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.

Novelist Susan Straight was born in Riverside, California, and it is the city she still calls home. It is also the place that informed and influenced the city in all seven of her novels, the fictional Rio Seco. Her most recent work, Take One Candle Light a Room: A novel, was released in October 2010.

In this interview, we cover a great deal of ground, mostly her latest work. Her newest novel sets out to tell the tale of Fantine Antoine, who “is a travel writer, a profession that keeps her happily away from her Southern California home. When she returns to mark the fifth anniversary of the murder of her closest childhood friend, Glorette, she finds herself pulled into the tumultuous life of Glorette’s twenty-two-year-old son—and Fantine’s godson—Victor. After getting involved in a shooting, Victor has fled to New Orleans. Together with her father, Fantine follows Victor, determined to help him avoid the criminal future that he suddenly seems destined for.”

Straight was kind enough to work with me on this email interview and, as the mark of any good writer, tried to be economic with her words. In that spirit, she chose to compile her thoughts on my final five questions into one engaging and in-depth answer. I was more than happy to adjust my questions (and chose to drop one) accordingly in the final editing, and appreciate the opportunity to interview Straight. Also my thanks to author Caroline Leavitt for putting me in contact with Straight.

After reading the interview, please be sure to avail yourself of Amazon’s Take A Look feature for the book.

Of your most recent novel, Ayelet Waldman wrote “Susan Straight is the Meryl Streep of novelists…” How does one take a compliment of that caliber?

Ayelet’s line about Meryl Streep was hilarious, because I’m a short white woman who writes about communities filled with black men from the South, teenagers selling drugs, Oaxacan immigrants trying to survive, and yes, even blonde foster moms who are raising other people’s children.  So I don’t know about Meryl Streep – I’ve been told variously that I “look like” Sissy Spacek, Mia Farrow, and Reese Witherspoon.  It’s a compliment based on chameleon qualities, I think.

Another review at Amazon says of your work: “I tried to read TAKE ONE CANDLE LIGHT A ROOM slowly to savor the language and the feeling, but it was hard not to rush forward with the flow of story.” How hard is it to build a narrative with lush wordplay but with a story flow that also pulls the reader in, eager for the next word, the next sentence, the next page?

It’s very hard to worry about plot, and narrative flow, while enjoying the writing you create, with language and imagery that make a reader feel as if she or he is actually in the yard, or the car, with the characters.  I find that reading mystery novels – my old favorites Walter Mosley, Ross MacDonald, and Dennis Lehane - helps me to see plot as an inevitable scaffold and a pull for the reader.  I love books that make me stay awake late – Bathsheba Monk’s new novel, Nina Revoyr’s new novel Wingshooters, and lately, Jessica Treadway’s stories.  They have excellent balance.

After you’ve written a novel, how important is it to you that the publishing house develops a cover that does justice to your words? Can you talk about the creative process (and your level of input) with Toni Scott on the most recent cover design?

For this new novel’s cover, I should start by saying Toni (Sims) Scott is my ex-husband’s first cousin, and an artist I admire immensely.  Novelists often have little say over the covers; I loved my first three with Hyperion, which were done by a San Francisco artist who read the manuscripts for Sorrow’s Kitchen, Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights, and The Gettin Place, and then painted original paintings!  I felt incredibly lucky that he captured the essence of the novels.  For Highwire Moon, I didn’t like the hardcover, and wasn’t consulted by Houghton.  But for A Million Nightingales, the hardcover was a picture of my middle daughter, age 14, and she’s mixed-race, just like the main character Moinette.  For this novel, I suggested Toni’s artwork, and my editor loved this image as much as I did.  To be truthful, we believe some readers may have been put off by the stark image, and the many races reflected in the “angel” figure.  But if you read the novel, it’s perfect.  An angel may have saved Victor, during the hurricane, and it may have been the spirits of his ancestors.

Not many people can claim that they can see the hospital of their birth from their kitchen window, is there a level of reassurance that your life has firm roots in where you’ve lived a majority of your life, or do you ever have the urge to live in other parts of the country?

I believe I may be the only living writer in America who can see that hospital, where I was born.  But I think often of Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and William Faulkner.  I think also of Ernest J. Gaines, who wrote of the Louisiana he left while he lived in San Francisco, and now lives where he grew up.  I’m not going to lie – it’s often hard to live in the place where everyone has known you since birth, especially when times are hard and the place can be hard, too.  We have a death in our family this week, a young niece, and I had coincidentally been writing about the death of a young woman and the resulting tragedy for her family.  That eerie coincidence has kept me awake all week.

How did you come up with the Book Rate Book Club?

The Book Rate Book Club was my idea to celebrate the Media Mail/Book Rate at the post office!  I still love the post office.  And I love that my writer friends send novels I might never have otherwise seen, and they arrive in the mail.  So I wanted to do that.  I have to work harder to get it out there.

How does your family feel about writing about your family–for instance has it ever rankled your ex-husband that you use family history or experiences as fuel for some of your work? Are your daughters ever self-conscious, given how you share photos of them and their life as part of the tapestry of your website? Or do they understand why you want to share your family with your readers?

My ex-husband and daughters and rest of our family are fine with the website, and with my essays, because I try to be really careful to respect them and not write things that should be private, or things that cross the line.  I’d struggle with memoir…

When you sit on a panel with fellow writers like Francine Prose and Mona Simpson, are there lessons or insights you take away from the exchange of ideas? This goes back several years to earlier in your career, but not many folks can say they studied with James Baldwin. How did he help shape your approach toward writing and did working with him have a bearing on how you now approach teaching yourself? Are there times that the process of teaching others how to write that you find solutions to some of your own writing challenges? You recently won the 2011 Gina Berriault Award, this is far from the first award you’ve won or been nominated for–how gratifying is it when you receive awards such as these?

In general for the last five questions, I’d like to tackle other writers I admire and what they teach me.  To study with James Baldwin was a highlight of my life, because he saw things in stories that other professor did not.  He taught me how important secondary characters are to work – I teach that now every year to my own students.  But Jay Neugeboren was just as instrumental for me – he taught me how to line-edit my work, how to be clean in the sentences, how to make images stand out, and he was my mentor when I graduated.  Being on panels, or teaching, with writers like Mona Simpson and Francine Prose, or this spring in New Orleans with Dorothy Allison, reminds me that even though I’m isolated out here in semi-rural California, my writing community is these incredibly intelligent women whose novels I can’t wait to read when I get them, and who say smart things about plot, character, and research.  And lastly, the Gina Berriault Award meant the world to me this year, because I’d been feeling down about my own novels getting out into the world (so many books, and harder to sell!) and during a break, I read her story collection and thought about the beauty and grace of publishing these gem-like stories in small magazines, having this book come out with North Point Press (based in SF long ago) and existing in the world, no matter of sales or reviews or anything else. Just beautiful paragraphs and characters who remain in our minds forever.

Raising Stony Mayhall

Article first published as Interview: Novelist Daryl Gregory on Raising Stony Mayhall on Blogcritics.

Writer Daryl Gregory always provides enlightening and entertaining discussion, that’s why this marks the third time I have interviewed him about his work. Last month saw the release of his newest novel, Raising Stony Mayhall, described by publisher Del Ray as “In 1968, after the first zombie outbreak, Wanda Mayhall and her three young daughters discover the body of a teenage mother during a snowstorm. Wrapped in the woman’s arms is a baby, stone-cold, not breathing, and without a pulse. But then his eyes open and look up at Wanda—and he begins to move. The family hides the child—whom they name Stony—rather than turn him over to authorities that would destroy him. Against all scientific reason, the undead boy begins to grow. For years his adoptive mother and sisters manage to keep his existence a secret—until one terrifying night when Stony is forced to run and he learns that he is not the only living dead boy left in the world.”

In addition to chatting about his newest novel, Gregory also explained how his previous novel, Pandemonium, came to be translated into Hebrew, as well as what else is on the creative horizon for him.

Tim O’Shea: In terms of this novel’s timeline, the first zombie outbreak happened in the late 1960s. What was your thinking in terms of the timeframe of when Stony was born?

Daryl Gregory: It’s a nod to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which came out in 1968. In the world of the novel, a guy who also happens to be named Romero films the outbreak a documentary. We go on from there, and the book spans Stony’s entire “life,” from when he was discovered as an undead baby beside the highway in ’68, to his eventual second death in his forties in 2010.

Conveniently enough, I was born in 1965, so Stony’s life and times are basically my life in times, with a few key differences. (Stony spends his life as a zombie, for example, while I am only a zombie before I’ve had my first cup of coffee.) Stony eventually discovers that he’s not the only living dead boy in the world, and he goes through a political awakening when he realizes he’s part of an oppressed community.

Using my own chronology was my chance to talk about growing up surrounded by sisters (only two of them, but I felt surrounded), as well as childhood friendships, and finding your place in the world. A reviewer on GoodReads called it a zombildungsroman, and that’s the best, most efficient description of the book I’ve found.

O’Shea: The lead character, Stony, is fascinated with the nature of his body and his mind (understandably, given that he’s a zombie). What are you trying to explore by this character examination?

Gregory: Stony is a thinking man’s zombie! Or a man’s thinking zombie? Regardless, he’s a scientist at heart. And just because his own circumstances seem to be impossible, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t try to figure out who and what he is.

The thing about real, Romero-style zombies (as opposed to, say, genetically altered humans who act like zombies) is that they make no sense. If they’re dead, how do they move? If they have no metabolism, why do they eat, and how do they digest what they eat?

Instead of disregarding those questions, Stony takes them as facts of his world, and begins experimenting on himself to see what that means about him. One small example: If his brain is nothing but inert matter, but he still is conscious, then consciousness must exist outside the body. He arrives at religious explanations based on the evidence.

O’Shea: How elated and surprised were you when Publisher’s Weekly pegged Raising Stony Mayhall as its pick of the week?

Gregory: Very elated and very surprised. Publisher’s Weekly does a great job of covering science fiction and fantasy, but I didn’t expect to see them choose a genre book as their pick for all readers. (Then again, maybe they do this more than I’ve realized.) I’m just very grateful.

O’Shea: Did you find that response from your GoodReads giveaway helped spread the word about your new book?

Gregory: My publisher graciously put up 20 copies for the giveaway, and we had a huge number of people sign up to win free copies of the book. I don’t know if that will turn into sales, but I hope so. At the very least, it exposed a lot of people to a book they might not have picked up at the local bookstore — if they even have a local bookstore.

O’Shea: At what point in the development of Raising Stony Mayhall, did you realize that you wanted an element of humor in the story?

Gregory: I think that was built in from the beginning. A strict zombie story is dependent on constant, increasing levels of terror. But Stony is a bent life story, so there’s room for all range of tones and elements. There’s humor, because life is humorous.

O’Shea: Not every author offers to sign and mail bookplates to fans, when did you decide to start doing that–and is that another way you try to stay connected to your fans?

Gregory: I stole this idea from new Del Rey writer Kevin Hearne. My editor told me what Kevin had done, and it seemed like a good idea. For one, bookstores are now ordering what to place on the shelves based on pre-orders, so it seemed like a good idea to encourage a jumpstart. But also, there are plenty of folks who I’ll never be able to meet or sign books for, and this seemed like a nice way to stay in touch and say thanks.

O’Shea: You just wrapped up a Clockwork retreat, what do you enjoy most about these creative retreats?

Gregory: I would like to say that it’s because I get a tremendous amount of work done, but that’s a lie. It’s really about hanging out for a week with fellow writers, talking about business and craft and crafty business people. These guys — Matt Sturges, Chris Roberson, Bill Willingham, and the rest of the gang — are my Council of Elrond. I’m trying to learn how to break into comics and balance that with writing prose, and these people are all doing that — and all doing it differently! I also come out of these weeks recharged, ready to try new things.

O’Shea: Not every writer can say “hey my book just got translated into Hebrew“–but that’s exactly what happened with Pandemonium. How did that book deal come about? How many different countries have published your novels?

Gregory: Pandemonium is in three countries so far — Italy, the Czech Republic, and this edition from Graff Publishing in Israel. I’d gotten to know Rani Graff at science fiction conventions, and one day a couple years ago we were sitting in a bar at a WorldCon and he told me that he wanted to publish Pandemonium, but was having trouble getting through to the rights people at Random House. And I said, my editor is sitting next to me! I introduced them, and I think they shook hands on the deal that day.

O’Shea: What else is on the creative horizon for you?

Gregory: My first collection of short stories is coming out from Fairwood Press this fall — it’s called Unpossible and Other Stories. I’m also working on a new novel, and writing comics. I’m writing Planet of the Apes from BOOM! Studios, and my other comic for them, Dracula: The Company of Monsters, is finishing up soon with #12. The eight-year-old Daryl is very impressed with me right now.

And nervous bookstore employees pleaded with eager female fans not to lift their shirts in front of Mr. Hagar when they reached the signing table.