Caroline Leavitt's Blog, page 83

Sandra Goroff talks about her new book of photography, Solitary Soul, never planning a shot, artistry, and so much more

I've known and loved Sandra Goroff for a few years now.  Smart, successful, funny, she's one of those people you feel you can tell everything and anything, too. When she told me she was a photographer and was putting together a book, I immediately told her I wanted to look at it. 

And I was stunned. 

Sandy's photos tell stories. They aren't just a captured moment, but they reveal character the way the best novels do. I'm so thrilled to host her here. Thank you, Sandy! 


Please tell us how you became a photographer and more importantly, why.

I don't think one becomes an artist, a photographer or a writer. I think it is something you are born to, something that develops in you but something that has always been there. I have always been interested in art and photography -- as early as I can remember i would frame images in my mind -- even before I ever owned a camera. As a Scorpio and an empath, I am highly tuned into other's feelings -- overly so -- painfully so, at times -- the images I am drawn to -- in people and things are evocative -- images that stir emotions and move me -- even though, sometimes they are sad.

Your photos have this very subtle eye--you think you know what you are seeing, and then another image seems to shine to the surface. Do you plan your photos like this or do they ever surprise you?

I never plan or pose a shot. I don't work in a studio.  I am always surprised and try to be spontaneous. Taking my camera out for a day is like going to a flea market or an antique show (also something I love). You really don't know what you are going to find, what will catch your eye and what you will go home with. It may take a long time to spot the right shot -- but once I do, the process is very fast -- I don't want to lose the moment. I can zoom in very quickly and i recognize my shot in an instant; my heart begins to beat quickly (maybe like love at first sight).

What went into making a book of photography, the choosing of the photos, the text, the everything. What did you want people to feel when looking at your photos?

One of the great thrills of art in general -- and i think that includes writing as well -- is that each person brings their own life and emotional experiences to a book, painting or photo. We have our own filters and sensibilities. I know what I see -- but i also know each person will bring something different to that experience. I don't want to dictate what that might be. I accept the fact that this is something I cannot control.

What's obsessing you now and why?

I am even more obsessed with photography now than ever before. I literally think about it all day -- whether I am editing, reviewing, tweaking, organizing or actively photographing. My mother was an artist. She passed away last year at the age of 95 but really right up to the end she was obsessed with learning new things about painting (and life); that was the quality i most admired about her and I am proud to think i may have inherited it.

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

What artists or photographers have inspired you most?

Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollock, John Marin, Dorothea Lang.....What I find interesting is that artists and writers, as they grow, (and age) seem to recognize that there is power in simplicity. Their later works are less complicated. Even Jackson Pollock's chaotic spatter approach became sparser in time. I am drawn to simple images. I love art and grew up with it. Some have described my photography as "painterly," perhaps this is why.


Sandra Goroff
Photographer, Solitary Soul - Available wherever books are sold.
www.solitarysoul.net

Natalee Caple talks about her dazzling new novel, In Calamity's Wake, the real Calamity Jane, and why she wrote a profoundly anti-violent Western

Natalee Caple is the author of  the acclaimed short story collection, The Heart is Its Own Reason,  and the novels, The Plight of the Happy People in an Ordinary World,  Mackerel Sky,  and the book of poetry, A More Tender Ocean. Her newest novel, In Calamity's Wake is both profound, provocative, deeply moving, and so much fun to read. But don't just take my word for it. Quill & Quire called it "a taught poetical thriller," and The Toronto Sun said the novel "hurtles along like a runaway train full of wild characters." I'm so honored to have Natalee here today and this is really one of my favorite interviews. Thank you, Natalee!
 What sparked this novel? Why Calamity Jane?
I had just finished writing a novel about a mother-daughter counterfeiting team in the Upper Laurentians influenced by films from the French New Wave and I was living in the Canadian West, in the Rockies, for the first time. The idea of a Western appealed to me because the connection between landscape and culture was so palpable. In Canada, at least, the connection to landscape in the West means that the distance between Canada and America seems less than the distance between Western and Eastern Canada. I fell in love with the mountains, the prairies, the Badlands. I had my children there. I also discovered that the West was so much more diverse and international than I had seen in Westerns and I wanted to put the stories of women, indigenous peoples, Black America, Chinese America, back into the landscape and show the rest of the West. Calamity Jane was an ideal because she travelled and met so many people. She helped the sick and the poor and she was herself a kind of social outcast who was overwritten in popular culture. I wanted a story about the masses and their heroism, about the irreducible value of every human life. When Calamity Jane cared for people dying of yellow fever she risked her own life. When she went into battle and did not shoot another human being but instead pulled people out of battle, she emphasized the value of life. Whether those events happened as they were told or not she became a symbol of North America that was different to me, that showed a desire to resolve conflict, to protect and shelter human life beyond politics.

What was the research like? Did you have a preconceived notion of Calamity Jane? (Mine is actually from that old Doris Day movie about her) and what, if anything, surprised you? 

Once I gave up the idea that I would find out the truth about Calamity Jane (including when she was born or who she was at birth) it was a massive adventure! I devoured films, comic books, novels, digital versions of microfiche of ancient newspapers, biographies of the West that mention her – she was everywhere and nowhere. She was some kind of projection of dreaming America, the dream of being human and imperfect but good. She was a cipher that was also a real person and she seemed to have suffered somewhat under the burden of performing herself to survive. I thought it would be a book about an angry daughter hunting down the mother who had abandoned her but it became a dialogue between women about their journeys. I realized how much we need stories of women’s diversity to provide us with a context for our every experience, even failures. My daughter and my son, our daughters and our sons need their maternal legacies as well as their paternal legacies so they can understand their whole selves. 
Why tell the story primarily from the viewpoint of Calamity’s daughter, rather than Calamity herself?

Well, Calamity Jane is the mystery. She’s composed of myth and reality and she means something but it’s hard to know what. You get to see her as a greater than life mythical character, a distant third hand memory, a creature who appears in print and on film, a memory, a version recalled by a friend, a version of herself as she would tell it and other ways. I wanted to show Miette’s longing for her adoptive mother before she could know it. I wanted to show how real her beloved adoptive father was to her, what a solid life he had given her. I wanted to show how fame distorts and yet become part of who someone is in the world, how fiction and reality collaborate. I wanted to show how difficult it is to get to the truth of someone so famous that they don’t completely belong to themselves anymore. I wanted the biological mother who gave her child up to be shrouded in questions. So, if it had been from the point of view of Calamity Jane it would have been too stable, too falsely clear who she was. 
At one point, Calamity says, a lie is a thing. Can you talk about that? 

Yes, thank you for asking! A lie here means something told that comes to have a life of it’s own, like a story in a book, or a story you tell about your own life in conversation, or a speech given. It’s not a bad thing but it has no responsibility to you once it is out in the world. And it matters; it has a reality. If Calamity Jane was or was not everything that was said about her, it’s not her fault and it does not matter. The biographers will suffer but the arrangement they make of facts is a lie as well. Stories act in the world. They represent some need in the telling. All stories, no matter how close to detailed events, are arrangements that help us communicate something going on inside of us that wants to move out of us into the world. We tell stories to make things happen or to make them make sense. So a lie is a thing, a real thing, that effects people and the culture and becomes real when it does so. A lie can help you envision a future that you can then strive for, for example. I only use the word lie because Calamity Jane has been so abused by those who seek to debunk her as a hero and make her seem weak and unwholesome, pathetic for being poor and human.

Let’s talk about craft. What kind of writer are you? How do you go about figuring out your story, and what were the perils--and the delights--of this one.
I play a lot. I play with ideas and I follow odd leads in research and think about all the different ways a story can be told and what it means to tell it one way versus another. I’m a feminist writer so I’m primarily interested in women characters who show how complex women’s histories are. I follow Helene Cixous in seeing women’s absences in stories as opportunities to re-engage with genres I have loved since childhood. My writing is me engaging with the world and thinking through the landscape, the animals, the people around me as if I could change myself enough to see everything again through some other perspective. Writing is also the place where I work through how to be human in the face of terrible evidence of human cruelty, human ignorance, human damage. I start with a joke, often. And then I look for pictures, I walk the landscape, I watch movies, I draw, I look up recipes – it’s a very immersive process most of which is only known by me. But when the writing is going well I feel like a beast doing the thing it does, very alive.
What’s obsessing you now and why? 

Women pirates. My husband bought me an old non-fiction book about women pirates for Christmas and I can feel that flame catching.

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

Hmm, you asked great questions so I don’t know. I can tell you that when I was writing In Calamity’s Wake my cousin Heather was murdered by an eighteen-year-old boy who wanted to kill someone in front of his friends. I lost contact with humanity at that point. I just kind of fell off the world and I decided not to finish the novel. Art seemed useless against the violence that could just come from anywhere at any time. But I had to finish the draft to fulfill my promises (grants had been given, it was part of my PhD). So when I went back to work I was miserable, sifting though photos and notes. Once day I saw picture of Calamity Jane and she looks – it’s eerie – she looks just like Heather. And they don’t have faces that you see everywhere; they have unusual faces. But they look the same. I just started crying and I knew that I could go back in and write a Western that could be profoundly anti-violence. That’s when Calamity Jane became Heather for me.

Lionel Shriver, Louise Erdrich, and Me! IS THIS TOMORROW is a 2013 Great Group Reads Pick

National Reading Group: GREAT GROUP READS2013 Selections

I am thrilled, honored and totally jazzed that my novel IS THIS TOMORROW has been selected as one of the Women's National Book Association's National Reading Group Great Group Reads. These selections will be promoted in ten cities, through bookstores, libraries, and press releases and in October, for National reading Group Month, WNBA chapters around the country will be hosting author programs to celebrate the event, reaching out to their book groups and to the reading public.
Thank you, WNBA! And thank you, Great group Reads!
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
Big Brother by Lionel Shriver
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra
David by Ray Robertson
The House Girl by Tara Conklin
How It All Began by Penelope Lively
Is This Tomorrow by Caroline Leavitt
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
Margot by Jillian Cantor
Mary Coin by Marisa Silver
The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg
Nowhere Is a Place by Bernice L. McFadden
The One-Way Bridge by Cathie Pelletier
Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger
The Other Typist by Suzanne Rindell
The Round House by Louise Erdrich
Schroder by Amity Gaige
Sparta by Roxana Robinsn
Wash by Margaret Wrinkle
The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

The very wonderful John Searles talks about Help for the Haunted, terrifying demon dolls, his puppy Ruby, staring at the ceiling while working, and so much more

John Searles is one of those people you can't help but adore. Not only is he a fabulous writer, he's generous to other writers, he's hilariously funny,  and you're just glad he's out there in the world. Books editor at Cosmopolitan and NBC'S Today Show, he's also the author of Boy Still Missing and Strange But True, and his newest novel, Help for the Haunted is already racking up the raves (it's got starred reviews just about everywhere and is already on many Best Of lists) and justifiably so. Literate and terrifying, the novel is about Sylvie Mason and her parents, who help "haunted souls" find their peace. But the book is also about mysterious family secrets, with an ending you'll never see coming. Unsettling, scary and unforgettable, it makes you see the world differently. I'm so honored to host John here. Thank you, John!
It’s been a few years since you published your last astonishing novel, Strange But True. You seem to do just about everything on the planet, from being the books editor at Cosmopolitan and NBC’s Today Show, and writing. How do you ever find time to write--and to do it so brilliantly?
If only it were a few years since Strange But True. Recently, at lunch with my editor, I made the same comment about it being a few years and she stopped me to ask, “Do you really want to know how long it has been?” I promptly put my napkin over my head to hide then gripped the table and told her to lay it on me. Well, it’s nine years. Let me repeat: NINE YEARS since Strange But True! I almost died. 
So to answer your question, the way I am able to do so many things is that I take my time. But I have accepted it. The first two books came quickly and this one came very slooooowly. What matters most is that I’m proud of the story and the way it came out.

I always want to talk about craft, so tell me how this novel sparked. Did you have it all mapped out, or do you follow your muse (mine always seems missing in action). At what point did you know how the book was going to end, and what pieces of the story to withhold for maximum drama? 
Originally, I was writing a novel about a girl in her twenties who goes away to an island to take care of a reclusive mystery writer. There was so much about that novel I loved, but it just never came together. Thankfully, my literary agent had the good sense to intervene. One day, she showed up at my house with the whopping 500 pages I’d written and broke it to me that it was not working. We spent the entire day and well into the night discussing what the problems were and what, if anything, could be salvaged. In the end, the only thing I kept was the main character’s name: Sylvie Mason. I had this idea about her being orphaned and left in the care of her troubled older sister. So I started writing that story and stuck with it. I’m lucky it worked out on the second go-round!
The novel is also many things at once--a terrifying thriller, a creepy scarefest, and an astute psychological drama about the coming of age of one remarkable narrator.  How did you manage such alchemy?
Thank you for saying that. This story was way more challenging than anything I’ve ever done creatively. I guess that’s because I was trying lots of things: telling the story from the perspective of a young girl, combining a murder mystery with a ghost story with a coming of age tale and a family drama. Believe me, there were times when I’d just lay on the floor and stare at the ceiling trying to figure out how to piece everything together. When that didn’t work I’d do push-ups—I do so many of those writing this book I should probably start wearing a bra by now because my chest got so big…haha! I’d also go for crazy long runs to puzzle things out.
Help for the Haunted has one of the most cinematic openings I’ve read. Was this always the way you knew the book would start? 
Well, I started Strange But True with a phone call in the middle of the night as well, so I guess I’ve hit my quota on that sort of opening. But think about it: is there anything more startling than your phone ringing late at night? It just gets your attention and cranks up your fear right away. So that’s how I saw this story beginning….and then came the snowstorm and the drive to the church. Originally, I wrote the scene with Sylvie inside the church, but I realized at some point that it was more compelling to stop at the point when she reaches the door.
The novel is both truly terrifying, undeniably creepy, and it has that DOLL, Penny.  Did you do research into the supernatural at all, and what about your research surprised (or even better, scared) you?
I read lots of books about the history of demons and spirits. It was fascinating to learn about some of the unusual things that “believers” have done in different cultures at various times. Mostly, though, I just used my imagination. I never wanted the story to cross over into the sort of fiction where suddenly people are moving objects with their minds or they sprout fangs or fly through the air. Nothing wrong with those kinds of stories but that territory seems so well-tread by now. Once things cross over into that sort of situation, things feel weirdly familiar since readers have seen so much of that in fiction. As a result, the familiarity makes it way less scary. But how much scarier to keep things grounded in reality and let the reader wonder what the hell is going on? 
What’s obsessing you now and why?
Right now, I am obsessed with my puppy Ruby, who arrived on my birthday this year in June. I started her own Twitter page so if people want to share my obsession check her out at @ohmygoditsruby.
What question didn’t I ask that I should have?

How am I so handsome? Hahaha. Just kidding. No, I think you covered it all, Caroline. Thanks for having me on your blog!

Sneak Peak of the sublime Lizzie Skurnick Books List!

Sneak Peak: Spring 2014We're no good at sitting on our hands. We hope you'll love these as much as we do.

WRITTEN IN THE STARS , by Lois Duncan. APRIL 2014
A completely original collection of author's earliest stories, published when she was as young as 18 in magazines such as Seventeen and American Girl. With the author's introduction and accompanying essays.

MORE ALL-OF-A-KIND FAMILY , by Sydney Taylor. MAY 2014
The first sequel to the beloved ALL-OF-A-KIND FAMILY series, following our favorite five Jewish girls on the turn-of-the-century Lower East Side. With an introduction by Taylor scholar June Cummins.

LUDELL , by Brenda Wilkinson. JUNE 2014
Growing up in the 1950s South with her grandmother, Ludell is a budding writer, dreamer, and keen observer of the changing world around her. With an introduction by the author.

ALL-OF-A-KIND FAMILY UPTOWN , by Sydney Taylor. JUNE 2014
When the family moves uptown, Mama gets sick. But there's wonderful new neighbors, new responsibilities, and, of course, the obsession of decades of readers: a mysterious TEA-DYED DRESS.

AND THIS IS LAURA , by Ellen Conford. JULY 2014
Being the least talented member of your family seems like the most annoying fate in the world. That is, until you can see all your relatives' futures, your classmates' futures -- and your own.

DOMESTIC ARRANGEMENTS , by Norma Klein. AUGUST 2014
Tatiana, a teen sophisticate on New York's Upper West Side, is grown up enough to handle her parents' divorce, becoming a movie star, sex, and young love. Almost. With an introduction by Judy Blume. SUBSCRIBE TO THE WHOLE SERIES September: Lois Duncan in NYCWe could not be more thrilled to announce that Lois Duncan is coming to New York to celebrate the release of  DEBUTANTE HILL ! You can catch her Sunday, September 15, 1:30 p.m. at YA Lit at 92nd Street Y: Lois Duncan in conversation with Maureen Johnson (INFO); Monday, September 16th, 5:30 p.m. at McNally-Jackson Books, signing and reading (INFO); and Tuesday, September 17th, 7 p.m. at the Lizzie Skurnick Books launch party (INFO). Live very much elsewhere? Read this great Q&A with Lois in Publishers Weekly , or look out for her upcoming appearance on Sirius XM's  Bob Edwards show .Shelfie alert: Win one of 5 free copies of Debutante Hill!We want to see your YA shelves! The collection at LSB HQ takes up so many bookcases it is literally impossible to accurately or comprehensively photograph. HOWEVER, whether you are an obsessive hoarder, a picky preservationist, or simply keep your battered copies in your childhood bedroom, send us a Shelfie of your collection! The first 5 will win a free copy of DEBUTANTE HILL signed by the author, and one lucky winner will get A TOTE AS WELL. follow on Twitter  |  like on Facebook  |  forward to a friend

Joyce Maynard talks about AFTER HER, working through a story problem, using a true story, why she sets her novels in other times than our own, and so much more

Joyce Maynard became famous at 18. That’s right, 18. When she was a freshman at Yale, she published “An 18-year-old Looks Back on Life” in the New York Times, which caught the attention of J. D. Salinger. Known for her extraordinary honesty, (I've never met anyone with such an open heart), she’s the author of fifteen novels, including To Die For, and her stunning memoir, At Home in the World, has been reissued with a new preface, and recorded by Joyce for the first time in its entirety. Her novel Labor Day will soon be out as a major motion picture directed by James Reitman. Joyce teaches writing workshops, performs as a storyteller at The Moth, and her work has appeared just about everywhere. (I know, you’re asking, is there nothing this woman can’t do?) 

Her newest novel, After Her, is about the loss of innocence, the enduring love of sisters, and the persistence of hope. Based on a true story, After Her follows two sisters living in an area where a serial killer is at large, their determined homicide detective father, and the killer himself.
I'm so honored to have Joyce here. Thank you so, so much, Joyce.





I love the story of how you came to write this novel, and how you changed the original story to craft something so dazzlingly original. Can you talk about this please?
I was hosting one of the memoir workshops i teach now and then in the living room of my house in Marin County, California.  Among the women who'd shown up that day to work with me that day were two sisters, now in their forties. Laura and Janet. 
I liked these two women right away, and I felt moved by something about them that was both very strong and very vulnerable at the same time.  I felt, immediately, the extraordinary closeness between these two. I knew something had happened to them, when they were young, that had made them very, very close. As one of two sisters myself, I felt I was in the presence of a rare and powerful bond. 
My living room--where we'd gathered to work on the true life stories of the group--looks out on a pretty dramatic view.  My house , which is situated about ten miles north of San Francisco, sits very close to the peak of a mountain known as Tamalpais.  It’s a beautiful place, but haunting too.  And it is this mountain that I'd seen first every morning when I got up, for over fifteen years, and that I’d seen throughout my writing day, from the window over my desk as I write.  I hike a lot , alone on this mountain.  It’s a big presence in my life.
I had been aware for years that a series of murders of women had taken place on the hiking trails of this mountain, back in the seventies and early 80's.  More than thirty years later, people who lived in the area were still haunted by the two-year period in which the killer had remained at large.  But the story of those long-ago events took on a new power for me that day at my writing workshop, meeting those two sisters, Laura and Janet, when they told me that back when they were young--age 13 and 11-- their father had been the homicide detective in charge of the investigation of those killings.  This was known as the Trailside Killer case.
The two sisters spoke that day of the weight their father had felt, and the sorrow, as months passed --and then years--in which he failed to apprehend the Trailside Killer.  Eventually, the killer was arrested by a different police officer, in a different jurisdiction, and brought to trial.  But it was the belief of the two sisters that their father had never gotten over that case.  He died, in his early forties, not long after the trial. 
Though I love a good story (and try, with every novel I write, to give one to my readers ), I am not a writer of crime fiction. And I am not ultimately as interested in the mind and actions of a psychopath as I am in the lives and relationships of so-called ordinary people:  Husbands and wives.  Parents and children.  Brothers and sisters.  Or…sisters. 
But the moment I knew I wanted to tell this story --a fictionalized version of it--occurred in my kitchen, later that day, as I was washing dishes after the workshop.  The other people who’d come to my house that day had gone home, but Laura and Janet had stayed on after , to help clean up.  This was when Laura told me the story of how--years after the death of her father, when in her forties--she had written a letter to the prison where the killer remains incarcerated , asking if she might visit him. 
Her goal for that visit sounded like that of a very young girl.  She had this dream that if she went to see the killer on Death Row in San Quentin, she might actually extract from the killer the confession her father (and all the other police officers) had never managed to gain from him. More simply, she told me, she wanted to look into his eyes, see what her father had seen, and maybe --by doing this--locate some understanding of her father's experience in those last years he spent, chasing the man. 
And she went to visit him, on Death Row in San Quentin.  And the experience had not provided any of the answers or resolution she’d sought.
I imagined what it would be like, to be haunted, into adult life, by events that had taken place decades before. Well, in fact I know a thing or two about this feeling—as, in some form or other, I think many of us do.  I wanted to imagine how a person like Laura, but a fictional character, created by me, might, in a novel I’d write, locate the resolution real life had failed to provide for her.
So--knowing they had no further interest to write about this themselves--- I asked Laura and Janet if they'd be willing to let me write a work of fiction that would portray some of what they'd experienced (but with a lot of invention, too.)  They gave me their blessing.  And over the course of the nearly two years that followed, while I was writing After Her, they tirelessly offered their assistance . 
In the novel I wrote, I wanted to look at how the lives of two young girls--at a crucial moment in their own coming of age--would have been affected by growing up in the shadow of a series of serial killings in their back yard.  I wanted to explore their relationship with their father, a handsome and utterly charming, irresistible hero figure (a man I would have fallen in love with myself, in fact, if I’d known him), whom they watched slowly being crushed by the weight of his failure to resolve this case.  
And I wanted to explore the inner life of a thirteen year old girl, who actually believes (as only a thirteen year old can, perhaps) that she possesses the power to channel the feelings of the killer , to identify who he is, and then to trap him.  Using herself as bait.  
I wanted to understand the bond of these two sisters, and their deep love for their larger-than-life and deeply-flawed father.  And I wanted to go deep into the world, and sexuality, of young girls , at the moment they're trying to make sense of so much in the world around them.  Sex being high on the list. At its core, that's what my novel is about:  girls trying to make sense of the dark, sometimes violent world around them.  And to make sense of their own sexuality. 
The novel has this unsettling and growing power that keeps you in its grip. In fact, while reading on the train, I was so upset, the conductor actually came by and asked me, "Are you all right?" And I wasn't. Because of your book. How did you figure out the structure of the book so that it would slowly and powerfully grab readers like that? Was it a totally conscious choice on your part, or did it surprise you, too?
First off, Caroline:  I want to say I love it that I pulled you so deeply into my story.  As a writer, it's my goal to take a reader so far outside of her own self that she might inspire a train conductor to ask if she needed help.  
As for how I accomplish the suspense in my novel:  It's never a consciously constructed thing.  Although I name many writers among my friends, who plan out every beat of a story, my own way when writing is to bring to life the most authentic and moving characters I can render on the page, and then let them determine what they will do.  I know this may sound a little crazy, but I often end up feeling (and did, writing After Her) that I am not so much constructing a story as experiencing it unfolding, in the voices of my characters.  Often this involves watching a story unfold in ways I could never have predicted. 
The novel is also stunningly filmic. Having had your novels turned into films, do you feel that you are more conscious now of story as it translates to film--or does that never enter your mind?
Well, just the other day I got to sit in a dark movie theater and watch the first-ever screening of the absolutely terrific film adaptation of my novel Labor Day.  (It won't be officially released until Christmas Day, but there was this advance showing of the movie, and people were just loving it .  You could actually hear people weeping, in the theater, at a couple of places in the movie (an actually , though I'd seen the film before,  I wept a little myself.)
Did I set out to write a story that would be adapted by film, or sit down and say to myself “Go write a role for Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin”? 
No.  But I saw this movie in my head, before I’d written the first line.
I don't consciously set out to write novels that could be turned into movies.  But I certainly love a good story, and I am a lover of movies.  So when I write, I am actually describing the movies I imagine, projected inside my head.  (I am the screenwriter.  But I am also the director.  The lighting person.  I compose the soundtrack.  Imagine the wardrobe choices of my characters.  I hear the soundtrack.  And of course, I am the editor.  And I am the woman who buys the ticket and sits in the front row as the projector begins to roll.
The budget for these movies in my head is just a whole lot lower than the budget for even a small indie film, by the way.  I have said this before, but it's really true:  I am sitting there at my keyboard, typing as fast as my fingers can go, to keep up with the movie going on in my head. I am right there with my reader:  longing to find out what will happen. 
There are so many unexpected reveals and revelations in the book, that I was as unsettled as I was stunned. How much of this is planned out in advance?
None of it.  I let my instincts and knowledge of human nature direct me in my writing. 
I'll tell you a story here, about a place where I got stuck for a while in the writing of After Her.  I need to tell you this without giving anything away for your readers who haven't read my novel yet, because of course I hope they will want to.  But you'll understand what I'm talking about, as will any reader of the novel, when she gets to a certain point in the story. 
So….There is this point in the story where the two sisters --having worked to lure the killer to a place where they might actually confront him—do in fact encounter the murderer.  Only they get more than they  bargained for.  They find themselves totally alone on this mountain, with a serial killer coming towards them--a man who has killed many times before, and one who would have no problem doing so again. 
I needed to get these girls out of this terrifying situation.  But I didn't want to have some big strong man with a gun saving the day. I wanted them to be the architects of their own survival, and triumph over the killer.  
But how?  I racked (WRACKED? SP?) my brain for weeks.  Months, I think.  Sometimes I'd wake up in the middle of the night, to try out some new scenario on the  endlessly patient man lying next to me, who was my boyfriend at the time.  (He's now my husband.  We got married this summer.  He didn't run the other way, even after being awakened in the night more times than I can remember, to talk this through.)
But my breakthrough in figuring this out came when I was all alone, renting a little cabin on the Russian River this last winter.  I'd gone there to work on After Her, and I was stuck on this problem of the girls on the mountain with the killer. 
It was the middle of the night.  I'd been up in the night once again, trying to figure out not simply "a plot device" but what two girls like the sisters in my novel might actually do in a situation like the terrifying one in which I'd placed them. 
And then it came to me.  You know what they do, of course. I won't say it here (because I want the people reading this to read my book).  I will just tell you that the action they took came directly out of a game the two real sisters, Laura and Janet, had told me about, that they used to play a lot, growing up.  The kind of game a couple of young girls would not play in the year 2013, if they were spending their lives texting and going online, instead of being out on their own, cooking up their own adventures as my two  characters do, living in an era that predated all this technology. )
And when I came up with this solution for my girls, I have to tell you what i did .  In the middle of the night, in the darkness of my little cabin, I burst out laughing.  It was so perfect for these two.  It felt like just what an eleven year old and a thirteen year old would cook up , if they were facing a serial killer.  (This eleven and thirteen year old, at least.)  
And so I burst out laughing. 

What's obsessing you now, and why?
I always want to tell a good love story.  There's a great one in my novel, Labor Day, and actually--though this is not the central story in my new novel--there's a love story that made me cry a little in After Her too.  I go back and back to love. And to families, and family secrets.  And the longing I think we all feel , or felt , if we didn’t have this growing up, to be part of a happy family. 
My obsessions don't change, in fact.  They resurface in every novel I write --just in different forms.  
You know, there's this image that appears, in some form or other, in several of my novels (as it does, in this new one.)  I didn't even realize this until I sat down a few months back, with my first bound copy of After Her in hand, and read it start to finish for the first time.  It's the image of a character looking through a window somewhere, and imagining that the people on the other side of the glass are having this wonderful, happy life.  
I remember doing that myself, when I was young.  (Or maybe as recently as a few weeks ago?  )   Looking in a window at night, maybe, at this warm and glowing scene….
In After Her, my two young girls engage in a variation on this behavior.  Children of divorce, whose mother has checked out, whose father is off somewhere with a woman who isn't their mother, and left to their own devices, they actually position themselves on a hillside, outdoors, at night--huddled together under a blanket-- and look in their neighbor's picture window, to watch soundless reruns of The Brady Bunch.  And imagine what it might be like, to be those characters.  
That a was me, at their age, more or less, though the television shows I watched, and the fantasy families I pictured myself part of, came from an earlier time.
What question didn't I ask that I should have? 
You can ask me why my last four novels have been set in times other than those we live in now.  (After Her takes place mostly in 1979 and 1980.  Labor Day is largely set in the year 1987.  The Good Daughters goes from the fifties to the present , but my main characters are young in the sixties and seventies.   And The Cloud Chamber is set in 1967.)
Here's why:  Although in my daily life I avail myself of the usual technology (laptop , iPhone, iPad), I find these devices singularly soul-less to write about.  There's something brittle and cold about a scene in which a character--instead of talking with a character, or picking up the phone, or writing a letter--sends a text.  And there is nothing remotely dramatic, or visual, or romantic--nothing to get the heart beating faster--about a character sitting at a desk somewhere, typing on a keyboard. 
I want to get my characters out into the world, in nature, on a mountain, under the stars.  I wanted to give the characters of my two sisters the kind of adventures few young people get to have any more.  I think, here, of one of my favorite movies of all time:  Stand By Me.  In some ways, I wanted to write a real life Little Red Riding Hood tale.  I wanted to write a story with some of that feeling, of setting young people out into the world --one not wholly safe, or free from anxiety, but a real world--and then watch how they navigate their way out of the woods.  The darkest woods being the territory of sexuality, of course. That's the place they're wandering around in.  It's a place of beauty and terror, all at once.  I wanted to capture both . 

Stressed about college applications? Or looking for a great read? Win a copy of Lacy Crawford's Early Decision

We're buried under college applications here, and the most helpful book on the planet for us is actually a novel: Early Decision by Lacy Crawford. A one-time college-essay whisperer, Lacy's novel gets at the price college-bound kids pay when their parents are a bit too helicopter, and when they aren't allowed to discover their own voice. But besides the excellent you-are-there advice, Early Decision is also a whip-smart novel about a young woman discovering her own path, even as she helps the college-bound discover theirs. 
To win a copy, simply post a comment! We'll be giving away two copies to the first two people who post!

Sarah Weinman talks about Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, and the lost generation of women crime and suspense writers

I was so honored to have the amazing Sarah Weinman interview me at McNally Jackson Books when Is This Tomorrow launched. She's smart, funny and a fabulous writer. The News Editor for Publishers Marketplace, she contributes a monthly crime fiction column to the Los Angeles Times and a monthly Q&A with authors on personal finance for Currency. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, Maclean's, the Guardian, and more. Her writing has appeared in Dublin Noir, Baltimore Noir, Damn Near Dead, A Hell of a Woman, and more. She also has a M.S. degree in Forensic Science, and her under-rennovation blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind was mention just about everywhere, including the  New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the Ottawa Citizen, Library Journal and the India Times Business-Standard. Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (was there ever a better title?) reintroduces astonishing women suspense and crime writers we may have forgotten (and shouldn't have).


What was the moment that sparked this book? 
I'm not sure there was a specific moment, but the anthology could not have happened if I hadn't written an essay for Tin House for their Spring 2011 issue that first outlined my whole idea of domestic suspense and this lost generation of largely women writers. I knew, as I was working on it, that I had a lot more to say, and when I ended up having lunch with the editor who ended up acquiring TROUBLED DAUGHTERS and talking at some length and passion about this void, he suggested there might be an anthology in this. And so there was!
Tell us how these writers were so pioneering?  And what can modern mystery writers (both men and women) learn from them?
Crime fiction is customarily thought of as having two distinct paths: the hardboiled/noir path (Chandler/Hammett/Cain, then Thompson/Macdonald/McDonald/Spillane, etc) and the Golden Age/cozy path (Christie/Allingham/Sayers/Marsh, etc.) But there was this whole group of writers -- almost all of them women -- who won awards, were critically acclaimed, published and sold well in hardcover, that were dealing with more domestic themes. Subtle terrors. Family matters, toxic marriages, crumbling relationships, social issues. And they never got their critical due in the same way their male counterparts did. 
In terms of what modern mystery writers can learn, it's that the current crop of domestic suspense -- Gillian Flynn's GONE GIRL being the most famous example -- had precedent and antecedent. The same anxieties afflicting us today were around 50,60,70 years ago. We still grapple with a lot of the same issues. 
I love that so many of the stories deal with the darker side of human nature. Do you think that part of why some of these writers were not as famous as they deserved to be was because people felt women shouldn’t concern themselves with such shocking matters? And what price did some of these writers pay for venturing outside what society expected of them?
I think there's something to that, but it's also about who got to anoint which books. Taste is subjective, and those in a position to canonize writers after a fashion, whether by reissuing their work with an influential imprint like Black Lizard or republishing and present books as important a la the Library of America, go by their own likes and dislikes.
How did you go about choosing the stories in this book?
I went in knowing some of the writers I wanted to include, people like Charlotte Armstrong, Dorothy B. Hughes, Margaret Millar, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Celia Fremlin (as those two were part of my Tin House essay) and Vera Caspary. I also wanted that first short story by Patricia Highsmith, and hoped something by Shirley Jackson would suit, which it did. Then I discovered other writers who fit the bill, like Helen Nielsen, Joyce Harrington, Miriam Allen deFord, Nedra Tyre, and last but not least, Barbara Callahan. I wanted a mix of well-known writers, those who were well-known in their time but had faded from view, and undiscovered treasures.
Picking the actual stories involved a lot of detective work. Hours and hours online scouring directories for titles, even PDFs. Several hours at the NYPL (where I found the Holding story, buried in a bound edition of its first magazine printing) the Center for Fiction (where I found the Callahan and the Fremlin) and Partners & Crime, the late great Greenwich Village mystery bookshop, which had a stash of old Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines that provided a wealth of source material for TROUBLED DAUGHTERS. Then requesting permissions, which is a whole other story. Then figuring out the order, again mixing known and well-known, and loosely going by the age of the protagonist.
What’s obsessing you now and why?
Well I'm still pretty deep into everything related to TROUBLED DAUGHTERS! But also, the source material for one of my next projects (fiction) which I am superstitious and thus must keep quiet about.  
What question didn’t I ask that I should have?
Maybe this: what sort of conversation do I hope will start because of TROUBLED DAUGHTERS? And it's that if the anthology spurs readers to search out, buy, read, and love any or all of the authors included, I have done my job, several times over. As I write this the book has been out a week and I've been amazed and overwhelmed by the response. 

Rochelle Jewel Shapiro talks about I Dare You to Write, mistakes new writers make, Kaylee's Ghost, and so much more

I've know Rochelle Jewel Shapiro for a million years. We switch pages, we share secrets, and no one is more fun to go shopping with. Her  first novel, Miriam the Medium (Simon & Schuster) was nominated for the Harold U. Ribelow Award and published in the U.K., and Belgium and Holland as Miriam Het Medium. Her new novel, Kaylee’s Ghost (Amazon and Nook) was finalist in the Indie 2013 Awards. Shapiro teaches writing at UCLA Extension and like her character, Miriam Kaminsky, she is a phone psychic. Articles have been written about her psychic gift in Redbook, The Jerusalem Post, the Dutch Magazine, TV GID, and the Long Island section of the New York Times. She’s chronicled her own psychic experiences in Newsweek (My Turn), and The New York Times (Lives) which can be read on her website at http://rochellejewelshapiro.com. 
Why write a book about writing? How is this book different from other books on writing? 
I had no idea that I was going to write a book on writing. A few years ago, I began writing a monthly column on writing for Authorlink.com, a website that connects writers, editors, agents, and readers. With each column, I explored issues that I was either having in my own writing, or curious about, or thought that my writing students would benefit from. Instead of tiring of it, each article became more interesting to me. I’d walk around thinking about what I would be writing next. When Authorlink.com morphed into a small publishing company, Doris Booth, the editor, said, “Hey, why don’t we publish fifty of your most exciting essays into a book?” I looked them over and fifty leaped out at me. Even after I had read the proofs until my eyes felt like joke eyes, popping out of their sockets on springs, I remained interested in the material and bet the reader will be too.

How this book is different from others on writing is that I drew from all kinds of sources. Since I’m a psychic, I have a chapter called, Your Intuition Knows What You Want To Write, which is actually a Ray Bradbury quote. Because I’ve taken acting classes, I have a chapter Writing as an Actor, and another on Writing as if You’re Auditioning for the Reader. I don’t snub genre writing. In my chapter, Fifty Shades of Shocking Pink, I tell you all I’ve learned about writing erotica. But I also go to the masters as I do in my chapter What Papa Hemmingway Still has to Teach Us. I DARE YOU TO WRITE is both comprehensive and quirky. 
What mistakes do you think new writers (and old ones) make? I think too often writers are pressured to think, What will sell? Then they go after that, even if it doesn’t fit their psyches. Believe me, I know. I had an agent who wanted me to write a book about being a dog psychic because she was sure it would sell, never mind that although I am psychic and a dog may wuff into a reading but, I would not bill myself as an animal psychic, which is a specialty. Needless to say she is my former agent, but you see how this can go? What you need to do to find what to write about is to go deeply into yourself, find your own themes, and when you do, you can write almost anything, and readers will eagerly read it. Ask yourself what drives you crazy? What keeps you up at night worrying? What kind of book do you always reach for? What gives you solace? What situations have shaped your own life? Who would you like to remember? Who would you like to forget? What cracks you up? You can’t just follow trends. By the time you finish the book, the trend might be over. Write what moves you, what feels crucial to you. Writing a book is a long arm wrestle. If you’re not writing from your core, you won’t be able to keep going.   
Can you give us a sample from the book, a tip that writers can use?  In my essay: Cultural Clashes: Grist for the Mill, I point out that some of the greatest works of literature arise from clashes between cultures: people from different countries, socioeconomic classes, and when you think of it, each family has its own culture, a way of doing things that is unique and sometimes doesn’t mix well with another family.

Think of Jay Gatsby who came from an impoverished childhood in North Dakota and grew fabulously wealthy through bootlegging and securities fraud in order to win the love of high-society Daisy. Too late he finds out about the careless morality of the upper class. The Great Gatsby also reflected the decay of social and moral values that led to the crash of the stock market, and has relevance today. When your characters are from different socioeconomic backgrounds, even if you aren’t trying, you will have social commentary, which will make your story larger than the plot.   

Think of Shaw’s Pygmalian, where a Professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, makes a bet that he can train Eliza Doolittle, a bedraggled girl who sells flowers, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party by teaching her to assume an air of gentility by teaching her manners and most of all, elocution. As Higgins tries to get her to nix the cockney accent, the play not only turns out to be a hilarious love story, but also a satire on the rigid British class system that existed back then. 

D.H. Lawrence also created the clash of different backgrounds in his daring, sexually explicit, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, the hot affair between Constance (Connie) Chatterly, the wife of a minor nobleman, and Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on the estate. We learn from other characters that Lady’s Chatterly’s lover had been a commissioned officer and had had a good education as a child, something rare for the working class back then. But he chose to speak with the broad Devonshire accent and work with his hands to fit into his community. Unlike Jay Gatsby, we find out that Mellors is a man of true nobility despite the station that the world sees him in.    The differences in the backgrounds of the characters are the heart of Tennessee Williams,’ A Street Car Named Desire. When Blanche DuBois, the “fallen” woman puts on airs, turning her nose up at Stanley Kowalski, her sister’s brutal blue collar husband, they strip each other of their pretensions. Stella, Stanley’s wife, has married beneath her station, and has to witness her sister’s final ruin and decide whether or not to forgive her husband for causing it.   If you’re presently trying to write a novel, check to see if there are some social class differences between your most important characters. If you haven’t made those clashes, you might make your story stronger by including them. After all, strong plot is built on differences.    
What's obsessing you now and why?
Legacy, the idea of legacy. No matter what age we are, we have to think about what we are going to leave behind to those we love and those we’ve never met. Each day of writing for me feels more important than the next. And it isn’t just in my writing. It’s how I greet people, how I say goodbye, how I’ve made someone else’s life better, even with a joke. By the way, did you hear the one about…..?
What question didn't I ask that I should have?
Why do you have to dare someone to write? Because it’s hard to justify to others and sometimes even yourself.  Ever notice how parents foist music lessons on disinterested kids, holler at them if they don’t practice, sit through tedious piano recitals, and then, if their children decide to become musicians, the parents are desperate to talk them out of it. Parents want their kids to become lawyers, dentists, accountants, so that someday their kids will be able to afford to foist music lessons on their progeny.  It’s no different with writing. Dare to become an English major and everyone is asking you, with a raised brow, “So, what are you intending to do with it?” Creative writing major? Forget it. Better to say you’re studying micro-economics (code for, I’ll be earning very little, which might be the truth.) That means you will have to figure out another job to sustain you. And what’s wrong with that? William Carlos Williams and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were both practicing physicians. Nathaniel Hawthorne was a weigher and a gouger at the Boston Custom House which housed offices to process the paperwork of imports and exports. Dan Brown, before he struck it rich with The Da Vinci Code, was a high school English teacher.  Once you commit yourself to writing, people ask you, “Have you sold your book yet?” as if it were easy and took so little time to either write it or get an agent, then get it sold to a publisher. They don’t understand that you have to hone your craft, read extensively, especially in the area in which you want to write. “They” get to you. You get to you. That’s why I need to dare yourself to write. 

Melissa Studdard and Donna Baier Stein talk about The Tiferet Talk Interviews, fostering the creative spark, and so much mor

Imagine the perfect interview. The luminaries interviewed include writers, thinkers and people determined to make the world a better place and how to tell the truth of their lives and access creativity. That's the basis of The Tiferet Talk Interviews, a fascinating collection of twelve interviews transcribed from the famous Tiferet Talk Radio Show, conducted by award-winning bestselling author and host Melissa Studdard, with a forward by Donna Baier Stein, the publisher of the Tiferet Journal. Included in the book are interviews with Julia Cameron, Edward Hirsch, Floyd Skloot, Robert Pinsky, Bernie Siegel, Lois P. Jones, Anthony Lawlor, Jeffrey Davis, Robin Rice, Marc Allen, Jude Rittenhouse, and Arielle Ford. And I'm honored to report that I will be interviewed for a Tiferet Talk in the coming year. 
Donna Baier Stein's poetry and prose have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Kansas Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Washingtonian, and many other journals and anthologies. Her story collection Great Drawing Board of the Sky was a Finalist in the Iowa Fiction Awards; her novel Fortune received the PEN/New England Discovery Award and is now represented by William Morris Endeavor.
Donna was a founding editor of Bellevue Literary Review, and currently is the Editor and Publisher of Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature. Her awards include a Scholarship from Bread Loaf Writers Conference, two awards from the Poetry Societies of Virginia and New Hampshire, a Fellowship from Johns Hopkins University, a fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and individual fiction and poetry prizes from various journals and anthologies.
.Melissa Studdard  is the author of  Six Weeks to Yehidah which won the Forward National Literature Award  The Pinnacle Book Achievement Award,  The International Book award and January Magazine's Best Children's Book awards Finalist for National Indie Excellence Awards and  the readers favorite awards. 
Melissa is currently completing her first poetry collection, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast. Her poetry, fiction, essays , reviews and articles have appeared in dozens of journals including Boulevard, Connecticut Review and Poets and Writers. She also serves as a reviewer for The National Poetry Review and she is an editorial advisor for Lapis Lazuli Journal of the Harold Pinter Society of India and The Criterion. She's a contributing editor for the Tiferet Journal, and the host of Tiferet's famed radio program, Tiferet Talk.  She is also a professor for the Lone Star College System and a teaching artist for the Rooster Moans Poetry Cooperative. Thank you so much, Melissa and Donna for being here.

First, Donna, tell us about how Tiferet came to be. 
I started Tiferet when I was studying Integrated Kabbalistic Healing (IKH).That's when I first learned the Hebrew word tiferet and fell in love with it. Tiferet is one of ten sefirot on the Tree of Life. Sefirot are thought to be characteristics of, or portals to, God. Tiferet is the place on the Tree where the spiritual and physical realms meet. It corresponds to the heart, compassion, and reconciliation of opposites, and is, in my opinion, the state from which true creativity arises. 
Melissa, how did you come to be involved with Tiferet?
A few years ago, while on vacation in Colorado, I found a copy of Tiferet at a magazine stand and read it cover to cover. I was thrilled because I’d been writing spiritual poetry and wasn’t sure quite where to place it. When I got home, I submitted some poems, and they were accepted. After that, because I liked the Tiferet community so much, I began to form a relationship with the journal and the staff, especially Donna. Eventually, Donna asked me if I wanted to join the staff, and I enthusiastically accepted.

Why did you see a need for it, and how did you fill that need? 
Because I grew up with a Jewish Dad and Christian Mom, and had certainly experienced my own back-and-forth ambivalence about issues, I found this concept wonderful. To me, reconciliation of opposites is absolutely essential in today's increasingly divisive world. Part of our individual healings in IKH involved accepting opposites within ourselves. That kind of healing also has to happen in communities, governments, nations, the world. It's recognizing that what looks like "the other" - whether it is a black teenager in a hoodie or a Muslim woman in a hijab, a Wall Street billionaire or unemployed autoworker, a Democrat or a Republican - "the other" is not something to fear or hate. I recognize that this is a big task, for all of us, at times. But it's a goal and it's one Tiferet Journal works toward.
It also fascinates me that traditional religions stand on so much common ground. The Golden Rule, for instance, is key to all the major religions in the world. 
I put a quote on our website from Ralph Waldo Emerson:  "God enters by a private door into each individual." I firmly believe this. I believe in cultural pluralism. I also believe in the importance of writing and creativity, both for individuals and cultures. It's no accident that so many world religions place great emphasis on "the word."
"In the beginning was the Word," says John 1:1 in the New Testament. In Hebrew and Sanskrit, letters themselves have special powers. The first sermon in Islam begins with the word, "Recite!" 
So the original mission of Tiferet Journal was to help reveal spirit, in all its manifestations, through the written word. To that end, we publish writing from authors of many faiths, even non-traditional ones. An early essay was entitled "My Faith in Graffiti."
What do all these voices, intent on making the world be a better place, have in common in terms of the way they think or work, Donna?
I think most of our authors attempt to make the world a better place through their own writing. Some of them have active spiritual practices; others don't. Finding out about their own beliefs and creative practices is one of the best parts of our Tiferet Talk Radio Show hosted by Melissa Studdard. I've always been interested in exploring where creativity comes from. Personally I think that, if we are lucky and dedicated, we can be conduits for something greater.
Melissa, can you weigh in?
It’s like a potluck party. Our contributors have all arrived with different dishes. Some have come by train, some by car, and some have rowed over lakes and moats. They’ve travelled from as far as the other side of the globe and as near as next door. But they’ve all come to the same party, and that party is about connection and the search for meaning. Placing all these dishes on the table together, we see that truth is plural, not singular, and that while each dish tastes good alone, together they make a meal that can nourish us more fully.
As a follow-up question, I wanted to point out that you're no stranger to pushing the boundaries of what writing can do. Donna, you're a founding editor of Bellevue Literary Review, which seeks to explore the narratives of illness, doctors and patients in a way that's never been done before. Would you say Tiferet was a natural progression?
Definitely! I had so much fun helping to launch Bellevue Literary Review. I also felt a need to bring in the non-physical and thought it might be fun to have a literary journal focused on literature and spirituality as well as one on literature and medicine. So I started the Tiferet publishing project, naively forgetting that I didn't have the BLR's financial and staffing backing of New York University!

What do you think makes a great interview, Melissa? What's been surprising about these interviews for you?
Without question, openness. If the interviewee is open and receptive to the questions, nothing can go wrong that can’t be fixed. In the beginning, the interview is almost like a first date—the interviewer must make it clear to the interviewee that he or she will be treated with respect and that the situation is safe. Sometimes it takes awhile—even up to the first third of the interview—but once that has been established, the interview will be great.
What’s surprised me most is that the spontaneous parts are consistently the best parts. Of course, research and knowing the subject are integral to the process, but once that research has been done, the interviewer has to be able to step back and gently guide the conversation, rather than trying to force it. It took me a while to learn how important this is.
What I love so much about these interviews is how they are really conversations and we get to learn something about Melissa as well as the person interviewed. So how do you prepare for an interview? And can you talk about any interviews that surprised you or did not turn out the way you thought they might?
First of all, thank you. That’s so nice! I do prepare like crazy because I like to conduct whole person interviews, which means that although we may focus on a specific work, I also want to look at the work in the context of a larger picture of who that person is and how that specific work fits into their oeuvre. I start by reading the person’s primary works and then branch out to secondary sources and other interests. So, for example, if I were interviewing a novelist, such as you, about a newly released novel, I would read that novel first. Then I would read other works by you and then reviews of the works and interviews with you. From there I would move on to your blogs and other interests. For instance, I noticed at your website that you also have screenwriting accomplishments and teach at Standford and UCLA, so I’d want to talk to you about those things too, if time permitted and they seemed relevant.\
There have been many, many surprises during interviews. The biggest one actually has nothing to do with content. It was when the sound on my phone quit working and I had to scramble around for several minutes to find a headset I never used. Thankfully, it was charged, and when I got back on the call, the person was still talking. Still talking! Can you believe it? It was seamless. I listened to the interview later, with my heart in my throat, to make sure I hadn’t asked any questions that had already been answered while I was searching for the headset, and I hadn’t. I still can’t believe my luck!
What's obsessing you now?
I'm proofing my story collection which will come out later this year and am back at work on revising my novel (which you helped me with you so much through your UCLA class and private critique). Each day I face my own task of balancing my own writing work with the work involved in publishing and financing Tiferet. So finding the best ways to do that is my current obsession!
I recently said in another interview that I’m obsessed with writing the way teenage girls are obsessed with make up and teenage boys are obsessed with teenage girls. I don’t think that will ever change. Like Donna, I have a lot of other obligations all the time, so the drive to write has to be intense, or the writing will not get done.

What question didn't I ask that I should have
How about "What would you like people to do?" I think my answer to that first, is to be aware of their own prejudices (and we all have them.) Second, to foster their own creativity and seek the sacred wherever they find it. And third, to subscribe to our journal and purchase our wonderful  new book Tiferet Talk Interviews at www.tiferetjournal.com.
Nothing. I’m happy with the interview and appreciate you hosting us at your site!