Interview with Kent Wascom, Author of The Blood of Heaven

The Blood of Heaven by Kent Wascom (Grove Press; 432 pages; $25).

In elegant, lucid prose, fiction newcomer Kent Wascom brings the frontier, in all its violence and disorder, to stunning life in The Blood of Heaven.  Wascom follows Angel Woolsack, from his early life as the son of an itinerant preacher to the bordellos of Natchez and the barrooms of New Orleans to the bayous of Louisiana where Angel meets schemers and dreamers.  Rich with detail and characterizations, The Blood of Heaven revisits an early America where fortunes and men were made and great risks were taken.

Wascom is not yet 30, but he infuses his story with a wisdom, awareness, and clarity well beyond his years.   As Angel and others carve out a rough-hewn existence in early nineteenth century America, we  see them seizing their place and even plotting to overthrow a sovereign government.  Through it all, Angel’s hold on us never wavers but intensifies.  The Blood of Heaven proves Wascom is a trailblazer whose brilliance is not a one-off but a true and rooted fact.

 

Jaime Boler: Thank you, Kent, for letting me ask you these questions.   I was entranced by The Blood of Heaven and particularly loved how you capture the spirit and wildness of the frontier. Did you always want to be a novelist?

Kent Wascom

Kent Wascom: Well, I really appreciate the kind words, Jaime. I’m so glad you enjoyed the book. And, yes, for as long as I can remember I wanted to be a writer. I started writing stories when I was in elementary school, and finished my first novel—historical fiction, oddly enough, about Prohibition—at age twelve. My parents were incredibly tolerant of this strange kid who sat in his room pecking away at an old IBM Selectric.

 

JB: You were twelve going on thirty, but it paid off.  How would you describe The Blood of Heaven?

 

KW: Religiosity, love, revolution, and the birth of the American empire.

 

JB: What was the impetus behind your story?

 

KW: The voice of Angel Woolsack, the furious cadence of his speech and the viciousness of his perceptions.

 

JB: How did you decide on the title?

 

KW: I’m awful with titles. The title of the first draft was “The Kings of the Cannibal Islands”, but by the third draft the thematic element of that song had been mostly dispensed with, and it remained untitled until I wrote the last pages.

 

JB: When did you begin work on the novel and how long did it take to write?

 

KW: I began the book, after trying it out as a short story and novella, the summer of 2009, in my first year at Florida State. It took around two and a half years, maybe closer to three, to complete.

JB: While reading your story, two things struck me: 1) that The Blood of Heaven is your debut; and 2) that you aren’t even 30.  Have you written any short stories?  And how is it that your writing is so wise and astute?

KW: You’re too kind. Any wisdom in the book is the result of osmosis or at best a sort of unconscious ventriloquism. As for short stories, I’ve written quite a few, but only one I felt was worthwhile. (The one that won the Tennessee Williams prize) I love the form, love the masters like [Barry] Hannah, [Jorge Luis] Borges, [Amy] Hempel, [Julio] Cortazar, and [Isaak] Babel, but I don’t think I have the control or quality of perception necessary to be a worthwhile writer of short stories. When ideas come, they’re always for novels, or at the least novellas. I need space to roam, I suppose.

JB: What kind of research did you do for The Blood of Heaven?  Did anything you learn surprise you?

KW: The research process, because I was either a full-time student of teacher throughout, was catch-as-catch-can. And, because discovering the story of West Florida and the Kempers was such a surprise, I was continually amazed—even at the simple facts of daily life at that time, the tenuousness of the frontier people’s existence both in terms of safety and livelihood and their national status.

JB: Did you find anything in your investigation that you’d like to revisit someday, perhaps for a future story?

KW: More than I can say. That Samuel Kemper led a force of Americans into Texas and Mexico during the 1811 Gutierrez/Magee expedition, where they fought alongside Mexican nationals against the Spanish colonial army. It fascinates me to no end, this idea that ethnic boundaries were of little consequence at that moment in time, only to become very important several decades later.

In my research of Cincinnati and the Ohio River area I found a travelogue by a British traveler who was making a trip from there and down the Mississippi in order to collect Native American artifacts. His descriptions of how the settlers desecrated the burial and worship mounds which dot the waterways and forests of the region still have a hold to my imagination, and moreover that some of the artifacts were described in such wonderfully [Gabriel] Garcia Marquez-esque terms. There was a green, polished stone about the size of a platter which, if you kissed it, would cause you to levitate. This confluence of Enlightenment ideals and the fantastic seems ripe.

 

JB: Sounds like such lyrical and beautiful language.  Do you have a favorite character in The Blood of Heaven?  If so, who and why?

KW: Red Kate. I like the combination of threat and desire, of this woman who loves but could also kill you in a flash. I felt so much for her that she’s the only character unfortunate enough to encounter Angel who manages to escape, spiritually and physically. Not, of course, intact.

JB: Is Angel Woolsack based on a real person?  How did his character come about?

 

KW: Many of his actions in West Florida are based on those of the third Kemper brother, Nathan, who did not die as he does in my book. In my research I found that Nathan, lesser known than his two older brothers, was actually the one doing much of the rabble-rousing. I liked the idea that regardless of what he did, he would be overshadowed.

But he was never to be Nathan. Better, I thought, that he should be an outsider, that his position with the brothers should be precarious. I did have something of a physical model for Angel, at least late in life.

Early in the writing of the book, I stumbled on a picture of the man who ceremonially fired the first shot on Ft. Sumter, inaugurating the Civil War.
http://www.old-picture.com/defining-moments/pictures/Edmund-Ruffin.jpg
I looked at him and thought, there’s Angel. Of course I reduced him by and eye and arm.

 

JB: What, in your view, can the period in which you set your novel teach us about American history and about ourselves?

KW: I think the turn of the 19^th century offers a profound coign of vantage for understanding ourselves as a country that has been in a continual state of flux from the moment of its inception. The very idea of a “national character” is as mutable (or permeable for that matter) as our borders and the capricious regard in which we hold the borders of others. Moreover, the period was the brooding ground for our great national conflict, which continues to this day, between Enlightenment principles and the savage convictions of violence, avarice, and religious fanaticism.

 

JB: Would this story have worked as well, or at all, if set in a different time and place?

KW: The characters are such products of their time, truly turn of the century people—with one foot in the 18^th and the other in the 19^th—that they could not be transplanted. However, their circumstances, the intrigues and revolutionary acts of extra-national acquisition (an over-fancy way of saying filibustering) in which they participate have occurred throughout the history of the country, so in a way I do believe the story would work as well if it were set at the time of Philip Nolan, or William Walker, or Sam Zemurray.

JB: How different were earlier versions of the novel compared with the final copy?

 

KW: Radically. The first draft combined Reuben and Samuel, only featured Red Kate in a minor fashion, continued the story through 1814, and was almost completely thrown out.

 

JB: What was the most difficult thing about writing The Blood of Heaven?

KW: Living with the voice of Angel. Having the crazed, calloused perspective of a 19^th century slaver rattling around in my head even after leaving the desk.

 

JB: Did you learn anything new about yourself in the midst of writing and editing your story?

The author signing copies of his book

 

KW: I certainly learned the foibles, the tell-tale tics and tremors, of my technique. Nothing will give you a better idea of your weaknesses as a writer than repeated readings of your work. I hope I’ve absorbed some of that learning and can avoid a few miscues and wrong turns as I work on the next book.

 

JB: What do you like to do when you are not writing?

 

KW: Read, fiddle about in the outdoors (fishing, hiking, etc.), the occasional human contact.

