Jesse Browner

Jesse Browner is the author of the novels The Uncertain Hour and Everything Happens Today, among others, as well as of the memoir How Did I Get Here?

He is also the translator of works by Jean Cocteau, Paul Eluard, Rainer Maria Rilke, Matthieu Ricard and other French literary masters. He lives in New York City.

Browner's new novel is Sing to Me.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My working title for Sing to Me was The Ruined City, but I got a lot of pushback for that from my early readers because, while it was a literal description of the novel’s main subject, it failed entirely to capture the story’s ultimately hopeful, optimistic thrust. It was also a very one-note title, whereas Sing to Me works on such a broad spectrum of meanings and intimations, at least one of which I can’t tell you because it’s a major spoiler. But song in general is woven into every aspect of the book – as incantation, as lullaby, as prayer, as a secret language of love and as the enigma of intercultural communication. My wife, my other early readers, my editor and I all came up with a wide and ridiculous variety of alternate titles – which is a very typical part of the process – but everyone agreed that Sing to Me struck precisely the right tone between lyricism and mystery.

What's in a name?

In choosing names, I was constrained by the cultural and linguistic identities of my characters, almost all of whom are ethnic Hittites or Luwians. Now, the words “Hittite” and “Luwian” are never uttered anywhere in the novel, nor are the characters even aware of their own ethnicity, so in truth I could have named them anything I wanted. But there’s a pretty large body of Hittite personal names available in the archeological record, so there was no reason not to make the effort to ensure historical accuracy, to the extent that’s even possible with a civilization that vanished more than 3,000 years ago. I also wanted names that a reader could grow accustomed to and pronounce easily, so they would become familiar and reassuring, rather than alien and exotic. And because my young protagonist is so brave and good, he is named for a great Hittite king, while his beloved sister is named for the Hittite goddess of the sun.

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

My younger self would in no way be surprised by this book. I read a lot of science fiction as a teenager, and although there is absolutely nothing sci-fi about Sing to Me, they have a lot of tropes in common: apocalypse, the conundrum of communicating with aliens, vulnerability in the face of a superior and threatening culture, hero journeys. On top of that, even in adolescence I was fascinated with the ancient world and the evolution of languages. But what I remember most about how I read in those days is that often, after I’d finished doing my homework, I would get into bed with a new book and read all night until I’d finished. I’ve always wanted to recreate that feeling of total immersion for my readers, which is why most of my novels are short enough to read in one, intensive sitting.

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

Beginnings are always much harder, especially in literary fiction, where characters must develop and come alive starting with nothing, and (in my case at least) the plot is a function of character development. So by the time I get towards the end the book essentially writes itself, but the first third almost always has to be discarded and rewritten because that’s the part where the characters are still inchoate, evolving puppets.

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

I suppose there’s a lot of me in every character, but I’d be hard pressed to pinpoint what it is. If I had to take a stab at it, I’d say my characters have all my flaws, insecurities and doubts, but I have none of their ingenuity, perseverance or courage. I’d love to be more like them, because they’re generally more capable than I am of solving the riddles that continue to stymie me. That said, neither they nor I ever end up with hard answers to our questions, but they, at least, tend to point themselves in the right direction.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I did a lot of food writing early in my career, and old habits die hard, so there’s usually some element of cooking and feasting in my books, fiction and non-fiction alike. I even wrote a history of hospitality in Western civilization. I also spent thirty years working as a translator in the United Nations Security Council, so human stupidity and political futility always seem to creep in, somehow. But ultimately, I have to say that I don’t fully recognize the distinction between literary and non-literary, because I approach every topic and achieve any understanding I may have of the world through the lens of storytelling. By the time I get through with it, everything comes out of the pipeline as literature, for better or for worse.

Writers Read: Jesse Browner (January 2012).

Writers Read: Jesse Browner.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessica Guerrieri

Jessica Guerrieri (pronounced grrr-air-eee) is a writer and novelist who lives in Northern California with her husband and three daughters. With a background in special education, Jessica left the field to pursue a career in writing and raise her children. With over a decade of sobriety, she is a fierce advocate for addiction recovery.

Her award-winning debut book club novel is Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea sets the tone before the first page. The cover’s striking image—water as both refuge and threat—mirrors the novel’s emotional stakes. The title speaks to being trapped between two impossible choices, something my protagonist, Leah, knows all too well. On the surface, she has it all: a handsome husband, three daughters, and a fresh start in a sleepy coastal town. But beneath that facade, she’s quietly unraveling—gripping tightly to the illusion of control, one drink at a time.

The "devil" can be read as addiction, guilt, or the crushing expectations of motherhood. The “deep blue sea” is both literal and symbolic: the beach town where Leah lives and surfs, and the murky depths of her own emotional landscape. It also hints at the secret she’s keeping from the O’Connor family—one that shadows her every move. And Leah’s not the only one caught in this tide. Both Christine and Amy find themselves navigating impossible choices of their own, their quiet crises rippling beneath the surface until they can no longer be ignored.

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

Not surprised at all. My teenage journals are packed with poetry and emotional angst—raw, unfiltered expressions of someone already trying to escape herself. That deep ache to numb, to disappear, to feel something other than what I was feeling—it was always there. So no, it isn’t remotely surprising that drugs and alcohol eventually appealed to me. What would surprise my younger self is that I survived long enough to write about it—and that I found a way to turn all that pain into something honest, and healing.

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

Both are equally hard—but for different reasons. They’re the parts of the story I spent the most time with, and they carry the most weight. The beginning has to earn the reader’s trust and attention from the very first page. I experimented with several different openings, including a flashback to when Leah first met her husband. Ultimately, I wanted to anchor the reader in the emotional undercurrent of her life, not just the chronology. Getting the hook right took time, revision, and a willingness to throw out what wasn’t working—even when it had been there from the start.

The ending was its own kind of reckoning. I made a profound change there, one that my editor gently but wisely guided me toward. I had to let go of the ending I thought the story needed and instead land in a place that felt earned, honest, and emotionally true.

So while I may have revised the beginning more often, it was the ending that required the biggest leap of faith.

