Michele Zackheim

Michele Zackheim is the author of four books. Born in Reno, Nevada she grew up in Compton, California. For many years she worked in the visual arts as a fresco muralist, an installation artist, print-maker, and a painter. Her work has been widely exhibited and is included in the permanent collections of The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; The Albuquerque Museum; The Grey Art Gallery of New York University; The New York Public Library; The Hebrew Union College Skirball Museum, and The Carlsbad Museum of Art. She has been the recipient of two NEA awards, and teaches Creative Writing from a Visual Perspective at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Of her transition from visual artist to author she writes: “Over time, random words began to appear on my canvases…then poems…then elaborate fragments of narratives. I began to think more about writing and less about the visual world. Finally, I simply wrote myself off the canvas and onto the lavender quadrille pages of a bright orange notebook. This first book, Violette’s Embrace, was published by Riverhead Books.” That book is a fictional biography of the French writer Violette Leduc. Her second book, the acclaimed Einstein’s Daughter: The Search for Lieserl (Penguin Putnam, 1999), is a non-fiction account of the mystery of the lost illegitimate daughter of Mileva and Albert Einstein. Broken Colors (Europa Editions, 2007) is the story of an artist, whose life takes her to a place where life and art intersect. Her fourth novel, Last Train to Paris, was published in January 2014.

From Zackheim's Q & A with Valerie Hemingway at The Paris Review:

All of your books share a certain preoccupation with World War II. Why?

My family lived in Compton, California, an area that was declared vulnerable to an enemy attack. I was only four years old when World War II ended, but I remember small details—a brass standing lamp with a milk-glass base that was lit at night while my parents listened to the menacing news on the radio. The sound of night trains, which ran on tracks a block away. And of course—and this is hard to admit—my only sibling was born in 1944. Because I was the eldest, and because before her birth I had already experienced grim hardships, an intense sibling rivalry was born. I have to assume that she became part of my unconscious interest in war. These memories, along with the emerging news from concentration camps after the war, and my parents’ outraged and mournful whisperings in Yiddish, created an unconscious anxiety that I’ve been making work about all my adult life.

You wove the story of your cousin’s murder through your novel. Was the expansion and departure from the initial incident a natural progression for you?

I often start out writing nonfiction. But there’s a problem. It’s boring for me not to embellish—actually, it’s no fun. I did try, however, for a short time, with this book.

When I discovered that a distant relative of mine had been murdered in Paris in 1937, I was intrigued. I had discovered this story in a New Yorker essay by Janet Flanner. And then, to my surprise, I discovered that Colette and George Sand’s daughter, Aurora, was part of the story, too.

The only problem was that...[read on]

Visit Michele Zackheim's website.

My Book, The Movie: Last Train to Paris.

Writers Read: Michele Zackheim.

The Page 69 Test: Last Train to Paris.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sara Benincasa

Sara Benincasa is an award-winning comedian and author of the books Great, a teen adaptation of The Great Gatsby, and Agorafabulous!: Dispatches From My Bedroom, a book based on her critically acclaimed solo show about panic attacks and agoraphobia.

From the author's Q & A with Emily Winter for The Barnes & Noble Book Blog:

EW: And why did you choose to modernize The Great Gatsby?

SB: Well, feminist retellings of ancient myths and fairy tales are pretty cool. I wanted to do something a little different. I thought, what would happen if I took a male-centered, twentieth-century novel written by one of the most notorious literary celebrities of his generation and rebooted it with girls as the main characters?

I thought the bones of the story were strong enough to support a retelling in any era, really. Gatsby’s love for Daisy—or maybe it’s just an obsessive desire for what she represents—well, that’s something that transcends the boundaries of time and place. It reminded me of the way girls sometimes obsess over one another in middle school and high school. They see things they want to embody and fall into a kind of love with one another that has very little to do with romance. Of course, some girls genuinely fall in love with each other, and that’s wonderful. But when it came to Great, I wanted to tell a story that was more about obsession and desire than about true love.

EW: Was it super daunting to revisit/rewrite an American classic? Was it restrictive or freeing to have a sort of template to work from?

SB: I think my inexperience as a novelist made me bold. It didn’t occur to me until I had completed the book that...[read on]

Visit Sara Benincasa's website, blog, and Facebook page.

My Book, The Movie: Agorafabulous!.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Cornwell

Sarah Cornwell grew up in Narberth, Pennsylvania. Her fiction has appeared in the 2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Missouri Review, Mid-American Review, Gulf Coast, and Hunger Mountain, among others, and her screenwriting has been honored with a Humanitas Prize. A former James Michener Fellow at UT-Austin, Cornwell has worked as an investigator of police misconduct, an MCAT tutor, a psychological research interviewer, and a toy seller.

Her debut novel is What I Had Before I Had You.

From Cornwell's Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:

Where did the for this novel spark?

My mother had several miscarriages before I was born. As a child, I wondered if those miscarriages were my own failed attempts to enter the world, or if they were brothers and sisters I would never know, each with a unique soul. I started writing about Myla and Olivia with those ghost siblings in mind, and it was Olivia’s childhood—the nursery, the beach, the domineering mother, the patterns of domestic life in the Reed household—from which the rest of the story sprang.

To me, there’s nothing more haunting than a missing child. It’s every parent’s nightmare. Did you have moments writing it when you just had to stop?

Though it is a nightmarish, worst-case scenario, no—at risk of giving away too much of the ending of the book, when I invented the present day plot thread in which Olivia searches for Daniel at the beach, I had a pretty good idea of where I was headed. That whole present day frame narrative presented itself in 2011, toward the end of the writing process. I certainly shared Olivia’s terror, but also her...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Sarah Cornwell's website.

The Page 69 Test: What I Had Before I Had You.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Matthiessen

Peter Matthiessen's 2014 novel In Paradise is set in the mid-90s, at a spiritual retreat at Auschwitz.

From the author's Q & A with the Amazon books editors at Omnivoracious:

Chris Schluep: When I first started reading the galley, I thought, “I didn’t know Peter Matthiessen was Jewish.” But you’re not. How aware of this were you while writing the novel?

Peter Matthiessen: I was aware that I wasn’t Jewish, of course, and I was only somewhat hindered by doubt on that score. It was more that I wasn’t qualified in other ways. I wasn’t a veteran of the camps, and perhaps more important, I hadn’t lost family in them; some people don’t think you’re entitled to write about the camps unless you’ve had first-hand experience of them. And of course I was humbled by the many powerful accounts of life in the camps: who needed mine? If I couldn’t bring something fresh to it, why do it at all? Nonetheless, there was a strange experience I wanted to write about. In the mid-1990s an international group of more than a hundred went to Auschwitz. We chose to go in the winter, because that was the toughest time for the prisoners, and we stayed in the former SS barracks and meditated on the selection platforms in all weathers. It was a way of honoring or “witnessing” for the more than a million who had died there. In addition to the violent impression the place itself made on us, so grim and relentless—the towers and gates, all that barbed wire, the few decrepit barracks still standing--most of us experienced a peculiar event in the course of our stay there, a manifestation of … something. I couldn’t purge myself of the wish to write about it. I’d kept a journal of my time there, and later I sketched out a factual account, but I found no way to do justice to the experience with the bare facts, which were nebulous. Under those circumstances, I felt I could ...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Johanna Lane

Johanna Lane was brought up in Ireland, studied English Literature at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and Creative Writing at Columbia's MFA program. Her forthcoming debut novel is Black Lake.

From Lane's Q & A with Anne Goodwin:

One of the themes of Black Lake is attachment to place, manifest in both the narrative and in your evocative description of the house and surrounding countryside. What drew you to this theme and the landscape of rural Donegal in particular?

When I was a baby, my parents bought a cottage in Donegal, so I spent all my summers there as a child. To me, it’s the most beautiful place on earth; the sky, the mountains, the sea, even the colours of the grasses in winter. The landscape is always changing, often quite dramatically.

Life at Dulough could hardly be more different to Celtic-Tiger era Dublin. Do you feel particularly attuned to the conflict between tradition and modernity?

I see tradition as quite a negative force when it comes to Ireland. In Black Lake, John embodies tradition, and it’s his modus operandi that causes such terrible problems for his family. On the other hand, his wife Marianne embodies modernity; she’s the necessary counter to his traditionalism. On a broader scale, Ireland’s great traditions are well known and much lauded, but I see it as a country whose traditionalism is in danger of choking it, especially when it comes to social and religious questions.

What made you decide to relate the story from the point of view of each member of the family? Was it tricky to write from four different perspectives?

Black Lake was the first novel I tried to write, and honestly, I think it just seemed too daunting to sustain a whole book from one character’s perspective. That said, I...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Miriam Pawel

Miriam Pawel is the author of The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography.

From her Q & A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:

Q: You've already written about the United Farm Workers movement. What made you decide to focus on Chavez specifically?

A: He's never been portrayed as the complex, multifaceted leader that he was. Nor in a way that takes into account his failures as well as his successes.

Q: Did he grow up in a farm worker family?

A: He grows up on a farm that his family owns. It's not a terrible existence, but they lose their house and their land in the Depression.

In 1939, when he's 12 years old, his family moves to California. They arrive about a month after the publication of "The Grapes of Wrath."

In many ways, the California that he first encounters is that of the Joad family. He begins to work full-time after he graduates from eighth grade. He's a farm worker in the fields with the exception of when he's in the Navy.

Q: Workers gained many protections in the first decades of the last century. Why were farm workers left behind?

A: Farm workers were not covered by the labor, health, and safety laws that most of the workers took for granted.

The one constant was that there was almost always a surplus of workers. Wages were very low. There were no bathrooms in the field – a particular problem for women. There was no clean water to drink, no overtime provisions, no protection from pesticides.

Farm worker housing, and this is still a real issue, was pretty dreadful. And in addition to all the physical deprivations and difficulties, there was...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Goetz

Thomas Goetz's new book is The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis.

From his Q & A with Tessa Miller at The Daily Beast:

You write something in the beginning of the book: ‘If there’s one caution to this tale, it’s this: Avoid the temptation to read the story, and the science within it, as the inevitable march of progress, a predetermined direction for human history. Especially where scientific investigations are concerned, it’s a fallacy to treat history as an unstoppable trajectory away from ignorance and toward insight.’ Can you explain that more?

Well, it’s obvious in some regard: that history isn’t predetermined. But I thought it was worth underscoring because when it comes to science, we assume all previous discoveries were preordained. But those discoveries don’t just happen—they are the very real product of men and women and struggle and failure and all sorts of human foibles. The stories of discovery are so rote, though, that we forget that they took incredibly hard work.

Part of this story, in particular, is the way that credit and acknowledgement and fame were so essential to the story—you have people like the French scientist [Jean Antoine] Villemin who kind of discovered the TB bacteria, but nobody believed him, so he doesn’t get credit. And then you have Koch, who was so diligent that nobody could reasonably doubt him.

Really, the story is an example of how it is harder and harder to convince people to care about discovery. It starts with...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Ronlyn Domingue

Ronlyn Domingue is the author of The Mercy of Thin Air, The Mapmaker's War and the soon-to-be-released The Chronicle of Secret Riven.

From the author's Q & A with The Qwillery:

TQ: Tell us something about The Chronicle of Secret Riven that is not in the book description.

Ronlyn: Tidbit 1: You don’t have to read The Mapmaker’s War first to follow what’s happening. You can start with the second book.

Tidbit 2: The seed of this story came from a fairy tale I wrote in college about a girl who lived in a kingdom where women were forbidden to read.

Tidbit 3: I wrote this book by hand. With pencils.

TQ: Give us one of your favorite lines from The Chronicle of Secret Riven.

Ronlyn: “To see is a trick of the mind, but to believe is a trick of the heart.”

TQ: What would you say are the themes of The Chronicle of Secret Riven?

Ronlyn: The risk of authenticity—how does a person manage to be who she is when most people, even within her own family, don’t accept or understand her? Power over is another one—the power parents have over their children, that authority has over subordinates—both in overt and covert ways. Also...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Ronlyn Domingue's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

The Page 69 Test: The Mapmaker's War.

Writers Read: Ronlyn Domingue.

My Book, The Movie: The Mapmaker's War.

--Marshal Zeringue

Akhil Sharma

Akhil Sharma’s new novel is Family Life.

From the author's Q & A with Mohsin Hamid for Guernica:

Guernica: Family Life is the story of an Indian family that immigrates to America in the late 1970s as part of the first large wave of Indian immigration to the US. They come for the opportunities that the country offers for the family’s two children. At first everything they hope for occurs: the older of the two sons gets into the Bronx High School of Science. Soon, though, after they have been in the country for two years, the family suffers a tragedy: the older son has an accident in a swimming pool. He dives into the pool, strikes his head on the bottom of the pool, is knocked unconscious, and remains underwater for three minutes. When he is pulled out, he is severely brain damaged.

I know that this story is very similar to your life. Could you give me a sense of how much of the novel is autobiography?

Akhil Sharma: This is one of those questions that novelists hate to answer.

Guernica: I know.

Akhil Sharma: Novels should be judged rigorously. Either a book works or it doesn’t. The fact that something is true in the real world should not lend authority to it in fiction.

Guernica: I know. I ask because I have a second question based on your answer.

Akhil Sharma: Almost everything in the novel is true. In the novel, though...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Holly Peterson

Holly Peterson's new novel is The Idea of Him.

From her Q & A with Hannah Seligson for The Daily Beast:

Is The Idea of Him a post-recession book?

Yes, I wanted to write about the post-crash New York and how the recession changed how people behave. I did not want to write, as I had in my last book, about the Park Avenue, NetJets crowd. I wanted to write about a totally different sector of New York, which is far more interesting in my mind: the meritocracy crowd. They are a distinct crowd that made it on their own. You can’t be a true part of the meritocracy crowd in Manhattan if you inherited Daddy’s company and drove it into the ground, even if you own a sports team.

Wade Crawford, a big player in your new book, is the fictional face of the meritocracy crowd because he pulled himself up by his bootstraps. But who is the real-life face of meritocracy crowd in this city?

These are people like Harvey Weinstein, Bruce Wasserstein, Diane von Furstenberg, and Barry Diller. Part of the meritocracy crowd is their inability to stop and never be satisfied with any level of success. It’s also the quest for power. I go to the Grill Room with my dad a lot for lunch and there are men there well into their 80s who are still doing huge deals. That phenomenon of never being satisfied with any level of success or money—it’s an intense, maniacal drive. I think they are fascinating. My father is 87 and he writes speeches in the dentist chair. The dentist can’t get to his teeth.

What did your father, who was secretary of Commerce under Nixon, think of the book?

He...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue