you outline, listen to music, etc.?
DP: My process is a bit of a mish-mash. I write when I can, in what ways I can, when the book calls to me—not exactly a formula for a successful writing life. My new book was written in fits and starts over a period of several years. It started with an idea; with a character, really. And I don't think I let go of that character the entire time I was working on the piece, even if I wasn't necessarily sitting at my desk and working on the piece in a traditional sense. I was working it through in my head. Sometimes, this happened through music. There was one James McMurtry song that haunted me. There was a line in it that spoke to me of the rootlessness at the heart of the story I was trying to tell. "I'm not from here, I just live here." I played the crap out of that song. Sometimes, I found the rhythm of the piece when I was out for a long run, so I started going out for longer and longer runs. In fact, I ran a couple marathons at the front end of the book's long gestation, and those miles were like a moving writer's workshop. When I thought I had a thing or two figured out, I'd roll up my sleeves and write in bursts, sometimes through the night, until I had it down.
DF: How did you develop your voice? Are you able to slip into it during the writing process or is it something you find while you’re editing?
DP: A Single Happened Thing is a departure from my first two novels. Those books featured the same main character, so they shared a certain sensibility, a certain point of view. Here I was reaching for a different tone, so I developed the "voice" of my narrator to reflect that. I wanted the reader to feel he/she was in the hands of someone who was reasonably well read, but reasonably inexperienced and uncertain of himself as a writer. I needed his self-consciousness to come through, the feeling that he carried with him that he was being watched, judged.
The story, at bottom, is about our narrator trying to convince the people he loves of an unbelievable encounter, but when his wife dismisses the encounter as a delusion his world begins to unravel. The narrative needed to reflect that unraveling, but at the same time it needed to carry the narrator's certainty. In the book I'm working on now, there's a different voice entirely. When a reader tells me he didn't recognize me as the writer of this new book, after having read my first two novels, I take that as a great compliment. Maybe it's not meant as a compliment, but that's how I take it in. The goal for me is to find a voice that serves the story.
DF: How does one become a celebrity ghostwriter?
DP: Ah, a question for the ages. I'm asked this all the time, and every answer bumps into the Catch-22 of the trade. Nobody's about to hire you to help write his or her autobiography unless you've helped a few other folks write their autobiographies first. So how do you crack that puzzle and land your first gig? In my case, it came about with a stroke of luck and an accident of good timing. And once you do a good job with your first assignment, it can lead to another. And then another. After a while, it's like you've stepped in shit and you can't scrape it off your shoes because the work starts to follow you around. I mean this in a good way, because I've come to really enjoy the collaborative aspect of my work. I get to meet interesting people, and insert myself into their lives in such a way that I can help them write meaningfully about their own.
DF: What’s the premise of A Single Happened Thing and what inspired the novel?
DP: The book is about a Manhattan book publicist who believes he's been visited by the ghost of an old-time baseball player. It was inspired by the life (and death) of one of the forgotten greats of the game—the real old-time baseball player at the heart of the story. Fred "Sure Shot" Dunlap played in the 1880s, most notably for the 1884 St. Louis Maroons of the Union Association. For a time, Dunlap was the highest paid ballplayer in all the land, and one of the most celebrated, and yet at the time of his death he was penniless, friendless, and desperate. I stumbled across his stat lines and developed a small obsession.
Mostly I was stuck on the loneliness (the alone-ness) of Dunlap's death, and couldn't get past the disconnect between how he'd lived and how he died. (The funeral home that handled his burial had to pull strangers off the street to act as pallbearers.) And yet there wasn't a whole lot about Dunlap in the public record, other than the box scores and accounts from his time in the game, so there were a lot of holes I couldn't think how to fill.
At some point, I started to connect Dunlap's story, and the restless spirit I came to imagine had stamped his days at the end, to a more contemporary story of a middle-aged man, who perhaps hadn't accomplished everything he'd set out to accomplish in life, mired in complacency and sameness at work and grooved into routine at home.
I determined that the "contemporary" story be set in the late 1990s—a more innocent, pre-steroid era for our national pastime, and a more innocent pre-9/11 time in our shared psyche as well. I wanted my characters to dwell in a world without our most recent black clouds. I wondered how these two lost souls might connect and bounce off each other, and this became the genesis of the novel. The baseball stuff with Dunlap is historically accurate; the stuff of his life is rendered as accurately as the public record allowed; the 1998-2000 baseball stuff, also as they (mostly) happened; but everything else is the stuff of my imagination.
DF: How did you get into his mindset of both your main characters—one a struggling publicist and the other a 19th century ballplayer? How much of yourself generally ends up in your characters?
DP: I read everything I could find on Fred Dunlap. I visited the library at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. I immersed myself in newspaper clippings and box scores from the period, and read a whole bunch of novels from the turn of the last century, to get my head (and my ear!) around the language. As for the Manhattan book publicist, David Felb, who becomes unmoored on the back of his apparent delusion, well, I suppose there were some elements of my own experience laced into his back story. I think it's unavoidable for certain aspects of character to attach to the characters in your novel, certain experiences as well.
But here again, the idea is to grab at the pieces that serve the story and shed the rest. The anchor in Felb's life turns out to be his baseball-mad, tomboy-ish daughter Iona, who accepts her father's story on its face. In fact, she believes she's been visited by Dunlap as well, and as the story closes she's his tether to sanity—his only tether, really. Iona is the oldest of three Felb children. I happen to have three children as well, and what's curious is that each of them believes he/she is the inspiration for Iona, and I'm not about to disabuse any of them of that notion.
DF: What were some of the themes you wanted to explore in the novel?
DP: The book is really about legacy—what it means to matter, to leave a mark. Here you had this larger-than-life baseball player, an American icon, for a time. How is it possible for someone to live a life of such broad strokes, and to somehow leave this world without a trace? Sure, Dunlap's name lives on in the record books. He hit .412 (just about off the charts!) and scored 162 runs (also, an insane number!) during his season in the sun in 1884, but his career has lapsed into obscurity. Alongside of that, I wanted to look at my protagonist, living a life of small strokes, worried that he isn't leaving any footprints at all. How do you find a way to shine when your life has been dulled by routine or disappointment? The book is also about coming unglued in a time of uncertainty, and holding fast to the people you love, even as they seem inclined to let you go.
DF: What’s your advice to aspiring authors?
DP: Write for yourself. Hold your own attention. Keep at it, and find ways to surprise yourself as you move along. Don't worry who will publish your book, who will read your book, who will review your book. These things are out of your control. Write the book you want to read. Print it out and hold it in your hands. Marvel at what you've accomplished. Then go ahead and write another one. This right here is the most encouraging thing anyone ever said to me about my work—the essence of what it means to be called to write.
And I have it on good authority, from a wonderful creative writing teacher I had in college. His name was Alan Lebowitz, one of the world's great Melville scholars and an accomplished novelist in his own right. He was the chairman of the English Department at Tufts University. He's the one who turned me on to Norman Mailer in a full-on way. And we kept in occasional touch, for a while. I even sent him my second novel, Mourning Wood, just to hear what he had to say about it. And what he had to say was this, "Write another one." So I'm stealing from him here.
DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?
DP: Once, I had the thrilling opportunity to ski with Stein Erikson, the Olympic gold medalist in the giant slalom at the 1952 games in his home country of Norway. And when I say I had the opportunity to ski with him, I mean I followed him around on the mountain and worked it out so I could ride the chairlift with him a time or two. I was like a stalker, really, but I timed it just right. He was kind enough to ski with me for a couple runs, and I remember being struck by his grace, his effortless style, and the way he danced across the snow. The man was 70 years old, and he moved like no one else on the mountain (And he was fast!).
What struck me too was the way other idiots like me seemed to tail him. It's like we wanted to absorb his greatness, see it up close, and understand it in a new way. When he died this past winter in Park City, Utah at the age of 88, I was reminded of this brief encounter with this absolute legend, and it put me in mind of some of the themes of this novel. Like Fred "Sure Shot" Dunlap, Stein Erikson was a man who lit up his sport. Nobody skied like him. It was a thing of beauty, the way this man skied, and for a stretch of years no one could touch him. It's like he was invincible. And yet, unlike Dunlap, Stein Erikson lived another 60 years beyond his glory. He built a ski school, became a joyful ambassador of his sport, lent his name to one of the great ski lodges on the planet. He left a mighty set of ski tracks, to where the rest of us mere mortals could fall in behind and go through the motions and imagine what it must be like to light up the sky and move about as if we too are untouchable, invincible, even if just for a moment.
To learn more about Daniel Paisner, visit his official website or follow him on Twitter @DanielPaisner.
The Writer's Bone Interviews Archive
Romancing the Light: 12 Questions With Author Andrea Dunlop
Andrea Dunlop
By Lindsey Wojcik
“I can’t believe you’re leaving Manhattan.”
The opening line to Andrea Dunlop’s debut novel Losing the Light immediately pulled me in. The thought of leaving New York City is something I grapple with daily, yet the line also had me yearning to discover an exotic place far from Manhattan.
As 30-year-old Brooke Thompson prepares to leave Manhattan to move upstate with her fiancé, she runs into a man she once obsessed over, French photographer Alex de Persaud, at a party. Though Alex does not seem to remember the time they spent together in France while Brooke was an exchange student, Brooke accepts an invitation to meet him for a date the following week.
The meeting sends Brooke into a tailspin, and she’s flooded with memories she hoped to forget about her year in France—including an affair with a professor, her close friendship with fellow American exchange student Sophie, and the impact that Alex had on her a decade prior. Dunlop also takes readers on a journey to the picturesque city of Nantes, and she sprinkles the French language into dialogue throughout. (I had the opportunity to read the book in its natural habitat on a recent trip to Paris and hoped it would improve my French. Il a aidé un peu.)
Dunlop, a Seattle-based writer and the social media and marketing director of Girl Friday Productions, recently took some time to answer questions about her first novel, her cure for wanderlust, and what notable figures would be invited to her dream dinner party.
Reading the book in the country that inspired it.
Lindsey Wojcik: Did you grow up wanting to become a writer, or was that something that grew organically over time?
Andrea Dunlop: I always wanted to be a writer. My mom loves to tell people about finding little scraps of paper with dialogue written on them all over the room when I was a kid. It’s always been wrapped up in my identity.
LW: Who were your early influences?
AD: I was lucky in that my parents read to us a lot when we were kids. Some of the first books I remember being captivated by were those in C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. The idea of having a portal to an alternate world really captured me: probably because I always felt a bit like that with my own imagination. I discovered Sandra Cisneros in high school, and her work is so beautiful and vivid, I’ll never forget reading The House on Mango Street for the first time. In college, I studied with the novelist Pat Geary, who became my mentor and friend. Her work is stunning and impossible to put into a genre: magical realism would be the closest. Not every great writer is a great teacher, but she definitely has that distinction.
LW: What's your writing process like? Do you outline, just dive in, listen to music, etc.?
AD: I write in the morning when I first wake up—after coffee, of course. I usually have a general idea of where the story is going, but I’m often surprised by what comes up as I’m working. That’s the most gratifying part of the process for me: that I learn more and more about my characters as I write them.
LW: What inspired you to write Losing the Light?
AD: I started writing an early draft 13 years ago when I was still in college. I had just returned from a semester in France, and it was an utterly transformative experience—not in the way it is for my characters, I would hasten to add. To be truly out of your element in that way, to see with your own eyes how differently people in other countries live, that was something that stuck with me in a big way. What’s interesting is that when I started the book, I was the age of my characters in the flashbacks, and when I finished it I was roughly the age Brooke is when she’s looking back, so I felt all the nostalgia that she’s feeling about those memories.
LW: How much of yourself—and the people you have daily interactions with—did you put into your main characters in the novel? How do you develop your characters in general?
AD: My characters often have an initial real-life inspiration, but the fun part is that they grow to very much have a life of their own on the page. I usually draw inspiration from people I have brief interactions with, rather than those I know well. It’s fraught to write about someone you know well, obviously, and also, if you’re too close to someone, your imagination has no space to fill in all the gaps. A huge theme of Losing the Light is the way in which you become infatuated with people when you’re young, and therefore completely misunderstand their true nature and intentions. I often feel that first flush of infatuation with characters, and then grow to know them on a deeper level as I go.
LW: What were some of the themes you wanted to tackle in the novel?
AD: One of the major themes is the sense of possibility that you feel when you’re on the cusp of adulthood. It’s really a coming of age novel in that way: that opening of the mind and heart when you leave your home for the very first time, especially traveling abroad, that was something that was really life-changing for me. The female friendship angle is also very strong, the way in which when you’re that age, friendships feel like the most important thing, and yet they’re often complicated and even destructive. Those friendships are almost romantic in their intensity—even if they never become sexual—you feel like you can’t live without the person and you just want to be with them all the time. And everyone is still figuring out who they are, so the breakups are often even more dramatic than whatever romantic splits you have. It’s so different than when you’re in your thirties and your best friends are people you’ve known for a decade through marriages, kids, what have you.
LW: The book’s opening line “I can’t believe you’re leaving Manhattan” really struck a chord with me as a New Yorker, and it's something all New Yorkers can relate to—the unbearable idea of leaving the city. You left New York for other adventures. What was the hardest part about leaving? What do you miss the most?
AD: To be honest, it wasn’t so hard when I left because I was really ready for a change. But if you’d asked me two years earlier if I’d ever leave, I would have said “Leave New York? Blasphemy!” New York is a pretty magical place, and for me it was the perfect place to spend my twenties. There is the sense in New York that anything can happen at any time, that there are life-changing opportunities around every corner. It’s thrilling and exhausting in equal measure. I worked for Doubleday when I was in New York, which taught me so much that has put me in good stead as a publishing professional and an author. I wouldn’t trade those years for anything, but nor would I ever be tempted to move back. Certainly it was glamorous and exciting and that sense of possibility was wonderful. Everyone you met was doing something fascinating; I feel like I met plenty of difficult people, but never boring ones. I miss that. And also—no disrespect to Seattle, which has many fine restaurants—but I miss the food! And the pizza? Get out of here.
LW: What's your cure for wanderlust?
AD: Well, travel if possible. Even going somewhere not terribly far-flung for a quick weekend can give you a new perspective and remind you how vast and wonderful the world is. But if not, books! I think that traveling via book is something all readers can relate to. The variety of perspectives available to you in books is mind-blowing. One of my favorite book-travels in the past few years was reading the stunning Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi. It was so vivid and transporting; I don’t know that I will ever get the chance to visit Lagos or Accra, but with this book, I was given a meaningful glimpse at what life in those places is like. I really hope that American publishing will move in the direction of incorporating more diverse voices in the coming years, including translations, otherwise it’s such a missed opportunity for us all to see outside our own experiences (and for underrepresented voices, see to see their own experiences reflected). Buzzfeed is doing some truly impressive work in this area, including their fellowship program. More of that please.
LW: How has your role as the social media and marketing director for Girl Friday Productions helped your writing career?
AD: My work with GFP has given me an incredible skill set for marketing my own work. The job of being an author, and a businessperson with a product to sell, is quite different from the job of being a writer—an artist who needs to create. I think my career in publishing has given me a unique appreciation for the way in which those two roles must co-exist and also remain separate. My work has given me a lot of skills in terms of promoting my work, but perhaps even more helpfully, it’s given me the ability to take a step back and not take things super personally. Once the book was finished, I put my marketing hat on. Many writers are way out of their comfort zone having to promote their own work, but the way I see it, this is my job. I worked really hard to get a book published, and I want it to reach as many readers as possible; I don’t think that’s anything to feel embarrassed by! Many other people also worked very hard on my book—my agent, editor, publicists, etc.—and so anything I can do to promote the book is for them too.
LW: Now that you have your first novel under your belt, what’s next for you?
AD: Working on another book, of course. My new novel is about a woman who discovers that she has wealthy cousins she never knew about when she meets them at her mother’s funeral. She joins them in New York two years later and much drama ensues. It’s about how you think you know your family members, but actually your very closeness to them can obscure some truly disturbing things about their nature. I’m also very excited to be writing about New York!
LW: What’s your advice for up-and-coming writers of all kinds?
AD: Figure out what your goals are, and then work towards them accordingly. Maybe you just want to write for yourself and a small audience, that’s absolutely valid. There are plenty of university presses and small presses that do amazing work for a small handful of titles each year. Maybe you want to be a best-selling author someday, that’s awesome, but recognize how much work that will take, far above and beyond writing a great book, which is always step one. I also feel that it’s really important to support the community on which we all depend: i.e. other writers, booksellers, etc. Always be reading new books by your fellow authors, talk about them on social media, review them on places like Goodreads and Amazon, and come see them when they visit your town. If you want support from the community, it starts with you.
LW: Can you please share a random fact about yourself?
AD: I’m obsessed with exercise guru Shaun T. I do one of his Insanity workouts almost every morning. The workouts are great, and he just seems like such a lovely positive person. I think he is a good force in the world. Do you ever do that game where you imagine your fantasy dinner party? Mine is Shaun T, Cheryl Strayed, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Michelle Obama. There could be more, but I’d want to keep it intimate. We’d eat something healthy but there would also be plenty of wine.
To learn more about Andrea Dunlop, visit her official website, like her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter @Andrea_Dunlop.
The Writer's Bone Interviews Archive
A Conversation With I’m Glad About You Author Theresa Rebeck
Theresa Rebeck (Photo credit: Monique Carboni
By Daniel Ford
Theresa Rebeck has written everything from award-winning Broadway plays to hit television shows (Admit it, you had “Smash” on your DVR).
Rebeck’s recently published novel, I’m Glad About You, features star-crossed lovers, Midwestern sensibilities, New York City Millennial drama, quippy dialogue, and plenty of dark, twisted angst.
The author/screenwriter/playwright (when does the woman sleep!) graciously took some time away from her production schedule to answer my questions about her writing career, what inspired I’m Glad About You, and what aspiring authors need to do to succeed.
DF: Did you grow up knowing you were going to be a writer, or is it a passion that grew over time?
Theresa Rebeck: I thought I was going to be a writer when I was about 3 years old. That’s not to say that I fully believed it. Even when I was young and a dreamer, it felt like a very bold choice. And certainly everyone I knew in Cincinnati thought I was somewhat insane to think that someday I might be a writer.
There were a lot of other dreams in there. I dreamed of being a chemist, or a mathematician, or a doctor. I’m good at math and chemistry, improbably, so my pragmatic Midwestern roots argued in that direction. Eventually reality caught up with me, at which point that first dream looked more like what it was—determination.
DF: You’ve written critically acclaimed Broadway plays and hit television shows. Were there any disciplines you learned that you were able to transfer to writing I’m Glad About You?
TR: The novel remains a mystery and a challenge to me. One of the things you learn in the theatre and in TV is that you just have to keep working until you finish it, and then you have to finish it again. There’s a lot of forward motion, always. And that turned out to be a very useful tool to have in my toolkit when facing the complexities that arise in the writing of a novel.
DF: When you sit down at your computer to write, what’s your process like? Do you listen to music? Outline? Was your writing process for I’m Glad About You any different than your screenwriting process?
TR: I think in screenwriting and in television writing, there’s generally too much outlining. So when I’m working in fiction, I try to keep things looser. I have a general idea of where I’m going, but I don’t want to have too much settled on before I’m actually writing. I feel like the writing reveals a lot of surprises and deeper secrets when you haven’t made too many decisions ahead of time. That’s not to say you should just go blindly into something, I don’t believe that. I try to hold some tension between what I know is going to happen and what I don’t know.
DF: What inspired I’m Glad About You?
TR: I’m from Cincinnati and I live in New York. I used to think that at some point, those two aspects of my personal story were going to make more sense to each other. But, they didn’t. And I became aware over time that this is a real problem in our country—I feel like no one knows how to talk to each other anymore, and I wondered what that would look like if I had a pair of lovers who ended up in that situation.
DF: Kyle and Alison could have easily been caricatures we’ve seen in past novels, movies, and television shows, but you ground them in reality and give them honest-to-god issues to wrestle with. How did you go about developing these two, and how much of yourself landed in each one?
TR: Developing characters is something that comes to me over time. I did know when I started working on the novel that I was going to have Kyle stay in one place, and that Alison, by contrast, was someone who would rise, in visibility, in the wider world. Kyle’s journey was always going to be more and more interior, more and more isolated, more and more centered on this lonely quest for a spirituality that would often elude him. His innate decency is not enough, finally, for Kyle: He truly wants to be a good man. But what does that mean, to the soul?
Alison’s journey is more like Sister Carrie’s, in a way: as she rises as an actress, she becomes more and more of an object. But Alison surprised me. She refused to accept that destiny. She never saw herself as an object, so she never fell prey internally to what was happening to her externally.
DF: As a playwright/screenwriter by trade, did you start with the dialogue and fill in the prose or did you have the story in mind and craft the dialogue organically?
TR: I don’t do anything like that—start with the dialogue and then fill in the prose. I start at the beginning, and when I get to the end, I stop. And when I rewrite, sometimes I add things in, sometimes I take things out. Only one time in my life did I write a story in pieces, different scenes that weren’t connected, that were connected only later. If there’s anyone out there who writes the dialogue first and then fills in the prose, I’d like to talk to them. That sounds kind of interesting to me.
DF: How long did it take you to write I’m Glad About You? Did you settle on the novel’s structure during the writing or editing process?
TR: It took me a really long time—it felt like a really long time. It took me about six years. I came up with the structure during the editing process. Because there are two sides in the story, I did have a lot of material I ended up cutting. It wasn’t clear to me from the onset how the two strands of the story would sit next to each other. So that was something that emerged with greater clarity as I worked on later drafts.
DF: I’m Glad About You has garnered rave reviews from critics and readers alike. What’s next for you?
TR: Right now I’m in pre-production for a movie I wrote starring Anjelica Huston, Bill Pullman, and David Morse. I’m directing it as well. And then I have some other ideas that are starting to emerge. I’m so compelled by fiction right now but it’s a lot of work, it requires a lot of space and silence and I haven’t had that lately.
DF: What’s your advice for aspiring writers?
TR: Learn how to finish drafts. So many people get caught up in the process and don’t ever see the point where it says, “The End.” So even if you have to push through sections that aren’t working—I’m not saying force it, though sometimes you do have to force it—finish a draft. Also, I think writing a lot is a good thing. Like practicing scales on a piano. The more you write, the better you get...hopefully. Don’t be precious: learn how to cut. Learn how to edit.
DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?
TR: I have the best collection on Earth of tiny stone bears. I also collect Peruvian retablos. I guess that’s two facts but seriously the little bears are great and so are the retablos.
To learn more about Theresa Rebeck, visit her official website or follow her on Twitter @TheresaRebeck.
The Writer's Bone Interviews Archive
The Promise of Prose: 5 Questions With The Queens Bookshop
By Lindsey Wojcik
Nestled between a nail salon and a residential building on Austin Street—a shopping mecca in the heart of the Queens, N.Y., neighborhood Forest Hills—is a welcoming café that serves organic coffee, as well as vegetarian and vegan bites. Although Starbucks is nearby, the Red Pipe Café stands out on its own as a charming, much quieter shop where Forest Hills residents can gab with friends over a sandwich or take in a new book while sipping a piping hot latte.
As I entered the Red Pipe Café on a chilly February night, it became clear why Natalie Noboa, Vina Castillo, and Holly Nikodem selected the location as the meeting place to chat about The Queens Bookshop initiative. The café is less than a five-minute walk from the former space occupied by Barnes & Noble, where Noboa, Castillo, and Nikodem once worked together. The Barnes & Noble, beloved by neighborhood residents for more than 20 years, closed late last year. In an effort to fill the void caused by Barnes & Noble’s absence, the women launched the Queens Bookshop initiative with hopes to bring an independent bookstore to Forest Hills.
The Red Pipe Café served as the perfect setting to meet Noboa, Castillo, and Nikodem. Its cozy atmosphere—similar to what I imagine The Queens Bookshop’s space will offer—helped guide an effortless conversation about the trio’s goals and dreams for the bookstore they long to create. That discussion evolved into an in-depth feature about The Queens Bookshop initiative. However, some important and fun topics were left unused at the bottom of my notes. The benefits of bookselling and book recommendations are front and center in this previously cut-for-space Q&A with Noboa, Castillo, and Nikodem.
Lindsey Wojcik: What stands out to you as the most rewarding benefit of being a bookseller?
Natalie Noboa: I've worked at Borders, Books-A-Million, and Barnes & Noble, so I have a little bit of history. My absolute favorite thing was telling people what my favorite books were and having them actually buy them and come back and be like, "You were right!" I would especially do that for little kids because my favorite book as a 10-year-old was The City of Ember, which in my opinion is totally underrated. I would recommend it, they would get it, and their parents or somebody would come back and be like, "They want the rest of the series." I love that feeling. I think it's going to be easier to do that in a less corporate environment because we’ll have more freedom to go up to someone and talk about the books we love.
Vina Castillo: Yes, recommending books is one of my favorite parts of being a bookseller. But it is also refreshing when customers share their favorite reads with me, I’ll never forget when an elderly woman recommended The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Her pitch was that her granddaughter had begged her to read it and once she did, it brought her to tears and became one of her—and thanks to her one of mine—favorite books despite it being shelved in the YA section. I could rant forever about books being dismissed because of the age range in which they are shelved.
I also really love creating my own displays. I'm looking forward to doing that again in our own store. There are so many underrated books that should be displayed and appreciated by readers.
NN: The opposite is true; there are so many books that are displayed that shouldn't necessarily be.
Holly Nikodem: Same. The most rewarding thing is when you a recommend a book—especially for me, because I worked in weird parts of the store, like comic books. Filling the shelf and listening to the people next to you talk and adding your two cents, "Oh yeah, I read that," and having them turn around and say, "Oh, you read that too?" and making instant five-minute friends over things you have in common. Maybe you'll never see them again or maybe they'll come back be like: "Oh did you find the newest issue of whatever it is?" But it was always cool to see them light up because they share something with someone.
LW: Why do you feel that bringing literacy to Queens is important?
NN: I went to school to become an English teacher so I’ve seen what kids can be like. It's crazy to me to see that they aren't that interested in reading. It's not just a school thing or about comprehension. For me, it's about getting invested in a really good book and being able to go to so many different places and go on so many different adventures without ever leaving your head. It's so sweet and so nice. And to see kids who are supposed have so much excitement about this just not care, it breaks my heart. If they don't see people excited about reading, it's out of sight, out of mind. If they don't even see a bookstore, why are they going to want to read a book?
HN: One of the counters I stumbled upon, was [doesn’t Queens] have a lot of libraries? But as a child, owning your favorite book and no matter what time, going and picking up that book, and having that comfort, is important. For an academic though, owning a book is also important. Let's say you're not very good at school and need to take your own time, owning the book is so much better than borrowing the book. It's yours. If you need to write in the book, go ahead and write in it. If it takes you longer, it takes you longer. If you have to revisit it later, fine. Later, when you grow up and find your favorite book all dog-eared, you can remember how it changed you. That's why, sure there are libraries, but the ownership of books is a completely different outlook.
LW: If your store was open today, what would be your staff pick?
HN: A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab. It’s one of three books I've read more than once. It's just a fun little fantasy novel.
VC: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. My first copy—yes, I own multiple editions of it—is extremely yellowed, bent, and stained because I have loaned it to anyone and everyone who has asked me to recommend them a book.
NN: Until the End of the World by Sarah Lyons Fleming. It's a zombie apocalypse series that is not as appreciated as it should be.
LW: What's a book you can't live without?
VC: The entire Harry Potter series. These books played a big part in my proud realization that I am a book lover through and through.
HN: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. It entered my life sophomore year of college and has been present ever since in some way or another. Also one of my favorite albums stemmed directly from it. I listen to it every day.
NN: The City of Ember by Jeanne Duprau. It was one of the first books I found and purchased on my own as a kid and I fell in love with it. It introduced me to the genre I am obsessed with to this day and shaped me as a growing reader.
LW: What's a random fact about each of you?
NN: There are mixed reactions on this. Some people get very mad, some people don't care, but I have never in my life eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
HN: I'm amazed.
NN: It's become a matter of principle, and now I can't. I had to have been 19 or 20 when I realized I had never eaten one.
HN: I have been stranded in the middle of the Serengeti in Tanzania twice. I volunteered two summers in a row with a school off the shores of Lake Victoria in Tanzania. Getting to the main city of Arusha to this school, twice our Jeep broke down in the Serengeti. One time we were stranded for hours and they drove us to another hotel to wait. The second time, we got stranded and it was dark. You're not allowed to drive in the Serengeti after dark, so they found us a rest house, which are basically these houses that people rent out in the Serengeti if you can't get out. We rented out the whole house and they locked us in to keep the baboons out. We got out the next morning.
VC: I have a stranded story. I was in Dublin back in 2010 when the volcano erupted. My friends and I were stranded for three nights. The planes weren't running, so we hopped from Dublin to London and took four to five trains and two boats to get home. We slept at the airport and took showers at the YMCA. It was crazy but definitely brought us closer as friends.
NN: Now my peanut butter fact seems lame! Holly has a stranded story in the Serengeti, Vina has a stranded story because of a volcano. I have a volcano story! I climbed a volcano in Ecuador.
To learn more about The Queens Bookshop, read Lindsey’s feature “The Queens Bookshop Aims to Bring Books Back to Forest Hills.” To learn more about the future bookshop, visit its official website, like its Facebook page, or follow it on Twitter @bookshopqueens.
The Writer's Bone Interviews Archive
Scribbler-in-Chief: Searching for the Meaning of Life With Author Lee Eisenberg
Photo credit: Marion Ettlinger
By Daniel Ford
Lee Eisenberg’s new book The Point Is: Making Sense of Birth, Death, and Everything in Between tackles big honking life questions such as, “Why are we so afraid of death,” “Do mid-life crises exist,” and, of course, “What’s the point?”
You’d think the book would be a heavy springtime read, however, Eisenberg’s crackling, engaging writing style, which naturally weaves quotes from philosophers and other brainy humans of all sorts, makes it seem like he’s telling you all this over a spiked iced tea on the front porch.
Writers will also be happy to note that Eisenberg’s answers to these questions are based on the idea that we have an internal writer-in-residence, which he names “the scribbler,” that’s hard at work crafting our life story. At this point, I imagine my own scribbler as a scruffy, Hawaiian shirt-wearing, beach bum who has been tinkering with a novel at the same time as trying to keep up with my shenanigans (with varying success at both).
Naturally, while reading The Point Is, I tweeted the author in the most Millennial way possible:
Thoughts while reading @Lee_Eisenberg's captivating book The Point Is: pic.twitter.com/mszaeOWAR8
— Daniel Ford (@danielfford) March 16, 2016
Eisenberg, best-selling author and former editor-in-chief of Esquire, recently answered some of my much less brow-furrowing questions about his writing career, his research process, and how his scribbler helped him write The Point Is.
Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
Lee Eisenberg: There was no particular moment. My parents didn’t think much of my plan to be a cowboy or a fireman, and I didn’t think much of their plan that I be a doctor or a lawyer. In college, I started writing movie and theater reviews for a weekly underground paper (it got me in free), and sketches for a satirical revue that ran on campus (it brought minor celebrity). Thus motivated by noble principles, I began to take myself seriously as a writer —maybe good enough to write the great American novel but more likely (I was a realist) to wind up on Madison Avenue, where I’d write jingles and drink myself to death.
DF: You spent a considerable amount of time at Esquire and Time, so I have to ask why you jumped into journalism in the first place? How has it changed from when you first started out and what do you think the future holds for the craft?
LE: I didn’t jump in, exactly. I won a contest. Esquire’s great editor Harold Hayes decided the magazine needed a "junior editor" who could make sense of the counterculture. So he wrote a column that offered a job to anyone who was (a) under 25 and (b) thought he/she had a sense of humor. The assignment was to rewrite the titles and subtitles in that particular issue of the magazine. To make a long story short, I won the contest. Luckily, I got to work in magazines at a time when you didn’t have to put a celebrity on the cover every issue and there was still a firm wall between advertising and editorial. Not to mention that you could commission and publish nonfiction pieces that ran, on average, 4,000-words—or in the case of writers like Tom Wolfe or Richard Ben Cramer, two or three times longer than that. Inspired long-form journalism isn’t dead. But its future lies between the covers of books, not magazines.
DF: What’s your writing process like? Do you outline, listen to music, etc.?
LE: I’m a classic “How can I know that I think until I see what I say?” kind of guy. The quote’s been attributed to E.M. Forster but a great many other writers have said the same thing. Work from an outline? I lecture myself on how important it is to know for sure where you're going—in my new book, I talk about the perilous mid-section of a story. But until I hear the sound of my own voice, I’m not confident that I can know where I’m going, or whether it’s worth going there. As a result, even in the early research stage I find myself writing and rewriting the beginning of the book— to assure myself that what I’m doing plays well on the page.
DF: Your first book, Shoptimism, came out while America was still grappling with the Great Recession. The Point Is arrives in yet another compelling time, one in which we’re having this national discussion about health, death, and the like. What inspired the book and where can we shop for your sense of timing?
LE: Thank you for the compliment. But we’ve been having a "discussion” about health, death, and the like since the dawn of human history. If it seems particularly intense at the moment, it’s probably because 78-million baby boomers are contemplating the abyss and asking themselves what their life stories were all about. Myself included. Four or five years ago, having worked for so long and lived all over the place, I decided it was time to take stock.
DF: What was your research process like for The Point Is? How did you go about using your findings to illuminate the themes you were exploring?
LE: There were three parallel paths.
First, I started talking to people—men and women, from twenty-somethings to those who were even older than I am. I asked everyone to tell me their life stories: the best and worst chapters, the turning points, describe the major and minor characters, etc. Eventually, I dropped the $64,000 bomb: Do you know what the point is?
Second, I read books by ancient and modern philosophers, finding inspiration in the work of Victor Frankl, among others, who argued that we are all born with a drive to find meaning in our lives. Failing that, we face years of frustration and boredom.
Finally, I went back and thought hard about my own life, which got me thinking about why certain memories endure and others don't. And how memories are rewritten as the years go by. The death of my father, for example, and the birth of my children. An aha-moment came when I realized that every one of us walks around with a tiny little writer in our brain, whose assignment is to write and rewrite a private life story that can make sense of life and ultimately explains ourselves to ourselves.
DF: If you were a fiction author I’d ask how you develop your characters, however, the major players in your book are actual people! What did you discover about great thinkers, such as Tolstoy, Freud, Joseph Campbell, and Virginia Woolf, and how did they influence your own thinking as you wrote the book?
LE: They have all taken whacks at what constitutes a meaningful life. The writing challenge was to draw on these insights yet not turn the book into Bartlett’s Quotations. The trick was to reference philosophers and great writers in a non-academic or overly pompous way. The solution was to use their insights to illuminate events and relationships in my own past, which allowed me to keep a narrative going.
DF: You employ a rather charming writing style that makes these heavy topics infinitely approachable. First of all, how did you develop your voice over the course of your career? Secondly, are you able to slip into it during the writing process or is it something you find while you’re editing?
LE: My voice is my voice. It pretty much comes out the way it sounds on the page. I then go back and hunt down and ruthlessly remove a lot of unnecessary words.
DF: Now that all the research and writing is done for this project, what do you answer when someone asks you, “Who are we?” or “Why are we?”
LE: I think I make it clear in the book that the aim isn't to tell every man, woman, and child as yet unborn what the meaning of life is. The aim is to give readers a fresh way to think about the story they're carrying around inside. And to keep open the possibility that your life may be a lot more meaningful than you're giving it credit for.
DF: What’s your advice for up-and-coming writers of all kinds?
LE: Read like crazy. And write as much as you can. Keep a diary, which is useful for a great many reasons that I outline in the book. The two most important: daily writing keeps the wheels greased, as P.D. James, the great mystery novelist, put it. But it's also a way to preserve insights for later use. Joan Didion compared keeping a journal to putting loose change into a savings account, where it accumulates interest. Keeping a journal is a "thrifty virtue," she said.
DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?
LE: I have a tattoo. I got it decades before tattoos became fashionable. All I’ll say is that it’s on my left shoulder, it’s small and discreet, and it has something to do with a course I took in graduate school. But the precise why it's there, and the details of the night in question, and what it had to do with my personal myth at the time, well, that's between me and the little writer living upstairs.
To learn more about Lee Eisenberg, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @Lee_Eisenberg.
The Writer's Bone Interviews Archive
Sweet Hilarity: A Conversation With Author Julia Claiborne Johnson
Julia Claiborne Johnson
By Daniel Ford
The clock read 1 a.m. Only fifty pages remained in Julia Claiborne Johnson’s mesmerizing debut Be Frank With Me. My coffee had worn out and I was tempted to put my bookmark back to work.
The novel simply wouldn’t allow it. The story would break your heart one moment and then force it to take flight the next. Structured around a reclusive author, an insecure assistant, and an eccentric and immensely lovable 9-year-old, Be Frank With Me will move anyone who has ever been labeled “different” or “outsider.” I can’t remember the last time I had time to actually re-read a novel, but I have no doubt that I’ll pick this tale up again in the near future.
Julia Claiborne Johnson was kind enough to talk to me about her secret weapon during the writing process and what inspired the wonderful characters in Be Frank With Me.
Daniel Ford: Did you grow up wanting to become a writer or did the desire to write grow organically over time?
Julia Claiborne Johnson: I was always a writer. My mother had a typewriter that she must have used in college, in the late 1940s or early 1950s. It was my main source of amusement when I was a kid. My hands must have been unusually strong for a grade-schooler because I wrote a lot of stories about my dolls on it. Sadly, lost to the sands of time.
For me, writing always came naturally. It was something I was born with, like having the naturally blonde straight hair like Alice, the narrator of my novel. I assumed that writing came easily to everybody else, too, and took it for granted. My English teacher told me when I was a freshman in high school that I’d be a writer, and I can remember thinking at the time, “Yes, yes, but will I ever be popular?” Not a chance of that for me then. But some of the girls who were the social superstars of my high school just came to my reading in Nashville, so I guess it all evens out in the end. If you’re willing to wait 40 years.
DF: Who were some of your early influences?
JCJ: The novels of P. G. Wodehouse were the first serious books I loved. By “serious” I mean “books adults read” because honestly, those novels were the antithesis of serious. For some reason they had a lot of Wodehouse in the Shelbyville Public Library. They made me snort with laughter in middle school. In high school, I went for the usual stuff, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald. More Fitzgerald because there was such an ache about him, but he was so charming and could be funny, too. Also, Fitzgerald was married to a Southern girl and I was a Southern girl. When I was fifteen I loved reading Zelda, that bio of his wife by Nancy Mitford. Not that I wanted to be Zelda. Being Zelda was interesting, but way too exhausting. In college I loved Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy and Robert Penn Warren. William Styron.
Beyond all that, I had a father who told amazing stories. On long car trips with my family, we children would hang over the back of the front seat, listening spellbound, while my mother drove. Which was good, because my father cared more about holding his audience than staying on his side of the road. Also, he was one of those “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story” guys. That’s an excellent tradition to be raised in if you’re going to grow up to write fiction.
DF: What’s your writing process like? Do you outline, listen to music, etc.?
JCJ: I often work wearing those earmuffs the guys who use flashlights to direct airplanes into their parking spaces wear. Noise distracts me. So does music. I unplug the house phone and turn the ringer off on my cell. Chain myself to my chair. My husband started calling me “Iron Ass,” which, it seems, was Nixon’s nickname when he was in law school because he could sit in the library studying longer than his more charming and talented fellow students. So that’s my great skill—what I lack in genius I make up with in determination.
Can I tell you about what turned out to be my real secret weapon? Naps. I tried to work a 30-minute one into each work day if I could because my unconscious was great at untangling knotty story threads while I slept.
DF: I gladly lost a night of sleep finishing your utterly charming debut Be Frank With Me. What inspired this tale?
JCJ: Good, somebody else losing sleep from all the writing I did. That seems fair, since I spent so many years writing after I put my children to bed and walked around in a fog most days because of that. Really, though, that’s great to hear. I love finding books I can’t put down. I think that’s the highest compliment you can give a novel.
Here’s what got me started: When my daughter was in middle-school, she read To Kill a Mockingbird, a book I hadn’t read since I was about thirteen. So I decided to reread it then. This time around, as the middle-aged parent of children in public school in the 21st century, it struck me that Boo Radley might have fallen somewhere on the autism spectrum. And that, moreover, characters like Boo had always existed in fiction; in the old days there were no handy label to slap on them to explain their behavior. My very next thought was, “Well, it’s a lot easier to write Boo Radley than is to raise him.” And with minutes, my whole story rolled itself out, because it was a story I wanted to read. An eccentric kid; his mother, who’d written that character and was now raising him; and a girl in her twenties who thought she knew everything about raising children because she’d never really been tested by a difficult child. I made a conscious choice not to say that Frank was on the spectrum. As helpful as labels can be, I thought labeling Frank would limit him, so I didn’t. I was writing a work of fiction about individuals in a difficult situation, not a psychology textbook.
DF: You introduce readers to one of the most memorable characters I’ve read in a long time. Frank, a 9-year-old boy who enjoys dressing and acting like classic movie stars, is the beating heart of the novel and is an absolute joy to read even when he’s forcing other characters to their breaking point. How did you get into his mindset in order to develop his character? How much of yourself ended up in Frank, as well as the rest of your characters?
JCJ: I think I’m more Mimi and Alice than Frank. My daughter, in fact, says Alice is “nice me” and Mimi is “mean me.” And that, moreover, she gets Mimi while her brother gets Alice. Sigh.
When I was thinking about how Frank was going to be, I decided early on that I didn’t want him to be some meek kid in the back row of his fourth grade class, dressed in Garanimals and doing quadratic equations while the rest of the class drilled on state capitals. I wanted people to be able to look at him and know right away that he was different. In my twenties, I’d worked as a writer in fashion magazines in New York City. Up until then, I was only familiar with the kind of academic achievement that gets rewarded in school. The good students got ahead, and the bad students got jobs at the chicken plant. But once I was working in magazines, I came up against visual genius for the first time. The fashion people were brilliant and amazing to look at, and, alas, often inarticulate. So what? You could see them coming from a mile away, and you knew right away that they were singular. It wasn’t like I people who passed me on the street saw me and thought, “Look at that girl. She can write.” So I decided to make Frank visually splendid, because honestly, there isn’t enough fabulousness in the world. Unfortunately, being fabulous at Frank’s age is the equivalent of wearing a bulls-eye for bullies on your chest to school every day.
As for the whole Old Hollywood business, I’ve lived in it for the past 20 years. My house used to belong to Oscar Hammerstein’s son, and the club at the end of my block is the one Groucho Marx wouldn’t belong to if it wanted him as a member. I can walk to Paramount studios, which is where Fred and Ginger filmed their movies. I love all that stuff. Can you blame me for putting it in my book when I’m surrounded by it every day?
DF: The novel explores themes dealing with not only the relationship children have with their parents and their peers, but also issues that creative people, particularly writers, grapple with on a daily basis. Did you set out to tackle those themes or did you discover them as you were telling this story?
JCJ: This novel was about outsiders from the get-go. I was the chubby, awkward Teacher’s Pet who got picked last for every team on the playground and never got invited to parties. My husband is a comedy writer, and listen, most comedy writers aren’t prom kings, either. When you’re a kid, it can be hard to grasp that the things that make you a success as an adult are the very things that make you a loser when you’re young. Would knowing that make things any less hard when you’re in grade school? Probably not. It’s hard to be different. That’s why Mimi has the list of all the people who never finished college or high school or grade school in her bedside table drawer. She just needed to keep reassuring herself that what was unique about Frank would make him a success in the world, if it didn’t kill him first the way it killed her brother.
DF: Your writing style in the novel is so witty and well honed. How did you develop your voice? Are you able to slip into it during the writing process or is it something you find while you’re editing?
JCJ: I don’t pretend to be a brilliant prose stylist. If you’d met me, you’d know that Alice’s voice is more or less my voice. I talk the way she does. My husband always says that we’re raising our children to think it’s more important to be funny than to be good. Uh oh. He may be right about that. Just please don’t ask me if my husband helped me write my jokes. I’m always shocked when people ask me that. Surely they don’t mean to suggest that a woman can’t be funny on her own? I will say this, though: Living with a guy who is hilarious as my husband is has upped my game. Our house is a wit-friendly environment. We fell in love with each other because we crack each other up. And have, for the past twenty-five years.
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?
JCJ: I think I felt that way after I wrote the first chapter I put to paper. It’s Chapter 8, the one where Alice spends the night alone with Frank for the first time. In it you’ll find every mother’s fears of all the ways your kid could find to kill himself and others if you look away for even a minute. I had assumed I’d be a great mother, but I was completely unprepared that level of constant vigilance. It was exhausting. After I’d finished writing Chapter 8, I thought, “Hey, this could really be something.” That’s all that got me through the thousands of pages I wrote to get to the three hundred or so I ended up with. The belief that, if I could just get it right, people would want to read it. Why? Because I never got bored with the story myself.
Here’s what was the most thrilling part of this whole experience for me. When I finished that first draft late one night after three years of sweating over it, I googled the name of my favorite author’s agent. (Bel Canto by Ann Patchett is my favorite book.) I found the agent’s name and sent an email to her fancy agency in New York. I didn’t think I’d hear from her for months, if ever. When I woke up, the agent had written me back to ask to see my manuscript. She took me on as a client a week later. I still had two years of revisions ahead of me, but I had an agent. I still can’t believe how lucky I was. The part I’d always assumed would be the hardest turned out to be the easiest of everything.
DF: Now that you have your first novel under your belt, what’s next for you?
JCJ: I hope I will start writing my next book June or thereabouts. I have a couple of ideas that seem solid to me. I’ve spent the past few months reconnecting with friends and re-familiarizing myself with the world outside my office. Once I got going on it, I was so determined to finish Be Frank With Me that I wouldn’t socialize or answer the phone or emails or do anything I didn’t have to do to keep my family together. I’m so glad it worked out in the end because if it hadn’t it would have been so depressing to miss out on so much fun for so many years.
DF: What’s your advice to aspiring authors?
JCJ: Don’t talk about the book you’re going to write. Write it.
DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?
JCJ: I grew up on a farm so I’ll be handy to have around when the zombies come. I know how to milk a cow and ride a horse and fish and string barbed wire. I don’t have the hand-eye coordination for a bow and arrow. I wish I did. I flunked archery at camp, despite wanting so desperately be good at it. Which is probably why I gave Frank that bow and arrow.
To learn more about Julia Claiborne Johnson, like her Facebook page or follow her on Twitter @JuliaClaiborneJ.
Full Interviews Archive
A Conversation With High Dive Author Jonathan Lee
Photo credit: Tanja Kernweiss
By Adam Vitcavage
Jonathan Lee is no stranger to the literary world. He is a senior editor at Catapult and a contributing editor to Guernica. Lee has previously published two books in Europe, but the British writer has just published his first novel in America. High Dive has already received advance praise ahead of its March release and was selected to be apart of Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program.
His smartly written story about the 1984 assassination attempt of the British Prime Minister juggles multiple characters and threads in an inmate way. Fellow authors have proclaimed Lee’s pacing and dialogue are exceptional, which is obvious from the very beginning.
I chatted with Lee via email as he embarks on a U.S. book tour about where this book came from, his writing process, and the literary world he’s a part of.
Adam Vitcavage: Why this event? Did you already have interest in the bombing when you thought of the idea? Or did you seek an event out for the book?
Jonathan Lee: For me a book always comes out of a specific image or fact or moment. I’ve never been able to write well about broad ideas—I’m more of a micro thinker, and, therefore, a micro writer. I’m interested in small details and moments and hope that by paying an almost absurd amount of attention to those micro moments—finding the right word when a character is fusing electrical components together, or finding the right image to capture the feel of the air in a swimming pool—larger patterns will emerge on their own. So my idea for High Dive wasn’t “I must write about the conflict in Northern Ireland.” It was that I’d seen The Grand Hotel on various childhood visits to Brighton, was maybe struck by the grandeur of it—so different from the three-bedroom, viewless terraced house I grew up in—and eventually heard the small details: that this long-delay device had been planted in the hotel under the bath in room 629, and had exploded 26 days later. That 26 days, and that bath, and that room number... These were the kinds of micro things that fascinated me. I began at some point to wonder what life was like in the hotel during that 26 days of highly charged unawareness, if that makes sense. And also what life was like for the men who had planted the bomb and were back in Belfast, waiting to see its effects on a television screen.
AV: What sort of research had to go into this?
JL: Lots of reading of IRA memoirs, many of them self-published. Lots of hanging around in hotels. Lots of reading about hospitality, as a trade—books written by people who managed hotels, and also brilliantly absurd 1980s books aimed at telling travelers on how to get the most out of their hotel experience. I tried to avoid reading too many books about the time and instead focused on books written in the time—1984 and the years before it—as well as newspaper accounts from the relevant months. Those kinds of contemporaneous records have none of the lethal objectivity of hindsight, do they? I wanted to avoid deep-freezing my novel with hindsight. If a character said or thought something about Thatcher, I wanted the hot mess of what they thought or said to be there on the page. I wanted everything to be in the moment—very partial and open to revision.
AV: How did writing this book differ from other projects? How was it similar?
JL: High Dive is my third novel, and somehow the writing doesn’t get easier with each new book. The good news is it doesn’t get harder, either. I guess I worry a little less about things like plot than I used to do. I’m keener now to let the entire plot, the sequence of events—and I do like there to be events; I like my novels to offer a compelling narrative—to just emerge from the personalities, the natural decisions, of my characters. With High Dive, more than with earlier projects, I wanted to be very focused on day-to-day lives. I wanted character to be plot, and character to be language, and character to be structure. The other thing that gets very slightly easier the more books you write, I find, is that you get better at getting characters in and out of rooms, and using section breaks and chapter breaks to your advantage—leaning into the white space when you need to. There was a time when I’d send my characters on all these costly 5,000-word taxi rides. Now, more often, I just have them thinking about going to X or Y’s house, and then turning up. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to no longer be describing those taxi rides.
AV: Building off of that: how did you decide to weave these particular stories together?
JL: I just started writing a few pages from the perspectives of six or seven possible characters, and the three who are center stage in the published book seemed to be the ones that intrigued me most. I didn’t have a specific structural idea at the start, save for the fact that I wanted the story to look at things at least two ways—to have an Irish republican perspective as well as a protestant English one—and I wanted it to move back and forth in time in a manner I still think of, perhaps rather grandly, as tidal. As the book progressed it also seemed to me to make sense to pull the rope of the narrative very gradually tighter—to have the three main threads, the three characters’ stories, get closer to each other as the ending came near. So by page 300 or so you have these very short sections—sometimes just a paragraph—before the next character has his or her close third person section. The characters’ fates and thoughts become more intertwined as we approach the explosion. There’s a sort of structural empathy, maybe—purely structural.
AV: How would you describe your writer process for novels? How intricate are you outlines? For instance: do they include white boards of each chapter?
JL: No, I’m not much of a planner. I just start writing and see what comes. Worse, I’m a hypocrite about it, because when I teach students on occasional residential courses or workshop weekends, I preach the importance of planning. It’s because I know my own methods lead to so much wastage—tens of thousands of words needing to be cut away, and several novels abandoned midway through.
AV: A lot of aspiring writers don’t really get the process of selling a book. Can you take us through how this became your first American release?
JL: Well, that’s a long story. It took me a long time to find the right U.S. editor—one who could fall in love with weird novels set in England, which are the kinds of books I seem to write. For my first two books I was lucky to have publishers in Poland and Taiwan and all sorts of places, but not America. But I think sometimes aspiring writers worry about trying to please everyone, as I used to do, when in fact you just have to please one person. Publication is a process of matchmaking, I think. It is more intimate than people think, and it requires patience. At each stage before publication, you only need one person to really love your work. One agent’s assistant—the one who looks through the slush pile. Then one agent. Then one editor. In Diana Miller at Knopf, I happened to find the perfect U.S. editor, and in Jason Arthur at William Heinemann in the U.K. I’ve had for many years an essential relationship too—he was the first editor who ever saw any potential in my work. Then there’s also this issue of community-building, and that too is intimate. I sometimes get messages from writers starting out that contain a line like “I only read the classics.” That’s an infuriating thing to say. You have to support the system you want to be part of. If you want to write contemporary fiction, read some contemporary fiction. If you want to be an author reading your work at a bookstore one day, go see authors reading at bookstores today. Maybe even set up your own reading series. Build the community. Go to the library and read a story in Tin House before you think of submitting to Tin House. You don’t want to be published everywhere, and you don’t want to be edited by everyone—you just want to find the one or two key people who love the sentences you love.
AV: When you’re giving talks, how different is each appearance? Or is there a script where you always want to hit certain points for discussion? If so, what are those points?
JL: A script! If only. It depends who the audience is. I feel like a lot of readers that I’m meeting on the High Dive book tour at the moment are also aspiring writers. So I try and bear that in mind and not get too caught up in talking about this or that moment in the book when what they might be looking for is more general encouragement, or to hear me or another author talk about craft. When I went to readings in my early twenties in London, I was often attending more out of a fascination with process than through obsession with a particular book. It’s the same reason I compulsively read Paris Review interviews back then. They got into the nitty-gritty of process, the staples and paper and handwriting. And I remember writers like David Mitchell being really kind when I queued up to get a copy of an early book of his signed many years ago. He took one look at me and said, “So you write as well, then?” Not “want to write.” Not “hope to write.” He didn’t condescend. There must have been a certain desperation in my eye, and he was incredibly kind—he knew he was part of a community.
AV: You interview a lot of authors. What’s your approach to those conversations? What do you choose to focus on?
JL: I like interviewing other writers. I like that, in the book world, it’s so easy to meet your heroes, because no literary author, however famous, is too famous. Authors hardly ever get asked about their sentences, so I like to ask about that if I’m interviewing them. I like to find out what they’re trying to erase or emphasize as they re-write, given most writing is re-writing. Sometimes I’m a little rude and bring up a particular review of their work, perhaps a negative one, because I think the type of response to that question speaks a lot to the honesty or at least the openness of the writer, and I tend to know at that point whether it’ll be a good interview or not. When I was interviewing James Salter for Guernica several years ago, and the conversation turned to a negative review that Robert Towers had given of Light Years in The New York Times on its original release, he immediately smiled and said “that review was wounding.” Then he went on to explain how the reviewer’s criticisms had actually changed the way he wrote his subsequent work. I loved him for that. A less generous writer would have covered up their pain.
To learn more about Jonathan Lee, visit his official website or follow him on Twitter @JonLeeWriter.
Full Interviews Archive
The Zen of Storytelling: 11 Questions With Author Amy Parker
Amy Parker
By Daniel Ford
Amy Parker’s debut short story collection Beasts & Children includes a blurb all writers would kill for:
Amy Parker proves herself an unflinching, passionate, and profoundly humane writer, even as she hold a knife to your heart.”—Michelle Huneven, author of Blame
After my discussion with the author, I couldn’t agree more. The first thing I look for when reviewing fiction is whether or not there’s a big ol’ thumpin’ heart behind the prose, and Parker’s literary EKG is off the charts. She expertly drops readers into a fully formed world in her first sentence and explores familiar family themes throughout her linked stories.
Parker recently talked to me about how an English sheepdog sparked her creativity, why authors need to finish their stories, and what inspired Beasts & Children.
Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
Amy Parker: In third grade my teacher held a contest—whoever wrote the most stories in a marbled black composition book class would win a prize. The prize was a poster of an English sheepdog set against a very, very blue sky. I wanted that poster! You know how it is when you’re eight, and you think something is so cute that you could die? That desire for cuteness—to possess that which is adorable. That dog—textbook old English sheepdog, pink tongue hanging out, shaggy-browed, panting under an improbably blue sky. My soul cried out for it. So I cranked out a dozen stories—derivative as hell—baby’s first potboilers—one of them involved me having an affair with Superman and getting into a catfight with Lois Lane, for example. Some I illustrated. I busted my butt. That was also the first time I encountered the problem of the blank page—and the pain caused by lack of narrative invention. But I won the poster. And I still have the notebook.
DF: Who were some of your early influences?
AP: How early? I loved Lois Duncan, in particular the book Down a Dark Hall; I also read Stephen King and John Irving probably far too early. Beverly Cleary. Judy Blume. E.B. White. L.M. Montgomery—the Emily books (Emily’s a depressive who wants to be a writer; she was my hero). Around fifth grade I started getting ambitious—Dickens—and by sixth grade I was collecting “great books”—these snazzy editions of the classics that came with their own illustrated magazines explaining the plot and characters—I read Poe and the Brontes and suchlike. But I read everything. I had very highbrow taste. But I’d also devour V.C. Andrews (and make myself ill on it) and Mad Magazine. I remember the first time I saw an episode of “Northern Exposure,” the magical realism of it, I thought wait, I’m allowed to do this? And that was game-changing.
DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?
AP: I write in bursts, in a notebook, longhand, generally when I’m in the middle of something else. Then later, when I have enough raw material, I type it up, editing as I go, and then I stitch the pieces together and fill in the gaps. I can’t listen to music. It’s too distracting. And I should learn to outline, but I don’t. I’m very messy. My mind is not well organized. It is a fitful, poorly lit place. Or a compost heap. Let’s call it that.
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?
AP: Stephen King calls a short story a kiss in the dark from a stranger. I love that. If I were to state a preference, it would be for long, doorstop-heavy Victorian novels—but with short stories it is possible to achieve a degree of perfection and compression that a novel can’t match. Certain short stories are just complete. A short story is like an egg, self contained, shapely, rounded off. They’re very difficult to do well. The best short story writers understand timing, they know what to leave out, what telling detail should be placed where, how to go for the jugular, how to strike that secret chord, how to sock you in the gut and then pas de bourree offstage leaving you gasping in a dark theater.
DF: How did the idea for Beasts and Children originate?
AP: I read Flaubert’s St. Julien the Hospitaler as an undergrad and internalized it so thoroughly that, 10 years later, I had a vision of animal trophies coming back to life and pursuing their hunter, and I thought it was a stroke of genius. When I reread the Flaubert, I was mortified, because I thought my idea was original. But at that point the title story had mutated so much that it didn’t matter. And honestly, credit for this book has to go in huge part to Jenna Johnson, my editor, whose vision pushed it places, pushed me places, I wasn’t sure I could go. Initially I’d sent her a huge block of unconnected stories, (I was claiming they were “thematically connected,” but they were really just everything I had ever written up to that point). Jenna saw something worth pursuing in four of those stories, and they happened to be interconnected—two were about the Bowmans, and two were about the sisters in Thailand. She asked if I could write more, and link them, and naturally I said yes. Then we traded versions of the manuscript back and forth until it came right. Pilar Garcia Brown at HMH also weighed in with valuable advice and suggestions. As did Ellen Levine, my agent, and my two sisters.
DF: What were some of the themes you wanted to explore throughout the collection?
AP: I was, and am, very interested in the gaps between the stories we tell about themselves—our slanted version of events—and the subtext in those stories of which we’re totally unaware. I wanted to play with a set of stories where characters revise and comment on one another’s experiences, both directly and by showing them living their own lives, with their own delusions. So the power of stories to influence one another, that’s one theme. And of course the question of the destructiveness of the adult world, of adult culture, on the young and on the planet. The question of who adults really are—are they just flailing overgrown children? What does it mean to be an adult? How do we respond to violence, how do we outgrow our wounds; is that even possible? How to be a parent when you’ve been badly parented yourself? Mourning for the shrinking natural world. The deep bond between siblings. Those are some of the themes. Hopefully readers will see others I’m not consciously aware of at the moment.
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?
AP: There’s a lot of me and my experiences in the book. Both sets of sisters are homages to my own sisters. There are three of us, and I scramble bits of us around in each character. Other characters are completely invented. I develop characters by tuning in to them—it’s kind of like trying to catch a radio station that’s just slightly out of range; I’ll hear snatches of dialogue and then I’ll know I’m onto something. When they start yapping, I take dictation. That’s usually how it starts. Hearing voices. Sometimes it’s a mood, a feeling. But usually, if I can find the voice, then the rest is just a question of examining cause and effect, and how that character would behave in different circumstances.
DF: How long did it take you to complete Beasts and Children?
AP: It depends. With a first book, it’s honestly hard to say, I think. In one sense it took my whole life. I started working on the title story, “The White Elephant,” during a period of intense mourning at Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery in 2006. That was the inception. Some of the stories I completed in grad school. Some in the first year after my son was born. It wasn’t a linear process at all.
DF: Beasts and Children has garnered rave reviews from the likes of Booklist and Molly Antopol (a Writer’s Bone favorite!). What has that experience been like and what’s next for you?
AP: I’m thrilled and surprised and grateful. Really, this feels like a miracle, and I’ve had a lot of help and support—from Jenna Johnson at HMH, Stephanie Kim, Ayesha Mirza, who work publicity, from Ellen Levine, my agent; from workshop peers and family.
But also, I’ve been so busy trying to raise a kid and teach full-time and write a novel that a lot of this good stuff has been a blur. In Zen, you’re taught not to hang out in bliss, but move on to the next practical thing, and that’s been very much my experience. I would have liked to hang out in bliss for a few minutes, though! I wish I had a talent for celebration, but I don’t. I’m grateful the book has been well received.
I’m currently working on a novel set in Ankara, Turkey. That’s what’s next. Unless HBO calls and offers me a job writing for television. (Seriously, call me.)
DF: What’s your advice to aspiring authors?
AP: Finish your stories! If they’re bad, write better ones, expose the bad ones on a hillside and move on. But train yourself to finish. Also, find a reader who will tell you the truth, a reader who is smart enough and insightful enough to grasp what you’re aiming to do, and who cares enough to read closely and tell you when your skirt, metaphorically speaking, is tucked into the back of your tights. When you find that reader ply them with gratitude and send them burnt offerings and do not let them go because such a reader is the writer’s better half. Truly. And then, and this is very important, listen to them. And rewrite. And read. Read a lot, and risk being read. Though most writers don’t have an especially hard time shoving their manuscripts under people’s noses.
DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?
AP: I can do a passable impression of Tom Waits singing “Good King Wenceslas” and I believe that if I do it often enough he will wake up one day and decide to record a Christmas album.
To learn more about Amy Parker, visit her official website.
Full Interviews Archive
For Love of the Genre: The Ripped Bodice Bookstore Romances Readers
Just Write It: 6 Questions With Author Maxim Jakubowski
Maxim Jakubowski
By Sean Tuohy
There seems to be no genre that can contain author Maxim Jakubowski. From hardboiled fiction to sci-fi, Jakubowski is a hardworking and skilled writer. Jakubowski’s anthologies are highly praised, and his Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction was the gateway novel that led me into hardboiled detective fiction.
I got a chance to chat with Jakubowski about his love of writing and what advice he gives to first-time writers.
Sean Tuohy: What authors did you worship growing up?
Maxim Jakubowski: I can't say I worshipped authors. Some I enjoyed more than others and made it a rule to read more of if I liked them. My first big literary “crush” was Jules Verne if only because of his sense of wonder and originality, which probably led to me beginning to write science fiction and fantasy in my teens and beyond.
ST: What attracted you to crime fiction?
MJ: I've always been a lover of popular/genre fiction alongside what may be termed as “mainstream” literature, again because genre must appeal first and foremost to the imagination rather than the senses, and often the fantastic is of more appeal than tales of kitchen sink or social mores. But these days they all coexist happily in my reading menu and my choices are pretty idiosyncratic.
ST: What is your writing process: outline then begin writing or just vomit on the page and see what happens?
MJ: Short stories just come out of the blue and are often improvised. Novels less so, and have to be briefly outlined but not over-prepared to the extent that writing becomes boring. The longest and most difficult period is the actual gestation when no writing is being done and it all whirlpools in my mind until I have a fix on the story, the characters and some form of structure, at which point I will actually get to work. On some books that can take years, with others less so. Also, for the past decade all my novels have sold to publishers on outline long before a word was set down on paper, so it became a financial obligation to work that way.
ST: What does the future hold for Maxim Jakubowski?
MJ: Just to keep on writing what I want to write, regardless of market or genre demands. The next two books are a long psychological thriller with several major twists under my principal pen name, which I'd reserved hitherto for my erotica as that market has now collapsed, but I have a “brand” so it makes sense shifting that author name to a neighboring genre, and, the first novel under my own name in four years, a post-apocalyptic thriller that begins as a standard private eye yarn and turns into something rather curious and supernatural as it goes along.
ST: What advice do you give to aspiring writers?
MJ: Don't talk about it, just write it. Read. Live.
ST: Can you tell us one random fact about yourself?
MJ: I once survived a whole weekend on a kilo of potatoes.
To learn more about Maxim Jakubowski, visit his official website.
Full Archive
A Conversation With Musician Alexander Shields
Alexander Shields
By Robert Masiello
Do you ever stop and wonder how much music you haven’t heard? Have you considered how many albums out there you would love, but were never introduced to? Imagine, for a moment, the hours upon hours of recorded music that hasn’t yet found its way to your ears.
Alexander Shields just might be one of those artists who has slipped under your radar. Since 2009, he has quietly been releasing music under the moniker, A Grave With No Name. While it may sounds like the name of some Norwegian doom metal band, his earnest, fractured songs maintain a certain gracefulness lacking in so much modern music.
With his latest release, “Feathers Wet, Under the Moon,” Shields stepped away from the lo-fi, reverb-laden sound of his earlier work. The songs here are sharply produced, every note aching with mournful intensity. Fans of early Cat Power, Keaton Henson, and especially Carissa’s Wierd (yes, that’s the actual spelling) will find a lot to love here.
“Feathers Wet, Under the Moon,” opens with the hypnotic, ghostly “Nursing Home,” throughout which Shields coos, “Why is she singing all night?” It sets the stage for an elegant, introspective song-cycle. When the pace quickens, such as on “Candle” or “Orion,” the feel is somehow vast-yet-intimate, never succumbing to cheap climaxes or production tricks. Gorgeous imagery abounds, evoking both human relationships and the natural world. There’s nothing so obvious as a straightforward love song or a breakup song, but the album is stronger for it.
Throughout “Feathers Wet, Under the Mood,” Shields weaves detailed, touching stories. Lyrics such as, “people fall away/but I saw your ghost was there by the lake,” which might come off as cloying or maudlin in the hands of a less sophisticated songwriter, are imbued with warmth and sincerity. Even the album’s darkest corners are never bleak or unforgiving.
The album closes with “Natural Light,” a string-laden finale which attempts to answer the question posited in “Nursing Home.” Shields warbles, “You hear her singing every night/and she sings ’til natural light/comes visiting with the morning.” It’s not exactly a happy ending—death seems imminent—but, like all of “Feather’s Wet, Under the Moon,” it’s oddly comforting. And maybe that’s exactly what Shields is trying to tell us: even in the chaos of nature, even in the impermanence of life, there is beauty and hope.
Shields was kind enough to answer some my questions about his writing process and future album plans.
Robert Masiello: I discovered your music completely by accident. While searching reviews for the band Wet, I stumbled upon your album “Feathers Wet, Under the Moon” and was immediately enamored. How long did you spend writing the album? What was the writing process like for you?
Alexander Shields: I began writing “Feathers Wet, Under the Moon” back in July 2013, and the basic songs were finished by December of the same year. My intention was to record the album in my bedroom, however, by April 2014 I found myself far away from home in Mark Nevers’ Beech House studio in Nashville, Tenn.
The writing process was the most disciplined I have ever been while creating an album. I was suffering from insomnia at the time, so I made the best of a bad situation by getting up at 5:00 a.m. each morning, watching a film or two, and then I would spend the rest of the day writing and recording demos. My grandmother was pretty ill at the time, so it also served as good therapy for me to be occupied in that way on a daily basis.
RM: Despite a cleaner, more polished sound than your earlier work, “Feathers Wet, Under the Moon” strikes me as particularly mournful and elegiac. I think that says a lot about the quality of your songwriting; the songs don't need any lo-fi hiss or to be drenched in reverb to convey emotion. How did it feel bringing your songs to a proper studio?
AS: The thought of flying to Nashville on my own, playing with musicians far superior to myself, and working with a producer who has made some of my favourite records was incredibly intimidating, however, I was eager to challenge myself. Anyone who has worked with Mark Nevers will tell you he is a genius, and it was an honour to work in his studio, and to allow him to shape the sound of my music. Previously I had written every single note of each song, and either performed it myself, or dictated exactly how it should be played. Making “Feathers Wet, Under the Moon,” was a very different experience. Mark assembled a local group of musicians, and I would present them with the bare bones of the songs; we’d hash them out a couple of times, then press record, and create the arrangements on the fly. We had the basic tracking down by the end of the first week, and then spent the second week adding more deliberate overdubs, and textures to the songs. It was incredibly humbling to be around such great musicians, and I’m grateful to them all for making beautiful contributions to my album.
RM: I'm especially impressed by how songs such as "Candle" and "Orion" are almost anthemic without losing their sense of intimacy. Did you start with the intention of writing them as "big" songs, or did they just turn out that way?
AS: When I approach a new album, I usually set myself a few guidelines, and for “Feathers Wet, Under the Moon” my one rule was that I didn’t want to incorporate any big rock dynamics into the record, so in fact the demos of those songs are considerably more hushed than their finished album counterparts. We worked hard in the studio to ensure that the songs would swell and ache in the right places, however, I wanted to ensure that moments should not be achieved cheaply by stomping on a fuzz pedal. When the songs feel more expansive on the album it is through the accumulation of the parts coming together in the right way, which maintains an atmosphere of intimacy at the center of their ornate facades.
RM: I've noticed many references to the natural world in your song—landscapes, animals, and geography. How does nature shape and influence your music?
AS: I’m an insular, contemplative person by nature (excuse the pun), so the environments I create in my songs tend to reflect that. For me, these unpopulated, desolate, meditative spaces allow more complex thought and questions to resonate, away from the distractions and minutiae of day-to-day human life.
RM: It seems like some bands are constantly on the road, but touring doesn't seem to have been a huge part of this project so far. Do you enjoy performing live?
AS: I have a complicated relationship with live music. As an audience member I enjoy shows where the method of performance, venue, and players have all been carefully curated, but all too often, bands embark on long tours that serve little purpose other than to commodify their music and maintain their visibility. An undesired side effect of the length and infrastructure of these tours is that they have a numbing effect on the artists where performance becomes rote, and uninspired, and putting out a record becomes just another reason to keep touring. Live music can be transcendental, but the ingredients that allow this alchemy to occur are so ephemeral and multifarious that these days I tend to perform live very infrequently.
RM: I read that you're close friends with Yuck's Daniel Blumberg, and that he lent a hand in recording “Feathers Wet, Under the Moon” (side note: I'm a huge fan of the album he recorded as Oupa, and in some ways it reminds me of AGWNN). What was it like working in the studio with a friend?
AS: Daniel has lent a hand on every record I have made to date, but “Feathers Wet, Under the Moon” is the only one that he has actually played on. We are closely involved in each other’s music, and refer to each other at every step of the creative process. I was thinking about how much I love that Oupa album just a couple of days ago. It’s a beautiful record, and it was inspiring to witness its creation, and be involved in the creative process as a confidant.
Daniel was the one who suggested that I worked with Mark Nevers, and he joined me in the second week of recording to help out with overdubs and offer his guidance. Funnily enough, we ended up having the sole argument in our long friendship over a guitar solo, and didn’t speak to each other for an entire day.
RM: You've suggested on social media that a new album is already in the works. Can we look forward to it dropping this year? Are there any stylistic changes in the works?
AS: The album is finished. It’s called “Wooden Mask” and it should be out later in the year. It has a raw, sacred, elemental feel to it. The arrangements and melodies sound as though they have been stripped of their flesh. I was saying to a friend that it’s the first time I’ve made a record that actually sounds like it has been made by a project called A Grave With No Name.
RM: What recent music has caught your ear? What would your dream collaboration be?
AS: I’m very into the music being put out by Three Lobed Recordings, particularly the Daniel Bachman and Tom Carter albums they released last year. I’m a total Chief Keef obsessive, and find each of his projects fascinating at the very least. My apartment is filled with Mount Eerie records and books, so my dream collaboration would likely be to spend a week or two in the studio with Phil Elverum on production duties.
To learn more about Alexander Shields, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, follow him on Twitter @alaxander, or listen to his Sound Cloud channel.
FULL ARCHIVE
Private Scribe: 13 Questions With Author Michael Compton
Michael Compton
By Daniel Ford
Author Michael Compton's debut novel Gumshoe hits all our favorite beats: hardboiled private eyes, a fast-paced plot, and a 1940s Hollywood setting.
Compton talked to me recently about how science fiction ignited his passion for reading, his screenwriting career, and the inspiration behind Gumshoe.
Daniel Ford: Did you grow up wanting to become a writer, or was that something that grew organically over time?
Michael Compton: As a kid, I was mostly interested in outdoor stuff—sports, camping, fishing, etc. I actually got a big lecture once from my fifth grade teacher because I told her I didn’t like to read. But in high school I read my first science fiction novel (Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End) and I was hooked. As soon as I got into reading, I started thinking about writing my own stories.
DF: Who were some of your early influences?
MC: In science fiction, it was Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and especially Larry Niven. Later on, I broadened my interests to “literary” writers like Kafka, Camus, and Dostoevsky, and I got into the hardboiled detective genre with writers like Hammett and Chandler.
DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?
MC: When I was young and single I had a very set routine of writing every evening while listening to music, but my home and teaching schedules are so variable now that I write more in bursts or when I can. I do outline a lot, especially when it comes to writing screenplays, because I do a lot of collaborative writing, and in collaboration everyone involved needs to know where the story is going.
DF: Does your writing style change when you are writing a screenplay like the one for “Carjacked?” Do you focus more on dialogue when writing a screenplay?
MC: In writing a screenplay, you’re trying to use as few words as possible and convey everything in visual terms. There can’t be any long descriptive passages, and you can’t describe what is going on in the characters’ heads. Plus, there are aspects of style and format that are industry standard, and unless you are Quentin Tarantino, you need to stick to them. I do focus a lot on dialogue, because that’s where you get to have a little fun and maybe show off your wit.
DF: Do you have any screenplays currently in development?
MC: I have several, but my big project right now is a novelization called Inferno 2033 that I am writing in collaboration with my wife Sherry and my friend Allan Walsh. We already have a script, a website, a live-action trailer, and a lot of graphic art. Our target date for publication is July 2016, and we plan to use the novel as a launch pad for a film or TV series, graphic novels, maybe even video games.
DF: What inspired your debut novel Gumshoe?
MC: I’ve been a fan of crime movies, and especially film noir, for years. I’ve also read everything by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. So Gumshoe is kind of a tribute to the whole hardboiled genre, but with my own spin. I think I’ve written the novel so that anyone can enjoy it, but readers with a knowledge of classic movies and detective fiction will relate to the material on a whole other level.
DF: What draws you to crime fiction? Is it the mystery, the characters, the problem solving?
MC: Whether it’s a book, a movie, or a television series, there is nothing that draws me into a story like mystery and suspense. It’s that sense of wonder, and the desire to find out what happens next, that drives me forward. A story is always a kind of puzzle, I think, and the best fiction bears re-reading, so that you can go back and pick up on all the little details that had greater significance than you realized the first time through. As far as crime fiction, I am drawn to the worldview it represents, in which there is this dark, alternative reality that lurks beneath the surface of everyday life.
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?
MC: All I can say is that I play with the genre, that the “built-in tropes” are very much part of the story. To say more would be to give too much away.
DF: How much of yourself—and the people you have daily interactions with—did you put into your main characters in the book? How do you develop your characters in general?
MC: I tend to create a lot of smart-alecky characters, and that is certainly a reflection on me and the kind of people I hang around with. But the most gifted writers are the ones who can create characters outside of themselves—different sex, age, race, belief system, etc. I can’t write anything unless I find a voice in which to tell it, and that’s how I approach character. If I can find a character’s voice it gives me at least a starting point from which I can render a fleshed-out person on the page—hopefully one that can surprise me.
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?
MC: If I’m not convinced it’s good before I finish the first draft, I will put it aside and move on to something else. If inspiration strikes, I’ll come back to it, but if not I’ll let it go. There are too many stories to write to get bogged down on something that isn’t working. But feedback is important. What I think is brilliant almost always needs more work, and what I am most unsure of is sometimes the work that most resonates with readers.
DF: Now that you have your first book under your belt, what’s next?
MC: Gumshoe was originally a film script, and so was Inferno, and I have several other scripts that I think will work as novels, so that is where I am right now. Several of my scripts—as well as a couple of other novel ideas—focus on teenagers, so I’m thinking of jumping into the Young Adult market. I feel like I need to do more reading in that genre, though, before I’ll be truly comfortable with it.
DF: What’s your advice to aspiring authors?
MC: Lose the ego, or at least learn how to suppress it. If you can’t take criticism, and you aren’t always looking to improve, you should do the world a favor and stop writing.
DF: What is one random fact about yourself?
MC: My dogs and cats are all strays my wife and I have taken in. A portion of all our book sales goes to animal rescue and spay/neuter programs.
To learn more about Michael Compton, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @ikeandmikeblog.
FULL ARCHIVE
A Conversation With Lay Down Your Weary Tune Author W.B. Belcher
W.B. Belcher
By Daniel Ford
If I had to review W.B. Belcher’s debut novel Lay Down Your Weary Tune simply based on its title and bitchin’ cover, I’d instantly make it a Writer’s Bone favorite (we run a column called “Bob, Bourbon, and Books” after all).
However, critics from Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal agree that Belcher’s first literary effort is as memorable and artful as any Dylan lyric.
Belcher recently took time out of his book tour (Lay Down Your Weary Tune lands on shelves Jan. 26) to talk to me about his early influences, his writing shed, and his publishing journey.
Daniel Ford: Did you grow up wanting to become a writer, or was that something that grew organically over time?
W.B. Belcher: Well, I think the kids I grew up with would say that I had a habit of stretching the truth, but the thought of being a writer didn’t cross my mind until high school. That’s when I fell in love with literature. I remember reading Long Day’s Journey Into Night, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and The Stranger. During my freshman year in college, I took a class with Matthew Zapruder titled “Introduction to Imaginative Writing.” At the same time, I was reading Richard Wright’s Black Boy, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills, and I was watching plays by Jean Genet and Arthur Kopit. That’s when the idea of being a writer took hold. Of course, I imagined myself a playwright first and a novelist second, but that order flip-flopped after I moved to Upstate New York.
DF: Who were some of your early influences?
WBB: My earliest influences were probably James and the Giant Peach, The Phantom Tollbooth, and the Stephen King library. Later it was The Great Gatsby, On the Road, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And there was always Shakespeare. I spent 1998 just reading as many plays as I could, including work by Sam Shepard, Caryl Churchill, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, August Wilson, and so on. It wasn’t until much later, well after undergrad, that my reading life cracked open, and I discovered a whole new world of writers that would impact my fiction (and my view of the world)—Marilynne Robinson, James Baldwin, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Carson McCullers, and many others. Looking back on my high school and undergrad reading lists, I’m still amazed at the gender imbalance on the big syllabus.
DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?
WBB: When I’m in the thick of it, I wake up early (4:41 a.m.), stumble outside to my little finished shed, and work until about 7:00 a.m. Then I come back inside to make lunches for my kids and get them on the school bus. No music—the shed is silent and Internet-free. After the bus, I head out to my day job, which demands a lot of focus and attention. On occasion, I’ll revise or tinker with language during lunch, but that’s a rare event these days. At night, as I’m drifting off to sleep, I like to imagine the scenes I’ll work on the next morning. I don’t outline at first, but I do go back and create an outline of sorts after the second draft. For me, it’s about getting into the right frame of mind, and the routine helps. After a few days, I have access to the characters, and the writing comes easier. On the other hand, if I skip a week of writing, it takes me several days to get back on track.
DF: What was your MFA experience like and would you recommend MFA programs to aspiring writers?
WBB: I attended the low-residency program at Goddard College. As an undergrad, I was an English and Theatre Arts major. While I had decent dramaturgical skills, I was still reading fiction as if I was a literature student. The MFA helped me begin to read as a writer, to see how the work was done, to observe what succeeded (or what didn’t), and to know how to fix it. At the same time, it forced me to fit writing into my daily life. It was no longer about writing on every other Wednesday and sometimes Saturday; it was about a solid routine that balanced my writing time with everything else, including a 40+ hour/week job and two toddlers. It also mirrored the editor and writer relationship, which was beneficial later on. To put it simply, I’d recommend the low-res process to aspiring writers, but only those who feel they are in a position to commit the time and effort to make it worthwhile. It’s not a backstage pass to the concert; it’s just another way to focus your attention on the show.
DF: I’m a huge Dylan fan, so I’m predisposed to loving your novel based on the title alone. Are you a big music fan or did other factors inspire Lay Down Your Weary Tune?
WBB: I love it—I wrote this book for you! I’m a fan of music of all kinds. At any given time, I could be listening to Phantogram or Robert Johnson, Ray Charles or Jenny Lewis, Bob Dylan, or Beck. Because of my role on the board of Caffe Lena, a historic folk music coffeehouse in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., I’m also listening to a lot of emerging Americana artists, which is cool. Actually, a few musicians are joining me during my book tour, including M.R. Poulopoulos, Dennis Crommett, and Krista Baroni. I’m going to have pry myself away from the music to do the actual readings.
To answer the second part of your question, the novel wasn’t quite inspired by music. Not at first. I began by riffing on the themes of masks, myth-making, and reinvention, but the story was adrift. As soon as it occurred to me to layer in folk music, and to have a folk music icon at the center of the story, the idea started to come to life. After I choose the narrator and point of view, it was clear that the music was going to help me drive the book.
DF: How much of yourself—and the people you have daily interactions with—did you put into your main characters in the book? How do you develop your characters in general?
WBB: That’s a tough question. In a way, every action and gesture and detail in the novel stems from some observation I’ve gathered and bookmarked in my head. But to get to the heart of it, none of the characters in the book are based on any one particular person. They stem from a bunch of different details stitched together. Eli Page, folk music icon, is a composite of three dozen different artists, from Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger to J.D. Salinger to professors I know to movie personalities. The town of Galesville is built the same way.
As far as how I develop my characters, it’s all sort of a mystery. I need to step into their lives, I need to understand what’s at stake, and I need to know what’s in their way. It might come from my short life as a playwright, but I ask what does the character want, what or who is in the way, and what tactics are employed to remove the obstacle. More than that though, I try to add texture and complexity to their lives and their motives. Nothing’s simple and straightforward in life. Why should it be any different for them?
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?
WBB: Not at all. I knew I had something interesting, but I also knew it’d take years of revision. I finished the first and second drafts in 2007/2008. That’s a long time ago. I really didn’t know what I was writing about until I’d written it, if that makes sense. After the second draft, I ripped it into a hundred scenes and summaries. It took me another year and a half to piece it back together with a more coherent structure, an emotional arc, and some narrative propulsion. To use a rusty old cliché, it was really like stripping down an engine to all of its individual pieces and then rebuilding it from scratch, while replacing the bad parts along the way. Eventually, I had something that worked, but it still needed fine-tuning. There are scenes that have only been touched three or four times, and there are scenes that have suffered through 18 drafts. Lastly, I should also point out that after the novel sold, I worked with my editor (Judith Gurewich) and the team at Other Press on another revision, one that subtracted 75 pages.
DF: How long did it take you to land an agent and publish Lay Down Your Weary Tune?
WBB: That’s a good question, but I don’t have a clean answer. Ignoring all advice, I jumped into the agent process too early. Luckily, I only dipped my toes in once or twice a year, reaching out to four or five agents who I thought might be a match. I wanted to get a sense of how it worked, but the manuscript wasn’t ready. After the rejections came in, I went back to revising. Within three years of tiptoeing around, I’d racked up 20 rejections or so. A few agents actually took the time to tell me where they’d lost interest. This generosity helped me polish the manuscript. Meanwhile, I’d been keeping a list of agents to query when the time was right, compiled from articles or posts I’d read. When I felt comfortable that I had the manuscript in good shape, I reached out to that tailored list of 14 agents (Christopher Rhodes was one of them). Once Christopher and I connected and he offered representation, a few of those other agents were suddenly interested. That’s the way it goes. But none of that mattered—Christopher was passionate about the book and its future; I knew it’d be in good hands.
DF: Your debut has already gotten rave reviews from the likes of Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist. What’s that experience been like and what’s next for you now that you have a novel under your belt?
WBB: I’ve heard a few authors talk about the run-up to pub day as the quiet before the quiet. It certainly feels like it sometimes, but I’m grateful for those moments that aren’t so quiet—the days when the blurbs come in or when the trade reviews come out or when I get to connect with the fine folks at Writer’s Bone. It’s a funny transition. In many ways, the book is no longer mine. It has a life of its own. When the finished copies arrived, I flipped through the first few sections, and I couldn’t believe how distant it felt. After years of staring and scrutinizing every little detail, I could step back and see the thing as a whole.
What’s next? Well, I’m working on that sophomore outing, and it’s challenging me in new ways. But it’s wonderful to have my head in a different set of characters and to be generating new work.
DF: What’s your advice to aspiring authors?
WBB: First, read. Read all the time. Read widely. Second, embrace the process. I know it’s easier said than done, but resist the urge to jump into the fray until your manuscript is ready. Find purpose in the work. Try to understand that your process is unique to you. Third, don’t give in to the self-doubt. Find the fire in your belly to keep going, despite the odds and despite the rejection. Return to the work. Make it better.
