Little Red Riding Hood

Next Friday, May 11, Anna Trodglen, creator of the online comic strip Biscuits & Bellyrubs, will unveil her translation and illustration of Little Red Riding Hood, the classic children’s story, from the original German. The book celebration is set to be held at the Young Blood Gallery (636 N Highland Ave. Atlanta, GA 30306/404-254-4127), from 6 to 9 PM. As befits a children’s book, kids are encouraged to attend (bring the parents of course) the gathering, where snacks and sodas will be served. As an added bonus, Anna’s musical collaboration with husband Dugan Trodglen and John Armstrong (aka the legendary band, DQE) will perform a set. In anticipation of the event, Anna and the book’s designer/letterer Anthony Owsley allowed me to email interview them. (Eagle eye readers will note this marks the second time I have gotten to interview Anna [the first time being in 2010]) My thanks to Trodglen & Owsley for the interview.

Tim O’Shea: What inspired you to tackle Little Red Riding Hood, rather than translating one of the myriad other German folklore tales?

Anna Trodglen: I wanted to do Little Red Riding Hood because I was really drawn to the Wolf. He seemed very interesting and as a dog relative he was appealing to me. I also liked the limited number of cast in the story and that there were three distinct female characters.

O’Shea: Was there any aspect of the translation that proved more daunting than expected?

Trodglen: For the most part the translation went well but there were a couple sentences that had so many pronouns in them that I couldn’t figure out what was going on, so I just let those sentences go.

O’Shea: In translating the story, were there nuances you learned that you had not heard in previous versions of the tale?

Trodglen: There’s a postlog that’s a little different and surprising.

O’Shea:  How did you and designer/letterer Anthony Owsley decide upon a design for the book? Were several fonts considered before you settled on the final one?

Anthony Owsley: When Anna showed me the drawings she was working on, and explained how she wanted a completely traditional approach to the storytelling, I immediately got the idea of an old letterpress edition storybook. Anna and I are both big fans of late 19th Century/early 20th Century storybooks and often give each other old picture books as gifts, so that was an approach we both readily agreed on.

I wanted to color it in a way that would not distract from, or obscure Anna’s line work, which is often uniform width and highly detailed. I decided to use a limited color palette with large areas of broad flat colors which, again, would harken back to turn-of-the-Century letterpress drawings and early comic strips.

Font selection was pretty easy and I got it right the first time. I wanted something that looked antique, traditional and slightly fairytale without looking too Ren-fair. Thomas Paine has always been one of my favorite fonts and it fit the bill perfectly. It’s rustic and earthy, with enough flourish to fit into a fantasy settting. It also looks good in the 12-16 point range needed for young childrens’ storybooks. Anna loved it immediately.

O’Shea: How did getting Anthony involved make the book a stronger project?

Trodglen: Anthony has lots of experience making books and doing design so I knew I wanted to get him on board. Also Anthony is very meticulous and precise, where I am more slapdash; and he’s a lot more laid back than I am, which is an asset in working with a terrier like me. I knew Anthony could do a great job, and he did.

O’Shea: Anthony, what is it about Anna’s work that made you want to be involved in the project?

Owsley: Anna and I have been friends for many years and always wanted to collaborate on something, but nothing suitable ever came up. This was a chance to finally do something together. Also, when I learned that she was going to produce this through CreateSpace, I saw it as an opportunity to learn a few new technological skills that could help me on later freelance jobs.

O’Shea: The book will be officially launched at Young Blood Gallery in Virginia Highlands on May 11, what makes that gallery an ideal place for the launch?

Trodglen: Young Blood is a really classy place and has tons of nice looking, solid art, so it’s exciting to get to work with them. It has a gallery and boutique. The book will be on sale at the gallery at the opening and into the future. I will have greeting cards and prints as well and I think Anthony will have stuff for sale too.

Owsley: I used to have a studio space near Young Blood’s original Grant Park location so I would often drop in and look around. I always liked their DIY attitude. When I finally caught up with them in their new space, I was impressed. They had a nice boutique in the front part to sell artwork, and a huge open space in the back suitable for a live band to play. I thought it was perfect.

O’Shea: Given your many talents, am I correct in assuming there might be some live music at the book launch?

Trodglen: Dugan and John (Armstrong) and I will play a honky tonk acoustic set at 7 pm. The opening is from 6 to 9.

O’Shea: How satisfying was it to get to the finish line with this book, and to hold the finished product in your hands?

Trodglen: It’s a little scary to get to the finish line with a project, because that means it’s over, but I think we’re both pretty happy with it. The fi al stretch with multiple proofs and problems was so stressful too that when it finally got cleared up it was really a relief. All of that last bit of design and proofing fell to Anthony and he was really patient about it, which I appreciate.

Owsley: There were a few frustrating periods in the production of the book. There was a bit of a learning curve with formatting the book to CreateSpace’s template. We had to go through several proofs before getting it the way we both liked it. But the hard work paid off. I think it looks great!

Never Sit Down in a Hoopskirt and Other Things I Learned in Southern Belle Hell

When a mutual friend told me about Young Adult novelist Crickett Rumley‘s 2011 book, Never Sit Down in a Hoopskirt and Other Things I Learned in Southern Belle Hell, I immediately decided I had to email interview the author. Here’s the official scoop on the book: “Expelled from thirteen boarding schools in the past five years, seventeen-year-old Jane Fontaine Ventouras is returning to her Southern roots, and the small town of Bienville, Alabama, where ladies always wear pearls, nothing says hospitality like sweet tea and pimento cheese sandwiches, and competing in the annual Magnolia Maid Pageant is every girl’s dream.

“But Jane is what you might call an anti-belle, more fishnets and tattoos than sugar and spice. The last thing on her mind is joining the Magnolia Maid brigade and parading around town in a dress so big she can’t fit through a door. So when she finds herself up to her ears in ruffles and etiquette lessons, she’s got one mission: ESCAPE.”

This interview was conducted in late 2011. My thanks to Rumley for her time and humor.

Tim O’Shea: When did you first realize you derived creative satisfaction from writing teen comedy?

Crickett Rumley: Being a teenager is one of the most terrifying states of existence on earth. At least it was for me. On some level, everybody feels awkward and is searching for who they are, whether they are the most popular girl in school or the computer geek who hides in the corner and only comes out to answer calculus questions. Under those conditions, emotions run at full velocity – the highs are stratospheric, the lows are deeper than the sea. Everything means everything. So I’ve always felt that period in a character’s life is ripe for story-picking.

But discovering that I could write comedy? That’s a funny story! It was my third year of film school (I got my MFA in Film from Columbia University), and I was taking a class in writing television movies. At that point, I was known for writing earnest, angst-filled, twenty-something dramas, but I was not truly satisfied with anything I had written. It didn’t feel right. So we had this assignment to write ten pages of scenes based on a newspaper article. I chose a piece about a family of women who married old men and killed them for money. I thought I had written another earnest, angst-ridden drama, but when we read the scenes out loud in class, people were laughing. I don’t mean a little chuckle here and there. I mean, full-on, falling on the floor, can’t-catch-your-breath-laughing.

Cut to me, petrified. Eyes wider than the Grand Canyon. Turning redder than Rudolph the Reindeer’s nose. I couldn’t believe what was happening! My words had had that effect on my fellow classmates? What!? I started giggling, too, but not a charming, amused little laugh, noooooooo. Mine was a very high-pitched squeal of a giggle. Kinda like a pig. A stuck pig. A very nervous, freaked out stuck pig. But when the reading was over and the laughing died down, and all the tears had been wiped away, I felt amazing. I knew I had found my writing home, my writer’s voice, and I have never turned back.

O’Shea: Were you involved with the development of the trailer for the book? How enjoyable was that to develop?

Rumley: Yes, indeed! I wrote, co-directed and produced it. With my background in film, making a trailer was a natural extension of the book. Matt Kohnen and Nick Sivakumaran, my fellow instructors at the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles, got on board early to co-direct and shoot it for me. They were such a joy to work with. Lake Sharp, who played the Belle, is a dancer as well as an actress, and such a funny woman, that I knew that she would be able to rock that hoopskirt. And boy, did she! We laughed our butts off watching Lake move around in that dress, and the expressions on her face, well, I could never KEEP a straight face during filming! I would have to shove my hand in my mouth so that I didn’t laugh and ruin the moment. I especially love when she tries to play soccer in the dress. The kids in the trailer, my young friends Ruby and Hart, had a blast chasing each other around the dress. And Marcello, my dashingly handsome actor, was totally game for anything. He actually fell out of that tree again and again trying to kiss Lake!

Everyone on the shoot was a superstar, and I am very grateful that they shared their talents with me.

O’Shea: What was the biggest challenge in terms of writing Never Sit Down in a Hoopskirt?

Rumley: Learning to write prose. After so many years of focusing on screenplays, I was accustomed to writing short bursts of dialogue and very sparse paragraphs of scene description. Everything has to be externalized in film, but in prose, there is a tremendous amount of internal monologue. It was quite challenging – overwhelming, in fact – to shift gears. I had to convince myself to just get it in on the page, that no matter how bad it was, I could fix it later. The first draft was over 450 pages long. 450 messy, disorganized pages. It took me a long time to figure out how to construct a chapter that was entertaining and funny. But I really felt like I had something, and I am a big fan of the revision process, so I just kept chipping away at it until I was happy.

O’Shea: In addition to writing, you also teach screenwriting. What’s the most enjoyable aspect of teaching for you?

Rumley: Getting to hear stories from my students! I have a very interactive teaching style, and I encourage writers to draw from their personal experiences to create characters and dramatic conflict. Because our students range in age (18-80) and nationality (often there are only two or three Americans in a class of 12), the stories they tell, the characters they talk about in class, are incredibly diverse. Yet we are all humans traveling under the sun, and emotions are powerfully universal, even if culture isn’t. Every day in the classroom, I find myself inspired, whether it’s a story that a South African television presenter tells us about a surprise birthday party that her family threw her at dawn in the African bush, or it’s a character portrait that an American vet creates based on an insurgent he shot in Iraq. Never a dull moment, believe me.

O’Shea: How important/beneficial was social media (such as FB) in terms of marketing the book?

Rumley: I am not quite sure yet, Tim. Of course I developed a website and a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account and I try to keep up with them on a regular basis. To be honest, though, I think my live, in-person interactions with people have had a lot of impact, as well. I LOVE talking to people!

That being said, look for more action on my website come the new year [2012]. I’m excited about upcoming blog posts, including interviews with bona fide Southern belles and anti-belles, and some contests featuring Smashbox Cosmetics as prizes!

O’Shea: Who was your favorite character to write in the book?

Rumley: That’s like asking who is my favorite child! Heehee, luckily, I have no children. I love all my characters, but Brandi Lyn was the most fun to write. She is incredibly thoughtful and sweet, yet she has strong beliefs and is not afraid to express them. She comes from a modest background, yet has a work ethic that would blow many of us out of the sky. She’s a fish out of water, but she doesn’t let that stop her from pursuing lofty dreams. One of my favorite scenes in the book is when she lovingly gives her daddy a hard time for using the Lord’s name in vain, and he responds by saying “Sorry, baby” and tossing a quarter into an overflowing jar. Brandi Lyn’s so sweet, everybody just wants to love her and make her happy! Talk about catching more flies with honey…

O’Shea: In terms of the book reviews, were you pleasantly surprised that the Booklist reviewer noticed that you worked “in nice points about shaking up the status quo while still keeping things light and bright”? 

Rumley: Thrilled, actually. In fact, I am still grinning from ear to ear. In all seriousness, the fact that readers can laugh and have fun with the characters, yet still respond to the serious points that matter the most to me as a storyteller, well, that is exactly what’s it’s all about for me.

O’Shea: Is it hard for you to read reviews, or do you enjoy reading them?

Rumley: I count myself lucky that most of my reviews have been good, so I’ve been enjoying them!

O’Shea: In doing book signings, did you ever have some fun encounters with recovering and/or active Southern Belles?

Rumley: Women of a certain age LOVE telling me about their hoopskirt stories from back in the days when hoopskirts were commonly worn to proms, debutante balls, cotillions, et.al. And the stories ALWAYS involve the skirt flying over their heads, often with a cute date present, which always leads to maximum awkwardness! I love it!

The truth of the matter is, though, people have strong reactions to the “Southern Belle Hell” part of the title. They either love it and immediately start telling me about the time they committed (or had to suffer through) some horrible Southern belle faux pas, or they hate it and think I am going straight to hell. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration, but the head of the Historic Mobile Preservation Society did write me that as a bona fide Southern belle, she took issue with my title. Being the cheeky gal that I am, I immediately sent her a copy of the book. That was in May. Wonder if she’s read it yet?

O’Shea: Sorry, but I would kick myself if I did not ask–what was it like to work for John Sayles? Did working for him have some influence on your approach to writing?

Rumley: Working for John Sayles and his producer/partner Maggie Renzi was the best gig ever! They were incredibly supportive of their assistants and interns, and I learned a tremendous amount about how a film is made when I worked as their post-production assistant on the Secret of Roan Inish.

In terms of lasting influence, that would have to be in the realm of social commentary. This touches back on that question you asked about the review in Booklist. John’s work always contains an element of social commentary, and I also believe that it’s important that artists and writers not only express themselves, but express something of value to society. Of course, my take on life is a lot more comedic than John’s, but his influence is definitely present in my core belief system.

O’Shea: As writers go, you’re nothing if not ambitious. When most folks mention their next project, they have one or two items in the hopper. You had a list, that included:
— a TV pilot called Irreverent
— a screenplay about a bunch of crazy Southern women titled Fruitcake
– the stirrings of an idea for a musical for which I have named my father Head of Music Research
— And of course, I would love to write another Southern Belle Hell book!

Which of these on your list is closest to completion?

Rumley: You’re talking about a curse of blessings here, Tim! I always have a lot going on, but I don’t have a lot of time to devote to my own projects since I teach full-time. The good news is that I have drafts of the pilot and the screenplay written. They just need to be fixed. I am tossing around various ideas for my next novel, and I think I am going to draft a TV series version of Hoopskirt for my film and TV agent to shop around. I am SO looking forward to winter break – I am going to check myself into a hotel in Palm Springs (two hours east of my home in LA) for a few days and write me up a storm!

O’Shea: Is there anything you’d like to discuss that I neglected to ask you about?

Rumley: I am thrilled that this book got published and that people are responding warmly to it. Hands down, the best thing about publishing a novel, though, has been that I’ve had the chance to reconnect with people from all stages of my life! Friends from college, high school, of my mother, of my father, of my sister, long-lost relatives – they have come out of the woodwork with a tremendous amount of support and interest. I am so grateful! It’s been such a fun year and I can’t wait to get the next book out into the world!

The Mimic’s Own Voice

Tom Williams’ novella, The Mimic’s Own Voice, was released in 2011. Williams was kind enough to entertain a few questions of mine in this email interview (conducted in early December 2011). Williams’ story is a quirky consideration of mimicry and biography. And I’m not just saying that because of the kind sentiment he expresses at the start of the interview. As noted in his bio: “A former James Michener Fellow, he has received individual artist fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board and the Arkansas Arts Council. He currently is an associate editor of American Book Review” and Department Chair/Professor of English at Morehead State University. My thanks to Williams for his time and thoughts as well as Susan Henderson for helping to arrange this interview.

Tom Williams: Tim, let me first say thanks for agreeing to do this interview. One of the great things about having a small press book is that I’ve been required, pretty much, to do a lot of my own publicity. Yet I get to meet (in this virtual way) people like yourself, who do so much for writers and, it seems to me, receive so little in return. I hope I don’t stumble too much over these great questions.

Tim O’Shea: In developing this story, how early did you realize it was best suited as a novella, as opposed to a novel or short story?

Williams: As evidence of my unerring commercial intuition, I knew almost right away that it was a novella. The opening lines had a certain kind of tone and were pointing toward an almost historic sweep. I thought for a time it might be a novel but sensed the appropriate length was short of novel length after I had gone through, for the first time, my comedy history–from the one liner royalty to the vernacular story tellers to the mimics to the social critics to, finally, the observational comics. To flesh it out too much would, I thought, ruin the joke, and to try to bring it in under 30 pages would leave too much out.

O’Shea: In this Creative Loafing review, it is written: “Despite the layers of voices and styles, nothing about this book feels pastiche-ey or cobbled-together. Williams expertly subordinates each to the larger narrative, the academic story of Douglas Myles, and incorporates his source material smoothly into something more like a quilt than a collage, or like an onion.” How frustrating or taxing was it to build your narrative with the layers of voices and styles?

Williams: I’m having a conversation via email with another fiction writer, John Warner, whose debut novel, The Funny Man, shares many of the same themes and obsessions as The Mimic’s Own Voice, and one thing that he said that intrigued me was that in his own writing he needed to find ways to keep himself interested in the story. I went through a similar process. In trying to utilize all those voices and texts (I invented newspapers, journals, TV shows, all sorts of things for this purpose) in one narrative I was challenging myself and it became one of the joys of coming back to the manuscript every day. I can remember distinctly one morning inventing one of the critics, Melissa Tangier, and saying, “Oh man, she’s biracial, too,” and working to figure out where her lines would come in and blend with the other critics and the voice of the narrator. Seriously, though, I don’t think it would be the book it is without that element of multiple voices. That review,too, that you cite, by Jason Cook, is one that I think really gets at a lot of the crucial matters of the book, which is really heartening, knowing some people might have gotten what I was up to.

O’Shea: How important was it for the fuel/drive of the story that the lead character be “the only child of Angela and Ellis Myles, a black mother and white father“. And when I ask that question, I not only mean the racial aspect, but the element of being an only child?

Williams: You’re one of the first people to highlight the only child aspect of Douglas’s life, Tim, and I can’t stress enough how important I thought that was. Because I’m biracial, many people wondered how much of Douglas’s story has parallels with mine, and while I won’t say we are without similarities, what really helped make him the character I finally started to work with was his being an only child–unlike me. Had he any siblings, he wouldn’t have become a mimic, he wouldn’t have become the person he is, as he would have had somebody enough like him to identify with. As it is, when he’s finally orphaned and wholly alone, it’s as if he identifies with everyone else and never really, as we used to say, finds himself–though he’s one of the most famous people in the world.

O’Shea: In developing the novella, how much did you research the craft of being a mimic?

Williams: I hope this doesn’t disappoint, but virtually none. For one, there isn’t a whole lot, I’ve since discovered, to research. Mimicry seems one of those skills that people have or don’t have. I’m an okay mimic myself, but I’m out of practice and I was never up to the level Douglas Myles is. With him, I tried to imagine what it would be like if I could find in everyone’s voice something to reproduce and let it go from there. This lack of research might explain why I also left out in Douglas’s manuscript any of the techniques of mimicry. I feel kind of like a fraud now. Thanks, Tim.

O’Shea: How intrigued were you to read this analysis, which juxtaposed you work with Phong Nguyen’s Memory Sickness?

Williams: Speaking of great reviewers, John Stazinski couldn’t have written a better review if I had invented him. As well, in passing, he compared me to Sartre, Camus and Ellison, who belong to a club where I won’t even be invited to to clean the bathrooms. Moreover, I liked that my book shared space with Phong’s incredible collection. I don’t think his stories in that particular collection confront head on as much the issue of biracial identity, but his sensibility, shaped by being biracial, too, is very similar to mine. It’s that sense of being in-between, having connections with but never completely, to different cultures and experiences. I don’t want to speak for Phong, but as a biracial man, I’ve always felt like a spy without allegiances, bouncing between two warring nations.

He and I, along with some other first book authors, are going to read at Barbara’s Bookstore in Chicago during the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference [which was held in February 2012]. Should be a good time.

O’Shea: I’m curious, given that the novella is dedicated to your mother, do you agree with this writer’s assessment: “He keeps the memory of his mother alive in Myles’ beautifully written character.”

Williams: That is a wonderful sentiment, one that makes me wish I were the writer this person thinks I am, but in truth the book was finished long before my mother died. At the risk of sounding totally sentimental, I had always known that I would dedicate my first book to my parents. When I got the notice from Main Street Rag that they wanted to publish The Mimic’s Own Voice it was September and she’d died that May.

But in a way, Douglas Myles’s whole need to mimic stemmed from a need to keep people’s voices alive, even when the people themselves were no more. And of course this is, to me, the tragedy of the book, of Douglas’s art (if you want to call mimicry art)–that art can console but not quite heal. Yet what would we do without it?

This reminds me, too, that I need to get to work because I owe my dad a dedication. And my wife. And my son. And all the teachers who helped me to get where I am now.

O’Shea: Given the complexity of the novella, how much revision and editing (and how long as process) did it take you to get it completed?

Williams: I’ve shared this before in interviews, that , for one, I finished it so long ago, I’m wondering whether I’m inventing another fiction when I talk about its composition. But in truth it was such a joy to draft that I remember finishing the first version very quickly. A couple of months, perhaps. It was called at that time the Impressionist’s Own Voice, which sounds incredibly clumsy now yet the only reason I changed it was because a visit to Books A Million in 2003 shoved in my face some copies of Hari Kunzru’s novel The Impressionist.

Revision didn’t take all that long either. A month or two. I worked, as I tend to do, exclusively on this. Douglas Myles really consumed me. I wanted his world to be as amazing as he was and literally seven days a week I tried to make that happen.

The real story is how long the book sat, unpublished and nearly forgotten by its author. I am pretty sure the earliest completed version of it was part of a collection of stories I sent out in the summer of 2003; obviously, it didn’t get published. (Though the press, I point out with no glee, is no longer, so I got lucky by their rejection.) I sent that collection out to some contests, and tried too with some novella contests–no luck. I even sent out the novella to an online journal that specializes in longer works. Again, same story. That Scott Douglass (it just occurred to me that he has nearly the same last name as my central character’s first name) of Main Street Rag asked me if I had a novella to submit to their nascent novella series, and that he and Craig Renfroe said yes to it still strikes me as the most unlikely of dreams coming true.

O’Shea: Anything you’d like to discuss that I neglected to ask you about?

Williams: One thing that I have yet to hear about in the reviews and responses The Mimic’s Own Voice has generated is a discussion about the anonymous scholar narrator. John Stazinski gets it right that the narrator, in the world of the novella, is a “Comedic Studies scholar” but to my knowledge, no one has commented much on him. And to me he’s as much a mimic as Douglas, as any young scholar or even student who has to go through the paces of speaking with a bunch of others voices to speak for his point of view. That’s another thing I love about John’s review: He speaks of how the book turns on the idea of the notion of how all of us are nothing like a stable or consistent self but instead a “pastiche of voices.” But while I’m not saying that we’re all mimics, I am, or at least I thought I was, through both Douglas and the narrator, trying to have fun while exploring the notion of trying to find one’s voice through the use of other’s voices. I’m still trying to find my own, to be quite honest.

Thanks again, Tim. This was a blast.

Tim O’Shea: In a sense, do you think mentors benefit almost as much from the experience as the contributors?

Masha Hamilton: Absolutely. A bridge is being built between Afghan women and both mentors and readers abroad that I think is important to both sides. To read some of the mentors’ comments on our site, look here. Here is one quote from Stacy Parker Le Melle, but you can pick any one you’d like:

“Magical. How else to describe sitting at my computer in Harlem, USA, and connecting with young women in Afghanistan, women who want to better themselves as communicators so that they can be heard at home and all over the world? I cannot thank Masha Hamilton and her partners enough for creating this cyberspace classroom. At times, it feels like we’re meeting in our dreams.”

O’Shea: What are some of the more unique topics tackled by contributors?

Hamilton: The site can be overwhelming to a first-time visitor because there is so much information and so many wonderful essays and poems. A good place to start here here. You can read “My First Namaz,” a lovely poem on loss and prayer, or “I Thought It Was A Dream, But When I Woke Up, I Couldn’t Walk,” written by one of our writers who went to the hospital to visit her grandfather, and while there, met a girl who had lost her legs in a suicide attack. “Running for Parliament, Afghan-Style” is another favorite, by a woman writer who decided to throw her hat in the ring, and won! There is an open letter to President Obama and an open letter to Secretary of State Clinton. “Remembering Fifteen” is one of my personal favorite poems, in which one of our writer remembers being 15 years old, on the cusp of womanhood.

O’Shea: How important are donations to making this project an ongoing viable project?

Hamilton: Absolutely critical. Although we are volunteer-based, we are trying to get our writers laptops and Internet service, and provide Internet cafes for them in undisclosed locations. Rent and security as well as ongoing Internet service is not inexpensive. We have six writers now in a Taliban-dominated province waiting for us to get them Internet. It costs roughly $2,500 a year per writer to support the program.

O’Shea: Unlike writers, who are hoping to raise their profile and market themselves, as noted at the website: “Most of our Afghan writers participate in the project partially or entirely in secret from friends and family.” Clearly it is stressful for participants to risk being found out, but on the administration end how stressful is it to work with these brave women but make sure you do not accidentally reveal their talents/efforts to the wrong people?

Hamilton: We use first names only on the site and take out specific locators. We do not give out their email addresses to anyone not directly associated with AWWP. We have a security team who helps us consider ongoing issues. And we intentionally err on the side of safety. BUT, we still want to keep the project going, because we believe if we shut it down out of security concerns, we are effectively doing the same thing as those who would silence the Afghan woman, even if our motivation is different.

O’Shea: Looking at the project’s Facebook page, I noticed that readers are encouraged to give contributors feedback. In most situations, writers crave feedback–but am I correct in thinking feedback in this situation is appreciated like rain in the middle of a long drought?

Hamilton: The comments are important. The writers know they are being heard. We have a writer who walks four hours each way from a Taliban-controlled province to send us a poem. We don’t want her work to sit out there without comment.

Students of course love teachers who step out of the formality of academic life, who comment on it, but very few do so as more than theater. Very few commit to it the way David Foster Wallace commits to it. “This does not mean we have to sit around smiling sweetly at one another for three hours a week. … In class you are invited (more like urged) to disagree with one another and with me—and I get to disagree with you—provided we are all respectful of each other and not snide, savage or abusive. … In other words, English 102 is not just a Find-Out-What-The-Teacher-Thinks-And-Regurgitate-It-Back-at-Him course. It’s not like math or physics—there are no right or wrong answers (though there are interesting versus dull, fertile versus barren, plausible versus whacko answers).”

Go read the article, follow the links. It’s fun stuff.

The Twelfth Enchantment

In David Liss‘ new novel, The Twelfth Enchantment (Random House), he has decided to mix historical fiction with a dash of magic and the surprise presence of Lord Byron for good measure. Set in early 1800s England, Liss constructs a tale of the young down-on-her-luck Lucy Derrick who fears her best option may be to marry an unappealing fellow. Add to the story’s mix a battle between the Industrial Revolution and Luddites. Liss is clearly an author that loves to research his subjects–and fortunately enjoys discussing his latest novel in this interview.

Not every novelist, even one known for his historical fiction, would tackle the Luddite Uprising–how did you decide upon utilizing that historical event?

It developed naturally from my interest in wanting to write about the economics of the Regency period. I’ve always been drawn to significant moments in the history of capitalism, as well as labor history, so the Luddites were a perfect fit for my interests. Guys who express their anger at the system by breaking machines and burning down buildings? That always makes for a good story! Most people think of Luddites as people who hated technology, but that wasn’t the case. They were skilled laborers who were being left behind by the industrial revolution. Communities where artisans had supported their families for generations were being destroyed by the factory system. This was serious stuff.

Did you hesitate at all in using a major figure like Lord Byron in the book?

I’ve always avoided using real historical figures in my novels before — except in The Whiskey Rebels, where it made good, historical sense. In general, I tend to dislike historical fiction that tries to rehearse everything the reader already knows by writing stories in which everyone who just happens to be famous shows up. In this case, because I was writing historical fantasy, I felt free to play around with facts and characters. My main rule going in was that I could change the way things really happened, I could not change the way things appeared to happen. So, in Byron’s case, in this novel he experiences some things that are totally fictional, but none of it is visible to people on the outside.

What was the most challenging aspect of the history behind the story to research?

I’m used to researching fairly dull and obscure material. That’s par for the course when you write about economic history. In this case, because I was writing about a young woman during the Regency, my editor kept telling me I had to include more detail about clothing and fashions. That was a bit of a challenge for me. I can keep different elements of the stock market straight, but keeping the different dress styles straight was damn near impossible.

How hard was it to incorporate an element of magic into a work partially rooted in historical accuracy?

No, there is a lot of material out there—both secondary sources and reprints of original texts. Much of the reading was difficult, and deliberately so (I explain in the book that magical texts are written to be difficult to turn away readers who are not truly committed). So while it took a lot of time to work through some of these sources, they were not hard to find. Fortunately for me, historical magic is a subject with a lot of enthusiasts, so there is no shortage of interesting books out there.

As you note in this recent Book(ed) Passage interview “this is the first time I’ve written a novel entirely from a female character’s perspective”, at what point in writing the story did you realize you had a firm grasp on Lucy’s voice?

That was one of those things that you can only nail by trial and error. In general, getting the voice right is always the hardest part of starting a new novel, and while writing from the perspective of a young woman was a new sort of challenge, I still went about it the same way: writing and rewriting the first 50 pages or so until the voice felt “right.” Unfortunately there is no exact science, but it is usually easy to tell when you’ve got it right. And even easier to tell when you have it wrong.

Among the cast of this novel, who was the most enjoyable to write?

I always enjoy writing the morally complicated characters the most, so in this case, it is probably Lord Byron—nothing quite so much fun as writing a charismatic asshole.

When you and I discussed your recent comics writing, you said of the creative process: ” I love having an editor to bounce ideas off of.” Are there certain folks you bounce ideas off of, when developing your prose?

I have friends in the industry with whom I can discuss my work, and I always talk about my projects with my wife, but in the end, writing a novel is always going to feel much more solitary than writing comics.

As a veteran best-selling novelist, do you ignore reviews of your book, or do you still get enthused by positive buzz, like the recent Daily Beast praise?

Yes! Especially when the buzz comes from famous people. That sort of thing never stops being cool. But the bottom line is that I write books that are supposed to entertain people, and it’s nice to get feedback and hear that at least some readers think I’m doing an okay job.

Some Amazon reviews are already hoping for a sequel. What are the odds of you revisiting the world of The Twelfth Enchantment again?

I love the world and I love the characters, so it is something I would seriously consider. Write now I’m working on something else, but you never know what the future holds.

Birds of Paradise: A Novel

Article first published as Interview: Novelist Diana Abu-Jaber on Birds of Paradise: A Novel on Blogcritics.

If you are a regular listener to NPR, you likely have heard one of novelist Diana Abu-Jaber‘s frequent essays. Next week (September 6, to be exact) marks the release of the award-winning author’s newest novel, Birds of Paradise [Editor's note: Of course, the book is out as of this past Tuesday]. While I was already aware of Abu-Jaber, thanks to NPR, I did not realize she had finished her new book until an early July tweet by Bethanne Patrick (aka @thebookmaven). Soon after learning of the new novel, I reached out to Abu-Jaber for an email interview–and she was more than happy to entertain my queries. As described by her publisher (W. W. Norton & Company): “In the tropical paradise that is Miami, Avis and Brian Muir are still haunted by the disappearance of their ineffably beautiful daughter, Felice, who ran away when she was thirteen. Now, after five years of modeling tattoos, skateboarding, clubbing, and sleeping in a squat house or on the beach, Felice is about to turn eighteen. Her family—Avis, an exquisitely talented pastry chef; Brian, a corporate real estate attorney; and her brother, Stanley, the proprietor of Freshly Grown, a trendy food market—will each be forced to confront their anguish, loss, and sense of betrayal. Meanwhile, Felice must reckon with the guilty secret that drove her away, and must face her fear of losing her family and her sense of self forever.” In addition to the book, we also delve into her recent mention in a New York Times piece on email manners.

How early in the development of Birds of Paradise did you realize it had to be set in Miami–and what appealed to you in terms of setting it there?

Miami was present from the very first page. My husband and I moved to Miami eight years ago and I knew I wanted to use it as a setting. Ever since my second novel, Crescent, I’ve been very inspired by sunlight and water and I always like to use a strong setting for my stories– like the city of Syracuse and the blizzard that seems to keep blowing throughout Origin, my third novel. Birds of Paradise is a reflection of Miami’s many layers– its outward dazzling tropical colors and beauty, its racial and cultural collisions. I’m fascinated by that complexity and challenged by it. Setting my new novel here gave me a way to reflect on my adopted city and to push myself to learn more about it.

Structurally the story is broken down into chapters alternating their focus/perspective between varying characters–with the chapters labeled by character names. How challenging was it to structure the story in such a manner?

Actually, I found it easier to use the alternating perspectives than a single unified point of view because it gave me a way to break up the action and to tell the story from different vantage points. It did mean that I really had to become deeply familiar with each of those characters– more than, perhaps, with a novel governed by just one or two central characters. But I felt that this helped enrich the story, so that I couldn’t rely on “prop characters” to tell my story.

With the Muir family, was there any family member that you struggled to find the right voice for them in particular (or vice versa, any family member that was easier for you write and why)?

Brian, the father, was a real challenge for me, because he was of a species that I found very mysterious– the corporate executive. At first he was pretty ruthless and unsympathetic and the people who read my early drafts pointed out that they felt like I wasn’t being fair to him. Getting his character right became an important challenge for me– to push myself past my own preconceptions and to find his uniqueness and humanity.

One character, Brian, is a real estate lawyer–how much research did you undertake to get his work as accurate as possible?

As I mention in the earlier question, his profession was very new territory to me. Luckily, I have several good friends who are lawyers– they gave me lots of insights and more leads to other lawyers. I took many, many attorneys out to lunch, dinner, waylaid them in corridors, interviewed total strangers on the phone, through email, even on Facebook. I went to city commission meetings and zoning board meetings and talked to tons of developers. I also read books and articles about the lawyer’s experience, their training, their day to day struggles. It was a fascinating project because it was all so new, and the more I learned, the more interested I became.

This GoodReads review noted that “While not marketed to the YA [Young Adult] audience, this book will appeal to both adults and teens.”Are you hoping to garner some new YA readers with this new novel?

Wow, that’s interesting! It hadn’t crossed my mind that this might appeal to YA readers. There’s some heavy stuff in this book, so I’d hope they would be fairly mature teens.

How instrumental has Twitter and social media become in terms of drawing attention to your work?

That I really don’t know. My sense is that almost everyone on social media is advertising something, so at times there can be a bit of an echo chamber effect. But I enjoy the simple fun of meeting new people in this way– it’s especially nice for people who work from home and don’t get to carouse around much with a gang of co-workers.

I was fascinated to learn from this 2008 interview that you will write periodically during red lights, when did you first realize that you were capable of creativity while driving?

Ha! You know what, I started writing at red lights years ago when I worked as a film reviewer for the Oregonian newspaper. I found that my thoughts about a film were always clearest and freshest while I was driving home after the viewing, so I kept my pad out next to me in the car and eventually realized, hey! This actually isn’t a bad way to get thoughts down quickly….

Another non-novel related question. After your participation in this New York Times email manners story, did you start getting replies from emails you sent a long time ago?

That is too funny. I’ll tell you who I heard from — all sorts of people who thought they knew who the other writer was that I’d referred to in my story. All these people had had similar experiences with a friend who never followed up on their invitations, and they were CERTAIN they knew just who my story was about….only they’d all mentioned different names and none of them was the person I was talking about. Turns out, it’s just a really common experience!

When you write pieces like this one for NPR, do you ever find that you gain new readers of your novels, thanks to this exposure?

Wait! Isn’t that how I heard from you? All I can say with any authority is: I sure hope so. I’ve written commentary pieces for NPR and other media over the years and while there’s a big difference between an essay and a book, I’d like to think the short piece gives you a nice little window into what the larger works might hold.

Is there anything you’d like to discuss about Birds of Paradise that I neglected to ask you about?

Not really– just to tell people that Birds of Paradise is now available for pre-order from places like Indiebound.com and Amazon.com, that I’ll be traveling on a book tour this September and October, and they can learn more about me and my event schedule at my website www.DianaAbuJaber.com.

But once I discovered the main mission of the website: “Largehearted Boy is all about sharing the love I have for music, literature, and popular culture. A true labor of love, the site now features every day daily downloads of free and legal music as well as shorties (daily music, literature, geeky and popular culture news). ” I realized it was a site I should be visiting more frequently. And if you love pop culture as much as I do, you should visit the site as well.

The Family Fang

So last week, I ran across an NPR review of Kevin Wilson‘s debut novel, The Family Fang. The premise of the book (adult children returning to the scene of an absurd childhood where they were unwilling stars in their performance artist parents’ pieces) fascinated me. So I contacted Wilson to see if he was game for an email interview, fortunately he was. As longtime readers know, I really enjoy interviewing novelists–to get a better understanding of their craft. In this instance, when I started researching Wilson, there was an added bonus fun factor. I discovered Wilson’s wife is respected poet, Leigh Anne Couch. Couch and I went to high school together–and in fact she was one of the kind classmates who supported me in our senior year, when my father died. In fact, a few years back, Couch and I almost did an interview about her work for this blog, but family commitments (aka the birth of their child) delayed the interview. Hopefully one of these days, we’ll get back to that interview. In the meantime, I am pleased as hell to discuss The Family Fang with Wilson–I get the feeling this is the first of many creative successes for Wilson.

Tim O’Shea: Frequently I talk to authors that speak highly of the cover design for their book, but you are the first author I know to get the cover tattooed on your arm. When did you realize you wanted to commit the piece to flesh?

Kevin Wilson: I knew pretty much the minute that I saw Julie Morstad’s artwork for the cover that I wanted to get the tattoo. I thought it would be cool to get a tattoo that was connected to the novel. Before Allison Saltzman, Ecco’s book designer, showed me the cover design, I thought I might get four sets of fangs on my forearm, but when I saw Annie and Buster, I knew I wanted that on my arm.

O’Shea: With a spouse as a poet, do the two of you ever spitball ideas off of each other when working creatively? Also, as people who use their personal lives (on some level) for fodder for your creative projects, is there ever a time either of you says: “OK, this? I don’t want to see this pop up in any poems or stories.”

Wilson: We will talk to each other about what we’re working on and she’s the first person I ask for help when I’m stuck but we’re both pretty solitary artists and we like to be inside our own heads, so we use our time together mostly to talk about TV shows we are watching or about food that we want to eat, the important stuff. As far as using our own lives as material, honestly, our lives are pretty boring. Most of the time, something happens and then we both try to decide how to make it more interesting for our fiction and poetry.

O’Shea: By setting the book partially in Tennessee and at least partially in the mid-1980s, what aspects of this era and location appealed to you in terms of exploring them in your story?

Wilson: Mostly it was a time period and location that I was familiar with, having grown up pretty much in the same place and same time. So it helped keep me from worrying too much if I had the details right. Also, the Fang family is so bizarre that they seemed to transcend time and place, so even when they’re in San Francisco in the 70’s or TN in the 80’s, it still feels like a fantasy world.

O’Shea: The Fangs are performance artists. Two fold question: Did you research performance art much before starting the novel? How challenging was it to map out these performance pieces and the logistics of them, without stemming the flow of your narrative?

Wilson: I didn’t research much beyond what I already knew and loved about performance art, which despite the ridiculous nature of the Fangs, is a form of art that I think is unbelievably interesting. For the performance pieces, I tried to think of them less as works of art and more as snapshots of the familial dynamics of the Fang family. So while I wanted the piece to be successful or interesting, I mostly wanted it to reveal something essential about how these four people interact with each other. So I worked from the kernel of how it mattered to the family and then tried to build a piece that would support that idea.

O’Shea: As mentioned in this recent Memphis Commercial Appeal piece, you regard Nashville-based novelist Ann Patchett as your mentor. How has your writing benefited from knowing Patchett?

Wilson: My writing has benefited simply by having access to a writer that I consider to be as close to perfection as you can get. I was a fan of her work before we ever met, so to be able to show your work to someone like Ann (and she read an early draft of this novel and gave me really valuable advice) is such a huge gift. But, more important than the writing, being around Ann has benefited me as a person. She’s shown me how to live a kind and good life while also making space for creating art.

O’Shea: Clearly you have found success with this new novel, going forward do you intend to focus mostly on novels, or do you still have ideas you wish to explore through short stories? Also, creatively when considering ideas you want to explore, how early in the process do you realize this is an idea best suited for a novel or a short story?

Wilson: I want to do both. I like what each form allows you to do in terms of telling an interesting story to the reader. Sometimes it takes a long time before you figure out whether the idea is a story or a novel. I wrote a novel before this book that failed, until I realized it was a story and then I wrote it as a story and it turned out so much better. And the Family Fang started as a failed story about a brother and sister who play Romeo and Juliet in a high school play and it wasn’t until I figured out a larger, more interesting narrative that I realized it could and should be a novel.

O’Shea: Not many novels get such resounding praise (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, NPR, NYT, Washington Post), every novelist hopes for some praise for the work, but has it blindsided you just how much praise the book has garnered?

Wilson: I think people have expectations, realistic ideas of what will happen, and then they have hopes, fantasies of what could happen in the best of circumstances. So I had those two ideas and was prepared for either of them to happen. And then the reviews came in and people seemed to like it and I felt like perhaps I had not created a good enough fantasy for what would happen, that the reality of the situation outstripped my fantasy of what could happen. It was amazing.

O’Shea: Maureen Corrigan’s NPR review enjoyed a number of the book’s aspects, including the “loony summaries for Buster’s novels”. When concocting the summaries, were there any in particular you were more proud or most enjoyed developing?

Wilson: Those are basically books I wish I could write. They are the books I am not equipped to write, stylistically, so I gave them to Buster instead. I was a little disconcerted when Buster newest novel seemed to be the plot of The Hunger Games. I was very sick about that, but then I read the trilogy and felt like they were different enough to proceed.

O’Shea: As a comic book journalist I would be remiss if I did not ask (given your affinity for comics), if Marvel or DC came calling, would you ever consider writing for them–is there a dream character you would love to tackle?

Wilson: Everyone wants Spider-Man or Batman, but I’d like to try Aquaman for DC, a character that doesn’t really have much to do most of the time, despite being an inconic character, and I’d like to try Sub-Mariner for Marvel (I have a thing for handsome water-dwelling superheroes, I guess), who is so complicated and fun and just kind of a supreme jerk. Ms. Marvel is another Marvel character that I think is really wonderful but she doesn’t get enough to do.

O’Shea: Question in the borderline fanboy realm, how much of a blast was it to do a reading with musician Aimee Mann?

Wilson: It was very much like dying for a few seconds, seeing what heaven is like, and then coming back to the land of the living. It is so disconnected from my regular life, that it just didn’t seem all that real.

The Shadow Men

Article first published as Interview: Novelist Christopher Golden on The Shadow Men on Blogcritics.

Bestselling, award-winning novelist Christopher Golden is rarely at rest, considering that he typically writes or co-authors four novels in a given year. Or to consider it from another metric, as one bio notes: “There are more than eight million copies of his books in print.”  Last month, Spectra released The Shadow Men, the fourth Hidden Cities novel by Golden and Tim Lebbon. Here’s an excerpt from the publisher’s description of the novel: “From Beacon Hill to Southie, historic Boston is a town of vibrant neighborhoods knit into a seamless whole. But as Jim Banks and Trix Newcomb learn in a terrifying instant, it is also a city divided—split into three separate versions of itself by a mad magician once tasked with its protection.

Jim is happily married to Jenny, with whom he has a young daughter, Holly. Trix is Jenny’s best friend, practically a member of the family—although she has secretly been in love with Jenny for years. Then Jenny and Holly inexplicably disappear—and leave behind a Boston in which they never existed. Only Jim and Trix remember them. Only Jim and Trix can bring them back.”

Not only do we discuss this novel in our email interview, but Golden also discussed his ongoing Peter Octavian series (the latest installment, Waking Nightmares, was released this past March) as well as his Young Adult novels (written under the name Thomas Randall), such as Spirits of the Noh (the second installment in his Waking trilogy). Longtime fans of Golden’s writing will be pleased to learn in this interview he has upcoming e-book plans for such series as Body of Evidence and Prowlers. They’ll also be enthused to learn he has plans to collaborate with bestselling author Charlaine Harris.

Once you’ve read the interview, be sure to visit Golden’s Amazon page, where you can glimpse inside The Shadow Men.

Creatively, what do you most appreciate about the opportunity to collaborate with Hidden Cities co-writer Tim Lebbon?

See, you caught me with the word “creatively.” I might’ve commented on his sexy accent or impeccable taste in ales. But, creatively…two things come to mind instantly. The first is that, though Tim and I are very simpatico, we do bring different sensibilities to our work. His take on characters and what they feel is often different from mine, and it forces us both to think. The story always benefits from that. The second thing is that Tim is comfortable with spontaneity and improvisation, and that is very hard to pull off when there’s more than one writer on a book. But we can talk on Skype, spitball ideas, and cause a story and its characters to grow organically. That’s exciting.

When co-writing with someone, how challenging is it to settle on the right “voices” for your characters?

It’s the sort of thing that really develops naturally. If the voice of a particular is not at least similar in the two authors’ work, that usually means the collaborators aren’t viewing the character entirely the same way and that needs ironing out. But it’s not as hard as you’d think.

What aspect of developing a fictional version of Boston for The Shadow Men did you enjoy the most?

There are actually three different versions of Boston. I was born and raised in Massachusetts and have lived here all of my life, except for three years I spent in New York after college. I’m also both Irish and Italian, with immigrant roots in the city, so it was interesting for me to explore the idea of what might have become of the city had Irish influence continued to grow and become the prevailing power in the city. Honestly, I wish we’d spent a lot more time exploring our three Bostons, but the plot didn’t really allow for a lot of tangents.

With a series like Peter Octavian, how much do you try to grow the character in each new installment without trying too hard and unintentionally derailing the plot and action pace?

I actually think Octavian has changed dramatically over the course of five books, not least of which was the change from vampire to human mage. But those who’ve read all five books will understand when I say that the biggest changes in him are yet to come, as a result of a devastating twist that occurs at the end of Waking Nightmares. Later this year I’ll be starting the sixth book, The Graves of Saints, and we’ll see a very different Octavian.

How did you initially develop the Kara Harper character, and what is it about her that has helped foster a strong young adult readership?

I’ve always loved Japanese folklore, though I’m nowhere near an expert. When I started thinking about writing a novel that utilized those stories, I knew right away who Kara needed to be. A stranger in a strange land. She’s a character who’s full of hope, despite the death of her mother. She and her father are both looking for a new beginning, and it takes a lot of courage for Kara to start over as the only gaijin girl in an all Japanese school, in a town where there are very few westerners who aren’t tourists. Kara is the reader’s way into a story. The culture of Japan is going to be unfamiliar to most readers, but the reader and Kara get to experience it and adjust to it together. If she strikes a chord with readers, I think it’s partly that, and partly because she’s a teenager who is just trying to do her best to build a future and to make friends and to look both inward and outward to find out what she likes and what she wants from life.

When you conceive an idea for a story, is there ever a point where you struggle to decide if it should be an adult or young adult story?

Not usually at the point of conception. Sometimes I’ll write a novel that is intended for adults and, because a main character happens to be a teenager, certain people will think it’s intended for teens. Not all novels featuring teens are aimed at teen audiences, but out in the marketplace, sometimes it’s hard to make that distinction.

In a typical year how many books do you write or co-author? How do you avoid burnout?

If you include books I write solo and those I co-author, probably about four. That sounds like more than it is. That might be 1100 pages in a year, which averages less than three pages a day. As for burnout…I don’t necessarily avoid it. When I finished the tie-in novel Uncharted: The Fourth Labryrinth in March [set to be released this October], I was definitely burnt out. Over the last few months I’ve taken it much easier. I’ve written some sample chapters for a new novel and Tim Lebbon and I have started writing a new book together and Mike Mignola and I are working on our second book for St. Martin’s, though that’s a novella, so it’s much shorter. I’ve also had some health issues, so I’ve been kind of letting the creative well fill back up.

You have several series that you have written over the years (Body of Evidence, Prowlers, etc) with no current plans for new installments (but you have left the door open for the possibility of more). Have you see an increased interest in some of your older books via ebooks/Kindle sales?

Actually, I own all the rights to those series and there’ll be some major news regarding e-books this fall.

What’s on the creative horizon for you in 2011 and 2012?

CG: Lebbon and I are doing The Secret Journeys of Jack London: White Fangs [Book One of this Young Adult series was released in March] right now. [Mike] Mignola and I are doing our novella, and we’re still writing Baltimore comics for Dark Horse. Over the next year I’ll be doing a new Peter Octavian novel, a brand new original YA novel, and a trilogy of graphic novels with Charlaine Harris called Cemetery Girl. More than enough to keep me busy.