Andrea S. Boyles

Andrea S. Boyles is the author of Race, Place, and Suburban Policing.

From her Q & A at the University of California Press blog:

You begin the preface of Race, Place, and Suburban Policing with the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson (e.g., a St. Louis suburb). On the year anniversary of his death, what do you see that has changed?

A lot has happened since Mike Brown’s death, from increased social awareness and grassroots mobilization efforts to the grand jury’s decision to not indict Officer Darren Wilson and additional Black citizen-police conflicts.

More directly, in the wake of the Department of Justice (DOJ) report, the following changes occurred within Ferguson’s city government:

John Shaw, the city manager, resigned. The DOJ investigation found him encouraging the use of the municipal court in generating revenue for the suburb; Municipal Court Judge Ronald Brockmeyer resigned. Brockmeyer presided over the Ferguson municipal court, where DOJ found racially discriminate practices to be pervasive. He was replaced by a MO Supreme Court state appointed judge; Police Chief Thomas Jackson resigned. It was determined by the DOJ that his officers engaged in problematic policing tactics & used citizens to generate city revenue; the DOJ investigation also turned up racist emails, consequently, leading to the firing of two police officers and a court clerk in connection; a citizen review task force has been appointed to vet and make recommendations for establishing a Ferguson citizen review board; and following the first municipal election after Mike Brown’s death, Ferguson’s City Council now has three black council persons out of six. Previously, there had only been one.

Other occurrences included the use of body cameras by Ferguson police officers, the replacement of two makeshift Mike Brown memorials at the scene of his shooting with a bronze dove and plaque on what would have been his 19th birthday; modified practices with the municipal court and its response to citizens; increased community activities and partnerships such as volunteerism, activism, job fairs, and revitalization efforts for Ferguson schools, businesses, and neighborhoods. Furthermore, there is a push for reform in the entire St. Louis region, particularly as there are additional DOJ investigations underway and black citizens in the inner-city and suburbs face on-going bias treatment in a wide array of ways across the social spectrum.

In sum, there have been quite a few changes—subtle/overt, better/worse, immediate/forthcoming—throughout the year in Ferguson. Hence, it is important to note that “change” can be broadly interpreted, particularly when accounting for power and privilege or the lack thereof as experienced in everyday living among diverse populations. Nevertheless, the aftereffects from Mike Brown’s death and other cases alike are...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Heather Lende

Heather Lende's new book is Find the Good: Unexpected Life Lessons From a Small-Town Obituary Writer.

From her Salon interview with Marilyn Johnson:

You write about older people in your town; you also write about young people, the native Tlingit, fishermen, hippies and loners. My favorite Haines resident might be Granny, who wears a large red helmet and shin guards and travels with a shopping cart and a dog. You were surprised to hear one day she had gone to London – as it turned out, to minister to the homeless during the Olympic festivities. Does Alaska attract eccentrics and originals? Do you “find the good” and the offbeat, as well?

I was at a wedding reception in the rain the other day, with lots of old friends and some new ones, and we actually talked about this, wondering if maybe we are a little nuts. We concluded that people who live here choose to, so they — we—me — have that in common, and it shapes our community. Haines is not an easy place in many ways. Weather. Winter. Remote yet intimate. The people who like it here wouldn’t, or maybe couldn’t, live happily anywhere else, and so there is certain respect given to the other survivors. There are residents who brag, “I died and came to Haines.” I am one of them. Granny is more of a nomad. She calls herself a pilgrim, and she never came back to Haines from London. She is in Juneau now, to be closer to medical care and other services (there is no hospital in Haines), but her dog Sissy is still here, and attends church faithfully.

You were a New Yorker who went to Alaska on your honeymoon and stayed. Now you hunt and fish and built your own chicken coop. Were you outdoorsy and resourceful as a child?

I didn’t build the chicken coop, but I designed it, and I care for the hens in it and maintain it. I have always been athletic, and outdoorsy. As a child in rural New York, I was a tomboy; I played baseball, sailed and climbed trees.

Now, I like to hike, swim, ride my bike and hunt, but I am not a killer. I did go bear hunting...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Val Brelinski

Val Brelinski's new novel is The Girl Who Slept with God.

From her Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:

I always want to know what sparks a book? What was haunting or obsessing you at the time that made you feel that this was the book you absolutely had to write?

My family’s strict evangelicalism has colored absolutely every part of my life, so it was very natural that when I finally began to write at age 40 (!), thoughts about my unusual upbringing poured out of me and onto the page in a nearly effortless stream. My novel is a fictional account of one girl’s adolescence that very closely resembles my own. I felt so very strongly about this female and her family and their agonized interactions because they are essentially me and my sisters and my parents, only slightly rearranged.

