Sukey Forbes talks about The Angel in My Pocket, grief, possibility and healing

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I imagine that writing this book was both painful--and deeply healing. Would you talk about that please?

Yes, it was both painful and healing to writing this book.  It was healing in that I had to revisit some of the ideas I had come to believe as truths through this process and get more information to back them up.  It has also been healing sharing the book with people and getting the validation that the book helped them to heal as that was the goal of sharing my story.  Knowledge is empowering and powerful and that helped me feel even more solid in my own path.  But it was also painful to write this book.  Grief never leaves us, we just learn to store it and manage it.  There were particular spots in the book that brought me back to very dark places in my grief.  Going to those places and writing about them was critical to the honesty of the story but it was difficult for me to step out of my new normal healthy and happy state of daily being and walk back through some of the dark days.  I’m glad I did because the whole point of writing the book was to offer a story through grief and out on the other side that might help others but yes, the process of writing it was painful and difficult in many regards.

One of the questions you ask is where has your daughter gone--and your answers are startlingly authentic, at least for me, and I imagine for very many people. Do you still the same way or have your feelings changed?

As I write in the book, the day that I had my ‘aha’ moment with knowing that my daughter Charlotte was in a good place, separate and yet still with me, changed my whole course of grieving and then living.  Life and death, I have come to believe, are just points on a continuum.  I still hold that same belief system and it is positively reinforced regularly.

What do you think is the one mistake people make about grief?

Grief is not unrelenting sorrow.  There are moments of lightness and laughter and those moments are almost more difficult than the deep sorrow because they feel, especially at first, totally wrong.  But our bodies and we as living and thinking beings, are wired to be resilient.

Along those lines, I think the other mistake people make about grief is that it undoes a person permanently.  While grief does stay with us forever it also changes us and deepens us and leaves us wisdom as its gift.  If we are open to the gifts in grief we emerge from it more solid, strong, loving and deep.

What's your writing life like now? Do you have rituals? Do you outline or just follow your muse?

I am a journaler.  Most of my writing is seeking to understand.  My way of exploring thoughts and ideas is usually on the page.  It’s a physical exercise for me and I use a good old fashioned pen and spiral notebook.  I’ll ask my self a question then sit and write non-stop for 10 minutes as a warm up and see what comes out on the page.  I find my most honest writing appears that way.  Some of it is not fit to be shared J

I am terribly undisciplined about my scheduled writing but my best work happens early in the morning before the kids are awake, often even before the birds are awake, when it is quiet both in the house and in my mind.

No, I do not outline.  I probably should.  But my writing comes from deep within and I find that if I try too hard to structure it that it is more difficult for my true voice to emerge.

What's obsessing you now and why?

I’m actually quite focused on the gifts of grief.  The conversation about how we move through grief as a culture and individually is evolving.  I think too much literature on the grief process in the past 60 years has been written by health professionals who are dealing with people in protracted states of grief rather than by people who have found coping skills and tools to work their way through the grief and back to a full life.  There are great life lessons in grief and not a lot of time has focused on them.  I don’t by any measure mean to imply that grief is easy.  It is not.  It is gut wrenching, and complicated, and painful, and confusing and we all go through it differently.  BUT WE ALL EMERGE and I want to be a part of the underscoring of the message that we all emerge.  We all are programmed to be resilient.  We all survive, and thrive, and if we are open to it, we are better people, parents, partners, citizens of the world for having experienced that depth of sorrow.

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

 What makes your book unique?

Are you happy?  Do you believe in God?

Chris Bohjalian talks about Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands, nuclear power plants, how being the dad of a daughter sparked the book, and so much more

Chris Bohjalian may just be one of the kindest, most generous authors around. He's the kind of writer that when you do an event with him, though it's obvious that 450 of the 500 people in the audience are there for him, he makes you feel that they're there for you, too, and he even holds up your book and exhorts everyone to buy and read it.  He's the critically acclaimed author of 17 books, including nine New York Times bestsellers.  His work has been translated into over 25 languages and three times become movies, and they've been chosen as Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Hartford Courant, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Bookpage, and Salon. 

You want to talk awards?  Chris' include the ANCA Freedom Award for his work educating Americans about the Armenian Genocide; the ANCA Arts and Letters Award for The Sandcastle Girls, as well as the Saint Mesrob Mashdots Medal; the New England Society Book Award for The Night Strangers; the New England Book Award; a Boston Public Library Literary Light; a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; and the Anahid Literary Award. His novel, Midwives, was a number one New York Times bestseller, a selection of Oprah's Book Club, and a New England Booksellers Association Discovery pick. He is a Fellow of the Vermont Academy of Arts and Sciences, too.

His dazzling new novel, Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands, is about  homeless teen girl, a nuclear meltdown, and how we feed our need for connection--and of course, it's about much, much more. Thank you so much, Chris for being here!  I'm so jazzed to host you!


I remember you talking about the research you did about plane crashes, and how in depth it was, so I cannot wait to hear you talk about the research you did for Close your Eyes, Hold Hands. What did you learn about nuclear power that startled you? About teens fighting mental illness? And should we be worried about nuclear plant accidents more than we already are? 

Sometimes my books demand a lot of research. But “Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands?” Not so much. The creation of Emily Shepard’s voice was. . .alchemic. It really was. The only other time I was so sure of a voice so quickly was years ago: Connie Danforth in “Midwives.”

Part of the reason why I found the voice so easily, I believe, is that I have written about teens in trouble often over the years as a Burlington Free Press columnist. I’m a big fan of Spectrum Youth Camp; Family Services in Burlington, Vermont and the remarkable work they do, and so I’ve met a lot of their kids. I’ve heard the teens’ stories and seen their faces. I’ve met the kids who are going to be okay, and the kids who are already so far down the rabbit hole that there’s no coming back.

I also know some of their staff. I went to college with Annie Ramniceanu, for instance, their associate executive director and an immensely gifted therapist and counselor. One day when I was having lunch with her, she started telling me how some of the kids – the teens who are falling through the system – would build igloos against the Vermont cold out of trash bags filled with wet leaves, and I knew instantly the novel I wanted to write.

As my 20-year-old daughter, Grace, would tell me when she finished reading the first draft, “Dad, please take this as a compliment, because I mean it that way: Your sweet spot as a novelist is seriously messed up young women.”  I know she’s right.

And I did learn a bit about how nuclear plants work – thanks to Arnie and Maggie Gundersen at Fairewinds Energy Education. But I really find nuclear power absolutely baffling. Their website is incredibly interesting ( www.fairewinds.org ).

And, yes, nuclear power does make me nervous.  The exclusion zone in my novel in Vermont is small compared to the actual exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan.

You get so deeply into the head of Emily that it feels as if you are channeling her. How did you do such alchemy? (P.S. I know the answer to this, but I love it so much that I want you to talk about it.)

Part of it was the voices of all those teens I have interviewed over the years. I still have the articles and my memories of their stories remain vivid.

And part of it was my own daughter, Grace. I can’t count how many times I would be failing to find the right synonym for a word or to capture the perfect expression a really smart sixteen or seventeen year old girl would use, and so I would text her. I would ask her questions like, “What’s a hip synonym for ‘tattoo?’” Or “I need another expression for ‘wasted.’ Any suggestions?” And she would text me back whatever words made sense in context. Trust me, you would not have found the word “bitchcakes” in the novel without her. She was amazing.

And, finally, I focused a lot on the universals of age, not necessarily the particularities of gender. It is how I have written across gender in the past, and how I imagine I will in the future.

To me, this book feels different than any of your others, which leads to the question, what sparked the writing? What was haunting you that made you want to write this particular novel?

First of all, thank you. I never want to write the same book twice.

And what sparked the writing? I’m a dad of a daughter. The idea of a teen girl living alone in an igloo made of trash bags and wet leaves broke my heart. That image indeed haunted me – and spurred me on.

I have to say that the title is one of the most moving and greatest titles I’ve read in a long time. Did you always know that would be the title? Are titles difficult for you? 

As Emily Dickinson wrote, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.”

That is definitely how my Emily Shepard writes and thinks. There is a slant to her story – and an edge to her prose.

And the words that comprise the title? They sound, she reminds us, like something we might read on a drugstore greeting card. Maybe the accompanying image is a couple holding hands as they jump off a dock into a placid lake one beautiful August afternoon. But, of course, their origin is far darker. Far sadder.

And that is the truth of my poor Emily’s life.

As for titles: They are usually really difficult for me. I agonize. I struggle.

But in this case? Not at all. I knew the title for this novel early on.

What’s obsessing you now and why?

I am writing a novel about sex trafficking and, yes, I have grown very protective of this character, too.

But it’s the summer. If I am obsessed with anything, it’s my biking.

Jo-Ann Mapson talks about Owen's Daughter, Santa Fe, Italian greyhounds, and so much more

 Want to know whom I credit for my Old Gringo cowboy boot addiction? My friend, writer Jo-Ann Mapson. Back when email first started, I tracked her down, wrote to her, and virtually insisted that she befriend me--and she has, through the years offering love, support, humor and tips on boots! Jo-Ann is the author of eleven novels and a book of short stories.  Her work is widely anthologized and her literary papers are being collected by Boston University’s Twentieth Century Author’s Collection.  Hank & Chloe was her debut novel.  Blue Rodeo was made into a CBS TV movie starring Kris Kristofferson.  The Wilder Sisters and Bad Girl Creek were Los Angeles Times bestsellers.  Solomon’s Oak won the American Library Association’s RUSA award for women’s fiction.  Many of her books have been Booksense titles and Indiebound choices. Her wonderful new novel, Finding Casey, featuring some of the characters from Solomon’s Oak, will be published October 2012.

Thank you so much, Jo-Ann--for this interview and for everything.

 The questions I always ask are what sparked this particular book and did anything surprise you in the writing?

I’ve wanted to write the sequel to Blue Rodeo for twenty years.  This book is kind of a kind of sequel, but also a stand-alone story, and it fits into Solomon’s Oak and Finding Casey as well. I placed my BR character Margaret Yearwood as Glory & Joe Vigil’s next door neighbor in Finding Casey.  Maggie often babysits their children--the Vigils’ five-month-old daughter Sparrow, and Aspen, their “adopted” granddaughter.  Aspen is a handful.  She’s also kind of psychic.   

Your characters are always so blazingly alive. What kind of character work do you do?

I love to people watch, eavesdrop on conversations, and in that foggy-not-quite-clear thinking state, I imagine my characters driving, eating at one of the many interesting restaurants here, splurging on a pair of Old Gringo cowboy boots downtown, or waiting for various appointments, being annoyed by Santa Fe wind, and the loneliness people feel at whatever age.  I think a lot of people are quite lonely in our current world.  Loneliness can lead to some foolish choices.  I also love to write about romance, but realistically, and for me that means timeworn parts and issues are involved.  In Owen’s Daughter, Maggie finds out she’s in the early stages of a serious disease, just days before her grown son Peter arrives with his own suitcase of troubles.  Skye, Owen’s daughter, is freshly out of rehab at the ripe old age of 22, and going through a divorce.  Her addiction problems stem from bad parenting, a bad marriage, and having a child at age eighteen.  Sounds awful, but I love to weave stories around real life problems.  I think that makes the payoff much more rewarding.

What do you hope readers come away with?

A fervent desire to purchase all my novels, make them into Hollywood movies, and tell everyone else about this writer they must read.  Nothing makes my day when I hear from a reader who enjoyed my book, and to hear that reading got them through a rough day, or year.

What's your writing life like these days?

I live 20 minutes out of Santa Fe proper, on a dirt road with lots of solitude. I write every day, correspond with my MFA low residency students, I walk the dogs and ponder aging, and dislike the wind.  Facebook has given me a community even when I’m alone in my office, which I truly enjoy.  Occasionally, a Facebook friend will say, “Wait, are you the Jo-Ann Mapson who writes books?  I thought you were just a greyhound person.”  It makes me laugh.  Can’t I be both? Aging is weird.  My mom is almost 92, still lives in So. California, drives her BMW, plays bridge, and tells me what to do.  Her best friend died this year, and I think those losses when we’re older, are just devastating.  I decided that I couldn’t bear Opal going away for good, so I made her a character in this book, and in the one I’m currently working on.

What's obsessing you now and why?

The book I’m working on now is based on a true story, and was the very first novel I ever tried to write.  I failed miserably at it, thank goodness, because I’ve had so much time to let it percolate.   It requires massive research, some international travel, and more solitude than anything else I’ve ever written. 

What are you doing for fun? 

I rescued an Italian greyhound from Hobbs, NM, named her Chick-lit.  She is a handful.  First female IG I’ve ever had.  Very high prey drive.  That’s four dogs now, and it’s like living with a posse of clowns.  Henry just sauntered in wearing a pair of my underwear.  God knows how he got them on.  He looks both humiliated and quite proud.  Dogs are just amazing to me, as are horses, and birds.  I love to put animals in my books.  Dogs, cats, horses, whatever, are neutral love objects.  People often communicate through them.  When I finish a book, I like to make jam.  Tomorrow I’ll be peeling Meyer lemons and oranges for marmalade.

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

Why hasn’t Oprah called?

High school hazing, nuns and the funniest dialogue since Richard Price's The Wanderers-- Anthony Breznican talks about his mind-blowingly good debut, BRUTAL YOUTH

Every once in a while I start reading a book that I think speaks exactly to me. As someone who endured a harrowing high school life, I was immediately drawn to Anthony Breznican's Brutal Youth (great title and brilliant cover, too, by the way). The world he creates is so real, that if you take your eyes off the page (go ahead, I dare you), you'll feel disorientated. Breznican's characters, are each so bristlingly alive, you'd swear they were tugging at your arm, spilling their stories. Heartbreaking, funny, boldly imaginative, cruel and gentle, too, Brutal Youth stuns. Anthony has worked as a reporter for The Arizona Republic, Associated Press, and USA Today, and is currently a senior staff writer for Entertainment Weekly, and I'm so honored to have him here.




Brutal Youth has one of the most astonishing openings I've read in a long while. Did that opening come to you originally, or did it come after you had written parts of the book?

I always knew I wanted to start with something intense and visceral - a real grab-you-by-the-collar opening that would thrust you into a school where the danger wasn't getting a good grade, or getting a date ... It's basic survival. I'd heard this story from my own high school about a kid who flipped out in the hall after many years of being teased and tormented. He started swinging his bag in a circle, and clobbering anyone who got near. I heard one of the teachers jumped on his back, and then rode him around like it was a rodeo when even that didn't slow him down. As another kid who carried his whole locker in his book bag, I wondered: what could have made him snap? We all face hard times and feel angry and powerless, but what makes someone really lose it and switch from trying to lay low to trying to cause pain. I amped up that old legend, added what I'd consider kind of a horror element to illustrate that this was a story with fangs. But sadly, we've seen plenty of instances over the years where a kid goes over the edge and causes much more catastrophic damage.


Which, of course, leads to a structure question. Did you plan out this book or just follow the characters to see where they might lead you?

I knew I wanted to write about four main freshmen -- Davidek, a nice kid who just wants to avoid trouble; Stein, who loves trouble and fights every good fight; Lorelei, who is desperate to be liked (but doesn't like herself very much) and Green, who charms his way to safety, but loses touch with where he came from.  After that, the story unfolded as I threw a lot of menace, mistrust, and double-crossing at them in the form of adults who have a lot of growing up to do, too.
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 I always want to know what sparked a book, what was haunting you that nudged you into writing this?

I wanted it to be a war story about trying to save yourself, but maybe losing yourself along the way. I was a feisty, rebellious kid and I have a soft spot for troublemakers. I also have a pretty big problem with authority. Haven't we all witnessed people in charge who probably shouldn't be? BRUTAL YOUTH came from my efforts to write a coming-of-age story that was also a thriller. Hopefully it also has something to say about the forces that shape us (or warp us) when we're young.

As someone who was bullied in junior high and high school (I narrowly escaped being beaten up for wearing a beaded headband (don't ask) because the girl was caught calling in a phony bomb threat and was expelled), I still remember all the humiliations and violence--and your book brought them all vividly to life. Were you bullied as a kid? What was it like writing this book and living with all that brutal growing-up?

A beaded headband? Clearly you had it coming! I joke, but that's because some of these experiences seem so absurd once you get some distance on them. But at the time they are terrifying -- and it feels like there is no escape. I was pushed around, chased around, and beaten up from time to time. (That's an occupational hazard when you are a teenage wise-ass.) What's worse is when you are being emotionally or psychologically harassed by an adult -- teacher, parent, bus driver, whomever -- and that happens ALL THE TIME, whether we like to admit it or not. I've read some criticism of the book where people say, "oh, this kind of thing could never happen. It's unbelievable." Really? Because do a google news search of bullying in high school, and see what turns up. BRUTAL YOUTH is fiction, and compounds a lot of these stories in one particularly bad environment, but I just saw a news report about a middle school teacher caught on video grabbing a boy by the face and shoving him into a wall. Saying things like, "no, someone would step in and stop this" assumes someone is paying attention. And sadly, most of the cruelty out there doesn't end up on video.


 Despite the brutality, the book is also ragingly funny, and spot on about the way kids think and talk, with an eye for dialogue that I thought rivaled Richard Price's in The Wanderers. How did you go about creating your characters?

I'm really glad you feel that way. I worry that amid all the talk of the heavier elements of the book, it sounds like a painful slog. I definitely wanted to break the reader's heart at times, but I also wanted them to feel it is a white-knuckle ride, and to laugh a bit at the way deep, dark trouble often comes full circle into absurdity. One of the characters who seems a little unbelievable in BRUTAL YOUTH is the parish priest, who is literally skimming cash out of the collection plate to fund a gambling addiction. Well ... That was inspired by a real guy from my school's church, who got caught after pinching about $1.3 million from the parish. It's insane, and funny in a kind of head-shaking way. Who could be that sinister?  But it also happens to be true. Life is funny, sad, infuriating, and baffling -- sometimes all at once.


 
What's your writing life like?

I work full-time as a reporter covering the film beat for Entertainment Weekly, so I spend a lot of time telling the stories of other storytellers. I was drawn to that because I've always wanted to tell one of my own. My wife is a librarian and when she was pursuing her masters I found myself with a lot of free time. BRUTAL YOUTH was written at the kitchen table while she studied at the desk in our one-room apartment. I always wanted to give her a book to catalog that was written just for her. And here it is.


What's obsessing you now and why?

We have two little kids now, an infant son and a daughter who is about to go into kindergarten. They keep me pretty occupied! Obviously, empathy is a big deal with me, and I want them to grow up and be strong, yes, be smart, absolutely, but most of all I want them to be good. Now that my daughter is almost 5, she's one of the big kids in her pre-school class. I've learned that she is one of the biggest defenders of the little 3-year-olds who are just entering the group. She welcomes them, befriends them, watches out for them amid the roughhousing of the big kids. I'm obsessed with these stories! It's scary to start out somewhere, whether it's pre-school or a new job. I'm proud my little girl knows that, even at such a young age, and tries to make it not so scary for others. It's making me rethink my dark, twisted, and cynical view of the world!

Naomi Elana Zener talks about Deathbed Dimes, writing, Hollywood, and so much more

Hollywood and the law--what could be more delicious in a novel? Naomi Elana Zener is the author of both Deathbed Dimes and satire fiction, which is posted on her blog Satirical Mama. She blogs for Huffington Post and her articles have been published by Erica Ehm’s Yummy Mummy Club. Naomi is also a practicing entertainment attorney and I'm thrilled to have her here. Thank you, Naomi!.

What sparked the writing of Deathbed Dimes?

Back in 2005, I conceived an idea for a TV series about estate litigators. I ended up shelving the idea, as I was preoccupied with building my entertainment law career. As time wore on, in late 2008 I watched "The Bucket List" with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson, and devised one for myself. Item #1 was to write a novel. So, I dusted off the idea for Deathbed Dimes, played with it and came up with a unique idea for a novel that married fiction genres (think Helen Fielding meets John Grisham), as well as the zeitgeist of greed that permeates the underworld of estate litigation battles with a Hollywood twist.

The novel is set in the world of law and Hollywood, two worlds you know a lot about. Tell us about all of this, please.
I studied Estates and Trusts law, with a focus on Estate Litigation,  when I pursued my JD and LL.M., so I knew a lot about the area of law. When I entered the fray of practising entertainment law, when I decided to write Deathbed Dimes, I thought that it would be fascinating to marry my knowledge of estate litigation with the zany world of the entertainment industry and those in it. Estate litigation battles affect everyone in every walk of life. I've read so many different cases about families fighting over money, from those disputing a  $50,000 estate where the legal fees were triple that amount, to those that involved hundreds of millions of dollars and many disgruntled family members who felt entitled to inherit that wealth. In practising entertainment law, given that everyone dies, including rich and famous celebrities, it made sense to me to set Deathbed Dimes' story in Los Angeles, amongst the glitz and glamour of that world, even though the estate battle arc in the story isn't focused on that world.

How do you write? What’s your process like? Do you outline or just follow your muse (if there is such a thing!)

I outline. I make notes. I jot down dialogue as it comes to me to save for a character or a conversation that will appear in the short story or novel I'm working on. I don't fill notebooks of pages with ideas for a novel, or pages on end for a short story simply because I also like to let the story flow as it comes to me. Everything is my muse, from my marriage, my kids, to what I read, watch on TV/hear on the radio, and observe daily, and to people who flow in and out of my life. I always start to write from what I know and embellish from there.


What’s your writing life like?

Wonderful. I love to write. I miss it when I'm not doing it. I love to enjoy family time, work (my writing secret identity is being an entertainment lawyer), leisure, but my characters, ideas, worlds, and the like are never far from my mind. That's why I'm weighed down heavily by a large bag full of notebooks and my iPhone to write when a moment of inspiration strikes.



What’s obsessing you now and why?

Several things. First, my second novel. I'm waiting for notes from my editor so that I can write the third draft to use for querying new literary agents (I left my last one). Second, my third novel idea that I've started to flesh out and outline. Third, a short story I'm trying to finally finish, but life is getting in the way.



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

There are many I could throw at you, but I tend to be open on my writing, but private about my personal life. I will offer that you didn't ask me who my favourite shoe designer is. For that question, I could never give an answer. It would be like trying to pick a favourite child. I love all of my shoes (well those that burned a deep hole in my wallet Carrie Bradshaw style).

Robin Black talks about Life Drawing, writing about craft, not knowing where a story is going, and so much more

 Robin Black's unsettling portrait of a marriage, LIFE DRAWING, is one of the most arresting novels I've read. And, I have to say, that her first short story collection,  IF I LOVED YOU, I WOULD TELL YOU THIS, which was published to international acclaim, was one of the best short story collections I've read. She's received grants from the Leeway Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, The Sirenland Conference, and she's also the winner of the 2005 Pirate's Alley Faulkner-Wisdom Writing Competition for short story.  I'm so thrilled to have her here. Thank you so much, Robin!

Life Drawing is your first novel. What was it like moving from short stories to a novel?  Will you go back to short stories or are you now madly in love with the novel? Do each of the forms have its own satisfactions? (and discontents?) 

I went into novel writing like a whiny child, “But I don’t waaaaant to. . . “ I knew that there were professional reasons to do it and had signed the infamous two book deal so many post-MFA folks sign – if they are fortunate. The stories, first, and then. . A NOVEL! I was just so certain that I was a short story writer, that I had a short story writer’s mind - whatever the heck that even means. I had actually already written a bad novel, so all I knew about myself as a novelist was that I wasn’t any good. But then, the second I started LIFE DRAWING, I was 100% comfortable, and the second I finished I knew the next book would be a novel.

I have written one short story since then, and I was relieved that I still could, though it felt like using a part of my brain I’d almost forgotten I have. The part that understands compression and is as focused on what to exclude as on what to put in. You know, we writers are endlessly making analogies, and there are dozens out there about short stories and novels. Short stories are love affairs; novels are marriages, and so on. My latest take is that short stories are strict parents and novels are permissive ones. Short stories have curfews, and set limits. Novels don’t tell you when to get home and pretend they don’t know what you’re doing with your boyfriend in the basement.

I do love them both – and essays too - but I have this feeling I may have discovered, in my fifties. and very much against my own strongly held views, that I have the nature of a  novelist.

I loved the tense, nerve-jangly way that the novel proceeded. How did you go about structuring the novel and was there anything about that that surprised you?

To be honest, everything about it surprised me. I don’t do outlines, my mind just doesn’t work that way. The one thing I knew, though, all the way through, was that somehow, by the end, I had to fulfill the promise of the big plot disclosure in the first paragraph. But that was all I knew. Except for that give-away in the opening lines, nothing was planned.

But in some ways the most surprising aspect of the whole process was that unlike many of my stories which are written in bits and pieces, often patch-worked together and then reworked endlessly, this novel came out in order. I started on Page One and wrote through to the end with very few detours or changes until the revisions I did with my editor, none of which altered the plot, just cut a bit, reordered a bit, and added a couple of scenes. I have rarely written a short story in so straightforward a way and the last thing I expected was to write a novel in one kind of spurt – a year-long spurt, but still. It was weirdly straightforward.

Though – and this really matters – that spurt arrived after first, writing that “starter novel” that will never see the light of day and then years of misery and doubt about whether I could write a decent novel at all. So whenever I start kidding myself that this was easy, I have to remember the agony of all that doubt. Or I can just ask my husband who has keen, keen memories of how angst-ridden I was for how long.

So much about the novel is about creative partnerships and whether or not they work.  Do you think the two--love and work--can ever really be balanced? 

There were many ways in which I used my narrator Gus as a way to play with the notion of having a life very different from mine. I’ve been a mom since I was twenty-five; she is childless. I am very close to my own mother; Gus has no memories of hers. And I am married to a lawyer, while she, a painter, has been with a writer for nearly thirty-years.

I think that many of us writers (or maybe all artists) who aren’t married to someone in the arts have a pretty romanticized notion of what that would be like. Sort of like Bloomsbury only maybe without quite so much partner swapping. And though it sounds funny, one result of really delving into the lives of my married artist characters was that I now think that though there might be some companionable aspects, it would also have the potential to be sheer hell. I’ve become ever more aware of how nice it is that my husband and I work in different enough worlds that there’s no competition. That when we’re sick of our own day jobs, we can go to one another for something truly different.

But as for balancing love and work, I haven’t always been good at it. I started writing seriously at about 40, and I knew that it was going to take something quite extraordinary with three kids at home, one of whom has special needs, to get lift-off in this pursuit and I think I was a pretty sub-par wife (and mother) there for a bit. I was an absolute workaholic, like a crazy person who has fallen in love with an activity. And I’m not even sure I regret that, because it gave me something I desperately needed without which I would increasingly have been a very, very bad mother and wife. But it was an uneasy balance at the time.

Your title is actually perfect for the book, on so many levels, beside the most obvious one. Can you talk about it? 

I’m not great at titles, but when I hit on this one I was absolutely sure it was right. Leaving aside the obvious – my narrator is a painter who has trouble painting people – it is of course about what I feel I’m doing while writing. Drawing lives. Creating people, not depicting real ones, but animating something which has no life of its own. I have a short story in my collection about a portrait painter, and it’s called “Immortalizing John Parker.” In that, as in this, the overlap between what I say about the painting process and what I experience in my own creative life is pretty massive.

And that includes the fact that like my narrator, Gus, I struggled early on as a writer with specific aspects of “life drawing” or, as we call it, character depiction. I was always very interested in psychology and in moral dilemmas, but I had trouble putting those things into bodies, drawing – there it is – lives, and even just physical appearances that would render my characters more than vehicles for me to work through emotional issues or other non-corporeal aspects of human life.

I’m tempted to say that writing about visual artists is a good way for any fiction writer to learn about herself and about challenges she may have but not quite see, that jump outin the context of another creative pursuit.

What’s your writing process like? Do you fly by the seat or your pen or do you know where you are going? 

I make it up as I go along. I wander in the dark looking for light. I never outline – not only because I can’t think that way, but because the few times I’ve tried, the process has felt like paint-by-numbers to me, like I was just filling in the colors as opposed to feeling like a process of discovery. I strongly believe that for me, with my work, the more surprise there is in the process of writing, the more surprise and excitement there will be for the reader.

But the fact is that even if I believed that outlining would help the work, I still couldn’t do it. I have very significant ADD and though I medicate for it which helps a lot, I’m still along, long way from being organized enough to plan a work ahead.

What’s obsessing you now and why?

Other than book release? I know that you, and any authors reading this, understand that when a book is coming out, it’s hard for that not to feel the only event in the cosmos.

But in fact I am also focusing on the next book. There are two that I have in mind and I’m not sure which is going to bubble up first. I won’t say more than that because it’s all still at that fragile stage where it feels like if you breathe too hard, you’ll lose the possibilities.

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

Hmmmm. I guess that I always want people to ask me about the essays I write about being a writer and on the craft of writing, because my other obsession right now is turning those into a book. Many are posts I’ve done the Beyond the Margins (beyondthemargins.com) but there are others too. I’m an absolute craft nerd, and have discovered in myself this very strong impulse – even need – to write about my experiences writing, the life of it, my own personal history with inhibitions and with discovered directions. So, as I puzzle through my fiction future, I am also working on that. Oh, and then there’s the book I’m writing with my daughter, who has special needs. And then there’s. . . and then there’s. . .  Always more to talk about, always more to write!!

Lori Day talks about Her Next Chapter: How Mother-Daughter Book Clubs Can Help Girls Navigate Malicious Media, Risky Relationships, Girl Gossip, and so much more

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 We need to empower girls and educational psychologist and consultant Lori Day has written a groundbreaking book: her Next Chapter: How Mother-Daughter Book Clubs Can Help Girls Navigate Malicious Media, Risky Relationships, Girl Gossip, and so much more. A co-founder and member of the board of Brave Girls Want, a think tank of girl empowerment experts who advocate for healthier media and products for girls. Don't forget to check out her website for mother/daughter bookclubs. I'm honored to have her here. Thank you, Lori!

This is such an important topic. Was there a specific event that sparked this book?

I’m a blogger for the Huffington Post, and an acquisitions editor at Chicago Review Press “discovered” me there when she read a post I wrote about princess culture. She then went to my website and read more of my writing, and reached out to me to ask me to submit a book proposal to her on anything I wanted to write about. It was so unexpected and so fortunate to be presented with such an opportunity. I decided to write about mother-daughter book clubs because our own club was the most transformative experience of my parenting journey, and also of my daughter Charlotte’s childhood.  I work in the girl empowerment space, with a special focus on media literacy, and I realized I could write about the kind of mother-daughter book club I would create today given the changes in girl culture and how much more difficult raising girls has become. I realized these clubs could serve as very practical media literacy vehicles on top of their traditional purposes of encouraging bonding, socializing and reading, and that moms really need more tools.

I also thought it would be both fun and genuinely helpful to collaborate with Charlotte, now age 22. I’d always dreamed of writing with her. She is so incredibly talented, and wants to be a professional writer, so having her as a contributing author would 1) seriously make the book better, 2) be super fun to do, and 3) give her the credential of being a published author at a young age, as she pursues her own writing career. It all played out so well. Her reflections at the end of the last 8 chapters really helped the book blossom and added the genuine perspective of a young woman. But also, she’s a great editor. I mean that in a couple of ways. She’s a fantastic proofreader—much better than me—and she caught lots of small mistakes. She’s also a great developmental editor. We brainstormed all the chapters together, even though I did the research and writing on my own. One of the things that makes Her Next Chapter unique is that we wrote it as a mother-daughter team.

Can you talk about what you think is "female-empowering" literature and why it's so important? 

I think there’s a difference between female-centric and female-empowering, and it goes for movies, music, gaming and lots of other media in addition to literature. You can have a book about girls that is full of stereotypes, and it would be female-centric, but not female-empowering. There’s a saying: “You can’t be what you can’t see.” (Marie Wilson, founding president of the White House Project). So we need girls to see and read about female characters who are heroines, and that does not mean they must save the world, but they must be the heroines of their own lives. It’s about demonstrating authentic agency in the arcs of their own narratives…being subjects rather than objects who are acted upon by other characters, or who are ornaments beside the adventures and self-actualization of male characters. That’s where empowerment lies. It’s important for many reasons, but two of the most important are that girls need to believe there is no gendered limit to their potential, and equally important is that boys need to see that too.

What do you think a more modern mother-daughter bookclub would be? 

I often joke about how it would not be about baking brownies! No offense to moms and daughters who love to bake together, and they should feel free—but that is what the term “mother-daughter book club” brings to mind for me, and a more modern club would be so much more powerful than that.

If I were starting another mother-daughter book club today, there are many things I would do differently in response to how much more challenging our culture has become for girls. I would want to be able to tackle head-on some of the known impediments to healthy emotional development for girls and young women (such as gender stereotypes, sexualization, negative body image, "mean girl" bullying, obstacles to female leadership, etc). It would be important to me to have this sharper focus, and to build a club with other mothers who shared these same concerns and values, and whose parenting style, like mine, was to talk openly and directly about the sensitive and difficult passages our girls were navigating. I would take all of the benefits of reading girl-empowering literature plus the collaborative development of media literacy skills, and I would help our group harness all of that energy to push back against a marketing and media culture that tells girls their greatest value lies in how they look, and that the world they are inheriting places gendered limits on who they can be and what they can do. And all of this is exactly what I’ve tried to do with Her Next Chapter! Mothers and other adult women who work with girls learn to identify the cultural obstacles that women face, to understand more fully why and how they occur, and to recognize in themselves how they as adults are affected. Moms also learn to use suggested books, movies, other media and group activities to create a place outside the modern girlhood box that their daughters can inhabit and in which they can thrive.

Can you tell us some of the practical tools the book offers? 

I do give mothers and other adult women practical tools for getting at these tricky subjects--recommendations, original reviews and discussion guides for books, movies and Internet media that open up dialogue on these topics. Also included are group activity suggestions, insightful interviews with some of the leading experts on healthy girlhood, and lots of parenting tips to use at home in addition to the ones for use during club meetings. When we talk about the urgent need to teach children media literacy so they can deconstruct and subvert the thousands of unhealthy messages that bombard them every week, we often don’t give adults the tools to do that. Yes, it’s about the teachable moments everyday, but a lot of parents need more structure and support. Her Next Chapter is a media literacy guidebook.

As the mother of a son, I also worry about the images boys are fed, as well. Is that something you are looking at as well?

Absolutely. Although I talked about that throughout my book, I did not focus on it extensively from the male perspective because the book’s mission was to help mothers parent their daughters, and thus most of my focus was on what happens in our culture that makes it hard for girls to reach their potential and transcend our society’s laser-like focus on them as beautification projects or sexual objects. But it is that very issue that is also relevant to boys, because when we always depict girls in marketing and in media as sexualized and powerless—sometimes as degraded and violated—this is also what boys consume. And the message to boys is that girls are objects. What we know about that from the work of Jean Kilbourne and others is that when the female body is so often depicted in dehumanizing ways, and girls are so often shown as less important than boys (to the point of either being completely missing in the media kids consume, or present in token numbers and marginalized or objectified roles), it subtly conditions boys to view girls as inferior at best, and worthy of violation at worst. We are all aware of the many, many distressing events in the news these days about boys and men who abuse girls and women as if they are not fully human. Media and marketing, as examined in Her Next Chapter, are shown in certain ways to be culpable for providing girls and boys a steady diet of toxic gender roles that hurt them all. And it is all profit-driven, which makes it all the more enraging.

What's obsessing you now and why?

Ha ha, good question! Porn. Seriously. I am absolutely obsessed with the current role of porn in our culture, and the fact that so many young boys (as well as some girls) partake of free 24/7 access to it on the Internet beginning at very young ages while they are just beginning to understand sex. As an adult society we don’t seem to be dealing with this well at all. When I was a child, men would sometimes leave Playboy magazines lying around, and kids would find them. But today, extremely violent, sadistic and degrading porn is viewed by large numbers of boys and men, and while there has been porn since cavemen could draw it on their walls, it has never been anything like this before. Porn has gone mainstream. It is heavily influencing the advertising industry, the fashion industry, the music industry, you name it. It is affecting boys and girls in their relationships, in the pressure boys put on girls or girls put on themselves to perform what is shown in movies, in the emptiness of relationships that are often exclusively sexual between kids who barely know each other, and so forth. As a former school administrator, it was so difficult to stay ahead of the kids on this, and I know that for parents it is nearly impossible. Other countries are much more concerned about it and taking action at the government level to protect kids, but at the risk of wandering to near the porn/free speech precipice, just let me say that the US could benefit from looking outside our own borders on this one!

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

Perhaps “What do you hope to accomplish with your book?” And this is simple: to launch as many mother-daughter book clubs into the world as possible; to give mothers and other female role models the education and the tools needed to push back on our toxic media culture for girls and women; to change girlhood for the better. Kind of a tall order, I know!

Elizabeth Silver talks about The Execution of Noa P. Singleton, death row, motherhood, and surprises in writing

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A woman languishes on death row. The mother of the woman she allegedly killed, an attorney,  comes to her with a proposition. She'll do everything in her power to commute the death sentence to life in prison if she can only know why her daughter was killed.

You have to read this, right? Elizabeth  Silver is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, The Execution of Noa P. Singleton, an Amazon Best Book of the Year, Amazon Best Debut of the Month, a Kirkus Best Book of the Summer, Kansas City Star Best Book of the Year, Oprah “Ten Books to Pick up Now,” and selection for the Target Emerging Author Series. Optioned for film by ImageMovers Production Company (Robert Zemeckis), the novel will be translated into Polish, French, Japanese, Russian, and Korean.

 I'm thrilled to have Elizabeth here. Thank you, Elizabeth! 

 I'm always interested how a novel sparked? A college dropout on death row for murder--where did that come from? How did The Execution of Noa P. Singleton come into being?

After years of writing fiction and toying with a variety of day jobs in writing-related fields, I switched directions, and in my late-twenties, attended law school. I entered my third year of law school and took a course in capital punishment, where I learned about the death penalty from some of the country’s top anti-death penalty attorneys in Austin, Texas.  The course included a clinic component in which I worked on a clemency petition, visited death row, interviewed inmates and met with a handful of victim family members with my supervising attorneys.  I also attended a symposium at the Texas State Capitol where several lawyers, journalists, filmmakers, and a solitary victim’s rights advocate spoke about the problems with the death penalty as it related to one potentially wrongful execution.  Only one person on the dais represented the voice of the victim, surprisingly, and she was the mother of a victim ten years later still struggling with her position. While listening to each person express a different perspective on the issue, the complicated relationship between a mourning parent trying to forgive and an admittedly guilty inmate struck me as an intricate and conflicted bond ripe for exploration. It wasn’t about guilt or innocence necessarily, but instead about the fragility, doubt, and unease in each of these people. I also knew that I wanted my protagonist to be intelligent, self-educated, and someone with whom readers may be able to relate, despite her residence and status.  Instantly, my new project was borne, although at that point, I wasn’t sure the body it would occupy or the story that would carry it along. I rushed home, and over the next few months before the bar exam, wrote the first and last chapters of the novel.

A lot of this extraordinary novel occurs in prison. Did you do research? What was that like? Did anything surprise you and turn the plot of the novel in a way you didn't expect?

Most of my research came from my law school classes and my very first job as a lawyer. Right after the bar exam, my first professional lawyer gig was as a judicial clerk for a judge on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest criminal court in Texas. All death penalty cases skip over the intermediate courts and go directly to this court. My first assignment as a clerk was to draft a death penalty opinion (the decision) for my judge. I spent the next two years drafting over two dozens opinions for the court, several of which were death penalty cases. I reviewed trial transcripts, researched the law, and on my lunch breaks and free time, wandered into local courtrooms to watch live trials. Meanwhile, I was writing the novel at night. As a result, once the clerkship was over, there was little I had to research. It was minutiae, like ensuring that the details were accurate: for example, the proper color of the jumpsuits for Pennsylvania's death row and the size of the cell and the state-to-state population, which changed from the point I began the book to the point it was sold and the point it was published.

As for the turning plot, oh yes, so much surprised me. I had never written a story like this and hadn't a clue how it was going to proceed. I knew two things when I started: whether Noa was guilty and whether she was going to be executed. What I didn't know was how or why and this was the thrill of the writing. As a result, every plot turn, every development surprised me along the way. I was nearly finished with the first draft before I had any sort of motivation for Noa to even commit a crime because I became so fascinated with her childhood, which ultimately helped bring her actions full circle.

I deeply admired the structure of the novel. Did you plan it out before you wrote, or did you just follow the characters?

Thank you so much. I did plan the structure of the novel after those first few chapters, but only loosely. It wasn't until round two of edits with my editor that I wrote a timeline for each character and discovered massive plot and character flaws that were likely there because I was sticking to that original structure. Early on, I planned the book in six parts to represent the six months leading up to "X-Day," Noa's date of execution. I also planned for Marlene to write a letter to her dead daughter between each section. Apart from that very simple structure, though, I just followed the characters and allowed them to fall into place as time progressed (and regressed). It was also important to be introduced to both characters from their present state: prison for Noa and freedom and power for Marlene, and then to watch as they overlap and at times switch positions psychologically and emotionally. By the time we are nearing the end, we will have very different visions of these women based on their histories, despite the fact that they are in precisely the same place in the present day.

You also write screenplays. Do you find you have to get into a whole different mindset to do that, or does it just come naturally for you?  Is one easier for you than the other?

I'm not sure anything comes naturally. I  do love writing scripts of any form as well as fiction and I find it easier than fiction, in part because I know I might just be providing a blueprint for another team to use to tell the story. Scripts will have a director whose vision the story will ultimately become, actors who interpret your lines, cinematographers, soundtracks, costumes, settings, props, etc. With fiction, you get to play all of those parts for as long or as short as you crave. These are entirely distinct ways of approaching creativity and storytelling, and inherently require a different mindset and skill set.  I have great respect for storytellers of any kind, and often the most difficult step is determining what medium the story fits. So many films should be stage plays and so many novels should have been written as short stories, and the list could go on. As for the mind of screenwriting, all I can say is that I simply enjoy it. When I feel stuck with my fiction, I know I can find great pleasure in writing a script, particularly because I love dialogue, but also because there is some liberation in the constraint scripts require. I'm a rule-lover. I like making lists and crossing things off of them.

What's obsessing you now and why?

My five-month old baby girl. She's simultaneously digging into my writing time and creating it, tightening my energy and multiplying it. On a more literary note, I'm also obsessed with everything written by Emily Rapp. Read her essays and memoir, if you can. They're devastating and beautiful and incandescent. I'm also obsessed with short stories, particularly Karen Russell and can't believe I waited until now to finally read her. Do you have a favorite collection I should add to my ever-growing night table queue?

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

Yikes, this is a bit like writing your own letter of recommendation, I fear. That was always so difficult for me. Thank goodness I'm not applying for any more graduate school. Thank you so much for having me on your incredible blog. It's been a tremendous honor getting to talk with you and get to know you. These questions were so much fun.