 

JB: Who are some of your favorite authors and what are some of your favorite books?

 

KW: There are so many, and it’s really a jackdaw’s nest-style collection. Of course, the Southern America pantheon, which I (after Carlos Fuentes, who stands high in my regard) consider paired with the Latin American: [William] Faulkner, [Flannery] O’Connor, [Barry] Hannah, [Harry] Crews, [Cormac] McCarthy, [Shelby S.] Foote, [Larry] Brown; [Jorge Luis] Borges, [Gabriel] Garcia Marquez, [Juan] Ruflo, [Julio] Cortazar, [Mario] Vargas Llosa, [Eduardo] Galeano, [Jose] Donoso. My more recent but no less verdant loves: Hilary Mantel, whose backlog I’m rationing, William T. Vollmann, for his historical work and philosophy. For pure linguistic pleasure, learning the beat and pulse of a sentence, I adore William H. Gass and John Hawkes. Above all, perhaps, is Yukio Mishima, whose unflinching eye, salience to horror, and the achievement of his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, has been immeasurable influence.

 

JB: What was your publication process like?

 

KW: Magical, really. I finished the final draft of the book on the same day my friend and mentor Bob Shacochis finished his. A first sign of cosmic promise. Within a few weeks Bob had passed the manuscript on to interested editors at Scribner and Grove. A week or so later, Bob told me that Grove editor Elisabeth Schmitz was hosting a dinner at the AWP conference in Chicago, and that I should go. “But,” he said, “I don’t think they want the book. They haven’t said a word about it, and these sorts of silences don’t bode well, my boy. But go, make some connections, and maybe they’ll take the next one.” So, for the week leading up to the conference Bob runs me down with talk of Grove’s disinterest, leaving me haggard and depressed by the evening of the dinner.

Unbeknownst to me, the folks at Grove had read the book in three days and had been screaming at Bob to let me know that they wanted it. Meanwhile, all I hear is “They really don’t seem to want the book. Tough luck, kiddo.” So the evening of the dinner arrives, and I’m standing outside this pizza place with Bob when a cab pulls up and out steps Elisabeth Schmitz. As she approaches, Bob takes me aside and says, “Okay, there is something I’ve been keeping from you. I’m sorry to say that, at this time, Grove / Atlantic is NOT prepared to offer you a one book contract.”

I am near collapse when Elisabeth winsomely says, “Because we want to offer you a TWO book contract.” I burst into tears, grab Elizabeth and spin her round, and proceed to collapse into a laughing, bawling wreck out there on the sidewalk. Utterly glorious.

JB: That IS glorious and rather wonderful.  Do you have any advice for anyone working on a first novel?

KW: For those embarking on their first: Let no National Novel Writing Months fool you, the act of writing a novel is arduous and long, and the world, as you’ve undoubtedly noticed, is pitiless to your goal. Your efforts should be limited to survival (financial, emotional—though neither of these are guaranteed) and not only finishing the book, but making it the best that it can be. (In short, revise until you’ve got the words on the page memorized.) Give primacy to nothing else.

There’s a great quote from Harry Crews that goes something like, “The world doesn’t want you to write a book. The world wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably every day.” Do your best to avoid that world, though you will lose a chance of friends on your way.

 

JB: Your writing has been compared to Cormac McCarthy and Charles Frazier and even Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner.  How do such comparisons make you feel?

KW: You can only bow your head at such things and try to shake them off.  It’s such a lovely compliment, to be associated in a small way with the pillars of world letters. But these comparisons are like beauties with razor-blades for teeth; they appear gorgeous but can just as easily leave you in shreds. If you look at some of [Cormac] McCarthy’s early reviews, he gets absolutely savaged with the [William] Faulkner comparison.

 

JB: What do you hope readers take with them after reading The Blood of Heaven?

 

KW: Enjoyment. It may seem strange to say that about such a harrowing book, but I enjoy dark and harrowing books, and I hope it finds an audience of such people—while also shaking up the worlds of some cloistered others. Intellectually, once it’s in the reader’s hands my desires are off the table; they take from it what they will.

 

JB: What’s next for you?  Are you working on anything new?

 

KW:  I’d better get it out of the way that The Blood of Heaven is the first volume of a planned sextet, dealing with the history of the Gulf coast and later its interchanges with the Caribbean (The Golden Circle, if you will), from the Louisiana Purchase to Katrina and the oil spill. From birth to apocalypse. Secessia, the novel I’m currently working on, is about the occupation of New Orleans during the Civil War and features as perspective characters, among others, Angel Woolsack’s son and wife (both mentioned in the prologue), as well as the infamous General Benjamin Butler. I hasten to add that the sextet is a lifetime project—I can only hope that I’ll be lucky enough to have a kindly publisher who will keep printing them as they come—and will be interrupted by unrelated projects.

JB: Wow, I am in awe and will eagerly await Secessia.  Thanks, Kent, for a wonderful interview.  Good luck with the book!

 

KW: Thank you so much, Jaime. It was a pleasure.

 

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The Registry by Shannon Stoker: TLC Blog Tour

The Registry by Shannon Stoker (William Morrow Paperbacks; 336 pages; $14.99).

The Registry saved the country from collapse. But stability has come at a price. In this patriotic new America, girls are raised to be brides, sold at auction to the highest bidder. Boys are raised to be soldiers, trained by the state to fight to their death.

Nearly eighteen, beautiful Mia Morrissey excitedly awaits the beginning of her auction year. But a warning from her married older sister raises dangerous thoughts. Now, instead of going up on the block, Mia is going to escape to Mexico—and the promise of freedom.

All Mia wants is to control her own destiny—a brave and daring choice that will transform her into an enemy of the state, pursued by powerful government agents, ruthless bounty hunters, and a cunning man determined to own her . . . a man who will stop at nothing to get her back.

I was initially intrigued by Stoker’s chilling dystopian world.  As I am a huge Margaret Atwood fan, I hoped to see traces of The Handmaid’s Tale, but that was not to be.  Perhaps my hopes were too high.  Disappointment quickly set in.

Mia, the protagonist of this, the first book in a trilogy, never progresses as a character and remains one-dimensional, content to play with new make-up and hairstyles as those around her risk their lives…for her.  It’s utterly laughable.

Her sister is far more interesting than Mia, making me wish the story had been written about her and not about Mia.

As with most other YA novels, Stoker creates a love triangle.  Andrew and Carter vie for Mia’s attention, producing almost agonizing scenes.  But I will say this: Carter is funny and adorable, while Andrew is Andrew.  He helps Mia escape the prospect of a slave-like existence only to hope one day to get out of the service and enter the registry for a wife.  Only at the very end of the book does Andrew change his mind.

Then, you have the character of Whitney, Mia’s friend who escapes with her.  Intelligent and practical, Whitney has no prospective grooms and thus will likely “marry” the government.  Instead of being her own person and choosing to live a life of her own, Whitney is nothing more than a throwaway character who ends up losing her life for Mia.  Whitney seems to exist only to save Mia’s life.  Everything is about Mia.

The world Stoker envisions in this novel is interesting.  Although it’s not as fleshed out as the worlds of The Hunger Games, Matched, or Divergent, there is something here.  It’s a world where girls are better than boys.  A world where Mexico is a land of freedom and where the internet is monitored.  Stoker, in effect, turns the tables, and thus draws you into her story, but it’s not enough.

The information about what led to the Registry is teased out in little morsels.  We are only given bits and pieces, and these do not sustain us.  She wants us to read the next book.  While I understand that, it still feels gimmicky.  William Morrow will release the second novel in Winter 2014, but this reader will not be purchasing it.

Stoker’s novel works best in a teen audience and maybe that’s why it didn’t work for me.

Interview with Lisa Brackmann, Author of Hour of the Rat

Hour of the Rat by Lisa Brackmann (Soho Crime; 371 pages; $25.95).

Ellie McEnroe returns in the sequel to the critically acclaimed New York Times and USA Today best-seller, ROCK PAPER TIGER.

Iraq War vet Ellie McEnroe has a pretty good life in Beijing, representing the work of controversial dissident Chinese artist Zhang Jianli. Even though Zhang’s mysterious disappearance of over a year ago has her in the sights of the Chinese authorities. Even though her Born-Again mother has come for a visit and shows no signs of leaving. But things really get complicated when Ellie’s search for an Army buddy’s missing brother entangles her in a conspiracy that may or may not involve a sinister biotech company, eco-terrorists, an art-obsessed Chinese billionaire and lots of cats—a conspiracy that will take her on a wild chase through some of China’s most beautiful and most surreal places.

Jaime Boler: Thank you so much, Lisa, for letting me ask you these questions.  I’ve always been a huge fan of yours from your Rock Paper Tiger days and Hour of the Rat is a clever, taut sequel.   You have worked as an executive at a major motion picture studio, as an issues researcher for a presidential campaign, and as a singer/songwriter/bassist in a rock band.  What made you want to write novels?

Lisa Brackmann: I really wanted to write fiction before I did any of those other things you mention above. I’ve told the story before, but I tried to write my first novel at the age of five. It was to be an epic adventure about cats who went camping. Unfortunately I did not know how to spell “tent.” This is a true story. I wrote fiction on and off when I was young, and none of it was very good, but I did have an idea how to construct a narrative, and writing was something that I was very passionate about.

I studied writing briefly in college – one of my professors was Lydia Davis, who just won the Man Booker Prize and who had a tremendous influence on me. She helped teach me how to see the world with greater precision. But I got to a point where writing felt like I was constantly living my life as source material rather than actually living it, so I took a break and got into music. Later, I worked in the film industry, and like just about everyone in Los Angeles, I wrote a couple screenplays and a bunch of teleplays. I really enjoyed those projects, but they aren’t finished until someone decides to produce them – and given the weirdness of what I tended to write, the odds of that happening weren’t great.

I decided to write a novel for fun while I came up with that high concept screenplay idea that was going to make me rich. I never did come up with the high concept screenplay, but I found that I really enjoyed writing novels. Even if I didn’t sell them, they were complete in themselves. I found that really satisfying.

JB: Your first novel, Rock Paper Tiger, was selected by Amazon as one of its Top 100 books of 2010 and a Top 10 pick in the

Rock Paper Tiger

mystery/thriller category.  It was also nominated for the Strand Magazine Critics Award for Best First Novel.  What was that experience like?

LB: I’m friends with a bunch of writers, and in one of the groups I’m in, we call it “The Emo-Coaster.” When you’re a working author, you have tremendous highs, and crashing lows, regardless of how hard you try to stay balanced. It’s just very weird to have something you worked so hard on, that is such a personal expression, out there in the world being judged. This is especially true for debuts, I think – it’s all a new experience.

I really didn’t expect much to happen with Rock Paper Tiger – I was happy to be published, but I knew something about the reality of the lifecycle of most books. So when the book ended up doing pretty well, I was surprised. I remember at one point, feeling this weird rushing sensation – like, whoa, this is actually kind of taking off. Maybe I have a career doing this after all. At the same time that it was unexpected, I also felt like I’d really found my tribe, for the first time – that being a writer, being around other writers and around people who really care about books – this was where I belonged.

Getaway

JB: Getaway, your second novel, is a standalone book.  Was it good to get back to the characters and setting of your debut?

LB: I hadn’t planned on writing a sequel to Rock Paper Tiger, but realized that there were still more stories that I wanted to tell about Ellie McEnroe and about China. I never find writing novels to be easy, but writing Hour of the Rat was definitely less hard than others. A lot of the groundwork is already done; you know who these people are and what they tend to want. As for the setting, I’d felt that I’d barely scratched the surface of the richness and complexity that is today’s China. My formative experience in China was in 1979, and though I’d been back at least a half a dozen times before writing Rock Paper Tiger, I’d kept going back after, and felt that I could bring a little more depth and insight into a new book than I’d been able to bring to the first. So it was great to return to China and to Ellie. I really had a lot of fun with it.

JB: What attracts you to writing existential thrillers?

LB: I like to think of myself as a realist. I’m very interested in big issues, but the reality is, unlike superhero or James Bond movies, the ability of one person to have a significant impact on global conspiracies, you know, the typical stuff of thrillers, is pretty limited. For most people, if you care about things, you have to learn how to deal with a world that doesn’t really care about you. You’re up against institutions and individuals that are extremely powerful, and all the weapons, both real and metaphoric, are on their side. Realistically, you don’t get to defeat those villains. Mostly, you just have to try and do your best and figure out how you’re going to live with that reality.

I’m interested in “ordinary” people as opposed to superheroes, who not only have to survive whatever perils they’ve been placed in, but who are trying to figure out how to live in the world.

JB: How would you describe Hour of the Rat?

LB: A romp through environmental apocalypse in China with accidental Iraq War vet Ellie McEnroe.

JB: What provided the inspiration for Iraq War vet Ellie McEnroe, the lead character in both Rock Paper Tiger and Hour of the Rat?  Is she based on anyone in real life?

LB: The years before I started writing Rock Paper Tiger, I’d been following the news about the Iraq War and the War on Terror pretty closely. I was fascinated by figures like Jessica Lynch, who’d joined the National Guard to get some extra money–there were no jobs at Wal-Mart, and she wanted to go to school and study to be a teacher—and then when she was captured by Iraqi forces, she became a symbol of the war in a way that she never wanted to be. On the flipside, you had Lynndie England, brought up in a trailer park in Appalachia in an abusive family and who was implicated in the torture at Abu Ghraib–one of the few individuals actually prosecuted for this, along with other low-level soldiers – none of the architects of the abuses were ever punished.

I wanted to deal with the Iraq War and the War on Terror in [Rock Paper Tiger], so I came up with the character of Ellie McEnroe, an accidental war vet who’d joined the National Guard to get health insurance and maybe some money for college, and ended up in a situation way above her pay grade. Unlike say, a Lynndie England, Ellie has a strong sense of right and wrong and also, of guilt.

I just sort of imagined her background and her experiences, and channeled who she would be, if that makes any sense.

JB: Ellie or “Yili” was born in the Year of the Rat.  According to a website that explains the Chinese zodiac, “The Rat is quick-witted. Most rats get more accomplished in 24 hours than the rest of us do in as many days. They are confident and usually have good instincts. Stubborn as they are, they prefer to live by their own rules rather than those of others.”  Is this why you chose that sign for Ellie?  And why you chose Hour of the Rat as your title? 

LB: I think, actually, that I chose her sign sort of backwards – I needed her to be a certain age in Rock Paper Tiger, and the birth-date I picked for her landed her in the year of the Rat. I thought that the Rat sounded like a good sign for Ellie – stubborn and quick-witted and living by her own rules – though she must have some other influences that undermine that whole “good instincts” part, because even when she knows that it’s a bad idea to do something, she tends to go ahead and do it anyway!

Since Rock Paper Tiger came out in the Year of the Tiger – which, by the way, was totally unplanned, it just happened that way – I thought maybe carrying over the Chinese astrology theme for the title would be cool. As Ellie explains in the book, Chinese astrology, like Western astrology, has rising signs, based on the time of day you’re born. Each “Hour” is actually two, and the Hour of the Rat is between 11 PM and 1 AM. I was actually born in the Hour of the Rat, and I don’t know, I just liked the way it sounded and the images that it conjured up.

JB: How different were earlier versions of Hour of the Rat compared to the final copy?

LB: Not very. One of my beta readers made a very smart observation about how a plot reveal I’d initially done early on sort of undermined the tension, so I moved that around. My amazing editor at Soho, Juliet Grames, suggested the addition of a prologue, to put people back into Ellie’s world, and had some notes about strengthening certain emotional arcs and story points. Overall, though, I was really lucky with this book – it basically came out in the first draft pretty much the way that it went to print. Would that they were all so easy!

JB: Do you have a favorite character in this story?  If so, who?

LB: I like them all, of course, but I will admit to a particular fondness for Kang Li, the macho guy with a soft spot for cats.

JB: You traveled to China shortly after the Cultural Revolution.  How did that visit affect you and also your writing?

The author in China.

LB: It completely changed the course of my life. I was twenty years old, and China at that time had been very closed off to the West and to Western cultural influences. When I showed up it was like being from the Starship Enterprise, and I’d beamed down to this strange planet. Americans, especially young Americans, were objects of intense curiosity and speculation—most of the Chinese we encountered hadn’t met many, or any Americans, so we took on this weird symbolic role, too. At the same time, there really weren’t any American pop culture influences in China at that time, other than bootlegged tapes of The Sound Of Music and TV broadcasts of a short-lived TV series starring Patrick Duffy called The Man From Atlantis (which was filmed in my hometown of San Diego, making it even weirder to see in Beijing, China!). American pop culture is so globally pervasive that being someplace where it was absent was oddly liberating.

I was in China for six months but the whole thing was so intense that it felt like Experience Concentrate.

It took me years to put it all in context and to really fully integrate the experience. I don’t think I really did until I started studying Mandarin years later and began to travel back to China.

In terms of the writing, if you compared examples of my prose before and after China, I don’t think you’d recognize them as being by the same person.

 

JB: World-wide environmental and political issues are of significant importance to you.  How easy or how difficult is it to

Lisa Brackmann

incorporate the things that matter to you into your fiction?

LB: I always say that my stories are about character meets setting meets something that I’m passionate about – the kind of issues you mention above help provide the passion. The main thing I have to work on is incorporating those kinds of topics into the story in an organic way. I want to avoid info dumps and a lot of didactic speechifying. I’m writing suspense novels, not academic non-fiction or political polemics.

JB: What is different this time around compared to when you were writing Rock Paper Tiger?

LB: Pretty different on a lot of levels. When I wrote Rock Paper Tiger, I didn’t have an agent. I hadn’t sold a book. There were no particular expectations on me other than the ones I put on myself. Hour of the Rat is my third published novel, and there’s a whole process that goes along with that. I can’t say that I’m exactly used to it, but I’m somewhat familiar with it at least.

JB: What was the most difficult thing about writing Hour of the Rat?

LB: Probably that I had to take certain aspects of Rock Paper Tiger that I had intended to be a little metaphoric – the open-endedness of the parts of the story to me was an expression of what the book was about. But in a sequel, you don’t have the same leeway to leave that many areas mysterious. I had to make decisions about how to ground these things in reality.

JB: Did you learn anything new about yourself in the midst of writing the novel?

LB: Mostly that I could write a book on a schedule and with a deadline, and that as long as I planned my time wisely, I could do that.

JB: What is a typical day of writing like for Lisa Brackmann?

LB: I get up and do my email and reading. I edit any work I did the night before. When I’m on a roll or have a lot to do, I have a writing session after that. Then late afternoon, I go out and get some exercise – either I go to the gym, or I take a long walk to do errands. I think it’s super-important for writers not to neglect their bodies, which is easy to do when your job is so much in your head and there’s so much sitting involved! My latest favorite form of exercise is old-school weight training—dead-lifts and bench presses and the like. I’m loving it.

 

I usually read novels or books for research and/or watch some TV in the early evening. I save the tough creative work for late night. I’ve always been a night owl, and I got into the habit of writing late at night when I had a full-time day job. I just sort of trained myself into it: “Now is the time to be creative and work.” For whatever reason it’s when my focus is best and when I am most able to problem-solve. Maybe for me it’s easier to be creative when everyone around me is asleep.

 

Mixed in with all this is socializing with friends and family, which is another thing that I think is really essential. Most writers are introverts, and for a lot of us, at times we think of other people as intrusions and interruptions. While it’s true that we need to be able to shut the door and work, I think for me, it’s important to not isolate. Besides, people and their conflicts are at the center of what we write. If we just stay in our rooms all day and don’t talk to anyone, what are we going to write about?

 

Of course, then, I have to make sure that I’m not socializing as a form of procrastination, which has been known to happen. 

 

Also, cats. Generally there are cats involved. I’m sitting next to one as I type this.

 

JB: Will you go on a book tour?  If so, which cities will you visit?

LB: I’m mostly going to focus on California this time out, so I’m doing events in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego and Orange County. I’ll also be at Bouchercon in Albany, NY, in September and am hoping to do a few gigs in New York City around that.

JB: What do you hope readers take with them after reading Hour of the Rat?

LB: I hope they get a little sense of what China is like, and maybe take away that the tough things we need to face in many cases are global in scale. What happens in China affects us in the US, and vice-versa. And that maybe there are certain aspects of our global economy that are pretty [screwed] up, that don’t benefit most people and that don’t benefit the planet.

Also, I hope that it’s a book people can escape into for a few hours, go somewhere different, and at the end that they enjoyed the ride.

JB: What’s next for you?  Are you working on anything new?  I certainly look forward to the return of Lao Zhang.

LB: I’m working on the third book in the series, tentatively called Dragon Day. The end of Hour of the Rat actually is setting up for a sequel – there are some plot threads running through the first two books that I feel I need to draw to a conclusion. So, yes, you will see Lao Zhang! I’m also working on a sequel to my second book, Getaway. It’s very different from that book, with a more satiric edge, but it also deals with issues that I’m very interested in exploring: the prison system in the US, particularly private prisons, and the relationship between that and the War on Drugs. Also, I’m having a lot of fun with the main character, Michelle, who I’m just going to say is not the woman she was at the beginning of Getaway, and the villain of the piece, who gets so much joy out of screwing with peoples’ lives—a man who truly loves his work.

JB: Thanks, Lisa, for a wonderful interview.  Good luck with the book!

LB: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure!

 

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Book Review: In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell

In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell (Soho; 320 pages; $25.95).

Reading Matt Bell’s first novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, I often looked up from the book and blinked furiously in confusion.  I expected to see a house with myriad rooms, a strange sky above me, a lake in the distance, and a wooded green.  Instead, my own familiar environs surrounded me.   That is just how powerful the setting is in Bell’s dreamlike, fabled, and beautiful debut.  The story of a marriage and its collapse become much more as Bell infuses myth, allegory, and symbolism into his story, transforming the work into something else entirely.

A couple marries and, longing to get away from the rest of the world, moves to a bizarre land.  The husband builds them a house, which the wife improves upon not by her hands but with her voice.  If the husband starts building a room, for example, the wife can simply sing the rest of the space into being.  For a time, despite the presence of a bear, a presence that looms over the entire novel, they are harmonious.  Yet, their family is incomplete.

He longs for a child; she tries to give him one, but fulfilling that longing is not easy as her every pregnancy fails.  The wife senses that she and her husband are slowly drifting further and further away from one another.  Determined to save her marriage, the wife sings a son into existence.  When the husband discovers the horrible truth of the child’s origins, he goes in search of his wife and their “foundling.”

As the husband walks through the house his wife built, now abandoned by them, Bell shows us the remnants of a failed marriage.  “And in this room,” Bell writes, “The sound of my wife’s knuckle first sliding beneath the beaten silver of that ring, a sound never before heard, or else forgotten amidst all the other business of our wedding day.”  Behind each door the husband opens is a different and striking scene.  Each room holds a memory, a recollection the husband has long forgotten, but which the wife tucks away.

In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods may seem otherworldly, but the story is actually very familiar and recognizable.  “As her side of our bedchamber grew some few inches, I did what little I could to right our arrangement, tugged hard at the blankets that barely covered the widened bed—until once again all things were distributed evenly, even as they were somehow also further apart.”

The debut is a simple story of love, marriage, parenthood, and aging amplified by mystery, lore, and imagery.  A fabulous and fantastical journey into the heart of a husband and wife and into the unknown, In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods is by turns dark, mysterious, and foreboding.  Bell imbues such imagination and brilliance into this tale.  Bell provides a real insight into ourselves, and therein lies the real beauty of the story.

As the years pass and the couple gets older, the wife can no longer remember her husband or the foundling.  Sadly, she cannot even remember the songs she once sang.  Most arresting to me was the squid the husband turned into as he swam into the depths of the murky lake, his aches and pains and age dissolving away.  Muted passages like these spoke volumes to me and lend the narrative richness and power.

Reminiscent of the work of Aimee Bender and Karen Russell, In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods has already

Matt Bell

garnered attention from the Indie Next list, choosing it as one of its selections for July.  Bell’s lyrical language, his crystal clarity, and his sharp and colorful setting explain what all the fuss is about and herald the arrival of a major new literary talent.

When you open In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, you leave your world behind and enter a shadowy and forbidding landscape.  And you will be so glad you did.

 

Book Review: You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt

You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt (Penguin; 304 pages; $26.95).

When two school-age girls have a falling out, the clash can seem like the outbreak of world war.  Both sides have many friends, allies who declare war simply because of loyalty to one party.  Think of them as NATO versus the Warsaw Pact.  There is no détente, and things can quickly get ugly.  Each girl deploys secret agents to spy and gather intelligence on the opposing foe.  Undercover surveillance reveals the weaknesses of each adolescent, failings that must be exploited at any cost.  Mutually assured destruction is a given.  If one of the girls tells a deep, dark secret on the other, retaliation will be swift and massive.    In this electrically charged, DEF-CON 1 environment, nuclear war becomes a real possibility as the chances of disarmament plummet.  This terminology recalls the blackest, iciest days of the Cold War—the early 1980s—the setting of Elliott Holt’s smart and suspenseful debut You Are One Of Them.

Hostile young girls are not that much different from warring nations.  Best friends Sarah Zuckerman and Jennifer Jones write letters to Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov in 1982.  Incredibly, the president replies, but only to Jenny’s missive, not to Sarah’s.  Andropov invites Jenny and her family to the USSR on a good-will tour.  Jenny becomes a celebrity practically overnight but never mentions Sarah’s letter or the fact that it was all Sarah’s idea.  Say good-bye to that friendship.  A new cold war between former best friends thus commences.

Then, in 1985, Jenny and her family die in a plane crash.  The news devastates Sarah, sending her into a tail-spin.  Because Sarah thinks she is defective since those closest to her end up leaving or dying (her sister, her father, her best friend), defectors from the Soviet Union like Mikhail Baryshnikov, Vitaly Yurchenko, and Oleg Gordievsky fascinate her.   After college, Sarah decides to visit Russia for the first time.  She hopes to find a position in journalism in Moscow.

Sarah, though, has another reason to visit Moscow.  She receives a strange letter from a woman who spent time with Jenny during her tour of the Soviet Union and alludes to the possibility that Jenny did not actually die in the crash.  Here’s where the story turns exciting and interesting, especially when Sarah comes face to face with a woman who may or may not be Jenny.

Holt’s ending is intentionally ambiguous.  However, I preferred the vague ending to a clearer conclusion in this instance.  I liked not knowing.  I liked closing the book and wondering how one can navigate a course for truth when secrets and lies cloud the way.   Of course, the novel’s indefinite finale may frustrate some readers, but I appreciated the enigmatic mystery.

The character of Jenny is loosely based on Samantha Smith.  In December of 1982, Smith, a ten-year-old girl from Manchester, Maine, wrote a letter to Andropov.  Smith asked the Soviet premier if he planned to mount a nuclear war against America.  He replied to her, and, at his invitation, Smith toured the Soviet Union the next year.  Her picture was everywhere, and she even became a television actress.  This little girl was America’s youngest ambassador, but her life was cruelly cut short in 1985 when she and her parents were killed in a plane crash.

Set in Washington, D.C. in the 1980s when Star Wars was on the minds of moviegoers and presidents alike and in Moscow during the

Elliott Holt

1990s when the world map was constantly being drawn and redrawn, You Are One of them is fast-paced to reflect that fast-moving world.  Because the author lived in Moscow from 1997 to 1999, her writing radiates with intricate ease as Sarah navigates Moscow.  Holt is thus able to transport us to a strange, new, and uncertain Russia—a country that was once just as perplexing as the mystery that is at the heart of You Are One of Them.

Holt excavates the familiar terrain of friendship, loyalty, betrayal, and deception in You Are One of Them, but her penetrating gaze and knowing voice propel her tale far past other novels.   You Are One of Them shares the feel of The Americans and is just as addictive.  I was glued to every page of Holt’s novel.  I would have endured a nuclear winter to spend more time with these striking and well-illustrated characters…well, maybe.

Spotlight on Hour of the Rat by Lisa Brackmann

One of my favorite novels of 2010 was Rock Paper Tiger by Lisa Brackmann.

I bit every one of my fingernails to the quick while reading Brackmann’s book–it was just that good and that compelling.

And now she’s back for another go with Hour of the Rat, coming June 18 from Soho.

Ellie McEnroe returns in the sequel to the critically acclaimed New York Times and USA Today best-seller, ROCK PAPER TIGER.

Iraq War vet Ellie McEnroe has a pretty good life in Beijing, representing the work of controversial dissident Chinese artist Zhang Jianli. Even though Zhang’s mysterious disappearance of over a year ago has her in the sights of the Chinese authorities. Even though her Born-Again mother has come for a visit and shows no signs of leaving. But when her mom takes up with “that nice Mr. Zhou next door,” Ellie decides that it’s time to get out of town—given her mother’s past bad choices of men, no good can come of this.

An old Army buddy, Dog Turner, gives her the perfect excuse. His unstable brother Jason has disappeared in picturesque Yangshuo, a famous tourist destination, and though Ellie knows it’s a long shot, she agrees to try to find him. At worst, she figures she’ll have a few days of fun in some gorgeous scenery.

But her plans for a relaxing vacation are immediately complicated when her mother and the new boyfriend tag along. And as soon as she starts asking questions about the missing Jason, Ellie realizes that she’s stumbled into a dangerous conspiracy that may or may not involve a sinister biotech company, eco-terrorists, an art-obsessed Chinese billionaire and lots of cats—one that will take her on a wild chase through some of China’s most beautiful—and most surreal—places.

About Lisa:

Lisa Brackmann has worked as an executive at a major motion picture studio, an issues researcher in a presidential campaign, and

Lisa Brackmann

was the singer/songwriter/bassist in an LA rock band. Yes, she will do karaoke, and she’s looking to buy a bass ukulele. Her debut novel, ROCK PAPER TIGER, set on the fringes of the Chinese art world, made several “Best of 2010″ lists, including Amazon’s Top 100 Novels and Top 10 Mystery/Thrillers, and was nominated for the Strand Magazine Critics Award for Best First Novel. Her second novel, GETAWAY, won the Los Angeles Book Festival Grand Prize and was nominated for the T. Jefferson Parker SCIBA award.

Hour of the Rat is clever and taut and every bit as good as Rock Paper Tiger.  I love how flawed Brackmann’s protagonist is.  Her imperfections make Ellie real and relatable.  It is that authenticity together with an atmospheric setting and a spectacular plot that make Hour of the Rat such a stimulating and fascinating read.

Check back next week for my interview with Lisa Brackmann.  Yes, there will be a third book in the series!

Book Review: The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiSclafani

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiSclafani (Riverhead Books; 400 pages; $27.95).

We’ve all known girls like Thea Atwell—girls who made mistakes so big they were sent away, fast girls, precocious girls, daring girls.  Thea narrates Anton DiSclafani’s debut novel The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, an exquisite period piece and a provocative, passionate, and bold coming-of-age tale. Much more than just a precocious teen, Thea is a magnificently well-drawn character, a trail-blazer, wholly modern, and a feminist (before there was such a thing).  No one who reads this story will be able to forget Thea, one of the most memorable characters in fiction today.

Exiled from her family, from her Florida home, and from her beloved horse, Sasi, Thea is sent to a school for girls in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.  In a voice that is at times worldly and sometimes naïve, Thea reveals, “It was called the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, but it was neither a camp nor a place for girls.  We were supposed to be made ladies here.”

Her place in the family had once been well-defined, but now Thea is displaced and struggling, “a confused, wronged girl” whose parents punish her for a misdeed by banishing her.  Her twin brother, Sam, who commits a transgression of his own, is left unpunished.

DiSclafani uses two story arcs, one present and one past, to tell her story.  The two narratives are like Thea herself—on the cusp of something.  Each story arc leads up to a shuddering climax, while Thea herself is a character also on the cusp, at a crossroads of adulthood, womanhood, and budding sexuality.

Thea slowly comes to realize it is a man’s world.  Whether she is in Florida or in North Carolina, she must obey either her father or the headmaster.  She must obey their rules and abide by their laws.  And she is not alone.  At Yonahlossee, her new friends must also follow the dictates of their fathers and the depressed economy.  Friends like Leona, mistress of the showing arena, who must leave her horse behind when her father can no longer afford his daughter’s tuition.  They are “but daughters.” It’s no wonder these girls ride horses: only in the saddle do they have any semblance of control.

Interestingly, Thea seems to assume the role that others have assigned her at Yonahlossee.  “Did my parents hope I’d been taught a lesson?  They thought they’d sent me somewhere safe.  Away from men, away from cousins…If my parents had kept me home, I might have learned their lesson.”  Thea, though, chafes at convention.  She is a girl who wants too much and who desires desperately, a girl who has been introduced to the world of men and finds she likes this world, even if she does not always understand it.  She is fearless, an attribute that aids her “in the [horse] ring” but “badly in life.”

At fifteen, Thea wants to explore who she is and what and where the boundaries are.  Today, her rebellion is a rite of passage, but it was unusual in 1931 for a girl to behave as risky as Thea does in the novel.  Since her parents have expelled her, she feels that there is nothing left for her to lose.

With reckless abandon, Thea sets her sights on the headmaster, Mr. Holmes.  And what Thea wants, she usually finds a way to get.  She knows “what it was like to want, to desire so intensely” that she is “willing to throw everything else into its fire.”

When DiSclafani reveals both the shocking act that led to Thea’s expulsion and the scandalous way in which she leaves Yonahlossee,

Anton DiSclafani

you are speechless, shaken, and consumed with awe.  DiSclafani writes, “I wanted everything.  I wanted my cousin.  I wanted Mr. Holmes.  I was a girl, I learned, who got what she wanted, but not without sadness, not without cutting a swatch of destruction so wide it consumed my family.  And almost me.  I almost fell into it, with them.  I almost lost myself.”

Yet it is only because of her intense desire and wildness that Thea is able to forge her own path, a place in the ring where she rules supreme and where fathers and headmasters are absent.  Neither her parents nor Thea expected this surprising turn of events when Thea was cast out.   In the end, Yonahlossee shows Thea her life is hers and no one else’s. Thea must “lay claim to it.”

Penetratingly plot-driven, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls is a literary stunner and will be one of the most talked-about novels of the year.  Get a head start and read it now.

 

 

 

 

 

Interview with Bill Cheng, Author of Southern Cross The Dog

Southern Cross the Dog by Bill Cheng (Ecco Books; 336 pages; $25.99).

Chinese-American author Bill Cheng takes on the African-American existence in Mississippi in his odyssey Southern Cross the Dog.  Cheng focuses his narrative lens on Robert Chatham, a black man in his 20s who believes he is cursed.

Cheng contrasts the tenderness of falling in love for the first time with the rising waters of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the catastrophe that destroyed Robert’s home and changed his life forever.

Robert’s journey takes him from a refugee camp to a brothel to a job clearing land in the name of progress.  With an evocative setting, Southern Cross the Dog is a testament to a man’s will to live and to the distance he will go for friendship and love as he must carve a place and an existence free of bad luck and curses.

Full of meaning, Southern Cross the Dog features a strong narrator who takes us with him on his incredible journey.  Cheng’s magisterial and resonating historical epic is steeped in an astounding setting and peopled by the most intriguing and charismatic characters.  Equally memorable and equally fascinating, Southern Cross the Dog heralds the arrival of a brilliant new voice in literature.

 

Jaime Boler: Thank you, Bill, for letting me ask you these questions.  You blew me away with your epic odyssey set in my home state.  Did you always want to be a writer?

Bill Cheng

Bill Cheng: It’s my pleasure.

I can’t remember a time of wanting to be anything else.  When I was a kid, I was prone to daydreaming a lot in class, and, when I was twelve, I started writing these adventure stories with my friends.  There wasn’t a discrete moment, though, where I felt like I was suddenly [a] writer.  It was just something I did, out of boredom or to amuse myself.  Some part of that probably holds true today.

 

JB: How would you describe Southern Cross the Dog in ten words or less?

 

BC: Coming home.

 

 

JB: Are you a fan of the blues?

 

BC: Very much so.  I kind of came of age at a time when this country was particularly fragile and unsure of itself and its place in the world.  Blues, for me, had a way of framing that anxiousness and desperateness.  When I listen to John Hurt or Skip James or Leroy Carr, the world becomes smaller somehow, more manageable.

 

JB: Which character’s voice did you hear first?

BC: Dora’s.  Robert I saw first, but Dora I know down to the timbre.  When I was 21 or 22, I was teaching for a short time at this this school in Bedford-Stuyvesant.  I think I heard her voice there.

 

JB: What was the inspiration behind Southern Cross the Dog?

BC: There isn’t one blues song that helped me build the texture and world of this novel.  The first one I point to, though, is John Lee Hooker’s Tupelo, but there are a host of others: (In the Evening) When the Sun Goes Down by Leroy Carr; Hellhound on my Trail by Robert Johnson, Death Letter Blues by Son House, Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor by Mississippi John Hurt, Hard Times Killing Floor by Skip James… the list goes on and on.

But on the subject of inspiration, the writers teaching at my MFA program at Hunter College—Colum McCann, Peter Carey, Nathan Englander—have been an ongoing source of inspiration, not only for this book, but my outlook on what I think a writer is and should be.

 

JB: Your title is a reference to “Where the Southern crosses the yellow dog,” where two railroad lines cross in Moorhead, Mississippi.  What does the title mean to Robert Chatham, your main character?

BC: Interesting question.  I don’t know if I’ll have an interesting answer.  To me, that’s always existed in my mind as a place of final rest and peace, like the Beulah Land that John Hurt sings about.  To me, that’s what Robert wants throughout the novel, but when Robert he uses the term in the novel, I’m not sure if it’s anything but a reference to the place.

 

JB: Prior to your Mississippi book tour, had you ever visited the state?  Did anything about Mississippi or its people surprise you?

 

The author at Lemuria Books in Jackson, MS

BC: I hadn’t.   

I hate to generalize, but I suppose my greatest surprise was how warm and genial [everyone] was.  I remember driving through Vicksburg one Sunday evening, and my wife and I had gotten a little turned around.  We were along some stretch of houses down by the river, and some old guy was just sitting on his porch, looking at us.  Then, unexpectedly, he lifted up his hand to wave to us.  We waved back.

 

JB: Yes, that sounds exactly like Mississippians.  What research did you do for Southern Cross the Dog?

 

BC: I’ve done a fair amount.  Read a lot, listened to music, oral histories, watched movies, documentaries, visited museums—basically everything short of booking a flight and setting foot down into the Delta. It can be tricky with research; you don’t want to do so much that the story you want to tell becomes bullied and constrained by the research.  Somewhere in my parents’ house is a replica of a brochure that shows all the Black-friendly hotels in Mississippi.  That never made it into the book, but it told me something about the world I was trying to imagine.
JB: What was the most difficult thing about writing your novel?

 

BC: Writing the Dora section was difficult.  Having to embody a young black girl who undergoes this horrible abuse—it really tested my convictions as to what I believe is and isn’t within a writer’s wheelhouse.

 

JB: Did you learn anything new about yourself while writing this story?

 

BC: I suppose I learned a lot about what I’m willing to test and what I’m willing to risk as a new writer starting out.  I learned that good fiction is unafraid, and, more than art, the writer needs conscience.

 

JB: How were earlier versions of Southern Cross the Dog different from the final copy?

 

BC: In the earliest conception of the book, Eli Cutter was going to play a more significant role in Robert’s life.  Robert and Eli would have traveled together in Duke’s medicine show.  In the end, I decided it would make the already large book too unwieldy.  I also cut some scenes with the dog.  Its presence was pressing too deeply in the realm of the supernatural, and I wanted it its presence to be an open question in the reader’s mind.

 

JB: What do you hope readers take with them after reading Southern Cross the Dog?

 

BC: I want readers to understand that this was not a book about the South, or about the Black experience.  It’s about us, today, right here.

 

JB: What’s next for you?  Are you working on anything new?

 

BC: Yes.   About a hundred new things, in fact.  It’s hard to stay with anything new when a part of you is still so vested in the world of this book.  But I think things are about winding down now.  I have a new novel I’m trying to make some headway, but I might just go ahead and try to knock out some short stories as a kind of palette cleanser.

I can say, however, with some confidence that whatever my next project is, it won’t be another blues novel.  It’d be easy enough to poach some of the characters from here and perhaps set the book in post-WWII Chicago but there’s nothing vital in that for me right now.  It’s not to say that it couldn’t happen in the future, but, right now, I feel like I’ve said what I wanted to say.

 

JB: I will read anything you write.  Whatever it is: I know it will be good.  Thanks, Bill, for a wonderful interview.  Good luck with the book!

Author Website

 

 

Interview with Matt Bell, Author of In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell (Soho Press; 312 pages; $25). 

Jaime Boler: Thank you, Matt, for letting me ask you these questions.  I loved your mythic, fabled novel IN THE HOUSE UPON THE DIRT BETWEEN THE LAKE AND THE WOODS.  Did you always want to be a writer?

 

Matt Bell

 

Matt Bell: Thank you! I’m so glad you enjoyed the book, and I appreciate you talking to me about it.

 

I was always a reader, and did occasionally write, off and on, but I didn’t begin to actively pursue writing seriously until I was twenty or so, right before I went back to college. Not surprisingly, that change happened around the same time I found the first literary writers I truly loved, writers like Kurt Vonnegut, Denis Johnson, Amy Hempel, and Raymond Carver.

 

JB: How would you describe IN THE HOUSE UPON THE DIRT BETWEEN THE LAKE AND THE WOODS in ten words or less?

 

MB: It’s not the easiest book to synopsize, is it? Ten words isn’t much—that’s less words than are in the title—but let’s say the book is a “myth about marriage and parenthood—with bear, squid, and maze.”

 

JB: How did you come up with the title?

 

MB: I think I had the title pretty early on. It’s not a particularly tricky title, despite how long it is: It’s really just the setting, right? And I always liked that. Part of what makes the book go is the constrained setting, and I like announcing that in the title.

 

JB: Your story explores “the limits of parenthood and marriage—and of what happens when a marriage’s success is measured solely by the children it produces, or else the sorrow that marks their absence.”  Yet you infuse the tale with allegorical and epic qualities.  Why did you choose to tell the story in this way?  And how different a novel would it be without the myth and enchantment?

 

MB: The story is this way because it’s what the story demanded, more than anything else: I was discovering the events of the story before I knew what they meant, or how they necessarily went together. For me, these thematic concerns emerge from story, not the other way around.

 

JB: Novelist Colum McCann writes, “It’s complicated when you’re talking about voices and trying to create voices, or trying to create an atmosphere around a voice. I think eventually the voice is heard deep, deep into the work. There’s one line there—if you can recognize it, you can bring it back to the beginning. It’s like music, right? You find the right note, the other notes will follow. That’s how the voice things work in a book. You’re like a conductor who goes into the pit and you bring all the magicians and the instruments and you have to strike them up. Most likely you need a few days with them to find the texture of the music you want to play, or perhaps months. And then you find where the actual quality, the actual flavor of the voice is. From there, you hope the music works.”  Is this true for you?  Whose voice did you hear first in your own story?

 

MB: I think this is absolutely the case: Without the voice, there isn’t even any way to continue forward. I often don’t hear it quite right at the beginning—one of the reasons to rewrite so much is to continue to deepen the voice—but I try always to let it push the story forward. I don’t plan first drafts, I don’t try to understand too much, I try to let the speaker dictate where the story goes next. In this case, of course, it was the husband’s voice—and his voice was so loud that it was, for a long time, hard to see the rest of the story from any other perspective but his.

 

JB: You teach creative writing at Northern Michigan University.  Is writing something that can be taught or is it a matter of either you “got it or you don’t”?

 

MB: If I didn’t believe you could teach writing, my job would be a bit of a scam, right? Talent exists, but it’s the least of the qualities a writer needs, and a writer can make up for most any lack he or she has with a powerful work ethic, a voracious reading appetite, and an honest and personal approach to the world, in addition to the study of form and technique. And if any of these aspects of being a writer can’t be taught, they can at least be modeled. I try to do both for my students.

 

JB: Has teaching writing made you a better author?

 

MB: Absolutely. It’s a pleasure to get to talk about stories I love with smart and sensitive young writers, and of course their own work is often surprising and inspiring. A lot of the models I share with my students are stories that were fundamental in my own growth as a writer, but I also share a lot of very new stories from lit mags and new collections that I find interesting. It’s great to get to work through those stories with fifteen smart students, and to see them working day by day to understand their own natural aesthetics, the slice of literature in which they’ll begin to write and work.

 

JB: What is a typical day of writing like for you?

 

MB: Under normal circumstances, I write in the mornings, from the time I get up until I break for lunch at 12 or 1. Then the rest of the day is given to reading and teaching and editing, and of course to friends and family and so on. It’s a surprisingly dull-sounding schedule, perhaps—but I’m very thankful for it.

 

JB: What are some of your favorite books and who are some of your favorite authors?

 

MB: I’m so bad at listing favorites, because the number of writers I might name is far too lengthy for this kind of interview. If you forced me to pick a favorite book, I’d say Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson: I’ve read that book at least once a year for as long as I’ve known it, and it’s gotten better with every single read.

 

 

 

JB: Your debut has already been selected as June Book Club Selections for Powell’s Indiespensable and the Nervous Breakdown.  IN THE HOUSE UPON THE DIRT BETWEEN THE LAKE AND THE WOODS also has the distinct honor of being chosen as an Indie Next pick for July.  How did you react upon hearing the news?

 

MB: Obviously, each of these was a great honor, unexpected but greatly appreciated. I never thought the response to this novel would be so kind, and I couldn’t be more grateful for the attention it’s received.

 

JB: What do you hope readers take with them after reading IN THE HOUSE UPON THE DIRT BETWEEN THE LAKE AND THE WOODS?

 

MB: There isn’t a specific message I want readers to take away, or anything like that. The book isn’t an argument, in that sense. What I hope instead is that readers have an experience with the book, that it draws them in and then makes a space where they might be moved and possibly changed, intellectually or morally or, most importantly, emotionally. That’s what writing the book did for me. It’s what I hope reading the book will do for others.

 

JB: Thanks, Matt, for a wonderful interview, and good luck with the book.

 

Author Website

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Interview with Marybeth Whalen, Author of The Wishing Tree

Ivy Marshall, a savvy, determined woman, finds out her husband has cheated on her on the same day her sister’s perfect boyfriend proposes on national television. When Ivy’s mother asks her to return to her family’s beach home to plan her sister’s upcoming wedding, she decides to use the excuse to escape from the pain of her circumstances.
When her return to Sunset Beach, North Carolina, brings her face to face with her former fiance, old feelings rise to the surface and she wonders if there is a future for them. However, her husband has started tweeting his apology to her and doesn’t want to give up on their marriage. As she helps prepare the wishing tree for her sister’s wedding, she must examine her own wishes for the future and decide what love should be.

The Wishing Tree by Marybeth Whalen (Zondervan; 336 pages; $15.99)

Jaime Boler: Thank you, Marybeth, for letting me ask you these questions.  Your fourth novel struck such a chord with me—it’s incredibly moving, tender, and sweet.  Did you always want to be a novelist?

Marybeth Whalen: Thank you! Yes, I have wanted to write novels for as long as I can remember. But the thought of putting myself out there, and possibly failing, terrified me. Of course, now I’m so glad I finally did!

JB: How would you describe The Wishing Tree in ten words or less?

MW: A story about wishes we make and power of forgiveness.

JB: What inspired you to write this story?

MW: In researching the history of guest books for my last novel (The Guest Book), I stumbled across information about the tradition of putting up a wishing tree at a wedding. I was intrigued and decided that would make a great element to wrap a story around next.

JB: I confess that, prior to reading The Wishing Tree, I had no idea what a wishing tree was.  Can you explain what it is?  Is it a regional practice?  Is the wishing tree a tradition in your own family?

MW: It’s actually a Dutch tradition that I’d never heard of either before my research. But I loved the idea of starting off a life together with all these wishes from those you love. And then I thought how all marriages begin with wishes– and then those wishes change over time. And what a picture that is of marriage. I had the theme and element I knew would make for a great story.

JB: In The Wishing Tree, Elliott gets to know his wife, Ivy, all over again through social media sites like Pinterest, Goodreads, and Twitter.  While reading that, I thought to myself: “How modern and how cute!”  You have a presence on all these sites.  Is this your love letter to social media?

MW: It’s my acknowledgement of how these sites have invaded our lives, for better or worse. They’re a part of our culture and I felt they should be included. I originally had the idea of a husband who apologized to his wife via Twitter because she wouldn’t talk to him and he was desperate to get to her. I put myself in that situation and knew that– if it were me– just knowing he was talking about me would compel me to peek, no matter how stalwart I was about my anger. That tension between wanting to know what he’s saying and wanting to keep her distance, creates a dilemma for Ivy in the book. Of course, it’s not her only one!

JB: Have you ever gotten to reconnect with someone through social media?

MW: Facebook has put me in touch with many people from my past. It’s been so fun! I was actually able to hear from the girl who took me to Sunset Beach, North Carolina, the first time. Without her I’d never know about this special place where 3 of my books are set. So it was so wonderful to be able to thank her.

JB: Ivy’s mother, Margot, says to her: “I didn’t even consider that something that was over could have a new life.”  How does the wishing tree reflect Ivy and Elliott’s marriage?

MW: The wishing tree is a symbol of their marriage. Where do we hang our wishes? Is it right to hang our wishes on another human being? Can they withstand the weight of those wishes? And what happens if they can’t? The story that ensues is an examination of that.

 JB: You choose not to show the reader the conversation between Ivy and Elliott near the end of the book, the talk in which they got back together.  Why not feature it within the narrative?

MW: That conversation was so raw and personal and intimate I felt it was almost like a sex scene. Better to say it was happening, then leave the details up to the imagination. To try to hash it out line by line somehow cheapened the scene.

JB: How different were earlier versions of The Wishing Tree compared to the final version?

MW: Pretty similar except there were some character issues– motives, history, resolution– that had to be resolved.

JB: What was the most difficult thing about writing this novel?  And did you learn anything new about yourself in the midst of writing and editing?

MW: Dealing with Ivy’s motives in pursuing Michael. It made me uncomfortable and I knew it would my reader as well. Also determining how the book should end. I didn’t know for most of the book what would happen. In some ways that was fun and in some ways unnerving!

JB: What are some of your favorite books and who are some of your favorite authors?

MW: Elizabeth Berg is probably my all-time favorite. I read all her work. She has a knack for noticing the little things that are actually poignant and preserving them in prose.

JB: You are a wife, mother of six children, novelist, and the director of She Reads, an online book club focusing on the best in women’s fiction.  You are Superwoman!  How do you do it all?

Marybeth Whalen

MW: I do the best I can every day, working my priorities, which vary according to the day. I try to be flexible and forgive myself when I fail, which is a lot. Somehow it all gets done.

JB: What do you like to do when you aren’t writing?

MW: Read. Hang out with my family. Watch movies or true crime shows. Now that it’s summer, we spend a lot of the time at the pool.

JB: What do you hope readers take with them after reading The Wishing Tree?

MW: The power of forgiveness– forgiving others, forgiving yourself.

JB: What’s next for you?  Are you working on anything new?

MW: I just finished my fifth novel which, Lord willing, will be out this time next summer. It’s another Sunset Beach story with a symbolic element bringing two people together a la The Mailbox, The Guest Book, and The Wishing Tree!

JB: Thanks, Marybeth, for a wonderful interview!  Good luck with the book.

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