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

Leah isn’t me—but we’ve definitely walked the same roads. I’m in recovery, too, and I wrote parts of this novel while still grieving and raw. So while the specifics of her story are fictional, the emotions behind them are deeply real. I poured the sharp edges of my lived experience into her—not to write a memoir in disguise, but to offer a story that feels lived-in and unflinching.

Leah is messier than I am, more secretive, more self-destructive. But I understand her. I love her. And I wrote her to reflect what it means to want desperately to be a good mother, even when you don’t yet know how to be good to yourself. Like me, Leah is also privileged in many ways. That mattered to me. I wanted to show that addiction doesn’t always look like rock bottom from the outside—it can exist even when all the ingredients for a perfect life seem to be in place.

Her obsession with pointing the finger is something I was guilty of in addiction. That used to be me. Thankfully, it isn’t anymore. Sadly, I also didn’t inherit her bohemian surfer vibe. But the internal battles? Those, I know by heart.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

A local artist, Emily Dilbeck, was my creative muse for this book. She introduced me to her materials and process, and I was struck by how closely her approach to making art mirrored my own writing practice—intuitive, layered, and often born from emotion rather than logic. Watching her work reminded me that creativity doesn’t always have to begin with a plan; sometimes it starts with a feeling.

Music was another major influence. I had a very specific playlist I listened to on repeat while writing this novel. Songs like "Coastline" by Hollow Coves, "Exile" by Taylor Swift and Bon Iver, "Song for Zula" by Phosphorescent, "Ophelia" by The Lumineers, and "Wildfire" by Cautious Clay helped me stay emotionally tethered to the story’s tone and rhythm. Each track became a kind of emotional shorthand for the scenes I was writing.

I also took two writing retreats to Half Moon Bay to immerse myself in the world of the book. The first was in 2020, during lockdown, when the idea had just begun to form. I asked my husband if he could hold down the fort with our young kids while I escaped to the coast for two days to write. The second was years later, for my final round of edits before the manuscript went to print. That time, I brought along one of my closest friends—also a writer—and we worked side by side, talking through scenes and soaking up the atmosphere of the very town that inspired the novel’s setting. The coast gave me space to listen to myself, and in many ways, the story was born there.

Visit Jessica Guerrieri's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tennessee Hill

Tennessee Hill holds an MFA from North Carolina State University. Her work has been featured in Poetry magazine, Best New Poets, Southern Humanities Review, Adroit Journal, Arkansas International, and elsewhere. She is a native of South Texas, where she still lives and teaches with her husband and their dog.

Hill's new novel is Girls with Long Shadows.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I went back and forth with this title quite a lot and ultimately landed on Girls with Long Shadows because I think it introduces a sense of foreboding that is important to the tone. I love that “Girls” is in the title, too, because it highlights the tension between the way the sisters want to be seen and the way they are actually perceived by their community.

What's in a name?

Names are so important, not just to characters but to people and places and things. Having the sisters named Baby A, Baby B, and Baby C was the first big decision I made when I was writing, and I molded a lot of the plot to support this choice, to avoid it feeling lazy or reductive.

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

I’m not sure. I’d love to ask her! I think she’d be very proud.

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

Definitely endings, but more than either of these, middles! Writing, for me, feels like a long run, where you have so much energy and optimism at the start but by the middle and end, you’re tired and kind of lost and just want the journey to wrap up somewhere restful. This being my debut novel, I feel like I changed every part of it drastically. The spirit of the original idea is captured most purely in the beginning.

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 there are certainly bits of myself in many of the characters, but I try to stay away from any inclinations towards auto-fiction. Girlhood and southern-ness and family are deeply important to me, so I feel connected to the characters through those larger thematic vessels.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music, certainly. Nature, too. I think my writing is just an attempt to combine and harness those two experiences; being out in the world in a lyrical way. Right now, I’m listening to so much Bon Iver, HAIM, and Glen Campbell. In general, I make an effort to let all of the beautiful things in the world rub off on me.

Visit Tennessee Hill's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicola Kraus

Nicola Kraus has coauthored, with Emma McLaughlin, ten novels, including the international #1 bestseller The Nanny Diaries, Citizen Girl, Dedication, and The Real Real. Nicola has contributed to the Times (of London), the New York Times, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Town & Country, and Maxim, as well as two short story collections to benefit the War Child fund: Big Night Out and Girls’ Night Out. In 2015 she cofounded the creative consulting firm The Finished Thought, which helps the next generation of aspiring authors find their voice and audience. Through her work there, she has collaborated on several New York Times nonfiction bestsellers.

Kraus's new novel is The Best We Could Hope For.

My Q&A with the author:

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

While the novel had many titles over the eight years that I was writing it, once I hit on The Best We Could Hope For it was so clearly non-negotiable. I love language with multiple meanings. This title immediately asks readers to consider, is the story they’re about to learn the best case scenario? Or the worst case scenario? For many characters it’s both. Additionally, since the narrative starts in the postwar era, the idea of the best looms large for this sprawling family, wanting the best, deserving the best, having the best. And falling so far short. Hope is also a powerful recurring theme. Hope as an active agent for change, and hope as delusion.

What's in a name?

The daughter in my novel is named Linden because there used to be a preschool across the street from my office called the Linden School. I grew up on the Upper East Side where many young women were christened with their mother’s maiden names. I knew girls named Galt and Nelson. I liked the idea of Linden getting shortened down to Lin eventually as she claims her own identity away from her dysfunctional family.

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

My teenage self would be thrilled to find that eventually I would take so much of what I’d witnessed and experienced on the Upper East Side and transform it into this story about the abject child neglect of the 80s and Gen X’s imperfect quest to live and parent consciously.

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

I wrote the prologue of this novel fairly early but the ending didn’t reveal itself until years in. I trusted I would find it but I didn’t know what it would be. Once it arrived however, it seems like the two pieces must have been written together because they are so much a pair. It’s like buying a single candlestick at a flea market and then finding its mate years later in a junk shop. I just trusted everything would be revealed to me.

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

People keep asking me if this novel is based on my life and thankfully it isn’t. My parents were married for forty years. I have no half-siblings, or first cousins. But Linden and I certainly share some DNA. We both arrived in adulthood feeling broken and eager to find the tools that could help us. We are both relentless in our optimism, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, and we both use art to transmogrify grief into joy.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I learn so much from watching great films. Because the story structure has to be so tight, and the math so solid, it is a master class in cause and effect, arriving late, leaving early, and saying everything as economically as possible.

Visit Nicola Kraus's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Danielle Teller

Danielle Teller is in her second career, writing, which involves a lot more rejection than her first career, doctoring, but the hours are much better. She still misses Canada and academics, but life as a Californian empty-nester is also pretty great. She is the author of two novels, All the Ever Afters and Forged, and is also the author of a bunch of nonfiction, only about half of which describe unpronounceable molecules.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I tried to come up with a title that riffs on the word “gilded,” since Forged is set in the Gilded Age, and the story revolves around a Gatsby-like con artist, making the point that not all that glitters is gold. Everything I came up with was too clunky, and it was my husband who suggested the alternative we wound up using. “Forged” works well in all its connotations: The protagonist is herself a counterfeit, but she’s also self-invented; she has forged and formed herself in a harsh world. She uses forgery as a tool to make her millions, and she forges forward through adversity. Finally, Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, plays a small but vital role in the story.

What's in a name?

At the beginning of my novel, the protagonist’s name is Fanny Bartlett, an unassuming name for a farm girl whose family emigrated from England to the Canadian wilderness in order to carve out some land. Over time, she morphs into the high society Catherine “Kitty” Warren. Warren is her married name, and she chooses Catherine for the character in Wuthering Heights, because Fanny longs to be wild and unruly like the girl she admires and loves. Kitty is one of those diminutive nicknames popular among East Coast socialites.

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

My teenage self would approve of the rags-to-riches aspect of the story but would be surprised and disapproving of the focus on relationships. In my teens I was a science fiction fan; I liked that sci-fi books were all about plot and ideas, largely eschewing the messiness and potential ickiness of human relations. As an adult, I’m fascinated by humanity.

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

Beginnings seem more arbitrary than endings to me; I don’t tend to overthink them. Endings stay with readers and color the whole reading experience, so I fret over them a lot. Figuring out the ending for a con artist story was particularly tricky as I wanted to preserve moral ambiguity and some feeling of legerdemain; I’m interested but also nervous to hear what readers think of it!

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

I can relate to some of the feelings my characters experience, but I have little in common with any of the characters in Forged, other than small things, like a love of reading. My personality is quiet and rule-following, so I’d make a really bad con artist or socialite.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

We are living through what has been called the second Gilded Age, with terrible wealth inequality, poor worker protection, eroding social welfare and reckless billionaires who seem to be motivated by nothing but greed and adulation. This got me interested in writing about the first Gilded Age, in part as a reminder that we’ve been here before and things can get better if we have a will to change.

Visit Danielle Teller's website.

Writers Read: Danielle Teller (May 2018).

The Page 69 Test: All the Ever Afters.

My Book, The Movie: All the Ever Afters.

--Marshal Zeringue

Milo Todd

Milo Todd (he/him) is co-EIC at Foglifter Journal, runs The Queer Writer newsletter, and teaches creative writing and history primarily to queer and trans adults. He’s received awards, accolades, and fellowships from such places as Lambda Literary, Tin House, Pitch Wars, GrubStreet, Monson Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Todd's debut is The Lilac People.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The title for this one just wasn’t coming together for me. I ended up asking my beta readers and they all independently gave the same answer: The Lilac People. It made sense since the book is ultimately about a given community and its resilience in the face of hardship. However, a reader may not know what The Lilac People specifically means as a title before they read the book since it’s specific to a time, place, and identity currently unknown by most modern people.

What's in a name?

My three main male characters—Bertie, Karl, and Gert—were named after three of the only known documented trans masculine/intersex individuals to have survived Nazi Germany. Their lives/storylines otherwise don’t cross over much with my characters, but I wanted to honor them in this way.

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

My teenage self would be ecstatic to learn we one day publish a novel. However, he’d be surprised that it’s historical fiction since history used to be one of my least favorite subjects.

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

Beginnings are harder for me to write. I plan my work out scene by scene before I start writing, but I never know when or how my characters are going to defy me. I also don’t get a steady feel for their voices until I’m already working with them. My rough drafts are often stronger the further in I get, but I always need to go back to the earlier chapters and fix them.

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

Every character and story, no matter who or what they’re about, are ultimately about the writer. We can only write through our own lenses, which are dependent on how we grew up, how we educate ourselves, who we’ve interacted with, etc. Everything we experience or learn is filtered through us before we put it on the page.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

History influences my writing. It feels like cheating sometimes since I let facts drive my stories. I research until I have too much information, then stitch together storylines that best complement as many pieces of that information as possible. When given the choice, I lean toward emphasizing the pieces that will best resonate with modern readers, whether timely or not.

Visit Milo Todd's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Porter

Andrew Porter is the author of four books, including the short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter (Vintage/Penguin Random House), which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the novel In Between Days (Knopf), which was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection, an IndieBound “Indie Next” selection, and the San Antonio Express News’s “Fictional Work of the Year,” the short story collection The Disappeared (Knopf), which was published in April 2023 and longlisted for The Story Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and the novel The Imagined Life, just released from Knopf.

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

With my first novel, In Between Days, the title was the last thing I figured out, and I went through many lists of many possibilities before arriving at it. With my current novel, The Imagined Life, though, the title simply grew out of the writing, a passage in one of the last chapters that begins “In the imagined life, so much is different.” As soon as I wrote that passage, I opened up a document I’d been using to save possible titles in and wrote down “The Imagined Life” and highlighted it, though I think I sensed even at that moment that this would be the title. It just fits perfectly with the main story of the novel—a story about a man who is trying to retrace what happened to his father, who disappeared when he was twelve. His whole life has been imaging how his life would have been different had his father not disappeared. At the same time, the title also fits nicely with the storylines of many of the other characters in the book too, all of whom have their own imagined lives.

What's in a name?

I did not place a lot of significance on the name of my novel’s narrator, Steven Mills, but I did deliberately choose not to name the character of his father, who Steven refers to simply as “my father” throughout the entire novel. I did this partly because Steven’s father is very much a mystery to him, and I thought that not naming him would add to this sense of mystery for the reader too.

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

My teenage self was more interested in music and film than books, so he would have probably been shocked that I wrote a novel at all. At the same time, I had a desire even at that age to tell stories, even if my initial inclination was to tell them visually or musically rather than through writing. Since there are many references to skateboarding and West Coast punk rock music from the eighties in this book, I also imagine he would approve of (and enjoy) the Southern California setting and pop culture references.

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

Endings are definitely harder for me, unless they just present themselves very clearly at some point in the writing process, which does happen sometimes. More often than not, though, the ending is something that eludes me in my initial drafts of anything I write. It’s something that I tend to tinker with a lot, revise, adjust, sometimes even reenvision completely. I do know when the ending is right. I can always feel it. It just takes me a while to get there sometimes.

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 there’s probably a little bit of me in all of my characters, and I’m sure most writers would say the same. With that said, I’ve never written a single character that I would say resembles me in a significant way. Even as I embody the consciousness of a character, I’m also always outside of the character, trying to look at the character objectively, thinking about their flaws, their blind spots, their weaknesses. To me, that’s the fun part of writing fiction.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

When I entered college, I wanted to be a filmmaker. I loved film, and I used to sit in my dorm room and visualize films that I wanted to make, thinking about the lighting, the music, the atmosphere. And many of the films that I studied and revered at that time are films that I still return to and rewatch today, especially when I’m thinking a lot about tone and atmosphere in my fiction. For example, with this novel, I was thinking a lot about Wim Wenders’s film Paris, Texas—the father, mother, son dynamic, the idea of a family that has been broken apart and separated by trauma and by a disappearance. There’s also an incredibly beautiful atmosphere to that film, a quiet and haunting soundtrack, gorgeous visuals. I watched that film along with several others as I writing this novel.

Learn more about the book and author at Andrew Porter's website.

My Book, The Movie: In Between Days.

--Marshal Zeringue

Adam Plantinga

Adam Plantinga’s first book, 400 Things Cops Know, was nominated for an Agatha Award and won the 2015 Silver Falchion award for best nonfiction crime reference. It was hailed as “truly excellent” by author Lee Child and deemed “the new Bible for crime writers” by The Wall Street Journal. His second book, also nonfiction, is Police Craft. Plantinga began his career in law enforcement in 2001 as a Milwaukee police officer. He is currently a sergeant with the San Francisco Police Department assigned to street patrol.

Plantinga's new novel Hard Town follows The Ascent, his debut.

My Q&A with the author:

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

It's a pretty heavy lift. (The Heavy Lift would also be a good title for a thriller). Titles matter, and are hard to pick. Hard Town seemed a good fit to me because it's short and stark and consistent with the book's style and themes. I was going for a dirt-under-the-fingernails kind of vibe.

What's in a name?

Kurt Argento is a name I'm pleased with. His ancestry is half German, hence Kurt, and half Italian, which gives us Argento. Argento is a composite of several cops I've worked with over the years, but I was inspired to name him Kurt because that was the first name of a Milwaukee street cop I know who was a memorably tough piece of meat.

The last name was trickier. I cycled through some other options. One was Anselmo, which I concluded sounded too soft for a former Detroit SWAT operator. Anselmo is the leafy town in SoCal where you'll find lots of nice spas. I finally landed on Argento. It's the name of one of Maximus' two horses in the film Gladiator. I just liked the sound of it.

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

Beginnings and endings have flowed pretty well for me so far. It's that tricky middle that can be tough sledding. I'm hard on my characters, so in my first two books, I've tossed them into a meat grinder. Not all of them make it out. I do find myself doing a fair amount of tinkering throughout the novel to make sure I earn my ending.

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

Argento and I have some similar world views and attitudes about policing. We're both urban cops with a fair amount of experience with urban blight and dysfunction. He may be slightly better at fighting than me, an admission I make grudgingly. I'm taller, so there's that. But I didn't want to write a thinly disguised fictional version of myself, because I'm not that interesting. So there are key differences. I earned a degree in English and Argento was lucky to graduate high school. I'm a family man and he's a loner. He likes to throw back beer and I'm a lifelong teetotaler. He's handy and I can't fix anything. It's the sparkly magic of fiction, folks.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Movies with some moral brawn to them, like John Sayles' film Matewan. Springsteen's lean and sometimes bleak album Nebraska. The kinds of drug-ravaged, unpredictable streets I work as a cop. News stories about improbable tales of survival, like someone being rescued after days of being stuck under earthquake wreckage or escaping a burning building. I'm drawn to accounts of people being pushed to their limits.

Visit Adam Plantinga's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Ascent.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alice Henderson

In addition to being a writer, Alice Henderson is a dedicated wildlife researcher, geographic information systems specialist, and bioacoustician. She documents wildlife on specialized recording equipment, checks remote cameras, creates maps, and undertakes wildlife surveys to determine what species are present on preserves, while ensuring there are no signs of poaching. She’s surveyed for the presence of grizzlies, wolves, wolverines, jaguars, endangered bats, and more.

Henderson's latest Alex Carter mystery thriller is The Vanishing Kind.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Originally I wanted each book in this series to be the group name of an animal and the animal, like "A Murder of Crows" or "An Obstinacy of Bison." But I quickly learned with the first three species I focused on (wolverines, polar bears, and mountain caribou), that they had no specific group names. So I made up fitting group names: A Solitude of Wolverines, A Blizzard of Polar Bears, A Ghost of Caribou. Originally I gave The Vanishing Kind the working title of A Prowl of Jaguars, and it was the first time the group of animals I was focusing on had an actual, pre-established group name: a prowl. But it was at this time that my publisher wanted to go in a different direction with the title themes, so The Vanishing Kind was chosen instead. We thought the title would convey a mystery...what is vanishing? And at the same time it applies to both the critically endangered jaguar and to certain events in the book.

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

I think my teenage self would be happy with my novel. Even back then, I was working to help wildlife both in the field with rescue/rehabilitation and habitat improvement. I was writing letters, circulating petitions, and donating money to wildlife non-profits. So to know I'd written a series about a wildlife biologist dedicated to helping endangered species would have made me quite happy.

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

They are equally challenging for me. I want to immediately invite readers into a mystery, so I put a lot of thought into what's going to unfold at the start and how it will tie in to the story later on. But for endings, it's also very important, especially in a thriller or mystery, to tie up all the threads you've introduced over the course of the novel.

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

I see a lot of similarities between me and my protagonist. We're both wildlife researchers, we both have a deep love of nature and conservation. But villains who want to destroy habitat are definitely a world apart from me, so it's interesting to get into their mindsets.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Nature is infinitely inspiring to me. Most scenes in my novels are written while I'm out in the wild. I have a portable word processor and I'll sit outside on a boulder or under a tree in a forest, writing and gazing out at the scenery. I camp in the very places where I set my books, so I'll steep in the setting -- what the air smells like, what bird songs I hear, what wildlife I see.

Visit Alice Henderson's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Vanishing Kind.

My Book, The Movie: The Vanishing Kind.

--Marshal Zeringue

Louise Hegarty

Louise Hegarty’s work has appeared in Banshee, the Tangerine, the Stinging Fly, and the Dublin Review, and has been featured on BBC Radio 4’s Short Works. She was the inaugural winner of the Sunday Business Post/Penguin Ireland Short Story Prize. Her short story “Getting the Electric” has been optioned by Fíbín Media. She lives in Cork, Ireland.

Hegarty's debut novel is Fair Play.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The title of my book comes from the fair play doctrine, one of the defining principles of Golden Age detective fiction - the concept that the reader should have a fair chance to solve the mystery before the grand reveal. The trick was to provide the reader with enough clues so that they could have, as TS Eliot put it “a sporting chance to solve the mystery”. It was so central to mystery writing at the time that The Detection Club – a dining club and discussion forum for writers of detective fiction founded in 1930 – began its own constitution with the line: “it is a demerit in a detective novel if the author does not play fair by the reader.” Over the years, many writers have put together their own version of the fair play rules: TS Eliot, Ronald Knox and SS Van Dine. Some writers, like JJ Connington and Ellery Queen, in radical displays of fair play, even included cluefinders at the back of their books. These were appendices that listed out all the clues with their corresponding page numbers to show the reader that they had in fact been given “a fighting chance” to solve the mystery. In my book, I use these fair play rules together with the familiar structure of a Golden Age detective novel - with its murder, its suspect, its Watson and the reveal - to explore the emotions around death and grief.

What's in a name?

I had a lot of fun choosing the names of the detective novel characters in Fair Play. I wanted the names to be like Easter Eggs that whodunnit fans could uncover. The detective’s name is Auguste Bell: Auguste from C Auguste Dupin (from arguably the world’s first detective story "The Murders on the Rue Morgue") and Bell from Joseph Bell who was one of the influences for the character Sherlock Holmes. His sidekick is named Sacker which was the original name Arthur Conan Doyle had for John Watson. Because my book has two timelines, there are also a lot of shared names (with very slight changes).

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

Surprised – but also not surprised! I have been reading murder mysteries all my life which have obviously hugely influenced Fair Play.

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

I find endings a lot easier to write. I’m not sure why exactly but I know that when I start writing something new, I want to know (even roughly) where I am supposed to be aiming. With Fair Play, the idea for the ending came to me suddenly and I wrote it very quickly. It has changed very little since the initial draft. Deciding where you are going to enter the narrative can be difficult and so it did take me a while to figure out how I was going to begin the novel.

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

I can’t say that any of the characters are similar to me but a lot of them are Irish people around my own age so they are a group of people that I would be familiar with.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

In terms of playing with genre tropes, I took inspiration from the television show The Singing Detective and the film The Last of Sheila. When writing the grief side of things, I looked to Season 5, Episode 16 (“The Body”) of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the way that genre fiction can deal with sudden deaths. I also thought a lot about the Japanese architect Toyo Ito and the White U house he built for his widowed sister and his young daughters to provide them with a place to be together and grieve, and which acted like a giant concrete hug for the family. In 1997, once the family had all moved out, Ito had the house demolished on the basis that it had done its job. In grief, we can find ourselves retreating from the wider world. Some of this is a necessity – duvet days to relax and rest – but grieving also means moving towards a routine and some hope of normalcy.

Learn more about Fair Play at the publisher's website.

The Page 69 Test: Fair Play.

--Marshal Zeringue

Van Hoang

Van Hoang is the author of Girl Giant and the Monkey King, Girl Giant and the Jade War, and the forthcoming Auntie Q's Golden Claws Nail Salon for middle grade readers. Her adult debut novel is The Monstrous Misses Mai; Silver and Smoke is her new novel. Hoang earned her bachelor’s in English at the University of New Mexico and her master’s in library information science at San Jose State University. She was born in Vietnam, grew in up Orange County, California, and now resides in Los Angeles with her family.

My Q&A with Hoang:

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

Silver and Smoke seems like a simple title, but it conveys all the parts of the novel that I wanted to focus on. Silver draws to mind the silver screen, where the novel is set during 1936 Old Hollywood. The Smoke refers to the magical element, but it could also reference how much of the film industry is about illusions, whether behind a fantastical world or through tricks--both are true in this book.

What's in a name?

The main character's name is Issa Bui, which I thought would be a bit silly to have an actor with the last name resembling so close to "boo." She also has to literally spell it out for people even though it's a straightforward sort of name, which is indicative of the struggles she faces on such a miniscule level, being a person of color.

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

I don't think I'd be surprised at all! My adult self is more surprised that I ended up writing a ghost story set in history, but looking back, I was always drawn to slightly scary stories during times that allowed for an escape from my current problems.

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

I find beginnings much harder to write, mostly because I can't move forward until I get it almost perfect. Sometimes, I have to accept that I'll have a few "false starts" and just give myself permission to write badly, but I do end up rewriting the beginning so much more than the rest of the novel.

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

Usually, I put a lot of myself into the main character, but Silver and Smoke is the first where the characters are least like me. The book is about two movie stars who have to be confident and sophisticated and ambitious, and I don't think I'm anything like that. It was really fun to channel these personality traits and pretend that I could be though!

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

All the Old Hollywood films! But I was especially drawn to the You Must Remember This podcast when I was researching this book, and highly recommend it! I was also inspired by Anna May Wong's life and experience in Hollywood, and much of the story of Silver and Smoke was written to honor her legacy.

Visit Van Hoang's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Monstrous Misses Mai.

The Page 69 Test: Silver and Smoke.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Inman

Novelist, screenwriter and playwright Robert Inman is a native of Elba, Alabama where he began his writing career in junior high school with his hometown weekly newspaper. He left a 31-year career in television journalism in 1996 to devote full time to creative writing.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Place has always played a significant role in my storytelling. To a great extent, the setting of the story becomes a character. It influences who the human characters are, why they are where they are, and how they – and the place – interact.

The title Villages goes to the heart of the story. There are two villages: One is a war-blasted town in the Middle East where my central character, 21-year-old Jonas Boulware, is badly wounded performing a heroic act as a combat medic. Then there is the village of Copernicus, the small southern town where Jonas grew up, and to which he returns, altered in body and spirit, to try to get his life back together. Both places have a profound impact on his life, both before and after his traumatic war experience.

In the first draft of the novel, I simply titled it “Copernicus.” But it became clear that Copernicus was only half of the story. So, Villages. The title may be only a hint at the story at first, but it becomes clear quickly what those places are all about.

What’s in a name?

I collect names. I’m always coming across names that interest me, and I tuck them away in my memory until the moment they might suit a character I’m dealing with in a story. There’s nothing particularly unusual about the character names in Villages, but to me, in the writing process, they just seemed to fit. Perhaps the most unusual name is “Lyric.” She’s a down-on-her-luck folksinger who’s passing through Copernicus. Jonas takes her in and falls in love with her. Since I’m also a songwriter, “Lyric” seems just right.

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

I wasn’t your typical teenage reader. I had the great advantage of a wonderful librarian in the small southern town where I grew up. She took a special interest in me, and plied me with books that were, to put it mildly, a stretch. She had me reading Faulkner and Hemingway when I was 12 years old, and through my teenage years she introduced me to as much truly fine literature as her little library could offer. If my teenage reader self picked up Villages, I think he’d feel at home with it.

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

Over the course of writing six novels, it has worked both ways. My first, Home Fires Burning, grew out of a short story I wrote in graduate school, and I knew from the beginning what the ending would be. It was then a matter of re-inventing the characters and story and getting to that point I already knew. Other work has proceeded from a beginning I imagined, and the job there is to go visit the characters every possible chance and see where they’re leading you.

With Villages, I turned everything on its head. The first draft began with a scene from combat. But as I rewrote, it became clear that that scene belonged at the end of the book. The arc of the story is Jonas’s quest to deal with ghosts from his past, and it’s not until the end that he truly knows who those ghosts are.

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

I believe there is something of me in every character I imagine – otherwise, I couldn’t write their story in an authentic way. As a writer, I’m the product of everything I’ve seen, every word I’ve heard, every place I’ve been, every person I’ve known, every idea I’ve had, including the disturbing ones. The challenge is to let them be their own people, to say and do and think things that surprise me, baffle me, delight me, make me cringe.

Jonas, in Villages, is in many ways most like me – the small-town raising, the dysfunctional family, the need to take care of people. He’s made me laugh, cry, reflect, and feel deep pain and genuine hope.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

First of all, I come from a large, rowdy storytelling southern family. A lot of what I heard around them was truth, but a lot of it was just plain made up. And that was the fun part. They – and my mother reading to me from the time I could hold my head up – gave me the gift of imagination.

Also, I’m a visual person. I had a lengthy career in television journalism, working with both words and pictures to tell stories. And I’ve been able to channel that visual sense into a good career in screenwriting and playwriting. I have to see a scene before I can write it. And then the challenge is to flesh out the scene with a few good words, just enough to trigger the reader’s imagination. If a thousand people read my story, I’ve really written a thousand stories. I trust my readers, and that’s the magic part.

Visit Robert Inman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Villages.

My Book, The Movie: Villages.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rav Grewal-Kök

Rav Grewal-Kök’s first novel, The Snares, is published by Random House.

His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, the New England Review, Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, The White Review, and elsewhere. He has won an NEA fellowship in prose and is a fiction editor at Fence.

Grewal-Kök grew up in Hong Kong and on Vancouver Island and now lives in Los Angeles.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My title comes from Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s translation of a poem by Kabir, the 15th Century north Indian mystic. Kabir tells us that men trap animals by offering them what they most desire (for a bull elephant, a mate; for a monkey, a pot of rice; for a parrot, a bamboo perch). “Beware the snares, says Kabir. / If the ship of Rama comes calling, / Board it at once.”

I’m not religious. But when I read Kabir’s lines for the first time, fourteen years ago, I sensed that they contained a profound truth. Our lusts, hungers, desires entrap us. If we don’t escape our endless wanting through love or art (or the divine)—if we don’t board “the ship of Rama”—we are doomed.

My novel’s protagonist doesn’t heed Kabir’s warning. At the outset he’s a mid-level government lawyer, happily married, with two young daughters. A mysterious CIA bureaucrat takes an interest in him, appeals to his ambition, and offers him something more: rank, power, proximity to the White House. The title tells the reader that traps, not rewards, lie ahead.

What's in a name?

My protagonist’s name is Neel Chima. “Chima” is my mother’s maiden name, and also the name of the Punjabi village where her father spent his childhood, and where he returned for the last twenty years of his life (many Punjabis take their village name as a surname).

Giving my protagonist a name from my own family made him seem more real to me while I was writing the book. I tried to make the world of the book real as well, to justify his presence in it.

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

Difficult question. My teenage self might have been surprised (and worried), by the darkness of The Snares. I write about war, betrayal, moral failure. It’s also a very American novel, and as a teenager I hadn’t lived here and knew little about this country. That might have intrigued my teenage self.

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

Beginning any piece of writing—novel, essay, story—is difficult. It takes me many attempts to find a plausible rhythm and language. By the time I got to the ending of this book, I was writing very fast, and hardly revising at all. That’s been the pattern for me in shorter pieces as well.

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

I see a lot of myself in the protagonist of my novel. Perhaps that’s a damning admission, because Neel Chima is a flawed person who does some very bad things. But he’s also funny at times, and resilient, and capable of love. I think he deserves compassion.

There’s less of me in the secondary characters, and more of other people I’ve known, especially those I’ve disliked!

