Stephanie Cowell

Before turning to novel writing, Stephanie Cowell was an opera singer, balladeer, founded an outdoor arts series in New York City's Bryant Park, a Renaissance festival, a chamber opera company and many other things. She has lived in New York City all her life, indeed in the same apartment building for fifty-two years in the neighborhood (and sometimes down the block) where they filmed You've Got Mail. Cowell has loved England and Europe all her life and traveled there almost every year.

Her new novel is The Man in the Stone Cottage.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I can’t remember when I chose my title, but I feel it has air of mystery about it. Who could this man be? I found a very early draft of the novel from years ago from Charlotte’s pov but it eventually became more of Emily’s journey and the title changed. I was always so drawn to the remoteness of half-ruined houses/cottages on the Yorkshire moors -- the loneliness of them, the allure. I first saw such cottages in my adolescence and climbed in one and wondered if the owner would step through time and come in. I could see him standing in the doorway.

What's in a name?

The Man in the Stone Cottage is about real people, the Brontë sisters who wrote Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, etc. so those names are factual. The only fictional characters are a minor one and of course, the mysterious titular character, the shepherd. I don’t recall why I called him Jonathan, but his surname is a common for the island of St. Kilda from where he comes (or says he comes). I feel that is a strong, solid name…a man who says plainly who he is and what he stands for, a man you can count on. And he is…but…well you will have to read the book to see the “but” in that.

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

My adolescent self would not believe that she would write something so emotionally and technically complicated. I was fourteen when I read Wuthering Heights and likely Jane Eyre and I didn’t conceive of someone actually sitting down to write them. They were just there, these incredible books. I wrote a historical novel back then and have not the courage to look at it if I still have it. But I think I wrote simple things like, “The boy rode his horse into the battle.” I could not comprehend the complicated mixture of plot, place, character development that is a finished novel. As an adolescent, I felt taking the summer to do a book was a lot. I never dreamed of the struggles and despair and rising joy it would take to do one…and the sometimes many years.

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

Beginnings are the worse. I can revise and rewrite them many times because I don’t truly know the best beginning until I write the whole story. The beginning leads the reader into the book. I cannot remember how many ways I rewrote the beginning of The Man in the Stone Cottage. Only when I discovered that Emily and her inner life was the main lead in the story and that subsequently this intense relationship with a handsome man who may be partially from her mind -- then I knew my beginning.

I then began the book again when she was a child of perhaps twelve years old, and wandering alone, finding the ruined cottage in an isolated part of the moors. It is quite deserted. She spends hours there and makes up stories. Then she grows up and forgets about it for many years until one day, she finds it again and the shepherd who is now living there.

For The Man in the Stone Cottage, I had the ending many months before the book became final.

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

I very much see myself in the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne. They are all parts of my own character. Part of me is hidden and mystical like Emily, feeling the presence of people others may not see. Part of me is determined to make my world succeed like Charlotte. The third sister in the novel, Anne, proceeds quietly forward in life without fuss. I would love to have more of Anne in me. My friends say I do but I don’t believe it.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

It is very difficult to pinpoint this because so much of my life and the things I have seen and done have influenced my writing. I’d say first it is travel: at age 23 and quite alone, I went to the Brontë parsonage now a museum in the village on a steep hill in Yorkshire England. Stumbling over the moors with a friend and then walking the rooms where the Brontë family lived put down seeds in me which would not turn into a novel for many decades later.

My second inspiration is music. Mozart showed me the structures which I then used in writing: a theme repeated, a surprise turn, suddenly pianissimo (very soft) and then fortissimo (very loud) and building to the end.

Third is old houses and furnishings which as a historical novelist I love. There is a museum in NYC with a medieval stair which I have stared at for a long time until I feel people from centuries ago descending it. I am mystical like Emily Brontë! Another influence is family and personal relations. Lastly is the weary struggle for enough money. That was a huge thing in my life when I was a young woman and later a single mom of two boys. Being unable to pay bills was a very big worry.

Visit Stephanie Cowell's website.

The Page 69 Test: Claude & Camille.

The Page 69 Test: The Man in the Stone Cottage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Danila Botha

Danila Botha is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collections, Got No Secrets, For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I’ve Known, which was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, The Vine Awards and the ReLit Award and most recently, Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness. The collection won an Indie Reader Discovery Award for Women's Issues, Fiction, and was a finalist for the Canadian Book Club Awards, the Next Generation Indie Book Awards and the National Indie Excellence Book Awards. She is also the author of the award-winning novel Too Much On the Inside which was optioned for film. Her first graphic novel, Vidal will be published in Feb 2026 by At Bay Press.

Botha's new novel is A Place for People Like Us.

