Wendy Davis

Wendy Davis is the Democratic candidate for governor of Texas and author of a new memoir, Forgetting to Be Afraid.

From her Q & A with Jill Filipovic at Cosmopolitan:

How does your life experience, including ending a pregnancy but also growing up poor and the many other details in your book, inform your views and shape what kind of leader you are?

My story is similar to so many. The challenges I faced are similar to so many challenges that people in my state face: going to work when I was 14 to help my mother, who had a very limited education and was left as the primary financial support of her four young children. Finding myself a single mom when I was very young. Feeling the disappointment in myself for getting off track; feeling frustrated that I didn't know how to get back on track. Understanding the experience of standing at the grocery store when you have to put groceries back because you don't have enough money; understanding what it's like to come home and have your electricity turned off, even though you're working as hard as you can. I know there are people in our state who confront these challenges every day.

My path out of that was education. While a lot of folks know about my fight in the reproductive rights arena, they may not know about what a strong fighter I've been in education. My first filibuster was to try to stop $5.5 billion in cuts to public schools. My fight for equal pay for equal work for women in our state has of course been informed by my own personal experiences. My position and desire as governor to move our state forward with an increase in the minimum wage is informed by my experiences. My fight in consumer reform too — I have been unafraid to take on some of the biggest bullies in the Texas capital, the payday lenders, the electricity arena, and the insurance arena. I've taken them on because I understand how families can be made or broken based on whether they're treated fairly. I am a product of my life experience. The legislator I've become, and the governor I will be, is all informed by that.

How have you felt about the various responses to your memoir, positive and negative?

I don't read them. I let...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Janet Bolin

Janet Bolin's love of sewing, knitting, crocheting, quilting, and machine embroidery led her to invent the village of Threadville where the supplies for all these hobbies, and experts to untangle all those unavoidable snares, are only a short walk away. Bolin's love of reading, writing, and mysteries caused her to add some rather nefarious activities to Threadville, along with a slightly reluctant sleuth named Willow who co-opts her best friend, Haylee, and Haylee's three (yes, 3) mothers to help solve murders.

Bolin's latest Threadville Mystery is Night of the Living Thread.

From her Q & A with Rosemary McCracken:

Janet, you are becoming well-known as a writer of “cozy” mysteries. What does the cozy sub-genre mean to you?

Cozy is a sub-genre of the traditional mystery—think Agatha Christie—in which the reader can attempt to solve the puzzle along with the sleuth. In a cozy, readers won’t encounter overt violence (except for the murder itself, but gore in cozy mysteries is held to a minimum), gratuitous sex or profanity. The sleuth is an amateur, often with a skill or hobby that may help solve murders. Cozies take place in a defined space where everyone usually knows everyone else. It gives a whole new meaning to “cozy,” doesn’t it?

Do your novels require a lot of research?

It’s terrible! I have to visit sewing and embroidery shops and try out the latest embroidery machines and software. I can hardly stand that. (Where’s the nearest sewing store? I’m on my way!)

Is the protagonist at all like you? If so, in what ways?

Willow is in her early 30s. She’s tall, slim, talented and feisty. Yep, that pretty well describes me. No? Well...[read on]

Visit Janet Bolin's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

The Page 69 Test: Threaded for Trouble.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Janet Bolin and Laddie and Lacy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kimberly Elkins

Kimberly Elkins was a finalist for the National Magazine Award and has published fiction and nonfiction in the Atlantic, Best New American Voices, Iowa Review, Chicago Tribune, Glamour, and Village Voice, among others.

She has a B.A. from Duke University, an M.A. in Creative Writing from Florida State, and an MFA in Fiction from Boston University. Elkins grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

What Is Visible is her first novel.

From Elkins's Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:

I always want to know what sparked a particular book and why it haunts the author. Why Laura Bridgman? How did the subject matter personally speak to you?

I first read about Laura Bridgman in the New Yorker in 2001, and was astounded that I’d never heard of her. The mid-nineteenth century’s second most famous woman and Helen Keller’s predecessor, and yet she’d seemingly vanished from history! But it was the photograph of Laura that really got me: an ethereal, almost emaciated, and yet somehow fierce-looking young woman with a ribboned shade tied round her eyes, balancing an enormous, raised-letter book on her lap. She sat absolutely erect with a stubborn dignity and vulnerability that both opened and broke my heart, posing for a photographer she couldn’t see, for a photograph she’d never see, and with a face and body that she’d never know except through touch. That very night, I stayed up until dawn writing a story about her that would appear shortly thereafter in The Atlantic. That’s how quickly and completely I got into her head and heart, and she in mine.

And yet for many years, even while writing the novel, I had no plausible idea why I had been so irrevocably drawn to this woman who’d lost four of her five senses--what could I possibly have in common with her, and how could I possibly know her voice so well? Finally, it hit me, just shy of the book’s publication, that I had immediately and subconsciously identified with her sense of profound isolation, her inability to communicate her deepest thoughts and desires to anyone she thought would truly understand her. These feelings I knew from a lifetime of battling severe depression, and though our disabilities were far from the same, it was a terrible bridge that we shared across the centuries. Four years ago, I finally found...[read on]

Visit Kimberly Elkins's website.

My Book, The Movie: What Is Visible.

The Page 69 Test: What Is Visible.

Writers Read: Kimberly Elkins.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Gilbert

Matthew Gilbert's new book is Off The Leash: A Year at the Dog Park.

From his Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:

You’re a person after my own heart, a homebody, yet Toby, your dog, transformed you into someone who loves the company of others and who is truly present in the world. How did this alchemy take place?

When the puppy you’re falling in love with comes into your office and starts nudging your elbow with his cold nose, looking at you with his brown eyes like you’re the best person in the world, well, you go wherever he wants to go.

And my dog, Toby, always only wanted to go to the dog park. So as reticent as I was to stand around making chitchat with other dog owners, I couldn’t resist Toby’s hunger for play. I was the classic writer-type who writes because he’d rather not communicate in person; the thought of a dog park group was not inviting. And I was the classic TV addict who prefers to be protected from the hurts and messiness of the real world by a screen. But I had a dog who was a thoroughly social being, and he pulled me and pushed me.

I love the way we get the dog we need. In my case it was an introverted owner getting an extroverted dog who pulled him into a more vibrant, present life.

And gradually, as I write in the book, I came around. Big-time. I began to love the semi-anonymity of the park, the shared exhilaration of watching dogs wrestle and play, and the new friendships, which were...[read on]

Visit Matthew Gilbert's website and Twitter perch.

Coffee with a Canine: Matthew Gilbert & Toby.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ed Lin

Ed Lin is the author of several books and is an all-around standup kinda guy. Waylaid and This Is a Bust were both published by Kaya Press in 2002 and 2007, respectively, and both were widely praised. Both also won the Members’ Choice Awards in the Asian American Literary Awards. His third book, Snakes Can’t Run, was published by Minotaur Books in April 2010; it was loved by many and also won an Asian American Literary Award, and was followed by in One Red Bastard 2012. Lin, who is of Taiwanese and Chinese descent, is the first author to win three Asian American Literary Awards.

Lin's new novel is Ghost Month.

From the author's Q & A with Anna Wu for Taiwanese American.org:

Anna Wu: Hi Ed. Could you tell us a bit about your novel, Ghost Month?

Ed Lin: My latest novel Ghost Month was published by Soho Crime, actually near the start of Ghost Month, the seventh lunar month in late July, a time of year the gates to the underworld open and ghosts are free to roam the earth. It is a Taipei-based mystery and basically, this guy named Jing-nan who works at the Shilin Night Market finds out that this girl that he’s loved his whole life and planned to marry was murdered, and he goes and tries to find out how she was killed and who killed her.

It’s also a bit of a meditation on the state of Taiwan, because there is a small faction that wants eventual or soon-ish “reunion,” (I say in quotes), with China. And another faction wants to declare independence immediately, but most people actually favor the status quo right now, this sort of strange kind of independence. But, you know, the status quo kind of means something different to everybody, and I just wanted to really be as inclusive as possible in terms of how people feel.

A: When did you first start working on this book? What inspired it?

E: I started working on this book maybe two and a half years ago. I had written a series on a Chinese American cop set in 1976 in New York, and just in the course of that, just doing the research into the state of Chinese America in 1976, I naturally sort of looked to my own family, and just looked at my own roots, and I’ve never really had a chance to explore fictionally the sort of Taiwanese part of my identity. My father’s family is from Taiwan, they arrived there shortly after the Ming Dynasty fell apart [in the 1600s].

My mom was from Northern China, and she was part of the waishengren [the large migration of "mainlander" Chinese to Taiwan in the 1940s and 50s]. She essentially grew up in Taiwan. So over the years, she has come to believe herself that Taiwan should be independent. [Laughs.] But it’s funny. Her siblings, most of her family, believe the opposite and believe that Taiwan is part of China. I just wonder if it’s just one of these ongoing things that will never be resolved.

The thing is about Taiwan is that...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Ed Lin's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Snakes Can't Run.

The Page 69 Test: One Red Bastard.

My Book, The Movie: Ghost Month.

Writers Read: Ed Lin.

--Marshal Zeringue

Janice Steinberg

Janice Steinberg is an award-winning arts journalist who has published more than four hundred articles in The San Diego Union-Tribune, Dance Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. She is also the author of five mystery novels, including the Shamus Award–nominated Death in a City of Mystics. She has taught novel writing at the University of California, San Diego extension, and dance criticism at San Diego State University.

Her latest novel is The Tin Horse.

From Steinberg's Q & A at writing for the web:

Q. What drove you to write Tin Horse?

My inspiration was a nameless character in the Raymond Chandler novel The Big Sleep, a woman working in a bookstore who’s described as having “the fine-drawn face of an intelligent Jewess.” I was struck by that phrase with its sense of otherness and by the fact that, among Chandler’s tough guys and fast women, the Jewess in the bookstore was the one character with whom I identified. So—in the spirit of novels like Mrs. Ahab, which take marginal female characters from other books and put them center-stage—I set out to tell the Jewess’s story.

Q. Obviously place has had a big influence on writing TH. Can you talk about that?

I got insanely lucky! I had a feeling the Jewess in the bookstore occupied a very different Los Angeles than Chandler’s mean streets. And I started researching the history of Jews in Los Angeles, to find out where, in the 1930s, she would have lived. I found a goldmine, a setting so rich that it could become a character in its own right: Boyle Heights.

I say a lot about Boyle Heights on my website, The Tin Horse, but to give a few basics: It’s directly east of downtown L.A. and is now completely Hispanic, but in the 1920s and 30s, Boyle Heights had a large Jewish neighborhood on the West Coast and was a center of Jewish culture, with delis, Yiddish and socialist societies, synagogues, and more.

I got even luckier in that...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Janice Steinberg's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Tin Horse.

Writers Read: Janice Steinberg.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rory Flynn

Rory Flynn is the author of Third Rail. From his Q & A with Janet Walker for The Culture Concept Circle:

Third Rail is the first in the Eddy Harkness series. What inspired Eddy Harkness and the series?

I wanted to create a different kind of cop, of course. Every crime writer wants to do that, create someone new. With Eddy, it’s the unusual combination of intuition, which lets him find hidden drugs and other evidence, and a strong moral compass, which leads him to do what he feels is right, even if it means going against the rules. He also combines a certain amount of smart sophistication (he went to Harvard!) with a street-wise toughness that comes from having been part of Boston’s very rough-and-tumble hardcore punk scene back in his youth. He’s also intimately aware of the Harkness family’s mixed heritage. After all, his father was a charming swindler. And he knows the centuries of history accumulated in Nagog, his colonial hometown, and beneath the crooked streets of Boston, the city he loves so deeply.

Why Boston?

Well, there’s a long tradition of great crime/mystery novels coming out of Boston, from George V. Higgins to Robert B. Parker to Dennis Lehane. Boston’s in the middle of a new renaissance in so many ways. The restaurants don’t suck anymore, thanks to Barbara Lynch. The streets are cleaned up. The Combat Zone’s gone. The Seaport screams prosperity. We’ve got a great new mayor whose Boston accent is even thicker than the last guy’s. But there’s still a lot of violent crime and deep corruption – which all adds up to make the city a natural for fiction. For example, the last three Speakers of the House in Massachusetts have been indicted on felony charges. That’s got to be some kind of record.

Crime in Boston is different now – pockets of...[read on]

Visit Rory Flynn's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chuck Greaves

The Last Heir is Chuck Greaves’s third novel in the award-winning mystery series featuring trial lawyer Jack MacTaggart.

From the author's Q & A with Ken Isaacson for The Big Thrill:

THE LAST HEIR is centered around a Napa Valley winery. I’ve heard that you have a winery of your own. How did that come about?