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I love movies. I’m sure watching scenes play out on the screen has influenced how I write scenes on the page. I often sketch a room or exterior location and place stick-figure characters on it before I begin writing, so I can keep the physical aspects clear in my own mind.

I sometimes listen to music when I write, especially late at night. Usually I choose jazz from the 50s and 60s: Monk, Mingus, Coltrane, Miles Davis. It helps with the flow, and also makes me feel less lonely.

But everything in one’s life can influence the writing. You cook a chicken for dinner, you hear a siren in the distance—and later that night your characters do as well.

Visit Rav Grewal-Kök's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Charles B. Fancher

Charles B. Fancher is a writer and editor, and a former senior corporate communications executive for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He also worked as a journalist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Detroit Free Press, and WSM-TV, as well as a publicist for the ABC Television Network. Fancher was previously a member of the School of Communications faculty at Howard University and the adjunct faculty at Temple University. He lives in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains.

Fancher's new novel is Red Clay.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My initial title for what would become Red Clay was Felix, a holdover from my original intent to write a narrative nonfiction book about my great-grandfather, a young boy when he and his enslaved family were emancipated at the end of the Civil War and how he overcame great odds to mature, achieve a measure of success, and provide a strong foundation for future generations.

When I decided to write a historical novel instead, it became clear that the story was about a lot more than just one man; it was about a place and time, a culture, and the people who lived through one of the most tumultuous periods in American history: the last months of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the dawning of the Jim Crow era.

Regardless of race, religion, or social status, one thing bound all of the region’s inhabitants together—the land—especially the red clay soil, which was also symbolic of the blood spilled on battlefields, blood oozed from wounds inflicted by the overseers’ whips, and blood running through the veins of families across generations. The character Felix remained at the center of the story, but a new title was needed, and the one that made sense was Red Clay.

What’s in a name?

Although Red Clay, a work of historical fiction, is inspired by family anecdotes, most of the characters are figures of my imagination, and I pored over lists of names from that period—the mid- to late-19th century—to find the ones that “felt” right when I spoke them aloud. There were, however, four given names from my family that I chose to use (even though they are fictionalized versions of the real people), because doing so anchored me as the story unfolded: my great-great-grandfather, Plessant, and his wife, Elmira; and my great-grandfather Felix, and his wife, Zilpha.

In choosing fictional names of other characters, I also tried to select names that would be memorable without being eccentric. For example, the owner of the Road’s End plantation is John Robert Parker. Neither John nor Robert is unusual, but by making him known as John Robert (employing a Southern penchant for addressing one by both first and middle names) it became memorable without being unusual, as something like Zebulon Jeremiah Parker might have been.

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

I find beginnings to be harder, because the weight of structuring them in ways that will grab readers’ attention and pull them into the rest of the work is so keen. In Red Clay, I needed to establish Felix Parker, a carpenter and formerly enslaved Black man, as someone whose life had been consequential and whose contemporaries cared about him deeply. I also needed readers to share that sense of him and to want to know why those around him felt as they did.

My solution was to begin in a church packed to the rafters with relatives, friends, and associates assembled for his funeral, a dramatic show of love and respect for a well-lived life. It also provided a means to introduce some of the key characters in the story to come. Notably, the funeral provides a motive for Adelaide Parker, the elderly daughter of the man who had owned Felix before Emancipation, to meet and sit down with Felix’s young granddaughter as a vehicle for piecing together Felix’s life story and exploring the times and events that surrounded him.

As for the ending, I had a clear vision of where the story would go from the moment I decided to make it a work of fiction. The challenge was to come up with the right beginning and to build a dramatic arc to a satisfying conclusion.

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

I cannot point to a single character with whom I identify completely. It is fair to say, however, that in Red Clay, some of what I see as my best—and worst—traits are spread across multiple characters.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Perhaps more than any other non-literary inspiration—and there are several—music has been at the forefront. I wrote most of Red Clay, with music playing in the background, instrumental jazz mostly, but also playlists created from other genres as varied as 1970s singer-songwriter tracks by the likes of Kris Kristofferson, Janis Ian, and Neil Young; African choral music performances, compositions by Aaron Copland, and 1970s and 1980s soul artists like Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, and Donny Hathaway. As different as they all are, they have one thing in common—they engender powerful emotional responses. The music I chose was determined by the nature of what I would be writing that day.

Visit Charles B. Fancher's website.

The Page 69 Test: Red Clay.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rosanne Limoncelli

Rosanne Limoncelli is an author, filmmaker, and storyteller living in Brooklyn. She has written, directed, and produced short narrative films, documentaries, and educational films. Limoncelli also writes plays, feature scripts, poetry, games, mysteries, and science fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Suspense Magazine, and Noir Nation, and her short films have been screened in festivals around the world.

Limoncelli's debut mystery novel is The Four Queens of Crime.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My book The Four Queens of Crime takes the reader straight into the premise of Golden Age Mysteries. Fans of that era know Agatha Christie was called the Queen of Crime, and if they haven’t yet read Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio Marsh or Margery Allingham, the novel is a good introduction to those authors. They were dubbed the Four Queens of Crime since they were to top selling authors of the 1930’s and all four authors are characters in the book. The year is 1938 and the Four Queens of Crime are called upon to host a fundraiser gala ball for the Women’s Voluntary Service, to help prepare for the event of war. They host the ball on a Friday evening and will stay the whole weekend at Sir Henry Heathcote’s country estate. The gala goes well, but the four writers witness quite a bit of dramatic family dynamics and political intrigue that pervade the event. The next morning Sir Henry is found murdered on the locked library.

What's in a name?

I love research. It’s the most fun and productive way to procrastinate. Many of the characters in this story are real people and I read everything I could that was written about them and written by them, so using their real names was important. My favorite character is DCI Lilian Wyles. The fact that she was the first woman detective in Scotland Yard, everything she had to go through, and had to fight for, was inspiring to me. For the fictional characters, choosing names is something I struggle with, it’s so hard to decide! I try and let my mind wander and come up with something from my subconscious in order for it to feel organic. More important to me is their background, their motivation, and their actions that connect them to the themes and clues and plot points.

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

My teenage self would love that I found the courage to write whole novels, especially of the mystery genre. At the time I was reading a lot of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and was about to discover Agatha Christie. My brain loved to solve puzzles and ponder on how other people’s brains thought about a variety of things, and the psychology of their actions, good, bad and the gray in between. I was not encouraged to write fiction, at that young age, in fact I was discouraged, and it took me years to find my path to writing, which is now what I love to do best.

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

Definitely beginnings! I always write the endings first. I must understand the crime, what it means to me as the key to the theme, then I work my way backwards. Meanwhile, in my mind, I'm writing the life stories of all the characters, but how much of that does the book really need? Where the story should start is my biggest conundrum. In this story I decided to have each author be introduced in their own scene as they are thinking conflicted thoughts about participating in the gala. Agatha is receiving the invitation, Dorothy is helping prepare for the event, Ngaio is choosing clothes and packing for the weekend, and Margery is driving to the country estate. Each scene introduces the character to the reader, allows the character to foreshadow issues, and also brings us closer in time to the event. I also wanted to introduce DCI Lilian Wyles, and her scene turned out to be a prologue.

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

So many of these characters did feel like they were a world apart, mainly due to the 1938 era, but I focused on the parallels. Each writer character has their own unique writing style and background, but I related to all of them in my own way, as a writer. Overall, I think I relate most to DCI Wyles, as she is the professional puzzle solver, the real detective, and has to deal with the professional world she is in which is mostly made up of men. She has to find her way to deal with professional situations and hold strong to succeed in her job. I definitely brought a lot of my own experience to imagine Lilian’s.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I am also a filmmaker and I teach filmmaking and story writing so I love watching movies as much as I love reading, so I would say that is my biggest influence outside of books. But I also have a wide interest in genres and when researching this book I watched narrative and documentary films, as well as reading fiction and nonfiction books that were about the era or written in the era. I loved getting into the specific language and politics of the time and place, listening, watching, and reading materials on how people spoke in 1938 England and what topics were filling their minds. There are so many parallels with the politics of that time to ours, and studying those details was a big inspiration for this book.

Visit Rosanne Limoncelli's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Four Queens of Crime.

The Page 69 Test: The Four Queens of Crime.

--Marshal Zeringue

Su Chang

Su Chang is a Chinese-Canadian writer. Born and raised in Shanghai, she is the daughter of a former (reluctant) Red Guard leader. Her fiction has been recognized in Prairie Fire’s Short Fiction Contest, the Canadian Authors’ Association (Toronto) National Writing Contest, the ILS/Fence Fiction Contest, the Masters Review’s Novel Excerpt Contest, the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Contest, among others.

The Immortal Woman is Chang's debut novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Ah, titles! It’s the bane of my existence as a writer. My book title was the last thing I decided on, long after the book was written and self-edited multiple rounds. I had quite a few contenders. At one point, it was called “Erasure”. Later, it became “The Trouble with Leaving.” I was very serious about the latter title, and it almost made it to the end, if my editor hadn’t put a stop to it. I still think it was a decent one as it illuminated the main theme of the book, but I can also see some issues with it, the most important one being that it suggests the book is all about the daughter character, while in reality the mother character is equally important (with large sections of the book devoted to her). Another issue may be that the old title doesn’t have any “cultural marker.” A reader wouldn’t know from the title that half of the book is set in China and it’s a book about Chinese modern history and Chinese immigrants.

The current title, The Immortal Woman, is a good one and certainly solves the cultural marker problem. At the most literal level, the Immortal Woman is the patron saint of the mother and daughter’s ancestral village. She embodies tradition and hence a threat the Maoist China desperately sought to eradicate, as well as something the heartbroken Lemei, during her early motherhood, resolved to expunge from her daughter’s life. At the same time, the Immortal Woman also serves as a symbolic stand-in for both mother and daughter, who, despite decades of trauma, ultimately re-emerge into the light, resilient and enduring.

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

My teenage self would be surprised. She was a sheltered girl, living in a cocoon of her own culture and having no idea that she’d end up living in the West and learning all sorts of tabooed facts about her birth country and its history. She’d never have expected the kind of bone-chilling isolation and loneliness she’d one day experience as an adult immigrant - so much so that she had to channel her pain into artistic expression.

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

I love writing beginnings, and I loathe writing endings. That’s not to say beginnings are easy – they are not. Whether I can hook readers in those early pages has an outsized impact on the book’s fate, and I indeed find that kind of pressure very unsettling. Having said that, I am an ideas person and starting a book to explore my new ideas is always exciting. I do typically know where the story will end up when I start the book, but after traversing through the long middle of the book, my preconceived endings almost always come up short. For The Immortal Woman, I had a completely different, almost opposite, ending in my first 10 drafts. I’ve probably written 20 to 30 drafts of this book over the years. At about halfway, I changed the ending entirely. The original ending was sadder - the daughter character remained in North America, with more self-awareness and understanding of her history, but still without a clear path forward. That was a more realist take on the story. But I thought, I’ve already put those characters through the wringer, let’s end it on a note of hope. The current ending borders on a kind of fairytale in my mind. The daughter, having lived as an immigrant, an “alien,” on a continent that doesn’t necessarily welcome her, to then be able to find a sense of comfort and security in her own skin, and to be surrounded by a community again, is very much akin to a fairytale. But I have to point out the sinister note lurking in the last few paragraphs of the novel, where the daughter is aware that she’s living in an imagined bubble that can burst anytime; yet she just needs to hold onto that sense of belonging for a precious moment. I hope that sense of danger and brittleness is clear, because ultimately, I’m not writing a fairytale. Let’s not be naïve here.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Video footage and documentaries on modern Chinese history that I only had access to after I emigrated from China were crucial during my research for this novel. I am a piano player and music fan, so I often turn to music (e.g. songs from my Shanghai childhood, Astor Piazzolla, Rachmaninoff, Mandopop, etc.) to center myself or access a particular mood conducive to writing. I am also a politics junkie, reading news and commentaries daily and political theories often. Last but not least, my father’s unfulfilled, lifelong writerly dream provides fuel whenever I’m at my writing desk.

Visit Su Chang's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Immortal Woman.

The Page 69 Test: The Immortal Woman.

--Marshal Zeringue