Kim Barnes

From a Q & A with Kim Barnes about her new novel, A Country Called Home:

Q: Part One of A COUNTRY CALLED HOME is preceded by an epigraph by John Gardner: “The fall from grace is endless.” Why did you choose this quote?

A: My young life was defined by the teachings of religious fundamentalism and the constant reiteration of man’s fall from grace—that fall from the Garden of Eden. The fact that my own father was a man characterized by a mix of uncommon nobility and flawed judgment...well, that’s the very definition of a tragic figure.

My father was an absolutist, a man of deep conviction who was determined—driven, really—to create a better life for himself and his family. Even though my character Thomas Deracotte is a Yale educated physician, while my father was a logger with very little education, they both believed that they could control the world around them with a mix of superior insight and will. Such people are often blinded by their own vision, even though the vision itself may be an honorable one. And the fact is that, even in their failure to realize that vision, and even though their flawed judgment and blind hubris may result in chaos rather than order, we benefit from their attempts. This is why A COUNTRY CALLED HOME is divided into two parts: the first part is the story of Thomas Deracotte’s attempt to create a Utopian existence for his wife and daughter. Part II explores how Deracotte’s vision, though destructive, is also creative: in the life of his daughter, Elise, we recognize the chance for redemption.

Like Elise, I have been both scarred and shaped by my father’s vision. The strength of his will and demanding nature instilled in me a sense of fearful respect, but it also allowed me the opportunity to rise above the poverty and familial dysfunction that had informed his own life. Without my father’s vision, even though flawed, I would not have achieved my educational and creative goals, and I am grateful. But I’m also aware of how that fall from grace—from childhood innocence and adult obliviousness to consequence—is perpetual.

Read the complete Q & A.

The Page 69 Test: A Country Called Home.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katherine Neville

From a Q & A with Katherine Neville at the publisher's website:

Question: It’s been twenty years since The Eight. Why did it take so long to write THE FIRE?

Katherine Neville: I don’t actually write my books, they kind of write themselves–but they also seem to decide on their own when they are going to be written. Or in this case, not written. Until the right moment.

In the early 1990s, while I was on a 16-hour train trip from Switzerland to Prague, I was pacing up and down through the railroad cars when I figured out how to continue the story that began in The Eight. I saw clearly how the children of the previous characters would have to solve the true underlying mystery, which even their parents hadn’t yet discovered, about the original creation of the fictional chess set that had once belonged to Charlemagne, and of the powerful and very real historic events that had first set its course in motion.

THE FIRE was weaving its tale within me for almost a decade. Then, all of a sudden, one bright sunny morning, a plane smashed into the Pentagon just across the river from my apartment in D.C. I already knew about the two planes in New York–I’d seen them hit the towers on TV just moments earlier–and I knew at once, when the third plane hit, that I wasn’t writing the book I thought I was writing.

Read the complete Q & A.

Visit Katherine Neville's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Margaret Atwood

Deborah Solomon interviewed Margaret Atwood for the New York Times Magazine.

Two of their exchanges:

As one of Canada ’s most esteemed novelists and poets, you are about to deliver a series of public lectures on a seemingly nonliterary subject, “Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth,” which is also the title of your latest book. Your timing is perfect.

Well, I didn’t do it on purpose. It’s not my fault. I didn’t make those banks collapse.

* * *

So what led you to take up the subject of debt?

Long ago, I was a graduate student in Victorian literature. When you think of the 19th-century novel, you think romance — you think Heathcliff, Cathy, Madame Bovary, etc. But the underpinning structure of those novels is money, and Madame Bovary could have cheerfully gone on committing adultery for a long time if she hadn’t overspent.

Read the complete Q & A.

Read more about Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan Reinhardt

Susan Reinhardt has been called “the Southern Belle’s answer to David Sedaris” and “a modern-day, Southern-fried Erma Bombeck or Dave Barry.” She is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist and author of three books -- Not Tonight, Honey: Wait ‘til I’m a Size 6 (2005); Don’t Sleep With a Bubba Unless Your Eggs are in Wheelchairs (2007); and Dishing with the Kitchen Virgin (2008).

From her interview with Mary Ward Menke for January Magazine:

You’ve been compared to Erma Bombeck, Dave Barry and David Sedaris. How does that make you feel?

I like hearing it, but don’t fully believe it. So it hasn’t gone to my head. Everything tends to go to my belly. Everything. I’m a bloater. By the way, I do love all those writers you mentioned, and was so honored to speak at the Erma Bombeck Humor Writers Conference in Dayton in 2006 and meet all of her family. Betsy Bombeck bought two of my books. I was elated.

Has humor always been an important part of your life? Where did your sense of humor come from?

My dad is the funniest man alive and my sister is the funniest woman on the planet. For example, she recently couldn’t get her kids to bathe, so she just put them in the golf cart and ran them through the car wash. She also had an e-Bay bidding war to win a possum fur coat. She said it has a tire mark through it, too.

Read the complete interview.

Visit Susan Reinhardt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Biespiel

From a Q & A with the poet David Biespiel:

6. What's your best advice for a writer?

Don't listen to me would be my advice...

7. No really. One thing?

All right...read. Immerse yourself in reading the kind of writing you're doing. Writing screenplays? Read them, & watch movies. Constantly. Writing a memoir, read them. Writing poems, read them--& not just the latest National Book Award finalists or whatever is fadish--the Bread Crumb Prize Winner for Best Decolotage Ficton. Follow the trail: If you like writer X, see who writer X read, then read that writer. And so on. There you have it, one thing: Read. The ratio between what you read & what you write will be enormously imbalanced. More reading compared to less writing. And yet--let me contradict myself--write more, too.

Read the complete Q & A.

Read--or listen to David Biespiel read--the poem, "Though Your Sins Be Scarlet."

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Kimmel

From Inside Higher Education:

Leaders of colleges for traditional-age students spend a lot of time worrying about the behavior of male undergraduates — and specifically the misbehavior of many through excessive drinking, hazing, and abusive behavior toward women. A leading sociologist and gender scholar, Michael Kimmel, has just published a new book that offers an inside look at this young male culture, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (HarperCollins). The book covers male development from ages 16 through 26, and features extensive discussion of campus life. Kimmel responded via e-mail to questions about his work.

Q: As colleges welcome a new crop of freshmen, what should they be aware of about their new male students that perhaps they aren’t aware of now?

A: What I call “Guyland” is both a developmental stage and a social space. Young adults, age 16-26, are taking about a decade longer to complete the transition to adulthood than did their parents and especially their grandparents. 30 is really the new 20. Guyland is also the world that young people — male and female — inhabit. After growing up with helicopter parents micromanaging every nanosecond, they enter a world in which colleges have backed away from the old “in loco parentis” model, so that young people increasingly define themselves through media images and peer groups. And on campus, guys rule.

Read the complete interview.

Learn more about Guyland and the author at the official Guyland website.

The Page 99 Test: Guyland.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Quick

From a Q & A with Matthew Quick, author of The Silver Linings Playbook:

GC: Your character, Pat Peoples, thinks his life is a movie produced by God, bound to end with a silver lining. What do you think of this very close connection, in fiction and your life, between the novel and the film? Have you found the silver lining?

MQ: When I decided to write full-time, after consulting with my wife for months, I quit a tenured position at a prestigious high school, sold my house, moved into my in-laws’ home, and wrote in their basement every day for three years. My parents thought I had gone mad. Some friends quietly disapproved. People kept asking what I was doing in the basement, and when I was going to get a ‘real’ job. And it was hard, because at times I wasn’t sure that I was doing anything productive at all. It’s a wild thing to write in your in-laws’ basement for three years, not knowing if you will ever publish. Two things gave me hope: my wife’s constant encouragement and—as stupid as it might sound—looking up at clouds during my daily sunset runs. Considering all I had sacrificed, all the work I had put into this process, the silver lining had to be coming, right? More than eighty agents rejected my pitch letter and sample chapters. Fifty more never even responded. The one referral I managed to finagle from a respected published writer went nowhere and ended in polite rejection. I was just about to give up; I was getting my C.V. together, soliciting letters of recommendation, and looking for a teaching gig when I got a call from Doug Stewart of Sterling Lord Literistic. And then the real-life silver lining began to manifest. The way things played out—especially given the title of the book—made me pause and reflect. I won’t suggest that it was some sort of divine plan, but maybe inevitability really does exist if you work hard and look at the world with the right eyes.

Read the complete Q & A.

Matthew Quick floated down the Peruvian Amazon and formed ‘The Bardbarians’ (a two-man literary circle), backpacked around Southern Africa, hiked to the bottom of a snowy Grand Canyon, soul-searched, and earned his Creative Writing M.F.A. through Goddard College.

Read an excerpt from The Silver Linings Playbook, and learn more about the novel and author at Matthew Quick website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Silver Linings Playbook.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dave Boling

Ali at Worducopia interviewed Dave Boling, author of Guernica and a journalist in the Pacific Northwest.

From the interview:

You've been a sports journalist for many years. Have you been writing fiction for a long time as well, or is this something new for you? I guess I'm wondering whether you see yourself as primarily a journalist who became inspired to write a novel, or are you a novelist with a day job as a journalist?

This was absolutely my first try at fiction. I hadn't even fiddled with it. I had some fellow journalists who turned into successful novelists (Jess Walter and Jim Lynch) and I just sort of decided it was time to see if I had a knack for it.

Seems you do have the knack. And you're certainly not the only ones to cross over successfully--Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe come to mind. One of the main differences I see between journalism and fiction is that journalism emphasizes the clear dissemination of facts, while in fiction, the facts are only included as they're relevant to story development. Was it tough for you to focus on sticking to the story, rather than presenting all of the interesting or important facts you collected in your research? I'm sure there was a lot you had to leave out.

Actually, I went back and forth quite a bit on how much history and politics and non-fiction to include. Initially, I think I included too much. I had a great deal of Basque lore, political explanations, and much more non-fictiony background on Picasso and Franco, who were both fully examined characters. I guess it was just a part of learning how to tell the story that I realized that it all would be better if the history rose more naturally from the characters.

Read the complete Q & A.

Learn more about Guernica at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

T. Lynn Ocean

From Jonathan Maberry 's ITW interview with T. Lynn Ocean about her new novel, Southern Poison:

Southern Poison continues the adventures of Jersey Barnes. Introduce us to this tough and sexy ex-MP.

If she were to knock on my front door and waltz into my life, we'd be best friends. Of course, she could kick my ass. But I'm having so much fun writing Jersey! The manuscript for Southern Fatality (first in the Jersey Barnes series) was written from the first person male POV. Having grown up as a tomboy, I thought it would be cool to write a book with a male lead character. But just as I was finishing the manuscript, the lead character woke me up in the middle of the night and told me that he was really a female. I'm like, cripes, you couldn't have said something SOONER? After I thought about it, the change made perfect sense. I did a complete rewrite and the character of Jersey was born. Take a hardcore military-trained dude, stuff him inside the body of a 5'8" tall female with a penchant for quality lingerie and a dry wit. Oh yeah, and strap on a weapon. She's having trouble leaving home without one--even in retirement.

Read the complete Q & A.

Read an excerpt from Southern Poison, and learn more about the author and her work at T. Lynn Ocean's website.

The Page 69 Test: Southern Fatality.

The Page 69 Test: Southern Poison.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Fuller

From a Q & A with screenwriter, now novelist, David Fuller, about his debut novel Sweetsmoke:

Q: What differences struck you between writing a novel and writing screenplays?

A: Screenplays must be simple and fast in order to fit into a two hour period of time. Streamlined storytelling. Sit down with a DVD of your favorite movie and outline it on paper, writing down each scene as it comes along. Make note of the time that major plot points happen. You will find a simple story structure with characters that quickly identify themselves. Much of what makes movies seem complex is the work of intelligent actors and the visuals that propel the story along. Novels allow you to get inside the minds of the characters, to take the time to know them and understand why they do what they do. In a novel, the style of the writing is also a factor in the pleasure of the storytelling.

In my screenplay for “Necessary Roughness,” the main character runs the family farm, but yearns for his lost years as he did not get to play football after his father died. In the opening scene, he puts together a football “scarecrow” built with a hinge. He throws footballs at it when he’s alone, dreaming of the past. These quick brushstrokes reveal his yearning, and the viewer understands who he is without fully knowing why. It is quick and effective, but it is not deep.

Sweetsmoke opens with Cassius watching a fight between two ten yearolds, one white and one black, and he remembers an almost identical moment from his past when he was humiliated by the white planter’s son. The aftermath of the moment in his own childhood made him understand for the first time in his life that he was powerless, the property of another human being. By dwelling inside his head, the reader learns what will happen to the young black slave, also understanding that this is what happened to Cassius twenty years before. To portray that much information in a film would take a significant amount of time and need to be done in a more straightforward way. It would almost certainly be cut out of the film. Cassius’s difficult relationship with the planter’s son, Jacob Howard, would need to be explained in an altogether different way.

Read the complete Q & A.

Visit David Fuller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue