Caroline Leavitt's Blog, page 45

Secrets. musical theater (Hamilton!), writing, more. Lynda Cohen Loigman talks about her amazing debut THE TWO-FAMILY HOUSE

First, the reviews!

The Associated Press called The Two-Family House "a richly textured, complex, yet entirely believable story.

The Beaumont Enterprise says that the characters in this debut are "achingly human, tragically flawed and immediately recognizable." Oprah Book Club Pick author Christina Schwartz, national bestselling author of Drowning Ruth raves, "In a single, intensely charged moment, two women come to a private agreement meant to assure each other's happiness. But as Loigman deftly reveals, life is not so simple, especially when it involves two families, tightly intertwined."

And because this is only the second day the novel has been out, there will be more praise flooding in.

The Two-Family House (published by St. Martin's Press) is the debut of the talented Lynda Cohen Loigman. I'm so delighted to host her here. Thank you so much Lynda!

Every novel seems to have some sort of spark, something that was haunting the author that compelled him or her to write. What was it for you?

When I was young, my favorite stories were the ones my mother and her two sisters would tell me about their childhood in Brooklyn. They lived with their parents on the top floor of a two-family house, and my grandmother’s brother, his wife and their three daughters lived on the bottom floor.

My aunts told the best stories – tales of knish carts, holidays and visits to a fancy Italian restaurant in Manhattan. As a young girl with only one brother and no sisters, I couldn’t imagine anything more wonderful than growing up in a two-family house as one of six girls. That home became the setting for The Two-Family House.

The spark for the story was separate, and it was something that came to me when I was pregnant with my first child. I had made a deal with my husband about how many children we would have – I had agreed to stop at two, but I insisted that if the first two were boys, we would try again for a girl. My desire for a girl was something that consumed and confused me. Why did I care so much? Why did anyone?

My grandmother, the mother of three girls, told me many times throughout my childhood how much she had wanted a boy. My brother was the first of her four grandsons, so you can only imagine how much she doted on him. There is a scene in The Two-Family House where Helen remembers her grandmother giving her brother the coveted cherry from the top of the chocolate cake she brought every week from their local bakery. That was me – my grandmother let my brother have the cherry every Saturday!

I thought about gender a lot when I was pregnant, about how far people might go to have a boy or a girl. Then, six months after my daughter was born, I read an article about a new technology that allowed couples to come closer then ever to choosing the gender of their baby. I wondered whether my grandmother would have used something like that if it had been available in her time, and it occurred to me how lucky it was that both she and her sister-in-law had three girls each. There was no reason for envy or resentment to fester. But I couldn’t help imagining what might have happened if one of them had all girls and the other all boys. What would that house have looked like? What if they had been pregnant together? Imagine the tension!

That’s where the story came from, and for years I would tell different ideas about it to my husband and to my friends.  I was telling this story for at least ten years before I ever started writing it down.


What kind of writer are you? What’s your process like—and what do you wish it were like?

Well, I’m still figuring this one out, but while I was writing The Two-Family House I found that my need to include certain scenes shaped my process. Before I started writing, I had a list of very specific situations I wanted to put the characters in, certain moments I wanted them to suffer through, especially after the night of the blizzard. A lot of people have described The Two-Family House as “character-driven,” and it definitely is. But what drove me while I wrote was my desire to show the behavior and reactions of the characters when they were in distress.

For instance, I wanted to have a scene where Helen was required to fill out paperwork for one of the children. It sounds like such a mundane task, but given the story, that moment where Helen has to write down what her relationship is to Teddy on a hospital form becomes very dramatic. Once I had that scene in my mind, I had to figure out a way to get the characters to the emergency room, so I came up with Teddy’s accident at Sol’s party. The creation of the party led to other events – Rose wandering off, and Mort blaming Judith. Every time I put my characters in an uncomfortable or painful situation, they took over. They did and said things that surprised me, but working that way helped me get closer to them and to craft a more realistic story.

I wrote The Two-Family House from the points of view of the six main characters – four adults and two children. This structure helped me get into each character’s head in the best possible way, and it allowed me to dig very deeply. One thing I loved about this method was that it allowed me to replay certain moments from different perspectives.

The last thing I’ll say is that while I was writing The Two-Family House, I discovered what a linear writer I am – I have to write my stories in the order that people will read them. I can’t skip ahead and write the ending because I need to experience the story along with the reader. As I write, things change, characters develop, details are added and layers accumulate. For instance, I could never have written about Natalie as a young woman until I had written about her as a child. I wish I were not so tied down to this way of writing, because when I get stuck, I am truly stuck! I can’t make myself work on a different part of the story, and sometimes that drives me nuts.

This is your debut, so what’s up next? And does having one book published feel like writing the next book will be easier?

I’m very excited about my next book! I’ve been working on a story about a recently engaged young woman and her grandmother. The grandmother has kept a secret from her family for over fifty years, and it finally catches up with her as she watches her granddaughter navigate the upcoming wedding. There is more humor in this next book than there was in The Two-Family House, but it is still a complex and character-driven story. The book flashes back to the grandmother’s days as a young woman, so we get to see a lot of the 1930s and 1940s in New York.

It’s definitely easier to write this second novel. Some of that stems from the fact that I have more confidence in my abilities, but a lot of it is because I have learned how to be more productive.

I always want to know what surprised you in the writing of this particular book, how the characters took over, or the plot changed, or any way, really. What surprised you?

I love this question! When I first started thinking about The Two-Family House – and long before I began writing it – I was focused on the women in the story. Back then, they weren’t Helen and Rose yet, but I knew that one of them would be the mother of four boys and one would be the mother of three girls. I was obsessed with these women, and I spent years thinking about them and asking myself questions about them. What kind of women were they? What kind of mothers? What were their relationships with their children like? What were their secret longings and what disappointments had life thrown their way? What would happen to their relationship if they made certain choices? Sure, I knew there would be men in the story, that Abe and Mort would be important characters, but I didn’t really think about the emotional trajectories of the men in the same way. I always thought that the women would be the real stars of the show.

But when I began to write, the men became just as important as the women, and I grew just as attached to them. I always knew Abe would be a great guy, a lovable mensch, from beginning to end. We all know people like Abe, so he was easy. But Mort? Mort was the toughest, initially the most despicable, and, in the end, the biggest challenge to write because of the way he redeemed himself and changed his way of thinking. What surprised me the most was how much I looked forward to writing the chapters that were told from his point of view.

I knew Mort would grow on me, but I did not anticipate how much his character would consume my thoughts. He kept getting more interesting, more multifaceted and more conflicted as I wrote. I wanted to know what drove him to behave the way he did, I wondered if he could truly change, if he could forgive and love and mourn. Mort captured my heart in a way I never could have predicted when I began to write the story. The novel started out as a story about two women, but in some ways Mort emerged as the most complex character of all.

What’s obsessing you now and why?

I’m a big musical theater person, so it won’t surprise you to know that I am thoroughly obsessed with Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. I dragged my husband and friends to see it at The Public Theater last winter, but we had no idea what a phenomenon it would become. When the soundtrack came out, my daughter and I began listening to it, and now it is on a constant loop in my car. I finally took her to see it in January for her 17th birthday, and she was completely blown away.

I think that Hamilton has particular appeal for writers – the focus is on the lyrics, and the words are the stars of every song. Plus, one of the recurring themes is Hamilton’s writing – how much he wrote, how he couldn’t stop himself from writing, how he even tried to write his way out of public scandal. I think that all authors can relate to that overwhelming need to write, and to fill a creative void.

Plus, the other appeal for me is that the show was inspired by Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton. You have to love a musical that is based on a book!


What question didn’t I ask that I should have?

Well, one question that people ask me a lot is when the reader is supposed to know the truth of what happened the night of the blizzard. The answer is that I always assumed that readers would figure this out quickly, or at least have strong suspicions from the beginning of the story. I tried to keep the night of the blizzard murky and mystical – without coming right out and saying what happened – because I wanted it to haunt the reader the same way it haunts Helen and Rose. But I always intended the book to be a drama and not a mystery: the choice the two mothers make is not a secret I want to keep from the reader – rather, it is a secret that Rose and Helen keep from the other characters. For me, the most compelling part of the story is not the choice that Helen and Rose make – it is the way that choice affects the rest of their lives, their relationships with their families and with each other.

Thank you so much for all of your questions, and for having me on your blog. I am so grateful and honored to be one of your guests!

John Jodzio talks about his extraordinary collection of stories, KNOCKOUT, writing, how many people have died from javelin accidents, and so much more

John  Jodzio's work has been featured in a variety of places including This American Life, McSweeney's, and One Story. He's the author of the short story collections, Get In If You Want To Live and If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home and the forthcoming Knockout (Soft Skull Press, Spring 2016). He lives in Minneapolis and I am so excited to have him hosted here! Thank you, thank you, John.


I always ask writers what was haunting them before they began writing their particular book, so I want to ask you the same question. And did writing Knockout answer any questions for you?

It took me five years to write all the stories in Knockout.  All throughout that time I went through the traditional roller coaster that I think every writer of every book throughout history has gone through – lots of angst about whether what I thought was good was actually good.  Writing Knockout answered one large question in my mind and that was could I follow up my first short story collection (If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home) with something better and more satisfying? Luckily, I think Knockout has accomplished that.   

What I loved so much about this collection are the surprises, which are stated very matter-of-factly. An Opium Depot opens up. A bounty hunter has a pet boa and another story features a ragtag tiger.  There’s also an alcoholic bed and breakfast. Yet everything connects in a way that is so startling, you find yourself rereading pages. So, how do you write? Do you plot everything out or do you find yourself just following the muse? Do you have serious rituals?

I am a slow writer and I think the reason it takes me a ton of time to finish stories is I’m constantly fiddling with plot points and characters and making damn sure that anything bizarre seems like it is matter-of-fact.  My one goal is always to keep my reader entertained and to not do anything to knock them out of the world I’ve created. 


I don’t really do much plotting.  Most of my stories are simply the product of a funny sentence I’ve written or an intriguing scenario I want to explore and then they are pulled together by trial and error over a ton of drafts.  
The only serious ritual I have is that I eat way too many burritos.

You could say that the characters in Knockout are knocked about by life, their dreams pressed to the pavement, their dead ends growing deader by the minute—but there is also a frisky glimpse of hope here, and lots of hysterical and smart humor. I’m just curious: why are these people on the edge of life your chosen cast of characters? What is the singular thing that they can reveal?



I think I’ve always been interested in people who are getting knocked about.  I’m trying to figure out how hope and humor are present within the tragic and unsettling. For whatever reason, these are the characters and themes I constantly return to when I write.     


You’ve got real cult status. You’ve been called a weirdo by the likes of an admiring Dan Chaon and a thematic traditionalist by Chuck Klosterman. So what do you call yourself?


The only thing I ever tell anyone about myself is that I’m a short story writer.  Maybe I’ll combine Dan and Chuck’s descriptions and call myself “a weirdo thematic traditionalist who eats a lot of burritos”? 

What’s obsessing you now and why?



In the last few weeks I’ve started to work on my next book.  It’s a novel and it’s totally baggy and full of possibility at this point.  I’m excited and scared about whether or not I’ll be able to pull everything together in a meaningful way.



What question didn’t I ask that I should have?



Q: At this point in your novel how many people have died from javelin accidents?
A:  At this point four, but there may be a couple more.


The totally fabulous Julie Klam talks about writing, giving advice, the road to publishing, and why no one knows what really sells books

 Can you ever get enough Julie Klam? No, of course you can't, and that's why I'm including this great interview that Julie offered me. Julie is not only the author of the fabulous books above, she's an advice columnist at Dame, a book critic, dog lover and hilariously funny.

You graduated from New York University in 1988 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in film, cinema and fine arts. In 2001, you began working as a freelance writer, landing articles in such publications as O, The Oprah Magazine, Rolling Stone, Harper’s bazaar, Glamour and The New York Times Magazine. How do new writers get their work published in a national magazine? What is the basic process and what are some important “must-dos” to be successful? 

Things have changed so much… sooooooo much since 1988. For example, when I pitched a magazine, I would go to my fire pit and send the smoke signal ‘Johnny Depp profile’ and if the editor liked it, I would get paid two wooly mammoth skins a word. Ha ha I joke. But it was all mail and follow up phone calls, oh yeah and there were actual magazines to pitch to, a lot of them. That’s what people looked at when they were bored. Now we are never bored because we have our phones!
But you want advice. Well, it’s about a gazillion times harder to get an assignment because more writers and less places to write. That said, I think if someone wants to write something, you have pitch it well to an editor and if they say no, see if you can get an idea what they’re looking for. Or build a time machine.

 In addition to freelancing, from 1999 to 2002, you worked as a writer for VH1’s television show, Pop-Up Videos, earning an Emmy nomination for “Outstanding Special Class Writing”. What kind of abilities and talents must a writer possess to qualify for this type of work?

Interestingly for Pop-Up, it was to be able to write short and tight – kind of pre-dated the tweet and status update. It was hard though because you were telling a story, but there were a lot of punch lines in there, too. Writers needed to be taught to do pops, the producers, including my extraordinarily talented ex-husband, really figured out the best way to make the show work. I was there in around the 7th season and by then it was a well-oiled machine. Which brings about a good point, when you are hired to write for a tv show or magazine that has a voice, it’s your job to deliver in that voice and not try and be a big pain in the ass and make it your own. I mean make it great, but realize you are working for a company, you are not an artiste!

From the period of 2002 to 2003, you took a major detour and authored and co-authored a series of five World War II history books, which were published by Smart Apple Media. http://www.smartapple.com/ As background, Smart Apple Media is a distributor and publisher of children's books for schools and public libraries from K-12. Since our research doesn’t indicate you were ever a World War II buff, how did this opportunity arise and what convinced Smart Apple Media you were perfect for this assignment? Of course, we also are curious, how in the world were you able to produce five books in such a short time period?

Six books!  Five would’ve been easy! It actually came from a book packager called Byron Preiss. (Book packagers find writers to write books on a topic sometimes for a company. Like I did one for Comedy Central with them.) Anyway, the editor a lovely woman named Dinah Dunn who very coincidentally was the sister of my best friend, Jancee, approached me to write these. She chose me because I was broke and had time on my hands and they needed six 6000 word books in six weeks.  I was able to do it because I had to. But I did try at about week two to get pretend I was dead which I’ve actually done many times since then to get out of work.  But they knew I was faking so I finished it.

 In 2009, Please Excuse My Daughter, a memoir, was published by Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA). It recounts your life of growing up in the affluent Westchester County of New York under the tutelage of your mother, who sounds like every little girl’s dream. For example, taking you out of school to go shopping at Bloomingdale’s was the norm, which you used as the premise for the book’s title. Since this was your first foray into writing a memoir and since Riverhead Books touts itself as a well-established publisher of best selling literary fiction and quality nonfiction, please describe the chain of events, which enabled you to land a contract.

I had the idea for a book, it felt like a story that hadn’t been told. It wasn’t super-dramatic, I hadn’t been rescued from a well or come back from a life of drugs and prostitution, but it seemed like a good story nonetheless. I mean the whole thing was about not really being ready for adulthood which is much more of a thing now than it was then. Whatever this generation is – XY, everyone knows they aren’t ready for life, but we were supposed to be ready.

Anyway, I have an amazing agent, the great Esther Newberg and she told me to write a  proposal and some sample chapters which I was able to do really fast. It was definitely a story that was all there in my head. We talked about who my dream publisher would be. I remember I got up one morning at like 5 am and was pulling all of the books off my shelf that felt like what I wanted my book to be and I noticed that in all of the acknowledgements they mentioned Geoffrey Kloske. So I googled him. He’d been an editor at Scribner and was now the publisher of Riverhead Books so I knew I wanted to be there. I sent Esther an email that said “what about Riverhead?” And she wrote back
“There’s a young woman there….” Later that day she said the young woman, Megan Lynch, wanted to speak to me. I talked to her on the phone for about an hour, we clearly had the same vision –which was for her to be my editor and she told me that she needed to speak to Geoff but he it was a Friday and he was going away for the weekend so it would probably be the following week. I hung up the phone and about 45 minutes later Esther called me and said “Riverhead made an offer.” I was jumping up and down. Megan edited that book and the three after that and the left to be a big shot at another company and now my editor is Jake Morrissey (who edits Anne Lamott and Marlon James among others). Please Excuse My Daughter got very nice reviews – a full page in The New York Times Book review.. really cool, but it didn’t sell well, and Geoff said to me, “I’m sorry this book didn’t hit it, but hopefully the next one will and if not, then the one after that.” And that is not what most publishers say, so I knew I was in the right place. When ever I write Riverhead Books I dot the I with a heart.

Your first memoir was followed the next year by another memoir, You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets of Happiness. Once again, Riverhead Books was the publisher. In a previous interview, you revealed, “With the second book, there were times I felt more slumped. Sophomore efforts for writers are talked about: If your first does well, will the second?” How did you work through this and what did you do to motivate yourself to finish the book?

I had the most trouble figuring out what the second book should be. It’s always hard to follow-up a memoir, especially one that takes you to the present. I mean what was going to write about, my book tour? How I had a lot of club sandwiches? But I’d been doing the dog rescue for years and I wrote the draft for it while I was going through a lot of the stuff… which is interesting. I wasn’t looking back I was in it.  I wasn’t that motivated to do the edits which is weird because now that’s my favorite part, but Megan said one day, ‘if you don’t get this done by next week, it’s going to be a whole other year before we can get it published.’ I was at the gym in the middle of working out, I put down the towel and went home and finished it over the weekend.

After the publication of You Had Me at Woof, you were quoted as saying, “My first book got a lot of reviews and the book sold very little. This time I’ve gotten barely any reviews but the book’s done great. It’s redefined for me what it takes to sell books.” What did you learn? What exactly does it take to sell books?

You know, you think you learn something and then you put those things into practice the next time and it turns out to not be the case. What does it take to sell books? That’s the gazillion dollar question! I thought I knew, I don’t. I think it changes all the time. I remember talking to this agent (not mine) and saying, ‘well there’s no guarantees to selling books except Oprah.’ And she said, “my client was on Oprah and barely got a bump.” When a book does well everyone tries to figure out why and duplicate it, but there are so many factors, you just can’t say. It’s definitely a confluence of things….and luck… and I think a great title and a great cover and a great book. Sometimes I think an author with a great personality who can get on tv is the thing and then you see the most obnoxious writer in the world who is number 1 on all the lists. I was at a book club fair for my first book and there was a room full of authors signing books. No one was on line to get my book, but there were a zillion people on line for this other woman and I decided it was because she wore a sweater with a snow man on it and I had a velvet blazer. Clearly the snow man had put a spell on the readers!

Please explain a “book trailer” and discuss the most effective methods to distribute it. We love your book trailers, by the way!

Book trailers are little 3 minute videos that like movie trailers, try to get a person to buy a book. Sadly, I think book trailers are over now. I did a few and basically they were me trying to be funny and have fun. The first one I did with one of my best friends, Ann Leary, she directed it. We took something that should have been about a half a day’s work and turned it into 3 months. Really. It was like Titanic. We had no idea what we were doing, but Ann learned to edit and she videotaped 8 million hours of me and my dogs and our friend Susan Orlean and Ann’s husband Denis and she made some of the greatest trailers that ever were. The following year I had 2 big budget trailers, both amazing and fun –did they sell books? I don’t know but I enjoy watching them. One is a fantastic animated thing and the other is a little movie with Geoff Kloske and Timothy Hutton. Geoff was so funny because he didn’t act. In fact, one of the things about Geoff, if you meet with him, he eats nuts. He didn’t stop eating nuts for the shoot, even with a big hair and make up team. And Tim was just –extraordinary. You know after the video he went on to get a part in the movie Ordinary People and won an Oscar. All because of me.

In 2011, you wrote an additional dog memoir, Love at First Bark: How Saving a Dog Can Sometimes Help You Save Yourself (Riverhead Books), which was closely followed by Friendkeeping: A Field Guide to the People You Love, Hate and Can’t Live Without (Riverhead Books).

The latter sparked a weekly “friendkeeping” advice column titled “Dear Julie”, in DAME, an e-magazine publication. We read several columns and loved the way you were able to exhibit your trademark sense of humor, while consistently offering sage advice.

How did this opportunity present itself and what has this experience taught you?

Everyone should read Dame magazine. It is the smartest online magazine EVER CREATED. I seriously gasp at the stories on there. One of the editors, Kera Bolonik, was my facebook friend. She and I always had a lot of online laughs, but also really liked each other and I for one had always wanted to work with her. She was coming up with content for Dame and approached the founder, Jennifer Reitman, about using me for a column. It turns out Jen is a big dog rescue person so she said yes. It is absolutely the joy of my week … answering those letters. At heart, I am a know it all. Also, I’ve been in therapy for almost 30 years so I know what people are supposed to do… doesn’t mean I do it but I know. Since then I’ve worked with Kera and another editor Lisa Butterworth. I send her my columns and she only writes back the parts that make her laugh –there’s never any ‘change this’ or ‘tone it down.’ I love them so much –if you can put a bunch of hearts around the Dame Magazine link, I would appreciate that.

We loathe this moment when the interview has come to an end and we still have so many more questions to ask. We will leave you with one simple question: What’s next on the agenda for the unstoppable, passionate and multi-talented Julie Klam?

I have a book on the nature of celebrity that is so late, I should be killed, but I will get it done. And maybe a book of my columns. More dog things because I love the dogs so much. Another podcast with Ann Leary and Laura Zigman… uh… lose the weight I gained this summer… find a suitcase with a million unmarked non-sequential dollars… there’s a dress on sale that I want…. Need to make dinner….

Happy Pub Day! Clea Simon talks about here edgy and dark new novel, THE NINTH LIFE, the election, writing and so much more

 I first met Clea Simon on a website for writers and it didn't take us long to become fast friends and comrades-in-arms. I'm thrilled to host her here for her edgy new novel, THE NINTH LIFE, which has been racking up the raves--and Clea was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal today!

Clea is the author of three nonfiction books and four mystery series. The nonfiction books are Mad House: Growing Up in the Shadow of Mentally Ill Siblings, Fatherless Women: How We Change After We Lose Our Dads and The Feline Mystique: On the Mysterious Connection Between Women and Cats. The Theda Krakow mystery series was launched in 2005 with Mew is for Murder and continued with Cattery Row and Cries and Whiskers, and Probable Claws. Her Dulcie Schwartz series launched in 2009 with Shades of Grey, and continues with Grey Matters, Grey Zone, Grey Expectations, True Grey, Grey Dawn, Grey Howl, Stages of Grey and Code Grey. The Pru Marlowe pet noir series started in 2011 with Dogs Don't Lie and continues with Cats Can't Shoot, Parrots Prove Deadly, Panthers Play for Keeps, Kittens Can Kill and, in 2016, When Bunnies Go Bad . In 2016, Severn House launched a new, darker Blackie and Care mystery series with The Ninth Life.

A regular contributor to the Boston Globe, Clea's writing pops up occasionally in such publications as American Prospect, Ms., San Francisco Chronicle, and Salon.com. 




The Ninth Life just got a rave from Library Journal, the kind that authors would kill for. Tell us about the book, where it sparked, how you wrote it and can you also talk about the "waiting for reviews" stage?

Thank you, Caroline! As you can imagine, I’m over the moon. I feel like the reviews have been getting it – the “it” being that after 19 (yikes!) cozy/amateur sleuth mysteries, I’ve written something darker, even if it also (like my other mysteries) features a cat.

I’m not sure what sparked it, actually. I know that I tend to read darker, more serious fiction than I’ve been writing for the last decade or so, so I guess it made sense that this would finally come through. I was thinking, at first, of a kind of Sherlock Holmes pastiche – only, Holmes has been removed from the scene and the action focuses on one of his Irregulars, the street urchins who did his errands. And I knew that i wanted a narrator who could not directly interact with the other characters. (Not-really-a-spoiler alert: he’s a cat.) One thing that was hard for me was finding the heart of the book. Blackie, as the narrator is called (that’s not his name, but that’s another story), is rather cool and distanced. It wasn’t until I realized that although he’s the POV character that he’s not the heart of the book that it really took off. Does that make sense?

Then it was the classic thing where I wrote a draft in a rush - and only after reading it through did I realize that there was this other theme going on, about the sexual abuse/exploitation of children. Because of my background writing “cozies,” I don’t do explicit violence. I can’t stand to be cruel to my characters for no reason, although I want them to be tested. But there is a lot of darkness in this book. So, yeah, waiting to see what the critics would think - cat mystery AND dark, etc. - has been nerve-wracking. I think PW nailed it when they said, "Noir fans who are fond of felines will find a lot to like.” Though the jury is still out on how many of those kinds of readers there are. Library Journal said "A delight for anyone who relishes cat mysteries.” And that was NOT a foregone conclusion.

 I also loved that Publishers Weekly says you take a turn to the dark side with an edgy new novel--who wouldn't adore THAT phrase? Were you consciously trying to be darker, or did it just happen, or just fit with the story you were telling? I think I'm asking, how much control do you feel you really have over your writing?

This is one of those books that just came to me. I couldn’t have made it softer if I had tried - this just wasn’t that kind of book. So, I guess the answer is I didn’t feel I had any control.

Do you base the cats in your mysteries on real cats you've loved and known? Blackie, in The Ninth Life, is a new cat--how'd you go about creating Blackie?
I think he’s a person I’ve known, but I’m not sure. I know I project mightily onto every animal I see, because … hey, they’re not going to argue with you, right?  He just is, you know?

You've written a lot of different series and some nonfiction books--is the writing process the same for each book?
With the series books (right now the Dulcie Schwartz feline mysteries and the Pru Marlowe pet noir books), I can’t start with a fresh slate. I not only have a cast of characters already in place, but I have a larger overall series arc. For instance, Dulcie Schwartz is almost done with her doctoral dissertation - so that has to be part of the book. And Pru Marlowe is thawing a little in her relation to other people and that’s a constant I have to at least touch on. I do pick up and momentarily abandon some of the secondary characters book by book, but the overall larger story has to be at least taken into consideration when I write the series.

You're also one of the hardest working writers I know. How do you manage your time?

Thanks, Caroline! I know for a fact that you work pretty hard too. For me, fear of deadline is a motivating factor. I always want to have something on paper – a pile of words – that i can start revising early enough so that I can conceivable make my deadline. The way I do it is I give myself a word count per day that I have to write. Right now, I’m going for 1,250 words a day. Knowing that none of them may make it into the final book helps!

What's obsessing you now and why?

The election. Don’t ask. Trump. I just … can’t.

What question didn't I ask that I should have?

OK, I’m going to be self-serving here and say, “Why should anyone who doesn’t normally read cat mysteries read this book?” To which I’d say, it’s not about the cat. Its a dark take on the hero’s quest, with all that implies. Only, yeah, the hero is a feline.

Abby Frucht and Laurie Alberts talk about their dazzling new novel, A WELL-MADE BED, being scammed, the wanderings of dementia, murder, lust and so much more

<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-font-charset:78; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;} @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073743103 0 0 415 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} </style>  <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7eGF6Mw..." width="420"></iframe><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zc1Mj0xuIe..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zc1Mj0xuIe..." width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WsVBQCNRbd..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="303" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WsVBQCNRbd..." width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5sNPtdajbH..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5sNPtdajbH..." width="230" /></a></i></div><br /><i><br /><br /> "A tour de force written by two wildly talented writers."<br />Connie May Flowler, author of Before Women Had Wings</i><br /><br /><i>Yep, yep, that's only some of the praise being given <a href="http://awell-madebednovel.squarespace... WELL-MADE BED,</a> an exhilarating new novel written by two equally exhilarating writers. About murder, lust, friendship, dementia and that mysterious wheel of Peruvian cheese, the novel is both rollicking fun and rapturously written.</i><br /><br /><i><a href="http://www.abbyfrucht.net/">Abby Frucht</a> won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize in 1987 and is the author of six other novels, Snap, Are You Mine?, Licorice, Life Before Death, Polly's Ghost and a second collection of stories, Fruit of the Month and The Bell at The End of the Rope. </i><br /><br /><i><a href="http://www.lauriealberts.com/"&g... Alberts</a>  is the author of three other novels (Lost Daughters, The Price of Land in Shelby, and Tempting Fate); a story collection (Goodnight Silky Sullivan); two memoirs (Fault Line and Between Revolutions: an American Romance with Russia), and a craft of writing book (Showing & Telling). She has received a Michener Award for the Novel, The Katherine Anne Porter Prize, the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society Prize for short story, and an American Fiction award.</i><br /><br /><br /><b>What sparked the writing of this book? What was it that haunted you so you had to write this?</b><br /><br />Abby: I read a newspaper article in 2010 about old people with dementia who wandered.  The detective who was being interviewed said that such people tend to walk in the direction of one of two things: water, or a place or event from out of their pasts. I thought of a daughter following around her dad who was wandering and learning things about his and her past, and what haunted me was the idea of him leading her toward evidence of wrongs he had done, wrongs in which she herself was in a way complicit ... but I knew that such a book would need to be a more plot driven book than I have ever felt able to write on my own. So I called up Laurie.  Plus, the other thing was, I was tired of sitting around by myself at my desk. Laurie’s a thousand miles away, but as soon as she said yes, my desk got brighter and busier. It was like turning on the TV or something; stuff just started happening.<br /><br />Laurie:  I am the “No” person in this relationship, so when Abby called me talking about writing a novel together about a serial killer with dementia I didn’t want to write about that subject together or alone but we’d both been recently scammed – Abby’s parents lost all their retirement to a famous scammer and a college friend of mine, who is now in jail, tried to involve me in his Ponzi scheme, so I suggested we work with the scam theme instead. Out of that grew an entirely new idea – of Jaycee and Noor and the cocaine-laden wheel of Peruvian cheese.<br /><br /><b>What was it like to work with another person? What did you expect it would be like and what happened instead? Did you find your writing routines changing?</b><br />Abby: I loved working with Laurie.  I loved knowing that we were going to read each other’s chapters and each other’s input as soon as we and they were ready, and that we would talk about what we read, and that whole new unexpected parts of the story were going to come into being without my needing to be the one to think of them.  I loved, as I knew I would, the grounded rationality of her world and her characters, whose lives continue to appeal to me as being more real, more palpable, and more relevant than the lives of my own characters, which tend in my view to lack a center of gravity.  As for routine; I’m a sociable person, and I loved the mix of creativity and friendship. It was like cooking a giant and unwieldy meal together and somehow pulling it off or at least getting away with it.<br /><br />Laurie: Abby is much more lyrical and playful in her prose than I am. I was constantly surprised and inspired by the turns she took with events and language. Of course I said “No” a lot when I thought she was being too fanciful. Working together also revealed to both of us the differences in our composition process – I tend to blurt out a first draft, concentrating on generating ideas, and then go back to work over the prose later. Abby likes to get everything exactly right as she goes along (and also as she revises endlessly). We had to acknowledge the differences in our approaches and find a way to be respectful of them. We also discovered that we had two very distinct internal images of the place where Jaycee lived with her dotty parents and their “Living History Books” theme park. I ended up having to draw a map that we could agree on – or maybe I forced that one by drawing the map. What’s inside your collaborator’s head is a mystery constantly being revealed…<br /><br /><b>Noor and Jaycee are so different, yet they share one driving need--money. And they need it right away. Ah, that's something everyone I know can relate to--but their so-called foolproof plan isn't so foolproof. Do you ever think that if money worries went away, the world would be so much easier to maneuver? (Then we'd only have to worry about work we love and love we need...)</b><br /><br />Abby.   My parents, who are gone now, were Bernard Madoff investors.  Overnight December 11, 2008, on the day of Madoff’s arrest, their life savings went from something over half a million dollars to exactly four dollars and sixty four cents.  But when I watched the ABC miniseries about Madoff’s crimes a few weeks ago, I didn’t miss my stolen inheritance. I missed my parents.  So yes, I agree that the world would be a much sweeter place if everybody had the luxury that I had of sitting on a soft couch in a warm room with a full stomach missing my parents instead of their money.<br /><br />Laurie:  I think we tend to create problems to fill the problem-vacuum and we would just invent other issues to fret about if we had no money worries. I’m not talking about people who are struggling to survive, but people like you and me. Yes, the world would be easier to maneuver – we just might not be as happy about it as we think we would be.<br /><b><br />I love the subtext of the title--the well-made bed that always gets messed up in one way or another. Who came up with it--and why?</b><br /><br />Abby: Just a day or two ago, right now in February 2016, a week before pub date, I picked up the book to choose which passages I would read at a reading next week, and I was surprised to find our title, A Well-Made Bed, buried amid the rest of the prose on the bottom of page 118.  We hadn’t planned on embedding our title in the prose as some authors do, and in fact, when we wrote that chapter, in which a principle mystery of the book is answered, our title wasn’t A Well-Made Bed yet at all but the working title, A Cool Drink of Water or maybe even further back when between us we called the book Hillwinds. The funny thing is that the paragraph on page 118 in which the words of the title are found, is contextually the perfect place for them, because it’s in that paragraph that the book’s main balancing act, between a life on “the straight and narrow,” as Jeff puts it as he lies in his well-made bed after doing a grave wrong, and a life in which you do bad things on purpose, is expressed.  Ordinarily I go out of my way NOT to include a book’s title in its pages, because it makes me think of something my friend, the writer Mary Grimm once said to me when we were walking in her Cleveland neighborhood decades ago, and that is that she finds it self-conscious for a title to be included.  So now I think maybe Laurie and I were being self-conscious subconsciously.  Is that even possible?<br /><br />Laurie: I was trying to remember how we came up with that title but Abby conveniently discovered its source the other day. Or, if not its source, its expression.<br /><br /><b>What's obsessing you now and why?</b><br /><br />Abby:  I’ve always been most interested in observing, in the news and through literature and even in the people I know (not to mention myself), the outer limits of human fallibility.  At least that’s how I used to put it. Now I see that human fallibility HAS no outer limits.<br /><br />Laurie: Having survived a very nasty riding accident in September including a helicopter airlift—one of many I should say -- and following an intervention by doctors and family, I’ve had to give up my horses and my riding life. What’s obsessing me now is getting over losing 30 years of my life with horses and remaining open to what will come next.<br /><br /><b>What question didn't I ask that I should have?</b><br /><br />Laurie:  How many fights did Abby and I have along the way as we wrote this book?  Many, including some ugly ones in which we cyber-hurled insults and curses at one another. Are we still friends and willing collaborators? Absolutely.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />

Michele Filgate talks about Red Ink, being daunted, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and so much more!

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Filgate</a>--and for a huge variety of reasons. First, she's a tireless champion of writers. Second, she's smart, funny and a great writer herself. Third, her Facebook page is so much fun to follow, you might want to just pitch a tent there and stay there. She ran events at indie bookstores for seven years. First at <a href="http://www.riverrunbookstore.com/&quo... Bookstore</a> in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; then at <a href="http://www.mcnallyjackson.com/"&... Jackson </a>in Manhattan, and last (but not least!) <a href="http://www.communitybookstore.net/&qu... Bookstore </a>in Brooklyn.She also is curating the <a href="http://www.bookcourt.com/events/red-i... Ink </a>panels at the fabulous <a href="http://www.bookcourt.com/">Bo... bookstore,</a> a quarterly series co-sponsored by the great <a href="http://www.lithub.com/">Literary Hub</a>. And don't miss the second Red Ink Panel featuring <a href="http://eileenmyles.com/">Eileen Myles</a> (Must be Living Twice), <a href="http://www.ruthozeki.com/">Ruth Ozeki</a> (The Face: A Time Code), <a href="http://porochistakhakpour.com/"&... Khakpour </a>(A forthcoming memoir called Sick), <a href="http://www.annamarch.com/">Anna March</a> (Salon, The Rumpus, the New York Times) and <a href="http://www.alexandrakleeman.com/"... Kleeman </a>(You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine.) 9/22 at 7.</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>I'm so jazzed to have Michele here!  Thank you, thank you, Michele!</i><br /><br /><br /><span style="color: #10131a; font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">I don’t think I’ve met anyone as amazing as you. You gave up steady work at a bookstore as the events person to make it as a writer—and you did. But not only that, you give so much back to the literary community, including this spectacular new venture Red Ink, a reading series for women writers. What made you come up with this idea? And how do you see it growing?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I ran events at indie bookstores for seven years. First at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; then at McNally Jackson in Manhattan, and last (but not least!) Community Bookstore in Brooklyn. I really enjoy curating literary conversations, and even though I gave it up as something I do on a regular basis, it’s part of my DNA. There are lots of great reading series in NYC (including Franklin Park Reading Series, run by the amazing Penina Roth) so I wanted to do something a little bit different. What if I could bring together a diverse group of women to talk about issues that a lot of people care about? What if I could partner with a great indie bookstore in order to do this? I approached BookCourt’s rock star events coordinator, Andrew Unger, and he loved the idea. I asked Lit Hub, where I’m a contributing editor, to co-sponsor the series. It all came together so easily, and I’m really pleased. There will be four panels a year. The next one is on September 22^nd, so save the date!  It’s too early to say how I see this growing, but who knows? Maybe there could be a Red Ink imprint down the line. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">I love the idea of the first event, Finding Solitude in a Noisy World, which is a big issue for most of the writers I know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>How do we block out the world at large to carve out work, while still staying connected? Will every reading tackle an important question?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I’m sure Katherine, Valeria, Molly, Angela, and Leslie will have great answers to that very question! Or more questions, perhaps! I picked this topic for two reasons. One is that I wanted to do an event for my friend Katherine Towler, whose new memoir, THE PENNY POET OF PORTSMOUTH, is one of the most exquisitely beautiful books about the writing life that I’ve ever read. She focuses on her friendship with Robert Dunn, an eccentric poet who was well-known in Portsmouth, NH, but content to be a minor poet in the world. He had a town he thrived in, but he also had a private world that he guarded; a space where he reflected and came up with his poems. That’s something we can all learn from Robert: the idea of embracing our communities while also retreating from it when we need to. I don’t think there’s an easy answer to this question. I think it’s perhaps the biggest challenge for writers, honestly. Short of going to writing retreats (which many writers can’t afford to do) and canceling plans with friends and family, how do we make sure we have the time we need to create? How do we nurture it? How do we not feel guilty during the time that we AREN’T writing? </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I do hope that all of the panels will tackle some sort of question, or at least some sort of big idea. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">You’ve mentioned that this series will also have transcripts of each event for people who can’t make it—which is a genius idea. I always feel terrible when I can’t get to events! Any plans to put these transcripts into a book later? Or a podcast series?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Good idea! We’ll see. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">How do you manage to do all that you do? You teach creative nonfiction, you are a contributing editor at LitHub, you are running this series, you produce literary segments and you write—and I am probably missing at least a dozen other things. And despite all of this you remain one of the kindest, warmest, most confidant people I’ve met. Does anything ever daunt you? </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I am constantly daunted, and unafraid of showing that side of myself on social media. I believe in sharing the good and the bad, and there’s a lot of bad. I deal with depression and anxiety on a daily basis. Perhaps I keep myself so busy as a way of distracting myself. I’m sure that has something to do with it. 2016 is my year of learning to say no: to assignments I don’t want, coffee dates, etc. (I’m very bad at saying no. I try to do all of the things. No one can do all of the things. I also really believe in mentoring and helping out other writers.) I am making more of an effort to allow myself time to reflect. That’s just as important, if not more so, than actual writing time. I really, really want to write a book. That is my number one priority right now. So I’m in the process of working on something and trying to figure out if it will amount to anything. I hope it will. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">What’s obsessing you now (beside Red Ink) and why?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”! I was hesitant to watch the show because the name really offended me. But it’s subversive and smart and really, really funny. Rachel Bloom is so talented! My favorite song is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky-BY... SexyGetting Ready Song.” </a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br />What question didn’t I ask that I should have?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">How many times have you deleted these answers and rewritten them? </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Don’t ask. <span style="font-family: "wingdings"; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">J</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>

Michele Filgate talks about Red Ink, being daunted, Crazy Ed-Girlfriend, and so much more!

<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Wingdings; panose-1:5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:2; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:0 268435456 0 0 -2147483648 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-font-charset:78; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;} @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073743103 0 0 415 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} </style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #10131a; font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 14.0pt;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wTzq-l0GpN..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wTzq-l0GpN..." width="268" /></a></span></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #10131a; font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 14.0pt;"><i><br /></i></span></div><br /><i>Everyone in the literary world knows and adores <a href="http://www.michelefilgate.com/"&... Filgate</a>--and for a huge variety of reasons. First, she's a tireless champion of writers. Second, she's smart, funny and a great writer herself. Third, her Facebook page is so much fun to follow, you might want to just pitch a tent there and stay there. She ran events at indie bookstores for seven years. First at <a href="http://www.riverrunbookstore.com/&quo... Bookstore</a> in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; then at <a href="http://www.mcnallyjackson.com/"&... Jackson </a>in Manhattan, and last (but not least!) <a href="http://www.communitybookstore.net/&qu... Bookstore </a>in Brooklyn.She also is curating the <a href="http://www.bookcourt.com/events/red-i... Ink </a>panels at the fabulous <a href="http://www.bookcourt.com/">Bo... bookstore,</a> a quarterly series co-sponsored b the great <a href="http://www.lithub.com/">Literary Hub</a>. And don't miss the second Red Ink Panel featuring <a href="http://eileenmyles.com/">Eileen Myles</a> (Must be Living Twice), <a href="http://www.ruthozeki.com/">Ruth Ozeki</a> (The Face: A Time Code), <a href="http://porochistakhakpour.com/"&... Khakpour </a>(A forthcoming memoir called Sick), <a href="http://www.annamarch.com/">Anna March</a> (Salon, The Rumpus, the New York Times) and <a href="http://www.alexandrakleeman.com/"... Kleeman </a>(You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine.) 9/22 at 7.</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>I'm so jazzed to have Michele here!  Thank you, thank you, Michele!</i><br /><br /><br /><span style="color: #10131a; font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 14.0pt;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">I don’t think I’ve met anyone as amazing as you. You gave up steady work at a bookstore as the events person to make it as a writer—and you did. But not only that, you give so much back to the literary community, including this spectacular new venture Red Ink, a reading series for women writers. What made you come up with this idea? And how do you see it growing?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I ran events at indie bookstores for seven years. First at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; then at McNally Jackson in Manhattan, and last (but not least!) Community Bookstore in Brooklyn. I really enjoy curating literary conversations, and even though I gave it up as something I do on a regular basis, it’s part of my DNA. There are lots of great reading series in NYC (including Franklin Park Reading Series, run by the amazing Penina Roth) so I wanted to do something a little bit different. What if I could bring together a diverse group of women to talk about issues that a lot of people care about? What if I could partner with a great indie bookstore in order to do this? I approached BookCourt’s rock star events coordinator, Andrew Unger, and he loved the idea. I asked Lit Hub, where I’m a contributing editor, to co-sponsor the series. It all came together so easily, and I’m really pleased. There will be four panels a year. The next one is on September 22^nd, so save the date!  It’s too early to say how I see this growing, but who knows? Maybe there could be a Red Ink imprint down the line. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">I love the idea of the first event, Finding Solitude in a Noisy World, which is a big issue for most of the writers I know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>How do we block out the world at large to carve out work, while still staying connected? Will every reading tackle an important question?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I’m sure Katherine, Valeria, Molly, Angela, and Leslie will have great answers to that very question! Or more questions, perhaps! I picked this topic for two reasons. One is that I wanted to do an event for my friend Katherine Towler, whose new memoir, THE PENNY POET OF PORTSMOUTH, is one of the most exquisitely beautiful books about the writing life that I’ve ever read. She focuses on her friendship with Robert Dunn, an eccentric poet who was well-known in Portsmouth, NH, but content to be a minor poet in the world. He had a town he thrived in, but he also had a private world that he guarded; a space where he reflected and came up with his poems. That’s something we can all learn from Robert: the idea of embracing our communities while also retreating from it when we need to. I don’t think there’s an easy answer to this question. I think it’s perhaps the biggest challenge for writers, honestly. Short of going to writing retreats (which many writers can’t afford to do) and canceling plans with friends and family, how do we make sure we have the time we need to create? How do we nurture it? How do we not feel guilty during the time that we AREN’T writing? </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I do hope that all of the panels will tackle some sort of question, or at least some sort of big idea. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">You’ve mentioned that this series will also have transcripts of each event for people who can’t make it—which is a genius idea. I always feel terrible when I can’t get to events! Any plans to put these transcripts into a book later? Or a podcast series?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Good idea! We’ll see. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">How do you manage to do all that you do? You teach creative nonfiction, you are a contributing editor at LitHub, you are running this series, you produce literary segments and you write—and I am probably missing at least a dozen other things. And despite all of this you remain one of the kindest, warmest, most confidant people I’ve met. Does anything ever daunt you? </b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I am constantly daunted, and unafraid of showing that side of myself on social media. I believe in sharing the good and the bad, and there’s a lot of bad. I deal with depression and anxiety on a daily basis. Perhaps I keep myself so busy as a way of distracting myself. I’m sure that has something to do with it. 2016 is my year of learning to say no: to assignments I don’t want, coffee dates, etc. (I’m very bad at saying no. I try to do all of the things. No one can do all of the things. I also really believe in mentoring and helping out other writers.) I am making more of an effort to allow myself time to reflect. That’s just as important, if not more so, than actual writing time. I really, really want to write a book. That is my number one priority right now. So I’m in the process of working on something and trying to figure out if it will amount to anything. I hope it will. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">What’s obsessing you now (beside Red Ink) and why?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”! I was hesitant to watch the show because the name really offended me. But it’s subversive and smart and really, really funny. Rachel Bloom is so talented! My favorite song is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky-BY... SexyGetting Ready Song.” </a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br />What question didn’t I ask that I should have?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">How many times have you deleted these answers and rewritten them? </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Don’t ask. <span style="font-family: "wingdings"; mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Wingdings;">J</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>

Lee Hope talks about her gripping novel Horsefever, the powerful relationship between horses and their riders, bringing literature to people on parole, writing, and so much more

First, the raves:

 This atmospheric first novel thrusts readers into the intense, often seedy world of competitive horsemanship. Though the concept will certainly appeal to those interested in equine sports, the shifting character dynamics and tense plot will hook fans of suspense as well as horse lovers.–Maggie Reagan, Booklist

Hope has melded a perfect concoction in Horsefever – horses, a murder mystery, a little passion, some suspense, all wrapped around our four-legged friends. Add this one to your 2016 reading list.
–Horse Country Chic
 Lee Hope is editor-in-chief of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices. Her fiction has received grants from both the Maine and the Pennsylvania Arts Commissions. Her short stories have been published in numerous literary journals, such as: Witness, The North American Review, Epiphany, and Sou’wester. She is currently president of the nonprofit Solstice Institute for Creative Writing and teaches for Changing Lives Through Literature, which brings reading to people on probation.

I'm honored to host Lee. Thank you, Lee!

I always want to know what sparks a book? What did it for you? 
I am fascinated with literary suspense.  With Horsefever, I was drawn to a particular murder case about two imperiled marriages that ends tragically with a killing.  I was also fascinated with horses, and owned a small horse farm. So I changed the protagonists in the original case to be horse people, and the novel took off.   Nikki, one of the four protagonists, wishes to compete in the dangerous sport of cross country horse jumping, but her fears hold her back.  Her landowner, husband, Cliff, hires Gabe, half paralyzed in a jumping accident, as a horse trainer, and an attraction grows between Gabe and Nikki, as do the jealous suspicions of Cliff and Gabe's wife Carla, which eventually lead to violence.  The fates of these marriages are intertwined with the relationships with horses, and with ambition and fear.  


What I so love about your novel is the storyworld--the way you bring  us into a world that is as exotic as it is compelling, and even dangerous. Why do you think this particular world gives rise to both the spiritual and the sensual?
In a high risk sport, or any high risk physical activity, really, you risk your life. Cross country riding, or jumping horses, is that dangerous.  At any moment you could be thrown, your horse could trip, you could break bones, your neck, get a concussion, be brain dead.  And risking death can be spiritual, you must confront your fears, and persist.  It takes a certain irrationality, yes.  One eventer said that cross country riders, eventers, are a little crazy.  But I would say such riding also takes an inner strength.  You use your body, as in any sport, but in riding you also connect with the body of the horse…you sense your body so vividly in its vulnerability and strength each time your horse jumps, or competes…it's a union that brings together, if you're tapped into it, the sensual and the spiritual.  And this union is what Nikki knows, and Gabe, her trainer, knows it, and her husband Cliff, senses it, the power of the body/spirit connection.  So Cliff quickly comes to wish he had never hired a trainer in the first place, but it is too late.  The passion of the sport, of winning, has taken hold and propels all four main characters into spiritual territory, both dark and light.   

Can you talk a bit about the connection between the riders and the horses, how it works, when it doesn’t--and why? 

I love this question because it leads us into the spiritual connections between species, the sensual, emotional communication between humans and nonhumans. 
Horses are creatures of prey that have survived since prehistoric times through fear.  They know fear in its depths, so they sense ours as we touch or ride them.  If we are afraid, then their fears ignite, and
 they can become dangerous.  So to ride well, we must master our own fears, sense fear in our bodies, in ourselves, find a calm center, and then in centering, we can communicate quietly through each touch, each gesture with reins, with our thighs, our heels, our heads, our sight, our tones of voice, our breath.  We can learn to feel into the horse,  to come to where we do not dominate, but to where we relate beyond ourselves,…to where we transcend.  Yet if we cannot center ourselves, as Nikki sometimes cannot, and as Gabe once failed to do, then we can become as Gabe, half paralyzed.  Infirm.  Or, in some cases, dead.  So pay attention to the horse, to the nonhumans outside of us.

What kind of writer are you? Did you carry this story around in your head for years, or dash it out on paper and then revise? Do you have rituals? And can you talk about what you’re working on now?  

I find in order to circumvent my logical mind, I must write fast, not a free write, exactly, but to let it flow, to think of it as a draft, which it is, and then, yes, I must revise again and again. 
My ritual is to do what riders must do, to center somehow, in the midst of it all.  To find a meditative space.  To maybe even meditate before I write, which is often easier for me in the mornings.  Now after a few years break, I finally have started a new novel.  No horses in it.  But a crime.  That old fascination of mine returning, or it never went, of those people who live close to the edge and sometimes go over it.   As any of us really can. 

I was so happy to see that you teach for Changing Lives Through Literature--I’ve worked with this program, too, and found it extraordinary. Can you talk about this, please?

You can see how I would be drawn to this program with its use of literature to touch the lives of people on probation, people who were on the edge, and for some reason, could not stop the momentum…and made a wrong choice perhaps, which leads them to the classes in this
terrific national program, which was founded in Massachusetts, where I teach with a judge and a probation officer.  We have seen the effects of this program on some of our students.  Some come to realize how smart they are, come to identify with characters in the stories, characters who also can make wrong choices causing suffering. So some students make other life choices than they once might have.

I have published a few stories by these students in Solstice:  A Magazine of Diverse Voices, of which I am the editor-in-chief.  We publish established writers, including  writers of color and various social classes, as well as writers on the margins.  We promote diversity in literature, as in a different way, Changing Lives Through Literature also does. 
 
What’s obsessing you now and why?

I'm obsessed with beginning a new novel in the midst of the publicity for Horsefever.
How to handle that balance?  I'm obsessed with trying to promote my own writing after so many years of publishing other writers, and teaching them in conferences, and founding an MFA program in Creative Writing, and how I take such joy and feel satisfaction in promoting other writers, while I find myself feeling awkward and shy asking others for favors about my own work.   And more than all that, I'm obsessed with trying to get back to meditation, and to prayer perhaps, to center myself, because it's in centering oneself, as I said above, that we can take life-affirming risks. 

What question didn’t I ask that I should have?

 Your questions are so fine and made me think.  I would say that I'd love for readers to check out our terrific magazine, Solstice:  A Magazine of Diverse Voices, www.solsticelitmag.org.  It's an independent nonprofit that publishes our hybrid mag online, yet we are also publishing print anthologies of our writers as well.  We're so proud to have two Notable Essays cited in The Best American Essays 2015.  And we just received a small grant through the Massachusetts (Needham) Cultural Council, and we are a Best of the Net winner!  We have a mission to promote diversity in literature and photography.

But there I go promoting something other than my book.  You can link to my authorsite, at leehopeauthor.com, or go to my FaceBook author's page to read more and to order Horsefever.

Charlie Smith talks about his heart-scorching new novel GINNY GALL, writing about a black man and being white, research, basketball and so much more

Prepare to be amazed. Charlie Smith has written one of the most extraordinary, gripping, harrowing novels of the year. (Check out the praise on the back of the book above.) His eight poetry collections include Red Roads, selected for the National Poetry Series and Great Lakes New Poets Award; Word Comix , and Headlong . Smith has also published seven novels, among them Cheap Ticket to Heaven, Chimney Rock, and Three Delays , as well as a collection of novellas, Crystal River.

I am so honored to have Charlie here. Thank you, Charlie. Thank you.

What sparked this particular novel?

My novels generally start with an image that sticks in my mind, a mental snapshot that fascinates me so strongly that I want to find out what is going on—in this case a picture of a young man, a black man, riding on top of a boxcar on a long freight train passing a country zoo.  I wondered who he was and where he was going and what generally he was up to, where the zoo was.  It was late summer or fall in the South.  The light was a dusty gold.  The young man had a look on his face of loneliness and anticipation—of eagerness and curiosity.  The novel grew from that picture.

Did you find it daunting at all, as a white man, to write about a black man?

I didn’t so much worry about being white and writing about a black man as I did about how to get as deeply as possible into Delvin’s heart and the hearts of the other characters.  The things we crave are pretty simple: we want to love and be loved, to express who we are and be treated with dignity and humaneness, we all get scared and want to laugh and hook up with others—these are the same whether we’re black or white.  Novels are acts of empathy (unless they are simply forms of personal memoir) and that’s the hard part.  Letting go and descending into the heart. 


How did you go about crafting a character as rich as Delvin?

From the start I sensed in Delvin a buoyancy and a voyaging and a yearning.  I was interested in writing about someone like that.  My other novels are all long prose tragedies, but from the first I knew this book would be different.  Also, the book ends with a beginning, so no telling what’s coming.


Was writing a novel different than writing poetry? Did one form inform the other?

I’ve published eight novels and a collection of three novellas.  I’ve published eight poetry books, including a selected poems.  I’ve always done both.  Both captivated me from the start.  I switch from one to the other as the occasion demands.  I like the compression and passionate speech of a poem, the long haul and characterizations of a novel.

Tell me about the research you did. Did anything surprise you?

I didn’t do much research.  In writing a novel I set myself the task of imagining characters and a world—that’s the fun of it.  As a southerner—one who left the South when he was young—some of my background was useful to me.  I was aware of the Scottsboro Boys, but beyond the facts that could be set out in a single sentence I knew nothing about them.  I wanted to imagine this child and young man’s story.                         
       
What's obsessing you now and why?

My next novel is the story of a professional (NBA level) basketball player and his wife, a mathematician, nuclear scientist and near Olympic level swimmer, told in points of view alternating between them.  Takes place around the country and around the world. 

Joyce Maynard talks about UNDER THE INFLUENCE, using giant white boards to write, children, music, alcohol, wanting to be good and so much more

Usually my interviews for this blog are done via email, but Joyce Maynard wanted us to see each other as we talked, for it to be more personal. How could I resist that? So with her in Guatemala and me in Hoboken, we made contact via Skype, had great laughs and talked for an hour.

Joyce is the critically acclaimed author The Usual Rules, Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Old in the Sixties, Where Love Goes, Baby love, To Die for (made into a movie with Nicole Kidman), Labor Day (made into a movie with Kate Winslet) and the memoir, At Home in the World.  She also runs fiction and memoir workshops in California and internationally, and founded The Lake Atitlan Writers’ Workshop in Guatemala.  In 2013, she got married, after 25 years as a single person.

Her latest novel Under the Influence will be out February 23, and it is completely wonderful. I’m delighted to host Joyce here. Thank you so much, Joyce!



For me, a novel always begins with something is haunting me, some issue I have to get at. Was it that way for you, and if so, can you talk about what that was, and how it became the origins of your novel?
Every novel I’ve written has come out of my obsessions.  I don’t always know it at the time, but then I look at the pages, and there I am--of course! There are certain things that never go away. The yearning for family. The loneliness of a single mother.  Actually, most of my novels have single mothers in them.

But this time around, I was thinking a lot about the loss of friendship. I’ve experienced that in a very painful way, more painful that the loss of a love affair. Of course, my story was not the story of Helen, but I like to attach the engine of my own strongest emotion to the stories I tell.

Did you feel healed by writing Under the Influence at all?

No one should have to pay $20 for my healing! But I understand my own issues more. I look to understand relationships when I write, but I want to make it clear that I was very careful in writing Under the Influence not to make this the story of any of my own friendships. I deliberately put Ava in a wheelchair because I never had a close friend in a wheelchair.

I also was thinking about drinking. I had to give up wine. I had a pattern of drinking that would be very familiar to a lot of women. You know, it’s the end of the day and you open up that bottle of wine. I’ve never been drunk, never had Helen’s experience with getting a DUI, but I was using wine in a way that alarmed me. I come from an alcoholic family. Four years ago, I was pulled over, handcuffed and taken to the police station to get a Breathalyzer test. I saw my life flash before my eyes as I waited for the. I passed, but it changed me. I began to speak about it, to name the demon and write about what was happening. I know that as long as I see drinking as a way of dulling pain, I’d better not drink.

Kirkus, in a rave review, called attention to your expert plotting and use of suspense.  Do you map things out? What’s your writing process like?

It’s emotional and organic. I do a giant white board and pretend that I’m a painter. I track my characters. I’ve always said that past a point, if you’ve created characters who have emotional authenticity, they will determine their destiny. I didn’t know what was going to happen with Swift and Ava. They did the kind of things that people like that would do. I never know how a book is going to end. I want to find out.

You also tell stories at The Moth. Does that feel different to you than writing a novel?

You can see your audience! It’s so lonely for a writer, alone at her desk compared to performing in front of an audience where you can hear people laugh or cry  You can also feel when it isn’t working, I think my years of oral storytelling made me a better story teller on the page. And it made me a better teacher.  I love to  help writers at all levels tell a story well. I like to create an arc on my white board, and I keep asking them questions, what do the characters want?  Where is the big change? How do they come out of the novel differently than when they started?

Do your novels change as you are writing them?


Absolutely. This one was almost finished and sitting on  my desk about to be sent  to my editor when when my husband  Jim was diagnosed with cancer. I didn’t go back to writing for eight months. My life as a writer was gone –and when my husband got a lot better and I finally did get back to work,  I was a different person. I was changed, so the novel was changed. I had a different feeling about love. It was no longer the super romantic, flashy love affair that keeps you in bed for weeks that I was interested in. I was thinking about a deeper feeling, about what really matters in a relationship, and that’s how I created Eliot, who is quiet and good, and whom Helen rejects at first as boring.

Do you think about your audience while you write?

I don’t think about what are people going to think. I write the book that I want to read. There have been a number of times when I put away a two hundred page manuscript. Not that it wasn’t good. It just wasn’t good enough. You want to grow. You don’t want to stay in the same place. My new novel is a more ambitious one than the novel before it, and I hope that will always be so. 

So much of this extraordinary novel is about how you don’t really know what a person is about, what they are choosing to hide or show--and why. The “Have-it-All Havilands seem to sparkle and anyone would be drawn to them, including troubled Helen’s son Ollie, but their friendship soon turns out to be something very different than it appears. Can you talk about this please?

I used to really be really vulnerable about looking at other people’s lives and believing that they had it figured out and what was the matter with me that I didn’t? I thought I was the only person whose father got drunk. Years passed and I found out that a lot of other people I knew had fathers who got drunk. I never want to create the impression that I have it all figured out. I don’t! Helen is somebody who is a fan, an admirer, a worshipper. She feels so honored when Swift uses her name to address her. It’s thrilling to her, and it’s only when she comes to know them better, that she can see how very deep the flaws and failures go.

How did writing this novel change you?


Every book I write is hugely influenced by where I am and what I’m living through as I write it.  Under the Influence was written (or revised, at least, and basically rewritten) during a time when my husband was fighting a serious cancer battle.  And I wrote out of that place.  I’m very conscious of the value of the present, and very aware of death, the certainty for us all. And our culture keeps denying it. Being with my husband Jim while he battled cancer (he’s now cancer-free and gaining weight) made me keenly aware of the preciousness of days.  I think I always aspired to this, but now more than ever I want to do books that have meaning. I want to do good work.

I also want to think that people are going to be good. It’s cost me, but I still want to be that way. Long ago, I had the experience of writing to a man in prison, and gradually his funny, kind, interesting letters grew uglier and uglier. But I wrote Labor Day to show the flip side. What if a so-called bad man was really good?

You’ve had two of your novels made into films, To Die for, with Nicole Kidman, and Labor Day, with Kate Winslet. What does that feel like for you?

Well, it’s a different entity than your book. You have to let go of ownership, similar to what you need to do with your kids. Relinquish control.  There were things in the movies that would not have been my choice, but I’m not making the movie. The funny thing is I want to give the feeling of a movie in a book. When you read a book of mine, I want to create a movie in your head.  Everything but the popcorn.


What’s obsessing you now and why

Children have been an obsession all my life, and parenthood. I think every one of my novels has a child. Each one unique.  

Music is an obsession. I always want to know what music my characters listen to. I even did a sound track for Where Love Goes, and produced it.  If I had my choice of what I’d be good at, I’d make music. I’d be Emmylou Harris, with a voice that has so much feeling it bring tears to a person’s eyes. When I write, I pretend that I am making music on the page. My book is like a song, maybe a heartbreak song, a song that makes you feel the beating of your heart in your chest.  Every book is another song of mine.  As in life, there is generally sadness and sometimes great pain in my songs.  But ultimately, I like to think they are hopeful too.  I’m an optimistic person .  And I believe in the power of love.  That’s an obsession.  It’s in every story I tell.