What I have is a small vineyard—just five acres of viognier and pinot noir grapes—in which I can be found most afternoons after mornings spent wrestling with my current work-in-progress. Its function is primarily therapeutic. But my love of wine goes back many years, and I’ve been a collector and general aficionado ever since I returned to California from law school in Boston in the early 1980s.

A recurring motif of the MacTaggart series involves plopping Jack—who’s a lunch pail kind of guy—among the tea party set and letting him rattle the china. I thought that a Napa Valley winery would make a perfect setting for that sort of frisson. I also liked the idea of an outwardly happy, successful wine family that’s actually riven by inter-generational jealousy and dysfunction leading, naturally, to murder, with each family member trying to manipulate Jack – this blue-collar outsider – in order to advance his or her agenda. Publishers Weekly calls it “intrigue-laden,” which I think is a good descriptor. And of course, it was an opportunity to write about a subject (wine, not family dysfunction) with which I’m both interested and familiar.

Most new authors write, in the hope of being published, while still hanging onto their day jobs so they can eat. You, on the other hand, up and left a successful law practice to “see if you could write.” Weren’t you terrified?

There were times when...[read on]

Visit Chuck Greaves's website.

The Page 69 Test: Hard Twisted.

The Page 69 Test: Green-Eyed Lady.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy Hallinan

Timothy Hallinan is the Edgar- and Macavity-nominated author of numerous widely praised books—twelve novels and a work of nonfiction—including the Poke Rafferty Bangkok thrillers and the Junior Bender mysteries, including Crashed, which kicked off the series.

The latest Junior Bender novel is Herbie's Game.

From Hallinan's Q & A with Neal Thompson for Omnivoracious:

Book that changed your life?

The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum. My family moved all the time – 22 houses in my 18 years with them, and when you're a kid, a move across town might as well be to the next galaxy. All your friends disappear, you're in a new school, and so forth. You learn not to make friends. When I was seven, I read The Wizard of Oz and realized that wherever I went, I could take books with me. From then on, I read all the time. It's impossible for me to imagine who I would be if that part of my life hadn't opened up so wondrously.

Book that made you want to become a writer?

The Big Sleep, pure and simple. It opened to me a form of storytelling in which the objective was to answer a question, and the answer was buried deep inside a character. And, like most really great writers, Chandler made it look easy. Eighteen books later, I'm...[read on]

Visit Timothy Hallinan's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Crashed.

My Book, The Movie: Crashed.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Mountford

Peter Mountford’s debut novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, won the 2012 Washington State Book Award and was a finalist in the 2012 VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize. In its full-page review, The Seattle Times wrote: “Debut novels don't come much savvier, punchier, or more entertaining...the work of an extraordinary talent.”

Mountford's latest novel is The Dismal Science.

From his Q & A with David Sheilds for Tin House:

David Shields: All of your work seems to me mature, complex, layered, bittersweet, but this book feels almost unspeakably sad. How do you write or read about such sadness without succumbing? This is a bit of a rhetorical question on my part. I can’t read work that isn’t unspeakably sad, but I want to hear your answer, Peter.

Peter Mountford: All my favorite pieces of writing break my heart, badly. I’ve actually assembled in a manila folder a dozen or so short stories that bring me to tears every time I read them. And I sometimes reread one just to experience that little rush of heartbreak. It blows open the doors within me. What I’ve noticed with those stories is that there’s usually a lot of humor along the way to coax the reader onward, and to sharpen the contrast. That’s important, I think, and this book has a certain comedic atmosphere, even if it’s not at all a comedy. Toni Morrison once said something like, “My goal is to break my reader’s heart, I want to make them cry, and if I’m going to do that, I can’t cry.” I’m paraphrasing, but it’s true. As a writer you can’t force the emotion onto readers.

The emotion has to be a natural byproduct of what’s happening, and it has to be earned, too, so it often takes a while. People have to be made to care, over time. The crushing end of A Farewell to Arms—without the preceding 200-something pages, without the aching beauty of their stolen romance, without that it wouldn’t eviscerate you.

DS: When I write about politics, it comes out as “Impeach George Bush.” How do you manage to write so well about politics?

PM: Thank you for saying that, but I think the answer is implied by your question. Certainty is...[read on]

Visit Peter Mountford's website.

The Page 69 Test: A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism.

My Book, The Movie: A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism.

Writers Read: Peter Mountford.

The Page 69 Test: The Dismal Science.

My Book, The Movie: The Dismal Science.

--Marshal Zeringue