Rachel Kadish is the award-winning author of the novels From a Sealed Room and Tolstoy Lied: a Love Story, as well as the novella I Was Here.Her latest novel is The Weight of Ink.
From Kadish's Q&A at ArtSake:
Can you talk about what sparked The Weight of Ink? And what has been its journey since that initial spark?Visit Rachel Kadish's official website.
I often start writing when something is troubling me and I can’t work out why. There are things I come to understand only through writing fiction: stepping into the fray with a set of characters and living the problem alongside them for enough pages to see it through. Years back, there were a few things troubling me, and one of them was that question posed by Olive Schreiner and then later and more famously by Virginia Woolf: what if Shakespeare had had an equally talented sister? What would her fate have been?
Woolf’s succinct answer – she died without writing a word – haunted me. I kept asking myself: what would it have taken for a woman of that era with a capacious intelligence not to die without writing a word?
And what if such a woman were further hampered by being poor… and perhaps a member of a religious minority…what would it have taken then?
For one thing, she would have to be a genius at breaking rules.
It took me...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: Tolstoy Lied.
My Book, The Movie: The Weight of Ink.
Writers Read: Rachel Kadish.
The Page 69 Test: The Weight of Ink.
--Marshal Zeringue