A Silly Interview with Tina Gower, newly published debut novelist!

Originally published at Rachel Swirsky. You can comment here or there.

Many thanks to Tina Gower for agreeing to do a silly interview with me!

Tina’s bio has a typical writery buffet of eclectic experiences: “Tina Gower grew up in a small community in Northern California that proudly boasts of having more cows than people. She raised guide dogs for the blind, is dyslexic, and can shoot a gun or bow and miraculously never hit the target (which at some point becomes a statistical improbability).”

She also has a bunch of writing achievements, but this *is* a silly interview. (Though I admit it begins with me asking about her writing, and a picture of her book.

Later I bug her with questions about dogs and hats, though.

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1) The heroine of your book specializes in statistics as an actuary for the accidental death department. Have you worked in jobs that require that kind of statistical analysis? If not, what appealed to you about writing such a character?

I’ve never worked as an actuary or any kind of risk assessment except for the anxiety of always thinking about the worst case scenario in my head. I have, however, worked with statistics as a school psychologist where I had to calculate student test or IQ scores on the bell curve or create measures. While in graduate school, we had to take a lot of psychometrics and statistics to complete the degree. Seriously, statistics is the most fun of all the math classes. I’m pretty sure