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

Sharon Wishnow

Armed with an MFA, publications certification, and a BA, Sharon J. Wishnow, a New Englander now in Northern Virginia, crafts upmarket fiction with environmental themes. As a former VP of Communications for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, she founded Women’s Fiction Day and serves as Executive Editor of WriteOn! magazine.

Wishnow’s storytelling centers on flawed, educated women navigating environmental changes. Passionate about research, she shares insights through speaking engagements and her newsletter, Research for Writers and Other Curious People.

Beyond writing, she finds solace in her garden, bird-watching, and feeding peanuts to local squirrels.

Wishnow's new novel is The Pelican Tide.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I tell authors I know not to become hooked on their book title because chances are, it'll change. My original title for The Pelican Tide was axed by my agent. She renamed it and I hated it. It knew I'd have another chance if it was sold. And I was right. I feel the title does a 75% job of clueing readers into themes of the story, it deals with an ocean setting and there is most definitely a pelican. The word tide also evokes change and my characters face a lot of change. However, the other 25% of the book is about an oil spill and a hot sauce competition.

What's in a name?

Names are everything in my story and provide authenticity to the setting and something to help the reader remember the characters. Josie Babineaux is named after a friend's mother who passed away as I was starting the book. Hugh Dean and Odeal, the book's human antagonists were taken from an actual US. Census listing of the Babineaux family in the Louisiana Parish where the story takes place. Louise, the town mayor, is named for my childhood best friend. Minnow, Josie's daughter was at first a character nickname until it just became the character. And Gumbo the pelican was named to explain his origin story with the Babineaux family.

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

I think she would love the story but not believe older me had the ability to write it.

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

I begin every story knowing what the last scene is and that usually doesn't change. Beginnings are completely different. I rewrite first chapters and opening sentences more times than I can count.

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

I don't see any particular character like me in The Pelican Tide. However, the characters face some issues that I have in my life and I was able to call on my memories and emotions to make their stories more authentic.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I am greatly influenced by the natural world. The Pelican Tide was inspired by a documentary I had seen on the 10th anniversary of the Deep Water Horizon oil spill and I asked, What happened to the people. This is my version.

Visit Sharon J. Wishnow's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Maggie Nye

Maggie Nye is the author of The Curators. She is a writer and teacher whose work has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, and the St. Albans Writer in Residence program.

My Q&A with the author:

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

For many years, while I was shopping my manuscript around, my title was How do you like these bad days? That original title came from a line in a postcard I found from murder victim Mary Phagan to her cousin. I dug up said postcard in the archives of the Breman Museum of Jewish History in Atlanta. I loved that it gave Mary a chance to speak, but editors and readers agreed that it was too long and obscure.

After much agonizing, I landed on The Curators because that title accurately depicts the desires of the adolescent girls who narrate my novel. They seek to collect and to control a historical perspective that is denied to them. An audience member at my book launch asked me recently: “Why not The Creators? They create a golem, so wouldn’t that title make more sense?” And my answer is that though they bring a golem to life, even that is an act of curation. Their golem can only act within the boundaries of history and the conversation that surrounds it. They can only manipulate the conversation and try to change the lens.

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

Honestly, I think my teenage reader self would really dig this novel. I suppose that either means that my selfhood is remarkably consistent or that I haven’t matured much intellectually since my teenage years. Either is possible. But the intensity of the adolescent friendships in my novel, the feeling of trying to uncover what is being shielded from you, and the desire to have agency in one’s own life, and to be part of--not apart from--history all seem like themes my high school self, at least, could get behind!

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

Endings, for sure! I am not a planner. Never have been when it comes to writing. So while my beginning remained pretty much consistent, the concept of the ending that I had in my head when I first started writing changed pretty radically as the characters made choices I hadn’t anticipated. I also changed my ending at the eleventh hour to give more space to Mary Phagan--the murdered adolescent factory worker at the heart of the historical tragedy that underpins my novel.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Ooh, I love this question! Well, first, I did a ton of research for this novel, so the cumulative time I spent in the archives of various museums in Georgia or skimming through historical issues of the Atlanta Constitution or reading issues of the popular weekly Collier’s pretty much created the novel. I really do feel like this novel hatched from the research I did.

But in addition to the research, I watched several movies to try to enhance my visual writing and to immerse myself in the intensity and urgency of adolescent girl friendships. The Turkish film Mustang (2010), for example, was very meaningful to me during this time. I see it as a more internal, more intimate Turkish answer to The Virgin Suicides. The films Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), and especially Heavenly Creatures (1994) were also on repeat while I was drafting my novel too. The fervor of the fantasy world that the protagonists of Heavenly Creatures conjure made me giddy with desire to write!

Visit Maggie Nye's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Curators.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Copenhaver

John Copenhaver’s historical crime novel, Dodging and Burning, won the 2019 Macavity Award for Best First Mystery. His second novel, The Savage Kind, won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Mystery. He cohosts on the House of Mystery Radio Show, is the six-time recipient of Artist Fellowships from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and for years, wrote a crime fiction review column for Lambda Literary called “Blacklight.”

Copenhaver teaches fiction writing and literature at Virginia Commonwealth University and is a faculty mentor in the University of Nebraska’s Low-Residency MFA program.

His new novel is Hall of Mirrors.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Images often make great titles. Before I began outlining the story, I knew I would call the novel Hall of Mirrors because it’s evocative, and I like the metaphorical image it conjured in the reader’s mind. It’s about doubles and identity. My bad girl/good teen duo, Judy and Philippa, from the first book, The Savage Kind, return, but now it’s 1954, and Washington, DC, is fully consumed with post-WWII paranoia.

Enter Lionel and Roger, who serve as foils for Judy and Philippa. They are a mixed-race gay couple who write under the pseudonym of Ray Kane, a hardboiled, straight mystery author persona, one of the girls’ favorite authors. After Roger is fired from his day job at the State Department for being gay, which was part of an actual initiative carried out by the federal government called the Lavender Scare, he dies in a suspicious fire. The cops deem it a suicide, but Lionel suspects foul play.

Both Judy and Philippa and Roger and Lionel represent mixed-race same-sex couples, so they serve as reflections of one another. But like any funhouse hall of mirrors, there’s distortion. Are they who they seem? Are there good and bad reasons for deceiving others about your identity?

Mirror images and doubles are also a trope in classic film noir. I reference the final scene from The Lady from Shanghai because it was an incredible funhouse sequence with mirrors and doubles and shattering glass that informed my story; it’s the most noir thing you can imagine, visually speaking. Also, there’s some subtext: Rita Hayworth was forced to whitewash what Columbia Pictures head Henry Cohn called her “Mediterranean” look for the American audience, and then Orson Welles made her a blonde in the film. So, Hayworth herself was wearing a kind of disguise.

What's in a name?

In The Savage Kind, Judy Nightingale began as Judy X in an orphanage, and then Judy Peabody. Peabody is her adoptive parent’s last name. The Peabodys mistreat her, so when she turns eighteen, she selects her own name, Nightingale, because, as she remarks to herself, “a Nightingale is a bird that sings at night, a symbol of beauty despite the darkness.” I named her Judy—or Judith—as a nod to the deuterocanonical Book of Judith, in which Judith seduces and beheads Holofernes to save her home, the city of Bethulia. She’s powerful, self-possessed, and not afraid of violence like my character.

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

Teenage-me wouldn’t be surprised about the love of the historical period or the mystery/thriller plot. I was a huge Christie fan and devoured Patricia Cornwell's novels. You can see both writers in my book–I have a puzzle mystery and a serial killer! However, I would’ve been shocked about my openly gay characters. It wasn’t easy to be out in the 1990s in high school in rural Virginia, and I wasn’t.

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

Beginnings. Absolutely. Because so much has to be set up. You must establish the reader’s bond with your characters, lay down the appropriate threads of the mystery plot, capture the reader’s attention, and propel the story forward. All this requires lots of editing. However, the opening scene of Hall of Mirrors, with Lionel staring up at his burning apartment, trying to process the weight of what’s happening, has remained largely intact from early drafts.

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

Oh, yes. Parts of me are in all my primary characters, but none of my characters are me. I’m a Gemini, so (surprise!) I like to explore duality in my characterization. Judy and Philippa contrast with each other, and so do Lionel and Roger, and then the couples also contrast each other. The friction between what is considered socially proper versus what’s morally right is a consistent theme in my work and my life. Everything is about contrasts and the questions that arise from contrasts.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I’m a big film buff if that wasn’t already apparent. I’m also a collector of film scores. I’ve been collecting them since high school and own thousands. For this reason, I write cinematically, not because I’m attempting to, but because that’s how my imagination is structured. I want to create a fully immersive experience for my reader with all the mood and detail of a lush film noir.

Visit John Copenhaver's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Savage Kind.

My Book, The Movie: The Savage Kind.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathleen Bryant

Kathleen Bryant inherited a love of travel from her parents, who bundled her up for her first road trip when she was only six months old. Originally a Midwestern farm girl, she’s spent the past decades thawing out in the West, hiking its deserts and mountains, bouncing along backcountry roads, and sometimes lending a hand at archaeological sites. After writing numerous travel guides and magazine articles about Sedona, Grand Canyon, and the Four Corners, she’s returned to her first love, writing novels. Today, Bryant lives with her musician husband in California, where she continues to seek out new adventures, finding them on hiking trails, at farmers markets, and in the pages of a good book.

Bryant's new novel is Over the Edge.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I chose Over the Edge as my working title because it reflected the story’s trigger incident and emotional theme.

The book opens with Jeep guide Del Cooper’s discovery of a body lying on a canyon ledge, someone who’s literally fallen over the edge. Or so it seems.

As for Del, she’s been figuratively over the edge. Three years earlier, she was a crime reporter who made an error in judgment that killed a cop. She started drinking, lost her job, and even now, after pulling herself back from the abyss, she struggles to hold it together. She has unexplained visions that might be clues to the murder… or signals she’s still poised at the knife edge of normalcy.

What's in a name?

Sedona--the name is sibilant, mysterious, even seductive. People fascinated by its energy vortexes point out Sedona is a palindrome for “anodes.” Others suggest a connection to the Inuit sea goddess Sedna. The truth is more prosaic, but still charming: Sedona was the wife of Theodore Schnebly, the town’s first postmaster.

It’s easy to be dazzled by Sedona’s gorgeous scenery or caught up in its busy tourist center and yet, a raven’s flight away, the surrounding canyons are steeped in history and intrigue.

Lee Canyon—a fictional locale—is part of a proposed multimillion-dollar land trade, a trade that might be motive for murder. It’s a composite of actual places, filled in with my imagination. A failing ranch and abandoned film set. A thousand-year-old cliff dwelling. A secret trail. Places like these—far from the usual tourist track—are what gives Sedona its magic.

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

As a young reader, my favorite books were Call of the Wild, Night of the Grizzlies, and a Crazy Horse biography. I’d read every Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, and Hardy Boys mystery by the time I reached my teens, when I started devouring gothic romances. Presented with Over the Edge—an outdoorsy mystery set in the West, with a hint of romance and peril for the female lead—my teen self might say, “Huh. So I didn’t go to med school after all?”

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

Beginnings are easy, and I change them the most. Endings are harder. Though I usually know exactly how I want the book to end, I’m more pantser than plotter. I need to feel my way through a story, give my characters some room, and not think too linearly until the final shaping, when I put on my editor hat.

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

Over the Edge is Jeep guide Del Cooper’s story. Her coworkers at Blue Sky Expeditions make up an ensemble cast of nature lovers, science geeks, history buffs, and a radio dispatcher who’s dialed into Sedona’s metaphysical community. Though wary of making connections, Del eventually realizes “these are my people.” They’re mine, too. I identify with their enthusiasm and curiosity, and they represent facets of my own Sedona experiences.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Next to reading, nature is my biggest inspiration. I grew up on a farm, where observing the natural world was a given. I’m also a longtime yoga practitioner, and the foundation of yoga is observation—noticing or perceiving through close attention. Observation can be a valuable writing tool, but more than that, it’s an invaluable living tool.

Visit Kathleen Bryant's website.

My Book, The Movie: Over the Edge.

--Marshal Zeringue

Deborah Batterman

Deborah Batterman is the author of Just Like February, a finalist in the 2019 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, 2018 Best Book Awards, International Fiction Awards, and American Fiction Awards. A story from her collection, Shoes Hair Nails, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2012 she published Because My Name Is Mother, a chapbook of essays linked by the reminder that every mother is a daughter, too.

My Q&A with the author:

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

When I read a novel with an intriguing title — and I think that can be said about Just Like February — I always look to that aha! moment when its meaning is revealed. Jake is a Leap Year baby, which gives him a unique perspective in terms of the passage of time, not to mention what becomes the central metaphor of the novel, revealed maybe halfway into it. There’s a fascinating history to how the calendar evolved. Politics and religion played their part in determining the length of months and marking important days in a way that might still be in sync with astronomy. All of which got me thinking that for all the scientific accuracy we have, randomness plays its part in our lives. Just like February.

What's in a name?

More often than not the names of characters just come to me. As a character surfaces in my mind, I form a picture of her or him and I start to play with different names. I’ve known more than one Rachel over the years (it’s a popular Jewish name) and I like the sound of it, which seemed to suit the narrator well. Haven’t you ever had the experience of telling someone they do or don’t look like their name? The name Jake popped into my head in the same way. Jake is actually derived from Jacob, a more traditionally Jewish name. And Jake is anything but traditional.

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

My teenage self, an avid reader, probably sensed I would one day write a novel.

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

Your question calls to mind a quote attributed to E.L. Doctorow: “Writing is like driving a car at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” The point being that for me beginnings, when they’re right, take me down a road that almost always leads to one possible ending. I love beginnings — I love the openness of the places a sentence or a paragraph can take me. To answer your question more directly, in my short stories, beginnings almost never change. In a novel, sections might get shifted for a stronger narrative arc.

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 certain themes keep arising in a writer’s stories—in my case it’s family relationships and particularly the mother/child bond. As a mother, I can’t help but see at least a little of myself in my fictional mothers.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music plays a big part in my writing. Songs are often referenced but more important is the part I think rhythm plays in what I think of as narrative pulse. It’s what so often drives the story. I watch movies a lot and they influence me in terms of framing scenes. News stories also find their way into what I write largely as a way of placing the reader in a particular time.

Learn more about the book and author at Deborah Batterman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Just Like February.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alyssa Palombo

Alyssa Palombo's novels include The Violinist of Venice, The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence, The Spellbook of Katrina Van Tassel, and The Borgia Confessions, as well as the contemporary novel Heavy Metal Symphony, published as A.K. Palombo. Born and raised in Buffalo, NY, she graduated from Canisius College with degrees in English and creative writing and now works as a marketing copywriter for a software company. When not writing, she enjoys reading, traveling, spending time with her dog, planning for next Halloween, listening to music and going to concerts, and adding to her record collection.

Palombo's new novel is The Assassin of Venice.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The Assassin of Venice definitely lets readers know what to expect and what sort of story this is going to be. I think it communicates that the book is going to be a high-stakes thriller in a beautiful and interesting setting. Or that is certainly my hope!

What's in a name?

I don't always have a choice, as sometimes I write about real historical figures, and so in that case I already have their names. But when I do get to choose, my main characters' names have to feel like them. Before I start writing I daydream about the characters for a while, think through a few scenes, and try to get a feel for who they are and what type of person they are. Then I find a name that fits them. This is an extremely unscientific process and I don't know as I can describe it any better, haha. In the case of The Assassin of Venice, Valentina's name is actually a nod to Cesare Borgia, who I wrote about in my last historical novel, The Borgia Confessions - he was at one point the Cardinal of Valencia and later given the French title Duke of Valentinois, so Italian speakers went from calling him Cardinal Valentino to Duke Valentino. I had so much fun writing a villainous character in Cesare Borgia that that is part of what prompted me to write The Assassin of Venice, even if Valentina turned out to be less villainous and more...morally flexible, shall we say. And the name of Valentina certainly fit her - there's something assertive about the sound of it, I think. And Valentina is certainly assertive - that's putting it mildly!

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

Honestly? I don't think she would be. The Assassin of Venice is exactly the kind of book teenage Alyssa imagined herself writing when she first decided to write historical fiction: some romance, some intrigue, some danger, and of course, a badass female heroine, and it's also just the kind of book she loved to read! This book challenged me in multiple ways, so teenage Alyssa's writing skills definitely had to do some leveling up to get to this point!

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

As a general rule, I find beginnings more difficult than endings. I think this is because I always begin with the end in mind, and I almost always know the ending when I start writing: not just the plot climax and resolution, but the exact scene I want to end on and the chord I want it to strike in the reader. The last few lines were actually the very first things I wrote for both The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence and The Borgia Confessions. Of all my published works, none of the endings have changed from the first draft, beyond perhaps some minor tweaking of wording. I find beginnings harder to put my finger on: sometimes I start the story in the wrong place and have to go back and redo it, and I feel like I tend to struggle with making the openings really dynamic, something that grabs the reader right away.

With all that said, The Assassin of Venice was the complete opposite. It has what is probably my best first line ever (I've always wished I was good at snappy first lines, and I came up with a good one here) and I feel the first two chapters are my best first two chapters ever, if not some of my best writing yet. (We'll see if readers agree, of course!). And then, by contrast, I struggled with finding the right note to end this book on - I knew all along how the plot would resolve, but that very last scene gave me some trouble. I'm not sure why this was the case, except that all books are different to write!

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

Of all my main characters, Valentina is one of the ones who is most different from myself. They all have at least a piece of me in them, because for me personally I have to find some connection with a main character to be able to write in their voice. With Valentina, it's that she is fiercely loyal to her friends and loved ones, which is a trait I share. Other than that, we're quite different - we certainly solve our problems in very different ways! With that said, I had so much fun writing Valentina precisely because she's so different from me, and different from any other character I've written so far. It gave me an opportunity to try something new, to stretch my skills as a writer, and have fun stepping into a life that's nothing like mine.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Oh, I love this question. While I'm always inspired by the work of fellow authors, I often feel that my biggest influences are in fact other forms of media. Music is definitely the biggest one for me; it's one of my very favorite things in the world. I make playlists for all of my books that I build and refine while I'm working on a project, and I've utterly lost count of the times that I've gotten the idea for a certain plot point or bit of characterization from a song. In fact, the song "What Have You Done" by Within Temptation was one of the first seeds of inspiration for The Assassin of Venice.

Other than music, I'd also have to say that one of my biggest influences as an artist has been Tim Burton's work. The aesthetic of his films, certainly, but also the way that he tells darker stories or stories with dark elements, yet always with some light and hope in there as well. Dark but never bleak. That approach has had a big impact on me.

Visit Alyssa Palombo's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Violinist of Venice.

The Page 69 Test: The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence.

My Book, The Movie: The Spellbook of Katrina Van Tassel.

My Book, The Movie: The Borgia Confessions.

--Marshal Zeringue