Catherine O'Flynn

Catherine O'Flynn is the author of The News Where You Are.

From her Q & A with the Independent:

What are you currently reading?

Fordlandia by Greg Grandin about Henry Ford's attempt to create mythical small-town America in the heart of the Amazon jungle. I think Werner Herzog could have told him how that would end.

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

David Foster Wallace. My husband took Infinite Jest with us when we moved to Spain. It looked insanely intimidating and I avoided it until I'd exhausted every other book I could lay my hands on. I finally picked it up and the next few weeks passed in a blur. He demanded so much from himself as a writer.

Describe the room where you usually write

Books, vinyl records, old magazines, too many chairs, all of which are broken, a card index that will never be used, some posters in Spanish for a Smiths karaoke night.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Mitchell

David Mitchell's new novel is The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

From his Q & A with Mark Martin at the Barnes & Noble Review:

Mark Martin: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is set primarily on the tiny man-made island of Dejima in the bay of Nagasaki in the era of the Napoleonic Wars. What drew you to this particular time and place?

David Mitchell: It was a keyhole in the door in the wall that encircled Japan for 250 years. It was the only meeting point for Japan and Europe. And it reversed the usual colonial situation where the Europeans arrive and make the rules. The ten to fifteen Europeans who lived there were effectively prisoners or hostages. They weren't allowed to leave. The only people they could meet were merchants and translators and very, very expensive prostitutes. If I couldn't find a halfway decent novel swimming around in all of that, then I wouldn't be much of a writer.

MM: You do have an interest in isolated societies. Whether it's a Japanese doomsday cult or a seniors' home run like Colditz, examples appear throughout your books, and Dejima adds one more to the list. Could you explain what fascinates you about these claustrophobic little worlds?

DM: I think, dramatically, enclosure is quite good news. If there's no exit door, then when the going gets tough, people can't conveniently leave. If characters are stuck in a place, whatever human neuroses they are host to can fructify. Those neuroses are free to bear fruit and follow their arcs to a conclusion.

MM: Were there any particular literary models or inspirations you had in mind when writing this book?

DM: Models...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Adrienne McDonnell

From a Q & A with Adrienne McDonnell about her new novel, The Doctor and the Diva:

The Doctor and the Diva is based on actual events in your family. Did the connection to actual relatives make the story easier or more difficult to write? Which characters came easier for you, the ones based on actual people or the ones who were purely fictional?

The ancestors who gave rise to my characters lived a century ago. By the time I married into my first husband's family, they'd taken on a kind of legendary air. "Erika" and "Peter" had lived in such bold and colorful ways that people in the family—especially the older women—liked to talk and speculate about them.

In my early twenties, as I walked past Erika's childhood home in Boston's Back Bay on my way to work, I'd pause and stare up at the windows and wonder about her. Before I ever had a child, I felt kinship to her in a primal way, knowing that my descendants would be her descendants. The family connection was deeply inspirational, and having hundreds of pages of family letters was a blessing and a gift.

But despite all the research I'd done, no record existed about certain key moments in Erika's life. For example, there's the scene in which Erika tells her little boy that she'll be leaving him behind and moving to Italy to develop her singing career. From his childhood letters, it's obvious that he was left with the impression that she'd eventually return. The letters show that as the months went by, he felt forlorn and frustrated by his father's evasive answers about when "Mama" would be coming back. But the private conversation between the departing mother and her little boy? That was something I had to "overhear" in my imagination.

I never felt a big difference between the "real" versus the "invented" characters, or felt that creating one was more difficult or easier than the other, because even the "actual" characters also had to be imagined to an extent. Writing this novel was a process of reaching beyond what was known, into the realm of what could have occurred.

Let me also say that there's something liberating in writing a novel about people who lived a century ago. By the time I began the novel, they'd long been dead. So that allowed me to write with a certain abandon and emotional honesty. I didn't have to worry about the possibility of offending them, or their own children and even grandchildren.

Read the complete Q & A.

Visit Adrienne McDonnell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Heather Graham

Heather Graham's new novel is Ghost Shadow.

From her Q & A with Andrew Peterson at ITW:

Is there something in your life--a hobby or pastime--that you feel has influenced your writing?

Basically, I think that the fact that life is ever-changing has influenced my writing. Obviously, we are often able to use what we know when we write--and come up with brilliant characters and plots such as those created by Kathy Reichs, a number of our physician writers, attorney writers, police writers, and so on. Before I started writing, I had modeled, bartended, been a singing, tap-dancing rib sales girl, more restaurant and bar service, a few commercials, a few bits in movies, back-up singing, and dinner theater. None of these really help solve crime, or give a clue to crime, or allow for real knowledge for a crime-fighting protagonist.

Hmm. I have known many people who believe they are vampires, so maybe that helps! I have used a lot of actresses, dancers, singers, musicians--and I have to throw a bartender in here and there. In Ghost Shadow, the heroine is a karaoke hostess, but she's caught up in the act and forced to learn quickly about defense. But, as I said--life itself. I've used little-league, dancing, scuba-diving, comedy clubs, and all kinds of places, events, and people I've gotten into myself, or through my children. My husband is Italian-American and goes to Carnival every year, so I've made use of Venice several times. Everything in life is always a new "what if," so when...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr's new book, his fourth, is Memory Wall. His other books are The Shell Collector, About Grace, and Four Seasons in Rome.

From his Q & A with Writers on Process:

Talk about your invention process. What do you do to come up with ideas? What about your revision process?

Practically, writing doesn’t really break out for me in terms of invention, composition, and revision. I often sit down with only the ghost of an idea, a few things I’m interested in, and from that point I am always revising, eternally revising. I suppose once I’ve finished something there must be a first draft in there, engraved invisibly beneath all the revisions, but really the first draft is just a single sentence I’ve written down and immediately begun altering. Before adding a second sentence, I’m already revising the first one.

Do you have a regular routine? As a professional writer, do you set goals each day for how much you are going to write?

Yep: when I’m working on fiction, I try to write in the mornings, when my brain is fairly clean and untrammeled by all the email and news of the day. Get up with the kids, set them up with a waffle or something, then tag out with my wife and start working. My brain is too tired in the evenings.

And I only drink caffeine when I’m working; I try to save its power, because it is an incredibly useful drug. I try to get into some caffeine, read through everything I’ve written so far on a project, if that’s possible, and then start trying to make it fuller, better, richer, etc...

Are there any quirky parts of your writing process that help you write?

I wear a pair of chainsaw ear protection muffs when I write. Is...[read on]

Visit the author's website.

The Page 69 Test: Anthony Doerr's Four Seasons in Rome.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sophie Littlefield

Sophie Littlefield grew up in rural Missouri. Her first novel, A Bad Day for Sorry, was an Edgar Award Finalist and is shortlisted for an Anthony, Barry, and Macavity Award. It won an RT Book Award for Best First Mystery and has been named to lists of the year's best mystery debuts by the Chicago Sun-Times and South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Her new novel is A Bad Day for Pretty.

From a Q & A with the author about her YA novel Banished, due out in October:

What were you like in high school?

Awkward.

I was what is euphemistically called a "late bloomer." I felt ungainly and unattractive and clumsy. I was in the orchestra, did not play sports, excelled at things like math and spelling and found it nearly impossible to understand, much less navigate, the complex social hierarchy at school. I didn't date, and I started working at part-time jobs when I was fourteen so I didn't participate in any after-school activities.

I now understand that I had some serious attention issues, and it was very difficult for me to focus in class. I remember school as excruciating, alternating between deathly boredom and an overwhelming sense that I would never fit in. My parents went through a difficult divorce, which added to my sense of isolation.

One of the gifts of my adult friendships has been to find out that everyone struggled in high school. I frequently felt like I was the only person who hated the way I was, who wished for a fairy godmother who would change not only my circumstances but who I was at the very core. I thought that the cheerleaders and class presidents and football players were all confident and happy, but my adult friends who were in that group in high school tell me they had plenty of their own problems. Growing up is a momentous and difficult job for everyone.

Did you model the main character in BANISHED after yourself?

Sort of...

In some ways, Hailey is very much like I was at sixteen. She also feels socially isolated and is unable to form friendships with the kids at school, although in her case there are other forces at work related to her dark legacy and the powers she doesn't realize she has.

Hailey has a lot of responsibilities since her grandmother expects her to care for the four-year-old boy they foster in order to get money from the state. To some extent this is a reflection of the challenges I faced as a teenager as my parents divorced and dealt with the challenges of starting over. My siblings and I were expected to get ourselves where we needed to go, and to pitch in with household chores. We cooked meals, cleaned (not very well, as my dad can attest) and learned to stretch our allowance as far as possible.

Like me at that age, Hailey...[read on]

Learn more about the books and author at Sophie Littlefield's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: A Bad Day for Sorry.

Writers Read: Sophie Littlefield.

The Page 69 Test: A Bad Day for Pretty.

My Book, The Movie: A Bad Day for Pretty.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Connelly

From a Q & A with Michael Connelly about his forthcoming novel, The Reversal:

Question: The Reversal seems to feature Mickey Haller and Harry Bosch pretty equally. So is this a legal thriller or a detective story?

Michael Connelly: I would like to think it's both, but it is about a trial — actually a retrial — so I guess that probably tips it toward being a legal thriller. My goal was to show what goes on both inside and outside of a trial. So, inside the courtroom you have Mickey Haller primarily carrying the narrative and then Harry Bosch carries it forward outside. Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside.

Question: Just curious, is it more fun or more difficult to balance two of your signature characters in a single book?

Michael Connelly: It's a fun challenge. This book alternates chapters, so the big challenge was evenly distributing the plot so that they could alternately carry it forward without having any chapters that were static. I think each chapter advances the story significantly.

Q: Can you explain the title without giving away too much about the novel?

MC: The title is pretty straightforward but at the same time it has a few different meanings. The main plot surrounds the reversal of a murder conviction that puts a man named Jason Jessup back on trial in a 24-year-old murder. But...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter D. Ward

Peter D. Ward is a professor of biology and earth and space sciences at the University of Washington and the author of The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps.

From his Q & A with the Barnes & Noble Review:

Why is the rise in sea level really such a huge deal?

There are three big reasons. There are the economics, because sea level rise is going to cost us a whole lot of money. And then there's food, because sea level rise is going to wipe out an unbelievably high percentage of the agricultural areas that we're extremely dependent upon, deltas in particular -- they are, by definition, at sea level and they produce the majority of the rice on the planet.

And then the third thing is people. A 3-foot sea level rise will cause a large part of Bangladesh, for example, to either disappear or be unfarmable, so you're displacing millions of people physically. This becomes way worse when you couple it with the food part of the equation. The number of people on the planet is expected to be 9 billion by 2050 and steadying out at 9.5 or 10 billion by 2100, so you've got one-third more people and maybe 20 percent less food. You do the numbers.

What are the high and low estimates for sea rise by the end of the century?

The most extreme (that you can put real scientific confidence in) is 5 feet by 2100. The most conservative at this stage is slightly less than 1 meter, or about 2.8, 2.9 feet. The best, most levelheaded predictions and models comes from Stefan Ramsdorf, just outside of Berlin in Potsdam. He's now saying at least 3 feet by 2100, with 5 feet not out of the realm of possibility.

But we have these 2100 scenarios and all the [city planners] stop then. Nobody goes to 2150 or 2200 because the secret is that once you hit the 2100 value, it continues to accelerate. So if we have a 3-foot rise by 2100, we're not just going to have 6 feet by 2200, we're going to have...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Gayle Brandeis

Gayle Brandeis is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write, Dictionary Poems, the novels The Book of Dead Birds, which won Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change, Self Storage, and Delta Girls, and her first novel for young readers, My Life with the Lincolns.

From her Q & A at Fictionaut:

Q (Meg Pokrass): What stories or books or films do you feel closest to?

I often return to Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus for a good dose of bliss. American Primitive by the poet Mary Oliver, too. The compassion of Grapes of Wrath devastates me in the best possible way. Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver will forever be my favorite of her books, and one of my favorite books, period, for its exploration of sisters and community and justice. And I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for Harriet the Spy.

As for films, Wings of Desire offers such a gorgeous taste of the sublime, and Pee Wee’s Big Adventure offers such a glorious taste of the ridiculous. I could watch both of them again and again. All of these books and movies give me a sense of coming home.

Whose work (or works) have influenced you the most as a writer?

The poet Sharon Olds gave me permission to write in a more honest way, to not shy away from gritty physicality on the page. Diane Ackerman has reminded me to pay deep attention to the natural world and the senses in my work. Barbara Kingsolver showed me how to blend art and social responsibility. I also love and have been influenced by writers who weave together...[read on]

The Page 69 Test: Self Storage.

My Book, The Movie: Self Storage.

The Page 69 Test: Delta Girls.

--Marshal Zeringue

Beth Greenfield

Beth Greenfield received her M.A. in journalism from New York University and has since written about travel, entertainment, gay culture, and parenting for publications including the New York Times, Lonely Planet guidebooks, Out, Time Out New York Kids, and Time Out New York, where she is currently a staff editor. She lives in New York City and Provincetown with her partner and their daughter.

From a Q & A about newly published memoir, Ten Minutes from Home:

Jill Dearman: When did you first start writing about the accident?

Beth Greenfield: I actually started writing about it shortly after it occurred, when I was 12 years old. I got it in my head that I was going to write a book about it, and did so, longhand, on a packet of loose-leaf notebook paper. It was 200 handwritten pages and took me almost a year. The adolescent writing makes me cringe a bit now, but it came in handy, with all of the details that I would've probably forgotten, when I began writing about the accident as an adult, maybe 15 years ago. It would be the topic I'd return to again and again in the many writing workshops I've been enrolled in over the years. But I'd say I became serious about finally turning all of those dribs and drabs into a cohesive book maybe six or so years ago.

JD: Your career as a journalist has thrived over the years. You're an editor at Time Out New York and have written for The New York Times. How has your "day job" helped and/ or hindered you as a creative writer?

BG: It's hindered me time-wise; having deadlines for work that I was getting paid for would always make it easy to justify putting my creative writing on the back burner. So it was crucial for me to actually nab that book deal in order to get it finished! Being a journalist has...[read on]

The Page 99 Test: Ten Minutes from Home.

--Marshal Zeringue