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

KC Jones

KC Jones is a screenwriter-turned-novelist currently living in western Washington. When not writing, he can be found watching movies, playing video and board games, or enjoying nature—whenever it isn’t raining.

He graduated from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas with a degree in film production. His first published novel, Black Tide, was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a first novel.

Jones's new novel is White Line Fever.

My Q&A with the author:

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

White line fever is a colloquialism for highway hypnosis, which is the primary tool with which this malevolent stretch of road confuses, frightens, and ultimately kills people who drive it. The main character, Livia, has also been going through adulthood in her own form of highway hypnosis—until an unexpected turn shocks her out of it, and she suddenly realizes she doesn't recognize her life. Not her husband, her house, even herself. Her journey is not just surviving a trip down a hellish highway, it's reclaiming control instead of just going where the road takes her. To me, though, "highway hypnosis" just didn't quite ring as a title, whereas "white line fever" has a nice punchy cadence, like broken road stripes flashing past, and it's a bit strange, a bit unsettling. I came across the term while researching the psychology behind highway hypnosis, and knew immediately that it had to be the title.

What's in a name?

There's no deep meaning behind any of the character names, besides Livia most often going by the shortened "Liv," which is the thing she's not been doing for as long as she can remember, and will hopefully start doing again by the end. I had a bit more fun with her family name of Rhodes, particularly her father's Rhodes' End junkyard, which comes into play as both a name and place. The "Silver Bullet" campervan is another fictional name that I used pretty intentionally in a wink-wink, nudge-nudge sort of way. The road itself is nicknamed "The Devil's Driveway" for how dangerous it is, but its real name, County Road 951, takes inspiration from a couple of things. One is Road 5 NW, aka White Trail Road, a rural bypass in central Washington that I've driven more times than I could count. 951 comes from the address of a haunted house a childhood friend lived in. They never claimed there were ghosts in 951 (and only ever referred to the house by its street number), just a nebulous "bad magic," which I found far creepier, and thus the combination of numbers has always felt a bit sinister to me.

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

Not in the slightest. Scary stories have been my thing since Goosebumps, and many of my formative experiences involved vehicles and creepy roads. I wrote screenplays prior to novels, and even with books I'm just writing the movie I see in my head. My teenage self would look at this and likely say "that tracks."

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

I don't like to start writing a story until I know how it ends. Endings are my lodestar, they help guide everything that comes before. I rewrote this story several times, from screenplay to exploratory novel to first draft to a complete page-one rewrite that more closely resembled the final product. But despite how completely different all of these versions were, the ending was always the same. How do you defeat a road? I knew from the outset, but getting the characters and story to the point where it's even a possibility was a journey of many beginnings.

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

Bits and pieces. Livia's tendency to avoid conflict, of trying to keep everybody together and happy, is definitely me, and shades of Becka's upbringing, and eventual turning away from it, are reflective of my own experience. Morgan and Ash's witnessing a family member slowly succumb to a terrible illness, and the ways that experience informs a lot of their behavior, is probably the most personal connection to myself in this. Personality-wise I'm way more Morgan than Ash (although I do like the "noise" of the kitchen when I need to shut everything else out.)

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

This is a hard one to distill down, because for me it's just living life. Watching, listening, experiencing. In terms of what paved the way for White Line Fever, my numerous trips down very long, very empty roads, an oddball group of childhood friends, and space. Yeah, the cosmos. I think about it a lot when playing with the more magic elements of stories. Its ability to be both beautiful and terrifying, essential to our existence and utterly hostile, vast beyond imagining and yet always right there, if we only go outside after dark and look up.

Visit KC Jones's website.

The Page 69 Test: White Line Fever.

--Marshal Zeringue