Juliet Marillier

Therese Walsh interviewed Juliet Marillier last year for Writer Unboxed. Here is the introduction and the first exchanges from the interview:

Internationally acclaimed Australian author Juliet Marillier writes epic fantasy novels with true-to-life characters, singular plots, vivid weavings of myth and magic, and buttery prose. Her meticulous research of unique settings – Norse Orkney, ancient Ireland and Pictish Scotland – put her on the cutting edge of historical fiction as well.

Q: Where do the seeds for these epic stories come from? Are they all based on bits of old tales?

JM: The seeds often come from real history – for instance, the story for Wolfskin was inspired by my interest in the history of Orkney and what might have happened when the first Norse settlers (0r invaders) clashed with the indigenous Pictish population. I like unanswered questions: why did the Picts vanish from the north of Britain so quickly, after being such a strong military and political presence? The basis for The Bridei Chronicles is real history. I was fascinated by the story of the young Bridei being groomed for kingship by an influential mage or druid, which has some parallels with Arthur and Merlin. Because I love myth, legend and folklore and have been reading it all my life, many motifs and themes from traditional stories work their way into my books almost despite me. I also gain inspiration from what I see, hear and experience in my daily life. There are elements in the Bridei books that relate strongly to the fact that I was writing in the early days of the Iraq war.

Q: The stakes are always exceedingly high in your stories, whether characters are out to save a race of people, win peace, or in some other way combat evil. How important are high stakes in the fantasy genre and why?

JM: I find it hard to generalize about the fantasy genre because it is now so diverse, spanning everything from gritty urban fantasy to the traditional invented-world epic to outright comedy and covering a wide range of writing approaches from the highly literary to the unabashedly commercial. Many fantasy stories do tap into the archetypal themes of mythology, which involve the highest stakes – defeating evil, saving the world, being happy ever after … It is traditional for a fantasy story to be about the struggle between good and evil, although that can be portrayed in a thousand different ways and need not be a grand epic story. Readers tend to expect a quest of some kind. Again, that need not involve slaying a dragon or saving the whole of Middle Earth, it can be an individual, personal journey to enlightenment.

In my novels, although often there are high stakes involved on a political or family level, I try to balance that with the personal journey of my protagonist. As a reader, I like to be involved in the characters’ struggle to become wiser or better, so that’s what us most important in my stories. That touches me more than a quest to save the world.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lilith Saintcrow

Kimberly Swan interviewed Lilith Saintcrow at Darque Reviews.

One exchange from the Q & A:

The fourth book in your Dante Valentine series, Saint City Sinners, will be released by Orbit Books in November and the fifth book, To Hell and Back, in January 2008. I’ve read that this will wrap up this series. Do you feel that everything you wanted for Dante has been realized?

LS: It's funny, if one of the main characters in the first book hadn't utterly disregarded my plans for him the series would have been only three books long. But as soon as the demon Japhrimel grew wings and fell in love, I knew what the entire series was going to be. I knew what each book involved and where the story was going, I even knew the ending line of the fifth book. I don't know if everything I wanted for Dante has been realized. Part of being a writer is seeing your work in print and thinking, "my God, I could have done better." If you don't look at something you wrote six months ago and see how it could be made better, you're not growing as a writer. So there's a certain amount of dissatisfaction once a book is finished and past the page proofs. There are certain things I would have done differently, but by and large I feel I did what the series needed. I think it's a good bit of work, and I'm proud of it.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lydia Davis

Bret Anthony Johnston interviewed 2007 National Book Award Fiction finalist Lydia Davis, author of Varieties of Disturbance: Stories.

Two exchanges from the interview:

BAJ: How long did you work on Varieties of Disturbance?

LD: My previous book, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, came out nearly six years ago, so during the intervening time I was working on many of the stories in this collection. But I was also working on my translation of Proust's Swann's Way, which took a great deal of time. On the other hand, I did include in this collection, as I had in previous ones, some older stories that had fallen out of print. I like to mix up the old and the new.

BAJ: What drew you to the stories?

LD: A few of the stories, especially the longer ones, were inspired by other texts and incorporate the language of other people, including non-writers (as, for instance, the study of the fourth-graders' get-well letters called "We Miss You"). I find the writing of non-writers, in particular, wonderfully fresh and surprising, and in some of the stories in this book I enjoyed taking it up and combining it with my own writing. More generally, what lies at the source of these stories is some strong emotion, whether that emotion is grief, anger, indignation, love, pity, or even delight in a piece of language.

Read the full interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Donna Andrews

G.M. Malliet interviewed Donna Andrews (The Penguin Who Knew Too Much, No Nest For the Wicket) for Inkspot, the Midnight Ink author’s blog.

One exchange from the Q & A:

Q: What made you choose to write a mystery novel, as opposed to a mainstream novel?

A: Partly because I think it's important to read the genre you write, and write in a genre you read. I grew up reading a lot of fantasy and science fiction, but my college roommate introduced me to many of what are now my favorite mystery writers, and I began to find that while I was buying and borrowing both speculative fiction and mysteries, the mysteries were getting read much faster. Looking back, I think that at the time, the mystery genre was going through a wonderful period of expansion and diversification, with the debut of many writers who have become giants of the genre, while the speculative fiction shelves were heavily populated with bad Tolkien clones and worse Star Wars ripoffs.

I'm not saying everything in the science fiction and fantasy field was rotten -- at the same time I began to discover writers who are still among my favorites, such as Barbara Hambly, Lois McMaster Bujold, Steven Brust, Tanya Huff, and Terry Pratchett, to name a few. But back then I found a lot more to love and admire in the mystery field.

And I also think I write mysteries partly because it's the genre that still respects things like a well-constructed, comprehensible plot and engaging characters. I'm not the only mystery writer who sometimes feels baffled when reading books in the mainstream or literary fiction genres -- and they are genres. One writer friend jokingly said that she got halfway through a critically praised mainstream book and felt so frustrated that she wasn't sure she was going to finish it. "It wasn't the fact that I hadn't seen a body yet -- I could live with that," she said. "It was the complete absence of any hint of a plot." I understand what she means.

I also find myself mildly annoyed when someone talks about a book "transcending the genre." Sounds a lot like the written equivalent of "overcoming his unfortunate upbringing." If I read a mystery that really blows me away -- Laura Lippman's Every Secret Thing or To the Power of Three, for example -- I don't feel obliged to say that it transcended the genre. Just that it's a really great book. Period.

Read Part One of the interview.

(h/t to The Rap Sheet)

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan Hayes

Linda Fairstein interviewed Jonathan Hayes, author of Precious Blood, for Publishers Weekly.

Her lead-in and their first exchange:

During my days as a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney's office, I had the privilege of working with a brilliant young forensic pathologist in the city's office of the chief medical examiner. Now, Dr. Jonathan Hayes is joining me on the literary side of the law, with the publication of his first novel, Precious Blood (Reviews, Sept. 10), which introduces New York City forensic pathologist Edward Jenner.

What was your inspiration for Precious Blood, and what led you to put aside the scalpel and pick up a pen?

I'd been writing professionally about food and travel for several years before I felt ready to write a novel. Precious Blood has its origins in my heavily Catholic childhood — I was educated, in part, at a monastery school in southwest England. I actually started the book in Oaxaca in Mexico, after a day spent visiting the city's Gothic churches. Their walls and ceilings have insanely detailed gilt decoration, thousands of hours of painstaking work; I was struck by the fact that religion and obsession are often very closely linked. It wasn't a big step from there to the book's essential plot.

Read the full interview.

The Page 69 Test: Precious Blood.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mort Gerberg

For the Playboy Blog, Jennifer Thiele interviewed Mort Gerberg, New Yorker cartoonist and editor of the recently-released Last Laughs: Cartoons About Aging, Retirement ... and the Great Beyond.

The opening of the interview:

Playboy: What were you thinking when you came up with the idea for this book?

Gerberg: The inspiration came after a ski trip in Salt Lake City. I saw an older man who announced that he had just skied for free because it was his eightieth birthday. I’m cheap and I want to ski for free, so I thought that was a great goal. People are continuing to be very active well into their older years. I play tennis with people in their 70s. People are living longer, but instead of being in denial about aging and death we should embrace and laugh about it.

Playboy: You were born in Brooklyn and live in Manhattan. Has being a born-and-bred New Yorker affected your humor?

Gerberg: My humor usually arises from being annoyed at something. You don’t do cartoons about something easy, fun or pleasant and there are many more things to be annoyed at living in New York City like noise, dirt, slow people and traffic. There’s always something to get pissed off at here. How can you make fun of things while lying on the beach in the sun, staring at an azure sky?

Read the full interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Craig Davidson

Craig Davidson's stories have been published in The Fiddlehead, Event, Prairie Fire, and SubTerrain. His debut collection of stories, Rust and Bone, was called "remarkable ... challenging and upsetting, but never boring" by Chuck Palahniuk and "the best I've read in a long time from a young writer" by Bret Easton Ellis. He also writes horror fiction under a pseudonym.

His novel The Fighter was published by Penguin in Canada and Soho Press in the U.S.

From a Q & A about the book:

What motivated you to write a book about boxing and illegal fighting?

Good question. Perhaps, in the long run, I should’ve written a book about teenage angst in a small Mennonite community. There might be more of a market for that sort of story.

Anyway, I wrote what I wrote. As for my motivation — I’ve come to understand that I’m not totally sure about myself, my motivations. I mean, I THINK I know why I’m doing what I’m doing, why I set myself down this or that path, but in the end, I end up mystifying myself as much as I end up mystifying my readers, potentially. As I wrote in the book: The brain is a subtle organ, and it goes wrong in subtle ways. Not to say there’s anything wrong with my brain (at least, I’d like to hope not), but more to say that some of the stuff that came to me while writing this book ... well, I’m not entirely sure where it came from. But I chose to write it down, so the responsibility is mine.

But, to concretely answer your question: I’ve been fascinated with boxing, with fighting, for a long time. It’s a love/hate thing. I love the discipline of it, the training and the monk-like life of a dedicated boxer, and I love how sometimes, in the ring, two men (or women) can bring something out of each other that neither really thought s/he had in him. But most "real" boxing stories — discounting the "Rocky"-style Hollywood movies — are tragic. Boxers are abused by their managers, treated like cattle, and most often hang on too long and get hurt in ways they can’t recover from. They do it because they don’t really understand a life that doesn’t involve boxing; they’re incapable of existing without the sport.

But more crucially, boxing/illegal fighting allowed me the frame upon which to drape some of the main issues of the novel: the changing role of manhood in today’s society, and the fears and insecurities and regrets of that changing role; fathers and sons; a life of privilege versus a life of modest means. Anyway, it’s my sense a lot of writers do this: the main thrust or theme of a book is something that, yes, fascinates that writer — but the fascination lies as much in the offshoots or the repercussions of that theme than it does in the theme itself. If that makes any sense, which conceivably it does not.

Read the entire Q & A.

The Page 99 Test: The Fighter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rick Mofina

Sandra Ruttan interviewed Rick Mofina for the Fall 2007 issue of Spinetingler Magazine.

Here is one exchange from their rich and wide-ranging interview:

Sandra: I’m just wondering, because you’re writing what mainly gets classified as thrillers, do you think the reporter has a certain advantage over the cop in the sense that with the reporter there always is a constant deadline for the next issue to produce something, whereas with a cop if you get something at twelve or if you get something at one it doesn’t matter quite as much.

Rick: They’re definitely different worlds and I’ll tell you what cops told me when I was on the beat. They said, “You have a great freedom.” I said, “What do you mean?”. “If I’m a city police officer or I’m a federal police officer and I’m pursuing my case and I decide I need this or this in another jurisdiction, the further away it is the more complicated it gets for me to pursue my information, where you as a reporter can say, “Hey, I think this guy in Bagdad knows something, I’ll pick up the phone and call him,” and you can do that, you’re expected to do that. You don’t have to answer to anybody for doing that.”

There is a freedom that way, and there’s also, detectives would tell me, “You run something and you truly believe it’s true and your organization believes it’s true and the next day you find out it’s not, you run a correction, oops. Yeah, you may face a lawsuit, depending on what the error is. When we’re building our case, we’ve got to make sure it’s right all the way along because it could be pulled out on us in court and it could affect the prosecution side of things, so we have to build a very very solid house.”

We were more like gypsies, and to them, from their view, journalists didn’t have as much accountability. I would turn it on them and say, “Look, okay, I can call up people from around the world at any time and they can curse at me and hang up. But you can get a subpoena and you can get a court order and you can flash your badge and people are kinda, in a way, more inclined to have to talk to you, and you say, “I want to get that unlisted phone number” and you can get it.”

So we would joust that way, in terms of pursuit of information.

Read the full interview.

Visit Rick Mofina's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Perfect Grave.

--Marshal Zeringue

Liam Durcan

Liam Durcan is currently a staff neurologist at the Montreal Neurological Hospital and an assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University. He has published short fiction since 2000 in a variety of Canadian and American Journals. His short fiction has won the 2004 Quebec Writers Federation/CBC prize and he work has been shortlisted 3 times for the CBC National Literary Awards. His novel Garcia's Heart was published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart and in the U.S. by Thomas Dunne Books.

From a Q & A with the publisher:

McClelland & Stewart: García’s Heart is your debut novel. It follows a short story collection that was named a top book of the year by the Globe and Mail. When you are not writing fiction, you are a neurologist at the Montreal Neurological Hospital and an assistant professor at McGill University. Can you tell us how your work informs your fiction? What lead you to explore, in this novel in particular, the moral and medical issues around neurology in a fictional way?