My Q&A with the author:

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

A Place for People Like Us was actually a very hard title to choose, which isn’t usually the case for me. Often the title comes to me relatively early, and I use it to frame the story as I go through each draft. For example, before I’d even written the title story in my short story collection, For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I’ve Known, I knew the kind of story I wanted to write, and that it would capture the theme of love lost in the collection. In this case, the original draft was told from both Hannah’s and Jillian’s points of view. I was listening to a lot of Fiona Apple at the time, and she has this amazing song, "Fast As You Can," with lyrics that go “oh darling/ it’s so sweet/ you think you know how crazy/ how crazy I am.” How Crazy I Am was an early title I considered, but I worried that it both trivialized mental health struggles and was reductive, because both women are so much more complex. Another title I considered was The World Is Dead and I’m Full of Joy, which comes from a wonderful line in a Zeruya Shalev novel, Love Life: "I said to myself, the world is dead and I am full of joy. And sometimes, the words turned over in my mouth, and I said I’m dead, and the world is full of joy, and it seemed to me that it was really the same thing, and I thought, what luck, I could’ve gone through my whole life without ever feeling this." I just worried that either it would be too abstract, for everything I wanted to express, or it would give away too much, I wanted everything that happened to Hannah and Jillian to genuinely surprise the reader. I think the title A Place for People Like Us encompasses the characters and the story so much more.

The title, A Place for People Like Us. What's in a name?

This is a great question. One of the big themes in the novel is the lengths people go to in order to find a sense of belonging, love, community and identity. I read and write a lot of short stories, and even though this is a novel, the title was inspired by one of my favourite short story collections, Jesus’s Son by Denis Johnson. The final story, "Beverly Home," has this beautiful line right at the end, which was the original inspiration: ” All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.” I highly recommend the collection to everyone, even to people who don’t normally read that much short fiction, it’s beautiful and brave and fearless.

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

I think my teenage self would so thrilled first of all, to know that I was writing and publishing novels. I loved to read and to write from such a young age, I was always creating stories and narratives and reading novels and short stories, and as a teenager, it would have felt like winning the lottery to know that I’d really get to do this as a job one day.

My teenage self identified deeply with characters who didn’t fit in, artists who were looking for their place in the world, and characters like Jillian, who fearlessly create and do what they want to do, and are unabashedly themselves, and make music on their own terms, and characters like Hannah who overcome so much, who are steely in their determination to carve their own paths, and who are building the confidence to really pursue their artistic interests. I think I would have related to both of their desires to rebel against their upbringings, though because their upbringings were so different, of course, their reactions are different. My teenage self may also have been surprised by some of the turns in this story, but I hope she would have been entertained, and excited to know that the potential for that kind of research and imagination, and the confidence to edit and draft and rewrite existed somewhere within me.

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

I love this question. They can both be challenging in different ways, and they definitely both require editing and rewriting until you get them right, but I find beginnings easier. Once in my mind, I’ve established the character’s voice, and I can hear them speaking, it’s easier to imagine where their life starts, or where the narrative arc starts. Endings are harder for me because I really try to resist the urge to tie everything up, my favourite endings are the ones where I keep wondering about the characters, where I stay invested emotionally in what could happen next to them, or the effect something will have on them. I actually rewrote the ending to A Place For People Like Us multiple times before landing on this one, and I hope it hits all the right notes with readers.

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

I don’t write autobiographically, so my characters are often a world apart (which in many ways is a good thing). I really like to understand try to understand characters, their motivations, their reasons, and I really enjoy doing that when they’re entirely a combination of imagination and research. I love doing this kind of research. The part that sometimes is a little bit connected to me is in their taste. I really enjoyed describing Jillian’s style, her taste in aesthetics, her taste in music. I loved imagining her apartment, her stacks of coffee music books that included Aretha Franklin, Prince and Bjork, her framed paparazzi photos of Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, her bedroom floor which was painted to look like a Jackson Pollock painting, her bathroom full of dick pic art covered in crystals. It’s not my taste exactly, but I really enjoyed riffing and researching and sometimes highlighting things I loved. I made music when I was younger, and some of Jillian’s lyrics are actually mine from years and years ago. "Believe Me" was actually one of those songs, it was really fun to be able to reuse them.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music has always been a huge part of my process. I listened to a lot of Bikini Kill when I wrote the early scenes, especially the songs, "Rebel Girl," which is quoted in the beginning of the book, and "Liar." I love Kathleen Hanna, and her songs (including her Le Tigre songs) instantly transported me. Sonic Youth had the same effect. (I even included a band button I have of Sonic Youth’s, it has a picture of two raccoons and the words Live Fast! Eat Trash! which I have Jillian wearing on the day they see each other for the second time.)

My decision to give Jillian her name actually came from the singer Jill Scott, whose music I love, and who used to call herself Jilly From Philly at live shows. Aside from being incredibly talented, she evinces this confidence and warmth onstage that I thought would a real inspiration to Jillian Azoulay. There’s a lot of music that makes appearances in this story, from bands and artists Jillian loves (Hannah describes her voice as sounding like a cross between St Vincent and Beyonce) to what she’s listening to in the last scenes, to Bjork’s "Sun in My Mouth," which Hannah hears at the end and instantly connects them again. A lot of visual art makes appearances too. Early on, Hannah describes Jillian as looking like “a living version of the Woman in Gold painting” (that one of her roommates had a poster of). There’s also the art in the Goldwater family’s home (which includes a painting by Menashe Kadishman, whose work I love) and references to graffiti artist Know Hope, among others. Hannah wants to make movies and studies film, along with business, so there are more film references than I’d usuall make. In the first chapter, when Hannah signs a lease with someone she doesn’t know, against her better judgment, she says she feels like Ariel in The Little Mermaid, “signing my voice away for the vaguest potential of happiness.” At one point Jillian is watching But I’m a Cheerleader, a movie I loved from the late 90’s, and later, she’s watching Tank Girl, which also felt very on brand. When Hannah is first interested in Jewish culture, she and Naftali watch Jewish film and TV, including Menashe, Shtisel and Fiddler on the Roof.

Visit Danila Botha's website.

Writers Read: Danila Botha (May 2011).

--Marshal Zeringue

Sonora Reyes

Born and raised in Arizona, Sonora Reyes is the award-winning and bestselling author of The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School, The Luis Ortega Survival Club, The Broposal, and The Golden Boy's Guide to Bipolar. They also have contributed short stories to the anthologies Transmogrify! and For the Rest of Us.

They write fiction celebrating queer and Mexican stories in a variety of genres, with current projects in both kidlit and adult categories.

My Q&A with Reyes:

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

The title for The Golden Boy's Guide to Bipolar came much easier than some of my other works. Since it's a spinoff novel to The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School, I already knew the titles would mirror each other in a sense. The word "lesbiana" was so significant in being included in the title of the first book, so I wanted to have a similar punchy title for this one. Since bipolar disorder is so heavily stigmatized, I thought it would be fitting to put it right in the title, so readers know exactly what kind of representation they'll be getting.

What's in a name?

I'll admit that I may have named my characters based off of vibes only, but I think there is a fair amount of subconscious meaning that ended up going into them. For example, I think Cesar and Yamilet's names can represent how they wish to be perceived. Yamilet, who is Cesar's sister and the main character of the book preceding The Golden Boy's Guide to Bipolar, has a much more unique name than Cesar. Yamilet is the Spanish equivalent of Jamila, which means "beautiful." Even though Cesar is considered the prodigious "golden boy" who always stands out, his name is fairly common. Yami, at her core, wants to be seen, while Cesar wants to blend in, even though their roles are often reversed.

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

Younger me would be gobsmacked that I wrote a book that so openly talks about bipolar disorder. Much like Cesar, I did my best to hide my struggles from those around me when I was younger. If I knew then that I would write an entire book about someone like me, who people actually like, my heart would have burst. My inner teenager is getting to do a lot of healing now because of this book, and I couldn't be more grateful to them for sticking around long enough for me to make it happen.

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

I have a much harder time with beginnings. Sometimes it takes me ages just to start writing because of all the time I spend agonizing over the perfect way to open the book. With endings, I have the whole book to figure out the most satisfying way to close it out, so those come a lot easier for me.

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

All of my characters hold different pieces of me and the people I love. Cesar, like me, struggles with mental illness and more mistakes than he can count, but I've also never been a golden child the way he is. I relate more to his sister in the way I've been treated and perceived growing up. I relate to his love interest, Jamal, in the way he sees the world. His cousin, Moni, is who I wished I was at that age. Meanwhile, many of the side characters mirror people I know and love, or people I wish I could have had by my side at that age.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music! I have a book playlist for every novel I've written. Music helps me understand my characters and the worlds they live in so much better. There are so many songs that I feel match up perfectly with specific chapters or subplots. Sometimes I'll hear a song and get an epiphany about a story! It's like magic.

Visit Sonora Reyes's website.

Writers Read: Sonora Reyes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Catherine Chidgey

Catherine Chidgey’s novels have been published to international acclaim. Her first, In a Fishbone Church, won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In the UK it won the Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her second, Golden Deeds, was a Notable Book of the Year in the New York Times and a Best Book in the LA Times. Chidgey has won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship and the Janet Frame Fiction Prize. Her novel Remote Sympathy was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her novels The Wish Child and The Axeman’s Carnival both won the Acorn Prize for Fiction, New Zealand’s most prestigious literary award. She lives in Cambridge, New Zealand, and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Waikato.

Chidgey's new novel is The Book of Guilt.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I knew from very early on that The Book of Guilt was the right title for the book because of the way it works with the three-part structure. The novel tells the story of thirteen-year-old triplet brothers living in a shadowy boys’ home in the New Forest, England, in a skewed version of 1979. Their three carers – Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night – record the boys’ wrongdoings in a ledger called The Book of Guilt, so the title refers to an actual book within the book. It’s mentioned early in the story, on page 14, and signals to the reader that these are children who are closely monitored. It also speaks to the emotional atmosphere of the novel; almost every character is culpable in some way – or believes that they are, which is possibly more corrosive. The title is also the name of the last of three sections in the novel: The Book of Dreams, The Book of Knowledge, and The Book of Guilt. While all referencing specific texts, these titles also trace the main characters’ journeys from dreamy unawareness, through dawning knowledge, and on into an abiding guilt.

What's in a name?

I named the boys’ carers after their daily shifts to suggest that – just like their young charges – they are ensnared in a system that values some lives less than others. Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night are expendable, easily replaced – every other children’s home within the mysterious Sycamore Scheme has carers that bear these names. And yet, the boys do love them – the only mothers they have ever known, and the ones who administer their daily medications to keep them safe from the mysterious and unpredictable illness known only as the Bug.

One spark for the book was reading a news story about a Japanese politician who holds the role of Minister of Loneliness; I seized on that and knew it belonged in my writing. In The Book of Guilt, when the new government announces that they will be closing the homes and releasing the remaining children into the community (which is making the community very nervous), it’s the Minister of Loneliness who is tasked with implementing the closures. I love the strangeness of her official title, with its notes of wistfulness, sorrow and compassion, and I love the fact that during the writing of the book, this same position was created in the United Kingdom.

The boys’ home lies on the outskirts of a sleepy New Forest village called Ashbridge. I invented this name to suggest a separation between the boys, who have been confined to the home for most of their lives, and the outside world – it may be possible to bridge this divide, but that bridge will be exceedingly fragile, as if made of ash.

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

She might be surprised that I’ve finally stopped writing angry, angsty poems about Ronald Reagan and nuclear war. When she was 15 or thereabouts, she wanted to become a nun, so she would probably be pleased that I still have an eye on complex moral issues – is there ever a sound reason for drawing on the medical research conducted in concentration camps in Nazi Germany, for instance? She would recognise some of the questions the boys are asked to consider each week in their Ethical Hour classes, led by Mother Morning: A building is on fire. You can rescue a trapped child, or you can rescue a valuable painting and sell it in order to raise enough money to save twenty children from starvation. What should you do and why? These are lifted from her own Religious Studies classes at her Catholic high school, where – after wrestling with them – she and her classmates were told that there was no right answer. This all makes the book sound like quite a weighty read; I hope teenage Catherine would also laugh at the many moments of humour that thread through 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 definitely mined my own nerdiness at age 13 when writing the boys. The only books they have access to are the eight volumes of a children’s set of encyclopedias called The Book of Knowledge. Outdated and biased, these tomes speak with the stuffy voice of authority, and the boys believe that all knowledge in the world is contained between their covers. In their day-to-day conversations, they geekily drop in facts from The Book of Knowledge, and even quote passages from it. With the closure of the home looming, the boys attend Socialisation Days with girls from another home to learn how to behave when they meet other people beyond those few they’ve known all their lives. Here I really had fun in playing up the utter awkwardness I felt at that age, especially in the presence of the opposite sex; the children’s common ground is The Book of Knowledge, so they resort to peppering their small talk with extremely niche factoids from these familiar, safe texts.

Follow Catherine Chidgey on Facebook and Instagram.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessica Bryant Klagmann

Jessica Bryant Klagmann grew up climbing mountains, paddling rivers, and scampering through the woods of New Hampshire. She studied writing there and in Fairbanks, Alaska, before falling in love with northern New Mexico. Klagmann is the author of the novel This Impossible Brightness, and when she isn’t writing, she can be found illustrating, trail running, or teaching her two kids the fine art of scampering.

Klagmann's new novel is North of the Sunlit River.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I hope the title North of the Sunlit River is compelling and original, but also relatable enough that people don’t ask, what the heck could this book possibly be about? I think the word “north” is fitting because it’s not just about a specific place in Alaska, but about the idea and feel of living in the North. “Sunlit” is a reference to the extended daylight hours of summer in Alaska, and it also describes the river as not a specific one, but one that means something to these characters in this story. Every river is sunlit at some point, but this one belongs to them and the particular memories they made there. I also think the themes suggested by the title are present throughout the novel, but they don’t come fully together until the very end, so my hope is the title is a thread that can be followed to a satisfying final moment with the book.

What's in a name?

In North of the Sunlit River, I changed the main character’s name quite a few times before settling on Eila. Her name, as well as her father’s name (Stefan), and the last name (Jacobsen), came from a list of Scandinavian names, even though I abandoned the idea of specifically mentioning their heritage in the book. I have strict opinions about names being short and easy to pronounce, but also unique and not connected to anyone I know in real life. Ultimately, I chose all of the characters’ names based on my own sense of cohesion and how I pictured each one in my mind, rather than focusing on the names’ meanings or origins.

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

Probably quite a bit, as I had decided to be a visual artist when I was a teenager. In fact, I went to college as an art major. Pretty quickly though, I changed my major to writing. As a reader back then, I was more interested in historical fiction. It wasn’t until college that I discovered my love for magical realism and writing about the natural world. I don’t think my teenage self would have ever expected I’d be living in (and thus inspired by) Alaska.

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

I love beginnings. The caveat to this is that I rewrite them a lot. I have to start with a really good line to get my momentum going, and it’s what inspires the tone and voice and pacing of the story. But later on, I rearrange things, try moving chapters around, and the beginning is often the last thing I come back to when I’ve finished. As chaotic and uncertain as that may sound, I enjoy this process a lot. Endings feel so much harder, as the story has to come together fully, all the threads tied up and yet leaving the reader with some sense of the future. I’ve always believed endings should be somewhat inevitable, but also surprising to the reader, which I find so difficult to pull off. That said, when I do finally land on that ending that feels right, it’s extra satisfying.

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 every character comes from some part of me, if only because I spend so much of my life observing the world for the purpose of writing. It doesn’t matter if I’m writing male characters or female characters, there is always some part of me in there. In North of the Sunlit River, there’s a lot of me in Eila, mainly because I drew on the experiences of losing my father and of living in Alaska. She also has a lot of my personality, which is nature-loving and quiet. There is also a little of me in Jackson’s character, too, because I run a lot. And there is some of me in Lark as well, because she lives in New Mexico and makes a journey to Alaska similar to the one that I once made.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I find music is inspiring, both before and during the writing process. I get a lot of ideas from lyrics when I’m listening to music on a run or when I’m cooking. And then I always have a kind of soundtrack for everything I write—something I listen to often during the writing itself. It has to be instrumental, and it adds a certain feel to the way language evolves on the page. For North of the Sunlit River, I listened to a lot of Hania Rani and Jóhann Jóhannsson.

Visit Jessica Bryant Klagmann's website.

Writers Read: Jessica Bryant Klagmann.

--Marshal Zeringue

Zoë Rankin

Zoë Rankin grew up in a village in Scotland. She studied international relations and Arabic before going on to qualify as a primary school teacher. She spent many years traveling in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and eventually settled in New Zealand. She has always been passionate about writing as well as spending time outdoors and exploring by bike, often with her two small children, who are equally adventurous.

Rankin's new novel is The Vanishing Place.

My Q&A with the author:

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

When my manuscript was still in working draft form on my computer, it was titled The Wilder Child. This first title idea was inspired by the opening hook of an unkempt child appearing from the bush (vast areas of dense New Zealand forest). But something about it didn’t hit quite right. My New Zealand publisher and I went back and forth, over a few months, until we settled on The Vanishing Place. At one point, a character in the novel says, ‘this is the vanishing place,’ a statement which holds true on a number of levels. The New Zealand bush has this ability to swallow you up, to hold tight and never let go. It is a place where secrets and people can truly disappear. I think, as a title, The Vanishing Place evokes questions and intrigue and creates a sense of unease in the reader.

What's in a name?

The fictional village where the story is set is based on a real settlement on the West Coast of New Zealand called Haast. However, as I am not from Haast (a remote community of three hundred people) I didn’t feel comfortable using the name. So, instead, I chose the name Koraha which is a Te Reo Māori term for wilderness. This name, therefore, means a lot as it alludes to the heart of the novel.

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

I think my teenage self would be very unsurprised that I wrote a novel set in the middle of nowhere surrounded by trees. I have always been drawn to smaller, more remote, locations. I have also always been a habitual overthinker, so my teenage self would absolutely recognise the internal struggle and sense of stubbornness and self-doubt that lives in the main character, Effie.

As a teenager, I was fascinated by the role that our childhoods might have on who we are as adults – in those experiences, some remembered and some not, that live deep inside of us and continue to shape our lives. When I was sixteen, I did a school project, exploring whether evil is something that we are born with, or if it is something that is thrust upon us by circumstance. This question is very much at the heart of The Vanishing Place.

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

I find the endings hardest because I have no idea what they are going to be. For me, the opening arrives as this clear, gripping, image. From there, I follow the characters into the pages, nervously watching and waiting for an ending to reveal itself. However, having said that, while the opening sentence of chapter one didn’t change from that first sentence I wrote, the prologue did get added in later.

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

When I was seventeen, I was living in Uganda doing volunteer work, something that I had dreamed about doing since I was eight-years-old. But I became very ill and consequently I was sent home by a doctor months earlier than planned. This sense of failure has lived in me ever since, and I think it could be why I now live in New Zealand, as far from my Scottish home as possible, as I was desperate to prove myself. The main character, Effie, reflects this part of me, in that she carries the weight of her childhood events, things that haunt her.

Effie also loves the outdoors and she has a connection with both New Zealand and Scotland, like I do. So, although Effie is not based on me, there are definite parallels between our lives and personalities.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My writing was inspired by my dad’s love of the outdoors, and his role in the mountain rescue team throughout my childhood and the stories that he told me about the rescues.

At the moment, in New Zealand, there is a huge story in the news about a man called Tom Phillips, who had been hiding in the bush for four years with his three children. This story is close to the hearts of many New Zealanders and, while The Vanishing Place, is not linked to this real-life tragedy at all, the fact that Tom Phillips was able to evade the efforts of police for so many years, illustrates just how dense and vast the New Zealand bush is.

Follow Zoë Rankin on Facebook and Instagram.

--Marshal Zeringue

David McGlynn

David McGlynn's books include the memoirs One Day You'll Thank Me and A Door in the Ocean, and the story collection The End of the Straight and Narrow. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The American Scholar. He teaches at Lawrence University and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

McGlynn's debut novel is Everything We Could Do.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The novel's title, Everything We Could Do, is meant to call to mind the phrase often used by physicians & healthcare providers after a patient dies -- "we did everything we could." The phrase is often of little comfort to families, but it's also absolutely necessary. People need to know the doctors and nurses did everything imaginable to save a life. Everything We Could Do is set not only in a hospital, but in a neonatal intensive care unit, where the smallest, most fragile humans cling to life. In the novel's second plot line, one of the NICU nurses struggles to care for her disabled, nearly adult son, even though she has fought and advocated for him throughout his life. In both cases, characters try "everything" to hold onto the ones they love. But everything, quite often, isn't enough.

What's in a name?

Everything We Could Do was inspired by my own experience as a NICU parent, and to an even greater degree by my wife's years as a NICU social worker. She cared for the very families and infants who appear in the novel. I wanted my main character to be strong and smart, but also tender and vulnerable -- not a professional healthcare employee, but a woman who can navigate a complex world, full of arcane, rapid-fire language. She's a bit of an amalgam of my wife, so I named her Brooke, which is my wife's middle name.

The nurse who cares for the babies -- and whose own son is struggling as he nears adulthood -- is named Dash Coenen. Her name is stolen from one of the nurses in the NICU where I served as a volunteer. I loved the nurses I interacted with in the NICU, especially during my research. They were funny and sharp and, in most cases, no-nonsense women. Most were local to Northeast Wisconsin, where the novel is set, and loved things like the Green Bay Packers, fishing, camping. But when acute situations arose, which happened quite often, they were among the toughest, most focused professionals I'd ever encountered.

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

I've wanted to write a novel since I was a teenager. Everything We Could Do is my first novel, but my fourth book. I've written a collection of stories, plus two works on nonfiction. I think my teenage self would say, "Hey, man, nice novel, but what took you so long?" I don't have a good answer other than, "I was trying for a really long time."

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

Over the course of my work, I've noticed a curious phenomenon. I believe I have the beginning of a book nailed down for a long time -- years, in many cases. And yet, as I near the end of the final draft, I begin to find the book's beginning problematic in some way. It's too long, or too slow, or too cumbersome. Such a realization causes no small amount of consternation and angst until I work up the courage to cut it -- typically the first 50 pages. I have cut the first 50 pages of the last three books I have written, including Everything We Could Do. The novel's opening line -- "The word didn't fit. Children. Babies. Hers." -- was originally in the middle of the third or fourth chapter. When I finally realized that, yet again, my opening needed to go, I started cutting a paragraph at a time until I got to that line. It felt fresh and raw, so I stopped.

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

I am hugely connected and invested in my characters. Each of them embodies some aspect of me: my fears, my hopes, my dreams, my worst qualities or my best. I also took a lot of care to reflect the characteristics of the very real people I met and worked with and spoke to during my long years of research for the novel. I wanted Everything We Could Do to provide the most accurate depiction of a world -- the NICU -- that's both common and unknown to most people who haven't experienced it personally. As I told friends when I was working on the book, the birthing center (or labor and delivery ward) is the one wing of the hospital where people arrive fully expecting everything to go well, for both a mother and her newborn infant to emerge healthy and perfect. When something doesn't go as planned, or when something truly harrowing occurs, the whiplash between expectations and reality is fierce. I wanted to bear witness to that experience, for the people who go through it. I went through it when my younger son was born, and was caught up in all the emotions the story contains.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I grew up in Texas and California, and went to graduate school in Utah. I am a creature of the American West you might say. When I moved to Wisconsin in 2006, it seemed a different world. I often felt (and can still feel) like an outsider. But rather than try to leave, I tried my best to make a life. I went to fish frys and potlucks, watched football and hiked in the snow during the winter. I wanted to show how a relatively ignored corner of the country -- Northeast Wisconsin -- could be full of intelligent, sarcastic, talented, and fragile people. I am always looking around at my environment, at my townspeople and friends, in community centers and YMCAs and churches, for insights into the culture taking place all around me.

It's also true that I love medical dramas, whether in books, in the movies, or on TV. The HBO show, The Pitt, was a huge success this year, largely because it so thoroughly depicts the frenzied humanity of the emergency room. The doctors and nurses work incredibly hard, for 12+ hours, and never manage to get caught up. I'm a sucker for shows like that precisely because they feel so real, and they give a broader, public voice to the experiences I hear my wife relate to me about her job. Aren't we all drawn to art -- including TV and cinema -- in which we can see ourselves? I know I am.

Visit David McGlynn's website.

Writers Read: David McGlynn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kitty Zeldis

Kitty Zeldis is the pseudonym for a novelist and non-fiction writer of books for adults and children. She is the author of Not Our Kind and The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, NY.

Zeldis's new novel, One of Them, is "a story of secrets, friendship, and betrayal about two young women at Vassar in the years after World War II, a powerful and moving tale of prejudice and pride that echoes the cultural and social issues of today."

My Q&A with the author:

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

The title is an essential part of the story or experience; another writer told me the title is an advertisement and I think it’s true. Sometimes a title comes to me right away, before the thing is finished or even written. Other times it has been a struggle, and I've gone through many options before settling. One of Them is a title that came almost instantly and I think it’s perfect for this book.

What's in a name?

Names tell you a lot about a character right away. James Prescott III is going to conjure someone quite different than Isaac Hirshkowitz without even a word of description. I collect names that seem beautiful, quirky or even terrible for possible later use; it’s thing I’ve done for years. I knew a girl with the last name of Goldhush when I was a freshman in college and I used that name for one of my characters; I hadn’t even known I was storing it away. It doesn’t have to be a name I like, it needs to fit the character.

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

Well, my teen aged self had no idea I would be a writer at all, so I think she would be very surprised! In those years I was intent on becoming a ballet dance; writing was not on my mind at all.

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

It’s split pretty evenly. The beginning is super important, and maybe even harder because you’ve got the task of luring the reader in. By the ending, you’ve developed some momentum, and so that can carry you along in the writing.

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

My characters are both entirely me—I’ve created them after all—and not me at all, because they live in a fictional world that is not mine. Both things are true at the same time.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I’ve found inspiration in a television series and have drawn ideas from stories I’ve been told or something I read in the newspaper. Inspiration is all around; you just have to be open enough to let it in.

Visit Kitty Zeldis's website

My Book, The Movie: Not Our Kind.

Writers Read: Kitty Zeldis (December 2018).

Coffee with a Canine: Kitty Zeldis & Dottie.

The Page 69 Test: Not Our Kind.

The Page 69 Test: The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights.

My Book, The Movie: One of Them.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephanie Reents

Stephanie Reents is the author of The Kissing List, a collection of stories that was an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times Book Review, and I Meant to Kill Ye, a bibliomemoir chronicling her journey into the strange void at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. She has twice received an O. Henry Prize for her short fiction. Reents received a BA from Amherst College, where she ran on the cross country team all four years; a BA from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; and an MFA from the University of Arizona. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Reents's new novel is We Loved To Run.

My Q&A with the author:

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

We Loved To Run is a funny title because the first line of my novel is “We hated a lot of things…” followed by a whole list of running adjacent things my characters dislike, including their coaches. I knew from the very beginning that my novel would explore how my characters – the members of a women’s cross country team competing for a small New England college in the early 1990s – both love running and also hate it at times because of the amount of sacrifice involved in training to be fast and setting their sights on a spot at nationals. The first plural voice – “we” – is very important in my novel, which alternates between the communal voice of the team (which truly belongs to the team and not any single character) and the perspectives of two individual runners: Danielle, the team captain, and Kristin, a runner who is determined to steal the top spot from another runner. In my experience whenever a character insists on something – like “we loved to run” – you know their feelings about it are probably more complicated. As it so happens, my characters do love to run (and also hate it) and there are other less tangible challenges they’re trying to convince themselves they can overcome.

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

I ran in both high school and college, and so writing this book meant spending a lot of time with that distant teenage and young adult runner. (I’m in my 50s now.) I think she would love this novel because it’s about young female athletes: their physical strength and mental fortitude; the highs and lows of training, the thrill and heartbreak of racing; the complexity of team dynamics; and finally, the beautiful fierceness of women’s friendships. I didn’t know of a single book about women runners – or even women athletes – when I was growing up. There are a handful of novels about women sports now more than thirty-five years later, but we still need more!

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

I wrote the beginning of this novel in my first graduate school workshop in the late 1990s. Then it was the beginning of a short story that wasn’t very good. I remember a very cool man named Eli (who also happened to be a talented writer) scribbling on the back of my manuscript, “Find a plot!” What I did find was the communal voice of the team—which was still exciting to me twenty years later when I started working on this novel in earnest. The first lines of that story became the first lines of this novel; of course, once I began discovering the plot and getting to know the six cross country runners at the heart of my novel, I layered in more details to the opening chapter of my novel.

I love writing endings, and they’re also really hard to figure out. With We Loved to Run, I first tried an experimental shortcut way to get to the end of the novel, which failed because it was just a lame attempt to avoid writing the final section. Then, I wrote an ending that took me (and my characters) to the right place (an abandoned farmhouse) but missed the mark on tone and mood. Then, I got the tone and action right, but my editor suggested that the novel needed one more chapter.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Walking both inspires me and fuels my creative process. I love what Rebecca Solnit says about web of connections between walking, observing, and thinking in her book, Wanderlust: “Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.” I spent hours roaming Providence, where I was living when I started writing this book, and Seattle, where I moved with my family when I was finishing it. I also backpacked in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho and repeatedly climbed Old Steepie, a stretch of dirt road on an island in the San Juans, one of my very favorite places for writing and walking and thinking.

Visit Stephanie Reents's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Kissing List.

Writers Read: Stephanie Reents (June 2012).

--Marshal Zeringue

Marisa Silver

Marisa Silver is the author of the novels The Mysteries; Little Nothing; Mary Coin, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Bookseller’s Award; The God of War, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction; and No Direction Home. Her first collection of short stories, Babe in Paradise was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. When her second collection, Alone with You was published, The New York Times called her “one of California’s most celebrated contemporary writers.” Her fiction has been included in The Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories, as well as other anthologies. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Cullman Center for Scholars and writers. She lives in Los Angeles.

At Last is Silver's new novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

At Last follows the lives of two women who enter into an uneasy, often competitive relationship when their children marry. The lengths they go to prove that they are the more essential matriarch is sometimes comic, sometimes heartbreaking and often both at the same time. But underneath all of their missteps lies their desire to love and be loved by their children, their granddaughter, and, in the strange ways that love shows up, by each other — at last.

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

I wasn’t the most dedicated reader as a kid. This is an understatement. My free time was mostly spent sitting in a swivel chair in our den daydreaming or staring out the window, observing people on the street, and wondering about their lives. My parents were great readers who considered reading to be maybe the only valuable way to spend your spare time. They found my lack of interest troubling, maybe a sign that I just wasn’t going to measure up to their hopes for me. Often, my mother would come to me with a book she’d just read and loved, urging it on me. And because I wanted to please her and maybe because I secretly believed my parents might be right, and that I wasn’t going to amount to much, I read what she gave me: the works of writers like Paula Fox, Toni Morrison, Alix Kates Schulman, Marge Piercy, Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, to name a few. My mother was interested in the lives of women, and although I don’t think I would have been able to articulate this when I was a teenager, she was interested in the ways women claimed themselves in worlds where they were not always given agency. I like to think that had At Last been published when I was a kid, it would have been one of the books she would have found compelling for those same reasons and that she would have pressed it on me, and that I would have read it.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings?

When I start a novel or a story, I feel like I’m circling a monolithic building that has no obvious doorway and I’m trying to figure out a way in. And then, after a lot of thinking, some pounding (i.e. my head against a wall) a little fissure opens up and I slip inside and begin. I tend to start in the middle of something that’s already going on. In the case of At Last, the two central characters are stuck in a car together as they make preparations for the wedding of their children. They’ve never met before. The intimacy of the tight space horrifies them both. This seemed like a great way to begin a story about the battle of two formidable wills.

I never know where I’m heading with a novel and so I don’t know where things will end up. I like to work this way. I want to discover and be surprised by what I write just as much as I want a reader to be surprised by how the novel delivers more than what might be obvious at the outset.

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

When I was a young girl, my parents would go on holidays and leave me and my older sister in the care of our grandmothers. One day, when one grandmother was driving us to the other’s house, she said “You love me more than you love her, don’t you?” I have never forgotten this, and I wrote At Last to explore what might have made her say that. But beyond that, the novel and its characters are imagined. Figuring out how to make a pure invention make what we think we are familiar with and know, unfamiliar and new – that, for me, that’s the challenge and the joy of writing.

Visit Marisa Silver's website.

The Page 69 Test: The God of War.

--Marshal Zeringue