Jana Richman

Jana Richman is the author of the memoir Riding in the Shadows of Saints: A Woman's Story of Motorcycling the Mormon Trail and the novel, The Last Cowgirl.

Jenny Shenk interviewed her for NewWest Books & Writers.

The opening exchange from the interview:

NewWest: One aspect of The Last Cowgirl that struck me was Dickie’s age when she has what might be described as a midlife crisis, prompted by her brother’s death. In the present portions of the book, she’s 52 years old, and through the flashbacks, she’s confronting issues and experiences from her childhood and teenage years that she hasn’t fully dealt with yet. Why did you choose to have Dickie this age when she has her moment of crisis and introspection?

Jana Richman: Part of this is simply circumstance. I was more concerned about Dickie’s age in 1968 — she needed to be young enough that the entire family would still be together at the ranch but old enough to really grasp the impact of the event — and I didn’t have any reason not to set the present portions of the book in, well, present time as opposed to 1998 or some year that would have made her younger, so she ended up being 52. She could have been 42; she could have been 62. There’s no magic age where we finally begin to unravel the complexity of the life we’ve made for ourselves, figure out exactly how much we’ve messed up our lives with the decisions we’ve made and what can or cannot be done about it. For me, it was my late 40s. Some more enlightened than I might figure it out in their early 40s or even their 30s; some never figure it out at all. I think Dickie might have been one who never confronted the truths of her life — or may have done it much later in life — if the death of her brother hadn’t forced the issue at that particular time.

Read the entire interview.

The Page 99 Test: The Last Cowgirl.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathleen A. Bogle

Andy Guess interviewed Kathleen A. Bogle, author of Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus, for Inside Higher Ed.

A couple of exchanges from the interview:

Q: How much of your interviews reveal what students perceive about hookup culture — that is, what they hear from their friends and expect from popular culture — as opposed to what actually happens on campus? Are their responses reflecting personal experience, wishful thinking, or both?

A: I asked students about their general perceptions of college students, perceptions of their peer group and their own behavior. What I found is that students tend to overestimate what their peers are doing. In other words, students often perceive that others hook up more often and go farther sexually during hookup encounters. These misperceptions, in turn, affect their own behavior because students make decisions about their own lives based on what they believe is “normal” for college students. I hope that my book can help clear up these distorted perceptions so that students can make choices based what is really going on.

Q: Recent reports about the hookup culture and “friends with benefits” have been seen by some as a cause for alarm. How does your study differ from previous accounts?

A: I tried to take a more evenhanded approach than previous commentators have on this subject. Where others have focused primarily on the most extreme behavior, I found that hooking up represents a wide range of behavior. I tried to present a realistic view of the hookup culture by including the voices of those who participate in moderate degrees and those who do not participate at all. Although I agree that some of what is going on in the hookup culture is cause for alarm (or at least concern), it is unfair to characterize the entire system, much less “all college students,” by what we see on MTV’s coverage of spring break.

I also think that in comparing hooking up to dating, other commentators have shown the dating era through rose-tinted glasses. Research on dating indicates that it was less than ideal. So I tried to present my findings about hooking up in a more accurate historical context.

Read the entire interview.

Learn more about Hooking Up.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Erard

Bob Garfield of NPR's "On the Media" interviewed Michael Erard, author of Um...: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean.

Part of their conversation:

BOB GARFIELD: And is [saying “um” or “uh”] a universal phenomenon? You mentioned English. Does it happen in other languages, and do people say "uh" in, I don't know, France?

MICHAEL ERARD: Every language gives a speaker a way to fill a pause with a sound. Sometimes it's that neutral vowel. In English it's "uh." In French it's "eu,” in Spanish it's "eh".

Other languages repurpose words that mean something else, so in Mandarin the word for "this” and “that" is the word that you fill pauses with. So if you listen to Mandarin speakers, they'll say nega-neka-nega. Or in Japanese, it's ano, which also means “this” or “that.”

BOB GARFIELD: What about the public's patience for vagaries of spoken language? Is there, in fact, an ebb and flow to the way we all handle other people's speech errors?

MICHAEL ERARD: We typically don't hear most of the “uhs” or the “ums” that other people say. There was one interesting study that was done where people are given a speech to listen to and about half of them, natively, listen to the content, and about half of them, natively, without any instruction, listen to the style.

When the content, for whatever reason, becomes extremely boring, people who listen for content start listening for style, and that's when they start to notice the “uhs” and the “ums.” So when people say to me, how do I reduce the “uhs” and “ums,” I say, that's easy; just be more interesting.

Read, or listen to, the entire interview.

The Page 69 Test: Um...: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean.

--Marshal Zeringue

Caroline Tiger

Caroline Tiger, author of How to Behave: Sex and Dating, talked to Phillyist last year as Valentine's Day loomed.

The opening exchanges from the Q & A:

Where did the idea for this book come from?

My book on general etiquette, How To Behave: Modern Manners for the Socially Challenged, came out in 2003 and ever since, people have been coming to me for advice. I couldn't help but notice that many of their questions had to do with dating, relationships and sex. Maybe it's who I hang out with, I don't know. It makes sense when you think about it--none of the old dating rules apply anymore, so we're without guidelines. And dating puts you in such a vulnerable position, you're naturally more anxious that you're going to do the "wrong" thing. Stakes are high. So it seemed like the obvious pick for a sequel.

What kind of research can you do for this kind of book? Hang out at bars?

I didn't do much on-site anthropological research. It was more about asking people, pretty much everyone I met, what questions they wanted answered and what kinds of sticky situations they'd run into while dating and in relationships. I really tried to get down to those nitty-gritty universal scenarios that everyone experiences but that are hardly ever addressed, such as: pets in the bedroom while you're having relations--yay or nay? And what's expected from you the next morning should you host a one-night-stand?

Read the entire Q & A.

Find out what Caroline Tiger has been reading.

Visit Caroline Tiger's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eli Gottlieb

Eli Gottlieb's The Boy Who Went Away won the prestigious Rome Prize, the 1998 McKitterick Prize from the British Society of Authors, and was a New York Times Notable book. His new novel is Now You See Him.

Bookreporter.com's Kate Ayers interviewed Gottlieb about the new book. Their opening exchanges:

Bookreporter.com: NOW YOU SEE HIM is a brilliant, sad and funny book. What was the inspiration for it?

Eli Gottlieb: They say that writers write the kind of books they'd like to read. In part I suppose I simply wanted to fill a gap in my own reading list. As to the origins of the book, it began with an image of two writers meeting at one of those art colonies of which America is so full. These places, in addition to being great for getting work done, are also hotbeds of erotic intrigue, filled with gossip, bitchery and exploding marriages. I brought the soaring star male writer and the coolly ambitious but unknown female writer together in one of these colonies, and watched what happened. I had been living abroad in Italy for several years, and I think my perceptions were energized by the fact of returning home. Everything, to the returning exile, seems fresh and new, and I tried to wire some of that energy into the novel.

BRC: Your character descriptions are so uniquely realistic. Do you observe people with an extraordinarily keen eye, gleaning quirks and traits from a compendium of different encounters, or do you just have a knack for building characters from scratch?

EG: I guess having been a self-conscious kid has its uses! All of the classical writers I've loved were in one way or another masters of observation, and I've tried to live up to their example. As for the construction of character, I tend to use a seed of reality based on someone I know or have observed, and then layer the personage outwards from there. For me, the novel as a literary form is mainly about character.

Read the entire interview.

The Page 69 Test: Now You See Him.

Read an excerpt from Now You See Him, and learn more about the book and author at Eli Gottlieb's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy Brook

Timothy Brook's latest book is Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World.

The opening exchange of his interview with Essential Vermeer:

The Essential Vermeer: For many years, art historians pictured Vermeer as an isolated painter in a relatively small town, a painter who, in the security of perfectly arranged interiors, crafted perfect scenes of domestic intimacy. Is there anything wrong with this picture in your opinion?

Timothy Brook: The image of Vermeer passing his days in a small town painting quiet domestic interiors is how we see him as we peer back from our cosmopolitan whirl and wonder at the smallness and completeness of the world his paintings seem to reveal. That world feels familiar, and yet so unlike our own. This mixed sense of familiarity and loss is why we enjoy imagining the places he lived in and painted with nostalgic pleasure. But Vermeer’s real world extended outside the walls of his mother-in-law’s house. He may have lived in a provincial town, but that town was the home of merchants who actively engaged in global trade, and the fruits of their trade flowed past his eyes. A few of these foreign things came right into his house, and he put them in his paintings. The world he wanted to depict was the intimate domestic setting in which he passed some of his time, but the world in which he lived was quite as wide as our own, if less busy, and he was part of it.

Read the entire interview.

Learn more about Vermeer's Hat.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom Perrotta

Anna Metcalfe interviewed Tom Perrotta for the Financial Times. Perrotta's latest novel, The Abstinence Teacher, was published in October 2007 by St. Martin's Press.

A few exchanges from the interview:

What was the last book you couldn't finish?

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson.

* * *

What book do you wish you'd written?

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

* * *

What book changed your life?

The Lord of the Rings. I locked myself in the bathroom and read it for hours and hours when I was young.

Read the entire interview.

Learn more about The Abstinence Teacher.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sandeep Jauhar

Erika Dreifus of Practicing Writing interviewed Sandeep Jauhar, author of Intern: A Doctor's Initiation.

Their opening exchange:

Erika Dreifus (ED): Fairly early in your memoir, you tell us that "journalism had always been a passion" of yours. You mention that you spent the summer before starting medical school on a science journalism fellowship sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. You also mention an internship you undertook -- while you were a full-time medical student -- with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Please tell us a little about your training and development as a writer--how these (and any other) experiences proved formative.

Sandeep Jauhar (SJ): In high school I always enjoyed writing. But like most budding writers, I didn't know how to parlay my interest into a career. When I went to Berkeley in 1985, I made a deliberate choice to focus on science and math. My writing interest lay dormant for many years until I came across a brochure advertising the AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellows Program. I applied and, much to my amazement, got the fellowship. I spent the summer of 1995 at the Washington, DC, bureau of Time magazine.

That experience convinced me that journalism and writing had to be a part of my career if I was going to feel fulfilled. Heeding the advice of journalism mentors, I landed a reporting internship at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch during my second year in medical school. The internship taught me how to write 500-word news stories on deadline. These pieces and some longer feature articles became the portfolio I presented to The New York Times. Cornelia Dean, the science editor, gave me my first big break in 1998 by accepting a query for a 1200-word piece about the closing of a leprosy hospital in Louisiana. I eventually started writing essays about internship and residency for the science section of The Times. (My first essay required 3 or 4 complete rewrites! I remember Cornelia advising me to stop being "writerly" and just tell the story.) After a couple of years I moved on to 3000-word pieces for the Sunday Times Magazine.

Read the entire interview.

The Page 69 Test: Intern: A Doctor's Initiation.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aimee Bender

Aimee Bender is the author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, An Invisible Sign of My Own, and Willful Creatures. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper's, Tin House, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, and elsewhere, and she has received two Pushcart prizes. She also teaches creative writing at USC.

Dave Weich interviewed her in 2005 for Powells.com. One exchange from their dialogue:

Dave: How has living in Los Angeles shaped your writing? You're not working in any kind of local tradition such as noir. And you're not writing stories or novels that would be readily adaptable as screenplays. You're also not writing stories set on Venice Beach; it's not that either. But I feel like there is a sensibility, something native to southern California?

Bender: It's hard to tell what part of the place is in me because I'm from there, but my current thought is this: People think L.A. is a very social city because of the wheeling and dealing, people making movies; everyone's so friendly — nuts but still smiley. They're not grim, toughened New Yorkers. And I think part of the reason that's true is because it can be very introverted in L.A.; you spend so much time in your car, often by yourself, that there's a lot of down-time. There's a lot of daydreaming space in L.A., and in that way I think that does help my work.

People on the subway in New York, you know how they don't look at each other? I think it's because they need a break from people — and they don't have a car. So you need to create your own little bubble. In L.A., you can be friendly all the time because you keep going back to your protective bubble. It takes a half-hour to get anywhere. How many half-hours in a day do I have? I have plenty of them, going from place to place. It's not like I'm doing my writing in that time, but it gives me that space-out time. It's protected.

Read the full interview.

The Page 99 Test: Willful Creatures.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Marinick

Richard Marinick is the author of Boyos and In for a Pound. Cameron Hughes interviewed him for January Magazine.

Here's part of Hughes's introduction and their first exchange:

It is my fear that Richard Marinick’s novels will be overshadowed by his past. You see, he was a prolific thief of armored cars. To put it in crime-fiction terms, he was the Parker of his thievery gang, the planner. But he was caught before anyone was killed by his gang and served 10 years in the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Norfolk. Before getting into the robbery game, Marinick was a state trooper in Massachusetts. Now, at 56 years old, he proves that you can always turn your life around.
* * *

Cameron Hughes: What was an average day in prison like?

Richard Marinick: In the morning I’d usually rise around 6. Begin my day with morning prayers that I’d remain safe, avoid conflict and be able to see trouble coming, whether it be from inmates or the guards (who we referred to as “screws”). I’d then hit a small mat on the floor and crank out anywhere from 2,000 to 2,500 crunches. That would take almost a half hour. At 7 [the guards] would make a “standing” count (head count), call chow shortly after. The count would “clear,” meaning we had “movement” outside of the blocks and we could go to the yard, gym, whatever, around seven-fifty. I’d hit the yard and run five miles. Afterwards, around 8:30, I’d report to work at the gym, sweep, mop, whatever, then work out for another two hours: weights, pull-ups, dips, heavy bag, speed bag, end with sit-ups. When I attended the Boston University prison education program, if I had a class in the morning, I’d cut the workout short, return to the gym in the afternoon. Other free time was spent -- average four to five hours daily -- working on homework assignments from the various classes I was enrolled in. Every day around four, weather permitting, I’d walk the yard with a friend, a mafia capo from Revere [Massachusetts] serving a murder and racketeering sentence. I was with this guy and his crew the entire time I was in Norfolk State Prison. Every day in the gym I trained with him/them, ate with them, walked the yard, et cetera. This guy was a good guy, I learned a lot from him. At night I never watched TV before 8 o’clock, ever. I’d watch until 10, unless something special was on; otherwise, lights out.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue