Mesha Maren

Mesha Maren's new novel is Sugar Run.

From her Entertainment Weekly interview with David Canfield:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: This took you several years to write. What did the initial sketching of Sugar Run look like?

MESHA MAREN: Jodi came to me very strongly, and everything fell into place around her. In about 2010, she took up residence in my brain. I don’t have a sense of where she came from or what specific person or experience. But I started thinking about her, and became infatuated with her. I started daydreaming about her all of the time, working on the book then, on and off. I was teaching myself how to write with this being my first novel. There were many times when I felt like I wasn’t sure if I could write a novel, and definitely wasn’t sure if I could write this novel. But Jodi was very strongly in my mind. I’d put the pages in a drawer and be like, “I’m giving up on this project,” but she haunted me!

During the time I was working most intensively on the novel, I was working as a waitress in a little diner in Iowa City. I remember attempting to abandon the project and then going through my day waitressing, and really feeling like I was giving up on a friend or a partner or something. Like I’d neglected her. I felt guilty, like she was mad at me. I kept coming back to it because I felt like I owed it to her in some kind of way. I remember at some point, too, I made this pact in my mind with Jodi, where I was like, “I’m going to...[read on]

Visit Mesha Maren's website.

--Marshal Zeringue