Roger E. A. Farmer

From a Q & A with Roger E. A. Farmer, author of How the Economy Works: Confidence, Crashes and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies:

Q: Why does the stock market matter to every American?

Farmer: In the 1930s, stock market wealth was much more concentrated than it is today. Middle and low income Americans held their savings in banks and it is for that reason that the collapse of the banking system in the 1930s was so devastating. In the 21st century, most middle class Americans own pension plans that invest in the stock market.

US wealth is roughly two-fifths houses and three-fifths factories and machines that are indirectly owned by households through their ownership of financial intermediaries such as bank accounts and pension rights. When the stock market plummets but recovers quickly, as it did in 1987, the effect on private households is minimal. When the stock market falls, as it did in 2000, but house prices keep rising, the effect is again small since households can borrow against housing wealth to maintain consumption. When houses and stocks fall together as they did in 1929 and again in 2008, the effect can be devastating.

Q: From an early age, the American student learns the basics of math and science, but the fundamentals of economics are often not part of his or her core curriculum until college. Do you think economics should be a core component of a student’s primary education?

Farmer: Economic literacy is...[read on]

Visit Roger Farmer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Howard Frank Mosher

From a Q & A with Howard Frank Mosher, author of the new novel, Walking to Gatlinburg:

Q: Walking to Gatlinburg has been described as a “Civil War thriller.” This is your tenth novel. Is it your first thriller?

A: Yes. My 1989 novel A Stranger in the Kingdom has some of the elements of a mystery, but Walking to Gatlinburg is the story of a young man whose life is in constant danger from the moment he decides to track down his older brother, who has gone missing in the Civil War. Morgan Kinneson, just 17 years old, walks from northern Vermont to the Great Smokies in search of his brother Pilgrim. At the same time, he is being pursued by a gang of psychopathic terrorists. To find Pilgrim, he has to eliminate them, one by one, while solving the mystery of a secret, runic stone in his possession. Most of my earlier books are high-action novels, but Walking to Gatlinburg is my first “non-stop thriller.” It was a great deal of fun to write.

Q: Is Morgan’s trek south to find his brother based on a true event?

A: It is, but ideas for novels come from strange and mysterious places, often deep in the writer’s imagination. Several years ago, a bookseller friend told me the story of her Confederate ancestor, a young soldier from North Carolina with the wonderful name of Jasper Memory. Jasper was captured and sent to the infamous Union prison at Elmira, N. Y. – known as the “Andersonville of the North.” While he was there, a fellow prisoner, a dentist in civilian life, made him, from a gold uniform button, a wedding ring for his fiancé. At the end of the war, Jasper walked home, all the way from Elmira to the mountains of North Carolina, to present the ring to his beloved. I couldn’t stop thinking about his journey. Eventually, in the very mysterious way that ideas for my novels have always come to me, I asked myself the “what if” question. What if...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Melissa Febos

From a Q&A with Melissa Febos, author of the memoir Whip Smart:

Q: Tell us about your memoir.

A: On the surface, Whip Smart is a book about my four-year experience as a professional dominatrix in New York City, during which I managed to graduate college with honors and overcome a drug problem. Sensational as that all sounds, I tried hard not to glamorize, or otherwise dress-up the experience. I wanted to be faithful to the reality of that world, as well as to my own emotional and intellectual experience. While my goal was to create a literary portrait of a subculture, and of addiction, mostly I wanted to tell a story of personal transformation, of how a life lived in extremes led me to myself, and to a life of surprising normalcy and joy. I knew from the beginning that I wanted it to be a kind of love story.

Q: Why write a book about it?

I’d planned on being a writer since the age of seven, but I never planned on writing about being a dominatrix. I figured it would work its way into my fiction eventually, but that’s it. I was midway through a novel in graduate school when I figured out that this was the best story I had to tell, and the one most itching to be told. I resisted it at first, but most writers know how impossible that can be.

Before that, I never saw myself writing memoir, and considered young memoirists essentially narcissistic and unimaginative. Needless to say, I feel differently now. I have great admiration for many memoirists. Creating a literary work out of one’s own experience requires tremendous imagination, and humility.

Q: What are readers going to find most shocking about your experience?

No doubt...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Judith Warner

Judith Warner writes the “Domestic Disturbances” column for the New York Times and is the host of “The Judith Warner Show” on XM Satellite Radio. Her new book is We've Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication.

From her Q & A with Bill Tipper at the Barnes & Noble Review:

The Barnes & Noble Review: We've Got Issues reads at times like a kind of mystery story -- you’re the investigator, trying to track down where these ideas about medicated kids come from. But there prove to be many layers: the popular myth of the doped-up child, the real issues that parents of mentally ill children are facing, the questions of psychiatric ethics and pharmaceutical money. At points you convey the sense of a difficult problem that has no center --was that your experience as you researched and wrote this book?

Judith Warner: This was a very difficult book to write. The image that always came to mind, as I grappled with it, was of quicksand. I kept trying to get a handle on the book – what it was really about, what I did and didn’t know, and each time I thought I had a new formula for moving forward, it would collapse under and around me. My certainties were so solid at the very beginning. I sold the idea of a book on “affluent parents and neurotic kids,”and the way forward seemed clear: : we lived in an anxious time; parents were pushy and competitive; children were undisciplined and badly-behaved generally, all that bad behavior was being called sickness. It made sense to me that children’s purported “issues” were just side-effects of living in our anxious, competitive times. It suited my way of thinking – habits of mind developed back in college that were only semi-conscious – to “read” children’s symptoms as signs of cultural malaise. It suited my prejudices (again, only semi-conscious) to basically discount the beliefs of modern psychiatry; to see biological psychiatry as anti-humanist, to feel that our culture was pushing to fit children into a box and that those who didn’t fit into it were being diagnosed as sick.

The problem came, first, when I began speaking to (or more precisely, listening to) parents of children with mental health issues. There was an objective reality to the difficulties they were witnessing and experiencing that didn’t at all fit with my idea of children’s-mental-illness-as-mirage. There is a “center,” as you put it, to the topic of children’s mental health issues: there is the experience of children and their parents. When you get at the reality of this experience – that children...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Lorraine Adams

Lorraine Adams was educated at Princeton University and was a graduate fellow at Columbia University, where she received a master’s degree in literature. A staff writer for the Washington Post for 11 years, she won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Her new novel is The Room and the Chair.

From an interview with Adams at The Nervous Breakdown:

DH: In your novel, there's a classified report that gets leaked to the media. But it's the sensational parts of the report, really not that significant, that get all the attention. The most salient facts in the voluminous report don't get noticed, even though they are in plain sight. The public is always shocked when the dots are not connected. But it's the public themselves who are the worst at connecting the dots. Aren't the answers in plain sight sometimes but we are not seeing them? What role do you think literature can play in connecting the dots?

LA: Consider the Napoleonic wars. In the first decade afterwards, a reader will find state records, memoir and correspondence. Sometime after, historical accounts appear that try to synthesize those writings. Eventually historians take issue with those accounts, usually with conceptual narratives that make a story out of the claims and counterclaims of the histories themselves. But if you want to know what the Napoleonic wars felt like to the human beings caught up in them, you read War and Peace or The Charterhouse of Parma. Fiction gives us a grasp of seemingly vague or disparate phenomenon. It makes meaning. History and non-fiction, at least the intellectually honest practice of both, give us arguments about what is knowable. Somehow today it's gotten fashionable to call what I call meaning-making “connecting the dots.” But only fiction can do that. Intelligence is the collection of data and making arguments about what that data portend. Our expectations about what intelligence gatherers can extrapolate speedily from data is way too high. First, these gatherers of data are evaluating things which are definitely not dots. And they're not working with the traditional childhood numbered dots. The data is all around the globe and it sure doesn't have any numbers. So what the data gatherers must do is...[read on]

Visit Lorraine Adams' website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Greaney

From Karen Meyer's Q & A with Mark Greaney, author of The Gray Man:

Describe how the idea of The Gray Man was born.

I spent a few months in Central America a couple of years back. Now and then I’d run into American expatriates in bars and it gave me the idea for a character; an American expat assassin, living off the grid, trained by the CIA but now operating alone, forced to dodge elements of his own government due to reasons he does not fully understand. While on the run he works as a private hit man, but he only accepts contracts against targets he deems worthy of extrajudicial execution (assassination). As the idea progressed into a novel he became Court Gentry, the Gray Man.

The settings vary greatly throughout the novel. Have you visited all of the locations?

For the most part, yes. The meat of the novel describes the Gray Man’s race against time across Europe, and I essentially covered the same ground as in the book. I ventured down back alleys in Prague, took a bus from Budapest to the Austrian border, visited a remote hilltop village in Switzerland, walked through streets and train stations in Paris and Geneva and Zurich. My field research ended, just like in the novel, a...[read on]

Read an excerpt from The Gray Man, and learn more about the book and author at Mark Greaney's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Gray Man.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fred M. Frohock

From a Q & A with Fred M. Frohock, author of Lives of the Psychics: The Shared Worlds of Science and Mysticism:

Q. You're a professor of political science, yet you've written a book on alternative medicine (Healing Powers) and now one on Lives of the Psychics. How did you first become interested in studying psychic phenomena? Would you call yourself a skeptic or a believer?

A. I have always been interested in psychic phenomena. I grew up in Key West, Florida, and my mother's side of the family is Cuban. Latino culture in that time and place was dense with beliefs in mysticism, alternative realities, and psychic phenomena in general. (It still is to some degree.) I was raised with the paranormal as a part of ordinary life, so much taken for granted that psychic experiences were regarded as the normal state of affairs. So I was a believer, by birth and nurture, until the right critical thinking permanently insinuated itself into my intellect in college (to be joined later by a return to spiritual convictions).

It may be this background that blinds me now to any conflict between my work in political theory and the explorations I seem drawn to in the worlds of psychic phenomena. I am writing a book right now on religion and politics. Unless I am missing something, the research I did for Lives of the Psychics feeds into understandings of religious sensibilities, at least those that rely on transcendent or alternative realities.

Q. In Lives of the Psychics, you mention two "supernatural" experiences in your own life—your daughter's prophetic dream of a plane crash, and your remote sensing of your mother's death. Can you describe those experiences for us, and tell us how they have affected your life and work? Has personal experience with psychic phenomena reinforced your interest in studying the supernatural?

A. My younger daughter...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Haag

Michael Haag is the author of The Templars: The History and the Myth. From his Q & A with Nick Owchar at The Siren's Call:

TSC: There are so many books now out there about the Templars, thanks in large part to the interest Dan Brown created with his "Code." Was there something that these books weren't saying about the Templars that you felt needed to be told?

MH: Books about the Templars fall into two categories. Some are strictly history and confine themselves to the two centuries of the Templars' existence. Others are speculative and deal in the many stories surrounding the Templars, in what you might call the afterlife of the Templars that continues in the popular imagination to this day. I wanted to take a serious look at both the history and the mythic afterlife and to show how they are intimately related and always have been -- how the Templars became the subject of popular imagination already at their inception, celebrities, you might say, the superstars of the Middle Ages.

Superstars?

Already during their heyday, the Templars attracted to themselves many associations, legends, rumors and romances. When the story of the Holy Grail first began circulating in medieval Europe, it was immediately associated with the Templars. This star quality of the Templars was due partly to their prominent role in the central movement of the times, the Crusades and the defense of the Crusader states in the East, where the Templars were surrounded by potent historical and sacred associations. After all, the Templars were founded on Christmas Day 1119, within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the spot which marks the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and they were headquartered on the Temple Mount, which indelibly associated them with stories surrounding the Temple of Solomon -- and nothing in medieval Christendom could beat that!

But being in the spotlight...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Dorothy Koomson

Dorothy Koomson's books include Marshmallows for Breakfast, My Best Friend’s Girl, and The Ice Cream Girls.

From her Q & A with Arifa Akbar at the Independent:

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

JG Ballard. He had an incredible imagination – very few people can put the depth and passion into characterisation and plot that he did. He was also master of the twist-in-the-tale ending.

* * *
Which fictional character most resembles you?

A while back I would have said Miss Marple, now I'd probably say Little Bo Peep – substituting "time" for sheep.

* * *
Who is your hero/heroine from outside literature?

If you'd asked me years ago I would have said Oprah [Winfrey] because seeing her show one day when I was off sick inspired me to leave my job and work freelance. In that time I started the book that would become The Cupid Effect and started my career as a published author. I haven't seen Oprah's show in three years – since I left Australia. So, now, I genuinely...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Gina Welch

Gina Welch is the author of In the Land of Believers: An Outsider's Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church.

From a Q & A at her publisher's website:

Q: Why were you initially drawn to write a book about Evangelicals?

When I was a kid religion barely touched my life, and when it did, it delivered a neat, repulsive shock. I clamped my lips shut during the under God bit of the Pledge of Allegiance, and wrote anxious letters to my father when I felt I was being pressured to pray at summer camp.

Eventually I matured enough to tolerate the religious practices of others, just as long as they were willing to tolerate my resistance to the God stuff. What I couldn’t accommodate was what I perceived as rampant arrogance on the part of people who felt entitled to badger others into adopting their faith. Proselytizing struck me as not only arrogant but dangerous, in that it suggested a fundamental unwillingness to coexist with people who don’t share your narrative of the universe. I couldn’t help but notice that for Evangelicals, the most determined and numerous proselytizers around, that unwillingness to coexist was manifesting as legislation of faith.

When I moved to Virginia for graduate school, it wasn’t long before I realized I was squatting in Christian country. Naturally, I felt alien there, but I began to realize—with the Christian conservative-fueled reelection of George W. Bush and the ensuing media coverage of the whopping third of our country self-identifying as Evangelical—that my whole perception of our country as a secular place had canted to favor my experience. Our country was much more Evangelical than I’d ever realized, and I felt it critical to grapple in person with what that meant: What were Evangelicals like when they weren’t speaking into a microphone? What was it like in their churches? What was their vision for our shared future?

Q: Why did you choose to join Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church?

Jerry Falwell was one of the only Evangelicals...[read on]

Visit Gina Welch's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue