Mirta Ojito

Born in Havana, Mirta Ojito is a journalist, professor, and author who has worked at the Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, and the New York Times. The recipient of an Emmy for the documentary Harvest of Misery as well as a shared Pulitzer for national reporting in 2001 for a series of articles about race in America for the New York Times, Ojito was an assistant professor of journalism at Columbia University for almost nine years. She is the author of two award-winning nonfiction books: Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus and Hunting Season: Immigration and Murder in an All-American Town. Currently, Ojito is a senior director on the NBC News Standards team working at Telemundo Network.

Deeper than the Ocean is Ojito's debut novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I don’t exactly know when I decided on Deeper than the Ocean as the title, but I do know that I never considered any other. The narrative in my historical novel is anchored on a very real event: the 1919 shipwreck of a Spanish ship, the Valbanera, with 488 people on board; most of them, immigrants who left Spain and were en route to Havana, Cuba, in search of a better life. A devastating hurricane derailed those dreams, and the ship sank far from Havana, off the coast of Key West. When it was found, the ship was buried in a bank of soft sand, and the bodies had disappeared. It is believed they were buried deep, deeper than the ocean. But the title also alludes to the love story that drives the story and to the ties that run deep and connect families across the oceans, migrations, generations, and unimaginable losses.

What's in a name?

Everything. When I first conceived of this book I saw an image: a woman wearing a mauve dress running on naked feet, desperately searching for her infant daughter in a ship, her long curly red hair flowing behind her. That was it. I didn’t have any more. But I knew her name: Catalina Quintana, the name of my maternal grandmother, whom I never knew. She died at 40, a day after my mother turned 16. Mary Oliver has a poem that begins with this line: “Needing one, I invented her.” I’ve always needed my grandmother, and so I invented her. I infused the character with all the stories my mother had told me about her, and the rest… the rest is the novel.

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

Very surprised. When I was a teenager, my mother’s stories were such an integral part of my life that I never saw them as magical or inspiring — essential elements for a novel. It wasn’t until later, much later, that I began to pay attention and to remember my own visits to my mother’s birthplace and to understand that her entire life was the stuff of novels. Not surprisingly, she told me several times that she had always wanted to be a writer. “One day,” she used to tell me, “I’m going to write the story of my life.” In many ways, this book is her gift to me, and, of course, mine to her.

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

Beginnings. Always the beginnings. As a journalist you know that you must grab the reader with the first sentence. And while a novel gives you more freedom and possibilities as a writer, I still sweat out that first sentence as if I were writing a lede on deadline. Endings have their own force, of course, but they happen organically. The story takes you there, and, instinctively, you know you’ve reached the end.

For example, I changed the beginning of this novel several times, but never the ending. Because my novel is a dual narrative in two different timelines, I had the choice of beginning with Catalina Quintana, the character in 1919, or with Mara Denis, the character a century later, in 2019. Ultimately, I went with the contemporary character because Mara is the one investigating her family’s past. It seemed appropriate, then, to begin not in the past but at the beginning of the search, the quest that informs what happens later.

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

Yes, readers who know me are certain that I modeled the character of Mara Denis after my own, and they are not completely wrong. Of course, I’m not Mara, but I gave her many elements of my life and of my own memories. She is Cuban and a mother, like me. A journalist, like me. And she is 55, the age I was when I began writing the book. Crucially, I also gave her a flare for scarves — which I’ve been told I have — and a love for Santander, a city by the sea in the north of Spain where I used to spend summers when my children were young.

Interestingly, Mara has inspired me to follow her steps. In the book, she is searching for her Spanish ancestors; specifically, her great-grandmother. I’d never done that before, because I never knew where my great-grandparents were from, but I’ve just learned that my mother’s grandfather went to Cuba from the Canary Islands, and now, like the character in the book, I’ve begun my own search.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Paintings have always inspired me. For some reason, before I begin a writing project, I visit a museum. Sometimes I take notes. Sometimes not, and I just stand there focusing on a painting, and trying to understand the art and the process.

I’m also influenced by the news. I can’t help it, I’m a journalist. In fact, Deeper than the Ocean begins with a phone call in the middle of the night. Mara’s editor in New York wants her to go to the Canary Islands to cover a story about a boat full of African immigrants that capsized near one of the islands. Mara goes, of course, because reporting is her life, and because, unknown to her, those islands are imprinted in her DNA and in her soul.

Visit Mirta Ojito's website.

My Book, The Movie: Deeper than the Ocean.

The Page 69 Test: Deeper than the Ocean.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brigitte Dale

Brigitte Dale is an author, editor, and historian. She graduated from Brown University and earned her master's degree in women's history at Yale University. A book editor by day and an author by night (or early morning), Dale lives in Connecticut. The Good Daughters is her first novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My book is called The Good Daughters, but for a very long time while I was writing my first drafts, I called it The Jail Keeper's Daughter. One of my main characters, Emily, is in fact the daughter of the warden of Holloway Prison, the notorious jail where suffragettes were imprisoned in London. When Emily comes face to face with a young suffragette, Charlotte, on the other side of her father's prison bars, she's forced to confront the similarity of their lives, and begins to work in secret on the behalf of the women's suffrage campaign. Eventually, that title didn't serve the story well enough, because it's bigger than just Emily. The Good Daughters is about four wildly different young women at the frontlines of the battle for women’s suffrage. All four women weigh their familial and societal expectations with their own ambitions and sense of justice. That's how The Good Daughters came to be the title (and, of course, the meaning of "good" changes as the story develops).

What's in a name?

I love coming up with character names. Emily is perfect for a working class girl from a simple background; she was raised to never cause trouble. Charlotte, Beatrice, and Sadie are all names that serve the characters' personalities (and I just like them!). The most important characters to name intentionally were Adeline and Isabel Hurston, a mother-daughter team that leads the suffragette campaign in the book. The Hurstons are stand-ins for the real historical figures, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, who led the Women's Social and Political Union. I fictionalized enough of the story to justify changing their names, but I hoped the astute reader might pick up on the parallels.

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

There are two answers to this question. First of all, my teenage self would be inspired, enraged, and captivated by the story of the suffragettes, a story she never learned in school. She'd be devastated that the incredible perseverance, resilience, and determination that these women demonstrated over more than a decade fighting for the vote is barely a footnote in most history classes, and I know this book would spark her desire to learn more.

Secondly, my teenage self would be absolutely thrilled that she (I) wrote and published a novel! It's been a lifelong dream to become an author, and I know she'd be blown away that this dream came true.

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

I didn't know how this novel would end, even though I knew how this historical era concluded. My characters needed personal journeys, not just historical benchmarks, and so although we all know women eventually won the right to vote, I needed to find an equally satisfying ending for each characters' personal arc. That said, the novel is circular; it opens with the ending, and that actually never changed across my many drafts. If you read the first page, you'll know how the book ends--but you have to read the rest of it to figure out exactly what happened and why!

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

I fell in love with all four of my main characters. Charlotte is independent and bold, Emily is quietly fierce, Beatrice is unexpectedly daring, and Sadie is deeply passionate. But if I had to choose a favorite, I think it’s Charlotte: she embodies the bravery and fearlessness I sometimes wish I had more of myself.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I studied women’s history in my undergraduate and master’s programs, and did on-the-ground research in London’s archives to uncover the story of the suffragettes. When I decided to write The Good Daughters, I knew I wanted to draw on that research, and although my characters are fictional, their experiences are based on real historical figures and events. Suffs: The Musical premiered on Broadway after I finished writing, but it's a fantastic representation of the American story of women's suffrage activists (and that soundtrack helped me power through revisions and copy edits!).

Visit Brigitte Dale's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allison Brook

A former Spanish teacher, Allison Brook (AKA Marilyn Levinson) writes mysteries, romantic suspense, and novels for young readers. She loves traveling, reading, knitting, doing Sudoku, and visiting with her grandchildren on FaceTime.

Her new novel, Death on Dickens Island, is the series debut of the Books on the Beach Mysteries.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I'd say Death on Dickens Island is an apt title for this, the first book in my Books on the Beach series because it says it all. The peaceful community of Dickens Island has been shaken by a murder. A word regarding titles: I may suggest titles to my publisher, but they often select one of their own.

What's in a name?

I give my characters names that I think suit them. A name has to sound right to me. I often look up the meaning of a name to make sure that it's right for that character. Also, in this series I've used a few names that we associate with literature quite deliberately. I called the island Dickens Island as a tribute to Charles Dickens. And my sleuth Delia Dickens is actually named Cordelia, like King Lear's youngest daughter.

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

Not very, I'd think. Death on Dickens Island is about Delia's relationships: with her son, her parents, her aunt and uncle, and with her first love now back in her life. I also have a ghost as a character, which wouldn't surprise my teenage reader self at all, having loved reading the Topper books, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and seeing Blithe Spirit.

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

I don't find either difficult to write. I usually begin my novels with a dialogue because that pulls my reader immediately into the story. The endings always seem to fall into place naturally, often in the oddest of places.

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

I've created many characters over the course of writing twenty-six books, and I'm not thinking about myself as I write about them. That said, I'm sure many personal aspects can be found in my characters like my love of animals and enjoying dining out.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

That's difficult for me to pinpoint, but I'm sure that movies I've seen, books I've read, personal experiences, what's going on in the world--all influence my writing to some degree. In the last two children's books I've written I was surprised to see how politics inspired a major theme in the series.

Visit Allison Brook's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Martin Edwards

Martin Edwards has been described by Richard Osman as "a true master of British crime writing." His novels include the eight Lake District Mysteries and four books featuring Rachel Savernake, including the Dagger-nominated The Puzzle of Blackstone Lodge. He is also the author of two multi-award-winning histories of crime fiction, The Life of Crime and The Golden Age of Murder. He has received three Daggers, including the CWA Diamond Dagger (the highest honour in UK crime writing) and two Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America. He has received four lifetime achievement awards: for his fiction, short fiction, non-fiction, and scholarship. He is consultant to the British Library’s Crime Classics and since 2015 has been President of the Detection Club.

Edwards's newest novel is Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The aim of Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife is to give readers the chance to play mystery games of various kinds as well as enjoying a twisty mystery. Titles are very important, but it wasn’t easy to find a fresh idea that worked for a crime novel set at Christmas. I was keen on Evil under the Snow, as a jokey riff on Agatha Christie’s Evil under the Sun, but my editor suggested Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife. In the end we compromised. Evil under the Snow became the title of a podcast that plays an important part in the story. And I enjoyed finding ways to make my editor’s choice of title highly relevant to what happens in the remote village of Midwinter – even though there is no character called Miss Winter in the story. But the elements of the title all come together, again in a jokey way, in the final pages.

What's in a name?

Names, like titles, are very important. I think it makes sense to choose names that differentiate the characters to some degree and also to fit in with the tone of the book. It’s also a good idea to avoid names that start with the same letter if possible. However, as a lawyer, I’m aware of the dangers of accidental libel. So many of my characters have surnames (but not first names) borrowed from sportsmen of the past, mainly footballers and cricketers.

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

Very surprised and very happy, because I dreamed of being a detective story writer from the age of just eight years old, although I didn’t come from a literary background and never even met a writer until I was much older.

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

For me, middle sections are the hardest. I usually have a strong idea for a beginning, and by the time I get to the end, I’ve set up my characters and puzzles, so it’s great fun to tie up all the loose ends. Middles are hardest, because you need to sustain the energy and excitement of the narrative without resolving things too quickly. I revise the whole book plenty of times, always striving to make every part of it better. Once it’s gone into print, there’s nothing more you can do, so you have to give it your best shot and work on the manuscript until it’s as strong as possible.

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

One of the joys of writing fiction rather than fact (and I write both) is that you can make stuff up. And you can make up people, which I love doing. I’m not trying to write about people in real life, but inventions who are believable and not two-dimensional. But of course my own tastes and experiences influence the way I write and in Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife, to some extent I identified with Harry Crystal, a detective novelist who keeps stumbling into calamities.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My parents were gifted people who were not ambitious but had happy lives. Growing up, however, I felt they could have achieved a great deal if they had had more ambition. I had a much narrower range of talents than either of them, but I was determined to make the most of my passion for books and writing, and they gave me a good deal of support and encouragement. They also urged me to get a ‘proper job’, which was good advice, because it enabled me to write the books I wanted to write, not the books that publishers told me to write. In the end, that’s worked out pretty well.

Visit Martin Edwards’s website.

Writers Read: Martin Edwards (April 2013).

The Page 69 Test: The Frozen Shroud.

The Page 69 Test: Dancing for the Hangman.

The Page 99 Test: The Arsenic Labyrinth.

The Page 99 Test: Waterloo Sunset.

My Book, The Movie: Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife.

Writers Read: Martin Edwards.

--Marshal Zeringue

R. T. Ester

Originally from Nigeria, R.T. Ester moved to the United States in 1998 and, catching the creative bug early on, studied art with a focus on design. While working full time as a graphic designer, he began to write speculative fiction in his spare time and, since then, has had stories published in Interzone and Clarkesworld.

Ester's new novel is The Ganymedan.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I think it belongs to the same naming convention as titles like The Martian and The Bear where there's an ironic layer to it. It's a reference to the main character, but the story itself ends up complicating that connection, and the character you may have assumed would be a typical Martian or bear is revealed to be the outlier in some profound sense. If you're already sort of aware of this convention, I would say the title does a lot. It tells you the protagonist will not be your typical Ganymedan, but an outlier. Briefly, before googling it and seeing that the title already belonged to an excellent short story by the scifi author Derek Kunsken, I considered Ghosts of Ganymede. Parts of the story revolve around a dissident group with chapters that all use the word ghost in their names. One of them had a significant influence on the protagonist growing up and their anti-AI ethos comes back to haunt him at pivotal moments throughout the book.

What's in a name?

I'm a pantser most of the time, so when I name a character, it's often a very in-the-moment placeholder name, but then the character becomes the person with that name, the more I write them. With The Ganymedan, I actually had an outline before I started writing and I was already thinking about who all these characters were. For V-Dot, or Verden Dotnet, I think I knew early on that I wanted to explore a connection between the corrupting influence his employer LP has on him and the devastation his homeworld endured during a war that was also started by LP. Dotnet is a silly name I came up with early on, but to me it made sense to just leave it alone. Old internet term have lost their original meaning here. By contrast, Verden bring

s the word verdant and the color green to mind, which I wanted to reinforce as who V-Dot was before coming in contact with LP.

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

I think he would probably wonder if I was pulling a prank on him. I wasn't much of a reader back then, but I did write a lot of compulsive nonsense that will never see the light of day. Also, it just never occurred to me that I would pursue writing the way I have over the last eight years or so. I think my teenage self would be very pleasantly surprised.

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

I always knew I wanted The Ganymedan to begin with V-Dot wanting to go home again. Early on, the idea was that the encounter he has with the officers at the spaceport would be a sort of in media res introduction to the story's world, but also it would quickly connect readers to V-Dot as just someone being harassed for no apparent reason. I ended up preempting all of that with parts of the story's original ending because I think it eventually made more sense to lean into the structure the story now has where it first tells you what happened, then it tells you how it happened. All that to say, I probably struggle a little more with beginnings than I think I do with endings.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I come from a design background, so first, I would say some of the principles I employ in my day job as a designer make it into my writing in some way. These are principles that primarily concern how information is presented and made consumable for a specific audience. I don't know if my stories always excel at both but I think a background in design generally means the writer who has it will be experimenting with structure a lot.

Visit R.T. Ester's website.

Writers Read: R.T. Ester.

The Page 69 Test: The Ganymedan.

--Marshal Zeringue

Maryka Biaggio

Maryka Biaggio is a psychology professor turned novelist who brings forgotten lives back to the light. Specializing in historical fiction inspired by real people, she is celebrated for illuminating overlooked historical figures with psychological depth and narrative grace. Her debut novel, Parlor Games (2013), launched a distinguished career that includes Eden Waits, The Point of Vanishing, The Model Spy, Gun Girl and the Tall Guy, and Margery and Me (forthcoming from Regal House in 2026). Her work has earned numerous accolades, including the Willamette Writers Award, Oregon Writers Colony Award, Historical Novel Society Review Editors' Choice, La Belle Lettre Award, and a Michigan Upper Peninsula Notable.

My Q&A with Biaggio:

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

Gun Girl and the Tall Guy is based on the true story of a young couple who went on a robbery spree in 1924 Brooklyn. I wanted the title to include both the main characters, and I had to look no further than the headlines of the day to discover the many monikers the press applied to the duo, including the bob-haired bandit and her handsome companion or the feisty gun girl and her shy man. I settled on gun girl for Celia because it’s short and catchy and tall guy for Ed because it makes it clear he’s in a supporting role.

At its heart, the story is about why this young couple resorted to crime and also why New Yorkers—and the whole country, for that matter—were so fascinated by these two. They were the Bonnie and Clyde of the 1920s, with a few twists. So I wanted a title that featured both Celia and Ed and provided a sense of the story to come.

What's in a name?

I decided to use Celia and Ed Cooney’s real names because I stuck to the facts as much as possible, although dialogue and many day-to-day details are obviously manufactured. But I had to include a whole cast of other characters, and I enjoyed selecting names that gave some sense of the characters and the times—like Em and Rosie to lend the ring of familiarity to Celia’s friends and Mr. Gualazzi for the neighborhood grocer because lots of Italians lived in New York at that time. Another invention of the novel is the many varied terms of endearment Ed came up with for Celia, which I liked because it showed how devoted Celia and Ed were to each other.

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

My teenage self would be very surprised by this novel, particularly my decision to write about crooks. I was a bookish youngster who enjoyed stories of adventure, like the Tarzan novels and tales of North Pole expeditions. When I was a teenager, I did think I’d like to write novels, but I hadn’t a clue as to what those novels would be about. It took me a few decades to settle on first, writing fiction, and second, basing my stories on real people whose lives had been forgotten. Now I enjoy the hunt for fascinating characters from the past, and Celia and Ed’s story just drew me in.

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

Beginnings are hard! I like to feel that I’m capturing a sense of my main character in the first few sentences of a novel, and sometimes that takes a while to manage. I just keep plowing ahead with my research until I feel that I’ve “found” the character’s voice. Endings are easy by comparison. I don’t worry about them until I get to the end. And once I’ve cranked out the bulk of the story, I find that the end tends to flow pretty easily from what came before.

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

I’ve written about quite varied characters—a conwoman, an older couple who establish a utopian community, a young writer with a tragic life, a World War II spy, and, in the latest, robbers. I find that parts of myself always come through, however, because what writer doesn’t use her own thoughts and feelings to enrich the portrayal of characters? When it comes to Celia Cooney, I’d say she has certain principles that she lives by—even if she bends the rules from time to time—and that is something I borrowed from my own “psychology.” Still, I labor to give each of my protagonists distinctive traits, and I hope my readers enjoy the greatly varied characters I write about.

Visit Maryka Biaggio's website.

My Book, The Movie: Parlor Games.

The Page 69 Test: Parlor Games.

Writers Read: Maryka Biaggio (February 2013).

--Marshal Zeringue

Christa Carmen

Christa Carmen lives in Rhode Island. She is the Bram Stoker Award-winning and two-time Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of The Daughters of Block Island, Beneath the Poet's House, and How to Fake a Haunting, as well as the Indie Horror Book Award-winning Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, the Bram Stoker Award-nominated "Through the Looking Glass and Straight into Hell" (Orphans of Bliss: Tales of Addiction Horror), and co-editor of the Aurealis Award-nominated We Are Providence and the Australiasian Shadow Award-nominated Monsters in the Mills. She has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA from Boston College, and an MFA from the University of Southern Maine.

When she’s not writing, she keeps chickens; uses a Ouija board to ghost-hug her dear, departed beagle; and sets out on adventures with her husband, daughter, and bloodhound–golden retriever mix. Most of her work comes from gazing upon the ghosts of the past or else into the dark corners of nature, those places where whorls of bark become owl eyes, and deer step through tunnels of hanging leaves and creeping briars only to disappear.

My Q&A with Carmen:

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

The title is very much the premise of the novel. My main character, Lainey, is married to a man named Callum who is an alcoholic but not on paper. He’s ruining her life and their daughter’s life with his drinking. She feels that if she were to take him to a judge to try to divorce him and get full custody of their daughter, she’s not going to have a lot to go on, and that’s heightened by the fact that he has a very influential family. So Lainey’s wild and crazy best friend comes up with a wild and crazy plan to stage a haunting in the house so realistic that it drives her husband out of the house for good.

What's in a name?

I do occasionally give my characters names that are symbolic (Saoirse White and Emmit Powell as having the same initials as Sarah Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe in Beneath the Poet’s House, for example), but in the case of How to Fake a Haunting, I just went with whatever I felt in the moment (with a small shout-out to Lainey Wilson, whom Lainey Taylor is named for, but only because my daughter loves her music).

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

I have been writing in one capacity or another for as long as I can remember—painstakingly bound and hilariously illustrated short stories as a child, emo journal entries as an adolescent and when I was in treatment for substance abuse, impassioned nonfiction essays and decidedly weak attempts at memoir—but I didn’t start writing fiction seriously until about 2014, so I think my teenaged reader self would be surprised…and maybe a little impressed!

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

I’d say the hardest scenes for me to write are both the first and the last, or, maybe not the last, per se, but the climax. The first scene I have to get right before I can move on, even on a first draft, because the tone and content of that scene will set the stage for me for the rest of the novel in terms of my headspace and how I’m approaching the characters and narrative. I’ll go back over it thirty-six times if I have to, and once I feel like it’s “right,” I’ll allow myself to write the next chapter. And I feel like climax scenes are hard for any writer, no matter how skilled or experienced. It’s the place where you have to put everything together, where you have to prove to the reader that they’ve made the right choice by following you as far as they have.

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 I write is the result of small elements of my own personality or experience, which I then force through the blender of edits, beta reader observations, rewrites, cuts, late-night analyses, and (sometimes impulsive) additions. For me, emotionally satisfying characters are a matter of examining them over and over again from all different angles. Is this character believable? Relatable? Driven by clear motivations? Neither all good nor all bad? And onward through the editing process until they resemble both “real” people and “real” players within the drama of the story’s narrative.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Place inspires a lot of my writing. I’d say 95% of what I write takes place somewhere in my home state of Rhode Island; How to Fake a Haunting is set in Newport, RI, my last novel, Beneath the Poet’s House, is set in Providence, my debut, The Daughters of Block Island, was set on Block Island, and many of my short stories take place in Mysticism, a fictional town that exists somewhere between Westerly and Charlestown, and borrows a portion of its name from Mystic, Connecticut.

I think the consistent use of Rhode Island as setting can be attributed to a combination of two factors. First, there is absolutely something haunted and horrific about the smallest state in the United States. Especially in the beach communities at the southern part of the state, there’s such a sense of isolation in the winter, of things lurking in the cold and waiting to awaken. Additionally, while I don’t necessarily subscribe to the oft-repeated ‘write what you know’ adage, I find that in terms of place, setting a work of fiction in a locale with which you are intimately familiar makes for fiction that’s more dynamic to read, and more enjoyable to write.

Visit Christa Carmen's website.

The Page 69 Test: Beneath the Poet's House.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ian Chorão

Ian Chorão is a writer and psychotherapist in private practice in Brooklyn, New York. He lives with his wife, who is a filmmaker and professor; they have two children.

Chorão's new novel, When We Talk to the Dead, is his first book of horror.

Like his main character, Chorão appreciates that the space between feeling and creation, reality and imagination is often ambiguous at best.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My book’s title, When We Talk to the Dead, was a last-minute decision. For the longest time it was called, She’s Not There. Both titles work, but are wildly different, vibe wise. She’s not there is a refrain said several times in the book; it has multiple meanings (no spoilers but trust me).

But alluding to what the book’s about isn’t enough. A title needs to capture more: tone, genre. My book is a gothic, psychological horror. I needed a title to speak to that. When We Talk to the Dead instantly tells you the type of story you’re about to read. This is a scary book, a story of darkness. This is the tale of 19-year-old Sally da Gama, so haunted by tragic loss that she will follow a path that might offer release or might plunge her deeper into madness.

The title also has an energy and action I really liked. It sets up a dynamic. When we talk to the dead, what then happens? Get ready. Once you enter the book, you will find out.

What's in a name?

A character can’t feel alive and dimensional until I have their name. Personally, I shy away from their names being overly symbolic—for me that feels too pushy. I name them more the way people often name their kids. A name you like, a name that reflects some aspect of their background, culture, region. For me, it’s less about being meaningful and more about being naturalistic. Finding a name that feels like their name.

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

I didn’t read much horror or gothic literature when I was a teenager. I loved existential books, like The Stranger, by Albert Camus, and books that explored the ills of society, like Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and I was also into intense emotional books, like The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath. At first blush, my teenage self might think: “Older me, you wrote a horror novel?” But in truth, the differences between genres is maybe less than we think. Horror simply offers an extreme and active landscape to explore all the things I have always loved: the deeply complicated and emotional experience of being a flawed person living in a very imperfect world. Once my teenage self began reading this book, I’d like to think he’d be hooked.

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

For me, neither is harder, just different. The beginning always just appears. There’s some situation or person I’m curious about, a memory, a stranger I see on the street, an image, an issue, and suddenly my curiosity has morphed that into a character or fictional situation.

I’m a psychotherapist. I work with a lot of traumas, anxiety, fear. Another thing that comes up is how variable people’s memories are, particularly as it’s been affected by life events: some have very detailed memories, some very impressionistic, some people have no memories, whole sections of their lives lost behind a big blank. One day, these culminated into a character in my head. A young woman who had endured a tragedy in childhood. A traumatic event she has no memory of that has, nonetheless, haunted her life since. A beginning was born.

Having a character and situation is one thing; finding the right entryway into the story is often a lot of work of going down many dead ends until the right path is found. It’s time consuming but doesn’t feel hard because even writing you toss out helps you get to know your character.

The ending is different from the beginning. Where the beginning just appears spontaneously, the ending reveals itself once I’m deep into the writing, but well before I’ve gotten to the end. Once the life of the character is set in motion, I know them well enough to see exactly where they are going. And once I know the ending, it tends to be set, almost like fate.

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

There is a diverse cast of characters in the book, of varying ages, races, ethnicities, genders, cultures, economies. I am closer to some than others. There is a therapist—obviously I know what it is to be a therapist; likewise, the main character’s father taps into me being a father. I’m a different age and gender than the main character, but we share a lot in common. Though I don’t have the traumatic background she has, we are similar temperamentally, ethnically, the ways we both have felt like “the other” in different situations. She makes little films to try to understand the things she doesn’t understand, or to at least find some expression for what churns inside her—for me writing serves a very similar function. I feel I know her very well.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Like an archipelago, a group of seemingly distinct islands that are connected beneath the water, there’s an interconnection across creative fields; they commingle. I get inspiration for my writing from so many art forms beyond other writing.

Music is huge. I always have a playlist for my characters. How music folds around you, moves through your body, transports you, how it conjures emotions: these are so helpful when trying to occupy the sensation of the written character. A song like "Depreston" by Courtney Barnett is as good as any Raymond Carver story.

I studied visual art, and my writing tends to be visual. I will look at art, colors used, how a hand is painted, and it taps me into a wordless visual relationship to things that I then try to put into words.

Films, for the story, for the tempo, how scenes are cut together. A favored movie of my childhood, Over the Edge, had a huge impact on how it felt to be a teenager, and in my book, I have an ode to it if one cares to look. Or a movie like The Witch captured an unnerving menace that inspired the atmosphere of my book.

Lastly, spending time outside, in nature. The book has an island that’s another character. I wanted to let the island speak in its language of wind and plants and sea. I also wanted to capture the embodied experience of being a person in the physical world. The felt experience of running, of hyperventilating; feeling the elements of air and water on the skin, the physical nature of fear. I spend time in nature, with the elements, so I can try to write those elements in a way that the words might fade, and the reader forgets they’re reading because they’ve been plunged into a world of sensations.

Follow Ian Chorão on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

Writers Read: Ian Chorão.

--Marshal Zeringue

Addie E. Citchens

Born in the Mississippi Delta, Addie Citchens graduated from Jackson State University and attended the Callaloo Writer Workshop. She has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Midnight & Indigo, and The Oxford American. She is a 2025 O. Henry Award winner and in 2023 was noted by the ASME. Her Blues history work is featured heavily in Mississippi Folklife Magazine.

FSG's inaugural Writer's Fellow, Citchens's highly-anticipated debut novel is Dominion.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The title Dominion shoves readers into the book, and ultimately, for me, the moral of the story is that the concept of dominion itself is both relative to the forces at hand and dependent upon the willingness of other entities to be subjected. I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this, but I have a love/hate relationship with my title. It feels powerful, yet literal. The first title, or rather the working title was In the Image of the Beast, which also felt literal, though, so I don’t know. I’ve never been good at titles. Dominion was a joint effort, which I could dig, but I sometimes wish I would have held out until we could come up with something even harder and more poignant.

What's in a name?

Emanuel’s name is the most deliberately chosen in Dominion, but otherwise, as a lover of interesting names period, I didn’t mean to be symbolic in naming this characters, but after the fact, I can see how some of the names could be seen as so. Most of the time I have to rehash the beginning of a story over and over to find a name for a character that sticks with me, and for me, factors like how it would sound read aloud in my head for however many times it appears in a text fare heavily. I have to really fuck with it to want to keep saying it. Rarely do my characters start out with permanent names. In my short story “A Good Samaritan,” featured in The Paris Review, I almost avoid naming folks altogether.

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

My teenage self would not be surprised at all at Dominion. I’ve been writing this, via observation of the community around me, for most of my life.

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

Almost all of my stories begin assertively as hell, so I will say beginnings almost always come out exactly how they will stay for however long I am working on the project. I used to have endings in mind when I wrote, but I’ve learned not to marry myself to anything in the text or force anything to be. Endings change as my relationship to my characters change and as they themselves evolve in the text. I don’t mind changing endings until it feels right.

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 all have some aspect of me, even the minor ones. I’m a person with a lot of strange habits and aversions, so I stick a piece of me all throughout my stories. I don’t have kids, so this is my version of spreading my genetic code about.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music of all types influences my writing. I walk in the French Quarter and people watch. I walk through Treme and people watch. Watching people and being nosy influences my work. Life is like theater of the living. Social media, cat behavior, exercise, YouTube videos—there’s inspiration in almost everything for me.

Visit Addie E. Citchens's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathleen S. Allen

Kathleen S. Allen is a young adult writer of gothic horror, historical, fantasy, and speculative fiction. She has published poems, short stories, novellas, and novels. She prefers dark to light, salty to sweet, and tea to coffee. She is a fan of K-Pop, classic rock, and British detective shows. She loves gray, foggy, cool, rainy days; unfortunately she lives in Los Angeles which is usually sunny and warm.

Allen's new novel is The Resurrectionist.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The title sets up an image in the reader’s mind that this is a story about a resurrectionist, which it is. I went through many title changes before my agent suggested the current title. Here’s a list of them:

The Darkness Within; In Darkness We Rise; What Lies Beneath The Skin; We Shall Be Monsters; Unhallowed; The Resurrectionist’s Daughter; For in that Sleep of Death What Dreams May Come; Frankenstein’s Daughter; In Darkness We Dwell; The Story of The Creature; The Story of The Monster; The Creature; The Last Dream of My Soul

The book cover goes further in that readers will guess it’s about a young woman in Victorian times trying to become a resurrectionist. Yet, there’s something sinister as evidenced by the bloody scalpel in her hand and the blood spots on her gown and handkerchief she carries. The Masquerade Venetian half mask she wears also suggests all is not as it seems.

What's in a name?

I took my main character’s name from Swan Lake/The Swan Princess. Odile Rothbart. In Swan Lake Odile is the evil or black swan and Odette is the non-evil one. I used Deirdre as the name of Dilly’s (Odile) twin because it went well with Dilly. Rothbart is the villain in both Swan Lake (Von Rothbart) and in The Swan Princess. Why choose those names? I liked the juxtaposition of them, with one being the evil one and one being the so-called good one. And I chose Rothbart because I wanted their last name to be that of a villain that wasn’t immediately recognizable.

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

My teenage self wouldn’t be surprised because I’d been thinking about writing a gothic horror story for a long time. And Frankenstein has been my favorite book since I read it at the age of eight! My first foray into the genre was a Jane Eyre retelling I wrote when I was seventeen. Needless to say that one won’t see the light of day, it’s been permanently shelved.

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

I think solidifying the perfect beginning takes time. Where should I open the lens so readers can view their story at the precise moment to bring them into the world I’ve created? What is important for the readers to know about Dilly and Deirdre? Finding that balance between too much information/back story and too little is like teetering on the edge of a cliff. One step too far and you plummet into the abyss of tedious information no one (except the author) cares about, and one step too far back and no one can figure out what’s going on.

I usually change both depending on the final form of the story. The original beginning of this novel had their father’s funeral in it but was cut during edits. It took me a while to figure out the ending. I had several written but none were working. One day as I was editing, the ending came to me in a flash and that’s the ending readers will see.

Visit Kathleen S. Allen's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Resurrectionist.

My Book, The Movie: The Resurrectionist.

Writers Read: Kathleen S. Allen.

--Marshal Zeringue