Your novel is so soulful and so spiritual, as it tackles big questions of faith and family--both of which can help us and offer comfort, or they can destroy us. Can you talk about that, please?

I know that my parents believed utterly that their faith and the choices they made because of it were in their daughters’ best interests. They genuinely worried that my sisters and I might go to hell if we didn’t follow their fundamentalist dictates—a problematic situation because I was...[read on]

Visit Val Brelinski's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ilona Andrews

Ilona Andrews, the pseudonym for husband-and-wife Andrew and Ilona Gordon, writes the hugely popular Kate Daniels series.

From their Q & A with Diana Biller for The B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog:

I’m always fascinated by your description of post-Shift Atlanta. How do you both approach your worldbuilding? How much of it is pulled from real life Atlanta (for example, do you guys take trips to Atlanta and look at skyscrapers and think, “Huh, that would be fun to destroy in our next book”?)

I guess we try to make it interesting and original, but still believable. We lived for several years in Georgia and we both traveled frequently to Atlanta for our jobs. I feel like we knew the city well enough to realistically turn it into a post-apocalyptic landscape. Yes, Ilona did turn the building she went to for corporate training into one the skyscrapers we…mutated, I guess would be the word. We also use Google Maps to make sure we’re putting stuff where it’s supposed to be, or where it was before we wrecked it.

World mythology is such a frequent thread in your books. If you could each pick one mythological figure/deity/whatever to have dinner with, who would it be?

For Ilona it would be Loki; she says he would have the best stories. Along the same vein, for me it would be...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Ginger Adams Otis

Ginger Adams Otis's new book is Firefight: The Century-Long Battle to Integrate New York's Bravest.

From her Q & A at the New York Daily News:

Question: You’re a journalist who has never been a firefighter. How do you know so much about life inside a firehouse and how did you get firefighters to share their stories and feelings with you, especially about a topic as sensitive as race?

It took more than 10 years of reporting to build up some basic trust among a lot of the firefighters I relied on for “Firefight.” I feel like most of them were confident I was not out to do a hatchet job on the FDNY. Many are not named, but they spoke to me on background and their experiences are folded into the story. I try to be fair in my reporting — but still, there are inevitably some times when what you report angers people. But when you’ve been around for as long as I have, you almost become like wallpaper — people just get used to seeing you, and they come to accept your presence as something normal. After so many years of covering this story, I’d heard pretty much every different viewpoint firefighters had to offer and I actual tried hard to...[read on]

Visit Ginger Adams Otis's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Meg Waite Clayton

Meg Waite Clayton's new novel is The Race for Paris.

From her Q & A with Caroline Leavitt:

I always ask writers what the “spark” moment was for his or her book. What was haunting you that led to this story?

The idea for The Race for Paris actually came to me while I was doing research for my first novel, The Language of Light. I read photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White’s autobiography, Portrait Of Myself. Something she said in that—about motherhood, I think I can say that much without spoiling the plot—really moved me. I had to read the autobiography in the stacks of the Vanderbilt library because it was out of print and couldn’t be checked out, so you can picture me sitting in the stacks, weeping.

The story really began to take shape when I read about how Martha Gellhorn got to cover the Normandy invasion. Only male journalists were allowed to go. (The excuse: “no women’s latrines there, and we aren’t about to start digging them now”—never mind that the press camps were generally set up in lovely big French chateaus with running water and sometimes whiskey literally on tap.) Martha stowed away in the loo of a hospital ship and went ashore with a stretcher crew, one of the very few correspondents to cover the invasion from French soil. nAnd her reward for her bravery? She was taken into custody on returning to England, and stripped of her military accreditation, her travel papers, and her ration entitlements. She was confined to a nurses’ training camp until she could be shipped back to the U.S.

So here’s what she did: She...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Meg Waite Clayton's website and blog.

Meg Waite Clayton is the nationally bestselling author of The Four Ms. Bradwells, The Wednesday Sisters, and The Language of Light—all national book club picks.

The Page 69 Test: The Four Ms. Bradwells.

The Page 69 Test: The Wednesday Daughters.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Singer

Peter Singer's latest book is The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically.

From his Q & A with Jay Quigley for Animal Charity Evaluators:

JQ: Your book provides a compelling overview of effective altruism (EA) as a philosophy and social movement. What is the most important lesson that someone not familiar with effective altruism—animal activist or otherwise—can take away?

PS: It’s hard to boil it down to just one lesson, but if I have to do that, I’d say: stop to think before you make your choices! Whether it is a choice about where to give, what career to follow, where to volunteer, you should make sure that your head has a major role in your decision, as well as your heart.

JQ: One of the recurring questions that comes up in your book is the question of which cause to support. You seem to allow readers to draw their own conclusions about which of the main causes to support—be it poverty, animals, existential risk, or EA movement-building. But when it comes time for someone to make a donation—or choose a career—what factors should people think through in choosing a cause?

PS: Think about where you can make the biggest difference. One of the reasons I am not prescriptive about the choices you mention is that it is so difficult to compare, say, the suffering of hens kept for their entire lives in battery cages with the suffering of a woman in a developing country with an untreated obstetric fistula. We don’t have a methodology for doing that. With existential risk, the difficult philosophical question is how to take into account the loss of the untold billions of humans who, if we do not minimize risks to the survival of our species, and the worst happens, will never come into existence.

JQ: What does the best evidence—and/or your experience—suggest are some of the best ways to create new effective altruists and/or effective animal activists?

PS: First, get the ideas out there, through all the media you can access. Then...[read on]

Peter Singer is Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He is the author, co-author, or editor of more than thirty books, including Animal Liberation, widely considered to be the founding statement of the animal rights movement, Practical Ethics, and One World: Ethics and Globalization.

Visit The Life You Can Save website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

The Page 99 Test: The Life You Can Save.

The Page 99 Test: The Most Good You Can Do.

--Marshal Zeringue

Naveed Jamali

Naveed Jamali's new book is How to Catch a Russian Spy: The True Story of an American Civilian Turned Double Agent.

From his Q & A with Sam Fellman for MilitaryTimes:

Q. Your bio says you don't intend to travel to Russia anytime soon. Seriously, are you ever worried about reprisal by the Russians?

A. The Russians are a professional military. They're used to losing, they're used to winning. I think that this is a story that they hope runs its course and they don't want to bring any more attention to this. The other advice I got is not to humiliate them.

Q. Putin's Russia has made itself a Western opponent again. You faced down the Russians and won. What are your takeaways from that?

A. I think one of the most interesting things is that my entire operational experience consisted of in-person meetings. The Russians were terrified about using any type of electronic communications. I would talk to my handler [about using email or phones to no avail]. That fear drove...[read on]

Visit Naveed Jamali's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christy Wampole

Christy Wampole’s debut essay collection is The Other Serious: Essays for the New American Generation. From her Q & A with Michele Filgate for Salon:

In the introduction, you write: “Essays are barometers of the intellect. We are all atmospheric creatures, influenced by the cultural weather around us; the essayist takes it as her role to say something about the way the atmosphere plays upon a person and exerts pressure on the mind and its bearing.” Something I’m always curious about, as a fellow essayist: What gave you the confidence to become an essayist? I feel like it takes a certain amount of belief in your opinions and your personal voice to set your arguments on the page. Have you ever struggled with that, or has that always come naturally to you?

I started to write essays because the form allows you to vent those thoughts that have no other outlet. For me, the diary entry, the short story, or the poem just didn’t cut it because they seemed to lack a certain reflective element that I believe to be the core of the essay genre. Essay writing has been for me a matter of necessity and, in some ways, therapy. I’ve written so many essays that will never see the light of day, crafted purely for myself. I’ve come to the conclusion that thoughts not put down in writing might as well never have been thought.

Regarding those essays that do make their way to the public, it isn’t that I think my opinions are worth more than someone else’s; it’s that I believe everyone should be essaying all the time and I’m simply doing my part in what I wish were a universal project. Sadly...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Naomi J. Williams

Naomi J. Williams was born in Japan and spoke no English until she was six years old. Her debut novel, Landfalls, is a fictionalized account of the 18th-century Lapérouse expedition.

From her Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: What did you see as the right blend of history and fiction as you were writing Landfalls?

A: I tried to hew as closely to known "facts" as I could for this project. Not because I think that's how you're "supposed" to do historical fiction or because I owe it to readers or even to the memory of the Lapérouse expedition.

It was just a challenge I set for myself, a set of constraints around which to work, like the challenge of writing a Shakespearean sonnet, with its particular rules and conventions. I didn't, for instance, make up or conflate any members of the expedition. And I never knowingly altered the timeline of events.

But around those general outlines, I fabricated a lot. I imagined personalities and motivations and emotional baggage, of course.

Many of the women in the book are...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue