Caroline Leavitt

Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Days of Wonder, With or Without You, Cruel Beautiful World, Is This Tomorrow, Pictures of You, Girls In Trouble, Coming Back To Me, Living Other Lives, Into Thin Air, Family, Jealousies, Lifelines, and Meeting Rozzy Halfway. Many of her titles were optioned for film, translated into different languages, and condensed in magazines. Many of her titles were Best Books of the Year and Indie Next Picks. A New York Foundation of the Arts Fellow, she was also shortlisted for the Maine Readers Prize, and was a Goldenberg Fiction Prize winner. She recently won an award from the MidAtlantic Arts for portions of her next novel, The Inseparables.

My Q&A with Leavitt:

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

Days of Wonder is a little deceptive as a name of a book because it’s a title of hope. The book is about two 15-year-olds from different classes in NYC who fall madly in love and are about to be separated by the boy’s abusive father, and so they start fantasizing about killing him. And then the fantasy veers into something realer, and both kids are accused of attempted murder. Both kids were sleep-deprived and drugged-up the night of crime, and neither can really remember just what happened. Jude, with a wealthy dad and a good lawyer, goes free, but Ella gets 25 years. When she’s early released after six years, she’s desperate to find Jude, to find her child, and to find out what really happened that night, and why?

Doesn’t seem like the stuff of wonder, does it? But I wanted to focus on the bright glints of life or hope that appear in a lot of the novel’s darkness. Yes, this great gorgeous young love is destroyed, but like that great old movie, Splendor in the Grass, there is always the memory of it. Things don’t work out the way any of the characters imagine they will, and there is a tremendous cost to everyone, but out of that darkness, there is growth, understanding, and yeah, a sense of wonder about how the world works. I wanted that wonder to be revealed at the end when the real story of the attempted murder comes out.

My publisher wanted to change the name, to call the book, The Second Life of Ella Fitchburg, and I protested, because that title, to me, sounded, too briskly commercial. That word, wonder, has always obsessed me.

What's in a name?

Oh, for me, names are everything. In fact, I actually gave my character family names—and for different reasons. I called Helen, Ella’s mother who grew up in a Hassidic community she was boosted out of, the same name as my own mother. My mom grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family and her father was a rabbi. When he died suddenly, she stopped believing in God and gave up religion, though for the rest of her life, she yearned for that community. I wanted to give fictional Helen that community in a way my mother never had! I called Ella’s later boyfriend Henry, making him a good guy, because for me, it erased the fact that my father had been a brutal bastard to the whole family! And I used the name Ruta for a minor character because I wanted to give my sister the happy life that had escaped her. For me, names are all about the emotions I feel when I hear the name. In a book about the yearning for connection, I satisfied my own yearning for connection with my family that is lost to me now.

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

My teenaged reader self would be happy—because I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was in first grade and I told stories to the class (“Adventure With a Lion” was my first!). I persisted through countless teachers telling me I couldn’t write or that wasn’t a profession for me.

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

Both, but the beginning has to be right before I can go on, and I often write it through sixteen revisions. I have to have that inkling that something wrong is about to happen, that getting out of it isn’t going to be easy, and I have to know that I am writing about the things that obsess and matter to me, which are usually family, loss, longing. I don’t think about masterpieces when I am first writing as much as I am thinking about getting deeper and deeper into the story-world that I am desperate to inhabit!

I had started Days of Wonder two different ways, one way had Ella snooping on and virtually stalking the little girl she gave up while she was in prison. I liked that, but it didn’t feel like it had enough danger in it for me. So, then I tried to start the book with Ella just getting out of prison at 22 and being the one stalked by an angry media. That felt like the right place for me. It came alive in my mind, so I used that.

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

Their emotions are mine. Like Helen, I always felt, and still feel like an outsider, always struggling for community. Like Ella, I had that wild, passionate young love that I never ever forgot. And like Jude, I often blame myself for things that are not my fault at all. But I always try to get past that feeling, to make the characters live and breathe on their own.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Everything inspires me. A great dinner or a disgusting one. Seeing a lover’s argument on the streets of New York City and watching their body language. Eavesdropping on people next to me at a restaurant, capturing the cadence of their speech in my mind.

Visit Caroline Leavitt's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Pictures of You.

My Book, the Movie: Pictures of You.

The Page 69 Test: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Cruel Beautiful World.

The Page 69 Test: Cruel Beautiful World.

Writers Read: Caroline Leavitt (October 2016).

My Book, The Movie: Days of Wonder.

--Marshal Zeringue

Helen Benedict

Helen Benedict, a British-American professor at Columbia University, is the author of seven previous novels, six books of nonfiction, and a play. Her newest novel is The Good Deed.

The Good Deed, set in a refugee camp in Greece, comes out of the research Benedict conducted for her 2022 nonfiction book, Map of Hope and Sorrow, co-authored with Syrian writer and refugee, Eyad Awwadawnan and endorsed by Jessica Bruder (Nomadland), Dina Nayari (The Ungrateful Refugee) and Christy Lefteri (The Beekeeper of Aleppo), among others. That book earned PEN's Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History in 2021 and praise from The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, and elsewhere.

My Q&A with Benedict:

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

I think titles are of utmost importance to the writer and the reader. For the writer, they serve to distill, even if subliminally, what the book is actually about and even its mood and point of view, so it's essential to get it right. If the title is ironic or funny, that sets an inescapable tone for the whole book. Likewise, if the title is poetic, quirky, funny, weird, surreal, or deadly earnest. For the reader, the title signals all that and more because basically it's calling out, "See how intriguing I am? Read me!"

Because of all this, I often go through dozens of titles before I find the right one. But best is when a title comes to me right away and sticks. That happened with The Good Deed. It is ironic but serious, implying that a good deed is not all it seems, that it might even be the opposite, just as that road of good intentions is. I hope readers will find the title intriguing and just mysterious enough to make them want to read the inside of the book, too, especially when they see those words over the picture on the cover, which shows an empty lifejacket floating in the sea. Is the book about the good deed of saving someone from drowning? Maybe!

What's in a name?

Most of the characters in my book are Syrian or Sudanese and so have Arabic names, where every name carries a meaning. This meant I chose the names -- Amina, Leila, Nafisa -- with care, as I did the names of all the people in their families. But I also have an American tourist in there, Hilma, and a Greek man named Kosmos. Hilma sounds old fashioned, which fits a little. Kosmos sounds grandiose, which fits, too. I like to know the meanings of the names I choose but I don't want those meanings to be too obvious or to define people. We are all more complicated than a name.

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

My teenage self would have been surprised that I'm writing about refugees in Greece, about which I would have known nothing, but not surprised that I'm writing about enterprising, independent women in difficult circumstances. At that age, I was reading a lot of Charlotte Bronte and discovering feminism and Civil Rights, so the leap from the me then to the me now is not so enormous.

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

Beginnings are a dream for me to write, for they usually trigger the entire novel for me. They might come from an image in my head, something I see, a phrase I hear, a memory, and that will open the door to the whole story. Endings, on the other hand, are hell. They carry so much weight. They can leave the reader with a gut punch or betray the whole book, letting it down with a pathetic thump. I rewrite both a lot, but endings are so hard that I prefer writing novels to stories, so I only have to come up with an ending every five years or so!

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

I never write directly from my life or the life of anyone I know, but of course no writer can be impervious to her own personality, ideas, prejudices, likes and dislikes. So I do pilfer from myself occasionally. But in The Good Deed, nobody is the least like me. Even if someone shares an opinion with me, they will often have other opinions I don't agree with at all. I love writing characters who are different from me because that becomes an adventure in discovery, rather than just boring myself by writing what I already know.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

The Good Deed is highly influenced by the news, given that it's about current refugees in current day Greece. It is based on research I did myself by spending a lot of time in the refugee camp over several years, and spending much of those years talking with and listening to the people trapped in that camp, several of whom are still my friends. Indeed, I co-authored a nonfiction book out of that same research with a Syrian refugee I met in the camp named Eyad Awwadawnan. That book was called Map of Hope and Sorrow: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece. I then wrote The Good Deed because I wanted to go even deeper into the hearts and everyday lives of what it's like to flee for your life from home, only to have to live in a place where nobody wants you.

Music matters to me when I write, for there is as much music in prose as in poetry, or should be. I am very aware of rhythm, chorus and sound when I write.

I have watched many documentaries about refugees that have fed my work, but nothing compares to having spent time myself among people struggling to keep their dignity and love alive in a filthy, inhumane camp.

Learn more about Helen Benedict and her work.

My Book, The Movie: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Wolf Season.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Cecil

Mark Cecil is an author, journalist and host of The Thoughtful Bro show, for which he conducts author interviews with an eclectic roster of award winning and bestselling writers. He has written for LitHub, Writer’s Digest, Cognoscenti, The Millions, Reuters, and Embark Literary Journal, among other publications. He is Head of Strategy for A Mighty Blaze and he has taught writing at Grub Street and The Writers Loft.

Cecil's debut novel is Bunyan and Henry; Or, the Beautiful Destiny.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I really love my title, Bunyan and Henry; Or, The Beautiful Destiny, which I think does a lot of work.

The initial title of the book was just “Bunyan” because it’s a big, larger than life story about a very famous folk hero. Sort of like, Oedipus Rex, or Hamlet, or Madame Bovary and so on. By the time my publisher acquired it, we changed it to, “Paul Bunyan And The Beautiful Destiny,” because this picks up some of the spiritual and philosophical themes of the work as well.

But by the time we were ready to go to print, the team at my publishing house thought that title could be improved. So we came up with a number of alternatives, and even sent a list of possible titles around at Penguin Random House and at my agency, and people voted on their favorites. I think we got it right in the end.

First, it highlights the unlikely friendship of these two American folklore heroes—white lumberjack Paul Bunyan and Black steel drivin’ man John Henry. The other title didn’t have John Henry in it.

The second part of the title “Or, The Beautiful Destiny,” is great for a few reasons. First, it announces the philosophical and spiritual aspects of the work—this is a book that has a meditation and message about how to live an authentic life, and follow a higher calling. While my book is often described as an entertaining romp, it’s also meant to serve as a kind of bottled courage to those considering a change in their lives.

Finally, the title as a whole has a kind of literary ring and formulation to it—it has a semicolon in it, after all! It harkens back to a kind of old-timey, literary tradition, like Moby-Dick, Or, The Whale. I think the compound formulation is intriguing, and literary, and subtle, and just might do the thing a title is supposed to do most…make a person passing it in a book store think, Wait a second, what’s this about? And then they read the first page and get hopefully get hooked.

What's in a name?

I really do love character names, and I’ve been told by other writers that my character names “do some of the storytelling work.”

Of course my main two characters are well-known folk heroes. They already had names. But the other characters I had a lot of fun with. To name a few:

Eleanor Throttlecock—a tough minded, upper class British woman who runs an outlaw, underground fight ring.

Mad Dog Mahoney—Bunyan’s chief rival in Lump Town, the polluted mining hamlet where the story begins.

El Boffo—the book’s main antagonist, an archetypal Yankee peddler and owner of Lump Town. He has written an evangelistic book aphorisms called Awaken The Capitalist Within.

Bright Eyes—the genius Native American woman who has cracked the scientific mystery of the book.

Pulaski and Lynch—a pair of racist bounty hunters.

All these names are a lot of fun, but also capture the essence of the characters, I hope.

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

I think my teenage self would be really proud of this book! It’s an all-ages kind of story, one that a teenager can enjoy, and also someone late in their lives. For a long time I was trying to write books that were serious, dark and pessimistic…in other words, books that seemed more “literary.” But at last I wrote the book of my heart, one that’s upbeat, optimistic and full of hope in the end. It’s the kind of book I would have loved to read as a young man, when one always feels at a crossroads, on the verge of making a big decision, and trying to figure out life.

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

For me endings are harder. I once heard Jeannette Winterson say that writing a novel is like entering a tunnel that gets narrower and narrower. At first there’s lots of light and room, but then there’s just this tiny little opening at the end, and you have to squeeze yourself out of it. That said, if you can nail the ending, and deliver the payoff you have set up, it’s the greatest thing in the world. Where your character ends up and why is deeply related to what the story “means” and what you are trying to say. And it is hard to figure out what you’re trying to say! Endings are tough—but if you stick the landing, you’re golden.

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

I believe that all great fantasy and myth—and arguably even more realistic fictional storytelling—is powered by emotional autobiography. I think Lord of the Rings is about J.R.R. Tolkien’s experiences in World War I (much as he might have denied it.) And I think Luke’s conflict with Darth Vader is really about George Lucas’s own revolt against his father, who owned a stationary story in California and wanted his son to work with him, rather than go to film school. For me, I left my job mid-career to chase my dream of writing a book. It was more heartbreaking, desperate and difficult than I ever could have imagined. And yet, in the end, I did publish my book, and it was absolutely one of the most exhilarating things I’ve ever done. Paul Bunyan in my book is stuck in his life, and wonders if he will ever leave his terrible job and chase his own Beautiful Destiny. Finally, he decides to take the leap. His adventure is a metaphor for my own.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

What an interesting question. I’d have to say film has influenced me, especially fantasy films like Lord of the Rings and Black Panther. I always want my writing to be so clear and visual, that even a child could conjure up in their mind what they are seeing. My books also have tons of dialogue, rhymes, chanting and even singing. I often ask myself when writing, could a director shoot this scene? And if a film director couldn’t shoot it, then usually that means the scene is not clear enough or active enough or entertaining enough. Filmmakers take pace and action very seriously, and I try to bring that into my work.

Visit Mark Cecil's website.

My Book, The Movie: Bunyan and Henry; Or, the Beautiful Destiny.

The Page 69 Test: Bunyan and Henry; Or, the Beautiful Destiny.

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen E. Olson

Karen E. Olson is the winner of the Sara Ann Freed Memorial Award and a Shamus Award finalist. She is the author of the Annie Seymour mysteries, the Tattoo Shop mysteries, and the Black Hat thrillers. Olson was a longtime editor, both in newspapers and at Yale. She lives in North Haven, Connecticut.

Olson's new novel is An Inconvenient Wife.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The phrase “an inconvenient wife” was something Henry VIII said to describe his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, when he was trying to divorce her but she was stonewalling the process. Most of his wives were “inconvenient” in some way at some point in their marriages, and as my book is told from the point of view of four of the wives, it has always felt to be appropriate as a title and sets the stage for the reader.

What's in a name?

Since the book is a fictional retelling of history, I played around with the actual names of the historical figures: Henry VIII becomes Hank Tudor; Katherine Parr becomes Kate Parker; Catherine of Aragon becomes Catherine Alvarez; Catherine Howard is Caitlyn Howard; and Ann of Cleves is now Anna Klein. I didn’t change Thomas Cromwell’s name, but I did change Thomas Culpepper to Alex Culpepper because there were a lot of Thomases in Tudor England and I didn’t want to confuse the reader.

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

My teenage self would be thrilled. My Tudor obsession actually began when I was 14 and read a biography of Elizabeth I. The only real surprise would be that it’s crime fiction, a genre I didn’t read until I was in my twenties.

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

Endings, definitely. The beginning is a blank slate with endless opportunities. By the middle of the book, though, I start to wonder how I’m going to stick the landing, since everything has to come together and make sense. That’s when the rewriting and revising happens.

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

Since I’ve written about the world of billionaires, it is most definitely not my life. However, Kate’s background is more humble, more middle class before she gets involved with her husband’s world. She had to work through school to pay for her education and she worked in public relations to pay her bills. Also, as a woman of a certain age, I am able to relate to Catherine and how she faces growing older. So I do bring some of myself into my characters.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I love spending time on Zillow looking at real estate. When imagining Hank Tudor’s estates and Anna Klein’s inn, I bounced from magnificent house to magnificent house with swimming pools, oceanfronts, tennis courts, picturing my characters’ physical world.

Visit Karen E. Olson's website.

The Page 69 Test: An Inconvenient Wife.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ashton Lattimore

Ashton Lattimore is an award-winning journalist and a former lawyer. She is the editor-in-chief at Prism, a nonprofit news outlet by and for communities of color, and her nonfiction writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, Slate, CNN, and Essence. Lattimore is a graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and Columbia Journalism School. She grew up in New Jersey, and now lives in suburban Philadelphia with her husband and their two sons. All We Were Promised is her first novel.

My Q&A with Lattimore:

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

I think the title All We Were Promised clues readers into the sense of expectation that each of the main characters carries throughout the story. The book centers on three very different young Black women in pre-Civil War Philadelphia: a formerly enslaved housemaid, a wealthy socialite and budding abolitionist, and a young girl who’s currently enslaved and hoping to escape. Though their circumstances are very different, each of them has absolutely been promised something, whether by their family members, friends, society at large, or even the law. For the housemaid, Charlotte, her white-passing father brought her to Philadelphia on the promise of freedom and a better life, only to shunt her into a role as his domestic servant. Meanwhile Nell, the wealthy abolitionist, was born into a free family and has—until this point—led a life that’s comfortable and uncomplicated, but as she becomes more involved in the abolitionist movement she discovers that her social class doesn’t protect her from the city’s racial strife. Lastly there’s Evie, who was left behind on the plantation when Charlotte and her father fled. Evie expected at least loyalty from her dear friend, and she arrives in Philadelphia ready to demand what she feels she’s owed.

My original working title of the book was The Free City, which gets at the same idea on a larger societal and legal scale. The story is set in Philadelphia, the cradle of liberty, but it’s also 1837, and we see the stark reality of who actually had access to its promised freedoms and who did not, regardless of the city’s professed virtues or the state’s actual emancipation laws. As a title, All We Were Promised captures that same sense of irony, in a less direct way.

What's in a name?

The original idea for this novel was inspired by Les Miserables, so several of the character names reflect that. In its earliest shape, All We Were Promised was the story of a father who was on the run from a dangerous past, and how his daughter grappled with the limitations he placed on her life. As I created the character names, escaped convict “Jean Valjean” became fugitive slave “James Vaughn,” and his daughter “Cosette” became “Charlotte.” As the story grew in scope and came to incorporate more characters, a few more names were similarly inspired, while others were just reflections of what I thought sounded appropriate to the time period and the characters’ backgrounds.

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

Honestly, not in the slightest. I’ve always been a history nerd, particularly U.S. history and Black history, and I’ve always gravitated toward writing stories that center upon the experiences and growth of young women. In addition, I’ve been a Broadway enthusiast since I was about 9 years old. Given all that, learning that I’d grown up to write a historical fiction novel about three young Black women in 1830s Philadelphia that was also loosely inspired by Les Miserables would probably be the least surprising thing my teenage self ever heard.

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

Definitely beginnings. At the start of All We Were Promised, I hoped to catch each character at the moment just before their life changed. For some of them, that was more obvious—with Evie, who’s arrived in Philadelphia but is still enslaved, when she sees Charlotte in the marketplace, it’s like a sudden lightning bolt of possibility for her. But for a character like Charlotte, whose life has gone through so many transformations in just a few years, discovering her “beginning” was less straightforward: is it the moment she first meets her sophisticated new friend, Nell? Or is it when she decides to start sneaking out of the house, against her father’s wishes, to join a literary club and rub shoulders with abolitionists? For me, discovering those precise moments of transformation that mark a beginning felt more complicated than deciding where each character would land at the end of her journey.

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

There’s quite a lot of me in Charlotte, in the sense that she’s being pulled in many different directions all at once: She’s trying to break into high society and the abolitionist world, free her enslaved friend, and pursue her passions as a seamstress, all while keeping secrets from just about everyone she knows. I have fewer secrets, but the sense of trying to juggle a lot of different versions of yourself is very familiar—it’s a lot like how I felt working on this book and juggling my day job and two young children!

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

History is the biggest influence, and of course musical theater. I’ve also been very influenced by TV, particularly when writing All We Were Promised. Two of my favorite TV shows are Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, and much of the last third of the book is pretty directly inspired by two episodes of those shows—“Homecoming” from Season 3 of Buffy, and “Not Fade Away” from Angel, which was the series finale. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that helping an enslaved person is very risky business, and as a result, the young women in the story end up in pretty grave danger. Similarly, “Homecoming” finds Buffy and rich-girl queen bee Cordelia in serious peril, and while All We Were Promised doesn’t feature any vampires or monsters, there’s something really inspiring in that episode about how two wildly different young women worked together in an extreme situation. As for “Not Fade Away,” thematically, the message of that episode was that the fight against evil is never fully won, but you have to just keep fighting. Given the state of the world Charlotte, Nell, and Evie lived in as Black women in the 1830s, and the state of the abolitionist movement at that time, that message—to just keep doing the work, even against seemingly insurmountable odds—really resonated, and it directly inspired the last line of the book.

Visit Ashton Lattimore's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ellen Feldman

Ellen Feldman, a 2009 Guggenheim fellow, is the author of The Living and the Lost (winner of Long Island Reads award), Paris Never Leaves You (translated into thirteen languages), Terrible Virtue (optioned by Black Bicycle for a feature film), The Unwitting, Next to Love, Scottsboro (shortlisted for the Orange Prize), The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank (a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice”), and Lucy.

Feldman's new novel is The Trouble with You.

My Q&A with the author:

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

Of all the novels I’ve published, The Trouble with You was the hardest to title. I auditioned dozens of attempts. They were all too generic and could apply to any story or too specific and therefore incomprehensible. After much solitary agonizing and endless consulting with my patient editor and publisher, we hit on The Trouble with You. That’s the exasperated phrase that would be thrown at the protagonist Fanny, her aunt Rose, and several other characters in the book. I’m delighted to report that many readers have agreed. They’ve told me they could hear the more conventional characters in the book shouting the words at those who flouted the rules to forge their own personae.

What's in a name?

I’m a stickler for a character’s name fitting his or her nature. It has to be appropriate to the time and place, but especially to who the character is. That said, I avoid names that telegraph a character’s temperament or behavior. Dickens could pull it off. I can’t. I’m not sure how I determine the suitability of a name. It’s more instinct than reason. In this novel, Rose’s name is, I think, an apt and ironic comment on the world she inhabited and the life she was dealt.

Rose, whose very name was a joke, like the names of so many of the girls with whom she'd grown up and worked in the factories. Rose. Iris. Flora. Pearl. Ruby. Golda. They gave them names that connoted beauty or opulence, then sent them to work sewing hats or gloves or dresses so their brothers could graduate from college.

Other characters, however, often squirm in the names I initially give them and demand repeated changes. Fanny took some time to find a name she was comfortable wearing. Thank heavens for global search. Charlie, on the other hand, danced brashly onto my laptop screen wearing his name. He knew who he was. I had to get to know him.

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

I have a double-edge answer to that. My teenage self would be amazed that I’ve published novels. I always wanted to write and began writing in childhood, but I always thought writers were special people beyond my reach. That said, I don’t think my teenage self would be surprised by the story. Kernels of it were bubbling just beneath the surface in her angst-ridden adolescent mind.

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

The Trouble with You is the exception to my answer to this question. I usually find the beginning of a novel challenging to the point of despair and have to write several opening chapters, most of which are discarded, before I find my way into the story. In this book I knew the beginning from the moment the idea started to take shape in my mind. I was striving for something that would plunge the reader into Fanny’s life, let the reader savor her happiness, yet create a subtle tension about what was to come. As for endings, in this book, as in most I’ve written, I know where it’s going but I rarely know exactly how it will end until I’m almost there. That’s because I depend on the characters to lead me to the conclusion.

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

I think it’s hard, if not impossible, to write a character you can’t get inside. Some of my characters are close to the person I want to be so it’s not difficult living in their skins. Some are people I don’t admire and fear resembling. Then I try to find what makes the character tick so unpleasantly. The worst part of writing those unattractive characters is that I often realize the objectionable traits are ones I’m fighting in myself. The recognition is disagreeable for me as a woman, but invaluable for me as a writer.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Years ago a writer friend told me that in my books I “seize the thistle.” He meant, of course, that I go after difficult subjects. I have always cherished the description. I can’t undo past injustice, but I can try to call readers’ attention to it. However, I don’t so much choose topics as feel chosen by them. Specific instances of war, racism, and misogyny make me want to alert the world to the fact that they happened and warn against their reoccurrence. People who have fought those scourges – individuals like Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Margaret Sanger – inspire me to write about them. Fictional characters like Fanny, Charlie and Rose in this book allow me to address vast human issues in deeply personal terms.

Learn more about the book and author at Ellen Feldman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Scottsboro.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sara Donati

Sara Donati (a pen name for Rosina Lippi) she is the author of the Wilderness series, historical novels that follow the fortunes of a group of families living in the vast forests in upstate New York from about 1792-1825, with particular attention to the War of 1812. Her newest series (the Waverly Place Series) is about the extended Bonner family and includes The Gilded Hour and Where the Light Enters. The story in this series jumps ahead two generations to follow Nathaniel and Elizabeth Bonner’s grand- and great granddaughters into the twentieth century.

Donati's new novel, The Sweet Blue Distance, is set in 1858 in New Mexico Territory; it serves as a bridge between the Wilderness series of novels and the first two novels of the Waverly Place series.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I have never had much luck naming my own novels. Editors and marketing people have more control than I like. I wanted to call this newest novel Little Birds -- and I admit it would give the reader no real sense of the story. The Sweet Blue Distance does provide some insight. This is a novel about moving west and into a new life, and thus far it seems that readers agree that the title evokes the images I was hoping for.

What's in a name?

Character names are a universe to themselves. I have a total of ten historical novels in print, and the same families feature in most of them. This provides an anchor, of a sort -- the first and primary couple are Elizabeth and Nathaniel. As their universe grew (children, children-in-law, grandchildren) I found it harder and harder to find compelling names, almost certainly because I didn't know those characters very well yet. I have used 'Martha' multiple times in various generations, and the name has deep connotations for me because of the last Martha -- born to Jemima Southern, who readers love to hate, and to Liam Kirby, who they love unconditionally. Martha is a conflicted young woman with some awful childhood memories (thanks to her mother) but she finds her footing and grows into one of my own favorites. I suppose that she had to develop in that direction because she married into the Bonner family; she had to earn that privilege. At least, that's what my writer's brain worked out.

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

Beginnings are awful. It may take me months of rethinking and rewriting an opening, and I won't get anything really written until that's done. A bit morbid, by it's something like digging a grave. Just how deep do you need to go? How wide? If I start out and convince myself I'm on the right track -- when I know that I am not, really -- I will pay for it not so far down the line. The worst experience with this cost me about five thousand words. That discarded chapter still lives deep in the bowels of my hard drive. I won't go looking for it.

I'd like to point out that dozens of hugely admired and successful writers agree with me on this. Agatha Christie put it very clearly: "Starting to write a book: there is no agony like it" (1977). My favorite quote is what George Orwell had to say: "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."

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

A few of my characters have traces of my personality, but only slightly. Many of my female characters are more capable of violence than I think I would be in similar situations. It's more likely that I draw on a person from my life for a character, and most often this is not a compliment. There are two female and two male characters that I drew pretty much from life, People familiar with my work will recognize the name Moncrieff, but they have no way to know who he's based on, and I'm not going to go into detail. At least, not until the real-life Moncrieff is dead. It occurs to me that I should ask my readers for the five worst characters I've come up with. I wonder what they will say.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

The biggest influence on my writing mind has always been history. Or better said, hidden histories. As a teenager I was truly angry to find out that Anne Frank's diary had been severely edited by her father, who wanted a neater, cleaner story. Later reading about the War of 1812 I was shocked at how little we had been taught about that war. Reading extensively about slavery and the way colonialization destroyed whole nations of people put another set of stories in my head. And I have always been interested in the way women survived in a world where they were pinned down by the demands of survival. You can find all these topics and others in my historical fiction. My purpose is to turn a small light on. The very best compliment I have ever had about my novels goes something like "I didn't realize... so I went to read about it... and now I'm still reading because wow, why did I never learn any of this in school?"

Visit Sara Donati's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Gilded Hour.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Pomeroy

Mark Pomeroy lives with his family in Portland, Oregon, where he was born and raised. In 2014 Oregon State University Press published his first novel, The Brightwood Stillness, which The Oregonian called “absorbing and humane.” He has received an Oregon Literary Fellowship for fiction, and his short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Open Spaces, Portland Magazine, The Wordstock 10, NW Book Lovers, The Oregonian, and What Teaching Means: Stories from America’s Classrooms. For the past twenty-eight years he has led creative writing workshops in Portland schools.

Pomeroy's new novel is The Tigers of Lents.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I worked on The Tigers of Lents over the course of twelve years. For eleven of those years, the novel had a different title. My editor and publisher liked the earlier title, but asked me to supply an alternative option.

It took two weeks of brainstorming — long lists, plenty of brooding, some cursing — before I zeroed in on a title that links some key aspects of the novel. I also like the sound of The Tigers of Lents. Sound is important.

The Tigers of Lents is a family saga that centers on three feisty teenage sisters living in poverty in Lents, an outer neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. One of the sisters is a soccer star on the verge of possibly accepting a college scholarship. The novel shows how the three girls battle to be taken seriously, how they experience a crash of worlds when they try to engage the wider society, and how they also battle with self-doubts and self-sabotage.

The title connects the novel’s soccer element to the inner character of each person in the Garrison family.

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

My teenage self would probably be stunned that I’m a novelist. I spent part of my childhood living on poverty’s edge — that fluid state, month to month, that many people don’t understand. Parmesan cheese comes powdered in a can, and you and your single mother are one emergency away from real struggle.

I read as a young kid, then stopped reading as a teen. For several years after my mother remarried, when I was in third grade, my homelife was difficult, and I wanted to be out of the house as much as possible. I spent a lot of time in the street playing soccer.

I worked on my high school newspaper, but not until I was in college did I start reading again, widely. After college, I traveled a lot and worked part-time jobs, then I was a middle school teacher for a few years. I quit to have my mornings for writing fiction. In the afternoons I worked as a creative writing teacher in Portland Public Schools, and as a soccer coach in after-school programs all around the city.

Some of these gigs were in neighborhoods marked by poverty. Places much like where I spent part of my childhood.

In 2011, I was the last writer-in-residence at Marshall High School in Lents. The school district had just chosen Marshall, out of all the city’s high schools, for closure, citing budget issues. It was another major blow to that community, which had been cut in half by a freeway a few decades earlier.

I found myself, before each teaching day, sitting in the school’s parking lot and taking notes, the freeway noise filling my car. The seeds of a new novel were growing, and they connected to parts of my childhood.

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

In a beginning, you just want to pull the reader into the story in an honest way. You want crisp, evocative sentences. You want the reader, from the sentences and the voice, to feel an immediate trust and curiosity. Mostly, you want to tap what the late great Oregon writer Brian Doyle called “The Shimmering Center.” Each scene, each person in the novel must be true in that sense. Set aside the rest.

In The Tigers of Lents, both the opening and the ending just came in the moment, in the flow of drafting, and I felt there was resonance. I felt this over time. Sixty-some drafts.

There are no shortcuts, of course. It’s about showing up regularly at the desk and proving to the spirits that you’re actually serious about the work. Stubbornness is key. As is faith.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Places. Mount Hood and its foothills. The Oregon Coast. The Salmon River near Mount Hood. Central Oregon, including the Metolius River. New York City, Salzburg, Namibia, the island of Ometepe in Nicaragua, Nepal, parts of Indonesia, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Among other places.

Musicians. So many musicians. Erroll Garner, Anita Baker, Midnight Oil, Hilary Hahn, Yo-Yo Ma, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Peter Gabriel, Mark Knopfler, KRS-One, Kendrick Lamar, Alison Krauss, Sting, Chopin, Beethoven. Among many others. A few days ago I heard Chaka Khan’s “Ain’t Nobody (Loves Me Better),” it had been several years, and I about teared up. God, what a song.

Athletes. Christine Sinclair, Megan Rapinoe, Julius Erving, Tim Duncan, Steve Nash, Pelé, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Ed Viesturs, Homare Sawa, Marta, Sabrina Ionescu, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Lothar Matthäus. The list could go for another few pages.

I would also include many painters, woodworkers, schoolteachers, ceramic artists, small business owners, nurses, professors, bakers, landscapers, and so on. Anyone who brings sustained attention, genuine skill, dedication, kindness, grit, grace, and integrity to their work.

Inspiration is all around us. It’s our choice — to notice or not notice.

Visit Mark Pomeroy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Beth Durst

Sarah Beth Durst is the award-winning author of over twenty books for kids, teens, and adults, including Spark, Drink Slay Love, and The Queens of Renthia series. She won an American Library Association Alex Award and a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award and has been a finalist for SFWA's Andre Norton Nebula Award three times. She is a graduate of Princeton University and lives in Stony Brook, New York, with her husband, her children, and her ill-mannered cat.

Durst's new novel is The Lies Among Us.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The Lies Among Us is quite literally about the lies among us. When Hannah looks at the world, she sees it overlaid with the physical manifestations of the lies we tell one another and ourselves. A toxic sludge spills from the TV while a politician speaks. A shadowy convertible that no one ever owned speeds past her on the highway. The house she grew up in -- when she looks at it, she sees a cheerful two-story yellow house with white shutters, a porch swing, and pink azaleas. Her sister, Leah, sees a drab one-story beige house with peeling paint and a yard full of junk.

Hannah herself cannot be seen or heard by anyone, and in the wake of her mother's death, she struggles to reach out to a sister who will not -- and cannot -- acknowledge her.

It's about sisterhood, grief, and the corrosive nature of lies, as seen through the eyes of a woman who does not exist.

What's in a name?

My favorite source of names is the Social Security website. They have this baby-name statistics page where you can search for names by popularity in their birth year. I use it all time to ensure my character names match their age.