Liam Durcan: None of the stories in my first book had anything to do with medicine, which was a conscious decision when I stared writing short fiction, I suspect to prove to myself that medicine wouldn’t be a subject by necessity. But I can’t deny that medicine, or perhaps more specifically, the habits acquired in medical training — systematic observation, a consideration of various possibilities to explain a situation — have informed everything I’ve written. If there is any one source that led me to explore deeper issues in García’s Heart, it was The Nazi Doctors by Robert Jay Lifton, a book that examines the process through which individuals become able to commit atrocious acts. I found myself thinking about the doctors that Lifton described, people who were sophisticated and educated and yet could rationalize their acts on a daily basis for years before returning to live seemingly normal lives. One of the descriptions I found most troubling was that of a doctor who, despite his obvious acceptance of genocidal policies of the Nazis and the workings of the death camps, was highly thought of by many of the prisoners. I hadn’t understood that a relationship under those circumstances could be anything other than outright hatred. Understanding how complicated those sorts of relationships can be led me to start writing the book.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Linda Gregerson

Linda Gregerson's latest collection of poems Magnetic North, was a National Book Award finalist this year. In the spring David Baker interviewed the poet for Kenyon Review, which has published some of her work. Here are Baker's introductory remarks and the first two exchanges from the interview:

Linda Gregerson is one of the most original and vibrant of contemporary American poets. Born in 1950 and raised in Cary, Illinois, she received her B.A. from Oberlin College, M.A. from Northwestern University, M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, and her Ph.D. from Stanford University. Currently she holds the Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professorship at the University of Michigan and teaches in the M.F.A. program for writers at Warren Wilson College. She also teaches frequently at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, in Gambier, as well as at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

Gregerson's poetry collections include Fire in the Conservatory (Dragon's Gate, 1982), The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (Houghton Mifflin, 1996), Waterborne (Houghton Mifflin, 2002), and Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin, 2007). For her poetry she has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and she has received the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize, the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine, and many other distinctions.

In addition to the contributions of her poetry, she is an influential literary scholar. Her The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton and the English Protestant Epic, appeared in 1995 from the Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, and Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry, was published in 2001 as part of the Poets on Poetry series from the University of Michigan Press.

David Baker: Linda, thanks so much for the chance to talk about your two poems in the new Kenyon Review. They are splendid poems, both of them, and we are very glad for the opportunity to print them. I'd also like to use this occasion to talk about your forthcoming book of poems, Magnetic North, and to range further into other interests of yours, like teaching, Renaissance poetry and scholarship, the theater, more.

But let's start with "Over Easy." This is one of my favorite new poems of yours. I have a few specific questions about this poem, but I wonder if there's anything you wish to say about it first-about its origin or impetus or whatever you might wish to say to begin.

Linda Gregerson: Well, in the first place, you are very kind to overlook the speaker's comments on the Ohio landscape, not to hold them against me, I mean. And I should also say I regard that landscape - northern Ohio, northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin, southern Michigan, not the lushness and lovely elevations of points further south and north, but the sectioned-off flatness of farmlands and shopping malls-as my unerasable imaginative home. But yes, the origins: a car trip, and perhaps the purest sensuous incitement I've ever tried to get down on paper. At which I flatly failed, by the way. It was that radiant sliver of limpid tangerine: I could taste it in the back of my throat, and it brought such pure enchantment. Midwestern Proust. I spent ages trying to identify the sense-memory, which was multiple and mildly mortifying: a dress I had in high school, a pair of fishnet stockings, a lipstick (it was the sixties, remember; we all looked ghastly!), and a sort of sherbet-on-a-stick we used to call a "Push-Up." Quite a farrago, and of course I had to ditch it all. But I tried to keep the impetus, that primitive thing that comes before speech and way before aesthetic judgment.

DB: There are things in "Over Easy" that resonate with your larger body of work-the family narrative, the voice concurrently tender and intellectual, the persisting turn toward conscience or toward something like social connection or civic adhesion. But rarely in your poems is the speaker, simply, moving. Have you noticed? Here she's in her car with her daughters, blasting the stereo, as they range across those "scabrous fields" of Ohio. Your poems are nearly always underscored by a tension between velocity and impediment, to be sure; but the velocity is usually intellectual. In "Over Easy" it's also literal, physical. She is on the move.

LG: Ah, you don't overlook the comment on the landscape! But you're right about the movement, and I'm afraid it doesn't speak well of me that I'm so rarely able to imagine a speaker in physical motion. I suffer from the can' t-chew-gum-and-walk syndrome: it takes something remarkable to make me notice the world if I'm trying to move through it. The beginning of the poem is meant to be more than a little at my own expense.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue