I.S. Berry

I.S. Berry spent six years as an operations officer for the CIA, serving in wartime Baghdad and elsewhere. She has lived and worked throughout Europe and the Middle East, including two years in Bahrain during the Arab Spring. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law and Haverford College. Raised in the suburbs of Washington, DC, she lives in Virginia with her husband and son.

Berry's new novel is The Peacock and the Sparrow.

My Q&A with the author:

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

A fair amount. I’m partial to titles with literary references, like For Whom the Bell Tolls or Tender is the Night—titles with layers of meaning that prompt the reader to think or do a bit of research. And I lean toward the poetic and oblique more than the literal and straightforward. Darkness at Noon, a reference to Stalin’s searing power juxtaposed against its black consequences, is one of my favorites.

My novel actually began with a different name, but another author happened to publish a book along the way with the same title! Luckily, I had a backup, which I ended up liking more than my original. The Peacock and the Sparrow is a reference to a parable in 1001 Arabian Nights: a sparrow ignores a peacock’s warning, strays from his path, and gets caught in a net. It’s about the futility of trying to outrun your destiny—one of my book’s themes—but there’s another, hidden meaning that readers won’t discover until the end.

My title doesn’t scream “spy novel,” but I do think it hints at an interesting, perhaps contentious, relationship between two people or sides.

An unexpected bonus: I’ve come to realize how many illustrious books have birds in their titles. To Kill a Mockingbird, The Falcon and the Snowman, Red Sparrow…

What's in a name?

A lot. The most interesting name in my book, perhaps, is one I never reveal. Shane Collins, my protagonist, refers to his love interest as simply “Almaisa,” which he borrows from a portrait of the same name by artist Amedeo Modigliani. The character Almaisa is enigmatic and inscrutable, and I deliberately wanted her name (or lack thereof) to reflect this. Collins, looking back, observes, “It’s an apt moniker, I’ve come to believe, a name borrowed from a painting. Because she was, in many ways, the brushstrokes of my imagination: facets of her person, her self, that did not bridge the gap between reverie and reality, that were formed solely from my expectations and interpretations and reflections, my inner artist’s eye.”

Another character, the Admiral, commander of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, never gets a name. For me, he was a symbol of American military might, not a specific person.

Shane Collins’ name reflects his background: Irish ancestry, a childhood in a rough immigrant neighborhood. And CIA station chief Whitney Alden Mitchell’s middle name is a reference to Alden Pyle, the young spy in The Quiet American who represents American optimism, arrogance, and naivete.

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

Moderately surprised. I read a ton of classics and literary fiction in my youth. I was inspired by personal journeys like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or On the Road (though I did have a soft spot for dark authors like Poe, Nabokov, Dostoevsky). I tried my hand at writing a novel several times, mostly stories of young women trying to find their way in the world or the “great American novel,” whatever that meant. I didn’t predict I’d someday write about a middle-aged, washed up, alcoholic male spy engaged in international espionage. Then again, I knew the stories I was attempting to write weren’t quite right for me. And I did anticipate that life experience would eventually inform my writing. When I became a spy for the CIA and lived in the Middle East, I finally had the right raw material. (And I’ve come to firmly believe that the terms “literary fiction” and “spy novel” aren’t mutually exclusive.)

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

I found the ending and beginning of my novel about equally easy to write. I’d mapped out my book’s ending in my mind when I started writing, even the exact scene. The Peacock and the Sparrow is such a twisting, complex journey, I knew the ending would have to do justice to the story and leave readers satisfied and legitimately surprised. So this dictated a fairly specific finale. Also, when you fully  develop a character, his/her ending writes itself. Once I knew who Shane Collins was, his destiny became obvious.

On the other hand, the first sentence of my book also came naturally to me; I never changed it. The first line tells the reader that Collins hates the smell of his informant’s cigarettes—but at a pivotal point in the story, this changes; Collins goes so far as to buy his informant a pack of smokes. So those first words hold great weight and ripple through the pages.

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

On the surface, my protagonist, Shane Collins, and I have nothing in common. He’s a jaded, divorced, cantankerous alcoholic man. But in writing, I realized how much we shared: weariness from the profession of spying; a sense of being battered and worn down from years of manipulating; an anguish from past decisions; a realization that ends don’t always justify means. The beauty of writing (and reading), in my view, is that you find connections to characters and people in unexpected, transcendent ways.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

International relations and politics definitely influence my writing. Living in Bahrain for two years during the Arab Spring sparked the idea for The Peacock and the Sparrow. My book also incorporates real-life events like the 2012 Adliya bombings in Manama or the 2011 assassination attempt against the Saudi ambassador in Washington, DC. And my travels inspire me: the uniqueness of each place—its local perfumes, the tint of its sunsets—becomes fertile soil for my writing.

Noirish and gritty but beautiful films like The Third Man or the Babylon Berlin series probably rattle around my subconscious when I’m envisioning and writing certain scenes. Clearly, art too influences me; I named my central female character after a painting! (Side note: after writing my book, I came across the real Almaisa painting in a museum in Vienna, Austria; no pictures were allowed, but I couldn’t resist snapping one… I’d written an entire character based on this painting!)

Leonard Cohen songs played in my head while writing The Peacock and the Sparrow. Cohen’s lyrics and melodies are so haunting and dark. The narrator I chose for my audiobook sounds like Cohen as well. It was a moment of serendipity: when I heard his voice, I knew he was the one.

Visit I.S. Berry's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jasmin Iolani Hakes

Jasmin Iolani Hakes was born and raised in Hilo, Hawai'i. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the Sacramento Bee. She is the recipient of the Best Fiction award from the Southern California Writers Conference, a Squaw Valley LoJo Foundation Scholarship, a Writing by Writers Emerging Voices fellowship, and a Hedgebrook residency. Dance has always been central to Jasmin's life and creativity. She took her first hula class when she was four years old and danced for the esteemed Halau o Kekuhi and the Tahitian troupe Hei Tiare. She worked throughout college as a professional luau dancer. She lives in California.

Hula is her first novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

There was never a question of what the title was going to be for this book. Ancient Hawaiʻi was an oral culture full of epic poetry and performative arts. Hula and chants were ways to pass down the histories and explanations of various people, gods and goddesses, geological happenings like volcanic eruptions and valleys chronically full of mist, of flora and fauna, and of other ancient practices. I wanted to write a story about my hometown of Hilo that somehow captured the complexities of contemporary Hawaiʻi, its subtle cultural nuances, and present it in all its layered glory. So in that way, Hula is not a book about hula, it is a hula, in literary form. The word Hilo means to braid, so I laid out the book in verses and weaved the stories together to present a Hawaiʻi that not a lot of people might be familiar with.

What's in a name?

I struggled with names. I wanted local names, ones that felt true to me, but I also wanted to steer clear of overused Hawaiian names or ones people would struggle to read and visualize. In the end, I tied each of the main characters to Hawaiian mythology. Hiʻi is short for Hiʻiakaikapoliopele, younger sister of Pele and patron goddess of hula, chant, and medicine. Her mother Laka pays tribute to the goddess Laka, the goddess of forest growth and hula, in that Laka is said to be the inspiration and origin of a dancer’s movement. The word Hulali means a shining surface or a reflector of light. Her grandmother Ulu is names after ʻulu the breadfruit, which in Hawaiʻi is a symbol of resilience and security.

It is from Ulu that Hulali inherits the mission of her life, the cultural stories kept safe and hidden from years of missionaries and commercial exploitation. Hulali must reflect and shine a light on those stories and life ways, Laka must keep it alive by embodying the physicality of hula itself, and so on.

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

Enormously surprised. During my senior year of high school I went to school in the mornings and worked as a book shelver at the Hilo Public Library in the afternoons. I usually figured out a way to shelve all my books in under thirty minutes, leaving the rest of my shift open to hide from the librarians and read. I read indiscriminately, but there was always a part of me that longed for a book that reflected the world I lived in, full of island concerns and challenges, people who spoke and thought like me, and set in my hometown. I was used to people only talking about Honolulu or Maui, and when Hawaii was ever depicted in the media, it was never representative of Hilo.

In many ways I wrote this for my teenage self. I think she would have loved it!

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

Even with years of editing, the beginning of Hula is more or less exactly as it was from the very first draft. What felt impossible was the ending. The historical milestones that are covered in the story are still unresolved for the most part – we still have a sovereignty movement fighting for self determination and international acknowledgment that America is illegally occupying the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, we still have the definition of a Hawaiian being laid out by America that is subtractive and requiring of a blood quantum minimum for land, we still have land being leased for enormous profit without the permission of Native Hawaiians – so when I was drawing near to the ending when writing the first draft I was loathe to artificially tie up all the loose ends in a way that is satisfying and expected of fictional stories.

In general, I think endings are harder for me because I write with an idea and then see where it leads me. I have found it is rarely where I think I’ll end up. So I find myself writing to find out what happens next.

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

Hiʻi, Laka, and Hulali represent different generations, and that was done very deliberately. Our opinions are so influenced by our context – what is happening in the news, what is going on with our parents and community as we’re growing up – and this story introduces you to the evolution of both the Hawaiian sovereignty movement as well as its cultural renaissance. What I wanted was for a reader to see the hows and whys of what led us to the Hawaii of today.

So there was always that to consider, but primarily I would say that I approached these women, their characteristics, their strengths and flaws and mannerisms, very much in relation to each other. Who they were as mothers and daughters revealed nearly everything you needed to know about them. And that was definitely something I connected to personally. I was raised by my mother and was always surrounded by aunties. I had a strong, very smart grandmother. In my memories, it was the women running the show. The stories I was told when I was little more often than not featured a female ancestor who was very much her own person. That subconsciously trickled into the way I approached raising my daughters when they were little. My sometimes challenging relationship with my mother also played a role.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Hula, certainly. I started dancing when I was very little, and that form of storytelling stuck with me. So when I wrote Hula the book, I wrote very much by ear, relying on cadence and rhythm to show me the way forward. The sway of the islands and the sing song of pidgin also very much inspired the story’s musicality – I wanted a reader to feel like they were experiencing the pace and feel of my hometown while they were getting to know it through the Naupakas.

Visit Jasmin Iolani's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Samantha Jayne Allen

Samantha Jayne Allen is the author of the Annie McIntyre Mysteries. She has an MFA in fiction from Texas State University, and her writing has been published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, The Common, and Electric Literature.

The new Annie McIntyre Mystery is Hard Rain.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Hard Rain works on multiple levels. On a purely marketing level, the sound of it is punchy and dark, communicating to readers that this is a gritty crime novel. The story begins with a devastating flood in which a woman nearly drowns and is rescued by a mysterious stranger. The woman hires Annie, a rookie PI, to find the man who saved her, and after a different victim—shot dead, not drowned—turns up, Annie wonders if the hero she seeks is actually a killer. So, the title works on a literal level as reference to the flood, but also on a thematic level; there's nothing—no person, no place—in this small Texas community that wasn't touched by the devastation, and Annie, too, must now reckon with her conflicting feelings of agency and powerlessness. I also chose the title as a reference to the Bob Dylan song, "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." The mysterious stranger is a blue-eyed wanderer, and Annie's search for him will take her to bear witness to all variety of troubles.

What's in a name?

Annie McIntyre is a name I chose when I wrote my debut novel, Pay Dirt Road, before I knew it would be a series, but was hoping — I wanted to pick something that emphasized that she was a person you want to know and stick with. Annie is a name I think is strong, classic, but also warm. It was the name of my family's favorite dog growing up, a collie who was sensitive, intelligent, and fiercely loyal, qualities my main character shares. McIntyre I liked simply because it has a ring to it, a snap in that "mack" sound.

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

My teenage self would be delighted more than she'd be surprised, I think. I've always wanted to be a writer, and when I was a teenager I was obsessed with writing (bad) poetry about storms, both literal and metaphorical. I can see now that something along the lines of Hard Rain has been brewing for a while! I also loved reading mysteries as a teenager, and was always very into the strong female investigator—Kinsey Millhone, Deborah Knott, and before them, Nancy Drew and Miss Marple.

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

I think that the beginning is harder to write than the ending, and I usually rewrite it many times. For me, if the ending seems wrong, it's because it hasn't been set up correctly, which is therefore actually a problem with the beginning. Once I have the opening, when I know what this story is truly about, I gain a sense of momentum and the rest clicks into place. A good ending to any book, but particularly a mystery, I believe, is one that it feels surprising but inevitable. Mine are character-driven mysteries, and so I hope that my endings feel earned, and that the reader has gone on a journey in lockstep with Annie.

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

I was raised in small towns in Texas and in California, so my worldview is similar to Annie's, and my experiences having lived in a place like Garnett, TX are infused throughout. Annie's a romantic, like me, and is at times ambivalent toward this place and the people in it—a bittersweetness, a nostalgia for something I'm not sure ever truly existed.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music certainly has influenced my writing, as in the aforementioned Dylan, also classic country music, specifically western frontier ballads like those of Marty Robbins. I also am influenced by environmental issues. In Pay Dirt Road I wrote about eminent domain in relation to the oil and gas industry in Texas, and in Hard Rain, I was inspired by studies showing that flooding in Central Texas is being exacerbated by rapid urbanization and climate change. I wanted to explore the juxtaposition between what we see as acts of God—rainfall—and what troubles we've brought upon ourselves.