Beyond that, I try to choose names that match the character in feel. Hannah is sheltered, innocent, and kind -- so I gave her a name where the shorter central letters are visually cushioned and protected by the taller first and last letters.

Leah is more bitter, sharper -- I wanted her to have a correspondingly shorter name that also pairs nicely with Hannah, to make them aurally sisters as well as biologically.

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

I think she'd be very surprised. My teenage self would have expected all my books to include swords and monsters and unicorns and winged cats... and in fact, I have written many novels with all those things. (My latest epic fantasy is called The Bone Maker, and it has a bone army and all sorts of wizards and warriors. And my upcoming cozy fantasy, The Spellshop, has both a unicorn and a winged cat, as well as merhorses and a talking spider plant!) But this novel... It's a true departure for me in many ways.

This novel is my first book club fiction and my first family drama, and it was such a tremendous writing experience! In this novel, I had the chance to use the techniques I'd developed in other genres to explore an intangible concept in a concrete way, specifically the concept of lies and the effect they have on our relationships and ourselves. I learned so much by pushing myself to experiment with style, voice, and the interiority of my characters.

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

I can't write the book until I know the beginning. It's where I find the voice of the novel. Sometimes it flows out easily, and sometimes I write fifty or more openings, auditioning different approaches to the style, the tone, the characters, and the story. The ending usually unfurls naturally from all that I've written in the chapters 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 try to create characters who are distinct from me (and from anyone I know). They need to feel like real, unique people in order for me to write them. That said, I think it's impossible to avoid pouring some of yourself into your characters.

Writing a character a bit like being an actor -- you try to imagine what you would do, say, and feel if you'd had a certain set of experiences and possess a particular worldview, and then you try to bring the character to life (except in writing, your tool is your keyboard, instead of your body, face, and voice).

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I always listen to music as I write. For The Lies Among Us, my playlist included a lot of Kate Bush, Tori Amos, k.d. lang, Edie Brickell, Taylor Swift, Vertical Horizon, and multiple covers of Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner."

Visit Sara Beth Durst's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sami Ellis

Sami Ellis is a queer horror writer who’s inspired by the horrific nature of Black fears and the culture’s relation to the supernatural. When she’s not acting as the single auntie with a good job, she spends her time not writing.

Check out her words in the Black horror anthology, All These Sunken Souls.

Ellis's debut novel is Dead Girls Walking.

My Q&A with the author:

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

I am very much a speculative fiction author, and I love, love, loved getting the chance to play around with death in a Friday the 13th-type camp story. Thus, and this is probably a spoiler to some, Dead Girls Walking as a title is quite literal. The girls are dead - and somehow, they are also walking. Gasp!

What's in a name?

The name Temple Baker came to me in full. I usually have to mix and match different names that are familiar to me (there are lots of “Imani’s” in my notebooks), but the original title for Dead Girls Walking was Temple Baker the Badass. I hated the title, but the name itself stuck - and if you read the book, you'll find that that's not all there is to her name (though she'll kill you before she ever tells you).

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

As a teenager, I read anything that was kept in stock at the library. That mostly means that as long as it wasn't popular – thus not already checked out – I was reading it in one sitting. I think teen me would be most surprised that I stuck to one kind of story, one kind of genre. I always loved horror, sure - but I had been reading 2 rom-coms a day back then. I inhaled Kimani Tru and Simon Pulse's entire catalogue just for fun. The idea that my adventurous tastes don't translate to my talent would probably shake teen me to her core.

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

Beginnings are difficult for me because they teach me, and the reader, about patience that we may not have. I have to wait to get to the fun parts I like! All of my stories are like a Jenga tower. Readers pick apart at it page-by-page, chapter-by-chapter until everything collapses on itself - and the collapsing part is the fun part for me. Bodies are found, girls are screaming, and somehow I’ve got to rebuild everything that fell apart.

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

I see my younger self in my characters. Temple is hardheaded and frustrated with everything, including herself. It makes her lash out and fight people who are only trying to help her. I wasn't exactly that girl all the time, but there were plenty of times I was. I had friends that were that girl. I've had students that were that girl. And those people just needed someone on their side for once, even when they were acting out. So I tried to write Dead Girls Walking with love love, instead of tough love, for some girl to find it when she needs it – since I’d probably be the same at that age.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Dreams influence me a lot! I used to have frequent hallucinations around when I went to sleep and woke up (they’re called hypnogogic and hypnopompic hallucinations), and eventually I decided - "Well, I'm a horror writer, so let's write some of these down." I used to have this one particular hallucination that was recurring, which had never happened to me before. I would keep waking up and there would be math all over my walls. Scribbled, in-depth math like a professor's chalkboard. I would always get out of bed to run to read it, but by the time I reached the wall I would be too awake and the hallucination would dissipate. I used that one in Dead Girls Walking.

Visit Sami Ellis's website.

My Book, The Movie: Dead Girls Walking.

--Marshal Zeringue