Anna North

Teddy Wayne, author of Kapitoil, interviewed Anna North about her new novel, America Pacifica.  Part of the exchange:

What were some of your literary inspirations for America Pacifica?

While I was writing America Pacifica, I was also reading a lot of noir fiction -- Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson. These writers influenced me a lot, especially in their pacing and the isolation their main characters feel. The detectives in noir novels often face danger at every turn and feel like outsiders wherever they go, and I thought about them a lot when I was writing about Darcy's search for her mom. I was also deeply inspired by Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, which is about a young woman who's raised by a book. I loved its dystopian setting -- I've always devoured stories of gritty futures -- but more than that, I was attracted to the story of a girl from difficult circumstances who grows up to be a hero. I've long been really interested in what makes a person become heroic, what shapes her into someone with the ability to make history. So in addition to The Diamond Age, I've been influenced by quest narratives like The Odyssey and Arthurian legends.

How much did you think about politics when writing the book? What are its political implications?

I was really interested in the choices people would have to make after the ice age hit, and I ended up focusing on the decision between trying to preserve life as it once was or living in an entirely new way. This decision becomes intensely political because it's not possible to preserve the old life for everyone -- there are only enough resources to provide baseball, beef, and apples for a wealthy few. But to give all that up, to say no one's going to eat a hamburger or...[read on]

Visit Anna North's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Colin Cotterill

Colin Cotterill is the author of The Coroner’s Lunch, Thirty-Three Teeth, Disco for the Departed, and Anarchy and Old Dogs, featuring seventy-three year old Dr. Siri Paiboun, national coroner of Laos.

Killed at the Whim of a Hat, which kicks off a new series, is due out in the US in July 2011.

From his Q & A with LJ Hurst at Shots:

Colin Cotterill, thanks for talking to Shots. Killed At The Whim Of A Hat to be published in March 2011 by Quercus in the UK begins a new series. Previously you’ve had the elderly male coroner, Dr Siri Paiboun as your protagonist but now you’ve reversed things, with Jimm Juree, a feisty young female reporter. And you’ve changed your scene from Laos to Thailand. Why have you made those changes?

A change is as good as a rest. I always thought I’d coined that phase but I saw footage of Benjamin Disraeli using it on YouTube. Yet it still holds true in this millennium. Dr Siri and his team write their own stories these days and they often don’t let me get a word in. You can know characters too well to the point that writing them gives you fewer challenges. You know how they’re going to react and you’ve got the Dr. Siri fan club members who know how they’re going to react. So trying something new just pisses people off. I needed a break from 1970s Laos and a new challenge. Four years ago we moved to the south of Thailand to a little fishing village in the middle of nowhere. ‘Ha Ha’, I thought. ‘Now there’s a challenge. I’ll set my new series here in a place that’s so dull the local police station doesn’t have a cell. I’ll make it contemporary so I can do all my research on-line and I’ll make the protagonist a feisty young female reporter who happens to be the same age and nationality as my wife. I’ll throw in my dogs and my neighbours and cast them into turmoil by inventing heinous crimes that turn their lives upside down. All being well I might not even need to get out of bed at all.

I was pleased to meet Jimm Juree with her confidence and optimism. Your Quercus list-mate Adrian Hyland, with his Emily Tempest mysteries set in Australia, has a similar heroine. Do you think there is something in the air that rejects the old tropes of “women in peril” that have been kept alive by Nikki French and others? If so, why is it that male authors are writing about these women?

To be perfectly honest I’m afraid of women. To be more specific I’m afraid of...[read on]

Visit Colin Cotterill's website and his Crimespace page.

The Page 69 Test: Anarchy and Old Dogs.

My Book, The Movie: Curse of the Pogo Stick.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tess Gerritsen

Tess Gerritsen's latest novel is The Silent Girl.

From her Q & A with award-winning crime writer Matt Rees:

[Rees:]What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?

[Gerritsen:] I’m traveling at the moment so don’t have the book in front of me, but it’s the first sentence from GONE WITH THE WIND (paraphrased): “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it…” At least, it’s the one sentence that has stuck with me through the years.

And you remembered it correctly, even on the road, by the way. What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?

The battle scenes of Helm’s Deep from Tolkien’s THE TWIN TOWERS. Or maybe it’s just that the book was such a beloved favorite that I still remember the horrible description of the decapitated warriors’ heads flying over the battlements.

Who’s the greatest stylist currently writing?

An impossible question! Let’s just say that I’m very much enjoying the creativity of Markus Zusak’s THE BOOK THIEF.

Who’s the greatest plotter currently writing?

Another impossible question! But I do think that there’s a reason that writers such as...[read on]

Learn about Gerritsen's favorite heroine from outside literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Louis Bayard

From Louis Bayard's Q & A about his latest novel, The School of Night, with Lenny Picker at Publishers Weekly:

How did you learn about the School of Night [an obscure Elizabethan society of poets and scientists]?

Professor Google. Who, in addition to being a useful time-suck, is a very useful idea generator. Somehow or other, I landed on a page about the School of Night, and it was the name itself that captured my attention. And the more I learned, the more intrigued I was. Thomas Harriot, an author, astronomer, and mathematician, became my protagonist because, of all the school's purported members, he was the least likely to have his own book.

How has your work in politics and your current work as a critic affected your fiction writing?

I gave up working in politics a while back, and while I have strongly held beliefs, I try very hard not to let them seep into my work. By contrast, I think being a critic is pretty central to my fiction because...[read on]

Visit Louis Bayard's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Black Tower.

The Page 69 Test: The Pale Blue Eye.

The Page 69 Test: The School of Night.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erica Jong

Erica Jong is the author of Fear of Flying and the editor of a newly released book titled Sugar In My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex, an anthology features essays and short stories about sexuality from prominent female writers in a variety of fields.

From her Q & A with Nick Andersen at the Wall Street Journal:

The Wall Street Journal: In your introductory essay for this book, you mention that sexuality has been cheapened in more recent times. How has writing about sex changed since you first published “Fear of Flying?”

Erica Jong: There is so much pornography on the internet, and there isn’t really any good, sensitive, smart writing on sexuality, which is the opposite of pornography. To get a bunch of really good writers to write about their feelings was really hard to do. When people go out to write about their feelings, that’s hard to do. People wanted to ask their significant others, their children — which is a mistake. Regardless of changing attitudes, it’s still hard to write about sexuality. Often, women who write about sex are not taken seriously as writers. They feel they are demoted on the literary scale.

So how did you assemble this collection, then? Who did you call, and how did you choose?

I know a lot of writers. I used to be the President of the Author’s Guild, so I had a lot of writers’ numbers. I wanted variety, and I didn’t want explicit essays. I wanted a broad spectrum of ideas, fantasies — but not explicit writing. I called up Gail Gollins, and she said, ‘I’m going to write about how Catholic education primes you for bad sex.’ She has such a satirical spin. But you also have Liz Smith going back to the 1940s, talking about sex during World War II. Or Ann Roiphe talking about children playing doctor — both are afraid, but both are helping the other along, too. Or even my daughter saying, ‘They had sex, so we don’t have to.’ It’s a backlash, and a kind of summary of where we are.

Were there writers that you didn’t get to contribute that you wish you had?

I wish that I had...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Graham Swift

Graham Swift was born in 1949 and is the author of nine acclaimed novels including Waterland and the newly released Wish You were Here, a collection of short stories and Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing. He has won many awards for his work including the 1996 Booker Prize.

From his Q & A with Jonathan Ruppin (one of the team at Foyle's, Charing Cross Road):

Wish You Were Here reflects on the consequences for ordinary people of contemporary issues, the conflict in Iraq and the difficulties faced by farming communities. Is this a political novel or do they simply form a context for the issues Jack and Ellie face?

I don't think the either-or of the question really applies. I don't write political novels in the sense of writing with a political agenda and my primary interest is in the messy, uncategorizable stuff of personal life and in what might be called 'the stuff we have inside us'. And I also simply want to tell a story. But, equally, I've always been interested in how the 'small world' of our personal lives connects or doesn't connect with the 'big world' of historical and communal forces. Once you enter that area, there's a political dimension. You'd hardly call Jack a 'political creature' and most of his dealings in the novel are of an acutely personal kind, but he's not totally blind to the fact that he's also dealing, intimately and personally, with the consequences of his country's foreign policy or to the need to look into his own conscience about it. There's a passage in the novel where he reflects, clumsily, on what it means to be a 'citizen' - to be a citizen in the particular distressing circumstances he has to confront. That's the beginning of politics.

In locating Jack and Ellie's new life in a seaside caravan park, you've returned to the liminal zone between land and water that served you so well in Last Orders, Waterland and 'Cliffedge' [a short story in Learning to Swim]. Why do you think you've been drawn to writing about such locations?

I agree that I keep coming back to the seaside. There's a piece in my non-fiction book Making an Elephant which is all about this and called 'I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside', which was one of the epigraphs for Last Orders. There are two aspects to it. I think...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Esri Allbritten

From a Q & A with Esri Allbritten about her new novel, Chihuahua of the Baskervilles:

Q: Chihuahua of the Baskervilles features something called the Emma Crawford Coffin Race. Is that a real event?

A: It is. Emma Crawford came to Manitou Springs, CO, in the late 1800s, hoping to cure her tuberculosis by drinking the spring waters. It didn’t work, but before she died, she got engaged and asked her fiancée to bury her on the top of Red Mountain. It wasn’t an official graveyard, and when the railroad needed the land, they moved her grave. Maybe they weren’t very careful, because in 1929, a huge rainstorm unearthed poor Emma and sent her coffin hurtling down the mountain on a tide of mud. So every year in October, the people of Manitou Springs dress up and race coffins down the main street. The event draws about ten thousand people, most of them in costume, and feels like a cross between Mardi Gras and Halloween.

Q:Is the coffin race the reason you set the novel in Manitou Springs?

A: That was part of it. My plan is to set each book of this series in a tourist town that has some cool event. I fell in love with Manitou Springs when I attended Authorfest, a writing conference. It’s a real jewel of a town, everyone is tremendously friendly, and if they all buy a copy of my book, that’ll be a nice print run.

Q: One of your characters likes to poke fun at the supernatural. Are you a believer or a skeptic?

A: When I first moved to Boulder, I...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Kelle Groom

Kelle Groom is a poet and memoirist. She is the author of three poetry collections: Five Kingdoms (Anhinga Press, 2010); Luckily (Anhinga, 2006); and Underwater City (University Press of Florida, 2004). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2010, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among others, and has received special mention in the Pushcart Prize 2010 and Best American Non-Required Reading 2007 anthologies.

From a Q & A about her new memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl:

It seems as though this book has probably existed in some form or another in your head for a long time. Was finally getting it all down on paper an act of therapy for you, or were the events of your life something you had to come to terms with personally before you could write this memoir?

I kept journals, from before my son was born, throughout my active alcoholism, and well into sobriety. Even in the journals, I wouldn't call it therapy—I had a sense of myself as a writer. Other than a brief childhood interest in becoming an archeologist, I'd always wanted to be a writer. The journal writing often felt as if it was saving my life, not as therapeutic exercise, but as writing practice—that even in the darkest, craziest confusion, I could write. The chapter, "The Last Time I Saw Her" began as a story I wrote for an undergraduate creative writing class in 1984, a year after the events in the story. From the beginning, I knew that the only way to have an understanding, to know what had happened, would be to write it. What drives the memoir is my not having come to terms with the events of my life. It's the hunger to know and to understand that set the book in motion. In 2006, when I put aside my journals and began writing this memoir from the beginning, I believed that the writing of it would take me to my son. That I would find him in whatever way was possible. I was also able to see my younger self as a character, with the clarity and compassion I would offer any stranger. It was crucial to the writing, and I could also feel how that care for her/my younger self and the discoveries I made were changing me as I wrote. The writing of the book also catalyzed the visit to my son's parents. I'd been unable to make that trip for 27 years, unable to even pick up the phone.

Since you have been sharing your story, have you found that others have opened up about personal experiences involving alcoholism, adoption, or the loss of a child at a young age?

Yes, it's been really great that others connect to my story and have talked and written to me about their own. While some stories are directly related to the subjects that I write about, others aren't specific to alcoholism or adoption. People have...[read on]

The Page 99 Test: I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl.

Writers Read: Kelle Groom.

--Marshal Zeringue

Melissa Febos

From Terry Gross's Q & A with Melissa Febos, author of the memoir Whip Smart:

GROSS: How strange was it to tie people up - people who wanted bondage as part of what they were paying for? I mean, that just has to be a really - particularly when you're first doing it - it has to be a really crazy, odd, kind of creepy experience.

Ms. FEBOS: Yeah, I mean, a lot of the experiences were. And you know, this is one of those jobs, I think like a lot of probably a lot of people in the medical industry have this kind of experience, or maybe even people in sports, too. But you work very, very closely with human bodies in a way that most people don't.

It's very intimate. You know, you really get to know the human body. And when people are paying to be put in this position and make themselves really vulnerable, they do give you a kind of power, and that was sort of a clumsy position for me to be in at first, and it made me really nervous. And it wasn't always a power that I wanted, you know. But I was also - I was also fascinated and kind of mesmerized by it. But yeah, tying up another person is a bizarre experience.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. FEBOS: Most people don't have that experience, I don't think.

GROSS: What's the protocol when a session begins, when you're entering the room? Is the client already in there? Is there a protocol for them?

Ms. FEBOS: Well, before the session begins, there's usually a consultation. And if it's a new client who doesn't sort of have a regular dominatrix that he sees, he comes in. And all of the women working a particular shift will walk into the room one by one and talk to him for a couple minutes, and sort of suss out what his penchants are, and see if they're interested in doing that session, and sort of try to get information but also sell themselves.

And then the phone girl goes back in, and the client will pick the woman that he wants to do the session with, and then you'll have another consultation where you'll sort of iron out the fine details of the session so that by the time the clock actually starts on a session, you already know what the scene is, you already know what your outfit is, what equipment you'll need. And so you can really walk into the room and...[read on, or listen to the interview]

Read more about Whip Smart.

Visit the official Melissa Febos website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Vanessa Veselka

Vanessa Veselka's new novel is Zazen.

From her Q & A with Jennifer Tyler at Three Guys One Book:

JT: Zazen is your first novel. Did you know it was a novel when you started to write it?

VV: I started writing Zazen in somewhat of a fury and wrote it as a short story, sent it in to Tin House for consideration, but then kept writing. While I realized within a couple of weeks that it was going to be my first novel, I was a little resistant to that idea. I had another idea in mind and didn’t consider myself ready to write a novel.

I came to fiction very late, at 35 really, and wrote a couple of short stories. The first one got published, which was very encouraging, but I never considered myself a short story writer. And yet I wasn’t a novelist. So what the hell was I? Delusional? But I had this idea of a novel I was always going to write. It was a bildungsroman with an anti-heroine that I thought was my one real story to tell. My first short story, “Il Duce”, was actually an exploration of that idea. So my plan was to practice on a bunch of short stories then work up to the novel.

But Zazen destroyed all my plans. I think novels that want to be written do. Della’s voice took over my world. Sometimes that felt like a samurai sword and sometimes like a meth binge. Novels are a curse, in some ways. You look down three years later and realize your most intimate relationships are imaginary. It’s very disconcerting. Also, the amount of alone time you need comes out of your social bank. At the end, while people will listen to your new song or look at your new poem or painting, in general, nobody wants to read your novel. Leper. Novelist. Wake me when it’s published. I’m kidding somewhat. I was fortunate enough to have some really devoted support around me. Ultimately though, I wrote Zazen because I had no emotionally viable alternative.

JT: Aside from you bringing your life experience into the work (union organizer, paleontology student, expatriate…), how much of Della is you?

VV: Writers tend to range on how they understand this question about self and character. Many say that they...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Vanessa Veselka's blog.

My Book, The Movie: Zazen.

The Page 69 Test: Zazen.

Writers Read: Vanessa Veselka.

--Marshal Zeringue