Jennifer Fawcett

Before writing books, Jennifer Fawcett was an award-winning playwright and cofounder of the theater company Working Group. She is the author of Beneath the Stairs. Born and raised in Canada, she spent a decade living in the Midwest before settling in the Hudson Valley. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. Her plays have been published by Original Works and in Third Coast Magazine, Reunion: The Dallas Review, and in the anthology Long Story Short.

Fawcett's new novel is Keep This for Me.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

A good title is doing several things at once: it’s catching a reader’s attention, it’s helping a reader (and bookseller or librarian) place a book in context with others, i.e., what genre, sub-genre, and which other writers might be similar to, and finally it is a connection into the story, one that should go deeper as the reader dives in so that by the end, its meaning is layered.

Keep This for Me is an evocative title. It doesn’t explain itself immediately. “Keep what for me?” a reader might understandably ask. Without knowing what specifically is being kept, the title should make the reader think about holding on to something (or someone), about memory, and about objects that hold meaning.

The title comes from a line in the book, but that line doesn’t come until quite far in. Even before they come across that line, the reader will learn about the importance of specific objects in this story. This is a story about someone who disappeared. When someone disappears, all that’s left behind are the physical objects they once owned and their memories. So, while the line is said by one specific character to another, if you expand the “this” being kept from just a physical object into a memory, a memory of a whole person, then the meaning deepens.

What's in a name?

I’m very specific about character and place names. They have to feel right. If I can’t find the right name for a character (or place) then I use letters as stand-ins until I get the right fit. I’m less concerned about deeper meaning and more about gut instinct. I also don’t use names that belong to friends and family because I need a feeling of distance to be able to write freely.

If a name doesn’t organically appear to me, then I look up lists of baby names for the year when I imagine the character to be born. This is particularly helpful with characters who are older than I am.

Sometimes names have to be changed. It can be confusing for a reader if there are two characters, whose names start with the same letter, especially if they are the same gender or have something else in common. In early drafts, I had a David and a Danny. Both male names, five letters long, two syllables, and starting with a D. Even though the characters were entirely distinct to me, I was told it might cause confusion and so I renamed Danny, Jason.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

I think my teenage self would have loved my novel! (At least I hope so.) When I was a teenager, I read lots of Stephen King, a variety of literary fiction, poetry, and the odd steamy romance novel that made the rounds between the girls in my class. My novel is a literary thriller and I like to think there’s some poetry to the language, so aside from the steamy stuff (I got that out of my system in my first book), I think my fifteen-year-old self would approve.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Endings are harder. In a thriller, everything has to build toward the ending but it can’t be predictable. For Keep This for Me, I knew what the climax was going to be from early on. I don’t want to write about it specifically because that would give spoilers, so all I’ll say is that I knew that X + Y would happen, but I had no idea how I was going to get there. As I started writing and digging deeper with these characters, I figured out how I was going to get there. I think of it as climbing a mountain. I can see the summit from the ground, but I can’t see the path that’ll get me there until I start the journey.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I am in all of my characters, even though many of them are quite unlike me. One of the reasons why I write is to imagine what it would be like to be in different situations. Given that I write thrillers, those situations are often nightmarish. The original spark for Keep This for Me came from this. I learned about a couple whose car had broken down on the side of the road (this was before the age of cell phones). They waved down a passing transport truck, not knowing that the driver was a serial killer. Not far into the journey, the trucker stopped and asked the man to help him adjust the load. He killed him and then held the woman hostage for a few hours before killing her, too. The driver was caught after these murders and this information came from later court testimony.

When I read about this, I immediately started wondering what was going through that woman's mind in those few hours before her death. How would she have kept herself from descending into utter panic? I imagined she would be trying to make sense of how she had suddenly gone from an ordinary drive to a nightmare. Humans are sense-making creatures, and even when there is no logical explanation, we try to find one. We think of all the “what ifs.” So, as I imagined her (or me as her) in that truck, I started to build out her family and all the people who didn’t even know yet that this had happened. The people who would try to piece together the events of this night and try to build their own understanding of why it had happened.

My characters feel very real to me and I think this is because I try to imagine myself as them. Inevitably, pieces of me get woven in. I believe that within each of us, there is the possibility for cruelty, for love, for bravery. By writing, I imagine what would happen if those possibilities were realized.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Keep This for Me was inspired by an actual serial killer case, as I noted above. I stumbled upon it in a news article many years ago. The article was actually about something else and this case was only briefly mentioned, but it struck me and through some research I was able to dig up more information. I have used news articles before as inspiration because I’m fascinated by human psychology. Why do we do what we do? Often, when there’s no easy or obvious answer, a story starts to grow. I’m not trying to write nonfiction, so I use real events as the jumping off point into fiction.

Visit Jennifer Fawcett's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John A. McDermott

John A. McDermott was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. He now serves on the board of directors for the Writers’ League of Texas and teaches creative writing at Stephen F. Austin State University. Prior to teaching, he worked as an actor, bartender, house painter, and advertising copywriter. He lives in Nacogdoches with his wife and teenage daughter.

The Last Spirits of Manhattan is his first novel.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The Last Spirits of Manhattan is pretty direct in two respects: the novel has ghosts at a cocktail party (hence two kinds of spirits) and it’s set in Manhattan. “Last” is the tricky word; are these the final spirits or the latest spirits? I’d like to leave that to the reader. The title wasn’t always so directly informative; for a long time, it was called The Direction of Rented Spirits. Direction was a play on both film directors, since the party is hosted by Alfred Hitchcock, and the life-changing choices confronting the characters. What direction are they heading? Rented played on the idea that the house where the party happened was an old rowhouse rented for the evening by Hitchcock—and rented in the sense of torn. There are lots of emotional scars on these ghosts. The published title is more informative, though I was sad to see the play on rented and direction go, but last gives it the interpretive options I wanted.

What's in a name?

The novel is based on a family story my mother told me years ago, so the original incarnation of my protagonist was named Marion, a nod to my mother’s middle name. The further I progressed into the manuscript, the more I fictionalized the source material, the harder it was to make Marion do things that caused interesting plot points. I was hampered by her being too close to my mother’s personality; she needed a change. My mother’s first name was Cornelia, so I mashed Cornelia and Marion together, and with a nod to Carolyn Keene of Nancy Drew fame, my Marion became Carolyn. Once she was Carolyn, I found her much easier to write. She was no longer my mother, she was her own woman and gained some of Nancy Drew’s energy.

The weirdest character name in the book is an advertising executive, Bob “The Duck” Buck. As he solidified, he became simply “The Duck.” I don’t think I’ll ever have another character with a capitalized article again because it was a proof-reading nightmare. But it fits him: he is The Duck.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

My teenage self would be surprised I’m a writer, since he was obsessed with theater, but it was a logical creative move to go from acting to writing fiction. The topic wouldn’t surprise him too much. I’ve always loved old family stories and ensemble casts and Manhattan, though I grew up far from it, in Madison, Wisconsin. The weird mix of mystery, ghost story, comedy, and family drama would amuse him. I’ve always liked novels that were hard to categorize.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I find it easier to write beginnings, at least with this novel. The prologue of the published novel has been in the manuscript since my first days with the project. Endings are trickier, although one character thread of this novel ends with a scene that I wrote before I wrote anything else in the entire book. (It’s a scene with Hitchcock in a hotel bathroom, but not the sort of scene you might expect with Hitchcock and hotel bathroom in the same sentence!) My biggest challenge was choosing an ending, not so much writing one. My editor told me after a round of edits that he thought I had three endings and I needed to choose one. He was right but it meant yanking an epilogue I’d spent a lot of time on and was inordinately fond of. One day maybe I’ll put out an edition with the lost epilogue. Or at least put it on my website!

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Honestly, I think fiction writers inhabit all of their characters as we play out emotions we have actually felt or try out choices we are either too scared or polite or sane to make in real life. My favorite aspect of writing fiction is pretending to be all of the characters (that’s my theater background, I guess), but it’s also why I love reading fiction. Losing myself in someone else’s world is such a joy. Empathy’s a hot button word now, but for me, writing (and reading) fiction are acts of empathy, trying to think like someone else and why they might make the choices they make, but writing a novel is a constant mix of using my own choices and asking but what would this person do?

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

To get into the right mood to write this novel, I listened to a lot of 1950s music, singers like Blossom Dearie, Sammy Davis Jr., and Ella Fitzgerald, and a host of jazz musicians. There’s a playlist available at both my website and the Simon and Schuster site that explains a bit of my musical influences. For a historical novel, it felt necessary to listen to the music that my characters would know. I love film, too, and with a novel with Alfred Hitchcock as a primary character, I had to watch his films from that era. The tonal span between the comedic The Trouble with Harry and the tragic The Wrong Man might explain the tonal shifts in my novel! I go from comedy to tragedy in one night and I think Hitchcock might have inspired that. His TV series of that era was helpful, too, because I could study the cadence of his speech. The research I did for this novel was so much fun—the music and the movies of the era are just two examples.

Visit John A. McDermott's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Skyla Arndt

Skyla Arndt has always loved the creepy, crawly side of life. When she was younger, she thought that love might translate to hunting Bigfoot, but luckily for him, writing proved easier. These days, you can catch her writing stories by candlelight, splurging on candles for her office, and continuing to keep an eye out for Bigfoot (because you never know). She lives with her husband and three cats by the perpetually frozen Great Lakes.

Arndt's new novel is House of Hearts.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I’m not sure what strange book magic is involved, but for the most part, the book’s title comes to me first! I knew I wanted this story to be called House of Hearts before I even fully incorporated Alice of Wonderland into the book…which is wild considering how heavy an influence the Queen of Hearts plays in this finished novel! In the end, it was a perfect fit.

What's in a name?

While Violet and Calvin’s names were both chosen on a vibe-based whim, the name of the boarding school they attend was intentional. Hart Academy is an obvious tie-in to the title and it helps to create the pun for my Wonderland-inspired bogeyman, the Queen of Hart’s.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

I don’t feel like she would be surprised! I’ve wanted to be an author since I was a kid, so it was always a dream of mine that I wanted to make a reality. On top of that, I’ve always been into stories that are equal halves spooky and swoony! Being a horromance author was a natural fit.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Beginnings, 100%! There is something so unbelievably daunting about staring at a blank page. It’s also challenging on a psychological level. Knowing that a majority of readers will judge a book off its opening definitely applies a ton of pressure.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Definitely! In this particular book, I was navigating my own personal grief alongside that of my main protagonist. In an odd twist of fate, I experienced loss in the middle of revision. While it was challenging to work on the book in the beginning (to put it lightly), it ended up being extremely therapeutic to include my own feelings. My not-so-fun fact is that I went through all the stages of grief alongside my MC.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

TV/Movies influence me a lot! For this book, there’s inspiration drawn from The Ring and Maxton Hall (a bizarre combo, I know).

Visit Skyla Arndt's website.

Writers Read: Skyla Arndt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Keshe Chow

Keshe Chow (she/her) is a Sunday Times bestselling author of fantasy, romance, and speculative fiction. Born in Malaysia, Chow moved to Australia when she was two years old. Her debut novel, The Girl with No Reflection, won the 2022 Victorian Premier's Literature Awards Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript and was shortlisted in the 2025 ABIA awards. Her new YA fantasy is For No Mortal Creature. Currently Chow resides in Naarm (Melbourne) with her husband, two kids, one cat, and way too many house plants.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title is taken from an excerpt from Wuthering Heights, which was one of the inspirations for For No Mortal Creature. Specifically, this passage of dialogue uttered by Cathy Earnshaw:

“He quite deserted! we separated!” she exclaimed, with an accent of indignation. “Who is to separate us, pray? They’ll meet the fate of Milo! Not as long as I live, Ellen: for no mortal creature. Every Linton on the face of the earth might melt into nothing before I could consent to forsake Heathcliff.”

I feel as though the title conveys quite a lot about the book. Firstly, that it draws inspiration from Wuthering Heights. Second, using words such as ‘mortal’ and ‘creature’ conveys that it has fantasy and gothic undertones. Third, ‘no mortal creature’ fits the book well, as the book is about ghosts who can die and become ghosts of ghosts. Since there are many ghosts in the book, having ‘no mortal creature’ in the title is very evocative.

What's in a name?

The names in this book are significant in that they indicate where the characters come from. For No Mortal Creature is set at the very edge of an empire that borders on a neighboring kingdom, so there are clashing cultures. The main character’s name, Jia Yi, is supposed to mean ‘auspicious’ and is Chinese-coded.

The character Lin, who is an orphan, is named after the forest in which he was found. Lin is the Chinese word for forest and it made sense to me that, as an orphan adopted into a Chinese-coded community, he would be named a simple single-character word that relates to how he was found. This is a similar origin story to Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights.

The character Essien Lancaster is from across the border, from the kingdom of Yske, which is modelled more after England. He is inspired by the character Edgar Linton, so his name reflects that.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

I’ve always been quite scared of ghosts so my teenage self would probably be surprised that I would dare to write a ghost story! That being said, I don’t think they would bat an eyelid at me writing a book that mixes fantasy, romance, and horror elements, since I read extremely widely as a child.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Usually I find beginnings much easier to write, but I found the opening chapter of For No Mortal Creature extremely difficult. This is because I had a vision of the ‘vibe’ I wanted to achieve for this book and when I first started writing it, I wasn’t nailing that vision at all. The opening chapter initially started in a bustling market—it was much more urban and action-packed. However, it didn’t have that creeping, pervasive sense of doom, or the haunting atmosphere I wanted, so I scrapped that chapter several times. It was only when I rewrote it to the forest setting that it all clicked into place.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

All of my characters do have elements of my own personality but they are also their own people! Mostly they’re also a lot braver than I am. I’m a massive introvert and these days I would much rather be holed up at home with my family, books, and cats than out there journeying on quests!

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

These days, I very rarely get a chance to consume other forms of media apart from books, but when I do I like to watch film and television. The other major influence for For No Mortal Creature was the film Inception—that’s where the idea for ghosts who can die multiple times, and a multi-layered afterlife, came from.

Visit Keshe Chow's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Victoria Redel

Victoria Redel is a first-generation American author of four books of poetry and six books of fiction. Her newest novel is I Am You. Redel’s work has been widely anthologized, awarded, and translated in ten languages. Her debut novel, Loverboy (2001) was adapted for feature film directed by Kevin Bacon. Redel’s short stories, poetry and essays have appeared in Granta, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bomb, One Story, Salmagundi, O, and NOON among many others. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center. Redel is a professor in the graduate and undergraduate Creative Writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York and Utah.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

My hope is that before reading the novel the title I Am You provokes a question in the reader-- What does this mean? Or maybe even a response of-- No way, you're not me! But when you start reading the novel, what the title means keeps slightly altering as the relationship of the two central characters, Maria and Gerta, shifts. And when you come to the end, the title hopefully feels quite layered and rich.

What's in a name?

In I Am You though the story is invented, the central characters are based on real people from the Dutch Golden Age and I've kept their names.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

I've actually written the kind of novel my teenage reader self would have gobbled up, which maybe says that my obsessions haven't changed all that much. A novel that concerns itself with paint, art, an awakening self, gender, obsession, betrayal and secrets-- that was my jam then, and it apparently still is.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

The key for me is to find the opening. I believe that once I have the "right" beginning I simply have to keep unpacking it to find the entire work. So, sometimes that takes a while. In I Am You, the opening paragraphs happened fast and easily and are not much changed. At a certain point in the writing, I could see the end. The hard part for me was not rushing to get there, to slow myself down, and find more unexpected surprises along the way.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Despite the centuries between myself and my characters, I feel close and deeply connected to them. There is so much that Gerta says and feels about herself and her awakening development as an artist that feels akin to me. Maria is difficult in ways that I am not, but I wanted to think about ambition both it's necessity in the world and the corrosive effects it has on relationships.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I'm not trying to be glib when I say everything! I spend a lot of time outdoors-- in the mountains, on lakes, and lately, at a late age, I've started riding horses (western). So trees, creeks, the attentive ears of horses are all inspirations. In this novel, I was also able to pay homage to my love of painting, paint, and color.

Visit Victoria Redel's website.

The Page 69 Test: Before Everything.

The Page 69 Test: I Am You.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephanie Cowell

Before turning to novel writing, Stephanie Cowell was an opera singer, balladeer, founded an outdoor arts series in New York City's Bryant Park, a Renaissance festival, a chamber opera company and many other things. She has lived in New York City all her life, indeed in the same apartment building for fifty-two years in the neighborhood (and sometimes down the block) where they filmed You've Got Mail. Cowell has loved England and Europe all her life and traveled there almost every year.

Her new novel is The Man in the Stone Cottage.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I can’t remember when I chose my title, but I feel it has air of mystery about it. Who could this man be? I found a very early draft of the novel from years ago from Charlotte’s pov but it eventually became more of Emily’s journey and the title changed. I was always so drawn to the remoteness of half-ruined houses/cottages on the Yorkshire moors -- the loneliness of them, the allure. I first saw such cottages in my adolescence and climbed in one and wondered if the owner would step through time and come in. I could see him standing in the doorway.

What's in a name?

The Man in the Stone Cottage is about real people, the Brontë sisters who wrote Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, etc. so those names are factual. The only fictional characters are a minor one and of course, the mysterious titular character, the shepherd. I don’t recall why I called him Jonathan, but his surname is a common for the island of St. Kilda from where he comes (or says he comes). I feel that is a strong, solid name…a man who says plainly who he is and what he stands for, a man you can count on. And he is…but…well you will have to read the book to see the “but” in that.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

My adolescent self would not believe that she would write something so emotionally and technically complicated. I was fourteen when I read Wuthering Heights and likely Jane Eyre and I didn’t conceive of someone actually sitting down to write them. They were just there, these incredible books. I wrote a historical novel back then and have not the courage to look at it if I still have it. But I think I wrote simple things like, “The boy rode his horse into the battle.” I could not comprehend the complicated mixture of plot, place, character development that is a finished novel. As an adolescent, I felt taking the summer to do a book was a lot. I never dreamed of the struggles and despair and rising joy it would take to do one…and the sometimes many years.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Beginnings are the worse. I can revise and rewrite them many times because I don’t truly know the best beginning until I write the whole story. The beginning leads the reader into the book. I cannot remember how many ways I rewrote the beginning of The Man in the Stone Cottage. Only when I discovered that Emily and her inner life was the main lead in the story and that subsequently this intense relationship with a handsome man who may be partially from her mind -- then I knew my beginning.

I then began the book again when she was a child of perhaps twelve years old, and wandering alone, finding the ruined cottage in an isolated part of the moors. It is quite deserted. She spends hours there and makes up stories. Then she grows up and forgets about it for many years until one day, she finds it again and the shepherd who is now living there.

For The Man in the Stone Cottage, I had the ending many months before the book became final.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I very much see myself in the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne. They are all parts of my own character. Part of me is hidden and mystical like Emily, feeling the presence of people others may not see. Part of me is determined to make my world succeed like Charlotte. The third sister in the novel, Anne, proceeds quietly forward in life without fuss. I would love to have more of Anne in me. My friends say I do but I don’t believe it.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

It is very difficult to pinpoint this because so much of my life and the things I have seen and done have influenced my writing. I’d say first it is travel: at age 23 and quite alone, I went to the Brontë parsonage now a museum in the village on a steep hill in Yorkshire England. Stumbling over the moors with a friend and then walking the rooms where the Brontë family lived put down seeds in me which would not turn into a novel for many decades later.

My second inspiration is music. Mozart showed me the structures which I then used in writing: a theme repeated, a surprise turn, suddenly pianissimo (very soft) and then fortissimo (very loud) and building to the end.

Third is old houses and furnishings which as a historical novelist I love. There is a museum in NYC with a medieval stair which I have stared at for a long time until I feel people from centuries ago descending it. I am mystical like Emily Brontë! Another influence is family and personal relations. Lastly is the weary struggle for enough money. That was a huge thing in my life when I was a young woman and later a single mom of two boys. Being unable to pay bills was a very big worry.

Visit Stephanie Cowell's website.

The Page 69 Test: Claude & Camille.

The Page 69 Test: The Man in the Stone Cottage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Danila Botha

Danila Botha is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collections, Got No Secrets, For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I’ve Known, which was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, The Vine Awards and the ReLit Award and most recently, Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness. The collection won an Indie Reader Discovery Award for Women's Issues, Fiction, and was a finalist for the Canadian Book Club Awards, the Next Generation Indie Book Awards and the National Indie Excellence Book Awards. She is also the author of the award-winning novel Too Much On the Inside which was optioned for film. Her first graphic novel, Vidal will be published in Feb 2026 by At Bay Press.

Botha's new novel is A Place for People Like Us.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

A Place for People Like Us was actually a very hard title to choose, which isn’t usually the case for me. Often the title comes to me relatively early, and I use it to frame the story as I go through each draft. For example, before I’d even written the title story in my short story collection, For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I’ve Known, I knew the kind of story I wanted to write, and that it would capture the theme of love lost in the collection. In this case, the original draft was told from both Hannah’s and Jillian’s points of view. I was listening to a lot of Fiona Apple at the time, and she has this amazing song, "Fast As You Can," with lyrics that go “oh darling/ it’s so sweet/ you think you know how crazy/ how crazy I am.” How Crazy I Am was an early title I considered, but I worried that it both trivialized mental health struggles and was reductive, because both women are so much more complex. Another title I considered was The World Is Dead and I’m Full of Joy, which comes from a wonderful line in a Zeruya Shalev novel, Love Life: "I said to myself, the world is dead and I am full of joy. And sometimes, the words turned over in my mouth, and I said I’m dead, and the world is full of joy, and it seemed to me that it was really the same thing, and I thought, what luck, I could’ve gone through my whole life without ever feeling this." I just worried that either it would be too abstract, for everything I wanted to express, or it would give away too much, I wanted everything that happened to Hannah and Jillian to genuinely surprise the reader. I think the title A Place for People Like Us encompasses the characters and the story so much more.

The title, A Place for People Like Us. What's in a name?

This is a great question. One of the big themes in the novel is the lengths people go to in order to find a sense of belonging, love, community and identity. I read and write a lot of short stories, and even though this is a novel, the title was inspired by one of my favourite short story collections, Jesus’s Son by Denis Johnson. The final story, "Beverly Home," has this beautiful line right at the end, which was the original inspiration: ” All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.” I highly recommend the collection to everyone, even to people who don’t normally read that much short fiction, it’s beautiful and brave and fearless.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

I think my teenage self would so thrilled first of all, to know that I was writing and publishing novels. I loved to read and to write from such a young age, I was always creating stories and narratives and reading novels and short stories, and as a teenager, it would have felt like winning the lottery to know that I’d really get to do this as a job one day.

My teenage self identified deeply with characters who didn’t fit in, artists who were looking for their place in the world, and characters like Jillian, who fearlessly create and do what they want to do, and are unabashedly themselves, and make music on their own terms, and characters like Hannah who overcome so much, who are steely in their determination to carve their own paths, and who are building the confidence to really pursue their artistic interests. I think I would have related to both of their desires to rebel against their upbringings, though because their upbringings were so different, of course, their reactions are different. My teenage self may also have been surprised by some of the turns in this story, but I hope she would have been entertained, and excited to know that the potential for that kind of research and imagination, and the confidence to edit and draft and rewrite existed somewhere within me.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I love this question. They can both be challenging in different ways, and they definitely both require editing and rewriting until you get them right, but I find beginnings easier. Once in my mind, I’ve established the character’s voice, and I can hear them speaking, it’s easier to imagine where their life starts, or where the narrative arc starts. Endings are harder for me because I really try to resist the urge to tie everything up, my favourite endings are the ones where I keep wondering about the characters, where I stay invested emotionally in what could happen next to them, or the effect something will have on them. I actually rewrote the ending to A Place For People Like Us multiple times before landing on this one, and I hope it hits all the right notes with readers.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I don’t write autobiographically, so my characters are often a world apart (which in many ways is a good thing). I really like to understand try to understand characters, their motivations, their reasons, and I really enjoy doing that when they’re entirely a combination of imagination and research. I love doing this kind of research. The part that sometimes is a little bit connected to me is in their taste. I really enjoyed describing Jillian’s style, her taste in aesthetics, her taste in music. I loved imagining her apartment, her stacks of coffee music books that included Aretha Franklin, Prince and Bjork, her framed paparazzi photos of Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, her bedroom floor which was painted to look like a Jackson Pollock painting, her bathroom full of dick pic art covered in crystals. It’s not my taste exactly, but I really enjoyed riffing and researching and sometimes highlighting things I loved. I made music when I was younger, and some of Jillian’s lyrics are actually mine from years and years ago. "Believe Me" was actually one of those songs, it was really fun to be able to reuse them.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music has always been a huge part of my process. I listened to a lot of Bikini Kill when I wrote the early scenes, especially the songs, "Rebel Girl," which is quoted in the beginning of the book, and "Liar." I love Kathleen Hanna, and her songs (including her Le Tigre songs) instantly transported me. Sonic Youth had the same effect. (I even included a band button I have of Sonic Youth’s, it has a picture of two raccoons and the words Live Fast! Eat Trash! which I have Jillian wearing on the day they see each other for the second time.)

My decision to give Jillian her name actually came from the singer Jill Scott, whose music I love, and who used to call herself Jilly From Philly at live shows. Aside from being incredibly talented, she evinces this confidence and warmth onstage that I thought would a real inspiration to Jillian Azoulay. There’s a lot of music that makes appearances in this story, from bands and artists Jillian loves (Hannah describes her voice as sounding like a cross between St Vincent and Beyonce) to what she’s listening to in the last scenes, to Bjork’s "Sun in My Mouth," which Hannah hears at the end and instantly connects them again. A lot of visual art makes appearances too. Early on, Hannah describes Jillian as looking like “a living version of the Woman in Gold painting” (that one of her roommates had a poster of). There’s also the art in the Goldwater family’s home (which includes a painting by Menashe Kadishman, whose work I love) and references to graffiti artist Know Hope, among others. Hannah wants to make movies and studies film, along with business, so there are more film references than I’d usuall make. In the first chapter, when Hannah signs a lease with someone she doesn’t know, against her better judgment, she says she feels like Ariel in The Little Mermaid, “signing my voice away for the vaguest potential of happiness.” At one point Jillian is watching But I’m a Cheerleader, a movie I loved from the late 90’s, and later, she’s watching Tank Girl, which also felt very on brand. When Hannah is first interested in Jewish culture, she and Naftali watch Jewish film and TV, including Menashe, Shtisel and Fiddler on the Roof.

Visit Danila Botha's website.

Writers Read: Danila Botha (May 2011).

--Marshal Zeringue

Sonora Reyes

Born and raised in Arizona, Sonora Reyes is the award-winning and bestselling author of The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School, The Luis Ortega Survival Club, The Broposal, and The Golden Boy's Guide to Bipolar. They also have contributed short stories to the anthologies Transmogrify! and For the Rest of Us.

They write fiction celebrating queer and Mexican stories in a variety of genres, with current projects in both kidlit and adult categories.

My Q&A with Reyes:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title for The Golden Boy's Guide to Bipolar came much easier than some of my other works. Since it's a spinoff novel to The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School, I already knew the titles would mirror each other in a sense. The word "lesbiana" was so significant in being included in the title of the first book, so I wanted to have a similar punchy title for this one. Since bipolar disorder is so heavily stigmatized, I thought it would be fitting to put it right in the title, so readers know exactly what kind of representation they'll be getting.

What's in a name?

I'll admit that I may have named my characters based off of vibes only, but I think there is a fair amount of subconscious meaning that ended up going into them. For example, I think Cesar and Yamilet's names can represent how they wish to be perceived. Yamilet, who is Cesar's sister and the main character of the book preceding The Golden Boy's Guide to Bipolar, has a much more unique name than Cesar. Yamilet is the Spanish equivalent of Jamila, which means "beautiful." Even though Cesar is considered the prodigious "golden boy" who always stands out, his name is fairly common. Yami, at her core, wants to be seen, while Cesar wants to blend in, even though their roles are often reversed.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

Younger me would be gobsmacked that I wrote a book that so openly talks about bipolar disorder. Much like Cesar, I did my best to hide my struggles from those around me when I was younger. If I knew then that I would write an entire book about someone like me, who people actually like, my heart would have burst. My inner teenager is getting to do a lot of healing now because of this book, and I couldn't be more grateful to them for sticking around long enough for me to make it happen.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I have a much harder time with beginnings. Sometimes it takes me ages just to start writing because of all the time I spend agonizing over the perfect way to open the book. With endings, I have the whole book to figure out the most satisfying way to close it out, so those come a lot easier for me.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

All of my characters hold different pieces of me and the people I love. Cesar, like me, struggles with mental illness and more mistakes than he can count, but I've also never been a golden child the way he is. I relate more to his sister in the way I've been treated and perceived growing up. I relate to his love interest, Jamal, in the way he sees the world. His cousin, Moni, is who I wished I was at that age. Meanwhile, many of the side characters mirror people I know and love, or people I wish I could have had by my side at that age.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music! I have a book playlist for every novel I've written. Music helps me understand my characters and the worlds they live in so much better. There are so many songs that I feel match up perfectly with specific chapters or subplots. Sometimes I'll hear a song and get an epiphany about a story! It's like magic.

Visit Sonora Reyes's website.

Writers Read: Sonora Reyes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Catherine Chidgey

Catherine Chidgey’s novels have been published to international acclaim. Her first, In a Fishbone Church, won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In the UK it won the Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her second, Golden Deeds, was a Notable Book of the Year in the New York Times and a Best Book in the LA Times. Chidgey has won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship and the Janet Frame Fiction Prize. Her novel Remote Sympathy was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her novels The Wish Child and The Axeman’s Carnival both won the Acorn Prize for Fiction, New Zealand’s most prestigious literary award. She lives in Cambridge, New Zealand, and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Waikato.

Chidgey's new novel is The Book of Guilt.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I knew from very early on that The Book of Guilt was the right title for the book because of the way it works with the three-part structure. The novel tells the story of thirteen-year-old triplet brothers living in a shadowy boys’ home in the New Forest, England, in a skewed version of 1979. Their three carers – Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night – record the boys’ wrongdoings in a ledger called The Book of Guilt, so the title refers to an actual book within the book. It’s mentioned early in the story, on page 14, and signals to the reader that these are children who are closely monitored. It also speaks to the emotional atmosphere of the novel; almost every character is culpable in some way – or believes that they are, which is possibly more corrosive. The title is also the name of the last of three sections in the novel: The Book of Dreams, The Book of Knowledge, and The Book of Guilt. While all referencing specific texts, these titles also trace the main characters’ journeys from dreamy unawareness, through dawning knowledge, and on into an abiding guilt.

What's in a name?

I named the boys’ carers after their daily shifts to suggest that – just like their young charges – they are ensnared in a system that values some lives less than others. Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night are expendable, easily replaced – every other children’s home within the mysterious Sycamore Scheme has carers that bear these names. And yet, the boys do love them – the only mothers they have ever known, and the ones who administer their daily medications to keep them safe from the mysterious and unpredictable illness known only as the Bug.

One spark for the book was reading a news story about a Japanese politician who holds the role of Minister of Loneliness; I seized on that and knew it belonged in my writing. In The Book of Guilt, when the new government announces that they will be closing the homes and releasing the remaining children into the community (which is making the community very nervous), it’s the Minister of Loneliness who is tasked with implementing the closures. I love the strangeness of her official title, with its notes of wistfulness, sorrow and compassion, and I love the fact that during the writing of the book, this same position was created in the United Kingdom.

The boys’ home lies on the outskirts of a sleepy New Forest village called Ashbridge. I invented this name to suggest a separation between the boys, who have been confined to the home for most of their lives, and the outside world – it may be possible to bridge this divide, but that bridge will be exceedingly fragile, as if made of ash.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

She might be surprised that I’ve finally stopped writing angry, angsty poems about Ronald Reagan and nuclear war. When she was 15 or thereabouts, she wanted to become a nun, so she would probably be pleased that I still have an eye on complex moral issues – is there ever a sound reason for drawing on the medical research conducted in concentration camps in Nazi Germany, for instance? She would recognise some of the questions the boys are asked to consider each week in their Ethical Hour classes, led by Mother Morning: A building is on fire. You can rescue a trapped child, or you can rescue a valuable painting and sell it in order to raise enough money to save twenty children from starvation. What should you do and why? These are lifted from her own Religious Studies classes at her Catholic high school, where – after wrestling with them – she and her classmates were told that there was no right answer. This all makes the book sound like quite a weighty read; I hope teenage Catherine would also laugh at the many moments of humour that thread through the novel.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I definitely mined my own nerdiness at age 13 when writing the boys. The only books they have access to are the eight volumes of a children’s set of encyclopedias called The Book of Knowledge. Outdated and biased, these tomes speak with the stuffy voice of authority, and the boys believe that all knowledge in the world is contained between their covers. In their day-to-day conversations, they geekily drop in facts from The Book of Knowledge, and even quote passages from it. With the closure of the home looming, the boys attend Socialisation Days with girls from another home to learn how to behave when they meet other people beyond those few they’ve known all their lives. Here I really had fun in playing up the utter awkwardness I felt at that age, especially in the presence of the opposite sex; the children’s common ground is The Book of Knowledge, so they resort to peppering their small talk with extremely niche factoids from these familiar, safe texts.

Follow Catherine Chidgey on Facebook and Instagram.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessica Bryant Klagmann

Jessica Bryant Klagmann grew up climbing mountains, paddling rivers, and scampering through the woods of New Hampshire. She studied writing there and in Fairbanks, Alaska, before falling in love with northern New Mexico. Klagmann is the author of the novel This Impossible Brightness, and when she isn’t writing, she can be found illustrating, trail running, or teaching her two kids the fine art of scampering.

Klagmann's new novel is North of the Sunlit River.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I hope the title North of the Sunlit River is compelling and original, but also relatable enough that people don’t ask, what the heck could this book possibly be about? I think the word “north” is fitting because it’s not just about a specific place in Alaska, but about the idea and feel of living in the North. “Sunlit” is a reference to the extended daylight hours of summer in Alaska, and it also describes the river as not a specific one, but one that means something to these characters in this story. Every river is sunlit at some point, but this one belongs to them and the particular memories they made there. I also think the themes suggested by the title are present throughout the novel, but they don’t come fully together until the very end, so my hope is the title is a thread that can be followed to a satisfying final moment with the book.

What's in a name?

In North of the Sunlit River, I changed the main character’s name quite a few times before settling on Eila. Her name, as well as her father’s name (Stefan), and the last name (Jacobsen), came from a list of Scandinavian names, even though I abandoned the idea of specifically mentioning their heritage in the book. I have strict opinions about names being short and easy to pronounce, but also unique and not connected to anyone I know in real life. Ultimately, I chose all of the characters’ names based on my own sense of cohesion and how I pictured each one in my mind, rather than focusing on the names’ meanings or origins.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

Probably quite a bit, as I had decided to be a visual artist when I was a teenager. In fact, I went to college as an art major. Pretty quickly though, I changed my major to writing. As a reader back then, I was more interested in historical fiction. It wasn’t until college that I discovered my love for magical realism and writing about the natural world. I don’t think my teenage self would have ever expected I’d be living in (and thus inspired by) Alaska.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I love beginnings. The caveat to this is that I rewrite them a lot. I have to start with a really good line to get my momentum going, and it’s what inspires the tone and voice and pacing of the story. But later on, I rearrange things, try moving chapters around, and the beginning is often the last thing I come back to when I’ve finished. As chaotic and uncertain as that may sound, I enjoy this process a lot. Endings feel so much harder, as the story has to come together fully, all the threads tied up and yet leaving the reader with some sense of the future. I’ve always believed endings should be somewhat inevitable, but also surprising to the reader, which I find so difficult to pull off. That said, when I do finally land on that ending that feels right, it’s extra satisfying.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I think every character comes from some part of me, if only because I spend so much of my life observing the world for the purpose of writing. It doesn’t matter if I’m writing male characters or female characters, there is always some part of me in there. In North of the Sunlit River, there’s a lot of me in Eila, mainly because I drew on the experiences of losing my father and of living in Alaska. She also has a lot of my personality, which is nature-loving and quiet. There is also a little of me in Jackson’s character, too, because I run a lot. And there is some of me in Lark as well, because she lives in New Mexico and makes a journey to Alaska similar to the one that I once made.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I find music is inspiring, both before and during the writing process. I get a lot of ideas from lyrics when I’m listening to music on a run or when I’m cooking. And then I always have a kind of soundtrack for everything I write—something I listen to often during the writing itself. It has to be instrumental, and it adds a certain feel to the way language evolves on the page. For North of the Sunlit River, I listened to a lot of Hania Rani and Jóhann Jóhannsson.

Visit Jessica Bryant Klagmann's website.

Writers Read: Jessica Bryant Klagmann.

--Marshal Zeringue