Peter Behrens

Last year Peter Behrens was interviewed for the CBC's Words at Large.

Part of the interview:

Why did you decide to become a writer?

When I was in grade 4, I remember standing in the kitchen with my sister Anne — who was in grade 5 — washing dishes. And Anne at one point turned to me and said "What do you like at school?" And I said "composition". And she said "Wait until you get to grade 5 — it gets really hard." And somehow, composition never did. So I just went on from there — it was just a ceaseless continuum from grade 4 composition to novel.

What books or authors have most influenced your life?

Some books you read when you're 14 that you couldn't bear to read as an adult because they aren't really very good books. But they worked as books do, they threw you into a world. They had that kind of magic and power. So I just remember reading, for example, Grapes of Wrath, when I was 14, and it was pitched perfectly for me then. I can't read it now. When I first read Joyce in my early 20s — not so much Ulysses but the stories in Dubliners — those were very powerful for me. And at a later stage, when I read the great Canadians of this golden age — particularly people like Alistair MacLeod — that was really important to me.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jacquelyn Mitchard

Jacquelyn Mitchard’s first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was named by USA Today as one of the ten most influential books of the past 25 years – second only to the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling.

Her new novel Still Summer is due out in early August.

Here are two questions and answers from her website:

Why such sad stories?

I don’t think they’re sad. They challenging. They’re about ordinary people under pressure of extraordinary circumstance. Those pressures reveal people. They reveal character in a way that a great vacation at the beach (unless there is a shark) doesn’t. So while I don’t think I will always write sad stories (in fact, ‘Still Summer’ is more harrowing than emotionally wrought) I write about what’s on my mind and heart – the connections between people, people thrust out of their comfort zones, pity, honor, love, terror (Did I just make that up?)

* * * *

What’s your all-time favorite novel?

‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ by Betty Smith. It’s always thought of as a middle-grade book; but it’s filled with truly gritty accounts of the immigrant experience, from death by alcoholism to the molestation of a child. How simply and elegant it is. It’s just simply amazing what she did. In fact, my daughter’s name is Francie Nolan.

Read the entire Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cornelia Read

From a Q & A with Cornelia Read about her acclaimed debut novel, A Field of Darkness:

How did you get started with this novel?

I'd been laid off from a dotcom job in early 2001, and had spent months slogging through Craigslist job postings trying to find a new gig. One morning I ran across an announcement for a new crime fiction writing group here in Berkeley. I hadn't done fiction seriously in years, and had never tried my hand at the genre, but decided to go check it out when I realized how committed a mystery reader I'd become.

Our initial meeting was a week before 9/11. I volunteered to submit first, figuring I had two weeks to come up with a story.

So how did you decide on this story?

Driving home from that meeting, I started thinking about an unsolved double murder my husband's father told me about years ago, over lunch one day at their family farm... Decades earlier, the bodies of two girls were found in a neighbor's field. They'd last been seen alive with a pair of soldiers, walking along the New York State Fair's midway.

My father-in-law told me he'd been leasing that same field for several years, and had churned up a set of dog tags there one spring. Since I was working for a local paper at the time, he thought I might be interested in writing about it. I did fluffy feature things, mostly — how to make sushi, book reviews, Valentine's Day profiles of couples who'd found love through the personal ads. I had no idea how to tackle a crime story. I didn't have the confidence to pursue it.

Read the entire Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Trinie Dalton

Last year Kevin Sampsell interviewed Trinie Dalton for PowellsBooks.blog. The introductory remarks and first exchange:

Trinie Dalton's Wide Eyed is one of the most inviting and interesting books of short fiction to be released this decade. Her stories alternate easily between funny and sad, dreamy and harshly realistic. She writes like someone who wants to be your friend, but as a reader, you're not sure if she scares you or not. Some of her stories display a style of living that seems like it's on full blast, like the narrator is even overwhelmed by the emotions of her surroundings. Dalton lives in Los Angeles and is also the co-editor of a peculiar book made up of notes that she confiscated from students (as a substitute teacher) entitled Dear New Girl or Whatever Your Name Is.

Kevin Sampsell: With all the music references in your stories, I imagine you as someone who wanted to be a rock star. Is that an accurate guess?

Trinie Dalton: I started going to shows at an early age. My dad used to take me to shows like Peter, Paul, and Mary, or Linda Ronstadt. So as a teen, I was obsessed with music and going to shows. Siouxsie, Love and Rockets, Dinosaur Jr., The Sugarcubes, Jesus and Mary Chain, Ween, that era. Some good bands and some suck ass ones. For my twelfth birthday, my mom let me take a limo to see The Pretenders and Iggy Pop! I played in a band awhile back, Unicornucopia ??? all the songs were about unicorns. It was folky, kind of predating all the freak folk stuff. Fake medieval, with a big paper mache unicorn, and I'd dress up like a maiden, play guitar and sing in harmony with two guys. But now, I'm a music journalist. I write for Arthur and the LA Weekly. I want to get better at writing about music. I'd like to write more songs some day. It's fun to play live.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Deborah Moggach

In 1999, at the time her Tulip Fever released in the U.K., Deborah Moggach sat for an interview with Patricia Deevy for the Sunday Independent.

The interview opens:

Deborah Moggach should be a poster girl for good mental health. At 51, she carries no less baggage than any of us - and a lot more than many - but here she is, at home on the edge of Hampstead Heath, blooming, beautiful and beloved.

"I've got a very strong - libido sounds sexy, but it isn't that; I've got a strong joy for living and I do bounce up," she says.

"And also - like most writers - I'm quite ruthless. I stand aside from things and I think I could write about that - while it's happening, practically. I couldn't write in the middle of my divorce and I couldn't write when Mel (her partner of 10 years) died for about two or three months at all. But within three months it was welling up again."

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy Cohen

"Between the Lines" interviewed Amy Cohen, author of The Late Bloomer's Revolution.

The interview opens:

What’s A Late Bloomer?

It’s simple — a Late Bloomer is someone who discovers his or her strengths later than expected. I’m convinced that George Elliot was speaking to Late Bloomers when she said, “it’s never too late to be what you might have been.” I love that idea, especially since I’ve discovered there are all kinds of Late Bloomers. Who knew? I only found out because every time I mention the book title someone says, “That’s me! I’m a Late Bloomer too!”

So people say, “I’m a LATE BLOOMER too!” Can you talk about that?

Apparently, everyone is a Late Bloomer in some way. It really is a revolution. One of my favorite stories is about a guy who worked in Hollywood throughout his twenties. An assistant on a TV show, he felt his life was going nowhere. Then one day he ordered the wrong lunch for the show’s star, who was furious. When the assistant found the tuna sandwich stuffed into his coffee mug he quit on the spot. He enrolled in law school and became a civil rights lawyer. I love that story because it manages to be both inspiring and dishy. Another woman had been a stay at home mother in her thirties. She had always wanted to be an interior decorator, but worried she was too late to start a new career. Now she owns her own company.

When I wrote the book I had no idea how many people would identify themselves as Late Bloomers — I thought it was just me. I met a woman at a party who said, “You wrote a book about Late Bloomers? I decided to have a child at forty-five and I got pregnant the first try!” Then there was a seventeen year old boy who told me he didn’t talk until he was three and now he’s going to Yale. Another man said that in high school, “I was the short, chubby kid who took forever to go through puberty. I didn’t get hair on my face until last week,” he laughed. “And I didn’t lose my virginity until I was twenty.”

I love hearing people’s Late Bloomer stories. It’s fantastic. They’re eager to share their stories and say, as I did, “Don’t get discouraged! There’s hope!”

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeremi Suri

Jeremi Suri is a history professor at the University of Wisconsin. His publications include The Global Revolutions of 1968 and Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente.

His new book is Henry Kissinger and the American Century.

Here he responds to a few questions about Kissinger that I put to him:

Oliver Wendell Holmes reportedly said of FDR: he has "a second-class intellect but a first-class temperament." In your view, what class intellect and temperament did Kissinger the diplomat have?

Henry Kissinger is a first class intellect. He is broadly read and he has a penetrating mind. He has a remarkable talent for digesting, ordering, and critically evaluating mountains of material. He identifies core problems and mobilizes diverse ideas and concepts to offer coherent and practical solutions. This combination of big ideas and effective steps for action is what has long made Kissinger an attractive advisor for presidents. Kissinger does not, however, possess a first class temperament. He is self-centered, incredibly suspicious, and monumentally insecure. Part of this comes, as my book shows, from his experiences as a German-Jew in Weimar and American society. Part of this also comes from his personality. Kissinger is a man who learned to ingratiate the elites he had to please, but he has enormous trouble forming congenial bonds with others.

Many political scientists like to view international politics at three levels: the individual, the state, and international system. That is, do individuals have a decisive impact on international life?; or is the quality of the domestic regime (democratic or communist or fascist) or internal politics that which matters most in international life?; or is the distribution of global power more significant (i.e., rich and powerful countries have their way more often than poor countries)? I imagine historians aren't so enthralled with a such a reductive model, but what weight did Kissinger give to each of the levels, and is your view similar to his?

Kissinger believes that all three of these levels have important influence, but he gives primary place to the individual "statesman." The leader must understand the nature of various regimes and the distribution of global power, but he can shift these in various directions for his state's interests. In this sense, the great leader for Kissinger is someone with an acute understanding of the contemporary world, a vision of the future, and an ability to identify and exploit small opportunities for shifting power. As I show in my book, Kissinger defines the statesman in Romantic terms -- like Goethe or Nietzsche. He is an extraordinary figure -- a Bismarck or a Churchill -- who, in Bismarck words can “listen to the footsteps of God, get hold of the hem of His cloak, and walk with Him a few steps of the way.” The statesman for Kissinger is transformative in his insight and his connection to divine power. I share some of Kissinger's focus on the power of an effective statesman, but I also see a need for greater democratic and other institutional checks on the overweening power of a Kissinger-like leader.

Who is the statesman Kissinger most admired (Zhou Enlai? Bismarck? someone else?) and why?

Bismarck is Kissinger's model statesman. He brought a vision of German unification to fruition, and built a foundation for stability and peace in Central Europe. This came apart when Bismarck's boss, Kaiser Wilhelm II, fired the great statesman and embarked on misguided policies. The problem for Kissinger is that great statesman are very rare, and their achievements are often undone by inferior successors.

A question about Kissinger the scholar: is his first book, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-22 (1957), still considered an important work about that era in European politics or has it been superseded by other scholarship?

Kissinger's dissertation and first book, A World Restored, is still highly influential, especially among non-historians. Kissinger's picture of a conservative and stable post-Napoleonic settlement, and the personal roles of Metternich and Castlereagh, continues to influence how people view the Congress of Vienna and its aftermath. Scholars have complicated this picture, but Kissinger's simpler version remains important.

Harold Nicholson (I think it was) wrote that the best diplomats possessed Fingerspitzengefühl -- roughly, having a sure instinct for the job as if the important facts and issues were at one's fingertips. Does Kissinger possess Fingerspitzengefühl?

Kissinger definitely has Fingerspitzengefühl. He needed it throughout his career to survive, to ingratiate the right people, and to make a remarkable career for himself from a very modest background. During his time in the Nixon administration, he developed into a widely respected and effective international negotiator with men like Zhou Enlai, Le Duc Tho, and Anatoly Dobrynin. They all had more experience in this realm than Kissinger, Yet, Kissinger quickly learned to match their wit, their patience, and their determination at the negotiating table. That is a testament to his ability to sense and master his environment.

What are you working on now?

I am starting another big book that will examine why powerful states intervene in places far away, where they have limited interests, in ways that are doomed to failure. I will take this history back to the Greeks and forward to the present. I will argue that regime-type and personality are not determinative. Dominance in the international system brings inherent perils -- hubris, overstretch of resources, and popular resentment. Dominance also breeds a combination of domestic sensitivity and foreign callousness that encourages a search for brutal but cheap responses to crises. An international system with one dominant power, in this sense, is unstable and prone to warfare. I hope my book will offer a warning to American policy-makers about the dangers of our dominance in the world today.

Learn more about Henry Kissinger and the American Century, and read an excerpt, at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kate Blackwell

Kate Blackwell talked to Powells.com Ink Q & A about her new story collection, You Won't Remember This.

One exchange from the interview:

What fictional character would you like to date, and why?

My mother, who was not a whimsical woman, used to say she wished she had a son so that she could name him Sydney Carton. I was impressed. When I was a teenager and read A Tale of Two Cities, I, too, developed a crush on Sydney. I sometimes imagined him, lean and passionate, in place of the boy whose arms were around me in a smelly car. But I was no Lucie and could not envision anyone transforming his character through love for me (I'm sure my mother could), so I gave him up. Still, if Sydney came along today, I wouldn't mind strolling with him along the Seine, arm in arm, talking in low voices of the film we just saw or the state of the world or the weather.

Blackwell was also invited to "[r]ecommend five or more books on a single subject of personal interest or expertise." Read about her response.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Judith Cutler

From Even Tan Gee's interview with Judith Cutler for Crime Time:

Who's your literary muse?

Where do I start? When I was a child, I was very sickly. I didn't go to school till I was ten, so you can imagine how lonely and isolated I was. But there were always books at home, and the library was a constant oasis. In those days, remember, you weren't allowed to borrow fiction without borrowing non-fiction. (And, my God, you were silent while you were choosing it!) There was a big hoo-ha when I wanted to read adult books when in theory I was too young. But I'd already read everything, fiction and non-fiction, in the junior section. God knows how racist and sexist some of the stuff was - Arthur Ransome, and so on. In the Adult Section I got on to the great classics of crime fiction. (I gather this still happens today: there's a great up-take of Agatha Christie by teenagers whose parents are happy that there's no sex or violence. OK, racism, sexism - but no sex or violence...) What they make of the class attitudes, I don't know. I was horrified when I re-read a wonderful Ngaio Marsh the other day - how could she be so snobbish? I also fell in love with all Georgette Heyer's handsome heroes at about that time: I wasn't keen on Heyer's crime fiction but loved (still love) the historical fiction - pace, characterisation, humour. But there was more "literary" stuff as well: Richardson, Fielding, Austen, Eliot, Hardy, James, Lawrence... And I ended up reading English at university, though I'd say that was one of the worst mistakes I ever made. It gave me fifteen years of writer's block. Yes, honestly.

When I was still in my teens, you see, I had started to get published. I won, among other things, the Critical Quarterly short story prize. So I must have been quite good. I even had an agent approach me, though it was thirty years before I gave his agency a novel that was publishable Thank you, Murray Pollinger, for being so patient and so loyal to me. But I lost it completely when I was an undergraduate. Since my style was by then heavily influenced by the late Henry James novels, perhaps it's fortunate.

So, a ragbag of influences in the past. But a major one more recently. Sara Paretsky. What magic. A tough investigator with a private life, inner-city poverty - yes! I wanted to write like Sara Paretsky. I wish I could say I'd managed it....

Read the entire interview.

Visit Judith Cutler's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anne Fadiman

Jill Owens interviewed Anne Fadiman, author, most recently, of At Large and At Small, a collection of essays on ice cream, butterflies, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, among other topics.

Part of the interview:

Jill: I love the line in the introduction that "a blend of narcissism and curiosity" may be the most well-suited kind of personality for the familiar essay.

Fadiman: The narcissism allows me to write the parts of the essay that are about myself, and the curiosity allows me to write the parts of the essay that are about the actual subject. I get tired of writing just about myself. I don't think that I'm interesting enough. I don't think that my life has been interesting enough. I don't think that I would wish to read a book that was only about me. And I certainly wouldn't want to write a book which was only about me, which would take a hell of a lot longer than reading that book. But if I can also make use of my curiosity, then I can write or think about my own life for awhile, and then just set it aside, and take up a book, and read about the history of coffee, or ice cream, or moving, or mail, or being a night owl, and learn about other people's intersections with whatever that topic is. Then my curiosity is satisfied, and I can go back to being a narcissist again.

Jill: It's the best of both worlds. In terms of research, then, these were all subjects that you already were interested in reading more about?

Fadiman: All but one, I would say. The one exception is a piece about flags. It's called "A Piece of Cotton," which is a phrase used about a flag that I explain in the long historical section of the middle of the piece. I had never been particularly interested in the American flag, and knew absolutely nothing about it, except that it was sewn by Betsy Ross, which doesn't turn out to be quite as true as we think. The whole Betsy Ross story is one of a number of flag myths that I found out were actually myths.

I started thinking about flags after 9/11. We'd just moved into an old farmhouse in western Massachusetts, and we inherited a flagpole and an old flag. We'd never flown a flag before, but after 9/11, we flew it at half-staff. I started being curious about how the connotations of the flag had changed over time, and I thought that this was something I'd really like to read about. If it hadn't been for 9/11, and if it hadn't been for the accident of our having that flag and flagpole, that's not a subject that I ever would have thought about writing about. But it was consoling for me, to be working on that shortly after 9/11. It gave me a focus in those early jittery and scattered days.

Everything else in the book is about something I've been interested in for a long time, so I was particularly appreciative to have the excuse to learn more about it, and in many cases, to read or reread books that were already on my shelves, and to mark up my books. I always buy them used, so sometimes they already have other people's markings on them. When I was getting ready to write the essay on Coleridge and Charles Lamb, it just was with a feeling of glee, the way another person might feel before starting a meal that consisted only of his favorite foods, one after another. I would think, I get to spend two weeks with nothing but reading by and about Charles Lamb! What could be better?

And then, you really feel pleased at the end, because if it's a subject you're already interested in and know something about, you're so much more expert two weeks later than you are at the beginning. It's like seeing an acquaintance turn into a friend, and seeing that acquaintance turn into a friend after an intense period. It's like being stuck in an elevator for three days, or going on a camping trip, or having that kind of all-night conversation that we used to have in college and that we don't have time for now.

But I can have an all-night conversation with Coleridge or Charles Lamb if I want; I can stay up all night with those guys and do nothing but think about them. So I feel that the relationship is much more intense and intimate after the period of research. I love that period. I never think of it as, Oh, God, now I have to get out my books and take notes. I cannot wait; I look at my calendar and I know that that's coming up, and I can start researching an essay. I can't wait for that period. I hate starting to write it, but I love starting to research it.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue