Ask the Author: Suzanne Feldman
Answered Questions (7)
Suzanne Feldman
Where are my keys? My glasses! MY PHONE! These are the daily mysteries I find myself solving!
Suzanne Feldman
After giving this a lot of thought, I have to say that Rosemary and Fern, from 'We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves' (Karen Joy Fowler) are my current favorite fictional couple. The story follows two sisters--one human and one a chimpanzee. The chimp is brought home by the father as a 'research project' and when Fern is returned to the research lab, her departure destroys the family. The bond between ape and human is so delicately described, and the whole story is so artfully done. I would recommend it to anyone.
Suzanne Feldman
I like to read other authors for inspiration. Right now I'm reading Borges, because the guy was so widely read himself, you can almost read by proxy the books he's talking about. Reading Borges is a serious trip down the rabbit hole of literature. He twists everything into strange, surreal and often very funny patterns. I learn a lot every time I read his work.
Suzanne Feldman
Write every day if you can. Make it a sentence, a paragraph, or a page. Make it 500 words or a thousand, but just write. Even if it's terrible, at least you've written SOMETHING. That's the most important thing.
Suzanne Feldman
I love writing. Even when it's really hard to do, it's something I couldn't live without. It makes me feel productive and like I've accomplished something for the day.
Suzanne Feldman
I don't really believe in writer's block. Larry Rivers, the great painter, once said (I'm probably paraphrasing), "Start. Start anywhere. Make it as big as a postage stamp, but just start." So that's pretty much how I treat a blank page. I just write a sentence. It can be a bad sentence or a good one, but at least I've got it on the page. I shoot for a thousand words a day and that can be pretty daunting at times, so there are times when I just try to finish the page.
Suzanne Feldman
I first started thinking about Absalom's Daughters when I was in grad school and we were reading Absalom Absalom, by William Faulkner. As I was reading, I was looking for the women in the story, and it seemed to me that the women were no more than wallpaper. That was when I decided to write a book using Faulkner's women as characters. It turned into an adventure story about two teenage girls, but it wouldn't have happened without Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Zora Neale Hurston, some of my favorite writers.
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