Henriette Lazaridis Power

Henriette Lazaridis Power is a first-generation Greek-American who has degrees in English literature from Middlebury College; Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar; and the University of Pennsylvania. She taught at Harvard for ten years, serving as an academic dean for four of those. She is the founding editor of The Drum, a literary magazine publishing exclusively in audio form. A competitive rower, Power trains regularly on the Charles River in Boston.

Her new novel is The Clover House.

From Power's Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:

It took you eight years to write this novel. What was that process like? Was there anything you'd do differently in writing your next novel?

It actually took me both much less and much more time than eight years to write this novel. Let me explain that. When I first contemplated quitting teaching to take up my pre-academia dream of being a writer, I went to the stories I knew best: stories of my parents’ childhood and youth during the Second World War in Greece. I wrote a mediocre novel that had something to do with that (and that will remain in its desk drawer), but when I finally did quit teaching, I began working on another project that had no connection to that earlier narrative. Whenever I took a break from that manuscript, I would tinker with some story or other from World War II, one of which was published in the New England Review. At one point, I set the other book aside, thinking it was done, and I returned to the World War II story. I came up with the character of Calliope Notaris Brown, a 35-year-old Greek-American woman who is wrestling with the legacy of her mother’s life during the war--a legacy she can feel in her mother’s coldness and sorrow, but that she can’t quite understand. Once I had that, I wrote a good draft of the novel in a matter of months. I wrote much of it during the winter, with the curtains to my study closed so that I couldn’t see the passage of time. It was exhilarating, and I treasure my memory of that experience. I hope I’ll be able to capture that feeling again.

At the moment, I’ve returned to that older manuscript once more for a final revision. But for the book after that, which I’ve begun notes for, I want to be better prepared. With The Clover House, I had at least a chronological structure to the narrative, provided by the timeline of Carnival celebrations in Patras, Greece. In the past, I’ve...[read on]

Visit Henriette Lazaridis Power's website and blog.

Writers Read: Henriette Lazaridis Power.

The Page 69 Test: The Clover House.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Henriette Lazaridis Power & Finn.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lauren Roedy Vaughn

Lauren Roedy Vaughn is an award-winning educator who has spent twenty years teaching English to high school students with language-based learning disabilities. Vaughn lives with her husband in Los Angeles, where she is an avid yogini and Big Lebowski nut.

Her new, debut novel is OCD, The Dude, and Me. From Vaughn's Q & A with Briana at Pages Unbound:

How has teaching high school English influenced your approach to writing a young adult novel?

For better or for worse, I’ve never left school. Once I was finished being a student, I became a teacher, so the world of school is part of my external and internal life, and it inspires my writing life. When I was a student, I was one of those weird people that loved to write essays; I loved the challenge of it and the process of writing multiple drafts until it felt complete. No surprise I became an English teacher. For twenty years, I’ve taught students who struggle in school. I love this diverse student population. They are original, brave, and misunderstood. Their needs are often subtle but significant because their emotional lives are involved. Young people spend the bulk of their time in school, so when they have school issues, that can damage their entire sense of self. (Imagine something you aren’t good at. Now imagine your whole life centered around that daunting activity. Alas. You’d need large doses of tenacity and courage to keep going.) When students are dealing with learning disabilities, they do not wear their struggles on the outside—they are not obviously “disabled.” Lots and lots of students have learning issues, many not identified, and they benefit from individual attention to get the most out of school. I think every student could benefit from more individualized care while in school, but that is a long and different conversation. Many learning disabled students possess extraordinary creativity and other gifts that need nurturing. Throughout my career, I saw how the simple act of caring about students, paying attention to them, made a difference. I am interested in my students, in all their quirks and all their struggles; that interest shows up in my writing. Teaching English also taught me to be patient with the writing process, as it applied to my students and to me. Not everyone enjoys writing; many of my students became very anxious each time a paper was assigned. I learned to be very respectful of the difficult but beautiful act of writing. Anyone who writes (from a student to a novelist) is...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Lauren Roedy Vaughn's website.

Writers Read: Lauren Roedy Vaughn.

The Page 69 Test: OCD, The Dude, and Me.

My Book, The Movie: OCD, the Dude, and Me.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julie Sarkissian

Julie Sarkissian is a graduate of Princeton University, where she won the Francis Leon Paige Award for creative writing, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. Her new novel is Dear Lucy.

From her Q & A with Jaime Boler at Bookmagnet's Blog:

JB: Please describe Dear Lucy in ten words or less.

JS: Disabled girl, pregnant teenager and talking chicken vs. the world.

JB: What inspired you to write Dear Lucy? Which character’s voice came to you first? And in what way?

JS: The inspiration for Dear Lucy was Lucy’s voice, narrating her gathering of the eggs. Her voice was so strong I just felt compelled to follow it, wherever it lead me. Her voice was the initial inspiration and the guiding force for the whole project.

JB: Lucy is truly an unforgettable and beautifully quirky character. How did her creation come about?

JS: Thank you so much! She presented herself to me as....[read on]

Visit Julie Sarkissian's website.

The Page 69 Test: Dear Lucy.

Writers Read: Julie Sarkissian.

--Marshal Zeringue

Virginia Morell

Virginia Morell's latest book is Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures.

From her Q & A with Amy Sommer for Westside Today:

WT: The description of your book says that “dolphins that rumble like rival street gangs”. Really? How? Also, is there a Michael Buffer-esque creature who serves as the ringmaster?

VM: In the wild, male bottle-nose dolphins form all-male partnerships and alliances—kind of like boys’ clubs or all-male street gangs. The simplest dolphin alliance is made up of two or three buddies. They work together to make friends with other male alliances. Why do male dolphins need buddies and alliances? It’s not to go fishing; dolphins typically hunt by themselves. They need a pal in order to capture female dolphins. Male and female bottle-nose dolphins are about the same size, and a single male can’t control a female by himself. So he gets a partner, and when they find a fertile female, they use their bodies to fence her in, and make warning calls and clicks to her, telling her to stay put. Of course, other males want her, too. They may attack a partnership that looks weak. That’s why the males also need allies. They can call in the troops if they’re under attack. In western Australia, the dolphin researcher I visited told me he’d seen more than twenty male dolphins battling over a single female (poor thing). And, no, there’s no referee. They fight until one group gives up and swims away, leaving the other with the prized lady.

WT: Why is the knowledge that rats like to be tickled of value to humanity?

VM: Knowing that rats laugh and like to be tickled tells us that having fun and expressing joy are very ancient biological traits—they didn’t appear just with us. Playing is at the heart of growing up, whether you’re a reptile, fish, bird, or mammal. Researchers who study how animals play think that it...[read on]

Learn more about Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Virginia Morell and Buckaroo.

--Marshal Zeringue

George Saunders

George Saunders's fourth collection of stories is Tenth of December.

From his Q & A with Killian Fox for the Guardian:

I was intrigued to learn that you were once a fan of Ayn Rand. For a writer so alert to how capitalism can grind people down, that's unexpected.

It's kind of a sweet story. I was in high school in Chicago, not really doing any work. Neither of my parents had been to college so to me it wasn't a big thing. Then two teachers started taking an interest in me and giving me books, and one was Atlas Shrugged. I hadn't read a novel since third grade, and if you're a crummy reader sometimes bad art can do magical things. She appeals to a certain kind of adolescent male, I think, and she definitely got me.

So I went to college and read all the rest of the books and she was sort of my patron saint. Then you get an uncomfortable moment where you realise there's this little bag you're holding that's filling up with phenomena that don't really fit the model. And that bag got heavier and heavier. My family ran into some financial problems. And I thought, she would not understand what we're going through. She'd equate it with some kind of moral weakness on our part. And then after college I went to Asia and saw some things there that made the bag really heavy, and at some point I just said, "I don't get her any more, I'll set her down." Only years later I was like, "Oh my God, she's very dangerous." But I like that. I like the idea that someone can change. You could be a rabid right-winger one moment and then…

… you're forced to completely reassess your views. And I imagine you'd learn a lot in the process.

Exactly, because you've embraced the opposite view totally non-ironically so you can understand it. Even now, I look at...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Darden Asbury Pyron

Darden Asbury Pyron is a history professor at Florida International University in Miami and author of a 2000 biography titled Liberace: An American Boy.

Spurred by the release of Behind the Candelabra, a new film about Liberace by director Steven Sodenbergh, Randy Dotinga of the Christian Science Monitor interviewed the biographer. Part of the Q & A:

Q: I'm sure some people think of Liberace as a joke today. Why do you take him seriously as a performer?

A: All of his contemporaries did. Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, all of these guys admired him enormously.

He is the absolute consummate performer, the definite article. He's extremely intelligent, and besides being intelligence, he has a sixth sense about what appeals to people, how far to push things.

He calculated that if people couldn't get things, he'd get them and he'd fulfill them, give them this sense of being in a different world, of getting a brief chance at being rich.

When I was working on the book, I was at my local bank in Miami and talked to a woman about what I was working on. Liberace had been dead for years, but she looked at me with this faraway look and said, "Oh, I always wanted to have a candelabra."

Q: What did he think about his style of performance?

A: He himself talks about how people see art, not just in his performance but art in general, as a way of transcending their own limitations. Art is about introducing you to another kind of world.

Nothing was realistic about him, nothing. He didn't believe in realism or naturalism. His sense about performance was something entirely different. I've never talked to anybody who saw him perform – straight, gay, men, women – who didn't come away just delighted.

Q: Wasn't he corny, though?

A: Someone said that he does the same act all the time and tells the same jokes. When was he going to do new material? His response:...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

George Packer

George Packer's new book is The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.

From his Q & A at the publisher's website:

Alex Star: You’ve titled your book The Unwinding. What do you mean by that?

George Packer: It’s a word that a character in the book, Dean Price, once used. He was talking about the way that the economy in his part of the country — rural North Carolina, where tobacco and textiles used to be king — might revert to pre-industrial characteristics, with lots of small, local producers of food and energy taking the place of Bojangles’ restaurants and long-haul trucking.

As soon as he said it, the word resonated with me. But what I imagined wasn’t Dean’s future. I saw the present — a country where so many once-solid things were collapsing. Banks, governments, news organizations, small towns, main streets, shops, factories. You see it visibly all over the country, especially when you leave the prosperous coasts. And you find it across America in the unraveling of the fabric that connects people to one another. In short, “the unwinding” refers to the end of a deal Americans used to have with one another — a social contract.

Alex Star: Of course, there are many possible ways to write the end of that deal. Why did you choose to cover the dismantling of the social contract as you did – via biographies of figures known and unknown?

George Packer: I wanted to write a historical narrative about this unwinding — but not big history, conventional history, going from one major event and issue to the next. Instead, I wanted to convey what it has been like to be an American and live in this country during the years of my adulthood, the years since the late 1970s. I wanted to get at it from the inside out. And since the most powerful stories are often found....[read on]

Writers Read: George Packer (July 2007).

--Marshal Zeringue

Dror Mishani

D. A. Mishani is an Israeli crime writer, editor and literary scholar, specializing in the history of detective fiction.

The Missing File is his first novel and the first in a series featuring the police inspector Avraham Avraham.

From his Q & A with Ayelett Shani in Haaretz:

Why do you think crime novels don’t do so well here [in Israel]?

Mishani: What I know for certain is that attempts to write or translate detective novels always ran into powerful resistance here.

Because they are considered an inferior genre?

Because Hebrew literature was founded as part of the national project, and was always committed to themes of the national present, the national past, the national identity and the future. A detective does not deeply occupy himself with questions of national identity. That is why Hebrew literature has always rejected this genre.

There was a moment in the 1930s [in prestate Israel] when an attempt was made to start translating Sherlock Holmes stories, and a few original detective novels were also written. The project generated fierce opposition on the part of critics and members of the literary establishment. They branded it a disaster. The few who backed the project did so on national grounds, as a way to teach the young generation Hebrew. Youngsters will find it difficult to learn Hebrew from [Uri Nissan] Gnessin or [Yosef Haim] Brenner, because they are hard to read, so they will learn Hebrew from detective novels. Sherlock Holmes was translated into Hebrew as children’s and juvenile literature. That is unparalleled anywhere in the world.

Those books are violent, blood-drenched. I have them at home, in the Marganit edition.

Arthur Conan Doyle was absolutely not a children’s writer. That is unbelievable. And there are other reasons, of course. In Israeli culture it is very difficult to imagine the policeman as a hero. The soldier is...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at D. A. Mishani's website and Facebook page.

My Book, The Movie: The Missing File.

The Page 69 Test: The Missing File.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sara Wheeler

Sara Wheeler is the author of six books of biography and travel, including Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey Through Chile, Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, and The Magnetic North.

From her Q & A at the Independent:

Choose a favourite author and say why you admire her/him

Willa Cather. She makes the black earth of a vanished Nebraska live again and the very best of her novels slip the shackles of their period and enter the immortal zone.

* * *

Who is your hero/ heroine from outside literature?

I think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer a lot. More dignity than I could muster in a thousand lifetimes, and his inspirational ideas live on.

Read the complete Q & A.

Terra Incognita by Sara Wheeler is one of Sarah Anderson's top ten books about wilderness.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erika Robuck

Erika Robuck is the author of the novels Hemingway’s Girl and the newly released Call Me Zelda.

From Robuck's Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:

Why Zelda? And why now? What do you think she has to say to modern readers?

Hemingway actually led me to Zelda. While I researched HEMINGWAY’S GIRL, I read over and over again how much Hemingway disliked Zelda. Knowing that Hemingway didn’t always have the healthiest views of women, I wanted to learn more about her on my own. I found her life and struggles fascinating and relevant today, particularly to women looking for balance in their business, creative, and domestic lives. I’m also sympathetic to Zelda’s difficulties, and want to show the particular pain of mental illness, demonstrate how it affects families, and explore opportunities for healing.

What was the research like? Did anything surprise you?

So much in the research surprised me. I was shocked to learn that F. Scott Fitzgerald hid Zelda’s diaries because he wanted their life to be “his material,” and that he used some of her writings (even personal letters) in his fiction. I was shocked how devoted Scott and Zelda were to each other in spite of seemingly insurmountable odds. I was surprised what an accomplished artist Zelda was, and how many notable triumphs she had in her life after Scott’s death.

How do you want readers to see Zelda?

I want readers to...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Erika Robuck's website and blog.

My Book, the Movie: Hemingway’s Girl.

Writers Read: Erika Robuck.

--Marshal Zeringue