Tess Little

Tess Little is a writer, historian, and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

She was born in Norwich, read history at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and is currently studying for the MA in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia. She recently completed a doctorate on 1970s feminist activism in the UK, France, and the US, having interviewed activists and visited archives across all three countries.

Little's short stories and non-fiction have appeared in Words And Women: Two, The Mays Anthology, The Belleville Park Pages, The White Review and on posters outside a London tube station.

Her debut novel was published in October 2021 as The Last Guest (North America) and The Ninth Guest (UK); it was first published in the UK as The Octopus.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The Last Guest has had almost as many titles as full drafts. It began as a novella, with an extremely long title to balance out the brevity of the story—When we Called the Police to Collect my Ex-husband’s Body,—and that title ended with a comma because the first words of the prose continued on from the title: ‘We believed he had died from an overdose’.

This first sentence survived various edits because the story still launches from the same jetty. The narrator, Elspeth Bryant Bell, arrives at the Hollywood house of her ex-husband, British film director Richard Bryant, for his fiftieth birthday party. She expects to find an enormous, sprawling celebration in his honor, but instead she is met by only seven other guests. In the morning, Elspeth finds Richard’s body, sprawled across his couch. The director is dead, seemingly due to an overdose. Then the police discover that Richard was murdered, and each one of his guests becomes a suspect.

But of course, the original title was far too long for a published novel, so when my agent and I first sought publishers, here in the UK, we decided to rename the manuscript. I toyed with Aquarium, To the Surface, Chromatophore—and eventually settled on the title which these ideas were circling: The Octopus.

When Elspeth arrives at Richard’s house, she meets not only his seven other guests, but also his pet: a giant Pacific octopus named Persephone, who watches over the party, silently, from her tank. And just as Persephone’s aquarium sits at the heart of Richard’s house, so too does the captive octopus sit at the heart of the novel—embodying the stories of Elspeth and the other party guests.

But that title is quite cryptic and metaphorical. It doesn’t give potential readers any idea of genre; The Octopus might well be sci-fi, fantasy, or even non-fiction. For that reason, my American editor was interested in trying a different title—something darker, mysterious, a little Agatha Christie-esque, perhaps.

We went with The Last Guest, which I like to think is not too distant from the UK title. While the ‘last guest’ could be read as Elspeth—the final human to arrive at the party—to my mind it represents Persephone. She’s the last guest the reader meets, crawling out from her rocks after Elspeth’s arrival.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I begin every story I write with the first sentence—which sounds obvious and trite, but many authors don’t. I’ll carry around the kernel of the story for a while—perhaps collecting characters, phrases, images—but I find the writing doesn’t flow until I have that very first sentence. It has to capture the voice of the narration, the atmosphere, the pace, and once you have those elements the rest will follow.

So I’m very careful with my first sentences; I don’t write them down until they feel right. And looking back at everything I’ve written, I can see that those sentences always survive multiple drafts. ‘We believed he had died from an overdose’ is Elspeth’s voice, and that sentence holds the story of The Last Guest.

My endings, on the other hand, often change. I’ll begin a story knowing the rough arc of the characters—maybe a realisation they’ll reach, or a decision they’ll make—but not knowing exactly where the writing will end.

This is a dangerous way to live when writing a murder mystery—a genre which famously requires every detail to reconcile with the solution. I rewrote the ending of The Last Guest with almost every re-drafting and seeding each solution through the novel took much careful thinking, and much time. Hopefully this makes the red herrings all the more credible. I certainly believed them myself at one point or another.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Writers are often told to write what they know—or at least, to begin there for their debut novel. The characters in The Last Guest, however, live entirely different lives from mine. Elspeth is middle-aged, a mother, American, wealthy, divorced; she worked as an actor—I’ve never been any of those things. And that’s just my protagonist, who at least shares my language, race, and gender, unlike other characters in the novel.

I think I wrote this story, in part, to escape myself and my life—or to grapple with questions that have occupied my mind in a more removed way. I enjoy telling stories, telling truth slant. But of course, that requires some knowledge. Imagination isn’t plucked from thin air.

Despite the prima facie differences between myself and my characters, they did emerge from two personal places. The first is listening. While writing The Last Guest, I was completing my PhD in history. Researching and reconstructing other lives was my bread and butter, whether from archival sources or, quite literally, listening: I was conducting oral history interviews as well. My interviewees were all women, all older than me, and many were of different nationalities to me. Having spent hundreds of hours listening to such voices, Elspeth’s voice came to me quite naturally.

In listening to other people narrating their lives for my historical research, I’ve never failed to find some commonality. This is the second place from which my characters emerged: my own thoughts, experiences, ways of being. I gave each of them at least a sand grain’s worth of myself—as writers often do.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

The Last Guest was influenced by many non-literary works. By film, of course, given the novel is set in LA: classic film noir, as well as Mulholland Drive, The Invitation, The Player, Play it as it Lays. I also watched a great deal of octopus footage, to study their movements and behaviour: Jean Painlevé’s silent, black and white depictions were the films I returned to most often, and they ended up making a cameo in the novel.

I returned to certain works of art too: Hockney’s technicolour depictions of California, Bernini’s Proserpina. While writing, I came across the Sunset paintings of Caroline Walker, a series depicting a former beauty queen living a lonely existence in the beautiful, cinematic emptiness of the Hollywood Hills. (The cover of The Last Guest features her dark, aquatic oil painting Plunge Pool.)

Architecture was another major influence—Sedgwick, Richard’s modernist home in the Hollywood Hills, is a reimagining of the old country manors of Golden Age detective fiction. Where those stories took place amid the crumbling bricks of English tradition, The Last Guest unfolds within brutal concrete and clean glass. Still a home for the isolated elite, but the Hollywood version—this time literally perched above the masses, looking down across the cityscape.

Here, John Lautner’s Sheats-Goldstein Residence was my main inspiration, as well as the work of photographer Nicholas Alan Cope, who captures stark LA architecture in black and white on the pages of his book Whitewash.

As for music, I couldn’t name all the songs I listened to while writing The Last Guest, but I do remember feeling greatly affected by Nina Simone’s 1976 Montreux Festival performance of ‘Stars’, which tells a beautiful, heart-breaking story. It’s everything I wanted for Elspeth.

Visit Tess Little's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Margaret Verble

Margaret Verble is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and a member of a large Cherokee family that has, through generations, made many contributions to the tribe’s history and survival. Although many of her family have remained in Oklahoma to this day, and some still own and farm the land on which her books are set, Verble was raised in Nashville, Tennessee, and currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

Verble's first novel, Maud's Line, was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016. Her second novel, Cherokee America, was listed by the New York Times as one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year for 2019 and won the Spur Award for Best Western. It is set in 1875 in the Arkansas River bottoms of the old Cherokee Nation West and is a prequel to Maud's Line. The books are linked both by their setting and by four characters who are young in Cherokee America and elders in Maud's Line.

Verble's new book, When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky, is set in 1926 in the old Nashville Glendale Park Zoo.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I think the title is fairly apt. It alludes to a major plot point and bounces off the introductory chapter which tells the reader when in time the story is placed. I can’t take credit for the title. My editor, Nicole Angeloro, came up with it and it took some thought.

What's in a name?

I named my title character Two Feathers because I found a horse-diver who used that name had actually worked at the Glendale Park Zoo, where the story is set. I don’t know much about that woman except that she worked there for more than one season and was a featured, highly-touted act. I suspect in real life she was white because whites were always dressing up like Indians to make themselves more exciting and exotic.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

I don’t think my teenage self would be surprised at all by this novel. She’d probably say, “What took you so long?” I was raised on the grounds of the old park zoo where the novel is set. I can’t remember not knowing about it, and it captured the imagination of every child raised in my neighborhood.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I don’t think I can truthfully make a generalization about that. I think the critical point in any work of literary fiction is about 80% of the way in. Writers who don’t write from a formula let the characters drive the narrative, but at some point that narrative has to turn toward an ending. The last 20% of the tale is wrapping it all up, not necessarily neatly, but in some way. A lot of novels fail right there. You have to get that right and it can be tricky.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters?

Not necessarily. Or I should say probably not as much as some of my readers do. No one has ever confused me with Check Singer, the protagonist of Cherokee America. But I’ve had the rather discombobulating experience of people assuming I’m a lot like Maud Nail. Since I have grandchildren and Maud is eighteen I’ve found that rather odd. But a good thing, I guess. Anyway, the female protagonists of all of my novels are rather take-charge kind of women. And it’s true I’m like that. And all three of them are good with a gun and I used to be a fairly good shot. But I don’t shoot much anymore and I don’t feel the need to be in charge of much other than my own life. So these characters come out of me but aren’t me.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Certainly, the greatest influence on my writing was the fact that I grew up watching a treaty being broken. When I was young, in Oklahoma the Army Corp of Engineers was stealing the Arkansas River bed from the Cherokees in trucks carrying valuable sand and gravel right down the very section line I portray in Maud’s Line. It was an outrageous theft that went on for several years and it infuriated me. Those trucks ran me to the side of the road more than once and I had to watch the old Indians in my family stomach that theft when I knew they had been stolen from again and again.

Another influence that pertains directly to When Two Feathers Fell From the Sky is the fact that my mother was a fourth grade teacher and the fourth grade was where children in Nashville were first introduced to its history. Which, believe me, consisted of a lot of stories of murderous Indians – who were Cherokees – attacking poor innocent white people for no apparent reason. That, too, infuriated me, both on my own behalf and on my mother’s, who had to teach that nonsense year after year. She never said anything about that, but that’s how everybody handled that kind of history then. They just kept their mouths shut. Fortunately, times have changed.

Visit Margaret Verble's website.

My Book, The Movie: Maud's Line.

Writers Read: Margaret Verble (March 2019).

The Page 69 Test: When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessica Vitalis

Jessica Vitalis is a full-time writer with a previous career in business and an MBA from Columbia Business School. An American expat, she now lives in Canada with her husband and two daughters.

Vitalis's new book is The Wolf's Curse.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The working title for this story was “Death” until very late in the process; not because I thought it was a great title, but because it’s a Grim Reaper retelling and I thought of the story as my “death” book as I was drafting. It wasn’t until I started thinking about querying that I landed on The Wolf’s Curse as the title. I love the ambiguity in that readers can’t be sure if the title means that the wolf is cursed or if the wolf is the one doing the cursing. (You’ll have to read the book to find out!)

What's in a name?

I think names are incredibly important! I took great care to make sure the names I chose in The Wolf’s Curse help convey a French-inspired world. For example, the story is set in the country of Gatineau, and the village is Bouge-by-the-Sea. My main character, Gauge, is a carpenter’s apprentice; I love how his name hints at his vocation. My antagonist’s name, Lord Mayor Vulpine, carries equal weight; Vulpine means “crafty” or “cunning,” and I love that it hints at the Canidae, or dog family, since my narrator is a wolf. And I don’t want to give too much away, but the wolf’s name also carries great meaning—not because of its actual definition, but because using it helps remind her of her shared humanity.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenage self would be shocked by this novel! Although I’ve always loved to write, I never thought of myself as a creative person, and I don’t think I ever would have believed that I’d end up writing fantasy stories. That said, I also think that this is the type of book that my teenage self needed to read––despite the fantastic world in which villagers believe that stars are actually lanterns lit by their loved ones as they travel to the sea in the sky to sail into eternity, it’s actually about grief and loss, and hope and healing, and how our friends and community come together to pull us through our darkest times.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I always struggle with my endings. Not because I don’t know what’s going to happen from a plot perspective (I usually do), but because a great ending is about more than wrapping up a plot—it’s about digging deep into the characters’ emotional journeys and making sure that inner transformation comes across on the page. By contrast, I generally find openings fairly easy to write; I usually have a list of what I need to accomplish, and I really enjoy the challenge of fitting all of those elements into the story in a way that hooks the reader.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

There are three main characters in my story: the invisible Great White Wolf, twelve-year-old Gauge, and twelve-year-old Roux, and they all contain aspects of my personality. In fact, I think I’m probably 1/3 the Wolf’s snark, 1/3 Gauge’s sweet innocence, and 1/3 Roux’s no-nonsense practicality. (Okay, I might be a tad bit more than 1/3 when it comes to the snark!)

Visit Jessica Vitalis's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bethany Ball

Bethany Ball was born in Detroit and lives in New York with her family.

She is the author of What To Do About The Solomons and The Pessimists.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Unconsciously I was probably thinking of titles like The Corrections, The Sympathizer, The Immortalists etc. I love how a title like that seems to stand tall and wide with hands on hips and takes a stance. I felt like I was attempting to sum up at least a small portion and a snapshot in time of a generation—Gen X. And it is indeed descriptive of the book. Many Americans have felt increasingly pessimistic since at least the Great Recession in 2008. And I myself fought pessimism every day that Donald Trump was president. On the other hand, I like to end novels with hope. In my last novel, I quote an Arabic aphorism: one day of honey, one day of onion. I try to end a book with a little honey if possible.

What's in a name?

I was really influenced by the time my father became Karl Malden’s Sekulovich in a movie filmed in my father’s newsroom. Sekulovich was Malden’s real name, his father’s name, and he made sure to insert it in every film he made. The bit role my father had was Malden’s Sekulovich. In the same vein, I made a little vow to myself as an homage to my late southern mom to name at least one main protagonist after someplace in the south. Carolyn in my first book and Virginia in my second. Beyond that, names are incredibly important to me. I always want to get a name bang on. I think they tell so much about a character, where they were born, who their parents were, socioeconomic class, the hopes and dreams of their parents. Virginia is married to a guy named Tripp Powers. I sort of expected someone to tell me I couldn’t do that, that his name was too ridiculous. His real name is Travis. It was important for me to let the reader know that almost as an aside. Tripp Powers is about as Dickinsinian as I will get with a name but I think it works in a lot of real life ways.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

Writing was the only thing I was good at and it was the only activity in my life I did consistently. I was an awful awful student but I kept getting the highest scores on my writing assessment. Higher than anyone in the school. It didn’t matter much though, my guidance counselor still tried to place me in remedial English. Not that I’m bitter or anything. Fortunately I had wonderful teachers in my public school system: Ms. Zizka, Ms. Stonehouse, Ms. Downey, Ms Murley to name a few. They saw through my terrible academic record and supported me anyway.

I see bits of writers I read in high school in my writing style today: Mary Gaitskill, Tony Morrison, Bret Easton Ellis, Philip Roth, Alice Walker, Joy Williams, and Anne Tyler.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Beginnings are incredibly difficult. You have to get the tone and voice right or the piece has no momentum. Landings are hard but beginnings are nearly impossible. I worry and work over the beginning much more. It’s like curb appeal. It might in fact not be the most important part of the book but no one is going to enter the realm of the book unless you entice them in. A reader might forgive a less than perfect ending but they will never get past a bad beginning.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I like to say that I share a lot of negative attributes with my characters. This makes writing characters sort of delicious and fun. In The Pessimists, my character Gunter wants the most un-cool cool car in the world, the Mercedes G-Wagon. He wants luxury and to be high up and look down on everyone while he drives. I’m very sorry to say I share this desire with Gunter and in fact, my editor shared in the margins that she felt just the same way! It was fun to explore this dumb desire and kind of make fun of myself through Gunter. There are others but that’s the only one I’ll cop to here!

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Most definitely music. I sang in a choir all through school and in college. My father sang in a professional choir in Detroit and I spent my childhood attending his concerts. I love music more than any other art form. For me writing must have rhythm for it to work. There are slow rhythms and fast. Loud, quiet, and silence.

My second inspiration is tennis. My son is a division one tennis player and I picked up the sport about seven years ago. I spent many years of weekends watching tournaments in tony parts of Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. I play on a team and have been to the most elite country clubs around. Places filled with what Tom Wolfe called “the Masters of the Universe.” Some of the conversations I overheard definitely inspired The Pessimists. As an introvert writer who spends a lot of time alone, playing sports on a team forced me to get out and interact with people, many of whom I otherwise never would have met and I’ve grown to love.

Visit Bethany Ball's website.

The Page 69 Test: What To Do About The Solomons.

--Marshal Zeringue

Georgie Blalock

Georgie Blalock is a history and movie buff who loves combining her different passions through historical fiction, and a healthy dose of period piece films. When not writing, she can be found prowling the non-fiction history section of the library or the British film listings on Netflix or in the dojo training for her next karate black belt rank. Blalock also writes historical romance under the name Georgie Lee.

Her latest novel is The Last Debutantes.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title works pretty hard to take readers into the story. The Last Debutantes is set in 1939, during the last debutante season before World War II. Once war breaks out, many things, including the lives and futures of the debutantes, change forever. The title indicates that the 1939 Season was the last one of normalcy before everything changed. Although the debutante tradition would return after World War II, the war and the world that had spawned that tradition was, like the debutantes, irrevocably altered. These were the last debutantes to celebrate their entry into society in this way.

What's in a name?

I didn’t have much choice in naming Valerie de Vere Cole because she is a real person. She was the niece of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and lived with Mr. and Mrs. Chamberlain at No. 10 Downing Street where she celebrated her debutante season in 1939. However, I did choose to use the more formal version of her name, Valerie de Vere Cole. In the newspapers of the time, she was only referred to as Valerie Cole. Her father’s name was Horace de Vere Cole and he had an impressive lineage that included ties to the Earl of Oxford. I decided to add the de Vere to Valerie’s name to give her a more aristocratic flavor.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I find it harder to write endings rather than beginnings. With most of my novels, the opening scene is the first thing that comes to me, and it sets the tone for the rest of the story. The end comes after a great deal of research and time spent with the characters. Once I better understand the story, and the historical characters’ lives and world then it is easier to write the end. The end is more likely to change depending on the direction the story, characters and historical research take me.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I do see some of myself in the characters because my deadline for finishing The Last Debutantes was June 2020. My writing schedule for March through June was well sketched out and, as we all know, the universe had other plans. It was a very unique experience to write during such a stressful and uncertain time and it allowed me to better relate to the debutantes who were doing their best to carry on with their normal lives while also living though very uncertain times.

Visit Georgie Blalock's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Other Windsor Girl.

The Page 69 Test: The Other Windsor Girl.

My Book, The Movie: The Last Debutantes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katherine Ashenburg

Photo by Joy von Tiedemann

Katherine Ashenburg is the prize-winning author of two novels, four non-fiction books and hundreds of articles on subjects that range from travel to mourning customs to architecture. She describes herself as a lapsed Dickensian and as someone who has had a different career every decade. Her work life began with a Ph.D. dissertation about Dickens and Christmas, but she quickly left the academic world for successive careers at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a radio producer; at the Toronto newspaper The Globe and Mail as the arts and books editor; and most recently as a full-time writer.

Ashenburg's new novel is Her Turn.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I was well into writing the novel when I settled on the title. Liz, my heroine, edits a newspaper column of personal essays called “My Turn.” Calling the novel Her Turn indicates that Liz is going to take centerstage now, and also suggests that it’s finally her turn to make sense of her divorce. There’s also a little word-play in the title, in that Liz changes quite a bit in the course of the book: she turns.

With the first meaning, of Liz coming forward, the emphasis is “Her Turn.” With the second meaning, the emphasis is “Her Turn.”

What’s in a name?

When I used to read about novelists saying their characters took over, I rolled my eyes: it all seemed too mystical for me. But I have to admit that Liz more or less insisted on being called Liz. She’s a mostly tidy, organized and conscientious character at the start of the novel (her affair with her married boss being the sole exception to that), so I wanted to give her a classic name like Claire or Ellen. But try as I would to fix those names on her, “Liz” kept bubbling to the surface. I had no idea why. Finally I had to accept that Liz acknowledged her transgressive side, and voila, my heroine had the right name.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

I think my teenage reader self might say to me, “What in the world took you so long?” An omnivorous reader of novels in my teens and after, it never occurred to me that I could ever produce one myself. I was 73 when my first novel, Sofie & Cecilia, was published three years ago. Now I see no reason to stop. As for the content, my teenage self liked novels about romance, eccentric characters and heroines with interesting jobs who needed to understand themselves better. I think she would approve of Her Turn.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I find beginnings far easier. With Her Turn, I had gotten Liz into such a mess I couldn’t imagine how I could ever rescue her and end the book. Her ex-husband’s second wife has submitted an essay to Liz, not knowing she’s sending it to her predecessor and, guarding her anonymity, Liz has been pretending to engage in a thorough edit of a piece she never intends to publish. Catastrophes multiply and there’s no way Liz can emerge unscathed.

One morning, still in the dark as to how this could end, I told myself that whatever happened, Liz needed to talk on the phone with the second wife. Disciplining myself to write the dialogue with no sense of where it was going led me to a conclusion that satisfies almost everyone.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

That depends on the book. My first novel, Sofie & Cecilia, was about three painters, so paintings were my inspiration as well as my subject. For the novel I’m writing now, it’s Dior’s 1947 New Look collection. For Her Turn, I relied on Liz’s career as a journalist, one that I shared. The driven, hyper-focused people in a newsroom almost guarantee that a novel set there will be funny, and I enjoyed returning to that world.

Visit Katherine Ashenburg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

M. J. Kuhn

M. J. Kuhn is a fantasy writer by night and a mild-mannered office worker by day. She lives in the Midwest with her husband, a puppy named Wrex, and a cat named Thorin Oakenshield.

Less than a year into her life as a full-time office-worker she began using her nights and lunch breaks to work on her first novel, and she hasn’t looked back since.

When she isn’t reading or writing you can find her playing the piano, weightlifting, or anxiously awaiting the next installment of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.

Kuhn's new novel is Among Thieves.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title of my debut, Among Thieves, is based on one of two common idioms: “There is honour among thieves,” and “No honour among thieves.” It’s purposely ambiguous which one I mean, and when you dive into the story you’ll see why!

The plot centers around a mercenary named Ryia, but it is ultimately the tale of six thieves teaming up to steal a magical artifact… while each thief secretly plots their own betrayal. They all have their own designs for the heist’s loot, and the multi-perspective story will have readers wondering who will be victorious in the end.

I’m hoping the title calls to mind both the obvious meaning (thieves), and the implied meaning of these commonly used and misused idioms. Are the characters in the story to be trusted? Do they have any sense of loyalty or honor? The reader will find out as the story unfolds.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

My teenage-reader-self would be thrilled with my novel, I think. Shocker - it’s exactly my taste! I have been obsessed with heist stories since around my teenage years (high school and on), so I think my teen self would be tickled that I managed to pull off a heist novel myself.

Also, it’s been my dream to see a book I wrote on the shelf at a bookstore since I was in elementary school, so this entire experience is really just a dream-come-true for my younger self.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

My characters are all incredibly different from me. In reality I am not a sword-fighter, or a mercenary, or even a bold enough person to say half of the sassy remarks you’ll find in the pages of Among Thieves. However, I do still insert bits of myself into the characters as I breathe life into them. If it’s possible to write without doing so, I haven’t figured it out yet!

I may give a character one of my own fears, or make them wrestle with a flaw I also have. I think this is part of the reason why sharing a book with the world is so difficult sometimes. Yes, it’s fiction! The story is fake, the characters are not directly based on any real people, it’s all make-believe. But my own heart beats alongside the heart of the story, which makes sharing it an incredibly vulnerable act.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I am influenced by all of my experiences, to some degree, but I know that’s not a very satisfying answer!

I’ll try to be a little more specific and center my inspirations around Among Thieves. Let’s kick things off with the obvious: My obsession with heist films such as the Oceans franchise, and The Italian Job definitely inspired me to write a heist story of my own.

My inspiration for main characters who weren’t exactly knights in shining armor came from many different places, but I think I was inspired largely by video games, specifically Mass Effect. In the Mass Effect franchise, the player has the option to make the main character either a hero or an antihero. During my first playthrough, the antihero option was so much more interesting to me that I definitely latched onto the idea of morally gray characters at that point in time.

Lastly, I was inspired by my enduring love of fantasy films and television shows. Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films (and of course, the original literary source material) have been an obsession of mine throughout my life. I was also fascinated by the twists, turns, and betrayals of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and (to some extent) the HBO adaptation, Game of Thrones. There is so much wonderful fantasy and sci-fi content out in the world these days, and I am definitely thankful for it!

Visit M. J. Kuhn's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrea Wang

Andrea Wang is the award-winning author of the picture books The Nian Monster (Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature Honor), Magic Ramen (Freeman Book Award Honor), and Watercress. The Many Meanings of Meilan is her debut middle-grade novel. The first character in Wang’s Chinese name is an archaic one that means fragrant, but her parents’ friends all thought it was the character for jade, which sounds exactly the same. That sparked her lifelong interest in names and identity. She’d much rather be a rock than smelly. Wang likes to write about family, food, and culture. She spent her childhood in Ohio and Boston and now lives in Colorado with her family.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

My agent actually came up with the title The Many Meanings of Meilan. I originally called my book The Orchid Variations, but that doesn't do nearly as much work as a title since it assumes that readers know that the second syllable of Meilan's name, "lan," means "orchid" in Mandarin. The current title does a much better job -- right away you know that Meilan is Chinese American and that the story is about the different ways she sees and defines herself by her name.

What's in a name?

Meilan's name is the crux of the book. When the principal of her new school renames her to "Melanie" because it "sounds more American," she begins to question who she really is. Her parents also start calling her by a new nickname, "Lan," which further confuses her. When she discovers that there are multiple Chinese characters with different meanings that are all pronounced "Lan," her sense of self begins to fracture. She decides to adopt three of these homophones -- the words for "basket," "mist," and "blue," as the meanings for who she is in different situations, and behaves accordingly. It's not until her grandfather tells her the origin of her name that she learns to embrace her whole self.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenage self would be surprised and mortified by The Many Meanings of Meilan. I was a very shy and reserved teen who would never have considered writing a book that is so deeply personal and reflects so many of my own struggles with identity, family dynamics, microaggressions, and racism.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I never know the right place to begin a story until I've written the ending. I always knew that the book would be about Meilan's code-switching and end with her uniting the different versions of herself, but it took a while (and my wonderful editor's help) to figure out what she was like before and how she got to the point where she felt she had to take on these different personas.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Meilan is very much a reflection of my child self. I was always the kid hiding in the back row, sitting cross-legged in my chair in an attempt to make myself as small and invisible as possible. And at home, I tried to be the most dutiful, filial Chinese daughter -- just like Meilan. However, it took me until I was an adult to find my voice. I gave Meilan the ending I wished I'd had as a child.

Visit Andrea Wang's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Welsh-Huggins

A son of the Finger Lakes in western New York State, Andrew Welsh-Huggins now calls himself a “proud native adopted Ohioan.” By day, he is a reporter for the Associated Press in Columbus. By earlier in the day, he is the author of seven books in the Andy Hayes private eye series, featuring a former Ohio State and Cleveland Browns quarterback turned investigator.

Welsh-Huggins's latest novel in the series is An Empty Grave.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Sometimes I start writing a book with a title in mind, other times I’m not sure of the title and wait for inspiration. For the first book in my series about former Ohio State quarterback turned private eye Andy Hayes, Fourth Down and Out, I went with the pun to telegraph Andy’s troubled back story. The second novel involved an arson fire and I settled on Slow Burn early on. The same went for the fourth novel, The Hunt, about Andy’s search for a missing prostitute. An Empty Grave started life as Dead Run, but it became clear early on that that was only a working name. I settled on the final title after realizing how much of the book focused on secrets and mysterious deaths. In any case, I always aim for something punchy that will catch a browsing reader’s attention but that also doesn’t give away the plot.

What's in a name?

Normally, I choose character names in unromantic fashion, by mixing and matching names from a 2008 Columbus White Pages phone book (remember those?) that I keep close at hand. That’s how I started with Hillary Quinne, the female private eye whom Andy encounters in An Empty Grave. In this case, though, I tinkered with her name a few times. I knew she would be a professional rival with some romantic undercurrents, and someone who will likely make return appearances, and so I wanted a memorable name that conveyed power and intrigue.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

I don’t think he’d be surprised by the crime fiction elements since I’ve loved mysteries since I was a kid and was sneaking my mom’s Perry Mason paperbacks off the shelf. He’d probably be a little wide-eyed at the idea of a character with a football background, however, since organized sports were never my thing.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I’m a proponent of a strong opening chapter, both from the obvious perspective of hooking a reader early and the understanding (gleaned from multiple book events over the years) that I’ll probably end up reading that aloud frequently, so it needs to be solid. As a result, I tend to revise that opener a lot.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

My character, Andy Hayes, is both my alter ego and a fictional version of myself. No one calls him Andrew and no one calls me Andy. I’m a former small college track runner; he’s an ex-major university college football star. He’s been divorced twice and can’t manage a steady girlfriend while I’ve been married nearly forty years to my wife, Pam. He’s a dog guy, I’m a cat person, etc. On the other hand, we share the same sense of humor, read a lot of the same books, approach life with a similar level of skepticism, and have equally low thresholds for tolerating BS. I’m not sure how well we’d get along in real life, but I think I’d enjoy having a beer with the guy from time to time.

Visit Andrew Welsh-Huggins's website.

My Book, The Movie:: An Empty Grave.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jo Perry

Jo Perry earned a Ph.D. in English, taught college literature and writing, produced and wrote episodic television, and has published articles, book reviews, and poetry.

She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, novelist Thomas Perry.

They have two adult children. Their three cats and two dogs are rescues.

Perry's new novel is Pure

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

“Pure” comes from the Latin Latin “purus” –– "clean, clear; unmixed; unadorned; chaste, undefiled." Pure is a mysterious title, but its associations and meanings illuminate the novel from beginning to end. The title arrived with the idea––a volunteer in a Jewish burial society who encounters a body of a woman she suspects was murdered. Jewish burial societies (Muslims have a similar burial prep) prepare bodies for burial by performing tahara, a ritual washing which returns the dead to newborn purity.

“Pure” is also an intensifier, i.e., it can mean unadulterated or unalloyed as in “pure joy” or “pure misery.” “Pure” has goodness-connotations, too, and my protagonist is trying to find a path to goodness. And the novel takes place during the pandemic lockdown in Los Angeles, there is always the threat of contamination, constant masking and unmasking and imposed isolation as strategies to remain uninfected/pure.

What's in a name?

My female protagonist is named Ascher Lieb and the choice was personal to me. Since I have a masculine (well, “Jo” without the “e” isn’t “ Joe,” but it’s close) gender-neutral name, it felt right that my protagonist would, too. I am named after my maternal grandfather, Joseph. Ascher is named after my paternal grandfather.

“Lieb” means “love.” “Lieb” is both an ironic and unironic name for Ascher who must to solve a murder alone and loveless. But Ascher receives love from unexpected sources and she bestows love, too. Ascher’s name also announces her Jewish heritage (it’s a Jewish tradition to name children after someone who died), and carries an slightly archaic, uncomfortable heaviness that fits her situation: Ascher has been parentless for some time when her only relative, her beloved aunt, dies. Family and the absence of family weigh her down as she makes her way through the locked-down world seeking the truth for the dead woman and for herself.

How surprised would your teenaged reader self be by your novel?

I recently crossed over into a new decade––a big one––yet my ever-receding-in-time teenaged self still resides inside my head. Is she a lens or a vestige? Or am I still somehow still that girl––self-doubting, first-person-writing, smart-ass drawn to the sly and the dark––but with more layers, tons of baggage? I’m not sure, but I think that my late-teens self would feel a kinship with Ascher. They are both awkward outsiders. Both have the only-child fear of being parentless. Both write. Both find ways to evade hard truths.

So, I think my teenaged self would probably love Pure.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

In my experience, the beginning of a book provokes and contains its ending. I’m not saying I know the ending right away––I don’t. The ending is hidden––but it’s dimly, distantly there––a feeling, a mood, a question. So, what I do is intuit my way to the ending. I don’t outline, so mine is not an orderly process delivering me to the final page. I feel my way. Characters appear on the page. Characters dissolve. Stuff happens to them and between them. They surprise me. They lead me in new directions, then take me finally to the place where they’ve been going all along—The End.

I revise constantly and then revise my revisions, but I rework the early parts of a book more than I do the closing.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Yes. And yes. I recognize aspects of personality and my experience in my characters, but they are separate from me. My Dead series is about a murdered man and a dead dog he encounters in the afterlife who return to the living world to solve his murder, and later to help the meek and the exploited. Rescuing a dog dumped in a Home Depot parking lot was the experience that informed the first book in the series, Dead Is Better. That dog changed me and my life just as the dog in the novel whom the dead man names Rose, changes him and his afterlife. But I am not my human protagonist, Charlie––he’s got his own problems to work out. And I am not, though I wish I were, deeply wise and sweet as Rose.

Ascher is only my second female protagonist (Everything Happens, a novella, has the first) and she is my first first-person narrator, so I suspect that aspects of my personal experience have seeped into her character and into the story more often than in the other books.

Writing a novel is building a world, then populating it. Unless the writer is living an extraordinary life, that world must be a world apart from the writer’s world to be interesting or surprising. To create this new world, the writer uses everything she knows, every person she’s met, every experience, and every fear, every joy, accident, or trauma she has lived.

But in my books I also investigate/interrogate my personal preoccupations: In the Dead series, it’s mortality. In Pure, it’s what Robert Frost described as “what to make of a diminished thing.” Besides solving a murder–if there was a murder–Ascher must find the truth of the dead woman and her own truth. She must find a way to get past failure, to live with loss, and how to love her less-than-purely-good self in a world roiled by racial and ethnic hatred.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Problems I feel powerless to solve or understand and questions I can’t answer inspire my novels. I have been interested in antisemitism and death for some time now. But my family and current events have also inspired me.

As my son went through Jewish chaplaincy school, his deepening connection to and knowledge of Judaism enriched my own understanding of the religious tradition into which I was born. I became moved and inspired by Jewish death rituals which inspired Pure. As I was writing it, my son helped me by translating prayers, answering all sorts of questions, leading me to texts that illuminated the Jewish concept of the soul and its journey from life to the afterlife, the requirement for the living respect, guard and care for the dead, and the selfless good deed that is tahara, the ritual preparation and purification of the body before burial. The chaplains and Jewish burial society volunteers who worked to care for the living and the dead of the Surfside collapse were a recent reminder to me that questions about death, the soul and the afterlife are universal and always relevant––even to a nonobservant, Jewish atheist like me.

I realized with a start long after I finished Pure that two hate-inspired defenestration murders in Paris that I forgot reading about must have unconsciously shaped the novel. It shocks me a little that I had no memory at all of Sarah Halimi’s or Mireille Knoll’s murders while writing, but I was reminded of both when they returned to French headlines after I’d finished the book. Clearly, though, these murders influenced events in the book.

Visit Jo Perry's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Jo Perry & Lola and Lucy.

My Book, The Movie: Dead is Better.

The Page 69 Test: Dead is Better.

My Book, The Movie: Dead is Best.

The Page 69 Test: Dead is Best.

My Book, The Movie: Dead Is Good.

The Page 69 Test: Dead Is Good.

The Page 69 Test: Dead is Beautiful.

My Book, The Movie: Dead is Beautiful.

My Book, The Movie: Pure.

--Marshal Zeringue