Ask the Author: Joanne Leedom-Ackerman
Answered Questions (9)
Joanne Leedom-Ackerman
My book PEN Journeys: Memoir of Literature on the Line began as a serial blog. The global organization PEN International with 150+ centers in over 100 countries was about to celebrate its Centenary. I had been engaged with PEN for decades as President of a PEN center, Chair of PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee, as the International Secretary and as a Vice President. The President of PEN International asked if I’d write up memories to use for the Centenary. I began posting stories several times a month, beginning in May 2019 and finishing in October 2020. Many readers, including colleagues in PEN, urged that the stories become a book. Fortunately, Shearsman Books agreed, and PEN Journeys was published in February 2022.
The ideas behind my upcoming novel Burning Distance I’ll answer in future posts.
The ideas behind my upcoming novel Burning Distance I’ll answer in future posts.
Joanne Leedom-Ackerman
I have two novels to be published, Burning Distance in March 2023 and The Far Side of the Desert due out Spring, 2024 so I am finishing edits on those. I’m 120 pages into a new novel which doesn’t yet have a title. I don’t like to talk about work when I’m in the middle of it so I’ll share those details in the future.
Joanne Leedom-Ackerman
Write. And read. And don’t talk a lot about what you are writing until you have written it, at least if you’re writing fiction. Nonfiction and journalism usually require you talk to people.
Joanne Leedom-Ackerman
When possible, I spend the first hour or even two each day quietly thinking, listening to thoughts larger than mine, sometimes reading. In earlier days, that might be called invoking the muses. When I’m in the middle of a novel, I often have finished the work the day before on a kind of precipice so that I have to plunge in either to find out what happens next or execute what happens next. Sometimes I review what I’ve written earlier, and the momentum of that process takes me forward. The ground zero inspiration comes from writing. Writers write. That is how they live and breathe so each day find the time to get words and ideas moving, and these will create momentum.
Joanne Leedom-Ackerman
It is a privilege to be able to think and consider ideas and people and life through words. The best part is the discovery and the joy when one (or more) beautiful sentence and idea appears and is given to you in thought and then on paper, or what used to be paper, now on the screen. And it’s even better when readers connect with what you have written, and you can share.
Joanne Leedom-Ackerman
By writing. Anything. Just get the words flowing, be it a letter to a friend/parent/spouse or letter to the editor. Or just free association of words and ideas. Don’t worry who will read what you’re writing, just get words and ideas moving. I have rarely experienced writer’s block, but I do know the hesitation when starting a new project, the challenge to get it started. It’s rather like standing at the edge of a pool which you know is going to be cold, at least until you start swimming. The key is to plunge and start swimming!
Joanne Leedom-Ackerman
Once upon a time there was a very sorry leader who feared ideas and books and set about burning all books and ideas he didn’t understand or agree with. For a time the people hid their books and themselves and suffered, but a writer came forward and rewrote the story of the sorry and fearful man and taught him how to read.
Joanne Leedom-Ackerman
Probably London in most any book in the ninetieth and twentieth century. I lived in London for six years, and literature there has a special place in the atmosphere, though as a woman, I would probably be agitating against the restrictions and conventions in many of the plots.
Joanne Leedom-Ackerman
I am a bit of an eclectic reader and don’t plan out what I will read too far in advance, but I still order books so I will have them when I’m ready. Here are some from my shelf and some ordered in advance of publication, including Orhan Pamuck’s upcoming Nights of Plague and Elliot Ackerman’s upcoming The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan. Waiting on my shelf are Amor Towles’ The Lincoln’s Highway; Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger; Paulette Jiles’ News of the World; Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me; Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lies of Church Ladies (started by not yet finished); Avni Doshi’s burnt sugar; Laura Prescott’s The Secrets We Kept; Richard Yates’ Young Hearts Crying; James Lee Burke’s The New Iberia Blues; Peter Godwin’s When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (read but haven’t finished); Phil Klay’s Missionaries. I recommend Azar Nafisi’s new book Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times.
I doubt I will get all these books read in the summer but perhaps over the year. And to this I add a longer list: Burhan Sonmez’s Istanbul Istanbul; Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were; Homero Aridjis’ Selected Poems: Eyes to See Otherwise; Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage; Louis Bayard’s The Pale Blue Eye; Three African-American Classics (Up from Slavery, The Souls of Black Folks, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, two of which I have read); Peter Stearns’ A Brief History of the World; William Boyd’s Any Human Heart; Assia Djebar’s Children of the New World; Anne Patchett’s The Dutch House. Honor Moore & Alix Kate Shulman’s Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings That Inspired a Revolution and Still Can (an anthology so I read essays in separate takes)
All the books above are contemporary. There are classics which I return to and reread, and I expect I will also discover new classics this year.
I read on all three platforms—I often listen to a book while eating lunch or driving, read digital book, especially when the light is poor, and also read the book itself, often marking where I am on all three platforms. I am usually reading more than one book at a time, though not at the same time though sometimes on the same day.
I doubt I will get all these books read in the summer but perhaps over the year. And to this I add a longer list: Burhan Sonmez’s Istanbul Istanbul; Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were; Homero Aridjis’ Selected Poems: Eyes to See Otherwise; Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage; Louis Bayard’s The Pale Blue Eye; Three African-American Classics (Up from Slavery, The Souls of Black Folks, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, two of which I have read); Peter Stearns’ A Brief History of the World; William Boyd’s Any Human Heart; Assia Djebar’s Children of the New World; Anne Patchett’s The Dutch House. Honor Moore & Alix Kate Shulman’s Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings That Inspired a Revolution and Still Can (an anthology so I read essays in separate takes)
All the books above are contemporary. There are classics which I return to and reread, and I expect I will also discover new classics this year.
I read on all three platforms—I often listen to a book while eating lunch or driving, read digital book, especially when the light is poor, and also read the book itself, often marking where I am on all three platforms. I am usually reading more than one book at a time, though not at the same time though sometimes on the same day.
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