DF: What is one random fact about yourself?
WBB: I once met Harrison Ford at a salad bar. He was waiting for me to replenish the lettuce.
To learn more about W.B. Belcher, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @wbbelcher.
New England Narrative: 9 Questions With Author Jay Atkinson
Jay Atkinson (Photo credit: Paul Bilodeau, Eagle-Tribune)
By Daniel Ford
As a relatively recent transplant to Boston and Massachusetts, I've done my best to immerse myself in the history of the area. Books like Stephanie Schorow's Drinking Boston, Nathaniel Philbrick's Bunker Hill, and Brian Deming's Boston and the Dawn of American Independence have given me a crash course in New England lore. (For the record, I was born and raised in Connecticut, but spent considerable time in New York City.)
Author Jay Atkinson's thrilling nonfiction narrative Massacre on the Merrimack matches those historical tomes in both substance and style. Hannah Duston's capture and daring escape from her Native American captors not only proved to be a harrowing tale, but also shed light on the political and sociological issues facing early North American settlers.
Atkinson talked to me recently about his research process, journalism, and the inspiration behind Massacre on the Merrimack.
Daniel Ford: What came first, the love of history or love of writing?
Jay Atkinson: I’m not a professional historian, or even an academic, really, though I’ve been teaching writing at the college level for 20+ years (the last eight at Boston University). I’m just a storyteller. My eighth grade English teacher, a very nice fellow named Andrew Melnicki, told me after class one day that I should consider becoming a writer. That surprised me, since I come from a blue-collar family and was, eventually, the first one to go to college. I had always loved reading stories, and there in junior high set out to learn how to write them. Hannah Duston’s ordeal is a great story, and that’s what drew me to it.
DF: Since you’ve also worked as a journalist, and currently teach it at BU, I have to ask what you think of the current state of journalism. Also, what’s the most entertaining story you ever worked on?
JA: I don’t know exactly where journalism is going, but I’m certainly interested in finding out.
When I see students getting their news from Twitter and other online sources, I tell them to start reading The New York Times every day and forget about the Web. I hope they listen, since the sort of in-depth, professional, intelligent reporting done by The New York Times (and other longstanding print/Web publications) is so superior to Internet-based junk that it’s not even worth talking about.
One of the most entertaining stories I have worked on (and I’ve been lucky enough to have a few that were pretty exciting) was my winter canoe trip down the Merrimack River for The New York Times. Last March, for the second time, I traced Hannah Duston’s route back to Haverhill after she and two companions killed ten of the Abenaki, scalped them, and stole one of their canoes.
DF: Narrative nonfiction has been a healthy trend for history in the last decade. What made you decide to go that route with your own work?
JA: Well, I write fiction, too. As a matter of fact, the next book I publish will be a work of fiction, and I’m currently working on a novel. Over my career, I’ve been a student of narrative writing—how it works and how it’s done. That’s what interests me most of all, whether its narrative nonfiction like Massacre on the Merrimack (Globe Pequot, 2015) or a historical novel like City in Amber (Livingston Press, 2005).
DF: You tell a really poignant story about what inspired you to write Massacre on the Merrimack. Could you share that with us, and explain how your hometown/state shaped the narrative?
JA: My hometown, Methuen Mass., was part of Haverhill until 1726. I grew up hearing Hannah Duston’s story, and always had it in the back of my mind as I progressed as a writer. It’s got everything a good story demands: compelling characters, violent conflict, adventure, a series of dramatic events and reversals, overarching tragedy, vengeance, and triumph. As a storyteller, what’s not to like?
DF: What was your research process like for this book, and what’s your research process like in general?
JA: I spent three years on the book. The first year, I was often in the Haverhill Library Special Collections room (where they have a jumble of Duston ephemera that’s never really been catalogued, but was invaluable once I sorted through it), Haverhill Historical Society, and Nevins Memorial Library in Methuen, Mass. A wonderful Nevins reference librarian named Maureen Burns Tulley was instrumental in researching and shaping Massacre on the Merrimack. I dedicated the book to Maureen, in the name of librarians everywhere.
The second and third years, I continued my research in various libraries, but also took my investigations outside, into the woods and onto the rivers that Duston knew. In my opinion, Hannah’s story is really about the beauty and danger of the New England landscape.
DF: Historians often debate about whether or not to use “politically correct” language when writing about the pre-colonial period. Does one use Native Americans or does one use “Indians/savages/etc.” Massacre on the Merrimack features the latter, and I was wondering if you went back and forth at all about that issue or you felt like your story needed to be rooted in the language of that time.
JA: Since in the narrative chapters of the book I was using what you could call Creative Nonfiction technique, I was limited to what I considered to be the prejudices, preconceptions, and preoccupations of the time period. To change the language to reflect current social mores would have seemed false to me. As a writer, my interest begins and ends at the level of the story, and telling it the way I did was the most honest way to do service to that.
DF: What really struck me about the book is that while Hannah Duston showcased extreme bravery and flintiness during her ordeal, her neighbor Goodwife Bradley exhibited the same traits multiple times! How fun was it uncovering these other stories during your research?
JA: I think the chapter that you’re referring to, which is entitled “The Fate of Other Captives,” contains the most interesting material I came across in my research. It fits with Hannah’s story, but is remarkable in its own way.
DF: You’ve written other nonfiction, but this book seems more personal based on your proximity to where the events take place. What’s next on the horizon for you and do you feel daunted at all about tackling another subject?
JA: Personally, I have no shortage of stories or story ideas, just a shortage of time. I’m happiest when I’m working on something.
DF: What’s your advice to up-and-coming authors and historians?
JA: All I can say is what my mentor at the University of Florida, the great Southern Gothic novelist Harry Crews, said to me when I finished my creative writing degree: “Son, go fix your ass to the seat of the chair, and get to work.”
To learn more about Jay Atkinson, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @Atkinson_Jay.
Writing in the Rain: 10 Questions With Noah’s Wife Author Lindsay Starck
Lindsay Starck (Photo credit: Victoria McHugh Photography)
By Daniel Ford
What the $%(&$&^ was Noah’s wife thinking?
Her husband starts seeing signs during a biblical rainstorm, builds an ark, and tells her to get on (in author Lindsay Starck’s words) “a floating zoo.” It would take a loyal and flinty woman to step aboard and buy into her man’s faith, right?
Starck’s debut novel, Noah’s Wife, not only gives us a better understanding what that woman might have been like, but also provides the literary world with yet another strong young voice.
The book, which goes on sale Jan. 26, finds our heroine arriving in “a gray and wet town” that has been inundated with rain for “as long as anyone can remember.” Noah’s wife has to grapple with her “eccentric” neighbors, her husband’s “internal crisis of faith,” and, of course, zoo animals.
The author recently talked to me about her early publishing efforts, dealing with rejection, and the inspiration behind Noah’s Wife.
Daniel Ford: Did you grow up wanting to become a writer, or was that something that grew organically over time?
Lindsay Starck: I wanted to become a writer from a young age. I wrote a number of stories, and in middle school I very optimistically sent one off to a publisher. (It was called The Stranded Island Dudes. It featured a group of house pets that went on an adventure to a tropical island. Now that I think about it, I guess I’ve always liked to write about animals!) The publisher, understandably enough, rejected it—and I was so disheartened that I stopped writing creatively for many years. I didn’t know then that rejection is an inevitable part of the writing process.
But I always loved literature. I loved reading books, and I loved writing about them. My writing career as an adult grew out of this deep engagement with books in high school, college, and graduate school. I remind my writing students now that to become better writers, they must first commit themselves to becoming better readers. It’s a cliché, but (like so many clichés) it’s true.
DF: Who were some of your early influences?
LS: Lucy Maud Montgomery, certainly—I read Anne of Green Gables many times over. I also read and reread Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s Greensleeves, a fantastic YA novel in which the heroine eventually realizes that she wants to become a writer. Perhaps that’s where I got the idea! As I recall, Anne of Green Gables was a writer, as well.
DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?
LS: I know that some writers prefer solitude, but I like to work in coffee shops—that way I can look up and see what everyone else is doing. My writing is character-driven, so I usually start with the idea of a personality and then build from there.
Because Noah’s Wife is organized into forty chapters, when I was writing it I assigned each chapter its own Post-It note. (Even this organizational strategy was based on characters: each chapter was assigned to a single character’s perspective, and the notes were color-coded accordingly.) Then I stuck the Post-Its up on a door in my apartment, arranged in eight rows of five, so that I could visualize the storyline. At times, when revising and rewriting, those Post-It notes were scattered all over the place. Editing is a pretty messy process.
DF: What inspired your debut novel Noah’s Wife?
LS: When I began writing this novel, I was in my mid-twenties and my friends and colleagues were beginning to pair off. As I watched people navigate the tumultuous waters of romance and friendship, I wondered over the nature of “pairings” more generally. What makes a marriage work? Why do some friendships fall apart, while others last for decades? What qualities make a good mother, a good daughter, a good neighbor?
The idea of “pairs,” along with my conviction that the flood story was darker and more complex than it often appears to be in popular culture, led me to Noah—and from there, to his wife. What sort of woman, I wondered, would be willing to abandon her community and follow her husband into a giant floating zoo? What if she were afraid of reptiles or allergic to feathers? How could she continue to believe in Noah, if she could not see the signs that he saw? If she were given a voice, what would she say?
DF: How much of yourself—and the people you have daily interactions with—did you put into your main characters in the book? How do you develop your characters in general?
LS: There is a little bit of me in every character, certainly—I feel as though I share Noah’s wife’s desire to please, Mrs. McGinn’s fear of change, Leesl’s oddly fatalistic sense of hope, Noah’s anxiety over disappointing those who love him.
In general, I piece together characters from things that I’ve heard, stories that I’ve read, people that I’ve known. A friend of mine did take an empathy class in med school, as Dr. Yu does; I imagine Mrs. McGinn’s daughter looking a lot like a former roommate; and at times Mrs. McGinn sounds a lot like my mother. Sometimes I hear sentences that stick with me, and sooner or later I’ll find one of my characters speaking those words aloud on the page.
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?
LS: I felt comfortable sending out the draft almost immediately—but I was young and hopeful and a little naïve. When I signed a contract with a publishing house, I assumed that the book would be coming out in a matter of months. But I spent four full years revising the novel after the contract was signed. My editor bought the novel because she liked the writing and she liked the concept, but she knew that I didn’t yet have enough of a real story (plot, tension, etc.) to hold readers’ interest. She also knew that it would take time to find that story. Fortunately for me, she was willing to be patient while I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote until finally the narrative began to emerge.
DF: How long did it take you to land an agent and publish Noah’s Wife?
LS: Once I finished the manuscript, I bought one of those giant books of literary agents and began making a list of everyone I thought might be a good fit for the novel. I decided to send out five queries per day, every day, until I found someone. I steeled myself for rejection, and I got a lot of it. But I knew I only needed one “yes,” the right “yes”—and after a few weeks, I had it. I found an agent who loved the book and, more importantly, who was willing to work with me to improve it.
Of course, there was a whole other round of rejections when my agent sent the new draft out to publishing houses. But once again, we only needed one good yes. And after a slew of “no’s,” we finally heard it.
It’s a lot like dating, or job-hunting, really. You have to manage a lot of heartbreak and rejection; but when you find the right fit, you know it. And you only need the one.
DF: Now that you have your first book under your belt, what’s next?
LS: Well, since I’m a graduate student by day (novelist by night!), my next task is to finish my dissertation. I’m writing on modernist literature and gossip. But I’ve also begun sketching characters and scenes of a second novel. It may take a few years, but it will come.
DF: What’s your advice to aspiring authors?
LS: Remember that everything is a work in progress. Noah’s Wife only emerged as a novel after years of intensive revisions. I had to cut out whole characters, come up with new plotlines. It was exhausting. And even though the novel is stronger for it, the book isn’t perfect. There are things about it that I would change, if I could. As a perfectionist, this is hard for me to accept—but it’s the inevitable result of growing as a writer and a person.
DF: What is one random fact about yourself?
LS: I used to play the viola. I chose it as my instrument because I knew that viola players were always in high demand—so even if I wasn’t very good (and I wasn’t), people would still ask me to play in groups with them. And they did!
To learn more about Lindsay Starck, visit her official website or like her Facebook page.