Jonathan Segura

Scott Butki interviewed Jonathan Segura about his debut novel, Occupational Hazards.

Two questions from the Q & A:

What writers do you most hope to be compared to favorably? In your nightmare scenario (and I think every writer has this scenario) who would you be compared to?

Radar dropped Elmore Leonard, which I was happy to read. PW dropped Arthur Nersesian, which was also nice. Both of them also dropped Chuck Palahniuk, and I suppose I wouldn't kick him out of bed, either. But, man, would it break my @!$%#ing heart if I read something like, “It’s like the staid love-child of that nutty night when Garth Stein and Nicholas Sparks slipped Danielle Steel a roofie at Brother’s Lounge…"

Your book draws from your experience as a journalist in Omaha, right? When did you work there and what did you cover?

I was a reporter and editor at the Omaha Weekly from 2000-2002. I also freelanced for The Reader in Omaha before I got the staff gig at the Weekly. The Weekly was a life-altering experience for me as a writer and as a person--I had a great editor in John Heaston, and because we had such a small staff, I was cranking out 3,000 to 4,000 words a week. I met a lot of weird, wonderful people. Most of what I did was covering city hall and courts. Some cops stuff. Throw in the occasional feature or profile. It was a lot of work, and we’d often be in the office closing an issue until 3 in the morning. Good times.

Read the complete interview.

The Page 69 Test: Occupational Hazards.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ed Lynskey

Declan Burke interviewed Ed Lynskey at Crime Always Pays.

The interrogation opens:

What crime novel would you most like to have written?

HELL HATH NO FURY by Charles Williams, a 1953 noir classic about a smouldering small town and the desperate characters living there and double-crossing each other.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?

Read the entire Q & A.

Ed Lynskey is the author of Pelham Fell Here, The Dirt-Brown Derby, The Dirt-Brown Derby, Out of Town a Few Days, and A Clear Path To Cross (all detective mysteries). His work has also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Washington Post, and New York Times.

The Page 99 Test: Pelham Fell Here.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Fulmer

Tim Whitaker of Philadelphia Weekly interviewed David Fulmer about his latest novel, the highly-acclaimed The Blue Door.

Whitaker's introduction and the first exchange:

“At 10:30 on the night of March 24, 1962,” begins the opening passage in The Blue Door, David Fulmer’s newly published mystery. “Eddie Cero walked out the back door of the Southside Boxing Club in Philadelphia with a bloody bandage over his eyebrow and $40 cash in his pocket.” Fulmer’s absorbing tale is of Philadelphia boxer turned private investigator Eddie Caro, who decides to find out on his own what happened to a popular soul singer in the city who disappeared without a trace. Caro gets involved with the singer’s secretive sexy sister, and his story quickly turns alternately violent and passionate, all against a vivid Philadelphia backdrop. Fulmer, who has previously written mysteries based in New Orleans and Atlanta (where he now resides), says he may author more mysteries based in Philadelphia in the future.

How did this story come to you?

“Growing up there was this guy in my hometown who left for Philly to become a club fighter. He was just so bad. The way he walked, the way he moved. He had presence. He was a character that just stayed with me. The first scene in the book, where he’s coming out of the club, was just dictated to me from somewhere. I have no idea where. I don’t plot my books out like a lot of mystery writers. I start with a location, which in this case was Philadelphia in the early ’60s, and of course characters.”

Read the entire interview.

Read Chapter One from The Blue Door and learn more about the author and his writing at David Fulmer's website.

David Fulmer is the author of, among other works, the acclaimed Storyville mysteries featuring Creole detective Valentin St. Cyr. The first volume of the series, Chasing the Devil's Tail, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Mystery/Thriller Book Prize and the winner of the Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel.

My Book, The Movie: David Fulmer's "Storyville" books.

The Page 69 Test: The Dying Crapshooter's Blues.

The Page 99 Test: The Blue Door.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ayelet Waldman

Curled Up with a Good Book's Luan Gaines interviewed Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, about her novel.

The opening exchanges from the interview:

Luan Gaines: What was your inspiration for Love and Other Impossible Pursuits?

I wanted to write about the loss of a child. I lost a baby quite late in a pregnancy -- a very different situation, but a terrible one for us. For years I was writing around this loss, dealing with it in various ways, but I finally confronted it head on in the novel.

Emilia is emotionally raw after the loss of her newborn. What is the purpose of her route through Central Park, avoiding the mothers with children on the way to William's preschool?

She needs the park -- it's her refuge, her solace. But it's full of babies, and every baby reminds her that hers is gone. She retreats to the park, but it's a terribly ambivalent experience because it fails to provide the comfort she needs.

You inhabit the emotions and turmoil of this protagonist. How did you research the grieving and angry young mother?

That was a work of imagination and experience, not research. When I lost my baby, I was in a support group and we were all devastated -- laid waste by loss. And we were all really, really angry.

Read the complete interview.

The Page 69 Test: Love and Other Impossible Pursuits.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Darnton

Dick Donahue of Publishers Weekly interviewed John Darnton about his new novel, Black & White and Dead All Over. Their first exchange:

PW: Your murder mystery is set at the New York Globe. Are you concerned that people will think it’s the New York Times, or do you hope they’ll think that?

JD: I have to say I employed some clever disguises. For example, everyone knows that the New York Times in its old building was on West 43rd St. between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. The New York Globe, however, is on West 45th St. between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. So you see there’s no connection whatsoever. I thought anyone looking at the book jacket would realize that, unimaginatively, I’ve spent my whole life with the same singular institution, the Times, so there’s no way I could write a book that wouldn’t somehow refer back to the Times. And in a way the Times is perfect for the kind of vehicle I wanted to do, because it is, in my estimation, kind of a perfect setting to describe both what’s happening to the newspaper business today and to recall the glories of what it was like when I first began, in 1966. But if you’re referring to libel, I’m not worried. The characters are—well, some might be, in a certain sense, identifiable, but most are composites of types that are familiar to any newsroom around the country.

Read the complete interview.

Visit John Darnton's website.

The Page 99 Test: Black and White and Dead All Over.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven Wingate

Steven Wingate is the author of Wifeshopping.

From the transcript of a June 2008 interview with Wingate by Arsen Kashkashian:

AK: Hi, I’m Arsen Kashkashian of the Boulder Bookstore and I’m talking with Steven Wingate, the author of the short story collection Wifeshopping, which will be coming out in July. Steven, I wanted to ask you a few questions. The title, Wifeshopping, could apply to many of the stories in the collection. It’s a very varied collection, stylistically, and with many different characters, and yet you have the theme of men looking for relationships throughout the book. How did that come about?

SW: The collection came about between about 1992 and 1999, between the end of an unsuccessful marriage and the beginnings of a successful one, and I wrote a whole bunch of stories during that time. Probably two dozen stories that were all clustered around this idea of searching for love, because I think both psychically and imaginatively I was really trying to figure out what the love thing was and how relationships worked and why they didn’t work. So out of that big bunch of stories, over the years and years, I just pulled out the best, and those are the thirteen in the collection.

AK: You’ve ended that stretch of time married, and yet your characters do not have a similar fate.What was the difference between you and your characters?

SW: I think if there’s one thing I’ve learned from working with these characters and writing about these characters, and also from living, it’s [read on].

Visit Steven Wingate's website.

Writers Read: Steven Wingate.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nalini Jones

Nalini Jones was born in Newport, Rhode Island, graduated from Amherst College, and received an M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in the Ontario Review, Glimmer Train, Dogwood, and Creative Nonfiction's "Living Issue." The paperback edition of her story collection, What You Call Winter, is due out in early August.

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

Q: WHAT YOU CALL WINTER is a collection of stories, but not in the traditional sense… the characters in the different vignettes are all neighbors, relatives, and friends, and many of them reappear in several stories, giving the reader a vision of their community as a whole. Did you always intend for the book to come together this way?

A: I always envisioned a community that functioned that way — people who recognized each other, families who brought up their children together. But in my first version of the book, only a small cluster of stories were connected; others floated off on their own. When I reread that draft with my editor, we found that many of my own preoccupations in writing about the neighborhood cropped up again and again. It seemed as if I could explore them better — in more intricate and substantive ways, but also more succinctly — if I worked with a smaller, tighter cast of characters. I began to try to draw everything closer together. At first I didn’t realize that would mean leaving some stories behind and rewriting several others entirely. But as I was revising, I saw certain new possibilities for stories that had been isolated. It wasn’t so much that bringing them together connected the collection as a whole, but that story by story, those connections began to yield opportunities to think about the characters and their predicaments in unexpected ways. Everything began to feel a little richer.

Q: Your characters all live in (or once lived) the same, vividly imagined Catholic neighborhood near Mumbai. Why did you choose to write about such a place? Have you always been drawn to India as a setting for your work?

A: My mother is from a Catholic neighborhood just outside of Mumbai, and as children, my brother, sister and I visited family regularly. When I grew older, I began to go on my own. But I never lived there, so aspects of life that my mother and her family took as commonplace seemed endlessly intriguing to me. That became an enormous challenge for me when I was writing. I had experienced my mother’s community only as an outsider, but to write fiction, I had to conceive of it from the points of view of people who lived there, who could speak languages I can’t speak. I ended up creating a new place, with a name and street map all its own. I gave this neighborhood, which I called Santa Clara, schools, hospitals, churches, parks, a post office. I no longer had to try to accurately represent the real community where I had been a foreigner. Suddenly, with Santa Clara, I could concentrate on bringing something to life instead.

Read the full interview.

Visit Nalini Jones' website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt is the author of The Sorrows of an American and other books.

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

What book changed your life?

Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. It's a book of overwhelming feeling and of the relentless interrogation of ideas.

* * *

What book would you give to someone who had time-travelled from another era, to paint a picture of the 21st century?

Don DeLillo's Underworld . He has a tremendous gift for insight into contemporary western culture.

Read the entire Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael S. Gazzaniga

Michael S. Gazzaniga is the director of the University of California–Santa Barbara's SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind, as well as its Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience. He serves on the President's Council on Bioethics and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. His publications include The Ethical Brain: The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas and the newly released Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique.

From his Q & A at Powells.com:

If you could be reincarnated for one day to live the life of any scientist or writer, who would you choose and why?

That's easy. Richard Feynman. I knew him, knew what he was like but never could be him in the sense of how he apprehended phenomena. To have a sense of how he grasped the world and its relationships would be a stunning experience. He once spent a sabbatical year in the laboratory of the great biologist Max Delbruck. He toiled in the lab everyday doing experiments and at the end of year he gave a seminar to the Caltech biology department reporting on his studies. At the end he said, "Thanks for a great year but I am going back to physics. I don't think like a biologists and I would never be any good." Well, I realized then and as I do now, I will never be able to grasp such things as quantum mechanics and the other geometrical relationships Feynman saw and that is an unhappy fact about my own brain. I would like that for a day although I doubt it would change my psychological life much at all.

Read the entire Q & A.

The Page 99 Test: Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kerry Cohen

Kerry Cohen received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon and an MA in counseling psychology from Pacific University. She is a practicing psychotherapist and the author of the young adult novel Easy and a new book, Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity.

From her interview with Powells.com:

Share an interesting experience you've had with one of your readers.

Before the book even came out, lots of people were indignant about the fact that I had dared to refer to myself as promiscuous when I had only slept with 40-plus guys. People were really pissed about this! At least three relatively well-known bloggers wrote very mean, personal attacks, essentially accusing me of being a disgusting attention whore who had not earned a book. Well over 250 commenters came on to agree. Some said things like, "I sleep with 40 guys per year. Where's my book contract?" Many were sickened that I had written two books on the subject (one is a young adult novel). At first I felt pummeled. I expected some backlash and misunderstanding, but not the level of personal hatred I was seeing. After I dropped my defenses, though, I realized how ridiculous the whole thing was. I mean, they were pissed at my number. My slut stats. It actually shows how much my story gets misconstrued and molded into more familiar discourse, and it's a good entryway into more constructive discussion.

I can't say what will hurt or feel right for another person. I only know that of the 40-some-odd boys and men I had sex with, maybe two or three were fulfilling situations. The rest made me feel like crap. Only one could be defined as rape — meaning, I actively didn't want that one to happen — but most all the other sex felt just as violating and self-destructive. And yet I chose it. I kept choosing to have sex, not from a place of natural sexual desire, or just because I was attracted to a guy and wanted to get with him. I was having sex from a place of terrible desperation. Every single time I did it because I needed the sex, and his interest in me sexually, to mean I was worthwhile and lovable.

Read the entire interview.

The Page 69 Test: Loose Girl.

--Marshal Zeringue