Follow Samantha Jayne Allen on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allison L. Bitz

Allison L. Bitz hails from Lincoln, NE, where she lives with her spouse and two kids. Her superpower is empathy, and she’s been known to have resting tell-me-your-life-story face. Bitz holds a PhD in Counseling Psychology and has worked as a licensed psychologist since 2012. When she’s not working on a novel or counseling, Bitz is more than likely writing a song, getting riled up about something political, or trying to track down a pastry to enjoy with her coffee. She has a soft spot for rescue animals, which are vying for species majority in her home (two perfect dogs, two ornery cats). The Unstoppable Bridget Bloom is her debut novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The journey to Bridget’s title was, as is the case with many contemporary books—well, a journey. This book’s original working title was Fish Out of Water¸ which is clearly much vaguer than where I landed and pretty reflective of me being new to the world of publishing. The next title, and the one it was acquired under, was In the Key of B, which I still think is clever, but my marketing and sales team at HarperCollins wanted a title that was less music focused (though this book is very music-y!), more inclusive. The Unstoppable Bridget Bloom is far and away my favorite title this book has had, and that is partially because it absolutely does a lot of work on behalf of the story. Right away, between the title and the cover, we get a peek into Bridget’s personality and goal, and I love that.

What's in a name?

I have always really loved the name Bridget, and as this character started to form in my mind she felt like a Bridget to me. I tend to like alliteration, so Bloom as her last name came easily—I love the way Bridget Bloom rolls off the tongue. Bridget’s best friend Liza is named for Liza Minnelli (by me and that’s how she’s named by her Broadway star mother in story canon!). The academy Bridget attends, Richard James, is named for both of my grandfathers (who both happened to be named Richard) and for my spouse (James). One of the love interests, Duke, was jokingly named by my critique partner, and then I kept the name. When it comes to naming characters, sometimes I think long and hard and go for a deeper meaning or names that have sentimental value for me. And other times, I go with something that sounds good, no meaning attached. (And this process is very reflective of me as a person—half very serious, half whimsical).

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

My teenage self would be not at all surprised that I did write a book—I was always a writer—but I think she’d be surprised by the content of this book. Bridget is a fat teen who lives comfortably and unapologetically in her body. I was also a fat teen, but always with the worry I was taking up too much space, both physically and emotionally. I wrote Bridget into the body my high school self wore for precisely this reason—a love letter to my past self and a battle cry to contemporary teens. This isn’t a story about weight loss or shrinking in any way, this is a fat teen living her life, failing and falling in love, beautiful, graceful, talented just the way she is. I think my teen self would have been equally shocked and gratified to read a character like this, and to see how far her future self had come in loving all versions of herself, no matter what size her body happened to be at that moment.

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

I love beginnings, and writing Bridget was no exception. It was a joy to introduce readers to her larger-than-life personality and voice, to make people laugh right away with how out of touch she can be. (The reader can see right off the bat that she’s often an unreliable narrator!) Hilariously, I almost always start my stories in the wrong place, so Chapter 1 in this book was my seventh version! Endings are harder for me, both in writing and in life; however, they are extremely satisfying when done right. I always knew how Bridget needed to grow by the end of the book, but nailing the exact scene and pacing of that was a challenge that also took a few tries. As it is, I do think Bridget ends on a note of growth, hope, and happiness.

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

My characters always have at least a little bit of me in them—after all, they come from me! When she read Bridget, my grandma thought Bridget was me, so this is my big chance to go on record saying: no! No, she absolutely is not! What Bridget and I share is a love of music that runs so deep we would pursue it as a career (I was heavily involved in music as a teen and a music minor for a time in college), naturally curly hair, and feeling out of place in our rural hometowns. Where we diverge is basically everything else. I gave Max my love of Queen and Freddie Mercury. I gave Duke the easy charm that I’d always wished I had. To Liza, I gave my affinity for wearing black. The roommate dilemma between Bridget and Ruby was heavily inspired by what transpired between myself and my college roommate.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

This book is very, very musical. In fact, I think there’s at least some reference to music in every chapter. Broadway standards, pop classics, and classical music are all represented here and influenced the way I saw and wrote the book. I even wrote sheet music for this book—there are two original songs, written by me, in the back of this book! (Also, I have a Spotify playlist of every song that’s in The Unstoppable Bridget Bloom. Come find it on my Spotify account if you’d like to listen along.) The TV show Glee and also the movie/musical Legally Blonde both impacted how I wrote the book, as did my original inspiration, The Little Mermaid (in which a girl loses her voice in exchange for a new home and chance at love). The political landscape is always a part of my head and writing, and you’ll see those influences sneaking out at times, here and in everything I put to page.

Visit Allison L. Bitz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Cypher

Sarah Cypher is the author of The Skin and Its Girl (Ballantine 2023) and holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she was a Rona Jaffe Creative Writing Fellow in Fiction. She grew up in a Lebanese Christian family near Pittsburgh and lives in Washington, D.C., with her wife.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I love titles that create a syntactical hiccup. For instance, there's Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties and Andrea Lawlor's Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. The title for The Skin and Its Girl came very late, but I warmed up to it as I thought about all the ways that the various members of my fictional Rummani family struggle with identities determined by the bodies they're in.

I wanted to know, what determines agency: the body or the person? What is the tension between these alternatives? There's Betty with her cobalt-blue skin, Nuha and Saeeda as aging Palestinian women in post-9/11 wartime America, Nuha with her body's queer desires, and Betty's father with his missing hand and scarred arm.

Readers will see the hospital staff reacting to Betty's newly blue skin in the first scene, so there is an early connection to the title. Of course, as the story unfolds, the title takes on new layers, gathering toward a late twist. This novel is an unconventional narrative--stories wrapped in stories--and it deserved a title that hinted at its strangeness.

What's in a name?

So much! My narrator, Betty Rummani, is born into a family with a storied history in the ancient Nabulsi soap-making trade. Rummani means pomegranate in Arabic, and as Betty narrates when reminiscing about difficult love affairs, "We come from an old and thorny shrub...so dense that to wade into it is to be blessed only with scratches and blood." This says a lot about many of my characters' personalities.

Betty's given name is Elspeth, which is a diminutive of "Elizabeth," and connects to the family's blue-skinned ancestor, Alissabat. The Rummanis are Orthodox Christians, so the name has some resonance there. Moreover, though, Betty's mother tends to make things difficult for her traditionalist relatives--here by choosing this difficult-to-pronounce name. She's dubbed Betty by her great-aunt Nuha, the family's storyteller and matriarch, and the name sticks.

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

Shocked, I tell you. The Skin and Its Girl is so queer! I grew up in a small, conservative, steel-mill town in Western Pennsylvania in the 1980s and '90s. I didn't know anyone who was gay, did not have language for imagining a life in which I'd be as happily married (to a woman) as I am now, and certainly didn't see myself represented in the books that were available to read.

Yet perhaps my teenage self would connect with this novel deeply anyway, as it is so concerned with the experience of being a misfit.

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

I find beginnings much easier, just as it's easy to walk up to a gong and hit it. It's easy to say something that calls attention to itself.

Also, beginnings are wonderfully sensitive to small changes: when I'm writing a novel, I'm aiming at a point very far off on the horizon, so I find myself making frequent, minute adjustments to the opening lines. That trajectory is powerful, holding in itself a whole world, and it's a source of excitement to me.

Joan Didion famously said in a Paris Review interview, "Everything else is going to flow out of that [first] sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone. ... The minute you start putting words on paper you’re eliminating possibilities." Hence, by the time I get to a novel's ending, I only have a few possibilities, and in the case of The Skin and Its Girl, those options did not feel very malleable.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

In almost every writing group I've participated in, my work gets flak for being too ornate--certainly much more formal-sounding than I speak. My family took me to church for a lot of my childhood, and the Orthodox liturgy is quite beautiful; it's chanted, and even in English, it has a very grandiose, formal register. It's impossible to get that golden, transcendent sound out of my bones when I sit down to my writing, which is, in many ways, my only religious practice.

As for the content of what I write, I have an absurdist imagination that came from being a weirdo nerd in anti-intellectual spaces, growing up. It's fun to shoot this irreverence through the formal registers that I mentioned--mixing high and low, subverting what I can.

In my new project, I am exploring nonhuman ecosystems, wild spaces, suicide, and wildlife photography, which sounds like a mishmash, but it comes out of how I spent time during the early part of the pandemic and the sort of thinking I did about humanity in those years. I think the common thread with my past work is that I'm always trying to see how far the novel's form will stretch, even to the limits of human language.

Visit Sarah Cypher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Trish Esden

Trish Esden loves museums, gardens, wilderness, dogs and birds, in various order depending on the day. She lives in Northern Vermont where she deals antiques with her husband, a profession she’s been involved with since her teens. Don’t ask what her favorite type of antique is. She loves hunting down old bottles and rusty barn junk as much as she enjoys fine art and furnishings.

Esden's new novel is A Wealth of Deception.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The title of A Wealth of Deception pulls a lot of weight as far as telling readers what to expect from the book. For one thing, it’s the second novel in the Scandal Mountain Antiques Mystery series. As such, the title has a similar word structure and physical appearance to the title of the previous book in the series, The Art of the Decoy. Along with the series title and dark tone of the cover image, A Wealth of Deception’s title is intended to tell readers that the book is a traditional mystery with a slightly ominous tone and a rural setting. The word ‘deception’ hints at the crime which a reader can expect to encounter. ‘Wealth’ is a word that has more than one meaning—and all apply in this case. In truth, the title is intended as a word puzzle for the reader to untangle as they read the novel and solve the story’s central mystery.

What's in a name?

My husband doesn’t read my novels while I’m working on them or even afterwards, but he does help me brainstorm sometimes. When I told him I needed an old fashion New England name for a twenty-something character that was smart and strong-willed, he immediately suggested Edie Brown, the name of his very independent and down-to-earth grandmother. As soon as he said it, I knew the name was perfect for the character.

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

Teenage me wouldn’t be shocked in the least. Well, maybe she might be surprised that the romance in the novel doesn’t play a larger role. In my teens, I was reading gothic romance novels and writing them in my room at night by candlelight. I also first started buying and selling antiques in my teens (a business that I now do fulltime). Antiques, art, and writing have always played a large part in my life.

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

I actually write the beginning and the end of novels at the same time, and any changes I make to one is immediately reflected by revisions to the other. Let me explain, one of the things that makes a novel feel satisfying to me is when the end mirrors the beginning in one or more ways—setting, tone, emotion, repeated words, or images…. At the same time, the end needs to show how the main character has changed due to the events she’s been through. A Wealth of Deception is my eighth traditionally published novel and I’ve used this technique for each and every one of them.

Visit Trish Esden's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Zhang Ling

Zhang Ling is the award-winning author of nine novels and numerous collections of novellas and short stories, including A Single Swallow, translated by Shelly Bryant; Gold Mountain Blues; and Aftershock, which was adapted into China’s first IMAX movie with unprecedented box-office success. Born in China, she moved to Canada in 1986 and, in the mid-1990s, began to write and publish fiction in Chinese while working as a clinical audiologist. Since then, she has won the Chinese Media Literature Award for Author of the Year, the Grand Prize of Overseas Chinese Literary Award, and China Times’s Open Book Award. Where Waters Meet is her first novel written in English.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I did sweat a bit over the title of this book. Despite the myriad of ideas flying around in my mind, the central image of water had been crystal clear even before I started writing the first line. Among the alternatives were Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall, Rain’s Ashes, Where Water Meets Sky, etc. The present title Where Waters Meet didn’t materialize until the editing process started. Both the editorial team and I myself feel this title relates to the story well, because one of the main characters’ name is Rain, and the major events that occur in her and her daughter’s lives are centered around rivers. The present title serves a dual purpose: it’s a road sign pointing, subtly, to the direction of the plot development; and it also creates a symbolic association with the course of life and the process of migration. The image of water, I hope, can lead the readers effectively into the depth of the story.

What's in a name?

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, says Shakespeare, but I beg to differ. The name matters, as it can potentially produce a unique quality that separates a person from the multitude. There are two main characters in Where Waters Meet, a mother and a daughter. The mother’s name is Rain, which, in the beginning of the novel, is just a mere reference to the spring rain that falls around the time of her birth. As the story unfolds, the name Rain gradually reveals its layers of meaning, as a symbol for many “rains” that have fallen into her life; and as an indication of the nourishing and sustaining power she harbours within her, despite her sufferings.

The daughter’s name is Phoenix (Ah Feng in Chinese). Phoenix in Chinese culture carries complex and profound symbolic associations: an outstanding leader or a person of great success and fame; a creature with invincible strength and vitality that rises from the ashes; and a bird with powerful wings that can soar above the sordid realities... This name also serves several functions, as an indication of a mother’s expectation, though unrealistic at times, of her daughter’s success in life; a foretelling of the many difficulties and obstacles that the daughter has to overcome in order to survive; and her fate of eventually leaving the small and stifling hometown filled with dark memories, to live in a big and faraway world.

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

I grew up during China’s Cultural Revolution when most books were banned and public display of emotions and feelings discouraged. What filled my mind then was secret longings for love and romance, a forbidden land in the era of revolution. If I were to write a book then, I probably would have created a fantasy tale about an omnipotent hero coming to rescue me from my complete boredom and loneliness, and to take me away to a world where I could have a life. My adolescent self would never have expected, nor believed, that my adult self would be writing sagas and historical novels.

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

In general, I have more difficulty dealing with beginnings. I have a habit of patiently building up the momentum and keeping the suspense, or rather, the shock effect, till the very end. As a result, my opening chapter might read slow and flat to myself upon a second or third reading. Then I would go back to revise or even rewrite it. The endings are usually well-planned, ready to jump out at me at any moment. Normally I do very little changing to my endings.

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

I write family sagas and historical novels such as Where Waters Meet and A Single Swallow, exploring themes of war, trauma and healing. Empathy and compassion are the core of my creative process. However, I’ve been careful not to allow my emotions cloud my judgment. Logic and common-sense are what I usually resort to when I plot my characters’ trajectory of life and course of action. The story is theirs but the eyes that perform the observation and perception are entirely mine. I can totally see myself in my characters, yet I keep a rational distance from them at the same time.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My family is probably the most important source of inspiration. I grew up surrounded by many strong women in my extended family. My maternal grandmother gave birth to 11 children (in addition to a few miscarriages) through wars and incessant social turmoil. The fact that ten survived to adulthood is nothing short of a miracle as infant mortality rate was very high in those days. With unbelievable courage, tenacity, and a great deal of common sense, Grandma kept her huge family afloat despite all sorts of social unrest and economic hardship. Ever since I was a little girl, my mother has been telling me the remarkable survival stories of the women in her family. Although Rain in Where Waters Meet and Swallow in A Single Swallow are fictional characters, they are a true reflection of these women in spirit.

Learn more about Where Waters Meet at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erica Bauermeister

Erica Bauermeister is the author of the bestselling novel The School of Essential Ingredients, Joy for Beginners, The Lost Art of Mixing, and The Scent Keeper, which was a Reese’s Book Club pick. She is also the co-author of non-fiction works, 500 Great Books by Women: A Reader’s Guide and Let’s Hear It For the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14, and the memoir, House Lessons: Renovating a Life.

Bauermeister has a PhD in literature from the University of Washington, and has taught there and at Antioch University.

Her new novel is No Two Persons.

My Q&A with the author:

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

A lot, I hope. No Two Persons comes from the saying “no two persons ever read the same book.” It’s a concept I’ve thought a lot about over my years of teaching and writing books, and meeting with book clubs. We may all read the same words, but we never see the same story. I wanted to write a book that would explore the effect of one fictional book on its writer and nine very different readers, each character with their own story and chapter. I knew it was a complicated concept with an unusual structure, and it would be useful if the title could help set expectations. It didn’t hurt that I liked the sound of No Two Persons.

What's in a name?

My characters usually arrive in my imagination with their own names, but the writer in No Two Persons needed to be Alice—as in Alice in Wonderland. Her brother is Peter, as in Peter Pan. Each of those names is a tiny moment of rebellion on the part of their mother in the face of her authoritarian husband. My guess is that few readers will ever realize the meanings behind the names, but I love leaving Easter Eggs for readers who like to dig in.

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

In some ways not at all. The first fictional piece I ever wrote was presented from the points of view of a mother, a daughter, and her grandmother. The entire idea was how differently the three of them saw the same scene. But then I decided for some reason that I couldn’t write fiction, and I stepped away from it for almost twenty years. No Two Persons feels like coming full circle, writing the book I was always meant to. It did help to have forty years of life experience under my belt when I returned to the idea, though.

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

I love writing beginnings. Sometimes I write them first, and sometimes I write them last, but I love the challenge of setting a scene and creating a narrative atmosphere. In addition, there is the challenge of including the major themes so that later a reader can go back and see that everything was there from the very first moment.

Endings are trickier. When you are writing a novel, there is one ending, and the expectation is that it will wrap everything up in a (fairly) neat bow. But with interconnected short stories, which is really what No Two Persons is, the job of each ending is to open up its story, potentially sending the reader back to the beginning with a new and different perspective. And the final ending is that concept on steroids, because you are bringing a whole set of narrative threads together. To find that ending, I had to let all the stories simmer in the back of my brain until one morning I woke up and just knew what it would be. I think it’s my favorite of all the endings I have written, but I can’t tell you what it is.

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

I agree with authors who say all our characters are us and none of them are us. I never base any of my characters on people I know, or on myself. But there are elements in all of my characters—an insight, a fear, a love—that are intrinsic to me as well. And I often find when I am done writing a story it can feel as if I wrote it to figure something out for myself. Those unexpected lessons are one of the most fascinating aspects of writing for me.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My goal is to learn something new with every book I write. My topics often have something to do with the subliminal—the way that food, or our sense of smell, or the lay-out of our houses affect us without our ever consciously knowing. In No Two Persons the larger theme is how reading a particular book can change us, but in order to create deeply immersive worlds for each character I ended up researching free diving, intimacy coordination in movies, ghost towns, leap seconds, homelessness, audiobook narration, curious animal facts… the list goes on. So I suppose I would say my non-literary inspiration is the desire to never stop learning.

Visit Erica Bauermeister's website.

The Page 69 Test: The School of Essential Ingredients.

The Page 69 Test: The Lost Art of Mixing.

The Page 69 Test: The Scent Keeper.

The Page 69 Test: No Two Persons.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patrick Chiles

Patrick Chiles began his writing career with the self-published novels Perigee and Farside, which were acquired by Baen Books in 2016. His subsequent novels, 2020’s Frozen Orbit, 2021’s Frontier, and 2023’s Escape Orbit, have established him as a rising talent in the realm of realistic, near-future science fiction. Having a fascination with practical space travel and a love for Cold War technothrillers, his novels feature plausible technology while leveraging his military and airline experience to create stories with engaging, relatable characters on astonishing adventures: “ordinary people, doing extraordinary things.”

My Q&A with Chiles:

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

I like the title a lot, it’s punchy and uses actual spaceflight terminology to hint at what happens in the story, the same way Frozen Orbit did. It also implies an urgency, a need to get away from something, which is an underlying theme. My main POV character, Traci Keene, is driven to find her lost crewmate, Jack Templeton, out at the far reaches of the solar system. In the meantime she isn’t happy with developments at home, which are pushing her to get away. Not to give up too much, but it’s obvious from the cover (which is awesome) that Jack may have stumbled onto something quite strange which promises to take them both even deeper into space.

What's in a name?

I didn’t have to give much thought to the names, as all the characters came from Frozen Orbit along with a couple of previous books. Most of the names just came to me as I was thinking the characters through, enough to where I needed to do a few Google searches to make sure I wasn’t subconsciously appropriating another author’s characters, or using someone from real life.

One I did have to think about was Dr. Jacqueline Cheever, the NASA Administrator. She’s a nasty piece of work, and her name had to suggest this. Cheever takes herself extremely seriously and is impatient with people who she thinks “play in the shallow end of the gene pool.” She’s the type who will insist you call her “doctor.”

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

I’ve mentioned before that teenage me would ask why it took so long, and that still holds true. Anyone who knew me growing up is probably not the least bit surprised that writing science fiction is what I do now. Teenage me would be surprised at some of the more out-there scientific concepts I had to get my head around to write this story, because I was famously bad at math in my youth. I eventually got better at it.

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

Beginnings, definitely. I have to think through how to put the reader into the story right away, and keep things tight enough that they want to turn the page. Endings tend to come naturally once I’m far enough into the book, though most of the time the way I envisioned it ending is nothing like the final product. Sometimes I’m as surprised as the reader, which is great fun when that happens. I had a good idea of how Escape Orbit would end, but getting the characters to that point unfolded in ways I didn’t anticipate.

You've said "still firmly hard sci-fi, Escape Orbit is more of a space opera than its predecessor [Frozen Orbit]." Why is that?

Honestly, I hadn’t given it much thought until Publishers Weekly used the term in their review and I thought, “yeah, they’re right.” Space Opera contains themes of melodramatic, romantic adventure (the classical definition, not lovey-dovey stuff) set in space, with conflict using powerful technologies. That’s all at play here. I took the hard-sf technology of Frozen Orbit and Frontier, and used it propel my characters to a destination they could barely conceive of. Of course, the great-power conflicts we have on Earth follow them out the edge of the solar system. Everyone wants to stake a claim on what they’ve found, and to keep others from exploiting it.

You've also said that Escape Orbit is more character-driven? Why is that?

Using characters I’d already established in Frozen Orbit, I was able to play around in their sandbox and put them in situations that would test them in different ways. I was also able to explore some unresolved feelings between Traci and Jack. Traci is the main POV, and I enjoyed telling the story mostly through her eyes. She’s been recovering from an injury that has kept her off NASA’s flight roster, but now she’s been given a compelling reason to get back out there. She has to overcome personal physical challenges, bureaucratic inertia, and political scheming before she can even get started on the technological hurdles. She’ll play whatever cards she has to win, and is helped along the way by some unexpected alliances.

I also had a lot of fun developing Daisy, the artificial intelligence helping Jack run the Magellan spacecraft. She becomes a major player in her own way, and I’m looking forward to building her up even more in the next book.

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 all of them reflect different aspects of my personality, Traci and Jack especially. I used them to work out the conflicts in my own head about the nature of life: Where did we come from? Were we created or did we evolve, either by random chance or guided by some superintelligence? And if we haven’t found evidence of intelligent life elsewhere, is it possible that we’re the first? And how do we reconcile those types of philosophical conflicts?

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I’ve joked that Escape Orbit is “Interstellar without all the crying.” The comparison is kind of obvious, in particular the bizarre effects of relativity and their emotional impact on characters who’ve been separated by time dilation. Once the book is well underway and I’m kind of living inside the story, I like to write to movie soundtracks. They’re designed to hit certain emotional beats, and that works out well for me. I listened to a lot of Hans Zimmer soundtracks for this one, though oddly enough Interstellar wasn’t one of them! Inception hit the right beats this time, as did some of the Wrath of Khan soundtrack. Other than that, the PC game Kerbal Space Program helps me quite a bit. I’ll build the kinds of vehicles I envision for the books and simulate their missions. My background research goes a lot deeper than that, but Kerbal’s a great way to visualize what the end results will look like. Although readers will quickly find there is no way to simulate what ultimately happens in Escape Orbit!

Visit Patrick Chiles's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Patrick Chiles & Frankie and Beanie.

The Page 69 Test: Frozen Orbit.

My Book, The Movie: Frontier.

The Page 69 Test: Frontier.

Q&A with Patrick Chiles (June 2021).

The Page 69 Test: Escape Orbit.

Writers Read: Patrick Chiles.

--Marshal Zeringue

E.J. Copperman

E.J. Copperman’s new novel is Ukulele of Death, first in the Fran and Ken Stein Mystery series. Copperman also writes the Jersey Girl Legal Mystery series, currently represented by And Justice For Mall and soon to be joined by My Cousin Skinny. When not otherwise occupied, Copperman lives in New Jersey.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Well, Ukulele of Death was such a catchy little title we couldn’t possibly have passed it up. I actually wanted to give the reader a slight inkling of the rather unusual protagonists for the story, but the series name A Fran and Ken Stein Mystery should clue in all but the least observant readers. The ukulele mentioned in the title is the McGuffin of the story; it is the object everyone’s looking for and therefore the impetus for the plot. Hitchcock said the McGuffin is “the thing all the characters on the screen are chasing and the audience doesn’t care about.” So I’ll leave it at that.

What's in a name?

The names were pretty much the jumping off point. When I knew that I wanted to do another sort-of-paranormal series (after the Haunted Guesthouse books), my first thought was that Frankenstein, Detective would be fun. But I didn’t want it to be just one person. Two manufactured-ish people, who start an investigation agency to help people find their birth parents because the investigators themselves never had birth parents, seemed like a good vein to mine. And the names just had to be.

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

My teenage reader self probably wouldn’t have noticed; he was so busy training to write screenplays that movies were all he thought mattered. He read, but not very selectively. Mostly books about movies. I think he’s be surprised that the story isn’t grimmer. I had more of a stomach for the gruesome in my younger days. Now I feel like if you’re not laughing on every page I missed an opportunity.

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

I find middles far harder to write than beginnings or endings. I’m a “pantser,” so I’m constantly making it up as I go. But I start with a premise (because if you don’t have that you’ve got nothing) and that’s the beginning. I have a general idea of where I want the characters to end up, so that’s a vague idea of an end. The middle? Your guess is as good as mine until it’s written. I like to write myself into a corner and then see how I can get out —when I can get out. Endings get changed a lot because of all the stuff I made up in the middle. And who the murderous culprit is going to be changes three or four times per book. I’ve literally come to the page with the reveal and had to think it through.

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

Well, they have a snarky sense of humor most of the time and you’ll be shocked, but so do I. Other than that, each character has to have of life of their own. If I can’t tell you what the character does in the parts of their life between chapters, I don’t have a firm enough grasp of who I’m writing. And they do all spring from my mind, so there has to be some of me in there. Is any one character exactly like me? No, not even the most obvious example in the (long-ago) Aaron Tucker series. I believe in don’t write what you know. Find out about it and then write it.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

First it was movies. I didn’t even realize that someone wrote the stories on the screen until Star Trek and North By Northwest, and then that was all I wanted to do. When I found out about the writers room at Your Show of Shows, with Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart, Lucille Kallen, Neil Simon and (sometimes) Woody Allen, among many others, I wished I had been born earlier. I don’t wish that anymore. I don’t think there were any authors that particularly influenced me, but I did appreciate how Robert B. Parker got right to the story and didn’t mess around. I try to do that.

Visit E. J. Copperman's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

My Book, The Movie: The Thrill of the Haunt.

The Page 69 Test: The Thrill of the Haunt.

My Book, The Movie: Ukulele of Death.

The Page 69 Test: Ukulele of Death.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alisa Lynn Valdés

Alisa Lynn Valdés is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist and a former staff writer for both the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe. With more than one million books in print in eleven languages, she was included on Time’s list of the twenty-five most influential Hispanics and was a Latina woman of the year as well as an Entertainment Weekly breakout literary star. She is the author of many novels, including Playing with Boys and The Husband Habit.

Valdés's new novel is Hollow Beasts.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I tend to come up with book titles that are double entendres, sometimes even triple or quadruple entendres, catchy enough to entice a reader to open the book, but layered enough that at the end of the book the title will make sense on multiple symbolic levels. Hollow Beasts is no exception.

What's in a name?

I choose character names with deliberation. Jodi Luna, the protagonist of Hollow Beasts, has a name that is both symbolic and a bilingual double entendre. Jodi’s full given name is Jodilynn Luciana Luna. She’s a Hispana from northern New Mexico, with roots that go back in that area to the 1500s. Luna is a regional, old Spanish surname in New Mexico. It means moon. Jodilynn is a countrified anglo name that she shortens to Jodi, but jodí is the Spanish first-person past tense for “I f*cked up.” She’s the oldest rookie game warden ever hired by the state of New Mexico, a nature poet who has decided nature needs more than poetry in the era of climate change; it needs warriors. Luciana means light, hope. So her name, to me, symbolizes, in a way, how the US colonization and anglicization of our region, its wilderness and its people left them screwed, how she is a bit of a screw-up in this new job, but also that she is motivated by a hope and light that are rooted in the ancient power of the moon.

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

My teen self knew she wanted to be a novelist, and loved suspense novels. I don’t think she’d be surprised at all.

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

Endings are harder for me, especially with an ongoing series like the Jodi Luna books, because it’s a balance between figuring out how to tie up the loose ends enough to feel satisfying, while leaving others dangling as hooks for future books. That said, I rewrite beginnings more, probably by virtue of revisiting them more each time I sit down 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?

I have a lot in common with Jodi Luna. We are both middle aged single mothers from New Mexico, who left to attend ivy league colleges and become writers, but returned to New Mexico in our middle age to live a more rural and secluded life dedicated to protecting wildlife. I’m not a game warden, but if I were younger and could do things all over again, I would be.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I am a musician by training. My undergraduate degree is in music, from the modern music conservatory, Berklee College of Music. So music, and being a musician, have influenced my writing more than anything else in my life. I approach writing as an auditory endeavor. I seek the music in prose. I employ the same mindset in writing novels that I use in jazz improvisation as a saxophonist, which is a bit hard to explain to people who’ve not studied jazz improvisation. Jazz improvisation is spontaneous composition, on the spot, over a set of complex cord changes, governed by strict harmonic and melodic rules that must be memorized and practiced for years so that what flows out of the artist in the moment seems and feels easy. So I “practice” my stories and the shapes and sonic colors of my work before I sit down to write, and when I do sit down to write I enter a trancelike state of absolute concentration where the words just come, fully formed, from a subconscious place. I’ve been told I’m an unusually “fast” and clean writer, and I credit my training as a jazz improviser with training my brain and fingers to work in a peculiar way that lends itself to the illusion of speed.

Visit Alisa Lynn Valdés's website.

My Book, The Movie: Hollow Beasts.

--Marshal Zeringue

Josh Weiss

Josh Weiss is a first-time author from South Jersey. Raised in a proud Jewish home, he was instilled with an appreciation for his cultural heritage from a very young age. Today, Weiss is utterly fascinated with the convergence of Judaism and popular culture in film, television, comics, literature, and other media. After college, he became a freelance entertainment journalist, writing stories for SYFY WIRE, The Hollywood Reporter, Forbes, and Marvel Entertainment.

Weiss's new novel is Sunset Empire, the thrilling alternate history sequel to Beat the Devils.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Believe it or not, you’re only the second person to ask about the meaning behind the title. Alas, I cannot go into too much detail, as it would divulge more than a few crucial plot points. All I can say is that the word “Sunset” connotes a state of decline — both morally and geopolitically. The original title was Empire of the Setting Sun, though it was my brother-in-law (he’s got a PhD in chemistry and is much smarter than I could ever hope to be) who suggested shortening it to the current title. Not only did this shave down the word count for my publisher, but it also had the added benefit of sounding like a true film noir. Thanks for the advice, Rob!

What's in a name?

If you happen to glance at the left-hand corner of the Sunset Empire cover, you’ll see an incredibly humbling blurb from Ian R. MacLeod, Sidewise-Award winning author of Wake Up and Dream (a true work of imaginative genius). I foolishly tried to nab the film rights to it while still in college, but, quite understandably, the publisher didn’t go for my low-ball offer.

Nevertheless, I still had Ian’s email address and reached out to him several years later when it was time to collect promotional blurbs for my own book. He happily obliged and what’s more: he happily obliged again on Book 2! I wanted to acknowledge Ian in my sophomore effort with a small nod to WU&D, which centers around a version of Clark Gable who became a private eye after failing to adapt to the “feelies” (a moviemaking process in which an actor’s raw emotional aura is captured and then projected back to an audience).

The story begins with Gable entering into a dubious partnership with a femme fatale by the name of April Lamotte. Oh, man, “Lamotte” is a surname divinely built for hardboiled fiction, wouldn’t you agree? So, when it became clear Sunset Empire would feature a powerful Los Angeles businessman with potentially shady motivations, I just knew he had to be named “Orson Lamotte,” a hybrid of film noir legend Orson Welles and the seductive April Lamotte.

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

If you spoke to the 18-year-old version of Josh studying his butt off for the AP U.S. History exam in 12th Grade, I don’t think he’d be the least bit surprised with the subject material of Beat the Devils and Sunset Empire. As much as I owe my fascination with the past to my father, I’d be remiss not to provide a shoutout to my history teacher in 11th and 12th grade. Mr. Kirzner — whose name you will find prominently featured in the acknowledgements of both books — had the rare gift for bringing history to life through a combination of animated delivery and multimedia aids. Plus, we’d get extra credit for watching movies at home and relating them back to our class via a one-page essay. Dear teachers of the world: take note!

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

It really depends, honestly. I often find myself jumping between different parts of a manuscript if certain narrative beats are much stronger in my head than others. Consider it a helpful detour around the dreaded potholes of writer’s block. The first section I ever completed for Sunset Empire was the epilogue — a year or so before I started tackling the rest of the book — because it was so vividly imagined.

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

I know this is sort of a cop-out answer, but I’ll have to go with my main character: Jewish homicide detective turned private investigator Morris Baker. He represents an amalgam of several different individuals — my own grandfather, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Jake Gittes, Rick Deckard, Eddie Valiant, and Indiana Jones — but his personal struggles with faith in the wake of the Holocaust directly reflect my own religious frustrations.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Movies! Lots and lots of movies. I went to religious day school for most of my life and every morning, we were required to wrap phylacteries and pray. Don’t ask me how — because I’m not even sure myself — but I somehow convinced my teachers I was using my phone to access the prayer text. That was only half-true. Whenever they weren’t looking, I’d begin surfing through Wikipedia and IMDb for cinematic trivia and the latest developments out of Hollywood.

It’s through this clandestine practice that I learned about film noir and the greatest entries of the genre: The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Chinatown. I especially loved the subsection of Neo-noir projects, which combined the classic gumshoe premise with elements of sci-fi and fantasy (think Blade Runner, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Minority Report). All of that came back to me when I sat down to write Beat the Devils and Sunset Empire.

Visit Josh Weiss's website.

My Book, The Movie: Beat the Devils.

The Page 69 Test: Beat the Devils.

My Book, The Movie: Sunset Empire.

The Page 69 Test: Sunset Empire.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emily Franklin

Emily Franklin is the author of more than twenty novels and a poetry collection, Tell Me How You Got Here. Her award-winning work has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Guernica, JAMA, and numerous literary magazines as well as long-listed for the London Sunday Times Short Story Award, featured and read aloud on NPR and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries.

Franklin's new novel is The Lioness of Boston.

My Q&A with the author:

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

When I began this novel about the life of Isabella, Stewart Gardner, I kept coming back to the idea that she evolved into the art collector/museum, founder/Boston, scandalous society person from her beginnings as a social outcast. Initially, the novel was called Becoming Isabella. However, once I had finished writing the novel, I realized that unless a reader knew who Isabella Stewart Gardner was, the title wouldn't mean all that much. I also realized that I wrote about this woman in the 1800s becoming herself as Boston was becoming the city it is today, so I wanted to ground the story in a location. The entrance to the Gardner museum is flanked by two Lions, and there's a story of Isabella parading two Lions down Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. Once I incurred the novel title in Boston, the lions quickly followed. The Lioness of Boston is truly about a woman finding her own voice and being able to roar.

What's in a name?

Isabella, Stewart Gardner and numerous people in this novel: Henry James, John Singer, Sargent, Berthe Morisot, George Sand, James McNeill Whistler, Oscar Wilde - were all real folks so I didn't have to name them. Other characters that I did create were given names that suited the time (Miles Louris) or a character trait (Mr. Valentine).

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

My teenage reader self would not be completely surprised by this novel. I did grow up going to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and was completely captivated by it… I also loved Edith Wharton and EM Forster, and this novel certainly fits into that genre.

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

I have always found both beginnings and endings come rather easily to me. That said, I more often know the exact ending, including a last line of what I'm writing, whether it is a short story, or poetry, or a novel, and the opening pages are more likely to shift. I end up changing the first chapter once I've gotten further along in the novel because generally that's before I found the voice completely.

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

Probably all of the characters have a little bits of me a little bits of other people I know, and certainly a great degree of imagination to make them fully realized on the page. I think I identify with Isabella's outspokenness, her inability to fit in completely with one group or another. I enjoyed writing the witty banter between Isabella and many of her friends, because that is certainly how some of my friends and I like to talk, so I identify with that fast-paced wit. Ultimately, I suppose I do feel similar to Isabella and the friends she finds in that it took me a while to find my lunch table. In terms of the world, these characters live in, a lot of Boston, still retains its historic architecture, so that was not too big of a stretch, but the social mores of the 1800s were a far cry from anything I have experience personally, though growing up in the UK in the 1980s and 90s there were still some remnants of those old social rules (which I often broke).

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My first novel was all about mix tapes. I find music and lyrics at the heart of a lot of my influences, and listen and enjoy all types of music. Weirdly, I cannot listen to music when I write, because I find it leaks onto the page. Nature is also a huge part of my writing, and does show up in everything I write. To break up my workday I take a lot of walks with my giant beast dogs and find the natural world full of inspiration. My family is a constant influence - both my chosen family and my family of origin.

Visit Emily Franklin's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Lioness of Boston.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eli Cranor

Eli Cranor lives and writes from the banks of Lake Dardanelle, a reservoir of the Arkansas River nestled in the heart of True Grit country. His critically acclaimed debut novel, Don't Know Tough, won the Peter Lovesey First Crime Novel Contest and was named one of the "Best Books of the Year" by USA Today and one of the "Best Crime Novels" of 2022 by the New York Times. Cranor also pens a weekly column, "Where I'm Writing From" for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and his craft column, "Shop Talk," appears monthly at CrimeReads.

Cranor's new novel is Ozark Dogs.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Ozark Dogs works pretty well for this novel. The main theme is the vicious cycle of violence caused by poverty in places like rural Arkansas. My family is all the time taking in stray cats and dogs. I wanted to extend that metaphor to the people in my home state and play up the sense of loss. What's funny, though, is that Ozark Dogs was not the original title. When I turned the manuscript in it was called Salvation. Which hits on the book's other main theme of redemption. In the end, Ozark Dogs won out because of marketability.

What's in a name?

This book is chock full of original names. Evail, Bunn, Rudnick, and Beladonna Ledford. Guillermo Torres. Dime Ray Belly. Jeremiah and Joanna Fitzjurls. I keep a little black book in my pocket and take down unique names as I encounter them. Those were some of my favorites.

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

I didn't read many thrillers until later in life, but I was always into the classics. I think teenage Eli would find a book like Ozark Dogs as a welcome surprise.

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

The endings always take the most thought for me, and usually get changed half a dozen times before publication. The original Ozark Dogs manuscript was over 100,000 words. As it stands now, it's barely 70,000. Almost all of that cutting came in the final act.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I played guitar and wrote songs long before I tried penning a novel. Those early musical influences are as follows: John Prine, Jerry Jeff Walker, Jimmy Buffett, Harry Chapin, Carole King, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bob Marley, Jason Isbell, Outkast, and lately one hell of a duo by the name of Shovels & Rope.

Visit Eli Cranor's website.

The Page 69 Test: Don't Know Tough.

--Marshal Zeringue