Ronlyn Domingue

M.E. Wood interviewed Ronlyn Domingue, author of The Mercy of Thin Air.

The Q & A opens:

Moe: Looking back was there something in particular that helped you to decide to become a writer? Did you choose it or did the profession choose you? When did you 'know' you were a writer? Were you a good writer as a child? Teenager? Etc.

Ronlyn Domingue: My third grade teacher noticed I was a precocious reader and let me spend several hours each week reading and writing on my own. I started my first novel in that class, a mystery called Ghost Mountain. I knew at the age of eight I wanted to be a writer. It’s hard to judge one’s early work, but teachers and friends thought I had talent. Now, if I read something I wrote as a young person, I can see flickers of promise but most of it is just awful.

I hardly wrote fiction at all during my 20s. It wasn’t a practical thing to do. I knew the odds of getting published, much less what it would take to make a living as a fiction writer. During those years, I had what I call my “dead baby dreams.” In the dreams, I’d lose babies to abortion, stillbirth, or adoption. I felt very guilty about the fact I didn’t want these children. One morning, I woke up and realized those dead babies were my unwritten books. I broke the code and never had another dream like that.

From that point on, I became serious about my work. I took some fiction writing classes for fun, and then decided to get an MFA in creative writing. Although all of my past jobs involved writing in some way, I never called myself “a writer” until I got my first book deal.

Read the entire interview.

The Page 69 Test: The Mercy of Thin Air.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alison McGhee

Last February, Minneapolis Observer Quarterly interviewed Alison McGhee about her writing.

One question touched on her book Falling Boy, which has since been published:

What projects do you have planned for the future?

I’m currently re-writing Falling Boy, a novel that comes out next summer. That one began when the image of a teenage boy sitting in a wheelchair appeared to me. He looked at me with these flat dark eyes and said, “What the f---? You can’t write about me?” I didn’t want to write about him, but I had no choice. I’ve been working on that book for a year and a half now, and simultaneously revising three picture books.

Read the entire interview.

The Page 99 Test: Falling Boy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dan Gilgoff

Dan Gilgoff, author of The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America Are Winning the Culture War, was interviewed on "Fresh Air" last month.

One exchange from the interview:

NPR: A lot of people think that the Democratic victory in the House and the Senate in 2006 signalled that the Christian Right had lost power. Do you see it that way or do you see it differently?

DG: I would actually draw the exact opposite lesson. Everyone after the 2004 election talked about that election as being a "values election." A lot of it, for the Christian Right, was a response to the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts. And the birth of the amendment to the Constitution to ban gay marriages, a real issue in the evangelical movement. But if you look at the exit polls for 2006, that was also a values election. Only the values this time were about Republican corruption in Congress. And in talking to the pollsters for the Democratic National Committee, for instance, when they saw the numbers shift in the two years leading up to the 2006 midterm elections -- they were tracking values and evangelical voters very closely -- when they saw those numbers start to break for them, it was basically after revelations that the former House speaker, Tom DeLay, and accusations and charges against him and corruption -- and after the Mark Foley scandal which occurred just a month or two before the 2006 elections. So in a way, the 2006 midterms and the shift of evangelical and religious votes were a testament to the power of values in churchgoers in elections. It's also important to point out that John Kerry's religious outreach in 2004 was abysmal. Particularly when compared to the machine that Ralph Reed, the former executive director of the Christian Coalition, was able to build for President Bush in his reelection in 2004. But John Kerry's religious outreach direction in 2004 spent the next couple of years founding a consulting firm that would help Democratic candidates reach out to evangelical and faith voters. She was signed up by so many of the successful campaigns in 2006, by the successful Democrats, whether it be the Ohio success if the Democrat for governor or the senate, or for Casey in Pennsylvania. So I think the Democrats applied a lot of the lessons of 2004 and the failure of religious outreach that year to 2006. In the places where this new consulting firm -- called "Common Good Strategies" run by Kerry's former outreach director -- was active, those were the states and the races where the Democrats saw the sharpest uptick in evangelical votes and in the votes of religious Americans. I think it's no mistake that right now each of the three Democratic frontrunners for president have serious religious outreach operations up and running at this early stage.

This snippet from the interview is drawn from the transcript at "The Scribe."

Listen to the interview at NPR.

--Marshal Zeringue

Holly Goddard Jones

Nancy Zafris, fiction editor of The Kenyon Review, interviewed Holly Goddard Jones, whose story “Life Expectancy” appears in the Winter 2007 issue of The Kenyon Review.

One exchange:

NZ: Tell me a little bit about that [a collection of your stories from graduate school].

HJ: There are nine stories at this point, though I may need to cut one for length. I tend to write long, and many of my stories cover spans of years. I like seriousness and sweep and — to one of my professor’s constant aggravation — exposition. When I talked about my “real” writing life, I was referring largely to my discovery that short fiction could be generous and soulful, in the manner of Andre Dubus, and not just a brief glimpse at some moment or idea. I think the collection reflects that interest. I wrote “Good Girl,” the Southern Review story, at the beginning of my second year in graduate school. It was a leap forward for me. I learned something about the writer I wanted to be in the process of getting that story down, and I can look back at it two years after completing the draft and think, Yeah, that’s not bad. That’s still me.

Read "Life Expectancy" at The Kenyon Review.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kim Garcia

Angela Veronica Wong interviewed Kim Garcia, author of Madonna Magdalene, for Small Spiral Notebook.

The preface and their first exchange:

Kim Garcia’s first book of poetry, Madonna Magdalene, was called “a startling book of origins, a mature and passionate first book of poems” by Edward Hirsch. In Madonna Magdalene, Kim expands known Biblical and mythological narratives by using her personal experiences and gently but unequivocally questioning what is known. On a surprisingly kind November morning in Boston, Kim and I discussed poetics, politics, women and poetry, and of course, the process of writing Madonna Magdalene.

Angela Veronica Wong: Recently, I’ve been really interested in defining the “confessional” poetics. I’m not trying to label your poetry as “confessional,” but I do think that your poetry does explore, return to, and depend on the self. So I ‘m interested in how you see and understand “confessional poetry.”

Kim Garcia: It's hard to say where poetry is not confessional in a sense. If you're looking to the personal. Confession used to have a strongly religious meaning. You confessed your sins to another person. There was also the sense of confessing as witnessing or telling the truth. It was testimony. So the term changes with what people hang their meanings on. Most people are no longer talking to God like Milton or even to the capital “I” Imagination as the Romantics did.

The first poets who were called confessional—Lowell and that crowd–were hanging their meanings on psychotherapy—Freud and the talking cure. You're still “justifying God's ways to man,” or making some kind of narrative, but it's a different frame. Poets are not going to escape from the hard work of laying bare their particular moment with their particular meanings.

I don't think poetry should escape confessing. The term is meant to be a little snide, I think. A way of distancing yourself from vulnerability, or a way of putting that down.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert J. Sawyer

SCI FI Weekly interviewed Robert J. Sawyer about his new novel Rollback.

The interview opens:

One of the themes you frequently explore in your fiction is immortality. In Mindscan, a kind of immortality is conveyed via transferring the mind into a robot body, and in your latest, Rollback, immortality is achieved through medical means — a kind of cellular regeneration. Which of these possibilities do you think is more likely to be put into practice someday, and do you think either will be available within our lifetimes?

Sawyer: I say in Rollback that, by the time of the novel — 40 years from now — Vernor Vinge's technological singularity had still not come to pass. But I do think we will see enormous technological strides in the next 40 years, and they will far exceed those of the last 40, and that will include huge breakthroughs in both the areas you've mentioned. Absolutely, we'll make great progress in slowing down and conceivably rejuvenating our bodies. And I'm just as sure that we'll make a lot of progress in scanning human brains and being able to reproduce the fine structures of the brain—and therefore the mind that arises from that structure — at any level of resolution you care to name.

So, sure, both rollbacks and mindscans will be commercially available in our lifetimes (although only the former at Wal-Mart ...). Which of the two will be more popular depends on the prevailing psychology. Flesh and blood has a lot to be said for it, but it also means you can still go splat and die. Still, almost all people would immediately accept that a version of yourself that has been rejuvenated is still you; it's a bigger philosophical leap to recognize that a copy of you that exists when the original no longer does is also still you.

Read the entire interview.

Check out Sawyer's wish-list for the cast should Rollback be adapted for the big screen.

Visit Robert Sawyer's website and blog, and read an excerpt from Rollback.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Cañón

James Cañón, author of Tales from the Town of Widows, answered a few questions for Authortrek, including:

Which writers have influenced you the most?

Willa Cather, Machado de Assis, Gabriel García Márquez and Sherwood Anderson.

Where do you stand on the nature v. nurture debate? Were you born a writer, or were there factors in your environment that enabled you to become a writer?

I believe that within everyone lies a creative spirit that, when allowed, manifests itself in beautiful and fantastic ways. I don't come from a literary family - my brothers and I are the first ones to go to college - but I had an amazing childhood, surrounded by highly imaginative people. That sort of environment, together with the people that came into my life later on, played a major role in my becoming a writer.

Read the entire interview.

See the Page 69 Test: Tales from the Town of Widows.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cait Murphy

Cait Murphy, author of Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History, answered a few questions about her book for Smithsonian Magazine.

The first exchange from the Q & A:

How did you come to write Crazy '08?

I've been a journalist for more than 20 years and wanted to try something longer form. I began scouting for ideas, considering subjects as different as ice and a famous 1928 tennis match. My father suggested I look into the 1908 season. I am a serious baseball fan, and have always been interested in the early game. When I began looking into the season, I realized that this was an idea combination of baseball and American history.

Read the entire Q & A.

Visit Cait Murphy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Prescott

A couple of years ago Michael Prescott answered ten questions from Nickie Fleming.

One of the ten:

Who's your own favourite crime writer? By the way, do you like other genres as well?

Two of my favorites are Michael Connelly and Jeffrey Deaver. There are some talented new writers out there, too, like Danielle Girard. Besides suspense fiction, I read a lot of classics and nonfiction, as well as historical novels. One of the best historicals I've read is Steven Pressfield's "Gates of Fire", an extraordinary recreation of the Battle of Thermopylae. "The Pillars of the Earth", by Ken Follett, is another outstanding historical novel. I read both of those books virtually nonstop, barely pausing even to eat. That's the way I hope my own books grab my readers. I want to keep them on the edge of their seat!

Read the entire Q & A.

Visit Michael Prescott's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cathryn Jakobson Ramin

Helaine Olen interviewed Cathryn Jakobson Ramin about her new book Carved in Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife for Salon.

Here is the introduction to the interview and their first exchange:

Memory, as Oscar Wilde wrote, is the diary that we all carry about with us. Open one volume, and you recall a summer picnic from childhood. Open another and there's a grocery list from last week. But what happens when the journal pages get stuck together? Or, even worse, tear loose and vanish entirely?

Thanks to advances in medicine and ever-lengthening life expectancies, most of us will live to find out just how ephemeral memory can be, says Cathryn Jakobson Ramin, author of the new book "Carved in Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife." Beginning in our 40s or 50s, we may begin to misplace words -- not to mention our house keys -- with greater frequency. And for some, that forgetfulness will turn pathological, leading gradually down the path toward dementia: According to the Alzheimer's Association, adults who survive past the age of 85 currently have a 42 percent chance of suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

Ramin, now 50, embarked on an investigation of the causes and possible cures for middle-aged absent-mindedness after she began having her own brushes with forgetfulness. "My mental calendar, once easily summoned, grew elusive and developed blank spots," she recalls. "Life became billowy, amorphous, as if someone had removed the support poles from my tent."

Determined to beat back the fog, Ramin turned into a human guinea pig, experimenting with everything from memory-enhancing tests to cutting-edge pharmaceuticals and sleep research. She altered her diet, cut back on multitasking, reduced her stress levels and visited experts who study how memories are formed and retained. Her conclusion: We can't stop time, but we can hinder its effects by taking better care of both our bodies and minds.

Salon sat down with Ramin in San Francisco, where she talked about the nature of memory, the curative powers of ballroom dancing, and why so many of us are scared to even say the word "Alzheimer's."

When did you realize you were losing your memory?

I noticed I'd started to forget things that I should have been able to remember. Once I went to a movie with my husband and five minutes out of the movie theater, I realized I did not know the name of the movie or the name of the main character. It was just gone, a blank.

Suddenly there were sinkholes, as if the information had just been sucked down the drain. And I started to notice a tremendous amount of what I called "content-less conversation." I would exchange information, decide on a plan and then it would be as if nobody remembered what had been said. People were relating these stories over and over to me.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue