Erica Wright

Erica Wright's new novel Hollow Bones, a contemporary retelling of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, is out now! Her essay collection Snake was released as part of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series. Her mystery Famous in Cedarville received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was called "a clever little whodunnit" in The New York Times Book Review. She is the author of five other books, including the poetry collections Instructions for Killing the Jackal and All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned. Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Denver Quarterly, New Orleans Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Wright was the senior poetry editor at Guernica Magazine for more than a decade and currently teaches at Bellevue University. She holds degrees from New York University and Columbia University. She lives in Knoxville, Tennessee with her family.

From my Q&A with Wright:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Hollow Bones is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and the title comes from the line “…thy bones are hollow; impiety has made a feast of thee.” It is a condemnation—the villain’s absence of faith has lead to an absence of character—but the phrase “hollow bones” also references birds. And a bird is a perfect symbol for the book’s protagonist Essa who is slight and fragile but determined. While not what Matthea Harvey might call a license plate title, grounded in information, I do think Hollow Bones establishes an appropriately gothic tone.

What's in a name?

This story is told in three POVs, and I decided to give Juliet the same name in my version that she has in the Shakespeare play. In Measure for Measure, she only has seven lines, so I was starting from scratch in some ways. Of all the characters in the play, she’s most affected by the events but given least attention. Her fiancé Claudio has been sentenced to die for impregnating her, and she’s sent off to what sounds an awful lot like prison. In Hollow Bones, she’s also in tough circumstances. Her fiancé has been arrested for burning down a church and killing two people inside. Instead of wallowing, though, she tries to control her own fate, not relying on the whims or rules of others.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

Honestly? Not too surprised. I was introduced to Measure for Measure as a teenager when I attended the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery. I was captivated by Isabella and her plight. I even had her first speech on mercy memorized, but please don’t ask me to recite it today!

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

In general, I find endings more difficult to write. With a mystery, I want all the pieces to click together, and sometimes those pieces are misshapen or broken on a first—or fifth—draft. For this book, though, I wrote and rewrote and rewrote the first chapter. The final version of Hollow Bones is only 70,000 words but I wrote at least 100,000 during the drafting process.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Like Essa, I grew up in small town, and while most aspects of my childhood were happy ones, I longed for privacy. I never had any important secrets to hide from my neighbors, but I never liked them knowing even my unimportant ones. Essa wants to start over somewhere where she won’t be known as “the serpent orphan,” and who could blame her? Personality-wise, we’re worlds apart. I like to think that we could be friends, though.

Visit Erica Wright's website.

My Book, The Movie: Famous in Cedarville.

The Page 99 Test: Snake.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Bass Parman

Elizabeth Bass Parman grew up entranced by family stories, such as the time her grandmother woke to find Eleanor Roosevelt making breakfast in her kitchen. She worked for many years as a reading specialist for a non-profit and spends her summers in a cottage by a Canadian lake. She has two grown daughters and lives outside her native Nashville with her husband and maybe-Maltipoo, Pippin.

Parman's debut novel is The Empress of Cooke County.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

My story is dual-POV and has two main characters, Posey Jarvis and her daughter, Callie Jane. The title applies to them both. Posey claims to be the Empress of Cooke County, and everything she does in the book can be traced back to her feelings of entitlement, but, in my mind, Callie Jane is the real empress. The cover art is of Posey at the Curly Q beauty shop, and Posey is very vocal about her rightful position as an empress, so it’s easy to interpret the title as applying only to Posey, but I hope readers read more closely and realize how Callie Jane is transforming.

What's in a name?

Posey’s name is obvious—she is a poser, and Callie Jane’s name relates to something very specific in the book I can’t name without giving a spoiler. The Humboldt family got their name from the town of Humboldt, Tennessee, which I would pass when I’d drive to Memphis to see my daughter. Vern’s name was harder to come up with. I wanted something plain but dignified, a “salt of the earth” name. I went through several options before choosing Vern. I asked the woman who inspired the character of Evangeline to name Evangeline’s dog and she chose Muse. Evangeline means “good news,” and every Callie Jane in the world needs an Evangeline to help her see clearly.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

Not a bit. She would say, “It’s about time!” I first announced I wanted to be a writer when I turned four. I asked my mother where books came from, and when she told me people wrote them, I could not imagine anything better than being an author. It took over 50 years from that announcement for me to be published, but better late than never.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Definitely the beginning. I always know the ending of a story before I write the first word, but knowing where to start the story is hard for me. I rewrote that first chapter probably a dozen times. I compare that first paragraph to a double Dutch jump rope game— you have to time your entry into the action perfectly or everything falls apart.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I take bits and pieces of my own personality and give them to characters, but they are mostly from my imagination. Callie Jane has trouble speaking up for herself, which I struggled with when I was younger, and she has no sense of direction, which I suffer from. Some of the sweet things Vern does for Callie Jane came from my father, like teaching me to ride a bike.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I am an active observer when I am out and about. Inspiration can come from anywhere, and I am always watching and listening. I keep a notebook where I write down tidbits I hear or see, and it is amazing how often I can use those notes in a story. For example, I misread the name of a church we whizzed by on the interstate and will be using that wrong name in a future book. During a recent trip, I spotted a woman carrying an unusual purse, and I am pretty sure that will pop up in the next one, too.

I will talk to anyone and love striking up conversations with strangers while in line or waiting for a take-out order. Stories are about people, and talking with new people gives me new ideas. That being said, if I’m behind you in a slow grocery line, be careful what you say!

Visit Elizabeth Bass Parman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ryan Elizabeth Penske

Ryan Elizabeth Penske is a mix of a Midwest and Southern California upbringing, where she discovered her love for snowy Halloweens in Michigan and the everlasting California sun, but most importantly her love for reading in her early teens. Now, after writing her debut YA novel The Dreamers, she looks forward to completing her MA in English Literature from Chapman University where she received her BA in English Literature, Rhetoric, and Cultural Studies. Between moments of writing and her academic pursuits, Penske spends her days with her best buddy Indy, her Australian Shepherd. Together they enjoy hiking, going to bookstores, traveling, spending exuberant amounts of time of “BookTok,” and of course dreaming.

My Q&A with Penske:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title of my novel, The Dreamers, relates directly to a specific element of the story. Not only are the characters constantly dealing with the notion of dreams, thinking about dreams and what they mean, but they are also actively dreaming and in a dream state quite a lot throughout the novel. The characters who are able to dream figments of the future are also called “Dreamers” by staff that work in The Dreamers main setting of the novel, The Manor de Reves.

I write a lot of stuff, whether that be for my masters program or creative work, and I always find the title to be the last thing I think of or come up with. I think the “meat” of the work has to come first to then inform the author on what a piece should be called. I think if you title something first, very rarely will the title from the very beginning stay the same. With my novel The Dreamers however, I had enough of the premise and concept of the actual Dreamers in my story figured out, that from opening the first word document I ever began writing the story in, I titled it The Dreamers. Luckily for me it stuck, and everyone who read it including my editor and publisher liked it.

In general, I think a title should reflect the most important part of your story. It doesn’t have to be something blaringly obvious or spoiler-y, but I think what is the most cool is when a story has a title that allows for the readers to have an “ah-hah” moment and connect/understand the title once they get to a certain point in the story. I recently had this experience with Corelli’s Mandolin, and I loved the way the title related to something not quite so obvious in the book at first, but very significant to the storyline the further you read and uncovered.

What's in a name?

For me so far, the naming of characters and places goes by a case-by-case situation. Sometimes a character’s name is simply chosen because I like it, or sometimes it holds significance to something in my life. For example, the main love interest in The Dreamers name is Charlie. Charlie is the name of the boy I had a major crush on in middle school, so I thought it would be funny to pay homage to that first personal crush I had back when I was young. Another example would be Clear Water High, which is the high school my main character Stella goes to. The street I grew up on is called Clear Water, so again I enjoyed pulling in an element from my real life and using it as inspiration and fun easter-egg nods towards in the novel.

I think names can both hold great weight, but also not. I would argue that it's up to the author to decide whether a name should be something meaningful and special or if a name can just simply be one they like or think sounds nice. I definitely think if you want to have a strong character that is memorable and makes a great impression, then I would spend a bit longer thinking of what you should name them than simply choosing a random name from a list. Almost everything that has a name in The Dreamers, whether that be a person or place, relates to something from some point in my life, so I do think that naturally authors will default to naming something that has a fun relation to themselves or their lives, but I’m sure that changes with the more you write and maybe run out of names!

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

I don’t think my teenage reader self would be surprised by my novel at all, but more so elated and over the moon that I am a published author! This has been a lifelong dream of mine, so I think my teenage self would be jumping up and down. It makes sense that my first novel is a YA book, because the YA blockbuster series that came out and were massive hits when I was a teenager, such as The Hunger Games, Divergent, City of Bones, all of those type series, are what made me a big reader and ultimately inspired me to start writing The Dreamers.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

This is a great question because funny enough, I think beginnings are way harder to write than endings, but the ending to The Dreamers changed at least three times! Beginning a piece, whether it's an academic paper or a creative piece, I always find writing an intro or that first paragraph to be the hardest. It's the story in the middle and at the end that I always have the clearest vision for, so once I get to those parts it's always so much easier. My ending idea however, was changed greatly from my first draft of The Dreamers, and that is due to different eyes reading the story and helping me mold it to have a different outcome for the better. That’s what great editors are for!

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

When writing my first every main character, Stella in The Dreamers, I leaned on personality traits of my own to help shape her. I think I did this because it was an easy way to begin molding a character and give her personality that I felt comfortable with writing because I naturally knew how she would then go about responding to or handling a situation. I wouldn’t say she is a carbon copy of myself, as there are certain traits I also have, but I think she naturally became her own character very separate from myself as she is faced with circumstances, people, and situations that are worlds different from anything I have faced. I think if you are able to write great characters, they naturally take up a life of their own as the story unfolds even if you have something different originally intended for them.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Any and all stories across page, screen, stage, etc. that I have enjoyed or felt connected to inspire and influence my writing. The most significant answer I can give to this question would be all creative works I was exposed to while attending the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. I was at the festival and attending cast, writer, and director interviews, including film premieres, and the creativity was so electric that it inspired me to begin writing The Dreamers. Specifically, I remember viewing Emma Roberts' film premiere for Paradise Hills (2019) and finding a lot of influence for the setting and vibe of The Dreamers. Other than this specific instance, this answer might feel cliché, but it's a testament to how influential this story has been to so many people, would be the Harry Potter series. I guiltily will admit that I have never read the book series in full, but the movies have always had a permanent presence in my life. The strong sense of characters, relationships, and iconic setting that the stories hold influenced the way emphasis and efforts I put into writing stand out characters and memorable settings.

Visit Ryan Elizabeth Penske's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laila Ibrahim

Laila Ibrahim is the bestselling author of After the Rain, Scarlet Carnation, Golden Poppies, Paper Wife, Mustard Seed, and Yellow Crocus. Before becoming a novelist, she worked as a preschool director, a birth doula, and a religious educator. Drawing from her experience in these positions, along with her education in developmental psychology and attachment theory, she finds rich inspiration for her novels. She’s a devout Unitarian Universalist, determined to do her part to add a little more love and justice to our beautiful and painful world. She lives with her wonderful wife, Rinda, and two other families in a small cohousing community in Berkeley, California. Her children and their families are her pride and joy. When she isn’t writing, she likes to cuddle with her dog Hazel, take walks with friends, study the Enneagram, do jigsaw puzzles, play games, work in the garden, travel, cook, and eat all kinds of delicious food.

Ibrahim's new novel is Falling Wisteria.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I put so much thought into my titles. And they don't come to me quickly. I needed Falling Wisteria to be culturally sensitive, stand alone and fit with the Yellow Crocus series which meant a plant or flower. My initial working title was Cherry Blossom, but one of my Japanese American beta readers thought it was a stereotypical trope, so I wanted to change it. To be honest I didn't want to go full on purple since I'm heading there, but haven't gotten to the end of the family saga yet. When I googled 'Japanese flowers that grow in the SF Bay Area' I was delighted to see wisteria on the list. I knew at once it was the flower that would be in the title. I have a beautiful wisteria plant in my backyard--they are very common in Berkeley, but I didn't realize they were native to Japan.

Wisteria is a perfect metaphor for making it through hard times, for finding beauty in the midst of pain and of learning to make a home in a new place.

What's in a name?

For this novel, Falling Wisteria, I used names from my own family and friends--with their permission of course. It was fun, and a little unsettling, to use so many familiar names. The main character, Kay Lynn, was named after my daughter, Klin, in the previous novel. On more than one occasion I misspelled my main character's name. I named Kay Lynn's daughter Lizzie, after the character in my first novel, Lisbeth, who is her great grandmother. And I chose my brother's name for Kay Lynn's brother, and my son-in-law's name for Kay Lynn's husband. The Fujiokas are named for our family friends, Kimiko, Donna and George, though in real life Donna and George are the parents and Kimiko is their daughter.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

Very surprised. I always loved reading, but I was not a natural writer. The stories would surprise my teenage self, but the discipline and devotion to writing would be a shock.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Each story reflects something I've struggled with in my life. I'm certain I was processing COVID and the complexity of a worldwide pandemic in Falling Wisteria. Kay Lynn was overwhelmed by the news, uncertain what she needed to pay attention to in the world versus taking care of her own small world. There was so much happening in so many places all at once. There was also no knowing how long it would go on.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I appreciate a psycho-spiritual tool called the Enneagram. Friends told me about it in the early 2000, but I didn't learn much about it then. In 2016 I realized it would help me with character development--for my writing. But after doing a deeper dive into it I have come to value it for my personal character development. It's a great tool for giving me more compassion and insight to myself and to other people.

Visit Laila Ibrahim's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elena Taylor

Elena Taylor spent several years working in theater as a playwright, director, designer, and educator before turning her storytelling skills to fiction. Her first series, the Eddie Shoes Mysteries, written under the name Elena Hartwell, introduced a quirky mother/daughter crime fighting duo.

With the Sheriff Bet Rivers Mysteries, Taylor returns to her dramatic roots and brings readers much more serious and atmospheric novels. Located in her beloved Washington State, Taylor uses her connection to the environment to produce tense and suspenseful investigations for a lone sheriff in an isolated community.

Taylor is also a senior editor with Allegory Editing, a developmental editing house, where she works one-on-one with writers to shape and polish manuscripts, short stories, and plays.

Her favorite place to be is at Paradise, the property she and her hubby own south of Spokane, Washington. They live with their horses, dogs, and cats. Taylor holds a B.A. from the University of San Diego, a M.Ed. from the University of Washington, Tacoma, and a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia.

The new Sheriff Bet Rivers mystery is A Cold Cold World.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title, A Cold Cold World, came to me very quickly. There were a few different reasons why it fit the book so well and was on my mind. There is a song by Blaze Foley with the same title. (Titles are not covered by copyright). I love the simplicity of the lyrics and the tune. It’s about regrets and the challenges of living.

Further, Blaze Foley was murdered, making him an apt figure to inspire a mystery novel. The first novel in the Bet Rivers series focuses a lot on music, the protagonist, Bet, and her father and friends are musicians and singers, and would often sing together. I feel it’s a song they would have performed.

I also wanted to pit Bet against a monster storm. When I lived in North Bend, Washington, we usually got a few inches of snow at a time, which might linger for a week. One winter we had several feet that stuck around for eight weeks. That’s the storm I recreated here. It was definitely a cold, cold world. I’m thrilled that my publisher liked the title as much as I did.

What's in a name?

Elizabeth “Bet” Rivers came to me out of the blue. I knew she was Bet before I knew that was short for Elizabeth. Names are very important to me, though they are a combination of me researching the meaning of names and using those, and names that appear in my mind as if by magic.

Alma is named after an Alma that I worked with years ago, an equally tough, tiny, almost octogenarian who would no doubt have done a great job running a sheriff’s station.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenaged reader self would not be the least bit surprised at A Cold, Cold World. She read mysteries nonstop and loved small towns, horses, and women who stand up for themselves.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I find it very easy to write an opening scene. That’s usually where my imagination takes hold. But I quickly work at finding the ending. For me, the middle is extremely challenging to write if I don’t know where a story or a character is going.

Each book is a little different with regards to rewrites. The beginning might change the most if I realize new things by the end of a first draft, but I also once changed who the killer was after several rewrites on a certain novel, so endings can change too.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

There is some of me in every character I write. My characters reflect how I understand the world, including the dark side of people. So, while I’ve never killed anyone, and like to think I never would, I put myself into the shoes of my killers and try to imagine the situations they are in to do the things they do.

I do believe there are evil people in the world, but no one is defined by a single action. We are a complicated intersection of our histories, our biology, and our situations. There are psychopaths out there, but the much more interesting criminal is the one who knows right from wrong and makes a bad choice anyway.

I like to consider what drives people to do the things they do, and the fact that a person’s fortune can change on a dime through one careless act or bad decision. People often say, “I had no choice.” But we always have a choice, and what we do says a lot about us.

Another choice might have been the better path, but it often wasn’t as obvious, or was harder to commit to. Much better if we can see all the choices in front of us before we make a big decision.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

As mentioned before, music inspires me. In bluegrass and country music, there are a lot of songs that tell a story. I’ve always been intrigued by how much character and plot can be packed into a song. (If you don’t believe me, read the lyrics to "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts" by Bob Dylan).

I also take inspiration from photos, paintings, and the world at large. I’ve had novels and stories inspired by deep dark lakes, images of people and buildings, and true crime events or things I hear on the news. Finding a story is the easy part, writing a satisfying plot is what’s hard.

Visit Elena Taylor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christine Gunderson

Christine Gunderson grew up on a fourth-generation family farm in rural North Dakota where she read Laura Ingalls Wilder books in her very own little house on the prairie. She’s a former television anchor and reporter and former Capitol Hill aide. She currently lives in the Washington, DC, suburbs with her three children, Star the Wonder Dog, and a very patient husband. When not writing, she’s sailing the Chesapeake Bay with her family, playing Star Wars Monopoly, rereading Jane Austen novels in the school pickup line, or unloading the dishwasher.

Gunderson's debut novel is Friends with Secrets.

My Q&A with the author:

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

I've wanted to be a writer since 4th grade when I attempted my first novel, which I entitled Millicent's Revenge, a sort of Anne of Green Gables meets Trixie Belden mash up.

My teenage self would be unsurprised by all of this because my teenage self had absolutely no idea how hard it is to actually become a published author. My teenage self was a wonderful combination of hope and ignorance.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Friends with Secrets is the only book I've ever started in the right place. I have six unpublished novels sitting in a drawer, and in every other book, I had to re-write the beginning multiple times to figure out where the story actually starts. I don't have trouble with endings, but the opening of a book is always hard for me, for some reason.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Such a great question. I am basically Nikki, one of the main characters in Friends with Secrets. I struggle to stay organized, to keep track of my phone, to keep track of the 7,412 things I need to keep track of as the mother of three kids. And I dread school supply shopping every year.

Like Nikki, I left a job I loved to stay home with my kids. That transition from working person to stay-at-home mom was really hard, and I tackle that in Friends with Secrets.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My kids are a huge influence on my writing because they made me a mother. They provide the material and life experience that allows me to write novels like Friends with Secrets.

I've gotten so many e-mails from readers who tell me that Friends with Secrets made them feel seen, as women and as mothers, and I love that so much. I am able to write these characters because I am these characters, and being a mom makes that possible.

Some days my kids and their many activities and orthodontist appointments also make writing im-possible. But that's another story...and maybe my next story.

Visit Christine Gunderson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Easter Collins

Sarah Easter Collins is a writer and artist. A mother to a wonderful son, she has worked extensively in the field of education, teaching art in the UK, Botswana, Thailand, and Malawi. Collins now lives on Exmoor with her husband and dogs, where she loves running and wild swimming. She is a graduate of the Curtis Brown Creative novel writing course.

Collins's debut novel is Things Don’t Break On Their Own.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

As a title, Things Don’t Break On Their Own implies the involvement of outside forces: things can break, and more significantly, so can people, but none of that happens by itself, and this is certainly a true reflection of the nature of the story. A reader will discover two distinct families in Things Don’t Break On Their Own. Laika and Willa’s family is all about appearances, to the point that they are obsessed with not having any of their cracks showing, whereas in Robyn’s family, everything can always be fixed, mended, saved for later and made better. They are loud, messy and their cracks are visible and worn with love.

When a bowl breaks at Robyn’s house, her father shows the two girls how they can use the Japanese art of Kintsugi to mend it. I love the idea behind Kintsugi, that something can be made more beautiful by the very act of mending it. Robyn comes from a family where things break all the time, but vitally things – and people – are treasured. So healing is a big theme of the novel, and something I hope my reader will take away from the story.

What's in a name?

In Things Don’t Break On Their Own I named the missing sister Laika, after the little Russian stray dog that became the first dog in space. That is explained in the book as her having been born on the anniversary of the day that Laika, the dog, was shot up into space, but what I wanted to convey by using that name, was the idea that we, as people, are somehow capable of holding completely contradictory information in our heads: that we can know the truth of something, especially something unpalatable, and yet we sometimes present that information, even to ourselves as well as outwardly, as somehow being acceptable. If you google images of the name Laika you will find plenty of cartoon images depicting a little smiling, seemingly happy dog apparently flying a rocket. You can even buy little plastic rockets for your children with a little dog inside, and for me, that is a fundamental reworking of the truth of the treatment meted out to a living, sentient creature in the name of science.

So in terms of exploring that theme in terms of my story, from the outside, the Martenwood family may look like they have it all. But what is presented to the outside world, and the reality of their lives inside that family unit, are two different things. With the notable exception of Laika, they are all aware that they are maintaining a fiction to the outside world.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

I didn’t have a huge amount of confidence as a youngster, my teenage self would be blown away to know that I’m published at all. But I always loved to write.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I had the opening scenes with Robyn’s family written down for a long time. Those characters came to me in a way that felt fully realised but for a long time but I wasn’t sure what to do with them. I knew I wanted somebody to go missing in the story, and at first I thought it was going to be Robyn’s brother, and that’s where I got stuck, because – and this is obvious to me now – he was never, under any circumstances – going to go missing from that family. But then I went to a dinner party where one man (loud, wealthy, self-important) dominated the entire meal, and I suddenly realised that the missing child would not from Robyn’s family at all, but from another family altogether (i.e., that man’s family!) and suddenly I had a whole story. I was writing so fast from that point on that I was finding it almost impossible to sleep.

The very last scene also felt very ‘complete’ to me too and is almost exactly as it was originally written, but I should say that throughout the editing process, a lot of other things changed. I had some great editors.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I think I probably ‘occupy’ all of the first-person characters as I write them, so there are elements of me in Robyn, Willa and Laika. My characters begin to feel very real to me. Putting them through hard things can, without exaggeration, honestly make me weep.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Definitely music! I had a Spotify playlist which I made as I was writing the story. It included any songs I had referred in the text but also music which felt to me like ‘theme tunes’ for certain of the characters: for instance, "More Milk" by Penguin Café captured Robyn’s upbeat personality for me, and "Sometimes" by Goldmund, Willa’s hesitance and uncertainty.

I spent a lot of time on a boat as a child, and the night-time scenes at Robyn’s family home undoubtedly grew out of my memories of that time. As a family we spent many nights moored somewhere out on the water, together but isolated from the rest of the world. Our only source of entertainment was each other, and we would spend our evenings playing cards, talking and watching the stars. So all that is missing from those scenes is the hiss of a gas lamp, and the rhythmic sound of rigging tapping against a mast.

Visit Sarah Easter Collins's website.

The Page 69 Test: Things Don't Break on Their Own.

--Marshal Zeringue

Minsoo Kang

Minsoo Kang is a fiction writer and a historian specializing in the intellectual history of modern Europe. Due to his father's occupation as a diplomat for South Korea, Kang has lived in Korea, Austria, New Zealand, Iran, Brunei, Germany, the United States, and other places for shorter periods. He served in the army of the Republic of Korea and earned his Ph.D. in European History at UCLA. Currently, he is a professor at the history department of the University of Missouri at St. Louis, and the author of a number of history books and short speculative fiction.

Kang's new novel is The Melancholy of Untold History.

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Whenever I set out to write a novel, I usually have a definite idea for the title, one that is designed to be both evocative and informative of the kind of story it is going to tell. I have a special love for long and complicated titles, like Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. But this novel was unusual in that the original title I had, Return to Four Verdant Mothers, was not one that I was particularly in love with. It was an apt one in the sense that the fictional mountain known as Four Verdant Mothers plays a central role in the narrative, symbolizing home, peace, and innocence as well as escape, to which the myriad characters of the novel are trying to get back to. But my agent thought it might be too mysterious for prospective readers, so he suggested The Melancholy of Untold History, a phrase that my historian character utters, which I loved. It points to the millennia-long span of the novel as well as its concern with telling stories of people who have been left out of mainstream historical narratives. And all my characters, living in vastly different points in time, are dealing with the melancholy of being lost in one way or another. So I am very happy that this is the title I went with at the end.

What's in a name?

I am definitely of the Dickensian/Nabokovian school of thought that names of characters should be both fun and evocative of their natures. But writing a novel that took place in a fictional Asian country presented me with a difficulty as I have always been loathe to use Asian-sounding names that were faux Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. For the chapters of the novel that took place in the premodern era, the easy solution was to take advantage of the fact that names of lofty people in many East Asian countries were chosen for their meanings. So I have two emperors named Veiled Sun and Fiery Dedication, which refer to their characters. But that would seem too traditional in the modern context, so I chose not to use names at all in chapters that take place in the contemporary era, my central character in them known simply as the historian. This is not so far from actual practice in East Asia today in which people are often addressed and referred to by their occupation and rank.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

I think my teenage self would have enjoyed this novel, especially the parts that deal with myth and history. But I don’t know how he would have reacted to the more realist sections that have to do with a middle-aged history professor mourning the death of his wife. I have always been an avid reader of serious literature, and I was already reading novels with heavy themes by Dostoevsky, Hemingway, and Camus in my teens. So the passages on grief, longing, and loneliness would not have been unfamiliar literary material to him. But I think he would have been impatient to get to the more sensational chapters on the war among gods and the rise and fall of dynasties. It’s interesting that I had the reverse experience when I recently read a novel I wrote when I was in my twenties. I was constantly surprised by how different I was back then, and how my worldview changed so much since that time. Even if I had the opportunity to publish that novel now, I would find it difficult to figure out how to update and edit it.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Endings have always been much easier for me. In fact, I have never begun writing a novel without knowing exactly where it was headed since that gave me direction as well as opportunities to put in presages throughout the narrative. When I get an idea for a novel, the endings come naturally to me – sometimes the idea would come with a conclusion. But I recently had the unusual experience of wanting to write a novel for a few years without being able to figure out the ending. It only came to me a few months ago, so I am finally ready to write it. Beginnings, on the other hand, used to be a source of deep frustration for me. I kept doing this thing where I would begin writing a novel, thinking that I knew how it should start, and write 30-50 pages before realizing that it’s all wrong. And so I would have to start all over. After that happened a number of times, I came to hate it because it felt like it was disrupting the momentum one needs to write an extended narrative. But I realized at some point that that’s part of my process of figuring out what the story is going to be really about and how it is going to be told. So now I don’t particularly mind having to go back to the drawing board after the initial launch.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Of course all writers endow their main characters with parts of their personalities, experiences, and feelings, but when it comes to my protagonists I do not write in the autobiographical mode at all. That may be surprising to some readers since the central narrator of The Melancholy of Untold History is a history professor just like myself. But other than our academic careers, our love of history, and our commitment to scholarship, we are very different people. My character lost both of his parents when he was still young, which had a huge impact on the kind of person he became. I suffered no such tragedy, and I led a much more peripatetic life, living in many different countries. I am a rather private person who cannot imagine writing a non-fiction memoir, so writing fiction is a means of dealing with issues and ideas that are of interest to me without revealing myself in a way that would make me feel uncomfortable.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I am a historian, and I draw a great deal of inspiration from my study of the past, as it will be apparent to readers of this novel. When I am researching history, I am constantly thinking of how differently things could have gone, what would have been the consequences of alternate outcomes, and what that reveals about the vicissitudes of human events. And fiction is the perfect medium with which to pursue such ideas. I am also a big movie buff, though in this golden age of television much of my interest has shifted to quality series on the small screen. From my early studies of cinema and writing of screenplays, I tend to imagine things visually. So I usually have clear ideas of what all my characters look like, the environments they are in, and how actions in the narrative unfold. That has been useful to me creatively, and it has also made the process a lot of fun.

Follow Minsoo Kang on Facebook and Instagram.

The Page 99 Test: Sublime Dreams of Living Machines.

--Marshal Zeringue

Janie Kim

Janie Kim is the author of We Carry the Sea In Our Hands. Applauded as “beautifully composed [and] original” by New York Times-bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, the debut novel employs poetic prose and an imaginative voice to explore family, trauma, and belonging through one woman’s journey to reconnect with her roots.

Kim grew up in San Diego, California, and studied molecular biology at Princeton University. She is currently a biology PhD student at Stanford University and is studying RNA in the symbiosis between V. fischeri, a bioluminescent bacterium, and the bobtail squid, a very charismatic little creature. She likes ocean critters that are fun-sized, or, better yet, microscopic (funner-sized). As an undergraduate, she worked with bacteria that live inside algae and make toxins to deter hungry sea slugs. During her Fulbright research grant to Denmark, she spent time with some tag-team marine bacteria and microalgae.

Kim writes about these and other topics in microbiology for Small Things Considered.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The sea—how it both gives and takes life—is a recurring image throughout the story. In a literal sense, my novel ends with the main character at a beach with seawater cupped in her hands, and the last sentence is "Briefly, I carry the sea in my hands." In a less literal sense, much of the story is about the multitudes of one person's identity, how these are often amorphous, and how other people in Abby's life in both the present and the past are a part of her own sense of self. So it felt right to keep the last sentence of the story except changed to plural first person.

The title was the last part of the book I came up with. I was trying to come up with something that gave a sense of things being nested or layered or within other things, and of these being weights (whether good or bad or neither) that we bear as we move through the world, plus a subtle homage to the hypotheses that life arose from bodies of water.

What's in a name?

For most of the stories I wrote prior to We Carry the Sea in Our Hands, I tended to either choose more unusual names for my characters or simply not name them at all. I decided against this when I started writing this book, because I wanted to avoid the usual pressure I feel to write characters that live up to the "specialness" of their names. I also wanted to write a story with a main character whose uniqueness comes not from something nominal but rather from everything else that happens in the story and builds up into who she is. So I chose the name "Abby." I also chose this name and all of the other characters' names because at the time of writing in 2020-2021, I didn't know anyone with those names well enough to have a "template" or to feel weird about "stealing" their name.

A few other names in particular: "Iseul" I chose because it means "dew." The bad PI character is named Stanley just because it doesn't sound similar to the names of any of the wonderful PIs I've been lucky to call mentors over the years. As for San Oligo, my fictional Southern Californian city based off San Diego: "oligo" (short for "oligonucleotides") is a term for bits of DNA or RNA, which are often combined in the lab to create longer stretches of DNA or RNA. I liked that notion. I do realize that in the context of a Californian city name starting with the Spanish "San," the Greek root is odd, but I grew too fond of the little mash-up to change it later on.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

I think my teenage self would be a bit surprised that the characters in my novel are neither birds nor dragons, which were my two childhood obsessions and the subjects of most stories I wrote in elementary school (although both birds and dragons are certainly both mentioned in my novel!). She would probably not be surprised that there are scientist characters and that there is a made-up microbe important to the plot. I'd first become smitten with science and microbes after an 8th grade science class that had us students do a science fair project on the side.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I think I tend to change beginnings more. This is especially true if events from a character's past are particularly important to the story (like this novel)—when editing, I get caught up in indecision over what point along the character's timeline the story should start.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

All of my characters have some piece of me in them, whether a personality trait or an interest or a piece of their history or something else. When coming up with characters, having that familiar seed to start with makes it easier for me to then get into exploring aspects of personhood and identity that I'm not familiar with. For example, Abby and I share the fact that we are Korean American and are in science, but I'm not adopted and am also very lucky that my close friends are alive and well. I'm a second-generation Korean American, and I think part of the inspiration for my book drew from my perception of America as a complicated adoptive parent and of South Korea as a distant and unfamiliar and equally complicated biological parent.

I do definitely have the same sense of humor as Abby, though (for better or for worse).

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My scientific research, for one. It's fun when I can take tangential "what if?" questions I had in the lab and explore them further through fiction. (It's also fun and cathartic when I can take my experiments that failed miserably in real life and make them work in my fiction.) Also, most any advice from my science mentors and writing mentors applies to both science and to writing. I admire my science mentors' willingness to explore unfamiliar areas and to learn on the fly and to do curiosity-driven work, and I try to emulate that mindset when I write. I also try to treat my characters while writing with the same generosity, forgiveness, and openness that my science mentors have given me every time I screw up.

Running, too. I think I often write better when I'm not focused so much on writing well. If I'm actively trying to put out "good writing," the pressure and magnitude of that task is too paralyzing. So, when I'm stuck on something or need to come up with key ideas, going for a longer run outside helps, and I usually get back home with potential solutions on my phone's notes app. There's a pleasant emptying of the mind, some kind of half-conscious limbo, as you slip through the miles that lends itself to idea-generation and problem-solving, without any of the burdensome hyper-awareness of time passing and deadlines and other practical realities. I owe it to this book and the frustrations while writing it that I've run marathons. Various running communities I've been a part of, too, have a particular mindset that translates well into the process of writing.

And songs! For each writing project, I tend to end up listening to a few songs on endless repeat that get me into the mindset. For preparing my qualifying exam proposal last December, that was the Lawrence of Arabia overture, "Run Free" from DreamWorks's Spirit, and the Wii Mii Channel theme song. For this book, it was Studio Ghibli songs ("The Changing Seasons," mostly), "It's Not Enough" by Starship, and "Celebrity" by IU.

Visit Janie Kim's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Derek Milman

Derek Milman is the author of Scream All Night and Swipe Right for Murder. A graduate of Yale Drama School, Milman has performed on stages across the country, and appeared in numerous TV shows and films, working with two Academy Award-winning film directors. He lives in Brooklyn.

Milman's new novel is A Darker Mischief.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

It was originally called With Love & Mischief, which is the sign-off of the secret society at the heart of the novel, and also the real one at Yale on which it is based. I adored that title, it reminded me of an old Salinger story, For Esmé--with Love and Squalor, and classic literature, which this book takes many of its cues from. When the sub-genre of dark academia began to trend and my book fell into this emerging aesthetic (accidental, on my part) Scholastic asked me to change the title so we went with A Darker Mischief which I think is a good encapsulation of the world of the book and the plot.

What's in a name?

The main character's name is Calixte Ware and he goes by Cal. Calixte means "most beautiful" in French, but I think I just found the name especially fetching in its own way. If I hear a name I like to make a note of it, and did so in this case. I like that he doesn't use his full first name, it makes him seem more real to me, more multi-layered. In early drafts he detested his name, but I cut that, so now he just goes by Cal because it makes him more relatable. His parents are unconventional people, so it makes sense they would have transcended typically Southern norms for names and picked Calixte.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

I probably would have no idea what I was talking about or what this even was. I didn't go to boarding school, I wasn't out, I had no inkling of secret societies. But I was reading those classic Vintage International paperbacks, which this is similar to, in scope, and maybe I would have seen the literary angle going on, and would have probably recognized the humor.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I tend to figure out what the ending is going to be very early on in the process and then it becomes a race to figure out how to get there. The beginning changed many times in this book, but that might just be typical of this book. But I think I tend to tweak beginnings a lot and then the ending is set from a pretty early point in the drafting phase.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

It depends on the character. They all germinate from my consciousness, so they all have to come from somewhere inside me. That said, many characters in A Darker Mischief are fairly different from me in many ways. Maybe this book more than any other I've written. Looking at the main character of Cal, however, he has a very different background than mine. I grew up in the well-to-do New York suburbs and was fairly shy and sexually dormant. Cal, who is poor, comes from a small town in Mississippi, and got up to a lot of mischief before winning his scholarship to Essex and traveling far away (which I never would've done at that age outside sleepaway camp). But internally, a lot of those differences vaporize. We are both sharp, sensitive, hyper-aware people, who struggle with loneliness and a sense of belonging, while fighting against isolation and self-worth. Luke Kim, his foil, probably represents my dark side, even though I wouldn't peg him as an especially dark character, just troubled, compromised.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Books and movies always do. Movies have been a massive influence. But meeting people and hearing their stories is the best source of inspiration. People always tell you fairly wild stories, if you listen, and so much of what anyone says can help make up a character, or build a psychological profile. Even the smallest of anecdotes can inspire something. I'm a visual person, so I always love going to museums, galleries, and rifling through photography books. Sometimes music, or the strangest of songs, can inspire something. When the thrashing punk band Wavves slowed everything down to record this pretty, nonsensical song called "Cop" about a man who kills a cop and then just rests in his boyfriend's arms after the carnage, I loved that whole idea, it lit some fuse about gays behaving badly that have permeated my last few books. Why do gay men always have to be depicted as fashionistas screaming "slay, queen!" at their local drag bar -- no, there is a whole wide world out there, and we are just like other people, with all the flaws and pain and hopes and dreams.

Visit Derek Milman's website.

My Book, The Movie: Scream All Night.

The Page 69 Test: Swipe Right for Murder.

My Book, The Movie: Swipe Right for Murder.

--Marshal Zeringue