Ellen Meeropol talks about House Arrest

Ellen Meeropol's House Arrest is well...arresting. Heidi Durrow calls it "a compelling debut" while Julia Class raves that it is “smart, provocative, and moving." I want to thank Ellen for answering all my pesky questions here.

What particularly impressed me about House Arrest were all the moral choices going on. Both Emily and Pippa have to make a choice about whether or not to break the law, for their own reasons. How do you go about crafting a character?

The spark for this book was a short article in the Boston Globe about a nurse who was assigned to monitor the pregnancy of a cult member. Her patient was under house arrest pending investigation of the death of a child living in the cult. It captured my interest so I clipped the article and put it in my “ideas” folder. A few years later, I still occasionally found myself wondering what it would be like for a nurse to build a therapeutic relationship with a cult member, with some whose health beliefs were so different from her own, and decided to explore the story. In my imagination, the nurse and an Isis cult member became friends and the novel’s ethical dilemma developed from that friendship. I had no idea where the narrative would go, but I knew the conflict had something to do with the care-giving relationship and with prejudice against the cult.

When I’m crafting characters, I often imagine them Thumbelina-sized, sitting on my shoulder and whispering their secrets into my ears. Perched on one shoulder, reserved home-care nurse Emily told me about her childhood in Maine, how she lost her parents because of their political activism, and how she believes that living by the rules will keep her safe. On the other shoulder, Pippa revealed what she discovered about her father, and why she had to leave Georgia, and how the Family of Isis welcomed her.

A sense of place and the natural world are important to the way my characters grow. House Arrest is set in the Forest Park neighborhood of Springfield, Massachusetts, where I lived for many years, and on an island off the coast of Maine, where most of my fiction takes place. I work surrounded by hand-drawn maps and elaborate family trees, grounding my characters in our shared imaginary world.

You come from a background of nursing which infuses this novel. How different is Emily from you?

I worked for many years as a pediatric nurse and nurse practitioner, particularly with children with spina bifida, the condition that Emily’s beloved cousin Zoe has. I never did home care, so I had to learn from colleagues in that field. I have worked with patients from different cultural backgrounds, people who have wonderfully varied ways of looking at health and illness, and I’ve always been fascinated by those differences.

Emily is not based on me (for one thing she’s half my age) but aspects of her character are drawn from young people I have known whose activist parents made choices that had terrible consequences for themselves and their families. Emily is haunted by her parents’ actions and frozen in her own life. Nursing is a way for her to connect with people and she’s good at it.

I read that you didn't begin writing fiction until your fifties. Why not? And what jump-started your desire? What was that like?

Some days I wish like anything that I had started writing much earlier. That way, maybe I wouldn’t be publishing my first novel and applying for Medicare at the same time! I’ve always read a lot, and I often thought about writing fiction. For many years I scribbled ideas on napkins and corners of the newspaper and collected them in that “ideas” folder. But it wasn’t until 2000, when I was planning a two-month “sabbatical” so that my husband could write his book, that I realized that it was a perfect time for me to jump in too.

We rented a cottage on that island off the coast of Maine that I mentioned before; there I met my muse and she literally changed my life. I wrote all the time. Three years later, I entered an MFA program and then I took early retirement from my nurse practitioner job. Re-inventing myself in my fifties was both humbling and exhilarating. Regardless of my age and my past life as a competent profession, I was a beginner again, free to experiment and make lots of mistakes. It continues to be a terrifying and liberating experience.

The novel talks a lot about forgiveness, and how whether we actually should forgive. Do you think there ever is anything that is unforgivable? Should compassion rule us more than our laws?

I don’t really have an answer for that question, Caroline. Whether or not to forgive something that feels unforgivable is such a personal decision. If I wanted to tell people how to live, I’d write essays or self-help books. As a person and a writer, I’m fascinated by situations in which well-meaning people make questionable decisions that have awful consequences and novels let me explore those stories, with made-up characters. For my characters, sometimes forgiveness is the only way to heal.

Can you talk about your writing process?

I’m a seat-of-the-pants writer. I start with a character, or a scene, or sometimes an image, and follow it to see where it takes me. I write at the computer, in a very messy office strewn with books and papers and magazines and folders and notes and maps and photographs. I’ve never made an outline, although I’ve often wished for one. I once heard E.L. Doctorow say that for him writing a novel is like driving on a dark road at night, with only your parking lights for illumination. You can only see ahead a short distance, but that’s all you need to keep going. I’m working on my third novel manuscript now and am just beginning to trust the process.

Another part of my process is having multiple narrators. I love reading books that offer the story from several points of view, and that seems to be the way writing narratives develop for me as well. The stories that fascinate me often involve complex perspectives. I enjoy developing my novels by alternating between four or five characters, taking turns sitting on my shoulders and opening their hearts to me.

What's obsessing you now in your work and why?

No matter what I’m writing, my obsessions tend to poke their nose into my characters’ business. In general I am obsessed by the way family legacies shape our lives, and by the interplay between our actions, especially relating to political activism, and the consequences of those choices.

Right now I’m working on a manuscript about a university professor who is kidnapped and taken to a civilian detention center on an island off the coast of Maine for interrogation. This is new territory for me and this book is frightening to write. One of the multiple narrators is a guy who believes that torture is warranted to protect national security. It’s enormously challenging to try to inhabit this character in order to write his scenes.

What question didn't I ask that I should have?

You didn’t ask me what the biggest surprise has been so far in the debut of my first novel. My answer would be the generosity and bigheartedness of other authors (like you!) and by readers. Publishing literary fiction is such a difficult business; there are so many books and so little space for “success.” But I’ve been amazed by the welcome from established authors, by the support, the blurbs, the suggestions, the camaraderie, and the generous response by readers. Thank you!

BOOK GIVEAWAY!

Hey! It's an Algonquin Books Giveaway for PICTURE OF YOU! To celebrate the official pub date of my novel, Algonquin is giving away two copies of my novel! All you have to do is leave a comment on the Algonquin blog (www.algonquinbooksblog.com) or facebook page to have a chance to win! (And you'll win my undying gratitude, too!)

Algonquin Books Blog

www.algonquinbooksblog.com

Robb Forman Dew Talks about Being Polite to Hitler

I first met Robb because of a letter I wrote to her. Instantly, she responded, and she was so warm and friendly, that I kept writing to her. We've become friends--and she's truly one of the most important people in my life. A brilliant writer, she has the ability to tunnel so deeply into her characters' lives that you swear that any moment, they are going to ring your bell. Being Polite to Hitler moves through memory and history, the political and the personal with effortless grace. I loved the book--and I love Robb, too. Thanks, Robb, for answering my pesty questions.

Being Polite to Hitler is funny, moving, and so, so blazingly alive, thanks to your gorgeous, evocative prose. What’s most wonderful for me, is Agnes, who I’ve devotedly followed through the first two novels, who actually reaches her 70s in the novel, with an inner life that is just as sparkling as her outer one. When you began writing about her, did you ever expect her to end up the way she did?

When I began this trilogy I didn't think Agnes would be the focus of any one of the volumes. I had in mind something along the lines of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy. I thought I was going to be able to illustrate the rise and fall of a family within a community. But Agnes just...well, she had a world view that I hadn't imagined tackling, and I became more and more intrigued. And, as a matter of fact, in the first draft of BEING POLITE TO HITLER Agnes died. But it was too neat. No one dies that conveniently, and the last line of the book popped into my head and bothered me for weeks while Agnes was still dead.

This is your third book centered on the extraordinary and wonderful Agnes (and her family) of Washburn Ohio. The times have changed and we are now in post WWII America, with a familiar cast of characters. Did you always see these books as a trilogy?

I did see them as a trilogy, but initially there was a novel that precedes THE EVIDENCE AGAINST HER. It began about 1830 with the Scofield family, who were hard-scrabble farmers in Pennsylvania. But I suddenly found myself trapped in what is always referred to as "Historical Fiction," and I didn't want to have to wrestle with those assumptions about what I was after. Of course, then people assumed that EVIDENCE was historical fiction, which drove me crazy!

You have an enviable ability to show just how fluid time is, but I’d also say that you have a knack for showing how fluid family is, as well, and how people continue to impact the lives of others. Would you comment on that?

I'm often asked that question, and I once found myself arguing with my students, in a class I was teaching at Iowa, that if Henry James did say that a writer couldn't use a universal narrator (which my students had been mysteriously talking about as a "universal P.O.V.") that he was simply wrong. I had been so worried about not having any idea what a P.O.V. was that it took me quite some time to make my point. I don't think that is exactly what he said, because whatever works, works! I wish I had a choice in the matter, but I cannot think of time as static, nor can I think of a person as ever separate from his or her experience.

The problem for me is that everything that is always true, is always true all of the time. I work very hard to separate the pointless from the significant in conveying character and family, and at one point in the novel previous to this one, my husband was reading a section for me--which I couldn't do without, but which I don't always accept graciously. He came to find me and spread the marked pages out to show me. "You know, sweetie, I just don't think the history of WWII is your story," he said. I was appalled, because I had become fascinated with various treaties and little known meetings.

"How can you SAY that? I need my audience to know what's going on in the world..."

"Well," he said, "but, you know, there are other sources." Charles teaches American History, and I threw away about 150 pages which would have been deadly boring to anyone but me--and would even have been boring to me the second time around.

I love all the history threaded through the narrative. What was the research like for you, and given the historically rich periods the novel covers, how did you decide what to use and what to discard, particularly as the events impact the characters?

Don't you think that we are entitled to the memories of, say, our grandparents? If we live in a household that is saturated with the stories told by the people we live with, then those stories, filtered through their telling, and also filtered by our affection or dislike of the story-teller...Well, it's absurd to imagine that those stories aren't possessed by us as memories, too. I was about six years old when my parents and Red Warren and Cal Lowell--probably Peter and Eleanor Taylor, Alan Tate--I can't remember exactly who was there--but they and my parents and my uncle got into what turned into a spirited discussion in which eventually they settled on the fact that if a person preferred Benny Goodman to Artie Shaw, then it was inevitably the fact that that person would prefer Tolstoi over Dostoevsky. And vice versa: If you liked Artie Shaw then by rights you must prefer Dostoevsky over Tolstoi. I wasn't old enough to understand what was being debated, except that it was being debated with deeply earnest intensity. I was an argument that was never resolved in my extended family, and it was a moment that I claim as a memory of my own.

I loved doing the research for the first book, because the book was dependent on my perceptions of that era. I became fascinated--oddly enough--with the huge Corliss engines eventually built by Scofields and Sons, a company, of course, which was invented. In fact, I spoke to a wonderful woman in Dayton, Ohio, at The National Cash Register Company which houses the last extant Corliss engine, and she went down to the works and held her phone out so that I could record what it sounded like. I was astounded at the sound--a sort of smooth, muscular, loud--but purposeful--noise. I drove my friends crazy insisting that they listen to it over and over.

As it turned out, though, I only described that sound very briefly in one paragraph of the book.

What I particularly loved about this novel is the way the minute details of family life play out against the monumentally terrifying political events—i.e. the threat of nuclear war, the social change of the 50s and 60s and the 70s that is undermining all that has come before. The family seems to evolve even as the times do. Because it all feels so seamless, I wanted to ask you about your process. How much of a novel do you know before you sit down and write? Are you an outliner or do you fly by the seat of your writing pants, so to speak?

My sense of being dismissed as a "domestic" writer had become increasingly annoying to me. I was 52 when I began this trilogy. For one thing, people betray their bias when they refer to a book as domestic--Jonathan Franzen is, in my opinion, consumed entirely with domestic life and its fluctuations within a frightening and changing framework, but no one would ever describe his work as domestic fiction. But I had put myself in the position of being considered less than...well, I hadn't had the courage to express my whole point of view. I have virtually no education; who was I to make pronouncements? And finally I thought it was time I grew up and had my say. Not that anyone was waiting around for me to do so, but I needed to try to make my case. I'm not at all sure I've succeeded.

I've always thought that the profound and the mundane were one and the same thing. We all live our one, insulated life--there's no choice--and suppose you gave birth to a baby at the same moment, say, that John Kennedy was assassinated? In your life your child's birth is far more profound, but in the life of the world babies are a dime a dozen. But it seems to me that it's far to easy to dismiss the personal as unimportant as opposed to the universal. My fiction is about character--what people are like and how they became who they are--and I was determined to attempt to make people see that.

I love the provocative title, Being Polite to Hitler, which is about staying safe, hiding your terror, and appearing to do the right thing—an impossible act given the changes flying all about the characters. Can you tell me how this title came about?

As a matter of fact, that was a saying in my household. A sort of code, really. When we were off to see people we didn't especially want to see, or going to some event we dreaded, it was referred to as: going off to be polite to Hitler. Little, Brown really wanted me to change it to...well, to anything else! "IN THE GARDEN," was one of their favorites, and I still don't know why--unless they meant something along the lines of the garden of life. My editor liked my title, but whomever is the head of LB was dead set against it. I ended up in tears to my long suffering agent, threatening to withdraw the book from publication--which I couldn't possibly have afforded to do, and somehow or other my editor persuaded Little, Brown to let the title stand. I think LB thought it would antagonize whomever they think is my natural audience. I hope they're wrong!

You and I have had many conversations about the writing life vs. the publishing life—and both are, indeed, different species! Do you personally see hope for the future of publishing?

I grew up among poets and critics and writers--and also among readers. Reading simply was more relied upon as entertainment and fulfillment. We'll never see that intensity again But I've always thought there was a core group of serious readers of about 20,000. I think that number won't change much, but we will have a whole different genre of reading, I think, that isn't intended to be anything but entertaining. I think that's fine. And, anyway, it's inevitable. But I would hate to be young and becoming a writer now. I don't think any but a very few can make their living doing it. I can't even find anyone with whom to discuss fiction with me except other writers! It used to be one of the greatest pleasures of my life--well, and thank god for email, because as you know, discussing books is invaluable to a writer. And just fun!

What is obsessing you now? What question didn’t I ask that I should have?

Oh, well. I've backed myself into a peculiar corner with all these characters still roaming around in my head. I've been obsessed with the idea that I may never be able to shake them off! And I'm so glad you didn't ask me what I'm writing next!

Jonathan Evison talks about West of Here

I can't tell you how thrilled I am to be asking Jonathan Evison questions on my blog. First, you have to know that he's a knockout, genius writer who has written THE book of 2011. (Don't take my word for it, look at the starred advance reviews from PW, Booklist and Library Journal. Look at how Vanity Fair raves and he's the number one indie pick.) But even more importantly, you have to know what an incredibly funny, kind and truly generous guy he is. I personally would like to bottle him and sell him if I could. (How about, it Johnny, we could make a killing.) So thanks, Johnny, for both the incredible book and for the personality that goes along with it.

I read somewhere that you wrote this before All About Lulu? I loved Lulu but this book is so much larger in scope I’m trying to figure out how one evolved from the other. Why didn’t you publish this one first?

Nah, I was researching West of Here while I was writing Lulu. Lulu being a first-person voice novel, practically wrote itself. I knew with West of Here I really wanted to push myself as a craftsman. I wanted to use every tool in my belt and a few I didn't have. It's rather shocking to me--after the fact-- that the novel has enjoyed such a broad appeal. With 41 limited points-of-view, and a hundred odd years to cover, i was afraid I might lose a lot of readers.

You also told me that part of why you have such thick skin is that you wrote six novels before All About Lulu that no one wanted. I find this incredible, both that no one wanted them, and also that you were able to persevere and keep writing and remain incredibly cheerful. Was this out of need or belief in yourself or both?

If you'd read most of them, you see it wasn't so incredible that nobody wanted to publish them. The first three were all out stinkers. As far as what keeps me going, it's the process of writing itself. I need it to distill all the stuff life throws at me. Not that it's always a barrel of monkeys--writing West of Here probably took a couple of years off my life. And writing the book I just finished, literally broke my heart. But I always feel like I come out the other side a better person.

Where did the whole idea for West of Here come from and how did you manage to seemingly effortlessly juggle all the story and time lines?

Well, I wanted to bring the history of the Olympic Peninsula--the history of America, really--to life on the page. But I didn't want to write a historical novel, per se, rather a novel about history, about footprints, who makes them and who follows them, etc. And rather than employ a wide-angle lens to historicize the material, I wanted my lens to be a kaleidoscope of overlapping limited points-of-view, so that the living history which I sought to create, was democratic. In my experience, most "histories" only tell one side of the story. As far as juggling all those POV's, it wasn't effortless--it was a big fat pain in the ass, but in the end, exhilarating.

Gertie, one of my favorite characters in the book, says that a “person is made up of choices”, an idea which keeps playing out through the book. But how much real choice do you think we have in our own choices, especially when we are hurtling through the forces of history?

Well, for starters, you have the choice to complain or make lemonade, as it were. I think this fundamental choice in outlook has a far-reaching effect on any life, and also on all the lives that touch that life. Determination and optimism are choices, and from what I've observed, they can pay big dividends. Or not. Either way you feel better, and the people around you feel better.

The line “we are haunted by ourselves” links the past to the present (at least it does for me), Do you think it’s ever possible to escape our past, all that has come before us, or do you think it is coded into our DNA?

Absolutely it's possible to escape our past. It may be hard as fuck, but it's possible, and we all know folks who have done it. I don't think you can outrun your past, I don't think can hide from it, but I know for a fact you can turn around, look it in the face, accept it, and move on. That's what Port Bonita is trying to do, and that's what America ought to do. The world, really.

I deeply admired how the tone and the writing changed in the historic parts and present day. How difficult a hire wire act was this? Did you ever feel discombobulated?

To write these two epochs in American history in the same voice would have been a disservice to the narrative, I think. We don't speak the same language we did in the nineteenth century, figuratively or literally. Manifest destiny, for instance, is no longer a commonly accepted ethos. We know longer think anything is possible, not without without paying a few fiddlers, anyway. Cynicism is far more common these days. And the government's not giving away land to anyone with a shovel, anymore.

OK, tell me what’s coming up next for you besides richly deserved fame and glory and maybe some more rabbits?

Well, I'm done with my next novel, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, which will pub sometime in '12 or '13. Again, it's a departure from West of Here, which is a novel of big themes and ideas. The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving is a novel of the heart. I think it is at once the saddest and funniest thing I've written. At present, I'm deep into a new novel, The Dreamlife of Huntington Sales, which is possibly a more ambitious narrative enterprise than West of Here. IF IF IF it works-- but the real joy, is finding out.

Alice Hoffman talks about The Red Garden

Alice Hoffman really needs no introduction, but I want to give her one anyway. A bestselling author for adults and young adults, a screenwriter, and humanitarian (she does great, great work for breast cancer), she's also beloved by her legions of readers AND she knows and loves NYC's City Bakery, renowned for the best hot chocolate on the planet. I took the arc of The Red Garden with me everywhere, from the NYC subways to a book convention in Michigan. I'm thrilled Alice agreed to answer my questions. Thank you so much, Alice!

What I really loved, beside the shimmering language, was how strong and powerful the women were, something that kept being passed down through the generations. Could you comment on that?

The Red Garden is very much about survival – in the natural world, in the world of loss and love. The women in the book all have the will to survive, even in the most extraordinary circumstances, and I think there is a sense of knowledge and experience being passed down throughout the history of the town.

The Red Garden had so much of a magical fairy tale quality to it, but by that, I mean The Brothers Grimm—the real, dark fairy tales that haunt you, rather than the happier Disneyfied versions. Would you agree? And where did that love of fairy tales come from?

I grew up reading fairy tales, and always felt they were the stories that didn’t talk down to me as a child-reader. The darkness inherent in Grimm’s’ Tales, and the Russian fairy tales my grandmother told me, seemed “true”. I think children understand that fairy tales are often journeys that chart growth – growing up, finding oneself or one’s true love. Real fairy tales are often brutal, and beautiful as well.

The Red Garden, explores the threads that link people and places and memories together from the 1700s to the present. You’ve explored before, in Blackbird House, how a place can become a character and a catalyst, and how the natural world can influence or impact our choices. Do you feel that we can ever escape our pasts or our places—and should we?

In Blackbird House the focus was a house, and the ways in which an old house can contain many stories, many lives. In The Red Garden I think the complications are more complex --- it’s the story of a town, but also of the complicated relationships and personal histories of the residents. I made a “family tree” after the book was completed and was surprised to find how inter-related everyone was, and how many secrets were never discovered.

I loved reading about Johnny Appleseed in The Red Garden, and truly, the novel is filled with history. I was wondering how much research you did or if you let your imagination take over?

I did quite a lot of research, and I was surprised at how my vision of Johnny Appleseed was formed by Disney. He was a truly remarkable character – a precursor to the hippie movement, a true believer. For each story, I researched the time period and my characters grew out of the time periods in which they lived.

I’ve been reading your work since Property Of. It seems to me that your earlier works feel and read differently than your later ones, which isn’t to say they allaren’t terrific. I’m wondering how much of this is organic or conscious or a little of both? Do you feel that as you yourself change, so does your writing?

I think most writers have themes or obsessions, but I agree that a writer’s work changes with life and work experience. What you write at a very young age reflects who you are as a writer in a particular moment in time. It makes sense that as you experience the world your vision evolves. Hopefully, we get smarter and are more compassionate as time goes by.

People talk about how difficult it is to translate good books into good films. Obviously the forms are different. It’s funny, but Independence Day (a wonderful film that you wrote), feels like an Alice Hoffman movie, but Practical Magic, though enjoyable, did not. Maybe it’s that word “based on a novel by”, which changes the story for filmic purposes. Or maybe it’s simply because you didn’t write the script. So, I’m curious. Had you ever envisioned Independence Day to be a novel or was it always a script, and do you think that’s why it felt like such an intrinsically Alice Hoffmanesque film? Is there a way to solve this problem of better translating a book onto the screen?

I wrote the screenplay of Independence Day so it was “mine” in a deeper way – I wasn’t the screenwriter or involved in the production of any of the films made of novels. Independence Day was never envisioned as a novel; it was always meant to be a film. I think a novel can make for a great film, but it has to be a unified vision. The practice of having three or four writers on a film is a mystery to me – how could there be a voice or a vision?

What is obsessing you now?

For the past five years I’ve been working on and researching a novel set in the distant past in the Middle East. I’m currently obsessed with the time period – finding out everything from how cheese was made, to what sort of snakes lived in the wilderness, to the habits of leopards.

Psst, a giveaway!!

I am thrilled to be in this month's Mothering Magazine! There's an interview and yup, a giveaway, too. Please come take a look!

Jennifer Rosner talks about telling the truth

The job of a writer is to tell the truth, but what if that truth hurts those you love? Jennifer Rosner, the author of If A Tree Falls: A Family's Quest to Hear and Be Heard wrote an astonishing guest post on just that topic. Thank you, Jennifer! (Don't forget to watch the great Youtube clip!)

For years, I evaded my mother’s questions about the book I was writing. I was vague even about its genre (a memoir). “There’s some fiction in it,” I’d say, as a portion of it (though not the portion about her) was fictionalized.

Being a mother myself, I knew intuitively that there was no mother alive who would want her child to write down and make public (by publishing) the stuff I was writing about my mother.

I went ahead with the writing, though, chronicling the deafness in my family and in particular, my mother’s deafness – how she sometimes failed to hear me, failed to listen to me, as I was growing up. It was tough material, raw and painful.

For a while, I was just writing it – journaling it, sharing it only with the members of my tight writing circle. And the writing yielded perspective – it led me to a deeper understanding of my mother’s experience, her struggles and her challenges. It humbled me, brought into view my own limitations, and led me to find forgiveness, both of my mother and of myself. Over time, the writing became polished, it took shape in book form. It encompassed far more than my experience of my mother; it grappled with the basic human need to hear and be heard. I found myself yearning to express my thoughts on this more widely.

I got an agent and she began sending the manuscript around to publishing houses. As the process got underway, I panicked. Through the writing of my book, I had come to feel better about my relationship with my mother than I’d had in decades. Yet here I was hurtling into a catastrophe: if the book got published, she would read it and we’d unravel. I considered halting the process. Maybe this really was a book just for me – a journal of my experience, one I needn’t share. The writing process had been healing in its own right. What further purpose would be served by sending it into the wider world? As it was, the very process of trying to get the book published was trying – as I waited for publishing houses to decide whether to accept or reject it, I found myself spending whole afternoons manically eating chocolate chips by the handful. Maybe this was a weird “ego” step I needn’t take, especially as its gains would surely be undercut by the dissolution of my connection with my mother.

At one point, I considered sending the manuscript to my mother in advance of any publication decisions. But I was too terrified. I made an appointment with a child psychologist, and entered the office (at age 43) as a “child,” asking for advice about how to manage things with my mother. The psychologist’s advice was: you can’t manage things. She will have her reaction, and it’s not for you to control. Ugh!

Using a different means to test family reaction, I gave my sister a draft of the manuscript to read. While she thought my portrayal of our mother was unquestionably true, if not soft-pedalled, she became unaccountably upset about my mention of a menu selection she made at a diner one night (she ordered the roast lamb chops). This didn’t bode well.

I called my father, hoping to solicit his private advice. I explained that some of the material was difficult, and that I was considering pulling my manuscript out of the publication process. With judgment undoubtedly colored by paternal pride, my father urged me to stick with it. When my book got accepted, I requested the use of a pen name. How liberating! I could be anyone. Mercedes Almeida. Genevieve Benoit. A friend suggested I use the name Elsie Gezeltzer. My mother would never need to know that I published a book! But my editor said no. Despite the swath of historical fiction that ran through it, my book was categorized as a memoir. My editor believed that the use of a pen name would cast doubt on the veracity of the book. She refused to do it.

I called my father again. Again, he urged me to go ahead. “But, Dad, you haven’t read it,” I warned. He was resolute.The book came out on May 1, with my name on the cover. I received an author copy, and began constructing a letter to my mother on the inside cover. My sister called me to say they already got a copy– my father couldn’t wait and ordered it on Amazon.

My chocolate chip consumption doubled, tripled, as I waited for my mother to read it. She didn’t. A month went by. Two months. I called her on the phone. “Mom, you don’t need to read it. But I do need to know: are you going to?”She said she was.

One night, a few weeks later, my mother phoned me.“Jenny, I read your book.”

I thought I’d sink through the floor.

“I read it backwards,” she said.

“Huh?”

“I read it backwards. The last chapter first, then the next to last chapter, and so on.”

I had told my mother that the book was rougher at the beginning; that it got easier toward the end. (I had also made her promise that, if she started reading it, she would read it through.) Maybe this backward reading was a gracious strategy, a way to get us through this. “How did it flow?” I couldn’t help asking. I had spent over two years on the book’s complicated braided structure.

“It’s a beautiful book, Jenny. I realize that I had trouble hearing you. I was overwhelmed with the four children in five years, and with my hearing loss on top of it. I am sorry.”

I couldn’t believe my ears.

For the next week, I was on a high. My mother wasn’t angry! She understood my feelings. The weight of years, worrying about her reaction to my book, slid off my shoulders. My writing had brought us closer. I eased up on the chocolate chips.

Shortly after this, I got a call from a different family member who shall remain nameless(!) - a heretofore enthusiastic supporter, who had mailed copies of my book to all her friends. In the call, she expressed great upset: upset that she wasn’t in the book.

A note to memoir writers: The bullets always come from the most unexpected direction...

Renée Thompson talks about The Bridge at Valentine

Who can resist star-crossed lovers? Not me. And especially not when said lovers are in an imaginative, fiercely moving new debut, Renée Thompson’s THE BRIDGE AT VALENTINE (Tres Picos Press). A retelling of Romeo & Juliet, set in 1890’s Idaho, the book tells the story of July Caldwell, the daughter of a sheepman, and Rory Morrow, the son of a cattleman, and their fathers’ desire to control the rangeland and their children. Renée expertly crafts a protagonist willing to oppose her Mormon father by falling in love with a Gentile, exposing a world where trouble comes not from the head, but the heart. Ultimately, July learns that women trapped by fate or circumstance have a choice, but with choice comes consequence.

Thanks, Renee, for letting me ask you all these questions!

Where did the idea of this novel come from? How and why did you play with the whole idea of Romeo and Juliet?

I was reading John Steinbeck’s EAST OF EDEN, and was struck by his use of an allegory – the story of Cain and Abel from the Bible’s book of Genesis – to create his characters and plot. Until then it hadn’t occurred to me to try such a thing, but I was so captivated with this technique that I was determined to try it too.

About the same time, I happened to be reading my grandmother’s Book of Remembrance, which is a Mormon journal of sorts. In it, she recounts a story where a cattleman named Alex Durty shot and killed a sheepman, Tom Nook. As soon as I read that, I knew I had the makings of a Hatfield versus McCoy scenario, but I knew too I didn’t want to write a traditional Western. In trying to think of similar plots, it occurred to me I could use Romeo & Juliet as a template, which would serve as a guide, knowing too I would radically alter the plot. That template provided the primary characters of July Caldwell (Juliet Capulet), Rory Morrow (Romeo Montague), Preston Forbes (Paris), Tom Blakely (Tybalt), and Mads Larson (Mercutio), and allowed me to fashion a story that was uniquely my own.

You live in Northern California, but all the scenes in Idaho are achingly alive. What was your research like?

Researching the novel was a joy, and one of the best trips my husband Steve and I have taken together. Steve is a former wildlife biologist and range conservationist, and we drove to Idaho in the late summer – a scouting trip, of sorts – to check out the landscape. Because my grandmother’s father was a sheepman, I wanted to see where she had grown up, and to understand how July’s father’s ranch might fit into my vision. Every so often we would stop so Steve could point out various grazing concerns – where sheep or cattle had overgrazed the land, and where it had been well-tended. We had lived in southeastern Oregon when we were younger, so I knew sagebrush well, but he introduced me to rabbit brush and bitter brush, and helped me understand what a switchback was, and a swale. We took a lot of photos and when we got home I created a map on butcher paper, using felt pens and prints of the photos to forge my fictional homestead. It was a great tool, as it included, for example, mileage from July’s house, near the town of Morning Tree, to the bridge at Valentine, and then on to Rory’s ranch. I’m directionally challenged, so referring to this map kept me from making mistakes in my writing that I might have otherwise made.

I also met with two sheep families – one in Loma Rica, California, and another in McCall, Idaho, and talked to cattle ranchers about grazing issues and opportunities. I read a lot. And the mother in Amy Tan’s novel THE BONESETTER’S DAUGHTER inspired the voice of my Chinese sheepherder, Pun.

I love the whole idea of a female look at the tough American West, especially with such a strong character as July. How did you go about creating her?

I wrote the last scene first, and that gave me a solid appreciation for and understanding of what kind of woman July would become. Readers often ask if I am July, and the answer is no. Like most writers, I gave my protagonist qualities I wished I possessed; July was braver and more adventurous than I was as a young adult – I’m afraid of horses! What we have in common, though, is a serious respect for and love of the land, and a belief that God and Church exist in the outdoors.

I’m always interested in process, so can you talk about the writing of this book?

When I’m writing a novel, my husband tells me I’m my own worst boss. I’m pretty disciplined, which means I start writing at 9:00 a.m., keeping at it until I’ve completed 1,000 words. Sometimes it takes all day. Sometimes I don’t make it, stopping after six hours or so to work on something else. I’m not speedy and I’m not prolific. The worst day writing I ever had netted 276 words. The best was 1,900, a rarity.

What’s obsessing you these days and why?

I wrote a short story called “Radio Gal” that I had hoped to workshop at Sirenland last spring, but it wouldn’t come together. I’ve destructed and reconstructed it maybe five times now, and it’s still not working. I’ve let it go for the time being, but it’s haunting me. I’m hoping I’ll be able to use at least some of it in another story I’m thinking about, but maybe not. (It might be like that comment you made on Facebook once, Caroline: “I just deleted 10 pages and kept ONE line.”)

What question didn’t I ask?

I’ve been asked if a sequel to BRIDGE is planned, but I’m inclined to say no. I think I’ve told the story.

Eleanor Brown talks about The Weird Sisters

Recently, a manuscript came into my office with a request for a blurb. It was a debut, which I'm always partial to because I want to help new writers, and it had a great title: The Weird Sisters. This novel knocked me out from the first page, to the point that I couldn't do anything for the next few days but read. It's deliciously witty, incredibly smart, and undeniably moving, as it reveals the lives of sisters, the deeper meaning of Shakespeare, and the surprises of life. I fell in love with the book, and not only gave it a rave blurb, but contacted the author Eleanor Brown, who is as warm, funny and wonderful as her novel (which, by the way, is racking up the raves and the honors!) Be sure to watch the great book trailer, too!) Thank you, Eleanor, so, so much for answering these questions!

Tell us about how The Weird Sisters came about?

Like most stories, I think, it came together piece by piece. I'd wanted to tell a story about family and birth order for a long time. When I was in grad school, I was playing around with different voices and styles and I become interested in first person plural narration ('we' and 'our') and wondered what kind of story would require it. And as my friends and I floundered around in our twenties and made all kinds of ridiculous mistakes, I started thinking about what it means to be an adult and why some people have so much trouble with growing up. Add in a wonderful class on Shakespeare, a study abroad program in Oxford, a whole lot of daydreaming, and The Weird Sisters was born!

Does being a first novelist coincide with your visions of what it would be like?

I don't know that I really had a vision! I sat down to sign some books the other day and I turned to my sweetie (J.C. Hutchins, who is also a writer), and said, "I have no idea what to write." And he figured I was the only author who had never considered how she would sign her books.

One thing that has surprised and pleased me is how wonderfully supportive people are - the folks at Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, old friends on Facebook, fellow authors and writers and book bloggers and librarians and readers - everyone is just so lovely. Readers want to find stories they will fall in love with, and I'm delighted when they find that in The Weird Sisters.

Did you reread your Shakespeare as you were writing, and what was that process like?

I did scandalous amounts of research, reading, and going to plays and watching movies. It was great fun - Shakespeare's plays in particular are so rich and people have done such inventive things with them. I remember being in Oxford and seeing an open-air production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in which the production used the nearby stream to have Titania and Oberon arrive in an actual boat! It was magical.

Unfortunately, as I wrote, I realized that a great deal of my research wasn't going to be used - The Weird Sisters is about a family so immersed in Shakespeare that it's become nothing more than a sort of shorthand for them. They've already had all the exciting thoughts they're going to have about Shakespeare, so it wasn't like they were going to turn to each other in the middle of a scene and start discussing the use of numbers and numerology in the plays (yes, I actually read that article).

But I don't feel that time was wasted - it helped me understand how the family thought and functioned, I got to see lots of wonderful acting, and I fell in love again with Shakespeare's language. There's a reason that guy has hung around for a few hundred years - he's pretty good.

What IS it about sisters that is so compelling? Do you have a sister yourself?

I think sisters have the potential to have incredibly complex and emotional relationships. The love and envy and friendship and hatred that can be present in any relationship are amplified with sisters. I am the youngest of three sisters, and I am particularly interested in the way our birth order shaped our personalities and carved out roles for us that have persisted long into adulthood and re-emerge whenever we're all together.

What's obsessing you now? (And what's up next as far as writing?)

I'm thinking a lot about love and marriage and divorce and how they all fit together. I'm working on another novel that I hope to finish this year, but I'm awfully superstitious about talking about works in progress, so I won't say more!

What question didn't I ask that I should have? (P.S. Eleanor's answer shows you what kind of amazing person she really is--wonderful as well as brilliant.)

You should have asked which Caroline Leavitt book is my favorite, so I could say Girls in Trouble. I read it when I was chaperoning a trip of 120 seventh graders and I absolutely credit it with preserving my sanity (such as it is). I love reading all the authors you have in to visit almost as much as I love reading your novels.

I spill the beans on Julianna Baggott's blog

The fabulous novelist Julianna Baggott asked me to answer some of the most interesting questions about writing and being a writer that I've ever been asked. I spill the beans here: