Margaret Cezair-Thompson

Marilyn Sides, author of The Island of the Mapmaker's Wife and Other Tales and The Genius of Affection, talked with Margaret Cezair-Thompson about Cezair-Thompson' novel, The Pirate's Daughter.

From publisher's website:

Marilyn Sides: As a close friend, I watched you over the last seven years labor mightily to bring forth this new novel, The Pirate's Daughter, at the same time you were raising, as a single mother, your son, Ben, and teaching at Wellesley College full time. What gets a novelist through those many late nights and hours stolen from the pressing responsibilities of ordinary life? What keeps the dream of a novel intact until it becomes a realized fact?

Margaret Cezair-Thompson: Very strong coffee. But truthfully, there’s a lot at stake: it’s not only about keeping the dream of the novel alive but the dream of being a writer.

MS: In your first novel, The True History of Paradise (Dutton 1999), Jean Landing's story is set in 1980's post-independence Jamaica, during the violent "state-of-emergency," but throughout the novel Jean hears the voices of ancestors whispering to her across three centuries. In The Pirate's Daughter you concentrate on the late 1940s to the late 1970s, three decades that begin with the post World War II bustle and international glamour of colonial Jamaica and that end during the political unrest which fills THP. Why did you come back to for an up-close look at this particular period?

Margaret Cezair-Thompson: Well, like many writers, I’m attracted to what seems like a vanished or vanishing era. I heard a lot about the forties and fifties from my parents. It was a remarkable period for Jamaica in terms of its developing a sense of itself as a nation, yet...[read on]

Read the complete conversation.

The Page 69 Test: The Pirate's Daughter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alaa Al Aswany

Alaa el-Aswany is an Egyptian writer and a founding member of the political movement Kefaya. Trained as a dentist in Egypt and Chicago, el-Aswany's novels include The Yacoubian Building and Chicago.

Anna Metcalfe of the Financial Times put a few questions to the author, including:

Who are your literary heroes?

For me, Dostoyevsky is the best novelist in the history of literature.

* * *
Who would you most like to sit next to at a dinner party?

Gabriel García Márquez.

* * *
What was the first novel you read?

The first in Arabic was by Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel Prize-winner. In French it was a simplified Labrière called Les Caractères.

Read the full Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bill Loehfelm

Bill Loehfelm is the author of Fresh Kills and the Winner of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award; his work has also appeared in the anthologies Year Zero and Life in the Wake.

From a Q & A at Amazon.com:

Do you have favorite authors who've influenced your writing style?

When I write, I want the efficiency of Hemingway, the lyricism of Fitzgerald, and the humor of Twain. I'll never get there, but that's what I shoot for. Frank Miller, the graphic novelist who wrote Sin City and the Dark Knight Batman series has been a real influence on me. He really knows how to deliver a line, and to write with punch and grace at the same time. Great dark humor. Batman is probably my favorite character in American story-telling. I've been fascinated by the complexities of that character my whole life. I really like Dennis Lehane, James Lee Burke, and John Banville's "Benjamin Black" novels--they're proof-positive of what I said about mysteries above. The Lovely Bones is another great example. I love Alice Sebold's work. She can't write fast enough for me. Roddy Doyle's got serious game, as well. A lot of musicians have influenced me: U2, Springsteen, Warren Zevon, and the Tragically Hip to name a few. The Gin Blossoms' album New Miserable Experience is a hell of a short story collection.

Read the complete Q & A.

The Page 69 Test: Fresh Kills.

--Marshal Zeringue

Irina Reyn

Irina Reyn is a fiction and nonfiction writer who divides her time between Pittsburgh and Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in anthologies and publications such as The Forward, San Francisco Chronicle, The Moscow Times, Nextbook and Post Road. Born in Moscow, Irina was raised in Fair Lawn, New Jersey.

From a Q & A about her new novel, What Happened to Anna K.:

What influenced you to become a writer?

As an immigrant, writing was the last vocation I imagined for myself. In fact, I avoided it as long as I could, waiting for a calling in medicine, computer programming, or public relations. In order to allow myself to be a writer, I first had to discard or fail at every other sensible profession.

What inspired you to update Anna Karenina, specifically?

In graduate school, I took a seminar organized entirely around Anna Karenina. It was amazing how such a protracted, close reading revealed insights hidden during my previous forays into the novel. Before, Anna had struck me as a helpless, lovelorn victim of her society and time period. However, further examination revealed her to be an artful self-saboteur, overly influenced by books and suffering from romantic illusions. Vronsky fit Anna's plot perfectly, and I could identify with her impulse to dismantle a well-structured life in order to chase the narrative arc of fiction. As I read the book, I thought of people like me who arrived in this country as children, and how often we were tempted to sabotage our parents' expectations of us, to subvert the model of hard-won immigrant success. I think What Happened to Anna K. must have emerged from those considerations.

Read the complete Q & A.

Visit Irina Reyn's website.

The Page 69 Test: What Happened to Anna K.

--Marshal Zeringue

Selden Edwards

Selden Edwards is the author of The Little Book.

From a Q & A at the publisher's website:

How did the original idea that eventually became The Little Book come to you?

My construction of this story began in 1974, the year I studied at Stanford, and a friend introduced me to a book called Wittgenstein’s Vienna. He and I began theorizing about immersing ourselves there and then, and I began thinking up a thriller/mystery-type story about traveling in time to turn-of-the-century, fin de siecle Vienna and meeting the child Hitler: would you kill him? I began collecting and reading articles and books about the period and began expanding my imaginings way beyond that simple plot line of the first draft. Eventually, I developed a library of over fifty books and expanded the plot well beyond the simple idea of meeting the obligatory love interest and the child Hitler. Wheeler Burden came to life and grew in detail over the years, especially thanks to an eccentric college friend Doug Messenger who had wonderful stories about his baseball and music and to David Crosby who became a friend in the 1980s. The other characters grew out of the needs of the story over the years, and once introduced they developed lives of their own, as a novel’s characters tend to do. I had a full-time job, first as an English teacher and then as a private-school headmaster, so I did my writing sometimes on weekends but mostly on my vacations. But the story was nearly always in my head, gaining characters, details, layers and plot twists.

Read the complete Q & A.

Visit Selden Edwards' website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Margaret Coel

From a Q & A with Margaret Coel about her new novel, Blood Memory:

Q. Tell us about Blood Memory. What's it about?

A. It's a suspense novel set in Denver that features an investigative reporter, Catherine McLeod, and a Denver police detective, Nick Bustamante. Someone is trying to kill Catherine, not because of something she has written but because of something she is about to write. She has no idea of what it might be, but to save her own life, she must uncover the story.

Q. Where did you get the idea for the story? Are you always asked that?

A. Oh, yes. The story is based on the actual efforts of the Arapahos and Cheyennes in 2004 to get land near Denver for a casino. I had followed the story with no intention of ever writing about it. But when I started thinking about doing a suspense novel, there it was--the perfect idea upon which to hang the plot.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Stephanie Elizondo Griest is the author of the memoirs Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana (Villard/Random House, 2004), Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines (Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster, 2008), and the guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go (Travelers' Tales, 2007).

From a Q & A at her website:

You call yourself a "globe-trotting nomad" who has explored 30 countries and 47 of the United States. Tell us about your travels and how they have shaped you.

My great-great Uncle Jake was a hobo who saw America from the peepholes of boxcars, so wanderlust is encoded in my DNA! My travels began in 1996 in Moscow, where I mingled with the Russian Mafiya. (My boyfriend's best friend was a freelance hit man.) Next stop was Beijing, where I spent a year polishing propaganda at the English mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party. Then I jetted off to Havana, where I belly danced with rumba queens. These adventures are the subject of my first memoir: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana.

While traveling in the Communist Bloc, I was struck by how fervently Stalin, Mao, and Castro tried to vanquish centuries of religion, tradition, and ritual by forcing their citizens to conform to socialist culture. Yet hundreds of thousands of people defied them. During the Soviet regime, East Europeans risked being banished to the Gulag by illegally distributing newspapers printed in their native language. Even today in China, Muslim Uighurs and Buddhist Tibetans gamble with imprisonment by worshipping in the officially atheist nation.

All of this made me reflect on how, in the United States, those of us who haven't needed to fight for our culture have often deserted it. I, for instance, had invested little time or energy in learning about my Mexican heritage. I couldn't even speak Spanish! So after traveling all over the world, I realized the need to turn inward.

Read the complete Q & A.

Visit Stephanie Elizondo Griest's website.

The Page 99 Test: Around the Bloc.

Writers Read: Stephanie Elizondo Griest.

--Marshal Zeringue

Charles C. Mann

From a Q & A with Charles C. Mann about his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus:

Q: Although this book had its origins in an Atlantic Monthly cover story, what was it that first drew you to the subject?

A: Two things, I think. More than twenty years ago, I wrote an article for Science (I’m a correspondent for the journal's news division) that involved going to the Yucatan peninsula. I visited some of the Maya ruins there and like so many other people was absolutely fascinated. I’d just spent two years living in Rome, and I was struck by how much more extensive—but equally finely built—the Maya ruins were. I also was astonished by how different the aesthetic system was—the vertiginous staircases, the corbel arches, the huge reliefs, etc.

This dovetailed with something else. The summer before seventh grade, my parents moved from the suburbs of Detroit to the Pacific Northwest, an area where the presence of Native Americans seemed much more evident. I was fascinated by the idea that very different peoples had lived in the area in the not too distant past, and that their descendants were still living nearby. But it wasn’t until I got to Yucatan that the penny dropped and I grasped, really and truly, that when Columbus landed he had stumbled across an entire **hemisphere** full of people whose cultures had nothing to do with Europe or Asia. Half the world!

It was kind of a Homer Simpson-ish “d’oh!” moment for me. So was realizing that I knew practically nothing about this entire half of the world, and my teachers in school had known practically nothing about it. I decided I would try to find out more when I could.

Read the entire Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joan Sewell

Joan Sewell is the author of I'd Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido.

From a Q & A at her website:

The title of your book implies that you'd rather eat chocolate than have sex. Don't you like sex?

Of course I like sex. There's a misconception floating around on the Web that because I prefer eating chocolate to having sex, then I must loathe sex. But the truth is I don't loathe or hate sex at all. Actually, I say in the book on page 83 that I have sexual fantasies, on page 61 that I sometimes masturbate, on page 188 that I enjoy intercourse on occasion, and on page 20 that I can orgasm.. And another thing I don't mind is giving oral sex—well as long as it doesn't take forever. So, just because I'd rather eat chocolate, that doesn't mean at all that I don't like sex.

You seem to imply that preferring to eat chocolate over having sex is like preferring to eat ice cream over going for a swim or preferring to watch TV over playing a game. But don't you ever get aroused to the point that you want sex over anything else?

I don't mean to make a misleading comparison, but yes, my sexual desire does spike a few times a month, and at those times I do want sex for its own sake. On some of those occasions I want sex with my husband. But on most of those occasions I'd still rather just have a sexual fantasy and release the tension by bowing my own violin rather than take the time and effort to involve an actual partner. Unlike men, the mere thought of anticipating sex doesn't fill me with desire. In contrast, if I walk by a display case of earrings in the mall, I'm attracted to it like a magnet. The mere suggestion of sex doesn't work on me like that. For me, sex is just a lot lower preference or priority, even when I've had really good sex with Kip.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Craig McDonald

Novelist Tony Black interviewed Craig McDonald for Shots Magazine about the Edgar nomination for McDonald's debut Head Games, the current state of U.S. crime fiction, the craft of interviewing, and the sequel to Head Games, Toros & Torsos.

One exchange from the Q & A:

What writers have had the greatest influence on your own work?

Hemingway. Probably Lester Dent because my grandfather used to get me Bantam reprints of the Doc Savage pulps as they appeared. I read the entire run of the series in reprint. His basement was full of old Gold Medals and crime novels…Richard S. Prather, Marlowe, and Nick Carters. Hemingway is probably my most profound influence. After that I’d have to say Ellroy, Crumley and Sallis. I remember being very captivated by William Lindsay Gresham at one point. I’d probably have to cite Cornell Woolrich above Chandler and Hammett as an influence. I read Chandler and Hammett in college and drifted away from them pretty quickly, but stayed with Woolrich.

Read the full Q & A.

The Page 69 Test: Craig McDonald's Head Games.

--Marshal Zeringue