Welcome to the wild and wooly world of the Bat Segundo Show and Edward Champion!

First there is the name. Who wouldn't want to be on an author/artist interview program called The Bat Segundo show? But more importantly is the show itself. Casually conducted in cafes, diners, etc. around New York City, these interviews ask the questions you really want to know. Podcasts introduced by Bat and given by "Our Young, Roving Correspondent",  the show has been known to include music by Three Cheap Tenors. You absolutely need to read the website (link is above) so you can find the answers to such startling questions like, "Why is Bat so rude?" and "Who is Bat Segundo?" and what is the unspecified indignity he suffered which is vaguely alluded to in the introduction of each show? I'm thrilled to have Edward Champion here to answer all my pesky questions.

What I love most about the interviews is that they aren't interviews as usual. They're funny, surprising, silly, shocking, revealing--all the good adjectives. Are guests ever taken aback? Usually writers are solitary people with no social skills whatsoever, and yet you manage to have these wild and wooly interviews on the show. Is it because you disarm the writers? And if so, how?

Thanks so much for all the many kind modifiers, Caroline.  I'm pleasantly taken aback, because I'm so used to the outlaw qualifier! Writers are often taken aback by my style: sometimes because they cannot figure me out, but mostly because of my interpretive and interlocutory ebullience.  If you're an author, then  you're going to deal with that inevitable disconnect between what you intended to write and what a reader finds within.  Now most authors who still maintain a genuine passion for books and who aren't needlessly catholic about what they etch into text are cool with this.  Personally, I think all of this is fair game.  Because you never know if some wending road that might lead you to another journey.  

Mary McCarthy, for instance, once wrote an essay for The New Republic, where she offered an exceptionally close reading of Nabokov's Pale Fire.  Her piece begins with this astonishing sentence: "Pale Fire is a Jack-in-the-box, a Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game, a do-it-yourself novel." Now what self-respecting soul wouldn't want to carry on reading such marvelous excitement?  Yet even today, there remain some people who actively loathe this approach, who really have it in for McCarthy for spending so much of her time with Nabokov and finding dead ends.  Well, so what?  Those feelings and observations were true to McCarthy.  And is this not what life is all about?  Keeping the floodgates of inquiry wide enough?  Staying curious and engaged?  Even when, and I won't dredge up the oft-quoted but wise  passage from American Pastoral, you're utterly wrong?  

I've never been especially shy about throwing a rather silly or eccentric reading into these conversations (or even some of my journalism).  Because if your mind gravitates towards something, then chances are there's a good reason.  Even if it springs from some subconscious motivation.  Even now, while preparing for a conversation with another writer in a few days, I'm struck by how this author is suspicious of California sunshine.  It's too good to be true!  She describes it as fantastical in one book and childish in another.  As a California native, I can see where she's coming from.  And there's a good chance I'm going to bring this up with her.  On the surface, this may seem like I'm ferreting out for some mildly gossipy viewpoint -- what are this author's thoughts about West Coast weather? -- but, having read her work and seen how well she deals with characters who are in denial about their unhappiness, I'm very curious about whether such a decision helped to define her characters.  I could very well be wrong.  But I enjoy finding those fun little nuggets.  Perhaps it disarms the writers because they so often have to deal with other interviewers who don't read the books like I do (if they read at all!).  And above all, I want the conversation to be fun.  There's a genuine excitement I feel thinking about this silly little aside about California sunshine that I know will make its way into my talk with this author.  And I'm sure there are at least thirty more elements that will get me excited, many of which I don't know about right now.

So, how much money would it take to unmask the young roving reporter who does the interviews? ;)

I didn't realize that I was in a witness protection program, Caroline!  Believe it or not, I make it a habit to leave the house at least once every day and I am known to go for very long walks and attend modest soirées of varying scale and notoriety.  But you're right to point to some modest unmasking.  There's certainly some modest theater applied to the man with the two mikes.  Michael Silverblatt, the great interviewer of KCRW's Bookworm, told me that he also has a modest persona.  There's no cash required to suss me out.  But I have refused to put the name "Edward Champion" in any of these shows.  Because this is about making the authors look good.

I love it that the interviews are conducted in casual settings, so I have to ask, did anything ever go wrong? Do people around you ever listen in? Or want to ask a question?

Part of the fun of informal locations such as hotels, bars, cafes, restaurants, and so forth is that you never know if there will be some unexpected intervention.  When I interviewed David Denby, there was a crazy guy who shrieked into one of the mikes.  When I talked with Toby Ball, two children actually came up to us and started asking us about the mikes, not knowing that we were actually recording.  It was adorable.  I have had managers attempt to put a stop to the proceedings.  Andre Dubus III, just to give you a sense of what a gent he is, got up and wanted to personally negotiate with a manager who wanted to kick us out of a room that we just walked into and started talking in.  (And don't get me started on how certain hotels are needlessly proprietary about rooms that nobody will use in the next three months.  Or draconian "no mike" policies.)  I've left all this in.  Because even though there's heavy preparation with these conversations, I do want them to reflect the spontaneity of life.  (And honestly when I type up a list of notes and questions, this is really more my method of telling myself that I have read the book and that I can get a high quality 40 to 60 minute conversation with an author.  Because I do my best to make sure I'm not wasting many seconds.  Very often, I stray from the list entirely.)  

I have had people come up to me after the conversation.  There was one guy in a bar, who didn't like the type of guy who read Andrea Barrett, who became so transfixed by our talk that he came up to us when it was over and introduced himself.  Very friendly.  A few weeks ago, I ended up having a conversation with a tourist who overheard the talk, and he said he was going to buy everything the author wrote.  Really, the casual settings emerged only because I didn't have a studio.  It is rather funny how the lack of something causes so many unexpected adventures!

So do Bat Segundo and Edward Champion fight for space in your body or do they get along?

Oh, they get along quite well.  The Bat Segundo persona who was originally in the introductions has appeared less and less -- in large part because my other work doesn't afford me the time to do the elaborate intros I envision.  It could also be that my increasing interest in nonfiction is to blame.  The "Correspondent" is the partial persona I adopt now.   Although I remain a genuinely impassioned and curious journalist of some sort.

It strikes me that almost all of your questions are questions that only a writer would ask another writer. You seem to get at the most interesting things going on--and I love it that some of your interviews notice that! So how do you prepare for an interview--do you know all the questions, or do you want it to be more conversational?

Thank you for the kind words.  I prepare for these interviews by reading, at minimum, the author's latest book.  Sometimes I take notes.  Sometimes I don't.  Sometimes I get so interested in a writer that I read many other books. Tom Bissell was a little alarmed that I had reread all of his books before talking with him.  But, hey, I do think the man is one of the most underappreciated writers working in America today and I wanted to do right.  And we ended up talking for two shows.  On the day I'm talking with a writer, I type up a list of questions. I read as many reviews and articles and essays as I can, and I tend to avoid questions that other people have asked. This phase is astonishingly easy to do in this age of Google, but it's remarkable how so many alleged professionals remain committed to cookie cutter conversations.  (It is also alarming that some staff members are actually paid to come up with such stale chestnuts as "Where do you get your ideas from?")  

I don't preinterview.  I know nearly every other radio show does, but, if you ask me, that's a recipe for sterility.  The list I make is really my own private act of faith that I know the books reasonably well to have an informed conversation.  Very often, I wander from this, like a saunterer espying an unexpected sight off the route.

What's obsessing you now and why?

Lots of subjects obsess me, I'm afraid.  But I'd say I'm really concerned about the global economic crisis -- especially what's going on with the eurozone and the effects that these bailouts will have upon other banks and our ability to earn a living -- and the remarkable public indifference towards it.  On the literary front, I was very obsessed with Saul Bellow after reading The Adventures of Augie March for the first time as part of my Modern Library Reading Challenge, my dutiful effort to read (and write about) the top 100 works of fiction.  Ended up reading the two apprentice novels that came before, a volume of letters, and cursing myself for reading this masterpiece so late in life.  Because it surely would have given me the right push if I had read Bellow in the right order in my twenties. (I read all the later books then.  Like much of my life, I tend to do things in idiosyncratic order.)  Income inequality, the gender divide, the marvelously inventive television show Community, the strange increase in zombie-like incidents in 2012.  What doesn't obsess or interest me?  I'm afraid, Caroline, that I'm going to have to curtail my response, lest I burden you with a protracted tract of bullet points and grievances.

What question didn't I ask that I should be ashamed of myself for forgetting?

Never be ashamed about what you do not ask.  Even the most able and curious types are subject to some variant of l'esprit de l'escalier.  If we ask nothing at all, or have no answer (even a wrong one) when someone asks us something, that's when we're in real trouble.  

The fabulous Jodi Picoult and her daughter Samantha Van Leer talk about Between the Lines, writing together, and more

To me, nothing is more important than writers helping other writers, and honestly, you can't find a better fairy godmother to have than megaseller Jodi Picoult. Warm, funny and with the best curly hair I have ever seen, she now has co-written a book with her daughter, Samantha Van Leer, Between the Lines. The book was Samantha's idea, and it's a classic fairy tale with a twist you won't see coming. I'm completely thrilled to have both Jodi and her daughter on my blog today. I can't thank you both enough! 

Jodi: Between the Lines was Sammy’s idea, and frankly, she’s got a better imagination than I ever did at her age. It’s called Between the Lines, and it’s about what happens when happily ever after…isn’t. Delilah, a loner hates school as much as she loves books—one book in particular. In fact if anyone knew how many times she has read and reread the sweet little fairy tale she found in the library, especially her cooler than cool classmates, she’d be sent to social Siberia . . . forever.To Delilah, though, this fairy tale is more than just words on the page. Sure, there’s a handsome (well, okay, incredibly handsome) prince, and a castle, and an evil villain, but it feels as if there’s something deeper going on. And one day, Delilah finds out there is. Turns out, this Prince Charming is not just a one-dimensional character in a book. He’s real, and a certain fifteen-year-old loner has caught his eye. But they’re from two different worlds, and how can it ever possibly work?

Sammy:  I was most surprised at how hard it was to sit for hours at a computer and just WRITE.  I sometimes wanted to get up and burst through the window – and I’m sure there were times my mom wanted to kill me because I got distracted.  But then there were times it was really amazing to work together. Sometimes we tripped over each other’s sentences just to get to the next line – it was sort of like we were having the same dream and seeing exactly the same images in our heads, so that when we were writing we were telepathic.  So, really, the most surprising thing about working with my mom was how much fun we had together…and learning how similar we can be when we're writing.  

Jodi: Sammy has always been incredibly creative. As a seven-year-old, she wrote a 42-page short story. She's got an innate sense of character and conflict, which is the hardest thing to teach someone who wants to write. When she first pitched me this story idea, I thought it was a remarkable one, not just for teens but for adults. I mean, who hasn't had a crush on a literary character? I thought my role in the writing process would be to encourage her to actually follow through on her idea, and to give her specific goals--i.e. today we're going to write twenty pages! But she came into this with great skills, and I wound up treating her like an equal partner. She's a much better writer than I was at her age, and I found myself being swayed by her choices as a writer, and to my surprise, her instincts were spot on, even when I disagreed at first. The best part about working with her? Well, how many moms get a chance to spend five weeks on a book tour with a daughter who's leaving soon for college? I am so excited about having this concentrated, intense, amazing experience with her!

Nichole Bernier talks about The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D., writing, and so much more!

Nichole Bernier is the extraordinary founder of the literary blog, Beyond the Margins, and she's also written a knockout debut that's already racking up the raves, The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D Set after 9/11, the book explores just how well two women friends know one another. I'm thrilled to have her here on my blog. Thank you so, so much, Nichole!

So I have to ask, where did this idea come from? Do you yourself keep journals?
I’ve kept a journal on and off since I was a teenager, and I’ve always been fascinated with why, exactly, people do this crazy thing, putting private thoughts to paper. What happens if you’re hit by a truck tomorrow? Were you really writing for your own reflection and catharsis, or were you writing for others to see it someday, your chance to have your final say?The what-ifs that generated the novel spooled out from there. What if you inherited the journals of a friend without clear direction what to do with them, and learned you didn’t know your friend nearly as well as you thought, including where she was really going when she died? What might the dynamic be with the widower who resents not being given his wife’s journals? How might you feel about why your friend didn’t confide in you — and how might that make you realize ways you weren’t candid with loved ones, yourself? It was tremendously satisfying to explore that juxtaposition of the faces we show the world and those we hold close, our private ambitions and fears, and what it costs us in the end. 

Do you think we ever really know the ones we think we know? That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? We might think we do, but there are small things everyone holds close. We all die with bits of our story untold. I suppose the extent of not-knowing comes down to whether those bits are small or not so small. One of my favorite sayings is “You never know,” because there’s no knowing why people do the things they do, or what kind of unseen things they’re struggling with. Keeping that in mind keeps me empathetic, and humble.

I loved the title. Do you think we are all unfinished in one way or another? 

Thanks! The unfinished refers both to journal keeper’s artistic aspirations and the person she was struggling to be become. But it could also be taken more literally as a reference to her missing journals. I think we’re all works in progress. I know I am.

Tell us about the writing of this novel. Were there any surprises as you were writing it?

In a way the entire process was a surprise to me, since I’d only ever written nonfiction. I had only a general sense of where I was going with the plot, so the story’s unfolding was a novelty. The process of discovering the characters’ lives was something I learned as I went along, and a few months into writing, I decided I needed to write the two women’s stories one at a time, at least initially. I wrote the entire life of Elizabeth through her journals first to really know her, then I threw away half, and wove the best parts into her friend’s summer vacation of reading them. I don’t know if that’s what sane writers do, but it’s how I had to do it.

Do you map things out or do you simply write to see what will be revealed to you? And what's your daily writing life like?

This novel I figured out as I went; the next one I’ll be more meticulous. Or at least I think I will. It could very well be just as circuitous a learning process. On a daily basis? I have five children and the youngest two aren’t in school yet, so I rely on babysitting hours and late nights. I don’t obsess about daily productivity because everything can be derailed by an ear infection or a class presentation on bugs. To write THE UNFINISHED WORK OF ELIZABETH D., I gave myself a 2,000-word-a-week goal, and that felt about right. It also kept me from beating myself up on a daily basis if I didn’t get a certain amount done. 

What's obsessing you now and why?

There are two things I’m obsessed with these days. One is a disturbing premise set in the former Soviet Union. The other takes place on an eerie forbidden island I visited with the Park Service a few months ago, a real-life fascinating and creepy place that spans three distinct phases of history. Once my book tour quiets down I’ll be going to town on one of these stories, whichever one is keeping me up at night the most.

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

Well, I suppose we could talk about why I set my novel in the year following September 11^th terrorist attacks, since so many agents and editors told me that was verboten.That year was such a fascinating and horrible time. It was both terrifying and numbing to watch CNN in 2002 because you never knew what you might hear. It felt as if anything could happen —anthrax and Ebola unleashed, reservoirs poisoned, Mad Cow disease waiting in every hamburger. I think many people, myself included, felt for a while that anything was not only possible, but likely. Most of us moved on from that paralyzing fear, but it was fascinating to me to create a character who became quietly obsessed with protecting her family from so many unknowns, and could not move on.

Lisa Unger talks about Heartbroken, storyworld, her obsession with the psychic, and so much more

I had one of the best times ever sitting at Le Pain Quotidian in Chelsea with Lisa Unger. She's funny, smart, and so engaging, I really wanted her to start checking out New York city real estate so she could come live here.  An award-winning New York Times and international bestselling author, her novels have sold over 1 million copies in the U.S. and have been translated into 26 different languages. Her writing has been hailed as “masterful” (St. Petersburg Times), “sensational” (Publishers Weekly) and “sophisticated” (New York Daily News) with “gripping narrative and evocative, muscular prose” (Associated Press.) The only thing that would thrill me more than hosting her on my blog would be to have her come to lunch again with me! Thank you, Lisa!

You're known for the tense psychological grip your novels hold on readers. Can you talk about your techniques for this? Do you plan out your stories in advance or does some of the tension just come to you?

I’m the worst person to talk to about technique, because I write for the same reason that I read. I want to know what’s going to happen. When I sit down to write a novel, I only hear a character voice, or see a scene in my head. I never know what my book will be about, who will show up, or what those characters will do day to day. So there’s no

know what my book will be about, who will show up, or what those characters will do day to day. So there’s no plan, really. But I’m always in suspense, in the grip of the drama playing out in the lives of my characters. So hopefully I can pass along that tension, that suspense, that passion to my readers. 

The novel has three really indelible women in it. One of the women, Kate, writes a novel, based on her grandmother and aunt's journals about a tragedy. Do you feel that everything is material for a writer or that some stories should be kept secret--and why? (I loved one of the lines: It was her story, not theirs.)

The page is where I exorcise all my demons. It’s where I answer my questions about the world, about myself, about the things that frighten and pain me. I am all over the page, even though my work is purely fiction. There is almost no autobiography to the stories, the characters. And yet I exist in every word. (I talk more extensively about this in two recent blogs, The Truth About Fiction and The Truth About Fiction, Part Two found at: http://lisaunger.com/2012/05/the-truth-about-fiction-part-two/)

If something is affecting me, living in me, I don’t suppose it’s any surprise that it winds up on the page. But it’s not intentional. If we’re living and writing authentically, where we are allowing our experiences to change our lives, and our lives to inform our fiction, then everything we feel, dream, know and imagine is going to find its way into the work. If I were to censor or question that, I might limit my growth and honesty as a writer.growth and honesty as a writer.

I always talk to my UCLA students about storyworld--how the setting of their novels should have its own dramatic arc and change as the characters do. You've done this gorgeously in Heartbroken with Heart Island (I also loved the play on words with the title). Why choose this Lake? What did it mean to you specifically? 

Thank you for that. I do consider the island to be a kind of character in this story. It has a history, a personality. It does change and grow in the story. 

In many ways, Heart Island, which is a totally fictional island in a fictional lake, is an allegory for family. Emily, Birdie, and Kate are all connected to this place, and they are each either there or headed there for very personal reasons. Everyone wants something from HEART ISLAND; it means something different to each of them. But Heart Island is a fiction, a dream each of them has. And they’ll all be crashed upon the rocks of its reality. So often this is true of family. We want so much from it, but ultimately it can only be what it is. The contrast is often stark and painful.

I also loved the idea of memories and ghosts that filter through this novel. Do you think we can ever escape our past? 

Most of us aren’t living in the present tense. Every moment is a messy twist of what we remember, what we are experiencing now, and what we expect, hope, or dread for the future. We are haunted in a sense by what has come before. I think the intention to dwell in the now, shedding the past, and not thinking about the future, is an important one. But, no. I don’t think we can escape our past – any more than we can escape our genetics. We can accept it, forgive it, move on from it, learn not to act from a place of pain relating to it. But it’s always with us.

What's obsessing you now?

I am currently obsessed with psychic phenomenon, the childhood behavior of psychopaths, and the genetic roots of violence. I tend to get obsessed with certain dark non-fiction topics, and spend a lot of time buried in books. Those ideas often wind up figuring largely into my fiction. I am not sure if the story inspires the obsession, or if the obsession inspires the story. 

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

You should have asked when you would be invited to come to Florida and hang out in my tiki hut! I’ve been doing a series of videos with authors and other book lovers, where they sit in my tiki hut and talk about books. I call it: Tiki Talk! The answer is: You have a standing invitation.

Jennifer Weiner talks about The Next Best Thing, helping other writers, working in TV, obsessions and more, more, more

Every writer needs to know Jennifer Weiner. Not only is she hilariously funny and warm, she's a passionate, generous advocate for women writers and she's unafraid to say what she thinks. (If you haven't read her BEA speech, do so right now. Really. I mean it.) She was a newspaper reporter until she published her first novel, and her books include Good in Bed, In Her Shoes, Little Earthquakes, Goodnight Nobody, The Guy Not Taken, Certain Girls, Best Friends Forever, Fly Away Home, Then Came You, and The Next Best Thing. She's been on The Today Show, The Martha Stewart Show, The Rachel Ray Show and more, and she writes for the Huffington Post and her own blog. Time Magazine named her as one of the best 140 Twitter feeds, too, and they were right. I'm thrilled to know her and I'm delighted to host Jennifer on my blog. A million thanks, Jennifer!

You are one of the goddesses supporting women writers. Incredibly generous, supportive, and funny, I think we all need to build you a shrine. Women need to be supporting one another, especially since the publishing climate today is definitely male-centric. Can you talk about the smaller ways all writers can do help one another--and why it's so important?

One of my favorite writers in the world is Susan Isaacs. I love that she writes smart, funny, Jewish protagonists who get the guy and save the world and live happily ever after not because they’re gorgeous but because they’re smart and funny.

When we had ARCs of GOOD IN BED, I sent one to Susan Isaacs, with a note saying how much I loved her work. We had nothing in common – we didn’t share a publisher or an agent, we’d never met at a conference. When she gave me a beautiful blurb, I was so grateful and so moved that she took the time to read the book, that she liked it, that she said so, that she did it in a way that would help me immensely, I cried.

I had a very different experience with another one of my favorites, a newspaper columnist-turned-novelist/memoirist. When I sent her my book, I got a curt note from her assistant saying that she no longer did blurbs.

I decided, way back in 2000, that no first-timer would ever get that kind of note from me (or my assistant)…that I would always, always, always blurb…that I would always do whatever I could to repay the help and support that all of my blurbers had given me.

I am so lucky to live in a world that gives writers so many opportunities to support each other. In the days of e-reading, consumers aren’t necessarily wandering into bookshops and picking up new books and reading the cover copy.

So, blurbs still matter…but, I honestly believe that Twitter and Facebook matter even more. If your readers have come to trust you, if you talk to them like they’re your friends, or the lady standing next to you at preschool pickup or the nine-year-olds’ soccer game saying, Oh my God, I just read the most amazing book….that matters so much. More, even, than a review in a newspaper.

If you’ve got a computer, you’ve got a voice. If you read something you loved, chances are, you can tell the author, and you can tell everyone you know who follows you how great it was.

You and I have also talked about the one issue that makes my head explode--when writers attack other writers, which I think is just plain bullying and needs to be addressed and confronted. Any thoughts about how we can stop this?

I’m with you – it makes me stabby. I get so frustrated watching female writers make distinctions between “literary” and “commercial,” between who “churns out” a book a year and sells them at Target versus who writes less frequently and sells fewer copies. I was bewildered when Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer in 2011 and, instead of using her moment in the spotlight to thank her loved ones or her professors, or use the opportunity to say, “Here are five great women writers you’ve never heard of,” she decided instead to tell young female writers whose work was not worth aspiring to – the quote-unquote “chick lit” authors who’d been plagiarized by Harvard faker Kaavya Viswanathan. Because being plagiarized isn’t terrible enough – that pain must be compounded by a big-deal literary lady telling the world that your books weren’t even quality enough to rip off.

Egan eventually did give a very gracious apology, and I have a lot of respect for her saying that what she said was, at the very least, poorly timed. But how can we fix things? I don’t know. I feel like the grass is always greener, and that, to some extent, envy and anxiety are the natural state of artists. Commercially successful female authors, those of us whose churned-out books are sold not only in Target but also – quelle horror! – in Costco and Sam’s Club – will never be reviewed in the prestigious publications, the way bestselling male genre authors might be. Which sucks for us.

Meanwhile, well-reviewed literary ladies can’t make a living, can’t quit their day jobs, can’t even, in the case of the editor of the anthology charmingly entitled THIS IS NOT CHICK LIT, get their novels published. Which sucks for them.

But I don’t think either side profits by telling the other, “This is your fault.” Commercial writers are not out there stealing shelf space from more quote-unquote deserving authors…and literary ladies are not the ones, in general, keeping commercial women writers out of the book-review sections.

I don’t know the answer…but I don’t think that women beating up on other women is not how we make things better. And, no, this doesn’t mean that anyone in possession of a vagina must support anyone else who owns the same equipment…but I think it means being tactical in what we say, and where, and how, we say it.

Personally, I’m trying to do better. I’m practicing holding my tongue and rolling my eyes in private – not on Twitter -- when the next twenty-five-year-old with an MFA announces on The Millions or Jezebel that writers like me don’t deserve any critical attention because we write crap. If I find a book I love, whether it’s quote-unquote commercial or literary, I will tell the world, I will tweet and Facebook my heart out, I’ll run a contest, I’ll do an event, or mention her books at mine. If I come across another writer trashing my genre, I’ll point it out, but try to do it nicely, by saying that, “Hey, some of those books you’re rolling your eyes at have good stories between those sparkly pink covers.

Then I’ll find another book I love, and talk about that some more.

 I loved The Next Best Thing, set in the world of Hollywood, which just sparkled on the page. You spent a year in Hollywood yourself,  with your sitcom, State of Georgia. What's it like moving from novel to TV?  And what surprised you about cowriting (and co-running) a sit-con.) Do you miss that year in Hollywood? Would you want to write another sitcom or a film? 

The obvious answer is that TV is collaborative. Instead of you and your laptop, alone in a room, you’re in a writers’ room, with a bunch of other funny people, making each other laugh (oh, and writing a script). I had a ball out there. I loved being in the room, I loved shoot nights, in front of the proverbial live studio audience, I loved learning a whole new job at forty-one.

There were, of course, things I didn’t love, and things I wasn’t very good at (talking to actors was one of them – turns out, spending ten years dealing with imaginary friends leaves you spectacularly ill-equipped for talking to real people). But I know I learned a lot, and I also know that just about every successful show-runner has a few flops in his or her background. So maybe someday I’ll be back…but probably when my kids are older. The hardest part was spending four months basically commuting between Philadelphia and Los Angeles, because the show got picked up in February, and we decided not to try to find a new school for our second-grader, and move her cross-country in the middle of the year. So she stayed in Philadelphia with her dad, and my three-year-old was with me part-time and in Philly part-time, and I flew home almost every weekend. If anyone needs them, I have a LOT of miles.

 What's your writing life like? Do you map things out or are you a "write by the seat of my pen" type of person? 

I’m a little bit of both. Generally, my books start with a character’s voice in my head. Then I start to figure out who this person is: what’s her story? Where is she in her life? Where does she want to go?

I’ll write up an outline once I know where things start, and how they end…but I’d say that the finished product is usually about 50 percent true to that outline, and 50 percent zigs and zags and curveballs. My characters still surprise me. Which is great!

What's obsessing you now and why?

I signed up for a sprint-distance triathlon in September, so I’m figuring out my training plan. I’ve been running, at a pace I like to think of as a brisk waddle, for months. Now I just need to add in the biking and the swimming. Of course, “The Bachelorette” remains a constant obsession, although this season’s disappointing me. Emily, while beautiful, just doesn’t seem to have many dimensions beyond “sweet” – at least, none we’ve seen so far – and the fellas in Sausage Mansion are still impossible for me to tell apart.

I’m in love with my new Nike sneakers, and watching my kids ask Siri dumb questions, and my little rat terrier Moochie, who came to us from a rat terrier rescue organization in January.

Finally, I’m obsessed – and not in a good way – with the woman who was full-on flossing her teeth at the table in a restaurant yesterday. Help me out, people: are we doing that in public now?

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

I did an interview the other day where the reporter asked me about goals, and did I have any big ones I was trying to meet? I couldn’t answer. It was crazy. I’m a major goal-setter (an Aries, if you believe in that, an oldest daughter, if you’re into birth order), and, all through my twenties and thirties, I had goals. I wanted to get a job as a newspaper reporter when I finished my six-week boot camp at the Poynter Institute in 1991. Then I wanted a job at a bigger paper. I wanted a job at a major national paper by the time I was twenty-five; I wanted a column by the time I was twenty-eight, and I wanted to sell a novel by the time I turned thirty (I missed that one by six weeks – GOOD IN BED sold in May of 2000, after I’d blown out my candles).

I wanted to write a saleable book, but I never hoped to have a best-seller…because, to me, that felt like hoping to win the lottery.

I’d written about writers and publishing as a pop culture reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and I knew what the odds were, and how few writers can actually make a living writing fiction (short summary: don’t quit your day job). My plan was to keep working as a reporter – a job that I loved – and write fiction on the side. I knew that walking into a bookstore, finding my book in the stacks and saying, “I wrote that” would be enough to make me happy. Saying “I want to write the best book I can” is a reasonable, attainable goal. Saying, “I want to find an agent and publish the book” is a little more of a crapshoot. Agents and editors turn down great books every day, and, with e-publishing, authors can take things into their own hands with self-publishing, which has became another path to traditional publication (if the author decides that’s what he or she wants).

So: writing a great book, yes. Publishing said book, yes. Hitting the best-seller list, though,doesn’t feel like it’s within an author’s control. Having a book become a best-seller is a rare and wondrous alignment of the right cover, the right title, the right blurbs and subject and voice and characters, all, of course, at the absolute right moment…and not all of the pieces of the puzzle are within the writer’s control.

So I don’t hope for another number-one bestseller, or having another book turned into film. If it happens, I’ll be thrilled, but it’s so far out of my control that I spend precisely zero time worrying about it.

I’d love to keep a foot in the world of television, because I think that’s where some of the most interesting storytelling is happening these days, and, again, if you get that once-in-a-lifetime confluence, where the stars align, you can create something magical. That didn’t happen my first time out. Could it happen down the road? Who knows?

Here is what I do hope for: I want to continue to strive for that work/life balance, where my daughters see me doing work that leaves me happy and fulfilled, and with plenty of time to be a mom, to cook dinners and give baths and read stories, or just spend a morning walking on the beach.

I want to make each book better than the one before. I want to push myself, in terms of dialogue and description and writing with the kind of vividness and immediacy that people like Kate Christensen and Curtis Sittenfeld can pull off. I want to plot like Dennis Lehane and Harlan Coben, I want to bring the funny like Nora Ephron and Fran Lebowitz. 

And, professionally, I want to use whatever power I have for good. I want to help some other woman feel what I felt when Susan Isaac’s blurb for GOOD IN BED came rolling off the fax machine at the Inquirer…or when my youngest brother came into Bertucci’s that night in May and pressed a scrap of paper into my hand that read Your editor called. You’re number 33 on the Times.

If 2010, the Year of Franzen, was all about cursing the darkness, about tallying up the bylines and books that got covered and insisting, Hey, there’s a problem here, even when nobody wanted to hear it, I want the next stage of my career to be about lighting a hundred candles. If the New York Times continues to ignore womens fiction, I want to remedy that situation as best I can, to be a voice that says these books are worthy, even if the Grey Lady says they’re not. 

Win a copy of An Uncommon Education by Elizabeth Percer

I was handed An Uncommon Education, Elizabeth Percer's extraordinary new novel by her editor, Maya Ziv, who also happened to be a former assistant of my agent. Maya had saved my life when I almost botched sending in the right manuscript, and so I was willing to look at anything she wanted me to--and this book was astonishing. About a young woman's coming of age, and how she begins to learn how to find and figure out what really matters in life, An Uncommon Education is the kind of book you want to hand to all your friends. And all this week, we are having a giveaway! there are five copies to hand out and all you have to do is comment on Elizabeth's  question below. The first five commenters will win a copy of the book! Please email me your email to reach you at carleavitt@hotmail.com.

People have asked me if the title for this novel was the original one. And the answer is no! The idea for the title came from the idea that we all have uncommon educations--not uncommon in the sense of rare or privileged, but uncommon in the sense of being unique to our own particularly chosen paths. Far more important than the knowledge I gained in school were those moments of informal learning that happened along the way -- my mother reading Irish poetry to me as a toddler; my father telling and retelling me stories of his childhood in Jerusalem; joining an underground Shakespeare Society when I should have been studying more at college. How have you learned to craft a life around what is uncommon to you? 

Elizabeth Collins talks about the loaded subject of The Beautiful Anthology

I first heard about the Beautiful Anthology from the superb writer Gina Frangello. Because I love Gina's writing and I trust her judgement completely, I wanted to see a copy--plus, beauty is such a queasy kind of topic.  What's beautiful? Who decides that? And what does it do to us if we don't fit the general norm? (Please don't make me go back to my teenaged years, where I was routinely mocked, caricatured and threatened for the way I looked.) The Beautiful Anthology is provocative, inspiring, and yup, important. I asked writer/editor Elizabeth Collins, who put together the anthology of essays, poems and art, if she'd come on my blog, and I'm honored she said yes. Thank you so much, Elizabeth.

What sparked the idea for this collection? Were there any surprises? 

We have so many great contributors at TNB. (The Nervous Breakdown.) Getting a group together for an anthology seemed like a natural project for TNB Books. 

Beauty was chosen as a topic because it's a universal theme. Everyone has an opinion about it; everyone has a story and strong feelings about the subject.

As for surprises--yes, definitely. I was pleasantly surprised by some of the creative twists in many of the essays. For example, I asked my writer friend J.E. Fishman to contribute, and he came up with a fascinating piece about the most beautiful tennis serve he ever hit. Similarly, one of the first students I taught--now a grown-up and a very talented writer--Nora Burkey surprised me with her mature, feminist take on why we should not impose Western ideals of beauty on other parts of the world. I could go on, of course. The point is that many of the essays and stories have an interesting, unexpected angle. I would say that The Beautiful Anthology explores the flip side of beauty, and not necessarily the literal definition of the word.

This seems like a collection that would really touch a nerve. Can you talk a bit about that?

I think beauty is a loaded subject. Most of us feel that we don't measure up in terms of beauty. We might feel resentful about the ideals of beauty that are always shoved in our faces and that are always changing. Fashions change; the general notion of what is beautiful (in terms of fashion) changes. But beauty should be more than that. Beauty should be a feeling, a state of grace, a happy place where we simply feel our best and at peace with the world.

Sometimes, when we think about beauty, we immediately also think of when we did not feel beautiful, when the beauty was outside of us and not in us, but we longed for it. 

What I find interesting in the anthology is the different takes on beauty that our male and female contributors have. The female experience is often fraught with fears of not measuring up, and full of worry about what we'll look like when we grow up. The male experience is conscious of not wanting to judge the opposite sex too harshly, and/or finding a new vantage point from which to discuss the subject of beauty.

I was really moved by your piece, by the way something that happened in the past still has such an impact, almost like a scar. (I still can remember my mother saying I looked like a wild woman with my hair--and I was only five!) Do you think we ever get over those scars?

As for my piece, well, it's funny that I don't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, but I remember precise details about what life was like when I was five (and even a bit younger). I think the healing comes from a place of acceptance, a realization that "this is who I am. This is what I look like." My story is about a scar--but we all have scars of some kind. We can let those scars bother us, or can we not even see them anymore (as is the case with me). It's also about taking care of what you have and making the best of it. We can absorb the things we are told about what is beautiful or how to be beautiful, but ultimately, we have to make our own way and be who we are. 

I loved the photos in the book. Who did them?

The photographs in the anthology are all finds of our intrepid and talented book designer, Charlotte Howard. (I can direct you to her for more on the photos; she got them all and made the placement decisions)

Do you think women will ever not be burdened by the idea of what they should look like?

As for whether or not I think that women will ever NOT be burdened by ideas of what they should look like? Well, we are assaulted constantly with media ideals (magazines, TV, film) and images of models and infomercials about fitness, etc. It's literally impossible to be unaware of what the marketers are trying to sell us (or make us feel insecure about). Even if we moved off the grid and isolated ourselves, we would still have some hopes for our looks and our body, perhaps based on family members' influence, or our neighbors or friends. I think that it is when we get away from our natural states that we start to be less beautiful--and by this I mean that if our bodies are very out of whack in terms of size, then that's a signal to us that our weight is unhealthy. After all, the "perfect" size woman is supposed to be some ideal of fertility, her shape literally a signal that she is good mother material. On some level, the human animal will always find the "healthy" specimen the most attractive, and when we feel good, we tend to look good, so it's all a circle.

(I am probably getting too literal and biological--sorry.)

What's obsessing you now? 

Do you mean in terms of projects and writing, or beauty-related topics? I am in the final stages of memoir writing/pre-pub madness. My memoir, Too Cool for School, is about my experience as a English teacher in a girls' school. I got pretty caught up in my persona as "rock star teacher" (which is embarrassing to think about now) and I was constantly being tapped for new classes, new projects. On one level, perhaps it was because I was versatile and I'm a writer, so it makes sense to ask me to teach lots of different kinds of writing, but on the other, I had people say to me, "They are setting you up to fail. No one can teach that many classes well." And it's true. At some point, the house of cards has to fall. In my case, I was blindsided by a politically motivated attack by a couple of parents who wanted me fired because I am a Democrat, and it became this horrific witch hunt that nearly killed me. Sounds dramatic, but when your purpose in life is attacked, it can leave you reeling. So that story is what is coming next, but even that is a subject I am over because I have been living it (and the attendant notoriety) for years. I am telling the story and I wrote the book in the hopes of helping protect other teachers, particularly in the hyper-partisan landscape and partisan teacher hate that's been going on. I really want to work on my new YA novel, though. If I could get my draft done this summer, I will be happy.

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

As for unasked questions, I suppose I'd like to address the idea that The Beautiful Anthology is not chick lit; it's a universally appealing (I hope) exploration of many facets of beauty. We have male contributors; we have sad stories, funny stories, academic stories, political stories--a great mix of fresh voices from an international slate of established and emerging writers. Now, I realize that sounds too promo, but I feel I have to say it if I can. 

Rebecca Woods, author of Living Through Charlie, talks about the Mommy Competition

Rebecca Woods was a student of mine in my UCLA class, and I got the pleasure of seeing her novel, Living Through Charlie, grow. She grew up in Orange County, California, and she's got  a bachelor's degree in Drama and attended the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley.  A former drama teacher in “a posh private school” as well as a special education school, she lives in Southern California with her husband, her two mean little dogs, a parakeet, and three tortoises, and is working on her second novel. Rebecca wanted to write something different for my blog, and I gave her carte blanche. So thanks, Rebecca!

The Mommy Competition

If you’ve spent a good portion of your adult life either driving a car or looking for your keys so you can drive your car, chances are you’re a mom. And if you’re a mom, chances are you occasionally have doubts that you’re doing it right. Okay, you frequently have doubts. You wallow in doubt. You lap it up from a spoon and wear it daily as a skin suit Silence of the Lambs style. This insecurity fuels something I call Mommy Competition. You know what it is, it’s that need to figure out who’s doing it better. That uncontrollable desire to look at another mom’s kids, do a quick assessment and decide who is the Alpha Mom and who is most likely to serve dinner by tossing a greasy bag of food from a drive-through window into the back seat of the mini-van on the way home.

The best way to quickly establish the identity of the Alpha Mom is to greet each other with A Question About Each Other’s Children. “Is he breastfed?” “Is she talking?” “Walking?” “Reading?” “Applying to preschool?” That’s right. I just said, “applying to preschool” like that’s a normal thing that normal three year olds do everywhere. They don’t. But in communities where there’s a waiting list for toddler tutors, Mommy Competition rises to a near professional level.

If you live in the school-by-application-only culture like I do, you’re lucky! Your town has conveniently set up a Mommy hierarchy for you! Recognizing the Alpha Mom is as easy as knowing the reputations of the local private schools. There are the good schools and there are the schools-your-kid-got-into-because-he-couldn’t-get-into-a-better-school-so-you-must-be-a-crappy-mom. It starts with preschool- “So, where is Hydrangea going to preschool?” What you’re really trying to find out is- Were you teaching your kid the alphabet while I was drinking wine and playing Yo Gabba Gabba on a continuous loop? Did you have a reward system for your child that never included you saying, “Fine. Here’s the damn cookie.”? …like me.

Most of the private elementary schools in my area have uniforms. This is a wonderful shortcut if you have to establish who the Alpha Mom is from a distance. (If your child’s school doesn’t believe in uniforms, there’s a whole different ranking system involving license plate holders and the Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s parking lots but it’s too complicated a formula to explore in such a brief blog post.) Should two moms encounter each other in the wild and the children are wearing uniforms, you can skip, “Where is Petunia in school?” and go straight to, “What is Carnation up to?” Carnation went to summer camp in Costa Rica where she hand pollinated indigenous vines and then she won the third grade science fair with the paper she wrote about it! Damn it. But Carnation isn’t in school right now. Yes! She’s got a tutor on set until her movie wraps. You win. I give.

My kids are in their mid-twenties so I should know better. And, in spite of (or maybe because of) my inability to ever rise to the role of the Alpha Mom based on this Mommy Competition criteria, my kids are seriously awesome! Seriously. Nevertheless, I actually did the let’s-see-how-I-rank-as-a-mom thing at a Pilates class yesterday. (Yes, I do know how that sounds. I already told you I live in a private school environment, that there are Pilates classes nearby shouldn’t be that much of a surprise.) I ran into a mom I hadn’t seen in about fifteen years and I greeted her with, “Oh my gosh, hi! So, what is Chrysanthemum up to?” 

We were doing the back and forth about her kids and my kids (I was winning, by the way, it seems little Chrysanthemum is still living at home and hasn’t chosen a college major) and I suddenly realized what I was doing! I don’t want to do this, I’ve already won this game!  She’s won this game! Being a mom is hard, we shouldn’t be competing with each other, we should be supporting each other! So what if Chrysanthemum hasn’t chosen a college major, one of my kids flunked out of the first college she went to! And even though Carnation won the science fair in third grade, she could get bullied every day in fourth grade like my other kid did. Suddenly I blurted out, “I wrote a book! It’s about private school moms trying to live vicariously through their kids and what it’s like for one mom when her kid doesn’t fit in!” Our conversation stopped as my faux pas hung in the air. Did I really just start talking about myself instead of continuing to rank our kids’ accomplishments so we can identify the Alpha Mom?  We stared awkwardly at each other’s Lululemon workout gear for a moment not knowing what to say as if I had made a racial slur or an inappropriate political comment. Finally I broke the silence. “And I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to.”